Acharya Narendra Deva

Acharya Narendra Deva, the patriarch and doyen of Indian socialism, was born in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, on October 31, 1889. His ancestors, on the other hand, came from Sialkot to UP. 

 

His education began in Faizabad and continued in Allahabad and Banaras. He graduated from Allahabad University with a law degree and studied law for a while. His scholastic mind, however, was unsatisfied, and in 1921 he began teaching history at Kashi Vidyapeeth. 

 

He was a historian, archaeologist, religious scholar, philosopher, and cultural critic. His studies covered a wide range of languages, including Hindi, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, German, French, and English. His teaching style was plain.

 

One excerpt from his 1936 speech is: “Our work is not only to end the exploitation by the imperialism but to end the exploitation by all those classes of the society which are exploiting the people today. We want to create a new civilization which will be rooted in ancient civilization, which will have the colors of the country, which will keep the excellent elements of the ancient civilization safe, and, simultaneously, new progressive elements of the contemporary world will also be included, and, thus would like to present a new ideal before the world.” (‘Acharya Narendra Deva Vangamay’, Volume 1)

 

•    Acharya is said to have been born to teach. He lacked the passion and political abilities of a politician, and he did not channel his creativity and energy in that direction. 

•    Acharya's position and reputation in Indian politics were that of a national political philosopher. He was an international scholar of socialist theory and philosophy at the same time.

•    His academic and political activism, however, were limited to Uttar Pradesh. 

•    He became Vice Chancellor of Lucknow University from 1947 to 1951 and Banaras Hindu University (BHU) from 1951 to 1953 after teaching at Kashi Vidyapeeth. 

•    His own life was austere, and he used to financially support disadvantaged students. He had a warm and inspiring friendship with the students. 

•    Among his students were Lal Bahadur Shashtri, Kamlapati Tripathi, and Chandrashekhar. Chandrasekhar entered politics as a result of Acharya's influence, and he continued to treat him as his mentor.

•    After independence, Acharya was politically active in the Assembly, the Congress Communist Party, and the Socialist Party. 

•    On May 17, 1934, he presided over the Congress Socialist Party's formation conference in Patna's Anjuman Ismailia Hall, where he was also elected as the new organization's first president. 

•    As a contemplative line of thinking and process, Acharya was drawn to Marxism. He said on one occasion that he could quit the party but not Marxism. 

•    He was not, however, a stereotypical or traditional communist. This is to suggest that a dictatorial mentality of an individual or a group within the communist party was intolerable to his democratic mind in the name of the proletariat.

•    Acharya was a vocal opponent of the Soviet Russian government's undemocratic nature and lack of political equality. He was, however, no supporter of pro-American imperialist imperialism. 

•    He saw no conflict between Marxism and India's National Independence Movement and the rest of the world oppressed by colonialism. In the same way, he saw mutual supplementation of revolutionary power among farmers and workers. 

•    He believed there should be a connection between the agricultural and socialist revolutions. That is why he dedicated more time to the politics of farmers. 

•    There was a lot of importance in India's ancient culture, according to Acharya. He studied Buddhism and its philosophy in depth. He wrote the Hindi book ‘Boddh Dharma-Darshan,' which received the Sahitya Akademi award. 

•    Acharya, like many of the important leaders of the independence movement, was often imprisoned. From 1940 to 1945, he was imprisoned during World War II and the Quit India Movement. 

•    When Gandhi initiated satyagraha in 1940, Acharya, despite his declining health, came forward and was imprisoned. 

•    Gandhi remained with him in the Sevagram Ashram after his release in September 1941 to take care of his welfare. On the call of the Quit India Movement, Acharya and other leaders were arrested. On June 15, 1945, he was released.

•    In the one hand, imprisonment harmed his health due to his asthma, but on the other hand, it provided him with a lot of time to read and write. For example, he began translating Vashubandhu's "Abhi-Dhamm Kosh" from French to Hindi in a Banaras jail in 1932 and finished it in Ahmed Nagar jail in 1945, where he was imprisoned alongside many other leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru. 

•    Nehru expresses his gratitude to his colleagues, including Acharya Narendra Deva, for their scholarship in the preface of his book "Discovery of India."

•    The most important aspect of Acharya Narendra Deva's ideas is that they aim to improve a person's spiritual values through the transformative process of social change. 

•    His focus on the ethical side of social change is similar to the Indian perspective, while the theoretical study of social forces is similar to the Marxist perspective. 

•    In 1948, when the socialists broke away from the Congress and founded the independent Socialist Party, he and his partners resigned from the UP Legislative Assembly seat they had won on the Congress ticket, despite the fact that it was not needed at the time and no one had asked for it. 

•    However, Acharya claimed that being a member of the assembly after establishing a separate political party from the Congress was immoral. In the by-polls, he was defeated. 

At the age of 67, Acharya died in Madras on February 19, 1956. As a teacher, thinker, and socialist leader, he had made a significant contribution to the independence movement and later to nation-building.