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Sankharitola’s Apologia
THE omniscient editor of
the Indian Nation exposed himself last week to a well-deserved
castigation at our hands by trespassing into history, of which he evidently
knows less than a fifth form schoolboy in an English public school. We gave him
his deserts, but were careful to couch our criticism, however deservedly severe,
in perfectly courteous language. We find, however, that the
courtesy was thrown away
on the most hysterically foul-mouthed
publicist in the whole Indian Press. The late Sambhunath Mukherji ironically
described Mr. N. N. Ghose as a thundering cataract of law: he might more aptly
have described him as a thundering cataract of billingsgate. He has attempted to
answer our criticism in this week’s Indian Nation, but the answer is so
much befouled with an almost maniacal virulence of abuse that most of our
friends have advised us to ignore his frenzies and never again give him the
notoriety he desires by noticing him in our columns. It is true that the
Indian Nation addresses itself to a microscopic audience and expresses
the personal vanities, selfishness, jealousies of a single man, but so long as
it enjoys a false reputation for learning and wisdom even
with a limited circle or trades on that reputation to attack and discredit the
National movement, it is our duty to expose its pretensions, and we shall not be
deterred by any abuse, however foul.
Page-518 Mataram writers Srijut Aurobindo Ghose for the object of his wrath and among other elegant terms of abuse calls him a prig and a Graeculus esuriens. To those who may not be such accomplished Latin scholars as the Principal of the Metropolitan College, we may explain that the last expression means a starving and greedy scholar who is prepared to commit any vileness for the sake of earning a livelihood. We will not stop to ask whether this description applies to Srijut Aurobindo Ghose or to a Principal who daily exhorts his students to subordinate honour, high feeling and patriotism to the supreme consideration of bread and himself practises the lofty philosophy he preaches. We will only ask Mr. Ghose whether a man can be at once a prig and an esurient Greekling. Srijut Aurobindo Ghose may be one or the other or neither, but he can hardly be both. Either Mr. N. N. Ghose’s knowledge of Latin is as distinguished and correct as his knowledge of history, or else he is so ignorant of English as to be even ignorant what the word prig means. We can understand his being in a rage at the merciless exposure of pretended scholarship, but that does not excuse his incoherence; nor is it a sufficient reason for what was once a fair counterfeit of a gentleman and a scholar turning himself into the image of a spitting and swearing tom-cat. And with that we leave Mr. N. N. Ghose the fishwife and pass on to Mr. N. N. Ghose the historian. He does not try to justify his blunders, — that would be hopeless — but he does try to excuse them. He practically admits that his Italian republics are a blunder and that he was thinking of the Middle Ages when he was writing of the nineteenth century. But he pleads that Burke uses the word commonwealth in the sense of state and therefore Mr. N. N. Ghose can use the word republic in the same sense. This is Metropolitan College logic and Metropolitan College knowledge of English. Does Mr. Ghose really think that republic and commonwealth mean the same thing precisely or that Burke would have talked of the Russian republic when he meant the Russian monarchy? But, says Mr. Ghose, it does not matter, as I was not talking about forms of government. But if Mr. Ghose in his class was to talk about adjectives when he meant nouns, would it be an excuse to say that he was not talking about the difference between various
Page-519 parts of speech? His defence of his other blunders is still more amusing. Says the Oracle: “To combat our proposition about ancient Greece an academic commonplace is trotted out, namely, that the people of Greece never developed a panhellenic sentiment.” Really this is enough to take one’s breath away. Mr. Ghose told us last week that the Greeks became an united nation under the pressure of the Persian invasion; this week he coolly tells us that it is an academic commonplace that the Greeks never even developed a panhellenic sentiment. We certainly never said anything of the sort. The Greeks, as any tyro in history knows, did develop a panhellenic sentiment but it was never strong enough — and that was all we said — to unite them into a nation. But Mr. Ghose flounders still deeper into the mire in the next sentences. “What does it signify whether they did or not? The whole question is, could the Greek states have been set against one another? Athens and Sparta, for instance, against each other? And if not, why not?” Really, Mr. Ghose, really now! Is it possible you do not know that soon after the Persian invasion which you say made Greece an united nation, Athens and Sparta were at each other’s throats and the whole of the Greek world by land and sea turned into one vast battlefield on which the Hellenic cities engaged in a murderous internecine strife? What would we think of a “scholar” who pretended to know Indian history and yet asserted that the Hindus became an united nation under the pressure of the Mahomedan invasion and that it was impossible to set the Hindu states against each other, Mewar and Amber for instance? Yet this is precisely the blunder Mr. Ghose has committed with respect to Greek history. But he pleads bitterly that his facts are no doubt all wrong, but the conclusions he bases on them are right. What do facts matter? It is only Mr. N. N. Ghose’s opinions which matter. Mr. Ghose accuses us of incapacity to understand the substance of his article. We quite admit that it is difficult to understand the mystic wisdom of a sage who asserts that the soundness of his premises has nothing to do with the soundness of his conclusions. Mr. Ghose stated certain facts as supporting a conclusion otherwise unsupported. We have proved that his
Page-520 facts are all childish blunders. He must therefore accept one of the two horns of a dilemma: either his facts had nothing to do with his “truism” or his “truism” itself is an error. But we had another object in view in exposing the pretentious sciolism of this arrogant publicist. Our business with him is not so much to disprove his opinions as to convince the few who still believe in him of the hollowness of his pretensions. It was for this reason that we dwelt on his blunders last week and have done the same this week, — in order to show that this gentleman who claims a monopoly of culture and wisdom in India, is a half educated shallow man whose boasted mastery of the English language even is imperfect and who in other subjects, such as history and politics, is an ignoramus pretending to knowledge. Bande Mataram, August 24, 1907
The Englishman has been warning us against our false friends. We have been asked to avert our eyes from those Indian delegates who have asked the socialistic Conference at Stuttgart to liberate one-fifth of the human race from serfdom. The Englishman unblushingly calls these Indian delegates our enemies and perhaps points to himself as our only friend, guide and philosopher. With the Englishman for our friend, and the Civil and Military Gazette for our ally and the rest of the Anglo-Indian Press for our well-wishers it is no doubt sinful to long for a change for the paradise of universal brotherhood. India is the freest of lands, retorts the Hare Street Journal to the misrepresentation of our false friends in the above socialistic Conference. Here under British rule the people enjoy religious freedom, they are allowed to stick to their absurd social customs, they are not denied food, clothing and luxuries. What is there wanting to their freedom the Englishman is at a loss to discover. Does our contemporary seriously desire enlightenment on the point? Or is he indulging in a bit of Hare Street humour at our expense? Is it owing to this freedom of which we are the enviable possessors that he himself as well as his prototype in Lahore enjoy the monopoly of pour-
Page-521 ing daily vile abuses on us with perfect safety and immunity? Is it due to this freedom that we are threatened with imprisonment for republishing the articles of the Yugantar and they are supported and patronised for the very same offence? Is it for this enviable freedom that some innocent men of Comilla were very near being hanged and transported without a shred of evidence against them? Is it in consequence of this freedom that a highly respectable accused at Rawalpindi is taking his trial on a sick bed? Is it in the exercise of their rights as free citizens of the British Empire that Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh have been deported without even the mention of the charge against them? This freedom is perhaps responsible for the banishment of an Arya Samajist from his country though the trying magistrate has declared him quite innocent of the charge brought against him. Is it a tangible demonstration of our freedom that we cannot keep our food grains for our own use even when there is a terrible famine in the land? Is it because we are free to think and act that the Partition of Bengal has been carried out in the teeth of an unanimous and protracted opposition? The disarming of a whole people is another incontrovertible evidence of their freedom. They are not allowed the use of arms because they are free. Their manhood is repressed because they are free. They are converted into so many harmless cattle because their Mother-country is the freest of all countries! If we had even a jot of freedom the Englishman could not have flung in our face such a mocking statement. The world has come to know of India’s true condition, and these interested and shameless perversions of truth can deceive nobody. Bande Mataram, August 26, 1907
One of the most encouraging signs of the present times is the effect of repression in bringing together men of all views who have the future welfare and greatness of their country at heart. At this time last year the great fight between the old and new parties was just beginning to pass from the stage of loose occasional
Page-522 skirmishes into a close and prolonged struggle. The emergence of Nationalism as a self-conscious force determined to take shape and fight for the domination of the national mind was indicated by the appearance of the Bande Mataram as the first out and out Nationalist daily in the English tongue published in India. For the first time a gospel of undiluted Nationalism without any mitigating admixture of prudent concealment or diplomatic reservation was poured daily into the ears of the educated class in India. At first the Bande Mataram and the cause it came to champion had to make a hard fight for existence and for a voice in the country, and in the struggle which culminated in the last session of the Congress, many hard words were used on both sides, strong animosities aroused and what seemed incurable misunderstandings engendered. Those times are now fading into a half-remembered past. The second year of the paper’s existence has begun with a prosecution for sedition, but circumstances have so changed that in its hour of trial it has the sympathy of the whole of Bengal at its back. We note with satisfaction and gratitude that all classes of men, rich and poor, all shades of opinion, moderate or extremist, the purveyors of ready made loyalty alone excepted, have given us a sympathy and support which is not merely emotional. This growing unity is mainly due to the action of the bureaucracy in attempting to put down by force a movement which has now taken possession of the nation’s heart beyond the possibility of dislodgment. This is the last and crowning blessing of British rule. Bande Mataram, August 27, 1907
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