India’s Heritage in Question
by Michael Domino
The present intellectual climate in India is so perverted that it would be tempting to go on and expose the workings of the perversion in exhaustive detail.
The point I wish to draw your attention to is how catchwords are hypnotically brandished, with no intelligent debate permitted on their real meaning. Indian scholars and thinkers must develop the courage to grapple with the central issues hidden behind those words. If they do not, they in effect abandon the field to the kind of perversion that has been growing in recent years, increasingly eclipsing India’s heritage and its contribution to world civilization, portraying it as retrograde and responsible for all of India’s ills. This school of thought, based on a freak hybrid of Marxist dialectics, psychoanalysis and Christian revivalism, has been steadily invading Western and Indian universities, textbooks, media, public opinion, erasing the last traces of Indian culture from Indian education and uprooting younger Indian generations from a culture which should be theirs by birthright.
Ram Swarup’s warning needs to be heard :
Hindus are disorganized, self-alienated, morally and ideologically disarmed. They lack leadership ; the Hindu elites have become illiterate about their spiritual heritage and history and indifferent and even hostile towards their religion.... India has been asleep for too long, and it needed all these knocks and probably it would get more.
In 1926 Sri Aurobindo put it very simply : “Aggressive religions tend to overrun the earth. Hinduism on the other hand is passive and therein lies the danger.” This renewed aggressive, conquering effort on the part of Christianity and Islam, hiding behind their misbegotten child of false secularism, must be resisted by the Indian intelligentsia for two reasons. One, of immediate urgency, to limit and hopefully reverse the harm done to India’s social fabric by artificial conversions, induced ninety-nine times out of a hundred by pecuniary allurements, not by any genuine religious feeling. Unless the tide is stemmed, the infinite complexity that is Indian society may become irretrievably fragmented into thousands of conflicting groups, with the kind of consequences we can already see in the North-East and many tribal regions of India.
The second reason, more essential, is to pursue and renew India’s perennial search for the Truth. If we unquestioningly accept the falsehoods that are now bandied about, we shall in the end cripple our ability to discern the Truth. “It is Truth that conquers and not falsehood,” says the Upanishad, and to work out that conquest for the world has always been at the core of India’s preoccupation. This is no ideological question, it is a matter of saving or losing our intellectual independence and ultimately our spiritual freedom—the only one left to the common Indian.
As early as 1910, Sri Aurobindo asserted :
Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,—to think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima.
Were Indian civilization, ever in quest of new realms of reality, to surrender its independence of mind and spirit, the loss would be grave not only for India but for the world, for between moribund religious obscurantism trying to revive and grab the earth once more, and the new market fundamentalism that has well nigh grabbed it, humanity’s future appears rather bleak. We must work to see that India fulfils her role and opens a new path. We must make up for lost time.
by M Ritesh
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