BE ROOTED IF YOU WISH TO SHOOT

BE ROOTED IF YOU WISH TO SHOOT

Rootedness and novelty admixed provide the spring of civilisation. If you believe you can shoot without firm footing in your roots, you are headed for civilisational destruction as many past civilisations have by their glorious fleeting existence on earth testified.

Civilisational identity comes over ages and forms the bedrock of a people's onward march. Our identity lies in our Vedic roots and our progress must necessarily lie along the track laid down by our Rishis of yore. The blueprint they have provided for posterity is succinctly articulated in the Geeta and elaborately expounded in our Puranas, the Upanishads ever forming the philosophical basis for such a terrestrial lay-out. Succeeding generations of sages and saints, Avatars and Acharyas have further expounded on these early expositions, deepened our cultural roots and exemplified through their lustrous lives how we ought to conduct ourselves as a civilisation. We must study their instances and make good the promise of our earliest civilisational beginnings by way of contributing our ploughshare to the life of the world. This is the mission of the Hindu race.

The world is in terrible turmoil today as it transits in phases from medieval modes to modernity. The ancient propensity for warfare holds man even today, the tribal instinct further accentuated by inordinate capitalistic greed, the lust for power propelled by his possession of modern arms. The environment is being destroyed in a manner that future habitation on earth will be a difficult deal indeed. And yet this savage ravaging of the earth's resources is carrying on, not so much to support a burgeoning global population but to appease the ever-increasing greed of the capitalist, and crony capitalist at that, who rules the destiny of nations. All this has led humanity to the current state of predator-prey relation where the strong tyrannise over the weak and vast populations die so that a privileged few may live. Here the Hindus have their contribution to make towards making the world a more humane place, a habitat of peace, light and love.

But who is a Hindu? Is he the anti-Hindu bigot who is no more than a titular Hindu, whose sole purpose is to ally himself with all anti-Hindu forces in the name of leftist liberalism and godless secularism? Is he the hodgepodge of hererodoxy who lives in abysmal ignorance of his sublime civilisational roots but proceeds to pronounce, nonetheless, on the future course humanity ought to take en route to the millenium, the utopia he fancies as the civilisational destiny of mortal man? Is he the cultural cross-breed who is attempting to usher in a new world civilisation with fantastic materialistic ideas that cannot brook Hinduism in any virile form anyway?

It does not work that way, my friend. A materialistic philosophy grounded purely in dated facts and reason with subtle insight into the spiritual heart of things missing, which is in contradiction with modern scientific findings which are more in consonance with Vedic philosophy than with that of Marx or any kith and kin of his, cannot be the basis of the Hindu's life, nor now nor in the future. The Hindu finds nourishment and strength in his pristine Vedic philosophy and therein he must remain rooted if he has to shoot to substance in the world. Cut him off from his spiritual roots and you will have killed him. Is that what you want, the destruction of Hinduism, the Hindus and Bharatvarsha with it? Brother, it shall never be. The Hindu, despite your seductive talk of a promising modernity, your carping criticism of everything hailing from India's antiquity, you vociferous denunciation of the divides that plague Hindu society, will never en masse listen to you, although you may get the odd convert to your materialistic mode hither and thither. The bulk of the Hindus are yet vibrating to the pulse of the Vedas. They will reject you.

We have not yet lost our links to our roots en masse primarily because of our masses who are culturally bound to their Vedic roots coming to them in the guise of local cultures that have embedded in their practices pristine philosophical principles, if only we care to delve deeply into them. This has been the hallmark and strength of our civilisation, this democratisation of lofty spiritual philosophy through local retelling in the form of Puranic narratives from which diverse folklore have emerged and diffused the essential message of the Rishis into the bloodstream of common humanity.

And here, O modern reformer of suspicious intent, do you want to strike your axe to sever the umbilical link of these simple rustic folk with their mother, the Sanatan culture that is native to them? Is this your strategy of saving the masses from all forms of erstwhile exploitation by destroying them altogether? If the masses are cut off from the soil that nourishes them, they will die, and a dead man does not suffer exploitation. Is that your intended end then, your master Marxist Machiavellian manouvre? What has been its result in nations where you have tried it and at what a human cost? It won't work in India, brother, as you well know from your failed attempts so far. The Hindus are predominantly spiritual and they will remain so. Your attempts to seduce them into giving up the religion of their forefathers will not work. Yours is an exercise doomed from the very start. So, rectify means and align yourselves with the Sanatan Dharma. Do not break India brick by brick by forming an alliance with anti-India Islamic and Christian forces or any other neocolonial break-India force emanating from the West.

India has suffered a thirteen century long ravaging by Islamic invaders and Euro-Christian colonisers which has left it deeply wounded as a civilisation, to borrow the idea from V.S. Naipaul who called it 'A Wounded Civilisation'. Continuous invasion by barbarous Islamic hordes from the deserts of Arabia and infusion of toxic ideology into the bloodstream of the Hindus created a civilisational chaos in India from which we have yet to recover. This was followed up by brutal colonisation by the Portuguese who inflicted on the Hindus the Inquisition of barbaric proportions. The Dutch, the Danes, the English and the French followed, carrying on with their Christian conversion of an innocent population while draining them of resources to the marrow. 45 trillion dollars the British alone plundered, impoverishing a prosperous India while building Britain from economic scratch in the bargain. The intolerant toxicity of Islam, the rape of resources by Christian Europe and the Macaulay Effect on Indian education have left their corrosive mark so deep on the psyche of the Hindus that masses of them, other than converting to the proselytising Abrahamic faiths, have lost their Hindu identity otherwise, their link to their foundational civilisational roots. This is borne out daily by the fact that educated Hindus keep hitting out at Hinduism, at Hindu society and at the Hindus themselves for this and that maliciously when they ought to be defending their home under attack from proselytising political outfits with a worldwide operational network. Such rootless Hindus, molested for a millenium by invasive ideologies, are today verily the victims of the Stockholm Syndrome. 

The upper class educated Hindus, especially the leftist-minded Bengalis, have touched their civilisational nadir and need to go upswing necessarily if they are not to go down the cosmic drain. Should they fail to rectify stance, they certainly will be extinct, I say, in the much the same way as Swamiji had predicted about the very same class then, setting the time as being 'within three generations'. History will avenge this wrongdoing of the pseudosecular cowardly liberals for failing to defend their civilisational citadels. This will come to pass verily by the Law of Karma.

But the bulk of the Hindus are the toiling masses and they must be tended well and trained to defend the Dharma. Herein lies all force, all power, all grace. The masses must not be allowed to be perverted from the Sanatan Dharma to Islam or Christianity or Communism or any other anti-Hindu movement. They must be physically, vitally, psychologically, intellectually and spiritually well nourished so that they become the bulwark of our defence against invasive toxic ideologies bent upon destroying India's age-old spiritual culture.

Hindus must be trained to defend their Dharma. The average Hindu has scant knowledge of his faith. All that he knows about his religion are some vague unconnected ideas whose symbolism or deeper philosophical import he is unaware of. Here we have work to do.

Each and every Hindu must be taught Sanskrit from childhood. For this education must be made affordable and easily accessible. Large numbers of schools, colleges and universities must be established where the mother language (Sanskrit) must be taught. A people proficient in Sanskrit will be a linguistically uplifted one who can then study the Sanatan scriptures first-hand and even seminal literary works of Kalidasa, Banbhatta and the like. This will raise the culture of the land and self-confidence with it. It will also sharpen the intellect and help build character which is the effective sum and resolution of all mental impressions. The sublime spiritual works of the Sanatan Dharma are almost all written in the Devabhasha (divine language), Sanskrit, and reading these will fill the brain with lofty ideas tending to purify the mind-stuff and invigorate the overall being. Culture rising, consciousness will rise and a self-conscious people will know how to defend their civilisation. So, education is the key. Herein lies the solution to the Hindus' problems and herein lies the means for the defence of the Dharma.

But what kind of education must it be? The modern western education which Hindus are eagerly lapping up for worldly benefits or the ancient Hindu system of the Gurukul which was geared to the integrated development of the pupil with the spiritual objective of liberation from the transmigratory cycle of birth and rebirth as the ultimate aim? Or, ought education for the modern Hindu to be a synthesis of the Sanatan Dharma and western science for the dual development of body and soul?

Written by Sugata Bose