India's Self Denial
by Francois Gautier
Copyright 1999 Francois Gautier (Auroville, 24. 11. 99)
Introduction
Why is it that Indians, particularly its elite -
the intelligentsia, the journalists, the writers, the top bureaucrats,
the diplomats - hold an image of themselves which is often negative, and
have a tendency to run down their own country? The self-perception that
Indians have of themselves, is frequently detrimental to their
self-confidence. This is particularly striking amongst Indian
journalists, who always seem to look at India through a western prism
and constantly appear to worry how the foreign press views India, how
the foreign countries - particularly the United States of America -
perceive India, what the Human Right agencies say about India... Thus,
when one reads certain Indian magazines, one has the impression that
they could be written by foreign journalists, because not only do they
tend to look at India in a very critical manner, but often, there is
nothing genuinely Indian in their contents, no references to India's
past greatness, no attempts to put things in perspective through the
prism of India's ancient wisdom. Therefore, most of the time, their
editorial contents endeavour to explain the present events affecting
India, such as Ayodhya, or the problem of Kashmir, or the Christian
missionaries' attempts at conversion of tribal Hindus, by taking a very
small portion of the subcontinent's history - usually the most recent
one - without trying to put these events in a broader focus, or
attempting to revert back to India's long and ancient history. In a
gist, one could say - although things have been changing in the late
nineties - that there is hardly any self-pride amongst India's
intellectual elite, because they are usually too busy running down their
own country. It is done in a very brilliantly manner, it is true -
because Indian journalists, writers, artists, high bureaucrats, are
often intelligent, witty and talented people - but always with that
western slant, as if India was afflicted by a permanent inferiority
complex. One then has to try to analyse the underlying reasons of this
negative self-perception that India has of herself, probe the
unconscious impulses which give many Indians - Hindus, we should say, as
the majority of India's intelligentsia are born Hindus - the habit of
always depreciating their own culture and traditions.
1. The Theory of the Aryan Invasion
The first and foremost explanation for this
inferiority complex could be the theorem of the Aryan invasion, which is
still taken as the foundation stone of the History of India. According
to this theory, which was actually devised in the 18th and 19th century
by British linguists and archaeologists, who had a vested interest to
prove the supremacy of their culture over the one of the subcontinent,
the first inhabitants of India were good-natured, peaceful, dark-skinned
shepherds, called the Dravidians. They were supposedly remarkable
builders, witness the city of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistani Sind, but had no
culture to speak-off, no written texts, no proper script even. Then,
around 1500 B.C., India is said to have been invaded by tribes called
the Aryans : white-skinned, nomadic people, who originated somewhere in
Ural, or the Caucasus. To the Aryans, are attributed Sanskrit, the Vedic
- or Hindu religion, India's greatest spiritual texts, the Vedas, as
well as a host of subsequent writings, the Upanishads, the Mahabharata,
the Ramanaya, etc...
This was indeed a masterly stroke on the part of
the British : thanks to the Aryan theory, they showed on the one hand
that Indian civilisation was not that ancient and that it was posterior
to the cultures which influenced the western world - Mesopotamia,
Sumeria, or Babylon - and on the other hand, that whatever good things
India had developed - Sanskrit, literature, or even its architecture,
had been influenced by the West. Thus, Sanskrit, instead of being the
mother of all Indo-European languages, became just a branch of their
huge family; thus, the religion of Zarathustra is said to have
influenced Hinduism - as these Aryan tribes were believed to have
transited through numerous countries, Persia being one, before reaching
India - and not vice versa. In the same manner, many achievements were
later attributed to the Greek invasion of Alexander the Great :
scientific discoveries, mathematics, architecture etc. So ultimately, it
was cleverly proved that nothing is Indian, nothing really great was
created in India, it was always born out of different influences on the
subcontinent.
To make this theory even more complicated, the
British, who like other invaders before them had a tough time with the
Brahmins and the Kshatriyas, implied that the Aryans drove the
Dravidians southwards, where they are still today; and that to mark
forever their social boundaries, these Aryans had devised the despicable
caste system, whereby, they the priests and princes, ruled over the
merchants and labourers... And thus English missionaries and later,
American preachers, were able to convert tribes and low caste Hindus by
telling them : " you, the aborigines, the tribals, the Harijans, were
there in India before the Aryans; you are the original inhabitants of
India, and you should discard Hinduism, the religion of these arrogant
Aryans and embrace, Christianity, the true religion".
Thus was born the great Aryan invasion theory, of
two civilisations, that of the low caste Dravidians and the high caste
Aryans, always pitted against each other - which has endured, as it is
still today being used by some Indian politicians - and has been
enshrined in all history books - Western, and unfortunately also Indian.
Thus were born wrong "nationalistic" movements, such as the Dravidian
movement against Hindi and the much-maligned Brahmins, who actually
represent today a minority, which is often underprivileged.... This
Aryan invasion theory has also made India look westwards, instead of
taking pride in its past and present achievements. It may also
unconsciously be one of the reasons why there was at one time such great
fascination for Sonia Gandhi, a White-Skinned-Westerner, who may have
been unconsciously perceived as a true Aryan by the downtrodden
Dravidians and a certain fringe of that Indian intelligentsia which is
permanently affected by an inferiority complex towards the West. It may
even have given a colour fixation to this country, where women will go
to extremes to look "fair".
But today, this theory is being challenged more and
more by new discoveries, both archaeological and linguistic. There are
many such proofs, but two stand out : the discovery of the Saraswati
river and the deciphering of the Indus seals. In the Rig Veda, the
Ganges, India's sacred river, is only mentioned once, but the mythic
Saraswati is praised on more than fifty occasions. Yet for a long time,
the Saraswati river was considered a myth, until the American satellite
Landstat was able to photograph and map the bed of this magnificent
river, which was nearly fourteen kilometres wide, took its source in the
Himalayas, flowed through the states of Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan,
before throwing itself in the sea near Bhrigukuccha, today called
Broach. American archaeologist Mark Kenoyer was able to prove in 1991
that the majority of archaeological sites of the so-called Harappan (or
Dravidian) civilisation were not situated on the ancient bed of the
Indus river, as first thought, but on the Saraswati. Another
archaeologist , Paul-Henri Francfort, Chief of a franco-american mission
(Weiss, Courty, Weterstromm, Guichard, Senior, Meadow, Curnow), which
studied the Saraswati region at the beginning of the nineties, found out
why the Saraswati had 'disappeared' : " around 2200 B.C., he writes, an
immense drought reduced the whole region to aridity and famine "
(Evidence for Harappan irrigation system in Haryana and Rajasthan
-Eastern Anthropologist 1992). Thus around this date, most inhabitants
moved away from the Saraswati to settle on the banks of the Indus and
Sutlej rivers.
According to official history, the Vedas were
composed around 1500 BC, some even say 1200 BC. Yet, as we have seen,
the Rig Veda, describes India as it was before the great drought which
dried-up the Saraswati; which means in effect that the so-called Indus,
or Harappan civilisation was a continuation of the Vedic epoch, which
ended approximately when the Saraswati dried-up. Recently, the famous
Indus seals, discovered on the site of Mohenja Daro and Harappa, may
have been deciphered by Dr Rajaram, a mathematician who worked at one
time for the NASA and Dr Jha, a distinguished linguist. In the biased
light of the Aryan invasion theory, these seals were presumed to be
written in a Harappan (read Dravidian) script, although they had never
been convincingly decoded. But Rajaram and Jha, using an ancient Vedic
glossary, the Nighantu, found out that the script is of Sanskrit
lineage, is read from left to right and does not use vowels (which like
in Arabic, are 'guessed' according to the meaning of the whole
sentence). In this way, they have been able to decipher so far 1500 and
2000 seals, or about half the known corpus. As the discovery of the
Saraswati river, the decipherment of the Indus scripts also goes to
prove that that the Harappan Civilization, of which the seals are a
product, belonged to the latter part of the Vedic Age and had close
connections with Vedantic works like the Sutras and the Upanishads. In
this light, it becomes evident that not only there never was an Aryan
invasion of India, but, as historian Konraad Elst writes, it could very
well be that it was an Indian race which went westwards : " rather than
Indo-Iranians on their way from South Russia to Iran and partly to
India, these may as well be the Hitites, Kassites or Mitanni, on their
way from India, via the Aral Lake area, to Anatolia, or Mesopotamia,
where they show up in subsequent centuries" (Indigenous Indians).
2. An Image of Poverty
Another reason why Indians often exhibit a negative
idea of themselves, may be because India is always associated in the
world with poverty : Mother Teresa, Unicef, or Calcutta. This image has
been reinforced by books such as the City of Joy, an international
best-seller, which takes a little part of India - the Calcutta slums -
and gives the impression to the naive and ignorant western readers, that
it constitutes the whole of India. Another factor which reinforces the
image of poverty is the tremendous fame which Mother Theresa enjoyed in
her lifetime - and even after her death, as she is in the process of
being made a saint. While it is true that Mother Theresa did a
tremendous job in Calcutta, she never tried to counterbalance the very
negative image of India that her name was carrying, with some praise for
the country which had adopted her for fifty years. She could have
spoken for instance about the great hospitality of Indians, or the
open-mindedness of Hindu religion, which had allowed her to practise
Christianity near one of the most sacred temples of the country, or even
about the near worship which most Hindus showed for her.
It is true that there is a tremendous amount of
poverty in India, and that many people can only afford one meal a day.
But four things should be known. Firstly, that until the 18th century,
in spite of the repeated Muslim invasions, India was known as one of the
richest countries of the world, the land "of milk and honey". You only
have to read the numerous accounts of travellers from different
countries, who all marvelled at India's prosperity. The second thing, is
that all the great famines of India happened during the British time.
Many historians, such as Frenchman Guy Deleury, have documented the
economic rape of India by the British : "Industrially the British
suffocated India , gradually strangling Indian industries whose finished
products, textiles in particular, were of a quality unique in the world
which has made them famous over the centuries. Instead they oriented
Indian industries towards jute, cotton, tea, oil seeds, which they
needed as raw materials for their home industries. They employed cheap
labour for the enterprises while traditional artisans were perishing.
India, which used to be a land of plenty, where milk and honey flowed
started drying" (Modele Indou)... According to British records, one
million Indians died of famine between 1800 and 1825, 4 million between
1825-1850, 5 million between 1850-1875 and 15 million between 1875-1900.
Thus 25 million Indians died in 100 years ! The British must be proud
of their bloody record. It is probably more honourable and
straightforward to kill in the name of Allah, than in the guise of petty
commercial interests and total disregard for the ways of a 5000 year
civilisation. Thus, by the beginning of the 20th century, India was bled
dry and there were no resources left.
The third fact, is that after Independence,
whatever poverty there still was in this country, there were no more
famines, as India managed to become self-sufficient in food through the
Green Revolution (whatever negative side effects it had on India's
ecology - but that is another story). This is a great achievement, a
tremendous task of which India can be proud off. For if you look at
China, India's largest neighbour, which always invites natural
comparison with India as they share many of the same problems and
characteristics, it went through tremendous traumas after independence.
Millions died of hunger, for instance, when Mao diverted peasants from
cultivating the land, in his misguided and megalomaniac effort to
increase steel production. It should also be said that later it did look
as if China fared better than India in its effort to feed adequately
its people. But that is because they employed coercion to control their
own population, whereas India, a democracy, never tried to force its
citizens to have less children - except for a short while under Indira
Gandhi (who lost the elections shortly after).
The fourth thing is that there is a tremendous
amount of black money in India - as much as 40 to 50% of the total
economy. If that money could be tapped and channelled to the White
economy, it would give a tremendous boost to the nation. But you need a
government wise enough to enact laws which make people cheat less.
People have been cheating since 1947, because Nehru had decided that
Socialism, partly modelled after the Soviet Union, was the best tool to
bridge the yawning gap between the very rich and the very poor of India.
At that time, it seemed a good idea, but as years passed, it proved a
disaster, spawning a huge bureaucratic system, breeding corruption,
stifling free enterprise and overall making people cheat, because it had
introduced one of the heaviest taxing system in the world. And the sad
thing is that Indians - from the middle class to even the poorer people -
are some of the greatest savers in the world. Not for them the credit
card system, which is ruining the West, by artificially enhancing the
economy - no, they save in land, gold, jewellery, or in cash, often
stashed at home. And that is a tremendous asset for India, if it could
be brought in the open. There is nowadays an economic crisis in the
so-called Tiger countries of Asia - even Hong-Kong is affected by it.
But so far, India's economy has remained sound. Of course there are
drawbacks: the Rupee is not yet fully convertible, subsidies drain the
Exchequer, import duties are still levied on many goods... However this
partially insulated economy has helped India to protect her own
industries, while switching gradually to a fully liberalised financial
system. Thus, if that tremendous amount of black money could be tapped,
it would also contribute towards changing this "poor" image sticking to
India, which is harming her in her quest for foreign investments and
international recognition.
China too had a very negative image until the late
sixties : the Red menace, the communist Dragon, the great Backward
leap... But after Nixon's visit in 1971, everything changed - that is
the Western Press, which was responsible in the first place for China's
negative image, started projecting a more positive picture of China. It
also helped, that contrary to Indians, the Chinese are proud of
themselves and possess a strong nationalistic bend - maybe because they
have never been colonised, except for short periods. And today, there is
not only a fascination for China in the West, but the Industrialised
World has also placed many of its economic chips there. France, for
instance, invests 10 times more in China than in India. Yet, India is a
much more interesting country from the investment point of view : it is
democratic, which China is not; people there speak more English than in
China; it has laws to protect contracts, which is not the case in China;
it is a stable country, in spite of the political problems and all
kinds of separatist movements... But still, the world hardly takes
notice of India - although things are beginning to change. And that is
because of India's negative image, of course ! And nobody is more
responsible about this negative image than Indians themselves. India has
to stop going around with a begging bowl in her hands. For India does
not have to beg : it has the material and intellectual wealth - it has
even the monetary resources.
3. The Caste System
The caste system has been the most misunderstood,
the most vilified aspect of Hindu society at the hands of Western
scholars - and even today by "secular" Indians. And this has greatly
contributed to India's self-depreciation, as you hardly find any Indian
who is not ashamed of caste, especially if he talks to a Westerner. But
ultimately, one must understand the original purpose behind the caste
system, as spelt out by India's Great Sage and Avatar of the Modern Age,
Sri Aurobindo : "Caste was originally an arrangement for the
distribution of functions in society, just as much as class in Europe,
but the principle on which this distribution was based was peculiar to
India. A brahmin was a brahmin not by mere birth, but because he
discharged the duty of preserving the spiritual and intellectual
elevation of the race, and he had to cultivate the spiritual temperament
and acquire the spiritual training which alone would qualify him for
the task. The kshatriya was kshatriya not merely because he was the son
of warriors and princes, but because he discharged the duty of
protecting the country and preserving the high courage and manhood of
action, and he had to cultivate the princely temperament and acquire the
strong and lofty Samurai training which alone fitted him for his
duties. So it was for the vaishya whose function was to amass wealth for
the race and the shudra who discharged the humbler duties of service
without which the other castes could not perform their share of labour
for the common, good". (India's Rebirth, p 26).
It is true that in time the caste system has become
perverted, as Sri Aurobindo also noted : "it is the nature of human
institutions to degenerate; there is no doubt that the institution of
caste degenerated. It ceased to be determined by spiritual
qualifications which, once essential, have now come to be subordinate
and even immaterial and is determined by the purely material tests of
occupation and birth... By this change it has set itself against the
fundamental tendency of Hinduism which is to insist on the spiritual and
subordinate the material and thus lost most of its meaning. the spirit
of caste arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to dominate it
instead of the spirit of duty, and the change weakened the nation and
helped to reduce us to our present condition...(India's Rebirth, p 27)
Today, the abuses being done in the name of caste are often horrifying,
specially to a Westerner brought up on more egalitarian values. Some of
the backward villages of Tamil Nadu, or Bihar for instance, still
segregate Harijans and the lower castes, who do not have the same access
to educational facilities than the upper castes, in spite of Nehru's
heavy-handed quota system, which has been badly taken advantage off.
Modern-day Indian politicians have exploited like
nobody else the caste divide for their own selfish purposes. The
politicians of ancient India were princes and kings belonging to the
kshatriya caste; their duty was to serve the nation and high ideals were
held in front of them by the brahmins and rishis who advised them. The
Buddha's father for instance, was a king elected by its own people. But
today we see corrupt, inefficient men, who have forgotten that they are
supposed to serve the nation first, who are only interested in minting
the maximum money in the minimum time. Indian politicians have often
become a caricature, which is made fun of by the whole country, adding
to India's self-negating image. They are frequently uneducated, gross
people, elected on the strength of demagogic pledges, such as promising
rice for 2 Rs a kilo, a folly which at one time was draining many
state's coffers, or by playing Muslims against Hindus, Harijans against
Brahmins, as in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Ministers in
India are most of the time ignorant, unqualified, often having no idea
about the department they are overseeing - it is the civil servants who
control matters, who know their subject thoroughly. You have to work
hard to become a civil servant, study, pass exams, then slowly climb up
the hierarchy, hereby gaining experience. The politician just jumps from
being a lowly clerk, or some uneducated zamindar to become a powerful
Minister, lording over much more educated men. There should be also
exams to become a minister, a minimum of knowledge and skills should be
required of the man who says he wants to serve the nation. It matters
not if he comes from a low caste, but he should have in his heart a
little bit of the selflessness of the kshatriya and a few drops of the
wisdom of the brahmin.
Nobody is saying that the caste system should be
praised, for it has indeed degenerated; but it would also help in
enhancing India's self-pride if Indians realised that once it
constituted a unique and harmonious system. And finally, have the people
who dismiss caste as an Aryan imposition on the Dravidians, or as an
inhuman and nazi system, pondered the fact that it is no worse than the
huge class differences you can see nowadays in South America, or even in
the United States, where many Negroes live below the poverty level ?
And can you really exclude it off-hand, when it still survives so much
in the villages - and even in more educated circles, where one still
marries in matching castes, with the help of an astrologer? Does the
caste system need to be transformed, to recapture its old meaning and
once more incarnate a spiritual hierarchy of beings? Or has it to be
recast in a different mould, taking into account the parameters of
modern Indian society? Or else, will it finally disappear altogether
from India, because it has become totally irrelevant today ? At any
rate, Hindus should not allow this factor to be exploited shamelessly
against them, as it has been in the last two centuries, by missionaries,
"secular" historians, Muslims, and by pre and post-independence Indian
politicians - each for their own purpose.
4. Muslim Invasion
Another very important reason for the negative
self-image that Indians have got of themselves, are the Muslim
invasions. This is still today a very controversial subject, since
Indian history books have chosen to keep quiet about this huge chunk of
Indian history - nearly 10 centuries of horrors. At Independence, Nehru
too, put it aside, perhaps because he thought that this was a topic
which could divide India, as there was a strong Muslim minority which
chose to stay and not emigrate to Pakistan. Yet, nothing has marked
India's psyche - or the Hindu silent majority, if you wish - as the
Muslim invasions. And whatever happens in contemporary India, is a
consequence of these invasions, whether it is the creation of Pakistan,
whether it is Kashmir, whether it is Ayodhya, or Kargil. There is no
point in passing a moral judgment on these invasions, as they are a
thing of the past. Islam is one of the world's youngest religions, whose
dynamism is not in question; unfortunately it is a militant religion,
as it believes that there is only one God and all the other Gods are
false. And so as long as this concept is ingrained in the minds of
Muslims, there will be a problem of tolerance, of tolerating other
creeds. And this is what happened in India from the 7th century onwards :
invaders, who believed in one God, came upon this country which had a
million gods... And for them it was the symbol of all what they thought
was wrong. So the genocide - and the word genocide has to be used -
which was perpetrated was tremendous, because of the staunch resistance
of the 4000 year old Hindu faith. Indeed, the Muslim policy vis a vis
India seems to have been a conscious and systematic destruction of
everything that was beautiful, holy, refined. Entire cities were burnt
down and their populations massacred. Each successive campaign brought
hundreds of thousands of victims and similar numbers were deported as
slaves. Every new invader often made literally his hill of Hindu skulls.
Thus the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000, was followed by the
annihilation of the entire Hindu population there; indeed, the region is
still called Hindu Kush, 'Hindu slaughter'. The Bahmani sultans in
central India, made it a rule to kill 100.000 Hindus a year. In 1399,
Teimur killed 100.000 Hindus in a single day, and many more on other
occasions. Historian Konraad Elst, in his book "Negationism in India",
quotes Professor K.S. Lal, who calculated that the Hindu population
decreased by eighty million between the year 1000 and 1525, indeed,
probably the biggest holocaust in the world's history, far greater than
the genocide of the Incas in South America by the Spanish and the
Portuguese.
Regrettably, there was a conspiracy by the British,
and later by India's Marxist intelligentsia to negate this holocaust.
Thus, Indian students since the early twenties, were taught that that
there never was a Muslim genocide on the person of Hindus, but rather
that the Moghols brought great refinement to Indian culture. In
"Communalism and the writing of Indian history", for instance, Romila
Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, professors at the JNU in New
Delhi, the Mecca of secularism and negationism in India, denied the
Muslim genocide by replacing it instead with a conflict of classes :
"Muslims brought the notion of egalitarianism in India", they argue. The
redoubtable Romila Thapar in her "Penguin History of India",
co-authored with Percival Spear, writes again : "Aurangzeb's supposed
intolerance, is little more than a hostile legend based on isolated acts
such as the erection of a mosque on a temple site in Benares".
What are the facts, according to Muslim records ?
Aurangzeb (1658-1707) did not just build an isolated mosque on a
destroyed temple, he ordered all temples destroyed an mosques to be
built on their site. Among them the Kashi Vishvanath, one of the most
sacred places Hindu worship, Krishna's birth temple in Mathura, the
rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujurat, the Vishnu temple
replaced with the Alamgir mosque now overlooking Benares and the
Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. The number of temples destroyed by
Aurangzeb is counted in 5, if not 6 figures, according to his own
official court chronicles: "Aurangzeb ordered all provincial governors
to destroy all schools and temples of the Pagans and to make a complete
end to all pagan teachings and practices"... "Hasan Ali Khan came and
said that 172 temples in the area had been destroyed"... "His majesty
went to Chittor and 63 temples were destroyed"... "Abu Tarab, appointed
to destroy the idol-temples of Amber, reported that 66 temples had been
razed to the ground". Aurangzeb did not stop at destroying temples,
their users were also wiped-out; even his own brother, Dara Shikoh, was
executed for taking an interest in Hindu religion and the Sikh Guru Tegh
Bahadur was beheaded because he objected to Aurangzeb's forced
conversions.
This genocide is still a reality which should not
be wished away. Because what the Muslims invasions have done to India is
to instil terror in the Hindu collective psyche, which still lingers
many centuries later and triggers unconscious reactions. The paranoia
displayed today by Indians, their indiscipline, their lack of charity
for their own brethrens, the abject disregard of their environment, are a
direct consequence of these invasions. What India has to do today, is
to look squarely at the facts pertaining to these invasions and come to
term with them, without any spirit of vengeance, so as to regain a
little bit of self-pride. It would also help the Muslim community of
India to acknowledge these horrors, which paradoxically, were committed
against them, as they are the Hindus who were then converted by force,
their women raped, their children taken into slavery - even though today
they have made theirs the religion which their ancestors once hated.
5. European Colonialism
Obviously, one of the major causes for India's
self-depreciating image are the European invasions. The paradox is that
no country in the world as India has shown as much tolerance towards
accepting in its fold persecuted religious minorities from all over the
planet. Take the Jews, for instance, who have been persecuted and
treated as second-class citizens everywhere after fleeing the
destruction of the temple of Jerusalem. In India, not only were they
welcomed, but also they were allowed to live and practise their religion
peacefully, till most of them went back to Israel after Independence...
But it is not only the Jews, but also the Parsis, who fled persecution
by the Muslims in Iran, or the Christian Syrians, who landed in India in
the 3rd century, or the Arab merchants who from time immemorial were
allowed to establish trading posts in Kerala... Or even the Jesuits, who
were welcomed when they landed with Vasco de Gama in Calicut in 1495.
But, as the Syrian Christians, as the Arab merchants, they quickly
turned against their benefactors and set not only to exploit India
commercially, but also attempted to impose their own religions on the
"Heathens", the Pagans, the Infidels.
It is thus a bit of a paradox when one hears today
Indian intellectuals claim that Hindus are intolerant, fanatic, or
"fundamentalists". Because in the whole history of India, Hindus have
not only shown that they are extremely tolerant, but Hinduism is
probably the only religion in the world who never tried to convert
others - forget about conquering other countries to propagate their own
religion. This is not true with Christianity, it is not true with Islam -
it is not even true with Buddhism, as Buddhists had missionaries who
went all over Asia and converted people. This historical tolerance of
Hinduism is never taken into account by foreign correspondents covering
India and even by Indian journalists. If it was, Indians might at least
take some pride in their country's boundless generosity towards
others... Indians have a very short memory of themselves, maybe because
they never cared to write down their own history.
Thus, this beautiful tolerance was taken advantage
off by numerous invaders - particularly Europeans colonisers. The
Portuguese for instance, were allowed to establish trading posts in the
15th century by the Zamorin of Cochin. And what did they do? Alfonso de
Albuquerque started a reign of terror in Goa, razing temples to erect
churches in their stead, burning "heretics", crucifying Brahmins, using
false theories to forcibly convert the lower castes and encouraging his
soldiers to take Indian mistresses. Later, the British missionaries in
India were always supporters of colonialism; they encouraged it and
their whole structure was based on "the good Western civilised world
being brought to the Pagans". In the words of Claudius Buccchanan, a
chaplain attached to the East India Company : "...Neither truth, nor
honesty, honour, gratitude, nor charity, is to be found in the breast of
a Hindoo"... What a comment about a nation that gave the world the
Vedas and the Upanishads ! After the failed mutiny of 1857, the
missionaries became even more militant, using the secular arm of the
British Raj, who felt that the use of the sword at the service of the
Gospel, was now entirely justified, so that at Independence, entire
regions of the north-east were converted to Christianity. Remember how
Swami Vivekananda cried in anguish at the Parliament of Religions in
Chicago: "if we Hindus dig out all the dirt from the bottom of the
Pacific Ocean and throw it in you faces, it will be but a speck compared
to what the missionaries have done to our religion and culture "".
In the late nineties, Indian Christians complained
about persecutions by Hindus "zealots". It is true that there happened
two or three crimes, particularly a ghastly murder against an Australian
missionary and his two young sons. But the massive outcry it evoked in
the Indian Press showed clearly how Indians are constantly denying
themselves and consider the life of a White Man infinitely more
important and dear than the lives of a hundred Indians. Or to put it
differently : the life of a Christian seems to them more sacred than the
lives of many Hindus, which shows how the White Man's presence in India
still has such an impact. Because when Hindus were slaughtered, whether
in Pendjab in the eighties, or in Kashmir in the nineties, when
militants would stop buses and kill all the Hindus - men, women and
children, when the few last courageous Hindus to dare remain in Kashmir,
were savagely slaughtered in a village, very few voices were raised in
the Indian Press - at least there never was such an outrage as provoked
by the murder of the Australian missionary.
At long last, Hindus are beginning to realize the
harm done by missionaries to their social and cultural fabric. Yet even
today, one still hears of covert attempts at conversion by Christian
missionaries. In the poor districts of Kerala for example, missionaries
still use the " miracle " ploy to convert people : the naive drops a "
wish " in a box placed at the entrance of church. And lo, this wish - a
loan, some cloths, a boat - is miraculously granted a few days later.
Needless to say that the happy innocent converts quickly, bringing along
his whole family. It is also this meekness of the Hindus towards the
Christians, as if the British missionaries had permanently left an
imprint of inferiority in the collective psyche of Indians, which
contributes towards India's self-denial. And let us not forget that Pope
John Paul II proclaimed that Asia will be the target of Evangelisation
in the Third Millennium.
6. Macaulay's Children
When they took over India, the British set upon
establishing an intermediary race of Indians, whom they could entrust
with their work at the middle level echelons and who could one day be
convenient instruments to rule by proxy, or semi-proxy. The tool to
shape these " British clones " was education. In the words of Macaulay,
the " pope " of British schooling in India: " We must at present do our
best to form a class, who may be interpreters between us and the
millions we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but
English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellects ". Macaulay
had very little regard for Hindu culture and education : " all the
historical information which can be collected from all the books which
have been written in the Sanskrit language, is less valuable than what
may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools
in England ". Or : " Hindus have a literature of small intrinsic value,
hardly reconcilable with morality, full of monstrous superstitions "...
It seems today that India's Marxist and Muslim
intelligentsia could not agree more with Macaulay, for his dream has
come true: nowadays, the greatest adversaries of an " indianised and
spiritualised education " are the descendants of these " Brown Shahibs "
: the " secular " politicians, the journalists, the top bureaucrats, in
fact the whole westernised cream of India. And what is even more
paradoxical, is that most of them are Hindus ! It is they, who upon
getting independence, have denied India its true identity and borrowed
blindly from the British education system, without trying to adapt it to
the unique Indian mentality and psychology; and it is they who are
refusing to accept a change of India's education system, which is
totally western-oriented and is churning out machines learning by heart
boring statistics which are of little usefulness in life. And what India
is getting from this education is a youth which apes the West : they go
to Mac Donald's, thrive on MTV culture, wear the latest Klein jeans and
Lacoste T Shirts, and in general are useless, rich parasites, in a
country which has so many talented youngsters who live in poverty. They
will grow-up like millions of other western clones in the developing
world, who wear a tie, read the New York Times and swear by liberalism
and secularism to save their countries from doom. In time, they will
reach elevated positions and write books and articles which make fun of
India, they will preside human-right committees, be "secular" high
bureaucrats who take the wrong decisions and generally do tremendous
harm to India, because it has been programmed in their genes to always
run down their own country. In a gist, they will be the ones who are
always looking at the West for approval and forever perceive India
through the western prism. It is said that a nation has to be proud of
itself to move forward - and unless there is a big change in this
intellectual elite, unless it is more conscious of its heritage and of
India's greatness, which has begun to happen in a small way, it is going
to be very difficult for India to enter the 21st century as a real
super power.
Thus the education curriculum has to be totally
revised. For instance, Indian history is still taught as it was devised
by western scholars and it promotes blindly theories such as the Aryan
Invasion, which probably never happened. On the other hand, students
learn practically nothing about the extraordinary genius of their
culture. Studies of the Vedas, for example, should be made compulsory
from the seventh grade upwards, because, as Sri Aurobindo remarked :
"the Veda was the beginning of our spiritual knowledge, the Veda will
remain its end. The recovery of the perfect truth of the Veda is
therefore not merely a desideratum for our modern intellectual
curiosity, but a practical necessity for the future of the human race.
For I firmly believe that the secret concealed in the Veda, when
entirely discovered, will be found to formulate perfectly that knowledge
and practice of divine life to which the march of humanity, after long
wanderings in the satisfaction of the intellect and senses, must
inevitably return." (India's Rebirth, p.94). Indian children should be
told about the immense human and spiritual values of their own
literature, like we in Europe are brought up on the values of the Iliad
and the Odyssey, or the great Greek tragedies. Therefore, education in
India has to be more indianised - it is not a question of being
"nationalistic", or "saffron-oriented", as Indian Marxists are fond of
saying, but of knowing one's own culture : the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita,
the Ramayana, which according to many western scholars stand among the
greatest literary works ever written.
Of course, Indian students have to be geared-up for
the competitive world, because unless you can deal on par with the
West, unless you can speak fluently English, in order to do business and
interact, you cannot compete, you cannot become a great nation.
Therefore, the best of western education has to be imparted, as Sri
Aurobindo had clearly indicated : "National education...may be described
as the education which starting with the past and making full use of
the present, builds up a great nation. Whoever wishes to cut of the
nation from its past, is no friend of our national growth. Whoever fails
to take advantage of the present, is losing us the battle of life. We
must therefore save for India all that she has stored up of knowledge,
character and noble thoughts in her immemorial past. We must acquire for
her the best knowledge that Europe can give her and assimilate it to
her own peculiar type of national temperament. We must introduce the
best methods of teaching humanity has developed, whether modern or
ancient. And all these we must harmonise into a system which will be
impregnated with the spirit of self-reliance, so as to build up men and
not machines". (India's Reb 36). Then India will produce generation
after generation of children who are proud of their own countries and do
not go about negating themselves.
7. The Partition of the Subcontinent
The first leaders of pre-independent India took some
disastrous decisions, and the worst of them was to allow the division
of their own country on religious lines. And today, the consequences of
this partition are still felt : Kashmir is the most visible of them; but
you also have Ayodhya, Kargil, the nuclear bomb, the Bombay or
Coimbatore blasts - and above all, the self-negation of a nation which
is not whole, which has lost some of its most precious limbs in 1947.
Yes, it is true, the British used to the hilt the existing divide
between Hindus and Muslims; yes, the Congress was weak : it accepted
what was forced down its throat by Jinnah and Mountbatten, even though
many of its leaders, and a few moderate Muslims, disagreed with the
principle of partition; it was also Gandhi's policy of non-violence and
gratifying the fanatical Muslim minority, in the hope that it would see
the light, which did tremendous harm to India and encouraged Jinnah to
harden his demands. But ultimately, one has to go back to the roots, to
the beginning of it all, in order to understand Partition. One has to
travel back in history to get a clear overall picture. This is why
memory is essential, this is why Holocausts should never be forgotten.
For Jinnah was only the vehicle, the instrument,
the avatar, the latest reincarnation of the medieval Muslims coming down
to rape and loot and plunder the land of Bharat. He was the true son of
Mahmud Ghaznavi, of Muhammed Ghasi, of Aurangzeb. He took up again the
work left unfinished by the last Mughal two centuries earlier:
'Dar-ul-Islam', the House of Islam. The Hindu-Muslim question is an old
one - but is it really a Muslim-Hindu question, or just plainly a Muslim
obsession, their hatred of the Hindu pagans, their contempt for this
polytheist religion? This obsession, this hate, is as old as the first
invasion of India by the Arabs in 650. After independence, nothing has
changed: the sword of Allah is still as much ready to strike the Kafirs,
the idolaters of many Gods. The Muslims invaded this country, conquered
it, looted it, razed its temples, humiliated its Hindu leaders, killed
its Brahmins, converted its weaker sections. True, it was all done in
the name of Allah and many of its chiefs were sincere in thinking they
were doing their duty by hunting down the Infidel. So how could they
accept on 15th August 1947 to share power on an equal basis with those
who were their subjects for thirteen centuries? "Either the sole power
for ourselves, and our rule over the Hindus as it is our sovereign
right, we the adorers of the one and only true God - Or we quit India
and establish our own nation, a Muslim nation, of the true faith, where
we will live amongst ourselves".
Thus there is no place for idolaters in this
country, this great nation of Pakistan; they can at best be 'tolerated'
as second-class citizens. Hence the near total exodus of Hindus from
Pakistan, whereas more than half the Muslim population in India, chose
to stay, knowing full well that they would get the freedom to be and to
practice their own religion. In passing, the Muslims took their pound of
flesh from the Hindus - once more - by indulging in terrible massacres,
which were followed by retaliations from Sikhs and hard core Hindus,
the ultimate horror. Partition triggered one of the most terrible exodus
in the history of humanity. And this exodus has not ended: they still
come by hundreds of thousand every year from Bangladesh, fleeing
poverty, flooding India with problems, when the country has already so
many of her own.
For French historian Alain Danielou, the division
of India was on the human level as well as on the political one, a great
mistake : "It added to the Middle East an unstable state, Pakistan, and
burdened India which already had serious problems". And he adds: "India
whose ancient borders stretched until Afghanistan, lost with the
country of seven rivers (the Indus Valley), the historical centre of her
civilisation. At a time when the Muslim invaders seemed to have lost
some of their extremism and were ready to assimilate themselves to other
populations of India, the European conquerors, before returning home,
surrendered once more the cradle of Hindu civilisation to Muslim
fanaticism." (Histoire de l'Inde, p.355)
Pakistanis will argue that the valley of Kashmir,
which has a Muslim majority, should have gone to Pakistan - and in the
mad logic of partition they are not totally wrong. It is because Nehru
and Gandhi accepted this logic, which was tremendously stupid, that
India is suffering so much today. Of course, we cannot go back, History
has been made : Pakistan has become an independent country and it is a
"fait accompli". But if you go to Pakistan today, you will notice that
its Punjabis look exactly the same as Indian Punjabis : they have the
same mannerisms, eat the same food, dress similarly, speak the same
language... Everything unites them, except religion. And this is what
Sri Aurobindo kept saying in 1947 : " India is free, but she has not
achieved unity, only a fissured and broken freedom...The whole communal
division into Hindu and Muslim seems to have hardened into the figure of
a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that
the Congress and the Nation will not accept the settled fact as for ever
settled, or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it
lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled; civil strife may
remain always possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign
conquest. The partition of the country must go...For without it the
destiny of India might be seriously impaired and frustrated. That must
not be." (Message of Sri Aurobindo on the 15th of August 1947). It is
only when the subcontinent will be whole again and the scars on both
sides have been healed, that a Greater India will regain some of the
self-pride gone with Partition.
8. The Humiliation of 1962
The so-called Kargil war of Kashmir in June 99 has
triggered two very positive phenomenons for India. For the first time in
a long stretch, it gave the country a bit of nationalism, it made many
Indians proud of the heroism and selflessness of their soldiers.
Whatever jingoism, or chauvinism there also was, one could feel, from
Tamil Nadu to Punjab, that for a time there grew a feeling of
togetherness in the nation, the knowledge of one's soldiers fighting it
out there, in the harshest and most dangerous conditions and defending
Mother India's sacred land. And that was very positive, for unless a
nation possesses a bit of nationalism, it cannot keep on growing. And
the second very positive aspect is that it has revived in India a notion
which has been extinct for a long time : that of the kshatriya spirit. A
nation needs warriors, it needs soldiers to defend itself and protect
its women, children, and its borders from hostile and asuric elements,
which throughout history have negated the Good and the Holy. It is fine
to be Gandhian and non-violent, but in the tough and rough world of
today, one cannot be too naive : you need a strong and well-equipped
army to be able to defend one's dharma. But a well equipped army is not
enough - we have seen how today the United States' army, the most modern
and high-tech of the world, is only capable of fighting from a
distance, either bombarding from the sky, or shooting from boats
off-shore, a coward's war, as its soldiers have lost the sense of
kshatriya, of honour, of dying for one's country. In Kargil, India saw
the selflessness of its soldiers, with all the officers in front,
climbing in the cold under enemy fire and wrestling peaks in impossible
conditions, with little more than blood and tears.
But not only Indians lack self-confidence in their
dealings with the West, but they seem to have a permanent fear of the
Chinese. Is it because in 1962, the Chinese took advantage of India's
naivete, and attacked treacherously in the Himalayas, humiliating the
Indian army and taking away 20.000 square kilometres of her territory,
which they have not yet vacated ? India's first Prime Minister,
Jawarlahal Nehru, had decided that India and China were the natural
'socialist' brothers of Asia. Shortly before China's attack, the Indian
Army Chief of Staff had drafted a paper on the threats to India's
security by China, along with recommendations for a clear defence
policy. But whe n Nehru read the paper, he said : "Rubbish. Total
Rubbish. We don't need a defence plan. Our policy is non-violence. We
foresee no military threats.. Scrap the Army. The police are good enough
to meet our security needs." We know the results of this very foolish
assessment.
But the biggest mistake that Nehru did was to
betray Tibet, a peaceful spiritualised nation. For Tibet had always been
a natural buffer between the two Giants of Asia - in fact, the Dalai
Lama's repeated offer that Tibet becomes a denuclearised, demilitarised
zone between India and China, makes total sense today and Indian leaders
should have immediately adopted it. But unfortunately, if there is one
thing which all political parties in India share, it is the policy of
appeasing China in exchange for a non-interference of the Chinese in
Kashmir. But what non-interference ? Not only did China give Pakistan
the know-how to develop nuclear weapons, but it also provided missiles
to deliver them ! On top of that, according to the CIA, China has
transferred one third of its nuclear arsenal to Nagchuka, 250 kms away
from Lhassa, a region full of huge caves, which the Chinese have linked
together by an intricate underground network and where they have
installed nearly one hundred Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, many
of them pointed at Indian cities. The reason for this is that the
Chinese, who are probably among the most intelligent people in the
world, have always understood that India is their number one potential
enemy in Asia - in military, nuclear and economic terms.
It should be clear that as long as India does not
stand-up up to its responsibility towards Tibet and continues to
recognise China's unjust suzerainty of it, there will be no peace in
Asia. Indian leaders are perfectly aware that the Chinese, a span of
fifty years, have killed 1,2 million Tibetans, razed to the ground 6254
monasteries, destroyed 60% of religious, historical and cultural
archives and that one Tibetan out of ten is still in jail. As we enter
the Third Millennium, a quarter million Chinese troops are occupying
Tibet and there are 7.5 million Chinese settlers for six million
Tibetans - in fact, in many places such as the capital, Lhassa, Tibetans
are outnumbered two to one... India has also to wake-up to the plain
fact that China needs space and has hegemonic aspirations : it got
Tibet, it got Hong Kong, it got part of Ladhak; now it wants Taiwan,
Arunachal Pradesh, the Spratly islands and what not ! Fifty years ago,
during the Korean war, Sri Aurobindo, had seen clearly in the Chinese
game : "the first move in the Chinese Communist plan of campaign is to
dominate and take possession first of these northern parts and then of
South East Asia as a preliminary to their manoeuvres with regard to the
rest of the continent in passing Tibet as a gate opening to India".
India should overcome its awe of China and be ready to eventually face
once more the Chinese army. The nuclear tests of India, which have been
very criticised, because ideally you have to get rid of nuclear weapons
if you want a safe world, should be seen in that light.
9. A Westernised Framework
It is not only the British education system, which
was blindly adopted at Independence by Nehru, but also the whole
judicial, constitutional, and legal set-up. The Constitution, for
instance, has repeatedly shown its flaws, as the Presidents, who has no
real powers, are playing more and more games and trying to impinge upon
the Prime Minister's prerogatives. Democracy in India has also been
perverted : we have seen how the Congress, who in the last three
elections of the century made disastrous showings, has used the
subtleties of the system to bring down four successive governments, thus
provoking useless and expensive elections, which in turn threw no
stable governments until the National Democratic Alliance won by a
landslide in 1999. Therefore, it is the whole democratic system of India
that has to be reshaped to suit a new, truer nation, which will
manifest again its ancient wisdom.
And what is true democracy for India, but the law
of Dharma ? It is this law that has to be revived, it is this law that
must be the foundation of a true democratic India: "It has been said
that democracy is based on the rights of man; it has been replied that
it should rather take its stand on the duties of man; but both rights
and duties are European ideas. Dharma is the Indian conception in which
rights and duties lose the artificial antagonism created by a view of
the world which makes selfishness the root of action and regain their
deep and eternal unity. Dharma is the basis of democracy which Asia must
recognise, for in this lies the distinction between the soul of Asia
and the soul of Europe." (India's Reb p.37- March 16th 1908)
And the most wonderful thing is that, practically,
India has at hand the model of a new form of democracy in the old
Panchayat system of Indian villages, which has to be revived and worked
up to the top. These ancient Panchayat system and their guilds were very
representative and they had a living contact with the people. On the
other hand, the parliamentary system has lost contact with the masses :
the MP elected from Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh, sits most of his time
in Delhi, an artificial, arrogant and faraway city. The palatial
bungalow, the car, the servants, the sycophancy, the temptation to get
corrupt he encounters there, make him forget his original aspiration to
serve the people - if he ever had one...What has to be done is not only
to decentralize the Government, by giving a greater autonomy to the
states - which should take care of most separatist movements - but also
to send back the elected politicians to their fields of work, so that
they have a living contact with their people, as they did two thousand
years ago : " We had a spontaneous and a free growth of communities
developing on their own lines...Each such communal form of life - the
village, the town, etc. - which formed the unit of national life, was
left free in its own internal management. The central authority never
interfered with it... because its function was not so much to legislate
as to harmonise and see that everything was going all right"... (India's
Rebirth 172)
The Judiciary, with its millions of backlog cases,
which sometimes take decades to be decided upon, with its lawyers
looking like crows in these ridiculous black dresses, would have to be
reviewed too. It would be absurd to put back the Manu law into practice;
but certainly the law of Dharma, of Truth, should be translated into a
new Judicial system. Not to judge according to Western standards, with
its so-called secular values, which have no relevance to India : " The
work of the legislators attempted to take up the ordinary life of man
and of the community and the life of human desire and aim and interest
and ordered rule and custom and to interpret and formulate it in the
same complete and decisive manner and at the same time to throw the
whole in to an ordered relation to the ruling ideas of the national
culture and frame and perpetuate a social system intelligently fashioned
so as to provide a basis, a structure, a gradation by which there could
be a secure evolution of the life from the vital and mental, to the
spiritual motive.. " (Found of Indian Culture p. 283).
India has no national language, as Nehru thought
that English could be the unifying language. But barely 10% of India
knows English fluently and Hindi is spoken only in the North. Yet, very
few seems to realise that India possesses in Sanskrit the Mother of all
languages, so intricate, so subtle, so rich, that no other speech can
equal it today. It could easily become the unifying language of India :
"Sanskrit ought still to have a future as the language of the learned
and it will not be a good day for India when the ancient tongues cease
entirely to be written or spoken", admonished 50 years ago Sri
Aurobindo, A dead language, you say ! Impossible to revive? But that's
what they argued about Hebrew. And did not the Jewish people, when they
got back their land in 1948, revive their 'dead' language, so that it is
spoken today by all Jewish people and has become alive again ? The same
thing ought to be done with Sanskrit, but as Sri Aurobindo points out:
"it must get rid of the curse of the heavy pedantic style contracted by
it in its decline, with the lumbering impossible compounds and the
overweight of hair-splitting erudition". Let the scholars begin now to
revive and modernise the Sanskrit language, it would be a sure sign of
the dawning of the Renaissance of India. In a few years it should be
taught as the second language in schools throughout the country, with
the regional language as the first and English as the third. On top of
that, Sanskrit would be a gift to the world, because it will boost the
studies of the Vedas, whose great secrets will be unravelled. And again,
this will go in enhancing India's self image.
10. Arise Again O Ancient India
"Arise O India, be proud once more of Thyself", one
would be tempted to say in conclusion. This should be India's motto for
the Third Millennium, after five centuries of self-denial. For, in spite
of its poverty, in spite of the false Aryan invasion, in spite of the
Muslim holocaust, in spite of European colonialism, in spite of
Macaulay's children, in spite of the Partition, in spite of the Chinese
threat, in spite of the westernised framework, India still has got
tremendous potential. Everything is there, ready to be manifested again,
ready to mould India in a new modern nation, a super power of the 21st
century. Of course, India has to succeed its industrialisation, it has
to liberalise, because unless you can compete economically with the
West, no nation can become a super power. India has also to solve its
political problems, settle its separatist troubles, get rid of
corruption and bureaucracy. And lastly, it has to apply quickly its mind
and genius to its ecological problems, because the environment in India
is in a very bad way, near the point of no-return. Thus, if India can
succeed into its industrialisation and liberalisation, become a force to
be reckoned militarily, economically and socially, then the wonder that
IS India could again manifest itself.
And what is this Wonder? Beyond the image of
poverty, of backwardness, beyond even the wonder that is Hinduism, there
is a Knowledge - spiritual, occult, esoteric, medical even - still
alive today in India. This Knowledge was once roaming upon the shores of
this world - in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece... - but it has now vanished
to be replaced by religions, with their dogmas and rituals, do's and
don't, hells and heavens. For we have lost the truth. we have lost the
Great Sense, the meaning of our evolution, the meaning of why so much
suffering, why dying, why getting born, why this earth, who are we, what
is the soul, what is reincarnation, where is the ultimate truth about
the world, the universe... But India has kept this truth, India has
managed to preserve it through seven millenniums of pitfalls, of
genocides and attempts at killing her santanam dharma. And this will be
India's gift to this planet during the next century: to restore to the
world its true sense. to recharge humanity with the real meaning and
spirit of life, to gift to this dolorous Planet That which is beyond
mind : the Supra-Mental. India will become the spiritual leader of the
world : "It is this religion that I am raising-up before the world, it
is this that I have perfected and developed through the Rishis, Saints,
and Avatars, and now it is going forth to do my work among the nations. I
am raising forth this nation to send forth my word...When therefore it
is said that India shall rise, it is the Santana Dharma that shall rise,
it is the Santana Dharma that shall be great. When it is said that
India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Santana Dharma that
shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the Dharma and
by the Dharma that India exists". (India's Reb. p. 46 -Uttara speech)
This knowledge does not necessarily reside in
mystical realms, as it can be very practical. Ayurveda for instance, the
oldest medical science still in practise, but which is unfortunately
now being neglected. As a result, American companies are patenting
medicines using the properties of neem or haldi, which were known 4000
years ago by India's forefathers. As in the case of Sanskrit, the Indian
Government should put its energies and resources towards the reviving
of Ayurveda, so that India is not totally swamped by allopathic
medicine, which is controlled by multinationals. Or pranayama, the
science of breathing. It is a very practical, down to earth knowledge
and its effects have been studied for thousands of years. Indian
teachers know exactly what results will this type - or that type - of
exercise have on you and what kind of routine you should do to improve
that particular problem, or develop this certain faculty in you.
Pranayama is probably the best suited Indian yogic discipline for the
West, because it is so down to earth, so scientific - there are no
miracles, no levitation, no smoky mysticism and everything can be
explained in a rational way. And again, the U.S.A., always prompt to
experience new techniques, is using this knowledge : quite a few
American companies have included exercises of pranayama in the peps
sessions of their executives; sportsmen too are experimenting with it to
improve their performances, as the film " the Great Blue ", has shown
when the hero does a series of breathing exercises known in India as "
Viloma ", to store as much air as possible in his lungs, before breaking
a world record in underwater diving without oxygen. Then you have
meditation, the queen all of yogic disciplines, which is being practised
more and more in the West, as there have been numerous scientific
studies, which have shown the positive effect of meditation on heart
problems, psychological stress or blood circulation.
The irony of it all is that not only most of the
Indian upper class and intellectual elite does not practise meditation
and pranayama, or gets treated for its problems with Ayurveda, but that
none of these things are included in the schools and universities
curriculum. So you have this wonderful knowledge, which has disappeared
from the rest of the world, but if you go to cities like Delhi, or
Bombay, you realise that most of the youth there have no idea about
meditation, or have never heard of pranayama. They are totally cut off
from their ancient culture, from the greatness of their tradition, and
even look down on it. So unless Indians start taking pride in their own
culture, India will never be able to gift it to the world.
Famous French writer Andre Malraux had said that
unless the 21 century is spiritual, then it will not be. What he meant
was that the world has now come to such a stage of unhappiness, of
material dryness, of conflicts within itself, that it seems doomed and
there appears no way that it can redeem Itself : it is just going
towards self-destruction, - ecologically, socially, spiritually. So
unless the 21st century allows a new spiritual order to take over - not a
religious order, because religion has been a failure, all over the
world - then the world is going towards pralaya. And India holds the key
to the world's future, for India is the only nation which still
preserves in the darkness of Her Himalayan caves, on the luminous ghats
of Benares, in the hearts of her countless yogis, or even in the minds
of her ordinary folk, the key to the planetary evolution, its future and
its hope.
The 21st century then, will be the era of the East;
this is where the sun is going to rise again, after centuries of
decadence and submission to Western colonialism; this is where the focus
of the world is going to shift. And as when India used to shine and
send forth Her Dharma all over the Orient: to Japan, Thailand, China,
Burma, or Cambodia and influence their civilisations and religions for
centuries to come, once more She will emit Her light and radiate, Queen
among nations: "India of the ages is not dead nor has She spoken Her
last creative word; She lives and has still something to do for Herself
and the human peoples. And that which She must seek now to awake, is not
an anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to
repeat the cycle of the Occident's success and failure, but still the
ancient immemorial Shakti recovering Her deepest self, lifting Her head
higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to
discover the complete meaning and vaster form of Her Dharma".
Then, India's Self-Denial will be done with forever...
About the Author
Francois Gautier,
born in Paris in 1950, is a French journalist and writer, who is the
political correspondent in India and South Asia for "Le Figaro",
France's largest circulation newspaper. He is married to an Indian and
has lived in India for the past 29 years, which has helped him to see
through the usual cliches and prejudices on India, (to which he
subscribed for a long time), as most foreign (and sometimes,
unfortunately, Indian) journalists, writers and historians do. He
shuttles between Delhi and the international city of Auroville near
Pondichery.
Bibliography
* Negationism in India, by Konrad Elst. Voice of India, New Del
hi.
* Histoire de l'Inde, by Jean Danielou. Editions Fayard, Paris.
* India's Rebirth, Institut de Recherches Evolutives, Paris.
Distributed in India by Mira Aditi Center, 62 Sriranga 1st Cross, 4th Stage Kuvempunagar, Mysore 570023
* Le Modele Indou, by Guy Deleury. Hachette, le Temps & les hommes. 1978
* Indigenous Indians, by Konrad Elst, Voice of India, New Delhi.*
* The Foundations of Indian Culture, by Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondichery. 1988
* Growth of Muslim population in India, by K.S. Lal. Voice of India, New Delhi.
