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FULLER PORTRAITS
75 philosopher alive for ever that the subsequent generations who did not have the living touch of the master, may not be altogether deprived of his profoundly instructive wisdom. He presented the portrait of Dr. Johnson as he appeared to him, and also as he might appear to anyone else. The concern for and awareness of others, the assertion of communal self dilutes even if it does not altogether undermine individual self and its purely personal tastes and dislikes. Inevitably, this generates in the outlook of each author a kind of scientific objectivity.
The case of Dilip Roy is somewhat different. In our tradition, there is a singular absence of the communal self. The controversy about individualism and totalitarianism has never troubled us. We have been only a loose collectivity of individuals rent apart from one another. We have the individuals at their best and the most shining and we have individuals sunk in inertia. But each one of us is for himself. Roy has cultivated the Western desire to present what he finds valuable for himself before the whole world. But he lacks the objective vision of what he sees. He cannot see his subjects also as all other men might see them. There is nothing to dilute his individual self. That is why, often one might feel, the centre of all his writing is the individual vision of Dilip Roy. He himself says, as we have noted earlier, “I”/“Me" remains very important for him. His own vision, his own view of all things, is important for him for his own reasons and purposes. If by the way, it happens to be useful and instructive to other people too, it is their luck. His writing is only thus partially an expression of a writer's public spirit which, it cannot be denied, had been partially generated under the impact of British education in India. One cannot help feeling that Dilip Roy should have cultivated proper care and patient industry of long years in the Western fashion to realize elegant perception and systematic writing. He should have in a still greater measure erased himself from the centre and implanted instead, the larger and more serene objective view. We have a feeling in reading Roy-which we do not have in reading Boswell-that a mountain stream meanders through the plains towards the sea at random. Boswell steers the ship towards the goal. This clearly is the difference between the East and the West even when we take up the best specimen of both the cultures such as Boswell and Dilip Roy.
Hence, Dilip Roy's portraits, as against those of Boswell and Strachey are spatial and not temporal. Notes:
Dilip Kumar Roy, Yogi Sri Krishnaprem, 3rd ed. (Bombay:Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1992), pp.xxiii-iv. Dilip Kumar Roy, Six Illuminates of Modern India, (Bombay:Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. 1982), p.1.
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