“What is a nation?” asks Sri Aurobindo and sets himself to answer it. “We have studied in the schools of the West and learned to ape the thoughts and language of the West forgetting our own deeper ideas and truer speech, and to the West the nation is the country, so much land containing so many millions of men who speak one speech and live one political life owing allegiance to a single governing power of its own choosing. When the European wishes to feel a living emotion for his country, he personifies the land he lives in, tries to feel that a heart beats in the brute earth and worships a vague abstraction of his own intellect. The Indian idea of a nationality ought to be truer and deeper. The philosophy of our forefathers looked through the gross body of things and discovered a subtle body within, looked through that and found yet another more deeply hidden, and within the third body discovered the Source of life and form, seated for ever, unchanging and imperishable. What is true of the individual object, is true also of the general and universal. What is true of the man, is true also of the nation. The country, the land is only the outer body of the nation, its annamaya kosh, or gross physical body; the mass of people, the life of millions who occupy and vivify the body of the nation with their presence, is the prānamaya kosh, the life-body of the nation. These two are the gross body, the physical manifestation of the Mother. Within the gross body is the subtler body, the thoughts, the literature, the philosophy, the mental and emotional activities, the sum of hopes, pleasures, aspirations, fulfilments, the civilization and culture, which make up the sukshma sharir of the nation. This is as much part of the Mother’s life as the outward existence which is visible to the physical eyes. This subtle life of the nation again springs up from a deeper existence in the causal body of the nation, the peculiar temperament which it has developed out of its ages of experience and which makes it distinct from others. These three are the bodies of the Mother, but within them all is the source of life, immortal and unchanging, of which every nation is merely one manifestation, the universal Narayan, One in the Many of whom we are all the children.” [Bande Mataram, CWSA, Vol. 7, pp.1115-16] This is fundamentally what constitutes a distinct culture and civilization, a peculiar national temperament; it is that which gives a nation its nationhood. When we say Vande Mantaram, it is this deity seated in the depth of the soul whom we hail in our prayer and ask for boons from her. ~RYD