An Extremely Distinct Nationalist

Born a year after the first freedom struggle, devastated by the communal lines on his land, a radical freedom-fighter, the advocate of self-rule, opponent of Gandhian views and proponent of gender equality, Bipin Chandra Pal, died today in 1932.

Nationalist Prophet, Bipin Chandra Pal; Source: Flickr

The country was boiling with rebellion still. In some parts, the freedom struggle, the first of its kind, had been suppressed and rather harshly. Other areas still struggled either in favour of the Indians or the British! In today's Bangladesh, in this heat, was born one-third part of the Lal-Bal-Pal trio. He was to become one of the most radical faces of the background he was born in.

Bipin Chandra Pal had no humble beginnings. He was always well-provided for by his family. He got a good education and then joined in the freedom struggle. Pal was more of a consequence of the situation around him, in society and politics, rather than his own life!

His free will is what earned him the title of the Father of Indian Revolutionary Thought.

Pal was born in a country in the depth of foreign power and on the tip of a revolution. In the influence of ideas that poured from the West, the Indian thought was slowly waking from its slumber. Not to say that Indian thought had always been fixed, but it had certainly moved towards orthodoxy. Bipin Pal stood in stark contrast to this, so did his revolutionary comrades, Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

Unlike the nationalists who believed more in magic than in logic, Pal along with Lal and Bal, plunged into revolutionary and violent ways of fighting the government, thus preaching an extreme form of nationalism.

Troubled by the power of foreigners over their own land and the inherent incapacity of Indians to rule over themselves highlighted by the foreign regime to justify their colonialism; Pal made a solemn call for Purna Swaraj - complete independence. He didn't seek Indian representation in the governing bodies, he wanted the leeching power to leave the country forever. He then hoped for Swadeshi, all that India needed should be produced here. The country would no longer be just a market but a manufacturing powerhouse.

Though he was an advocate of the boycott of foreign goods and a member of Congress, it is not very difficult to imagine him nodding his head in discontentment when he saw India and its leaders jumping into Non-Cooperation immediately after Bengal had been divided into two parts.

Indian freedom, he believed, could only be achieved by a transformation, by a realization of where we lack and a constant effort to improve it and not in some pacifist pity fights that Indians were engaged in.

The only way to move forward is to find positive constructive criticism in the present. A nation should indulge in the same, like an individual. India had to get rid of her chains of casteism and free her women to marry even after losing their husbands. His brand of nationalism was different from others and that is what made him radical. For Bipin Pal, it was time to change the glass walls of our house with solid steel walls.

Unlike others, Chandra wasn't just a man of words. After the demise of his first wife, he married a widow.

Dissatisfied with the Gandhian pacifist ideas of Congress, it is not unimaginable that Pal left politics and retired to his journalism full-time. He died peacefully on 20th May 1932, with the dreams of independence that he had woven for 73 years.

Pal was different from others in his time, be it Aurobindo Ghosh or M K Gandhi. He despised the British, but not their ideas. He realized the need for India to be free from within to break the shackles that bound her from outside. This freedom was not in a Rama-Rajya but in changing the story of the Ramayana, where a Sita would not have to give a test of her purity. It was in shedding away all that made Indians unfit to rule in the eyes of the British. It was a different nationalism, one that awoke the country from a different sleep.