The Unfoldment of Human Potential

The whole existence of human beings is ever-anxious for mental development.

Whatever is conducive to that development people cordially welcome, calling their distant friends nearer to them in the effort to express themselves.

Whatever is antagonistic to this development they reject with all their hearts, though they may be forced to temporarily submit to it under circumstantial pressure.

But as soon as an opportunity presents itself, they rise in revolt to deliver themselves from its clutches. This is human nature at all times and in all ages.

Thus whenever something has to be done for humanity, it must be done keeping this essential human characteristic in mind.

The author’s literature and the artist’s creation of art are indeed dedicated to the service of humanity, and so the litterateur and the artist must always deeply remember this truth.

They will have to delineate their subject or theme in such a way that people, while assimilating it, may not feel any impediment in the path of their development. Interest must be created through natural expression.

The suggestion of subtle hints, interest and humour that exists even in the crudeness of ordinary life has to be adroitly held up before the eyes of the people – a touch of its colour must be conveyed to their minds.

It is easy to talk, but difficult to act.

In spite of mental characteristics being the same in all persons, they are expressed differently at different times, at different places, and in different persons due to variations of reactive momenta (saḿskára) or environmental peculiarities.

If the artist’s mind can be made to touch the innermost hearts of others – if their human sentiment can be synchronised with others’ sentiments – then alone can people determine which path will be truly beneficial for them, which road will lead to the greatest unfoldment of their potentialities.

If the potentialities of individual or collective development are not clearly understood, the psychic wealth of humanity may be misused at any moment.

Literature can beautifully convey to those who have the potentiality of leadership, how to develop that leadership properly, and how to establish that benevolent leadership on a firm foundation.

But leadership is not only found among the good.

Thieves, dacoits and knaves also have their leaders. There are also leaders in reactionary movements.

So if those with the potential of leadership, who are anxious to express their leadership qualities, derive suggestions from the litterateur how to enhance their personal prestige through malevolence and wickedness instead of through true benevolence and welfare, they may perhaps readily choose the evil path.

People are desperate to develop themselves: if they are not guided onto the path of welfare by the litterateurs, they will follow the path of evil.

They have no time to count the waves, sitting on the shore of the sea of time. They do not, and they will not, sit quietly, subduing their desires and propensities in the hope that some day, someone will come and direct them onto the path of benevolence.

Human beings want free and untrammelled expression of their innermost thoughts and feelings.

Few people have the capacity to judge the way this expression is taking place.

Some ability develops at a later age as the result of many trials and tribulations, but it is completely absent in childhood, in adolescence and in early youth.

So during this period, people readily accept glittery, superficial art and literature as an outlet for their self-expression. Instead of seriously pondering over this, they do not even understand the necessity of deeper reflection or analysis.

In this connection it is necessary to add that if two different paths, both good and bad, are presented before people for the expression of the same idea, they will gladly choose the easier one, instead of the more complex one.

So no matter how benevolent the ideas of the litterateur, if they are not presented with exuberant delight and overflowing joy, though they may be acceptable to some, they will remain ever disagreeable and indigestible to the general mass.

These observations may be somewhat significant for Coastal Literature, but for Epochal Literature they are indeed of paramount importance.

If literature is not presented through the medium of joy, then it cannot really be accepted as literature at all, because in spite of its being guided by the thought of benevolence, that thought is unable to take practical shape.

Such literature only enhances the price of the book, but it cannot at all enhance the value of humanity. When a presentation is made through the medium of joy, there people have the opportunity for comprehensive enjoyment, and the sympathy of the writer makes direct contact with the hearts of his or her readers.

Such an excellent presentation is not possible if the writer lacks genuine human feeling. Good or bad, friend or foe, a chaste lady or promiscuous woman – all are human to the author.

The author will have to be responsive to the aspirations of their hearts, and must try to give proper expression to their inner thoughts and sentiments.

He or she will try to delineate their happiness and sorrow, hopes and desires, and treat every small or big clash and counter-clash of their affliction-ridden lives as the expression of the human heart.

To the litterateurs no profession or propensity is either dignified or lowly: they will only present all these before the people in their true perspective so that the audience, after being acquainted with them, may make their individual and collective lives more meaningful.

In no circumstances must the artist or the litterateur portray humanity as an object of hatred or ridicule.

Even the character of a promiscuous woman or a thief must leave on the minds of the readers an impression of sympathy, charged with profound pain.

When artists lack such bold large-heartedness, they view humanity and the world through the spectacles of superstitions – they are incapable of truly acquainting human beings with each other or with the world, because these spectacles of superstitions or prejudices distort their vision so much that they are unable to understand the true perspective of anything.

Weak-minded litterateurs often try to stirringly exhort their readers with forceful language in order to camouflage their own inherent weaknesses before the public. They think that by the strength of their language they will prevail, but this is a grave error on their part. Perhaps a few fools may be deluded for some time, but ultimately, recognizing the malevolent repercussions of such literature, people will scrupulously avoid it.

A careful examination will enable anyone to discover the flagrant emptiness that always lurks behind such high-sounding utterances, Generally speaking, the greater the clouding of the litterateurs’ vision by the blind delusions of communalism, provincialism or nationalism, the greater the outpouring of this sort of literature from their pens.

Decency and Indecency in Art

There is a serious difference of opinion also among artists and litterateurs with regard to decency and obscenity in art.

The conservative among them or the connoisseurs of art and literature are somewhat like the supporters of the cult of Varńáshrama (the Hindu caste system). They think that a little deviation from the established tradition will tarnish the purity of art or literature. Excessively worried about matters of caste and outcaste, about the analysis of decency and vulgarity in art or literature, they lose sight of its main objective.

If writing and drawing, chisel and hammer get themselves entangled in he wranglings of so-called ethics and morality, they cannot make any contribution to any section of the people. If you open a book to find that it contains only the tall topics of morality, you will have a headache before you read even five pages of it. In a movie if only moral ideals are paraded over and over again to the exclusion of everything else, the public will never appreciate that film.

The conclusion of all of this is that the thought of public welfare alone should be the main criterion of all artistic and literary creation, and that thought will take form only though artistic joy – only then can subtle intellect awaken in crude minds.

So when the artists or litterateurs have to march forward creating such a flow of delight, they cannot afford to cling to any fastidious notions of so-called purity or impurity, for it will retard progress. Excessive prudery, like mysophobia (fear of contamination), will obstruct their path of movement.

These mysophobic, conservative writers will compose poems about seas, mountains and moonlight – will paint literary pictures of the drawing-rooms of the aristocratic Ballygunge elite – but it will offend their pens to write about the endless humiliations, the low standard of living and the vulgar dirtiness of the neglected, uneducated society of the villages, because these matters are unpleasant.

The abominable life of corrupt women, the obnoxious environment of the slums, the carnal cravings of antisocial human beasts – all these they seek to avoid, because they are unacceptable by the standards of “decency” and “decorum”.

The human mind has many ideas and propensities that are normal and natural. But the mysophobic artists or litterateurs, with their touch-me-not-or-I-might-lose-my-purity mentality, want to avoid all these. They think that these propensities, if given place in literature, will jeopardize society. I cannot support this orthodox, rightist mentality.

Yet those who are leftists in the world of art are even more dangerous. The defect of the rightists is their inaction, and that of the leftists is their hyper-activity, based on selfishness. It seems as though they are deliberately seeking out the dark and dirty aspects of life and, like flies, growing fat on the secretions of society’s festering sores. It must be remembered that flies do not heal sores – rather they exacerbate them, because the very pus of these sores provides them with their vital juice. So the filthy aspects of society are the only wealth on which these artists and litterateurs subsist.

If art or literature is created revolving around the evil propensities of the human mind, people will naturally gravitate towards it in large numbers, and the creators of such literature will earn a great deal of money thereby; indeed, this is the only aim of their artistic creation. Engaged in the quest of evil, obscenity and vulgarity, they, too, lose sight of the primary goal of art.

In such matters of decency or indecency, the middle path is the best: that is, we must not deviate from the ideal. At the time of pursuing the path of benevolence we shall not bother as to which of these – decorum or vulgarity, decency or indecency – the brush, the pen, the chisel or the hammer, has become contaminated with during its march ahead.

If we do so, we will stray from our path.

I am not prepared to accept any hard and fast rule that literature must be created centering on good citizens alone, nor am I inclined to agree to the policy that crude and mean people have to be presented as low or vile before the readers or spectators. In my opinion whatever artists create must have the fullest touch of their sympathetic minds.

Those who are inferior and neglected, helpless and destitute are the very people who are the most unrepresented in the salons of literature.

They are mute.

And so the heavy responsibility of expressing the sentiments that are hidden in their tormented minds has to be borne by the artist alone.

The litterateur or the artist, has to take the responsibility of enabling them to rise up and sit in the same row with the rest of society, after dusting off the dirt from their bodies.

Mundane and Transcendental Love

Many people complain that most of modern literature is full only of the whimperings of cheap erotic love.

After seeing Bombay-made films, it seems that juvenile society has no other job than busying itself with so-called love – as though every college girl of any respectable community is engaged in amorous escapades, throwing all decency and decorum overboard.

In fact, the mentality of those artists and litterateurs who depict only this type of situation is nothing but impotent.

Whatever be the profound, philosophical implications of the word prema, or love, the true characteristic of prema is supra-physical – beyond the bondage of any limitation.

When artists, absorbed in the essence of love, try to convey it to the people through their language, rhetoric and subtle suggestions, the sweetness of their artistic genius reaches the apex of expression. But then this creation of the artist cannot be regarded as popular literature or art, because the subtle sense which is capable of comprehending that transcendental feeling is, indeed, undeveloped in most people.

The literature of Rabindranath Tagore has some semblances of this pure, supra-physical love. But whenever Rabindranath tried to give expression to it, he became unintelligible to the mass.

The transcendental thoughts and ideas of the sweet, graceful shlokas of the Upaniśads are also incomprehensible to the common people.

Infinite love is the ultimate ecstatic expression of finite love.

This very sense that artists try to awaken in the popular mind – when they devote themselves to the task of establishing the link between the finite and the infinite, between the mundane and the transcendental – this very awareness though not purely transcendental, verily bears the highest importance in the realm of art.

Through expressions which are comprehensible to ordinary intelligence, it gradually leads the sweetness of the human mind to a supra-sensible dreamland. Rabindranath’s poem “Urvashii” is a composition of this type. There is no dearth of physicality in the poem, nor is it difficult to understand; and yet its crude materiality gradually expands into a subtlety beyond understanding.

Love that is completely physical is not love at all in terms of philosophy. Therefore philosophy will not, and perhaps should not, entertain such love at all. But can an artist ignore it?

It is in every great or small incident of life that an ordinary person feels pleasure or pain. Even love concerned with the body is not something completely cut off from pleasure and pain.

How then can the artist, given to delineating human happiness and sorrow – sworn to giving form to the impact of human grief and pain, hopes and desires – neglect this physical love?

Here it must be noted that artists must seek to exhibit before people the simple form of truth, sweetened with the sweetness of their hearts.

But it is a matter of great regret that a class of modern artists, in the realms of poetry, novels, cinema, drama, etc., employ all their artistic talents for the sole purpose of kindling people’s crude sensuality, instead of portraying human propensities with the idealistic outlook of a true artist.

I would say that this class of artists is truly a blot on society.