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.'
