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The Village and the Nation
WE WROTE
yesterday of the necessity of going back to the land if the Bengali Hindu is to
keep his place in the country and escape the fate of those who divorce
themselves from the root of life, the soil. But there is another aspect of the
question which is also of immense importance. The old organisation of the Indian
village was self-sufficient, self-centred, autonomous and exclusive. These
little units of life existed to themselves, each a miniature world of its own
petty interests and activities; like a system of planets united to each other
indeed by an unconscious force but each absorbed in its own life and careless of
the other. It was a life beautifully simple, healthy, rounded and perfect, a
delight to the poet and the lover of humanity. If perfect simplicity of life,
freedom from economic evils, from moral degradation, from the strife, faction
and fury of town populations, from revolution and turmoil, from vice and crime
on a large scale are the objects of social organisation, then the village
communities of India were ideal forms of social organisation. Many look back to
them with regret and even British administrators who were instrumental in
destroying them have wished that they could be revived. So valuable indeed were
the elements of social welfare which they secured to the nation, that they have
persisted through all changes and revolutions as they were thousands of years
ago when the Aryans first occupied the land. Nor can it be denied that they have
kept the nation alive. Whatever social evils or political diseases might corrupt
the body politic, these little cells of national life supplied a constant source
of soundness and purity which helped to prevent final disintegration. But if we
owe national permanence to these village organisations, it cannot be denied that
they have
stood in the way of national unity.
Wherever a nation has been formed, in the
modern sense, it has been at the expense of smaller units. The whole history of
national growth is the record of a long struggle to establish a
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central
unity by subduing the tendency of smaller units to live to themselves. The
ancient polity of Greece was the self-realisation of the city as an unit
sufficient to itself while the deme or village was obliged to sacrifice its
separate existence to the greater unity of the city-state. Because the Greeks
could not find it in their hearts to break the beautiful and perfect mould of
their self-sufficient city life, they could never weld themselves into a nation.
So again it was not till the Romans had subdued the tendency of the Italian
cities to live to themselves, that the first European nation was created. In
mediaeval times the city-state tried to re-assert itself in the Municipalities
of France and Germany and municipal freedom had to be blotted out by an absolute
monarchy before national unity was realised. Whenever a smaller or different
unity, whether it be that of the province, the church or feudal fief, tends to
live for itself, it is an obstacle to national unity and has to be either broken
up or subordinated if the nation is to fulfil its unity. Ancient India could not
build itself into a single united nation, not because of caste or social
differences as the European writers assert, — caste and class have existed in
nations which achieved a faultless national unity,
— but because the old polity of the Hindus
allowed the village to live to itself, the clan to live to itself, the province
or smaller race-unit to live to itself. The village, sufficient to itself, took
no interest in the great wars and revolutions which affected only the ruling
clans of the kingdom including it in its territorial jurisdiction. The Kshatriya
clans fought and married and made peace among themselves, and were the only
political units out of which a nation might have been built. But the clan too
was so attached to its separate existence that it was not till the clans were
destroyed on the battlefield of Kurukshetra that larger national units could be
built out of their ruins. Small kingdoms took their place based on provincial or
racial divisions and until the inrush of foreign peoples an attempt was in
progress to build them into one nation by the superimposition of a single
imperial authority. Many causes prevented the success of the attempt, and the
provincial unit has always remained the highest expression of the
nation-building tendencies in India. One cause perhaps more than any other
contributed to the failure of the
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centripetal
tendency to attain self-fulfilment, and that was the persistence of the village
community which prevented the people, the real nation, from taking any part in
the great struggles out of which a nation should have emerged. In other
countries the people had to take part in the triumphs, disasters and failures of
their rulers either as citizens or at least as soldiers, but in India they were
left to their little isolated republics with no farther interest than the
payment of a settled tax in return for protection by the supreme power. This was
the true cause of the failure of India to achieve a distinct organised and
self-conscious Nationality. It is worthy of notice that the Indian race in which
the national idea attained its most conscious expression and most nearly
attained realisation, was the Maratha people who drew their strength from the
village democracies and brought them to interest themselves in the struggle for
national independence. If the Marathas had been able to rise above the idea of
provincial or racial separateness, they would have established a permanent
empire and neither of the Wellesleys could have broken their power by diplomacy
or in the field. The British, historians have told us, conquered India in a fit
of absence of mind. In a fit of absence of mind also they destroyed the separate
life of our village communities, and, by thus removing the greatest obstacle in
the way of national development, prepared the irresistible movement towards
national unity which now fills them with dismay. The provinces have been brought
together, the village has been destroyed. It only remains for the people to
fulfil their destiny. We are now turning our eyes again to the village under the
stress of an instinct of self-preservation and part of our programme is to
re-create village organisation. In doing so we must always remember that the
village can be so organised as to prove a serious obstacle to national cohesion.
One or two of our leading publicists have sometimes expressed themselves as if
our salvation lay in the village and not in the larger organisation of the
nation. Swaraj has been sometimes interpreted as a return to the old conditions
of self-sufficient village life leaving the imperial authority to itself, to tax
and pass laws as it pleased — ignored because it is too strong to be
destroyed. Even those who see the futility of ignoring Government which seeks to
destroy
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every
centre of strength, however minute, except itself, sometimes insist on the
village as the secret of our life and ask us to give up our ambitious strivings
after national Swaraj and realise it first in the village. Such counsel is
dangerous, even if it were possible to follow it. Nothing should be allowed to
distract us from the mighty ideal of Swaraj, National and Pan-Indian. This is no
alien or exotic ideal, it is merely the conscious attempt to fulfil the great
centripetal tendency which has pervaded the grandiose millenniums of her
history, to complete the work which Srikrishna began, which Chandragupta and
Asoka and the Gupta Kings continued, which Akbar almost brought to realisation,
for which Shivaji was born and Bajirao fought and planned. The organisation of
our villages is an indispensable work to which we must immediately set our
hands, but we must be careful so to organise them as to make them feel that they
are imperfect parts of a single national unity, and dependent at every turn on
the co-operation first of the district, secondly of the province, and finally of
the nation. The day of the independent village or group of villages has gone and
must not be revived; the nation demands its hour of fulfilment and seeks to
gather the village life of its rural population into a mighty, single and
compact democratic nationality. We must make the nation what the village
community was of old, self-sufficient, self-centred, autonomous and exclusive
— the ideal of national Swaraj.
Bande
Mataram,
March 8, 1908
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