THERE are some men who achieve greatness within the milieu of society, and who choose to configure that greatness into service to humanity. Such a man is Pandit Satish Prakash of the Arya Samaj Pratinidhi Sabha. Pt. Satish Prakash has impacted the Arya Samaj Pratinidhi Sabha – a branch of the Hindu community — in an overwhelming way, and is currently spiritual head of the movement in Guyana, as well as having a large following in various parts of the world, especially New York, where he is domiciled.
Born at Uitvlugt, on the West Coast of Demerara in Guyana, Pt. Satish attended St. Stanislaus College before pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in modern languages, specifically French and Spanish, at the University of Guyana. After graduating in 1974, he worked as head of the Arya Samaj Youth Movement until 1997; when, in January of that year, he left Guyana’s shores to pursue religious studies in India.
Pt Satish attended the gurukula, a school of Sanskritic studies located in Haryana in India, where he studied advanced Sanskrit grammar for three years, which he described as very intense and advanced; and this attached a Sanskrit component to his Bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages.  This qualified him for admission to the Master’s degree in Vedic Sanskrit in Gurukul Kangri University, located in Haridwar, India, which is known as a Sanskritic city in Eastern Utter Pradesh. In 1985, Pt Satish received his PhD in Vedic Sanskrit Literature.
During his years of intense studies in Sanskritic literature Pt. Satish simultaneously pursued and completed a teacher’s training course, “How to teach Hindi as a foreign language”, additionally earning for himself a Hindi Teacher’s Training Certificate, which served him in good stead when he returned to Guyana. Upon his return home he was appointed lecturer in Hindi Language, Literature, and the Cultural Civilization of India at the University of Guyana.
Subsequently, Pt. Satish migrated to the USA, and settled in New York as a guest of the President of the Arya Samaj movement in the USA, Vishnu Bandhu. While there, Pt. Satish was sponsored to be a pandit in New York, while he simultaneously taught Spanish and French in the city schools. He served in the latter capacity under the auspices of the New York City Board of Education for 27 years – from 1985 to 2011 — after which he retired last year.
Concurrent to his professional career, Pt. Satish has, to date, been, in his own words “…on the foundation of the Arya Samaj.

“I have been on the platform of the Arya Samaj. I have been travelling worldwide, providing support services by way of lecturing, Vedas and allied Sanskritic subjects to Arya Samaj/Sanatani groups in many countries of the world – in India, in Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, Canada — as well as various cities of the United States, preaching from Vedas, Ramayana, Bhagwat Gita, and other holy books.”

Conjunctive to this missionary work, ten years ago, Pt. Satish established Maharishi Dayanand Gurukula in New York City. This is an institution that focuses on teaching Hindi, Sanskrit, Vedas, the Darshanas, Upanishad, the Ramayana, the Bhagwad Gita, the Mahabharata, the Satya Prakash, and the works of Rishi Dayanand Saraswattie.

An extension of the Maharishi Dayanand Gurukula was established in Guyana by Pt. Satish, who has been making annual pilgrimage to Guyana, travelling the “length and breadth of this country, focusing on religious cohesion, social problems, as well as cultural problems.”

Within this landscape, the Arya Samaj spiritual head said, the situation in Guyana has increasingly been constraining his attention to a sphere outside of the box of orthodox religion and Hindu tenets – moving away from the dogmas to incorporate the social dynamics of the country, with its multiplicity of religions and cultures – focusing less on theology and more on social problems.

Pt. Satish elucidated that this focus concentrates more on the role of God in human life, rather than in the form of worship by any religion or denomination. The differences in the way Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, or any other religion conceives of God are irrelevant. The only imperative is that this family of humanity recognizes that there is a universal rock on which mankind can stand, and which should not create divisions is the basic foundation on which all religions are premised and take root, posited Pt. Satish.

And this is the sublime message underpinning his mission – to carry a message of unity in purpose to all religious and social communities; a message that is all-embracing, all-inclusive.

According to Pt. Satish, his associates, among whom are Vishnu Bisram, Vishnu Bandhu, Dave Rameshwar and others, and his organisation have been trying to reach out to the Christian and Moslem fraternities of religions to join forces and lift a collective voice in a national day of prayer in Guyana.
“All Guyanese need to stand together on one spiritual rock and feel comfortable,” he said. Continuing, he said, “Rishi Dayanand wanted this interfaith unity too.

He drew a historical parallel: “When Queen Victoria was about to be made the Empress of the Indian Union, The British Raj, Rishi Dayanand, called the first interfaith service and adjured Hindus, Moslems, Christians, what everyone believed in, to accentuate and focus on that, and raise one collective voice in prayer.”

Contextualizing this within the Guyanese framework, Pt. Satish explained that pain is universal, irrespective of causal wounds; but alleviation of the pain is not possible without treating those wounds.

He said: “The philosophy of what we are expounding seeks to accentuate what unites us… There is an element of belief and practice that unites all Guyanese and all humanity, in terms of what we believe in and in terms of what we practice.  For example, no religion advocates divorce, or separation of families; nor does the Supreme Father advocate in any religious pathway that hatred rather than love is the way to seek His favour; but God embraces all of us and tells us to put our palms together and call His Name – the name by which we know Him, and be inspired deep within to find solutions together.  That is something all religions are on the same platform, the same page.”

Acknowledging that one cannot divorce politics from social issues, Pt. Satish said it is his firm belief that only the spiritual pathway can resolve national problems, where the confluences of all the national dynamics can find a common rock on which everyone can feel comfortable and at one with each other under the unifying force of the universal Lord.

According to Pt. Satish, citizens deal with Government in all their social activities, either directly or indirectly, and this is a process of reconciling personal lives with national dynamics. The reconciliation between Government and religion – church, mandir, masjid and state — must impact human consciousness, posited the Arya Samaj spiritual head; and here he drew parallel with Lord Ram, the Gurukula, and his human role as King pf Ayodhya.

“Ram was religion, but he was government too, because Ram was a king,” said Pt. Satish. “So one cannot divorce religion from politics, but you have to so preach politics so as not to divide, but to unite nations; because politics is about serving humanity and not self, as is religion.

“Unfortunately,” he lamented, “politicians have converted politics as a mechanism to grab power, whereas Ram set the module for politics and leadership roles in nations, where service to the people is paramount, and their welfare takes precedence above everything.”

According to Pandit Satish, his job as a missionary of the Arya Samaj, and of Hinduism in general, “is to look for that happy blending – a happy mix that would incorporate politics and religion — with a consequential melding of the various religious faiths and denominations all on one platform under the human umbrella of nationhood.

Hence the National Day of Prayer, on the 12th August at Joe Vieira Park, preceding which will be a march from the Vreed-en-Hoop stelling beginning (at) 07:00 hours, which is any annual event that began in 1994 under the coordination of Pt. Satish and Vishnu Bandhu.

On the Gurukula that he had established, he said, “Rishi Dayanand Saraswattie, in the third and fourth chapters of his magnum opus – his great work, the Satya Prakash, meaning ‘The Light of Truth’ — talked about creating a new generation.

“Karl Marx and Dayanand were contemporaries, and both brought out revolutions, with one being a political/economic revolution and the other being a religious/social revolution. Marx targeted the youth of Europe, and the Maharishi targeted the home of Mother India – from the day the child is conceived, to the day the child grows up, to the day the child is educated and graduates; but that growth starts from the womb, from the sanskars – the impregnation sanskar, called the gharbhadhan – the conception sacrament, which seeks to purify the chemistry of the procreating parents; from there gurukul begins.

“Gurukul is not a mere building. It is an institution that begins with mom and dad coming together for the creation of a new generation.

“Now that re-generation of humanity continues to the pre-natal sanskar, that’s how Arya Samaj and Sanatan Dharm are brought together in terms of how we create a new generation. At the age of eight, the child is given a janeo thread when that child is admitted to institutionalized gurukula, the teacher’s family. There is not distinction between boys and girls in the Hindu religion.”
Debunking popular myth that Hindus advocate the concept of the supremacy of male over female, the pandit explained, “I will go straight to Vedas: In the Rig Vedas, where God literally says that woman is God in His creative aspect; and I will connect this to show that Hinduism abhors violence in any form against woman.  When God made the first set of human beings through the asexual process of creation, then He gave her the power of procreation. Assigning her that primary duty was His initial task.”

The pandit quoted several passages from religious texts to show that women are ranked before men in existential dynamics, even as this subject relates to various cultures.

“Women must not be subjugated in terms of just cooking, washing, cleaning and taking care of children, which is a tremendous aberration and a wrong application to Hinduism. She is the boat taking all family members safely across the tides of life; the boat that leads the family to its destination.  Without her, they would have no destination to arrive at. Hence she is the critically important factor in the family, (and she is) of more importance than the man.  In our culture, when an expectant woman walks, a king steps aside, because she is carrying an entire generation in her womb. It is a tremendous violation of Hindu tenets for us to put women down.

These precepts, according to Pt. Satish, are expounded in all Arya Samaj gurukuls.  He informed the Chronicle that his gurukul in India – Gurukul Kangri — had been established in 1903 in Haridwar by Swami Shradanand, who had followed Maharishi Dayanand’s advice in the Satya Prakash. The Gurukul Kangri is a Government-accredited university from which Pt. Satish had acquired his PhD.

One hundred years after the original institution had been established in Haridwar, Pandit Satish founded the Maharishi Dayanand Gurukula in New York City.

While the New York gurukula has no residential facilities, the Guyanese chapter, with Dave Rameshwar providing oversight, provides in-house facilities for both boys and girls, who are taught Hindi, Sanskrit, Vedic Philosophy, The Darshanas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Gita, the Satya Prakash, and the Sanskars. They are also trained to become priests and lecturers.

Dave Rameshwar, a civil engineer, organises Gurukul activities and Pt. Satish’s itinerary, while Vishnu Bandhu is the general organizer of all Pt. Satish’s visits to Guyana.

On Pandit Satish’s itinery this year is a week-long residential gurukul camp at the Sanatan Dharmic Mandir at Hydronie, Parika, beginning Sunday, August 19th, and concluding the following Sunday, when the participants (chelas) will graduate.

Pt Satish says that his focus during this year’s pilgrimage to Guyana are the youth camps and the National Day of Prayer, the principal objective of which is to create more responsible and fully-rounded youths; to create focused families that will form strong bonds to provide a secure foundation for children to grow; and unity in the nation through bonding of commonality in religious faiths.

Pt recited from the holy texts, translation of which means, “Let every child be obedient to mom and dad; but for that to happen, parents must speak to each other in honeyed words that are conducive to a very beautiful atmosphere, setting standards that children can emulate.” He adjured every husband to follow the Ram model, and every wife to follow the Sita model, so that families, communities, and entire nations can build on and grow through these principles, incorporated in every religion by way of which mankind worships the Supreme Father.