The Sun and The Rainbow

India and the Fate of Nations

A GLANCE AT THE CAREERS OF ANCIENT RACES

THROUGH SRI AUROBINDO'S EYES

According to Sri Aurobindo, every nation, every large and distinguishable human collectivity, is a super-organism, with a common or communal body, mind and soul. This super-organism, like the individual, passes through a cycle of birth, growth, youth, ripeness and decline. If the decline lasts long, it 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 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 behind, a principle of that soul's manifestation. This soul in turn is a manifestation and vehicle of the eternal Spirit whose expression in time is the whole universe. The Cosmic Self or "Virat", as the Rishis called it, acting through its particularised representative, the soul, is the true source and support of the inner life-idea of the collective

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being, as it is of the individual. And if the source and support is not sufficiently contacted in consciousness through the soul, the eternal is never brought with dominant effect into the temporal and ultimately a people suffers dissolution or a fusion . into other races instead of achieving their assimilation into its own communal consciousness.

This has happened to several great collectivities of old: Egypt, Sumer, Crete, Greece, Persia, the Celtic culture, Rome, the Incas, the Aztecs and the civilisations of ancient America before them. The nations that exist today where these were at one time are no real continuations of them. Some influence does linger and is still fruitful in general amidst some ethnic remnant, but there is no perceptible identity of inner life-idea or even outer nation-body.

When, however, 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 the 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 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 in spite of many phases of apparent decline.

In ways that are different in several respects but have a basic similarity India and China strike the historian as nations that can be said to have lived from remote antiquity onward with a general touch on this infinite Cosmic Self. The sense of

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Atman, the sense of Tao meet us throughout. Not that there have been no counter-currents, but, by and large, the inmost universal Reality has been felt by them across the millenniums. And that is why they have persisted with a recognisable continuity, as no other nation contemporary with their early careers has done.

Modern China has gone through a revolution which appears to run against such a continuity at last. But can a nation that has kept a Tao-toned identity for so long lose its character under the sweep of Dialectical Materialism? It hardly seems probable. Certain economic changes may come to stay; permanent change of essential genius is unlikely.

Not the least doubt, however, can be entertained about the India of today. Behind a thousand defects, weaknesses and corruptions, there still runs, as an undying potential, the ancient spirituality. This potential also acts secretly against the trend of a superficial modernism. At one period — in the nineteenth century — India passed through the grave danger of getting its true genius obscured. Then arose Ramakrishna in a stark nudity of fundamental Indianness — illiterate, childlike, clear of all Europeanised trappings and modernised refinements. He began a new cycle of the Eternal in time for the old race. Vivekananda, his disciple, gave a strong vital and mental body to the sheer soulfulness of his master and brought the new cycle into some rapport with the temper of the age. But the sannyasi ideal was still a harking back to the past. Now, with the advent of Sri Aurobindo, the power of renewal, the realisation of perpetual youth, is a certainty, for there is the ideal of life-acceptance and life-transformation by means of spirituality, along with the taking up of all that is significantly modern.

But India labours under a host of difficulties, a load of shortcomings. Of course, we must not let them obsess our view or blind us to the greatness growing in the womb of time. Yet we cannot neglect them either. India must wake up more and more at once to these incongruities and to that greatness in order to fulfil with swift strides her deathless destiny.

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