Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

28

Bhawani Mandir

Needless to say that Bhawani Mandir was sure to be adjudged seditious matter by the British Government of India. The revolutionaries' chief means of propaganda was the publication of books and periodicals. The pamphlet Bhawani Mandir provided them with a golden opportunity.

"The pamphlet opened with an invocation of Bhawani," Barin stated, "and in most stirring and appealing language called for initiates to this cult in the new spirit of Nationalism. But the appeal was more in the nature of a spiritual than a political one, as the failure of the first attempt (1902-1904) at the formation of a secret society clearly proved that without spiritual background, the movement was not likely to have the moral stamina required for the facing of death ungrudgingly, nor for giving moral tone to terrorist activities."

On 10 December 1917, the British Government set up a Sedition Committe with Mr. Justice Rowlatt as President. The Commitee submitted its report on 15 April 1918. Among the pile of materials it studied, three books in particular drew its attention. Bhawani Mandir was the first. "The Bhawani Mandir

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(temple to Bhawani, one of the manifestations of Goddess Kali)" ran the Report, "exalt Bhawani as the manifestation of Sakti. Indians must acquire mental, physical, moral and spiritual strength.... They must draw strength from religion. How this is to be done is described in moving and powerful terms. The book is a remarkable instance of perversion of religious ideals to political purposes." A little farther the Sedition Com-mitee's Report again refers to Bhawani Mandir. "The central idea as to a given religious order is taken from the well-known novel Ananda Math of Bankim Chandra. We find the glorification of Kali, under the names of Sakti and Bhawani (two of her numerous names) and the preaching of the gospel of Force and Strength as the necessary condition for political freedom.¹ The necessity for Indians to worship Sakti (or Bhawani manifested as the Mother of Strength) is insisted upon if success is desired. A new order of political devotee was to be instituted. A new organisation of political Sannyasins was to be started, who were to prepare the way for revolutionary work. It was the liberation of India from foreign yoke." The Rowlatt Committee admitted though that "at this stage there is no reference to violence or crime."

The Committee drew the following conclusion. "The samities and associations formed later than 1908, gradually dropped the religious ideas underlying the Bhawani Mandir pamphlet and developed the terroristic side with its necessary accompaniments of dacoity and murder."

But, in spite of himself, Justice Rowlatt had to praise Bhawani Mandir: "It was remarkable in more ways than one."

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Lord Ronaldsey in his book The Heart of Aryavarta, writes this about Bhawani Mandir. "Couched in sparkling English, the booklet is a piece of inspired writing. These ideas seem indeed to have been the mainspring behind Sri Aurobindo's activities in support of the revolutionary movement."

So that the readers may judge for themselves the truth or otherwise of the above statements, we give here a few extracts from Bhawani Mandir.

OM Namas Chandikayai

A temple is to be erected and consecrated to Bhawani, the Mother, among the hills. To all the children of the Mother the call is sent forth to help in the sacred work.

Who is Bhawani?

Who is Bhawani, the Mother, and why should we erect a temple to her ?

Bhawani is the Infinite Energy

In the unending revolutions of the world, as the wheel of the Eternal turns mightily in its courses, the Infinite Energy, which streams forth from the Eternal and sets the wheel to work, looms up in the vision of man in various aspects and infinite forms. Each aspect creates and marks an age. Sometimes She is Love, sometimes She is Knowledge, sometimes She is Renunciation, sometimes She is Pity. This Infinite Energy is Bhawani, She also is Durga, She is Kali, She is Radha the Beloved, She is

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Lakshmi, She is our Mother and the Creatress of us all.

Bhawani is Shakti

In the present age, the Mother is manifested as the mother of Strength. She is pure Shakti.

The Whole World is Growing Full of the Mother as Shakti

Let us raise our eyes and cast them upon the world around us. Whenever we turn our gaze, huge masses of strength rise before our vision, tremendous, swift and inexorable forces, gigantic figures of energy, terrible sweeping columns of force. All is growing large and strong. The Shakti of war, the Shakti of wealth, the Shakti of Science are tenfold more mighty and colossal, a hundredfold more fierce, rapid and busy in their activity, a thousandfold more prolific in resources, weapons and instruments than ever before in recorded history. Everywhere the Mother is at work; from Her mighty and shaping hands enormous forms of Rakshasas, Asuras, Devas are leaping forth into the arena of the world. We have seen the slow but mighty rise of great empires in the West, we have seen the swift, irresistible and impetuous bounding into life of Japan. Some are Mlechchha Shaktis clouded in their strength, black or blood-crimson with Tamas or Rajas, others are Arya Shaktis, bathed in a pure flame of renunciation and utter self-sacrifice : but all are the Mother in Her new phase, remoulding, creating. She is pouring Her spirit into the old; She is whirling into life the new.

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We in India Fail in All Things for Want of Shakti

But in India the breath moves slowly, the afflatus is long in coming. India, the ancient Mother, is indeed striving to be reborn, striving with agony and tears, but she strives in vain. What ails her, she who is after all so vast and might be so strong? There is surely some enormous defect, something vital is wanting in us, nor is it difficult to lay our finger on the spot. We have all things else, but we are empty of strength, void of energy. We have abandoned Shakti and are therefore abandoned by Shakti. The Mother is not in our hearts, in our brains, in our arms.

The wish to be reborn we have in abundance, there is no deficiency there. How many attempts have been made, how many movements have been begun, in religion, in society, in politics! But the same fate has overtaken or is preparing to overtake them all. They flourish for a moment, then the impulse wanes, the fire dies out, and if they endure, it is only as empty shells, forms from which the Brahma has gone or in which it lies overpowered with Tamas and inert. Our beginnings are mighty, but they have neither sequel nor fruit....

India therefore Needs Shakti Alone

The deeper we look, the more we shall be convinced that the one thing wanting, which we must strive to acquire before all others, is strength —strength physical, strength mental, strength moral, but above all strength spiritual which is the one inexhaustible and imperishable source of all the others. If

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we have strength everything else will be added to us easily and naturally. In the absence of strength we are like men in a dream who have hands but cannot seize or strike, who have feet but cannot run.

India, Grown Old and Decrepit in Will, has to be Reborn

If India is to survive, she must be made young again. Rushing and billowing streams of energy must be poured into her; her soul must become, as it was in the old times, like the surges, vast, puissant, calm or turbulent at will, an ocean of action or of force.

India can be Reborn

Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.

What is a Nation? The Shakti of Its Millions

For what is a nation? What is our mother-country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation....

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It is Our Own Choice whether We Create a Nation or Perish

What is it that so many thousands of holy men, Sadhus and Sannyasis, have preached to us silently by their lives ? What was the message that radiated from the personality of Bhaga-wan Ramakrishna Paramahansa? What was it that formed the kernel of the eloquence with which the lion-like heart of Vivek-ananda sought to shake the world? It is this, that in every one of these three hundred millions of men, from the Raja on his throne to the coolie at his labour, from the Brahmin absorbed in his Sandhya to the Pariah walking shunned of men, GOD LIVETH. We are all gods and creators, because the energy of God is within us and all life is creation; not only the making of new forms is creation, but preservation is creation, destruction itself is creation. It rests with us what we shall create; for we are not, unless we choose, puppets dominated by Fate and Maya ; we are facets and manifestations of Almighty Power.

India must be Reborn, because her Rebirth

is Demanded by the Future of the World

India cannot perish, our race cannot become extinct, because among all the divisions of mankind it is to India that is reserved the highest and the most splendid destiny, the most essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from herself the future religion of the entire world, the Eternal Religion which is to harmonise all religion, science and philosophies and make mankind one soul. In the sphere of morality, likewise, it is her mission to purge barbarism (Mlechchha hood)

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out of humanity and to Aryanise the world. In order to do this, she must first re-Aryanise herself....

To get Strength we must Adore the Mother of Strength

Strength then and again strength and yet more strength is the need of our race. But if it is strength we desire, how shall we gain it if we do not adore the Mother of strength? She demands worship not for Her own sake, but in order that She may help us and give Herself to us....

Religion, the Path Natural to the National Mind

All great awakenings in India, all her periods of mightiest and most varied vigour have drawn their vitality from the fountain-heads of some deep religious awakening. Wherever the religious awakening has been complete and grand, the national energy it has created has been gigantic and puissant; wherever the religious movement has been narrow or incomplete, the national movement has been broken, imperfect or temporary. The persistence of this phenomenon is proof that it is ingrained in the temperament of the race. If you try other and foreign methods we shall either gain our end with tedious slowness, painfully and imperfectly, or we shall not attain it at all. Why abandon the plain way which God and the Mother have marked out for you, to choose faint and devious paths of your own treading?...

We need a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to its uttermost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These,

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having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land....

The Message of the Mother

When, therefore, you ask who is Bhawani the Mother, She herself answers you,. "I am the Infinite Energy which streams forth from the Eternal in the world and the Eternal in yourselves. I am the Mother of the Universe, the Mother of the Worlds, and for you who are children of the Sacred Land, Aryabhumi, made of her clay and reared by her sun and winds, I am Bhawani Bharati, Mother of India."

Then if you ask why we should erect a temple to Bhawani, the Mother, hear Her answer, "Because I have commanded it, and because by making a centre for the future religion you will be furthering the immediate will of the Eternal and storing up merit which will make you strong in this life and great in another. You will be helping to create a nation, to consolidate an age, to Aryanise a world. And that nation is your own, that age is the age of yourselves and your children, that world is no fragment of land bounded by seas and hills, but the whole earth with her teeming millions."

Come then, hearken to the call of the Mother. She is already in our hearts waiting to manifest Herself, waiting to be worshipped,—inactive because the God in us is concealed by Tamas, troubled by Her inactivity, sorrowful because Her children will not call on Her to help them. You who feel Her stirring within you, fling off the black veil of self, break down

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the imprisoning walls of indolence, help Her each as you feel impelled, with your bodies or with your intellect or with your speech or with your wealth or with your prayers and worship, each man according to his capacity. Draw not back, for against those who were called and heard Her not She may well be wroth in the day of Her coming; but to those who help Her advent even a little, how radiant with beauty and kindness will be the face of their Mother.

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The cover of the Bhawani Mandir, it seems, had a drawing of a falchion on it. It came to official notice only in August 1905.¹ Although there was nothing on the pamphlet to show who the author or the publisher was, the government was in no doubt about its authorship: Aurobindo Ghose. During the searches in Calcutta in May 1908, the police found three copies of Bhawani Mandir: one in the Bande Mataram office, a second in the bomb store at 134 Harrison Road, and a third in the house of Debabrata Bose, one of the chief writers with Barin for the revolutionary Bengali journal, the Yugantar.

1. In the History of Modern Bengal, Part 2 (p. 175), R. C. Majumdar mentions about "its Hindi and Bengali translations."

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