IX
DAY ANANDA – BANKIM – TILAK
ANDAL
- NAMMALWAR
Dayananda
THE MAN AND
HIS WORK
AMONG the great company of remarkable
figures that will appear to the eye of posterity at the head of the Indian Renascence,
one stands out by himself with peculiar and solitary distinctness, one unique
in his type as he is unique in his work. It is as if one were to walk for a
long time amid a range of hills rising to a greater or lesser altitude, but all
with sweeping contours, green-clad, flattering the eye even in their most bold
and striking elevation. But amidst them all, one hill stands apart, piled up in
sheer strength, a mass of bare and puissant granite, with verdure on its
summit, a solitary pine jutting out into the blue, a great cascade of pure,
vigorous and fertilising water gushing out from its strength as a very fountain
of life and health to the valley. Such is the impression created on my mind by
Dayananda.
It was Kathiawar that
gave birth to this puissant renovator and new-creator. And something of the
very soul and temperament of that peculiar land entered into his spirit,
something of Girnar and the rocks and hills, something of the voice and
puissance of the sea that flings itself upon those coasts, something of that
humanity which seems to be made of the virgin and unspoilt stuff of Nature,
fair and robust in body, instinct with a fresh and primal vigour, crude but in
a developed nature capable of becoming a great force of genial creation.
When I seek to give an
account to myself of my sentiment and put into precise form the impression I
have received, I find myself starting from two great salient characteristics of
this man’s life and work which mark him off from his contemporaries and
compeers. Other great Indians have helped to make India of today by a
self-pouring into the psychological material of the race, a spiritual infusion
of themselves into the fluent and indeterminate mass which will one day settle
into consistency and appear as a great formal birth of Nature. They have
entered in as a sort
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of leaven, a
power of unformed stir and ferment out of which forms must result. One
remembers them as great souls and great influences who live on in the soul of
India. They are in us and we would not be what we are without them. But of no
precise form can we say that this was what the man meant, still less that this
form was the very body of that spirit.
The example
of Mahadev Govind Ranade presents itself to my mind as the very type of this
peculiar action so necessary to a period of large and complex formation. If a
foreigner were to ask us what this Mahratta economist, reformer, patriot
precisely did that we give him so high a place in our memory, we should find it
a little difficult to answer. We should have to point to those activities of a
mass of men in which his soul and thought were present as a formless former of
things, to the great figures of present-day Indian life who received the breath
of his spirit. And in the end we should have to reply by a counter question,
"What would Maharashtra of today have been without Mahadev Govind Ranade
and what would India of today be without Maharashtra?" But even with those
who were less amorphous and diffusive in their pressure on men and things, even
with workers of a more distinct energy and action, I arrive fundamentally at
the same impression. Vivekananda was a soul of puissance if ever there was one,
a very lion among men, but the definite work he has left behind is quite
incommensurate with our impression of his creative might and energy. We
perceive his influence still working gigantically, we know not well how, we
know not well where, in something that is not yet formed, something leonine,
grand, intuitive, upheaving that has entered the soul of India and we say,
"Behold, Vivekananda still lives in the soul of his Mother and in the
souls of her children." So it is with all. Not only are the men greater
than their definite works, but their influence is so wide and formless that it
has little relation to any formal work that they have left behind them.
Very different was
the manner of working of Dayananda. Here was one who did not infuse himself
informally into the in- determinate soul of things, but stamped his figure
indelibly as in bronze on men and things. Here was one whose formal works are
the very children of his spiritual body, children fair and robust
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and full of vitality, the image of their creator. Here was one who knew
definitely and clearly the work he was sent to do, chose his materials,
determined his conditions with a sovereign clairvoyance of the spirit and
executed his conception with the puis- sant mastery of the born worker. As I
regard the figure of this formidable artisan in God’s workshop, images crowd on
me which are all of battle and work and conquest and triumphant labour. Here, I
say to myself, was a very soldier of Light, a warrior in God’s world, a
sculptor of men and institutions, a bold and rugged victor of the difficulties
which matter presents to spirit. And the whole sums itself up to me in a
powerful impression of spiritual practicality. The combination of these two
words, usually so divorced from each other in our conceptions, seems to me the
very definition of Dayananda.
Even if we leave out of account the actual
nature of the work he did, the mere fact that he did it in this spirit and to
this effect would give him a unique place among our great founders. He brings
back an old Aryan element into the national character. This element gives us
the second of the differentiae I observe and it is the secret of the first. We
others live in a stream of influences; we allow them to pour through us and
mould us; there is something shaped and out of it a modicum of work results, the
rest is spilt out again in a stream of influence. We are indeterminate in our
lines, we accommodate ourselves to circumstance and environment. Even when we
would fain be militant and intransigent, we are really fluid and opportunist.
Dayananda seized on all that entered into him, held it in himself, masterfully
shaped it there into the form that he saw to be right and threw it out again
into the forms that he saw to be right. That which strikes us in him as
militant and aggressive, was a part of his strength of self-definition.
He was not only
plastic to the great hand of Nature, but asserted his own right and power to
use Life and Nature as plastic material. We can imagine his soul crying still
to us with our insufficient spring of manhood and action, "Be not content,
0 Indian, only to be infinitely and grow vaguely, but see what God intends thee
to be, determine in the light of His inspiration to what thou shalt grow.
Seeing, hew that out of thyself, hew that out of Life.
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Be a thinker, but be also a doer; be a soul, but be also a man; be a servant of
God, but be also a master of Nature!" For this was what he himself was; a
man with God in his soul, vision in his eyes and power in his hands to hew out
of life an image according to his vision. "Hew" is the right word.
Granite him- self, he smote out a shape of things with great blows as in
granite.
In Dayananda’s
life we see always the puissant jet of this spiritual practicality. A
spontaneous power and decisiveness is stamped everywhere on his work. And to
begin with, what a master-glance of practical intuition was this to go back
trenchantly to the very root of Indian life and culture, to derive from the
flower of its first birth the seed for a radical new birth! And what an act of
grandiose intellectual courage to lay hold upon this scripture defaced by
ignorant comment and oblivion of its spirit, degraded by misunderstanding to
the level of an ancient document of barbarism, and to perceive in it its real
worth as a scripture which conceals in itself the deep and energetic spirit of
the forefathers who made this country and nation, – a scripture of divine knowledge,
divine worship, divine action. I know not whether Dayananda’s powerful and
original commentary will be widely accepted as the definite word on the Veda. I
think myself some delicate work is still called for to bring out other aspects
of this profound and astonishing Revelation. But this matters little. The
essential is that he seized justly on the Veda as India’s Rock of Ages and had
the daring conception to build on what his penetrating glance perceived in it a
whole education of youth, a whole manhood and a whole nationhood. Rammohan Roy,
that other great soul and puissant worker who laid his hand on Bengal and shook
her – to what mighty issues – out of her long, indolent sleep by her rivers and
rice-fields- Rammohan Roy stopped short at the Upanishads. Dayananda looked
beyond and perceived that our true original seed was the Veda. . He had the
national instinct and he was able to make it luminous, – an intuition in place
of an instinct. Therefore the works that derive from him, however they depart from
received traditions, must needs be profoundly national.
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To be national is not to
stand still. Rather, to seize on a vital thing out of the past and throw it
into the stream of modern life, is really the most powerful means of renovation
and new creation. Dayananda’s work brings back such a principle and spirit of
the past to vivify a modern mould. And observe that in the work as in the life
it is the past caught in the first jet of its virgin vigour, pure from its
sources, near to its root principle and therefore to something eternal and
always renewable.
And in the work as
in the man we find that faculty of spontaneous definite labour and vigorous
formation which proceeds from an inner principle of perfect clearness, truth
and sincerity. To be clear in one’s own mind, entirely true and plain with
one’s self and with others, wholly honest with the conditions and materials of one’s
labour, is a rare gift in our crooked, complex and faltering humanity. It is
the spirit of the Aryan worker and a sure secret of vigorous success. For
always Nature recognises a clear, honest and recognisable knock at her doors
and gives the result with an answering scrupulosity and diligence. And it is
good that the spirit of the Master should leave its trace in his followers,
that somewhere in India there should be a body of whom it can be said that when
a work is seen to be necessary and right, the men will be forthcoming, the
means forthcoming and that work will surely be done.
Truth seems a
simple thing and is yet most difficult. Truth was the master-word of the Vedic
teaching, truth in the soul, truth in vision, truth in the intention, truth in
the act. Practical truth, arjava, an inner candour and a strong
sincerity, clearness and open honour in the word and deed, was the temperament
of the old Aryan morals. It is the secret of a pure unspoilt energy, the sign
that a man has not travelled far from Nature. It is the bar dexter of the son
of Heaven, Divasputra. This was the stamp that Dayananda left behind him and it
should be the mark and effigy of himself by which the parentage of his work can
be recognised. May his spirit act in India pure, unspoilt, unmodified and help
to give us back that of which our life stands especially in need, pure energy,
high clearness, the penetrating eye, the masterful hand, the noble and dominant
sincerity.
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DAYANANDA AND THE VEDA
Dayananda accepted the Veda as his rock of firm foundation, he took it for his
guiding view of life, his rule of inner existence and his inspiration for
external work, but he regarded it as even more, the word of eternal Truth on
which man’s knowledge of God and his relations with the Divine Being and with
his fellows can be rightly and securely founded. This everlasting rock of the
Veda, many assert, has no existence, there is nothing there but the commonest
mud and sand; it is only a hymnal of primitive barbarians, only a rude worship
of personified natural phenomena, or even less than that, a liturgy of
ceremonial sacrifice, half religion, half magic, by which superstitious animal
men of yore hoped to get themselves gold and food and cattle, slaughter
pitilessly their enemies, protect themselves from disease, calamity and
demoniac influences and enjoy the coarse pleasures of a material Paradise. To
that we must add a third view, the orthodox, or at least that which arises from
Sayana’s commentary; this view admits, practically, the ignobler interpretation
of the substance of Veda and yet – or is it therefore? – exalts this primitive
farrago as a holy Scripture and a Book of Sacred Works.
Now this matter is no
mere scholastic question, but has a living importance, not only for a just
estimate of Dayananda’s work but for our consciousness of our past and for the
determination of the influences that shall mould our future. A nation grows
into what it shall be by the force of that which it was in the past and is in
the present, and in this growth there come periods of conscious and
subconscious stock-taking when the national soul selects, modifies, rejects, keeps
out of all that it had or is acquiring whatever it needs as substance and
capital for its growth and action in the future: in such a period of
stock-taking we are still and Dayananda was one of its great and formative
spirits. But among all the materials of our past the Veda is the most venerable
and has been directly and indirectly the most potent. Even when its sense was
no longer understood, even when its traditions were lost behind Pauranic forms,
it was still held in honour, though without knowledge, as authoritative reve-
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lation and inspired Book of Knowledge, the source of all sanctions and standard
of all truth.
But there has always been
this double and incompatible tradition about the Veda that it is a book of
ritual and mytho- logy and that it is a book of divine knowledge. The Brahmanas
seized on the one tradition, the Upanishads on the other. Later, the learned
took the hymns for a book essentially of ritual and works, they went elsewhere
for pure knowledge; but the instinct of the race bowed down before it with an
obstinate inarticulate memory of a loftier tradition. And when in our age the
Veda was brought out of its obscure security behind the Purdah of a reverential
neglect, the same phenomenon reappears. While Western scholarship extending the
hints of Sayana seemed to have classed it for ever as a ritual liturgy to
Nature-Gods, the genius of the race looking through the eyes of Dayananda
pierced behind the error of many centuries and received again the intuition of a
timeless revelation and a divine truth given to humanity. In any case, we have
to make one choice or another. We can no longer securely enshrine the Veda
wrapped up in the folds of an ignorant reverence or guarded by a pious
self-deceit.
Either the Veda is what Sayana says it is, and then we have to leave it behind
for ever as the document of a mythology and ritual which have no longer any
living truth or force for thinking minds, or it is what the European scholars
say it is, and then we have to put it away among the relics of the past as an
antique record of semi-barbarous worship; .or else it is indeed Veda, a book of
divine knowledge, and then it becomes of supreme importance to us to know and
to hear its message.
It is objected to the
sense Dayananda gave to the Veda that it is no true sense but an arbitrary
fabrication of imaginative learning and ingenuity, to his method that it is
fantastic and unacceptable to the critical reason, to his teaching of a
revealed Scripture that the very idea is a rejected superstition impossible for
any enlightened mind to admit or to announce sincerely. I will not now examine
the solidity of Dayananda’s interpretation of Vedic texts, nor anticipate the
verdict of the future on his commentary, nor discuss his theory of revelation.
I shall only state the broad principles underlying his thought about the Veda
as
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they present themselves to me. For in the action and thought of a great soul or
a great personality the vital thing to my mind is not the form he gave to it,
but in his action the helpful power he put forth and in his thought the helpful
truth he has added or, it may be, restored to the yet all too scanty stock of
our human acquisition and divine potentiality.
To start with the
negation of his work by his critics, in whose mouth does it lie to accuse
Dayananda’s dealings with the Veda of a fantastic or arbitrary ingenuity? Not
in the mouth of those who accept Sayana’s traditional interpretation. For if
ever there was a monument of arbitrarily erudite ingenuity, of great learning
divorced, as great learning too often is, from sound judgment and sure taste
and a faithful, critical and comparative observation, from direct seeing and
often even from plainest commonsense or of a constant fitting of the text into
the Procrustean bed of preconceived theory, it is surely this commentary,
otherwise so imposing, so useful as first crude material, so erudite and
laborious, left to us by the Acharya Sayana. Nor does the reproach lie in the
mouth of those who take as final the recent labours of European scholarship.
For if ever there was a toil of interpretation in which the loosest rein has
been given to an ingenious speculation, in which doubtful indications have been
snatched at as certain proofs, in which the boldest conclusions have been
insisted upon with the scantiest justification, the most – enormous
difficulties ignored and preconceived prejudice maintained in face of the clear
and often admitted suggestions of the text, it is surely this labour, so
eminently respectable otherwise for its industry, good will and power of
research, performed through a long century by European Vedic scholarship.
What is the main positive
issue in this matter? An interpretation of Veda must stand or fall by its
central conception of the Vedic religion and the amount of support given to it
by the intrinsic evidence of the Veda itself. Here Dayananda’s view is quite
clear, its foundation inexpugnable. The Vedic hymns are chanted to the One
Deity under many names, names which are used and even designed to express His
quaiities and powers. Was this conception of Dayananda’s an arbitrary conceit
fetched out of his own too ingenious imagintion? Not at all; it is the ex-
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plicit statement of the Veda itself: "One existent, sages" – not the
ignorant, mind you, but the seers, the men of knowledge, – "speak of in
many ways, as Indra, as Yama, as Matarishwan, as Agni". The Vedic Rishis
ought surely to have known some- thing about their own religion, more, let us
hope, than Roth or Max Muller, and this is what they knew.
We are aware how
modern scholars twist away from the evidence. This hymn, they say, was a late
production, this loftier idea which it expresses with so clear a force rose up
somehow in the later Aryan mind or was borrowed by those ignorant fire-
worshippers, sun-worshippers, sky-worshippers from their cultured and
philosophic Dravidian enemies. But throughout the Veda we have confirmatory
hymns and expressions: Agni or Indra or another is expressly hymned as one with
all the other gods. Agni contains all other divine powers within himself, the
Maruts are described as all the gods, one deity is addressed by the names of
others as well as his own, or, most commonly, he is given as Lord and King of
the universe attributes only appropriate to the Supreme Deity. Ah, but that
cannot mean, ought not to mean, must not mean, the worship of One; let us
invent a new word, call it henotheism and suppose that the Rishis did not
really believe Indra or Agni to be the Supreme Deity but treated any god or
every god as such for the nonce, perhaps that he might feel the more flattered
and lend a more gracious ear for so hyperbolic a compliment! But why should not
the foundation of Vedic thought be natural monotheism rather than this
new-fangled monstrosity of henotheism? Well, because primitive barbarians could
not possibly have risen to such high conceptions and, if you allow them to have
so risen, you imperil our theory of the evolutionary stages of the human
development and you destroy our whole idea about the sense of the Vedic hymns and
their place in the history of mankind. Truth must hide herself, commonsense
disappear from the field so that a theory may flourish! I ask, in this point,
and it is the fundamental point, who deals most straightforwardly with
the text, Dayananda or the Western scholars?
But if this fundamental
point of Dayananda’s is granted, if the character given by the Vedic Rishis
themselves to their gods
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is admitted, we are bound, whenever the hymns speak of Agni or another, to see
behind that name present always to the thought of the Rishi the one Supreme
Deity or else one of His powers with its attendant qualities or workings.
Immediately the whole character of the Veda is fixed in the sense Dayananda
gave to it; the merely ritual, mythological, polytheistic interpretation of
Sayana collapses, the merely meteorological and naturalistic European
interpretation collapses. We have instead a real Scripture, one of the world’s
sacred books and the divine word of a lofty and noble religion.
All the rest of
Dayananda’s theory arises logically out of this fundamental conception. If the
names of the godheads express qualities of the one Godhead and it is these
which the Rishis adored and towards which they directed their aspiration, then
there must inevitably be in the Veda a large part of psychology of the Divine
Nature, psychology of the relations of man with God and a constant indication
of the law governing man’s God- ward conduct. Dayananda asserts the presence of
such an ethical element, he finds in the Veda the law of life given by God to
the human being. And if the Vedic godheads express the powers of a supreme
Deity who is Creator, Ruler and Father of the universe, then there must
inevitably be in the Veda a large part of cosmology, the law of creation and of
cosmos. Dayananda asserts the presence of such a cosmic element, he finds in
the Veda the secrets of creation and law of Nature by which the Omniscient
governs the world.
Neither Western
scholarship nor ritualistic learning has succeeded in eliminating the
psychological and ethical value of the hymns, but they have both tended in
different degrees to minimise it. Western scholars minimise because they feel
uneasy whenever ideas that are not primitive seem to insist on their presence
in these primeval utterances; they do not hesitate openly to abandon in certain
passages interpretations which they adopt in others and which are’ admittedly
necessitated by their own philological and critical reasoning because, if
admitted always, they would often involve deep and subtle psychological
conceptions which cannot have occurred to primitive minds! Sayana
minimises because his theory of Vedic discipline was not
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ethical righteousness with a moral and spiritual result but mechanical
performance of ritual with a material reward. But, in spite of these efforts of
suppression, the lofty ideas of the Vedas still reveal themselves in strange
contrast to its alleged burden of fantastic naturalism or dull ritualism. The
Vedic godheads are constantly hymned as Masters of Wisdom, Power, Purity,
purifiers, healers of grief and evil, destroyers of sin and falsehood, warriors
for the truth; constantly the Rishis pray to them for healing and purification,
to be made seers of knowledge, possessors of the truth, to be upheld in the divine
law, to be assisted and armed with strength, manhood and energy. Dayananda has
brought this idea of the divine right and truth into the Veda; the Veda is as
much and more a book of divine Law as Hebrew Bible or Zoroastrian Avesta.
The cosmic element is not
less conspicuous in the Veda; the Rishis speak always of the worlds, the firm
laws that govern them, the divine workings in the cosmos. But Dayananda goes
farther; he affirms that the truths of modern physical science are discoverable
in the hymns. Here we have the sole point of fundamental principle about which
there can be any justifiable misgivings. I confess my incompetence to advance
any settled opinion in the matter. But this much needs to be said that his idea
is increasingly supported by the recent trend of our knowledge about the
ancient world. . The ancient civilisations did possess secrets of science some
of which modern knowledge has re- covered, extended and made more rich and
precise but others are even now not recovered. There is then nothing fantastic
in Dayananda’s idea that Veda contains truth of science as well as truth of
religion. I will even add my own conviction that Veda contains other truths of
a science the modern world does not at all possess, and in that case Dayananda
has rather understated than overstated the depth and range of the Vedic wisdom.
Objection has also been made to the
philological and etymological method by which he arrived at his results,
especially in his dealings with the names of the godheads. But this objection,
I feel certain, is an error due to our introduction of modern ideas about
language into our study of this ancient tongue. We modems use words as counters
without any memory or appre-
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ciation of their original sense;
when we speak we think of the object spoken of, not at all of the expressive
word which is to us a dead and brute thing, mere coin of verbal currency with
no value of its own. In early language the word was on the contrary a living
thing with essential powers of signification; its root meanings’ were
remembered because they were still in use, its wealth of force was vividly
present to the mind of the speaker. We say "wolf" and think only of
the animal, any other sound would have served our purpose as well, given the
convention of its usage; the ancients said "tearer" and had that
significance present to them. We say "agni" and think of fire, the
word is of no other use to us; to the ancients "agni" means other
things besides and only because of one or more of its root meanings was applied
to the physical object fire. Our words are carefully limited to one or two
senses, theirs were capable of a great number and it was quite easy for them,
if they so chose, to use a word like Agni, Varuna or Vayu as a sound-index of a
great number of connected and complex ideas, a key-word. It cannot be doubted
that the Vedic Rishis did take advantage of this greater potentiality of their
language, – note their dealings with such words as gau and candra. The
Nirukta bears evidence to this capacity and in the Brahmanas and Upanishads we
find the memory of this free and symbolic use of words still subsisting.
Certainly, Dayananda
had not the advantage that a comparative study of languages gives to the
European scholar. There are defects in the ancient Nirukta which the new
learning, though itself sadly defective, still helps us to fill in and in
future we shall have to use both sources of light for the elucidation of Veda.
Still this only affects matters of detail and does not touch the fundamental
principles of Dayananda’s interpretation. Interpretation in detail is a work of
intelligence and scholarship and in matters of intelligent opinion and
scholarship men seem likely to differ to the end of the chapter, but in all the
basic principles, in those great and fundamental decisions where the eye of
intuition has to aid the workings of the intellect, Dayananda stands justified
by the substance of Veda itself, by logic and reason and by our growing
knowledge of the past of mankind. The Veda does hymn the one Deity of many
names and powers; it does
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celebrate the divine Law and man’s aspiration to fulfil it; it does purport to
give us the law of the cosmos.
On the question of
revelation I have left myself no space to write. Suffice it to say that here
too Dayananda was perfectly logical and it is quite grotesque to charge him
with insincerity because he held to and proclaimed the doctrine. There are
always three fundamental entities which we have to admit and whose relations we
have to know if we would understand existence at all, God, Nature and the Soul.
If, as Dayananda held on strong enough grounds, the Veda reveals to us God,
reveals to us the law of Nature, reveals to us the relations of the Soul to God
and Nature, what is it but a revelation of divine Truth? And if, as Dayananda
held, it reveals them to us with a perfect truth, flawlessly, he might well
hold it for an infallible Scripture. The rest is a question of the method of
revelation, of the divine dealings with our race, of man’s psychology and
possibilities. Modern thought, affirming Nature and Law but denying God, denied
also the possibility of revelation; but so also has it denied many things which
a more modern thought is very busy reaffirming. We cannot demand of a great
mind that it shall make itself a slave to vulgarly received opinion or the
transient dogmas of the hour; the very essence of its greatness is this, that
it looks beyond, that it sees deeper.
In the matter of
Vedic interpretation I am convinced that whatever may be the final complete
interpretation, Dayananda will be honoured as the first discoverer of the right
clues. Amidst the chaos and obscurity of old ignorance and age-long
misunderstanding his was the eye of direct vision that pierced to the truth and
fastened on that which was essential. He has found the keys of the doors that
time had closed and rent asunder the seals of the imprisoned fountains.
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