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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES: Dilip Kumar Roy It is clear in the controversy that Tagore's argument is quite sound. Gandhiji, instead of answering it, turns rather irrelevantly, to the uses of the spinning wheel for the starving masses of India. The spinning wheel, granted, is useful. But does it mean that art is useless? Does it mean that the inspired artists should not be busy creating the things of beauty? Gandhiji is silent on all these. The passion to feed the hungry has possessed his soul entirely. He is unable to see anything else.
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In the present sketch, Dilip Roy gathers together the varying notions of different great people on art. But his one limitation is that he simply reports greatness and a great man's words without subjecting them to any critical examination. He fails to see, for example, that there was a lot of truth in Gandhiji calling himself an artist, and a lot of truth in the common view that he was an enemy of art. Bapu was an artist in that he used his life and personality as the material medium for the realisation of certain spiritual beauty which everyone. around him immediately felt. With a sculptor's care and industry, he carved and chiselled his life into a desired shape, and he felt that the shaping process still continued even near the end of his life. Who can deny that Gandhiji was an artist in this sense?
But he could never appreciate any of sensuousness or intellectual or emotional beauty in any medium alien to his immediate consciousness and. behaviour. You cannot imagine him standing before the portrait of Monalisa spell-bound by her charming smile. He discovered no beauty at all in Taj Mahal which was little more than an expensive tomb to him. He had no heart to respond to sensuousness such as Keats's or sublimity of Western epics and Shakespeare. He could never realise that in diverse media various artists seek to realise in varying measures the celestial sublimities and beauties manifested. upon the earth. None can deny that Gandhiji had been an ascetic representing the monastic tradition of India which had been taught for centuries to see nothing beautiful in the transience of the temporal stream. That is how, Gandhiji is the other extreme of Tagore who saw eternity in time itself. Our reverence for the Father of the Nation should not blind us to the fact that his philosophy had been too simple to be sublime, and that his austere ethics was dry and negative and blind to the beauties of life and art. Dilip Roy should have seen this. But he does not. Perhaps he did, but dared not criticize a great man whom he worshipped. To him, it seems, reverence and criticism cannot co-exist. This is apparent in all his work. And it defines his constant limitation.
One can argue that Roy did criticize Gandhiji in one of his letters for pursuing politics and not social work which appeared to be his swadharma. But this kind of criticism appears mild and very cautious. Ultimately, he glorifies the greatness of his own subject by informing the readers that Gandhiji was very tolerant and he replied his letter with patience and warmth. So, the author's
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