THIS THEN IS THE BRAHMIN’S philosophy of life: “Shun not the world” as it has dwelling at its core, Brahman, the light par excellence. The wrappings will come off with knowledge. That the visible is the sun dial of the invisible, sums up his outlook. In Goethe’s words, “Man is formed to look on lit things, not on light.”
It is the exploration of the world around that takes one, doing one’s daily duties— to the passage leading to the core. The pleasure, however, is in the serene struggle — multisided and comprehensive, to cross the ocean. Who could sum up this philosophy of calm and contemplative endeavour better than the modern sage who had wisdon of the Brahmin in him—Goethe?
It was in those Brahmanic traditions—spiritual, moral and political—that Panditji of his prime moved and had his being.
By the nineties of the last century, India was spiritually dead. Each party was treating the symptoms of the body politic and trying to throw the responsibility on someone else, for the sorry pass the country had come to.
Benares was asleep; the traditional sanctity of the holy place and the Divine Ganges was still believed by the average citizen to be quite sufficient to atone for inactivity and sins of omission and commission.
Pandiitji raised his trumpet-tongued voice to call off sleep. Mother Ganges (Sanatana Dharma personified) may flow wide awake laving the lips of the sleepy masses and prevent them from dying of thirst, but time had come for a change in the orientation of Sanatana Dharma. If India is to come into her own again, a new synthesis was to be built up and the new generation was to be stamped with the impress of the new evangel.
Just as Wilhelm von Humboldt, viewing with humiliation the prostrate form of Frederick’s Prussia after the battle of Jena, saw in the creation of the University of Berlin the one unfailing lever for working the uplift of regeneration of the nation, Panditji wanted the Indian nation to go to school again to be indoctrinated into the tenets of "how to live” and "what to live for.”
In the amrta- kumbha in which he threw India, mangled and disembowelled, he added all the dynamic elements of the Soma of western science, which give grip to life, and he expected a new synthesis to shoot forth like the cosmic lotus from the navel of Narayana. This big Amritakumbha is the Benares Hindu University. Has the magician succeeded?
In sketching the scope of the University, he laid emphasis on the revival of the Sanskritic lore in its widest comprehension for the rejuvenation of the spirit, and inculcation of western science, so that the refashioned the mind can ride astride the environment and mould it to its will—instead of remaining the plaything of intractable and inscrutable tamasic nature.
The university has yet to work out its destiny. It is in its swaddling clothes. It stands for the inculcation of the spirit of self-help. Society stands together, because each tries to work out his self-realisation on lines which would not inhibit the process of growth for others. Order, with individual development, will be the keynote of the new policy.
The university, while supplying a spiritual background, will not fail to provide the facade which will help in putting the individual at his ease. He will not find in the halls mere space to meditate but machines that will multiply his energy hundredfold. This practical side is never absent from the mental get-up of Panditji. Sir Rajendra Mookerjee was his colleague on the Industrial Commission and in appraising his work he gave it the place of honour.
THE HINDU UNIVERSITY is the monument of this selfless and dreamy Brahmin. It is his pet child. Beggared in worldly goods—this is his rich possession. Having made the world his kith and kin, this is his favourite child. For it, he has played the autocrat and the doting father, and extended his palm in the fine frenzy of begging—which had never known what it was to accept a gift for self.
Will it prove the proverbial mustard seed from which a mighty tree would grow that would shelter Hindu society in its travail after perfection? It all depends on a succession of knight-errants being available who will carry on the search after the Holy Grail. The Brahmanic outlook on life is one of calm contemplation of the forces of nature, riding them astride and bending them to your will. In the expressive words of Jeremy Taylor, “the Brahmin has a strange evenness and untroubled passage, sliding towards his ocean of God and infinity, with a certain and silent motion.”
There is a joy in the life of Yoga. In Ranade’s words, purposeless activity is better than no activity. A regular Mahabharata will have to be fought to make the Hindu University approximate to the ideal of its architect.
I have mentioned above that birth has been the Mahamana’s destiny. He has played up to the highest traditions of the qualities that to the Brahmin are svabhavaja. Dressed in unostentatious and immaculate white with his passions subdued and his form all fire, he has never allowed the serenity born of internal harmony, the birthright of his tribe, to be obscured for long by jarring elements outside.
Huxley spoke of Gladstone as one on whose tongue the honey bee had worked the miracle when he was born. The Vyasa in Panditji sublimated to perfection, has made of him the silver-tongued, dulcet-voiced speaker of the masses.
Another result of the Vyasa habit of entering into the skins of the audience makes him simulate the emotion of the audience. If you approach Panditji with a tale of your tribulation, the death of a relative and start weeping, tears will well forth from his eyes. They are not the tears of affectation. His genuinely refined nature is so attuned to world-emotionalism that the response is instantaneous and genuine.
He stands as a block of granite in the midst of a mass of shale and conglomerate. His beautifully modelled body, every limb tingling with the pulsating harmony within, which has known the impulse without, the prolonged austerities of tapas, his loftiness of purpose, would disdain to think anything that was mean, his varied scholarship that puts him at ease amongst the scholar pilgrims to his shrine of learning, his universality of spirit that makes him a citizen of the world and the least of a chauvinist, who that has known this Shankara of the 20th century, the Tyagamurti at its highest, would fail to detect the Super Brahmin in him?
Like the peak of Kailasa, he stands,with his seventy winters, a towering spectacle clothed in the effulgence of a mass of white, like the primaeval lotus which nothing can sully, a beacon of hope often, a portent never.
Series Concluded
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