Page:Modern review 1921 v29.pdf/456

Rh stick with which Government goes for over-importunate beggars. On the contrary, I say that a dependence on the favours of others is the sign of the truly pessimistic wretch. I refuse to be a party to the attitude that unless we bend our knees and fold our hands there is no hope for the country. I believe in our country and I have a great respect for the powers of our people. And, above all, I know for certain that if our present unity be not a realisation of India’s essential oneness from within, if it be something depending on the changing of his mood by the foreigner, then is it doomed to repeated futility.

Therefore it is always incumbent on us to inquire and find out what is the true way of India. To establish a personal relationship between man and man was always India’s main endeavour. Our relationships extended to the most distant connections, continued unrelaxed with children even when grown up, and included neighbours and villagers irrespective of race or caste. The householder was bound by family ties to preceptor and teacher, guest and wayfarer, landlord and tenant,— not ties prescribed by religion or law, but of the heart. Some were as fathers, others as sons, some as brothers, others as intimates. Whomsoever we came into contact with we drew into the circle of relationship. So we never got into the habit of looking on man as a machine, or a tool for the furtherance of some interest.

There may be a bad as well as a good side to this, but it was the way of our country,—nay more, it is the way of the East.

We saw this in the Japanese war. War is doubtless a mechanical thing now-a-days and those who engage in it have to act and become as parts of a machine. And yet every Japanese soldier was something more than a machine. He was not reduced to a blind piece of war material, nor to a blood-thirsty brute. They all remained related to their Mikado and their country in a reverential self-dedication. So, in our old days, our warriors did not go to their death like pawns moved by an unknown player, but, through their chiefs, each of them dedicated himself to the Kshatra-dharma. No doubt this made the ancient battle-field resemble a vast sacrifice of self-immolation and the westerner may exclaim that it was magnificent, but not war, but the Japanese by not neglecting their pristine magnificence, while making efficient modern war, won the admiration of East and West alike.

Anyhow, that is our nature. We are unable to turn necessity to account unless we first purify it with the touch of personal relation. And so we have often to take on ourselves extra burdens. The ties of necessity are narrow and confined to the place of business. If master and servant are merely so related, their commerce is confined to the giving and taking of work and wages, but if personal relations are brought in, then is the burden of each cast on the other through the whole gamut of their respective joys and sorrows.

Let me give a modern illustration of what I mean. I was present at the Provincial Conferences of Rajshahi and Dacca. Of course we all looked on the work of the Conference as a serious piece of business, but what took me by surprise was, that the demands of hospitality, and not of the business of the day, were the more conspicuous — as if we had accompanied a bridegroom to his wedding — and the requirements of our comfort and our amusement were so insistent that they must have strained our hosts to the limit. If they had reminded us that we had come to do patriotic work and that there was no reason to suppose that we had laid them under some eternal obligation, they would have been justified. But it is not our characteristic to admit business as an excuse for keeping to one’s own concerns. However business-like our modern training may be making us, the host must still be above mere business considerations. We cannot allow even business to remain untouched by the heart. And so at the Conferences we were less impressed by the business done than by the hospitality received. Those meetings of our countrymen, with all their western paraphernalia, were unable to get rid of their eastern heart. So, also, with the Congress, that much of it which is truly national — its hospitality