THE BOSE INSTITUTE 255 



As regards India, it is profoundly true, as it is still 

 true of the European multitudes, that illiteracy does 

 not necessarily connote darkness. The Indian villager is 

 not nearly so ignorant as by the average of literates he 

 is judged to be. The needed popularisation of science 

 is commonly thought of by us as a matter of definite 

 exposition to the untaught ; but that is only part of it. 

 In the meantiine, and continuously, the traditional life 

 of the people, with its spiritual roots in the organic being 

 of Society and its folk-knowledge linking the generations, 

 enables the people to get at something of the greater know- 

 ledge in their own fashion. The story of a Moslem villager 

 who invited Bose to enter his liouse so that his women- 

 folk might see him is delightfully to the point. It was 

 soon after the Indian Press had spread the news that the 

 Bengal wonder-worker had been received with acclamation 

 in every country he visited during his tour round the world. 

 ' But am I not a stranger ? ' Bose asked, ' and do you not 

 maintain the seclusion of your zenana ? ' ' You/ replied 

 the Moslem triumphantly, ' are no stranger. You are one 

 of us. Has not your voice reached everywhere ? ' So, 

 too, with Bose's village neighbours at Sijberia. Of his 

 experimental garden there they say, ' That is where, at 

 night, the plants talk to him ! ' 



In their own way then a very real way the simple 

 labouring folk may be, and even now are being reached by 

 such vital movements of quickening and renewing litera- 

 ture and advancing knowledge as their poets and men of 

 letters, headed by Rabindranath Tagore, their men of 

 science headed by Jagadis Bose, are opening out to them 

 to them, and above all to their children ; for manifestly 

 it is only with the coming generations that such sowings 

 can be brought to harvest, and thence again to fresh sowings 

 on ever widening fields. 



It is here, perhaps, in the quietude of his village that 

 we might have left him at the close of this record. But I 

 seem to hear his words of protest : ' No, it is not in the 



