Under Western Eyes

IN THE CLOSING PAGES of the final volume of his monumental History of the Dharmasastra, Mahamahopadhyaya PV Kane memorably captures the foundational essence of the Sanatana civilisation: “Our ancient sages laid the foundation [for philosophical and social harmony] by insisting… that there is and must be harmony between man’s spirit and the spirit of the world and man’s endeavour should be to realise in his actions and his life this harmony and unity… social reforms and politics have to be preached through our age old… philosophy. If our leaders and people throw away or neglect religion and spirituality altogether, the probability is that we shall lose both spiritual life and social betterment.”(Emphasis added)

Clearly, about four generations of our political leaders after independence not only axed these spiritual foundations but ensured that engineering social disharmony was a fecund vote-getting method. We can leave it at that.

Essentially, our rishis had realised that a conscious and lifelong cultivation of an inner spiritual culture was the failproof method to refine the mind which, in turn, would sculpt the external life. To strip this to the bare minimum, it means this: how one regards life itself.

Sanatana civilisation and society are built on the edifice of regarding life as a celebration in all its multifaceted aspects— just as joy, sorrow, too, is celebrated as a Great Cosmic Drama of the Unmanifested Brahman whose Lila (sport) is this physical world. The Veda has a profusion of hymns praying to the Devatas to grant abundance and enjoyment without violating Dharma. For example, in the celebrated ‘Chamaka Prashna’, the rishi asks the Devatas to grant a whopping 143 items of tangible and intangible enjoyments. And one of the great messages of Vedanta is the quest for immortality via transcendence of death. The Kathopanishad in which the eight-year-old boy Nachiketa confronts Yama and asks him to teach him the secret of immortality is one of the most lasting gifts of philosophy Bharatavarsha has given the world.

Thus, in both the sacred corpus and literary lore of Sanatana culture, we find no mention of lines like “Death lays his icy hand on kings:/ Sceptre and Crown/ Must tumble down”. While this is quite beautiful in itself, it leaves one wanting. That want is filled, for example, by Bhartrhari whose grand verse Maatar-Medini, Taata Maruta is the philosopher-poet’s outpouring that occurs after he has realised within himself the highest spiritual truth. In the verse, he offers a moving and heartfelt oblation to all the elements of creation (earth, air, sun, etc) that have made his realisation possible. There is no mention of death but Bhartrhari’s merging with Parabrahman. This is the Sanatana spirit and method.

All of this reveals another central feature of Bharatavarsha’s philosophical underpinnings: the total absence of pessimism. Happiness and sadness are but mere phases, which realisation is rooted in the Sanatana conception of time as cyclic. The foregoing exposition offers an essential backdrop to re-examine India’s current position as a civilisation in an age rife with mass epidemics like wokery and Islamic terror.

As Bharatavarsha, postcolonial and post-Congress India is the only surviving and unbroken non-Abrahamic, ancient civilisation and culture. More important, this civilisational flow has pretty much been maintained intact in almost all realms of our national life. In passing, it is worth quoting KM Munshi’s brilliant assessment in this regard: “I have seen and felt the form, continuity and meaning of India’s past. History, as I see it, is being consciously lived by Indians… The role of alien invasions in the history of India, hitherto exaggerated, deserves to be reduced to its appropriate proportions… But during all this period, the vitality of the race and culture… expressed itself with unabated vigour. The history of India is not the story of how she underwent foreign invasions, but how she resisted them and eventually triumphed over them.” (Emphases added)

We need to emphasise the phrase that Bharatavarsha is the “only surviving non-Abrahamic, ancient culture and civilisation.” S Radhakrishnan, in his preface to PV Kane’s aforementioned work writes: “True religion should have three sides to it: (i) State of Mind (ii) Relationship to reality and (iii) A way of life.” This threefold precept is a handy model to show how both Abrahamic systems—Islam and Christianity—are conspicuous in sharp contrast to Sanatana Dharma.

We can consider two elements first. The first is Radhakrishnan’s “relationship to reality”, and the second, the fundamental conception of life mentioned earlier. While Christianity regards birth and thus life itself as sinful, the core doctrines of Islam in this regard are quite radical to say the least. The great incentive to commit ceaseless jihad is the notion of a glorious Jannat, which is the promised and only reality for the believer. In contrast, Sanatana Dharma regards all life as sacred, a veneration that extends to all of nature—the profound and ancient tradition of tirtha-kshetras is rooted in this sanctity.

Given such a fundamental incongruence, it remains a travesty to witness the nonchalant manner in which Sanatana Dharma and Abrahamic belief systems are clubbed together as ‘religion’ in our public discourse for the last eight decades. The falsehood has almost become received truth. It is a tragedy that breeds itself. And the path that led us to this plight necessitates a slight historical detour.

In the 1950s, RC Majumdar wrote how “real history… teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely changed masters in the eighteenth century.”

A primary difference between the protracted Muslim rule in India and British colonialism is the fact that while Muslim rulers settled in India, the British never made India their home.

From the very early days, the British constantly kept reminding themselves that they would have to pack their bags and leave one day. But the cultural destruction they inflicted has today become almost impossible to repair. This began with the well-known introduction of English education, which was simultaneously accompanied by the comprehensive destruction of our traditional modes of learning. Concomitant with this was the impetus given to Christian missionaries who, not coincidentally, came to monopolise the educational space. It is a dominance they retain to date.

It is worth recalling Ananda Coomaraswamy’s early warning that an English-educated Indian would be permanently sundered from his roots and become an “intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West, the past or the future. The greatest danger for India is the loss of her spiritual integrity. Of all Indian problems the educational is the most difficult and most tragic.” When we trace the history of the ideological battles being fought in the educational sphere since the 1950s, we notice how this malaise has become a monster.

There was another handmaiden of English education. This was the growth and expansion of the discipline of Indology, which began making major forays into higher education and bureaucracy when British rule was at its peak. The biggest ‘contribution’ of Indology over the last two-odd centuries undoubtedly is the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) which ranks as one of the world’s greatest intellectual hoaxes in the service of colonialism. Over time, AIT has been repeatedly shown to be false. However, far from this acting as a deterrent, the same phenomenon has clothed itself in newer attire. The power centre has shifted from Britain to America. Current offshoots of Indology include the ongoing attempts to politicise and offer spurious interpretations of the Vedas, epics, Puranas, the Sanskrit language, folklore and, indeed, anything that can be considered ‘native’, indigenous and useful for multi-pronged Western interventions in India. The two pathbreaking books, Breaking India and Snakes on the Ganga are alarming exposés of how this colonialism-impelled design against India operates in our age. In other words, the West never gave up studying Hindu Dharma in all its aspects—philosophy, literature, culture, society, traditions, and Hindus as a people. Agenda-driven American scholars continue to undertake this kind of study whose findings will be used by the foreign policy machinery of America.

Two examples from recent history serve to illustrate the fatal consequences of not erecting unbreachable safeguards against such mischief. The Philippines, which for all practical purposes is still an American colony. It is not coincidental that its Magsaysay Award has been behind much of the sustained actions to disrupt India using Indians. East Timor (Timor-Leste), a former ‘pagan’ nation, was systematically infiltrated by Christian missionaries, leading to a full-blown civil war. Christianity gained a new country for itself—in the 20th century.

Both countries have now become mere Christian outposts of powerful nations of the West.

It is clear that Bharatavarsha is the last non-Abrahamic bastion to be subverted and conquered by the West— bloodlessly if possible, but rarely has such conquest been bloodless. Do we want Sanatana Bharatavarsha to undergo a similar fate?

civilisational subversioncultureIndian philosophyliteratureMahamahopadhyaya PV KaneSanatan DharmasocietytraditionsWestern Eyes