Sri Aurobindo. Bankim Chandra Chatterji. 3 .His Official Career // The Harmony of Virtue: Early Cultural Writings (1890-1910)

Sri Aurobindo

The Harmony of Virtue

Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910

Bankim Chandra Chatterji

3.His Official Career

Thus equipped, thus trained Bankim began his human journey, began in the radiance of joy and strength and genius the life which was to close in suffering and mortal pain. The drudgery of existence met him in the doorway, when his youth was still young. His twenty-first year found him at Jessore, his fifty-third was the last of his long official labour. Here too however his inveterate habit of success went always with him. The outward history of his manhood reads more brilliantly even than that of his youth, and if he did not climb to the highest posts, it was only because these are shut to indigenous talent. From start to finish, his ability, delicacy of judgment and careful work were recognised as something unusual: yet it would not be easy to find a more careful or cleverer set of administrators than the Hindu civilians of Bengal. At Jessore his life was chequered by a great boon and a great sorrow. It was here that he made fast his friendship with the dramatist Dinabandhu Mitra, which remained close-soldered to the end, and it was here that his young wife died. At Kanthi, the next stage of his official wanderings, he married again and more fortunately. Khulna, the third step in the ladder, was also the theatre of his most ambitious exploits. Entangled in the Sunderban¹, that rude and unhealthy tract of marsh and jungle, the zillah was labouring under two morbid ailments, for which none of its official doctors had found an efficient panacea, — the smallpox of piracy and the greater pox of Indigoism. Ruffians from Europe were in hot competition with the native breed which should deserve best the Government Scholarship for lawlessness and brutality; and as they had a racial gift for these things and a wider field it might have been safely awarded to them. Unluckily Bankim stept into their happy hunting-grounds and spoiled the game. But to the unhappy ryots, the battle-field for these rival rascalities, he came as a champion and a deliverer. At Khulna this mild, thoughtful Bengali wears the strange appearance of a Hercules weeding out monsters, clearing augean stables, putting a term to pests. His tranquil energy quite broke the back of the Indigo tyrants. Their master-criminals and chief indigocrats fled to Anam and Brindaban, but they were overtaken by Bankim's warrant and persuaded to come back. Fine and imprisonment meted out with a healthy severity shattered their prestige and oppressed their brutal spirits². Khulna then saw the last of government by organised ruffiandom. No less terse and incisive were Bankim's dealings with the water-thieves who lurking in creek and brushwood dominated to the perpetual alarm and molestation of travellers the hundred waters of the Sunderban³. The outlaws were hunted down and imprisoned and their principal spirits relegated where there was less room for their genius to find self-expression. The hydra of the waters had been crushed as effectually as the indigo pest; and since the era of Bankim's magistracy one may travel the length and breadth of Khulna without peril except from malaria and ague. By a little quiet decisiveness he had broken the back of two formidable tyrannies and given an object lesson in what a Government can do when it heartily intends the good of the people.

Baruipur, a place consecrated⁴ in the calendar of literature, was next put into his hands. The event of his residence here was his appointment vice Mr. Justice Princep to the chair of an Official Emoluments Commission, then sitting. The Government intended this to look like an extraordinary distinction, and had not the genius of the man raised him immeasurably⁵ above any Englishman in the country, we might have regarded it as such. Berhampur⁶ was the next step in his journey, and after Berhampur⁷ Maldeh, and after Maldeh the important Suburban district of Hugly. He was now nearing his high-water mark and his official existence, which had been till then more than ordinarily smooth, began to be ploughed up by unaccustomed storms. The Government wanted to give some inadequate expression to its sense of his extraordinary merits and could think of nothing better than a place in the Secretariat. It was here that he came into collision with the spirit of bureaucracy. His superior was a certain Macaulay, hard⁸ working official, whose brains were tied together with red tape. The diligent mediocrity of this man was goaded to extra hours by flickering visions of a Lieutenant-Governorship, but Bankim, having no such high incentive, was careful to close his work at the strict office-hour. For this Macaulay took him severely to task. “It is natural enough,” replied Bankim, forgetting unfortunately that he was talking to a piece of red tape, “it is natural enough for you to work hard. You are of the ruling caste and may rise, who knows? to be Lieutenant-Governor. But why should I be subservient to your example? Here is the bourne and goal of my promotion. Beyond it what prospect have I? No, I have no idea of sweating myself to death over extraordinary work.” When independence and red tape come into collision, it is usually independence that gets tripped up. Bankim was sent back in a hurry to Magistrate's work, this time at Alipur. But his ill-luck followed him. He was shipwrecked again in a collision with Anglo-Indianism. Walking in Eden Garden he chanced across Munro, the Presidency Commissioner, a farouche bureaucrat with the manners of an Englishman and the temper of a badly-educated hyena. Bankim examined the queer curiosity, as one might any queer curiosity, with a certain lazy interest, but no signal of respect. He was unaware at this time that to Salaam any stray European you may meet is the highest privilege of a Hindu and the whole duty of a Deputy Magistrate. But he was soon to receive instruction: for His Hyenaship was off in a rage to the Government and by a little private roaring easily got Bankim transferred to Jahajpur in Orissa. Bankim was considerably taken aback and not a little angry. “Have I then committed some grave fault?” he enquired of the Chief Secretary, “or is it that the Government has found out a new way to pay its old debts? Resolve me, for I am in doubt.” The gibe told. He had hardly set foot in Orissa, when he was gazetted back to Hugly. After a lapse of time — Munro, I believe, had in the meantime been struck by his own astonishing likeness to the founder of Christianity and was away to spread the light of the Gospel among the heathen — after a lapse of time Bankim was allowed to come back to Alipur. But this was the last stage of that thankless drudgery in which he had wasted so much precious force. His term of service was drawing to a close and he was weary of it all: he wished to devote his remnant of life to literature. But the days that remained to him were few and evil. One or two years clouded with sickness, sorrow and suffering stood between him and the end.