With what present duty, in what future hope, can they live who imagine that they have attained completeness in their great grand-fathers and whose sole idea is to shield themselves against the influx of the Modern behind the barriers of antiquated belief and custom?
The Englishman has come through the breach in our crumbling walls, as the messenger of the Lord of the world-festival, to tell us that the world has need of us, not where we are petty, but where we can help with the force of our Life, to rouse the World in wisdom, love and work, in the expansion of insight, knowledge and mutuality. Unless we can justify the mission on which the Englishman has been sent, until we can set out with him to honour the invitation of which he is the bearer, he cannot but remain with us as our tormentor, the disturber of our quietism. So long as we fail to make good the arrival of the Englishman, it shall not be within our power to get rid of him.
The India to which the Englishman has come with his message, is the India which is shooting up towards the future from within the bursting seed of the past. This new India belongs to humanity. What right have we to say who shall and who shall not find a place therein? Who is this “We”? Bengali, Marathi or Panjabi, Hindu or Mussalman? Only the larger “We” in whom all these,— Hindu, Moslem and Englishman, and whosoever else there be,— may eventually unite, shall have the right to dictate who is to remain and who is to leave.
On us to-day is thrown the responsibility of building up this greater India, and for that purpose our immediate duty is to justify our meeting with the Englishman. It shall not be permitted to us to say that we would rather remain aloof, inactive, unresponsive, unwilling to give and to take, and thus to make poorer the India that is to be.
So the greatest men of modern India have all made it their life’s work to bring about an approachment with the West. The chief example is Rammohun Roy. He stood alone in his day for the union of India with the world on the broad base of humanity. No blind belief, no ancestral habit was allowed to obscure his vision. With a wonderful breadth of heart and intellect he accepted the West without betraying the East. He, alone, laid the foundation of new Bengal.
Rammohan Roy cheerfully put up with persecution in order to extend the field of our knowledge and work, right across from East to West, to gain for us the eternal rights of man in the pursuit of Truth, to enable us to realise that we, also, had inherited the earth. It was he who first felt and declared that for us Buddha, Christ and Mohammed have spent their lives; that for each one of us has been stored up the fruits of the discipline of our Rishis; that in whatsoever part of the world whosoever has removed obstacles in the path of wisdom or, breaking the bondage of dead matter, has given freedom to man’s true shakti, he is our very own, and through him is each one of us glorified.
Rammohan Roy did not assist India to repair her barriers, or to keep cowering behind them,— he led her out into the freedom of Space and Time, and built for her a bridge between the East and West. That is why his spirit still lives with us, his power of stimulating India’s creative energies is not yet exhausted. No blind habit of mind, no pettiness of racial pride, were able to make him commit the folly of rebellion against the manifest purpose of Time. That grand purpose which could not have found its fulfilment in the past, but is ever marching onwards to the future, found in him a gallant, unflinching standard bearer.
In the Deccan, Ranade spent his life in the making of this same bridge between East and West. In his very nature there was that creative faculty of synthesis which brings men together, builds up the Samaj, does away with discord and inequity and circumvents all obstacles in the way of knowledge, love and will-power. And so he rose superior to all the petty or unworthy considerations prevalent in his time, in spite of all the various conflicts of ideas and interests between the
