National
Unity in Our Heritage
SOUL
OF OUR NATION
Jawaharlal Nehru, in his most memorable
speech on the eve of Independence on the night of 14th August 1947
referred to that midnight
hour and said that ‘when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and
freedom’ and that ‘the
soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance’. It was not as though a totally new
NATIONAL UNITY IN OUR HERITAGE
2.
Our self-governance for over fifty years under the Constitution has only
tended to segmentalise the people in quarrels and divisive activities arising
from exercise of political power. Disproportionate coverage of such events by
the mass media has further diverted the people’s attention from the underlying
core of national unity. National leaders, now and then, take up the cause of
‘national integration’ in the interest of building up a strong
VALUE SYSTEM PROJECTED BY EPICS
3.
Ramayana and Mahabharatha, the two national epics, portray a system of
values that were held high throughout
DHARMIC PRINCIPLE
4. The importance of the principles of Dharma in our life is emphatically projected at several places in Thirukkural. For example, Kural 204 in Chapter 21, reproduced below, asserts this important principle.
Thiruvalluvar emphasises that (Dharma) itself will deal with the person who plots to harm another person. The pride of place given to Dharma in the scheme of things in Ramayana and Mahabharatha is well known. The commonality of such fundamental principles that governed the conduct of people all over the country underlined their unity in community life in the midst of diversity of local administrations under different monarchical institutions.
ACTION AND REACTION – INEVITABILITY
5. The concept of every action leading to a consequential reaction is another fundamental aspect of our national ethics from the dawn of history. Hinduism deals with this elaborately as the Law of Karma. Thiruvalluvar refers to the inviolability of this concept in his chapter on . In modern science we find a parallel to this in Newton’s third law “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”, which is the only one among his propositions which holds good even when we step out of earth into space!
FAMILY
6. Family ties are strong in the Indian way of life. Family is recognised as the building block of society and is therefore protected by sacremental marriages and paternal responsibilities for the education of the young.
SANSKRIT
7. Sanskrit was looked upon as a perfect language for the precise documentation of important matters to be preserved and passed on from generation to generation. It was not the spoken language or the mother tongue of any group of people but was the ‘official’ language for scholars and learned men for their academic purposes. It is very significant that without the pressure of government patronage, Sanskrit was effectively learnt by a large number of scholars throughout the land. Kambar knew his Sanskrit well.
PARENT SCRIPT FOR SANSKRIT AND TAMIL
8.
Despite the persistent efforts of some ‘separatists’ to seek evidence
to prove that the Dravidian group of languages is a totally separate and
independent stream from the Indo-Aryan group of Sanskrit and allied languages,
we should take note of the very significant fact that the letters occur
in that order in the alphabets of both
groups. It is now surmised by research scholars that the scripts of both
Sanskrit and Tamil have their origin in the Brahmi script that was in use in
MUSIC
9. Indian music system too stands out unique in the world for having developed the style of Raga alapana which is common to both Hindustani and Carnatic schools. Raga alapana, which in a way provides absolute music independent of Sahitya, is a very distinguishing characteristics of our musical heritage and is present in no other system in the world. Acknowledged experts in musicology aver that the Hindustani and Carnatic schools of music are only off shoots of the same parental system of Indian music several centuries old and they are now pursued as two sub systems, but with some very significantly common features.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion it may be reiterated that the
Indians of India constitute one nation with a glorious heritage of tradition and
culture, some of whose characteristic features may be identified as the
following: