Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
forms of _Yoga_ asceticism, man can transform himself into a super-man,
and he has constituted himself the high priest of a religious revival
which has taken a profound hold on the imagination of the emotional
youth of Bengal. His ethical gospel is not devoid of grandeur. It is
based mainly on the teachings of Krishna to Arjuna as revealed in the
_Bhagvad Gita_, and I cannot hope to define its moral purpose better
than by borrowing the following sentence from Mrs. Besant's introduction
to her translation of "The Lord's Song":--
It is meant to lift the aspirant from the lower levels of
renunciation where objects are renounced, to the loftier
heights where desires are dead and where the Yogi dwells
in calm and ceaseless contemplation, while his body and
mind are actively employed in discharging the duties that
fall to his lot in life.
This reading of the _Bhagvad Gita_ differentiates the newer Indian
conception of renunciation, which does not exclude but rather prescribes
the duty of service to society, from the older conception, which was
concerned merely to procure the salvation of the individual by his
complete detachment from all mundane affairs. With this gospel of active
self-sacrifice none can assuredly quarrel, but it is the revolutionary
form which Mr. Arabindo Ghose would see given to such activity that,
unfortunately, chiefly fascinates the rising generation of Bengalees.
For him British rule and the Western civilization for which it stands
threaten the very life of Hinduism, and therefore British rule and all
that it stands for must go, and in order that they may go every Hindu
must be up and doing. That Mr. Arabindo Ghose himself holds violence and
murder to be justifiable forms of activity for achieving that purpose
cannot be properly alleged, for though he has several times been placed
on his trial and in one instance for actual complicity in political
crime--namely, in the Maniktolla bomb case--and though he is at present
a fugitive from justice, the law has so far acquitted him. But that his
followers have based upon his teachings a propaganda by deed of the most
desperate character is beyond dispute. It has been openly expounded with
fanatical fervour and pitiless logic in a newspaper edited by his
brother, Barendra Ghose, of which the file constitutes one of the most
valuable and curious of human documents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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