Summary and Conclusion

Before we end this study of Indian history, let us cast a look at some of the salient features, which have characterised Indian culture.  The history of India is the history of a civilisation which even by the most conservative estimates is at least five thousand years old. A civilisation and culture which has survived so long and is still not only vigourously alive but has an important role to play in the future of the world must surely be based on some fundamental and eternal values and truths. Let us see what these are and analyse them not only in the light of the past of India but also their role in the future, which is now taking shape.

We shall see that there are three powers that have been at the base of Indian civilisation and culture.

·                    First and foremost, spirituality; this has been the master key of the Indian mind and forms the essential spirit of Indian culture.

·                    But this spirituality did not exist in the void; it had for its support a tremendous life force. The second characteristic is therefore her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness.

·                    And to mediate between these two powers there was the intellect. The third striking feature is therefore the tremendous importance given to the development of the intellect. Its chief impulse was that of order and arrangement, but an order founded upon a seeking for the inner law and truth of things and having in view always the possibility of conscientious practice.

To sum up in the words of Sri Aurobindo:

“Thus an ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and gust of life and, mediating between them, a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence combined of the rational, ethical and aesthetic mind each at a high intensity of action, created the harmony of the ancient Indian culture. Indeed 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. The spirituality that so flourishes is something morbid, hectic and exposed to perilous reactions. It is when the race has lived most richly and thought most profoundly that spirituality finds its heights and its depths and its constant and many-sided fruition”.

To understand the essential spirit of Indian civilisation, we must go back to its first formative period, the early epoch of the Veda and the Upanishads, its heroic creative seedtime. This period was luminous with the discovery of the Spirit.

The next period was that of the Dharma; this period may be said to have started with the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata right until the formation of the first empires.

The third phase in this progression may be called the period of the Shastra; this was the classical period of Indian history from the period of the first empires right until the invasions by the Muslims. It was the time of the great philosophies, the classical literature in Sanskrit and the creation of the great artistic achievements. It was also the age of philosophy and science, legislation and political and social theory and many-sided critical thought, religious fixation, art, sculpture, painting, architecture.

It is also important to note that this took place all over India, as much in the North as the South of India.

To sum up: Her first period was luminous with the discovery of the Spirit; her second completed the discovery of the Dharma; her third elaborated into detail the first simpler formulation of the Shastra; It is important to note that none of these periods was exclusive, the three elements were always present in different proportions.

But after that there came a slow and steep decline, which came to a head in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This last phase was a brief but very disastrous period of the dwindling of that great fire of life; it seemed to be a moment of incipient disintegration. Outwardly it was marked by a political anarchy, which gave European adventure its chance, and inwardly by an increasing torpor of the creative spirit in religion and art. At this time, science and philosophy and intellectual knowledge had long been dead or petrified into mere scholasticism. It is evident that all this only pointed to a nadir of setting energy, the evening-time from which according to the Indian idea of the cycles a new age has to start. It was at this moment that the pressure of a superimposed European culture fell upon India and that made a reawakening necessary for its very survival.

 It is in this period of decline and decay that we can see the limitations, the points at which Indian culture stopped short and failed to develop its whole or its true spirit. At first this decay seemed to have been arrested for a moment by the impact of Western culture. But soon it created a violent and decisive crisis. An upheaval resulted that began with the threat of a total death and irretrievable destruction of the culture; but fortunately instead of the destruction, it was uplifted by the beginnings of a great revival, transmutation and renascence.

The Renaissance

This reawakening or renaissance has gone through three stages or steps. The first step was the reception of the European contact; the consequences of this contact was the inevitable and radical reconsideration of many of the prominent elements of the old culture; in some cases it was even a revolutionary denial of the very principles of the old culture.

In the second phase there was a reaction of the Indian spirit upon the European influence, sometimes with a total denial of what it offered and a stressing both of the essential and the strict letter of the national past, which yet masked a movement of assimilation.

The third, has only just begun and has not taken a sure form and direction; this is rather a process of new creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind remains supreme, recovers its truths, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modern idea and form, but so transmutes and Indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms it entirely into itself that its foreign character disappears and it becomes another harmonious element in the characteristic working of the ancient goddess, the Shakti of India mastering and taking possession of the modern influence, no longer possessed or overcome by it.

As seen earlier this renaissance took place in almost all the fields of culture. The only exception was in the field of politics; this poses a serious danger to the soul of India. For a political Europeanisation of India would be followed by a social turn of the same kind and bring a cultural and spiritual death in its train. It is indispensable therefore that in the political field there has to be a true renaissance based on the genuine Indian political temperament and culture. One can neither ignore nor minimise this danger as one sees that even today a certain class of Indians are still hypnotised by the Western model in the field of politics - some by the Parliamentary type of democracy and others by an imported Communism.  And this happens because they seem to see  all the power, creation, and activity on the side of the West and the immobility or weakness of a static inefficient defence on the side of India. But wherever and whenever the Indian spirit has been able to react, to attack with energy and to create with éclat, the European glamour has begun immediately to lose its hypnotic power.

We shall take up now a brief resume of the political movements in India in the last century and a half. 

As already seen, the first phase of the Indian political revival started with the formation of the Indian National Congress. This phase was dominated by the Moderate philosophy of the Congress.  The essentials of the movement may be summed up thus:

·                    An implicit faith in the British sense of justice and fairplay.

·                    The determination to work within the framework of the constitution as laid down by the British and by non-violent means.

·                    No clear cut goal for political freedom; only some reforms and a greater participation in the government; 

·                    The method adopted to fulfill these demands were: pray, petition and protest; even for its shamefully modest demands, flattery to gain the goodwill of the British

In the second phase, led by Sri Aurobindo, Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai and Bepin Chandra Pal, the movement took a new orientation. The Swadeshi movement as it was called attempted to override the previous apparent impossibility of political creation by the Indian spirit upon other than imitative European lines. This movement pursued a quite new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception and to make them instruments of self-expression rather than objects in themselves.  No doubt it failed, but that was not due to any falsity in its inspiration, but rather due to the strength of a hostile pressure and the weakness still left by a past decadence. Although its incipient creations were broken or left languishing and deprived of their original significance, yet they remain as a finger post on the roads. The attempt is bound to be renewed as soon as a wider gate is opened under more favourable conditions. Till that attempt comes a serious danger besets the soul of India.

The third phase began with the advent of Gandhi. It seemed at one point of time that there would be a continuation of the movement started in the second phase. Gandhi with his enormous popularity and his hold on the Indian masses seemed poised to continue the spiritual turn given in the previous stage. But that was not to be. There was a distinct shift from the Indian spiritual turn to a more moral and in some ways a Christian turn, however well garbed it was in the Indian attire. Gandhi gave a completely new interpretation of the Indian spirit and it is this vision that stills holds sway among a very large section of the Indian intelligentsia and political elite. Let us therefore study this aspect in some detail.

We shall start however, with the great contributions of Gandhi in the political field. Firstly, he created a tremendous awakening in the masses to their political rights and privileges. In the first phase from 1885 to 1905, the awakening was restricted only to the elite; in the second or the Swadeshi phase, the whole middle class and a certain section of the poorer class were touched. But with the advent of Gandhi, every section of the nation from the elite to the peasant woke up and the revolutionary spirit was kindled all over India.

The second most outstanding feature of the Gandhian era was the willingness of people to endure and face with courage the hardships and punishments inflicted by the British Government. In addition there were two other contributions: The first was that the Congress had really become a mass movement and secondly the Congress party was almost overnight turned into a revolutionary party. It was no longer a merely deliberative organisation; it had become an organised fighting party pledged to action and revolution. And Gandhi himself inspired this. For he was a man of great courage and by his personal example inspired the Indian people.

The third important contribution was the concept of Sarvodaya or Gram Swaraj. In this concept, the village (and villager) was at the centre of Gandhi's thought insofar as India's social and political organisation was concerned. As with all of Gandhi's ideas, Gram swaraj should be understood and viewed within the context of the twin beacons of Truth and nonviolence. However, put simply, the fundamental concept of Gram swaraj was that every village should be its own republic, "independent of its neighbors for its own vital wants and yet interdependent for many others in which dependence is necessary," In this view each village should be basically self-reliant, making provision for all necessities of life - food, clothing, clean water, sanitation, housing, education and so on, including government and self-defence, and all socially useful amenities required by a community. Full independence would mean that every village would be a republic with full powers. These were revolutionary ideas. Unfortunately, Nehru who was a strong believer in Socialism never accepted this and therefore, even long after India attained independence, it remained only a theoretical proposition. But it contains in it a great truth, which will have to be recognized in the future economic development of India.

However, there were some elements in the Gandhian approach, which did not reflect the values of true Indian spirituality.

The first such element was in regard to non-violence. For Gandhi, non-violence was an absolute rule applicable in all circumstances. According to Gandhi, Indian culture was synonymous with absolute non-violence; recourse to violence was wrong in any situation and therefore non-violence was an absolute law to be followed in all circumstances. The nation was less sacred to him than the principle of non-violence; it was secondary in his list of priorities and wherever there was a conflict among these principles or values, the nation was sacrificed to the principle of non-violence. The natural casualty was Indian nationalism. One would naturally ask: What was it that was wrong in this principle of non-violence? Was it not a basic Indian value? The answer is that in its essence non-violence is a spiritual truth and therefore perfectly right and justified; but when it takes on a mental form, it becomes a distortion of the Truth. True Hinduism enjoins a spiritual or ethical purity of the mind with action as one outward index. It says strongly enough, almost too strongly, “Thou shouldst not kill,” but insists more firmly on the injunction, “Thou shalt not hate, thou shalt not yield to greed, anger or malice,” for these are the roots of killing. And Hinduism admits relative standards, a wisdom too hard for the European intelligence. Non-injuring is the very highest of its laws, ahimsa paramo dharmah; still it does not lay it down as a physical rule for the warrior, but insistently demands from him mercy, chivalry, respect for the non-belligerent, the weak, the unarmed, the vanquished, the prisoner, the wounded, the fugitive, and so escapes the unpracticality of a too absolutist rule for all life. A misunderstanding of this inwardness and this wise relativity is perhaps responsible for much misrepresentation. The Western ethicist likes to have a high standard as a counsel of perfection and is not too much concerned if it is honoured more by the breach than by the observance; Indian ethics puts up an equally high and often higher standard; but less concerned with high professions than with truth of life, it admits stages of progress and in the lower stages is satisfied if it can moralise as much as possible those who are not yet capable of the highest ethical concepts and practice. The Western mind is unable to understand this; for it believes that Mind is the highest instrument of knowledge. The Indian mind does not accept this contention; the Mind cannot grasp the whole of the truth, it grasps only one aspect of the truth and ignores other aspects. And therefore all our moral ideals, which are mental translations of the truth, are ill evolved, ignorant and arbitrary constructions rather than transcriptions of the eternal truths of the spirit. They tend to become authoritative and dogmatic, and assert certain absolute standards in theory; but in practice every existing system of ethics proves either in application unworkable or is in fact a constant coming short of the absolute standard to which the ideal pretends. It was this falsity of placing Mind above Spirit that gave a wrong direction to Indian spirituality.

The second area was in regard to Hindu-Muslim unity. This is no doubt a noble ideal and it goes without saying that this unity must be brought about. But the method proposed to bring about this unity was false. For it demanded that the Hindus being the majority community should be prepared to sacrifice all their interests and culture on the altar of unity. This was a shortsighted and self-defeating policy. It not only encouraged Muslim aggressiveness and fanaticism but also suppressed the Hindus. No unity can be one-sided, there has to be an attempt to understand both sides. The ultimate result of this one-sided approach was the creation of Pakistan, something that even Gandhi did not want, but which was the natural and inevitable consequence of his policies. This tendency to sacrifice the essential values of Hinduism was a great error and is now leading to a backlash. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: “As for the Hindu-Muslim affair, I saw no reason why the greatness of India's past or her spirituality should be thrown into the waste paper basket in order to conciliate the Muslims who would not at all be conciliated by such a stupidity”.

The Future

Let us now look at the future and see how India can fulfill its true destiny.

If we want to secure the future of India and progress according to its natural Swadharma three steps have to be taken.

·                    Make spirituality the central motive force of India

·                    Further this process by moving beyond the religious spirit.

·                    Create an Indian Nationalism, a nationalism that harmonizes all religions, all political views, all economic systems and is all-inclusive.

If India is to fulfill its higher destiny and take its proper place in the comity of nations, it must insist much more finally and integrally than it has as yet done on its spiritual turn, on the greater and greater action of the spiritual motive in every sphere of our living.

We shall quote a passage from Sri Aurobindo which sums up the whole position:

“India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of every thing new that comes to us in the stream of time or happens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed   by the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible and above all unspiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light or 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. Religion has been a central preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined India, precisely because we made the whole of life religion or religion the whole of life, we have failed in life and gone under. I will not answer, adopting the language used by the poet in a slightly different connection that our fall does not matter and that the dust in which India lies is sacred. The fall, the failure does matter, and to lie in the dust is no sound position for man or nation.  But the reason assigned is not the true one.  If the majority of Indians had indeed made the whole of their lives religion in the true sense of the word, we would not be where we are now; it was because their public life became most irreligious, egoistic, self-seeking, materialistic that they   fell. It is possible that on one side we deviated too much into an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an excessive externalism of ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship, and on the other into a too world-shunning asceticism which drew away the best minds who were thus lost to society instead of standing like the ancient Rishis as its spiritual support and its   illuminating life-givers. But the root of the matter was the dwindling of the spiritual impulse in its generality and broadness, the decline of intellectual activity and freedom, the waning of great ideals, the loss of the gust of life.”

“Nor does spirituality mean the moulding of the whole type of the national being to suit the limited dogmas, forms, tenets of a particular religion, as was often enough attempted by the old societies, an idea    which still persists in many minds by the power of old mental habits and associations; clearly such an attempt would be impossible, even if it were desirable in a country full of the most diverse religious opinions and harbouring too three distinct general forms as Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, to  say nothing  of  the numerous special forms to which each  has  given birth  . Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion and in the larger ideas that are now coming on us, even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or brand of the one universal religion; by which we shall understand in the future man’s seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greatest self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values”.

One of the most serious problems facing India today is the Hindu-Muslim problem. There are two conceivable solutions, the rise of a greater spiritual principle and formulation which would reconcile the two and a political patriotism surmounting the religious struggle and uniting the two communities".     

During the freedom struggle an attempt was made to create this political patriotism and was partially successful but in the end the religious intolerance and mistrust took over and the result was the partition of the country.                         

It is now high time to attempt the solution of the problem on both these lines. The institution of SAARC is itself a first step and opportunity in this direction and this forum can be used to create patriotism on both political and economic lines.

As for religion, the solution lies in this approach.

"The conflict of religions arises because each one claims the exclusive truth and demands a complete adherence to it by the method of dogma, ritual, ceremony and prescribed acts. The solution would be, first to recognize that the real truth of religion is in the spiritual experiences of which it is an outer formulation. To transcend therefore the outer form, and insist on the spiritual experience and in addition to recognize that there can be infinite and valid varieties of spiritual experiences is the important step in the solution. It is not by insisting on religion that India and the world can be reconstructed. The new world will transcend religions and will insist on the purity of spiritual experience.

Instead of taking religions in their outward forms, which are precisely dogmas and intellectual conceptions, if we take them in their   spirit, in the principle they represent there is no difficulty in unifying them. They are simply different aspects of human progress, which complete each other perfectly well and should be united with many others yet to form a more total and more complete progress, a more integral approach to the Divine.

India’s attempt in her religion was to some extent directed to this inner perception; it is at present lost but we must   now place forward this perception clearly and radically, not revive religion or religious spirit, but present the ideal of spiritual perfection which consists of an integral realization of the spirit and its full manifestation on physical life".

Regarding Indian Nationalism, we must put forward a nationalism, which harmonizes all religion, region, caste and creed.  Here is a passage from Sri Aurobindo that   exemplifies this approach:

“The new [Indian Nationalism] overleaps every barrier; it calls to the clerk at his counter, the trader in his shop, the peasant at his plough; it summons the Brahmin from his temple and takes the hand of the Chandala in his degradation; it seeks out the student in his College, the schoolboy at his book, it touches the very child in its mother's arms; its eye searches the jungle for the Santal and travels the hills for the wild tribes of the mountains. It cares nothing for age or sex or caste or wealth or education or respectability; it mocks at the talk of a stake in the country; it spurns aside the demand for a property qualification or a certificate of literacy. It speaks to the illiterate or the man in the street in such rude vigorous language as he best understands, to youth and the enthusiast in accents of poetry, in language of fire, to the thinker in the terms of philosophy and logic, to the Hindu it repeats the name of Kali, the Mahomedan it spurs to action for the glory of Islam. It cries to all to come forth, to help in God's work and remake a nation, each with what his creed or his culture, his strength, his manhood or his genius can give to the new nationality. The only qualification it asks for is a body made in the womb of an Indian mother, a heart that can feel for India, a brain that can think and plan for her greatness, a tongue that can adore her name or hands that can fight in her quarrel”.

When these three things are done, then India will be on the high road to the fulfillment of its destiny.

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