Pinarayi Vijayan’s assessment of Sri Narayana Guru must be obligatorily dismissed and dumped as the rantings of an ageing and disoriented communist

In a remarkably succinct and moving assessment of the iconic Sri Narayana Guru, legendary philosopher-scholar-monk of the Ramakrishna Order and its thirteenth president Swami Ranganathananda describes a unique dimension of the Guru’s reform movement.

It was unique in an important respect, Ranganathananda argues, in that it is “entirely constructive and devoid of any bitterness against the higher classes”. Speaking of the attitude of class hatred that some ideologies and movements propound as a process and method towards empowerment and equity, Swami Ranganathananda observes that such class antagonism and hatred “is harmful to the abiding interest of social health and well-being” and that the “theory that all social-progress is the result of class-antagonism and class-struggle is yet to be proved.”

Clash of interests in society, he argues, “is inevitable (but) what is not so evident is that social progress is the beneficent result of such clashes. It is more reasonable to hold that true progress is possible only where class-antagonism is least, in virtue of the emphasis on ideas and ideals which are the common wealth of all classes.”

This vision and ideal were actualised through a unique praxis by Sri Narayana Guru. The Indian conception of dharma, the Swami points out, “seeks the unity of social endeavour through harmony and cooperation,” and it is to the “eternal glory of Sri Narayana Guru to have inaugurated a movement which embodies in itself this unique genius of Hinduism and to have released the forces of the Spirit for the solution of the many pressing problems of even the mundane life of his people.”

The Guru’s approach, Ranganathananda writes, “never created any bitterness or ill-will.” He “never condemned anyone. He was full of blessings.” The key to understanding his philosophy of social reforms P. Parameswaran, another multifaceted and towering thought-leader in the mould of Swami Ranganathananda, reminds us, is to be found in Sri Narayana Guru’s famous injunction, “Do not create any commotion. It is quite unnecessary.” It is commonly understood, Parameswaran points out, “that social reform means organising agitations and stirring up passions and denouncing adversaries in vituperative language.” The attitude of the Swami in this respect was totally different.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, having been trained and conditioned over a lifetime by an ideology which essentially believes in and lives on fostering class clash and hatred, will obviously have a piecemeal and stunted understanding of Sri Narayana Guru’s as was evident in his recent public utterances. Vijayan’s capacity and authority to interpret Sri Narayana Guru is much less or non-existent when it comes to Swami Ranganathananda, who went on to become a foremost world spokesman and interpreter of Sanatana Dharma.

Vijayan’s interpretation of Sri Narayana Guru’s philosophy is puerile. One cannot blame him. Having read all his life, party pamphlets, he is hardly expected to have read authentic and authoritative assessments of Sri Narayana Guru. In any case, communists in Kerala and all over the country are faced with an exhausted intellectual arsenal. They do not produce anymore the likes of EMS Namboodiripad or Hiren Mukherjee, who were prolific, intense, with a vast reading, possessed of a razor-sharp logic, commanding an impressive expression and flow of language and above all, a mastery of a capacity to interpret and indulge in an informed intellectual debate when it came to Indian traditions and thought.

One could and did differ with them, but that difference was based on a solid foundation of knowledge and of reading. Not so for Vijayan, who is more in the mould of an apparatchik and manager. The point and counterpoint of EMS and P. Parameswaran, also among the stalwart thinkers of the RSS, in Kerala, for instance, is now the stuff of lore and legend.

In his Malayalam opus, ‘Navotthanatthinte Pravacakan: Sri Narayana Guru Swamikal’ (Narayana Guru: The Prophet of Renaissance) P. Parameswaran refers to Swami Nijananda of Sivagiri Mutt whose unequivocal description of Sri Narayana Guru ought to be taken note of. Sri Narayana Guru, says Swami Nijananda “was the votary of Sanatana Dharma which upholds the supreme authority of the Vedas.” Surely the spiritual Swami Nijananda, having spent a lifetime embodying the philosophy of Sri Narayana Guru, has a more authentic ring in his assessment than the political Vijayan, whose only purpose is to denigrate Sanatana Dharma and its adherents.

2025 also marks the centenary of two historic visits to the Sivagiri Mutt. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Shraddhanand visited Sri Narayana Guru in 1925, months apart. In the course of an interesting conversation that ensued between Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Narayana Guru, the former asked the Guru whether he was “certain that Hinduism is enough for the attainment of salvation?”. “More than enough”, came the Guru’s cryptic reply.

Later that year when Swami Shraddhanand, then president of the Bharatiya Hindu Shuddhi Sabha, visited the Mutt, writes P. Parameswaran, Sri Narayana Guru “received him with open arms”. An interesting conversation followed. “Swami Shraddhanand paid compliments to the Guru for the great service he had been doing for the upliftment of the depressed section of the Hindus, and acknowledged the fact that the task of the Arya Samaj had been considerably lightened by him. The Guru returned the compliment by saying that Arya Samaj is really Dhayrya Samaj, thereby acknowledging the fact that it had put courage into the hearts of the people who were originally timid and cowardly.” The appreciation of each of the other’s work was genuine and heartfelt.

The Guru’s unique and unparalleled mission aimed to spiritually rejuvenate and socially and culturally empower the marginalised, then in the throes of discrimination and injustice. His whole attention, argues Parameswaran in his opus, was to make the entire community culturally conscious and organisationally strong so that the marginalised and oppressed could uplift themselves. Education and organisation were the two principal pillars on which the Guru built the edifice of his spiritual reform movement. His insistence on cleanliness was intense and uncompromising. “Can anyone treat a person practising cleanliness as an untouchable and ask him to move away? Even when asked, will he do so? You should practice cleanliness not to satisfy others, but for yourselves. Cleanliness must begin at home, from the kitchen of your home,” Sri Narayana Guru declared.

The Guru was also reputed as an Ayurvedic physician, but, writes Swami Ranganathananda, “he was a greater physician of social maladies.” He “prescribed education as the one remedy for all the ills of the depressed classes.” An “unwearied champion of modern education for his people,” Sri Narayana Guru saw this as an effective means to “economic and social advancement.” Equally important for him, Ranganathananda notes, “was the acquirement of culture, for which he prescribed Sanskrit education.” While a “third vital need was spiritual sustenance”, which came first in importance in his scheme of work and reform. He thus “consecrated temples and shrines. Temples, modern education and Sanskrit culture formed integral parts of the Guru’s method of root and branch reform.” He inspired and infused people with a sense of “self-respect and self-help”. This evoked the latent capacities of self-reliance in them.

At his Advaita Ashrama at Aluva, which he founded in 1913, Sri Narayana Guru’s primary aim, Parameswaran tells us, “was to teach and propagate and make man live by the doctrine of Advaita.” The school he founded would work out his ideals of an education based on and driven by Advaita. “Provision was made for learning English. Without any distinction of caste, students lived and studied together there.” The study of Sanskrit, writes Parameswaran, “was given the place of pride” in the Advaita Ashrama education centre and “like a mother bringing up her children with loving care and filial affection, the Guru’s entire attention was focused on the progress of the Sanskrit School. He earnestly desired that the pupils should grow in [an] unique atmosphere of Sanskrit culture. He was very particular that paper-reading and speeches at student assemblies should be entirely in Sanskrit.”

Through his mantra of ‘one religion’, Sri Narayana Guru, argues P. Parameswaran, “has not denied any religion or its usefulness, he only emphasised the basic unity of all religions.” It was an effort to usher in greater unity by emphasising the common basis of all religions. Yet, while “he accepted all religions as true”, Sri Narayana Guru “resisted all attempts at religious conversions.” That was not all. He was active in “reclaiming those who had joined other faiths giving up the Hindu religion.” The historic Neyyanttikara reconversion saga in which Sri Narayana Guru took personal initiative is a case in point.

Pinarayi Vijayan’s ideology vehemently and vituperatively opposes all the manifestations of Sri Narayana Guru’s reformative action. The communists have demonized Sanskrit. Legions of their ideologues have denigrated it as an instrument of class control. They have scoffed at Hindus and Sanatana Dharma and have been opposed to temples and temple worship. Their rejection of the invitation to the Ram Temple Pran Pratishtha in Ayodhya was an expression of their disdain for the faith of the majority. Communists have been vehemently opposed to all re-conversion movements initiated by adherents of Sanatana Dharma to welcome back, into the fold, those who had drifted away.

They have heaped abuse on such efforts. Communists have lampooned Hindu culture and have projected it as a retrograde dimension that ought to have no role in our national life. They have repeatedly teamed up with those political elements who have likened Sanatana Dharma to a pestilence that needs to be eradicated. Having rejected all that Sri Narayana Guru symbolises, how does Vijayan qualify to become an exponent of the Guru’s philosophy and social action?

The attempt to forcefully secularise Indian thought leaders and reformers is an old communist ploy which needs to be called out. It is a mistaken notion, P. Parameswaran emphasises, “that a spiritual teacher cannot be a social reformer or vice versa.” Sri Narayana Guru was “a happy harmony of these two aspects. In his ideal life, spiritual philosophy found an admirable reconciliation with social reformist zeal. The one was the complement of the other.” A spiritual philosophy without the “concept of social service,” is incomplete and “bound to remain dry and bookish.”

Sri Narayana Guru thus stands in the long line of an illustrious pantheon of spiritual leader-reformers in the league of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Maharshi Dayananda Saraswati, Sri Aurobindo to name some, who had, to quote P. Parameswaran’s assessment, “all realised the truths of the Hindu religion in their lives and had transmitted religion into experience.”

Of these, Sri Ramakrishna “was the embodiment of the harmony of all religions.” He “practised all paths and disciplines in his life and found each one of them real, useful and leading to the truth.” Maharshi Dayanand’s “greatness lay in having carried on an uncompromising crusade against what he considered latter-day accretions and corruptions” presenting “the Vedic religion to its pristine purity,” while Sri Narayana Guru “was the modern spokesman of pure Advaita. None of them has claimed for himself the authorship of any religion or a philosophy.”

To an interlocutor who “wanted to know what his religion was”, came the Guru’s unequivocal reply, “My religion is Sri Sankara’s Advaita itself.” From this point of view, Parameswaran observes, “The religion that Sri Narayana lived and realised by arduous austerities was nothing more than the religion revealed in the Upanishads.” If Adi Sankaracharya was not separate and apart from Sanatana Dharma, and if it is that Sri Narayana Guru embodied his religion in his life and action, then how can it be said of Sri Narayana Guru that he was apart from and had nothing to with Sanatana Dharma. It is false dialectics that communist propagandists propagate and would like us to believe.

In the ultimate analysis, argues P. Parameswaran, unarguably one of the finest interpreters of Sanatana Dharma in our age, an ardent and profound narrator of Kerala’s spiritual, cultural, social and political psyche, Sri Narayana Guru was, “an ideal Sannyasin. A Hindu Sannyasin would be a more appropriate word.” That qualification aptly describes the essence of Sri Narayana Guru’s personality and the source of his spiritual and social action as a continuum and expression of the essence of Sanatana Dharma. In the words of P. Parameswaran, Sri Narayana Guru practised penance and religious austerities prescribed by the Hindu tradition:

“…He wrote treatises on the perennial philosophy of the Hindu religion. He built temples and installed in them idols of God and Goddesses in keeping with the religious conception of the Hindu. To install even a lighted lamp in lieu of an image is in true Hindu tradition. He strongly discouraged conversions of the Hindus. The Guru taught that each one should practice his own religion with intense faith and then also learn to love and respect other religions. This was his prescription for eradicating religious strife. It is neither the negation of religion nor the creation of new ones…”

In any assessment of Sri Narayana Guru’s epic life and contributions, one ought to necessarily resort to the authentic and profound appreciations and interpretations of the likes of Swami Ranganathananda and P. Parameswaran. Both stalwarts, sons of Kerala who went on to evolve into illustrious sons of Bharat Mata. Both of them towering seers, interpreters and chroniclers of India’s spiritual and cultural evolution and unfolding.

When these exist before us, the assessment of Pinarayi Vijayan must be obligatorily dismissed and dumped as pure balderdash, as the rantings of an ageing and disoriented communist.

SOURCE

https://www.news18.com/opinion/opinion-sri-narayana-guru-the-ideal-hindu-sannyasi-9181816.html