THE HOPE OF TO-MORROW.
Under the auspices of the Madras Students’ Convention and the George Town Students’ Club, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu delivered an open air address on “The Hope of To-morrow” at Gowri Vilas, Royapetta, on the evening of the 20th December, 1917, with Mr. J. H. Cousins in the chair. There was an immense gathering of ladies and gentlemen numbering about six to seven thousand persons present. Mrs. Sarojini Naidu said :—
Were I first to choose one sentence out of the entire realm of language to sum up what hides in my heart as the secret of my “hope of to-morrow,” I should say one sentence only and then keep silence. I would say “you are the hope of to-morrow.” But I fear that my silence, however great a tribute to my hope, will not comfort you. How will it satisfy you? Many of you during the past few days have heard me speak, and you will say that mine is merely a monotone, but sometimes in the history of Nations, it is necessary that one should have a lyre not of many strings but one string. Such a crisis in National life is here that only those who have the courage to be called monotonous strike that one note over and over again till its echoes re-echo in the hearts of the crowd, and it is only the singer of that one note has to-day a place in the National life. We are told that the age is irreverent but I think not, for nowhere the great Indian civilisation can be irreverent. Reverence is the very blood in our veins, and therefore it is the only guarantee of the salvation for the future.
Have you considered what is your share and responsibility in the bringing about of this hope of to-morrow ? Yesterday is over ; to-day is over : concrete problems are here, contemporary things are here and there cannot be a future for a human race that has not evolved historically and spiritually from the past. Therefore, the problems of to-day, the contemporary things of to-day are concrete problems and not illusory visions of the past. It is well for us in thinking of tomorrow to take a look backwards to that radiant yesterday. What constituted the fulfilled hope of yesterday? What was it that made India great? What was it that gave opportunities to her genius to find such manifold and immortal expression? It was that India was true to herself. She believed that the only authentic expression of the Nation springs from within the soul of the Nation; and though a Nation must absorb all that is beautiful in other civilisations and in other ages, it can only be enriched by a foreign civilisation but not dominated by alien things. After all these thousands of years, we find perennial and beautiful that great treasure of intellect and spirit that is ours that we do not remember as ours. Those philosophies are alive to-day. They have outlasted time, because that philosophy was the evolution of the proven thought of India. Her religion lives to-day, and even as five thousand years ago on the banks of the Ganges the hymns of ancient Vedas were chanted, so to-day we denationalised pilgrims, that go to the Ganges hear the self-same chant and there not only by the water of the Ganges are our spiritual sins absolved but they purify instinctively all our intellectual tual transgressions. I, the child of two civilisations, the hybrid of two civilisations, went to the Ganges, that eternal Ganges which is the one test of Hindu spirit, and there without my knowledge, my intellectual transgressions fell from me and I remember that I was indeed the child of the Vedic spirit.
The evolution of India was authentic and outlasted centuries because it was spiritual. It has been perennial because it was elastic; it was able to retain its vitality and enrich itself age after age out of your thought that age brings, out of your forces that every new conquest brought to India. It was only a temporal conquest by a foreigner, because the spirit of the alien became absorbed into the spirit of India. The vitality of India has been stronger there than all things reminding one of that miracle where many rods have come and this one rod of the Indian spirit has been able to swallow all those rods that turned into the serpent of wisdom, and that has been the value and secret of the past of India; and because you are the inheritors not merely of the civilisation that you find today enclosed within the pages of the Vedic teachings and carved on the rocks of temples, revealing cosmic history in little coins, not because merely of the material embodiment as souvenirs from that glorious past but because something of life has been there, not the rock temples only, not the teachings of the Upanishads only, not the Edicts of Asoka only, but the living spirit that sung the hymns on the banks of the Ganges five thousand years ago sings to-day the self-same chants of the self-same God.
Keeping this background of historic spirituality in your minds, turn towards the dawn that you desire from dawn to dawn, not from darkness to dawn but from the dawn to the dawn. Dawn to dawn implies a preparation for the dawn. We all know that, where the dawn dies to-day, the whole world is a miracle of preparation that a great dawn of to-morrow shall be born. That is the function of the waiting time between dawn and dawn—getting ready the world, beautifying the world, enriching the world, so that the dawn that succeeds upon that dawn might find a richer welcome and a greater glory of the coming dawn. The preparation for the coming dawn means that we look to the New India that shall be the child of the old India which was lovely so that New India, the child of old India, shall be more lovely, and yours is the responsibility of enriching and glorifying and beautifying the coming of that Renaissance that shall make the daughter lovelier than the mother, lovely though that mother was five thousand years ago. Enriching does not mean adding repetition to repetition, but the enrichment of life that makes diversity into some unified heritage for the people. The period between that early dawn and this later dawn has given you all the materials for this enriching, for remember how many streams of intellectual and spiritual thought have come into this country, how India has had the opportunity of enlarging herself, filling herself with vast treasures of thought, Iranian, Semetic, Christian, Muslim.
When I was a child — and that was very long ago—I did not know that there was any real difference excepting of language between the culture of the Muslims and that of the Hindus. We never knew the Hindu-Muslim problem, because we were taught that there was no difference between the Hindu and the Muslim thought behind. The veils that covered both the cultures laid the same spirit that was to serve Mother India. You cannot afford to be provincial only in your outlook; you must learn to share the life of the entire Nation, and the crucial problem to-day is the problem of unity that shall be indivisible and immortal. How shall you within your province show that you have been transfigured by this great ideal of unity ? In the north, this idea of unity has got into our heart. If I should say in the north that there is a problem in the south of India that we did not realise, they would say “ Had we a Brahmana-non-Brahmana problem here?” A great French poet has said: “ To each one his own infinity.” It means that his own infinity is his own infinite opportunity and responsibility. A strange thing is this infinite spiritual opportunity and responsibility, a thing that you cannot lightly dismiss. You cannot say today, “ I am busy with my personal gain and personal happiness. ” It knocks at your door and asks for an answer. Your infinity here is clear: it has no veils upon its face, it has no seals upon its doors. It is an open secret from which you may turn away but it chases you as a hound in heaven. Remember that the National responsibility, the service of India, must chase you. You will be asked, “What did you do to establish that hope of to-morrow, of which I speak today.” The great French phrase, “To each man his own infinity” reduces itself to the simple question, a thing of daily consciousness, a daily service, a daily manifestation, the sincerity of your own dreams transmuted day by day into that current coin of loving service in the cause of Indian unity. Remember that the poet’s dream is no more than the mirror of your hearts. If I say to you that this great hope of to-morrow lies in you, it simply means that within you is the power to achieve. How shall you face the responsibilities?
The real measure of a Nation is the measure of average action, of average man: it is not the great man or the great genius who is the true standard of a Nation’s capacity or worth. I wonder if it has ever occurred to you when you hold out great names as the guarantee of India’s greatness, how false and illusory are your standards of judgment. Great men belong to no race: they are a Kingdom apart. But it is the average man of a race that is the only true measure of that Nation’s capacity. When we say that we are a great Nation and if some man says to you, “prove categorically in what way you are great,” can you say to him, “Look at the great commercial enterprises, our economic prosperity, the original art, look at the high standard of education of women, look how free we are to administer our laws?” That man will answer if you say so, “Young man, wake up, wake up. Are you still dreaming of the past when it was so? It is not so any longer.” That answer amuses you, but it does not amuse me. I want you to understand and realise what is the average of India today, what is the average intellectual capacity, what is the average political capacity, what is the average literary and artistic capacity? Is it even mediocrity? I doubt it. The great art of self-expression has died out of us. Because we have not understood the vital nature of the life of self-expression, our arts have degenerated, our literatures are dead, our beautiful industries have perished, our valour is done, our fires are dim, our soul is sinking. The average taste of India’s average man is a measure of sleep not even illumined with the glory of dreams.
This immense crowd which represents the people of to-morrow, listening to the words of a woman, is the first augury of the hope of to-morrow that India has returned — whether consciously or unconsciously does not matter but inevitably—to that first ideal of the Devi. It is when India comes back to her old ideal of wisdom and recognises the place that woman is an embodied deity of Lakshmi and Saraswati combined that the hope of to-morrow will be coming into the skies with fresh rose and purple beauty. There are more things than the waking of the Devi aspect of Indian woman. One has to wake to the human aspect of those who are treated as brute beings. The children of those whom you have not given the living chance said to the Viceroy and the Secretary of State that, within sixty feet of their wells, they are not allowed to come. Think now your brothers arraigned you of robbing them of their very right to be human.
The hope of to-morrow will never come until you repair that wrong, and the only reparation of the wrong is the abolition of the wrong. Women who, according to your tradition, should have been your comrades, your equals sharing, according to the old Shastraic teaching, your spiritual and civic life, what are they to-day? You dream dreams, but you are hampered because your women have lost the power of walking side by side with you. Those classes so numerous in the south, your religious south, your south of Ramanuja, are a dehumanised people without a chance, and yet the hope of to-morrow lies in this. Even the deaf say, “we shall be made to hear,”" the dead say, “we shall live,” the dumb say, “we shall speak.” All that we can do is that each of us, recognising our own individual capacity, should recognise our own individual responsibility and take our share, and faithful trust implies doing our duty, and each doing a little makes a congeries of achievement that is called National achievement, National consciousness, National spirit, National mind. The dying flame must be kindled, and no outside hand must come to rekindle that flame. Nothing else counts—not your knowledge, not all the degrees for which you break your youth, not all those posts for which you sell your birthright, not all those titles for which you sell your country. Only love counts—the love of India. When the great hour comes, when all the secrets of the young generation are yielded up to the judgment of time, what shall posterity say? It will not say, “What were the qualifications you had?” It will not say, “How many lands have you left, how many houses have you left?” It will not say to you, “What material good have you left us?” But it will say, “O, dead, wake up, and speak what spiritual treasure have you left us, what of beauty in art have you left us, what of heritage of freedom have you left us, have you only lived that we shall still be slaves or did you die that Ind might be free ?”