The National Week

THE National Week, which India is celebrating, not, it must be confessed, with the earnestness, enthusiasm and determination that characterised the celebration in the earlier years, the years immediately following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, but still in a manner not entirely unworthy of the occasion, is perhaps the most memorable epoch is our modern history. We do not forget the 7th of August and the 16th of October, 1905, days as sacred to the Indian nationalist as any other day in our history, but those days were peculiarly connected with a movement which directly affected one particular part of the country. The National Week, on the other hand, is connected in our memory with a movement which was national in the truest and widest sense of the term, even as the measure against which India recorded her protest on the 6th of April, 1919 and in connection with which hundreds of patriotic Indians — Hindus, Mahomedans and Sikhs — shed their blood at Jallianwala Bagh on the 13th, was a measure affecting the whole country. The measure against which India recorded her protest in one case was an even graver and more calculated insult to India’s self-respect and national self-consciousness than in the other, and the protest which it called forth was even stronger and more intense. And need we say that neither the National Week nor the earlier epoch of which it was in a sense the culmination represents a dead past of which one can safely say that it should be buried in oblivion or recalled only as we recall men and events that have ceased to be of any direct living importance to us? Neither the partition of Bengal nor the Rowlatt Act is really dead, though the actual measures have been annulled.