The facts about the articles in the Indu prakash
were these. They were begun at the instance of KG Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo's Cambridge friend who was
editor of the paper, but the first two articles made a sensation and frightened
Ranade and other Congress leaders. Ranade 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 Sri Aurobindo to continue in a modified tone and he
reluctantly consented, but felt no farther interest and the articles were
published at long intervals and finally dropped of themselves altogether.
The title refers to Congress politics. 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.
From Notes and Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Here is the fourth of the series published in Indu Prakash, 18 September
1893. Once more Sri Aurobindo was fighting not against the British but against
the elderly leaders of the country who didn’t seem to have their ideologies fixed
in the native spirit. He comes with a heavy hand on Pherozshah Mehta and
Manmohan Ghose, the Moderates.
I repeat then with renewed confidence, but still with a
strong desire to conciliate Mr Pherozshah Mehta, that the Congress fails,
because 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. But for all
that I have not managed to bring my view into coincidence with Mr Mehta’s. It
is true he is not invincibly reluctant to concede the limits, which hedge in
the Congress action and restrict its output of energy; but he is quite averse
to the dictum that by not 'transgressing the middle-class pale the Congress has
condemned itself, as a saving power, to insignificance and ultimate sterility.
The bounded scope of its potency and the subdued tone which it affects, are, he
opines, precisely what our actual emergencies of the moment imperatively
demand; wider activity and a more intense emphasis would be in his view highly
unadvisable and even injurious and besides it does not at all signify whether
we are fortified by popular sympathy or are not; for is not Mr Pherozshah Mehta
there with all the enlightenment of India at his back to plead temperately—temperately,
mind you; we are nothing if not temperate—for just and remedial legislation on
behalf of a patient and suffering people? In plain words a line of argument is
adopted amounting to this:—"The Congress movement is nothing if not a
grand suit-at-law, best described as the case of India vs. Anglo-India, in
which the ultimate tribunal is the British sense of justice, and Pherozshah
Mehta, Mr Umesh Chandra Banerji and the other eminent leaders of the bar are
counsel for the complainant. Well, then, when so many experienced advocates
have bound themselves to find pleas for him, would it not be highly rash and
inopportune for the client to insist on conducting his own complaint?" Now
it is abundantly clear that, judged as it stands, this line of argument, though
adroit beyond cavil and instinct with legal ingenuity, will nevertheless not answer.
I am not going to deny that Mr Pherozshah Mehta and the enlightenment of India,
such as it is, are pleading, undoubtedly with temperance and perhaps with
sincerity, for something or other, which for want of a more exact description,
we may call remedial legislation. But so far there has been nothing at all to
prevent me from denying that the analogy of the law-court holds; this sort of
vicarious effort may be highly advantageous in judicial matters, but it is not,
I would submit, at all adequate to express the reviving energies of a great
people. The argument, I say, is not complete in itself, or to use a vernacular
phrase, it will not walk; it badly wants a crutch to lean upon. Mr Mehta is
clever enough to see that and his legal acumen has taken him exactly to the
very store where or not at all he must discover an efficient crutch. So he goes
straight to history, correctly surmising that the experience of European races
is all that we, a people new to modern problems, can find to warn or counsel
us, and he tells us that this sort of vicarious effort has invariably been the
original step towards progress: or, to put it in his own rhetorical way,
"History teaches us that such has been the law of widening progress in all
ages and all countries, notably in England itself." Here then is the
argument complete,—crutch and all; and so adroit is it that in Congress
propaganda it has become a phrase of common parlance, and is now in fact the
stereotyped line of defence. Certainly, if he is accurate in his historical data,
Mr Mehta has amply proved his case; but in spite of all his adroitness, I
suspect that his trend towards double-shotted phrases has led him into a
serious difficulty. "In all ages and all countries" is a very big
expression, and Mr Mehta will be exceedingly lucky if it will stand a close
scrutiny. But Mr Manmohan Ghose at least is a sober speaker; and if we have
deserted his smooth but perhaps rather tedious manner for a more brilliant
style of oratory, now at any rate, when the specious orator fails us, we may
well return to the rational disputant. But we shall be agreeably disappointed
to find that this vivid statement about the teaching of history is Mr Ghose’s
own legitimate offspring and not the coinage of Mr Mehta's heated fancy:
indeed, the latter has done nothing but convey it bodily into his own address.
"History teaches us," says Mr Ghose, "that in all ages and all
countries it is the thinking classes who have led the unthinking, and in the
present state of our society we are bound not only to think for ourselves, but
also to think for those who are still too ignorant to exercise that important
function." When we find the intellectual princes of the nation
light-heartedly propagating such gross inaccuracies, we are really tempted to
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, Would
they be ignorant otherwise that mainly to that 'country, if not to that country
alone, their statement applies, but that about most ages and most countries it
is hopelessly inaccurate? Absurd as the statement is, its career has been
neither limited nor obscure. Shot in the first instance from Mr Ghose's
regulation smooth-bore, it then served as a bullet in Mr Pherozshah Mehta’s
patent new double-barrelled rifle, and has ultimately turned stock ammunition
of the Congress against that particular line upon which I have initially
ventured. Here then the argument has culminated in a most important issue; for
supposing this line of defence to be adequate, the gravest indictment I have to
urge against the Congress goes at once to the ground. It will therefore be
advisable to scrutinise Mr Ghose's light-hearted statement; and if the policy
he advocates is actually stamped with the genuine consensus of all peoples in
all ages, then we shall very readily admit that there is no reason why the
masses should not be left in their political apathy. But if it is quite
otherwise and we cannot discover more than one precedent of importance, then Mr
Ghose and the Congress chairman will not make us dance to their music, charm
they never so wisely, and we shall be slow to admit even the one precedent we
have got without a very narrow scrutiny. 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. From Runnymede to the Hull riots is a far cry; yet
these seven centuries have done less to change partially the political and
social exterior of England, than five short years to change entirely the
political and social exterior of her immediate neighbour. But if Mr Ghose's
dogmatic utterance is true of England, I imagine it does not
apply with equal force to other climes and other eras. 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 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. And if the example of France
is not sufficient to deprive Mr Ghose's statement of force, let us divert our
eyes to Ireland
where the ancient and world-wide quarrel between Celt and Teuton is still
pending. Is it at all true that the initiators of Irish resistance to England were a body of successful lawyers,
remarkable only for a power of shallow rhetoric, and deputed by the sort of men
that are turned out at TrinityCollege, Dublin?
At any rate that is not what History tells us. We do not read that the Irish
leader annually assembled to declaim glib orations, eulogistic of British rule
and timidly suggestive of certain flaws in its unparalleled excellence, nor did
they suggest as a panacea for Irish miseries, that they should be given more
posts and an ampler career in the British service. I rather fancy Turlough
O’Neill and his compeers were a different sort of men from that. But then it is
hardly fair perhaps to cite as an example a disreputable people never prolific
of graduates and hence incapable of properly appreciating the extraordinary
blessings which British rule gives out so liberally wherever it goes. Certainly
men who preferred action to long speeches and appealed, by the only method
available in that strenuous epoch, not to the British sense of justice but to
their own sense of manhood, are not at all the sort of people we have either
the will or the power to imitate. Well then, let us return to our own orderly
and eloquent era. But here too, just as the main strength of that ancient
strenuous protest resided in the lrish populace led by the princes of their class,
so the principal force of the modern subtler protest resides In the Irish
peasantry led by the recognised chiefs of an united people. I might go on and
cull instances from Italy
and America,
but to elaborate the matter further would be to insult the understanding
of my readers. It will be sufficient to remind them that the two, grand
instances of ancient history point to an exactly similar conclusion. In Athens and in Rome
the first political quarrel is a distinct issue the man of the people and a
limited, perhaps an alien, aristocracy. The force behind Cleisthenes and the
constituency that empowered Tiberius Gracchus were not a narrow middle class,
but the people with its ancient wrongs and centuries of patient endurance.
If then, as we are compelled to infer, Mr Mehta's
statement is entirely inaccurate of remoter ages and in modern times accurate
of one country alone, we shall conclude that whatever other proof he may find
for his lame argument, that crutch at least is too large and must go [to] the ground.
But Mr. Mehta, too acute ,and experienced a pleader to be disheartened by any
initial failure, will no doubt pickup his crutch again and whittle it down to
the appropriate size. It may be quite correct, he will perhaps tell me, that
his statement applies with appreciable force to England
and to England
alone, but when all is said, it does not eventually matter. In allowing that
his statement does generally apply to England, I have admitted everything he
seriously wants me to admit, for England is after all that country which has
best prospered in its aspirations after progress, and must therefore be the
grand political examplar of every nation animated by a like spirit, and it must
be peculiarly and beyond dispute such for India in her present critical stage
of renascence. I am quite aware that in the eyes of that. growing community
which Mr Ghose is pleased to call the thinking class; these plausible
assertions are only the elementary axioms of political science. But however
confidently such statements are put before me, I am not at all sure that they
are entirely correct. I have not quite made up my mind that England is indeed
that country which has best prospered in its aspirations after progress and I
am as yet unconvinced that it will eventually turn out at all a desirable
examplar for every nation aspiring to progress, or even for its peculiar pupil,
renascent India. I shall therefore feel more disposed to probe the matter to
the bottom than to acknowledge a very disputable thesis as in any way self-evident.
To this end it is requisite closely to inquire what has actually been the main
outcome of England
political effort, and whether it is of a nature to justify any implicit
reliance on English methods or exact imitation of English models.