The Spirit of Tolerance

If we look at the history of India without a bias, we find that, despite the many wars fought in India and despite much that has been cruel, this land has been tolerant of and welcoming to all. It has borne many a heavy burden.

There are some who think this is a sign of weakness. But look at the fate today of those who did not have the spirit of tolerance and accommodation and who believed in the aggressive posture, and you know the enormous power of the spirit of tolerance and accommodation. Rome and Greece lacked the spirit of tolerance and lived by and large on aggression. Where are these Great Powers of ancient times? India, in contrast, stillis the good old India. Time had its impact, it is true, but India’s language, thinking, philosophy of life, literature and much else have stood the test of time. The India of old has certainly not vanished like the aggressive societies of old.

At the same time, we find pervading squalor in India. This is hundreds of years old. When foreign rule began in this country, the time-honoured village organisation broke up, and as a result the value given in Indian culture to cleanliness vanished. Today the situation is that the scientific cleanliness brought by the West has not pervaded Indian society, and the spiritual cleanliness that was the hallmark of our culture has vanished. The Vedas were so conscious of cleanliness that they said – on getting up in the morning one should wash one’s eyes before looking at the stars and planets. The idea was that one should be mentally, physically and sensually clean before doing anything sacred–and the stars and planets were considered sacred. Cleanliness was a unique part of Indian culture and religion, so much so that to be unclean was considered irreligious and un-Indian. The scriptures had as a rule whole sections devoted to cleanliness, just as hygiene and sanitation have their inevitable niche in modern social values.

This is no longer so, and there is a lot of uncleanliness in India. Yet, surprisingly, the thinking and culture of thiscountry still have a certain Indianness in them. It is the power of the spirit.

Here is an old story about India’s power of the spirit. Alexander invaded India and was one day walking in the streets of a town he had conquered when he met a fakir on the roadside. He was a spiritual man and such men were called rishis in those days, though later they came to be known as fakirs. Those were times 2200 years ago. Alexander hailed the man and asked him who was the king of the earth on which he was standing, whereupon the fakir replied that he knew: it was the man to whom Alexander was talking. He said it with such conviction that Greek thinkers accompanying Alexander concluded there must be another, more painless, way of conquering the world than Alexander’s, or else how could this lonely man make such a claim? And yet this self-proclaimed king of the earth on which he was standing had no contention with Alexander, the other claimant to the conquest.

It is this spirit of tolerance that is India’s pride and power. In modern times, Gandhiji showed us the power of this spirit of tolerance and suffering. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had defined this spirit thus regard yourself as humble as a straw and be tolerant like the tree.

All kinds of creeds have come to India, and not all have come through aggression. Some came seeking shelter and succour. Nearly thirteen or fourteen hundred years ago the Parsis came from Iran to the Bombay coast seeking shelter, and they did get shelter and protection. They came condemning the gods and praising the demons, for in Persian God is called demon and the demon is called God. It must have sounded strange to people here, and even sacrilegious, yet these expatriates were welcomed with love and allowed to follow their creed absolutely unhampered and with complete freedom.

People in Europe and elsewhere have only now started talking of co-existence. Co-existence means that peoples of different cultures should live together and in harmony. No one should attack anyone’s way of life. India has innumerable castes – castes which no one wants now and to obliterate whom it is the duty of each of us. But if we take the historical perspective, the birth of these castes can be traced to the spirit of co-existence. It was in India that East and West met. It was in India that people with diametrically opposed scales of values – one considering something sacred and holy, the other considering the same thing unholy – coalesced and learnt to live together not only in one country but in the same village. Sometimes there are different localities in the same village for different sections of the population, sometimes adjacent villages have been settled with different sections of the population but living in harmony. Today this may look sectarian, but in those far off days such harmonious living was a unique example of Indian culture. No society should attack us, and our society should attack no other, and the two should be assimilated into each other by love and mutual accommodation–this is the essence of humane social behaviour. Of course everything suits a particular time and may look incongruous and harmful in another context. But the point is that even the origin of caste is a sign of co-existence in the particular context of those times.

The Upanishads say: “Stand like a tree, do not budge even when somebody is cutting you down.” The reason behind this edict is that tolerance has the power to win. The verb “saha” in Sanskrit has appropriately two meanings: one, to brave or stand up to something, and the other to win. The Vedas use this word and in fact the word “singh”, or victor, emanates from “saha”. The one who can tolerate or stand up to things can alone win. This is India’s philosophy. The problem today is how to express this power collectively.

Butwhile India had these virtues, there were vices also. Contact and assimilation with the new modern culture is working to cure Indian culture of the vices it has contracted. If the Indian people keep this in mind, a whole vista of progress will open up before them.