Chitta Ranjan Part 2

"I gave a beggar from my little store Of well-earned gold. He spent the shining ore And came again, and yet again, still cold And hungry as before.

I gave a thought, and through that thought of mine He finds himself a man, supreme, divine, Fed, clothed, and crowned with blessings manifold, And now he begs no more."

Such is the nature of Chitta Ranjan's charity which has aimed not merely at alleviating want, but at creating independence.

Patriotism is with Chitta Ranjan another name for socialism by which we mean his ardent love for the suffering humanity. He loves this country as it gives shelter to his poor brethren whom his religion has taught him to look upon as incarnations of Narayana.

When in April 1917 the political leaders of Bengal asked Chitta Ranjan to preside over the annual session of the Provincial Conference, he delivered a speech in Bengali which was unique in character and form and in which Chitta Ranjan stated that socialism and patriotism were almost identical so far as our country was concerned. He said in course of this speech:--

"Some people might say: 'This conference is for political discussion; what has talk about Bengal to do with it?' Such a question would be symptomatic of our disease. To look upon life not as a comprehensive whole but as divided among many compartments was no part of our national culture and civilisation.... Must we not view our political discussions from the stand-point of the whole of our countrymen? And how shall we find truth, unless we view life thus comprehensively and as a whole?... After all, what are the ultimate object and significance of this political thought and endeavour? If we wish to express it in one word, we shall have to say--what has been said so often--that the object of our politics will be to build up the Bengalees into a nation of men.... It is therefore that we shall have to ascertain what our present condition is, and in order to ascertain this we shall have to take first into consideration the material circ.u.mstances of our people. This again will require that we shall have to enquire into the condition of our peasantry--whether agricultural wealth is increasing or decreasing and whether agriculture is flourishing or otherwise. This in its turn will lead us to a further enquiry still, viz, as to why our people are leaving their villages in increasing numbers and are coming to settle within towns. Is it because the villages are insanitary or is there any other reason for that? Thus we find that an adequate discussion of politics will involve a consideration of agricultural questions as well as the questions of village-sanitation. At the same time we shall have to consider whether we can improve our material condition even by bringing under tillage all the available culturable land of the country. If we can't, then we shall have to consider the question of industry and trade as well."

But why do we fail to enquire into the condition of our country in this way? We never look to our country, never think of our countrymen, of our past national history, or our present material condition, for the vanity arising from false education has rendered us blind and callous. Chitta Ranjan has truly remarked in the same paper.

"We boast of being educated; but how many are we? What room do we occupy in the country? What is our relation to the vast ma.s.ses of our countrymen? Do they think our thoughts and speak our speech? I am bound to confess that our countrymen have little faith in us.

... Besides, we seem to look upon them with contempt. Do we invite them to our a.s.semblies and our conferences? Perhaps we do when we want their signatures to some pet.i.tion to be submitted before the Government; but do we a.s.sociate with them heartily in any of our endeavours? Is the peasant a member in any of our committees or conferences?"

By the grace of G.o.d this mentality has now been changed. The ma.s.ses and the cla.s.ses of our country have a.s.sociated themselves in the present national movement. The peasant delegates are now honoured members of even the Indian National Congress. The note of warning that Chitta Ranjan struck was very opportune. This set our leaders to feel the heart-throbbing of our mother country. But what led us astray?

Chitta Ranjan has justly remarked:--

"Mimic Anglicism has become an obsession with us: we find its black foot-print in every walk and endeavour of life. We subst.i.tute meeting houses for temples; we perform stage-plays and sell pleasures in order to help charities. We hold lotteries in aid of our orphanages; we give up the national and healthful games of our country and introduce all sorts of foreign importations. We have become hybrid in dress, in thought, in sentiment, and culture and are making frantic attempts even to be hybrids in blood. What wonder, then, that in this new pursuit of western ideals we should forget that money is only a means to an end and not an end in itself?"

What has made us shallow; why have we, the so-called educated, become strangers to our own countrymen? For like other ideals, our ideal of education also has become mean and impoverished; and so what was easy and natural--we have made it complex and difficult. We must even now beware and listen to the wise warning of Bankim--a warning all too unheeded when it was first uttered. But one thing is certain that unless we change the whole organism of our educational system and make it harmonise with our national ideals even our existence is threatened. For this education has created a wide gulf between the educated and the ma.s.ses, which our national existence demands to bridge over. About our present system of education Chitta Ranjan has said:--

"It has imparted an element of unnecessary anglicism into our manners and modes of life--so that in outer seeming it might almost appear as if the educated Bengalee had little organic touch with the heart of his countrymen. Then, again this education has made us familiar not with things but with words; it has made us clever but not men.... We have acquired a despicable habit of looking down with contempt, upon those who have not received this English Education of ours; we call them "illiterate" and "uneducated" and sneer at their ignorance. But these uneducated countrymen have hearts and sympathies; they worship their G.o.ds, they are hospitable to guests, they feel for the suffering and distress of their neighbours.... To me it seems perfectly clear that if we want to lead our newly-awakened national consciousness in the paths of true knowledge, education should be diffused through the medium of our own vernacular and not through the unwholesome medium of English."

The reason for this ghastly failure in our national life is palpable from other points of view also. We the educated few, never co-operated with the ma.s.ses of our countrymen. We are not only proud of our education, but also proud of our wealth and proud of our caste: and this three-fold pride has so deadened and blinded our senses that, in all our endeavours we leave quite out of account those who are the flesh, blood and back-bone of the land. The gentry of our country are mostly ill educated and therefore their pride springs from emptiness.

To speak the truth, the so-called educated have no right to mix with their countrymen. They are narrow, callous and anglicised. They fail even now to understand that in this crucial moment of Indian History, the whole country should stand as one in working out her future destiny. Here the Hindus and the Mohammedans should co-operate, the Brahmins, the Vaidyas and the Kayasthas should come out hand in hand with the peasants and the chandals. Chitta Ranjan harped upon the same theme in his presidential address at the Provincial Conference:--

"Those who const.i.tute 40 out of 46 millions of our countrymen,--those who produce our bread by their labour--those who in their grinding poverty have kept alive the torch of their ancient culture and ancient polity--those whom our English civilization and English culture and English law-courts have yet been powerless entirely to corrupt--those whom the oppression of Zemindars and Mahajans have failed to crush--are we,--a corrupt and effete handful--are we their betters and superiors? We boast of our Hinduism; but with our false pride of caste we are striking Hinduism at its very root. Even now while there is time, let us perceive our fearful and heedless blunder. In our oppressed and down-trodden fellow-brethren let us recognise the image of Narayana: before that sacred and awful image, let us abandon all false pride of birth and breed and let us bend our heads in reverence and true humility. These seething millions of your land--be they Christians or Mahomedans or Chandals--they are your brothers; embrace them as such, co-operate with them and only then will your labours be crowned with success."

In taking a survey of our present condition, we have to think of the poverty of the peasant-cla.s.s, and closely connected with this question of poverty is the question of village depopulation. The village is the centre of our civilisation and culture; and hence the decay of village-life is bound to cripple and enfeeble our body-politic. Now the cause of this village depopulation is two-fold. In the first place, there is the ravage of malaria and in the second place, there is the temptation of city-life with its ease, luxury and commercial and money-making facilities. Thus modern cities like some huge reptiles are swallowing up the ancient village centres of our country; and one of our chief duties will be to re-establish the health, prosperity and welfare of the villages. In order to do this, we shall have to improve the water-supply of our villages, to remove jungles, to educate the common people in the laws of health and sanitation.

Also in order that agriculture may flourish, we shall have to establish banking inst.i.tutions upon a small scale. For this combined and harmonious work we must have a plan. Chitta Ranjan has suggested one in his presidential address at the Provincial Conference of 1917:--

Our first step will be to organise all the villages of each district into a number of village groups or unions. Where one village is sufficiently large and populous, that by itself will const.i.tute one union or group. In the case of smaller villages, several of them will be combined to form one group or union. Then a census must be taken of the adult males of each village-union: These will form the primary village a.s.semblies; and they will elect from among themselves a panchayet or executive body of five members. This panchayet or executive body will have the sole administration of the village-group in its hands. It will look to sanitation; it will arrange for water-supply; it will establish night-schools; it will arrange for industrial and agricultural education; in short the domestic economy of the village-group will be entirely in the hands of the Panchayet.

Besides, in each village-group there will be a public granary; each agricultural proprietor will contribute to this granary according to his quant.i.ty of land; and in years of drought and scarcity, the resources of this public granary will be drawn upon to feed the people.

In case of petty disputes, civil or criminal the panchayet will be the sole deciding authority, but in the case of larger disputes, they will report to the district civil and criminal courts; and their reports will be treated as the sole plaints or complaints in such cases.

In the next place, the primary a.s.sembly of each group, will, according to its population, select from five to twenty five members to the district a.s.sembly. These district a.s.semblies will consist of members numbering from 200 to 500 and will exercise the following powers:--

(1) It will exercise general supervision over the working of the panchayets and the affairs of the village group.

(2) It will devise ways and means of the better performance of the functions of panchayets; and it will be directly responsible for the education and sanitation of the district capital.

(3) It will devise means for the improvement of agriculture and cottage industries.

(4) It will supervise the sanitation of the villages included in each village-group: and will be directly responsible for the sanitation of the district council.

(5) It will start such industrial and business concerns as may be best suited to further the resources of the district.

(6) It will employ chowkidars and peace-officers for the villages.

(7) It will have sole charge of the district police.

(8) Each district a.s.sembly will elect its own President and will appoint sub-committees for the discussion of different subjects.

(9) For the provision of cheap capital, each district a.s.sembly will open a bank: this bank will have branches in each village-group.

(10) The district a.s.semblies will have power to raise by taxation the money necessary for its requirements.

(11) The present local and district boards will be abolished.

(12) Necessary laws will have to be pa.s.sed to place the primary and district a.s.semblies on a legal basis.

This out-line of work is very closely connected with Indian socialism.

This is what we now call Swaraj or self-government of the villages.

These inst.i.tutions did actually exist in our country from very ancient times; they grew and developed with our growth, and they have a peculiar harmony with the genius of our national character. Chitta Ranjan has therefore proposed only reversion to our older social inst.i.tutions. But life among us now is not so simple as it was before; it has become complex, difficult and intricate. Hence what was inchoate requires to be put into a system. The panchayet was a natural out-growth of our ancient village community! It consisted of those five persons who naturally and easily emerged into prominence by their qualities of character and intellect. The authority of the panchayet lasted only so long as the community at large tacitly accepted their authority. Now the question arises, "Will the Government entrust so much power to us?" Again there are the Anglo-Indian papers crying themselves hoa.r.s.e, "No no, there is so much of anarchism in the land, it will lead to fearful abuses if the people are entrusted with any large share of power." But the real fact is just the opposite, if the people are given opportunities of serving their country on a larger scale, the so-called anarchism will die out of itself. Of this Chitta Ranjan says in his address:--

"Since the days of the swadeshi movement our young men have been possessed with the ardent desire to serve their country. At the time of the Ardhodoy yoga (the most auspicious moment for taking a bath in the Ganges), and again at the time of the Damodar floods of 1913, this desire for service found n.o.ble vent in action; and the help rendered by our young men on these two occasions has been repeatedly acknowledged even by high officials of the Government. But unfortunately much of this n.o.ble energy and zeal goes utterly to waste; there is no permanent channel through which it can be made to flow; there is no work of durable utility to which we have been able to apply it. Hence a feeling of impatience and despair has arisen in the minds of our young men; and sedition is the outer manifestation of this feeling of impatience and despair."

It will be the part of wise statesmanship not simply to check the symptom but to cure the disease--not simply punish sedition but to root out the deep seated cause which gives rise to it. Our young men labour under the impression that the bureaucracy will give them no opportunity of doing real service to their country. This impression must be removed and they must be given opportunities for larger co-operation in the affairs of administration of the country. These young men have hearts to feel and a burning zeal for service; they think that instead of being utterly suppressed the activities of these young enthusiasts ought to be given proper field and scope. The English have no doubt done us immense deal of good and we are grateful to them for that. By holding before our eyes the ideal of an alien culture and civilization, the English have roused us from the stupor, torpidity and lethargy of spirit into which we had gradually come to sink. They have helped to awaken our national consciousness and to re-establish our national vitality. We are no doubt grateful for these manifold services. But are there no reasons for the English to be grateful to India? Are they not in honour bound in return of the many benefits they have derived from us to give us every scope of shaping our national life? Chitta Ranjan has also harped upon this point in his address at the Provincial Conference:--

"I am confident that the praise and grat.i.tude which are their due for these manifold services will flow forth in an abundant measure from our hearts. But let us look to another aspect of the question. What was England before her advent to India? What was her position in the hierarchy of world powers? Can it be denied that the sovereignty of India increased the power and prestige of England a hundred-fold and more? If then India has reason to be grateful to England, is not England also under a corresponding debt of immense grat.i.tude to India?

Of the grat.i.tude of India, proofs have been forth-coming again and again. Of the grat.i.tude of England, the proof is now to come; and if you refuse to grant our legitimate prayer, we shall take it that your grat.i.tude is an empty and meaningless phrase."

To a patriot when he goes to take a survey of the present condition of India, the first thing that presents itself is the deplorable state of the agriculturists; and that at once reminds us of our poverty. We all know that in the absence of trade and commerce agriculture is the chief means of our subsistence. In his address at the Bengal Provincial Conference Chitta Ranjan has presented before us a pitiable picture of our peasantry. The annual income of a peasant of our country ranges from sixteen to twenty rupees. This amount is certainly insufficient for a peasant even to keep his body and soul together. A prisoner in a Government Jail in India gets Rs. 48 annually for his subsistence. The comparison clearly shows that for bare subsistence the peasants have to incur debts. There is not one single village in Bengal where at least 75% of the inhabitants are not in debt; and there are villages where this frightful indebtedness extends to the whole of the population. Thus it appears, first, that the peasant by tilling his land does not earn enough to give him an adequate livelihood; and secondly, that out of the little that he earns a portion finds its way into the pocket of the "Mahajan". And poverty is the source of all corruption, in the case of the peasants poverty grinds them in two ways. In the first place, it makes them weak, feeble, spiritless, and in the second place it has become a frightful source of theft and robbery. Thus from whatever point of view we consider the matter, the removal of poverty seems to be one of our chief and foremost problems.

In order to fight out poverty agriculture will not be sufficient for us. Without industry and commerce our poverty will never be removed.

We had commerce though not on European lines. Time was when we earned our own bread and wove our own clothes. We had corn in our granaries; our cattle gave us milk; our tanks supplied us with fish; and the eye was smoothed and refreshed by the limpid blue of the sky and the green foliage of the trees. All day long the peasant toiled in the fields; and at eve returning to his lamp-lit home, he sang the song of his heart. For six months the peasant toiled in the field: and for the remaining six months of the year he worked at the spinning wheel and distaff as was most consonant with the natural genius of his being.

To-day that peasant is gone--his very breed extinct; gone too is that house-hold with its ordered and peaceful economy of life. The granaries are empty of their golden wealth; the kine are dry and give no milk; and the fields once so green are dry and parched with thirst.

The evening lamp is no more lighted; the house-hold G.o.ds are no longer worshipped; even the plough cattle have to be sold in order to give us some poor and meagre sustenance. The tanks have dried up; their water has become unwholesome; and the peasant has lost his natural freshness and gaiety of temperament. What will remedy this? Chitta Ranjan has thus said in his address--

"Agriculture is not sufficient to give us our subsistence. Trade and commerce we must adopt; only our road must not be the road of Industrialism. In the days of old when our life was natural, normal, we had our own fashion and method of trade--a fashion dictated by the law of our being, by the genius of our soul. There we find that when the season of agriculture was over, our peasants would weave their clothes and prepare other articles of domestic use. They had not to look forward to Manchester to clothe them. Our cottage industries have perished; and the muslin-industry of Dacca and other parts of Bengal, once so famous and prosperous--has practically vanished. So also has vanished cotton cultivation--once conducted on an extensive scale but the secret of which now seems to have died out. Why should we not take to the spinning wheel as before and weave our own clothes?

The bra.s.s ware industry of Bengal--that also has practically disappeared, chiefly for lack of patronage; for economic prudence aside, even our aesthetic taste has grown so coa.r.s.e and vile that we prefer false and tawdry imitations to genuine and durable articles of value. Thus all our national industries have vanished and with these have vanished our wealth and prosperity."

How to reconstruct these industries and restore a portion of our ancient affluence? We must have no traffic with industrialism, for our simple industries are powerless to cope with the dynamic force of western industrialism. In the first place we have to give up our luxury and licence. They have filtered down even to the cottage of the cultivator. We must give them up if we wish to awaken the powers of our latent self and so invigorate the whole of our social and national life. Home-spun and coa.r.s.e clothes should not p.r.i.c.kle us. The temperance and restraint which will be necessary in order to sacrifice our luxury will be healthful and beneficent for our soul. Curtailment of luxuries which means non-importation of foreign articles will conserve our wealth and give a chance of new life to our dying industries and starved handicrafts.

As a true patriot Chitta Ranjan foresaw as early as the year 1917 that our national regeneration lay in the curtailment of our luxuries. To get rid of the materialism of Europe we must turn to our home industries. He advised his countrymen to fall back upon the spinning wheel and to weave their own clothes, be they coa.r.s.e or fine. He has often said that until we, as a nation, are purged of the impurities consequent upon western license, all our healthy growth must become impossible. For it is certain, that

"Nation grown corrupt Love bondage more than liberty-- Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty."

CHAPTER VII.

Chitta Ranjan as a Politician.