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Bharat Dharma Mahamandala : a duly registered association of Hindus formed at Mathura in 1902. In the December 1903 Session of the Congress, Sir Subramania Ᾱyyar & Prof Rangāchāri left its Social Conference & started the Hindu League & induced Tilak to write a few articles on this subject. Extracts from Tilak’s articles in Kesari: “The principles of Hinduism do not absolutely preclude reform. If it had drawn its shutters completely both Hinduism & Hindu Rāshtra would have disappeared long ago.” – “Every reform must aim at the awakening of national consciousness. The only consciousness which we as a nation can proudly retain & foster ought to have its springs in Hindutva.” – “It would not be wrong to say that the present-day votaries of social reform do not care for religion.... They cry themselves hoarse as champions of widow-remarriage. The appalling number of converts to Christianity, however, leaves them cold & inactive.” – “Every successive generation of English educated Indians is getting hardened as an advocate of utilitarianism & materialism. The gulf between this class & the masses is yawning wider & wider.”[Lōkamānya B.G. Tilak…, S.L. Karandikar, Pune, 1957, p.198] ― In 1905, the headquarters of the Bharat Dharma Mahāmandala moved to Benaras. The orthodox character of the association & its avowed object to maintain the Hindu Dharma secured for it the support of religious pontiffs the majority of lay Hindus, & some ruling Rajas & Maharajas. In 1912, the Association elected the Maharaja of Darbhanga as its president. Sri Aurobindo (c.1912?): Neither antiquity nor modernity can be the test of truth or the test of usefulness. All the Rishis do not belong to the past; the Avatars still come; revelation still continues…. But to all things there is a date & a limit. All long-continued customs have been sovereignly useful in their time, even totemism & polyandry. We must not ignore the usefulness of the past, but we seek in preference a present & a future utility…. One is repelled by the ignorant enthusiasm of social reformers. Their minds are usually a strange jumble of ill-digested European notions.... Almost every point that the social reformers raise could be settled one way or the other without effecting the permanent good of society. It is pitiful to see men labouring the point of marriage between subcastes & triumphing over an isolated instance. Whether the spirit as well as the body of caste should remain, is the modern question. Let Hindus remember that caste as it stands is merely jāt, the trade guild sanctified but no longer working, it is not the eternal religion, it is not chaturvarnya. I do not care whether widows marry or remain single; but it is of infinite importance to consider how women shall be legally & socially related to man, as his inferior, equal or superior; for even the relation of superiority is no more impossible in the future than it was in the far-distant past. And the most important question of all is whether society shall be competitive or cooperative, individualistic or communistic. That we should talk so little about these things & be stormy over insignificant details, shows painfully the impoverishment of the average Indian intellect. If these greater things are decided, as they must be, the smaller will arrange themselves…. In the changes of the future the Hindu society must take the lead towards the establishment of a new universal standard. Yet being Hindus we must seek it through that which is particular to ourselves. We have one standard that is at once universal & particular, the eternal religion, which is the basis, permanent & always inherent in India, of the shifting, mutable & multiform thing we call Hinduism…. The eternal religion is to realise God in our inner life & our outer existence, in society not less than in the individual. Esha dharmah sanātanah. God is not antiquity nor novelty: He is not the Manava Dharmashāstra, nor Vidyāranya, nor Raghunandan; neither is He an European…. Whatever is consistent with the truth & principle of things, whatever increases love among men, whatever makes for the strength of the individual, the nation & the race, is divine, it is the law of Vaivaswata Manu, it is the sanātanah dharma & the Hindu Shāstra…. I seek a light that shall be new, yet old, the oldest indeed of all lights. I seek an authority that accepting, illuminating & reconciling all human truth, shall yet reject & get rid of by explaining it all mere human error. I seek a text & a Shāstra that is not subject to interpolation, modification & replacement, that moth & white ant cannot destroy, that the earth cannot bury nor Time mutilate. I seek an asceticism that shall give me purity & deliverance from self & from ignorance without stultifying God & His universe. I seek a scepticism that shall question everything but shall have the patience to deny nothing that may possibly be true. I seek a rationalism not proceeding on the untenable supposition that all the centuries of man’s history except the nineteenth were centuries of folly & superstition, but bent on discovering truth instead of limiting inquiry by a new dogmatism, obscurantism & furious intolerance which it chooses to call common sense & enlightenment; I seek a materialism that shall recognise matter & use it without being its slave. I seek an occultism that shall bring out all its processes & proofs into the light of day, without mystery, without jugglery… I seek… – the truth about Brahman, not only about His essentiality, but about His manifestation, not a lamp on the way to the forest, but a light & a guide to joy & action in the world, the truth which is beyond opinion, the knowledge which all thought strives after – yasmin vijñate sarvaṃ vijñātaṃ. I believe that Veda to be the foundation of the Sanātan Dharma; I believe it to be the concealed divinity within Hinduism, – but a veil has to be drawn aside, a curtain has to be lifted. I believe it to be knowable & discoverable. I believe the future of India & the world to depend on its discovery & on its application, not to the renunciation of life, but to life in the world & among men. [CWSA-12: 50-54, 61-62]