THE FEAR OF DEATH

[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]

 

 

 

THE FEAR OF DEATH

 

 

I have been collecting descriptions of swaraj. One of these would be: Swaraj is the abandonment of the fear of death. A nation which allows it to be influenced by the fear of death cannot attain swaraj, and cannot retain it if somehow attained. English people carry their lives in their pockets. Arabs and Pathans consider death as nothing more than an ordinary ailment; they never weep when a relation dies. Boer women are perfectly innocent of this fear. In the Boer war, thousands of young Boer women became widowed. They never cared. It did not matter in the least if the husband or the son was lost; it was enough and more than enough that the country’s honour was safe. What booted the husband if the country was enslaved? It was infinitely better to bury a son’s mortal remains and to cherish his immortal memory than to bring him up as a serf. Thus did the Boer women steel their hearts and cheerfully give up their darlings to the angel of Death. The people I have mentioned kill and get killed. But what of those who do not kill but are only ready to die they? Such people become the objects of a world’s adoration. They are the salt of the earth. The English and the Germans fought one another; they killed and got killed.

The result is that animosities have increased. There is no end of unrest, and the present condition of Europe is pitiful. There is more of deceit, and each is anxious to circumvent the rest. But the fearlessness which we are cultivating is of a nobler and purer order and it is therefore that we hope to achieve a signal victory within a very short time. When we attain swaraj, many of us will have given up the fear of death; or else we shall not have attained swaraj. Till now mostly young boys have died in the cause. Those who died in Aligarh were all below twenty-one. No one knows who they were. If Government resorts to firing now, I am hoping that some men of the first rank will have the opportunity of offering up the supreme sacrifice. Why should we be upset when children or young men or old men die? Not a moment passes when someone is not born or is not dead in this world. We should feel the stupidity of rejoicing in a birth and lamenting a death. Those who believe in the soul and what Hindu, Mussulman or Parsi is there who does not? know that the soul never dies. The souls of the living as well as of the dead are all one. The eternal processes of creation and destruction are going on ceaselessly. There is nothing in it for which we might give ourselves up to joy or sorrow.

Even if we extend the idea of relationship only to our countrymen and take all the births in the country as taking place in our own family, how many births shall we celebrate? If we weep for all the deaths in our country, the tears in our eyes would never dry. This train of thought should help us to get rid of all fear of death. India, they say, is a nation of philosophers; and we have not been unwilling to appropriate the compliment. Still, hardly any other nation becomes as helpless in the face of death as we do. And in India again, no other community perhaps betrays so much of this helplessness as the Hindus. A single birth is enough for us to be beside ourselves with ludicrous joyfulness. A death makes us indulge in orgies of loud lamentation which condemn the neighborhood to sleeplessness for the night. If we wish to attain swaraj, and if having attained it we wish to make it something to be proud of, we must perfectly renounce this unseemly fright. And what is imprisonment to the man who is fearless of death itself? If the reader will bestow a little thought upon the matter, he will find that if swaraj is delayed, it is delayed because we are not prepared calmly to meet death and inconveniences less than death.

As larger and larger numbers of innocent men come out to welcome death, their sacrifice will become the potent instrument for the salvation of all others; and there will be a minimum of suffering. Suffering cheerfully endured ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy. The man who flies from suffering is the victim of endless tribulation before it has come to him, and is half dead when it does come. But one who is cheerfully ready for anything and everything that comes escapes all pain; his cheerfulness acts as an anesthetic. I have been led to write about this subject because we have got to envisage even death if we will have swaraj this very year. One who is previously prepared often escapes accidents; and this may well be the case with us. It is my firm conviction that swadeshi constitutes this preparation. When once swadeshi is not a success, this Government nor anyone else will feel the necessity of putting us to any further test. Still it is best not to neglect any contingency whatever. Possession of power makes men blind and deaf; they cannot see things which are under their very nose, and cannot hear things which invade their ears. There is thus no knowing what this power intoxicated Government may not do. So it seemed to me that patriotic men ought to be prepared for death, imprisonment and similar eventualities. The brave meet death with a smile on their lips, but they are circumspect all the same. There is no room for foolhardiness in this non-violent war. We do not propose to go to jail or to die by an immoral act. We must mount the gallows while resisting the oppressive laws of this Government.