When some American students from Minnesota staying with us told me that one of their subjects was ‘Peace Studies’, I lost no time in telling them that at Chicago, a Hindu monk from Kolkata, Swami Vivekananda (1863 – 1902) had created a sensation at the World Parliament of Religions held there in September 1893 by stating “We Hindus believe that all religions are true”. I told them that if this statement, along with the fundamentally important principle of democracy “Let us agree to differ”, were understood, appreciated and seriously followed, the whole world would be a better place to live in.

Noticing their interest in Swami Vivekananda, I told them more: that serious thoughts and concern about the need for peace, amity, righteousness, and even for freedom and emancipation in various forms, democracy and internationalism, may be attributed to another person from Bengal who was nearly 90 years older – Rammohun Roy (1774 – 1833), whose life and work serves as a veritable benchmark for all that followed in the Bengal renaissance; also because he was not only born, but also passed away, before almost all the others were even born.

Having always been a hero-worshipper of every great Bengali from Rammohun Roy to Subhas Chandra Bose, with the greatest respect for the values and ideologies they represented and upheld, I would unhesitatingly have considered them relevant not only at present, but for all time, because of their timelessness alone.

Changes in value systems

However, present-day ground reality compels me to make a compromise, and treat this relevance as what academicians would call a ‘theoretical limiting case’. I feel that the very best opinion surveys would reveal, quite apart from the inevitable erosion and changes in values occurring over a period of time, how widespread fallacies, misconceptions and a lack of knowledge are in present-day Indian minds, the most important being the lack of awareness about how in Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab, the struggle for political freedom was given a different dimension by several reform movements preceding it in the 19th century, and was by no means a 1920–1947 phenomenon as in most other states. This being so, there were more freedom fighters from these three states and over a much longer period.

One wonders if the phrase ‘quirks of fate’ adequately explains why there was no one from Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab at the negotiating table in 1947 when the British, with several ‘collaborators’ in support, decided in favour of Dominion Status and the partition of Bengal and Punjab, with Subhas Chandra Bose, according to most researchers at present, still living outside India after making it imperative in many ways for the British to leave India in a hurry, and his elder brother Sarat Chandra doing his utmost till the very end to prevent Bengal’s partition and form an united independent Bengal.

While the political party which inherited power from the British had values and ideologies based on the feudal culture, and used the most devious of means to disparage the role of their first-ever democratically elected president Subhas Chandra Bose in India's freedom movement, the party now in power, which had no role to play in this movement, has used the ‘thus far, and no further’ approach very well with regard to Subhas Bose to serve its own interests best, one of which is to establish India as a Hindu rashtra from which the values and ideologies of 19th century and early 20th century Bengalis are discordantly different. Its operations in recent years has revealed clearly how easily it can, with tremendous money and political power at its disposal, exploit to its advantage the particular organised religion it is connected to, with its priesthood, rituals and ceremonies and social divisions helping facilitate this process in the best possible manner. With the deviousness associated with a feudal culture, the highest standards are being set for a system that employs blatant untruths, hypocrisy, double standards, and fake news through large sections of the communication media influenced by the party to form the basis of a totalitarian political system characterised by the extreme Hindu fanaticism of northern India and north-western India, with the rest of India utterly disregarded.

Rise of Brahminical Hinduism 

It becomes abundantly clear that, on the one hand, with the feudal culture always in our blood and in the marrow of our bones, the democratic culture can take root in India only with the highest conceivable levels of hypocrisy; on the other, Hindutva or Brahminical Hinduism will keep rearing its head all the time. Even in 19th century Bengal, the lives of Rammohun Roy and Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, both Brahmins by birth, were threatened – for their efforts aimed at the abolition of satidaha in 1830, and the passing of the Widow Remarriage Act in 1856, respectively – and Swami Vivekananda, a non-Brahmin, was not accepted as a Hindu sannyasi by many well-educated Bengali Brahmins even after his triumphant return from the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893!

Inveterate old-timers like me, who have been influenced by the values and ideologies of the 19th century and early 20th century ‘greats’ of Bengal, now constitute, at best, a microscopic minority. However , irrespective of which group one belongs to, I feel that one would do well to know better about the roles of the Tagore family, the Tattvabodhini Sabha, the Brahmo Samaj, Ramakrishna Paramhansa and the Ramakrishna Mission, the Swadeshi movement, Rashbehari Bose, Jatindranath Mukherjee, Chittaranjan Das, the revolutionaries and martyrs belonging to various groups, not to speak of the legendary figures in the fields of science, literature and education. If anything, this may lead to some informed understanding about great Bengalis of those times and their values and ideologies which aimed at peace and harmony, and at uniting – and not dividing – people.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based retired PR consultant and history enthusiast. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached corpocom@gmail.com)