The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

Indian Nationalism at Its Truest

THE word "Nationalism" is very much in the air of an awakened and resurgent Asia. But, apart from opposition to colonial rule by the West as well as to the spread of Moscow-dictated Communism, what light exactly may be considered as thrown by India on this important word? We need to ask ourselves what Indian Nationalism is. For, on the answer will depend our own future and the role we shall play in world-history.

Indian Nationalism is not a simple phenomenon: it has many meanings and directions. All who have fired the Indian heart and fought for the independence of our country have contributed some special colour to this Nationalism. But if we wish to drive to its truest significance we must pick out the figure owing to whom the national awakening first took place in its most marked and conscious form.

Nationalism, to be the truest, must be not only a movement against a foreign rule but also an expression of a nation's authentic temperament. At times the authentic temperament is seen best when everything touched by foreign influences is cut away and the typical power of the nation's consciousness is found in its stark nakedness. It is in the nineteenth century that India began slowly to arise out of the decline into which she had fallen - the decline whose one result was her defeat at the hands of foreign invaders and another the strong stamp put on her by the culture of those who held her in subjection. But the stir of the native consciousness was neither complete nor sufficiently dynamic. There were many imitative elements, apings of the West, and a general tendency to believe that a westernised India alone could be India resurgent and India competent to cope with the shackles imposed by imperialist England. Denuded altogether of westernisation the only Indian feature seemed the superstition-ridden illiteracy of the common peasant or at the best the stagnant though not uncultured religious conventionalism of the common pundit. Surely here was not any creative source: everything else

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seemed a cross between India and England, with the latter herself providing by her home tradition of democratic humanism the directive energy for the former's fight against her colonial policy.

The Country's Very Soul in Pure Power

Then a strange thing occurred. Out of a temple in which the Goddess Kali was worshipped by stagnant though not uncultured religious conventionalism there came a man who had all the outer look of representing superstition-ridden illiteracy. And yet he was as little the common peasant as he was the common pundit. He came with a religious message but it was something the pundit was utterly incapable of. He came with an absolute lack of education but it was something quite unlike the ignorance of the peasant. Here was one altogether innocent of western formulas, one who seemed akin at the same time to the two specimens thought possible of sheer Indianness and who still was entirely different from them and carried a tremendous conquering creativity. Before him bowed down the finest flower of educated Bengal. In him the westernised Indians saw authentic India stand up, clear of every colour of the West, clear even of every tinge of what typical India appeared to be in that age - a representative was he of some hidden essence of the national being, the country very soul in pure power. At one stroke the emergent Nationalism was made to recognise its central meaning and direction. The attractive veil of westernisation fell from the eyes, the feebleness of the country's decadence went out of the limbs and India knew what she was and grasped the essential energy of her own self.

Ramakrishna, the illiterate man from the temple of conventional Kali-worship, was a veritable colossus of mystical experience: in him direct and immediate realisation of the Divine Being reached an intensity and variety which made him a marvellous summing-up of the whole spiritual history of India, with a face carrying the first gleam of a new age of the human soul. He could neither read nor write English: not even a word of English could he understand. Bengali itself he could only speak: he had no schooling at all. All that he had was God: he could unite himself

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with the Supreme Omniscience, his heart's home was the Infinite, he lived constantly in the Eternal. The Divine Being and the Divine Force that he called the Mother were a presence with him at all times - from deep within him, from near and far around him, from some absolute transcendence high above. His feelings were not of the ordinary emotional kind but radiant with the true spontan-eous psyche which is an everlasting spark of the Supreme, a child of the World-Mother. His thoughts were not of the brain-mind but luminous with an intuitive perception which was in contact with the inward as well as the outward. Apparently ignorant but wise beyond measure, frail and helpless to an initial view yet a power-house that could move the world, poor and ascetic yet holding the thrill of the Beauty that is immortal, he sat day after day at Dak-shineshwar with the most educated men of Calcutta about him together with simple village folk. And from his strange spiritual personality the true Indian Nationalism was born. For the first time came the awareness of what it was that had to be resurrected and put against the shallow vitalism from the West that was keeping India in chains or, at its most benevolent, bringing her up to be an artificially galvanised part of its own glittering scheme.

Of course, the Indian genius is not confined to spirituality pure and simple, not even to a many-sided spirituality to the exclusion of all other modes of being. The very fact that Rama-krishna's chosen instrument for world-work was Vivekananda, a complex passionate analytic mind, a highly cultured master of system and organisation, a richly endowed physical nature, shows that India moves instinctively to grip earth no less than heaven. At least the intention of Ramakrishna was to reshape through Vivekananda the whole of the country's life in the light of God-realisation. But by embodying in his own figure a stark spirituality, as it were, he performed the catharsis that was most needed in the country's consciousness if accretions and superfluities, illusions and delusions, waste matter and foreign matter were to be swept off and prevented from obscuring and obstructing the growth of Indian Nationalism. The central conditio sine qua non stood out the most vividly and acted the most puissantly by getting thus isolated.

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The Four Types of Nationalism in India

If it was the shock of sheer spirituality in the figure of Ramakrishna that gave birth to Indian Nationalism by kindling in the nation a consciousness of its own typical genius, we should do well to guard against satisfaction with any lesser type of nationalist aspiration. The type truly in consonance with the cathartic shock from Ramakrishna is summed up in the famous cry of Bankim's song, Bande Mataram – "I bow to you, O Mother." The movement is basically religious, it is towards the Divine – the country is viewed as a Goddess who is not only its collective soul but also a face and form of the World-Mother, the creatrix of the universe. When the innate turn of the nation is mystical, even the patriotic fervour can be directed only to the Divine Spirit, and unless the country is felt as that Spirit's emanation this fervour will never fulfil the national life: such is the philosophy behind Bande Mataram . And it was sought to be made country-wide by Sri Aurobindo in his political days. There is a second type of Nationalism which is not directly spiritual but charged with indigenous history. Since India 's history cannot be separated from the spiritual quest, here also is a sense of the World-Mother just as in the first type indigenous history is ever alive, but the stress now falls less upon the Divine Presence than upon the particular face and form She assumes in the country's collective soul as felt in the traditional ideals and institutions , the characteristic customs and festivals, - in short, the whole historic consciousness. This Nationalism has the root s of its politics in the popular dharma. It is the one fostered by Balgangadhar Tilak. A third type is an ethical Nationalism in which certain moral doctrines are set up for the patriot 's guidance, chiefly the doctrines of non-violence and ingenuousness. Its fosterer is Mahatma Gandhi. Patriotism which, for the second type, stands in need of no defence and aims first and foremost at the country 's freedom and the expression of the country 's historic nature and does not bind itself to rigid dogmas of method, patriotism which says "Swaraj is my birthright" and will not fight shy of violent revolution and effective secret strategy, is not acceptable. A

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particular brand of moral self-discipline deriving mainly from the Buddhist strand of our culture subsumes patriotism here, just as the mystic's élan takes it up in the Bande Mataram type; but there is a difference in that the latter has a wideness and a plasticity which has a keen tact of the moment wedded to loyalty to ideals, and, besides, it looks for its inspiration towards a Light beyond the trenchant mind's temperamental ideals . Ethicism is surely not spurned by it, but there is little adherence to one or another fixed and exclusive dogma: a large nobility is sought after and the idealism is not averse to a variety in the means of action.

A fourth type that has developed both by sympathy with the third and by appreciation of the latter's effectiveness at certain junctures of the nationalist movement is one bringing a blend of the rationalistic mind which has had so much to say in the modem West. Its representative is Jawaharlal Nehru. It cuts the ethical completely off from the mystical. The third type is never without a religious bent, though the bent is towards serving God by serving men in a way the mind suggests rather than towards calling down a more than mental Power to guide one in work for that Power amongst men. The fourth type is non-religious, wholly secular. The country is no face and form of the Supreme Divine: it is not even a collective soul that can be addressed as Mother, except metaphorically. It is only an aggregate of individuals, a mass of human creatures, a large group of people with common traditions and a common territory. This Nationalism need not lack patriotic fervour or an upshot of noble deed. But, however noble the secular nationalist may be, he is bound to be uncomfortably haunted by a division in his own Indianness: on one side the historic pull of a country deeply religious, if not always God-lit, and on the other the doctrinaire drag of a rationalistic "realism". Also, the secular nationalist is bound to come upon a limit to his effectivity, for he will put himself at variance with the whole trend of India's development and he will have to make an attempt at jettisoning the most important part of the experience and thought embalmed in the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita, experience and thought which fundamentally make India Indian. The only advantage he brings is enfranchisement from superstitious

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orthodoxy, from narrow insularity of outlook – an openness to world-forces, a tendency to international vision. But this advantage is just as much compassed by a truly spiritual Nationalism: an inner largeness breaks through sectarianism as well as communalism, an intuitive capacity is there for seizing on the essentially progressive elements everywhere and assimilating the best of the Occident into the Orient. When it is the World-Mother that is worshipped, there can be no imprisonment in small formulas: the mind is wide open to the world. At the same time, no loss is suffered of the delightful differentia that constitutes nationhood, for the World-Mother is seen focussed as the single unifying soul of the motherland. It thus combines the quality of the second type of Nationalism with that of the fourth, while transcending both, and in that transcendence it resembles the third type but even beyond the latter it goes to the supra-ethical source of all ethics. Thus it combines the advantages of all the four types in a value higher than theirs.

This higher value not only answers most truly to the Indian genius and thereby promises to advance it the best but also makes a power that can carry India to a future greater than any possible to other countries on the strength of their own Nationalism: it promises to place India in the van of the world as a leader in the evolution of consciousness from the human to the divine.

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