The first edition of this biography in 1945 contained corrections by Sri Aurobindo himself. The third edition in 1972 was rewritten in the light of new material
Sri Aurobindo : Biography
THEME/S
CHAPTER 10
I
Mid-1906, and Sri Aurobindo was in Calcutta. At first he stayed with his friend and political Associate, Raja Subodh Mullick, at his palatial residence, 12 Wellington Street. Perhaps Sri Aurobindo had temporary shelter for a few days at the Yugantar Office at Kanaidhar Lane before he shifted to Subodh Mullick's place. But here too he couldn't make a permanent stay, for that would have proved too embarrassing to the members of Mullick's family. Accordingly, Sri Aurobindo's resourceful factotum, Abinash Bhattacharya, found a separate place, first at Chhaku Khansama Lane, then 23 Scott's Lane, where Mrinalini and Sarojini (and for a time Barin) could also join them. What with the associate editorship of the newly started Bande Mataram and the Principalship of the Bengal National College - not to mention the behind-the-scenes contacts with the Nationalists and the underground direction of the revolutionaries - Sri Aurobindo had his hands full, and plenty to occupy his mind. He had, after all, taken the decisive plunge into the maelstrom, and the air was vibrant with singular expectancy.
Bepin Pal called his paper the Bande Mataram for a very good practical reason - but it was a leap of intuition as well. The movement against the partition of Bengal had, by mid-1906, spread out and boiled up so as to include much more than the opposition to the partition, and - by one of those unpredictable but amazing quirks of fate - had come to be symbolised by the magic incantation "Bande Mataram!", the opening words of Bankim Chandra's song imbedded in his novel Ananda Math. At one extreme end, it was as though nothing but immediate full-fledged independence could satisfy the people's pent-up hunger for freedom. At the other end, people simply fought for the right to sing the song at a time when the mere singing of the song seemed to sound like the death-knell of the British Raj to the perturbed pillars of the bureaucracy. At Barisal on 14 April 1906, for example, when the procession was being dispersed, the boy Chittaranjan - son of Manoranjan Guhathakurta, a stalwart of the nationalist movement - continued shouting Bande Mataram! while the police went on belabouring him even after he had fallen on the ground and was bleeding profusely. And everywhere - on railway platforms, in Court compounds and college corridors - Bande Mataram was at once the salvo of defiance of authority and a dedication to the service of the Mother. Earlier, in 1905, a young student of the Presidency College, Ullaskar Datta, "had thrashed with his shoe the professor of philosophy, an Englishman, for making some disparaging remarks about the Bengalis. The thrashing had been followed by cries of Bande Mataram from a "hundred lusty throats". The Principal of the College, a Bengali, could only note the self-evident fact: "I see, 'Bande Mataram' has become a war-cry".1 A war-cry indeed it became, and not in Bengal
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only, but over the entire subcontinent.
In Sri Aurobindo's series of seven articles in the Indu Prakash (16 July to 27 August 1894) on Bankim Chandra Chatterji, there was a casual reference to Ananda Math but no mention at all of the song, Bande Mataram. As a matter of fact, the song was very little known outside the circle of those who had read the novel itself. Composed around 1875 and included in the novel in 1882, the potency hidden in the song hadn't been suspected till twenty-three years later. Neither during the Ilbert Bill agitation nor the trial of Surendranath Banerjee in 1883 that provoked students' demonstrations was Bande Mataram sung as a battle-cry. It was first sung from the Congress platform by Rabindranath Tagore in 1896, but it made then no electric impact on the audience. Nine more years passed, and on 7 August 1905, thousands of students drawn from all communities gathered at noon at the College Square in Calcutta and made a processionary march to the Town Hall, filling the air all the way with the cry of Bande Mataram and other slogans. At the Town Hall meeting, summoned to protest against the partition and to pass resolutions on Swadeshi and Boycott, somebody sang Bande Mataram, and at that moment - in that charged atmosphere - it ceased to be a mere song and became the mantra of nationalism, or swadeshi atma, as Tagore described it. It was an avalanche of the spirit, and nothing could now resist its progress. Town and countryside alike resounded with the battle-cry, it was as though some stimulating wine had gone into the people's heads and they needs must give expression to their sense of sudden exhilaration. The traditional religious worship of Mother Durga merged with the patriotic adoration of the country as the Mother, and so Durga and Bharati fused into Bhavani, "holder of multitudinous strength, - bahubala dhārini". Patriotism of an intellectual or emotional kind had been there for two or three decades, and of course people talked of national unity and the need for service and the possible necessity for sacrifice of some sort. But these did not substantially alter the political situation. Something more was required. Although the wiring had been done and the bulbs fitted into the sockets, the electric contact was lacking still. The song sung at the psychological moment was the needed fuse, and at once the wires tingled with animation, and from the bulbs leapt out blinding light.
Writing in 1905, Satish Chandra Mukherjee of the Dawn Society wondered if Bankim himself could have dreamt of the transformation of the two opening words of his song into a national mantra of liberation:
The welkin now rings with Bande Mataram. The streets and the lanes of Calcutta and of the rest of the province resound with the solemn watch-word. Bande Mataram has stirred the hearts of the people to their depths.2 The two words - soft like silk yet taut with infinite power - carried their vibrations to the ends of India, and in distant Madras, for example, the young Tamil poet, Subramania Bharati, made them the refrain of some of his own tremendous patriotic songs:
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Mother, we bow to thee
Victorious Mother...
Be victory ours or
defeat or death,
We stand united
And raise the chant
Mother, we bow to thee!
Again:
We'll bow to the Mother
To Bharat the Mother...
Ashamed of subjection
The toil, shame, and blister,
We shall now end it all
And sing in chorus
Vande Mataram! 3
While returning after attending the Benares Congress, Bharati had met Sister Nivedita who, in a single moment of spiritual contact, had ignited the fire in him to a fury of poetic and patriotic effort, and in April 1906 he became editor of India, a Tamil extremist paper in Madras. His writings and editorials breathed fire and brimstone, and so immediately overpowering were his patriotic songs that the Moderate leader, V. Krishnaswami Aiyar, insisted on financing the printing of 10,000 copies of the poems for free distribution. As in Bengal, as in Madras and Maharashtra and the Punjab, everywhere in India there was this new spirit, the "Bande Mataram" spirit; it was as though, after a long drought, the parched earth had received a downpour and quickened into spring life. And Sri Aurobindo read in it even an Asiatic awakening:
India received the ablution of the holy waters singing her sacred hymn Bande Mataram that filled the spaces of heaven with joyous echoes heard of the Gods as of old - and the nations of the earth listened to the song of unfree India and knew what it was - a voice in the chorus of Asiatic liberty.4
II
A daily paper in English like the Bande Mataram, whatever the mesmerising appeal of its name, could hardly be run on the outlay of Rs.. 500, with which Bepin Pal had launched it in a moment of enthusiasm. The fact that Sri Aurobindo had joined forces was no doubt a great accession of intellectual and spiritual strength, but even he - with his eye for practical realities - saw the need to put the paper on a sound financial footing and give it a strong party base. When Pal went on a tour of the eastern Districts of Bengal to spread the message of nationalism, Sri Aurobindo
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was in charge of the paper, and he took the opportunity to call a private meeting of the young nationalists to chalk out their future programme. He told them it was no use going on as before - sudden spasmodic action followed by long periods of apathy, haphazard alliances without continuing purpose or action - and what was therefore needed was an all-India nationalist party organised, not simply to indulge in irritant fireworks to embarrass the ruling leadership, but boldly to throw it out and capture the Congress organisation. The one all-India leader with the requisite intellectual and moral eminence and record of national service and sacrifice was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and hence the nationalists of Bengal should join hands with those of Maharashtra, the Punjab and elsewhere, and follow Tilak's leadership. Secondly, to give the national party a mouthpiece on a nation-wide basis, the party should adopt the Bande Mataram, and give it adequate financial and other support. All this was agreed to, and it was also decided to incorporate a Bande Mataram Company to raise the necessary finance.5 In the meantime, Subodh and Nirod Mullick offered to keep the paper going, and Bepin Pal, enjoying as he did the support of C.R. Das and others, remained editor; but differences unfortunately developed between him and two of the editorial assistants, Shyamsundar Chakravarti and Hemendra Prasad Ghose, and so Pal retired towards the end of 1906. Although Sri Aurobindo wrote most of the leading articles and made other contributions as well, his name did not figure as Editor except once, and even then it was without his knowledge; and he was firm that the mistake should not recur. His editorial assistants - Shyamsundar, Hemendra Prasad and Bejoy Chatterjee - were also brilliant writers who could on occasion successfully imitate their chief. By the end of September, Sri Aurobindo and his three colleagues -B.C. Pal himself being away most of the time - had given the Bande Mataram its distinguishing stamp as the supreme hot-gospeller in the cause of national independence and regeneration. During October, November and the early part of December, Sri Aurobindo was rather seriously ill, and moved, first to his father-in-law Bhupal Chandra Bose's house in Serpentine Lane, and in December to his grandfather Rajnarain Bose's place in Deoghar. Restored to health, Sri Aurobindo returned to Calcutta well in time to attend the annual session of the Congress, which was to be held on 26 December.
It is difficult to recapture at this distance of time the phenomenal impact the Bande Mataram made on the English-knowing intelligentsia in Bengal and all India. In Calcutta, there were well-established Anglo-Indian papers like the Englishman and the Statesman, and to compete with them was not easy unless an altogether new force could be brought into play, and this is exactly what happened. In an incredibly short time, the paper became the barometer of nationalist thought, and for that very reason it became an eyesore to the Government, the Anglo-Indian press and the ultra-moderate or sheerly loyalist elements in the country. The editor of the Statesman seems to have bitterly complained that, although the editorial articles in the Bande Mataram were diabolically clever and crammed full of sedition between the lines, the paper was still legally unassailable because
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of the superlative skill of the writing. The Government too must have shared this view for they didn't venture to prosecute the paper for its editorial or other articles whether from Sri Aurobindo's or from the pen of any of his three editorial colleagues. It was nevertheless an editor of the Statesman, S.K. Ratcliffe, who aid a "lowing tribute to Sri Aurobindo over forty years later. Writing to the Manchester Guardian in December 1950, Ratcliffe said that he knew Aurobindo Ghose as "a revolutionary nationalist and editor of a flaming newspaper which struck a ringing new note in Indian daily journalism". Describing the paper further, Ratcliffe wrote:
It had a full-size sheet, was clearly printed on green paper, and was full of leading and special articles written in English with brilliance and pungency not hitherto attained in the Indian press. It was the most effective voice of what we then called nationalist extremism.6
B. C. Pal himself paid this well-merited tribute to the Promethean touch Sri Aurobindo had given to the Bande Mataram:
The hand of the master was in it from the very beginning. Its bold attitude, its vigorous thinking, its clear ideas, its chaste and powerful diction, its scorching sarcasm and refined witticism, were unsurpassed by any journal in the country, either Indian or Anglo-Indian.... Morning after morning, not only Calcutta but the educated community almost in every part of the country eagerly awaited its vigorous pronouncements on the stirring questions of the day.... Long extracts from it began to be reproduced in the exclusive columns of the Times of London.7
And the Times admitted that the Bande Mataram was edited with "a literary ability rare in the Anglo-native press"!
Certainly, in those days, it must have seemed to many that Sri Aurobindo's movements of thought as they were reflected in his writing were those of a man driven by a deity (or was it really a demon?). It is recorded by Radhakumud Mukherjee that Manomohan Ghose "used to rush in utter anxiety to his brother Aurobindo to remind him that he was a born poet and should not plunge into politics".8 Yet Sri Aurobindo held on to his chosen course in life. But, then, weren't many of his articles in the Bande Mataram suffused with poetic feeling? Weren't many of his editorials compounded of passion and prophecy? It was not journalism, it was literature; it was not politics, it was a new religion, the religion of nationalism, the worship of Bhavani Bharati; and he was not wasting his time castigating the bureaucracy, he was instructing a whole nation in the alphabet of nationalism and patriotism. A single example may be given here. In an article on 'The Life of Nationalism' (16 November 1907),9 Sri Aurobindo served his readers a spicy dish, an hors-d'oeuvre made up of contemporary history, Puranic story, Political controversy and picturesque prophecy. It is a prolonged simile in which the birth and growth of Indian nationalism runs parallel to the Avatarhood of Krishna. There are four stages in this history: gestation and growth in secrecy or obscurity (Krishna in Gokul growing from infancy to youth), the leaping of the
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great name to light (the sudden coming from Gokul to Mathura causing amazement, alarm and fury to Kamsa), the season of trial and triumph (the hour of reckoning when the enemy"feels the grasp of the avenger on his hair and the sword of doom in his heart"), and finally the season of rule and fulfilment (the reign of Krishna in Dwaraka). The second period is the most exciting, for it is "the season of ordeal and persecution" whose blaze of glory only the "children of grace" will be able to see. The enemies will do everything in their power to destroy the new incarnation, the new idea, believing and not believing it, promulgating iniquitous ordinances, spreading persecution, enacting cruelty with "the rack and thumb-screw and old engines of torture" being brought out for use. Even of the nation to which the gospel is preached, the well-to-do, the high-priests, the men in position and authority receive the new idea - the new Avatar - with anger, fear and contempt: anger because the promised change might mean a jolt to their comfortable positions, fear because of the threatened upheaval and turmoil, and contempt because the new idea is unintelligible to the calculations of worldly wisdom, "the narrow systems of expediency and the pedantic wisdom of the schools". And yet the idea grows, the new faith will not be suppressed, and it simply cannot be:
...largely because of all the persecution, denunciation and disparagement, the idea gathers strength and increases; there are strange and great conversions, baptisms of whole multitudes and eager embracings of martyrdom, and the reasonings of the wise and learned are no more heeded and the prisons of the ruler overflow to no purpose and the gallows bears its ghastly burden fruitlessly and the sword of the powerful drips blood in vain. For the idea is God's deputy, and life and death, victory and defeat, joy and suffering have become its servants and cannot help ministering to its divine purpose.
Was nationalism no more than a counsel of despair, the illegitimate issue of Lord Curzon, helped to birth by the skilful midwifery of Sir Bampfylde Fuller (Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal)? No, a thousand times no:
Long before the advent of Curzonism and Fullerism, while the Congress was beslavering the present absolutist bureaucracy with fulsome praise... while it was singing hymns of loyalty and descanting on the blessings of British rule, Nationalism was already born.... It was not born and did not grow in the Congress Pandal... nor in the brains of the Mehtas and Gokhales, nor in the tongues of the Surendranaths and Lalmohans, nor under the hat and coat of the denationalised ape of English speech and manners. It was born like Krishna in the prison-house, in the hearts of men to whom India under the good and beneficent government of absolutism seemed an intolerable dungeon, to whom the blessings of an alien despotic rule were hardly more acceptable than the plagues of Egypt... with whom a few seats in the Council or on the Bench and right of entry into the Civil Service and a free press and platform could not weigh against the starvation of the rack-rented millions, the drain of our life-blood, the atrophy of our energies and the disintegration of our national character and ideals; who looked beyond the temporary ease and opportunities
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of a few... to the lasting pauperism and degradation of a great and ancient people. And Nationalism grew as Krishna grew who ripened to strength and knowledge, not in the courts of princes and the schools of the Brahmins but in the obscure and despised homes of the poor and ignorant. In the cave of the Sannyasin, under the garb of the Fakir, in the hearts of young men and boys many of whom could not speak a word of English but all could work and dare and sacrifice for the Mother, in the life of men of education and parts who had received the mantra and put from them the desire of wealth and honours to teach and labour so that the good religion might spread, there Nationalism grew slowly to its strength....
Krishna came to the world to destroy the Asuric power of Kamsa, and there could be no conciliation or co-existence for them. The Moderates - Gokhale with his debating skill. Rash Behari Ghosh with his "army of literary quotations and allusions" - tried to convince the British that conciliation was possible; but the British knew better, it had to be a fight to the finish. And so Sri Aurobindo concludes with the magnificent peroration:
As neither the milk of Putana nor the hoofs of the demon could destroy the infant Krishna, so neither Riponism nor Poona prosecutions could check the growth of Nationalism while yet it was an indistinct force; and as neither Kamsa's wiles nor his visakanyās, nor his mad elephants nor his wrestlers could kill Krishna revealed in Mathura, so neither a revival of Riponism nor the poison of discord... nor Fullerism plus hooliganism... can slay Nationalism now that it has entered the arena. Nationalism is an avatār and cannot be slain. Nationalism is a divinely appointed śakti of the Eternal and must do its God-given work before it returns to the bosom of the Universal Energy from which it came.
Rhetoric, glorious rhetoric, certainly; but also rhetoric charged with idealism, poetry, prophecy. Contemporary history is here raised to the level of myth, the idea of Avatarhood is translated into the reality of unfolding contemporary history. It is a comprehensively formulated epic simile, and the images of Indian tradition and the idiom of the English language fuse creatively in the masterly elaboration and splendid articulation of the entire essay.
One who reads the Bande Mataram articles today will be struck - as their readers of about sixty-five years ago must have been struck - by their unlaboured ease, their air of spontaneity, their unfailing gusto. There was evidently no "perspiration" behind the writing, for it must all have come out in a heady rush of thought and expression. Sri Aurobindo had little time to revise and refine, to pick his epithets, to chisel his images, to measure his periods; the words apparently came straight on" (as Mark Antony might have put it). It is said that once, when Shyamsundar Chakravarti asked for an article, Sri Aurobindo drew out some old packing from a pile on his table, and began writing and finished it in fifteen minutes - "not a scratch, not a change, not a moment's pause". And yet, the next ay that -""tide was to fan "the fire of patriotism in the hearts of Nationalists all
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over India".10 Here we have a hint of the terrific pressure behind Sri Aurobindo's writing, a pressure sustained as much by the inner fire as the revolutionary tempo of the times.
III
It is beyond the scope of this chapter or book to consider in detail Sri Aurobindo's innumerable contributions to the columns of the Bande Mataram The paper had an influence that beyonded the limits suggested by the actual circulation figures, and this was so especially after the paper began to issue a weekly edition as well from 2 June 1907. People in distant comers of India did eagerly await the arrival of copies of the paper and read them with avidity and reverent care as if they were indeed the epistles of a modern Apostle. And as we examine the articles today, we can understand why Sri Aurobindo's contemporaries had to listen to him as to an instructor, as to a friend, as to a born leader of men. As we turn back the old leaves, we light upon so many brilliant and trenchant editorial contributions that we feel all but dazzled and dazed by their noble gait and solid and shining structure of argument. Sri Aurobindo often speaks in inspired tones, and he is weighty and solemn and grandly persuasive on those occasions. At other times, he is more of a superlatively clever controversialist and intellectual pugilist, and then we witness a true clash of arms, we watch with amusement (and pity) the hapless and cumbrous antagonist writhing in the nimble grasp of Sri Aurobindo. There are other occasions still when Sri Aurobindo is the tribune of the Indian people, and through him the disarmed and emasculated proletariat speak with awakened knowledge and pride and defiance to the civilised world in the strength of their new-found self-confidence and strength. The Prophet of renascent India, the Tribune of the people, the Generalissimo of the army of nationalists - these are some of the divers powers and personalities of Sri Aurobindo that we are privileged to glimpse in the Bande Mataram contributions; but even these are but partial manifestations and emanations of the central Power and Personality whose utter essence we ever vainly try to comprehend!
After Sri Aurobindo's assumption of the de facto editorship of the Bande Mataram, the first major issue that he had editorially to tackle was the forthcoming session of the Congress in Calcutta. Presently he fell ill, and made a brief trip to Deoghar. Back in Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo took stock of things and tried to mobilise the Nationalist (or "extremist") elements in readiness for the Congress session from 26 to 29 December 1906. The Nationalists had earlier thought of Tilak as President of the Congress, but the Moderates, sensing trouble, had pro' posed the venerable Dadabhai Naoroji as the acceptable compromise candidate and got him back from England. Both sides looked forward to the deliberations with considerable anxiety. Although Bengal had its own Moderates in Surendranath Banerjee and Rash Behari Ghosh, Calcutta was more of a Nationalist stronghold
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because of the tempo generated by the partition. On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo l-new that the Congress organisation as such was still controlled by the Moderates A split was easy to bring about, but a capture of-the organisation was rather more difficult. Sri Aurobindo's strategy therefore was to win over, if possible, Dadabhai Naoroji himself so that the Moderates would be obliged to meet at least half-way the Nationalists. The on-the-eve-of-the-Congress editorial in the Bande Mataram was in itself a piece of masterly strategy, for the article both flattered and warned Dadabhai by placing him in marked juxtaposition with Tilak:
Two men of the moment stand conspicuously before the eyes of the public.... Both of them are sincere patriots, both have done what work lay in them for their people and for the land that bore them; both are men of indomitable perseverance and high ability....
Having said so much, Sri Aurobindo adds: "but there the resemblance ends". After half-a-century's toils, Dadabhai was "worn and aged"; but Tilak came "with his face to the morning, a giant of strength and courage". The man of the past, and the man of the future! The old politics had no doubt brought about the renewal of public activity in India after the trauma of conquest by a foreign power, and besides some experience had also been gained during "that long wandering in the desert of unrealities and futilities". Dadabhai himself had seized "on one great fact and enforced it in season and out of season... the terrible poverty of India and its rapid increase under British rule". He had lately gone beyond the customary Moderate stance and "frankly declared that freedom from foreign rule must needs be the only governing ideal of Indian politics". And Sri Aurobindo adroitly concluded his article thus:
The man who is responsible for that declaration ought to be no Moderate. His heart at least should be with us. That in India and in the Presidential chair of the Congress his voice also will be for us we cannot so confidently forecast. If it is, his venerable sanction will be a support to our efforts; if not, his reticence or opposition will be no hindrance to our final triumph. For that which Time and Fate intend, no utterances of individuals however venerable or esteemed, can delay or alter.
Apart from Tilak, there were present Lajpat Rai, G.S. Khaparde and other staunch Nationalists, and many of them met first at Subodh Mullick's place to mobilise their forces and finalise their strategy, and Sri Aurobindo took a prominent part in the private discussions. It was agreed that the Nationalists should press for adoption of independence, swadeshi, boycott and national education - As expected, they met with opposition from Moderate leaders like Pherozeshah Mehta, Gokhale, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Surendranath, and at one stage the Extremists seem to have staged even a "walk out". A new development was that the Moderates themselves put a little more heat into their speeches than usual. As Ambika Charan Mazumdar has recorded:
Moderates and Extremists alike and with equal emphasis protested against the attitude of Government, with equal firmness deprecated an ignominious
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begging spirit, and urged the people to take their stand more upon justice than upon generosity and upon their own rights more than upon concessions of Government.11
When Dadabhai himself inclined - be it ever so little - towards the Nationalist position, the Moderates made a virtue of necessity and adopted the four resolutions, through with some modifications. The resolutions certainly bore, to quote again the Moderate leader, Ambika Charan Mazumdar, "unmistakable evidence of the spirit of the times".12
Although Sri Aurobindo had preferred to work behind the scenes during the Congress session, his deployment of the forces and his interventions were not a little responsible for the success of the Nationalists. Commenting on "The Results of the Congress", Sri Aurobindo wrote in the issue of 31 December 1906: "our hopes have been realised, our contentions recognised if not always precisely in the form we desired or with as much clearness and precision as we ourselves would have used, yet definitely enough for all practical purposes.... All that the forward party has fought for, has in substance been conceded". To end the wrangle between the Nationalists who wanted "independence" to be affirmed as the aim of the political movement and the Moderates who harped on the British connection, Dadabhai proposed "Swaraj" and this proved acceptable to all, though perhaps each party understood the word a little differently.* In any case, it was no small gain. It is curious how history tantalisingly repeats itself. Twenty years later, the issue of Independence versus Dominion Status was to be fought at the Madras, Calcutta and Lahore Congresses (1927-9) respectively. Once again - this time Mahatma Gandhi - tried to hedge, by avoiding both Independence and Dominion Status but reviving the familiar Swaraj and further qualifying it as Puma Swaraj!
Of the four planks (chatus-sūtri) in the new programme, - Swaraj, national education, Swadeshi and boycott, - Sri Aurobindo had expressed even in his "New Lamps for Old" articles (1893-4) his adhesion to the independence ideal, and in his "Bankim Chandra Chatterji" articles in the Indu Prakash (1894) his detestation of the system of education in India ("the very worst system of training"). Independence had to be wrested from the British, if necessary by a recourse to armed revolution; and the alien system of education had to be displaced by something more attuned to the local traditions and more capable of meeting local needs. As regards swadeshi and boycott, they were meant to be at once economic and political weapons, the same weapon in fact though double-edged. Even charkha (that was to be flourished as a talismanic cure-all by Mahatma Gandhi in the twenties and after) was advocated by Hironmoyee Devi, as reported in the Bande Mataram of 30 December 1906, for a sound reason:
* According to the Israeli scholar, Daniel Argov, "Aurovindo Ghosh gave the clearest exposition of Swaraj by declaring it synonymous with independence — 'a free national Government unhampered even in the least degree by foreign control'". [Moderates and Extremists in the Indian National MweiM'1 1883-1930, (1967), p. 126]
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If we could not utilise the leisure of our women, which is now uselessly frittered away, in some small industries, assuming that charkha (the spinning wheel) cannot compete with machinery, it will yet give food to millions of starving women and find some useful work for those who have, for want thereof, to fritter away their leisure hours.
Sri Aurobindo had earlier wished to rope in the Indian industrialists, commercial and landed magnates into the movement so that "men of industrial and commercial ability and experience and not politicians alone could direct operations and devise means of carrying out the policy" (of swadeshi and boycott), but he had been told that the scheme was impracticable.13 But since boycott as such was a good political weapon against the rulers, the idea was pressed by both Tilak and Sri Aurobindo. Not that the idea hadn't been mooted before in India during the three decades preceding, but it became a truly effective weapon only from 7 August 1905 when it was adopted at the Calcutta Town Hall meeting to the fanfare of Bande Mataram singing and tempestuous cheers. Earlier, in February-March one Tahal Ram Ganga Ram had visited Calcutta and exhorted college students to organise a boycott of British goods; on 13 July, Sri Aurobindo's maternal uncle, Krishna Kumar Mitra, had made a plea for boycott in his Sanjivani; and on 17 July, a correspondent "G" had strongly advocated boycott in the columns of the Amrita Bazar Patrika. Was "G" really Aurobindo Ghose? Was it Barindra Kumar Ghose?14 Anyhow, all climaxed in the events of 7 August, and the swadeshi-boycott offensive received the tardy imprimatur of the Congress in December 1906. Sri Aurobindo had thus reason enough to feel satisfied with the "results" of the Calcutta Congress.
IV
During 1906-7, the usual criticism levelled by the Moderates against the Nationalists (or Extremists) was that the latter had no constructive ideas: that, while they demanded "independence", they had no sanctions or "practical programme" to enforce the demand. Motilal Nehru, for example, had described Extremist postures as being "evolved out of the depths of despair". In answer to this line of criticism, the Bande Mataram published from 10 April to 2 May 1907 a series of 14 articles under the general caption "New Thought". The first was by Satish Mukherjee, the rest by Sri Aurobindo - out of which, again, the first seven were an position of the "doctrine of Passive Resistance" and the rest were in the nature of ancillary comments. The "New Thought" was summed up, first negatively by Satish Mukherjee:
It is not the offspring of a spirit of revenge; it is not the advocating of mere measures of coercion and retaliation; it is not a mere suggestion of despair.
Then followed the "Passive Resistance" series, in which Sri Aurobindo discussed its possibilities as an instrument of political action - an instrument that has since
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"helped India more than any other to reach her goal".15 For an enslaved country that desires liberation, only three courses are open: petitioning, self-development and self-help, and organised resistance to the rule by the alien. In the given Indian context, petitioning was unlikely to succeed; hence, self-help or resistance, one or both, had to be resorted to. A century of all-pervasive foreign despotism had induced in us a "fatal dependence, passivity and helplessness"; and, therefore, we had first "to recover the habit of independent motion and independent action".16 Swadeshi, national education and arbitration were some of the planks on which self-help and self-development could take effective shape. But were the alien bureaucracy to offer opposition to our constructive programme - and this possibility had to be taken into account - we would then be obliged to offer resistance in our turn. "We have therefore not only to organise a central authority," said Sri Aurobindo, "not only to take up all branches of our national life into our hands, but, in order to meet bureaucratic opposition and to compel the alien control to remove its hold on us, if not at once, then tentacle by tentacle, we must organise defensive resistance."17
Passive or defensive resistance - even like violent resistance - may have different ends, operate on different levels, and pursue different mean. Were the Government indigenous, resistance could be offered to bring about the redress of particular grievances. But in subject nations "which mean to live and not to die", resistance - passive or active - "can have no less an object than an entire and radical change of the system of Government".18 Nation-wide agitation was carried on to achieve the annulment of the partition of Bengal - "pettiest and narrowest of all political objects" - as, in the Gandhian era, similar movements were to be started on the issue of the Kilafat, the salt tax, etc. But always, the swelling tide of the popular resentment refused to be so narrowly circumscribed, and the real aim of the movements was nothing less than the ending of "the bleeding to death of a country by foreign exploitation".19 Thus our immediate problem as a nation was, "not how to be intellectual and well-informed or how to be rich and industrious, but how to stave off imminent national death, how to put an end to the white peril, how to assert ourselves and live".20 Sri Aurobindo did not rule out violence in all circumstances, but it appeared to him that the bureaucracy, not being of the ruthless Russian kind, could be effectively countered by passive resistance. Not that such a policy was dictated by weakness or cowardice, for a method of peaceful passive resistance, while it was less bold and aggressive in appearance than violent methods like guerilla warfare or armed insurrection, called "for perhaps as much heroism of a kind and certainly more universal endurance and suffering". In passive resistance, it is not a "daring minority" that "purchase with their blood the freedom of the millions"; it is the entire population that gets ready to "share in the struggle and the privation".21
The means suggested by Sri Aurobindo for translating the idea of passive resistance into practicable and fruitful action rather anticipated the Gandhian programme of a later day. Boycott of Government schools and even "aided" schools,
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boycott of the alien courts of justice, non-payment of taxes, a general refusal of assistance to Government - these were to be the "methods" of the new movement. Much of this resistance movement could be strictly legal, for it was no legal of- fence "to abstain from Government schools or Government courts of justice or the help and protection of the fatherly executive or the use of British goods".22 As for non-payment of taxes, or the deliberate transgression of an unjust law, it came under what Gandhiji described as satyagraha. Sri Aurobindo therefore laid down as the first canon of passive resistance that "to break an unjust coercive law is not only justifiable but, under given circumstances, a duty".23 Likewise, coercive orders - this was the second canon - had to be resisted as a duty. And the third cannon of the movement was that social boycott was "legitimate and indispensable as against persons guilty of treason to the nation":
'Boycott foreign goods and boycott those who use foreign goods,' - the advice of Mr. Subramaniya Aiyer to his countrymen in Madras, - must be accepted by all who are in earnest, ...without the social boycott no national authority depending purely on moral pressure can get its decrees effectively executed....24
At the time of the non-cooperation movement launched by Gandhiji to redress the "Punjab-Kilafat" wrongs, it was often pointed out that the movement was "illegal"; and C. Rajagopalachari then argued that the movement was quite "legal" because the non-cooperators did not shirk the consequences of their action! The attack and the defence were both anticipated by Sri Aurobindo in 1907: "In a peaceful way we act against the law or the executive, but we passively accept the legal consequences."25 But whereas Gandhiji maintained that violence was to be eschewed in all circumstances, Sri Aurobindo felt that passive and peaceful resistance was possible only so long as the actions of the bureaucracy were themselves "peaceful and within the rules of the fight". In a concluding eloquent passage, Sri Aurobindo deftly gathered into one moving symphony the divers scattered strains of argument, exhortation, poetry and prophecy:
The work of national emancipation is a great and holy yajña of which Boycott, Swadeshi, National Education and every other activity, great and small, are only major or minor parts. Liberty is the fruit we seek from the sacrifice and the Motherland the goddess to whom we offer it; into the seven leaping tongues of the fire of the yajña we must offer all that we are and all that we have, feeding the fire even with our blood and lives and happiness of our nearest and dearest; for the Motherland is a goddess who loves not a maimed and imperfect sacrifice, and freedom was never won from the gods by a grudging giver. But every great yajña has its Rakshasas who strive to baffle the sacrifice, to bespatter it with their own dirt or by guile or violence put out the flame. Passive resistance is an attempt to meet such disturbers by peaceful and self-contained brahmatejas; but even the greatest Rishis of old could not, when the Rakshasas were fierce and determined, keep up the sacrifice without calling in the bow of the Kshatriya....
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Vedantism accepts no distinction of true or false religions, but considers only what will lead more or less surely, more or less quickly to moksa, spiritual emancipation and the realisation of the Divinity within. Our attitude is a political Vedantism. India, free, one and indivisible, is the divine realisation to which we move, emancipation our aim .... Passive resistance may be the final method of salvation in our case or it may be only the preparation for the final sādhanā. In either case, the sooner we put it into full and perfect practice, the nearer we shall be to nationalliberty.26
In the remaining six articles, Sri Aurobindo underlined certain aspects of the passive resister's preparation for the ordeal ahead of him. First in importance was faith: "faith in ourselves, faith in the nation, faith in India's destiny". Faith as well as hope - hope that the Nationalists' aims were capable of early realisation and would be realised. And what were those aims? The Loyalists wanted only good government, with some share in the administration; the Moderates hoped for a colonial type of self-government at some future time; but the Nationalists wanted "independence" (within or outside the Empire), and were not prepared to wait indefinitely for its consummation (this was their only "extremism"!). Regarding the question of India's loss of liberty in the past, Sri Aurobindo had some pertinent things to say:
It was not from the people of India that India was won by Moghul or Briton, but from a small privileged class. On the other hand, the strength and success of the Marathas and Sikhs in the eighteenth century was due to the policy of Shivaji and Guru Govinda which called the whole nation into the fighting line.27
When that cohesion or that discipline failed, the Mahratta and the Sikh power also dissipated itself. Then alien rule could thrive only so long as it was not opposed by a "universal political consciousness in the subject nation". It was thus infantile to assume that the foreigner was paternally or benevolently interested in training the subject nation in the tasks of self-government. On the other hand, the alien bureaucracy was really engaged in keeping the country in a state of permanent political paralysis:
The bureaucracy which rules us ... holds and draws nourishing sustenance for itself from the subject organism by means of tentacles and feelers thrust out from its body thousands of miles away. Its type in natural history is not the parasite, but the octopus. Self-government would mean the removal of the tentacles and the cessation both of the grip and the sustenance.28
Only a united India could fight this evil, but how was such a unity to be brought about? The divided Hindu sects could once again rediscover their unity in the larger spiritual truths of Hinduism, the Hindu and Muslim could become habituated to one another and overcome their religious differences in the consciousness of a common motherland and a common destiny (as had happened in Akbar's time), but the complicating factor was the presence of the alien, something "superimposed on the native-born population, without any roots in the soil". This
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heavy and superior presence had brought all Indians "to a certain level of equality by equal inferiority to the ruling class". The British rulers, having eliminated or reduced to impotence or misery the three centres of organised strength in pre-British India the local Kings, the landed aristocracy and the vast peasantry organised as village communities wanted at last to suppress the new class, the rising middle class, the very class that British rule and English education had helped to bring into existence with arenas for self-expression such as the Bar, the University, the Press, the Municipalities and Local Boards, and even the Legislative Council. In this crisis, what the middle class had to do was to refuse to be frightened or bribed or further divided by the crafty rulers, but rather to identify itself with the proletariat or the mass of the people and organise them for resisting and ending the alien despotism. The octopus had to be attacked and destroyed before it succeeded in destroying the remaining signs of life in the nation.
Sri Aurobindo saw that the times were such that constant vigilance was necessary on the part of the Nationalists. There was, on the one hand, "the Pharisaical cant" of the Anglo-Indians, and, on the other, the ready and tame acquiescence of the anglicised denationalised Indians. The Bande Mataram had little difficulty in exposing "the heartless hypocrisy, the intolerable sanctimony" of the Anglo-Indian advisers.
... who first make sure that only such education is imparted to our people as would effectively cripple their mental and moral faculties for the assimilation and execution of progressive ideas, and also that all the necessary steps are taken for the preservation of our economic serfdom, and then turn round to us and tell us that we must renovate our decaying society and industries before we can have even the right to cherish political ideals.29
The worldly-wise Indian, of course, was a prey to "a hydra-brood of delusions, two springing up where one is killed": for example, that regeneration could come through prayerful petitioning, that religious revival or doses of industrialisation could revitalise us! But Sri Aurobindo was able, through an appeal to history and common sense and some douche of satire, to shatter those delusions.30 He was, however, gratified that the younger generation at least had valiantly risen to the occasion. The boys had, in fact, been the very soul of the Swadeshi movement. Nay more: they had even taught their parents "the loyal or stingy father and the foppish mother" the meaning of patriotism, and with their "divine enthusiasm, indomitable courage and energy of wonderful sacrifice", they had added a bright chapter to recent Indian history. In this they had only emulated the doings of youth elsewhere -
Mazzini depended on young Italy .... When the insurrection broke out at Bologna, the leaders were chiefly students of the University .... In Milan, a crowd assembled before the Government House whereupon the soldiers fired a blank volley to disperse them. A mere boy shouted 'Viva l'Italia' and discharged his pistol at the soldiers and his example was at once followed by the mob behind him. The guard was overpowered, the tricolour hoisted on the Government
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buildings and the Governor himself was made a prisoner.31
And the boy heroes in our Puranas: Dhruva, Prahlad, Krishna himself! And Chittaranjan Guhathakurta at Barisal! Young men had no lack of examples, whether drawn from literature and myth or from modem European or contemporary Indian history. The "Hour of God" had brought out these young men - and many not so young - from out of "the narrow and confined track" of their humdrum lives, and they had seen with surprising suddenness "the august face of their destiny"; and to their eager eyes had been vouchsafed some contours at least of the beckoning image of the Future.32 Having glimpsed that vision, they wouldn't be held back - whatever the hazards ahead.
V
In that brief latter-day Heroic Age, every day was a hundred days, for in the "Hour of God" seconds might determine the fate of years (or even centuries), and in an atmosphere made murky, in a country that wished suddenly to shake off the lethargy of many decades, at a time when old men somnolently fooled and children precociously enacted martyrdom, at such a time the art of generalship called for an intuitive grasp of possible future developments, for matchless courage and 'for mantric "orders of the day". The Bande Mataram could hardly be kept going according to conventional standards of financial or journalistic propriety. Every day there was a crisis. Every day a crisis somewhere or other asked to be commented upon in the paper. One day it was the bureaucracy-inspired hooliganism at Jamalpore in the Mymensingh District. Another day it was the blow struck at the Punjabee, or the threatened action against Lala Hansraj and Sardar Ajit Singh, or the deportation of the Lion of the Punjab, Lajpat Rai. Yet another day it was the onslaught on the universities and other educational institutions. Or it was the arrest and imprisonment of Bhupendranath Datta on the staff of Yugantar. Everyday some enormity or other was happening, and Sri Aurobindo happened to know much more about those things than most politicians, even most Nationalists, for he had his links with the underground Revolutionaries too. He was teaching at the National College - he was editing the Bande Mataram - he was keeping an eye on the Yugantar - he was directing the Nationalist movement in Bengal and following its fortunes (or misfortunes) in the other Provinces - and he was also maintaining a pretty close contact with the Revolutionary groups. It was a fivefold responsibility, an Atlas' load, that he was carrying during those disturbed and disturbing days. In a letter to his wife, Mrinalini, dated 17 February, Sri Aurobindo reveals by implication both the condition of his mind and the nature of his activities; although little is actually said, much is suggested by the disarming words:
My coming to meet you on the 8th January was settled, but I could not come.. I had to go where the Lord led me.... I had gone for His work. The state of my mind, at present, has totally changed; more than that I would not reveal in
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this letter. Come here, then I will tell you... Henceforward I am no longer my own master; I will have to go like a puppet, wherever the Divine takes me; I shall have to carry out like a puppet whatever he makes me to do.... You may come to think that I am neglecting you and doing my work. But do not think so you will have to understand that all that I do does not depend on my own will, but is done according to the command of the Divine. When you come here, you will be able to understand fully the meaning of my words. I hope the Lord will show you the light of His infinite Grace which He has shown me, but it all depends upon His will....
The letter was written from the Scots Lane residence, and Mrinalini was at the time living at Deoghar with Sarojini. But what the letter really reveals is that Sri Aurobindo, already in early 1908, was a descended God, or at east a God-driven human instrument, engaging in multiple-tasks with a sense of preordained inevitability. To measure Sri Aurobindo's actions or words - to measure the man himself - in terms of a human calculus applicable to other men would thus not lead us anywhere. In that age of supermen - for among the Nationalists there were personalities like Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Ajit Singh, Bepin Pal, Aswini Kumar Dutt, Subramania Bharati, Chidambaram Pillai - Sri Aurobindo somehow indisputably steamed foremost, for it was more than human ability that sustained him, it was more than political leadership that he gave his people. As the historian R.C. Majumdar has pointed out,
While Tilak popularised politics and gave it a force and vitality it had hitherto lacked, Aurobindo spiritualised it and became the high priest of Nationalism as a religious creed. He revived the theoretical teachings of Bankim Chandra and Vivekananda...
...placed the country on the altar of God and asked for suffering and self-immolation as the best offerings for His worship.33
And Sister Nivedita and others who watched Sri Aurobindo at close quarters could see that he was a man of God, that his Nationalism was really a new religion. If it was the purpose of religion to take men to God, it was the purpose of the religion of Nationalism to bring men to their Mother, India - Bhavani Bharati or Prabuddha Bharata! To strive for the country, for India, was work for the Divine, and the Divine would give one the necessary strength to fight on, to persevere, even to sacrifice one's life if that should become necessary.
It is only against such a background - a religious or rather a spiritual view of political thought and campaigning - that one can hope to follow Sri Aurobindo's actions and writings of this period. Superficially, with his manifold burdens, Sri Aurobindo was like the proverbial Indian juggler who is expected to keep half a dozen balls simultaneously in the air. But it was inner spiritual strength that sustained Sri Aurobindo, it was the inner fire that kept the instrument functioning infallibly. It is indeed astonishing that, although working under such varieties of pressure, Sri Aurobindo's words, like his actions, should have uncannily fused d purpose, steadiness and strength. After the Jamalpore hooliganism, the
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Bande Mataram wrote in its issue of 27 April 1907:
The desecrated shrine, the outraged sanctity of religion, the blood of our kindred, the offended honour of our cause and country - all cry out for succour and vindication. They lay bare the policy of the alien bureaucracy and show the helpless nature of our position in the absence of the necessary organisation.
Within a fortnight, it returned to the theme to echo Tilak's warning to the Bengalis in the Kesari, and concluded with the ominous words:
It is inhuman to still busy ourselves with our selfish interests and pursuits.... The country in which the cry of outraged chastity rises day after day unavenged to heaven is doomed to ruin. The Government which permits it and stands looking on smiling and with folded hands is already doomed by the justice of heaven..;. But we too who look on while our sisters and mothers are outraged, - against us too the doom will go forth unless we act before it is too late.34
The Risley Circular of 6 May provoked appropriate comment two days later:
This ukase out-russians Russia.... Not even the omnipotent Tsar has dared to issue an ukase so arbitrary, oppressive and inquisitorial.... It means, if there is a grain of self-respect left in the country, that the Government University will perish and a National University be developed. And for this reason we welcome the circular....
The issue of 29 May returned to the subject and called for an "Educational Strike", for not otherwise could the infamous challenge of the Risley Circular be adequately met:
.. .the whole nation is on trial, - professors, teachers and students are all confronted with the choice of signing themselves serfs and, in the case of the former, paid detectives as well and tools for doing the dirty work of the bureaucracy or of severing their connection with a university so shamefully fettered and turned to vile uses.... The choice is too plain to be blinked at or ignored. We must either submit to the deprivation of our natural liberties or dissociate ourselves from Government and aided schools and colleges. The first is unthinkable, and the second is therefore our only course.
As regards the developing situation in the Punjab, Sri Aurobindo's pen-picture in the issue of 6 May projects almost a foreshadowing of the Amritsar atrocities of twelve years later:
Britain, the benevolent, Britain, the mother of Parliament, Britain, the champion of liberty, Britain, the deliverer of the slave, - such was the sanctified and legendary figure which we have been trained to keep before our eyes...
... we have a strange companion picture [in the Punjab] to that dream of benevolent and angelic Britain, - a city of unarmed men terrorised by the military, the leaders of the people hurried from their daily avocations to prison, siege-guns pointed at the town, police rifles ready to fire on any group of five men or more to be seen in the streets, bail refused to respectable pleaders and
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barristers from sheer terror of their influence. Look on this picture, then on that!
Lala Lajpat Rai's deportation followed on 9 May, and two days later Sri Aurobindo wrote editorially in the Bande Mataram:
The bureaucracy has declared with savage emphasis that it will tolerate & meekly carping loyalism, it will tolerate an ineffective agitation of prayer, protest and petition, but it will not tolerate the New Spirit.
But was the country going to be cowed down because a leader here had been arrested, another there intimidated, and a third deported? There was a Leader behind the leaders, and that was the Leader the country had been following and would follow still:
The King whom we follow to the wars today, is our own Motherland, the sacred and imperishable; the leader of our onward march is the Almighty Himself, that element within and without us whom sword cannot slay, nor water drown, nor fire bum, nor exile divide from us, nor a prison confine. Lajpat Rai is nothing, Tilak is nothing, Bepin Pal is nothing: these are but instruments in the mighty Hand that is shaping our destinies and if these go, do you think that God cannot find others to do His will?
If Lalaji had been taken from his people, men even greater and stronger would take his place. If persecution struck down one worthy representative of a living cause, there would arise, "like the giants from the blood of Raktabij", men of redoubled or quadrupled strength:
It was the exiled of Italy, it was the men who languished in Austrian and Bourbon dungeons, it was Poerio and Silvio Pellico and their fellow sufferers whose collected strength reincarnated in Mazzini and Garibaldi and Cavour to free their country.
When John Morley, as Secretary of State, tried to defend the indefensible in Parliament, when he (and Lord Minto the Viceroy) tried simultaneously to brandish, in one hand the sword of repression and in the other the mini-chocolate of coming reforms, Sri Aurobindo remarked with a touch of acid in the issue of 16 May:
We have heard of a despotism tempered by epigrams and a despotism tempered by assassination, but this is the first time we hear of a self-government tempered by deportation. ... Coerce, if you will - we welcome coercion, but be sure that it will rank the whole of India against you without distinction of parties.
Again, the very next day, commenting on the apologia offered by the Statesman:
Prodigious! A man is arrested without any charge being formulated against him, without trial, without any chance of defending himself, separated suddenly from his family and friends... and relegated to solitary imprisonment in a distant fortress; yet because he is not treated as Mr. Tilak was treated, as a common criminal... this remarkable Liberal organ goes into ecstasies over the leniency of the British bureaucracy.
Although such castigation, whether of the declared enemy or of the more dangerous
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seeming friend, was sometimes necessary and had to be administered with surgical precision and ease, Sri Aurobindo gave far more importance to the positive evangelical aspect of his editorial responsibility - namely, to summon India and Indians to a realisation of their Divine mission. "Swadeshism" was much more than political economy, it was rather a call to self-respect, self-knowledge and self-realisation. A superb article in the issue of 11 September 1907 linked India's resurgence with Asia's, and contrasted it with Western "progress" which, for all its glittering material prizes, was in reality a delusion and a snare. In times of benumbing darkness, when hope lies nearly dead, when the impulse to life is atrophied, when suspicion and suicidal division prowl about, it is in such moments of extremity that the Divine invasion and afflatus has turned winter into sudden spring:
Human progress seems always to have depended on the reawakening touch of some divine impulse whenever the spirit of man flagged and failed.... These visitations of immortality in man have been known by different names such as Buddhism, Christianity, the Renaissance, Vaishnavism and the like. Asia forgetful, decadent, dying in "the scorching drought of modem vulgarity" needed most the purifying ablution of such a wave; and it has now come at its appointed hour crested with all the glory if her own ideals, giving India back the long-lost treasure of her race, the passion for self-knowledge, called by us National Education.... It is only by growing to know herself that she can learn to shun like deadly poison all those misnamed ideals so dear to the West: the industrialism that dwarfs the worker down to the pin's point over which it is his miserable lot to work out his very life; the commercialism that floods the world with ugly and worthless wares owing nought to beauty or religion; the piety that results in the sending of panoplied missions with more reliance on gunpowder than on God; the gluttonous earth-hunger whetted with cruelty, carnage and all manner of godlessness cloaked by the cunning of a mere word. Imperialism.
The worship of the gods of external life had led the West (and those who had followed the Western lead) to a bleak desert of parched inner life. On the contrary, poverty and squalor and slothful underemployment as were (and still are!) prevalent in India couldn't prove favourable soil for the cultivation of inner health and happiness and peace. The proletariat in India (and Asia and Africa) needed "wealth and abundance" because without food and clothes no worthwhile life was possible; and swaraj or self-rule was needed too, because "without it she cannot possibly bring about those conditions under which only she would be able to re-enthrone the faith that is in her in its integrity". Bread and butter were not ends in themselves, but they were a necessary base; hence the need to end political serfdom and economic paralysis through the unfaltering pursuit of the ideal of Swadeshi in its whole arc of significance from the material to the spiritual. With a revivified India as a result of Swaraj, it would once again be "a pride to live in her, a privilege to die for her".
This was no clever editor, no nimble controversial pugilist, no adroit manipulator
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of a popular communication medium - though he seemed to be these too! - hit a power that exceeded them all: this was a Messiah, a God-Man, a redeemer ho had taken birth to lead a fallen people out of the cold and the dark into the sunlit spaces of a warm new day. In his writing there was no tinge of mere racial hatred of the British, and his plea for Swaraj went beyond the charge of tyranny against an alien government. True self-government in the sense of self-reliance and self-knowledge and self-mastery was a Vedantic as much as a political objective - more Vedantic, in fact, than purely political. The whole Aurobindonian thesis a unique amalgam of patriotic fervour and Vedantic idealism, was thus brilliantly summed up at the time by B.C. Chatterji:
The aspirations of Young India were in his writings, a divining intention of the spirit of liberty, the beating of whose wings was being heard over Asia; an exaltation, an urgency, a heartening call on his countrymen to serve and save the Motherland, an impassioned appeal to their manhood to reinstate her in the greatness that was hers. Had she not once been the High Priestess of the Orient? Has not her civilisation left its ripple-mark on the furthermost limits of Asia? India still had a soul to save, which the parching drought of modem vulgarity threatened daily with death; she alone in a pharisaical world, were everyone acclaimed God in speech and denied Him in fact, offered Him the worship of her heart; she alone yet gave birth to the choice spirits who cast aside the highest of earth's gifts in their enraptured pursuit of the life of life. Show us the country but India that could produce in the nineteenth century the Saint of Dakshineshwar. The saving wisdom was still in the land which taught man how to know and realise his God....
But how should the culture of the soul survive in the land where a shifting materialism was asserting itself under the aegis of foreign rule? Had not the fools and the Philistines, whose name was Legion - the monstrous products of a soulless education nourished on the rind of European thought - already begun to laugh at their country's past? And dared to condemn the wisdom of their ancestors? Was India to deform herself from a temple of God into one vast inglorious suburb of English civilisation? Even beauty, the vernal Goddess enshrined in her hymns and her poetry, was feeling the country chased by a hungry commercialism pouring out its flood of ugly and worthless wares' owing naught to art or religion'. This doom that impended over the land must be averted. India must save herself by ending the alien domination which had, not only impoverished her body, but was also strangulating her soul. It was only in an independent India, with the reins of self-determination in her own hands, that the ideal could be re-enthroned in its integrity of high thinking and holy living, which cast on every man the obligation to cultivate throughout life the knowledge of Atman (Self and God), and of striving to realise in conduct the code of humanity that Gautama Buddha enjoined. It was from the height of this vision of India to be that he called upon his countrymen to prepare themselves to be free, and not for the mere secularity of autonomy
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and wealth, the pseudo-divinities upon whose altars Europe has sacrificed her soul and would some day end by immolating her very physical existence.35
Such a message, delivered week after week in the prophetic accents of such a person as Sri Aurobindo, was a perfervid challenge to the race and a call to action; and the response was immediate, for "the nation felt a quickening in the beating of its heart, a stirring in its blood, the vibration of chords long silent in its race consciousness".36
VI
The so-called Minto-Morley proposals for constitutional reform were the subject of editorial comment in the Bande Mataram on more than one occasion. The agitation against the partition of Bengal had become a nation-wide affair, had made the boycott of British goods an effective political weapon and had waxed into a demand for independence. These were met by ruthless repression. But a weak does of "reform" too had become necessary to assuage the outraged feelings of the people. In May 1907, the Government of India promulgated an Ordinance forbidding meetings without prior official permission. The Ordinance was made applicable, first to Lahore on 11 May and on 18 May to Barisal in East Bengal. Writing on 16 May in the Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo called the Ordinance "the latest act of medieval tyranny" and tore the veil of British hypocrisy and charged Morley himself with insincerity and lack of principle. Then came the reference to the reform proposals in the air:
For some time Mr. Morley and Lord Minto... have been talking big of some wonderful reform that they have up their sleeves and feverishly assuring the world that these fine things are all their very own idea and by no means forced on them by Indian agitation.
When later actual "proposals" were made public, the Bande Mataram called them "comic opera" reforms, and witheringly pointed out that "the right place for this truly comic Council of Notables with its yet more comic functions is an opera by Gilbert and Sullivan and not an India seething with discontent and convulsed by the throes of an incipient revolution".37 Sri Aurobindo returned to the theme in later issues and poured ridicule both on Mr. Morley the co-author of the reforms and on the proposals as well. People in India were not used to "the habit of following the turns of British parliamentary eloquence or reading between the lines of the speech of a Cabinet Minister"; the dhwani was often very different from the articulated verbiage. Superficially, the proposed Council of Notables, the to-be-expanded Legislative Councils, the likely admission of Indian members to the India Council and the possibility of greater decentralisation in the administration, all had the vague look of "progress" - one step further from colonialism towards self-government. But apply the lens and see, and something very different revealed itself:
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All the reforms have one single object, one governing idea, - an absolute personal despotic British control in touch with the people....
To maintain in India an absolute rule as rigid as any czar's, to keep that rule in close touch with the currents of Indian sentiment, opinion and activity and to crush any active opposition by an immediate resort to the ordinary weapons of despotism, ordinances, deportations, prosecutions and a swift and ruthless terrorism, this is Morleyism....
What, then, had happened to Morley the great "liberal" statesman? India's disillusionment was not very different from that of the imaginary African chief, as described in Lytton Strachey's 'Bonga-Bonga in Whitehall' in Characters and Commentaries. The editorial entitled 'Biparita Buddhi' in the issue of 26 June 1907, as good as skinned alive the suave philosopher veiled in ornamental Liberalism who hid within "the typical John Bull with the full equipment of tiger qualities"; he learned his politics from the Anglo-India press in India, his poetry from Rudyard Kipling, his history from records of oppression:
Shakespeare and Milton did not illumine his imagination when he peered into the future of India. Mill, Carlyle or Herbert Spencer did not shed any light on his reasoning when he applied himself to the study of the problems in India. Hume, Froude, Kingsley or Freeman did not help him at all in taking a correct reading of events and their bearings. Neither Chatham nor Wilberforce nor even Mr. Gladstone stood by him with their enlightened statesmanship when he gave his seal of approval to the despotic acts of Sir Denzil Ibbetson. Chatham... rose from his sick-bed, was literally carried to the House, entered his last protest against the employment of German mercenaries for suppressing the natural aspirations of the people (of America) of his own blood; but this erstwhile most liberal statesman of England does not show even any lurking sympathy for the natural hankering after liberty without which a man is no man. The atmosphere of the India House, the debasing responsibility of office, the intoxication of power has brought out the Jingo and killed the man.
There was such a thing as biparita buddhi or perverse mentality, and this had wholly infected Morley, and perhaps this too was the preordained way in which things had to be fulfilled in India:
Mr. Morley is a victim to this biparita buddhi, as his predecessors were on the eve of the American Revolution, as Duryodhana and Dhritarashtra were on the eve of the battle of Kurukshetra, as Ravana was before the fall of the mighty Rakshasa kingdom, as the ancient tyrants or the French monarchs were before they made way for the emancipation of their section of humanity.... The biparita buddhi that helps the regeneration of weak and oppressed peoples is manifestly at work. We welcome it....
Sri Aurobindo's rhetorical method was to pile up to overwhelming effect illustration upon illustration, as if he were raining hammer-blow on hammer-blow; this is brilliant jiu-jitsuing, the opponent being worsted every time.
The Bande Mataram also carried certain snappy items like satiric compositions
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and parodies, many of which were the work of Shyamsundar Chakravarti though of course Sri Aurobindo's inspiration was there too. Shyamsundar was a witty parodist and could write with much humour and he could be tellingly rhetorical as well; he had caught up some imitation of Sri Aurobindo's prose style and many could not at once distinguish between their writings. Whenever Sri Aurobindo was away from Calcutta, Shyamsundar had to do much of the editorial work and write the leading articles, unless Sri Aurobindo sent them from Deoghar or wherever he was camping at the time. One of Shyamsundar's successful skits was the "mock-petition" to "Honest John", a piece of vigorous and stinging satire which was printed in the inaugural issue of the Weekly edition of the Bande Mataram on 2 June 1907. When the skit was later reproduced in the Glasgow News, it created quite a stir in Britain - a stir that had its official repercussions in India.
As a politician, it was a matter of principle with Sri Aurobindo never to "appeal" to the British people; and the Bande Mataram also avoided any such exercise in mendicancy. But the paper certainly tried to prod and awaken the Indian nation from its unconscionable slumber. Sri Aurobindo's Vidula - to which reference has already been made in an earlier chapter (4. VI) appeared in the second issue of the Bande Mataram Weekly, which also contained Shyamsundar's "Unreported Conversation" in verse between a Briton and Ajit Singh on the eve of the latter's arrest. Another striking item in the issue was "Pagri Samalo, Jata", a free rendering by Shyamsundar of the poem that used to be sung by the Jats to rouse their countrymen to protest against the imposition of iniquitous taxes. Perseus the Deliverer, Sri Aurobindo's poetic play, began as a serial in the issue of 30 June, and the readers of the Weekly must have seized the import of the word "Deliverer" hammered on the consciousness again and again. In the issue of 7 July, again, the Bande Mataram printed verses from Wilfrid Blunt's poem "The Wind and the Whirlwind", and left it by itself to speak in defence of Indian nationalism. In the next issue of the weekly edition, Shyamsundar transferred, by sleight of hand, the "Trial Scene" in The Merchant of Venice to a Calcutta Police Court. The editor of the Yugantar is Antonio, and the denizens of "Law and Order" constitute Shylock. It is all in Shakespeare; but the derogation is directly aimed at the repressive policy of the Government.
A week later, the satirical poet turned his attention to the place-seekers an title-hunters who weakened the Nationalist case. "A Hymn to the Supreme Bu is supposedly the Mantra of these people, who raise their hands in abject prayer the Supreme Bull and beat their breasts and scream the while:
Hail, sempiternal Lord! Be bounteous still
To give us only titles and posts, and if sedition
Hath gathered aught of evil, or concealed,
Disperse it, as your police disperse our crowds.38
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The aim of these satirical shafts was to hit the bull's-eye every time, and that they did indeed; and yet where people had the rhinoceros' skin, such arrows could effect no more than pin-pricks. But on a total view, the Bande Mataram had brought about no mean revolution in political thought in India during the first twelve months fits career, and hence felt justified in writing on the occasion of the anniversary:
It [the paper] came into being in answer to an imperative public need and not to satisfy any private ambition or personal whim; it was born in a great and critical hour for the whole nation and has a message to deliver, which nothing on earth can prevent it from delivering.... It claims that it has given expression to the will of the people and sketched their ideals and aspirations with the greatest amount of fidelity.
VII
If only the Government had left the Bande Mataram alone! But the biparita buddhi walked into the Council chamber and lo! the Government decided to prosecute the Bande Mataram: not even the paper itself, but one individual particularly, Sri Aurobindo, because he was supposed to be the infernal brain behind it. But there were difficulties. It was easy enough to launch a prosecution against the Yugantar, because it preached more than sedition: it preached revolution itself. But the Bande Mataram, although in its subtle and suggestive way it was an even more dangerous paper, had kept itself uncannily within the four comers of the existing law. And so Government, having decided on the prosecution, now brought against the paper the charge of having reproduced translations of certain articles that had earlier appeared in the Yugantar and also for the printing of a "Letter to the Editor" entitled "Politics for Indians" in the Dak edition of the Bande Mataram of 28 July 1907. Sri Aurobindo went at once to the Detective Police Office for surrendering himself. From there he was taken to Poddopukur Thana, but was soon released on bail. Two gentlemen. Prof. Girish Bose of Bangabasi College and Nirod Mullick of Wellington Square, stood surety for Sri Aurobindo.39
Previous to the launching of this prosecution, Sri Aurobindo had confined himself to writing and holding the reins of leadership from behind the scenes, and had not cared to advertise himself or put forward his personality. As he wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy two or three decades later:
I was never ardent about fame even in my political days; I preferred to remain behind the curtain, push people without their knowing it, and get things done. It was the confounded British Government that spoilt my game by prosecuting me and forcing me to be publicly known as a 'leader'.40
Thanks to the bungling of the British Government in India, Sri Aurobindo's name was overnight on the lips of a whole people. The semi-mystery of the authorship of the series of challenging and coruscatingly beautiful and brilliant Bande Mataram articles was now wholly cleared up at last. Wires flashed, messages were splashed,
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and appreciations, congratulations, animated appraisals, all lighted up the pages of the national press. The Madras Standard wrote as follows:
Perhaps, few outside Bengal have heard of Mr. Aurobindo Ghose, so much so that even the London Times has persisted in saying that none but Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal could be the author of the able articles appearing in the Bande Mataram.... In the history of press prosecutions in this country, we have not come across a man who has been more conspicuous by reason of his ability and force of character.
The Indian Patriot wrote that millions of his countrymen were at that moment doing homage to Sri Aurobindo's genius and "pronouncing his name with reverence and gratitude", and added:
Mr. Aurobindo Ghose is no notoriety hunter, is no demagogue who wants to become prominent by courting conviction for sedition. A man of very fine culture, his is a lovable nature; merry, sparkling with wit and humour, ready in refined repartee, he is one of those men to be in whose company is a joy and behind whose exterior is a steadily growing fire of unseen devotion to a cause.
And the Mahratta (Tilak's paper) succinctly declared: "Who knows but what is sedition today may be divine truth tomorrow? Mr. Aurobindo Ghose is a sweet soul."
Likewise, messages poured upon Sri Aurobindo. Most celebrated of all was Rabindranath Tagore's poem in Bengali which first appeared in the Bande Mataram of 8 September 1907, and the following lines are from an English rendering by Kshitish Chandra Sen:
O friend, my country's friend, O voice incarnate, free,
Of India's soul! No soft renown doth crown thy lot,
Nor pelf or careless comfort is for thee...
...O Victory and Hail!
Where is the coward who will shed tears today, or wail
Or quake in fear? And who'll belittle truth to seek
His own small safety? Where's the spineless creature weak
Who will not in thy pain his strength and courage find?...
The fiery messenger that with the lamp of God
Hath come - where is the king who can with chain or rod
Chastise him? Chains that were to bind salute his feet,
And prisons greet him as their guest with welcome sweet...
And so today I hear
The ocean's restless roar borne by the stormy wind,
The impetuous fountain's dance riotous, swift and blind
Bursting its rocky cage, - the voice of thunder deep
Awakening, like a clarion call, the clouds asleep.
Amid this song triumphant, vast, that encircles me,
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Rabindranath,
O Aurobindo,
bows to thee.41
The students of the Baroda College - his own students of but yesterday - sent this message: "We the students, past and present, of the Baroda College, in a meeting assembled, convey our warmest sympathy to our late Vice-Principal Mr. Ghose in ,. present trouble." And a contributor to the Indian Patriot, who signed himself "A.S.M.", asseverated in the course of his eulogy: "Slaves of ease and security, the butterflies of the hour look small and pitiable by his side."
The prosecution against the Bande Mataram and its supposed editor, Sri Aurobindo Ghose, pursued a strange career. Exasperated, frightened, almost maddened, the Government were after Sri Aurobindo: his sinister hand was seen everywhere - in the Yugantar, in Sandhya, and of course in the Bande Mataram. And how extensive were the tentacles that shot out of these "organs of public opinion"! and how uncannily they sought out converts or victims - who became critics and enemies of the bureaucracy - everywhere, even outside Bengal! And the man was so elusive, so mercurial, so diabolically clever: yet he seemed to be an etheric presence, everywhere, everywhere, yet nowhere precisely to be located and entrapped. But there were means and means, there were agents and agents, there were complicated three-tier nets to catch even the most slippery fish! First warnings were issued to the Yugantar (on 7 June 1907) and the Bande Mataram (on 8 June) that, if they didn't learn to behave better, police action might ensue against them. After a decent interval, the Yugantar Office was searched on 3 July, and Bhupendranath Datta (instead of prudently trying to save his own neck) declared that he was the editor, courted arrest, and by refusing to offer defence (why should he, as a revolutionary, take cognizance of an alien court?) secured a year's jail sentence.* And the manager, - that was Abinash Bhattacharya; he had to be acquitted, for nothing could be proved against him. On 30 July, it was the turn if the Office of the Bande Mataram to be searched, and on 16 August the warrant for Sri Aurobindo's arrest was issued. But he wouldn't try to evade arrest; on the contrary, he went himself to the police court and asked to be arrested. Was he the editor of the Bande Mataram. No. Was he the printer? No, again. A stalemate! Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya - another great evangelist of Nationalism who had referred to Sri Aurobindo as Aurobindo, the lotus of immaculate whiteness, the hundred-petalled lotus in full bloom in India's Manasarovar - was arrested as the editor of Sandhya on 31 August, but he was to trick the authorities and die, after a ort illness, in the Campbell Hospital before the case against him could be concluded. Who, then, was most likely to throw light on the still obscure editor of the Bande Mataram? Bepin Pal, of course - the founder of the paper! So he was put on the witness box. Hadn't he severed his connection with the paper? Wasn't he
* Cf. Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, Vol. 26, pp. 24,41-2.
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the more likely therefore to squeal a little? But all calculations went wrong. Benin Pal refused to name Sri Aurobindo as the editor of the paper. Et tu Brute! Pal was promptly sentenced to six months' simple imprisonment.* Commenting on the verdict, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Bande Mataram of 12 September that Pa] had been awarded "the maximum penalty permitted by the law for the crime of possessing a conscience". The issue had been whether Pal should obey the letter of the law requiring him to give evidence or whether he should rather obey (as many like Antigone had done) "the imperative command of his conscience" which he held to be a "more sacred and binding law than the Penal Code". But Pal and the country alike only stood to gain from his conviction:
The country will not suffer by the incarceration of this great orator and writer this spokesman and prophet of nationalism, nor will Bepin Chandra himself suffer by it. He has arisen ten times as high as he was before in the estimation of his countrymen.... He will come out of prison with his power and influence doubled, and Nationalism has already become the stronger for his self-immolation. Posterity will judge between him and the petty tribunal which has treated his honourable scruples as a crime.
Indeed, the Government had made a laughing-stock of themselves by instituting proceedings against Sri Aurobindo. "There would have been some meaning in the case", the Punjabee wrote, "if proceedings had been taken against the paper [the Bande Mataram) for any of its editorial writings which had given it a speciality among Indian newspapers"; but the flimsy ground - that the paper had reproduced some articles (in translation) from another paper - on which the prosecution chose to stand proved very soapy indeed. It was in vain that the prosecution Counsel had thundered: "I do not care whether Arabindo was editor or not. I say he is the paper itself!" Mr. Chuckerburtty, the Defence Counsel, had no difficulty in drawing home the point that Sri Aurobindo was not really responsible for the publication of the articles to which exception had been taken. Incidentally, Mr. Chuckerburtty revealed the fact that, during a period of eight or nine months, Sri Aurobindo had received only fifty rupees for his contributions to the Bande Mataram!
At last, the Chief Presidency Magistrate Mr. Kingsford delivered judgement, acquitting Sri Aurobindo, and giving it as his considered opinion that "the genera) tone of the Bande Mataram is not seditious". Thus, as the paper wrote editorially on 25 September 1907, the prosecution that had "commenced with a flourish of trumpets" ended merely "in the most complete and dismal fiasco such as no Indian Government has ever had to experience before in a sedition case". What, after all, had been the head and front of the Bande Mataram's offence against the Government? Only this, - it had attacked the existing system of Government and advocated a radical and revolutionary change "on grounds of historical experience,
* Sir Andrew Fraser the Lt. Governor wrote to Minto on 12 September: "We cannot catch him [Pal] for his speech; but an Indian Magistrate has given him six months for silence!" (Quoted from the Minto Papers in M. N. Das's India under Morley and Minto, p. 135)
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the first principle of politics and the necessity and national self-perseveration". But the Government had gone about witch-hunting, and had sought by any means whatsoever to incriminate Sri Aurobindo and consign him to the dungeon. They had even clutched at the straw of the obscure Anukul Mukherjee's testimony, but Anukul had broken down in cross-examination. Even in that extremity, the Government would not see reason but pressed for a verdict, but the Magistrate could not oblige them. And if it all ended as a boomerang to the bureaucracy, they , had only themselves to blame. This, then, was the way the trial ended, not with a bang (as Government had expected) but a whimper!
After the acquittal, Rabindranath came to congratulate Sri Aurobindo, and said ironically: "What! you have deceived us!" And Sri Aurobindo seems to have answered with a smile: "Not for long will you have to wait!" But the story is not without its anticlimax. Magisterial wrath required a prey and found an easy victim in Apurva Bose, the printer of the Bande Mataram. Thus, "only an unfortunate Printer who knew no English and had no notion what all the pother was about, was sent to prison for a few months to vindicate the much-damaged majesty of the almighty bureaucracy".42 Thou hast conquered, indeed, O Bureaucracy!
As an epilogue to the tragi-comedy, there was a minor skirmish between the David-like Bande Mataram and the Goliath-sized Statesman regarding the fate of the "poor" printer sentenced to three months' imprisonment, the nuances of magisterial ethics and the virtues of journalistic anonymity. On every count, Sri Aurobindo was able deftly to turn the tables against his antagonist of the Statesman (alias the "Friend" of India!) in two articles that appeared in the issue of 28 September 1907. One or two sentences may be extracted here:
The bureaucracy has armed itself with such liberal powers of repression that a journalist attacking it is like a man with no better weapon than a pebble assailing a Goliath panoplied from head to foot, armed with a repeating rifle and supported by howitzers and maxim guns. For a backer of the giant to complain because the unarmed assailant throws his pebble from behind a bush or wall is, to say the least of it, a trifle incongruous.
As for the "poor" printer, even had somebody come forward as the editor (as Bhupendranath had done for the Yugantar), "the printer would still have been liable under the statute and got his three months". And the article entitled Chowringhee and Anonymous Journalism" put the record straight about certain facts in the history of British journalism, and concluded devastatingly with a touch of the sardonic as follows:
If the Statesman will consider these facts, it will realise that the mere possession of a rotary machine does not of itself make one an authority either on the history or on the ethics of journalism.
The laurels were with David, as always - not with Goliath.
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