Karmayogi

Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 57

Based on foreign will imposed from outside and not on the free choice and organic development of the nation.
We might go on to expose the other inconsistencies and sophia tries of Mr. Gokhale's speech. We might well challenge the strange ness of a sweeping and general charge of cowardice against the nation's leaders proceeding from the "broken roed" of Poons. But we are more concerned with the significance of his attitude than with the hollowness of his arguments. Lord Morley the other day quoted Mr. Gokhale's eulogium of the Asquith Government, saviours of India from chaos, as a sufficient. answer to the critics of deportation. There was some indignation against Lord Morley for his disingenuousness in suppressing Mr. Gokhale's condemanation of the deportations: but it now appears that the British statesman did not make the mistake of quoting Mr. Gokhale without being sure of the thoroughness of the latter's support. As if in answer to tho oritics of Lord Morley Mr. Gokhale hastens to justify the deportations by his emphatic approval of stern and relentless repression as the only possible attitude for the Government towards the ideal of independence even when its achievement is sought through peaceful means. Mr. Gokhale's phrase is bold and thorough; it includes every possible weapon of which the Government may avail itself in, the future and every possible use of the weapons which it holds at present. On the strength of Mr. Gokhale's panegyric Lord Morley, mocked at Mr. Mackarness and his supporters asmore Indian than the Indians. We
more
repe
of
may well quote him again and apply the same ridicule, the ridicule of the autocrat, to Mr. Beachcroft, the Alipur judge, whe, acquitted an avowed apostable of the ideal of independence Mr. Gokhale, at least, has become more English than the English. A British judge, certainly not in sympathy with Indian unrest, expressly admits the possibility of peaceful passive resistance and the blamelessness of the ideal ef indpen
dence.
A leader of Indian Eberaliam denounces that ideal as necessarily insane and crminal and the adr vocates of passive resistance se lunatic and hypocritical cowards and alle for the denunciation of the
relentless de the irontes
is
well that we should know who are dur enemise even if they be of our own household Till now many of us regarded Mr Gokhale as a brother with whom we had our own private differences, but he has himself by calling for the official sword to exterminate us removed that error. He publishes himself now as the righteousness Bibhishan who, with the Sugrives, Angads and Hanumans of Madras and Allahabad has gone to join the Avatar of Radical absolutism in the India
Office, and ourselves as the Rakehasa to be destroyed by this new Holy Alliance. Even this formidable conjunction does not alarm us. At any rate Bibhishan has gone out of Lanka, and Bibhishaps are always more dangerous there thap in the camp of the adversary.
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TWO PICTURES. Thomodern Review and Prabasi are doing monthly a service to the country the importance of which cannot be exaggerated. The former review is at present the best conducted and the most full of valuable matter of any in India. But good as are the articles which fill the magazine from month to month; the whole sum of them is outweighed in value by the single page which gives us the reproduction of some work of art by a contemporary Indian painter. To the lover of beauty and the lover of his country every one of these delicately executed blocks is an event of importance in his life within. The Reviews by bringing those masterpieces to the thousands who have no opportunity of seeing the orginals are restoring the sense of beauty and artistic emotion inborn in our race but almost blotted out by the long reign in our lives of the, influence of Anglo Saxon vulgarity and crude tasteless commercialisna. The pictures belong usually to the new school of Bengali art, the only living and original school now developing among us and the last issues have each contained a pictureespecially important not only by the intrinsic excellence of the work but by the perfect emergence of that soul of India which we attempted to characterise in an articlé in our 1.1 0.7 second issue. The picture in the July number
pies of their country and their re- by Mahomed Hakim Khan, a
dent of the Government School of Art, Cleusts, and represents Nadir Shith ordering a general massacre. It is not one of those pictures salient and imposing which leap at once at the eye and hold it. A first glance only shows three figures almost conventionally Indian in power which also seem conventional. But as one looks again and again the soul of the picture begins suddenly to emerge, and one realises with start of surprise that one is in the presence of a work of genina, The reason for this lies in the extraordinary restraint and simplicity which conceals the artist's strength and subtlity. The whole spirit and conception is Indian and it would be difficult to detect in the composition a single trace of foreign influence. The graco and perfection of the design and the distinctness and vigour of form which support it are not European; it is the Saracenic sweetness and grace, the old Vedantie massiveness and power transformed by some new nameless element of harmony into something original and yet Indian. The care ful and minute detail in the minutine of the dressos, of the armour of the warrior seated on the right. of the flickering lines of the pillar on the left are inherited from an intellectual ancestry whose daily vision was accustomed to the rich decoration of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri or to the fullness and crowded detail which informed the ninssivi work of the old Vedantic artists and builders, Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist. Another peculiarity is the fixity andl stillness which, in spite of the Titanic life and promise of motion in the figure of Nadir, pervade the picture. A certain stiffness of de sign marks much of the old Hindu art, a stiffness courted by the artists perhaps in order that no insintence of material life in the figures might distract attention from the expression of the spirit within which was their main object. By some inspiration of genius the artist has transformed this conventional stiffness into a hint of rigidity which almost suggests the lines of stone. This stillness adds immensely to the effect of the picture. The petrified inaction of the three human beings oohtrasted with the expression of the faces and the formidable suggestion in the pose of their sworded figures affects us like the silence of murder orouching for his leap.
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