{"id":336,"date":"2013-07-13T01:27:23","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=336"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:27:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:27:23","slug":"002-new-lamps-for-old-vol-01-bande-mataram-volume-01","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/01-bande-mataram-volume-01\/002-new-lamps-for-old-vol-01-bande-mataram-volume-01","title":{"rendered":"-002_New Lamps for Old.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\nNEW LAMPS
\nFOR OLD<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

   
\nThe facts about the articles in the Indu Prakash <\/i>were these. They were
\nbegun at the instance of K. G. Deshpande, Aurobindo’s Cambridge friend who was
\neditor of the paper, but the first two articles made a sensation and frightened
\nRanade and other Congress leaders. Ranade warned the proprietor of the paper
\nthat, if this went on, he would surely be prosecuted for sedition. Accordingly
\nthe original plan of the series had to be dropped at the proprietor’s instance.
\nDeshpande requested Sri Aurobindo to continue in a modified tone and he
\nreluctantly consented, but felt no farther interest and the articles were
\npublished at long intervals and finally dropped of themselves altogether.
\n                                                                                                                      <\/p>\n

                                                                                                                     
\n*
\n <\/p>\n

The title refers to Congress politics. It is not used in the sense of the
\nAladdin story, but was intended to imply the offering of new lights to replace
\nthe old and faint reformist lights of the Congress.<\/p>\n

\nFrom notes and letters of Sri Aurobindo<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Page-3<\/p>\n

\n

\nNew Lamps for Old – 1<\/font><\/b>
\n<\/font>
\n
\n                           IF THE<\/b> blind lead the blind, shall they not
\nboth fall into a ditch? So or nearly so runs an apothegm of the Galilean
\nprophet, whose name has run over the four quarters of the globe. Of all those
\npithy comments on human life, which more than anything else made his teaching
\neffective, this is perhaps the one which goes home deepest and admits of the
\nmost frequent use. But very few Indians will be found to admit — certainly I
\nmyself two years ago would not have admitted, — that it can truthfully be applied
\nto the National Congress. Yet that it can be so applied, — nay, that no
\njudicious mind can honestly pronounce any other verdict on its action, – is the
\nfirst thing I must prove, if these articles are to have any raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/i>.
\nI am quite aware that in doing this my motive and my prudence may be called into
\nquestion. I am not ignorant that I am about to censure a body which to many of
\nmy countrymen seems the mightiest outcome of our new national life; to some a
\nprecious urn in which are guarded our brightest and noblest hopes; to others a
\nguiding star which shall lead us through the encircling gloom to a far distant
\nparadise: and if I were not fully confident that this fixed idea of ours is a
\nsnare and a delusion, likely to have the most pernicious effects, I should simply
\nhave suppressed my own doubts and remained silent. As it is, I am fully
\nconfident, and even hope to bring over one or two of my countrymen to my own way
\nof thinking, or, if that be not possible, at any rate to induce them to think a
\nlittle more deeply than they have done.
\n        I know also that I shall stir the
\nbile of those good people who are so enamoured of the British Constitution, that
\nthey cannot like anyone who is not a partisan. "What!" they will say,
\n"you pretend to be a patriot yourself, and you set yourself with a light
\nheart to attack a body of patriots, which has no reason at all for existing
\nexcept patriotism, – nay, which is the efflorescence, the crown, the summit and
\ncoping-stone of patriotism? How<\/p>\n

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wickedly inconsistent all this is! If you
\nare really a friend to New India, why do you go about to break up our splendid
\nunanimity? The Congress has not yet existed for two lustres; and in that brief
\nspace of time has achieved miracles. And even if it has faults, as every
\ninstitution however excellent it may be, must have its faults, have you any
\nplausible reason for telling our weakness in the streets of Gath, and so taking
\nour enemies into the secret?" Now, if I were a strong and self-reliant man,
\nI should of course go in the way I had chosen without paying much attention to
\nthese murmurers, but being, as I am, exceedingly nervous and afraid of offending
\nany one, I wish to stand well, even with those who admire the British
\nConstitution. I shall therefore find it necessary to explain at some length the
\nattitude which I should like all thinking men to adopt towards the Congress.
\n        And first, let me say that I am not
\nmuch moved by one argument which may possibly be urged against me. The Congress,
\nit will be said, has achieved miracles, and in common gratitude we ought not to
\nexpress [towards] it any sort of harsh or malevolent criticism. Let us grant for
\nthe moment that the Congress has achieved miracles for us. Certainly, if it has
\ndone that, we ought to hold it for ever in our grateful memory; but if our
\ngratitude goes beyond this, it at once incurs the charge of fatuity. This is
\nthe difference between a man and an institution; a great man who has done great
\nthings for his country, demands from us our reverence, and however he may fall
\nshort in his after-life, a great and high-hearted nation — and no nation was
\never justly called great that was not high-hearted — will not lay rude hands on
\nhim to dethrone him from his place in their hearts. But an institution is a very
\ndifferent thing. It was made for the use and not at all for the worship of man,
\nand it can only lay claim to respect so long as its beneficent action remains
\nnot a memory of the past, but a thing of the present. We cannot afford to raise
\nany institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the
\nslaves of our own machinery. However I will at once admit that if an institution
\nhas really done miracles for us — and miracles which are not mere conjuring
\ntricks, but of a deep and solemn import to the nation, — and if it is still
\ndoing and likely yet to do miracles for us, then without doubt it may lay claim
\nto<\/p>\n

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\n

a certain immunity from criticism. But I
\nam not disposed to admit that all this is true of the Congress.
\n        It is within the recollection of most of us to how giddy an eminence this body
\nwas raised, on how prodigious a wave of enthusiasm, against how immense a weight
\nof resisting winds. So sudden was it all that it must have been difficult, I may
\nalmost say impossible, even for a strong man to keep his head and not follow
\nwith the shouting crowd. How shall we find words vivid enough to describe the
\nfervour of those morning hopes, the April splendour of that wonderful
\nenthusiasm? The Congress was to us all that is to man most dear, most high and
\nmost sacred; a well of living water in deserts more than Saharan, a proud banner
\nin the battle of Liberty, and a holy temple of concord where the races met and
\nmingled. It was certainly the nucleus or thrice-distilled essence of the novel
\nmodes of thought among us; and if we took it for more than it really was, — if we
\ntook it for our pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night; if we
\nworshipped it as the morning-star of our liberty; if we thought of old myths, of
\nthe trumpets that shook down Jericho or the brazen serpent that healed the
\nplague, and nourished fond and secret hopes that the Congress would prove all
\nthis and more than this; — surely our infatuation is to be passed by gently as
\ninevitable in that environment rather than censured as unnatural or presuming.
\n        If then anyone tells me that the
\nCongress was itself a miracle, if in nothing else, at any rate in the enthusiasm
\nof which it was the centre, I do not know that l shall take the trouble to
\ndisagree with him; but if he goes on and tells me that the Congress has achieved
\nmiracles, I shall certainly take leave to deny the truth of his statement. It
\nappears to me that the most signal successes of this body were not miracles at
\nall, but simply the natural outcome of its constitution and policy. I suppose
\nthat in the sphere of active politics its greatest success is to be found in the
\nenlargement of the Legislative Councils. Well, that was perhaps a miracle in its
\nway. In England a very common trick is to put one ring under a hat and
\nproduce in another part of the room what appears to be the same ring and is
\nreally one exactly like it — except perhaps for the superscription. Just such
\na miracle is this which the Congress has so triumphantly<\/p>\n

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\n

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achieved. Another conjuring trick, and
\nperhaps a cleverer one, was the snatch vote about Simultaneous Examinations,
\nwhich owed its success to the sentimentalism of a few members of Parliament, the
\nself-seeking of others and the carelessness of the rest. But these, however
\nmuch we may praise them for cleverness, are, as I hope to show later on, of no
\nreally deep and solemn import to the nation, but simply conjuring tricks and
\nnothing more. Over the rest of our political action the only epitaph we can
\nwrite is "Failure". Even in the first flush of enthusiasm the more
\ndeep-thinking among us were perhaps a little troubled by certain small things
\nabout the Congress, which did not seem altogether right. The bare-faced
\nhypocrisy of our enthusiasm for the Queen-Empress, — an old lady so called by
\nway of courtesy, but about whom few Indians can really know or care anything —
\ncould serve no purpose but to expose us to the derision of our ill-wishers.
\nThere was too a little too much talk about the blessings of British rule, and
\nthe inscrutable Providence which has laid us in the maternal, or more properly
\nthe step-maternal bosom of just and benevolent England. Yet more appalling was
\nthe general timidity of the Congress, its glossing over of hard names, its
\ndisinclination to tell the direct truth, its fear of too deeply displeasing our
\nmasters. But in our then state of mind we were disposed to pass over all this
\nas amiable weaknesses which would wear off with time. Two still grosser errors
\nwere pardoned as natural and almost inadvertent mistakes. It was true that we
\nwent out of our way to flatter Mr. Gladstone, a statesman who is not only quite
\nunprincipled and in no way to be relied upon, but whose intervention in an
\nIndian debate has always been of the worst omen to our cause. But then, we
\nargued, people who had not been to England could not be expected to discern the
\ncharacter of this astute and plausible man. We did more than flatter Mr. Gladstone;
\nwe actually condescended to flatter "General" Booth, a vulgar
\nimposter, a convicted charlatan, who has enriched himself by trading on the
\nsentimental emotions of the English middle class. But here too, we thought, the
\nCongress has perhaps made the common mistake of confounding wealth with merit,
\nand has really taken the "General" for quite a respectable person. In
\nthe first flush of enthusiasm, I say, such ex-<\/p>\n

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\n

cuses and such toleration were possible and even natural,
\nbut in the moment of disillusionment it will not do for us to flatter ourselves
\nin this way any longer. Those amiable weaknesses we were then disposed to pass
\nover very lightly, have not at all worn off with time, but have rather grown
\ninto an ingrained habit; and the tendency to grosser errors has grown not only
\ninto a habit, but into a policy. In its broader aspects the failure of the
\nCongress is still clearer. The walls of the Anglo-Indian Jericho stand yet
\nwithout a breach, and the dark spectre of Penury draws her robe over the land in
\ngreater volume and with an ampler sweep.<\/p>\n

\n
\nIndu Prakash<\/i>, August 7, 1893<\/p>\n

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\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

New Lamps
\nfor Old-2<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

                       
\nBUT<\/b> after all my present business is not with
\nnegative criticism. I want rather to ascertain what the Congress has really
\ndone, and whether it is so much as to condemn all patriots to an Eleusinian
\nsilence about its faults. My own genuine opinion was expressed, perhaps with too
\nmuch exuberance of diction, — but then the ghost of ancient enthusiasm was
\nnudging my elbow — when I described the Congress as a well of living water, a
\nstandard in the battle, and a holy temple of concord. It is a well of living
\nwater in the sense that we drink from it assurance of a living political energy
\nin the country, and without that assurance perhaps the most advanced among us
\nmight not have been so advanced: for it is only one or two strong and individual
\nminds, who can flourish without a sympathetic environment. I am therefore
\njustified in describing the Congress as a well of living water; but I have also
\ndescribed it as the standard under which we have fought; and by that I mean a
\nliving emblem of our cause the tired and war-worn soldier in the mellay can look
\nup to and draw from it from time to time fresh funds of hope and vigour: such,
\nand such only, is the purpose of a banner. One does not like to say that what
\nmust surely be apparent even to a rude intelligence, has been beyond the reach
\nof intellects trained at our Universities and in the liberal professions. Yet it
\nis a fact that we have entirely ignored what a casual inspection ought at once
\nto have told us, that the Congress is altogether too unwieldy a body for any
\nsort of executive work, and must solely be regarded as a convenient alembic, in
\nwhich the formulae of our aspirations may be refined into clear and accurate
\nexpression. Not content with using a banner as a banner, we have actually caught
\nup the staff of it with a view of breaking our enemy’s heads. So blind a misuse
\nmust take away<\/font> at least a third part of its virtue
\nfrom the Congress, and if we are at all to recover the loss, we must recognise
\nthe limits of its utility as well as emend the device upon it.<\/p>\n

        The
\nCongress has been, then, a well of living water and a<\/p>\n

\nPage-10<\/p>\n

\n

standard in the battle of liberty; but besides these it
\nhas been something, which is very much better than either of them, good as they
\ntoo undoubtedly are; it has been to our divergent races and creeds a temple, or
\nperhaps I should be more correct in saying a school of concord. In other words
\nthe necessities of the political movement initiated by the Congress have brought
\ninto one place and for a common purpose all sorts and conditions of men, and so
\nby smoothing away the harsher discrepancies between them has created a certain
\nmodicum of sympathy between classes that were more or less at variance. Here,
\nand not in its political action, must we look for any direct and really
\nimportant achievement; and even here the actual advance has as a rule been
\nabsurdly exaggerated. Popular orators like Mr. Pherozshah Mehta, who carry the
\nmethods of the bar into politics, are very fond of telling people that the
\nCongress has habituated us to act together. Well, that is not quite correct;
\nthere is not the slightest evidence to show that we have at all learned to act
\ntogether; the one lesson we have learned is to talk together, and that is a
\nrather different thing. Here then we have in my opinion the sum of all these
\ncapacities, in which the Congress has to any appreciable extent promoted the
\nreally high and intimate interests of the country. Can it then be said that on
\nthese lines the Congress has had such entirely beneficial effects as to put the
\ngag on all harsher criticism? I do not think that it can be properly so said. I
\nadmit that the Congress has promoted a certain modicum of concord among us; but
\nI am not prepared to admit that on this line of action its outcome has been at
\nall complete and satisfying. Not only has the concord it tends to create been
\nvery partial, but the sort of people who have been included in its beneficent
\naction, do not extend beyond certain fixed and narrow limits. The great mass of
\nthe people have not been appreciably touched by that healing principle, which to
\ndo the Congress justice, has very widely permeated the middle class. All this
\nwould still leave us without sufficient grounds to censure the Congress at all
\nseverely, if only it were clear that its present line of action was tending to
\nincrease the force and scope of its beneficence; but in fact the very contrary
\nappears. We need no soothsayer to augur that, unless its entire policy be remodelled, its power<\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nPage-11<\/p>\n

\n

for good, even in the narrow circle of
\nits present influence, will prove to have been already exploited. One sphere
\nstill remains to it; it is still our only grand assurance of a living political
\nenergy in the country: but even this well of living water must in the end be
\npoisoned or dried up, if the inner political energy, of which it is the outward
\nassurance remains as poor and bounded as we now find it to be. If then it is
\ntrue that the action of the Congress has only been of really high import on one
\nor two lines, that even on those lines the actual result has been petty and
\nimperfect, and that in all its other aspects we can pronounce no verdict on it
\nbut failure, then it is quite clear that we shall get no good by big talk about
\nthe splendid unanimity at the back of the Congress. A splendid unanimity in
\nfailure may be a very magnificent thing in its way, but in our present
\nexigencies it is an unanimity really not worth having. But perhaps the Congress
\nenthusiast will take refuge in stinging reproaches about my readiness to publish
\nour weakness to the enemy. Well, even if he does, I can assure him, that however
\nstinging his reproaches may be, I shall not feel at all stung by them. I leave
\nthat for those honest people who imagine that when they have got the Civil
\nService and other lucrative posts for themselves, the Indian question will be
\nsatisfactorily settled. Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves,
\nbut our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy,
\nour purblind sentimentalism. I really cannot see why we should rage so furiously
\nagainst the Anglo-Indians and call them by all manner of opprobrious epithets. I
\ngrant that they are rude and arrogant, that they govern badly, that they are
\ndevoid of any great or generous emotion, that their conduct is that of a small
\ncoterie of masters surrounded by a nation of Helots. But to say all this is
\nsimply to say that they are very commonplace men put into a quite unique
\nposition. Certainly it would be very grand and noble, if they were to smother
\nall thought of their own peculiar interests, and aim henceforth, not at their
\nown promotion, not at their own enrichment, but at the sole good of the Indian
\npeople. But such conduct is what we have no right to expect save from men of the
\nmost exalted and chivalrous character; and the sort of people England sends out
\nto us are not as a rule exalted and chivalrous, but are usually the very<\/p>\n

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reverse of that. They are really very ordinary men,
\n— and
\nnot only ordinary men, but ordinary Englishmen — types of the middle class or
\nPhilistines, in the graphic English phrase, with the narrow hearts and
\ncommercial habit of mind peculiar to that sort of people. It is something very
\nlike folly to quarrel with them for not transgressing the law of their own
\nnature. If we were not so dazzled by the artificial glare of English prestige,
\nwe should at once acknowledge that these men are really not worth being angry
\nwith: and if it is idle to be angry with them, it is still more unprofitable to
\nrate their opinion of us at more than a straw’s value. Our appeal, the appeal of
\nevery high-souled and self-respecting nation, ought not to be to the opinion of
\nthe Anglo-Indians, no, nor yet to the British sense of justice, but to our own
\nreviving sense of manhood, to our own sincere fellow-feeling — so far as it can
\nbe called sincere — with the silent and suffering people of India. I am sure
\nthat eventually the nobler part of us will prevail, — that when we no longer
\nobey the dictates of a veiled self-interest, but return to the profession of a
\nlarge and genuine patriotism, when we cease to hanker after the soiled crumbs
\nwhich England may cast to us from her table then it will be to that sense of
\nmanhood, to that sincere fellow-feeling that we shall finally and forcibly
\nappeal. All this, it will be said, may be very true or very plausible, but it is
\nafter all made up of unsupported assertions. I quite admit that it is more or
\nless so, nor did I at all intend that it should be otherwise; the proof and
\nsupport of those assertions is a matter for patient development and wholly
\nbeside my present purpose. I have been thus elaborate with one sole end in view.
\nI wish even the blindest enthusiast to recognise that I have not ventured to
\nspeak without carefully weighing those important considerations that might have
\ninduced me to remain silent. I trust that after this laboured preface even those
\nmost hostile to my views will not accuse me of having undertaken anything
\nlightly or rashly. In my own opinion I should not have been to blame even if I
\nhad spoken without this painful hesitation. If the Congress cannot really face
\nthe light of a free and serious criticism, then the sooner it hides its face the
\nbetter. For nine years it has been exempt from the ordeal; we have been content
\nto worship it with that implicit
\n                                                                                                                                                     <\/font><\/p>\n

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\n

trust which all religions demand, but which sooner or
\nlater leads them to disaster and defeat. Certainly we had this excuse that the
\nstress of battle is not the time when a soldier can stop to criticise his
\nweapon: he has simply to turn it to the best use of which it is capable. So long
\nas India rang with turbulent voices of complaint and agitation, so long as the
\nair was filled with the turmoil of an angry controversy between governors and
\ngoverned, so long we could have little leisure or quiet thought and reflection.
\nBut now all is different; the necessity for conflict is no longer so urgent and
\nhas even given place to a noticeable languor and passivity, varied only by
\nperfunctory public meetings. Now therefore, while the great agitation that once
\nfilled this vast peninsula with rumours of change, is content to occupy an
\nobscure corner of English politics it will be well for all of us who are capable
\nof reflection, to sit down for a moment and think. The hour seems to have come
\nwhen the Congress must encounter that searching criticism which sooner or later
\narrives to all mortal things; and if it is so, to keep our eyes shut will be
\nworse than idle. The only good we shall get by it is to point with a fresh
\nexample the aphorism with which I set out. <\/i>"If the blind lead the
\nblind, shall they not both fall into a ditch?"<\/p>\n

\n
\nIndu Prakash<\/i>, <\/i>August 21, 1893<\/p>\n

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\n

New Lamps
\nfor Old – 3<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

        "Thou art weighed in the balance
\nand found wanting:"
\n        "The little that is done seems
\nnothing when we look forward and see how much we have yet to do."<\/p>\n

Thus far I have been making a circuit, in my disinclination to collide too
\nabruptly with the prepossessions of my countrymen and now that I am compelled to
\nhandle my subject more intimately and with a firmer grasp, nothing but my
\ndeliberate conviction that it is quite imperative for someone to speak out, has
\nat all persuaded me to continue. I have at the very outset to make distinct the
\ngrounds on which I charge the Congress with inadequacy. In the process I find
\nmyself bound to say many things that cannot fail to draw obloquy upon me: I
\nshall be compelled to outrage many susceptibilities; compelled to advance many
\nunacceptable ideas; compelled, — worst of all, — to stroke the wrong way many
\npowerful persons, who are wont to be pampered with unstinted flattery and
\nworship. But at all risks the thing must be done, and since it is on me that the
\nchoice has fallen, I can only proceed in the best fashion at my command and with
\nwhat boldness I may. I say, of the Congress, then, this, — that its aims are
\nmistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is
\nnot a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has
\nchosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the
\nright sort of men to be leaders; — in brief, that we are at present the blind
\nled, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed.
\n        To begin with, I should a little
\nwhile ago have had no hesitation in saying that the National Congress was not
\nreally national and had not in any way attempted to become national<\/i>. <\/i>But
\nthat was before I became a student of Mr. Pherozshah Mehta’s speeches. Now to
\ndeal with this vexed subject, one must tread on very burning ground, and I shall
\nmake no apology for treading with great care and circumspection. The subject is<\/p>\n

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wrapped in so thick a dust of
\ncontroversy, and legal wits have been so busy drawing subtle distinctions about
\nit, that a word which was once perfectly straightforward and simple, has become
\nalmost as difficult as the Law itself. It is therefore incumbent on me to
\nexplain what I wish to imply, when I say that the Congress is not really
\nnational. Now I do not at all mean to re-echo<\/span> the Anglo-Indian catchword about
\nthe Hindus and Mahomedans. Like most catchwords it is without much force, and has
\nbeen still further stripped of meaning by the policy of the Congress. The Mahomedans have been as largely represented on that body as any reasonable
\ncommunity could desire, and their susceptibilities, far from being denied
\nrespect, have always been most assiduously soothed and flattered. It is entirely
\nfutile then to take up the Anglo-Indian refrain; but this at least I should have
\nimagined, that in an era when democracy and similar big words slide so glibly
\nfrom our tongues, a body like the Congress, which represents not the mass of the
\npopulation, but a single and very limited class, could not honestly be called
\nnational. It is perfectly true that the House of Commons represents not the
\nEnglish nation, but simply the English aristocracy and middle class and yet is
\nnone the less national. But the House of Commons is a body legally constituted
\nand empowered to speak and act for the nation, while the Congress is
\nself-created: and it is not justifiable for a self-created body representing
\nonly a single and limited class to call itself national. It would be just as
\nabsurd if the Liberal Party, because it allows within its limits all sorts and
\nconditions of men, were to hold annual meetings and call itself the English
\nNational Congress. When therefore I said that the Congress was not really
\nnational, I simply meant that it did not represent the mass of the population.
\n        But Mr. Pherozshah Mehta will have
\nnothing to do with this sense of the word. In his very remarkable and instructive
\nPresidential address at Calcutta, he argued that the Congress could justly
\narrogate this epithet without having any direct support from the proletariate;
\nand he went on to explain his argument with the profound subtlety expected from
\nan experienced advocate. "It is because the masses are still unable to
\narticulate definite political demands that the functions and duty devolve<\/p>\n

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upon their educated and enlightened
\ncompatriots to feel, to understand and to interpret their grievances and
\nrequirements, and to suggest and indicate how these can best be redressed and
\nmet."
\n        This formidable sentence is, by the
\nway, typical of Mr. Mehta\u2019s style and reveals the secret of his oratory, which
\nlike all great inventions is exceedingly simple: it is merely to say the same
\nthing twice over in different words. But its more noteworthy feature is the idea
\nimplied that because the Congress professes to discharge this duty, it may
\njustly call itself national. Nor is this all; Calcutta comes to the help of <\/i>Bombay
\nin the person of Mr. Manmohan Ghose, who repeats and elucidates Mr. Mehta\u2019s
\nidea. The Congress, he says, asserting the rights of <\/i>that body to speak
\nfor the masses, represents the thinking portion of <\/i>the Indian people,
\nwhose duty it is to guide the ignorant, and this in his opinion sufficiently
\njustifies the Congress in calling itself national. To differ from a successful
\nbarrister and citizen, a man held in high honour by every graduate in India, and
\nabove all a future member of <\/i>the Viceroy’s Council, would never have been
\na very easy task for a timid man like myself. But when he is reinforced by so
\nrespectable and weighty a citizen as Mr. Manmohan Ghose, I really cannot
\nfind the courage to persevere. I shall therefore amend the obnoxious phrase
\nand declare that the National Congress may be as national as you please, but it
\nis not a popular body and has not in any way attempted to become a popular body.
\n        But at this point some one a little
\nless learned than Mr. Pherozshah Mehta may interfere and ask how it can be true
\nthat the Congress is not a popular body. I can only point his attention to a
\nprevious statement of <\/i>mine that the Congress represents not the mass of
\n<\/i>the population, but a single and limited class. No doubt the Congress tried
\nvery hard in the beginning to believe that it really represented the mass of <\/i>the
\npopulation, but if it has not already abandoned, it ought now at least to
\nabandon the pretension as quite untenable. And indeed when Mr. Pherozshah Mehta and
\nMr. Manmohan Ghose have admitted this patent fact — not as delegates only, but
\nas officials of <\/i>the Congress — and have even gone so far as to explain
\nthe fact away,<\/p>\n

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it is hardly requisite for me to combat
\nthe fallacy. But perhaps the enquirer, not yet satisfied, may go on to ask what is
\nthat single and limited class which I imagine the Congress to represent. Here it
\nmay be of help to us to refer again to the speeches of the Congress leaders and
\nmore especially to the talented men from whom I have already quoted. In his able
\nofficial address Mr. Manmohan Ghose asks himself this very question and answers
\nthat the Congress represents the thinking portion of the Indian people.
\n"The delegates present here today," he goes on, "are the chosen
\nrepresentatives of that section of the Indian people who have learnt to think,
\nand whose number is daily increasing with marvellous rapidity." Perhaps Mr.
\nGhose is a little too facile in his use of the word "thinking". So
\nmuch at the mercy of their instincts and prejudices are the generality of
\nmankind, that we hazard a very high estimate when we call even one man out of
\nten thousand a thinking man. But evidently by the thinking portion Mr. Ghose
\nwould like to indicate the class to which he himself belongs; I mean those of us
\nwho have got some little idea of the machinery of Eng1ish politics and are eager
\nto import it into India along with cheap Liverpool cloths, shoddy Brummagem
\nwares, and other useful and necessary things which have killed the fine and
\ngenuine textures. If this is a true interpretation he is perfectly correct in
\nwhat he says. For it is really from this class that the Congress movement draws
\nits origin, its support and its most enthusiastic votaries. And if I were asked
\nto describe their class by a single name, I should not hesitate to call it our
\nnew middle class. For here too English goods have driven out native goods: our
\nsociety has lost its old landmarks and is being demarcated on the English model.
\nBut of all the brand new articles we have imported, inconceivably the most
\nimportant is that large class of people — journalists, barristers, doctors,
\nofficials, graduates and traders — who have grown up and are increasing with
\nprurient rapidity under the aegis of the British rule: and this class I call the
\nmiddle class: for, when we are so proud of our imported English goods, it would
\nbe absurd, when we want labels for them, not to import their English names as
\nwell. Besides this name which I have chosen is really a more accurate
\ndescription than phrases like "thinking men" or "the educated
\nclass"<\/p>\n

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which are merely expressions of our own
\nboundless vanity and self-conceit. However largely we may choose to indulge in
\nvague rhetoric about the all-pervading influence of the Congress, no one can
\nhonestly doubt that here is the constituency from which it is really empowered.
\nThere is indeed a small contingent of aristocrats and a smaller contingent of
\nthe more well-to-do ryots: but these are only two flying-wheels in the great
\nmiddle-class machine. The fetish-worshipper may declare as loudly as he pleases
\nthat it represents all sorts and conditions of people, just as the Anglo-Indians
\nused to insist that it represented no one but the Bengali Babu. Facts have been
\ntoo strong for the Anglo-Indian and they will be too strong in the end for the
\nfetish-worshipper. Partisans. on either side can in no way alter the clear and
\nimmutable truth — these words were put on paper long before the recent
\ndisturbances in Bombay and certainly without any suspicion that the prophecy I
\nthen hazarded would be fortified by so apt and striking a comment. Facts are
\nalready beginning to speak in a very clear and unambiguous voice. How long will
\nthe Congress sit like careless Belshazzar, at the feast of mutual admiration?
\nAlready the decree has gone out against it; already even the eyes that are dim
\ncan discern, — for has it not been written in blood? — the first pregnant phrase
\nof the handwriting upon the wall. "God has numbered the kingdom and
\nfinished it." Surely after so rough a lesson, we shall not wait to unseal
\nour eyes and unstop our ears, until the unseen finger moves on and writes the
\nsecond and sterner sentence: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found
\nwanting." Or must we sit idle with folded hands and only bestir ourselves
\nwhen the short hour of grace is past and the kingdom given to another more
\nworthy than we?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

lndu Prakash<\/i>, <\/i>August 28,1893<\/p>\n

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                         I<\/b>
\nREPEAT<\/b> <\/font>then with renewed confidence, but still
\nwith a strong desire to conciliate Mr. Pherozshah Mehta, that the Congress
\nfails, because it has never been, and has made no honest endeavour to be, a
\npopular body empowered by the fiat of the Indian people in its entirety. But for
\nall that I have not managed to bring my view into coincidence with Mr.
\nMehta\u2019s. It is true he is not invincibly reluctant to concede the limits,
\nwhich hedge in the Congress action and restrict its output of energy; but he is
\nquite averse to the dictum that by not transgressing the middle-class pale the
\nCongress has condemned itself, as a saving power, to insignificance and ultimate
\nsterility. The bounded scope of its potency and the subdued tone which it
\naffects, are, he opines, precisely what our actual emergencies of the moment
\nimperatively demand; wider activity and a more intense emphasis would be in his
\nview highly unadvisable and even injurious and besides it does not at all
\nsignify whether we are fortified by popular sympathy or are not; for is not Mr. Pherozshah Mehta there with all the enlightenment of India at his back to plead
\ntemperately — temperately, mind you; we are nothing if not temperate — for just
\nand remedial legislation on behalf of a patient and suffering people? In plain
\nwords a line of argument is adopted amounting to this: — "The Congress
\nmovement is nothing if not a grand suit-at-law, best described as the case of
\nIndia vs.<\/i> Anglo-India, in which the ultimate tribunal is the British sense of
\njustice, and Pherozshah Mehta, Mr. Umesh Chandra Bonerji and the other eminent
\nleaders of the bar are counsel for the complainant. Well, then, when so many
\nexperienced advocates have bound themselves to find pleas for him, would it not
\nbe highly rash and inopportune for the client to insist on conducting his own
\ncomplaint?" Now it is abundantly clear that, judged as it stands, this line
\nof argument, though adroit beyond cavil and instinct with legal ingenuity, will
\nnevertheless not answer. I am not going to<\/font><\/p>\n

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deny that Mr. Pherozshah
\nMehta and the enlightenment of India, such as it is, are pleading, undoubtedly
\nwith<\/font> temperance and perhaps with sincerity, for something or other, which
\nfor want of a more exact description, we may call remedial legislation. But so
\nfar there has been nothing at all to prevent me from denying that the analogy of
\nthe law-court holds; this sort of vicarious effort may be highly advantageous in
\njudicial matters, but it is not, I would submit, at all adequate to express the
\nreviving energies of a great people. The argument, I say, is not complete in
\nitself, or to use a vernacular phrase, it will not walk; it badly wants a crutch
\nto lean upon. Mr. Mehta is clever enough to see that and his legal acumen has
\ntaken him exactly to the very store where or not at all he must discover an
\nefficient crutch. So he goes straight to history, correctly surmising that the
\nexperience of European races is all that we, a people new to modern problems,
\ncan find to warn or counsel us, and he tells us that this sort of vicarious
\neffort has invariably been the original step towards progress: or, to put it in
\nhis own rhetorical way, "History teaches us that such has been the law of
\nwidening progress in all ages and all countries, notably in England
\nitself." Here then is the argument complete, crutch and all; and so adroit
\nis it that in Congress propaganda it has become a phrase of common parlance, and
\nis now in fact the stereotyped line of defence. Certainly, if he is accurate in
\nhis historical data, Mr. Mehta has amply proved his case; but in spite of all
\nhis adroitness, I suspect that his trend towards double-shotted phrases has led
\nhim into a serious difficulty. "In all ages and all countries" is a
\nvery big expression, and Mr. Mehta will be exceedingly lucky if it will stand a
\nclose scrutiny. But Mr. Manmohan Ghose at least is a sober speaker; and if we
\nhave deserted his smooth but perhaps rather tedious manner for a more brilliant
\nstyle of oratory, now at any rate, when the specious orator fails us, we may
\nwell return to the rational disputant. But we shall be agreeably disappointed to
\nfind that this vivid statement about the teaching of history is Mr. Ghose\u2019s
\nown legitimate offspring and not the coinage of Mr. Mehta’s heated fancy:
\nindeed, the latter has done nothing but convey it bodily into his own address.
\n"History teaches us," says Mr. Ghose, "that in all ages and all
\ncountries it is the<\/p>\n

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thinking classes who have led the
\nunthinking, and in the present state of our society we are bound not only to
\nthink for ourselves, but also to think for those who are still too ignorant to
\nexercise that important function." When we find the intellectual princes of
\nthe nation light-heartedly propagating such gross inaccuracies, we are really
\ntempted to inquire if high education is after all of any use. History teaches
\nus! Why, these gentlemen can never have studied any history at all except that
\nof England. Would they be ignorant otherwise that mainly to that country, if
\nnot to that country alone, their statement applies, but that about most ages and
\nmost countries it is hopelessly inaccurate? Absurd as the statement is, its
\ncareer has been neither limited nor obscure. Shot in the first instance from Mr.
\nGhose’s regulation smooth-bore, it then served as a bullet in Mr. Pherozshah
\nMehta\u2019s patent new double-barrelled rifle, and has ultimately turned out the stock
\nammunition of the Congress against that particular line upon which I have
\ninitially ventured. Here then the argument has culminated in a most important
\nissue; for supposing this line of defence to be adequate, the gravest indictment
\nI have to urge against the Congress goes at once to the ground. It will
\ntherefore be advisable to scrutinise Mr. Ghose’s light-hearted statement; and if
\nthe policy he advocates is actually stamped with the genuine consensus of all
\npeoples in all ages, then we shall very readily admit that there is no reason
\nwhy the masses should not be left in their political apathy. But if it is quite
\notherwise and we cannot discover more than one precedent of importance, then Mr.
\nGhose and the Congress chairman will not make us dance to their music, charm
\nthey never so wisely, and we shall be slow to admit even the one precedent we
\nhave got without a very narrow scrutiny. If then we are bent upon adopting
\nEngland as our exemplar, we shall certainly imitate the progress of the glacier
\nrather than the progress of the torrent. From Runnymede to the Hull riots is a
\nfar cry; yet these seven centuries have done less to change partially the
\npolitical and social exterior of England, than five short years to change
\nentirely the political and social exterior of her immediate neighbour. But if
\nMr. Ghose’s dogmatic  utterance<\/p>\n

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\nis true of England, I imagine it does not apply with
\nequal force to other climes and other eras. For example, is it at all true of
\nFrance? Rather we know that the first step of that fortunate country towards
\nprogress was not through any decent and orderly expansion, but through a
\npurification by blood and fire. It was not a con- vocation of respectable citizens,
\nbut the vast and ignorant proletariate, that emerged from a prolonged and almost
\ncoeval apathy and blotted out in five terrible years the accumulated oppression
\nof thirteen centuries. And if the example of France is not sufficient to deprive
\nMr. Ghose’s statement of force, let us divert our eyes to Ireland where the
\nancient and world-wide quarrel between Celt and Teuton is still pending. Is it
\nat all true that the initiators of Irish resistance to England were a body of
\nsuccessful lawyers, remarkable only for a power of shallow rhetoric, and deputed
\nby the sort of men that are turned out at Trinity College, Dublin? At any rate
\nthat is not what History tells us. We do not read that the Irish leaders annually
\nassembled to declaim glib orations, eulogistic of British rule and timidly
\nsuggestive of certain flaws in its unparalleled excellence, nor did they suggest
\nas a panacea for Irish miseries, that they should be given more posts and an
\nampler career in the British service. I rather fancy Turlough O\u2019Neill and his
\ncompeers were a different sort of men from that. But then it is hardly fair
\nperhaps to cite as an example a disreputable people never prolific of graduates
\nand hence incapable of properly appreciating the extraordinary blessings which
\nBritish rule gives out so liberally wherever it goes. Certainly men who
\npreferred action to long speeches and appealed, by the only method available in
\nthat strenuous epoch, not to the British sense of justice but to their own sense
\nof manhood, are not at all the sort of people we have either the will or the
\npower to imitate. Well then, let us return to our own orderly and eloquent era.
\nBut here too, just as the main strength of that ancient strenuous protest
\nresided in the Irish populace led by the princes of their class, so the
\nprincipal force of the modern subtler protest resides in the Irish peasantry led
\nby the recognised chiefs of an united people. I might go on and cull instances
\nfrom Italy and America, but to elaborate the matter<\/font><\/p>\n

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further would be to insult the
\nunderstanding of my readers. It will be sufficient to remind them that the two
\ngrand instances of ancient history point to an exactly similar conclusion. In
\nAthens and in Rome the first political quarrel is a distinct issue between the man of
\nthe people and a limited, perhaps an alien, aristocracy. The force behind Cleisthenes and the constituency that empowered Tiberius Gracchus were not a
\nnarrow middle class, but the people with its ancient wrongs and centuries of
\npatient endurance.
\n        If then, as we are compelled to
\ninfer, Mr. Mehta’s statement is entirely inaccurate of remoter ages and in
\nmodern times accurate of one country alone, we shall conclude that whatever
\nother proof he may find for his lame argument, that crutch at least is too large
\nand must go [to] the ground. But Mr. Mehta, too acute ,and experienced a pleader
\nto be disheartened by any initial failure, will no doubt pick up his crutch again
\nand whittle it down to the appropriate size. It may be quite correct, he will
\nperhaps tell me, that his statement applies with appreciable force to England
\nand to England alone, but when all is said, it does not eventually matter. In
\nallowing that his statement does generally apply to England, I have admitted
\neverything he seriously wants me to admit, for England is after all that country
\nwhich has best prospered in its aspirations after progress, and must therefore
\nbe the grand political examplar of every nation animated by a like spirit, and
\nit must be peculiarly and beyond dispute such for India in her present critical
\nstage of renascence. I am quite aware that in the eyes of that growing
\ncommunity which Mr. Ghose is pleased to call the thinking class, these plausible
\nassertions are only the elementary axioms of political science. But however
\nconfidently such statements are put before me, I am not at all sure that they
\nare entirely correct. I have not quite made up my mind that England is indeed
\nthat country which has best prospered in its aspirations after progress and I am
\nas yet unconvinced that it will eventually turn out at all a desirable examplar
\nfor every nation aspiring to progress, or even for its peculiar pupil, renascent
\nIndia. I shall therefore feel more disposed to probe the matter to the bottom
\nthan to acknowledge a very disputable thesis as in any way self-evident. To this
\nend it is requisite closely<\/p>\n

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to inquire what has actually been the main outcome of English
\npolitical effort, and whether it is of a nature to justify any implicit reliance
\non English methods or exact imitation of English models.\n<\/p>\n

\nlndu Prakash<\/i>, <\/i>September 18, 1893<\/p>\n

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\n                       
\n<\/font>
\nW<\/b>E  HAVE<\/b> then to appreciate the actual
\nconditions of English progress, in their sound no less than their unsound
\naspects: and it will be to our convenience to have ready some rough formulae by
\nwhich we may handle the subject in an intelligible way. To this problem Mr. Surendranath Banerji, a man who with all his striking merits, has never evinced
\nany power of calm and serious thought, proffers a very grandiloquent and
\nheart-stirring solution. "We rely," he has said, "on the
\nliberty-loving instincts of the greatest representative assembly in the world,
\nthe palladium of English Liberty, the sanctuary of the free and brave, the
\nBritish House of Commons" and at this inspiriting discharge of oratory
\nthere was, we are told, nor do we wonder at it — a responding volley of loud and
\nprotracted applause. Now when Mr. Banerji chooses to lash himself into an
\noratorical frenzy and stir us with his sounding rhetoric, it is really
\nimpracticable for anything human to stand up and oppose him: and though I may
\nhereafter tone down his oriental colouring to something nearer the hue of truth,
\nyet it does not at present serve my purpose to take up arms against a sea of
\neloquence. I would rather admit at once the grain of sound fact at the core of
\nall this than strip off the costly integuments with which Mr. Banerji’s
\nelaborate Fancy chooses to invest it. But when Mr. Banerji’s words no
\nlonger reverberate in your ears, you may have leisure to listen to a quieter,
\nmore serious voice, now unhappily hushed in the grave, — the voice of Matthew
\nArnold, himself an Englishman and genuine lover of his country, but for all that
\na man who thought deeply and spoke sanely. And where according to this sane and
\npowerful intellect shall we come across the really noteworthy outcome of English
\neffort? We shall best see it, he tells us, not in any palladium or sanctuary,
\nnot in the greatest representative assembly in the world, but in an aristocracy materialised, a middle class vulgarised and a lower class bruta-<\/p>\n

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lised: and no clear-sighted student of
\nEngland will be insensible to the just felicity with which he has hit off the
\nsocial tendencies prevailing in that country. Here then we have ready rough
\nformulae by which we may, at the lowest, baldly outline the duplicate aspect of modern
\nEngland: for now that we have admitted Mr. Banerji\u2019s phrase as symbolic of the
\nhealthy outcome creditable to English effort, we can hardly be shy of admitting
\nMatthew Arnold’s phrase as symbolic of the morbid outcome discreditable to it.
\nBut it is still open to us to evince a reasonable doubt whether there is any way
\nof reconciling two items so mutually destructive: for it does seem paradoxical
\nto rate the produces of institutions so highly lauded and so universally copied
\nat a low grade in the social ladder. But this apparent paradox may easily be a
\nvital truth; and in establishing that, as I hope to establish it, I shall have
\nincidentally to moot another and wider theorem. I would urge that our entire
\npolitical philosophy is rooted in shallow earth, so much so indeed that without
\nrepudiation or radical change we cannot arrive at an attitude of mind healthily
\nconducive to just and clear thinking. I am conscious that the argument has
\nhitherto been rather intangible and moved too largely among wide abstract
\nprinciples. Such a method is by its nature less keenly attractive to the general
\nreaders than a close and lively handling of current politics, but it is required
\nfor an adequate development of my case, and I must entreat indulgence a step or
\ntwo further, before I lay any grasp on the hard concrete details of our actual
\npolitical effort.
\n        Now the high value at which Mr. Mehta
\nappraises history as our sole available record of human experience in the mass
\nwill clearly be endorsed by every thoughtful and judicious mind. But to sustain
\nit at that high level of utility, we must not indulge in hasty deductions based
\non a very partial scrutiny, but must group correctly and digest in a candid
\nspirit such data as we can bring within our compass. If we observe this precept,
\nwe shall not easily coincide with his opinion that European progress has been of
\na single texture. We shall rather be convinced that there run through it two
\nprinciples of motion distinct in nature and adverse in event, the trend of whose
\ndivergence may be roundly expressed as advance in one direction through
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and. in another direction through social
\nmethods. But as the use of these time-worn epithets might well promote
\nmisconception and drag us into side-issues, I will attempt a more delicate
\nhandling and solicit that close attention without which so remote and elusive a
\nsubject cannot come home to the mind with proper force and clearness.
\n        In bringing abstractions home to the human intelligence, it is perhaps best to
\ndispel by means of near and concrete specimens that sense of remoteness which we
\nshrink from in what is at all intangible. Hence I shall attempt to differentiate
\nby living instances the two principles which I suggest as the main motors of
\nprogress. The broadcast of national thought in England prevalent from very early
\ntimes, may not inappropriately stand for the sort of progress that runs after a
\npolitical prize. The striking fact of English history — the fact that dwarfs all
\nothers — is, without doubt, the regular development from certain primordial
\nseeds and the continuous branching out, foliation and efflorescence of the
\ninstitution which Mr. Banerji has justly termed the greatest representative
\nassembly in the world. This is highly typical of the English school of thought
\nand the exaggerated emphasis it lays on the mould and working of institutions.
\nHowever supreme in the domain of practical life, however gifted with commercial
\nvigour and expansive energy, the English mind with its short range of vision,
\nits too little of delicacy and exactness, its inability to go beyond what it
\nactually sees, is wholly unfit for any nice appraisal of cause and effect. It is
\nwithout vision, logic, the spirit of curiosity, and hence it has not any habit
\nof entertaining clear and high ideals, any audacity of experiment, any power of
\nfinding just methods nicely adopted to produce the exact effect intended: — it
\nis without speculative temerity and the scientific spirit, and hence it cannot
\nproject great political theories nor argue justly from effect to cause. All
\nthese incapacities have forced the English mind into a certain mould of thought
\nand expression. Limited to the visible and material, they have put their whole
\nforce into mechanical invention; void of curiosity, they have hazarded just so
\nmuch experiment and no more, as was necessary to suit existing institutions to
\ntheir immediate wants; inexact, they have never cared in these alterations to
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than an approximation to the exact effect
\nintended; illogical and without subtlety, they have trusted implicitly to the
\npolitical machines for whose invention they have a peculiar genius, and never
\ncared to utilise mightier forces and a subtler method. Nor is this all: in their
\ndefect of speculative imagination, they are unable to get beyond what they
\nthemselves have experienced, what they themselves have effected. Hence, being
\nunscientific and apt to impute every power to machinery, they compare certain
\nsets of machines, and postulating certain effects from them, argue that as this
\nof their own invention has been attended by results of the highest value, it is
\ntherefore of an unique excellence and conserves in any and every climate its
\nefficiency and durability. And they do not simply flaunt this opinion in the
\nface of reason, but, by their stupendous material success and vast expansion,
\nthey have managed to convince a world apt to be impressed by externals, that it
\nis correct, and even obviously correct. Yet it is quite clear that this opinion,
\ncarefully analysed, reduces itself to a logical absurdity. By its rigid
\nemphasising of a single element it slurs over others of equal or superior
\nimportance: it takes no account of a high or low quality in the raw material, of
\nvariant circumstances, of incompatibilities arising from national temperament,
\nand other forces which no philosophical observer will omit from his
\ncalculations. In fact it reduces itself to the statement, that, given good
\nmachinery, then no matter what quality of materials is passed through it, the
\neventual fabric will be infallibly of the most superior sort. If the Indian
\nintellect had been nourished on any but English food, I should be content with
\nstating the idea in this its simplest form, and spare myself a laborious
\nexegesis; but I do not forget that I am addressing minds formed by purely
\nEnglish influences and therefore capable of admitting the rooted English
\nprejudice that what is logically absurd, may be practically true. At present
\nhowever I will simply state the motive principle of progress exemplified by
\nEngland as a careful requisition and high appraisal of sound machinery in
\npreference to a scientific social development.
\n        But if we carry our glance across the
\nEnglish Channel, we shall witness a very different and more animating spectacle.
\nGifted with a lighter, subtler and clearer mind than their insular<\/p>\n

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neighbours, the French people have moved
\nirresistibly towards a social and not a political development. It is true that
\nFrench orators and statesmen, incapacitated by their national character from
\noriginating fit political ideals, have adopted a set of institutions curiously
\nblended from English and American manufactures; but the best blood, the highest
\nthought, the real grandeur of the nation does not reside in the Senate or in the
\nChamber of Deputies; it resides in the artistic and municipal forces of Parisian
\nlife, in the firm settled executive, in the great vehement heart of the French
\npopulace — and that has ever beaten most highly in unison with the grand ideas
\nof Equality and Fraternity, since they were first enounced on the banner of the
\ngreat and terrible Republic. Hence though by the indiscreet choice of a machine,
\nthey <\/i>have been compelled to copy the working of English machinery and
\nconcede an undue importance to politics, yet the ideals which have genuinely
\ninfluenced the spirit which has most deeply permeated their national life are
\nwidely different from that alien spirit, from those borrowed ideals. I have said
\nthat the French mind is clearer, subtler, lighter than the English. In that
\nclarity they have discerned that without high qualities in the raw material
\nexcellence of machinery will not suffice to create a sound and durable national
\ncharacter, — that it may indeed develop a strong, energetic and capable temper,
\nbut that the fabric will not combine fineness with strength, will not resist
\npermanently the wear and tear of time and the rending force of social problems:
\n— through that subtlety they divined that not by the mechanic working of
\ninstitutions, but by the delicate and almost unseen moulding of a fine, lucid
\nand invigorating atmosphere, could a robust and highly-wrought social temper be
\ndeveloped: — and through that lightness they chose not the fierce, sharp air of
\nEnglish individualism, but the bright influence of art and letters, of
\nhappiness, a wide and liberal culture, and the firm consequent cohesion of their
\nracial and social elements. To put all this briefly, the second school of
\nthought I would indicate to my readers, is the preference of a fine development
\nof social character and a wide diffusion of happiness to the mechanic
\ndevelopment of a sound political machinery. Here then as indicated by these
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progress; a careful requisition for the
\nsake of evolving an energetic national character and high level of capacity, of
\na sound political machinery; and the ardent, yet rational pursuit, for its own
\nsake, of a sound and highly-wrought social temper.
\n        It may be worth while here to develop
\na point I have broadly suggested, that with these distinct lines of feeling
\naccord distinct types of racial character. The social ideal is naturally limited
\nto peoples distinguished by a rare social gift and an unbounded receptivity for
\nnovel ideas along with a large amount of practical capacity. The ancient
\nAthenian, pre-eminent for lightness of temper and lucidity of thought, was
\ncontent with the simplest and most nakedly logical machinery, and principally
\nsought to base political life on equality, a wide diffusion of culture, and a
\nlarge and just social principle. Moreover, as the subtlest and hence the most
\nefficient way of conserving the high calibre of his national character, he chose
\nthe infusion of light, gaiety and happiness into the common life of the people.
\nClear in thought and felicitous in action, he pursued an ideal strictly
\nconsonant with his natural temper and rigidly exclusive of the anomalous: and so
\nhighly did he attain, that the quick, shifting, eager Athenian 1ife, with its
\nmovement and colour, its happy buoyancy, its rapid genius, or as the Attic poet
\nbeautifully phrases it, walking delicately through a fine and lucid air, has
\nbecome the admiration and envy of posterior ages. The modern Frenchman closely
\nallied by his clear habit of mind to the old Athenian, himself lucid in thought,
\nlight in temper and not without a supreme felicity of method in practical
\nthings, evinces much the same sentiments, pursues much the same ideals. He too
\nhas a happily-adjusted executive machinery, elaborated indeed to fit the needs of
\na modern community, but pervaded by a thoroughly clear and logical spirit. He
\nalso has a passionate craving for equality and a large and just social
\nprinciple, and prefers to conserve the high calibre of his national character by
\nthe infusion of light, gaiety and happiness into the common life of the people.
\nAnd he too has so far compassed his ideal that a consensus of competent
\nobservers have pronounced France certainly the happiest, and, taken in
\nthe mass, the most civilised of modern countries. But to the Englishman or
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they strike him in the light of luxuries
\nrather than necessities. It is the useful citizen, the adroit man of business,
\nthe laborious worker, whom he commends with the warmest emphasis and copies with
\nthe most respectful emulation. Such a cast of mind being entirely incompatible
\nwith social success, he directs his whole active powers into the grosser sphere
\nof commerce and politics, where practical energy, unpurified by thought, may
\nstruggle forward to some vulgar and limited goal. To. put it in a concrete form,
\nParis may be said to revolve around the Theatre, the Municipal Council and the
\nFrench Academy, London looks rather to the House of Commons and New York to the
\nStock Exchange. I trust that I have now clearly elucidated the exact and
\nintimate nature of those two distinct principles on which progress may be said
\nto move. It now remains to gauge the practical effect of either policy as
\nhistory indicates them to us. We in India, or at any rate those races among us
\nwhich are in the van of every forward movement, are far more nearly allied to
\nthe French and Athenian than to the Anglo-Saxon, but owing to the accident of
\nBritish domination, our intellects have been carefully nurtured on a purely
\nEnglish diet. Hence we do not care to purchase an outfit of political ideas
\nproperly adjusted to our natural temper and urgent requirements, but must eke
\nout our scanty wardrobe with the cast-off rags and thread-bare leavings of our
\nEnglish Masters and this incongruous apparel we display with a pompous
\nself-approval which no unfriendly murmurs, no unkind allusions are allowed to
\ntrouble. Absurd as all this is, its visible outcome is clearly a grave
\nmisfortune. Prompted by our English instruction we have deputed to a mere
\nmachine so arduous a business as the remoulding of our entire destinies, needing
\nas it does patient and delicate manual adjustment and a constant supervising
\nvigilance – and this to a machine not efficient and carefully pieced together
\nbut clumsy and made on a rude and cheap model. So long as this temper prevails,
\nwe shall never realise how utterly it is beyond the power of even an excellent
\nmachine to renovate an effete and impoverished national character and how
\npalpably requisite to commence from within and not depend on any exterior
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peculiar value, if it at all induces us to acknowledge
\nthat it is a vital error, simply because we have invented a clumsy machine, to
\nrest on our oars and imagine that expenditure of energy in other directions is
\nat present superfluous.\n<\/p>\n

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\nTHAT<\/b> this intimate organic treatment of <\/i>which I speak is really
\nindispensable, will be clearly established by the annals of ancient Rome. The
\nRomans were a nation quite unique in the composition and general style of their
\ncharacter; along with a predilection for practical energy, a purely material
\nhabit of mind, and an indifference to orderly and logical methods which suggest
\na strong affinity to the Anglo-Saxon temperament, they possessed a robust and
\nclear perception, and a strong practical contempt for methods pronounced by hard
\nexperience to be ineffectual, which are entirely un-English and allied rather to
\nthe clarity and impatience of the Gaul. Moreover their whole character was
\nmoulded in a grand style, such as has not been witnessed by any prior or
\nsucceeding age — so much so that the striking description by which the Greek
\nambassador expressed the temper of the Roman Senate, might with equal justice be
\ntransferred to the entire people. They were a nation of Kings: that is to say,
\nthey possessed the gift of handling the high things of life in a grand and
\nimposing style, and with a success, an astonishing sureness of touch, only
\npossible to a natural tact in government and a just, I may say a royal instinct
\nfor affairs. Yet this grand, imperial nation, even while it was most felicitous
\nabroad in the manner and spirit in which it dealt with foreign peoples, was at
\nhome convulsed to a surprising extent by the worst forms of internal disorder:
\n— and all for the want of that clear, sane ideal which has so highly promoted
\nthe domestic happiness of France and Athens. At first, indeed, the Romans
\ninexpert in political methods, were inclined to repose an implicit trust in
\nmachinery, just as the English have been inclined from the primary stages of
\ntheir development, and just as we are led to do by the contagious influence of
\nthe Anglomaniac disease. They hoped by the sole and mechanic action of certain
\nhighly lauded institutions to remove the disorders with which the Roman body
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\nailing. And though at Rome no less than among ourselves, the social condition of
\nthe poor filled up the reform posters and a consequent amelioration was loudly
\ntrumpeted by the popular leaders, yet the genuine force of the movement was
\ndisposed, as is the genuine force of the present Congress movement, to the
\nminimising of purely political inequality. But when the coveted institutions
\nwere in full swing, a sense gradually dawned on the people that the middle class
\nhad the sole enjoyment of any profit accruing from the change, as indeed it is
\nalways to the middle class alone that any profit accrues from the elimination of
\nmerely political inequality; but the great Roman populace untouched by the
\nchange for which they had sacrificed their ease and expended their best and
\nhighest energies, felt themselves pushed from misery to misery and broke out
\nagain in a wild storm of rebellion. But to maintain a stark persistence in
\nunreason, to repose an unmoved confidence in the bounded potency of a mechanic
\nformula, proved ineffectual by the cogent logic of hard experience; they had no
\nthought, or if they had the thought, they being a genuinely practical race, and
\nnot like the English straining after practicality, had not the disposition.
\nHence that mighty struggle was fought out with perplexed watchwords, amid wild
\nalarms and rumours of battle and in a confused medley of blood, terror and
\nunspeakable desolation. In that horror of great darkness, the Roman world
\ncrashed on from ruin to ruin, until the strong hand of Caesar stayed its descent
\nto poise it on the stable foundation of a sane and vigilant policy rigorously
\nenforced by the fixed will of a single despotic ruler. But the grand secret of
\nhis success and the success of those puissant autocrats who inherited his genius
\nand his ideals, was the clear perception attained to by them that only by social
\nequality and the healing action of a firm despotism, could the disorders of Rome
\nbe permanently eradicated. Maligned as they have been by those who suffered from
\ntheir astuteness and calm strength of will, the final verdict of posterity will
\nlaud in them that terrible intensity of purpose and even that iron indifference
\nto personal suffering, which they evinced in forcing the Caesarian policy to its
\nbitter but salutary end. The main lesson for us however is the pregnant
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\nin the sphere of practical success, by attempting a cure through external and
\nmechanic appliances entailed on themselves untold misery, untold disorder, and
\nonly by a thorough organic treatment restored the sanity, peace, settled
\ngovernment and calm felicity of an entire world.
\n        But perhaps Mr. Mehta will tell me
\n"What have we to do with the ancient Romans, we who have an entirely modern
\nenvironment and suffer from disorders peculiar to ourselves?" Well, the
\nconnection is not perhaps so remote as Mr. Mehta imagines: I will not however
\npress that point, but rather appeal to the instance of two great European
\nnations, who also have an entirely modern environment and suffer or have
\nsuffered from very similar maladies — and so end my long excursion into the
\ndomain of abstract ideas.
\n        As the living instances most nearly
\nsuggesting the diversity of impulse and method, which is my present subject, I
\nhave had occasion to draw a comparison between these two peoples, whom, by a
\nsingular caprice of antithesis, chance has put into close physical proximity,
\nbut nature has sundered as far as the poles in genius, temper and ideals.
\nWhatever healthy and conservative effects accrue from the close pursuit of
\neither principle, whatever morbid and deleterious effects accrue from the close
\npursuit of either principle, will be seen operating to the best advantage in the
\nsocial and political organism of these two nations. The healthy effects of the
\none impulse we shall find among those striking English qualities which at once
\ncatch the eye, insatiable enterprise, an energetic and pushing spirit, a
\nvigorous tendency towards expansion, a high capacity for political
\nadministration, and an orderly process of government; the morbid effects are
\nsocial degradation and an entire absence of the cohesive principle. The better
\nqualities have no doubt grown by breathing the atmosphere of individualism and
\nbeen trained up by the habit of working under settled and roughly convenient
\nforms; but after all is said, the original high qualities of the raw material
\nenter very largely into the credit side .of the account. Even were it not so, we
\nare not likely, tutored by English instruction, to undervalue or to slur over
\nthe successful and imposing aspect of English attainment. Hence it will be more
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\nkeeping the bright side in view, to concentrate our attention on the unsounder
\naspects which we do not care to learn, or if we have learned, are in the habit
\nof carefully forgetting. We may perhaps realise the nature of that unsounder
\naspect, if we amplify Matthew Arnold’s phrase: — an aristocracy no longer
\npossessed of the imposing nobility of mind, the proud sense of  honour, the
\nstriking pre-eminence of faculty, which are the saving graces — nay, which are
\nthe very life-breath of an aristocracy; debased moreover by the pursuit through
\nconcession to all that is gross and ignoble in the English mind, of gross and
\nignoble ends: — a middle class inaccessible to the influence of high and
\nrefining ideas, and prone to rate every thing even in the noblest departments of
\nlife, at a commercial valuation: — and a lower class equally without any germ
\nof high ideas, nay, without any ideas high or low; degraded in their worst
\nfailure to the crudest forms of vice, pauperism and crime, and in their highest
\nattainment restricted to a life of unintelligent work relieved by brutalising
\npleasures. And indeed the most alarming symptoms are here; for it may be said of
\nthe aristocracy that the workings of the Time-Spirit have made a genuine
\naristocracy obsolete and impracticable, and of the middle class, that, however
\nsuccessful and confident, it is in fact doomed; its empire is passing away from
\nit; but with the whole trend of humanity shaping towards democracy and
\nsocialism, on the calibre and civilisation of the lower class depends the future
\nof the entire race. And we have seen what sort of lower class England, with all
\nher splendid success, has been able to evolve — in calibre debased, in
\ncivilisation nil. And after seeing what England has produced by her empiricism,
\nher culture of a raw energy, her exaltation of a political method not founded on
\nreason, we must see what France has produced by her steady, logical pursuit of a
\nfine social ideal: it is the Paris ouvrier<\/i> with his firmness of grasp on
\naffairs, his sanity, his height of mind, his clear, direct ways of life and
\nthought, — it is the French peasant with his ready tact, his power of quiet and
\nsensible conversation, located in an enjoyable corner of life, small it may be,
\nbut with plenty of room for wholesome work and plenty of room for refreshing
\ngaiety. There we have the strong side of France, a lucid social atmosphere, a
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\nrationally directed to insure a clearly conceived purpose, a high level of
\ncharacter and refinement pervading all classes and a scheme of society bestowing
\na fair chance of happiness on the low as well as the high. But if France is
\nstrong in the sphere of England’s weakness, she is no less weak in the sphere of
\nEngland\u2019s strength. Along with and militating against her social happiness, we
\nhave to reckon constant political disorder and instability, an alarming defect
\nof expansive vigour, and entire failure in the handling of general politics.
\nFrance, unable to conceive and work out a proper political machinery, has been
\nreduced to copy with slight variations the English model and import a set of
\nmachinery well suited to the old English temper, but now unsuited even to the
\nEnglish and still more to the vehement French character. Passionate, sensitive,
\nloquacious, fond of dispute and apt to be blown away by gusts of feeling, the
\nGaul is wholly unfit for that heavy decorum, that orderly process of debate,
\nthat power of combining anomalies, which still exist to a great extent in
\nEngland, but which even there must eventually grow impossible. Hence the
\nvehement French nation after a brief experience of each alien manufacture has
\ngrown intensely impatient and shipped it back without superfluous ceremony to
\nits original home. Here is the latent root of that disheartening failure which
\nhas attended France in all her brief and feverish attempts to discover a stable
\nbasis of political advance, – of that intense consequent disgust, that scornful
\naversion to politics which has led thinking France to rate it as an indecent
\nharlequin-show in which no serious man will care to meddle. But if this were
\nall, a superficial observer might balance a defect and merit on one side by an
\nanswering merit and defect on the other, and conclude that the account was
\nclear; but social status is not the only department of success in which England
\ncompares unfavourably with France. There is her fatal incoherency, her want of
\npolitical cohesion, her want of social cohesion. A Breton, a Basque, a
\nProven\u00e7al, though no less alien in blood to the mass of the French people than
\nthe Irish, the Welsh, the Scotch to the mass of the English people, would repel
\nwith alarm and abhorrence the mere thought of impairing the fine solidarity, the
\nhomogeneity of sentiment, which the possession of an agreeable social<\/p>\n

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\nhas developed in France. And we cannot sufficiently admire the supreme virtue of
\nthat fine social development and large diffusion of general happiness, which has
\nconserved for France in the midst of fearful political calamities her splendid
\ncohesiveness as a nation and as a community. In England on the other hand we see
\nthe sorry spectacle of a great empire lying at the mercy of disintegrating
\ninfluences, because the component races have neither been properly merged in the
\nwhole nor persuaded by the offer of a high level of happiness to value the
\nbenefits of solidarity. And if France by her injudicious choice of mechanism,
\nher political incapacity, her refusal to put her best blood into politics, has
\ninvolved herself in fearful political calamities, no less has England by her
\nexclusive pursuit of machinery, her social incompetence, her prejudice against a
\nrational equality, her excessive individualism, entered on an era of fearful
\nsocial calamities. It is a suggestive fact that the alienation of sympathy, the
\nstrong antipathetic feelings of Labour towards Capital, are nowhere so marked,
\nthe quarrel between them is nowhere so violent, sustained and ferocious as in
\nthe two countries which are proudest of their institutions and have most
\nsystematically neglected their social development — England and America. It is
\nnot therefore unreasonable to conclude — and had I space and leisure, I should
\nbe tempted to show that every circumstance tends to fortify the conclusion and
\nconvert it into a certainty — that this social neglect is the prime cause of
\nthe fearful array of social calamities, whose first impact has already burst on
\nthose proud and successful countries. But enough has been said, and to discuss
\nthe matter exhaustively would unduly defer the point of more direct importance
\nfor ourselves: – I mean the ominous connection which these truths have with the
\nactual conditions of politics and society in India.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
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\n\t\tIndu Prakash<\/i>, <\/i>November 13, 1893 <\/p>\n

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\nI<\/b> AM<\/b> not ignorant that to practical men all I have written will
\nprove beyond measure unpalatable. Strongly inimical as they are to thought in
\npolitics, they will detect in it an offensive redolence of dilettantism, perhaps
\nscout it as a foolish waste of power, or if a good thing at all a good thing for
\na treatise on general politics, a good thing out of place. To what end these
\nremote instances, what pertinence in these political metaphysics? I venture
\nhowever to suggest that it is just this gleaning from general politics, this
\nsurvey and digestion of human experience in the mass that we at the present
\nmoment most imperatively want. No one will deny, — no one at least in that
\nconsiderable class to whose address my present remarks are directed, — that for
\nus and even for those of us who have a strong affection for oriental things and
\nbelieve that there is in them a great deal that is beautiful, a great deal that
\nis serviceable, a great deal that is worth keeping, the most important objective
\nis and must inevitably be the admission into India of occidental ideas, methods
\nand culture: even if we are ambitious to conserve what is sound and beneficial
\nin our indigenous civilisation, we can only do so by assisting very largely the
\ninflux of Occidentalism. But at the same time we have a perfect right to insist,
\nand every sagacious man will take pains to insist, that the process of
\nintroduction shall not be as hitherto rash and ignorant, that it shall be
\njudicious, discriminating. We are to have what the West can give us, because
\nwhat the West can give us is just the thing and the only thing that will rescue
\nus from our present appalling condition of intellectual and moral decay, but we
\nare not to take it haphazard and in a lump; rather we shall find it expedient to
\nselect the very best that is thought and known in Europe, and to import even
\nthat with the changes and reservations which our diverse conditions may be found
\nto dictate. Otherwise instead of a simply ameliorating influence, we shall have
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\nvices and calamities of the West superimposed on the vices and calamities of the
\nEast.<\/p>\n

       
\nNo one has such advantages, no one is so powerful to discourage, minimise and
\neven to prevent the intrusion of what is mischievous, to encourage, promote and
\neven to ensure the admission of what is salutary, than an educated and vigorous
\nnational assembly standing for the best thought and the best energy in the
\ncountry, and standing for it not in a formal parliamentary way, but by the
\nspontaneous impulse and election of the people. Patrons of the Congress are
\nnever tired of giving us to understand that their much lauded idol does stand
\nfor all that is best in the country and that it stands for them precisely in the
\nway I have described. If that is so, it is not a little remarkable that far from
\nregulating judiciously the importation of occidental wares we have actually been
\nat pains to import an inferior in preference to a superior quality, and in a
\ncondition not the most apt but the most inapt for consumption in India. Yet that
\nthis has been so far the net result of our political commerce with the West,
\nwill be very apparent to any one who chooses to think. National character being
\nlike human nature, maimed and imperfect, it was not surprising, not unnatural
\nthat a nation should commit one or other of various errors. We need not marvel
\nif England, overconfident in her material success and the practical value of her
\ninstitutions has concerned herself too little with social development and set
\nsmall store by the discreet management of her masses: nor must we hold French
\njudgment cheap because in the pursuit of social felicity and the pride of her
\nmagnificent cohesion France has failed in her choice of apparatus and courted
\npolitical insecurity and disaster. But there are limits even to human
\nfallibility and to combine two errors so distinct would be, one imagines, a
\nmiracle of incompetence. Facts however are always giving the lie to our
\nimaginations; and it is a fact that we by a combination of errors so eccentric
\nas almost to savour of felicity, are achieving this prodigious tour de force<\/i>.
\nServile in imitation with a peculiar Indian servility we have swallowed down in
\na lump our English diet and especially that singular paradox about the unique
\nvalue of machinery: but we have not the stuff in us to originate a really
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for
\nourselves. Hence the Congress, a very reputable body, I hasten to admit, teeming
\nwith grave citizens and really quite flush of lawyers, but for all that meagre
\nin the scope of its utility and wholly unequal to the functions it ought to
\nexercise. There we have laid the foundations, as the French laid the
\nfoundations, of political incompetence, political failure; and of a more fatal
\nincompetence, a more disastrous failure, because the French have at least
\noriginality, thought, resourcefulness, while we are vainglorious, shallow,
\nmentally impotent: and as if this error were not enough for us, we have
\npermitted ourselves to lose all sense of proportion, and to evolve an inordinate
\nself-content, an exaggerated idea of our culture, our capacity, our importance.
\nHence we choose to rate our own political increase higher than social perfection
\nor the advancement, intellectual and economical, of that vast unhappy
\nproletariate about which everybody talks and nobody cares. We blindly assent
\nwhen Mr. Pherozshah in the generous heat of his temperate and carefully
\nrestricted patriotism, assures us after his genial manner that the awakening of
\nthe masses from their ignorance and misery is entirely unimportant and any
\nexpenditure of energy in that direction entirely premature. There we have laid
\nthe foundation, as England laid the foundation, of social collapse, of social
\ncalamities. We have sown the wind and we must not complain if we reap the
\nwhirlwind. Under such circumstances it cannot be superfluous or a waste of power
\nto review in the light of the critical reason that part of human experience most
\nnearly connected by its nature with our own immediate difficulties. It is rather
\nour main business and the best occupation not of dilettantes but of minds gifted
\nwith insight, seriousness, original power. So much indeed is it our main
\nbusiness that according as it is executed or neglected, we must pronounce a
\nverdict of adequacy or inadequacy on our recent political thought: and we have
\nseen that it is hopelessly inadequate, that all our efforts repose on a body
\norganically infirm to the verge of impotence and are in their scheme as in their
\npractice, selfishly frigid to social development and the awakening of the
\nmasses.
\n        Here then we have got a little nearer
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\nreaders the precise and intrinsic meaning of that count in my indictment which
\ncensures the Congress as a body not popular and not honestly desirous of a
\npopular character — in fact as a middle-class organ selfish and disingenuous in
\nits public action and hollow in its professions of a large and disinterested
\npatriotism. I hope to have convinced them that this is a solid charge and a
\ncharge entirely damaging to their character for wisdom and public spirit. Above
\nall I hope to have persuaded Mr. Pherozshah Mehta, or at least the eidolon of
\nthat great man, the shadow of him which walks through these pages, that our
\nnational effort must contract a social and popular tendency before it can hope
\nto be great or fruitful. But then Mr. Pherozshah is a lawyer: he has, enormously
\ndeveloped in him, that forensic instinct which prompts men to fight out a cause
\nwhich they know to be unsound, to fight it out to the last gasp, not because it
\nis just or noble but because it is theirs; and in the spirit of that forensic
\ntradition he may conceivably undertake to answer me somewhat as follows.
\n"Material success and a great representative assembly are boons of so immense a
\nmagnitude, so stupendous an importance that even if we purchase them at the cost
\nof a more acute disintegration, a more appalling social decadence, the rate will
\nnot be any too exorbitant. Let us exactly imitate English success by an exact
\nimitation of English models and then there will be plenty of time to deal with
\nthese questions which you invest with fictitious importance." Monstrous as the
\ntheorem is, profound as is the mental darkness which pervades it, it summarises
\nnot unfairly the defence put forward by the promoters and well-wishers of the
\nCongress.
\n        On us as the self-elected envoys of a
\nnew evangel there rests a heavy responsibility, assumed by our own will, but
\nwhich once assumed we can no longer repudiate or discard; a responsibility which
\npromises us immortal credit, if performed with sincerity and wisdom, but saddled
\nwith ignominy to ourselves and disaster to our country, if we discharge it in
\nanother spirit and another manner. To meet that responsibility we have no
\nheight, no sincerity of character, no depth of emotion, no charity, no
\nseriousness of intellect. Yet it is only a sentimentalist, we are told, who will
\nbid us raise, purify and transform ourselves so that we<\/font><\/p>\n

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may
\nbe in some measure worthy of the high and solemn duties we have bound ourselves
\nto perform! The proletariate among us is sunk in ignorance and overwhelmed with
\ndistress. But with that distressed and ignorant proletariate, — now that the
\nmiddle class is proved deficient in sincerity, power and judgment, –with that
\nproletariate resides, whether we like it or not, our sole assurance of hope, our
\nsole chance in the future. Yet he is set down as a vain theorist and a dreamy
\ntrifler who would raise it from its ignorance and distress. The one thing
\nneedful we are to suppose, the one thing worthy of a great and statesmanlike
\nsoul is to enlarge the Legislative Councils, until they are big enough to hold
\nMr. Pherozshah M. Mehta, and other geniuses of an immoderate bulk. To play with
\nbaubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious
\nenergy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils,
\nour Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial
\nfrom the executive functions, — while we, I say, are finessing about trifles,
\nthe waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the
\nprimitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin
\ncrust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated. Already a red
\ndanger-signal has shot up from Prabhas-Patan, and sped across the country,
\nspeaking with a rude eloquence of strange things beneath the fair surface of our
\nrenascent, enlightened India; yet no sooner was the signal seen than it was
\nforgotten. Perhaps the religious complexion of these occurrences has lulled our
\nfears; but when turbulence has once become habitual in a people, it is only
\nfolly that will reckon on its preserving the original complexion. A few more
\ntaxes, a few more rash interferences of Government, a few more stages of
\nstarvation, and the turbulence that is now religious will become social. I am
\nspeaking to that class which Mr. Manmohan Ghose has called the thinking portion
\nof the Indian community: well, let these thinking gentlemen carry their
\nthoughtful intellects a hundred years back. Let them recollect what causes led
\nfrom the religious madness of St. Bartholomew to the social madness of the Reign
\nof Terror. Let them enumerate if their memory serves them, the salient features
\nand symptoms which the wise man detected<\/p>\n

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\nmany years before the event to be the sure precursors of some terrible
\ncatastrophe; and let them discover, if they can, any of those symptoms which are
\nabsent from the phenomena of our disease. With us it rests – if indeed it is not
\ntoo late — with our sincerity, our foresight, our promptness of thought and
\naction, that the hideous parallel shall not be followed up by a sequel as awful,
\nas bloody and more purely disastrous. Theorist, and trifler though I may be
\ncalled, I again assert as our first and holiest duty, the elevation and
\nenlightenment of the proletariate: I again call on those nobler spirits among us
\nwho are working erroneously, it may be, but with incipient or growing sincerity
\nand nobleness of mind, to divert their strenuous effort from the promotion of
\nnarrow class interests, from silly squabbles about offices and salaried
\npositions, from a philanthropy laudable in itself and worthy of rational
\npursuit, but meagre in the range of its benevolence and ineffectual towards
\npromoting the nearest interests of the nation, into that vaster channel through
\nwhich alone the healing waters may be conducted to the lips of their ailing and
\ntortured country.\n<\/p>\n

lndu
\nPrakash<\/i>, <\/i>December 4, 1893<\/p>\n

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\n P<\/b><\/font>OVERTY<\/font><\/b>
\nof organic conception and unintelligence of the deeper facts of our environment
\nare the inherent vices I have hitherto imputed to the Congress and the
\nburgess-body of which it is the political nucleus. But I have not done enough
\nwhen I have done that. Perversion or error in the philosophy of our aim does
\nindeed point to a serious defect of the political reason, but it is not
\nincompatible with a nearer apprehension and happier management of surface facts;
\nand if we had been so far apprehensive and dexterous, that would have been an
\noutput of native directness and force on which we might reasonably felicitate
\nourselves. For directness and force are an inalienable ancestral inheritance
\nhanded down by vigorous forefathers, and where they are, the political reason
\nwhich comes of liberal culture and ancient experience, may be waited for with a
\ncertain patient hopefulness. But it is to be feared that our performance up to
\ndate does not give room for so comforting an assurance. Is it not rather the
\nfact that our whole range of thought and action has been pervaded by a stamp of
\nunreality and helplessness, a straining after achievement for which we have not
\nthe proper stamina and an entire misconception of facts as well as of natural
\nlaws? To be convinced of this we have only to interrogate recent events, not
\nconfiding in their outward face as the shallow and self-contented do, but
\ngetting to the heart of them, making sure of their hidden secret, their deeper
\nreality. Indeed it will not hurt any of us to put out of sight for a moment
\nthose vain and fantastic chimeras about Simon de Montfort and the gradual
\nevolution of an Indian Parliament, with which certain politicians are fond of
\namusing us, and look things straight in the face. We must resolutely hold fast
\nto the primary fact that right and effective action can only ensue upon a right
\nunderstanding of ourselves in relation to our environment. For by reflection or
\ninstinct to get a clear insight into our position and by dexterity to make the
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of
\nit, that is the whole secret of politics, and that is just what we have failed
\nto do. Let us see whether we cannot get some adequate sense of what our position
\nreally is: after that we shall be more in the way to hit closely the exact point
\nat which we have failed.
\nWhatever theatrical attitude it may suit our vanity to adopt, we are not, as we
\npretend to be, the embodiment of the country’s power, intelligence and worth:
\nneither are we disinterested patriots striving in all purity and unselfishness
\ntowards an issue irreproachable before God. These are absurd pretensions which
\nonly detract from the moral height of our nature and can serve no great or
\nserious end. We may gain a poor and evanescent advantage by this sort of
\nhypocrisy, but we lose in candour and clearness of intellect, we lose in
\nsincerity which is another name for strength. If we would only indulge less our
\nbias towards moral ostentation and care more to train ourselves in a healthy
\nrobustness and simple candour, it would really advantage us not only in
\ncharacter, but in power; and it would have this good effect, that we should no
\nlonger throw dust into our own eyes; we should be better fitted to see ourselves
\nas a critic of human society would see us, better able to get that clear insight
\ninto our own position, which is one condition of genuine success. No, we are not
\nand cannot be a body of disinterested patriots. Life being, as science tells us,
\nan affirmation of one’s self, any aggregate mass of humanity must inevitably
\nstrive to emerge and affirm its own essence, must by the law of its own nature
\naspire towards life, aspire towards expansion, aspire towards perfecting of its
\npotential strength in the free air of political recognition and the full light
\nof political predominance. That is just what has been happening in India. In us
\nthe Indian burgess or middle class emerges from obscurity, perhaps from
\nnothingness, and strives between a strong and unfeeling bureaucracy and an inert
\nand imbecile proletariate to possess itself of rank, consideration and power.
\nAgainst that striving it is futile to protest; one might as well quarrel with
\nthe law of gravitation; but though our striving must be inherently selfish, we
\ncan at least make some small effort to keep it as little selfish as possible, to
\nmake it, as far as may be, run in harness with the grand central interests of
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\nlarge. So much at least those of us who have a broad human affection for our
\ncountry as distinct from ourselves, have a right to expect.
\nThus emergent, thus ambitious, it was our business by whatever circumstances we
\nwere environed, to seize hold of those circumstances and make ourselves masters
\nof them. The initial difficulties were great. A young and just emergent body,
\nwithout experience of government, without experience even of resistance to
\ngovernment, consequently without inherited tact, needs a teacher or a Messiah to
\ninitiate it in the art of politics. In England the burgess was taught almost
\ninsensibly by the nobility; in France the found a Messiah in the great Napoleon.
\nWe had no Napoleon, but we had a nobility. Europeans, when the spirit moves them
\nto brag of their superiority over us Asiatics, are in the habit of saying that
\nthe West is progressive, the East stationary. That is a little too
\ncomprehensive. England and France are no doubt eminently progressive but there
\nare other countries of Europe which have not been equally forward. America is a
\ndemocratic country which has not progressed: Russia is a despotic country which
\nhas not progressed: in Italy , Spain<\/font>,<\/font>
\nGermany even progress has been factitious and slow: Nevertheless, though the
\nvulgar wording of the boast may be loose and careless, yet it does not express a
\nvery real superiority. The nations of the West are not all progressive, true;
\nbut they are all in that state which is<\/i> the first condition of progress,
\na state, I mean, of fluidity, but of fluidity within limits, fluidity on a
\nstable and normal basis. If no spirit of thought or emotion moves on the face of
\nthe waters, they become as foul and stagnant as in the most conservative parts
\nof Asia, but a very slight wind will set them flowing. In most Asiatic
\ncountries, — I do not speak of India — one might almost imagine a hurricane
\nblowing without any perceptible effect. Accordingly in Europe the transition of
\npower from the noble to the burgess has been natural and inevitable. In India,
\njust as naturally and inevitably, the administration remained with the noble.
\nThe old Hindu mechanism of society and government certainly did prescribe
\nlimits, certainly had a basis that was stable and normal; but it was too rigid,
\ntoo stationary: it bound down the burgess and held him in his place
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\niron weight of custom and religious ordinance. The regime that overthrew and
\nsucceeded it, the Mussulman regime, was mediaeval in character, fluid certainly,
\nindeed in a perpetual state of flux, but never able to shake off the curse of
\ninstability, never in a position to prescribe limits, never stable, never
\nnormal. In such a society the qualities which make for survival, are valour,
\ndexterity, initiative, swiftness, a robust immorality, qualities native to an
\naristocracy and to nations moulded by an aristocracy, native also to certain
\nraces, but even in those nations, even in those races, alien to the ordinary
\nspirit of the burgess. His ponderous movements, his fumbling, his cold timidity,
\nhis decent scrupulousness have been fatal to his pretensions, at times inimical
\nto his existence. Accordingly in India he has been submerged, scarcely existent.
\nGreat affairs and the high qualities they nourish have rested in the hand of the
\nnoble. We had then our nobility, our class trained and experienced in government
\nand affairs: but to them unhappily we could not possibly look for guidance or
\neven for co-operation. At the period of our emergence they were lethargic,
\neffete, moribund, partially sunk in themselves; and even if any of the old
\nenergy had survived their fall, the world in which they moved was too new and
\nstrange, the transition to it had been too sudden and confounding to admit of
\ntheir assimilating themselves so as to move with ease and success under novel
\nconditions. The old nobility was quite as helpless from decay and dotage, as we
\nfrom youthful inexperience. It was foreign energy that had pushed aside the old
\noutworn machinery, it was an alien government that had by policy and self-will
\nhurried us into a new and quite unfamiliar world. Would that government, politic
\nand self-willed as it was, help us to an activity that might, nay, that must
\nturn eventually to their personal detriment? Certainly they had the power but
\nquite as certainly they had not the will. No doubt Anglo-Indians have very
\nlittle right to speak of us as bitterly as they are in the habit of doing. By
\nsetting themselves to compel our social elements into a state of fluidity, and
\nfor that purpose not only of putting in motion organic forces but bringing
\ndirect pressure to bear, by strictly enforcing system and order so as to lay
\ndown fixed limits and a normal basis, within which the fluid elements might
\nsettle into new forms, they<\/p>\n

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in
\nfact made themselves responsible for us and lost the right to blame anyone but
\nthemselves for what might ensue. They are in the unlucky position of
\nresponsibility for a state of things which they abhor and certainly had no
\nintention of bringing about. The force which they had in mind to construct was a
\nbody of grave, loyal and conservative citizens, educated but without ideas, a
\nbody created by and having a stake in the present order, and therefore attached
\nto its continuance, a power in the land certainly, but a power for order, for
\npermanence, not a power for disturbance and unrest. In such an enterprise they
\nwere bound to fail and they failed egregiously. Sir Edwin Arnold when he found
\nout that it was a grievous mistake to occidentalise us, forgot, no doubt, for
\nthe moment his role as the preacher and poetaster of self-abnegation, and spoke
\nas an ordinary mundane being, the prophet of a worldly and selfish class: but if
\nwe accept his words in that sense, there can be no doubt that he was perfectly
\nright. Anglo-Indians had never seriously brought themselves to believe that we
\nare in blood and disposition a genuine Aryan community. They chose to regard our
\nhistory as a jungle of meaningless facts, and could not understand that we were
\nnot malleable dead matter, but men with Occidental impulses in our blood, not
\nvirgin material to be wrought into any shape they preferred, but animate beings
\nwith a principle of life in us and certain, if subjected to the same causes,
\nplaced in the same light and air as European communities, to exhibit effects
\nprecisely similar and shape ourselves rather than be shaped. They proposed to
\nconstruct a tank for their own service and comfort; they did not know that they
\nwere breaking up the fountains of the great deep. There, stated shortly, is the
\nwhole sense of their policy and conduct. The habit, set in vogue by rhetoricians
\nof Macaulay\u2019s type, of making large professions of benevolence invested with an
\nair of high grandiosity, has become so much a second nature with them, that I
\nwill not ask if they are sincere when they make them: but it is a rhetorical
\nhabit and nothing more. We who are not interested in keeping up the fiction, may
\njust as well pierce through it to the fact. If they had seen things as they
\nreally are, they would have been wisely inactive: but they wanted a submissive
\nand attached population, and they<\/p>\n

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\nthought they had hit on the best way of getting what they wanted. In this
\nconfidence, if there was a great deal of delusion, there was also something of
\ntruth. But we must not be surprised or indignant if the Anglo-Indians, when they
\nsaw their confidence so rudely dashed and themselves confronted, not with
\nsubmission and attachment but with a body eager, pushing, recriminative, pushing
\nfor recognition, pushing for power, covetous above all of that authority which
\nthey had come to regard as their private and peculiar possession, — there is no
\ncause for surprise or resentment, if they cared little for the grain of success
\nin their bushelful of failure, and regarded us with those feelings of alarm,
\ndistrust and hatred which Frankenstein experienced when having hoped to make a
\nman, he saw a monster. Their conduct was too natural to be censured. I do not
\nsay that magnanimity would not have been better, more dignified, more politic.
\nBut who expects magnanimity from bureaucracy? The old nobility then were almost
\nextinct and had moreover no power to help us: the bureaucracy had not the will.
\nYet it was from their ranks that the Messiah came.<\/p>\n

\n                                                                                                                                                                                         
\n <\/font>Indu Prakash,<\/i> February 5,1894<\/p>\n

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\nTHE<\/b> Civilian Order, which accounts itself, and no doubt justly, the
\ninforming spirit of Anglo-India, is credited in this country with quite an
\nextraordinary degree of ability and merit, so much so that many believe it to
\nhave come down to us direct from heaven. And it is perhaps on this basis that in
\ntheir dealings with Indians, \u2013 whom being moulded of a clay entirely
\nterrestrial, one naturally supposes to be an inferior order of creatures, \u2013 they
\npermit themselves a very liberal tinge of presumption and arrogance. Without
\ndisputing their celestial origin, one may perhaps be suffered to hint that eyes
\nunaffected by the Indian sun, will be hard put to it to discover the pervading
\nsoul of magnificence and princeliness in the moral and intellectual style of
\nthese demigods. The fact is indeed all the other way. The general run of the
\nService suffers by being recruited through the medium of Competitive
\nExamination: its tone is a little vulgar, its character a little raw, its
\nachievement a little second-rate. Harsh critics have indeed said more than this;
\nnay, has not one of themselves, has not Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a blameless
\nAnglo-Indian, spoken, and spoken with distressing emphasis to the same effect?
\nThey have said that it moves in an atmosphere of unspeakable boorishness and
\nmediocrity. That is certainly strong language and I would not for a moment be
\nthought to endorse it; but there is, as I say, just a small sediment of truth at
\nthe bottom which may tend to excuse, if not to justify, this harsh and
\nunfriendly criticism. And when one knows the stuff of which the Service is made,
\none ceases to wonder at it. A shallow schoolboy stepping from a cramming
\nestablishment to the command of high and difficult affairs, can hardly be
\nexpected to give us anything magnificent or princely. Still less can it be
\nexpected when the sons of small tradesmen are suddenly promoted from the counter
\nto govern great provinces. Not that I have any fastidious prejudice against
\nsmall tradesmen. I simply mean that the<\/p>\n

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\neducation men of that class can get in England, does not adequately qualify a
\nraw youth to rule over millions of his fellow-beings. Bad in training, void of
\nculture, in instruction poor, it is in plain truth a sort of education that
\nleaves him with all his original imperfections on his head, unmannerly,
\nuncultivated, unintelligent. But in the Civil Service, with all its vices and
\nshortcomings, one does find, as perhaps one does not find elsewhere, rare and
\nexalted souls detached from the failings of their order, who exhibit the
\nqualities of the race in a very striking way; not geniuses certainly, but swift
\nand robust personalities, rhetorically powerful, direct, forcible, endowed to a
\nsurprising extent with the energy and self-confidence which are the heirlooms of
\ntheir nation; men in short who give us England \u2013 and by England I mean the whole
\nAnglo-Celtic race \u2013 on her really high and admirable side. Many of these are
\nIrish or Caledonian; others are English gentlemen of good blood and position,
\ntrained at the great public schools, who still preserve that fine flavour of
\ncharacter, scholarship and power, which was once a common possession in England,
\nbut threatens under the present dispensation to become sparse or extinct. Others
\nagain are veterans of the old Anglo-Indian school, moulded in the larger
\ntraditions and sounder discipline of a strong and successful art who still keep
\nsome vestiges of the grand old Company days, still have something of a great and
\nnoble spirit, something of an adequate sense how high are the affairs they have
\nto deal with and how serious the position they are privileged to hold. It was
\none of these, one endowed with all their good gifts, it was Mr. Allan Hume, a
\nman acute and vigorous, happy in action and in speech persuasive, an ideal
\nleader, who prompted, it may be by his own humane and lofty feelings, it may be
\nby a more earthly desire of present and historic fame, took us by the hand and
\nguided us with astonishing skill on our arduous venture towards pre-eminence and
\npower. Mr. Hume, I have said, had all the qualities that go to make a fine
\nleader in action. If only he had added to these the crowning gifts,
\nreflectiveness, ideas, a comprehensive largeness of vision! Governing force,
\nthat splendid distinction inherited by England from her old Norman barons,
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\ntheir<\/span> way, but they are not the whole of politics. Ideas, reflection, the
\npolitical reason count for quite as much, are quite as essential. But on these,
\nthough individual Englishmen, men like Bolingbroke, Arnold,
\nBurke, have had them pre-eminently, the<\/span> race has always kept a very
\ninadequate hold: and Mr. Hume is distinguished from his countrymen, not by the
\ndescription of<\/span> his merits, but by their degree. His original conception,
\nI cannot help thinking, was narrow and impolitic.
\n     He must have known, none better, what immense
\ncalamities may often be ripening under a petty and serene outside. He must have
\nbeen aware, none better, when the fierce pain of hunger and oppression cuts to
\nthe bone what awful elemental passions may start to life in the mildest, the
\nmost docile proletariates<\/span>. Yet he chose practically to
\nignore his knowledge; he conceived it as his business to remove a merely
\npolitical inequality, and strove to uplift the burgess into a merely isolated
\npredominance. That the burgess should strive towards predominance, nay, that for
\na brief while he should have it, is only just, only natural: the mischief of it
\nwas that in Mr. Hume’s formation the proletariate<\/span>
\nremained for any practical purpose a piece off the board. Yet the proletariate<\/span> is, as I have striven to show, the real key of
\nthe situation. Torpid he is and immobile; he is nothing of an actual force, but
\nhe is a very great potential force, and whoever succeeds in understanding and
\neliciting his strength, becomes by the very fact master of the future. Our
\nsituation is indeed complex and difficult beyond any that has ever been imagined
\nby the human intellect; but if there is one thing clear in it, it is that the
\nright and fruitful policy for the burgess, the only policy that has any chance
\nof eventual success, is to base his cause upon an adroit management of the
\nproletariate<\/span>. He must awaken and organise<\/span> the entire power of the country and thus multiply
\ninfinitely his volume and significance, the better to attain supremacy as much
\nsocial as political. Thus and thus only will he attain to his legitimate
\nstation, not an egoist class living for itself and in itself, but the crown of
\nthe nation and its head.<\/p>\n

     
\nBut Mr. Hume saw things in a different light, and let me confess out of hand,
\nthat once he had got a clear conception of his business, he proceeded in it with
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\nand<\/span> tact. The clear-cut ease and strong simplicity of his movements were
\nalmost Roman; no crude tentatives<\/span>, no infelicitous
\nbungling, but always a happy trick of hitting the right nail on the head and
\nthat at the first blow. Roman too was his principle of advancing to a great
\nobject by solid and consecutive gradations. To begin by accustoming the burgess
\nas well as his adversaries to his own corporate reality, to proceed by a
\ndefinitive statement of his case to the Viceregal<\/span> government, and for a final throw to make a
\nvehement and powerful appeal to the English parliament, an appeal that should be
\nfinanced by the entire resources of middle-class India and carried through its
\nstages with an iron heart and an obdurate resolution, expending moreover
\ninfinite energy, — so and so only could the dubious road Mr. Hume was treading,
\nlead to anything but bathos and anticlimax. Nothing could be happier than the
\nway in which the initial steps were made out. To be particularly obstreperous
\nabout his merits and his wrongs is certainly the likeliest way for a man to get
\na solid idea of his own importance and make an unpleasant impression on his
\nill-wishers. And for that purpose, for a blowing of trumpets in concert, for
\na self<\/span>-assertion persistent, bold and clamorous, the Congress, however
\nincapable in other directions may be pronounced perfectly competent; nay, it was
\nthe ideal thing. The second step was more difficult. He had to frame somehow a
\nwording of our case at once bold and cautious, so as to hit Anglo-India in its
\nweak place, yet properly sauced so as not to offend the palate,<\/span>
\ngrown fastidious and epicurean, of the British House of Commons. Delicate as was
\nthe task he managed it<\/span> with indubitable adroitness and
\na certain success. We may perhaps get at the inner sense of what happened, if we
\nimagine Mr. Hume giving this sort of ultimatum to the Government. "The Indian
\nburgess for whose education you have provided but whose patrimony you
\nsequestrated and are woefully mismanaging, having now come to years of
\ndiscretion, demands an account of your stewardship and the future management of
\nhis own estate. To compromise, if you are so good as to meet us half-way, we are
\nnot  unready<\/span>, but on any other hypothesis our
\nappeal lies at once to the tribunal of the British parliament. You will observe
\nour process is perfectly constitutional." The sting of <\/p>\n

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\nthe<\/span>
\nscorpion lay as usual in its tail. Mr. Hume<\/span> knew well
\nthe magic power of that word over Englishmen. With a German garrison it would
\nhave been naught; they would quickly have silenced with bayonets and prohibitive
\ndecrees any insolence of that sort. With French republicans it would have been
\nnaught; they would either have powerfully put it aside or frankly acceded to it.
\nBut the English are a nation of political jurists and any claim franked by the
\nepithet "constitutional" they are bound by the very law of their being to
\nrespect or at any rate appear to respect. The common run of Anglo-Indians,
\nblinded as selfishness always does blind people, might in their tremulous rage
\nand panic vomit charges of sedition and shout for open war; but a Government of
\npolitical jurists pledged to an occidentalising<\/span> policy could not do so without making
\nnonsense of its past. Moreover a Government viceregal<\/span>
\nin constitution cannot easily forget that it may have to run the gauntlet of
\nadverse comment from authorities at home. But if they could not put us down with
\nthe strong hand or meet our delegates with a non possumus<\/span><\/i>,
\nthey were not therefore going to concede to us any solid fraction of our
\ndemands. It is the ineradicable vice of the English nature that it can never be
\nclear or direct. It recoils from simplicity as from a snake. It must shuffle, it
\nmust turn in on itself, it<\/span> must preserve cherished
\nfictions intact. And supposing unpleasant results to be threatened, it escapes
\nfrom them through a labyrinth of unworthy and transparent subterfuges. Our
\nrulers are unfortunately average Englishmen, Englishmen, that is to say, who are
\nnot in the habit of rising superior to themselves; and if they were uncandid<\/span>, if they were tortuously hostile we may be
\nindignant, but we cannot be surprised. Mr. Hume at any rate saw quite clearly
\nthat nothing was to be expected,<\/span> perhaps he had never
\nseriously expected anything, from that quarter. He had already instituted with
\nreally admirable promptitude, the primary stages of his appeal to the British<\/font>
\n <\/span>
\nparliament.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nIndu<\/span> Prakash<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> <\/i>March 6, 1894<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nPage-56<\/p>\n

\n


\n
\n
\nHome<\/span><\/a><\/font><\/b><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD       The facts about the articles in the Indu Prakash were these. They were begun at the instance of K….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-01-bande-mataram-volume-01","wpcat-8-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","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=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}