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Towards a New Ideology
INDIA must evolve her own political and social ideology; she must discover and establish in this domain also, as in all others that concern her collective life, her own genius and rule. This is what Swaraj really means and demands. Russia has her Sovietic Communism, Germany, for the present at least, her Nazidom, Italy her totalitarian Fascism, old England her Parliamentarianism and France her Bureau cratism; each nation finds the norm and scheme of self-rule that suits its temperament and character and changes and modifies that also in its own characteristic manner. Even so India must find her own scheme of Swarajya. If she is to live and be great and contribute something to the enrichment and glory of human civilisation, she must look to herself, enter into herself and know and bring out what lies there buried. It is a grievous blunder to try to transplant a Mussolinian or Leninian or a Hitlerian gospel on an Indian soil'. It is not desirable nor is it truly possible. If, however, we take a right about turn and look away from the West to the Far East, we already see in Japan a different type of national self-government. It is based on an altogether different basis which may appear even novel to the modern and rationalistic European mentality. I am referring to the conception of duty which moulds and upholds the Japanese body politic and body social, as opposed to the conception of right obtaining royal rule in the Occident. The distinction between the attitudes that underlie these two conceptions was once upon a time greatly stressed by Vivekananda, who was the first to strike two or three major chords that were needed to create the grand symphony of the Indian Renaissance. It is true Europe too had her Mazzini Page 136 whose scheme of a new humanity was based on the conception of the duties of man. But his was a voice in the wilderness and he was not honoured in his own country. The malady of the modern age springs precisely from this poisonous source, viz., it views man as a bundle of rights and its problem of social organisation is the problem of safeguarding and, if possible, even of increasing individual and collective rights. Thus came into being the competitive society—a society necessarily red in tooth and claw like Nature.
Vivekananda pointed .out that one should rather think of
one's duties, how best to accomplish them and leave the
rights to take care of themselves. Such an attitude would give a man the correct
outlook, the correct poise, the correct inspiration in living the collective life. Instead of each one
demanding and claiming what one regards as one's dues and
consequently scrambling and fighting for them (and most
often not getting them or getting at a ruinous expense—what It may be answered that there does not seem to be any special virtue in the word "duty"; for, the crimes committed under that ensign are not less numerous or violent than those inspired by the ideal of Rights. It was once considered in some religions to be the duty of the faithful to kill or coerce or convert as many as possible of another faith; it was the bounden duty of the good shepherd to burn and flay -the heretic. And in recent times the ceremony of "purge" bespeaks of the same compulsion of the sense of duty in the consciousness of modern Messiahs. But the true name of the thing in all these cases is not duty, but fanaticism. For fanaticism may be defined as duty running away with itself; but duty proper, the genuine form of it is something give than to demand, it is less easily provoked to aggression and battle. Even so, it may be claimed on behalf of Right that the right hand of Right is not likely to do harm, for it Page 137 is then another name for liberty, it means the freedom to live one's life unhampered without infringing on an equal facility for others to do the same. But the whole difficulty comes in precisely with regard to the frontier of each other's sphere of rights. It is easy to declare the principle, but to tarry it out in life and action is a different matter. The line of demarcation between one's own rights and the rights of another is always indeterminate and indefinable. In establishing and maintaining one's rights there is always the possibility, even the certainty of "frontier incidents", of encroaching upon other's rights. Liberty, alone and by itself, is not a safe guide therefore so much stress is being laid nowadays upon' discipline and obedience in modern ideologies. But perhaps the real truth of the matter here is that all these terms—liberty or right or even duty—are mental conceptions. They are indeed ideals, that is to say, made of the stuff of ideas and do not always coincide with the deeper realities of life and hence are not able to produce the perfect and durable harmony among warring members whether in the individual or in the collective life. We had in India a fairer word than "duty", a deeper and more luminous mantra: it is dharma. The expression has certainly '"fallen on evil days and on evil tongues"; it smells today of mediaevalism and obscurantism and whatever is not "forward" and "radical". Still we hark back to it: it is high time that we should resuscitate the old word mantra—in spite of its musty covering, it carries the purest nugget of gold. Indeed, Right, Duty and Dharma are three terms that represent the three stages of an ascending consciousness in its play of forces. At the base and beginning the original and primary state of consciousness is dominated by the mode of inertia (tamos), in that state things are an inchoate mass and are simply jumbled together; they are moved and acted upon helplessly by forces that are outside them. A rise in the scale of growth and evolution occurs when things begin to be organised, that is to say, differentiated and coordinated. And this means at the outset the self-assertion of each and every unit, the claim and the right of the individual to be itself first and foremost. It is a necessary development, for it signifies the growth of self-conscious units out of a general, unconsciousness. Page 138 It is the appearance of rajas, the mode of life and activity. Right belongs to this field and level: it is the lever that serves to bring out the individual nuclei from a general formlessness, it is the force that crystallises and organises the separative centres for separate fulfilment in life. And naturally it is the field also of competition and conflict. This is a stage and has to be transcended, from the domain of differentiation and contrariety one has to rise to the domain of co-ordination and co-operation. Here comes in the concept of duty which seeks to remedy the ills of the modus of rights in two ways, first, by replacing the movement of taking by that of giving, orienting the consciousness from the sense of self-sufficiency and self- importance towards that of submission and humbleness; secondly, by the recognition of the just rights of others also against one's own. Duty represents the mode of sattwa in action. But the conception of duty too has its limitations. Even apart from the misuses of the ideal to which we have already referred, the ideal itself, is of the mental plane; it is more or less an act of mental will that seeks to impose a rule of co-operation upon the mutually excluding and conflicting entities. The result is bound to be imperfect and precarious. For mind force, although it can exercise some kind of control over the life forces, cannot altogether master them, and eradicate even the very seeds of conflict that breed naturally in that field. The sense of duty raises the consciousness to the mode of sattwa; sattwa holds rajas in check, but is unable to eliminate wholly the propensities and impulses of aberration ingrained in rajas, cannot radically purify or transfigure it.
We have to rise above rajas and sattwa to enter a domain
where one meets the source of inevitable harmony, where the
units without losing their true self and nature and returning
to the undifferentiated primordial mass, fulfil themselves and
are yet held together in a rich and faultless symphony. This is
Dharma, that which holds together. Dharma means the law
of one's soul. And when each soul follows its own law and line
of life, there cannot be any conflict; for the essence and sub- Page 139 This then is the basis upon which the new society and humanity have to be built up, if we want to have a life on earth really worth living. Individuals have to find out their real being and nature and embody that in life. Individuals will associate and combine and form groups in response to the urge and. impetus of a group harmony that seeks expression and embodiment. The system of varnas and ashramas of ancient India—even if it be supposed that it never existed actually in its purest ideal form—serves as a graphic example of how man as a social being should create and organise his existence in order that that existence might be rendered as perfect and integrally sound as things can be. That system we hold forth as only an illustration; we do not mean that it is a pattern of life that should be or could be implanted on our present day social circumstances. These are certainly very different and demand different groupings and hierarchies that must naturally grow out of them. It should be noted that in contemporary life stress is laid upon one side, one part and one- function of human nature which cover only a superficial—however useful and necessary— area. Man is not a political animal (even in the Aristotelian sense); and it is an error to say that he is an economic animal. These notions divide man's integral being into various sectional views only; they seek to cut out and suppress all other members excepting the favoured one. The politically militant bourgeois ideal of the Nazi or the Fascist and the economically militant ideal of the proletarian are equally guilty of this lapse. Even the ideal of man as a rational being does not go far enough to be able to save man and mankind. All of them evoke conflict, some deliberately, and the resolution of the conflict ends in suppression, amputation and atrophy. We have to recognise that man, in his individual as well as in his collective being, is a complex entity, not something simple and one-dimensional. The healthy growth of himself and his society means a simultaneous development on many lines, all moving together in concord and harmony. And this movement of all-harmony can be found only when the movements are initiated from the very source of harmony which is the soul. Certain soul-principles that seek expression in lif) today that Page 140 are necessary to the age or to the coming age, have to be recognised and each given a field and a scope. That should be the basis of social groupings. And a composite variety of group- ing with strands and strata, each expressing a particular mode of being of the one group-soul—which in its turn is an aspect of the Vishva Purusha in his play—is the ideal pattern of social organisation. What exactly the lines of grouping would be need not and perhaps cannot be settled now; a certain preliminary growth and change of consciousness in man is necessary before anything definite and precise can be foreseen as to the form and schema that consciousness will manifest and lay out. Still some kind of hierarchy seems to be the natural and inevitable form of collective life. A dead level, however high that may possibly be, appears to be rather a condition of malaise and not that of a stable equilibrium. The individual man cannot with impunity be brains alone—he becomes then what is called "a barren intellectualist", "an ineffectual angel"; nor can he rest satisfied with being a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water—he is no more than a bushman then. Like- wise a society cannot be made of philosophers alone, nor can it be a monolithic construction of the proletariat and nothing but the proletariat—if the proletariat choose to remain literally proletarian. As the body individual is composed of limbs that rise one upon another from the inferior to the superior, even so a healthy body social also should consist of similar hierarchical ranges. Only this distinction should not mean—and it does not necessarily mean—a difference in moral values, as it was pointed out long ago by Aesop in his famous fable. The distinction is functional—and spiritual. In the spirit, all differences and distinctions are based upon and are instinct with an inviolable and inalienable unity, even identity. Differences here do not mean invidious distinction, they are not the sources of inequality, conflict, strife, but make for a richer harmony, a greater organisation. However the crucial point arises here—how is the collective life, the group existence to be made soul-conscious? One can understand the injunction upon individuals to seek and find their souls; but how can a society be expected to act from its soul and according to the impulsions of its soul ? And then, has a collectivity at all a soul ? What is usually spoken of as the Page 141 group-houl does not seem to be anything spiritual; it is an euphemism for herd instinct, the flair of the pack. The real truth is that a group has the soul—the spiritual being—that is put into it. How can that be done? It is done by the individual, in and through the individual. Not a single individual perhaps, but a few, a select body, a small minority who by their conscious will and illumined endeavour form the strong nucleus that builds up automatically and inevitably the larger organisation instinct with its spirit and dharma. In fact all collective organisations are made in the same way. The form that a society takes is given to it by the ideology of one man or of a few men. All depends upon the truth and reality, the depth and fecundity of the inspiration and vision, whether it will last a day or be the eternal law of life, whether it will be a curse for mankind or work for its supreme good. Naturally, the higher the aim, the more radical the remedy envisaged, the greater the difficulty that has to be surmounted. An aggregate always tends to live and move on a lower level of consciousness than the individual's. It is easy to organise a society on forces and passions that belong to the lower nature of man—although it can be questioned whether such a society will last very long or conduce to the good or happiness of man. On the other hand, although difficult, it may not prove impossible to cast the nature, character and reactions of the aggregate into the mould prepared out of spiritual realities by those who have realised and lived them. Some theocratic social organisations, at least for a time, during the period of their apogee illustrate the feasibility of such a consummation. Only, in the present age, when all foundations seem to be shaking, when all principles on which we stood till now are crumbling down, when even fundamentals—those that were considered as such—can no more give assurance, well, in such a revolutionary age, one has perforce to be radical and revolutionary to the extreme: we have to go deep down and beyond, beyond the shifting sands of more or less surface realities to the un -shaking bed-rock, the rock of ages. And that is nothing but the truth of the soul, the realities of the Spirit. And India is pre-eminently fitted to discover this pattern of spiritual values and demonstrate how our normal life—individual and collective—can be moulded and built according to Page 142 that pattern. It has been India's special concern throughout the millenaries other history to know and master the one thing needful (tamevaikam janatha atmanam anya vaco vimuncatha), knowing which one knows all (tasmin vijnate sarvam vijnatam). She has made countless experiments in that line and has attained countless achievements. Her resurgence can be justified and can be inevitable only if she secures the poise and position which will enable her to impart to the world this master secret of life, this art of a supreme savoir vivre. A new India in the old way of the nations of the world, one more among the already too many has neither sense nor necessity. Indeed, it would be the denial of what her soul demands and expects to be achieved and done. Page 143 |