Books: Passage to India

LANCER AT LARGE — Francis Yeats-Brown—V’iking ($2.75).

Readers of his Lives of a Bengal Lancer will remember that ex-Lancer Yeats-Brown was not only an enthusiastic polo-player and pig-sticker but an amateur of Hindu mysticism. In Lancer at Large, an account of India revised after 15 years, Hollywood will be hard put to it to find any material at all. At 50, Yeats-Brown approached India not as a sporty subaltern but as an inquiring disciple.

Commissioned to write a 100,000-word book on India, Yeats-Brown gave himself six months to do it in, 20,000 miles by airplane, elephant, train, car, horse to gather his impressions. At the outset he confessed himself stumped by India’s size (350,000,000 pop.), unwilling to guess the answers to such problems as India’s 24,000 births a day (world’s highest birth rate, which has increased the population, in spite of the world’s highest death rate, 34,000,000 in the last decade), five or six million beggars, 24½ million “entirely superfluous cattle, costing £132,000,000 annually—a staggering sum … to pay for their veneration of cows.” In spite of such temptations to lay down the white man’s law, Yeats-Brown says: “I have no intention of teaching the grandmother of our civilization how to suck the eggs of democracy.” Nor does India’s caste system stick in his craw. He cites it as a method of spreading employment, as in the case of his Indian officer friend, who employed 25 servants, supported in all 62 people. He mentions the maharajah who went to pay a quiet overnight visit with 700 retainers, and was of such high caste that he always ate alone, when he gave a dinner party would have a half lemon put on his plate, out of courtesy. As for the condition of Indian women, Mr. Yeats-Brown flatly disagrees with Katherine Mayo (Mother India) that they are an enslaved sex: “Her facts are correct as regards the infinitesimal percentage of women to whom they apply, but her deductions from these special cases are a travesty of the truth.

The wife is the goddess of Hindu civilization, the mother is its pivot, and the grandmother is the ruler of the home.” Author Yeats-Brown went wherever he could find holy men. dervishes, religious teachers. In Allahabad he watched the parade of 1,000 stark naked followers of Siva.

He met Her Holiness Sri Sankarima, 109, who had spent 40 years in remote caves of the Himalayas, learning rejuvenating breathing exercises from a guru (teacher) who claimed to be 300. A swami told him: “The normal age of a man who lives rightly should be 140. . . . There are many Mahatmas living in the high Himalayas of over 200.” Says Yeats-Brown: “They have no birth certificates, unfortunately.” In seven instances of alleged reincarnation which he discovered, the children gave circumstantial evidence to prove that they remembered a previous life on earth. Most complicated case was that of a five-year-old who spoke one day to his mother “in great perplexity, saying that he was her husband, and that his grandfather his father, and his grandmother his mother.” One boy said he had been a soldier who had died in the ”German War”: up to the age of four “he used to play frog-leap and other peculiar games. He playfully walked in military fashion and gave cautions.” Mr. Yeats-Brown revisited his old friends Sir Rabindranath Tagore and Sir JagadisBose, botanist famed for his experiments on the nervous systems of plants.

He called on Gandhi and many another of India’s great and near-great. But the high point of his journey was at Trivandrum, where he met one Chidambaram Swami, who became his spiritual teacher, put him to work practising yoga in earnest. The pupil gives all the details of his training — breathing exercises, meditations, calisthenics — and observes that one of the prime necessities to spiritual advancement is a well-functioning bowel.

Still calling himself a Christian, Author Yeats-Brown says darkly: “I have gone too far along the path of the Vedanta to turn back now, and must follow it to its end, where I see a Cross.” He admits he has not yet become an expert in the spiritual life, but he left India so full of grateful respect that his view of her future is very different from most of his compatriots’: “India can manage her own affairs, given the right men in the right place. . . .

Eventually, in her own way and in her own time, India will return to the dictatorship of saints and sages.”