A Fair and Gracious Dream, 4 - The Parts and the Whole

Nations are languages, and civilization a song

Yes, I know, dear reader. I promised you a positive vision for the future in this Part 1 of this essay, but what I’ve given you so far is three more sections of analysis! I’m fully aware of the fact that you have come here for a viable answer to the question: What will the New Dhārmika Dream be? The one that replaces Shuddho, and inspires the next generation to make our civilization whole again. I think I’m now ready for my humble stab at this question. However, it is important to note that I do not see this next section as a work of philosophy. It is meant, on the contrary, to be an exhortation!

So … yes … we were talking about our Common Fire.

As we think through the nature of our peoplehood, the Common Fire story emerges as a good way for us Bhāratīyas to understand our own development as a people and a nation. But there’s obviously more to our story than just this historical process. The soil of Bhārata is the source of at least four major traditions of knowledge and peoplehood - the Hindu Dharma, the Buddha Dharma, the Jaina Dharma, and the Sikh Dharma. All four of these traditions are the vessels for what Sri Aurobindo describes in part 1 of this article as “the thoughts, the literature, the philosophy, the mental and emotional activities, the sum of hopes, pleasures, aspirations, fulfillments, the civilization and culture” of the Bhāratīya people. And this is exactly what Bhāratīya civilization is - the eternal, unending song of a people.

A song of a people who have their own identity, their own stories, their own ideas and memories, and are certainly not a people who only exist as conquest-fodder for other people. We have inhabited this land for millenia, and every instance of happiness or sadness we’ve ever experienced has been expressed through these traditions. Through this process, we have made and shaped this land and this geography into what it is, and what it will be in the future. Over this period, of course, our ranks have been swelled by many outsiders - the Indo-Greeks, the Sakas, the Parthians, the Bactrians, the Huns, etc. This is not unique to us either. Borders in the ancient period were quite fluid, and the movements of people and the intermingling that followed is consistently seen in places like Hellas, Egypt, Persia, etc.

From our point of view, these alien people, despite at one point of time not being “us”, adopted our traditions and became a part of our song. They are undoubtedly Bhāratīyas, and this is why the name of a Central Asian king - Kanishka - is today found on shop-signs everywhere across Bhārata. We still name our children after Kanishka. We haven’t forgotten about him, despite how long it’s been and how little of his Empire now remains in Bhārata’s modern territory. Today, the cultural and genetic legacies of the Sakas, Indo-Greeks, Parthians, etc. are scattered all across north and north-west Bhārata, including in the parts now occupied by the “country” of Pakistan. Thus, we see again that the Bhāratīya identity is, and has never been, an ethnic one. Instead, as Aurobindo says in the excerpt from “Arya” that I quoted in part 1 of this article, it is a desire, a commitment, to a higher state of being and virtue. It is an acceptance of the Common Fire of Dharma,the parts and the whole. Anybody who accepts this, can become a Bhāratīya.

Now, if one is a student of history, one should expect this fascinating process to have created nothing but the kind of boundless culture Bhārata has produced. This culture is decentralized, but it is also whole. It is diverse, but also unified. And nothing embodies our identity and history more than the treasure troves of our culture - our bhashas (languages) and bolis (dialects).

The multitude of languages and dialects our country has produced is something that should fill us with pride. The sheer quantity of our output on this front is breathtaking - the common quip goes that in Bhārata, the boli (dialect) changes every ten kilometers one travels! In terms of cultural production, we are busy and voluminous people. And this massive amount of linguistic and cultural diversity is why the modern West looks at us and is baffled by our unity as a nation. European nation-states are broadly the size of Bhāratīya states, and have similar characteristics - different languages, differences in historical trajectories, etc. So a natural question arises: How can Europe not be a united country, but Bhārata can? Of course, we know why - we have seen in the previous section that this Bhāratīya identity was forged through our eternal Common Fire. But we should also understand why our common peoplehood makes no sense to the modern Western understanding of what nations are. It shouldn’t surprise us that they use this lens to try and study us, even if we know that it is an incorrect way to understand the civilizational-State entity that is Bhārata.

Despite what the West thinks, every part of Bhārata, in spite of its diversity in history, culture, comprehensively sings the existence of our Common Fire back to us.

So … let’s lend an ear, shall we?

সপ্তকোটীকন্ঠ-কল-কল-নিনাদকরালে দ্বিসপ্তকোটীভুজৈধৃতখরকরবালে অবলা কেন মা এত বলে! বহুবলধারিণীং নমামি তরিণীং রিপুদলবারিণীং মাতরম্ ৷ তুমি বিদ্যা তুমি ধর্ম্ম তুমি হৃদি তুমি মর্ম্ম ত্বং হি প্রাণাঃ শরীরে ৷ বাহুতে তুমি মা শক্তি হৃদয়ে তুমি মা ভক্তি তোমারই প্রতিমা গড়ি মন্দিরে মন্দিরে ৷ ত্বং হি দুর্গা দশপ্রহরণধারিণী কমলা কমল-দলবিহারিণী বাণী বিদ্যাদায়িণী নমামি ত্বাং নমামি কমলাম্ অমলাং অতুলাম্সুজলাং সুফলাং মাতরম্

Who has said you are weak in your lands When the swords flash out in seventy million hands And seventy million voices roar Your dreadful name from shore to shore? With many strengths who are mighty and stored, To you I call Mother and Lord! You who save, arise and save! To her I cry who ever her foeman drove Back from plain and Sea And shook herself free. You are wisdom, you are law, You are our heart, our soul, our breath You are love divine, the awe In our hearts that conquers death. Yours the strength that nerves the arm, Yours the beauty, yours the charm. Every image made divine In our temples is but yours. You are Durga, Lady and Queen, With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen, You are Lakshmi lotus-throned, And the Muse a hundred-toned, Pure and perfect without peer, Mother lend thine ear, Rich with your hurrying streams, Bright with your orchard gleams, Dark of hue O candid-fair

Of course, I had to start with Vande Mātaram, particularly with the last verses of Ṛṣi Bankim’s famous paean. But given that this series of essays has been inspired by Aurobindo’s essay on Bankim, the “Prophet of Nationalism”, I think it is only fitting that we understand what Bankim “preached”.

The image of the fierce Mother conquering the enemies of her people! The pointed question of the Bhakta - how can they call you weak, Mother? And yes, the famous equation of the Mother and the Nation - every image in every temple is but yours!

It is a peerless description of our peoplehood, and it is no wonder that this composition was the fount of the Bhāratīya nationalist movement in the early 1900s. One can just imagine young Rabindranath, as he was waiting for his siblings to finish the latest Bangadarshan issue so they could pass it down to him, striking upon this paragraph in 1882. Or a young-adult Aurobindo in Baroda, reading through Anandamath as he was trying to teach himself his own mother tongue! One can feel the primordial force of the medieval Śākta and Vaiṣṇava traditions of Vanga, bursting through seems! There are few, if any, more beautiful descriptions of how the people of Bhārata feel about their nation, than this song. Listen to it, memorize it. Know its meaning! Every time Aurobindo talks about “The Mother”, these passages are what he means. Let it inspire your life as it did his!

மன்னு மிமய மலையெங்கள் மலையே! மாநில மீதிது போற்பிறி திலையே! இன்னறு நீர்கங்கை யாறெங்களாறே! இங்கிதன் மாண்பிற் கெதிரெது வேறே! பன்னரு முபநிட நூலெங்கள் நூலே! பார்மிசை யேதொரு நூலிது போல! பொன்னொளிர் பாரத நாடெங்கள் நாடே! போற்றுவோ மிதை யெமக்கிலை யீடே!

The eternal Himalaya is our very own asset. There’s nothing else to equal it as yet! The sweetly nourishing Gaṅgā flows here dancing. Is there a river on earth so entrancing? The expository Upaniṣads are our prized treasure The entire world doesn’t have any work of that measure. Oh, the Golden Bhārata is verily our own land Hail our land, we are of a matchless brand!

And lo! Another voice booms from the South! The great Subramanya Bharati, in his clear-sighted and piercing vision, binds our nation together from north to south, just as he did in choosing to wear a Turban, in an act of tribute to his Sikh friend! His act was a great example of the millions of tiny connections forged in Bhārata over millennia, connections between “parts” that our enemies seek to deny and erase, but connections that make us a “whole”. Yes, different parts of Bhārata and Dharma have grown differently, even in the same period of time. But they were never growing and developing in isolation. The movement of ideas and people between the different parts of Bhārata is just as real as the parts themselves!

I don’t think anything embodies this reality better than the magazine Vijaya Bharatam, published first from Madras, and then from Puducherry (and is still published today). It was a magazine to which Subramanya Bharati contributed to regularly, as part of the freedom struggle. When you see the image of the magazine, attached below, does it not seem obvious that Ṛṣi Bankim and Bharatiyaar are singing back and to each other, in Bangla and Tamil, the same idea of our peoplehood?

Even when we go beyond the purely political realm, we find that the Song of our Civilization is also expressed through all our art, music, and dance forms. In fact, one of our four Vedas itself - the Sāma Veda - not only gives music and melody to portions of the Ṛg Veda but it is also the source of the entire conglomerate of Carnatic and Hindustani music. Clearly, we’ve had this bug of being a musical people from the very beginning! So we are not just a Common Fire, but a Common Fire forged in Song. We are a people of poetry, music, dance, and art. Our ancient works on grammar and surgery are composed as poems!

If, as Marshall McLuhan says, The Medium is the Message, then a civilization that is formed in song, and spreads its wings through song, will find this reflected in its nature. It will be focused on the poetic in every aspect of life (something I find to be most embodied in the rituals of our traditions) and diligently look for the symbolic in its observations of the physical environment and human nature. It will find that a lyric exists in every behavior of mankind! Throughout time and region, we have seen the people of Bhārata burst out into song. And more often than not, these expressions were humble attempts at describing an aspect of the divine and to try and connect ourselves with this divine.

Perhaps my favorite example of this comes from a devotional and music journey from medieval Eastern Bhārata. A story of love, of Saints, of languages mixing and churning, traveling from state to state, and bursting into song. This is the story of the Vaiṣṇava Padāvali movement, the Maithili language, and the cultural glue that holds our nation together!

We start this journey in the verdant plains of Maṇipur. Maṇipur is a State with a fascinating history and is home to beautiful Meiteis, who live in the Imphal plains, and the Kukis and Zomis, who live in the hills. And it is the Meitei community who are the focus of my attention today. They are one of our youngest siblings in our Dhārmika brotherhood, with most of them embracing Hindu Dharma in the 18th century and beyond, with the act of King Charairongba embracing Vaiṣṇava Dharma and changing his name to Pitambar Singh being an important point in this history. Yes, there is evidence of Hindu Dharma existing in Manipur even before the 18th century, but the Meiteis’ joining of the Dhārmika community is generally accepted as an 18th century phenomenon. Even today, the many Meiteis practice their Vaiṣṇava traditions along with their own ancestral religion of Sanamahism. The Meiteis are the most recent example of our Dhārmika Common Fire welcoming new brothers and sisters to sit next to the hearth.

And our peoplehood is so much richer now that our Meitei brothers are with us. Perhaps nothing embodies this connection and this story, more than one of the eight classical dances of Bhārata - The Madhur Rasa of the Manipuri Raas Leela. The Raas Leela is part of the Vaiṣṇava Padāvali tradition. Like its sister traditions, it brings the eternal story of the devotion of Radha-Krishna to life, and in doing so, creates a beautiful fusion of Meitei culture, and the Vaiṣṇava Bhakti of Eastern Bhārata.

This Vaiṣṇava Padāvali tradition was not just a revolution of music and Bhakti. It was also a linguistic revolution. There’s no better way to introduce yourself to this story than this video by India in Pixels. The story of Brajabuli is that of a language formed due to the cruel tides of history, primarily the drying up of patronage towards Hindu causes due to Turkish conquest of Bengal. This caused the 15th century Chaitanya Mahaprabhu-led Krishna Bhakti movement to look west - which ended with them finding the works of the great Maithili poet Vidyapati, and fusing his Maithili works with Bangla to develop a language made specifically for Krishna Bhakti. Other hallowed figures like the poet Chandidas and Maladhar Basu, also played a vital role in this revolution.

And it was a revolution in the truest sense of the word. It was a ray of lightning for a population smarting under foreign rule and oppression - a chant of Harinam to banish the fears! And these themes of Vaiṣṇava Bhakti never truly left Bangla. Centuries later, they found themselves in Kaviguru Rabindranath’s musings, as he asked, from the point of view of a girl, “Who plays this flute, that touches my whole being?”. And of course, one of the largest Dhārmika organizations in the world is a direct continuation of the tradition!

And this all ties into the Meitei people and Manipur, because this language formed out of this beautiful association between Maithili and Bangla did not confine itself only to Bengal. It flew further east, with its devotional poetry flying under its wings, and eventually found itself in plains of Imphal. This Youtube comment beautifully describes this association.

It’s hard to read a story like this, and not feel like you’re encountering a hidden secret of our peoplehood, one that has been denied to us by our own indifference, but also a story that when once internalized, makes the cultural vessels of our country make so much more sense!

And this story isn’t finished just yet! If you go east from Bangla, skip-over the awkwardly placed ”Desh” in between, and land in Srimanta Sankaradeva’s Kamarupa, the Vaiṣṇava Padāvali tradition rears its head again! Borgeet, the collection of Vaiṣṇava Bhakti poems composed by Srimanta Sankardeva and Madhavdeva, is mostly composed in a dialect called “Brajavali”, and this Brajavali is a language created by the addition of Maithili to Ahomiya words and pronunciations. So our beloved Maithili, the works of Vidyapati, started from northern Bihar, galvanized Bangla, made Ahom fall in love, and helped the Meiteis become a part of the Dhārmika Common Fire! It is a beautiful story indeed, fitting for one of the most beautiful languages of Bhārata.

Srimanta Sankaradeva (pronounced with the “S” sound replaced with “H”), a peerless polymath, was himself an extraordinary figure in Dhārmika history. It is no joke to say that northeast Bhārata is essentially still a part of Bhārata today mostly because of his extraordinary life and efforts. Ahom’s unique flavor of Dharma, Ekasarana Dharma, is his gift to the nation. He was almost a one-man army in gluing the Ahomiya culture (born in a flux of cultural migration and mixing) together:

He is widely credited with building on past cultural relics and devising new forms of music (Borgeet), theatrical performance (Ankia Naat, Bhaona), dance (Sattriya), literary language (Brajavali). Besides, he has left an extensive literary oeuvre of trans-created scriptures (Bhagavat of Sankardev), poetry and theological works written in Sanskrit, Assamese and Brajavali. The Bhagavatic religious movement he started, Ekasarana Dharma and also called Neo-Vaiṣṇava movement, influenced two medieval kingdoms -the Koch and Ahom kingdom - and the assembly of devotees he initiated evolved over time into monastic centers called Sattras, which continue to be important socio-religious institutions in Assam and to a lesser extent in North Bengal. Sankardev inspired the Bhakti movement in Assam just as Guru Nanak, Ramananda, Namdev, Kabir, Basava and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu inspired it elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent.

If Bharatiyaar and Bankim represented the South and the East of Bhārata communicating with each other, Sankardeva turns to his West from Ahom with this beautiful composition “Brindabone Kheloto” (বিৰিন্দাবনে খেলত), a gorgeous tribute to the city of Vrindavan!

I can only hope that the reader understands how interconnected the development of various parts of Bhārata’s unique traditions was. Bhārata’s cultural unity aligns with its geographic unity. The whole is as real as the parts, and glued together by Bhakti and the Natya Shastra. The bonds of the Common Fire, the natural fruits of our soils, are forged in language, music, dance, and more!

Songs in Stone

From this prolonged stay in eastern Bhārata, we take a sojourn to look at the solid structures that we build with our own hands. At this point, complaining about the lack of a sense of Indic aesthetics in our modern architecture has become akin to beating a dead horse. Public architecture in modern Bhārata is a complete mess, with almost no connection to the diverse traditions of building things that have evolved in this country. No “secular” public space today has any relation to Indic architecture. It does not represent the natural development of our nation, our thoughts and aspirations. It does not sing our peoplehood back to us. Which means, that is by its very nature, unnatural. And I think that this asymmetry has an understandable effect of demoralizing the people.

Our cities today are mostly a patch-up of gray rectangular boxes that are dull, insipid and life-sucking. They offer no inspiration and reflect the flatness of the ideology that produces them. Changing this paradigm is probably the most immediate and productive thing we can do to uproot the demoralization felt by our people. Bhārata’s secular places must reflect the ideas of the Vastu Shastras, Shilpa Shastras, and yes, even parts of Varahamihira’s Brihat Samhita!

They must reflect the five main principles of our work on the topic: Diknirnaya (principles of orientation), Padavinyasa (site planning), Hastalakshana (proportionate measurement ratios of sections), Ayadi (six canonical principles of architecture), and Patakadi (aesthetics or character of each building or part of the overall plan). One can only imagine what walking through a Bhāratīya city would be like if they were rebuilt using these principles in mind. Imagine an office worker coming into his daily grind, but finding a cubicle floor that is formed out of Dhārmika interior design! Imagine a student walking into a school-complex through a gate that resembles a miniature Gopuram! It would give a Dhārmika person the same feeling that a European gets today while walking through the streets of Florence. Frankly, we have no excuses for our complete lack of imagination and our failure to produce modern (but Dhārmika) ideas about urban planning, hygiene, etc.

In addition, our modern cities have to be made livable, breathable and not be abandoned to become concrete urban heat islands. Every one of our water bodies, especially in urban areas, need to be treated with the reverence that we have for temple ponds. For this to happen, we will have to work to create a school of urban planning that is rooted in Dhārmika sensibilities and assumptions. The excavated ruins of our ancient cities prove that we were once able to plan our urban settlements in an organized and coherent manner. And while the explosion in population and other modern challenges are new issues that we have to deal with today (that our ancestors didn’t have to), it still doesn’t mean that such an endeavor cannot be done. For all his blindspots, I believe that Mohandas Gandhi was morally justified in his war against the Bhāratīya apathy towards a lack of sanitation. And we must endeavor to make sure his dreams in this regard become a reality.

Because architecture, at its best, reflects the verses of a civilization’s song being carved in stone. Perhaps nothing reflects this better in Bhārata than the Vesara style of architecture found in modern-day Karnataka. As most of us will know, this Vesara style is a hybrid form of Bhāratīya temple architecture. As the text Kamika-agama explains, the style fusesa South Indian planning structure, with a shape that features North Indian details. It is most commonly found in temples of the later Chalukyas and Hoysalas in the Deccan region. The Hoysala style of architecture in particular, with its star-shaped design of the base of the shrine, the rhythmic projections and recesses being carried through the tower in an orderly succession of decorated tiers, represents the Vesara style beautifully.

This part of the nation, lying above the deep south and below the Maratha lands, is a beautiful mix of influences from either side, which are then combined and developed further to create a unique culture of its own. This blending of North and South is seen in the language spoken in this region (primarily Kannada) and the cultural output. Is it not beautiful that the temple architecture that developed in this area reflects this merging of northern and southern influences? It is, in my opinion, the song of a civilization finding expression in stone!

The Parts and the Whole

“In a word, India is not real - only the parts are real. Class is real. Religion is real - not the threads in it that are common and special to our religions but the aspects of religion that divide us, and thus ensure that we are not a nation, a country, those elements are real. Caste is real. Region is real. Language is real - actually, that is wrong: the line is that languages other than Sanskrit are real; Sanskrit is dead and gone…”

Eminent Historians (Arun Shourie)

This is a description by Shri Arun Shourie of the “line” employed by our Eminent Marxist historians to demoralize Bhāratīya minds since the 1970s. Now, it should be no surprise to the reader that I reject the “parts but not the whole” theory of Bhārata.

Instead, the theory I put forward to you is this: Yes, the parts are real, but this does not mean that the whole is also not real! And this brings me to something that might be considered a little controversial: I think that those of us who want to speak for the Bhāratīya nation and its unity get very defensive - a little too defensive - when our own enemies want to focus on the “parts” of Bhārata.

We believe that the enemy wants to deconstruct and deny the unity of the nation, and so our reactions tend to swing completely the other way - our focus shifts towards proving the existence of only this unity and the “whole”, even if it means denying the existence and reality of the “parts”.

Now, this reaction is understandable. The “parts but not the whole” theory of Bhārata is the foundational axiom of nearly all of the ideologies that deny our peoplehood - believers of the Do Qaumi Nazariya (Two-Nation Theory), Khalistani and Dravidian extremists who deny Bhārata’s nationhood, leftists and Marxists, etc. All of these theories, in order to be viable in any form, need Bhārata to have never been a nation and a people. The British understood this, and this is why the “parts but not the whole theory” became the basis of their propaganda against our nationalist movement.

Given that this theory is the axiom of our enemies it is understandable that our impulsive response has been to go to the other end of the extreme - to homogenize. Many among us have responded to these charges of “not being a nation” by concluding that all this means is that Bhārata needs a homogeneous culture, that is, a single language and a single religion (Hinduism). After all, this is what our enemies claim to be our shortcomings, right?

If it’s not clear so far, I disagree with this homogenization. I do not think that Bhārata will somehow be a more cohesive nation under “Hindi, Hindu, Hindusthan”, as much as I admire the great Bharatendu Harishchandra. And I say this as someone whose mother tongue is Hindi.

It is my belief that we should not be afraid of exploring the histories and culture of the “parts” of Bhārata. Just as a purely objective fact, there is no doubt that different parts of Bhārata have often been on divergent trajectories. There’s an abundance of languages and dialects, heroes and villains, cultures and understandings that will change as one goes from region-to-region. There’s no doubt that this has created some awkward situations when it comes to historical memory. For example, for someone who is not Bengali or Marathi, it was a bit of a surprise for me to learn that some parts of Bengal do not remember the raiding Maratha armies very fondly. It is this diversity of culture and memory that causes many of our enemies and even some of our friends to say that Bhārata is only its parts.

But should this mean that we should deny the reality, the developments, and the cultural diversity of Bhārata’s parts? Absolutely not! For in these “parts” of Bhārata lie the most amazing tales of our history and our most lasting works of cultural production. From these “parts” have emerged some of the most extraordinary men and women who have left such an indelible mark on the nation, that we refuse to forget their names.

In a way, our job as the New Dhārmika Elite is to lead a full-fledged exploration of the “parts” of Bhārata - because they are our parts! And we must refuse to give-in to the narrow-minded instinct of homogeneity and “wholeness” at the expense of the “parts”. We must remember that the wise men and women who’ve come before us, especially in the British era, were also tasked with tackling this same question - Bhārata is one of the few nations that has to endlessly justify its own existence - in the face of people like John Strachey saying: ”The first and most essential thing to learn about India is that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India, possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious“.

And our predecessors in the late-19th and early-20th century responded in kind. In the form of brilliant books and speeches, like Radha Kumud Mookerji’s The Fundamental Unity of India, or Sri Aurobindo’s India, One and Indivisible.

And it is my belief that the New Dhārmika Dream should not be afraid to draw from the various “regional” Dreams that emerged in Bhārata throughout our history. And taking inspiration from this understanding, I will now turn my attention to two of these “regional” Dreams that we can draw inspiration from - the Maratha Dream (Hind Swaraj) and the Sikh Dream (The Khalsa).

The current discourse around the Maratha Empire is a fiercely contested one. For the Eminent Historians, the Marathas were a regional force who endorsed caste hierarchies. But for a significant part of the country - and not just for the people of Maharashtra - the Marathas are remembered as Dhārmika heroes.

A fascinating anecdotal example is seen in the end-credits song (Etthara Jenda) of the movie RRR. This song was a beautiful celebration of many of the forgotten figures (often dismissed as “regional” figures) of Bhāratīya history (ones like Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja, V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, Rani Kittur Chennamma, etc.) and their struggle against colonial rule.

However, there are two fascinating things about the song - the fact that this cinematic procession of warriors from our history ends with a beautiful image of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, and the fact that his likeness almost always got the loudest cheers when it came up, wherever you were watching in Bhārata, or anywhere else in the world. What explains the lasting impact of this “regional figure” in the minds of so many Bhāratīyas?

The answer, of course, is that Hind Swaraj was not a “regional” Dream. Any Bhāratīya who has gone beyond the Shuddho “child’s version of history” knows that at its peak, the Maratha Confederacy held political sway from “Attock to Cuttack”, and even had some influence as far South as Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. It is a tired trope at this point, but it is the de facto truth that the British conquered Bhārata not from the Moguls, but from the Marathas.

But there was clearly something more endearing about the fearless, swash-buckling Marathas (the interested reader should consider buying Uday Kulkarni’s wonderful books on the Marathas) than just the scope of their Empire. And I believe that it was this Dream of Swaraj itself.

It is hard for those of us who grew up in the modern Republic of Bhārata to appreciate this, but in the 17th century, the idea of self-rule on Dhārmika lines (Swaraj) would’ve felt like stumbling onto an oasis in the desert to the people of northern Bhārata and the Deccan, who had not ruled themselves for centuries. In these parts of Bhārata, the Marathas were the first political entity in centuries who offered a Dream of a Rule where they were not treated like second-class citizens, where their leaders would rule and not be ruled, where their artists and architects would be employed to build consequential structures, where they didn’t have to pay the jizya to be able to follow their own indigenous, emergent traditions, or where their word would count as equal to the words of a Muslim in a legal case.

It’s impossible to overstate just how crucial Hind Swaraj was for the development of a political consciousness in these vital parts of Bhārata. For many of our people, the Maratha Empire was the first glint of the possibility of self-rule - one where our culture would be promoted, our languages patronized, our history be put center-stage again in our nation. Maratha Rule meant Swabhasha, Swadharma, and Swaraj, and it left such a mark on the history of central and northern Bhārata that we have never forgotten it. It is truly an instance of the broader public memory of a period and an Empire not aligning with the Elite view (which finds itself identifying with Mogul Rule). If one were being cheeky, one could even call it an example of “subaltern history”.

Even after the glorious Chhatrapati Shivaji and Dharamveer Chhatrapati Sambhaji, the Maratha Confederacy under various Peshwas - Baji Rao, Nanasaheb, Madhavrao - expanded Swaraj across the length and breadth of the country. Their work in physically reviving many shrines and ghats across this region is well known, but even this physical revival pales in comparison to the uplifting of the Dhārmika spirit brought about by their success. For the first time in centuries, Dhārmika society had a military and political nobility who they identify with, and I believe that the consequences of this moralization of Dhārmika society would bear fruit in the nationalist movement that developed a few centuries later.

Because when you give a people who haven’t ruled themselves for centuries the faintest of hope of Swaraj, they will latch onto it and make it the vessel of their hopes and aspirations. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and the Maratha empire he spawned were, in many ways, the true beginnings of Bhāratīya nationalism. A people who had, to their discredit, accepted foreign rule as inevitability for centuries, finally threw-off the chains of slavery and dared to rule themselves again.

Of course, this Hind Swaraj Dream is stronger in the Deccan and in northern Bhārata, because foreign rule lasted longer in these areas. And given the flow of history, there’s nothing wrong with the southernmost parts of the country not fully identifying with this sentiment. Even more than the actual physical impact of their Rule, I think it is for their daring and their ambition, their aesthetics and their acumen that the New Dhārmika Elite should be inspired by the Marathas. In the emerging world of modernity, they were among the first of us who sought to shape this land’s future in a Dhārmika vision.

One fascinating connection for me is that the Attock to Cuttack Dream contained countless parallels to the Dhārmika nationalism we later find in Bengal, with the addition of State power (which the Bengalis, coming to the fore in the 19th century, lacked). Sri Aurobindo was trying to capture this essence in his (sadly unfinished) essay “On the Bengali and the Mahratta”. This sentiment of the concurrent rise of the Bengalis and the Marathas was brought to the fore in the Dance of the Bengalis and Marathis in the 19th century. Their cooperation and leadership of the new embers of the nationalist movement is a great example of the eternal unity of thought in the country, and it was reinforced by the unique insights of each region. A great anecdote from Friedrich Max Müller in his book “India: What Can it Teach Us?” stands out in this regard:

“It was only the other day that I saw in the Liberal, the journal of Keshub Chunder Sen’s party, an account of a meeting between Brahmavrata Samadhyayi, a Vedic scholar of Nuddea, and Kashinath Trimbak Telang, a M.A. of the University of Bombay. The one came from the east, the other from the west, yet both could converse fluently in Sanskrit.”

For all the statements about the Marathas not being remembered kindly in Bengal, it was these two communities that played the trailblazing role in our nationalist movement. If the New Dhārmika Elite can create a class of people as competent and steeped in the country’s history and tradition as the Bengalis and the Marathas of the late 19th century, I’d say we will have succeeded.

If the Marathas answered the call of Dharma in the Deccan, the Sikhs fought to bring about the resurgence of Dharma in the Panjab. The Sikh Dharam was forged in the tumultuous frontier of the Panjab, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was always going to be among the toughest places to retain in the Dhārmika fold due to its geography. There is no doubt that the Panjab is physically, culturally, demographically, etc. part of Bhārata, but the tides of history have meant that the physical frontiers of Bhārata have shrunk from the Khyber Pass in ancient times, to the plains of the Sindhu river and her five tributaries.

Historically speaking, the Panjab is fascinating because it has been a cultural melting pot right from ancient times. For large periods of the history of Bhārata, different parts of the Panjab and the Saraiki region were ruled by non-Bhāratīya empires like the Parthians, the Bactrians, the Indo-Greeks, and later on, the Afghans and the Turks. In fact, the Panjab has had one major ethnic Panjabi ruler in the entire period from the year 1000 CE to today - the great Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

It is in this context, amid the raging storm of the invasion of the Timurid Babar, that the Sikh Dharam took shape in the Panjab through the work and teachings of Guru Nanak Dev ji. Now, Guru Nanak Dev ji is a fascinating figure, because he is considered by many Hindus to be associated with the Bhakti movement that swept through Bhārata in this period, preaching Nirguna Bhakti like Sant Kabir. Today, Guru Nanak Dev ji’s legacy is obviously perceived in the light of the development of the Sikh Dharam in the 16th and 17th centuries. But what is fascinating about Guru Nanak is that doesn’t only belong to what I term “Narrow Sikhi”, or what its proponents call “Khalsa Sikhi”. In India and across the world, devotion to Guru Nanak Dev ji and his deeds, goes beyond Narrow Sikhi. Anybody who has ever entered the house of a Panjabi Hindu can most likely attest to that! Similarly, the Nanakpanthis are devotees of Guru Nanak despite not subscribing to the later developments and narrowing of the Sikh Panth.

But the Khalsa Dream itself, which was fleshed out and developed by the Gurus who succeeded Guru Nanak Dev ji, is another sign of a Dhārmika resurgence in a part of Bhārata that perhaps needed it the most, occurring as the region went through a rapid demographic transformation through birth rates and immigration from the neighboring Afghan territories. These two reasons combined are essentially why the majority of the Panjab is no longer part of the modern Republic of Bhārata. In this period, the Khalsa offered the Hindus of the Panjab a way to organize themselves and to resist the various discriminatory policies of Turko-Afghan rule, and it brought back thousands of Jatt Muslims back into the Dhārmika fold. Later, in the form of Guru Gobind Singh ji, a brilliant figure (a Warrior Poet) Sikhi produced a figure for the ages, whose resistance against the Mogul tyranny is every bit as legendary as that of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.

Regardless of how the Sikh Dharam developed and narrowed in British times, increasingly narrowing the definition of “Sikh” to one that had very little place in its ranks for various and diverse sects like the Sikhligarhs, Vanjaareys, Radha Soamis, Nirmaleys, Namdharis, Satnamiye, Udaasiyas, etc., those of us who want to create a Dhārmika future of Bhārata should not forget the sacrifice and grace of the great Gurus for the cause of Dhārma.

Another figure we must learn from is the extraordinary Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The head of the Sukerchakia Misl was without doubt one of the great Dhārmika rulers of his time, an extraordinary figure in the history of the Panjab, and someone who made the Khalsa Dream a reality. The Maharaja’s deeds need no introduction to the well-versed reader - from his defeat of the Afghans at the age of 20 and the incredible terms of surrender he offered them, to his generosity for the gold on top of the Kashi Vishwanath mandir, to his will gifting the Koh-i-Noor diamond to the Jagannath temple in Puri, to his sending of soldiers to the Ahom Kings in the north-east to protect them from Burmese invasion. The one-eyed but valiant Maharaja deserves to be as revered as the other great Dhārmika kings of his time, with his one possible failure being to somehow force a demographic transformation in the Panjab, which might have ensured that the Panjab and Sind could still be parts of Bhārata today.

While being inspired by the Khalsa Dream, however, we do need to understand that the developments and narrowing of the Sikh Panth in the last 200 years has happened. And we need to understand properly just how Narrow Sikhi sees other Dhārmika traditions and its relation to them. Narrow Sikhi’s primary emotion towards the Vedic Hindu Dharma is a fear of “assimilation” - the fear that there are so many things in common between the Sikh Dharam and Vedic Hindu Dharma, that the former needs to vigilantly guard its walls against the encroachment of the latter. To do this, Narrow Sikhi consciously and wilfully plays up the narcissism of small differences. They think that if they don’t do this, they will lose their unique identity which has developed over time, and that Hindu Dharma will swallow them up by “assimilating” them like we have (in their eyes) done to followers of the Jaina Dharma.

So when the members of the RSS call Sikhs “Keshdhari Hindus”, they probably don’t realize that they are stoking the fires of one of the core fears of Narrow/Khalsa Sikhi. So how does one solve this conundrum, and what role can the Sikh Dharam, even in its now Narrow form, play in the future of a Dhārmika Elite?

In my opinion, we must first accept that Sikhi now sees itself as a Dhārmika “third-way” tradition. It believes that it has wisdom to offer that is different from Hindu Dhārma and Islam (the two main religions in the time and place this tradition developed), but also one that contains the best parts of what they both teach. This should perhaps be unsurprising to us, given how the tradition developed. And our job as a New Dhārmika Elite should be to find common ground with the Sikhi that exists today. They are, after all, a Dhārmika Panth. We might disagree with them about the specifics of the nature of the divine and the nature of the soul, but we share a peoplehood and a creed with them. The fear of “assimilation” and internal dialogue within Khalsa Sikhs will mean that we have to engage them sensitively, but there is no reason for the things we have in common to not unite us towards a common platform of Dhārma. The narcissism of small differences must be resisted, and our common peoplehood must be allowed to prevail.

To conclude, I believe that when the New Dhārmika Elite sees our enemies deny the unity of Bhārata by trying to exploit its diversity and divergent developments, they must claim all these “regional” Dreams as their own, and not be afraid to talk about them. The way I see it, Bhārata has seen the development of various “regional” Dreams since the medieval collapse. I believe these dreams to be fragments of a greater Bhāratīya dream, manifesting itself in different parts of the country, in different languages, taking different forms and colors. But by their very nature, there seems to be something incomplete about these Dreams - they seem like partial expressions of the whole, like the desperate attempts of a long-suppressed nation to find its voice. The Dhārmika consciousness never stopped striving to express itself, even when it was struggling to climb out of a hole of medieval darkness and dampness. A New Dhārmika needs to internalize and own these “regional” Dreams, and imbibe the best of them to create a New Dream for Bhārata’s future.

Universal, and Eternal

Putting these various Bhāratīya consciousnesses together - and making them greater than the sum of their parts - is the New Dream.

It is Hind Swaraj, it is The Mother, it is the Khalsa, it is Shiva, it is Venkata, it is the Ramcharitramanas. When I look back at the history of Bhārata, I find myself in the Kashmiri pandit mapping the impossible to map Ananatag cave, in the Jat soldier pushing back the invader from the West. in the toiler of the Gangetic plains and in the vanvaasi who knows every little scent of the forest in Malwa. I am the Gujarati merchant looking out to the sea, the Odia fisherman welcoming the birds into Chilika. I am the Hoysala temple architect fusing north and south, the Malayali port trader welcoming the world. I am the Chola merchant taking Dharma to shores anew.

I am the pilgrim climbing a hill on foot to reach my deity - am I in Tirumala, Junagadh or in Katra? I am the Gurkha soldier charging into battle with “Jai Maha Kali, Ayo Gorkhali” on my lips. I am connected in all this by the thread of Dharma. Because for the Bhāratīya people, Dharma _is _the nation. This glue of Dharma is why the Bhāratīya nation is a nation. It is why the parts come together to form the whole. Bankim knew this, when he told The Mother, that তোমারই প্রতিমা গড়ি মন্দিরে মন্দিরে (tomhari pratima godi mandire mandire). This is the concept that became Aurobindo’s “Mother”. And this Mother is eternal.

Which is why the New Dhārmika Elite needs to realize that reclaiming the physical space of our sacred geography is a non-negotiable aspect of our future. Being a primary, emergent tradition, our geography is more important to us than to those from other traditions. The Dhārmika tradition is inexorably connected to the land we have peopled for centuries. This emotion found a concrete expression in Bankim’s above-quoted Vande Mataram - the nation is inseparable from Dharma. They are one and the same thing - Aurobindo says at Uttarpara: ”When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the Dharma and by the Dharma that India exists. To magnify the religion means to magnify the country”. This process of reclaiming public space has to end with the ambition to one day return the Panjab, Sindh, Kashmir and Bangla to their Dhārmika roots. It is likely that this will never happen, I believe that this impossibility should not affect our ability to imagine it happening, and how we can make it happen. The process of Dhārmika rejuvenation does not end till there is a Sun Temple in Multan.

Because the beauty of Dharma is that vestiges of it even exist in the people who’ve most rejected it. I’m reminded of a Bangladeshi Muslim friend of mine in college who picked up a book he dropped and pressed it to his forehead. It was a very poignant moment for me and showed me the depth of the Bhāratīya identity and the impact it leaves on people. Despite the conversion, despite the decades of this alien software and rampant indoctrination, the faint embers of Dharma remain in the people inhabiting our strange neighborhood “countries”. The flames are, in this sense, eternal, or Sanatan. These vestiges have to be engaged through a system of Dhārmika apologetics. For this, the doctrines of faiths of Christianity and Islam will have to be studied seriously. They have their own set of apologetics, and our counter-apologetics has to be serious, positive, and must have a Dream of the future to show to the reverter. There’s many of these converts who would be willing to revert to Dharma if given an opportunity and a tangible process to follow, but sadly our lack of organization even prevents these people from making the leap. A New Dhārmika Elite has to change this paradigm decisively.

To end this series, I think it’s only fair I go back to someone who has inspired the writing of the series in the first place. I have quoted him extensively in this essay too, because I genuinely believe that no single person has more beautifully articulated the scale of the task ahead of us, and the immense human effort it will require to raise a once-great civilization back to the place it deserves at the world table. While he himself was enamored by Rishi Bankim’s writings, today, Aurobindo stands in front of us like a river raftsman who has navigated the rapids and has left a detailed map of how to get there. His writings and work have to be the single biggest guiding source of our future.

When he came to Baroda to work in the administration of the Gaekwad Maharaja, he eventually began working as a teacher at Baroda College. This section from this wonderful article bears repeating in full:

From accounts left by his students, one gets to know that Aurobindo had an overawing presence as a teacher. His classes were not of an interactive nature. He usually started the class by reading relevant passages from the sourcebooks, and after that with half-closed eyes, delivered his lecture without any reference notes. He did not ask any questions. On the whole, his delivery did not exactly adhere to the academic conventionalities of the subject. He expressed his own thoughts on the subject and his delivery was not necessarily directed towards achieving success in examinations. He also presided over debates and literary events conducted by the students in the College and spoke at the Central Hall of the College. The language in his lectures and dictations was the finest example of classical English and inspired students to strive for higher levels of adeptness in expression. He laid a lot of stress on articulate expression in compositions, particularly underscoring the importance of a logical flow of ideas. He always equated clear composition with clear thinking.

Among his students was K.M. Munshi, who in later life became an eminent litterateur, lawyer, freedom fighter, founder of the Bharati Vidya Bhavan, and later in independent India, the Governor of Uttar Pradesh. Munshi recounted his interaction with him. While discussing how to intensify the spirit of nationalism the Professor pointed out to Munshi the map of the country and said, ”Look at that map. Learn to find in it the portrait of BharatMātā. The cities, mountains, rivers and forests are the materials which go to make up Her body. The people inhabiting the country are the cells which go to make up Her living tissues. Our literature is Her memory and speech. The spirit of Her culture is Her soul. The happiness and freedom of Her children is Her salvation. Behold Bharata as a living Mother, meditate upon Her and worship Her in the nine-fold way of Bhakti.” Munshi also mentioned that when asked about what books one should read, the Professor suggested Vivekananda, whose works had just come out in the previous few years.

As usual with Aurobindo, I find myself in a position where there is very little I can add. The only thing I’ll say is that only a New Elite who believes the above passage deep in its heart can lead this country to its deserved destination. We have to remember, as the great man says in his essay Rishi Bankim Chandra, the essay that inspired this whole series, that ”Ours is the eternal land, the eternal people, the eternal religion, whose strength, greatness, holiness, may be overclouded but never, even for a moment, utterly cease. The hero, the Rishi, the saint, are the natural fruits of our Indian soil; and there has been no age in which they have not been born“.

This is the path that, as the New Elite, must tread on. Again, he adds, that ”Once that vision has come to a people, there can be no rest, no peace, no farther slumber till the temple has been made ready, the image installed and the sacrifice offered”. It is the job of this New Dhārmika Elite to bring this vision to the people of Bhārata, and we must reflect the restlessness and urgency needed to make this vision - A Fair and Gracious Dream - a reality.

And with that, I will end this fourth part of the series! I want to thank those of you who have followed it so far for reading! धन्यवाद and বন্দে মাতরম্‌!