Does Borrowing Dilute a Self or Complete It?

We Become

Ourselves by What We Choose to Borrow The fear. There is a familiar fear about cultural borrowing: that a people who take too much from others will lose themselves. The opposite possibility is rarely considered. Perhaps some selves can only be completed by borrowing, as long as the borrower transforms what is borrowed rather than merely copying it.

Two stories, from two very different domains, suggest the second view is closer to the truth.

A saxophone that found India without going there The borrowing. John Coltrane, born in North Carolina in 1926, came of age in an America of segregated clubs and Jim Crow laws.

He never visited India. But through records of Pandit Ravi Shankar and lessons with him, Indian music reached him. So did the philosophy behind it. In 1961 he recorded a piece called "India" at New York's Village Vanguard and he later named his son Ravi. The transformation. Critics called the music "anti-jazz." It was, in fact, jazz becoming something new.

Coltrane did not imitate a raga. He took its long, meditative development and bent it to his own questions: faith, suffering and the search for meaning after addiction nearly destroyed his career. His album A Love Supreme was a jazz record and a spiritual testament at once.

When four Black girls were killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, his piece "Alabama" followed the cadence of Martin Luther King Jr.'s eulogy. Nothing in Coltrane's music sounds like anyone but Coltrane.

An idea that travelled around the world and came back changed Gandhi's borrowing. The second story is not about art but about politics.

As a young law student in London, Mohandas Gandhi first read the Bhagavad Gita in an English translation by Edwin Arnold. He met his own tradition through a foreign hand. He was deeply moved by Leo Tolstoy's writings and named his South African settlement Tolstoy Farm.

He admired Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience. Gandhi's transformation. Yet Gandhi insisted that satyagraha was his own idea, not Thoreau's. He was right: he fused these influences with Indian ethics into a method of mass political action that none of his sources had imagined. The idea travels on. Two decades later, Martin Luther King Jr. carried that method into the Montgomery bus boycott and in 1959 he travelled to India as, in his own description, a pilgrim.

An Indian idea, partly built from American and Russian sources, became an American movement.

What the

two stories show together The two stories meet. The domains are different: music is felt, politics is argued. But they meet at one point. The same King whose non-violence came from Gandhi supplied the rhythm of Coltrane's "Alabama." India's gifts reached the Civil Rights era through two doors at once. The lesson. In both cases, borrowing did not erase identity.

Coltrane remained unmistakably American and Black; Gandhi remained unmistakably Indian. What made the difference was that each borrowed to answer his own question - spiritual rescue in one case, national freedom in the other.

Imitation borrows answers; transformation borrows tools.