Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified
his enquiries into Indian conditions. They too turned for the most
part on his facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt
desire for human brotherhood. At last indeed came an affair that
refused ultimately to remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil
that invoked newspaper articles and heated controversies.
The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
attraction and irritation. He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India
into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to
the other. "I came to see India," he wrote, "and there is no India.
There is a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin
in the air, quietly scorning everybody else."
His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste
began with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had
turned an Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and
culminated in a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness
at Benares, who had thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner
because Benham's shadow had fallen upon it.
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