The Sun and The Rainbow

The Two Smiles

A LETTER TO A WESTERN VISITOR TO INDIA

Bombay, May 11,1952

1 think that during those few hours we met I smiled at you sufficiently to make up for all the unsmiling faces you have encountered in Delhi! And I assure you that you will find many smiling ones in various parts of India. The trouble is that mostly they are scattered, because the conditions that make for the Indian smile do not prevail in strength enough all over the country.

I should like to make a few remarks about the Indian smile and the Western smile. Of course, human beings have the same qualities everywhere and authentic happiness beams out from the same source in all places. But there are differences in disposition of qualities and also dissimilarities in stress on one quality or another. As a result it happens that the Westerner can smile with some genuineness even when inwardly sad. He lives with a certain intensity of life-force which shows out in smiles as a reflection of the sheer love of earthly existence: this love, in spite of all wounds and frustrations, retains its pleasure in the very act of breathing. No doubt, the intellect too is very prominent in the West, but it is turned more upon the active material scene than upon the secret supra-physical background of our universe: therefore, even its nihilist moods catch something of that vital pleasure and the blackest intellectual despair still remembers that sunshine and shadow make an exciting composition, that the

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moment as it flies is a call to chase nature's secrets and that the colourful jostle of fellow-creatures gives warmth and wonder to the senses. As long as these familiarities as well as surprises are left, one can smile.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong in drawing satisfaction from the vision of the world dynamically going on. In fact, the capacity thus to smile has in general a positive value inasmuch as the material scene does not get neglected: the material scene is very important as the basic field of the manifestation of man's potentialities. But there is the danger that too much emphasis on it for its own sake may slow down the mysterious pressure that is in man towards the bringing out in him of the more-than-human.

India's intellect is not essentially unworldly or otherworldly as people sometimes make out, but it wants to value the material scene mostly In the light of what it can find in the secret background of the physical cosmos — the occult, the mystical, the spiritual. Occasionally, preoccupation with this background takes away its feel of the reality of the material scene and then we have the illusionist attitude wearily regarding the earth as a mere dream. When, however, the Indian intellect's hunger for that background is not fed, the material scene naturally becomes the dominant reality but it is not capable of satisfying that intellect. The drama of the days, the challenge of passing beauty, the stir of bright bodies are not sufficient to bring smiles. Further, the intellect itself is not for the Indian the acme of consciousness: he lives neither in the life-force nor in the mind so much as in a sense of "soul" to which the occult, the mystical, the spiritual are more or less directly "given" and the intellect is merely the instrument for formulating what the soul-sense perceives or intuits. So, when as has happened with quite a number of people at present, the soul-sense gets covered up and the intellect has only the earth left to hug, the vital-physical movements, though not unpleasurable, lack the sparkle which is necessary to make smiles automatically break out even when no real happiness

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glows in the heart. The Indian smile, when it does make its appearance and is genuine and not just a formality or a social habit, is born of a real happiness that has its roots in the more-than-human. This smile you will discover wherever Indians live in tune with their own historic genius — wherever the national consciousness is at its truest.

True India is the life of subtle vision and inner experience to which the Divine is a concrete reality — a reality not only beyond the cosmos but also within it, permeating all things and beings and manifesting itself in a thousand different yet harmonious ways. True India, therefore, consists at present of those who feel the reawakened national soul as a face and front of some universal Goddess-Power making for a many-hued profound national vitality as well as for a grand symphonic world-unity on a basis of actual inner experience of the one Self of selves. All those who intellectually and emotionally respond to this Presence in some mode or other and serve it through art, literature, philosophy, politics, social life or even common labour are also true India, though they are more open to doubts and confusions than those whose touch on this Presence is more direct. Most clearly and intensely true India are the few who make a conscious and consistent attempt to be in touch with hidden spiritual truths — and this, not through rigid rules and stereotyped disciplines, though these too have their limited uses when charged with authentic inspiration, but through a plastic spontaneous multi-aspected movement under the creative and compassionate eye of one who has realised those truths in actual experience. That is why I asked you not to miss paying a visit to the Ashram in Pondicherry and know something about Sri Aurobindo and meet the Mother. Here you have a nucleus in which the historic genius of the country is alive with a new brilliance which is directed more towards the future than towards the past and has all dynamic modernity within the Light that has been through the ages. You will see a lot of the genuine Indian smile in the Ashram — and most radiantly focused on

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the lips of the Mother, a smile at once of bliss and love taking you up into a luminous freedom and wideness and strength and world-rapport.

There is no need for you to be disappointed so soon with what you observe of our country. Even Delhi is perhaps not so bad as it may seem. Possibly the heat of the season has slowed down people's activities and given you the impression that the leaders of the masses are lethargic and evasive, "waiting for miracles without moving a finger". But I must admit that even where there is a fair amount of doing things, it Is often doing without knowing — expenditure of physical and nervous force without proper light from the brain and proper warmth from the heart. A considerable number of people are in a state of confusion. They don't know what sort of government they want at home, how exactly the country's life should be directed and organised and what our attitude should be in international politics. But all this ignorance, as well as every other ignorance is part of the general ambiguity in people's minds owing to a degree of obscuration of India's true spirit. True India, however, is, as I have said, not completely submerged and is very far from being defunct. In fact, in one place it is burning with a gathered fire as never before and towards that fire all the scattered flames that are difficult at times to discern will finally be drawn and a vast new life take birth, destroying our present confusion, challenging with undeniable authority the anti-soul heresies rampant today over the globe and providing real leadership to the whole world which is so ravaged and baulked and sorrowful behind all its smiles.

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