“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!
FOOTNOTES
[44] For Bepin Chandra Pal’s action during a prosecution of the Bande Mataram, see Introduction, p. [23].
[45] Bande Mataram, January 21, 1908.
[46] As Macaulay is no longer thought generally necessary to education, it may be worth while to recall a few sentences of his indictment of a whole people nearly twice as numerous as his own. The passage comes in his essay on Warren Hastings: “A war of Bengalis against Englishmen was like a war of sheep against wolves, of men against demons.... The physical organization of the Bengali is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situations are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness, for purposes of manly resistance; but its suppleness and its tact move the children of sterner climates to admiration not unmingled with contempt. All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to the Ionian of the time of Juvenal, or to the Jew of the dark ages. What the horns are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, what the sting is to the bee, what beauty, according to the old Greek song, is to woman, deceit is to the Bengali.” And so on, for many more sentences of nicely balanced rhetoric.
[47] Bande Mataram, January 22, 1908.
[48] On May 3, 1908, Mr. Arabindo Ghose was arrested on the charge of being implicated in a conspiracy to provide rifles and dynamite for revolutionary purposes.
[49] The Times of India, October 26, 1907.