-164_New Conditions.htm

New Conditions

                A GREAT deal of the work done by us during the last three years has been of a purely preparatory character. The preparation of the national mind was the first necessity. All that the old schools of politics did was to prepare the way for the new thought by giving a full trial to the delusions that then possessed the people and demonstrating their complete futility. Since the awakening of the nation to the misdirection of its energies a fresh delusion has taken possession for a time of the national mind, and this is the idea that a great revolution can be worked out without the sacrifices of which history tells in the case of other nations. There is a general shrinking from the full danger of the struggle, a wish to try by how few sacrifices the work can be accomplished and at how cheap a cost the priceless boon of liberty can be purchased. This reluctance to enter on the real struggle was a necessary and salutary stage of the movement, because the nation, after the long pauperisation of its energies and enervation of its character by a hundred years of dependence and mendicancy, would have been unequal to the sacrifices the real struggle demands. A fresh stage is at hand in which this reluctance can no longer be indulged. A nation cannot afford to haggle with Providence or to buy liberty in the cheapest market from the Dispenser of human fate. The sooner the struggle now commences, the sooner the fate of India is fought out between the forces of progress and reaction, the better for India and for the world. Delay will only waste our strength and give opportunities to the enemy. A band of men is needed who can give up everything for their country, whose sole thought and occupation shall be the stimulation of the movement by whatever means the moment suggests or opportunity allows. If such a band can be got together, then only will real work as distinct from the work of preparation be possible; for the salvation of a country cannot be the work of our leisure moments, the product of our superfluous energy or the result of a selfish life in which the

Page-889

country comes in only for the leavings. Devoted servants of India are needed who will ask for no reward, no ease, no superfluities, but only their bare maintenance and a roof over their heads to enable them to work for her. This attitude of utter self-abandonment is the first condition of success. Sannyāsa, utter and inexorable, tyāga, unreserved and pitiless, mumuksutva, burning and insatiable, must be the stamp of the true servant of India. Academical knowledge, power of debate, laborious study of problems, the habit of ease and luxury at home and slow and tentative work abroad, the attitude of patience and lesiurely self- preparation are not for this era or for this country. An immense and incalculable revolution is at hand and its instruments must be themselves immense in their aspiration, uncalculating in their self-immolation. A sacrifice of which the mightiest yajña of old can only be a feeble type and far-off shadow, has to be instituted and the victims of that sacrifice are ourselves, our lives, our property, our hopes, our ambitions, all that is personal and not of God, all that is devoted to our own service and taken from the service of the country. The greatest must fall as victims before the God of the sacrifice is satisfied. Whoever is afraid for himself, afraid for his property, afraid for his kith and kin, afraid for his vanity, self-interest, glory, ease or liberty, had better stand aside from the sacrifice, for at any time the call may come to him to lay down all these upon the altar. If he then refuses, his fate will be worse than that of the fugitive who prefers safety to the struggle, for he will be a recusant doomed to suffer without reward and fall without glory.
        The times are thickening already with the shadow of a great darkness. The destruction of the Congress, begun at Surat and accomplished at Allahabad, is the prelude for the outburst of the storm that has long been brewing. Great issues were involved in that historic struggle at Surat of which none of the actors were aware. Only posterity looking back with awe on the sequel, will date the commencement of the real world-shaking earthquake from that slight ruffling of the untroubled surface of the soil. The forces that sent that slight quiver of the earth to the surface are hidden as yet from the eye of contemporary politics or only dimly guessed by a few, but within a brief period they will have

Page-890

declared themselves to the amazement of those who thought that they were only playing a clever tactical game with the lifeless figures of a puppet show. The grim forces that have been moving under the surface will now find the field open to them by the shattering of the keystone of the old political edifice. The efforts of the two parties to replace the Congress by new bodies of a party character are not likely to prosper, for the Moderate Convention will fade into nothingness by its inherent want of vitality, while the Congress of the Nationalists, whatever its destiny, will not be the old Congress but a new and incalculable force, the product of a revolution and perhaps its plaything. The disappearance of the old Congress announces the end of the preparatory stage of the movement, the beginning of a clash of forces whose first full shock will produce chaos. The fair hopes of an orderly and peaceful evolution of self-government, which the first energies of the new movement had fostered, are gone for ever. Revolution, bare and grim, is preparing her battle-field, mowing down the centres of order which were evolving a new cosmos and building up the materials of a gigantic downfall and a mighty new-creation. We could have wished it otherwise, but God’s will be done.

Whom to Believe?

The account of the Conference given by the Lucknow Advocate which we quote elsewhere makes curious reading. If we are to believe this apparently well-informed source, the reports of the great fight made by the Bengal Moderates are a tissue of exaggerations. There was no fight at all over the question of creed or objects, and indeed the difference of name is so trivial that the legend of this stout fight over a shadow has little verisimilitude. About the question of the subscription to the creed the only difference between the Bengal-Punjab Party and the Bombay-United Provinces Party was whether it should be obligatory to sign the creed or sufficient to swear verbally to it. That the clause should be binding and express acceptance obligatory as a condition of admission to the Congress, both parties were agreed. What be-

Page-891

comes then of the story of Surendranath’s gallant battle for the freedom of election and freedom of conscience in the Congress? It seems that the whole Committee was solid for exclusion. The other point of difference was whether there should be a new Congress called by the Convention or the adjourned Congress resummoned by Dr. Rash Behari Ghose. As this adjourned Congress would in any case be saddled with the creed and the Convention constitution, it would be in effect a new Congress. This subject of quarrel, too, like the others, turns out to be a distinction without a difference. According to the Advocate, then, Surendranath’s Party and the Mehta Party were in entire agreement, only the Bengal members wanted to call the same things by other names. Not a creed but a statement of objects binding on every delegate; not a written subscription but a verbal oath of allegiance; not a new Congress without the Nationalists, but the old Congress without the Nationalists. If we are to believe the Advocate, the Bengal Moderates only succeeded in showing themselves consummate hypocrites and fencers with words. If this account be a libel on them, it should, we think, be authoritatively contradicted. Otherwise, the public will form their own conclusions.

By The Way

The Parable of Sati

Daksha, the great Prajapati, had a daughter, named Sati, whom he loved beyond all his children, and the Rishis wedded her to Mahadeva, the great lord of the Universe. The choice of the Rishis was not pleasing to Daksha, because he was unable to see in Mahadeva anything but a houseless ascetic wandering with the beasts of the field and the demons of the night, a beggar’s bowl in his hand, his body smeared with ashes, a tiger’s skin for his only robe. His scorn increased the more he came to know of his son-in-law, a Bhang-eating, lazy ne’er-do-weel, with no ascertainable means of livelihood, no home, no property, no degree or other educational qualification, no stake in the world. He

Page-892

cursed the Rishis for fools and evil counsellors, visionaries who saw in this pauper with his bowl and his matted hair the Master of the World. So when he had to offer a great sacrifice, he sent invitations to all the gods, but deliberately excluded his son-in-law. The result was disastrous. Sati, full of grief and indignation at the affront to her lord, gave up her body and disappeared from mortal ken. Then came Mahadeva in his wrath, the mighty One, the destroyer of Universes, and broke Daksha’s sacrifice to pieces and shattered the hall of sacrifice and slew Daksha in his hall.

*

        There was a Daksha too in India which was called the Indian National Congress. Like Daksha it was a great figure, a Prajapati with numerous offspring, full of dignity, sobriety, wisdom, and much esteemed by the gods. This Daksha too had a daughter whom he loved, the young Indian Nation. When the time for her marriage came, she chose for herself the bridegroom offered to her by the Rishis who declared him to be Mahadeva, the Destiny of India and her fated Lord. It was at sacred Benares that she first saw Mahadeva face to face and betrothed herself to him, but the marriage took place at Calcutta with a fourfold Mantra, Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott, National Education, as the sacred formula of union. The marriage did not please Daksha, but the Rishis were importunate and Sati firm, so he was compelled to give way. He cursed the Rishis freely. "What manner of husband is this they have given to my Sati? A homeless beggar, wild and half crazy with the Bhang he has drunk, wandering on the hills in company with the wild beasts and the demons, without culture, enlightenment and education, rude in speech, rough in manners, ill-clad, destitute, with no past, no present and no future! Yet these fanatics call him the Master of the World, an embodiment of the Almighty, and what not!" So he hid his grief and wrath but determined to be revenged. For Mahadeva the Mighty, the Destiny of India, had long wandered in the wilderness with a beggar’s bowl in his hand, poor and destitute, an ascetic smeared with ashes and clad in a tiger’s skin, with no home in which he could lay down his head. And when

Page-893

he came to the marriage, it was in fearsome guise and in evil company, drunk with the Bhang of a wild inspiration, shouting “Bombom Bande Mataram” at the top of his mighty voice, disreputable in appearance and unfit to associate with polite and cultured gentlemen such as Daksha had hitherto made his friends, poor, shaggy, ill-clad, with no visible means of existence and no tangible prospects in the future; and his companions were a wild company of lathi-bearing National Volunteers and other disquieting phantasms quite out of place in Daksha’s tastefully got-up and elegant marriage Pandal. How could Daksha realise that in this uncouth figure was the Destroyer and Creator of an Universe, One who held the fate of India and of the world in his hands? The Rishis only knew it and they were called visionaries and fanatics for their pains.

*

         Daksha prepared a great annual sacrifice in the year after the marriage and held it with much pomp, but he determined to exclude Mahadeva the Mighty from the sacrifice and so framed the rules of admission that the undesirable son-in-law might keep away in future. The result is known to everybody. The Destiny of India, whom Daksha tried to exclude, came in wrath and knocked at the gates of the hall of sacrifice and when Daksha’s hired men tried to beat him back, he broke into the hall and shattered the sacrifice and slew Daksha in his hall.

*

          The story goes that Mahadeva, entreated on behalf of Daksha, restored him to life, but when the head of Daksha was sought for, it could not be found, and so a goat’s head was incontinently clapped on the unfortunate Prajapati’s shoulders. When the modern Daksha died, there was a similar desire to revive him but the head could not be found. Some said it was lost, others argued in more legal language that it was functus officio. Accordingly, these wise men found a goat’s head which they called a creed and stuck it on the shoulders of Daksha and put life

Page-894

into his trunk and swore that this goat-headed legless anomaly should in future be called Daksha. Unfortunately, they made the whole thing more grotesque by clapping on the goat’s head the wrong way, so that its face was turned backward and, when the crippled monster tried to shove itself along, its progress was retrogression and its advance a retreat. For its eyes were turned to the past and not to the future.

*

        Meanwhile, Mahadeva the Mighty wandered over the world carrying the dead body of Sati on his head, dancing a wild dance of ruin which shook the world to its foundations. For Sati had left her old body and men said she was dead. But she was not dead, only withdrawn from the eyes of men, and the gods clove the body of Sati into pieces so that it was scattered all over India, which thing is also a parable; for after the death of the Congress the unity of India which was the daughter of the Congress, must break up into factions and groups. The Convention is already developing parties and in the wild times that are coming the Nationalists also will break up into parties, some of which will make the present designation of extremism as applied to us look an absurdity, and the political life of India will become an anarchy. But not for ever. For Sati will be born again, on the high mountains of mighty endeavour, colossal aspiration, unparalleled self-sacrifice she will be born again, in a better and more beautiful body, and by terrible tapasyā she will meet Mahadeva once more and be wedded to him in nobler fashion, with kinder auguries, for a happier and greater future. For this thing is written in the book of God and nothing can prevent it, that Sati shall wed Mahadeva, that the national life of India shall meet and possess its divine and mighty destiny.

Bande Mataram, April 29, 1908

Leaders and a Conscience

We find it difficult not to sympathise with one passage at least on

Page-895

Mr. Khare’s letter to the Dhulia Reception Committee. “Moreover,” he says, “I don’t know who the leaders are. I for instance cannot specify any such, nor can I give my conscience into the keeping of anyone.” We cannot follow Mr. Khare in his ultra-judicial ignorance of the personality of the party leaders, and it is certainly hard on Sir Pherozshah and Mr. Gokhale that a new recruit should so bluntly express his inability to specify them as leaders. But the concluding sentiment is unexceptionable and we think the Dhulia Reception Committee made a mistake in calling on the leaders to unite instead of referring, as the Pabna Conference did, to a definite authority. The time has gone by when a few leaders could play a quiet game among themselves with the destinies of the country. Mr. Khare was once taken for a Nationalist of a sort, and we are glad that he preserves in his new camp so much at least of Nationalist robustness as to keep possession of his own conscience. We Nationalists too, like Mr. Khare, decline to give our conscience into the keeping of anyone, be it a leader or a knot of leaders, or the whole Congress itself in session assembled. For this precise reason we refuse to sign or verbally swear to any creed imposed on us from outside.

An Ostrich in Colootola

Srijut Surendranath’s organ is very anxious for union, we wish it were equally passionate for truth. The country has begun to speak out about the Convention and at Dhulia and Chittagong references have been made to the Convention and opinions expressed for an united Congress on the old lines which are of the utmost significance. The Bengalee seems to have received precisely the same telegram as we have received from Dhulia and it marks it as sent by its Own Correspondent. Yet the merciless manner in which it has dealt with the telegram of its Own Correspondent is amusing and instructive. The speech of the Dhulia President breaks off abruptly in our contemporary’s telegram with a blessing on the National Schools and all the rest of the weighty and trenchant remarks about the Convention and the Continuation Committee are boycotted. But is anything gained by burking

Page-896

facts or burying one’s head in the sand in this ostrich fashion? It is an old moderate habit but one which does not improve with age.

I Cannot Join

We quote the following from Mr. Khare’s letter to the Secretaries of the Dhulia Reception Committee giving his reasons for withdrawing from the Presidentship. “I see resolution No. IV adopted by them. This resolution calls upon the leaders of all the parties in the land to make a united effort to arrange the holding of the next Congress etc. Now having signed the creed I cannot join those who refuse to sign the creed (until at all events the creed is formally set aside) in arranging the holding of the National Congress etc.” The attitude of Mr. Khare is the attitude of the Bombay and Poona Moderates and Srijut Surendranath had a taste of it at Allahabad. Yet the Bengalee still talks smoothly of remaining in the Convention in order to secure a mandate for Dr. Rash Behari Ghose to resummon the adjourned Congress! But Srijut Surendranath was always a sanguine optimist.

By The Way

Colootola Conjures

There are some who believe that passion and conviction are the sign of want of culture. If the language of poetry is used by a political writer, it shows lack of balance. The use of imagination, the presence of inspiration, the full expression of feeling are violent and indecorous. Whatever the depth of emotion felt, whatever the inspiring character of the vision seen, the emotion must be banished, the inspiration killed, otherwise wisdom takes flight. If our politics had been left to these gentlemen, it would have remained the decorous pastime of lawyers and sober educationists, a sort of half-forensic, half-academic debate with the

Page-897

bureaucracy on the merits of its rule. Sobriety, moderation, wisdom would have been satisfied and the nation killed by a surfeit of gentlemanly decorum. Unluckily for the Bengalee and its ilk, the days of “modest and sober and mostly unreadable prose”, of Colootola “common sense”, of the “healthy mind” which was too healthy to think and too sound to be sincere, are gone. The great passions which move mankind, the rude forces which shake the world, the majestic visions which bring life to dead nations have once more become part of our national existence, and in vain Colootola waves its conjuring rod of bad logic, inconsistent sentiment and sober imbecility to quell the phantasms. They are not to be quelled.

Common Sense and Revolutions

The Bengalee is scornful of our prophetic visions. The man of common sense who cannot see what lies before his nose, naturally considers the man who can see a prophet or a visionary. Before the French Revolution many travellers visited France, but only one or two were able to see that there existed in the quiet of that country all the conditions that have In history preceded great revolutions. The men who perceived it were not prophets but merely observers, gifted with sympathy and insight. They were, in fact, men of uncommon sense. The Bengalee and its like are unable to conceive that anything great can happen in India. Formerly it believed that we should go on for several centuries prosing about our political grievances in an ineffective debating society called the National Congress. Even now it believes that the country will remain obedient to the call of what it terms sobriety, and that fate will wait upon the prudence and fears of a few respectable and wealthy gentlemen in Calcutta and Bombay. Its idea of our future is that we should become a big outlying parish of England, and of the means, that we should peddle forever with the details of a bureaucratic administration.

Page-898

Pace and Solidarity

It is impossible for such minds, – if minds they can be called – to perceive that what is happening is the first stage of a revolution or that the condition of keeping the wilder forces of revolution in harness was the solidarity of the movement. Once that solidarity has been broken, it is the wildest and most rapid forces which will set the pace; there will be no mean resultant of all the forces producing a swift and yet ordered advance. The solidarity of the movement depends on the existence of an united Congress in which the Moderates and Nationalists should form the brake and the motive energy respectively. But the united Congress has been suffocated with a creed at Allahabad and with it the solidarity of the movement and the check on the fiercer forces which have recently given evidences of their existence will disappear. That means if not “the aproaching end of the world” at least the end of that state of the Indian world in which Surendranaths can perorate, Mehtas brew mischief and Colootola daily enjoy its robust digestion of its own sober and modest prose.

*

        The Bengalee pretends that the Congress, even after Allahabad, is only collapsed and not dead. Its receipe for reviving the patient is that Dr. Ghose should resummon the adjourned Congress. Great Rash Behari has only to send forth his almighty voice, accompanied by a telling literary joke and an appropriate quotation, has only to say with his inimitable gesture and facial expression, “Let there be an united Congress”, and, behold, an united Congress! And Mr. Khare’s resolution calling a new Congress does not preclude, it seems, Dr. Ghose from resummoning the adjourned Congress! This is the finished product of Colootola’s common sense and the healthy mind that flourishes only at Barrackpore.

*

Page-899

The Voice of Colootola has been lashed into a rage by our article on the Wheat and the Chaff. Unable to wound itself, it engages a correspondent to do the work for it. The exposure of moderate policy which that article made has irritated this gentleman into an outburst of spleen too bitter to be contained, and he foams at the mouth in his fury. "Why should the Nationalists arrogate the right to instruct their elders? What have they done? Who are they? We are the leaders of the people and they are only self-styled leaders. What right have they to be an independent party? They are cowards who dare not act except behind the veil of the Moderates, and are angry because that veil is being withdrawn. Their leaders are ungrateful scoundrels to abuse the party of the barristers who saved them from jail.” So the friend of Colootola.

*

        A good deal of this epic rage would have been saved if the irate correspondent had taken the trouble to understand the article before writing about it. What we have written about the Moderates, we have written and we do not withdraw one syllable of it. Their action at Allahabad was a betrayal of the country dictated by fear and self-interest. Among those who took part in it, there are prominent men who no more believe in Colonial self-government for India than they believe in the man in the moon. The part they played is especially reprehensible. Others are anxious to put themselves right with the bureaucratic government and hardly take the trouble to conceal their motives. The few who were sincere both in their profession of the creed and in their belief that it is necessary for the country, are too insignificant to be reckoned.

*

        What the Bengalee’s friend in need has not understood is the latter part of the article in which we pointed out that the amateur kind of Nationalism which has hitherto been the order of the day will no longer serve. The real workers are yet to come.

Page-900

This part of the homily in which, by the way, the reference to the barristers occurred as addressed to our own party and if anyone has any right to take umbrage at it, it is the Nationalists, barristers or others, and not pseudo-Nationalists like our Colootola critic. The steel for the Mother’s sword of which we spoke is not the present Nationalist Party as he imagines, but the rising generation of young men. They are the wheat which will remain. Of the present Nationalist Party much will be winnowed away in the fiercer tests that are coming and rejected as chaff, only a small residue remaining. We do not know whether it was want of patience or want of English which prevented our critic from seeing the drift of the article – probably a combination of these lamentable wants – but if he will take the trouble to reread it with the help of a tutor, he may even yet understand. We did not condemn pleading in Swadeshi cases or taking shares in Swadeshi concerns any more than we condemned subscribing to National School funds. We said that these were safe and petty forms of patriotism and those who could not go beyond them were not the stuff of which the future will be built. And that is, after all, only a truism. Our whole lives are what is demanded of us and not a bit of our leisure or a mite from our purse.

Bande Mataram, April 30, 1908

Page-901