Henri Michaux: A Barbarian in Asia

As the most innocent mother knows, a baby is a dangerous propagandist who cries at the first opportunity and, in a tendencious and violent manner, creates a situation in which the people around him are not going to get the best of it.

People are not always a priori on the baby’s side when they are not obliged to look after him.

Babies and writers know this and cleverly make use of it according to the strength of their voices, and the extent to which they are aware of their surroundings.

When I went on a journey to Asia twenty years ago, I was innocent enough to believe that I could give my impressions, and perhaps above everything I exulted in the great multi-form, living challenge of the Asiatic peoples to our terrible Western monotony. Long live the last resistants!

As well as exulting, I certainly made propaganda, after my own fashion, for an endless variety of civilizations. (Down with the idea of only one!) There have been decades and decades of them. There could be, there can be more and more of them. Just as each child must make up his own personality out of a thousand different elements and a few chromosomes of various types, so the masses of men must make up a personality that will be called their civilization. A miners’ union calls a strike — good. But suppose that instead they were to declare a miners’ civilization. How strange it would be. What a lot we should have to learn from them. Wouldn’t they shake us. And then we could have a South Pole civilization. Why not a Tennessee Valley civilization too?

When one reflects that the Papuans had their Papuan civilization, and complete and complex it was, one ought to feel hopeful.

Or must we be content forever with the economic sciences?

The most urgently needed science is one that will show us how to make civilizations .

Man needs a vast far-sighted aim, extending beyond his lifetime. A training rather than a hindrance for the coming planetary civilization.

To avoid war — construct peace.

HENRI MICHAUX

In India there is nothing to see — everything to interpret.

Kabir

was a hundred and twenty years old and was going to die when he sang:

I am drunk with joy

with the joy of youth

the thirty millions gods are there

I am going there — Happiness! Happiness

I cross over the sacred circle…

I know some twenty capitals. Bah!

But then there is Calcutta. Calcutta, the most crowded city in the Universe.

Imagine a city exclusively composed of ecclesiastics. Seven hundred thousand ecclesiastics (plus another 700,000 inhabitants indoors — the women. They are a head shorter than the men and they never go out). One is only among men — an extraordinary sensation.

The Bengali is a born ecclesiastic, and ecclesiastics, with the exception of the very small ones who are carried, always go on foot.

Everyone is a pedestrian — on the pavement or in the middle of the street… tall and slender with no hips, no shoulders, no gestures, no laughter.

The most varied costumes.

Some are almost naked; but a true ecclesiastic is always an ecclesiastic. The most naked ones are perhaps the most dignified. Some are dressed in togas with two folds thrown back, or with one fold thrownback — mauve, pink, green, wine-colored togas — or in white robes. They are too numerous for the streets and for the city. All of them are self-assured, with a mirror-like expression, an insidious sincerity and the kind of impudence that come from meditating with the legs crossed.

The way they look at you is perfect, neither up nor down, without pride or apprehension.

When they are standing up their eyes might belong to a man lying down. Lying down, to a man standing up. Unwavering eyes, unbending and trapped.

An unself-conscious insolent crowd basking in itself, or rather each in himself, but a crowd that can be cowardly and stupid if attacked and taken by surprise.

Each individual is watched over by his seven centers, by his lotuses, his heavens, by his morning and evening prayers to Kali, with meditation and sacrifice.

Everyone intent on avoiding any kind of pollution such as laundrymen, leather workers, Mohammedan butchers, fishermen, cobblers or handkerchiefs which retain what belongs on the ground, the sickening breath of Europeans (with the odor of murdered victims clinging to it), and in general the innumerable causes for a man’s being continually plunged up to his neck in mud, if he is not careful.

Always on guard (those who are born stupid become twice as stupid, and who is stupider than a stupid Hindu), slow, controlled and self-inflated. (In Indian plays and films, traitors who are unmasked and the Rajah’s officer who draws his sword in rage never take action immediately. They require about thirty seconds in which to ‘color’ their anger.)

Concentrated, abandoning themselves reluctantly to the rush and torrent of existence, self-contained, highly charged. Never crushed, never at the end of their tether, never at a loss. Assured and impudent.

Sitting wherever they want to; when they get tired of carrying a basket, putting it on the ground and throwing themselves down alongside it; meeting a barber in the street, or at a crossroads and saying, ‘Well, what if I did have a shave. ..’ and getting shaved right then and there in the middle of the street, quite unperturbed by the traffic, sitting in any place except where one might expect to find them — on the road, in front of benches, amongst the goods on the shelves in their shops, beside hats or pairs of shoes, on the grass, in the hot sun (they feed on the sun), in the shade (they feed on the shade), or at the border line between sun and shade, conversing among the flowers in the parks, or just alongside a bench or AGAINST it (does one ever know where a cat is going to sit?). These are the ways of the Hindu. Oh, those devastated lawns in Calcutta. No Englishman can look at that grass without an inward shudder. But no police on earth, no battery of guns would prevent them from sitting wherever it suits them.

Motionless and not expecting anything from anyone.

Anyone who feels in the mood for singing, sings, for praying, prays aloud, while he sells his betel-nut or no matter what.

A city incredibly full of pedestrians, always pedestrians, so that one can hardly make one’s way through even the widest streets.

A city of canons and of their master, their master in impudence and unconcern, the cow.

They have allied themselves with the cow, but the cow does not care. The cow and the monkey, the two most impudent of the sacred animals. There are cows all over Calcutta. They cross the streets, stretch out at full length on the pavement which is thus rendered useless, deposit their dung in front of the Viceroy’s car, inspect the shops, threaten the elevators, install themselves on your doorstep, and if the Hindu were good to nibble, no doubt he would be nibbled.

As for her indifference towards the outer world, herein again she is the Hindu’s superior. Obviously she seeks neither explanation nor truth in the outer world. It is all Maya. This world is Maya. It does not matter. And when she eats nothing but a tuft of grass, she needs more than seven hours to meditate upon that.

So they abound, and they roam, and they meditate all over Calcutta; a race that does not mix with any other, like the Hindu, like the English, the three peoples inhabiting this capital of the World.