Page 20 - All India Magazine Aug-2025

Sanatana Dharma and Nationalism
This is the word that has been put into my mouth to speak to
you today. What I intended to speak has been put away from me,
and beyond what is given to me I have nothing to say. It is only
the word that is put into me that I can speak to you. That word is
now finished. I spoke once before with this force in me and I said
then that this movement is not a political movement and that na-
tionalism is not politics but a religion, a creed, a faith. I say it again
today, but I put it in another way. I say no longer that nationalism
is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatana Dharma
which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the
Sanatana Dharma, with it it moves and with it it grows. When the
Sanatana Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the
Sanatana Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatana
Dharma it would perish. The Sanatana Dharma, that is national-
ism. This is the message that I have to speak to you.
CWSA 8: 12

The universal and individual aspects of Dharma
The whole right practice of life founded on this knowledge was
in the view of Indian culture a Dharma, a living according to a just
understanding and right view of self-culture, of the knowledge of
things and life and of action in that knowledge. Thus each man and
class and kind and species and each activity of soul, mind, life, body
has its dharma. But the largest or at least most vitally important part
of the Dharma was held to be the culture and ordering of the ethical
nature of man. The ethical aspect of life, contrary to the amazingly
ignorant observation of a certain type of critics, attracted a quite
enormous amount of attention, occupied the greater part of Indian
thought and writing not devoted to the things of pure knowledge
and of the spirit and was so far pushed that there is no ethical for-
mation or ideal which does not reach in it its highest conception
and a certain divine absolutism of ideal practice. Indian thought
took for granted, — though there are some remarkable speculations

20 All India Magazine, August 2025