MY MOTHERLAND

MY MOTHERLAND

There is an intrinsic strength in India which is what holds it as a continuing civilisation since ages despite the ravages of time and repeated invasions threatening to alter the very fabric of its culture. It is the spiritual current of the sages that perhaps holds the web of national life. The powerful thought waves of countless sages through millenia permeating the mind of the masses have lent a solidarity to the civilisation which invasive alien ideologies have failed to overcome. They have in effect been largely absorbed into the flowing Sanatan culture and evolved to become more humane and less antithetical to what is truly and traditionally Indian.

The great national evolution has been going on for ages, the pulse of our national life being in ferrying souls across the turbid waters of binding karma to the other shore of eternal freedom.

Through over two thousand three hundred years of invasions and attacks by foreign forces, often barbarian hordes, and one thousand three hundred years of partial and complete conquest by Asiatic desert tribes and Euro-colonial forces, India, tormented and tortured, plundered and plagued, coerced and converted, culture desecrated, men in tens of millions killed, women enslaved, molested, sold in Arab markets, and finally the holy motherland dismembered in three, has stood up to the challenges thrown at her and survived as a much wounded but still thriving spiritual civilisation.

A galaxy of greats has illuminated this Ayodhya of ours with the Deepavali of their inner effulgence and guided hundred of millions of our ancestors through the dark night of occupation and conquest till now we stand on the edge of an arrival awaited by our seers for millenia, a free nation forging ahead in shaping our eternal destiny, that of creating conditions for that great transit from material bondage to spiritual freedom. We are building our nation for the fulfilment of that great purpose, the liberation of the human soul. India, hoary India, spiritual India, eternal India is the home of souls world-weary and yearning to anchor in primeval moorings, the secure foundation of the Soul, the Atman, the Brahman where all freedom is.

But a cursory view of history is easy where much that is constraining, tortuous, tormenting, clashing, conflicting, the tyrannical tide of events are bypassed by a few scratches of the pen, but which in real terms is full of gory episodes stretching over protracted periods of time when survival of a civilisation becomes doubtful. Words can scarce express the survival ordeals of a conquered race and its recovery through so many centuries of gradual rise amidst terrible persecution and attempted obliteration of its civilisation. The savaging of our Sanatan civilisation is still going on even as we lend our arms to turning the wheels of dharma along the destined direction. We are rising as a nation but amidst confusing conditions where the remnants of alien civilisations, never wholly absorbed but ever tending to rupture the fabric of our ancient heritage, are attempting their unfinished agenda of the subversion of our civilisation and the imposition of a toxic alien civilisation that can never be our own. For it is intolerant, exclusive, theologically and philosophically superficial, puerile and pernicious, which goes against the grain of our Sanatan civilisation.

The nation yet lives, and it is a marvel that it does. Perhaps, it is its inherent spiritual culture, its rootedness in the Vedanta, its wonderfully accessible freedom of the Ishta (Chosen Deity), its continuous energisation by the lifeblood of its never-ending stream of sages, its millenia-old spiritual civilisation prior to its earliest suffered invasions which had already laid down deep civilisational foundations impossible of destruction, the omnipotent thought-current of its sages, its largeness of geography and difficulty of access to its sprawling territorial segments, its racial sturdiness that has always held this earthly life as trifle compared to the spiritual life for the preservation of which it is ever ready to sacrifice all, even life itself, all these and many more intangibles, perhaps, have preserved this race where any other civilisation suffering such horrors of death and desecration would have capitulated and lost its identity for good. History testifies to such episodes galore where civilisations have been destroyed and obliterated for good, but not ours which has manfully withstood all such ordeals and survived.

Written by Sugata Bose