Bande Mataram

Last Friday's Folly

17-September-1906

Even at the risk of being branded as social reactionaries, we must, we feel, enter our protest against the notions and ideals that lay, evidently, under the so-called national dinner, celebrated at the Albert Hall on Friday last. The function, in itself, was too insignificant to deserve any notice. Two hundred and fifty men and boys meeting and dining together in public, regardless of caste-restrictions and old orthodoxy, is not even a new thing in Calcutta Society. Hindus and Mahomedans had dined publicly in Calcutta, on special occasions, before now. Dinners had repeatedly been given at the India Club in honour of prominent members in which members of all castes and creeds joined. Subscription dinners had been organised in honour of prominent public men, even outside that Club, the last one being less than two years old, when the friends of Sir Henry Cotton met him at a dinner at the Calcutta Town Hall. Babu Narendranath Sen organised a public dinner some years back, to celebrate the birthday of Buddha, where people of all castes and more than one creed, sat down on mats and dined together on simple loochie and dal. These dinners had all been publicly announced and publicly reported; but no one cared to publicly condemn them. Had last Friday's dinner been associated with some specific public function, or been held in honour of any particular public men, no one would have, we believe, taken any serious notice of it. The folly of it lay in the idea that interdining was a necessary condition of nation building in India; and it deserves condemnation for propounding the foolish and suicidal ideal that social and religious differences must first of all be destroyed before India can ever hope to realise her own true civic life.

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This is the Anglo-Indian and the British idea. It is the main plea upon which the present despotism supports and justifies itself. It is the plea upon which even our own old-school patriots proclaim the fatal doctrine that India is not, and will never for a very long period be, fitted for self-government, and, therefore, the strong hand of the foreigner must be over her, to prevent her various castes and creeds flying at each others' throats, and thus falling a prey to some other and infinitely worse foreign yoke, if the present one is removed; and that, therefore, the highest political wisdom demands that we should, as long as there are diversities of creeds and castes among us, cultivate with care the present servitude, trying to make it easy to bear for the nation, and profitable for the individual, by adopting the policy of "association with and opposition to the Government". This plea must be knocked on the head, therefore, before we can expect to make out a reasonable case for that propaganda of national freedom and autonomy which has been taken up by the new party in the country.

Those who say that caste and religious differences must first of all be destroyed before India can ever rise to the status of a nation, have very hazy and confused notions regarding the character and constitution of that nation. Our history has been different in many respects from the history of other peoples. The composition of the Indian people has been unique in all the world. Nations grew in the past by the accretion and assimilation of different tribes. This is an earlier process. But India has not been a mere meeting place of tribes, but a meeting place of grown up nations with developed social and religious lines of their own, and with original castes and types of cultures peculiar to them. The character and composition of the coming Indian nation, therefore, will differ very materially from those of the European nations, the process of unification among whom took place at a much earlier and comparatively more nebular stage of their growth. This is a fact which our old school politicians and social reformers do not seem as yet to have had any time to think of, and we are not hopeful that even now, after it is pointed out to them, in the plainest language possible, they will have the

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patience to do so and recognise this essential peculiarity of our infant national life. The nation-idea in India will realise itself, in all its departments, along what may be called federal lines,—it will be a union of different nationalities, each preserving its own specific elements both of organisation and ideal, each communicating to the others what they lack in either thought or character, and all moving together towards one universal end, both in civic and social life, progressively realising that end along its own historic and traditional lines, and thus indefinitely drawing near to each other, without, for an equally indefinite period, actually losing themselves in any one particular form of that life, whether old or new. The Mahomedan, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian in India will not have to cease to be Mahomedan, Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian, in any sense of the term, for uniting into one great and puissant Indian nation. Devotion to one's own ideals and institutions, with toleration and respect for the ideals and institutions of other sections of the community, and an ardent love and affection for the common civic life and ideal of all—these are what must be cultivated by us now, for the building up of the real Indian nation. To try to build it up in any other way will be impossible, whether that way be the way of the Brahmo, the Christian, or the propagandist Mahomedan. To make any attempt along any of these lines, will not make for but work against national unity; and the reckless men who organised this so-called national dinner will, if they persist in their folly, instead of bringing the different races and religions together, only help to arouse the opposition of orthodoxy everywhere, and drive the great forces that range always with orthodoxy to an attitude of open hostility to the great national movement, and bring about a reaction that will seek to accentuate those very differences and tighten those very bonds of caste and custom which in their unphilosophic and unscientific zeal they are trying by these wrong and obtrusive methods to obliterate and loosen. It is in this view that we condemn the folly that was perpetrated on Friday last under the name of a National Dinner.

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