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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Mon May 26, 2003 10:59 am
Subject: Sitaram Goel: How I Became Hindu

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=60439

http://www.geocities.com/tulsidas_ramayan/page408.htm

My Old Friend Death - Page 408

Death is my old friend,.... I dont mind talking about an old friend

Do you konw what the greatest wonder in the world is ?

The greatest wonder is that people live as if they will never die...
and die, never having truly lived.

'The greatest wonder in the world is, people see everyone dying
around them, but they think they will never die "

most people perhaps do not understand.... my writing is my own
personal method of worship...

it is like my pooja....

I seek constantly to reach a certain state, a certain level...

like a meditative level....

and I seek those who can join me in that "lila",... that level...that
altered state of consciousness

even if NO ONE reads.... even if I am alone... it is still my
worship.... I still achieve that state-of-mind-state-of-being...

but.... I must ACT as if there is someone else.... someone which whom
I am in dialogue.... otherwise..... I cannot write.... I cannot
achieve that level..... that is my "virtual Sangha"

its an ancient proverb: only 3 kinds of people speak the naked
truth...... the child, the dying, and the mad man

Shankarachariya said "Thoughts pour into the mind like molten metal
into a mold"....

Vedas say 'Let noble thoughts come from all sides"

thoughts come from outside of us...

the salt doll..whos tries to fanthom the ocean of maya, but get
dissolved at the first dip

================================

http://www.bharatvani.org/books/hibh/ch1.htm

Chapter 1

FROM ARYA SAMAJ TO MAHATMA GANDHI
(I promised this intellectual autobiography to Hashmat, some twenty
years ago. Hashmat wrote frequently in the Organiser under the
general heading "Pakistan X-Rayed". It is years since I lost track of
him. But I never forgot my promise. I wonder what I would have
written twenty years ago. I wonder also how this story will shape if
I wait for another twenty years. And I do not know what its worth is
today. But I am impelled to write it because in today's India it is
not sufficient to be a Hindu by birth. Hindu society and culture are
under attack from several quarters. One has to be a convinced and
conscious Hindu to meet and survive that attack. One has to find
one's roots in Sanatana Dharma).

I was born a Hindu. But I had ceased to be one by the time I came out
of college at the age of 22. I had become a Marxist and a militant
atheist. I had come to believe that Hindu scriptures should be burnt
in a bonfire if India was to be saved.

It was fifteen years later that I could see this culmination as the
explosion of an inflated ego. During those years of self poisoning, I
was sincerely convinced that I was engaged in a philosophical
exploration of cosmic proportions.

How my ego got inflated to a point where I could see nothing beyond
my own morbid mental constructions, is no exceptional story. It
happens to many of us mortals. What is relevant in my story is the
seeking and the suffering and the struggle to break out of that
spider's web of my own weaving. I will fill in the filaments as I
proceed.

My earliest memory of an awakening to interests other than those with
which a young boy is normally occupied, goes back to when I was eight
years old. My family was living in Calcutta. My father was a total
failure as a broker in the jute goods market. But he was a great
storyteller. He could hardly be called an educated person having
spent only 2-3 years in a village school. But he had imbibed a lot of
the traditional lore by attending kathas and kirtanas in his younger
days. His knowledge of Hindu mythology, legendary heroes, and the
lives of saints was prolific.

One fine evening he started telling me the lengthy and complex story
of the Mahabharata. The narrative lasted for more than a month, each
installment lasting over an hour or so. I absorbed every event and
episode with rapt attention and bated breath. The sheer strength of
some of the characters as they strode across the story lifted me up
and above the humdrum of everyday life, and made me dwell in the
company of immortals.

The Mahabharata has been my most favourite book ever since. I regard
it as the greatest work ever composed. My yearning for reading this
great story in print led to a funny episode a few years later. I was
a student of the fifth standard in my village in Haryana. An Urdu
magazine was publishing a verbatim translation of the Mahabharata in
monthly installments. The only subscriber to it in our village was a
retired veteran of the First World War. But he kept the series locked
in his baithak (study), and stubbornly refused to lend them even to
his own son who was my classmate. The two of us watched his timings
in the baithak, broke into it via the skylight on the roof, read the
installments one after another, and restored them to their original
resting place. The theft was never discovered.

The character that impressed me most in the Mahabharata was, of
course, Sri Krishna. His great words and deeds left me enthralled.
The admiration was to deepen in later years till it became a worship.
His holy name became a sacred mantra. Sri Krishna is the foundation,
the middle, and the apex of the Mahabharata. I am told by one who
should know that Sri Krishna is the highest symbol of Truth, Beauty,
Goodness and Power which the human psyche has thrown up.

But I was painfully surprised when a wise man in the village equated
the Mahabharata with Alha Udal, and warned that the narration, even
the possession, of these two stories always led to feuds and
bloodshed. I have read Alha Udal also, the entire 52 martial episodes
rendered into sonorous verse by Matrumal Attar. And I feel very
strongly that the comparison is absolutely superficial, and the
belief purely superstitious. Hindus in North India have neglected the
Mahabharata for a long time. The very fact that the Mahabharata has
come to he equated with Alha Udal in the popular mind in the north is
indicative of a great intellectual and cultural decline.

To return to my story, while still in Calcutta I made my first
contact with another mighty scripture, the Granth Saheb of Sri
Garibdas. This Jat saint of Haryana has been the patron saint of my
family ever since an ancestor of ours, who was the saint's
contemporary, became his votary in the first half of the 18th
century. We revere him as the Satguru (true teacher) who was an
avatara of the Highest Being. He was totally illiterate but composed
and sang some 18000 verses of very sublime poetry which scales the
highest spiritual heights. The story goes that my ancestor would not
have his first morning sip of water unless he had paid homage to the
saint who lived at a distance of 4 miles from our village.

My father was able to acquire a copy of the first printed edition of
the Granth Saheb of Sri Garibdas soon after it was published from
Baroda. He would frequently read it out to my mother and myself with
his own running commentary on the lives of saints and bhaktas as they
were mentioned in the sakhis and the ragas. I also sat sometimes
turning the pages of this work. I hardly had the mental equipment to
understand the mystic messages. But the stories of some great saints
like Kabir, Nanak, Ravidas, Dadu, Namdev, Chippa, Pipa and Dhanna
were very strongly impressed on my mind, as also the stories of
renowned Muslim sufis like Rabiya, Mansur, Adham Sultan, Junaid,
Bayazid and Shams Tabriz. These stories were to flower into an
abiding satsanga (holy company) in years to come.

During that year's stay in Calcutta, I also came in contact with the
freedom movement for the first time. It was at its brightest and
stormiest peak the Salt Satyagraha. The atmosphere was full of
Mahatma Gandhi and Bharata Mata. I sobbed uncontrollably as I watched
the mammoth procession following the arthi (bier) of Jatindra Nath
Das on its way to the Nimtallah burning ghat. The martyrdom of Bhagat
Singh came soon after. I became vaguely aware that my country was not
free. My mother told me that we were being ruled by a queen sitting
on a throne across the seven seas. History for her had not moved
since the days of Queen Victoria.

The Congress movement was never strong in my countryside which was
dominated by the Zamindara League of Sir Chhotu Ram. But the Arya
Samaj movement was sweeping everything before it. Almost all men of
note in the village were Arya Samajists, including the half-a-dozen
freedom fighters who had been to jail. The preachers and songsters of
the Arya Samaj visited our village very frequently. I was very keen
to attend these sessions, many a time late into the night. It was
from their lectures and bhajans that I learnt my first lessons in
nationalism. The point of this nationalism, however, was turned not
against the British rulers but against Muslim invaders and tyrants
like Mahmud Ghaznavi, Muhammad Ghori, Alauddin Khalji and Aurangzeb.
The national heroes were Prithvi Raj Chauhan, Maharana Pratap,
Chhatrapati Shivaji, Guru Govind Singh, Banda Bairagi and Raja
Surajmal of Bharatpur. They became a part of my religious
consciousness along with the heroes of the Mahabharata and the saints
and sufis of the Granth Saheb of Sri Garibdas.

The Arya Samaj of my young days in the village had three main themes
to which they devoted the largest part of their programmes the
Muslims, the Sanatanists, the Puranas. The Muslims were portrayed as
people who could not help doing everything that was unwholesome. The
Sanatanist Brahmins with their priestcraft were the great misleaders
of mankind. And the Puranas, concocted by the Sanatanists, were the
source of every superstition and puerile tradition prevalent in Hindu
society.

I never felt any animosity towards the Muslims except the Muslim
invaders and kings already mentioned. Our house was in a
neighbourhood full of Muslim telis (oilmen). Most of them had Hindu
names like Shankar and Mohan. They participated in Holi and Diwali.
Only their women wore trousers unlike the Hindu women of the village.
My Muslim neighbours were gentle, quiet, unassuming and very
hardworking people. We addressed them as uncles and grandpas as we
addressed their women as aunts and grandmothers. An elderly member of
their clan who lived alone in a big but deserted Hindu haveli (big
house) was a very strong albeit a lovable character. I did not like
it when someone passed unkind remarks about these Muslims on account
of their religion, which was not unoften.

Nor did I lose my respect for the Brahmins. Some of them in our
village were quite learned. Other., inspired great respect by the
dignity of their demeanour in the midst of great poverty. None of
these venerable ones was an Arya Samajist. On the other hand, the
president of the Arya Samaj in our village was quite a questionable
character. He was president of the Congress also. One, of his great
exploits, of which he was very proud, was to defecate in the sanctum
sanctorum of the village temple. I always avoided him and many a time
turned back when I saw him coming from the other side of some village
street.

But I did take very seriously the Arya Samajist denunciation of the
Puranas and the Sanatanists. They became something tantamount to the
effeminate and the immoral in my mind.

There was not much of traditional Sanatanism in my family due to the
influence of Sri Garibdas, a saint in the nirguna tradition of Kabir
and Nanak. Our women did keep some fasts, performed some rituals and
visited the temple and the Sivalinga. But the menfolk were mostly
convinced about the futility of image worship, and did not normally
participate in any rituals. The Brahmin priest was not seen in our
homes except on occasions like marriage and death. The great
religious event in our family was the patha (recitation) of the
Granth Saheb performed by Garibdasi sadhus who stayed with us for
weeks at a time. I remember very vividly how lofty a view I took of
my own nirguna doctrines and how I looked down upon my classmates
from Sanatanist families whose ways I thought effeminate. I
particularly disliked their going to the annual meld (festive
gathering) of a Devi in a neighbouring town. God for me was a mate
person. Devi worship was defilement of the true faith.

And I cannot help laughing even now when I remember my first
encounter with a Purana. Srimad Bhagvata was the only Purana known
and available in our village. I had a strong urge to read it. But I
was always afraid that I might get caught in the act. It was years
later when I had left the village and joined a school in Delhi, that
I borrowed a copy of Srimad Bhagvata from the local Harijan Ashram
and stealthily brought it home. As I read it, I was watchful lest
someone should see me in the midst of this indulgence and spread the
story abroad. I did not find it repulsive in the least, though I
thought some of the stories highly exaggerated. But on the whole it
did not impress me. Sri Krishna of the Mahabharata was strongly
stamped on my mind. I found him missing in the Bhagvata. His frolics
with die gopis (milk maids) left me cold. I, however, lived to learn
that the Puranas were an integral part of that mansion of Vedic
spirituality of which the Mahabharata was the crowning arch.

My interest in Arya Samaj brought me in contact with the newly
established Harijan Ashram in our village. I was already a high
school student in Delhi. During the summer vacations a friend in the
village asked me to join a sahabhoja (fraternal dinner) in which
Harijans were to serve sweetened rice to caste Hindus. I went to the
Harijan Ashram and watched the assembly which included practically
all emancipated luminaries of our village. I did not share the meal
because the Harijans who were serving rice and the caste Hindus who
were eating it, were dripping with perspiration in that midday of a
hot month. But when I came out and was asked by some orthodox people
whether I had par taken of the "chamar (cobbler)" food, I did not
deny it. Deep down inside me I wished that my hygienic inhibitions
had not stopped me from doing what I thought right and proper.

It was perhaps this sense of guilt which took me to the Harijan
Ashram a few days later. The man in charge was a member of my own
caste and a veteran freedom fighter who had spent long spells in
jail. He was very tough and devoutly dedicated to Harijan uplift. One
could hardly discuss anything with him without his introducing the
Harijan problem into it. He made a deep impression on me, even though
he was short tempered and intolerant towards everything which he
could not trace to Mahatma Gandhi. Seeing him taking care of a band
of young Harijan boys, I often suspected that his loyally to Mahatma
Gandhi was perhaps secondary to his dedication to Harijan uplift.

It was this gentleman who told me that the sahabhoja had been
organised not by the Arya Samaj but by the Harijan uplift movement of
Mahatma Gandhi. And I was surprised, in fact shocked, when he told me
that the Mahatma was not an Arya Samajist but a Sanatanist. He
himself was a convert from Arya Samaj to the Mahatma's way of worship
and thought. This revelation landed me in a great dilemma. My
knowledge of Arya Samaj did not go beyond what its preachers in the
village had told me. My knowledge of the Mahatma's doctrine was
poorer still. But I was convinced that being a Sanatanist was
something disreputable. How could a great man like Mahatma Gandhi be
a Sanatanist? Yet I revered him with all my mind and all my heart. I
had heard and myself shouted his jaya (victory) for several years
now.

As chance would have it, the dilemma was resolved in the next few
days, without any great intellectual effort on my part. One of my
younger contemporaries who came to me everyday for lessons informed
me that the Satyartha Prakasa was one of the several books he had
borrowed from his school library in our district town. Copies of this
magnum opus of the Arya Samaj were, readily available in private
homes in our village as well is in libraries in Delhi. But I had
never felt any interest in it. Now suddenly I was eager to study it
and find out what it was all about.

I do not remember at this distance in time my reactions to the
learned discussions which the Satyartha Prakasa carries on many
subjects. But I do remember very vividly the painful shock I received
as I read its remarks about Kabir and Nanak. These were two of the
most hallowed names I had cherished since my first awakening to a
religious consciousness. I concluded that Swami Dayananda had been
unnecessarily unkind to these great saints, and that his way of
thinking was wrong. That was the end of Arya Samaj for me at that
time. It was years later when I read Sri Aurobindo's Bankim, Tilak,
Dayananda that I bowed, in repentance and renewed reverence, before
that fearless lion of a man who tried his best to rescue and revive
the Vedic vision among the Hindus. A true understanding and
appreciation of the crucial cultural role which the Arya Samaj played
at a critical juncture in our national life dawned on me
simultaneously.

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