Kishoreganj - at the Conference of Palli Samity
18.Apr.1908
Sri Aurobindo spoke at the Conference of Palli Samity (Village Worker's Association) at Kishoreganj in the district of Mymensingh. The following is an excerpt....
Sri Aurobindo spoke at the Conference of Palli Samity (Village Worker's Association) at Kishoreganj in the district of Mymensingh
"...foreign rule can never be for the good of a nation, never work for its true progress and life, but must always work towards its disintegration and death.... We in India had our own instruments of life and growth; we had the self-dependent village; we had the Zamindar as the link between the village units and the central governing body, and the central governing body itself was one in which the heart of the nation beat... If we are to survive as a nation we must restore the centres of strength which are natural and necessary to our growth, and the first of these, the basis of all the rest, the old foundation of Indian life and secret of Indian vitality was the self- dependent and self-sufficient village organism. If we are to organise Swaraj we must base it on the village. But we must at the same time take care to avoid the mistake which did much in the past to retard our national growth. The village must not in our new national life be isolated as well as self-sufficient, but must feel itself bound-up with the life of its neighbouring units, living with them in a common group for common purposes; each group again must feel itself part of the life of the district, living in the district unity, so each district must not be engrossed in its own separate existence but feel itself a subordinate part of the single life of the province, and the province in its turn of the single life of the country. Such is the plan of reconstruction we have taken in hand, but to make it a healthy growth and not an artificial construction, we must begin at the bottom and work up to the apex. The village is the cell of the national body and the cell-life must be healthy and developed. Swaraj begins from the village.... There may have been a time in history when it was enough that a few classes... should be awake. But the organisation of the modern nation depends on the awakening of the political sense in the mass. This is the age of the people, the million, the democracy.... The work of the village Samity will be to make the masses feel Swaraj in the village, Swaraj in the group of villages, Swaraj in the district, Swaraj in the nation. They cannot immediately rise to the conception of Swaraj in the nation, they must be trained to it through the perception of Swaraj in the village. The political education of the masses is impossible unless you organise the village Samity."
He says that "Unless we organise the united life of the village we cannot bridge over the gulf between the educated and the masses."
