'To the Indians Who Died in South Africa\r'

'T S Eliot’s verse ‘To the Indians who Died in Africa’ is an interesting Eliot piece. It is non a great deal you read a poem by Eliot which refrains from striking the grand pose. He tended to chide the giant issues of hu globe soul all(prenominal) time he penned a poem, besides of course, when he wrote those cat poems. But this is a puzzlingly small-aimed poem. A bit advise not grand wisdom, I guess. That this poem in imbued in the war and empire aureole is obvious. What he has to say to the Indians is funnily passive, â€Å"Look, it is ok if you die absurdly in a inappropriate country’.It is noteworthy how Eliot deploys elaborateness to persuade the reader that it is indeed authorized that there was a commonality utilisation among the Indian and the side of meat soldiers. It appears to me that in the eldest two stanzas the speaker   evokes the image of the ‘ public scene’ so that we see how various it is for 1 to die in a foreign country. Then of course he goes on to assert that this need no more be seen as erratic or as tragic. He seems to arouse that the place where a piece of music meets his portion is his destination. He associates destiny with the inevitable pass completion of one’s life as well as one’s efforts.He suggests that the divide between crustal plate and deportation is illusory; that the opposition between ‘our’ and ‘your’ is not real. all country will run done such places where ‘foreigners’ argon buried (whether it is the English midlands or some village in Punjab †‘Five Rivers’). He emphasises that the common social function really erases the differences that notions of ‘home’ and ‘exile’ entertain; the divide that notions of national difference highlight. The devastation of an Indian soldier in Africa trash Germany and defending England may appear absurd.But the speake r points out that the Indian and the English soldiers are united in a common purpose. As for greater meaning in such lives and deaths, he says it is to be seen solely after ‘final judgment’. To the Indians Who Died in Africa * T. S. Eliot A man’s destination is his avow village, His own fire, and his wife’s cooking; To sit in mien of his own door at old And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson performing in the dust together. Scarred entirely secure, he has many memories Which return at the hour of conversation, (The warm or the self-possessed hour, according to the climate)Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places, Foreign to each other. A man’s 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. permit his village remember. This was not your land, or ours: that a village in the Midlands, And one in the Five Rivers, may demand the same graveyard. Let those who go home tell the same story of you: Of doing with a common purpose, action no(prenominal) the less fruitful if neither you nor we Know, until the feeling after death, What is the fruit of action.Eliot, T. S. â€Å"To the Indians Who Died in Africa. ” placid Poems 1909-1962 This is what Narayan Chandran has to say about this poem: It is intrigue that T. S. Eliot has repeatedly drawn upon Indic sources, especially the Bhagavad-Gita and its philosophical system of disinterested action, while piece of writing on war and world affairs through the 1940s. Eliot’s Occasional Verses, particularly â€Å"To the Indians who Died in Africa,” betray the poet’s imperialist biases, distant much of his poetry, in which they do not seem to surface visibly as in his prose writings and conversations.Couched in the spoken communication and imagery of the Gita, Eliot seems to tell the Indians that their action is its own rewa rd; the irony hardens as we guess historical facts and situations that drove hapless Indians to moderate the Allied war effort in many theaters outside India. The essay also looks at two other British writers on Indian themes, Kipling and Forster, whose texts seem to impression an interesting sidelight on â€Å"action,” whose jest resonance Eliot seems to relish in writing his war poems. Eliot, evidently, had little use for the ism he quoted back to the distressed Indians.\r\n'