While sitting with someone, close to me, one morning a few days ago, I conversationally mentioned a book I read long ago when I was in the college. It was in the context of me expressing my views of the works of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore. I told him that I find Bankim having roots deep into the ground of contemporary India while Tagore represents the soul of India. Of course, soul is greater than body as soul can live independent of the body while body cannot live independent of soul. However, ignoring the body altogether in one’s quest for soul cannot take one far as the body is the foundation on which one can attain soul. Though soul is timeless and body, transient it can hardly be logical to let go of the body to embrace soul, I said.
At the time, the book titled ‘Wither Goes the Hindu Nation?’ (translated from Bengali) flashed through my mind. It was a cheaply priced book under shabby covers. It contained a number of articles related to the burning problems plaguing the nation when it was striving to shake the shackles of slavery off its shoulders through myriad means-revolutionary, Gandhian, Communist and the like. Though I took it home it remained stacked in my shelf for days. One day a school-time friend came, saw the book and said that the writer of the book Principal Deboprasad Ghosh was their neighbour in a central Calcutta locality, not far away from our ancestral house. He told me that he was the national president of Bharatiya Jana Sangh for some years following the untimely death of Syama Prasad Mukherjee. My interest in the writer grew. I found that Nirad C. Chowdhury whose caustic pen rarely praised anybody –even he did not spare the iconic Tagore from his witty banter-had once spoken volume of the brilliant intellect of Ghosh. Chowdhury is on record, saying that if Ghosh had not strayed into politics and had trained his focus exclusively on mathematics the world would have got another Srinivasa Ramanujan, the wizard of mathematics.
My interest suddenly aroused in the writer, I took the book from my shelf, dusted it and started reading it. Let me now write a few words about the condition of my mind at the time. I was then groping for an issue out of the mental confusion I was in regarding the path the nation should have treaded to free itself from the bondage during that tumultuous time of its history. The appeals of the revolutionaries, the Gandhian movement, the Boseite adventure and the Communists were still strong in me, though I was not fully satisfied with them.
The book helped me clear the cobwebs of confusion and reassess things in a new light. Now let us come to the contents of the book.
According to the writer, India, more particularly the Hindu nation, was then standing at critical crossroads of its chequered history and the strategy it would adopt was loaded with immense importance for the posterity which would inhabit free India. He said that the British had come at a particular juncture of India’s history when the nation was wallowing in decadence, stuck as it were in the proverbial cul- de- sac, both politically and culturally.
History stands witness to the stronger nations ruling over the weak. It is a fait accompli of the flow of history and there is thus nothing for the Indians to cry foul of that. As the British came they would go back in due course of time. But the question is- what kind of India they would leave behind? Who would rule free India-the Hindus who inhabited the land for millennia or the Muslims who invaded India when the Hindu nation had lost its martial vigour thanks to the dizzy height its civilization reached? The writer said that it was quite natural for the Muslims who ruled over India for close to one thousand years to nurture the dream of getting back their rule over all of India, if possible, and over at least a part of India where they were in the majority after the exit of the British. The Hindu nation should accept this reality and frame its strategy of the anti-colonial movement in tune with the demand of the time, Ghosh opined. Should the Hindus blindly fight the British rulers, rejecting the administrative reforms that the latter were offering to them to help their progressive journey to absolute self-governance or should they stick to their demand of complete independence at one go, something which looked like a chimera, given the might of British Imperialism? Ghosh wrote that if the Hindus chose to stick to their ‘complete independence at one go’ demand and fight the British hysterically through non-cooperation or revolutions the crafty British would naturally keep hobnobbing with the Muslim leadership, particularly M A Jinnah, who was strictly for constitutional fight with the British, to the ultimate peril of the Hindu nation. Ghosh wrote that if the Hindu nation followed the lead of either Mahatma Gandhi or Subhas Chandra - going for confrontation, either through the non-cooperation movement or the all-out war as envisaged by Bose to kick the British out of the land,- the possibility of a united India with Hindu ascendency was doomed forever. It would either strengthen the hands of the conformist Muslims at the expense of the recalcitrant Hindus in the administrative structure of the free and united India or it would result in a partitioned freedom with ominous consequences for Hindu India.
Ghosh advocated a middle path-accepting the administrative reforms, meant to take things towards complete independence, and demanding for more to speed things towards the final consummation of self-rule. He was convinced that the Indians must prepare themselves for self-rule in the modern concept of democratic governance under the British-helmed administration while using to the full what power they had courtesy the British-introduced administrative reforms to gain more and more experiences of the art of administration before the stage came for their finally taking up the reins of the land from the British.
However, three questions cropped up in my mind. The first one- does not the alternative way propounded by Ghosh amount to conceding the efficacy of the two-nation theory, later fiercely propagated by Muslim League under Jinnah? The second-would the British leave the Indian shores so soon if there was no mass movement under Gandhi and the war waged by INA under Subhas Chandra and its ripples found among the members of the armed forces? And finally, would it help avoid the partition after the British left? Would we not have Kashmir in the whole of the Muslim majority provinces now parts of Pakistan in case a united India came up with Hindu domination by grace of the British regime?
These questions need to be answered. However, one thing must be cleared in view of Congress, Communists and the like often tearing into the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Hindu Mahasabha-the precursor to Bharatiya Jana Sangh and thus Bharatiya Janata Party- for steering clear of the nation’s struggle for freedom. We must admit that they had their own reasons for doing so.
It is thus wrong to attempt to reflect them in the ‘pro-British’ light. Those associated with the RSS or Hindu Mahasabha were no less nationalist than the followers of the Congress or Bose or the Communist ideologies. Of course, they had their own viewpoint of advancing towards complete independence while keeping eyes focused on the evolving trajectory of the time, on the ground, on the body rather than on the soul which, they thought, could be taken care of later.