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 The Exiled Pandits
of Kashmir
Will They Ever Return Home?
Bill K. Koul
The Exiled Pandits of Kashmir
 Bill K. Koul

The Exiled Pandits

of Kashmir
Will They Ever Return Home?
Bill K. Koul
Independent Author
Perth, WA, Australia

ISBN 978-981-15-6536-6    ISBN 978-981-15-6537-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6537-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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 To my Mother Kashmir—Maej Kasheer—and my Kashmiri ancestors
and to all those Kashmiris who selflessly work towards and pray for normalcy
to return to their valley of Kashmir and long for Kashmiri Pandits to
return to their home in Kashmir.
To my mother, Rani (Jai Kishori Koul); my guru-mata, Shrimati Bimla
Hakhu; and my guru, Shri Bansi Lal Hakhu (Bhaisahib) for their
unconditional love and wisdom.
Gar firdaus bar-rue zamin ast, hami asto, hamin asto, hamin ast …
Mughal Emperor Jehangir (seventeenth century) on Kashmir
(If there is a heaven on earth, it’s here, it’s here, it’s here…)
 Abstract

The book attempts to answer why it is important for normalcy and sus-
tainable peace in Kashmir, and its holistic progress and cultural survival,
that both ethnic Kashmiri communities—Pandits and Muslims—perma-
nently bury their past bitterness of 1989–1990 and forge one strong,
composite Kashmiri community. It exhorts the Pandit community to re-
establish personal relationships, on an individual basis, with their earlier
Muslim neighbours and friends, and earnestly endeavour to cohere with
their Muslim brethren just as they did before 1990. In the same vein, it
sends an appeal to the Kashmiri Muslim community to wholeheartedly
embrace those Pandits who wish to return out of their own volition and,
more importantly, for all right reasons. The book tries to make both com-
munities to understand each other’s perspectives and self-introspect. The
book visits the historical, political and regional issues confronting the sub-
continent, and the current mindset of Kashmiris and their social issues.

vii
 About the Core Issue

In August 1947, the subcontinent got partitioned, seemingly based on

religious demographics, but, strangely, more Muslims stayed back in India
than Pakistan’s entire population at that time. Since then, the two coun-
tries, born from the same mother country, the British India, have fought
several wars, including three over Kashmir, and the tension still continues.
The Indo-Pak border zone is the world’s highest militarised area, prac-
tically a powder keg, considering both countries possess hundreds of
nuclear weapons, obviously for their intended use in some desperate
situations. As if that was not enough, they also possess very large armies to
fight conventional warfare against each other.
Thanks to the Cold War between the USA and the USSR in their play-
ing field, Afghanistan, and the past military dictator of Pakistan, General
Zia and his Operation TUPAC, Kashmir saw a significant politico-­religious
uprising since the 1980s, which saw hundreds of thousands of indigenous
Kashmiri Pandits flee their home in early 1990s and take refuge in the
plains of India and subsequently elsewhere in the wider world. Can one
say, therefore, that Kashmiri Pandits may have fallen through cracks—
between India and Pakistan, and between Kashmiri Muslims and the
broader Indian populace?
They remain a self-exiled but endangered community since their exo-
dus three decades ago. Some Kashmiri leadership and a few Indian politi-
cians have lately been talking cursorily about their return to Kashmir, but
without any serious and deep thinking or addressing the core reasons that
had initially led to their exodus. Such surficial gestures by politicians are
deemed to be solely for their personal political gains, without any sincere

ix
x ABOUT THE CORE ISSUE

motives to help the displaced Kashmiri Pandits in their rehabilitation in

their home.
Kashmiri Pandits are not cattle or commodities who can be loaded in a
truck and transported by force and/or without their consent back to
Kashmir. They are humans with real emotions and feelings. They have
experienced unimaginable and irreversible pain of losing their home. They
moan and cry when they miss Kashmir. They have suffered immensely for
no fault of theirs. They have paid, and continue to pay, a heavy price for
the sins and misgivings of others.
Kashmiri Pandits are practically political orphans, mainly because of
their minuscule population, education and a peaceful disposition. Indeed,
many political parties and politicians have spoken with and for them from
time to time, even rendered them symbolic lip sympathy, but nothing of
that has ever translated into any substantial or meaningful transformation
in their current displacement from their home, and an existential threat to
this endangered and vulnerable community.
To make things worse for themselves, their political inclinations have
always differed within the community and also wavered over time. Prior to
the 1990s, a majority of them remained firmly loyal towards Indira Gandhi
and the Indian National Congress (INC).
However, in the past one decade or so, their loyalty has turned around
by 180 degrees towards Mr Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP). They keep looking around with hope, but only to be left
dejected and hopeless time and again.
When your (blind) loyalty is taken for granted and you become
predictable, you start getting marginalised and taken for a ride. You are
considered as a low-maintenance commodity. Your leaders feel assured of
your (unwavering) support. They don’t feel any need to give you much in
return. No wonder some vulnerable and endangered communities, such as
the Kashmiri Pandits, hardly get their fair share of treatment and benefits
from their government and political leaders. ‘A closed mouth catches no
fly,’ goes an old English saying. In India, figuratively, it means, Bin roye’
maa bhee dhoodh nahin daetee, which literally means, Unless you cry, even
your mother won’t feed you.
The sudden and shocking abrogation of Article 370 in the Constitution
of India, on 5 August 2019, and especially the manner in which it was
undertaken and followed up on the ground in Kashmir, may have para-
doxically compounded the existential issues of Kashmiri Pandits. Instead
of bringing them closer to their homes and their Kashmiri Muslim
brethren, it may have pushed the two estranged Kashmiri communities
further apart from each other rather than bringing them together.
 ABOUT THE CORE ISSUE xi

Kashmiri Pandits are, therefore, most likely to see a status quo and
continue to be called Kashmiri migrants, at least for the next three decades
or so. After that, they will certainly be a forgotten community, especially
after their current middle-aged generation passes on. It will be a tragedy
that, after 2050, not many Kashmiri Pandits will be left to celebrate their
most important festival, Herath (called Shivratri elsewhere in India) in the
traditional Kashmiri manner and fervour.
In essence, Pandits are left with just under 30 years or so to revive and
redeem themselves as a community. It is essential that some of them, if not
all, return to their mother valley—their Maej Kasheer—before it is too
late. For that, it is paramount that their Maej Kasheer attains peace and,
more importantly, their Kashmiri Muslim brethren extend a helping hand
to them.
Only when Maej Kasheer is complete and happy with all her children
back in her lap—Pandits and Muslims—Kashmiris will start benefitting
and reaping the fruits of her rich blessings.
To bring peace to Kashmir, one needs a complete shift in the approach
towards achieving this Herculean task. Same input will produce the same
output. To improve and change things for better in Kashmir, one needs to
completely change the current approach, whatever that is. Someone must
keep their eyes open, someone must think deeply and someone must care.
All stake holders are that someone.
Alarmingly, in the summer of 2018, a responsible Kashmiri Pandit—a
senior government officer living in Jammu—replied immediately, without
wasting any time, ‘What will be the deal?’ when the author asked her, ‘Will
you return to Kashmir to live if a sustainable reconciliation is brought
about and an honest agreement is struck between the two Kashmiri
communities to welcome back those Kashmiri Pandit families who—out
of their own volition—choose to return and resettle down permanently in
Kashmir?’
Another responsible Kashmiri Pandit, a retired senior technocrat,
made the following frank and honest comments, and critical observations,
about Kashmiri Pandits when the author challenged him about the
current leadership of Kashmiri Pandits.

Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) in Jammu and all over the world are a greatly frag-
mented society. Each one of us thinks he/she is the most wise person and ­everything
said by others is pure trash … just read a newspaper any day and see how many
organisations we have of KPs in Jammu. Unless someone like Hitler or Stalin
or even Modi comes, the unification of our community is not going to happen.
Sadly, even our ladies have also become like the rest of us…
xii ABOUT THE CORE ISSUE

Maybe if you would have been an Indian, we could have inducted you into
the executive and then start making changes. Alas you are not! As we are in
midst of things here, our view is entirely different from yours …
Just after my retirement, I was approached by … and told to join … party
and be a Hindu face. I had closely watched … one day, he would be right at the
top and the next day at the bottom. So I refused. I have no desire to join politics.
You are very young and have a long way to go … Come here and work at the
grassroots … Regards.

In a country where people live selfishly as individuals, and not as a

cohesive community, there exists a significant difference between the
expectations and the needs of their nation and the personal needs of the
people. As a nation can’t truly align itself with the expectations of all peo-
ple, it is pragmatic and reasonable to expect that people align their per-
sonal needs and expectations as much as possible with the expectations
and the call of their nation. Only when people cohere and align themselves
with their nation, they will live in a cohesive and progressive environment.
Such a nation will progress very fast.
A fundamental requirement for the sustainability of their alignment is
the benevolence and fairness of their nation’s expectations. Therefore, a
clear outline of the national objectives is necessary. To develop and imple-
ment the measures that are necessary to achieve the defined objectives and
the common goal(s), such a nation demands visionary leaders at the helm.
 About the Book

This book is about Kashmiri Pandits. It attempts to answer a number of

questions about them, including:

• Who are they?

• Where are they?
• What is their problem?
• Who owns them now?
• Why India won’t care for them?
• What are their current existential issues?
• Why they must reconnect with Kashmir?
• Why history of the region must be revisited?
• What is their possible way forward?

This book speaks for all Kashmiris who have suffered immensely in the
past three decades for no fault of their own, including all those Kashmiri
Pandits who crave for their home and hope for miracles to happen for their
dignified return.
The objectives of this book are not to prove which community is right
or wrong—the Kashmiri Muslims or the Kashmiri Pandits—or whose suf-
fering is greater. The book tries to answer why it is important for Kashmir
and for both major Kashmiri communities that Pandits return to their
native Kashmir, especially those who really want to return home, out of
their own volition and for all the right reasons.

xiii
xiv About the Book

The purpose of this book is to bring about a reasonable and realistic

degree of practical and sustainable reconciliation between the two com-
munities, whilst trying to make them stand in each other’s shoes, under-
stand each other’s perspective and pain and then self-introspect sincerely,
so that a bridge of mutual trust and acceptance is rebuilt between the two
communities, which can then allow those Pandits, who genuinely want to
return, to cross over and be home.
There is no doubt that, for absolutely no fault of theirs since the British
left the subcontinent, Kashmiri Pandits have suffered immeasurable pain
and grief due to militancy in Kashmir, whilst also losing thousands of
innocent members of their community, directly to militant bullets and
indirectly to heartbreak, the diseases of the plains, sunstrokes and snake
bites after getting uprooted from their home. Additionally, they also face
an existential threat to their unique culture, values and identity, which
renders them an endangered community. Many Kashmiri Muslims will
also make similar claims, for similar reasons and not-so-similar reasons.
For reconciliation and moving forward, it is paramount that Kashmiri
Pandits realise and accept that, like them, their Kashmiri Muslim brethren
have also suffered immensely in the past three decades. They also carry a
bruised psychology. Day in and day out, they witnessed and experienced
violent mobs, shootings, bomb blasts, social disturbances and assassina-
tions. Many of them left Kashmir in 1990 or soon thereafter, and some
returned only a couple of decades later or so. For security reasons, many
Kashmiri Muslims also had to move internally from their original home in
Srinagar. So there was indeed some internal displacement of Kashmiri
Muslims too.
It is a matter of fact that most Kashmiri Muslims, for fear of their lives,
may have witnessed silently the mass exodus of the Pandits, for which they
may be held eternally responsible by the Kashmiri Pandits. Possibly, many
would not have even known in the earliest days of the militancy
(1989–1990) about what was really happening on the ground.
Undoubtedly, there was an air of confusion abound in the valley. Varied
emotions—anticipation, premonition, excitement, anxiety, fear—filled the
human minds.
The politico-religious movement, which was wrongly, but strategically,
being driven in the name of jihad, was riddled with a number of fatal flaws.
The architects of the movement had not seemingly thought it out well,
otherwise why would they have blundered in scaring away the Pandits and
 About the Book  xv

engaging in an armed confrontation with professional security forces—the

brave local police and the powerful Indian Army?
There was absolutely no logic behind those numerous individual attacks
on both common and prominent Kashmiri Pandits. It was nothing short
of madness. If one thinks deeply, they will understand that this blunder of
the architects of the movement did actually sink the movement itself.
Their pawn soldiers, the local militants and the foreign mercenaries, were
misled and fooled in the name of jihad. The history would have been dif-
ferent if Kashmiri Pandits were not targeted and, instead, consulted and
cordially brought on board for launching a peaceful movement.
On a brighter note, there are numerous heart-warming stories about
many Pandits being cautioned and saved by their Muslim neighbours and
friends. On a sad note, however, there are many stories of deceit and
betrayal wherein many Kashmiri Muslim neighbours collaborated with
militants in getting their Pandit neighbours killed, for a range of reasons—
occupation of their houses and properties, business, past vengeance, reli-
gious fanaticism and so forth. One must note that the militancy in Kashmir
has been driven in the name of Islam, as jihad, which attracted militants
and mercenaries from a number of countries—Pakistan, Pak-occupied
Kashmir, Afghanistan, many Arab and African countries, Chechnya and
even Australia.
The mechanism and principle of jihad was hijacked, grossly misused,
rather abused, by the architects of the militancy to muffle and neutralise
the potential resistance expected from most Kashmiri Muslims.
Kashmiri Pandits must, therefore, try to understand the helplessness of
a common Kashmiri Muslim and why she/he could not say or do any-
thing, especially if that person knew or was aware, even faintly, that an
armed militant or a radicalised youth was living in her/his house—as her/
his son, brother, cousin, father—or in the neighbourhood or was a relative
or a friend. Many fathers were killed by their sons and many brothers by
their own brothers.
Although some of the claims and counter-claims of both parties may be
subject to serious challenges, it is prudent that, in the greater interest of
Kashmir and all Kashmiris, the two communities now move on and con-
sciously come together before time runs out on them, in which case the
history will never forgive them. Proving each other wrong and guilty will
not help anyone except the devil of the destruction, which has already
claimed nearly a hundred thousand souls (from all sides—average citizens,
xvi About the Book

armed militants and the security personnel) in the last 30 years. Everyone
has lost and no one will ever win! As a matter of fact, Kashmir has lost!
This book explores the possibilities and the logical core conditions for
the return of Kashmiri Pandits to their native Kashmir.
In Chap. 2 of this book, a snapshot of a unique culture set of earlier
Kashmiri Pandits, who lived in Kashmir in the pre-1990 era, is provided.
The reason is that their exodus, as well as the past three decades of daily
struggles of life, has taken a heavy toll on them. With a steady erosion of
their culture over the past three decades, they are an endangered commu-
nity. If things don’t change for the better for them sooner than later,
within the next three decades or so at the most, they will fade into history
as an anonymous community, without their traditional culture and roots.
Therefore, solely for the benefit of their current younger generations and
their future generations, this cultural snapshot aims to provide to some
extent a hazy glimpse of their past life, customs, lifestyle, household and
rituals until 1990.
For the benefit of readers, and completeness of the subject matter, this
book briefly revisits the history of Kashmir, during both pre- and post-1947
eras. This book also discusses their current situation around the globe and
their existential cultural challenges post their exodus from Kashmir in
1989–1990.
This book should also be of interest to all non-Kashmiris, especially the
policymakers, political analysts and the people’s leaders in Kashmir and
India and to all those readers who are interested in the overall welfare of
Kashmir and the Kashmiris. Kashmir is the geographical head of India.
Therefore, a healthy, prosperous and peaceful Kashmir is vital for India’s
health, and vice versa.
In the context of the subject matter, it is appropriate that this book
includes the following appendices to provide the reader with related back-
ground information about Kashmir and the rest of the subcontinent:

• Appendix A—Kashmir’s history in brief

• Appendix B—The Pakistan factor

It is imperative that when we discuss the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits,

we will also need to discuss Kashmir and its past political turmoil. That
leads us straight into the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, followed by
a continued tug-of-war between an Islamic Republic of Pakistan and a
secular, democratic Republic of India. Pakistan has remained a confused
 About the Book  xvii

nation since its inception; it has tried to live two lives—one in the first
millennium and the other in the second millennium. It is, therefore,
logical that this book also provides an insight into the volatility of a con-
fused Pakistan since its inception, which has directly or indirectly played
a vital role in sealing the fate of the Pandits of Kashmir and their Muslim
brethren.
The author wishes to reiterate that the core objective of this book is to
bring the two estranged Kashmiri communities—Pandits and Muslims—
back together before it is too late.
This book had to be largely opinion-based, from the author’s perspec-
tive and experience, based on the facts, of course. Facts supporting this
book are included in its appendices. Dozens of books—from both sides of
the religious divide—newspapers and magazines from around the world
over the last 30 years have documented why and how the Pandits had
moved out—over a wide period of time—with differing versions coming
from different sources. As such, there is no one version, and every version
is opinionated, depending upon the author’s religious background, educa-
tion, political affiliation, socio-economic standing and so forth. Kashmiri
Muslims have generally their own set of versions, and Kashmiri Pandits
have their own set of versions. Third parties—with different agenda and
intentions—project their own set of versions. Governments—State and
Central —have their own theories. Different countries have their own sto-
ries, and their political parties have their own versions.
The author’s first book on Kashmir, 22 Years—A Kashmir Story, docu-
ments a series of events in Srinagar (Kashmir), as experienced and wit-
nessed by the author, which led to his exit from the valley in late December
1989, about a month before the exodus of most, if not all, members of his
community on and after 19 January 1990. The subtitle of that book, One
Lakh Pandit Families May Have One Lakh Stories, reflects a wide range of
reasons why and how Pandits would have left. As a matter of fact, the
exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley has been happening since
1947, for varied reasons. It is more appropriate to reference the author’s
aforementioned book, instead of reproducing it here.
The original manuscript of this book was written and submitted to the
publisher on the morning of 5 August 2019. Later on that day, in a sudden
and surprising historical move, the current Government of India abro-
gated Article 370 of the Constitution of India, under which the erstwhile
State of Jammu and Kashmir enjoyed a semi-autonomous status.
xviii About the Book

Subsequently, on 31 October 2019, in another historical move, the

Government of India passed the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act
and divided the State into two union territories—the Union Territory of
Jammu and Kashmir and the Union Territory of Ladakh.
At the time of the submission of the final manuscript of this book, the
valley of Kashmir had been under a lockdown for more than nine months,
initially imposed by the Indian government for preventing violent reactions
in the valley against the abrogation of Article 370, and later in tandem
with a preventive lockdown against the spread of COVID-19.
On the basis of a largely disturbed life in Kashmir, caused by a continued
lockdown and a limited freedom of expression, since the abrogation
of Article 370, the book should be logically titled as: The Exiled Pandits of
Kashmir—Can They Ever Return Home?
 Acknowledgement

Authors must endure and overcome their personal pain for the greater
good of the humanity. To write a book on the plight of Kashmiri Pandits
will never be easy and will not be without undergoing immense mental
pain and emotional rollercoaster for any person coming from this com-
munity. Undoubtedly, my journey through the writing phase of this book
has left me mentally bruised and exhausted, but also relieved to a great
extent. Sometimes, it may be much wiser and safer to leave a bullet inside
the body than run a risk in removing it. But that causes moral dilemma. If
no one scratched one’s old scars to uncover and revisit those deep wounds,
the world will never learn from history. Some humans do bad things which
must be righted by other humans, so that the world moves on without
returning to dark days.
It does not matter if I physically return to Kashmir or not. I am already
living there in my spirit. I shall live permanently in my words, in my books.
I am fortunate that I have made a niche in the hearts and minds of many
Kashmiris who live there, whom I love, so I am reconnected to Kashmir.
Humans are all about love and respect. God bless my Kashmir and my
Kashmiri brethren.
Kashmiris may look weary, teary, dreary, shaky, noisy or lazy. That is
only a superficial perception, which may fool many. Deep down, they are
extremely hardy, tenacious, pugnacious and resilient. Their history is
extremely complex. They have weathered very difficult times in the past,
which have hardened them to core. They withstood Alexander’s invasion
and repeated invasions of several Mongol chiefs. They survived the rules
of alien regimes over more than 600 years—Shahmiris, Pathans, Mughals,

xix
xx ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Sikhs and Dogras—who invaded, occupied, ruled Kashmir from time to

time and finally disappeared. Yet, Kashmiris did not fade out; they lived
and survived as Kashmiris. There is something in Kashmir and Kashmiris
that will sustain them for many more centuries as ethnic Kashmiris. Over
time, most of them have become quite stoic. Their resilience and stoicism
will help them to survive through all times to come.
Kashmiris are excellent hosts and universally known for their warm hos-
pitality. They remember every kind word, every kind gesture and every
kind favour they receive. Equally, they never forget the pain and injustices
they suffer. Some of them may have given in to the external cultures and
surrendered a part of their identity. However, most of them, who hold
Kashmir in their heart and wear Kashmir on their sleeves, will remain
Kashmiris to the core. They are Kashmiris; they will survive.
As a born Kashmiri Pandit, I pay my most humble homage to the Sikh
Gurus. I remain eternally indebted to Guru Teg Bahadur (1 April 1621–24
November 1675), the 9th Sikh Guru, without whose supreme sacrifice for
Kashmiri Pandits, this book was not possible. He must be remembered by
every Kashmiri Pandit generation till the eternity. The ancestors of
Kashmiri Pandits, also known as Koshur Bhattas, and the Sikh gurus were
known to have a close bond and interaction with one another. Both shared
common characteristics—knowledge and learning. The word Bhatta,
from the Sanskrit word Bhatt, represents a learned person or a student of
learning. As such, Kashmiri Pandits can use the title Pandit before their
name. Similarly, the word Sikh means a learned disciple of the Guru.
My humble acknowledgement and wholehearted thanks to Late Bala
Sahib Thackeray (23 January 1926–17 November 2012), without whose
benevolence and proactive support, a majority of uprooted Kashmiri
Pandits would not have found their feet and reclaimed their lives after
1990. In the same spirit, I also wish to acknowledge and sincerely thank
the people of Jammu of 1990 for their benevolence, tolerance and accep-
tance of a major portion of the uprooted Kashmiri Pandits community in
1990. I also wish to acknowledge all Kashmiris—in Kashmir and else-
where in India and abroad—with whom I have interacted in my life and
particularly since December 1989.
I must thank and acknowledge the input of a number of authors whose
articles, published in various newspapers in India and abroad, have been
referenced and included in this book solely in the context of the book and
to supplement my independent thoughts about the subject matter.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT xxi

I wish to thank my father, Engineer Jawahar Lal Koul, for painstakingly

proofreading the manuscript, and my life partner, A/Prof Dr Rekha Bhan
Koul, for her support and bearing with me during my writing journey.
I also wish to acknowledge my friend, Dr Farzad Beygi, for proofreading
the manuscript of this book and his assistance with its formatting work.
My thanks also go to Nick Lowe for proofreading it briefly.
Last, but not the least, my sincere thanks to my publisher, Springer
Nature, for publishing this book.

Perth, Western Australia Bill K. Koul

26 May 2020
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Victims of an International Socio-religious Political Conspiracy   1
The Truth   4
How   5
Three Decades Since the Exodus   5
Kashmir—A Power Tussle   7
The Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits   8
Nineteenth January  10
An Uprooted Community  11
How Did the Pandits Leave?  14
Migrant Camps in Jammu  16
Current Position of Migrant Campers  16
Current Position of the Kashmiri Muslim Community  18
Kashmiri Muslims Call Pandits to Return  18
What Does the Author Think as a Kashmir Pandit?  30
Was It a Case of Genocide?  31
The Failure of Indian Secularism and Democracy  37
Identity Threat to the Pandits  38
The British Exit  40
Victims of Geopolitics  41
Divisions in India Since 1947  42
Article 370 of the Constitution of India  44
Abrogation of Article 370  46
What Gave Birth to Article 370?  47

xxiii
xxiv Contents

Article 370 in Simple Terms  49

Gradual Erosion of Article 370  51
Should Article 370 Have Been Abrogated?  51
Can Pandits Return Home After the Abrogation of Article 370?  53
Who Has Gained Anything Out of the Abrogation of Article 370?  56
Feelings of a Disillusioned Kashmiri Pandit Post-Article 370  60
References  63

2 About Kashmiri Pandits 67

Etymology  67
Geological Behaviour  70
Genealogy  72
Cultural Transformation  76
An Evening in a Kashmiri Pandit Household (1960s–1980s)  78
Dwellings and Household Items  80
Kitchen and Appliances  83
Cooking and Heating Fuel  85
Food and Beverages  85
Sundried Vegetables and Fruit  88
Fasting Days  89
Clothing  90
Birthday Functions  90
Wedding Functions  91
Cultural Parameters  92
Cultural Uniqueness  94
Soundar  95
Kah-nethar  95
Shishür  95
Mekhal  96
Death and Funeral  97
Herath  98
Navreh  99
Punn 100
Gaard-Batt 101
Khyatchi-Mawas 101
Kashmiri Pandits and Secularism 101
A Global Community 104
High Adaptability 105
 Contents  xxv

Dal-e-Bhatta 106
Politically Insignificant But Part of the Solution 107
References 108

3 Political Orphans?109
What About Kashmiri Pandits? 109
India Does Not Truly Care for Kashmiri Pandits 113
The Bitter Truth 115
Going Forward 116
A Stark Realisation 117
Pandits’ Cry for Justice 118
Were Kashmiri Pandits Cowards? 118
Enigmatic Saints of Kashmir Fought in Their Own Way 123
Swami Nand Lal 123
Bhagwan Gopinath 124
References 125

4 Issues in Pandit Community127

Lack of Political Vision 127
Indifference Towards Kashmir 129
Jingoistic Volatility 131
Erosion of Family Values 131
Dwindling Family and Community Size 133
Loss of Family and Neighbourhood Support 134
Cultural Metamorphosis 135
Divorces 138
Reference 139

5 Main Challenges for Kashmir141

India and Pakistan Must Fight Terrorism Together 141
Pakistan’s Precarious Position 142
India’s Internal Issues 144
Jingoism and Patriotism 145
Terrorism: A Cancer 146
Philosophy 147
The Way Forward 148
A Commentary on the Pulwama Terror Attack 149
Questions to Answer 150
India’s Pre-emptive Attack 150
xxvi Contents

India Needs Vision 151

Kashmir Does Not Need Mediation 153
Shallow Kashmiri Character 154
Kashmir’s Cultural Flux 156
Environmental Vandalism in Kashmir 160
Political Instability in Kashmir 162
A Pampered State 164
Will the Kashmir Issue Ever Go Away? 165
References 167

6 The Way Forward?169

Visiting History Is Important 169
Understanding the Root of Kashmir Issue 170
Famous Poets and Mystics of Kashmir 172
What Is Good for Kashmir? 175
Kashmir Sits on a Nuclear Powder Keg 176
Is Kashmir’s Greater Autonomy a Way Forward? 177
Abrogation of Article 370: A Disaster? 178
Kashmir Needs Cultural Fix 178
Pandits and Muslims Need Each Other 180
Moral Dilemma 181
Spiritual and Moral Obligations 181
Identity and Culture 182
Will Pandits Return? 184
How Many Pandits Will Possibly Return to Live? 186
Going Forward: The Role of Kashmiri Muslims 189
Going Forward: The Role of Kashmiri Pandits 191
The Key 193
The Next Five Years 195
To Conclude 196
References 200

Appendix A: Kashmir’s History in Brief203

Appendix B: The Pakistan Factor233

 About the Author

The author was born in an educated prominent Kashmiri Pandit family in

Srinagar, Kashmir. As Kashmir witnessed a gradual paralysis of adminis-
tration and law and order in 1989, accompanied with a series of violent
politico-­religious incidents and the assassination of a number of eminent
members of his community, the author felt deeply distressed and extremely
concerned for his personal safety and the safety of his family. Finally, on
23 December 1989, he bid his last farewell to his home (his parents’
house) in Kashmir—the house that he had seen rising from the ground
and taking shape brick-by-brick—and that street in front of our house,
which he had helped to construct, stone by stone, with his tiny hands.
Until then, he had never undertaken any manual labour before; his hands
were full of sores and scratches.
He left his home because he felt deeply betrayed by his Kashmiri
community—his own flesh and blood—and the then two governments,
State and Central. He has never been able to understand how and why
religion succeeded in separating brothers from one another. After all,
they were ONE Kashmiri community, historically related by blood.
Amazingly, at that time, the State government seemed to have abdicated,
and the Central government was hopelessly clueless about what was
happening in the valley. But the author was alert and aware; he had seen
it coming and he was afraid, very afraid. Not many people paid attention
to his fear; no one listened to his cry, not even his parents. He believes
his God may have certainly cried with him when he left his home in deep
fear, for an uncertain future.

xxvii
xxviii ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A month later, he was undoubtedly fully uprooted from his soil on the
morning of 20 January 1990, when his parents decided to leave suddenly,
under duress and after repeated pleas and advice (to leave the valley) from
his father’s Muslim colleague. His parents were dropped at the Srinagar
airport by their noble Muslim neighbour, Dr Abdul Majid (RIP). At the
airport, they crossed path with Mr Jagmohan, the newly (re)appointed
governor of Jammu and Kashmir, who had just arrived in the valley. Rest
is history!
History must not be forgotten or allowed to be distorted.
Since 1984, the author had been feeling the tremors that had rocked
the valley from time to time. With time, he had also noticed an alarming
growth in their intensity. In 1989, he made significant noise to warn his
friends and relatives, but they chose to sleep blissfully. Even his parents
ignored him. In October 1989, he took his first flight out to Delhi, but
got disillusioned and returned a few weeks later. Later, on 23 December
1989, when he could bear it no more, he took a historical flight out of
the valley with his young family (but without his parents). The harsh
reality of losing his home dawned upon him in the plains of India during
the hot summer days. He struggled to breathe; the hot air was unbearable.
‘Delhi or Detroit, it should not matter, go where you find honour, dignity,
respect and success,’ a wise Kashmiri Pandit, Mr SK Bhan, advised.
He and his family were grounded—poor, hopeless, disillusioned, desolate
and helpless—like half a million other people. God helps those who help
themselves. So, the family had to work hard to reclaim their lives back.
Their first long flight out of India took them to Southeast Asia, where
he lived and worked. The family prospered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
They worked very hard and tried to save every hard-earned penny that
they could. They lived a very modest but dignified lifestyle and focussed
mainly on the education of their young children, whilst inculcating in
them the traditional Pandit virtues and values, as well as freeing them of
many outdated stigmas. They raised their two children as free citizens.
The author was fortunate to have worked on some iconic large infrastruc-
ture projects in Malaysia, whose foundation design work had his signifi-
cant input. It was the golden period of Malaysia when Dr Mahathir was
the popular prime minister of the country. For technical reasons, however,
Malaysia could not be their long-term home, so they started preparing for
their next long flight to Australia—the land down under, the land of green
and gold, the land of opportunities, the land of Don Bradman and Dennis
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR xxix

Lillee. But things did not come on a platter. Before allowing them in, their
new home rigorously tested their commitment and resolution, worth and
qualifications. In those days (late 1990s), immigration to Australia was
relatively quite difficult, and the general public, due to a lack of exposure,
was a little conservative towards the new immigrants, especially from the
non-English-speaking countries.
The author was required to pass a two three-hour long written assess-
ments in engineering, called the Test by Examination, conducted by
Engineers Australia, which was held over two days at the Australian High
Commission in Singapore, which he passed in the late 1996. This strin-
gent assessment process was later scrapped by the then Government of
Australia in 1998, as not many foreign-trained engineers could pass it; it
was replaced with a new, much more lenient (and potentially corrupt-
ible) assessment process—comprising the submission of three project
reports. Since 1998, the new assessment process has allowed many more
foreign-­trained engineers to freely immigrate into the country. After
passing his technical assessment, the whole family had to undergo a full
medical assessment—to prove their good health and physical fitness—
which was followed by their character assessment. After crossing all these
hurdles, they received the final ‘green’ signal—their first embrace—from
their new home.
Australia adopted them more than two decades ago as its own and gave
them freedom, honour and dignity. The peaceful environment in their
new home helped them to grow fast within themselves and accelerated
their healing process. Although their wounds have healed over time, their
mental scars remain. Thankfully, their pain and grief metamorphosed into
empathy, compassion and forgiveness. The author has written his personal
story about his exodus, and of his pain and suffering, in a book, 22
Years—A Kashmir Story (2018).

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread;
and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. … Matthew 6:9–13
(RSV-2CE)1

1
The Lord’s Prayer is read in the Parliament of Australia at the start of the day whenever
the parliament is in session.
xxx ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author is not affiliated with any political party or any organisation
in India or abroad. He continues to be a vegetarian, loves cricket and
practices Transcendental Meditation. He remains eternally indebted to
Guru Teg Bahadur, the 9th Sikh Guru, for his supreme sacrifice. This
book has been driven by heart and will need a heart to read and under-
stand its objectives. It is based on the author’s personal experience as an
indigenous Kashmiri and his observations and interactions with the
members of both Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim communities.
If nothing is done soon, the Kashmir issue may take its natural recourse,
as reaction to political and social imbalances, to achieve equilibrium.
Kashmir does not look as pristine as it did only a few decades ago. Militancy
has taken a significant toll on the human well-being and mental health, as
well as the natural environment. The scars of environmental degradation
in lakes, rivers, wetlands and forests—due to mindless, myopic and selfish
human vandalism—are visible in Kashmir. On the human front, the rate of
mental illness has risen.
One does not need to be an expert on Kashmir or be a political science
graduate to write on the subject matter. Any person who has the ability to
think rationally, especially as an ethnic Kashmiri, should be heard.
It is a Kashmiri Pandit in the author who, despite living in Australia,
a living paradise on the earth, makes him put in very hard yards—in
terms of time and effort, serious commitment and personal resources—
to try and wake up India, because in India’s survival lies the survival of
Kashmir, and vice versa. In the past two decades, Australia has infused in
him its core character—if there is something wrong, stand up, make
noise and do something about it, but never be a silent witness. This
Australian diehard character aligns with the core message of the Bhagwad
Gita, which the author follows.
Fearless and selfless actions, borne out of noble intentions, align with
dharma (righteousness/duty) and set one apart. Such actions alone make
this world a better place. Being optimistic is healthy. Unfortunately, in this
context, pure optimism bedded with inaction should be considered as
burying one’s head in sand, like an ostrich. It is not the time to do nothing
to address the core issues that have been disturbing Kashmir.
God does not do anything without the human thought and endeavour.
Likewise, in the areas of social engineering and the environmental sustain-
ability of the country, visionary humans, as God’s representatives, must
stand up and act, to fulfil the wishes of Kashmiris and for the welfare of
their future generations.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR xxxi

Mahabharata, the great epic, painfully reminds one about many learned
and brave men, including the invincible Bhishma, well known for his vow
of celibacy, who remained passive witnesses to many wrongs being done
by others. The country lost, and nobody won. The victory of Pandavas
was of benefit to no one, as not many people were left to enjoy the fruit of
that victory.
Many people, who carry strong bitterness from the past, ask many
uncomfortable questions about why things happened in Kashmir in 1990.
Fair enough, these are valid questions, but such questions will not help to
stitch back the Kashmiriyat. Many of them have advised the author, ‘Why
are you so much concerned about Kashmir? You have left Kashmir about
three decades ago. Leave Kashmir and Kashmiris alone; they have got
what they deserve’. But the author has truly learnt the lesson from the
Mahabharata.
The author is a firm believer in the best of humanity and knows the
importance of looking ahead and being optimistic. His mother, supported
by the life experience, has taught him that the past, if ugly, can become a
potential seed for new conflicts if unnecessarily nourished by bitter
memories and acidic expressions. Kashmir and Kashmiris, both within and
outside Kashmir, urgently need healing.
The author endeavours to reconnect the two long lost brothers (Pandits
and Muslims), which he thinks is extremely important for the welfare of
their future generations and for sustainable peace in Kashmir. He believes
it is only up to the individual Kashmiri people from both sides to come
together and restitch their unique Kashmir community together and forge
a peaceful and progressive future of the homeland.
The author has no expectations from any politicians or any illusions
about what they can or can’t do, and, more importantly, what they will
never ever do.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Victims of an International Socio-religious

Political Conspiracy
The world has not changed much since the human race came into exis-
tence about 200,000 years ago except that the human number increased
significantly post the dawn of Industrial Age, during the last 400 years or
so. Humans still eat, breed and hunt just like their ancestors did; the only
difference being that their mannerism and weapons became more sophis-
ticated and subtle over time. At no stage have humans lost their conniv-
ance. The current human sophistication may be just skin-deep. When it
comes to power—social, religious, military and political—and competi-
tion, humans can be as or perhaps more dangerous than other animals.
In this day and age—with muscle, might and majority continuing to be
right—if an ethnic community demographically comprises less than 5% of
the population in their homeland, or around 0.06% of their country’s
population and 0.01% of global population, would they make any differ-
ence to anyone other than themselves? Their numbers may be considered
as traces and, therefore, insignificant, both in the country of their birth
and elsewhere in the world. In anthropological and sociological domains,
however, they may be considered as significant, as any ethnic group on the
planet. But can they be considered important in statistical or political
domains? Those members of the community, who know the answer to this
question, silently strive on through individual endeavours and manage to
survive wherever they exist, whereas others—a much smaller group—who

© The Author(s) 2020 1

B. K. Koul, The Exiled Pandits of Kashmir,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6537-3_1
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
have a private opportunity of hearing Mr. Irving and judging of his
fitness.
Let the autumn of 1819 be supposed to have passed, with
Carlyle’s studies and early risings in his father’s house at Mainhill in
Dumfriesshire,[20] and those negotiations between Irving and Dr.
Chalmers which issued in the definite appointment of Irving to the
Glasgow assistantship. It was in October 1819 that this matter was
settled; and then Irving, who had been on a visit to his relatives in
Annan, and was on his way thence to Glasgow, to enter on his new
duties, picked up Carlyle at Mainhill, for that walk of theirs up the
valley of the Dryfe, and that beating-up of their common friend,
Frank Dickson, in his clerical quarters, which are so charmingly
described in the Reminiscences.
Next month, November 1819, when Irving was forming
acquaintance with Dr. Chalmers’s congregation, and they hardly
knew what to make of him,—some thinking him more like a “cavalry
officer” or “brigand chief” than a young minister of the Gospel,—
Carlyle was back in Edinburgh. His uncertainties and speculations as
to his future, with the dream of emigration to America, had turned
themselves into a vague notion that, if he gave himself to the study of
law, he might possibly be able to muster somehow the two or three
hundreds of pounds that would be necessary to make him a member
of the Edinburgh Bar, and qualify him for walking up and down the
floor of the Parliament House in wig and gown, like the grandees he
had seen there in his memorable first visit to the place, with Tom
Smail, ten years before. For that object residence in Edinburgh was
essential, and so he had returned thither. His lodgings now seem to
be no longer in Carnegie Street, but in Bristo Street,—possibly in the
rooms which Irving had left.
No portion of the records relating to Carlyle’s connection with
our University has puzzled me more than that which refers to his law
studies after he had abandoned Divinity. From a memorandum of his
own, quoted by Mr. Froude, but without date, it distinctly appears
that he attended “Hume’s Lectures on Scotch Law”; and Mr. Froude
adds that his intention of becoming an advocate, and his consequent
perseverance in attendance on the “law lectures” in the Edinburgh
University, continued for some time. Our records, however, are not
quite clear in the matter. In our Matriculation Book for the session
1819–20, where every law student, as well as every arts student and
every medical student, was bound to enter his name, paying a
matriculation-fee of 10s., I find two Thomas Carlyles, both from
Dumfriesshire. One, whose signature, in a clear and elegant hand, I
should take to be that of our Carlyle at that date, enters himself as
“Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” with the addition “5 Lit.,” signifying
that he had attended the Literary or Arts Classes in four preceding
sessions. The matriculation number of this Thomas Carlyle is 825.
The other, whose matriculation number is 1257, enters himself, in a
somewhat boyish-looking hand, as “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,”
with the addition “2 Lit.,” signifying that he had attended one
previous session in an Arts Class. Now, all depends on the
construction of the appearances of those two Carlyles in the
independent class-lists that have been preserved, in the handwritings
of the Professors, for that session of their common matriculation and
for subsequent sessions. Without troubling the reader with the
puzzling details, I may say that the records present an alternative of
two suppositions: viz. either (1) Both the Thomas Carlyles who
matriculated for 1819–20 became law students that session; in which
case the “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,” notwithstanding the too
boyish-looking handwriting, and the gross misdescription of him as
“2 Lit.,” was our Carlyle; or (2) Only one of the two became a law
student; in which case he was the “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” or
our Carlyle, using “Dumfries” as the name of his county, and
correctly describing himself as “5 Lit.” On the first supposition it has
to be reported that Carlyle’s sole attendance in a law class was in the
Scots Law Class of Professor David Hume for the session 1819–20,
while the other Carlyle was in the Civil Law Class for “the Institutes”
that session, but reappeared in other classes in later sessions. On the
second supposition (which also involves a mistake in the
registration), Carlyle attended both the Scots Law Class and the
“Institutes” department of the Civil Law Class in 1819–20, and so
began a new career of attendance in the University, which extended
to 1823 thus:—
Session 1819–20: Hume’s Scots Law Class, and Professor
Alexander Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Institutes”).
Session 1820–21: Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Pandects”), and Hope’s
Chemistry Class (where the name in the Professor’s list of his
 vast class of 460 students is spelt “Thomas Carlisle”).
Session 1821–22: No attendance.
Session 1822–23: Scots Law Class a second time, under the new
Professor, George Joseph Bell (Hume having just died).[21]
With this knowledge that Carlyle did for some time after 1819
contemplate the Law as a profession,—certain as to the main fact,
though a little doubtful for the present in respect of the extent of
time over which his law studies were continued,—let us proceed to
his Edinburgh life in general for the five years from 1819 to 1824. He
was not, indeed, wholly in Edinburgh during those five years. Besides
absences now and then on brief visits, e.g. to Irving in Glasgow or
elsewhere in the west, we are to remember his stated vacations,
longer or shorter, in the summer and autumn, at his father’s house at
Mainhill in Annandale; and latterly there was a term of residence in
country quarters of which there will have to be special mention at the
proper date. In the main, however, from 1819 to 1824 Carlyle was an
Edinburgh man. His lodgings were, first, in Bristo Street, but
afterwards and more continuously at No. 3 Moray Street,—not, of
course, the great Moray Place of the aristocratic West End, but a
much obscurer namesake, now re-christened “Spey Street,” at right
angles to Pilrig Street, just off Leith Walk. It was in these lodgings
that he read and mused; it was in the streets of Edinburgh, or on the
heights on her skirts, that he had his daily walks; the few friends and
acquaintances he had any converse with were in Edinburgh; and it
was with Edinburgh and her affairs that as yet he considered his own
future fortunes as all but certain to be bound up.
No more extraordinary youth ever walked the streets of
Edinburgh, or of any other city, than the Carlyle of those years.
Those great natural faculties, unmistakably of the order called
genius, and that unusual wealth of acquirement, which had been
recognised in him as early as 1814 by such intimate friends as
Murray, and more lately almost with awe by Margaret Gordon, had
been baulked of all fit outcome, but were still manifest to the
discerning. When Irving speaks of them, or thinks of them, it is with
a kind of amazement. At the same time that strange moodiness of
character, that lofty pride and intolerance, that roughness and
unsociableness of temper, against which Margaret Gordon and
others had warned him as obstructing his success, had hardened
themselves into settled habit. So it appeared; but in reality the word
“habit” is misleading. Carlyle’s moroseness, if we let that poor word
pass in the meantime for a state of temper which it would take many
words, and some of them much softer and grander, to describe
adequately, was an innate and constitutional distinction. It is worth
while to dwell for a moment on the contrast between him in this
respect and the man who was his immediate predecessor in the
series of really great literary Scotsmen. If there ever was a soul of
sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal blandness and good
fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came into the world.
When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it was as if the
Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to have been
amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost the
opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly
endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal
peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of
pain. From his childhood upwards, Carlyle had been, as his own
mother said of him, “gey ill to deal wi’” (“considerably difficult to
deal with”), the prey of melancholia, an incarnation of wailing and
bitter broodings, addicted to the black and dismal view of things.
With all his studies, all the development of his great intellect, all his
strength in humour and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of
the ludicrous confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess
of character, but had brought it into those comparatively mature
years of his Edinburgh life with which we are now concerned. His
despondency, indeed, seems then to have been at its very worst. A
few authentications may be quoted:—
April, 1819.—“As to my own projects, I am sorry, on several accounts, that I
can give no satisfactory account to your friendly inquiries. A good portion of my
life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene,
on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose.
The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not
very strong.”[22]
March, 1820.—“I am altogether an —— creature. Timid, yet not humble, weak,
yet enthusiastic, nature and education have rendered me entirely unfit to force my
way among the thick-skinned inhabitants of this planet. Law, I fear, must be given
up: it is a shapeless mass of absurdity and chicane.”[23]
October, 1820.—“No settled purpose will direct my conduct, and the next
scene of this fever-dream is likely to be as painful as the last. Expect no account of
my prospects, for I have no prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being
thrown from another planet on this terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its
possessors; I have no share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste
and howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under dark-
brown shade.”[24]
March 9, 1821.—“Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene for me.
In the country I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from a far-distant land. I
must endeavour most sternly, for this state of things cannot last; and, if health do
but revisit me, as I know she will, it shall ere long give place to a better. If I grow
seriously ill, indeed, it will be different; but, when once the weather is settled and
dry, exercise and care will restore me completely. I am considerably clearer than I
was, and I should have been still more so had not this afternoon been wet, and so
prevented me from breathing the air of Arthur Seat, a mountain close beside us,
where the atmosphere is pure as a diamond, and the prospect grander than any
you ever saw,—the blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills swelling
gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and precipices at our feet, where
not a hillock rears its head unsung; with Edinburgh at their base, clustering
proudly over her rugged foundations, and covering with a vapoury mantle the
jagged, black, venerable masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show
like a city of Fairyland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down,
and the moon’s fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as it is, was riding quietly
above me.”[25]
Reminiscence in 1867.—“Hope hardly dwelt in me ...; only fierce resolution in
abundance to do my best and utmost in all honest ways, and to suffer as silently
and stoically as might be, if it proved (as too likely!) that I could do nothing. This
kind of humour, what I sometimes called of “desperate hope,” has largely attended
me all my life. In short, as has been indicated elsewhere, I was advancing towards
huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh
purgatory, and had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of various kinds for
several years coming, the first and much the worst two or three of which were to be
enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think of in part even yet!”[26]
What was the cause of such habitual wretchedness, such lowness
of spirits, in a young man between his five-and-twentieth and his
seven-and-twentieth year? In many external respects his life hitherto
had been even unusually fortunate. His parentage was one of which
he could be proud, and not ashamed; he had a kindly home to return
to; he had never once felt, or had occasion to feel, the pinch of actual
poverty, in any sense answering to the name or notion of poverty as
it was understood by his humbler countrymen. He had been in
honourable employments, which many of his compeers in age would
have been glad to get; and he had about £100 of saved money in his
pocket,—a sum larger than the majority of the educated young
Scotsmen about him could then finger, or perhaps ever fingered
afterwards in all their lives. All this has to be distinctly remembered;
for the English interpretations of Carlyle’s early “poverty,”
“hardships,” etc., are sheer nonsense. By the Scottish standard of his
time, by the standard of say two-thirds of those who had been his
fellows in the Divinity Hall of Edinburgh, Carlyle’s circumstances so
far had been even enviable. The cause of his abnormal unhappiness
was to be found in himself. Was it, then, his ill-health,—that fearful
“dyspepsia” which had come upon him in his twenty-third year, or
just after his transit from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh, and which clung to
him, as we know, to the very end of his days? There can be no doubt
that this was a most important factor in the case. His dyspepsia must
have intensified his gloom, and may have accounted for those
occasional excesses of his low spirits which verged on hypochondria.
But, essentially, the gloom was there already, brought along with him
from those days, before his twenty-third year, when, as he told the
blind American clergyman Milburn, he was still “the healthy and
hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scottish dalesman,” and had not yet
become “conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement
called a stomach.”[27] In fact, as Luther maintained when he
denounced the Roman Catholic commentators as gross and carnal
fellows for their persistently physical interpretation of Paul’s “thorn
in the flesh,” as if there could be no severe enough “thorn” of a
spiritual kind, the mere pathological explanations which physicians
are apt to trust to will not suffice in such instances. What, then, of
those spiritual distresses, arising from a snapping of the traditional
and paternal creed, and a soul left thus rudderless for the moment,
which Luther recognised as the most terrible, and had experienced in
such measure himself?
That there must have been distress to Carlyle in his wrench of
himself away from the popular religious faith, the faith of his father
and mother, needs no argument. The main evidence, however, is that
his clear intellect had cut down like a knife between him and the
theology from which he had parted, leaving no ragged ends. The
main evidence is that, though he had some central core of faith still
to seek as a substitute,—though he was still agitating in his mind in a
new way the old question of his Divinity Hall exegesis, Num detur
Religio Naturalis?, and had not yet attained to that light, describable
as a fervid, though scrupulously unfeatured, Theism or
Supernaturalism, in the blaze of which he was to live all his after-life,
—yet he was not involved in the coil of those ordinary “doubts” and
“backward hesitations” of which we hear so much, and sometimes so
cantingly, in feebler biographies. There is, at all events, no record in
his case of any such efforts as those of Coleridge to rest in a
theosophic refabrication out of the wrecks of the forsaken orthodoxy.
On the contrary, whatever of more positive illumination, whatever of
moral or really religious rousing, had yet to come, he appears to have
settled once for all into a very definite condition of mind as to the
limits of the intrinsically possible or impossible for the human
intellect in that class of considerations.
Yet another cause of despondency and low spirits, however, may
suggest itself as feasible. No more in Carlyle than in any other ardent
and imaginative young man at his age was there a deficiency of those
love-languors and love-dreamings which are the secrets of many a
masculine sadness. There are traces of them in his letters; and we
may well believe that in his Edinburgh solitude he was pursued for a
while by the pangs of “love disprized” in the image of his lost
Margaret Gordon.
Add this cause to all the others, however, and let them all have
their due weight and proportion, and it still remains true that the
main and all-comprehending form of Carlyle’s grief and dejection in
those Edinburgh days was that of a great sword in too narrow a
scabbard, a noble bird fretting in its cage, a soul of strong energies
and ambitions measuring itself against common souls and against
social obstructions, and all but frantic for lack of employment.
Schoolmastering he had given up with detestation; the Church he
had given up with indifference; the Law had begun to disgust him, or
was seeming problematical. Where others could have rested, happy
in routine, or at least acquiescent, Carlyle could not. What was this
Edinburgh, for example, in the midst of which he was living, the
solitary tenant of a poor lodging, not even on speaking terms with
those that were considered her magnates, the very best of whom he
was conscious of the power to equal, and, if necessary, to vanquish
and lay flat? We almost see on his face some such defiant glare round
Edinburgh, as if, whatever else were to come, it was this innocent
and unheeding Edinburgh that he would first of all take by the throat
and compel to listen.
 Authentication may be again necessary, and may bring some
elucidation with it. “The desire which, in common with all men, I feel
for conversation and social intercourse is, I find,” he had written to a
correspondent in November 1818, “enveloped in a dense, repulsive
atmosphere, not of vulgar mauvaise honte, though such it is
generally esteemed, but of deeper feelings, which I partly inherit
from nature, and which are mostly due to the undefined station I
have hitherto occupied in society.”[28] Again, to a correspondent in
March 1820, “The fate of one man is a mighty small concern in the
grand whole in this best of all possible worlds. Let us quit the subject,
—with just one observation more, which I throw out for your benefit,
should you ever come to need such an advice. It is to keep the
profession you have adopted, if it be at all tolerable. A young man
who goes forth into the world to seek his fortune with those lofty
ideas of honour and uprightness which a studious secluded life
naturally begets, will in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, if
friends and other aids are wanting, fall into the sere, the yellow
leaf.”[29] These feelings were known to all his friends, so that Carlyle’s
despondency over his poor social prospects, his enormous power of
complaint, or, as the Scots call it, “of pityin’ himsel’,” was as familiar
a topic with them as with his own family.
No one sympathised with him more, or wrote more
encouragingly to him than Irving from Glasgow; and it is from some
of Irving’s letters that we gather the information that certain
peculiarities in Carlyle’s own demeanour were understood to be
operating against his popularity even within the limited Edinburgh
circle in which he did for the present move. “Known you must be
before you can be employed,” Irving writes to him in December 1819.
“Known you will not be,” he proceeds, “for a winning, attaching,
accommodating man, but for an original, commanding, and rather
self-willed man.... Your utterance is not the most favourable. It
convinces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very few (I can
claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is worse.
They are, generally (I exclude myself), unphilosophical, unthinking
drivellers, who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and who give
you little justice in the recital, because you give their vanity or self-
esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the encounter. Therefore, my
dear friend, some other way is to be sought for.”[30] In a letter in
March 1820 Irving returns to the subject. “Therefore it is, my dear
Carlyle,” he says, “that I exhort you to call in the finer parts of your
mind, and to try to present the society about you with those more
ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which
they receive them [your present extraordinary displays], and the
ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall
and wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the
possession of your treasures, and to study more the times and
persons to which you bring them forth. When I say your treasures, I
mean not your information so much, which they will bear the display
of for the reward and value of it, but your feelings and affections;
which, being of finer tone than theirs, and consequently seeking a
keener expression, they are apt to mistake for a rebuke of their own
tameness, or for intolerance of ordinary things, and too many of
them, I fear, for asperity of mind.”[31] This is Margaret Gordon’s
advice over again; and it enables us to add to our conception of
Carlyle in those days of his Edinburgh struggling and obstruction the
fact of his fearlessness and aggressiveness in speech, his habit even
then of that lightning rhetoric, that boundless word-audacity, with
sarcasms and stinging contempts falling mercilessly upon his
auditors themselves, which characterised his conversation to the last.
This habit, or some of the forms of it, he had derived, he thought,
from his father.[32]
Private mathematical teaching was still for a while Carlyle’s
most immediate resource. We hear of two or three engagements of
the kind at his fixed rate of two guineas per month for an hour a day,
and also of one or two rejected proposals of resident tutorship away
from Edinburgh. Nor had he given up his own prosecution of the
higher mathematics. My recollection is that he used to connect the
break-down of his health with his continued wrestlings with
Newton’s Principia even after he had left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh;
and he would speak of the grassy slopes of the Castle Hill, then not
railed off from Princes Street, as a place where he liked to lie in fine
weather, poring over that or other books. His readings, however,
were now, as before, very miscellaneous. The Advocates’ Library, to
which he had access, I suppose, through some lawyer of his
acquaintance, afforded him facilities in the way of books such as he
had never before enjoyed. “Lasting thanks to it, alone of Scottish
institutions,” is his memorable phrase of obligation to this Library;
and of his appetite for reading and study generally we may judge
from a passage in one of his earlier letters, where he says, “When I
am assaulted by those feelings of discontent and ferocity which
solitude at all times tends to produce, and by that host of miserable
little passions which are ever and anon attempting to disturb one’s
repose, there is no method of defeating them so effectual as to take
them in flank by a zealous course of study.”
One zealous course of study to which he had set himself just
after settling in Edinburgh from Kirkcaldy, if not a little before, was
the study of the German language. French, so far as the power of
reading it was concerned, he had acquired sufficiently in his
boyhood; Italian, to some less extent, had come easily enough; but
German tasked his perseverance and required time. He was
especially diligent in it through the years 1819 and 1820, with such a
measure of success that in August in the latter year he could write to
one friend, “I could tell you much about the new Heaven and new
Earth which a slight study of German literature has revealed to me,”
and in October of the same year to another, “I have lived riotously
with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest: they are the greatest men at
present with me.” His German readings were continued, and his
admiration of the German Literature grew.
Was it not time that Carlyle should be doing something in
Literature himself? Was not Literature obviously his true vocation,—
the very vocation for which his early companions, such as Murray,
had discerned his pre-eminent fitness as long ago as 1814, and to
which the failure of his successive experiments in established
professions had ever since been pointing? To this, in fact, Irving had
been most importunately urging him in those letters, just quoted, in
which, after telling him that, by reason of the asperity and irritating
contemptuousness of his manner, he would never be rightly
appreciated by his usual appearances in society, or even by his
splendid powers of talk, he had summed up his advice in the words
“Some other way is to be sought for.” What Irving meant, and urged
at some length, and with great practicality, in those letters, was that
Carlyle should at once think of some literary attempts, congenial to
his own tastes, and yet of as popular a kind as possible, and aim at a
connection with the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood.
Carlyle himself, as we learn, had been already, for a good while,
turning his thoughts now and then in the same direction. It is utterly
impossible that a young man who for five years already had been
writing letters to his friends the English style of which moved them
to astonishment, as it still moves to admiration those who now read
the specimens of them that have been recovered, should not have
been exercising his literary powers privately in other things than
letters, and so have had beside him, before 1819, a little stock of
pieces suitable for any magazine that would take them. One such
piece, he tells us, had been sent over from Kirkcaldy in 1817 to the
editor of some magazine in Edinburgh. It was a piece of “the
descriptive tourist kind,” giving some account of Carlyle’s first
impressions of the Yarrow country, so famous in Scottish song and
legend, as visited by him in one of his journeys from Edinburgh to
Annandale. What became of it he never knew, the editor having
returned no answer.[33] Although, after this rebuff, there was no new
attempt at publication from Kirkcaldy, there can be little doubt that
he had then a few other things by him, and not in prose only, with
which he could have repeated the trial. It is very possible that several
specimens of those earliest attempts of his in prose and verse,
published by himself afterwards when periodicals were open to him,
remain yet to be disinterred from their hiding-places; but two have
come to light. One is a story of Annandale incidents published
anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1831, under the title
“Cruthers and Jonson, or the Outskirts of Life: a True Story,” but
certified by Mr. William Allingham, no doubt on Carlyle’s own
information, to have been the very first of all his writings intended
for the press.[34] The other is of more interest to us here, from its
picturesque oddity in connection with Carlyle’s early Edinburgh life.
It is entitled “Peter Nimmo,” and was published in Fraser’s Magazine
for February 1831, the next number after that containing Cruthers
and Jonson.
Within my own memory, and in fact to as late as 1846, there was
known about the precincts of Edinburgh University a singular being
called Peter Nimmo, or, by tradition of some jest played upon him,
Sir Peter Nimmo. He was a lank, miserable, mendicant-looking
object, of unknown age, with a blue face, often scarred and patched,
and garments not of the cleanest, the chief of which was a long,
threadbare, snuff-brown great-coat. His craze was that of attending
the University class-rooms and listening to the lectures. So long had
this craze continued that a University session without “Sir Peter
Nimmo” about the quadrangle, for the students to laugh at and
perpetrate practical jokes upon, would have been an interruption of
the established course of things; but, as his appearance in a class-
room had become a horror to the Professors, and pity for him had
passed into a sense that he was a nuisance and cause of disorder,
steps had at last been taken to prevent his admission, or at least to
reduce his presence about college to a minimum. They could not get
rid of him entirely, for he had imbedded himself in the legends and
the very history of the University.——Going back from the forties to
the thirties of the present century, we find Peter Nimmo then already
in the heyday of his fame. In certain reminiscences which the late Dr.
Hill Burton wrote of his first session at the University, viz. in 1830–
31, when he attended Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class, Peter is an
important figure. “A dirty, ill-looking lout, who had neither wit
himself, nor any quality with a sufficient amount of pleasant
grotesqueness in it to create wit in others,” is Dr. Hill Burton’s
description of him then; and the impression Burton had received of
his real character was that he was “merely an idly-inclined and
stupidish man of low condition, who, having once got into practice as
a sort of public laughing-stock, saw that the occupation paid better
than honest industry, and had cunning enough to keep it up.” He
used to obtain meals, Burton adds, by calling at various houses,
sometimes assuming an air of simple good faith when the students
got hold of the card of some civic dignitary and presented it to him
with an inscribed request for the honour of Sir Peter Nimmo’s
company at dinner; and in the summer-time he wandered about,
introducing himself at country houses. Once, Burton had heard, he
had obtained access to Wordsworth, using Professor Wilson’s name
for his passport; and, as he had judiciously left all the talk to
Wordsworth, the impression he had left was such that the poet had
afterwards spoken of his visitor as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in
appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had
ever met with.”[35]——Burton, however, though thus familiar with
“Sir Peter” in 1830–1, was clearly not aware of his real standing by
his University antecedents. Whatever he was latterly, he had at one
time been a regularly matriculated student. I have traced him in the
University records back and back long before Dr. Burton’s knowledge
of him, always paying his matriculation-fee and always taking out
one or two classes. In the Lapsus Linguæ, or College Tatler, a small
satirical magazine of the Edinburgh students for the session 1823–
24, “Dr. Peter Nimmo” is the title of one of the articles, the matter
consisting of clever imaginary extracts from the voluminous
notebooks, scientific and philosophical, of this “very sage man,
whose abilities, though at present hid under a bushel, will soon blaze
forth, and give a very different aspect to the state of literature in
Scotland.” In the session of 1819–20, when Carlyle was attending the
Scots Law Class, Peter Nimmo was attending two of the medical
classes, having entered himself in the matriculation book, in
conspicuously large characters, as “Petrus Buchanan Nimmo,
Esquire, &c., Dumbartonshire,” with the addition that he was in
the 17th year of his theological studies. Six years previously, viz. in
1813–14, he is registered as in the 8th year of his literary course. In
1811–12 he was one of Carlyle’s fellow-students in the 2d
Mathematical Class under Leslie; and in 1810–11 he was with Carlyle
in the 1st Mathematical Class and also in the Logic Class. Peter seems
to have been lax in his dates; but there can be no doubt that he was a
known figure about Edinburgh University before Carlyle entered it,
and that the whole of Carlyle’s University career, as of the careers of
all the students of Edinburgh University for another generation, was
spent in an atmosphere of Peter Nimmo. What Peter had been
originally it is difficult to make out. The probability is that he had
come up about the beginning of the century as a stupid youth from
Dumbartonshire, honestly destined for the Church, and that he had
gradually or suddenly broken down into the crazed being who could
not exist but by haunting the classes for ever, and becoming a fixture
about the University buildings. He used to boast of his high family.
Such was the pitiful object that had been chosen by Carlyle for
the theme of what was perhaps his first effort in verse. For the
essential portion of his article on Peter Nimmo is a metrical
“Rhapsody,” consisting of a short introduction, five short parts, and
an epilogue. In the introduction, which the prefixed motto, “Numeris
fertur lege solutis,” avows to be in hobbling measure, we see the
solitary bard in quest of a subject:—
Art thou lonely, idle, friendless, toolless, nigh distract,
Hand in bosom,—jaw, except for chewing, ceased to act?
Matters not, so thou have ink and see the Why and How;
Drops of copperas-dye make There a Here, and Then a Now.
 Must the brain lie fallow simply since it is alone,
And the heart, in heaths and splashy weather, turn to stone?
Shall a living Man be mute as twice-sold mackerel?
If not speaking, if not acting, I can write,—in doggerel.
For a subject? Earth is wonder-filled; for instance, Peter Nimmo:
Think of Peter’s “being’s mystery”: I will sing of him O!

In the first part Peter is introduced to us by his physiognomy and

appearance:—
Thrice-loved Nimmo! art thou still, in spite of Fate,
Footing those cold pavements, void of meal and mutton,
To and from that everlasting College-gate,
With thy blue hook-nose, and ink-horn hung on button?

Six more stanzas of the same hobbling metre inform us that Peter is
really a harmless pretender, who, for all his long attendance in the
college-classes, could not yet decline τιμή; after which, in the second
part, there is an imagination of what his boyhood may have been. A
summer Sabbath-day, under a blue sky, in some pleasant country
neighbourhood, is imagined, with Peter riding on a donkey in the
vicinity, and meditating his own future:—
Dark lay the world in Peter’s labouring breast:
Here was he (words of import strange),—He here!
Mysterious Peter, on mysterious hest:
But Whence, How, Whither, nowise will appear.

Thus meditating on the “marvellous universe” into which he has

come, and on his own possible function in it, Peter, caught by the
sight of the little parish-kirk upon a verdant knoll, determines, as the
donkey canters on with him, that God calls him to be a priest. His
transition from Grammar School to College thus accounted for, the
third part sings of his first collegeraptures in three stanzas. In the
fourth part he is the poor mendicant Peter who has become the
Wandering Jew of the University, and whose mode of living is a
problem:—
Where lodges Peter? How his pot doth boil,
This truly knoweth, guesseth, no man;
He spins not, neither does he toil;
Lives free as ancient Greek or Roman.
Whether he may not roost on trees at nights is a speculation; but
sometimes he comes to the rooms of his class-fellows. The fifth part
of the rhapsody tells of one such nocturnal visit of his (mythical, we
must hope) to the rooms of the bard who is now singing:—
At midnight hour did Peter come;
Right well I knew his tap and tread;
With smiles I placed two pints of rum
Before him, and one cold sheep’s-head.

Peter, thus made comfortable, entertains his host with the genealogy
of his family, the far-famed Nimmos, and with his own great
prospects of various kinds, till, the rum being gone and the sheep’s
head reduced to a skull, he falls from his chair “dead-drunk,” and is
sent off in a wheel-barrow! The envoy moralizes the whole rather
indistinctly in three stanzas, each with this chorus in italics:—
Sure ’tis Peter, sure ’tis Peter:
Life’s a variorum.

Verse, if we may judge from this grim specimen,[36] was not

Carlyle’s element. Hence, though he had not yet abandoned verse
altogether, and was to leave us a few lyrics, original or translated,
which one would not willingly let die, it had been to prose
performances that he looked forward when, on bidding farewell to
Kirkcaldy, he included “writing for the booksellers” among the
employments he hoped to obtain in Edinburgh. Scientific subjects
had seemed the most promising: and among the books before him in
“those dreary evenings in Bristo Street” in 1819 were materials for a
projected life of the young astronomer Horrox. Irving’s letter of
December 1819 was the probable cause of that attempt upon the
Edinburgh Review, in the shape of an article on M. Pictet’s Theory of
Gravitation, of which we hear in the Reminiscences. The manuscript,
carefully dictated to a young Annandale disciple who wrote a very
legible hand, was left by Carlyle himself, with a note, at the great
Jeffrey’s house in George Street; but, whether because the subject
was not of the popular kind which Irving had recommended, or
because editors are apt to toss aside all such chance offers, nothing
more was heard of it.
 This was in the cold winter of 1819–20; and, to all appearance,
Carlyle might have languished without literary employment of any
kind for a good while longer, had he not been found out by Dr. David
Brewster, afterwards Sir David. The Edinburgh Encyclopædia,
which Brewster had begun to edit in 1810, when he was in his
twenty-ninth year, and which had been intended to be in twelve
volumes, thick quarto, double-columns, had now, in 1820, reached
its fourteenth volume, and had not got farther than the letter M.
Among the contributors had been, or were, these: Babbage,
Berzelius, Biot, Campbell the poet, the second Herschel, Dionysius
Lardner, Lockhart, Oersted, Peacock of Cambridge, Telford, and
other celebrities at a distance; besides such lights nearer at hand as
Brewster himself, Graham Dalzell, the Rev. Dr. David Dickson, Sir
Thomas Dick Lauder, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell, Professor
Dunbar, the Rev. Dr. John Fleming, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gordon,
David Irving, Professor Jameson, the Rev. Dr. John Lee, Professor
Leslie, and the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thomson. This was very good
company in which to make a literary début, were it only in such
articles of hackwork as might be intrusted conveniently to an
unknown young man on the spot. The articles intrusted to Carlyle
were not wholly of this kind; for I observe that he came in just as the
poet Campbell had ceased to contribute, and for articles continuing
the line of some of Campbell’s. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore,
were his first six, all under the letter M, and all supplied in 1820,
with the subscribed initials “T.C.”; and between that year and 1823
he was to contribute ten more, running through the letter N, and
ending in the sixteenth volume, under the letter P, with Mungo Park,
William Pitt the Elder, and William Pitt the Younger. It was no bad
practice in short, compact articles of information, and may have
brought him in between £35 and £50 altogether,—in addition to
something more for casual bits of translation done for Brewster.
More agreeable to himself, and better paid in proportion, may have
been two articles which he contributed to the New Edinburgh
Review, a quarterly which was started in July 1821, by Waugh and
Innes of Edinburgh, as a successor to the previous Edinburgh
Monthly Review, and which came to an end, as might have been
predicted from its title, in its eighth number in April 1823. In the
second number of this periodical, in October 1821, appeared an
article of 21 pages by Carlyle on Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends,
to be followed in the fourth number, in April 1822, by one of 18 pages
on Goethe’s Faust.
Even with these beginnings of literary occupation, there was no
improvement, as far as to 1822 at least, in Carlyle’s spirits. “Life was
all dreary, ‘eerie,’” he says, “tinted with the hues of imprisonment
and impossibility.” The chief bursts of sunshine, and his nearest
approaches to temporary happiness, were in the occasional society of
Irving, whether in visits to Irving in Glasgow, or in the autumn
meetings and strolls with Irving in their common Annandale, or in
Irving’s visits now and then to Edinburgh. It was in one of the
westward excursions, when the two friends were on Drumclog Moss,
and were talking together in the open air on that battle-field of the
Covenanters, that the good Irving wound from Carlyle the confession
that he no longer thought as Irving did of the Christian Religion. This
was in 1820.
More memorable still was that return visit of Irving to
Edinburgh, in June 1821, when he took Carlyle with him to
Haddington, and introduced him, at the house of the widowed Mrs.
Welsh, to that lady’s only child, Jane Baillie Welsh. Irving’s former
pupil, and thought of by him as not impossibly to be his wife even
yet, though his Kirkcaldy engagement interfered, she was not quite
twenty years of age, but the most remarkable girl in all that
neighbourhood. Of fragile and graceful form, features pretty rather
than regular, with a complexion of creamy pale, black hair over a
finely arched forehead, and very soft and brilliant black eyes, she had
an intellect fit, whether for natural faculty or culture, to be the
feminine match of either of the two men that now stood before her.
——Thirty years afterwards, and when she had been the wife of
Carlyle for four-and-twenty years, I had an account of her as she
appeared in those days of her girlhood. It was from her old nurse, the
now famous “Betty”; to whom, on the occasion of a call of mine at
Chelsea as I was about to leave London for a short visit to Edinburgh,
she asked me to convey a small parcel containing some present. The
address given me was in one of the little streets in the Old Town, on
the dense slope down from the University to the back of the
Canongate; and, on my call there to deliver the parcel, I found the old
Haddington nurse in the person of a pleasant-mannered woman, not
quite so old as I had expected, keeping a small shop. Naturally, she
talked of her recollections of Mrs. Carlyle before her marriage; and
these, as near as possible, were her very words:—“Ah! when she was
young, she was a fleein’, dancin’, licht-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh,
that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a’ at ance. There
was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher: and he cam
aboot her. Then there was Maister——[I forget who this was]. Then
there was Maister Carlyle himsel’; and he cam to finish her off, like.
I’m told he’s a great man noo, and unco’ muckle respeckit in
London.”——That was certainly a memorable day in 1821 when there
stood before the graceful and spirited girl in Haddington not only the
gigantic, handsome, black-haired Irving, whom she had known since
her childhood, but also the friend he had brought with him,—less tall
than Irving, of leaner and less handsome frame, but with head of the
most powerful shape, thick dark-brown hair several shades lighter
than her own, and an intenser genius than Irving’s visible in his deep
eyes, cliff-like brow, and sad face of a bilious ruddy. It was just about
this time that Irving used to rattle up his friend from his desponding
depths by the prophecy of the coming time when they would shake
hands across a brook as respectively first in British Divinity and in
British Literature, and when people, after saying “Both these fellows
are from Annandale,” would add “Where is Annandale?” The girl,
looking at the two, may have already been thinking of Irving’s jocular
prophecy.
A most interesting coincidence in time with the first visit to
Haddington would be established by the dating given by Mr. Froude
to a memorandum of Carlyle’s own respecting a passage in the
Sartor Resartus.
In that book, it may be remembered, Teufelsdröckh, after he has
deserted the popular faith, passes through three stages before he
attains to complete spiritual rest and manhood. For a while he is in
the state of mind called “The Everlasting No”; out of this he moves
on to a middle point, called “The Centre of Indifference”; and finally
he reaches “The Everlasting Yes.” The particular passage in question
is that in which, having long been in the stage of “The Everlasting
No,” the prey of the most miserable and pusillanimous fears, utterly
helpless and abject, there came upon him, all of a sudden, one sultry
day, as he was toiling along the wretched little street in Paris called
Rue Saint Thomas de l’Enfer, a kind of miraculous rousing and
illumination:—
“All at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself: ‘What art thou
afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go
cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that
lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that
the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst
thou not suffer whatso it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample
Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet
it and defy it!’ And, as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my
whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown
strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was
changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it; but Indignation and grim fire-eyed
Defiance. Thus had the Everlasting No (das Ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively
through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me
stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest.
Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation
and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No
had said, ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the
Devil’s)’; to which my whole Me made answer: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and for
ever hate thee!’ It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or
Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.”
In the memorandum of Carlyle’s which Mr. Froude quotes, he
declares that, while most of Sartor Resartus is mere symbolical
myth, this account of the sudden spiritual awakening of the
imaginary Teufelsdröckh in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris is
a record of what happened literally to himself one day in Leith Walk,
Edinburgh. He remembered the incident well, he says in the
memorandum, and the very spot in Leith Walk where it occurred.
The memorandum itself does not date the incident; but Mr. Froude,
from authority in his possession, dates it in June 1821. As that was
the month of the first visit to Haddington, and first sight of Jane
Welsh, the coincidence is striking. But, whatever was the amount of
change in Carlyle’s mind thus associated with his recollection of the
Leith Walk incident of June 1821, it seems an exaggeration to say, as
Mr. Froude does, that this was the date of Carlyle’s complete
“conversion,” or spiritual “new birth,” in the sense that he then
“achieved finally the convictions, positive and negative, by which the
whole of his later life was governed.” In the first place, we have
Carlyle’s own most distinct assurance in his Reminiscences that his
complete spiritual conversion, or new-birth, in the sense of finding
that he had conquered all his “scepticisms, agonising doubtings,
fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-
gods,” and was emerging from a worse than Tartarus into “the
eternal blue of Ether,” was not accomplished till about four years
after the present date: viz. during the year which he spent at Hoddam
Hill between 26th May 1825 and 26th May 1826. In the second place,
it would be a mistake to suppose that the spiritual change which
Carlyle intended to describe, whether in his own case or in
Teufelsdröckh’s, by the transition from the “Everlasting No,” through
the “Centre of Indifference,” to the “Everlasting Yes,” was a change of
intellectual theory in relation to any system of theological doctrine.
The parting from the old theology, in the real case as well as in the
imaginary one, had been complete; and, though there had been a
continued prosecution of the question as to the possibility of a
Natural Religion, the form in which that question had been
prosecuted had not been so much the theoretical one between
Atheism or Materialism on the one hand and Theism or Spiritual
Supernaturalism on the other, as the moral or practical one of
personal duty on either assumption. That the “theory of the
universe” which Carlyle had adopted on parting with the old faith
was the spiritualistic one, whether a pure Theism or an imaginative
hypothesis of a struggle between the Divine and the Diabolic, can
hardly be doubted. No constitution such as his could have adopted
the other theory, or rested in it long. But, let the Theistic theory have
been adopted however passionately and held however tenaciously,
what a tumult of mind, what a host of despairs and questionings,
before its high abstractions could be brought down into a rule for
personal behaviour, and wrapt with any certainty or comfort round
one’s moving, living, and suffering self! How was that vast
Inconceivable related to this little life and its world; or was there no
relation at all but that of merciless and irresistible power? What of
the origin and purpose of all things visible, and of man amid them?
What of death and the future? It is of this course of mental groping
and questioning, inevitable even after the strongest general
assumption of the Theistic theory, that Carlyle seems to have taken
account in his description of a progress from the “Everlasting No” to
the “Everlasting Yes”; and what is most remarkable in his description
is that he makes every advance, every step gained, to depend not so
much on an access of intellectual light as on a sudden stirring at the