Dr. Besant: A Tribute

The present renascent movement is probably the biggest rise, since the days of the Buddha and Asoka. Whether the fruits will be gathered in plenty and variety in the ripening hour is beyond isthe power of the most daring prophet. But one thing is clear. The longing to do something is intense. The air is charged with a soaring idealism and a fervent desire to achieve. The sense of worship is exalted to a spiritual passion. The will to do, to act, stands at the highest today. That is always a rare and momentous mood for the Indian temperament. It has been fruitful in the past.

But will it all materialise now? Or will the clouds get scattered once again as it has happened so often in our history? That is the eager question everywhere. Yes, it will materialise if the worship of ideas becomes the worship of work, songs fertilise into deeds. Then the achievement will be as complete and renewing as the great renascent rise which our land witnessed twenty-five centuries ago.

We have never been stirred to our depth so much as now. Every department of our life is feeling the stir of unrest and the touch of renewal. The unrest is creative, not the mere ripple of politics in the pond, but the stir of a New India in the making. The awakening, is not listless but is charged with a keen desire to work for a living present. Can there be a purer testimony to a renaissance than this?

Three great personalities have directed this movement till now. Swami Vivekananda, Dr. Annie Besant and Mahatma Gandhi, each giving the movement the impress of his or her own qualities as the Time-spirit and their own temperament would allow. Dr. Besant's contribution to this national emergence and growth is realistic. Hers is the canalising genius of the irrigation engineer. She is both pioneering and provocative. She has quickened the blood circulation and the national metabolism. She has achieved it both by her words of eloquence and deeds of worth. The tragedy at the present moment is that there is "nobody now to carryon her line of work, while Mahatmaji is continuing on even a larger scale the idealistic work of awakening the country which Swami Vivekananda had begun.

Swami Vivekananda was something like a conch-blower of renascent India. In him the spiritual elements gained a perfection and a charm because of his fine appreciation of political ends and social aims. When the earth and the sky were still shrouded in darkness and doubt he sang bravely and in a tranquil voice, the voice of Truth, in the misty morning air of margasirsha nights like a true conch-blower, when all were asleep, the glory of the coming dawn. His was the ecstatic utterance of the prophet who sees the Vision. His was the clarion call to the sleepers to" Awake! Arise!" But he died young.

Swami Vivekananda was something like a nature-force, an earthquake whose tremor is felt allover, a gleam of lightning which lights the darkest gloom in the forest-tracks. Mahatma Gandhi also is, at least, as mach a nature-force. He is something like a cloud-burst or snow-fall in the Himalayan heights, that sends mighty floods down the Ganges, which move gliding down, lisping the rare babble of liquid life, seeking at every bend and curve of the coarse the constructive and the fertilising touch of the irrigation engineer.

God who gave us the Gandhi an flood in the river has not yet vouchsafed to us simultaneously the Irrigation Engineer; to canalize this release of national energy into constructive statesmanship so that the flood may bless even the remotest village in the parched up plains of Hindustan. Once I had hoped that the late C. R. Das was the man to harness simultaneously the awakened idealism and release of energy and direct it into the ploughed acres and sown fields. It was God's will to cut off C. R. Das in the prime of life as it was His will to cat off two centuries ago the Peshwas one by one at a very early age.

Had Dr. Besant been of Indian birth and forty years younger, she would have made an ideal ally of Mahatmaji and a constructive statesman of the first rank. But to me, this wistful regret has its own charms and lessons. The sum of her qualities can give us the clue for constructive work. Her long and strenuous life is indeed a great example to us, for hers are just the qualities to fertilise the Indian temperament.

II

Dr. Besant is a karma yogin who applies frankly her powers in the first instance to social and humanitarian ends. Mahatmaji also is a karma yogin but his final quest is fundamentally different. He is primarily interested in the individual, and his refinement and evolution, while Dr. Besant fixes her compassionate eye on the collective good and the beneficent working of institutions. Organisation, working beneficently for the common good of man is life to Dr. Besant, and organisation, however healthy, as a final state of affairs, is death to Mahatmaji and to every true Hindu.

This humanitarian view of life has given to Dr. Besant the religious fervour and energy for all self-less work. She is a tireless worker, with faith in work as the great, cleansing agent of life, a worker with love and purity, self-less and detached. All her great qualities, even the atma gunas in her case, cease to have an independent existence of their own, but serve and slave to feed the ceaseless fire of love of work. This, no doubt, slightly upsets the balance, tilts the axis of life, and makes uneven the harmonies and gives us the impression of the defects of her qualities.

Action is the greatest urge in her life, strenuous, sympathetic self-willed, self sustained action. Fighting is not the motive of her action but a necessary implement in this conflicting world. Even love and peace in their desire for full self-expression will have to fight. It is more compassion, a humanitarian tenderness against the cruel, age long social wrongs to many, than love–unrelated compassion is love–in its static or dynamic form that pulls her to work. Loveeven in its most active form is catholic and quiescent. Its propaganda is ethical, never political. Love is even and reacts equally both to the high and the low, the rich and the poor, while compassion responds quickly to the miseries of the poor, but views with distrust even the virtues of the rich.

 Dr. Besant is in intellectual reach, if not in realisation, a true advaitin. Right or wrong does not matter provided you are selfless. For, right or wrong is only relative to given conditions and has no final value. Evolution reckons only activity. And all true activity is impersonal, is constructive, and has no final relationship with right and wrong and all true activity is the work of the worker who is self-less and detached.

Decisiveness, and courage which follows decisiveness, like heat that follows light, are her great assets. Once she decides she always goes about her work with roaming joy and freedom like the tempest, but a tempest which raises and brings in its wake not a sand-storm but the monsoon winds of plenty.

She is a fighter, but not a fighter for the sterile joy of it. She is primarily a worker with the self-imposed duty, after thought and conviction, of cleansing the Augean stables. But she is a worker who finds that she has to fight courageously, however reluctantly, against all the odd things in the way of her work; something like the first freshes in the Cauvery that have to sweep down its whirling eddies, all dirt and lumber, dried twigs and leaves, rotten trunks of dead trees that block the way and scar the sandy bosom of the river bed.

Dr. Besant's mode of approach to life is essentially Indian Her mind is spiritual not in the pure Indian sense of utter communion, lonely, devout, tragic and sublime, divorced from land and life: but in the best cultural sense. It is spiritual in that it has gained a mastery, a kind of yogiccontrol over the senses and the appetites, and the sources of energy that feed daily life, its exaltations and depressions.

She is one of the first to rediscover the unity of India in her cultural and spiritual life, and to work for it through religious, awakening, and show us the priceless treasures of our own inheritance lying in sealed cases in our ancestral vaults. On the whole her long life is one lived in the great Gita tradition though handicapped by the dragging weight of the civilisation of her own birth.The valuable formative period of her life was wasted in one endless struggle and effort to break the bonds of tradition and go out in freedom in search of Truth.

 Her full life has no doubt a message for us all. We have never lacked in wisdom but only in the will to follow the wise and the selfless. Her will-power is a great example. Her message to renascent India is to organise, canalise, co-ordinate and work; till and prune, prune and till; water and manure, manure and water; prune off the dried roots and the rotten branches, work hard and work self-lessly; once again the ancient orchad will bloom to life, bear fruits all the more luscious for the age of the trees; work for the betterment of the social conditions, work on lines of no exploitation, work with generosity and love, and a religious fervour applied to mundane affairs; work for the uplift of all. Renascent India will always honour such work.

This philosophy of life, the primary bias of a humanitarian, gives to Dr. Besant the compassion of a Buddha, the monarchical and the beneficent temperament of an Asoka, the intellect and organising talents of a St. Paul or Ignatius Loyola, and an acute patriotism, courageous and concrete in feeling, for the service of man and the well-being of humanity for which there is no exact parallel in history. If she is not likely to attain immortality in the same rank as those already mentioned, it will not be for lack of sincerity in the quest of Truth, or love for fellow-men, or talents and energy to work out her convictions, but because of a failure to apprehend man in his highest idealistic reaches in moments of meditative felicity.

Dr. Besant has spiritual hunger but not vision. She does not know the needs of the individual man in his highest altitudes. She has great knowledge as a shepherd Ass and can protect the flock with singular combative skill from wolves, and wolves in the clothing of Lambs. But of new pastures for them to feed upon, she bad no clear knowledge or idea, except for a vague feeling of wide meadows on the other side of the river in some far-off valley. She has executive courage to a marvellous degree. But God has denied her, and the civilisation and the social organisation in which she was born denied her, meditative. courage and intuitional originality, which alone wrap one in the amber of immortality. Thus with all her superb endowments, she has very narrowly missed, the first rank of the immortals. But her life itself is classic adventure and testimony to the wonder and greatness that is in man.

But there is no doubt that hers is a lasting name in our own history. She is not only the greatest living woman, but one of the greatest for all time. She is the pioneer of the nineteenth century and an example to the twentieth. Her life is the greatest adventure in peace one has known in quest of Truth. She is the most sincere humanitarian of the century. Her mystic glands continually pour into the stream of her compassionate blood an aching affection for humanity and a fevered throb for the well being of man. She has lived her strenuous eighty years of life in the highest moods of a creative rapture and unrest of work. Has anyone, man or woman, a finer record of selfless work to present before the Maker or to one's own generation?