FOOTNOTES:
[43] “My illustrious Friend, and Joy of my Liver! The thing you ask of me is both difficult and useless. Although I have passed all my days in this place, I have neither counted the houses nor inquired into the number of the inhabitants; and as to what one person loads on his mules and the other stows away in the bottom of his ship, that is no business of mine. But, above all, as to the previous history of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the infidels may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It were unprofitable for us to inquire.
“Oh, my soul! Oh, my lamb! seek not after the things which concern thee not. Thou camest unto us and we welcomed thee: go in peace.
“Of a truth, thou hast spoken many words; and there is no harm done, for the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of thy people thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy and content in none. We (praise be to God) were born here, and never desire to quit it. Is it possible then that the idea of a general intercourse between mankind should make any impression on our understanding? God forbid!
“Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal to the belief in God. He created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of His creation? Shall we say, behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goes and comes in so many years? Let it go. He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it.
“But thou wilt say to me, Stand aside, O man, for I am more learned than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkest thou art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God that I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the things I care not for; and as for that which thou hast seen, I defile it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek Paradise with thine eyes?
“Oh, my friend, if thou wilt be happy, say there is no God but God! Do not evil and then wilt thou fear neither man nor death; for surely thine hour will come.
“The meek in spirit,
“Imaum Ali Zade.”
Layard’s “Nineveh and Babylon,” p. 663.
CHAPTER XII
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.
The Kalighat.
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!