Reflections of an Aryan woman, 77

(Left, seal of the Theosophical Society in Budapest, Hungary.) Apart from the Theosophical Society—itself in close connection with certain Masonic Lodges in the West—it was among the Hindus of the dissident sects, such as the Brahmo Samaj, that I met the only Anti-Hitlerians who crossed my path in India—apart, of course, from the great majority of non-German Europeans, and all Communists without exception. I will only mention, as an example, the Brahmo Samajist milieu which the Shantiniketan Open Air University represented then, and still represents. The poet Rabindranath Tagore, its founder, was still alive when, in 1935, I spent six months at the said University to improve my knowledge of the Bengali language and to learn Hindi. I didn’t notice anything special except the presence, as ‘German teacher’, of a Jewess from Berlin, Margaret Spiegel, known as Amala Bhen, who had come there, after two years in Gandhi’s ashram, to spread her hatred of the Third Reich among the students entrusted to her and the Hindu colleagues she could indoctrinate. I soon learned that ‘Govinda’, the Buddhist monk whose saffron-coloured robe and handsome Burmese parasol added a picturesque note to the landscape, was also a Jew from Germany. I was also told of the deep friendship between the poet and Andrews, a British man and former Christian missionary. But no one expressed any hostility to my Hitlerian faith, except Amala Bhen.

The latter, who had been introduced to me as a ‘European’ on my arrival in Shantiniketan had, after only half an hour’s conversation, realised very well the ‘pan-Aryan’ nature of Hitlerism as I understood it and still understand it. She was quick to tell me—she who had come to the end of the world ‘not to see the shadow of a Nazi’—that I was ‘worse than the whole pack rolled in one’. Those, indeed, she told me, marched through the streets of the Reich’s cities singing: ‘Today Germany belongs to us; tomorrow the whole world’, but they were thinking mainly of Germany, despite the words of their song. I, on the other hand, by insisting on the profound identity of the Hitlerian spirit and that of orthodox Hinduism, was paving the way for the future military and moral conquest and unlimited influence of a German Reich that would spill over into Asia.

These words flattered me beyond belief. But the hostility of Margaret Spiegel, known as Amala Bhen, and no doubt that of ‘Govinda’, to whom I wasn’t introduced, still seemed to me to be confined to the non-Hindu element of the University of Shantinikétan.

It was a surprise to me to learn, a few months before the Second World War, that the poet Rabindranath Tagore himself had sent a telegram of protest to the Führer against the invasion of ‘unfortunate Czechoslovakia’. What was he meddling with? I couldn’t help but praise his work as an artist. Didn’t he realise that it was mainly the unfortunate Sudeten Germans who had the right to be protected? Didn’t he know that Czechoslovakia had never been anything but an artificial state, an assemblage of the most disparate elements, built from scratch to serve as a permanent thorn in the side of the German Reich? But what am I saying? Would he even have been able to draw a map of it? So why this indiscreet intervention? Was it suggested to him by the foreigners, Christians or Jews, whom I have just named, and by others, all of them humanitarian and anti-racists—at least anti-Aryan—who occasionally haunted Shantinikétan or who lived there?

Or should I not rather admit that, however artistic he may have been—however luminous and musical a neo-Sanskrit language such as Bengali may have revealed itself under his genius pen—a Brahmin who rejected the caste system wholesale could only be anti-Hitler? The poet’s stand against the defender of the Aryan elite of Europe shocked me all the more because Rabindranath Tagore had an ivory complexion and the most classic features of the white race: physical signs of a more or less unmixed parentage with those conquering Aryas, who passed on the hyperborean tradition to ancient India. But I might have thought that, if these same visible signs of Aryan nobility couldn’t have prevented him from joining his voice to that of the despisers of the ‘Law of colour and social function’ (varnashrama dharma) in India, it was unlikely that they would have become the occasion for an awakening of ancestral consciousness linked with any sympathy for that modern European form of the Brahminical spirit which is Hitlerism.