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Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, August 23rd, 1907 }
In Melancholy Vein
The Englishman is in melancholy mood. Swaraj and Justice Saroda Charan Mitter have been too much for our gentle contemporary’s nerves, and he is full of sorrow and care-worn longings. He wants “to wipe out an unpleasant world and create a new and beautiful one to live in,” where there is no Swaraj, and no High Courts, and no diminishing cotton imports, and no Anglo-Indian editors to telegraph home denying his blood-curdling visions, and the agitator is not abroad. He wants “like the Hindu ascetic considering all this as Maya to retire into existence of solid imagination”. We shall find it hard to believe that there is any lack of imagination in Hare Street existence, but this new-born desire to turn the imagination from the gaseous into the solid state is a hopeful sign. Our contemporary anticipates all sorts of curious and pleasing results from his new departure, and even breaks out into irregular blank verse in his ecstasy. “Then comes again the care-free heart of youth, the lines of trouble fade from the face, the empty pocket, like that of Virgil’s traveller, becomes a cause for song, or like that of the schoolboy, a hoarding place for curious and assorted treasure.” We are sorry to hear that the Englishman‘s pocket is empty, but we think he goes too far in expecting people to write poetry about his diminishing sale and circulation. As for his alternative hope, the Englishman‘s pocket whether empty of cash or not, is full enough of Golden Bengal Mare’s nests, Newmaniac effusions and other curious and assorted treasure. Finally our contemporary announces his intention of dismissing “mean-souled malice”— of the Statesman and Empire and others— with a “vacant stare”— which is evidently preferable to the Barisal stare. Our contemporary
Page – 653 wishes to practise the art of detachment as a substitute for furlough and hypophosphites. We would suggest to him that it might be better to take the furlough and the hypophosphites— especially the furlough— to restore his scattered system, and try the detachment as an additional sedative. That, to adapt the language of the Abbotabad Magistrate, will be the best for the Englishman and will satisfy everybody else in India. Page – 654 Advice to National College Students
I have been told that you wish me to speak a few words of advice to you. But in these days I feel that young men can very often give better advice than we older people can give. Nor must you ask me to express the feelings which your actions, the way in which you have shown your affection towards me, have given rise to in my breast. It is impossible to express them. You all know that I have resigned my post. In the meeting you held yesterday I see that you expressed sympathy with me in what you call my present troubles. I don’t know whether I should call them troubles at all, for the experience that I am going to undergo was long foreseen as inevitable in the discharge of the mission that I have taken up from my childhood, and I am approaching it without regret. What I want to be assured of is not so much that you feel sympathy for me in my troubles, but that you have sympathy for the cause in serving which I have to undergo what you call my troubles. If I know that the rising generation have taken up this cause, that wherever I go, I go leaving behind others to carry on my work, I shall go without the least regret. I take it that whatever respect you have shown to me today was shown not to me, not merely even to the principal, but to your country, to the Mother in me, because what little I have done has been done for her, and the slight suffering that I am going to endure will be endured for her sake. Taking your sympathy in that light I can feel that if I am incapacitated from carrying on my work, there will be so many others left behind me. One other cause of rejoicing for me is to find that practically all my countrymen have the same fellow-feeling for me and for the same reason as yourselves. The unanimity with which all classes have expressed their sympathy for me and even offered help at
Talk given at the Bengal National College on 23 August 1907. Text published in the Dawn and Dawn Society’s Magazine in September 1907.
Page – 655 the moment of my trial, is a cause for rejoicing, and for the same reason. For I am nothing, what I have done is nothing. I have earned this fellow-feeling because of serving the cause which all my countrymen have at heart. The only piece of advice that I can give you now is— carry out the work, the mission, for which this college was created. I have no doubt that all of you have realised by this time what this mission means. When we established this college, and left other occupations, other chances of life, to devote our lives to this institution, we did so because we hoped to see in it the foundation, the nucleus, of a nation, of the new India which is to begin its career after this night of sorrow and trouble, on that day of glory and greatness when India will work for the world. What we want here is not merely to give you a little information, not merely to open to you careers for earning a livelihood, but to build up sons for the motherland to work and to suffer for her. That is why we started this college and that is the work to which I want you to devote yourselves in future. What has been insufficiently and imperfectly begun by us, it is for you to complete and lead to perfection. When I come back I wish to see some of you becoming rich, rich not for yourselves but that you may enrich the Mother with your riches. I wish to see some of you becoming great, great not for your own sakes, not that you may satisfy your own vanity, but great for her, to make India great, to enable her to stand up with head erect among the nations of the earth, as she did in days of yore when the world looked up to her for light. Even those who will remain poor and obscure, I want to see their very poverty and obscurity devoted to the motherland. There are times in a nation’s history when Providence places before it one work, one aim, to which everything else, however high and noble in itself, has to be sacrificed. Such a time has now arrived for our motherland when nothing is dearer than her service, when everything else is to be directed to that end. If you will study, study for her sake; train yourselves body and mind and soul for her service. You will earn your living that you may live for her sake. You will go abroad to foreign lands that you may
Page – 656 bring back knowledge with which you may do service to her. Work that she may prosper. Suffer that she may rejoice. All is contained in that one single advice. My last word to you is that if you have sympathy for me, I hope to see it not merely as a personal feeling, but as a sympathy with what I am working for. I want to see this sympathy translated into work so that when in future I shall look upon your career of glorious activity I may have the pride of remembering that I did something to prepare and begin it.
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