A Nation in Making/Chapter 7

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7

Journalism

Here I must interrupt for a moment the narrative of these political activities, in which I had my part and share, to refer to a personal undertaking which I believe greatly helped our political work.

The Press in India in the seventies of the last century was not as vocal or as powerful as it is to-day; but even then it was a great instrument of propagandism. I felt that an organ of our own was needed to help us in our political work. I had before me the example of the Hindoo Patriot, which, under the editorship of Kristo Das Pal, had become the first Indian newspaper in Bengal, and perhaps in India, exercising great influence over the people and the Government.

I could start an independent paper of my own or take up an old one. I preferred the latter. I have always preferred to build upon old foundations. Throughout my life and in all my undertakings, I have fought shy of the new. My faith, perhaps an inherited Brahminical instinct, is inveterate in the old. I have always taken my stand upon old foundations. I have never indeed deemed them perfect, but I have preferred remodelling the old to starting new organizations.

A chapter of accidents favoured me in providing myself with an organ of my own. The Bengalee newspaper was at that time under the editorship of Babu Bacharam Chatterjee. He was also its proprietor. The paper had gone down very low, the number of subscribers not being over two hundred. Negotiations were opened between him and myself through a common friend, the late Babu Romanath Law. Babu Romanath Law's name is now wellnigh forgotton. But he was a well-known solicitor of the High Court during the sixties and the seventies of the last century. We have now a crowd of Indian solicitors of the High Court; but in those days it was Girish Chunder Banerjee (Mr. W. C. Bonnerjea's father) and Romanath Law, who vindicated the capacity of our countrymen for this branch of the legal profession. He was as ​good a lawyer as he was a true and an earnest friend; and through him the negotiations were brought to a successful termination and 1 became the proprietor and editor of the Bengalee from January 1, 1879. I paid Rs. 10 to Babu Bacharam Chatterjee, as consider- ation money for the goodwill of the paper. I owe it to his memory to say that he would not ask for more nor accept more. Indeed, he wanted to make a free gift of the paper, but, as Babu Romanath Law pointed out that some money had to be paid in order to give legal validity to the transaction, he accepted the small pecuniary consideration to which I have referred. I paid Rs. 1,600 for the press, borrowing from a friend Rs. 700 for the purpose, which I repaid after a couple of years without interest, as my friend would charge none. I mention these facts, trivial as they may seem, in order to record my appreciation of the good wishes and the unspoken blessings of many, amid which the Bengalee newspaper came under my charge.

Not the shadow of a desire to start a business transaction was present in my mind. All that I had in view, the sole inspiring impulse, was to serve the public ends with which I had completely identified myself. Indeed, having become the proprietor of the paper, I offered it to the Indian Association, undertaking to edit the paper for nothing, the Association paying all other expenses. As the Hindoo Patriot was the property of the British Indian Association, the Indian Association might, I thought, place itself in the same relation in regard to the Bengalee. But the difficulty was that the paper was a losing concern, and the Association, young as it was and limited as to its funds, felt that it would be inexpedient to incur the pecuniary liability of managing the Bengalee. Judging in the light of subsequent events, I must say that the decision of the Association was a wise one. No political organization with its own special work and its multifarious duties could have controlled with anything like efficiency a newspaper with the wide and increasing circulation of the Bengalee. But I am anticipating events.

When I became editor and proprietor of the Bengalee in January, 1879, it was a weekly newspaper. With the exception of the Indian Mirror, all our newspapers in Bengal, including the most influential, were weekly. The craving for fresh news was then not general; and Indian readers for the most part were content to have a weekly supply of news and comments thereon. I remember speaking at the time to the head master of a Government high school, a man of education and culture, who said to me that it took him a week's ​time to go through the Bengalee (then a weekly paper), and that if it were a daily paper he would not know what to do with it. That represented the temper of the Bengalee mind, say, thirty years ago. The daily paper is a more recent development, but it has so com- pletely superseded the weekly that the latter has no chance of a wide circulation except as an adjunct to a daily paper.

In the early stages of my journalistic venture I was greatly assisted by the disinterested labours of my lamented friend, the late Ashutosh Biswas. I discovered him at a public meeting held at the London Missionary Society's Institution at Bhowanipore, where I delivered an address on Chaitanya. He spoke at that meeting. I was greatly impressed with what he said. The words were few; but they were eloquent, to the point, and came straight from the heart. They disclosed the man and the stuff that was in him. I invited him to see me; and our first acquaintance was the beginning of a friendship that only his tragic end dissolved. He called me his guru; it was no lip-deep profession. He was indeed a veritable 'disciple, following me with a fidelity and devotion rare in these days.

The paper used to be issued every Saturday morning, and we had to work during a good part of Friday night, correcting proofs, writing out copy if necessary, and giving directions to the printers. My friend was my companion, my colleague in this somewhat dreary work, from 1879 to the early part of 1884, when he began to help the Guardian, a weekly paper, which had just been started at Bhowanipore. Now that he is dead and gone, the victim of a tragic crime, I gratefully testify to the debt I owe to his memory.

With his rising practice at the Bar, my friend's interest in journalism became less keen and persistent than before, and latterly he ceased to have any connexion with it. But our personal relations continued to the last to be friendly and cordial, and, whenever I had need of legal help, I turned to him for advice and it was always cheerfully given. In politics he belonged to our party, and, while yet connected with the Bengalee, he went on a tour in Northern India to help the work of the Indian Association. It was the irony of fate that he should have been the victim of an anarchical outrage. The head and front of his offence was that, being engaged on the side of Government, he was helping the prosecution of the accused in what is known as the Alipore Bomb Case. He was one of the cleverest criminal lawyers of his day, and the accused had good reason to dread his legal skill and acumen. It is possibly this feeling that inspired the tragedy which ​cost him his life, when an anarchist (who, by the way, was hardly able to use one of his arms) shot him dead within the precincts of the Magistrate's Court at Alipore. He had received threatening letters, and the authorities had offered him police protection. But he declined it, believing, fatalist that he was, that it was not in the power of any human agency to save him from what destiny had decreed.

Acute lawyer and sagacious man of the world that he was, there was in him a strange medley of orthodox and heterodox beliefs. Every Sunday he was a frequenter of the temple of Kali, where he performed his devotions; yet he never hesitated to dine with unorthodox people, and, if a dish were laid before him with a mixture of forbidden food, he would accept the unorthodox portion of the food without any objection. I mention this fact to show the sort of compromise that we meet with in Hindu society some- times, when the forces of othodoxy are compelled to fraternize with those of the opposite school, and in a manner that would have been abhorrent to the men of the same faith in the last generation. The spirit of liberalism is marching apace even in an atmosphere of rigid and inflexible formulae. Hindu society is moving, steadily moving, adapting itself, though very slowly, to its environment.

However that may be, it was my pleasing duty and privilege to have been of some service to his family after his death. I person- ally introduced his sons to the late Sir Edward Baker, who was then Lieutenant-Governor, and was partly instrumental in securing from the Government a suitable provision for the family. Sir Edward Baker took the matter up with the generous warmth that always distinguished him when he had to deal with individual cases where a wrong had to be redressed or the generosity of a great Government had to be exhibited in an impressive manner.

My friend, Babu Ashutosh Biswas and myself continued to edit the paper. We made no profit, but we were able to pay our way. It was no longer a losing concern. It ceased to be so from the year I took it up. We paid off the small debt we had incurred in purchasing the printing-press, plant, etc., and we followed the usual journalistic rôle—criticizing, commenting, making friends, and not infrequently creating enemies. There is perhaps one event that I may notice before the occurrence of the contempt case in which the Bengalee was involved in 1883. Sir Ashley Eden was about to retire from the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal, and it was proposed by some of his friends and admirers to hold a demonstra​tion in his honour at the Town Hall. Sir Ashley Eden was one of the ablest of the Lieutenant-Governors of Bengal. He was a Haileybury man and an official of the old type. He had many friends among the aristocracy and the Bengalee leaders of his time. He was on familiar terms with Maharaja Jotindra Mohon Tagore, and held Kristo Das Pal in great esteem. Let it also be said to his credit that in social life he made no distinction between Europeans and Indians, and it was during his time that Mr. B. L. Gupta of the Bengal Civil Service, who was then Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta, submitted the note that became the genesis of the Ilbert Bill controversy. If he had continued to be Lieutenant-Governor, I believe, he would have kept the Civil Service well in hand and the Bill would have had a different termination.

All this was to his credit, but he was a bureaucrat to the marrow of his bones, and had a profound distrust of all progressive institu- tions. Mr. Buckland tells us in his Bengal under the Lieutenant-Governors that Lord Ripon said of him that he had never known a man less likely to be led away by vague sentiment or mere theory than Sir Ashley Eden. This was only a euphemistic way of saying that he was singularly free from the domination of ideals, and that he had no higher conception of the duties of an administrator than to do the day's work and be satisfied with it. He was a strong supporter of the Vernacular Press Act and had no love for a free Press, or free institutions.

Of representative govenment he said that it was a sickly plant in its own native soil, and as to its being tried in India, that was out of the question.

A ruler with such ideas could not command either the affection or the esteem of the new school that had risen in Bengal, and which looked forward to the birth of a new India, with free and pro- gressive institutions. To his personal friends he had endeared himself by bestowing on them, or on others on their recommenda- tion, titles, distinctions and public offices. They were grateful to him. Their desire to honour him was natural; but they had no right to speak in the name of the community, who saw nothing in his administration to entitle him to the honour of a public demonstra- tion. It was this line that I took up in the Bengalee and wrote a series of articles. I made it quite clear that if a public meeting were held, there would be a protest against the public character of the demonstration. The hint was taken; and the Town Hall meeting, which was to have been called in the name of the public, resolved ​itself into 'a meeting of friends and admirers'. To this there could have been no objection, and there was none. The 'friends and admirers' of the retiring Lieutenant-Governor were at liberty to do what they pleased; and the public had no right to interfere or to protest. This was a notable triumph of middle class educated opinion in Bengal, which, it was evident, had now become a living force and had to be reckoned with.