AN UNSPECIFIC ACHE

The Ardnamurchan peninsula, in the western highlands of Scotland, is beautiful but bleak; remote, austere, easily romanticised by those who briefly visit it. The poet Alasdair Maclean, born and raised in a croft at its extremity, describes autumn on the Ardnamurchan: ‘Everything seems drenched in a gentle melancholy, that unspecific ache that is the heritage of man.’

The Chandogya Upanishad speaks of ‘the real city of Brahman’, wherein ‘all desires are contained’, as the place where we are ‘free from sin, free from old age, free from death, free from sorrow, free from hunger, free from thirst’.

Is the ache for ever unspecific, or might its pain be stilled, its yearning satisfied? Does the journey beyond thirst lie by way of its suppression or of its assuagement? Is that ‘peace’ to which both Hindu and Christian literature make frequent reference to be understood as the fulfilment of desire or as the consequence of its suppression? These are among the questions on which I propose to offer some reflections.

In Chapter One, I told the story of that episode in the history of religion which is now ending with the superseding of the culture of ‘enlightenment’ of which it formed a part; an episode whose assumptions set the framework and agenda for nineteenth-century exchanges between the cultures of India and European (especially British) culture.