Ideology of Anti Colonial Resistance : Uniting Maharashtra, Bengal and Punjab

                                                                                           by Kalyan Kumar Chakravarty

The Punjab, Bengal and Maharashtra were united in their aggressive nationalist response to British imperialism by their spiritual Narodnism, which looked back to an Indian millennium and idealized poverty and suffering. They were also aggrieved by British policies, which led to impoverishment, bounding prices and loss of employment. The British had transformed retainers of the Peshwa, including Deshmukhs and Chitpavan Brahmins, into mere pensioners. Brutal collection of land revenue through an amendment of the Civil Procedure Code, plague in Bombay, deprivation caused to soldiers by the Punjab Land Alienation Act, 1907, fears of abrogation of the permanent settlement in Bengal, consequent on Partition, destruction of Indian village industry by British colonial policy to support Manchester, Lancashire manufacturers, constant drain of Indian resources to support the British Empire and its wars and British refusal to consider India’s self rule even as a dominion within the British Empire, persecution of the press, suppression of independent expression of opinion, open discrimination against Indians in all sectors of Governance, provided a background to the extremist turn in India’s freedom movement in in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Vedanta for Nation Building

Lala Lajpat Rai in the Punjab, Bal Gangadhar Tilak in Maharashtra and Bipin Chandra Pal in Bengal were active in transforming India from what was misconceived as a mere geographical expression into a living and united nation. They rejected the idea that India required the British colonial agency to act like a nation. They saw nationalism as an emotionally vibrant and fortifying rationale, and looked beyond the fragmentation of native states or sectarian discords to pan Indian statehood. They drew in common on the splendor that was India. They imbibed Bankim Chandra’s idea of Krishna of Geeta and Mahabharata, as the ideal hero, dvipadam varam, ecce homo, who synthesized the divine and human, individual and universal for the good of the world or lokasangraha. They saw the Krishna cult as an inspiration for engaging in a Dharmayuddha or holy war against the British. Satyananda’s call in Bankim’s Anandamath to the martial spirit incited Aurobindo Ghosh into creating a Sanatan dal to engage in war on the British. No Wagnerian nationalist, Bankim advocated the Religion of Man, which could be practiced only with political freedom. His essays Bharat Kalanka, the Disgrace of India and Bharatvarsher Svadibhinata O Paradhinata, the Freedom and Slavery of India, in Vividha Prabandha, Miscellaneous Essays, laid the blame on India’s lack of the will to freedom, internal dissensions and reluctance to bring dharma and karma, jnana and Bhakti, renunciation and enterprise together. These ideas animated the life and work of Aurobindo and patriots across the nation.

Swami Vivekananda’s Vedantic vision, epitomized in Krishna’s homilies in Geeta, suggesting action without attachment, and his life and message, combining self transcendence of the East with empiricism of the West, were mirrored in the tremendous fusion of action and self abnegation in Lal, Bal, Pal and their followers. Vivekananda’s exhortation for transcending the excess of rajas and tamas respectively in the West and the East in a Vedantic univeralist goal of conquering both physical and inner nature, uniting Ksatravirya and Brahmatejas, manly strength and spiritual energy, his insistence on reorienting religion from pursuing personal beatitude to serving hungry millions, his characterization of foreign rule as maya, an illusion, galvanized the spirit of patriotic resistance to oppressive alien rule.

Thus, according to Tilak, the greatest lesson of Geeta was not to blanch for fear or surrender to sentimentality before danger or duty but to deal with it heroically. He urged Bharata Dharma Mahamandala at Varanasi in 1906 to propagate the common Vedic root of Indian dharma, which had held the nation together. He pointed out that unlike Mohammed or Jesus who came once forever, Krishna held out promise to come again and again for holding up dharma. He spoke of the vindication in modern science of the truth of chaitanya or consciousness, pervading everything, and the philosophy of work without attachment in Yoga and Vedanta. Aurobindo described Tilak’s book The Arctic Home in the Vedas as a monument of Oriental research and his Marathi work Gita Rahasya as no mere commentary but original criticism on ethical truth. In a speech at Nagari Pracharini Sabha at Varanasi in December 1905,Tilak spoke of a national movement for bridging the divide of a Sanskrit Dravidian, Hindi Urdu Marathi Balabodha, and Devanagari and Modi running script character.

Lal Bal Pal turned away from the Teutonic Anglo Saxon model of the moderates to an ethno centric model of Aryan fatherland. They saw the culmination of the Vedic civilization in the Gita. Aurobindo wrote an introduction, Tilak, a commentary on Geeta, Lajpat Rai an Urdu biography of Sri Krishna. Lajpat’s message that unlike the West, India should not gain wealth at the cost of its soul, caught the imagination of Aurobindo, who insisted, in Karmayogin, on the pursuit of integral humanity in a quadriga, equally philosophic, emotional, mystic and active, the ideal preached in the Geeta. The gestation of India, like that of Krishna, was complete and it was time to bring the rule of evil Kamsa to end. For Aurobindo, Swaraj was necessary for India to resume its role of teacher and guide for the world, to rediscover its own true ideal of democracy and give it back to the world, a democracy based not on antagonism of rights or duties, but on dharma, in which rights and duties would regain unity and equality of all under one God. He decried the tamas, inertia, suffocating initiative and sapping strength. He insisted on a monastery of Karma Yogins, dedicated to the spiritual regeneration of the nation, mass instruction of the poor in lucrative arts and manufactures and Aryanization of the world.

In the Punjab, Swami Dayananda embodied the liberating theology in his Satyartha Prakash, Veda Bhashya, and the Arya Samaj. He went back to the Vedas as the law of life, creation and cosmos as against the worship of idols, inhuman social customs or caste divisions. His congregational samajas provided the Sikh and the Jat a shared platform. He felt that foreign rule would go when Indians would give up their own failings by returning to their faith. Aurobindo described him as a granite vein in India’s rock of the ages.

Lajpat and the extremists were clear that the British had conquered Indians with their help and would go when the help was withdrawn. Indians did not owe compliance with British laws which did not have their consent and had not given them either justice or rights. They spoke for cooperation rather than competition and laissez faire. With Lajpat, they characterized yoga and vairagya, communion and renunciation as common to both Hinduism and Islam, insisted on rationalism and tolerance rather than orthodoxy and bigotry, the essential dimensions rather than inessential, divisive rituals of religion, propagated by maulanas, pandits, and gyanis, demanded proportional rather than communal representation, a chemical rather than mechanical union, in a federation. Lajpat spoke of a democracy in which everyone would be a co worker, capitalists would not be allowed to preempt large land, untouchability would be abolished, the life of Brahmins would be open to non Brahmins, labor would be given rights and privileges and the condition of women would be uplifted.

Nation as the Mother

Bankim hailed mother land as Goddess Durga in Vande Mataram in Anandamath, who held trenchant steel in the hands of millions of her children and not the bowl of the mendicant. Aurobindo was inspired by Bankim’s mother and Nivedita’s Kali. He wrote Bhavani Mandir to celebrate Bhawani, a manifestation of Goddess Durga and the tutelary deity of Shivaji, and worshipped Bagala to spell doom for enemies. He took to yoga to release the elemental energy for engulfing the mlecchas. Mother was seen by him as the apotheosis of cosmic energy, dynamic ethical consciousness and providence in history, who demanded courage to embrace death as her caress rather than any sigh of exhaustion or resignation or prayer for mercy. In Karakahini, Aurobindo saw Narayana in everyone and everything. B.C. Pal saw the mother as held on the lap of Narayana and the nation’s place in the bosom of humanity. The destruction of the British was seen as Moira, a cosmic necessity predetermined by Shakti, for which he was a mere agent, nimittamatram. In 1907, at a Shakti celebration at the house of Raja Prasana Narain Dev in Shobha Bazaar, he advocated performance, in every house and village, of Raksha Kali puja every Amavasya night, accompanied by music and drums, to imbibe the purifying effect of the Mother Goddess who was never divorced from Shiva, even in conflict, carnage and destruction for the cause.

Combining Eastern and Western Strategy for Resistance

The trio of Lal, Bal and Pal saw politics itself as a spiritual movement and described freedom as their , human being’s and India’s birthright. Despite rejection of Western constitutionalism, they didn’t hesitate to draw their ideas from irredentist movements in the West. The use of classical heritage by Renaissance stalwarts like Petrarch and Alberti, to reinforce national pride, influenced them. Tilak harped on the revolutionary struggle in British history, Russian revolution and Japan’s rise in Asia. Lajpat wrote biographies of Mazzini and Garibaldi who unified Italy, and about Shivaji, Sri Krishna and Dayananda Saraswati. He went through both Calcutta and Punjab Universities, wrote for Hindu Muslim unity in the Urdu weekly Koh-i-noor, and asked for an understanding of the meaning which Max Muller had missed in Indian texts. In 1917, he founded the Indian Home Rule League of America. Well acquainted with the work of Henry Meyers, Beatrice Webb, Lansbury who promoted socialism in Britain, he founded the All India Trade Union Congress. Aurobindo denounced India’s ancien regime in Michelet’s metaphors. He insisted on immediate revolution from below. However, he discovered in Indian village society the seeds of collectivism, socialism and corporate feeling and pitted these against proletarian revolution based on worship of materialism. The extremist movement, released by their thought and action, drew its inspiration from ideas of the Irish Fenians, Russian anarchists, the Italian Risorgimento, including use of robbery for replenishing revolutionary war chest, import and generation of revolutionary literature, supported by secret societies of Indians abroad. They also drew from the theosophical movement in USA and Europe to oppose Hindu religious ideas of an organic collective ethical and spiritual body, against utilitarian, materialistic, mechanistic, individualistic civilization of the world. Extremist revivalism returned to the spirit rather than forms of ancient civilization, and reinterpreted the Indian tradition in the new context, giving it a dynamic and revolutionary content.

Nationalization of Economy, Culture and Institutions

Tilak promoted the Shivaji Festival because he felt Shivaji fulfilled the need of a national hero. He expressed his confidence that Bengal would give a leader like Shivaji to India. To him, Shivaji epitomized the rugged strong democratic Maratha spirit, which he combined with radical simplicity, like a sword in a scabbard, on which he modeled himself. He raised funds for restoring the Shivaji tomb in the Raigarh fortress, where Shivaji was crowned. He reminded Marathas of their heroic fights against Bijapur and Mughals. He celebrated Shivaji through a festival, with song, theatre, fair and athletics, Shivaji’s guru Ram Das in February, birthday in April, coronation in June, Ganapati worship in September. Lal Bal Pal were inspired by Shivaji’s guerilla swoops, night raids, ruses and his religious fervor, in establishing a Dharmarajya, a Hindu Rashtra, under the guidance of Ram Das. In 1904, Tagore also put his seal on this image of Shivaji.

In a speech Honest Swadeshi in 1906 in Beadon Square, presided over by Lala Lajpat Rai, Tilak objected to Lord Minto’s remark, while opening an Industrial Exhibition in Calcutta, dubbing association of political aspiration with industrial advancement of India, as dishonest. In a speech in Calcutta in 1907, he said that the Government had kept people in India from going for each other's throat and established Pax Britannica so that it could go at the throats of all Indians, and had full freedom to exploit India in British interests. Since the Government had mixed politics with commerce, India had to mix economics with politics. He asked for scientific, mechanical, industrial and vernacular education in his speech at Barsi in 1908. He incited agitation among the cotton mill workers of Bombay, with the slogan that the Government Income from Akbari for making them drunk exceeded the total income of the Maratha Empire. The riots that followed led to the closure of the cloth, freight and share markets. The extremist leaders united in supporting non cooperation, boycott of British goods and Swadeshi, including autonomous development in Industry, to bring about a blood less revolution, by withdrawing consent to serve or assist the British Government in India. They insisted on decentralization, separation of executive and judicial powers, village self government, linguistic and ethnological reorganization of states in a federation, to permit full freedom to the growth of autonomous Indian institutions, including Indian industry. In 1895, Lajpat started the Punjab National Bank—the first Indian bank to begin solely with Indian capital, and the Lakshmi Insurance Company. These initiatives were buttressed by promotion of national education and health initiatives. Lajpat was responsible for the D.A.V. College, National College, Tilak School of Politics, the Gulab Devi Hospital and the Servants of People Society. A Swadeshi company was established at Sayalkot and Dera Ismail Khan in the Punjab, in the wake of the Boycott and Swadeshi movement, that began after Bengal partition. Use of foreign sugar was proscribed by the Merchants’ Brotherhood at Multan. In Maharashtra, Tilak, with the help of Tatas, organized the Swadeshi Cooperative Stores, Bombay Swadeshi Traders’ Association, Tata Iron and Steel plant, local trading, banking, insurance and steam navigation companies, floated a Paisa Fund to promote indigenous industrial production, and used the Shivaji and Ganesh festivals as occasions for selling Swadeshi goods.

In Bengal, shops trading in British ware were picketed, marriage presents, ceremonies with foreign goods were boycotted, intermediary comprador trading operations were curtailed and some import houses had to close down their piece branches or dispose off textile stocks at drastically reduced prices. The moderates and the extremists united in fighting for reduction of salt tax and rent, income tax and excise duty on cotton. They fought for economic justice and opposed the bleeding and draining of India for free trade, by killing India’s handicrafts and exposing the peasantry to recurrent famines. The extremists saw Boycott and Swadeshi not only as an economic, but also as a political movement, to build up a republic around the village panchayat, small artisans and crafts. They campaigned against subordinate partnership of local Indian capital with foreign capital and ostracized people buying shares in British Joint Stock Company. They saw this, in the words of Tilak, as a Yoga of Bahiskara, a penance of self denial, for inflicting punishment, through a war à outrance on evil. They were not willing to throw away the alchemic stone for pebbles on the sea shore, or sacrifice the goal of complete freedom for minor concessions.

The extremist leaders of Maharashtra , Bengal and Punjab were united in questioning the British stand about unfitness of India for self rule because of India’s internal dissensions. They saw the Hindu Muslim conflict as created by the British through division of spoils and offices, as there was no mercantile or industrial rivalry between Hindus and Muslims. They wanted Swaraj for every Indian, irrespective of sectarian divisions. With Tilak, they asserted that Britain refused to permit Indian talent, industry or science to grow, or give even dominion status to India, because, in view of its larger human and natural resources, India would be like a big brass vessel tied around the small earthen pot of Britain, which would break when thrown in the breakers. With B.C. Pal, they did not want freedom for establishing white or brown manity but humanity for everyone and characterized the British rule as an economic, political, moral and spiritual wrong. They characterized the British as the mythical mermaid, part ruler part trader, accounting for their sacrifice of humanity to commodity, for detaching the Indian people from their genius and roots. Pal defended the boycott of all who supported the maya of British rule as vratya or outcaste and insisted on setting up parallel village government for education, health, infrastructure and justice. He insisted on scientific as well as liberal education and refused to accept recitation of Vande Mataram as illegal, if Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves was not a taboo. Lajpat also insisted on the conversion of the British Empire into a commonwealth of equal and free nations in which India would be a living member, as in a League of Nations. India, unlike the West, which was enslaved by compulsions of capital, labor and markets, was already spiritually free. In a Congress Presidential Address at Calcutta, Lajpat spoke of the demise of Tilak as a calamity of indescribable magnitude and lauded the purity, disinterestedness and high patriotism of Aurobindo Ghosh. He characterized the nationalists as rightarians, dedicated to right of manhood and revolution from below, and moderates are charitarians, who loved gilded bondage and gifts from above.

The hiatus between life and learning in English education had to be bridged, according to the Lal Bal Pal, through a nationalist education in both Western science and Indian tradition. While launching the Home Rule League in 1916, Tilak insisted on the uneducated Indians having equal rights like the educated, as literacy could not be the criterion for intelligence. He would not call him God if he permitted untouchability. He promoted national education to destroy the superstition of slavery that had blinded India’s spirit. In 1884, Tilak founded the Deccan Education Society in Pune, the New English School for primary studies and Fergusson College for higher education, along with Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Mahadev Ballal Namjoshi and Vishnushastri Chiplunkar. In 1901, Tagore founded the Brahmacarya Ashram at Bolpur to give an institutional form to the ideal of spiritual education and character formation. The Dawn Society, led by B.C. Pal and Brahmabandav Upadhyaya created a National Council of Education and Bengal National College in 1906 to combine vernacular and foreign language education with scientific and technical education, history of Europe as well as resurgent Asia.

British Oppression and Militant Resistance

At the same time as Tilak and Lajpat were organizing movements for all round regeneration of youth, physical, moral and intellectual, there were similar initiatives in Bengal, for nation building through the ordeal of fire. Between 1901 and 1910, Jotin Banerjee, Miss Sarala Devi Ghoshal, BA, Pulin Bihari Das set up schools, akharas, gymnasia and Anushilan Samitis for training youth in battle drills, street fighting, fencing, Jujutsu, wrestling and lathi, making of explosives and destruction of buildings and bridges. Sarala Devi began celebrations in Mymensingh, in imitation of the Shivaji Festival. In Desher Katha, the story of Bengal, Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, a Maratha Brahmin resident of Kolkata, wrote on the life of Shivaji. Aurobindo wrote Shikher Balidan, the self immolation of the Sikhs. Miss Kumudini Mitter, later, editor of Suprabhat magazine, wrote about the sacrifice of Guru Teg Bahadur, Fateh Singh and Jorawar Singh, who didn’t flinch before death and would not sacrifice their faith. Zamindars of Bengal, Marathi land owners like the Natoo Brothers, Rambhuj Dutt Chouwdhury of the Punjab supported radicals like Tilak and Lajpat Rai.

A militant national press grew up in all the three regions simultaneously. Titled Lion of Punjab or Punjab Kesari, Tilak founded the Urdu weekly Vande Mataram, the English weekly The People, a newspaper, Kesari, to voice his radical views. Yugantar brought out Mukti Kon Pathe, Which Way Freedom, a book on Tilak’s trial and life, books on Shivaji and the great uprising of 1857, and propagated movement against mlechchas under cover of the message of Krishna. Deenbandhu Mitra’s Neel Darpan incited the Neel Rebellion by describing the oppression of indigo planters. Tagore, R.C. Dutt, ICS, Bankim and Sharat Chatterjee in Bengal, Jyotiba Phule in Maharashtra wrote about the sorry state of the peasantry and depressed classes. Tilak asked for a Permanent Settlement for the Rayats rather than the Zamindars to stop the constant escalation in land revenue demands. Inflammatory material was published simultaneously in Maratha at Pune, Bombay Chronicle, Indian Sociology, London, Gaelic American, New York, Vande Mataram, Paris. On 17th June, 1906, and 14th December, 1907, Yugantar addressed people “if you cannot show yourself a man in life, show yourself one in death. Foreigners have come to decide how you are to live, but it depends entirely on you how you are to die”. It asked how long will the English remain if the Sikh again take their stand as they did at Chillianwala. Gandhi cancelled the Bardoli Satyagraha in 1922 after the isolated act of Chauri Chaura violence against the police in Gorakhpur in the teeth of protests from Lajpat Rai from the prison as also from Subhash Chandra Bose in Bengal. Bose, in a letter to brother from Insein gaol, May 8, 1927, supported the extremist stand against the moderates with the words that “I am not a shopkeeper and do not bargain. The slippery path of diplomacy I abhor as unsuited to my constitution”. In his address at the All India Youth Congress, Calcutta, December 25, 1928 he refused to accept the Gandhian view that the soul was so important that the military culture and military training could be ignored. Later, in his press statements in 1943, he supported the extremist stand that civil disobedience must develop into an arms struggle and the Indian people could qualify for freedom only when they received the baptism of fire. In 1944, in his farewell speech to his regiment he gave them a call, “blood is calling to blood, rise take up your arms”.

There was a growing sentiment that, being built on brute force, the English could be overthrown by brute force only. Assaults started being made on the lives of important Government functionaries and Indian approvers of the Government. Aurobindo joined the revolutionary society of Bombay at Baroda and sent his emissary Jatin Bandopadhaya in 1902 to meet P. Mitra, President of the secret Anushilan Samiti Bombay, to further its objectives. Tilak urged the British to act according to tarkashastra rather than markatashastra, science of logic rather than monkeys. His philosophy of anti British agitation was that the mouth didn’t open unless the nose was stopped. In 1896-97, He mobilized the Sarbojanik Sabha to deal with plague, famine and earthquakes, accompanied by riots and strikes against money lenders, plantation owners, landlords, and insisted on relief and remission. The Government withdrew recognition from the Sabha. Tilak was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months for inciting disaffection. There was a furor of protest from the Bengali newspapers and the Amraoti Congress session and he was released after a year. In both 1906 Calcutta Congress and 1907 Nagpur Congress, Bengal Constituents, including B.C. Pal, campaigned for Tilak’s election as the President, and compelled the Congress to adopt resolutions for India’s self government within the British Empire, annulment of Bengal partition, promotion of National Education and Swadeshi. In view of the moderate opposition, the extremists shifted their session from Nagpur to Surat, where a compromise to elect Lala Lajpat Rai was defeated. Tilak led his supporters in roaring down Surendranath Banerjee’s Presidential address. In the Surat Congress in 1907, the extremists came together under the leadership of Lal, Bal and Pal with active support of Aurobindo for boycott of British goods and Swaraj or home rule against the moderate stand of going slow and adapting legal means. The extremist victory was reversed by the moderates at the Allahabad Convention in 1908. Khudiram Bose had been arrested after his failed attempt on the life of Kingsford. Kennedys were killed in a Muzaffarpur explosion and attacks took place on Europeans in Lahore and Rawalpindi in 1907-08. In Rawalpindi in 1907, Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh fulminated against increase in land taxes, water rates, compulsory labor. They had pictures of revolutionaries, including Khudi Ram Bose, distributed in schools. At their call, students, railway workers and peasants attacked Government offices, missionary cottages and British business houses at Rawalpindi. Ajit Singh created the Bharat Mata Sabha in the Punjab and wrote Buried Alive about these tempestuous times. Lala Lajpat and Ajit were deported to Burma without trial . Tilak was also banished. The Bengali Vande Mataram hailed Tilak’s banishment in thrilling words, “Go, Tilak, where ever you may be sent, to crush your body…the canker of the chains will eat into every heart of the country to stir it up to duty. Nearer the God, nearer the fire. You have fulfilled your mission…startled the deep slumber of false opinions,…thrilled a pang of noble shame through callous consciences”. Tilak responded that “it may be the will of providence that the cause which I represent is to prosper more by my suffering than by my remaining free”. The extremist stand was vindicated after Secretary of State Morley’s remarks in British Parliament that a Canadian fur coat was inappropriate in Deccan summer, suggesting that Western democracy was unsuitable for India. . 

The Indian Explosive Substances Act and Summary Justice Act 1908, the Press and Arms Acts were resorted to against the radical press and leaders. The Indian criminal law was amended. Secret societies were banned. There was a failed attempt to assassinate the British Viceroy, Lord Hardinge on the transfer to capital of British India from Calcutta to New Delhi. A mutiny was planned by the Ghadar Party and the Jugantar Group to start in Punjab, Bengal, Burma, Siam and rest of India, beginning Christmas Day, 1915. The plot was thwarted after British intelligence uncovered the plot through German and Indian double agents in Europe and Southeast Asia. Several leaders of the Jugantar party including Aurobindo Ghosh were arrested in connection with bomb making and deported to the Andaman Cellular Jail. On return to India from America in 1920, Rai presided over a session of the Congress in Calcutta, to support the non-cooperation movement and oppose the oppressive Rowlatt Act—that allowed British officials to arrest an Indian on suspicion without evidence. During the agitation led by Lajpat against the Simon Commission, he was injured in a police assault led by Sanders and died of a heart attack in 1928. The young revolutionary Bhagat Singh assassinated Sanders and was sentenced to death.

Radical Challenge

Unlike moderates, Lal Bal Pal refused to see Indian politics in the light of English constitutional history in the Witenagemot and the Magna Carta. They took Congress out of its occidental fascination with the dignified impotence of an august, leisurely and temperate assembly, Indianized it and brought it home to the masses. They urged the Congress to transform politics from a holiday recreation into an everyday obligation. For them, liberty preceded progress, while, for moderates, progress preceded liberty. Between 1905-10, they seized on the four main points of Bengal agitation, Swaraj, or home rule, Swadeshi, or self determination, National Education and Boycott and made these into a practical program of agitation in India. They refused to follow the moderate path of Plea, Prayer and Petition in England. Aurobindo Ghosh agreed with them that the Baniya approach of trading in half measures diplomacy, adapted by the moderates, had to be given up for the Kshatriya approach of embracing risk and sacrifice. The Indian people were not working out accidents of causality, but their higher destiny, in obedience to their divine mission for freedom. The sacrifice must be complete like that of the Carthaginian parents who sent their children to fire to Moloch. Aurobindo supported Lal Bal and Pal on giving up political accommodation, trimming and ready swearing, for unflinching sternness and martyrdom; on sannyasa, tyaga and mumuksutva, ascetic renunciation of the personal, in the service of nation and God; and, on a revolution rather than orderly evolution.

The radical challenge pioneered by Lal Bal and Pal in Punjab, Maharashtra and Bengal retains its contemporaneity and relevance till this day. The extremists, under their leadership, leavened and transformed the idea of nationalism by purging it of its westernizing inspiration, and harnessed it to the quintessential idea of the Indian nation equipped with a spiritual, moral, maternal personality. They inaugurated a movement for its regeneration from the grassroots with the cooperation of hinterland communities, irrespective of sectarian or geographical boundaries, for decolonizing and rebuilding all institutions of economic, political, social and educational governance. At this time of Indian History, some of India’s rulers are still engaged in a proto colonial policy of Divide and Rule, corporatization in the name of liberalization, degradation and destruction of India’s natural resources in the interest of a predatory few, suppression of democratic dissent, and systematic annihilation of separation of powers, foundational to democracy. It is necessary to recall the radical fervor unleashed from Maharashtra, Punjab and Bengal for stemming the consequent rot in the national economy and moral fibre. It is time to recall the sacrifices, in blood, sweat and tears, made by patriots at the threshold of the 19th and 20th centuries, to shore up defenses in the 21st century, against the erosion of the Indian ethos on false pretences, being steered by a few groups for power and self aggrandizement.

Select References

Ker, James Campbell . 1917. Political Trouble in India, Delhi : Oriental Publishers

Lala Lajpat Rai. 1924. The Hindu Muslim Problem. Lala Lajpat Rai: Writings and Speeches, vol. 2, 1920-1928, ed. by Vijaya Chandra Joshi , Delhi: University Publishers, 1966, pp. 170-222.

Pal, Bipin Chandra. 1907. Speeches of Bipin Chandra Pal, Delivered at Madras. Ganesh and Co.

             1916, Nationality and Empire, Thacker, Spink & Co / Low Price Publications

Tilak, Bal Gangadhar. 1935. Srimad Bhagavadgitarahasya or Karma-yoga-sastra, Poona : R.B Tilak Lokmanya Tilak Mandir

                   1966. Letters of Lokmanya Tilak, Poona : Kesari Prakashan    

Toye , Huge. 2009.  The Springing Tiger: A Study of the Indian National Army and of Netaji  Subhas Chandra Bose, Calcutta : Allied Publishers 

Tripathi, Amales. 1967. The Extremist Challenge: India Between 1890 and 1910. Calcutta: Orient Longmans.

                  2014. Indian National Congress and The Struggle for Freedom 1885-1947, Translated from Bengali. Amitava Tripathi, Delhi : Oxford University Press