Note: This essay is the Eleventh part in the series of articles based on Guruji's Bunch of Thoughts.

This speech of Guruji focused upon the origin of the word “Hindustan” and the social diversity across the land. Despite the many different sects, we have only one “Dharma”. He also took upon the false propaganda of how the age old Varna-vyavastha has been blamed for our downfall. It, in fact, served as a great bond of social cohesion. He also took upon the myth of Tamil separatism and the Aryan-Dravidian controversy that have been used as political tools by the enemies to disintegrate the nation. 

Some people object to the name ‘Hindu’ saying that it is comparatively of a recent origin and moreover given to us by the foreigners. They suggest the name ‘Arya’ or ‘Bharatiya’ in place of Hindu.

Why the name ‘Hindu’?

‘Arya’ is an old and proud name, but it has gone out of use especially for the last thousand years. Moreover, the mischievous propaganda carried on by the British under the cover of historical research during the last century has struck deep into the minds of our people the poisonous roots of the cooked-up Aryan-Dravidian controversy. ‘Bharatiya’ too is an ancient name associated with us. But today, it is commonly used as a translation of the word ‘Indian’ which includes all the various other communities like the Muslim, Christian, Parsi, etc., residing in this land.

According to Bhrihaspati Agama the word ‘Hindu’ is formed with the letter ‘Hi’ from the Himalayas and ‘Indu’ from Indu Sarovar (the Southern Ocean), conveying the entire stretch of our motherland. The Brihaspati Agama says:

हिमालयं समारभ्य यावदिंदुसरोवरम् ।

तं देवनिर्मितं देशं हिंदुस्थानं प्रचक्ष्यते ।।

(The land created by the Gods and stretching from Himalayas to the indu (i.e. Southern) ocean is called Hindusthan.)

The word ‘Hindu’ has been especially associated with us during the crucial period of the last thousand years of our history. The dream of all our valiant freedom fighters like Guru Govind, Vidyaranya and Shivaji had been to establish Hindu Swaraj. The name ‘Hindu’ carries with it the fragrant memories of all those great lives, their deeds and their aspirations.

‘Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti’

The first special characteristic that strikes the eye of an outsider is the bewildering variety of sects and sub-sects like Shaiva, Vaishnava, Shakta, Vaidik, Bouddha, Sikh, Jain, Lingayat, Aryasamaj, etc., obtaining the elastic framework of our dharma. But the diversities in the path of devotion did not mean division in society. All are indivisible organs of one common dharma which held society together. The same philosophy of life, the same goal, the same belief in the supremacy of the inner spirit over the outer gross things of matter, the same faith in rebirth, the same adoration of certain qualities like brahmacharya, satya, etc., the same holy samskars in short, the same life-blood flowed through all these limbs of our society. It was the propounder of pure Advaita (non-dualism, Sri Shankaracharya, who prescribed the Panchayatna Pooja - the worship of the five deities, Surya, Shakti, Vishnu, Ganapati and Shiva – for the sake of the common man. What a glorious example of the harmony of the various paths to God Realization! Diversity of sect had seldom caused bloodshed or unholy rivalry amongst our people in the past.

The formation of many of these sects and aspects of philosophy served another very useful purpose. The Sikh sect, for example, came into being to contain the spread of Islam in Punjab. When the Christian missionaries were trying to woo the people on our West Coast to their faith in the name of an all-merciful personal God, Sri Madhavacharya rose with the bhakti aspect of our dharma to neutralize that foreign poison. The efforts of Ramanujacharya and Basaveshwara too were inspired with the aim of removing feelings of high and low that had crept into the people and unifying them all in a common bond of devotion to God.  

Present Perversions

The part which is geographically called North is as dear to us as the one called South. Ganga is as holy to us as Cauvery. The great Shivalinga formed out of ice in the Himalayan cave at Amarnath claims the same devotion from all of us as the Linga at Rameshwaram. We are intrinsically one, transcending all superficial barriers of distance, creed or sect. It is because of this sap of unity is dried up today that all the various branches of the great tree of dharma are falling apart.

Secondly, the name ‘Hindu’ which signified our all comprehensive dharma has fallen into disrepute. People have begun to feel ashamed of calling themselves Hindus. Some of the Sikhs, Jains, Lingayats and Aryasamajists declare that they are separate from Hindus.

The head of the Namadhari-panth of Sikhs once said, “A person who is not a devout Hindu cannot be a Sikh either, cannot be a disciple of those great gurus who shed their blood in the cause of the mother society and mother religion, i.e., the Hindu”. Sri Guru Govind Singh had declared, “A true Sikh is one who has faith in the Vedas and Bhagwat-Gita and worships Ram and Krishna.”

In fact their whole life, even to this day, is permeated with the same thoughts and feelings as the rest of Hindus. Even as recently as a couple of decades ago one son from every Hindu family used to be named a Sikh.

The Anti-Hindu Government

Even people at the helm of affairs have unwittingly fallen prey to the pernicious idea of Sikh separatism. We often hear them calling upon ‘Hindus and Sikhs’ to live in amity and harmony. It never occurs to them that persons in such high positions using an expression which puts a seal of sanction of separatism between Sikhs and the rest of Hindus would only further embitter their relations. It is clearly written in our Constitution that the term ‘Hindu’ includes Sikh, Jains, and Buddhists which means that the expression ‘Hindu and Sikh’ is opposed to the Constitution.

The tragedy is, all such nonsense goes on under the name of dharma! What surprise is there if, on seeing such perversions, the people lose faith in dharma itself? It is not the defect of dharma but of ourselves.

The policy of the present government has only added fuel to the fire. The very word ‘Hindu’ has become an anathema to our present rulers. Whoever disclaims the Hindu fold and parades himself as a non-Hindu minority finds a special favour with our government.

Once the Glory

The other main feature that distinguish our society was the Varna-vyavastha.  But today it is being dubbed ‘casteism’ and scoffed. Our people have come to feel that the mere mention of varna-vyavastha is something derogatory. They often mistake the social order implied in it for social discrimination. The feeling of inequality, of high and low, which has crept into the Varna system, is comparatively of recent origin. The perversion was given a further fillip by the scheming Britisher in line with his ‘divide and rule’ policy.

Even during the past one thousand years when our nation fell before foreign onslaughts, there is no instance on record to show that caste distinctions were at the root of our national disunity that helped the invaders to conquer us. Caste never came into the picture.

Many Strings, but same Melody

The diversity of our national heritage has also expressed itself in the field of our languages. Considering the vastness of our country and our people, it is nothing to be surprised about. Take any language in the country; we find the same sublime sentiments, the same inspiring thoughts and ideals reflected in all its literature. The same personality of Shri Ramachandra stands eulogized by a Valmiki in Sankrit, by a Tulsi in Hindi and by a Kamba in Tamil.

These days we are hearing much about Tamil. Some protagonists of Tamil claim that it is a distinct language altogether with a separate culture of its own. They disclaim the faith in the Vedas, saying that Tirukkural is their distinct scripture. Tirukkural is undoubtedly a great scriptural text more than two thousand years old. Saint Tiruvalluvar is its great author. There is an authentic translation of that book by V.V.S. Iyer, the well-known revolutionary. What is the theme propounded therein, after all? The same old Hindu concept of chaturvidha-purushartha is put forth as the ideal. Only the chapter on moksha comes in the beginning. It does not advocate any particular mode of worship or name of God but enunciates the pure ideal of moksha. Thus it is not even a sectarian book.  Mahabharata also eulogizes the same picture of social life as Tirukkural present. It is thus purely a Hindu text propounding grand Hindu thoughts in a chaste Hindu language. In fact, all our languages, whether Tamil or Bengali, Marathi or Punjabi, are our national languages.

English or Hindi?

Language being a living medium of human intercourse, the foreign language English is bound to bring in its train English culture and English life-patterns also. And allowing foreign life-patterns to take root here would mean the undermining of our own culture and dharma. Centuries of foreign rule has failed to destroy our great nation only because we have preserved our cultural heritage through the media of our languages.

English language was just a part of British rule and no amount of artificial puffing up can make it survive for long after its main support has collapsed. As a solution to the problem of ‘lingua franca’, till the time Sanskrit takes that place we have to give priority to Hindi on the score of convenience. It does not mean that Hindi is the only national language or that it is the oldest or the richest of all our languages. In fact Tamil is a much richer and older language. But Hindi has come to be the spoken language of a large section of our people and is the easiest of all our languages for learning and speaking. In fact, with the rise of Hindi, all our sister languages also will flourish. The enemy of all our Bharatiya languages is English.

The Great Myth

Today so many other new points of dissension and disintegration are cropping up. The Aryan-Dravidian controversy, for example, is very recent and artificial. Two thousand years ago the country had been grouped under Pancha Gowda and Pancha Dravida, the South coming under the latter name. It was not a racial but only a territorial denomination. In our country the word ‘Arya’ was always a sign of culture and not the name of a race. All through the puranic literature, wives address husbands as ‘Arya’. Surely the wives were not anarya!

It is being made out today that the struggle between Ram and Ravan was the one between Arya and Dravida. How ludicrous! Ravan himself was a great Sanskrit scholar and a devotee of Shiva. He is even reported to have set Sama-veda to music. If anything, Ravan was oppressing the South and Ram only liberated the Southern people from his oppression.

And again, the Harsha-Pulakeshin struggle is sought to be made out as an attempt by the North to dominate the South and its successful rebuttal by the South. But Pulakeshin was not a Dravidian at all, much less a Tamilian! The North-South controversy is pure and simple power-politics got up by the modern politicians who find the present climate extremely congenial for sowing seeds of all sorts of separatism.   

A Duty by Birth

Let us remember that this oneness is ingrained in our blood from our very birth, because we are all born as Hindus. Some wise men of today tell us that no man is born as Hindu or Muslim or Christian but as a simple human being. This may be true for others. But for a Hindu, he gets the first samskar when he enters the mother’s womb, and the last when his body is consigned to the flames. There are sixteen samskars for the Hindu which make him what he is. We are Hindus even before we emerge from the womb of our mother. We are therefore born as Hindus. About the others, they are born to this world as simple unnamed human beings and later on, either circumcised or baptized, they become Muslims or Christians. Therefore, to strengthen the unity and spirit of identity in our society is a duty born with our birth, our sahaja karma. And that which is our sahaja karma must not be given up even if it may appear to be defective.     

सहजं कर्म कौन्तेय सदोषमपि न त्यजेत् । says the Gita.    

Hindu society, whole and integrated, should forever be the single point of devotion for all of us. No other consideration whether of caste, sect, language, province or party should be allowed to come in the way of single-minded devotion. May we all rise and take the life-giving message of our innate unity to every Hindu heart and home, transcending and submerging all other barriers and light up in every Hindu heart the effulgent vision of a single living Samajadevata throbbing with life in her multitude of glorious expressions.

Image Source: Ennapadam Panchajanya