India -- Description and travel; India -- Politics and government -- 1765-1947
[44] For Bepin Chandra Pal’s action during a prosecution of the
_Bande Mataram_, see Introduction, p. 23.
[45] _Bande Mataram_, January 21, 1908.
[46] As Macaulay is no longer thought generally necessary to
education, it may be worth while to recall a few sentences of his
indictment of a whole people nearly twice as numerous as his own. The
passage comes in his essay on Warren Hastings: “A war of Bengalis
against Englishmen was like a war of sheep against wolves, of men
against demons.... The physical organization of the Bengali is
feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His
pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid.
During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more
hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to
which his constitution and his situations are equally unfavourable.
His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to
helplessness, for purposes of manly resistance; but its suppleness
and its tact move the children of sterner climates to admiration
not unmingled with contempt. All those arts which are the natural
defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to the
Ionian of the time of Juvenal, or to the Jew of the dark ages. What
the horns are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, what the
sting is to the bee, what beauty, according to the old Greek song,
is to woman, deceit is to the Bengali.” And so on, for many more
sentences of nicely balanced rhetoric.
[47] _Bande Mataram_, January 22, 1908.
[48] On May 3, 1908, Mr. Arabindo Ghose was arrested on the charge of
being implicated in a conspiracy to provide rifles and dynamite for
revolutionary purposes.
[49] _The Times of India_, October 26, 1907.
CHAPTER XIII
A MAHRATTA SHOE
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