Indian Nationalism and Radhanath Rai’s Mahajatra

INDIAN NATIONALISM AND
RADHANATH RAI’S MAHAJATRA

A study in Western influence

S. N. RATH

‘Nationalism in India is, in effect,
a quest for nationhood, and an
ambition for a greater India.’             –L. S. S. O’MALLEY

Nationalistm is a recurrent theme in Radhanath’s epic poem, Mahajatra. Writing all its seven cantos in the ‘last great quarter’ to recall Professor V. K. Gokak’s admirable phrase, of the nineteenth century, Radhanath was directly under the impact of Indian nationalism. Originally a Western spirit, nationalism came into force in Renaissance Bengal, and then it travelled far and wide, as a current of Indian sentiment, across the whole country influencing the thought and the literature of the time. Considered from this standpoint, the contribution of the West to the growth and evolution of Radhanath’s stream of national consciousness is Mahajatrais profound, and as an expression in the Oriya language it is admirable. Naturally, to say that the unifying force of Indian nationalism is primarily due to Western influences is to study Mahajatrain relation to the political traditions of the West; and further, to believe that the study of English literature provided patterns of revolutionary feelings to Radhanath is to accept the English influence outright as central to the spiritual existence of nationalism in the poem. Indeed, Radhanath’s epic has, within its structure of ideas, and description of feelings, imbibed certain political tendencies of the revolutionary West; and certain literary aspects and aspirations of the patriotic poets of England. In addition to these, one may also trace out in its lines an impact of the English literature of revolt written from Milton to Byron. At large, the ideas and influences and aspirations in Mahajatraarecharacteristically Western, as there was no tradition of nationalistic ferver in Indian history prior to the nineteenth century. Radhanath’s education in English schools, his careful study of English literature, and the poetry of Shelley and Byron, his passionate love for Iliad and Aeneidand again, his contact, of course indirectly, with the political ideas of Burke and Mill provided him the needed impetus to channelize his thinking in the direction of achieving India’s status as a nation, her self-respect and freedom. When England was for the English, why, then, not India for the Indians? Mahajatrais the feeling of an ambitious Indian who, for the first time in history, was experiencing the need of freedom.

Mainly dwelling upon the theme of nationalism in the last three cantos of Mahajatra, Radhanath has chosen a negative approach to the subject. He has brought to light India’s loss of liberty in the medieval times as a price of the people’s disunity, division, and animosity among themselves. Such an act of the Indians, Radhanath has written, invited Muhammed Ghori to India to become the country’s master. By means of bitter satire he has blamed the Indians who made their country conducive to foreign rule. Of those Indians the Brahmanas and the Khatriyas were the two classes of men responsible for their country’s fall. Weakening the country by constant rivalry and hatred they led her independence to its final doom. With their thoughtless action these unworthy sons of the soil struck hard at the root of their country’s strength, and

Passing this fertile land of ours,
Her green fields and golden corn, to foreign hands
They lived in slavery.                                         (V. 100-2)

Once the Khatriyas were bereft of their strength and honour they lived feeding upon their ineffective ego to involve themselves in fruitless battles. Placing personal reasons above the country’s causes they lived as traitors ignobly leaving Bharat, the beloved country of their birth, to sink in insult and misery under the foreign masters (V. 189) for a millennium. These Indians lived slothfully like sleeping dogs, inactive, unenterprizing, and unambitious, but acted in anger against each other during their waking hours. In a regular course of these events, India no more remained a country for the Indians; their food was forbidden to them, and their shelter was occupied by those who came from distant climes. Ultimately, the whole country, from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin was lost to the foreigners through disunity, internal disintegration, and external attacks. The people’s prosperity, their honour, and subsistence were snatched away with the strokes of swords by the new-comers.

The Yabanas(to Radhanath a Yabanais a Westerner) lived in this country with comfort, and the Indians, the original people of the soil, toiled in poverty. Fighting battles over rejected crumbs of their master’s meals, as warring dogs in a village street, they withered away their energy and enthusiasm. This is a terrible image into which is projected a vision of human degradation. His satire is directed against his countrymen, that opened India’s gates to foreign races, letting the country to be dominated by wicked people. During these fateful centuries in history Indians lived in perpetual agony whereas

Coming from distant lands, foreigners
had suck India’s blood as her masters.              (V. 399-400)

With such an attitude towards India’s bleeding past Radhanath has introduced a new note of nationalism in Oriya poetry, unprecedented, and was never so in Indian literature. In itself a nineteenth-century phenomenon, this national awareness is partly revolutionary and partly reactionary. Western thinking and Western life opened to the poet new horizons of national consciousness to feel acutely India’s woe during his own time. Living and writing in the midst of the Indian Renaissance he was in close contact with the Western traditions that brought about amazing changes in Indian thought. During this period a consciousness started growing among the Indian intellectuals, that the Indians belonged to one nation, as the English or the French to their own nations. In their quest for self-respect the Indians became ambitious ofbinding all Indians into a unified whole, notwithstanding their religious diversities, and multiplicity of languages. To recover the country’s long lost freedom national unity was felt to be a crying need. History had shown that the country was lost due to fragmentation of India. Unity if achieved among Indians would win the country’s honour. English language which provided the people to common tongue to raise their voice of revolution in unanimity came to their aid. British law proclaimed equality among the people make them feel that they were in no way inferior to their rulers socially and intellectually. English history and literature introduced to the Indian mind new modes of thinking for the nation’s cause. It was felt that when the English hanged their king for their liberty they had no right to subjugate India, to keep the Indians as subjects. The memory of 1857 could not be obliterated from the people’s mind; it was, powerfully, a living experience for them. Though the battle was lost, it was fought heroically. And the people could not forget their defeat. Under these circumstances India awakened after centuries of suffering and injustice. The Indian National Congress was established in 1885. It was a time of rising from inactivity to action, from idiocy to wisdom. Because of this, the nineteenth century was a time of tremendous transformations in society, in politics; and equally in literature. As a reflection of a nation’s consciousness, and record of the country’s social epoch Radhanath’s poem embraced these ideas and feelings. Unless Mahajatrais studied in the historical context its significant as a national document will remain ununderstood. Radhanath was a child of this extraordinary moment in India’s history, and naturally, he was mentally, imaginatively, and physically effected by the impressions and consequences of the situation. As a part of conscious reality ideas and impressions in relation to the time entered into his poetry in the form a metaphorical language to describe one thing for another. For this reason, though its immediate concern seems to be a medieval historical event, it is a suggestive of the nation’s nineteenth century preparations for independence and self-determination, for unity and honour. Admittedly, the deep current of patriotism which runs constantly in the poem is embedded with India’s craving for national prestige.

Taken together, Radhanath’s attitude, reactions, and emotions that one sees in his poem are an outcome of his understanding of and insight into the people’s suffering, and the Government’s injustice. What a nationalist would have done with a banner, Radhanath has done with language. His main concern has been to warm up the people with their spirit of heroism.

One cannot sacrifice his life and desire in his country’s cause unless he is a hero dedicated to the service of his motherland. Is a coward ever capable to raise his country’s honour high up into the sky?                        (VI, 237–40)

These lines also reveal the poet’s realization of his nation’s predicament, lines in which he felt the seed of Western thought. But the atmosphere which prevails over them is Indian. With a language charged with patriotic passion Radhanath has penetrated into the heart of things social, economic and political. Todd’s Annals of Rajasthan might have provided him with an impetus to describe his feeling under the garb of Ghori-Prithu confrontation, but the essential intention in Mahajatrais to make it a contemporary document in which the nation’s aspirations have been recorded with candour. In close combination with history a body of national literature has been created which is at once poetically political and politically poetic. Imagination modifies historical reality to allow literature and nationalism to exist in coalescence.

Amarsi belongs to the epic tradition. A heroic character as he is, he knows no fear. His ideas and his language appeal to human passion that can pierce into thought.

Should we continue to live in hunger passing on this ancient land of ours to foreigners.    (VII, 89-90)

Amarsi’s love for his people, and his respect for his country is an echo of the nineteenth century national zeal. Mahajatra, for these reasons, remains as a record of India’s troubled days; at the same time it is a charter of the people’s hope, and courage, and a record of their aspirations and longings, their yearning for freedom and survival. Receiving ideas from a social and cultural epoch Radhanath has created his system of values and standards and norms of national need that have expressed themselves in poetry during a critical moment in India’s history.

Among the poets of rebellion Milton, Shelley and Byron were well-known in Europe; in the nineteenth century they received attention in India. Their influence was felt in Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s poetry, and for Radhanath, too, the influence of these English writers was inescapable. Particularly, the spirit of the Protestant revolution of the seventeenth century in England had entered into Mahajatrathrough Milton’s Satan. Amarsi’s determination, his strength of mind, his courage, his purpose, and his conviction has in them an essential ingredient of revolutionary spirit, similar to that of Milton’s hero.

Cowardice is death in a hero’s life, and
you all are dead, though alive, for you
are all cowards, my countrymen:                       (VII, 80-81)

By its side may be placed Satan’s invocation to his follower:

And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome:                (BK. 108-109)

or Doing or suffering
to be weak is miserable.                                    (Ibid, 15)

One who detects a similarity between Amarsi and Satan is right in his discovery, with the exception, that Radhanath’s expression is oblique, and Milton’s direct, though both of their characters speak in the same tone. Their language is shaped with the spirit of revolution. Like Satan, Amarsi urges his men to rise, to fight, and to win; he is not to be shaken by the idea of death. If death comes on the way, he will welcome it (VII, 142-6). An undaunted heroic spirit, Amarsi has carried in his mind the true tradition of poetry of revolt.

During the Romantic period patriotism was one of the major national spirits in English literature. This convention, that emerged out of England’s struggle against Napoleon, continued even long after Waterloo. For his keen study of Scott and Byron Radhanath was influenced by his exotic tendency of nationalistic spirit. Byron’s poetry encouraged an action of revolt; Shelley’s poems generated ideas of revolution. Scott always suggested a patriotic love for one’s own country. True to the nineteenth century Indian spirit they all have their seminal influences in Mahajatra. Amarsi’s appeal is not alone to the heart and mind of his men; it also shakes their sinews; stirs up their thoughts to spring into action, for without action one cannot achieve his desired goal. The poet’s love of his country is converted into an intellectual realization, a thought that brings to his mind the sad story of his people. This thought, receiving form in language, becomes a gospel of action, of heroic endeavour, in Mahajatra.

Genetically, the desire for a struggle to safeguard the country’s interest against the foreign domination generated in the nineteenth century a reaction when many of the Western educated Indians began to feel the economic and political pinch of the British rule on their conscience. How strange it was, how miserable, that they lived on their own soil as a subject race. A bitter feeling of deprivation continued as a strong current of discontent in the intellectual circles. Radhanath, in contact with this psychological discontent of his contemporaries, reacted in a similar way. Due to this influence, the human situation in the poem enlivened with the poet’s insight into the actual functioning of things.

Oh, how can a lion tolerate in silence when
a jackal snatches away his rightful meal,
entering into his cave!                                        (VII, 98.100)

It seems to be an overtone of antipathy to the domination of an alien race. A handful of Englishmen governed some forty crores of people, a lion’s strength. In metaphorical structure of poetry, the poet has expressed the people’s feeling of their deprived lot. The idiom Radhanath has chosen is saturated with satire, bitterness, and criticism. It is a criticism of his own people for their lethargy; and of the rulers for their injustice. Adopting a platform technique in his use of words he has converted Amarsi into a national leader whose responsibility is to make an attempt to lead his people to their right destiny.

In the last three Cantos of MahajatraRadhanath has pleaded in favour of national unity, his intention has been to see India as one country, and Indians as one people. His allusions to a greater India extending from the Himalayas to Comorin brings home to his poetry a national greatness. The past with its miserable picture of discord, conflict and dissolution was in his vision; he was aware of his time which was equally depressing. But he realized, with his knowledge of the American and the Italian struggles of the West, that if all the Indians were joined together they would be able to topple down the mighty mountain of the British rule. This realization was a nineteenth century Indian discovery; a force that attracted the Indians towards the common centre of national interest. Because of this, at one place he bemoans India’s loss of unity, and at another he gives a call to the nation to unite under one banner for the country’s honour.

Mahajatra, for such reasons, remains in the Oriya language as an Indian’s testament to India, the beloved country of ours. It deals with the destiny of Bharata, as Aeneidwith of Rome. Political, ethical, moral, social, economic, religious and historical ideas and situations merge into a single pattern of poetry during an aesthetic moment. Political consciousness enters into the arena of imaginative literature. The result is a great national epic, profound in feeling and sublime in thought. Though lived in the last century, Radhanath, on the merit of his deathless national ideas and awareness, is our contemporary, and he will remain a contemporary of many generations in future.