BUNCH OF THOUGHTS
M.S. Golwalkar
Part Two: The Nation and Its Problems
Chapter 9.  Our Motherland

1.THE GRAND VISION

This is our sacred land, Bharat, a land whose glories are sung by the gods-

-a land visualised by Mahayogi Aurobindo as the living manifestation of the Divine Mother of the universe, the Jaganmata, the Adishakti, the Mahamaya and the Mahadurga, Who has assumed concrete form to enable us to see Her and worship Her,

-a land eulogised by our philosopher-poet Rabindranath Tagore as:

-a land saluted by the inspired poet of freedom, Bankim Chandra, in his immortal song Vande Mataram, which spurred thousands of young hearts to cheerfully ascend the gallows in the cause of her liberty, as

-a land worshipped by all our seers and sages as Matrubhoomi, Dharmabhoomi, Karmabhoomi and punyabhoomi, a veritable Devabhoomi and Mokshabhoomi,

-a land which has been to us since hoary times the beloved and sacred Bharat Mata whose very name floods our hearts with waves of pure and sublime devotion to her,

-well, this is the mother of us all, our glorious motherland.

In fact, the very name ‘Bharat’ denotes that this is our mother. In our cultural tradition, the respectful way of calling a woman is by her child’s name. To call a lady as the wife of Mr. so-and-so or as Mrs. so-and-so is the Western way. We say, "She is Ramu’s mother". So also is the case with the name ‘Bharat’ for our motherland. Bharata is an elder brother of ours, born long long before us. He was a noble, virtuous and victorious king and a shining model of Hindu manhood. When a woman has more than one child, we call her by the name of her eldest or the most well known among her children. Bharata was well known and this land was called as his mother, Bharat, the mother of all Hindus.

But there are persons who say that Hindus did not know what motherland was, that they were all divided into various warring clans, that patriotism, i.e., devotion to one single motherland, was unknown to them and if at all they were to a certain extent devoted, it was only to certain fragments of the land and not to the country as a whole from the Himalayas to Kanyakumari, as we obtain it at present. Even leading persons of the day often declare that ours is a ‘continent’ or a ‘ sub-continent’ having various climates and various kinds of soil with a conglomeration of nations and therefore unfit to be called a single country. How did these queer notions creep into our national mind?

It was the wily foreigner, the Britisher, who to achieve his ulterior imperialistic motives, set afloat all such mischievous notions among our people so that the sense of patriotism and duty towards the integrated personality of our motherland was corroded. He carried on an insidious propaganda that we were never one nation, that we were never the children of the soil, but mere upstarts having no better claims than the foreign hordes of the Muslims or the British over this country. The misfortune is that the so-called educated of this land were taken in by this ruse.

But the fact is, long before the West had learnt to eat roast meat instead of raw, we were one nation, with one motherland.

(Over all the land up to the oceans, one nation) is the trumpet cry of the Vedas. Asetu-Himachal – from the Setu to the Himalayas-has had been our clear concept down these ages. Long ago our forefathers sang:

The entire Himalayas with all their branches and sub-branches extending to the North, South, East and West, with the territories included in these great branches, have been ours-not merely the Southern lap of the mountains. It is sheer practical common sense-apart from religious or other sentiments-that no powerful and wise nation would make the top of the mountains its boundary. That would be suicidal. Our ancestors had instituted some of our places of pilgrimage on the northern side of the Himalayas making those regions our live boundary. Tibet, i.e., Trivishtap-now called ‘a Chinese province’ by our leaders!-was the land of gods and Kailas , the abode of Parameshwara, the Supreme Lord. Manasarovar was another holy centre of pilgrimage looked upon as the source of our sacred rivers like Ganga, Sindhu and Brahmaputra.

Kalidasa, our great national poet, has described the Himalayas as:

(At the North is the divine Himalayas, the King of mountains, stretching its arms to the ocean on the east and west and standing as the measuring rod of the earth.)

Chanakya, who has been held an authority on our political science, has stated:

That only means, the poet Kalidasa’s description tallies with the statesman Chanakya’s statement in giving us a fairly correct picture of the vastness of our motherland.

Our epics and our puranas also present us with the same expansive image of our motherland. Afghanistan was our ancient Upaganasthan. Shalya of the Mahabharata came from there. The modern Kabul and Kandahar were Gandhar from where Kaurava’s mother Gandhari came. Even Iran was originally Aryan. Its previous king Reza Shah Pehlavi was guided more by Aryan values than by Islam. Zend Avesta, the holy scripture of Parsis, is mostly Atharva Veda. Coming to the east, Burma is our ancient Brahmadesha. The Mahabharata refers to Iraavat, the modern Irrawady valley, as being involved in that great war. It also refers to Assam as Pragjyotisha since the sun first rises there. In the South, Lanka has had the closest links and was never considered as anything different from the mainland.

It was this picture of our motherland with the Himalayas dipping its arms in the two seas, at Aryan (Iran) in the West and at Sringapur (Singapore) in the East, with Sri Lanka (Ceylon) as a lotus petal offered at her sacred feet by the Southern Ocean, that was constantly kept radiant in people’s mind for so many thousands of years. Even to this day a Hindu while taking his daily bath invokes the sacred rivers right from Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada and Sindhu to Cauvery.

This is also a lesson in devotion, because we are made to feel that even a drop of water from these holy rivers has the potency of wiping out all our sins.

One of the greatest personalities who have left an indelible stamp upon character and culture of our people is Sri Ramachandra. His great qualities like tranquillity, catholicity, depth of knowledge and feelings are held comparable to the immeasurable depth and serenity of the ocean, and his indomitable valour and fortitude are compared to the great and invincible Himalayas-

Do we not know that our motherland is bounded on one side by the Himalayas and the rest of the three sides by the ocean ? The entire motherland has been thus visualised in its fullness in the ideal personality of Sri Rama. Various are the ways in which this motherland of ours has been set forth as an object of worship, whole and integrated. Any idea of fragmentation has been intolerable to us.

The entire land to us is tapobhoomi. There is an illuminating incident in our ancient literature. A question was once raised as to which land was pure and holy for practising tapas and performing sacrifices so as to bear proper fruit, and which was the ideal place for the realisation of the Ultimate Reality. The answer given there is, the land where Krishnasara-mriga is found is the only suitable land for that purpose. Any student of zoology can tell you that this particular type of deer is to be found only in our country and nowhere else in the world. What does it show? Our forefathers were of the conviction that throughout the world this is the holiest of the lands where the least merit will bear fruit a hundred or thousand-fold. Swami Vivekananda has said, "If there is any land on this earth that can lay claim to be the blessed Punyabhoomi, to be the land to which every soul that is wending its way Godward must come to attain its last home, it is Bharat."

This is verily the chosen land of God Realisation. This is not mere sentimental effusion, but our deep-rooted conviction. Some years ago our newspapers had flashed the story of a German who came to our land as a spiritual aspirant. He embraced sanyas and underwent the stern austerities of an all-renouncing ascetic. But even after prolonged penance he could not realise God. On a searching self-enquiry he was convinced that his body, born and bred in the passionate climate of the West, was unfit for God Realisation. He therefore went to Haridwar and gave up his body in the holy Ganga. He left a note stating, "I am giving up the body of my own accord. May the offering of my body in the sacred waters of Ganga merit me with a rebirth in Bharat and with that new chaste body I may be able to realise God."

We come to the same conclusion regarding this special feature of our motherland if we study the lives of the founders of the various other faiths and sects in the world. Even in the case of the great saint, Jesus Christ, nowhere is there any reference that he had actually seen God. He had only come across angels and once Satan. When put on the Cross, he was even tormented for a moment by a doubt regarding the mercy of God and he exclaimed, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

The founder of Islam, too, was a powerful man. He could unite those people, torn asunder by feuds and factions, and roused in them the urge and the organised power to build empires. But even he met only Gabriel and felt he heard some divine voices, that is all. He did not see God face to face.

It was given to the great sons of this soil to see and realise God in His full effulgence. At a time when other races had not yet emerged from their caves and forests, the Vedic Rishis addressed mankind as the children of Immortal Bliss-

and declared in thundering tones:

There is no parallel in the rest of the world literature to these expressions for their supreme self-confidence and self-realisations. Again nowhere else can you find the parallel of a Sri Krishna who speaks in the first person ‘I’ as God Himself in His immortal soul-stirring call to mankind-the Bhagavad-Gita.

Nor is this unique feature of our land confined to ancient tradition only. Even in modern times there is the instance of Narendra’s (later, Swami Vivekananda) historic meeting with Sri Ramkrishna. As a young and brilliant college student, he had already dived deep into the philosophies of the East and the West. But his questioning spirit was not satisfied. He met various learned and pious men of his time. Even they could not quench his spiritual thirst. He came to know that there was a paramahamsa (liberated soul) in the temple of Dakshineswar. He went to him and bluntly posed him the question that had haunted him for years: "Sir’ have you seen God?" Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa replied without a moment’s hesitation: " Yes, I see Him just as I see you here, only in a much more intense degree. And I can show Him to you also." And Sri Ramakrishna fulfilled his promise to Narendra.

As we know, Narendra was a modern young man with a towering intellect and tremendous will-power. He was not the type to be mesmerised or hypnotised into blindly believing things. But he could not help being convinced about the reality of God when brought face to face with God Himself. Such is the living tradition of men of God, who have continuously held aloft the name of our land as the land of God Realisation, as Dharmabhoomi, as Mokshabhoomi.

No wonder that such a land with divinity ingrained in every speck of its dust, has been to us the holiest of the holy, the centre of our utmost devotion. And this devotion is felt for the whole of the land and not for any fraction of it. The worshipper of Shiva goes from Kashi to Rameshwaram, and the devotee of Vishnu in His various forms and Incarnations travels the whole length and breadth of this country. If he is an advaiti, the four ashrams of Shankaracharya standing as sentinels beckon him to the four corners of the country. If he is a Shakta, the worshipper of Shakti-the Divine Mother of the Universe-fifty-two are the places of his pilgrimage spreading from Hingula in Baluchistan to Kamakhya in Assam and Jwalamukhi in Himachal Pradesh to Kanyakumari in the South. It only means that this land is the divine manifestation of the Mother of the Universe.

Nothing can be holier to us than this land. Every particle of dust, everything living or non-living, every stock and stone, tree and rivulet of this land is holy to us. To keep this intense devotion ever alive in the heart of every child of this soil, so many procedures and conventions were established here in the past. The various religious rites invariably included a description of the spot in relation to the entire expanse of Bharatavarsha-

All our important religious ceremonies start with bhoomi-poojan-worship of earth. There is a custom that as soon as a Hindu wakes up in the morning, he begs forgiveness of the Mother Earth because he cannot help touching Her with his feet throughout the day.

A simple act indeed, but it brings home to our minds every morning the idea of devotion for this motherland as the sublimated devotion to the Divine Mother. This training has gone so deep that even in ordinary day-to-day affairs we often come across a flash of that realisation. When a child at play tramples on the ground, the mother says, "Do not kick the Mother Earth, dear child." Or if a nail is driven into the earth wantonly, she says, "Oh, no! Dear child, Mother will be pained. " An ordinary farmer, too, before applying the plough to the soil, prays for a pardon. Such is our living tradition.

Never, never has our land been dead inanimate matter, but always the living divine mother to all her children-the lowliest and the greatest.

Swami Vivekananda, when about to leave England for Bharat, was asked what he thought of his motherland after having visited the luxuriant countries of the West like America and England. He said, "Bharat, I loved before. But now every particle of dust in Bharat is extremely holy. It has become a place of pilgrimage for me."

There is one more touching instance of Swamiji when he returned to our motherland after his triumphant tour of the West. A vast assembly of our countrymen eagerly awaited to offer a hero’s welcome to him. When the Swamiji alighted from the ship and stepped on the Southern shores, a thunderous ovation greeted him. However, the people were amazed to see Swamiji prostrating on the ground and showering his body with the dust of the soil. To the surprised query of some one, Swamiji explained: "My body has been so long in the materialistic countries of the West and hence has become contaminated. I am therefore purifying myself with the dust of this holy soil."

And his guru Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa once severely admonished a person who was going to Ganga to wash himself after answering nature’s call. He said, "How unbecoming of you to pollute the divine waters of Ganga-Gangavari brahmavari-with your dirt!"

Such has been the living realisation of the glorious motherhood of our land inculcated by her great sons, which has permeated into all strata of our people.

She has been, in fact, the central theme of our national life all through. She has nourished us as the mother with her soil, air and water and all the various necessary objects for our sustenance and happiness. Like a father she has arranged protection to us through impregnable Himalayas in the north, and mountain ranges like Aravali, Vindhya and Sahyadri interspersed all over the country that afforded our freedom-fighters protection and shelter in the past. And she has acted as our spiritual preceptor too in her capacity as Dharmabhoomi and Mokshabhoomi.

Verily, our motherland has been a mother, a father and a teacher-mata, pita and guru – all rolled in to one.

2.WANTED HEROIC DEVOTION

There are some very eminent luminaries in our country, who declare with an air of omniscience, "What is this so-called motherland, except stones and clay!" Such persons feel that intellect is everything. According to their intellectual reasoning, a country is after all a stretch of inanimate, inert territory. However, even intellectual reasoning has its own limits. For instance, the human body is after all material. The body of one’s mother also is as much material as any other woman’s body. Then, why should any one consider his mother as different from other women? Why have devotion for her? An intellectual has no answer for this.

Take another instance. The human body requires for its nourishment starch, protein, fat salt, and water. And these food-contents are readily available in human flesh in the requisite proportion. After all, biologically, man is nothing but flesh, blood and bones. So, why not eat up our neighbor? But if a person says this, he may be called a scholarly logician, but certainly not a civilised human being. Such intellectualism leads only to cannibalism. Ravana was a scholar, but a barbarian all the same. Therefore, mere intellect is not enough. Man must be capable of experiencing the nobler sentiments of the heart.

Now, how did this concept of ‘mother’ blossom from out of ‘stones and clay’? We know that as living species evolve and progress, they begin to invoke the sentiments of mother in those things, animate or inanimate, which feed and nourish them. Take a frog or a snake, for example. They have no idea of mother at all. They are also not aware as to what happens to their offspring. Neither the offspring nor the mother look upon each other in that relationship. Gradually, as life evolves, We come to mammals where the mother feeds her young ones in their childhood. Birds take care of their eggs and the small ones until they become strong enough to fly about. When the usefulness of the mother is no more felt, the offspring forget their mother and thereafter they are entire strangers to one another. Man is supposed to be at the top in the scale of evolution. If he is cultured, his love and adoration for his mother continues even after she ceases to be physically useful to him. In fact, he will serve and revere her all the more, if she becomes very old, blind and bodily out of use.

As human life evolves, the concept of mother also takes a wider and more sublime form. When man looks around with his discerning intellect, He sees so many other things to which he owes a debt of gratitude. He begins to look upon them also as mother. He sees the rivers, which give him food and water. He calls them mother. Once he outgrows the use of his mother’s milk, he sees the cow, which feeds him with her milk throughout his life. He calls her mother-cow. And then he reaches the state of understanding that it is the mother soil which nourishes him, protects him and takes him in her bosom after he breathes his last. He becomes conscious that she is his great mother. Thus to look upon one’s land of birth as mother is a sign of a high state of human evolution. The Vedas declare.

Therefore, it is up to us to keep aglow that highly evolved concept of divine motherhood towards our land. Now, how are we to express our devotion to her? There are two ways. The one is the formal method of worshiping with flowers, lights, chanting of hymns, etc. Our people have been doing this even today in a sprit of religious devotion. They go round the country on pilgrimage, follow the religious injunctions, recite hymns, worship and offer flowers and take bath in the various holy rivers. They do all this with the sole purpose of acquiring personal religious merit. This is in a way the passive aspect of devotion.

The dynamic aspect of devotion is to manifest in practical national life a spirit of readiness to sacrifice our all for the protection of the freedom and honour of every speck of this motherland. It is this active manifestation that counts in this hard matter-of–fact world. A heart fired with such devotion can never tolerate the slightest affront to the object of its devotion, i.e., the motherland. It takes on a terrible form and rests not till the aggressive elements responsible for the insult no more remain in a position to commit the sacrilege a second time. A divine discontent to undo all the past insults and humiliations burns in such a heart.

Without this dynamic, conquering spirit, even devotion to a divine cause will be of little avail. In this hard world which is an arena for trial of strength with brute forces, mere goodness or noble virtues, i.e., the passive aspect of sattva, will not hold the field even for a single moment. That is why we find that in spite of all the piety, goodness and devotion to God all through the past thousand years, we were trampled under the feet by foreign aggressors who, though total strangers to goodness and virtue, had a passion for heroic action and organised effort, i.e., full of rajas. Our history also bears witness to the fact whenever our people became charged with the conquering spirit-charged with the dynamic aspect of sattva-then all those demonic empires of the enemy were reduced to a shambles.

That is also the lesson of our puranas which depict the stories of the struggle between devas(gods) and rakshasas(demons). We often see devas, in spite of their divinity, being beaten down by the organised and aggressive rakshasas. And it was only when the devas roused themselves to heroic action that they could triumph over the rakshasas. It is activity, dynamism and heroism that rule the world. Indeed, "veerabhogya vasundhara" (This Earth is for the valiant) sums up the philosophy of a successful life in this world.

Is this fiery and heroic aspect of devotion to our motherland alive in our hearts today? If that spirit had been there in our leaders and in our common folk, could Partition have taken place? Would they not have risen uncompromisingly, heroically as one man against all such machinations of the British and the Muslim, prepared to shed their last drop of blood for maintaining the scared integrity of the motherland? Alas, that did not happen. On the contrary, people, led by the leaders, were busy in celebrations on the advent of so-called independence!

There are some who tell us, "Bygones are bygones. What is the use of raking up old dead issues? After all, Partition is now a settled fact." How is this ever possible? How can a son forget and sit idle when the sight of his mutilated mother stares him in the face every day? Forget? No true son can ever forget or rest till she becomes once again her complete whole. If Partition is a settled fact, we are here to unsettle it. There is, in fact, no such thing as a ‘settled fact’ in this world. Things get settled or unsettled solely by the will of man. And man’s will is steeled by a spirit of dedication to a cause, which he knows to be righteous and glorious.

There are some others who justify Partition saying, "After all, Hindus and Muslims are brothers. Partition is just a brotherly division of their property." But have we never heard of children cutting up their mother saying that she is their common property? What depths of depravity! Motherland has verily become an object of bargaining, only a land of enjoyment, Bhogabhoomi, just like a hotel, and not a Dharmabhoomi, Karmabhoomi and Punyabhoomi. The tearing away of the limbs of our mother and the gory blood-bath of millions and millions of our kith and kin is the price that we have paid for that ignoble attitude. Even today the tragedy of Partition has not come to a close. Kashmir has been partitioned. And now it appears Nagaland is well on the way.

Our country is not wanting in people who lightly say, ‘well, give it up’, whenever there is an aggression or even a threat of aggression on parts of our motherland. If the Chinese occupy portions of Ladakh, they say, "Let it go. Not a blade of grass grows there." Some time back a subtle propaganda was carried on about NEFA insinuating that it was a godforsaken place, unfit for human habitation, infested with poisonous snakes and leeches which would go into the throats of our army officers and suck their blood! Even our newspapers, on which lies the responsibility of educating the people and inculcating in them a spirit of burning patriotism, gave it publicity which could only create disgust for our own territory in the minds of our people.

The same story has been repeated in the case of the Rann of Kutch. Along with the shocking news of the invasion and occupation by Pakistan of strategic points of that area, disparaging descriptions of that area also began to appear in our papers. Even the Central Government’s brochure on the subject describes it as a desert where not a blade of grass grows, that it is useless for most part of the year being submerged under sea-water, and is so much infested with flies that one cannot drink a cup of water without swallowing some flies also along with it, and so on.

The close parallel in the description of NEFA and the Rann of Kutch, in the wake of aggression by enemies, make one almost suspect that this is probably an effort to build up an atmosphere for allowing the enemies to swallow those areas without the people in general resenting it. Maybe, such news items were given publicity without forethought. That is worse. For, if a man does it with forethought, we can only say that he is perverse. But if a man does it naturally, it means that, deep in his heart, he has lost the love for the motherland altogether. This is a very dangerous state of affairs.

Our own leaders chose to call the naked aggression by China and her occupation of tens of thousands of square miles of our territory as ‘border conflict’ or ‘boundary dispute’! Our leaders say, ‘borders shifting a few miles here or a few miles there in those snow-bound mountainous regions does not matter much’, which has invariably meant thousands of square miles ‘here’ and never a single mile ‘there’! We have often heard them saying that those borders are yet undefined and under dispute. Once Pandit Nehru while referring to our territory occupied by the Chinese, even referred to it as ‘supposed to be ours’!

Alas! Nowhere do we find the vibrant and complete vision of our motherland inspiring our people to strive and sacrifice in defence of her integrity. A spirit of compromise, an attitude of purchasing peace by parting with portions of our motherland to whoever chooses to lay axe on her, has taken hold of our people. Even the memory of those parts under enemies’ possession is dying away. How many of us feel the insult that we are denied access to our holy Kailas and Manasarovar, that we have no chance even to take a dip in the scared Sindhu, which gave us the name Hindu and Hindusthan? Takshashila, once the world-centre for diffusion of Hindu thought, is no more with us. Mulasthan (Multan), which witnessed the incarnation to the terrible Narasimha for the protection of Prahlad form the demon Hiranyakashipu, is once again under the heels of a demonic domination. Do all these memories burn in our veins?

We have especially to guard ourselves and our coming generations in this regard, lest the oppressive weight of external conditions blur our vision and crush our spirit. We shall only deaden our conscience by thinking and repeating that our present-day political borders represent our complete motherland. How humiliating it is to our manliness and how insulting to our intelligence! At times, political boundaries undergo some changes on account of political impacts and the whimsical fortunes of war. But it can never mean that the portions we have lost politically are not parts of our motherland at all.

Was not the whole of our country, until recently, under the foreign domination of the British? Before that, was not part of our country under Muslim domination for centuries? Then, should we say that the whole of this country was not ours at all during those periods? Did we not, on the other hand, struggle and make sacrifices domination? And is not every speck of our land protected and purified by the sacred blood of countless heroes and martyrs? If, today, we say that what we have lost to the aggressors, whether they be the Muslims or Chinese, is not ours but belongs to them by right, then it only means that we have lost the will to fight, that we have forsaken our manliness to the extent that we have begun to glorify our defeats and humiliations.

We have to beware, more than anything else of this deadening of national will. If the will to fight, the will to suffer and sacrifice for the sake of liberty and integrity of the motherland becomes extinct, then, that will surely sound the death-knell to the freedom and honour of the nation.

Devotion to the motherland of the intense, dynamic, uncompromising and fiery type is the life-breath of a free, prosperous and glorious national existence on the face of the earth. And we, the Hindus, are the inheritors of the most sublime devotion lying dormant in every Hindu heart be fanned and joined in a sacred conflagration which shall consume all the past aggressions on our motherland and bring to life the dream of Bharat Mata reinstated in her pristine undivided form.