In ‘The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna’ there comes an episode in early 1880s, when Sri Ramakrishna asked his young disciple Rakhal (who he considered his spiritual son, and who later became Swami Brahmananda and served as the first President of the Ramakrishna Mission) who was engrossed in a book, as to what he was reading. The chronicler of the Gospel, Master Mahashay – Mahendranath Gupta who was then the Headmaster of Metropolitan Institution, a school founded by Ishwarchandra Bandyopadhyay (the redoubtable Vidyasagar) – answered on the boy’s behalf. The book was ‘Self-Help’, authored by the Scottish-born Samuel Smiles. Today, few people, other than perhaps those who have read modern British history or Victorian English literature would know of Samuel Smiles and his famed text ‘Self-Help’. But there was a time when it was regarded as ‘the Bible of the Victorian Age’ and its author enjoyed almost a prophet-like reputation.
The book and Smiles’s subsequent works like Character, Thrift, and Duty, inspired more than a single generation and had its great admirers spread throughout the world. Bernard Shaw (one clearly not disposed to offer praise easily) compared Smiles to the great Greek historian, moralist and essayist, Plutarch – the author of ‘Parallel Lives’ and ‘Moralia’. Sakichi Toyoda (who laid the foundation of the Japanese firm Toyota) considered Smiles’s works a key influence in his life.
Reading Smiles’s ‘Self-Help’ inspired an orphan boy in America who himself became a rags to riches case and an exemplar of what James Truslow Adams would later call the ‘American Dream’. This boy, Orison Swett Mardon, had his education amidst struggles that would have overpowered a lesser man, continued to advance and finally got a medical degree from Harvard. He later become a hotelier, owning several hotels across the United States. At 44, he gave up active business and took to writing fulltime, and stormed the American publishing scene with his work ‘Pushing the Front’ (1894) and continued to produce with singular prolificity about 50 titles in subsequent decades. In many ways he became the reference point for the self-help publications worldwide that we see till today. His admirers included men of high and diverse accomplishments as Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, William Gladstone, Henry Ford, and J.P. Morgan.
Samuel Smiles’s main emphasis is quite simple, in fact deceptively so. It says that through self-enterprise, self-improvement, self-application towards one’s pursuits and ‘good habits’ like thrift even the working classes could raise themselves up the social ladder. A middle-class Indian can easily relate to these ideas as that has been the dominant moral paradigm that one imbibes from early years – from family and school through moral science or value education primers. In the Christian world these ideas were the part of the Sunday School discourse. In fact these ideas feel so simple and mere commonsense just because they have captured the minds of people in last two centuries and they seem nothing new. But before the industrial revolution and discovery of new lands, the idea of upward social mobility was hardly in discourse and its instances exceedingly difficult to find. One is tempted to say that these ideas and values have become what the great Italian Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci would have later called ‘commonsense values’ – a part of the larger cultural hegemony of the ruling elite.
But one should not yield to cynicism. Without doubt, these virtues which Smiles propagated, have thrown up great characters – would we have got a Dr. Ambedkar or Dr. Kalam without this ethic, who raised themselves up from almost nothing to towering heights? But the Smilesian construct surely warrants a deeper look.
Samuel Smiles himself had failed in many a professions and later took to writing – to my mind his case too indicates that it is not merely the work ethic that is a sure determiner of success (in whatever way one views success) but depends on several factors. Among Smiles’s premises was that an enterprising person is favoured by a benevolent natural order, which perhaps true in a limited sense, falls apart when weighed against the tremendous social disadvantages that a person from underclass has to grapple with.
Critics have also pointed out an inherent contradiction between the means and ends of the Smilesian prescription. While Smiles hailed values like hard work, thrift, and similar ideas that are often expedient to the middle and working classes, the aim in view was to become raise oneself to the life of a gentleman – of which leisure and luxury were characteristic ingredients. Clearly, a Smilesian disciple would go through all the rigour and cherish values only to throw them in the end. Expensive vacationing, hunting, riding, fencing, socialising through parties / balls, subscribing to memberships of elite clubs were all that typified the life of the gentry in those times and one can see not much has changed since then though idleness of landed aristocracy is no longer in vogue as that class itself has become more or less passe and its successors now participants in the capitalist economy. So were the values Smiles taught only a stepping stone and not of any permanent use? Should they then be called a moral value, is a question that has always remained.
The mid-nineteenth century in Britain as well as America came up with several such works that embodied and celebrated the theme of the ‘self-made man’. ‘John Halifax Gentleman’ by Dinah Craice published in 1856 (three years before ‘Self-Help’) was a famous work set in such a mould. In America, a number of works of Horatio Alger, starting with Rugged Duck (1868), too belonged to the same category. The greatest Victorian era novelist, Charles Dickens, too, in his early to middle works like David Copperfield, wove this theme into his narrative, leading many to say that Dickensian novels were in reality fairy-tales; plots which were possible only in one out of thousand cases. Dickens took a more problematic view of this theme in his later work ‘Great Expectations’ (1861) which was a critique of the gentlemanly world, and showed how respectability is often shallow and a carefully worn veneer.
While the merit in Smiles’s simple ideas is undeniable, and can definitely serve as inspiration to individuals, the problem is that when taken as a social maxim they slip to a simplistic level when one considers the weight of the disadvantages that working and ultra poor classes have to combat. Even more dangerously they are often used to trivialise and counter the notion of disadvantage that working and ultra poor classes in India, and perhaps all over the world face throughout their lives. The likes of Ambedkar and Kalam are exceptions. Every year when results of IIT Entrance examinations are announced they are invariably followed by a story or two of a subjiwallah’s son making it to IIT. Such posts become viral and stuff of inspiration. Inspirational they certainly are – but their newsworthiness itself demonstrates that they are outliers – do we read story of a child of a successful businessman or a senior academic or civil servant getting selected in IIT? These stories are exceptions, cases of struggles against all odds by persons of extraordinary enterprise and tenacity, and a stark reminder of how uneven the playing field is, how the odds are stacked up heavily against the weaker social classes, and of almost insurmountable structural barriers in the society to upward social mobility. Why should a person from disadvantaged class need to be ‘extraordinary’ in order to negate the disadvantage that his birth and family have placed him in, while even a much less ‘extraordinary’ person from a privileged class achieves the same outcomes with comparatively lesser rigour, if not outright ease. This brings us back to the complicated idea of judging merit in an utterly uneven playfield.
My view is that when taken in positive, Smilesian idea and such exceptional cases of sucess can doubtless serve as inspiration, but when seen from a negative perspective – like poor people are often lazy, lack thrift (say, carelessly spending on alcohol etc), lack sense of enterpise, and thus deservedly remain at that level, is a positively dangerous and diabolical idea, one that reeks of class conceit and arrogance. Having interacted with the Indian middle and upper classes over the decades, I have found such notions often deeply established in their psyche and such interactions have left me indignant and livid.
Vinayak Lohani
5th October, 2025.