of belonging to Bengal or Bombay, is coming the consciousness of being
an Indian. This consciousness of a national unity is one of the
outstanding features of the time in India, all the more striking because
hitherto India has been so unwieldily large, and her people incoherent,
like dry sand. "The Indian never knew the feeling of nationality," says
Max Müller. "The very name of India is a synonym for caste, as opposed
to nationality," says Sister Nivedita, the pro-Hindu lady already
referred to, who likewise notes the emergence of the national idea.[35]
"Public spirit or patriotism, as we understand it, never existed among
the Hindus," writes Mr. Bose, himself an Indian, author of a recent work
on _Hindu Civilisation under British Rule_.[36] And Raja Rammohan Roy,
the famous Bengali reformer of the beginning of the nineteenth century,
we have already heard denouncing the caste system as "destructive of
national union." From what then, during the nineteenth century, has the
national consciousness come forth? Many causes may be cited. The actual
unification effected by the postal, the telegraph, and the railway
organisation, has done much. The omnipresence of the foreign government,
all-controlling, has also done much. The current coins and the postage
stamps with King Edward's head upon them--the same all over India, a few
native states excepted--bring home the union of India to the most
ignorant. The constant criticism of the Government in the native press,
the meetings of the All-India political association called the Congress,
and the fact that modern interests, stimulated by daily telegrams from
all over the world, are international, not provincial or sectarian--all
these things combine to give to the modern educated Indian a new Indian
national consciousness in place of the old provincial and sectarian one.
In short, the British rule has united India, and the awakened mind of
India is rejoicing in the consciousness of the larger existence, and is
identifying the ancient glories of certain centres in North India with
this new India created by Britain. Never before was there a united India