Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram

Political Writings and Speeches. 1890–1908

Part One. Writings and a Resolution 1890 – 1906

The Congress Movement¹

With the opening of the twentieth century there is visible in India – visible at least to a trained political observer who is accustomed to divine the flux and change of inner forces from the slight signs that are the first faintly heard footsteps of the future and does not limit himself to the imposing and external features which are often merely the landmarks of the past – a remarkable and most vital change in the feeling and thought habit of our nation or at least of those classes in it whose thought and action most tells on the future. The lifestream of our national existence is taking a massive swerve towards a far other ocean than the direction of its flow hitherto had ever presaged. If I say that the Congress movement has spent itself, I shall be reminded of the Ahmedabad Congress, the success of the Industrial Exhibition and the newborn enthusiasm of Gujerat. Are these, it may be said, symptoms of decline and weakness? The declining forces of a bygone impetus touching a field which it had not yet affected, assume thereby some resemblance to their first youthful vigour but must not on that account be mistaken for the great working vitality of youth and manhood. The political activity of the nation gathering itself into the form of the Congress rose for some time with noise and a triumphant surging impetus until like a wave as it culminates breaking upon rocks, it dashed itself against the hard facts of human nature and the elementary conditions of successful political action which the Congress leaders had never grasped or had chosen to ignore; there it stopped and now there is throughout the country the languor, the weakness, the tendency to break up and discohere of the retiring wave. But behind and under cover of this failure and falling back there has been slowly and silently gathering another and vaster wave the first voices of which are now being heard, the crests of whose foam are just mounting here and there into view. Soon it will push aside or assimilate its broken forerunner, occupy the sea and ride on surging and shouting to its predestined failure or triumph. By the succession of such waves shall our national life move forward to its great and inevitable goal.

For us of the new age, who are to mount on the rising slope of the wave even if we do not live to ride on its crest, the first necessity is to understand the career of our predecessor, the principle of its life and the source of its weakness. I have said that the Congress movement broke itself on the hard facts of human nature [incomplete]

Earlier edition of this work: Archives and Research: A biannual journal.— Volume 7, No1 (1983, April)

¹ An incomplete essay written sometime after the Ahmedabad Congress (December 1902).

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