{"id":401,"date":"2013-07-13T01:27:46","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=401"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:27:46","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:27:46","slug":"132-the-village-and-the-nation-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\/132-the-village-and-the-nation-vol-01-bande-mataram-volume-01","title":{"rendered":"-132_The Village and the Nation.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\nThe Village and the Nation<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n               
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>W<\/font><\/b><\/span>E WROTE<\/font><\/b>
\nyesterday of the necessity of going back to the land if the Bengali Hindu is to
\nkeep his place in the country and escape the fate of those who divorce
\nthemselves from the root of life, the soil. But there is another aspect of the
\nquestion which is also of immense importance. The old organisation of the Indian
\nvillage was self-sufficient, self-centred, autonomous and exclusive. These
\nlittle units of life existed to themselves, each a miniature world of its own
\npetty interests and activities; like a system of planets united to each other
\nindeed by an unconscious force but each absorbed in its own life and careless of
\nthe other. It was a life beautifully simple, healthy, rounded and perfect, a
\ndelight to the poet and the lover of humanity. If perfect simplicity of life,
\nfreedom from economic evils, from moral degradation, from the strife, faction
\nand fury of town populations, from revolution and turmoil, from vice and crime
\non a large scale are the objects of social organisation, then the village
\ncommunities of India were ideal forms of social organisation. Many look back to
\nthem with regret and even British administrators who were instrumental in
\ndestroying them have wished that they could be revived. So valuable indeed were
\nthe elements of social welfare which they secured to the nation, that they have
\npersisted through all changes and revolutions as they were thousands of years
\nago when the Aryans first occupied the land. Nor can it be denied that they have
\nkept the nation alive. Whatever social evils or political diseases might corrupt
\nthe body politic, these little cells of national life supplied a constant source
\nof soundness and purity which helped to prevent final disintegration. But if we
\nowe national permanence to these village organisations, it cannot be denied that
\nthey <\/font> have
\nstood in the way of national unity.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n           
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>Wherever a nation has been formed, in the
\nmodern sense, it has been at the expense of smaller units. The whole history of
\nnational growth is the record of a long struggle to establish a<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nPage-736<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n

\ncentral
\nunity by subduing the tendency of smaller units to live to themselves. The
\nancient polity of Greece was the self-realisation of the city as an unit
\nsufficient to itself while the deme or village was obliged to sacrifice its
\nseparate existence to the greater unity of the city-state. Because the Greeks
\ncould not find it in their hearts to break the beautiful and perfect mould of
\ntheir self-sufficient city life, they could never weld themselves into a nation.
\nSo again it was not till the Romans had subdued the tendency of the Italian
\ncities to live to themselves, that the first European nation was created. In
\nmediaeval times the city-state tried to re-assert itself in the Municipalities
\nof France and Germany and municipal freedom had to be blotted out by an absolute
\nmonarchy before national unity was realised. Whenever a smaller or different
\nunity, whether it be that of the province, the church or feudal fief, tends to
\nlive for itself, it is an obstacle to national unity and has to be either broken
\nup or subordinated if the nation is to fulfil its unity. Ancient India could not
\nbuild itself into a single united nation, not because of caste or social
\ndifferences as the European writers assert, \u2014 caste and class have existed in
\nnations which achieved a faultless national unity,
\n\u2014<\/span> but because the old polity of the Hindus
\nallowed the village to live to itself, the clan to live to itself, the province
\nor smaller race-unit to live to itself. The village, sufficient to itself, took
\nno interest in the great wars and revolutions which affected only the ruling
\nclans of the kingdom including it in its territorial jurisdiction. The Kshatriya
\nclans fought and married and made peace among themselves, and were the only
\npolitical units out of which a nation might have been built. But the clan too
\nwas so attached to its separate existence that it was not till the clans were
\ndestroyed on the battlefield of Kurukshetra that larger national units could be
\nbuilt out of their ruins. Small kingdoms took their place based on provincial or
\nracial divisions and until the inrush of foreign peoples an attempt was in
\nprogress to build them into one nation by the superimposition of a single
\nimperial authority. Many causes prevented the success of the attempt, and the
\nprovincial unit has always remained the highest expression of the
\nnation-building tendencies in India. One cause perhaps more than any other
\ncontributed to the failure of the<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nPage-737<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ncentripetal
\ntendency to attain self-fulfilment, and that was the persistence of the village
\ncommunity which prevented the people, the real nation, from taking any part in
\nthe great struggles out of which a nation should have emerged. In other
\ncountries the people had to take part in the triumphs, disasters and failures of
\ntheir rulers either as citizens or at least as soldiers, but in India they were
\nleft to their little isolated republics with no farther interest than the
\npayment of a settled tax in return for protection by the supreme power. This was
\nthe true cause of the failure of India to achieve a distinct organised and
\nself-conscious Nationality. It is worthy of notice that the Indian race in which
\nthe national idea attained its most conscious expression and most nearly
\nattained realisation, was the Maratha people who drew their strength from the
\nvillage democracies and brought them to interest themselves in the struggle for
\nnational independence. If the Marathas had been able to rise above the idea of
\nprovincial or racial separateness, they would have established a permanent
\nempire and neither of the Wellesleys could have broken their power by diplomacy
\nor in the field. The British, historians have told us, conquered India in a fit
\nof absence of mind. In a fit of absence of mind also they destroyed the separate
\nlife of our village communities, and, by thus removing the greatest obstacle in
\nthe way of national development, prepared the irresistible movement towards
\nnational unity which now fills them with dismay. The provinces have been brought
\ntogether, the village has been destroyed. It only remains for the people to
\nfulfil their destiny. We are now turning our eyes again to the village under the
\nstress of an instinct of self-preservation and part of our programme is to
\nre-create village organisation. In doing so we must always remember that the
\nvillage can be so organised as to prove a serious obstacle to national cohesion.
\nOne or two of our leading publicists have sometimes expressed themselves as if
\nour salvation lay in the village and not in the larger organisation of the
\nnation. Swaraj has been sometimes interpreted as a return to the old conditions
\nof self-sufficient village life leaving the imperial authority to itself, to tax
\nand pass laws as it pleased \u2014<\/span> ignored because it is too strong to be
\ndestroyed. Even those who see the futility of ignoring Government which seeks to
\ndestroy<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nPage-738<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nevery
\ncentre of strength, however minute, except itself, sometimes insist on the
\nvillage as the secret of our life and ask us to give up our ambitious strivings
\nafter national Swaraj and realise it first in the village. Such counsel is
\ndangerous, even if it were possible to follow it. Nothing should be allowed to
\ndistract us from the mighty ideal of Swaraj, National and Pan-Indian. This is no
\nalien or exotic ideal, it is merely the conscious attempt to fulfil the great
\ncentripetal tendency which has pervaded the grandiose millenniums of her
\nhistory, to complete the work which Srikrishna began, which Chandragupta and
\nAsoka and the Gupta Kings continued, which Akbar almost brought to realisation,
\nfor which Shivaji was born and Bajirao fought and planned. The organisation of
\nour villages is an indispensable work to which we must immediately set our
\nhands, but we must be careful so to organise them as to make them feel that they
\nare imperfect parts of a single national unity, and dependent at every turn on
\nthe co-operation first of the district, secondly of the province, and finally of
\nthe nation. The day of the independent village or group of villages has gone and
\nmust not be revived; the nation demands its hour of fulfilment and seeks to
\ngather the village life of its rural population into a mighty, single and
\ncompact democratic nationality. We must make the nation what the village
\ncommunity was of old, self-sufficient, self-centred, autonomous and exclusive
\n\u2014 the ideal of national Swaraj.<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\nBande
\nMataram<\/i>,
\n<\/i> <\/font> March 8, 1908<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-739<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Village and the Nation                   WE WROTE yesterday of the necessity of going back to the land if the Bengali Hindu is to…<\/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-401","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\/401","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=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}