When one looks at today’s political leaders and compares them with those of the past, one realises how far the standards in our country’s political life have declined.
Leaders who cut their teeth during the freedom struggle seem to have belonged to a different species. Most of them were thinkers, writers and propagandists besides being political leaders in the true sense of the term.
They really led from the front, formed public opinion and swayed the people by their political agendas unlike the leaders of today who mostly follow the mob. Despite devoting all their lives to the struggle against the British colonial rule, they wrote erudite books.
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Who can forget Lokmanya Tilak’s “Gita Rahasya” and “The Arctic Home in the Vedas”, Gandhi’s autobiography “My Experiments with Truth”, Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Discovery of India” and “An Autobiography”
I was reminded of all this when I chanced upon Acharya Narendra Dev’s “Bauddh Dharm-Darshan”among my books the other day. Most people know him as a great Socialist leader who was, unlike Ram Manohar Lohia, not intractably opposed to Marxism. Chandra Shekhar, who later became Prime Minister for a brief while, had come under the spell of the Acharya in his student days and later emerged as a promising young leader of his Praja Socialist Party. During the early 1970s he was instrumental in getting a collection of Narendra Dev’s writings “Towards Socialist Society” , published. It wasedited by Brahmanand.
When Acharya Narendra Dev died in 1956, an emotional Jawaharlal Nehru recalled his 40-year-long association with him and described his political opponent as a man of “rare distinction – distinction in many fields – rare in spirit, rare in mind and intellect, rare in integrity of mind and otherwise.
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Those were the days when original books were written in Hindi on various subjects although their writers had enviable command over English too.
Most of the leaders were at least bilingual if not multilingual. A look at the 700-page tome “Bauddh Dharma-Darshan” (Buddhism and Its Philosophy) reveals the expanse as well as depth of Acharya Narendra Dev’s scholarship.
It was published in 1956 posthumously and when it went into second edition in 1994, the Dalai Lama wrote its foreword. Perhaps, it’s the only book of its kind in Hindi that offers a majestic survey of the Buddhist philosophy and its various schools along with an in-depth exposition of the intricacies of their differing philosophical viewpoints. However, it’s not an easy book to read and understand.
Another scholar, who is not often remembered, was Bharat Singh Upadhyaya. A Brahmin by birth, he had become a devotee of the Buddha and wrote many books about his life and philosophy.
He spent most of his working life teaching in a college at Baraut, a small town in the Baghpat district of Uttar Pradesh.
Once in the course of a free-flowing conversation, renowned Hindi critic Namwar Singh told me that Bharat Upadhyaya could speak and write Pali like his mother tongue. Although he was a teacher of Hindi, his understanding of the Buddhist as well as other schools of Indian philosophy was really impressive.
Among his many books is a two-volume book that makes a comparative study of the Buddhist and other schools of Indian philosophy. “Bauddh Darshan aur Anya Bharateeya Darshan” (“Buddhist Philosophy and other Indian Philosophical Schools”) – a 1200-page tome that offers a glimpse into his scholarship. Among many original observations is his assertion that Buddhism cannot be dubbed as a ‘nastik’ philosophy because the word has many shades of meaning and there is no unanimity as to what it really means.
It is generally taken to be a synonym of ‘atheist’ but it is not just that.
Those who did not believe in the authenticity of the Vedas and their divine origin were also called ‘nastik’ as were those, as Panini states in his “Ashtadhyayi”, who did not believe in an afterlife and heaven and hell.
One wishes that we had many more Bharat Singh Upadhyayas among us.