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Passing Thoughts Volume I - Feb. 19, 1910 - No. 33 The Bhagalpur Literary Conference
The prevalence of annual conferences in the semi-Europeanised life of Bengal is a curious phenomenon eloquent of the unreality of our present culture and the inefficiency of our modernised existence. Our old life was well, even minutely organised on an intelligent and consistent Oriental model. The modern life of Europe is well and largely organised on an intelligent and consistent Occidental model. It materialises certain main ideas of life and well-being, provides certain centres of life, equips them efficiently, serves the object with which they are instituted. Our old life did the same. But this is precisely what our modern life does not do. Its institutions are apes of a foreign plan, unintelligent expressions of an idea which is not ours; they serve no civic, no national purpose. They are the spasmodic movements of an organism whose own life is arrested, but which feels itself compelled to move, however awkwardly and uselessly, if only to persuade itself that it is not dead. We have for instance a Literary Conference which meets once a year, if nothing occurs to prevent it. But such an annual celebration has no intelligent purpose except as the centre of an organised literary life. The pulse of our literary life is feeble and artificial. Its centres are conspicuous by their absence. In Europe the club, the literary paper, the coterie, the school of writing, the Academy are distinct entities in which the members of the organism have living relations, a common atmosphere, a common intellectual food. They have no Literary Conference because the literary life of Europe is a reality. We in India have neither these institutions nor any other centres of our own. The Conference is a convulsive attempt to relate ourselves to each other, which evinces a vague desire for united living, but no capacity to effect it. There was a time when a vigorous literary life seemed about to form itself in Bengal, and its relics are seen in the literary magazine
Page – 402 and the Sahitya Parishad; but at present these serve only to record the extremely languid pulsation of our intellectual existence. The great intellectual stir, hopefulness and activity of the last century has disappeared. The individual lives to himself, vigorously or feebly, according to the varying robustness of his personality or intensity of his temperament. Co-ordination is still far from us.
Life creates institutions; institutions do not create, but express and preserve life. This is a truth we are too apt to forget. The Europeans and especially our Gurus, the English, attach an exaggerated importance to machinery, because their own machinery has been so successful, their organisation so strong and triumphant. In the conceit of this success they imagine that their machinery is the only machinery and that the adoption of their organisation by foreign peoples is all that is needed for perfect social and political felicity. In Europe this blind attachment to machinery does not do fatal harm, because the life of a free nation has developed the existing institutions and modifies them by its own irresistible law of life and development. But to take over those institutions and think that they will magically develop European virtues, force and robustness, or the vivid and vigorous life of Europe, is as if a man were to steal another's coat and think to take over with it his character. Have not indeed many of us thought by masquerading in the amazing garb which nineteenth century Europe developed, to become so many brown Englishmen ? This curious conjuring trick did not work; hatted, coated and pantalooned, we still kept the Chaddar and the Dhoty in our characters. The fond attempt to become great, enlightened and civilised by borrowing European institutions will be an equally disastrous failure.
In India we were, if possible, even more attached to our machinery — all the more because we had ceased to understand the
Page – 403 science of social mechanics which they embodied. We attached a superstitious importance to maintaining our society exactly in the mould of our Shastras while in reality that mould had been altered out of recognition centuries ago. We quoted Parasara and Manu while we followed Raghunandan and custom. This religious fiction was very much like the English superstition about the British constitution which is supposed to be the same thing it was in the days of Lord Somers, but is really a thing Lord Somers would have stared at aghast as an unrecognisable democratic horror. The cause is the same in both cases — a robust and tenacious society freely developing its machinery in response to its inner needs while cherishing and preserving them. Englishman and Hindu have been alike in their tenacious conservatism and their refusal to accept revolution, alike in their respect for law and the thing established, alike in their readiness to change rapidly and steadily if the innovator would only disguise from them the fact that they were changing. The Hindu advanced more slowly because he was an Asiatic in a period of contraction, the Englishman more quickly because he was an European in a period of expansion. If our social reformers had understood this Indian characteristic, they might have revolutionised our society with comparatively small friction, but the parade of revolution which they made hampered their cause. Even as it is, Indian Society, in Bengal at least, is changing utterly while all the time loudly protesting that it has not changed and will not change. The mould in which Raghunandan cast society, is disintegrating as utterly as the mould of Parasara or Manu has disintegrated. What will replace it, is another matter.
Every Samaj must have its Shastra, written or unwritten. Where there is no Social Scripture, there is none the less a minute and rigid code of social laws binding men in their minutest actions. The etiquette of the European is no less binding than the minute scrupulosities of Manu or Raghunandan, and it is even more minute and scrupulous. It is a mistake to think that in Europe men can eat as they will, talk as they will, act as they will with
Page – 404 impunity. They cannot — or at least they could not, though one hears of strange revolutions, and in the days of the suffragette everything is possible. Society everywhere is exacting, scrupulous, minute, pitiless in punishment of slight departures from its code, however absurd and unreasonable that code may be. But while in India the sanction is religious, in Europe it is social. In India a man dreaded spiritual impurity, in Europe he shrinks from the sneers and disliike of his class or his fellows. Social excommunication is always the ultimate penalty.
But in Europe and India alike we seem to stand on the threshold of a vast revolution, political, social and religious. Whatever nation now is the first to solve the problems which are threatening to hammer Governments, creeds, societies into pieces all the world over, will lead the world in the age that is coming. It is our ambition that India should be that nation. But in order that she should be what we wish, it is necessary that she should be capable of unsparing revolution. She must have the courage of her past knowledge and the immensity of soul that will measure itself with her future. This is impossible to England, it is not impossible to India. She has in her something daemonic, volcanic, elemental — she can rise above conventions, she can break through formalities and prejudices. But she will not do so unless she is sure that she has God's command to do it, — unless the Avatar descends and leads. She will follow a Buddha or a Mohammad wherever he will lead her, because he is to her either God himself, or his servant, — because as Sri Ramakrishna would have put it, she saw the Chapras. It was a little of that daemonic, volcanic, elemental thing in the heart of the Indian which Lord Curzon lashed into life in 1905. But the awakening was too narrow in its scope, too feebly supported with strength, too ill-informed in knowledge. Above all the Avatar had not descended. So the movement has drawn back to await a farther and truer impulse. Meanwhile let it inform its intellect and put more iron into its heart, awaiting a diviner manifestation.
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