Our Motherland
Shri Madhava Sadashiva (Guruji) Golwalkar (1906 – 1973)
This land has been to us since hoary times our beloved and sacred Bharat Mata. Her very name floods our hearts with waves of pure and sublime devotion to her.
In fact, the very name Bharat denotes that this is our mother. In our cultural tradition, calling a woman by her child’s name is the respectful way. Calling a lady the wife of Mr. so-and-so or Mrs. so-and-so is the Western way. We say “she is Ramu’s mother”. So also is the case with the name Bharat for our motherland. Bharata is an elder brother of us, born long long before us. He was a noble, virtuous and victorious king and a shining model of Hindu manhood. When a woman has more than one child, we call her by the name of her eldest or the most well known among her children. Bharata was well known and this land was called as his mother, Bharat, the mother of all Hindus.
But there are persons who say that Hindus did not know what motherland was, that they were all divided into warring clans, that patriotism, i.e., devotion to one single motherland, was unknown to them, and if at all they were to an extent devoted, It was only to some fragments of the land and not the country as a whole from Himalayas to Kanyakumari as we obtain it at present. Even leading persons of the day declare that ours is a “continent” or a “subcontinent” having various climates and various kinds of soil with a conglomeration of nations and therefore unfit to be called a single country. How did these queer notions creep into our national mind?
It was the wily foreigner, the British, who, to achieve his ulterior imperialistic motive, set afloat all such mischievous notions among our people so that the sense of patriotism and duty towards the integrated personality of our motherland was corroded. He carried on an insidious propaganda that we were never one nation, that we were never children of the soil, but mere upstarts having no better claims than the foreign hordes of Muslims or the British over this country. The misfortune is that the so called educated were taken in by this ruse.
But the fact is, long before the West learnt to eat roast meat Instead of raw, we were one nation with one motherland. “prithivya samudra paryantaaya eka raat” (Over all the land upto the oceans we were one Nation).
Also, “Uttaram yat samudrasya Himaadres chaiva dakshinam, varsham tat Bhaaratam naama Bhaarati yatra santatihi” (The land to the north of the oceans and south of Himalayas Is called Bharat Varsha and Bharatis are her children).
The entire motherland has been visualised in its fullness in the Ideal personality of Shri Ram (Samudra iva gaambheerye dhairyena Himavaan iva, i.e, his great qualities like tranquility, catholicity, depth of knowledge and feelings are held comparable to the immeasurable depth and serenity of the ocean and his indomitable valour and fortitude are compared to the great and invincible Himalayas).
Do we not know that our motherland is bounded on one side by the Himalayas and the rest of the three sides are by the ocean? Any idea of fragmentation is intolerable to us.
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(Shri Guruji’s punya tithi falls on June 5 )