{"id":2884,"date":"2013-07-13T01:44:22","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2884"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:44:22","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:22","slug":"19-bande-mataram-30-8-06-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\/19-bande-mataram-30-8-06-vol-06-07-bande-mataram","title":{"rendered":"-19_Bande Mataram 30-8-06.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t
\n\t
\n\t
\nBande Mataram <\/font><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t
\n\t{ CALCUTTA, August 30th, 1906 }<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t
\n\tLoyalty and Disloyalty in East Bengal
\n<\/font><\/b>
\n\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t <\/p>\n

\n\tThe Englishman <\/i>and those who are evidently anxious to set the machinery of relentless state prosecutions against the leaders of
\nthe present national movement in this province, need not take so much trouble to prove that there is considerable disaffection
\nand disloyalty in East Bengal which ought at once to be put down with a strong hand. Our contemporary must be far more
\nsimple-minded than what one should expect him to be, judging both from his general education and experience and his position as an intelligent observer and critic of current affairs, if he ever thought that there could be any real affection and loyalty
\nto an alien despotism, such as the present Government in this country undoubtedly is, in the minds of the subject populations
\nin India. Lord Curzon once declared that though differing in colour and culture, the Indians were as much human as the
\nBritishers, and had the same sentiments and susceptibilities that the British people had. If the
\nEnglishman <\/i>and his friends believe
\nin this common humanity of the Indian, they have simply to place themselves mentally in the position of their “native
\n\tfellow-subjects”, to realise the kind of affection and loyalty for the present Government that can ever be felt by the people of this
\ncountry. Indeed, loyalty as a feeling of personal love and regard for the sovereign is an extinct virtue in civilisation, and, if it is
\nnot found in countries where the sovereign belongs to the people, and lives and stands among them as the head of their State and
\nthe fountain of all social honour, and where the people always participate in his glory, his magnificence and his wealth,\u2014 each
\naccording to his status and qualification,\u2014 how much more rare must it be in a country like India whose sovereign belongs
\n    <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n\tto a distant country and an alien race, who professes an alien
\nreligion, who is not related to the people by any ties of tradition or past historic associations, and in the glories and prerogatives
\nof whose throne, as well as in the wealth and magnificence of whose empire, these people have neither lot nor part. To
\nbelieve the barest possibility of any true loyalty in India is really to take the Indians to be very much less than human. But, in
\ntruth, nobody ever honestly believed in it. Loyalty has ever been a mere convenient tie in this country\u2014 convenient to the ruler
\nbecause the reputation for profound loyalty of the Indian people keeps foreign enemies away; convenient to the ruled because like
\ncharity it covereth a multitude of political sins. But in truth no one ever really believed in this much-proclaimed virtue. No Englishman ever honestly believed in the truth of it. No Indian ever cherished it honestly himself. Both the rulers and the ruled have
\nbeen playing at blind man’s buff all these years with this great civic virtue, each seeking to make some political capital out of it.
\n\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tThat the British Government in India never set a two-pence value on the loyalty of their Indian subjects,\u2014 though they are
\nalways anxious to proclaim it from the housetops, as a magnificent charm to keep away the evil-eye\u2014 is proved by the entire
\nhistory of their past transactions with us. The Arms Act surely does not prove England’s faith in India’s loyalty. The Frenchman, the German, the American, nay, even the Negro and the Hottentot,\u2014 indeed every foreigner can possess arms and bear
\nthem in India without a licence; the man who belongs to the country and who is most interested in its prosperity and peace,
\nalone cannot do so. The systematic exclusion of the people of the land, however qualified they may be, from all positions of
\nexceptional trust and responsibility in what ought, by the law of God and nature alike, to be their own Government, surely
\ndoes not prove that English statesmen ever honestly believed in the allegiance of the Indian people to their rule. The methods of
\nstate-regulated education, which carefully eschew every training or text book or instruction that is calculated to quicken any
\ngenuine love of freedom or any noble patriotism in the pupils; the extreme anxiety of the authorities to train the youths of this
\n   
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\n

\n\tcountry in habits of gentleness and subordination, while in their
\nown country every form of manliness and even rowdyism as long as it does not strike against the very soul of social and civic
\norders are not only tolerated, but frequently encouraged by the leaders of public opinion and the custodians of public morals;
\nthe denial of the commonest right of free citizenship,\u2014 the right of free participation in public meetings having for their object
\nthe reform of the Administration,\u2014 to the commonest of public servants; the crusade against every form of patriotic efforts on
\nthe part of the people, such as are calculated to inspire them with devotion to their nation, all these go distinctly to prove at
\nwhat value the much proclaimed loyalty of the people of this country is really rated by their foreign masters. The fact really
\nis that loyalty in the sense in which the term is usually used,\u2014 either in the old sense of loving attachment to the person or
\nthrone of the sovereign, or even in the new and higher sense of devotion to the State which reveals and realises the highest
\ncivic ideals and aspirations of the subjects,\u2014 cannot naturally exist or grow in a country that is subject to the domination
\nof another. No Englishman therefore honestly believes in it in India, however much he may be anxious to conjure it up in times
\nof trouble or difficulty as a saving magic working for his safety and salvation. Loyalty, in the general acceptance of the term, has
\nbeen a mere myth in British India; and the Englishman <\/i>need not be at so much pains to disprove the presence of a thing in East
\nBengal that had never as yet existed in any part of the country subject to British rule. Disloyalty is want of loyalty, and there
\ncannot be anywhere an absence of a thing,\u2014 as a new fact,\u2014 where that thing had never existed before.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tBut if loyalty is not possible in India in its present condition of servitude, what then is the secret of that unquestioning
\nobedience to the authority of the present alien Government in the country, which alone makes it easy and possible for them to
\nrule so vast a population with such slender means? The answer is plain and obvious: it is not affection, neither is it disaffection, both of which are active sentiments, but mere indifference, mere listlessness, the fatuous fatalism of the Hindu and the
\n   
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\n

\n\tMahomedan populations of India that keeps them so easily
\nunder British subjection. Not loyalty, not allegiance, but mere passive acquiescence,\u2014 that is the word which sums up the real
\nattitude of the Indian people towards their foreign master and the outlandish civic order they have established in the country.
\nThis acquiescence is due to a general belief\u2014 now rapidly being undermined and destroyed by the open excesses and repressions
\nof recent administrations\u2014 in the benevolence of the British despotism, itself the result of a strange hypnotic spell that British
\npoliticians and statesmen of the earlier generations had cast over the people. If by loyalty is meant this passive acquiescence to
\nthe existing civic order in the country, there is still considerable loyalty in the country, though the events of the past five or six
\nyears have done much to disturb even this passive sentiment in the people.
\n\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tBut there has always been another kind of loyalty also in this country, and that species of loyalty exists still among us, both
\nin East Bengal and West Bengal, though it has been subjected during the last eight or nine months to a strain which would
\nkill it altogether in any other country, and most of all in that country to which the
\nEnglishman <\/i>himself belongs, and this kind
\nof loyalty will last as long as the Government and those whose views the Englishman
\n<\/i>represents, do not themselves destroy it
\nwith their own hand. Loyalty in the radical sense of the term, derived from lex\u2014<\/i> law, and meaning obedience to law\u2014 has
\nalways been a cordial characteristic of our people; and in this sense people have always been loyal in this country. This loyalty\u2014 this extreme regard for law of the Indian population\u2014 has been the strongest bulwark of the present foreign despotism in
\nthis country. We are still loyal, as we have been in the past, in the sense of law-abiding. Had we not been loyal in this, the
\ntruest sense of the term, the history of British administration in every part of India would have to be very differently written
\nindeed. In fact the Englishman <\/i>ought not to forget that it is this extreme loyalty of the people that saved the situation created in
\nBarisal and elsewhere by the lawless excesses of the executive Government during the last nine or ten months. Had our people
\n   
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\n

\n\tbeen less law-abiding than they are, the whole country would
\nhave long ago been completely given over to riots and mob-rule, which it would tax the entire strength and resources of the
\nGovernment to grapple with and conquer. The lawless excesses of the Executive and the Police in East Bengal during the last
\neight or nine months, are matters of common knowledge; and the Englishman
\n<\/i>knows it full well that there is no other country
\nin the world where such wanton oppression and injustice would have been so quietly borne by the people as these have been
\nborne in the New Province. To attribute this to the cowardice of the people would be an act of fatal folly on the part of the Government or their advisers. East Bengal, at least, has never been noted for such cowardice. It is not fear, but self-restraint due to
\nconsiderations of larger and higher interests, and the command of their leaders that kept East Bengal so quiet under all these
\nenormities during the last nine or ten months. But this loyalty also seems apparently to be giving way now, for it is useless to
\nconceal the fact that a grim determination has gradually grown among the people to no longer suffer any illegal excesses, in the
\nway they have been suffered so long. But even in this new spirit of resistance in the people there is no lack of regard for law,
\nfor this new determination means not to outrage but to protect the honour and dignity of the law itself, when both are openly
\noutraged by those whose duty it is to protect them. If this be disloyalty, we freely admit this disloyalty exists, and is growing
\nto great proportions in every part of the country; and the threats of the Englishman
\n<\/i>or the setting of the sedition-law in motion
\nwill not kill, but only increase this disloyalty the more.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t_______<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t <\/p>\n

\n\t
\n\tBy the Way
\n<\/font><\/b>
\n\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t <\/p>\n

\n\tDiogenes in the Statesman <\/i>indulges himself in a paragraph of grave advice to the “self-constituted” leaders of the Indian
\nlabour movement. For a philosopher, our friend takes singularly little trouble to understand the opponents’ case. Neither Mr.
\nA. K. Ghose nor Mr. Aswini Banerji nor any of their assistants   
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\tproposes, so far as we know, to benefit labour by getting rid
\nof English capital. What they do propose, is to get rid of the exceedingly unjust conditions under which Indian labour has
\nto sweat in order to enrich alien capitalists. And by the way, as it were, they also propose to get rid of the habit of coarse
\ninsult and brutal speech which Englishmen have accustomed themselves to indulge in when dealing with “low-class” Indians.
\n\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tAre the leaders of Indian labour self-constituted? One would imagine that men whom Indian workers naturally turn to in
\ndifficulty and who can organise in a few weeks so large an affair as the Railway Union, have vindicated their claim to be the
\nnational leaders of Labour. At any rate their constituents have very enthusiastically ratified their “self-constituted” authority.
\nBut perhaps Diogenes has been converted from cynicism to Vedanta, and sees no difference between the self of the railway
\nemployees and the self of Mr. A. K. Ghose. Still, the tub from which he holds forth is a small one, and he should not cumber
\none-sixth of his space with such cumber.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tThe rift between the Labourites and the Liberals grows daily
\nwider. The alliance was never natural and cannot in its nature be permanent. But official Liberaldom will be foolish indeed if it
\ndeclares war on Labour at the present juncture. The Socialistic element in England is quite strong enough to turn the Liberal
\ntriumph of 1905 into a serious disaster at the next elections. Nor are the Labourites likely to be frightened by Ministerial menaces.
\nMr. Winston Churchill and the Master of Elibank may thunder from their high official Olympus, but Mr. Keir Hardie will go
\non his way unscathed and unmoved. He knows that the future is with Socialism and he can afford to despise the temporary and
\nimperfect fruits which a Liberal alliance promises.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tFor us English politics have small personal interest. From the
\nConservatives we can expect nothing but open oppression, from the Liberals, nothing but insincere professions and fraudulent
\nconcessions,\u2014 shadows calling themselves substance. Can we hope better things from Labour? Many whose judgment we
\nrespect, think that there is a real ally\u2014 that the friendship of Labour for India is sincere and disinterested. For the present, yes.
\n   
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n

\n\tBut when Labour becomes a power and sits on front benches we
\nfear that it will be as intolerant and oppressive as Conservatism itself. Australia is a Labour Commonwealth, and we know the
\nattitude of the Australian working-man to Indians and Asiatics generally. India’s hope lies not in English Liberalism or Labour,
\nbut in her own strong heart and giant limbs. Titaness, who by thy mere attempt to rise can burst these Lilliputian bonds, why
\nshouldst thou clamour feebly for help to these pigmies over the sea?
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t
\n\tPage \u2013 125<\/font><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, August 30th, 1906 } Loyalty and Disloyalty in East Bengal   The Englishman and those who are evidently anxious to set…<\/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-2884","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\/2884","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=2884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2884\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}