Полное собрание сочинений. Том 37. Произведения 1906–1910 гг. Letter to a Hindoo

It appears especially strange of India, for here we have a people of 200 millions of individuals, highly endowed with spiritual and physical powers, in absolute subjection to a small clique, composed of persons utterly alien in thought and aspiration and altogether inferior to those whom they enslave.

These causes, as one can easily see from your letter, from the articles in «Free Hindustan», from the highly interesting writings of the Hindoo Swami Vivekananda and others, are in accord with that which causes the distress of all the peoples of our time; in the absence of a rational religious teaching which, while elucidating the meaning of life to the people in an equal way, would also make clear the higher law, which should be a guide to conduct, and in the substitution for them of the more than dubious propositions of a false religion and pseudo science, and in the immoral conclusions called civilization derived from both.

One has already seen not only from your letter and from the articles in «Free Hindustan», but also from the entire Hindoo political literature of our times, that the majority of the leaders of public opinion among the native races of India, while no longer ascribing any significance to those religious teachings which were professed, and are professed by the Hindoo peoples, now find the sole possibility of deliverance from the oppression they endure, in embracing those anti-religious and subtly immoral forms of social order in which the English and other pseudo Christian nations live to-day.

Nothing shows more clearly than this, the total absence of religious consciousness in the minds of the present day leaders of Hindoo peoples, than does this tendency to instil into the hearts of the natives the acceptance of the forms of life in operation amongst European nations. Meanwhile, in the absence of this true religious consciousness and the guidance of conduct flowing from it, in the absence which is common in our times to all the nations of the East and the West, from Japan to England and America: lies the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of all the Indian peoples by the English.

II

О ye, who see perplexities over your heads and beneath your feet, to the right and to the left! you will be an eternal enigma unto yourselves, until you become humble and joyful as children.