The Loyal Cultural Opposition

RICHER BY ASIA (432 pp.)--Edmond Taylor--Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

The first, and classic, account of German "psychological warfare" was Edmond Taylor's The Strategy of Terror (1940). In 1943, Taylor got a wartime job well suited to his gifts, as OSS coordinator with Lord Louis Mountbatten's Southeast Asia Command. Richer by Asia tells how 28 months in Asia changed him.

From his first morning's awakening in New Delhi to breathe "an air that was like some noble nourishment, distilled to rarity," Taylor determined to cultivate his awareness of India. He diagnosed the "sahib sickness" of British colonials and U.S. officers alike as "spiritual avitaminosis" (vitamin deficiency), caused by a refusal to be open-minded toward India's beauties. Taylor felt that it would be fruitful for him--hence for Britain and the U.S.--to look on Indian life as a "loyal cultural opposition" in ordering the world of the future.

This position, much like that of Yale's Professor F. S. C. Northrop in The Meeting of East and West (TIME, Aug. 12, 1946), soon led him to conclude, among other things, that the "most disgraceful colonial problem in the world" is that of Negro-white relations in the U.S. Indian politics, always a great puzzle to Occidentals, seemed to him likewise a puzzle to Indians, because their political terminology was a misfit hand-me-down from the British. The paranoid touchiness in all the Indian factions, but especially in Pakistan's Moslems, he likened to what he called group or "institutional delusions" throughout the world, to be corrected only by "a discipline whereby the normal man can train himself to be something healthier than a normal man, to become an athlete of reality."

A U.S. athlete of reality would know, according to Edmond Taylor, that journalists, political scientists and diplomats have built up a mythical picture of the political world: 1) by talking about issues instead of human beings, 2) by looking at the world from the distorting point of view of U.S. interests, 3) by creating a belief in "the certitude of certainty."

Taylor's incidental anecdotes, sketches of military and political leaders, descriptions of Indian scenes and atmospheres give a concrete context to his meditations--which tend to run on at times. His book is loosely stitched together, but it has a generous, large and lucid air, living up to its title.

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