THREE BENGALIS AND THE PAPERS
All know the crowded Kalighat on the muddy little branch of the
Ganges south of Calcutta. The little temple of the mother Kali stands
close by, where Hindus keep up an animal sacrifice something similar
to the classic and ancient Jewish rites. Many Europeans enjoy seeing
the heads of the wretched little goats sliced off by a priest’s sword
while the animals are still dripping from a plunge in the sacred
tanks. Many, like myself, have gone with the crowding pilgrims on
festival Sundays or weekday evenings and watched the people bathing
in the turbid water, and the Brahmans seated in the open portico
reading aloud the wanderings of Rama and breaking into song at the
impassioned parts. Or we have stood at the narrow entrance till the
door of the inmost shrine should open, allowing a glimpse of the
goddess herself, the Bengal Mother, symbolic of the strange Force in
nature, always moving irresistibly on its way with life and death,
blessing and damnation in its hands. Blue-black she is, with three
staring, scarlet eyes, one of them in her forehead. In her four
arms she holds the signs of happiness and of destruction. One foot
is planted on the body of a man, and from her mouth a golden tongue
protrudes. Her worshippers tell that in her career of destruction
through the universe, she was only stayed by the intervention of
her husband Shiva, who in the semblance of a dead man flung himself
before her feet to be trampled on. She is represented pausing in
horror at the discovery. To put out the tongue is the common gesture
of shame or horror among the Indian women, and if it seems a peculiar
expression of those emotions, watch an English country servant
whenever she drops a trayful of your best china on a stony floor, and
she will almost invariably do the same.
[Illustration: THE KALIGHAT.]
[Illustration: PILGRIMS TO KALI.
[_Face p. 206._
]
How far this hideous collection of symbols is itself worshipped is
the problem of all imagery and symbolic art. A priest of Kali, who
had himself received a religious education in one of our missionary
colleges, told me that in the hour of prayer he found that the image
helped him to concentrate his thoughts upon that idea of universal
force. He admitted that some unlearned worshippers obscurely
connect a supernatural power with the actual image as it stands;
and the great desire of many to draw near, and even to touch the
representation of the god, seems to prove it, as one may see in all
temples and churches where symbolism prevails. It is rather strange
that Indians, with their beautiful sense of colour and design,
should content themselves with unusually hideous gods; for, grand
as the figure of Buddha in contemplation is, it stands alone in its
beauty, and now no longer appears in Hindu forms of worship. Yet the
adoration of the Mother Kali, even at the bloodstained Kalighat,
does not appear to be more horrible or debasing than the service of
other gods. In divine worship, devotion has never corresponded to
external beauty; and as to the blood sacrifice, that custom has been
too universal, and is still too recent even in the highest forms of
religion, to excite horror or disgust, except in the tourists who go
to enjoy the spectacle. It seemed to me that the Kali worship did not
suggest the violence of bloodshed, still less the common lust that
visitors are told to associate with it, but rather a certain heat
or fervency that pervades and sometimes obscures the Bengali mind,
taking the form in some of exaltation, in others of oratory, and now
and then of fluid speech.
All know this crowded Kalighat. But turn northward again; pass
the Lieutenant-Governor’s beautiful Residency at Belvedere;
pass the racecourse and polo-grounds, the old Fort where the
Commander-in-Chief has his headquarters, and the Strand where
steamers smoke on the river and the English drive slowly up and down
in the evening; pass the white Government House where the Viceroy
lives in winter, and the dull streets of English shops where they
sell things that are not quite good enough for England or quite bad
enough for the Colonies; enter the squalid chaos of the Indian city,
so ordinary and colourless compared to Bombay or Madras; pass through
mile after mile of crowded bazaars, and teeming slums, and factories
jumbled up with temples;—till at last the buildings begin, as it
were, to shake themselves loose, green reappears, and when you come
upon the river on your left, it looks almost clean and holy; palms
and other trees grow on the banks, and there is a sense of escape
in the air. There you will find another temple of Kali, spacious,
silent, and a home of peace.
Under a great banyan tree in this temple’s garden a religious teacher
sat for years, and gathered many disciples round him before his
death in 1886. He was known as Ramakrishna, but he had the names of
Deva and Paramahamsa as well, and there he sat expounding the things
of the spirit, like other Hindu teachers. But there seems to have
been an intensity of conviction about him that attracted unusual
disciples. Among them was a young Bengali named Norendra Nath Datta,
who took the more holy name of Vivekananda, and spread his master’s
teaching as far as Oxford and Chicago—cities so seldom associated
together in spiritual things. He too has gone from this world
now—he went in 1902, at the age of forty—but has left a school, a
kind of religion or Church, that proclaims a spiritual Hinduism to
all mankind without limitation of race or nation. Its proper name
is the Ramakrishna Society, but the members are generally called
Vedantists, because of their belief in the Vedas as the inspired
guides of man. They abjure images and sacrifice, except of flowers
and fruits, which I have seen them offer as symbols of thanksgiving
and praise to the spirituality of the universe in their bare but
sufficient little temple up a flight of steps. By their belief
in the Vedas they approach the Arya Samaj. But their more modern
advancement and universality bring them nearer the Brahmo Samaj,
or cultivated Unitarians of Hinduism, whose freedom of life and
social intercourse for men and women alike gives a peculiar charm to
Indian society in Calcutta. Small in number themselves, they stand
between these two main bodies of religious reformers—believers in the
Hindu scriptures, but preachers of a universal religion; free from
the caste restrictions of travel, marriage, and food, but strongly
national in their devotion to the country. Just across the river,
from that peaceful temple of Kali where their founder sat, they have
their little monastery for the training of about thirty Brothers, who
go out from their pleasant garden to teach all the world, and to save
their own Indian people in days of plague and famine.
It was in a small circle of these Vedantists that I first met Moti
Lal Ghose, one of the most peculiar figures of Calcutta life. He
is not a Vedantist himself, being a special worshipper of Vishnu.
Indeed, he follows the Bengali saint Chaitanya, or, as he prefers to
call him, the Lord GAURANGA, who proclaimed a purified and emotional
form of Hinduism about the time of Luther, and still has disciples,
especially among outcasts and downtrodden people, because he promised
the love of God to all without charity’s limitations to the thrifty
and deserving. But devoted Vaishnava as Moti Lal is, one would think
his guiding faith was a sort of clanship or family affection. They
say a hundred relations make their home in his rambling household
among the little streets of the Bagh Bazar, and that number would be
distracting enough for the most placid of mankind, which Moti Lal is
not. Almost every one seems to be Moti Lal’s relation, and as, like
many Hindus, he speaks of his cousins as brothers, and his nephews
as sons, the bonds of kinship seem as close as they are wide. But
the affection of his heart is reserved for his real born brother,
Shishir Kumar, who now has waved adieu to this carnal world and
lives in religious seclusion at Baidianath, a far-famed shrine of
Central Bengal, communing with spirits whose visitations among men he
chronicles in the _Hindu Spiritual Magazine_.
Both the brothers were brought up in the district of Jessore,
and they made their mother’s village famous by taking its name
of Amrita Bazar for the title of their paper, the _Amrita Bazar
Patrika_—_Amrita News_, as we should say. It so happens that the word
“Amrita” in Bengali means both “nectar” and “poison,” and no name
could have been invented to express the character of their paper more
exactly, for it can be sweet or venomous at pleasure, and is usually
both. Its quickness and satiric power have won it a unique place
among Indian newspapers. It has also a good service of news, and as
for enterprise, when Lord Lytton passed his Vernacular Press Act in
the ’seventies, while Sir Ashley Eden was Lieutenant-Governor of
Bengal, the _Amrita_ changed its language from the vernacular Bengali
to the alien English in its very next issue. Such a transformation
would have seemed impossible, if I had not seen the compositors in
Madras setting up my “copy” with hardly a mistake, though they did
not understand a word of English, and only guessed our letters by
sight.
Moti Lal is an oldish man now, as Bengalis go, but he stands thin
and erect, his mass of grey hair surmounting a face in which pathos,
humour, and subtlety are strongly mingled. It is difficult to class
him among the Indian parties. He often runs off on side issues, such
as his peculiar and personal indignation at the rational proposal
to separate the large and extraneous province of Behar from the
Calcutta government, so as to relieve the pressure of work which was
the nominal excuse for the Partition of Bengal. On most of the wider
questions of policy he would take a fairly steady “Congress” line,
with a tendency to the Left or Extremist position. But that tendency
may be suddenly interrupted by some queer cross-current, such as a
personal devotion to the Royal Family, because he was once introduced
to the Prince of Wales, and kissed his feet with a veneration that
might abash even Royalty’s sense of Divine Right. By means of his
paper he is undoubtedly a power among the party of nationality and
reform, but the general belief that in the past he has exercised a
certain influence even upon British officials is perhaps justified.
At all events, when he asked me to remind the Lieutenant-Governor
of a promise to restore the Road Cess to its proper purpose of
sanitation, I noticed that the petition was received in a friendly
spirit, and I was instructed to tell Moti Lal that the proposal had
not been forgotten, but was already embodied in a Bill.
Sanitation is one of those side issues which he follows with
peculiar zeal. Poverty and high prices, he says, are killing out
the educated classes in Bengal. But worse than the disappearance
of educated Bengalis, which many Anglo-Indians would regard as a
mercy of Providence, is the general ravage of malaria, plague, and
famine. The plague is still new, famine has been unusually frequent
and terrible in the last thirty years; but worse than either, in
his opinion, is the malaria which rots the country away. Like many
Indians he attributes the growth of the disease to the Government
railways, which have blocked or diverted the natural drainage of the
land. The theory sounds a little fantastic. To me it seems a far more
serious matter that the irrigation, which is often so lucrative, both
to the peasant and the Government, should be accompanied by increase
of fever. But whatever evil may arise in India, from a cesspool to
a famine, is put down to the Government, as always happens when the
people have no control over its powers and no experience of every
Government’s limitations. “There is no need to talk about driving the
English from India,” cried Moti Lal to me once: “In twenty years they
will be driven out by the stench of our rotting corpses!”
Humorous, sarcastic, vehement, probably a little peevish, a little
uncertain and unstable in his dealings with men and things, Moti
Lal moves as a strange and isolated figure in Indian life. He is
ageing and rather feeble now; when I asked him if he was going to the
Congress at Surat, he answered, “No, I cannot afford to die.” But
he went all the same. I suppose he might be called a Congress man,
but it seems unlikely that any one ever thought of him as a possible
President, or as anything else except the bitter-sweet editor of the
_Amrita Bazar Patrika_.
Very different is the editor of the other leading Indian daily in
Calcutta. Mr. Banerjea, whom every one calls Surendra Nath, is just
the ideal of a leader in Congress, and Poona made him President in
1895, Ahmedabad in 1902. He appears to be about sixty now, and in
the early ’seventies he was an assistant magistrate in the Indian
Civil Service, from which he was dismissed for a casual neglect of
duty that in the opinion of many English Civilians might have been
suitably punished with a sharp reprimand. Like most highly educated
people out of work, he took to teaching, lecturing, and journalism;
became Principal of Ripon College for the training of Hindu boys,
as he still is; was appointed editor of the _Bengalee_ by the
proprietors, who, I believe, are Indian physicians; and has for many
years maintained it in its position as the most prominent Indian
paper written in English.
From early days, when he was the first to originate tours of
political instruction, his influence has been very powerful, and no
one has opposed the partition of his country with greater vehemence
and persistency. In politics he has shown himself the fighting man
rather than the thinker, a better leader than guide. Such theory
as he has professed holds him to the Moderate and Constitutional
party, and till it comes to action he would cordially accept the
propositions of all reasonable and practical reformers. But his
instincts might carry him further than his creed, and in a moment of
crisis he would probably be found in the front almost out of sight of
his party. No matter how strongly reason and expediency disapproved,
he would be reluctant to hang back from any extreme position, or
to leave a devoted band of defenders there alone. That appeared to
mark him out as the best intermediary between the Extremists and
the Centre; for, while neither party would look to him for definite
political guidance, both might be supposed to know that he was at
heart their friend, and both could point to his past services in
the Bengal Legislative Council, the University Senate, and the old
Calcutta Corporation, before Lord Curzon destroyed it.
The same kind of divergence between reason and personality causes,
I believe, an uncertain attitude towards other affairs of life.
By education and habit he is Western in the things of society and
religion, and probably would have remained so without scruple of
conscience, but for the recent revolt against everything foreign.
Among the Extremists there is a kind of conservative reaction towards
Indian ways and Indian religion, prompted not so much by love of
those early marriages and Hindu gods as by the determination to
tolerate European things no more. Thus, you might find an Indian
graduate of Oxford worshipping Kali for the same reason as makes him
buy Swadeshi cotton, or pledging his infant daughter in marriage for
fear she should grow up like an English lady. From patriotism of this
sort Surendra Nath would not like to stand aloof, and, even if his
judgment hesitated, an impetuous nature would perhaps bear him on,
especially if he could thus assist his associates of the moment.
But his real function in life is as an orator, and his eminence has
been won by an extraordinary power of speaking. I do not know how
far his speeches in his own tongue might be effective, but he served
his political apprenticeship at a time when oratory was tested by
a knowledge of English, and I think he always speaks by choice in
our language. Certainly, his command over it is very remarkable.
Except for Mr. Gladstone, I have heard no speakers use the grand
and rhetorical style of English with more assurance and success. I
remember one afternoon there was a crowded meeting of many thousand
students and other young men in the great College Square at Calcutta.
There they stood, white-robed, bare-headed, as is the Bengali
custom, and when the “Bande Mataram” had been sung, Surendra Nath
rose. It was not a specially important speech. His object was only
to sketch out the general programme of the approaching Congress,
and to urge all parties to unite for the credit of their country,
which was being watched by jealous eyes ever ready to detect the
first appearance of a flaw. That was all his theme, but he expounded
it with a magnificence of phrase, and continuity of expression
that held me in wonder. Sentence answered to sentence, period to
period, thunder to thunder. There was no hesitation, no throwing
back, no wandering for ideas or words. Out the great language
rolled without a break and without a drop, each syllable in its
exact place and order, each sentence following some cadence of its
own, so inevitable that you could foretell the stress and rhythm of
its rise and fall far in advance of the actual words, just as you
can in Macaulay’s declamations. It was oratory such as, I suppose,
Cicero loved to practise, and Pitt, and Brougham—such oratory as
few living Englishmen dare venture on for fear of drowning in the
gulfs of bathos. But Surendra Nath loved it, as Cicero might. To him
it was evidently the sincerest pleasure of life to listen to the
beat of marching phrases, to advance from one to another with the
assurance that not one of them would fail, and to lead them out in
the martialled order of earth-shaking battalions moving shoulder to
shoulder on their front. It was to him the fulfilment of function,
and that way happiness lies. After him I spoke, and the meeting ended.
That evening I went to see a Bengali of still another type, but as
distinctive of the present crisis in the country as the satirist
or the orator. It had been arranged, as I supposed, that I should
meet some representatives of the young Nationalist party which form
the staff of _Bande Mataram_, a daily paper written in English
and maintaining Extremist views, but trying rather carefully to
keep within the law. In that respect it differed from the farthing
paper, _Sandhya_ (“Evening”), written in Bengali of the roughest
popular dialect, and deliberately going all lengths in virulence and
abuse. That had been the policy of its founder and editor, Pundit
Upadhya Brahmabandhab, who had died a few months before while under
trial for sedition. One of the Brahmo Samaj by training, he had
travelled much in Europe, had lectured in Cambridge, tried to become
a Roman Catholic but failed (so rare a failure!) and on returning
to Calcutta had startled the reformers of the Congress party by
a light-hearted violence that must have ended in gaol, had not
death anticipated imprisonment by release. In the same way _Bande
Mataram_ differed from the vernacular weekly _Yugantar_ (“New Age”
or “New Dispensation”), a revolutionary paper of a more gloomy and
solemn type than the _Sandhya_, but about equally open to charges of
sedition, to meet which it kept a staff of “prison editors” always
ready for the next prosecution. The first of them to go to gaol was
the youth Bupendra Nath Datta, a brother of the Swami Vivekananda,
who followed Ramakrishna. In the early summer of 1908 it was
prosecuted for the fifth time, its printer was fined about £67, and
sent to hard labour for twenty-three months, and after Lord Minto’s
new Press Act of June, 1908, it stopped regular circulation.
Mr. Arabindo Ghose was almost certainly not connected with the
_Yugantar_, but nobody seriously denied his connection with the
English-written _Bande Mataram_, though that paper also had a staff
of volunteers for prison.[44] When I reached the house in a large
square where the meeting was to have been held, I found it dark
and apparently empty. A Hindu servant let me in, and after a time
Mr. Arabindo Ghose himself appeared alone. He had not expected me,
because the letter about my coming had been stopped, no doubt by
the postal spies, as he said nearly all his letters were. He had no
special reason to complain of that, nor did he complain; for the
letters from one of the most respected public men in England to a
member of the Viceroy’s Council had recently been opened in Bombay,
and English people who were friendly with Indians in Calcutta told me
even their letters from home were tampered with in the same way.
He was a youngish man, I should think still under thirty. Intent
dark eyes looked from his thin, clear-cut face with a gravity that
seemed immovable, but the figure and bearing were those of an
English graduate. His parents had been half-anglicized, and had
never fully taught him his own language, so that he could not write
Bengali correctly, or make a speech in the only tongue, as he said,
that really went to the heart of the people. He had brought himself
up amid poverty in Manchester, St. Paul’s School in London, and at
Cambridge. Though he passed the Indian Civil Service examinations
within the first two or three, he failed to pass the riding test, and
was rejected. Having served the Gaekwar of Baroda for a time in the
education of that progressive State, he came to Calcutta, and was now
the leader of the Nationalists, or young Extremists who regarded even
Mr. Tilak as touched with the cautious moderation of the past. One of
his brothers, a poet of some standing in English, was Professor of
English Literature at the Presidency College in Calcutta University,
and I found him there teaching the grammar and occasional beauties of
Tennyson’s “Princess,” with extreme distaste for that sugary stuff.
Another brother was supposed to belong to a different branch of the
Extremists.
Arabindo’s purpose, as he explained it to me, was the Irish policy of
Sinn Fein—a universal Swadeshi, not limited to goods but including
every phase of life. His Nationalists would let the Government go its
way and take no notice of it at all. They hoped nothing from reforms;
all the talk about Legislative Councils and Indian members and
the separation of Judicial and Executive functions was meaningless
to them. They did not spend a thought upon it. In fact, the worse
the Government was, the more repressive it became, and the less it
inclined to reform, so much the better for the Nationalist cause. He
regarded the Partition of Bengal as the greatest blessing that had
ever happened to India. No other measure could have stirred national
feeling so deeply or roused it so suddenly from the lethargy of
previous years.
“Since 1830,” he said, “each generation had reduced us more and more
to the condition of sheep and fatted calves.”
He lamented the long peace, leading to degeneracy and effeminate
ways. Under it the ordinary people had sought only after prosperity
and material comfort, while the thoughtful men spent their time in
æsthetic circles, admiring Shelley and Swinburne, or imitating them.
The more English a man was, the more he counted himself successful,
and the life-blood of nationality had run thin. But all this torpor
and smug contentment had been rudely interrupted by the disguised
blessings of Lord Curzon’s errors. Indignation had again created
patriotism when apparently it was dead, and the new party’s whole
policy was aimed at carrying forward the work that Lord Curzon
had so successfully begun for the revival of national character
and spirit. For this purpose of building up a race worthy of a
great name they proposed to work on the three lines of a national
education, independent of Government but including the methods of
European science; a national industry, with boycott of all foreign
goods except the few things that India could not produce; and the
encouragement of private arbitration, in place of the law-courts, for
the settlement of disputes.
But behind these simple means a deeper spirit was at work. Arabindo
Ghose had already, I think, formed the project of developing out
of the Congress, or in place of the Congress, a nationalist and
democratic body that would prepare the country for self-government
and, indeed, act within limits as a true Indian Parliament quite
apart from the Anglo-Indian system. A few weeks later, a leading
article on the subject, probably written by Arabindo himself,
appeared in _Bande Mataram_—
“Let us try the experiment,” it said, “of a self-governing popular
assembly, so far as is consistent with the existence of an alien
bureaucracy seeking to restrict our independent activities in every
possible way. No growth is possible under perpetual tutelage. We
must devise means for stimulating activities on the part of our
people. This cannot be better done than by organizing a really
representative assembly that in its annual or periodic sittings
will decide on our course of action. It does not necessarily follow
that such an assembly will come into collision with the powers that
be. We have every right to organize ourselves independently. The
agitators have so long been taunted with absolute dependence on
the bureaucracy that people cannot reasonably try to repress an
assembly for the offence of carrying out their own precepts....
As they cannot see their way to giving us any real voice in the
administration, even in a dim and distant future, we have no other
course open to us. Let us relieve the bureaucratic administration
of as much of its duties as we can by undertaking to govern
ourselves in as many departments as possible.”[45]
Courage, he rightly saw, was the first thing to maintain or to create
in any people, especially in a subject people like the Bengalis, who
had so long been taunted with cowardice by one master after another.
The taunt of cowardice is like one of those prophecies that fulfil
themselves. It implants the cowardice that it derides, and if you
call a people timid they begin to shake. Ever since Macaulay wrote,
the Anglo-Indians had been brought up by their schools and coaches
to regard the Bengalis as the cowards of the world, and what was far
worse, the educated Bengalis had been taught to regard themselves as
the cowards of the world too, just because Macaulay had delighted
himself one morning with a brilliant passage of rhetoric.[46]
Where the consciousness of timidity exists among a people, the first
duty of a patriot is to remove it at all costs. So in the columns
of his paper and in his rare speeches Arabindo Ghose was insisting
especially on the necessity of courage:—
“Courage,” said a leader in _Bande Mataram_, “is your principal
asset. Heroism, says Emerson, feels and never reasons, and
therefore is always right. If you are to work out the salvation
of your country, you will have to do it with heroism. You have
voluntarily cut yourselves off from outside help to develop
strength from within. Darkness will hem you round, disappointments
will cross your path, slander will pursue you from behind, but you
are to depend on yourselves, and yourselves alone. You must press
on and not allow yourselves to be dragged back by encumbrances in
the name of unity. You have your only guide in the loftiness and
spirituality that make their heaven in the thought of the wider
light and purer happiness that you may bring to your country by
long force of vision and endeavour. The rapturous contemplation
of a new and better state for your country is your only hope. What
great element is wanting in a life guided by such a hope?”[47]
There is a religious tone, a spiritual elevation, in such words
very characteristic of Arabindo Ghose himself, and of all Bengali
Nationalists, contrasted with the shrewd political judgment of Poona
Extremists. In an age of supernatural religion Arabindo would have
become what the irreligious mean by a fanatic. He was possessed by
that concentrated vision, that limited and absorbing devotion. Like a
horse in blinkers, he ran straight, regardless of everything except
the narrow bit of road in front. But at the end of that road he saw a
vision more inspiring and spiritual than any fanatic saw who rushed
on death with Paradise in sight. Nationalism to him was far more than
a political object or a means of material improvement. To him it was
surrounded by a mist of glory, the halo that mediæval saints beheld
gleaming around the head of martyrs. Grave with intensity, careless
of fate or opinion, and one of the most silent men I have known, he
was of the stuff that dreamers are made of, but dreamers who will act
their dream, indifferent to the means. “Nationalism,” he said, in a
brief address delivered in Bombay, early in 1908—“Nationalism is a
religion that comes from God”:—
“Nationalism cannot die, because it is God who is working in
Bengal. God cannot be killed, God cannot be sent to gaol. Have
you got a real faith, or is it merely a political inspiration,
a larger kind of selfishness?... You all know what Bengal used
to be; you all know that the name of Bengali used to be a term
of reproach among nations. What has happened? What has made the
Bengali so different from his old self? One thing has happened,
Bengal is learning to believe. Bengal was once drunk with the wine
of European civilization, and with the purely intellectual teaching
that it received from the West. It began to see all things, to
judge all things, through the imperfect instrumentality of the
intellect. When this was so, Bengal became a land of doubters and
cynics....
“The intellect, having nothing more to offer save despair, became
quiescent, and when the intellect ceased to work, the heart of
Bengal was open and ready to receive the voice of God whenever he
should speak. When the message came at last, Bengal was ready to
receive it, and she received it in a single moment. In a single
moment the whole nation rose, the whole nation lifted itself out
of despair, and it was by this sudden awakening from a dream that
Bengal found the way of salvation, and declared to all India that
eternal life, immortality, not lasting degradation, was our fate....
“There came a time, after the first outbreak of triumphant hope,
when all the material forces that could be brought to bear against
Nationalism were gradually brought into play, and the question was
asked of Bengal, ‘Can you suffer? Can you survive?’ The young men
of Bengal were now called upon to suffer. They were called upon to
bear the crown, not of victory, but of martyrdom....
“It is not by any mere political programme, not by National
Education alone, not by Swadeshi alone, not by boycott, that
this country can be saved. Swadeshi by itself might merely lead
to a little more material prosperity, and you might forget the
real thing you sought to do, in the glamour of wealth and in the
desire to keep it safe. In other subject countries also there was
material development.... When the hour of trial came, it was found
that those nations which had been developing materially were not
alive.... The forces of the country are other than visible forces.
There is only one force, and for that force I am not necessary, you
are not necessary, he is not necessary. Let us all be thrown aside
as so much waste substance, the country will not suffer. God is
doing everything. When He throws us away, He does so because we are
no longer required. But He is immortal in the hearts of His people.”
This fervour of nationality, which some would call fanaticism,
certainly appears to differ in degree from the religious fervour
with which we pray for the High Court of Parliament, “under our most
religious and gracious King at this time assembled.” But it would be
no compliment to ourselves to doubt that at the back of both there is
a unity of spirit.[48]
As to fanaticism of language and the violence that cannot keep
outside the limits of sedition, I have seen violent and bloodthirsty
passages translated from the _Yugantar_, the _Sandhya_, the
_Hitaishi_ (“Friend”) of Barisal, and other vernacular papers. Such
papers are fined, suppressed, have editors imprisoned, and under
the new Press Act may have their type confiscated. But in none of
them have I seen more deliberate attempts to stir up race hatred and
incite to violence than in Anglo-Indian papers which suffer nothing.
Take, for instance, this obvious instigation to indiscriminate
manslaughter by the _Asian_, an Anglo-Indian weekly in Calcutta (May
9, 1908):—
“Mr. Kingsford has a great opportunity, and we hope he is a fairly
decent shot at short range. We recommend to his notice a Mauser
pistol, with the nickel filed off the nose of the bullets, or
a Colt’s automatic, which carries a heavy soft bullet and is a
hard-hitting and punishing weapon. We hope Mr. Kingsford will
manage to secure a big ‘bag,’ and we envy him his opportunity.
He will be more than justified in letting daylight into every
strange native approaching his house or his person, and for his
own sake we trust he will learn to shoot fairly straight without
taking his weapon out of his coat pocket. It saves time and gives
the elevation fairly correctly at any distance up to about ten or
fifteen yards. We wish the one man who has shown that he has a
correct view of the necessities of the situation the very best of
luck.”
That was written certainly at a time of great excitement, when an
attempt had been made to assassinate the unpopular magistrate by a
bomb, which killed two ladies, not only innocent, but related to one
of those exceptional men whose sympathy with the people makes them
justly beloved. But two can play at the evil game of race hatred,
and if the Indian press is violent, the tone of the Anglo-Indian
press is almost invariably insolent and provocative. If “seditious”
only means “likely to lead to violence,” it is seditious too. There
are fine exceptions, like the _Statesman_, the _Indian Daily News_,
the _Empire_, and _Capital_, in Calcutta. Steadily supporting the
official side, though with great freedom of criticism, as was shown
in the case of Lord Curzon, the _Pioneer_ of Allahabad maintains
an honourable tradition. But as to Anglo-Indian papers like the
_Englishman_ of Calcutta and the _Civil and Military Gazette_ of
Lahore, it must have been difficult for any thoughtful Indian who
loved his country to read them during 1907 without cursing our race.
Even the _Times of India_, the best paper in Bombay, greeted Mr. Keir
Hardie’s arrival in the city with a whole column of insults, not only
to the Labour leader, but to the Indian people. Judging from the
style, I thought the editor must have bribed some poor, half-educated
Indian to do the thing for him; but I heard afterwards, through one
of the staff, that it was written by an Anglo-Indian, who was quite
proud of his achievement. What cause he had for pride may be seen
from a paragraph or two:—
“Mr. Keir Hardie’s reception in Bombay was thoroughly in keeping
with the rest of his experiences, and foolishly ebullient
proceedings. All along the mountains have been in labour; to the
disappointment of excited and expectant Babudom the mighty throes
have never produced more than here and there the proverbial mouse.
Fifty Hindus, and a couple of Parsis: what a deputation from the
wealthiest and most progressive commercial city of the East, what
a characteristic greeting from the great heart of Indian labour to
the personification of the political labourite spirit! Even this
bathotic manifestation of the deplorable fact that the Oriental is
almost entirely devoid of humour, as completely so as the labouring
man and his chosen apostle, must needs miscarry. The fifty Hindu
schoolboys and their two Parsi companions cannot find the god of
their idolatry. Perchance he sleepeth, and cannot hear, or will not
hear the piping yell of ‘Bande Mataram’; at any rate look where
they will in the compartments commonly occupied by their beloved
agitators and demagogues, not a sign of this one is to be found.
Topknots and draperies flying wildly to the winds, they race up
and down chattering discordantly, baffled, desperate till at last,
‘proh pudor,’ they find him, not occupied in great meditations,
not even spouting platitudes to the circumambient air, but
prosaically strapping up his exiguous baggage, in a second-class
compartment. ‘Cophinus foenumque supellex.’ A damper this and no
mistake. Deputation from the dumb millions of India brimming over
with enthusiasm and verbosity, subconsciously dominated by the
traditional respect of the East for superior men, men to be looked
up to, men on the summits, what to say to this essentially and
markedly labelled second-class product!...
“Does it not occur to this man of the people, uncultured,
illiterate, with at the best a stunted and perverted imagination,
does it not occur to him, and the astuter ones who are making
him their cat’s-paw, that his enterprise is not only radically
mischievous but overwhelmingly ridiculous? The appeal from masses
to masses, the slogan of gutter to gutter, cementing all the forces
of inferiority, inefficiency, and serfdom, preludes war against
all that is best and sanest and strongest in life. It is the
voiced concentration of hatred, the hatred which the sick and the
feeble and the bad by some strange law of antagonism cannot help
cherishing against the healthy, the great and the good. On the one
hand Aristocracy, the rule of the best, on the other Democracy, the
rule of the mob, that ‘bellua centiceps’ representing again by the
inexorable laws of nature what for the time being is the worst.”[49]
And for the time being we certainly need not look, even from
Democracy, for anything worse than that!
FOOTNOTES:
[44] For Bepin Chandra Pal’s action during a prosecution of the
_Bande Mataram_, see Introduction, p. 23.
[45] _Bande Mataram_, January 21, 1908.
[46] As Macaulay is no longer thought generally necessary to
education, it may be worth while to recall a few sentences of his
indictment of a whole people nearly twice as numerous as his own. The
passage comes in his essay on Warren Hastings: “A war of Bengalis
against Englishmen was like a war of sheep against wolves, of men
against demons.... The physical organization of the Bengali is
feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His
pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid.
During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more
hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to
which his constitution and his situations are equally unfavourable.
His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to
helplessness, for purposes of manly resistance; but its suppleness
and its tact move the children of sterner climates to admiration
not unmingled with contempt. All those arts which are the natural
defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to the
Ionian of the time of Juvenal, or to the Jew of the dark ages. What
the horns are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, what the
sting is to the bee, what beauty, according to the old Greek song,
is to woman, deceit is to the Bengali.” And so on, for many more
sentences of nicely balanced rhetoric.
[47] _Bande Mataram_, January 22, 1908.
[48] On May 3, 1908, Mr. Arabindo Ghose was arrested on the charge of
being implicated in a conspiracy to provide rifles and dynamite for
revolutionary purposes.
[49] _The Times of India_, October 26, 1907.