On India
THEME/S
I
(After thirteen years in England where he received a thoroughly Western education, Sri Aurobindo returned to India on February 6, 1893, at the age of twenty. Bankim Chatterji's Anandamath, which contained "Bande Mataram," the hymn to the Motherland, had been published eleven years earlier. Swami Vivekananda had just come to the end of his first pilgrimage round India, and was preparing to sail for America. But it was going to take another dozen years for their call to their countrymen to find expression in the political field. For the present, the eight-year-old Indian National Congress, whose members were mostly drawn from the Anglicized upper classes of society, had full faith in British fair-mindedness and the "providential character" of British rule in India, and year after year swore its "unswerving allegiance to the British crown"; it was content with submitting petitions which were simply ignored by the Colonial rulers. There was another twelve years to go before the start of the open struggle for freedom in 1905, and twenty-five years before Mahatma Gandhi's entry on the political scene in 1918. Sri Aurobindo was twenty-one when he wrote a series of nine articles, "New Lamps for Old," in the Indu Prakash, a Marathi-English Bombay daily; in these articles, which had to be stopped following pressures on the newspaper's editor, Sri Aurobindo took stock of the prevailing situation and launched into a detailed and forceful criticism of the "mendicant policy" of the Congress. A few extracts:)
(After thirteen years in England where he received a thoroughly Western education, Sri Aurobindo returned to India on February 6, 1893, at the age of twenty.
Bankim Chatterji's Anandamath, which contained "Bande Mataram," the hymn to the Motherland, had been published eleven years earlier. Swami Vivekananda had just come to the end of his first pilgrimage round India, and was preparing to sail for America. But it was going to take another dozen years for their call to their countrymen to find expression in the political field. For the present, the eight-year-old Indian National Congress, whose members were mostly drawn from the Anglicized upper classes of society, had full faith in British fair-mindedness and the "providential character" of British rule in India, and year after year swore its "unswerving allegiance to the British crown"; it was content with submitting petitions which were simply ignored by the Colonial rulers. There was another twelve years to go before the start of the open struggle for freedom in 1905, and twenty-five years before Mahatma Gandhi's entry on the political scene in 1918.
Sri Aurobindo was twenty-one when he wrote a series of nine articles, "New Lamps for Old," in the Indu Prakash, a Marathi-English Bombay daily; in these articles, which had to be stopped following pressures on the newspaper's editor, Sri Aurobindo took stock of the prevailing situation and launched into a detailed and forceful criticism of the "mendicant policy" of the Congress. A few extracts:)
August 7, 1893
We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery.
*
* *
Page 9
August 21, 1893
Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.
August 28, 1893
I say, of the Congress, then, this—that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders;—in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed.
December 4, 1893
To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, * our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions,—while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.
___________ * References to two largely meaningless reforms that the Congress was at the time begging from the British rulers.
___________
* References to two largely meaningless reforms that the Congress was at the time begging from the British rulers.
Page 10
(On his return to India, Sri Aurobindo joined the Baroda State Service; from 1897 to early 1906 he taught French and English at the Baroda College, eventually becoming its principal. These years gave him a first-hand experience of the dismal condition of education in India and made him feel an acute need for a true national education.)
Early 1900s (?)
If the physical training it [the Indian University system] provides is contemptible and the moral training nil, the mental training is also meagre in quantity and worthless in quality In order for a student to get a degree let us make it absolutely necessary that he shall have a good education. If a worthless education is sufficient in order to secure this object and a good education quite unessential, it is obvious that the student will not incur great trouble and diversion of energy in order to acquire what he feels to be unnecessary. But change this state of things, make culture and true science essential and the same interested motive which now makes him content with a bad education will then compel him to strive after culture and true science.... We in India have become so barbarous that we send our children to school with the grossest utilitarian motive unmixed with any disinterested desire for knowledge; but the education we receive is itself responsible for this.......
It is a fundamental and deplorable error by which we in this country have confused education with the acquisition of knowledge Amount of knowledge is in itself not of first importance, but to make the best use of what we know. The easy assumption of our educationists that we have only to supply the mind with a smattering of facts in each department of knowledge and the mind can be trusted to develop itself and take its own suitable road is contrary to science,
Page 11
contrary to human experience Much as we have lost as a nation, we have always preserved our intellectual alertness, quickness and originality; but even this last gift is threatened by our University system, and if it goes, it will be the beginning of irretrievable degradation and final extinction.
The very first step in reform must therefore be to revolutionise the whole aim and method of our education.1*
Indian scholarship ... must clearly have one advantage [over the European], an intimate feeling of the language, a sensitiveness ... which the European cannot hope to possess unless he sacrifices his sense of racial superiority For to the European Sanskrit words are no more than dead counters which he can play with and throw as he likes into places the most unnatural or combinations the most monstrous; to the Hindu they are living things the very soul of whose temperament he understands and whose possibilities he can judge to a hair. That with these advantages Indian scholars have not been able to form themselves into a great and independent school of learning is due to two causes, the miserable scantiness of the mastery in Sanskrit provided by our universities, crippling to all but born scholars, and their lack of a sturdy independence which makes us over-ready to defer to European authority.2
___________ * See references at the end of the book.
* See references at the end of the book.
Page 12
(From 1900 onward, Sri Aurobindo began contacting revolutionary groups in Maharashtra and Bengal, and tried to coordinate their action with the help of his brother, Barindra Kumar Ghose, and Jatindranath Banerjee; at Sri Aurobindo's initiative, P. Mitter, Surendranath Tagore, Chittaranjan Das and Sister Nivedita soon formed the first secret council for revolutionary activities in Bengal. Although an effective coordination between the various groups remained elusive, some of them, such as P. Miner's Anusilan Samiti, played a considerable part in spreading the Nationalist ideal. Their chief weapon was the establishment of centres in numerous towns and villages, where young men were given intellectual, moral and physical training, and were inspired to work for India's liberation. Around this time, Sri Aurobindo wrote Bhawani Mandir, a pamphlet "for, the revolutionary preparation of the country." Thousands of copies of it were distributed clandestinely. A few excerpts:)
(From 1900 onward, Sri Aurobindo began contacting revolutionary groups in Maharashtra and Bengal, and tried to coordinate their action with the help of his brother, Barindra Kumar Ghose, and Jatindranath Banerjee; at Sri Aurobindo's initiative, P. Mitter, Surendranath Tagore, Chittaranjan Das and Sister Nivedita soon formed the first secret council for revolutionary activities in Bengal. Although an effective coordination between the various groups remained elusive, some of them, such as P. Miner's Anusilan Samiti, played a considerable part in spreading the Nationalist ideal. Their chief weapon was the establishment of centres in numerous towns and villages, where young men were given intellectual, moral and physical training, and were inspired to work for India's liberation.
Around this time, Sri Aurobindo wrote Bhawani Mandir, a pamphlet "for, the revolutionary preparation of the country." Thousands of copies of it were distributed clandestinely. A few excerpts:)
1905
India, the ancient Mother, is indeed striving to be reborn, striving with agony and tears, but she strives in vain. What ails her, she who is after all so vast and might be so strong? There is surely some enormous defect, something vital is wanting in us, nor is it difficult to lay our finger on the spot. We have all things else, but we are empty of strength, void of energy. We have abandoned Shakti and are therefore abandoned by Shakti. The Mother is not in our hearts, in our brains, in our arms.
The wish to be reborn we have in abundance, there is no deficiency there. How many attempts have been made, how many movements have been begun, in religion, in society, in
Page 13
politics! But the same fate has overtaken or is preparing to overtake them all. They flourish for a moment, then the impulse wanes, the fire dies out, and if they endure, it is only as empty shells, forms from which the Brahma has gone or in which it lies overpowered with Tamas and inert. Our beginnings are mighty, but they have neither sequel nor fruit.
Now we are beginning in another direction; we have started a great industrial movement which is to enrich and regenerate an impoverished land. Untaught by experience, we do not perceive that this movement must go the way of all the others, unless we first seek the one essential thing, unless we acquire strength.
Is it knowledge that is wanting ? We Indians, born and bred in a country where Jñāna has been stored and accumulated since the race began, bear about in us the inherited gains of many thousands of years.... But it is a dead knowledge, a burden under which we are bowed, a poison which is corroding us, rather than as it should be a staff to support our feet and a weapon in our hands; for this is the nature of all great things that when they are not used or are ill used, they turn upon the bearer and destroy him____
Is it love, enthusiasm, Bhakti that is wanting? These are ingrained in the Indian nature, but in the absence of Shakti we cannot concentrate, we cannot direct, we cannot even preserve it. Bhakti is the leaping flame, Shakti is the fuel. If the fuel is scanty how long can the fire endure ?...
The deeper we look, the more we shall be convinced that the one thing wanting, which we must strive to acquire before all others, is strength—strength physical, strength mental, strength moral, but above all strength spiritual which is the one inexhaustible and imperishable source of all the others. If we have strength everything else will be added to us easily and naturally. In the absence of strength we are like men in a dream who have hands but cannot seize or strike, who have feet but cannot run____
If India is to survive, she must be made young again. Rushing
Page 14
and billowing streams of energy must be poured into her; her soul must become, as it was in the old times, like the surges, vast, puissant, calm or turbulent at will, an ocean of action or of force.
Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.
For what is a nation ? What is our mother-country ? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha Mardini sprang into being from the Shakti of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity. The Shakti we call India, Bhawani Bharati, is the living unity of the Shaktis of three hundred million people, * but she is inactive, imprisoned in the magic circle of Tamas, the self-indulgent inertia and ignorance of her sons....
We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts, to be born again.... We need a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to its uttermost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilises the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.
___________ * The population of India, which at the time included present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh.
* The population of India, which at the time included present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Page 15
(From a letter Sri Aurobindo wrote in Bengali to his wife, Mrinalini Devi, in which he tried to explain to her the call he felt to work for his country's freedom; this letter was seized by the police a few years later and produced as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Case.)
August 30, 1905
While others look upon their country as an inert piece of matter—a few meadows and fields, forests and hills and rivers—I look upon my country as the Mother. I adore Her, I worship Her as the Mother. What would a son do if a demon sat on his mother's breast and started sucking her blood ?... I know I have the strength to deliver this fallen race. It is not physical strength—I am not going to fight with sword or gun —but the strength of knowledge... .3
Page 16
(Alarmed by the rising force of Bengali feeling against British rule, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, partitioned Bengal in 1905. This faithful application of the "divide-and-rule"policy aimed both at breaking the growing political agitation in Bengal and at using the Muslim-dominated East Bengal as the thin end of a wedge between Hindus and Muslims—a policy that was to culminate in the partition of India forty years later.
Bengal responded to its partition by massive and unanimous protests, in which many personalities took part, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Surendranath Banerji, Bepin Chandra Pal, Ashwini Kumar Dutt The ideal of Swadeshi, which called for the boycott of British goods, spread widely.
In March, 1906, Barin Ghose with a few others started the fiery Bengali weekly, the Yugantar, to which Sri Aurobindo contributed several articles. In August, B. C. Pal launched the famous English daily, the Bande Mataram; Sri Aurobindo joined it and soon took up its editorship, side by side with his behind-the-scenes activities with, among others, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai.
Day after day till May, 1908, Sri Aurobindo used the pages of the Bande Mataram to breathe inspiration, force and clarity of purpose into the nascent Nationalist movement; his first preoccupation, in the face of fierce opposition from the British authorities, the self-righteous Anglo-Indian press and most of the Congress Moderates, was in his own words "to declare openly for complete and absolute independence as the aim of political action in India and to insist on this persistently in the pages of the journal; [Sri Aurobindo] was the first politician in India who had the courage to do this in public and he was immediately successful. The [Nationalist] party took up the word Swaraj to express its own ideal of independence and it soon spread everywhere.........The greatest thing done in those years was the creation of a new spirit in the country. "4 The following passages are from the Bande Mataram.
Page 17
The true policy of the Congress movement should have been from the beginning to gather together under its flag all the elements of strength that exist in this huge country. The Brahman Pandit and the Mahomedan Maulavi, the caste organisation and the trade-union, the laborer and the artisan, the coolie at his work and the peasant in his field, none of these should have been left out of the sphere of our activities. For each is a strength, a unit of force; and in politics the victory is to the side which can marshal the largest and most closely serried number of such units and handle them most skill fully, not to those who can bring forward the best arguments or talk the most eloquently.
But the Congress started from the beginning with a misconception of the most elementary facts of politics and with its eyes turned towards the British Government and away from the people.
September 4, 1906
We objected so strongly to this measure [Bengal's Partition] because it was calculated to strike a serious blow at the political power of the Bengalee speaking race. Our second objection was that it was professedly wanted by the Government to create a Mahomedan province with Dacca as its capital, and the evident object of it was to sow discord between the Hindus and the Mahomedan s in a Province that had never known it in the whole history of the present British connection.... There is in [the present] agitation a consciousness of a new strength, the quickening of a new life, the inspiration of a new ideal. This agitation is not an agitation merely against Partition or against any other particular measure of the Government.... The attainment of
Page 18
absolute national autonomy,—it is this alone that will settle down this movement.... *
The idea that by encouraging Mahomedan rowdyism, the present agitation may be put down, is preposterous; and those who cherish this notion forget that the bully is neither the strongest nor the bravest of men; and [they think] that because the self-restraint of the Hindu, miscalled cowardice, has been a prominent feature of his national character, he is absolutely incapable of striking straight and striking hard when any sacred situation demands this. Nor has it been proved even in recent British-concocted disputes between Hindus and Mahomedans in different parts of India, that the mild Hindu is so absolutely helpless and incapable of defending his rights and liberties as he is painted to be by his foreign enemies.
September 13, 1906
The idea that the election of a Mahomedan President will conciliate the anti-Congress Mahomedans is a futility which has been repeatedly exposed by experience.
Ever since the birth of the Congress, those who have been in the leadership of this great National Movement have persistently denied the general public in the country the right of determining what shall and what shall not be said or done on their behalf and in their name. The delegates have been gathered from all parts of the country, not to deliberate upon public matters, but simply to lend their support to the decisions that had already been arrived at by secret conclaves of half a dozen men.
___________ * This is one of the first times, if not the first, that an Indian had the courage to publicly call for India's complete independence.
* This is one of the first times, if not the first, that an Indian had the courage to publicly call for India's complete independence.
Page 19
December 31, 1906
The leaders can only deserve reverence by acting in the spirit of the chief servants of their country and not in the spirit of masters and dictators.
April 5, 1907
Politics is the work of the Kshatriya and it is the virtues of the Kshatriya we must develop if we are to be morally fit for freedom.
April 8, 1907
We reiterate with all the emphasis we can command that the Kshatriya of old must again take his rightful position in our social polity to discharge the first and foremost duty of defending its interests. The brain is impotent without the right arm of strength.
April 13, 1907
We should be absolutely unsparing in our attack on whatever obstructs the growth of the nation, and never be afraid to call a spade a spade. Excessive good nature, chakshulajja [the desire to be always pleasant and polite], will never do in serious politics. Respect of persons must always give place to truth and conscience; and the demand that we should be silent because of the age or past services of our opponents, is politically immoral and unsound. Open attack, unsparing criticism, the severest satire, the most wounding irony, are all methods perfectly justifiable and indispensable in politics.
Page 20
We have strong things to say; let us say them strongly; we have stern things to do; let us do them sternly. But there is always a danger of strength degenerating into violence and sternness into ferocity, and that should be avoided so far as it is humanly possible.
April 16, 1907
There are periods in the history of the world when the unseen Power that guides its destinies seems to be filled with a consuming passion for change and a strong impatience of the old. The Great Mother, the Adya Shakti, has resolved to take the nations into Her hand and shape them anew. These are periods of rapid destruction and energetic creation, filled with the sound of cannon and the trampling of armies, the crash of great downfalls, and the turmoil of swift and violent revolutions; the world is thrown into the smelting pot and comes out in a new shape and with new features. They are periods when the wisdom of the wise is confounded and the prudence of the prudent turned into a laughing-stock____
The supreme service of Bankim [Chandra Chatterji] to his nation was that he gave us the vision of our Mother It is not till the Motherland reveals herself to the eye of the mind as something more than a stretch of earth or a mass of individuals, it is not till she takes shape as a great Divine and Maternal Power in a form of beauty that can dominate the mind and seize the heart that ... the patriotism that works miracles and saves a doomed nation is born....
It was thirty-two years ago that Bankim wrote his great song and few listened; but in a sudden moment of awakening from long delusions the people of Bengal looked round for
Page 21
the truth and in a fated moment somebody sang Bande Mataram. The Mantra had been given and in a single day a whole people had been converted to the religion of patriotism. The Mother had revealed herself.
April 23, 1907
Each nation must practise the political creed which is the most suited to its temperament and circumstances; for that is the best for it which leads most surely and completely to national liberty and national self-realisation.
May 11, 1907
In this grave crisis of our destinies let not our people lose their fortitude or suffer stupefaction and depression to seize upon and unnerve their souls. The fight in which we are engaged is not like the wars of old in which when the king or leader fell, the army fled. The King whom we follow to the wars today, is our own Motherland, the sacred and imperishable ; the leader of our onward march is the Almighty Himself, that element within and without us whom sword cannot slay, nor water drown, nor fire burn, nor exile divide from us, nor a prison confine.
Let there be no fainting of heart and no depression, and also let there be no un foreseeing fury, no blindly-striking madness. We are at the beginning of a time of terrible trial. The passage is not to be easy, the crown is not to be cheaply earned. India is going down into the valley of the shadow of death, into a great horror of darkness and suffering. Let us realise that what we are now suffering, is a small part of
Page 22
what we shall have to suffer, and work in that knowledge, with resolution, without hysteria The first need at the present moment is courage, a courage which knows not how to flinch or shrink.
May 23, 1907
Where the will of a higher Power is active in a great upheaval, no individual is indispensable.
May 28, 1907
We have to fill the minds of our boys from childhood with the idea of the country, and present them with that idea at every turn and make their whole young life a lesson in the practice of the virtues which afterwards go to make the patriot and the citizen. If we do not attempt this, we may as well give up our desire to create an Indian nation altogether; for without such a discipline nationalism, patriotism, regeneration are mere words and ideas which can never become a part of the very soul of the nation and never therefore a great realised fact. Mere academical teaching of patriotism is of no avail.
June 7, 1907
What India needs especially at this moment is the aggressive virtues, the spirit of soaring idealism, bold creation, fearless resistance, courageous attack; of the passive tamasic spirit of inertia we have already too much. We need to cultivate another training and temperament, another habit of
Page 23
mind. We would apply to the present situation the vigourous motto of Danton, that what we need, what we should learn above all things is to dare and again to dare and still to dare.
June 19, 1907
Apart from the natural attachment which every man has to his country, its literature, its traditions, its customs and usages, patriotism has an additional stimulus in the acknowledged excellence of a national civilisation. If Britons love England with all her faults, why should we fail to love India whose faults were whittled down to an irreducible minimum till foreign conquests threw the whole society out of gear? But instead of being dominated by the natural ambition of carrying the banner of such a civilisation all over the world, we are unable to maintain its integrity in its own native home. This is betraying a trust. This is unworthiness of the worst type. We have not been able to add anything to this precious bequest; on the contrary we have been keeping ourselves and generations yet unborn from a full enjoyment of their lawful heritage____
According to Sedgwick,* physical expansion proceeds from a desire for spiritual expansion and history also supports the assertion. But why should not India then be the first power in the world? Who else has the undisputed right to extend spiritual sway over the world? This was Swami Vivekananda's plan of campaign. India can once more be made conscious of her greatness by an overmastering sense of the greatness of her spirituality. This sense of greatness is the main feeder of
___________ * A writer who, defending British imperialism, spoke of "the justifiable pride which the cultivated members of a civilised community feel in the beneficent exercise of dominion and in the performance by their nation of the noble task of spreading the highest kind of civilisation [51c!]."
* A writer who, defending British imperialism, spoke of "the justifiable pride which the cultivated members of a civilised community feel in the beneficent exercise of dominion and in the performance by their nation of the noble task of spreading the highest kind of civilisation [51c!]."
Page 24
all patriotism. This only can put an end to all self-depreciation and generate a burning desire to recover the lost ground.
June 22, 1907
He is a leader in Bengal] has not the qualities of a politician —robustness, backbone, the ability to will a certain course of action and the courage to carry it out.... No man who shrinks from struggle or is appalled by the thought of aggression can hope to seize and lead the wild forces that are rising to the surface in twentieth-century India.
July 3, 1907
The East is more ancient by many thousands of years than the West, but a greater length of years does not necessarily imply a more advanced age Asia is long-lived, Europe brief, ephemeral. Asia is in everything hugely mapped, immense and grandiose in its motions, and its life-periods are measured accordingly. Europe lives by centuries, Asia by millenniums. Europe is parcelled out in nations, Asia in civilisations. The whole of Europe forms only one civilisation with a common, derived and largely second-hand culture; Asia supports three civilisations, each of them original and of the soil. Everything in Europe is small, rapid and short-lived; she has not the secret of immortality.
July 25, 1907
Spiritual power in the present creates material power in the future and for this reason we always find that if it is
Page 25
material force which dominates the present, it is spiritual which moulds and takes possession of the future----
Since the spiritual life of India is the first necessity of the world's future, we fight not only for our own political and spiritual freedom but for the spiritual emancipation of the human race For it is not among an enslaved, degraded and perishing people that the Rishis and great spirits can continue to be born.
Page 26
(On August 15, 1906, a few days after the start of the Bande Mataram, the Bengal National College had opened in Calcutta with Sri Aurobindo as its Principal; it was one of the first experiments in the search for a true national education. Its foundation had been made possible by the generous financial assistance of Subodh Mullick, one of Sri Aurobindo's collaborators in his secret action. In spite of his charge of the Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo found time to teach Indian history and geography, English history, political science, as well as French, German and English........ A year later, on August 16, 1907, the British government, alarmed by the spread and impact of the Bande Mataram, arrested Sri Aurobindo under a sedition law; he had turned thirty-five the day before. He owed his acquittal a month later to the government's failure to prove that he was the editor of the dreaded journal. It was then that Rabindranath Tagore wrote his famous poem to Sri Aurobindo, whom he saluted as "the voice incarnate, free, of India's soul." A few days after his arrest, Sri Aurobindo, released on bail, resigned his post of Principal of the Bengal National College. A few excerpts from a speech he delivered before the students and teachers, who had assembled to express their "heart-felt sympathy.")
(On August 15, 1906, a few days after the start of the Bande Mataram, the Bengal National College had opened in Calcutta with Sri Aurobindo as its Principal; it was one of the first experiments in the search for a true national education. Its foundation had been made possible by the generous financial assistance of Subodh Mullick, one of Sri Aurobindo's collaborators in his secret action. In spite of his charge of the Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo found time to teach Indian history and geography, English history, political science, as well as French, German and English........
A year later, on August 16, 1907, the British government, alarmed by the spread and impact of the Bande Mataram, arrested Sri Aurobindo under a sedition law; he had turned thirty-five the day before. He owed his acquittal a month later to the government's failure to prove that he was the editor of the dreaded journal. It was then that Rabindranath Tagore wrote his famous poem to Sri Aurobindo, whom he saluted as "the voice incarnate, free, of India's soul."
A few days after his arrest, Sri Aurobindo, released on bail, resigned his post of Principal of the Bengal National College. A few excerpts from a speech he delivered before the students and teachers, who had assembled to express their "heart-felt sympathy.")
August 23, 1907
When we established this college and left other occupations, other chances of life, to devote our lives to this institution, we did so because we hoped to see in it the foundation, the nucleus of a nation, of the new India which is to begin its career after this night of sorrow and trouble, on that day of glory and greatness when India will work for the world. What
Page 27
we want here is not merely to give you a little information, not merely to open to you careers for earning a livelihood, but to build up sons for the Motherland to work and to suffer for her. That is why we started this college and that is the work to which I want you to devote yourselves in future. What has been insufficiently and imperfectly begun by us, it is for you to complete and lead to perfection. When I come back I wish to see some of you becoming rich, rich not for yourselves but that you may enrich the Mother with your riches. I wish to see some of you becoming great, great not for your own sakes, not that you may satisfy your own vanity, but great for her, to make India great, to enable her to stand up with head erect among the nations of the earth, as she did in days of yore when the world looked up to her for light. Even those who will remain poor and obscure, I want to see their very poverty and obscurity devoted to the Motherland. There are times in a nation's history when Providence places before it one work, one aim, to which everything else, however high and noble in itself, has to be sacrificed. Such a time has now arrived for our Motherland when nothing is dearer than her service, when everything else is to be directed to that end Work that she may prosper. Suffer that she may rejoice. All is contained in that one single advice.
September 22, 1907
Caste was originally an arrangement for the distribution of functions in society, just as much as class in Europe, but the principle on which the distribution was based in India was peculiar to this country.... A Brahmin was a Brahmin not by mere birth, but because he discharged the duty of preserving the spiritual and intellectual elevation of the race, and he had to cultivate the spiritual temperament and acquire the spiritual training which could alone qualify him for the task.
Page 28
The Kshatriya was a Kshatriya not merely because he was the son of warriors and princes, but because he discharged the duty of protecting the country and preserving the high courage and manhood of the nation, and he had to cultivate the princely temperament and acquire the strong and lofty Samurai training which alone fitted him for his duties. So it was with the Vaishya whose function was to amass wealth for the race and the Sudra who discharged the humbler duties of service without which the other castes could not perform their share of labour for the common good........Essentially there was, between the devout Brahmin and the devout Sudra, no inequality in the single virat purusa [Cosmic Spirit] of which each was a necessary part. Chokha Mela, the Maratha Pariah, became the Guru of Brahmins proud of their caste purity; the Chandala taught Shankaracharya: for the Brahman was revealed in the body of the Pariah and in the Chandala there was the utter presence of Shiva the Almighty.........
Caste therefore was not only an institution which ought to be immune from the cheap second-hand denunciations so long in fashion, but a supreme necessity without which Hindu civilisation could not have developed its distinctive character or worked out its unique mission.
But to recognise this is not to debar ourselves from pointing out its later perversions and desiring its transformation. It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived. The spirit is permanent, the body changes; and a body which refuses to change must die. The spirit expresses itself in many ways while itself remaining essentially the same but the body must change to suit its changing environments if it wishes to live. There is no doubt that the institution of caste degenerated. It ceased to be determined by spiritual qualifications which, once essential, have now come to be subordinate and even immaterial and is determined by the purely material tests of occupation and birth. By this
Page 29
change it has set itself against the fundamental tendency of Hinduism which is to insist on the spiritual and subordinate the material and thus lost most of its meaning. The spirit of caste arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to dominate it instead of the spirit of duty, and the change weakened the nation and helped to reduce us to our present conditions.
October 7, 1907
This great and ancient nation was once the fountain of human light, the apex of human civilisation, the exemplar of courage and humanity, the perfection of good Government and settled society, the mother of all religions, the teacher of all wisdom and philosophy. It has suffered much at the hands of inferior civilisations and more savage peoples; it has gone down into the shadow of night and tasted often of the bitterness of death. Its pride has been trampled into the dust and its glory has departed. Hunger and misery and despair have become the masters of this fair soil, these noble hills, these ancient rivers, these cities whose life story goes back into prehistoric night. But do you think that therefore God has utterly abandoned us and given us up for ever to be a mere convenience for the West, the helots of its commerce, and the feeders of its luxury and pride? We are still God's chosen people and all our calamities have been but a discipline of suffering, because for the great mission before us prosperity was not sufficient, adversity had also its training; to taste the glory of power and beneficence and joy was not sufficient, the knowledge of weakness and torture and humiliation was also needed; it was not enough that we should be able to fill the role of the merciful sage and the beneficent king, we had also to experience in our own persons the feelings of the outcaste and the slave.
Page 30
October 23, 1907
There is a cant phrase which is always on our lips in season and out of season, and it is the cry for unity. We call it a cant phrase because those who use it, have not the slightest conception of what they mean when they use it, but simply employ it as an effective formula to discourage independence in thought and progressiveness in action. It is not the reality of united thought and action which they desire, it is merely the appearance of unity. ... It is a habit of mind born of the spirit of dependence and weakness. It is a fosterer of falsehood and encourages cowardice and insincerity. "Be your views what they may, suppress them, for they will spoil our unity; swallow your principles, they will spoil our unity; do not battle for what you think to be the right, it will spoil our unity; leave necessary things undone, for the attempt to do them will spoil our unity;" this is the cry. The prevalence of a dead and lifeless unity is the true index of national degradation, quite as much as the prevalence of a living unity is the index of national greatness.
December 6, 1907
[The British] began of course long ago, the attempt to make capital of the religious diversities of Indian society and recently the policy of setting the Mahomedans as a counterpoise to the Hindus has been openly adopted.* In the new Legislative Councils the Mahomedans are to have representation not as children of the soil, an integral portion of one Indian people, but as a politically distinct and hostile interest which will, it is hoped, outweigh or at least nullify the Hindus The Hindus have become self-conscious, they have heard a voice that cries
___________ * This policy led two years later to the Morley-Min to reforms (see pp. 62 & 64). The first meeting of the Muslim League was held at Karachi on December 29, 1907.
* This policy led two years later to the Morley-Min to reforms (see pp. 62 & 64). The first meeting of the Muslim League was held at Karachi on December 29, 1907.
Page 31
to them, "Arise from the dead, live and follow me," and they are irresistibly growing into a living and powerful political force.
The latest brilliant device [of the British bureaucracy] is an attempt to reshuffle the constituent elements of Indian politics and sort them out afresh on the basis not only of creed, but of caste [Caste] has not and should not be allowed to have any political meaning.
December 17, 1907
When the word of the Eternal has gone abroad, when the spirit moves over the waters and the waters stir and life begins to form, then it is a law that all energies are forced to direct themselves, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or against their will, to the one supreme work of the time, the formation of the new manifest and organised life which is in process of creation____
Nationalism* depends for its success on the awakening and organising of the whole strength of the nation; it is therefore vitally important for Nationalism that the politically backward classes should be awakened and brought into the current of political life; the great mass of orthodox Hinduism which was hardly even touched by the old Congress movement, the great slumbering mass of Islam which has remained politically inert throughout the last century, the shopkeepers, the artisan class, the immense body of illiterate and ignorant peasantry, the submerged classes, even the wild tribes and races still outside the pale of Hindu civilisation, Nationalism can afford to neglect and omit none----
What Nationalism asks is for life first and above all things;
___________ * Sri Aurobindo seldom used the words "Extremism" or "Extremist Party," which were the British government's and the Congress Moderates' derogatory designation of the Nationalist movement.
* Sri Aurobindo seldom used the words "Extremism" or "Extremist Party," which were the British government's and the Congress Moderates' derogatory designation of the Nationalist movement.
Page 32
life, and still more life, is its cry. Let us by every means get rid of the pall of death which stifled us, let us dispel first the passivity, quiescence, the unspeakable oppression of inertia which has so long been our curse; that is the first and imperative need.
Page 33
Sri Aurobindo presiding over the Nationalists'
conference at Surat. On his right is G. S. Khaparde;
on his left, standing, is B. G. Tilak.
(On December 27, 1907, the Nationalist party, with Sri Aurobindo presiding over its conference, broke away from the Congress Moderates at the tumultuous Surat session over the tatter's refusal to reaffirm the demands of Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott and National Education, which had been adopted at the previous Calcutta session under the presidentship of Dadabhai Naoroji. It was going to take the Congress another twenty-two years to declare complete independence for its goal.)
January 19, 1908
(A few days after the Surat events, Sri Aurobindo had in Baroda a first decisive experience, that of Nirvana or the Brahman consciousness. Henceforth all his activities, including his speeches and writings, flowed from an "absolute silence of the mind." On his way back to Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo was asked to speak at many places. A few excerpts from a speech he gave before a large gathering at the Mahajan Wadi in Bombay:)
(A few days after the Surat events, Sri Aurobindo had in Baroda a first decisive experience, that of Nirvana or the Brahman consciousness. Henceforth all his activities, including his speeches and writings, flowed from an "absolute silence of the mind."
On his way back to Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo was asked to speak at many places. A few excerpts from a speech he gave before a large gathering at the Mahajan Wadi in Bombay:)
Belief is not a merely intellectual process, belief is not a mere persuasion of the mind, belief is something that is in our heart, and what you believe, you must do, because belief is from God. It is to the heart that God speaks, it is in the heart that God resides.... Here is a work that you have undertaken, a work so gigantic, so stupendous, the means for which are so poor, the resistance to which will be so strong, so organised ... and what means have you with which to carry out this tremendous work of yours? If you look at it intellectually, it is hopeless.... This intellectual process, if it is used honestly, if it is followed to the very end, leads you to despair. It leads you to death.
Page 35
What is the one thing needful? What is it that has helped the older men [of the Nationalist movement] who have gone to prison ?... They have had one and all of them consciously or unconsciously one over-mastering idea, one idea which nothing can shake, and this was the idea that there is a great Power at work to help India, and that we are doing what it bids us.... They have this conviction within, not in the intellect but in the heart, that the Power that is guiding them is invincible, that it is Almighty, that it is immortal and irresistible and that it will do its work. They have nothing to do. They have simply to obey that Power. They have simply to go where it leads them. They have only to speak the words that it tells them to speak, and to do the thing that it tells them to do.... He himself is behind us. He himself is the worker and the work. He is immortal in the hearts of his people....
When you believe in God, when you believe that God is guiding you, believe that God is doing all and that you are doing nothing,—what is there to fear?... There is nothing to fear.... What can all these tribunals, what can all the powers of the world do to That which is within you, that Immortal, that Unborn and Undying One, whom the sword cannot pierce, whom the fire cannot burn, and whom the water cannot drown ? Him the jail cannot confine and the gallows cannot end. What is there that you can fear when you are conscious of Him who is within you? Courage is then a necessity, courage is natural and courage is inevitable.... You are protected through life and death by One who survives in the very hour of death, you feel your immortality in the hour of your worst sufferings, you feel you are invincible....
Try to realise the strength within you, try to bring it forward, so that everything you do may be not your own doing, but the doing of that Truth within you. Try so that every hour that you live shall be enlightened by that presence, that every thought of yours shall be inspired from that one fountain of inspiration, that every faculty and quality in you may be
Page 36
placed at the service of that immortal Power within you The leader is within yourselves.
February 19, 1908
When a great people rises from the dust, what mantra is the sanjivani mantra* or what power is the resurrecting force of its resurgence? In India there are two great mantras, the mantra of "Bande Mataram" which is the public and universal cry of awakened love of Motherland, and there is another more secret and mystic which is not yet revealed.
February 20, 1908
Truth is the rock on which the world is built. Satyena testate jagat. Falsehood can never be the true source of strength. When falsehood is at the root of a movement, that movement is doomed to failure. Diplomacy can only help a movement if the movement proceeds upon truth. To make diplomacy the root-principle is to contravene the laws of existence.
February 22, 1908
Whatever plans we may make, we shall find quite useless when the time for action comes. Revolutions are always full of surprises, and whoever thinks he can play chess with a revolution will soon find how terrible is the grasp of God and how insignificant the human reason before the whirlwind of
__________ * A mantra capable of bringing a dead man back to life.
__________
* A mantra capable of bringing a dead man back to life.
Page 37
His breath. That man only is likely to dominate the chances of a Revolution, who makes no plans but preserves his heart pure for the will of God to declare itself. The great rule of life is to have no schemes but one unalterable purpose. If the will is fixed on the purpose it sets itself to accomplish, then circumstances will suggest the right course; but the schemer finds himself always tripped up by the unexpected.
February 24, 1908
National education cannot be defined briefly in one or two sentences, but we may describe it tentatively as the education which starting with the past and making full use of the present builds up a great nation. Whoever wishes to cut off the nation from its past is no friend of our national growth. Whoever fails to take advantage of the present is losing us the battle of life. We must therefore save for India all that she has stored up of knowledge, character and noble thought in her immemorial past. We must acquire for her the best knowledge that Europe can give her and assimilate it to her own peculiar type of national temperament. We must introduce the best methods of teaching humanity has developed, whether modern or ancient. And all these we must harmonise into a system which will be impregnated with the spirit of self-reliance so as to build up men and not machines..........
March 5, 1908
India is the guru of the nations, the physician of the human soul in its profounder maladies; she is destined once more to new-mould the life of the world....
Page 38
March 6, 1908
When the poison of Western education was first poured into our veins, it had its immediate effect, and the Hindus [of Bengal], who were then the majority of the Bengali-speaking population, began to stream away from the village to the town.......
Only the race which does not sacrifice the soundness of its rural root of life to the urban brilliance of its foliage and flowering, is in a sound condition and certain of permanence We must now turn to the one field of work in this direction which we have most neglected, the field of agriculture. The return to the land is as essential to our salvation as the development of Swadeshi or the fight against famine. If we train our young men to go back to the fields, they will be able to become mentors, leaders and examples to the village population.... The problem is urgent in its call for a solution, and the mere organisation of village associations will be only partially effective if it is not backed up by a system of instruction which will bring the educated Hindu back to the soil as a farmer himself and a local leader of the peasantry of the race.
March 16, 1908
It has been said that democracy is based on the rights of man; it has been replied that it should rather take its stand on the duties of man; but both rights and duties are European ideas. Dharma is the Indian conception in which rights and duties lose the artificial antagonism created by a view of the world which makes selfishness the root of action, and regain their deep and eternal unity. Dharma is the basis of democracy which Asia must recognise, for in this lies the distinction between the soul of Asia and the soul of Europe.
Page 39
March 28, 1908
We are Hindus and naturally spiritual in our temperament, because the work which we have to do for humanity is a work which no other nation can accomplish The grand workshop of spiritual experiment, the laboratory of the soul has been India............
March 31, 1908
The increasing poverty of the masses has been the subject of innumerable pamphlets, speeches and newspaper articles, but we are apt to think our duty done when we have proved that the poverty problem is there; we leave the solution to the future and forget that by the time the solution comes, the masses will have sunk into a condition of decay from which it will take the nation many decades to recover. We have been accustomed to deal only with the economical side of this poverty, but there is a moral side which is even more important. The Indian peasantry have always been distinguished from the less civilised masses of Europe by their superior piety, gentleness, sobriety, purity, thrift and native intelligence. They are now being brutalised by unexampled oppression;* attracted to the liquor shops which a benevolent Government liberally supplies, bestialised by the example of an increasingly immoral aristocracy and gradually driven to the same habits of looseness and brutality which disgrace the European proletariats. This degeneration is proceeding
________________ * Sri Aurobindo is referring not only to the exactions of the Zamindars, but also to the British planters' cruel treatment of the peasantry and the ruthless imposition of high taxes which greatly impoverished it, often resulting in recurring famines. The huge drain of wealth to Britain from all fields of India's economic life was well documented at the time in Dadabhai Naoroji's Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1876), in Romesh Dutt's Economic History of India (1901), and in Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar's Desher Katha (1904); the last two books, in particular, had a great influence on the birth of the Swadeshi movement.
________________
* Sri Aurobindo is referring not only to the exactions of the Zamindars, but also to the British planters' cruel treatment of the peasantry and the ruthless imposition of high taxes which greatly impoverished it, often resulting in recurring famines. The huge drain of wealth to Britain from all fields of India's economic life was well documented at the time in Dadabhai Naoroji's Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1876), in Romesh Dutt's Economic History of India (1901), and in Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar's Desher Katha (1904); the last two books, in particular, had a great influence on the birth of the Swadeshi movement.
Page 40
with an alarming rapidity. In some parts of the country it has gone so far that recovery seems impossible.... We have heard of villages where the liquor shop and the prostitute, institutions unknown twenty-five years ago, have now the mastery of the poorest villagers. Many of the villages in West Bengal are now well supplied with these essentials of Western civilisation ..........These conditions of the worst districts tend to become
general and unless something is done to stem the tide of evil, it will sweep away the soul of India in its turbid current and leave only a shapeless monstrosity of all that is worst in human nature.
April 11, 1908
The Mother's feet are on the threshold, but she waits to hear the true cry, the cry that rushes out from the heart, before she will enter.... The Mother asks us for no schemes, no plans, no methods. She herself will provide the schemes, the plans, the methods better than any we can devise. She asks us for our hearts, our lives, nothing less, nothing more.
Regeneration is literally re-birth, and re-birth comes not by the intellect, not by the fullness of the purse, not by policy, not by change of machinery, but by the getting of a new heart, by throwing away all that we were into the fire of sacrifice and being reborn in the Mother. Self-abandonment is the demand made upon us. She asks of us, "How many will live for me ? How many will die for me ?" and awaits our answer.
April 12, 1908
Do not be afraid of obstacles in your path, it does not matter how great the forces are that stand in your way Do not
Page 41
think that anything is impossible when miracles are being worked on every side. If you are true to yourself there is nothing to be afraid of. There is nothing unattainable by truth, love and faith. This is your whole gospel which will work out miracles.
April 14, 1908
Distrust is the atmosphere of modern politics, mutual suspicion and hatred the secret spring of action. Under the fair outside of its material civilisation, a deep-seated moral disease is at work eating into the vitals of European society of which a thousand symptoms strike the eye If India follows in the footsteps of Europe, accepts her political ideals, social system, economic principles, she will be overcome with the same maladies. Such a consummation is neither for the good of India nor for the good of Europe. If India becomes an intellectual province of Europe, she will never attain to her natural greatness or fulfil the possibilities within her. Para dharmah bhayanaha, to accept the dharma of another is perilous; it deprives the man or the nation of its secret of life and vitality and substitutes an unnatural and stunted growth for the free, large and organic development of Nature. Whenever a nation has given up the purpose of its existence, it has been at the cost of its growth. India must remain India if she is to fulfil her destiny. Nor will Europe profit by grafting her civilisation on India, for if India, who is the distinct physician of Europe's maladies, herself falls into the clutches of the disease, the disease will remain uncured and un curable and European civilisation will perish as it perished when Rome declined, first by dry rot within itself and last by irruption from without.
Page 42
April (?), 1908
We knew so little of life that we expected others who lived on our service to prepare our freedom, so little of history that we thought reform could precede liberty, so little of science that we believed an organism could be reshaped from outside. We were ruled by shopkeepers and consented enthusiastically to think of them as angels. We affected virtues we were given no opportunity of assimilating and lost those our fathers had handed down to us. All this in perfect good faith, in the full belief that we were Europeanizing ourselves and moving rapidly toward political, social, economical, moral, intellectual progress. The consummation of our political progress was a Congress which yearly passed resolutions it had no power to put in practice, statesmen whose highest function was to ask questions which need not even be answered, councilors who would have been surprised if they had been consulted, politicians who did not even know that a Right never lives until it has a Might to support it. Socially we have initiated by a few petty mechanical changes a feeble attempt to revivify the very basis of our society, which [failed to] be equal to so high a task; a spiritual renovation was hardly even attempted; economically, we attained great success in destroying our industries and enslaving ourselves to the British trader; morally, we successfully compassed the disintegration of the old moral ideas and habits and substituted for them a superficial respectability; intellectually, we prided ourselves on the tricking out of our minds in a few leavings, scraps and strays of European thought at the sacrifice of an immense and eternal heritage. Never was an education more remote from all that education truly denotes____
British rule, Britain's civilising mission in India has been the record success in history in the hypnosis of a nation. It persuaded us to live in a death of the will and its activities, taking a series of hallucinations for real things and creating in ourselves the condition of morbid weakness the hypnotist
Page 43
desired, until the Master of a mightier hypnosis laid His finger on India's eyes and cried, "Awake." Then only the spell was broken, the slumbering mind realised itself and the dead soul lived again.*
The new [Nationalism] overleaps every barrier; it calls to the clerk at his counter, the trader in his shop, the peasant at his plough; it summons the Brahmin from his temple and takes the hand of the Chandala in his degradation; it seeks out the student in his College, the schoolboy at his book, it touches the very child in its mother's arms; and the secluded zenana has thrilled to its voice; its eye searches the jungle for the Santal and travels the hills for the wild tribes of the mountains. It cares nothing for age or sex or caste or wealth or education or respectability; it mocks at the talk of a stake in the country; it spurns aside the demand for a property qualification or a certificate of literacy. It speaks to the illiterate or the man in the street in such rude vigorous language as he best understands, to youth and the enthusiast in accents of poetry, in language of fire, to the thinker in the terms of philosophy and logic, to the Hindu it repeats the name of Kali, the Mahomedan it spurs to action for the glory of Islam. It cries to all to come forth, to help in God's work and remake a nation, each. with what his creed or his culture, his strength, his manhood or his genius can give to the new nationality. The only qualification it asks for is a body made in the womb of an Indian mother, a heart that can feel for India, a brain that can think and plan for her greatness, a tongue that can adore her name or hands that can fight in her quarrel [The new Nationalism] is the rebirth in India of the Kshatriya, the Samurai.5 Man is of a less terrestrial mould than some would have
________________ * An allusion to the 1905 awakening.
* An allusion to the 1905 awakening.
Page 44
him to be. He has an element of the divine which the practical politician ignores. The practical politician looks to the position at the moment and imagines that he has taken everything into consideration. He has indeed studied the surface and the immediate surroundings, but he has missed what lies beyond material vision. He has left out of account the divine, the incalculable in man, that element which upsets the calculations of the schemer and disconcerts the wisdom of the diplomat.6
The Nationalist never loses sight of the truth that law was made for man and not man for the law. Its chief function and reason for existence is to safeguard and foster the growth and happy flowering into strength and health of national life and a law which does not sub serve this end or which opposes and contradicts this end, however rigidly it may enforce peace, order and security, forfeits its claim to respect and obedience. Nationalism refuses to accept Law as a fetish or peace and security as an aim in themselves It will not prefer violent or strenuous methods simply because they are violent or strenuous, but neither will it cling to mild and peaceful methods simply because they are mild and peaceful. It asks of a method whether it is effective for its purpose, whether it is worthy of a great people struggling to be, whether it is educative of national strength and activity, and these things ascertained, it asks nothing farther.7
A certain class of minds shrink from aggressiveness as if it were a sin. Their temperament forbids them to feel the delight of battle and they look on what they cannot understand as something monstrous and sinful. "Heal hate by love, drive out injustice by justice, slay sin by righteousness" is their cry. Love is a sacred name, but it is easier to speak of love
Page 45
than to love The Gita is the best answer to those who shrink from battle as a sin and aggression as a lowering of morality.
It is a barren philosophy which applies a mechanical rule to all actions, or takes a word and tries to fit all human life into it. The sword of the warrior is as necessary to the fulfilment of justice and righteousness as the holiness of the saint. Ramdas is not complete without Shivaji. To maintain justice and prevent the strong from despoiling and the weak from being oppressed is the function for which the Kshatriya was created. Therefore, says Sri Krishna in the Mahabharata, God created battle and armour, the sword, the bow and the dagger.8*
________________ * This passage and the preceding one are from unpublished articles which the police seized at the time of Sri Aurobindo's arrest in May, 1908. These two articles were produced as evidence in the Alipore Bomb case, as the prosecution hoped to show that they were seditious and advocated violence to overthrow British rule in India.
* This passage and the preceding one are from unpublished articles which the police seized at the time of Sri Aurobindo's arrest in May, 1908. These two articles were produced as evidence in the Alipore Bomb case, as the prosecution hoped to show that they were seditious and advocated violence to overthrow British rule in India.
Page 46
(On May 2, 1908, following a failed assassination attempt on a British judge by revolutionaries belonging to Barin's secret society, Sri Aurobindo was arrested. The British were now confident of having a chance to silence forever "the most dangerous man we have to deal with at present."* While the famous Alipore Bomb trial went on, Sri Aurobindo, defended by Chit-taranjan Das, spent a year in jail, during which he had crucial experiences and revelations; as he wrote later, "Now the inner spiritual life and realisation which had continually been increasing in magnitude and universality and assuming a larger place took him up entirely and his work became a part and result of it and besides far exceeded the service and liberation of the country and fixed itself in an aim, previously only glimpsed, which was world-wide in its bearing and concerned with the whole future of humanity."" When after his acquittal on May 6, 1909, Sri Aurobindo came out of the "Alipore ashram," as he called it, the Bande Mataram had been stopped by the British, most of the Nationalist leaders jailed, deported or in self-imposed exile, and the few who remained were dispirited —the Nationalist movement was at a low ebb. Sri Aurobindo set about pouring fresh life into it, giving many speeches and starting a new English weekly, the Karmayogin, as well as a Bengali weekly, the Dharma. The following excerpts are from the Karmayogin. ________________ * Thus wrote Lord Min to, the then Viceroy of India, on Sri Aurobindo.9 Sir Edward Baker, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, concurred: "I attribute the spread of seditious doctrines to him personally in a greater degree than to any other single individual in Bengal, or possibly in India."10
(On May 2, 1908, following a failed assassination attempt on a British judge by revolutionaries belonging to Barin's secret society, Sri Aurobindo was arrested. The British were now confident of having a chance to silence forever "the most dangerous man we have to deal with at present."* While the famous Alipore Bomb trial went on, Sri Aurobindo, defended by Chit-taranjan Das, spent a year in jail, during which he had crucial experiences and revelations; as he wrote later, "Now the inner spiritual life and realisation which had continually been increasing in magnitude and universality and assuming a larger place took him up entirely and his work became a part and result of it and besides far exceeded the service and liberation of the country and fixed itself in an aim, previously only glimpsed, which was world-wide in its bearing and concerned with the whole future of humanity.""
When after his acquittal on May 6, 1909, Sri Aurobindo came out of the "Alipore ashram," as he called it, the Bande Mataram had been stopped by the British, most of the Nationalist leaders jailed, deported or in self-imposed exile, and the few who remained were dispirited —the Nationalist movement was at a low ebb. Sri Aurobindo set about pouring fresh life into it, giving many speeches and starting a new English weekly, the Karmayogin, as well as a Bengali weekly, the Dharma.
The following excerpts are from the Karmayogin.
* Thus wrote Lord Min to, the then Viceroy of India, on Sri Aurobindo.9 Sir Edward Baker, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, concurred: "I attribute the spread of seditious doctrines to him personally in a greater degree than to any other single individual in Bengal, or possibly in India."10
Page 47
May 30, 1909
(Extracts from the famous Uttarpara speech.)
When I approached God at that time [after Sri Aurobindo's return from England], I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptics was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion. * I felt there must be a mighty truth somewhere in this Yoga, a mighty truth in this religion based on the Vedanta. So when I turned to the Yoga and resolved to practise it and find out if my idea was right, I did it in this spirit and with this prayer to Him, "If Thou art, then Thou knowest my heart. Thou knowest that I do not ask for Mukti, I do not ask for anything which others ask for. I ask only for strength to uplift this nation, I ask only to be allowed to live and work for this people whom I love and to whom I pray that I may devote my life." I strove long for the realisation of Yoga and at last to some extent I had it, but in what I most desired I was not satisfied. Then in the seclusion of the jail, of the solitary cell I asked for it again, I said, "Give me Thy Adesh. I do not know what work to do or how to do it. Give me a message." In the communion of Yoga two messages came. The first message said, "I have given you a work and it is to help to uplift this nation. Before long the time will come when you will have to go out of jail; for it is not my will that this time either you should be convicted or that you should pass the time, as others have to do, in suffering for their country. I have called you to work, and that is the Adesh for which you have asked. I give you the Adesh to go forth and
________________ * It is important to note that Sri Aurobindo, in the Indian context, uses the word "religion" not in a narrow dogmatic sense, but always in the broader Hindu view of dharma (see for instance pp. 50 and 69).
* It is important to note that Sri Aurobindo, in the Indian context, uses the word "religion" not in a narrow dogmatic sense, but always in the broader Hindu view of dharma (see for instance pp. 50 and 69).
Page 48
do my work." The second message came and it said, "Something has been shown to you in this year of seclusion, something about which you had your doubts and it is the truth of the Hindu religion. It is this religion that I am raising up before the world, it is this that I have perfected and developed through the Rishis, saints and Avatars, and now it is going forth to do my work among the nations. I am raising up this nation to send forth my word.... When therefore it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall rise. When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the Dharma and by the Dharma that India exists...."
But what is the Hindu religion ? What is this religion which we call Sanatan, eternal ? It is the Hindu religion only because the Hindu nation has kept it, because in this Peninsula it grew up in the seclusion of the sea and the Himalayas, because in this sacred and ancient land it was given as a charge to the Aryan race to preserve through the ages.* But it is not circumscribed by the confines of a single country, it does not belong peculiarly and for ever to a bounded part of the world. That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose. This is the one religion that can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy. It is the one religion which impresses on mankind the closeness of God to us and embraces in its compass
________________ * Sri Aurobindo never subscribed to the absurd division between Aryans and Dravidians: "I regard the so-called Aryans and Dravidians as one homogeneous race," he wrote later in The Secret of the Veda. This point will be developed in further passages.
* Sri Aurobindo never subscribed to the absurd division between Aryans and Dravidians: "I regard the so-called Aryans and Dravidians as one homogeneous race," he wrote later in The Secret of the Veda. This point will be developed in further passages.
Page 49
all the possible means by which man can approach God. It is the one religion which insists every moment on the truth which all religions acknowledge that He is in all men and all things and that in Him we move and have our being. It is the one religion which enables us not only to understand and believe this truth but to realise it with every part of our being. It is the one religion which shows the world what the world is, that it is the Lila of Vasudeva. It is the one religion which shows us how we can best play our part in that Lila, its subtlest laws and its noblest rules. It is the one religion which does not separate life in any smallest detail from religion, which knows what immortality is and has utterly removed from us the reality of death....
I said [last year] that this movement is not a political movement and that nationalism is not politics but a religion, a creed, a faith. I say it again today, but I put it in another way. I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism____ The Sanatan Dharma, that is nationalism. This is the message that I have to speak to you.
June 19, 1909
We have said that brahmateja is the thing we need most of all and first of all. In one sense, that means the pre-eminence of religion; but after all, what the Europeans mean by religion is not brahmateja which is rather spirituality, the force and energy of thought and action arising from communion with or self-surrender to that within us which rules the world. In that sense we shall use it. This force and energy can be directed to any purpose God desires for us; it is sufficient to knowledge, love or service; it is good for the liberation of an individual soul, the building of a nation or the turning of a tool. It works from within, it works in the power of God, it
Page 50
works with superhuman energy. The reawakening of that force in three hundred millions of men by the means which our past has placed in our hands, that is our object.
The European is proud of his success in divorcing religion from life. Religion, he says, is all very well in its place, but it has nothing to do with politics or science or commerce, which it spoils by its intrusion; it is meant only for Sundays when, if one is English, one puts on black clothes and tries to feel good, and if one is continental, one puts the rest of the week away and amuses oneself But after all God does exist and if He exists, you cannot shove Him into a corner and say, "That is your place and as for the world and life it belongs to us." He pervades and returns. Every age of denial is only a preparation for a larger and more comprehensive affirmation.
It is an error, we repeat, to think that spirituality is a thing divorced from life It is an error to think that the heights of religion are above the struggles of this world. The recurrent cry of Sri Krishna to Arjuna insists on the struggle; "Fight and overthrow thy opponents!", "Remember me and fight!", "Give up all thy works to me with a heart full of spirituality, and free from craving, free from selfish claims, fight! Let the fever of thy soul pass from thee."
There is a mighty law of life, a great principle of human evolution, a body of spiritual knowledge and experience of which India has always been destined to be guardian, exemplar and missionary. This is the sanatoria dharma....
The European sets great store by machinery. He seeks to renovate humanity by schemes of society and systems of government; he hopes to bring about the millennium by an act of Parliament. Machinery is of great importance, but only as
Page 51
a working means for the spirit within, the force behind. The nineteenth century in India aspired to political emancipation, social renovation, religious vision and rebirth, but it failed because it adopted Western motives and methods, ignored the spirit, history and destiny of our race and thought that by taking over European education, European machinery, European organisation and equipment we should reproduce in ourselves European prosperity, energy and progress. We of the twentieth century reject the aims, ideals and methods of the anglicised nineteenth, precisely because we accept its experience. We refuse to make an idol of the present; we look before and after, backward to the mighty history of our race, forward to the grandiose history for which that destiny has prepared it____
We say to the nation: "It is God's will that we should be ourselves and not Europe. We have sought to regain life by following the law of another being than our own. We must return and seek the sources of life and strength within ourselves. We must know our past and recover it for the purpose of our future. Our business is to realise ourselves first and to mould everything to the law of India's eternal life and nature____"
We say to the individual and especially to the young who are now arising to do India's work, the world's work, God's work: "You cannot cherish these ideals, still less can you fulfil them if you subject your minds to European ideas or look at life from the material standpoint. Materially you are nothing, spiritually you are everything. It is only the Indian who can believe everything, dare everything, sacrifice everything. First, therefore, become Indians. Recover the patrimony of your forefathers. Recover the Aryan thought, the Aryan discipline, the Aryan character, the Aryan life. Recover the Vedanta, the Gita, the Yoga. Recover them not only in intellect or sentiment but in your lives Difficulty and impossibility will vanish from your vocabularies. For it is in the spirit that strength is eternal and you must win back
Page 52
the kingdom of yourselves, the inner Swaraj, before you can win back your outer empire.... Recover the source of all strength in yourselves and all else will be added to you, social soundness, intellectual pre-eminence, political freedom, the mastery of human thought, the hegemony of the world."
We do not fear Mahomedan opposition; so long as it is the honest Swadeshi article and not manufactured in Shillong or Simla,* we welcome it as a sign of life and aspiration. We do not shun, we desire the awakening of Islam in India even if its first crude efforts are misdirected against ourselves; for all strength, all energy, all action is grist to the mill of the nation-builder. In that faith we are ready, when the time comes for us to meet in the political field, to exchange with the Musulman, just as he chooses, the firm clasp of the brother or the resolute grip of the wrestler....
Of one thing we may be certain, that Hindu-Mahomedan unity cannot be effected by political adjustments or Congress flatteries. It must be sought deeper down, in the heart and in the mind, for where the causes of disunion are, there the remedies must be sought. We shall do well in trying to solve the problem to remember that misunderstanding is the most fruitful cause of our differences, that love compels love and that strength conciliates the strong. We must strive to remove the causes of misunderstanding by a better mutual knowledge and sympathy; we must extend the unfaltering love of the patriot to our Musulman brother, remembering always that in him too Narayana dwells and to him too our Mother has given a permanent place in her bosom; but .we must cease to approach him falsely or flatter out of a selfish weakness and cowardice. We believe this to be the only practical way of dealing with the difficulty. As a political question the
________________ * Seats of the British colonial government in India.
* Seats of the British colonial government in India.
Page 53
Hindu-Mahomedan problem does not interest us at all, as a national problem it is of supreme importance.
We shall never lose our fortitude, our courage, our endurance. There are some who think that by lowering our heads the country will escape repression.* That is not my opinion. It is by looking the storm in the face and meeting it with a high courage, fortitude and endurance that the nation can be saved. It is that which the Mother demands from us,—which God demands from us.
June 23, 1909
(From a speech at Bakergunj.)
There are times of great change, times when old landmarks are being upset, when submerged forces are rising, and just as we deal promptly or linger over the solution of these problems, our progress will be rapid or slow, sound or broken---- The problem is put to us one by one, to each nation one by one He has shown us the possibility of strength within us, and then He has shown us where the danger, the weakness lies. He is pointing out to us how is it that we may become strong. On us it lies ... to answer the question which God has put to us, and according as we answer on it depends how this movement will progress, what route it will take, and whether it will lead to a swift and sudden salvation, or whether, after so many centuries of tribulation and sufferings there is still a long period of tribulation and suffering before us. God has put the question to us and with us entirely it lies to answer.
________________ * Since the uprising that followed the partition of Bengal, the Colonial government's repression had become particularly cunning and ruthless.
* Since the uprising that followed the partition of Bengal, the Colonial government's repression had become particularly cunning and ruthless.
Page 54
June 25, 1909
(From a speech at Khulna.)
The virtue of the Brahmin is a great virtue. You shall not kill. This is what Ahimsa means. If the virtue of Ahimsa comes to the Kshatriya, if you say, "I will not kill," there is no one to protect the country. The happiness of the people will be broken down. Injustice and lawlessness will reign. The virtue becomes a source of misery, and you become instrumental in bringing misery and conflict to the people.
July 3, 1909
When confronted with the truths of Hinduism, the experience of deep thinkers and the choice spirits of the race through thousands of years, [the rationalist] shouts "Mysticism, mysticism!" and thinks he has conquered. To him there is order, development, progress, evolution, enlightenment in the history of Europe, but the past of India is an unsightly mass of superstition and ignorance best torn out of the book of human life. These thousands of years of our thought and aspiration are a period of the least importance to us and the true history of our progress only begins with the advent of European education!
July 17, 1909
There are particular movements in particular epochs in which the Divine Force manifests itself with supreme power shattering all human calculations, making a mock of the prudence of the careful statesman and the scheming politician.
Page 55
falsifying the prognostications of the scientific analyse and advancing with a vehemence and velocity which is obviously the manifestation of a higher than human force. The intellectual man afterwards tries to trace the reasons for the movement and lay bare the forces that made it possible, but at the time he is utterly at fault, his wisdom is falsified at every step and his science serves him not. These are the times when we say God is in the movement. He is its leader and it must fulfil itself however impossible it may be for man to see the means by which it will succeed.
July 24, 1909
Terrorism thrives on administrative violence and injustice; that is the only atmosphere in which it can thrive and grow. It sometimes follows the example of indiscriminate violence from above; it sometimes, though very rarely, sets it from below. But the power above which follows the example from below is on the way to committing suicide.
July 31, 1909
Our ideal is that of Swaraj or absolute autonomy free from foreign control. We claim the right of every nation to live its own life by its own energies according to its own nature and ideals. We reject the claim of aliens to force upon us a civilisation inferior to our own or to keep us out of our inheritance on the untenable ground of a superior fitness. While admitting the stains and defects which long subjection has induced upon our native capacity and energy, we are conscious of that capacity and energy reviving in us.
Page 56
August 7, 1909
The future belongs to the young. It is a young and new world which is now under process of development and it is the young who must create it. But it is also a world of truth, courage, justice, lofty aspiration and straightforward fulfilment which we seek to create. For the coward, for the self-seeker, for the talker who goes forward at the beginning and afterwards leaves his fellows in the lurch there is no place in the future of this movement. A brave, frank, clean-hearted, courageous and aspiring youth is the only foundation on which the future nation can be built.... God does not want falterers and flinchers for his work, nor does he want unstable enthusiasts who cannot maintain the energy of their first movements.
August 21, 1909
The spiritual force within not only creates the future but creates the materials for the future. It is not limited to the existing materials either in their nature or in their quantity. It can transform bad material into good material, insufficient means into abundant means. It was a deep consciousness of this great truth that gave Mazzini the strength to create modern Italy....
It is our hope that ... not only the political circumstances of India be changed but her deeper disease be cured and by a full evocation of her immense stores of moral and spiritual strength that be accomplished for India which Mazzini could not accomplish for Italy, to place her in the head and forefront of the new world whose birth-throes are now beginning to convulse the Earth.
Page 57
August 28, 1909
Strength attracts strength; firm and clear-minded courage commands success and respect; strong and straight dealing can dispense with the methods of dissimulation and intrigue. All these are signs of character and it is only character that can give freedom and greatness to nations.
We suppose in a bureaucracy it is inevitable that officials should be masters and be able to inflict inconvenience and loss on the citizen without any means of redress If officialdom were to acquire a common sense, the laws of Nature would be sadly contravened.
September 4, 1909
Every action for instance which may be objectionable to a number of Mahomedans is now liable to be forbidden because it is likely to lead to a breach of the peace, and one is dimly beginning to wonder whether the day may not come when worship in Hindu temples may be forbidden on that valid ground.
September 11, 1909
Action solves the difficulties which action creates. Inaction can only paralyze and slay The errors of life and progress are more exuberant and striking but less fatal than the errors of decay and reaction.
Page 58
September 18, 1909
The end of a stage of evolution is usually marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution .... The law is the same for the mass as for the individual. The process of human evolution has been seen by the eye of inspired observation to be that of working out the tiger and the ape. The forces of cruelty, lust, mischievous destruction, pain-giving, folly, brutality, ignorance were once rampant-in humanity, they had full enjoyment; then by the growth of religion and philosophy they began in periods of satiety such as the beginning of the Christian era in Europe to be partly replaced, partly put under control. As is the law of such things, they have always reverted again with greater or less virulence and sought with more or less success to re-establish themselves. Finally, in the nineteenth century it seemed for a time as if some of these forces had, for the time at least, exhausted themselves and the hour for samyama [rejection] and gradual dismissal from the evolution had really arrived. Such hopes always recur and in the end they are likely to bring about their own fulfilment, but before that happens another recoil is inevitable. We see plenty of signs of it in the reeling back into the beast which is in progress in Europe and America behind the fair outside of Science, progress, civilisation and humanitarianism, and we are likely to see more signs of it in the era that is coming upon us.
September 25, 1909
The debasement of our mind, character and tastes by a grossly commercial, materialistic and insufficient European education is a fact on which the young Nationalism has always insisted. The practical destruction of our artistic perceptions and the plastic skill and fineness of eye and hand
Page 59
which once gave our productions pre-eminence, distinction and mastery of the European markets, is also a thing accomplished. Most vital of all, the spiritual and intellectual divorce from the past which the present schools and universities have effected, has beggared the nation of the originality, high aspiration and forceful energy which can alone make a nation free and great. To reverse the process and recover what we have lost, is undoubtedly the first object to which we ought to devote ourselves. And as the loss of originality, aspiration and energy was the most vital of all these losses, so their recovery should be our first and most important objective. The primary aim of the prophets of Nationalism was to rid the nation of the idea that the future was limited by the circumstances of the present, that because temporary causes had brought us low and made us weak, low therefore must be our aims and weak our methods. They pointed the mind of the people to a great and splendid destiny, not in some distant millennium but in the comparatively near future To
raise the mind, character and tastes of the people, to recover the ancient nobility of temper, the strong Aryan character and the high Aryan outlook, the perceptions which made earthly life beautiful and wonderful, and the magnificent spiritual experiences, realisations and aspirations which made us the deepest-hearted, deepest-thoughted and most delicately profound in life of all the peoples of the earth, is the task next in importance and urgency. . . .
We must remember also why the degradation and denationalisation, "the mighty evil in our souls" of which the writer* complains, came into being. A painful but necessary work had to be done, and because the English nation were the fittest instrument for his purpose, God led them all over those thousands of miles of alien Ocean, gave strength to their hearts and subtlety to their brains, and set them up in
_____________ * Sri Aurobindo is referring to "The Message of the East," an article written by A. K. Coomarswamy in The Modern Review
_____________
* Sri Aurobindo is referring to "The Message of the East," an article written by A. K. Coomarswamy in The Modern Review
Page 60
India to do His work, which they have been doing faithfully, if blindly, ever since and are doing at the present moment. The spirit and ideals of India had come to be confined in a mould which, however beautiful, was too narrow and slender to bear the mighty burden of our future. When that happens, the mould has to be broken and even the ideal lost for a while, in order to be recovered free of constraint and limitation .... We must not cabin the expanding and aggressive spirit of India in temporary forms which are the creation of the last few hundred years. That would be a vain and disastrous endeavour. The mould is broken; we must remould in larger outlines and with a richer content. For the work of destruction England was best fitted by her stubborn individuality and by that very commercialism and materialism which made her the anti-type in temper and culture of the race she governed. She was chosen too for the unrivalled efficiency and skill with which she has organised an individualistic and materialistic democracy. We had to come to close quarters with that democratic organisation, draw it into ourselves and absorb the democratic spirit and methods so that we might rise beyond them We have to throw away the individualism and materialism and keep the democracy. We have to solve for the human race the problem of harmonising and spiritualising its impulses towards liberty, equality and fraternity.
October 2, 1909
An imitation of the forms and workings of the old Congress is also inadvisable. We were never satisfied with those forms and that working. The three days' show [i.e. the Congress sessions], the excessively festal aspect of the occasion, the monstrous preponderance of speech and resolution-passing over action and work, the want of true democratic rule and order, the weary waste of formal oratory without any practical
Page 61
use or object, the incapacity of the assembly for grappling with the real problems of our national existence and progress, the anxiety to avoid public discussion which is the life-breath of democratic politics, these and many other defects made the Congress in our view an instrument ill-made, wasteful of money and energy, and the centre of a false conception of political deliberation and action. If we imitate the Congress, we shall contract all the faults of the Congress.
November 6, 1909
(In 1909, the Morley-Minto Reform Scheme gave Indian Muslims a separate electorate to "reformed" legislative councils, in effect encouraging them to assert their separate identity.)
The question of separate representation for the Mahomedan community is one of those momentous issues raised in haste by a statesman unable to appreciate the forces with which he is dealing, which bear fruit no man expected and least of all the ill-advised Frankenstein who was first responsible for its creation. The common belief among Hindus is that the Government have decided to depress the Hindu element in the Indian people by raising the Mahomedan element, and ensure a perpetual preponderance in their own favour by leaning on a Mahomedan vote purchased by a system of preference. The denials of high-placed officials, who declare that it is only out of a careful consideration for the rights and interests of minorities that they have made special Mahomedan representation an essential feature of the Reform Scheme, have not convinced a single Hindu mind; for the obvious retort is that it is only one minority which is specially cared for and this special care is extended to it even in provinces where it is in a large majority. No provision at all has been made for the safe-
Page 62
guarding of Hindu minorities, for the Parsis, the Sikhs, the Christians and other sections which may reasonably declare that they too are Indians and citizens of the Empire no less
than the Mahomedans____
Our own attitude is clear. We will have no part or lot in reforms which give no popular majority, no substantive control, no opportunity for Indian capacity and statesmanship, no seed of democratic expansion. We will not for a moment accept separate electorates or separate representation, not because we are opposed to a large Mahomedan influence in popular assemblies when they come but because we will be no party to a distinction which recognises Hindu and Mahomedan as permanently separate political units and thus precludes the growth of a single and indivisible Indian nation. We oppose any such attempt at division whether it comes from an embarrassed Government seeking for political support or from an embittered Hindu community allowing the passions of the moment to obscure their vision of the future.
Dr. U. N. Mukherji recently published a very interesting brochure in which he tried to prove that the Hindus were a dying race and would do well to imitate the social freedom and equality of the still increasing Mahomedans....
The real truth is that, owing to an immense transition being effected under peculiarly un favorable conditions, both communities, but chiefly the more progressive Hindu, are in a critical stage in which various deep-seated maladies have come to the surface, with effects of an inevitable though lamentable character. None of these maladies is mortal and the race is not dying. But the knife of the surgeon is needed and it is to the remedy rather than the diagnosis that attention should be pointedly directed. The mere decline in the rate of increase is in itself nothing. It is a phenomenon which one now sees becoming more and more marked all the world
Page 63
over and it is only countries backward in development and education which keep up the old rate of increase. The unfit tend to multiply, the fit to be limited in propagation. This is an abnormal state of things which indicates something wrong in modern civilisation. But, whatever the malady is, it is not peculiar to Hindus or to India, but a world-wide disease.
The Mahomedans base their separateness and their refusal to regard themselves as Indians first and Mahomedans afterwards on the existence of great Mahomedan nations to which they feel themselves more akin, in spite of our common birth and blood, than to us. Hindus have no such resource. For good or evil, they are bound to the soil and to the soil alone. They cannot deny their Mother, neither can they mutilate her. Our ideal therefore is an Indian Nationalism, largely Hindu in its spirit and traditions, because the Hindu made the land and the people and persists, by the greatness of his past, his civilisation and his culture and his invincible virility, in holding it, but wide enough also to include the Moslem and his culture and traditions and absorb them into itself.
November 20, 1909
Not only class, as was formerly the case, but creed has been made the basis of representation [in the Morley-Minto reforms] and, therefore, unless the Hindus have the strength of mind to boycott a system which creates a distinction insulting as well as injurious to the community, this measure, while giving us not an atom of self-government, will be a potent engine for dividing the nation into two hostile interests and barring the way towards the unity of India. Formerly, there were only two classes in India, the superior European and the inferior Indian; now there will be three, the supreme European, the
Page 64
superior Mahomedan and the inferior Hindu. This is loss number one, and it is no small one, to the Mahomedan no less than the Hindu. The official of course gains.
In India ... we have been cut off by a mercenary and soulless education from all our ancient roots of culture and tradition....
The value attached by ancients to music, art and poetry has become almost unintelligible to an age bent on depriving life of its meaning by turning earth into a sort of glorified ant-heap or beehive.
The future is mightier than the past and evolution proceeds relentlessly in its course trampling to pieces all that it no longer needs. Those who fight against her fight against the will of God, against a decree written from of old, and are already defeated and slain in the karanajagat, the world of types and causes where Nature fixes everything before she works it out in the visible world.
November 27, 1909 ,
A purely scientific education tends to make thought keen and clear-sighted within certain limits, but narrow, hard and cold.... Man intellectually developed, mighty in scientific knowledge and the mastery of the gross and subtle nature, using the elements as his servants and the world as his footstool, but underdeveloped in heart and spirit, becomes only an inferior kind of asura using the powers of a demigod to satisfy the nature of an animal.
Page 65
December 11, 1909
Between them music, art and poetry are a perfect education for the soul; they make and keep its movements purified, self-controlled, deep and harmonious. These, therefore, are agents which cannot profitably be neglected by humanity on its onward march or degraded to the mere satisfaction of sensuous pleasure which will disintegrate rather than build the character. They are, when properly used, great educating, edifying and civilising forces.
December 25, 1909
The system of education which, instead of keeping artistic training apart as a privilege for a few specialists frankly introduces it as a part of culture no less necessary than literature or science, will have taken a great step forward in the perfection of national education and the general diffusion of a broad-based human culture. It is not necessary that every man should be an artist. It is necessary that every man should have his artistic faculty developed, his taste trained, his sense of beauty and insight into form and colour and that which is expressed in form and colour, made habitually active, correct and sensitive. It is necessary that those who create, whether in great things or small, whether in the unusual masterpieces of art and genius or in the small common things of use that surround a man's daily life, should be habituated to produce and the nation habituated to expect the beautiful in preference to the ugly, the noble in preference to the vulgar, the fine in preference to the crude, the harmonious in preference to the gaudy. A nation surrounded daily by the beautiful, noble, fine and harmonious becomes that which it is habituated to contemplate and realises the fullness of the expanding Spirit in itself____
Page 66
In India the revival of a truly national Art is already an accomplished fact and the masterpieces of the school can already challenge comparison with the best work of other countries.* Under such circumstances it is unpardonable that the crude formal teaching of English schools and the vulgar commercial aims and methods of the West should subsist in our midst. The country has yet to evolve a system of education which shall be really national. The taint of Occidental ideals and alien and unsuitable methods has to be purged out of our minds, and nowhere more than in the teaching which should be the foundation of intellectual and aesthetic renovation. The spirit of old Indian Art must be revived, the inspiration and directness of vision which even now subsists among the possessors of the ancient traditions, the inborn skill and taste of the race, the dexterity of the Indian hand and the intuitive gaze of the Indian eye must be recovered and the whole nation lifted again to the high level of the ancient culture—and higher.
Undated
We of today have been overpowered by the European tradition as interpreted by the English, the least artistic of civilised nations. We have therefore come to make on a picture the same demand as on a photograph,—the reproduction of the thing as the eye sees it.... The conception that Art exists not to copy, but for the sake of a deeper truth and vision, and we must seek in it not the object but God in the object, not things but the soul of things, seems to have vanished for a while from the Indian consciousness____
_____________________ * Sri Aurobindo is referring in particular to the remarkable artistic awakening which Bengal witnessed at the end of the nineteenth century, with the Tagore family providing its most talented leaders. This revival, however, could not resist the utilitarian onslaught and started fading away in the 1930s.
_____________________
* Sri Aurobindo is referring in particular to the remarkable artistic awakening which Bengal witnessed at the end of the nineteenth century, with the Tagore family providing its most talented leaders. This revival, however, could not resist the utilitarian onslaught and started fading away in the 1930s.
Page 67
Indian Art demands of the artist the power of communion with the soul of things, the sense of spiritual taking precedence of the sense of material beauty, and fidelity to the deeper vision within____
January 1, 1910
It is foolish to expect men to make great sacrifices while discouraging their hope and enthusiasm. It is not intellectual recognition of duty that compels sustained self-sacrifice in masses of men; it is hope, it is the lofty ardour of a great cause, it is the enthusiasm of a noble and courageous effort.
January 15, 1910
A bureaucracy is always inclined to be arrogant, self-sufficient, self-righteous and unsympathetic, to ignore the abuses with which it abounds....
Early 1910
There is no word so plastic and uncertain in its meaning as the word religion. The word is European____ The average Christian believes that the Bible is God's book, but ordinarily he does not consider anything in God's book binding on him in practice except to believe in God and go to Church once a week; the rest is only meant for the exceptionally pious. On the whole, therefore, to believe in God, to believe that He wrote a book,—only one book in all these ages,—and to go to Church on Sunday is the minimum of religion in Europe; on these essentials piety and morality may supervene and deepen the meaning.
Page 68
Religion in India is a still more plastic term and may mean anything from the heights of Yoga to strangling your fellow-man and relieving him of the worldly goods he may happen to be carrying with him. It would therefore take too long to enumerate everything that can be included in Indian religion. Briefly, however, it is dharma or living religiously, the whole life being governed by religion. But again what is living religiously ? It means, in ordinary practice, living according to authority. The authority generally accepted is the Shastra; but when one studies the Shastra and Indian life side by side, one finds that the two have very little to do with each other; the Indian governs his life not by the Shastra but by custom and the opinion of the nearest Brahmin. In practice this resolves itself into certain observances and social customs of which he understands neither the spiritual meaning nor the practical utility. To venerate the Scriptures without knowing them and to obey custom in their place; to reverence all Brahmins whether they are venerable or despicable; to eat nothing cooked by a social inferior; to marry one's daughter before puberty and one's son as soon as possible after it; to keep women ignorant and domestically useful; to bathe scrupulously and go through certain fixed ablutions; to eat on the floor and not at a table; to do one's devotions twice a day without understanding them; to observe a host of meaningless minutiae in one's daily conduct; to keep the Hindu holidays, when an image is set up, worshipped and thrown away, —this in India is the minimum of religion. This is glorified as Hinduism and the Sanatana Dharma. If, in addition, a man has emotional or ecstatic piety, he is a Bhakta; if he can talk fluently about the Veda, Upanishads, Darshanas and Puranas, he is a Jnani. If he puts on a yellow robe and does nothing, he is a tyaga or sannyasin. The latter is liberated from the ordinary dharma, but only if he does nothing but beg and vegetate. All work must be according to custom and the Brahmin. The one superiority of average Indian religion is that it does really reverence the genuine Bhakta or Sannyasin provided he does
Page 69
not come with too strange a garb or too revolutionary an aspect. The European almost invariably sets him down as a charlatan, professional religionist, idle drone or religious maniac.
The average Hindu is right in his conception of religion as dharma, to live according to holy rule; but the holy rule is not a mass of fugitive and temporary customs, but this, to live for God in oneself and others and not for oneself only, to make the whole life a sadhana the object of which is to realise the Divine in the world by work, love and knowledge.12
Page 70
(Early in 1910, the Colonial government took advantage of a few terrorist acts to stamp out all opposition, arrest and deport Nationalist leaders and pass increasingly tyrannical laws. There remained in the field the impotent Moderates on the one hand, and on the other fruitless and directionless violence. Simultaneously, there were more pressing portents that the government had finally decided to arrest Sri Aurobindo again, deport him under its draconian laws, and silence the Karmayogin. In mid-February, following news of an impending arrest, Sri Aurobindo received an Adesh to go to Chandemagore, then under French government. Leaving the Karmayogin office at once, he reached Chandemagore the next morning, where he remained for a month and a half, immersed in sadhana. Most of the following extracts are from articles he had written before leaving, or perhaps sent from Chandemagore to the Karmayogin, which he had left in the charge of Sister Nivedita. At the end of March, he received a second Adesh to go to Pondicherry. The last issue of the Karmayogin came out on April 2, 1910.)
February 19, 1910
Life creates institutions; institutions do not create, but express and preserve life. This is a truth we are too apt to forget. The Europeans and especially our Gurus, the English, attach an exaggerated importance to machinery, because their own machinery has been so successful, their organisation so strong and triumphant. In the conceit of this success they imagine that their machinery is the only machinery and that the adoption of their organisation by foreign peoples is all that is needed for perfect social and political felicity____ To take over those institutions and think that they will magically develop European virtues, force and robustness,
Page 71
or the vivid and vigorous life of Europe, is as if a man were to steal another's coat and think to take over with it his character. Have not indeed many of us thought by masquerading in the amazing garb which nineteenth century Europe developed, to become so many brown Englishmen ? This curious conjuring trick did not work; hatted, coated and pantalooned, we still kept the Chaddar and the Dhoty in our characters. The fond attempt to become great, enlightened and civilised by borrowing European institutions will be an equally disastrous failure.
But in Europe and India alike we seem to stand on the threshold of a vast revolution, political, social and religious. Whatever nation now is the first to solve the problems which are threatening to hammer Governments, creeds, societies into pieces all the world over, will lead the world in the age that is coming. It is our ambition that India should be that nation. But in order that she should be what we wish, it is necessary that she should be capable of unsparing revolution. She must have the courage of her past knowledge and the immensity of soul that will measure itself with her future.
Men see the waves, they hear the rum our and the thousand voices and by these they judge the course of the future and the heart of God's intention; but in nine cases out of ten they misjudge. Therefore it is said that in history it is always the unexpected that happens. But it would not be the unexpected if men could turn their eyes from superficies and look into substance, if they accustomed themselves to put aside appearances and penetrate beyond them to the secret and disguised reality, if they ceased listening to the noise of life and listened rather to its silence.
Page 72
February 26, 1910
The attempt to make boys moral and religious by the teaching of moral and religious text-books is a vanity and a delusion, precisely because the heart is not the mind and to instruct the mind does not necessarily improve the heart----
The danger of moral text-books is that they make the thinking of high things mechanical and artificial, and whatever is mechanical and artificial is inoperative for good----
You can impose a certain discipline on children, dress them into a certain mould, lash them into a desired path, but unless you can get their hearts and natures on your side the conformity to this imposed rule becomes a hypocritical and heartless, a conventional, often a cowardly compliance----
The first rule of moral training is to suggest and invite, not command or impose. The best method of suggestion is by personal example, daily converse and the books read from day to day. These books should contain, for the younger student, the lofty example of the past given, not as moral lessons, but as things of supreme human interest, and, for the elder student, the great thoughts of great souls, the passages of literature which set fire to the highest emotions and prompt the highest ideals and aspirations, the records of history and biography which exemplify the living of those great thoughts, noble emotions and aspiring ideals. This is a kind of good company, satsanga, which can seldom fail to have effect so long as sententious sermonising is avoided, and becomes of the highest effect if the personal life of the teacher is itself moulded by the great things he places before his pupils. It cannot, however, have full force unless the young life is given opportunity, within its limited sphere, of embodying in action the moral impulses which rise within it.
The events that sway the world are often the results of trivial circumstances. When immense changes and irresistible
Page 73
movements are in progress, it is astonishing how a single event, often a chance event, will lead to a train of circumstances that alter the face of a country or the world. At such times a slight turn this way or that produces results out of all proportion to the cause. It is on such occasions that we feel most vividly the reality of a Power which disposes of events and defeats the calculations of men. The end of many things is brought about by the sudden act of a single individual. A world vanishes, another is created almost at a touch. Certainty disappears and we begin to realise what the pralaya of the Hindus, the passage from one age to another, really means and how true is the idea that it is by rapid transitions long-prepared changes are induced. Such a change now impends all over the world, and in almost all countries events are happening, the final results of which the actors do not foresee. Small incidents pass across the surface of great countries and some of them pass and are forgotten, others precipitate the future.
March 5, 1910
A very remarkable feature of modern training which has been subjected in India to a reductio ad absurdum is the practice of teaching by snippets. A subject is taught a little at a time, in conjunction with a host of others, with the result that what might be well learnt in a single year is badly learned in seven and the boy goes out ill-equipped, served with imperfect parcels of knowledge, master of none of the great departments of human knowledge____
The old system was to teach one or two subjects well and thoroughly and then proceed to others, and certainly it was a more rational system than the modern. If it did not impart so much varied information, it built up a deeper, nobler and more real culture. Much of the shallowness, discursive lightness and fickle mutability of the average modern mind is due
Page 74
to the vicious principle of teaching by snippets. The one defect that can be alleged against the old system was that the subject earliest learned might fade from the mind of the student while he was mastering his later studies. But the excellent training given to the memory by the ancients obviated the incidence of this defect. In the future education we need not bind ourselves either by the ancient or the modern system, but select only the most perfect and rapid means of mastering knowledge.
In defence of the modern system it is alleged that the attention of children is easily tired and cannot be subjected to the strain of long application to a single subject. The frequent change of subject gives rest to the mind. The question naturally arises: are the children of modern times then so different from the ancients, and, if so, have we not made them so by discouraging prolonged concentration? ... A child of seven or eight, and that is the earliest permissible age for the commencement of any regular kind of study, is capable of a good deal of concentration if he is interested. Interest is, after all, the basis of concentration. We make his lessons supremely uninteresting and repellent to the child, a harsh compulsion the basis of teaching and then complain of his restless inattention ! The substitution of a natural self-education by the child for the present unnatural system will remove this objection of inability. A child, like a man, if he is interested, much prefers to get to the end of his subject rather than leave it unfinished. To lead him on step by step, interesting and absorbing him in each as it comes, until he has mastered his subject is the true art of teaching.
The mother-tongue is the proper medium of education and therefore the first energies of the child should be directed to the thorough mastering of the medium. Almost every child has an imagination, an instinct for words, a dramatic faculty, a wealth of idea and fancy. These should be interested in the literature and history of the nation. Instead of stupid and
Page 75
dry spelling and reading books, looked on as a dreary and ungrateful task, he should be introduced by rapidly progressive stages to the most interesting parts of his own literature and the life around him and behind him, and they should be put before him in such a way as to attract and appeal to the qualities of which I have spoken. All other study at this period should be devoted to the perfection of the mental functions and the moral character. A foundation should be laid at this time for the study of history, science, philosophy, art, but not in an obtrusive and formal manner. Every child is a lover of interesting narrative, a hero-worshipper and a patriot. Appeal to these qualities in him and through them let him master without knowing it the living and human parts of his nation's history. Every child is an inquirer, an investigator, analyzer, a merciless anatomist. Appeal to those qualities in him and let him acquire without knowing it the right temper and the necessary fundamental knowledge of the scientist. Every child has an insatiable intellectual curiosity and turn for metaphysical enquiry. Use it to draw him on slowly to an understanding of the world and himself. Every child has the gift of imitation and a touch of imaginative power. Use it to give him the ground-work of the faculty of the artist____ Teaching by snippets must be relegated to the lumber-room of dead sorrows.
March 26, 1910
The work that was begun at Dakshineshwar is far from finished, it is not even understood. That which Vivekananda received and strove to develop, has not yet materialised. The truth of the future that Bijoy Go swami hid within himself, has not yet been revealed utterly to his disciples. A less discrete revelation prepares, a more concrete force manifests, but where it comes, when it comes, none knoweth.
Page 76
(The following extracts are from Epistles from Abroad, written to an imaginary correspondent in India. Sri Aurobindo wrote these Epistles early in 1910 and probably intended to publish them in the Karmayogin, but could not owing to his abrupt departure from Calcutta. Some of the last extracts are from Epistles he wrote shortly after his arrival at Pondicherry.)
Dearly beloved.
Was life always so trivial, always so vulgar, always so loveless, pale and awkward as the Europeans have made it ? This well-appointed comfort oppresses me, this perfection of machinery will not allow the soul to remember that it is not itself a machine.
Is this then the end of the long march of human civilisation, this spiritual suicide, this quiet petrifaction of the soul into matter? Was the successful businessman that grand culmination of manhood toward which evolution was striving? After all, if the scientific view is correct, why not ? An evolution that started with the protoplasm and flowered in the orangutan and the chimpanzee, may well rest satisfied with having created hat, coat and trousers, the British Aristocrat, the American Capitalist and the Parisian Apache. For these, I believe, are the chief triumphs of the European enlightenment to which we bow our heads. For these Augustus created Europe, Charlemagne re founded civilisation, Louis XIV regulated society. Napoleon systematised the French Revolution. For these Goethe thought, Shakespeare imagined and created, St. Francis loved, Christ was crucified. What a bankruptcy! What a beggary of things that were rich and noble!
Europe boasts of her science and its marvels. But an Indian cannot content himself with asking like Voltaire, as the supreme question, "What have you invented?" His glance is
Page 77
at the soul; it is that into which he is accustomed to enquire. To the braggart intellect of Europe he is bound to reply, "I am not interested in what you know, I am interested in what you are. With all your discoveries and inventions, what have you become? Your enlightenment is great,—but what are these strange creatures that move about in the electric light you have installed and imagine that they are human?" Is it a great gain for the human intellect to have grown more acute and discerning, if the human soul dwindles ?
But Science does not admit the existence of soul. The soul, it says, is only an organised republic of animalcules, and it is in the mould of that idea Europe has recast herself;—that is what the European nations are becoming, organised republics of animalcules,—very intelligent, very methodical, very wonderful talking and reasoning animalcules but still animalcules. Not what the race set out to be, creatures made in the image of the Almighty, gods that having fallen from heaven remember and strive to recover their heritage. Man in Europe is descending steadily from the human level and approximating to the ant and the hornet. The process is not complete but it is progressing apace, and if nothing stops the debacle, we may hope to see its culmination in this twentieth century. After all our superstitions were better than this enlightenment, our social abuses less murderous to the hopes of the race than this social perfection.
It is a very pleasant inferno they have created in Europe, a hell not of torments but of pleasures, of lights and carriages, of balls and dances and suppers, of theatres and cafes and music-halls, of libraries and clubs and Academies, of National Galleries and Exhibitions, of factories, shops, banks and Stock Exchanges. But it is hell all the same, not the heaven of which the saints and the poets dreamed, the new Jerusalem, the golden city. London and New York are the holy cities of the new religion, Paris its golden Paradise of Pleasure.
It is not with impunity that men decide to believe that they are animals and God does not exist. For what we believe, that
Page 78
we become. The animal lives by a routine arranged for him by Nature; his life is devoted to the satisfaction of his instincts bodily, vital and emotional, and he satisfies himself mechanically, by a regular response to the working of those instincts. Nature has regularised everything for him and provided the machinery. Man in Europe arranges his own routine, invents his own machinery, and adds to the needs of which he is a slave, the intellectual. But there will soon be no other difference.
System, organisation, machinery have attained their perfection. Bondage has been carried to its highest expression, and from a passion for organising external liberty Europe is slaying her spiritual freedom. When the inner freedom is gone, the external liberty will follow it, and a social tyranny more terrible, inquisitorial and relentless than any that caste ever organised in India, will take its place. The process has already begun. The shell of external liberty remains, the core is already being eaten away. Because he is still free to gratify his senses and enjoy himself, the European thinks himself free. He does not know what teeth are gnawing into the heart of his liberty.13
It will be well when every Indian, instead of taking a warlike stamp from his foreign surroundings, is able to carry India with him wherever he goes. For that will mean that India is destined to conquer and place her stamp upon the whole world.14
For my part I see failure written large over all the splendid and ostentatious achievements of Europe. Her costliest experiments, her greatest expenditure of intellectual and moral force have led to the swiftest exhaustion of creative activity, the completest bankruptcy of moral elevation and discouraging of man's once infinite hope. When one considers how
Page 79
many and swift her bankruptcies have been, the imagination is appalled by the swiftness of this motor ride to ruin. The bankruptcy of the ideas of the French Revolution, the bankruptcy of utilitarian Liberalism, the bankruptcy of national altruism, the bankruptcy of humanitarianism, the bankruptcy of religious faith, the bankruptcy of political sincerity, the bankruptcy of true commercial honesty, the bankruptcy of the personal sense of honour, how swiftly they have all followed on each other or raced with each other for precedence and kept at least admirable pace. Only her many-sided science with its great critical and analytical power and all the contrivances that come of analysis, is still living and keeps her erect. There remains that last bankruptcy yet to come and when that is once over, what will be left ? Already I see a dry rot begun in this its most sap full and energetic part. The firm materialism which was its life and protection, is beginning also to go bankrupt, and one sees nothing but craze and fantasy ready to take its place.
A thousand newspapers vulgarise knowledge, debase aesthetical appreciation, democratize success and make impossible all that was once unusual and noble. The man of letters has become a panderer to the intellectual appetites of a mob or stands aloof in the narrowness of a coterie. There is plenty of brilliance everywhere, but one searches in vain for a firm foundation, the power or the solidity of knowledge. The select seek paradox in order to distinguish themselves from the herd; a perpetual reiteration of some startling novelty can alone please the crowd Of all literary forms the novel only has still some genius and even that is perishing of the modern curse of overproduction.
Learning and scholarship are unendingly active over the dead corpse of creative power as in Alexandria and with the later Romans before the great darkness.... Yesterday's opinion is today exploded and discarded, new fireworks of theory, generalisation and speculation take the place of the old, and
Page 80
to this pyrotechnic rushing in a circle they give the name of progress....
In a word, the whole of Europe is now a magnified Alexandria, brilliant forms with a perishing soul in imitation of the forms of health, feverish activity with no capital but the energy of the sickbed. One has to concede however that it is not altogether sterile, for all Europe and America pullulate with ever multiplying machinery.15
These hollow worm-eaten outsides of Hinduism crumbling so sluggishly, so fatally to some sudden and astonishing dissolution, do not frighten me. Within them I find the soul of a civilisation alive, though sleeping. I see upon it the consoling sentence of God, "Because thou hast believed in me, therefore thou shalt live and not perish." Also, I look through the garnished outsides, gaudy, not beautiful, pretentious, not great, boastful, not secure, of this vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe and I have seen written on the heart of its civilisation a sentence of death and mounting already from the heart to the brain an image of annihilation....
It is not in noble figures that she presents herself to my imagination, this sole enlightened continent, it is not fear or respect that they awaken in my mind, these civilised superior nations. I see a little girl wearing a new frock and showing herself off to Mamma and all the world, unable to conceal her pride and delight in the thought that never was a frock so new and nice or a little girl so pretty,—never was and never will be! I think of a very small boy to whom somebody has given a very big cane—one can see him brandishing it, executing now and then an exultant war-dance, tormenting, tyrannising over and plundering of their little belongings all the smaller boys he can get within his cane's reach, not displeased if they show a little fight so that he can exhibit his heroic strength of arm by punishing them. And then he adorns himself
Page 81
with glittering Victoria crosses and calls on all his associates to admire his gallant and his daredevil courage. Sometimes it reminds me of an old man, a man very early old, still strong in his decrepitude, garrulous, well-informed, luxurious, arrogant, intelligent, still busy toddling actively from place to place, looking into this, meddling in that, laying down the law dogmatically on every point under the sun; and through it all the clutch already nearing the brain, the shaking of the palsy already foreshadowed in tremulous movement and uncertain nerve. Very true, Europe, your frock is the cleanest and newest, for the present, your stick the biggest, your war-dance a very frightening spectacle,—frightening even to yourselves—with Krupp and Mauser and machine gun what else should it be, you are indeed for a while the robust, enlightened oldster you seem. But afterwards. Well, afterwards there will be a newer frock, a bigger stick, a war-dance much more terrible and a real Titan grasping at the earth for his own instead of the sham.16
Page 82
Home
Sri Aurobindo
Books
Compilations
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.