Delivered Extempore
ADDRESS BY SHRI K.R. NARAYANAN, VICE PRESIDENT OF INDIA, AT THE SEMINAR "INTEGRATION: CALL OF THE HOUR " AT THE PUNJAB UNIVERSITY PREMISES
CHANDIGARH, JANUARY 6, 1994
His Excellency, the Governor of Punjab, Shri Surendra Nathji, His Excellency, Governor of Haryana, Shri Dhanik Lal Mandalji, Hon'ble Chief Minister of Haryana, Shri Bhajan Lalji, Dr. Karan Singh, Vice‑Chancellor of the University, Prof. Kapoor, Shrimati Gargi Devi, Shrimati Karan Singh, Members of the Faculty and students of this University, Members of the Aurobindo Society and ladies and gentlemen,
I am really honoured to have been asked to speak on this occasion. After a very eloquent and enlightening key note address by Dr. Karan Singh, there is not too much to be said because he carried the house.
When I was, three days ago, in Santi Niketan, in order to open the Japan Bhavan in the Visva Bharati, I told the Vice‑Chancellor that after two or three days I am going to Chandigarh for an Aurobindo Seminar. So, it is almost like a Bengali week for me. They were amazed why an Aurobindo Seminar celebrating his return to India a Century ago should be celebrated in Chandigarh. It was difficult to give an answer. But then I found that one of the biographers of Shri Aurobindo had said that the Ghoses of Bengal, as you know, the Aurobindo was Aurobindo Ghosh had descended from a warrior class in the Punjab, and I also found that these two States of India were in the forefront of India's freedom struggle. These are also the States where the people have the mobility of mind about which Tagore explained, this to absorb new ideas, new ways of tackling problems, dealing with things probably more than any other people in this country. Above all, I discovered that the great philosophy of integration preached by Shri Aurobindo was not only in the perennial stream of Indian philosophy but was something which was preached by the great Gurus of the Sikh religion in the Punjab. One has only to go back to some of the sayings of the Gurus to realise this.
Should like to quote to you something which you all probably know. Shri Guru Nanak Dev said about his time; they were very turbulent times; very confused times, almost as our own times, and he said, " The age is like a knife, things are butchers, religion has taken wings and flown in the dark night of falsehood, I cannot see where the moon of truth is rising." It is the search after truth for which the great sages, seers and philosophers of India had spent almost all their energies, and all their thought. Guru Nanak Dev also emphasised this somewhere, "Truth above all, above truth, truthful conduct." This is something very profound, very realistic. We have had philosophers, great souls who preached truth in our country but probably where we have failed, is in truthful conduct in actual life. Probably that explains why in spite of the long line of great men, great souls, religious leaders, we have had from Buddha to Ashoka, to the great Gurus, to Mahatma Gandhi, Aurobindo in spite of this long line of great men, who walked on this earth of India and who preached the philosophy of truth and of unity of mankind, in spite of all that we found very little trace of it actually among our lives. We have this wonderful capacity of forgetting and this is probably why Shri Krishna said, I will be born again and again in India when the evil times, I think it is certainly need for God to be re‑incarnated in our country again and again and again!! The philosophy of integration has been in the sayings of the great Gurus as I said. I would like also to quote something from Guru Govind Singh Dev.
He said, men quarrel over diet, dress and rituals and over caste, community and creed and thus have torn man from man. My mission is to restore mankind to a single brotherhood." I think this is the simplest, the most direct and the most beautiful exposition of the philosophy of integration that I have read. The integration within oneself, integration between man and man, integration between man and society, integration within a nation and integration with the nation and the rest of humanity, and the rest of the world, it is such that has gone on for centuries and centuries in our country. Shri Aurobindo had almost gathered up all the streams of Indian thought and expressed it with great profoundity, poetic beauty and with inspiration and insight. First of all, I find that is the message he gave on August l5, l947, which happened to be his own birthday. He was asked to give a message and in this message he enunciated five dreams of his. One was unity of India. He was one who believed passionately that India should remain united. He expounded his dream of the unity of Asia, the unity of mankind and he visualised the dream he had the dream of India giving a gift to the world, a gift of thought, a gift of sprirituality and a new vision for world unity. He had his dream of an integrated human being at peace within himself. As has been already pointed out we need all these integrations at every level of life. Your subject of discussion at the Seminar, the sub themes of integration of political consciousness, integration of cultural variety of india, I think, these two themes highlight the current problems of India in a way.
Integration of our society, of our nation is a crying need for us today. Nehru had talked that a dream of unity had haunted India from the beginning and we have tried to build up a united India. Somewhere towards the end of his life he wrote and I would like to quote it here, the man who try so passionately to build Indian unity, administratively, economically, emotionally and culturally. There was a strain of sadness in him when he wrote this and I would to quote this for you. "But the basic fact remains that we have yet to develop a unified nation. We distrust each other. Under stress of some calamity or external danger we may all unite. When that immediate urge is removed, we fall back into our respective shells and lose the sense of the whole. Painfully we try to get out of the shells and build the unity of India. Step by step, we advance and then something happens which lays bare our inner urges and failures. Whether it is caste, or provincialism, we still live in a tribal age. Religion was exploited to break up our unity and now language, which should be a binding and a nobling factor works in the same way. Meanwhile, caste remains to separate us and encourage narrow groupings." This feeling of helplessness of the first Prime Minister of India is something which haunts us even today.
In this context, we have to think hard about integration of different elements in our vast complicated society. We have to think of uniting India economically because India has yet to be fully, economically made inter‑dependent and united and we have above‑all have the political consciousness that if this country does not stand as a single unit, determined to protect its independence we shall again go done in history. Because the threats to India's unity and independence are certainly from within but at the same time we are facing almost an invisible conspiracy which threatens our unity from outside. There are several kinds of threats in this world. It is not just across the border only. India is a big country, a country which has resources to be of powerful factor in the world tomorrow, if not today. This vision of an India which is developed, which is powerful, is something that troubles many powers in the world because that might upset many of their neatly devised, calculated strategic conceptions of the world as a whole. Therefore, we have to manage, to integrate our political society, our economic society and above all integrate emotionally and spiritually.
In this process, I think, while we have to follow all the great sages but we have also to recognise, this is as much a practical proposition as an intellectual and spiritual task. We have had the idea of unity expounded in India for centuries. We had the great Ashoka, we had the great Akbar, We had certain political or shall I say administrative unity under the British but it is for the first time in our long long history that India has had an opportunity to build up economic unity and inter‑dependence of this country. Without that all of the unity will be a floating hollow dream without real substance. Why we have cohered during the last 45 years in spite of external and internal threats is because every part of India has realised that it has a stake in India as a whole, because however much we may condemn it today, the process of planning that Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, initiated, introduced for the first time an economic content into the concept of the unity of India. Punjab is must to the rest of India but Punjab is also dependent on the rest of India. In that way every State is involved with every other State and that is a state we have today. Certainly there are other factors and in this intellectual, cultural, spritual factors are most important.
In this country, it was always the spiritual forces which really influenced the conduct of people. Ultimately, it was a spiritual impulse which has raised our country to a high level and in this the individual is important. After all the individual human being is the real unit of humanity and it is on this individual that we build our society, our nation and the international order itself. I should like to quote to you something from Swami Vivekananda who dwelt upon this subject. He said, "All healthy social changes working within and if these are strong and well adjusted, society will arrange itself accordingly. It is very easy to point out the defects of institutions all being more or less imperfect but he is the real benefactor of society who helps the individual to overcome his imperfections under whatever institutions he may live. The individuals being raised, the nation and its institutions are bound to rise." This is also the philosophy that Aurobindo preached and he saw an integration at various levels, starting with the individual's mind and spirit itself, with his relationship with society and with the relations between society and the nation, the State and then with the wider international order that he envisaged. It is fascinating today to see how Aurobindo had this vision of a world order. He based this vision on this inner changes, the spiritual changes starting with an individual human being and as Vivekananda said, "It is ultimately the spiritual forces changes in the individual human being that will affect the social order that will fashion international order." Today, we have to recall these great figures of our history who had believed passionately that India had something worthwhile to offer to the rest of the world but we can dare now to think of offering something to the rest of the world only if we can correct the situation in our country, if we can overcome the fissiparous forces in our society if we can overcome all the superficial division that harass and distract us and retard our development.
I must congratulate Shri Surendra Nathji,the Governor, for taking this very very important initiative in holding the Seminar on Aurobindo on the specific subject of integration here and I want to congratulate the Governor of Haryana, the Chief Minister of Harayana, the Governor and Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh to have co‑operated in this very significant venture. I think this collaboration between the three States on Aurobindo and specifically on the subject of integration is in itself a very major exercise in integration. The fact that it is taking place in the premises of this great university of which I have the honour of being the Chancellor is indicative that this is a movement which can capture the minds and hearts of our young people. For ultimately you have to enthuse our young people and attract them, their attention if you have to do anything worthwhile in the country.
We have considered perfection throughout our history as the goal of life. Now perfection looks like a static concept. If you are perfect nothing need be done after that. I think I may be corrected if I am wrong, but Aurobindo's concept of perfection was a constant progression and not a static concept. It was probably not just Nirvana, it was not the state of the classless society, the utopia of Karl Marx they are all the dialectics, it is also not the current concept of the end of history but it is something which goes on, progresses constantly, so that man improves himself and the perfection of man is an endless process and it is in this life that I think Aurobindo has seen perfection as a goal of mankind. We have got to be engaged in this noble task of perfecting ourselves, perfecting our society, perfecting our social order, perfecting the world in which we live. But while we talk of perfection we cannot forget there are millions of people in the world who are deprived.
I think Aurobindo had seen and once he said that the levels of development are different. There are people who are not able to do as much as other people and therefore, you have to carry on this developmental work is raising the human being who are at different stages of development. Sometimes, I feel that the evolutionary process, though all human beings look alike fundamentally, but some of them are less evolved, some of them them have evil tendencies, some have virtuous tendencies etc. Therefore, evolutionary process is working differently in different human beings also. But we have to address to the task of bringing people not exactly to a mathematical level, but you have to lift the millions of people who are deprived of the education, who are deprived of the ordinary comforts of life, who are deprived of the cultural gifts of civilisation. Above all if I may add one thing more that integration is inconceivable as an enviornment of violence as a method of achieving things. Integration means harmony whether it is within oneself whether it is in society or in the world as a whole. This harmony and violence do not work together. So, ultimately you come back to that very age old Indian concept of peace of living together in peace. The present Indian democratic concept is of settling all your problems through peaceful democratic means, it is ultimately what the message of Aurobindo and all our great sages all the great men we have had a good fortune to have on this ancient land of ours have said. I have really great pleasure to thank you all, the Aurobindo Society and all of you for inviting me to this dynamic State of Punjab, to this beautiful capital of Chandigarh and giving me the honour of addressing you on this very very significant occasion.
Thank you very much.
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