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Last
Friday's Folly
EVEN at the risk of being branded as social reactionaries, we must, we
feel, enter our protest against the notions and ideals that lay, evidently,
under the so-called national dinner, celebrated at the Albert Hall on Friday
last. The function, in itself, was too insignificant to deserve any notice: Two
hundred and fifty men and boys meeting and dining together in public, regardless
of caste-restrictions and old orthodoxy, is not even a new thing in Calcutta
Society. Hindus and Mahomedans had dined publicly in Calcutta, on special
occasions, before now. Dinners had repeatedly been given at the India Club in
honour of prominent members in which members of all castes and creeds joined.
Subscription dinners had been organised in honour of prominent public men, even
outside that Club, the last one being less than two years old, when the friends
of Sir Henry Cotton met him at a dinner at the Calcutta Town Hall Babu
Narendranath Sen organised a public dinner some years back, to celebrate the
birthday of Buddha, where people of all castes and more than one creed, sat down
on mats and dined together on simple loochie and dal. These
dinners had all been publicly announced and publicly reported; but no one cared
to publicly condemn them. Had last Friday's dinner been associated with some
specific public functions, or been held in honour of any particular public men,
no one would have, we believe, taken any serious notice of it. The folly of it
lay in the idea that interdining was a necessary condition of nation -building
in India; and it deserves condemnation for propounding the foolish and suicidal
ideal that social and religious differences must first of all be destroyed
before India can ever hope to realise her own true civic life.
This is the Anglo-Indian and the British idea. It is the main plea upon
which the present despotism supports and justifies itself. It is the plea upon which even our own old-school patriots proclaim the
fatal doctrine that India is not, and will never for a very long period be,
fitted for self, government and, therefore,
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the strong hand of the foreigner must be over her, to prevent her ,
various castes
and creeds flying at each other's throat, and thus falling
a
prey to some other and infinitely worse foreign yoke, if the
present one is removed; and that, therefore, the highest political wisdom
demands that we should, as long as there are diversities of creeds and castes
among us, cultivate with care the present servitude, trying to make it easy to
bear for the nation, and profitable
for the individual, by adopting the policy of "association with and
opposition
to the Government." This plea must be knocked
on the head, therefore, before we can expect to make out,
a
reasonable case for that propaganda of national freedom and
autonomy
which has been taken up by the New Party in the country
Those who say that
caste and religious differences must first of all be destroyed before India can
ever rise to the status of a nation, have very hazy and confused notions
regarding the character and
constitution of that nation. Our history has been different
in many respects from the history of other peoples. The composition of the
Indian people has been unique in all the world.
Nations grew in the past by the accretion and assimilation of different tribes.
This is an earlier process. But India has not
been
a mere meeting-place of tribes; but a meeting-place of grown up nations with
developed social and religious lines of their own, and with original castes and
types of cultures peculiar to them. The character and composition of the coming
Indian Nation, therefore, will differ very materially from those of the European
Nations, the process of unification among whom took place at a much earlier
and comparatively more nebular stage of their growth.
This
is a fact which our old school politicians and social reformers
do not seem as yet to have had any time to think of, and we are not hopeful that
even now, after it is pointed out to them, in the plainest language possible,
they will have the patience to
do so and recognise this essential peculiarity of our infant national life.
The nation-idea in India will realise itself
in
all its departments, along what may be called federal lines, -
it
will be a union of different nationalities, each preserving its
own specific elements both of organisation and ideal, each communicating to the
others what they lack in either thought or
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character;
and all moving together towards one universal end, both in civic and social
life, progressively realising that end along its own historic and traditional
lines, and thus indefinitely drawing near to each other without, for an equally
indefinite period, actually losing themselves in anyone particular form of that
life, whether old or new. The Mahomedan, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian
in India will not have to cease to be Mahomedan, Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian,
in any sense of the term, for uniting into one great and puissant Indian Nation.
Devotion to one's own ideals and institutions, with toleration and respect for
the ideals and institutions of other sections of the community, and an ardent
love and affection for the common civic life and ideal of all, - these
are what must be cultivated by us now, for the building up of the real Indian
Nation. To try to build it up in any other way will be impossible, whether that
way be the way of
the Brahmo, the Christian, or the propagandist Mahomedan. To make any attempt
along any of these lines, will not make for but work against national unity; and
the reckless men who organised this so-called national dinner will, if they
persist in their folly, instead of bringing the different races and religions
together, only help to arouse the opposition of orthodoxy everywhere, and drive
the great forces that range always with orthodoxy, to an attitude of open
hostility to the great national movement, and bring about a reaction that will
seek to accentuate those very differences and tighten those very bonds of caste
and custom, which in their unphilosophic and unscientific zeal they are trying
by these wrong and obtrusive methods to obliterate and loosen. It is in this
view that we condemn the folly that was perpetrated on Friday last under the
name of a National Dinner.
Bantle
Mataram, September
17, 1906
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