hospitable expansion of heart. Just as in the rains the water-courses are filled with water from the sky, so in mela time the village heart is filled with the spirit of the Universal.
These melas are altogether a natural growth in our country. If you call people to a formal meeting they come burdened with doubt and suspicion and it takes time for their hearts to open. But those who come to a mela are already in the open, holiday mood, for they have left plough and hoe and all cares behind. So that is the place and time to come and sit by the people and hold converse with them. There is not a district in Bengal where, at different times in the year and at suitable places, melas are not held. We should make a list of these times and places to begin with, and then take pains to make acquaintance with our own people through this open door.
If the leaders of the country will abjure empty politics and make it their business to give new life and objective to these melas, putting their own heart into the work and bringing together the hearts of Hindu and Muslim, and then confer about the real wants of the people,— schools, roads, water reservoirs, grazing commons and the like, then will the country soon awaken into life.
It is my belief that if a band of workers go about from district to district, organising these melas of Bengal, furnishing them with new compositions by way of Jatras, Kirtans and recitations, with bioscope and lantern shows, gymnastics and legerdemain, then the money question will give no trouble. In fact if they undertake to pay the zamindars their usual dues on being allowed to make the collections, they will stand to make considerable profit. And if this profit be used for national work, it would result in uniting the organisers of the mela to the people with a stronger tie, and would enable them to get acquainted with every detail of the life of the country. The valuable functions they could then perform in connexion with the national awakening would be too numerous to recount.
Religious and literary education has always been imparted in our country in the midst of the joy of festivity. Now-a-days, for one reason or another, the zamindars have been drawn away to the metropolis, and the festivities on the occasion of the weddings of their sons and daughters are limited to the dinners and nauches given for their rich town friends, the poor tenants being often called upon to pay extra impositions for the purpose. So the villages are losing all their joy, and the religious and literary culture, which was a feature of all festivity, and used to be the solace of man, woman and child alike, is getting to be more and more beyond the means of ordinary people. If our suggested band of organisers can take back this current of festivity to the villages, they will reclaim the desert into which the heart of the nation is fast lapsing.
We should also remember that the drying up or pollution of our reservoirs is not only a cause of water-scarcity, but of disease and death as well. So also many of our melas, originating in the name of some religious festival, have degenerated, and far from being a source of education are becoming centres of corruption. Fields which are neglected not only do not yield crops, but breed noxious weeds. If we do not rescue these institutions from such foul decay we shall be guilty before our country and our dharma.
I have said this much to give an example of how we can approach our countrymen in a natural way, and also to give an idea how, by organising and regulating our existing institutions, it may be possible to make them fruitful of untold blessings to the country at large.
Those who are unable to pin their faith on petitioning the Government as the highest form of political activity are dubbed pessimists by the opposite school. That is to say, they think that we refuse to beg because we are pessimistic as to the quantity or quality of the alms. But let me say as clearly as I can that I have never been one of those who seek the consolation of the grape-forswearing fox, and that I have never preached the superiority of self-determination because of the big
