The reclamation of our culture is an onerous task. But we will have to do it if we are to survive as a civilisation. Long ago Swami Vivekananda had forewarned that we would be extinct as a race in three generations time if we did not revert to the path of the ancient dharma and reorient our lives from the decadent western mode of sensate living. Along with it he had also laid down the path of our national revival and fired up the motherland with his volcanic words which bore into the national life-current and forged out of the sleeping mass of humanity a marching column of men who tore into the citadels of European colonialism and freed the motherland from its festering fetters.
Vivekananda did not merely preach. He roused the country from its thousand year slumber and quickened it into life and action. Then he left, leaving to us the task of carrying on the national regeneration. Are we to fail him? Are we to continue in this present mode of progressive urban westernisation whose contaminating influence is spreading like a killer virus across the hills and dales of the motherland, across the plains and plateaus, and into the very heartland of our ancient rural civilisation as well? Shall India die?
This was a question asked by the Swami himself and emphatically answered by him as well. Therefore, there is no need to repeat his words for they are accessible to all. What, however, bothers one, nonetheless, is the immediate situation of plummeting national culture with its superficial western induction and degenerate derivations thereof. So I say, the reclamation of our culture is of paramount importance for our continued survival as a civilisation.
The Swami had given us three generations within which to begin the reorientation of our declining culture and, indeed, the reversal of westernisation, the re-Indianisation began in the very generation of the Swami's as well. In fact, it had begun a generation earlier with the advent of Sri Ramakrishna and his life's work. But the Swami's exhortation was to the vast mass of Indians and not to a select few as the case will turn out to be if we are to reckon his Master, his brother disciples, his own disciples and the affiliates to the Ramakrishna Mission specifically in it. The general mass of Indians did respond to his clarion call within years of his death and up came the revival of India along multifarious national channels from the very first decade post his demise.
Unfinished and expanding ...
Written by Sugata Bose
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