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 eighth of the series published in Indu Prakash, 5 February
1894.
Poverty of organic conception and unintelligence of the
deeper facts of our environment are the inherent vices I have hitherto imputed
to the Congress and the burgess-body of which it is the political nucleus. But
I have not done enough when I have done that. Perversion or error in the
philosophy of our aim does indeed point to a serious defect of the political
reason, but it is not incompatible with a nearer apprehension and happier
management of surface facts; and if we had been so far apprehensive and
dexterous, that would have been an output of native directness and force on
which we might reasonably felicitate ourselves. For directness and force are an
inalienable ancestral inheritance handed down by vigorous forefathers, and
where they are, the political reason which comes of liberal culture and ancient
experience, may be waited for with a certain patient hopefulness. But it is to
be feared that our performance up to date does not give room for so comforting
an assurance. Is it not rather the fact that our whole range of thought and
action has been pervaded by a stamp of unreality and helplessness, a straining
after achievement for which we have not the proper stamina and an entire
misconception of facts as well as of natural laws? To be convinced of this we
have only to interrogate recent events, not confiding in their outward face as
the shallow and self-contented do, but getting to the heart of them, making
sure of their hidden secret, their deeper reality. Indeed it will not hurt any
of us to put out of sight for a moment those vain and fantastic chimeras about
Simon de Montfort and the gradual evolution of an Indian Parliament, with which
certain politicians are fond of amusing us, and look things straight in the
face. We must resolutely hold fast to the primary fact that right and effective
action can only ensue upon a right understanding of ourselves in relation to
our environment. For by reflection or instinct to get a clear insight into our
position and by dexterity to make the most of it, that is the whole secret of
politics, and that is just what we have failed to do. Let us see whether we
cannot get some adequate sense of what our position really is: after that we
shall be more in the way to hit closely the exact point at which we have
failed.
Whatever theatrical attitude it may suit our vanity to adopt, we are not, as we
pretend to be, the embodiment of the country's power, intelligence and worth:
neither are we disinterested patriots striving in all purity and unselfishness
towards an issue irreproachable before God. These are absurd pretensions which
only detract from the moral height of our nature and can serve no great or
serious end. We may gain a poor and evanescent advantage by this sort of
hypocrisy, but we lose in candour and clearness of intellect, we lose in
sincerity which is another name for strength. If we would only indulge less our
bias towards moral ostentation and care more to train ourselves in a healthy
robustness and simple candour, it would really advantage us not only in
character, but in power; and it would have this good effect, that we should no
longer throw dust into our own eyes; we should be better fitted to see
ourselves as a critic of human society would see us, better able to get that
clear insight into our own position, which is one condition of genuine success.
No, we are not and cannot be a body of disinterested patriots. Life being, as
science tells us, an affirmation of one's self, any aggregate mass of humanity
must inevitably strive to emerge and affirm its own essence, must by the law of
its own nature aspire towards life, aspire towards expansion, aspire towards
perfecting of its potential strength in the free air of political recognition
and the full light of political predominance. That is just what has been
happening in India.
In us the Indian burgess or middle class emerges from obscurity, perhaps from
nothingness, and strives between a strong and unfeeling bureaucracy and an
inert and imbecile proletariate to possess itself of rank, consideration and
power. Against that striving it is futile to protest; one might as well quarrel
with the law of gravitation; but though our striving must be inherently
selfish, we can at least make some small effort to keep it as little selfish as
possible, to make it, as far as may be, run in harness with the grand central
interests of the nation at large. So much at least those of us who have abroad
human affection for our country as distinct from ourselves, have a right to
expect.
Thus emergent, thus ambitious, it was our business by whatever circumstances we
were environed, to seize hold of those circumstances and make ourselves masters
of them. The initial difficulties were great. A young and just emergent body,
without experience of government, without experience even of resistance to
government, consequently without inherited tact, needs a teacher or a Messiah
to initiate it in the art of politics. In England
the burgess was taught almost insensibly by the nobility; in France the found a Messiah in the
great Napoleon We had no Napoleon, but we had a nobility. Europeans, when the
spirit moves them to brag of their superiority over us Asiatic, are in the
habit of saying that the West is progressive, the East stationary. That is a
little too comprehensive. England
and France are no doubt
eminently progressive but there are other countries of Europe
which have not been equally forward. America
is a democratic country which has not progressed: Russia
is a despotic country which has not progressed: in Italy,
Spain, Germany even
progress has been factitious and slow: Nevertheless, though the vulgar wording
of the boast may be loose and careless, yet it does not express a very real
superiority. The nations of the west are not all progressive, true; but they
are all in that state which is the first condition of progress, a state,
I mean, of fluidity, but, of fluidity within limits, fluidity on a stable and
normal basis. If no spirit of thought or emotion moves on the face of the waters,
they become as foul and stagnant as in the most conservative parts of Asia, but
a very slight wind will set them flowing. In most Asiatic countries,—I do not
speak of India—one
might almost imagine a hurricane blowing without any perceptible effect.
Accordingly in Europe the transition of power
from the noble to the burgess has been natural and inevitable. In India, just as
naturally and inevitably, the administration remained with the noble. The old
Hindu mechanism of society and government certainly did prescribe limits
certainly had a basis that was stable and normal; but it was too rigid, too
stationary: it bound down the burgess and held him in his place by an iron weight of custom and religious ordinance. The
regime that overthrew and succeeded it, the Mussulman regime, was mediaeval in
character, fluid certainly, indeed in a perpetual state of flux, but never able
to shake off the curse of instability, never in a position to prescribe limits,
never stable, never normal. In such a society the qualities which make for
survival, are valour, dexterity, initiative, swiftness, a robust immorality,
qualities native to an aristocracy and to nations moulded by an aristocracy,
native also to certain races, but even in those nations, even in those races, alien
to the ordinary spirit of the burgess. His ponderous movements, his fumbling,
his cold timidity, his decent scrupulousness have been fatal to his
pretensions, at times inimical to his existence. Accordingly in India he has
been submerged, scarcely existent. Great affairs and the high qualities they
nourish have rested in the hand of the noble. We had then our nobility, our
class trained and experienced in government and affairs: but to them unhappily
we could not possibly look for guidance or even for cooperation. At the period
of our emergence they were lethargic, effete, moribund, partially sunk in
themselves; and even if any of the old energy had survived their fall, the
world in which they moved was too new and strange, the transition to it had
been too sudden and confounding to admit of their assimilating themselves so as
to move with ease and success under novel conditions. The old nobility was
quite as helpless from decay and dotage, as we from youthful inexperience. It
was foreign energy that had pushed aside the old outworn machinery, it was an
alien government that had by policy and self-will hurried us into a new and
quite unfamiliar world. Would that government, politic and self-willed as it
was, help-us to an activity that might, nay, that must turn eventually to their
personal detriment? Certainly they had the power but quite as certainly they
had not the will. No doubt Anglo-Indians have very little right to speak of us
as bitterly as they are in the habit of doing. By setting themselves to compel
our social elements into a state of fluidity, and for that purpose not only of
putting in motion organic forces but bringing direct pressure to bear, by
strictly enforcing system and order so as to lay down fixed limits and a normal
basis, within which the fluid elements might settle into new forms, they in
fact made themselves responsible for us and lost the right to blame anyone but
themselves for what might ensue. They are in the unlucky position of
responsibility for a state of things which they abhor and certainly had no
intention of bringing about. The force which they had in mind to construct was
a body of grave, loyal and conservative citizens, educated but without ideas, a
body created by and having a stake in the present order, and therefore attached
to its continuance, a power in the land certainly, but a power for order, for
permanence, not a power for disturbance and unrest. In such an enterprise they
were bound to fail and they failed egregiously. Sir Edwin Arnold when he found
out that it was a grievous mistake to occidentalise us, forgot, no doubt, for
the moment his role as the preacher and poetaster of self-abnegation, and spoke
as an ordinary mundane being, the prophet of a worldly and selfish class: but
if we accept his words in that sense, there can be no doubt that he was
perfectly right. Anglo-Indians had never seriously brought themselves to
believe that are in blood and disposition a genuine Aryan community. They chose
to regard our history as a jungle of meaningless facts, and could not
understand that we were not malleable dead matter, but men with Occidental
impulses in our blood, not virgin material to be wrought into any shape they
preferred, but animate beings with a principle of life in us and certain, if
subjected to the same causes, placed in the same light and air as European
communities, to exhibit effects precisely, similar and shape ourselves rather
than be shaped. They proposed to construct a tank for their own service and
comfort; they did not know that they were breaking up the fountains of the
great deep. There, stated shortly, is the whole sense of their policy and
conduct. The habit, set in vogue by rhetoricians of Macaulay’s type, of making
large professions of benevolence Invested with an air of high grandiosity, has
become so much a second nature with them, that I will not ask if they are
sincere when they make them: but it is a rhetorical habit and nothing more. We,
who are not interested in keeping up the fiction, may just as well pierce
through it to the fact. If they had seen things as they really are, they would
have been wisely inactive: but they wanted a submissive and "attached
population, and they thought they had hit on the best way of getting what they,
wanted. In this confidence, if there was a great deal of delusion, there was
also something of truth. But we must not be surprised or indignant if the
Anglo-1ndians, when they saw their confidence so rudely dashed and themselves
confronted, not with submission and attachment but with a body eager, pushing,
recriminative, pushing for recognition, pushing for power, covetous above all
of that authority which they had come to regard as their private and peculiar
possession,—there is no cause for surprise or resentment, if they cared little
for the grain of success in their bushelful of failure, and regarded us with
those feelings of alarm, distrust and hatred which Frankenstein experienced
when having hoped to make a man, he saw a monster. Their conduct was too
natural to be censured. I do not say that magnanimity would not have been
better, more dignified, more politic. But who expects magnanimity from
bureaucracy? The old nobility then were almost extinct and had moreover no
power to help us: the bureaucracy had not the will. Yet it was from their ranks
that the Messiah came.