u6 LIFE AND WORK OF SIR JAGADIS C. BOSE 



The notion is often expressed by English journalists, 

 and even by officials who ought to know better, that 

 Indian unity is a recent ideal of lawyers and politicians 

 taken from Mazzini and absorbed by unrestful youth ; 

 and it is true enough that there are minds which thus 

 too simply view it, through that education in European 

 nationalism and liberalism which an orator can so logically 

 adapt and so eloquently re-voice. But India's real unity 

 is something incomparably older and deeper : it rests on 

 sacred and epic literature and legend for the people, and 

 on great and ancient philosophies, which are not merely 

 cultivated by the classically educated, but deeply diffused, 

 for good and evil, throughout the people as well. All this 

 variety of cultural influences, in essential harmony and (to 

 us strangely) free from intolerance, has from unnumbered 

 ages been steeping into the Indian villages with their old 

 economic self-sufficiency and moral solidarity : hence the 

 apparent heterogeneity, of languages and castes, and of 

 mingled and changing Hindu, Mohammedan and European 

 rule, has mattered far less than we are wont to suppose. 



India then, though not a nation in a European sense, 

 is something not merely less, but more. It is rather the 

 analogue of Europe : and though even vaster in population, 

 and more varied in climates and peoples, has a more diffused 

 and an often deeper community of spirit. Not simply 

 then through any mere political changes can this unity 

 be more adequately realised though on the modern spiral 

 some may think so but also, and more deeply and surely, 

 through her cultural spirit. That spirit not even the con- 

 quests of Islam have broken, nor yet the modern rule and 

 other influences of the West. This it is which is stirring 

 towards its renaissance, as the religious groups of the past 

 generation, or the political groups of the present, alike 

 show : and this it is which will more fully revive its old 

 values, and adjust them anew with those of the Western 

 world. This indeed is what many of its pioneers, like 

 Bose among others, have throughout their lives, and each 



