The message of Bahagavan Das on the present significance of the Vedic Social Order

able to produce the second volume, which was published in 1935. He then started work on the third volume, which he hoped to publish in 1937. However he stayed on in the Central Legislative Assembly in the hope that Congress Party would support his Bill for the validation of inter-caste marriage among Hindus. Unfortunately at this time Congress boycotted the Assembly and the official members voted against it. In 1938 he resigned from the Assembly, but with much other work to do and with the intervention of war the third volume of his Science of Social Organisation, as it was now called, did not appear until 1948.

In April 1942 Gandhi began to appeal to the British Government to leave India. Bhagavan Das immediately and repeatedly, but in vain, represented to him that the notions ‘Quit India’, ‘Withdraw’ and ‘Independence for India’ were negative, separative, destructive notions and against the conception of Human Brotherhood, for which he assumed Gandhi stood. He tried to emphasise the importance in all political striving of a name, of finding the right formula to convey exactly what one means, and proposed instead the notion of an Indo-British Commonwealth.

This very short sketch of certain parts of a long and fruitful life should be enough to show how truly Bhagavan Das, like the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic, integrated theory and practice in his life and work. He was in all his writings very direct in his criticism of the worst excesses of modern democracy in the sense of everyone thinking he has a right to an opinion about everything, of the denial of knowledge and the substitution of mere opinion or pleasure, of the cult of hedonism and the cultivation of empty egoism, of leaders who are no wiser than those whom they are supposed to lead and only gain power by promising ‘what the people want’. He was against plutocracy, the irresponsible wielding of the power of money for personal power and aggrandisement, as a main cause of unnecessary poverty; and against nationalism and the irresponsibility of political parties as causes of war: in short, he fought all the blots on our modern economic, political and cultural life. Yet equally he saw wellmeaning people floundering for a solution of the main social problems because they had no background from which they could think them out constructively, but could only approach them empirically and haphazardly.