RESURGENT INDIA     Resurgent India   SISIRKUMAR MITRA               ALLIED PUBLISHERS PRIVATE LIMITED BOMBAY -NEW DELHI -  CALCUTTA - MADRAS LONDON - NEW YORK   First Published 1963     ALLIED PUBLISHERS PRIVATE LTD. 15, Graham Road, Ballard Estate, Bombay 1 13/14 Asaf AH Road, New Delhi 1 17, Chittaranjan Avenue, Calcutta 13 38-C Mount Road, Madras 6     REPRESENTATIVES ABROAD GEORGE ALLEN AND UNW LTD. Ruskin House, Museum Street, London W. C. 1     © Allied Publishers Private Ltd. 1963     PRINTED IN INDIA BY SRI AUROBIN

CHAPTER XX   'THE TIME HAS COME'   SOME TIME AFTER her Declaration of 24 April 1956, the Mother said : 'The greatest thing that can be, the most marvellous thing since the beginning of creation, the miracle has happened.... A new world, yes, a completely new world is born and is here'.         This 'miracle' had taken place on 29 February 1956. On 29 February 1960, the day of its first leap-year celebration, the Mother gave a graphic account of what had happened :   'During the common meditation on Wednesday the 29th February, 1956'         'This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gol

CHAPTER VIII   VOICE OF FAITH         AS ALREADY SEEN, due to the Western impact, the Indian mind in the mid-nineteenth century showed signs of a rationalistic attitude and this was what Nature intended the human mind all over the world to develop as part of its preparation for a higher consciousness, the destined goal of human evolution. The impact also brought in forces that threatened to disrupt life and culture in India through a conflict of ideals between the progressive West and the conservative East. It was this difficult, if not critical, situation with which the Brahmo Samaj movement was confronted in its first two stages. Rammohun, the leader at the first stage, and D

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 secu

BIBLIOGRAPHY   Biographical   1. A Nation in the Making — Surendranath Banerji. 2. Acharya Jagadishchandra Basu (Bengali) — Charuchandra Bhattacharya. 3. Acharya Jagadis Chandra Bose Centenary Volume — Ed. Amal Home. 4. Advaita Ashrama publications on the lives and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. 5. Attnajivani (Bengali) — Rajnarayan Basu. 6. Autobiography — Devendranath Tagore. 7. Bal Gangadhar Tilak — D. P. Karmarkar. 8. Bhudev Mukhopadhyaya (in Bengali) — Pramathanath Bisi's article in the Katha Sahitya, Dol Number, 1364  B.E. 9. Character Sketches — Bipinchandra Pal. 10. Contemporary Indian Painters — G.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS         The author owns his grateful acknowledgements to the writers whose works he has used in preparing the book and has listed in the Bibliography; and to the institutions and their publications: Advaita Ashrama, Calcutta; Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Calcutta; Nava-Vidhan, Calcutta; Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Calcutta; Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry; Udbodhan Office, Calcutta; Visva-Bharati, Calcutta and Santiniketan. To Amrita Bazar Patrika, Ananda Bazar Patrika (Bengali), ·The Modern Review; he acknowledges his indebtedness for valuable material, particularly from their special numbers on some of the great

CHAPTER XVII   'INFINITE IN FINITE'   AS SEEN BEFORE, a true resurgence of India implies her rebirth into the truth and light of her soul. And this in modern times began when her mind sensed its spiritual roots and started coming to its own—a psychological revolution of very great promise, part indeed of the rise and growth of a renascent India. Her mind, so awakened, attempted to express itself in various ways, often reflecting its inherent intuitive bent. A new and powerful prose was born opening up larger possibilities. An inspired poetry pointed to its brilliant future. Even science turned its austere face to the light of the Spirit. It was now the turn of art to seek and re

CHAPTER XVI   SEER-SCIENTIST   THAT THE WESTERN impact energised the Indian mind into new and fresh forms of activity is borne out by the social, cultural and political movements in nineteenth-century India. Even the attempt to reform the religious life of the people was inspired more by Western ideas than by anything else. Broad and catholic in their aims, as they appeared to be, these movements as such were not therefore wholly Indian in their origin. Neither could they be said to have followed, all through, the lifeline of India's historic evolution sustained and motived by her all-embracing spirituality. Nevertheless, the contact with Western ideas modernised the mind of Indi

CHAPTER X    A MAKER OF FREE INDIA1   LOKAMANYA TILAKA is the other great son of Maharashtra whose work for the independence of resurgent India is doubly significant in that what he made possible was vaster than what he actually did. Ranade worshipped Mother India by doing his utmost to bring about an all-round improvement of her children so that they might recover their self as a progressive nation. Tilak's whole-hearted devotion to the Mother expressed itself in his dauntless demand for her freedom. He believed that freedom was the basic condition of all progress. 'Swaraj is my birthright and I will have it' was the flaming utterance of his soul. His was among the spiritual for

CHAPTER XIII   REVELATION OF GOD AS MOTHER   'SIR, HAVE you seen God ?' 'Yes, I see Him just as I see you here, only in a much intenser sense.' The question was from an intellectual agnostic believing only in Western positivism; the answer was from an illumined mystic fixed on the certitude of his vision of God, and the time was the early eighties of the momentous nineteenth century when Indian youths —products of English education—were most of them rationalists, and when the Brahmo Samaj leaders following what they believed to be reason and truth were trying to reform the religious and social life of the country. The mind of educated India, yet under the spell of Western ideas,