Martyrs and revolutionaries of India's freedom - VII

Martyrs and revolutionaries of India's freedom - VII

V Sundaram | Wed, 01 Aug, 2007 , 05:29 PM . After thirteen years in England where he re ceived a thoroughly Western education, Sri Aurobindo returned to India on February 6th 1893, at the age of 20. It was an age of faith and hope. Bankim Chandra Chaterjee's (1839-1894) Anandamath which contained the immortal song of 'Bande Mataram', the hymn to the Motherland, had been published only eleven years earlier. Swamy Vivekananda (1863-1902) had just come to the end of his first pilgrimage round India, and was preparing to sail for America. But it was going to take another dozen years for their call to their countrymen to find full expression in the political field. For the present, the eight-year-old Indian National Congress founded in Bombay in 1885, whose members were mostly drawn from the Anglicized upper classes of society, seemed to have full faith in British fair-mindedness and the 'providential character' of British rule in India, and year after year swore its 'Unswerving allegiance to the British Crown'. The Indian National Congress was content with submitting petitions which were simply ignored by the colonial rulers. There were another twelve years to go before the start of the open struggle for freedom 'the Swadeshi and Boycott Movement' in 1905, and twenty five years before Mahatma Gandhi's entry into the Indian political scene in 1918. Sri Aurobindo wrote a series of explosive articles under the title 'New Lamps for Old' in the Indu Prakash, a popular Marathi-English Bombay Daily at that time. In a few months, on account of official pressure from the Government, the editor of this Newspaper stopped publishing such articles. In those articles, Sri Aurobindo was taking stock of the prevailing political situation in the country at that time and launched into a detailed and forceful criticism of the 'mendicant policy' of the Indian National Congress. Here are a few excerpts from his articles in the Indu Prakash during this time: August 7,1893 'We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery' August 21, 1893 'Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism' August 28, 1893 �I say of the Indian National Congress, then, this�that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders�in brief , that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one eyed.� December 4, 1893 'To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the 'Judicial' from the 'Executive' functions'while we, I say, are finessing our trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilized societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.' Thus from 1900 onwards, Sri Aurobindo began contacting revolutionary groups in Maharashtra and Bengal, and tried to coordinate their action with the help of his brother, Barindra Kumar Ghose and Jatindranath Banerjee. It should be borne in mind that until that time, and indeed until the attainment of Independence, violence against the oppressive British was not an organized one. It was the work of a few individuals or the result of a sudden outburst of uncontrolled anger; and the famous freedom fighters of the Congress went to jail only because they were all passive resisters. Upon the initiative of Sri Aurobindo, P.Mitter, Surendranath Tagore, Chinttaranjan Das and Sister Nivedita formed the first Secret Council for revolutionary activities in Bengal in 1900. Sri Aurobindo also became a Member of a Secret Society in Western India, headed by a Rajput Noble of Udaipur and brought about a sort of liaison between this group and that in Bengal led by P. Mitter. He also undertook a special journey into Central India to meet the sub-Officers and men of one of the Regiments of the Indian Army who had been won over to the side of Revolutionaries raised by that Noble from Udaipur. Sister Nivedita (1867-1911), the Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda had called on Sri Aurobindo at Baroda on October 20, 1902 and stressed the need for his reaching Calcutta in order to give an effective lead to the Nationalist and Revolutionary Forces in Bengal. The celebrated Bhavani Mandir Scheme, written and circulated by Sri Aurobindo in 1905 marked the direct influence of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's 'Ananda Math' on Sri Aurobindo. This plan envisaged the erection of a temple in a secret place among the Hills consecrated to Goddess Bhavani, symbolizing Mother India, and founding an order of Bhramacharins who would be consecrated body and soul to the liberation of the Mother from foreign yoke through an armed uprising. Though the Bhavani Mandir Scheme did not materialize, yet the Rowlatt Committee Report (1918) said that �The Book is a remarkable instance of the perversion of religious ideals to political purposes and it really contained the germs of the Hindu Revolutionary Movement in Bengal'. There is no doubt that the Bhavani Mandir Scheme throws considerable light upon the mind of Sri Aurobindo in those hectic days in which he had three 'Mad Dreams' about which he had written to his wife Mrinalini, in his letter dated August 30, 1905, a historic letter which was seized by the police a few years later and produced as documentary evidence in the Alipore Bomb Case in 1908. The first madness was to look upon 30 crores of Indians as his brothers and sisters and do all that lay in his power to relieve their misery; the second to see God face to face; and the third to look upon the country as the Mother and to redeem her from the grip of a demon�the British Rule. In the same letter to his wife Sri Aurobindo wrote as follows: 'My third madness is that while others look upon their country as an inert piece of matter'a few meadows and fields, forests and hills and riversI look upon my country as the MOTHER. I adore Her, I worship Her as the Mother. What would a son do if a demon sat on his mother's breast and started sucking her blood? Would he quietly sit down to his dinner, amuse himself with his wife and children, or would he rush out to deliver his mother? I know I have the strength to deliver this fallen race. It is not physical strength, - I am not going to fight with sword or gun, - but the strength of knowledge. The power of the Kshatriya is not the only one; there is also the power of the Brahmin, the power that is founded on knowledge. This feeling is not new in me, it is not of today. I was born with it, it is in my very marrow. God sent me to earth to accomplish this great mission.' Thus, Sri Aurobindo, set ablaze the hearts of young Indians in Bengal in 1905 with his radical project for freedom. Alarmed by the rising tide of Bengali feeling against British Rule, Lord Curzon (1859-1925), the then Viceroy, partitioned Bengal in 1905. The main objective of his 'Divide-and-Rule' policy was to break the growing political agitation in Bengal BY USING THE MUSLIM-DOMINATED EAST BENGAL AS THE THIN EDGE OF A WEDGE BETWEEN HINDUS AND MUSLIMS�A POLICY THAT ULTIMATELY CULMINATED IN THE PARTITION OF INDIA IN 1947. The tragedy of today's India is that the UPA Government, abetted by the Communists with a known and criminal track record dating back to the days of 'Quit India Movement' of 1942, has taken this policy of Lord Curzon to its logical culmination, resulting in the cultural destruction of India. (To be contd...)