The Magsaysay Award

Citation for the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

PANDURANG SHASTRI ATHAVALE

In the Vedas and other sacred text, India's ancient sages conveyed a view of the cosmos so complex and compelling that it survives vibrantly today. Enriched but never overtaken by newer religions over the centuries and by its encounters with the clamouring 'isms' of our own time, Hindu civilization pervades the life of modem India. From deep within it, Pandurang V. Athavale is drawing strength for his country's spiritual renewal and material uplift.

Born into a family of Brahmin religious scholars in Maharashtra, Athavale mastered Sanskrit as a youth and absorbed the wisdom of the Hindu classics. In Japan to attend a world religious conference in 1954, he asserted confidently the salience of Vedic teachings and way of life. Someone asked: In your country, is there a single community that lives by these ideals? Disturbed by this question, Athavale returned home and pondered frankly the grim realities of contemporary Indian life.

Having founded a school combining India's sacred knowledge with Western learning, he began meeting regularly with a group of earnest young truth seekers-entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers and lawyers. He led them to cultivate self-awareness (Swadhyay) and to devote a portion of their free time to acts of devotion and gratitude to God. Taking up the call in 1958, Athavale's middleclass disciples ventured into rural villages to propagate Swadhyay and to advance their teacher's belief that barriers of caste, gender and religion must be transcended in order to recognize the true equality of all people.

In the ensuing decades, Athavale's volunteers swelled to hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Today, Athavale, or Dada (elder brother) as he is popularly known, guides a huge spiritual movement that courses through thousands of villages and touches millions of urban and rural Indians. Although emphatically spiritual, the Swadhyay movement has brought striking social and material benefits to its adherents.

In hundreds of villages, Swadhyay devotees have abandoned drunkenness, gambling, wife-beating and petty crime to devote themselves to community betterment. Fisher folk, chanting Sanskrit hymns, ply " boat temples" whose daily catch is reserved for the local hungry. Villagers plant multi-hectare "tree-temples" to restore degraded land and to make their habitats green again. Farmers cultivate the common fields of "Gods farm' to grow food to share with needy neighbours. Swadhyay imbued villages are clean, tidy and prosperous. Children faithfully attend schools. Villagers of all castes, men and women, worship side-by-side. Untouchability is not recognized. Moreover, communal strife is rare in Swadhyay communities and, in some places, Muslims, Hindus and Christians share the same place of worship.

Even so, Athavale often reminds people that Swadhyay has nothing to do with politics and is not undertaken to solve the problems of the world "We are he says, merely planting a bouquet of flowers of love, compassion, selflessness, and peace".

A small organization of volunteers gives some coordination to Athavale's vast "family" and guides the work of Swadhyay schools. But it is largely through teaching that Athavale leads the movement. His pithy, conversational sermons hold multitudes in rapt attention and circulate widely in print and on cassettes.

Athavale teaches them that "God resides in everyone" and that achieving "spiritual oneness" will bring with it solutions for worldly problems. Calling upon the oldest of Hindu teachings, but alluding to Western thinkers as well, seventy-five-year-old Athavale exhorts his listeners to liberate themselves from preconceived ideas and "baseless beliefs'. The basic revolution, he asserts, "should be of the human mind".

In electing Pandurang Shastri Athavale to receive the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his tapping the ancient wellsprings of Hindu civilization to inspire spiritual renewal and social transformation in modern India.