Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram

Calcutta, August 7^th, 1907

Part Four. Bande Mataram under the Editorship of of Sri Aurobindo (28 May – 22 December 1907)

Our Rulers and Boycott

It is often paradoxically urged that every step or policy which does not conduce to good feeling between the rulers and the ruled, the exploiters and the exploited, should be eschewed as both immoral and impolitical. And because Boycott certainly is not intended as a soothing potion for the rulers, there are some men of an unctuous humanity who look on it with alarm and distrust. We should love our country, they say, but should not allow that love to generate hatred against other nationalities; we should prefer our own manufactures and try to improve and extend them, but to eschew foreign goods is damnable. No nation, so runs the cant, can thrive on hatred and ill will,– though from the facts of History one might much more cogently argue that no nation has ever yet in its international relations thriven on love and philosophy and cosmopolitanism. These copybook maxims are, of course, meant for the especial benefit of the under-dog in the struggle. They are sometimes trotted out for the benefit of the rulers, but that is merely as a literary exercise or to fill up the orthodox amount of space required for the leading articles. Nobody seriously expects the English in India to forego any of the manifold and material advantages that are bound up with their despotic possession of the country, merely out of a philanthropic tenderness for the feelings, affections or interests of the ruled. Nobody really expects them to help the development of indigenous industry at the expense of British commerce merely because the millions of India are starving and ground down with poverty and miserable and discontented. Nobody sincerely thinks that they are going to part with an atom of their arbitrary and absolute power merely because our abject and servile condition awakes in our people anger and a settled bitterness and ill-feeling. No, it is only the down-trodden and suffering people of India who are expected to refrain from following the straight line of their national interest and welfare out of a noble and sensitive unwillingness to excite hatred and strife.

We have repeatedly said that Boycott is not a gospel of hatred. It is simply an assertion of our independence, our national separateness. But neither do we pretend that we can ask the rulers to overflow with feelings of benevolence for the Boycott or to regard it with kindly neutrality. Boycott has come among us not to bring peace but a sword. And this was inevitable. Until now the discontent, the ill-will, the suffering were all on one side. When one side is depressed, miserable, suffering, while the other thrives and prospers by means of that misery and suffering, when one side is denied the use of its capacities and the satisfaction of its aspirations, and the other grows great and glorious and robust by the exercise of the usurped opportunities it has taken from its neighbour, there must be resentment, there must be antagonism and therefore strife and ill-will and anger. No amount of pious and ethical exhortation will prevent it. When a just equality is denied, when the possibility of equal opportunities and equal accomplishment is rigidly excluded, there can be no real love and good feeling except such as exists between man and some of the lower animals. If there is insensibility on one side and indulgent masterfulness on the other, there can be an insulting patronage and a degrading loyalty, but these are animal emotions rather than the higher ethical feelings. It is only where liberty and a just equality are established that true good feeling can reign. Those who deny liberty have no right to appeal to the higher feelings or to morality at all, for they are trying to perpetuate for their own selfish ends an essentially immoral condition of things. So long as liberty is denied, there must be the hatred which the slave always cherishes for his master, and when the attempt to throw off the yoke comes, there must be the yet bitterer hatred which the master feels for his revolted slave. The denial of liberty is therefore doubly and trebly immoral and restoration of liberty the first condition of peace and good-will. There has been good feeling between Austria and a free Italy, but between Austria dominant and Italy enslaved it was impossible.

The English have long been boycotting us in our own country. They boycotted our industries out of existence, they boycotted our noblest capacities into atrophy by denying us any share in the higher activities of national life, they boycotted us in the management of our affairs, in the defence of our country, in the making of its laws. And India impoverished, degraded, demoralized, did not look with love upon the spoiler. Now the Boycott has commenced upon the other side, but it is not an act of retaliation merely; it is much more an unravelling of the English web, a retracing of the steps towards perdition which we were forced or induced to take. Shall we continue our course to perdition, shall we refuse to retrace our steps because it cannot be done without strife and ill-feeling, because it must temporarily result in a growth of enmity between class and class? Shall we consent to lie for ever stifled in the fatal web because the unweaving of it must enrage the master of the web? No, the curse of alien domination must be worked out, the doom which compels it to create hatred in its making and hatred in its unmaking. When natural relations have been restored, England and India may stand side by side as equals, comrades and allies in the world’s work, but until that is done, it is hypocrisy or folly to suppose that we can escape God’s law which makes strife the straight rough way to peace and enmity the father of union. Every redeemer or redeeming force has always been compelled to say in the first stages of his mission, “I come to bring among you not peace but a sword.”

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