Of
all the proud nations of
the West there is an
end determined. When their limited special work for mankind is done
they must decay and disappear. But the
function of India is to supply
the world with a perennial source of light and renovation. Whenever the
first play of energy is exhausted and earth
grows old and weary, full
of materialism, racked with problems she cannot solve, the function of
India is to restore the youth of mankind and assure
it
of immortality. She
sends forth a light from her bosom which floods the earth and the
heavens, and mankind bathes in
it
like St. George in
the well of life and recovers strength, hope and vitality for its long
pilgrimage. Such a time is now at hand. The world needs India and needs
her free. The work she has to
do now is to organise life in the
terms
of Vedanta, and that is a work she cannot do while overshadowed
by a
foreign power and a foreign civilisation. She cannot do
it
without raking the
management of her own life into her own hands. She must live her own
life and not the life of a part or subordinate in a foreign Empire.
All political ideals must have relation to the temperament and
past history of the race. The genius of India is separate from that of
any other race in the world, and perhaps there is no race in the world
whose temperament, culture and ideals are so foreign to her own as
those of the practical, hard-headed, Pharisaic, shopkeeping
Anglo-Saxon. The culture of the
Anglo- Saxon is the very antipodes of
Indian culture. The temper of the Anglo-Saxon is the very
reverse of
the Indian temper. His ideals are of the earth, earthy. His
institutions are without warmth, sympathy, human feeling, rigid and
accurate like his machinery, meant for immediate and practical gains.
The reading of democracy which he has adopted and is trying to
introduce first in the colonies because the mother country is still too
much shackled by the past, is the most sordid possible, centred on
material aims and void of generous idealism. In such a civilisation, as
part of such an Empire, India can have no future. If she is to model
herself on the Anglo-Saxon type she must first kill everything in her
which is her own. If she is to be a province of the British Empire,
part of its life, sharing its institutions, governed by its policy, the
fate of Greece under Roman dominion will surely be hers. She may share the privileges and
obligations of British citizenship,
—
though the proud
Briton who excludes the Indian from his colonies and treats him as a
lower creature, will perish rather than concede such an equality,
—
but she will lose her
Indian birthright. She will have to pass a sponge over her past and
obliterate
it
from her life, even
if she preserves the empty records of
it
in her schools. The
degradation of a great nation, by the loss of her individuality, her
past and her independent future, to the position of a subordinate
satellite in a foreign system, is the ideal of the Convention. It is
sheer political atheism, the negation of all that we were, are and hope
to be. The return of India on her eternal self, the restoration of her
splendour, greatness, triumphant Asiatic supremacy is the ideal of
Nationalism. Is
it
doubtful which ideal
will be more acceptable to the nation, that which calls on
it
to murder its
instincts, sacrifice its future and deny its past for the advantage of
an inglorious security, or that which asks
it
to fulfil itself by
the strenuous reassertion of all that is noble and puissant in the
blood
it
draws from such an
heroic ancestry as no other nation can boast?
The ideal creates the means of
attaining the ideal, if
it
is itself true and
rooted in the destiny of the race. All that can be said for the
Convention's ideal is that
it
saves the professor
of the ideal from the wrath of the bureaucracy. Otherwise
it
is as grotesquely out
of proportion to the strength of the people who profess
it
as any which the
Nationalist can uphold. It has no exciting virtue of divine enthusiasm
which can inspire to heroic effort and enable a fallen nation to shake
off its weakness, turn cowards into heroes and selfish men into
self-denying martyrs of the cause, and yet the effort
it
demands for
realisation is as heroic as anything which the Nationalist expects from
the people. The pride of race, the pride of empire, the pride of colour
are the three invincible barriers which stand between
it
and its realisation.
What force have the Conventionalists to set against these? Tears and
supplications, appeals to British justice and British generosity
—
nothing else. They
are not serious in their ideal and do not really hold
it
but flaunt
it
as a counterpoise to
the Nationalist ideal so that the country may be deceived into thinking
they have an aim and a policy. They have none. A false ideal is always
a veil for something else, and the Convention creed is with some a veil
for secret hopes of liberty which they dare not avow and with others a
veil for the absence of any aim except the hope of securing a few
peddling reforms in the existing system of administration.
The future is with the Nationalist ideal because there is no other. But
the danger is that the false shadow of an ideal which is now being put
forward as a reality will be accepted as a convenient instrument for
self-protection against the anger of the bureaucracy. The
temptation
it
holds out is one to
which all new faiths are exposed, that which was the chief danger of
Christianity in the days of persecution, to which, for a fleeting
moment, Mahomed is said to have succumbed when harassed by the Koreish,
the temptation of securing a respite from persecution by a false
profession which, masking itself as a harmless piece of diplomacy, will
really be a fatal stab at the very heart of the new religion. This
temptation must be religiously eschewed and the true issue boldly
proclaimed if Nationalism is to fulfil its divinely-appointed mission.