Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

32

A Unit of Force

Sri Aurobindo took part in the Barisal Provincial Conference held on 14 April 1906. He was in the front row of three in the procession, with Bepin Pal and Bejoy Chatterji. The president of the Conference, Abdul Rasul, passed with his English wife in a carriage. Other prominent leaders followed on foot in a procession. Nobody stopped them. But just as a band of young men came behind, the policemen lathi-charged the unarmed boys. Chittaranjan, the son of Monoranjan Guha Thakurta, was assaulted and pushed into a tank. Although he was severely injured the police could not stop him from shouting 'Bande Mataram.' That exemplifies the tyranny of the first Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal, Sir Bampfylde Fuller, and the undaunted courage of the youth.

After the breaking up of the Conference Sri Aurobindo accompanied Bepin Pal in a tour of East Bengal "where enormous meetings were held —in one district in spite of the prohibition of the District Magistrate."

"When after the Barisal Conference, we brought in the peasants into the Movement, forty or fifty thousands of them used to gather to hear Pal," recalled Sri Aurobindo. B.C. Pal,

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though lacking in organizational ability and not capable of political leadership, was perhaps the best and most original political thinker in the country, an excellent writer and a magnificent orator. Said Sri Aurobindo, "Pal was a great orator and at that time his speeches were highly inspired, a sort of descent from above."

Up to 1901 Bepin Chandra Pal was an avowed Moderate who believed in the 'Divine Providence' that had brought the British to India "to help it in working out its salvation." But the political turmoil unleashed by the Partition of Bengal, which brought him in close contact with B. B. Upadhyay and in closer association with Sri Aurobindo, wrought a change in him. Pal's speeches became full of the fire of Nationalism laced with philosophical knowledge. "Every large human movement, essentially a movement of thought, has, whether consciously or unconsciously, some Philosophy of Life behind it." By 1907 he became, not only a foremost political preacher in Bengal, but swept Madras off its feet with his impassioned nationalism. Srinivasa Shastri gives a vivid description of those speeches. "Babu Bipinchandra Pal burst into full fame in Madras as a preacher of the new political creed. For several days on the sands of the beach, he spoke words hot with emotion and subtly logical, which were wafted by the soft evening breeze to tens of thousands of listeners invading their whole souls and setting them aflame with the fever of a wild consuming desire. Oratory had never dreamed of such triumphs in India ; the power of the spoken word had never been demonstrated on such a scale."¹

1. Swadeshi and Swaraj,

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Pal spoke on Swadeshi and Swaraj. "Swaraj," he explained, "will be the Swaraj of the Indian people, not of any section of it." This new National Movement in India, he asserted, "is essentially a Spiritual Movement." In a word, he became a popular exponent of the spiritual nationalism of Swami Vivek-ananda and Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo was always more explicit. "Swaraj" he said in his address at Jhalakati in June 1909, "is not the Colonial form of Government nor any form of Government. It means the fulfilment of our national life. That is what we seek, that is why God has sent us into the world to fulfil Him by fulfilling ourselves in our individual life, in the family, in the community, in the nation, in humanity.... There are some who fear to use the word 'freedom,' but I always used the word because it has been the Mantra of my life to aspire towards the freedom of my nation."

Sri Aurobindo based his understanding of Swaraj on the Vedic literature. The nature of the Universal, explain the Vedas, is "independent, self-protecting, and stands by its greatness, and in its greatness—stands sva-mahimni," which is synonymous with Swaraj.

The word 'Swaraj' was a bugbear to the Europeans. When they heard it they became full of unreasoning terrors. So there is no need to describe the consternation of the Anglo-Indian Government at Bepin Pal's triumphant oratory. "I do not think we should allow Bepin Chandra Pal to stump the country preaching sedition as he has been doing," wrote Minto, the Governor-General of India, to Morley, the Secretary of

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State for India, on 2 April 1907. Within three months of this, Minto went further and proposed the deportation of Pal on the ground that "Pal's behaviour has been monstrous, and it is the danger of it that we cannot ignore." No, the government did not ignore the danger. On a flimsy charge a few months later, the Government got him sentenced to six months' imprisonment. His sin? He refused to testify in court against his colleagues, in what came to be known as the Bande Mataram Sedition Case.

Bepin Pal had been writing articles in his weekly organ New India. Then he started another journal with the name of Bande Mataram. He asked Sri Aurobindo to join him in this venture to which a ready consent was given, for now Sri Aurobindo saw his opportunity for starting the public propaganda necessary for his revolutionary purpose. In article after article Sri Aurobindo traced out the programme of the new Nationalist Party. One of the recurring themes was the inclusion of the neglected masses and the organization of all forces in the nation for revolutionary action as the sole effective policy. A few samples.

1 September 1906 —"The true policy of the Congress movement should have been from the beginning to gather together under its flag all the elements of strength that exist in this huge country. The Brahman Pandit and the Mahomedan Maulavi, the caste organisation and the trade-union, the labourer and the artisan, the coolie at his work and the peasant in his field, none of these should have been left out of the sphere of our activities. For each is a strength, a unit of force; and in politics the victory

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is to the side which can marshal the largest and most closely serried number of such units and handle them most skilfully, not to those who can bring forward the best arguments or talk the most eloquently.

December 17, 1907 —"Nationalism depends for its success on the awakening and organising of the whole strength of the nation; it is therefore vitally important for Nationalism that the politically backward classes should be awakened and brought into the current of political life;... the shopkeepers, the artisan class, the immense body of illiterate and ignorant peasantry, the submerged classes, even the wild tribes and races still outside the pale of Hindu civilisation, Nationalism can afford to neglect and omit none.

April 1908 (?) —"The new [Nationalism] overleaps every barrier; it calls to the clerk at his counter, the trader in his shop, the peasant at his plough; it summons the Brahmin from his temple and takes the hand of the Chandala in his degradation ; it seeks out the student in his College, the schoolboy at his book, it touches the very child in its mother's arms; and the secluded zenana has thrilled to its voice; its eye searches the jungle for the Santal and travels the hills for the wild tribes of the mountains. It cares nothing for age or sex or caste or wealth or education or respectability.... It speaks to the illiterate or the man in the street in such rude vigorous language as he best understands, to youth and the enthusiast in accents of poetry, in language of fire, to the thinker in the terms of philosophy and logic, to the Hindu it repeats the name of Kali, the Mahomedan it spurs to

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action for the glory of Islam. It cries to all to come forth, to help in God's work and remake a nation, each with what his creed or his culture, his strength, his manhood or his genius can give to the new nationality. The only qualification it asks for is a body made in the womb of an Indian mother, a heart that can feel for India, a brain that can think and plan for her greatness, a tongue that can adore her name or hands that can fight in her quarrel."

Just as he would leave not a single element out of the national life, so would he leave not an element out of yogic life. "To the last atom," said Sri Aurobindo.

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