Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/67

Rh country to a high level they could think of only one way, the complete Westernisation of India. English dress, English habits, even English diet and English life must, they thought, be imported into this country before we could think of replacing the English Bureaucrats. Ladies must learn, widows must remarry, castes must go,—all because we must be equal to our rulers in efficiency and strength. These early English-educated leaders advocated Social Reform with the same object with which Japan, nearly seventy years back threw away her crude military weapons in favour of the modern instruments of destruction. In short, love of imitation, loss of individuality, the glamour of the English civilisation and a fierce desire to get rid of India's inferiority, joined with the liberalising tendencies of the Western thought, ushered the era of Social Reform in India.

As years passed by, the wildness of these reformers somewhat abated. But the central idea that possessed them was faithfully transmitted to the next genration. Even Ranade was obessed with the idea of getting, so to speak a certificate from the rulers about the equal social status of the Indians. In all the social programme he has left us, we do not come accross a single item wherein he has departed from the English model. The idea that the English were Heaven-sent trustees of this country dominated Indian thought in his days also and it was believed that once the English had to concede that Indians had socially advanced up to their level political rights could not, with decency, be refused. It was Vishnushastri Chiploonkar, who gave a rude shock to this blind optimism and declared that if Indian