By the grace of God this mentality has now been changed. The masses
and the classes of our country have associated 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 substitute 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 masses, 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 gods, 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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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