VII

Our Hope in the Future

BUT PROFOUND as have been its effects, this revolution is yet in its infancy. Visible on every side, in the waning influence of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, in the triumph of the Bengali language, in the return to Hinduism, in the pride of birth, the angry national feeling and the sensitiveness to insult, which are growing more and more common among our young men, it has nevertheless only begun its work and has many more fields to conquer. Calcutta is yet a stronghold of the Philistines; officialdom is honeycombed with the antinational tradition: in politics and social reform the workings of the new movement are yet obscure. The Anglicised Babu sits in the high place and rules the earth for a season. It is he who perorates on the Congress, who frolics in the abysmal fatuity of interpellation on the Legislative Council, who mismanages civic affairs in the smile of the City Corporation. He is the man of the present, but he is not the man of the future. On his generation, a generation servilely English and swayed by Keshab Chandra Sen and Kristo Das Pal, Bankim had little effect. Even now you will hear Anglicised Bengalis tell you with a sort of triumph that the only people who read Bengali books are the Bengali ladies. The sneer is a little out of date, but a few years ago it would not have been so utterly beside the mark. All honour then to the women of Bengal, whose cultured appreciation kept Bengali literature alive! And all honour to the noble few who with only the women of Bengal and a small class of cultured men to appreciate their efforts, adhered to the language our forefathers spoke, and did not sell themselves to the tongue of the foreigner! Their reward is the heartfelt gratitude of a nation and an immortal renown. Yes, the women of Bengal have always been lovers of literature and may they always remain so; but it is no longer true that they are its only readers. Already we see the embryo of a new generation

Page – 116

soon to be with us, whose imagination Bankim has caught and who care not for Keshab Chandra Sen and Kristo Das Pal, a generation national to a fault, loving Bengal and her new glories, and if not Hindus themselves, yet zealous for the honour of the ancient religion and hating all that makes war on it. With that generation the future lies and not with the Indian Unnational Congress or the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. Already its vanguard is upon us. It has in it men of culture, men of talent, men of genius. Let it only be true to itself and we shall do yet more marvellous things in the future than we have done in the past. A Bengali may be pardoned who looking back to a splendid beginning and on to a hopeful sequel, indulges in proud and grandiose hopes.

Literature and learning are the provinces in which the Bengali is fitted to have kingship, and of the two literature rather than learning; but signs are not wanting that in other spheres also he may win laurels only less splendid. In painting and sculpture, in the plastic arts, the Hindu imagination has had no gift. The favourite style is evidence of a debauched eye and a perverted taste. Yet even in this alien sphere a Bengali has been winning noble renown, and that too in Italy, the native land of painting, the land of Raphael, Da Vinci and Angelo, and among Italians, with whom artistic taste is an instinct. In religion too, the Bengali has the future in his hands. He was the first to revolt against the shortcomings of Hinduism, and he is the first who has attempted to give some shape to that New Hinduism, which is, one feels, his religious destiny. He has sojourned for some time in the religious thought of the foreigner, but he is now coming back to the creed of his fathers with strange and precious gifts in his hands. In politics he has always led and still leads. The Congress in Bengal is dying of consumption; annually its proportions shrink into greater insignificance; its leaders, the Bonnerjis and Banerjis and Lalmohan Ghoses have climbed into the rarefied atmosphere of the Legislative Council and lost all hold on the imagination of the young men. The desire for a nobler and more inspiring patriotism is growing more intense; and already in the Hindu revival and the rise of an Indigenous  

Page – 117

Trade Party we see the handwriting on the wall. This is an omen of good hope for the future; for what Bengal thinks tomorrow, India will be thinking tomorrow week. Even towards commerce and science, spheres in which he has been painfully helpless, the Bengali is casting wistful glances; but whether he will here as elsewhere ascend the ladder, can only be settled by experiment. He is almost too imaginative, restless and swayed by his feelings for paths in which a cold eye or an untroubled brain is the one thing needful. Nevertheless let Bengal only be true to her own soul, and there is no province in which she may not climb to greatness. That this is so, is largely due to the awakening and stimulating influence of Bankim on the national mind. Young Bengal gets its ideas, feelings and culture not from schools and colleges, but from Bankim's novels and Robindranath Tagore's poems; so true is it that language is the life of a nation.

Many are carrying on the great work in prose and poetry: Hemchandra, Nobin, Kamini Sen, Robindranath and Robindranath's sister, that flower of feminine culture in Bengal, Swarna Kumari Devi, and many more whose names it would take long to repeat; but another Bankim, another Madhu Sudan comes not again. Some are pointing to this as a sign of intellectual barrenness; but it is not so. Shakespeare and Milton came within the limits of a century! Since then there have been Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, but not a second Shakespeare or Milton. Dante and Boccaccio came successively: since then there have been Berni, Boiardo, Alfieri, Tasso, but not a second Dante or Boccaccio. Such men come rarely in the lapse of centuries. Greece alone has presented the world an unbroken succession of supreme geniuses. There is nothing to prevent us Hindus, a nation created for thought and literature, from repeating that wonderful example. Greece is a high name, but what man has once done, man may again strive to do. All we need is not to tie ourselves down to a false ideal, not to load our brains with the pedantry of a false education, but to keep like those first builders a free intellect and a free soul. If we are careful to do that, there is no reason why the creative impulse in Bengal should for a moment die out. But whatever  

Page – 118

else may perish or endure, Bankim's fame cannot die. Already it has overleaped the barrier between East and West; translations of his works are already appearing in English and German, and wherever they are read, they excite admiration, wonder and delight. O sage politicians, and subtle economists, whose heads run on Simultaneous Examinations and whose vision is bounded by Legislative Councils, what a lesson is here for you! Not in this way shall we exalt ourselves in the scale of nations, not in this way, O sages of the bench and sophists of the bar, but by things of which your legal wisdom takes little cognizance, by noble thoughts, by high deeds, by immortal writings. Bankim and Madhu Sudan have given the world three noble things. They have given it Bengali literature, a literature whose princelier creations can bear comparison with the proudest classics of modern Europe. They have given it the Bengali language. The dialect of Bengal is no longer a dialect, but has become the speech of Gods, a language unfading and indestructible, which cannot die except with the death of the Bengali nation, and not even then. And they have given it the Bengali nation; a people spirited, bold, ingenious and imaginative, high among the most intellectual races of the world, and if it can but get perseverance and physical elasticity, one day to be high among the strongest. This is surely a proud record. Of them it may be said in the largest sense that they, being dead, yet live. And when Posterity comes to crown with her praises the Makers of India, she will place her most splendid laurel not on the sweating temples of a place hunting politician nor on the narrow forehead of a noisy social reformer, but on the serene brow of that gracious Bengali who never clamoured for place or for power, but did his work in silence for love of his work, even as nature does, and just because he had no aim but to give out the best that was in him, was able to create a language, a literature and a nation.

Page – 119