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SKETCHES
119 limitation magnifies the greatness of his portrait and the reader does not get a thoroughly faithful portrait of his subject. Moreover, Gandhiji, at that time, replied to Dilip Roy's suggestion that he should become a Sannyasin but did not respond to the latter's saner suggestion that he should confine himself to social service and leave politics. Dilip Roy also does not comment on Gandhiji's silence. In fact, it seems, he has forgotten that he made such a suggestion. It is for the reader, therefore, to say that Dilip Roy was right in asking him to leave politics. The later course of history has only shown how crooked politicians used him as an instruinent for the realization of power and threw him away when they found him useless. He was too saintly to be a politician.
Roy, in addition, tells his readers that whenever and wherever Mahatma Gandhi met him, he always invited him to sing to the accompaniment of his 'music. And Roy was very much delighted when he sang to Mahatma Gandhi and also when Gandhiji praised his talent. For instance, during one of his prayermeetings, when Dilip Roy finished his song, Gandhiji said:
“.....though I am no connoisseur of music, I may, I think, make bold to claim that very few persons in India-or rather in the world---have a voice like his, so rich and sweet and intense. And today his voice struck me as having grown even sweeter
and richer than before."98
But here, again, one has to remember that Gandhiji's interest was limited to the singing of bhajans or devotional songs only. It was devotion rather than music that delighted him. It was a love of music as a means to the end of spiritual feeling. The subject matter of the songs primarily appealed to him. And music was only a powerful carrier or a rouser or an intensifier of the religious sense. It was not the love of music for its own sake. Neither he nor his guru Ruskin could appreciate art for its own sake. The aesthetic view of art which was prevalent in criticism under the influence of Wilde and Whistler had no affinity with Gandhiji's.
One may wonder if Roy himself had any clear notion of art though he himself was an artist. He seems to be a poor art critic. At least, in the books under study here, there is no evidence that he ever thought seriously about the nature, function, structure and philosophy of art. That perhaps is one of the reasons why he could not easily identify Gandhiji's clear limitation, that is, lack of clarity in his views on art.
Dilip Roy has described Mahatma Gandhi's tenacious efforts to make other leaders agree with him in his projects of making spinning wheel popular among people. But what was most remarkable and relevant to Mahatma Gandhi's swadeshi movement, escaped from the notice of the author. It may appear to be irrelevant
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