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“Legitimate
Patriotism”
LORD Minto has given us the historic
expression “honest Swadeshi”, and it was reserved for an Anglo-Indian
publicist to startle the English-knowing world by an equally significant
expression, “legitimate patriotism”. Honesty, legitimacy and other kindred
words of the English vocabulary are being newly interpreted by the Anglo-Indian
bureaucrats and publicists. The natural sentiments and aspirations of men are to
be regulated according to their convenience and notions.
If you give preference to the indigenous products of the country and ask
your friends, relatives and countrymen to do the same, you are dishonest. This
is stretching the meaning of honesty to suit the moral sense of our alien and
benevolent despots. Today we hear from another Anglo-Indian Sir Oracle, the Daily
News of Calcutta, that there is such a thing as legitimate patriotism. We
have looked up the dictionaries to profit by the enlightenment so kindly
vouchsafed to us, but we have failed in our efforts. According to Webster,
patriotism covers all activities to zealously guard the authority and
interest of one's country and we are at a loss to understand how what the
Indians have hitherto done or proposed to do to ensure the authority and
interest of their country can be stigmatised as illegitimate. We on the contrary
believe, and that according to the best authority, that the patriotism which has
hitherto wrested from Mr. Morley only an expanded Council with an official
majority and a comic advisory Board of Notables, falls far short of the standard
of lexicographers. Patriotism will never rest satisfied till it has recovered
the authority of the country, however much the Anglo-Indians try to twist its
meaning and implications.
If it is patriotic for an Englishman to say, as their greatest poet has
said, that this England never did nor shall lie at the proud feet of a
conqueror, why should it be unpatriotic and seditious for an Indian to give
expression to a similar sentiment? If it is highly patriotic for a Roman “to
die in defence of
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his
father’s ashes and the temples of his gods”, why should it be madness and
senseless folly for an Indian to be stirred by a similar impulse? If "self-defence
is the bulwark of all rights", as Lord Byron has said, why should an Indian
journalist be charged with an attempt to incite to violence when he asks his
countrymen of East Bengal to defend the honour of their women at any cost? If
Campbell is right in saying that virtue is the spouse of liberty, why should an
Indian be exposed to the menace of siege-guns when entering on a legitimate and
lawful struggle for the recovery of his lost freedom? If each noble aim
repressed by long control expires at last or feebly mans the soul, why should
not our countrymen benefit by the advice of Goldsmith and begin to chafe at the
attempt to prolong this alien control? If Tennyson is justified in taking a
pride in his country which freemen till, which sober-suited Freedom chose, where
girt with friends or foes, a man may speak the thing he will, where freedom
slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent, why should it be criminal on
the part of an Indian to imagine a similar future for the land of his birth? It
will not do to fling in our face the mockery of glittering generalities or
blazing ubiquities of natural right with which they ridiculed the Declaration of
Independence by the American colonists in 1776. Man cannot escape the influence
of these glittering generalities and blazing ubiquities; the literatures of
peoples who struggled for independence in former ages have always abounded with
them and the awakened East must also talk in the same language. When some mighty
sentiments dominate the human breast, they give rise to language which runs the
risk of being scouted as mere platitude, they give rise to activities and
demonstrations which are in danger of being traced to illegitimate sources. The
students of Rajahmundry wore "Bande Mataram" badges, shouted "Bande
Mataram" in the streets, gave a grand reception to a Nationalist speaker,
formed themselves into a Balabharat Samiti, and the Daily News thinks all
these to be the outcome of a patriotism hardly legitimate. What is then
legitimate patriotism, pray? Our contemporary has given us no light on the
point. We suppose it means a blind loyalty to the alien government, a helpless
acquiescence in its most despotic measures, bowing our knee to every Anglo-
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Indian,
especially to the dicta of the Editor of the Indian Daily News and the
Englishman.
If we do not accept the ethics of the British and Anglo-Indian Press which
calls the present patriotic movement immoral and ascribes it to the want of
moral training in our schools and colleges, we may be guilty according to
Anglo-Indian jurisprudence but the higher tribunal to whom alone all oppressed
peoples look up, knows their hearts and shapes their destinies accordingly.
Bande Mataram,
June 27, 1907
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