AGAINST FAITH AND CASTE
The Idea of Karma : A Spell
Here is a paradox: A vast country interspersed with high mountains and wide valleys. Huge rivers encircle the land, fertilise and irrigate miles and miles of the plains. A long coastline borders the deep oceans. There are direct lines of communications with the very ends of the earth. The mines are rich with the mineral treasures. The fields serve as the granaries for the whole world. There is infinite scope for industrial and agricultural expansion. The people are hard-working, intelligent and brave. Indeed, all the contributory factors of prosperity and civilization are present in all their details. But look at the prospect. What a picture stares you in the face! Poverty and disease, ignorance and slavery. How has this apparition shot out of such promising features? Can poverty result from plenty? Can ignorance be the outcome of intelligence? Can a brave people be enslaved? Obviously they can, for such is the lesson that India teaches today. The negative is produced from the positive before your very eyes.
Our people are under a spell. Our material resources do not avail us because we are bound hand and foot disabling us from making use of them to our prosperity. We cannot exercise our intellect to dispel ignorance because our minds are tethered to a superstition and the domain of knowledge is kept as a close preserve. Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die. Hence the result that we starve amidst plenty, we slave in an age of freedom.
How does the spell work and how shall we break it? That is the investigation to which this journal will be devoted. We shall briefly indicate the factors inducing the trance reserving a closer examination of them to subsequent occasions.
To begin with there is the superiority complex. The privileged few have created the faith that they are the inheritors of the earth. The many should be content to be mere hewers of wood and drawers of water on pain of ostracism, rendering the delinquent isolated and helpless in the midst of a society infuriated at his act of rebellion. In order the more effectively to gain adherence to the faith, a policy of divide et empera has been adopted, and the cult of Varnashrama has been preached as a religion. The multitude has been divided against themselves by the promulgation of a system of graduated privileges constituting society into a vast hierarchy with the Brahmin gods at the top and the pariah underdogs at the bottom. Narrow domestic walls divide the people into conflicting groups. Artificial barriers of caste and creed prevent free intercourse and obstruct understanding and co-operation.
This doctrine of difference has been fortified by the elaboration of a false theory of heredity. The stigma of caste attaches not to a man’s doings but to his birth. No one is born a human being but everybody is born into a pre-existing mould which he shall not leave until death. The human spirit is imprisoned while yet in the mother’s womb and it shall not attain freedom until it separates from the flesh. In the name of heredity the common heritage of humanity is denied to one and all.
Not content with invoking all the powers of the earth to help at the maintenance of the tyranny, the resources of the next world have also been taped. The hopes, the fears and the possibilities of the life beyond are requisitioned as engines of oppression. The human gods are not only masters of the riddle of the earth but they hold the key to heaven. Salvation is but a prize for support of the earthly hierarchy. Hell fires consume the rebellious spirits that dared oppose the power of the territorial magnates. The soul shall not rest in peace after death. The dead ancestor is a surety for the loyal behavior of the descendent. The departed spirit is called to account periodically during srardh and made to bear the consequences of the transgression of descendents near and remote.
Man is enchained before birth by his past karma working through the law of heredity. He leads a fettered existence through life in accordance with the law of Varnashrama which is his present dharma. At death he is ushered into other worlds where he shall work out his predetermined future through various incarnations. The past, the present and the future form a continuous chain of inevitable which extends on and on, for ever and ever. Shall we attain the strength to break the vicious circle and liberate the spirit or shall we never wake from the trance but slumber away through the generations? The choice is clear before thinking India whether she will walk the path of tradition which leads to perpetual bondage or whether she will revolt against the narrowness of the past and take boldly to the road of enlightenment and progress. The call has gone forth to Young Indians to attain their birth right of intelligence and insight to dispel the darkness of superstition and slavery to usher in the dawn of knowledge and freedom.
Revolt, 7th November 1928
