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The Asiatic Role
THE genius of the Hindu is not for
pure action, but for thought and aspiration realised in action, the spirit
premeditating before the body obeys the inward command. The life of the Hindu is
inward and his outward life aims only at reproducing the motions of his spirit.
This intimate relation of
his thought and his actions is the secret of his perpetual vitality. His outward
life, like that of other nations, is subject to growth and decay, to periods of
greatness and periods of decline, but while other nations have a limit and a
term, he has none. Whenever death claims his portion, the Hindu race takes
refuge in the source of all immortality, plunges itself into the fountain of
spirit and comes out renewed for a fresh term of existence. The elixir of
national life has been discovered by India alone. This immortality, this great
secret of life, she has treasured up for thousands of years, until the world was
fit to receive it. The time has now come for her to impart it to the other
nations who are now on the verge of decadence and death. The peoples of Europe
have carried material life to its farthest expression, the science of bodily
existence has been perfected, but they are suffering from diseases which their
science is powerless to cure. England with her practical intelligence, France
with her clear logical brain, Germany with her speculative genius, Russia with
her emotional force, America with her commercial energy have done what they
could for human development, but each has reached the limit of her peculiar
capacity. Something is wanting which Europe cannot supply. It is at this
juncture that Asia has awakened, because the world needed her. Asia is the
custodian of the world's peace of mind, the physician of the maladies which
Europe generates. She is commissioned to rise from time to time from her ages of
self-communion, self-sufficiency, self-absorption and rule the world for a
season so that the world may come and sit at her feet to learn the secrets she
alone has to give. When the restless spirit of Europe has added a new phase of
discovery to
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the
evolution of the science of material life, has regulated politics, rebased
society, remodelled law, rediscovered science, the spirit of Asia, calm,
contemplative, self-possessed, takes possession of Europe's discovery and
corrects its exaggerations, its aberrations by the intuition, the spiritual
light she alone can turn upon the world. When Greek and Roman had exhausted
themselves, the Arab went out from his desert to take up their unfinished task,
revivify the civilisation of the old world and impart the profounder impulses of
Asia to the pursuit of knowledge. Asia has always initiated, Europe completed.
The strength of Europe is in details, the strength of Asia in synthesis. When
Europe has perfected the details of life or thought, she is unable to harmonise
them into a perfect symphony and she falls into intellectual heresies, practical
extravagances which contradict the facts of life, the limits of human nature and
the ultimate truths of existence. It is therefore the office of Asia to take up
the work of human evolution when Europe comes to a standstill and loses itself
in a clash of vain speculations, barren experiments and helpless struggles to
escape from the consequences of her own mistakes. Such a time has now come in
the world's history.
In former ages India was a sort of hermitage of thought and peace apart
from the world. Separated from the rest of humanity by her peculiar geographical
conformation, she worked out her own problems and thought out the secrets of
existence as in a quiet Ashram from which the noise of the world was shut out.
Her thoughts flashed out over Asia and created civilisations,
her
sons were the bearers of light to the peoples; philosophies
based themselves on stray fragments of
her infinite wisdom; sciences arose from the waste of her intellectual
production. When the barrier was broken and nations began to surge through the
Himalayan gates, the peace of India departed. She passed through centuries of
struggle, of ferment in which the civilisations born of her random thoughts
returned to her developed and insistent, seeking to impose themselves on the
mighty mother of them all. To her they were the reminiscences of her old
intellectual experiments laid aside and forgotten. She took them up, re-thought
them in a new light and once more made them part of herself. So she dealt with
the Greek, so with the Scythian, so
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with
Islam, so now she will deal with the great brood of her returning children,
with Christianity, with Buddhism, with European science and materialism, with
the fresh speculations born of the world's renewed contact with the source of
thought in this ancient cradle of religion, science and philosophy. The vast
amount of new matter which she has to absorb, is unprecedented in her history,
but to her it is child's play. Her all-embracing intellect, her penetrating
intuition, her invincible originality are equal to greater tasks. The period of
passivity when she listened to the voices of the outside world is over. No
longer will she be content merely to receive and reproduce, even to receive and
improve. The genius of Japan lies in imitation and improvement, that of India in
origination. The contributions of outside peoples she can only accept as rough
material for her immense creative faculty. It was the mission of England to
bring this rough material to India, but in the arrogance of her material success
she presumed to take upon herself the role of a teacher and treated the Indian
people partly as an infant to be instructed, partly as a serf to be schooled to
labour for its lords. The farce is played out. England's mission in India is
over and it is time for her to recognise the limit of the lease given to her.
When it was God's will that she should possess India, the world was amazed at
the miraculous ease of the conquest and gave all the credit to the unparalleled
genius and virtues of the Engligh people, a fiction which England was not slow
to encourage and on which she has traded for over a century. The real truth is
suggested in the famous saying that England conquered India in a fit of absence
of mind, which is only another way of saying that she did not conquer it at all.
It was placed in her hands without her realising what was being done or how it
was being done. The necessary conditions were created for her, her path made
easy, the instruments given into her hands. The men who worked for her were of
comparatively small intellectual stature and with few exceptions did not make
and could not have made any mark in European history where no special Providence
was at work to supplement the deficiencies of the instruments. The subjugation
of India is explicable neither in the ability of the men whose names figure as
the protagonists nor in the superior genius of the
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conquering
nation nor in the weakness of the conquered people. It is one of the standing
miracles of history. In other words, it was one of those cases in which a
particular mission was assigned to a people not otherwise superior to the rest
of the world and a special faustitas or decreed good fortune set to watch
over the fulfilment of the mission. Her mission once over, the angel of the Lord
who stood by England in her task and removed opponents and difficulties with the
waving of his hand, will no longer shield her. She will stay so long as the
destinies of India need her and not a day longer, for it is not by her own
strength that she came or is still here, and it is not by her own strength that
she can remain. The resurgence of India is begun, it will accomplish itself with
her help, if she will, without it if she does not, against it if she opposes.
The
Editor of the Urdu Swarajya has been warned to refrain from seditious
writings. The Magistrate in conveying the warning unctuously remarked that
"the Government never dissuades righteous criticism, it is only a
disaffectionate feeling that it wants to check." The heart of the
bureaucracy is evidently in the right place; it is so anxious to be loved that
it is ready to chop off the head of anyone who refuses to love it. The
bureaucracy has sometimes been compared by editors with exuberant pens to the
Emperor Nero, a comparison which it has resented by putting the writer in
prison; but it is written in history that Nero suffered precisely from this
amiable weakness. He wanted to be loved and anyone who had a "disaffectionate
feeling" for him or criticised "unrighteously" his character or
his flute-playing or his poetry or his acting, was in instant danger of being
taught affection by the sword. Nero also did not want to dissuade
"righteous" criticism, but then the judge of the righteousness of the
criticism was Nero himself. The love-sick despot is a more difficult kind of
animal to tackle than the more ferocious species. "Obey me or perish"
is the attitude of the latter, and it is one which can be appreciated if not
admired. But "love me or
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die",
is a principle of Government to which human nature cannot so easily accustom
itself. It is too ethereal for the grossness of our base terrestrial
composition.
Bande Mataram,
April 9, 1908
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