A Fair and Gracious Dream, 3 - A New Claim on the Land

“Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance…

The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over. And so we have to labor and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world”

You might be wondering, dear reader, if it is really wise to start this article with a quote from the arch-villain of the Hindu political consciousness himself. And maybe it isn’t. But hear me out. Read the first paragraph again, especially the last line. And when you do, I hope you realize that despite the rightly-contested legacy of the man who delivered this speech, this passage is still a great description of the ideological churn taking place in Bhārata today.

I don’t think the person delivering it intended to be interpreted this way, but perhaps he was, in this massive moment in the history of our nation, channeling forces far greater than himself. Not only was he correct, these “utterances” of the long-suppressed people are continuing today at a breakneck speed, to the point that many of his own relatives simply can’t keep up with them. The descendents of the speaker - biological and intellectual - are not really enjoying what these “utterances” have to say. Yes, even the broken clock of Paṇḍit Nehru seems to have been right twice a day!

So, the soul of a nation, long suppressed, is finding utterance again. And it is my opinion that the current discourse of Bhāratīya politics is largely about what this voice will have to say - both to Bhārata itself and the world. This essay is a meditation on this question.

So far in this series, we have covered the Bangali Kalpataru (বাঙালির কল্পতরু) and have followed the mazy journey of the Old Shuddho elite, with their mimicry and mediocrity. But now, the task ahead of me in this third part, the most challenging and rewarding one for me thus far, is to move beyond criticism and analysis, and towards prescription. After all, it’s easy to criticize the comically incompetent Shuddho elite, but if their confused Dreams will not govern Bhārata, which Dreams will? What will be the successor ideology to Shuddho? What should be the Dhārmika Dream of the New Elite?

Knowledge must be filtered down

Before we start with putting words to the shape of the New Dream, we must take a small detour. In particular, we must first think about the possible physical form of this Dream, and the means of its execution. To do this, we return again to my favorite part of Bhārata - Bengal.

I explored in Part I of this series how the ideas of the Bangali Kalpataru lit a fire in the hearts and minds of Hindu Bengal. But ideas don’t transmit themselves in a vacuum. They need a medium, a highway, to go the distance that they are meant to travel. Sure the Kalpataru blossomed, but who and what provided the land, soil, and water? How did the fruits of the Kalpataru reach its hungry audience?

For me, while this was obviously not the only factor at play, a large part of the credit goes to a now-virtually-forgotten magazine called Bangadarshan.

Bangadarshan was a Bangla-language literary magazine started in 1872 by one of the main gardeners of the Kalpataru himself, Ṛṣi Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.

Bankim himself had the following to say about his ambitions and goals for the magazine: quoted from Mother India’s Lighthouse: India’s Spiritual Leaders:

“…the English language for good or evil has become our vernacular; and this tends daily to widen the gulf between the higher and lower ranks of Bengali society. Thus I think that we ought to disanglicize ourselves so as to speak to the masses in the language which they may understand.”

Simonti Sen’s 2005 book “Travels to Europe: self and other in Bengali travel narratives, 1870-1910” says that the goal of the magazine was therefore to “negotiate with the set of ideas coming in the name of modernity by incorporating and appropriating the masses”.

And finally, the famous Sanskrit scholar Hara Prasad Shastry, himself a contributor to the magazine, simply added: “What is the purpose of Bangadarshan? Knowledge has to be filtered down.”

And filter down it did.

In its original period of publication in the 1870s-1880s, the magazine was a source of some of the most important Bengali novels ever published. Bankim’s own Vishabriksha, Indira, Yugalanguriy, Radharani, Chandrashekhar, Rajani, Krishnakanter’s Will, etc. were all chronicled in the magazine between 1873 and 1882. In 1882 itself, Anandamatha, one of the most important Bhāratīya books of the 19th century, and the source of the national song of the current Republic, was chronicled in the magazine. The works of others like the above-mentioned Shastry and the literary critic Akshay Chandra Sarkar also found their voices in the publication.

During its initial phase of publication, this now-obscure magazine was read by almost the entirety of the Bengali elite, including women. One of the readers was a young man from Kolkata, eleven-years of age in 1873. His name was Rabindranath Thakur. Kaviguru Thakur said of Bangadarshan: “It was bad enough to have to wait till the next monthly number was out, but to be kept waiting further till my elders had done with it was simply intolerable!”

The magazine went out of print in the 1880s, but two decades later, in 1901, the magazine was revived, with Kaviguru Rabindranath Thakur as its editor!

In this second wind, Bangadarshan played host to the chronicling of more timeless works. In fact, editing the magazine is said to have inspired Thakur to start writing novels! His first, Chokher Bali was serialized in the magazine, and later, during the Bangabhanga Andolan (the movement against the 1905 Partition of Bengal), the magazine became a noisy hotbed of protest against Viceroy Curzon’s decision. The magazine would then play host to a number of Kaviguru’s poems, including Amar Sonar Bangla, the national anthem of the current nation of Bangladesh, and several of his Geetanjali works. Indeed, both Bhārata’s national song and Bangladesh’s national anthem were first published in this magazine!

If the Bangali Kalpataru was a freshwater river flowing down from a mountain, Bangadarshan was the rocky slope that gave the river its powerful rush.

The lesson of Bangadarshan, for any New Elite that hopes to steer a future resurgence of Bhārata, is that shaping elite opinion matters. And elite discourse matters. It can transform societies ideologically and culturally. And if we can steer elite opinion, this opinion flows down to the rest of society. Imagine, a tiny magazine can capture the hearts of millions of people and shape their Dreams for nearly 150 years!

The hearts and minds of the general population, captured in electoral politics and the bubbling chaos surrounding it, are undoubtedly important in their own way. But they will never take a coherent, stable, and decisive course, until they are guided by an Elite that is aware of its duties and confident in its vision for the nation. This is what the story of Bangadarshan teaches us.

One more lesson that can be drawn from the Bangla Elite of the late 19th century, is that our New Elite must love the people it wants to govern. It must treat the citizens of Bhārata as people whose lives it wants to strengthen, whose interests it wants to protect, and whose fires of imagination it wants to kindle. The attitude of this New Elite towards the people of Bhārata, should be, in a word, parental. That is, the New Elite must want the growth and blossoming of the people of Bhārata in the same boundless way a parent wants the success of his or her own children. They must look at the people they govern not through a lens of fear and quiet resentment, as the current Old Shuddho Elite does. They shouldn’t hate the people they govern. They must identify with the people, be hurt by their pain, and experience ecstasy in their happiness and joy. The correct word for this kind of elite in the English language, is an aristocracy, which is what our New Elite should be - a Dhārmika aristocracy of a national character.

And while there is nothing wrong with learning from the rest of the world, the goal of the New Elite shouldn’t just be to use Bhārata as a “launching-pad”, to “graduate” from Bhārata, to become bottom-floor-residents of the Global Elite. This New Elite has to be located - physically and spiritually - in Bhārata, but also should be open to learning technological skills and various best practices in technical governance from the West. This is not to say that Non-Resident Hindus(NRHs) cannot contribute to this New Dream. Despite living in other countries, their hearts and minds often still beat for Bhārata and Dharma.

Their voice is absolutely valid and must be welcomed on most issues. But as foreign citizens and residents, there is a limit to how present and physically grounded they can be towards problems specific to Bhārata. A good balance will have to be found in harnessing their minds and devotion towards Dharma and Bhārata, while also being mindful of their immediate concerns as residents of their new home countries.

We cannot discard every single member of the Old Elite either. Many of them are among the brightest people Bhārata produces in an individual capacity. For reasons laid out in Part 2, the current paradigm often sees many of these Old Elites acting completely against the interests of their own country and people. But, we must be open to the possibility of receiving disaffected converts from this group. Yes, the worst among them are beyond our reach. They are completely consumed by hostile ideologies. But, I maintain that a significant section of these very people could be open to join our side, if we can show them a New Fair and Gracious Dream. Something that goes beyond the negative reactiveness we see from the current political discourse of Bhārata, and creates a new paradigm of thought and possibilities. Some of them will sign onto a Dhārmika Dream that is aspirational and forward-looking, but not the current Shuddho iteration that is negative and backward-looking.

There’s a certain kind of reader who will read this and think of these statements as propaganda and jingoism, a desire to artificially impose an unnatural Dream onto a people. But I would argue that it is Shuddho, the incoherent Dream of the Old Elite, that is unnatural and foreign. The New Dream will be nothing but the natural and eternal voice of the people of Bhārata. One that is a reflection of the ever-unfolding tapestry of our civilization. It will naturally rise to the top when the artificial barriers of Shuddho are removed.

Therefore, the precondition of this New Dream is the emergence of a New Dhārmika aristocracy of a national character. In my own vision of this, this New Elite will be filled with young men and women who are fluent in multiple Bhāratīya languages (in addition to Saṃskrit), who can journey through Bhāratīya history in their heads across region and time. This person will be just as comfortable as shutting down a Khalistani in sonorous ਪੰਜਾਬੀ, as they are defeating a Dravidian apologist in chaste தமிழ். The Elite must set an example to the rest of the people in every walk of life imaginable - the physical, cultural, spiritual, economic domains and more. It has to be worthy of representing the New Dream. For this, it has to develop a certain temperament and character.

So what should this temperament be like? For me, the answer is found in the word Ārya - in the Śri Aurobindo sense of the word. These standards are elucidated in his essay “Arya: Its Significance”, published in आर्य (Arya) magazine in September 1914:

The question has been put from more than one point of view. To most Europeans the name “आर्य”(“Arya”) figuring on our cover is likely to be a hieroglyph which attracts or repels according to their temperament. Indians know the word, but it has lost for them the significance which it bore to their forefathers. Western Philology has converted it into a racial term, an unknown ethnological quantity on which different speculations fix different values. Now, even among the philologists, some are beginning to recognize that the word in its original use expressed not a difference of race, but a difference of culture. For in the Veda the Aryan peoples are those who had accepted a particular type of self-culture, of inward and outward practice, of ideality, of aspiration. The Aryan gods were the supraphysical powers who assisted the mortal in his struggle towards the nature of the godhead. All the highest aspirations of the early human race, its noblest religious temper, its most idealistic velleities of thought are summed up in this single vocable.

In later times, the word “Arya” expressed a particular ethical and social ideal, an ideal of well-governed life, candor, courtesy, nobility, straight dealing, courage, gentleness, purity, humanity, compassion, protection of the weak, liberality, observance of social duty, eagerness of knowledge, respect for the wise and learned, the social accomplishments. It was the combined ideal of the Brahmana and the Kshatriya. Everything that departed from this ideal, everything that tended towards the ignoble, mean, obscure, rude, cruel or false, was termed un-Aryan or “anarya” (colloq. “anari”).

There is no word in human speech that has a nobler history.

This is the daunting task laid out in front of our New Elite - to live to this word in human speech that has the noblest history of them all. Can we rise up to this challenge and be worthy of the moment?

The Buffet on offer

In the “A House of Grain” chapter of A Wounded Civilization, V.S. Naipaul makes the following pronouncement:

But the alarm had been sounded. The millions are on the move. Both in the cities and in the villages there is an urgent new claim on the land; and any idea of India which does not take this claim into account is worthless. The poor are no longer the occasion for sentiment or holy alms-giving; land reform is no longer a matter for the religious conscience. Just as Gandhi, towards the end of his life, was isolated from the political movement he had made real, so what until now has passed for politics and leadership in independent India has been left behind by the uncontrollable millions.

As the passage above again demonstrates, Shuddho, the ruling formula and borrowed Dreams of the Old Elite, was an incomplete and disjointed set of alien beliefs that was simply unfit and incapable of acting as a positive Dream for the people of Bhārata in the long-term.

So the question that naturally follows is: If not Shuddho, then what?

Let’s start with the options on the table.

In the current global political and ideological landscape, the assailing winds of which are now landing on our shores, the dominant culture, blared across all forms of media, is American culture. In particular, it is liberal/progressive American culture that has emerged as an all-conquering ideology, one that aims to homogenize every emergent, regional culture into a consumerist and conformist sludge. This culture is sometimes imposed explicitly (a recent example being the unstoppable advance of ESG norms for corporations and sometimes adopted by the non-American populations naturally and voluntarily.

This is because culture spreads through technology

Therefore, in the two decades (1995-2015) of worldwide internet proliferation, with an internet still largely uncensored outside of China, American liberal culture dominated. In this period, this culture became a sort-of global aspiration culture for English-speaking people everywhere in the world, which created a kind of homogeneous, default, global culture and language. Anecdotally, every Bhāratīya who has grown up in an urban setting knows people who can only visualize their own lives through the language and events of American TV shows like FRIENDS and The Office. Let’s call this American Homogeneity, or as it is more commonly known on the internet, Global Homogeneity (Globalhomo).

From our perspective, it is clear that Globalhomo is where the current iteration of Shuddho looks-towards for power and patronage. This is how we can understand the phenomenon of English-speaking journalists “failing-upwards” to write in foreign platforms, discredited “experts” from the country landing cushy jobs in Ivy League institutions, etc. Globalhomo is the bridge that makes this strange reality possible.

Unfortunately, since 2015, the only worldwide competitor to Globalhomo has been a reactive backlash to Globalhomo itself. The Brexit-Donald Trump phenomenon can be seen as an example of this happening in the Home Country of Globalhomo (the United States) and their broader Anglo cultural colonies. Recently, even political leaders in places like France have warned about the creeping American homogenization in countries across the world and their internal discourse. Therefore, internationally, most people are either choosing Globalhomo (e.g. Germany) or aimlessly thrashing out against it. And as a result, the global ideological landscape has become barren.

For Bhārata, this global ideological desert represents a special kind of problem. We remain reliant on the Globalhomo home-base (the United States and its cultural colonies) for technology and financial investment. But these are the very things through which Globalhomo spreads organically to other countries! So the very things we need to expand our economic growth, will import Globalhomo into our offices, our OTT platform output, our urban “aspirational” and “chic” culture, etc.

But another reason why this is an issue for us is that throughout the last 200 years, the Shuddho Elite who has been in-charge of Bhārata has lived ona steady diet of Borrowed Dreams from the rest of the world. The Brahmo Dream borrowed from the Enlightenment; the Fabian Dream borrowed from John Ruskin and his successors; The Red Dream borrowed very explicitly from its German and Russian prophets. And Shuddho … well Shuddho is a very indigenous concoction of our Old Elite. At least we can give them that!

So, the problem for the vestiges of the Shuddho elite today, is that the global well of ideas seems to have dried out. No such “great ideas” are in the ether right now that can be repackaged into Bhārata, especially when compared to their equivalents in the 19th and 20th century. The only option on the table is Globalhomo, which is a very unimpressive idea but that will not stop the Old Elite from trying to implement it!. It is, in the words of Albert Camus in The Rebel, ”the horizontal religion of our times” - a flat, barren, wasteland of consumerism, homogeneity and degeneracy. Even today, the Shuddho Elite of Bhārata continues to look to its usual sources for inspiration, and finds nothing but the coarse sand of re-packaged Globalhomo.

For our New Dhārmika Elite, Globalhomo is an unfortunate reality that cannot be wished away. It is a genie that cannot be put back into its bottle. It is here to stay, as are the winds of capital and technology that carry it. Somehow, the New Elite of Bhārata will have to find a way to show a Dhārmika Dream to the very people whose minds and hearts have been captured by a weird blend of Shuddho and Globalhomo. The New Dhārmika Dream must emerge after either vanquishing or co-opting/subverting the Globalhomo epidemic. This part is unavoidable.

However, this should also be seen as an opportunity of obvious excitement - there is an ideological vacuum that is just waiting, begging, for us to fill it. Not just in Bhārata, but across the world! It is a daunting task, but not as daunting as it can sometimes seem…

The Blockchain of Dharma: Who we Are

There’s an endless debate, one I often find unimaginably tiresome, in our political discourse, about the origin of Hindu Dharma, the history of the early Āryan people, and how Bhāratīya civilization came into being. Most of these theories are about “invasions”, “migrations”, impositions, colonizations, etc., all of which are focused on creating the same basic structure of narrative for Bhārata’s story as a civilization. This is essentially a Hegelian narrative of “Master vs. Slave”, “Oppressor vs. Oppressed”, i.e. these are categories and frames imposed on us by an external eye. It represents the desire of Western and Bhāratīya Marxist historians to fit Bhāratīya history into the box of the historiography pioneered by grizzly-gray German Prophets (and their inspirations). In the words of Mao Zedong (who I quote here with delicious irony), it represents the small minds of ”they who with pitiful industry have picked up scraps from the dung-heap of textbooks written abroad…”

However, as we reject this lazy effort of our enemies, we have to be able to express our own history and development as a civilization in our own words. At the very least, we have to stop being so muddled and confused in our answers when our enemies bring up their usual line of attacks. Because the view of Bhārata they have imposed on us since Partition has become the hegemonic view of the Shuddho Elite of Bhārata. And a positive hegemony can only be replaced by another positive hegemony, not by simple analysis and criticism.

It should not be a controversial opinion to say that any nation, especially one as important to the world as our nation, deserves better than an Elite who does not even believe in its own nationhood. It is a bare minimum expectation, really. So, the New Dhārmika Elite must tell the people of Bhārata A New Story of Who We Are. A New Story that matches this New Claim on the Land…

And to reconstruct this first-person understanding of ourselves, we have to go back to the start of our civilizational memory … to The Ṛg Veda, and the story of the Bhārata Tribe.

The Bhāratas. We use their name for ourselves today, but we are told by our enemies that these people came from Central Asia, put our ancestors in chains and that this is why we worship “their” gods today. This, of course, is far from the truth. There is increasing clarity today that the traditions of the Bhārata tribe of the Ṛg Veda originated in modern-day Haryana and small pockets of the Panjab. As Sanjeev Sanyal says in “Land of the Seven Rivers”, using the works of Michel Danino and B.B. Lal:

“The Rig Veda neither mentions an invasion nor does it show any knowledge of Central Asia. All we can garner from the text is that these (the Rig Vedic) people were living in the area that corresponds roughly to modern-day Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, and Panjab (including Pakistani Panjab). They also knew about the Himalayas in the North, the seas in the South, the Ganga to the east, and eastern Afghanistan to the West”.

Therefore, a question rightly gets put forward: why is it, dear reader, that I, as someone whose family is from Awadh (mother’s side) and Purvanchal (father’s side), think of myself as a Bhāratīya? I am not from Haryana. Why does someone from the Mysore region? Or from Kamarupa?

Was this Bhāratīya identity imposed on all of us who are not from Haryana? Was it the case, as our enemies would have us believe, that the Bhārata tribe imposed its religion on us through conquest and oppression?

It should be obvious to any reasonable, thinking person that unending civilizations that have lasted for more than 5,000 years, do not survive if they were solely built on the edifice of oppression, violence and imposition. This is what Occam’s Razor should tell us. A civilizational equilibrium formed purely on intolerance will be brittle and temporary, and will deserve its inevitable decay. But the Bhāratīya identity is anything but that. It has proven its eternal character and strength by surviving the tough tides of invasion, modernity, alien ideas, changing norms, dedicated deconstruction, and even internal shortcomings. So, if it wasn’t the orgy of violence that our enemies hallucinate about, what was it that made us Bhāratīyas?

The best attempt at understanding this process comes from Sanjeev Sanyal’s theory (a video I’d recommend watching in full) about how the Blockchain of Dharma was forged. The source of this story is the Ṛg Veda itself - specifically the first and last hymn. The oldest surviving song of our civilization - The Ṛg Veda itself - gives us a common purpose - a compact - that itself mandates that respect has to be paid to both the ancient and the modern Ṛṣis, that is, to the old and new Ṛṣis and Devatās equally. The work itself says how it is not the first work to give this message (i.e. it is not a Revelation), but rather, as Sanyal says, it is a Saṃhitā, a compilation.

In their journey eastward from modern-day-Haryana, every time the Bhārata tribe would encounter a different people, either through war or peaceful interactions, they chose to never impose the gods of their own tribe onto these new people. Instead, the gods of the other people were given a place at what Sanyal beautifully calls ”The Common Fire of Bhāratīya Civilization”. The Bhārata added the gods of the other people to sit beside their own, and the other people added the Bhārata gods to their fires. This is how the decentralized ledger of Dharma was populated and forged. This simple act and approach is why, as Sanyal himself says, a Bengali Śākta worshiper identifies with the name of a thousands-of-years-old tribe from Haryana. This is the immutable code that has forged our peoplehood across millenia.

It is such a potent idea that the Common Fire has essentially absorbed all regionalisms and no one remembers “whose gods” these deities were. And most important, it doesn’t even matter “whose gods” they really were. Even if Śiva bhagavān was a “Dravidian god”, as many of this ideology now ridiculously claim, are you really going to tell the Śiva bhakta in Varanasi that her devotion to Śiva bhagavān is not real? The brilliant exhortation pamphlet by the Ghosh brothers, Bhawani Mandir, gives us a beautiful representation of this civilizational compact from the point of view of the Śākta tradition:

When, therefore, you ask who is Bhawani the mother, She herself answers you, “I am the Infinite Energy which streams forth from the Eternal in the world and Eternal in yourselves. I am the Mother of the Universe, the Mother of the Worlds, and for you who are children of the Sacred land, Aryabhumi, made of her clay and reared by her sun and winds, I am Bhawani Bharati, Mother of India.

Relics of this ancient forging survive in the continued presence of local Devas and Devis in villages and tribes and in family devatās. The ancestors of the people worshiping their Devas were never asked or told to stop worshiping their ancestral gods, as future expanding religions would do. Instead, the Common Fire made place for all. To quote the Ṛg Veda itself, our civilization was to have a code that would be “common in utterance, common in assembly, and common in thought and feeling”.

To the Abrahamic mind, this process makes no sense at all. Formed as they were through aggressive expansion and imposition, requiring the negation of what they replaced, the two proselytizing Abrahamic faiths cannot even fathom a world where an expanding tradition can work without imposition and deletion of the past! They project their own sordid history onto us. They think that the only way Bhāratīya civilization could’ve been forged was through violence, imposition and pain.

And let me make it clear that I’m not saying this process of the expansion of the Common Fire was completely peaceful. There were plenty of wars involved, and the usual unpleasantness that comes with war. But what makes us Bhāratīyas different from the two Abrahamic religions is what our ancestors did AFTER the violence and conflict. Instead of forcing the people they fought to give up their gods and memory, they chose to forge a mutual peoplehood - an unbroken decentralized ledger, a still-burning Common Fire. This is why, we - the Awadhi, the Bengali, the Marathi, the Telugu, the Tamil, the Ahom, the Kashmiri - ARE the Bhāratīyas. Even if these were once different traditions, they aren’t anymore, because of a conscious, voluntary and willful act of the forging of a chain of peoplehood.

In my opinion, this story of our development as a people has to be the foundational idea of our own understanding of ourselves. This is not a call to create a propagandistic myth (as I’m sure many who operate under the mist of Shuddho cynicism will see it). Rather it is a simple attempt to describe ourselves in terms of our own words and memory. There is nothing wrong with having a view of yourself that is not based purely on deconstruction and criticism. Bhārata deserves a story of its history and character that is not soaked in the hermeneutics of suspicion. A potential member of a New Dhārmika elite will have to appreciate the nature of our development as a people, and strive to live up to its ideals, in letter and spirit.

To conclude this section, I think it’s only fitting that I refer to Aurobindo Ghosh’s peerless essay in Bande Mataram called “The Mother and the Nation”:

What is a nation? We have studied in the schools of the West and learned to ape the thoughts and language of the West forgetting our own deeper ideas and truer speech, and to the West the nation is the country, so much land containing so many millions of men who speak one speech and live one political life owing allegiance to a single governing power of its own choosing. When the European wishes to feel a living emotion for his country, he personifies the land he lives in, tries to feel that a heart beats in the brute Earth and worships a vague abstraction of his own intellect. The Indian idea of nationality ought to be truer and deeper. The philosophy of our forefathers looked through the gross body of things and discovered a subtle body within, looked through that and found yet another more deeply hidden, and within the third body discovered the Source of life and form, seated forever, unchanging and imperishable. What is true of the individual object, is true also of the general and universal. What is true of the man, is true also of the nation.

The country, the land is only the outward body of the nation, its annamaya kosha, or gross physical body; the mass of people, the life of millions who occupy and vivify the body of the nation with their presence, is the pranamaya kosha, the life-body of the nation. These two are the gross body, the physical manifestation of the Mother. Within the gross body is a subtler body, the thoughts, the literature, the philosophy, the mental and emotional activities, the sum of hopes, pleasures, aspirations, fulfillments, the civilization and culture, which make up the sūkṣma śarīra of the nation. This is as much a part of the Mother’s life as the outward existence which is visible to the physical eyes.

This subtle life of the nation again springs from a deeper existence in the causal body of the nation, the peculiar temperament which it has developed out of its ages of experience and which makes it distinct from others. These three are the bodies of the Mother, but within them all is the Source of her life, immortal and unchanging, of which every nation is merely one manifestation, the universal Narayan, One in the Many of whom we are all the children.

When, therefore, we speak of a nation, we mean the separate life of the millions who people the country, but we mean also a separate culture and civilization, a peculiar national temperament which has become too deeply rooted to be altered and in all these we discover a manifestation of God in national life which is living, sacred and adorable. It is this which we speak of as the Mother. The millions are born and die; we who are here today, will not be here tomorrow, but the Mother has been living for thousands of years and will live for yet more thousands when we have passed away.