The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

Preface

The essays collected here are cullings, retouched in a few places, from the editorial contributions, either openly avowed or under the pen-name "Libra", to the fortnightly review - recently converted into a monthly - Mother India. The opening words of the manifesto in the first number ran: "We are here to answer a grave need of the times. This country has gained independence, but it has not found its proper line of life. There is a welter of ideologies and our minds are divided. A host of parties has sprung up, each with a different aim. In the clash of parties the right destiny of India is forgotten ." For nearly five years Mother India has carried on its work of throwing light on the true Indian spirit and its role in the creation of a new world, From the material standpoint the work has been one of unique tenacity, for Mother India is the only contemporary journal which has intellectually and spiritually gone from strength to strength over a long period of time without practically any advertisement-revenue! And this record achievement is due to the idealism inspired by the greatest intellectual and spiritual figure of our age, Sri Aurobindo, whose many-sided world-vision was sought to be reflected in various ways in Mother India. Symbolic of that inspiration was the launching of this periodical as near as possible to February 21 in 1949, the seventy-first birthday of Sri Aurobindo's co-worker for the regeneration of mankind, the radiant personality who is known in the Pondicherry Ashram as the Mother.

Originally the publication did not intend to stand aloof from political controversies, as it does now after Sri Aurobindo's passing. But its attitude to politics - both national and international - was an uncommon one. "In the hubbub of political slogans," said the manifesto, "we bring a standard that is non-political. Though we shall never stop touching politics as also we shall never stop touching all that constitutes man's many-faceted life, we are not a political party. And our standard of judgment, by being essentially non-political and above all parties, will conduce

Page 16

to an impartiality, a freedom, a wideness, a depth of vision."

What this standard of judgment was and how it was organically connected with the national genius that we termed Mother India will be made clear in the course of the essays in this volume, though purely political problems form no part of their subject-matter. In general it may be summed up by saying that in every field of activity the aim was to criticise whatever militated against humanity's instinct of an evolving divinity within itself and to give the utmost constructive help to all that encouraged this instinct. To quote the manifesto again: "The Godhead secret within man is the truth of man and most keenly the truth of the Indian nation, the truth that has to be lived out as much as possible. Not for any lesser ideal do we launch our paper and only this highest ideal we have in mind when we take as our motto the ancient cry: 'Great is Truth and it shall prevail.'

Did this mean that we must be religious zealots, fanatics of a creed? Certainly not. That would have gone against the national genius itself of India the home of a widely synthesising spirituality.

A large liberality and a love of freedom were integral part of the ideal served by Mother India. And yet there was no leaning towards a doc trine of stark individualism: the divinity within, which was the truth to be served, would at the same time that it allowed diverse development provide the uniting and harmonising status and dynamis rendering such a leaning impossible, for it would stand for the manifestation of the one infinite Self of selves, the single all-integrating Mother-power to which the cosmos owes its life and its evolutionary élan. Egoistic fissiparousness was never to be encouraged ; the quest for the organised whole, for the collective existence, was deemed indispen sable. But what was envisage d in the quest was a unity without uniformity, a concord without monotony and always the movement was towards the inner as the foundation of the outer.

Here an important point must be made explicit. Mother India has striven to drive it home again and again. Though the inner is to be the foundation of the outer, the latter is not to be conceived as a superstructure of poor materials and paltry dimensions. Whatever leads to a conception of this kind is not completely in keeping with

the instinct of divinity. Among the forces that today work to dim this instinct, perhaps the most dangerous is the idea assiduously spread that it is unworldly and impoverishes earth-life. We have to admit that there has been a spiritual trend in India and elsewhere to look too much beyond the world and renounce earth-life. But it is not the only trend, and spirituality can be dynamic as so often spirituality has been in India as well as elsewhere. In fact, to make it dynamic as never before, with the help of a new principle and power of consciousness, is the whole effort of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The full flowering, the full richness of life on earth is their objective.

The world at the present moment is in no less need than the world when our Cultural Review started its career, of some concrete hold on profound spiritual realities, strengthened and directed by masters of mysticism and Yoga who do not merely argue about them but cultivate the vision and experience of them in the widest manner and put the vision and experience into relation with all issues and, in particular, cultural ones - that is to say, issues basic to the human situation. The recognition of this need has led readers of Mother India to ask for republication in book-form of editorial articles dealing in the main, directly or indirectly, with the bearing of the Aurobindonian vision and experience on such issues - and centrally on those aspects of them that are burning matter in the life of the country in which God-lovers and God-knowers have been most abundant but which today is passing through a dangerous cultural crisis whose right resolution is of the utmost importance to the world 's future.

1953

K. D. Sethna