The facts about the articles in the Indu prakash
were these. They were begun at the instance of KG Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo's
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 seventh of the series published in Indu Prakash, 4 December
1893.
I am not ignorant that to practical men all I have
written will prove beyond measure unpalatable. Strongly inimical as they are to
thought in politics, they will detect in it an offensive redolence of
dilettantism, perhaps scout it as a foolish waste of power, or if a good thing
at all a good thing for a treatise on general politics, a good thing out of
place. To what end these remote instances, what pertinence in these political
metaphysics? I venture however to suggest that it is just this gleaning from
general politics, this survey and digestion of human experience in the mass
that we at the present moment most imperatively want. No one will deny,—no one
at least in that considerable class to whose address my present remarks are
directed,—that for us and even for those of us who have a strong affection for
oriental things and believe that there is in them a great deal that is
beautiful, a great deal that is serviceable, a great deal that is worth
keeping, the most important objective is and must inevitably be the admission
into India of occidental ideas, methods and culture: even if we are ambitious
to conserve what is sound and beneficial in our indigenous civilization, we can
only do so by assisting very largely the influx of Occidentalism. But at the
same time we have a perfect right to insist, and every sagacious man will take
pains to insist, that the process of introduction shall not be as hitherto rash
and Ignorant, that it shall be judicious, discriminating. We are to have what,
the West can give us, because what the West can give us is just the thing and
the only thing that will rescue us from our present appalling condition of
intellectual and moral decay, but we are not to take it haphazard and in a
lump; rather we shall find it expedient to select the very best that is thought
and known in Europe, and to import even that with the changes and reservations
which our diverse conditions may be found to dictate. Otherwise instead of a
simply ameliorating influence, we shall have chaos annexed to chaos, the vices
and calamities of the west superimposed on the vices and calamities of the
East.
No one has such advantages, no one is so powerful to
discourage, minimise and even to prevent the intrusion of what is mischievous,
to encourage, promote and even to ensure the admission of what is salutary,
than an educated and vigorous national assembly standing for the best thought
and the best energy in the country, and standing for it not in a formal
parliamentary way, but by the spontaneous impulse and election of the people.
Patrons of the Congress are never tired of giving us to understand that their
much lauded idol does stand for all that is best in the country and that it
stands for them precisely in the way I have described. If that is so, it is not
a little remarkable that far from regulating judiciously the importation of
occidental wares we have actually been at pains to import an inferior in
preference to a superior quality, and in a condition not the most apt but the
most inapt for consumption in India. Yet that this has been so far the net
result of our political commerce with the West, will be very apparent to any
one who chooses to think. National character being like human nature, maimed
and imperfect, it was not surprising, not unnatural that a nation should commit
one or other of various errors. We need not marvel if England, overconfident in
her material success and the practical value of her institutions has concerned
herself too little with social development and set small store by the discreet
management of her masses: nor must we hold French judgment cheap because in the
pursuit of social felicity and the pride of her magnificent cohesion France has
failed in her choice of apparatus and courted political insecurity and
disaster. But there are limits even to human fallibility and to combine two
errors so distinct would be, one imagines, a miracle of incompetence. Facts
however are always giving the lie to our imaginations; and it is a fact that we
by a combination of errors so eccentric as almost to savour of felicity, are achieving
this prodigious tour de force. Servile in imitation with a peculiar
Indian servility we have swallowed down in a lump our English diet and
especially that singular paradox about the unique value of machinery: but we
have not the stuff in us to originate a really effective instrument for
ourselves. Hence the Congress, a, very reputable body, I hasten to admit,
teeming with grave citizens and really quite flush of lawyers, but for all that
meagre in the scope of its utility and wholly unequal to the functions it ought
to exercise. There we have laid the foundations, as the French laid the
foundations, of political incompetence, political failure; and of a more fatal
incompetence, a more disastrous failure, because the French have at least
originality, thought, resourcefulness, while we are vainglorious, shallow,
mentally impotent: and as if this error were not enough for us, we have
permitted ourselves to lose all sense of proportion, and to evolve an
inordinate self-content, an exaggerated idea of our culture, our capacity, our
importance. Hence we choose to rate our own political increase higher than
social perfection or the—advancement, intellectual and economical, of that vast
unhappy proletariat about which everybody talks and nobody cares. We blindly
assent when Mr Pherozshah in the generous heat of his temperate and carefully
restricted patriotism,—assures us after his genial manner that the awakening of
the masses from their ignorance and misery is entirely unimportant and any
expenditure of energy in that direction entirely premature. There we have laid
the foundation, as
Here then we have got a little nearer to just and adequate comprehension. At
any rate I hope to have enforced on my the precise and intrinsic meaning of
that count in my indictment which censures the Congress as a body not popular
and not honestly desirous of a popular character—in fact as a middle-class
organ selfish and disingenuous in its public action and hollow in its
professions of a large and disinterested patriotism. I hope to have convinced
them that this is a solid charge and a charge entirely damaging to their character
for wisdom and public spirit. Above all I hope to have persuaded Mr Pherozshah
Mehta or at least the eidolon of that great man, the shadow of him which walks
through these pages, that our national effort must contract a social and
popular tendency before it can hope to be great or fruitful. But then Mr
Pherozshah is a lawyer: he has, enormously developed in him, that forensic
instinct which prompts men to fight out a cause which they know to be unsound,
to fight it out to the last gasp, not because it is just or noble but because
it is theirs; and in the spirit of that forensic tradition he may conceivably
undertake to answer me somewhat as follows. "Material success and a great
representative assembly are boons of so immense a magnitude, so stupendous an
importance that even if we purchase them at the cost of a more acute
disintegration, a more appalling social decadence, the rate will not be any too
exorbitant. Let us exactly imitate English success by an exact imitation of
English models and then there will be plenty of time to deal with these
questions which you invest with fictitious importance." Monstrous as the
theorem is, profound as is the mental darkness which pervades it, it summarises
not unfairly the defence put forward by the promoters and well-wishers of the
Congress.
On us as the self-elected envoys of a new evangel there
rests a heavy responsibility, assumed by our own will, but which once assumed
we can no longer repudiate or discard; a responsibility which promises us
immortal credit, if performed with sincerity and wisdom, but saddled with
ignominy to ourselves and disaster to, our country, if we discharge it in
another spirit and another manner. To meet that responsibility we have no
height, no sincerity of character, no depth of emotion, no charity, no
seriousness of intellect. Yet it is only a sentimentalist, we are told, who
will bid us raise, purify and transform ourselves so that we may be in some
measure worthy of the high and solemn duties we have bound ourselves to
perform! The proletariate among us is sunk in ignorance and overwhelmed with
distress. But with that distressed and ignorant proletariate,—now that the
middle class is proved deficient in sincerity, power and judgment,—with that
proletariate resides, whether we like it or not, our sole assurance of hope,
our sole chance in the future. Yet he is set down as a vain theorist and a
dreamy trifler who would raise it from its ignorance and distress. The one
thing needful we are to suppose, the one thing worthy of a great and
statesmanlike soul is to enlarge the Legislative Councils, until they are big
enough to hold Mr Pherozshah Mehta, and other geniuses of an immoderate bulk.
To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a
spirit: of serious energy; But while we are playing with baubles, with our
Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations. our ingenious schemes for
separating the judicial from the executive functions,—while we, I say, I are
finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and
that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are
superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously
agitated. Already a red danger-signal has shot up from Prabhas Patan, and sped
across the country; speaking with a rude eloquence of strange things beneath
the fair surface of our renascent, enlightened
lndu Prakash, 4
December 1893