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LETTER TO A HINDOO
I
Do not seek rest in that plane where the earthly gives birth to thoughts and desires, for if thou dost, thou wilt be dragged through the rough wilderness of life, which is not of Me. Whenever thou feelest that thy feet are becoming entangled in the interlaced roots of life, know then that thou hast strayed from the path to which I beckon thee, for I have placed thee in broad smooth paths which are strewn with flowers.
I have put a light before thee, which thou can’st follow and thus run without stumbling.
I received your letter and the two issues of the magazine. Both were intensely interesting to me; indeed, the oppression of a majority by the minority of a people and the corruption which flows from it, is a phenomenon which has always occupied my mind and at present is entirely occupying my attention. I will endeavour to convey to you what I think, both in a particular and a general way, about those causes from which those dreadful calamities have arisen and do arise, of which you write in your letter and which are also mentioned in the two numbers of the Hindoo magazine you sent me.
The causes, owing to which this astonishing spectacle arises, of the majority of the labouring classes submitting to a mere handful of idlers whom it permits to dispose not only of its labour but also of its very life, are always and everywhere the same; whether the oppressors and the oppressed belong to the same, or, as is the case in India and in other countries, where the dominant class belongs to an entirely different nation from those oppressed.
It appears especially strange of India, for here we have a people of 200 millions of individuals, highly endowed with spiritual and physical powers, in absolute subjection to a small clique, composed of persons utterly alien in thought and aspiration and altogether inferior to those whom they enslave.
These causes, as one can easily see from your letter, from the articles in «Free Hindustan», from the highly interesting writings of the Hindoo Swami Vivekananda and others, are in accord with that which causes the distress of all the peoples of our time; in the absence of a rational religious teaching which, while elucidating the meaning of life to the people in an equal way, would also make clear the higher law, which should be a guide to conduct, and in the substitution for them of the more than dubious propositions of a false religion and pseudo science, and in the immoral conclusions called civilization derived from both.
One has already seen not only from your letter and from the articles in «Free Hindustan», but also from the entire Hindoo political literature of our times, that the majority of the leaders of public opinion among the native races of India, while no longer ascribing any significance to those religious teachings which were professed, and are professed by the Hindoo peoples, now find the sole possibility of deliverance from the oppression they endure, in embracing those anti-religious and subtly immoral forms of social order in which the English and other pseudo Christian nations live to-day. Nothing shows more clearly than this, the total absence of religious consciousness in the minds of the present day leaders of Hindoo peoples, than does this tendency to instil into the hearts of the natives the acceptance of the forms of life in operation amongst European nations. Meanwhile, in the absence of this true religious consciousness and the guidance of conduct flowing from it, in the absence which is common in our times to all the nations of the East and the West, from Japan to England and America: lies the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of all the Indian peoples by the English.
