Tag: Dharampal

The 4-day SIDH samvaad centred around reading and discussing Dharampalji’s Bharatiya Chitta Manas Aur Kaal has just concluded. The samvaad was held at the Krishnamurti Study Centre set in the 100-year-old, 300-acre, wooded campus that also has the Rajghat Besant School and Vasanta College for Women. The campus is situated at the confluence of the Varuna and Ganga rivers and from the first floor of the study centre, where our 30-person group sat talking, we could see the quiet majesty of Gangaji through the trees. It was an ideal location for a contemplative and deep conversation.

The samvaad was memorable for various reasons.

• Since it was held in Varanasi, we could all go for darshans to the many powerful temples there.
• We went for a boat ride on the Ganga passing through all the famous ghats of the city.
• The Krishnamurti Study Centre were the perfect hosts, not only housing us in style and serving delicious food in their dining hall but also, once, taking the full group in one of their buses for a breakfast of the famous Banarasi kachoris and Jilebi.
• The participants, from very diverse backgrounds, included the founders of two schools, two teachers from a rural school, a farmer from central India and eminent scholars.

Dr Brijendra Pandey, a professor from Lucknow University and the founder of the Coomaraswamy Foundation was the main speaker along with Pawan Gupta of SIDH. In the discussions, Professor Pandey talked about many books and articles that can help us break the hypnotic trance of modernity and build our understanding of the way forward. The list, that looks like a full curriculum on modernity and tradition, is as follows (I have copy-pasted the list that Professor Pandey sent us on WhatsApp):

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1. Bipin Chandra Pal: The Soul of India , Rupa & Co., New Delhi.
2. Ananda K Coomaraswamy: Essays in National Idealism , Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd, New Delhi.
3. Ananda K Coomaraswamy: Art and Swadeshi , Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd, New Delhi.
4. Ananda K Coomaraswamy: East and West and Other Essays ,Ola Books Ltd, Colombo, Ceylon.
5. KC Bhattacharya: Swaraj in Ideas.
6. Rabindranath Tagore: Nationalism.
7. Swami Chandrashekharendra Saraswati: Hindu Dharma: The Universal Way Life , Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay.
8. Sri Aurobindo: Foundations of Indian Culture , Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.
9. बद्रीशाह: दैशिकशास्त्र , पुनरुत्थान विद्यापीठ, अहमदाबाद।
10. स्वामी करपात्रीजी: मार्क्सवाद और रामराज्य , गीताप्रेस, गोरखपुर।
11. स्वामी करपात्रीजी: राष्ट्रीय स्वयंसेवक संघ और हिन्दू धर्म , धर्मसंघ प्रकाशन, वाराणसी।
12. गिरधर शर्मा चतुर्वेदी: दिग्देशकाल-मीमांसा ।
13. Rene Guenon: The Crisis of Modern World , Sophia Perennis, Hillsdale, NY.
14. Simone Weil: Gravity and Grace .
15. Simone Weil: The Need for Roots .
16. Simone Weil: Waiting on God .
17. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Man and Nature .
18. Frithjof Schuon: Transcendent Unity of All Religions .
19. Frithjof Schuon: Understanding Islam .
20. Frithjof Schuon: Stations of Wisdom .
21. TS Eliot: The Idea of a Christian Society , Faber and Faber, London.
22. AK Saran: Traditional Vision of Man , Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, Varanasi.
23. Kenneth Oldmeadow: Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy , Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, Colombo.

इनके अतिरिक्त म. म. मोतीलाल शर्मा शास्त्री, म. म. गोपीनाथ कविराज, विश्वनाथ शास्त्री दातार, आचार्य बलदेव उपाध्याय, वासुदेवशरण अग्रवाल तथा विद्यानिवास मिश्र जैसे विद्वानों की भी रचनाएं अवलोकनीय हैं।

इन पुस्तकों को इनके प्रकाशक के माध्यम से अथवा अमेज़न/ फ्लिपकार्ट के माध्यम से मंगाया जा सकता है। कई पुस्तकें आउट ऑफ प्रिंट हैं, इनकी सॉफ्ट कॉपी www.archive.com से ही प्राप्त हो पाएगी।

‘वैज्ञानिक प्रगति’ की अंतर्निहित विसंगतियों को समझने के लिए पाश्चात्य विचारकों की ही निम्नांकित पुस्तकों का अवलोकन किया जा सकता है :

1. GH Hardy: A Mathematician’s Apology
2. RG Collingwood: The Idea of History
3. John Herman Randall (Jr): The Making of the Modern Mind
4. Rene Guenon: The Crisis of the Modern World (specifically ‘Sacred and Profane’)
5. Seyyed Hossain Nasr: Man and Nature
6. Oven Barfield: Saving the Appearances
7. Kenneth Oldmeadow: Traditionalism-Religion in the Light of Perennial Philosophy
8. Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West
9. Arthur Koestler: The Sleepwalkers

इनके अतिरिक्त प्रोफ़ेसर एके सरन के लेख ‘On Modernity’ तथा ‘धर्म और धर्म-निरपेक्षता’ एवं प्रोफ़ेसर रघुवीर सिंह के लेख ‘पर्यावरण और विकास’ का भी अवलोकन किया जाना चाहिए।

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I hope that the list above will be of use to you. As far as I am concerned, it looks like I am going to be busy reading a lot in the near future. 🙂

“एक भाग है उन आधे प्रतिशत लोगों का जो अपने सहायक तथा सेवक वर्ग के सहारे, जो कि लगभग १५-२० प्रतिशत बैठता है, भारत के तंत्र और साधन क्षेत्रों को नियंत्रित करते हैं। दूसरा भाग उन ८०-८५ प्रतिशत लोगों का है, जो अपने अति सीमित साधनों और अवशिष्ट बल से ही जी रहे हैं ।. . . . लेकिन बृहत् समाज को हीन मानकर, उनका उद्धार और कल्याण करने की युक्तियां देते हुए, राष्ट्रीय साधनों स्रोतों पर नियंत्रण रखना तो हमें छोड़ना ही होगा। ऐसे न्यायपूर्ण विभाजन, संयोजन और समन्वय द्वारा राष्ट्र में २०-३० वर्षों के लिये दोनों हिस्सों का शक्तिपूर्ण सह अस्तित्व रह सकना सम्भव है। ऐसे सह अस्तित्व की अवधि में, हमें कुछ अधिक साहस और शक्ति मिली तो हम मिलकर आगे का भी सोच सकेंगे और ऐसे रास्ते व व्यवस्थायें बना सकेंगे जिनके द्वारा हमारा यह टूटा बिखरा समाज फिर से एक होकर आगे बढ़ सकेगा।”
– धर्मपाल, ‘हमारे सपनों का भारत?’

I recorded a zoom meeting with Pawanji where we talked about the above quote by Dharampalji and what it meant for people like us – the 15-20% elite class of India. I have edited a relevant video clip and uploaded it on the SIDH Youtube channel.

This is a conversation that we at SIDH are very eager to engage in. I hope that you find it thought-provoking and useful.

What: Retreat at SIDH campus at Kempty
When: May 2nd to 6th, 2022
People: Around 20 participants from Bareilly, Chandigarh, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Vizag.
Idea: Reading, contemplation and discussion on ‘Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kaala’ can perhaps show us a direction to be at peace with ourselves and the world.

How the retreat went:

We were trying this kind of retreat for the first time at SIDH and it was well received by the participants. What we did was loud reading of one or two chapters of the Hindi version of the book every day followed by discussions that tried to connect what we read to our individual lived experience. The discussions ranged from the Shastras and Itihaasa to the problems of modern life.

The book is written in very simple language and talks about the disconnect that we educated Indians feel as we live our lives governed by systems that are misaligned with our Indian identity. For example, Dharampalji asks a simple question – Who does this 20th-21st century belong to? Because, it seems like most of the people of India have another conception of Kaala, they live in some other time-frame. This does not mean that we are backward or need to catch up with the century of the West but that we need to organize our lives in some other way.

Like Gandhiji, Dharampalji also talks about our essential Bharatiyata being preserved and propagated through the ordinary Indians. His recommendation is that if we can understand the Chitta, Manas and Kaala of the ordinary Indian we would perhaps understand the Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kaala. He goes on to say that this is now difficult because the educated Indian is far removed from the ordinary Indian.

Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kaala is a book that points to ways in which we can understand who we are and begin the work of coming out of the disconnect of living in somebody else’s world. Looking inwards at what is going wrong in our lives is a painful process and the retreat was helpful in starting a contemplative conversation about it.

What: Retreat at SIDH campus at Kempty
When: May 2nd to 6th, 2022
Idea: Reading, contemplation and discussion on Dharampal’s visionary book ‘Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kaala’ can perhaps show us a direction to move forward as a conscious Indian who is at peace with himself and the world.

Details:
There are many amongst us who are concerned with the direction which Bharatvarsha has taken since we gained independence in 1947. There is a feeling that by and large we have been following the same path that the Britishers laid down to keep us subjugated. The western powers were very anxious that India remains in the ‘Western orbit’ (Dharampal papers: President Roosevelt in conversation with the British ambassador to the US) even after independence and it looks like they were completely successful in this effort.

Many of us can sense and feel the deep discomfort of something very wrong, but are unable to articulate the problem or pinpoint the cause. Perhaps:

• Our sense of the past is flawed
• Our understanding of our traditions and of the Western modernity that we have unthinkingly adopted is unclear
• A distorted perception is making us lead a life which is alien and not really ours

Is there something we can do? At SIDH we feel that a collective reading of Dharampalji’s ‘Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kala’ , a book of 50 odd pages available in both Hindi and English, can give us some strong clues on not just what is wrong but also where to look. We are proposing a five day retreat of reading, silence and dialogue where we try to get to the deeper meaning, implications and to connect various dots. The retreat could potentially give us clues to connect the macro issues (societal, cultural, civilizational etc.) with the process of sense-making in our individual lives. The participants will be expected to go through the book (in either Hindi or English) at least once, before joining the retreat.

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The 3-day seminar on Dharampalji’s ‘Bharatiya Chitta, Manas aur Kala’ that was jointly organized by SIDH and IGNCA (Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts) finished yesterday evening. This was the first part of a series of 4 seminars on various aspects of Dharampalji’s powerful book.

Two SIDH publications were released on the first day of the seminar. ‘Rediscovering India’ by Dharampalji (which had been out of print for some time) and ‘The White Sahibs In India’ a hard-hitting book by a sympathetic Englishman, Reginald Reynolds, that talks about the barbarity of the British rule in India.

The four main speakers included Padma Shri Dr. Kapil Tiwari who has worked extensively in the area of India’s folk traditions and Padma Shri Dr. J.K. Bajaj who translated Bharatiya Chitta Manas aur Kala into English. The 50 participants included many people who had the good fortune of having known Dharampalji and therefore could speak with authority about the various subtleties of the book.

In the closing session of the seminar, Shri Ram Bahadur Rai, Dharampalji’s close friend, author, senior journalist and the current president of IGNCA put forward the radical idea that we should probably consider this book of Dharampalji to be of equal importance as Gandhiji’s ‘Hind Swaraj’. This is perhaps the proper way to honor the precious gift that Dharampalji has given all of us by drawing our attention to Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kala.

“We the educated elite of India are wary of any attempt to understand the Indian mind. . . . Deep within, we, the elite of India, are also acutely conscious of this highly elaborate structure of the Indian mind. We, however, want to deny this history of Indian consciousness, and wish to reconstruct a new world for ourselves in accordance with what we perceive to be the modern consciousness. Therefore, all efforts to understand the Chitta and Kala of India seem meaningless to us. The study of the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century India, which I undertook in the nineteen sixties and the seventies, was in a way an exploration into the Indian Chitta and Kala. . . . That study, of course, was not the most effective way of learning about the Indian mind. It did help in forming a picture of the physical organisations and technologies through which the Indians prefer to manage the ordinary routines of daily life. But it was not enough to provide an insight into the inner attitudes and attributes of the Indian mind. The mind of a civilisation can probably never be grasped through a study of its physical attributes alone.”
– From Dharampal’s Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kala

Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) and the Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas (SIDH) are jointly organizing four seminars anchored around Dharampal’s important essay, Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kala between April 2022 and March 2023. Around 40 people who are familiar with the works of Dharampal will be invited to participate in the seminars. The seminars will be three days long, residential and will be held at IGNCA, Delhi. The seminars are designed to initiate and spread a conversation about our civilizational identity and its role in creating a vibrant future for our nation.

Tentatively, the topics for the four seminars are:

1. What did Dharampal mean by the words Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kala? And why did he think it was so important to understand these words?
2. Our ‘educated’ people have become separated from the Chitta, Manas and Kala of our ‘ordinary’ people. What are the reasons and resolutions for this? What are the obstacles that come in the way of the resolution and how do we deal with it at an individual and societal level?
3. Western modernity has ended up creating a uni-polar world over the last 100 years. Is the Indian thought and foundational values in alignment with this?
4. What are the ways and practices for reconnecting back to the Chitta, Manas and Kala of the ‘Ordinary’ people?

These seminars will be recorded and the videos of the expert presentations and discussions will be made available in various formats (YouTube videos, articles, books on the proceedings etc.) by IGNCA and SIDH.

(The following is an abridged version of the Preface to the second edition written by Pawanji. Take a look…)

Professor Samdhong Rinpoche, highly revered monk and founding Director (later Vice-Chancellor) of Tibetan Institute of Higher Studies, Sarnath, as well as the first elected Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government in Exile, makes an important distinction between what he calls an ‘ordinary rational mind’ and the ‘original mind’. While felicitating Dharampalji in an award ceremony jointly organised by the Infinity Foundation and the Centre for Study of Developing Societies in 2004 he said, “Buddha had an original mind. Dharampalji has an original mind.” That is a high tribute but also the best way to describe Dharampalji. To put him in any category will be limiting our understanding of the man. He was not even a graduate having left his studies mid-way in 1942 during the Quit India movement. So, to call him a Historian, a Gandhian, a Philosopher, would not do justice to him and will blinker our understanding.

Jayprakash Narayan recognised his brilliance very early and persuaded him to become the General Secretary of AVARD (Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development) of which JP was the President. It was here, while studying the functioning of the newly introduced Panchayati Raj system of the Government of India that he realised the following: that Indian society functioned according to traditional idioms and beliefs, that ‘outward-looking’ (educated) Indians were completely alienated from the way our ‘ordinary’ people took their decisions and led their lives, that the educated had no understanding of our indigenous social systems and their dynamics, and that the picture of the Indian society that the educated have is all wrong.

Perhaps this and other similar experiences led him to undertake the long, intense and arduous research lasting more than 30 years in various libraries and archives both in England and in India. He wanted to know how the Indian society functioned before the British conquered it. It is difficult to imagine that what Dharampalji discovered in various archives and libraries was not seen by others before him. Gandhiji himself had referred to the existence of such records in 1931 while he was in London for the 2nd Round Table Conference. But it was Dharampalji’s sharp eye and his ability to see and cull out what others often tend to gloss over or remain oblivious to that made all the difference. What impressed him most was the relaxed and easy manner in which we were able (till the 19th century) to organize our collective life – organically and naturally.

“Rediscovering India”, being republished after a gap of almost 20 years is an important book to understand the British mind, their strategies, how India got destroyed, the ramifications of changes brought about by the British knowingly or unknowingly, the shift from societal systems to systems imposed by the State. As the Nobel prize winning author V.S. Naipaul used to say, India is a “wounded civilization.” “Rediscovering India” helps in the diagnosis of this long festering wound and points towards the path to a healthy India.

I have been carefully going through the ‘Rediscovering India’ document before we send it for typesetting and printing. I started copying out paragraphs that I thought were hard-hitting and am now having trouble selecting 500 words for this blog post. I have 9500 words to choose from. 🙂

Take a look…

“While there can be some controversy about the prosperity or poverty of the Indian people, or any seg­ments of them during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the term backwardness does not in any sense apply to them then. Rather, it was the newly arrived Europeans in India who felt that the Indians applied such an appellation to them (the Europeans) for their manners and greed which were considered barbaric and uncouth, about the color of their skin which was thought to be diseased, or even the system of dowry which is said to have obtained in eighteenth century England, but to have been looked askance in eighteenth century India. By the end of the eighteenth century when large parts of India had effectively been conquered and subdued the tide obviously changed and instead the term “backwardness” or images of similar nature began to be deliberately and extensively applied to Indian society.”
– From the chapter titled ‘A question of backwardness’

“Those who have become Westernized – the Western type of commodities may be used by a very large number of people, but those whose minds have been Westernized – I think are not more than half a percent of us. Probably less, basically not more than half a million people – the officer class in the European sense of the term, which could mean scholars, administrators, army personnel, high dignitaries, managers of industry, etc. And those who are completely lost, among these half a million wouldn’t be very many, maybe a few thousand or so – the rest I think can be brought back by a movement backed by spirit and courage and hope.

“Such a movement, however, has to be of much greater dimensions and inner energy than even the freedom movement under Mahatma Gandhi. It may not be pan-India, it could be initially a regional thing, because if we are going to wait for the spark to be all over India, then we would be waiting for many generations. The spark may arise in some corner of Tamil Nadu or in Bihar or anywhere, or in areas where movements like that of Swadhyaya have made visible impact dur­ing the past three to four decades, wherever there is this feeling of ‘What happened to us’, ‘We have got lost’, ‘Let’s stand up, do something’.”
– From the chapter titled ‘Five hundred years of western domination’

“What seems to have disturbed Mahatma Gandhi most during his early contact with Europe, was the manner in which the civilisation of Europe, especially of Britain, treated its own people, how it eroded their individual dignity as human beings, how it subordinated them to powerful hierarchical systems, rather than the damage done by Europe to his own country. The latter he could oppose as a patriot but the former violated his humanity. It is this former aspect which seems to have decided for him that his own country and anyone else who would listen to him should have nothing to do with such a civilisation at any stage. Yet, he failed to impart this understanding to men like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.”
– From the chapter titled ‘The common grounds of slavery and modern science’