{"id":2898,"date":"2013-07-13T01:44:27","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2898"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:44:27","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:27","slug":"65-bande-mataram-29-4-07-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\/65-bande-mataram-29-4-07-vol-06-07-bande-mataram","title":{"rendered":"-65_Bande Mataram 29-4-07.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
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\n\tBande Mataram<\/font><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

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\n\t{
\n\tCALCUTTA, April 29th, 1907 }
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\nSHALL INDIA BE FREE?
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\nNational Development and Foreign Rule <\/b>
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\nIn dealing with the Loyalist creed it will be convenient to examine first the general postulate before we can come to those which apply particularly to the conditions of India. The contention is
\nthat a healthy development is possible under foreign domination. In this view national independence is a thing of no moment or at
\nleast its importance has been grossly exaggerated. Nations can very well do without it; provided they have a good government
\nwhich keeps the people happy and contented and allows them to develop their economic activities and moral virtues, they need
\nnot repine at being ruled by others. For certain nations in certain periods of their development liberty would be disastrous and
\nsubjection to foreign rule is the most healthy condition. India, argue the Loyalists, is an example of such a nation in such a period. The first business of its people is to develop their commerce, become educated and enlightened, reform their society and their
\nmanners and so grow more and more fit for self-government. In proportion as they become more civilised and more fit, they
\nwill receive from their sympathetic, just and discerning rulers an ever-increasing share in the administration of the country
\nuntil with entire fitness will come entire possession of the status of British citizenship. The idea is that foreign rule is a Providential dispensation or a provision of Nature for training an imperfectly developed people in the methods of civilisation and
\nthe arts of self-government. This theory is a modern invention. Ancient and mediaeval Imperialism frankly acknowledged the
\nprinciple of might is right; the conquering nation considered that   
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\n\tits military superiority was in itself a proof that it was meant
\nto rule and the subject nation to obey; liberty, being denied by Providence to the latter, could not be good for it and there
\nwas no call on the ruler to concede it either now or hereafter. This was the spirit in which England conquered and governed
\nIreland by the same methods of cynical treachery and ruthless massacre which in modern times are usually considered to be
\nthe monopoly of despotisms like Turkey and Russia. But by the time that England had fastened its hold on India, a change
\nhad come over the modern world. The Greek ideas of freedom and democracy had penetrated the European mind and created
\nthe great impulse of democratic Nationalism which dominated Europe in the nineteenth century. The idea that despotism of any
\nkind was an offence against humanity, had crystallised into an instinctive feeling, and modern morality and sentiment revolted
\nagainst the enslavement of nation by nation, of class by class or of man by man. Imperialism had to justify itself to this modern
\nsentiment and could only do so by pretending to be a trustee of liberty, commissioned from on high to civilise the uncivilised and
\ntrain the untrained until the time had come when the benevolent conqueror had done his work and could unselfishly retire. Such
\nwere the professions with which England justified her usurpation of the heritage of the Moghul and dazzled us into acquiescence
\nin servitude by the splendour of her uprightness and generosity. Such was the pretence with which she veiled her annexation
\nof Egypt. These Pharisaic pretensions were especially necessary to British Imperialism because in England the Puritanic
\nmiddle class had risen to power and imparted to the English temperament a sanctimonious self-righteousness which refused
\nto indulge in injustice and selfish spoliation except under a cloak of virtue, benevolence and unselfish altruism. The genesis of the
\nLoyalist gospel can be found in the need of British Imperialism to justify itself to the liberalised sentiment of the nineteenth
\ncentury and to the Puritanic middle-class element in the British nation.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tThe question then arises, has this theory any firmer root? Is it anything more than a convenient theory? Has it any relations
\n   
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\n\twith actual facts or with human experience? To answer this question it is necessary to distinguish between three kinds of liberty, which are generally confused together. There is a national liberty
\nor freedom from foreign control; there is an internal liberty or that freedom from the despotism of an individual, a class or a
\ncombination of classes to which the name of self-government is properly given; and there is individual liberty or the freedom
\nof the individual from unnecessary and arbitrary restrictions imposed on him either by the society of which he is a part or
\nby the Government, whether that Government be monarchical, democratic, oligarchic or bureaucratic. The question at issue is,
\nthen, which, if any, of these three kinds of liberty is essential to the healthy development of national life; or can there be such
\ndevelopment without any liberty at all?
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tThe object of national existence, of the formation of men
\ninto groups and their tacit agreement to allow themselves to be ruled by an organised instrument of administration which
\nis called the Government, is nothing else than human development in the individual and in the group. The individual,
\nstanding alone, cannot develop; he depends on the support and assistance of the group to which he belongs. The group
\nitself cannot develop unless it has an organisation by means of which it not only secures internal peace and order and protection
\nfrom external attack but also proper conditions which will give free play for the development of its activities and capacities\u2014 physical, moral, intellectual. The nation or group is not like the individual who can specialise his development and throw
\nall his energies into one line. The nation must develop military and political greatness and activity, intellectual and aesthetic
\ngreatness and activity, commercial greatness and activity, moral sanity and vigour; it cannot sacrifice any of these functions of
\nthe organism without making itself unfit for the struggle for life and finally succumbing and perishing under the pressure
\nof more highly organised nations. The purely commercial State like Carthage is broken in the shock with a nation which has
\ndeveloped the military and political as well as the commercial energies. A purely military state like Sparta cannot stand against
\n   
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\n\trivals which to equal military efficiency unite a greater science,
\nintellectual energy and political ability. A purely aesthetic and intellectual state like the Greek colonies in Italy or a purely moral
\nand spiritual community like the empire of Peru are blotted out of existence in the clash with ruder but more vigorous and
\nmany-sided organisms. No Government, therefore, can really be good for a nation or serve the purposes of national life and
\ndevelopment which does not give full scope for the development of all the national activities, capacities and energies. Foreign
\nrule is unnatural and fatal to a nation precisely because by its very nature it throws itself upon these activities and capacities
\nand crushes them down in the interests of its own continued existence. Even when it does not crush them down violently, it
\nobstructs their growth passively by its very presence. The subject nation becomes dependent, disorganised and loses its powers by
\natrophy. For this reason national independence is absolutely necessary to national growth. There can be no national development
\nwithout national liberty. <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\tIndividual liberty is necessary to national development, because, if the individual is unduly hampered, the richness of national life suffers and is impoverished. If the individual is given
\nfree room to realise himself, to perfect, specialise and enrich his particular powers and attain the full height of his manhood, the
\nvariety and rapidity of national progress is immensely increased. In so far as he is fettered and denied scope, the development
\nof the nation is cramped and retarded. A Government which denies scope and liberty to the individual, as all foreign Governments must to a considerable extent deny it, helps to cramp the healthy development of the nation and not to forward it.
\nThe development of the individual is and must be an embarrassment to the intruding power unless the numbers are so few
\nthat they can be bribed into acquiescence and support by the receipt of honours, employment or other personal advantages.
\nFor development creates ambition and nothing is more fatal to the continuance of foreign rule than the growth of ambitions
\nin the subject race which it cannot satisfy. The action of Lord Curzon in introducing the Universities Act was for the British
\n   
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\n\tdomination in India an act of inevitable necessity, which had to
\nbe done some time or other. Its only defect from the Imperialist point of view was that it came too late.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tJust as individual liberty is necessary for the richness and variety of national development, so self-government is necessary
\nfor its completeness and the full deployment of national strength. If certain classes are dominant and others depressed, the result
\nis that the potential strength of the depressed classes is so much valuable force lost to the sum of national strength. The dominant
\nclasses may undoubtedly show a splendid development and may make the nation great and famous in history; but when all is said
\nthe strength of the nation is then only the sum of the strength of a few privileged classes. The great weakness of India in the past
\nhas been the political depression and nullity of the mass of the population. It was not from the people of India that India was
\nwon by Moghul or Briton, but from a small privileged class. On the other hand the strength and success of the Marathas and
\nSikhs in the eighteenth century was due to the policy of Shivaji and Guru Govind which called the whole nation into the fighting
\nline. They failed only because the Marathas could not preserve the cohesion which Shivaji gave to their national strength or the
\nSikhs the discipline which Guru Govind gave to the Khalsa. Is it credible that a foreign rule would either knowingly foster or
\nallow the growth of that universal political consciousness in the subject nation which self-government implies? It is obvious that
\nforeign rule can only endure so long as political consciousness can be either stifled by violence or hypnotised into inactivity.
\nThe moment the nation becomes politically self-conscious, the doom of the alien predominance is sealed. The bureaucracy
\nwhich rules us, is not only foreign in origin but external to us,\u2014 it holds and draws nourishing sustenance for itself from
\nthe subject organism by means of tentacles and feelers thrust out from its body thousands of miles away. Its type in natural
\nhistory is not the parasite, but the octopus. Self-government would mean the removal of the tentacles and the cessation both
\nof the grip and the sustenance. Foreign rule is naturally opposed to the development of the subject nation as a separate organism,
\n   
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\n\tto the growth of its capacity for and practice in self-government,
\nto the development of capacity and ambition of its individuals. To think that a foreign rule will deliberately train us for independence or allow us to train ourselves is to suppose a miracle in nature.
\n    <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n\t
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Bande Mataram   { CALCUTTA, April 29th, 1907 }   SHALL INDIA BE FREE?   National Development and Foreign Rule   In dealing with the…<\/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-2898","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\/2898","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=2898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}