(See Cover) In Simla last week, 21 Indians and one Englishman struggled to solve one of the world's most vexatious problems — giving self-government to India. The Englishman bore the resounding proconsular title of His Excellency, Field Marshal the Right Honorable Viscount Wavell (rhymes with naval) of Cyrenaica and Winchester. It mattered little that the title of Viscount of Winchester was as exotic in Simla as the Maharaja of Patiala would be in Wapping Old Stairs. In Lord Wavell was embodied the military might and the political glory of one of the only three great powers to survive the world's first total war.
The 21 Indians scarcely represented a nation at all. Chiefly Hindus and Moslems, they were members of violently hostile religious communities, mutually contemptuous, mutually recriminatory. But if they did not represent a nation, in the modern political sense, they represented something much greater. They represented India, one of the supreme symbols on the cultural horizon of mankind.
Ancient of Days. India, among nations, is the ancient of days. Before even China, there was India. Before human memory congealed from legend into record, India loomed from the unimaginable reach of time. Its landscape matched its origins —an immense wedge of the world, vast plains cracked by a too hot sun, vast jungles writhing with growth from too dense rains, vast cities melting under the unflagging onset of oblivion and the soft decay of stone itself, 400 million people pullulating in a too frantic drive to defeat the multiplicity of daily death.
Four thousand miles of all-but-harborless coast and the width of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal shut off the Indian subcontinent from the western desert world of Semites and the eastern twilight world of Annamese, Cambodians and Malays. Along the north, the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas, walled off India from the mass of Asia.
Capacity for Greatness. Every nation is obsessed with one problem which is the measure of its capacity for greatness: Egypt with immortality; Greece with beauty; Rome with administration and law; France with rationalism; Germany with war; Britain with the freedom of the individual man. India, islanded by sea and land, and haunted by the hourly wanton foreclosure of life by death, looked within and found that its obsession was the soul and its creator, the problem of good & evil. It embodied this vision in one of the world's great faiths (Buddhism) and in religious works of great power (the Vedas and Upanishads). India, under its squalor and its filth, its superstitions and its cruel ties, its babble of 75 languages and dialects and hodge-podge of peoples, its lethal famines and lethal wars, was nevertheless the most intensely spiritual area on earth.
In its obsession, it worshipped God under all forms, from inexpressible abstraction to inexpressible obscenity, from the monkeys which defiled villages and ruined precious crops, to the snakes which every year killed 20,000 people. More extreme devotees, the Jains, even placed cloths over their mouths and noses lest they breathe in and kill forms of life too minute for vision but nevertheless God-created.