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CHAPTER II
DARKNESS DEEPENS
THE curve of India's destiny has not been throughout an upward one. The pages of her history are not, all of them, bright with her golden achievements. In her early days, as shown before, she was indeed great both in the ways of the spirit and in the affairs of life. In fact, her spirituality growing over her long past sought to embrace the whole of life and govern all its movements. Yet there have been periods when the curve showed a downward trend, when India could not maintain the full strength of her soul and was therefore unable to withstand foreign aggressions. Perhaps she was then much too absorbed in inward contemplations neglecting the secular concerns of life. Or perhaps, her princes whose duty it was to defend the country did not have before them a clear vision of the oneness of India as a whole and so there arose no question in their mind of preserving her integrity.
It is none the less true that much of her past greatness was due to the smaller political units whose natural growth imparted vigour to their life, whose cultural pursuits on independent lines enriched the culture of the whole country. But it is also true that these smaller collectivities were as much a fatal cause of India's weakness as they were a source of her progress. Her fabulous wealth and the lack of a strong unified defence of her frontiers tempted the incursions of barbarian hordes, the result of which was unrestrained loot and plunder. This may be another way of Nature by which she gives the invaded people a well-merited experience and a needed lesson, or whips up to activity a people listless, somnolent or exclusively engrossed in inner pursuits. Undoubtedly, it is one of Nature's ways of correcting disequilibrium. The facts are however there that these onslaughts broke upon India and wrote many a black page in her history.
When in the eighteenth century the imbecile Mughuls—the very opposite of their great forbears—and their corrupt nobility, made more so by their jealousies and rivalries, were heading for their inevitable fall, the country was a sorry victim of all sorts of degrading vices that always beset a rotten administration. Add to these the economic exhaustion brought about by Aurangzeb's tragic reign which was another name for intolerance, short-sightedness and unending series of ruinous wars. Peace was impossible to have or maintain, so was political order. 'Agriculture and industries were so badly affected that for some time trade came almost to a standstill.' 'Thus ensued,' observed Jadunath Sarkar, 'a great eco- nomic impoverishment of India—not only a decrease of the "national stock" but also a rapid lowering of mechanical skill and standard of civilisation, a disappearance of art and culture over wide tracts of the country.' The weak-kneed central authority encouraged court revolutions and conspiracies leading to the virtual collapse of government, while ravages of pirates and plunderers and various other evils were rampant everywhere. 'The Indian nobles', said the French adventurer Jean Law, 'are a set of disorderly inconstant blockheads who exist solely for ruining a world of people.' The entire body-politic, vitiated by abuses, could hardly function to any effective purpose. And whatever of it did exist was steadily crumbling. It was indeed one of the darkest periods of India's history. Some writers hold that the eighteenth century was the darknest century for India by the end of which and the beginning of the next, says Poet Tagore, 'in social usage, in politics, in the realm of religion and art, we had entered the zone of uncreative habit, of decadent tradition, and ceased to exercise our humanity.'
But a condition such as this could not come about all of a sudden. It must have been, as it really was, the culmination of a long process of gradual decline of India's life energy. It was at this stage that European traders made their appearance and slowly established themselves in the country. They soon discovered that the princes were bitterly against one another. They also found that these 'foolish rulers' would often break into hostilities in which when one would take the help of the French, the other would invariably have the English on his side. These two peoples of Europe were then enemies at home and would naturally play the same game here in India. Thus was it easy for these foreigners to gain political foothold in a land so helplessly torn by disunity and mutual hatred. And when one of them was favoured by fortune, he became the ruler of the country and this not by any regular warfare but by exploiting the disunity of the princes and the disloyalty of the nobles.
Indeed the decisive factor of the so-called battle of Plassey was not the superiority of the English army but the great betrayal on the Indian side. Mirzafar, who betrayed his master, the Nawab of Bengal, to the British, was but the tragic culmination of the rot that had set in in every sphere of national life.
Be it noted that the coming of the Europeans to India in modern times began with the opening of the sea-route to India in 1498 when Vasco da Gama arrived on her shores—an event which, as later history has shown, had 'far-reaching repercussions on the civilised world'. The first to land were the Portuguese, then, one after another, the Dutch, the English and the French. But was it only their 'gold-hunger, commodity-hunger or earth-hunger' that brought these Europeans to India ? Whatever was their conscious aim, says Nolini Kanta Gupta, the urge to come in touch with India had behind it the inner quest of Europe's soul for the light of the Spirit of which India's soul has been the hoary guardian. This contact and this occult quest led to the revival in modern times of the intercourse that had existed between India and Europe for centuries before and after the Christian era, and through which Indian ideas, says Sri Aurobindo, influenced early European thought. Modern India's cultural impact on the West has already begun to prove equally, if not more, fruitful.
That the foreign element in India's political life could grow and develop and ultimately precipitate her fall was possible because of the hopeless condition that prevailed in the land at the time of the later Mughuls. In any case, the entry of the English into India was a significant event in Indian history and its true import was for later events to show. That a great people should lie low under foreign heels was no doubt a misfortune. But what else could be its lot under the then circumstances ? It was not only the disunity of the princes but a general decadence of the morale of the people that had been eating into the vitals of the body-politic and exposing them to an easy aggression from outside. The need of the hour was not only unity but a fresh spurt of energy by which the country could wake up and be able to hold its own. The English came at a crucial stage of India's evolution to fulfil a Will of the Sakti that guides her destiny. What that Will was is her recent history. |