Bande Mataram

The Utility of Ideals

03-April-1908

We notice that a correspondent of the Amrita Bazar Patrika, finding himself out of his depth at the Federation Ground Meeting, rather plaintively asks Bipin Babu to come down from the heights of philosophy and talk to the people of Swadeshi, Boycott and National Education. The correspondent seems to us at fault as to the bearings of the present situation. If Bipin Chandra were an ordinary political leader and the present time an ordinary political epoch, his complaint would have been justified. But we are in the first stages of a great revolution having its root in ideas, a revolution at least as far-reaching in its consequences as that which ushered in the nineteenth century, and of that revolution Bipin Chandra is a prophet. To ask such a man to confine himself to particular measures and questions of immediate political interest is as if one were to have asked Mazzini to forget his great teachings which revivified Italy, and confine himself to the questions of the day in Rome or Sardinia. Swadeshi, Boycott, National Education are merely aspects, phases, expressions of the great ideas which Bipin Chandra preaches. There is nothing new to be said about them, they have simply to be carried out. But the ideas which underlie them, the ideas of Indian resurgence, of the spiritualisation of the world through India, of the great awakening of the East and its ideals are of an infinite application like the ideas of fraternity, liberty, equality which were preached in the French Revolution until every man had them on his lips and in his heart. The prophet of the movement must repeat these ideas and popularise them until they are on the lips and in the heart of every man, so that they may act with the same dynamical force as the ideas of the eighteenth century acted in France. To say that such teachings are too visionary for the average Indian mind is to forget that this is the country of Vedanta where the most ignorant have some idea of abstract

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truths which the European mind is too weak to cope with. If the movement is to be vitalised, it will not be by preoccupation with details but by the execution of details in the light of the living truths for which they merely seek to provide suitable conditions of fulfilment.

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