Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 2, August 2002

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Drew, John. India and the Romantic Imagination. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998. xv + 305 pp. ISBN 019564710-6 $16.95, £ 11.50.

Reviewed by

Steve Wall

John Drew's thesis is that European thinkers have long been influenced by the thought and culture of India, and further that they have tended to idealize the ideas and culture that they borrowed. He traces this Indian influence, and he shows that it was particularly acute on the British Romantics.

            Drew uses the metaphor of a "passage to India," which is of course the title of E.M. Forster's novel and of Colonel James Capper's 1783 work Observations on the Passage to India, to illustrate these European actual and intellectual treks to and from India. Part One of the book is termed "The Passage Out," while Part Two is called "The Passage Back." He also utilizes this dominant “passage” metaphor in a number of chapter and sub-chapter headings.

            Drew begins his discussion of the European idealization of India with Forster; he then turns his attention to India's influences on Neo-Platonism, Sir William Jones, Appollonius of Tyana, Pythagoras, Alexander the Great, Medieval Christianity and Persia, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, and Alun Lewis. He is very careful to warn that some of the arguments and connections in this work are speculative; indeed he states that "the book itself may be regarded, alternatively, as a work of scholarship or fiction" (ix).

            Despite this caveat Drew makes an excellent case for his thesis, and he draws on a loaded fund from the history of philosophy, literary and anthropological accounts, and field research. He gleans a number of motifs that are common to European and Indian thought; for example, the cave, mysticism, and the “tree of life”. The most prominent use of the cave is of course Plato's Allegory of the Cave, but it is also present in the Prometheus myth, Kashmiri myths, Plotinus, and Porphyry. Drew writes that just as Plato viewed the soul’s ascent from the cave as requisite for wisdom, this process also describes Buddha’s account of his enlightenment. I would offer a slight disagreement with Drew here; assuming I correctly understand his point here I think that different thinkers use the cave metaphor for different purposes. Some do refer to ascents, but other caves represent places one goes into for knowledge or sustenance. This seems to be the case with the caves of Kashmir legend in which caves of ice are transformed into the milk of paradise and immortality. Going into a cave or the deep to gain wisdom is a major theme in Western literature: Odysseus, Aeneas, and Don Quixote, to name a few, are elucidated by their journey into these realms.

            In addition to these common themes, Drew sees some similarities between the philosophies of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, and that of the Indian thinkers. For example, Pythagoras’s vegetarianism, reincarnation, and the transmigration of souls is present in Indian thought as well. A form of reincarnation resurfaces in Socrates and Plato too. In the Meno, Socrates explains that we all know everything because our souls have been reincarnated many times, and therefore have accumulated all knowledge. What we require is a Socratic midwife to bring the buried knowledge to the surface. Plato uses reincarnation in his cautionary tale from the Republic, The Myth of Er. In this work the unjust are informed that they will be sentenced to many painful lifetimes of rebirth. 

            A possible explanation for so many parallels is that these thinkers actually made passages to India and learned the ideas directly from the Hindu masters themselves. There are records of the treks to India made by Appollonius and Alexander, but as for the others Drew states:

Whether Plato and Pythagoras ever actually did get to India is in one sense no more material than whether Appollonius did. What is pertinent is that in associating these philosophers with the passage to India, imaginative fiction, bodying out the metaphors through which the Imagination is revealed, suggests that the tradition of which they are the protagonists owes India some sort of debt of recognition or acknowledgement. (120)

While actual the means of transmission is less secure with the ancient thinkers, it is quite another matter with more modern figures. One of the truisms of cultural interaction is that the conquered nation or people have almost as much influence on the conquerors as vice versa. Horace’s adage that “captive Greece took Rome captive” applies in many ways to India and England as well; and particularly so during the late-eighteenth century and the early-nineteenth century. One reason for this influence is Sir William Jones, who stands as perhaps the central figure in the British intellectual experience with India. He was a source of information on India for rivals Burke and Hastings, he translated Hindu texts and provided useful interpretations, he did research on Indian mythology and literature, and he wrote poetry using Indian motifs. Jones's comparative study on the gods of Greece, Italy, and India was extremely beneficial in making readers of the late eighteenth century aware of the parallels among these disparate cultures. His influence simply cannot be overstated. 

            Jones sought to explain the strong parallels between the Vedanta School of Hinduism and the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato.  He held that ideas like transmigration of the soul proved an identity between these schools of thought. Because of the work of researchers like Jones, the German Idealist philosopher Schelling would remark in 1815 that "now we hear nothing but the language and wisdom of India" (185).  

            Two Romantic poets who fell under the spell of Jones’s India were Coleridge and Shelley. It is true that the later Coleridge backed away from the notion that India could provide the model for mystical knowledge; however, his earlier works show a definite familiarity with Indian ideas. His neo-Platonism is “used as a mediating factor between English poetry and Indian mythology” (223).  Drew writes that for a period Coleridge even referred to himself as Vishnu; and that while his “Kublai Khan” does not have specifically Indian motifs, but it has a number of general Oriental themes. Although he devotes a large section to Coleridge’s great poem this is actually the least satisfactory chapter in the book.

Drew holds that Sir William Jones was also a strong influence on Shelley, as was Southey’s “The Curse of Kehama.” Indeed, Jones served as a “catalyst” for Shelley’s thought (281). Shelley used Indian imagery throughout Prometheus Unbound, and Drew thinks that particularly in the final act one can discern Shelley’s acceptance of Jones’s optimism that India was the primeval fount of wisdom and understanding.

Drew’s knowledge of Indian mythology and literature is profound, and the level of scholarship in his book is very high. He utilizes hundreds of footnotes. Drew is careful to qualify his claims for influences and identities, so he cannot be accused of reaching beyond what he is able to support. I think that anyone who writes in this area in the future will have to address this work.