The Family Feuds Or The Village Feuds

In The Beginning, Before The Arrival Of The White Men, I Had Considered Myself Neutral. I Had Wanted Neither Side To Win, Neither The Army Nor The Rebels. As It Turned Out, Both Sides Lost.

Out Of Its Squalor And Human Decay, Its Eruptions Of Butchery, India Produced So Many People Of Grace And Beauty, Ruled By Elaborate Courtesy. Producing Too Much Life, It Denied The Value Of Life; Yet It Permitted A Unique Human Development To So Many. Nowhere Were People So Heightened, Rounded And Individualistic; Nowhere Did They Offer Themselves So Fully And With Such Assurance. To Know Indians Was To Take A Delight In People As People; Every Encounter Was An Adventure. I Did Not Want India To Sink [out Of My Memory]; The Mere Thought Was Painful.

What Matters In The End In Literature, What Is Always There, Is The Truly Good. And- Though Played Out Forms Can Throw Up Miraculous Sports Like The Importance Of Being Earnest Or Decline And Fall- What Is Good Is Always What Is New, In Both Form And Content. What Is Good Forgets Whatever Models It Might Have Had, And Is Unexpected; We Have To Catch It On The Wing.

I Have A Very Small Public.

One Isn’t Born One’s Self. One Is Born With A Mass Of Expectations, A Mass Of Other People’s Ideas – And You Have To Work Through It All.