Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 6th November 1909 — No.18
Facts and Opinions
The Dying Race
Dr. U. N. Mukherji recently published a very interesting brochure in which he tried to prove that the Hindus were a dying race and would do well to imitate the social freedom and equality of the still increasing Mahomedans. Srijut Kishorilal Sarcar has gone one better and proves to us by equally cogent statistics that not only the Hindus but the Mahomedans are a dying race,— even if the Hindus be in some places a little more rapid in the race for extinction than the followers of Islam. With all respect to the earnestness of these two gentlemen we think it would have been well if they had been less strenuous in their discouraging interpretations and chosen a less positive title. The real truth is that, owing to an immense transition being effected under peculiarly unfavourable conditions, both communities, but chiefly the more progressive Hindu, are in a critical stage in which various deep-seated maladies have come to the surface, with effects of an inevitable though lamentable character. None of these maladies is mortal and the race is not dying. But the knife of the surgeon is needed and it is to the remedy rather than the diagnosis that attention should be pointedly directed. The mere decline in the rate of increase is in itself nothing. It is a phenomenon which one now sees becoming more and more marked all the world over and it is only countries backward in development and education which keep up the old rate of increase. The unfit tend to multiply, the fit to be limited in propagation. This is an abnormal state of things which indicates something wrong in modern civilisation. But, whatever the malady is, it is not peculiar to Hindus or to India, but a worldwide disease.
Earlier edition of this work: Sri Aurobindo Birth Century Library: Set in 30 volumes.- Volume 2.- Karmayogin: Political Writings and Speeches (1909 — 1910).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972.- 441 p.