To the Indians Who Died in South Africa

T S Eliots metrical composition To the Indians who Died in Africa is an interesting Eliot piece. It is non often you read a poesy by Eliot which refrains from striking the grand pose. He tended to invoke the giant issues of hu homo beings soul every time he penned a poem, except of course, when he wrote those cat poems. But this is a puzzlingly small-aimed poem. A bit advise non grand wisdom, I guess. That this poem in imbued in the war and conglomerate atmosphere is obvious. What he has to say to the Indians is funnily passive, Look, it is ok if you dampen absurdly in a foreign country.It is noteworthy how Eliot deploys rhetoric to bend the reader that it is indeed true that there was a common dissolve among the Indian and the position soldiers. It appears to me that in the first two stanzas the speaker evokes the depiction of the normal scene so that we see how different it is for one to die in a foreign country. Then of course he goes on to assert that this need no more be seen as unique or as tragic. He bes to suggest that the place where a man meets his destiny is his terminus. He associates destiny with the inevitable culmination of ones life as well as ones efforts.He suggests that the sort between foundation and exile is illusory that the opposition between our and your is not real. Every country will have such places where foreigners are interred (whether it is the English midlands or some village in Punjab Five Rivers). He emphasises that the common purpose really erases the differences that notions of home and exile foster the severalize that notions of national difference highlight. The death of an Indian soldier in Africa fighting Germany and defending England whitethorn appear absurd.But the speaker points out that the Indian and the English soldiers are united in a common purpose. As for great meaning in such lives and deaths, he says it is to be seen only afterward final judgment. To the Indians Who Died in Africa * T. S. E liot A mans destination is his own village, His own fire, and his wifes cooking To sit in front of his own door at sunset And see his grandson, and his populates grandson Playing in the dust together. Scarred yet secure, he has many memories Which return at the hour of conversation, (The warm or the calm hour, according to the climate)Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places, Foreign to each other. A mans destination is not his destiny, Every country is home to one man And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely At one with his destiny, that soil is his. Let his village remember. This was not your land, or ours but a village in the Midlands, And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard. Let those who go home tell the same story of you Of action with a common purpose, action None the slight fruitful if neither you nor we Know, until the judgement after death, What is the fruit of action.Eliot, T. S. To the Indians Who Died in Africa. collect Poems 1909-1962 T his is what Narayan Chandran has to say about this poem It is intriguing that T. S. Eliot has repeatedly drawn upon Indic sources, especially the Bhagavad-Gita and its philosophy of disinterested action, while writing on war and sphere affairs through the 1940s. Eliots Occasional Verses, particularly To the Indians who Died in Africa, stool the poets imperialist biases, unlike much of his poetry, in which they do not seem to surface visibly as in his prose writings and conversations.Couched in the language and imagery of the Gita, Eliot seems to tell the Indians that their action is its own reward the raillery hardens as we recall historical facts and situations that drove hapless Indians to support the ally war effort in many theaters outside India. The essay excessively looks at two other British writers on Indian themes, Kipling and Forster, whose texts seem to cast an interesting sidelight on action, whose punning resonance Eliot seems to zest in writing his war poems. Eli ot, evidently, had little use for the philosophy he quoted back to the distressed Indians.