The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

The Significance of the English Language in India

in India*

India's decision to remain a member of the Commonwealth in spite of being an independent sovereign Republic has given a new lease of life amongst us to the English language. Until recently English was apt to be regarded as the remnant of a foreign imposition, an inappropriate growth in the way of an authentic indigenous literature. Today it seems an appropriate and desirable link between us and the group of English-speaking nations with whom we have formed a voluntary association: it has become the medium of a larger existence in which we have elected to share. This is all to the good - especially as America with whom we shall have more and more to deal is English-speaking. But we shall be underestimating the significance of the English language in India if we think that it is only a valuable means of promoting our political, economic and technological interests in the democratic world. English is, above all, an immense cultural asset. And it is such an asset not simply because it renders available to us magnificent countries of the mind, but also because it renders possible to us the most magnificent expression of our own soul.

The first impulse, vis-à-vis this statement, will be to cry, "Absurd paradox!" and to follow up with the question: "Can India really take to the English language as an instrument other Indianness and make her utterance in it anything more than an exotic curiosity?" The answer, surely, cannot be given with a facile pointing out of the great increase in the number of Indians who talk and write fair English. The answer can only be given by seeing whether there is what Galsworthy termed "flower of author". Disclosure of the inmost individuality through the subtlest potentialities of the language: this is "flower of author". Such "flower" need not be in one particular style as opposed to others. Simplicity and complexity, plainness and richness, urbanity and intense vibrancy - all these can equally allow it. Can we affirm that, in any style whatever, "flower of author" is

* This essay is a slightly enlarged version of one that has already appeared in the author's book, The Indian Spirit and the World's Future (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1953).

Page 208

possible in English-writing India as something more than a rare, almost accidental growth? Yes, we can. For two reasons.

What is called Indianness possesses as one of its main characteristics a power of multifold assimilation arising from a many-sidedness, a globality, in the unique penchant that is the Indian genius. The Indian genius is, of course, best described as spiritual; but it is not spiritual in a narrow way: it is an urge of synthesis of a hundred approaches to the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. Not only does it spiritualise everything in the long run: it also spiritualises everything without depriving any term of its own essential quality. It annuls nothing by the transforming change it induces: it induces the change by raising all things to their own hidden heights of Supernature, as it were - heights at which they are most authentically themselves by being spiritual, by being facets of the Divine, the Infinite, the Eternal. Wonderfully synthetical and assimilative, it can also embrace and Indianise the quality of any race, the force of any culture; hence it can make both the mind and the movement of the English language part of its activity. This mind and this movement do not confront it as utterly foreign: they come to it striking sympathetic chords in its multi-rhythmed heart. That is the first reason why "flower of author" in English can be an Indian growth drawing not unnaturally or accidentally its nourishment from the soil of the Indian soul.

The second reason is the character of the English language itself. No other modern language is so varied in mentality, so diverse in turn. It is a fusion of many strains - the Celtic, the Roman, the Saxon, the Teuton, the French, the Italian have mingled in it, and the Greek "psyche" and the Hebrew "ruach" have also coloured it. As a result, it is an extremely plastic and versatile instrument capable of being expressive of numerous types of consciousness. No wonder it does not have any marked tradition of persistent mood or manner - as, for instance, French has; no wonder, too, it is notable for countless idiosyncrasies: and no wonder, again, it has proved so adequate a medium for every innovation in outlook and in-look whether it be the adventurous imaginative gusto of the Renaissance, the gorgeous oriental religiosity of Hebraism, the passion and wonder and Nature-feeling of the Romantic Movement, the vague poignancies and dim wizardries of Celtic paganism. The synthetical and

Page 209

assimilative Indian genius 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.

There is no doubt that "flower of author" is, for Indians, possible in English. This does not, of course, imply possibility for all and sundry. Such possibility is not there for Indians in even the indigenous languages: every Indian is not a literary master. And, where English is concerned, it is quite to be expected that "flower of author" should be less common than in those languages. But to maintain that Indian utterance in English can only be an exotic curiosity and never an organic unfolding of genuine Indianness is to indulge in a sweeping superficiality. What now remains to be shown is that true Indian utterance in English is more than just possible and that it can be in quality finer and greater than in any language spoken by Indians today. This is the supreme paradox we have to elucidate - and if we can elucidate it we shall have dealt the death-blow to all efforts by our educationists to minimise the importance of English in our cultural self-expression.

English is unquestionably the most highly developed of modern languages both by virtue of the large variety of racial and psychological strains in it and by virtue of the extraordinary crop of poets in English history. Poetry is the sovereign power of all language: where poets of high quality abound, there the language reaches the highest development, especially when the language itself has immense potentialities. No student of the world's literature will dispute that England stands head and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the free-verse giant, Whitman. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique capacity for strangely suggestive effects - the super-subtle phrase, the packed visionary phrase, the phrase of indefinable intonation. Even in prose that unique capacity has its play and, within the less daring terms proper to prose, English

Page 210

still surpasses all modern languages, including those of India herself, in the immediacies and intimacies of intuitive speech. If this is so, then English is bound to be most valuable to the genius of a country which is not only synthetical and assimilative in the extreme but also spiritual to the nth degree; for, a speech with extraordinary potentialities of strangely suggestive effects suits most the magic, the mystery, the depth, the sudden and sublime revelatory reach of the spiritual consciousness. English promises, therefore, to be the expressive body par excellence of our true soul.

What adds to our conviction about this promise is the fact that the strangely suggestive potentialities of English have already been pressed into service of the spiritual consciousness by English writers themselves. Herbert's religious simplicity at once piquant and passionate - Crashaw's rich sensuousness kindling into ecstatic devotion - Donne's nervous intricate power troubling the Inscrutable - Vaughan's half-obscure half-bright straining beyond thought into mystical vision - Wordsworth's profound contemplative pantheistic peace - Blake's deeply delicate radiance or his mighty mythology of events in Eternity - Coleridge's glimmering occultism of the weird, the haunting or the honey-dewed - Shelley's rainbowed rapture of some universal Light and Love and Liberty - Keat's enchanted artistic luxuriance, through allegory and symbol and legend, in the Sovereign Beauty that is Sovereign Truth - Patmore's pointed polished ardour of the intellect for "the unknown Eros" - Francis Thompson's colourful heat of response to "the many-spendoured Thing" - Gerard Manley Hopkins's quiver and flash of aspiration within a God-dedicated discipline - Yeats's bewitched or passionate echo to the Immortal Loveliness in its world-wandering - AE's crystalline contact with superhumanly populated twilights within and divinely inhabited dawns above - all these quickenings of the spiritual consciousness, together with the American Whitman's dynamic delight under the touch of a Cosmic Life and the miniature snapshotting of an infinite Mystery by the American Emily Dickinson, are already present in English and have turned it to what may be called Indian uses. Doubtless, the uses are still somewhat elementary in comparison to what the Indian genius has achieved in the ancient Sanskrit of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita. But the fact stands that English

Page 211

lends itself as the fittest body to this genius with an actually accomplished functioning, however initial, along our own national soul-trend. Hence, if we are to fulfil that trend, the most natural no less than the most desirable act on our part is to find voice in English.

Not that the indigenous languages should be neglected. They must be developed. But English at present comes to us with a face of supreme destiny. And what that destiny is can be seen even now. For, even now, before our very eyes, it is being wonderfully worked out. A band of Indian poets remarkably gifted are uttering in English the mystical experience with an intense fidelity and felicity, and at their head is one of the greatest figures of the contemporary world and he has banished all shadow of doubt regarding the destiny we have spoken of.  Sri Aurobindo has given the world what is at once the finest and grandest literary achievement of modern India and the deepest and highest articulation of Indian spirituality today - the epic with which he was occupied in the spare hours of a Yogi and which grew to nearly twenty-four thousand lines: Savitri, a Legend and, a Symbol. In Savitri, we have proof as ample as we could wish that, while our vernaculars more easily provide us with footholds for climbing beyond commonplaces into the revelatory intensities of literature, English alone enables at present the soul of India to attain the absolute peak of self-expression.

And from that peak the soul of India will communicate, to the whole Commonwealth and to all America and to whatever country is in touch with them, the harmonious rhythms of its own greatness. Far and wide, by means of English, the Indian genius will spread the word born from the occult immensities that are the luminous source and support and goal of its unique history. Embodied in this language by India, Inspiration

...with her lightening feet,

A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,¹

will conquer the heart and mind of humanity. Not through translations from Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil or Hindi -

¹. Savitri, SABCL Vol. 28, p. 38.

Page 212

beautiful and powerful instruments of truth though they may prove - but directly through the tongue that was Shakespeare's and is now Sri Aurobindo's, the peoples of the earth will most vividly know India as the creative bride of the Divine and as the mighty mother of a new age which shall justify the light on man's upward face.

Page 213

French Culture and India

The India Government's plan to let the French Settlements enjoy, even when they are a part of the larger Indian sub-continent, a degree of cultural and linguistic autonomy is a wise one. It reflects the enlightened international outlook of Jawaharlal Nehru. The same outlook that has led him to keep India within the Commonwealth without abrogating her independence has recognised the French cultural influence as an enriching value worthy to play its part in the free future that is modern India's in a world of increasing internationalism.

England and France - these are the two countries whose cultures we should do well to assimilate by means of our naturally synthesising and multiform genius. England gives us on the one hand a practical dynamic expansive life-instinct which can serve profitably to re-stimulate what was ours in the days of our past greatness - namely, a deep creative life-intuition flexibly functioning to give birth to a richness of varied and complex, adventurous and even fantastic-seeming forms of existence which yet carry a certain stability and self-balance by being rooted in a spontaneous organic energy. On the other hand England gives us a language of extremely subtle poetic possibilities in which our innate mysticism of soul can most fittingly express itself and from which we can convey quickening colour and tone to our comparatively undeveloped vernaculars.

France comes with other gifts. There is, to begin with, her gift of prose as distinguished from poetry. English prose can be very great, but at its most characteristic it flourishes rather as a beautiful suburb of the poetic metropolis: it is poetry in a less intense medium, it has not its own typical self and movement. Poetry sings and visions and enraptures; prose converses and expounds and pleases, its power is persuasion and its progression has a controlled order and an accurate sober effectiveness. Not that it lacks fire and speed, but its glow is steady and tastefully tempered, its run is a vigorous continuity. There have been English prose-writers who did not want in the clarity, the justice, the care, the firmness and the ease that constitute prose an art distinct from poetry which comes with a flashing flooding force; but only French culture provides us with this art in its

Page 214

most perfect as well as most cumulative form. It is a valuable art, since what is best said by way of pointed and animated conversation cannot be replaced, however sublime the substitute offered. So, French prose cannot but be a cultural asset if the mind of modern India is to be adequate in expression of a certain quality of keen and serious thought or quick and refined feeling - a quality requiring a humane and natural manner.

Behind this prose there is the whole French civilisation. France brings, at her truest, a clear-seeing accurately organising idea-force and a considerately warm, liberty-loving, graciously and gracefully radiant sentiment. Here is a supple logic putting delicately discerned parts together to make a precise systematic whole, aided by a happy feeling for form which is an artistic eagerness at once to fashion total harmony and to keep unblurred the contours of individual entities. Ordered ensemble and sharp individuality in a brilliant combination - there we have the essence of the French genius. To resist standardisation or mass-reproduction and to make everything sparkle with a definite outline free of irrelevance and still to join all things to one another in a neat pattern which avoids waste and discloses their interrelation in a lucid crystalline loveliness - this is the French genius's ruling passion. In other words we may say that what the French genius attempts is a reasoned and tasteful, vivid and diversified integration.

But integration, we may note further, does not consist for the French genius in only combining system and individuality in a brilliant way. It consists in also bringing together the physical and the intellectual. The body with its senses, the mind with its conceptions - these are not, for the French, contrasting modes of living, opposed means of the joie de vivre. They are a single two-toned design and delight, complementaries and not contradictories. Hence, in general, so little dryness or abstractness in the French intellect and such a wide-spread intellectual flavour in the commonest walks of French life.

The things of the mind are not limited to a small group: even the sailor and the barman and the concierge will surprise you with intelligent interest in literature or science or the fine arts. As a charming instance of the general appreciation of serious literature in France F.L. Lucas remembers the case of one Laurent, called "Coco", accused of burglary in April, 1905, who proved an

Page 215

alibi because: "Juste à cette heure-là je me trouvais chez un marchand de vin de la Rue de Tracy et je discutais avec un camarade au sujet de la mère de Britannicus dans la tragédie de Racine." This discussion at a wine-merchant's on a personnage out of a classic drama in verse was proved to have lasted three-quarters of an hour. "No doubt," remarks Lucas, "burglars in England might discuss the character of Hamlet in a public-house; but no magistrate would believe it."

And, just as the apache, the restauranteur or the chorus-girl may talk with some esprit about Claudel, Camus, Picasso or perhaps even de Broglie, and, we may add, just as the window-dressers of the Faubourg Saint Honoré seem to bring to everyday objects the art of a Chardin composing with devoted care a still life, so also in their turn the littérateurs, the artists, the scientists live not like specialists but as men with broad sympathies and with an interest in day-to-day mundane occupations, men who are no bunglers in physical things but are aware of their niceties. It is difficult to come across, anywhere else in the world, the easy friendship between mind and body which is found where France is most French - that is, in Paris - and in those sections of Paris where, as Charles Morgan tells us, the foreigner's influence is least felt - the Rue Bonaparte, the square of St. Germain des Prés, the Ile St. Louis, the neighbourhood of Notre Dame.

No doubt, here is not the mystical harmonisation of all the terms of existence so as to lift each to its divine counterpart. But here is what can afford to the urge towards that harmonisation a fine co-operating zest, even as the French bent for a bright ordering of details without diminishing each detail's clear-cut uniqueness can be finely helpful to the balanced splendour of divine unity and divine diversity that, together with the ascent of earth to heaven and the descent of heaven to earth, is the complete aim of the spiritual consciousness.

When we go back to the Vedas, the early Upanishads and in later times the Bhagavad Gita, we discover a large synthesising movement careful of all aspects and forces of existence. Owing to various circumstances this movement got broken up and the Indian genius began to satisfy its hunger for the absolute by seeking keen separate culminations and carrying each trend to its farthest solitary limit, instead of by questing for an all-round interrelated perfection keyed to the highest spiritual yet orchestrating

Page 216

all the instruments of being. It is integration in this exalted sense that the Indian genius must ever toil for; it is integration of this kind that is most native to it; and to achieve it we must draw inspiration from our own spiritual depths and surcharge with their quality our outer life. But to help create in our outer life a response to those depths we might interfuse with our own spiritual temper the turns of the French genius, for we have to a considerable extent allowed important powers of our own to withdraw into the background and, in the modern milieu, these turns can go far both to resuscitate and to enrich them.

Of course, the French genius can degenerate into the sceptical, the superficial and the sensual, just as the English can become crudely commercial or deviously opportunist at one extreme and, at the other, lose itself in a labyrinth of fancy or in a conceptual muddle. But this does not detract from their intrinsic worth. We must do our best to absorb their positive virtues. The English language promises to remain a living force in all India and therefore the virtues of the culture of England are not likely to vanish from amongst us. But the centres of French culture are small - in fact, a few towns - and its peculiar essence is likely to be elusive unless we are studious to capture it.

After the Merger in 1954, a local non-governmental association was formed in Pondicherry: the Friends of French Language and Culture. Also, with the willing co-operation of the India Government which had already accepted the continuance of French Colleges, France founded, with Dr. Filliozat, an eminent orientalist, as Director, a French Institute in the same town. These have been hopeful signs. But surely the most effective means of capturing for our country the essence of French Culture is to give full support to the idea mooted some years ago that Pondicherry should be converted into a University town, a cultural meeting-place between India and France consciously organised around the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education which was initiated in 1951 and is fast flowering now. This Centre draws its inspiration from the creative genius of Sri Aurobindo, a master of East-West synthesis, as well as from that of his co-worker, the Mother, who, appealing for a double nationality, declared at the time of the Merger: "I am French by birth and early education, I am Indian by choice and predilection. In my consciousness there is no

Page 217

antagonism between the two, on the contrary they combine very well and complete one another. I know also that I can be of service to both equally, for my only aim in life is to give a concrete form to Sri Aurobindo's great teaching and in his teaching he reveals that all the nations are essentially one and meant to express the Divine Unity upon earth through an organised and harmonious diversity." From a cultural meeting-place such as Pondicherry can become, a great impetus would be gained by the new India which is arising today, an India true to her own nature and fulfilling it but also embracing and absorbing all that is best in the world and developing an international entity out of herself.

By developing such an entity she will extend her own spiritual influence in the world. France will not fail to respond to her. The French consciousness is not lacking in the capacity to answer the mystical call. A certain side of it is mystically perceptive, the side which turns with instinctive enthusiasm to the Figure of Jeanne d'Arc and does not feel alien to Pascal with his "reasons of the heart that Reason does not know" and his Pensées that all Europe has hailed as one of the most penetrating spiritual apologias produced by the West, the side which in the modern age has found expression in that exquisite search for the essence within the appearance, the single within the many, the infinite in each finite - the Symbolism of Mallarme and his heirs. It would be difficult to surpass in any poetry of our day the sublime profundity of insight in that line of Mallarme's on the dead Poe:

Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,

(At last to Himself he is changed by eternity)

or the rapturous visionariness that uplifts us in Rimbaud's

Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur!

(Millions of golden birds, O Vigour to come!)

What is, in several respects, the modern opposite of Symbolism à la Mallarmé by a stress not on the secret and unifying, universal and eternal essence but on the concrete and separate, individual and time-fissured existence - Existentialism à la Sartre may itself be traced to a perversely orientated pressure of the

Page 218

mystically inclined side of the French temperament. For this is not an atheism that is happy in its denials: it is an atheism avowedly torn by angoisse at the unending nothingness, ńeant, which it feels to be the fundamental fact against which the feverish little dramas of conscious life are futilely played out, an atheism unable to get over the calamity of its conviction that there is no God. It even luxuriates in that calamity, keeping it ever keen: the existentialists, as Jolivet has discerned, are intoxicated with the void and worship it because the void is as if not a non-existence but a paradoxical negative existence, a nihil tremendum et fascinans, inducing at once a strange death-wish and by reaction an intense leap inward into self-subjectivity, into utterly individual isolation. Born of such a leap is the disbelief of Sartrean Existentialism in any blind and iron fate ruling us by some inherent human or cosmic nature whose expressions we may be: each man is a unique activity, possessed of an ineradicable freedom from the tyranny of type, faced with an unescapable responsibility of choice, called to a valorous creativeness fighting the nausée which is felt on realising the meaninglessness, the absurdity of brute fact, the given world into which one is thrown without knowing why and incapable of saying no. And each man's free and constant self-creation should move towards "personal engagement" in a collective pursuit of values whose justification cannot be found in any scientific or philosophical formula. Sartrean Existentialism, inspiring the youths in chequered shirts and the girls with straight uncurled hair who used to flock to the Café de Flore, seeks, in misguided theory and often aberrant practice, to transcend the limitations of both the merely "natural" and the purely "rational".

The rival Existentialist school to Sartre's - that of Marcel - is not atheistic at all and is rather the complement of Symbolism than its opposite. Although Sartre is more in vogue because the French post-war psychology is shot through with a feeling of world-tragedy, Marcel has perhaps deeper roots in the soil of French history, connecting up as he does with the Christian tradition without being really committed to it. It was after his philosophy had been developed in most of its characteristics that he entered the Roman Catholic Church and its true ties are with all mystical aspiration in general that is founded on what he calls "the Mystery of Being". To this Mystery he brings a concrete

Page 219

approach - by music, art, drama, literature, poetry and by a philosophy of action which accepts exterior life with its myriad contacts yet springs, as he says, from a recollected interior life in communion with the supreme Ground and Source of all things, an all-enveloping secret Presence in which man is not a bundle of "functions" to be described by psychologists, sociologists and scientists nor by his Government, profession or trade union, but partakes of sheer ultimate Being, a world "méta-problématique". Marcel, we may remark, has here an affinity with that earlier French philosopher who has profoundly influenced modern thought - Bergson - by his analysis of the time-experience and his clarification of what he termed "intuition", the supra-intellectual in-feeling of the very flow of life. Marcel and Bergson are two of the most powerful factors tending the contemporary French mind in the direction of the basic Indian method of experiencing Reality, Together with Bergson's Introduction à la Métaphysique which kindled a new vision for a whole generation by its few pages of concentrated yet self-revelatory subtlety, Marcel's short treatise Positions et Approches Concrètes du Mystère Ontologique has been a luminously seminal document for European thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the second half the most significant event so far for Europe's thought has been the publication of Le Phenomène humain (The Phenomenon of Man) by the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who too was once influenced by Bergson. The book is physics and biology argued out along lines prompted by poetic and religious intuition in a language at the same time precise and wide-suggestion'd. Teilhard begins with one main insight: whatever manifests in the physical world must be there at the very base of things, although the manifestation takes place at certain "critical thresholds" of development. Just as the increase of mass with motion, which is detected at high speeds, is taken to be always there and just as the radio-active break-down of atoms, which is seen in particular heavy elements, is accepted to be omnipresent, so also life and mind, which show themselves at specific stages of material organisation, must be supposed to lie at the root of the cosmos. A "Within" of consciousness in some form or other has to be posited for the physical "Without" of Nature everywhere. Panpsychism is inevitable to consistent scientific thought. A progressive outbreak of

Page 220

the Within occurs at certain points of evolution when there is an "involution"¹or turning-in of material existence upon itself, a concentration or convergence of energies. Thus a threshold is crossed from Pre-life to Life, from Life to Mind. And when this happens a new earth-layer is formed, first a "biosphere" and then a "noosphere". The next layer is now in the making: the scientific age of rapid communication and spread-out of culture leads towards a unification of the human consciousness, a coming together of the psychological ends of the earth, a convergence of manifold mentality. A total earth-consciousness will develop and out of it a superhuman universality of awareness, which Teilhard names Omega Point. He discerns, in the heart of human aspiration and idealism, what he terms "Resonance to the All" - and he concludes that the All which will be realised as Omega Point is secretly a Reality already, a divine Alpha Point, a hidden Godhead urging and organising evolution, a Being who is the core of each soul, a Super-Person in whom every person can attain his utter fulfilment. Teilhard therefore builds a new version of Pantheism which we may term Pan-en-theism ("all-in-God" rather than "all-is-God") upon his Panpsychism and describes evolutionary history as the unfoldment of the "Cosmic Christ". The French sense of the free individual flowering within and through an ordered and ordering Whole seems to discover here its sublimest religio-scientific expression.

So much for what directly or indirectly has prepared conditions for a response from France to India's spiritual genius. But, the most sensitive temperament in Europe, the French race in even its older brand of atheism than the Sartrean, the scepticism which, unlike Sartre's chafing against science and intellectuality, is based on the "natural" and the "rational", is not quite closed to the haunting ambience of the ideal around the actual, no matter how firmly the intellect may refuse to admit any religious tinge in the strange sense of loss that is often felt in the midst of the most tangible fullness of physical preoccupation or achievement. Has not the agnostic Anatole France, ironical about the aspirations of the all-too-human, pitiful of blind pieties, shown also the

¹. This is an Aurobindonian term but obviously it does not bear the same meaning, just as Lloyd-Morgan's identical term in his philosophy of "Emergent Evolution" differs also.

Page 221

irony of the negativist attitude, the piercing pitiableness of the denying posture, when he penned that sentence of delicate inexplicable nostalgia: "Ce que la vie a de meilleur, c'est l'idée qu'elle nous donne de je ne sais quoi qui n'est point en elle"? A sentence, we may observe, that is typical also of the beautiful directness of French prose in even the glimmers it gives of the far and the faint, a combination of the subtle with the simple and straightforward, a fearless use of the almost colloquial without sacrificing euphony. Paul Bloomfield remarks that this sentence is as mellifluous in French as it would be awkward in English if translated word for word; and we may add that the soul of its liquid elegance as well as of its pellucid poignancy would be a little missing even in the finest free English rendering: "The best in life is the idea it gives us of a something that is not in it."

To return to our point: a certain side of the French consciousness is not wanting in mystical perception. But the emphatic and open mystical turn cannot come readily to the French consciousness, and when it does come it frequently gets grooved in conventional religiousness and deviates from its true goal. The genius of France, on the idealistic plane, is usually what the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram once described in warning that country against a violation of her svadharma by becoming utilitarian, calculating, mercantile: "France meant generosity of sentiment, newness and boldness of ideas and chivalry in action. It was that France which commanded the respect and admiration of all: it is by these virtues that she dominated the world." Yes, hers is not automatically the emphatic and open mystical turn. Of course, these virtues can help to prepare her, but her mystical tendencies will not acquire a steady right direction in general unless a greater natural force of mysticism comes to her aid. Only a movement like Indian spirituality's, at once illumined and elemental, free from narrowness and obscurantism without losing intensity, can bring about such a turn in its purity sooner or later in at least a marked nucleus of progressive minds. And all the more can it do so in its Aurobindonian version as a Yoga which embraces life in all its dynamism, endeavours to transform rather than reject any part of it and makes for the evolution of a supramental divine man in an ideal society on earth - a Yoga including yet transcending the ancient Indian realisations of the Vedanta and other paths as well as carrying in an ampler and

Page 222

completer spiritual Super-science what Teilhard the Roman Catholic scientist has glimpsed with the French esprit in him at its most brilliantly penetrating.¹

Yes, France can answer India's call. However, there must be the proper conditions. If the erstwhile French India becomes a cultural meeting-place and if India takes as much as possible into herself the best that France can show, the answer will be all the . more intimate and strong. And once there is the answer from France, all Europe will echo it in the course of time. For, France is still the vital core of European civilisation. Hence, both from the standpoint of helping out in the cause of the Divine some of our receded powers and from the standpoint of accomplishing as widely as we can the mission of mysticism that is India's, it is desirable to promote a Franco-Indian culture.

¹. A treatment, at some length, of the resemblances and the differences between Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo and of the validity as well as the error of putting together, as often done, the author of Le Phenomène humain and the Master of the Integral Yoga - a many-sided treatment built up by collecting the present writer's essays on Teilhardism first printed in Mother India has been published under the title: The Spirituality of the Future - A Search apropos of R.C. Zaehner's Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin, by Associated University Presses, Inc., New Jersey, 1981.

Page 223