Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

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New Lamps for Old

"Of course," said Sri Aurobindo, "I wrote many memoranda for the Maharaja. Generally he used to indicate the lines and I used to follow them. But I myself was not much interested in administrative work, and soon I got the Maharaja to transfer me to the College. My interest lay outside, in Sanskrit, in literature, in the national movement."

Sri Aurobindo had already in England decided to devote his life to the service of his country and its liberation. He even began soon after coming to India to write on political matters — without giving his name —in the press, trying to awaken the nation to the ideas of the future. "When I came to Baroda from England," Sri Aurobindo related, "I found what the Congress was like at that time and I formed a strong contempt for it. Then I came in touch with Deshpande, Tilak, Madhavrao and others [revolutionaries]. Deshpande requested me to write something in the Indu Prakash."

We fleetingly came across Deshpande in Cambridge. Along with Sri Aurobindo, he was a member of the Indian Majlis there. In The Harmony of Virtue which he wrote while at

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Cambridge, Sri Aurobindo named his chief character, Keshav Ganesh, after his college mate. After his return from England, Keshav Ganesh Deshpande settled in Bombay as a barrister. The Indu Prakash had two sections: Marathi and English. K. G. Deshpande was the editor of the English section. He was a Nationalist, he too. "I remember once going to a station to see Deshpande off," recalled Sri Aurobindo. "In his carriage there were many Englishmen. He told us afterwards that as soon as he sat down, the Englishmen said, 'We will beat you if you don't get out.' He replied, 'Come and try.' And they didn't dare!"

Thus it was that young A. Ghose, at the request of his friend, wrote a series of articles in the Indu Prakash on the Indian National Congress. "There I severely criticized the Congress for its moderate policy." Should we say, 'its mendicant policy' ? At all events, the very first two articles made a sensation and were so incisive that the Congress leaders of the time were frightened. Mahadeo Govind Ranade, the Maratha leader, warned the proprietor of the paper that if this went on he would surely be prosecuted for sedition. Accordingly the original plan of the series had to be dropped at the proprietor's instance. Deshpande requested his Cambridge friend to continue in a modified tone and he reluctantly consented. A. Ghose then "began to write about the philosophy of politics leaving aside the practical part of politics. But I soon got disgusted with it." The articles were published at long intervals and finally dropped of themselves altogether.

The series of articles in the Indu Prakash numbered

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nine: from 7 August 1893 to 5 March 1894. That is to say, it began six months after Sri Aurobindo's return from England, and when he was just going to be twenty-one years old. This series was published under the title New Lamps for Old. "It is not used in the sense of the Aladdin story, but was intended to imply the offering of new lights to replace the old and faint reformist lights of the Congress."

A short account of how the Indian National Congress came into being may not be amiss here.

It was on 28 December 1885 that this largest political organization of Indians was founded. The initiative for its foundation was taken, among others, by a retired English Civilian, Allan Octovian Hume whom, on his death, the Congress designated as its 'father and founder.' A.O. Hume (1829-1912) entered the Indian Civil Service in Bengal in 1849 and retired in 1882. Hume had a motive for organizing the Congress. His scheme was "to save the Indian youths from the influence of Spiritual teachers" who had been secretly working for India's freedom. The sannyasins of Bankim's Anandamath were no fiction. Lord Dufferin, who was then the Viceroy (1884-88), lent his support to the nascent organization deeming it would serve the interests of the British Empire and save it from danger. The Congress held its first session in Bombay with Woomesh Chandra Bonnerjee, an eminent Barrister of the Calcutta High Court, as its president. A.O. Hume was one, of the conveners of the first session. He was also general secretary of the Indian National Congress for its first twenty-one years. On the other side, the Indian leaders themselves were feeling the

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need to create a national unity as a basis for national progress. Surendranath Banerji's 'Indian Association' (1876), and the holding of the first All-India National Conference in Calcutta in 1883, were in a way precursors of the Indian National Congress. We must, however, point out that the outlook of the early leaders, such as Gokhale, or Pherozeshah Mehta and Ranade, all from the legal profession, was rather limited: redressal of grievances through petitions. Winning political liberty for India was beyond the pale of their imagination. They based themselves on the premise that the English had an innate sense of justice. They completely forgot that every government looks at its own country's interest first; the interest of its subject-nation is low on its agenda. As though the commonplace men in the government — "the sort of people England sends out to us are not as a rule exalted and chivalrous, but are usually the very reverse"— could be expected to smother all thought of their own self-interests! Thus by the time A. Ghose's articles began appearing in the Indu Prakash, the Congress was a forum of academic discussion by learned leaders at their holiday gatherings ; an airy-fairy annual show of oratorical feats by a sprinkling of the country's intelligentsia; and, of course, a sport of the British diplomacy.

K. G. Deshpande, in his introductory article in the Indu Prakash of 7 August 1893, wrote: "We promised our readers some time back a series on our present political progress by an extremely able and keen observer of the present times. We are very much pleased to give our readers the first instalment of that series.... We have been long convinced that our efforts in

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political progress are not sustained, but are lacking in vigour. Hypocrisy has been the besetting sin of our political agitation. Oblique vision is the fashion. True, matter of fact, honest criticism is very badly needed. Our institutions have no strong foundation and are in hourly danger of falling down.... The questions at issue are momentous. It is the making or unmaking of a nation. We have, therefore, secured a gentleman of great literary talents, of liberal culture and of considerable English experience, well-versed in the art of writing and willing, at great personal inconvenience and probable misrepresentation, to give out his views in no uncertain voice, and, we may be allowed to add, in a style and direction peculiarly his own. We bespeak our readers' most careful and constant perusal on his behalf and assure them that they will find in those articles matter that will set them thinking and steel their patriotic souls."

We shall now quote a few lines from here and there from those articles.

"If the blind lead the blind," began A. Ghose, or A.G. "shall they not both fall into a ditch?... I am not ignorant that I am about to censure a body which to many of my countrymen seems the mightiest outcome of our new national life; to some a precious urn in which are guarded our brightest and noblest hopes; to others a guiding star which shall lead us through the encircling gloom to a far distant paradise: and if I were not fully confident that this fixed idea of ours is a snare and a delusion, likely to have the most pernicious effects, I should simply have suppressed my own doubts and remained

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silent. As it is, I am fully confident, and even hope to bring over one or two of my contrymen to my own way of thinking, or, if that be not possible, at any rate to induce them to think a little more deeply than they have done.

"I know also that I shall stir the bile of those good people who are so enamoured of the British Constitution, that they cannot like any one who is not a partisan."

A.G. wanted to awaken our Rip van Winkles.

"It [an institution] was made for the use and not at all for the worship of man, and it can only lay claim to respect so long as its beneficent action remains not a memory of the past, but a thing of the present. We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the

slaves of our machinery It is within the recollection of most

of us," he recalled wistfully, "to how giddy an eminence this body was raised, on how prodigious a wave of enthusiasm, against how immense a weight of resisting winds.... How shall we find words vivid enough to describe the fervour of those morning hopes, the April splendour of that wonderful enthusiasm ? The Congress was to us all that is to man most dear, most high and most sacred; a well of living water in deserts more than Saharan, a proud banner in the battle of Liberty, and a holy temple of concord where the races met and mingled."

But within eight years of its existence the failures of the Congress had become too flagrant to be ignored. A.G. began to tear its mask off. "Even in the first flush of enthusiasm the more deep-thinking among us were perhaps a little troubled by certain small things about the Congress. The bare-faced

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hypocrisy of our enthusiasm for the Queen-Empress,— an old lady so called by way of courtesy, but about whom few Indians can really know or care anything —could serve no purpose but to expose us to the derision of our ill-wishers. There was too a little too much talk about the blessings of British rule, and the inscrutable Providence which has laid us in the maternal, or more properly the step-maternal bosom of just and benevolent England." That was a dig at Gokhale, who declared that "the Congress freely recognises that whatever advances we seek must be within the Empire itself." And Pherozeshah Mehta, "I accept British rule as a dispensation so wonderful ... that it would be folly not to accept it as a declaration of God's will."

A. G. 's exposure of the Congress' weaknesses was biting. "Yet more appalling was the general timidity of the Congress, its glossing over of hard names, its disinclination to tell the direct truth, its fear of too deeply displeasing our masters. But in our then state of mind we were disposed to pass over all this as amiable weaknesses which would wear off with time.... [They] have not at all worn off with time, but have rather grown into an ingrained habit; and the tendency to grosser errors has grown not only into a habit, but into a policy. In its broader aspects the failure of the Congress is still clearer. The walls of the Anglo-Indian Jericho stand yet without a breach, and the dark spectre of Penury draws her robe over the land in greater volume and with an ampler sweep." This analysis was made more than a hundred years ago, not today! And Sri Aurobindo was barely twenty years old.

On 21 August 1893 the Indu Prakash published the

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second article. "But after all my present business is not with negative criticism.... The Congress has been to our divergent races and creeds a temple, or perhaps I should be more correct in saying a school of concord. In other words the necessities of the political movement initiated by the Congress have brought into one place and for a common purpose all sorts and conditions of men, and so by smoothing away the harsher discrepancies between them has created a certain modicum of sympathy between classes that were more or less at variance.... Popular orators like Mr. Pherozshah Mehta, who carry the methods of the bar into politics, are very fond of telling people that the Congress had habituated us to act together. Well, that is not quite correct; there is not the slightest evidence to show that we have at all learned to act together; the one lesson we have learned is to talk together, and that is a rather different thing.... Not only has the concord it [the Congress] tends to create been very partial, but the sort of people who have been included in its beneficent action, do not extend beyond certain fixed and narrow limits. The great mass of the people have not been appreciably touched by that healing principle, which to do the Congress justice, has very widely permeated the middle class." Its support and its most enthusiastic votaries were drawn from the new middle class, he pointed out.

India's Muslims were, from the beginning, well represented in the Congress body. But the clear-sighted critic still refused to call it 'national.' "The Mahomedans," he wrote, "have been as largely represented on that body as any reasonable community could desire, and their susceptibilities, far from being

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denied respect, have always been most assiduously soothed and flattered." This habit became so dangerously ingrained in the Congress that finally it led to the break-up of India half a century later. And, even now, after more than a century, the pampering goes on showing a profound mental darkness that continues to pervade the Indian political leaders.

A. G. continued. "In an era when democracy and similar big words slide so glibly from our tongues, a body like the Congress, which represents not the mass of the population, but a single and very limited class, could not honestly be called

national____ It has never been, and has made no honest

endeavour to be, a popular body empowered by the fiat of the Indian people in its entirety."

He decried the Congress body's decrepitude. "Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism." This was eight years after the Congress was formed; is any change discernible in this assessment after fourteen times eight years?

He told off the Congress candidly. "I say, of the Congress, then, this,—that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders;—in brief, that we are at present the blind, led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed."

The Congress leaders, used to flattery and adulation,

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found this honest criticism unpalatable. A. Ghose went on to make them squirm. "If the Congress cannot really face the light of a free and serious criticism, then the sooner it hides its face the better. For nine years it has been exempt from the ordeal; we have been content to worship it with that implicit trust which all religions demand, but which sooner or later leads them to disaster and defeat.... The hour seems to have come when the Congress must encounter that searching criticism which sooner or later arrives to all mortal things; and if it is so, to keep our eyes shut will be worse than idle. The only good we shall get by it is to point with a fresh example the aphorism with which I set out. 'If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into a ditch ?'"

The Congress leaders were not only 'blind' or, at best, 'one-eyed,' they were lame too. And when they used History as a crutch to advance their line of argument that "it does not at all signify whether we are fortified by popular sympathy or are not," it proved to be a pitfall. "History teaches us," thundered one brilliant Congress leader, "that in all ages and all countries it is the thinking classes who have led the unthinking. Another specious orator took up the refrain: "History teaches us that such has been the law of widening progress in all ages and all countries, notably in England itself." Big words. Will they stand close scrutiny? A.G., with a firm grasp of history, easily tore their arguments to shreds.

"When we find the intellectual princes of the nation," their young critic's rapier thrust was swift, "light-heartedly propagating such gross inaccuracies, we are really tempted to

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inquire if high education is after all of any use. History teaches us! Why, these gentlemen can never have studied any history at all except that of England.... If then we are bent upon adopting England as our exemplar, we shall certainly imitate the progress of the glacier rather than. the progress of the torrent. ... For example, is it at all true of France ? Rather we know that the first step of that fortunate country towards progress was not through any decent and orderly expansion, but through a purification by blood and fire. It was not a convocation of respectable citizens, but the vast and ignorant proletariate, that emerged from a prolonged and almost coeval apathy and blotted out in five terrible years the accumulated oppression of thirteen centuries." It was the revolutionary France that he presented to India as its political model.

A.G. gave a stirring call. "Our appeal, the appeal of every high-souled and self-respecting nation, ought not to be to the opinion of the Anglo-Indians, no, nor yet to the British sense of justice, but to our own sincere fellow-feeling —so far as it can be called sincere —with the silent and suffering people of India."

Sri Aurobindo, then only twenty-one years old, was the first in Indian politics to plead the cause of the 'silent and suffering people of India,' the Indian masses. In fact, it was much before anyone had heard of Lenin. "The proletariate among us is sunk in ignorance and overwhelmed with distress. But with that distressed and ignorant proletariate ... resides, whether we like it or not, our sole assurance of hope, our sole chance in the future."

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From the beginning his was an all-embracing view, not limited to one class of people. "Theorist, and trifler though I may be called, I again assert as our first and holiest duty, the elevation and enlightenment of the proletariate." With an unerring and penetrating vision he saw and declared that "the proletariate is, as I have striven to show, the real key of the situation. Torpid he is and immobile; he is nothing of an actual force, but he is a very great potential force, and whoever succeeds in understanding and eliciting his strength, becomes by the very fact master of the future."

Five years later, in 1898, Swami Vivekananda was asked, "But have you no faith in what Congress is doing?" In his forthright manner he replied, "No, I have not." And he forcefully echoed the younger man's viewpoint. "Can you tell me what the Congress is doing for the masses? Do you think merely passing a few resolutions will bring you freedom ? I have no faith in that. The masses must be awakened first."

Swami Vivekananda was seven years older than Sri Aurobindo.

New Lamps for Old was like the morning light dispersing darkness. It brought with it the promise of a new sun about to rise over the horizon, and ride into the Indian political firmament.

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