Before we proceed further let us
look into the question that the idea of a nation-state is not an indigenous
idea, as argued by the author of Sri Aurobindo's Vision for a United India, but is one that was imported from
Europe to India.
So let us first put a contextual poser, first ask the question: What is Nationalism?
That could be the starting point for our current discussion. Sanatan
Dharma—that is Nationalism, said Sri Aurobindo in his Uttarpara speech
delivered after he was acquitted in the Alipore Conspiracy Case. That was a
hundred years ago, but the truth of it remains intact even today, Sanatan
Dharma being Nationalism. Indeed, that should settle the issue at once, that
Nationalism is not politics, is not a creed, a religion, a faith, but Sanatan
Dharma, Sanatan Dharma that was not born yesterday, in the colonial days, but
founded at the beginning of the life of a collective organized spiritual
community.
Nationalism is, Sri Aurobindo had written
earlier, “an attempt to transform the bourgeois into the Samurai and through
him to extend the workings of the Samurai spirit to the whole nation, or to put
it more broadly, it is an attempt to create a nation in India by reviving the
spirit and action of the ancient Indian character, the strong, great and lofty
spirit of old Aryavarta and setting it on fire, and mould the methods and
materials of modernity for the freedom, greatness and well-being of an historic
and immortal people.” [The article containing these statements of Sri Aurobindo
was produced as an exhibit in the Alipore Case.] That became the battle-cry of
the awakened masses of the country. There is in it the preparedness to pay the
price for the sake of the country. But this nationalism is the nationalism of
the freedom-fighter and now we have to look for nationalism of the
nation-builder, the Sanatan Dharma.
So, again the question arises: what
is nationalism? what is a nation-state? who is a nation-builder? If we go by
the dictionary listing, then a modern nation-state is to be considered as
nothing but a representative unit of political organization. Ashish Nandy would
further say that this whole business is not much older than 350 years and with
the onslaught of globalization it may not last for more than 100 years hence.
The Wikipedia speaks of it as
follows: “A nation-state is a state, or country, that has defined borders and
territory. It is additionally a country in which a nation of principally the
same type of people exists, organized by either race or cultural background. In
the nation-state, generally, everyone would speak the same language, probably
practice the same or similar types of religion, and share a set of cultural,
‘national,’ values. From this strict definition it’s easy to see that the US is not a
nation-state. We have multiple ethnicities, numbers of religions practiced, and
different cultural norms. Even though citizens of the US share the
same borders and territory, we do not, in the sense of the nation-state, share
a common nationality. Another way in which a nation-state cannot exist is when
there is a defined ethnic and cultural group that exists without territorial
borders, and complete right of ownership to those borders. For example, when
immigrants to the US
declared the country to be a state, numerous Native American tribes were
nations without being states. The borders of the various Native American
nations were disregarded by the larger US state, resulting in repeated
relocation of these nations to other areas and territories. These territories
were only held at the permission of the US. Today, some tribes do have
defined borders but they still in some cases may be subject to the laws of the US, making them
not fully nation-states. In fact, most countries do not completely fall within
the definition of the nation-state, since most countries have immigrants. Once
immigrants come to a country, especially in large numbers, the nation-state can
no longer exist. Countries with only a small number of immigrants may still be
seen as containing predominantly the same ethnicity and shared culture and may
thus be considered as approaching the theoretical nation-state. Iceland is considered almost an ideal
nation-state since immigration to Iceland is quite low. Japan also
comes close to being a nation-state because the sense of national identity and
shared language is very strong. It is not coincidental that both of these
countries are islands and thus less ‘crossing of the border’ can exist.”
Awakening the Soul of India
Such mechanical definitions of a
nation-state, particularly of a thriving-throbbing nation, only indicate that
we are talking of mechanical systems and not organic living-breathing entities
with their varied potentials coming out to express in life that is a
progressive field of activity. To get an idea of the spirit of a nation let us
excerpt what Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Karmayogin
dated 26 June 1909.
No national awakening is really
vital and enduring which confines itself to a single field. It is when the soul
awakens that a nation is really alive, and the life will then manifest itself
in all the manifold forms of activity in which man seeks to express the
strength and the delight of the expansive spirit within. Each nation has its
own separate nature over and above the common nature of humanity and it is not
only the common human impulses and activities but the satisfaction and
development of its own separate character and capacities that a nation demands.
Denied that satisfaction and development, it perishes.
If a national movement is imitative,
imported, artificial, then, whatever temporary success it may have, the nation
is moving towards self-sterilisation and death; even so the nations of ancient
Europe perished when they gave up their own individuality as the price of Roman
civilisation, Roman peace, Roman prosperity.
The nineteenth century in India
was imitative, self-forgetful, artificial. It aimed at a successful
reproduction of Europe in India,
forgetting the deep meaning of its existence. If we had succeeded in
Europeanising ourselves, we would have lost for ever our spiritual capacity,
our intellectual force, our national elasticity and power of self-renovation.
That tragedy has been enacted more than once in history, only the worst and
most mournful example of all would have been added. Had the whole activity of
the country been of the derivative and alien kind, that result would have
supervened. But the life-breath of the nation still moved in different movements.
It was in religion first that the soul of India awoke and triumphed. There
were always indications, always great forerunners, but it was when the flower
of the educated youth of Calcutta bowed down at the feet of an illiterate Hindu
ascetic, a self-illuminated ecstatic and "mystic" without a single
trace or touch of the alien thought or education upon him that the battle was
won. The going forth of Vivekananda, marked out by the Master as the heroic
soul destined to take the world between his two hands and change it, was the
first visible sign to the world that India was awake not only to survive
but to conquer. Afterwards when the awakening was complete, a section of the
nationalist movement turned in imagination to a reconstruction of the recent
pre-British past in all its details.
Once the soul of the nation was
awake in religion, it was only a matter of time and opportunity for it to throw
itself on all spiritual and intellectual activities in the national existence
and take possession of them. The future is now assured. Religion and politics,
the two most effective and vital expressions of the nation's self having been
nationalised, the rest will follow in due course. The needs of our religious
and political life are now vital and real forces and it is these needs which
will reconstruct our society, recreate and remould our industrial and
commercial life and found a new and victorious art, literature, science and
philosophy which will be not European but Indian. The Greeks, aiming at a
smaller and more easily attainable end, achieved a more perfect success. Their
instinct for physical form was greater than ours, our instinct for psychic
shape and colour was superior. Our future art must solve the problem of
expressing the soul in the object, the great Indian aim, while achieving anew
the triumphant combination of perfect interpretative form and colour.
Nationalism has been hitherto
largely a revolt against the tendency to shape ourselves into the mould of Europe; but it must also be on its guard against any
tendency to cling to every detail that has been Indian. That has not been the
spirit of Hinduism in the past, there is no reason why it should be so in the
future. In all life there are three elements, the fixed and permanent spirit,
the developing yet constant soul and the brittle changeable body. The spirit we
cannot change, we can only obscure or lose; the soul must not be rashly meddled
with, must neither be tortured into a shape alien to it, nor obstructed in its
free expansion; and the body must be used as a means, not over-cherished as a
thing valuable for its own sake. We will sacrifice no ancient form to an
unreasoning love of change, we will keep none which the national spirit desires
to replace by one that is a still better and truer expression of the undying
soul of the nation.
Already we see in these utterance
Sri Aurobindo as a realized soul deriving inspiration from the primal source of
knowledge. Not too long before he had two major spiritual experiences, one
after the Surat Congress of 1907 and the other in 1908 while he was
incarcerated for a year as n undertrial prisoner in Alipore jail. The first was
the experience of the Silent Mind or Passive Brahman, and the second of the
all-pervasive Brahman or the Immanent Divine, that all is God. Both are
essentially Vedantic in nature and take lives to have them, but Sri Aurobindo
got them within months of each other. They had remained permanently with him
since then, in fact, his future life was moulded by them. It is in that
realisation that Sri Aurobindo was revealing to the nation the true sense of
Nationalism, that it is Sanatan Dharma.
The real Key for Progress is Sacrifice
Sri Aurobindo asserts that only a
nation capable of self-sacrifice can ensure its future. It is in the universal
law of sacrifice that the flowering of mankind's true progress can be assured.
An individual’s sacrifice for the sake of the family, of the family for the
sake of the community, of the community for the sake of the nation are the
widening grades of sacrifice, and with each widening the greater fulfilment of
the collective life of humanity promoted. In order that that happens it is
first necessary that nationalism becomes the dharma of every well-formed
entity. “Nationalism is the dharma of the age,” says Sri Aurobindo. If the task
is to awaken a sleeping nation, sleeping in its deep tamas or inertia, then
that is the Mantra to be put into operation.
“The first attempts to form a
nationality were the Greek city, the Semitic or Mongolian monarchy, the Celtic
clan, the Aryan kula or jāti. It was the mixture of all these
ideas which went to the formation of the mediaeval nation and evolved the
modern peoples. Here again, it is the readiness to sacrifice self-interest,
family interest, class interest to the larger national interest which is the
condition of humanity's fulfilment in the nation and to die for its welfare or
safety is the supreme act of self-consummation in the larger national ego.
There is a yet higher fulfilment for which only a few individuals have shown
themselves ready, the enlargement of the self to include all humanity.”
But if nationalism is made a tool
for self-aggrandizement, that one’s country be the leader of nations to
capture, for instance world markets, then it will prove to be a curse. Modern
tendencies of globalization or the erstwhile imperialistic designs were just
such sigs of vitalistic nationalism. This becomes more and more prominent with power
and prosperity, as is perhaps the case with the present-day America. This
can in the long run prove self-destructive. Indeed, the absence of sacrifice by
a nation to promote internationalism could itself cause elimination of that
nation. It is only the alert soul of a nation that can arrest the possibility
of such a downfall. From the stage of the Rajasic or self-possessive
life-instinct, the nation must move to the next stage of Sattvic or well-poised
character of an advanced intellectual being. In most of the nations this has
yet to happen, but in the case the conditions are still more primitive, in the
sense that the country is just stepping out of the sleep, the tamas, the
inertia of millennia and entering the crude and depraved vitality of the
Rajasic kind; poverty and corruption are two good examples of it. We are in the
formative stage and the demand of noble sacrifice is imperative. This can
happen, in the beginning, with a few elite or awakened Indians ready to do the
last sacrifice for the sake of the country. The early generation of Indians who
set the country on the difficult path of freedom was a generation of such
individuals for whom nothing mattered more than the country whom they addressed
as the Mother, hailed her with the cry of victory.
Until the renaissance of Indian
nationalism in the early twentieth century, the problem the country faced was
the uncontainable decadence of the past few centuries. In a Bengali article
written by Sri Aurobindo on 4 December 1909, we have a brief but pointed
summary of these unfortunate developments: “Unity has never been achieved in
our country, but there has always been a pull, a tendency towards unity which
throughout our history has drawn the different parts of India together
to make them one. There wer some major obstacles in the way of this natural
endeavour: first, the regional diversity; second, the Hindu-Muslim conflict;
thirdly, the lack of a vision of the country as the Mother. The vast area of
the land, the difficulties and delays of communication and the diversity of
languages have been some of the main factors responsible for the regional
disunity… Despite the Hindu-Muslim conflict Akbar succeeded in unifying India. Had
Aurangzeb not succumbed to bad impulses, under the pressure of time, by force
of habit and through fear of foreign aggression the Hindus and Muslims of
India, like the Catholics and Protestants in England, would have become
permanently united. As a result of Aurangzeb’s folly, today at the instigation
of a few unscrupulous English politicians the fire of conflict has been kindled
and refuses to die out. But the major obstacle is the lack of vision of the
country as the Mother…” There was Mother Punjab, and Mother Maharashtra, and
Mother Bengal; but never was there the Mother India standing in her glory and
majesty. But now the Mantra of Mother India has been revealed in Bande Mataram.
Yet there is another Mantra that has not entered into the soul of the country:
the transformative Mantra of the Spiritual Life flowing not only in the soul
but in every small limb and nerve and vein of the country.
The Mogul and the British—from Bande
Mataram, 7 April 1908
When the Mogul ruled, he ruled as a
soldier and a conqueror, in the pride of his strength, in the confidence of his
invincible greatness, as the lord of the peoples by natural right of his
imperial character and warlike strength and skill. He stooped to no meanness,
hedged himself in with no army of spies, entered into no relations with foreign
powers, but, grandiose and triumphant, sat on the throne of a continent like
Indra on his heavenly seat, master of his world because there was none strong
enough to dispute it with him. He trusted his subjects, gave them positions of
power and responsibility, used their brain and arm to preserve his conquests
and by the royalty of that trust and noble pride in his own ability to stand by
his innate strength, was able to hold India for over a century until Aurangzeb
forgot the kuladharma of his house
and by distrust, tyranny and meanness lost for his descendants the splendid
heritage of his forefathers. The present domination is a rule of shopkeepers
who are at the same time bureaucrats, a combination of the worst possible
qualities for imperial Government. The shopkeeper rules by deceit, the
bureaucrat by the use of red tape. The shopkeeper by melancholy meanness
alienates the subject population, the bureaucrat by soulless rigidity deprives
the administration of life and human sympathy. The shopkeeper uses his position
of authority to push his wares and fleece his subjects, the bureaucrat forgets
his duty and loses his royal character in his mercantile greed. The shopkeeper
becomes a pocket Machiavel, the bureaucrat a gigantic retail trader. By this
confusion of dharmas, varnasankara is born in high places and
the nation first and the rulers afterwards go to perdition.
This is what has happened in India under the
present regime. The bureaucracy have ruled in the spirit of a mercantile power,
holding its position by aid of mercenaries, afraid of its subjects, with no
confidence in its destiny, with no trust even in the mercenaries who support
it, piling up gold with one hand, with the other holding a borrowed sword over
the head of a fallen people. It has sought its strength not in the mission with
which God had entrusted it, nor in the greatness of England, her mastery of the
ocean, her pride of unconquered prowess, her just and sympathetic principle of
government, but in the weakness of the people. The strength of England has
been held as a threat in the background, not as a source of quiet and
unostentatious self-confidence which enable the rulers to be generous as well
as just. The liberal principles of English rule have been chanted as a sort of
magic mantra to hypnotise the nation into willing subjection, not used as a
living principle of government. What have been the real sources of bureaucratic
strength? An Arms act, a corrupt and oppressive police, an army of spies, a
mercenary military force officered by Englishmen, a people emasculated, kept
ignorant, out of the world's life, poor, intimidated, abjectly under the thumb
of the police constable or the provincial prefect. Such a principle of rule
cannot endure. It contradicts the law of God and offends the reason of man; it
is as unprofitable as it is selfish and heartless.
The nation which has passed through
a century of such a misgovernment must necessarily have degenerated. The
bureaucracy has taken care to destroy every centre of strength not subservient
to itself. A nation politically disorganised, a nation morally corrupted,
intellectually pauperised, physically broken and stunted is the result of a
hundred years of British rule, the account which England can give before God of the
trust which He placed in her hands. The condition of the people is the one
answer to all the songs of praise which the bureaucrats sing of their rule,
which the people of England
chorus with such a smug self-satisfaction and which even foreign peoples echo
in the tune of admiration and praise. But for us the people who have suffered,
the victims of the miserable misuse which bureaucrats have made of the noblest
opportunity God ever gave to a nation, the song has no longer any charm, the
mantra has lost its hypnotic force, the spell has ceased to work. While we
could we deceived ourselves, but we can deceive ourselves no longer. Pain is a
terrible disillusioner and the pangs which had come upon us were those of
approaching dissolution. It was at the last moment, when further delay would
have meant death, that a higher than earthly physician administered through a
proud viceroy the potent poison of Partition and saved the life of India. The
treatment of the disease has been drastic and will continue to be drastic.
There are those who dream of mild remedies, whose beautiful souls will not bear
to think of the fierceness of strife, hatred or agony which a revolution implies;
but strong poisons are the only salvation in desperate diseases and we fear
that with- out these poisons India will not easily or ever recover from the
fatal and consuming disease which has overtaken her. What will support her
under the stress of the agony she will have to undergo? What strength will help
her to shake off the weaknesses which have crowded in on her? How will she
raise herself from the dust whom a thousand shackles bind down? Only the
strength of a superhuman ideal, only the gigantic force of a superhuman will,
only the vehemence of an effort which transcends all that man has done and
approaches divinity. Where will she find that strength, that force, that
vehemence? In herself. We have seen Ramamurti, the modern Bhimasen, lie
motionless, resistant, with a superhuman force will-power acting through the
muscles while two carts loaded with men are driven over his body. India must
undergo an ordeal of passive endurance far more terrible without relaxing a
single fibre of her frame. We have seen Ramamurti break over his chest a strong
iron chain tightened round his whole body and break it by the sheer force of
will working through the body. India
must work a similar deliverance for herself by the same inner force. It is not
by strength of body that Ramamurti accomplishes his feats, for he is not
stronger than many athletes who could never do what he does daily, but by faith
and will. India
has in herself a faith of superhuman virtue to accomplish miracles, to deliver
herself out of irrefragable bondage, to bring God down upon earth. She has a
secret of will power which no other nation possesses. All she needs to rouse in
her that faith, that will, is an ideal which will induce her to make the
effort. That ideal is now being preached by Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal in every
speech he delivers and never has it been delivered with such beauty of
expression, such a passion of earnestness and pathos, such a sublimity of
feeling as at Uttarpara on Sunday when he addressed a meeting of the people in
the compound of the Uttarpara Library. The ideal is that of humanity in God, of
God in humanity, the ancient ideal of the Sanatana Dharma but applied, as it
has never been applied before, to the problem of politics and the work of
national revival. To realise that ideal, to impart it to the world is the
mission of India.
She has evolved a religion which embraces all that the heart, the brain, the
practical faculty of man can desire but she has not yet applied it to the
problems of modern politics. This therefore is the work which she has still to
do before she can help humanity; the necessity of the mission is the
justification for her resurgence, the great incentive of saving herself to save
mankind is the native power which will give her the force, the strength, the
vehemence which can alone enable her to realise her destiny. No lesser ideal
will help her through the stress of the terrible ordeal which she will in a few
years be called to face. No hope less pure will save her from the
demoralisation which follows revolutionary strife, the growth of passions, a
violent selfishness, sanguinary hatred, insufferable licences, the disruption
of moralities, the resurgence of the tiger in man which a great revolution is
apt to foster. Srijut Bepin Chandra speaks under an inspiration which he
himself is unable to resist. The public wish to hear him on Swaraj, Swadeshi,
Boycott, National Education—the old subjects of his unparalleled eloquence, and
he himself may desire to speak on them, but the voice of a prophet is not his own
to speak the thing he will, but another's to speak the thing he must. India
needed the gospel of Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott and National Education to nerve
her to her first effort, but now that she is drawing nearer to the valley of
the shadow of Death she needs a still mightier inspiration, a still more
enthusiastic and all-conquering faith. The people have not yet understood, but
the power to understand is in them, and if any voice can awake that power, it
is Bepin Chandra's.
To kindle the heavenly Fire again
“Pain is a terrible disillusioner
and the pangs which had come upon us were those of approaching dissolution. It
was at the last moment, when further delay would have meant death” awoke the
country reclaiming its lost breath and its life. A gold-and-bright fire had
come from heaven and kindled the soul of India, kindled it again in the
glory of its heavenly meaning and purport, in its lustrous goldenness and
brightness. Had not such a soul been there since the days of the Vedic Rishis
and through the spiritual movements of all time, marching from age to age in
the newer possibilities of the creative-expressive spirit of the country? If
the eternal values of the spirit, the Sanatan Dharma, have been sustaining it
all through, if that is the true meaning of Nationalism as given to us by Sri
Aurobindo, then there cannot be anything more ridiculous than saying that
Nationalism came to India
from Europe. The new birth of India has
already occurred in it, and there is no doubt about it; but the task is now to
make it dynamic in thousandfold activity of ours. For that we have to do
another kind of national tapasya and kindle the heavenly fire again in it,
invoke that gold-and-bright fire in our heart and mind and will, in our soul
and in our spirit to do its work in us.