Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/299

284 masses of India would not materialise for obvious reasons, he worked along other ways for the same ends. His dream was to create a band of intellectuals in the land whom sheer-hunger-urge would compel to descend into the arid plains of unlearned human dwelling and give of their best there.

But there was one thing which possibly escaped him and that was the gap created by this same education between the city-dwellers and the village-dwellers. He lacked also possibly, being a city-bred man himself, in that real contact with the village economy without which no bridging of the gulf between the classes and the masses is possible. And possibly he forgot also that a negative urge could never produce or stimulate a positive patriotism : starvelings could possibly not really be the active instruments of salvation for India’s pauper millions.

But within these limitations, it must be confessed that Asutosh has beaten the Bureaucracy at its own game, that he has infused the breath of Asianism and Humanism into the corpse of a sterilised University system; rescued it from stiff-necked pedants and wily charlatans, made of it a magazine of free ideas and the rally-centre of Bengal’s higher culture. In fact, he has attempted and achieved a most difficult task : he has created a State within the State—a State of autonomy for teacher and taught within the State which is yet a stronghold of orthodox irresponsibility. Sir Asutosh has been a supreme adept in repelling all invasions, from all quarters, of his kingdom—he repelled the Swadeshi attack of twenty years ago as much as the more insidious invasion of the Curzonian diplomacy and stiffened the defences : he successfully side-tracked the big assault of the Gandhi-Dasite wreckers (of whose company my humble self was also one) and after having weathered the storm, piloted the boat safe to harbour athwart the sly skirmishings of the new Reformed regime and across the now-famous Government House thunders. And this was how the Bengal Tiger “tigered” it all across the trail—and