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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
some extent, has frecd itself from the noble human qualities of falsehood and hypocrisy. There are men and women who are not ashained of their feelings and emotions. There are artists who are neither mystics nor mythologists. But in India, literature is still "human" par excellence. It has no use for rcality. For it, truth is only a word to be repeated sanctimoniously, but never to be practised. The heroes and heroines of Indian fiction are pictures of false-hood ; because they do not correspond to anything which really exists in this mortal world. The pre-dominating theme of Indian literature is love, which is depicted in such a way that it has nothing to do with the real emotion. Even the delightfully sexual lyrics of Vidyapati, Chandidas, Jaydev, and even of Rabindranath in our own days, are interpreted as mystic accounts of spiritual elevation, of an erotic communion with the impersonal God! The legendary tales of the philanderings of a youthful cowherd and the delicious abandon of the milkmaids, jolted out of all inhibition by the flood of tropical spring, are given a dull scriptural value, and even a philosophical content is read in themmutual attraction between Jeevat ma and Paramatma. The realitics of life are still taboo in Indian literature, which is saturated with vapid romanticism, sloppy sentimentality and love degraded to a hypocritical spiritual experience.
In India, even to-day, man wants to be God.
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