AND WE FOUND THIS GEM during our periodic trawling of the invaluable treasures of the past, buried and forgotten in archives. It is a long form tribute to “Mahamana,” Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, celebrating his inestimable service to the rejuvenation of Sanatana Dharma.
The author is a former ICS officer named V.N. Mehta, whose reverential admiration for the Mahamana shines forth in every word. Sri Mehta was serving as Secretary, Department of Education, U.P. Government, when he wrote this in 1932. The essay is also a reflection of the cultural calibre and spiritual rootedness of the ICS cadre of that era.
Sri Mehta has befittingly titled his tribute as, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the Super-Brahmin. It has a timeless quality to it, which will become clear as you read it. It is especially relevant in the contemporary milieu where some of the vilest and the most vicious abuse of Brahmins is done by a good chunk of deracinated Brahmins themselves. Self-loathing never had such a fecund soil.
Sri Mehta’s essay is one of the finest counterpunches to this contemporary malaise of internalised inferiority complex. Using vivid and ennobling examples from the Mahamana’s life, it demonstrates how a life lived in full harmony with the Brahmana ideals and values really looks like. Happy reading!
IN A CELEBRATED PASSAGE, verse 41, Chapter XVIII, of the Bhagwad-Gita, it has been said that ”the duties in the world (Karma — action arising from the nature fashioned by past thoughts and desires) have been distributed according to the qualities born of their svabhava or natures.
Tranquility, restraint of senses, penance, purity, forgiveness, straight-forwardness, knowledge theoretical and practical, and theistic turn of mind are natural to the nature and sphere of the Brahmana. To the Hindu mind, the world is a dissolving scene in a kaleidoscope, and the individual who strides the stage is pulled by innumerable strings from behind.
Accordingly if the complex constituting the human personality or Svabhava is churned, the quintessential elements that are thrown up are the caste, parentage and the environment.
Panditji is a Brahmin, the son of a learned Vyasa and was nearing his 40th year when the smug enlightenment of the Victorian era had reached its terminus on the death of the Queen.
Birth for him has been his destiny. Jnana and Tapas are the twin traits that stand out predominant in the mental get-up of a Brahmin. To possess the giant’s strength, but not to use it like a giant. There must be knowledge, but only to be used after purging the self of all its grossness and as the baser elements are all burnt in any process of sublimation — Jnana perfected by Tyaga. Self-dedication carries a Brahmin through the ocean of life, buoyant and triumphant.
Visakha Datta, the author of the Mudrarakshasa, has drawn the picture of the household belongings of Chanakya, the Prime Minister of the Mauryan Emperor, in words indelibly impressing themselves on the reader’s memory.
Here lies a small stone to pound cow-dung cakes; there are to be seen bunches of barhi grass fetched by young scholars; the tenement itself with its dilapidated walls has the edges of its roof bent down on account of the sacred fuel kept on it for drying.
Ranade called his Chitpawan confrere, one who had the privilege to be intelligent and poor. The Brahmin, like the equally maligned junker, enjoys a privileged position, but it is the privilege of unstinted service, self-imposed poverty and the multiplication of loyalities and intensification of inhibitions that have called for more of sacrifice than gratification of self.
PANDITJI ACQUIRED KNOWLEDGE according to the standards of that period, but unlike the contemporary English-educated Brahmin lawyers, he looked upon acquisition of wealth with the lofty scorn of a tyagi, treating pelf as piffle (लोष्टवत्), like unto a clod of earth. The Snataka period being over, the Grihastha’s life was gone through without much ado, and an average family of sons and daughters bore witness to the satisfaction of the race instinct.
An all round harmonious development in which no part of his nature was starved or repressed, formed the basis of a life devoted to the betterment of his country, his province and his order.
He is one of the few survivors of that band of intrepid workers who brought down the Promethean fire, tended it during the alternate fits of enthusiasm and despair through which his co-workers passed, and succeeded in kindling the glow of political consciousness amongst educated Indians who were at that time staggering under the avalanche advance of western culture and western science.
His aim was to put India on a level with other self-governing units of the British Commonwealth of Nations. His countrymen were to cease to bear the brand of inferiority. He, the Brahmin par excellence, has never advocated that wisdom lies in the counting of noses. Knowledge with him is power and the individual must train himself to be the sensitised instrument of a policy of ordered and intelligent conservatism, whereby each group and each individual in that group, may be in a position to work out his own self-realisation without inhibition or distraction.
Panditji recognises no fundamental rights but duties, though in practice an individual’s duties are translated into his neighbour’s rights and vice versa. This involves gradual change and no cataclysmic transformation (Vyutkranti). Unlike unhistorical Rousseau, Panditji does not believe that every one is born free. He is in reality born loaded with the chains of his karma. The human endeavour (Purusha prayatna) is to be keyed to tune the environment so as to give fair scope for the individual to work out, in his orbit, his own self-realisation.
The study of English language and literature has made the educated Brahmin a cosmopolitan. Politically he has been attempting to be what spiritually he already had become: a self-respecting citizen of a well-respected State.
To be continued
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