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Notes and Comments Volume I - June 26, 1909 – Number 2 The Message of India
The ground gained by the Vedantic propaganda in the West, may be measured by the growing insight in the occasional utterances of well-informed and intellectual Europeans on the subject. A certain Mrs. Leighton Cleather speaking to the Oriental Circle of the Lyceum Club in London on the message of India has indicated the mission of India with great justness and insight. We need not follow Mrs. Cleather into her dissertation on the Kshatriyas, whom for some mysterious reason she insists on calling the Red Rajputs, but it is true that the first knowledge of Vedantic truth and the Rajayoga was the possession of the Kshatriyas till Janaka, Ajatashatru and others gave it to the Brahmins. But the real issues of this historical fact are inevitably missed by the lecturer. She is on a surer ground when she continues, "India’s message to the world today she considered to be the realisation of the life beyond material forms. The East has taken for granted the reality of the invisible and has no fear. The recognition of the soul in ourselves and others leans to the recognition of the universal soul and the great word of the Upanishads: ‘This soul which is the self of all that is, this is the real, this the self, that thou art.’ Modern civilisation had lost sight of the fundamental law of self-sacrifice as conditioning man’s evolution." We have here, very briefly put, the triple message of India, psychical, spiritual and moral. India believes in and has the key to a psychical world within man and without him which is the source and basis of the material. This it is which Europe is beginning dimly to discover. She has caught glimpses of the world beyond the gates, her hands are fumbling for the key, but she has not yet found it. Immortality proved and admitted, it becomes easier to believe in God. The spiritual message is that the universal self is one and that our souls are not only brothers, not only
Page – 29 of one substance and nature, but live in and move towards an essential oneness. It follows that Love is the highest law and that to which evolution must move. Ānanda, joy and delight, are the object of the līlā and the fulfilment of love is the height of joy and delight. Self-sacrifice is therefore the fundamental law. Sacrifice, says the Gita, is the law by which the Father of all in the beginning conditioned the world, and all ethics, all conduct, all life is a sacrifice willed or unconscious. The beginning of ethical knowledge is to realise this and make the conscious sacrifice of one’s own individual desires. It is an inferior and semi-savage morality which gives up only to gain and makes selfishness the basis of ethics. To give up one’s small individual self and find the larger self in others, in the nation, in humanity, in God, that is the law of Vedanta. That is India’s message. Only she must not be content with sending it, she must rise up and live it before all the world so that it may be proved a possible law of conduct both for men and nations.
On the converse side a passage from Mr. Algernon Cecil’s "Six Oxford Thinkers" is instructive. He dwells on the self-contradictory and ironic close of John Morley’s life. "He the philosophic Liberal, the ardent advocate of Home Rule, the persistent foe of war and coercion, is closing his fine record of public service with a coronet on his head as the ruler of India, of the child of Clive and Warren Hastings, of the creature of strife and fraud; as one might say, a benevolent despot in an absolute constitution imposed and administered by an alien race." We in India are sure of the despotism but have some doubts about the benevolence. Nor can we accept the phrase, absolute constitution, as anything but an oxymoron, a "witty folly", a happy and ironical contradiction in terms. But for the rest the implied criticism is just.
Mr. Cecil sees in this ending of Honest John as Lord Morley the
Page – 30 failure of Liberalism; and it must be remembered that the failure of Liberalism means the abandonment of the gospel of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity as a thing unlivable, and that again means the moral bankruptcy of Europe. "Liberalism in any intelligible sense cannot last another generation. In a score of years the strange adventure on which the nations of Europe embarked in 1789 will be concluded, and we shall revert, doubtless with many and formidable changes, to an earlier type. The principles of unchecked individual liberty and unrestricted competition have, to use the ancient phrase, been tried in the balance and found wanting. The golden dreams which so lately cheated the anxious eyes of men have tarnished with time. Their splendour has proved illusive and they have gone the way of other philosophies down a road upon which there is no returning. The old aristocrats have been swept away and some malicious spirit has given us new ones bathed in the most material sort of golden splendour. And Misery, Vice and Discontent stalk among the drudges of society much as they did before." Mr. Cecil like most Europeans sees that European liberalism has failed but like most Europeans utterly misses the real reason of the failure. The principles of 1789 were not false, but they were falsely stated and selfishly executed. Europe had not the spiritual strength, nor the moral force to carry them out. She was too selfish, too shortsighted, too materialistic and ignorant. She deserved to fail and could not but fail. It is left for Asia and especially for India to reconstruct the world.
The genesis of the Imperial Press Conference is to be found in that feeling of insecurity which is driving England to seek allies on the Continent and gather round her the children of her loins beyond the seas. During the better part of the nineteenth century after her triumph over Napoleon and her amazing expansion in India, she felt too strong to need extraneous assistance. Mistress of the seas, enormously wealthy, monopolist almost of the world’s commerce, she followed on the Continent a policy of splendid isolation broken only by the ill-starred alliance with the
Page – 31 third Napoleon. She fought for her own hand everywhere and felt strong enough to conquer. Her Colonies she regarded only as a nuisance. They were a moral asset, probably, but hardly a material. They assisted her in no way, they excluded her commerce by tariffs, they took her protection without payment and yet exacted internal independence with an inordinate and querulous jealousy of her interference and unwillingness to allow even the slightest iota of British control to mar the perfection of their autonomy. But a change has come over the spirit of her dream. Mighty powers have arisen in the world, young, ardent, ambitious, rapidly expanding, magnificently equipped, moving with the sureness and swiftness of material forces towards empire and aggrandisement. Their armies are gigantic forces against which England’s would be as helpless as a boy in the hands of a Titan. Their wealth increases. They are beating England out of the chosen fields of her commercial expansion, and it is only by bringing out all the reserves of her old energy that she can just keep a first place; worst of all, their navies grow and if they cannot keep pace with hers in numbers, equal it in efficiency. On the other hand India, her passive source of wealth, strength and prestige is struggling in her turn to exclude British commerce and assert autonomy without British control. England is uneasy; she cannot slumber at night for thinking of her precarious future. To her excited imagination German airships fill the skies and the myriad tramp of the Teuton is heard already marching on London, while huge conspiracies spring up like mushrooms in India and evade the eager grasp of the Police with a diabolical skill which leaves behind only arrests and persecution of innocent men, hard judicial comments, a discredited C.I.D. and a desperate weeping Englishman. One can no longer recognise the strong, stolid, practical, invincible Britisher in the emotional, hysterical, excitable, panic-stricken race dancing to the tune of its newly liberated Imagination.
It is not surprising under such circumstances that leading English-
Page – 32 men should call a Press Conference and turn it into a War Council full of such themes as military conscription and naval expansion and always looking out of the corner of its eye at Imperial Federation. The aid and backing of the Colonies has now become a necessity to British imagination. England seeks an American alliance and hungers after the unity of the Anglo-Saxon world, but there are hostile elements in America which militate against that dream. Parting with her old friends of the Triple Alliance she embraces France, her ancient and traditional enemy; she courts her bug-bear Russia and many of her publicists are ready to excuse and condone the most savage, merciless and inhuman system of tyranny in the world provided she gets a friend in need. But these are uncertain and transitory supports, while the Colonies are bound by ties of blood and interest. The objective of the Press Conference is therefore the Colonies, the union of the English throughout the Empire. And although Srijut Surendranath has been led to the gathering in gilded fetters and is "the most picturesque figure" in the Conference, that is all he is, a picture, even if a speaking picture, — nothing else. For the rest it is Anglo-India that has been called to the great journalistic War Council, not India. The real India has no place there. We wish Srijut Surendranath could have realised it. It might have prevented him from indulging in rhetorical hyperboles about "the wise and conciliatory policy of Lord Morley" — forgetful of the nine deportees, forgetful of the many good and true men in jail for Swadeshi, forgetful of Midnapore and all it typifies.
It is strange that British statesmanship should be blind to certain possibilities which will follow from their new Colonial policy. Among the first results of the new idea has been the federation of Australia and the federation of South Africa. The former event is not of such importance to the world as the latter. The referendum in Natal is indeed an event of the first significance, but what it portends is the rise of a new and vigorous nation, per-
Page – 33 haps a new empire in South Africa, — certainly not the consolidation of the British Empire. Great organisms like these tend inevitably to separate existence. The one thing that stands in the way is the present inability of these organisms to defend their separate existence. Australia lies under the outstretched sword of Japan to say nothing of the subtler, less apparent but more ominous menace of Germany. Canada is kept to England by the contiguity of a powerful, well-organised and expanding foreign State. South Africa on the other hand is occupied by a strong military race with a stubborn love of independence in its very blood. In the last war it has become aware of its supreme military capacity but also of its inability to hold its freedom without a navy. Yet the main cry of England now is that the Colonies should organise military and naval defence in order to lighten the burden of England and help her in her wars! They are not satisfied with the contribution of a Dreadnought. They want an Australian navy, a South African navy. Surely, God has sealed up the eyes and wits of these Imperialistic statesmen. They have eyes but they cannot see; they have minds but they are allowed only to misuse them.
Nothing is stronger than the difference presented by Europe and Asia in the matter of national vitality. European nations seem to have a brief date, a life-term vigorous but soon-exhausted; Asiatic races persist and survive. It was not so in old times. Not only Greece and Rome perished, Assyria, Chaldea, Phoenicia are also written in the book of the Dead. But the difference now seems well-established. France is a visibly dying nation, Spain seems to have lost the power of revival, Italy and Greece have been lifted up by great efforts and sacrifices but show a weak vitality, the Anglo-Saxon race is beginning everywhere to recede and dwindle. On the other hand in Asia life pulsates victoriously. Japan has risen at one bound to the first rank of nations; China untouched by her calamities renovates her huge national life. The effect on India of an accumulation of almost all the condi-
Page – 34 tions which bring about national death, has been a new lease of life and a great dynamic impulse. Of the Mahomedan races, not a single one is decadent. Persia rises from her weakness full of youthful enthusiasm and courage though not yet of capacity. Arabia in her deserts surges with life. Egypt after calamities is undergoing new birth; as far as Morocco the stir of life is seen. And today Turkey, the sick man, has suddenly risen up vigorous and whole. What is the source of this difference ? Is it not in this that Asia has developed her spirituality and Europe has turned from it ? Europe has always tended to live more in matter and in the body than within; and matter when not inert is always changing; the body is bound to perish. The high pressure at which Europe lives only tends to disintegrate the body more rapidly when the spiritual sources within are not resorted to for stability.
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