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		<i>The Basis of Unify</i> </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">A MODERN society or people cannot have religion, that is<b> 
</b>to<b> 
</b>say, credal religion, as the basis of its organized collective life. It was mediaeval society and people that were organized on
that line. Indeed mediaevalism means nothing more—and
nothing less —than that. But whatever the need and justification in the past, the principle is an anachronism under modern
conditions. It was needed, perhaps, to keep alive a truth which
goes into the very roots of human life and its deepest aspiration; and it was needed also for a dynamic application of that
truth on a larger scale and in smaller details, on the mass of
mankind and in its day to day life. That was the aim of the
Church Militant and the Khilafat; that was the spirit, although in a more Sattwic way, behind the Buddhistic evangelism or even Hindu colonization.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The truth behind a credal religion is the aspiration, towards
the realization of the Divine, some ultimate reality that gives a
permanent meaning and value to the human life, to the
existence lodged in this 'sphere of sorrow' here below. Credal
paraphernalia were necessary to express or buttress this core of
spiritual truth when mankind, in the mass, had not attained a
certain level of enlightenment in the mind and a certain degree
of development in its life-relations. The modern age is modern
precisely because it had attained to a necessary extent this
mental enlightenment and this life development. So the scheme
or scaffolding that was required in the past is no longer unavoidable and can have either no reality at all or only a modified</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">utility.<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
A modern people is a composite entity, especially with</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">regard to its religious affiliation. Not religion, but culture is
the basis of modern collective life, national or social. Culture
includes in its grain that fineness of temperament which
appreciates all truths behind all forms, even when there is a
personal allegiance to one particular form.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In India, it is well known, the diversity of affiliations is
colossal, <i>sui generis.</i> Two major affiliations have today almost
cut the country into two; and desperate remedies are suggested
which are worse than the malady itself, as they may kill the
patient outright. If it is so, it is, I repeat, the mediaeval spirit
that is at the bottom of the trouble.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The rise of this spirit in modern times and conditions is a
phenomenon that has to be explained and faced: it is a ghost
that has come out of the past and has got to be laid and laid
for good. First of all, it is a reaction from modernism; it is a
reaction from the modernist denial of certain fundamental and
eternal truths, of God, soul, and immortality: it is a reaction
from the modernist affirmation of the mere economic man.
And it is also a defensive gesture of a particular complex of
consciousness that has grown and lives powerfully and now
apprehends expurgation and elimination.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In Europe such a contingency did not arise, because the
religious spirit, rampant in the days of Inquisitions and St.Bartholomews, died away: it died, and (or, because) it was
replaced by a spirit that was felt as being equally, if not more,
authentic and, which for the moment, suffused the whole
consciousness with a large and high afflatus, commensurate
with the amplitude of man's aspiration. I refer, of course, to
the spirit of the Renaissance. It was a spirit profane and secular,
no doubt, but on that level it brought a catholicity of temper
and a richness in varied interest—a humanistic culture, as it is
called—which constituted a living and unifying ideal for
Europe. That spirit culminated in the great French Revolution
which was the final <i>coup de grace</i> to all that still remained of
mediaevalism, even in its outer structure, political and
economical.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In India the spirit of renascence came very late, late almost
by three centuries; and even then it could not flood the whole
of the continent in all its nooks and corners, psychological and
physical. There were any number of pockets (to use a current</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">military phrase) left behind which guarded the spirit of<b> 
</b>the<b> 
</b>past and offered persistent and obdurate resistance. Perhaps,
such a dispensation was needed in India and inevitable also;</font>&nbsp;

<font face="Times New Roman">inevitable, because the religious spirit is closest to India's soul
and is its most direct expression and cannot be uprooted so
easily; needed, because India's and the world's future demands</font>&nbsp;
<font face="Times New Roman">it and depends upon it.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Only, the religious spirit has to be bathed and purified and
enlightened by the spirit of the renascence: that is to say, one
must learn and understand and realize that Spirit is the
thing—the one thing needful—<i>Tamevaikam janatha;</i> 'religions'
are its names and forms, appliances and decorations. Let us
have by all means the religious spirit, the fundamental
experience that is the inmost truth of all religions, that is the
matter of our soul; but in our mind and life and body let there
be a luminous catholicity, let these organs and instruments be
trained to see and compare and appreciate the variety, the
numberless facets which the one Spirit naturally presents to
the human consciousness. <i>Ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti.
</i>It is an ancient truth that man discovered even in his earliest
seekings; but it still awaits an adequate expression and application in life.</font>

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<b>
<font face="Times New Roman">II</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; India's historical development is marked by a special
characteristic which is at once the expression of her inmost
nature and the setting of a problem which she has to solve for
herself and for the whole human race. I have spoken of the
diversity and divergence of affiliations in a modern social unit.
But what distinguishes India from all other peoples is that the diversity and 
divergence have culminated here in contradictoriness and mutual exclusion.                  </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The first extremes that met in India and fought and gradually
coalesced to form a single cultural and social whole were, as
is well known, the Aryan and the non-Aryan. Indeed, the
geologists tell us, the land itself is divided into two parts
structurally quite different and distinct, the Deccan plateau
and the Himalayan ranges with the Indo-Gangetic plain: the</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">former is formed out of the most ancient and stable and, on the
whole, horizontally bedded rocks of the earth, while the latter
is of comparatively recent origin, formed out of a more flexible
and weaker belt (the Himalayan region consisting of a colossal
flexing and crumpling of strata). The disparity is so much that
a certain group of geologists hold that the Deccan plateau did
not at all form part of the Asiatic continent, but had drifted
and dashed into it: in fact the Himalayas are the result of this
mighty impact. The usual division of an Aryan and a Dravidian
race may be due to a memory of the clash of the two continents
and their races.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; However, coming to historical times, we see wave after wave
of the most heterogeneous and disparate elements—Sakas and
Huns and Greeks, each bringing its quota of exotic material—
enter into the oceanic Indian life and culture, lose their
separate foreign identity and become part and parcel of the
common whole. Even so,—a single unitary body was formed
out of such varied and shifting materials—not in the political,
but in a socio-religious sense. For a catholic religious spirit,
not being solely doctrinal and personal, admitted and embraced
in its supple and wide texture almost an infinite variety of
approaches to the Divine, of forms and norms of apprehending
the Beyond. It has been called Hinduism: it is a vast synthesis
of multiple affiliations. It expresses the characteristic genius
of India and hence Hinduism and Indianism came to be
looked upon as synonymous terms. And the same could be
defined also as Vedic religion and culture, for its invariable<br>
basis—the bed-rock on which it stood firm and erect—was
the Vedas, the Knowledge seen by the sages. But there had
already risen a voice of dissidence and discord—that of Buddha, not so much, 
perhaps, of Buddha as of Buddhism. The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit the
supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth
and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for
a vital schism. The denial of the Vedas by itself, perhaps,<br>
would not be serious, but it became so, as it was symptomatic
of a deeper divergence. Denying the Vedas, the Buddhistic
spirit denied life. It was quite a new thing in the Indian
consciousness and spiritual discipline. And it left such a stamp
there that even today it stands as the dominant character of</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">the Indian outlook. However, India's synthetic genius rose
to the occasion and knew how to bridge the chasm, close up
the fissure, and present again a body whole and entire.
Buddha became one of the Avataras: the discipline of Nirvana
and Maya was reserved as the last duty to be performed at
the end of life, as the culmination of a full-length span of action
and achievement; the way to Moksha lay through Dharma
and Artha and Kama, Sannyasa had to be built upon Brahma-<br>
charya and Garhasthya. The integral ideal was epitomized
by Kalidasa in his famous lines about the character of the
Raghus:</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood,
in youth they pursued the objects of life; when old they
took to spiritual austerities, and in the end they died<br>
united with the higher consciousness.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">Only this process of integration was not done in a day, it took
some centuries and had to pass through some unpleasant
intermediary stages.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And still this was not the last—it could not be the last—
antithesis that had to be synthetized. The dialectical movement led to a more serious and fiercer contradiction. The
Buddhistic schism was after all a division brought about from
within: it could be said that the two terms of the antinomy
belonged to the same genus and were commensurable. The
idea or experience of Asat and Maya was not unknown to the
Upanishads, only it had not there the exclusive stress which
the later developments gave it. Hence quite a different, an
altogether foreign body was imported into what was or had
come to be a homogeneous entity, and in a considerable mass.
Unlike the previous irruptions that merged and were lost in
the general life and consciousness, Islam entered as a leaven
that maintained its integrity and revolutionized Indian life
and culture by infusing into its tone a Semitic accent. After
the Islamic impact India could not be what she was before—a
change became inevitable even in the major note. If was a
psychological cataclysm almost on a par with the geological
one that formed her body; but the spirit behind which created
the body was working automatically, inexorably towards the</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">greater arid more difficult synthesis demanded by the situation. Only the thing is to be done' now consciously, not through
an unconscious process of <i>laissez-faire</i> as on the inferior stages
of evolution in the past. And that is the true genesis of the
present conflict.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; History abounds in instances of racial and cultural immixture. Indeed, all major human groupings of today are
invariably composite formations. Excepting, perhaps, some
primitive aboriginal tribes there are no pure races existent.
The Briton, the Dane, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman
have combined to form the British; a Frenchman has a Gaul,
a Roman, a Frank in him; and a Spaniard's blood would show
, an Iberian, a Latin, a Gothic, a Moorish element in it. And
much more than a people, a culture in modern times has been
a veritable cockpit of multifarious and even incongruous
elements. There are instances also in which a perfect fusion
could not be accomplished, and one element had to be rejected
or crushed out. The complete disappearance of the Aztecs and
Mayas in South America, the decadence of the Red Indians
in North America, of the Negroes in Africa as a result of a
fierce clash with European peoples and European culture
illustrate the point.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Nature, on the whole, has solved the problem of blood fusion
and mental fusion of different peoples, although on a smaller
scale. India today presents the problem on a larger scale and
on a higher or deeper level. The demand is for a spiritual
fusion and unity. Strange to say, although the Spirit is the true
bed-rock of unity—since, at bottom, it means identity—it is
on this plane that mankind has not yet been able to really
meet and coalesce. India's genius has been precisely working
in the line of a perfect Solution of this supreme problem.</font>&nbsp;

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Islam comes with a full-fledged spiritual soul and a mental
and vital formation commensurable with that inner being
and consciousness. It comes with a dynamic spirit, a warrior
mood, that aims at conquering the physical world, for the
Lord, a temperament which Indian spirituality had not, or
had lost long before, if she had anything of it. This was,
perhaps, what Vivekananda meant when he spoke graphically
of a Hindu soul with a Muslim body. The Islamic dispensation, however, brings with it not only something complementary,</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">but also something contradictory, if not for anything
else, at least for the strong individuality which does not easily
yield to assimilation. Still, in spite of great odds, the process of
assimilation was going on slowly and surely. But of late it
appears to have come to a dead halt; difficulties have been
presented which seem insuperable.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; If religious toleration were enough, if that made up man's
highest and largest achievement, then Nature need not have
attempted to go beyond cultural fusion; a liberal culture is the
surest basis for a catholic religious spirit. But such a spirit of
toleration and catholicity, although it bespeaks a widened
consciousness, does not always enshrine a profundity of being.
Nobody is more tolerant and catholic than a dilettante, <i>but
</i>an ardent spiritual soul is different.</font>&nbsp;

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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font face="Times New Roman">To be loyal to one's line of self-fulfilment, to follow one's
self-law, <i>swadharma,</i> wholly and absolutely—without this no
spiritual life is possible—and yet not to come into clash with
other lines and loyalties, nay more, to be in positive harmony
with them, is a problem which has not been really solved. It
was solved, perhaps, in the consciousness of a Ramakrishna,
a few individuals here and there, but it has always remained a
source of conflict and disharmony in the general mind even
in the field of spirituality. The clash of spiritual or religious
loyalties has taken such an acute form in India today, they have
been carried to the bitter extreme, in order, we venture to<br>
say, that the final synthesis might be absolute and irrevocable.
This is India's mission to work out, and this is the lesson which
she brings to the world.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The solution can come, first, by going to the true religion of
the Spirit, by being truly spiritual and not merely religious,
for, as we have said, real unity lies only in and through the
Spirit, since Spirit is one and indivisible; secondly, by bringing
down something—a great part, indeed, if not the whole—of
this puissant and marvellous Spirit into our life of emotions
and sensations and activities.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; If it is said that this is an ideal for the few only, not for the
mass, our answer to that is the answer of the Gita—<i>Yad yad
acharati sreshthah.</i> Let the few then practise and achieve the
ideal: the mass will have to follow as far as it is possible and
necessary. It is the very character of the evolutionary system of</font>
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&nbsp;<font face="Times New Roman">Nature, as expressed in the principle of symbiosis, that any
considerable change in one place (in one species) is accompanied by a corresponding change in the same direction in
other contiguous places (in other associated species) in order
that the poise and balance of the system may be maintained.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It is precisely strong nuclei that are needed (even, perhaps,
one strong nucleus is sufficient) where the single and integrated
spiritual consciousness is an accomplished and established fact:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">that acts inevitably as a solvent drawing in and assimilating
or transforming and re-creating as much of the surroundings
as its own degree and nature of achievement inevitably</font>&nbsp;
<font face="Times New Roman">demand.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; India did not and could not stop at mere cultural fusion—</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">which was a supreme gift of the Moguls. She did not and could
not stop at another momentous cultural fusion brought about
by the European impact. She aimed at something more.
Nature demanded of her that she should discover a greater
secret of human unity and through progressive experiments
apply and establish it in fact. Christianity did not raise this
problem of the greater synthesis, for the Christian peoples
were more culture-minded than religious-minded. It was
left for an Asiatic people to set the problem and for India to
work out the solution.</font>

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