Gandhiji’s described himself as a sanātani Hindu. His main concern was reconstruction of society for which political freedom was just a prerequisite. “But he was,” says a professor of history, “a universalist Hindu and not a Hindu universalist like Swami Vivekananda.” If one was Christian-Tolstoyan, the other was, through and through, Vedantic-Indian. The mistake of the modern mind lies in equating religion with dharma which is more an inner law of living than a ritualistic observation of stipulations. Here again we are reminded of what the Mahabharata says in despair: “I raise my hands and call out to men, but no one listens to me. Artha and Kama can be realised through Dharma. Why should we not act in accord with Dharma for the realisation of all that we desire?” The Gita itself speaks of the decline of the dharma and the coming of the Avatar from age to age.

There is a long tradition of social sciences in India. Ancient literature has any number of treatises, among which the famous one is Manu Smriti. According to this tradition the social dharma is subject to variations of time, place and culture. It recognizes variations and is open to different possible social systems. The fundamental principle underlying the fourfold order or cāturvarņya is actually founded in the fourfold cosmic manifestation of the spirit itself and has widespread and general validity in the working of the collective life. It depends upon the nature and intrinsic build-up of an individual, upon his swabhāva, a soul-force operating in a specific manner for each one of us. But caste by birth is a dehumanizing distortion, a crude repugnant unacceptable distortion, which perhaps came into existence as an appalling defensive mechanism against invading forces of the vital world. But true cāturvarņya in its pristine formulation is a universal or eternal dharma, a natural law that seeks individual as well as collective harmony in social functioning.

When the Vedic hymn describes the four limbs of the great Cosmic Being, or when the Avatar of the Gita asserts that it is indeed he who created this division of quality and active functioning, we have at once in it an important truth of creative organisation whose roots are in the luminous soil of collective sustaining spirituality. What we have to understand from this basic formulation is that, as Sri Aurobindo explains, “the fourfold function of social man was considered as normally inherent in the psychological and economic needs of every community and therefore a dispensation of the Spirit that expresses itself in the human corporate and individual existence.”

Vivekananda in his welcome address at the Parliament of Religion 1892 put it as follows: “While the human mind and inclination occur in an innumerable variety, four broad types of men may be recognised for practical purposes: the man of action, the man of emotion, the mystic or man of spirit, and the philosopher or man of intellect. Religion must offer a path for each type to follow, suited to the nature of each type. Ancient religion in India offered four such paths, known as Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Raja Yoga and Jnana Yoga. These paths lead to Yoga or Union or Realisation of the ultimate Truth.” The linkage of yogic realizations and collective world organization is sempiternally there—because its roots are in the function of the spirit in the world.

Indeed, where is it that this fourfold order does not exist? There are everywhere educational elite, men of study and learning, there are adventurous souls ready to conquer mountains, defend values of life, there are begetters and traders of wealth, there are people who offer their labour, their sweat and toil for the betterment of the society. The individual’s capacity, and not his rights and claims, is what gives value to such an organisation. Newton and Einstein and Plato and Kant were Brahmins; Julius Caesar and Eisenhower and Churchill and Roosevelt were Kshatriyas; Henry Ford and DuPont and Bill Gates remain Vaishyas; millions of people who remain unnamed and who work on the farms and in the factories and take care of children in the schools and look after patients in the hospitals, the wood-cutter and the plough-maker and weaver and the plumber and the turner and the fitter and the electrician, and the wizards of the information technology are Shudras who make life and living possible here. If the old nomenclature of Brahmin-Kshatriya-Vaishya-Shudra has become detestable or repulsive, let us rename it as Learning-Power-Commerce-Action.

Society must organise itself not in a mechanical manner, but by recognising the truths that are behind the creative springs which sustain it. In them is the true social order and social harmony. To follow the restricted model of industrialisation and the creation of the massive implements of commerce associated with it, the banking and trade and management, setting up of professional schools, the infrastructural support that is essential for carrying out such Mammoth-like enterprises, is simply to invite problems of psychological mismatches and maladjustments; in the process we introduce if not produce all kinds of social imbalances and disorders, we give rise to demanding and cruel self-defeating inadequacies. Non-recognition of this basic principle in our life, the world over, has already caused considerable damage. Society has become lopsided.

We tend to gloss over all such asymmetries. Amartya Sen, who remains loyal to Tagore's liberal vision of human greatness, laments that an India whose traditions were mentioned by Marco Polo as one in which speaking the truth was paramount, is now no more that India. Indians “would not tell a lie for anything in the world and do not utter a word that is not true”; but now this has been superseded by the political rhetoric of the Hindutva in their revision of Indian history, he asserts.

In an online Washington Post discussion dated 12 June 2006 Amartya Sen speaks of different identities, identities “related not just to religion but also to language, occupation and business, politics, class and poverty, and many others—we can see that the polarization of one can be resisted by a fuller picture. I remember being struck as a child in undivided India during the Hindu-Muslim riots of the 1940s, that the victims very often shared a class identity—the killed people were typically the Muslim poor and the Hindu poor. Similarly, a shared business concern does a lot to reduce the force of religion-based divisions in, say, Singapore or Malaysia, despite fomentation by religious ideologues.” But true identity does not lie in common poverty or unemployment or want of education. That is the predictable discriminatory or inequitable thinking of the commentator. In fact, as far as the thrust in primary education is concerned, we may recall what APJ Kalam comments: “Dr Sen looked at India from a western perspective.” True indeed!

What is the western perspective? But then the socialist world created by the west got crushed under its own inadequacies. The capitalist mode brought disaster to itself because of arrogance and self-assertiveness with its overwhelming success. If we are really concerned with these matters we will notice that the fundamental reason behind our failures is that the fourfold harmony of social organisation never formed its basis.

Ideas of socialistic economics, secularism, parliamentary democracy are noble no doubt, lofty ideals, but they remain fixed in their partial moulds. Most of the time what we witness is the fact that these lofty ideals essentially amount to sponsorship of state agenda in all the walks of life; in it everything comes, in one way or the other, under the state control. The result is an unbending bureaucracy engaged in self-promotion.

Religion is not a state subject; nor is education, nor can be arts and literature and sports and advancement of knowledge. How can these be state subjects? One is simply astonished by such a manner of thinking. Development of Art and Culture by a government office is a laughable matter. A dynamic and living society has to take care of all these things by itself, in its living spirit. Not government, whose single concern should be governance, but society who has to build cultural foundations and a system suitable for fulfilling its aspirations and its progressive social aims in the nobility of its expressive spirit, is what has to happen. The foolish notion of human resources development by the state in the manner of commodities is a kind of dehumanizing degradation, utterly despicable and dehumanizing, and is totally unacceptable to the free spirit of the alert society. Planning, skills, professionalism, academic excellence, expressive arts and vocative training activities are surely the concerns of the society and not of file-keepers and bureaucrats, least of the politicians.

Secularism is a belief according to which the state, moralistic notions, education are considered to be independent of faith or creed. But faith is an individual’s concern and not of the state. Does it not imply that the state’s notion of secularism is an imposition on society? One can understand aversion to the rigid and retrograde religious rituals and practices because of the traumatic experience of history; but not to recognise the intrinsic character of human nature and its possibilities and its aspirations for the beautiful and the true is also a severe limitation of the heavily rationalised psychology of the age. Dogma-bound theology can never have any place in the bright and creative future of humanity; nor has it a place in future humanity. The pursuit of perfection in the greatness of the human soul and the human spirit has to be the only criterion.

Even today we have not recognised what exactly is meant by the Indian renaissance that began a hundred years ago, renaissance that marked “the end of an old era, the beginning of a new age”. Where are its origins? What are its expectations?

“Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind,” says Sri Aurobindo. “The sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning… that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of externalities. She was alive to the greatness of material laws and force; she had a keen eye for the importance of the physical sciences; she knew how to organise the arts of ordinary life. But she saw that the physical does not get its full sense until it stands in right relation to the supra-physical; she saw that the complexity of the universe could not be explained in the present terms of man or seen by his superficial sight, that there were powers behind, other powers within man himself of which he is normally unaware, that he is conscious only of a small part of himself, that the invisible always surrounds the visible, the suprasensible the sensible, even as infinity always surrounds the finite. She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is…. She saw the myriad gods beyond man, God beyond the gods, and beyond God his own ineffable eternity; she saw that there were ranges of life beyond our life, ranges of mind beyond our present mind and above these she saw the splendours of the spirit. Then with a calm audacity of her intuition which knew no fear or littleness and shrank from no act whether of spiritual or intellectual, ethical or vital courage, she declared that there was none of these things which man could not attain if he trained his will and knowledge; he could conquer these ranges of mind, become the spirit, become a god, become one with God, become the ineffable Brahman.”

About caste and democracy, let us also read the following from Bande Mataram dated 22 September 1907:

Caste was originally an arrangement for the distribution of functions in society. In Europe it was material in principles and material in its objects. It had its roots in distribution of powers and rights and developed and still develops through a struggle of conflicting interests. Economic convenience is the calculation in its system. In India it had a spiritual object and a spiritual and moral basis. It was conceived as distribution of duties. A man’s caste depended upon his dharma, his spiritual, moral and practical duties, and his dharma depended on his swabhāva, his temperament and inborn nature. That made caste a socialistic institution. Essentially there was, between the devout Brahmin and the devout Shudra, no inequality in the single virāt puruşa of which each was a necessary part. Heredity entered into caste divisions erroneously. But it entered into it as a subordinate element. Caste therefore was not only an institution which ought to be immune from the cheap second-hand denunciations so long in fashion, but a supreme necessity without which Hindu civilisation could not have developed its distinctive character or worked out its unique mission. That does not mean that we accept its later perversions, its degeneracy. Its spirit remains but the body must die. It ceased to be determined by spiritual qualifications. The spirit of caste arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to dominate instead of the spirit of duty, and the change weakened the nation and helped to reduce us to our present condition. These perversions must be set right. If it refuses to change, it will become a mere social survival and crumble to pieces. If it transforms itself, it will play a great part in the fulfilment of civilisation. Socialism is not an intrusion of the European idea; it is essentially Asiatic and especially Indian. Socialistic democracy is the only true democracy, with harmonised distribution of functions, each part of the community existing for the good of all and not struggling for its own separate interests. The fulfilment of Hinduism is the fulfilment of the highest tendencies of human civilisation and it must include in its sweep the most vital impulse of modern life. It will include democracy and Socialism also, purifying them, raising them above the excessive stress on the economic adjustments which are the means, and teaching them to fix their eyes more constantly and clearly on the moral, intellectual and spiritual perfection of mankind which is the end.

The organization of a society is not for any exclusive purpose: the man of learning imposing himself on society because of his learning; man of strength subduing the weak and the incapacitated; the man of commercial talent accruing for himself all the wealth of the nation; the engineer and the technocrat and the skilled worker engaged in self-promotion in his vocation;—these are not the attributes of a healthy and promising organisation. Here the fourfold order of Learning-Power-Commerce-Action becomes vital possession of a decadent soul. But Learning-Power-Commerce-Action in its noble and enlightened sense renders itself as the efficacious means for progress of the collective in the unexpressed values of the spirit. But non-recognition of this basic nature or character of things in the universal working leads to conflicts and clashes; it is bound to be that, particularly when it becomes arrogant and self-possessive. However, in the recognition of spiritual growth of mankind based on proper Learning-Power-Commerce-Action there is an occasion for the higher powers of the spirit to enter into the cosmic scheme. In it proceeds the unproclaimed undeclared yoga of society being carried out by the silent power operating from the depths of its source.