NATIONALISM IN
INDIA
OUR REAL PROBLEM in India is not political. It is social.
This is a condition not only prevailing in India, but among all nations. I do
not believe in an exclusive political interest. Politics in the West have
dominated Western ideals, and we in India are trying to imitate you. We have to
remember that in Europe, where peoples had their racial unity from the
beginning, and where natural resources were insufficient for the inhabitants,
the civilization has naturally taken the character of political and commercial
aggressiveness. For on the one hand they had no internal complications, and on
the other they had to deal with neighbours who were strong and rapacious. To
have perfect combination among themselves and a watchful attitude of animosity
against others was taken as the solution of their problems. In former days they
organized and plundered, in the present age the same spirit continues – and
they organize and exploit the whole world.
But from the earliest beginnings of history, India has
had her own problem constantly before her – it is the race problem. Each nation
must be conscious of its mission and we, in India, must realize that we cut a
poor figure when we are trying to be political, simply because we have not yet
been finally able to accomplish what was set before us by our providence.
This problem of race unity which we have been trying to
solve for so many years has likewise to be faced by you here in America. Many
people in this country ask me what is happening as to the caste distinctions in
India. But when this question is asked me, it is usually done with a superior
air. And I feel tempted to put the same question to our American critics with a
slight modification, ‘What have you done with the Red Indian and the Negro?’
For you have not got over your attitude of caste toward them. You have used
violent methods to keep aloof from other races, but until you have solved the
question here in America, you have no right to question India.
In spite of our great difficulty, however, India has done
something. She has tried to make an adjustment of races, to acknowledge the
real differences between them where these exist, and yet seek for some basis of
unity. This basis has come through our saints, like Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya and
others, preaching one God to all races of India.
In finding the solution of our problem we shall have
helped to solve the world problem as well. What India has been, the whole world
is now. The whole world is becoming one country through scientific facility.
And the moment is arriving when you also must find a basis of unity which is
not political. If India can offer to the world her solution, it will be a
contribution to humanity. There is only one history – the history of man. All
national histories are merely chapters in the larger one. And we are content in
India to suffer for such a great cause.
Each individual has his self-love. Therefore his brute
instinct leads him to fight with others in the sole pursuit of his
self-interest. But man has also his higher instincts of sympathy and mutual
help. The people who are lacking in this higher moral power and who therefore
cannot combine in fellowship with one another must perish or live in a state of
degradation. Only those peoples have survived and achieved civilization who
have this spirit of cooperation strong in them. So we find that from the
beginning of history men had to choose between fighting with one another and
combining, between serving their own interest or the common interest of all.
In our early history when the geographical limits of each
country and also the facilities of communication were small, this problem was
comparatively small in dimension. It was sufficient for men to develop their
sense of unity within their area of segregation. In those days they combined
among them-selves and fought against others. But it was this moral spirit of
combination which was the true basis of their greatness, and this fostered
their art, science and religion. At that-early time the most important fact that
man had to take count of was the fact of the members of one particular race of
men coming in close contact with one another. Those who truly grasped this fact
through their higher nature made their mark in history.
The most important fact of the present age is that all
the different races of men have come close together. And again we are
confronted with two alternatives. The problem is whether the different groups
of peoples shall go on fighting with one another or find out some true basis of
reconciliation and mutual help; whether it will be interminable competition or
cooperation.
I have no hesitation in saying that those who are gifted
with the moral power of love and vision of spiritual unity, who have the least
feeling of enmity against aliens, and the sympathetic insight to place
themselves in the position of others will be the fittest to take their
permanent place in the age that is lying before us, and those who are
constantly developing their instinct of fight and intolerance of aliens will be
eliminated. For this is the problem before us, and we have to prove our
humanity by solving it through the help of our higher nature. The gigantic
organizations for hurting others and warding off their blows, for making money
by dragging others back, will not help us. On the contrary, by their crushing
weight, their enormous cost and their deadening effect upon the living humanity
they will seriously impede our freedom in the larger life of a higher
civilization.
During the evolution of the Nation the moral culture of
brotherhood was limited by geographical boundaries, because at that time those
boundaries were true. Now they have become imaginary lines of tradition
divested of the qualities of real obstacles. So the time has come when man’s
moral nature must deal with this great fact with all seriousness or perish. The
first impulse of this change of circumstance has been the churning up of man’s
baser passions of greed and cruel hatred. If this persists indefinitely and
armaments go on exaggerating themselves to unimaginable absurdities, and
machines and store-houses envelop this fair earth with their dirt and smoke and
ugliness, then it will end in a conflagration of suicide. Therefore man will
have to exert all his power of love and clarity of vision to make another great
moral adjustment which will comprehend the whole world of men and not merely
the fractional groups of nationality. The call has come to every individual in
the present age to prepare himself and his surroundings for this dawn of a new
era when man shall discover his soul in the spiritual unity of all human
beings.
If it is given at all to the West to struggle out of
these tangles of the lower slopes to the spiritual summit of humanity, then I
cannot but think that it is the special mission of America to fulfil this hope
of God and man. You are the country of expectation, desiring something else
than what is. Europe has her subtle habits of mind and her conventions. But
America, as yet, has come to no conclusions. I realize how much America is untrammeled
by the traditions of the past, and I can appreciate that experimentalism is a
sign of America’s youth. The foundation of her glory is in the future, rather
than in the past; and if one is gifted with the power of clairvoyance, one will
be able to love the America that is to be.
America is destined to justify Western civilization to
the East. Europe has lost faith in humanity, and has become distrustful and
sickly. America, on the other hand, is not pessimistic or blase. You know, as a
people, that there is such a thing as a better and a best; and that knowledge
drives you on. There are habits that are not merely passive but aggressively
arrogant. They are not like mere walls but are like hedges of stinging nettles.
Europe has been cultivating these hedges of habits for long years till they
have grown round her dense and strong and high. The pride of her traditions has
sent its roots deep into her heart. I do not wish to contend that it is
unreasonable. But pride in every form breeds blindness at the end. Like all
artificial stimulants its first effect is a heightening of consciousness and
then with the increasing dose it muddles it and brings in exultation that is
misleading. Europe has gradually grown hardened in her pride of all her outer
and inner habits. She not only cannot forget that she is Western, but she takes
every opportunity to hurl this fact against others to humiliate them. This is
why she is growing incapable of imparting to the East what is best in herself,
and of accepting in a right spirit the wisdom that the East has stored for
centuries.
In America national habits and traditions have not had
time to spread their clutching roots round your hearts. You have constantly
felt and complained of its disadvantages when you compared your nomadic
restlessness with the settled traditions of Europe – the Europe which can show
her picture of greatness to the best advantage because she can fix it against
the back- ground of the Past. But in this present age of transition, when a new
era of civilization is sending its trumpet call to all peoples of the world
across an unlimited future, this very freedom of detachment will enable you to
accept its invitation and to achieve the goal for which Europe began her
journey but lost herself midway. For she was tempted out of her path by her
pride of power and greed of possession.
Not merely your freedom from habits of mind in the
individuals but also the freedom of your history from all unclean entanglements
fits you in your career of holding the banner of civilization of the future.
All the great nations of Europe have their victims in other parts of the world.
This not only deadens their moral sympathy but also their intellectual
sympathy, which is so necessary for the understanding of races which are different
from one’s own. Englishmen can never truly understand India because their minds
are not disinterested with regard to that country. If you compare England with
Germany or France you will find she has produced the smallest number of
scholars who have studied Indian literature and philosophy with any amount of
sympathetic insight or thoroughness. This attitude of apathy and contempt is
natural where the relationship is abnormal and founded upon national
selfishness and pride. But your history has been disinterested and that is why
you have been able to help Japan in her lessons in Western civilization and
that is why China can look upon you with her best confidence in this her
darkest period of danger. In fact you are carrying all the responsibility of a
great future because you are untrammeled by the grasping miserliness of a past.
Therefore of all countries of the earth America has to be fully conscious of
this future, her vision must not be obscured and her faith in humanity must be
strong with the strength of youth.
A parallelism exists between America and India – the
parallelism of welding together into one body various races.
In my country, we have been seeking to find out something
common to all races, which will prove their real unity. No nation looking for a
mere political or commercial basis of unity will find such a solution
sufficient. Men of thought and power will discover the spiritual unity, will
realize it, and preach it.
India has never had a real sense of nationalism. Even
though from childhood I had been taught that the idolatry of Nation is almost
better than reverence for God and humanity, I believe I have outgrown that
teaching, and it is my conviction that my countrymen will gain truly their
India by fighting against that education which teaches them that a country is
greater than the ideals of humanity.
The educated Indian at present is trying to absorb some
lessons from history contrary to the lessons of our ancestors. The East, in
fact, is attempting to take unto itself a history which is not the outcome of
its own living. Japan, for example, thinks she is getting powerful through
adopting Western methods, but, after she has exhausted her inheritance, only
the borrowed weapons of civilization will remain to her. She will not have
developed herself from within.
Europe has her past. Europe’s strength therefore lies in
her history. We, in India, must make up our minds that we cannot borrow other
people’s history, and that if we stifle our own, we are committing suicide.
When you borrow things that do not belong to your life, they only serve to
crush your life.
And therefore I believe that it does India no good to
compete with Western civilization in its own field. But we shall be more than
compensated if, in spite of the insults heaped upon us, we follow our own
destiny.
There are lessons which impart information or train our
minds for intellectual pursuits. These are simple and can be acquired and used
with advantage. But there are others which affect our deeper nature and change
our direction of life. Before we accept them and pay their value by selling our
own inheritance, we must pause and think deeply. In man’s history there come
ages of fireworks which dazzle us by their force and movement. They laugh not
only at our modest household lamps but also at the eternal stars. But let us
not for that provocation be precipitate in our desire to dismiss our lamps. Let
us patiently bear our present insult and realize that these fireworks have
splendour but not permanence, because of the extreme explosiveness which is the
cause of their power, and also of their exhaustion. They are spending a fatal
quantity of energy and substance compared to their gain and production.
Anyhow our ideals have been evolved through our own
history and even if we wished we could only make poor fireworks of them,
because their materials are different from yours, as is also their moral
purpose. If we cherish the desire of paying our all for buying a political
nationality it will be as absurd as if Switzerland had staked her existence in
her ambition to build up a navy powerful enough to compete with that of
England. The mistake that we make is in thinking that man’s channel of
greatness is only one – the one which has made itself painfully evident for the
time being by its depth of insolence.
We must know for certain that there is a future before us
and that future is waiting for those who are rich in moral ideals and not in
mere things. And it is the privilege of man to work for fruits that are beyond
his immediate reach, and to adjust his life not in slavish conformity to the
examples of some present success or even to his own prudent past, limited in
its aspiration, but to an infinite future bearing in its heart the ideals of
our highest expectations.
We must, however, know it is providential that the West
has come to India. Yet, some one must show the East to the West, and convince
the West that the East has her contribution to make in the history of
civilization. India is no beggar of the West. And yet even though the West may
think she is, I am not for thrusting off Western civilization and becoming
segregated in our independence. Let us have a deep association. If Providence
wants England to be the channel of that communication, of that deeper
association, I am willing to accept it with all humility. I have great faith in
human nature, and I think the West will find its true mission. I speak bitterly
of Western civilization when I am conscious that it is betraying its trust and
thwarting its own purpose.
The West must not make herself a curse to the world by
using her power for her own selfish needs, but by teaching the ignorant and
helping the weak, by saving herself from the worst danger that the strong is
liable to incur by making the feeble to acquire power enough to resist her
intrusion. And also she must not make her materialism to be the final thing,
but must realize that she is doing a service in freeing the spiritual being
from the tyranny of matter.
I am not against one nation in particular, but against
the general idea of all nations. What is the Nation?
It is the aspect of a whole people as an organized power.
This organization incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on
becoming strong and efficient. But this strenuous effort after strength and
efficiency drains man’s energy from his higher nature where he is
self-sacrificing and creative.
For thereby man’s power of sacrifice is diverted from his
ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organization, which
is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation
and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity. He feels relieved of the
urging of his conscience when he can transfer his responsibility to this
machine which is the creation of his intellect and not of his complete moral
personality. By this device the people which loves freedom perpetuates slavery
in a large portion of the world with the comfortable feeling of pride of having
done its duty; men who are naturally just can be cruelly unjust both in their
act and their thought, accompanied by a feeling that they are helping the world
in receiving its deserts; men who are honest can blindly go on robbing others
of their human rights for self-aggrandizement, all the while abusing the
deprived for not deserving better treatment. We have seen in our everyday life
even small organizations of business and profession produce callousness of
feeling in men who are not naturally bad, and we can well imagine what a moral
havoc it is causing in a world where whole peoples are furiously organizing
themselves for gaining wealth and power.
Nationalism is a great menace. It is the particular thing
which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles. And inasmuch as we
have been ruled and dominated by a nation that is strictly political in its
attitude, we have tried to develop within ourselves, despite our inheritance
from the past, a belief in our eventual political destiny.
There are different parties in India, with different
ideals. Some are struggling for political independence. Others think that the
time has not arrived for that, and yet believe that India should have the
rights that the English colonies have. They wish to gain autonomy as far as
possible.
In the beginning of our history of political agitation in
India there was not that conflict between parties which there is to-day. In
that time there was a party known as the Indian congress; it had no real
programme. They had a few grievances for redress by the authorities. They
wanted larger representation in the Council House, and more freedom in the
Municipal government. They wanted scraps of things, but they had no
constructive ideal. Therefore I was lacking in enthusiasm for their methods. It
was my conviction that what India most needed was constructive work coming from
within herself. In this work we must take all risks and go on doing our duties
which by right are ours, though in the teeth of persecution; winning moral
victory at every step, by our failure, and suffering. We must show those who
are over us that we have the strength of moral power in ourselves, the power to
suffer for truth. Where we have nothing to show, we only have to beg. It would
be mischievous if the gifts we wish for were granted to us right now, and I
have told my countrymen, time and time again, to combine for the work of
creating opportunities to give vent to our spirit of self-sacrifice, and not
for the purpose of begging.
The party, however, lost power because the people soon
came to realize how futile was the half policy adopted by them. The party
split, and there arrived the Extremists, who advocated independence of action,
and discarded the begging method, – the easiest method of relieving one’s mind
from his responsibility towards his country. Their ideals were based on Western
history. They had no sympathy with the special problems of India. They did not
recognize the patent fact that there were causes in our social organization
which made the Indian incapable of coping with the alien. What would we do if,
for any reason, England was driven away? We should simply be victims for other
nations. The same social weaknesses would prevail. The thing we, in India, have
to think of is this – to remove those social customs and ideals which have
generated a want of self-respect and a complete dependence on those above us,-a
state of affairs which has been brought about entirely by the domination in
India of the caste system, and the blind and lazy habit of relying upon the
authority of traditions that are incongruous anachronisms in the present age.
Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties
India has had to encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was
the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too
diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical
receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely one country
made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the advantage of
the strength of the many, as well as the strength of the one. India, on the
contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one has all along suffered
from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its unity. A true
unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily; but
diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed with all
force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not her own
creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her history.
In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost
exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of
extermination is making itself manifest, by inhospitably shutting out aliens,
through those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But
India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of
toleration has acted all through her history.
Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of
toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social
unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, yet fully
enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as
loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has
produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common
name is Hinduism.
India had felt that diversity of races there must be and
should be whatever may be its drawback, and you can never coerce nature into
your narrow limits of convenience without paying one day very dearly for it. In
this India was right; but what she failed to realize was that in human beings
differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed forever –
they are fluid with life’s flow, they are changing their courses and their
shapes and volume.
Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized
differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to
avoid collisions she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her
numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive
opportunity of expansion and movement. She accepted nature where it produces
diversity, but ignored it where it uses that diversity for its world-game of
infinite permutations and combinations. She treated life in all truth where it
is manifold, but insulted it where it is ever moving. Therefore Life departed
from her social system and in its place she is worshipping with all ceremony
the magnificent cage of countless compartments that she has manufactured.
The same thing happened where she tried to ward off the
collisions of trade interests. She associated different trades and professions
with different castes. It had the effect of allaying for good the interminable
jealousy and hatred of competition – the competition which breeds cruelty and
makes the atmosphere thick with lies and deception. In this also India laid all
her emphasis upon the law of heredity, ignoring the law of mutation, and thus
gradually reduced arts into crafts and genius into skill.
However, what Western observers fail to discern is that
in her caste system India in all seriousness accepted her responsibility to
solve the race problem in such a manner as to avoid all friction, and yet to
afford each race freedom within its boundaries. Let us admit in this India has
not achieved a full measure of success. But this you must also concede, that
the West, being more favourably situated as to homogeneity of races, has never
given her attention to this problem, and whenever confronted with it she has
tried to make it easy by ignoring it altogether. And this is the source of her
anti-Asiatic agitations for depriving the aliens of their right to earn their
honest living on these shores. In most of your colonies you only admit them on
condition of their accepting the menial position of hewers of wood and drawers
of water. Either you shut your doors against the aliens or reduce them into
slavery. And this is your solution of the problem of race-conflict. Whatever
may be its merits you will have to admit that it does not spring from the
higher impulses of civilization, but from the lower passions of greed and
hatred. You say this is human nature – and India also thought she knew human
nature when she strongly barricaded her race distinctions by the fixed barriers
of social gradations. But we have found out to our cost that human nature is
not what it seems, but what it is in truth; which is in its infinite
possibilities. And when we in our blindness insult humanity for its ragged
appearance it sheds its disguise to disclose to us that we have insulted our
God. The degradation which we cast upon others in our pride or self-interest
degrades our own humanity – and this is the punishment which is most terrible
because we do not detect it till it is too late.
Not only in your relation with aliens but also with the
different sections of your own society you have not brought harmony of
reconciliation. The spirit of conflict and competition is allowed the full
freedom of its reckless career. And because its genesis is the greed of wealth
and power it can never come to any other end but a violent death. In India the
production of commodities was brought under the law of social adjustments. Its
basis was cooperation having for its object the perfect satisfaction of social
needs. But in the West it is guided by the impulse of competition whose end is
the gain of wealth for individuals. But the individual is like the geometrical
line; it is length without breadth. It has not got the depth to be able to hold
anything permanently. Therefore its greed or gain can never come to finality.
In its lengthening process of growth it can cross other lines and cause
entanglements, but will ever go on missing the ideal of completeness in its
thinness of isolation.
In all our physical appetites we recognize a limit. We
know that to exceed that limit is to exceed the limit of health. But has this
lust for wealth and power no bounds beyond which is death’s dominion? In these
national carnivals of materialism are not the Western peoples spending most of
their vital energy in merely producing things and neglecting the creation of
ideals? And can a civilization ignore the law of moral health and go on in its
endless process of inflation by gorging upon material things? Man in his social
ideals naturally tries to regulate his appetites, subordinating them to the
higher purpose of his nature. But in the economic world our appetites follow no
other restrictions but those of supply and demand which can be artificially
fostered, affording individuals opportunities for indulgence in an endless
feast of grossness. In India our social instincts imposed restrictions upon our
appetites, – maybe it went to the extreme of repression, – but in the West, the
spirit of the economic organization having no moral purpose goads the people
into the perpetual pursuit of wealth; – but has this no wholesome limit?
The ideals that strive to take form in social
institutions have two objects. One is to regulate our passions and appetites
for harmonious development of man, and the other is to help him in cultivating
disinterested love for his fellow-creatures. Therefore society is the
expression of moral and spiritual aspirations of man which belong to his higher
nature.
Our food is creative, it builds our body; but not so
wine, which stimulates. Our social ideals create the human world, but when our
mind is diverted from them to greed of power then in that state of intoxication
we live in a world of abnormality where our strength is not health and our
liberty is not freedom. Therefore political freedom does not give us freedom
when our mind is not free. An automobile does not create freedom of movement,
because it is a mere machine. When I myself am free I can use the automobile
for the purpose of my freedom.
We must never forget in the present day that those people
who have got their political freedom are not necessarily free, they are merely
powerful. The passions which are unbridled in them are creating huge
organizations of slavery in the disguise of freedom. Those who have made the
gain of money their highest end are unconsciously selling their life and soul
to rich persons or to the combinations that represent money. Those who are
enamoured of their political power and gloat over their extension of dominion
over foreign races gradually surrender their own freedom and humanity to the
organizations necessary for holding other peoples in slavery. In the so-called
free countries the majority of the people are not free, they are driven by the
minority to a goal which is not even known to them. This becomes possible only
because people do not acknowledge moral and spiritual freedom as their object.
They create huge eddies with their passions and they feel dizzily inebriated
with the mere velocity of their whirling movement, taking that to be freedom.
But the doom which is waiting to overtake them is as certain as death – for
man’s truth is moral truth and his emancipation is in the spiritual life.
The general opinion of the majority of the present day
nationalists in India is that we have come to a final completeness in our
social and spiritual ideals, the task of the constructive work of society
having been done several thousand years before we were born, and that now we
are free to employ all our activities in the political direction. We never
dream of blaming our social inadequacy as the origin of our present
helplessness, for we have accepted as the creed of our nationalism that this
social system has been perfected for all time to come by our ancestors who had
the superhuman vision of all eternity, and supernatural power for making
infinite provision for future ages. Therefore for all our miseries and
shortcomings we hold responsible the historical surprises that burst upon us
from outside. This is the reason why we think that our one task is to build a
political miracle of freedom upon the quicksand of social slavery. In fact we
want to dam up the true course of our own historical stream and only borrow
power from the sources of other peoples’ history.
Those of us in India who have come under the delusion
that mere political freedom will make us free have accepted their lessons from
the West as the gospel truth and lost their faith in humanity. We must remember
whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in
politics. The same inertia which leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in
social institutions will create in our politics prison houses with immovable
walls. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to impose upon
a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert
itself in our politics in creating tyranny of injustice.
When our nationalists talk about ideals, they forget that
the basis of nationalism is wanting. The very people who are upholding these
ideals are themselves the most conservative in their social practice.
Nationalists say, for example, look at Switzerland, where, in spite of race
differences, the peoples have solidified into a nation. Yet, remember that in
Switzerland the races can mingle, they can intermarry, because they are of the
same blood. In India there is no common birthright. And when we talk of Western
Nationality we forget that the nations there do not have that physical
repulsion, one for the other, that we have between different castes. Have we an
instance in the whole world where a people who are not allowed to mingle their
blood shed their blood for one another except by coercion or for mercenary
purposes? And can we ever hope that these moral barriers against our race amalgamation
will not stand in the way of our political unity?
Then again we must give full recognition to this fact
that our social restrictions are still tyrannical, so much so as to make men
cowards. If a man tells me he has heterodox ideas, but that he cannot follow
them because he would be socially ostracized, I excuse him for having to live a
life of untruth, in order to live at all. The social habit of mind which impels
us to make the life of our fellow-beings a burden to them where they differ from
us even in such a thing as their choice of food is sure to persist in our
political organization and result in creating engines of coercion to crush
every rational difference which, is the sign of life. And tyranny will only add
to the inevitable lies and hypocrisy in our political life. Is the mere name of
freedom so valuable that we should be willing to sacrifice for its sake our
moral freedom?
The intemperance of our habits does not immediately show
its effects when we are in the vigour of our youth. But it gradually consumes
that vigour, and when the period of decline sets in then we have to settle
accounts and pay off our debts, which leads us to insolvency. In the West you
are still able to carry your head high though your humanity is suffering every
moment from its dipsomania of organizing power. India also in the heyday of her
youth could carry in her vital organs the dead weight of her social
organizations stiffened to rigid perfection, but it has been fatal to her, and
has produced a gradual paralysis of her living nature. And this is the reason
why the educated community of India has become insensible of her social needs.
They are taking the very immobility of our social structures as the sign of
their perfection, – and because the healthy feeling of pain is dead in the
limbs of our social organism they delude themselves into thinking that it needs
no ministration. Therefore they think that all their energies need their only
scope in the political field. It is like a man whose legs have become shrivelled
and useless, trying to delude himself that these limbs have grown still because
they have attained their ultimate salvation, and all that is wrong about him is
the shortness of his sticks.
So much for the social and the political regeneration of
India. Now we come to her industries, and I am very often asked whether there
is in India any industrial regeneration since the advent of the British
Government. It must be remembered that at the beginning of the British rule in
India our industries were suppressed and since then we have not met with any
real help or encouragement to enable us to make a stand against the monster
commercial organizations of the world. The nations have decreed that we must
remain purely an agricultural people, even forgetting the use of arms for all
time to come. Thus India in being turned into so many predigested morsels of
food ready to be swallowed at any moment by any nation which has even the most
rudimentary set of teeth in its head.
India, therefore has very little outlet for her
industrial originality. I personally do not believe in the unwieldy
organizations of the present day. The very fact that they are ugly shows that
they are in discordance with the whole creation. The vast powers of nature do
not reveal their truth in hideousness, but in beauty. Beauty is the signature
which the Creator stamps upon his works when he is satisfied with them. All our
products that insolently ignore the laws of perfection and are unashamed in
their display of ungainliness bear the perpetual weight of God’s displeasure.
So far as your commerce lacks the dignity of grace it is untrue. Beauty and her
twin brother Truth require leisure, and self-control for their growth. But the
greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to
produce and consume.
It has neither pity for beautiful nature, nor for living
human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment’s hesitation to crush
beauty and life out of them, moulding them into money. It is this ugly
vulgarity of commerce which brought upon it the censure of contempt in our
earlier days when men had leisure to have an unclouded vision of perfection in
humanity. Men in those times were rightly ashamed of the instinct of mere
money-making. But in this scientific age money, by its very abnormal bulk, has
won its throne. And when from its eminence of piled-up things it insults the
higher instincts of man, banishing beauty and noble sentiments from its
surroundings, we submit. For we in our meanness have accepted bribes from its
hands and our imagination has grovelled in the dust before its immensity of
flesh.
But its unwieldiness itself and its endless complexities
are its true signs of failure. The swimmer who is an expert does not exhibit
his muscular force by violent movements, but exhibits some power which is
invisible and which shows itself in perfect grace and reposefulness. The true
distinction of man from animals is in his power and worth which are inner and
invisible. But the present-day commercial civilization of man is not only
taking too much time and space but killing time and space. Its movements are
violent, its noise is discordantly loud. It is carrying its own damnation
because it is trampling into distortion the humanity upon which it stands. It
is strenuously turning out money at the cost of happiness. Man is reducing
himself to his minimum, in order to be able to make amplest room for his
organizations. He is deriding his human sentiments into shame because they are
apt to stand in the way of his machines.
In our mythology we have the legend that the man who
performs penances for attaining immortality has to meet with temptations sent
by Indra, the Lord of the immortals. If he is lured by them he is lost. The
West has been striving for centuries after its goal of immortality. Indra has
sent her the temptation to try her. It is the gorgeous temptation of wealth.
She has accepted it and her civilization of humanity has lost its path in the
wilderness of machinery.
This commercialism with its barbarity of ugly decorations
is a terrible menace to all humanity. Because it is setting up the ideal of
power over that of perfection. It is making the cult of self-seeking exult in
its naked shamelessness. Our nerves are more delicate than our muscles. Things
that are the most precious in us are helpless as babes when we take away from
them the careful protection which they claim from us for their very
preciousness. Therefore when the callous rudeness of power runs amuck in the
broad-way of humanity it scares away by its grossness the ideals which we have
cherished with the martyrdom of centuries.
The temptation which is fatal for the strong is still
more so for the weak. And I do not welcome it in our Indian life even though it
be sent by the lord of the Immortals. Let our life be simple in its outer
aspect and rich in its inner gain. Let our civilization take its firm stand
upon its basis of social cooperation and not upon that of economic exploitation
and conflict. How to do it in the teeth of the drainage of our life-blood by
the economic dragons is the task set before the thinkers of all oriental
nations who have faith in the human soul. It is a sign of laziness and
impotency to accept conditions imposed upon us by others who have other ideals
than ours. We should actively try to adapt the world powers to guide our
history to its own perfect end.
From the above you will know that I am not an economist.
I am willing to acknowledge that there is a law of demand and supply and an
infatuation of man for more things than are good for him. And yet I will
persist in believing that there is such a thing as the harmony of completeness
in humanity, where poverty does not take away his riches, where defeat may lead
him to victory, death to immortality, and in the compensation of Eternal
Justice those who are the last may yet have their insult transmuted into a
golden triumph.
Rabindranath Tagore
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