Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/297

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The passing away of Sir Asutosh Mookerjee and Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das—twin-souls, however contrasted and separated by accident and circumstance within a year’s swift interval, has been nothing short of a national tragedy. And yet adversity hath its uses and the secret of individual and collective progress is the capacity to transmute death into life. And thus India needs to be told from many an aspect of that in the life of both which can never die. India needs to assuage her thirst in that fount of rasa which coursed through that divine lilā that manifested itself in the stage of being as the composite personalities of an Asutosh and of a Chittaranjan. And once she has learnt to drink deep in that fount she will qualify also to march to the tune of the varied play of these two lives—so deep, so intense, so comprehensive, so vital, so sweet and withal so strong.

‘Sweet and strong’—these were indeed the key-notes of that compacted and synthetised harmony which made up our beloved Asutosh and our dear Chittaranjan.

The strength of Asutosh—that which earned for him the sobriquet of the Bengal Tiger and the strength of Chittaranjan the Deshabandhu were, however, of a quality, apart. As an associate of both, I have had opportunities of judging about this quality in both stalwarts and though subtle things are difficult to discriminate and describe in concrete language, I have still an overpowering, an overmastering sense of power as expressed in both lives. Asutosh’s strength lay concentrated in the brain: Chittaranjan’s in the heart. The one dominated by sheer, uncompromising hard logic and ratiocination: the other by a drive of warm impulse that irrigated, inundated the dry wastes of the analytic, the probing intellect.