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The New Nationalism
What is Extremism?
The nicknames of party warfare have often passed into the accepted terminology used by serious politicians and perpetuated by history, and it is possible that the same immortality may await the designations of Moderate and Extremist by which the two parties now contending for the mind of the nation are commonly known. The forward party
The Heart of Nationalism
Nationalism; but what is Nationalism? The word has only recently begun to figure as an ordinary term of our politics and it has been brought into vogue by the new, forward or extreme party which, casting about for a convenient description of themselves, selected the name as the only one covering in a word their temper and their gospel. For there is a great deal in a name in spite of Shakespeare. A name attached to a political party or school of thought not only serves to show the temper and point of view of the giver, but it helps greatly to colour contemporary ideas about the party it seeks to exalt or disparage. The advanced men whom Anglo-Indian and Moderate unite in branding as Extremists, have always repudiated the misleading designation. At first they preferred to call themselves the New School; they now claim the style of Nationalists; a claim which has been angrily objected to on the ground that the rest of the Congress party are as good Nationalists as the forward party. This
Page – 1109 The New Nationalism, I said in a former article, in this Review, is a negation of the old bourgeois ideals of the nineteenth century. It is an attempt to relegate the dominant bourgeois in us to his old obscurity, to transform the bourgeois into the Samurai and through him to extend the workings of the Samurai spirit to the whole nation. Or to put it more broadly, it is an attempt to create a new nation in India by reviving in spirit & action ancient Indian character, the strong, great and lofty spirit of old Aryavarta, and setting it to use and mould the methods and materials of modernity for the freedom, greatness and well-being of a historic and immortal people. This is not, I am well aware, a description under which the ordinary Congress politician will recognize what he prefers to disparage as Extremism, but it will be well understood by those who are constant readers of the Nationalist journals in Bengal, whether the Bande Mataram or New India or vernacular journals like the Yugantar, the Nabasakti or the Sandhya.1 Whatever their differences of temper, tone or style, however the methods they recommend may differ in detail, they are united by a common faith and a common spirit; a common faith in India, not in an Anglicised and transmogrified nation unrecognizable as Indians, but in India of the immemorial past, India of the clouded but fateful present, India leonine, mighty, crowned with her imperial diadem of the future; a common spirit of enthusiasm, hope, the desire to dare and do all things so that our vision of her future may be fulfilled greatly and soon. This is the heart of Nationalism. The ordinary Congress politician’s ideas of Nationalism are associated with heated discussions in Committee and Congress, altercations at public meetings, unsparing criticisms of successful and eminent respectabilities, sedition trials, National Volunteers, East Bengal disturbances, Rawalpindi riots. To him the Nationalist is nothing more than an “Extremist”, a violent, unreasonable, uncomfortable being whom some malign power has raised up to disturb with his
1 The following sentence was written in the top margin of the manuscript page; its place of insertion was not marked: Nationalism existed in India before it became definite and articulate in Bengal, but it is Bengal that gave it a philosophy, a faith, a method, a mantra and a battle-cry.
Page – 1110 Swaraj and Boycott, his lawlessness & his lathies the respectable ease and safety of Congress politics. He finds him increasing in numbers & influence with an alarming rapidity which it is convenient to deny but impossible to ignore. (It is the bourgeois view of the type destined to push him aside & supplant him and like all such views born of a panic fear & hatred, it is a caricature and not a description.)2 He has no clear idea of the aim and drift of Extremism. He imagines it to be our object to drive out the English and make India free by Boycott and the lathie, and, having thus erected a scarecrow to chuck stones at, he thinks himself entitled to dismiss the new party in his mind as a crowd of enthusiastic lunatics who talk nonsense and advocate impossibilities. Nationalism cannot be so easily dismissed. A force which has shaken the whole of India, trampled the traditions of a century into a refuse of irrecoverable fragments and set the mightiest of modern Empires groping in a panic for weapons strong enough to meet a new and surprising danger, must have some secret of strength and therefore of truth in it which is worth knowing. To get at the heart of Nationalism we must first clear away some of the misconceptions with which its realities have been clouded. We must know what Nationalism is not before we ask what it is. Extremism in the sense of unreasoning violence of spirit and the preference of desperate methods, because they are desperate, is not the heart of Nationalism. The Nationalist is no advocate of lawlessness for its own sake, on the contrary he has a deeper respect for the essence of law than anyone else, because the building up of a nation is his objective and he knows well that without a profound reverence for law national life cannot persist and attain a sound and healthy development. But he qualifies his respect for legality by the proviso that the law he is called upon to obey is the law of the nation, an outgrowth of its organic existence and part of its own accepted system of government.
2 Sri Aurobindo placed parenthesis marks on both sides of this sentence during revision. He apparently intended to move it elsewhere and to join the sentences before and after with a “but”.— Ed.
Page – 1111 A law imposed from outside can command only the interested obedience of those whose chief demand from life is the safety of their persons and property or the timid obedience of those who understand the danger of breaking the law. The claim made by it is an utilitarian, not a moral claim. Farther the Nationalist never loses sight of the truth that law was made for man and not man for the law. Its chief function and reason for existence is to safeguard and foster the growth and happy flowering into strength and health of national life and a law which does not subserve this end or which opposes and contradicts this end, however rigidly it may enforce peace, order and security, forfeits its claim to respect and obedience. Nationalism refuses to accept Law as a fetish or peace and security as an aim in themselves; the only idol of its worship is Nationality and the only aim in itself it recognizes is the freedom, power and well-being of the nation. It will not prefer violent or strenuous methods simply because they are violent or strenuous, but neither will it cling to mild and peaceful methods simply because they are mild and peaceful. It asks of a method whether it is effective for its purpose, whether it is worthy of a great people struggling to be, whether it is educative of national strength and activity, and these things ascertained, it asks nothing farther. He does not love anarchy and suffering, but if anarchy and suffering are the necessary passage to the great consummation he seeks, he is ready to bear them himself, to expose others to them, till the end is reached. He will embrace suffering as a lover and clasp the hand of Anarchy like that of a trusted friend,— if so it must be; for it is not his temper to take the inevitable grudgingly or to serve or struggle with half a heart. If that is Extremism and fanaticism, he is an Extremist and a fanatic; but not for their own sake, not out of a disordered love for anarchy and turmoil, not in madness & desperation, but out of a reasoned conviction and courageous acceptance of the natural laws that demand this sacrifice in return for so great a promise. The same natural law by which a man who aspires to reach a difficult height, must clamber up the steep rocks and risk life and limb in arduous places, has decreed that men who desire to live as freemen in a free country must not refuse to be ready
Page – 1112 to pay toll for freedom with their own blood and the blood of their children, and still more the nation which seeks to grow out of subjection into liberty, must consent first to manure the soil with the tears of its women and the bodies of its sons. The Nationalist knows what he asks from Fate and he knows the price that Fate asks from him in return. Knowing it, he is ready to drag down the nation with him into the valley of the shadow of Death, dark with night and mist and storm, sown thick and crude with perils of strange monsters and perils of morass and fire and flood, holding all danger & misery as nothing because beyond the valleys are the mountains of Beulah where the nation shall enjoy eternal life. He is ready to lead the chosen people into the desert for its long wanderings, though he knows that often in the bitterness of its sufferings it will murmur and rebel against his leadership and raise its hand to stone him to death as the author of its misery, for he knows that beyond is the promised land flowing with milk and honey which the Divine Voice has told him that those who are faithful, will reach and possess. If he embraces Anarchy, it is as the way to good government. If he does not shrink from disorder and violent struggle, it is because without that disorder there can be no security and without that struggle no peace, except the security of decay and the peace of death. If he has sometimes to disregard the law of man, it is to obey the dictates of his conscience and the law of God.
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