Fencing The State Borders ...

Maharashtra For Maharashtrians

.... at the risk of sounding sentimental, I would go with the repeatedly mouthed but rarely acted on statements of two of the otherwise vastly different leaders of modern India, Gandhi and Tagore.

Gandhi:
"I do not want my house to be walled in on sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible."

Tagore:
"…Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
…Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake".

Alaka M. Basu

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Sects must gradually disappear

Sects must gradually disappear as liberty and knowledge increase. Sects are founded on the nonessential, which by the nature of things cannot survive. The sects have served their purpose, which was that of an exclusive brotherhood on lines comprehended by those within it. Gradually we reach the idea of universal brotherhood by flinging down the walls of partition which separate such aggregation of individuals.

Interview. London, 1896. Complete Works, 5:197-98.

Is it comparative religion you want to preach?

It is really the philosophy of religion, the kernel of all its outward forms. All forms of religion have an essential and a nonessential part. If we strip from them the latter, there remains the real basis of all religion, which all forms of religion possess in common. Unity is behind them all. We may call it God, Allah, Jehovah, the Spirit, Love; it is the same unity that animates all life, from its lowest form to its noblest manifestation in human beings. It is on this unity that we need to lay stress, whereas in the West, and indeed everywhere, it is the nonessential that people are apt to lay stress. They will fight and kill each other for these forms, to make their fellows conform. Seeing that the essential is love of God and love of human beings, this is curious, to say the least.

Interview. London, 1896. Complete Works, 5: 197.