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:—