Sri Aurobindo

The Hour of God

and other writings

IX. Dayananda — Bankim — Tilak — Andal — Nammalwar

The Men That Pass

Romesh Chandra Dutt is dead. After a long life of the most manifold and untiring energy, famous, honoured, advanced in years, with a name known in England as well as in India, the man always successful, always favoured of Fortune, always striving to deserve her by skill and diligence, type of a race that passes, of a generation that to younger minds is fast losing the appearance of reality and possibility, has passed away at the height and summit of his career before his great capacities could justify themselves to the full in his new station, but also before the defects of his type could be thoroughly subjected to the severe ordeal of the times that have come upon us. The landmarks of the past fall one by one and none rise in their place. The few great survivors here and there become more and more dignified monuments of the last century and less and less creators of the living present. New ideals, new problems, new men, almost a new race wholly different in mind, character, temperament, feeling, rise swiftly and wait till they can open the gates of the future and occupy the field of action.

The official, the liberal Congress politician, the well-read litterateur, the Oriental scholar, the journalist proficient in English and fluent of Western ideas, the professional man successful and sleek, these were the foremost men of the old generation, those who were in the eyes of all śreṣṭha, the best, in whose footsteps, therefore, all strove to follow and on whose pattern all formed themselves. An active, self-confident, voiceful generation making up by these qualities for the lack of height, depth and breadth in their culture and atoning for the unoriginal imitativeness to which they were doomed by the fidelity in detail and framework of the imitation! In all but one of these lines of activity Romesh Dutt had achieved a high distinction among the men of his own generation, and we doubt whether another man could be pointed out among them so many-sided, so full of strength and hope and energy, so confident, so uniformly successful. Nature was liberal to him of her gifts, Fortune of her favours. A splendid physique, robust and massive, equipped him to bear the strain of an unceasing activity: a nature buoyant, sanguine, strong, as healthy as his frame, armed him against the shocks of life and commanded success by insisting upon it; an egoism natural to such a robust vitality seized on all things as its provender and enabled its possessor thoroughly to enjoy the good things of life which it successfully demanded; a great tact and savoir faire steered him clear of unnecessary friction and avoidable difficulties; an unrivalled quickness of grasp, absorption and assimilation, more facile than subtle or deep, helped him to make his own all that he heard or read; a rapid though not ingenious brain showed him how to use his material with the best effect and most practical utility; and a facile pen and speech which never paused for a thought or a word, could always be trusted to clothe what he wished to convey in a form respectable and effective and so well put as to conceal the absence of native literary faculty and intellectual distinction. These were Nature’s presents to him at his birth. Fortune placed him in a wealthy, well-read and well-known family, gave him the best advantages of education the times could afford, sent him to England and opened the doors of the Civil Service, the pinnacle of the young Indian’s aspiration in his days, and crowned him with the highest prizes that that highest of careers could yield to a man of his hue and blood. It is characteristic of his career that he should have died as Prime Minister of the Indian State which has been most successful in reproducing and improving upon the Anglo-Indian model of administration.

There were limits, as we have hinted, to the liberality of Nature. Of all the great Bengalis of his time Romesh Dutt was perhaps the least original. His administrative faculties were of the second order, not of the first; though he stood for a time foremost among the most active of Congress politicians and controversialists, he was neither a Ranade nor a Surendranath, had neither the gift of the organiser and political thinker nor the gift of the orator; he had literary talent of an imitative kind but no literary genius; he wrote well on scholastic subjects and translated pleasantly and effectively, but was no great Sanskrit scholar: he cannot rank with Ranade or even with Gokhale as an economist, and yet his are the most politically effective contributions to economic literature in India that recent years have produced. It must be admitted that his activity and dexterity of work were far in excess of his literary ability or scholastic conscientiousness. It is doubtful, therefore, whether any of his voluminous works in many kinds will be remembered, with the possible though not very certain exception of his Bengali historical novels in which he touched his creative highwater mark. His translation of the Rig-veda by its ease and crispness blinds the uninitiated reader to the fact that it may be a very pretty translation but it is not the Veda. His history of ancient Indian civilisation is a masterly compilation, void of original research, which is rapidly growing antiquated. In fact, the one art he possessed in the highest degree and in which alone it can be said that he did not only well but best, was the art of the journalist and pamphleteer. Originality and deep thought are not required of a journalist, nor delicacy, nor subtlety; his success would be limited rather than assisted by such qualities. To seize victoriously on the available materials, catch in them what will be interesting and effective and put it brightly and clearly, this is the dharma of the journalist, and, if we add the power of making the most of a case and enforcing a given view with irresistible energy, dexterity and apparent unanswerableness, we shall have added all that is necessary to turn the journalist into the pamphleteer. No man of our time has had these gifts to the same extent as Romesh Dutt. The best things he ever did were, in our view, his letters to Lord Curzon and his Economic History. The former fixed public opinion in India irretrievably and nobody cared even to consider Lord Curzon’s answer. “That settles it” was the general feeling every ordinary reader contracted for good after reading this brilliant and telling indictment. Without the Economic History and its damning story of England’s commercial and fiscal dealings with India we doubt whether the public mind would have been ready for the Boycott. In this one instance it may be said of him that he not only wrote history but created it. But all his works, with the exception of the historical novels, were rather pieces of successful journalism than literature. Still, even where it was most defective, his work was always useful to the world. For instance, his Ramayana and Mahabharata, though they are poor and commonplace poetry and do unpardonable violence to the spirit of the original, yet familiarised the average reader in England with the stories of the epics and thus made the way easy for future interpreters of the East to the West. In brief, this may be said in unstinted praise of Romesh Dutt, that he was a gigantic worker and did an immense amount of pioneer spadework by which the future will benefit.

We have dwelt on this interesting and vigorous personality as one of the most typical of the men that pass, much more typical than greater or more original contemporaries. The work they did is over and the qualities with which they were equipped for that work will no longer sufficiently serve our purpose. An education at once more subtle and more massive, a greater originality, force and range of intellectual activity, an insatiable thirst for knowledge, the glut of a giant for work and action, mighty qualities of soul, a superhuman courage, self-abnegation and power to embrace and practise almost impossible ideals, these are the virtues and gifts India demands from the greatest among her sons in the future so that they may be sufficient to her work and her destinies. But such gifts as Romesh Dutt possessed are not to be despised. Especially did his untiring capacity for work and his joyous vitality and indestructible buoyancy make him a towering reproach to the indolent, listless, sneering and anaemic generation that intervened between him and the recent renascence.