To celebrate the release of the latest issue of The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual (Volume 5), Manju Jain discusses some of the key ideas explored in her article ‘Through the Looking Glass: T. S. Eliot and Indian Philosophy‘ which features within Volume 5 of The Annual. The article is free to read via the LUP website throughout July-August 2023, in tandem with the activities of the T. S. Eliot Summer School for 2023.
The ideas for this article germinated over several years, going back to the time when I worked on my PhD thesis that became T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years. In my book, I attempted to locate Eliot’s interest in Indian philosophy within the context of debates in the Harvard Philosophy Department on science and religion, idealism and pragmatism, and compared his positions to those taken by his mentors –William James, Charles Lanman, Josiah Royce, James Wood, and Irving Babbitt — on some of the key concepts of the Vedanta and Buddhism. The recent publication of The Poems of T. S. Eliot and nine volumes of Eliot’s Letters made available a wealth of material that enabled me further to explore the trajectory of Eliot’s lifelong fascination with and ambivalence towards Indian philosophy, beginning with his discovery, as a boy, of Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia in his family’s library, until his use of the Mundaka Upanishad in his last play, The Elder Statesman.
Following two years’ study of Indian philosophy at Harvard, Eliot periodically returned to the texts that he had encountered there: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Yoga-System of Patanjali, which includes the Sankhya-Bhashya-Karika and the commentaries of Vachaspati Mishra, as well as some texts in the Pali Buddhist canon. Eliot was extremely impatient with scholars who claimed to be experts without having read the texts in the original, as he had done.
Eliot is often mistakenly perceived as having replicated Lanman’s contemptuous, Orientalist opinions of Indian philosophy. In this article, I lay out the differences between Eliot’s more positive and complex views on Sanskrit and the Upanishads as opposed to those of some of his teachers. Influenced by German Orientalists such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Paul Deussen, Lanman, James, and Royce interpreted the Upanishads as postulating the absolute identity of subject and object, a loss of individuality that the American philosophers, including Eliot himself, could not tolerate.
Unlike his teachers, though, Eliot repeatedly rejected what he considered to be the romantic, facile, Orientalist interpretations of Indian philosophy by Schopenhauer and Deussen. Nor was Indian philosophy merely a form of occult mysticism for him, as it was for some of his contemporaries. In most Indian philosophical systems, the attainment of liberation is not an easy subsumption into a higher reality, nor is there any dependence upon divine grace. It is a long and arduous journey of penance, meditation, and effort at improving one’s karma, over innumerable lifetimes. I therefore thought it important to highlight Eliot’s emphasis on the intellectual, scholarly aspects of Indian philosophical traditions which he encountered in his study of Patanjali and the Sankhya system.
Eliot was fascinated with the Bhagavad Gita from the time when he had studied it with Lanman in 1911-12. Although Eliot stressed the differences between his own opinions and beliefs and those of the Gita, it provided the basis for his deep meditations on concepts such as time and eternity, flux and stability, right action and inaction, detachment, attachment, and non-attachment. Eliot’s assertion that the Gita is “a syncretism of half a dozen philosophical systems,” strikingly illustrates his own deep knowledge of and reflection on the text.
Eliot’s abiding interest in Buddhism, too, contributed crucially to his search for a defining belief. At Harvard, Eliot was indebted to Irving Babbitt’s discriminating understanding of Buddhism, as opposed to the then prevalent Schopenhauerian “Romantic Orientalism” and nihilistic interpretations that were also held by James and Royce. Eliot’s interest in Buddhism led him to attend and to take copious notes on Masaharu Anesaki’s course on “Schools of the Religious and Philosophical Thought of Japan, and their Connexions with those of India and China.” In fact, Eliot was so deeply preoccupied with Buddhism that he had even thought of learning Tibetan so that he could read Buddhist texts in the language which were otherwise not available. However, despite his respect for Buddhism and his integration of Buddhist concepts in his creative work, Eliot subsumed them within his Christian discourse and emphasized the differences between Buddhism and Christianity, especially in his insistence on the need for the Christian doctrine of divine grace as opposed to the Buddhist emphasis on the individual’s will.
I was intrigued by Eliot’s continuing fascination with the same texts over his lifetime and the challenge they posed to his Western identity and Christian beliefs. It is almost as if he was repeatedly compelled to assert the superiority of Christianity to subjugate the threat that Indian thought posed to his Christian beliefs. As Keats said, “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.” For Eliot, too, his grappling with Indian philosophy was not a mere abstract, academic exercise but deeply felt personal experience, like “getting outside of one’s own skin,” or “jumping down one’s throat,” as he told I. A. Richards. Eliot was also acutely aware of the difficulty and intractability of Indian philosophy and of his own inadequacy in attempting to understand it. His struggle with Indian metaphysics in Sanskrit, Eliot reminisced to Richards, made him realize that “it was impossible to be on both sides of the looking glass.” Eliot foregrounded, too, the hermeneutical problem of understanding, translating, and interpreting belief systems that were different from one’s own.
Indian scholarly responses to Eliot’s use of Indian philosophy in his poetry have ranged from the highly adulatory, which Eliot himself mocked, to the sharply critical, especially from a postcolonial perspective, for Eliot’s misunderstanding and errors, and for his assertion of the superiority of Christianity over Indian philosophical and religious systems. While writing this article, I often wondered why I had spent so many years of my life on a white, male, canonical author, an orthodox Christian. What has continued to fascinate me about Eliot over the years, however, is his continuing engagement with a multiplicity of religious, intellectual, philosophical, and metaphysical traditions in his movement from scepticism to belief in the dogmas of Christianity, though scepticism remained an essential component of his belief. It was a challenging personal journey for me to explore the role that Eliot’s lifelong engagement with Indian philosophy played in his own intellectual, creative, and spiritual journey, and to see how the conflicts, tensions, and challenges that he encountered in the process were transmuted into his poetry. And in the contemporary political ethos of right-wing religious extremism, it is salutary to be reminded of Eliot’s admiration for the logical, intellectual components of Indian thought.
You can read Manju Jain’s article ‘Through the Looking Glass: T. S. Eliot and Indian Philosophy‘ from The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual volume 5 in full via the Liverpool University Press website for free from July – August 2023.
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