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Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, September 17th, 1906 }
Last Friday’s Folly
Even at the risk of being branded as social reactionaries, we must, we feel, enter our protest against the notions and ideals that lay, evidently, under the so-called national dinner, celebrated at the Albert Hall on Friday last. The function, in itself, was too insignificant to deserve any notice. Two hundred and fifty men and boys meeting and dining together in public, regardless of caste-restrictions and old orthodoxy, is not even a new thing in Calcutta Society. Hindus and Mahomedans had dined publicly in Calcutta, on special occasions, before now. Dinners had repeatedly been given at the India Club in honour of prominent members in which members of all castes and creeds joined. Subscription dinners had been organised in honour of prominent public men, even outside that Club, the last one being less than two years old, when the friends of Sir Henry Cotton met him at a dinner at the Calcutta Town Hall. Babu Narendranath Sen organised a public dinner some years back, to celebrate the birthday of Buddha, where people of all castes and more than one creed, sat down on mats and dined together on simple loochie and dal. These dinners had all been publicly announced and publicly reported; but no one cared to publicly condemn them. Had last Friday’s dinner been associated with some specific public function, or been held in honour of any particular public men, no one would have, we believe, taken any serious notice of it. The folly of it lay in the idea that interdining was a necessary condition of nation building in India; and it deserves condemnation for propounding the foolish and suicidal ideal that social and religious differences must first of all be destroyed before India can ever hope to realise her own true civic life.
Page – 167 This is the Anglo-Indian and the British idea. It is the main plea upon which the present despotism supports and justifies itself. It is the plea upon which even our own old-school patriots proclaim the fatal doctrine that India is not, and will never for a very long period be, fitted for self-government, and, therefore, the strong hand of the foreigner must be over her, to prevent her various castes and creeds flying at each others’ throats, and thus falling a prey to some other and infinitely worse foreign yoke, if the present one is removed; and that, therefore, the highest political wisdom demands that we should, as long as there are diversities of creeds and castes among us, cultivate with care the present servitude, trying to make it easy to bear for the nation, and profitable for the individual, by adopting the policy of “association with and opposition to the Government”. This plea must be knocked on the head, therefore, before we can expect to make out a reasonable case for that propaganda of national freedom and autonomy which has been taken up by the new party in the country. Those who say that caste and religious differences must first of all be destroyed before India can ever rise to the status of a nation, have very hazy and confused notions regarding the character and constitution of that nation. Our history has been different in many respects from the history of other peoples. The composition of the Indian people has been unique in all the world. Nations grew in the past by the accretion and assimilation of different tribes. This is an earlier process. But India has not been a mere meeting place of tribes, but a meeting place of grown up nations with developed social and religious lines of their own, and with original castes and types of cultures peculiar to them. The character and composition of the coming Indian nation, therefore, will differ very materially from those of the European nations, the process of unification among whom took place at a much earlier and comparatively more nebular stage of their growth. This is a fact which our old school politicians and social reformers do not seem as yet to have had any time to think of, and we are not hopeful that even now, after it is pointed out to them, in the plainest language possible, they will have the
Page – 168 patience to do so and recognise this essential peculiarity of our infant national life. The nation-idea in India will realise itself, in all its departments, along what may be called federal lines,— it will be a union of different nationalities, each preserving its own specific elements both of organisation and ideal, each communicating to the others what they lack in either thought or character, and all moving together towards one universal end, both in civic and social life, progressively realising that end along its own historic and traditional lines, and thus indefinitely drawing near to each other, without, for an equally indefinite period, actually losing themselves in any one particular form of that life, whether old or new. The Mahomedan, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian in India will not have to cease to be Mahomedan, Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian, in any sense of the term, for uniting into one great and puissant Indian nation. Devotion to one’s own ideals and institutions, with toleration and respect for the ideals and institutions of other sections of the community, and an ardent love and affection for the common civic life and ideal of all— these are what must be cultivated by us now, for the building up of the real Indian nation. To try to build it up in any other way will be impossible, whether that way be the way of the Brahmo, the Christian, or the propagandist Mahomedan. To make any attempt along any of these lines, will not make for but work against national unity; and the reckless men who organised this so-called national dinner will, if they persist in their folly, instead of bringing the different races and religions together, only help to arouse the opposition of orthodoxy everywhere, and drive the great forces that range always with orthodoxy to an attitude of open hostility to the great national movement, and bring about a reaction that will seek to accentuate those very differences and tighten those very bonds of caste and custom which in their unphilosophic and unscientific zeal they are trying by these wrong and obtrusive methods to obliterate and loosen. It is in this view that we condemn the folly that was perpetrated on Friday last under the name of a National Dinner. _________
Page – 169 Stop-gap Won’t Do
Even India has sometimes a ray of light in the midst of its twilight obscurity and crass lack of insight. Thus saith the organ of the Cottons and Wedderburns: “Mr. Morley will not be Secretary of State for India for ever and a day. So long as he is at the helm, the prow of the ship will be set in the right direction. But what will happen when his controlling hand is removed?” Precisely so, Mr. Morley may set the prow in the right direction, but it is perfectly evident from his public statements that he is not prepared to travel fast or far; on the contrary he is utterly against any decision and effective treatment of the intolerable situation in India. He is simply going to repeat an experiment which has failed and is out of date. We shall therefore gain little during his lease of power— and afterwards? Who shall secure us against another Curzonian reaction? We therefore say that an instalment of effective self-government is the one thing which the Congress should insist on because it is the one thing which will make reaction impossible. We farther contend that an effective instalment of self-government not only ought to be but must inevitably be the first step towards complete autonomy. For the statement of these plain and indisputable truths we must, forsooth, be dubbed “seditionists” and “extremists”, not only by Anglo-Indian papers for whose opinion we do not care a straw, but by Indian journals professing to be nationalist. There could not be a greater evidence of the dull servility of attitude, the fear of truth and the unworthy timidity which has become ingrained in our habits of mind by long acquiescence in servitude. If these things are sedition, then we are undoubtedly seditious and will persist in our sedition till the end of the chapter. ________
By the Way
The Bengalee came out on Sunday with an extraordinary leader in which it appeals to its opponents to sink all personal differences and unite in one common cause. The better to further
Page – 170 this desirable end it kicks them severely all round so as to bring them into a reasonable state of mind. The opponents of the Bengalee are all actuated by base personal motives; their organs of opinion are upstart journals trying to create a sensation; their championing of advanced political principles is a trick of the trade, etc. etc. And therefore the Bengalee appeals to them to be friendly, toe the line and follow faithfully in the wake of Babu Surendranath Banerji. Does our contemporary really think that this is the sort of appeal which is likely to heal the breach?
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The praise and approval of the Anglo-Indian papers, says the Bengalee wisely, is a sure sign that we are on the wrong road. Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung. On this principle, we ought to go on our way rejoicing. If there is one pleasing feature of the present situation, it is the remarkable unanimity with which the Anglo-Indian Press has greeted our appearance in the field with a shriek of denunciation and called on Heaven and Earth and the Government and the Moderates to league together and crush us out of existence. Statesman and Englishman, Times and Pioneer, all their discordant notes meet in one concord on this grand swelling theme. The “moderate” papers of all shades, pro-Government or advocates of association with Government or advocates of association-cum-opposition, have all risen to the call. The Hindu Patriot rejoices at our lack of influence, the Mirror threatens us with the prison and the scaffold, the Bengalee mutters about upstart journals and warns people against the morass which is the inevitable goal, in its opinion, of a forward policy. Well, well, well! Here is an extraordinary and most inexplicable clamour about an upstart journal and a party without influence or following in the country.
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The Statesman is taking its cue from the Mirror and is growing very truculent and minatory. It is not going to give us any quarter, this merciless “Friend of India”, but will abolish, expunge and
Page – 171 blot us out of existence in no time. It will not consent to support Indian aspirations unless we consent to perform harakiri. It will advise its friend Mr. Morley to make no concession, no, not even increase the number of our Legislative Honourables, until even the very scent of a “sedition” can no longer be sniffed in the Indian breezes.
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