WE ARE ONE

Pakistan and Bangladesh are both India in my mind still, for when I read the history of the freedom movement it is so evident. The subsequent Partition I reject from the bottom of my heart. However, this is pure effusion on my part, I know, and has no political bearing that I attach to it, for I do not attach any such intent in any mean measure as well. This is just to raise the awareness of what we were and what we have become through the perfidies of the times. United we were and united shall again be, for, essentially, united we still are. The land of the rishis is not possible to politically divide for they have in the Sama Veda sung the eternal song of the integrated life. It is but a matter of time --- and in the flowing field of moving history, a few decades are nothing, an insignificant entity bearing little meaning, --- before the subcontinent will be one, for the light that led us to freedom will inevitably lead us to unity as well, so said the mighty prophet of nationalism, the seer and the sage, the divine Sri Aurobindo. India must not misconstrue the people of Pakistan to be enemies for they are the unfortunate children of the Mother, temporarily banished by the historical heresy of Partition unto the other side of the border where they daily suffer a living death at the hands of the dictatorial armed forces and have to perforce subscribe to their national agenda of eternal war with India. But in their heart of hearts they would much prefer union with India, for they are one with us and have been so for centuries and no amount of indoctrination of religion or political propaganda may prevent their feeling of empathy with us on this side of the border, for we have fought a common war against a common enemy, the British, before we have been made to fight with each other. Civilisation does not begin overnight nor does it die in a flash. The heritage of India, millenia-old, bears down on Pakistan and Bangladesh and beckons them to unite with the motherland. But like a schism takes time to manifest, so does the healing process take its due time before old adjustments are restored and the polity gains solidarity. So shall it be in the case of our benighted nations as well, the trinity that shall seek union in its original contemplation. The rishis discovered the Vedas on the banks of the Sindhu, the Saraswati and the Ganga, and it shall be the good fortune of future generations to see the motherland integrated and whole. Till then we must keep our hopes high, our aspirations for oneness throbbing in every pulsation of our being, a union not only human, cultural and spiritual but political as well, for only then the blood of the martyrs of either side of this artificial border will not have been spilled in vain and the sacrifices and suffering of millions of soldiers of the soul and their kith and kin not been a wasted deal in the barter that life profane is. And it ought not to be so, for these valorous beings that donned the earthly garb to free the motherland from the octopus-hold of the barbarous British, did no double dealing with the mother they dearly loved, and so, far transcended the realm of the bartering self to the domain of the divine within, the real Self that is at the heart of existence. To them freedom of the motherland was consonant with the spiritual freedom of the self and the struggle to bring about such transformation in the fate of the nation an austerity to which they had pledged their heroic heads. History does not take a straight course but curves upwards along a mountainous detour, here evolving with tortuous pace over centuries, there revolving in a flash over a few volcanic years, but advancing, nonetheless, the same. The civilisation of this nation is stretched over several millenia and dates back to then when there was no timekeeper, such is the antiquity of this culture we claim to be our own, and do so rightly too. We who are the inheritors of this grand movement of the masses, this march of the Grande Armee, the common men and women of hoary Bharatvarsha, we owe it to our motherland to love every single soul inhabiting the subcontinent and to hold none in hate, for in this integrated national feeling lies our future fate, our destiny as a nation, united and strong, with her amputated limbs relocated and healed and her peoples welded into a single national family to which the freedom fighters pledged as they gave their selves up on the scaffold. Vande Mataram! Jai Hind!

JHALKARIBAI, A FLASH DIFFUSED IN THE NIGHT OF JHANSI

I am overwhelmed, Wordsmith Rana, by this early response to my request to you for a commemorative piece on Jhalkaribai and I must say that in this short piece you have caught the spirit of the sacrifice insignificant of countless foot-soldiers in the broader scheme of things, martyrs who are lost in the pool of their own spilled blood and sink into oblivion subject to the tyranny of the times. But their collective force brings forth all significant historical changes even as they remain obscured in the dust of the battle that is raised during such tempestuous transformation. And when the dust settles, they are seen no more, either buried under the footfalls of history or blown away in diverse directions by the scattering effect of the pervading violence or absorbed by a mighty moment as integral to it, a moment that springs forth from the resolution of all such minuscule modes as the defining point in the history of a people. So are Jhalkaribais lost, save in so far as subsistence is possible in the larger persona of the Lakshmibais who occupy centre-stage and rightly so, but who can deny the individual moment its due in affirming the importance of the lengthened lifetime of a being? None can and none will dare do so for that would be suicidal. Yet, at the same time the moment was born as if to perish before its sibling took its charge and passed on the baton likewise from self to self, itself remaining incognito forever, for such is in the nature of things here on earth where man's sense of dimension renders his vision blurred beyond rough estimation in aggregate terms and he, perforce, has to miss out on all that is delicate and all that is sublime, the fair flower on the wayside or the glow-worm that failed to light up the sky that night and was consumed in the suffusing moonlight that spread its wings in a dizzy dance through the spaces of the heavens. What more may I say but to turn the words inward to still the thoughts of my feverish brain and, for once, listen to the music within where Jhalkaribai sings her solitary song en route to the scaffold, in blissful disdain of the imperial design to throttle the voice of freedom, even as her mistress, that goddess of a girl, the Rani Lakshmibai thunders, "Meri Jhansi nahin dungi"?

AN EXHORTATION TO COMRADES-IN-ARMS

Thank you @Satyendra Singhji for having suggested Jhankari Bai yesterday to me and thank you @Wordsmith Rana for having taken up the cause of propagation of her life and deeds so promptly upon being apprised of it. It is this spirit of discovery and the speed of delivery thereof that is crucial to the rise of our nation in right earnest.

@Poulome Mitra Shaw, an entreaty to you, to take up the cause of resurrection of the female freedom fighters who are sinking in obscurity into oblivion.

Same goes for @Nandini Biswas.

Same for @Jukta Basu Mallik, @Pritha Chakrabarty, @Mousumi Guha, @Pradipa Mukherjee, @Abhishikta Anuska Mukherjee.

Women must resurrect women, that is the line to follow.

The history of the nation must be written not by a handful of erudite historians but it must be written by thousands of able researchers and writers, now that the internet affords us such fabulous access to data which was earlier confined to shelves of libraries alone.

@Avisek Banerjee, paint a portrait series of Masterda, Bagha Jatin, Rashbehari Bose, Jatin Das and the like please.

@Wordsmith Rana, now get going with a moving description of Durgavati Devi.

I am talking of freedom fighters and that too, not for any political purpose which I espouse, for I am by nature, strictly apolitical and by affiliation, devoted to the cause of humanity, 'far from the madding crowd' of politicians and their perfidies. So, go ahead with the job at hand as part of your national duty as a conscientious citizen with a mighty pen at your disposal, a gift of Mother unto you and do not bother your head about the bubble politics of the day. Onward, brother, for thine is the hour and thine the honour too to represent the cause of the ones that gave us freedom.

Despite time constraints, in spite of potent pressures of life, @Satyendra Singhji, you are yet arriving at the conclusion of a project of your dreams, your proposed book on Swamiji, Gandhiji and Netaji, is it not? So may we all endeavour to pull in our best resources of time and energy, our creative labour, often in conjoint effort, to serve the cause of the motherland, for in so combining selflessly, we will achieve mighty marvels for the Mother whose very life-force we draw on to survive and to subsist, and the time and effort you talk of Sir, belongs to the Mother Herself, we having but borrowed its use for the while to career along in our earthly sojourn unto the destination divine. So, let us in real earnest work together, complementing each other's work to its successful fruition, to its contemplated end.

We have already started the process. See the way we are pursuing this project since the time when unwittingly we stumbled on to this group without having any clear-cut objective or purpose. Yet, there seems to be an invisible hand that is guiding us to some desired end. See, for example, how you, yourself, got involved in this whole business, and now we are, by your expert guidance, arriving at definite ends whence we may advance into the domain of delineation historical beyond reproach or reproof.
But there is the Emergency Department too @Satyendra Singhji, and we may be the medical personnel who can take the patient out into the sun again by tending to him adequately. Ours is the job cut out for and let us attempt this seemingly impossible mission and I assure you, we may fail in the execution perhaps but will so set up the ideal for future success to follow.

@Satyendra Singhji, for sure, unless my mother's health stands in the way. But, I assure you, I will spare no means to show you all pertinent places around in Kolkata as may be possible within the ambit of available time.

We are on the move @Jukta Basu Mallik and we shall overcome the hurdles in the way through collective effort and an iron will that is pliable to adjustment in progressive refinement but unbending in so far as relinquishing the work once begun. I hope @Suryada will also be able to help us out, being an expert in the field of computer network.
Sorry for the brief period of time I was away, attending to a call at the door. The visitor was a flowing glowing girl of age twenty years who was running the errand of her mistress of fetching for her a letter from Sri Sarada Math wrongly posted to our address. The true recipient and the wrong one, our neighbour in the same housing complex and myself, are both initiated devotees of the Ramakrishna-Sarada Order incidentally and perhaps, many among us are rightfully or woefully brazen about such assumptions of spirituality as comes by package performance of piety these days. But the irony was that the girl on being questioned as to what level she had studied up to, shocked me by saying that she had read up to c;lass 5 and no further because she did not like to study. And here she was carrying back from our house for her mistress a letter from Sri Sarada Math whose presiding deity, Sri Sarada Devi, during her earthly incarnation, had much aspired for education but by male patriarchal persuasion prevented from doing so, her slate snatched from her by her nephew-in-law, Hridayram Chattopadhyay. These were early days in her life when for a young girl to study was tantamount to corruption of character beyond repair or redemption and her only duty lay in terms of receiving education was to refrain from secular studies and only to concentrate on hearing the scriptures and the mythological tales from village minstrels (kathak thakur) who came by right to the doorstep to sing their folklore replete with spiritual input. But Sarada Devi, about whom Swami Vivekananda has said that she was born to regenerate woman-power in this Age, was made of a superior sublime stuff and persisted at her

WHEN MONOLOGUE MATTERS AND DIALOGUE DEFLECTS

You should read a lot at this stage of your writing career because you are gifted in literary expression but are, perhaps, not funded well enough with data at your disposal yet. Your writing skills are prodigious but your roots in history, philosophy and literature are to be tested yet in the crucible of your literary experience. I would like you to hone up your skills in writing by reading the recorded versions of the fluid extempore speeches of Swami Vivekananda and some of his writings as well. Tolstoy had said, "Vivekananda's English is perfect." Now, what more can be said over and above that? So, read Vivekananda for profundity of perception and proficiency in presentation of such inner realisations in language lyrical or prose profound as Your Highness pleases for, after all, as a creative artist, you are monarch of all you survey, pardon my pilfering from the treasury of English poetry as I say so. You might find it a good idea to begin with the Lectures from Colombo to Almora, Vol. 3 of the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, and then proceed to the more abstruse Jnana Yoga and its three siblings in Karma, Bhakti and Raja Yogas that you may get well-grounded in the fundamental thought of eternal India.
The motherland needs fiery writers full of patriotic zeal and high idealism catering to national service and regeneration thereby of the ones fallen low and suffering. Never let the surrounding chaos unnerve you in your bid to build the beautiful for the literary work is the expression of your inner aesthetics and poetry the perfected outflow of verbal ecstasy. Thus, clinging to your literary ideal as the one that can take you to mighty self-realisation if pursued to perfection, immerse in the ocean of ancient churn, and you shall arise immortal, having tasted of the nectarine bliss which is food for the gods. So, onward, my friend. Thine is the field to sport in, for thee the stage is set. Victoria a la literatura!

ALOK SARKAR, A FRIEND OF THE MISSION

Wonderfully stated Alok Sarkar Mahashay. I appreciate every word of your write-up and look forward to more illuminating posts like this one where I may learn something more from your rich fund of experience as an ex-student, and why? a perennial student of the Ramakrishna Mission, for it is this belonging to the highest flights of the teachings of the Swami Vivekananda that makes your observation bright and beautiful, especially, in the context of the present chaos and corruption that has rent everything apart. May you have a blessed and blissful life is my fervent prayer at the hallowed feet of the Holy Trinity of Thakur-Ma-Swamiji on this auspicious occasion of Nababarsha, to which I add on my own good wishes!

SANSKRIT, OUR ROOT LANGUAGE, FORSAKEN, FORGOTTEN

Woe unto us that we have as a nation almost forgotten Sanskrit, our real mother tongue, the fountainhead of almost all major Indian languages, the root of our culture, its memory, the very source of all that is sublime and surcharged with divinity in our literary heritage, 'devabhasha' or the language of the gods, Sanskrit, the sanitised daughter of the Vedic Chhaandas, grammatically, phonetically perfected verbal universe, we owe everything to it by way of a civilisation, its rise, growth and flourishing, and we have our life to lose as a nation if we are to sink into oblivion of this ancient heritage which is the very lifeblood of our existence as a civilising force on earth for millenia!

AN IDEA ABORTED AND AN IDEA FULFILLED

This is the power of Theory as Marx puts it. It grips the consciousness of the masses but it needs a leader to direct its course and Netaji was one such leader, for us the only one who truly cared for freedom above everything else, far more than self or ideology or any spiritual or philosophical persuasion, dry and divorced from life or requiring relinquishment of national duty at a time when the motherland groaned under the terrible tyranny of the British imperialists who had made India fodder for the building up of their vaunted empire.

True it is that 'one individual may die for an idea; but that idea will, after his death, incarnate itself in a thousand lives', but it is also true that while thousands may, after the death of the progenitor of the idea, take to the idea itself in real earnest and dedicate their lives to it, yet, they may fail to produce that single seminal soul from among themselves who may lead them unto the fruition of the idea in turbulent times under constraining conditions. The leader is not everyday born who becomes a Netaji. These are rare personages and appear but seldom in history, when the life of a nation is ebbing out to the detriment of world civilisation or when civilisation itself is facing extinction from the barbarism of brutal elements within its broader ambit seeking homogeneity of horrendous primitive culture. At such times of terrible turmoil a Netaji appears as the saviour of an oppressed race and embodies in his being the hopes and aspirations of a subjected people.

So, it is clearly evident that while it may be Netaji's magnanimity to inspire his followers or his countrymen in general with this articulation of his, it remains a fact, though, that in the death of a Netaji such an idea remains in the realm of the idea alone even in the thousands in whom it seeks expression and dies, aborted, a premature death with its progenitor amidst the tumult of the times. Generations pass before similar propitious historical circumstances emerge giving birth to a lustrous leader again who lives out the idea to fruition with his men following in his heels.

My deference to Netaji notwithstanding, this remains my humble submission that the idea must simultaneously incarnate in a living leader and a thousand followers of his, willing to live it out and, if called for, willing to die for it gamely, before it may find fulfilment in reaching its emphatic end, its final fruition, its desired destination in the attainment of the cherished goal. Vande Mataram! Jai Hind!