Bipan Chandra > Quotes

“There was a greater truth — that of a glorious struggle, hard-fought and hard-won, in which many fell martyrs and countless others made sacrifices, dreaming of the day India would be free. That day had come. The people of India saw that too, and on 15 August — despite the sorrow in their hearts for the division of their land danced in the streets with abandon and joy.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were:
‘We shall march prospering, not thro’ his presence;
Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,’ and
‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’

There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph!”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“Perhaps the attitude for us to take towards our many failures is the one adopted by Gopal Krishna Gokhale towards those of the Moderate nationalists: Let us not forget that we are at a stage of the country’s progress when our achievements are bound to be small, and our disappointments frequent and trying. That is the place which it has pleased Providence to assign to us in this struggle, and our responsibility is ended when we have done the work which belongs to that place. It will, no doubt, be given to our countrymen of future generations to serve India by their successes; we, of the present generation, must be content to serve her mainly by our failures. For, hard though it be, out of those failures the strength will come which in the end will accomplish great tasks.9”
― Bipan Chandra, India Since Independence

“One should not mistake gentleness and civility of character for weakness. They criticise me for my weakness, but this is too large a country with too many legitimate diversities to permit any so-called “strong man” to trample over people and their ideas.’14”
― Bipan Chandra, India Since Independence

“The deceiver loses when there is correct response from the deceived...”
― Bipan Chandra

“The Indian national movement is also an example of how the constitutional space offered by the existing structure could be used without getting co-opted by it. It did not completely reject this space, as such rejection in democratic societies entails heavy costs in terms of hegemonic influence and often leads to isolation — but entered it and used it effectively in combination with non-constitutional struggle to overthrow the existing structure.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“Friendly relations between the Hindus and Muslims were a very healthy feature of life in eighteenth-century India.”
― Bipan Chandra, History of Modern India

“would go to the length of giving the whole Congress organization a decent burial, rather than put up with the corruption that is rampant,”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“Indira Gandhi was to put it pithily in August 1972 when asked to list India’s achievements since 1947: ‘I would say our greatest achievement is to have survived as a free and democratic nation.’4”
― Bipan Chandra, India Since Independence

“Holding that religious tenets were not immutable, Syed Ahmed Khan emphasized the role of religion in the progress of society: if religion did not keep pace with and meet the demands of the time it would get fossilized as in the case of Islam in India.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“Kings are made for the people, not peoples for their Kings.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“In particular, secular, democratic elements must distinguish between religion as philosophy, spiritual experience, guide to morality and psychological solace and religion as dogma, bigotry and a vehicle for communalism.”
― Bipan Chandra, India Since Independence

“John Lawrence rightly remarked that ‘had a single leader of ability arisen among them (the rebels) we must have been lost beyond redemption.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“A conversation between Gandhiji and Narayana Guru is significant. Gandhiji, in an obvious reference to Chaturvarna and the inherent differences in quality between man and man, observed that all leaves of the same tree are not identical in shape and texture. To this Narayana Guru pointed out that the difference is only superficial, but not in essence: the juice of all leaves of a particular tree would be the same in content.8”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“nationalist or anti-imperialist struggle is a struggle about colonialism before it becomes a struggle against colonialism.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“The national movement, assert the writers of the imperialist school, was not a people’s movement but a product of the needs and interests of the elite groups who used it to serve either their own narrow interests or the interests of their prescriptive groups. Thus, the elite groups, and their needs and interests, provide the origin as well as the driving force of the idea, ideology and movement of nationalism. These groups were sometimes formed around religious or caste identities and sometimes through political connections built around patronage. But, in each case, these groups had a narrow, selfish interest in opposing British rule or each other. Nationalism, then, is seen primarily as a mere ideology which these elite groups used to legitimize their narrow ambitions and to mobilize public support. The national movement was merely an instrument used by the elite groups to mobilize the masses and to satisfy their own interests.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“The nationalist historians, especially the more recent ones, show an awareness of the exploitative character of colonialism, but on the whole they feel that the national movement was the result of the spread and realization of the idea or spirit of nationalism or liberty. They also take full cognizance of the process of India becoming a nation, and see the national movement as a movement of the people. Their major weakness, however, is that they tend to ignore or, at least, underplay the inner contradictions of Indian society both in terms of class and caste. They tend to ignore the fact that while the national movement represented the interests of the people or nation as a whole (that is, of all classes vis-a-vis colonialism) it only did so from a particular class perspective, and that, consequently, there was a constant struggle between different social, ideological perspectives for hegemony over the movement. They also usually take up the position adopted by the right wing of the national movement and equate it with the movement as a whole. Their treatment of the strategic and ideological dimensions of the movement is also inadequate.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“As a mass movement, the Indian national movement was able to tap the diverse energies, talents and capacities of a large variety of people. It had a place for all — old and young, rich and poor, women and men, the intellectuals and the masses. People participated in it in varied ways: from jail-going Satyagraha and picketing to participation in public meetings and demonstrations, from going on hartals and strikes to cheering the jathas of Congress volunteers from the sidelines, from voting for nationalist candidates in municipal, district, provincial and central elections to participating in constructive programmes, from becoming 4-anna (25 paise ) members of the Congress to wearing khadi and a Gandhi cap, from contributing funds to the Congress to feeding and giving shelter to Congress agitators, from distributing and reading the Young India and the Harijan or the illegal”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“Regarding the role of the nationalist Press, Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy, wrote as early as March 1886: ‘Day after day, hundreds of sharp-witted babus pour forth their indignation against their English oppressors in very pungent and effective diatribe.’And again in May: ‘In this way there can be no doubt there is generated in the minds of those who read these papers . . . a sincere conviction that we are all of us the enemies of mankind in general and of India in particular.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“While persisting poverty has been the most important failure in India’s post-independence development, the survival of the democratic structure has been its grandest success.”
― Bipan Chandra, India Since Independence

“The Trustee by the very term used means that he is not the owner. The owner is one whose interest he is called upon to protect,’ i.e., the worker.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“All people, high or low, respected one another’s religion and a spirit of tolerance, even harmony, prevailed.”
― Bipan Chandra, History of Modern India

“For them, the basic contradiction in Indian society in the colonial epoch was between the elite, both Indian and foreign, on the one hand, and the subaltern groups, on the other, and not between colonialism and the Indian people. They believe that the Indian people were never united in a common anti-imperialist struggle, that there was no such entity as the Indian national movement. Instead, they assert that there were two distinct movements or streams, the real anti-imperialist stream of the subalterns and the bogus national movement of the elite. The elite stream, led by the ‘official’ leadership of the Indian National Congress, was little more than a cloak for the struggle for power among the elite.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“since practices based on faith cannot be challenged without bringing faith itself into question. Hence, Raja Rammohan Roy, demonstrated that sati had no religious sanction, Vidyasagar did not ‘take up his pen in defence of widow marriage’ without being convinced about scriptural support and Dayanand based his anti-casteism on Vedic authority.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“India’s freedom struggle was basically the result of a fundamental contradiction between the interests of the Indian people and that of British colonialism. From the beginning itself, India’s national leaders grasped this contradiction. They were able to see that India was regressing economically and undergoing a process of underdevelopment. In time they were able to evolve a scientific analysis of colonialism. In fact, they were the first in the 19th century to develop an economic critique of colonialism and lay bare its complex structure. They were also able to see the distinction between colonial policy and the imperatives of the colonial structure. Taking the social experience of the Indian people as colonized subjects and recognizing the common interests of the Indian people vis-a-vis colonialism, the national leaders gradually evolved a clear-cut anti-colonial ideology on which they based the national movement. This anti-colonial ideology and critique of colonialism were disseminated during the mass phase of the movement.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“A legacy, especially of a prolonged movement, tends to endure for a long time. But no legacy, however strong and sound, can last forever. It tends to erode and become irrelevant unless it is constantly reinforced and developed and sometimes transcended in a creative manner to suit the changing circumstances.”
― Bipan Chandra, India After Independence: 1947-2000

“What W.H. Morris-Jones wrote in 1966 is equally valid today: ‘The combination of political stability with establishment of a free, and freely moving, political system is what we entitled to call India’s political miracle.’5”
― Bipan Chandra, India Since Independence

“The unity and stability of the empire had been shaken up during the long and strong reign of Aurangzeb;”
― Bipan Chandra, History of Modern India

“From the beginning, the Congress was organized in the form of a Parliament. In fact, the word Congress was borrowed from North American history to connote an assembly of the people.”
― Bipan Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence

“The power of the people in a democracy is the ‘liberating deluge’ that can, and we are sure will, sweep away the accumulated dirt of the ages. This is, of course, all the more reason for the preservation and deepening of democracy in India.”
― Bipan Chandra, India Since Independence