Page:Anandamath, The Abbey of Bliss - Chatterjee.djvu/16

 under Mir Jaffer who ruled at the time. It is notorious that that the times were bad beyond mention. Between themselves the East India Company and the Nawab had contrived to plunge the country into a state of distress which is looked upon, even by Englishmen as a tale of their disgrace. If they were so harassed, the people might well be angry with Mussulmans for their misdeeds and persecute them as they persecuted the people and even put to the credit of the community the misdeeds of its rulers. This is really all that the author seeks to depict. It would appear that in narrating the pranks of the free lances of his Children the author gives us only what would be natural in a body of uncultured men elated with victory and excited by activity. He does not justify them nor is he in sympathy with them. It would therefore not be quite fair to him to hold him responsible for these sayings and doings of the rabble which are so obviously wrong.

But with all this, one cannot but regret the anti-Mussulman sentiments that our author has so freely introduced in the present work. Whatever poetic justice there might be for those expressions considering the situation of the people whose careers are depicted in the novel, every true son of India to-day would sincerely wish that they had not existed in the work. I would willingly have expunged those passages from the translation were it not for a desire that the author should be presented in the translation as no better or worse than he is. The mischief is in fact past undoing, but may we not, Hindus and Mussulmans, agree to forgive our author's aberrations in the respect in view of the noble lessons in patriotism that he has given us. In justification of my attempt to present the work to a larger circle of readers, I may say, that it is this