I face earth’s happenings with an equal soul;
In all are heard Thy steps: Thy unseen feet
Tread Destiny’s pathways in my front. Life’s whole
Tremendous theorem is Thou complete.
No danger can perturb my spirit’s calm:
My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass;
Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,
Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune’s glass.
But the mother answered still with words that breathed her soul of fire. “Dear my son, for joy or sorrow twofold is the great life’s scope, To be righteous in our actions, to fulfil each human hope. Private welfare, high religion, both alike should urge thee on. It has come at last, the mightiest hour of all thy life, O son. Now if thou shouldst spurn occasion from vile fear or pitifulness, All thy beauty were dishonoured and thy strength grows thy disgrace. When dishonour stains thee, should I shape my words to soothe thy mind? Like a she-mule’s were my mother’s love, a brutish impulse blind. Leave the path of fools and cowards, vileness hated by the wise. Strange the sorcery of affection sealing up this people’s eyes! But not mine! While only thou art noble, art thou dear and loved. But a graceless son or grandchild by aspiring thoughts unmoved, Crude and brutish-brained with unformed soul, revolts a father’s mind, Knowing he had all in vain his labour to create his kind. Shrink not from a noble action, stoop not to unworthy deed! Vile are they who stoop, they gain not Heaven’s doors, nor here succeed. Kshatriyas on this world were loosed for battle by their Maker high, Sunjoy, for the strife and victory, and they conquer or they die. Ever by their doom of Nature to a labour unrevoked And a fierce hard-hearted action for the people’s safety yoked, Conquering or dying, glorious Indra’s radiant world they share: Yet his heavenly mansions to a warrior’s heart are not so dear As to dare and triumph, as the gust and glory of the strife, As to set his foes beneath his feet and drink the joy of life. When the thinking soul of manhood is insulted and oppressed, Deep he burns with fire for ever and revenge is in his breast, Till he’s strong to hurl disfigured self away and nobly cease Or to crush the proud wrongdoer; other way is none to peace. Wilt thou faint for difficulty and sorrow? they but strengthen men. Even a little pleasure comes not here without a little pain, Without struggle no delight is and without delight the soul Cannot live, but ceases like the Ganges in the ocean’s roll.”
To thy race, O India, God himself once sang the Song of Songs divine, Upon thy dust Gouranga danced and drank God-love’s mysterious wine, Here the Sannyasin Son of Kings lit up compassion’s deathless sun, The youthful Yogin, Shankar, taught thy gospel: “I and He are one.”
Come in thy chariot, Charioteer, And drive me whither thou wouldst go. All within me and all my acts Make luminous with surrender’s glow.
The policy of the bureaucracy at the present moment would be a curious study to any dispassionate observer of politics. It is not an unmixed and fearless policy of repression, yet the repression, wherever entered on, is as thoroughgoing, ruthless and without scruple as the most virulent advocate of the strong hand could desire. It is not a policy of frank and wise concession, though concessions of a kind are fitfully made with no very apparent rhyme or reason. A Coercion Act is put upon the Statute-book of the most thoroughly Russian severity; it is supposed to be passed in hot haste to meet a crisis of an exceptional kind and to be urgently and imperatively demanded by the Chief Bureaucrats of three provinces who decline to be responsible otherwise for the preservation of peace and the British rule within their respective jurisdictions; yet when it has been passed, it is only applied to a single district in the whole of India. The protests of Moderate politicians against the deportations and their urgent pleas for the release of the prisoners in Mandalay are brushed aside with contempt, yet the very next news is that Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh are released and on their way homeward. Simla, vowing it will ne’er consent, has consented. On the other hand Liakat Hussain is pursued with relentless severity, a politically-minded High Court Bench discharges with a contemptuous impatience the appeals brought before it in political cases, and the wholesale persecutions of young men in the mofussil centres and the campaign against the Nationalist Press does not relax. The official explanation given by the Englishman is that the Extremists have collapsed, Sir Pherozshah Mehta is once more master of the situation, the Moderate party has come suddenly by its own and the Government recognising its own victory and the victory of its friends, is willing and can afford to be generous. With all respect to Hare Street we will offer another explanation which we think will be found nearer to the mark.
Then that happened which always happens when God brings other forces to fight against the strength which He Himself has inspired. Because it is always necessary for the divinely appointed strength to grow by suffering; without suffering, without the lesson of selflessness, without the moral force of self-sacrifice, God within us cannot grow. Sri Krishna cannot grow to manhood unless he is called upon to work for others, unless the Asuric forces of the world are about him and work against him and make him feel his strength. Therefore in Bengal there came a time, after the first outbreak of triumphant hope, when all the material forces that can be brought to bear against Nationalism were gradually brought into play, and the question was asked of Bengal, “Can you suffer? Can you survive?” The young men of Bengal who had rushed forward in the frenzy of the moment, in the inspiration of the new gospel they had received, rushed forward rejoicing in the new-found strength and expecting to bear down all obstacles that came in their way, were now called upon to suffer. They were called upon to bear the crown, not of victory, but of martyrdom. They had to learn the real nature of their new strength. It was not their own strength, but it was the force which was working through them, and they had to learn to be the instruments of that force.
People are suffering immense troubles, undergoing imprisonments and whipping. Till now the people regarded the Bengali nation as impotent. The opinion of a certain English gentleman is that the Bengalis are well-versed in education and every individual among them is intellectual and dutiful, but from the political standpoint they are lifeless; they cannot do anything. But since the Swadeshi movement began this condition has changed. The difference between speaking and actually doing has disappeared. All the patriots are, as it were, one person and are moved by the same thoughts. Our younger generation seems to have lost regard for their lives. The example of Maulavi Liakat Hussain is not the only one. There are many such examples. Maulavi Liakat Hussain does not even know Bengali properly. But the endeavours and self-sacrifice made by this brave and noble-minded person are indescribable! There are three prosecutions pending against him at present. He not only accepted with a smile three years’ imprisonment recently inflicted on him, but expressed his obligation to the Magistrate for having afforded him an opportunity to serve his country! He has gone to jail perhaps never to return again. The story of the Yugantar newspaper is very wonderful. No sooner was one editor sentenced to one year’s imprisonment than another took his place. The moment the second man was prosecuted and sentenced, a third one came forward and willingly accepted the responsibility of editorship, in spite of the warning of the Magistrate! He was followed by a fourth person and thus the paper was continued. Whenever any editor was punished, his great concern was for the future issue of the paper; he did not think of his wife and children first. In this way the Yugantar still continues. And so the Bengalis are sacrificing their self-interest and their all in accordance with the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita: “Thy business is with the action only, never with its fruits.”
Wherever a nation has been formed, in the modern sense, it has been at the expense of smaller units. The whole history of national growth is the record of a long struggle to establish a central unity by subduing the tendency of smaller units to live to themselves. The ancient polity of Greece was the self-realisation…Read the whole passage · 728 wordsClose the passage
Wherever a nation has been formed, in the modern sense, it has been at the expense of smaller units. The whole history of national growth is the record of a long struggle to establish a central unity by subduing the tendency of smaller units to live to themselves. The ancient polity of Greece was the self-realisation of the city as an unit sufficient to itself while the deme or village was obliged to sacrifice its separate existence to the greater unity of the city-state. Because the Greeks could not find it in their hearts to break the beautiful and perfect mould of their self-sufficient city life, they could never weld themselves into a nation. So again it was not till the Romans had subdued the tendency of the Italian cities to live to themselves, that the first European nation was created. In mediaeval times the city-state tried to reassert itself in the Municipalities of France and Germany and municipal freedom had to be blotted out by an absolute monarchy before national unity was realised. Whenever a smaller or different unity, whether it be that of the province, the church or the feudal fief, tends to live for itself, it is an obstacle to national unity and has to be either broken up or subordinated if the nation is to fulfil its unity. Ancient India could not build itself into a single united nation, not because of caste or social differences as the European writers assert,—caste and class have existed in nations which achieved a faultless national unity,—but because the old polity of the Hindus allowed the village to live to itself, the clan to live to itself, the province or smaller race-unit to live to itself. The village, sufficient to itself, took no interest in the great wars and revolutions which affected only the ruling clans of the kingdom including it in its territorial jurisdiction. The Kshatriya clans fought and married and made peace among themselves, and were the only political units out of which a nation might have been built. But the clan too was so attached to its separate existence that it was not till the clans were destroyed on the battlefield of Kurukshetra that larger national units could be built out of their ruins. Small kingdoms took their place based on provincial or racial divisions and until the inrush of foreign peoples an attempt was in progress to build them into one nation by the superimposition of a single imperial authority. Many causes prevented the success of the attempt, and the provincial unit has always remained the highest expression of the nation-building tendencies in India. One cause perhaps more than any other contributed to the failure of the centripetal tendency to attain self-fulfilment, and that was the persistence of the village community which prevented the people, the real nation, from taking any part in the great struggles out of which a nation should have emerged. In other countries the people had to take part in the triumphs, disasters and failures of their rulers either as citizens or at least as soldiers, but in India they were left to their little isolated republics with no farther interest than the payment of a settled tax in return for protection by the supreme power. This was the true cause of the failure of India to achieve a distinct organized and self-conscious nationality. It is worthy of notice that the Indian race in which the national idea attained its most conscious expression and most nearly attained realization, was the Mahratta people who drew their strength from the village democracies and brought them to interest themselves in the struggle for national independence. If the Mahrattas had been able to rise above the idea of provincial or racial separateness, they would have established a permanent empire and neither of the Wellesleys could have broken their power by diplomacy or in the field. The British, historians have told us, conquered India in a fit of absence of mind. In a fit of absence of mind also they destroyed the separate life of our village communities and, by thus removing the greatest obstacle in the way of national development, prepared the irresistible movement towards national unity which now fills them with dismay. The provinces have been brought together, the village has been destroyed. It only remains for the people to fulfil their destiny.
A certain class of minds shrink from aggressiveness as if it were a sin. Their temperament forbids them to feel the delight of battle and they look on what they cannot understand as something monstrous and sinful. “Heal hate by love, drive out injustice by justice, slay sin by righteousness” is their cry. Love is a sacred name, but it is easier to speak of love than to love. The love which drives out hate, is a divine quality of which only one man in a thousand is capable. A saint full of love for all mankind possesses it, a philanthropist consumed with the desire to heal the miseries of the race possesses it, but the mass of mankind do not and cannot rise to that height. Politics is concerned with masses of mankind and not with individuals. To ask masses of mankind to act as saints, to rise to the height of divine love and practise it in relation to their adversaries or oppressors, is to ignore human nature. It is to set a premium on injustice and violence by paralysing the hand of the deliverer when raised to strike. The Gita is the best answer to those who shrink from battle as a sin and aggression as a lowering of morality.
If hatred is demoralising, it is also stimulating. The web of life has been made a mingled strain of good and evil and God works His ends through the evil as well as through the good. Let us discharge our minds of hate, but let us not deprecate a great and necessary movement because in the inevitable course of human nature, it has engendered feelings of hostility and hatred. If hatred came, it was necessary that it should come as a stimulus, as a means of awakening. When tamas, inertia, torpor have benumbed a nation, the strongest forms of rajas are necessary to break the spell, and there is no form of rajas so strong as hatred. Through rajas we rise to sattwa, and for the Indian temperament, the transition does not take long. Already the element of hatred is giving place to the clear conception of love for the Mother as the spring of our political actions.
When I was arrested and hurried to the Lal Bazar hajat I was shaken in faith for a while, for I could not look into the heart of His intention. Therefore I faltered for a moment and cried out in my heart to Him, “What is this that has happened to me? I believed that I had a mission to work for the people of my country and until that work was done, I should have Thy protection. Why then am I here and on such a charge?” A day passed and a second day and a third, when a voice came to me from within, “Wait and see.” Then I grew calm and waited. I was taken from Lal Bazar to Alipore and was placed for one month in a solitary cell apart from men. There I waited day and night for the voice of God within me, to know what He had to say to me, to learn what I had to do. In this seclusion the earliest realisation, the first lesson came to me. I remembered then that a month or more before my arrest, a call had come to me to put aside all activity, to go into seclusion and to look into myself, so that I might enter into closer communion with Him. I was weak and could not accept the call. My work was very dear to me and in the pride of my heart I thought that unless I was there, it would suffer or even fail and cease; therefore I would not leave it. It seemed to me that He spoke to me again and said, “The bonds you had not strength to break, I have broken for you, because it is not my will nor was it ever my intention that that should continue. I have another thing for you to do and it is for that I have brought you here, to teach you what you could not learn for yourself and to train you for my work.” Then He placed the Gita in my hands. His strength entered into me and I was able to do the sadhan of the Gita. I was not only to understand intellectually but to realise what Srikrishna demanded of Arjuna and what He demands of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion and desire, to do work for Him without the demand for fruit, to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high and low, friend and opponent, success and failure, yet not to do His work negligently. I realised what the Hindu religion meant. We speak often of the Hindu religion, of the Sanatana Dharma, but few of us really know what that religion is. Other religions are preponderatingly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanatana Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has not so much to be believed as lived. This is the dharma that for the salvation of humanity was cherished in the seclusion of this peninsula from of old. It is to give this religion that India is rising. She does not rise as other countries do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak. She is rising to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world. India has always existed for humanity and not for herself and it is for humanity and not for herself that she must be great.
When I approached God at that time, I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the…Read the whole passage · 779 wordsClose the passage
When I approached God at that time, I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion. I felt there must be a mighty truth somewhere in this Yoga, a mighty truth in this religion based on the Vedanta. So when I turned to the Yoga and resolved to practise it and find out if my idea was right, I did it in this spirit and with this prayer to Him, “If Thou art, then Thou knowest my heart. Thou knowest that I do not ask for Mukti, I do not ask for anything which others ask for. I ask only for strength to uplift this nation, I ask only to be allowed to live and work for this people whom I love and to whom I pray that I may devote my life.” I strove long for the realisation of Yoga and at last to some extent I had it, but in what I most desired, I was not satisfied. Then in the seclusion of the jail, of the solitary cell I asked for it again. I said, “Give me Thy adesh. I do not know what work to do or how to do it. Give me a message.” In the communion of Yoga two messages came. The first message said, “I have given you a work and it is to help to uplift this nation. Before long the time will come when you will have to go out of jail; for it is not my will that this time either you should be convicted or that you should pass the time as others have to do, in suffering for their country. I have called you to work, and that is the adesh for which you have asked. I give you the adesh to go forth and do my work.” The second message came and it said, “Something has been shown to you in this year of seclusion, something about which you had your doubts and it is the truth of the Hindu religion. It is this religion that I am raising up before the world, it is this that I have perfected and developed through the rishis, saints and avatars, and now it is going forth to do my work among the nations. I am raising up this nation to send forth my word. This is the Sanatana Dharma, this is the eternal religion which you did not really know before, but which I have now revealed to you. The agnostic and the sceptic in you have been answered, for I have given you proofs within and without you, physical and subjective, which have satisfied you. When you go forth, speak to your nation always this word that it is for the Sanatana Dharma that they arise, it is for the world and not for themselves that they arise. I am giving them freedom for the service of the world. When therefore it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall rise. When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the dharma and by the dharma that India exists. To magnify the religion means to magnify the country. I have shown you that I am everywhere and in all men and in all things, that I am in this movement and I am not only working in those who are striving for the country but I am working also in those who oppose them and stand in their path. I am working in everybody and whatever men may think or do they can do nothing but help on my purpose. They also are doing my work; they are not my enemies but my instruments. In all your actions you are moving forward without knowing which way you move. You mean to do one thing and you do another. You aim at a result and your efforts subserve one that is different or contrary. It is Shakti that has gone forth and entered into the people. Since long ago I have been preparing this uprising and now the time has come and it is I who will lead it to its fulfilment.”
This then is what I have to say to you. The name of your society is “Society for the Protection of Religion”. Well, the protection of the religion, the protection and upraising before the world of the Hindu religion, that is the work before us. But what is the Hindu religion? What is this religion which we call Sanatana, eternal? It is the Hindu religion only because the Hindu nation has kept it, because in this peninsula it grew up in the seclusion of the sea and the Himalayas, because in this sacred and ancient land it was given as a charge to the Aryan race to preserve through the ages. But it is not circumscribed by the confines of a single country, it does not belong peculiarly and for ever to a bounded part of the world. That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose. This is the one religion that can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy. It is the one religion which impresses on mankind the closeness of God to us and embraces in its compass all the possible means by which man can approach God. It is the one religion which insists every moment on the truth which all religions acknowledge, that He is in all men and all things and that in Him we move and have our being. It is the one religion which enables us not only to understand and believe this truth but to realise it with every part of our being. It is the one religion which shows the world what the world is, that it is the lila of Vasudeva. It is the one religion which shows us how we can best play our part in that lila, its subtlest laws and its noblest rules. It is the one religion which does not separate life in any smallest detail from religion, which knows what immortality is and has utterly removed from us the reality of death.
