Young India: An interpretation and a history of the nationalist movement from withinLajpat Rai, Lala
History
Young India: An interpretation and a history of the nationalist movement from within
Lajpat Rai, Lala
India -- Politics and government -- 1765-1947
This time, however, the movement was brought into existence by those who
had received their inspiration from Europe. Within less than twenty
years after the great mutiny, the Nationalist Movement of India was
born, almost at the same time and place at which Lord Lytton was
presiding at the great Imperial Durbar, and announcing that the great
Queen of England was assuming the title of Empress of India. The Durbar
reduced the chiefs of India from the position of allies to that of
feudatories, but it quite unconsciously and against the intentions of
its authors raised in theory the status of the Indian subjects of the
Queen to that of citizens of the British Empire. Little did the authors
of that Durbar realise the inner significance of the move they were
making. That Durbar, we may say, marked the beginning of the movement
which filled the educated Indian with the idea of obtaining his rightful
place in the Empire. He became articulate and began to assert himself.
He was no longer satisfied with the minor positions which he held in the
Government of India. He claimed his country as his own, and raised the
cry of “India for the Indians.” His cry gained strength when he found
that the India which he looked down upon in the fifties or sixties, the
system of thought and life which he considered barbarous, primitive and
old fashioned, and the past which he despised, were after all not so bad
as he had thought.
The latter was the contribution of the Brahmo Samaj, the Theosophical
Society, the Society for the Resuscitation of Sanskrit Literature, the
Bengal Sahitya Parishad, the Maharastra Sabha, the Arya Samaj, the
Sanatan Sabhas and other societies of a similar nature. The Bengali and
the Mahratta writers, who had carried on researches in Indian history
and unearthed valuable documents and written in their respective
vernaculars, contributed materially to the growth of this feeling. The
Theosophical Society began to praise and justify every Hindu institution
and to find science in every custom. In fact, for a time, the
thoughtful began to fear lest the pendulum was swinging the other way
and we were in the midst of a wave of reaction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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