The meeting had been organized, in the loose, informal way such gatherings often were in those months, by a coalition of Forward Bloc sympathizers and the newer, quieter circles Naren Mallik had begun drawing Satyen Babu toward — held in a rented hall not far from College Street, ostensibly to discuss the movement’s response to the war and the provincial ministries’ resignations, though the actual tenor of the evening, from the moment the first speaker rose, carried rather more heat than the announced topic strictly promised.
Satyen Babu had not planned, when he arrived that evening, to speak at all — he had come, he told himself, simply to listen, to gauge the temperature of this newer, more radical current he found himself increasingly drawn toward without yet having fully committed to it.
But the hall that night was thick with a particular restless energy, speaker after speaker rising to voice a frustration that had clearly been building, unspoken, in a hundred private conversations across the city for months — frustration with a war declared without consultation, with ministries resigned rather than forced from office, with a movement that seemed, to men in that hall at least, increasingly content to register its objections through dignified statements rather than any action the government might actually be compelled to fear.
By the time the chairman turned, somewhat unexpectedly, to Satyen Babu — known in that circle now as a respected recent convert to the cause, a barrister whose careful, articulate manner made him a natural choice to close the evening’s proceedings — Satyen Babu found himself rising to speak with a great deal more conviction gathered in him than he had arrived with.
“We are told,” he began, his barrister’s voice carrying easily to the back of the packed hall, “that patience is a virtue.
That the careful, measured statement, issued from the safety of a drawing room, will in time accomplish what impatience cannot.
I confess I have believed this myself, for many years — I have sat in a great many drawing rooms, spun a great deal of thread, drafted a great many careful resolutions, and told myself each time that the accumulated weight of all that patience was building, slowly, toward something the empire could not ignore.” He paused, and the hall, sensing the shift in his tone, grew quieter still.
“I no longer believe it,” he said.
“I have watched this government declare war on our behalf without so much as the courtesy of a telegram to our own elected leaders.
I have watched our own party’s ministries resign with great dignity, and change, in the process, precisely nothing about who actually governs the provinces we surrendered. This story is hosted at novelping . com.
And I have come to understand, at last, that there is a particular kind of patriotism — comfortable, well-meaning, entirely sincere in its own eyes — that mistakes the sound of its own careful words for actual resistance.
Drawing-room patriotism, I have come to call it.
The patriotism of men who love their country deeply, and who have convinced themselves that loving it carefully, from a safe distance, at a measured pace, will one day prove sufficient.
I do not believe it any longer.
I do not believe the empire that declared this war on our behalf without a single word of consultation intends to grant us our freedom simply because we have asked for it politely, and repeatedly, and with unfailing good manners, for the better part of twenty years.” The hall erupted — genuine, thunderous applause, several men on their feet, the particular electric charge of a room that has just heard its own half-formed frustration given precise and memorable shape.
Satyen Babu, caught up entirely in the moment, in the crowd’s response, in the particular intoxicating rush of having said, plainly and forcefully, something he had felt building in him for months, did not, in that moment, think once of his own oldest friend — a man who had, in fact, spent the better part of twenty years in precisely the kind of patient, careful advocacy the speech had just so thoroughly condemned.
But by the time he did, the phrase had already begun its journey down the lane ahead of him.
— It reached Bipin Babu the following morning, through the entirely unreliable but generally efficient channel of Nirmal — the same cousin whose tactless remark had briefly clouded the patrasthapan a month earlier, and who had, as it happened, been present at the previous evening’s meeting through some acquaintance of his own, and had arrived at the blue gate that morning with an expression of barely concealed, faintly gleeful concern that suggested he considered himself the bearer of important, if unwelcome, news.
“I thought you should hear it from family,” he said, settling himself in the front room with a cup of tea he had not, strictly speaking, been offered, “before it reaches you some less careful way.
Satyen Babu spoke last night, at a Forward Bloc meeting near College Street.
Spoke rather forcefully, from what I understand — a whole speech given over to condemning what he called ‘drawing-room patriotism.’ Men who love the country from a comfortable distance, he said.
Careful, well-meaning men who mistake their own patient words for actual resistance.” Nirmal paused, letting the implication settle.
“I understand the whole hall knew exactly who he meant, Bipin, even if he was careful enough not to name you outright.
It is not, I think, a coincidence that a man married to Congress’s patient, careful methods for twenty years should suddenly find himself the unnamed target of his own oldest friend’s public scorn, on the very same week their children’s engagement has been formally sealed.”