Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

4

Bankim's Bengal

At the intervention of the Maratha leader M. G. Ranade (1852-1904), the political series New Lamps for Old came to an end. Ranade, however, was keen to meet the intelligent and promising young critic. An interview was arranged that very year, and they met at Bombay. "I remember," wrote Sri Aurobindo in Karakahini {Tales of Prison Life), "when, back home from England fifteen years ago, I started writing articles in the Indu Prakash of Bombay, strongly protesting against the Congress policy of prayers and petition, the late Mahadeo Govind Ranade, seeing how these articles were acting on the minds of the youths, exhorted me, from the moment I met him and for half an hour, to leave off such writing and take up some Congress work. He wished to entrust me with the work of jail reform. I was surprised and displeased at this unexpected demand and turned it down." Commented Dinendra K. Roy, "Justice Ranade failed to refute Sri Aurobindo's arguments." M. G. Ranade, a judge of the Bombay High Court, was also an erudite scholar, and a reformist.

Sri Aurobindo continued ruefully: "I did not then know

Page 37

Bankim Chandra Chatterji

Page 38

that this was only a prelude to the distant future and that God Himself would one day keep me in jail for one year to make me see the cruelty and futility of the system." He also resolved to propagate this view and put forward arguments to abolish such hellish imported practices in a sovereign India. Alas for the tens of thousands of jail inmates rotting in 'free' India.

Four months after the last piece of New Lamps for Old appeared in the Indu Prakash, a new series of articles was begun on Bankim Chandra Chatterji 'by a Bengali' who signed himself 'Zero' (and not: Max Theon, the supreme God!).

From criticizing the Congress to Bankim the novelist! Those unacquainted with our young A. Ghose may be surprised at this prodigious jump from one pole to the other. True, A. Ghose was profoundly interested in literature, as he said himself. But if that was all, good writers abounded. So why Bankim? Well, that's a question from those who do not know Bankim Chandra. As our A. Ghose had a very methodical mind, he at once realized that Bankim was a nationalist who despised the way the Congress worked: "All its agitations seem to have an ephemeral look and lack in inner strength." Bankim was moreover a Hindu nationalist. He had not stopped with heaping praise on Rajnarain Bose when the latter delivered his famous lecture boldly proclaiming the 'superiority of Hindu religion and culture over European and Christian theology and civilization,' but propagated the ideas of Hindu nationalism through his own writings and lectures. He told young educated Bengalis who were swept off their feet by Western culture not to forget our own culture. "Therefore, I

Page 39

say, do not lose your reverence for the past," he told his audience in March 1894, after denouncing European scholars led by Max Müller. "It is on the past that you must plant your foot firmly, if you wish to mount high in the future." He reminded young Indians, "You are not a race of savages who have no past to remember; you cannot dissever yourselves in a day from the associations and influences of a past which extends over at least five hundred centuries. You cannot annihilate in a day a past national existence which has survived the annihilation of hundreds of empires, of hundred systems of religion, and which has surveyed unconcerned the downfall and ruin of many kindred civilizations. I have to make my warning so emphatic," he added sorrowfully, "because the general tendency of European scholars, who have so great an influence over you, is to decry your past history, to call for its virtual erasure from your memory...." European missionaries abetted by many European scholars were in the habit of presenting 'Hinduism' as a tangled jungle of gods, ghosts, demons and saints, and other monsters.

The articles on Bankim by Zero appeared in the Indu Prakash from 16 July to 27 August 1894.

"Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, the creator and King of Bengali prose, was a high-caste Brahman.... Born at Kantalpara on the 27^th June 1838, dead at Calcutta on the 8^th April 1894, his fifty-six years of laborious life were a parcel of the most splendid epoch in Bengali history; yet among its many noble names, his is the noblest...........The society by which Bankim was formed, was the young Bengal of the fifties, the most extraordinary perhaps that India has yet seen,—a society

Page 40

electric with thought and loaded to the brim with passion. A sort of miniature Renascence was in the process. An ardent and imaginative race, long bound in the fetters of a single tradition, had had suddenly put into its hand the key to a new world thronged with the beautiful or profound creations of Art and Learning.... The first impulse was gigantic in its proportions and produced men of an almost gigantic originality. Rammohan Ray arose with a new religion in his hand, which was developed on original lines by men almost greater one thinks than he, by Rajnarain Bose and Devendranath Tagore.......The calm, docile, pious, dutiful Hindu ideal was pushed aside with impatient energy, and the Bengali, released from the iron restraint which had lain like a frost on his warm blood and sensuous feeling, escaped joyously into the open air of an almost Pagan freedom. The ancient Hindu cherished a profound sense of the nothingness and vanity of life; the young Bengali felt vividly its joy, warmth and sensuousness. This is usually the moral note of a Renascence, a burning desire for Life, Life in her warm human beauty arrayed gloriously like a bride........" He did not forget to sketch Bankim's youth and his academic life: "The first picture we have of his childhood is his mastering the alphabet at a single reading," which was an image and prophecy of the rest; he was, together with another, the first B. A. of the Calcutta University which had come into being in 1857. Its jurisdiction then extended to Burma and Ceylon till 1904 when its territory was curtailed by Lord Curzon's decree. Bankim, with his usual distinguished success appeared for the B. L. His official appointment followed close on his degree. At

Page 41

the age of twenty he was sent as Deputy Magistrate to Jessore. "Khulna, the third step in the ladder, was also the theatre of his most ambitious exploits. Entangled in the Sunderban, that rude and unhealthy tract of marsh and jungle, the zillah [district] was labouring under two morbid ailments, for which none of its official doctors had found an efficient panacea —the smallpox of piracy and the greater pox of Indigoism." A. Ghose was referring to the merciless European indigo planters who enriched themselves by forcing their workers to slave, often to death. "Ruffians from Europe were in hot competition with the native breed which should deserve best the Government Scholarship for lawlessness and brutality; and as they had a racial gift for these things and a wider field it might have been safely awarded to them. Unluckily Bankim stept into their happy hunting-grounds and spoiled the game. But to the unhappy ryots, the battle-field for these rival rascalities, he came as a champion and a deliverer. At Khulna this mild, thoughtful Bengali wears the strange appearance of a Hercules weeding out monsters, clearing augean stables, putting a term to pests. His tranquil energy quite broke the back of the Indigo tyrants.... Fine and imprisonment meted out with a healthy severity shattered their prestige and oppressed their brutal spirits. Khulna then saw the last of government by organised ruffiandom. No less terse and incisive were Bankim's dealings with the water-thieves who lurking in a creek and brushwood dominated to the perpetual alarm and molestation of travellers the hundred waters of the Sunderban.... The hydra of the waters had been crushed as effectually as the indigo pest; and since the era of Bankim's

Page 42

magistracy one may travel the length and breadth of Khulna without peril except from malaria and ague. By a little quiet decisiveness he had broken the back of two formidable tyrannies and given an object lesson in what a Government can do when it heartily intends the good of the people."

Sri Aurobindo discounts the vulgar theory that "wordly abilities are inconsistent with the poetic genius." He reminds us that even if a literary genius chooses to burn the candle at one end, the candle has two ends and not one. He wrote, "Bankim, the greatest of novelists, had the versatility developed to its highest expression. Scholar, poet, essayist, novelist, philosopher, lawyer, critic, official, philologian and religious innovator,— the whole world seemed to be shut up in his single brain.... To give impartial expression to all your gifts is to miss your vocation. Bankim was never so far led astray as that. His province was literature, prose literature, and he knew it.... To find your vocation and keep to it, that is not indeed a showy, but it is a simple and solid rule of life.... Nature gives us quartz profusely and mixed alloy in abundance, but pure gold in rare parcels and infinitesimal portions.... His ten masterpieces of fiction are enough. They would serve to immortalize ten reputations.... He saw what was beautiful and sweet and gracious in Hindu life, and what was lovely and noble in Hindu woman, her deep heart of emotion, her steadfastness, tenderness and lovableness, in fact, her woman's soul."

Bankim was also a proponent of women's education. Many of his heroines are well-educated, some are even learned, and a few are trained in martial arts. What calamity awaits a

Page 43

society that leaves half its members uneducated? he asked. He further pointed out that "the ancient Rishis of Bharatvarsha, rare men of genius that they were, had thoroughly understood that women, low-caste and high-caste men, have all an equal right to education and knowledge."

Sri Aurobindo then spoke of another great gift Bankim gave to Bengal. "Bankim moreover has this splendid distinction that he more than any one exalted Bengali from the status of dialect to the majesty of a language.... We needed a language which should combine the strength, dignity or soft beauty of Sanskrit with the nerve and vigour of the vernacular, capable at one end of the utmost vernacular raciness and at the other of the most sonorous gravity. Bankim divined our need and was inspired to meet it,—he gave us a means by which the soul of Bengal could express itself to itself.

"As he had divined the linguistic need of his country's future, so he divined also its political need. He, first of our great publicists, understood the hollowness and inutility of the method of political agitation which prevailed in his time.......He saw that the force from above must be met by a mightier reacting force from below,—the strength of repression by an insurgent national strength. He bade us leave the canine method of agitation for the leonine. The Mother of his vision held trenchant steel in her twice seventy million hands and not the bowl of the mendicant. It was the gospel of strength and force which he preached.... And he had an inspired unerring vision of the moral strength which must be at the back of the outer force."

The considered view of many Nationalist leaders of 1905-10 accorded with the perception of Bankim that for the

Page 44

work of the country's liberation three elements were necessary to strengthen the fabric of society. Complete self-devotion was one; another was self-discipline and organization; the third element of moral strength was the infusion of religious feeling into patriotic work. Mind you, it was not the limited sense of narrow religion they were thinking of, but that of Dharma, the highest law of being. It was evident to these leaders that patriotic work divorced from dharmic feeling was bound to lead to moral degradation, which would bring in its wake corruption, which in turn would rot the root and stem of the national life. Theirs was a larger view, for they fully understood that politics is only a show at the top, and the real changes that matter are the changes that come into society. The leaders changed. And the Congress soon opted for its own brand of 'secularism' which has led us to where we are now.

Summing up, Sri Aurobindo wrote, "The religion of patriotism, —this is the master idea of Bankim's writings." And Bankim gave us the great song, Bande Mataram. "The third and supreme service of Bankim to his nation was that he gave us the vision of our Mother.... It is not till the Motherland reveals herself to the eye of the mind as something more than a stretch of earth or a mass of individuals, it is not till she takes shape as a great Divine and Maternal Power in a form of beauty that can dominate the mind and seize the heart that these petty fears and hopes vanish in the all-absorbing passion for the Mother and her service, and the patriotism that works miracles and saves a doomed nation is born."

Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1907, in the thick of the Swadeshi days, "Of the new spirit which is leading the nation to resurgence

Page 45

and independence, he is the inspirer and political guru."

Sri Aurobindo concluded the series in the Indu Prakash with these ringing words: "And when Posterity comes to crown with her praises the Makers of India, she will place her most splendid laurel not on the sweating temples of a place-hunting politician nor on the narrow forehead of a noisy social reformer but on the serene brow of that gracious Bengali who never clamoured for place or for power, but did his work in silence for love of his work, even as nature does, and just because he had no aim but to give out the best that was in him, was able to create a language, a literature, and a nation."

Sri Aurobindo called him 'Rishi' Bankim.

When in the spring of 1894, Bankim passed away, A. Ghose wrote a poem on him. Here are a few lines from it.

"O plains, O hills, O rivers of sweet Bengal,

O land of love and flowers, the spring-bird's call

And southern wind are sweet among your trees:

Your poet's words are sweeter far than these.

Your heart was this man's heart. Subtly he knew

The beauty and divinity in you.

His nature kingly was and as a god

In large serenity and light he trod

His daily way, yet beauty, like soft flowers

Wreathing a hero's sword, ruled all his hours.

Thus moving in these iron times and drear,

Barren of bliss and robbed of golden cheer,

He sowed the desert with ruddy-hearted rose,

The sweetest voice that ever spoke in prose."

Bankim's Bengal

Page 46