Introduction
Walt Whitman’s 1871 Passage to India, celebrates the interlinked themes of scientific and technological advances and spiritual transformation. Whitman was greatly impressed by three great engineering achievements: the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), the laying of the transatlantic undersea cable (1866), and the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads at Utah to produce the nation’s first transcontinental railway (1869).
These events resulted in improved communication and travel, thus creating a shorter passage to India. But in Whitman’s poem, the completion of the physical journey to India is only a prelude to the spiritual pathway to India, the East, and, ultimately, to God. These advances open his imagination to the hope of “the earth… [being] spann’d, connected by a network,/ The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,/… The lands to be welded together” (343). He employs India as a symbol of the most ancient wisdom and knowledge on earth and thus, the poem also refers to the exploration of knowledge and truth in a spiritual, transcending sense.
Major Engineering Achievements
The poem was inspired, however, by two major engineering achievements: the opening of the Suez Canal and the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad. Walt Whitman mentions these two improvements that have made India and the Orient more accessible to the western countries of Europe and America.
“I see, in one, the Suez canal initiated, open’d,
I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Eugenie’s leading the van;” (44-45)
“I see over my continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier;
I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte, carrying freight and passengers;” (50-51)
The title “Passage to India” can have three different meanings – physical, intellectual, and spiritual. In the first place, it celebrates the physical interconnection and linking of the nations of the earth.
The poet assumes that life began somewhere in Asia, possibly in India itself and he supposes that man spread eastward and westward until the two movements came together in America and so completed the circle of the earth. Thus Walt Whitman visualizes America as the greatest nation in the world – formed by the long process of political and economic evolution.
“Lands found and nations born, thou born America,
For purpose vast, man’s long probation fill’d,
Thou rondure of the world at last accomplish’d”.
From this physical union of East and West Whitman deduces that there should be an intellectual union leading to the fulfillment of the vast purpose which he assigns to America: “For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?” Then, metaphorically, Whitman says that the marvels of modern science should also include the mind of the East, and return to where all life began.
“To reason’s early paradise,
Back, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent intuitions,
Again with fair creation”.
Eternal Questions
Whitman feels that India has food for the soul of man, and it too must return “to the realms of budding bibles,” to the “teeming spiritual darkness” to get the search of an answer to its eternal questions: “Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and Whither O mocking life?” After the world shall have been thus unified, Whitman says that the true ‘son of God’ shall come. the true poet shall arrive, “the true son of God shall come singing his songs.” Then indeed,
“All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d, the secret shall be told,
The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be completely justified,
……….
Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,
The true son of God shall fuse them”.
In the lines “Ah Genoese thy dream! thy dream! / Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave, / The shore thou fondest verifies thy dream”, the word ‘Genoese’ refers to Christopher Columbus. He was a voyager who discovered America during his quest to go to India. Now Whitman through these lines addresses Christopher Columbus and tells him that the quest to reach India is still very much alive in America.
I think Walt Whitman made Christopher Colombus a central symbolic figure in the poem mainly because he was a voyager who undertook a dangerous journey in his quest for Indian shores. In this poem, man’s quest for a route or passage to India across the oceans symbolizes the soul’s longing for truth and God. Christopher Columbus symbolizes the man’s quest in itself. For the soul, then, this voyage is a passage to more than India— it is a passage to God.
“Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas!
Passage to you, to the mastership of you, ye strangling problems!
You strew’d with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach’d you.
And as the body and mind return for completion to the place of their origin, to India and the East, so the soul must return for completion to the place of its origin in God”.
The Central Idea
Passage to India has this central idea: if new technologies can connect East and West, it is also possible that they can connect more than East and West. These technological advances facilitate or could facilitate, passages not just to India, but connections between self and world. The Passage to more than India could be that most desirable and elusive thing – a Passage to you (Whitman, 294). It is a challenging spiritual journey.
Whitman asks the soul if it is ready: “Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?” The passage to the divine shores, to the “aged fierce enigmas,” and to the “strangling problems” is filled with difficulty and “skeletons, that, living, never reach’d you”. However, the poet is driven to seek an immediate passage because “the blood burns in my veins.” Thus ‘the passage to India—and more’, refers to the journey of man towards his inner quest for God which is driven by intense spiritual passion.
Conclusion
The poem is a meditation not on the passage itself, but on the means which made the passage possible – the new technologies. In the digitalized world of today, the media that brings the world together, connecting people from all parts of the world would be the internet and wireless networks. They are the current world-shrinking or world-connecting “wonders” of today.
Reference
Whitman, Walt. Passage to India.