Bande Mataram

The Secret of the Swaraj Movement

29-June-1907

The paragraphist of Capital in the course of a denunciation full of venom and adorned with one or two choice bits of Billingsgate, describes Swaraj as a far-off divine event to be made possible by our being gradually educated to it under the guidance of the beneficent aliens. We need not trouble about the choleric effusions with a daily output of which Anglo-Indian writers nowadays provide their readers. But apart from the natural unhinging of the reason for which the prospect of loss of power and prestige or of trade is responsible, there is a plentiful lack of appreciation of the nature of the movement, its causes and probable effects not only on the part of the ruling class but of the majority of our educated people. We can understand the ruling class doing their very best to crush the movement out of self-interest. But it is none the less our duty to return good for evil and try our best to enlighten their intellectual haziness. It is from the want of a true perception of the nature of the movement that much of the misunderstanding and irritation has proceeded. And in trying to present it in its true bearing we have not been guided by any individual notions of our own but the decisions and findings of master-minds on the success of all spiritual movements. Why do men at all turn their backs on old ideas and betake themselves to revolutionary ones? How come these ideas to rise up and fill the whole air?

Why do they command acceptance notwithstanding much that seems unseemly, alarming and often even preposterous about them? The answer is that in spite of any defects there may be, even if they are marred by self-contradiction, shallowness or elements of real danger, such

Page 557

ideas fit the crisis. They are seized on by virtue of an instinct of national self-preservation. The evil elements in them, if any, work themselves out in infinite mischief. The true elements in them save a country by firing men with social hope and patriotic faith, and the good done is well worth having even at the price of much harm and ruin. M. Taine gives the same explanation of the success of Rousseau and Voltaire in influencing the minds of the French people, though there were Montesquieu with a sort of historic method, Turgot and the school of the economists and, what is more, seventy thousand of the secular clergy and sixty thousand of the regular clergy, ever proclaiming by life or exhortation ideas of peace, submission and a kingdom not of this world.

At certain critical moments in history men come out from the narrow and confined track of their daily life and comprehend in one wide vision the whole situation; the august face of their destiny is suddenly unveiled to their eyes: in the sublimity of their emotion they seem to have a foretaste of their future and at least discern some of its features. Naturally these features are precisely those which their age and their race happen to be in a condition to understand. The point of view put forward is the only one under which the multitude can place themselves. There is pronounced the unique word, heroic or tender, enthusiastic or tranquillising: the only word that the heart and the intelligence of the time would consent to hearken to; the only one adapted to the deep-growing wants, the long-gathered aspirations, the hereditary faculties.

It might seem strange if it were not so consonant with past examples, that a man like Mr. Morley who has so heartily admired the discernment of Taine about the secret of the great movements of human history and explained and elaborated it as clearly as possible, should look upon the present happenings in India as mere effervescence due to accidental causes that will instantaneously subside at the mere frown of a mortal man however powerful. We have explained how this has happened in the particular case of Mr. Morley. A mind clouded by national self-interest and perverted by European prejudices and contempt for

Page 558

Asiatics forbids him to use his reasoning powers on India as he would have used them in the case of an European country similarly circumstanced. Otherwise he would have perhaps understood that the same laws govern and explain all human movements whether among Europeans or Asiatics. The working of the human mind, the correlation of causes and effects, the ups and downs in the life of a nation are never isolated phenomena defying the scientist's attempt to systematise, co-ordinate and generalise. The movement in India, like all other movements in history, has life and vitality in it and its root deep in the very nature of things and events. It is not artificially got up, no movement of the kind can be; it has not been engineered by a Lajpat Rai or an Ajit Singh: it does not proceed from mere discontent or "disloyalty": it is no aberration or monstrosity. It has the uniformity, the identity of manifestations in widely-separated regions, the similarity of thought, motive and expression which belong to great, sudden, spontaneous movements, to divine events.

India was a centre of human prosperity and a fountain of light when there was still darkness and savagery on the face of the major portion of the earth and she has not gone into an eternal eclipse. The over-shadowing influence cannot last for ever, it is a temporary obscuration from which the sun of her destiny is soon to emerge. This is the law of Nature and divine dispensation, and, amidst the noise and dust and smoke of that confused struggle of myriad opinions and misunderstandings which mark a revolution, the one thing essential which should never be forgotten by those who have once had the strength and clarity of vision to perceive through the clamour and confusion this guiding star of hope and truth.