(^24) "Presenting" the Past
away all our past and had entered into the great arena of violence, if we
had done all these things, which at the present moment represent Power
in the world, we might have been considered by the great nations of the
world as worthy of self-government. But we have been lacking in these
qualities." So his advice to the people was "Seek truth, speak truth and act
truth and I promise you shall win."^28
Taking a different cue tainted by Vedic philosophy and Hindu symbol-
isms, Bal (Gangadhar Tilak) asked the people, "Why should you not in the
name of religion, in the name of polity, in the name of that polity which
was cultivated in the past to the largest extent the history of the world has
yet produced—in the name of that philosophy that is religious, I appeal
to you to awaken to your position and do your level best for the attain-
ment of your birthright—I mean the right of managing your own affairs
in your own home."^29 In a similar vein, two things stood out for (Bipin
Chandra) Pal "in the past history of the Hindu people." They were the
supreme sense of the Spiritual, the Universal, and the Eternal, and the
constitutional and civil character of the genius of their social organiza-
tion. So "Spirituality and Freedom" must be every Indian nation builder's
motto, which denotes the "Ideal-End" and the "Essential-Way." He did
not agree with the view that India lacked a sense of history. He argued,
"If by history is meant a table of dates, names, and events, the absence of
such a history, in regard to ancient and medieval India, may perhaps be
admitted; ... the literature of anation [sic] furnishes a far truer and more
valuable record of their growth and evolution, than what the so-called
historical records have ever been able to give. And India possesses such a
thought-history, almost in an unbroken series, from the prehistoric epochs
of the earliest Vedic hymns, to those of the latest Moghul Emperors."^30
Taking an exactly opposite position of Bipin Chandra Pal, Bankim Chan-
dra Chatterjee was distressed by the Hindus' ignorance of their history.
He exhorted them "to 'discover' their true histories in consonance with
the 'scientific mode of thought'" because the principle of historicity was
an essential procedure to acquire objective knowledge, and the knowl-
edge of one's own history constituted the self-awareness of a people.^31
There were also others, such as Ananda Mohan Bose and Surendranath
Banerjee, who turned to Europe and espoused Giuseppe Mazzini's gos-
pel of national unity through their various organizations in Bengal in the
1870s and 1880s.^32
Following the Western model even more keenly, Jawaharlal Nehru
(1889-1965) gave more definite economic and social content to national-
ism and situated it within the domain of state ideology. With emphasis
on industrialization to strengthen the political foundations of nationhood,
his path of economic development was planned in terms of the scientific
understanding of society and history.^33 Thus Nehru set out to transform
the "backward," orthodox, and divided society into an industrialized, sec-
tina meador
(Tina Meador)
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