MIRA MOVEMENT WHAT STANDS FOR*

SADHU VASWANI

I turn to India’s youths and in humility say to them: “Your urgent need, the need of India’s educational institutions and cultural centres, the need of India’s public life and social activities is: cultivate the soul. For this stands the Mira School”

Civilisation, today, is breaking; and East and West are passing through tremendous events. Yet in flows the shakti of India’s heroes and saints. And the new day is calling us to a new life, to new communion with the soldier and the saint, with the peasant and the labourer, with the poor and broken ones.

On this institution is inscribed the name of a holy one. She was a saint, a singer and a great teacher. To India, still questioning, still struggling for the larger freedom of life, Mira gives the message: “You are not free till your womanhood is free and until you have redressed the wrongs of the masses the real people.”

St. Mira, I regard as a great teacher of humanity. In her poems rich in beauty and inspiration, she sings of four sources of education: (1) Nature:

(2) heroes and saints;

(3) the village-folk; and (4) the little ones.

The Mira School is a servant of the world’s sages, rishis and saints. It stands for a new type of education. Our emphasis is not on numbers but on these five things: (1) quality; (2) character; (3) community service; (4) love of Indian ideals; and (5) reverence for humanity.

We emphasise quality in education and so students are taught to have faith in themselves. “Believe in yourselves, “we say to pupils of the Mira School; “believe and achieve!”

Therefore, our emphasis, secondly is on character. Education of character is what we aim at. Our emphasis is not on text-books, though we prepare our pupils for various examinations and the School has shown commendable results, at the S. S. C. examination, year after year. Our emphasis is on the following qualities of character:

(i) Courage. The Mira School’s great word is, “shakti”. Be strong, we say; meet failure with success! Work on in strength of body and mind and heart and the will-to-achieve! “Say not the struggle not availeth: say not the labour and the wounds are in vain!”

(ii) We recognise, therefore, the value of games. At once, Greece and India, in the long, ago, believed in the moulding power of games. The Mira School is trying to build up a system of games which may be a synthesis of Indian and western games. Body-building, we believe, is nation-building. We recognise the value of military drill. We also believe in the value of Indian system of breathing exercises and archery as helpful in building the powers of concentration.

(iii) We believe more in the transforming power of the teacher than text-books. The word, character, radically means, impression. Who impresses? The teacher of the true type. And so, we endeavour to bring to this school, teachers of the true type. Clever men are plenty; but the need is of teachers who are friends of the pupils’ minds and hearts. Such teachers inspire trust.

In an atmosphere of shraddha did pupils move in the ashramas of old. In an atmosphere of trust must the pupils of today move to receive right education. Only in such an atmosphere may teachers and pupils participate in a common life. We endeavour to see that the Mira School builds up a community of teachers and students. The Gita, we regard as a scripture of shakti, therefore, as a scripture of India’s national life. Great is our emphasis on “Gita and Games”. In the Gita we read of samvada — dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna. True education is a dialogue between the teacher and the pupil, is a communion of their minds and hearts — one with the other.

(iv) The fourth quality of character we emphasise in St. Mira’s School is discipline. Its secret is voluntary obedience, not compulsion which is bound to arouse rebelliousness and which may result in humiliation and disunion. True discipline is not interference with the pupil but an endeavour to influence him. True discipline is what in the medieval books of Japan, was called Boshido. The “knightly way”. In India it was called the “way of the kshatriya”. India needs today centres of culture where teaching may be given in the right kshatriya way. India needs today a new revival of the spirit of the kshatriya. I look around and see that the homes and lives of my beloved people are broken. I wish the Mira School to re-build the community and the country. For this bands of young men are needed who, filled with the true kshatriyaspirit, may become servants and saviours of society.

(v) The fifth quality of character is reverence for great figures. The image of some great character must go into the heart of every student. With a view to this, we desire to construct, in the new Mira Building a “Hall of Heroes.” There students will be brought together in the presence of great ones of

East and West and receive the inspiration of their deeds and devoted lives.

Man, becometh what he thinketh upon — said a Rishi of ancient India. Not a system of maxims, but models, great figures, great characters, radiant with the light of great ideals, can really shape the lives of the pupils. With this idea, we in the Mira School, celebrate the days sacred to the great ones of humanity — the poets and prophets, the seers and sages, the rishis and thinkers, the heroes and holy men, men of action and devotion, men and women of dedicated lives — from the days of Yagnavalkya and Arjuna to the latter period of Shivaji and Rana Pratap, of Kabir and Guru Nanak, and the more modern period of the heroes of our history like the Lokmanya Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi.

The emphasis of the Mira Movement, then, is firstly on quality and secondly on character. Our emphasis in the third place, is on community service. In emphasising community-service, we teach our students to think of others and specially of the poor and needy ones.

We also emphasise love for Indian ideals. The Mira School believes that to build up India’s destiny anew, we needs must be in touch with agricultural needs, with peasants and labourers.

Cities, we believe, are soul-less. And I look forward to the day when the Mira Movement may become a real movement of new education by opening centres of true Indian culture in India’s villages and draw together the village-folk in the service of Indian ideals. Friends of the Mira Movement, therefore, are needed in many parts of India.

And lastly, the emphasis in the Mira plan of education is on reverence for humanity. Let every teacher and every student of the Mira School be an ambassador of humanity. Let not our nationalism be narrow, egoistic, but let the ideals of peace and a new community of the nations, a new Asian brotherhood as a symbol of world brotherhood, be impressed upon everyone who would be a helper and a servant of the Mira Movement.

Of all our resources, we believe, the richest are the minds and hearts of a few who feel the fascination of the life dedicated. They and such as they, in different parts, will, I believe, be the architects of a new India, an India of emancipated masses, of happy, prosperous village-folk. They and such as they will be the builders of a new unity of mankind, a new brotherhood of the races. They and such as they will, with faith in unity and the will-to-achieve, fulfil the dream in mine eyes. They and such as they will bring some back to their own unity, the unity of the self, the unity of the atman. They and such as they will, I trust, be to many in the years to come, the interpreters of St. Mira’s message. In a few words this message is briefly thus: “Awaken thy soul, O student! And dedicate thy powers to the service of India and humanity for thou art an atman!” The motto of the School is, in a few significant words thus: “O wanderer! Thy homeland calleth thee!” Our homeland is the atman, the spirit. This, indeed has been the voice of India and her sages through the ages. It is the voice of St. Mira.

At the close of the first World War, Germany was declared a republic. It was a period of stress and strain in Germany. In the new Government, which Germany established, the portfolio in economics was in charge of a great Jewish thinker and statesman, Rathenau. He looked around, surveying the situation of his country; he studied, specially, the situation of German youths: he felt their pulse: he listened to their questioning minds. And for their benefit, specially, he wrote a book, named The Way of Economics. Towards the close of this book, this great thinker, this ardent patriot, this lover of the German fatherland, indicated Contd. on page 22