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Past does not guide the present

Logic behind perversion of caste
Ram Sawrup
(From the Indian Express, 13th September, 1996)
Today casteism is rampant. It is a new phenomenon. Old India had castes but
not casteism. In its present form, casteism is a construct of colonial period, a
product of imperial policies and colonial scholarship. It was strengthened by
the breast-beating of our own reformers. Today, it has acquired its own
momentum and vested interests.
In the old days, {the Hindu caste system was integrating principle. It
provided economic security. One had a vocation as soon as one was
born.- a dream for those threatened with chronic unemployment. The
system combined security with freedom; it provided social space as well
as closer identity; here the individual was not atomised and did not
become rootless. There was also no dearth of social mobility; whole
groups of people rose and fell in the social scale. Rigidity about the old
Indian castes is a myth. Ziegenbbalg writing on the eve of the British
advent saw that at least one-third of the people practised other than
their traditional calling and that official and political functions, such as
those of teachers, councillors, governors, priests, poets and even kings
were not considered the prerogative of any particular group, but are
open to all.}
Nor did India ever have such a plethora of castes as became the order of the
day under the British rule. Megasthenes gives us seven fold division of the
Hindu society; Hsuan Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim (650 A. D.) mentions four
castes. Alberuni too mentions four main castes and some more groups which
did not strictly belong to the caste system.
Even the list of greatly maligned Manu contained no more than 40 mixed
castes, all related by blood. Even the Chandals were Brahmins on their
fathers side. But under the British, Risley gave us 2,378 main castes, and 43
races! There is no count of sub-castes. Earlier, the 1891 census had already
given us 1,156 sub-castes of chamars alone. To Risley, every caste was also
ideally a race and had its own language.
Caste did not strike early European writers as something specifically Indian.
They knew it in their own countries and saw it that way. J. S. Mill in his
Political Economy said that occupational groups in Europe were almost
equivalent to an hereditary distinction of caste.
To these observers, the word caste did not have the connotation it has today.
Gita Dharampal Frick, an orientalist and linguist tells us that the early
European writers on the subject used the older Greek word Meri which means
a portion, share, contribution. Sebastian Franck (1534) used the German
word Rott (rotte) meaning a social group or cluster. These words suggest
that socially and economically speaking they found castes closer to each
other than ordo or estates in Europe.
The early writers also saw no Brahmin domination though they found much
respect for them. Those like Jurgen Andersen (1669) who described castes in
Gujarat found that Vaishyas and not the Brahmins were the most important
people there.
They also saw no sanskritisation. One caste was not trying to be another; it
was satisfied with being itself. Castes were not trying to imitate the Brahmins
to improve social status; they were proud of being what they were. There is a
Tamil poem by Kamban in praise of the plough which says that even being
born a Brahmin does by far endow one with the same excellence as when
one is born into a Vellala family.
{There was sanskritisation though but of a very different kind. People
tried to become not Brahmins but Brahma-vadin. Different castes
produced great saints revered by all. Ravi Das, a great saint, says that
though of the family of chamars who still go around Benares removing
dead cattle, yet even the most revered Brahmins now hold their
offspring, namely himself, in great esteem.
With the advent of Islam the Hindu society came under great pressure; it
faced the problem of survival. When the political power failed, castes
took over; they became defence shields and provided resistance
passive and active. But in the process, the system also acquired
undesirable traits like untouchability. Alberuni who came along with
Mahmud Ghaznavi mentions the four castes but no untouchability. He
reports that much, however, as these classes differ from each other,
they live together in the same towns and villages, mixed together in the
same houses and lodgings.
Another acquired another trait; they became rigid and lost their mobility.
H. A. Rose, Superintendent of Ethnography, Punjab (1901-1906), author
of A Glossary of Punjab Tribes and Castes says that during the Muslim
period, many Rajputs were degraded and they became scheduled castes
and scheduled tribes. Many of them still retain the Rajput gotra of
parihara and parimara. Similarly, G. W. Briggs in his The Chamars tells
us that many chamars still carry the names and gotra of Rajput clans
like Banaudhiya, Ujjaini, Chandhariya, Sarwariya, Kanaujiya, Chauhan,
Chadel, Saksena, Sakarwar, Bhardarauiya, and Bundela, etc. Dr.K. S. Lal
cites many similar instances in his recent Growth of Scheduled Tribes
and Castes in Medieval India.
The same is true of bhangis. William Crooke of Bengal Civil Service tells
us that the rise of the present Bhangi caste seems from the names
applied to the castes and its subdivisions, to date from the early period
of Mohammedan rule. Old Hindu literature mentions no bhangis of
present function. In traditional Hindu rural society, he was a corn-
But
measurer, a village policeman, a custodian of village boundaries.
scavenging came along with the Muslim and
British rule. Their numbers also multiplied. According to 1901
Census, the bhangis were most numerous in the Punjab and the United
Provinces which were the heartland of Muslim domination.
Then came the British who treated all Hindus equally all as an inferior race
and fuelled their internal differences. They attacked Hinduism but cultivated
the caste principle, two sides of the same coin. Hinduism had to be attacked.
It gave India the principles of unity and continuity; it was also Indias definition
at its deepest. It held together castes as well as the country. Take away
Hinduism and the country was easily subdued.
Caste in old India was a cooperative and cultural principle.; but it is now being
turned into a principle of social conflict. In the old dispensation, castes
followed dharma and its restraints; they knew how far they could go. But now
a caste is a law unto itself; it knows no self-restraint except the restraint put on
it by another class engaged in similar self-aggrandisement. The new self-
styled social justice intellectuals and parties do not want castes without
dharma. This may be profitable to some in the short run but it is suicidal for all
in the long run.}
In the old days, castes had leaders who represented the culture of the land,
who were natural leaders of their people and were organic to them. But now a
different leadership is coming to the fore; rootless, demagogic and ambitious,
which uses caste slogans for self-aggrandisement.

'Vedic practices provided the inspiration for advances in astronomy and

mathematics'
(Excerpted from an article by B.V.Subbarayyappa in the book India
1000 to 2000, Editor : T.J.S.George, published in December 1999 by
Express Publications (Madurai) Ltd, Express Estates, Anna Salai,
Chennai - 600 002. The excerpt was also published in The New Indian
Express on Sunday in the FYI column on April 8, 2001.)
Jyothisha (astronomy) was one of the six auxiliaries of the Vedas and
the earliest Indian astronomical text goes by the name of Vedanga
Jyotisha. Year-long sacrifices commenced from the day following the
winter solstice and Vedic knowledge of both winter and summer
solstices was fairly accurate. The Vedanga Jyotisha had developed a
concept of a cycle of 5 years (one Yuga) for luni-solar and other time
adjustments with intercalation at regular intervals.
Indian mathematics too owes its primary inspiration to Vedic practices.
The Shulba sutras, part of another Vedic auxiliary called the Kalpa
sutras, deal with the construction of several types of brick altars and in
that context with certain geometrical problems including the
Pythagorean theorem, squaring a circle, irrational numbers and the
like. Yet another Vedic auxiliary, Metrics (chandah), postulated a
triangular array for determining the type of combinations of 'n' syllables
of long and short sounds for metrical chanting. This was
mathematically developed by Halayudha who lived in Karnataka (10th
Century) into a pyramidal expansion of numbers. Such an exercise
appeared six centuries later in Europe, known as Pascal's triangle.
Vedic mathematics and astronomy were pragmatic and integrated with
Vedic religio-philosophical life.
But such an approach was not to last long. During the three centuries
before and after the Christian era, there were new impulses. Astronomy
became mathematics-based. In the succeeding centuries, while
astronomy assimilated Hellenic ideas to some extent mathematics was
really innovative. Indian astronomers were able mathematicians too.
The doyen among them, Aryabhatta I (b.476 A.D.) gave the value of pi
(3.1416 approx., a value used even today) worked out trigonometrical
tables, areas of triangles and other plane figures, arithmetical
progression, summation of series, indeterminate equations of the first
order and the like. He expounded that the earth rotates about its own
axis and the period of one sidereal rotation given by him is equivalent
to 23h 56m 4s.1, while the modern value is 23h 56m 4s.091. He
discarded the mythical Rahu-Ketu postulate concerning eclipses in
favour of a scientific explanation.
Aryabhatta's junior contemporary Varahamihira, was well known for his
compendium, the Panchasiddhantika, a compilation of the then extant
five astronomical works called the Siddhantha- Surya, Paulisha,
Romaka, Vasishta, and Paitamaha. Of them, the Suryasiddhanta,
which he regarded as the most accurate, underwent revisions from
time to time and continues to be an important text for computing
pancangas.
Brahmagupta was a noted astronomer mathematician of the 7th
Century. His remarkable contribution was his equation for solving
indeterminate equations of the second order - an equation that
appeared in Europe a thousand years later known as Pell's equation.
His lemmas in this connection were rediscovered by Euler (1764) and
Lagrange (1768). Brahmagupta was also the first to enunciate a
formula for the area of a rational cyclic quadrilateral. In the latter half of
the first millenium A.D. there were other noted astronomers and
mathematicians like Bhaskara I, Lalla, Pruthudakasvamin, Vateshvara,
Munjala, Mahavira (Jaina mathematician), Shripati, Shridhara,
Aryabhatta II , and Vijayanandin. The tradition of astronomy and
mathematics continued unabated - determination of procession of
equinoxes, parallax, mean and true motions of planet, permutations
and combinations, solving quadratic equations, square root of a
negative number and the like.
Using nine digits and zero, the decimal place value system had
established itself by about the 4th century A.D. Says historian of
science, George Sarton, "Our numbers and the use of zero were
invented by the Hindus and transmitted by Arabs, hence the name
Arabic numerals which we often give them.' Brahmagupta's
Brahmasphuta Siddhanta and Khandakhadyaka were also rendered
into Arabic in the 9th-10th century. The Brahmi numerical forms with
some modifications along with the decimal place-value system
developed in India have since become universal.
The beginning of the second millenium A.D. witnessed the emergence
of the notable astronomer-mathematician, Bhaskaracharya II (b.1114).
His cyclic (cakravala) method for solving indeterminate equations of the
second order has been hailed by the German mathematician 'Henkel',
 as the finest thing achieved in the theory of numbers before Lagrange.
Bhaskaracharya II had also developed basic Calculus. Between the
14th and 18th Centuries, there were schools of astronomers-
mathematicians in Kerala and Maharashtra, Ganesha Daivajna
simplified methods of computation for almanac makers. The Kerala
school was well known for its keen observations of eclipses over 55
years. Parameshwara (1360-1455) was the first in the history of
mathematics to have given the exact formula for the circumradius of a
cyclic quadrilateral; this was rediscovered in Europe by L'Huiler nearly
300 years later.
Adhering to the Aryabhatta tradition, other Kerala savants like Govinda
Bhatta, Damodara, Nilakantha Somayaji, Jyesthadeva, Acyuta
Pisharati and Putumana Somayaji added to both astronomy and
mathematics. The leader of this intellectual lineage was Madhava (14th
century), who formulated the approximations for pi, trigonometrical
sine, cosine, arc tan power series (now known as Gregory series) that
were rediscovered in Europe three centuries later. Nilakantha Somayaji
provided a convergent infinite geometric progression. In north India,
Narayana Pandita worked out a rule for finding out factors of divisors of
a number, much before such an attempt was made in Europe. He was
well known for his analysis of sets of numbers, magic squares and the
like. As for astronomy, the astrolabe began to be used during the
Muslim rule. Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh erected five observatories in
Benares, Mathura, Ujjain, Delhi and Jaipur (early 18th Century).
Though Jai Singh knew the use of telescope and European heliocentric
astronomy, he clung to the traditional geo-centric calculations of Indian
astronomy, but raised the level of observational mathematics.
- India 1000 to 2000

Past does not guide the present

Logic behind perversion of caste
Ram Sawrup
(From the Indian Express, 13th September, 1996)
Today casteism is rampant. It is a new phenomenon. Old India had castes but
not casteism. In its present form, casteism is a construct of colonial period, a
product of imperial policies and colonial scholarship. It was strengthened by
the breast-beating of our own reformers. Today, it has acquired its own
momentum and vested interests.
In the old days, the Hindu caste system was integrating principle. It provided
economic security. One had a vocation as soon as one was born.- a dream for
those threatened with chronic unemployment. The system combined security
with freedom; it provided social space as well as closer identity; here the
individual was not atomised and did not become rootless. There was also no
dearth of social mobility; whole groups of people rose and fell in the social
scale. Rigidity about the old Indian castes is a myth. Ziegenbbalg writing on
the eve of the British advent saw that at least one-third of the people practised
other than their traditional calling and that official and political functions, such
as those of teachers, councillors, governors, priests, poets and even kings
were not considered the prerogative of any particular group, but are open to
all.
Nor did India ever have such a plethora of castes as became the order of the
day under the British rule. Megasthenes gives us seven fold division of the
Hindu society; Hsuan Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim (650 A. D.) mentions four
castes. Alberuni too mentions four main castes and some more groups which
did not strictly belong to the caste system.
Even the list of greatly maligned Manu contained no more than 40 mixed
castes, all related by blood. Even the Chandals were Brahmins on their
fathers side. But under the British, Risley gave us 2,378 main castes, and 43
races! There is no count of sub-castes. Earlier, the 1891 census had already
given us 1,156 sub-castes of chamars alone. To Risley, every caste was also
ideally a race and had its own language.
Caste did not strike early European writers as something specifically Indian.
They knew it in their own countries and saw it that way. J. S. Mill in his
Political Economy said that occupational groups in Europe were almost
equivalent to an hereditary distinction of caste.
To these observers, the word caste did not have the connotation it has today.
Gita Dharampal Frick, an orientalist and linguist tells us that the early
European writers on the subject used the older Greek word Meri which means
a portion, share, contribution. Sebastian Franck (1534) used the German
word Rott (rotte) meaning a social group or cluster. These words suggest
that socially and economically speaking they found castes closer to each
other than ordo or estates in Europe.
The early writers also saw no Brahmin domination though they found much
respect for them. Those like Jurgen Andersen (1669) who described castes in
Gujarat found that Vaishyas and not the Brahmins were the most important
people there.
They also saw no sanskritisation. One caste was not trying to be another; it
was satisfied with being itself. Castes were not trying to imitate the Brahmins
to improve social status; they were proud of being what they were. There is a
Tamil poem by Kamban in praise of the plough which says that even being
born a Brahmin does by far endow one with the same excellence as when
one is born into a Vellala family.
There was sanskritisation though but of a very different kind. People tried to
become not Brahmins but Brahma-vadin. Different castes produced great
saints revered by all. Ravi Das, a great saint, says that though of the family of
chamars who still go around Benares removing dead cattle, yet even the most
revered Brahmins now hold their offspring, namely himself, in great esteem.
With the advent of Islam the Hindu society came under great pressure; it
faced the problem of survival. When the political power failed, castes took
over; they became defence shields and provided resistance passive and
active. But in the process, the system also acquired undesirable traits like
untouchability. Alberuni who came along with Mahmud Ghaznavi mentions the
four castes but no untouchability. He reports that much, however, as these
classes differ from each other, they live together in the same towns and
villages, mixed together in the same houses and lodgings.
Another acquired another trait; they became rigid and lost their mobility. H. A.
Rose, Superintendent of Ethnography, Punjab (1901-1906), author of A
Glossary of Punjab Tribes and Castes says that during the Muslim period,
many Rajputs were degraded and they became scheduled castes and
scheduled tribes. Many of them still retain the Rajput gotra of parihara and
parimara. Similarly, G. W. Briggs in his The Chamars tells us that many
chamars still carry the names and gotra of Rajput clans like Banaudhiya,
Ujjaini, Chandhariya, Sarwariya, Kanaujiya, Chauhan, Chadel, Saksena,
Sakarwar, Bhardarauiya, and Bundela, etc. Dr.K. S. Lal cites many similar
instances in his recent Growth of Scheduled Tribes and Castes in Medieval
India.
The same is true of bhangis. William Crooke of Bengal Civil Service tells us
that the rise of the present Bhangi caste seems from the names applied to
the castes and its subdivisions, to date from the early period of Mohammedan
rule. Old Hindu literature mentions no bhangis of present function. In
traditional Hindu rural society, he was a corn-measurer, a village policeman, a
custodian of village boundaries. But scavenging came along with the Muslim
and British rule. Their numbers also multiplied. According to 1901 Census, the
bhangis were most numerous in the Punjab and the United Provinces which
were the heartland of Muslim domination.
Then came the British who treated all Hindus equally all as an inferior race
and fuelled their internal differences. They attacked Hinduism but cultivated
the caste principle, two sides of the same coin. Hinduism had to be attacked.
It gave India the principles of unity and continuity; it was also Indias definition
at its deepest. It held together castes as well as the country. Take away
Hinduism and the country was easily subdued.
Caste in old India was a cooperative and cultural principle.; but it is now being
turned into a principle of social conflict. In the old dispensation, castes
followed dharma and its restraints; they knew how far they could go. But now
a caste is a law unto itself; it knows no self-restraint except the restraint put on
it by another class engaged in similar self-aggrandisement. The new self-
styled social justice intellectuals and parties do not want castes without
dharma. This may be profitable to some in the short run but it is suicidal for all
in the long run.
In the old days, castes had leaders who represented the culture of the land,
who were natural leaders of their people and were organic to them. But now a
different leadership is coming to the fore; rootless, demagogic and ambitious,
which uses caste slogans for self-aggrandisement.

Your Holiness,
On behalf of many Hindus whom I know personally, I welcome your visit to
Bharat. This is a country with an ancient civilisation and unique religious
culture which accommodates many religious traditions that have come to this
country throughout the centuries.
Being the head of the Vatican State and also the Catholic Church with a great
following all over the world, you enjoy a highly venerable position and can
play a significant role in defusing religious conflicts and preserving the world's
rich cultures. You have in your Apostolic Letter tertio millennio adveniente, 38
(November 10, 1994) voiced your intention to convoke a Special Assembly of
the Synod of Bishops for Asia. After seeing the report of the Pre-Council of the
General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops Special Assembly for Asia
appointed by you, I want to bring to your kind notice the concerns of many
Hindus in this country about religious conversion. In the Second Vatican
Council, the status accorded to the world religions was that of a means of
preparing them for Christ. We all understand that the Catholic religion does
not accommodate other religions, except in this context. But I am appealing to
you here to accept that every person has the freedom to pursue his or her
own religion.
In the recent past, you mentioned that reason should be respected. On the
basis of reason, no non-verifiable belief is going to fare any better than any
other non-verifiable belief. Therefore, according to reason, there is no basis
for conversion in matters of faith.
Apart from reason, there is another important issue which I request you to
consider. Among the world's religious traditions, there are those that convert
and those that do not. The non-converting religious traditions, like the Hindu,
Jewish and Zoroastrian, give others the freedom to practise their religion
whether they agree with the others' tenets or not. They do not wish to convert.
I would characterise them as non-aggressive. Religions that are committed by
their theologies to convert, on the other hand, are necessarily aggressive,
since conversion implies a conscious intrusion into the religious life of a
person, in fact, into the religious person.
This is a very deep intrusion, as the religious person is the deepest, the most
basic in any individual. When that person is disturbed, a hurt is sustained
which is very deep. The religious person is violated. The depth of this hurt is
attested by the fact that when a religious sentiment is violated, it can produce
a martyr. People connected to a converted person are deeply hurt. Even the
converted person will suffer some hurt underneath.
He must necessarily wonder if he has done the right thing and, further, he has
to face an inner alienation from his community, a community to which he has
belonged for generations, and thus an alienation from his ancestors. I don't
think that can ever be fully healed. Religious conversion destroys centuries-
old communities and incites communal violence. It is violence and it breeds
violence. Thus, for any humane person, every religious sentiment has to be
respected, whether it is a Muslim sentiment or a Christian sentiment or a
Hindu sentiment.
Further, in many religious traditions, including the Hindu tradition, religion is
woven into the fabric of culture. So, destruction of a religion amounts to the
destruction of a religious culture. Today, for instance, there is no living Greek
culture; there are only empty monuments. The Mayan, Roman and many
other rich cultures are all lost forever and humanity is impoverished for it. Let
us at least allow humanity to enjoy the riches of its remaining mosaic of
cultures. Each one has some beauty, something to contribute to the
enrichment of humanity.
In any tradition, it is wrong to strike someone who is unarmed. In the Hindu
tradition, this is considered a heinous act, for which the punishment is severe.
A Buddhist, a Hindu, a Jew, are all unarmed, in that they do not convert. You
cannot ask them to change the genius of their traditions and begin to convert
in order to combat conversion. Because it is the tradition of these religions
and cultures not to convert, attempts to convert them is one-sided aggression.
It is striking the unarmed. I respect the freedom of a Christian or a Muslim to
practise his or her faith. I do not accept many of their beliefs, but I want them
to have the freedom to follow their religion.
You cannot ask me to respond to conversion by converting others to my
religion because it is not part of my tradition. We don't believe in conversion,
even though certain Hindu organisations have taken back some converted
people. Thus, conversion is not merely violence against people; it is violence
against people who are committed to non-violence.
I am hurt by religious conversion and many others like me are hurt. Millions
are hurt. There are many issues to be discussed regarding conversion, but I
want to draw your attention to only the central issue here which is this one-
sided violence. Religious conversion is violence and it breeds violence. In
converting, you are also converting the non-violent to violence.
Any protest against religious conversion is always branded as persecution,
because it is maintained that people are not allowed to practise their religion,
that their religious freedom is curbed. The truth is entirely different. The other
person also has the freedom to practise his or her religion without
interference. That is his/her birthright. Religious freedom does not extend to
having a planned programme of conversion. Such a programme is to be
construed as aggression against the religious freedom of others.
During the years of your papal office, you have brought about certain changes
in the attitude and outlook of the church. On behalf of the non-aggressive
religions of the world, the Hindu, the Parsi, the Jewish and other native
religions in different countries, I request you to put a freeze on conversion and
create a condition in which all religious cultures can live and let live.
The writer is the head ofArsha Vidya Gurukulam
Friends,
I have been thinking on this topic for a long time. It is very clear to me, and
perhaps to many of you, that there are two distinct religious traditions in the
world. Some of them have a good following. Some others may not have.
One tradition does not believe in conversion. A Jewish person is born of a
Jewish mother. A Zoroastrian is born of Zoroastrian parents. A Hindu is born of
Hindu parents. And so too are the followers of Shintoism, Taoism and many
other tribal religious groups all over the world. They are born to be the
followers of their religions. In other words, they do not want to convert
anybody. In India, when the Parsis, Zoroastrians, came as refugees, being
driven from Iran, they came to Bombay, they were received and allowed to
settle down in India.. They were very faithful to their religion and they lived
their religion. They did not cause any problem to others. Hindus
accommodated them as even they accommodated the Christians, the
Muslims and many other small tribal traditions. Our vision of God allows that.
We generally accept various form s o f w o r s h i p . W e a c c e p t m a
ny forms of prayers; one more really does not m
atter to us. In fact, some of our Hindu friends in
their puja rooms have a picture of Jesus and the
y don't see anything wrong about it, nor do I fee
l anything wrong about it.I would call the Jewish
, the Zoroastrian and the Hindu traditions as no
n aggressive traditions. For me, aggression is n
ot just a physical one. It need not be the Kargil
type. There are varieties of aggression. You can
e m o t i o n a l l y b e a g g r e s s i v e . I n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s,
it is a crime to be aggressive towards the children. Simple abuse is looked
upon as aggression. Verbally you can be aggressive. Physically you can be
aggressive. Economically you can be very aggressive. And the worst
aggression, which I consider more than physical aggression, is cultural
aggression or religious aggression.Hurt is born of many sources. I am hurt if
somebody encroaches upon my piece of land that is vacant, and the court
supports that person and gives me the responsibility of finding a new house
for him; it is an aggression. I, get hurt. That he encroached upon my property
is itself a good source of hurt. It is enough to hurt. That the law protects the
one who encroached makes me more hurt. That hurt cannot be easily healed,
because it leaves you helpless and the helplessness is a source of great hurt.
If somebody physically hurts you, of course, it is very well known that it is a
hurt. It is treated as a crime and there is a penalty for it. If I am emotionally
abused, then, that also is a gre a t h u r t . F o r e x a m p l e , p e o p l e
in authority can abuse you. The employer can ab
use you emotionally. Husband can abuse. Wife a
lso can abuse the husband. In laws can abuse. F
or these, I can seek some redress somewhere.Bu
t the worst hurt, I would say, is the hurt of a rel
igious person whether what the person believes
has a basis or not. It is not my domain of enquir
y to say whether it has a basis or not. Each one
is free to follow his or her religion. Everybody w
ould, have a certain belief system. Either the p
erson is convinced or the person needs to be convinced. On the whole, he
believes in the whole theology and follows that theology. He has the freedom
to follow. that theology. That is human freedom. What is it that one is
connected to as a religious person? He is connected not to any particular
person here, who is the member of the contemporary society or his family. I
am connected to my parents as their son. I cannot take myself as just a son; I
am connected to other people too. I am son to my parents. I am also the
father to my children and husband to my wife. I am uncle, cousin, neighbour,
employer, employee and citizen. I have a number of hats to wear every day.
As the religious T, I have different roles to play, day after day. A son is related
to a person outside. A brother is related to a person outside. A citizen is
related to a country, a state. As a religious person, who am I related to? Let
us for the sake of convenience call that religious person a devotee. To whom
is that devotee connected? Definitely, not to anyone here. I may be a religious
son. I may be a religious father, religious brother, religious husband. In fact, if I
am religious, the religious 'me' is going to pervade every role I play. Basically,
first and last, I am a religious person, if I am one. That religious person is the
bas
ic person not related to anything empirical. He i
s related, of course, to a force beyond whateve
r that force may be. One may say that force is G
o d , a n d H e i s i n h e a v e n . An o t h e r o n e m a y s a y , H
e i s i n K a i l a s a . An o t h e r m a y s a y , H e i s i n V a i k u
n t h a . A n o t h e r may say, He is in Goloka Brindavan. And another may
say, He is elsewhere, elsewhere and elsewhere. But the person related to that
force is the one whom we call a devotee, and that person has an altar. That
person is not an empirical person in the sense he is the father or son or
daughter. He is the basic person. The hurt of a basic person is going to be a
hurt, which is deep, and true. There is no healing power which can heal that
hurt. That is the reason why any religious sentiment, if it is violated, in anyway,
will produce a martyr. There is a martyr ready to be born in that basic person.
And thus the religious sentiment seems to be the most sensitive. Whenever a
religious sentiment is hurt, you will find that, in the Indian press, there is a
complete black out, in terms of who did what. Even the names are not given.
They will say one community fought with another community. I think it is
correct because it prevents further escalation. We generally do guess work
and say it must be this community or that c o m m u n i t y . T h i s i s s o
because, that sentiment is very deep and has to
be respected whether it is a Muslim sentiment o
r a Christian sentiment or a Hindu sentiment or
a Jewish sentiment. That sentiment has got to b
e r e s p e c t e d . I f t h a t r e s p e c t i s n o t s h o w n , then the
State has to protect that sentiment. You tell me whether it is correct or not!
The State has got the responsibility to protect the religious sentiment of all the
people. That I consider is secularism. In America, the religious sentiment of
every individual is protected. You can go to the court and get an answer, if
there is something wrong done to you as a religious person. There is justice.
They respect. In fact, if you register an institution as a "religious church", they
take it as a religious c h u r c h . Y o u d o n ' t r e q u i r e t o s u b m i t
even an income tax return. Until there is a publi
c complaint, they respect it. They give you the f
reedom. Here, if an institution is said to be "Hin
du Religious", there is no tax exemption for the
d o n o r . I t i s e n t i r e l y a different thing altogether. A religious
sentiment has got to be respected by every one, whether he believes in my
religion or not. Just because I don't believe in your ideas, you can't stand on
my toes! If you don't like my nose, it is your problem. I don't have any
problem. If my ideas and my belief systems are not acceptable to you, I give
you the freedom not to accept them. But you don't have any business to stand
on my toes to hurt me in any manner. (Long cheers) In fact I will fight for your
freedom to think differently. You must be free enough to differ from me.
Bhagavan has given us the faculty of thinking, of discrimination. We are not
shy of enquiries. Our whole method of enquiry is to invite poorvapaksha
objections. We will create objections that cannot even be imagined by you
and then answer them. We welcome them because we are not shy. We want
to explore and find out what the truth is. But that is entirely a different thing.
You have the freedom to differ from me; I have the freedom to differ f r o m
you. This is what I am telling you.
This is the attitude of the non aggressive traditi
ons. On the other hand, the second category of r
eligions, by their theologies, is committed to co
nversion.
Conversion is not only sanctioned by their theol
o g i e s b u t a l s o i s p r a c t i s e d b y t h e i r f o l l o w e r s . An
d that is their theology. They have got a right to
have their own belief systems. But they don't ha
ve a right to thrust them on you. They are free t
o believe that unless one is a Christian, one wil
l not go to heaven. They have a system, a set of
non verifiable beliefs nitya paroksa on which t
h e y b a s e t h e i r t h e o l o g y . (Ap p l a u s e )
Someone says, I have been sent by God to save
you". I can also say the same thing. I will have t
e n p e o p l e w i t h m e , b e c a u s e I c a n t a l k . I f I don't talk
and be a mouni baba, still there will be ten people. It is easy to get ten people
anywhere, especially in India. I can say, "God sent me down to save all of
you!"
Once, I went to Kilpauk Mental Hospital. Just for a visit, of course. (Laughter)
It is my own imagination. It is not true. The Kilpauk Hospital is one of the most
ancient mental hospitals in this country. Next one is in Agra. We have got the
number one status in many things and this is one!
Early morning, all the crows had flown away. Nobody was there. I saw a man
standing under a huge tree talking in loud voice, "Listen to me. I have come
here, sent down by God, to save ail of you. You please ask for forgiveness of
your sins. Those who want to be saved, please raise your hands". Then he
said, Thank you, thank you, thank you". He thought that from the audience
many people had raised their hands. But there was no audience. I was the
only one standing behind him. Not even in front of him. I was naturally
amused but I was not surprised, be c a u s e I k n e w w h e r e I w a s .
(Laughter)
As I was enjoying this situation, well, I heard a
voice from the heaven. It said, "This is God spe
aking. I did not send him down. (Laughter) Don't
believe him". When I looked up, there was one m
ore fellow sitting on the tree. (Loud laughter a
nd applause)
This is a non verifiable belief as you can see. In
addition most of these religions, when they talk
of heaven, are promoters of tourism, really spea
king. (Laughter) I am interested in making my lif
e here, right now. If there is something you hav
e got to say to make my life different, I am read
y to listen to you. If there are some pairs of ear
s ready to listen to some other thing, let them h
ave the freedom.
That there is a heaven is a non verifiable belief.
That, following this person, I will go to heaven,
is another non verifiable belief. That I will survi
ve death, is a non verifiable belief. There is not
hing wrong in believing. But we have to understa
n d t h a t i t i s a n o n v e r i f i a b l e b e l i e f . An d h a v i n g g
one to heaven I will enjoy heaven, minus cricket
match, is another non verifiable belief. The unfo
rtunate thing is another fellow says: I am the lat
est and the last. Don't follow that fellow; follow
me". (Laughter) That really confuses me. He ha~
really no argument to give that he is the fast. T
hat I am the latest, is another non verifiable beli
ef and what is promised is again not verifiable.
I say, let those non verifiable beliefs be there. I
want them to have those beliefs, even though I
w i l l n o t a d v o c a t e t h e m . I w a n t t h e m to have freedom.
Let them enjoy the freedom to have their beliefs. But what is the basis for that
person to come and convert me? If you are convinced of something, you can
try to convince me and not convert me. Did you ever notice a physics
professor knocking at your door, asking for your time, so that he can talk to
you about the particles? Never! If you want to learn physics, you have to go to
him.
But here, every day, I am bothered. At the airport I am bothered, in the street
corners I am bothered, at home, I am bothered. They want to save my soul!
I say this is not merely an intrusion; this is an aggression. There are varieties
of intrusions. If the sound is too much outside, with all the loud speakers, well,
it is an intrusion into my privacy. One can complain; not in India, of course!
Here also we have got laws. It is not that we do not have laws. But we have
'in-laws' at right places. You know! (Laughter)
So nobody has any business to intrude into my privacy. You come .and tell me
that I have got to save my soul. But I don't look upon myself as condemned
for you to come and save. We, really, don't have a word in Sanskrit,
equivalent for salvation. Because, 'salvation' means you have been
condemned. Unless you are condemned, you need not be saved.
But this man comes and tells me that I am damned. I have to believe that first.
Then he appoints himself to save me. This is very interesting. This is how the
union leaders work. You create a problem and then appoint yourself as a
leader to solve it. (Laughter) You become inevitable thereafter.
Instead of the word 'salvation', we have a word 'moksha'. Here, among the
dignitaries there are may gurus. All of them have a common word and that
common word is moksha. Is it not true? For every one of them it is moksha.
Moksha is not a word which is equivalent to salvation. It is derived from the
verbal root moksh = mokshane. It means freedom from bondage. All of them
use the word moksha. Even Saankhyas use this word. Vaiseshikas,
Naiyaayikas and all others use this word moksha. In fact, if moksha is not an
end in view, it is not 0 school of thought to talk about. We all have a moksha.
Even Chaarvaakas, the materialist, has his own concept of moksha. 'Body
goes'; that is moksha for him. He says, bhasmeebhutasya dehasya
punaraagamanam kutaha.
So the word moksha does not mean salvation. It refers to freedom from
bondage. On the other hand the aggressive religions have this belief system
that you are condemned and you have to be saved.
When I look into these theologies, what I see is very interesting. I need not
say anything to prove that they are illogical. I have to only state what they say!
I would like to illustrate this:
You must have heard about the 'Godfather'. You know the Mafia don is called
the Godfather. He makes an offer that you cannot refuse.
He comes and tells you: I am buying your house".
You may say, I am not selling".
He says, "You are selling".
This type of approach was existing in Madras for some time, I am told. I hope
it does not come back again. (Loud laughter and applause)
The fellow comes and tells: I am buying your house!"
And you reply, "This is my house and I am not selling".
He says, "You are selling it and you are selling it at this price".
He decides the price also and then tells you, I know exactly where your
children are studying and when they are coming home also".
He threatens you and buys the house.
Thus, a Godfather is one who makes an offer that you cannot refuse.
Now, what about God, the Father? He is worse, I tell you, because he says
either y o u f o l l o w t h i s p e r s o n o r I w i l l c o n d e m n y o u
eternally to hell. This is worse than the offer of
the Mafia don! This too is an offer, which I cann
o t r e f u s e . An d i t i s w o r s e .
In the other case at least, I can do something.
But here he is not even visible. He is sitting in
a place even safer than Dubai! I cannot do anyth
ing to him. This is the non verifiable belief on w
hich their religion is based.
He has the right to follow that religion. Let him
f o l l o w h i s r e l i g i o n . Al l t h a t I s a y i s h e d o e s n o t
have anything much to offer to me. If he thinks
he has something to offer to me, let him have th
e freedom to think so. But he has no freedom to
intrude into my privacy.
He converts the Hindus by any means by marri
age, by some enticement or by some preaching w
hich creates a fear. He talks about the goodies
available in heaven if you go to heaven, you wil
l enjoy this and that. You will have beatitude an
d be saved. Otherwise, you will go to hell. It wil
l be too hot etc. So, more out of fear of hell, on
e m a y c h o o s e t o go to heaven.
He says and does all this to convert others to his religion. I say, this is wrong
because if one Hindu or Jew or a Parsi is converted, and the other members
of the family are not converted, they are all hurt. Even the converted one must
be hurt underneath. He will be debating whether he was right in getting
converted, It takes sometime for him to heal that. He is also hurt. All other
members are definitely hurt. The community that comes to know of this
conversion is hurt.
Please tell me, what is violence? What do you call this act that hurts? I call it
violence. It is not ordinary violence. It is violence to the deepest person, the
core person, in the human being. The religious person is the deepest. And if
that person is hurt, I say, it is violence, rank and simple.
It is pure violence. And what does it do? It wipes out cultures.
I would like to go to Greece and see the live culture of the people who lived
there. Where is that culture now? I have to imagine how they might have
lived. I only see the huge monuments that are left behind.
And like this, many other cultures have been totally destroyed. The native
cultures of South America, North America and Australia have all been
destroyed. What about the Hawaiian culture? Gone! All the tribal cultures in
Africa have been destroyed. How many cultures, for the past two thousand
years, are methodically destroyed? The humanity is the sufferer and is poorer
for it.
We need all the cultures. And let the humanity enjoy the riches of the different
cultures. It is a mosaic of cultures, Each one has got some beauty. With the
destruction of religion comes the destruction of culture. When a new religion
replaces the old, a culture is destroyed.
After converting, they may try to preserve the art forms like Bharatanaatyam
with the themes of the new religion. But without Nataraaja where is
Bharatanaatyam, without devotion, where is nrityam?
And therefore, the culture cannot be retained if the religion is destroyed. It is
true with reference to all other cultures also. But definitely it is true with
reference to our culture, because, you cannot separate culture from religion.
Our religion and culture are intertwined. The religion has gone into the fabric
of the culture. When I say 'Namaste' to you, it is culture. It is religion. When
you are throwing rangoli, it is religion; it is culture. There is a vision behind all
that. Every form of culture is connected to religion and the religion itself is
rooted in the spiritual wisdom. This is because we have a spiritual tradition.
And therefore there is no cultural form unconnected to religion. Destruction of
culture is destruction of religion. Destruction of religion is destruction of
culture. If this Destruction is not violence, what is violence? I would like to
know?
I say CONVERSION IS VIOLENCE. (Thunderous applause) It is rank
violence. It is the deepest violence.

Not only that, in our dharma shaastra, it is said

that if somebody forcefully occupies another's pi
ece of land, he is called an aatataayi. For an aa
tataayi, in our shaastra, there is capital punish
ment.
Occupying another's land or another's house or
f l a t , against the will of the owner is a grave paapa according to our
dharma. Many times, when the owner asks, "Give me back my house", the
tenant invariably replies, I am sorry. I cannot give you the house, because my
children are going to the school in this area. Please find a similar house for
me. Then I will move". When the owner finds such a house for him, the tenant
says, It is too far away for the children to go to school. Please find something
in the same neighbourhood". It means, I would like to be here". If you go to
the court, twenty five years would be gone. But occupying another's land is
not dharma as per our culture.
Another's kshetra is another's kshetra. It has nothing to do with me. Kshetra-
apahaari is an aatataayi. The one who does arson or poisons somebody is an
aatataayi, and there is capital punishment for him. One who kidnaps another's
wife is an aatataayi and there is capital punishment for him. All these actions
deserve capital punishment. And if, simply for occupation of a land of another,
there is capital punishment, think of what would be the punishment for the
destruction of a culture.
Suppose somebody is ashastrapaani, unarmed, and you kill him, it is not
correct. Karna in the Mahaabhaarata uses this argument when he was
completely unarmed. Talking to Arjuna, he said, I am an ashastrapaani; you
should not hit me now. Krishna had to tell him that Karna was not unarmed,
but he was duly disarmed. There is a lot of difference between the two.
Krishna had to convince him.
So here, a Hindu is a n a s h a s t r a p a a n i . A J e w i s h p e r s o n i
s an ashastrapaani. A Buddhist is an ashastrapa
ani. A Parsi is an ashastrapaani. That is, they a
re all non aggressive. When you try to convert th
em, it is like hurting an ashastrapaani.
Y o u c a n n o t a s k m e t o c h a n g e t h e g e n ius of my culture,
the genius of my religion. It is the tradition of my culture and religion that I do
not convert. It is not a situation where, you convert and I convert. And the one
who has a better organisation is going to convert more number of people. It is
not a percentage game of the market.
Here it is one sided. I cannot change the genius of my culture because I do
not believe in conversion. I allow you to be a Christian. I allow you to be a
Muslim. You be a Christian, you be a Muslim. You pray; it is fine for us. I let
you be a Muslim or a Christian, even though I do not say, "All religions lead to
the same goal". I don't commit that ubiquitous mistake. (Cheers)
But I give you the freedom. You please follow your religion. Don't ask me to
convert others to my religion like you, because I cannot convert. It is because
I do not believe in it. My parents did not believe in it. My grand parents did not
believe in it. My Rishis did not believe in it. And I don't believe in it. You cannot
change a culture in order to be on par with the others. It is against the genius
of our culture.
It is not only our culture, which is like this; there are other cultures too. The
number of the Parsis is dwindling. I loathe to see the destruction of the Parsi
culture. They are harmless good people. But now they are the losers.
Jewish people are also the losers; their numbers are also dwindling. They are
fighting to preserve their culture and religion. They are not converting. There
is no evangelism in Judaism. There is no pros e l y t i z a t i o n . T h e r e w
ere never any inquisition. They were the suffere
rs; they were the victims of aggression, and pla
nned aggression for ages.
An d there fore, con version is n ot merely violenc
e against people; it is violence against people,
who are committed to non violence. (Prolonged c
heers)
I don't say Hindus do not fight. They can fight v
ery well. You don't tell me, "You put your house
in order". I will put my house in order, in my ow
n time and in my own way.
I f t w o b r o t h e r s a r e f i g h t i n g o v e r a n e m p t y p i e ce
of land that is there next door, and a third man occupies the land saying,
"Because you two are fighting, I am occupying this piece of land", what is this
logic? Some people advance this logic to me and say that we are all fighting
and therefore they are in. We may be fighting amongst ourselves but we have
to settle that among ourselves. That does not mean YOU can be violent.
(Applause)
Somebody says we must have ecumenical dialogue. I had attended some of
these dialogues. And I stopped attending them. Because I don't see any use
in it. On one such occasion, I said, I can have a dialogue with a Christian, if he
is ready to change, if convinced, after the dialogue". Is he, if convinced, going
to change his stand? Is he going to stop conversion? Don't ask me to have a
dialogue with you when you are standing on my toes. You just move away.
Then we can have a dialogue.
The world religious conferences that are held are only meant to neutralise any
protest against conversion. That is all. (Cheers) Because they don't want to
stop conversion. So what is the use of saying, "We are all same. We are all
going to the same God". It is something like saying, you know, your property is
my property; my property is your property; your money is my money; my
money is your money. Therefore, let my money be with me and let your
money also be with me! (Laughter) So this is all wrong thinking.
All forms of prayer are valid. That I can accept. They don't accept that. I can
accept because of my understanding of the shaastra. The Lord will
understand, definitely, if I pray in Tamil or, Latin or Greek. There is nothing
Latin and Greek to the Lord. He will understand in whichever language the
prayer is made. If I pray in Samskritam, definitely, he will understand because
it is His language anyway. (Laughter) I am very Catholic, understand'. I don't
have this kind of silly notions that it has got to be in one language and it has
got to be in one form etc.
But we have certain special for
ms of rituals Vedic rituals which cannot be co
mpromised with. Because we do not know how th
ey can be different. We have no other pramaana
for it. We do not have a means of knowledge to
prove that this can be different.
T h e y d o n o t a c c e p t a n y of that. And they preach. It is not that
they preach their own religion. They preach against other religions. And I
consider that kind of preaching is violence. It breeds violence. I have a genius
which does not permit me to convert. I cannot be asked to convert.

Therefore, the violence against me is a one side

d violence. It is a rank one sided violence. They
have gotten away with it for two thousand years.
I want them to know that this is violence. Let th
em prove conversion is non violence.
I a m h u r t a n d m a n y o t h e rs like me are hurt. Millions are hurt.
There are so many other issues to be discussed with reference to conversion.
But I have only one to discuss here. It is the violence that is allowed to be
perpetrated against humanity, against cultures, against religions. That is the
only issue here; there is no other issue. (Applause)
Violence is the only issue. Humanity should not stand with hands down and
allow violence to be continued against a person who is non-violent.
There is another important fact in the India n c o n t e x t , I t e l l y o u .
I am a Swami committed to ahimsa. A sannyasi's
vow is ahimsa, really. It is nothing but ahimsa s
arva bhootebhyo abhayam. l am taking this sanya
sa and offer a complete assurance to all the bei
ngs and to all the devataas, that I am not a com
petitor to any of them and that I will not hurt an
y of them kayena vacha manasaa. That is sanny
asa. I am aware of this. I am a sannyasi .
Now I sit in Rishikesh. These two people come t
o me. One is a Padri and the other is a Moulvi. I
i n v i t e b o t h of them. They are religious people. I respect them. I give
them seats. They try to argue with me about something. Generally, I do not
argue with them. You can argue with people whom you can convince. I don't
want to argue with people who only want to convince me.
So I don't argue. I enjoy their company. I sit with them and talk to them. They
pick up a quarrel with me. And then they begin to beat me. Please note that,
this is just an imaginary tale. And there is a policeman standing there. They go
on beating me black and blue. I implore to the policeman, "Please stop them. I
am committed to ahimsa. I don't want to fight them back. You please do
something". I appeal to him.
He says, This is a matter between religious people. I am secular. (Prolonged
cheers) I am supposed not to interfere". I appeal to him. Twice, thrice I
request him. He does not respond to me positively. Then I think I have to
protect myself. My shaastra will forgive me. Even though I am given to
ahimsa, still I can protect myself.

And therefore I thought I will take care of myself. I am not just a weakling. I
have got enough strength. And therefore, I can take care of these two fellows
plus one more. I began to defend myself. The best form of defence is offence.
That is what every husband does. And therefore, you defend yourself.
(Laughter)

But the policeman stops me and says, They are minorities. They have to be
protected and you should not fight against them". (Prolonged cheers)
"Hey, policeman, you are supposed to protect me. You are the Government.
You are the State. You are supposed to protect me. You cannot be like this".
This is the situation that prevails in India.
You have to change the whole blessed thing here. If the constitution has to be
changed, let it be changed for good. (Prolonged cheers) My dharma is not
violence. It does not allow conversion. And that dharma has to be protected.
The State has to protect. If the protector does not protect, people should have
a new protector to protect. That is all. (Prolonged cheers)
Conversi o n i s v i o l e n c e . A n d * i t b r e e d s v i o l e n c e . D o
n't convert because, by this, you are converting
t h e n o n v i o l e n t t o b e v i o l e n t . (Ap p l a u s e ) Yo u a r e
doing something wrong. This is drastically wrong
. This error has to be realised. The sooner it is
corrected, the better it is for all of us even for
Christians and even for Muslims.
I want the Islamic culture to be there. I want th
e Christian culture to be there. I want the Hindu
culture and every other culture to be there. Ever
y c u l t u r e i s t o b e p r o t e c t e d . T h a t i s secularism.
Thank you. (Prolonged cheers)
Defining religion Sita Ram Goel answers the questions raised in the Antaios'
special number on HindutvaAn Interview with Sita Ram Goel
Publication : The Observer
Date : February 22, 1997
Who are you? How do you define yourself?
I am a Hindu, which to me means the inheritor of the oldest and the highest
spiritual culture known to human history. Although I have been in service and
business to earn my living, I define myself as a writer. I started as a poet,
became a novelist, and have ended as a commentator, on cruel, crude and
imperialist ideologies Christianity, Islam, and Communism.
Could you explain your spiritual and culture background, your evolution?
As a young man I was influenced by Vaishnavism, Arya Samaj and Mahatama
Gandhi. In college I was under the spell of Marxism and became a
Communist.
In 1949, Ram Swarup cured me of Communism, and after that I returned to
Hinduism. I have been strongly influenced by the Mahabharata, discourses of
the Buddha, Sri Aurobindo and, Plato.
My masters have been Vyasa, Buddha and Sri Aurobindo, as elucidated by
Ram Swarup.
What does the idea of Paganism mean for you? Are you a Pagan? A
Polytheist? 'Paganism' was a term of contempt invented by Christianity for
people in the countryside who lived close to and in harmony with Nature, and
whose ways of worship were spontaneous as opposed to the contrived
though-categories constructed by Christianity's city-based manipulators of
human minds.
In due course, the term was extended to cover all spiritually spontaneous
culture of the world - Greek, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, native
American.
It became a respectable term for those who revolted against Christianity in the
modern West. But it has yet to recover its spiritual dimension which
Christianity had eclipsed. For me, Hinduism preserves ancient Paganism in all
its dimensions. In that sense, I am a Pagan.
The term "Polytheism' comes from Biblical discourse, which has the term
'theism' as its starting point. I have no use for these terms. They create
confusion.
I dwell in a different universe of discourse which starts with 'know thyself' and
ends with the discovery, 'thou art that'.
Could you explain your position towards monotheism and the main
differences between semitic religions and Hindu traditions?
The literal meaning of monotheism, namely, that God is one and not many
does not interest me.
What bothers me is the monotheism known to history Christianity and Islam,
religions which have prompted aggression, massacres, plunder, pillage,
enslavement and the rest. Histories of Christianity and Islam tell the full story.
Honest gangster do all this in a straightforward manner, "I want your land,
your wealth, your women and children and you yourself as my slaves.
Surrender or I will kW you." Dishonest gangsters have done the same in the
name of the 'only true God'. God is not needed by them except as an alibi.
Communists have done the same in the name of History, and the Nazis in the
name of the Master Race.
Christianity and Islam do not need any supernatural scaffolding for doing what
they have been doing. The mainstay of their monotheism is gross materialism.
I do not regard Christianity and Islam as semitic. The semites of west Asia
were Pagans with pluralistic religious traditions before the Biblical God
appeared on the scene. I, therefore, call both Christianity and Islam the
Biblical creeds. Both of them have their source in the Bible.
And as I do not view them as religions at all, I refuse to compare them with
Hinduism. I have found it quite apt to compare Christianity and Islam with
Communism and Nazism.
What about the negative role of Christian missions in India?
Christian missions in India have been the Devil's workshop to use their own
language. I need not tell you about the 'science' of 'missiology'.
Christian missionaries had perfected the art of manipulating human minds
quite early in the history of their cult. of their cult. The amount of mischief they
have done defies description.
They have received a help from the Communists. I am not going into the
history of Christian missions and the various mission strategies for converting
Hindu India.
(Muslims were 'spared' because of fear for their lives). Here I am taking up
their role in the present.
As soon as they sensed that the anti-Hindu coalition was cracking and a
Hindu reawakening was around, they became hysterical in their anti-Hindu
tirades. I have in my possession a 400-page script of a study sponsored by
the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, which presents the Hindu
movement as Nazi.
We hear the same refrain from the powerful and extensive Christian media in
India and abroad.
In the Ayodhya dispute they have joined the Muslim-Marxist brigade in crying
'wolf', while concealing the fact that thousands of mosques and hundreds of
churches stand on the sites of deliberately demolished Hindu temples and
have been built with temple debris.
It is mostly Christian missionaries who are responsible for the negative
publicity which Hindus have been getting in the West recently.
They have immense financed the media-power in India, and can mobilise any
number of mercenaries and hired hoodlums.
And their men are everywhere in the media and academia of the West. It was
a shocking experience for me to read an article in The New York Review of
Books written about Ayodhya by the South Asia correspondent of the Time
magazine a few years ago.
He had invited me for presenting the Hindu case on Ayodhya.
I had given him documented studies on what happened to Hindu temples
under Muslim rule.
Also a study by Koenraad Elst on Ayodhya. But he ignored everything in his
article and, after quoting from a few books cooked up by well-known
Communist writers hired by the Muslim lobby, he dismissed the Hindu case as
bogus! There are many other scoundrels like him functioning in the Western
media and academia.
The mischief created by Christian missionaries and their mouthpieces In India
and the West has to be known in order to be believed.
Mother Theresa is a part of this gang, presenting India as a starved, diseased
and corrupt country to her Western audiences and collecting fabulous sums
for the missionary machine.
I met her briefly in Calcutta in 1954 or 1955 when she was unknown.
I had gone to see an American journalist who was a friend and had fallen ill,
when she came to his house asking for money for her charity set-up. The
friend went inside to get some cash, leaving his five or six year old daughter in
the drawing room. Teresa told her, "He is not your real father. Your real father
is in heaven." The girl said, "He is very ill." Theresa commented, "If he dies,
your father does not die. For your real father who is in heaven never 'dies."
The girl was in tears. My friend came back and gave her the money. She
departed. He saw his daughter in tears, and turned towards me.
I reported the dialogue. He was furious, and said, "Had I known what sort of a
bag she is, I would have thrown her out. I am not a Christian. I was never
baptised. Nor do I care for Christianity. I was only moved by her appeal in the
name of the poor, and gave her some money. I hope she does not come
again, and try to poison my daughter's mind. "
The closed mind of Mother Teresa was revealed a few years back in an
interview published In India Today, a prestigious fortnightly which had devoted
a special issue to her. One of the questions put to her was: "Where would you
have been between the Church and Galileo?" Came the reply, "With the
Church. " That is a measure of her intellectual equipment.
But Western establishments have built her up into a colossal myth with Nobel
Prize and all.
Who is your tutelar God/Goddess? Why? I have no use for God. In fact, the
very word stinks in my nostrils. This word abounds in the Bible and the Quran,
and has been responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
On the other hand, saints who have used this word in a spiritually wholesome
sense have seldom warned us against its sinister use; most of the time they
have been confused by the criminal use of this word, and have confused
others. I do not feel the same way about the word 'goddess' because the
monotheist who happen to be male chauvinists, have not used this word for
their purposes.
In fact, the only thing which softens me towards Catholicism is the figure of
the Virgin Mother even though theology has not permitted her to soar up to
her highest heights.
Having been a student of Hinduism, I find that our tradition knows no God or
Goddess as the creator and controller of the Cosmos.
The Vedas know no god or goddess in that sense, nor the Upanishads, nor
the six systems of philosophy, nor Buddhism, nor Jainism. It is the Puranas
which speaks for the first time of a paramatman (Highest Self), or a
purushottama (Highest Persona). But that is not the extra-cosmic and blood-
thirsty tyrant of the Bible and the Quran.
We do have in Hinduism the concept of ishtadeva, the highest symbol of a
person's spiritual aspiration.
In that sense, I am devoted to Sri Krishna as he figures in the Mahabharata,
and the Goddess Durga, as she reveals herself in the Devi-Bhagvata Purana.
I feel free and shed all fear when I meditate on them.
They promise to clean up the dross that I carry within me.
They prepare me for battle against forces of darkness and destruction.

READ

miraditi@vsnl.com

Swami Vivekananda
on
the Aryan Invasion Theory
(Extracts from: 1. A translation of a Bengali article titled, The East and the
West, CW, Vol. 5, p. 436-439, Mayavati Memorial Edition, 1947, Advaita
Ashrama, Almora and 2. Lectures from Colombo to Almora, p. 221-223)
And what your European Pundits say about the Aryans swooping down from
some foreign land, snatching away the lands of the aborigines and settling in
India by exterminating them, is all pure nonsense, foolish talk! Strange, that
our Indian scholars, too, say amen to them; and all these monstrous lies are
being taught to our boys! This is very bad indeed.
I am, an ignoramus myself; I do not pretend to any scholarship; but with the
little that I understand, I strongly protested against these ideas at the Paris
Conference. I have been talking with the Indian and European savants on the
subject, and hope to raise my objections to this theory in detail when time
permits. And this I say to youto our Punditsalso, You are learned men,
look up your old books and scriptures, please, and draw your own
conclusions. And this is very significant, since we have all along been trained
to tell parrot-like whatever the British had to say about us, without cogitating
the least as to what it conveys and if it is the truth. On the contrary it is
venerated as the Vedic dictumthe ultimate truth. Never have our historians
tried to unravel the veil of myth woven around the nations heritage, culture
and historyall by themselves, instead of hankering for authentication by an
elite alien race. And this has proved to be our undoing, with so many
divisions perpetrated long after the very raison detre for these have been
obliterated by a vigilant and agile national leadership. The bourgeois
politicians have everything to gain by way of trumpeting this cacophony and
camouflaging their miserable failures in the milieu that ensues. An astute
mass should be the last to succumb to such divisive philanthropy of these
bountiful philanderers.
Whenever the Europeans find an opportunity, they exterminate the aborigines
and settle down in ease and comfort on their lands; therefore they think the
Aryans must have done the same! The Westerners would be considered
wretched vagabonds if they lived in their native homes depending wholly on
their own internal resources, and so they have to run wildly about the world
seeking how they can feed upon the fat of the land of others by spoliation and
slaughter; and therefore they conclude the Aryans must have dome the same!
But where is your proof? Guess-work? Then keep your fanciful guesses to
yourselves!
In what Veda, in what Sukta, do you find that the Aryans came into India from
a foreign country? Where do you get the idea that they slaughtered the wild
aborigines? What do you gain by talking such nonsense? Vain has been your
study of the Ramayana; why manufacture a big fine story out of it?
Well, what is the Ramayana? The conquest of the savage aborigines of
Southern India by the Aryans! Indeed! Ramachandra is a civilised Aryan king
and with whom, is he fighting? With King Ravana of Lanka. Just read the
Ramayana., and you will find that Ravana was rather more and not less
civilised than Ramachandra. The civilisation of Lanka was rather higher, and
surely not lower, than that of Ayodhya. And then, when were these Vanaras
(monkeys) and other Southern Indians conquered? They were all, on the
other hand, Ramachandras friends and allies. Say which kingdoms of Vali
and Guhaka were annexed by Ramachandra?
It was quite possible, however, that in a few places there were occasional
fights between the Aryans and the Aborigines; quite possible, that one or two
cunning Munis pretended to meditate with closed eyes before their sacrificial
fires in the jungles of the Rakshasas, waiting however, all the time to see
when the Rakshasas would throw stones and pieces of bone at them. No
sooner had this been done than they would go whining to the kings. The mail-
clad kings armed with swords and weapons of steel would come on fiery
steeds. But how long could the aborigines. fight with their sticks and stones?
So they were killed or chased away, and the kings returned to their capital.
Well, all this may have been but does this prove that their lands were taken
away by the Aryans? Where in the Ramayana do you find that?
The loom of the fabric of Aryan civilisation is a vast, warm, level country,
interspersed with broad, navigable rivers. The cotton of this cloth is composed
of highly civilised, semi-civilised, and barbarian tribes, mostly Aryan. Its warp
is Varnashramachara, and its woof, the conquest of strife and competition in
nature.
And may I ask you, Europeans, what country you have ever raised to better
conditions? Wherever you have found weaker races, you have exterminated
them by the roots, as it were. You have settled on their lands, and they are
gone for ever. What is the history of your America, your Australia, New
Zealand, your Pacific Islands and South Africa? Where are those aboriginal
races there today? They are all exterminatedyou have killed them outright,
as if they were wild beasts. It is only where you have not the power to do so,
and there only, that other nations are still alive.
But India has never done that. The Aryans were kind and generous; and in
their hearts which were large and unbounded as the ocean, and in their
brains, gifted with superhuman genius, all these ephemeral and apparently
pleasant but virtually beastly processes never found a place. And I ask you,
fools of my own country, would there have been this institution of
Varnashrama if the Aryans had exterminated the aborigines in order to settle
on their lands?
The object of the peoples of Europe is to exterminate all in order to live
themselves. The aim of the Aryans is to raise all up to their own level, nay,
even to a higher level than themselves. The means of European civilisation is
the sword; of the Aryans, the division into different Varnas. This system of
division into different Varnas is the stepping stone to civilisation, making one
rise higher and higher in proportion to ones learning and culture. In Europe, it
is everywhere victory to the strong and death to the weak. In the land of
Bharata, every social rule is for the protection of the weak.
In connection with this I want to discuss one question which has a particular
bearing with regard to Madras. There is a theory that there was a race of
mankind in Southern India called Dravidians, entirely differing from another
race in Northern India, called the Aryans, and that the Southern India
Brahmins are the only Aryans that came from the North, the other men of
Southern India belong to an entirely different caste and race to those of
Southern India Brahmins. Now I beg your pardon, Mr. Philologist, this is
entirely unfounded. The only proof of it is that there is a difference of language
between the North and the South. I do not see any other difference. We are
so many Northern men here, and I ask my European friends to pick out the
Northern and Southern men from this assembly. Where is the difference? A
little difference of language. But the Brahmins are a race that came here
speaking the Sanskrit language! Well then, they took up the Dravidian
language and forgot their Sanskrit. Why should not the other castes have
done the same? Why should not all the other castes have come one after the
other from Northern India, taken up the Dravidian language, and so forgotten
their own? That is an argument working both ways. Do not believe in such
silly things. There may have been a Dravidian people who vanished from
here, and the few who remained lived in forests and other places. It is quite
possible that the languages may have been taken up, but all these are Aryans
who came from the North. The whole of India is Aryan, nothing else.
Then there is the other idea that the Shudra caste are surely the aborigines.
What are they? They are slaves. They say history repeats itself. The
Americans, English, Dutch, and the Portuguese got hold of the poor Africans,
and made them work hard while they lived, and their children of mixed birth
were born in slavery and kept in that condition for a long period. From that
wonderful example, the mind jumps back several thousand years and fancies
that the same thing happened here, and our archaeologist dreams of India
being full of dark-eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryan came fromthe Lord
knows where. According to some, they came from Central Tibet, others will
have it that they came from Central Asia. There are patriotic Englishmen who
think that the Aryans were all red-haired. Others, according to their idea, think
that they were black-haired. If the writer happens to be a black-haired man,
the Aryans were all black-haired. Of late, there was an attempt made to prove
that the Aryans lived on the Swiss lakes. I should not be sorry if they had been
all drowned there, theory and all. Some say now that they lived at the North
Pole. Lord bless the Aryans and their habitations! As of truth of these theories,
there is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryans ever
came from anywhere outside of India, and in ancient India was included
Afghanistan. There it ends. And the theory that the Shudra caste were all non-
Aryans and they were a multitude, is equally illogical and equally irrational. It
could not have been possible in those that a few Aryans settled and lived
there with a hundred thousand slaves at their command. These slaves would
have eaten them up, made chutney of them in five minutes. The only
explanation is to be found in the Mahabhirata, which says that in the beginnin
of the Satya Yuga there was one caste, the Brahmins, and then by difference
of occupations got themselves into different castes, and that is the only true
and rational explanation that has been given. And in the coming Satya all the
other castes will have to go back to the same condition.

Defining religion Sita Ram Goel answers the questions raised in the
Antaios' special number on Hindutva
An Interview with Sita Ram Goel
Publication : The Observer
Date : February 22, 1997
Who are you? How do you define yourself?
I am a Hindu, which to me means the inheritor of the oldest
and the highest spiritual culture known to human history.
Although I have been in service and business to earn my
living, I define myself as a writer. I started as a poet, became a
novelist, and have ended as a commentator, on cruel, crude
and imperialist ideologies Christianity, Islam, and
Communism.
Could you explain your spiritual and culture background, your evolution?
As a young man I was influenced by Vaishnavism, Arya Samaj and Mahatama
Gandhi. In college I was under the spell of Marxism and became a
Communist.
In 1949, Ram Swarup cured me of Communism, and after that I returned to
Hinduism. I have been strongly influenced by the Mahabharata, discourses of
the Buddha, Sri Aurobindo and, Plato.
My masters have been Vyasa, Buddha and Sri Aurobindo, as elucidated by
Ram Swarup.

What does the idea of Paganism mean for you? Are you a Pagan? A
Polytheist? {'Paganism' was a term of contempt invented by Christianity for
people in the countryside who lived close to and in harmony with Nature, and
whose ways of worship were spontaneous as opposed to the contrived
though-categories constructed by Christianity's city-based manipulators of
human minds. }
In due course, the term was extended to cover all spiritually spontaneous
culture of the world - Greek, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, native
American.
It became a respectable term for those who revolted against Christianity in the
modern West. But it has yet to recover its spiritual dimension which
Christianity had eclipsed. For me, Hinduism preserves ancient Paganism in all
its dimensions. In that sense, I am a Pagan.
The term "Polytheism' comes from Biblical discourse, which has the term
'theism' as its starting point. I have no use for these terms. They create
confusion.
I dwell in a different universe of discourse which starts with 'know thyself' and
ends with the discovery, 'thou art that'.
Could you explain your position towards monotheism and the main
differences between semitic religions and Hindu traditions?
The literal meaning of monotheism, namely, that God is one and not many
does not interest me.
{What bothers me is the monotheism known to history Christianity and Islam,
religions which have prompted aggression, massacres, plunder, pillage,
enslavement and the rest. Histories of Christianity and Islam tell the full story.
Honest gangster do all this in a straightforward manner, "I want your land,
your wealth, your women and children and you yourself as my slaves.
Surrender or I will kW you." Dishonest gangsters have done the same in the
name of the 'only true God'. God is not needed by them except as an alibi.
Communists have done the same in the name of History, and the Nazis in the
name of the Master Race. }
Christianity and Islam do not need any supernatural scaffolding for doing what
they have been doing. The mainstay of their monotheism is gross materialism.
I do not regard Christianity and Islam as semitic. The semites of west Asia
were Pagans with pluralistic religious traditions before the Biblical God
appeared on the scene. I, therefore, call both Christianity and Islam the
Biblical creeds. Both of them have their source in the Bible.
And as I do not view them as religions at all, I refuse to compare them with
Hinduism. I have found it quite apt to compare Christianity and Islam with
Communism and Nazism.
What about the negative role of Christian missions in India?
Christian missions in India have been the Devil's workshop to use their own
language. I need not tell you about the 'science' of 'missiology'.
Christian missionaries had perfected the art of manipulating human minds
quite early in the history of their cult. of their cult. The amount of mischief they
have done defies description.
They have received a help from the Communists. I am not going into the
history of Christian missions and the various mission strategies for converting
Hindu India.
(Muslims were 'spared' because of fear for their lives). Here I am taking up
their role in the present.
As soon as they sensed that the anti-Hindu coalition was cracking and a
Hindu reawakening was around, they became hysterical in their anti-Hindu
tirades. I have in my possession a 400-page script of a study sponsored by
the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, which presents the Hindu
movement as Nazi.
We hear the same refrain from the powerful and extensive Christian media in
India and abroad.
In the Ayodhya dispute they have joined the Muslim-Marxist brigade in crying
'wolf', while concealing the fact that thousands of mosques and hundreds of
churches stand on the sites of deliberately demolished Hindu temples and
have been built with temple debris.
It is mostly Christian missionaries who are responsible for the negative
publicity which Hindus have been getting in the West recently.
They have immense financed the media-power in India, and can mobilise any
number of mercenaries and hired hoodlums.
And their men are everywhere in the media and academia of the West. It was
a shocking experience for me to read an article in The New York Review of
Books written about Ayodhya by the South Asia correspondent of the Time
magazine a few years ago.
He had invited me for presenting the Hindu case on Ayodhya.
I had given him documented studies on what happened to Hindu temples
under Muslim rule.
Also a study by Koenraad Elst on Ayodhya. But he ignored everything in his
article and, after quoting from a few books cooked up by well-known
Communist writers hired by the Muslim lobby, he dismissed the Hindu case as
bogus! There are many other scoundrels like him functioning in the Western
media and academia.
The mischief created by Christian missionaries and their mouthpieces In India
and the West has to be known in order to be believed.
Mother Theresa is a part of this gang, presenting India as a starved, diseased
and corrupt country to her Western audiences and collecting fabulous sums
for the missionary machine.
I met her briefly in Calcutta in 1954 or 1955 when she was unknown.
I had gone to see an American journalist who was a friend and had fallen ill,
when she came to his house asking for money for her charity set-up. The
friend went inside to get some cash, leaving his five or six year old daughter in
the drawing room. Teresa told her, "He is not your real father. Your real father
is in heaven." The girl said, "He is very ill." Theresa commented, "If he dies,
your father does not die. For your real father who is in heaven never 'dies."
The girl was in tears. My friend came back and gave her the money. She
departed. He saw his daughter in tears, and turned towards me.
I reported the dialogue. He was furious, and said, "Had I known what sort of a
bag she is, I would have thrown her out. I am not a Christian. I was never
baptised. Nor do I care for Christianity. I was only moved by her appeal in the
name of the poor, and gave her some money. I hope she does not come
again, and try to poison my daughter's mind. "
The closed mind of Mother Teresa was revealed a few years back in an
interview published In India Today, a prestigious fortnightly which had devoted
a special issue to her. One of the questions put to her was: "Where would you
have been between the Church and Galileo?" Came the reply, "With the
Church. " That is a measure of her intellectual equipment.
But Western establishments have built her up into a colossal myth with Nobel
Prize and all.
Who is your tutelar God/Goddess? Why? I have no use for God. In fact, the
very word stinks in my nostrils. This word abounds in the Bible and the Quran,
and has been responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
On the other hand, saints who have used this word in a spiritually wholesome
sense have seldom warned us against its sinister use; most of the time they
have been confused by the criminal use of this word, and have confused
others. I do not feel the same way about the word 'goddess' because the
monotheist who happen to be male chauvinists, have not used this word for
their purposes.
In fact, the only thing which softens me towards Catholicism is the figure of
the Virgin Mother even though theology has not permitted her to soar up to
her highest heights.
Having been a student of Hinduism, I find that our tradition knows no God or
Goddess as the creator and controller of the Cosmos.
The Vedas know no god or goddess in that sense, nor the Upanishads, nor
the six systems of philosophy, nor Buddhism, nor Jainism. It is the Puranas
which speaks for the first time of a paramatman (Highest Self), or a
purushottama (Highest Persona). But that is not the extra-cosmic and blood-
thirsty tyrant of the Bible and the Quran.
We do have in Hinduism the concept of ishtadeva, the highest symbol of a
person's spiritual aspiration.
In that sense, I am devoted to Sri Krishna as he figures in the Mahabharata,
and the Goddess Durga, as she reveals herself in the Devi-Bhagvata Purana.
I feel free and shed all fear when I meditate on them.
They promise to clean up the dross that I carry within me.
They prepare me for battle against forces of darkness and destruction.

Effects of Colonization
on Indian Thought
By Michel Danino
This paper was presented at a seminar on Decolonization and its Cultural
Problems organized by N. V. Krishna Warrior Smaraka Trust at Tripunithura
(Kerala) on 9-10 October 1999.
The theme chosen by this seminar is a very apt one. Having suffered the
burden of two centuries of British occupation, India has, since Independence,
tried to come to terms with the impact of that exotic presence perhaps
diametrically opposed to her own temperament, culture and genius. If
anything, this introspection has only intensified in recent years, as Western
culture (if it deserves this noble name) aggressively spreads around the
globe. But it stands to reason that for an effective decolonization to take
placeeven in order to find out whether and how far it is desirablewe
should first take a hard look at the effects of this colonization, what traces it
has left on the Indian mind and psyche, and how deep. That is what I have
briefly attempted to do in this paperbriefly, because it is a subject as vast
and complex as Indian life itself, and also because I am a mere student of
India, not a learned scholar like those present among us today.
Historical Background
But first, an aside. I have only referred to the British occupation, not to the
Muslim invasions, though they stretched over a much longer span of time and
collided violently with Indian civilization. Yet, strangely, in spite of their
ruthlessness, their proud and sustained use of violence to coerce or convert,
Indias Muslim rulers never attempted to take possession of the Indian mind :
in faithful obedience to Koranic injunctions, they simply tried to stamp it out.
That they did not succeed is another story.
{The British, too, dreamed of stamping it out, but not through sheer brute
force. As we know, besides their primary object of plunder, they viewedor
perhaps justifiedtheir presence in India as a divinely ordained civilizing
mission. They spoke of Britain as the most enlightened and philanthropic
nation in the world[1] and of the justifiable pride which the cultivated
members of a civilised community feel in the beneficent exercise of dominion
and in the performance by their nation of the noble task of spreading the
highest kind of civilisation.[2] Such rhetoric was constantly poured out to the
Britons at home so as to give them a good conscience, while the constant
atrocities perpetrated on the Indian people were discreetly hidden from
sight.}
{To achieve their aim, the British rulers followed two lines : on the one hand,
they encouraged an English and Christianized education in accordance with
the well-known Macaulay doctrine, which projected Europe as an enlightened,
democratic, progressive heaven, and on the other hand, they pursued a
systematic denigration of Indian culture, scriptures, customs, traditions, crafts,
cottage industries, social institutions, educational system, taking full
advantage of the stagnant and often degenerate character of the Hindu
society of the time}. There were, of course, notable exceptions among British
individuals, from William Jones to Sister Nivedita and Annie Besantbut
almost none to be found among the ruling class. Let us recall how, in his
famous 1835 Minute, Thomas B. Macaulay asserted that Indian culture was
based on a literature ... that inculcates the most serious errors on the most
important subjects ... hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality ... fruitful of
monstrous superstitions. Hindus, he confidently declared, had nothing to
show except a false history, false astronomy, false medicine ... in company
with a false religion.[3]
As it happened, Indians wereand still largely areinnocent people who
could simply not suspect the degree of cunning with which their colonial
masters set about their task. In the middle of the 1857 uprising, the Governor-
General Lord Canning wrote to a British official :
As we must rule 150 millions of people by a handful (more or less small) of
Englishmen, let us do it in the manner best calculated to leave them divided
(as in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with
the greatest possible awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion
of our motives.[4]
Even a liberal governor such as Elphinstone wrote in 1859, Divide et impera
[divide and rule in Latin] was the old Roman motto and it should be ours.[5]
In this clash of two civilizations, the European, younger, dynamic, hungry for
space and riches, appeared far better fitted than the Indian, half decrepit,
almost completely dormant after long centuries of internal strife and repeated
onslaught. The contrast was so huge that no one doubted the outcomethe
rapid conquest of the Indian mind and life. That was what Macaulay, again,
summarized best when he proudly wrote his father in 1836 :
Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully.... It is my belief that if our
plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among
the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence.[6]
But if there is one thing that the British could not understand about Indians, it
is that they live more in the heart than in the mind. And that heart the rulers
could never touch or influence, especially not with their shallow religion or
science. As for the mind, they did succeed in creating a fairly large educated
class, anglicized and partially Christianized, which always looked up to its
European model and ideal, and formed the actual foundation of the Empire in
India.
Came Independence. If India did achieve political independenceat a terrible
cost and by amputating a few limbs of her bodyshe hardly achieved
independence in the field of thought. Nor did she try : the countrys so-called
elite, whose mind had been shaped and hypnotized by their colonial masters,
always assumed that anything Western was so superior that in order to reach
all-round fulfilment, India merely had to follow European thought, science, and
political institutions. Swami Vivekananda was the first to give this call : O ye
modern Hindus, de-hypnotise yourselves ![7]
The Symptoms
A hundred years later, at least, we can see how gratuitous those assumptions
were. Yet the colonial imprint remains present at many levels. On a very basic
one, it is almost amusing to note that Pune is sometimes called the Oxford of
the East, while Ahmedabad is the Manchester of Indiaand since
Coimbatore is often dubbed the Manchester of South India, we have at least
out-Manchestered England herself ! The Nilgiris are flatteringly compared to
Scotland (never mind that Kotagiri, where I live, is called the second
Switzerland), and I understand that tourist guides refer to your own
Alappuzha as the Venice of the East. Pondicherry, also to attract tourists,
calls itself Indias Little France or the French Riviera of the East. Indias
map seems dotted with European places. And east of what, incidentally ?
This is something like Indias learned Oriental instituteswhat orient do
they refer to ? Thailand or Japan, perhaps ?
Things become more troublesome when Kalidasa is called the Shakespeare
of India, when Bankim Chatterji needs to be compared to Walter Scott or
Tagore to Shelley, and Kautilya becomes Indias very own Machiavelli. We
begin to see how our compass is set due west. Would the British call
Shakespeare Englands Kalidasa, let alone Manchester the Coimbatore of
Northwest England ?
But I think the most alarming signs of the colonization of the Indian mind are
found in the field of education. Take the English nursery rhymes taught to
many of our little children, as if, before knowing anything about India, they
needed to know about Humpty-Dumpty or the sheep that went to London to
see the Queen. When they grow older, some of them will be learning Western
psychology while remaining totally ignorant of the far deeper psychology
offered by Yoga, or they will study medicine or physics or evolution without
having the least idea of what ancient India achievedand often anticipated
in those fields. Which teacher, for example, will tell his or her students that
Darwinian evolution was always at the back of the Indian mind, as the
sequence of the Dashavatar shows ? Or that the speed of light is clearly
given, to an amazing degree of precision, in Sayanas commentary on the
Rig-Veda ?[8] And can it be a coincidence if a day of Brahma, equal to
4,320,000,000 years, happens to be the age of the earth ? Many such
examples could be supplied in other fields, from mathematics and astronomy
and quantum physics to linguistics and metallurgy and urbanization.[9] If
teachers were not so ignorant, as a rule, of their own culture, they would have
no difficulty in showing their students that the much vaunted scientific
temper is nothing new to India. Even in medicine, we know how Ayurveda
and Siddha systems of medicine have been neglected under the illusion that
modern medicine is the only way to provide health for all.
Our educational policies systematically discourage the teaching of Sanskrit,
and one wonders again whether that is in deference to Macaulay, who found
that great language (though he confessed he knew none of it !) to be barren
of useful knowledge. In the same vein, the Indian epics, the Veda or the
Upanishads stand no chance, and students will almost never hear about them
at school. Even Indian languages are subtly or not so subtly given a lower
status than English, with the result that many deep scholars or writers who
chose to express themselves in their mother-tongues (I have of course N. V.
Krishna Warrior in mind) remain totally unknown beyond their States, while
textbooks are crowded with second-rate thinkers who happened to write in
English.
If you take a look at the teaching of history, the situation is even worse. Almost
all Indian history taught today in our schools and universities has been written
by Western scholars, or by native historians who [have] taken over the views
of the colonial masters,[10] in the words of Prof. Klostermaier of Canadas
University of Manitoba. All of Indias historical tradition, all ancient records are
simply brushed aside as so much fancy so as to satisfy the Western dictum
that Indians have no sense of history. Indian tradition never said anything
about mysterious Aryans invading the subcontinent from the Northwest, but
since nineteenth-century European scholars decided so, our children still
today have to learn by rote this invention now rejected by most archaeologists
; South Indian tradition said nothing about the Dravidians coming from the
North, driven southward by the naughty Aryans, but again that shall be stuffed
into young brains. No Indian scholar or grammar or tradition ever claimed that
Sanskrit and Tamil languages were great rivals belonging to wholly separate
families, but this shall be taught at school in deference to Western linguists or
to our own Dravidian activists. The real facts of the destruction wreaked in
India by Muslim invaders and also by some Christian missionaries must be
kept outside textbooks and curricula, since they contradict the tolerant and
liberating image that Islam and Christianity have been projecting for
themselves.[11] Even the freedom movement is not spared : as the great
historian R. C. Majumdar[12] and others have shown, no serious, objective
criticism of Mahatma Gandhi or the Indian National Congress is allowed, and
the role of other important leaders is systematically belittled or erased.
Nothing illustrates the bankruptcy of our education better than the manner in
which, just a year ago, State education ministers raised an uproar at an
attempt to discuss the introduction of the merest smattering of Indian culture
into the syllabus, and at the singing of the Saraswati Vandana.* The message
they actually conveyed was that no Indian element was tolerable in education,
while they are perfectly satisfied with an education that, at the start of the
century, Sri Aurobindo called soulless and mercenary,[13] and which has
now degenerated further into a stultifying, mechanical routine that kills our
childrens natural intelligence and talent. They find nothing wrong with
maiming young brains and hearts, but will be up in arms if we speak of
teaching Indias heritage.
Ananda Coomaraswamy, the famous art critic, gave the following warning
early this century :
It is hard to realize how completely the continuity of Indian life has been
severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the
threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived
of all rootsa sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or
the West, the past or the future. The greatest danger for India is the loss of
her spiritual integrity. Of all Indian problems the educational is the most
difficult and most tragic.[14]
Swami Vivekananda had earlier said much the same thing in his own
forthright style :
The child is taken to school, and the first thing he learns is that his father is a
fool, the second thing that his grandfather is a lunatic, the third thing that all
his teachers are hypocrites, the fourth, that all the sacred books are lies ! By
the time he is sixteen he is a mass of negation, lifeless and boneless. And the
result is that fifty years of such education has not produced one original man
in the three presidencies.... We have learnt only weakness.[15]
The child becomes a recording machine stuffed with a jarring assortment of
meaningless bits and snippets. The only product of this denationalizing
education has been the creation of a modern, Westernized elite with little or
no contact with the deeper sources of Indian culture, and with nothing of
Indias ancient view of the world except a few platitudes to be flaunted at
cocktail parties. Browsing through any English-language daily or magazine is
enough to see how Indian intellectuals revel in the sonorous clang of hollow
clichs which, the world over, have taken the place of any real thinking. If
Western intellectuals come up with some new ism, you are sure to find it
echoed all over the Indian press in a matter of weeks ; it was amusing to see
how, some two years ago, the visit to India of a French philosopher and
champion of deconstructionism sent the cream of our intellectuals raving
wild for weeks, while they remained crassly ignorant of far deeper thinkers
next door. Or if Western painters or sculptors come up with some new-fangled
cult of ugliness, their Indian counterparts will not lag far behind. If Western
countries plan grand celebrations for the millennium (not a third millennium
of darkness, one hopes), we in India follow suitthough we appear to have
forgotten to celebrate the fifty-second century of our Kali era earlier this year.
And let politically correct Western nations make a new religion of human
rights (with intensive bombing campaigns to enforce them if necessary), and
you will hear a number of Indians clamouring for them parrotlike. The list is
endless, in every field of life, and if India had been living in her mind alone,
one would have to conclude that India has ceased to existor will do so after
one or two more generations of this senseless de-Indianizing. In Sri
Aurobindos words :
... Ancient Indias culture, attacked by European modernism, overpowered in
the material field, betrayed by the indifference of her children, may perish for
ever along with the soul of the nation that holds it in its keeping.[16]
Maladies of the Mind
The root of the problem is of course that we have ceased to think by
ourselves. We are spoon-fed and often force-fed almost every one of our
thoughts, or what masquerades as thought. Independent reflection is
discouraged at every step, especially at school.
Yet it is not my point that English education in India has been an unmitigated
evil. It was a necessary, probably an unavoidable evil. India had to be shaken
from her lethargy, to open up to the world and face its challenges, and that
was the fastest way to compel her to do so. There is also no doubt that this
opening to dynamic currents of thought from the West contributed in no small
measure to the quest for independence, as has often been pointed out.
Sometimes indeed, one poison is needed to cure another. But to continue
taking poison after the cure is over is inexcusable. Indias failure to boldly
formulate and implement a truly Indian education after Independence ranks as
her most tragic, most ruinous error. The blame for it must be laid at the door of
the countrys first education ministers, and even more so its first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself an undiscriminating product of English
education who was always prompt to pour scorn on Indias culture and
traditions and to make a cult of modernity.
But subjection to Western influence does more than simply impoverish the
Indian mind or wean it away from Indian culture. It also introduces serious
distortions into its thinking processes. With their clear and bold thought,
Western thinkers since the eighteenth century no doubt did much to pull
Europe out of the dark ages brought about by Christianity. But they had to
take shortcuts in the process : they needed sharp intellectual weapons and
had no time to develop the qualities of pluralism, universality, integrality native
to the Indian mind and nurtured over thousands of years. Their thought was
essentially divisive and exclusive : God was on one side and the creation on
another, an abyss separated matter from spirit, one was either a believer or
an atheist, either a Christian or a Pagan, either ancient or modern, determinist
or indeterminist, empiricist or rationalist, rightist or leftist. Whether one was an
adept of idealism, realism, positivism, existentialism or any of the thousand
isms the Western intellect cannot live without, Truth was parcelled out into
small, hardened, watertight bits, each no wider than one line of thought or one
philosophical system, each neatly labelled and set in contrast or opposition
with the other.
The result of this Western obsession with divisiveness has been disastrous in
Indias context. Her inhabitants had never called themselves Aryans or
Dravidians in the racial sense, yet they became thus segregated ; they had
never known they were Hindus, yet they had to be happy with this new
designation ; they had never called their view of the world a religion (a word
with no equivalent in Sanskrit), but it had to become one, promptly labelled
Hinduism. Nor was one label sufficient : India always recognized and
respected the infinite multiplicity of approaches to the Truth (what is
commonly, but incorrectly, called tolerance), but under the Western spotlight
those approaches became so many sects almost rivalling each other
(perhaps like Catholics and Protestants !). Hinduism was thus cut up into
convenient bitsVedism, Brahmanism, Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism,
Tantrism, etc.of which Indians themselves had been largely unaware, or at
any rate not in this rigid, cut-and-dried fashion. As for Buddhism, Jainism and
Sikhism, which had been regarded in India as simply new paths, they were
arbitrarily stuck with a label of separate religions. Similarly, thousands of
fluid communities were duly catalogued and crystallized by the British rulers
as so many permanent and rigid castes.*
Unfortunately, this itemizing and labelling of their heritage became a
undisputed truth in the subconscious mind of Indians : they passively
accepted being dissected and defined by their colonial masters, and they
learned to look at themselves through Western eyes. The Indian mind had
become too feeble to take the trouble of assimilating the few positive
elements of Western thought and rejecting the many negative ones : it
swallowed but could not digest. Even some of the early attempts to lay new
foundationsthe Brahmo Samaj and many other reformist movements in
particularwere, despite their usefulness as a ferment, conceived
apologetically in response to Europes standards and judgement. If, for
instance, they were told that Hindus were polytheistic idolaters, rather than
show the fallacy of such a label, they would bend over backward to build their
new creeds on monotheism of a Judeo-Christian type. Just recently we had a
revealing echo of such an attitude when our own President, on a recent visit
to your State, felt obliged to speculate that Adi Shankaracharyas Monism
must have been influenced by Islams monotheism. This is intellectual
bankruptcy at its highest pitch.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once put it,
The mistake of the West is that it measures other civilizations by the degree to
which they approximate to Western civilization. If they do not approximate it,
they are hopeless, dumb, reactionary.[17]
Educated Indians virtually admitted they were hopeless, dumb, reactionary,
and could only stop being so by receiving salvation from Europe : they pinned
their hopes on its democracy and secularism, ignoring all warnings that those
European concepts would wreak havoc once mechanically transposed to
India. Worse, they rivalled with one another in denigrating their heritage. If
even today a Western journalist or professor utters the words of caste or
sati or Hindu fundamentalism (and I would like to ask him what the
fundamentals of Hinduism are), you will hear a number of Indian intellectuals
beating their chests in unisoneven as they keep their eyes tightly shut to the
most fatal aberrations of Western society. Some ninety years ago already, Sri
Aurobindo observed :
They will not allow things or ideas contrary to European notions to be anything
but superstitious, barbarous, harmful and benighted, they will not suffer what
is praised and practised in Europe to be anything but rational and
enlightened....[18]
As a result, many modern Indians (I have had myself occasion to hear some
of them), and even a number of Swamis, especially those with Western
following, will proudly assert that they are not Hindus. (That fashion was
probably started last century by Keshab Chandra Sen.) What they usually
mean by that is that they are tolerant of everything and anything (especially
of Western anythings), and therefore far too broad-minded to be Hindus. They
forget that Hinduism in its true form, Sanatana dharma, is as wide as the
universe and can include any pathprovided that path is, like itself, and
unlike Semitic religions, respectful of other paths, because it knows it is only
one small parcel of the whole Truth beyond all paths.
Ram Swarup, a profound Indian thinker who passed away recently, was not
afraid of swimming against this self-deprecating tide nurtured by our
intelligentsia and media :
A permanent stigma seems to have stuck to the terms Hindu and Hinduism.
These have now become terms of abuse in the mouth of the very elite which
the Hindu millions have raised to the pinnacle of power and prestige with their
blood, sweat and tears.[19]
Such is the painful but logical outcome of two centuries of colonization of the
Indian mind.
Looking Ahead
The deeper meaning of this transitory dark phase has been expressed thus by
Sri Aurobindo :
The spirit and ideals of India had come to be confined in a mould which,
however beautiful, was too narrow and slender to bear the mighty burden of
our future. When that happens, the mould has to be broken and even the
ideal lost for a while, in order to be recovered free of constraint and limitation.
[20]
There is no doubt that Indias old mould is being broken. The question is what
is going to take its place. There are increasing and hopeful signs of an
aspiration to a reawakening and a liberation from this intellectual and cultural
degeneration. But for this aspiration to be fulfilled, I am convinced that we
shall have to go deeper than the intellect, and tap anew the inexhaustible
source of strength that has sustained India over ages. Take care of Indias
soul and the rest will take care of itself, as Swami Vivekananda said.[21] Only
then will we recover our native suppleness and independence of mind, and
learn to question West and India alike, past and present alike. Only then will
we regain our discernment, viveka, our only possible beacon in the growing
gloom.
Permit me to quote Sri Aurobindo once more :
We must begin by accepting nothing on trust from any source whatsoever, by
questioning everything and forming our own conclusions. We need not fear
that we shall by that process cease to be Indians or fall into the danger of
abandoning Hinduism. India can never cease to be India or Hinduism to be
Hinduism, if we really think for ourselves. It is only if we allow Europe to think
for us that India is in danger of becoming an ill-executed and foolish copy of
Europe.[22]
To recover her true genius in a new body is the task now facing India. She
needs it not only for herself but for the world, as the West is fast being sucked
into its own emptiness, except for a few lucid thinkers desperately searching
for a deeper meaning to our human madness. Europe is destructive,
suicidal,[23] said Andr Malraux to Nehru in 1936, whom he would meet
several times until the 1960s, trying in vain to persuade him of the relevance
of Indias spirituality in todays world. Malraux also reflected :
... To the West, whether Christian or atheist, the fundamental obvious fact is
death, whatever meaning it gives to it, whereas Indias fundamental obvious
fact is the infinity of life in the infinity of time : Who could kill immortality ?[24]
This deeper view of the universe, and of ourselves as an integral part of it, this
bridge between matter and spirit is what the world needs today. And that is not
philosophy, it is a practical question : India alone could show, as she did in her
ancient history from the Indus Valley civilization to the Maurya times and after,
how material and spiritual developments can be harmonizedand indeed
need each other if society is to last. Because the West ultimately believes only
in death, it is destroying man as well as the earth ; because India ultimately
sought only the secret of life, it could restore the divinity of the earth and of all
creatures, man included. Last century already, the French historian Michelet
marvelled :
Whereas, in our Occident, the most dry and sterile minds brag in front of
Nature, the Indian genius, the most rich and fecund of all, knows neither small
nor big and has generously embraced universal fraternity, even the identity of
all souls ![25]
This Indian genius has now begun to percolate back to the West, where it
inspires new approaches, deeper thoughts, though not yet the transforming
shakti. Perhaps the tide of colonialism will be reversed, after all. And without
bloodshed.
Perhaps Rabindranath Tagores hope of April 1941, three months before his
death, will be fulfilled :
The spirit of violence which perhaps lay dormant in the psychology of the
West, has at last roused itself and desecrates the Spirit of Man....
I had at one time believed that the springs of civilization would issue out of the
heart of Europe. But today when I am about to quit the world that faith has
gone bankrupt altogether....
Today I live in the hope that the Saviour is comingthat he will be born in our
midst in this poverty-shamed hovel which is India. I shall wait to hear the
divine message of civilization which he will bring with him.... Perhaps that
dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises.[26]

http://www.bharatvani.org/general_inbox/pramod/neverold.htmlIndia-
Ever Ageing But Never Old
(Text of a talk delivered by Pandit Vamadeva Shastri (Dr.David Frawley)
at IIT-Madras on March 9, 2001)
Namaste!
I was given a subject that is so broad that I can tackle it from almost any
direction or may be couldnt have tackled it from any direction at all. I would
like to take it from a couple of points. One, I think it is important to take a new
look at the characteristic civilisation of this region. What is not just called the
civilisation of India, but the civilisation of Bharata, or what is called the
Bharateeya Samskriti.
Because, we live in a time when civilisation and culture are being defined from
one corner of the world. And of course, that corner is America. And the
American idea of civilisation is very different from the Bharateeya idea. It is so
different that the Western thinkers have neither understood nor adequately
estimated the civilisation of India.
The British were here for two or three hundred years and yet they failed to
understand the orientation of the Vedas, Vedanta and the indigenous culture.
So, what is happening today is that you are first introduced to your culture
from an alien point of view, from a framework of alien ideas and values and
also with a great deal of distortion. Most of what you think about Bharateeya
culture or at least a significant part of it is actually not true and needs to be re-
examined. I am speaking specifically of the historical situation.
The history of this country from Vedic times is largely described by a colonial
model which fails to understand the indigenous civilisation of the region and
the continuity of the culture that has been established here. Today, there is,
what they call, a clash of cultures or clash of civilisations going on in the
world. This is essentially an attempt of one culture to dominate and overcome
the rest.
We live in an era of globalisation which when examined closely appears to be
another form of colonialism. I remember watching an American television
programme a couple of years ago on globalisation which showed young
people wearing blue jeans, working at the stock market, drinking coffee, in
Singapore, Bombay, Africa and South America. I felt this isnt globalisation,
the entire world simply being forced into an American or Western model.
What is the Bharateeya model and how is it relevant? We should keep in mind
that every culture rewrites history in its own image. So, the history of India that
you see in text books is not a scientific fact like the law of gravity, it is simply
one view that reflects a western and largely a materialistic civilisation.
Now, if we go back to the roots of civilisation in this region, the most important
texts we have are called the Vedas, particularly the Rig Veda. There is a
continuity of teachings from the Vedas to the Upanishads and the Gita. Most
of you have been taught to have some respect for the Vedantic philosophy, at
the same time, most of you are also taught that the Vedas were composed by
some foreign intruders or nomads and that the invaders were from Central
Asia.
I dont want to go into this subject in great detail tonight. We are going to have
a conference in Hyderabad and Bangalore over this issue. But, based on the
latest developments in archaeology, we can trace this indigenous civilisation
in this subcontinent to 7000 BC which is at a place called Mergarh in what is
now Pakistan. There was a continuous development of an archaeological
record of the characteristic agriculture, domestication, urban and cultural
developments that have come to be associated with India.
And this ancient culture was centred around a river called the Saraswati,
which was the largest, and the most significant rivers of that period. This was
the great Saraswati river of Vedic fame. So, we would like to recall this ancient
civilisation of India, the Saraswati culture. 80% of the urban sites of the
Harappan or the Indus sites are on the dried up banks of the Saraswati. This
ancient river dried up around 2000-1900 BC owing to various ecological
changes and hence there was a gradual relocation of the population. So, we
have the Vedic literature on the Saraswati, shifting to the Puranic literature on
the Ganga and we find a number of texts like the Mahabharata, portions of
which are on the Saraswati and others on the Ganga. In fact, the whole
Kurukshetra region of the Mahabharata was along the great plane of the
Saraswati, but at a time when the river was already on the decline and largely
not flowing.
This civilisation called Harappan should be renamed as the Saraswati
civilisation to be more accurate. This was the largest urban civilisation of the
world, particularly in the third millennium BC, but it could have been older than
that. Recent, archaeology shows that riding and other factors came as early in
India as in Egyptian Sumeria or other cultures.
In this culture of ancient India, which was so large and extensive at that time,
you could put all of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Sumeria and still find extra room left
over. So, India represents something we could call The Cradle of
Civilisations. But, so far this has not been entirely acknowledged, largely
owing to the Western mindset which going by its traditional, habitual patterns
looks to the Biblical aspect of the near East even though the Judaic tradition
was rather a very minor tradition in the ancient world in the past, and also
compared to the Greco-Roman developments that came later. Neither of
these had any significant impact on India until the British period.
If you also take a look at this Western view of civilisation and culture, we have
first of all the regular scientific view that civilisation develops through
technology and the manipulation of the material world, through the
developments in science.
Secondly, we have the western religious view that civilisation develops
through some inspired prophet or saviour who receives some message from
God and passes it on to humanity.
The Indian tradition is different from the western worldview in both these
aspects. Hence, the western terminology that is superimposed like religion or
God or scriptures is not entirely appropriate to this country. Going back to the
Vedic view, we see a culture of the Rishis, which had a significant impact in
developing the civilisation of this region. Who were these Rishis? They were
enlightened souls, who, through their own Tapas, through their own sadhana,
could reach a state of consciousness where they could perceive a cosmic law
or a higher state of realisation which could be used as the foundation of
civilisation. And thus a civilisation emerged where Moksha or liberation of the
spirit was the highest goal, not just material development nor salvation
through a monotheistic God.
In fact, there is an interesting thinker in Delhi, J.C. Kapoor, a well-known
person in the educational and foreign affairs fields. He made a very interesting
observation in this regard that the thrust of Western civilisation today, even in
its materialistic and consumeristic aspects is still following an essentially
monotheistic model which is to get everybody do the same thing, look the
same way, cherish the same values and conditioned along the same lines.
The Vedas, on the other hand, are based on a model of unity, a unity in
multiplicity in which there is a natural pluralism, "Ekam Sat Vipra Bahuda
Vadanti" (Truth is one, sages call it by various names). It is a civilisation of
Dharma, there us some natural and universal law, not some order of some
God in heaven. It does not owe its origin to a particular individual or culture.
There are certain universal laws like the law of karma, universal principles like
satya, ahimsa, which are the foundations of dharma, not of one teacher
versus another or one sect versus another.
This emphasis on dharma, spirituality and moksha, this pluralistic approach
has characterised the civilisation of this region. But, this civilisation continues
to be under siege today and at the same time is undergoing some revival and
is also gaining recognition worldwide. It is a very interesting transitional
phenomenon.
In the West, many people honour India for its great spiritual traditions, Yoga,
Vedanta, Buddhism etc. but here in India, you have a situation where these
very traditions are not honoured and added to this is an attempt to discredit
them as not being legitimately representing the civilisation of this region.
A very unfortunate thing that happened in modern India which I still am not
certain why it happened that way, is that at the time of independence, the
intelligentsia (especially the English language intelligentsia), followed a
Marxist-Socialist model that rejected the dharmic rights of this culture and also
was particularly anti-Hindu in its orientation. In fact, the colonial rule left
behind its incarnation in the form of the intelligentsia of the country; even
Nehru described himself as the last English Prime Minister of India! He
depended on the London school of Economics to structure this country which
was predominantly a socialist school. He also looked to a socialist influence
and the Soviet model five-year plans to develop the country. He refused to
change the textbooks from the British colonial model. These textbooks are
essentially the same as they were before Independence. They still teach you
to a great extent that this nation owes its existence, at least as a united
political entity, to the British and that if there was anything called Hinduism, it
was because the British were able to make some sense out of all the different
sects that we find in this country.
This is not only wrong but also totally cynical. This culture has aided in
preserving this civilisation longer than any other and has also maintained its
continuity better than any other. I will give you a simple example of this. You
have the text called Mahabharata. What does Mahabharata mean? It also
means Great Bharata, great India. Even the most restricted accounts
acknowledge that it is more than two thousand years old. You will find in this
Mahabharata, all the important deities, practices that have come to
characterise the Hindu tradition and you also find all aspects of the country
mentioned from Afghanistan to Assam, from Sri Lanka to Tibet. We have no
equivalent epic called Great Europe or Great Britain! Even today, Europe in
spite of all its colonial glory is much more fragmented than India and there
doesnt seem to be any hope of getting it united over the next few decades.
Even, China, which has maintained a political identity better than any other
region of the world, has not maintained this kind of a cultural identity.
I dont think you will find anywhere a book, which has such a wide scope for
all spiritual practices, diverse approaches to various levels of life and culture.
Yet this civilisation is not appreciated even here today.
The other problem is that this Marxist intelligentsia allied itself with external
forces, missionary and religious and this siege of Hinduism is still going on
within India. There are even new movements going on towards conversions in
this country. There is another journalist writing some thing very good, Francois
Gautier, he made a very interesting point, "When the English newspapers of
India talk about Hindu Gurus, they talk about them as godmen and cult
figures. But, when they talk about the Pope they call him Holy Father."
But, we are also observing today a revival of interest in Vedic disciplines,
Yoga, Vedanta and Vedic philosophy. We find a greater awakening of this kind
among overseas Hindus, for example, in America where Yoga has become
very popular. There is a revival, but at the same time, there is a clash,
conversions also go on.
Dr. Padma Subramanyam of Dharma Rakshana Samithi, the famous
exponent of Bharata Natyam, was saying the other day that in Tamil Nadu
they have now created academia for teaching Bharata Natyam in which the
traditional dance is taught but all for the glory of Jesus. This process is called
inculturalisation in the religious tradition i.e. appropriating native customs for
conversion purposes and then undermine that very culture and civilisation
from which these traditions were borrowed, all for the sake of conversion.
What has made India great is a pluralistic approach to spirituality and a
spiritual approach to life. I dont mean that we should get prejudiced or
bigoted or not be open to truth when it comes from other areas. If Christian,
Islamic or any other group wants to be part of the pluralism of this culture that
is fine, they should be welcome. But, if they want to exclusively take it over,
and push out the pluralism, which characterises this culture, then they should
be opposed.
And in the name of freedom of democracy, exclusive ideologies are promoting
themselves because they have more money! When the Pope was here, there
was some debate on the issue of conversions. The Catholic Church said, "
Conversion is the right of the individual. It is part of individual freedom,
freedom of choice." This is a very curious statement coming from a group that
does not believe in pluralism and talks of one path only!
You have an authoritarian institution using freedom as a means of promoting
authoritarianism. People are sincerely interested in freedom of religion and
spirituality, why dont we all get together and discuss these things? Why
doesnt the Pope invite all the Swamis, the saints, the teachers of all religions
come together to discuss these things, to develop friendship and respect for
others views and have a commonality of approach? That will be the simple
way to do it. Instead, they hold on to promoting their agenda and ignore the
rest of what is going on in the country.
So, this civilisation has preserved certain things. For example, if you look at
ancient Egypt or Greece, you will find certain philosophies, certain religious
practices; certain mystical practices that once existed. You find them still
going on in this country today. It is very important to preserve the essence of
this civilisation. India doesnt need to become another United States, Japan,
Soviet Union or Saudi Arabia. And of course, it surely doesnt need to become
another Afghanistan. Pakistan is moving closer to becoming another
Afghanistan.
The characteristic civilisation of this region needs to be restored, which is one
of tolerance but not of apologetic appeasement which is what tolerance is
often confused with. You should be proud of your traditions, you should
endeavour to study them, and you must learn how to adapt them to the
modern needs.
Or consider for example, another such stereotype, there is lot of criticism of
the Manu Smriti as if it was the most characteristic or important teaching in
the Hindu tradition. That could be like judging Christianity by the law codes of
Solomon or Islam by the laws of the Shariyat. These are medieval law codes.
The Manu Smriti as a modern law code does not look particularly good. No
medieval law code looks particularly good. The Manu Smriti as a medieval law
code does not look so bad either.
And as Arun was saying earlier, the Smritis could change, they do change and
have always changed. The Dharma Shaastras which dealt with the problems
of the society have always been changed and adapted. The Manu Smriti was
never a last word, they we just certain guidelines and opinions reflecting the
needs of that particular period of society.
For example, the medieval period, the culture was often under siege. So,
there were lots of rules to protect women, they wouldnt go out alone. If you
take that statement out of context then it appears that women had no freedom
at all. When you understand the context, the situation changes.
I have also looked at the textbooks of Hinduism in the West. And they discuss
Hinduism through the Manu Smriti or they talk about the Ashvamedha and
how many horses might have been sacrificed in the ancient world or Sati!
They dont mention Ramana Maharshi or Sri Aurobindo or if they do bring in
some modern Gurus, they try to discredit them by portraying them as cult
figures.
The situation is changing in some areas. There are scholars and thinkers who
are more open, but these are people with certain spiritual awareness. For
example, there is a Professor Klosteimer in Canada who published an
interesting book called The Survey of Hinduism, which is much better than
the books you have in India, particularly for those meant for schools and
universities. He was able to appreciate figures like Ramana Maharshi.
We live in this computer age, information age and it is very easy to promote
distortion. At the same time, India is in a situation where you have the
computer and the Internet expertise that can challenge these superficial
distortions. For example, the Kumbh Mela received a lot of positive coverage
in England. After the news they also relayed information about it. The
American media generally ignored it and some of them came up with silly
stories that in the 18 th century some of the sects fought and so many people
were killed as if that was relevant news today.
Look at the deeper currents in this culture, there is a whole lot of survival of
tradition, how many people went to the Kumbh Mela. Compare this to any
other culture. In America, people dont go to the Church, may you will find a
few thousand fundamentalist Christians, but you dont have this kind of
devotion, nor will you find this kind of a spectacle in any other religion.
It is interesting to note that according to a lot of western thinkers, Hinduism is
not even a religion. It is just a bunch of sects. If that is the case, what is this
Kumbha Mela about? What other religion can produce that type of gathering
or that type of a situation?
In the current era in which we live, science is the predominant force, and yet
we are also developing new openness towards spirituality. Unfortunately, often
are the regressive forms of western culture that come to India. For example,
the main Christian group operative in India, the evangelical Christians are
generally rejected, criticised and even ridiculed in America.
The Southern Baptists, one of the active groups of evangelical Christians
brought out some hand books criticising not only Hinduism as a pagan and
destructive religion but also Judaism and Buddhism. They were criticised by
the American press.
When people come to this country you must find out where they come from,
they usually dont represent the West and they generally dont represent the
more open or progressive elements within Christianity. Even the Catholic
Church represents a regressive form of Christianity; many of the Catholic
countries in the world are poor countries. Latin America, South America,
Philippines has never been very progressive or modern!
The Western world developed the positive aspects of its civilisation in spite of
these authoritarian ideologies. It introduced freedom and broke the rule o
these authoritarian ideologies. This is the model that needs to be borrowed.
Unfortunately, the west did not have the spiritual model of freedom or the
approach to spiritual life on an individualised basis.
Why are there so many deities in the Hindu tradition? Is it because they cant
figure out some unity behind the Universe? This is curious. Hindus are
criticised for two things. One, you have too many Gods, that is a big problem!
But worse than that you believe that everything is God! (laughter). That is
probably the reason why you have too many Gods. But, you cannot be called
a polytheist just because of this.
You have also been taught to look at your spiritual tradition as something
backward and the religions of the West as something enlightened. I wont go
into that in any detail but I think it is fairly easy to see that the spiritual aspects
of consciousness, awareness, the pursuit of the Infinite, eternal, even what
modern science is doing is more in harmony with the Vedas and Vedanta than
this kind of Biblical revelation idea of the world.
How many of you have heard of this text called the Yoga Vasishtha? All of you
must read it. Everything you might think of telepathy, about transcending time
and space, time travel, every aspect of occult spirituality, artificial intelligence,
change of species, references to other worlds, all these things are mentioned
in a text hundreds of years (if not thousands) old.
As we move into this new century, we are moving into an era where the Vedic
and Vedantic spirituality is much more reflected in the futuristic trends. I think
it is very important for India to undergo a renewal, culturally and spiritually.
This is possible only by honouring and respecting the traditional roots of
civilisation in the region, which is this Rishi culture, and this doesnt mean you
have to mechanically follow the Upanishads or the Vedas.
The Gayatri Mantra, one of the most important ones in the Hindu tradition,
says,"Dheeyo Yonah Prachodayaat". May that divine Sun impel and enlighten
dhee, the buddhi, and the higher intelligence. That is still the call and the
need. There needs to be that awakening of the higher mind, that higher
intelligence, that deeper discrimination. As a species we need to recognise
our spiritual heritage, our connection with the Rishis, the great Yogis behind
humanity, the spiritual goal of life. The real movement of life is the evolution of
consciousness and not just simply a historical development of civilisation in
one form or the other.
And that energy, that impulse, that culture, is still here and if it has to rise in
the rest of the world, it has to be awakened in this land.

Question and answer session.

(Sri Dwarakanath Reddy commented in the meanwhile that "God doesnt
make mistakes usually, but I am afraid he did make one when he made
Frawley born elsewhere. But that mistake has been corrected now and we
can claim him to be our own.")

Is Indian Culture Obsolete ?

Keynote address presented at the Vivekananda Jayanthi Lecture for Youth
organized by the Bharateeya Vichara Kendram at Thiruvananthapuram
(Trivandrum) on 12 January 2000.
Today, on Swami Vivekananda Jayanthi, we celebrate our National Youth Day.
This should be an occasion for young and old to rejoice ; it should be a joyous
homage to that great soul who single-handedly awoke India from her deep
slumber. But ceremonies apart, what do we really have to celebrate ? And
what does the youth of this country actually have to celebrate ?
The Angry Young Indian
If I were to picture myself as a twenty-year-old Indian today, my answer to this
question would have to be a harsh one. I would have to ask my elders how in
fifty years they managed to bring the nation to such a state of degradation. I
would feel both anger and contempt for the hordes of politicians and
bureaucrats who have been dutifully bleeding this country white and have
turned the daily life of honest Indians into a hopeless hell. But I would also ask
the many good, honest, capable, cultured people of this country why they
have done so little to stem the rot, why they have contented themselves with
throwing up their hands in despair and pleading helplessnessor, at best,
with giving fine lectures on every ill India is ridden with. I might even be
cynical towards programmes such as the one which has brought us together
tonight, asking what they achieve, if anything. And I may possibly be tempted
to do like many of my friends : go abroad, leave this hell, and fly to some
heaven across the seas, where you do not have to pay a bribe at every step,
where you do not have to prove that you are backward before you can move
forward, where your talents can be used rather than crippledin a word,
where you do not have to feel ashamed of your country.
This, as I have frequently seen, is what many, if not most, young Indians carry
in their hearts. It is a justified, legitimate if bitter feeling, nurtured by scores of
daily proofs.
But I have also seen that it often goes a step or two further, and our angry
young Indian, as I will call him or her, may voice the following feelings (I am
summarizing here voices I have actually heard over the years) :
See how Westerners live : their cities are modern and clean, people dont
dump garbage all around, trains and buses run on time, there is no corruption,
no illiteracy, they are hard-working, they have discipline, a civic sensewhile
we Indians have none, we are lethargic, we have no courage to fight the
system ; hypocrites that we are, we will talk about our great culture while
throwing our rubbish to the other side of the street or greasing palms at the
least demand, and while crores of us still live in the most abject misery. All
right, maybe we were great two or three or five thousand years ago, maybe
our kings of old were better than the crooks and criminals who now rule us,
but what good is that ancient culture today, except to attract a few foreign
tourists ? Today, it is the Westerners who are superior ; they dont talk as
much as we do, but they have conquered the world with their abilities and
hard work. They wanted to be achievers and they achieved ; they hunted
after success and they succeeded. And if there is any hope for this country, it
is only in adopting their methods, their science and technology, their
management and tradenothing else is going to bring us prosperity, certainly
not our traditions which have degenerated into so much ignorant superstition :
see the caste divisions, see the survival of sati or child marriage, see the
countless barbaric customs still prevailing in our villages. Who wants to waste
time glorifying all that ? And what has our surfeit of religion achieved, except
to make us weak, fatalistic, always ready to bow to everyone else ? Are
temples going to make the country prosperous ? Will smearing ashes on our
foreheads help us build the future ? Lets face it : culture is good for people
who have nothing to do. The sooner we throw out those relics of the past and
turn to healthy rationalism and progressive thinking, the better for all of us.
That, with endless variations of course, is what most of our young people are
fed with more or less subtly from their schooldays, and every day through our
Westernized media. It represents fairly well todays conventional thinking, or
shall I say the politically correct view of India aired by self-appointed
guardians of our thought. There is a certain amount of truth in those
statements, and we will do well to admit it ; but there is much blindness and
facile thinking too, and we will have to confront it.
The part of truth is there for all to see : True, our cities are generally
congested and unclean, because municipality officials and clerks think their
only duty is to draw their salary. True, we have millions of illiterates, because
our policy makers have failed to make education not only compulsory and
free, but also stimulating and enriching, and because our educationists think
their duty is done when they have spoken at a few dozen seminars while the
average village school struggles along without electricity, sometimes without a
roof, and quite often without teachers. Very true, it is revolting to have to give
a bribe for the smallest certificate, to pay ones admission to a College and
often ones way to a job, because we have come to accept that the dharma of
those in power is to live off the fat of the land even more shamelessly than our
British rulers ever did. True again, we are generally too sluggish to protest
effectively against this state of affairs, ready to condemn it in private talk but
willing to condone it in deed. And true also, Indian tradition has often become
cluttered with meaningless minutiae or a convenient excuse for rigid and
retrograde attitudes.
Western Culture
So far so good. But there is also an ignorant part in our angry young Indians
diatribe, a hopelessly idealized view of the West, and a hopelessly distorted
view of Indias heritage. Life in Western society is not as rosy as all that, and it
has its share of corruption, poverty and illiteracy. But it also has far more
essential problemsotherwise why should a number of Western thinkers
speak with anguish of the Wests degeneration ? Why do we constantly hear
of some American snatching a semiautomatic weapon and spraying passers-
by with bullets ? Why do a hundred thousand U.S. students go to school and
college every day carrying a weapon ? Is it the West or India which invented
manic depression, child abuse, the psychopath and the serial killer ? Or even
simply the killer instinct ? Why is it that few Western economies can survive
without massive arms sales, most of the time to Third-World countries, thus
fuelling hundreds of wars around the globe while at the same time preaching
peace and human rights ? Do you know what is right now the hottest bone of
contention in Europe ? the beef war between Britain and France. A few
weeks ago, a British M.P. landed at a French airport brandishing a piece of
beef from her country ; not long earlier, her countrys prime minister proudly
declared that beef was central to British culture. That was, in case you have
forgotten, in defence of the mad cowsmad because they are fed waste
from animal flesh. Which is madder, the cow or the man ? And which is more
refined ? In France, some cattle is fed with recycled sewage. In that same
country, supposedly the most cultured of the West, hunters organized in
powerful associations and lobbies fiercely defend their right to kill ; the law
permits them to enter your property in pursuit of an animal, you have no right
to stop them ; every year they will sit in the path of migratory birds and shoot
thousands of them in flight. Killing cranes or ducks or pigeons which have
been tirelessly flying over country after country to their distant nesting grounds
is the most refined of pleasures for those brutes who call themselves men and
are proud of their advanced civilization. The other day, a Japanese woman
killed her neighbours daughter because she was too much of a rival to her
own daughter at schoolmaybe she thought that was what cut-throat
competition should mean in practice ? Japan is not the West, you will say
well, in any case, it is flaunted as a triumph of Asias Westernization.
I could go on with this sinister enumeration for hours. But every society has its
aberrations, you may say again, havent we got quite a good number of them
in India ? We certainly do, and apparently more and more as Indian society
clumsily tries to westernize itself, believing there lies the supreme panacea.
But the instances I have quoted are not aberrations, they are the logical
outcome of the selfish values of Western society, which is why those
monstrosities are growing not rarer and rarer, but increasingly frequent,
widespread, and insane.
Not long ago, an Indian observed the West closely and said :
[Its] institutions, systems, and everything connected with political governments
have been condemned as useless ; Europe is restless, does not know where
to turn. The material tyranny is tremendous. The wealth and power of a
country are in the hands of a few men who do not work but manipulate the
work of millions of human beings. By this power they can deluge the whole
earth with blood. . . . The Western world is governed by a handful of Shylocks.
All those things that you hear aboutconstitutional government, freedom,
liberty, and parliamentsare but jokes. . . . The whole of Western civilisation
will crumble to pieces in the next fifty years if there is no spiritual foundation.
[1]
This Indians birth anniversary we are commemorating today, and he spoke
those words more than a hundred years ago, on his return from his first
journey to the West. In case you find Swami Vivekananda too extreme, let me
quote one of the Western thinkers I alluded to just before, a French historian
of science, Pierre Thuillier, who wrote a few years ago a penetrating analysis
of the maladies afflicting the West for all its talk of progress :
Westerners remain convinced that their mode of life is the privileged and
definitive incarnation of civilization ; they are unable to understand that this
civilization has become as fragile as an eggshell. At the end of the twentieth
century, political, economic and cultural elites behave as if the gravity of the
situation eluded them. . . . Those who profess to be progressive clearly no
longer know what a culture is ; they no longer even realize that a society can
continue to function more or less normally even as it has lost its soul. . . . In
their eyes, a society is dead only when it is physically destroyed ; they do not
realize that the decay of a civilization is inner before anything else.[2]
Or what about the great French writer Andr Malrauxs observation, I see in
Europe a carefully ordered barbarism ?[3] I could quote other Western
thinkers to show that there was nothing extreme about Swami Vivekanandas
statement, though his prediction of fifty years may have been a little wide of
the mark. But let me remind you that he criticized Indias own maladies
equally severely, perhaps more severely than anyone else. Yet he saw too
deeply to fall into the common trap of throwing out the baby with the
bathwater, and he always kept his rock-solid faith in Indian civilization.
Moreover, in America and Europe he met with many dissatisfied Westerners
who were anxious to understand Indias message. Their number has been
steadily growing since then, among scholars and common people alike. The
so-called New Age trend of the 1960s owed as much to India as to America ;
a number of Western universities offer excellent courses on various aspects of
Indian civilization, and if you want to attend some major symposium on Indian
culture or Indias ancient history, you may have to go to the U.S.A. ; some
physicists are not shy of showing parallels between quantum mechanics and
yogic science ; ecologists call for a recognition of our deeper connection with
Nature such as we find in the Indian view of the world ; a few psychologists
want to learn from Indian insights into human nature ; hatha yoga has become
quite popular, ashrams of various hues are not hard to come by, and gurus
and lamas proliferate, some genuine, others less so ; any bookshop will have
a corner for Asian spirituality, even if much of what is on offer is in the
manner of yoga without tears, Tantric secrets unveiled or God-realization
in ten lessons. In France, Buddhism is at present the fastest growing religion
(even as churches are alarmed at a decreasing attendance, some forced to
close), and more than half of the French population is said to believe in
reincarnation and karma. All that, however jumbled or cheap or distorted at
times, reflects an undeniable need, which neither science nor Western
religions have been able to meet.
The historian Will Durant, writing in the 1950s, anticipated this phenomenon
when he wrote :
It is true that, even across the Himalayan barrier, India has sent us such
questionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism
and chess, and, above all, our numerals and our decimal system. But these
are not the essence of her spirit ; they are trifles compared to what we may
learn from her in the future.[4]
So, if we want to understand things at a slightly deeper level than that of the
clichs of the day, we must allow our anger, however justified, to subside, and
start asking a few serious questions. The first must be : Would there be in the
West such a steadily growing interest in IndiaI mean in her spirituality and
culture, not in her political and bureaucratic systemswould there be such a
search for deeper things, however clumsy and confused, if our modern world
was as perfect as we are told ? Shall we still say that Indian culture is just a
bundle of superstitions ? In 1920, Sri Aurobindo summed up the whole
problem in the following words :
The scientific, rationalistic, industrial, pseudo-democratic civilisation of the
West is now in process of dissolution and it would be a lunatic absurdity for us
at this moment to build blindly on that sinking foundation. When the most
advanced minds of the occident are beginning to turn in this red evening of
the West for the hope of a new and more spiritual civilisation to the genius of
Asia, it would be strange if we could think of nothing better than to cast away
our own self and potentialities and put our trust in the dissolving and moribund
past of Europe.[5]
The Tree of Indian Civilization
Now, let me ask you a simple question : If you have in your garden a huge old
tree with some dead branches, overgrown with creepers and thorns, its foot
hidden by weeds of all kinds, will you decide to fell it, even though it is still
giving you shade, cool air and fruits ? Or wont you rather set to work, clear
the weeds and creepers, chop off the deadwood, prune a few branches here
and there, and give the tree a new youth ?
The tree is Indian civilization. It needs to be cleared and pruned, not felled.
But is it needed at all , you still ask, isnt it unsuited to our modern age ? I
will answer with a truism : modern has no meaningtoday is always
modern, and yesterday always behind the times ! When Indians living in
Harappan cities invented the decimal system, they were modern ; when,
about the same time, they measured the periods of rotation of the planets,[6]
they were modern ; when later they cast the Iron Pillar which still stands in
South Delhi and challenges todays metallurgists with its non-rusting
properties, they were modern ; when they pioneered discoveries in
mathematics, astronomy, surgery, construction and agricultural techniques,
they were modern. Now what is so special today that suddenly Indians cant
be modern anymore ? Arent our bright students who migrate to the West
quite successful there, even more so than the average Westerner ? Withdraw
overnight all Indians from the U.S.A., and that country will be paralyzed. So
Indians can still be modern, efficient, hard-workingbut abroad, not in India !
Our second serious question must therefore be : Why this terrible stagnation
here in India ? There is no time to detail here the historical causes up to
Independence, so let me just say, rather sketchily, that from the time of the
Indus-Saraswati civilization up to the Gupta period at least, that is three to
four millennia, we find the Indian subcontinent bursting with vitality and
creativity in every field, constantly adapting and renewing itself ; the decline
clearly began with the repeated waves of Muslim invasions, which
increasingly exhausted that vitality, though without succeeding in killing it
altogether. That made the British conquest ridiculously easy, and Indias torpor
was to the best advantage of the new rulers, who were shrewd enough to
encourage it, slowly and systematically destroying the remaining life in the
country, its native industries, crafts, and educational system :
English rule, wrote Sri Aurobindo, . . . undermined and deprived of living
strength all the pre-existing centres and instruments of Indian social life and
by a sort of unperceived rodent process left it only a rotting shell without
expansive power or any better defensive force than the force of inertia.[7]
Post-Independence India
That, in summary, was Indias condition at Independence. But there is no point
blaming Muslim or British invaders when the country has had a full fifty years
to rebuild and revitalize itself. Indias tragedy was the direction imposed upon
it after Independence with a blind faith in a Soviet-type socialistic system, a
corresponding monstrous bureaucracy grafted over an already mammoth
colonial administration, a rigid five-year planning with a huge and ruinous
public sector, an absurd degree of centralization and nationalization, and a
constant interference in every field of life which gave people the impression
that the government would do everything for themwhich, of course, meant
in practice that it did nothing except grow ever more unwieldy, inefficient, self-
contained, arrogant, corrupt, unaccountable, oblivious and contemptuous of
the man-in-the-street or the man-in-the-village. Thus have Indians come to
surrender to this new and worse monster all sense of initiative, all courage to
protest, their proverbial tolerance stretched to the extreme, their no less
proverbial lethargy remaining their sole refuge. Thus have the many good,
honest, capable, cultured people whom I mentioned at the beginning come to
shun Indian politics as the dirty field it has indeed become, a goonda-raj[8] in
Sri Aurobindos words of 1935.
Blaming Indias present degradation on her ancient culture or civilization is not
merely ignorant, it is dishonest. And it is plain to see that those who are fond
of such self-deprecation are usually the very ones who profit from the present
system. They will criticize village superstitions but will overlook the far worse
superstitions of our perverted socialism, secularism, and other high-
sounding isms. They will throw a fit at the least mention of sati but will not
mind if thousands of young Indians commit suicide every year out of
desperation. They will deplore the bane of poverty but will suggest no
concrete action to stop the looting of the country at the hands of the ruling
elite. They will condemn the caste system while raising one community
against another even more systematically than the British did, and even
though whatever perversion remains in the caste system would have long
disappeared if they had done their duty and improved the lower classes
economic condition and education.
What has all this degeneration to do with Indian culture or tradition ? Indian
culture is largely about dharma, which is doing ones duty sincerely and with
all ones strength. Is that a crime ? Ancient scriptures have thousands of
pages on a rulers duties towards his subjectsand what do our modern
rulers do ? Step N1 : perversely equate dharma and religion ; step N2 :
declare that secularism demands that religion must be kept separate from
politics ; step N3 : therefore, dharma must be carefully kept out of politics !
And not only out of politics, but out of education and public life as wellout of
our brains, out of our lives. And indeed, that is exactly what has happened
over the years : dharma has been uprooted. So it is no surprise if countless
Indians have developed a mixture of disgust and hatred for all symbols of
authority.
There is no power in the universe to injure us unless we first injure
ourselves,[9] said Swami Vivekananda, as always to the point. Too much of
inactivity, too much of weakness, too much of hypnotism has been and is
upon our race.[10]
The only way to rebuild India is to reverse the tide and get men and women of
quality to reconquer the battlefield instead of running away from it. Quality
means substance, it means culture in the true sense of the term. Indian
culture has always been concerned with the quality of the human being,
because it has always taught that life is not as it appears, that we have a
divine something within us, that we essentially are that divine something. That
is why, with all its faults, the Indian substance remains among the best in the
worldearly European travellers to India said it, Swami Vivekananda said it,
Sri Aurobindo said it, others said it, and the slightest opportunity can still show
it to the eye that looks deeper than the surface. This was Rabindranath
Tagores advice to his fellow Indians :
Let me state clearly that I have no distrust of any culture because of its foreign
character. On the contrary, I believe that the shock of such forces is
necessary for the vitality of our intellectual nature. . . . What I object to is the
artificial arrangement by which this foreign education tends to occupy all the
space of our national mind and thus kills, or hampers, the great opportunity for
the creation of a new thought power by a new combination of truths. It is this
which makes me urge that all the elements in our own culture have to be
strengthened, not to resist the Western culture, but truly to accept and
assimilate it, and use it for our food and not as our burden. . . .
But before we are in a position to stand a comparison with the other cultures
of the world, or truly to co-operate with them, we must base our own structure
on a synthesis of all the different cultures we have. When, taking our stand at
such a centre, we turn towards the West, our gaze shall no longer be timid
and dazed ; our heads shall remain erect, safe from insult. For then we shall
be able to take our own views of Truth, from the standpoint of our own
vantage ground, thus opening out a new vista of thought before the grateful
world.[11]
So if you want to revitalize the country, tap the real source of life and strength
in yourself to start with. Keep the essence of this countrys long journey
through time, keep the core of its experience ; give it as many new forms, as
many new expressions as you wish. No one says we should bring back the
bygone past ; that would be a foolish and fruitless attempt. Our past with all
its faults and defects should be sacred to us, said Sri Aurobindo, but the
claims of our future with its immediate possibilities should be still more
sacred.[12] Then, if you find some aspects of Indian culture outdated, first
understand them, then get rid of themchop off the deadwood. If you want a
prosperous country, tackle the root causes instead of being brainwashed by
the slogans of the moment remove the weeds and creepers. If you want to
imitate the West, imitate its hard work, its energy and self-discipline, not its
crude greed and tragic lack of directiondont fell the tree. Preserve it, water
it, nourish it, care for itit is a magic tree, a life-giving tree, and its most
important fruit is yet to come.
Out of this decay is coming the India of the future, said Swami Vivekananda,
it is sprouting, its first leaves are already out ; and a mighty, gigantic tree is
here, already beginning to appear.[13]

Kali Yuga
or the Age of Confusion
By Michel Danino
Sanskrit Day address (revised here) presented at a function organized by the
Chinmaya International Foundation, Veliyanad, at the Chinmaya Vidyalaya,
Tripunithura (Kerala), on 15 August 2000.
I am much honoured to be invited to speak on this special day. At the same
time, I must admit that I am rather shy of addressing this gathering of
distinguished scholars and Sanskritists, I who am neither. For over twenty-five
years, if I have studied something of Indian culture, it has not been in a
bookish or theoretical manner : experience is what has always interested me
to live at least something of what sent so many in this land, like nowhere
else on earth, in search of the truth of this universe and this human adventure.
That something I slowly learned mainly from Sri Aurobindo, for although he
came to be regarded as a philosopher and a thinker, he really was an
experimenter before anything else. It is a happy coincidence that his birthday
should fall today, the 128th anniversary of his birth, and I shall take the liberty
of quoting him a few times.
If I have honestly warned you about my limitations, it is because I wish to
examine with you a few important issues which, in Indias present intellectual
climate, are usually regarded as sensitive or controversialin other words,
fit to be discreetly swept under the carpet. Yet I find that examining them turns
out to be immensely profitable, provided we do so from the standpoint of
Indian experience, not from dry philosophy or hollow Westernized
intellectualism. Conversely, turning away from them or blindly accepting
conventional ideas about them is, to my mind, the source of the most serious
confusion. Long ago we were warned about this unmistakable sign of our dark
age : in the Mahabharata, for example, Markandeya tells Yuddhisthira that in
the Kali Yuga, Men generally become addicted to falsehood in speech, and
intellectual darkness will envelop the whole earth.[1] Yet we have done
surprisingly little to dispel this darkness from our own minds to begin with. We
have allowed others, unfamiliar with or contemptuous of the truths discovered
by millennia of yoga and sadhana, to think for us, speak for us, and ultimately
to dictate to us.
What are these issues, then ? To discuss themvery briefly, of courseI
have chosen a few convenient keywords ; they are : God, religion,
secularism, and tolerance. Imposing words, no doubt, constantly thrown
under our eyes and into our ears. Yet the one thing seldom mentioned about
them is that they are Western notions, and correspond to no clear Indian
conceptshence the confusion they generate when mechanically applied to
the Indian context. I will keep returning to this central point.
But does not the word God at least correspond to an Indian concept, you
may ask ? Apparently it doesbut only apparently. We all know how Indians
love to stress that God is one and all religions have the same God. We
even find respectable swamis eager to get themselves photographed in front
of St. Peters of Rome or in an audience with the Popealthough they do not
realize that the same Pope would never care to visit a Hindu temple and offer
worship there. We are also told that all religions speak the same truth or are
as many paths to the Truth, and so on. Nice thoughts, full of goodwill, but
unfortunately ignorant ones, and in fact slogans rather than thoughts. I agree
that synthesis is desirable and essential in the search for truth, but painting
the whole world with a single brush will not produce a synthesis, only a
jumble. To reach a fruitful synthesis, we must learn again to make use of
viveka, a laser-like spiritual discernment that extracts the truth but also the
falsehood in each element. It is with good reason that viveka is the very first
qualification required of a seeker, according to Sankaracharya.[2]
The Semitic God
Our first task, therefore, is to examine the Western concept of God. By
Western, I mean the god of the three Semitic or Abrahamic religions,
Jehovah or Allah ; I am not referring to more ancient Greek, Norse or Celtic
gods since, as we know, the pre-Christian religions of Europe all but vanished
under the onslaught of so-called monotheism (though some are now striving
to revive).
The first thing that strikes the unbiased, discerning Indian reader of the Old
Testament, especially the Exodus, in which Jehovah (or Yahweh) first
introduces himself to Moses under that name, is his ungodlike character.
Jehovah is admittedly jealous : the second of the Ten Commandments reads,
You shall have no other gods before me, while the third explicitly forbids the
making and worship of any idols, for I am a jealous God, punishing the
children for the sin of the fathers.... Jehovah does speak as often of
punishment as he does of sin, and periodically goes into a state of fierce
anger, promising the most complete devastation to the Hebrews who reject
him. Not content with cursing his reluctant followers, he also curses nation
after nation, and finally the earth itself, which he inexplicably holds
responsible for mans sins : The Lord is going to lay waste the earth and
devastate it, he will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants (Isaiah, 24 :1), or
again, The day of the Lord is cominga cruel day, with wrath and fierce
angerto make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it (Isaiah, 13
:9). In fact, he is so obsessed with sin that one looks in vain in his oppressive
berating and legislating for any hint of a higher spirituality, such as the Gitas
final injunction to abandon all dharmas. Or contrast his jealousy with Sri
Krishnas insistence on spiritual freedom : Whatever form of Me any devotee
with faith desires to worship, I make that faith of his firm and undeviating
(7.21), or again : Others ... worship Me in My oneness and in every separate
being and in all My million universal faces (9.15). But the god of the Bible and
Koran will have none of this universality.
If Jehovah had stopped there, we might have found him to be simply a foul-
tempered and libidinous god ; after all, some Puranic gods too have such
defects, although they usually retain a sense of their limits and a compassion
of which Jehovah is spotlessly guiltless. But he has a clear plan, he means
business and knows that coercion alone can establish his rule : when the
Hebrews over whom he is so keen to hold sway go back to their older worship
of a golden calf, he orders through Moses that each of the faithful should kill
his brother and friend and neighbour (Exodus 32 :27). Instructions which
were promptly complied with, for we are informed that 3,000 were killed on
that fateful day ; to crown his punishment, Jehovah struck the people with a
plague. I find it highly symbolic that Judaism was born in blood and fear, not
out of love for its god. As Sri Aurobindo put it, The Jew invented the God-
fearing man ; India the God-knower and God-lover.[3] It probably took
centuries for the old cults to disappear altogether, and a stream of prophets
who sought to strike terror into the hearts of the Israelites. It was a radical,
unprecedented departure from ancient world cultures. Naturally, it did not stop
there and was to find more fertile soils in Christianity and Islam : earlier,
Jehovah was content with being the god of the Hebrews alone, but in the new
creeds, his ambition now extended to the whole earth.
Increasingly aware of this cruel, irritable, egocentric and exclusivist character
of Jehovah, many Western thinkers, especially from the eighteenth century
onward, rejected his claim to be the supreme and only god. Voltaire, one of
the first to ruthlessly expose the countless inconsistencies in the Bible, could
hardly disguise how it filled him with horror and indignation at every page.[4]
In particular, he found the plethora of laws dictated by Jehovah barbaric and
ridiculous.[5] Jefferson depicted him as cruel, vindictive, capricious and
unjust, while Thomas Paine found the Bible more like the work of a demon
than the word of God.[6] With the growth of materialistic science, in particular
Darwinian evolution, such views, which were revolutionary at the time of a
Voltaire, became widespread in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Bernard Shaw, for example, describes the Biblical god as a thundering,
earthquaking, famine striking, pestilence launching, blinding, deafening,
killing, destructively omnipotent Bogey Man....[7] Freud, seeing in Jehovah
an all-too-human creation, subjected him to psychoanalysisa dream of a
subject for a psychoanalyst. Aldous Huxley called the Old Testament a
treasure house of barbarous stupidity [full of] justifications for every crime and
folly.[8] Huxley traced the wholesale massacres perpetrated by Christianity
to Jehovahs wrathful, jealous, vindictive character, just as he attributed the
wholesale slaughter of Buddhists and Hindus by invading Muslims to their
devotion for a despotic person.[9] Because a fewnot allintellectuals had
the courage to state the obvious, the power of Christianity was greatly
reduced in the West. Yet I have always marvelled that Indians should learn
about Christianity neither from their own inquiry nor from those bold Western
thinkers, but from the very zealots who are no longer heard in the West.
But is that all there is to the Semitic god ? Are we simply faced with a man-
made demon or the product of some fevered brain ? If you look at Jehovah in
the light of Indian experience, it is striking how he has all the characteristics of
an Asura. Recall for a moment a being such as Hiranyakashipu : Had he not,
too, forbidden all other cults ? Did he not order that he alone should be
worshipped as the supreme god ? Did he not use fear and violence to coerce
Prahlad ? That he was stopped by a divine manifestation, like many other
Asuras eager to possess this world, is another story : the point is that we find
here the same seed of pride and cruelty as in a Jehovah, and without a
Prahlad and a Lord Narasimha, an exclusivist and cruel religion might well
have taken root on Indian soil.
Now, to pinpoint Jehovahs identity we must remember that he himself
acknowledges Yahweh to be a name new to the Hebrews : By that name I
did not make myself known to them (Exodus, 6 :3). He does not say what his
earlier name was, but the early Christian Gnostic tradition, which was brutally
suppressed by the growing orthodox school, provides us with an answeror
rather two. In the Gnostic Gospels which survived centuries of persecution
(most of which were found at Nag-Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945),
Jehovah is named either Samael, which means the god of the blind, or
Ialdabaoth, the son of chaos. Thus one of those texts contains this revealing
passage :
Ialdabaoth, becoming arrogant in spirit, boasted himself over all those who
were below him, and explained, I am father, and God, and above me there is
no one. His mother, hearing him speak thus, cried out against him, Do not
lie, Ialdabaoth ; for the father of all, the primal anthropos, is above you.[10]
This not only shows that Jehovah was not the supreme god, but also that he
had a mother ! For the Gnostics, like the Indians, refused to depict God as
only male ; God had to be equally femaleand ultimately everything. Another
text, in the Secret Book of John, points out pertinently, By announcing [that
he is a jealous God] he indicated that another God does exist ; for if there
were no other one, of whom would he be jealous ?[11] In fact, Jehovah is
viewed in the Gnostic Gospels as no more than a demiurge or a subordinate
deityexactly what Devas and Asuras are in Indian tradition.
The French novelist Anatole France, who made use of the apocryphal
Gospels in his perceptive novel The Revolt of the Angels, has one of the
rebellious angels depict Jehovah thus :
I no longer think he is the one and only God ; for a long time he himself did
not believe so : he was a polytheist at first. Later on, his pride and the flattery
of his worshippers turned him into a monotheist.... And in fact, rather than a
god he is a vain and ignorant demiurge. Those who, like me, know his true
nature, call him Ialdabaoth.... Having seized a minuscule fragment of the
universe, he has sown in it pain and death.[12]
Now contrast this Semitic notion of God as a tyrannical ruler wholly separate
from his creation, with the Indian notion of an all-encompassing, all-pervasive,
all-loving divine essence. In the language of the Upanishads : He is the
secret Self in all existences.... Eternal, pervading, in all things and impalpable,
that which is Imperishable ... the Truth of things.... All this is Brahman alone,
all this magnificent universe.[13] If Jehovah represents a radical departure
from ancient worships, it is because he is wholly other, as Huxley puts it.
Because of the unbridgeable gulf between him and his creation, no Christian
would dare declare, I am Jehovah or I am Christ, no Muslim would dream
of saying, I am Allah. But to the Hindu, soham asmi, He I am, or tat tvam
asi, You are That, is the most natural thing in the world. Again, can Christian
parents christen their son Jehovah or Muslim parents name theirs Allah in
the way a Hindu child can be called Purushottam, Parameswar or
Maheswari ?
Clearly, if we use a single word, God, for such conflicting concepts as the
Semitic and the Indian, we land ourselves in total confusion. God is one,
perhaps, in the Vedantic sense that all is ultimately one, because all is
ultimately divine, and yet Hindu inquiry always discerned a whole hierarchy of
beings, not all equally true or luminous : a rakshasa, for instance, cannot be
equated with a Sri Krishna. Some may object to calling the Biblical or Koranic
god an Asura, but I use the word in the deeper sense of a mighty god who
comes to his fall owing to ambition or pride ; moreover, the Indian approach
has always claimed absolute freedom to inquire into every aspect of divinity,
from the most personal to the most transcendent : if the Semitic god has the
attributes of an Asura and not those of the supreme Reality, why should we
look away from that essential difference ? And if a Christian or a Muslim
scholar can examine Hindu gods in the light of his religion, and often deride
them, or worse as we still see today, why could not a Hindu similarly look at
their god in his own light and come up with his own assessment ?
A more intelligent objection might be that in later Jewish mysticism (especially
the Kabala), and in Christian or Islamic mysticism, we do find seekers going
far beyond this loud-mouthed self-declared god. That is certainly true, but they
did so despite, not thanks to, the Semitic god, because their own nature or
spiritual thirst led them beyond to a truer experience. For that very reason
they often had a brush with heresy, and most were ruthlessly suppressed,
the Gnostic Christians to begin with, whose writings were madness and
blasphemy,[14] for they had no use of dogmas and insisted on self-
knowledge and the inner discovery : Look for God by taking yourself as a
starting point, said Monoimus, if you carefully investigate ... you will find him
in yourself.[15] Even a Meister Eckhart, whose teaching is so akin to
Vedanta, was hounded by the Inquisition. The fact remains, at any rate, that
those deeper mystics always were a very small number, and that masses of
Europe and her Christianized colonies remained stuck with the cruder notion,
their progress slowed down or arrested for centuries.
I am not going here into the more complex question of Jesus, as he is
portrayed in the New Testament, except for a brief observation or two. A Hindu
would probably have no problem with him as a teacher or even an Avatar,
were it not again for his exclusiveness which puts a fatal limit to himself and to
Gods power to manifestfor why should God have an only child (a male one,
of course) rather than ten or thousands ? Why should he send us only one
saviour, and to be saved from what ? God creates us, creates sin and
ignorance the better to curse us, sends us one and only one redeemer, and
warns us that we shall be tortured for ever if we do not accept him ! Such
crude notions are offensive to any deeper understanding. Also, the language
of Jesus, though not so much as that of Jehovah, makes liberal use of threat
and arrogance : Fear him who, after killing the body, has power to throw you
into hell.... Unless you repent, you too will all perish....[16] For judgment I
have come into this world.... All who came before me were thieves and
robbers.... No one comes to the Father except through me.[17] How far we
are from the Vedic concept of the whole universe as one family, vasudhaiva
kutumbakam.
Thus the first and central object of our inquiry, God, tells us that we have
surrendered to facile assimilations. We must reject the use of a single word to
describe two wholly different concepts. Sri Aurobindo did not fall into this all-
too-common trap, and summarized the whole issue in these words :
The conception of the Divine as an external omnipotent Power who has
created the world and governs it like an absolute and arbitrary monarchthe
Christian or Semitic conceptionhas never been mine ; it contradicts too
much my seeing and experience during thirty years of sadhana. It is against
this conception that the atheistic objection is aimedfor atheism in Europe
has been a shallow and rather childish reaction against a shallow and childish
exoteric religionism and its popular inadequate and crudely dogmatic notions.
[18]
Religion and Dharma
This takes us to the concept of religion, and here again we have to confront
the clumping together of a wide array of dissimilar faiths, creeds and practices
under a single term. True, it may be said that all religions are concerned in
some way with a supernatural being or creator, but that is not enough, since
there is a fundamental disagreement on the said being. Moreover, a number
of important differences between the Semitic family of religions and the older
faiths cannot be ignored. The most visible distinctions, for instance the
complete absence in Hinduism of dogmas, of an absolute authority in the form
of an only Scripture or a supreme clergy, or also the belief in reincarnation,
have been stressed often enough, and rightly so. But there are radical
differences of a more serious nature.
To begin with, the Indian and the Pagan approaches never made a distinction
between the faithful and the infidels, the former to be saved in a single life
and the latter to be eternally barbecued, as Swami Vivekananda once put it ;
humanity was never divided into two irreconcilable camps, or reconcilable
only through mass slaughter or mass conversion. Indeed, in the Hindu view,
the only thing one may ever be converted to is ones own concealed divinity,
and that can only be done through a long and sincere inner effort, not through
unquestioning adherence to cruel dogmas. By contrast, a fundamentalist
Christian or Muslim can see no hope for a Hindu, a Buddhist or a Parsi or,
say, an animist Red Indian ; today he may no longer openly spew venom on
them (though sometimes he still does), but a close look at his utterances will
show that this fatal division is central to his mentality. It is not only humanity
that is divided in the Semitic religions, God is also separate from his creation
and in particular from man, and by giving man one only Son or one last
prophet, one Scriptureonly one book in all these ages,[19] as Sri
Aurobindo remarkedGod has in effect ended his communication with man
for all time to come. In the Indian view, the Divine is you and me, the bird
outside and the wide ocean ; he or she or it is boundless, endless, and cannot
be limited to any Book or manifestation or dogma. No Rishi or yogi ever
declared his word to be final, or that one could reach salvation only through
him ; peddling in tickets to heaven was something alien to ancient India, as
was bribing the gatekeeper with a confession of faith. There was no easy
shortcut on the arduous path to self-discovery.
If one objects that these differences, however deep, are after all only
theoretical, or perhaps theological, then we must point out that centuries of
bloodshed, holy wars, jihad, plunder, Inquisition and persecution are ample
proof that to the followers of Christianity and Islam, the division between the
faithful and the infidels was no abstraction. If they indulged in such a barbaric
behaviour over such a vast area and such a length of time, it is not because
they were intrinsically bad, but because they followed the injunctions of their
respective Scriptures and religious instructors. If the Hindu and Buddhist
cultures never once tried to conquer other civilizations by force, never
persecuted anyone for his beliefs, never waged religious wars, it is not
because Indians were intrinsically good, but because their culture never
taught them those aberrations, and on the contrary insisted on a complete
spiritual freedom to choose or even create ones own path.
It is only the most superficial and hasty view that can equate such radically
diverging phenomena. I used the word culture to describe Hinduism and
Buddhism, because I cannot bring myself to use the word religion in their
context : if the three Semitic faiths are religions, then Hinduism cannot be
one ; or else call the former dogmatic or exclusivist creeds, not religions.
Words should have some clear meaning, as long as we have to use them.
Religion is a Western concept ; the Indian concept is neither religion nor even
Hinduism or any ismit is sanatana dharma, the eternal law of the universe,
which cannot be formulated in any rigid and final set of tenets, because it
must be discovered in life and through an inner quest. Still, we may say that
pluralism, synthesis, universality, oneness are some of its central pillars, and
go on to note that none of these essential values is to be found in the
Abrahamic worldview.
I do not mean to denigrate Semitic religions in any way. If any of their
followers is happy with his faith and finds it helps him, all to the good. But
bringing everything down to a single plane is a distortion and a running away
from the truth of things. Recently, the Vatican proclaimed itself forcefully
against the idea of equality of religions. If Christianity can thus insist on
belonging to a separate plane, why could not Hinduism do the same ? And
indeed, the ancient Indian culture is not on the same plane as the religions
that flowed from the Bible, neither in theory nor in life. There are no doubt a
few truths in common here and there, and it is good to note them ; there are
also in the Bible (especially the New Testament) considerable borrowings
from India, and it is good to be aware of them. But one must also have the
courage to see where the two worldviews diverge, and to go to the root of the
divergence. Only then can one begin to grasp some of the deeper forces at
work in human history.
Secularism and Tolerance
The synthesizers, as the remarkable thinker Ram Swarup* calls them, or
adepts of all-out samenessGod is the same, all religions are the same,
etc.are in love with big words. They bring in another Western concept, that
of secularism, and tell us that it means equal respect for all religions. This
too we are supposed to accept unquestioningly, like a sort of magic wand that
is going to solve all our religious and social problems. But what really is
secularism, in theory and practice ?
I have noticed that the noisiest proponents of secularism in India are always
careful not to evoke its historical origin. Secularism was born to challenge
theocracy in the Christian and Islamic worlds. In medieval Europe, political
power was in almost every country held or at least controlled by one Church
or another. It took nearly two centuries, the eighteenth and nineteenth, to
curtail that power and establish a complete separation between Church and
Statewhich is what secularism has meant in the West, as any good
dictionary will tell us.[20] In France, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church
was virtually all-powerful until the French Revolution, and only a century later
did it finally lose its control over education. Secularism meant keeping the
Church away from political power and from education, it meant a polity free
from Christian affiliation. Likewise, when Mustapha Kemal threw out the
Sultan in Turkey and established a secular republic in 1923, it was because
he had abolished the office of the Caliph of the Islamic world ; secularism to
him meant keeping Islam away from political power.
This notion of secularism has no application in India, where theocracy never
existed ; how could it, in the absence of an organized Church or clergy ? Even
so conformist a historian as Vincent Smith noted that Hindooism has never
produced an exclusive, dominant, orthodox sect, with a formula of faith to be
professed or rejected under pain of damnation.[21] Political rule was the
business of the Kshatriya, not of the priestly class, and although kings often
took the advice of a sage or a guru, it was usually in matters of governance.
The very notion of a State religion is entirely alien to India. We almost never
hear of a Vaishnavite or a Saivite raja imposing his creed on his population in
the way Catholic or Protestant kings kept doing, and wars between
neighbouring kingdoms were never caused by clashes of belief or cult. Quite
the contrary, rajas often prided themselves on protecting all sects without
partiality. Indians were a practical people, and they knew that political rule
calls for expertisehence the numerous treatises on the art of governance
which Sanskrit literature has preserved for us (and from which our modern-
day rulers could learn a thing or two if they were at all interested in the welfare
of the people).
Moreover, the Indian genius always endeavoured to spiritualize all aspects of
life, including the social and political. If spirituality was of any practical value,
why should it be kept out of governance ? Sri Aurobindo reflects that spirit
when he states, There is to me nothing secular, all human activity is for me a
thing to be included in a complete spiritual life....[22]
In such a context, why did we have to hear at all of secularism in India ? And
why do its loudest championsapart from opportunistic and largely brainless
politicianshappen to belong to the very religions against which Europe had
to erect the defence of secularism ? Why are self-appointed leaders of
Christian and Muslim Indians lecturing Hindus about the virtues of secularism,
when their own religions were always dead against it (and would still be, given
a chance) ? Just the other day, a Sikh leader from Amritsar followed suit,
asserting that Sikhism is a secular religion. Such thoughtless hurling about
of words is the bane of modern India. Not that anyone pays much attention
anyway, but I feel sorry that we find so few Indian intellectuals to point out the
extreme absurdity of the whole thingthey are probably put off by the wall of
accusation of Hindu fundamentalist that rises before anyone deviating from
the politically correct line. And yet, if secularism means, as it does, the
separation of religion and State, why is it that the Indian government controls
most Hindu temples while never touching churches and mosques, or can take
over Hindu schools while Christian and Islamic schools are free to
proliferate ? Why is nothing in the shape of Indian culture taught to children
born in this land ? Why is a text like the Gita, universally praised as the best
guide of ethics, kept away from the sight of Indian schoolchildren ? Perhaps
our secularists would like to enlighten us on these questions ?
Another big word the champions of secularism and minorityismfor in the
end, the two amount to the same thingnever tire of using is that of
tolerance. A great virtue indeed, one that Christianity and Islam scrupulously
steered clear of throughout their history, but which was always so natural in
India that there was not even a word for it. What they really mean is that they
should have full freedom to prey upon the Hindu masses, with limitless foreign
funds to assist them. The harm and disruption they inflict on Indias social
fabric is the least of their concern ; tribes which had lived in relative peace and
harmony for centuries suddenly find themselves divided into two opposite
camps ; we have seen in recent years the tensions among the Santhal and
Dangs tribes of Orissa and Gujarat, and I could give examples of cultural
alienation among tribes of the small Nilgiris district where I live, which has, I
am told, over 350 churches, ninety Bible colleges and 300 full-time and well-
paid missionaries. More than forty years ago, the famous Niyogi Committee
Report[23] provided a massive documented study of such practices, which
should be prescribed reading for all those interested in the subject of religious
freedom.
The Hindu certainly needs no lesson in tolerance, especially from such ill-
qualified zealots. He is always ready to tolerate and will never object to any
Christian or Muslim practising his faith. But true tolerance can only be
between mutually respectful faiths or societies or nations. How is it possible
to live peacefully with a religion whose principle is I will not tolerate you ?[24]
asked Sri Aurobindo. That is why Hindus are growing increasingly restless at
devious practises that target the most vulnerable among them with a well-
oiled propaganda machine and the lure of monetary or other gain. The growth
in tension is palpable year after year, and if we have not had any large-scale
conflict as yet (on the level of what we see in Ireland or Indonesia, for
instance), it is again thanks to the ever-patient nature of the Hindu. But
Christian leaders do not realize that they are aggravating matters by raising
the bogey of a Hindu persecution of Indian minorities for consumption by the
so-called secular press in India and abroad, making up incidents when
possible,[25] and hastening to accuse Hindus even when it is plain that others
are involved.[26] Once again, note how followers of the two most brutal
religions in world history, which stamped out all Pagans and minorities
wherever and whenever they could, try to paint Hindus with the black brush of
their very own past ! Strange that we never hear them utter one word of
protest against the horrific treatment of Hindu minorities in Pakistan and
Bangladesh, or also in Kashmir.
The net result in the Indian context is that, helped by sections of the English-
language media, those two Semitic religions have managed to project
themselves as tolerant, secular, equalitarian, progressivean image almost
perfectly opposite to what they were in their countries of origin at the peak of
their strength. On the other hand, Hinduism is portrayed as retrograde,
medieval, superstitious, increasingly intolerant. Oxymorons such as Hindu
fundamentalism or even Hindu fanaticism are used day in and day out,
forgetting that Hinduism has no identifiable fundamentals, no self-declared
mission to convert anyone, no wish even to impose itself on anyone, and
cannot therefore give rise to any fanaticism of the Christian or Islamic kind. Of
course, Hinduism is also equated to the caste systemas though it were
nothing elsewhose abuses are blown out of proportion. The far worse
abuses perpetrated in the names of Jesus or Mahomet are glossed over, as is
the fact that caste discrimination very much persists unchanged among
converts to Christianity and Islam.
Such distortions have been steadily gaining ground in recent years ; they are
politically correct, in modern parlance, but essentially untrue. They will throw
in other catchwords of the day for good measure, such as the imposing
human rights (which, again, Semitic religions never advocated or practised).
It is common to see some of our secular politicians share a dais with an
equally secular bishop or imam, while they would shudder to be seen with
anyone in a Hindu garb. The Popes brazen call to a great harvest of faith
from Asia, made during his recent visit to India, is a clear sign that the Hindus
are simply not expected to protestor if anyone does, his voice is drowned in
the secular din. Money pours in from America and Europe to finance
extensive missionary plans flaunted on the Internet, to build more churches
and Bible colleges, or from Arab countries to build more mosques, madrasas
and Koranic institutes.
More than ninety years ago, the famous art critic Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
gave this word of warning with reference to the methods of Christian
missionaries in India :
All that money, social influence, educational bribery and misrepresentation
can effect, is treated as legitimate.... But even Hindu tolerance may some day
be overstrained. If it be intolerance to force ones way into the house of
another, it by no means necessarily follows that it would be intolerance on the
owners part to drive out the intruder.[27]
Indias Heritage in Question
The present intellectual climate in India is so perverted that it would be
tempting to go on and expose the workings of the perversion in exhaustive
detail. Others have done it better than I could.[28] I will give just one rather
minor topical example, since we are gathered here to celebrate Sanskrit Day.
Just last month, Tamil Nadus education minister, a proud Dravidian
(whatever the word means), declared that Sanskrit was an artificial language
born in an old ware shop and clearly inferior to Tamil ; he added (probably
referring to himself), No fool will believe that Tamil was born only after the
birth of Sanskrit.[29] Such unprovoked abuse of Sanskrit (as if the Tamil
language could not stand on its own greatness) would not matter much if this
were just rhetoric, but we find it reflected in practice, with Sanskrit virtually
banned from temple rituals in Tamil Nadu, its teaching curtailed and
discouraged at all levels (in fact all over India) and Urdu, for instance,
receiving much more favour.
The point I wish to draw your attention to is how catchwords are hypnotically
brandished, with no intelligent debate permitted on their real meaning. Indian
scholars and thinkers must develop the courage to grapple with the central
issues hidden behind those words. If they do not, they in effect abandon the
field to the kind of perversion that has been growing in recent years,
increasingly eclipsing Indias heritage and its contribution to world civilization,
portraying it as retrograde and responsible for all of Indias ills. This school of
thought, based on a freak hybrid of Marxist dialectics, psychoanalysis and
Christian revivalism, has been steadily invading Western and Indian
universities, textbooks, media, public opinion, erasing the last traces of Indian
culture from Indian education and uprooting younger Indian generations from
a culture which should be theirs by birthright.
Ram Swarups warning needs to be heard :
Hindus are disorganized, self-alienated, morally and ideologically disarmed.
They lack leadership ; the Hindu elites have become illiterate about their
spiritual heritage and history and indifferent and even hostile towards their
religion.... India has been asleep for too long, and it needed all these knocks
and probably it would get more.[30]
In 1926 Sri Aurobindo put it very simply : Aggressive religions tend to overrun
the earth. Hinduism on the other hand is passive and therein lies the
danger.[31] This renewed aggressive, conquering effort on the part of
Christianity and Islam, hiding behind their misbegotten child of false
secularism, must be resisted by the Indian intelligentsia for two reasons. One,
of immediate urgency, to limit and hopefully reverse the harm done to Indias
social fabric by artificial conversions, induced ninety-nine times out of a
hundred by pecuniary allurements, not by any genuine religious feeling.
Unless the tide is stemmed, the infinite complexity that is Indian society may
become irretrievably fragmented into thousands of conflicting groups, with the
kind of consequences we can already see in the North-East and many tribal
regions of India.
The second reason, more essential, is to pursue and renew Indias perennial
search for the Truth. If we unquestioningly accept the falsehoods that are now
bandied about, we shall in the end cripple our ability to discern the Truth. It is
Truth that conquers and not falsehood,[32] says the Upanishad, and to work
out that conquest for the world has always been at the core of Indias
preoccupation. This is no ideological question, it is a matter of saving or losing
our intellectual independence and ultimately our spiritual freedomthe only
one left to the common Indian.
As early as 1910, Sri Aurobindo asserted :
Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the
world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,to think on all subjects,
to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by
their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder
as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the
mace of Bhima.[33]
Were Indian civilization, ever in quest of new realms of reality, to surrender its
independence of mind and spirit, the loss would be grave not only for India but
for the world, for between moribund religious obscurantism trying to revive
and grab the earth once more, and the new market fundamentalism that has
well nigh grabbed it, humanitys future appears rather bleak. We must work to
see that India fulfils her role and opens a new path. We must make up for lost
time.
Back to top Michel Daninos homepage Visit VOIs homepage

* The late Ram Swarups penetrating analysis of Christianity and Islam from a
Hindu perspective (see References) has inspired many in India and beyond. I
am indebted to his study in the above discussion on God.

http://www.bharatvani.org/general_inbox/pramod/rswarup_caste1.html
Past does not guide the present
Logic behind perversion of caste
Ram Sawrup
(From the Indian Express, 13th September, 1996)
Today casteism is rampant. It is a new phenomenon. Old India had castes but
not casteism. In its present form, casteism is a construct of colonial period, a
product of imperial policies and colonial scholarship. It was strengthened by
the breast-beating of our own reformers. Today, it has acquired its own
momentum and vested interests.
In the old days, the Hindu caste system was integrating principle. It provided
economic security. One had a vocation as soon as one was born.- a dream for
those threatened with chronic unemployment. The system combined security
with freedom; it provided social space as well as closer identity; here the
individual was not atomised and did not become rootless. There was also no
dearth of social mobility; whole groups of people rose and fell in the social
scale. Rigidity about the old Indian castes is a myth. Ziegenbbalg writing on
the eve of the British advent saw that at least one-third of the people practised
other than their traditional calling and that official and political functions, such
as those of teachers, councillors, governors, priests, poets and even kings
were not considered the prerogative of any particular group, but are open to
all.
Nor did India ever have such a plethora of castes as became the order of the
day under the British rule. Megasthenes gives us seven fold division of the
Hindu society; Hsuan Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim (650 A. D.) mentions four
castes. Alberuni too mentions four main castes and some more groups which
did not strictly belong to the caste system.
Even the list of greatly maligned Manu contained no more than 40 mixed
castes, all related by blood. Even the Chandals were Brahmins on their
fathers side. But under the British, Risley gave us 2,378 main castes, and 43
races! There is no count of sub-castes. Earlier, the 1891 census had already
given us 1,156 sub-castes of chamars alone. To Risley, every caste was also
ideally a race and had its own language.
Caste did not strike early European writers as something specifically Indian.
They knew it in their own countries and saw it that way. J. S. Mill in his
Political Economy said that occupational groups in Europe were almost
equivalent to an hereditary distinction of caste.
To these observers, the word caste did not have the connotation it has today.
Gita Dharampal Frick, an orientalist and linguist tells us that the early
European writers on the subject used the older Greek word Meri which means
a portion, share, contribution. Sebastian Franck (1534) used the German
word Rott (rotte) meaning a social group or cluster. These words suggest
that socially and economically speaking they found castes closer to each
other than ordo or estates in Europe.
The early writers also saw no Brahmin domination though they found much
respect for them. Those like Jurgen Andersen (1669) who described castes in
Gujarat found that Vaishyas and not the Brahmins were the most important
people there.
They also saw no sanskritisation. One caste was not trying to be another; it
was satisfied with being itself. Castes were not trying to imitate the Brahmins
to improve social status; they were proud of being what they were. There is a
Tamil poem by Kamban in praise of the plough which says that even being
born a Brahmin does by far endow one with the same excellence as when
one is born into a Vellala family.
There was sanskritisation though but of a very different kind. People tried to
become not Brahmins but Brahma-vadin. Different castes produced great
saints revered by all. Ravi Das, a great saint, says that though of the family of
chamars who still go around Benares removing dead cattle, yet even the most
revered Brahmins now hold their offspring, namely himself, in great esteem.
With the advent of Islam the Hindu society came under great pressure; it
faced the problem of survival. When the political power failed, castes took
over; they became defence shields and provided resistance passive and
active. But in the process, the system also acquired undesirable traits like
untouchability. Alberuni who came along with Mahmud Ghaznavi mentions the
four castes but no untouchability. He reports that much, however, as these
classes differ from each other, they live together in the same towns and
villages, mixed together in the same houses and lodgings.
Another acquired another trait; they became rigid and lost their mobility. H. A.
Rose, Superintendent of Ethnography, Punjab (1901-1906), author of A
Glossary of Punjab Tribes and Castes says that during the Muslim period,
many Rajputs were degraded and they became scheduled castes and
scheduled tribes. Many of them still retain the Rajput gotra of parihara and
parimara. Similarly, G. W. Briggs in his The Chamars tells us that many
chamars still carry the names and gotra of Rajput clans like Banaudhiya,
Ujjaini, Chandhariya, Sarwariya, Kanaujiya, Chauhan, Chadel, Saksena,
Sakarwar, Bhardarauiya, and Bundela, etc. Dr.K. S. Lal cites many similar
instances in his recent Growth of Scheduled Tribes and Castes in Medieval
India.
The same is true of bhangis. William Crooke of Bengal Civil Service tells us
that the rise of the present Bhangi caste seems from the names applied to
the castes and its subdivisions, to date from the early period of Mohammedan
rule. Old Hindu literature mentions no bhangis of present function. In
traditional Hindu rural society, he was a corn-measurer, a village policeman, a
custodian of village boundaries. But scavenging came along with the Muslim
and British rule. Their numbers also multiplied. According to 1901 Census, the
bhangis were most numerous in the Punjab and the United Provinces which
were the heartland of Muslim domination.
Then came the British who treated all Hindus equally all as an inferior race
and fuelled their internal differences. They attacked Hinduism but cultivated
the caste principle, two sides of the same coin. Hinduism had to be attacked.
It gave India the principles of unity and continuity; it was also Indias definition
at its deepest. It held together castes as well as the country. Take away
Hinduism and the country was easily subdued.
Caste in old India was a cooperative and cultural principle.; but it is now being
turned into a principle of social conflict. In the old dispensation, castes
followed dharma and its restraints; they knew how far they could go. But now
a caste is a law unto itself; it knows no self-restraint except the restraint put on
it by another class engaged in similar self-aggrandisement. The new self-
styled social justice intellectuals and parties do not want castes without
dharma. This may be profitable to some in the short run but it is suicidal for all
in the long run.
In the old days, castes had leaders who represented the culture of the land,
who were natural leaders of their people and were organic to them. But now a
different leadership is coming to the fore; rootless, demagogic and ambitious,
which uses caste slogans for self-aggrandisement.

Nature
and
Indian Tradition
By Michel Danino
A guest editorial in Tahr, newsletter of the Nilgiri Wildlife and Environment
Association, Ootacamund (Tamil Nadu), January-March 1999 issue.
Recently, a retired Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, on a private visit to
a Shola[1] forest in the Nilgiris, came across a few local residents and
engaged in a conversation about forest preservation, in the course of which
he made a few startling statements. Overprotection, as he called it, could be
undesirable, and some degree of woodcutting was not necessarily bad ; also,
forests sometimes needed fires to induce regeneration, sprouting of new
seeds, clearing of undergrowth, etc. He then revealed the source of his
information to be a programme he had watched on Discovery Channel.
This calls for two kinds of comment.
The first is that, quite obviously, the programme the retired PCCF had
watched must have been referring to coniferous forests, some of which have
in the course of time learned to turn fires (caused by lightning, etc.) to their
advantageconifers being eminently inflammable, those forests could not
have survived if they had not learned that lesson. But that has no bearing on
tropical rainforests such as Sholas, which thrive in a perpetually moist milieu
(provided their canopy is in good shape) ; any forest fire there would be
irreversibly destructive. As for overprotection, anyone familiar with the
conditions in the Nilgiris will be hard put to show where that is taking place.
Shola forests have evolved over millions of years, and till the last century or
so, had to suffer almost no human interferencewhich is the same as
absolute protection. It would be standing facts on their head to assert that
illicit cutting, the kind of which has led many of our Sholas to their present
degraded condition, especially near densely populated areas, has done them
any good.
Our second reflection is of a deeper nature. No one will deny the quality of
some programmes on Discovery Channel, the beauty of the images, their
informative and educational value. But no amount of such programmes will
help us cultivate a real contact with Nature : you cannot learn Nature as you
learn English or science or the latest news. Moreover, such programmes can
only, at best, reflect the minds of Western environmentalists of scientific bent.
They have no doubt done a remarkable and often courageous work in the last
few decades, but they do not have the monopoly of an understanding of
Nature. They forget that science is not necessarily the best tool to understand
Natureif it were, why should it have caused so much destruction to this
earth, that too in the span of two centuries, a mere flash in the planets life ?
In fact, since the start of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the West broke away
from Nature and began regarding her as so much inanimate matter to be
exploited (a polite word for plunder). That unfortunate attitude, which has
resulted in the ruthless abuse we see all over the world, can be traced all the
way to the Old Testament and to the Genesis. On that fateful sixth day,
Jehovah proclaims, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let
him rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock,
over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground....
And he said to newborn man, Fill the earth and subdue it (1:26 & 1:28).
Jehovah does not stop there ; for some mysterious reason, he seems to hold
the earth responsible for mans sins. After generously cursing various nations
through a succession of fire-spewing prophets, he turns his wrath to our poor
planet : Say to the southern forest : This is what the Sovereign Lord says : I
am about to set fire to you, and it will consume all your trees, both green and
dry. The blazing flame will not be quenched (Ezekiel, 20:47). I will make the
land of Egypt a ruin and a desolate waste among devastated lands (ibid.,
29:10, 12). See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it ; he
will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants.... The earth will be completely laid
waste and totally plundered (Isaiah 24:1, 3). Cursed is the ground because
of you (Genesis 3:17). And so on, Book after ranting Book.
The contrast with the ancient Indian attitude is as stark as could be. Indian
tradition regards the earth as a goddess, Bhudevi ; her consort, Vishnu, the
supreme divinity, incarnates from age to age to relieve her of the burden of
demonic forcessometimes of humanity itself. This he does out of love for
the earth, his companion. Sita means furrow, and she returned to the earth
whence she came. Shiva too is bound to the earth through Parvati, daughter
of Himavat, i.e. the Himalayas. Earth and Heaven are therefore inseparable :
Heaven is my father ; my mother is this vast earth, my close kin, says the
Rig-Veda (I.164.33). Earth is as sacred as Heaven, since she is our mother,
not a dead heap of natural resources. Nature, rather than an adversary to be
conquered and despoiled, is our best defence : Blue water, open space, hills
and thick forests constitute a fortress, says the Kural (742). Rivers from
Ganga to Sarasvati and Cauvery are goddesses, mountains from the
Himalayas to the Vindhyas are gods ; many trees are regarded as sacred (the
pipal has been so since the Indus Valley civilization at least) ; so are many
smaller plants and flowers too, such as those still used in rituals, and a
number of animals, from the cow to the peacock. The whole of Nature is seen
as pervaded with the divine Spirit. This was of course the view of most of the
ancient world, from the Greeks (for whom the earth was Gaia and Demeter) to
the Norsemen, the Mayas and Aztecs, and the Red Indians. But all those
cultures were wiped out by the steamroller of the Judeo-Christian advance, to
which any worship of Nature was idolatry (that is also the attitude of Islam).
Strangely, even in India the sages of old had foreseen a waning of this
communion with Nature. During the Kali Yuga, says the Shiva Purana
(II.1.23), one of the many signs of growing chaos is that the merchant class
have abandoned holy rites such as digging wells and tanks, and planting
trees and parks. Note that planting trees was then a holy rite. Todays
relentless wave of utilitarianism is the cause of this steep decline, yet we can
see something of that deep reverence subsist in many aspects of Indian life,
from the sacred groves still found in some villages to the bhumi puja at the
start of any construction. Even some borewell contractors will perform a small
puja before drilling the earth.
So if to Westerners Nature is a discovery, and often a shallow one, we
Indians have nothing to discover there : we only need to revive the old spirit
and infuse it into modern methods, including scientific ones. In doing so we
must remember that science is no more than a tool, and a dangerous one as
we now know. We will be able to use it rightly only if we keep alive in our
hearts our deeper relationship with our material mother. And if we should
certainly take a leaf out of Western ecologists book as regards their sense of
commitment and organization, on the other hand they could also imbibe with
great benefit something of the ancient Indian approach. The two together
could work wonders.
*
In a letter to the Tahrs editor, a British missionary residing at Ootacamund
complained that the above guest editorial distorted the meaning of the Old
Testament ; to her, the ruthless abuse of Nature condemned in the editorial
had to be traced not to Jehovah but to mans disobedience of his creator
and to his sinful ways, which compelled God to drive him out of the Garden
of Eden. The only hope, she concluded, lies in Jesus, the promised
Redeemer, the one who came to take the punishment for all our sin and who
can alone lead us to everlasting life. We reproduce below Michel Daninos
reply to this letter, published in the April-September 1999 issue of the Tahr.
I welcome Ms. Edith Powneys comments on my guest editorial, but I wish
they had been more focused on the central points at issue. In trying to avoid
them, I am afraid she has only reinforced my argument.
First, I cannot agree with Ms. Powneys accusation that I have distorted the
meaning of the passages I quoted from the Old Testament. I am not interested
here in the Garden of Eden : as a myth, Eden is certainly not without interest,
but I am not prepared to believe it physically existed on this earth ; if it did,
what happened to it ? Did Jehovah fold it up in disgust to take it back to
heaven along with himself ? We know, at least, that man is the result of a long
evolution of primates, themselves the result of a long evolution of mammals,
themselves ... and so on back to the Big Bang. Adam was not created in a day
(or a few, if we add poor Eve), and the Genesis account can at best have
symbolic and mythical value, which is a different question altogether.
My point about the Bibles distorted world-view was simpler, and twofold :
(1) In the Old Testament, Jehovah explicitly, and on several occasions, makes
man the master of all other species and asks him to rule over all creatures ;
Ms. Powney does not dispute this. Yet this mastery is undeniably the seed of
his aggressive smash-and-grab attitude towards all other species,
something he does as a matter of course, obviously believing it to be a God-
given right (except that he should call it Jehovah-given to avoid confusion).
(2) Jehovah, always prompt to cursing humanity for its supposed sins, seems
to hold the earth responsible for themelse, why should he so constantly
threaten to bring desolation, plunder, ravage etc. upon it ? Again, Ms. Powney
does not explain Jehovahs inexplicable fury for the earth, which he claims is
his own creation. Instead, she repeats the old story of the original sin,
implying that mans rebellion against Jehovah fully justified the latters divine
wrath. But she does not tell us why poor Earth should suffer for mans
supposed sins. Nor does she realize that the very notion of original sin admits
of a gulf between the creator and the creation. In the Indian Vedic conception,
which goes back at least six thousand years, there is no original sin, no fall,
no rebellion against the creator, no cursing of mankind or of the earth ; there
is only one divine universe : Truth is the base that bears the Earth, says the
Rig-Veda (X.85.1).
I would also like to point out that the idea of a fatal divorce brought about by
the Bible between God, on one side, and his creation, on the other, is nothing
new ; all I did was to present it starkly, as it deserves to be. A number of
Western thinkers have said as much, from Voltaire to Jefferson or from
Thomas Paine to Gore Vidal, and have pointed out that no such divorce
existed in Pagan or pre-Christian conceptions. Let me quote just one recent
instance, that of Pierre Thuillier, a respected French historian of science ; in
his book published in France in 1995, The Great ImplosionReport on the
Collapse of the West 1999-2002, he writes :
Christian theology defined a conception of nature perfectly adapted to
technicist ambitions. As a matter of fact, in Paganism, natural realities were
perceived to be living, inhabited by souls.... A spring (or a tree) was not
reduced to a physical reality, a material reality. It was something more, an
entity with a life of its own. It was therefore perfectly natural for a spring to be
respected and even revered. It was seen as a marvellous manifestation of
Nature, herself regarded as living. The Earth, let us recall, was also perceived
as one great organism ; the Greeks called her Mother Earth. Even minerals
appeared endowed with a certain life, and all individual existences
mysteriously associated with one another amidst the Whole, of which
humanity itself was but one fragment.
With Christianity, a supposedly superior religion, that attitude towards nature
was totally disqualified. Henceforth, it was forbidden to revere springs as if
they had a dignity of their own. Peoples whole adoration had to be turned to
the Christian God and to him alone.... It is true that nature, created by God,
retained a certain spiritual value. But a radical transformation had taken
place : earth, air, water and fire, now theologically stripped of all soul, were
no more than objects which Homo technicus was free to manipulate as he
wished.... Through its doctrine, the Judeo-Christian tradition somehow
legitimized officially the most daring technical enterprises.[2]
As for Ms. Powneys faith in Jesus as the Redeemer, she is certainly free to
have it, just as I am free to have no use for the Christian heaven and hell. But
I do not see what bearing that has on our discussion about Nature.
Finally, I have to note that Ms. Powney does not say a word of Indias (and the
whole pre-Christian worlds) deep reverence for the Earth as a sacred, divine
being of which we are all a part. The omission of this central point in my
editorial only goes to show that this notionwhich our modern world badly
needs to rediscover before it is too lateis foreign to her mentality. I would
request Ms. Powney to kindly read through the whole Bible (and the whole
Koran if she can) and tell us whether she can find there a single passage
showing a similar attitude of treating the Earth as our very own divine Mother.
It is a pity that Ms. Powney, living in India as she does, has no use for this
countrys rich ancient culture. I am tempted to try my luck with another culture,
that of the Red Indians. Let me quote a few sentences from Chief Seattles
1855 speech to a White governor who had come to purchase (in reality to
grab) huge tracts of the Red Indians lands :
What is it that the White Man wants to buy, my people will ask. It is difficult for
us to understand.
How can one buy or sell the air, the warmth of the land ? That is difficult for us
to imagine. If we dont own the sweet air and the bubbling water, how can you
buy it from us ? Each pine tree shining in the sun, each sandy beach, the mist
hanging in the dark woods, every space, each humming bee is holy in the
thoughts and memory of our people.... Every part of this soil is sacred in the
estimation of my people....
We are part of the earth, and the earth is part of us. The fragrant flowers are
our sisters, the reindeer, the horse, the great eagle our brothers....
We know that the White Man does not understand our way of life. To him, one
piece of land is much like the other. He is a stranger coming in the night taking
from the land what he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy, and
when he has conquered it, he moves on.... He treats his mother the Earth and
his Brother the sky like merchandise. His hunger will eat the earth bare and
leave only a desert....
Your God is not our God ! ... Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly
receding tide that will never return. The White Mans God cannot love our
people, or he would protect them....
But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people ? Tribe follows tribe,
and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of Nature,
and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will certainly
come, for even the White Man ... cannot be exempt from the common destiny.
We may be brothers after all. We will see.
I sincerely wish my critic could quote for us such lofty thoughts and feelings
from the Christian tradition ; but she cannot, for they do not exist.
Unlike Ms. Powney, I cannot end with May God bless you, as that formula
raises some thorny questionsfor instance, Which god ? an earth-cursing,
self-confessed jealous and angry god, or an earth-loving and earth-saving one
? But let me hope simply that Mother Earth will not, in turn, curse us too
harshly, deserved though her curse would be

* The late Ram Swarups penetrating analysis of Christianity and Islam from a
Hindu perspective (see References) has inspired many in India and beyond. I
am indebted to his study in the above discussion on God.

http://www.bharatvani.org/general_inbox/pramod/rswarup_caste1.html
Past does not guide the present
Logic behind perversion of caste
Ram Sawrup
(From the Indian Express, 13th September, 1996)
Today casteism is rampant. It is a new phenomenon. Old India had castes but
not casteism. In its present form, casteism is a construct of colonial period, a
product of imperial policies and colonial scholarship. It was strengthened by
the breast-beating of our own reformers. Today, it has acquired its own
momentum and vested interests.
In the old days, the Hindu caste system was integrating principle. It provided
economic security. One had a vocation as soon as one was born.- a dream for
those threatened with chronic unemployment. The system combined security
with freedom; it provided social space as well as closer identity; here the
individual was not atomised and did not become rootless. There was also no
dearth of social mobility; whole groups of people rose and fell in the social
scale. Rigidity about the old Indian castes is a myth. Ziegenbbalg writing on
the eve of the British advent saw that at least one-third of the people practised
other than their traditional calling and that official and political functions, such
as those of teachers, councillors, governors, priests, poets and even kings
were not considered the prerogative of any particular group, but are open to
all.
Nor did India ever have such a plethora of castes as became the order of the
day under the British rule. Megasthenes gives us seven fold division of the
Hindu society; Hsuan Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim (650 A. D.) mentions four
castes. Alberuni too mentions four main castes and some more groups which
did not strictly belong to the caste system.
Even the list of greatly maligned Manu contained no more than 40 mixed
castes, all related by blood. Even the Chandals were Brahmins on their
fathers side. But under the British, Risley gave us 2,378 main castes, and 43
races! There is no count of sub-castes. Earlier, the 1891 census had already
given us 1,156 sub-castes of chamars alone. To Risley, every caste was also
ideally a race and had its own language.
Caste did not strike early European writers as something specifically Indian.
They knew it in their own countries and saw it that way. J. S. Mill in his
Political Economy said that occupational groups in Europe were almost
equivalent to an hereditary distinction of caste.
To these observers, the word caste did not have the connotation it has today.
Gita Dharampal Frick, an orientalist and linguist tells us that the early
European writers on the subject used the older Greek word Meri which means
a portion, share, contribution. Sebastian Franck (1534) used the German
word Rott (rotte) meaning a social group or cluster. These words suggest
that socially and economically speaking they found castes closer to each
other than ordo or estates in Europe.
The early writers also saw no Brahmin domination though they found much
respect for them. Those like Jurgen Andersen (1669) who described castes in
Gujarat found that Vaishyas and not the Brahmins were the most important
people there.
They also saw no sanskritisation. One caste was not trying to be another; it
was satisfied with being itself. Castes were not trying to imitate the Brahmins
to improve social status; they were proud of being what they were. There is a
Tamil poem by Kamban in praise of the plough which says that even being
born a Brahmin does by far endow one with the same excellence as when
one is born into a Vellala family.
There was sanskritisation though but of a very different kind. People tried to
become not Brahmins but Brahma-vadin. Different castes produced great
saints revered by all. Ravi Das, a great saint, says that though of the family of
chamars who still go around Benares removing dead cattle, yet even the most
revered Brahmins now hold their offspring, namely himself, in great esteem.
With the advent of Islam the Hindu society came under great pressure; it
faced the problem of survival. When the political power failed, castes took
over; they became defence shields and provided resistance passive and
active. But in the process, the system also acquired undesirable traits like
untouchability. Alberuni who came along with Mahmud Ghaznavi mentions the
four castes but no untouchability. He reports that much, however, as these
classes differ from each other, they live together in the same towns and
villages, mixed together in the same houses and lodgings.
Another acquired another trait; they became rigid and lost their mobility. H. A.
Rose, Superintendent of Ethnography, Punjab (1901-1906), author of A
Glossary of Punjab Tribes and Castes says that during the Muslim period,
many Rajputs were degraded and they became scheduled castes and
scheduled tribes. Many of them still retain the Rajput gotra of parihara and
parimara. Similarly, G. W. Briggs in his The Chamars tells us that many
chamars still carry the names and gotra of Rajput clans like Banaudhiya,
Ujjaini, Chandhariya, Sarwariya, Kanaujiya, Chauhan, Chadel, Saksena,
Sakarwar, Bhardarauiya, and Bundela, etc. Dr.K. S. Lal cites many similar
instances in his recent Growth of Scheduled Tribes and Castes in Medieval
India.
The same is true of bhangis. William Crooke of Bengal Civil Service tells us
that the rise of the present Bhangi caste seems from the names applied to
the castes and its subdivisions, to date from the early period of Mohammedan
rule. Old Hindu literature mentions no bhangis of present function. In
traditional Hindu rural society, he was a corn-measurer, a village policeman, a
custodian of village boundaries. But scavenging came along with the Muslim
and British rule. Their numbers also multiplied. According to 1901 Census, the
bhangis were most numerous in the Punjab and the United Provinces which
were the heartland of Muslim domination.
Then came the British who treated all Hindus equally all as an inferior race
and fuelled their internal differences. They attacked Hinduism but cultivated
the caste principle, two sides of the same coin. Hinduism had to be attacked.
It gave India the principles of unity and continuity; it was also Indias definition
at its deepest. It held together castes as well as the country. Take away
Hinduism and the country was easily subdued.
Caste in old India was a cooperative and cultural principle.; but it is now being
turned into a principle of social conflict. In the old dispensation, castes
followed dharma and its restraints; they knew how far they could go. But now
a caste is a law unto itself; it knows no self-restraint except the restraint put on
it by another class engaged in similar self-aggrandisement. The new self-
styled social justice intellectuals and parties do not want castes without
dharma. This may be profitable to some in the short run but it is suicidal for all
in the long run.
In the old days, castes had leaders who represented the culture of the land,
who were natural leaders of their people and were organic to them. But now a
different leadership is coming to the fore; rootless, demagogic and ambitious,
which uses caste slogans for self-aggrandisement.

Nature
and
Indian Tradition
By Michel Danino
A guest editorial in Tahr, newsletter of the Nilgiri Wildlife and Environment
Association, Ootacamund (Tamil Nadu), January-March 1999 issue.
Recently, a retired Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, on a private visit to
a Shola[1] forest in the Nilgiris, came across a few local residents and
engaged in a conversation about forest preservation, in the course of which
he made a few startling statements. Overprotection, as he called it, could be
undesirable, and some degree of woodcutting was not necessarily bad ; also,
forests sometimes needed fires to induce regeneration, sprouting of new
seeds, clearing of undergrowth, etc. He then revealed the source of his
information to be a programme he had watched on Discovery Channel.
This calls for two kinds of comment.
The first is that, quite obviously, the programme the retired PCCF had
watched must have been referring to coniferous forests, some of which have
in the course of time learned to turn fires (caused by lightning, etc.) to their
advantageconifers being eminently inflammable, those forests could not
have survived if they had not learned that lesson. But that has no bearing on
tropical rainforests such as Sholas, which thrive in a perpetually moist milieu
(provided their canopy is in good shape) ; any forest fire there would be
irreversibly destructive. As for overprotection, anyone familiar with the
conditions in the Nilgiris will be hard put to show where that is taking place.
Shola forests have evolved over millions of years, and till the last century or
so, had to suffer almost no human interferencewhich is the same as
absolute protection. It would be standing facts on their head to assert that
illicit cutting, the kind of which has led many of our Sholas to their present
degraded condition, especially near densely populated areas, has done them
any good.
Our second reflection is of a deeper nature. No one will deny the quality of
some programmes on Discovery Channel, the beauty of the images, their
informative and educational value. But no amount of such programmes will
help us cultivate a real contact with Nature : you cannot learn Nature as you
learn English or science or the latest news. Moreover, such programmes can
only, at best, reflect the minds of Western environmentalists of scientific bent.
They have no doubt done a remarkable and often courageous work in the last
few decades, but they do not have the monopoly of an understanding of
Nature. They forget that science is not necessarily the best tool to understand
Natureif it were, why should it have caused so much destruction to this
earth, that too in the span of two centuries, a mere flash in the planets life ?
In fact, since the start of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the West broke away
from Nature and began regarding her as so much inanimate matter to be
exploited (a polite word for plunder). That unfortunate attitude, which has
resulted in the ruthless abuse we see all over the world, can be traced all the
way to the Old Testament and to the Genesis. On that fateful sixth day,
Jehovah proclaims, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let
him rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock,
over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground....
And he said to newborn man, Fill the earth and subdue it (1:26 & 1:28).
Jehovah does not stop there ; for some mysterious reason, he seems to hold
the earth responsible for mans sins. After generously cursing various nations
through a succession of fire-spewing prophets, he turns his wrath to our poor
planet : Say to the southern forest : This is what the Sovereign Lord says : I
am about to set fire to you, and it will consume all your trees, both green and
dry. The blazing flame will not be quenched (Ezekiel, 20:47). I will make the
land of Egypt a ruin and a desolate waste among devastated lands (ibid.,
29:10, 12). See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it ; he
will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants.... The earth will be completely laid
waste and totally plundered (Isaiah 24:1, 3). Cursed is the ground because
of you (Genesis 3:17). And so on, Book after ranting Book.
The contrast with the ancient Indian attitude is as stark as could be. Indian
tradition regards the earth as a goddess, Bhudevi ; her consort, Vishnu, the
supreme divinity, incarnates from age to age to relieve her of the burden of
demonic forcessometimes of humanity itself. This he does out of love for
the earth, his companion. Sita means furrow, and she returned to the earth
whence she came. Shiva too is bound to the earth through Parvati, daughter
of Himavat, i.e. the Himalayas. Earth and Heaven are therefore inseparable :
Heaven is my father ; my mother is this vast earth, my close kin, says the
Rig-Veda (I.164.33). Earth is as sacred as Heaven, since she is our mother,
not a dead heap of natural resources. Nature, rather than an adversary to be
conquered and despoiled, is our best defence : Blue water, open space, hills
and thick forests constitute a fortress, says the Kural (742). Rivers from
Ganga to Sarasvati and Cauvery are goddesses, mountains from the
Himalayas to the Vindhyas are gods ; many trees are regarded as sacred (the
pipal has been so since the Indus Valley civilization at least) ; so are many
smaller plants and flowers too, such as those still used in rituals, and a
number of animals, from the cow to the peacock. The whole of Nature is seen
as pervaded with the divine Spirit. This was of course the view of most of the
ancient world, from the Greeks (for whom the earth was Gaia and Demeter) to
the Norsemen, the Mayas and Aztecs, and the Red Indians. But all those
cultures were wiped out by the steamroller of the Judeo-Christian advance, to
which any worship of Nature was idolatry (that is also the attitude of Islam).
Strangely, even in India the sages of old had foreseen a waning of this
communion with Nature. During the Kali Yuga, says the Shiva Purana
(II.1.23), one of the many signs of growing chaos is that the merchant class
have abandoned holy rites such as digging wells and tanks, and planting
trees and parks. Note that planting trees was then a holy rite. Todays
relentless wave of utilitarianism is the cause of this steep decline, yet we can
see something of that deep reverence subsist in many aspects of Indian life,
from the sacred groves still found in some villages to the bhumi puja at the
start of any construction. Even some borewell contractors will perform a small
puja before drilling the earth.
So if to Westerners Nature is a discovery, and often a shallow one, we
Indians have nothing to discover there : we only need to revive the old spirit
and infuse it into modern methods, including scientific ones. In doing so we
must remember that science is no more than a tool, and a dangerous one as
we now know. We will be able to use it rightly only if we keep alive in our
hearts our deeper relationship with our material mother. And if we should
certainly take a leaf out of Western ecologists book as regards their sense of
commitment and organization, on the other hand they could also imbibe with
great benefit something of the ancient Indian approach. The two together
could work wonders.
*
In a letter to the Tahrs editor, a British missionary residing at Ootacamund
complained that the above guest editorial distorted the meaning of the Old
Testament ; to her, the ruthless abuse of Nature condemned in the editorial
had to be traced not to Jehovah but to mans disobedience of his creator
and to his sinful ways, which compelled God to drive him out of the Garden
of Eden. The only hope, she concluded, lies in Jesus, the promised
Redeemer, the one who came to take the punishment for all our sin and who
can alone lead us to everlasting life. We reproduce below Michel Daninos
reply to this letter, published in the April-September 1999 issue of the Tahr.
I welcome Ms. Edith Powneys comments on my guest editorial, but I wish
they had been more focused on the central points at issue. In trying to avoid
them, I am afraid she has only reinforced my argument.
First, I cannot agree with Ms. Powneys accusation that I have distorted the
meaning of the passages I quoted from the Old Testament. I am not interested
here in the Garden of Eden : as a myth, Eden is certainly not without interest,
but I am not prepared to believe it physically existed on this earth ; if it did,
what happened to it ? Did Jehovah fold it up in disgust to take it back to
heaven along with himself ? We know, at least, that man is the result of a long
evolution of primates, themselves the result of a long evolution of mammals,
themselves ... and so on back to the Big Bang. Adam was not created in a day
(or a few, if we add poor Eve), and the Genesis account can at best have
symbolic and mythical value, which is a different question altogether.
My point about the Bibles distorted world-view was simpler, and twofold :
(1) In the Old Testament, Jehovah explicitly, and on several occasions, makes
man the master of all other species and asks him to rule over all creatures ;
Ms. Powney does not dispute this. Yet this mastery is undeniably the seed of
his aggressive smash-and-grab attitude towards all other species,
something he does as a matter of course, obviously believing it to be a God-
given right (except that he should call it Jehovah-given to avoid confusion).
(2) Jehovah, always prompt to cursing humanity for its supposed sins, seems
to hold the earth responsible for themelse, why should he so constantly
threaten to bring desolation, plunder, ravage etc. upon it ? Again, Ms. Powney
does not explain Jehovahs inexplicable fury for the earth, which he claims is
his own creation. Instead, she repeats the old story of the original sin,
implying that mans rebellion against Jehovah fully justified the latters divine
wrath. But she does not tell us why poor Earth should suffer for mans
supposed sins. Nor does she realize that the very notion of original sin admits
of a gulf between the creator and the creation. In the Indian Vedic conception,
which goes back at least six thousand years, there is no original sin, no fall,
no rebellion against the creator, no cursing of mankind or of the earth ; there
is only one divine universe : Truth is the base that bears the Earth, says the
Rig-Veda (X.85.1).
I would also like to point out that the idea of a fatal divorce brought about by
the Bible between God, on one side, and his creation, on the other, is nothing
new ; all I did was to present it starkly, as it deserves to be. A number of
Western thinkers have said as much, from Voltaire to Jefferson or from
Thomas Paine to Gore Vidal, and have pointed out that no such divorce
existed in Pagan or pre-Christian conceptions. Let me quote just one recent
instance, that of Pierre Thuillier, a respected French historian of science ; in
his book published in France in 1995, The Great ImplosionReport on the
Collapse of the West 1999-2002, he writes :
Christian theology defined a conception of nature perfectly adapted to
technicist ambitions. As a matter of fact, in Paganism, natural realities were
perceived to be living, inhabited by souls.... A spring (or a tree) was not
reduced to a physical reality, a material reality. It was something more, an
entity with a life of its own. It was therefore perfectly natural for a spring to be
respected and even revered. It was seen as a marvellous manifestation of
Nature, herself regarded as living. The Earth, let us recall, was also perceived
as one great organism ; the Greeks called her Mother Earth. Even minerals
appeared endowed with a certain life, and all individual existences
mysteriously associated with one another amidst the Whole, of which
humanity itself was but one fragment.
With Christianity, a supposedly superior religion, that attitude towards nature
was totally disqualified. Henceforth, it was forbidden to revere springs as if
they had a dignity of their own. Peoples whole adoration had to be turned to
the Christian God and to him alone.... It is true that nature, created by God,
retained a certain spiritual value. But a radical transformation had taken
place : earth, air, water and fire, now theologically stripped of all soul, were
no more than objects which Homo technicus was free to manipulate as he
wished.... Through its doctrine, the Judeo-Christian tradition somehow
legitimized officially the most daring technical enterprises.[2]
As for Ms. Powneys faith in Jesus as the Redeemer, she is certainly free to
have it, just as I am free to have no use for the Christian heaven and hell. But
I do not see what bearing that has on our discussion about Nature.
Finally, I have to note that Ms. Powney does not say a word of Indias (and the
whole pre-Christian worlds) deep reverence for the Earth as a sacred, divine
being of which we are all a part. The omission of this central point in my
editorial only goes to show that this notionwhich our modern world badly
needs to rediscover before it is too lateis foreign to her mentality. I would
request Ms. Powney to kindly read through the whole Bible (and the whole
Koran if she can) and tell us whether she can find there a single passage
showing a similar attitude of treating the Earth as our very own divine Mother.
It is a pity that Ms. Powney, living in India as she does, has no use for this
countrys rich ancient culture. I am tempted to try my luck with another culture,
that of the Red Indians. Let me quote a few sentences from Chief Seattles
1855 speech to a White governor who had come to purchase (in reality to
grab) huge tracts of the Red Indians lands :
What is it that the White Man wants to buy, my people will ask. It is difficult for
us to understand.
How can one buy or sell the air, the warmth of the land ? That is difficult for us
to imagine. If we dont own the sweet air and the bubbling water, how can you
buy it from us ? Each pine tree shining in the sun, each sandy beach, the mist
hanging in the dark woods, every space, each humming bee is holy in the
thoughts and memory of our people.... Every part of this soil is sacred in the
estimation of my people....
We are part of the earth, and the earth is part of us. The fragrant flowers are
our sisters, the reindeer, the horse, the great eagle our brothers....
We know that the White Man does not understand our way of life. To him, one
piece of land is much like the other. He is a stranger coming in the night taking
from the land what he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy, and
when he has conquered it, he moves on.... He treats his mother the Earth and
his Brother the sky like merchandise. His hunger will eat the earth bare and
leave only a desert....
Your God is not our God ! ... Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly
receding tide that will never return. The White Mans God cannot love our
people, or he would protect them....
But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people ? Tribe follows tribe,
and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of Nature,
and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will certainly
come, for even the White Man ... cannot be exempt from the common destiny.
We may be brothers after all. We will see.
I sincerely wish my critic could quote for us such lofty thoughts and feelings
from the Christian tradition ; but she cannot, for they do not exist.
Unlike Ms. Powney, I cannot end with May God bless you, as that formula
raises some thorny questionsfor instance, Which god ? an earth-cursing,
self-confessed jealous and angry god, or an earth-loving and earth-saving one
? But let me hope simply that Mother Earth will not, in turn, curse us too
harshly, deserved though her curse would be

Sri Aurobindos View

of Indian Culture
by Michel Danino
This paper was presented at a seminar in celebration of Sri Aurobindos 125th
birth anniversary held in New Delhi on 21-24 November 1998, organized by
the Department of Culture, Ministry of Human Resource Development, with
the collaboration of the National Council of Educational Research and
Training, and the Indian Council of Philosophical Research.
The lecture deals with Sri Aurobindos view of Indian culture and confronts its
state of deep neglect in todays India, though it was precisely what gave the
country its special strength and its unique ability to survive the onslaughts of
time. There is an emphasis on the field of education (perhaps because many
in the audience were eminent professors and teachers), and on this question :
Why Indian education should exclude the very materials that could easily
transform the child into a rich human being, even as we witness today a
world-wide degradation of the human substance ?
If I am permitted to begin with a few personal words, I would like to say that I
am, almost every day of my life, conscious of having been blessed with a twin
privilege : that of having landed in India twenty-one years ago, and that of
having discovered Sri Aurobindo and Mother even earlier. Earlier, that is, while
a teenager in France in 1972, the year of Sri Aurobindos centenary. I would
never have imagined that, twenty-five years later, I would be asked to
participate in the celebrations of his 125th birth anniversary. All I knew was that
I could find nothing in France or in the West that could give a full meaning to
my life, nothingin its science, its philosophies, even its culturethat could
convince me that life is worth living. The first few pages I read by and about
Sri Aurobindo put an end to that questand were, of course, the beginning of
another.
Living in India has been another adventureand yet the same. It has brought
a constantly enriching, constantly growing experience, which I have always
tried to see through Sri Aurobindos eyes, if I may say so. For I do not think
that anyone has been able to convey more clearly and beautifully what India
is, what she represents for herself and for the world. And not only to convey it,
but to work for it.
Not that India is today the heaven we would all dream her to be. Far from it.
But Sri Aurobindo always saw behind the appearances of the moment,
however disheartening they may be. He saw Indias ancient strength, the
causes of her decay, the certainty of her rebirth. For sixty years, from his
student days in Cambridge to his passing in 1950, his will for the fulfilment of
Indias destiny never wavered. He fought for it, suffered for it, poured all his
energies towards it. Sixty years is a long time in a mans life.
Now, what is it that makes this country generate this sort of passionate love in
her children ?Not in all of them, unfortunately, but there have been enough
bright examples from Bankim to Tilak, from Vivekananda to Subramania
Bharati, from Tagore to Lala Lajpat Rai. What does India mean on a deeper
level ? And can that deeper meaning find any practical, immediate application
in changing Indias present condition, which, understandably, it is the favourite
pastime of most Indians to decry ? Or is the greatness of Indian civilization a
hollow, ineffective slogan ? And if this civilization has survived through 6 to
7,000 years, is it only to be now dismissed as unsuited to our modern
times ?
*
Before we attempt to find in Sri Aurobindo some answers to these questions, I
feel we would gain from a critical glance at the West. From a distance, we see
a mighty glittering edifice, impressive enough to hold anyone in awe; the
achievements are dazzling, the talents plentiful. If, however, we come closer,
we notice cracks on the faade, some of which have grown wide in recent
years, in spite of all the desperate patching up; and if, uninvited, we go to the
back of the building, we meet piles of garbage and are struck by a stench
emanating from the foundations. This is the experience of a number of
Westerners, though few of them would be ready to put it as bluntly. Western
society today believes only in exploitation, expansion, efficiency,
competitivenessand seeks to transform its members into unthinking cogs
in a huge Machine. We will certainly find some remarkable individuals here
and there, but the mass is left to live from day to day, with, now and then, the
luxury of a fit of depression, when the void in their hearts becomes a little too
acute. Or, if it is not depression, it is a bottomless pit of degradation. Western
civilization, if it can be given this noble name, was built on cynical greed, with
a thin veneer of culture to give it a respectable appearance. Anyone who finds
this statement excessive should study the way leading Western nations
spend their time selling weapons of death to everyone, then sending peace
missions to extinguish the wars they started, and more bombers in case the
peace missions are turned down. Not to speak of the countless dictators and
terrorists they constantly create, only to fight them in the name of human
rights once they are found inconvenient. Or, again, look at those giant
corporate houses which think nothing of laying the earth waste as long as
they can make a few more dollars. No one knows where the whole machine is
heading, nor does anyone carealthough many, especially among the
ordinary people, vaguely and anxiously sense that things cannot go on much
longer. Such unhealthy foundations are sure to decay before long, and the
signs of impending disintegration are not lacking, whether in the economic or
the social fields.
Sri Aurobindo, who last century imbibed all the culture Europe had to offer
him, saw very soon through the Wests chosen direction. He wrote in 1910 :
Was life always so trivial, always so vulgar, always so loveless, pale and
awkward as the Europeans have made it ? This well-appointed comfort
oppresses me, this perfection of machinery will not allow the soul to
remember that it is not itself a machine. Is this then the end of the long march
of human civilisation, this spiritual suicide, this quiet petrifaction of the soul
into matter ? Was the successful businessman that grand culmination of
manhood toward which evolution was striving ? After all, if the scientific view
is correct, why not ? An evolution that started with the protoplasm and
flowered in the ourang-outang and the chimpanzee, may well rest satisfied
with having created hat, coat and trousers, the British Aristocrat, the American
Capitalist and the Parisian Apache. For these, I believe, are the chief triumphs
of the European enlightenment to which we bow our heads. [...] What a
bankruptcy ! What a beggary of things that were rich and noble !
Europe boasts of her science and its marvels. But [...] to the braggart intellect
of Europe the Indian is bound to reply, I am not interested in what you know, I
am interested in what you are. With all your discoveries and inventions, what
have you become ? Your enlightenment is greatbut what are these strange
creatures that move about in the electric light you have installed and imagine
that they are human ? Is it a great gain for the human intellect to have grown
more acute and discerning, if the human soul dwindles ? [...] Man in Europe is
descending steadily from the human level and approximating to the ant and
the hornet. The process is not complete but it is progressing apace, and if
nothing stops the debacle, we may hope to see its culmination in this
twentieth century. After all our superstitions were better than this
enlightenment, our social abuses less murderous to the hopes of the race
than this social perfection.[1]
Ninety years later, what was then behind the veil is now out in the open. We
have almost reached the culmination of the Wests failure. It has failed in
spite of all its achievements because it has ignored what we are, scoffed at
what we are expected to become. And that is precisely, for Sri Aurobindo,
the heart of Indian civilization, its constant concern through ages, in art or
science or yoga, in every activity of life. The laboratory of the soul has been
India,[2] he said. Indian culture is simply the culture of mans inner richness.
It is a realization that the entire universe is divine, tree, bird, man and star
and our Mother Earth, whom the West has for two thousand years regarded
as a chunk of inanimate matter created to serve our ever-expanding greeds.
While fighting for Indias independence, Sri Aurobindo reminded his
countrymen :
This great and ancient nation was once the fountain of human light, the apex
of human civilisation, the exemplar of courage and humanity, the perfection of
good Government and settled society, the mother of all religions, the teacher
of all wisdom and philosophy. It has suffered much at the hands of inferior
civilisations and more savage peoples; it has gone down into the shadow of
night and tasted often of the bitterness of death. Its pride has been trampled
into the dust and its glory has departed. Hunger and misery and despair have
become the masters of this fair soil, these noble hills, these ancient rivers,
these cities whose life story goes back into prehistoric night. [... But] all our
calamities have been but a discipline of suffering, because for the great
mission before us prosperity was not sufficient, adversity had also its training;
to taste the glory of power and beneficence and joy was not sufficient, the
knowledge of weakness and torture and humiliation was also needed.[3]
One hopes that the lesson of weakness and humiliation is coming to its end. It
has lasted long enough. But, for Sri Aurobindo, it can only end if we get rid of
a central misconception, a fatal misconception. When we speak of the
laboratory of the soul, of Indias wisdom and spirituality, a widespread
tendency is to think that all this is fine for those confined to ashrams, or
perhaps for old age, but of little practical use to build a nation. Sri Aurobindo
frankly disagrees. To him, inner growth can never contradict outer growth, but
can alone put it on a sound foundation. Referring to Indias extraordinarily
creative past, which certainly never neglected material life and achievements,
he observed :
Without this opulent vitality and opulent intellectuality India could never have
done so much as she did with her spiritual tendencies. It is a great error to
suppose that spirituality flourishes best in an impoverished soil with the life
half-killed and the intellect discouraged and intimidated.[4]
It is an error, we repeat, to think that spirituality is a thing divorced from life.[5]
When, in 1920, Sri Aurobindo was asked to resume politics, while spelling out
his reasons for turning down the request, he also said :
I have always laid a dominant stress and I now lay an entire stress on the
spiritual life, but my idea of spirituality has nothing to do with ascetic
withdrawal or contempt or disgust of secular things. There is to me nothing
secular, all human activity is for me a thing to be included in a complete
spiritual life.[6]
With half-veiled causticity, Sri Aurobindo explained :
People care nothing about the spiritual basis of life which is India's real
mission and the only possible source of her greatness, or give to it only a
slight, secondary or incidental value, a something that has to be stuck on as a
sentiment or a bit of colouring matter. Our whole principle is different.[7]
We are sometimes asked what on earth we mean by spirituality in art and
poetry or in political and social lifea confession of ignorance strange enough
in any Indian mouth at this stage of our national history. [...] We have here
really an echo of the European idea that religion and spirituality on the one
side and intellectual activity and practical life on the other are two entirely
different things and have each to be pursued on its own entirely separate lines
and in obedience to its own entirely separate principles. [... But] true
spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human
self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of
being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it
all we do and create. [... India] can, if she will, give a new and decisive turn to
the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling, for the clue
to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge. Whether she will rise or
not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance which is coming upon
her, is the question of her destiny.[8]
To achieve Indias renaissance, Sri Aurobindo boldly and repeatedly called
on his countrymen to develop the Kshatriya spirit, almost lost after centuries
of subjection :
The Kshatriya of old must again take his rightful position in our social polity to
discharge the first and foremost duty of defending its interests. The brain is
impotent without the right arm of strength.[9]
What India needs especially at this moment is the aggressive virtues, the
spirit of soaring idealism, bold creation, fearless resistance, courageous
attack; of the passive tamasic spirit of inertia we have already too much. We
need to cultivate another training and temperament, another habit of mind.[10]
And how do we cultivate that other training and temperament ? We can
cultivate it on the individual or on the collective level. Individually, that is yoga;
it means opening ourselves to a wider consciousness and a greater power; it
means allowing them to fashion anew our hardly human nature. And of
course, it means discarding the misconception that yoga is good only for
escaping from this world. Recently, a young Indian friend asked me, But what
is the benefit of yoga ? Overlooking the rather mercantile aspect in his
question, I tried to explain that the benefit is all that ordinary life cannot
provideall that the ancient Rishis were after : true mastery, true power, true
expansion, and a true understanding of the world, which is so tragically
lacking today. I dont think my young friend was convinced it was really worth
all the trouble ! Which is why Sri Aurobindo never expected too many people
to sincerely practise his exacting integral yoga.
That brings us to the slower but crucial collective level. Sri Aurobindo always
laid great stress on education. He himself had the best European education
while in Cambridge, and, between 1897 and 1906, was a professor in the
Baroda State College, then in the Bengal National College. So he knew the
question in depth. And he had hopes in the young.
Our call is to young India. It is the young who must be the builders of the new
worldnot those who accept the competitive individualism, the capitalism or
the materialistic communism of the West as India's future ideal, not those who
are enslaved to old religious formulas and cannot believe in the acceptance
and transformation of life by the spirit, but all who are free in mind and heart to
accept a completer truth and labour for a greater ideal.[11]
Sri Aurobindo never tired of calling for what he termed a national education.
He gave this brief definition for it :
[It is] the education which starting with the past and making full use of the
present builds up a great nation. Whoever wishes to cut off the nation from its
past is no friend of our national growth. Whoever fails to take advantage of the
present is losing us the battle of life. We must therefore save for India all that
she has stored up of knowledge, character and noble thought in her
immemorial past. We must acquire for her the best knowledge that Europe
can give her and assimilate it to her own peculiar type of national
temperament. We must introduce the best methods of teaching humanity has
developed, whether modern or ancient. And all these we must harmonise into
a system which will be impregnated with the spirit of self-reliance so as to
build up men and not machines.[12]
Sri Aurobindo had little love for British education in India, which he called a
mercenary and soulless education,[13] and for its debilitating influence on
the the innate possibilities of the Indian brain. In India, he said, the
students generally have great capacities, but the system of education
represses and destroys these capacities.[14] As in every field, he wanted
India to carve out her own path courageously :
The greatest knowledge and the greatest riches man can possess are [India's]
by inheritance; she has that for which all mankind is waiting. [...] But the full
soul rich with the inheritance of the past, the widening gains of the present,
and the large potentiality of the future, can come only by a system of National
Education. It cannot come by any extension or imitation of the system of the
existing universities with its radically false principles, its vicious and
mechanical methods, its dead-alive routine tradition and its narrow and
sightless spirit. Only a new spirit and a new body born from the heart of the
Nation and full of the light and hope of its resurgence can create it.[15]
It is beyond this brief presentation to spell out the features of a national
education as Sri Aurobindo envisioned it; let me just mention that he laid great
stress on the cultivation of powers of thought and concentration, which runs
counter to the present system of rote learning. The student had to be trained
to think freely and deeply : I believe that the main cause of India's weakness,
Sri Aurobindo observed in 1920, is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of
spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of
ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or
unwillingness to think.[16] Sri Aurobindo also insisted on mastery of ones
mother-tongue, on the teaching of Sanskrit, which he certainly did not regard
as a dead language, on artistic values based on the old spirit of Indian art,
all of which he saw as essential to the integral development of the childs
personality. In short, nothing whether Indian or Western was rejected, but all
had to be integrated in the Indian spirit.
This is clearly not the line Indian education has taken. If we see today that
nothing even of the Mahabharata or the Ramayana is taught to an Indian
child, we can measure the abyss to be bridged. That the greatest epics of
mankind should be thrown away on the absurd and erroneous pretext that
they are religious is beyond the comprehension of an impartial observer. A
German or French or English child will be taught something of Homers Iliad
and Odyssey, because they are regarded as the root of European culture, and
somehow present in the European consciousness. He will not be asked to
worship Zeus or Athena, but will be shown how the Ancients saw and
experienced the world and the human being. But Indian epics, a hundred
times richer and vaster in human experience, a thousand times more present
in the Indian consciousness, will not be taught to an Indian child. Not to speak
of other important texts such as the beautiful Tamil epics, Shilappadikaram
and Manimekhalai. Even the Panchatantra and countless other highly
educational collections of Indian storieseven folk storiesare ruled out.
The result is that young Indians are increasingly deprived from their rightful
heritage, cut off from their deeper roots. I have often found myself in the
curious position of explaining to some of them the symbolic meaning of an
ancient Indian myth, for instanceor, worse, of having to narrate the myth
itself. Again, a French or English child will be given at least some semblance
of cultural identity, whatever its worth; but here, in this country which not long
ago had the most living culture in the world, a child is given no nourishing food
only some insipid, unappetizing hodgepodge, cooked in the West and
pickled in India. This means that in the name of some irrational principles,
India as an entity is throwing away some of its most precious treasures. As Sri
Aurobindo put it :
Ancient India's culture, attacked by European modernism, overpowered in the
material field, betrayed by the indifference of her children, may perish for ever
along with the soul of the nation that holds it in its keeping.[17]
Certainly some aberration worked upon the minds of those who devised
Indian education after Independence. Or perhaps they devised nothing but
were content with dusting off Macaulays brainchild. It is painful to see that the
teaching of Sanskrit is almost systematically discouraged in India; it is painful
to see that the deepest knowledge of the human being, that of yogic science,
is discarded in favour of shallow Western psychology or psychoanalysis; it is
painful to see that the average Indian student never even hears the name of
Sri Aurobindo, who did so much for his country; and that, generally, Western
intellectualism at its worst is the only food given to a nation whom Sri
Aurobindo described as once the deepest-thoughted.[18]
India will certainly be compelled to address these central questions in the very
near future, even as the Western edifice crumbles. Again and again, in the
clearest and strongest terms, Sri Aurobindo asserted that India can never
survive as a nation if she neglects or rejects what was always the source of
her strength. Again and again, he saw India as the key to humanitys rebirth.
In 1948, just two years before his passing, Sri Aurobindo said in a message to
the Andhra University :
It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual
heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and
more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light. This must not
and will surely not happen; but it cannot be said that the danger is not there.
There are indeed other numerous and difficult problems that face this country
or will very soon face it. No doubt we will win through, but we must not
disguise from ourselves the fact that after these long years of subjection and
its cramping and impairing effects a great inner as well as outer liberation and
change, a vast inner and outer progress is needed if we are to fulfil India's
true destiny.[19]

READ

Friday, October 29, 1999

An open letter to Pope John Paul II

Conversion is violence
Swami Dayananda Saraswati

Your Holiness,
On behalf of many Hindus whom I know personally, I welcome your visit to Bharat. This is a country
with an ancient civilisation and unique religious culture which accommodates many religious traditions
that have come to this country throughout the centuries.
Being the head of the Vatican State and also the Catholic Church with a great following all over the
world, you enjoy a highly venerable position and can play a significant role in defusing religious
conflicts and preserving the world's rich cultures. You have in your Apostolic Letter tertio millennio
adveniente, 38 (November 10, 1994) voiced your intention to convoke a Special Assembly of the
Synod of Bishops for Asia. After seeing the report of the Pre-Council of the General Secretariat of the
Synod of Bishops Special Assembly for Asia appointed by you, I want to bring to your kind notice the
concerns of many Hindus in this country about religious conversion. In the Second Vatican Council, the
status accorded to the world religions was that of a means of preparing them for Christ. We all
understand that the Catholic religion does not accommodate other religions, except in this context. But
I am appealing to you here to accept that every person has the freedom to pursue his or her own
religion.
In the recent past, you mentioned that reason should be respected. On the basis of reason, no non-
verifiable belief is going to fare any better than any other non-verifiable belief. Therefore, according to
reason, there is no basis for conversion in matters of faith.
Apart from reason, there is another important issue which I request you to consider. Among the world's
religious traditions, there are those that convert and those that do not. The non-converting religious
traditions, like the Hindu, Jewish and Zoroastrian, give others the freedom to practise their religion
whether they agree with the others' tenets or not. They do not wish to convert. I would characterise
them as non-aggressive. Religions that are committed by their theologies to convert, on the other hand,
are necessarily aggressive, since conversion implies a conscious intrusion into the religious life of a
person, in fact, into the religious person.
This is a very deep intrusion, as the religious person is the deepest, the most basic in any individual.
When that person is disturbed, a hurt is sustained which is very deep. The religious person is violated.
The depth of this hurt is attested by the fact that when a religious sentiment is violated, it can produce a
martyr. People connected to a converted person are deeply hurt. Even the converted person will suffer
some hurt underneath.
He must necessarily wonder if he has done the right thing and, further, he has to face an inner
alienation from his community, a community to which he has belonged for generations, and thus an
alienation from his ancestors. I don't think that can ever be fully healed. Religious conversion destroys
centuries-old communities and incites communal violence. It is violence and it breeds violence. Thus,
for any humane person, every religious sentiment has to be respected, whether it is a Muslim sentiment
or a Christian sentiment or a Hindu sentiment.
Further, in many religious traditions, including the Hindu tradition, religion is woven into the fabric of
culture. So, destruction of a religion amounts to the destruction of a religious culture. Today, for
instance, there is no living Greek culture; there are only empty monuments. The Mayan, Roman and
many other rich cultures are all lost forever and humanity is impoverished for it. Let us at least allow
humanity to enjoy the riches of its remaining mosaic of cultures. Each one has some beauty, something
to contribute to the enrichment of humanity.
In any tradition, it is wrong to strike someone who is unarmed. In the Hindu tradition, this is considered
a heinous act, for which the punishment is severe. A Buddhist, a Hindu, a Jew, are all unarmed, in that
they do not convert. You cannot ask them to change the genius of their traditions and begin to convert
in order to combat conversion. Because it is the tradition of these religions and cultures not to convert,
attempts to convert them is one-sided aggression. It is striking the unarmed. I respect the freedom of a
Christian or a Muslim to practise his or her faith. I do not accept many of their beliefs, but I want them
to have the freedom to follow their religion.
You cannot ask me to respond to conversion by converting others to my religion because it is not part
of my tradition. We don't believe in conversion, even though certain Hindu organisations have taken
back some converted people. Thus, conversion is not merely violence against people; it is violence
against people who are committed to non-violence.
I am hurt by religious conversion and many others like me are hurt. Millions are hurt. There are many
issues to be discussed regarding conversion, but I want to draw your attention to only the central issue
here which is this one-sided violence. Religious conversion is violence and it breeds violence. In
converting, you are also converting the non-violent to violence.
Any protest against religious conversion is always branded as persecution, because it is maintained that
people are not allowed to practise their religion, that their religious freedom is curbed. The truth is
entirely different. The other person also has the freedom to practise his or her religion without
interference. That is his/her birthright. Religious freedom does not extend to having a planned
programme of conversion. Such a programme is to be construed as aggression against the religious
freedom of others.
During the years of your papal office, you have brought about certain changes in the attitude and
outlook of the church. On behalf of the non-aggressive religions of the world, the Hindu, the Parsi, the
Jewish and other native religions in different countries, I request you to put a freeze on conversion and
create a condition in which all religious cultures can live and let live.
The writer is the head ofArsha Vidya Gurukulam

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Friends,

I have been thinking on this topic for a long time. It is very clear to me, and perhaps to many of you,
that there are two distinct religious traditions in the world. Some of them have a good following. Some
others may not have.
One tradition does not believe in conversion. A Jewish person is born of a Jewish mother. A Zoroastrian
is born of Zoroastrian parents. A Hindu is born of Hindu parents. And so too are the followers of
Shintoism, Taoism and many other tribal religious groups all over the world. They are born to be the
followers of their religions. In other words, they do not want to convert anybody. In India, when the
Parsis, Zoroastrians, came as refugees, being driven from Iran, they came to Bombay, they were
received and allowed to settle down in India.. They were very faithful to their religion and they lived
their religion. They did not cause any problem to others. Hindus accommodated them as even they
accommodated the Christians, the Muslims and many other small tribal traditions. Our vision of God
allows that. We generally accept various forms of worship. We accept many forms of prayers; one more
really does not matter to us. In fact, some of our Hindu friends in their puja rooms have a picture of
Jesus and they don't see anything wrong about it, nor do I feel anything wrong about it.

I would call the Jewish, the Zoroastrian and the Hindu traditions as non-aggressive traditions. For me,
aggression is not just a physical one. It need not be the Kargil type. There are varieties of aggression.
You can emotionally be aggressive. In the United States, it is a crime to be aggressive towards the
children. Simple abuse is looked upon as aggression. Verbally you can be aggressive. Physically you
can be aggressive. Economically you can be very aggressive. And the worst aggression, which I
consider more than physical aggression, is cultural aggression or religious aggression.

Hurt is born of many sources. I am hurt if somebody encroaches upon my piece of land that is vacant,
and the court supports that person and gives me the responsibility of finding a new house for him; it is
an aggression. I, get hurt. That he encroached upon my property is itself a good source of hurt. It is
enough to hurt. That the law protects the one who encroached makes me more hurt. That hurt cannot be
easily healed, because it leaves you helpless and the helplessness is a source of great hurt. If somebody
physically hurts you, of course, it is very well known that it is a hurt. It is treated as a crime and there is
a penalty for it.

If I am emotionally abused, then, that also is a great hurt. For example, people in authority can abuse
you. The employer can abuse you emotionally. Husband can abuse. Wife also can abuse the husband.
In-laws can abuse. For these, I can seek some redress somewhere.

But the worst hurt, I would say, is the hurt of a religious person - whether what the person believes has
a basis or not. It is not my domain of enquiry to say whether it has a basis or not. Each one is free to
follow his or her religion. Everybody would, have a certain belief system. Either the person is
convinced or the person needs to be convinced. On the whole, he believes in the whole theology and
follows that theology. He has the freedom to follow. that theology. That is human freedom.

What is it that one is connected to as a religious person? He is connected not to any particular person
here, who is the member of the contemporary society or his family. I am connected to my parents as
their son. I cannot take myself as just a son; I am connected to other people too. I am son to my parents.
I am also the father to my children and husband to my wife. I am uncle, cousin, neighbour, employer,
employee and citizen. I have a number of hats to wear every day. As the religious T, I have different
roles to play, day after day.

A son is related to a person outside. A brother is related to a person outside. A citizen is related to a
country, a state. As a religious person, who am I related to?

Let us for the sake of convenience call that religious person a devotee. To whom is that devotee
connected? Definitely, not to anyone here. I may be a religious son. I may be a religious father,
religious brother, religious husband. In fact, if I am religious, the religious 'me' is going to pervade
every role I play.

Basically, first and last, I am a religious person, if I am one. That religious person is the basic person
not related to anything empirical. He is related, of course, to a force beyond - whatever that force may
be. One may say that force is God, and He is in heaven. Another one may say, He is in Kailasa. Another
may say, He is in Vaikuntha.

Another may say, He is in Goloka Brindavan. And another may say, He is elsewhere, elsewhere and
elsewhere. But the person related to that force is the one whom we call a devotee, and that person has
an altar. That person is not an empirical person in the sense he is the father or son or daughter. He is the
basic person.

The hurt of a basic person is going to be a hurt, which is deep, and true. There is no healing power
which can heal that hurt. That is the reason why any religious sentiment, if it is violated, in anyway,
will produce a martyr. There is a martyr ready to be born in that basic person. And thus the religious
sentiment seems to be the most sensitive.

Whenever a religious sentiment is hurt, you will find that, in the Indian press, there is a complete black
out, in terms of who did what. Even the names are not given. They will say one community fought with
another community. I think it is correct because it prevents further escalation. We generally do guess
work and say it must be this community or that community.

This is so because, that sentiment is very deep and has to be respected -whether it is a Muslim
sentiment or a Christian sentiment or a Hindu sentiment or a Jewish sentiment. That sentiment has got
to be respected. If that respect is not shown, then the State has to protect that sentiment. You tell me
whether it is correct or not! The State has got the responsibility to protect the religious sentiment of all
the people. That I consider is secularism.

In America, the religious sentiment of every individual is protected. You can go to the court and get an
answer, if there is something wrong done to you as a religious person. There is justice. They respect. In
fact, if you register an institution as a "religious church", they take it as a religious church. You don't
require to submit even an income-tax return. Until there is a public complaint, they respect it. They
give you the freedom. Here, if an institution is said to be "Hindu Religious", there is no tax exemption
for the donor. It is entirely a different thing altogether.
A religious sentiment has got to be respected by every one, whether he believes in my religion or not.
Just because I don't believe in your ideas, you can't stand on my toes! If you don't like my nose, it is
your problem. I don't have any problem. If my ideas and my belief systems are not acceptable to you, I
give you the freedom not to accept them. But you don't have any business to stand on my toes to hurt
me in any manner. (Long cheers)

In fact I will fight for your freedom to think differently. You must be free enough to differ from me.
Bhagavan has given us the faculty of thinking, of discrimination. We are not shy of enquiries. Our
whole method of enquiry is to invite poorvapaksha objections. We will create objections that cannot
even be imagined by you and then answer them. We welcome them because we are not shy. We want to
explore and find out what the truth is. But that is entirely a different thing. You have the freedom to
differ from me; I have the freedom to differ from you. This is what I am telling you.

This is the attitude of the non-aggressive traditions. On the other hand, the second category of religions,
by their theologies, is committed to conversion.

Conversion is not only sanctioned by their theologies but also is practised by their followers. And that
is their theology. They have got a right to have their own belief systems. But they don't have a right to
thrust them on you. They are free to believe that unless one is a Christian, one will not go to heaven.
They have a system, a set of non-verifiable beliefs - nitya-paroksa - on which they base their theology.
(Applause)

Someone says, I have been sent by God to save you". I can also say the same thing. I will have ten
people with me, because I can talk. If I don't talk and be a mouni baba, still there will be ten people. It
is easy to get ten people anywhere, especially in India. I can say, "God sent me down to save all of
you!"

Once, I went to Kilpauk Mental Hospital. Just for a visit, of course. (Laughter) It is my own
imagination. It is not true. The Kilpauk Hospital is one of the most ancient mental hospitals in this
country. Next one is in Agra. We have got the number one status in many things and this is one!

Early morning, all the crows had flown away. Nobody was there. I saw a man standing under a huge
tree talking in loud voice, "Listen to me. I have come here, sent down by God, to save ail of you. You
please ask for forgiveness of your sins. Those who want to be saved, please raise your hands". Then he
said, Thank you, thank you, thank you". He thought that from the audience many people had raised
their hands. But there was no audience. I was the only one standing behind him. Not even in front of
him. I was naturally amused but I was not surprised, because I knew where I was. (Laughter)

As I was enjoying this situation, well, I heard a voice from the heaven. It said, "This is God speaking. I
did not send him down. (Laughter) Don't believe him". When I looked up, there was one more fellow -
sitting on the tree. (Loud laughter and applause)

This is a non-verifiable belief as you can see. In addition most of these religions, when they talk of
heaven, are promoters of tourism, really speaking. (Laughter) I am interested in making my life here,
right now. If there is something you have got to say to make my life different, I am ready to listen to
you. If there are some pairs of ears ready to listen to some other thing, let them have the freedom.

That there is a heaven is a non-verifiable belief. That, following this person, I will go to heaven, is
another non-verifiable belief. That I will survive death, is a non-verifiable belief. There is nothing
wrong in believing. But we have to understand that it is a non-verifiable belief. And having gone to
heaven I will enjoy heaven, minus cricket match, is another non-verifiable belief. The unfortunate thing
is another fellow says: I am the latest and the last. Don't follow that fellow; follow me". (Laughter)
That really confuses me. He ha~ really no argument to give that he is the fast. That I am the latest, is
another non-verifiable belief and what is promised is again not verifiable.

I say, let those non-verifiable beliefs be there. I want them to have those beliefs, even though I will not
advocate them. I want them to have freedom. Let them enjoy the freedom to have their beliefs. But
what is the basis for that person to come and convert me? If you are convinced of something, you can
try to convince me and not convert me. Did you ever notice a physics professor knocking at your door,
asking for your time, so that he can talk to you about the particles? Never! If you want to learn physics,
you have to go to him.

But here, every day, I am bothered. At the airport I am bothered, in the street corners I am bothered, at
home, I am bothered. They want to save my soul!

I say this is not merely an intrusion; this is an aggression. There are varieties of intrusions. If the sound
is too much outside, with all the loud speakers, well, it is an intrusion into my privacy. One can
complain; not in India, of course! Here also we have got laws. It is not that we do not have laws. But
we have 'in-laws' at right places. You know! (Laughter)

So nobody has any business to intrude into my privacy. You come .and tell me that I have got to save
my soul. But I don't look upon myself as condemned for you to come and save. We, really, don't have a
word in Sanskrit, equivalent for salvation. Because, 'salvation' means you have been condemned.
Unless you are condemned, you need not be saved.

But this man comes and tells me that I am damned. I have to believe that first. Then he appoints
himself to save me. This is very interesting. This is how the union leaders work. You create a problem
and then appoint yourself as a leader to solve it. (Laughter) You become inevitable thereafter.

Instead of the word 'salvation', we have a word 'moksha'. Here, among the dignitaries there are may
gurus. All of them have a common word and that common word is moksha. Is it not true? For every
one of them it is moksha.

Moksha is not a word which is equivalent to salvation. It is derived from the verbal root moksh =
mokshane. It means freedom from bondage. All of them use the word moksha. Even Saankhyas use this
word. Vaiseshikas, Naiyaayikas and all others use this word moksha. In fact, if moksha is not an end in
view, it is not 0 school of thought to talk about. We all have a moksha. Even Chaarvaakas, the
materialist, has his own concept of moksha. 'Body goes'; that is moksha for him. He says,
bhasmeebhutasya dehasya punaraagamanam kutaha.

So the word moksha does not mean salvation. It refers to freedom from bondage. On the other hand the
aggressive religions have this belief system that you are condemned and you have to be saved.

When I look into these theologies, what I see is very interesting. I need not say anything to prove that
they are illogical. I have to only state what they say!

I would like to illustrate this:

You must have heard about the 'Godfather'. You know the Mafia don is called the Godfather. He makes
an offer that you cannot refuse.

He comes and tells you: I am buying your house".

You may say, I am not selling".

He says, "You are selling".

This type of approach was existing in Madras for some time, I am told. I hope it does not come back
again. (Loud laughter and applause)

The fellow comes and tells: I am buying your house!"

And you reply, "This is my house and I am not selling".

He says, "You are selling it and you are selling it at this price".

He decides the price also and then tells you, I know exactly where your children are studying and when
they are coming home also".

He threatens you and buys the house.

Thus, a Godfather is one who makes an offer that you cannot refuse.

Now, what about God, the Father? He is worse, I tell you, because he says either you follow this person
or I will condemn you eternally to hell. This is worse than the offer of the Mafia don! This too is an
offer, which I cannot refuse. And it is worse.

In the other case at least, I can do something. But here he is not even visible. He is sitting in a place
even safer than Dubai! I cannot do anything to him. This is the non-verifiable belief on which their
religion is based.

He has the right to follow that religion. Let him follow his religion. All that I say is he does not have
anything much to offer to me. If he thinks he has something to offer to me, let him have the freedom to
think so. But he has no freedom to intrude into my privacy.

He converts the Hindus by any means - by marriage, by some enticement or by some preaching which
creates a fear. He talks about the goodies available in heaven -if you go to heaven, you will enjoy this
and that. You will have beatitude and be saved. Otherwise, you will go to hell. It will be too hot etc. So,
more out of fear of hell, one may choose to go to heaven.

He says and does all this to convert others to his religion. I say, this is wrong because if one Hindu or
Jew or a Parsi is converted, and the other members of the family are not converted, they are all hurt.
Even the converted one must be hurt underneath. He will be debating whether he was right in getting
converted, It takes sometime for him to heal that. He is also hurt. All other members are definitely hurt.
The community that comes to know of this conversion is hurt.

Please tell me, what is violence? What do you call this act that hurts? I call it violence. It is not
ordinary violence. It is violence to the deepest person, the core person, in the human being. The
religious person is the deepest. And if that person is hurt, I say, it is violence, rank and simple.

It is pure violence. And what does it do? It wipes out cultures.

I would like to go to Greece and see the live culture of the people who lived there. Where is that culture
now? I have to imagine how they might have lived. I only see the huge monuments that are left behind.

And like this, many other cultures have been totally destroyed. The native cultures of South America,
North America and Australia have all been destroyed. What about the Hawaiian culture? Gone! All the
tribal cultures in Africa have been destroyed. How many cultures, for the past two thousand years, are
methodically destroyed? The humanity is the sufferer and is poorer for it.
We need all the cultures. And let the humanity enjoy the riches of the different cultures. It is a mosaic
of cultures, Each one has got some beauty. With the destruction of religion comes the destruction of
culture. When a new religion replaces the old, a culture is destroyed.

After converting, they may try to preserve the art forms like Bharatanaatyam with the themes of the
new religion. But without Nataraaja where is Bharatanaatyam, without devotion, where is nrityam?

And therefore, the culture cannot be retained if the religion is destroyed. It is true with reference to all
other cultures also. But definitely it is true with reference to our culture, because, you cannot separate
culture from religion.

Our religion and culture are intertwined. The religion has gone into the fabric of the culture. When I
say 'Namaste' to you, it is culture. It is religion. When you are throwing rangoli, it is religion; it is
culture. There is a vision behind all that. Every form of culture is connected to religion and the religion
itself is rooted in the spiritual wisdom. This is because we have a spiritual tradition.

And therefore there is no cultural form unconnected to religion. Destruction of culture is destruction of
religion. Destruction of religion is destruction of culture. If this destruction is not violence, what is
violence? I would like to know?

I say CONVERSION IS VIOLENCE. (Thunderous applause) It is rank violence. It is the deepest

violence.

Not only that, in our dharma-shaastra, it is said that if somebody forcefully occupies another's piece of
land, he is called an aatataayi. For an aatataayi, in our shaastra, there is capital punishment.

Occupying another's land or another's house or flat, against the will of the owner is a grave paapa
according to our dharma. Many times, when the owner asks, "Give me back my house", the tenant
invariably replies, I am sorry. I cannot give you the house, because my children are going to the school
in this area. Please find a similar house for me. Then I will move". When the owner finds such a house
for him, the tenant says, It is too far away for the children to go to school. Please find something in the
same neighbourhood". It means, I would like to be here". If you go to the court, twenty five years
would be gone. But occupying another's land is not dharma as per our culture.

Another's kshetra is another's kshetra. It has nothing to do with me. Kshetra-apahaari is an aatataayi.
The one who does arson or poisons somebody is an aatataayi, and there is capital punishment for him.
One who kidnaps another's wife is an aatataayi and there is capital punishment for him. All these
actions deserve capital punishment. And if, simply for occupation of a land of another, there is capital
punishment, think of what would be the punishment for the destruction of a culture.
Suppose somebody is ashastrapaani, unarmed, and you kill him, it is not correct. Karna in the
Mahaabhaarata uses this argument when he was completely unarmed. Talking to Arjuna, he said, I am
an ashastrapaani; you should not hit me now. Krishna had to tell him that Karna was not unarmed, but
he was duly disarmed. There is a lot of difference between the two. Krishna had to convince him.

So here, a Hindu is an ashastrapaani. A Jewish person is an ashastrapaani. A Buddhist is an

ashastrapaani. A Parsi is an ashastrapaani. That is, they are all non-aggressive. When you try to convert
them, it is like hurting an ashastrapaani.

You cannot ask me to change the genius of my culture, the genius of my religion. It is the tradition of
my culture and religion that I do not convert. It is not a situation where, you convert and I convert. And
the one who has a better organisation is going to convert more number of people. It is not a percentage
game of the market.

Here it is one sided. I cannot change the genius of my culture because I do not believe in conversion. I
allow you to be a Christian. I allow you to be a Muslim. You be a Christian, you be a Muslim. You
pray; it is fine for us. I let you be a Muslim or a Christian, even though I do not say, "All religions lead
to the same goal". I don't commit that ubiquitous mistake. (Cheers)

But I give you the freedom. You please follow your religion. Don't ask me to convert others to my
religion like you, because I cannot convert. It is because I do not believe in it. My parents did not
believe in it. My grand parents did not believe in it. My Rishis did not believe in it. And I don't believe
in it. You cannot change a culture in order to be on par with the others. It is against the genius of our
culture.

It is not only our culture, which is like this; there are other cultures too. The number of the Parsis is
dwindling. I loathe to see the destruction of the Parsi culture. They are harmless good people. But now
they are the losers.

Jewish people are also the losers; their numbers are also dwindling. They are fighting to preserve their
culture and religion. They are not converting. There is no evangelism in Judaism. There is no
proselytization. There were never any inquisition. They were the sufferers; they were the victims of
aggression, and planned aggression for ages.

And therefore, conversion is not merely violence against people; it is violence against people, who are
committed to non-violence. (Prolonged cheers)

I don't say Hindus do not fight. They can fight very well. You don't tell me, "You put your house in
order". I will put my house in order, in my own time and in my own way.

If two brothers are fighting over an empty piece of land that is there next door, and a third man
occupies the land saying, "Because you two are fighting, I am occupying this piece of land", what is
this logic? Some people advance this logic to me and say that we are all fighting and therefore they are
in. We may be fighting amongst ourselves but we have to settle that among ourselves. That does not
mean YOU can be violent. (Applause)

Somebody says we must have ecumenical dialogue. I had attended some of these dialogues. And I
stopped attending them. Because I don't see any use in it. On one such occasion, I said, I can have a
dialogue with a Christian, if he is ready to change, if convinced, after the dialogue". Is he, if convinced,
going to change his stand? Is he going to stop conversion? Don't ask me to have a dialogue with you
when you are standing on my toes. You just move away. Then we can have a dialogue.

The world religious conferences that are held are only meant to neutralise any protest against
conversion. That is all. (Cheers) Because they don't want to stop conversion. So what is the use of
saying, "We are all same. We are all going to the same God". It is something like saying, you know,
your property is my property; my property is your property; your money is my money; my money is
your money. Therefore, let my money be with me and let your money also be with me! (Laughter) So
this is all wrong thinking.

All forms of prayer are valid. That I can accept. They don't accept that. I can accept because of my
understanding of the shaastra. The Lord will understand, definitely, if I pray in Tamil or, Latin or
Greek. There is nothing Latin and Greek to the Lord. He will understand in whichever language the
prayer is made. If I pray in Samskritam, definitely, he will understand because it is His language
anyway. (Laughter) I am very Catholic, understand'. I don't have this kind of silly notions that it has got
to be in one language and it has got to be in one form etc.

But we have certain special forms of rituals - Vedic rituals - which cannot be compromised with.
Because we do not know how they can be different. We have no other pramaana for it. We do not have
a means of knowledge to prove that this can be different.

They do not accept any of that. And they preach. It is not that they preach their own religion. They
preach against other religions. And I consider that kind of preaching is violence. It breeds violence. I
have a genius which does not permit me to convert. I cannot be asked to convert.

Therefore, the violence against me is a one-sided violence. It is a rank one-sided violence. They have
gotten away with it for two thousand years. I want them to know that this is violence. Let them prove
conversion is non-violence.

I am hurt and many others like me are hurt. Millions are hurt. There are so many other issues to be
discussed with reference to conversion. But I have only one to discuss here. It is the violence that is
allowed to be perpetrated against humanity, against cultures, against religions. That is the only issue
here; there is no other issue. (Applause)

Violence is the only issue. Humanity should not stand with hands down and allow violence to be
continued against a person who is non-violent.
There is another important fact in the Indian context, I tell you. I am a Swami committed to ahimsa. A
sannyasi's vow is ahimsa, really. It is nothing but ahimsa -sarva-bhootebhyo abhayam. l am taking this
sanyasa and offer a complete assurance to all the beings and to all the devataas, that I am not a
competitor to any of them and that I will not hurt any of them - kayena vacha manasaa. That is
sannyasa. I am aware of this. I am a sannyasi .

Now I sit in Rishikesh. These two people come to me. One is a Padri and the other is a Moulvi. I invite
both of them. They are religious people. I respect them. I give them seats. They try to argue with me
about something. Generally, I do not argue with them. You can argue with people whom you can
convince. I don't want to argue with people who only want to convince me.

So I don't argue. I enjoy their company. I sit with them and talk to them. They pick up a quarrel with
me. And then they begin to beat me. Please note that, this is just an imaginary tale. And there is a
policeman standing there. They go on beating me black and blue. I implore to the policeman, "Please
stop them. I am committed to ahimsa. I don't want to fight them back. You please do something". I
appeal to him.

He says, This is a matter between religious people. I am secular. (Prolonged cheers) I am supposed not
to interfere". I appeal to him. Twice, thrice I request him. He does not respond to me positively. Then I
think I have to protect myself. My shaastra will forgive me. Even though I am given to ahimsa, still I
can protect myself.

And therefore I thought I will take care of myself. I am not just a weakling. I have got enough strength.
And therefore, I can take care of these two fellows plus one more. I began to defend myself. The best
form of defence is offence. That is what every husband does. And therefore, you defend yourself.
(Laughter)

But the policeman stops me and says, They are minorities. They have to be protected and you should
not fight against them". (Prolonged cheers)

"Hey, policeman, you are supposed to protect me. You are the Government. You are the State. You are
supposed to protect me. You cannot be like this".

This is the situation that prevails in India.

You have to change the whole blessed thing here. If the constitution has to be changed, let it be
changed for good. (Prolonged cheers) My dharma is not violence. It does not allow conversion. And
that dharma has to be protected. The State has to protect. If the protector does not protect, people
should have a new protector to protect. That is all. (Prolonged cheers)
Conversion is violence. And *it breeds violence. Don't convert because, by this, you are converting the
non-violent to be violent. (Applause) You are doing something wrong. This is drastically wrong. This
error has to be realised. The sooner it is corrected, the better it is for all of us - even for Christians and
even for Muslims.

I want the Islamic culture to be there. I want the Christian culture to be there. I want the Hindu culture
and every other culture to be there. Every culture is to be protected. That is secularism.

Thank you. (Prolonged cheers)

READ
Effects of Colonization
on Indian Thought
By Michel Danino
This paper was presented at a seminar on Decolonization and its Cultural
Problems organized by N. V. Krishna Warrior Smaraka Trust at Tripunithura
(Kerala) on 9-10 October 1999.
The theme chosen by this seminar is a very apt one. Having suffered the
burden of two centuries of British occupation, India has, since Independence,
tried to come to terms with the impact of that exotic presence perhaps
diametrically opposed to her own temperament, culture and genius. If
anything, this introspection has only intensified in recent years, as Western
culture (if it deserves this noble name) aggressively spreads around the
globe. But it stands to reason that for an effective decolonization to take
placeeven in order to find out whether and how far it is desirablewe
should first take a hard look at the effects of this colonization, what traces it
has left on the Indian mind and psyche, and how deep. That is what I have
briefly attempted to do in this paperbriefly, because it is a subject as vast
and complex as Indian life itself, and also because I am a mere student of
India, not a learned scholar like those present among us today.
Historical Background
But first, an aside. I have only referred to the British occupation, not to the
Muslim invasions, though they stretched over a much longer span of time and
collided violently with Indian civilization. Yet, strangely, in spite of their
ruthlessness, their proud and sustained use of violence to coerce or convert,
Indias Muslim rulers never attempted to take possession of the Indian mind :
in faithful obedience to Koranic injunctions, they simply tried to stamp it out.
That they did not succeed is another story.
The British, too, dreamed of stamping it out, but not through sheer brute force.
As we know, besides their primary object of plunder, they viewedor perhaps
justifiedtheir presence in India as a divinely ordained civilizing mission.
They spoke of Britain as the most enlightened and philanthropic nation in the
worldHYPERLINK \l "_edn1" [1] and of the justifiable pride which the
cultivated members of a civilised community feel in the beneficent exercise of
dominion and in the performance by their nation of the noble task of spreading
the highest kind of civilisation.HYPERLINK \l "_edn2" [2] Such rhetoric
was constantly poured out to the Britons at home so as to give them a good
conscience, while the constant atrocities perpetrated on the Indian people
were discreetly hidden from sight.
To achieve their aim, the British rulers followed two lines : on the one hand,
they encouraged an English and Christianized education in accordance with
the well-known Macaulay doctrine, which projected Europe as an enlightened,
democratic, progressive heaven, and on the other hand, they pursued a
systematic denigration of Indian culture, scriptures, customs, traditions, crafts,
cottage industries, social institutions, educational system, taking full
advantage of the stagnant and often degenerate character of the Hindu
society of the time. There were, of course, notable exceptions among British
individuals, from William Jones to Sister Nivedita and Annie Besantbut
almost none to be found among the ruling class. Let us recall how, in his
famous 1835 Minute, Thomas B. Macaulay asserted that Indian culture was
based on a literature ... that inculcates the most serious errors on the most
important subjects ... hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality ... fruitful of
monstrous superstitions. Hindus, he confidently declared, had nothing to
show except a false history, false astronomy, false medicine ... in company
with a false religion.HYPERLINK \l "_edn3" [3]
As it happened, Indians wereand still largely areinnocent people who
could simply not suspect the degree of cunning with which their colonial
masters set about their task. In the middle of the 1857 uprising, the Governor-
General Lord Canning wrote to a British official :
As we must rule 150 millions of people by a handful (more or less small) of
Englishmen, let us do it in the manner best calculated to leave them divided
(as in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with
the greatest possible awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion
of our motives.HYPERLINK \l "_edn4" [4]
Even a liberal governor such as Elphinstone wrote in 1859, Divide et impera
[divide and rule in Latin] was the old Roman motto and it should be
ours.HYPERLINK \l "_edn5" [5]
In this clash of two civilizations, the European, younger, dynamic, hungry for
space and riches, appeared far better fitted than the Indian, half decrepit,
almost completely dormant after long centuries of internal strife and repeated
onslaught. The contrast was so huge that no one doubted the outcomethe
rapid conquest of the Indian mind and life. That was what Macaulay, again,
summarized best when he proudly wrote his father in 1836 :
Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully.... It is my belief that if our
plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among
the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence.HYPERLINK \l "_edn6"
[6]
But if there is one thing that the British could not understand about Indians, it
is that they live more in the heart than in the mind. And that heart the rulers
could never touch or influence, especially not with their shallow religion or
science. As for the mind, they did succeed in creating a fairly large educated
class, anglicized and partially Christianized, which always looked up to its
European model and ideal, and formed the actual foundation of the Empire in
India.
Came Independence. If India did achieve political independenceat a terrible
cost and by amputating a few limbs of her bodyshe hardly achieved
independence in the field of thought. Nor did she try : the countrys so-called
elite, whose mind had been shaped and hypnotized by their colonial masters,
always assumed that anything Western was so superior that in order to reach
all-round fulfilment, India merely had to follow European thought, science, and
political institutions. Swami Vivekananda was the first to give this call : O ye
modern Hindus, de-hypnotise yourselves !HYPERLINK \l "_edn7" [7]
The Symptoms
A hundred years later, at least, we can see how gratuitous those assumptions
were. Yet the colonial imprint remains present at many levels. On a very basic
one, it is almost amusing to note that Pune is sometimes called the Oxford of
the East, while Ahmedabad is the Manchester of Indiaand since
Coimbatore is often dubbed the Manchester of South India, we have at least
out-Manchestered England herself ! The Nilgiris are flatteringly compared to
Scotland (never mind that Kotagiri, where I live, is called the second
Switzerland), and I understand that tourist guides refer to your own
Alappuzha as the Venice of the East. Pondicherry, also to attract tourists,
calls itself Indias Little France or the French Riviera of the East. Indias
map seems dotted with European places. And east of what, incidentally ?
This is something like Indias learned Oriental instituteswhat orient do
they refer to ? Thailand or Japan, perhaps ?
Things become more troublesome when Kalidasa is called the Shakespeare
of India, when Bankim Chatterji needs to be compared to Walter Scott or
Tagore to Shelley, and Kautilya becomes Indias very own Machiavelli. We
begin to see how our compass is set due west. Would the British call
Shakespeare Englands Kalidasa, let alone Manchester the Coimbatore of
Northwest England ?
But I think the most alarming signs of the colonization of the Indian mind are
found in the field of education. Take the English nursery rhymes taught to
many of our little children, as if, before knowing anything about India, they
needed to know about Humpty-Dumpty or the sheep that went to London to
see the Queen. When they grow older, some of them will be learning Western
psychology while remaining totally ignorant of the far deeper psychology
offered by Yoga, or they will study medicine or physics or evolution without
having the least idea of what ancient India achievedand often anticipated
in those fields. Which teacher, for example, will tell his or her students that
{Darwinian evolution was always at the back of the Indian mind, as the
sequence of the Dashavatar shows ? Or that the speed of light is clearly
given, to an amazing degree of precision, in Sayanas commentary on the
Rig-Veda ?HYPERLINK \l "_edn8" [8] And can it be a coincidence if a day
of Brahma, equal to 4,320,000,000 years, happens to be the age of the
earth ? Many such examples could be supplied in other fields, from
mathematics and astronomy and quantum physics to linguistics and
metallurgy and urbanization.HYPERLINK \l "_edn9" [9] If teachers were not
so ignorant, as a rule, of their own culture, they would have no difficulty in
showing their students that the much vaunted scientific temper is nothing
new to India. Even in medicine, we know how Ayurveda and Siddha systems
of medicine have been neglected under the illusion that modern medicine is
the only way to provide health for all.} Our educational policies
systematically discourage the teaching of Sanskrit, and one wonders again
whether that is in deference to Macaulay, who found that great language
(though he confessed he knew none of it !) to be barren of useful
knowledge. In the same vein, the Indian epics, the Veda or the Upanishads
stand no chance, and students will almost never hear about them at school.
Even Indian languages are subtly or not so subtly given a lower status than
English, with the result that many deep scholars or writers who chose to
express themselves in their mother-tongues (I have of course N. V. Krishna
Warrior in mind) remain totally unknown beyond their States, while textbooks
are crowded with second-rate thinkers who happened to write in English.
If you take a look at the teaching of history, the situation is even worse. Almost
all Indian history taught today in our schools and universities has been written
by Western scholars, or by native historians who [have] taken over the views
of the colonial masters,HYPERLINK \l "_edn10" [10] in the words of Prof.
Klostermaier of Canadas University of Manitoba. All of Indias historical
tradition, all ancient records are simply brushed aside as so much fancy so as
to satisfy the Western dictum that Indians have no sense of history. Indian
tradition never said anything about mysterious Aryans invading the
subcontinent from the Northwest, but since nineteenth-century European
scholars decided so, our children still today have to learn by rote this invention
now rejected by most archaeologists ; South Indian tradition said nothing
about the Dravidians coming from the North, driven southward by the naughty
Aryans, but again that shall be stuffed into young brains. No Indian scholar or
grammar or tradition ever claimed that Sanskrit and Tamil languages were
great rivals belonging to wholly separate families, but this shall be taught at
school in deference to Western linguists or to our own Dravidian activists.
The real facts of the destruction wreaked in India by Muslim invaders and also
by some Christian missionaries must be kept outside textbooks and curricula,
since they contradict the tolerant and liberating image that Islam and
Christianity have been projecting for themselves.HYPERLINK \l "_edn11"
[11] Even the freedom movement is not spared : as the great historian R. C.
MajumdarHYPERLINK \l "_edn12" [12] and others have shown, no serious,
objective criticism of Mahatma Gandhi or the Indian National Congress is
allowed, and the role of other important leaders is systematically belittled or
erased.
Nothing illustrates the bankruptcy of our education better than the manner in
which, just a year ago, State education ministers raised an uproar at an
attempt to discuss the introduction of the merest smattering of Indian culture
into the syllabus, and at the singing of the Saraswati Vandana.HYPERLINK \l
"_ftn1" * The message they actually conveyed was that no Indian element
was tolerable in education, while they are perfectly satisfied with an education
that, at the start of the century, Sri Aurobindo called soulless and
mercenary,HYPERLINK \l "_edn13" [13] and which has now degenerated
further into a stultifying, mechanical routine that kills our childrens natural
intelligence and talent. They find nothing wrong with maiming young brains
and hearts, but will be up in arms if we speak of teaching Indias heritage.
Ananda Coomaraswamy, the famous art critic, gave the following warning
early this century :
It is hard to realize how completely the continuity of Indian life has been
severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the
threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived
of all rootsa sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or
the West, the past or the future. The greatest danger for India is the loss of
her spiritual integrity. Of all Indian problems the educational is the most
difficult and most tragic.HYPERLINK \l "_edn14" [14]
Swami Vivekananda had earlier said much the same thing in his own
forthright style :
{The child is taken to school, and the first thing he learns is that his father is a
fool, the second thing that his grandfather is a lunatic, the third thing that all
his teachers are hypocrites, the fourth, that all the sacred books are lies ! By
the time he is sixteen he is a mass of negation, lifeless and boneless. And the
result is that fifty years of such education has not produced one original man
in the three presidencies.... We have learnt only weakness}.HYPERLINK \l
"_edn15" [15]
The child becomes a recording machine stuffed with a jarring assortment of
meaningless bits and snippets. The only product of this denationalizing
education has been the creation of a modern, Westernized elite with little or
no contact with the deeper sources of Indian culture, and with nothing of
Indias ancient view of the world except a few platitudes to be flaunted at
cocktail parties. Browsing through any English-language daily or magazine is
enough to see how Indian intellectuals revel in the sonorous clang of hollow
clichs which, the world over, have taken the place of any real thinking. If
Western intellectuals come up with some new ism, you are sure to find it
echoed all over the Indian press in a matter of weeks ; it was amusing to see
how, some two years ago, the visit to India of a French philosopher and
champion of deconstructionism sent the cream of our intellectuals raving
wild for weeks, while they remained crassly ignorant of far deeper thinkers
next door.{Or if Western painters or sculptors come up with some new-
fangled cult of ugliness, their Indian counterparts will not lag far behind. If
Western countries plan grand celebrations for the millennium (not a third
millennium of darkness, one hopes), we in India follow suitthough we
appear to have forgotten to celebrate the fifty-second century of our Kali era
earlier this year.} And let politically correct Western nations make a new
religion of human rights (with intensive bombing campaigns to enforce them
if necessary), and you will hear a number of Indians clamouring for them
parrotlike. The list is endless, in every field of life, and if India had been living
in her mind alone, one would have to conclude that India has ceased to exist
or will do so after one or two more generations of this senseless de-
Indianizing. In Sri Aurobindos words :
... Ancient Indias culture, attacked by European modernism, overpowered in
the material field, betrayed by the indifference of her children, may perish for
ever along with the soul of the nation that holds it in its
keeping.HYPERLINK \l "_edn16" [16]
Maladies of the Mind
The root of the problem is of course that we have ceased to think by
ourselves. We are spoon-fed and often force-fed almost every one of our
thoughts, or what masquerades as thought. Independent reflection is
discouraged at every step, especially at school.
Yet it is not my point that English education in India has been an unmitigated
evil. It was a necessary, probably an unavoidable evil. India had to be shaken
from her lethargy, to open up to the world and face its challenges, and that
was the fastest way to compel her to do so. There is also no doubt that this
opening to dynamic currents of thought from the West contributed in no small
measure to the quest for independence, as has often been pointed out.
Sometimes indeed, one poison is needed to cure another. But to continue
taking poison after the cure is over is inexcusable. {Indias failure to boldly
formulate and implement a truly Indian education after Independence ranks as
her most tragic, most ruinous error. The blame for it must be laid at the door of
the countrys first education ministers, and even more so its first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself an undiscriminating product of English
education who was always prompt to pour scorn on Indias culture and
traditions and to make a cult of modernity.
But subjection to Western influence does more than simply impoverish the
Indian mind or wean it away from Indian culture. It also introduces serious
distortions into its thinking processes. With their clear and bold thought,
Western thinkers since the eighteenth century no doubt did much to pull
Europe out of the dark ages brought about by Christianity. But they had to
take shortcuts in the process : they needed sharp intellectual weapons and
had no time to develop the qualities of pluralism, universality, integrality
native to the Indian mind and nurtured over thousands of years. Their thought
was essentially divisive and exclusive : God was on one side and the creation
on another, an abyss separated matter from spirit, one was either a
believer or an atheist, either a Christian or a Pagan, either ancient or modern,
determinist or indeterminist, empiricist or rationalist, rightist or leftist.
Whether one was an adept of idealism, realism, positivism,
existentialism or any of the thousand isms the Western intellect cannot
live without, Truth was parcelled out into small, hardened, watertight bits,
each no wider than one line of thought or one philosophical system, each
neatly labelled and set in contrast or opposition with the other.
The result of this Western obsession with divisiveness has been disastrous in
Indias context. Her inhabitants had never called themselves Aryans or
Dravidians in the racial sense, yet they became thus segregated ; they
had never known they were Hindus, yet they had to be happy with this
new designation ; they had never called their view of the world a religion (a
word with no equivalent in Sanskrit), but it had to become one, promptly
labelled Hinduism. Nor was one label sufficient : India always recognized
and respected the infinite multiplicity of approaches to the Truth (what is
commonly, but incorrectly, called tolerance), but under the Western spotlight
those approaches became so many sects almost rivalling each other
(perhaps like Catholics and Protestants !). Hinduism was thus cut up into
convenient bitsVedism, Brahmanism, Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism,
Tantrism, etc.of which Indians themselves had been largely unaware, or at
any rate not in this rigid, cut-and-dried fashion. As for Buddhism, Jainism and
Sikhism, which had been regarded in India as simply new paths, they were
arbitrarily stuck with a label of separate religions. Similarly, thousands of
fluid communities were duly catalogued and crystallized by the British rulers
as so many permanent and rigid castes.}HYPERLINK \l "_ftn2" *
Unfortunately, this itemizing and labelling of their heritage became a
undisputed truth in the subconscious mind of Indians : they passively
accepted being dissected and defined by their colonial masters, and they
learned to look at themselves through Western eyes. The Indian mind had
become too feeble to take the trouble of assimilating the few positive
elements of Western thought and rejecting the many negative ones : it
swallowed but could not digest. Even some of the early attempts to lay new
foundations{the Brahmo Samaj and many other reformist movements in
particularwere, despite their usefulness as a ferment, conceived
apologetically in response to Europes standards and judgement. If, for
instance, they were told that Hindus were polytheistic idolaters, rather than
show the fallacy of such a label, they would bend over backward to build their
new creeds on monotheism of a Judeo-Christian type. Just recently we had a
revealing echo of such an attitude when our own President, on a recent visit
to your State, felt obliged to speculate that Adi Shankaracharyas Monism
must have been influenced by Islams monotheism. This is intellectual
bankruptcy at its highest pitch.}
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once put it,
The mistake of the West is that it measures other civilizations by the degree to
which they approximate to Western civilization. If they do not approximate it,
they are hopeless, dumb, reactionary.HYPERLINK \l "_edn17" [17]
Educated Indians virtually admitted they were hopeless, dumb, reactionary,
and could only stop being so by receiving salvation from Europe : they pinned
their hopes on its democracy and secularism, ignoring all warnings that those
European concepts would wreak havoc once mechanically transposed to
India. Worse, they rivalled with one another in denigrating their heritage. If
even today a Western journalist or professor utters the words of caste or
sati or Hindu fundamentalism (and I would like to ask him what the
fundamentals of Hinduism are), you will hear a number of Indian intellectuals
beating their chests in unisoneven as they keep their eyes tightly shut to the
most fatal aberrations of Western society. Some ninety years ago already, Sri
Aurobindo observed :
They will not allow things or ideas contrary to European notions to be anything
but superstitious, barbarous, harmful and benighted, they will not suffer what
is praised and practised in Europe to be anything but rational and
enlightened....HYPERLINK \l "_edn18" [18]
As a result, many modern Indians (I have had myself occasion to hear some
of them), and even a number of Swamis, especially those with Western
following, will proudly assert that they are not Hindus. (That fashion was
probably started last century by Keshab Chandra Sen.) What they usually
mean by that is that they are tolerant of everything and anything (especially
of Western anythings), and therefore far too broad-minded to be Hindus. They
forget that Hinduism in its true form, Sanatana dharma, is as wide as the
universe and can include any pathprovided that path is, like itself, and
unlike Semitic religions, respectful of other paths, because it knows it is only
one small parcel of the whole Truth beyond all paths.
Ram Swarup, a profound Indian thinker who passed away recently, was not
afraid of swimming against this self-deprecating tide nurtured by our
intelligentsia and media :
{A permanent stigma seems to have stuck to the terms Hindu and Hinduism.
These have now become terms of abuse in the mouth of the very elite which
the Hindu millions have raised to the pinnacle of power and prestige with their
blood, sweat and tears.}HYPERLINK \l "_edn19" [19]
Such is the painful but logical outcome of two centuries of colonization of the
Indian mind.
Looking Ahead
The deeper meaning of this transitory dark phase has been expressed thus by
Sri Aurobindo :
The spirit and ideals of India had come to be confined in a mould which,
however beautiful, was too narrow and slender to bear the mighty burden of
our future. When that happens, the mould has to be broken and even the
ideal lost for a while, in order to be recovered free of constraint and
limitation.HYPERLINK \l "_edn20" [20]
There is no doubt that Indias old mould is being broken. The question is what
is going to take its place. There are increasing and hopeful signs of an
aspiration to a reawakening and a liberation from this intellectual and cultural
degeneration. But for this aspiration to be fulfilled, I am convinced that we
shall have to go deeper than the intellect, and tap anew the inexhaustible
source of strength that has sustained India over ages. Take care of Indias
soul and the rest will take care of itself, as Swami Vivekananda
said.HYPERLINK \l "_edn21" [21] Only then will we recover our native
suppleness and independence of mind, and learn to question West and India
alike, past and present alike. Only then will we regain our discernment,
viveka, our only possible beacon in the growing gloom.
Permit me to quote Sri Aurobindo once more :
We must begin by accepting nothing on trust from any source whatsoever, by
questioning everything and forming our own conclusions. We need not fear
that we shall by that process cease to be Indians or fall into the danger of
abandoning Hinduism. India can never cease to be India or Hinduism to be
Hinduism, if we really think for ourselves. It is only if we allow Europe to think
for us that India is in danger of becoming an ill-executed and foolish copy of
Europe.HYPERLINK \l "_edn22" [22]
To recover her true genius in a new body is the task now facing India. She
needs it not only for herself but for the world, as the West is fast being sucked
into its own emptiness, except for a few lucid thinkers desperately searching
for a deeper meaning to our human madness. Europe is destructive,
suicidal,HYPERLINK \l "_edn23" [23] said Andr Malraux to Nehru in
1936, whom he would meet several times until the 1960s, trying in vain to
persuade him of the relevance of Indias spirituality in todays world. Malraux
also reflected :
... To the West, whether Christian or atheist, the fundamental obvious fact is
death, whatever meaning it gives to it, whereas Indias fundamental obvious
fact is the infinity of life in the infinity of time : Who could kill
immortality ?HYPERLINK \l "_edn24" [24]
This deeper view of the universe, and of ourselves as an integral part of it, this
bridge between matter and spirit is what the world needs today. And that is not
philosophy, it is a practical question : India alone could show, as she did in her
ancient history from the Indus Valley civilization to the Maurya times and after,
how material and spiritual developments can be harmonizedand indeed
need each other if society is to last. Because the West ultimately believes only
in death, it is destroying man as well as the earth ; because India ultimately
sought only the secret of life, it could restore the divinity of the earth and of all
creatures, man included. Last century already, the French historian Michelet
marvelled :
Whereas, in our Occident, the most dry and sterile minds brag in front of
Nature, the Indian genius, the most rich and fecund of all, knows neither small
nor big and has generously embraced universal fraternity, even the identity of
all souls !HYPERLINK \l "_edn25" [25]
This Indian genius has now begun to percolate back to the West, where it
inspires new approaches, deeper thoughts, though not yet the transforming
shakti. Perhaps the tide of colonialism will be reversed, after all. And without
bloodshed.
Perhaps Rabindranath Tagores hope of April 1941, three months before his
death, will be fulfilled :
The spirit of violence which perhaps lay dormant in the psychology of the
West, has at last roused itself and desecrates the Spirit of Man....
I had at one time believed that the springs of civilization would issue out of the
heart of Europe. But today when I am about to quit the world that faith has
gone bankrupt altogether....
Today I live in the hope that the Saviour is comingthat he will be born in our
midst in this poverty-shamed hovel which is India. I shall wait to hear the
divine message of civilization which he will bring with him.... Perhaps that
dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun
rises.HYPERLINK \l "_edn26" [26]

read
Kali Yuga
or the Age of Confusion
By Michel Danino
Sanskrit Day address (revised here) presented at a function organized by the
Chinmaya International Foundation, Veliyanad, at the Chinmaya Vidyalaya,
Tripunithura (Kerala), on 15 August 2000.
I am much honoured to be invited to speak on this special day. At the same
time, I must admit that I am rather shy of addressing this gathering of
distinguished scholars and Sanskritists, I who am neither. For over twenty-five
years, if I have studied something of Indian culture, it has not been in a
bookish or theoretical manner : experience is what has always interested me
to live at least something of what sent so many in this land, like nowhere
else on earth, in search of the truth of this universe and this human adventure.
That something I slowly learned mainly from Sri Aurobindo, for although he
came to be regarded as a philosopher and a thinker, he really was an
experimenter before anything else. It is a happy coincidence that his birthday
should fall today, the 128th anniversary of his birth, and I shall take the liberty
of quoting him a few times.
If I have honestly warned you about my limitations, it is because I wish to
examine with you a few important issues which, in Indias present intellectual
climate, are usually regarded as sensitive or controversialin other words,
fit to be discreetly swept under the carpet. Yet I find that examining them turns
out to be immensely profitable, provided we do so from the standpoint of
Indian experience, not from dry philosophy or hollow Westernized
intellectualism. Conversely, turning away from them or blindly accepting
conventional ideas about them is, to my mind, the source of the most serious
confusion. Long ago we were warned about this unmistakable sign of our dark
age : in the Mahabharata, for example, Markandeya tells Yuddhisthira that in
the Kali Yuga, Men generally become addicted to falsehood in speech, and
intellectual darkness will envelop the whole earthYet we have done
surprisingly little to dispel this darkness from our own minds to begin with.
{ We have allowed others, unfamiliar with or contemptuous of the truths
discovered by millennia of yoga and sadhana, to think for us, speak for us,
and ultimately to dictate to us.}
What are these issues, then ? To discuss themvery briefly, of courseI
have chosen a few convenient keywords ; they are : {God, religion,
secularism, and tolerance. Imposing words, no doubt, constantly thrown
under our eyes and into our ears. Yet the one thing seldom mentioned about
them is that they are Western notions, and correspond to no clear Indian
concepts}hence the confusion they generate when mechanically applied to
the Indian context. I will keep returning to this central point.
But does not the word God at least correspond to an Indian concept, you
may ask ? Apparently it doesbut only apparently. We all know how Indians
love to stress that God is one and all religions have the same God. We
even find respectable swamis eager to get themselves photographed in front
of St. Peters of Rome or in an audience with the Popealthough they do not
realize that the same Pope would never care to visit a Hindu temple and offer
worship there. We are also told that all religions speak the same truth or are
as many paths to the Truth, and so on. Nice thoughts, full of goodwill, but
unfortunately ignorant ones, and in fact slogans rather than thoughts. I agree
that synthesis is desirable and essential in the search for truth, but painting
the whole world with a single brush will not produce a synthesis, only a
jumble. To reach a fruitful synthesis, we must learn again to make use of
viveka, a laser-like spiritual discernment that extracts the truth but also the
falsehood in each element. It is with good reason that viveka is the very first
qualification required of a seeker, according to SankaracharyaThe Semitic
God
Our first task, therefore, is to examine the Western concept of God. By
Western, I mean the god of the three Semitic or Abrahamic religions,
Jehovah or Allah ; I am not referring to more ancient Greek, Norse or Celtic
gods since, as we know, the pre-Christian religions of Europe all but vanished
under the onslaught of so-called monotheism (though some are now striving
to revive).
The first thing that strikes the unbiased, discerning Indian reader of the Old
Testament, especially the Exodus, in which Jehovah (or Yahweh) first
introduces himself to Moses under that name, is his ungodlike character.
Jehovah is admittedly jealous : the second of the Ten Commandments reads,
You shall have no other gods before me, while the third explicitly forbids the
making and worship of any idols, for I am a jealous God, punishing the
children for the sin of the fathers.... Jehovah does speak as often of
punishment as he does of sin, and periodically goes into a state of fierce
anger, promising the most complete devastation to the Hebrews who reject
him. Not content with cursing his reluctant followers, he also curses nation
after nation, and finally the earth itself, which he inexplicably holds
responsible for mans sins : The Lord is going to lay waste the earth and
devastate it, he will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants (Isaiah, 24 :1), or
again, The day of the Lord is cominga cruel day, with wrath and fierce
angerto make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it (Isaiah, 13
:9). In fact, {he is so obsessed with sin that one looks in vain in his oppressive
berating and legislating for any hint of a higher spirituality,} such as the Gitas
final injunction to abandon all dharmas. Or contrast his jealousy with Sri
Krishnas insistence on spiritual freedom : Whatever form of Me any devotee
with faith desires to worship, I make that faith of his firm and undeviating
(7.21), or again : Others ... worship Me in My oneness and in every separate
being and in all My million universal faces (9.15). But the god of the Bible and
Koran will have none of this universality.
{If Jehovah had stopped there, we might have found him to be simply a foul-
tempered and libidinous god ; after all, some Puranic gods too have such
defects, although they usually retain a sense of their limits and a compassion
of which Jehovah is spotlessly guiltless. But he has a clear plan, he means
business and knows that coercion alone can establish his rule : when the
Hebrews over whom he is so keen to hold sway go back to their older worship
of a golden calf, he orders through Moses that each of the faithful should kill
his brother and friend and neighbour (Exodus 32 :27). Instructions which
were promptly complied with, for we are informed that 3,000 were killed on
that fateful day ; to crown his punishment, Jehovah struck the people with a
plague. I find it highly symbolic that Judaism was born in blood and fear, not
out of love for its god. As Sri Aurobindo put it, The Jew invented the God-
fearing man ; India the God-knower and God-lover It probably took centuries
for the old cults to disappear altogether, and a stream of prophets who sought
to strike terror into the hearts of the Israelites. It was a radical, unprecedented
departure from ancient world cultures. Naturally, it did not stop there and was
to find more fertile soils in Christianity and Islam : earlier, Jehovah was
content with being the god of the Hebrews alone, but in the new creeds, his
ambition now extended to the whole earth.}
Increasingly aware of this cruel, irritable, egocentric and exclusivist character
of Jehovah, many Western thinkers, especially from the eighteenth century
onward, rejected his claim to be the supreme and only god.{ Voltaire, one of
the first to ruthlessly expose the countless inconsistencies in the Bible, could
hardly disguise how it filled him with horror and indignation at every pageIn
particular, he found the plethora of laws dictated by Jehovah barbaric and
ridiculousJefferson depicted him as cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust,
while Thomas Paine found the Bible more like the work of a demon than
the word of GodWith the growth of materialistic science, in particular
Darwinian evolution, such views, which were revolutionary at the time of a
Voltaire, became widespread in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Bernard Shaw, for example, describes the Biblical god as a thundering,
earthquaking, famine striking, pestilence launching, blinding, deafening,
killing, destructively omnipotent Bogey Man7] Freud, seeing in Jehovah an
all-too-human creation, subjected him to psychoanalysisa dream of a
subject for a psychoanalyst. Aldous Huxley called the Old Testament a
treasure house of barbarous stupidity [full of] justifications for every crime and
follyHuxley traced the wholesale massacres perpetrated by Christianity to
Jehovahs wrathful, jealous, vindictive character, just as he attributed the
wholesale slaughter of Buddhists and Hindus by invading Muslims to their
devotion for a despotic personBecause a fewnot allintellectuals had
the courage to state the obvious, the power of Christianity was greatly
reduced in the West. }Yet I have always marvelled that Indians should learn
about Christianity neither from their own inquiry nor from those bold Western
thinkers, but from the very zealots who are no longer heard in the West.
But is that all there is to the Semitic god ? Are we simply faced with a man-
made demon or the product of some fevered brain ? If you look at Jehovah in
the light of Indian experience, it is striking how he has all the characteristics of
an Asura. Recall for a moment a being such as Hiranyakashipu : Had he not,
too, forbidden all other cults ? Did he not order that he alone should be
worshipped as the supreme god ? Did he not use fear and violence to coerce
Prahlad ? That he was stopped by a divine manifestation, like many other
Asuras eager to possess this world, is another story : the point is that we find
here the same seed of pride and cruelty as in a Jehovah, and without a
Prahlad and a Lord Narasimha, an exclusivist and cruel religion might well
have taken root on Indian soil.
Now, to pinpoint Jehovahs identity we must remember that he himself
acknowledges Yahweh to be a name new to the Hebrews : By that name I
did not make myself known to them (Exodus, 6 :3). He does not say what his
earlier name was, but the early Christian Gnostic tradition, which was brutally
suppressed by the growing orthodox school, provides us with an answeror
rather two. In the Gnostic Gospels which survived centuries of persecution
(most of which were found at Nag-Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945),
Jehovah is named either Samael, which means the god of the blind, or
Ialdabaoth, the son of chaos. Thus one of those texts contains this revealing
passage :
Ialdabaoth, becoming arrogant in spirit, boasted himself over all those who
were below him, and explained, I am father, and God, and above me there is
no one. His mother, hearing him speak thus, cried out against him, Do not
lie, Ialdabaoth ; for the father of all, the primal anthropos, is above youThis not
only shows that Jehovah was not the supreme god, but also that he had a
mother ! For the Gnostics, like the Indians, refused to depict God as only male
; God had to be equally femaleand ultimately everything. Another text, in the
Secret Book of John, points out pertinently, {By announcing [that he is a
jealous God] he indicated that another God does exist ; for if there were no
other one, of whom would he be jealous In fact, Jehovah is viewed in the
Gnostic Gospels as no more than a demiurge or a subordinate deityexactly
what Devas and Asuras are in Indian tradition.}
The French novelist Anatole France, who made use of the apocryphal
Gospels in his perceptive novel The Revolt of the Angels, has one of the
rebellious angels depict Jehovah thus :
I no longer think he is the one and only God ; for a long time he himself did
not believe so : he was a polytheist at first. Later on, his pride and the flattery
of his worshippers turned him into a monotheist.... And in fact, rather than a
god he is a vain and ignorant demiurge. Those who, like me, know his true
nature, call him Ialdabaoth.... Having seized a minuscule fragment of the
universe, he has sown in it pain and deathNow contrast this Semitic notion of
God as a tyrannical ruler wholly separate from his creation, with the Indian
notion of an all-encompassing, all-pervasive, all-loving divine essence. In the
language of the Upanishads : He is the secret Self in all existences....
Eternal, pervading, in all things and impalpable, that which is Imperishable ...
the Truth of things.... All this is Brahman alone, all this magnificent universe
If Jehovah represents a radical departure from ancient worships, it is because
he is wholly other, as Huxley puts it. Because of the unbridgeable gulf
between him and his creation, no Christian would dare declare, I am
Jehovah or I am Christ, no Muslim would dream of saying, I am Allah. But
to the Hindu, soham asmi, He I am, or tat tvam asi, You are That, is the
most natural thing in the world. Again, {can Christian parents christen their
son Jehovah or Muslim parents name theirs Allah in the way a Hindu child
can be called Purushottam, Parameswar or Maheswari ?}
Clearly, if we use a single word, God, for such conflicting concepts as the
Semitic and the Indian, we land ourselves in total confusion. God is one,
perhaps, in the Vedantic sense that all is ultimately one, because all is
ultimately divine, and yet Hindu inquiry always discerned a whole hierarchy of
beings, not all equally true or luminous : a rakshasa, for instance, cannot be
equated with a Sri Krishna. Some may object to calling the Biblical or Koranic
god an Asura, but I use the word in the deeper sense of a mighty god who
comes to his fall owing to ambition or pride ; moreover, the Indian approach
has always claimed absolute freedom to inquire into every aspect of divinity,
from the most personal to the most transcendent : if the Semitic god has the
attributes of an Asura and not those of the supreme Reality, why should we
look away from that essential difference ? And if a Christian or a Muslim
scholar can examine Hindu gods in the light of his religion, and often deride
them, or worse as we still see today, why could not a Hindu similarly look at
their god in his own light and come up with his own assessment ?
A more intelligent objection might be that in later Jewish mysticism (especially
the Kabala), and in Christian or Islamic mysticism, we do find seekers going
far beyond this loud-mouthed self-declared god. That is certainly true, but they
did so despite, not thanks to, the Semitic god, because their own nature or
spiritual thirst led them beyond to a truer experience. For that very reason
they often had a brush with heresy, and most were ruthlessly suppressed,
the Gnostic Christians to begin with, whose writings were madness and
blasphemyfor they had no use of dogmas and insisted on self-knowledge and
the inner discovery : Look for God by taking yourself as a starting point, said
Monoimus, if you carefully investigate ... you will find him in yourself Even a
Meister Eckhart, whose teaching is so akin to Vedanta, was hounded by the
Inquisition. {The fact remains, at any rate, that those deeper mystics always
were a very small number, and that masses of Europe and her Christianized
colonies remained stuck with the cruder notion, their progress slowed down or
arrested for centuries.}
{I am not going here into the more complex question of Jesus, as he is
portrayed in the New Testament, except for a brief observation or two. A Hindu
would probably have no problem with him as a teacher or even an Avatar,
were it not again for his exclusiveness which puts a fatal limit to himself and to
Gods power to manifestfor why should God have an only child (a male one,
of course) rather than ten or thousands ? Why should he send us only one
saviour, and to be saved from what ? God creates us, creates sin and
ignorance the better to curse us, sends us one and only one redeemer, and
warns us that we shall be tortured for ever if we do not accept him ! Such
crude notions are offensive to any deeper understanding. Also, the language
of Jesus, though not so much as that of Jehovah, makes liberal use of threat
and arrogance : Fear him who, after killing the body, has power to throw you
into hell.... Unless you repent, you too will all perish For judgment I have come
into this world.... All who came before me were thieves and robbers.... No one
comes to the Father except through me.How far we are from the Vedic
concept of the whole universe as one family, vasudhaiva kutumbakam.
Thus the first and central object of our inquiry, God, tells us that we have
surrendered to facile assimilations. We must reject the use of a single word to
describe two wholly different concepts. Sri Aurobindo did not fall into this all-
too-common trap, and summarized the whole issue in these words :
The conception of the Divine as an external omnipotent Power who has
created the world and governs it like an absolute and arbitrary monarchthe
Christian or Semitic conceptionhas never been mine ; it contradicts too
much my seeing and experience during thirty years of sadhana. It is against
this conception that the atheistic objection is aimedfor atheism in Europe
has been a shallow and rather childish reaction against a shallow and childish
exoteric religionism and its popular inadequate and crudely dogmatic
notionsReligion and Dharma
This takes us to the concept of religion, and here again we have to confront
the clumping together of a wide array of dissimilar faiths, creeds and practices
under a single term. True, it may be said that all religions are concerned in
some way with a supernatural being or creator, but that is not enough, since
there is a fundamental disagreement on the said being. Moreover, a number
of important differences between the Semitic family of religions and the older
faiths cannot be ignored. The most visible distinctions, for instance the
complete absence in Hinduism of dogmas, of an absolute authority in the form
of an only Scripture or a supreme clergy, or also the belief in reincarnation,
have been stressed often enough, and rightly so. But there are radical
differences of a more serious nature.
{To begin with, the Indian and the Pagan approaches never made a distinction
between the faithful and the infidels, the former to be saved in a single life
and the latter to be eternally barbecued, as Swami Vivekananda once put it ;
humanity was never divided into two irreconcilable camps, or reconcilable
only through mass slaughter or mass conversion. Indeed, in the Hindu view,
the only thing one may ever be converted to is ones own concealed divinity,
and that can only be done through a long and sincere inner effort, not through
unquestioning adherence to cruel dogmas.} By contrast, a fundamentalist
Christian or Muslim can see no hope for a Hindu, a Buddhist or a Parsi or,
say, an animist Red Indian ; today he may no longer openly spew venom on
them (though sometimes he still does), but a close look at his utterances will
show that this fatal division is central to his mentality. It is not only humanity
that is divided in the Semitic religions, God is also separate from his creation
and in particular from man, and by giving man one only Son or one last
prophet, one Scriptureonly one book in all these agesas Sri Aurobindo
remarkedGod has in effect ended his communication with man for all time
to come. In the Indian view, the Divine is you and me, the bird outside and the
wide ocean ; he or she or it is boundless, endless, and cannot be limited to
any Book or manifestation or dogma. No Rishi or yogi ever declared his word
to be final, or that one could reach salvation only through him ; peddling in
tickets to heaven was something alien to ancient India, as was bribing the
gatekeeper with a confession of faith. There was no easy shortcut on the
arduous path to self-discovery.
If one objects that these differences, however deep, are after all only
theoretical, or perhaps theological, then we must point out that centuries of
bloodshed, holy wars, jihad, plunder, Inquisition and persecution are ample
proof that to the followers of Christianity and Islam, the division between the
faithful and the infidels was no abstraction. If they indulged in such a barbaric
behaviour over such a vast area and such a length of time, it is not because
they were intrinsically bad, but because they followed the injunctions of their
respective Scriptures and religious instructors. If the Hindu and Buddhist
cultures never once tried to conquer other civilizations by force, never
persecuted anyone for his beliefs, never waged religious wars, it is not
because Indians were intrinsically good, but because their culture never
taught them those aberrations, and on the contrary insisted on a complete
spiritual freedom to choose or even create ones own path.
It is only the most superficial and hasty view that can equate such radically
diverging phenomena. I used the word culture to describe Hinduism and
Buddhism, because I cannot bring myself to use the word religion in their
context : if the three Semitic faiths are religions, then Hinduism cannot be
one ; or else call the former dogmatic or exclusivist creeds, not religions.
Words should have some clear meaning, as long as we have to use them.
Religion is a Western concept ; the Indian concept is neither religion nor even
Hinduism or any ismit is sanatana dharma, the eternal law of the universe,
which cannot be formulated in any rigid and final set of tenets, because it
must be discovered in life and through an inner quest. Still, we may say that
pluralism, synthesis, universality, oneness are some of its central pillars, and
go on to note that none of these essential values is to be found in the
Abrahamic worldview.
I do not mean to denigrate Semitic religions in any way. If any of their
followers is happy with his faith and finds it helps him, all to the good. But
bringing everything down to a single plane is a distortion and a running away
from the truth of things. Recently, the Vatican proclaimed itself forcefully
against the idea of equality of religions. If Christianity can thus insist on
belonging to a separate plane, why could not Hinduism do the same ? And
indeed, the ancient Indian culture is not on the same plane as the religions
that flowed from the Bible, neither in theory nor in life. There are no doubt a
few truths in common here and there, and it is good to note them ; there are
also in the Bible (especially the New Testament) considerable borrowings
from India, and it is good to be aware of them. But one must also have the
courage to see where the two worldviews diverge, and to go to the root of the
divergence. Only then can one begin to grasp some of the deeper forces at
work in human history.
Secularism and Tolerance
The synthesizers, as the remarkable thinker Ram Swarup calls them, or
adepts of all-out samenessGod is the same, all religions are the
same, etc.are in love with big words. They bring in another Western
concept, that of secularism, and tell us that it means equal respect for
all religions. This too we are supposed to accept unquestioningly, like a
sort of magic wand that is going to solve all our religious and social
problems. But what really is secularism, in theory and practice ?
I have noticed that the noisiest proponents of secularism in India are always
careful not to evoke its historical origin.{ Secularism was born to challenge
theocracy in the Christian and Islamic worlds. In medieval Europe,
political power was in almost every country held or at least controlled by
one Church or another. It took nearly two centuries, the eighteenth and
nineteenth, to curtail that power and establish a complete separation
between Church and Statewhich is what secularism has meant in the
West, as any good dictionary will tell usIn France, for instance, the Roman
Catholic Church was virtually all-powerful until the French Revolution, and
only a century later did it finally lose its control over education. Secularism
meant keeping the Church away from political power and from education,
it meant a polity free from Christian affiliation. Likewise, when Mustapha
Kemal threw out the Sultan in Turkey and established a secular republic
in 1923, it was because he had abolished the office of the Caliph of the
Islamic world ; secularism to him meant keeping Islam away from
political power.
This notion of secularism has no application in India, where theocracy never
existed ; how could it, in the absence of an organized Church or clergy ?
Even so conformist a historian as Vincent Smith noted that Hindooism
has never produced an exclusive, dominant, orthodox sect, with a formula
of faith to be professed or rejected under pain of damnation. Political rule
was the business of the Kshatriya, not of the priestly class, and although
kings often took the advice of a sage or a guru, it was usually in matters of
governance. The very notion of a State religion is entirely alien to India.
We almost never hear of a Vaishnavite or a Saivite raja imposing his
creed on his population in the way Catholic or Protestant kings kept doing,
and wars between neighbouring kingdoms were never caused by clashes
of belief or cult. Quite the contrary, rajas often prided themselves on
protecting all sects without partiality.{ Indians were a practical people, and
they knew that political rule calls for expertisehence the numerous
treatises on the art of governance which Sanskrit literature has preserved
for us (and from which our modern-day rulers could learn a thing or two if
they were at all interested in the welfare of the people).
Moreover, the Indian genius always endeavoured to spiritualize all aspects of
life, including the social and political. If spirituality was of any practical
value, why should it be kept out of governance ? Sri Aurobindo reflects
that spirit when he states, There is to me nothing secular, all human
activity is for me a thing to be included in a complete spiritual life....} In
such a context, why did we have to hear at all of secularism in India ? And
why do its loudest championsapart from opportunistic and largely
brainless politicianshappen to belong to the very religions against which
Europe had to erect the defence of secularism ? Why are self-appointed
leaders of Christian and Muslim Indians lecturing Hindus about the virtues
of secularism, when their own religions were always dead against it (and
would still be, given a chance) ? Just the other day, a Sikh leader from
Amritsar followed suit, asserting that Sikhism is a secular religion. Such
thoughtless hurling about of words is the bane of modern India. Not that
anyone pays much attention anyway, but I feel sorry that we find so few
Indian intellectuals to point out the extreme absurdity of the whole thing
they are probably put off by the wall of accusation of Hindu
fundamentalist that rises before anyone deviating from the politically
correct line. And yet, if secularism means, as it does, the separation of
religion and State, why is it that the Indian government controls most
Hindu temples while never touching churches and mosques, or can take
over Hindu schools while Christian and Islamic schools are free to
proliferate ? Why is nothing in the shape of Indian culture taught to
children born in this land ? Why is a text like the Gita, universally praised
as the best guide of ethics, kept away from the sight of Indian
schoolchildren ? Perhaps our secularists would like to enlighten us on
these questions ?
Another big word the champions of secularism and minorityismfor in the
end, the two amount to the same thingnever tire of using is that of
tolerance. A great virtue indeed, one that Christianity and Islam
scrupulously steered clear of throughout their history, but which was
always so natural in India that there was not even a word for it. What they
really mean is that they should have full freedom to prey upon the Hindu
masses, with limitless foreign funds to assist them. The harm and
disruption they inflict on Indias social fabric is the least of their concern ;
tribes which had lived in relative peace and harmony for centuries
suddenly find themselves divided into two opposite camps ; we have seen
in recent years the tensions among the Santhal and Dangs tribes of
Orissa and Gujarat, and I could give examples of cultural alienation
among tribes of the small Nilgiris district where I live, which has, I am told,
over 350 churches, ninety Bible colleges and 300 full-time and well-paid
missionaries. More than forty years ago, the famous Niyogi Committee
provided a massive documented study of such practices, which should be
prescribed reading for all those interested in the subject of religious
freedom.
The Hindu certainly needs no lesson in tolerance, especially from such ill-
qualified zealots. He is always ready to tolerate and will never object to
any Christian or Muslim practising his faith. But true tolerance can only be
between mutually respectful faiths or societies or nations. How is it
possible to live peacefully with a religion whose principle is I will not
tolerate you asked Sri Aurobindo. That is why Hindus are growing
increasingly restless at devious practises that target the most vulnerable
among them with a well-oiled propaganda machine and the lure of
monetary or other gain. The growth in tension is palpable year after year,
and if we have not had any large-scale conflict as yet (on the level of what
we see in Ireland or Indonesia, for instance), it is again thanks to the ever-
patient nature of the Hindu. But Christian leaders do not realize that they
are aggravating matters by raising the bogey of a Hindu persecution of
Indian minorities for consumption by the so-called secular press in India
and abroad, making up incidents when possibleand hastening to accuse
Hindus even when it is plain that others are involvedOnce again, note how
followers of the two most brutal religions in world history, which stamped
out all Pagans and minorities wherever and whenever they could, try to
paint Hindus with the black brush of their very own past ! Strange that we
never hear them utter one word of protest against the horrific treatment of
Hindu minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh, or also in Kashmir.
The net result in the Indian context is that, helped by sections of the English-
language media, those two Semitic religions have managed to project
themselves as tolerant, secular, equalitarian, progressivean image
almost perfectly opposite to what they were in their countries of origin at
the peak of their strength. On the other hand, Hinduism is portrayed as
retrograde, medieval, superstitious, increasingly intolerant. Oxymorons
such as Hindu fundamentalism or even Hindu fanaticism are used day
in and day out, forgetting that Hinduism has no identifiable
fundamentals, no self-declared mission to convert anyone, no wish even
to impose itself on anyone, and cannot therefore give rise to any
fanaticism of the Christian or Islamic kind. Of course, Hinduism is also
equated to the caste systemas though it were nothing elsewhose
abuses are blown out of proportion. The far worse abuses perpetrated in
the names of Jesus or Mahomet are glossed over, as is the fact that caste
discrimination very much persists unchanged among converts to
Christianity and Islam.
Such distortions have been steadily gaining ground in recent years ; they are
politically correct, in modern parlance, but essentially untrue. They will
throw in other catchwords of the day for good measure, such as the
imposing human rights (which, again, Semitic religions never advocated
or practised). It is common to see some of our secular politicians share a
dais with an equally secular bishop or imam, while they would shudder
to be seen with anyone in a Hindu garb. The Popes brazen call to a
great harvest of faith from Asia, made during his recent visit to India, is a
clear sign that the Hindus are simply not expected to protestor if anyone
does, his voice is drowned in the secular din. Money pours in from
America and Europe to finance extensive missionary plans flaunted on
the Internet, to build more churches and Bible colleges, or from Arab
countries to build more mosques, madrasas and Koranic institutes.
More than ninety years ago, the famous art critic Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
gave this word of warning with reference to the methods of Christian
missionaries in India :
All that money, social influence, educational bribery and misrepresentation
can effect, is treated as legitimate.... But even Hindu tolerance may some
day be overstrained. If it be intolerance to force ones way into the house
of another, it by no means necessarily follows that it would be intolerance
on the owners part to drive out the intruderIndias Heritage in Question
The present intellectual climate in India is so perverted that it would be
tempting to go on and expose the workings of the perversion in
exhaustive detail. Others have done it better than I couldI will give just
one rather minor topical example, since we are gathered here to celebrate
Sanskrit Day. Just last month, Tamil Nadus education minister, a proud
Dravidian (whatever the word means), declared that Sanskrit was an
artificial language born in an old ware shop and clearly inferior to Tamil ;
he added (probably referring to himself), No fool will believe that Tamil
was born only after the birth of SanskritSuch unprovoked abuse of
Sanskrit (as if the Tamil language could not stand on its own greatness)
would not matter much if this were just rhetoric, but we find it reflected in
practice, with Sanskrit virtually banned from temple rituals in Tamil Nadu,
its teaching curtailed and discouraged at all levels (in fact all over India)
and Urdu, for instance, receiving much more favour.
The point I wish to draw your attention to is how catchwords are hypnotically
brandished, with no intelligent debate permitted on their real meaning.
Indian scholars and thinkers must develop the courage to grapple with the
central issues hidden behind those words. If they do not, they in effect
abandon the field to the kind of perversion that has been growing in
recent years, increasingly eclipsing Indias heritage and its contribution to
world civilization, portraying it as retrograde and responsible for all of
Indias ills. This school of thought, based on a freak hybrid of Marxist
dialectics, psychoanalysis and Christian revivalism, has been steadily
invading Western and Indian universities, textbooks, media, public
opinion, erasing the last traces of Indian culture from Indian education and
uprooting younger Indian generations from a culture which should be
theirs by birthright.
Ram Swarups warning needs to be heard :
Hindus are disorganized, self-alienated, morally and ideologically disarmed.
They lack leadership ; the Hindu elites have become illiterate about their
spiritual heritage and history and indifferent and even hostile towards their
religion.... India has been asleep for too long, and it needed all these
knocks and probably it would get more
In 1926 Sri Aurobindo put it very simply : Aggressive religions tend to overrun
the earth. Hinduism on the other hand is passive and therein lies the
danger. This renewed aggressive, conquering effort on the part of
Christianity and Islam, hiding behind their misbegotten child of false
secularism, must be resisted by the Indian intelligentsia for two reasons.
One, of immediate urgency, to limit and hopefully reverse the harm done
to Indias social fabric by artificial conversions, induced ninety-nine times
out of a hundred by pecuniary allurements, not by any genuine religious
feeling. Unless the tide is stemmed, the infinite complexity that is Indian
society may become irretrievably fragmented into thousands of conflicting
groups, with the kind of consequences we can already see in the North-
East and many tribal regions of India.
The second reason, more essential, is to pursue and renew Indias perennial
search for the Truth. If we unquestioningly accept the falsehoods that are
now bandied about, we shall in the end cripple our ability to discern the
Truth. It is Truth that conquers and not falsehoodsays the Upanishad,
and to work out that conquest for the world has always been at the core of
Indias preoccupation. This is no ideological question, it is a matter of
saving or losing our intellectual independence and ultimately our spiritual
freedomthe only one left to the common Indian.
As early as 1910, Sri Aurobindo asserted :
Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the
world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,to think on all
subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not
stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and
prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of
all kinds as with the mace of Bhima. {Were Indian civilization, ever in
quest of new realms of reality, to surrender its independence of mind and
spirit, the loss would be grave not only for India but for the world, for
between moribund religious obscurantism trying to revive and grab the
earth once more, and the new market fundamentalism that has well nigh
grabbed it, humanitys future appears rather bleak. We must work to see
that India fulfils her role and opens a new path. We must make up for lost
time.}

READ

The Riddle
of Indias Ancient Past
An Overview of the Aryan Problem By Michel Danino
A revised version of a paper presented at a seminar on Value Education
organized by the Chinmaya Mission at Coimbatore on February 4-5, 1999.
I have been asked to speak a few words on Indias ancient past, a subject
which ought to be of interest to every Indian, and especially to teachers, since
students should be naturally curious to know the remotest origins of their
country. The birth of Indian civilization is a subject I have been studying for
some time, first of all because I find it fascinating : to explore the roots of a
great and living civilization spanning over 6,000 years is something we can
probably do only in India, since all other ancient civilizations have long
disappeared. There is however another reason for my interest, and that will be
the focus of this brief presentation : it is the so-called Aryan problem.
As you all know, what our history textbooks today teach is still basically the
theory of a few nineteenth-century European scholars (including the famous
Max Mller) : according to them, around 1500 BC, hordes of semi-barbarian,
pastoral nomads, the so-called Aryans, poured out of Central Asia into
Northwest India, and drove south the ancestors of todays Dravidians ; then,
over a few centuries, they composed the Vedas, gradually got their Aryan
culture (with its language, Sanskrit) to spread all over India, and eventually
built the mighty Ganges civilization. This, with some variations, is still today
what the school-going child is taught. Not only textbooks, even respectable
dictionaries and encyclopaedias will tell you more or less the same thing.
So at first sight, there would seem to be little scope for differing views on the
matter. Yet there are widely differing views, even a raging debateand it
rages not only in India but in Western universities and among eminent
scholars and archaeologists. As a matter of fact, many of them have in recent
years called for a new look at the established theory. In India that includes
reputed archaeologists such as B. B. Lal, Dilip Chakrabarti, S. R. Rao, V. N.
Misra, J. P. Joshi, S. P. Gupta, R. S. Bisht, K. M. Srivastava, Madhav Acharya,
etc. ; in the West, Jim Shaffer, J. M. Keyoner, G. F. Dales, Colin Renfrew, J.-F.
Jarrige, K. A. R. Kennedy and many others. They are joined by scholars from
various fields, such as David Frawley, Koenraad Elst, N. S. Rajaram, Subhash
Kak, Klaus Klostermaier, K. D. Sethna, A. K. Biswas, Shrikant Talageri,
Bhagwan Singh, etc.

All of them agree that archaeological evidence entirely fails to support the
Aryan invasion theory and actually goes against it ; many of them also find the
linguistic evidence that was used to buttress it quite shaky. But this debate, as
we shall see, is by no means limited to the academic world ; it is not a dry
scholarly matter, and it has far-reaching repercussions on todays India,
especially where her unity is concerned.
I have studied the question not only from an archaeological point of view, but
also taking into account the views of great Indians such as Swami
Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and several others (my starting point was in fact
Sri Aurobindos own research into the . {For it is a vast subject which touches
not only on archaeology and linguistics, not only on astronomy, ancient
mathematics, geology, metallurgy, even ecology, but also on Indian
Scriptures, culture and tradition}. A few years ago, I summarized some
important points in a small bookToday, however, I will limit myself to a few
main lines of argument which, to my mind, are sufficient to show that the new
school of archaeologists and scholars is right in calling for a radical review of
Indias remote past.
{At the centre of the riddle of Indians ancient past lies the famous Indus
Valley (or Harappan) civilization, one of the worlds oldest. It was certainly the
most extensive by far, since it covered todays Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat,
much of Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Kashmir, western Uttar Pradesh, the
whole of Pakistan, even parts of Afghanistan ; it was also one of the most
sophisticated in terms of urbanization, industry, technology, trade and sailing.
Its art and crafts were varied and refined, though much less abundant than in
contemporary Egypt or Mesopotamia. However, its hallmarks were a
remarkably peaceful civic organization based on cultural integration, and the
care it bestowed on its humblest inhabitants. Its sanitation and water
management, for instance, were of such a level that one wishes our municipal
corporations would follow them today. In its fully developed phase (the
mature phase, as archaeologists call it), it lasted from about 2600 to about
1900 BC ; its early phase dates back to at least 3500 BC (J. M. Kenoyer opts
for 5000 BC). A few sites, such as Mehrgarh, even show a continuity of
preceding cultures going back to 7000 BC. So far, over 2,600 sites have been
identified, over half of them in India, with 700 along the dry bed of a mighty
river to which we will soon return. While the best-known cities, Mohenjo-daro
(on the Indus river) and Harappa (on the Ravi), now lie in Pakistan, Indian
archaeologists have since Independence unearthed a number of important
settlements, such as Dholavira and Lothal in Gujarat, Kalibangan in
Rajasthan, Rakhigarhi and Banawali in Haryana.
When this civilization was discovered in the 1920s, the attempt was naturally
to fit it into the accepted framework. It was therefore assumed that its
inhabitants were Dravidians, that the invading Aryans destroyed its great
cities, and that the surviving Dravidians fled south for refuge. But today, no
one (except our textbook writers perhaps) takes this assumption seriously,
since there is no evidence on the ground to corroborate it. Archaeologists,
whatever their school of thought, whether Indian or Western, agree at least on
these three points :
First, as surprising as it may seem, there is no physical trace whatsoever of
any invaders, Aryan or other, from the Northwest or elsewhere, and no
findings have been made which could be associated with an Aryan people
coming into Indianeither pottery nor utensils nor tools nor weapons nor
graves nor any form of art. It is hard to imagine how a people supposed to
have conquered the subcontinent failed to leave the slightest physical trace !
Not only that, there is also no trace of any major conflict in any of the cities,
and no evidence of any southward population movement ; the only clear
movement, about the end of the Harappan civilization, is eastward and more
precisely towards the Gangetic basin. B. B. Lal, former director-general of the
Archaeological Survey of India, observes,
The supporters of the Aryan invasion theory have not been able to cite even a
single example where there is evidence of invaders, represented either by
weapons of warfare or even by cultural remains left by themJ. M. Kenoyer,
who is still pursuing excavations at Harappa, is even more categorical :
There is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or mass
migrations into the Indus Valley between the end of the Harappan Phase,
about 1900 BC and the beginning of the Early Historic period around 600
BCSecond, experts analyzing the skeletons found in Harappan cities
(especially in Sindh, Punjab and Gujarat) concluded that the physical traits of
their inhabitants were not markedly different from those of the populations
found today in the same regions. There is no sign of any sudden disruption in
population patterns, only the gradual changes that one would expect to take
place naturally over the centuries. Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, biological
anthropologist at Cornell University, U.S.A., who has worked extensively on
Harappan sites to study human skeletal remains, concludes unambiguously :
Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any of the theories
concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity.... What the biological
data demonstrate is that no exotic races are apparent from laboratory studies
of human remains excavated from any archaeological sites, including those
accorded Aryan status [by the old school]. All prehistoric human remains
recovered thus far from the Indian subcontinent are phenotypically identifiable
as ancient South Asians.... In short, there is no evidence of demographic
disruptions in the north-western sector of the subcontinent during and
immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture.}
Third, as mentioned earlier, the highest concentration of Harappan
settlements is found along a huge and now dry river, which follows with some
precision (though more to the North) the traditional Sarasvati, and once
flowed across Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Sindh and Gujarat, joining the
Arabian sea in Kutch. Its exact course has been plotted by geologists and
confirmed by satellite photography ; the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre has
even found that in parts of Rajasthan, in extreme desert conditions, the
water of the Sarasvati remains available at a depth of fifty to sixty metres,
and radiocarbon measurements of some water samples have shown them to
range from 2400 to 7400 Before Present, with no modern recharge
discernibleToday, scientists agree that this river, whose bed was three to ten
kilometres wide, could only have been the ancient Sarasvatithe same river
which is often praised in the hymns in the Rig-Veda. (This identification is
accepted by most archaeologists, for instance Kenoyer, Raymond and Bridget
Allchin, G. L. Possehl or D. P. Agrawal.) But it so happens that this river dried
up in stages, and its final disappearance has been scientifically dated to about
2000 BC. Then why did the supposed Aryans, who are said to have invaded
India five hundred years later and to have composed the Rig-Veda still later,
lavish so much praise on a long dried-up river ? It stands to reason that the
composers of the Vedic hymns lived near the Sarasvati while it was still in full
flow, and that again fits perfectly well with the Harappan era.
In addition, had Dravidians fled to the South as was supposed, many scholars
{have asked why they should have forgotten the famous Indus script on the
way, so that no trace of it is found in Southern India, and the oldest extant
Tamil inscriptions had to wait another two thousand years, that too in the
Brahmi script ? Similarly, nowhere do we find in the South artefacts
associated with Harappan culture, much less any trace of the urban skills
found in Indus citiesin fact urbanization in the South grew only from the third
century BC, probably under Mauryan and Roman
influences.}
Finally, it is increasingly recognized that there are strong links between the
Veda and the Harappan culture : we find statues and seals depicting yogis
and yogic postures, we find a Shiva-like deity, worship of a mother-goddess,
fire altars, all of which are suggestive of Vedic culture. Harappan symbols
include the trishul, the swastika, the conch shell (also used as a trumpet), the
pipal tree, all of which are central to later Indian culture. The Rig-Veda itself is
full of references to fortified cities and towns, to oceans, sailing, trade and
industry, all of which are found in the Harappan civilization. Studying
Harappan town-planning, R. S. Bisht, director at the Archaeological Survey of
India and excavator of the well-known site of Dholavira in the Rann of Kutch,
finds that city a virtual reality of what the Rig-Veda, the worlds oldest literary
record, describes S. P. Gupta, chairman of the Indian Archaeological Society,
agrees : Our analysis shows that [...] the Indus-Sarasvati civilization reflects
the Vedic literature. So it is clear that objective data repudiate the old invasion
theory. Archaeology completely fails to support the existence and arrival into
India of any supposed Aryan people. On the other hand, there is much
evidence to suggest that from a cultural point of view the Harappan civilization
had a Vedic backdrop, which would make the Rig-Veda at least 5,000 years
old.
{Of course, many questions remain. For instance, what about the mysterious
Indus script found on thousands of seals ? The fact is that several scholars
worked for decades trying to show that the language behind the script was
some form of proto-Dravidian, but without any conclusive success at
deciphering it. Most of them have now abandoned their attempt. Other
scholars (such as S. R. Rao or N. Jha) worked on the opposite line, trying to
show that the language was some form of Sanskrit, but their decipherments
have not received general acceptance either. Only the discovery of a bilingual
inscription, or a sufficiently long one (since most of the inscriptions on the
seals are very brief) could clinch the
issue.}
So that is, briefly, what science has to tell us. {One question that has
interested me a good deal is : What does Indian tradition have to tell us on the
same subject ? Does it agree with science, or does it support the old Aryan
theory ? Does it also support the division between Aryans and Dravidians
which comes as a result of the theory ? The answer leaves no room to
ambiguity : no Indian scripture makes any mention of an invasion from
the Northwest or of a previous homeland outside India. In fact, the Vedic
homeland most frequently referred to in the Rig-Veda is Saptasindhu, in other
words, the Indus and Sarasvati basins, which is exactly where the Harappan
civilization flourished. Let me quote here Swami Vivekananda :
There is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryans ever
came from anywhere outside India.... The whole of India is Aryan, nothing
else.} Some may say that this concerns the tradition of North India only. So let
us take a look at the South. In the Sangam literature, we find the legendary
origin of the Tamilians not in the North, but further South, in a now submerged
island or continent called Kumari Kandam. This may be an embellished
memory of the submergence of Poompuhar, the city described in the
Shilappadikaram and Manimekhalai epics, a submergence confirmed by
preliminary underwater explorations (note that marine archaeology in India is
only beginning : we can hope for some major discoveries in the years ahead).
What about the so-called Dravidian culture, then ? No one will dispute the
greatness and richness, even the distinctiveness of the Tamil genius, but I will
certainly dispute what some like to call its separateness. Early Tamil culture
was no more separate than, say, Bengali or Gujarati cultures. All of them
have their own stamp and own original contribution, but all are branches of
the same tree. If you take a look at the Shilappadikaram again, you will see
vivid references to Indra, Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Durga, Lakshmi, and several
mentions of the Veda ; King Shenguttuvan is shown as bringing the stone for
Kannagis idol from the Himalayas, where his ancestors are said to have
carved their emblem ; he does fight North Indian kings, but there is no hint
that their culture is regarded as different. In historical accounts, we find Chola
and Chera kings proudly claiming descent from Rama or from kings of the
Lunar dynastyin other words, an "Aryan" descent. We are told that the
greatest Chola king, Karikala, was a patron of both the Vedic religion and
Tamil literature, while the Pandya king Nedunjelyan performed many Vedic
sacrifices, and the dynasty of the Pallavas made their capital Kanchi into a
great centre of Sanskrit learning and culture. Another Pandya king is said to
have fed the armies on both sides during the Bharata war. And let us not
forget the reverence accorded in the South to Agastya, the great Rishi from
the North. Countless similar examples could be cited from Sangam poetry or
even the ancient Tamil grammar Tolkappiyam] None of this suggests any
clash of culture ; rather the contrary, it was a mutual enrichment : while Vedic
culture was welcomed in the South and harmonized with local elements, what
has come to be called Hinduism owes much to the generous contribution the
Tamil land made in return, for instance in music, dance, architecture, or the
bhakti movement.
{It is now time to conclude, and to my mind there are several important
lessons to be drawn from our brief study of the Aryan controversy.
The first is that there was never any Aryan invasion of India and that our
textbooks will have to be revised in the light of sound scientific findings. To
quote Dr. Ambedkar : The theory of [Aryan] invasion is an invention. It is a
perversion of scientific investigation, it is not allowed to evolve out of facts.... It
falls to the ground at every point All available evidence shows that Indias
civilization, whose roots go back even before the Harappan civilization, grew
on Indian soil. As the U.S. archaeologist Jim Shaffer puts it :
Current archaeological data do not support the existence of an Indo-Aryan or
European invasion into South Asia any time in the pre- or protohistoric
periods. Instead, it is possible to document archaeologically a series of
cultural changes reflecting indigenous cultural developments from prehistoric
to historic periods.{ Naturally, this new view will have considerable
repercussions on the history of ancient India and of the ancient world, and we
can safely predict that India will be shown to have been the source of much of
Western civilization. This had been anticipated by a number of Western
thinkers, such as the French philosopher Voltaire, who said more than two
hundred years ago }:
{I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the
Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc... It does not behove us,
who were only savages and barbarians when these Indian and Chinese
peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.} {The second
lesson is that those who today still insist on Aryan-Dravidian divide do so not
only in disregard of archaeological findings, but also in complete disregard of
Indian tradition (whether from the North or from the South) ; they prefer to
blindly follow a few nineteenth-century European scholars who made up the
invasion theory simply because they would not accept that ancient civilization
could have flowed out of India : it had to be the white man who brought it to
India. Moreover, in that colonial age, they were eager to divide India further
into Aryan and Dravidian, North and South, upper and lower castes, so as to
encourage conversions to Christianity and justify the British presence in
India.} Certain present-day followers of those scholars are equally interested
in this job of division ; the best proof of it is that they shy away from serious
debates, preferring to hurl invectives at serious and respected archaeologists
or historians, whom they call communal, parochial, etc. for suggesting, for
instance, that Vedic culture was indigenous and formed the backdrop of the
Harappan world. In other words, {if you look into the problem objectively you
are communal, while if you propagate outdated theories for political ends, you
utter gospel truths which no one should dare dispute. This is not only
unscientific and irrational, it is obscurantism plain and simple.}
The third lesson is that Indian culture is essentially one, though with
considerable regional variations, which only go to enrich it. Sri Aurobindo
never tired of stressing this essential unity : In India, he said, at a very early
time the spiritual and cultural unity was made complete and became the very
stuff of the life of all this great surge of humanity between the Himalayas and
the two seas.{ Western civilization, not even three centuries after the
Industrial Revolution, is now running out of breath. It has no direction, no
healthy foundations, no value left except selfishness and greed, nothing to fill
ones heart with.} India alone has preserved something of the deeper values
that can make a man human, and I am convinced that the world will be turning
to them in search of a remedy to its advanced malady. Once Indias
ancientness is recognized, we will better understand the strength that has
enabled her to survive through all those ages. Whether she will survive her
present phase of degradation and lead the world to a new phase is the
question.
I will end with these words from Sri Aurobindo :
A time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the darkness that has
fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second and third hand and
reassert its right to judge and enquire in a perfect freedom into the meaning of
its own Scriptures. When that day comes we shall, I think, [...] question many
established philological mythsthe legend, for instance, of an Aryan invasion
of India from the north, the artificial and inimical distinction of Aryan and
Dravidian which an erroneous philology has driven like a wedge into the unity
of the homogenous Indo-Afghan race
{When the most advanced minds of the occident are beginning to turn in this
red evening of the West for the hope of a new and more spiritual civilisation to
the genius of Asia, it would be strange if we could think of nothing better than
to cast away our own self and potentialities and put our trust in the dissolving
and moribund past of Europe.}

Selective Memory
By Meenakshi Jain
(Source: The Hindustan Times, 8th May 2001)

Non-ideological newspaper readers may be forgiven for wondering if there is

more than meets the eye in the high-voltage Leftist hysteria over moves to re-
examine the contents of NCERT history textbooks. Indeed, by raising the
bogey of 'saffronisation' before an academic review could even begin, Leftist
historians have shown nervousness that the biased nature of their work, and
their political agendas, may well be exposed.

That their history is both partial and partisan is evident from even a cursory
reading of the Medieval India textbook for Class VII, a rough summary of
collective Leftist scholarship on the subject. The Leftist claim to historical
objectivity suddenly appears vulnerable as well-known historical facts are
found deliberately obliterated or undervalued.

The arbitrary pre-dating of the medieval period by a couple of centuries, for

instance, and the forcible application of the concept of feudalism to this
period, seem inspired by political considerations. The intention, in both cases,
is clearly to draw attention away from the cataclysmic northern invasions and
focus instead, on the alleged political, economic, and cultural decay in India
on the eve of the Muslim advent. Credible Western scholars have questioned
this methodology and cast serious aspersions on the Indian Marxists'
understanding of history as well as their fidelity to facts.

The problem of historical accuracy is compounded as we proceed into the

medieval era. Key civilizational issues raised by the Islamic arrival are not
even hinted at. While the Dark and Feudal Ages in Europe are mentioned,
there is deafening silence on the basic tenets of Islam, the nature of the
Muslim polity, the status it accorded to non-Muslim subjects or its treatment of
ancient civilizations and cultures in conquered Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Syria. In
the entire discussion on the Delhi Sultanate, the words dhimmi and jaziya are
deliberately omitted, though they are crucial to understanding the dynamics of
that epoch. There is a complete glossing over of the closed nature of the
governing class and the extreme racialism of the rulers.

I{nstead, there are innumerable misleading references to Hindu participation

in the governmental process. If Indian involvement at the lower levels of
administration did not make the colonial state an Indo-British venture, surely
the same logic applies here as well? }Yet the text insists that Hindu princes,
landholders and priests of the time became constituents of the 'new
aristocracy' that arose. The fact, however, is that leaving aside the ruling
houses of Rajputana, Rajput resistance even in the neighbouring Katiher
region remained intense till the last days of the Mughal Empire. The
participation of landholders in the ruling class was, likewise, extremely
restricted even under the Mughals. Hence, to assert that involvement of these
groups was the norm in the Sultanate period is taking liberties with truth.

Overlooking all forms of Hindu persecution, the book states that Brahmins and
ulema were equally permitted to propagate their respective faiths. References
to the infamous 'pilgrimage tax' are conveniently dropped.

A crucial feature of the political philosophy of the Sultanate was its pan-
Islamic aspect. All Sultans, without exception, looked to the Caliph as the
source of their legitimacy, and even after the Caliph was murdered and the
Caliphate abolished, his name continued to appear on the coins of the Sultans
of India. Yet the phenomenon of pan-Islamism is neither mentioned nor
discussed anywhere in the text. {The section on the Sufis is of a piece of this
deception. There is no mention of "warrior Sufis," their participation in frontier
warfare, or their role in bringing fresh territory under Islam. Instead, we are
blithely told that the Sufis advised Hindus to be better Hindus!}
The Mughal period, too, is selectively purged of its unpleasant facets. {Akbar's
early measures like the re-naming of Hindu holy cities, the imposition of the
jaziya and forced conversions are ignored, as also the fact that as much as
seventy percent of his nobility consisted of foreign Muslims. The limited Hindu
participation in the upper echelons of the nobility (besides the Rajputs, just
four other Hindus) is not alluded to.}

{Much is made of the translation of Hindu epics into Persian on the orders of
the Emperor, but it is nowhere mentioned that the objective of this enterprise
was to wean away the Hindu administrative and political class from its own
language and script. The so-called patronage of Hindu writers needs to be
examined afresh in view of the fact that the greatest Hindu writer of the age,
Gosain Tulsidas, certainly never received any state patronage, either before
or after the Ramcharit Manas.}

The discussion on Din-i-Ilahi is similarly misleading. It was not intended to

dilute the Islamic content of Akbar's regime, and in the words of a leading non-
Marxist scholar, showed "a surprising indifference of Hinduism." Predictably,
Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi is not mentioned in the narrative on either Akbar or
Jehangir (through whose successive reigns he lived); his name only crops up
later in the midst of a discussion on Aurangzeb!

The brief treatment of the half-century reign of Aurangzeb, who is merely

appended to the chapter on Jehangir and Shah Jehan, is a masterly exercise
in evasion. That is why the reader (and presumably also the poor student) is
unable to comprehend the Leftist explanation for the sustained revolts of
Marathas, Sikhs and Jats against Mughal rule. Incidentally, the word jaziya
makes its appearance here for the first and last time (page 109 of the 123-
page book), though the reader is even now not told what the tax was about. If
this is objective history, subjective history might be something to look forward
to.
Swami Vivekananda
on
the Aryan Invasion Theory
(Extracts from: 1. A translation of a Bengali article titled, The East and the
West, CW, Vol. 5, p. 436-439, Mayavati Memorial Edition, 1947, Advaita
Ashrama, Almora and 2. Lectures from Colombo to Almora, p. 221-223)
And what your European Pundits say about the Aryans swooping down from
some foreign land, snatching away the lands of the aborigines and settling in
India by exterminating them, is all pure nonsense, foolish talk! Strange, that
our Indian scholars, too, say amen to them; and all these monstrous lies are
being taught to our boys! This is very bad indeed.
I am, an ignoramus myself; I do not pretend to any scholarship; but with the
little that I understand, I strongly protested against these ideas at the Paris
Conference. I have been talking with the Indian and European savants on the
subject, and hope to raise my objections to this theory in detail when time
permits. And this I say to youto our Punditsalso, You are learned men,
look up your old books and scriptures, please, and draw your own
conclusions. And this is very significant, since we have all along been trained
to tell parrot-like whatever the British had to say about us, without cogitating
the least as to what it conveys and if it is the truth. On the contrary it is
venerated as the Vedic dictumthe ultimate truth. Never have our historians
tried to unravel the veil of myth woven around the nations heritage, culture
and historyall by themselves, instead of hankering for authentication by an
elite alien race. And this has proved to be our undoing, with so many
divisions perpetrated long after the very raison detre for these have been
obliterated by a vigilant and agile national leadership. The bourgeois
politicians have everything to gain by way of trumpeting this cacophony and
camouflaging their miserable failures in the milieu that ensues. An astute
mass should be the last to succumb to such divisive philanthropy of these
bountiful philanderers.
Whenever the Europeans find an opportunity, they exterminate the aborigines
and settle down in ease and comfort on their lands; therefore they think the
Aryans must have done the same! The Westerners would be considered
wretched vagabonds if they lived in their native homes depending wholly on
their own internal resources, and so they have to run wildly about the world
seeking how they can feed upon the fat of the land of others by spoliation and
slaughter; and therefore they conclude the Aryans must have dome the same!
But where is your proof? Guess-work? Then keep your fanciful guesses to
yourselves!
In what Veda, in what Sukta, do you find that the Aryans came into India from
a foreign country? Where do you get the idea that they slaughtered the wild
aborigines? What do you gain by talking such nonsense? Vain has been your
study of the Ramayana; why manufacture a big fine story out of it?
Well, what is the Ramayana? The conquest of the savage aborigines of
Southern India by the Aryans! Indeed! Ramachandra is a civilised Aryan king
and with whom, is he fighting? With King Ravana of Lanka. Just read the
Ramayana., and you will find that Ravana was rather more and not less
civilised than Ramachandra. The civilisation of Lanka was rather higher, and
surely not lower, than that of Ayodhya. And then, when were these Vanaras
(monkeys) and other Southern Indians conquered? They were all, on the
other hand, Ramachandras friends and allies. Say which kingdoms of Vali
and Guhaka were annexed by Ramachandra?
It was quite possible, however, that in a few places there were occasional
fights between the Aryans and the Aborigines; quite possible, that one or two
cunning Munis pretended to meditate with closed eyes before their sacrificial
fires in the jungles of the Rakshasas, waiting however, all the time to see
when the Rakshasas would throw stones and pieces of bone at them. No
sooner had this been done than they would go whining to the kings. The mail-
clad kings armed with swords and weapons of steel would come on fiery
steeds. But how long could the aborigines. fight with their sticks and stones?
So they were killed or chased away, and the kings returned to their capital.
Well, all this may have been but does this prove that their lands were taken
away by the Aryans? Where in the Ramayana do you find that?
The loom of the fabric of Aryan civilisation is a vast, warm, level country,
interspersed with broad, navigable rivers. The cotton of this cloth is composed
of high l y c i v i l i s e d , s e m i c i v i l i s e d , a n d b a r b a r i a n t r i
b e s , m o s t l y Ar y a n . I t s w a r p i s V a r n a s h r a m a c h a r a
, and its woof, the conquest of strife and compet
ition in nature.
An d may I ask you, European s, what country you
have ever raised to better conditions? Wherever
you have found weaker races, you have exterminated them by the roots, as it
were. You have settled on their lands, and they are gone for ever. What is the
history of your America, your Australia, New Zealand, your Pacific Islands and
South Africa? Where are those aboriginal races there today? They are all
exterminatedyou have killed them outright, as if they were wild beasts. It is
only where you have not the power to do so, and there only, that other nations
are still alive.
But India has never done that. The Aryans were kind and generous; and in
their hearts which were large and unbounded as the ocean, and in their
brains, gifted with superhuman genius, all these ephemeral and apparently
pleasant but virtually beastly processes never found a place. And I ask you,
fools of my own country, would there have been this institution of
Varnashrama if the Aryans had exterminated the aborigines in order to settle
on their lands?
The object of the peoples of Europe is to exterminate all in order to live
themselves. The aim of the Aryans is to raise all up to their own level, nay,
even to a higher level than themselves. The means of European civilisation is
the sword; of the Aryans, the division into different Varnas. This system of
division into different Varnas is the stepping stone to civilisation, making one
rise higher and higher in proportion to ones learning and culture. In Europe, it
is everywhere victory to the strong and death to the weak. In the land of
Bharata, every social rule is for the protection of the weak.
In connection with this I want to discuss one question which has a particular
bearing with regard to Madras. There is a theory that there was a race of
mankind in Southern India called Dravidians, entirely differing from another
race in Northern India, called the Aryans, and that the Southern India
Brahmins are the only Aryans that came from the North, the other men of
Southern India belong to an entirely different caste and race to those of
Southern India Brahmins. Now I beg your pardon, Mr. Philologist, this is
entirely unfounded. The only proof of it is that there is a difference of language
between the North and the South. I do not see any other difference. We are
so many Northern men here, and I ask my European friends to pick out the
Northern and Southern men from this assembly. Where is the difference? A
little difference of language. But the Brahmins are a race that came here
speaking the Sanskrit language! Well then, they took up the Dravidian
language and forgot their Sanskrit. Why should not the other castes have
done the same? Why should not all the other castes have come one after the
other from Northern India, taken up the Dravidian language, and so forgotten
their own? That is an argument working both ways. Do not believe in such
silly things. {There may have been a Dravidian people who vanished from
here, and the few who remained lived in forests and other places. It is quite
possible that the languages may have been taken up, but all these are Aryans
who came from the North. The whole of India is Aryan, nothing else.}
Then there is the other idea that the Shudra caste are surely the aborigines.
What are they? They are slaves. They say history repeats itself. The
Americans, English, Dutch, and the Portuguese got hold of the poor Africans,
and made them work hard while they lived, and their children of mixed birth
were born in slavery and kept in that condition for a long period. From that
wonderful example, the mind jumps back several thousand years and fancies
that the same thing happened he r e , a n d o u r a r c h a e o l o g i s t d
reams of India being full of dark eyed aborigines
, a n d t h e b r i g h t Ar y a n c a m e f r o m t h e Lo r d k n o w
s w h e r e . Ac c o r d i n g t o s o m e , t h e y c a m e f r o m C e n
tral Tibet, others will have it that they came fro
m C e n t r a l A s i a . T h e r e a r e p a t r i o t i c E nglishmen who
think that the Aryans were all red-haired. Others, according to their idea, think
that they were black-haired. If the writer happens to be a black-haired man,
the Aryans were all black-haired. Of late, there was an attempt made to prove
that the Aryans lived on the Swiss lakes. I should not be sorry if they had been
all drowned there, theory and all. Some say now that they lived at the North
Pole. Lord bless the Aryans and their habitations! As of truth of these theories,
there is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryans ever
came from anywhere outside of India, and in ancient India was included
Afghanistan. There it ends. And the theory that the Shudra caste were all non-
Aryans and they were a multitude, is equally illogical and equally irrational. It
could not have been possible in those that a few Aryans settled and lived
there with a hundred thousand slaves at their command. These slaves would
have eaten them up, made chutney of them in five minutes. {The only
explanation is to be found in the Mahabhirata, which says that in the beginnin
of the Satya Yuga there was one caste, the Brahmins, and then by difference
of occupations got themselves into different castes, and that is the only true
and rational explanation that has been given} And in the coming Satya all the
other castes will have to go back to the same condition.

READ
The Condition of Hindu Under Muslim RulePart I
Dr. Jadunath Sarkar
(This article by Dr Jadunath Sarkar, first appeared in the 1950 Puja Annual
number of the Hindusthan Standard of Kolkata.)
What was the condition of the Hindus under Muslim rule in India? This is a
very natural question, and in the present situation of the country the inquiry
has a significance of the deepest practical importance. Every tree is judged by
its fruit; and the ideal Muslim Government of India, namely, a theocracy
administered for Allah by His agents, showed its unmistakable practical
consequences in the moral, intellectual and economic condition of the people
of this vast s u b c o n t i n e n t w h e n M u s l i m r u l e e n d e d a n
d British administration began. When Wellesley
and the Marquis of Hastings established British
paramountcy after overthrowing the six century o
ld Muslim domination, what Indian does not blus
h as he reads in the history of that conquest, ho
w hopelessly weak our country was in defence, h
ow abjectly degraded in spirit and education our
people were, and how inefficient and corrupt the
public administration, conducted entirely by nat
ives had become?
T r u e , o u r H i n d u r u l e rs had shown a similar bankruptcy of
capacity at the end of the Hindu period, when youthful Islam first attacked
India. But in that age the Hindu intellect was still active and it continued to
produce gems of thought and heroes of action even during he early stage of
the expansion of Islamic political sway over the country. But in the age of
Wellesley and Hastings, 1798-1818, Muslim rule had turned India into a sort
of Darkest Affica as regards culture, thought and character, and we had to
take our inspiration for a new birth of the spirit only by turning to Europe in the
19th century.
The poison lay in the very core of Islamic theocracy. Under it there can be
only one faith, one people, and one all overriding authority. The state is a
religious trust administered solely by His people (the Faithful) acting in
obedience to the Commander of the Faithful, who was in theory and very
often in practice too, the supreme General of the Army of militant Islam
(janud). Every Muslim sovereign claimed to be the Khalif of the Age, and as
such the Commander of the Faithful and shadow (representative) of
Godthe true sovereign. There could be no place for non-believers, not even
for the heretical sub-divisions of Islam (such as the Shias in a Sunni state like
that of the Sultans and Padishahs of Delhi) in its administration. Even Jews
and Christians could not be full citizens of it, though they somewhat
approached the Muslims by reason of their being People of the Book or
believers in the Bible, which the Prophet of Islam accepted as revealed,
though insufficient for salvation, unless supplemented by his Quran. The
Muslim attitude to these Ahal-i-Kitab is well expressed in the following verses
quoted by AI Badayieni, an orthodox literary champion of Islam and enemy of
the liberal philosophers Abul FazI and Faizi:
The water touched by a jew is impure:
But it will do to wash the corpse of a Christian
Zimmis
As for the Hindus and Zoroastrians, they had no place in such a political
system. If their existence was tolerated i t w a s o n l y t o u s e t h e m
as hewers of wood and drawers of water, as tax
payers Khiraj-guzar for the benefit of the domin
ant sect of the Faithful. They were called Zimmi
s or people under a contract of protection by the
M u s l i m s t a t e o n c o n d i t i o n o f c e r t a in services to be
rendered by them and certain political and civil disabilities to be borne by
them to prevent them from growing strong. The very term zimmi is an insulting
title like the Protected Princes of British India. It connotes political inferiority
and helplessness like the status of a minor proprietor perpetually under a
guardian; such protected people could not claim equality with the citizens of
the Muslim theocracy. Could the late Gaikwar Sayaji Rao, as he trembled and
hobbled before George V a t t h e D e l h i D a r b a r o f 1 9 1 2 , b e
called a ruler bound in equal alliance with the B
ritish King, or even possessed of the same right
s as a British peer?
Thus by the basic conception of the Muslim stat
e all non Muslims are its enemies and it is the in
terest of the state to curb their growth in numbe
r and power. The ideal aim was to exterminate t
hem totally, as Hindus, Zoroastrians and Christi
an nationals have been liquidated (sometimes to
tally, sometimes leaving a negligible remnant be
h i n d ) i n Af g h a n i s t a n , P e r s i a a n d t h e N e a r E a s t .
T h e l a s t r e m n a n t s o f t h e d e s c e n d a n t s o f Al e x a n d
e r s s o l d i e r s , s e t t l e d i n n o r t h e a s t e r n Af g h a n i s t a
n, were ground down to accept Islam and their p
rovince s name changed from Kafiristan to Nurist
a n ( p r o v i n c e l u m i n i o u s w i t h I s l a m ) i n o u r own
lifetime.
Whatever tended to strengthen the Hindus would ipso facto constitute a
menace to Islamic predominance. The same was seen in the late lamented
British Indian Empire, when a Bengali who learnt military science in Mexico or
France immediately became a political suspect and was ever afterwards
shadowed by the CID as a potential traitor. But the British, while curbing the
martial spirit of our educated classes, did not try to crush the Hindu mind at its
source: they did not forbid the study of Hindu philosophy and the practice of
the Hindu religion, rather encouraged them and opened the gates of the
Temple of Western Science to us. Not so, the orthodox Muslim rulers of India.
( To be concluded)

The Plight of Brahmins

By Meenakshi Jain
(From the Indian Express, Tuesday, September 18, 1990)
The Mandal Commission report marks the culmination of the attempt at social
engineering that began with the Christian missionary (followed by British
governmental) campaigns against the Brahmin community in the early part of
the 19th century. It was not accidental that Brahmins emerged as the principal
target of British attacks. Britishers of all pursuits, missionaries, administrators
and orientalists, were quick to grasp; their pivotal role in the Indian social
arrangement. They were all agreed that religious ideas and practices underlay
the entire social structure and that, as custodians of the sacred tradition,
Brahmins were the principal integrating force. This made them the natural
target of those seeking to fragment, indeed atomise, Indian Society. This was
as true of the British conquerors as it was of Muslim rulers in the preceding
centuries. Mandal takes off from where the British left.
The British were not wrong in their distrust of educated Brahmins in whom
they saw a potential threat to their supremacy in India. For instance, in 1879
the Collector of Tanjore in a communication to Sir James Caird, member of
the Famine Commission, stated that there was no class (except Brahmins )
which was so hostile to the English. The predominance of the Brahmins in
the freedom movement confirmed the worst British suspicions of the
community. Innumerable CID reports of the period commented on Brahmin
participation at all levels of the nationalist movement. In the words of an
observer, If any community could claim credit for driving the British out of the
country, it was the Brahmin community. Seventy per cent of those who were
felled by British bullets were Brahmins.
Role slighted
To counter what they perceived, a Brahminical challenge, the British launched
on the one hand a major ideological attack on the Brahmins and, on the other
incited non-Brahmin caste Hindus to press for preferential treatment, a ploy
that was to prove equally successful vis--vis the Muslims.
{In the attempt to rewrite Indian history, Brahmins began to be portrayed as
oppressors and tyrants who wilfully kept down the rest of the populace. Their
role in the development of Indian society was deliberately slighted. In ancient
times, for example, Brahmins played a major part in the spread of new
methods of cultivation (especially the use of the plough and manure) in
backward and aboriginal areas. The Krsi-parasara, compiled during this
period, is testimony to their contribution in this field.}
{But far more important was the Brahmin contribution to the integration of
society. So influenced are we by the British view of our past that we
completely ignore the fact that the principle by which the Brahmins achieved
the integration of various tribes and communities was unique in world history.
This was perhaps the only case where all incoming groups were
accommodated on their own terms. All aspects of their beliefs and behaviour
patterns were accepted as legitimate and no attempt was made to compel
them to surrender or change their distinctive lifestyles. Each group was left to
evolve and change according to its internal rhythm. What a contrast to the
Christian method of conversion by the sword and their efforts to obliterate all
traces of the previous history of all converts.}
Apart from misrepresenting the Indian past, the British actively encouraged
anti-Brahmin sentiments. A number of scholars have commented on their
involvement in the anti-Brahmin movement in South India. As a result of their
machinations non-Brahmins turned on the Brahmins with a ferocity that has
few parallels in Indian history. This was all the more surprising in that for
centuries Brahmins and non-Brahmins had been active partners and
collaborators in the task of political and social management.
Overdrawn
Some British observers themselves conceded that the picture of the Brahmin
as oppressor was overdrawn and that in reality there was little difference in
the condition of the Brahmin and the rest of the native population. H. T.
Colebrooke, one of the early Sanskrit scholars wrote, Daily observation
shows even the Brahmin exercising the menial profession of a Sudra it may
be received as a general maxim, that the occupation, appointed for each tribe,
is entitled merely to a preference. Every profession, with few exceptions, is
open to every description of persons; and the discouragement, arising from
religious prejudices, is not greater than what exists in Great Britain from the
effects of Municipal and Corporation laws.
The British census operations that began in the latter part of the 19th century
produced further distortions in the Indian system. The British sought to
interpret the caste system in the light of their own pet theories. H. H. Risley
who directed the 1901 census operations was, for example, determined to
demonstrate that race sentiment formed the basis of the caste system and
that social precedence was based on the scale of racial purity. The same race
theory played havoc in Europe in the form of Nazism and has now been fully
repudiated.
T{he British, unmindful of the complexities and intricacies of the social
arrangement, sought to achieve standardisation by placing all jatis in the four
varnas or in the categories of outcastes and aborigines. As a result they
destroyed the flexibility that was so vital for the proper functioning of the
system. The census operations raised caste consciousness to a feverish
pitch, incited caste animosities and led to an all-round hardening of the
system. They led to frantic efforts at Sanskritisation and upward mobility, so
very different from the flexibility of earlier times. When the system was made
rigid everyone wanted to be a member of a higher varna. Caste
consequently became a tool in the political, religious and cultural battles that
the Hindus fought amongst themselves.}
Downward mobility
It is significant that the census operations coincided with the attempt to
reorganise the army on the basis of the martial race theory. At about that time
the British were also beginning to raise questions about the relative balance of
Hindus and Muslims in the public services and about the monopoly of
certain castes in the new education. There was also talk of the conspiracy of
certain castes to overthrow their rule.
The forces unleashed by the British continued to gather momentum. Them
myth of the omnipotent Brahmin had been so successfully sold that most
Indians missed the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In recent years,
however, a number of studies have appeared that detail the downward
mobility that has been the chief characteristic of he Brahmin community
particularly since independence.
{Financially, the Brahmins have been very hard hit. State laws combined with
fragmentation of land have had the effect of substantially reducing the size of
family holdings so much so that most Brahmins today find it difficult to eke out
a living from land. Traditional occupations like family and temple priesthood,
recitation of the Vedas and practice of Ayurvedic medicine no longer prove
remunerative nor command respect.
A study of the Brahmin community in a district in Andhra Pradesh (Brahmins
of India by J.Radhakrishna, published by Chugh Publications) reveals that all
purohits today live below the poverty line. Eighty per cent of those surveyed
stated that their poverty and traditional style of dress and hair (tuft) had made
them the butt of ridicule. Financial constraints coupled with the existing
system of reservations for the backward classes prevented them from
providing secular education to their children.}
In fact according to this study there has been an overall decline in the number
of Brahmin students. The average income of Brahmins being less than that of
non-Brahmins, a high percentage of Brahmin students drop out at the
intermediate level.
In the 5-18 year age group, 44 per cent Brahmin students stopped education
at the primary level and 36 per cent at the pre-matriculation level. The study
also found that 55 per cent of all Brahmins lived below the poverty line that is
below a per capita income of Rs.65 a month. Since 45 per cent of the total
population of India is officially stated to be below the poverty line it follows that
the percentage of destitute Brahmins is 10 per cent higher than the all-India
figure. There is no reason to believe that the condition of Brahmins in other
parts of the country is different.
Appalling poverty
In this connection it would be revealing to quote the per capita income of
various communities as stated by the Karnataka Finance Minister in the State
Assembly on July 1, 1978: Christian Rs.1562, Vokkaligas Rs.914, Muslims
Rs.794, Scheduled caste Rs.680, Scheduled Tribes Rs.577 and Brahmins
Rs.537.

Appalling poverty compelled many Brahmins to migrate to towns leading to

spatial dispersal and consequent decline in their local influence and
institutions. Brahmins initially turned to government jobs and modern
occupations such as law and medicine. But preferential policies for the non-
Brahmins have forced the Brahmins to retreat in these spheres as well.
According to the Andhra Pradesh study, the largest percentage of Brahmins
today are employed as domestic servants. The unemployment rate among
them is as high as 75 per cent.
Clearly it is time to sit up and see reality as it is before we complete the task
the British began- the atomisation of Indian society and annihilation of Indian
civilisation.

READ
Nature
and
Indian Tradition
By Michel Danino
A guest editorial in Tahr, newsletter of the Nilgiri Wildlife and Environment
Association, Ootacamund (Tamil Nadu), January-March 1999 issue.
Recently, a retired Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, on a private visit to
a Sholaforest in the Nilgiris, came across a few local residents and engaged
in a conversation about forest preservation, in the course of which he made a
few startling statements. Overprotection, as he called it, could be
undesirable, and some degree of woodcutting was not necessarily bad ; also,
forests sometimes needed fires to induce regeneration, sprouting of new
seeds, clearing of undergrowth, etc. He then revealed the source of his
information to be a programme he had watched on Discovery Channel.
This calls for two kinds of comment.
The first is that, quite obviously, the programme the retired PCCF had
watched must have been referring to coniferous forests, some of which have
in the course of time learned to turn fires (caused by lightning, etc.) to their
advantageconifers being eminently inflammable, those forests could not
have survived if they had not learned that lesson. But that has no bearing on
{tropical rainforests such as Sholas, which thrive in a perpetually moist milieu
(provided their canopy is in good shape) ; any forest fire there would be
irreversibly destructive.} As for overprotection, anyone familiar with the
conditions in the Nilgiris will be hard put to show where that is taking place.
Shola forests have evolved over millions of years, and till the last century or
so, had to suffer almost no human interferencewhich is the same as
absolute protection. It would be standing facts on their head to assert that
illicit cutting, the kind of which has led many of our Sholas to their present
degraded condition, especially near densely populated areas, has done them
any good.
Our second reflection is of a deeper nature. {No one will deny the quality of
some programmes on Discovery Channel, the beauty of the images, their
informative and educational value. But no amount of such programmes will
help us cultivate a real contact with Nature : you cannot learn Nature as you
learn English or science or the latest news. Moreover, such programmes can
only, at best, reflect the minds of Western environmentalists of scientific bent.
They have no doubt done a remarkable and often courageous work in the last
few decades, but they do not have the monopoly of an understanding of
Nature. They forget that science is not necessarily the best tool to
understand Natureif it were, why should it have caused so much
destruction to this earth, that too in the span of two centuries, a mere
flash in the planets life ?
In fact, since the start of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the West broke away
from Nature and began regarding her as so much inanimate matter to be
exploited (a polite word for plunder). That unfortunate attitude, which has
resulted in the ruthless abuse we see all over the world, can be traced all the
way to the Old Testament and to the Genesis. On that fateful sixth day,
Jehovah proclaims, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let
him rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock,
over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground....
And he said to newborn man, Fill the earth and subdue it (1:26 & 1:28).
Jehovah does not stop there ; for some mysterious reason, he seems to hold
the earth responsible for mans sins. After generously cursing various nations
through a succession of fire-spewing prophets, he turns his wrath to our poor
planet : Say to the southern forest : This is what the Sovereign Lord says : I
am about to set fire to you, and it will consume all your trees, both green and
dry. The blazing flame will not be quenched (Ezekiel, 20:47). I will make the
land of Egypt a ruin and a desolate waste among devastated lands (ibid.,
29:10, 12). See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it ; he
will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants.... The earth will be completely laid
waste and totally plundered (Isaiah 24:1, 3). Cursed is the ground because
of you (Genesis 3:17). And so on, Book after ranting Book.
The contrast with the ancient Indian attitude is as stark as could be. Indian
tradition regards the earth as a goddess, Bhudevi ; her consort, Vishnu,
the supreme divinity, incarnates from age to age to relieve her of the
burden of demonic forcessometimes of humanity itself. This he does
out of love for the earth, his companion. Sita means furrow, and she
returned to the earth whence she came. Shiva too is bound to the earth
through Parvati, daughter of Himavat, i.e. the Himalayas. Earth and
Heaven are therefore inseparable : Heaven is my father ; my mother is this
vast earth, my close kin, says the Rig-Veda (I.164.33). Earth is as sacred as
Heaven, since she is our mother, not a dead heap of natural resources.
Nature, rather than an adversary to be conquered and despoiled, is our best
defence : Blue water, open space, hills and thick forests constitute a
fortress, says the Kural (742). Rivers from Ganga to Sarasvati and Cauvery
are goddesses, mountains from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas are gods ;
many trees are regarded as sacred (the pipal has been so since the Indus
Valley civilization at least) ; so are many smaller plants and flowers too, such
as those still used in rituals, and a number of animals, from the cow to the
peacock. The whole of Nature is seen as pervaded with the divine Spirit. This
was of course the view of most of the ancient world, from the Greeks (for
whom the earth was Gaia and Demeter) to the Norsemen, the Mayas and
Aztecs, and the Red Indians. But all those cultures were wiped out by the
steamroller of the Judeo-Christian advance, to which any worship of
Nature was idolatry (that is also the attitude of Islam).
Strangely, even in India the sages of old had foreseen a waning of this
communion with Nature. During the Kali Yuga, says the Shiva Purana
(II.1.23), one of the many signs of growing chaos is that the merchant class
have abandoned holy rites such as digging wells and tanks, and
planting trees and parks. Note that planting trees was then a holy
rite. Todays relentless wave of utilitarianism is the cause of this steep
decline, yet we can see something of that deep reverence subsist in many
aspects of Indian life, from the sacred groves still found in some villages to
the bhumi puja at the start of any construction. Even some borewell
contractors will perform a small puja before drilling the earth.
So if to Westerners Nature is a discovery, and often a shallow one, we
Indians have nothing to discover there : we only need to revive the old spirit
and infuse it into modern methods, including scientific ones. In doing so we
must remember that science is no more than a tool, and a dangerous one
as we now know. We will be able to use it rightly only if we keep alive in our
hearts our deeper relationship with our material mother. And if we should
certainly take a leaf out of Western ecologists book as regards their sense of
commitment and organization, on the other hand they could also imbibe with
great benefit something of the ancient Indian approach. The two together
could work wonders.}
*
In a letter to the Tahrs editor, a British missionary residing at Ootacamund
complained that the above guest editorial distorted the meaning of the Old
Testament ; to her, the ruthless abuse of Nature condemned in the editorial
had to be traced not to Jehovah but to mans disobedience of his creator
and to his sinful ways, which compelled God to drive him out of the Garden
of Eden. The only hope, she concluded, lies in Jesus, the promised
Redeemer, the one who came to take the punishment for all our sin and who
can alone lead us to everlasting life. We reproduce below Michel Daninos
reply to this letter, published in the April-September 1999 issue of the Tahr.
I welcome Ms. Edith Powneys comments on my guest editorial, but I wish
they had been more focused on the central points at issue. In trying to avoid
them, I am afraid she has only reinforced my argument.

First, I cannot agree with Ms. Powneys accusation that I have distorted the
meaning of the passages I quoted from the Old Testament. I am not interested
here in the Garden of Eden : as a myth, Eden is certainly not without interest,
but I am not prepared to believe it physically existed on this earth ; if it did,
what happened to it ? Did Jehovah fold it up in disgust to take it back to
heaven along with himself ? We know, at least, that man is the result of a long
evolution of primates, themselves the result of a long evolution of mammals,
themselves ... and so on back to the Big Bang. Adam was not created in a day
(or a few, if we add poor Eve), and the Genesis account can at best have
symbolic and mythical value, which is a different question altogether.
My point about the Bibles distorted world-view was simpler, and twofold :
(1) In the Old Testament, Jehovah explicitly, and on several occasions, makes
man the master of all other species and asks him to rule over all creatures ;
Ms. Powney does not dispute this. Yet this mastery is undeniably the seed of
his aggressive smash-and-grab attitude towards all other species,
something he does as a matter of course, obviously believing it to be a God-
given right (except that he should call it Jehovah-given to avoid confusion).
(2) Jehovah, always prompt to cursing humanity for its supposed sins, seems
to hold the earth responsible for themelse, why should he so constantly
threaten to bring desolation, plunder, ravage etc. upon it ? Again, Ms. Powney
does not explain {Jehovahs inexplicable fury for the earth, which he claims is
his own creation. Instead, she repeats the old story of the original sin,
implying that mans rebellion against Jehovah fully justified the latters
divine wrath. But she does not tell us why poor Earth should suffer for
mans supposed sins. Nor does she realize that the very notion of original
sin admits of a gulf between the creator and the creation. In the Indian Vedic
conception, which goes back at least six thousand years, there is no
original sin, no fall, no rebellion against the creator, no cursing of
mankind or of the earth ; there is only one divine universe : Truth is the
base that bears the Earth, says the Rig-Veda} (X.85.1).
I would also like to point out that the idea of a fatal divorce brought about by
the Bible between God, on one side, and his creation, on the other, is nothing
new ; all I did was to present it starkly, as it deserves to be. A number of
Western thinkers have said as much, from Voltaire to Jefferson or from
Thomas Paine to Gore Vidal, and have pointed out that no such divorce
existed in Pagan or pre-Christian conceptions. Let me quote just one recent
instance, that of Pierre Thuillier, a respected French historian of science ; in
his book published in France in 1995, The Great ImplosionReport on the
Collapse of the West 1999-2002, he writes :
{Christian theology defined a conception of nature perfectly adapted to
technicist ambitions.} As a matter of fact, in Paganism, natural realities were
perceived to be living, inhabited by souls.... {A spring (or a tree) was not
reduced to a physical reality, a material reality. It was something more, an
entity with a life of its own. It was therefore perfectly natural for a spring to be
respected and even revered. It was seen as a marvellous manifestation of
Nature, herself regarded as living}. The Earth, let us recall, was also
perceived as one great organism ; the Greeks called her Mother Earth. Even
minerals appeared endowed with a certain life, and all individual existences
mysteriously associated with one another amidst the Whole, of which
humanity itself was but one fragment.
{With Christianity, a supposedly superior religion, that attitude towards
nature was totally disqualified. Henceforth, it was forbidden to revere springs
as if they had a dignity of their own. Peoples whole adoration had to be
turned to the Christian God and to him alone.... It is true that nature, created
by God, retained a certain spiritual value. But a radical transformation had
taken place : earth, air, water and fire, now theologically stripped of all soul,
were no more than objects which Homo technicus was free to manipulate as
he wished.... Through its doctrine, the Judeo-Christian tradition somehow
legitimized officially the most daring technical enterprises}.
As for Ms. Powneys faith in Jesus as the Redeemer, she is certainly free to
have it, just as I am free to have no use for the Christian heaven and hell. But
I do not see what bearing that has on our discussion about Nature.
Finally, I have to note that Ms. Powney does not say a word of Indias (and the
whole pre-Christian worlds) deep reverence for the Earth as a sacred, divine
being of which we are all a part. The omission of this central point in my
editorial only goes to show that this notionwhich our modern world badly
needs to rediscover before it is too lateis foreign to her mentality. I would
request Ms. Powney to kindly read through the whole Bible (and the whole
Koran if she can) and tell us whether she can find there a single passage
showing a similar attitude of treating the Earth as our very own divine Mother.
It is a pity that Ms. Powney, living in India as she does, has no use for this
countrys rich ancient culture. I am tempted to try my luck with another culture,
that of the Red Indians. Let me quote a few sentences from Chief Seattles
1855 speech to a White governor who had come to purchase (in reality to
grab) huge tracts of the Red Indians lands :
What is it that the White Man wants to buy, my people will ask. It is difficult for
us to understand.
How can one buy or sell the air, the warmth of the land ? That is difficult for us
to imagine. If we dont own the sweet air and the bubbling water, how can you
buy it from us ? Each pine tree shining in the sun, each sandy beach, the mist
hanging in the dark woods, every space, each humming bee is holy in the
thoughts and memory of our people.... Every part of this soil is sacred in the
estimation of my people....
We are part of the earth, and the earth is part of us. The fragrant flowers are
our sisters, the reindeer, the horse, the great eagle our brothers....
We know that the White Man does not understand our way of life. To him, one
piece of land is much like the other. He is a stranger coming in the night taking
from the land what he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy, and
when he has conquered it, he moves on.... He treats his mother the Earth and
his Brother the sky like merchandise. His hunger will eat the earth bare and
leave only a desert....
Your God is not our God ! ... Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly
receding tide that will never return. The White Mans God cannot love our
people, or he would protect them....
But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people ? Tribe follows tribe,
and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of Nature,
and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will certainly
come, for even the White Man ... cannot be exempt from the common destiny.
We may be brothers after all. We will see.
I sincerely wish my critic could quote for us such lofty thoughts and feelings
from the Christian tradition ; but she cannot, for they do not exist.
{Unlike Ms. Powney, I cannot end with May God bless you, as that formula
raises some thorny questionsfor instance, Which god ? an earth-cursing,
self-confessed jealous and angry god, or an earth-loving and earth-saving one
? But let me hope simply that Mother Earth will not, in turn, curse us too
harshly, deserved though her curse
would be.}

XXXXX

{The depths to which society had pushed sections of its own induced the
latter to convert to Islam, for them the conversion was a liberation, and the
people who even today do not see this are "lunatics", says Swami
Vivekananda} (The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume III, page
294-5 and page 298. In all subsequent references to these books, the number
of the volume is given first followed by the page number). {That is one fact,
which accounts for the conquests of Islam. There are others, says the Swami.
For instance, there is the fact that the Hindu kings adhered to some self-
imposed codes of war, while the invaders did not:
" The most curious thing was the code of war of those days; as soon as the
battle for the day ceased and evening came, the opposing parties were good
friends, even going to each others tents; however, when the morning came,
again they proceeded to fight each other. That was the strange trait that the
Hindus carried down to the time of the Mohammedan invasion. Then again, a
man on horseback must not strike one on foot; must not poison the weapon;
must not vanquish the enemy in any unequal fight, or by dishonesty; and must
never take undue advantage of another and so on. If any deviated from these
rules he would be covered with dishonour and shunned. The Kshatriyas were
trained in that way. And when the foreign invasion came from Central Asia, the
Hindus treated the invaders in the selfsame way. They defeated them several
times, and on as many occasions sent them back to their homes with
presents etc. The code laid down was that they must not usurp anybodys
country; and when a man was beaten, he must be sent back to his country
with due regard to his position. The Mohammedan conquerors treated the
Hindu kings differently, and when they got them once, they destroyed them
without remorse." }(IV. 93-4)
The aim of the Bhakti movement was not just an ecumenical one of picking
the best in all traditions. The aim, the Swami says, was to prevent wholesale
conversion to Islam:
"The movements in northern India during the Mohammedan period are
characterised by their uniform attempt to hold the masses back from joining
the religion of the conquerors which brought in its train social and spiritual
equality for allThe friars of the orders founded by Ramananda, Kabir, Dadu,
Chaitanya, or Nanak were all agreed in preaching the equality of man,
however differing from each other in philosophy. Their energy was for the
most part spent in checking the rapid conquest of Islam among the masses,
and they had very little left to give birth to new thoughts and aspirations.
Though evidently successful in their purpose of keeping the masses within the
fold of the old religion, and tempering the fanaticism of the Mohammedans,
they were more apologists, struggling to obtain permission to live." (VI. 165-6).
Nor is India the only country on which, on Swami Vivekanandas reckoning,
Islam brought down such consequences. The Turks were tolerant and
humane, till Islam came, says the Swami for instance:
"In very ancient times, this Turkish race repeatedly conquered the Western
provinces of India and founded extensive kingdoms. They were Buddhist, or
would turn Buddhists after occupying Indian territory. In the ancient history of
Kashmir there is mention of these famous Turkish Emperors, Hushka, Yushka
and Kanishka. It was this Kanishka that founded the Northern School of
Buddhism called the Mahayana. Long after, the majority of them took to
Mohammedanism and completely devastated the chief Buddhistic seats of
Central Asia such as Kandahar and Kabul. Before their conversion to
Mohammedanism they used to imbibe the learning and culture of the
countries they conquered, and by assimilating the culture of other countries
would try to propagate civilisation. But ever since they became
Mohammedans, they have only the instinct for war left in them; they have not
got the least vestige of learning and culture on the contrary, the countries that
come under their sway gradually have their civilisation extinguished. In many
places of modern Afghanistan and Kandahar etc. there yet exist wonderful
Stupas, monasteries, temples and gigantic statues built by their Buddhistic
ancestors. As a result of Turkish admixture and their conversion to
Mohammedanism, those temples are almost in ruins, and the present Afghans
and allied races have grown so uncivilised and illiterate that far from imitating
those ancient works of architecture, they believe them to be the creation of
supernatural spirits like the Jinn, etc. and are firmly convinced that such great
undertakings are beyond the power of man to accomplish.
" The principal cause of the present degradation of Persia is that the royal line
belongs to the powerful, uncivilised Turkish stock, whereas the subjects are
the descendants of the highly-civilised ancient Persians, who were Aryans. In
this way the Empire of Constantinople- the last political arena of the Greeks
and Romans, the descendants of civilised Aryans- has been ruined under the
blasting feet of powerful, barbarous Turkey. The Moghul Emperors of India
were the only exceptions to this rule; perhaps that was due to an admixture of
Hindu ideas and Hindu blood. In the chronicles of Rajput bards and minstrels,
all the Mohammedan dynasties which conquered India are styled as Turks.
This is a very correct appellation, for, of whatever races the conquering
Mohammedan armies might be made up, the leadership was always vested in
the Turks alone...What is called the Mohammedan invasion, conquest, or
colonisation of India means only this that, under the leadership of
Mohammedan Turks who were renegades from Buddhism, those sections of
the Hindu race who continued in the faith of their ancestors were repeatedly
conquered by the other section of that very race who also were renegades
from Buddhism or the Vedic religion and served under the Turks, having been
forcibly converted to Mohammedanism by their superior strength." (VII. 394-
5).
Not quite the reading of history our communists and secularists would find
quotable!
Indeed, while these personages would find Swami Vivekanandas
exhortations to tolerance and broadmindedness and love appropriate and
quotable, the words in which he urges these, the activities of Christian
missionaries and Muslim conquerors he contrasts these with will make the
passages highly unquotable. Here us a typical exhortation:
"Therefore the world is waiting for this grand idea of universal toleration. It will
be a great acquisition to civilisation. Nay, no civilisation can long exist unless
this idea enters into it. No civilisation can grow unless fanaticism, bloodshed
and brutality stop. No civilisation can begin to lift up its head until we look
charitably upon one another; and the first step towards that much-needed
charity is to look charitably and kindly upon the religious conviction of others.
Nay more, to understand that not only should we be charitable, but also
positively helpful to each other, however different our religious ideas and
convictions may be. And that is exactly what we do in India as I have just
related to you. It is here in India that Hindus have built and are still building
churches for Christians and mosques for Mohammedans. That is the thing to
do. In spite of their hatred, in spite of their brutality, in spite of their cruelty, in
spite of their tyranny, and in spite of the vile language theyre given to uttering,
we will and must go on building churches for the Christians and mosques for
the Mohammedans until we conquer through love, until we have
demonstrated to the world that love alone is the fittest thing to survive and not
hatred, that it is gentleness that has the strength to live on and to fructify, and
not mere brutality and physical force." (III.187-8).
Please do not get me wrong. Swami Vivekananda did not single Islam out for
harsh words in fact he almost always talked of it in the past tense, as
something that had faded away. He did not attribute our miserable condition to
Muslim rule: that he attributed to our own divisions and sloth, as in the
following:
" Remember the old English proverb, Give every man his due. Therefore, my
friends, it is no use fighting among the castes. What food will it do? It will
divide us all the more, weaken us all the more, and degrade us all the more.
The days of exclusive claims are gone, gone are forever from the soil of India,
and it is one of the great blessing of the British rule in India. Even to the
Mohammedan rule we owe that great blessing, the destruction of exclusive
privilege. That rule was, after all, not all bad; nothing is all bad; and nothing is
all good. The Mohammedan conquest of India came as a salvation to the
downtrodden, to the poor. That is why one-fifth of our people have become
Mohammedans. It was not the sword that did it all. It would be the height of
madness to think it was all the work of sword and fire. And one-fifth- one-half-
of our Madras people will become Christians if you do not take care. Was
there ever a sillier thing before in the world than what I saw in Malabar
country? The poor Pariah is not allowed to pass through the same street as
the high-caste man, but if her changes his name to a hodge-podge English
name, it is alright; or to a Mohammedan name, it is alright. What inference
would you draw except that these Malabaris are all lunatics, their homes so
many lunatic asylums, and that they are to be treated with derision by every
race in India until they mend their manners and know better. Shame upon
them that such wicked and diabolical customs are allowed; their own children
are allowed to die of starvation, but as soon they take up some other religion
they are well fed. There ought to be no more fight between the castes."
(III.194-5).
And it is this trough of wretchedness out of which he endeavoured to life us.
But not only was the goal to which he sought to turn us the exact opposite of
what the communists and secularists have peddled, his method was the exact
opposite too. These worthies have kept themselves aloof from our culture;
they have sought to heckle it down as outsiders looking down at something
rotten in a pit. Contrast their denunciations with this way:
"Did India ever stand in want of reformers? Do you read the history of India?
Who was Ramanuja? Who was Shankara? Who was Nanak? Who was
Chaitanya? Who was Kabir? Who was Dadu? Who were all these great
preachers, one following the other, and a galaxy of stars of the first
magnitude? Did not Ramanuja feel for the lower classes? Did he not try all his
life to admit even the Pariah to his community? Did he not try to admit even
Mohammedans to his own fold? Did not Nanak confer with Hindus and
Mohammedans, and try to bring about a new state of things? They all tried,
and their work is still going on. The difference is this. They had not the
fanfaronade of the reformers of today; they had no curses on their lips as
modern reformers have; their lips pronounced only blessings. They never
condemned. They said to the people that the race must always grow. They
looked back and they said, O Hindus, what you have done is good, but, my
brothers, let us do better. They did not say, You have been wicked, now, let
us be good. They said, You have been good, but let us now be better. That
makes a whole world of difference. We must grow according to our nature.
Vain is it to attempt the lines of action that foreign societies have engrafted
upon us; it is impossible. Glory unto God, that it is impossible, that we cannot
be twisted and tortured into the shape of other nations." (III.219).
His entire life was premised on one conviction: that India had a message of
inestimable worth to give to the world. He had the confidence of course that
the ways and message of India and not the Church or the Prophet, nor of
Marx or Lenin! would in the end prevail:
"All religions have struggled against one another for years. Those which were
founded on a book, still stand. Why could not the Christians convert the
Jews? Why could not they make the Persians Christians? Why cannot they
any impression be made upon China and Japan? Buddhism, the first
missionary religion, numbers double the number of converts of any other
religion, and they did not use the sword. The Mohammedans used the
greatest violence. They number the least of the three great missionary
religions. The Mohammedans have had their day. Every day you read of
Christian nations acquiring land by bloodshed. What missionaries preach
against this? Why should the most blood-thirsty nations exalt an alleged
religion which is not the religion of Christ? The Jews and the Arabs were the
fathers of Christianity, and how they have been persecuted by the Christians!
The Christians have been weighed in the balance in India and have been
found wanting. I do not mean to be unkind, but I want to show the Christians
how they look in others eyes. The missionaries who preach the burning pit
are regarded wit horror. The Mohammedans rolled wave after wave over India
waving the sword, and today where are they?" (VIII.217-8).
He was in addition filled with a passion against the scorn and falsehood which
was being heaped on India and its tradition by the very ones whose doctrine
and slander our communists and secularists have internalised, and which they
regurgitate. Will they quote the following in their pamphlets? Better still, will
they spot how much of it applies to them?
One thing I would tell you, and I do not mean any unkind criticism. You train
and educate and clothe and pay men to do what? To come over to my country
to curse and abuse all my forefathers, my religion and everything. They walk
near a temple and say, You idolaters, you will go to hell. But they dare not do
that to the Mohammedans of India; the sword would be out. But the Hindu is
too mild; he smiles and passes on, and says, Let the fools talk. That is the
attitude. And then you, who train men to abuse and criticise, if I touch you with
the least bit of criticism, with the kindest of purpose, you shrink and cry, Dont
touch us; we are Americans. We criticise all the people in the world, curse
them and abuse them, say anything; but do not touch us; we are sensitive
plants. You may do whatever you please; but at the same time I am going to
tell you that we are content to live as we are; and in one thing we are better
off we never teach our children to swallow such horrible stuff: Where every
prospect pleases and man alone is vile. And whenever your ministers criticise
us, let them remember this: if all India stands up and takes all the mud that is
at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and throws it up against the Western
countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of that which you are doing
to us. And what for? Did we ever send one missionary to convert anybody in
the world? We say to you, Welcome to your religion, but allow me to have
mine. You call yours religion, but allow me to have mine.
"You call yours an aggressive religion. You are aggressive, but how many
have you taken? Every sixth man in the world is a Chinese subject, a
Buddhist; then there are Japan, Tibet, and Russia, and Siberia, and Burma,
and Siam; and it may not be palatable, but this Christian morality, the Catholic
Church, is all derived from them. Well, and how was this done? Without the
shedding of one drop of blood! With all your brags and boastings, where has
your Christianity succeeded without the sword? Show me one place in the
whole world. One, I say, throughout the history of the Christian religion one; I
do not want two. I know how your forefathers were converted. They had to be
converted or killed; that was all. What can you do better than
Mohammedanism, with all your bragging? We are the only one! And why?
Because we can kill others. The Arabs said that; they bragged. And where is
the Arab now? He is the Bedouin. The Romans used to say that, and where
are they now? Blessed are the peace-makers; they shall enjoy the earth.
Such things tumble down; it is built upon sands; it cannot remain long."
Did they- that is, the quoting communists- not brag as much? Did they not
proclaim that their victories too were forever? Were their victories based any
the less on the sword and on falsehood? And where are they today?
Conclusions
In brief, lessons upon lessons for friends who suddenly find Swami
Vivekananda so quotable:
Stray quotations cannot be set up to counter the entire life and work of such a
man;
As that life and work is the exact opposite of what you have been propagating,
the more you lean on Vivekananda, the more he will recoil on you;
Never forget what you have been saying about a man when you suddenly find
him handy, others are not likely to have forgotten;
And finally, never proclaim your intention to quote a man before you have
read him!
(Concluded)

READ
www.swordoftruth.com/swordoftruth/archives/mis
carticles/finabeti.html

Ram Swarup
F u n d a m e n t a l i s m i s n o t Ac c i d e n t a l b u t E s s e n t i a l
to Islam
Mr. Mushirul Hasan's innocuous opposition to th
e ban on The Satanic Verses has stirred a horne
t's nest. He attempted an apology but could not
save himself from the hounds. On May 22, the fi
re-eating Imam of Jama Masjid declared from the
pulpit that 'anyone who defends Salman Rushdie
is defiling Islam'. The students of the Jamia Mill
i a s h o u t e d : "{ Q a u m k a g a d d a r , M a u t k a h a q d a r] " (
Betrayer of the community, deserver of death).
Did Mr. Hasan badly miscalculate? Did he not re
alize the moral pressures under which he was w
orking? Or, did he think he could brazen it out a
nd earn an instant reputation as a liberal and a
progressive without having to pay a price for it?
Whatever his compulsions, the episode has prov
e d a g a i n t h a t {t h e r e a r e n o t m a n y M u s l i m l i b e r a l
s around, that they have to work under great pre
ssure, and that though they might establish thei
r credentials cheaply among Hindu secularists, t
hey will have to work at a more fundamental lev
el to deserve it.}
{T h e J a m i a M i l l i a c o n t r o v e r s y o f f e r e d i t s o w n d i l
emma to India's secularists who have a close all
iance with Islamism. The alliance works under a
veneer of liberal-sounding slogans. But when th
e Muslims themselves are divided, the secularist
s too are paralysed and have recourse to equivo
cation. To retain their ideological face, they mu
st appear to support the Muslim liberals, but in
p r a c t i c e t h e y g o a l o n g w i t h t h e B u k h a r i s , Al i M i a
ns, Saits and Shahabuddins. The sleight of hand
satisfies no party. The Muslim liberals feel let d
own. The Muslim fundamentalists feel the secula
rists must follow the mainstream Islam more gra
cefully. They expect the Hindu secularists to ab
andon hypocrisy and own up to the alliance with
Islam.}
{The fundamentalists have repeatedly proved tha
t the so called Muslim liberals do not matter. It
is they who represent the authentic voice of Isla
m. That is, the voice of the Quran and the Sunna
h, and Muslim law and history. They expect Hind
u secularists to realize this.}
Muslim fundamentalists have proved that Islam's
scripture, its Sunnah, its canonical writings and
its history are on their side. A book like The Sat
anic Verses is blasphemous and the punishment
of its author is death. This was clear from the c
ontroversy that followed the banning of the book
a n d t h e d e a t h f a t w a b y Ay a t o l l a h K h o m e i n i a g a i n
st Salman Rushdie. The Muslim world was seized
by a paroxysm of hate and demanded his blood.
The author had few defenders even on compassi
onate grounds in his community. Muslims in Indi
a were no exception.
But there was one exception. Mr. Wahid-aldin, e
d i t o r o f 'Al - R i s a a l a ' , w r o t e a g a i n s t t h e d e a t h s e
ntence. He based his arguments not on the princ
iple of free speech, but on humanitarian grounds
. He argued the death sentence was against the
spirit of Islamic scriptures and law and it had n
o support in Islam's history. He tried to present
a human face of Islam.
The effort is commendable, but it was at the exp
ense of historical truth and the subsequent cont
roversy demonstrated this. His antagonists had
no difficulty demolishing his argument and showi
ng that Islamic law and history were on the side
of the death sentence.
Maulana Muhassan Usmani Nadvi, assistant prof
e s s o r o f W e s t As i a n S t u d i e s a t t h e J a w a h a r La l
Nehru University, wrote a reply published by the
Islamic research Center, Zakir Nagar, New Delh
i, which deserves special mention.
In his article, Mr. Khan had argued that Muham
mad was a prophet of mercy, not of slaughtr. In
his reply, Mr. Nadvi said killing a Shaatim-e ras
ul was a most merciful act. If he remained unpun
i s h e d , i t w o u l d i n v i t e t h e w r a t h o f Al l a h w h i c h c
ould destroy the whole world. To prevent this wr
ath from becoming operative, the punishment of
the defiler was imperative. In that way alone lay
the salvation of mankind.
Mr. Khan had appealed in the name of 'mercy', o
f which he thought Islam had in excess. Mr. Nad
vi reminded him Islam is not all spirituality (ruh
aaniyat). It was also a state and politics (siyaas
at). He said the question had much to do with th
e prestige, power, glory and domination (izzat a
nd ghalbaa) of Islam. The author refers here to t
he widely recognized fact among Muslim theologi
ans that the {success of Islam owed more to the
awe of its political power than to its religious a
ppeal.} The initial era of 'reconciling or gaining
of hearts' (mullafa quluubhum), the Quranic doct
rine of winning the hearts of adversaries or of s
trengthening the loyalties of recent converts wit
h gifts, soon gave way to the era of 'arbitration
o f t h e s w o r d ' {( f a i s l a h d e r i v e d f r o m f a i s a l o r s w o
r d ) }. T h e K i n g d o m o f I s l a m i s n o t w i t h i n b u t w i t h
out. It should inspire respect through awe, both
among foes and the faithful.
Mr. Nadvi argued that Mr. Khan's effor to show t
he punishment of a detractor of the Rasul in Isla
m is not death is 'proof of his unfamiliarity with
the spirit of Islam and its history'. He wrote that
during all the 14 centuries of Islam, its theologi
ans and divines provided a united testimony in f
avor of death sentrence. Indeed, a Muslim offen
der incurs a double death penalty. One by revili
ng the Prophet. The second by becoming an apos
tate from Islam. He quoted extensively from Mus
lim commentators, jurists and from the practice
of the Companions, the first four rightly guided
caliphs, and from the life of the Prophet to prov
e the point.
Mr. Nadvi gave the example of one lady, Umm Q
urfah, who after converting to Islam committed a
postasy. She was asked to make amends but upo
n r e f u s a l w a s p u t t o d e a t h b y Ab u B a k r , t h e f i r s t
c a l i p h . D u r i n g Ab u B a k r ' s r e i g n , w e a l s o l e a r n o f
another case from Tarikh Tabari. A songster of Y
emen was accused of writing a satire on the Pro
phet. Mohajir, the Muslim governor, had her han
ds cut off and her teeth pulled out so that she c
o u l d n o t s i n g i n t h e f u t u r e . W h e n Ab u B a k r h e a r d
of this, he said if the case had been referred to
him first, he would have ordered his execution.
Mr. Nadvi quotes another case that belonged to
the period of the second caliph, Umar. Umru bin
Al'as, governor of Egypt, informed him of a pers
on who had been in and out of Islam several tim
es. Umar wrote to him to offer the accused Islam
again but, if he refused, to put him to death. Si
milarly, Usman, the third caliph, was informed o
f some followers of Maslamah, who claimed prop
hethood in rivalry to Muhammad; Usman ordered
they should be asked to become Muslims but on
t h e i r r e f u s a l b e p u t t o d e a t h . S i m i l a r l y , Al i , t h e
fourth caliph, was informed of some persons who
had gone back to Christianity, their religion bef
o r e t h e y b e c a m e M u s l i m s . At h i s o r d e r s t h e y w e r
e all put to the sword and their children made sl
aves.
In anothr case belonging to the early period of I
s l a m , a w o m a n C o m p a n i o n , d a u g h t e r o f H a r i s Al k
indi, had asked a Zimmi to embrace Islam. He no
t only refused but also spoke negatively of the P
rophet. The lady killed him on the spot. Umru bi
n Al ' a s , E g y p t ' s g o v e r n o r , a p p r o v e d o f t h i s . H e s
aid that a Zimmi had no right to give pain to a M
u s l i m a b o u t Al l a h a n d t h e R a s u l .
Mr. Wahid-aldin Khan had quoted some cases of
clement behavior of the Prophet belonging to his
early life. Mr. Nadvi argues these cases blonged
to the Meccan period when the 'orders of the Su
nnah had not descended'. During the Medina per
iod, when Islam began to acquire political power
, all this changed. He gave several examples, in
cluding those of poets who wrote satirical verse
s against the Prophet and who were assassinate
d at his orders. These cases are cited in Mr. Wa
j i d Al i K h a n ' s M u q a d d a s Ay a a t ( H o l y V e r s e s ) , w r i
tten in repl

Today, there is an increasing demand for revivin

g the Shariat law even in those Muslim countries
where it had been kept in abeyance. For exampl
e, in Pakistan, as recently as October 31, 1991,
all the five judges of the Highest Islamic Court r
uled that the punishment for defiling the Rasul
was death, and no life imprisonment as the prev
ailing penal law provided. But in countries like I
ndia where the Shariat law no longer prevails, b
ut where Muslim opinion counts, any critical dis
cussion of the Prophet and Islam is regarded as
lacking in good taste. It is unsecular, a great la
pse from accepted ideological morality. Critical
writings are as a rule edited out and even often
banned. Indian intellectuals have complete freed
om to admire Islam and its Prophet and they mak
e full use of it.

{F u n d a m e n t a l i s m i s n o t a c c i d e n t a l b u t e s s e n t i
a l t o I s l a m }. I t i s i n h e r e n t i n t h o s e r e l i g i o u s i d e
ologies which are built on a narrow spiritual visi
on, have limited psychic base, and which empha
size dogma and personalities, rather than experi
ence and impersonal truth. Islam's fundamentali
sm is rooted in its theology, its founder and his
practices. It means that it will also have to be f
ought there. But this point is ill-understood and,
therefore, the struggle against Muslim fundamen
talism is at the best of times a phoney war.
A worthwhile liberalism among Muslims does not
consist in merely having a dissenting opinion on
certain matters of personal law and social usage
. It involves waging a deeper struggle against Is
lam's fundamentals, its concept of God, the last
Prophet (khatimun nabiyin) and the Revelation t
hat ends all revelations. For example, it will hav
e t o d i s c u s s w h e t h e r t h e P r o p h e t s p e a k s f o r Al l a
h o r Al l a h s p e a k s f o r t h e P r o p h e t . I t w i l l h a v e t o
rethink the whole question of kafirs, Islam's nam
e f o r i t s n e i g h b o r s . {I t s h o u l d r a i s e t h e q u e s t i o n
whether Muslims should have the kafirs treat the
m a s t h e y t r e a t k a f i r s .} B u t t h i s i s a q u e s t i o n b e
st raised by the kafirs themselves and Muslim li
berals can follow suit.
The need of the time is to re-examine the whole
concept and assumptions of revelatory religions,
such as of a particular community being
chosen' as the swordsmen or salesmen of God.
W h e n a d i v i n e m e s s a g e c o m m a n d s , {" k i l l t h e i d o l
ators wherever you find them," we must give a cl
oser look not only to the message but also to th
e messenger and his source of inspiration. Judg
ed by this standard, we find that most of the Mu
slims who sail under a liberal banner, bring no h
onor to it. They represent a variant of Muslim fu
ndamentalism.}
There was a time when the West faced a similar
problem when it had to fight Christian fundament
alism. It did so by fighting Christianity's deeper
b e l i e f s a n d a s s u m p t i o n s . An d t h o u g h i t s t i l l k e e p
s Christianity for export and as an aid to imperi
alism, it has tamed its wild claims at home. A si
milar task awaits those who are called upon to fi
ght Muslim fundamentalism or rather Muslim fun
damentals.