To the Indians Who Died in South Africa

T S Eliots poem To the Indians who Died in Africa is an provoke Eliot piece. It is non often you read a poem by Eliot which refrains from striking the grand pose. He tended to shake the giant issues of hu mankind soul every time he penned a poem, except of course, when he wrote those goose poems. But this is a puzzlingly small-aimed poem. A bit advise not grand wisdom, I guess. That this poem in imbued in the state of war and empire atmosphere is obvious. What he has to say to the Indians is funnily passive, Look, it is ok if you die absurdly in a foreign country.It is noteworthy how Eliot deploys rhetoric to persuade the reader that it is indeed square that there was a rough-cut purpose among the Indian and the English soldiers. It appears to me that in the first two stanzas the loudspeaker evokes the image of the normal scene so that we see how different it is for one to die in a foreign country. Then of course he goes on to assert that this need no more be seen as unusual or as tragic. He seems to suggest that the place where a man meets his constituent is his destination. He associates destiny with the inevitable culmination of ones life as well as ones efforts.He suggests that the divide between home and exile is illusory that the opposition between our and your is not real. Every country will sop up such places where foreigners are buried (whether it is the English midlands or whatever village in Punjab Five Rivers). He emphasises that the communal purpose really erases the differences that notions of home and exile entertain the divide that notions of national difference highlight. The death of an Indian soldier in Africa fighting Germany and defending England whitethorn appear absurd.But the speaker points out that the Indian and the English soldiers are united in a common purpose. As for greater meaning in such lives and deaths, he says it is to be seen only after utmost judgment. To the Indians Who Died in Africa * T. S. Eliot A mans de stination is his knowledge village, His own fire, and his wifes cooking To sit in front of his own door at sunset And see his grandson, and his neighbors grandson Playing in the dust together. Scarred but secure, he has many memories Which return at the hour of conversation, (The warm or the cool hour, according to the climate)Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places, Foreign to for each one other. A mans destination is not his destiny, Every country is home to one man And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely At one with his destiny, that soil is his. Let his village remember. This was not your land, or ours but a village in the Midlands, And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard. Let those who go home tell the same story of you Of action with a common purpose, action None the less fruitful if neither you nor we Know, until the judgement after death, What is the fruit of action.Eliot, T. S. To the Indians Who Died in Africa. accumulate Poems 1909-1962 Thi s is what Narayan Chandran has to say about this poem It is intriguing that T. S. Eliot has repeatedly drawn upon Indic sources, especially the Bhagavad-Gita and its philosophy of disinterested action, sequence writing on war and world affairs through the 1940s. Eliots Occasional Verses, particularly To the Indians who Died in Africa, betray the poets imperialist biases, unlike much of his poetry, in which they do not seem to fold up visibly as in his prose writings and conversations.Couched in the language and imagery of the Gita, Eliot seems to tell the Indians that their action is its own reward the irony hardens as we recall historical facts and situations that drove hapless Indians to support the Allied war effort in many theaters outside India. The essay also looks at two other British writers on Indian themes, Kipling and Forster, whose texts seem to cast an interesting sidelight on action, whose punning resonance Eliot seems to savour in writing his war poems. Eliot, evid ently, had little use for the philosophy he quoted back to the distressed Indians.