द इण्डियन स्ट्रगल / भारतीय स्वाधीनता संग्राम (नेताजी सुभाष चन्द्र बोस - ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषण)

32 THE INDIAN STRUGGLE
Olcott, played an important rôle in social and public life.
Mrs. Besant joined the society in India in 1893 and became
the President in 1907, which office she continued to hold till
her death in 1933. Mrs. Besant became the great champion
of Hinduism against all attacks. Even the errors and abuses
of Hinduism she would explain away, rather than attack.
Thereby she helped to bring back into the hearts of the people
faith in their own culture and civilisation which had been
badly shaken as a result of the impact of the West. The large
following which she managed to gather round herself through
her religious and educational work, was of great value and
strength to her when in 1916-17 she took an active part in
politics and carried on a raging and tearing campaign for
demanding Home Rule for India.
By the beginning of the present century, the foreign
government was able to strike its roots deeper into the soil of
India. The political administration was no longer a centralised
government with autonomy in the branches as in former
times. It was a highly-complicated system with its rami-
fications in every town and village of the country and with a
bureaucracy ruling with a firm hand under orders from the
centre. People began to feel for the first time in their history
what foreign rule really meant. The beginning of the twen-
tieth century found the Boers of South Africa fighting against
the British for their freedom, the newly-awakened Japanese
fighting the Russians for their existence and safety and the
Russian masses fighting the all-powerful Tsar for their
bread and their liberty. About this time the pride and the
haughtiness of the rulers reached its limit and signs of serious
political unrest appeared in Bengal and in order to nip it in
the bud, the then Viceroy, Lord Curzon, ordered the dis-
memberment of the province. This was the signal for a
country-wide revolt and people everywhere began to feel that
constitutional agitation was not enough. The partition of
Bengal was taken as a challenge by the people and as a reply,
for the first time in British Indian history, a movement was
launched for the boycott of British goods. The political
agitation gave a strong impetus to the growth of national art,
national literature and national industry. Simultaneously,