{"id":2785,"date":"2013-07-13T01:43:48","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2785"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:43:48","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:43:48","slug":"115-bande-mataram-11-7-07-vol-06-07-bande-mataram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/06-07-bande-mataram\/115-bande-mataram-11-7-07-vol-06-07-bande-mataram","title":{"rendered":"-115_Bande Mataram 11-7-07.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
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\n\t
\n\tBande Mataram<\/font><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t
\n\t{
\n\tCALCUTTA, July 11th, 1907 }
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\n

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\n
\nEnglish Obduracy and Its Reason
\n<\/b>
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\n <\/p>\n

\nWe seriously invite our Moderate friends to ask themselves for a reason as to why Englishmen should invariably meet all their
\ndemands for political reforms with the one unalterable answer that they are not fit to receive them. Why should John Morley
\nwhose writings and sayings are so instinct with an ardent love of liberty, so lightly flout their prayer for some concessions of a
\ndemocratic nature? He not only denies the Indians the least measure of liberty, but shuts the door of any possible hope abruptly
\nin their face by telling them that as long as his imagination can travel into futurity so long must India remain under personal
\nrule. In his last Budget speech also he took the opportunity to reiterate his faith in the efficacy of personal rule for India and
\neven went a step further and indulged in the paternal prophecy that if the English left India today, she would plunge back into
\nrapine, bloodshed and chaos within a week. Naturally a Secretary of State who entertains such a low opinion of the Indian
\ncharacter would consider it the maximum of human folly to give Indians any control over the government of their country.
\nAnd the opinion of Mr. Morley only too truly represents that of the general body of the Europeans who have ever come into
\ncontact with India or thought about the problem she presents before humanity. The question is why should they all have arrived at this poor estimate of the Indian’s political capability? The answer, however, is not far to seek; we have only ourselves
\nto thank for this cosmopolitan contempt into which we have brought our country. The European remains today essentially as
\nhe was in the time of Aristotle, “a political animal”. His nature has retained throughout history its ingrained and inalienable
\n   
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\npolitical bent; polity has played the greatest part in the moulding
\nof his life and destiny; the ideas that have irresistibly moved him to heroic strivings, passionate hopes or death-defying sufferings
\nhave been mainly those of independence, freedom, liberty; the greatest names in his history are those of political heroes or
\ngovernors; the one call that has ever sung truly in his ears and commanded his unquestioning obedience is the call to the service of his country; the courting of death for the fulfilment or the upholding of the above ideas has been as natural to him
\nas breathing; the history of his country is the history of the increasing consummation of those ideas, in which faith and intellect have filled a subsidiary place. Such is the European by constitution. To him India is an insoluble riddle. How a country
\nof three hundred million men can consent to be governed by a handful of foreigners he simply cannot understand. He thinks
\nof the Indian as a member of a sub-human race, outside the pale of his privileges, his code of morality, his civilisation. And that
\nnew-fangled specimen of the Indian race, the educated Indian, only intensifies his contempt. That a man who has been nurtured
\non the literature of England, and has read the history of Europe, can still have failed to be touched by the European ideal, to be
\nvisited by an insatiable longing for liberty, and can continue, on the other hand, in a life of contented acquiescence in foreign rule,
\nand feel happy and proud merely to serve under it and ensure its continuation, strikes the native of Europe as a most monstrous
\nmockery, as some unimaginable and unaccountable perversion of human nature. He gradually gets to believe that whatever
\nmay be the excellence of his domestic life or the greatness of his philosophy, the Indian is by birth fit only to be a slave, and
\neducation succeeds in perfecting him only in the art of slavery. And as slavery means to the European the permanent extinction
\nof all the nobler possibilities that lie before man, servile India ceases altogether to engage his least consideration or enlist his
\nsympathy; let her alone with her slave’s philosophy and art, thinks he, she can be of no service to the future of the human
\nrace.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAnd the politics and politicians of India heighten further
\n   
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\n <\/p>\n

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\n\this convictions about the lowering nature and effect of slavery, and the impossibility of India ever lifting herself to the level of civilised humanity. Her politics are the slave’s politics
\nwhose method is prayer and petition and whose resentment or disapproval can find expression only in weeping and sobbing. And rebuff merely urges the Indian politician to greater efforts of supplication and to higher feats of wailing. And by
\nsuch persistent mendicancy alone he aspires to win his country’s liberty\u2014 liberty to which Europe has wilfully waded her way
\nthrough a welter of blood after her struggles of centuries. No, cries the irritated European, India can never be fit to govern
\nherself. This is the secret of John Morley’s point-blank refusal to satisfy Moderate aspirations; he has thrown to them a plaything
\nor two, for they deserve nothing better. And because Mr. Morley loves and prizes liberty more highly than the average man,
\ntherefore has he been the more intolerant of the Moderate’s pretensions, the more merciless in felling to the ground all his
\ncherished delusions based on his inverted conception of liberty. The Partition of Bengal Mr. Morley admits to be a wrong, but
\nhe will not undo it because it is a settled fact; in other words, in dealing with dependent India he refuses to observe the rules of
\npolitical morality which he has himself so clearly enunciated; in enunciating them, he would say, he had in contemplation only
\nthe rights and obligations that arise between one free people and another, and not the relationship between a ruling race and their
\nabjectly servile subjects. All his other pronouncements point to the same moral. And have we not heard of the common English
\nlabourer who on being harangued eloquently by a Moderate missionary about Indian grievances asked him bluntly if he was
\nreally relating the true state of affairs, and on being answered in the affirmative told the missionary without much ceremony
\nthat a people who could submit to such wrongs and could think of nothing better than the sending of representatives to England
\nto plead for their removal, fully deserved to be ruled by an arbitrary despotism? Unknowingly perhaps he was summarising
\nthe verdict of the civilised world on Indian politics. The moneymaking middle class in England say the same thing, and further
\n   <\/span><\/p>\n

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\n\tstrengthen their argument with the interesting inquiry, “What
\nis to become of our boys if we leave the management of India in your hands?” The man from the Continent or America asks
\nplainly, “How can the whole three hundred million of you be kept under by 70,000 tommies?”
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tOught not all this to give our Moderate friends furiously to think? We can appreciate the humanity of their desire to
\nemancipate the country without dragging her through the red horror of a revolution. But let them reconsider how best to
\nachieve this end. Surely their failure to obtain anything worth having after thirty years of patient supplication culminating in
\nthe supreme tragedy of the refusal of John Morley, the one man of whom they had expected more than of any other\u2014 even to
\nlisten to their prayers with any seriousness, ought to impel them to some introspective inquiry regarding the soundness of their
\npolitical faith. We also invite their thoughts to the changing attitude of England and of the whole world towards India since
\nthe declaration of the Boycott and the rise of the new party. We conjure the Moderate to spend his best and sincerest thoughts
\non these two most vital topics; and once he has begun to think<\/i>, we know the days of his creed are numbered, and there can be
\nbut one party in India, the Nationalists.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t
\n\t__________<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

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\n\t
\n\tIndustrial India
\n<\/b>
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\n\tThe Englishman <\/i>has the following\u2014 “Unfortunately for the Eastern artisan the present age is one devoted to mechanical
\ncontrivance. The handloom has given place to the power loom, the worker in metal has been displaced by the huge factories
\nwhich deal in a very wholesale way with tons of metal and most complicated machinery. The consequence has been that
\nIndian industry has been crushed by the superior strength of its European competitors, and the country has now practically
\nno resource save agriculture. This is regrettable for at least two reasons. Agriculture depending on the seasons, does not afford
\na stable basis for national prosperity. The absence of native   
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\n\t <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\tmanufacturing enterprise tends to dull the minds of the whole
\npeople. Hence we miss here the keenness to take advantage of opportunity, the readiness of industrial resource, which are
\ncharacteristic of other countries.” So far we agree with the Englishman<\/i>. But the
\nEnglishman <\/i>is discreetly silent about the causes
\nof this regrettable state of affairs. The reader of Indian history cannot be ignorant of the fact that England’s policy has been to
\ncrush Indian industries and thus convert her to the position of a producer of raw materials to be worked up beyond the seas.
\nAnd a “defective education” alone is not responsible for the shyness of Indian capital. However, we too admit that the system
\nof education, stamped with official approval, is responsible for much of our woe as it engenders a spirit of helpless dependence
\nand sense of inferiority and discourages in Indians the confidence in one’s own ability which is essential to enterprise. It is exactly
\nfor this reason that India has realised the necessity of a system of national education which will have the same effects in India that
\nsuch a system had in Germany. And we are sure the awakened spirit of nationalism, when it receives the powerful stimulus of
\na system of national education, will make the people self-reliant and able to bring about India’s industrial regeneration without
\nthe hollow sympathy and deceptive help of aliens.    <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t <\/p>\n

\n\t
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Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, July 11th, 1907 }   English Obduracy and Its Reason   We seriously invite our Moderate friends to ask themselves for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-06-07-bande-mataram","wpcat-54-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}