BipinChandraPal

Most Indians meet Bipin Chandra Pal as a syllable. He is the third beat of a phrase — Lal, Bal, Pal — learned in a classroom, recited in an examination, and rarely opened again. The phrase is accurate. It is also, on its own, close to useless. It tells you that three men were grouped together by their contemporaries. It tells you nothing about what any of them actually did.

What Pal did, for roughly fifty years, was write and speak. He edited newspapers in Bengali and in English. He founded them, ran out of money, and founded more. He wrote books on religion, economics, social reform and constitutional theory. He lectured to audiences of thousands on a Madras beach and to Unitarian congregations in English chapels. When the colonial government put his own newspaper on trial for sedition, he refused to give evidence against its editor and went to prison for six months rather than take the oath.

This is a different kind of political life from the one Indian public memory usually rewards. Pal did not lead an army, sign a treaty or head a government. His instrument was the printed page and the public platform, and his argument was that a nation which could not think for itself would never be able to govern itself. He belongs to the history of Indian nationalism, but he equally belongs to the history of Indian journalism, Indian political theory and Indian education.

The purpose of this publication is straightforward: to read Pal as he actually worked. Not as one third of a slogan, but as a writer whose ideas were themselves a form of political action — and whose arguments about self-reliance, economy, education and the meaning of freedom are recoverable, because he published them, and because a great deal of what he published survives.

Pal's career is unintelligible without the newspaper. He was not a politician who happened to write. He was a working editor whose politics were conducted, week after week, in columns of type.

Under colonial rule Indians were excluded from the machinery of the state. They could not vote it out, staff its upper reaches, or legislate through it. What they could do — until the law was tightened against them — was print. A newspaper could carry an argument from Calcutta to Madras in a week. It could give a scattered readership the experience of holding an opinion in common. It could turn a local grievance into a national fact.

That is what political journalism did in India before mass politics existed, and it is why the colonial state took the press so seriously. Presses were prosecuted, securities forfeited, editors jailed. When Pal launched the English daily Bande Mataram on 6 August 1906, he did so with roughly five hundred rupees. Within a year the paper was on trial for sedition.

Pal died on 20 May 1932 in Calcutta, fifteen years before the independence he had spent his life arguing for. He held no office. He founded no lasting institution bearing his name. By the standards a nation usually uses to measure its founders, he left very little.

What he left instead was text. His Madras lectures were printed in 1907 and are readable today. The Soul of India (1911), Nationality and Empire (1916), Responsible Government (1917), Non-co-operation (1920) and Swaraj: What Is It? And How to Attain It (1922) are catalogued in research libraries. His memoir, Memories of My Life and Times, was published in Calcutta in 1932, the year he died.

That is a specific kind of survival. A speech is an event and ends; a printed speech is an argument and does not. The reason Pal can be read at all, more than a century later, is the same reason he mattered at the time: he committed his politics to print, and print outlasted both him and the government he opposed.

In 1958, on the centenary of his birth, the Government of India issued a fifteen-naya-paisa stamp bearing his portrait and the words Scholar & Patriot. It is a modest object. It is also, in a country that names airports after its politicians, an oddly appropriate one for a man whose instrument was a printed sheet.