Caste and Outcast

Description

This book is the first autobiography of Dhan Gopal Mukerji, (1890-1936) a Hindu of Brahmin parentage who became a writer and was the first Indian to win a Newbery Medal in 1928. This book covers his childhood to his early twenties, from his lessons training as a priest in India to his establishment in San Francisco as an anarchist, from his homeless, and his jobs working the fields. He spends time debating and thinking about the philosophy and religion of Hinduism while trying to find his way in America. Excerpts: “The Indian holy man attains the simplicity of a child; the more childlike he is, the more holy. The holy man has a sense of humor; he is so holy that he has forgotten his holiness. This is the ideal of all Hindu life. To attain the spirit of childhood is the aim of Indian education…They asked my holy man if he had seen God. He said, ‘Even if you touched God's hand, he would remain unknown. He is the origin that annihilates all origins; He is godless, that is why I call Him God. The moment you make Him a person. He does not exist.’” “There is a curious thing. When Jesus was asked whether the Jews should pay taxes to Caesar, he said, ‘Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.’ By this he meant to say to the Jews that it was easy to placate their Roman lords by sacrificing a few ounces of matter, gold or silver, which had no importance. But it was their relation to God which was of real value. Now I think,” Frank continued, “that the Indian should look at it in that way. He must not try to overcome Western materialism with a rival materialism of his own. The Indian who is an oriental must give an answer like Christ's — 'I am so busy with my spiritual business that I have no time to pay attention to you who are demanding something material.’ And it is not a humiliation to belong to a conquered race. The people that are most humiliated in this Indian-British transaction are the British. They are damning their souls by exploiting a race in the name of British liberty. They are selling liberty as a prostitute sells her body. The Indian, on the contrary, is selling very little, so if I were to choose between the conquered or the conqueror I would prefer to be the conquered. At least your soul is saved. Give your spirituality to the British as Christ gave his to the Romans. And it is because you are conquered that you are spiritually sound. If you were not conquered you would not be spiritual.” “As regards the Pacific Coast, it cannot resist the culture of Asia...Oriental decorations along with Oriental aloofness are becoming discernible elements. In the homes of the Pacific Coast I have found that the people are aloof. They build a Chinese wall of pride around themselves. On the Pacific Coast one also finds something Spanish, not altogether European, but rather Africo-Saracenic in character…will it be too much to say that in five hundred years America will have a culture unique, magnificent and overpowering? America's tradition is her future. A Hindu, who bears the weight of forty centuries of tradition, is drawn by no country as by America…The future of this country is more staggering than the past of India. A supreme desolation is America's, and this desolation is as alluring as that of the Himalayas. I found in America's air the sharp taste of freedom, not freedom from politicians, not freedom from economic conditions, but freedom from the dead. No dead generations rock the cradle of the new-born here. I felt in America, as in Asia, an anti-human outlook. In Europe, on the other hand, life is homocentric and man is the measure of all things. The nausea of humanity that seizes one in Europe is not present here. In America, man is what he is in Asia; he is, as he ought to be, an episode, in the life cycle of a continent. He learns that the universe is not homocentric, but cosmocentric. Man's life in America seems like the flight of gnats in a windswept field.”