Chittaranjan Das: Nation

“I appeal to you, therefore, that a man like this stands not only before the bar of this court, but stands before the bar of the high court of History… Long after this controversy is hushed in silence, long after this turmoil and this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone his words will be echoed and re-echoed not only in India but across distant seas and lands.”

Chittaranjan Das

Speech in defence of Aurobindo Ghosh in the Maincktala Bomb Case. The judgement was issued in 1909. Quoted by Dr. Nitish Sengupta in his “History of the Bengali-speaking People.”
Legal

History , Lovers , Silence , Distant

“In the days of Ram Mohan Roy when English education was introduced in this country, the Mahomedans did not accept it… They did not accept English education and at the same time they were divorced from the culture which their fathers had advanced. The result was that whereas the Hindus got on in life, got into government employment, got many things which people value in life, the Mahomedans were left without it and gradually there came to be a sort of estrangement between the two nationalities at the time of the Swadeshi movement.”

Chittaranjan Das

Speech delivered at Barisal on 14th October 1917. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.
1917

Life , People , Education , Time

“We cannot forget that we live and have been living for many years in the midst of an empire. We cannot forget that the different provinces of India are gradually coming closer to one another and a new nationality which comprises not only the different provinces but the whole of India is growing up in our midst and we cannot forget that our interests, even our selfish interests, our hopes, our ambitions are indissolubly connected with the interest of the empire.”

Chittaranjan Das

Speech delivered at Dhaka on 11th October 1917. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu (with Bengali title but text in Bengali and English) edited by Manindra Dutta and Haradhan Dutta, Tuli Kalam, Kolkata. No copyright.
1917

Hope , Selfishness , Forgetting

“Each province has got a speciality of its own, I admit, but over and above that, all these different provinces are bound together in one common culture… If the whole of the Hindu races are bond up in that way you must also realise that the whole of the Mahomedan races all over India are also similarly bound up together and we must not forget that the two great cultures must meet together, and the result will be a great culture which is not purely Hindu, not purely Mahomedan but something which is made up of the contact of these two great races. And that is the ideal of Indian Nationality which must be preserved and developed to the fullest extent.”

Chittaranjan Das

Speech delivered at Barisal on 14th October 1917. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.
1917

Way , Forgetting

“Sarojini Naidu : Kingly was Deshbandhu Das in every impulse and gesture of his life, royal alike in the splendour of his bounty and the splendour of his renunciation. As the idol of the nation he served with unsurpassing devotion. To the generations of tomorrow, he will grow into a radiant figure of historic legend and romance, a vital portion of epic beauty and grandeur of their spiritual heritage.”

Chittaranjan Das

Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.

Beauty , Life

“About Swami Vivekanada: I am not saying that the message of the Swami was the final word in our nationalism… But it was tremendous – something with an undying glory of its own. If you read his books, if you read his lectures, you are struck at once with his love of humanity, his patriotism, not abstract patriotism which came to us from Europe but of different nature altogether a more living thing, something which we feel within ourselves when we read his writings.”

Chittaranjan Das

Speech delivered at Barisal on 14th October 1917. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.
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