In these columns I have quoted extensively from the early writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy right from 1906 to 1917 to show how he was a great Champion of cultural nationalism of Bharatvarsha. Cultural nationalism is a form of nationalism in which the nation is defined by a shared (inherited) culture, as opposed to, for instance, its ethnicity or its institutions. Cultural nationalism has been described as a variety of nationalism that is neither purely civic nor purely ethnic.
On the midnight of August 14-15, 1947 Nehru gave his famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech at the Parliament House in New Delhi. In his speech on that occasion, Nehru made no reference to the great cultural heritage of India. Since he was one of the leading products of the colonial system of English education established and promoted by Lord Macaulay from 1835 onwards, he made no reference to the national need for bringing about a new national renaissance in independent India through an educational revolution drawing its source of inspiration from our Vedic heritage rooted in Sanatana Dharma.
Let us contrast this vision—or want of vision—of Nehru with that of Ananda Coomaraswamy. On August 15, 1947, Ananda Coomaraswamy gave an inspiring address at the Hindustan Association, Boston, in USA. Many Indian students studying in USA were present and heard him on that day of our Independence. The dictionary is full of words. It is how the words are used that makes the big difference.
The art of words is to use them creatively, to select and arrange them to inspire the mind, stir the heart, lift the spirit. That is why Plato said: ‘Good words anoint a man, ill words kill a man’. The proverb of Solomon says it well: ‘A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver’. I would like to present below a few excerpts from Ananda Coomaraswamy’s great speech on that day: ‘I have been asked: ‘What is your message to the new India of our dreams?’ This is my answer: ‘BE YOUR SELF’. Our problem is not so much one of the rebirth of an Indian culture as it is one of preserving what remains of it.
This CULTURE is valid for us not so much because it is Indian as because it is CULTURE. At the same time, its special forms are adapted to a specifically Indian nature and inheritance, and are appropriate to us in the same way that a national costume is appropriate to those who have a right to wear it. We cut a sorry figure in our foreign and hybrid clothes, looking neither like ourselves nor like anyone else on earth.
We invite the ridicule of foreign musicians when we play the harmonium. We cannot expect to meet cultured Europeans when we know nothing of Indian culture’. ‘The younger generation of go-getters that comes to America to study, and that will largely shape the course of Indian social and educational policies in the immediate future is, for the most part, as ignorant of Indian traditions and cultural values as any European might be, and sometimes more so; and just because of this lack of background cannot grasp the American and European problems that confront it’. How very true? His prophetic words have become a reality in 2008. We have to only look at our multiple TV Channels today and we can see that most of the women who appear on the TV look like European/American women who have nothing to do with India and its culture!
The same observation is applicable equally to all the men—may I say non-men (!)—who arrogantly pontificate with half-naked bodies on our disgusting TV channels 24 hours (24 x 7 x 365) a day! Then Ananda Coomaraswamy went on to emphasise that Nehru and other Congress leaders on the day of our Independence were acting as proud cultural descendants of Lord Macaulay and not of Vedic or Upanishadic heritage of timeless India. This is how Ananda Coomaraswamy put it: Sage and Seer Ananda Coomaraswamy clearly saw that India under Nehru and the Congress Party was going into yet another ‘DARK AGE’.
This is how he described it on the first day of our freedom. ‘It will take many a long year yet for Indians to recover their SPONTANEITY. For the present, most of our ‘educated’ men are just as much as Americans dominated by the current catch words of ‘equality’, ‘democracy’, ‘progress’, and ‘literacy’. In the past, and still today, Indians have earned and deserved much of the contempt of the Europeans whom they have flattered so sincerely by an imitation of all their habits and ways of thinking.
We, too, are on our way to become a nation of SHUDRAS, at the same time industrious and ignorant. Notwithstanding that all philosophy refers to the ‘whole-man’ we seek to become mere ‘hands’, ‘cogs in a wheel’, ‘copies of copies’—we have learnt from the modern world to despise wisdom and push everything aside to ‘leap before we look’’. Ananda Coomaraswamy during the course of his speech on August 15, 1947 referred to Bharatan Kumarappa’s masterly work, ‘Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism’.
In that book, Kumarappa had made a reasoned argument for decentralisation, local self-sufficiency, small-scale manufacture, and the restoration of direct personal relations between the producers and the consumers of the necessaries of life. Ananda Coomaraswamy completely supported this view of Kumarappa and brilliantly concluded in these words: ‘I fully endorse the approach and philosophy of Kumarappa because that involves the whole of our culture, since it is the natural and proper function of the arts to provide for all the needs of the whole-man, as a physical and metaphysical person at one and the same time’. Jawaharlal Nehru was very proud to proclaim ‘By education I am an Englishman, by views an internationalist, by culture a Muslim, and I am a Hindu only by accident of birth’.
On another occasion, drunk with power, he had the temerity to declare ‘The ideology of Hindu Dharma is completely out of tune with the present times and if it took root in India, it would smash the country to pieces’. Thus Nehru dismissed the Hindus of India as a mere religious community without any cultural tradition going back to the dawn of history.
Unlike Mahatma Gandhi who was not afraid of proclaiming from the house top that he was a devout Hindu and a staunch supporter of Sanatana Dharma, Nehru took special pride in announcing his ‘voluntary’ Himalayan ignorance of Sanatana Dharma and Hindu culture from all public platforms.
Dressed in brief mortal authority, Nehru’s supercilious purblind audacity reached its acme when he wrote to Kailash Nath Katju in 1953: ‘In practice the individual Hindu is more intolerant and more narrow-minded than almost any person in any other country’. It is a grim national tragedy that the gullible and innocent Hindus of India entrusted the difficult but sacred task of governance immediately after our Independence to such a man as Nehru who had no faith whatsoever in India’s cultural heritage and who was in fact a sworn enemy of Hinduism and Sanatana Dharma.
We have to contrast the vicious anti-Hindu ideology of Nehru with the soul-stirring message of Swami Vivekananda given in 1893: ‘Hindu Dharma is the quintessence of our national life. Hold fast to it if you want your country to survive, or else you would be wiped out in three generations’. Thus Swami Vivekananda was supremely proud of being a Hindu, while Nehru was so ashamed of it as to reject it as an accident of birth!
In his historic speech at Boston on 15 August 1947, Ananda Coomaraswamy proclaim that throughout the ages, India has been a land of profound religious convictions and equally generous religious tolerance.
Here at least, if nowhere else, it is still possible to think of their own faith as the natural friend and ally of others in a common cause. He said that in the West religion was fast becoming an archaic and impossible refuge. But in India it still provided—and continues to provide—for both the hearts and minds of men, and gave them an inalienable dignity; and because of this, the natural connection of religion, with sociology and politics had never been broken.
In this context Ananda Coomaraswamy’s words are absolutely relevant: ‘There is no such opposition of sacred to profane as is taken for granted in the modern West; in our experience, culture and religion have been indivisible; and that, is our inheritance, is what we can least of all afford to abandon…. When the culture that we now propose to restore was alive, the learned men of foreign countries came from far away to study in India. The measure of our culture is not that our ability to learn new tricks, but that of what we have to give’.
Nehru and the Congress party after 15 August 1947 have used the might of the anti-Hindu pseudo-secular Indian State to not only to abandon this glorious inheritance but also to destroy it in letter and spirit forever.
(Concluded)
(The writer is a retired IAS officer)
e-mail the writer at vsundaram@newstodaynet.com
