Bankim-Tilak-Dayananda

This book contains essays by Sri Aurobindo on four outstanding Indians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Dayananda Saraswati, and Romesh Chandra Dutt. It also contains his translation of Bankim’s song Bande Mataram.

“There are many who, lamenting the by-gone glories of this great and ancient nation, speak as if the Rishis of old, the inspired creators of thought and civilisation, were a miracle of our heroic age, not to be repeated among degenerate men and in our distressful present. This is an error and thrice an error. Ours is the eternal land, the eternal people, the eternal religion, whose strength, greatness, holiness may be overclouded but never, even for a moment, utterly cease. The hero, the Rishi, the saint, are the natural fruits of our Indian soil; and there has been no age in which they have not been born.”