Later years
The long argument after the loud one
The last twenty-four years of Pal's life are usually compressed into a sentence about his decline. They contain most of his books.
The last chapter
London, and the failure of Swaraj
Pal came out of prison in March 1908 into a movement that had split at Surat, a government arming itself with new powers over the press, and a political climate in which his own paper would shortly be suppressed. He went to England.
There he brought out a journal called Swaraj, and he became associated with the circle around Shyamaji Krishnavarma's India House — the London centre of the most radical wing of Indian nationalism abroad.
On 1 July 1909 Sir William Curzon Wyllie was assassinated in London by Madan Lal Dhingra. Pal condemned the killing. The political consequences for Indian publishing in Britain were immediate and severe, and Swaraj did not survive them. Accounts of this period describe him left in serious financial difficulty by its collapse.
The episode is worth sitting with, because it locates him precisely. Pal was radical enough to be at India House and to have gone to prison rather than testify for the Crown. He was not, and never had been, a supporter of political assassination — his Madras lectures two years earlier had insisted, repeatedly, on keeping within the law. In 1906 he had been displaced from his own newspaper for insufficient radicalism; in 1909 he was ruined by the fallout from an act he condemned. He occupied a position that both sides found unsatisfactory.
Sources differ on the exact span of this stay. It is usually given as running to 1911; some accounts end it in 1909. What is fixed is that The Spirit of Indian Nationalism was published in London in 1910.
A changed country
The India Pal returned to was not the one he had left.
The Partition of Bengal, the grievance around which the whole Swadeshi movement had formed, was annulled in 1911 — and the capital of British India moved from Calcutta to Delhi in the same period. Bengal had won its point and lost its centrality in a single stroke.
The nationalist leadership had been dispersed. Tilak was in Mandalay until 1914. Aurobindo left politics altogether for Pondicherry in 1910. Lajpat Rai spent much of the war years abroad. The generation that had made 1905 was scattered, imprisoned or withdrawn.
Pal re-entered public life through writing and through the Home Rule agitation of the war years, and in 1919 travelled to England again as part of a deputation associated with the Home Rule League led by Tilak. But the political initiative was passing to someone else. Gandhi had returned to India in 1915, and by 1919 the methods that would define the next thirty years were taking shape.
The most productive decade of his life
The period usually described as his decline is the period in which he wrote most of his books.
Between 1916 and 1922 Pal published Nationality and Empire (1916), Responsible Government (1917), Indian Nationalism: Its Principles and Personalities (1918), The New Economic Menace to India (1920), Non-co-operation: Four Lectures (1920), Sir Ashutosh Mookherjea: A Character Study (1920), his Barisal presidential address (1921) and Swaraj: What Is It? And How to Attain It (1922).
Eight publications in seven years, by a man in his late fifties and early sixties who had been financially ruined a decade earlier.
The subject matter had shifted decisively. The 1907 lectures ask how a subject people can generate pressure. The books of 1916–22 ask what institutions a self-governing India will need: how responsibility is enforced on a government, what the relationship between nationality and empire could be, what Swaraj means once it stops being a slogan.
This is a serious body of political writing, and it is the part of Pal's output most thoroughly ignored. The reason is not hard to identify. The nationalist canon rewards the moment of confrontation. A man who spends the confrontation years writing about constitutional machinery is filed as having lost his energy — even when the bibliography shows the opposite.
8
Publications, 1916–1922
4
Books on constitutional questions
64
His age at the 1922 Swaraj volume
The disagreement with Gandhi
This is the most commonly repeated and most commonly garbled episode in Pal's later life. It is worth separating what is documented from what is characterisation.
What is documented is straightforward. Pal opposed the non-co-operation programme, said so publicly, and published his reasons.
At the Calcutta special session of the Congress in September 1920, the non-co-operation resolution was carried against the resistance of a group of senior figures which included Pal, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Annie Besant. The same year he published Non-co-operation: Four Lectures. In 1921, presiding over the Bengal Provincial Conference at Barisal, he criticised Gandhi's approach in his presidential address; that address was printed.
He also objected to the linking of the non-co-operation campaign to the Khilafat cause — the movement in defence of the Ottoman Caliphate — which is a notable position for the man who had lectured on Islam's contribution to Indian nationality. His objection was not to Muslim participation, which he had spent his career arguing for, but to fusing the national movement with a specifically religious grievance.
He is very widely reported as having criticised Gandhi's methods as resting on “magic” rather than “logic”. That characterisation appears in reference works and it captures the substance of his objection accurately. This site does not present it as a verified verbatim quotation, because the wording could not be traced to a primary text.
The event
A veteran votes against the new leadership
In September 1920 the Congress adopted non-co-operation over the objections of several of its most senior figures. Pal was among them, and unlike most he published his case at length.
The idea
Why he thought the method was wrong
Pal's whole career rested on the claim that a people becomes capable of self-government by being argued with — through newspapers, lectures, schools and institutions that build judgement. A movement mobilised around a single leader's moral authority, and fused with a religious cause, looked to him like the opposite: a politics of assent rather than of reasoning. Whether he was right is a live historical question. It was, at least, an objection consistent with everything he had argued since 1907.
Withdrawal
Having lost the argument, Pal withdrew from it.
Banglapedia records that he retired from active politics after 1925. Other reference accounts state that he parted from the Congress and lived a secluded life during his last six years. The two descriptions are compatible and point to the same period: from the middle of the 1920s, Pal was outside the organisation he had helped to radicalise twenty years earlier.
His circumstances in these final years were straitened. He had lost his family's support in the 1880s over his marriage, lost his journal and his money in London in 1909, and now lost his political community. Accounts of the period describe a man in reduced circumstances and considerable isolation.
He kept writing. The last major work was his memoir, Memories of My Life and Times, published at Calcutta in 1932 — an account of the nineteenth-century Bengal that had formed him, written by a man whose own century had ended some time before.
It is a hard ending and there is no purpose in softening it. Pal did not receive the recognition in his lifetime that his contemporaries received, and he did not live to see what he had worked for.
Posterity will judge between him and the petty tribunal.
Sri Aurobindo on Pal, 1907
Written twenty-five years before Pal's death
20 May 1932 · Calcutta
He did not live
to see it.
Bipin Chandra Pal died in Calcutta on 20 May 1932, aged seventy-three.
Independence came fifteen years later. He did not see the Government of India Act of 1935, the Quit India movement, the war, the transfer of power in 1947, or the partition of the province he had spent 1905 arguing could not be divided — which was divided anyway, along a line not far from the one he had opposed, and which placed his own birthplace in another country.
His son Niranjan Pal became a screenwriter and was among the founders of Bombay Talkies, one of the most important Indian film studios of the 1930s. The father worked in newsprint; the son worked in a medium that did not exist when the father was young.
Chronology — 1908 to 1932
Calcutta to London
Released after six months. He left an India in which the Congress had split at Surat and the press was about to be brought under tighter statutory control.
London
After the assassination of Sir Curzon Wyllie by Madan Lal Dhingra — which Pal condemned — the climate for Indian political publishing in Britain collapsed, and so did his journal. He was left in serious financial difficulty.
London
A statement of the Indian case addressed to a British readership, published while he was still in England.
The cause dissolves
The measure that had generated the Swadeshi movement was reversed, and the capital of British India moved from Calcutta to Delhi. Sources place Pal's return to India around this time.
Home Rule years
Nationality and Empire (1916), Responsible Government (1917) and Indian Nationalism: Its Principles and Personalities (1918). The agitator becomes a constitutional writer.
Home Rule League
Pal travelled to England as part of a deputation associated with the Home Rule League led by Tilak.
Calcutta special session
The non-co-operation resolution was carried against the resistance of Pal, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Annie Besant. Pal published Non-co-operation: Four Lectures the same year, along with The New Economic Menace to India.
Printed at Calcutta
Presiding over the provincial conference, Pal set out his criticism of the direction the Congress had taken. The address was printed and is catalogued in research libraries.
Age 64
Fifteen years after the Madras lectures on the same word, and now with self-government a nearer prospect, Pal returns to the definitional question that had occupied him since 1907.
Withdrawal
Banglapedia records his retirement from active politics after 1925; other accounts describe him as having parted from the Congress and lived a secluded life during his last six years.
Calcutta
His memoir was published at Calcutta in the year of his death. He died on 20 May 1932, aged seventy-three, fifteen years before Indian independence.
Sources for this chapter
- “Pal, Bipin Chandra”, Banglapedia — the six-month imprisonment of 1907, the self-imposed exile in England to 1911, retirement from active politics after 1925, and death at Calcutta in 1932.
- “Bepin Chandra Pal”, South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories — the association with Shyamaji Krishnavarma's India House, the founding of the journal Swaraj, and its discontinuation after the Curzon Wyllie assassination, which Pal condemned.
- Catalogue records, The Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania Libraries — publication years for all works cited on this page.
- Reference accounts of the Calcutta special session of September 1920 recording opposition to the non-co-operation resolution from Pal, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Annie Besant; and of Pal's presidential criticism of Gandhi's approach in 1921.
- Standard reference entry on Niranjan Pal, screenwriter and a founder of Bombay Talkies.
The “magic not logic” characterisation of Pal's criticism of Gandhi is widely reported in reference works. It is described on this page as a reported characterisation rather than quoted as his words, because it could not be traced to a primary text.