Henri Michaux - A Barbarian in Asia

Certain people maintain that he is naive when he declares: ‘If some English citizens afterwards want to remain in India, let them keep their religion, let them live in peace, but let them no longer kill oxen.’ I was extremely touched by this. To believe that some Englishmen could deny themselves beef for the sake of a foreigner, you must really be a man who believes in the spirit of conciliation. You could never meditate enough upon this spirit.

Alas, Gandhi for the Hindus is only a stage.

As a matter of fact, they do not want him any more. The people want him. But the intellectuals are far beyond. They have tasted of the European fruit.

European civilization is a religion. No one can resist it.

The most popular thing in Benares is the cinema. And what films!

In twenty years little will they care for the Ganges.

The white peoples’ civilization never tempted any other people in the old days. Almost all people do without comfort. But who can do without amusements? The cinema, the phonograph, and the train are the real missionaries from the West.

The Jesuit Fathers in Calcutta make no converts. Among their advanced students not eight per cent are Christians. But all are converted to Europeanization, to civilization, and they turn into communists.

The young people do not bother with anything but America and Russia. Other countries are for pleasure trips, countries without a creed.

They say that all European science originated with them (algebra, etc.), and when they put their minds to it they will make ten times more inventions than we do.

One must not judge a schoolboy too hastily as long as he is in ‘harness.’ He is not his real self. Now the Hindu has been under foreign domination for eight centuries.

I am convinced that once the Hindus are in power, in ten years the institution of caste will disappear. It has lasted three thousand years. It will be swept away. But it is a job that must be done at home, and that a foreigner cannot do.

In India there is undeniably a color prejudice. The Hindus cannot stand the Whites. As soon as they see us, their faces change. In the old days, probably it was the opposite.

In America, there are some twenty races; in spite of that, the American exists, and more distinctly than many a race that is pure.

Even the Parisian exists.

With all the more reason, the Hindu. Gandhi is perfectly right to maintain that India is one, and that it is the White people who see a thousand Indias.

If they see a thousand Indias, that is because they have not found the center of the Hindu personality.

Nor perhaps have I found it, but I feel sure that it exists.

1 Buddhism excepted, but long ago Buddhism abandoned India. Too pure for them .

2 A man, to them, has not two arms. He has eight, he has sixteen, he has twenty, he is pierced all over with arms .

What postcards do they sell in India? Nothing but postcards representing man from a magic viewpoint. Luminous circumferences on the forehead, at the navel, at the sexual organ…, flowers, forces, here is THEIR MAN.

3 Needless to say, our division by two or three does not correspond more closely to reality. ‘To be animate, to be inànimate, warm or cold, those who are seasick, those who are not seasick.’ Though the physical and natural sciences have showed us, and we KNOW that it is not as simple as all that, we continue to divide by two, even when we are obliged to follow up our division by corollaries, and by restrictions such as ‘yes but’ and ‘there is also…’

The Hindu foresees everything .

And if he does not possess the thirty-four elements for dividing a question, he will invent the ten or fifteen that he lacks .

Like the European who, though he knows nothing about an affair, nevertheless begins by dividing it into three .

4 A kind of tunic .

5 I have read marriage of RAMA and of SITA. No doubt, it was brilliant, but oh! how pretentious it must have been .

6 I have kept some postcards of the temple of Kornarak, and of its statues. The heads are beautiful, contemplative, lost in bliss .

The bodies with enormous sexual organs are joined in various positions, and onanism is not excluded .

7 Sperm puts the Hindu in a state of mystic jubilation. He sees his goddesses covered with it. (See Atharva Veda, Book VIII, hymn IX.)

8 And yet, as soon as they become workers, their reputation is gone. Deservedly, so one hears .

9 According to the Hindu doctrine it is useless to render material aid to someone, while spiritual aid must really be rendered, and even so it is very difficult. Dhan Gopal Mukerji defines a hospital thus: a solid house of disappointment where men delay the evolution of their soul by doing good .

10 The lowest theater with unspeakable ‘sickeningly sweet’ scenery has its two spotlights so that the false diamonds and the glass trimmings may have the proper glitter .

Take away the fawning praises, the flattery in Hindu literature, and a third of it would disappear completely .

When you arrive at Siliguri, you see, on a couple of very narrow-gauge rails, a tiny, tiny locomotive, what I might call a pony-locomotive, which appears to be harnessed to a little train.

Now you are puzzled. What! would it dare to undertake, does it really promise itself to undertake to climb the Himalayas?

And besides, it is divided in two; one half holds a little coal, and it is the other half that must do all the work.

There are some very small cars there, too, of a size to match.

Lastly, you may be able to see the steps (so-called). A weasel, at a pinch, might use them.

A hatrack was not omitted. You can, to be sure, deposit a box of lozenges on it, or some packets of ten cigarettes.

Even the lighting has not been forgotten. But the bulb is missing. So small it was, judging by the socket, it would not, all the same, have given any light. So it was better to do away with it. Far better.

A cattle car, very suitably, is hitched to the train, and certainly there might be room in it for a basket of poultry and a quarter of a dozen lambs.

There, the locomotive is off, and its tactics at once become visible.

In the first place, nowhere is there any sign of a tunnel. For such a small locomotive, it would have been ridiculous to dig tunnels and to spend money, so they simply made a path, a well-trodden path, a litde apron of mountain earth, and then on you go. Thus the travelers get all the view they could desire.

It takes curves the way one would take them cycling; it is never at a loss. It goes forward, goes backward, describes circumferences and little roundabouts, and retraces its steps.

If you get off at a stopping place, two small Nepali women, smiling, a gold coin in the nose, and so charming you would give them your soul, offer to carry your luggage, and under your enormous valise they keep on smiling.

Everywhere smiles, little, precise, aerial, the first smile of the yellow race that I have seen, the most beautiful in the world.

And one wanders about among prayers on slips of paper attached to the trees.

The Himalayas with their snowy peaks appear.

All the same, the famous Thomas Cook and his accomplice the American Express should not try to make us believe, as they insist on doing, that it is the most grandiose railway in the world.