A nation is building in India today before the eyes of the world so
swiftly, so palpably that all can watch the process and those who have
sympathy and intuition distinguish the forces at work, the materials in use,
the lines of the divine architecture. This nation is not a new race raw from
the workshop of Nature or created by modern circumstances.
One of the oldest races and greatest civilisations on this earth, the
most indomitable in vitality, the most fecund in greatness, the deepest in
life, the most wonderful in potentiality, after taking into itself numerous
sources of strength from foreign strains of blood and other types of human
civilisation, is now seeking to lift itself for good into an organised
national unity, always by its excess of fecundity engendering fresh
diversities and divisions, it has never yet been able to overcome
permanently the almost insuperable obstacles to the organisation of a
continent. The time has now come when those obstacles can be overcome. The
attempt which our race has been making throughout its long history, it will
now make under entirely new circumstances.
A keen observer would predict its success because the only important
obstacles have been or are in the process of being removed. But we go
farther and believe that it is sure to succeed because the freedom, unity
and greatness of India have now become necessary to the world. This is the
faith in which the Karmayogin puts its had to the work and will persist in
it, refusing to be discouraged by difficulties however immense and
apparently insuperable. We believe that God is with us and in that faith we
shall conquer. We believe that humanity needs us and it is the love and
service of humanity, of our country, of our religion that will purify our
heart and inspire our action in the struggle.
The task we set before ourselves is not mechanical but moral and spiritual.
We aim not at the alteration of a form of government but at the building of
a nation. Of that task politics is a part, but only a part. We shall devote
ourselves not to politics alone, nor to social questions alone, nor to
theology or philosophy or literature or science by themselves, but we
include all these in one entity which we believe to b all-important, the
dharma, the national religion which we also believe to be universal. There
is a mighty law of life, a great principle of human evolution, a body of
spiritual knowledge and experience of which India has always been destined
to be guardian, exemplar and missionary. This is the sanaatana dharma, the
eternal religion.
Under the stress of alien impacts she has largely lost hold not of
the structure of that dharma, but of its living reality. For the religion of
India is nothing if it is not lived. It has to be applied not only to life,
but to the whole of life; its spirit has to enter into and mould our
society, our politics, our literature, our science, our individual
character, affections and aspirations. To understand the heart of this
dharma, to experience it as a truth, to feel the high emotions to which it
rises and to express and execute it in life is what we understand by
Karmayoga. We believe that it is to make the yoga the ideal of human life
that India rises today; by the yoga she will get the strength to realise her
freedom, unity and greatness, by the yoga she will keep the strength to
preserve it It is a spiritual revolution we foresee and the material is only
its shadow and reflex.
The European sets great store by machinery. He seeks to renovate humanity by
schemes of society and systems of government; he hopes to bring about the
millennium by an act of Parliament. Machinery is of great importance, but
only as a working means for the spirit within, the force behind. The
nineteenth century in India aspired to political emancipation, social
renovation, religious vision and rebirth, but it failed because it adopted
Western motives and methods, ignored the spirit, history and destiny of our
race and thought that by taking over European education, European machinery,
European organisation and equipment we should reproduce in ourselves
European prosperity, energy and progress. We of the twentieth century reject
the aims, ideals and methods of the Anglicised nineteenth precisely because
we accept its experience. We refuse to make an idol of the present. we look
before and after, backward to the mighty history of our race, forward to the
grandiose destiny for which that history has prepared it.
We do not believe political salvation can be attained by enlargement of
Councils, introduction of the elective principle, colonial self-government
or any other formula of European politics. We do not deny the use of some of
these things as instruments, as weapons in a political struggle, but we deny
their sufficiency whether as instruments or ideals and look beyond to an end
which they do not serve except in a trifling degree. They might be
sufficient if it were our ultimate destiny to be an outlying province of the
British Empire or a dependent adjunct of European civilisation. That is a
future which we do not think it worth making any sacrifice to accomplish.
We believe on the other hand that India is destined to work out her own
independent life and civilisation, to stand in the forefront of the world
and solve the political, social, economical and moral problems which Europe
has failed to solve, yet the pursuit of whose solution and the feverish
passage in that pursuit from experiment to experiment, from failure to
failure she calls her progress. Our means must be as great as our ends and
the strength to discover and use the means so as to attain the end can only
be found by seeking the eternal source of strength in ourselves.
We do not believe that by changing the machinery so as to make our society
the ape of Europe we shall effect social renovation. Widow-remarriage,
substitution of class for caste, adult marriage, inter-marriages,
inter-dining and other nostrums of the social reformer are mechanical
changes which, whatever their merits or demerits, cannot by themselves save
the soul of the nation alive or stay the course of degradation and decline.
It is the spirit alone that saves, and only by becoming great and free in
heart can we become socially and politically great and free.
We do not believe that by multiplying new sects limited within the narrower
and inferior ideas of religion imported from the West or by creating
organisations for the perpetuation of the mere dress and body of Hinduism we
can recover our spiritual health, energy and greatness. The world moves
through an indispensable interregnum of free thought and materialism to a
new synthesis of religious thought and experience, a new religious
world-life free from intolerance, yet full of faith and fervour, accepting
all forms of religion because it has an unshakable faith in the One.
The religion which embraces Science and faith, Theism, Christianity,
Mohammedanism and Buddhism and yet is none of these, is that to which
the World-spirit moves.
In our own, which is the most sceptical because it has questioned and
experimented the most, the most believing because it has the deepest
experience and the most varied and positive spiritual knowledge, - that
wider Hinduism which is not a dogma or combination of dogmas but a law of
life, which is not a social framework but the spirit of a past and future
social evolution, which rejects nothing but insists and testing and
experiencing everything and when tested and experienced turning it to the
soul's uses, in this Hinduism we find the basis of the future
world-religion. This sanatana dharma has many scriptures, Veda, Vedanta,
Gita, Upanishad, Darshana, Purana, Tantra, nor could it reject the Bible or
the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart in
which the Eternal has His dwelling. It is in our inner spiritual experiences
that we shall find the proof and source of the world's Scriptures, the law
of knowledge, love and conduct, the basis of the inspiration of Karmayoga.
Our aim will therefore be to help in building up India for the sake of
humanity - this is the spirit of Nationalism which we profess and follow. We
say to humanity, `The time has come when you must take the great step and
rise out of a material existence into the higher, deeper and wider life
towards which humanity moves. The problems which have troubled mankind can
only be solved by conquering the Kingdom within, not by harnessing the
forces of Nature to the service of comfort and luxury, but by mastering the
forces of the intellect and the spirit, by vindicating the freedom of man
within as well as without and by conquering from within external Nature. For
that work the resurgence of Asia is necessary, therefore Asia rises. For
that work the freedom and greatness of India is essential, therefore she
claims her destined freedom and greatness, and it is to the interest of all
humanity, not excluding England, that she should wholly establish her
claim'.
We say to the nation, `It is God's will that we should be ourselves and not
Europe. We have sought to regain life by following the law of another being
than our own. We must return and seek the sources of life and strength
within ourselves. We must know our past and recover it for the purposes of
our future. Our business is to realise ourselves first and to mould
everything to the law of India's eternal life and nature. It will therefore
be the object of the Karmayogin to read the heart of our religion, our
society, our philosophy, politics, literature, art, jurisprudence, science,
thought, everything that was and is ours, so that we may be able to say to
ourselves and our nation, ``This is our dharma''. We shall review European
civilisation entirely from the standpoint of Indian thought and knowledge
and seek to throw off from us the dominating stamp of the Occident; what we
have to take from the West we shall take as Indians. And the dharma once
discovered we shall strive our utmost not only to profess but to live, in
our individual actions, in our social life, in our political endeavours.'
We say to the individual and especially to the young who are now arising to
do India's work, God's work, `You cannot cherish these ideals, still less
than can you fulfill them if you subject your minds to European ideas or
look at life from the material standpoint. Materially you are nothing,
spiritually you are everything. It is only the Indian who can believe
everything, dare everything, sacrifice everything. First therefore become
Indians. Recover the patrimony of your forefathers. Recover the Aryan
thought, the Aryan discipline, the Aryan character, the Aryan life. Recover
the Vedanta, the Gita, the Yoga. Recover them not only in intellect or
sentiment but in your lives. Live them and you will be great and strong,
mighty, invincible and fearless. Neither life nor death will have any
terrors for you. Difficulty and impossibility will vanish from your
vocabularies. For it is in the spirit that strength is eternal and you must
win back the kingdom of yourselves, the inner Swaraj, before you can win
back your outer empire. There the Mother dwells and She waits for worship
that She may give strength. Believe in Her, serve Her, lose your wills in
Hers, your egoism in the greater ego of the country, your separate
selfishness in the service of humanity. Recover the source of all strength
in yourselves and all else will be added to you; social soundness,
intellectual preeminence, political freedom, the mastery of human thought,
the hegemony of the world.'
