Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

31

Evolving the Genius of the Race

"If the truth which the yoga [of Sri Aurobindo] wants to achieve is attained and if India accepts it, then it will give quite a new turn to Indian politics —different from European politics. It would be a profound change." Sri Aurobindo had said that in an informal talk on 21 January 1925.

It was the evening of 14 December 1938. Nirod asked Sri Aurobindo, "What about India's independence? Is it developing along your lines?"

"Surely not," Sri Aurobindo was categorical. "India is now going towards European Socialism, which is dangerous for her, whereas we were trying to evolve the genius of the race along Indian lines and all working for independence."

Referring to the uprising of 1905 he said, "Take the Bengal Movement. The whole country was awakened within a short time. People who were such cowards and trembled at the sight of a revolver were in a short period so much changed that the police officials used to say, 'That insolent Barisal

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look !'¹ It was the soul of the race that awoke , throwing up very fine personalities. 2 The leaders of the Movement were either yogis or disciples of yogis - men like Monoranjan Guha Thakurta, the disciple of Bejoy Goswami . ... Then there were others , like Brahma Bandhab Upadhyay. The influence of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda worked from behind."

The genius of the Bengali race had, all of a sudden, burst into full bloom. Its main flowering was in the field of literature. A many-faceted literature which expressed itself in songs and dramas, poems and street-theatres, bringing to the remotest villages a new spirit of patriotism: Nationalism. A wonderstruck Ramsay MacDonald ejaculated that Bengal "is creating India by song and worship, it is clothing her in queenly garments."

The 'Bengal Movement' was triggered by Lord Curzon's proposal to restructure Bengal ... by breaking it into pieces. But then India did not lack wide and clear intelligences which could see through his stratagem. Nor did they hesitate to proclaim the eventual goal underlying that measure: "This measure is no mere administrative proposal but a blow straight at the heart of the nation," wrote he who was to be named the

1.Barisal, a town in East Bengal where in 1906, as we shall see, a Nationalist conference was brutally broken up by the police.

2.The 'fine personalities' were not exclusively among the leaders. A whole crop of young people could be counted among them. Sri Aurobindo himself said that when he was in prison, "I found myself among the young men and in many of them I discovered a mighty courage, a power of self-effacement in comparison with which I was simply nothing." We greatly regret not to be able to speak even a little about them. Each life of these untold numbers of revolutionaries would make a full story in itself.

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Flaming Apostle of Nationalism. In the event, Lord Curzon, on a tour of East Bengal, confessed that his "object in partitioning was not only to relieve the Bengali administration, but to create a Mohammedan province, where Islam could be predominant and its followers in ascendancy."

Sri Aurobindo set out to demolish many delusions held by the British government and shared by a part of the Indian intelligentsia. And, as was his wont, he went beyond and opened up a vast Promise. "When the word of the Eternal has gone abroad," he wrote in the Bande Mataram on 17 December 1907, "when the spirit moves over the waters and the waters stir and life begins to form, then it is a law that all energies are forced to direct themselves, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or against their will, to the one supreme work of the time, the formation of the new manifest and organised life which is in process of creation. So now when the waters of a people's life are stirred and the formation of a great organic Indian state and nation has begun, the same law holds. All that the adversaries of the movement have done whether they have tried to repress or tried to conciliate, has helped what they sought to destroy and swelled the volume and strength or purified as by fire the forces of Nationalism."

It is, indeed, passing strange to see how a people which had slumbered for over a millennium, awoke so suddenly, so vigorously, full of life and energy —as though a Master of Hypnosis had "laid His finger on India's eyes and cried, 'Awake.'"

The whole country seemed to be bubbling and boiling. The agitation generated by the Partition of Bengal had spilled

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over its borders and spread to the whole of India. The hearts of Maharashtra, Punjab and Bengal seemed to beat to the same rhythm.

In Calcutta, a mammoth gathering was held on 7 August 1905 at the Town Hall, in which "amid unprecedented scenes of enthusiasm the resolution of boycotting British manufactures was formally moved and passed amid deafening shouts of 'Bande Mataram' which had now become the war cry," wrote the noted historian R. C. Majumdar. The cream of Bengal was strongly represented, as was its milk which poured itself on the Town Hall. The freedom struggle of 1905-10 came to be known by its twin movement: Swadeshi and Boycott. And Sri Aurobindo it was who had pushed secretly for the adoption of this idea of boycott through his Nameso, K.K. Mitra —cousin Sukumar being the go-between —for Sri Aurobindo was still in Baroda service. On 13 July, a few days after the Government's final decision to partition Bengal had been announced, K.K. Mitra had in his Sanjibani called for the boycott of British goods and of government employees.

Sri Aurobindo himself had "always considered the shaking off of this economic yoke and the development of Indian trade and industry as a necessary concomitant of the revolutionary endeavour." Both Tilak and Sri Aurobindo were in favour of an effective boycott of British goods —but British goods only, not American, Austrian or German. They were for national self-sufficiency in key industries but it did not seem desirable to them to go in for a complete self-sufficiency "since a free India would need to export goods as well as supply them

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for internal consumption and for that she must import as well and maintain an international exchange. But the sudden enthusiasm for the boycott of all foreign goods was wide and sweeping and the leaders had to conform to this popular cry and be content with the impulse it gave to the Swadeshi idea." Tilak called boycott 'political Yoga.'

But all this 'sudden enthusiasm' did not explode out of nothing. A secret preparation of the ground had been going on for several years before 1905. Before the advent of the Nationalists, India's struggle for freedom grew by fits and starts. There was no constant effort to achieve it. "Sri Aurobindo had to establish and generalise the idea of independence in the mind of the Indian people and at the same time to push first a party and then the whole nation into an intense and organised political activity which would lead to the accomplishment of that ideal." This, in a country wholly unprepared for it. And without means.

But Sri Aurobindo had already decided in his mind the lines on which he wanted the country's action to run. His plan was fourfold: Boycott — "boycott of British trade;" National Education —"the substitution of national schools for the Government institutions;" People's Court —"the creation of arbitration courts to which the people could resort instead of depending on the ordinary courts of law;"¹ and youth-training

1. It is worth quoting Bankim. "Courts and brothels are of the same type; unless one is ready to pay for it one can have no admittance to either of these.... What kind of law is that by which the weak alone are punished and which is not applicable to the powerful?" In fact, the barbarous system of punishments makes the Indian Penal Code a triumph of civilized savagery.

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"the creation of volunteer forces which would be the nucleus of an army of open revolt, and all other action that could make the programme complete." He took advantage of the Swadeshi movement to popularize the idea of violent revolt in the future. Never rigid, Sri Aurobindo was always ready to change his tactics and strategies with the changing circumstances.

When Sri Aurobindo went on a tour of Bengal with Debabrata Bose —remember Khulna and the dishes I

Thus the revolution he and other Nationalist leaders envisaged was a four-pronged effort, its constituents being: youth, labour, peasantry and army. He told others who were pushing for a 'bomb programme' that "if we don't work among them and bring them to our way of thinking, the whole programme will fizzle out."

There was a possibility of a general revolt by the army. The youth was to be attracted to the revolutionary aim through public propaganda and overt or covert associations. Sri Aurobindo "encouraged the young men in the centres of

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work to propagate the Swadeshi idea which at that time was only in its infancy and hardly more than a fad of the few." Thus the Nationalist Party was the first to gather under its umbrella youth and labour and peasantry. In this way was the whole nation converted to the idea of independence.

It was clear to Sri Aurobindo that aiming only at the highest ideal would engender a mighty movement. Wide and high and vast.

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