We must carry on with the process of creating a composite culture for our polity by allowing room for self-expression of artists without inhibitions and devoid of the undue baggage of religious identity whose influence may be unconsciously there but must never be deliberately inserted in works of art and culture to score a point. The creative process devoid of political compulsions --- and here I include proselytising religions as well within the ambit of political movements --- is a synthetic and catholic movement at any rate and will of its natural impulsion to cater to beauty and well-being induce a state of cultural oneness despite the diversity of our people. It is religion and politics that play truant with this natural process of cultural synthesis and it is here that we must as a people stand up and resist. We must not allow the hijacking of our nationhood by a host of malefic elements, semi-literate and self-serving, who work as bond-slaves of foreign powers intent on destabilising India.
Religion must be kept strictly apart from the governance of the State. The sectarian idea is backdated and must be discarded. All these hangovers of the past attributed to the will of God are simply archaic superstitious readings into the workings of Nature and have nothing intrinsically spiritual about them. Remember, spirituality is not limited to any particular people or race or community. It is the inherent capacity in all to transcend the limitations of the body and the mind and all this subservience to this apparently omnipotent entity called God is simply unnecessary. It is the ancient and medieval reaction of humanity to Nature's seeming omnipotence which man attributed to a super-personality called God and lay prostrate before Him.
But we are a modern people and ought not to be guided by ancient lamps with their partial and deeply divided illumination. We must stand in the sunshine of knowledge embracing all of life in a comprehensive conception of it and we need no God or scripture to sanction our understanding or to allow us the freedom to act the way we will.
O man, outgrow archaic conceptions and stand free for once! Let nothing from the past weigh you down, not even your own preconditioning. That which is healthful and illumining in all of the past culture of humanity, by all means absorb from everywhere without subscribing to any as the final word on life and the hereafter. If any system of thought forces you or induces you to accept it as the final word of God, know for sure that it is flawed as a system at source and reject it as poison, as Swami Vivekananda was wont to saying. Accept yourself instead of God. This is the modern dispensation open to us to free ourselves from all past tyranny.
This rejection of the past must not mean that we eschew from our lives everything of our legacy as so much garbage, for we will then stand shorn of our heritage and will reduce ourselves to mere scientific brutes. No, we must not in that sense reject anything but must subject everything to scientific scrutiny before acceptance. Just imagine what will happen to much of religion if this test is applied. The Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam will simply disappear from the face of the earth if people wake up to science. The Indian dharma traditions will survive in essence but much of their social derivatives will disappear too. Just imagine how much good will accrue to the world if this were to be but alas, things happen in their due time for the human mind is conservative to a fault.
So, we will have to live with our present predicament and keep forging changes to the system by creative adjustment which is where we had begun our discussion. The future of humanity as a planetary species is one and there is no point in any further segmenting humanity into mutually exclusive culture groups that perennially clash and destroy each other. Even if for the time being the world at large will not listen to this inner harmony of Nature, we, Indians, must forge ahead to fulfil this national mission of ours that we have received as our brightest legacy from our Arya Rishis of ancient times. Millenia ago was sounded the symphony of the Universal Man on the banks of the Sindhu (Indus), the Saraswati and the Ganga when the Shvetashvatar Upanishad gave the glad tidings thus : "Shrinwantu vishve amritasya putraa / Aa ye dhaamaani divyaani tasthuh / Vedaahametang purushang mahaantang / Adityavarnaang tamasah parastaat / Tameva viditvaati mrityumeti / Nanyah panthaa vidyatey ayanaaya."
शृण्वन्तु विश्वे अमृतस्य पुत्रा
आ ये धामानि दिव्यानि तस्थुः॥२।५॥
वेदाहमेतं पुरुषं महान्त-
मादित्यवर्णं तमसः परस्तात् ।
तमेव विदित्वातिमृत्युमेति
नान्यः पन्था विद्यतेऽयनाय ॥ ॥३।८॥'
Hear ye, O children of immortal bliss! Even ye who reside in divine spheres, listen. I have known the Great Being whose colour is of the radiant sun and who resides in the realm beyond the dark. Ye, too, will have to know It if ye wish to conquer death. There is no other way.
End of Part 1
To be continued...
Written by Sugata Bose
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