Walt Whitman’s tribute to India
By Satish K. Kapoor

TO Walt Whitman, the American visionary poet and mystic, and transcendentalist, India was not merely a geographical entity but the fountainhead of spirituality, "reason’s early paradise" and wisdom’s birthplace.

He admired India’s hills and rivers — the lofty Himalayas, the pristine Ganges falling from Lord Shiva’s matted hair, the Indus and the Brahmaputra — "Temples fairer than lilies, religious dances, the deep diving Bibles and legends, the daring plots of the poets, the elder religions, the old occult Brahma and the tender and Junior Buddha."

Son of a carpenter and builder, Whitman was a mixed English and Dutch ancestory. He had no formal education worth the name, yet he cultivated interest in reading and writing at an early age. After 12 he worked in various capacities as an office boy, compositor, reporter, school teacher, part-time journalist and editor of newspapers like Long Islander (1838-39), Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1846-48), The Crescent (New Orleans, 1848), the Brooklyn Freeman (1849) and the Brooklyn Times (1857-59).

During the Civil War, he acted as a volunteer nurse in Washington in army hospitals. Later, he served as a government employee till he became paralytic. He spent the evening of his life at Camden (New Jersey) among his friends who formed the Whitman Fellowship. He left his physical frame on March 26, 1892.

Whitman’s mind was shaped by his father’s democratic convictions, his mother’s Quaker beliefs, the Holy Bible, the works of Homer, William Shakespeare and the European romanticists but, above all, by the transcendentalists who were greatly influenced by the Orient.

His Leaves of Grass (1855), a collection of 12 poems to which 33 pieces were added in 1856 and 120 in 1860 received accolades as well as criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. It was described both as a conglomeration of insolence, blasphemy, beauty and indecency (New York Times) and as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed", "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagavadgita and the New York Herald" (Ralph W. Emerson).

Individualism and universalism, life and death, emotion and reason, the ugly and the beautiful, the material and the spiritual, body and mind, simultaneously pervade Whitman’s writing. His unconventionality in rejecting traditional rules of metre and rhyme was compensated by his originality and deep sensitivity of feeling, his sexual imagery (as in Calamus poems) by the metaphysical touches he gave to his expressions and his Bohemian outlook by the power of his genius.

Although Whitman never fully acknowledged his debt to the Indian thought Leaves of Grass echoes many Hindu ideas like the infinite potentiality of human nature, the immortality of the human soul and belief in reincarnation. His conviction that the wise man ought to perceive the fundamental unity behind all diversity is Vedantic. The extensive use of "I" in his poems is mystically related to all other souls. "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you"; "I am large, I contain multitudes" (Song of Myself).

While expressing the nature of the soul, Whitman echoes the voice of Lord Krishna: "I know I have the best of time and space and was never measured and never will be measured." (Song of Myself, 46). The Vedantic aphorism (aham brahmasmi ("I am God") reverberates in some of his verses: "...from this side Jehovah am I, Old Brahma I and I saturnius am. Not Time affects me — I am time..." (Chanting the Square Deific, I).

"Divine am I inside and out and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from" (Song of Myself, 24). "I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself." (Song of Myself, 7). Whitman was also familiar with the Hindu view of Maya in its illusory aspect.

Whitman’s concept of death bears considerable oriental influence. To him life and death were entwined in the cosmic process. Death, the biological end of the human body, was a necessary stairway to eternal life. His belief in metempsychosis was a natural corollary to his acceptance of the fact of immortality of the human soul. "Births have brought us richness and variety. And other births will bring us richness and variety." (Song of Myself, 44)

References to Indian history, topography, literature and religious beliefs customs and traditions of people are interspersed in Whitman’s works. He was drawn to the Epics strewn with stories, myths, fables and pearls of wisdom. The Bhagavadgita, the Upanishads, the Vedas and the Shastras also fascinated him even though is knowledge of the holy texts was rudimentary and was derived from secondary sources.

A fervent believer in democracy, Whitman identified himself and mingled with all types of people — the insane, the ignoble, the criminal and the downtrodden — and wanted the state to give them maximum opportunities for growth and self-development. He believed in the destiny of America as a great nation but was irked by rampant corruption and soul-less materialism which had eroded moral values and social institutions. In Democratic Vistas (1871, prose work) he held that epic characters like Rama, Yudhisthra, and Arjuna — embodiments of truth, virtue and strength — could be fit models for Americans.