T. S. Eliot's relation to the philosophies of India still remains a relatively unexplored area. It is generally known that Eliot's interest in at least one Indian religion (Buddhism) began in his boyhood, via Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia'. It is on record that he had made some study of both Hinduism and Buddhism in his Harvard days and also learnt some Sanskrit under Lan-man. That he was a student of Irving Babbitt, one of the great western exponents of Indian philosophy, and was to some extent influenced by him, is also widely known. Moreover, The Waste Land and Four Quartets and The Cocktail Party contain direct borrowings from Indian texts, and passages occur in many others of his poems and plays which are distinctly reminiscent of Indian thought. It is therefore curious that among the critical writings on Eliot which were produced after he had attained fame, there are so few attempts to examine the impact of Eliot's Indic studies on his works. Many critics have refused to take this aspect seriously, some have regarded the "intrusion" of Indian thought as a blemish. For instance, Helen Gardner voiced the view "that to introduce Krishna at this point in The Dry Salvages' is an error, and destroys the imaginative harmony of the poem." An Indian critic, B. Rajan, declares that the third section of "The Dry Salvages" "begins badly, and Mr. Eliot is never happy in the maze of oriental metaphysics and his wanderings this time are uncomfortably sinuous." F. O. Matthiessen does not neglect to inform us that he himself had "not yet read the Upanishad from which Eliot borrowed" in The Waste Land, on the assumption that it is not necessary to read either the particular Upanisad or the Buddha's Fire Sermon, in order to comprehend Eliot's poem. It may be doubted whether a critic of Mr. Matthiessen's stature is justified in assuming the unimportance of something of which by his own admission he had no knowledge. A notably dissenting voice is sounded by Philip Wheelright who regarded the mention of Krisna as poetically valid inasmuch as it "furnished the main philosophical theme of the poem.... and synthesised the Hindu idea of rebirth with Herodotus' idea of relevance of rebirth to every temporal moment." It is not unlikely that the indifference of most critics to the Indian elements in Eliot's writings was partly caused by the poet's own statement that study of Hindu philosophy had left him in a state of "enlightened mystification." The memory of this paradoxical and temptingly quotable phrase probably left many serious readers of The Waste Land and Four Quartets in a state of part "mystification" whether "enlightened" or not. On another occasion Eliot said that his "only hope of really penetrating into the heart of the mystery of Indian philosophy would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or an European which for practical as well as sentimental reasons I did not wish to do." This statement, too, may be construed as lending support to Helen Gardner and B. Rajan. I would submit, however, that both these statements of the poet prove that his contacts with Indian philosophy were serious and went quite deep, and that we can ignore this aspect only at the risk of an imperfect understanding of his work.
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