The History of Bengal (Vol. I: Hindu Period; Vol. II: Muslim Period 1200–1757) v2.c50.s8: VIII. Reflections
The History of Bengal (Vol. I: Hindu Period; Vol. II: Muslim Period 1200–1757) v2.c50.s8
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VIII. Reflections
v2.c50.s8.1
When the sun dipped into the Ganges behind the blood-red field of Plassey, on that fateful evening of June, did it symbolise the curtain dropping on the last scene of a tragic drama? Was that day followed by "a night of eternal gloom for India," as the poet of Plassey imagined Mohan Lāl foreboding from the ranks of the losers? Today the historian, looking backward over the two centuries that have passed since then, knows that it was the beginning, slow and unperceived, of a glorious dawn, the like of which the history of the world has not seen elsewhere. On 23rd June, 1757, the middle ages of India ended and her modern age began.
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When Clive struck at the Nawab, Mughal civilization had become a spent bullet. Its potency for good, its very life was gone. The country's administration had become hopelessly dishonest and inefficient, and the mass of the people had been reduced to the deepest poverty, ignorance and moral degradation by a small, selfish, proud, and unworthy ruling class. Imbecile lechers filled the throne; the family of Alivardy did not produce a single son worthy to be called a man, and the women were even worse than the men. Sadists like Sirāj and Miran made even their highest subjects live in constant terror. The army was rotten and honey-combed with treason. The purity of domestic life was threatened by the debauchery fashionable in the Court and the aristocracy and the sensual literature that grew up under such patrons. Religion had become the handmaid of vice and folly.
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On such a hopelessly decadent society, the rational progressive spirit of Europe struck with resistless force. First of all, an honest and efficient administration had to be imposed on the country and directed by the English, if only for the sake of the internal peace on which their trade depended and the revenue by which its necessary defence force could be maintained. Thus, while the English rulers kept protesting that they were merchants and not rulers in Bengal, the civil administration, no less than the armed defence, of the country was forced upon them. In the space of less than one generation, in the twenty years from Plassey to Warren Hastings (1757-1776), the land began to recover from the blight of mediæval theocratic rule. Education, literature, society, religion, man's handiwork and political life, all felt the revivifying touch of the new impetus from the west. The dry bones of a stationary oriental society began to stir, at first faintly, under the wand of a heaven-sent magician.
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It was truly a Renaissance, wider, deeper, and more revolutionary than that of Europe after the fall of Constantinople. Bengal had been despised and thrown into a corner in the Vedic age as the land of birds (and not of men), in the epic age as outside the regions hallowed by the feet of the wandering Pāndav brothers, and in the Mughal times as " a hell well stocked with bread." But now under the impact of the British civilisation it became a pathfinder and a light-bringer to the rest of India. If Periclean Athens was the school of Hellas, " the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence," that was Bengal to the rest of India under British rule, but with a borrowed light, which it had made its own with marvellous cunning. In this new Bengal originated every good and great thing of the modern world that passed on to the other provinces of India. From Bengal went forth the English-educated teachers and the Europe-inspired thought that helped to modernise Bihar and Orissa, Hindustan and Deccan. New literary types, reform of the language, social reconstruction, political aspirations, religious movements and even changes in manners that originated in Bengal, passed like ripples from a central eddy, across provincial barriers to the furthest corners of India.
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Finally, after less than two centuries of rule the British have left Bengal free, and better fitted to keep that freedom in the modern world than the Romans had made Britain when they abandoned their imperial domination over the white island, more permanently civilised than the Hellenistic world on the dissolution of Alexander's empire, and more peaceful and progressive than the American colonies of Spain when they shook themselves free of European rule.
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Has not Bengal, unknown to herself, been working through the ages to reach this consummation? Her storied past, as narrated in these pages, shows how the diverse limbs of the country and warring tribes and sects of the people were fused into one by the silent working of time and a common political life till at the end of the Muslim period a Bengali people had become a reality. But not yet a Bengali nation, for the pre-requisites of a nation were then wanting. Two centuries of British rule and the neighbouring example of British society have now ground down large sections of the Bengali people to that uniformity of life and thought which alone can create a nation. It is for the future to perfect this good work.
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In June, 1757, we crossed the frontier and entered into a great new world to which a strange destiny had led Bengal. Today, in October 1947 we stand on the threshold of the temple of Freedom just opened to us. May the course of the years 1757 to 1947 have prepared us for the supreme stage of our political evolution and helped to mould us truly into a nation. May our future be the fulfilment of our past history.