The Fundamental Unity of India

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THIS brochure is based on an article which I contributed to the Down and Dawn Society's Magazine in January, 1909. In its present form it was delivered as an address to the Calcutta University Institute in March last under the presidency of Sir Gooroodass Banerji. Kt.. M.A., D.L., Ph.D., Ex-Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University, and it was reproduced in the pages of The Modern Review for April. It is now published with several additions and alterations.

In this work I have not dwelt upon the important evidence of the fundamental unity of India furnished by the social and religious institutions of the country. But have confined my attention mainly to its geographical basis.

I am deeply indebted to Dr. Brajendranath Seal. M.A., Ph.D., King George V Professor of Philosophy of the Calcutta University, for many valuable suggestions I received from him.

My grateful acknowledgments are due to the Hon. Maharaja Late Manindra Chandra Nandy of Cossim- bazar for the generous support he has accorded to me in the preparation of this work.

THIS book was first published in London as far back as 1914 (and written a little earlier) in anticipation of the later developments which led up to the division of India in 1947 into two separate States, though there was the compensating advantage that each State would be created into an independent sovereign State as a result of the division. The thesis of the work was endorsed by the late British Labour Leader, the Right Hon. J. Ramsay MacDonald, by contributing to it his learned Foreword.

This division of India was dictated mainly by the consideration that it would render each State a more homogeneous entity by reducing the strength of its minority and thereby ensuring in a greater degree the conditions of internal peace and concord. But even then it is physically impossible in these days so as to plan that each State should be composed of one com- munity. In fact, a territorial separation of communities is no solution of the communal problem. The communal problem will follow such separation into all the new States to be created by separation. No State can ever be a homogeneous social composition made up of only one community. It is bound to be made up of different communities, one of which must necessarily be the majority. Political and national frontiers do not coincide with racial, religious or social frontiers.