Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

The Basic Unity

THERE is one unity which cannot be denied to India, because Nature has given it and man cannot withdraw or annul it. It is the geographical, the physical unity. It is so clearly and indelibly marked that it has always been looked upon as a definite unit by all outside its boundaries; one may call in question the cultural unity, if one chooses, one may be sceptic about the spiritual unity, but the unity of the body leaps to the eyes, even as the clear contour of a living organism. As we know, however, an individual human frame may contain many personalities, many Jekylls and Hydes may lodge in the same physical tenement, even so, the physical unity that is India may harbour many and diverse independent elements. Admitting even that, the problem does not end there, it is only the beginning. The problem that is set in such a case is, as has been pointed out by the psychologists, the problem of the integration of personality.

A firm physical unity presupposes, at least posits the possibility of an integral unity. Otherwise the body itself would tend to break up and disintegrate. Such physical cataclysms are not unknown in Nature. However, a geographical unity cannot remain exclusively limited to itself; it brings about other unities by the very pressure, by the capillary action, as it were, of the boundary. The first unity that is called into being is the economic. A Zollverein (Customs Union) has almost always been the starting-point of a national union. Next or along with it comes the political unity. India's political and economic unity has been the great work of the British rule, however that rule might be distasteful to us. It is an illustration of Nature's method of compulsion and violence, when man's voluntary effort fails. India possesses a resounding roll of great

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names who endeavoured to give her this solid political and economic unity; Bharata, Yudhishthira, Asoka, Chandra­gupta, Akbar, Shivaji have all contributed to the evergrowing unification of Indian polity. But still what they realised was not a stable and permanent thing, it was yet fluent and uncertain; it was only the hammerblow, the plastering, as one would say today, from an outside agency that welded, soldered and fixed that unity.

Fissures of late have opened again and they seem to be increasing in depth and width and in number. What appeared to be a unified structure, of one piece, whole and entire, now threatens to crash and fall to pieces. We are asked to deny the unity. The political unity, it is said, is an impossibility, the geographical unity an illusion.

In such a predicament the vision of a prophet counts more than the arguments of a political huckster. That an Indian consciousness is there and has grown and taken more and more concrete shape through the ages is a fact to which history bears testimony and honest commonsense pays homage.

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