Author: Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia
Dhan Gopal Mukerji's autobiography,
Caste and Outcast, was originally published by E. P. Dutton in 1923. It
has now been republished by Stanford University Press with a 40-page introduction
by historian Gordon Chang and a substantial afterword, "The Homeless Self:
Problems of Cultural Translation in Autobiography," by anthropologists
Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta. All three of the editors are professors
at Stanford.
Mukerji (1890-1936) was the first
South Asian immigrant to the United States to carve out a successful literary
career, publishing more than twenty books of nonfiction, fiction, poetry,
drama, translations, and children's stories. Caste and Outcast was the
first book on India written by an Indian that was widely read in America.
It won high critical acclaim: Saturday Evening Post reviewed it as "the
most important and inspiring book that has appeared in America since the
war." It also garnered considerable commercial success. Reprinted five
times in the 1920s, it was translated into French, Czech, and other languages.
Its theme is the contrast between Hinduism's pervasive spirituality and
tolerance and the Western world's materialism and religious dogmas. Mukerji
proposes that the West should learn "repose and meditation" from India,
and India should learn the value of "activity and science" from the West.
As an interpreter of Indian thought
and spirituality, Mukerji's influence on American literary circles was
considerable. Among his long-time literary associates were the eminent
critic Van Wyck Brooks and the historians Will and Ariel Durant. (When
the Durants later published their 8-volume The Story of Civilization, they
entitled their first volume Our Oriental Heritage.) Chang notes: "Mukerji's
opus was an integral part of a far-flung intellectual effort in the early
twentieth century that seriously studied Indian civilization and drew upon
it for inspiration and direction. Those involved included such figures
as T. S. Eliot, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill, Lewis Mumford, Luther
Burbank, A. J. Liebling."
Caste and Outcast was published
when Mukerji was 33, but tells the story of his life only till age 25 and
that too with several gaps. A major reason for the gaps is that he did
not conceive the book as a conventional autobiography; its focus is on
his spiritual quest in India and in America. The book's first part, Caste,
describes his growing up in a Brahmin family in India: the early spiritual
training he received from his mother; his initiation into Brahmin priesthood
at the age of fourteen; his years of spiritual wandering; his studies at
the University of Calcutta; and his brief stay in Japan. The second part,
Outcast, describes his arriving in the United States; studying at the University
of California, Berkeley, from 1910 to 1913; and laboring in the farms and
factories of California to earn money for his studies. One of the gaps
in the autobiography is Mukerji's transfer to Stanford, where he completed
his degree. This and other gaps are elucidated in Chang's essay, which
gives us a more complete biography including Mukerji's marriage to a fellow
Stanford student, Pat Dugan, in 1918; his great success on the lecture
circuit and the popularity of many of his books; the birth of his son;
his friendships with international luminaries like Jawaharlal Nehru and
the French litterateur Romain Rolland; his nervous breakdowns; and his
suicide at age 46.
In Caste and Outcast, Mukerji depicts
India as a tolerant Hindu civilization. He illustrates Hinduism's tolerance
with numerous narratives. An example: As a child, Mukerji brings home a
picture of Christ given to him by his Christian teacher in the missionary
school with the admonition to get rid of false Hindu gods and instead worship
the only true god, Christ. Mukerji's mother places the picture of Christ
next to Vishnu's and says, "God is one. We have given him many names. Why
should we quarrel about names?" She burns incense and meditates before
the images of Christ and Vishnu.
In contrast to this tolerance, Mukerji
sees the Muslim period of Indian history as horribly oppressive to the
Hindus, during which the Hindus had to abandon some of their highly evolved
traditions: "The Mohammedans wanted to convert all India to Mohammedanism
. . . the Hindus were not willing converts but resisted to the point of
death . . . When the Hindu men died fighting, the entire female population
of garrison towns, in order not to fall into the hands of their conquerors,
burned themselves alive. It was this measure that saved India from being
overpopulated by Mohammedan children . . . . Girls before they reached
the age of maturity were irrevocably betrothed to young Hindus, so that
they could be protected from the Mohammedan enemies . . . Mohammedan
rule saw in India a new marriage system totally unlike the ancient sayamvara
, meaning the choice."
Mukerji's narratives about Muslims
in India are in the tradition of the pioneering Indian novelist Bankim
Chandra Chatterjee's Anand Math, which depicts the Muslims as hostile,
bigoted, polygamous people practicing a foreign religion. (The editors'
essays do not bring up the matter of Chatterjee's obvious influence on
Mukerji's thinking.) The one exception to these negative depictions of
Muslims occurs in Mukerji's narrative about his father's old Muslim music
teacher, who was held in affectionate regard by the Mukerji family. Even
in this case, it is the Mukerji family that is shown as tolerant
and hospitable, going to the extent of cooking meat dishes for the Muslim
guest even though the family is strictly vegetarian.
The major factor in the popularity
of Caste and Outcast among American readers is the exotic setting of India.
Another factor is the author's engaging narrative style, evident throughout
the book. For example, in the chapter about his early childhood, he tells
the story of the peacocks:
The owners of these beautiful creatures
naturally wish to show them off to their friends, but how to keep a peacock
at home in the afternoon has always been a problem. They usually leave
the house in the morning and go hunting for snakes out in the country,
and they do not come back again until night time.. To solve the problem
of getting the peacock home, they have cultivated the drug habit in the
bird. At a certain time of day the peacock is given a grain of opium: thus,
no matter where it may be, when that time arrives it will come home begging
for the opium. After the opium the peacocks will stay around the house
and can be shownto visitors.
The "Outcast" in the title
refers primarily to Mukerji's experience in America as a newly arrived,
penniless Indian student at the University of California, Berkeley, where
he suffered from racial discrimination.-the Indian students were routinely
refused service in the campus restaurants. To support himself he
had to take up menial jobs. Summers, he worked as a farmhand along with
Sikh and other North Indian immigrants in central California. He describes
his experience of working with the Sikhs positively. In contrast, he found
working with Muslim immigrants loathsome. : "The Mohammedans would not
buy the American butcher's meat, for animals whose flesh they eat must
be killed by having their throats cut and in no other way. So they bought
three big rams and after a great deal of prayer and benediction cut their
throats. The poor creatures writhed in mortal pain for a few moments as
the blood gushed out and wet the ground. I said to Hadji, 'Why do you kill
this way?' 'It is the way of our Lord; it is in the Koran,' he answered
me."
The Outcast section contains two
chapters about Mukerji's friendship with several members of the International
Workers of the World in Berkeley. Unlike other labor groups, these radical
socialists welcomed laborers of all races and religions, a principle that
strongly appealed to Mukerji.
The publication of Caste and Outcast
immediately established Mukerji as a major young writer in America. Except
for two slender books of poems, Mukerji wrote all of his books after this
success. Among them was Gay Neck: The story of A Pigeon for which he won
the Newberry Medal in 1927 for children's literature. In 1928, Mukerji
was the first to publish a rejoinder to American journalist Katherine Mayo's
notorious Mother India, which she had published after a 6-month tour of
India.(Mayo's book was dismissed by M.K. Gandhi as "a drain inspector's
report.") . Mukerji titled his rejoinder A Son of Mother India Answers.
In 1931, Mukerji published his translation of the Bhagavat Gita under the
title The Song of God. However, during the Depression the public was not
buying books as before.
After this decline , Mukerji suffered
several nervous breakdowns . He secluded himself from family and friends
and started spending more and more time in long solitary meditation sessions
, culminating in his suicide at age 46.I see a clue to the suicide
in the very chapter of Cast and Outcast: "My mother said to me, 'Never
stop halfway on any path. Go on like the rivers, to the end, and you will
find that in the end you have reached God.'"
It is gratifying to have this pioneering
book, which sheds light on Indian and American religious history, available
once more, in such a solid scholarly format. Although the Afterword essay
by Mankrekar and Gupta, suffused as it is in anthropological jargon, will
appeal mainly to the specialist in anthropology and in academic postcolonial
studies, the autobiography itself, as well as Chang's introduction, will
serve the general reader well. As Chang rightly points out: "The history
of Indian religious beliefs in America is widely underappreciated and certainly
understudied." This book will help remedy the lag.
Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Caste and Outcast
Edited by Gordon Chang, Purnima
Mankekar, and Akhil Gupta
277 pages Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford Univ. Press 2002
$ 21.95 Paper
