Isha Isita
“Bhawani Bharati is a mighty Shakti , composed of Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha Mardini sprang into being from the Shakti of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity. The Shakti we call India, Bhawani Bharati, is the living unity of the Shaktis of three hundred million people; but she is inactive, imprisoned circle of Tamas, the self-indulgent inertia and ignorance of her sons. To get rid of Tamas we have but to wake the Bramha within.”
This Sri Aurobindo wrote for you one hundred years ago, when you are not even close to your independence.
Now, Mother, you have been independent for 74 strong years but you are not yet Bhawani Bharati, nor are you any longer the force that moved the mighty pens of Sri Aurobindo and Tilak and Bankim and Gandhi. You are just a country, Mother, a country that is remembered only on specific days and forgotten for rest of the year.
Maa, I write this to call you back, back because I know the present India is not you, languishing and torturing, half-hearted and stifling, this cannot be you, the thousand-armed Goddess of Bankim’s dreams.
I am writing this Mother, because Sri Aurobindo saw so clearly your mission – “born to harmonize all the religions, science and philosophies, and make mankind one soul… to initiate this great work, the greatest and most wonderful work ever given to a race.”
But, today, Ma, your religion stands killed, used as a means to stifle you and your children, to alienate your children from your bosom. Surely, the religion that led Vivekananda to proclaim “brothers and sisters of America” instead of the customary – “ladies and gentlemen”, has become so intolerant as to kill, stifle and muffle people and justify policies that kill your skull-cap wearing and not bearing caste-mark children, to vanquish thy daughters (the same ones of whom Vivekananda said possessed the “mother’s heart and hero’s will”). For sure the Religion of Krishna, Kabir and Mira cannot become a dogmatic set of rituals and rites.
The science that produced Jagadish Chandra Bose and C. V. Raman cannot hold arbitrary notions of limited science and leave its sisters (liberal arts and morality) to pursue technology as the sole master. Surely, your science cannot be used to put under oppressive surveillance your very children.
Surely, your philosophy supported by pillars of the like of Vyasa and Valmiki, cannot be just “live only and only for a selfish stomach and at best an equally selfish stomach of one’s family. It cannot, cannot become the exclusive Hindutva that kills its own principles.
Surely, Ma, we, the citizens of India are not your daughters and sons, for how can we the lazy narrow minded, self-centered, unprogressive people, have the grace of being called your children; for how can we be compared to the likes of the Rani of Jhansi, simple and graceful Ramadevi, Kamala Chudhry, and Nivedita and Bhagat Singh, Gandhi, Bankimchandra and Vivekananda.
Surely this cannot be your policies where violence rules and the voice of the people is whitewashed and neglected, for was not your policy the ahimsa of Gandhi and democracy of Yudhistira!
This nation struck in an egoistic utopia of lazy ‘inertiatic’ pride cannot be you, Ma, the one who was behind the Great War of Mahabharat , the one who won her own independence, the one who has equated with terrific Kali and bounteous Maheswari, graceful Laxmi and beautiful Saraswati; the one who embraced all her children – Muslim, Hindu, Dalit Bramhin, woman man, foreign native; cannot be this one-centric spiral of destruction.
Rise, Mother, take your strength in your own hands, compel your children to undergo intellectual, bodily and spiritual regeneration. Become, O Mother, the Bhawani Bharati.