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The Unhindu Spirit of Caste Rigidity
THE
Bengalee reports Srijut Bal Gangadhar Tilak to have made a definite
pronouncement on the caste system. The prevailing idea of social inequality is
working immense evil, says the Nationalist leader of the
Deccan. This pronouncement is only natural from an earnest Hindu and a sincere
nationalist like Srijut Tilak. The baser ideas underlying the degenerate
perversions of the original caste system, the mental attitude which bases them
on a false foundation of caste, pride and arrogance, of a divinely ordained
superiority depending on the accident of birth, of a fixed and intolerant
inequality, are inconsistent with the supreme teaching, the basic spirit of
Hinduism which sees the one invariable and indivisible divinity in every
individual being. Nationalism is simply the passionate aspiration for the
realisation of that Divine Unity in the nation, a unity in which all the
component individuals, however various and apparently unequal their functions as
political, social or economic factors, are yet really and fundamentally one and
equal. In the ideal of Nationalism which
India
will set before the world, there will be an essential equality between man and
man, between caste and caste, between class and class, all being as Mr. Tilak
has pointed out different but equal and united parts of the Virat Purusha as
realised in the nation. The insistent preaching of our religion and the work of
the Indian Nationalist is to bring home to everyone of his countrymen this ideal
of their country's religion and philosophy. We are intolerant of autocracy
because it is the denial in politics of this essential equality, we object to
the modern distortion of the caste system because it is the denial in society of
the same essential equality. While we insist on reorganising the nation into a
democratic unity politically, we recognise that the same principle of
reorganisation ought to and inevitably will assert itself socially; even if, as
our opponents choose to imagine, we are desirous of confining its working to
politics, our attempts will be
Page-533
fruitless,
for the principle once realised in politics must inevitably assert itself in
society. No monopoly, racial or hereditary, can form part of the Nationalist's
scheme of the future, his dream of the day for the advent of which he is
striving and struggling.
The caste system was once productive of good, and as a fact has been a
necessary phase of human progress through which all the civilisations of the
world have had to pass. The autocratic form of Government has similarly had its
use in the development of the world's polity, for there was certainly a time
when it was the only kind of political organisation that made the preservation
of society possible. The Nationalist does not quarrel with the past, but he
insists on its transformation, the transformation of individual or class
autocracy into the autocracy, self-rule or Swaraj, of the nation and of the
fixed, hereditary, anti-democratic caste-organisation into the pliable
self-adapting, democratic distribution of function at which socialism aims. In
the present absolutism in politics and the present narrow caste-organisation in
society he finds a negation of that equality which his religion enjoins. Both
must be transformed. The historic problem that the present attitude of Indian
Nationalism at once brings to the mind, as to how a caste-governed society could
co-exist with a democratic religion and philosophy, we do not propose to
consider here today. We only point out that Indian Nationalism must by its
inherent tendencies move towards the removal of unreasoning and arbitrary
distinctions and inequalities. Ah! he will say, this is exactly what we
Englishmen have been telling you all these years. You must get rid of your caste
before you can have democracy. There is just a little flaw in this advice of the
Anglo-Indian monitors, it puts the cart before the horse, and that is the
reason why we have always refused to act upon it.
It does not require much expenditure of thought to find out that
the only way to rid the human mind of abuses and superstitions is through a
transformation of spirit and not merely of machinery. We must educate every
Indian, man, woman and child, in the ideals of our religion and philosophy
before we can rationally expect our society to reshape itself in the full and
perfect spirit of the Vedantic gospel of equality. We dwell on this common sense
idea here at the risk of being guilty of repetition.
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Education
on a national scale is an indispensable precondition of our social amelioration.
And because such education is impossible except through the aid of
state-finance, therefore, even if there were no other reason, the Nationalist
must emphasise the immediate need of political freedom without which Indians
cannot obtain the necessary control over their money. So long as we are under an
alien bureaucracy, we cannot have the funds needed for the purpose of an
adequate national education, and what little education we are given falls far
short of the nationalist ideal, being mainly concerned with the fostering of a
spirit of sordid contentment with things that be. Apart from the question of the
cultivation of those virtues which only come in the wake of liberty, apart from
the question of reorganisation of the country, if we were to look into the
problem in its purely social aspect, even then we are confronted with the
primary need of political emancipation as the condition precedent of further
fruitful activity.
The Nationalist has been putting the main stress on the necessity of
political freedom almost to the exclusion of the other needs of the nation, not
because he is not alive to the vital importance of those needs of economic
renovation, of education, of social transformation, but because he knows that in
order that his ideal of equality may be brought to its fullest fruition, he must
first bring about the political freedom and federation of his country.
Bande Mataram,
September 20, 1907
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