A Centenary Tribute 492 pages 2004 Edition   Dr. Sachidananda Mohanty
English

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A Centenary Tribute Original Works 492 pages 2004 Edition   Dr. Sachidananda Mohanty
English

A Centenary Tribute

Books by Amal Kiran - Original Works A Centenary Tribute Editor:   Dr. Sachidananda Mohanty 492 pages 2004 Edition
English
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The Indian Intellectual and Making of Modern India

 

 

I

 

There is a particular appropriateness in writing a piece on the relation of the literary intellectual to the spiritual traditions of our country and the links between these to the idea of India. Amal Kiran's entire life was spent in engagement with these ideas. He saw himself as 'poetic' and 'philosophic' and able through the Grace of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother to comment on the political questions of the day. For him the life of the literary intellectual, for such we may characterise him to be, was not unrelated to public affairs, more especially to political questions which had a bearing on how one represented the idea of Indian nationhood. Amal Kiran was, moreover, a partisan of English, and was convinced about the significance of the language for India. It was a cultural asset for him and it was a fit instrument for the expression of the Indian soul. English had the plasticity and flexibility to embody the Indian genius which was essentially spiritual in its urge and synthesising in its character. "The synthetical and assimilative Indian genius", he wrote, "meets in the English tongue a multiplicity and pliancy of temper and tone which give that genius all the more chance of taking hold of this tongue for living self-expression." And again, "English promises, therefore, to be the expressive body par excellence of our true soul."

 

I find in Amal Kiran's outlook and his commitment to English a sympathetic statement of what many of us in the profession of English Studies in India have often felt but perhaps never so well expressed. Consequently, this essay is an attempt to give expression to my own reflections on the literary intellectual, for such I believe myself to be, and the


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response of the literary intellectual to important spiritual traditions of modern India and the way these traditions provided a foundation for the idea of India. An important feature of this discourse was that it was conducted in English and Amal Kiran's own Master, Sri Aurobindo was a key figure in this discourse. Sri Aurobindo is modern India's distinguished savant, thinker and poet and he carried out his task in the English language, for which he had the greatest admiration and respect. Savitri was an epic in English with mantric potency. To talk of the literary intellectual and the spiritual traditions which gave Indian nationhood a character is also consequently to acknowledge the significance of the English language in our scheme of things. As a scholar of English I am naturally enthusiastic about this.

 

To talk of spiritual traditions in our country in relation to our conception of nationhood generates a series of related enquiries. First is the question of culture. In a strict personal sense culture is an inward quality, a tendency to refine all that is gross or crude in ourselves and to move to higher and higher levels of awareness and consciousness. This is a continuing process and I suppose the end is always a notch or two away. I understand this movement as a progress but also as overcoming a decline. "Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home" says Wordsworth, and I do believe that human birth is a violation of an integrity that existed prior to it, that it is a dispersal of a unity, a refraction of the One into the Many, or to put it differently, it is an inexorable focus on the play of difference. The human quest, clearly, is to recover that sense of Unity which we have lost, to get back the Garden of Eden which we have willingly let go. The primary patterns of human experience as embodied in myth, folklore, pre-verbal artifacts and in the written word everywhere in the world are a testimony to this human experience of loss, desire and recovery. 'Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise Regained' remain central metaphors of the human experience.

 

At another level, culture is an external thing, a communal (using the term in its positive sense and divesting it of the superfoetation of dust that has gathered upon it, mostly


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pejorative in implication) matter. It is, as T.S. Eliot knew, a whole way of life of a people. Thus the manner in which way Ugadi Pacchadi is made and served, the items of costume one must possess for various social gatherings, the festivals we celebrate, the vigils we keep, the music and art, both highbrow and middlebrow, which we enjoy - the sum total of this is culture. It is an anthropological way of looking at culture and we would be well advised to keep in mind this dimension, the secular dimension of culture, if you like, while we grapple with the relation of inner culture with outer culture, the subjective life of the soul and the way this issues forth in creative acts of nation-building.

 

If culture is a related concern so is the vital question of the nature of the intellectual and the self representation of the intellectual. There is a view current in our circles that the intellectual must be a dissident, and dissent is seen as the prerogative of the Left. It is fashionable to speak of intellectual dissent in terms of cultural materialism, post-coloniality and of collectivities which together constitute the nation and its fragments. While acknowledging the important work done by such schools of opinion, I would nevertheless enter a caveat and assert that there can be a radicalism of the conservative kind which can also ask fundamental questions about our capitalist social organisation. Radicalism of the kind Burke represented or his spiritual heir in India, C.Rajagopalachari, is a legitimate response to our technologico-Benthamite civilisation, a civilisation now linked up with what is called economic liberalisation, globalisation and information technology. The intellectual, on this showing, is also a dissenter, but unlike his or her Left Wing counterpart is likely to draw on tradition and in the Indian context characteristically on Indian spiritual traditions for the analysis of modern Indian culture and society. After Rajaji we have not had a continuity of the profound form of conservatism he represented. A profound conservatism is radical, in the sense of being rooted. Yeats speaks of his ideal woman 'rooted in one dear perpetual place', and of radical


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innocence, ideas only a profound conservative can appreciate. The conservatism I am speaking of has this Yeatsian radical innocence. It has, besides, the following features:

 

(a) It believes in the continuity of a society and in its traditions, particularly spiritual traditions.

 

(b) Its focus on spiritual matters stems from its acceptance of a Transcendental Reality which, nevertheless, pervades and permeates life and the world.

 

(c) It accepts the fundamental proposition that all are equal in the eyes of God but it stops short of accepting that all are therefore equal in the world, though as I shall later assert, we must move towards a reordering of gender and caste relations in modern times. Such a move would not be a negation of a profound conservatism.

 

(d) The inequalities we see are fundamental to life. While we must naturally strive to do everything humanly possible to give succour to the disadvantaged, it must be clearly understood that a sentimental humanism or a naive humani-tarianism are no answers to human problems of inequality. A spiritual sense of human unity is a necessary part of a profound conservatism.

 

(e) Society is the secular or temporal manifestation of God's purpose. It is organised subtly and everyone has a place and a purpose in God's plan. The conservative imagination is teleological in character.

 

(f) Society has an organic unity and it should be the purpose of man to discover that unity.

 

(g) Overturning society in the name of revolution is , hardly the conservative idea of how men and women must conduct themselves in society. Evolution and the refinement of one's consciousness is a preferable ideal to revolution. Man is constantly Becoming.

 

(h) The conservative thinker is, therefore, vocal in the negation of laissez-faire capitalism and the evils of such a social organisation. Laissez-faire market-driven economies: breed an unrestrained materialism. 


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(i) Finally the conservative is likely to promote a coalition between classes. S/he is likely to accept Coleridge's views on a clerisy which will provide leadership in society and s/he is likely to see the middle-class insular mind as an obstacle to the necessary link the clerisy must have with the people who are rooted to the soil. Yeats with great acuteness saw the unity of the aristocrat and the beggar and was opposed to bankers, priests and clerks, who only distorted the integrity of the individual and of society.

 

To cut this part of the exploration short, it is my view then, that an intellectual defined by conservative impulses is likely to have a stake in nation-building, in culture both in its inward and external dimensions. Above all in his or her radical critique of culture and nationhood, he or she is more often than not going to draw on a usable past, a past informed by spiritual traditions. In Hindu India this is likely to mean choosing from the different Vedantic traditions or going away from Vedanta to embrace one or other heterodox Darsanas or philosophies current in India. In this essay I shall focus on the Vedantic dimensions, partly due to my Samskara, and partly because I do not feel qualified to speak of other theistic traditions like Islam or Christianity in India, and also I have little sympathy with heterodox theologies because of their denial of God. Also as a strategy I believe a personal narration or response has the advantage of coherence and intensity, and clearly it is impossible for me to detach my subjectivity from such an enquiry. My enquiry is, therefore, informed by a conservative impulse to draw from the past, particularly the recent past of the nationalist period, and to delineate its main features which will help us to define our idea of Indian nationhood.

 

By temperament and upbringing I am theistic and I believe that if I were to explore my own relations with the theistic forms of philosophy, I would, in a way, be focusing sharply on the related questions of culture, conservative intellectual-ism, the spiritual traditions of our land and our conception of


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the Indian nation. I shall therefore embark on this personal narrative by quickly surveying some important landmarks in the nineteenth century and twentieth century to show how modernity in India was implicated in our spiritual traditions. I am, of course, referring to the movement from Derozio to Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the establishment of the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, the Prarthana Samaj in Western India, the Arya Samaj in the North and the political, cultural and educational offshoots of these events. The Indian Renaissance, as it is called, is rooted in our spiritual traditions.

 

II

 

Ram Mohan Roy is rightly called the father of Indian nationalism but it is remarkable how much his work in the public domain depended on his inward apprehension of his spiritual provenance. He effected reforms in Hindu society because he had a non-sectarian view of his Vedic religion. In 181.4 he started the Atmiya Sabha which was a forerunner of the Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1828. These social and religious activities were to run parallel to the political regeneration he attempted to bring about. The Brahmo Samaj in its long history is inextricably linked to the nationalist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Roy called for the purification of the Hindu system which he felt retarded spiritual progress and national progress. He wrote: "I regret to say the system adhered to by the Hindus is not well-calculated to promote their political interest. The distinction of castes, introducing of divisions and sub-divisions among them, has entirely deprived them of political feeling, multitude of religious rites and ceremonies and the laws of purification have totally disqualified them from undertaking any difficult enterprise. It is, I think, necessary that some change should take place in their religion at least for the sake of the political advantage and social comfort." With this as his motivation, Roy sought to go back to the philosophical portion of his Vedic tradition and to reconcile it with the Unitar-


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ian views he had derived from his contact with English and American philosophers. The oneness of God and the oneness of man thus became his faith. It was to be a faith which would move the elite sections of Bengali society and generate a rich stock of social, educational, political and intellectual ideas in Bengal. This had an impact elsewhere in the country and perhaps it is no accident that many of the Bengalis who were associated with the Indian National Congress were also Brahmos by faith. We must not forget the important religious and social ideas which Brahmos like Keshab Chandra Sen or Sitanath Tattvabushan initiated nor those by non-Brahmos like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in reaction to the Brahmos. Tagore's Gora dramatises this aspect of Indian modernity and is perhaps one of the most illuminating of literary texts to emanate from Brahmoism.

 

If the Brahmos held sway in East India, the Arya-Samaj dominated the North and part of the West. Swami Dayanand Saraswati is another example of a person whose inner life reflected nation-building activity. In 1875 he established the Arya Samaj in Bombay and the Samaj spread to other parts of the country. His Satyarth Prakash is a defence of Vedic religion and is based on his philosophic interpretation of the Vedas. Dayanand accepted caste but deplored its modification. He did not accept caste as birth oriented. Instead he stressed moral character and projected a view of Varna as flexible and mobile. A person could become a Brahmin by his actions, or fall in the societal order due to despicable actions. Dayanand saw no sanction for untouchability in the Vedas or for the discrimination against women. He was the first to use the term Swarajya, and perhaps the first nationalist to advocate Swadeshi. Dayanand, in other words, anticipated the agenda of Indian nationalism and, in particular, one sees Gandhiji's non-violent Satyagraha as having many points in common with Dayanand's discourse of resistance to national ills, foreign hegemony and injustice. The point is that the nationalist in Dayanand cannot be separated from the expounder of Vedic philosophy.


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In the West of India too figures like Justice Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak furthered social and nationalist causes. While Ranade was a Rishi-like figure in his relation to Gokhale (he was also a friend of Dayanand) he was forward looking and saw Western education as a solution to Indian backwardness. Tilak resisted Ranade because nativism was at odds with Ranade's Westernised ways; but Gokhale who represented the middle path of moderation revered him, likening him to Eknath and Tukaram in his enthusiasm. Ranade was fired by a religious conviction about India's manifest destiny and acted on that belief, but it was Gokhale, the founder of the Servants of India Society who imbibed the best qualities of his mentor and who converted what he learnt into a Karma Yoga of service. An optimist, he believed in the perfectibility of man through social action. His was a syncretic philosophy, a life devoted to constitutional change. His was the liberal mind at its best and we need not doubt the spiritual foundations of this mind which were thoroughly Indian and which were embodied in institutions like the Prarthana Samaj. For him politics had to be spiritualised and the Servants of India Society attempted just that.

 

When we turn to Tilak we see religious passion fusing into an almost xenophobic and chauvinistic patriotism. Tilak was an agitator, a leader of the Extremists, a man of instinct and fervour. He wrote the Gita Rahasya, an original treatise on a text which many nationalists either were attracted to or commented upon. Today we see fundamentalist forces at work in our society and regrettably they draw inspiration from the fiery platform of Tilak. Tilak's sacrifice and assertion of Swaraj are important aspects of our national struggle but our point now is not whether Tilak was a force for good or bad but only that one cannot understand nationalist extremism without acknowledging the place of revivalist Hinduism in it. A corollary is the extremist movement in Bengal where the nation was transformed into Mother India and a whole tradition of Sakti and Tantrik worship underscored the recourse to violent revolutionary methods. I shall be referring to this later.


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I believe that in this somewhat potted survey I have said enough to demonstrate the intimate links nationalist discourse had with an Indian spiritual provenance. The two have to be seen together and to ignore these connections is completely to misread the main currents of modern Indian culture and nationhood. Lest I be misunderstood, the survey has touched only on Hindu traditions, but the work of Ferozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai Naoroji, of Badruddin Tyabji, of Pandita Rama Bai, of C.J. Andrews and Maulana Azad to take names at random, clearly speak of a multiplicity of religious traditions at work in our country. This pluralism is central to our culture and it is perhaps the most valuable lesson we have learnt about ourselves - that we are the proud inheritors of a catholic view of life where narrow religious and domestic walls will not negate our multiple identities, our pluralism and diversity. If I choose to speak of a Hindu theistic identity it is because I know that best. I certainly do not claim an exclusive status for it but would assert its centrality to nationalist consciousness.

 

III

 

Having outlined the salient features of India's Renaissance, I shall now undertake a somewhat personalised narrative to dramatise the conflicts of the contemporary cultural critic or intellectual engaging with questions of nationhood. The first conflict I want to dramatise is the question of writing in English. English, as McCully has shown, is deeply implicated in nationalist discourse. Our freedom was won with English but it is necessary to point out that there was always an uneasiness about it. Our modern literature is replete with instances of this conflict. However, the modern intellectual cannot wish away the presence of this language in our conceptual universe and I want to draw attention to the work done by many of our men of religion who, while they sought to explore their inner lives, almost always found a parallel with the national life. I refer to autobiographies by Yogananda


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Paramahamsa, Swarrti Rarndas, Purohit Swami and Gandhiji, not to speak of the deeply subjective writings of Sri Aurobindo. Mahatma Gandhi in The Story of My Experiments with Truth points out how Indians are not accustomed to write autobiographies which are Western in origin. He opts to speak of his life as a series of experiments with truth and I believe he succeeds in showing a life always in the process of becoming. Gandhiji wrote his work in Gujarati but it was translated into English and it is with the English work that I am presently concerned. It dramatises the dilemma of the modern Indian intellectual where one is compelled to clothe, in a foreign form, deeply felt Indian values. The conflict, I believe, is still central to the way the contemporary intellectual represents himself or herself and the nation. In Gandhiji, for example, the scene where he is describing his sinful cohabitation with his wife, when he should have been tending his dying father, implies that his sin cost him his father. This for me is a deeply felt Indian emotion. It blighted Gandhiji's life and his entire emphasis on Ahimsa and Satyagraha can be seen at one level as emanating from that one sinful episode in his life. But in the terms of my personalised argument, it is not Gandhiji's sin alone. It is mine and ours as well, because if there is one feature which one kind of the modern Indian intellectual grapples with it is this question of sin, of the claims of the body, of guilt about it. Gandhiji's impact has been so deep that the austerity and self-abnegation he practised has in turn informed the responses of the modern Indian intellectual. In anything this kind of modern Indian intellectual undertakes there is this deep distrust of the life of the senses, this revulsion for the body and its uses. To some extent it is also responsible for the general intellectual tendency often visible in University academicians to shy away from the world. And to add to this there was the other Gandhiji, the Gandhiji who saw in the Gita the message of Karma, of activity. The consequences, I believe, of a Gandhian philosophy, deeply rooted in the Gita's ethic of Karma, has been to ensure that the intellectual


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who is at the cutting edge of nation-building activity, will not allow emotion and instinct-free play. The consequences of Gandhianism are that a completely rational apprehension of the world has resulted in an inability to give freedom to the imagination. It has created a utilitarian, Puritanical mind set. This intellectual provenance must not be minimised because out of it, after all, came a Vinoba Bhave. I am not minimising the importance of Karma but the anti-aesthetic Gandhian way has in it the seeds of its own deconstruction because Man does not live by Duty alone. He or she needs Beauty too.

 

The attractive alternative to Gandhiji is, of course, Tagore. Tagore celebrated the senses and he represents for me the complement to Gandhiji in the modern Indian mind. Tagore's Brahmo background ensured that he would apprehend the unique and essential truths of Vedanta. But the poetry of the Vedic hymns and of the Upanishadic utterances convinced Tagore that the world ought not to be denied or negated. So Tagore engaged with Maya. The doctrine of Maya, as Ramakrishna Parama-hamsa has pointed out, has two sides to it. On the one hand Maya does mean illusion, the not-self, the false, the transient, whose evil influence on human beings we are daily witness to. According to this view one has to transcend Maya and reach out to the One behind the Many. Difference is evil, Unity is good. That clearly is a dominant view among a large number of people, but there is another view of Maya which Sri Ramakrishna advances and which Tagore held fast to and this stems from the realisation that the One pervades and permeates the universe, that the world, nay human existence, is nothing more than God's play, His Leela. Seen this way one accepts the world with all its contradictions and inconsistencies, one celebrates difference and plurality, recognising the play of diversity to be only the emanation of the One Self, the Godhead, from which we come.

 

Tagore's entire career offers the modern Indian intellectual an important balance to Gandhiji. It allows one to be in the world and to take interest in what is happening around


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one. Indeed Tagore's own institution building is based on his recognition of this principle of unity in diversity. And it is a lesson the modern Indian intellectual ought not to forget easily. Tagore's provenance owes not a little to the Vaisnavism practised in Bengal from Chaitanya's times. Bhakti of the Tagorean kind foregrounds Beauty and the aesthetic, and does have a link with texts as ancient as the Narada Bhakti Sutras, or Jayadeva's Gita Govinda. It celebrates the body and the world and takes delight in the plenitude and variety of nature. Bhakti itself is a democratising tendency and clearly broke through caste and ritualistic taboos. The great Azhwars and Nayanmars were not all Brahmins and many of them came from a working-class background. The sociology of Bhakti has been extensively commented upon but I wish to point to its twin features of intense personal feeling and intense community feeling, both of which exercised an important influence on Tagore. Tagore's example complements the Mahatma's. Both had a deeply felt inner life and in both, this inwardness co-existed with a deep concern for the people at large.Jn Gandhiji it took the form of an austere sense of Duty. In Tagore it took an aesthetic form, a love of Beauty and of God. Both Gandhi and Tagore together account for the best in modern intellectual life in India, and the modern Indian intellectual is likely to derive inspiration from both.

 

No modern intellectual with a spiritual cast of mind can escape the influence of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda and their disciples. Sri Ramakrishna represented a high point in Indian spirituality, the quintessential moment, the culmination of over five thousand years of experiment with Godliness in India. The remarkable thing about him was that he experimented with a variety of religious traditions, including Christianity and Islam, and effortlessly reached high levels of religious consciousness through these various religious traditions. The lesson the modern intellectual learns from Sri Ramakrishna is the les-son of a positive secularism, a catholic respect for the variety of religious experience. Once touched by the spirit of Sri


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Ramakrishna, no intellectual can accept the small minded-ness of religious sectarianism, the ignoble agenda of com-munalism, the destructive and divisive politics of casteism. Sri Ramakrishna was truly catholic. On this foundation of a catholic spirituality, Swami Vivekananda built an edifice of social and religious service. The Ramakrishna Mission and the Sarada Mission embody in themselves the spirit of their progenitors. Most important they are the living manifestations of Swami Vivekananda's burning patriotism born through personal Sadhana and sacrifice. A modern intellectual in India has much to learn about social service as an aspect of spiritual life from this particular tradition.

 

Anyone at all alert to the spiritual and cultural barometers of our times cannot but remember the contemporaneous presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Shirdi Sai Baba, Sri Ramana Maharishi and the Paramacharya of Kanchi. Each in his or her Sadhana, I believe, exemplified the ancient Indian truth about Satyagraha, self-abnegation, self-absorbed meditation, and the inward gaze. None escaped from the world but each established an original relationship with it. Each of them helped us to include the world and transcend it in one's scheme of things. I am thoroughly convinced that the Sadhana of these great souls provided a counterbalance to what Sri Aurobindo has referred to as the asuric forces which were in the ascendant in our times, the public face of which was world wars, revolutions, violence and nuclear conflagration. That we have not destroyed ourselves over and over again is because the spiritual energy these souls generated proved so invincible, that even Hitler and other Satan-driven figures retracted in the face of it. This is my article of faith and as an intellectual I am proud to wear it on my sleeve. Our men of religion were first-class patriots and their contribution to our freedom and our representation of nationhood cannot be over-emphasised.

 

In much of what I have said so far the relation of gender issues to the spiritual life has not been specifically addressed. Gender questions determine our imaginative conception of


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nationhood. Historically the nativist response to British colonial rule was to demarcate an essential, pure, subjective spiritual realm distinguished from the public, secular space. More often than not this subjective inner realm was feminised and the Nation was seen as taking its origin in a purely feminine space. Bankim Chandra exploited the symbolic potential of such a mind set and conceived of Bharata Mata and his heroines in Anand Math and Debi Chaudhurani are idealised versions of Indian womanhood. The modulation from this conception of the Indian woman informed by the spirit of Sita, Tara, Savitri and Mandodari, to India herself as woman, and the further linking of India as Mother with the Mother Goddess, was natural and inevitable. Sri Aurobindo's Bhawani Mandir is an articulation of this idea. As I pointed out earlier the Shakti cult in many parts of India provided the necessary spiritual foundations for this nationalist conception. And yet it is clear that while it might have served a useful purpose of arousing patriotic feelings when we were a subject race, it is a conception which is severely limited in a contemporary context. I have deep veneration for the traditional conception of Indian womanhood, but I am acutely aware of the human costs involved in the imposed self-abnegation on woman by a patriarchal social structure. From the profoundly conservative standpoint I have adopted I would expect the modern Indian intellectual to reorder these relations in order to preserve that which is valuable and reject that which is unacceptable today. Clearly gender relations must be based on equality, and this equality is based on spiritual foundations. Our myth of Siva and Sakti and our iconic representations of Ardhanariswara make for a positive and radical reinterpretation in favour of gender equality and opposition to sexual or other forms of exploitation. No less a person than Gandhiji has spoken in favour of the androgynous mind. There is something of the woman in every man and something of man in every woman and it is time that the binary opposition between men and women gives place to a transcendental conception of the essential


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unity of man and woman. To my mind, and the recent work by Lata Mani bears me out, Mother worship with all the colourful ritual and litany is an extremely potent weapon for a reorientation of gender relations. Woman worshipping the Mother acquires the attributes of Sakti. Man worshipping the Mother acquires the necessary humanity and veneration for Woman. These cannot but be positive contributions to nation-building.

 

Kancha Illaiah has made a bold effort to question Hindu values and practices in Why I am Not a Hindu ? Without going into the merits of his arguments we can concede that if Indian society has to be regenerated the social relations between castes will also have to be reordered. In a profoundly conservative sense I do not have any illusions that caste will disappear, but I do believe that it can be made relatively unimportant for our public life by taking our inspiration from the profoundly humanistic aspect of our spiritual traditions advanced by figures like Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and, of course, Mahatma Gandhi, all of whom focussed on the individual and promoted the quest for self-perfection. In such a discourse who cares if you are man or woman, Brahmin or Dalit? The subtle spiritual unity of individuals moving towards God will ensure a glorious future for this Karma Bhoomi of ours. The intellectual driven by a conservative quest to interpret the past for the sake of the present, thus, becomes a cultural analyst and that in turn has its obvious relationship with questions of nationhood. I am convinced that those of us in academic life would do well to study the immediate past of our nation and draw lessons for ourselves and society. The lessons, I am convinced, will only be positive ones. Amal Kiran's life was a spiritual Sadhana devoted to these concerns and these concerns were in profound ways realised in Sri Aurobindo's Vision of Man rising to the Divine and when the moment came, of Divinity descending on the aspirant. That Aurobindonian quest should be ours as well. Nothing less than a supra-mental consciousness should satisfy the intellectual and if the profoundly conservative intellectual makes the effort that ideal could be achieved.


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