First Published in Indica Today Online Magazine in three parts. Links provided at the end.
PART 1
INTRODUCTION
Someone once mentioned of O. Henry, the short story writer, that the best way to select his hundred best was to put all his stories in a hat and pick up randomly one hundred of them! The same could be easily said in choosing the best work of Sri Aurobindo by putting the names of all his works in a similar hat and picking one. Each of his books gives a unique slice of a particular domain relating to our country’s culture and history. His grasp and understanding of Indian culture were near complete, and it is a tragedy that he was largely ignored by the builders of “new” India at independence for some inexplicable reasons. We had, in fact, the blueprints, in the works of people like Sri Aurobindo and Ananda Coomaraswamy, to construct a strong country based on foundations that were still holding despite the ravages of long colonial attacks.
The spiritual foundation of the country was intact, but our builders, after independence, managed to ignore those too and look completely westward to lay the principles of a supposedly new country. The irony was that we were the longest-surviving civilisation and culture for at least five thousand years, and our leaders could not look at our civilisational past to see how this might have happened. We must have had our strengths.
Anyway, this fabulous series of essays called the “The Foundations of Indian Culture and the Renaissance of India” (The Incarnate Word, Volume 14) is a brilliant depiction of the Indian past. Arya magazine published these essays between 1918 and 1921. The initial spark was a book written by William Archer (1917) called “India and the Future,” in which he completely denigrated the country and its people for having no culture, civilisation, arts, or sciences. It was a polemical attack, and Sri Aurobindo started what he termed an “aggressive defence” of Indian culture.
The larger idea of Archer in calling Indian people “barbaric” was to deny them self-rule, a demand of Indian revolutionaries after the first world war. Though it is the starting point, Sri Aurobindo expands these essays to give the most breathtaking exposition of the Indian past and how it could become a solution for the future of human civilisation if assimilated properly with modernity. He takes a grand sweep of the ancient Indian culture in a vision possible only for a Yogi of the highest order.
Here, he not only demonstrates the greatness of Indian culture but shows how its central point of spirituality should become the essence of her future development. For him, this core essential spirituality was the future of all humanity. India’s mission was to develop this spirituality in harmony with the modern world to elevate individuals and communities to the highest realms of the eternal.
A disclaimer: This three-part article is a summary, paraphrasing, and abridgement of the essays contained in the original volume to motivate readers to go for the full original. Except for the introduction and concluding remarks, this article has the sole authorship of Sri Aurobindo. The direct quotes have been highlighted at a few places. This is a humble effort to shorten and abridge the essays for easier consumption, especially for those who are not exposed to the writings of the legendary man. The divine literally shines through in his writings, and this particular book should have been compulsory reading in all schools since the beginning of our post-colonial journey. A lot of deracination and derooting, seen as a widespread phenomenon in the Indian population, would not have existed. Sadly, this was not to be.
THE ISSUE: IS INDIA CIVILISED?
William Archer had made an extravagant rationalistic attack on Indian culture and raised the credibility of the survival of Indian civilisation. John Woodroffe had previously tried to defend Indian civilisation against Archer’s polemics by highlighting its distinct spiritual value. Archer proposed that India must either Europeanize and materialise itself, or else her cultural superiors must keep her under subjection.
John Woodroffe invites vigorous self-defence, but Sri Aurobindo feels that the only sound strategy is vigorous aggression, like Swami Vivekananda’s speech in Chicago or the Swadeshi “extremist” movement. Apolitical and social Europeanisation can only bring a cultural and spiritual death to India. India alone, with whatever decline, has remained faithful to the spiritual motive. This successive passion for English ways, Continental culture, and revolutionary Russia has the potential to rationalise India beyond recognition. However, with proper engagement, we will be the leader in a new world phase. The present conflict, albeit temporary, should culminate on a higher plane and be a preparation for oneness.
Sri Aurobindo writes:
(For) the normal Western mind…The inner existence is formed and governed by the external powers. India’s constant aim has been, on the contrary, to find a basis of living in the higher spiritual truth and to live from the inner spirit outwards, to exceed the present way of mind, life, and body…
Science and philosophy have a basis in reason and materialism in the western world. However, Indian ideals would contend that while reason and science have their place, the real truth goes beyond them. Even science is constantly arriving at conclusions that spiritual knowledge of ancient India had already affirmed. In the desire for a universal world culture, there is danger of the disappearance of a distinctive Indian civilisation. We need to cultivate both spiritual and material tendencies. However, if the spiritual ideal points the final way to a triumphant harmony of manifested life, then fidelity to Indian values is our best way of human progress.
Western culture is proud of its successful modernisation, but it suffers from unsoundness in many respects. The application of ideal reason to inner life has not matched the application of scientific reason. From an evolutionary perspective, no country or continent has ever been fully civilised. If we define civilisation as a harmony of spirit, body, and mind, this has never happened.
Both blind criticism and worship of the Indian past are faulty. A reshaping of India’s spiritual essence must take place under the influence of the West, but its faithfulness to the core essence should stay intact. This requires an unfailing spiritual and intellectual courage to defend our culture against the ignorant Occidental criticism while simultaneously acknowledging our errors.
The European mind places first the principle of growth through struggle and later achieving some kind of unity. Indian culture proceeded on the principle that strove to find its base in a unity and reached out again towards some greater oneness. Instead of aggressively blotting out every other culture—the mark of the Occident—India must affirm her own deeper truths and help in the further evolution of collective humanity.
A RATIONALISTIC CRITIC ON INDIAN CULTURE
One can see a foreign culture through an eye of sympathy or as a dispassionate critic. The third is a hostile critic like William Archer. His book, though a journalistic fake, does help in a comprehensive view of the entire enemy case. It has an ulterior political aim to damage the Indian case for self-government. His ignorance and superficiality on subjects like metaphysics, religions, music, art, architecture, drama, and literature prevent any kind of rational assessment of Indian culture. Only those who possess a culture can judge the intrinsic value of its productions.
“Brahminical” civilisation does not imply dominant sacerdotalism, for the priest has had no hand in shaping our great culture. India’s main motives have been shaped by philosophic thinkers and religious minds, the Rishis, not all of them of Brahmin birth. A class developed to preserve the spiritual traditions, knowledge, and sacred law of the race; they could do this for thousands of years. The central feature of Indian culture has always remained spiritual, from which everything else derives. The culture of a people has three aspects: philosophy and religion; art, poetry, and literature; and society and politics. Together they make up its soul, mind, and body.
Archer tries to prove Indian philosophy and religion to be an irrational monstrosity. Philosophy in Europe is a pursuit apart from life, and ultimate truths are derived from pure reason. The Indian mind holds, on the contrary, that the seer of spiritual truth is the best guide of the religious, moral, and practical life. Our philosophy of the ultimate unthinkable and unknowable is not based on verifiable “scientific” experiments. However, Yoga is a well-tested means of opening up these greater realms, but most, like Archer, are unwilling to take this up before commenting on Indian metaphysics.
Indian culture, with its spiritual nobility, differs from and may be superior to the aims of the western rationalist. To say that Indian philosophy has led away from the study of nature is gross ignorance. No nation before the modern epoch carried out scientific research in all fields as successfully as India did in ancient times. From the earliest Vedic thought, the Indian mind held the same general powers in its spiritual, psychological, and physical existence. The ancient civilisation founded itself very explicitly upon four human interests: desire (Kama), material needs (Artha), ethical conduct (Dharma), and spiritual liberation (Moksha). There was no preaching about a general rush to the cave and the hermitage. The vivid literature and education in various fields of arts, sciences, politics, and administration were never otherworldly directions.
Indian culture, always seeing a self within us greater than the ego, recognised all human possibilities. Asceticism is vital to any culture, but Buddhism, by its exaggeration of asceticism, disturbed the balance. Archer preposterously misunderstands karma and reincarnation as a doctrinal negation of present life. In fact, both karma and reincarnation enormously enhance the value of effort and action. The nature of the present act determines not only our immediate but our subsequent future. At the same time, the idea that our present sufferings are the result of our own past action imparts a calm that the Western intelligence finds difficult to understand.
Archer’s attack is on the irrationality and unethical nature of Hinduism. The European mind characteristically has the cult of reason and the cult of life. Secularism is a necessary consequence of this, where both the infrarational and suprarational refuges of the religious spirit have ceased to exist. But in Asia, there has been no incompatibility between these two powers and the religious spirit. When confronted with Indian religion, thought, and culture, the Western rajasic and pragmatic mind finds it incomprehensible. Indian culture admires the self-possessed sattvic man for whom calm thought, spiritual knowledge, and the inner life are the things of importance. Only by remembering its fundamental character can we comprehend the rituals and philosophy of Hinduism, a non-dogmatic, inclusive religion. The accusation of a lack of ethical values is patently false, since the idea of Dharma is, next to the idea of the Infinite, its major chord. English scholars with a Christian bias were misled by the stress that Indian philosophy lays on knowledge rather than on works as the means of salvation.
Sri Aurobindo says:
The universal embracing Dharma in the Indian idea is a law of ideal perfection for the developing mind and soul of man. This ideal was not a purely moral or ethical conception… it was also intellectual, religious, social, and aesthetic, the flowering of the whole ideal man, the perfection of the total human nature. This was the mind that was at the base of the Indian civilisation and gave its characteristic stamp to all the cultures.
The Western impression has been that Hinduism is an entirely otherworldly system, oblivious to the here and now. The Indian conception of life starts from a deeper centre and moves along fewer external lines. However, it looks through the form and searches for the spirit in things everywhere. Man, himself, is a spirit that uses life and body. A gradual spiritual progress is the secret of the almost universal Indian acceptance of reincarnation, the pivot of the Indian conception of existence. There is room within it for all terrestrial aims and types. Indian culture did not impoverish the richness of the grand game of human life, and it kept always in sight two main truths: first, our being in its growth has stages; secondly, life is complex, and so is the nature of man.
In the initial movement of life, self-interest and desire (kama, artha) are inevitable. The tendency of man to seek after a just and perfect law of his living finds its truth in the Dharma. But even this was only the foundation and preparation for another highest thing— the aim of liberation, moksa. This aim ennobled the individual’s entire life.
There is nothing in the structure of Indian civilisation and its conception of life that shows inferiority to other human cultures. While it may not be perfect, final, or complete, this is a reality shared by all cultures. When Indian culture first tried to figure out how to balance life and spirit, it used two ideas to help it: the system of the four Varnas and the four Ashramas, which represent the four social classes and the four stages of a person’s development. We must not judge the ancient Chaturvarnya by its disintegration and parody—the caste system. The Indian idea fixed the status of a man not by his birth, but by his capacities and inner nature. However, in reality, birth became the foundation of Varna. Yet at no time was adherence to the economic rule quite absolute, and the greatness, originality, and permanent value lay in the real object of all orders—a liberating knowledge of moksha.
For this final end, Indian culture provided a framework, a scale, or a ladder. This was the object of the four Ashramas: the student, the householder, the recluse, and the free super-social man. This profoundly conceived cycle kept the full course of the human spirit in its view. This spiritual tradition has fortunately stayed with us even in the worst days and now rises once more to give the impulse of a lasting renaissance.
RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY
Indian culture made spirituality the highest aim of life. The European mind finds itself unable to make out what Hinduism is without rigid dogmas, eternal damnation, or papal heads. It admits all beliefs (including atheism and agnosticism) and permits all possible spiritual experiences and religious adventures. Indian belief, unlike the western one, is that intellectual truth is only one of the doors, and the most varying intellectual beliefs can be equally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite.
The endless variety of Indian philosophy, cultural practices, art forms, literature, and religion, which so puzzles the European, is itself a sign of a superior religious culture. The aggressive and illogical idea of a single dogma or religion for all mankind finds little support in the mature Indian view, which has always allowed a perfect liberty of thought and of worship in man’s approach to the Infinite. A large number of authorised scriptures; Kuladharma, the power of family and communal tradition; the religious authority of the Brahmins; and Parampara, the succession of spiritual teachers, were the different approaches to the Eternal.
Indian religion never denied intermediary forms, names, and powers of the Eternal and the Infinite. Monism, pantheism, or polytheism hardly do justice to Indian religion. Western definitions cannot adequately describe Indian religion. It is necessary to emphasise this synthetic quality and embrace the unity of Indian religious thought. The Hindu religion is founded upon three fundamentals: a) The One Existence of the Veda, to whom the sages give different names; b) the manifold way of man’s approach to the Eternal and Infinite; and c) that the Infinite can be met by each individual soul in itself.
The Vedic and Post-Vedic Ages
Europe put the whole emphasis on the outward life. India characteristically discovered our deepest being as the first necessity and made a spiritual life the aim of existence. In its earliest Vedic form, it looked at outer nature. But even in its external side, the Vedic religion gave a psychic function to the godheads worshipped by the people. Deeply concealed were the higher spiritual truths reserved for the initiates. The Upanishads were the crown and end of the Veda, or Vedanta.
The post-Vedic age saw the rise of the major philosophies, a copious, many-sided epic literature, art, science, a complex society, kingdoms, and empires, by manifold formative activities of all kinds and major systems of living and thinking. An extreme richness of both life experience and the spiritual life interacted, preserving the balance of Indian culture.
Changes happened, not through protest, but by a continuous development of its organic life. The apparent discontinuity in Buddhism was more apparent than real. The Vedantic archetypes matched or traced the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana, its ethical system, and universal compassion. What hurt Buddhism was its trenchant affirmations and exclusive negations, which were not sufficiently compatible with the native flexibility of Indian religious consciousness. Indian religion absorbed all that it could of Buddhism but assured its continuity with the ancient Vedanta.
Later, the rituals and ceremonies, along with the pantheon of the great Trinity, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, and Shakti worship, gained prominence. The Purano-Tantric stage was a successful effort to open the people’s minds to a deeper inner truth, experience, and feeling. The central spiritual truth remained the same. The Trinity is a triple form of the one supreme Godhead and Brahman. The idea of the divinity in man was popularised to an extraordinary extent, and Yoga became popular.
The Triple Quartette
The right practice of life was, in the view of Indian culture, a Dharma. Indian culture recognises the spirit as the truth of our being and our life as a growth and evolution of the spirit. The unique and characteristic Indian approach to individual or community spiritual attainment was the triple “quartette.” Its first circle (kama, artha, dharma, moksha) was the synthesis and gradation of the fourfold object of life: desire, personal interest, moral right, and spiritual liberation. Its second circle was the four-fold order (Varnas) of society, carefully graded with economic functions and having deeper cultural, ethical, and spiritual significances. Its third was the four-fold (Ashramas) stages of life: student, householder, forest recluse, and free super-social man.
An endeavour to cast the whole of life into a religious mould was according to the varying natural capacity of man, adhikara. Indian religion wisely admitted the infinite differences between humans of capacities: one physically minded (tamasic); another, capable of deeper psycho-spiritual experience (rajasic); and a third (sattvic), the most developed of all. For the first type, it meant a mass of ceremony, ritual, strict outward rule, and compelling symbols, which may seem like half-awakened religionism, but they have their concealed truth and psychic value. The second type is capable of understanding more clearly the psychic truths. But those things were openings for the third and greatest type of human being. Beyond symbols, he reached for absolute, universal love. Choosing a way, a guide, or an ishta-devata (a special god), understanding one’s nature (guna), and Yoga were important components in this evolution.
Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha
Indian culture distinguished between the lower (worldly) and the higher learning (transcendental), yet it did not create a chasm between them. Despite the summits’ asceticism and austerity, Indian ethics did not inhibit man’s aesthetic or hedonistic nature. Regarding the political, commercial, and social being, the paramount rule of the culture was that the higher a man’s position and power, the greater should be the call on him of Dharma. The king himself was charged to live and rule as the guardian and servant of the Dharma.
The aim of a powerful culture is to teach people to live by reason, by the law of unity, beauty, and harmony, and by some high law of spirit. The decline and arrested growth of Indian culture is true, but misfortune is not proof of the absence of culture. But what accounts for the remarkable and obstinate survival of India?
Our critic looks at our great limitations and insists on our renouncing our own culture and becoming docile followers of the West. We have the right to question if science, practical reason, efficiency, and unrestrained economic production truly represent the entirety of reality and the ideal of civilisation. The ugliness it has produced points to West’s imperfections too. India must not imitate the West but develop what is best in her own spirit and culture.
Indian Culture: A Unique Synthesis of Spirituality and Life
The critic says that the culture of India is both in theory and practice wrong and deleterious to the true aim of human living. However, even nihilistic Buddhism and illusionism gave a powerful discipline to the life of man on earth, society, art, and thought. Presently, the most vital movements of Indian thought and religion are again moving towards the synthesis of spirituality and life, which was an essential part of the ancient Indian ideal.
Archer, ignorantly and arrogantly, denies any practical value of Indian culture. India has been a home of solid realities, of a firm grappling with the problems of thought and life, of measured and wise organisation, and of great action as any other considerable centre of civilisation. In every field—science, literature (Sanskrit, Pali, and vernacular languages), architecture, sculpture, and painting—she went further than any country before the modern era. India not only has the long roll of her great saints, sages, poets, creators, scientists, scholars, and legists; she has had her great rulers, administrators, and heroes, the mind that plans, and the seeing force that builds.
By virtue of its culture, the whole nation shared in the common life. Economic benefits may not have been equal, but their religious life was intense. From the outcastes themselves have come saints revered by all. The entire notion that the Indian people lack life, will, and activity due to their culture is, at best, a myth. Instead of the egoistic will, the Indian mind is more interested in a calm, self-controlling, and even self-effacing personality—an effacement that is but an enhancement of value, power, and personality. This difference between the western rajasic and the eastern sattvic does not imply an inferiority in the aesthetics of Indian life and creation. Surely the Indian is the more evolved in spiritual conception.
PART 2
In the first part, we saw Sri Aurobindo mount one of the strongest defences of Indian culture in response to the ignorant criticisms of an English writer, Mr. Archer. We have seen previously how Sri Aurobindo articulates a clear understanding of Hindu religion and spirituality. In the second part, Sri Aurobindo looks at Indian art and Indian literature. He shows how Indian art differs in its perspective from European art. Approaching the former with the European understandings leads to misunderstanding and a deep misrepresentation of Indian art. Similarly, no civilisation and language in the world comes even close to the enormous output of India in terms of its literature.
INDIAN ART
Western criticism depreciates India’s fine arts due to a lack of understanding. The Indian ideal figure, as held by poets and authorities on art, of the masculine body with a characteristic width at the shoulders and slenderness in their middle has the simile of a lion. Mr. Archer believes this is proof that the Indian people were just out of the semi-savage state. The whole basis of Indian artistic creation is directly spiritual and intuitive, based on the superiority of the method of direct perception over intellect. Archer completely fails to grasp this elementary notion.
The western mind, long bound up in the Greek and Renaissance traditions, has only romantic and realistic motives. The imitation of Nature was the first law. There is a want of understanding when Archer and other better-informed critics approach ancient Hindu, Buddhistic, or Vedantic art with blank incomprehension. Mr. Archer, for instance, sees the Dhyani Buddha with its supreme spiritual calm with only a “passionless” face. European art does not invoke or consider the direct and unveiled presence of the Infinite and its godhead necessary for the highest expression.
The highest business of Indian art is to disclose something of the Self, the infinite, and the divine through its outer forms. Thus, beyond the ordinary aesthetic instinct, there is a spiritual insight or culture needed if we are to enter into the whole meaning of Indian artistic creation. The same is true for Indian philosophy, religion, yoga, and culture.
Architecture, sculpture, and painting are the great arts that appeal to the spirit and where the sensible and the invisible meet. The form attracts the Western mind, but the Indian mind perceives form as a creation of the spirit. The Indian mind goes to the inner spirit of reality. When one is capable of long and deep meditation, one can see a great oriental work of art in solitude. Indian architecture also demands this kind of inner study. A rational and secular aesthetic mind ignoring the spiritual suggestion and the meaning of the symbols fails miserably in appreciating Indian art. An Indian temple to whatever godhead is in its inmost reality an altar raised to the divine Self, a house of the Cosmic Spirit, an appeal and aspiration to the Infinite. To gain a true understanding, we must view everything through that perspective.
Architecture and Temples
Archer talks about the massive, yet “monstrous,” construction of South Temples but misses their unity, clarity, and nobility. He views the northern buildings with less disfavour, while he exempts the Mahomedan architecture (Indo-Saracenic) from condemnation. In reality, such criticisms miss the principle of unity. Indian sacred architecture constantly represents the infinite in the immensity and its crowding abundance of significant detail.
Western criticisms of Indian art and architecture should not trouble Indian minds. The two apparently different-looking temples at Kalahasti and Sinhachalam show how the immense multiplicity of the base, ascending and ending at a single sign, represents the profound spiritual significance of Indian architecture and sculpture. These great builders saw a tremendous unity. It is impossible to appreciate Indian architecture without understanding its entirety. The architectural language of the North is of a different kind; there is another basic style, but here too, the same spiritual, meditative, intuitive method has to be used to get the same results.
To condemn and object that the crowding detail “allows no calm” has no validity for the Indian experience. The “monstrous effect of terror and gloom” in these mighty buildings is astonishing to an Indian mind because terror and gloom are conspicuously absent from the feelings aroused in it by its religion, art, and literature. People often mistake Shiva’s dance for the dance of Death or the “terrible” form of Kali. In reality, it shows the rapture of the cosmic dance with the depths of unmoved infinite bliss or the destruction of evil forces. Regarding monstrous forms, the Indian aesthetic mind deals not only with the earth but with psychic planes in which these things exist.
Regarding Indo-Moslem architecture, the Indian mind might have taken from Arab-Persian imagination, but still, on the whole, it is a typically Indian creation. Archer is impressed by its rational beauty, refinement, and grace, refreshing after the monstrous riot of Hindu yogic hallucination. However, even the Taj is not a sensuous reminiscence of a fairy enchantment but the eternal dream of a love that survives death. The all-pervading spiritual obsession is not there, but other elements of life typical of Indian culture stay intact.
Sculpture
Sri Aurobindo writes:
Indian mind moves on the spur of a spiritual sensitiveness and psychic curiosity, while the aesthetic curiosity of the European temperament is intellectual, vital, emotional, and imaginative in that sense… The two minds live almost in different worlds, are either not looking at the same things, or, even where they meet in the object, see it from a different level….
The appreciation of our own artistic past has to be free from a foreign outlook. Two millennia of accomplished sculptural creation is a significant fact in Indian culture. The ancient sculptural art of India embodied the thought of the Upanishads and the life of the Mahabharata. It created and expressed not the ideal physical and emotional beauty but the utmost spiritual beauty the human form is capable of. The statue of a king or a saint is not meant merely to portray some dramatic action of a character but to embody rather a soul-state.
The profound intelligence, skill, and beauty of its masterpieces—the great Buddhas, south Indian bronzes, the Kalasamhara image, and the Natarajas—are impossible to deny. The figure of the Buddha achieves the expression of the infinite in a finite image. The Kalasamhara Shiva is supreme not only by the majesty and power but by the meaning poured through the whole unity of this creation. Similarly, the cosmic movement, the rapturous intensity, and the delight of the dance of Shiva attest to the art that, understood in its own spirit, is incomparable. Still, to Archer, the whole thing appears barbaric, meaningless, strange, and the work of a distorted imagination. Each manner of art has its own ideals, traditions, and agreed conventions. In its own way, Indian sculpture is a singularly powerful interpretation in stone and bronze of the inner soul of the people.
Painting
The art of painting in ancient and later India, due to its scantiness, does not create quite so great an impression as her architecture and sculpture. But a closer view reveals a persistent tradition linking even the latest Rajput art to the earliest surviving work in Ajanta. The one important thing that emerges is the continuity of all Indian art in its essential spirit and tradition. Painting is naturally the most sensuous of the arts, and the highest greatness open to the painter is to spiritualise the sensuous appeal by making the most vivid outward beauty a revelation of subtle spiritual emotion so that the soul and the sense are at harmony.
The six limbs of art, the sadanga, are common to all works in line and colour: the distinction of forms, rupabheda; proportion, pramana; aesthetic feeling, bhava; beauty for the satisfaction of the spirit, lavanya; truth of the form, sadrsya; and the harmony of colours, varnika-bhanga. It is the turn given to each of the constituents that makes all the difference. The first primitive object of painting is to illustrate life and nature; the second is the intuitive revelation of existence. The latter is the starting point of the Indian motive. We faithfully observe the distinction of forms in depicting humans, animals, buildings, trees, and objects, but not with a strict naturalistic fidelity. The colours and forms used are a means for spiritual and psychic intuition.
The classical art of India is characterised by its simplicity, reserve, and concentration. Such art is a revealing interpretation of the spiritual sense and its profounder meaning. Ignoring the spiritual intention is serious misinterpretation. The excellence of the decorative arts and crafts of India has been indisputable.
Sri Aurobindo writes:
Indian culture in this respect need not fear any comparison. Its civilisation, standing in the first rank in the three great arts as in all things of the mind, has proved that the spiritual urge is not, as has been vainly supposed, sterilising to the other activities, but a most powerful force for the many-sided development of the human whole.
INDIAN LITERATURE
The Veda and the Upanishads
Indian literature in Sanskrit, Pali, Sanskrit-derived, and Dravidian languages makes for the rich, many-sided expression of Indian culture. The civilisation becomes the world’s most creative and developed. The classical creations in Sanskrit—a magnificent literary instrument—stand first among the world’s literature.
The early mind of India is represented by four of the supreme and unparalleled productions of her genius: the Veda, the Upanishads, and the two vast epics (Mahabharata and Ramayana). The Veda represents an early intuitive and symbolical mentality that the later human mind has become completely unfamiliar with. The later scholastic idea made it nothing better than a book of mythology and sacrificial ceremonies. European scholars, yet worse, stripped it of its spiritual interest, poetic greatness, and beauty in an exclusive external reading. To the Rishis, the Veda was the word for discovering the truth—not the word of logical reasoning or aesthetic intelligence, but the intuitive and inspired rhythmic utterance, the mantra. The Rishis were not medicine men and makers of incantations to a robust and barbaric tribe but were seers and thinkers.
The life of man was to these seers a thing of mixed truth and falsehood, a movement from mortality to immortality, from mixed light and darkness to the splendour of a divine Truth whose home is in the Infinite. Life was both a journey and a sacrifice, and they spoke in a fixed system of images taken from nature and surrounding life. The cult of fire and the powers of living nature held a central place. The greatest seers achieve extraordinary heights, and the ancient Indian mind accurately traced all its philosophy, religion, and essential elements of culture back to these seer-poets of the Vedas.
The Upanishads, literary and poetical masterpieces, are the supreme work of the Indian mind, after the Veda. They are a source of unfailing inspiration and a direct spiritual revelation. Foreign translators engage with the intellectual sense of the Upanishads, often overlooking the philosophy or the ecstasy of spiritual experience. There is hardly a main philosophical idea, west or east, that cannot find an authority, a seed, or an indication in the Upanishads. Even the larger generalisations of modern science have their echoes in the Indian sages’ utterances of the deeper truth of the spirit.
The Upanishads, or Vedanta, were no mere philosophy without any vitality applicable to life. Even when the Vedic cult receded to the background, the creative Upanishads generated the numerous devotional religions and the persistent Indian idea of dharma. The Upanishads are full of revealing power and suggestive thought that discover a whole infinite through a finite image. The Upanishads, with their luminous brevity and immeasurable completeness, are a unique form of poetry.
The intuitive thoughts of the Upanishads start with the concrete imagery and symbols of the Vedic Rishis. It opens to sublime prose and poetry, revealing the spiritual truth in all its splendour. At the end emerges knowledge to which modern thought is returning through its own different method. At once poetry and spirituality, the Veda-Upanishads show how the soul of India was born and how it strives to soar from its earth into the supreme empire of the spirit.
Along with the creation of great philosophical systems, the Veda-Upanishidic movement also brought about the creation of moral, social, and political ideals that people and groups could use to guide their lives. The latter were the authoritative social treatises (Shastras), of which the greatest and most authoritative are the famous Laws of Manu. The philosophies gave intellectual reasoning to the truths already discovered by intuition, revelation, and spiritual experience and embodied in the Veda and the Upanishads.
The Itihasas
The Mahabharata and Ramayana are Itihasas with a massive purpose. The poets told an ancient tale in a beautiful manner with a sense of their function as architects of the national thought, religion, ethics, and culture. These poems weave philosophical ideas, embodying the entire ancient culture of India. The Mahabharata has been spoken of as a fifth Veda; it has been said of both these poems that they are not only significant poems but also Dharmashastras, the body of a large religious, ethical, social, and political teaching.
The significant personalities of the epics became abiding national memories and represented all that was best in the social, ethical, political, and religious culture of India. Valmiki, in the characters of Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Bharata, and Lakshmana, fashioned much of what is best and sweetest in the national character. They have become divine characters worthy of worship.
The characteristic diction of the Mahabharata is almost austerely masculine, trusting to the force of sense and inspired accuracy of turn; it is almost ascetic in its simplicity and directness. The Ramayana’s diction takes on a more attractive shape, a marvel of sweetness and strength, lucidity, warmth, and grace. Both poems embody a high poetic soul and inspired intelligence. The directly intuitive mind of the Veda and Upanishads retreats behind the veil of intellectual and outwardly psychical imagination.
The vastness of the plan and the leisurely minuteness of detail are baffling to a western mind accustomed to smaller limits with a more easily fatigued eye and a hastier pace of life. However, the Indian mind has grown accustomed to this expansiveness of vision. Another difference lies in the great powers and forces, Daivic, Asuric, and Rakshasic, that surround and influence terrestrial life and human action. The greater human figures are a kind of incarnation of these more cosmic personalities and powers.
The characters are intensely real, human, and alive to the Indian mind. Only the main emphasis here, as in Indian art, is not on the outward character but on the inner soul quality. The idealism of characters like Rama and Sita is no pale and vapid unreality; they are vivid with the truth of the ideal life, of the greatness that man may become when he gives his soul a chance.
These epics are therefore not a mere mass of untransmuted legend and folklore, as is ignorantly objected, but a highly artistic representation of intimate significances of life, the living presentment of strong and noble thinking, a developed ethical and aesthetic mind, and a high social and political ideal—the ensouled image of a great culture. More profound and rich than Greek or Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems serve a greater national and cultural function. Their reception by both the high and the low and their continued presence in national life for twenty centuries is the strongest evidence of this ancient Indian culture’s greatness and beauty.
The Classical Age
The classical age covers a period of some ten centuries or more. Finally, Sanskrit becomes the language of the Pandits and no longer a first-hand expression of the people. This change reflects the replacement of the spontaneous unity of the intuitive mind with the artificial unity of analysing and synthetic intelligence. In the representative poet of the age, Kalidasa, poetic speech reaches an extraordinary perfection. Kalidasa’s seven extant poems, each a masterpiece, are brilliant depictions of the life, mind, and the whole culture of the rich, beautiful, ordered life of India of his age. The rest of the poetry of the times is of the same type, though not of the same perfection. The literary epics of Bharavi and Magha reveal the beginning of decline. Gradually, the deeper soul disappears, and an overdeveloped intellectualism sets the stage for decadence.
The predominantly intellectual turn appears in abundance in the subhāṣita of Bhartrihari, a work of genius. His three centuries, or satakas, express, respectively, his high ethical thought, erotic passion, and ascetic weariness, which reveal the three leading motives of the age.
The drama, mostly romantic plays representing the images and settled paces of the cultured life, however, is the most attractive, though not the greatest, product of the age. There is a myth that India was lost in religious and philosophical dreams, but the Jatakas, the Kathasaritsagara, the Panchatantra, the Hitopadesa, animal fables, and literature of worldly wisdom, policy, and statecraft show that India was not so.
The Puranas and Tantras
The dominant note in the Indian mind has been spiritual, intuitive, and psychic, but not excluding a strong intellectual, practical, and vital activity. The philosophic writings and the religious poetry of the Puranas and Tantras completed the diffusion of ideas. There is no essential change from the Vedic ethos, but only a change of forms. Instead of being a degradation of the Vedic religion, they may be looked upon as an extension and advance.
The Tantras embody an immense and complex body of psycho-spiritual experience, supported by visual images, and systematised in yogic practices. The Tantras extend the Vedic method, which, like its geography and symbolism, is prone to misinterpretation. Its danger and disadvantage are inherent but should not blind us to the enormous effect produced in training the mass mind to respond to a psycho-religious and psycho-spiritual appeal that prepared it for a higher capacity. The remarkable religious poetry in all the eighteen Puranas has had profound effects on Indian culture. The Bhagavata holds the highest value in the future emotional and ecstatic religion of Bhakti. The perfect outcome is associated with Chaitanya.
Sanskrit literature still continues, but the regional languages in different provinces create a more popular literature, beginning with the inspired poetry of the saints and devotees. Vidyapati, Ramprasad, and Chandidas in Bengal; Mirabai in Rajasthan; Andal in the South; Tukaram and Ramdas in the Maratha regions; and Kabir exemplify this devotion to either Krishna or other forms of Vishnu. The Shaiva poets of the south, Surdas, Nanak, and the Sikh Gurus in the north were equally important and extensive. The epics were also adapted in vernacular renditions in many languages. These and other popular writings, entering deeply into the life of the people, are clear evidence of a remarkable culture.
PART 3
In the previous parts, we saw Sri Aurobindo looking at the greatness of Indian culture in the domains of spirituality, arts, and literature. In the final part, he looks at the unique ideas of Indian political systems and how they differ significantly from the modern ideas of democracy with its increasing tendency towards centralisation. He also talks about the correct way to go forward from here, a true renaissance, which places spirituality as its essence. Indeed, the future of human civilisation lies in this renaissance, which assimilates western ideas. This assimilation should not result in the destruction or deformation of Indian culture beyond recognition.
INDIAN POLITY
There is an ill-founded charge that the achievements and greatness of ancient India were only in things of the mind and spirit but failed in the external social, political, and economic spheres. The legend of Indian political incompetence arose from a lack of knowledge of history. Western parallels and standards, like industrialism and parliamentary democracy, are misleading. Indian polity dealt with these things in its own way according to its natural capacity.
Indian society evolved from the wandering clans (kula) to the meeting of the people (visah), with the king as the head. The Varna, or classes, then came, though not hereditary at first. Despite their predominance, the Brahmins did not usurp the political powers. The most important person in Indian culture was the Rishi, the man of higher spiritual knowledge, born in any Varna but exercising authority over all and instrumental in casting the life of the people into the well-shaped ideals and significant forms of a self-conscious civilisation.
Dharma in Polity and the Ideal of Dharmic Monarchy
The political evolution was towards an increasing emphasis on a Dharmic king as the head. However, absolute monarchism was in check by a contrary tendency towards republicanism, centred on either a democratic assembly or an oligarchy. The Indian monarchy previous to the Mahomedan invasion was not the religious head of the people. Normally there was no place in the Indian political system for religious oppression and intolerance.
The social lives of the people were also free from autocratic interference. Change was brought about not artificially from above but automatically from within, principally by the freedom granted to families or particular communities. The king, bound by Dharma to maintain it, had limited rights in taxation or the creation of laws. The ancient Indian system lacked room for autocratic tendencies or monarchical violence, as it was subject to numerous checks. The monarchical institution was only one element of the Indian socio-political system. What was hidden was the key to understanding the fundamental nature of the entire system.
There are three stages for any human society. The first is a condition of spontaneous play in the community. The second is when the communal mind becomes more intellectually self-conscious with the growth of exact knowledge and luminous ideals. The danger here is an exaggerated dependence on systems and institutions. It is only by reaching a third stage, spiritual existence—with its power of unity, sympathy, and spontaneous liberty—that it becomes an imperative need of the being. The last is yet to happen.
The right order of human life and the universe is preserved according to the ancient Indian idea by each individual and group following faithfully the svadharma, the true nature and its norm. There is also the dharma regulating relations as well as that of the age and environment, yugadharma. The self-determining individual and self-determining community are the ideal. But in the actual, unideal condition of humanity, there is a need for a king or a governing body.
Indian polity was the system of a complex communal freedom and self-determination. Each well-demarcated unit of the community administered its own life but connected with the whole through well-understood relations within a framework of communal existence. The State, sovereign or supreme political authority, was an instrument of coordination and general control but not an absolute authority. Law (dharma) and the will of the people limited the state’s powers. The latter was only a co-partner with the other members of the socio-political body.
The Organisation of Indian Polity
Sri Aurobindo writes:
The true nature of the Indian polity can only be realised if we look at it not as a separate thing, a machinery independent of the rest of the mind and life of the people, but as a part of and in its relation to the organic totality of the social existence. A people then, which learns to live consciously not solely in its physical and outward life but in the soul and spirit behind, may not at all exhaust itself and pass without death through many renascences. The history of India has been that of the life of such a people. Indian polity never arrived at that unwholesome substitution of the mechanical for the natural order of the life of the people, which has been the disease of European civilisation now culminating in the monstrous artificial organisation of the bureaucratic and industrial State, outcomes of the mechanising rational intelligence.
In effect, the ethical law coloured the political and economic spheres and imposed itself on every action. The life of the society itself was a significant framework for the development from the natural to the spiritual existence.
At its height, India had an admirable political system combining communal self-government with stability and order. More than individual freedom, it implied a communal freedom—primarily of the village and the clan. The rationale of the four orders, often misunderstood, was that each had its place, duty, and rights as a natural portion, but none of its fundamental activities was exclusive. Facts counter the claim that the Brahmins, for instance, monopolised knowledge and there was denial of knowledge to shudras. No one denied women their rights. The whole Indian system was in close cooperation with all the orders in common life, each predominating in its own field. There were never exclusive forms of class rule, as in the political history of other countries like Greece, Rome, and mediaeval Europe.
Three governing bodies occupied the political structure: the king and his ministerial council, the metropolitan assembly, and the general assemblies of the kingdom. The members of the Council were from all orders. The great metropolitan (paura) assembly and general assembly kept the king and the council from degenerating into autocracy. It is not clear when these institutions went out of existence, whether before the Mahomedan invasion or as a result of foreign conquest. But two elements seemed to survive: the social law of an order, kula-dharma, and of caste, Jati-dharma. The village community and the townships, two tangible bases of Indian society, continued their function. The joint family, now breaking down, was another community, though more of a synthetic form.
The Indian civilisation evolved an admirable political system, combining monarchical, democratic, and other principles. The excessive mechanising turn is a defect of the modern European state. If the greatness of a people and a civilisation is to be reckoned by its military aggressiveness, triumphs, annexation, and exploitation, then definitely India ranks the lowest.
Political Unification: Was it Important?
People talk of the inability of Indians to unite and of the divisions imposed by religion and caste. Why should we apply European ideas of unity, which are still far from reality, to India? The whole basis of the Indian mind is its spiritual and inward turn. An external rule could not initiate the process of political unification. The spiritual and cultural continuum is the only enduring unity, and though the western mind cannot concede this, the proofs are across the pages of history with a thriving Indian culture despite the dents. Spiritual unity does not insist, like in politics, on the centralisation of an imperial state. The Pathan and Moghul imperial systems suffered from the evils of centralisation due to their autocratic character.
The Vedic Rishis, however, recognised the necessity for political unification and embraced the ideal of the cakravartin, symbolised by the sacrifices of Aswamedha and Rajasuya. Not a destructive and predatory invasion, but a confederacy under an imperial head would be the nearest western analogy to the conception they sought. The successive rise of the consolidated Maurya, Sunga, Kanwa, Andhra, and Gupta dynasties could not impair the free, organic, diversified life at the village and town levels, the true expression of the mind and temperament of the people.
The Greek incursion did not seriously affect the nation. The Mussulman conquest was primarily concentrated in the more devitalised north. The south, especially the Vijayanagara and Marathas, long preserved its freedom. The Rajput and Sikh princes, like Rana Sangha, Ranjit Singh, and the Khalsa, held out against the Muslim and British rulers. These facts question the crude, sweeping statement that India has always been politically incapable. The real problem introduced by the Muslim conquest was not subjection but the struggle between two civilisations, each attached to a powerful religion and a different way of life.
Invasions and foreign rule, starting with the Greeks, through the Parthians, Huns, and Islamic, to finally British occupation, have not been able to crush the ancient Vedic soul of India. India has not spoken her last creative word; she must awaken not as a docile pupil of the West but as the ancient, immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self to discover a vaster form of her Dharma.
INDIAN CULTURE AND EXTERNAL INFLUENCE
Uniformity kills life. Real well-founded unity becomes fruitful through rich variation. Mechanical imitation, subordination, and servitude mean swallowing up a weaker culture or deforming it significantly. “Taking the good and leaving the bad” is a crudity of the superficial mind. “Take over” brings the good and the bad together pell-mell. If we take over, for instance, the monstrous European industrialism, our wealth and economic resources may improve, but assuredly we shall get to its social discords, moral plagues, and cruel problems, losing the spiritual principle of our culture.
Assimilation means to take whatever justifies our highest purport in the spiritual conception. To everything European, we should be applying its proper Dharma and its spiritual, intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, and dynamic utility. In every individualised existence, a double action exists: self-development from within and the reception of impacts from outside, which can either destroy the first or stimulate it to grow higher and fuller. It is the latter, which is the true meaning of assimilation.
The man who most lives from the inner self (svarat) embraces the universal and becomes the samrat, or possessor of the world. Finally, he grows one with all in the Atman. This is one of the greatest secrets of old Indian spiritual knowledge. Therefore, to live in one’s self, in accordance with one’s own law of being, svadharma, is the first necessity. Not being able to do that means disintegration of life and decline of inner powers. Fidelity to our own spirit, nature, and ideals is important, but masterful dealing with external influences need not be total rejection. There must be an element of successful assimilation.
India can only survive by confronting the raw, new, aggressive world with fresh creations of her own spirit. We have taken over the English way of writing stories, inductive science, the press, and so on. The point is not the taking over of some formal detail but a proper dealing with great effective ideas, like social and political liberty, equality, and democracy. We must not take them crudely in their European forms but work them out in keeping with our own conception of life. It is neither desirable nor possible to exclude everything that comes to us from outside. A living organism must recast the things it does to suit its own laws, forms, and characteristic actions.
Indian culture never excluded altogether external influences but harmonised the new elements with the spirit of its own culture. Each capable Indian must think it out or, better yet, work it out. The spirit of the Indian Renaissance will take care of the rest, creating a new and greater India.
THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA
Spirituality is indeed the master key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. European critics complain that in her ancient architecture, sculpture, and art there are no blank spaces. But that is no criticism; she lavishes her riches because she must. Every inch of space is filled with the stirring of life and energy from the Infinite. India has been preeminently the land of the Dharma and the Shastra. Her first period was the discovery of the Spirit. She then searched for the inner truth and law of each human or cosmic activity—its dharma. Once she found it, she applied it to practical life as Shastra. The three were not exclusive; they were always present. An ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness, and a powerful intelligence created the harmony of ancient Indian culture.
The European eye understands Indian spiritual thought only through the Buddhist and illusionist denial of life. Yet the pursuit of the extremes never resulted in disorder. India, from the beginning, was alive to the greatness of material laws and forces with a keen eye for the sciences and arts. However, she was always aware of the other invisible powers behind. She saw the myriad gods beyond man, God beyond the gods, and beyond God— his own ineffable eternity. With the calm audacity of her intuition, she declared that with the training of will and knowledge, the limited mind could conquer all the higher planes to become one with God, or Brahman. This was ingrained in her philosophy: Yoga, arts, and even the sciences.
For three thousand years at least, she has been creating abundantly and incessantly republics, kingdoms, empires, philosophies, cosmogonies, sciences, arts, poems, monuments, palaces, temples, public works, communities, societies, religious orders, laws, codes, rituals, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, systems of politics and administration, trades, industries, fine crafts, and so on. The list is endless and encompasses a wide range of activities. Her arts, philosophies, and other works spread through sea and land routes outside her borders to Egypt, Rome, the Far East, Mesopotamia, China, Japan, Palestine, and Alexandria. Christ echoes the figures of the Upanishads and the Buddhists’ sayings.
There has been recently some talk of a Renaissance in India after the disastrous period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. India never lost sight of its first spiritual age, despite all its degradations. At a certain point, the ancient civilisation paused and partially lost direction. A less vigorous energy of life might have foundered under the European attack. But the energy was sleeping, not dead. The rough influence of European culture sparked the Indian Renaissance in three important ways: a) the revival of old spiritual knowledge; b) the incorporation of this spirituality into new types of literature, art, science, and philosophy; and c) a fresh look at contemporary issues through the lens of the Indian spirit. The last and most difficult will determine the destiny of the renaissance underway.
The earliest generation of talented intellectuals, arising from Western education, hoped to modernise India wholesale and radically in mind, spirit, and life. They were patriotic but agreed with the Occidental view of our past culture as only a half-civilization needing ideals from the West. They drew away from mediaeval India in revolt and looked at ancient India with a tinge of pride but not grasping its original sense and spirit.
Their westernised intellectuality sought a rational religion, modelled its literature on the English spirit, ignored the arts, and made the middle-class pseudo-democracy of nineteenth-century England the supreme ideal. They had conviction, but their false method of anglicising India would have made us clumsy followers. Fortunately, this movement of thought could not endure.
There was a later reaction to this initial rejection of everything Indian after European contact. This meant a total denial of Europe and a strict stressing of only the national past. Finally, there started an assimilation process, the beginning of renaissance in its true sense. India has to work from a profound inwardness, and the later-forward steps would become an original factor in the future of human civilisation.
The obstinately westernised mind, bent upon blatant depreciation of the past, has ceased to exist. Indeed, there has been a better insight into the meaning of Indian things, as in the works of Bankim Chandra Chatterji. Swami Vivekananda was the leading exemplar of the subtle assimilation and fusing of the third stage. It is still an incongruous mix, like a half-European and half-Indian dress. India has to get back entirely to the native power of her spirit and harmonise the future of civilisation.
India is the meeting place of the religions, and among these, Hinduism—vast and complex—is not so much a religion as a subtly unified mass of spiritual thought, realisation, and aspiration. The spiritual motive will be the originating and dominating strain of India. All great movements in India have begun with a new spiritual thought and a new religious activity. The Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, and the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movements are recent examples of a wide synthesis of Vedic philosophy, spiritual experiences, asceticism, humanitarianism, and a missionary zeal. Spiritual experience, not critical intellect, is the source from which a true Indian philosophy can evolve. The contact of European philosophy has not been fruitful of any creative reaction. The past philosophies of Europe have little of any utility in this direction— nothing of the first importance that India has not already stated in forms better suited to her own spiritual temper and genius.
Spiritual Motive
What does spiritual motive mean? It does not mean preparing for the monastery or moulding national life to suit a particular faith. Spirituality, much wider, represents man’s seeking, in all his activities, for the eternal, the divine, and the source of unity. The spiritual view holds that the mind, life, and body are man’s means and not his aims. It sees the infinite behind all things— a greater reality than the apparent. The mental, vital, aesthetic, and ethical parts are also expressions of the spirit. Art, poetry, politics, society, economy, and science, which take the spirit as the first truth, become a framework within which man can seek and grow into his real self and divinity. This is what we mean by the application of spirituality to life. From the spiritual point of view, intuition and inner experience are more vital than the reasoning intellect.
Europe is admitting the light of the East, but on the basis of her own thinking and living. We should be as faithful in our dealings with the Indian spirit and modern influences. India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and keeping to her own centre. Perhaps there was too much religion in one sense; the word is English and smacks too much of things external, such as creeds, rites, and external piety; there is no one Indian equivalent. If we define religion as following the spiritual impulse, then there is too little religion—not too much. The right remedy is not to belittle the agelong ideal of India but to give it a still wider scope.
The European idea is that religion and spirituality stand on one side while intellectual activity and practical life are on the other as two entirely different things. The spiritual idea of renaissance does not try to convert entire humanity into monastic ascetics. Spirituality must not belittle the mind, life, or body. There was never a national ideal of poverty in India as some would have us believe, nor was squalor the essential setting of her spirituality.
Morality ordinarily is a well-regulated individual and social conduct that keeps society going. But ethics in the spiritual point of view is a means of developing our action and character into the nature of the Godhead. Philosophy is, in the Western way, a dispassionate inquiry by reason into the first truths of existence, placed by the facts of science or by a scrutiny of the concepts of reason. The spiritual viewpoint places intuition and inner experience above reason and scientific observation. Philosophy organises knowledge data into a synthetic relationship to the one Truth. The primitive aim of art and poetry is to create images of man and nature that will satisfy the sense of beauty. In a spiritual culture, they become, with their aim, a revelation of the deepest spiritual and universal beauty.
We should correct what went wrong with us; apply our spirituality on broader lines; admit Western science and other modern ideas but on the basis of our own way of life, not abandoning our fundamental view of God, man, and Nature. There is no real quarrel; rather, these two things need each other to fill themselves into their complete significance.
India has the key to the knowledge and conscious application of ideals. She can now break down the barriers and give her spirit an ampler flight. She can give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling; the clue to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge. Whether she will rise or not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance, which is coming upon her, is the question of her destiny.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Sisirkumar Ghose writes in the introduction to the book: “In the meditation between life and spirit—the essence of the Indian civilisation and experiment—Sri Aurobindo has given us a passionate purpose, the hope of a generalised spiritual life or society in the true sense of the past.” This is the central point of the phenomenal work of Sri Aurobindo. Reading Sri Aurobindo’s essays evokes a joy and thrill beyond words. However, reading him can be a little difficult, especially for those in the modern era who are used to the idea of speed reading and rapid assimilation.
My personal view (I could be wrong here, of course) is that normally we tend to read, focusing on important words in a sentence and then constructing the whole sentence in the mind at a rapid pace. Modern-day sentences tend to be short too; hence, picking the important words and ignoring the link words seems to be the key to reading for most. This is the core challenge of reading Sri Aurobindo. He tends to write long sentences, and at regular intervals, a single sentence with plenty of commas, colons, semi-colons, and dashes constitutes a whole lengthy paragraph! Speed reading in the usual manner does not help here at all, and someone not truly exposed to his works would drop reading either due to loss of interest, patience, or both. My only solution is to read him slowly, word by word, and it is sure to make a tremendous impact. The power of Sri Aurobindo—the saint, poet, writer, freedom fighter, nationalist, and humanist—then emerges, leaving one amazed at the sheer brilliance of his divine writings. One question that comes up repeatedly, at least to me, is why and how did we miss him for so long?
A wonderful resource in recent times is the book “Reading Sri Aurobindo” by Gautam Chikermane and Devdip Ganguly, which is a beautiful introduction to the individual works of Sri Aurobindo. The essence of all his books has been dealt with in different chapters by a host of expert writers. It would not be a bad idea to read the relevant essay from this book before embarking on the most fulfilling journey into Sri Aurobindo’s world—a world that puts India at the centre of hope for the achievement of universal harmony and peace.
RANDOM MUSINGS 