Did you enjoy the
article “Fifty Years of Growth” by K. R. Kripalani in the Visva-Bharati?[i]
Fifty years of growth refers by the way to the Congress. About the Swadeshi
period he writes: “Along time was to elapse before we were to appreciate the
infinite possibilities of the muddy waters at hand. In the meantime something
startlingly romantic happened. . . .
“The fountain [of
undefiled water] was cut by the fiery shafts of Tilak, Vivekananda, and
Aurobindo, among others. They gave to Indian Nationalism its fiery basis in
India’s ancient cultural glory and its modern mission. . . . It is always more
beautiful and more inspiring to contemplate the Idea and be drunk with it than
to face the actual facts and touch the running sores. . . .
“But this spirit,
fiery and beautiful as it was, was fraught with grave dangers. The glory that
it invoked and the passion that it aroused were so intensely Hindu that Muslims
were automatically left out. Not that they were deliberately excluded. . . .
However that may be, it seems now not unlikely that had the influence of Tilak
and Aurobindo lasted in its original intensity, we might have had two Indias
today— a Hindu-istan and a Pak-istan, both overlaying and undermining each
other. . . .
“However that be,
the fact remains that the conditions of our country being what they were, the
beneficial effects of Tilak’s and of Aurobindo’s political personalities were
soon exhausted, and might, if prolonged, have proved dangerous, if Gandhiji had
not come on the scene. . . .”
Subject,
politics,—taboo. Writer Kripalani a “romantic” and “idealistic” visionary
without hold on realities, living only in academic ideas—so not worth
commenting. All the present Congress lot seem to be men who live in ideas only,
mostly secondhand, borrowed from Europe (Socialism, Communism etc.), borrowed
from Gandhi, borrowed from tradition or borrowed from anywhere; Kripalani looks
down on the old Moderates for being in a different way exactly what he himself
is—only they were classics and not romantics. So what is the use of reading their
“histories”? However quite privately and within brackets[ii] I will enlighten you on one or two points.
(1) The Swadeshi movement was
idealist on one side (no great movement can go without an ideal), but it was
perfectly practical in its aims and methods. We were quite aware of the poverty
of India and its fallen condition, but we did not try to cure the poverty by
Khaddar and Hindi prachar. We advocated the creation of an industrial India and
made the movement a Swadeshi movement in order to give that new birth a field
and favourable conditions — cottage industries were not omitted in our view, but there were no fads. The Swadeshi
movement created the following very practical effects:
(a) It destroyed the
Moderate reformist politics and spread the revolutionary mentality (as
Jawaharlal now calls it) and the ideal of independence.
(b) It laid the foundations
of an industrial India (not of course wholly industrial, that was not our
intention) which is however slowly growing today.
(c) It brought in the
commercial classes and the whole educated middle class into the political
field—and not the middle class only, while Moderatism had touched only a small fringe.
(d) It had not time to bring
in the peasantry, but it had begun the work and Gandhi only carried it farther
on by his flashy and unsound but exciting methods.
(e) It laid down a method of
agitation which Gandhi took up and continued with three or four startling
additions, Khaddar, Hindiism, Satyagraha = getting beaten with joy, Khilafat, Harijan
etc. All these had an advertisement value, a power of poking up things which
was certainly livelier than anything we put into it. Whether the effects of
these things have been good is a more doubtful question.
(2) As a matter of fact the
final effects of Gandhi’s movement have been
(a) A tremendous fissure
between the Hindus and Mahomedans which is going to be kept permanent by
communal representation.
(b) A widening fissure
between caste Hindus and Harijans, to be made permanent in the same way.
(c) A great confusion in
Indian politics which leaves it a huge mass of division, warring tendencies, no
clear guide or compass anywhere.
(d) A new constitution which
puts the conservative class in power to serve as a means of maintaining British
domination or at least as an intolerable brake on progress—also divides India
into five or six Indias, Hindu, Moslem, Pariah, Christian, Sikh etc.
(e) A big fiasco [iii]
of the Non-Cooperation movement which is throwing politics back on one side to
reformism, on the other to a blatant and insincere Socialism.
That, I think, is the sum and substance of the matter.
As for the Hindu-Moslem affair, I saw no reason why the greatness of
India’s past or her spirituality should be thrown into the waste-paper basket
in order to conciliate the Moslems who would not at all be conciliated by such
a stupidity. What has created the Hindu-Moslem split was not Swadeshi, but the acceptance
of the communal principle by the Congress, (here Tilak made his great blunder),
and the farther attempt by the Khilafat movement to conciliate them and bring
them in on wrong lines. The recognition of that communal principle at Lucknow
made them permanently a separate political entity in India which ought never to
have happened; the Khilafat affair made that separate political entity an
organised separate political power. It was not Swadeshi, Boycott, National
Education, Swaraj (our platform) which made this tremendous division, how could
it? Tilak whom the Kripalani man blames along with me for it, is responsible
not by that, but by his support of the Lucknow affair—for the rest, Gandhi did
it with the help of his Ali brothers.
There you are. On a tabooed subject—it is, I think, enough. Not at all
for circulation you understand and quite confidential.
14 April 1936
(CWSA, Vol. 35, Sri Aurobindo on Himself and the Ashram, pp.
18-21)
[i] K. R. Kripalani, “Fifty Years of Growth”, The
Visva-Bharati Quarterly, vol. I, part
IV, New Series (February –April 1936), pp. 53–60.
[ii] Sri Aurobindo put brackets at the beginning
and end of this reply to indicate that it was not to be circulated in the
Ashram at that time. — Ed.
[iii] I
am referring to my prophecy made at the beginning of the Non-Cooperation
movement, “It will end in a great confusion or in a great fiasco.” I was not a
correct prophet, as I have pointed out before. It should have run, “It will end
in a great confusion and a great fiasco.” But after all I was not
speaking from the supramental which alone can be infallible.
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