The
Awakening Soul of India
(June 26, 1909, On
Nationalism, pp.401-406)
NO
NATIONAL awakening is really vital and enduring which confines itself to a
single field. It is when the soul awakens that a nation is really
alive, and the life will then manifest itself in all the manifold forms
of activity in which man seeks to express the strength and the delight
of the expansive spirit within. It is
for ananda that the world exists;
for joy that the Self puts Himself into the great and serious game of
life; and the joy which He sees is the joy of various
self-expression.
For this reason it is that no two men are alike, no two nations are
alike. Each has its own separate nature over and above the common
nature of humanity and it is not only the common human impulses and
activities but the satisfaction and development of its own separate
character and capacities that a nation demands. Denied that
satisfaction and development, it perishes. By two tests, therefore, the
vitality of a national movement can be judged. If it is imitative,
imported, artificial, then, whatever temporary, success it may have,
the nation is moving towards self-sterilisation and death; even so the
nations of ancient Europe perished when they gave up their own
individuality as the price of Roman civilisation, Roman peace, Roman
prosperity. If, on the other hand, the peculiar individuality of a race
stamps itself on the movement in its every part and seizes on every new
development as a means of self-expression, then the nation wakes, lives
and grows and whatever the revolutions and changes of political, social
or intellectual forms and institutions, it is assured of its survival
and aggrandisement.
The
nineteenth century in India was imitative, self-forgetful,
artificial.
It aimed at a successful reproduction
of Europe in India, forgetting
the deep saying of the Gita, "Better the law of one's own being
though
it be badly done than an alien dharma well-followed; death in one's own
dharma is better, it is a dangerous thing to follow the law of
another's nature." For death in one's
own dharma brings new
birth, success in an alien path means only successful suicide.
If we
had succeeded in Europeanising ourselves, we would have lost for ever
our spiritual capacity, our intellectual force, our national elasticity
and power of self-renovation. That tragedy has been enacted more than
once in history, only the worst and most mournful example of all would
have been added. Had the whole activity of the country been of the
derivative and alien kind, that result would have supervened. But the
life-breath of the nation still moved in the religious movements of
Bengal and the Punjab, in the political aspirations of Maharashtra and
in the literary activity of Bengal. Even here it was an undercurrent,
the peculiar temperament and vitality of India struggling for
self-preservation under a load of foreign ideas and foreign forms, and
it was not till in the struggle between these two elements the balance
turned in favour of the national dharma that the salvation of
India was assured. The resistance of the conservative element in
Hinduism, tamasic, inert, ignorant, uncreative though it was, saved the
country by preventing an even more rapid and thorough disintegration
than actually took place and by giving respite and time for the
persistent national self to emerge and find itself. It was in religion
first that the soul of India awoke and triumphed. There were
always
indications, always great forerunners, but it was when the flower of
the educated youth of Calcutta bowed down at the feet of an illiterate
Hindu ascetic, a self-illuminated ecstatic and "mystic" without
a
single trace or touch of the alien thought or education upon him that
the battle was won. The going forth of Vivekananda, marked out
by the
Master as the heroic soul destined to take the world between his two
hands and change it, was the first visible sign to the world that India
was awake not only to survive but to conquer. Afterwards when the
awakening was complete, a section of the nationalist movement turned in
imagination to a reconstruction of the recent pre-British past in all
its details. This could not be. Inertia, the refusal to expand and
alter, is what our philosophy calls tamas, and an excess of tamas
tends-to disintegration and
disappearance. Aggression is necessary for
self-preservation and, when a force ceases to conquer, it ceases to
live
—
that which remains stationary and stands merely on the defensive, that
which retires into and keeps within its own kot or base, as
the now defunct Sandhya used graphically to put it, is doomed
to defeat, diminution and final elimination from the living things of
the world. Hinduism has always been
pliable and aggressive; it has
thrown itself on the attacking force, carried its positions, plundered
its treasures, made its own everything of value it had and ended either
in wholly annexing it or driving it out by rendering its further
continuation in the country purposeless and therefore impossible.
Whenever it has stood on the
defensive, it has contracted within
narrower limits and shown temporary signs of decay.
Once
the soul of the nation was awake in religion, it was only a matter of
time and opportunity for it to throw itself on all spiritual and
intellectual activities in the national existence and take possession
of them. The outburst of anti-European feeling which followed on the
Partition gave the required opportunity. Anger, vindictiveness and
antipathy are not in themselves laudable feelings, but God uses them
for His purposes and brings good out of evil. They drove listlessness
and apathy away and replaced them by energy and a powerful emotion; and
that energy and emotion were seized upon by the national self and
turned to the uses of the future. The anger against Europeans, the
vengeful turning upon their commerce and its productions, the antipathy
to everything associated with them engendered a powerful stream of
tendency turning away from the immediate anglicised past, and the
spirit which had already declared itself in our religious life entered
in by this broad doorway into politics, and substituted a positive
powerful yearning towards the national past, a still more mighty and
dynamic yearning towards a truly national future. The Indian spirit has
not yet conquered the whole field of our politics in actuality, but it
is there victoriously in sentiment; the rest is a matter of time, and
everything which is now happening in politics, is helping to prepare
for its true and potent expression. The future is now assured. Religion
and politics, the two most effective and vital expressions of the
nation's self having been nationalised, the rest will follow in due
course. The
needs of our religious and political life are now vital and
real forces and it is these needs which will reconstruct our society,
recreate and remould our industrial and commercial life and found a new
and victorious art, literature, science and philosophy which will be
not European but Indian.
The
impulse is
already working in Bengali art and literature. The need of
self-expression for the national spirit in politics suddenly brought
back Bengali literature to its essential and eternal self and it was in
our recent national songs that this self-realisation came. The lyric
and the lyrical spirit, the spirit of
simple, direct and poignant
expression, of deep, passionate, straightforward emotion, of a frank
and exalted enthusiasm, the dominant note of love and bhakti, of
a mingled sweetness and strength, the potent intellect dominated by the
self-illuminated heart, a mystical exaltation of feeling and spiritual
insight expressing itself with a plain concreteness and practicality
—
this is the soul of
Bengal.
All our literature, in order to be wholly alive, must start from this
base and, whatever variations it may indulge in, never lose touch with
it. In Bengal, again, the national spirit is seeking to satisfy itself
in art and, for the first time since the decline of the Moguls, a new
school of national art is developing itself, the school of which
Abanindranath Tagore is the founder and master. It is still troubled by
the foreign though Asiatic influence from which its master started, and
has something of an exotic appearance, but the development and
self-emancipation of the national self from this temporary domination
can already be watched and followed. There again, it is the spirit of
Bengal that expresses itself. The
attempt to express in form and limit
something of that which is formless and illimitable is the attempt of
Indian art. The Greeks, aiming at a smaller and more easily
attainable
end, achieved a more perfect success. Their instinct for physical form
was greater than ours, our instinct for psychic shape and colour was
superior. Our future art must solve the problem of expressing the soul
in the object, the great Indian aim, while achieving anew the
triumphant combination of perfect interpretative form and colour. No
Indian has so strong an instinct for form as the Bengali. In addition
to the innate Vedantism of all Indian races, he has an all-powerful
impulse towards delicacy, grace and strength, and it is these qualities
to which the new school of art has instinctively turned in its first
inception. Unable to find a perfect model in the scanty relics of old
Indian art, it was only natural that it should turn to Japan for help,
for delicacy and grace are there triumphant. But Japan has not the
secret of expressing the deepest soul in the object, it has not the
aim. And the Bengali spirit means more than the union of delicacy,
grace and strength; it has the lyrical mystic impulse; it has the
passion for clarity and concreteness and as in our literature, so in
our art we see these tendencies emerging —
an emotion of beauty,
a nameless sweetness and spirituality pervading the clear line and
form. Here, too, it is the free spirit of the nation beginning to
emancipate itself from the foreign limitations and shackles.
No
department of our life can escape this great regenerating and
reconstructing force. There is not the slightest doubt that our society
will have to undergo a reconstruction which may amount to revolution,
but it will not be for Europeanisation as the average reformer blindly
hopes, but for a greater and more perfect realisation of the
national
spirit in society. Not individual
selfishness and mutually consuming
struggle but love and the binding of individuals into a single
inseparable life is the national impulse. It sought to fulfil
itself in
the past by the bond of blood in the joint family, by the bond of a
partial communism in the village system, by the bond of birth and a
corporate sense of honour in the caste. It may seek a more perfect and
spiritual bond. in the future. In
commerce also so long as we follow
the European spirit and European model, the individual competitive
selfishness, the bond of mere interest in the joint-stock
company or
that worst and most dangerous development of cooperative Capitalism,
the giant octopus-like Trust and Syndicate, we shall never succeed in
rebuilding a healthy industrial life. It is not these bonds which can
weld Indians together. India moves to a deeper and greater life than
the world has yet imagined possible and it is when she has
found the
secret of expressing herself in those various activities that her
industrial and social life will become strong and expansive.
Nationalism
has been hitherto largely a revolt against the tendency to shape
ourselves into the mould of Europe; but it must also be on its guard
against any tendency to cling to every detail that has been Indian.
That has not been the spirit of Hinduism in the past, there is no
reason why it should be so in the future. In all life there are three
elements, the fixed and permanent spirit, the developing yet constant
soul and the brittle changeable body. The spirit we cannot change, we
can only obscure or lose; the soul
must not be rashly meddled with,
must neither be tortured into a shape alien to it, nor obstructed in
its free expansion; and the body must
be used as a means, not
over-cherished as a thing valuable for its own sake. We will
sacrifice
no ancient form to an unreasoning love of change, we will keep none
which the national spirit desires to replace by one that is a still
better and truer expression of the undying soul of the nation.