THE APOLOGY OF “AJAX”
Babu Ramananda Chatterji is angry with me. I am not surprised. Nothing hurts so much as inconvenient and unpalatable truth; even a melancholy puritan brooding over the evils of the Calcutta University cannot be indifferent to it. “What is mere sport for immortal gods is sin for an ordinary mortal”, says a Bengali proverb. Babu Ramananda protests with becoming severity that he is not a superman, but evidently he claims the privileges of immortal gods, for he will have one law for himself and another law for others. He will not accept responsibility for the editorial notes published in the editorial columns signed by T. D. and A. C., but he holds Dr. Henry Stephen responsible for an article contributed by me, though Dr. Stephen deliberately excluded it from the editorial pages simply because I had the audacity, or the indiscretion, to use the first person plural in the heading, and in the body of the article. Mr. A. C. (Ashoke Chatterjee) has also committed the same indiscretion, but what is sin for me is evidently mere sport for Mr. Chatterjee. The Editor of the Modern Review cannot afford to have the same law for himself and his opponents. If a contradiction is sent to his magazine, he exercises his right of reply, and then abruptly closes the controversy, but when convenience demands he can give two replies in the Manashi and publish a third in his own columns.
“It is a common trick of controvertialists to put into the mouth of their antagonist things which he has not said and then controvert these quite easily.” Where in my writing did Babu Ramananda find trace of such trick? I challenge him to point out a single passage in which I have fathered on him opinions even of his most trusted paladin. I never wrote of the inconsistencies of Babu Ramananda but of the Modern Review. I cannot claim the wide and long journalistic experience of the Editor
