Spiritual practicality, Solider of light, Sculptor of men and institutions

Steeped in caste, communal and blasphemy

By R.P. Bansal Organiser Home > 2006 Issues > July 02, 2006

It is better to have a look at the book, Modern India (Page 175-179), by Bipin Chandra for Class-XII. The book writes about Arya Samaj and Swami Dayananda:

“At the same time, one of the Arya Samaj’s objectives was to prevent the conversion of Hindus to other religions. This led it to start a crusade against other religions. This crusade became a contributory factor in the growth of communalism in India in the 20th century. While the Arya Samaj’s reformist work tended to remove social ills and to unite people, its religious work tended, though perhaps unconsciously, to divide the growing national unity among Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs and Christians. It was not seen clearly that in India national unity had to be secular and above religion so that it would embrace the people of all religions.”

Here is another quote from the book on page 179, which says, “The amount of obloquy and persecution to which Swami Dayanand was exposed in his lifetime may be gathered from the fact that the numerous attempts were made on his life by the orthodox Hindus; assassins were hired to kill him, missiles were thrown at him during his lectures an disputations; he was called a hired emissary of the Christians, and apostate, and atheist, and so on.”

This is a negative and historically inaccurate portrayal of Arya Samaj, the great reformist movement of nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Muslim crusade against Hindus and the attempts of conversion of the Hindus were hundreds of years old story. Arya Samaj never started any crusade or jehad or a dharmayuddha. It merely started a small shuddhi movement, which was not a great success. The claim that this led to communalism is making a mountain out of a molehill. The Arya Samaj was a product of its time and was a movement, which was in line with other earlier attempts of the Hindu society to face a challenge of Islam. Is it justified then that if the Hindus wish to save themselves it becomes a contributory factory in the growth of communalism?

Rather than focussing on the contribution and legacy of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, an attempt in this book is to defame the Hindus in general and Arya Samaj as a reformist movement in particular. Sri Aurobindo Ghosh in his book, Bankim, Tilak, Dayanand, Calcutta, 1947, page 1 writes:

“Among the great company of remarkable figures that will appear to the eyes of posterity at the head of the Indian Renaissance, one stands out by himself with peculiar and solitary distinctness, one unique in his type as he is unique in his work. It is if one were to walk for a long time amid a range of hills, one hill stands apart, piled up in sheet strength, a mass of bare and puissant granite, with verdure on its summit….Such is the impression created on my mind by Dayanand…. Here, I say to myself, was a very solider of light, a warrior in God’s world, a sculptor of men and institutions, a spirit. And the whole sums itself up to me in a powerful impression of spiritual practicality. The combination of these two words, usually so divorced from each other in our conceptions, seems to me the very definition of Dayanand.”

Smt. Annie Besant says, “Swami Dayanand was the first to proclaim India for Indians. When the Swaraj temple is built, there will be images of all leaders of the freedom movement, and that of Swami Dayanad would be the tallest.”(The author is senior advocate of Supreme Court)