work of government? If the Indians, untrained, and indeed forbidden, to
bear arms, were unable at once to overthrow British rule, could they not
at least paralyse its machinery, as Bepin Chandra Pal was preaching, by
refusing to take any kind of service under it?
To such interpretations of contemporary events young Indians, who at
school read Burke and Byron and Mill "On Liberty," and in secret the
lives of Garibaldi and Mazzini, were bound to be receptive, and they
soon reached from a different base along different lines the same ground
on which the old orthodox foes not only of British rule but of Western
civilisation stood who appealed to the Baghavat-Ghita and exhorted
India to seek escape from the foreign domination that had enslaved her,
body and soul, by clinging to the social and religious ark of Hinduism
which in her golden age had made her wise and wealthy and free beyond
all the nations of the earth.
The stronghold of orthodox reaction was in the Mahratta Deccan, and its
stoutest fighters were drawn from the Chitawan Brahmans, who had never
forgiven us for snatching the cup of power from their lips just when
they saw the inheritance of the Moghul Empire within their grasp. First
and foremost of them all was the late Mr. Tilak, a pillar of Hindu
orthodoxy, who knew both in his speeches and in his Mahratta organ, the
_Kesari_, _i.e._ "The Lion," how to play on religious as well as on
racial sentiment. He first took the field against the Hindu Social
Reformers who dared to support Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill, and
his rabid campaign against them developed quickly into an equally rabid
campaign against British rule. He appealed to the pride of his Mahratta
people by reviving the cult of Shivaji, the great Mahratta chieftain who
first raised the standard of Hindu revolt against Mahomedan domination,
and he appealed to their religious passions by placing under the
patronage of their favourite deities a national movement for boycotting
British-imported goods and manufactures which, under the name of
_Swadeshi_, was to be the first step towards _Swaraj_. He it was too who
for the first time imported into schools and colleges the ferment of
political agitation, and presided at bonfires which schoolboys and
students fed with their European text-books and European clothes. The
movement died down for a time after the murder of two British officials
in Poona on the night of Queen Victoria's second jubilee in 1897 and the
sentencing of Tilak himself shortly afterwards to a term of imprisonment
on a charge of seditious and inflammatory writing. But the Partition of
Bengal was to give him the opportunity of transplanting his doctrines
and his methods from the Deccan to the most prosperous province in
India.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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