INDIAN CULTURE

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Gandhian Scholar

Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09415777229, 094055338

E-mail- [e-mail];[e-mail]

 

 

INDIAN CULTURE

 

 

When I was touring in U.P. in 1924 a peasant called out to me near Ayodhya and threw a sheet of paper in my car. I picked up that sheet and found that he had written on it many precious quatrains and couplets from Tulsidas’s Ramacharitamanasa. This made me very happy and enhanced my reverence for Indian culture. I preserved this sheet in my file hoping to publish it someday. I would take it up every week and put it aside. For, at the time I got it, I was not writing anything for Hindi Navajivan and I did not feel that it would be so useful for the Gujarati Navajivan. Part of what he had written on it was published in both the Gujarati and Hindi editions in 1927.

As these days I am regularly writing something every week for Hindi Navajivan and also as my tour of U.P. is to begin shortly, I am publishing below the remaining part: I have left out the words of praise. This peasant brother has a neat hand and he has formed his letters with care. Historians have testified that nowhere in the world are the peasants as civilized as in India. This sheet of paper is proof of it. Tulsidas has played a leading part in the preservation of Indian culture. Without the awakening influence of Ramacharitamanasa of Tulsidas, the life of the peasants would become dull and dry. One cannot say how it happened but it is unquestionably true that the life-giving force in Tulsidas’s language is not found in other writers. Ramacharitamanasa is a storehouse of gems of thought. The above couplets and quatrains give us some idea of its value. I firmly believe that the peasant writer did not have to put in much effort in the selection of quotations. He has supplied them from his repertory.

 We need not despair as to our morality, when we hear from a peasant’s mouth saying like, “Can an adulterer find salvation?”, “Can a kingdom stand without knowledge of statecraft?”, “Is there any vice to match backbiting or any virtue to match compassion?” and so on. It is said these days that the peasants are living in darkness, that in our country tamas is predominant and that it must move on into rajas. First of all I do not believe that tamas, rajas and sattva can be divided into such watertight compartments. I feel that everyone has within him all the three gunas in some measure or other. The difference is only of degree. I firmly believe that in our country it is not tamas which rules supreme but sattva. This sheet of paper is a proof of this. If this had been an exception, it would not have served as a proof of the predominance of sattva in India. But when we know that millions of peasants know by heart the quatrains and couplets of Tulsidas and that they also understand them, then we can say with a measure of certainty that people who have such ideas have a sattvik civilization and that these quatrains and couplets are a proof of it.