SHALL WE, HINDUS, PERISH ? -- PERSPECTIVES, ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL AND MODERN, AND A PEEP INTO THE FUTURE
Hindus must never forget the humiliation of a thousand years at the hands of Islamic conquerors who oppressed them and converted millions of them, mostly by the sword. Remembering this great tragedy that had befallen their community and their dharma, Hindus must always be wary of attempts to convert them even today. They must always resist conversion. They must be careful when even ordinary Muslims come over and try to spread Islamic awareness among them, knowing such advances to the first attempts at converting them following the principle of the Da'wah or the invitation to embrace Islam.
Preservation of Hinduism is the one way to achieving permanent peace and communal goodwill on earth among its myriad diversities, for this is the one philosophical system that has universal acceptance as its basic credo, although, the Sanatan Dharma does not regard fanatical falsities and exclusive, irrational scriptural claims as gospel truth as is often made out to be by Hindus themselves who are ignorant of the principles of their dharma.
The Hindu influence has been decreasing over the last two thousand years or so and has now been relegated to India and Nepal alone from its erstwhile domain of influence across the whole of Asia and parts of Europe. How did this happen while Christianity and Islam continued to grow all the while? It happened because of the spiritual nature of Hinduism and its non-insistence on conversion of adherents of other faiths. In business there is the principle that you either grow or diminish but you can never maintain the status quo economically for market forces are like the barbaric forces of conversion and will not let you remain where you are but will shrink you to nought. The same holds true for almost everything in this world at its state of socio-cultural evolution till date and it certainly holds true for religion.
One thing must be borne in mind that Hinduism is neither a proselytising religion nor is it a political one. Worse still, it is not a religion at all in the Semitic sense but is a dharma tradition, a philosophical system of thinking, much like science. It is based on reason, reflection, research, introspection, austerity, meditation and reflexive realisation, and it has nothing to do with either prophetic pronouncements or messianic messages being delivered unto an ignorant humanity from an almighty deity of sorts. Hinduism, a linguistic aberration that has somehow stuck to the Sanatan Dharma, has nothing to do with them. Like modern science it has evolved over thousands of years through experimentation and research, data collection and their analyses using not only reason but the sophisticated instrument of the analysing inner mind before it set down its discovered principles in its earliest text called the Vedas which is also the earliest human text known till date. But the process of investigation never stopped as more and more texts came to be added to the huge bulk of Vedic literature which gained climactic evolution in the Upanishads or the Vedanta. Besides these the Bharatvarshiyas, today called Hindus or Indians by turns, gained a great insight into the workings of external nature and spelled them out in mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, philology, grammar and music. The Hindus flourished in every field and ancient India rose to stupendous heights of spiritual and material civilisation whose equal the world has never since seen, for while great civilisations have come and gone in the world, they have shone only in material terms with little or no contribution to spirituality, barring, of course, the Greek civilisation which also made great contributions to both material life and the life of thought, but even there the Greeks were hardly any match for the Hindus in spirituality. What then went wrong with the Hindus and how did it all happen?
Written by Sugata Bose
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