AMONG the great company of remarkable
figures that will appear to the eye of posterity at the head of the Indian Renascence,
one stands out by himself with peculiar and solitary distinctness, one unique
in his type as he is unique in his work. It is as if one were to walk for a
long time amid a range of hills rising to a greater or lesser altitude, but all
with sweeping contours, green-clad, flattering the eye even in their most bold
and striking elevation. But amidst them all, one hill stands apart, piled up in
sheer strength, a mass of bare and puissant granite, with verdure on its
summit, a solitary pine jutting out into the blue, a great cascade of pure,
vigorous and fertilising water gushing out from its strength as a very fountain
of life and health to the valley. Such is the impression created on my mind by
Dayananda.
It was Kathiawar that
gave birth to this puissant renovator and new-creator. And something of the
very soul and temperament of that peculiar land entered into his spirit,
something of Girnar and the rocks and hills, something of the voice and
puissance of the sea that flings itself upon those coasts, something of that
humanity which seems to be made of the virgin and unspoilt stuff of Nature,
fair and robust in body, instinct with a fresh and primal vigour, crude but in
a developed nature capable of becoming a great force of genial creation.
When I seek to give an
account to myself of my sentiment and put into precise form the impression I
have received, I find myself starting from two great salient characteristics of
this man's life and work which mark him off from his contemporaries and
compeers. Other great Indians have helped to make India of today by a
self-pouring into the psychological material of the race, a spiritual infusion
of themselves into the fluent and indeterminate mass which will one day settle
into consistency and appear as a great formal birth of Nature. They have
entered in as a sort of leaven, a
power of unformed stir and ferment out of which forms must result. One
remembers them as great souls and great influences who live on in the soul of
India. They are in us and we would not be what we are without them. But of no
precise form can we say that this was what the man meant, still less that this
form was the very body of that spirit.
page 331-32 - The Hour OF God , volume 17 , SABCL
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