India
Renascent
(Notes
found in Sri Aurobindo's earliest available manuscripts, dated 1890-92,
his student days in England.)
The patriot who offers advice to a great nation in an era of change
and turmoil, should be very confident that he has something worth saying
before he ventures to speak; but if he can really put some new aspect
on a momentous question or emphasise any side of it that has not been
clearly understood, it is his bounden duty, however obscure he may be,
to ventilate it.
It is time that an Indian who has devoted his best thoughts and aspirations
to the service of his country, should have in his turn a patient hearing.
The
facts about the articles in the Indu Prakash were these. They
were begun at the instance of K. G. Deshpande, Aurobindo's Cambridge
friend who was editor of the paper, but the first two articles made
a sensation and frightened Ranade and other Congress leaders. Ranade
warned the proprietor of the paper that, if this went on, he would surely
be prosecuted for sedition. Accordingly the original plan of the series
had to be dropped at the proprietor's instance. Deshpande requested
Sri Aurobindo to continue in a modified tone and he reluctantly consented,
but felt no farther interest and the articles were published at long
intervals and finally dropped of themselves altogther.
The title refers to Congress politics. It is not used in the sense of
the Aladdin story, but was intended to imply the offering of new lights
to replace the old and faint reformist lights of the Congress.
(From notes and letters of Sri Aurobindo)
IF THE blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall
into a ditch? So or nearly so runs an apopthegm of the Galilean prophet,
whose name has run over the four quarters of the globe. Of all those
pithy comments on human life, which more than anything else made his
teaching effective, this is perhaps the one which goes home deepest
and admits of the most frequent use. But very few Indians will be found
to admit—certainly I myself two years ago would not have admitted,—that
it can truthfully be applied to the National Congress. Yet that it can
be so applied,—nay, that no judicious mind can honestly pronounce
any other verdict on its action,—is the first thing I must prove,
if these articles are to have any raison d'être. I am
quite aware that in doing this my motive and my prudence may be called
into question. I am not ignorant that I am about to censure a body which
to many of my countrymen seems the mightiest outcome of our new national
life; to some a precious urn in which are guarded our brightest and
noblest hopes; to others a guiding star which shall lead us through
the encircling gloom to a far distant paradise: and if I were not fully
confident that this fixed idea of ours is a snare and a delusion, likely
to have the most pernicious effects, I should simply have suppressed
my own doubts and remained silent. As it is, I am fully confident, and
even hope to bring over one or two of my countrymen to my own way of
thinking, or, if that be not possible, at any rate to induce them to
think a little more deeply than they have done.
I
know also that I shall stir the bile of those good people who are so
enamoured of the British Constitution, that they cannot like any one
who is not a partisan. "What!" they will say, "you pretend
to be a patriot yourself, and you set yourself with a light heart to
attack a body of patriots, which has no reason at all for existing except
patriotism,—nay, which is the efflorescence, the crown, the summit
and coping-stone of patriotism? How wickedly inconsistent all this is!
If you are really a friend to New India, why do you go about to break
up our splendid unanimity? The Congress has not yet existed for two
lustres; and in that brief space of time has achieved miracles. And
even if it has faults, as every institution however excellent it may
be, must have its faults, have you any plausible reason for telling
our weakness in the streets of Gath, and so taking our enemies into
the secret?" Now, if I were a strong and self-reliant man, I should
of course go in the way I had chosen without paying much attention to
these murmurers, but being, as I am, exceedingly nervous and afraid
of offending any one, I wish to stand well, even with those who admire
the British Constitution. I shall therefore find it necessary to explain
at some length the attitude which I should like all thinking men to
adopt towards the Congress.
And first, let me say that I am not much moved by one argument which
may possibly be urged against me. The Congress, it will be said, has
achieved miracles, and in common gratitude we ought not to express [towards]
it any sort of harsh or malevolent criticism. Let us grant for the moment
that the Congress has achieved miracles for us. Certainly, if it has
done that, we ought to hold it for ever in our grateful memory; but
if our gratitude goes beyond this, it at once incurs the charge of fatuity.
This is the difference between a man and an institution; a great man
who has done great things for his country, demands from us our reverence,
and however he may fall short in his after-life, a great and high-hearted
nation—and no nation was ever justly called great that was not
high-hearted—will not lay rude hands on him to dethrone him from
his place in their hearts. But an institution is a very different thing.
It was made for the use and not at all for the worship of man, and it
can only lay claim to respect so long as its beneficent action remains
not a memory of the past, but a thing of the present. We cannot afford
to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be
simply to become the slaves of our own machinery. However I will at
once admit that if an institution has really done miracles for us—and
miracles which are not mere conjuring tricks, but of a deep and solemn
import to the nation,—and if it is still doing and likely yet
to do miracles for us, then without doubt it may lay claim to a certain
immunity from criticism. But I am not disposed to admit that all this
is true of the Congress.
It is within the recollection of most of us to how giddy an eminence
this body was raised, on how prodigious a wave of enthusiasm, against
how immense a weight of resisting winds. So sudden was it all that it
must have been difficult, I may almost say impossible, even for a strong
man to keep his head and not follow with the shouting crowd. How shall
we find words vivid enough to describe the fervour of those morning
hopes, the April splendour of that wonderful enthusiasm? The Congress
was to us all that is to man most dear, most high and most sacred; a
well of living water in deserts more than Saharan, a proud banner in
the battle of Liberty, and a holy temple of concord where the races
met and mingled. It was certainly the nucleus or thrice-distilled essence
of the novel modes of thought among us; and if we took it for more than
it really was,—if we took it for our pillar of cloud by day and
pillar of fire by night; if we worshipped it as the morning-star of
our liberty; if we thought of old myths, of the trumpets that shook
down Jericho or the brazen serpent that healed the plague, and nourished
fond and secret hopes that the Congress would prove all this and more
than this;—surely our infatuation is to be passed by gently as
inevitable in that environment rather than censured as unnatural or
presuming.
If then any one tells me that the Congress was itself a miracle, if
in nothing else, at any rate in the enthusiasm of which it was the centre,
I do not know that I shall take the trouble to disagree with him; but
if he goes on and tells me that the Congress has achieved miracles,
I shall certainly take leave to deny the truth of his statement. It
appears to me that the most signal successes of this body were not miracles
at all, but simply the natural outcome of its constitution and policy.
I suppose that in the sphere of active politics its greatest success
is to be found in the enlargement of the Legislative Councils. Well,
that was perhaps a miracle in its way. In England a very common trick
is to put one ring under a hat and produce in another part of the room
what appears to be the same ring and is really one exactly like it—except
perhaps for the superscription. Just such a miracle is this which the
Congress has so triumphantly achieved. Another conjuring trick, and
perhaps a cleverer one, was the snatch vote about Simultaneous Examinations,
which owed its success to the sentimentalism of a few members of Parliament,
the self-seeking of others and the carelessness of the rest. But these,
however much we may praise them for cleverness, are, as I hope to show
later on, of no really deep and solemn import to the nation, but simply
conjuring tricks and nothing more. Over the rest of our political action
the only epitaph we can write is "Failure". Even in the first
flush of enthusiasm the more deep-thinking among us were perhaps a little
troubled by certain small things about the Congress, which did not seem
altogether right. The bare-faced hypocrisy of our enthusiasm for the
Queen-Empress,—an old lady so called by way of courtesy, but about
whom few Indians can really know or care anything—could serve
no purpose but to expose us to the derision of our ill-wishers. There
was too a little too much talk about the blessings of British rule,
and the inscrutable Providence which has laid us in the maternal, or
more properly the step-maternal bosom of just and benevolent England.
Yet more appalling was the general timidity of the Congress, its glossing
over of hard names, its disinclination to tell the direct truth, its
fear of too deeply displeasing our masters. But in our then state of
mind we were disposed to pass over all this as amiable weaknesses which
would wear off with time. Two still grosser errors were pardoned as
natural and almost inadvertent mistakes. It was true that we went out
of our way to flatter Mr. Gladstone, a statesman who is not only quite
unprincipled and in no way to be relied upon, but whose intervention
in an Indian debate has always been of the worst omen to our cause.
But then, we argued, people who had not been to England could not be
expected to discern the character of this astute and plausible man.
We did more than flatter Mr. Gladstone; we actually condescended to
flatter "General" Booth, a vulgar imposter, a convicted charlatan,
who has enriched himself by trading on the sentimental emotions of the
English middle class. But here too, we thought, the Congress has perhaps
made the common mistake of confounding wealth with merit, and has really
taken the "General" for quite a respectable person. In the
first flush of enthusiasm, I say, such excuses and such toleration were
possible and even natural, but in the moment of disillusionment it will
not do for us to flatter ourselves in this way any longer. Those amiable
weaknesses we were then disposed to pass over very lightly, have not
at all worn off with time, but have rather grown into an ingrained habit;
and the tendency to grosser errors has grown not only into a habit,
but into a policy. In its broader aspects the failure of the Congress
is still clearer. The walls of the Anglo-Indian Jericho stand yet without
a breach, and the dark spectre of Penury draws her robe over the land
in greater volume and with an ampler sweep.
Indu
Prakash, August 7, 1893
- Sri Aurobindo
