The Bangla Dream, Part 2 - Significance and Genealogy
Why the বাঙালির কল্পতরু Matters
The বাঙালির কল্পতরু worked because it gave the young, ambitious, forward-looking Bengali Hindu something to strive towards - a higher culture and higher purpose for them to lose themselves into, and to contribute their lives and efforts towards. It allowed them to be able to look beyond immediate self-interest, and become a part of a once-in-a-lifetime revolution. It was the all consuming dance, the animating spirit of the Bengali Hindu people in the late 1800s, and it expressed itself in every nook and cranny of the society. Imagine what a seductive prospect it must have been for the young and ambitious to be allowed to express themselves! All through a project in which they could be a small part of something that was more important than they were. For every elite needs to be shown a dream which they can aspire towards, especially the young among them.
Again, Aurobindo points this out more eloquently than I ever will be able to, in his essay “Rishi Bankim Chandra”:
He (Bankim), first of our great publicists, understood the hollowness and inutility of the methods of political agitation which prevailed in his time and exposed it with merciless satire in his “Lokarahasya” and “Kamala Kanta’s Daftar”. But he was not satisfied merely with destructive criticism – he had a positive vision of what was needed for the salvation of the country. He saw that the force from above must be met by a mightier reacting force from below – the strength of repression by an insurgent national strength. He bade us leave the canine method of agitation for the leonine. The Mother of his vision held trenchant steel in her twice seventy million hands and not the bowl of the mendicant. It was the stern gospel of force which he preached under a veil and in images in “Anandamath” and “Devi Chaudhurani”. And he had an inspired unerring vision of the moral strength which must be at the back of the physical force. He perceived that the first element of the moral strength must be tyaga, complete self-sacrifice for the country and complete self-devotion to the work of liberation.
And finally, he concludes with:
It was thirty-two years ago that Bankim wrote his great song (Vande Mataram) and few listened; but in a sudden moment of awakening from long delusions the people of Bengal looked round for the truth and in a fated moment, somebody sang Bande Mataram. The mantra had been given and in a single day a whole people had been converted to the religion of patriotism. The Mother had revealed herself. Once that vision has come to a people, there can be no rest, no peace, no further slumber till the temple has been made ready, the image installed and the sacrifice offered. A great nation which has had that vision can never again be placed under the feet of the conqueror.
Stirring stuff, of course. But herein lies the actual reason for my desire to write this article. For I must be honest with you, that while telling the story of the বাঙালির কল্পতরু is undoubtedly my goal with this article, the exploration of this revolution was a part of higher question that I have trying to work towards. And that question is:
What guides elites in their politics? Why do they believe the things they do, and how does one go about changing this? Is it even possible to change the minds of the elite? If so, what dream can we show them?
This is of course, a burning and relevant question in India. Indian politics today is largely defined by the asymmetry of the changing beliefs of the larger population (as reflected by the current dispensation ruling India) and the atrophied resistance offered by India’s legacy institutions - the English-media, the universities, the Judiciary, other legacy institutions i.e., India’s old elite. The gist of my queries is this: Can India’s current deracinated and demoralized Legacy Nehruvian elite, so far-gone currently in their mindless opposition, ever be brought on-board with the Dharmic movement?
This is in many ways, the defining question of Indian politics today. And therefore, it deserves honest scrutiny.
And this is also why I have undertaken this exploration of the বাঙালির কল্পতরু. It is an example of how a Hindu elite was made a part of a Dharmic movement in the recent past, and in an era that came after the arrival of the British, and western modernity. Understanding how and why this happened can perhaps help us understand how and why the current Legacy Indian elite thinks the way it does. Because make no mistake about it - the Dharmic movement needs them, or at least a section of them, to defect from their creaking old ideological forts and to strengthen the indigenous idea of India. Many of the elite are among the brightest people that our country produces (on an individual level), but their energies and efforts have been tragically co-opted by wasteful foreign ideologies. And we have to reach out to them, especially the young and impressionable among them, and push them towards a fair and gracious dream.
An Old Dream
For a student of the history of Indian history, Arun Shourie’s biting masterpiece, Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud is a landmark work. Shourie, a forgotten old master of the Indic movement, is incisive, brutal and unyielding in his defenestration of the titular tricksters, ideologues and activists posing as historians. It makes for mandatory reading.
However, there was always one chapter in that book that stood out more than the others. And it is simply titled: “A circular”. When I first read this chapter, it acted as an important marker for me. It confirmed, in shockingly blunt terms, a suspicion that I always had when reading India’s official (i.e. Indian National Congress constructed) history: that something didn’t seem quite right in the things I was reading. There seemed to be a fog that was muddying the view. And it felt like a man-made fog, as if someone was putting their thumb down to prevent me from seeing the truth.
Of course, this is the infamous (শুদ্ধ-অশুদ্ধ) Shuddho-Aushuddho circular.
| Aushuddho | Shuddho |
|---|---|
| “Fourthly, using force to destroy Hindu temples was also an expression of aggression. Fifthly, forcibly marrying Hindu women and converting them to Islam before marriage was another way to propagate the fundamentalism of the ulema.” | Though the ‘ashuddho’ column reproduces the sentences only from “Fourthly…”, the Board directs that the entire matter from “Secondly… to ulema” be deleted. |
| “Sultan Mahmud used force for widespread murder, loot, destruction and conversion.” | “There was widespread loot and destruction by Mahmud.” That is, no reference to killing, no reference to forcible conversion. |
| “He looted valuables worth 2 crore dirham from the Somnath temple and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni.” | Delete “and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni”. |
| “Hindu-Muslim relations of the medieval ages constitute a very sensitive issue. The non-believers had to embrace Islam or death.” | All matters on this page to be deleted. |
| “According to Islam law non-Muslims have to choose between death and Islam. Only the Hanafis allow non-Muslims to pay jizya in exchange for their lives.” | Rewrite this as follows: “By paying jizya to Alauddin Khilji, Hindus could live normal lives.” |
| “Mahmud was a believer in the rule of Islam whose core was ‘Either Islam or death’.” | Delete |
To quote Shourie:
“The design is… to attribute evil to the religion of our country, Hinduism; it is to present Islam as the great progressive force which arose; it is to lament the fact that humanity did not heed the teachings of progressive men like Muhammad - till the “remarkable and comprehensive” Russian Revolution of 1917!”
The circular is tangible proof that we are not mad that when we read our allotted history, we feel like we are reading the history of a different country. And it is a brilliant, if not slightly terrifying insight into the minds of the political and intellectual elite that inherited rule of India from the British Crown, and a stunning formalization of the post-Partition communal ceasefire agreement that we know as Indian “secularism”.
And most importantly, for my series, A Fair and Gracious Dream, this circular and this concept of শুদ্ধ-অশুদ্ধ, is a great way to capture the final destination of the intellectual journey of the group of people that I like to call the “Legacy Elite”, or the “Old Elite”. And it is obviously a useful tool for us as we try and decipher the taste of the broth of Dreams that our Elite has prepared for our consumption. This is why I have decided to term the second part of this series, “The শুদ্ধ Dream” (The “Shuddho” Dream)
The genealogy of the idea
First, I would like to state that I will be focusing only on the journey of the Elite over the last 200 years. And even within them, I will concentrate on the intellectual elite, because all the other kinds of elites (economic, political, cultural, etc.) mostly get their sense of right and wrong, their Dreams, from the intellectual elite who pontificate over them. Therefore, it becomes important to ask the following of the Indian Legacy Elite:
What did they read throughout history?
What ideas did they come into contact with?
Were these ideas emergent (Indic) ideas, or foreign imports?
And finally, how did these Dreams lodge themselves into the mind of the entire elite?
These Dreams essentially function the same way as genetic code functions in the growth of a human being. When a human being is a zygote, all he or she “is”, is a singular cell with some genetic material in the form of proteins. However, these proteins (what we know as DNA) contain the “code” that governs the trajectory of the future growth of that individual, with help from their environment. If we were to use a metaphor, the DNA protein is pure potential energy. It contains the vision of what that singular cell could grow into, if provided the right circumstances.
In my opinion, the Dreams that possess any society’s intellectual elite perform the same function. And this is why it is important for us to focus on them. This is not to say that what the common person or the collective Demos thinks doesn’t matter, or should not be studied. But this will not be an article that focuses on that.
So, now that the terms of our questions are settled, the next step is: where exactly do we start?
Here are a few questions that need answers:
How does the Bengali Hindu elite go from the Dharmic nationalism of Bande Mataram, to nearly a century’s obsession with communism?
How does The Hindu go from a foremost nationalist newspaper under the stalwart patriot G. Subramaniya Iyer, to publishing full-page adverts for the Chinese Communist Party, multiple times a year?
How does cutting-edge Indian commentary make the trip from the fiery nationalist newspapers and magazines like The Mahratta and Bande Mataram, to the Coconut online outlet The Juggernaut, which is nothing but white progressive wine in a “South Asian” bottle?
The answer to these questions lies in a dialectical journey - the meandering intellectual journey of this Inherited Indian elite.
They are, in many ways, an unremarkable bunch. With some notable exceptions (Rabindranath Thakur, Aurobindo Ghosh, etc.), they have been shallow followers of international trends, and don’t really have many ideas or works that say something new to the rest of the world. If one looks at the grand corpus of their works, there are only a few of them that can be considered works of international repute. Their record has been one of mimicry, a mimicry of elites of other nations who represent greater competence and vitality. To quote V.S. Naipaul from his book An Area of Darkness:
…no people, by their varied physical endowments, are as capable of mimicry as the Indians.
Despite this, they have maintained a degree of importance in the minds of the global elite, because they have owned and “represented” India, one of the largest masses of people in the world. They have lived off this ability to “represent” India, and used the power that comes with this to impose their will on the institutions of this country. The higher you climb on the Indian economic ladder, the more of them you’ll find, along with their naïve and nonsensical outlook of the world, which usually comes fused with an extreme sense of moral self-righteousness. They are a curious bunch, but that only makes them more worth studying.
Authored by Samyak Dixit. Published by Brhat.