****************THE FALL OF INDIA AND HER FUTURE RISE ... 1 (UNFINISHED)

Till Aurobindo led the extreme revolutionary movement, it went on along kshatriya lines. His quitting the revolutionary scene was suicidal for India as Gandhi filled up the void within a decade to vitiate it completely. The nation had to wait a long time before Subhas Chandra Bose came along in full might to salvage the revolutionary movement, giving it direction and finally leading it from foreign soil in an armed assault that triggered off a chain reaction within the country to evict the British for good. But the damage had been done and what the world gained in Sri Aurobindo, India lost in the form of revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose. Once more our motherland had sacrificed a nation-builder to contribute to the fund of world spirituality.

                              
It is but the dynamics of time. Aurobindo (1872-1950) was three years younger than Gandhi (1869-1948) and outlived him, too, by two years. Instead of Gandhi leading the freedom movement, it ought to have been Aurobindo who should have done so. But, alas, it was not destined to be so as a combination of circumstantial and psychological causes careered Aurobindo into an alternative path and confined him forever to French Pondicherry even as his soul soared in the limpid spaces of the divine.

There were others who were revolutionaries, too, and some like Bagha Jatin and Rash Behari Bose were dangerous foes of the British who along with co-conspirators almost succeeded in bringing down the Empire in the decade following the great departure of Aurobindo, but none of them were statesmen of the order of Aurobindo with the philosophical and intellectual attributes of the recluse of Pondicherry. India continued to hope for the return of her heroic son to political activity after a supposed hiatus of twelve years that was rumoured to have been the period of his revolutionary preparation in self-exile. But it all proved in vain as spiritual preoccupations consumed the energy of the erstwhile revolutionary who made Pondicherry his home for good and only cast distant glances at the brewing mass movements under Gandhi who transformed the character of the freedom movement completely from a formidable, unrelenting revolutionary one to a passive, non-violent ever-compromising one.

The revolutionaries between 1910 and 1917 were brutally crushed as internal betrayals foiled the hopes of freedom each time a major assault was planned to perfection that would evict the British from India. Armed revolution crushed, Gandhi stepped in to launch his passive resistance along non-violent lines beginning with Champaran in 1917. With this began the mass movement for freedom for the first time since 1857 and with this died India the kshatriya tradition in India that had held her in good stead for millenia despite countless invasions that had temporarily beset her onward march as a nation.

End of Part 1

To be continued...