What is Imagination?

Commenting on Sir Valentine Chirol’s remark that Indian have an excess of imagination and Englishmen are deficient in it, the Indian Social Reformer asks why, if the Indians are imaginative they do not relieve the sufferings of the depressed classes, the child widows and purdah ladies? Our contemporary thinks that the Indians can concentrate on the present as the Englishmen. “Indian politics will inevitably become more practical,” says the writer, “if Indians had more responsibility assigned to them. It is not the Englishman's lack of imagination that prevents him from handing over more responsibility to the Indian. Rather, it is too lively an imagination which pictures Indian administration more largely resting on India shoulders, as leading directly to chaos.” This is not a “lively imagination”, but an injurious one both to Indians and Englishmen.