The Intellectual Scene in Post-Independence India :A Critical Review

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The Intellectual Scene in Post-Independence India

 

Author: S. Gurumurthy, Text of an after-dinner talk delivered at

 

IIT-Madras

 

Tue, 17 Jun 2003

 

 

 

- A critical review of strengths and weaknesses

 

 

 

... Defeat and anger go together. Abuse and defeat go together. So, it

 

is in this norm and with this understanding of what an intellectual

 

debate means, I would like to place before you some of my thoughts

 

today. Some of may find it provocative. I am confident that the

 

audience is competent enough to absorb this and think rather than get

 

into the mood which all of us have got used to in the last 30-40 years

 

abuse.

 

 

 

Background: India before Independence

 

 

 

Let us see the pre-independence background, the intellectual content of

 

India. See the kind of personalities who led the Indian mind Swami

 

Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhiji, Tilak- giants in their own way.

 

Most of them were involved in politics, active politics, day-to-day

 

politics, handling men, walking on the road, addressing meetings,

 

solving problems between their followers. And, meeting the challenges

 

posed by the enemy, the conspiracies hatched against them. They were

 

handling everything, yet, they were maintaining an intellectual

 

supremacy, and a record and an originality which history has recorded.

 

 

 

Let us look at the academic side. Whether it is a P.C.Ray who wrote on

 

Indian Chemistry in 1905 or Sir C.V.Raman who wrote about mridangam,

 

tabala, and violin, and saw the Physics in it (this was in 1913);

 

whether it was R.C.Majumdar or Radhakumud Mukherjee who saw greatness

 

in the Indian Civilization; trying to bring up points, instances,

 

historical evidence to mirror the greatness of India, to the defeated

 

Indian race, they were all building the Indian mind brick by brick

 

 

 

Sri Aurobindo spoke of Sanatana Dharma as the Nationalism of India. He

 

didn"t rank it as a philosophy. He brought it down to the level of

 

emotional consciousness. Swami Vivekananda spoke of spiritual

 

nationalism; it was the same Swami who spoke of Universal brotherhood.

 

For them philosophy was not removed from the ground reality. The nation

 

was at the core of their philosophy. Swami Vivekananda was called the

 

"patriot monk".

 

 

 

Mahatma Gandhi spoke of Rama Rajya. Bankim Chandra wrote Bande

 

Maataram. The song, the slogans in it, the mantra in it made hundreds

 

of people kiss the gallows smilingly and many others went to jail. It

 

transformed the life of the people; this was the intellectual scene,

 

this was the content. This is what powered the intellectual as well as

 

the mass movement in India. This was the core of India, the soul of the

 

Indian freedom movement.

 

 

 

The symptoms: India immediately after Independence

 

 

 

Imagine what happened in 1947 and after, India was able to

 

intellectually lead not only Indians but also the whole world because

 

of the intellectual assertion that the freedom movement brought about.

 

Let us look at post Independence India. The persons who led

 

post-Independence India were also trained in the same freedom movement.

 

They went to jail, but they were not rooted in the intellectual content

 

of the Freedom movement!

 

 

 

The first Prime Minister of India, he was in jail for 7 years. He was a

 

great intellectual himself, purely in the sense of his capacity to

 

reason, understand, read, and expound a thought. He told Galbrieth

 

once, "I would be regarded as the last English Prime Minister of India.

 

See the intellectual capability of the man, the enormously competent

 

mind.

 

 

 

But intellectualism doesn"t exist in a vacuum. It has to be rooted in

 

something concrete. Vivekananda"s universal brotherhood was rooted in

 

India"s greatness as a civilization, which proclaimed it. The concept

 

of "Vasudaiva Kutumbakam" cannot exist without a living form, a

 

population which believes in it and believes in itself. You need to

 

have a society, which believes in it.

 

 

 

That is why India could invite the Jews who were butchered, raped, all

 

over the world. In 107 out of 108 countries, this race was butchered.

 

At least they had the courtesy and the gratitude to publish a book, the

 

Israeli govt. published a book that out of 108 countries that we sought

 

refuge, the only civilization, the only country, the only people, the

 

only ideology that gave us refuge was the Indian civilization. They

 

published a book, which most Indians are unaware of.

 

 

 

And we invited the Muslims. The refugee Muslims first landed in Kutch.

 

And they are called the Kutchy Memons even today but not the Memons who

 

bomb Bombay. But the Memons who lived with us.

 

 

 

In the year 1917, many of you might be aware, a case went to the

 

Preview Council, equivalent to the Supreme Court now. The Kutchy Memons

 

went and told the Preview Council that we are Muslims in name, but we

 

follow only the Hindu law. Please don"t impose the Shariyat on us. The

 

Preview Council ruled that they are Muslims but the only sacred book

 

they have is called "Dasaavathaara", it is not Koran. In fact they knew

 

no language other than the Kutchy language.

 

 

 

And in the "Dasaavathaara", nine were common between Hindus and Kutchy

 

Memons. We call the tenth avathaara "Kalki" and they call him "Ali".

 

The Preview Council ruled that the Shariyat law is not applicable to

 

them. The All India Muslim League took up the case, went to the British

 

and told them that this finding is dangerous to Islam and requested

 

them to pass a law which will overrule this judgement; the British

 

Govt. passed the law in 1923, called the "The Kutchy Memons Act" which

 

declared, " If a Kutchy Memon wants to follow the Shariyat, allow him

 

to do so". Please understand. It doesn"t mean a Muslim must follow the

 

Shariyat. Between 1923-1937, before the All India Shariyat(AIS) Act was

 

passed, not a single Kutchy Memon filed an affidavit with the plea that

 

he wants to follow the Shariyat. That was the integration prevalent in

 

India.

 

 

 

In 1937, when the AIS Act was passed, the preamble to the act mentioned

 

that this was being passed by a demand made by the AIML leader Mohammed

 

Ali Jinnah. Today, the Shariyat has become a part of Muslim

 

consciousness.

 

 

 

The purpose behind making you aware of this background is that 99% of

 

the people who speak about the constitutional rights of the minorities

 

or the distinctiveness of Muslim life are unaware of the ground level

 

facts. Till the year 1980, in Kuch Bihar district, the Shariyat law was

 

not applicable. In 32 instances between 1923 and 1947 by legislation,

 

the Shariyat law was not applicable to the Muslims. This is the extent

 

of the intellectual gap in India.

 

 

 

Secularism: A Reversal and perversion of the Indian mind. And now,

 

coming to what the position is today. Everything that drove the freedom

 

movement- everything that constituted the soul of the Freedom movement,

 

whether it is the Raamaraajya of Gandhiji or Sanaatana Dharma as

 

Nationalism of Sri Aurobindo or the spiritual patriotism of Vivekananda

 

or the soul stirring Vande Maataram song, came to be regarded not only

 

as unsecular but as sectarian, communal and even as something harmful

 

to the country.

 

 

 

Thus, there was a reversal, a perversion of the Indian mind. How did it

 

occur? Today, the intellectualism of India means to denigrate India.

 

There are mobile citizens and there are non- citizens deriding India,

 

go to the Indian Airlines counter, you will find people deriding India.

 

Go to the post office, they will deride India. Go to the railway

 

station, they will deride India. It is the English educated Indians"

 

privilege to deride India.

 

 

 

When I was talking to an audience of Postal employees in Madras, in the

 

GPO (a majority of them who heard me were women). I told them the basic

 

facts about the Post Office. I said it is one of the most efficient

 

postal systems in the world, one of the cheapest in the world, one of

 

the most delivery perfect postal systems in the world. For one rupee,

 

you are able to transport information from one end of the country to

 

the other.

 

 

 

And you have a postman, no where in the world this happens the postman

 

goes to the illiterate mother and reads out the letter, he is asked to

 

sit there and shares a cup of coffee and comes away. M.O.s are

 

delivered to the last paisa. It is an amazing system, one of the

 

largest postal systems linking one of the most populous nations, one of

 

the most complicated nations with so many languages.

 

 

 

Somebody writes the address in Tamil and it gets delivered in Patna! It

 

gets delivered to the Jawaan at warfront! When I completed my speech

 

many of the women were wiping their tears. I asked why are you crying,

 

I have only praised you. They said, "Sir, this is the first time we"ve

 

been praised, otherwise we"ve only been abused!"

 

 

 

You know how many people the Railway transports in India? A million

 

people which is equivalent to the population of Australia! And we have

 

only abuses for them!

 

 

 

Have we any ideas of what this country is? The best in India have

 

compared our country with Singapore, HongKong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

 

You can walk across many of these countries in one night (laughs)! The

 

best politicians, intellectuals, sociologists in India have compared us

 

with them, because, we have never understood what we are and unless you

 

do that, you can never relate us with others.

 

 

 

Demonising India: Projecting a negative image. This enormous

 

intellectual failure, to the extent of being intellectually bankrupt,

 

did not occur over night, it was no accident. There is a history behind

 

this enormous erosion. And I told you about these mobile citizens, what

 

they have done to us. Every country has problems. There is no country

 

without any problem. Are you aware of what is one of the most pressing

 

problems in America today? It is incurable according to the American

 

sociologists; even American economists have begun to agree with them.

 

American politicians are shaken, one third of the pregnant women are

 

school going children. And mothers mix the anti-pregnancy pill in the

 

food without her knowledge everyday.

 

 

 

But this is not the image of America. The image of America is a

 

technologically advanced country etc. etc. Ours is the only country

 

where the mobile citizens of India have transformed the problems of

 

India into the image of India-its identity.

 

 

 

Go to any country and the same negative stereotype is echoed that India

 

is suffering from poverty and malnutrition. India has no drinking

 

water. Indian women are all burnt. If they are married, they are burnt,

 

if they are widows, they are burnt. See the image that has been built

 

about this country. Who did this? The English educated Indian.

 

 

 

And one Kaluraam Meena (have you ever heard of him? Asks the audience

 

to raise their hands if they have), only a small fraction of this large

 

audience has heard of him. When Clinton came to India, he went to a

 

village called Nayla where the villagers interacted with him. And one

 

of the Panchayat board members asked him, "Sir, I am told that in the

 

West, all of you believe that this country is a rotten country, a

 

backward country, a poor, hungry country. Do you also think like that?"

 

 

 

Clinton was shaken, because he might have thought that this person

 

might be approaching him for some favour. This is the image of India. I

 

will relate my experience when I went to the Carter Centre in 1993.

 

They were talking about dispute resolution and all that. I went there

 

to meet somebody, if not Carter, somebody else at least. His Deputy, a

 

lady, was very hesitant to receive me. "Mr.Gurumurthy", she said, "Mr.

 

Carter is not around, anyway, I can spare seven-eight minutes for you."

 

I said three or four minutes of your time would do. Even before I could

 

start, she said, "Mr.Gurumurthy, we don"t have funds, we will not be

 

able to help" (laughter from the audience). I replied, "Let us assume

 

you have a hundred billion dollars, how much will you give me? One

 

billion? One million?" She kept quiet, "I don"t need your money. I came

 

here to discuss whether community living is an answer to disputes. I

 

have come to discuss this because you have suggested electoral means to

 

resolve problems in communities which have no damn idea of what an

 

election is; whether community living is an answer because you don"t

 

what that means. She sat and discussed this with me for two hours. This

 

is the image we have projected that anybody, who comes from India,

 

comes to beg. Ordinary Indians did not create this impression; educated

 

Indians created it. This is the work of civil servants, NGOs. Christian

 

missionaries during the freedom movement created this. Indians are

 

filthy, rotten, dirty and unhealthy, advertising abroad these are the

 

people who need to be saved. We have to Christianise them, enlighten

 

them, and give us money. I can understand that because it is their

 

business. But what did we do after 1947?

 

 

 

We repeated the same mistakes. We projected India as a country of

 

unending problems. As I said, every country has problems. Only in

 

India, problems become identities. How many dowry deaths take place in

 

India in a year? Yet, India is projected as a country burning its own

 

daughter-in-laws. And we also talk about it. Every damn newspaper will

 

be writing about it. We believe in self-deprecation. And this goes on

 

in the guise of intellectualism in India. And one woman, she attempted

 

to take a film of the widows. I wrote an article, asking her to go to

 

Lijjat Paapad. A widow brought me up. Millions of widows have worked to

 

bring up their children. It is a nation, which believes in Tapasya. You

 

may not believe in it but you are an exception. Compare Deepa Mehta"s

 

attitude with Sarada Maa"s who was the wife, who became a widow after

 

Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa"s passing away. She went to the very same

 

place where Deepa Mehta went and saw the widows She said, "These widows

 

are so pure, they are an illustration and an example to me." Deepa

 

Mehta saw them as prostitutes. The widows have already been hurt once.

 

Why are you sprinkling salt on their wounds?

 

 

 

I am very sorry to speak about this, but I have to, this audience is

 

enlightened enough to understand me. Indian women are sexually

 

unsatisfied and so they are becoming lesbians? This is one bloody story

 

against us, about us. This is the image of Indian men and women, and

 

this film is in English. Catherine Mayo wrote a book and Mahatma Gandhi

 

said about it, " I have no time to read this filth. But I am under a

 

compulsion, under pressure because this has been published abroad. The

 

image of India has been rubbished and I have to counter it. With this

 

introduction, he wrote about the book and said that this woman is a

 

gutter inspector (laughs).

 

 

 

The intellectualism in India is gutter inspection- people are of this

 

kind etc. Understand the level of erosion.

 

 

 

Indian Politics: Weaknesses and Pitfalls

 

 

 

Let us look at the post independence scenario from the macro level. We

 

installed a system of governance and it postulated all the important

 

goals for the Indian society and polity, which was gulped by the Indian

 

academia, by the Indian intellectuals. We will have a classless society

 

through socialism. We will have a casteless society through equality.

 

We will have a faithless society through secularism. We will have a

 

modern society devoid of tradition.

 

 

 

Instead of politics restructuring caste, caste has restructured

 

politics today. Political parties are talking only in terms of castes.

 

Has any Indian intellectual come to terms with caste? You must

 

understand caste if you want to handle the Indian society. You cannot

 

say that I want to have a very different kind of society. You have to

 

handle the Indian sentiment, the Indian tradition, Indian beliefs. You

 

can't clone a society of your choice in India. Social engineering has

 

failed everywhere; the masters of social engineering have given up the

 

communists- whether it is sociologists or economists you have to accept

 

a society as it is. You can only increase the momentum of evolution in

 

the society; you can't forcibly bring about a revolution today. But,

 

Indian leaders and intellectuals, till today, keep abusing caste. They

 

don"t know how to handle caste.

 

 

 

Let me narrate to you how a community in Karaikudi handled this issue.

 

The Chettiyar community assembled top businessmen, professionals from

 

all over the world for 3 days to discuss their culinary act, how to

 

construct houses, what languages they use, what old adages and stories

 

their grand parents used to tell, what clothes they used to wear; not

 

one word of politics, mind you. This was not even published in the

 

newspapers. Intellectuals were not even aware of it. So, caste is a

 

very important instrument in India, you may not like it. Unfortunately,

 

every intellectual leads a caste life inside, but outside he is

 

casteless! He is cloning an approach outside. There is no intellectual

 

honesty at all.

 

 

 

And what happened in the case of secularism? In India, any one who is

 

not a Hindu is per se secular. In the year 1957, just 10 years had

 

passed after the Muslim League demanded and got the country

 

partitioned, the leader who voted for the resolution for the partition

 

of India was Quazi Millath Ismail, (who was leading the same Muslim

 

League on the Indian side), the Congress certified that the Muslim

 

League in Kerala is secular and hence it can associate with them. The

 

Muslim League outside Kerala is communal with the same President! Three

 

hundred and fifty crores are spent today for the Haj pilgrims out of

 

the funds of secular India every year. No one can raise an objection.

 

At least I can understand why politicians don't want to do that because

 

they want the Muslim votes. But, what about the intelligentsia. What

 

about newspaper editors and journalists? And academicians? None of them

 

speak out. The reason is that we have produced a state dependent

 

intellectualism in India. We don"t produce Nakkeerans anymore, our

 

intellectualism is a derivative of the State and the State is a

 

derivative of the polity. And in turn the polity is a derivative of the

 

mind of Macaulay and Marx.

 

 

 

The Indian education system: A Legacy of Macaulay. This Macaulayian

 

system of education is a poison injected into our system. At least I

 

had the opportunity of schooling in Tamil and hence could withstand the

 

corruption that this English education brings with it. This corruption

 

begins the moment the child steps out of the house. He is told to

 

converse in English at home. This did not happen even in

 

pre-Independence India, even when Macaulay wrote that notorious note

 

sitting in Ooty. How many of you know Macaulay"s formulation? Just

 

those two or three sentences at least which form the crux " We require

 

an education system in India which will produce a class of

 

interpreters, who will be Indian in colour and Englishmen in taste,

 

opinions and morals."

 

 

 

This is the education system, which we have been continuing with, which

 

was earlier conceived to produce clerks for the British empire. If you

 

have to differ from an English educated person you have to differ only

 

through the English language. If you have to abuse somebody, even that

 

has to be done in English! If you abuse the Anglicised Indian, he will

 

not find fault with the blame but with the grammar in your language!

 

This is the extent to which a foreign language has possessed us. But,

 

we must master English, that is needed, but why do we have to become

 

slaves of the English language? We must use that language as a tool,

 

but why do we consider it as a status symbol? This is the influence of

 

Macaulay.

 

 

 

If you want to understand the Macaulay/Marxist mix in India, you have

 

to go a little back to see how Marxism grew out of the Christian

 

civilisation. I recommend that you read the Nov 27, 1999 edition of the

 

Newsweek, which describes how the Christian idea of the end of time

 

called the "apocalypse", influenced the entire history, art, music,

 

prognosis, sociology, economics, and the entire attitude of the

 

Christian civilisation towards the non-Christian civilisations.

 

 

 

A Christian scholar who describes how Communism grew out of

 

Christianity has written it. In 1624, Anna Baptists, a group of

 

Christians who believed in the basic tenets of Christianity seized

 

power in a particular place, banned private property and use of any

 

book other than the Bible. When Marxism came up later through the

 

exposition of Das Capital, the Marxists began expounding their doctrine

 

as an extension of Christianity.

 

 

 

The thesis, antithesis and synthesis of making Christianity acceptable

 

to the age of enlightenment was the Hegelian way demanded

 

rationalisation of Christianity in the days of the Protestant movement.

 

Hegel began with a disagreement, then started interacting with

 

Christianity and ultimately ended up accepting Christianity.

 

 

 

You can see the same phenomenon with Marxist postulates- "capitalism is

 

my enemy, we have to deal with capitalism" and finally we have to find

 

a synthesis with capitalism".

 

 

 

Marx on India

 

 

 

In fact in the year 1857, Marx wrote about India, " India was a

 

prosperous civilisation. It had a very high standard of living. Their

 

productivity was higher. India was an economic giant." It was so. If

 

you look at the statistics in 1820, India"s share of world production

 

was 19%, and England"s share was 9%, please note that Britain was deep

 

into the industrial revolution at that time. 18% of the world trade was

 

in Indian hands at that time whereas 8% was the figure for Britain and

 

1% for US. When 80% of the American population was engaged in

 

agriculture, India had 60% of the population engaged in

 

non-agricultural occupations. This is supposed to be an index of

 

development. All these statistics can be found in Paul S. Kennedy"s

 

"Rise and fall of great powers".

 

 

 

So, Marx says, "This was a great civilisation which had produced

 

prosperous communities." A prosperity which went deep into the

 

villages. In the early stages, when the East India Company came and

 

went to Murshidabad, an unknown name today in Bengal, a district level

 

town, the Britishers were awe struck with its prosperity and wrote that

 

it was more prosperous than London. This is no more disputed anyway,

 

even by Indian intellectuals. Marx acknowledges the fact that this was

 

a prosperous country and also had equality but unfortunately, he says

 

for 2000 years the society did not change nor did it allow any

 

revolutionary forces to enter! In his worldview human beings cannot

 

progress without a revolution!

 

 

 

In the two articles on British rule in India and the East India

 

Company- history and results written by Marx, quoted in the New York

 

daily, Karl Marx does grant though somewhat in a grudging manner that

 

"materially, India was fairly industrious and prosperous even before

 

the onset of the British rule. He said that India was an exporting

 

country till 1830.and started importing because it had opened its trade

 

to the British. Many of you may not be aware that the kings in India

 

had no right to over the lands, which came under the jurisdiction of

 

any panchayat. Whether it was Emperor Ashoka or Bhagavan Sri

 

Ramachandra, the rule was the same. It was changed only during the

 

British rule under the Ryotwari system, even the Mughals could not

 

change it. It was also found that family communities were based on

 

domestic industry, with the peculiar combination of hand-spinning,

 

hand- weaving, agriculture etc. which gave them a supporting power.

 

 

 

The misery inflicted by the British on Hindusthan is of an entirely

 

different kind and infinitely more intense than what it had to suffer

 

before civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines all these

 

did not go deeper than the surface. But, England broke the entire

 

framework of Hindusthan, the symptoms of reconstitution are yet to

 

emerge clearly. This loss of the Old World without the emergence of a

 

new order imparts a particular melancholy to the present misery of

 

Hindus and Hindusthan. Marx goes on to say that the British

 

interference destroyed the union between agriculture and the

 

manufacturing industry. Suddenly he remarks that the English

 

interference dissolved this semi barbarian, semi-civilised community.

 

 

 

He concedes that they were prosperous, that they organised their

 

affairs well, they have a measure of independence, they have a

 

democracy at the lowest level, all this has been conceded. Then, how

 

does he classify us as "semi-barbarian and semi-civilised communities"?

 

He notes that India"s social condition remained unaltered since remote

 

antiquity. This is important, for him revolution is the core, the soul

 

and centre of the society. This society never had a revolution; hence

 

it cannot be modern! There is an underlying assumption, which considers

 

revolution as a pre- requisite for being modern.

 

 

 

Hence, he feels that the destruction wrought by the British is the

 

inevitable revolution needed for the development of the Indian society.

 

England had vested interests, violent interests in bringing about this

 

"revolution". But, the question in focus is whether mankind can fulfill

 

its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state?

 

Whatever might have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious

 

tool of history in bringing about a revolution, "whatever bitterness

 

the spectacle of crumbling of an ancient world may evoke, from the

 

point of history, we have to exclaim, "should this torture torment us?

 

 

 

Since it brings us great pleasure, were not the rule of Taimur, souls

 

delivered without measure?" It is a creative destruction in the cause

 

of revolution according to him. If you see Indian communism which was

 

expounded by a man called Rajane Palme Dutt. Has anyone heard of his

 

name? (two persons from the audience raised their hands). Two. He was

 

born of a white woman and an Indian father in England. He was in charge

 

of Indian communism for 25 years. He never came to India though. In his

 

book, "India Today", he laid down the framework, the policy for Indian

 

communists, what must be done, what is the kind of revolution needed in

 

India, the development model etc.

 

 

 

In those days, even good photographs of India were not available, yet

 

this man spoke about India sitting in London. He came to India for the

 

first time in 1946, ten years after he wrote this book and realised

 

that he had to revise it. He stayed for 30 days! A visitor to India was

 

the father of Indian Communism! And from that day till date, the Indian

 

Communist has never been with India. Not only that, they took over the

 

Indian mind in the

 

post- independence period. It is these Marxist/Macaulayist intellectuals who

 

will certify whether somebody is modern or traditional, backward or secular

 

or communal, progressive or regressive. They were running an Open Air

 

University issuing certificates every day through the press. They have

 

branded me as a communal man.

 

 

 

Labels: Tools for stultifying important debates

 

 

 

Labels substituted debate in India. Simply a label- communal, that is

 

enough. Four or five editorials will appear preaching that Gurumurthy

 

is communal and the matter must end there. No one would even discuss

 

what communalism is! Religious fundamentalism, RSS/Bajrang Dal

 

fundamentalism! Anyone, who exposes the Hindu cause I India is a

 

fundamentalist! We have seen this term being used so casually and

 

superfluously and incessantly by politicians and newspapers. Has anyone

 

bothered to understand the meaning of religious fundamentalism going

 

beyond these slogans?

 

 

 

Secularism is an intra-Christian phenomenon. It has no application

 

outside Christianity at all. Secularism resolved the fight between two

 

powerful persons, the King and the Archbishop who were loyal to the

 

same faith, to the same prophet, to the same book and to the same

 

Church. It is not a multireligious virtue.

 

 

 

A multireligious idea, a multireligious living, a multireligious

 

culture, a multireligious fabric or a multi religious structure was

 

unknown outside India. There was usually only one faith and no place

 

for any other, not even for a variation of the same faith.

 

 

 

Fifty six thousand Bahais were butchered in one hour in Tehran! They

 

believed in the same Koran, in the same Muhammad, the only difference

 

was that they said that Muhammad might come in another form again. That

 

was their only fault and they were all butchered.

 

 

 

But we have no such problem. We can play with God, we can abuse God,

 

and we can beat God!

 

 

 

If I say that monotheistic religions have had a violent history, and

 

the reply will be "you are communal." But this is exactly the same

 

conclusion that a study in Chicago revealed, probably, the only study

 

on fundamentalism conducted by anybody so far. This fundamentalism

 

project brought out five volumes each volume about eight hundred to

 

nine hundred pages. The conclusion they have reached is that,

 

"Fundamentalism is a virtue of Abrahamic religions. It is not

 

applicable to eastern faiths at all.

 

 

 

What about the Indian intellectuals? Day in and day out, they keep

 

abusing us as fundamentalists, communalists, that we are anti-secular

 

and it is being gulped down by everyone including those from the IITs

 

and IIMs, lawyers and police officials, journalists and politicians.

 

Look at this intellectual bankruptcy.

 

 

 

An inner revolution: The much needed change

 

 

 

We need a mental revolution, an inner revolution; we need to get rooted

 

in our own soul. There is a missing element in India today and it is

 

this. That element has to be restored otherwise Indian intellectualism

 

will only be a carbon copy of Western intellectualism. We are borrowing

 

not only their language and idiom but we trying to copy the very soul

 

of the West.

 

 

 

So, all that we need to do is (it is impossible to share the entire

 

depth of the subject in one evening"s lecture programme. I have only

 

tried out point out in an incoherent way, how a completely fresh

 

mindset has to be evolved. And unless it evolves, the Indian mind,

 

which leads India, will be in a perpetual state of confusion, ordinary

 

people are perfectly all right.

 

 

 

Consider for example how thirty years before there was a question

 

whether Tamil Nadu will be a part of India or not. The Dravidian

 

parties have taken over the mind of Tamil Nadu. It had virtually ceased

 

to be a part of India. And their attack was aimed at Hinduism, the

 

moment you attack Hinduism you attack India. This is a fact. Neither

 

politicians nor intellectuals nor academicians realised this. But, the

 

ordinary people did. Just three religious movements- the Ayyappa

 

movement, the Kavadi movement and the Melmaruvatthur Adi Para Sakti

 

movement- have finsihed the Dravidian ideology to a very great extent.

 

It is only the outer shell of Dravidianism that remains today. Tamil

 

Nadu has been brought back successfully by Ayyappa, Muruga and Para

 

Sakti, not by the Congress or the BJP or any other political party.

 

 

 

How many people have intellectually assessed the depth and the reach,

 

the deep influence of religion over the people? A paradigm shift in a

 

study of India would be an intellectual approach to this subject. Or

 

consider for example its influence on economics. Many of you by now

 

would have studied economics in some detail. Take a look at the society

 

in India and compare the figures for public expenditure for private

 

purposes, which is called the social security system in the West. 30%

 

of the GDP in America is spent for social security, 48% in England, 49%

 

in France, 56% in Germany and 67% in Sweden. This private expenditure

 

is nothing but what you and I do by taking care of parents, our wives

 

and children, brothers and sisters and grandparents, widowed sisters

 

and distant relatives. This expenditure is met by the society in India.

 

 

 

And there is no law in India that people should do this. We consider it

 

as our dharma. A person went to a court and demanded a divorce from his

 

father and mother. The American court granted it saying that the only

 

relationship that exists between two persons of America is their

 

citizenship. The law in America recognises no other relationship ... In

 

the year 1978, an interesting incident occurred in Manhattan. There was

 

a power failure for six hours. Manhattan is in the heart of New York

 

where you find the UN building, the World Trade Centre and the head

 

quarters of many multi-national companies. One third of the world"s

 

health is concentrated in Manhattan. Within six hours, hundreds of

 

people were killed, robbed and assaulted. We don"t need electricity to

 

behave in a civilised manner. How many intellectuals in India have ever

 

articulated from such a sympathetic approach? We have only tarnished

 

the image of this country. We must be ashamed of this.

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

 

 

I shall conclude my speech with this example. When Sri Aurobindo came

 

to Pondicherry in search of a new light he used to get five rupees from

 

a friend and four persons used to live on this. A cup of tea was one of

 

the luxuries they used to have everyday in the morning, on the

 

Pondicherry beach.

 

 

 

Sri Aurobindo used to always look at a mystic called Kullachamy

 

(Subramanya Bharati has written a poem about him). He used to behave

 

like a madman, wandering here and there, throwing stones ... One, day

 

he came near Sri Aurobindo, lifted his cup of tea and emptied it in

 

front of him. Then he showed the empty cup to him, placed it on the

 

table and went away. Sri Aurobindo"s friends were angry and wanted to

 

chase him, Sri Aurobindo stopped them and said, " This is the kind of

 

instruction I had been expecting from him. He wants me to empty my mind

 

and start thinking afresh."

 

 

 

That is my appeal to you.