Is knowledge an activity? When I see a pot, who sees it? Sri Sankara, has he not said in his celebrated treatise, Drig Drishya Viveka, (Discrimination Between the Seeing and Seen): An object, say a pot, registers on the pupil of my eye, and that image is pictured in my mind. But who is it or what is it that knows it’s a pot? He or It is a principle that nobody has ever seen. One comes back again and again to Yajnyavalkya’s question: Who knows, or What knows the knower? What then, Sir, is knowledge?

‘The answer is simple. Knowledge, Jnana, itself the “I”.’

‘Oh! . . .’

‘And that, Maitreyi, is the Meaning of India.’

Appendix

Foreword to Kanthapura

There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthalapurana, or legendary history, of its own. Some god or godlike hero has passed by this village—Rama might have rested under this pipal tree, Sita might have dried her clothes, after her bath, on this yellow stone, or the Mahatma himself, on one of his many pilgrimages through the country, might have slept in this hut, the low one, by the village gate. In this way the past mingles with the present, and the gods mingle with men to make the repertory of your grandmother always bright. One such story from the contemporary annals of my village I have tried to tell.

The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own, the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word ‘alien’, yet English is not really an alien language to us.1 English is the language of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.