The other day I stumbled upon the news article that an Indian Charity Foundation serving meals free of cost to the homeless and schoolchildren in London. Akshaya Patra Foundation UK/Europe had been on fundraising to help feed midday meals to millions of school children in India.
The reciprocal gesture the Foundation had shown by helping the economically marginal people of the benefactor’s country, nonetheless, it raises a few curious scenarios on my mind. Let us assume a momentous time gap when it was almost impossible to think about this magnanimous decision from both the sides or for that matter, the benefactors and the beneficiary on a reverse and different time zone, say, two hundred years back from now on. Let us move back to a time zone when India was ruled by the British. In that era, the common concept about the British in India was that they have come here to exploit only. Every British citizen from every nook and crannies of the whole island are exploiters, indulged only in looting this country. It never occurs in those days that they have had also their share of big academicians, educationist, world famous universities, poets, ascetics as well as poor homeless people who could not afford their square meals in a given day like everywhere usually happens under the sky.
It is human nature that we tend to see only the one side of the coin. So the basic clash has always been among the ruling establishments, not the common peace-loving mass who hardly take interest in the power struggles among the warring establishments.
But the intent of this topic is not the power struggle between the ruling elites but the peculiar pattern and influence of ‘time’ which embark on the whole new scenario at a letter era followed by a different time zone and place when the so-called exploiter is at the receiving end. It just happens as a chain of events in a particular country where the people experience certain shades of exploitation and the tyranny, but on the contrary, the imaginary oppressor in a particular time zone never feels for a moment that amongst his own polity, community or sect itself a lot of people are toiling hard for both ends meets and they are the same oppressed class irrespective of class, creed or faith. Throughout the world irrespective of any country, there have been creative people who value human dignity above all else and the same reciprocity of feelings no matter from which part of the world they belong to. There are poets, seers, ascetics, philosophers who never in their wildest dreams ever want enmity and hardly like to lock horns for a piece of land and for any coerced creed or belief system. I wonder when India was governed by the British, Matthew Arnold was creating ‘The Scholar- Gipsy’, and William Wordsworth was writing ‘The Daffodils’. But, unfortunately, there had been the massacre of Jalianwalabag. I wonder it had nothing to do with the whole British race because William Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold had never approved of the massacre in spite of it had been committed by the British rulers at that time. On the contrary, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee were writing famous poems and novels which created ripples among the common people. And it goes without saying it is only when famous Irish novelist W.B. Yeats happened to find a translation of ‘Gitanjali’ and engrossed with it while travelling in a tram-car in London that paved essentially the way for the 1911 Noble prize in literature for Rabindranath Tagore despite the fact that Tagore was a citizen of a dependent country under British dominion. It never occurred to W. B. Yeats that Tagore was not a British citizen as he solely enthralled with the creativity only.
In this context, I would like to mention that my grandfather was a student of Bankura Cristian College in the district of Bengal run by that time mostly by the British Jesuit fathers in the first part of the twentieth century. I’ve heard from my grandfather the likes of Professor Brown or Professor Thomson. Professor Brown had been a wrangler of the University of Cambridge whereas Professor Thompson happened to be an ardent Tagore admirer, and both of them were as good as ‘saints’ in their personal as well as social life or as a teacher as according to my Grandfather. They never treated any students as British subjects and tried to help in every possible way to reach out to their one’s own potential. In fact, Professor Brown used to play such a mesmerizing football at the age of sixty-four that he seemed to be in his late twenties. Once he proposed seriously to my grandfather to take him off to England for further studies – the bond was so close between a teacher and his disciple that hardly any barrier of a different nationality, between an ordinary inhabitant of a colony and the omnipotent ruler stood between them. Anyway, it did not materialize though due to some reasons or other.
Raja Rammohan Roy, Pandit Iswarchandra Vidyasagar – both famous social reformers and educationists of the then 19th century fiercely objected in annulling the infamous practice of Sati – or the immolation of a too much younger Hindu widow on the funeral pyre of her so-called deceased husband, happened to be four/five times senior to her. The Bengal Sati regulation act of 1929 was promulgated to abolish this barbaric act for good by no other than under the aegis of Lord William Bentinck, the then Governor General of British India. Those persons with sanity and sensibility at that time from either the sides who ruled over or being ruled over never questioned that Lord William Bentinck was a Christian by faith and thus had no right to interfere on other’s personal religious affairs. So at the ultimate analysis, it goes without saying that a sensible soul no matter from any given time zone never allows or for that matter, never supports any derogatory thoughts which are harmful to humanity as a whole.
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