A pupil of an Anglo-vernacular school in Allahabad was once asked to define a river. The clever little fellow gave a perfectly correct definition. When he was asked what river he had seen, this unfortunate mite, living at the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna, replied that he had not seen any. He dimly had an idea that his familiar world (which so easily came to him through the medium of his own direct consciousness) could never be the great learned world of geography. In later life, he must have got the information that even his own country had its place in geography and actually had its rivers. But suppose this news did not reach him at all, till some foreign traveller told him one day that his was a great big country, that the Himalayas were great big mountains, that the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra were great big rivers - the shock of it could not but upset his mental balance, and in the reaction against the self-contempt he had nursed so long, he would lose no time in making himself absurdly hoarse by shouting that other countries were merely countries, but his was heaven itself! His previous understanding of the world was wrong - due to his ignorance. His subsequent understanding of the world was worse - it was ludicrously false with the falsehood of sophisticated foolishness.

The same thing happens in the case of our Indian culture. Because of the want of opportunity in our course of study, we take it for granted that India had no culture, or next to none. Then, when we hear from foreign pundits some echo of the praises of India's culture, we can contain ourselves no longer and rend the sky with the shout that all other cultures are merely human, but ours is divine - a special creation of Brahma! And this leads us to that moral dipsomania, which is the hankering after the continual stimulation of self-flattery.

We should remember that the doctrine of special creation is out of date, and the idea of a specially favoured race belongs to a barbaric age. We have come to understand in modern times that any special truth, or special culture, which is wholly dissociated from the universal, is not true at all. Only the prisoner condemned to a solitary cell is separate from the world. He who declares that India has been condemned by Providence to intellectual solitary confinement does not help to glorify her.

However that may be, if we are to create a centre of Indian culture, we must start with the belief that India has a culture, and one which is worthy of being imparted to all.

My mind feels a pull at its coat from the back at this point. I know a section of my countrymen are saying to me: 'Not so fast. Let us know if you believe that our Indian culture is the best in the world, or, at least so good as to deserve a place of honour in our education.'

Fortunately, in God's world, the tyranny of the one sole best is not tolerated. There are numerous varieties of the best to keep each other company. So let us not quarrel over that superlative adjective or take it too seriously.

It can be easily pointed out that our culture has its superstitions and its shortcomings. They show themselves too prominently only because its movement has stopped. European culture also has its superstitions. Its politics and its science are full of them. These do not become fatally unhealthy because they move and they change - just like their caste distinctions, which are not desperately oppressive because they are constantly moving.

Only a few years ago, Europe began to see the whole world through the mist of one scientific shibboleth, 'the struggle for existence'. This coloured her vision, and fixed her point of view. We, also, like a meekly obedient pupil, took the phrase from her and thought it a sign of imperfect education not to believe it. But already there is an indication of a change in this view, and facts are being brought to prove that the positive force which works at the basis of natural selection is the power of sympathy, the power to combine. In the nineteenth century, the message of political economy was unrestrained competition; in the twentieth, it is beginning to change into co-operation. This only proves that whatever binders movement is bad.

There was a time when we in India worked at the problem of life; we freely made experiments; the solutions we arrived at then cannot be ignored merely because they are different from those of Europe. But they must move; they have to join the procession of man's discoveries; they must not lag behind and superciliously forget others, and be contemptuously forgotten themselves. We are to call them into line and to move to the drum-beat of life.