SHALL WE HEED KRISHNA OR SHALL WE NOT?
श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुणः परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात्।
स्वधर्मे निधनं श्रेयः परधर्मो भयावहः।।3.35।।
This single verse of the Bhagavad Geeta not only enjoins us not to relinquish our allotted duty but also, in a broader sense, to resist conversion to other religions and their prescriptions as well. Although, dharma does not mean religion, yet, for all practical purposes as we encounter in the real world at large, dharma would have a religious connotation and content as well. As such, it would be wise for us, Hindus, to reinterpret this epic enunciation of Krishna in post-Krishna times as being inclusive of religion as well. That would be to our advantage as Hindus as we fight this continuous subversion of our ancient culture by proselytising faiths such as Christianity and Islam that have as their agenda nothing less than the conversion of the whole Hindu population to their respective creeds. Krishna is the God of India and warns us against such a subversion and we must heed his warning and act accordingly.
Is better to follow one's own vocation even if ill-performed than to follow someone else's vocation even if well-performed --- this is the purport of the initial line of the verse. It exhorts us not to relinquish duty and exchange vocation for ease of execution or for any other motivation. This is of supreme significance in our country today where we find the government itself in a malfunction-mode. From minister to minimum employee all are shirking duty while demanding more and more of the resources of the nation as their remuneration for work not done. It is the exercise of fundamental rights all the way without any thought of performing the associated fundamental duties as well.
But on a more serious note let us examine Krishna's exhortation from the conversion angle. Several centuries, perhaps nine, before the onset of Jainism and Buddhism that swept the nation and broke through the citadels of the Varnashrama Dharma, Krishna had warned about the possible dangers of non-performance of one's allotted dharma and the imperative to even die to protect and preserve the traditions of the dharma. That India failed to observe his injunction cost her dearly and does so even now as she struggles to overcome the damages done to her social system by Buddhism and Jainism in ancient times and Gandhism more recently and even today.
The gradual decline of dharma in post-Vedic India with the increase of priest-craft and all its malefic corollaries seriously debilitated the social syatem giving rise to the reform movements of Jainism and Buddhism. These were not just reform movements but were actually movements in reaction to the existing system of Sanatan Dharma in India. They revolted against not just the social malpractices of the dharma but they went radically against the very philosophical foundation of that system, the Vedas. Herein took place the great departure from India's rock-like foundation in the Sanatan Dharma which resulted in inescapable and inevitable damage to the nation from which we are still suffering and are refusing to learn from our mistakes. It is here that we need to go back to Krishna and learn our lessons once more so that we may save our dharma and our motherland with it. All this talk of secularism at the expense of protection of our heritage and culture is pure humbug.
Buddhism and Jainism were anti-Vedic systems of thought that rejected the inviolability of the Vedas and so did immense damage to the future prospects of our nation. The kashtriya power was weakened by this doctrinaire repudiation of violence of Jainism and Buddhism and military excellence by the specialised martial class was much reduced as the very idea of class or varna was attacked buy the reformist revolutionary anti-Vedic dharmas.
It was after the advent of Buddha and that too within two centuries that India fell victim to a succession of foreign attacks beginning with the Greeks. That Alexander was eventually checked and Greek military presence in India rooted out was purely because of the Hindu thinker Chanakya who led his protege Chandragupta Maurya into establishing resistance against the alien occupation. Later Chandragupta converted to Jainism and his grandson completed the rout by embracing Buddhism. In his bid to spread the dharma of the Buddha all over the then known world Ashoka aggressively renounced martial power after the infamous Kalinga War in which he had slaughtered over a hundred thousand people. Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism helped spread it with royal patronage far and wide but spelt the doom of the Sanatan Dharma from which it has never recovered.
Buddhism also did one more damage to the nation. By preaching in the language of the people Buddha brought his message to the masses and broke the backbone of exclusive privilege of the pundits (brahmans and ksatriyas) to interpret the dharma. But in so doing he also undermined the study of Sanskrit in India and, hence, the people were cut off from the glorious truths of the Upansihads for good and were instead exposed to all sorts of gross mythological accretions in the name of the Buddhist dharma. Gradually this led to decadence in the dharma itself as latter-day Buddhists significantly moved away from their Master's original message of love and purity and this in turn led to horrendous degeneration of the polity overall. This weakened the country and with the age-old Varnashrama Dharma already severely on the back-foot and struggling for a fair survival, India became prey to foreign invasion repeatedly whose effect we suffer from even today. We neglected our svadharma and embraced paradharma and here we are where we are on account of that. Krishna we cared not to listen to and now our fallen state and our prospective fate must force us to listen to him. Else, disaster there has been in the past but utter annihilation will be for us in the future.
It is often said that the Buddha saved the decadent Hindu society from utter annihilation then by infusing fresh purity into it and redirecting its course along the path of dharma. But while that is undoubtedly true, it is also true that he did immense long-term damage to it by undermining the Varnashrama Dharma and the Sanskrit language as stated above. By rejecting the authority of the Vedas categorically he struck at the foundations of the Indian spiritual civilisation and thereby did immense disservice to it. The people were for the first time by force of will and character taken away from the best part of their heritage and culture whose distant effects perhaps even the lion-heart Buddha also could not quite envisage. Effectively, Buddha did something unscientific and untrue. He ought to have modified the Sanatan Dharma as he attempted to reform society but by his ultra-radicalism actually went against the very spirit of the pristine philosophy of the land that had seen the synthesis of diverse currents of thought thus far and was better suited to solving India's problems than the formulations of one man who stood tall. Buddhism in effect while democratising the land in social terms made it a first-time victim of a spiritual dictatorship as the 'Apaurusheya Dharma' (impersonal dharma) was supplanted by a 'Paurusheya Dharma' (personal dharma in the sense that it was based on a single individual's realisation and formulations thereof).
Buddha's towering spiritual personality and universal heart won over the masses who were suffering the yoke of Brahmanical tyranny and converted them by the hordes to his new dharma. Buddha, despite his best intentions, thus, did not act in the best future interests of the country as he created the first great schism in the land of Aryavarta. The Jain movement was nowhere near as influential as that of the Buddha and, thus, I aver that it was Buddhism that made the first great schism in the thought system of India. The authority of the Vedas had to reestablished later by the great Adi Shankaracharya whose life's seminal work set us up once again on the highway of the Sanatan Dharma. But no amount of damage control could undo the original veering away of the nation from its Varnashrama Dharma excellence of specialised vocations and the martial class never quite recovered their original status as the nation's ideology had been deviated for good into an alternate channel. Then Gandhi with his Russian Orthodox Church influence in the form of Tolstoy's thought further took the nation ahead along the original Jain and Buddhist lines while all the time affirming that it was in keeping with the philosophy of the Bhagavad Geeta whose shloka is the point of contention here.
So, we did give up our svadharma and embrace the paradharma as offered us by the Buddha and Mahavira and we paid the price for it. India suffered as the world benefited from the priceless message of the Shakya Muni. In India there was great cultural revival though in the aftermath of the Buddha's advent but what of it? India paid as much in terms of repeated inroads into her territory by alien conquerors and never could rest in peace for any length of time owing to her progressive debilitation of the armed forces in the wake of expanding Buddhist influence in the land. And the worst of it was yet to come. Christian proselytism and the Mohammedan conquest of the motherland followed by a thousand year tyranny and eventual dismemberment of the motherland were yet to come. Our population was converted not to Christianity and Islam not by the force of character and sublimity of the message but by fraud, force, deceit and inducement and the programme of such anti-national and anti-human activity goes on till date.
The Buddhist dharma incline was to be for five hundred years. Then came the plateau and then a horrendous decline fraught with tantric debauchery that sent spiritual corruption careering through the body politic of India. Two-thirds of India had been converted to Buddhism and the Vedas had been accorded secondary status in the land of their origin and flourishing. And now with Buddhism suppurating, came the reaction of eternal India from the south of the Vindhyas where the influence of Buddhism had been relatively less. The Acharyas arose from there and re-anchored India in the eternal Vedas. Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya, Madhvacharya, Vallabacharya, Nimbarkacharya, Shuddhacharya and a galaxy of great men arose to reaffirm the supremacy of the Vedic thought. Shankara in open debate defeated the Buddhist philosophers by the dozens and sent them to flames in accordance with the precondition imposed upon the vanquished in the debate. The Sanatan Dharma was on the rise once again.
But out there in Arabia another religion was making waves. It was the religion of Islam, the one true faith with its one true messenger of God which would brook neither coexistence with other faiths nor had the civility to appreciate others' points of view but had to by divine injunction impose itself on the whole world in any manner, persuasive or brutal. India even in her resurrection now was oblivious of this dangerous cult that was soon to sweep the Middle East and parts of Europe soon. Islam was soon knocking upon the door of India and she was not ready to ward it off for she had lost her military might, courtesy the great Buddha.
The introduction of Christianity in southern India in the first century of the Common Era was the first influx of religion as opposed to dharma in India and now in the eighth century we were being challenged again, this time on the western border of Sindh by the conquering hordes from Arabia and their murderous cult that forced conversion by the sword on hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who fell in their way. Early Christianity in the south of India had been benign in its proselytising as they sought by persuasion to convert Indians to their new founded faith but the followers of Islam were brutal in their onslaughts and spared none that resisted conversion. Krishna's message was now being tested in open battlefields and in bloody cities that fell to Mohammedan conquest.
The Islamic inroads had begun and Shakracharya and the other acharyas while establishing the philosophical supremacy of the Upanishads had failed to articulate in sufficient terms the modes and means for the defence of the nation which ages ago Krishna had in copious conversation with his protege Arjuna enunciated. Mere philosophy does not help defend the borders of a nation and the Varnashrama Dharma having been weakened permanently by the Buddha and his followers, India fell yet again to foreign invasion. This time the servitude would last a thousand years and when freedom would eventually be attained, India would find herself partitioned, her landmass truncated, her hopes of integral well-being shattered by the fell hand of the political scissor. And all this because even in the movement for freedom the neo-Buddha in the shape of Gandhi imposed his will on the nation to make non-violent resistance the creed. Gandhi assiduously avoided any discussion on the building up of an army of disciplined Congressmen who would in course of time lead an armed revolution to evict the British and then take over the effective defence of the land against foreign aggression. In this point he differed with Subhas Chandra Bose and the rest is horrendous history that we are all aware of.
But to return to the Islamic invasion. Why term it Islamic invasion and not ordinary military invasion of a foreign aggressor? The reason is that the invasions from Arabia, Afghanistan and the like were inspired by the proselytising cult of Islam and were directed to spread the influence of the religion along with obvious political interests. So, there it was. Islam was the second religion that was at our doors after Christianity, only in a much more alarming way. The Arabs, the Syrians and the Afghans were bringing in their wake unspeakable brutality in the name of religion and India, shorn of her kshatriya might of yore, was incapable of countering it. Welcome the non-violence of the Buddha, welcome the non-violence of the Tirthankaras, welcome the revolt against the Varnashrama Dharma of the Hindu society and welcome the repudiation of the authority of the Vedas!
Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh and started the murderous assault on 'idolatrous' India. Mahmud of Ghazni looted the temples and monasteries of India ransacking the Somnath Temple in Gujarat multiple times and reducing it to rubble. Taimur Lang (Tamer Lane) looted and murdered Indians at will, killing in Delhi alone a hundred thousand civilians on a single day of retribution for a few soldiers of his army killed in the market place by civilians. And then came Muhammad Ghori who after defeating Prithwiraj Chauhan in the Second Battle of Tarain established his empire in India which laid the foundation of Muslim rule in this country. Throughout all this, India, hopelessly divided and lacking in sufficient kshtariya power, looked on helplessly as horde after horde of Central Asians ransacked her before settling here to unsettle the indigenous culture and flow of life. India submitted and retreated into her corner in capitulation.
Krishna would have been a grand unifying force for the whole of India and the Bhagavad Geeta the perfect vehicle of expression of his message. But India then and India now has not had the wisdom to heed his teachings and has paid and even now pays her price for it. The vast landmass of Aryavarta now lost her spiritual independence as a foreign tribal doctrinaire system was made increasingly the law which men in public had to abide by. As the Hindu kings lost their kingdoms to the Muslim monarchs, royal patronage was taken away from the Sanatan Dharma and it felt the rigour of loss of royal support. Sanskrit was replaced by Persian and Arabic in the newly founded Muslim courts that ran by Islamic texts and the ancient language languished for want of support. The civilisation of India was being wounded at last despite the Adi Shakaracharyas and the Ramanujacharyas. There was no hope of a revival of the Sanatan Dharma and India went through the corridor of dark for several centuries before the advent of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda began the restoration work.
In between Nanak and his Sikh Gurus, Chaitanya and his followers, Kabir, Dadu, Meera Bai and the like of the Bhakti Movement all played their roles to resuscitate the Sanatan Dharma but it was never comprehensive enough till Vivekananda's thundering call from Colombo to Almora set the ball rolling along the pristine path of the Vedas whence a nation long subjected to inhuman tyranny would 'awake to life and freedom'.
But Gandhi stood in the way and helped the erstwhile forces that debilitated India once again. That is not to discredit him for his Himalayan contributions to the freedom struggle though but is by way of orienting understanding about his negative contributions as well which has led to India's partition, loss of territory and loss of peace ever since.
But to return to the recounting of the wounding of the Indian civilisation, to yet again borrow the phrase from Naipaul. Bhaktiar Khilji laid waste to the Nalanda University, burning down the entire library consisting of the treasures of the Indian civilisation. Successive rulers --- barring the odd benevolent exception among which Akbar may not be included for his manifest atrocity over peoples during conquest --- looted Hindu temples, then destroyed them in a careful manner so that the building material thus freed could be reused for construction of mosques in their places. Indeed, benevolent was the reign of merciful Islam in India! Allauddin Khilji, Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan are but three ready illustrations being provided to furnish this point but the list goes on and on almost without exception. The reason is but obvious. Islam enjoins upon its adherents to wage war upon the idolatrous kaffir (infidel) and to destroy him wherever he is to be found unless, of course, he embraces the one and only true religion and accepts its messenger as the final and the most perfected one from God.
The Sikhs resisted in the north-west and the Marathas in the Deccan but the overall picture remained gloomy and the free flow of Indian life in line with the Vedas was never quite accomplished so long as Muslim rule predominantly persisted in India. The Europeans relieved us of Islamic dominance largely but by their rapacious despoliation of the land served us no better and the condition only improved post-independence despite Nehruvian appeasement politics towards the minorities and the later imposition of a strange version of constitutional secularism that is pronounced in its anti-Hindu stance. Thereby the country is yet to recover from the eradication of Hindu studies from the school curriculum totally.
The Sikhs resisted the advance of Islam in the North and Guru Nanak's Sikh Dharma, yet another derivative of the Sanatan Dharma, did much to thwart Islamic inroads there. The succeeding nine Gurus carried on the holy task of saving the culture of our motherland and paid a heavy price for it. Jahangir got the fifth Guru Arjan Dev executed for having afforded asylum to his son Khusrau who had revolted against him. Aurangzeb proved brutal beyond bounds in the way he got the ninth Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur executed after failing to get him converted to Islam subsequent to his arrest in Kashmir following the Guru's protest against atrocities by Mughal officials against Kashmiri Hindu Brahmins. Do you find any resonance between Aurangzeb's attitude and our present-day Governments' over the same atrocity over Kashmiri Brahmin Pundits?
So, there it was. The second Sikh Guru after Arjan Dev fell to the sword of the Mughals and it was left to the great Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru and son of Guru Tegh Bahadur to carry on the battle to end Islamic terror in India. Guru Gobind Singh fell to a Mughal assassin's surprise attack at his camp after he had conducted a series of valiant battles against the Mughals. Thus, the Sikhs paid their ultimate price in the loss of three of their ten Gurus to the Mughals. Truly, the Muslim Period in Indian history was a remarkable period of amity and harmony! After all, Kabir and the Sufi saints lived harmonious and luminous lives!
One last and most significant feature of Guru Gobind Singh's life. He founded the Khalsa with which he formally transformed a fraction of the Sikh community into a warrior class. At last a separate class of warriors had been made inline with the ancient kshatriya varna of the Sanatan Hindus. The varna system in so far as the kshatriya class was concerned was reinstated formally after the Buddha had abolished it with his force of personality in times long past. However, the Hindu community did have the kshatriya class but nowhere with the strict regulation of life as it used to be in later Vedic times. Guru Gobind Singh by instituting the Khalsa to fight Mughal and Islamic tyranny did a seminal service to future India which effectively marginalised Mughal power in North India. Thereafter, the British used it to their advantage in employing these men to maintain their Indian colony and their other colonies spread across the world. Today, in independent India, the armed forces are filled with men from the ranks of the khalsa who are laying down their lives selflessly for the defence of the country. We have to remember Guru Gobind Singh reverentially for this but instead we choose to hero-worship Mahatma Gandhi for all the good of our country while relegating the rest of our great men to the margins of our national attention. Krishna's aforesaid pronouncement in the Geeta became vindicated in the lives of Gurus Tegh Bahadur and Gobind Singh.
Now we turn our attention to the Maratha reaction to Mughal rule and then to the English colonial expansion in India. It was led by a petty chieftain, Shivaji Bhonsle by name, who grew in stature and power to eventually become the nemesis of the Mughals in the Deccan. Here the Maratha kshatriyas resisted the Mughals tooth and nail to establish Hindu (Maratha) rule eventually in large parts of the Deccan.
Wherever the Muslim rulers conquered Hindu territory, they brought about huge destruction of temples, built mosques in their places, carried away the womenfolk of the conquered people to fill their harem and converted hundreds of thousands by the sword to the faith of Islam. This was the standard practice. The continuous jauhar (self-immolation by fire) performed by tens of thousands of Rajput women to preserve their honour bears testimony to the evil intentions and acts of the Muslim monarchs once they had conquered a Hindu kingdom. On the contrary, when the Hindu kings like Maharana Pratap Singh, Shivaji, the Peshwas and Maharaja Ranjit Singh won Mughal territory and the Mughal women fell into their hands, they treated them and their religion with the utmost respect and honourably sent them back to their family without even as much touch a hair of theirs. The Hindus, thus, over the centuries of Muslim rule in India were a persecuted lot with a declining percentage following while the Muslims in persecution mode kept growing in numbers ever till by dint of such numerical strength (25% of the undivided nation's population), active British collaboration, disunity among the Hindus and Gandhiji's weak political stance in the teeth of what he construed would develop in the then conditions into a bloody civil war, they succeeded in partitioning the motherland on the basis of their refusal to live under the same roof with the supposedly adversarial Hindus who they now feared on account of their vast numerical superiority. So much for disobeying Krishna and failing to observe svadharma!
Coming to the British Period of Indian history, Lord Macaulay came to the understanding that the Indian strength lay in their indigenous scriptural education which taught them the divinity of their beings. So, in order to effectively entrench British rule in India, this indigenous system had to be subverted even as colonial commercial depredation and Christian conversion programmes continued simultaneously. The Gurukul method which taught Sanskrit had to be supplanted by a western system of education that would reduce the average Indian to a poor caricature of the enlightened European while effectively making him a clerical slave of his British master who he would serve in all servility. Thus began the gradual overhauling of the Gurukul system in the form of introduction of the western mode of university education which taught the Indians that everything Indian was archaic and fraught with superstition and falsity, that Indians, lagging as they were apparently in modern civilisation terms, were an uncivilised lot and that the British arrival in India was to them a boon bestowed upon by God to learn the rudiments of modern civilisation. This was the theme of the continuous propaganda that the British engaged in to erase from the educated Indian mind all sense of national self-respect and fill the vacuum so created with allegiance to the alien master. And it worked. Since the time of the introduction of Macaulay's Minutes on Education till date, India has been progressively weaned away from her ancient spiritual moorings and converted to a coarse copy of the western civilisation much to her detriment. That the subversion could not succeed more than it did can be attributed to two factors and this will be the subject matter of what now follows.
The British came to India with colonial intent and not with any altruistic idea of spreading civilisation which at any rate they were in no position to do considering the fact that India was a far more civilised nation than the conquering races that came to visit her could themselves claim to be. In pursuance of their colonial aims, the British kept diligently at their work of looting India to the marrow and, thus, failed to sufficiently carry out their so-called welfare programmes of spreading western education in India. The vast section of the local rural population thus remained ignorant of western modes and methods and it was only the urban elite that took to becoming Macaulay's cherished children. This in point of fact indirectly helped India as the age-old civilisation of the Vedas, although much debilitated owing to the ravages of the times, carried on and the ancient culture of the land survived to see a better day when it would recover to glory once more.
Another feature of the Indian recovery was the intellectual and spiritual response of the very intelligentsia and the enlightened who the British had by their western indoctrination attempted to keep in servility. The contact of India with occidental ideas filtering through the medium of the written literature ignited the indigenous mind with passions of social reform, the fire of religious revival by way of reaction to the attempted alien subversion and the quest for political freedom without which no sustainable development of the nation would be possible. Western education, instead of keeping India subservient to her colonist master, quickened the fire of revolution in every sphere of the nation's being and set the ball rolling once and for all in the direction of the nation's eventual freedom.
Raja Rammohun Roy was the architect of this Indian renaissance. He synthesised all that best in all the religious cultures of the world to found his Brahmo Samaj as the society where all humanity could assemble to worship the one immutable author and preserver of the universe. In this way he paved the way for the regeneration of Hindu society along the enlightened channels of rationality and realisation of the Upanishads. His seminal work to get the barbarous practice of enforced 'Sati' abolished with the help of the Governor General, Lord William Bentinck in 1829, has etched him in human memory for good. Rammohun's work in the field of education, economics, literature, journalism where he was one of the first advocates of the Free Press, linguistics and comparative religion --- he knew seven languages and had studied the Bible in the original Hebrew, the Quran in the original Arabic and the Upanishads, of course, in the original Sanskrit --- made him indisputably the first modern man of India and the father of the Indian Renaissance.
...unfinished...
Written by Sugata Bose
श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुणः परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात्।
स्वधर्मे निधनं श्रेयः परधर्मो भयावहः।।3.35।।
This single verse of the Bhagavad Geeta not only enjoins us not to relinquish our allotted duty but also, in a broader sense, to resist conversion to other religions and their prescriptions as well. Although, dharma does not mean religion, yet, for all practical purposes as we encounter in the real world at large, dharma would have a religious connotation and content as well. As such, it would be wise for us, Hindus, to reinterpret this epic enunciation of Krishna in post-Krishna times as being inclusive of religion as well. That would be to our advantage as Hindus as we fight this continuous subversion of our ancient culture by proselytising faiths such as Christianity and Islam that have as their agenda nothing less than the conversion of the whole Hindu population to their respective creeds. Krishna is the God of India and warns us against such a subversion and we must heed his warning and act accordingly.
Is better to follow one's own vocation even if ill-performed than to follow someone else's vocation even if well-performed --- this is the purport of the initial line of the verse. It exhorts us not to relinquish duty and exchange vocation for ease of execution or for any other motivation. This is of supreme significance in our country today where we find the government itself in a malfunction-mode. From minister to minimum employee all are shirking duty while demanding more and more of the resources of the nation as their remuneration for work not done. It is the exercise of fundamental rights all the way without any thought of performing the associated fundamental duties as well.
But on a more serious note let us examine Krishna's exhortation from the conversion angle. Several centuries, perhaps nine, before the onset of Jainism and Buddhism that swept the nation and broke through the citadels of the Varnashrama Dharma, Krishna had warned about the possible dangers of non-performance of one's allotted dharma and the imperative to even die to protect and preserve the traditions of the dharma. That India failed to observe his injunction cost her dearly and does so even now as she struggles to overcome the damages done to her social system by Buddhism and Jainism in ancient times and Gandhism more recently and even today.
The gradual decline of dharma in post-Vedic India with the increase of priest-craft and all its malefic corollaries seriously debilitated the social syatem giving rise to the reform movements of Jainism and Buddhism. These were not just reform movements but were actually movements in reaction to the existing system of Sanatan Dharma in India. They revolted against not just the social malpractices of the dharma but they went radically against the very philosophical foundation of that system, the Vedas. Herein took place the great departure from India's rock-like foundation in the Sanatan Dharma which resulted in inescapable and inevitable damage to the nation from which we are still suffering and are refusing to learn from our mistakes. It is here that we need to go back to Krishna and learn our lessons once more so that we may save our dharma and our motherland with it. All this talk of secularism at the expense of protection of our heritage and culture is pure humbug.
Buddhism and Jainism were anti-Vedic systems of thought that rejected the inviolability of the Vedas and so did immense damage to the future prospects of our nation. The kashtriya power was weakened by this doctrinaire repudiation of violence of Jainism and Buddhism and military excellence by the specialised martial class was much reduced as the very idea of class or varna was attacked buy the reformist revolutionary anti-Vedic dharmas.
It was after the advent of Buddha and that too within two centuries that India fell victim to a succession of foreign attacks beginning with the Greeks. That Alexander was eventually checked and Greek military presence in India rooted out was purely because of the Hindu thinker Chanakya who led his protege Chandragupta Maurya into establishing resistance against the alien occupation. Later Chandragupta converted to Jainism and his grandson completed the rout by embracing Buddhism. In his bid to spread the dharma of the Buddha all over the then known world Ashoka aggressively renounced martial power after the infamous Kalinga War in which he had slaughtered over a hundred thousand people. Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism helped spread it with royal patronage far and wide but spelt the doom of the Sanatan Dharma from which it has never recovered.
Buddhism also did one more damage to the nation. By preaching in the language of the people Buddha brought his message to the masses and broke the backbone of exclusive privilege of the pundits (brahmans and ksatriyas) to interpret the dharma. But in so doing he also undermined the study of Sanskrit in India and, hence, the people were cut off from the glorious truths of the Upansihads for good and were instead exposed to all sorts of gross mythological accretions in the name of the Buddhist dharma. Gradually this led to decadence in the dharma itself as latter-day Buddhists significantly moved away from their Master's original message of love and purity and this in turn led to horrendous degeneration of the polity overall. This weakened the country and with the age-old Varnashrama Dharma already severely on the back-foot and struggling for a fair survival, India became prey to foreign invasion repeatedly whose effect we suffer from even today. We neglected our svadharma and embraced paradharma and here we are where we are on account of that. Krishna we cared not to listen to and now our fallen state and our prospective fate must force us to listen to him. Else, disaster there has been in the past but utter annihilation will be for us in the future.
It is often said that the Buddha saved the decadent Hindu society from utter annihilation then by infusing fresh purity into it and redirecting its course along the path of dharma. But while that is undoubtedly true, it is also true that he did immense long-term damage to it by undermining the Varnashrama Dharma and the Sanskrit language as stated above. By rejecting the authority of the Vedas categorically he struck at the foundations of the Indian spiritual civilisation and thereby did immense disservice to it. The people were for the first time by force of will and character taken away from the best part of their heritage and culture whose distant effects perhaps even the lion-heart Buddha also could not quite envisage. Effectively, Buddha did something unscientific and untrue. He ought to have modified the Sanatan Dharma as he attempted to reform society but by his ultra-radicalism actually went against the very spirit of the pristine philosophy of the land that had seen the synthesis of diverse currents of thought thus far and was better suited to solving India's problems than the formulations of one man who stood tall. Buddhism in effect while democratising the land in social terms made it a first-time victim of a spiritual dictatorship as the 'Apaurusheya Dharma' (impersonal dharma) was supplanted by a 'Paurusheya Dharma' (personal dharma in the sense that it was based on a single individual's realisation and formulations thereof).
Buddha's towering spiritual personality and universal heart won over the masses who were suffering the yoke of Brahmanical tyranny and converted them by the hordes to his new dharma. Buddha, despite his best intentions, thus, did not act in the best future interests of the country as he created the first great schism in the land of Aryavarta. The Jain movement was nowhere near as influential as that of the Buddha and, thus, I aver that it was Buddhism that made the first great schism in the thought system of India. The authority of the Vedas had to reestablished later by the great Adi Shankaracharya whose life's seminal work set us up once again on the highway of the Sanatan Dharma. But no amount of damage control could undo the original veering away of the nation from its Varnashrama Dharma excellence of specialised vocations and the martial class never quite recovered their original status as the nation's ideology had been deviated for good into an alternate channel. Then Gandhi with his Russian Orthodox Church influence in the form of Tolstoy's thought further took the nation ahead along the original Jain and Buddhist lines while all the time affirming that it was in keeping with the philosophy of the Bhagavad Geeta whose shloka is the point of contention here.
So, we did give up our svadharma and embrace the paradharma as offered us by the Buddha and Mahavira and we paid the price for it. India suffered as the world benefited from the priceless message of the Shakya Muni. In India there was great cultural revival though in the aftermath of the Buddha's advent but what of it? India paid as much in terms of repeated inroads into her territory by alien conquerors and never could rest in peace for any length of time owing to her progressive debilitation of the armed forces in the wake of expanding Buddhist influence in the land. And the worst of it was yet to come. Christian proselytism and the Mohammedan conquest of the motherland followed by a thousand year tyranny and eventual dismemberment of the motherland were yet to come. Our population was converted not to Christianity and Islam not by the force of character and sublimity of the message but by fraud, force, deceit and inducement and the programme of such anti-national and anti-human activity goes on till date.
The Buddhist dharma incline was to be for five hundred years. Then came the plateau and then a horrendous decline fraught with tantric debauchery that sent spiritual corruption careering through the body politic of India. Two-thirds of India had been converted to Buddhism and the Vedas had been accorded secondary status in the land of their origin and flourishing. And now with Buddhism suppurating, came the reaction of eternal India from the south of the Vindhyas where the influence of Buddhism had been relatively less. The Acharyas arose from there and re-anchored India in the eternal Vedas. Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya, Madhvacharya, Vallabacharya, Nimbarkacharya, Shuddhacharya and a galaxy of great men arose to reaffirm the supremacy of the Vedic thought. Shankara in open debate defeated the Buddhist philosophers by the dozens and sent them to flames in accordance with the precondition imposed upon the vanquished in the debate. The Sanatan Dharma was on the rise once again.
But out there in Arabia another religion was making waves. It was the religion of Islam, the one true faith with its one true messenger of God which would brook neither coexistence with other faiths nor had the civility to appreciate others' points of view but had to by divine injunction impose itself on the whole world in any manner, persuasive or brutal. India even in her resurrection now was oblivious of this dangerous cult that was soon to sweep the Middle East and parts of Europe soon. Islam was soon knocking upon the door of India and she was not ready to ward it off for she had lost her military might, courtesy the great Buddha.
The introduction of Christianity in southern India in the first century of the Common Era was the first influx of religion as opposed to dharma in India and now in the eighth century we were being challenged again, this time on the western border of Sindh by the conquering hordes from Arabia and their murderous cult that forced conversion by the sword on hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who fell in their way. Early Christianity in the south of India had been benign in its proselytising as they sought by persuasion to convert Indians to their new founded faith but the followers of Islam were brutal in their onslaughts and spared none that resisted conversion. Krishna's message was now being tested in open battlefields and in bloody cities that fell to Mohammedan conquest.
The Islamic inroads had begun and Shakracharya and the other acharyas while establishing the philosophical supremacy of the Upanishads had failed to articulate in sufficient terms the modes and means for the defence of the nation which ages ago Krishna had in copious conversation with his protege Arjuna enunciated. Mere philosophy does not help defend the borders of a nation and the Varnashrama Dharma having been weakened permanently by the Buddha and his followers, India fell yet again to foreign invasion. This time the servitude would last a thousand years and when freedom would eventually be attained, India would find herself partitioned, her landmass truncated, her hopes of integral well-being shattered by the fell hand of the political scissor. And all this because even in the movement for freedom the neo-Buddha in the shape of Gandhi imposed his will on the nation to make non-violent resistance the creed. Gandhi assiduously avoided any discussion on the building up of an army of disciplined Congressmen who would in course of time lead an armed revolution to evict the British and then take over the effective defence of the land against foreign aggression. In this point he differed with Subhas Chandra Bose and the rest is horrendous history that we are all aware of.
But to return to the Islamic invasion. Why term it Islamic invasion and not ordinary military invasion of a foreign aggressor? The reason is that the invasions from Arabia, Afghanistan and the like were inspired by the proselytising cult of Islam and were directed to spread the influence of the religion along with obvious political interests. So, there it was. Islam was the second religion that was at our doors after Christianity, only in a much more alarming way. The Arabs, the Syrians and the Afghans were bringing in their wake unspeakable brutality in the name of religion and India, shorn of her kshatriya might of yore, was incapable of countering it. Welcome the non-violence of the Buddha, welcome the non-violence of the Tirthankaras, welcome the revolt against the Varnashrama Dharma of the Hindu society and welcome the repudiation of the authority of the Vedas!
Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh and started the murderous assault on 'idolatrous' India. Mahmud of Ghazni looted the temples and monasteries of India ransacking the Somnath Temple in Gujarat multiple times and reducing it to rubble. Taimur Lang (Tamer Lane) looted and murdered Indians at will, killing in Delhi alone a hundred thousand civilians on a single day of retribution for a few soldiers of his army killed in the market place by civilians. And then came Muhammad Ghori who after defeating Prithwiraj Chauhan in the Second Battle of Tarain established his empire in India which laid the foundation of Muslim rule in this country. Throughout all this, India, hopelessly divided and lacking in sufficient kshtariya power, looked on helplessly as horde after horde of Central Asians ransacked her before settling here to unsettle the indigenous culture and flow of life. India submitted and retreated into her corner in capitulation.
Krishna would have been a grand unifying force for the whole of India and the Bhagavad Geeta the perfect vehicle of expression of his message. But India then and India now has not had the wisdom to heed his teachings and has paid and even now pays her price for it. The vast landmass of Aryavarta now lost her spiritual independence as a foreign tribal doctrinaire system was made increasingly the law which men in public had to abide by. As the Hindu kings lost their kingdoms to the Muslim monarchs, royal patronage was taken away from the Sanatan Dharma and it felt the rigour of loss of royal support. Sanskrit was replaced by Persian and Arabic in the newly founded Muslim courts that ran by Islamic texts and the ancient language languished for want of support. The civilisation of India was being wounded at last despite the Adi Shakaracharyas and the Ramanujacharyas. There was no hope of a revival of the Sanatan Dharma and India went through the corridor of dark for several centuries before the advent of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda began the restoration work.
In between Nanak and his Sikh Gurus, Chaitanya and his followers, Kabir, Dadu, Meera Bai and the like of the Bhakti Movement all played their roles to resuscitate the Sanatan Dharma but it was never comprehensive enough till Vivekananda's thundering call from Colombo to Almora set the ball rolling along the pristine path of the Vedas whence a nation long subjected to inhuman tyranny would 'awake to life and freedom'.
But Gandhi stood in the way and helped the erstwhile forces that debilitated India once again. That is not to discredit him for his Himalayan contributions to the freedom struggle though but is by way of orienting understanding about his negative contributions as well which has led to India's partition, loss of territory and loss of peace ever since.
But to return to the recounting of the wounding of the Indian civilisation, to yet again borrow the phrase from Naipaul. Bhaktiar Khilji laid waste to the Nalanda University, burning down the entire library consisting of the treasures of the Indian civilisation. Successive rulers --- barring the odd benevolent exception among which Akbar may not be included for his manifest atrocity over peoples during conquest --- looted Hindu temples, then destroyed them in a careful manner so that the building material thus freed could be reused for construction of mosques in their places. Indeed, benevolent was the reign of merciful Islam in India! Allauddin Khilji, Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan are but three ready illustrations being provided to furnish this point but the list goes on and on almost without exception. The reason is but obvious. Islam enjoins upon its adherents to wage war upon the idolatrous kaffir (infidel) and to destroy him wherever he is to be found unless, of course, he embraces the one and only true religion and accepts its messenger as the final and the most perfected one from God.
The Sikhs resisted in the north-west and the Marathas in the Deccan but the overall picture remained gloomy and the free flow of Indian life in line with the Vedas was never quite accomplished so long as Muslim rule predominantly persisted in India. The Europeans relieved us of Islamic dominance largely but by their rapacious despoliation of the land served us no better and the condition only improved post-independence despite Nehruvian appeasement politics towards the minorities and the later imposition of a strange version of constitutional secularism that is pronounced in its anti-Hindu stance. Thereby the country is yet to recover from the eradication of Hindu studies from the school curriculum totally.
The Sikhs resisted the advance of Islam in the North and Guru Nanak's Sikh Dharma, yet another derivative of the Sanatan Dharma, did much to thwart Islamic inroads there. The succeeding nine Gurus carried on the holy task of saving the culture of our motherland and paid a heavy price for it. Jahangir got the fifth Guru Arjan Dev executed for having afforded asylum to his son Khusrau who had revolted against him. Aurangzeb proved brutal beyond bounds in the way he got the ninth Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur executed after failing to get him converted to Islam subsequent to his arrest in Kashmir following the Guru's protest against atrocities by Mughal officials against Kashmiri Hindu Brahmins. Do you find any resonance between Aurangzeb's attitude and our present-day Governments' over the same atrocity over Kashmiri Brahmin Pundits?
So, there it was. The second Sikh Guru after Arjan Dev fell to the sword of the Mughals and it was left to the great Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru and son of Guru Tegh Bahadur to carry on the battle to end Islamic terror in India. Guru Gobind Singh fell to a Mughal assassin's surprise attack at his camp after he had conducted a series of valiant battles against the Mughals. Thus, the Sikhs paid their ultimate price in the loss of three of their ten Gurus to the Mughals. Truly, the Muslim Period in Indian history was a remarkable period of amity and harmony! After all, Kabir and the Sufi saints lived harmonious and luminous lives!
One last and most significant feature of Guru Gobind Singh's life. He founded the Khalsa with which he formally transformed a fraction of the Sikh community into a warrior class. At last a separate class of warriors had been made inline with the ancient kshatriya varna of the Sanatan Hindus. The varna system in so far as the kshatriya class was concerned was reinstated formally after the Buddha had abolished it with his force of personality in times long past. However, the Hindu community did have the kshatriya class but nowhere with the strict regulation of life as it used to be in later Vedic times. Guru Gobind Singh by instituting the Khalsa to fight Mughal and Islamic tyranny did a seminal service to future India which effectively marginalised Mughal power in North India. Thereafter, the British used it to their advantage in employing these men to maintain their Indian colony and their other colonies spread across the world. Today, in independent India, the armed forces are filled with men from the ranks of the khalsa who are laying down their lives selflessly for the defence of the country. We have to remember Guru Gobind Singh reverentially for this but instead we choose to hero-worship Mahatma Gandhi for all the good of our country while relegating the rest of our great men to the margins of our national attention. Krishna's aforesaid pronouncement in the Geeta became vindicated in the lives of Gurus Tegh Bahadur and Gobind Singh.
Now we turn our attention to the Maratha reaction to Mughal rule and then to the English colonial expansion in India. It was led by a petty chieftain, Shivaji Bhonsle by name, who grew in stature and power to eventually become the nemesis of the Mughals in the Deccan. Here the Maratha kshatriyas resisted the Mughals tooth and nail to establish Hindu (Maratha) rule eventually in large parts of the Deccan.
Wherever the Muslim rulers conquered Hindu territory, they brought about huge destruction of temples, built mosques in their places, carried away the womenfolk of the conquered people to fill their harem and converted hundreds of thousands by the sword to the faith of Islam. This was the standard practice. The continuous jauhar (self-immolation by fire) performed by tens of thousands of Rajput women to preserve their honour bears testimony to the evil intentions and acts of the Muslim monarchs once they had conquered a Hindu kingdom. On the contrary, when the Hindu kings like Maharana Pratap Singh, Shivaji, the Peshwas and Maharaja Ranjit Singh won Mughal territory and the Mughal women fell into their hands, they treated them and their religion with the utmost respect and honourably sent them back to their family without even as much touch a hair of theirs. The Hindus, thus, over the centuries of Muslim rule in India were a persecuted lot with a declining percentage following while the Muslims in persecution mode kept growing in numbers ever till by dint of such numerical strength (25% of the undivided nation's population), active British collaboration, disunity among the Hindus and Gandhiji's weak political stance in the teeth of what he construed would develop in the then conditions into a bloody civil war, they succeeded in partitioning the motherland on the basis of their refusal to live under the same roof with the supposedly adversarial Hindus who they now feared on account of their vast numerical superiority. So much for disobeying Krishna and failing to observe svadharma!
Coming to the British Period of Indian history, Lord Macaulay came to the understanding that the Indian strength lay in their indigenous scriptural education which taught them the divinity of their beings. So, in order to effectively entrench British rule in India, this indigenous system had to be subverted even as colonial commercial depredation and Christian conversion programmes continued simultaneously. The Gurukul method which taught Sanskrit had to be supplanted by a western system of education that would reduce the average Indian to a poor caricature of the enlightened European while effectively making him a clerical slave of his British master who he would serve in all servility. Thus began the gradual overhauling of the Gurukul system in the form of introduction of the western mode of university education which taught the Indians that everything Indian was archaic and fraught with superstition and falsity, that Indians, lagging as they were apparently in modern civilisation terms, were an uncivilised lot and that the British arrival in India was to them a boon bestowed upon by God to learn the rudiments of modern civilisation. This was the theme of the continuous propaganda that the British engaged in to erase from the educated Indian mind all sense of national self-respect and fill the vacuum so created with allegiance to the alien master. And it worked. Since the time of the introduction of Macaulay's Minutes on Education till date, India has been progressively weaned away from her ancient spiritual moorings and converted to a coarse copy of the western civilisation much to her detriment. That the subversion could not succeed more than it did can be attributed to two factors and this will be the subject matter of what now follows.
The British came to India with colonial intent and not with any altruistic idea of spreading civilisation which at any rate they were in no position to do considering the fact that India was a far more civilised nation than the conquering races that came to visit her could themselves claim to be. In pursuance of their colonial aims, the British kept diligently at their work of looting India to the marrow and, thus, failed to sufficiently carry out their so-called welfare programmes of spreading western education in India. The vast section of the local rural population thus remained ignorant of western modes and methods and it was only the urban elite that took to becoming Macaulay's cherished children. This in point of fact indirectly helped India as the age-old civilisation of the Vedas, although much debilitated owing to the ravages of the times, carried on and the ancient culture of the land survived to see a better day when it would recover to glory once more.
Another feature of the Indian recovery was the intellectual and spiritual response of the very intelligentsia and the enlightened who the British had by their western indoctrination attempted to keep in servility. The contact of India with occidental ideas filtering through the medium of the written literature ignited the indigenous mind with passions of social reform, the fire of religious revival by way of reaction to the attempted alien subversion and the quest for political freedom without which no sustainable development of the nation would be possible. Western education, instead of keeping India subservient to her colonist master, quickened the fire of revolution in every sphere of the nation's being and set the ball rolling once and for all in the direction of the nation's eventual freedom.
Raja Rammohun Roy was the architect of this Indian renaissance. He synthesised all that best in all the religious cultures of the world to found his Brahmo Samaj as the society where all humanity could assemble to worship the one immutable author and preserver of the universe. In this way he paved the way for the regeneration of Hindu society along the enlightened channels of rationality and realisation of the Upanishads. His seminal work to get the barbarous practice of enforced 'Sati' abolished with the help of the Governor General, Lord William Bentinck in 1829, has etched him in human memory for good. Rammohun's work in the field of education, economics, literature, journalism where he was one of the first advocates of the Free Press, linguistics and comparative religion --- he knew seven languages and had studied the Bible in the original Hebrew, the Quran in the original Arabic and the Upanishads, of course, in the original Sanskrit --- made him indisputably the first modern man of India and the father of the Indian Renaissance.
...unfinished...
Written by Sugata Bose
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