Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram

Calcutta, September 4^th, 1906

Part Two. Bande Mataram under the Editorship of Bipin Chandra Pal (6 August – 15 October 1906)

Sir Frederick Lely on Sir Bampfylde Fuller

Sir Frederick Lely’s was a name well known in Gujerat and nowhere else in India. He has now earned a cheap notoriety for himself by holding forth in the Times on Sir Bampfylde Fuller’s dismissal. Sir Frederick is full of dismal forebodings on the effect of this dismissal, which has evidently shaken the foundations of British rule in India. One cannot help reflecting how weak, in that case, those foundations must be! Sir Frederick adorns his lamentations with an imaginative reference to people’s tongues being cut out for speaking against Brahmins some short period before this particular Heaven-born’s sacred boot soles hallowed the streets of Bombay! Evidently, Sir Frederick is brooding regretfully on the impossibility of adorning Belvedere with the tongues of Babu Surendranath Banerji and Babu Bipin Chandra Pal, red sacrifices to the stability of British rule. That might certainly simplify the task of Government,– or it might not.

This work was not included in SABCL, vol.1 and it was not compared with other editions.