The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

How Shall We Grow in Greatness?

WITH the withdrawal of the British from India we got the feeling of a new life. There was a sense of bright beginnings, a sudden intensity of national consciousness as if we had just been born as a great country. Naturally, with freedom freshly won, we think of ourselves as a young people whose future is waiting to be moulded according to its heart's desires. And we are casting our eyes all around for examples and models to guide us in our endeavour to build a beautiful and prosperous India.

But let us not forget one basic fact. The feeling of youth that we have now is not due solely to our liberation from political bondage. No doubt, many hidden energies have found release by this liberation and their breaking forth is conducive to the sense of youth. Yet, when we reflect that we are the only nation in the world whose civilisation has continued alive for so many thousands of years, we cannot help wondering how after so long a history we can still feel young. Even the Chinese civilisation is more recent than ours. We go back and back into remote antiquity and we have come out into the living present with fundamentally the same consciousness travelling down the centuries. According to any computation we are extremely old and by now should feel utterly exhausted. The departure of the British from our shores should have left us only with happy relief at being allowed a peaceful death. Instead, we are full of dreams and are willing to dance on the edge of a hundred precipices. How is it that a song is on our lips and the heart in us is leaping forward to gigantic trials and passioning for a dear and difficult greatness?

Strange indeed that our interminable past should hang on us so lightly. Some eternal child seems to be laughing within the land. And it is this eternal child's laughter and not the falling of political chains that is the true cause of the delightful stir of life with which we are filled today. The falling of the chains has only given a fine edge to a youthfulness that is the very essence of the Indian nation.

If we realise this we shall stop looking merely around for

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patterns on which to erect our future. Of course, all that is nobly or usefully modern in the world of which we are a part must be accepted with gusto. There is nothing anywhere too foreign for us to allow assimilation of its central truth and purpose. Indeed our own nature is such that we can absorb a host of alien things without losing our typical quality. India is not a drab unity of culture: she is multiform, so much so that sometimes she is mistaken for a colossal colourful confusion. There is really no confusion but a many-sidedness through which yet runs a single secret strain. Both in body and mind she is a subtle persistent identity in the midst of a myriad variations. The variations, however, are as important as the underlying theme and as constitutive of the true character of us and therefore we should not hesitate to take in whatever in the modern scene draws our heart's genuine response. At the same time, in the light of the strange youthfulness that is our essence we should look back at our own history and attempt to understand how and why we are vigorously and hopefully what we are despite such a lengthy past trailing behind us.

Surely it is no accident that civilisations seeming equally rich and powerful as ours died and disappeared. There is only one view of the history of civilisations that can explain our survival and our youthfulness. It is the view put forth by Sri Aurobindo and formulable in no terms save the mystical. We must regard every nation, every large and distinguishable human collectivity, as a super-organism with a common body and mind. This super-organism, like the individual, passes through a cycle of birth, growth, adolescence, ripeness and decline. The decline generally ends in death. But there resides in the vast subtleties of the collective being of a people a power of self-renewal with the help of its inner life-idea. The inner life-idea is the key to a nation's psychology and is more tenacious than the outer form. If it is great and intense and the body is strong enough and the surface-mind plastic and adaptive without being loose or unstable, then the collective being can keep unimpaired through vicissitudes, even rise phoenix like out of an apparent perishing and one cycle will evolve into another and many cycles run their courses before the final collapse. Certain of the ancient civilisations had this

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kind of continuity and resurrection. But even they could not last indefinitely. For, the inner life-idea itself of a super-organism is only a projection of the authentic soul-principle behind, which is meant to serve as a vehicle of the eternal Spirit whose manifestation in time is the whole universe. The cosmic Self or Virat, as the Rishis called it, acting through its particularised representative, the soul-principle, is the true source and support of the inner life-idea of the collective being, as it is of the individual. And if this source and support is not sufficiently contacted in consciousness, the eternal is never brought with dominant effect into the temporal and ultimately comes dissolution or a fusion into other races.

But when there is a constant look into the Inmost, a persistent pressure upon the deepest and widest Self, a people acquires the secret of perpetual life-renewal and never ages, no matter how many millenniums pass, what foreign invasions interfere with its physical expression and what defects and decadences set in as a result of its own folly. Even death may threaten again and again, but every time a renascence occurs and the wrinkles straighten out, the stiff limbs recover healthy resilient tissue, the crust of dull habit and stifling conservative restraint breaks to reveal an enterprising and creative consciousness that was never moribund within. A people living not only with a keen and independent psychological stress rather than with a merely refined and superficially mentalised animal urge, a people living also in the experience of its profound soul-principle and thereby in the presence of Virat, the infinite Self of the cosmos seeking its own highest manifestation through human history, such a people never dies and is everlastingly young.

India is the one outstanding instance of a never-dying ever-resurgent collectivity. And the sooner she throws off the cloud of scepticism put by her recent intercourse with Europe upon so many of her intelligentsia, and quickens to her own profundities and sees as the Soul of her soul the supreme Godhead, the Divine World-Mother, the more apt will she be to use her acutely felt youthfulness today for genuine growth in greatness and for carrying to a still more glorious height than in the past the wonder of her perpetually young civilisation.

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