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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
man after his own image. When religion becomes a crime against God himself, there must be something radically wrong with it.
The ascetic is a defeatist. His defeatism is the product of the depressingly hopeless social conditions that surround him. As soon as those conditions change, the discase growing out of them necessarily abates and gradually disappears. That was the case with the European society which succeeded in the struggle to come out of the chaos resulting from the decomposition of the antiquated society. The virus of Christian monasticism was a passing phenomenon. Monasteries outgrew their original negative features; gradually, they came to play a positive social role as productive units which constituted the corner-stone of a new social order. In India, the social crisis became a chronic disease, the ugly symptoms of which perpetuated themselves as so many specific features of a special type of culture. Raising defeatism on the proud pedestal of imaginary and often fraudulent spirituality, Indian society abjured the path of struggle. It stagnated into a fossilised existence, the "conservative genius" of which choked the internal forces of disruption and progress, but could not resist violent impacts from outside. The Hindu ideal of Brahmacharya is a hideous heritage of a tragic past.
In the world of early Christianity as well as in India, monasteries were filled mostly by the destitute who gained much more in the new life of
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