Sri Aurobindo - The Smiling Master

Chapter 15

Sri Aurobindo's Satirical Humour

The movement of the humorous impulse as well as its expression in words may not in all cases be inspired by human kindliness. If not properly handled they may easily degenerate into mere mockery and sarcasm arising out of personal malice and conveyed through the medium of impish invectives. Sarcasm has for its aim the infliction of psychological pain on the object with a perverted sense of sardonic pleasure: it often enough represents the 'sneer of the scoffer and the snarl of the literary critic' which 'scrapes the human feeling with a hoe.'

But this is only the undesirable negative stream of humour; there is a positive stream too. Satire, when it reaches its true stature, allies easily the comic spirit with an exalted and tolerant human understanding. By the way, the main aim, in this latter case, becomes not merely to amuse but to make humorous criticism an effective vehicle of a high instructional purpose. And satire, if properly expressed and conveniently directed, possesses a great social force too: it can be used as an instrument of transformation for bringing about desirable changes in human society. In speaking of Bernard Shaw, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the '30s inter alia:

"... An ostentation of humour and parade covers up the attack and puts the opponent off his defence. That is why the English mind never understood Shaw and yet allowed itself to be captured by him, and its old established ideas, 'moral' positions, impenetrable armour of commercialised puritanism and self-righteous Victorian assurance to be ravaged and burned out of existence by Shaw and his allies. Anyone who knew Victorian England and sees the difference now cannot but be struck by it, and Shaw's part in it, at least in preparing and making it possible, is undeniable."¹

And what about Cervantes with his immortal creation Don Quixote? He wrote his book as a satire upon the silly romances

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of chivalry. And what was the result? "It was Cervantes," remarks Prof. Stephen Leacock, "who, as has been said a thousand times, helped to laugh out of existence what remained of mediaeval chivalry." Prof. Leacock continues:

"If we grasp just what [with progressive degeneration] had happened to feudalism and chivalry, we can realize what it was that Cervantes did with Don Quixote and appreciate the glorious humour that lies at the base of it.... It can make us realize again the great power of humorous writing as a social force. Books of tears move the world as did Uncle Tom's Cabin, books of ecstasy enthrall the soul as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress did, but Cervantes's book helped to return to sanity the mind of a continent still a little delirious."²

And an attentive student of the development of the spirit of Indian Nationalism in the first decade of this century knows very well what a great role Sri Aurobindo's satirical writings in the pages of the journal Bande Mataram played in the matter of the fostering of this spirit.

If we care to study the evolution of satire as a distinct literary genre, in different countries and periods of history, we shall find that it has passed through a wide variety of forms, each having its own appeal.

Historically speaking, Archilocus of Greece was the first great master of satire. He was followed, again in Greece, by Simonides and Hipponax, the former combining with satire a strong sense of ethics, the latter a bright active fancy.

Gaius Lucilius, a poet, was the initiator of the Roman satirical tradition. Horace's satires showed a genial, playful and purposive character while the didactive element became dominant in the philosophical satires of Persius. The rhetorical satire attained its apogee in the hands of the tragic satirist Juvenal. Martial excelled with his epigrammatic satires. Then came Petronius and Apuleius who liberated satire from the constraints of metre and ushered in the age of satirical romance.

It was Western Europe which produced the first really important medieval satire. The Renaissance enlarged the armoury of the satirist: its representatives were Erasmus, Ulrich

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von Hutten, etc. Sir Thomas Moore, although himself not a satirist, became the inspirer of much subsequent satire through his idea of an imaginary commonwealth, Utopia. We have already talked about Cervantes who came at a later period: his Don Quixote was a satire and so much more.

In the writings of John Donne we may detect the direct imitation of the Roman satirists. Most of the great dramatists of the 17th century were satirists, Moliere being the prince among them. Samuel Butler's Hudibras was a great example of unadulterated satire. Dignified political satire was carried to perfection in Dryden's Absolm and Achitophel. The Horatian style reached its perfection in France in the satirical writings of Boileau. Alexander Pope in England showed great progress along the line. We should not forget either the names of Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift.

The 18th century was indeed the age of satire. Voltaire was really a superb master in the field. Byron allied satire with sublimity in his work Vision of judgment.

In the 19th century, Dickens, George Eliot and Balzac, although not satirists in the proper sense of the term, must be mentioned in this connection. Passing through Samuel Butler and G.B.Shaw, we come to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell of the 20th century, who have produced pure satire in their own individual ways.³

This is how Sri Aurobindo has commented on a few of the great names occurring in the field of satire:

"It is Dryden and Juvenal who have oftenest made something like genuine poetry out of satire, the first because he often changes satire into a vision of character and the play of psychological forces, the other because he writes not from a sense of the incongruous but from an emotion, from a strong poetic 'indignation' against the things he sees around him. Aristophanes is a comic creator - like Shakespeare when he turns in that direction - the satire is only a strong line in his creation; that is a different kind of inspiration, not the ordinary satire. Pope attempted something creative in his Rape of the

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Lock, but the success, if brilliant, is thin because the deeper creative founts and the kindlier sources of vision are not there."⁴

Before we proceed to relish Sri Aurobindo's own satirical writings which are invariably always suffused with an ambiance of benevolent criticism - incisive but without anger, ridiculing but without malice -, let us keep in mind what true satire is. According to the elaborate definition offered by Prof. Rhys Carpenter and incorporated in Encyclopaedia Britannica, satire is an "expression in adequate terms of the sense of amusement or disgust excited by the ridiculous or unseemly, provided that humour is a distinctly recognizable element, and that the utterance is invested with literary form. Without humour, satire is invective; without literary form, it is mere clownish jeerings."⁵

Here are a few representative samples of Sri Aurobindo's satirical treatment of different themes and subjects.

I. On matters "political"

(Should be read keeping in view the social and political situation prevailing in India in the first decade of the 20th century when she was under the heavy oppressive subjection of the British rulers.)

(1) Cow-killing: An Englishman's amusements!

"An Englishman, a forester, at Jalpaiguri has shot three cows one of them belonging to the school Head Pandit. The open garden of the forester is near certain bungalows adjoining the school, and it appears that the cows strayed into the garden, whereupon the Saheb calmly proceeded to shoot them. This he did laughing and in spite of the remonstrance of another Englishman, his friend. On the Head Pandit consulting his neighbours, he was told to consider himself lucky that it was the cows and not he whom the Saheb elected to shoot. Perceiving the force of this remark and apprehensive about his service, the Pandit has swallowed and is trying to digest the loss and the

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mortification. I hear that when the bodies of the cows were being taken away, the Saheb was dancing with exultation.

"We publish the above extraordinary story of wanton oppression with reservation, but Anglo-Indian vagaries of the kind are too common for us quite to disbelieve it. If it is a fact, we trust the sufferer will think better of it and seek redress; the fear of swift punishment is the only motive force that can keep these vagaries in check and every Indian who submits is partly guilty of the insults and oppressions inflicted on his fellow countrymen."⁶

(2) On English politics and English politicians:

"The attitude assumed by Mr. John Morley in answer to the questions in Parliament about the latest act of mediaeval tyranny, cannot surprise those who have something more than surface knowledge of English politics and English politicians. Those who have been behind the scenes in English political life, know perfectly well that there sincerity is an element which does not exist. Professions, principles, ideals are the tinsel and trappings of the stage; each politician is an actor who has a part to play and plays it, certain set sentiments to mouth and mouths them. But the only reality behind is a mass of interests, personal interests, class interests, party interests, and the ruling principle of action is to 'catch votes' and avoid the loss of votes. We have all noticed how persistently the Anglo-Indian Press out here talk of every movement as being artificial and the work of 'professional agitators', and how persistently they refuse to credit the popular leaders, even when they are men of high moral worth like Lala Lajpat Rai, with sincerity. We generally put this down to the perverseness and wilful misrepresentation of a reptile press; the real truth is that they are judging us from their knowledge of their own country.

"They are perfectly well aware that in England politics is a huge piece of humbug; it professes to be a conflict of principles and is really a conflict of more or less sordid interests. They know that in England, a sincere politician is a contradiction in terms. They are therefore unable to believe in the existence in

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India of a sincerity and reality for which their own country offers no precedent. The only exceptions to the general rule of insincerity are the novices in politics — the maiden innocence of whose souls is soon rubbed off by a few Parliamentary sessions, - and a handful of independent-minded eccentrics who have no chance whatever of rising to influence, much less to office. Occasionally a man of absolute sincerity like Mr. Bradlaugh breaks the record, but that is only once in half a century.

"When Mr. John Morley entered politics, he entered as a literary man and austere philosopher and brought the spirit of philosophy into politics. His unbending fidelity to his principles earned him the name of Honest John, and this soubriquet, with the reputation for uprightness of which it was the badge, has survived long after the uprightness itself had perished in the poisoned air of office. No one can be long a Cabinet Minister in England and yet remain a man of unswerving principle...."⁷

(3) In praise of honest John!

"Mr. John Morley is a very great man, a very remarkable and exceptional man. I have been reading his Arbroath speech again and my admiration for him has risen to such a boiling point that I am at last obliged to let it bubble over into the columns of the Bande Mataram.

"Mr. Morley rises above the ordinary ruck of mortals in three very important respects; first, he is a literary man; secondly, he is a philosopher; thirdly, he is a politician. This would not matter much if he kept his literature, politics and philosophy apart in fairly watertight compartments; but he doesn't. He has not only doubled his parts, he has trebled them; he is not merely a literary philosopher and philosophic litterateur, he is a literary philosopher-politician. Now this is a superlative combination; God cannot better it and the devil does not want to. For if an ordinary man steals, he steals and there are no more bones made about it; he gets caught and is sent to prison, or he is not caught and goes on his way rejoicing. In either case the matter is a simple one without any artistic possibilities. But if a literary philosopher steals, he steals on the

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basis of the great and eternal verities and in the choicest English.

"And so all along the line. An ordinary man may be illogical and silly and everybody realises that he is illogical and silly; but the literary man when he goes about the same business will be brilliantly foolish and convincingly illogical, while the philosopher will be logically illogical and talk nonsense according to the strictest rules of philosophical reasoning.

"An ordinary man may turn his back on his principles and he will be called a turn-coat or he may break all the commandments and he will be punished by the law and society, — unless of course he is an American millionaire or a member of the ruling race in India; - but the literary philosopher will reconcile his principles with his conduct by an appeal to a fur-coat or a syllogism from a pair of jack-boots; he will abrogate all the commandments on the strength of a Solar Topee.

"A politician again will lie and people will take it as a matter of course, especially if he is in office, but a literary philosopher-politician will easily prove to you that when he is most a liar, then he is most truthful and when he is juggling most cynically with truth and principle, then he most deserves the name of Honest John; and he will do it in such well-turned periods that one must indeed have a very bad ear for the rhythm of a sentence before one can quarrel with its logic.

"Oh yes, a literary philosopher-politician is the choicest work of God, — when he is not the most effective instrument in the hands of the Prince of Darkness. For the Prince of Darkness is not only a gentleman as Shakespeare discovered, but a gentleman of artistic perceptions who knows a fine and carefully-worked tool when he sees it and loves to handle it with the best dexterity and grace of which he is capable.

"... Mr. Morley has done the best of which he is capable and that is not a poor best. He has served the devil in the name of God with signal success on two occasions. ... Truly, Satan knows his own and sees to it that they do not do their great work negligently.

"Mr. Morley is a great bookman, a great democrat, a great

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exponent of principles. No man better fitted than he to prove that when the noblest human movements are being suppressed by imprisonment and the sword, it is done in the interests of humanity; that when a people struggling to live is trampled down by repression, pushed back by the use of the Goorkha and the hooligan, the prison walls and the whipping-post into the hell of misery, famine and starvation, the black pit of insult, ignominy and bonds from which it had dared to hope for an escape, the motive of the oppressor finds its root in a very agony of conscientiousness and it is with a sobbing and bleeding heart that he presses his heel on the people's throat for their own good; that the ruthless exploitation and starvation of a country by foreign leeches is one of the best services that can be done to mankind, the international crimes of the great captains of finance a supreme work of civilisation and the brutal and selfish immolation of nations to Mammon an acceptable offering on the altar of the indwelling God in humanity.

"... Mr. Morley does it with more authority than others, but his own particular and original faculty lies in the direction I indicated when drawing the distinction between the ordinary man and the extraordinary Morley. What he has done has been after all on the initiative of others; what he has said about it is his own, and nothing more his own than the admirably brilliant and inconsequential phrases in which he has justified wickedness to an admiring nation.

"Man has been defined sometimes as a political animal and sometimes as a reasoning animal... He is a political animal who has always made a triumphant mess of politics, a reasoning animal whose continual occupation it is to make a system out of his blunders, a literary animal who is always the slave of a phrase and not the least so when the phrase means nothing. The power of the phrase on humanity has never been sufficiently considered. The phrase is in the nostrils of the vast unruly mass of mankind like the ring in the nose of a camel. It can be led by the phrase-maker wherever he wishes to lead it. And the only distinction between the sage and the sophist is that the phrases of the sage mean something while the phrases of the sophist

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only seem to mean something....

"Take for instance his phrase 'The anchor holds.' Mr. Morley complains that he who has served Liberalism so long and so well, is not allowed to be illiberal when he likes, that when he amuses himself with a little reaction he is charged with deserting his principles! 'It is true, gentlemen,' says Mr. Morley, 'that I am doing things which are neither liberal nor democratic; but, then, my anchor holds. Yes, gentlemen, I dare to believe that my anchor holds.'

"So might a clergyman detected in immorality explain himself to his parishioners, 'It is true I have preached all my life continence and chastity, yet been found in very awkward circumstances; but what then? My anchor holds. Yes, dear brethren in Christ, I dare to believe that my anchor holds.'

"So might Robespierre have justified himself for the Reign of Terror, 'It is true, Frenchmen, that I have always condemned capital punishment as itself a crime, yet am judicially massacring my countrymen without pause or pity; but my anchor holds. Yes, citizens, I dare to believe that my anchor holds.'

"So argues Mr. Morley and all England applauds in a thousand newspapers and acquits him of political sin.

"... of course Mr. Morley's crowning mercy is the phrase about the fur-coat. It is true that the simile about the coat is not new in the English language; for a man who abandons his principles has always been said to turn his coat; but never has that profitable manoeuvre been justified in so excellently literary and philosophical a fashion before.

"Mr. Morley has given us the philosophy of the turn-coat. 'Principles,' he has said in effect, 'are not a light by which you can guide your steps in all circumstances, but a coat which is worn for comfort and convenience. In Canada, which is cold, you have to wear a fur-coat, there is no help for it; in Egypt, which is hot, you can change it for thin alpaca; in India, where it is very hot indeed, you need not wear a coat at all... It is just so with principles, democratic and other.' The reasoning is excellent and of a very wide application. For instance, it may be wrong in England to convict a political opponent for political

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reasons of an offence of which you know him to be innocent and on evidence you know to be false, or to sentence a man to be hanged for a murder which you are quite aware somebody else committed, or to disregard the plainest evidence and allow a bestial ravisher to go free because he happens to be a dog with a white skin, but it is absurd to suppose that such principles can keep in the heat of the Indian sun.

"It is difficult to know what inequity reasoning of this sort would not cover. 'I thoroughly believe in the Ten Commandments,' Caesar Borgia might have said in his full career of political poisonings and strangulations, 'but they may do very well in one country and age without applying at all to another. They suited Palestine, but mediaeval Italy is not Palestine. Principles are a matter of chronology and climate, and it would be highly unphilosophical and unpractical of me to be guided by them as if I were Christ or Moses. So I shall go on poisoning and strangling for the good of myself and Italy and leave 'impatient idealists' to their irresponsible chatter. Still I am a Christian and the nephew of a Pope, so my anchor holds, yes, my anchor holds.'

"Mr. Morley's fur-coat is one of the most comprehensive garments ever discovered. All the tribe of high-aiming tyrants and patriotic pirates and able political scoundrels and intelligent turn-coats that the world has produced, he gathers together and covers up their sins and keeps them snug and comforted against the cold blasts of censure blowing from a too logical and narrow-minded world, all in the shelter of a single fur-coat. And the British conscience too, that wondrous production of a humorous Creator, seeking justification of the career of cynical violence its representatives have entered on in India, rejoices in Mr. Morley's fur-coat and snuggles with a contented chuckle into its ample folds.

"Am I wrong in saying that Honest John is a wonder-worker of the mightiest and that Aaron's magic rod was a Brummagem fraud compared with Mr. Morley's phrases? Vivat John Morley!"⁸ (Paragraphing ours)

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(4) The Khulna comedy:

"In no recent political case except Rawalpindi has the veil of law been so ridiculously thin as in the Khulna case. Partly, no doubt, this is due to the personal gifts of the prosecuting Magistrate who decided the case.

"Mr. Asanuddin Ahmed is a very distinguished man. The greatest and the most successful achievement of his life was to be a fellow-collegian of Lord Curzon. But he has other sufficiently respectable if less gorgeous claims to distinction. Arithmetic, logic, English and Law are his chief fortes. His mastery over figures is so great that arithmetic is his slave and not his master; it is even said that he can assess a man at Rs. 90 one day and bring him down 200 per cent in estimation the other. It is whispered that it was not only for a masterly general incompetence but also for his special gift that he was transferred to Khulna.

"His triumphant dealings with logic were admirably ex-ampled by the original syllogism which he presented to the startled organisers of the District Conference. 'I, Asanuddin, am the District Magistrate; the District Magistrate is the representative of the District; ergo, I, Asanuddin, am the one and only representative of the district. Now only a representative of the district has a right to hold a District Conference or to do anything in the name of the district, or to use any expression in which the word district occurs; I, Asanuddin, am the sole and only representative of the district; ergo, I, Asanuddin, have the sole and only right to call a District Conference.'

"Mr. Ahmed's English is the delight of the judges of the High Court, who are believed to spend sleepless nights in trying to make out the meanings of his judgments. In one case at least, it is said, a distinguished judge had to confess with sorrow and humiliation that he could make nothing of the English of the learned Magistrate and after reading the judgment in the present case, we can well believe the story.

"As for his knowledge of law, the best praise we can give it is that it is on a level with his knowledge of, say, English.

"Such was the brilliant creature who appointed himself

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prosecutor, jury and judge in the Khulna sedition case.

"Under such auspices the conduct of the case was sure to be distinguished by a peculiarly effulgent brilliancy. In order to prove that Venibhusan Rai talked sedition it was thought necessary to prove how many volunteers were present at the Conference. This is a fair example of the kind of evidence on which the case was decided and which the great Asanuddin declared to be particularly relevant. Beyond evidence of this stamp there was no proof against the accused except the evidence of police officers unsupported by any verbatim report, while on the other side were the statements of the respectable pleaders, the verbatim copy of the speech and a whole mass of unshaken testimony.

"But our one and only Asanuddin declared that the evidence of respectable men was not to be believed because they were respectable and graduates of the Calcutta University and partakers in the Conference; the police apparently were the only disinterested and truthful people in Khulna. But the most remarkable dictum of this remarkable man was that when one is charged with sedition it is not necessary to prove the use of any particular seditious utterances; it is quite enough for the Magistrate to come to the conclusion that something untoward might, could or should have happened as the result of the accused having made a speech. In fact, it is hardly necessary under the section as interpreted by Daniels of this kind, to prove anything against the accused; the only thing necessary is that the Magistrate should think it better for convenience official or unofficial that he should be bound over....

"The Khulna case has been from the point of view of Justice an undress rehearsal of the usual bureaucratic comedy; from the point of view of Mr. Asanuddin Ahmed it has been a brilliant exhibition of his superhuman power of acting folly and talking nonsense; from the point of view of Srijut Venibhusan Rai it has been a triumph greater than any legal victory, a public certificate of patriotism, courage and sincerity, an accolade of knighthood and nobility in the service of the Motherland."⁹ (Paragraphing ours)

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(5) Look on this picture, then on that:

"Britain, the benevolent, Britain, the mother of Parliaments, Britain, the champion of liberty, Britain, the deliverer of the slave, - such was the sanctified and legendary figure which we have been trained to keep before our eyes from the earliest years of our childhood. Our minds imbued through and through with the colours of that legend, we cherished a faith in the justice and benevolence of Britain more profound, more implicit, more a very part of our beings than the faith of the Christians in Christ or of the Mahomedan in his Prophet. Officials might be oppressive, Viceroys and Lieutenant-Governors reactionary, the Secretary of State obdurate, Parliament indifferent, the British public careless, but our faith was not to be shaken. If Anglo-India was unkind, we wooed the British people in India itself. If the British people failed us, we said that it was because the Conservatives were in power. If a Liberal Secretary showed himself no less obdurate, we set it down to his personal failings and confidently awaited justice from a Liberal Government in which he should have no part. If the most Radical of Radical Secretaries condemned us to age-long subjection to a paternal and absolute bureaucracy, we whispered to the people, 'Wait, wait, Britain, the true Britain, the generous, the benevolent, the lover, the giver of freedom, is only sleeping; she shall awake again and we shall see her angelic and transfigured beauty'. Where precisely was this Britain we believed in, no man could say, but we would not give up our faith. Credo quia impossibile; - I believe because it is impossible, had become our political creed. Other countries might be selfish, violent, greedy, tyrannical, unjust; in other countries politics might be a continual readjustment of conflicting interests and clashing strengths. But Britain, the Britain of our dreams, was guided only by the light of truth and justice and reason; high ideals, noble impulses, liberal instincts, these were the sole guides of her political actions, — by the lustre of these bright moral fires she guided her mighty steps through an admiring and worshipping world.

"That was the dream; and so deeply had it lodged in our imaginations that not only the professed Loyalists, the men of

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moderation, but even the leading Nationalists, those branded as Extremists, could not altogether shake off its influence.... We ourselves, though we had our own views about British character and civilisation, have allowed ourselves to speculate whether it was not just possible that the British bureaucracy might be sufficiently tender of their reputation to avoid extreme, violent and arbitrary measures.

"That was the dream. The reality to which we awake is Rawalpindi and Jamalpur. The events in the Punjab are an instructive lesson in the nature of bureaucratic rule.... The result is that we have a strange companion picture to that dream of a benevolent and angelic Britain, - a city of unarmed men terrorised by the military, the leaders of the people hurried from their daily avocations to prison, siege-guns pointed at the town, police rifles ready to fire on any group of five men or more to be seen in the streets, bail refused to respectable pleaders and barristers from sheer terror of their influence. Look on this picture, then on that!

"And what next? It is too early to say. This much only is certain that a new stage begins in the struggle between democracy and bureaucracy, a new chapter opens in the history of the progress of Indian Nationalism."¹⁰

II. On matters "cultural"

Introduction:

The following pieces have been selected from Sri Aurobindo's well-known book, The Foundations of Indian Culture, which is, in the words of Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, "a richly rewarding and many-faceted study of the glory that is India's heritage from the past." This book was written as a rejoinder to the inveterate charges of an egregious critic, William Archer, who threw random brickbats at a great country's culture. Archer had his political axes to grind - to "prove" India barbarous "in order to destroy or damage her case for self-government." His was not any honest criticism but mere slander and 'vitriol-throwing'. He assailed mercilessly the whole life and culture of India, arming

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himself solely with a sublime and confident ignorance, and "lumped together all her greatest achievements, philosophy, religion, poetry, painting, sculpture, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, in one wholesale condemnation as a repulsive mass of unspeakable barbarism."¹¹

Sri Aurobindo wrote a sufficiently big book of almost four hundred pages to repudiate and smash to smithereens the fallacious presuppositions and conclusions of Mr. Archer and show convincingly the greatness of Indian culture and point out its foundations. The readers will do well if they go through this book, The Foundations of Indian Culture, in order to know what Indian culture and civilisation really stands for. As we are not, in this present work of ours, directly concerned with the topic of Indian culture, we refrain from saying anything more on this. Ours being a book on Sri Aurobindo's humour, we are concerned, in this chapter, only with his satirical writings. So we content ourselves with quoting here only a few representative passages from the above-mentioned book of Sri Aurobindo.

(1) Mr. Archer's amazing inference:

"I will give first an instance amazing in its ineptitude. The Indian ideal figure of the masculine body insists on two features among many, a characteristic width at the shoulders and slenderness in the middle.... Indian poets and authorities on art have given in this connection the simile of the lion, and lo and behold Mr. Archer solemnly discoursing on this image as a plain proof that the Indian people were just only out of the semi-savage state! It is only too clear that they drew the ideal of heroic manhood from their native jungle, from theriolatry, that is to say, from a worship of wild beasts! I presume, on the same principle and with the same stupefying ingenuity he would find in Kamban's image of the sea for the colour and depth of Sita's eyes clear evidence of a still more primitive savagery and barbaric worship of inanimate nature, or in Valmiki's description of his heroine's 'eyes like wine', madireksana, evidence of a chronic inebriety and semi-drunken inspiration of the Indian poetic mind. This is one example of Mr. Archer's most telling points."¹²

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(2) Mr. Archer's idea of spirituality:

"India, we are told, has no spirituality, - a portentous discovery; on the contrary she has succeeded, it would seem, in killing the germs of all sane and virile spirituality. Mr. Archer evidently puts his own sense, a novel and interesting and very occidental sense, on the word.... The thought and suffering which seam and furrow the ideal head of Homer, there, we are told, is the sane and virile spirituality. The calm and compassion of Buddha victorious over ignorance and suffering, the meditation of the thinker tranced in communion with the Eternal, lifted above the seekings of thought into identity with a supreme Light, the rapture of the saint made one by love in the pure heart with the transcendent and universal Love, the will of the Karmayogin raised above egoistic desire and passion into the impersonality of the divine and universal Will, these things on which India has set the highest value and which have been the supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very Occidental and up-to-date idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action, but as our typical heroes and exemplars of spirituality. Not Buddha, not Christ, Chaitanya, St. Francis, Ramakrishna; these are either semi-barbaric Orientals or touched by the feminine insanity of an Oriental religion. The impression made on an Indian mind resembles the reaction that a cultured intellectual might feel if he were told that good cooking, good dressing, good engineering, good schoolmastering are the true beauty and their pursuit the right, sane, virile aesthetic cult, and literature, architecture, sculpture and painting are only a useless scribbling on paper, an insane hacking of stone and an effeminate daubing of canvas... Whether Mr. Archer's epithets and his accusations against Indian spirituality stand in the comparison, let the judicious determine."¹³

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(3) The positivist's impatient arrogance:

"Yoga, which Mr. Archer invites us so pressingly to abandon, is itself nothing but a well-tested means of opening up these greater realms of experience.

"Mr. Archer and minds of his type cannot be expected to know these things; they are beyond the little narrow range of facts and ideas which is to them the whole arc of knowledge. But even if he knew, it would make no difference to him; he would reject the very thought with scornful impatience, without any degrading of his immense rationalistic superiority by any sort of examination into the possibility of an unfamiliar truth. In this attitude he would have the average positivist mind on his side.

"To that mind such notions seem in their very nature absurd and incomprehensible, - much worse than Greek and Hebrew, languages which have very respectable and credit-worthy professors; but these are hieroglyphs which can only be upheld as decipherable signs by Indians and Theosophists and mystical thinkers, a disreputable clan.

"It can understand dogma and speculation about spiritual truth, a priest, a Bible, whether disbelieving them or giving them a conventional acceptance; but profoundest verifiable spiritual truth, firmly ascertainable spiritual values! The idea is foreign to this mentality and sounds to it like jargon.

"It can understand, even when it dismisses, an authoritative religion, an 'I believe because it is rationally impossible'; but a deepest mystery of religion, a highest truth of philosophical thinking, a farthest ultimate discovery of psychological experience, a systematic and ordered experimentation of self-search and self-analysis, a constructive inner possibility of self-perfection, ... — this great ancient and persistent research and triumph of Indian culture baffles and offends the average positivist mind of the West....

"But the positivist mind may yet be of good courage: for its hold is still strong and it has still the claim of intellectual orthodoxy and the prestige of the right of possession; many streams must swell and meet together before it is washed under

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and a tide of uniting thought sweeps humanity towards the hidden shores of the Spirit."¹⁴ (Paragraphing ours)

(4)Archer's hook: a journalistic fake:

"In fact this book is not criticism; it is literary or rather journalistic pugilism. There too it is of a peculiar kind; it is a furious sparring at a lay-figure of India which is knocked down at pleasure through a long and exuberant dance of misstatement and exaggeration in the hope of convincing an ignorant audience that the performer has prostrated a living adversary. Sanity, justice, measure are things altogether at a discount: a show-off of the appearance of staggering and irresistible blows is the object held in view, and for that anything comes in handy, - the facts are altogether misstated or clumsily caricatured, the most extraordinary and unfounded suggestions advanced with an air of obviousness, the most illogical inconsistencies permitted if an apparent point can be scored.

"All this is not the occasional freak of a well-informed critic suffering from a fit of mental biliousness and impelled to work it off by an extravagant intellectual exercise, an irresponsible fantasia or a hostile war-dance around a subject with which he is not in sympathy. That is a kind of extravagance, which is sometimes permissible and may be interesting and amusing. It is a sweet and pleasant thing, cries the Roman poet, to play the fool in place and right season, dulce est desipere in loco.

"But Mr. Archer's constant departures into irrational extravagance are not by any means in loco. We discover very soon,... that for the most part he knew absolutely nothing about the things on which he was passing his confident damnatory judgments.... his one genuine and native contribution is the cheery cocksureness of his second-hand opinions. The book is a journalistic fake, not an honest critical production."¹⁵ (Paragraphing ours)

(5)"These irrational half-savages!"

"... when this Western mind is confronted with the still surviving force of Indian religion, thought, culture, it finds that

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all its standards are denied, exceeded or belittled; all that it honours is given a second place, all that it has rejected is still held in honour.

"Here is a philosophy which founds itself on the immediate reality of the Infinite, the pressing claim of the Absolute. And this is not as a thing to speculate about, but as a real Presence and a constant Power which demands the soul of man and calls it.

"Here is a mentality which sees the Divine in Nature and man and animal and inanimate thing, God at the beginning, God in the middle, God at the end, God everywhere! And all this is not a permissible poetical play of the imagination that need not be taken too seriously by life, but is put forward as a thing to be lived, realised, put at the back of even outward action, turned into stuff of thought, feeling and conduct!

"And whole disciplines are systematised for this purpose, disciplines which men still practise! And whole lives are given up to this pursuit of the supreme Person, the universal Godhead, the One, the Absolute, the Infinite! And to pursue this immaterial aim men are still content to abandon the outward life and society and home and family and their most cherished pursuits and all that has to a rational mind a substantial and ascertainable value!

"Here is a country... where... the experiences of Yoga are held to be as true or more true than the experiments of the laboratory. Is this not a thinking of things evidently unthinkable since the rational Western mind has ceased to think about them? Is it not an attempt to know things evidently unknowable since the modern mind has abandoned all attempt to know them? There is among these irrational half-savages an endeavour even to make this unreal thing the highest flight of life, its very goal, and a governing force, a shaping power in art and culture and conduct!..."¹⁶ (Paragraphing ours)

Here ends our chapter on Sri Aurobindo's satirical humour.

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REFERENCES

N.B. For what the abbreviations stand for please consult Bibliography on page 439.

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