A Centenary Tribute

Is Progress Possible Without Culture?

SEVERAL readers are likely to find the title of this article rather superfluous. This author's impression was not different when the chief organiser of a seminar on the theme of culture asked him to answer this question in his inaugural address.

But, luckily, when at a casual meeting of a few intellectuals I casually introduced this subject, I woke up with a shock, taking careful note of their spontaneous reactions, that there could be highly divergent thinking on this apparently simple issue. The divergence could be articulated through two questions opposed to each other. One: Who doubts that culture is indispensable for progress? Two: What had culture to do with progress? If a team of scientists would tomorrow invent a strategy that would harness the law of gravitation to run the automobiles instead of oil or solar power, what would it matter whether they had a taste for classical music and Bharatnatyam or not?

By and by it dawned on me that much depends on what we understand by culture and what we understand by progress.

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between my house in a remote hamlet in Orissa and the sea lay a vast meadow, evergreen and ever quiet but for the majestic roar of the sea. Twilight spread an almost uncanny it serene calm over it.

A huge rainbow spanned the sky during one such twilight, its end appearing to have reached a cluster of trees not far from me, then a toddler aged four. To touch it, if not to grab and capture a palmful of it, must be an exciting achievement. I ran towards it, only to find that it receded farther

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and farther. Exhausted I stopped and before my yearning eyes the rainbow disappeared.

I was intrigued why the memory should surface in my mind, decades later, when I began reflecting on my current assignment: Culture. It did not take me long to realise why. To locate the foundation of culture was as chimerical a task as catching the rainbow. The exercise will only lead us farther and farther down time and the goal would continue to be elusive.

The governments have their ministries and departments of Culture and they are devoted to promoting literature, art, music, dance and allied activities. Starting from this, where Culture has a specific scope and the term's use has an indisputable justification, to its use as a euphemism for snobbery ("Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors," as the tradition was described by the French thinker Simone Weil in The Need of Roots), the term has several tiers of meaning. But broadly speaking it has two aspects - Culture as individual trait or traits and Culture as an identifiable trait or traits in the collective life of a community, society, race or nation. Needless to say, the traits in question are those that convey refined and ennobling thoughts, ideas and inspirations and their evidence in the conduct and actions of the people concerned.

With this scope of Culture in view, as said earlier, we can broadly identify two streams of it: individual and collective. Often an example in refinement or nobility set by an individual becomes a star to which the society hitches its wagon. Let us take the instance of King Harishchandra. He promised to grant anything a sage asked of him and to our horror (even to this day) we saw that there was no end to the sage's demands. The king, the queen and their little son are all reduced to slavery and are driven to the farthest point of a tragic denouement, but their steadfastness to their truth serves as the invincible boat, speaking figuratively, to tide them over what seems to be an ocean of despair. Over the

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millennia past a second Harishchandra might not have emerged (who knows, there might have been a few unknown and unsung), but at the collective plane the example had played an invaluable role in inspiring faith in man, in man's capacity to stick to truth despite adversity and great suffering.

Or take the example of Sir Philip Sidney and his immortal last words - "Thy need is greater than mine." Nobody (or could there be some?) who had read or heard of the episode could have remained unaffected by it. Thus we have numerous proofs to establish the fact that a collective refinement emanates from the individual refinement while the quality of the individual model's consciousness remains as inexplicable as the phenomenon of consciousness itself. Why were such models unlike any other self-centred man? Why must a Dadhichi, instead of enjoying life, sacrifice it so that the weapon to be made of his bone could destroy the elements hostile to civilisation? That of course is beyond the scope of the present treatment of the subject.

It is important to examine the relationship between Civilisation and Culture. Here is a poignant statement on the issue by Sri Aurobindo:

Even when a nation or an age has developed within itself knowledge and science and arts, but still in its general outlook, its habit of life and thought is content to be governed not by knowledge and truth and beauty and high ideals of living, but by the gross vital, commercial, economic view of existence, we say that that nation or age may be civilised in a sense, but for all its abundant or even redundant appliances and apparatus of civilisation it is not the realisation or the promise of a cultured humanity. Therefore upon even the European civilisation of the nineteenth century with all its triumphant and teeming production, its great developments of science, its achievement in the works of the intellect we pass a certain condemnation, because it has turned

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all these things to commercialism and to gross uses of vitalistic success. We say of it that this was not the perfection to which humanity ought to aspire and that this trend travels away from and not towards the higher curve of human evolution. It must be our definite verdict upon it that it was inferior as an age of culture to ancient Athens, to Italy of the Renascence, to ancient or classical India. For great as might be the deficiencies of social organisation in those eras and though their range of scientific knowledge and material achievement was immensely inferior, yet they were more advanced in the art of life, knew better its object and aimed more powerfully at some clear ideal of human perfection.¹

Cultured life can keep pace with the march of civilisation only if the demand for achieving perfection of the form does not sideline or ignore the spirit beneath the form. Take the case of the Indian classical dance. It has been accepted by the authorities and masters of the tradition - the belief going back to the most remote point of recorded history - that dance originated in Lord Shiva. "Among the greatest of the names of Shiva is Nataraja, Lord of Dancers, or King of Actors. The cosmos is His theatre, there are many different steps in his repertory, He Himself is actor and audience..." (Ananda Coomeraswamy: , The Dance of Shiva) All the classical dances began and matured as an offering to the deity, as a way of prayer or obeisance, as a Yajna or 'sacrifice'- be it with the Devadasi performing in ecstatic abandon all alone in the temple (as for hundreds of years, till the death of the last Devadasi in the eighties of the 20th century, in the temple of Sri Jagannath at Puri) or the devotee in a religious ritual. The stage, commercial or otherwise, on which it is presented today, is a long way from the sanctum sanctorum, but it is certainly much more elegant today and the dance proper far more accomplished. The number of artistes too has multiplied, thereby indicating the expanding

1. Social and Political Thought, SABCL, Vol. 15, pp. 84-85.

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popular interest in the art. Innovations have enriched the dance and have either complicated it or, according to some, simplified its original intricacy.

All this is fine provided the spirit of the dance is not ignored. If that is ignored, then it is merely an entertainment. There are entertainments and entertainments; some of them satisfy the subtle sense of Rasa; others entertain, titillate or amuse the superficial senses. "Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training," said Aldous Huxley. ("Beliefs", Ends and Means) We can replace 'suitable training' with an attitude kept alive by the inner culture.

Hence, despite all the glitter, popular applause and patronisation by the society and the administration, Culture may be absent in the performance of a cultural item. And it does not take long for a soul-less culture to become anti-culture. An abundance of such activities accompanied by hype may pass on as a wide cultural awakening, but that is deceptive and in combination with other decadent factors, culture in this sense can serve as yet another brand of fertilizer for breeding anarchy. It can neither be an experience of any higher order nor can work as catharsis.

Culture induces empathy. Take the case of Music and let me refer to a unique legend about its efficacy. Once when the great sage Narada, the link between the heavens and the earth, was returning to his abode Goloka through the Himalayas - the range of mountains that remains interspersed with a subtle passage to the supra-physical worlds - he chanced upon a beautiful lot of demi-godly beings, male and female, and enquired of them as to their identity. Reluctant to speak out at first, they were obliged to reveal that they were the Gandharvas and the Gandharvis, the presiding spirits behind the modes of music - the Ragas and the Raginis.

On a closer look Narada detected that each one of those beings, extremely charming though, had been maimed. If one had lost one limb, another had been bereft of another. A third one carried a visible wound.

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Intrigued, Narada probed into its cause. Once again unwilling to satisfy him, the beings had to come out with the explanation after all: Each time a musician sang or played his or her instrument with ego and pride or sang or played wrong, the presiding spirit of the Raga or Ragini concerned received a blow. Over the long passage of time, repeated blows had caused them the harm Narada witnessed.

The sage now realised why they were so reluctant to speak. The truth could embarrass Narada who was a musician himself!

Narada extracted from them the panacea for their plight. Only if they got a chance to listen to the perfect musician, they would become whole again.

Who was the perfect musician? Who but the creator of music - Lord Shiva again.

Narada approached the great God and requested Him for a performance for the benefit of the Candharvas and Gandharvis in distress. Shiva agreed, but on condition that He must have in His audience at least one perfect listener!

Who were the perfect listeners? There were only two -Lord Vishnu and Lord Brahma.

Narada met the two who were but too willing to oblige him, for an opportunity to listen to Shiva singing came but rarely.

The event took place with the two great Gods as well as all the other divinities and the Gandharvas and the Gandharvis constituting the grand audience. As Shiva started singing, spring came over the region, all were splashed with wonderful waves of delight and of course, the lost limbs were restored to the presiding spirits of music.

But something most unexpected happened too. Lord Vishnu became so completely identified with the flow of music that his aura melted and began to flow away. Lord Brahma, however, captured the flow in his Kamandalu and did not let it go waste. (That was the genesis of Ganga. Later He released it in heavens and later still Prince Bhagiratha

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brought it down to the earth. The Ganga is so very sacred because originally it is the melted form of Vishnu's aura.)

What is relevant in the context of our subject is the symbolism in the major part of the legend - how music can unite the listener with itself in the latter's calm meditative attention, how the imperfect and the disharmonious can be made perfect and harmonious - as it happened to the Gandharvas and the Gandharvis for music is auditory representation of the secret rhythm of harmony at the core of Creation.

What I said with the tradition of dance and music as examples, applies to every other visible manifestation of our cultural life - to literature, drama, art, et al. Despite all the sparkle in appearance the absence and ignorance of the spirit and purpose of culture in any one of its manifestations (be it literature, drama or music) will inevitably contaminate the rest, for if they have emerged out of a genuine culture, there is bound to be a bondage and harmony among them. There can be a negative harmony too - in their joint decadence. An observation by T.S. Eliot may be relevant here: "Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pur-sued for its own sake." (Notes towards the Definition of Culture)

From another angle (which does not contradict Eliot's) we can say that the right kind of cultural activities are the product of a harmonious state of the collective life.

Can there be a Manadanda, a measuring rod for culture -to determine whether it was on its right path or had deviated from it at any given time? The word in Sanskrit for Culture is Samskriti - a force in operation that leads from the gross to the subtle. There are certain processes that cannot always be put into the grip of a rigid definition. Our consciousness has a built-in capacity, an innate sense that can discriminate between what degrades us and what ennobles us. The pleasure derived from a degraded indulgence and the elevation, which Culture brings, can be instinctively differentiated. The former is followed by a sense of guilt if the

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person concerned is sufficiently advanced as human; if not he falls into a state of inertia, which in its turn is stalked by restlessness, depression and violent upheavals of raw pas sion. The latter (the elevation which Culture brings) culti vates right intelligence, poise and calm, the elements required for progress in consciousness.

Progress in consciousness - that is the purpose of our life's journey. Let me quote Sri Aurobindo again: 

The whole aim of a great culture is to lift man up to something which at first he is not, to lead him to knowl-edge though he starts from an unfathomable ignorance; to teach him to live by his reason, though actually he lives much more by his unreason, by the law of good and unity, though he is now full of evil and discord, by a law of beauty and harmony, though his actual life is a repulsive muddle of ugliness and jarring barbarisms, by some high law of his spirit, though at present he is egoistic, material, unspiritual, engrossed by the needs and desires of his physical being. If a civilisation has not any of these aims, it can hardly at all be said to have a culture and certainly in no sense a great and noble culture².

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The concept of Progress in no less subject to variations, if not confusion, than that of Culture. Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork, instead of bare fingers, while eating his human prey? - asked the-Polish author, Stanislaw Lec. Unfortunately, however improbable it may sound, the concept of progress, even for the greater part of the educated and the elite population, is merely a greater scope for hedonistic indulgence. More productions, new inventions and novel innovations are mostly patronised and controlled by consumerism. Such advancements can

2. The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, pp. 172-73.

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be called progress, but progress in a limited sense. Barring some experiments and drives in health care and some scientific explorations which are the outcome of an evolutionary urge in man to conquer obstacles on one hand and to outgrow himself on the other hand, a mere proliferation of human activities and changes in lifestyle do not indicate progress.

A review of the history of mankind will show that its real progress has been a progress in consciousness. From its primitive state to the present, mankind has, however imperfectly and however unconsciously, tried to rise from its animal-like existence into higher possibilities inherent in it. If that is progress, an aspiration very conscious and very determined, can alone be the basis for a charter for our further progress. Such an outlook can be moulded only by a sound culture marked by a harmony among the different aspects of our being and a harmony between the individual and the environment - both social and natural environment. Indeed, there can be no progress in the true sense of the term without a culture in the true sense of the term.

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