Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 21

Global Comprehension

I

Strange, indeed, are the ironies concocted by the Time-Spirit. An alien bureaucracy sends a patriot to prison and he turns it, as Sri Aurobindo did at Alipur, into a Temple of Sadhana; or, like Tilak at Mandalay, he finds fulfilment in the composition of a masterly commentary, the Gita Rahasya; or he opens himself, as Jawaharlal Nehru did in The Discovery of India, to the influence of the winding movement of his nation's unfolding history. Or, again, a poetaster-laureate writes a foolish panegyric on a dead King, and a Byron answers with the gloriously entertaining satire, The Vision of Judgement; a Kingsley casually assails the convert Newman's integrity, and the latter in self-defence writes a classic spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua, wrung from the depths; or an egregious critic, William Archer, throws random brickbats at a great country's culture, and the Yogin-Seer Sri Aurobindo turns what begins as a punishment into a richly rewarding and many-faceted study of the glory that is India's heritage from the past.

The volume that appeared as The Foundations of Indian Culture in 1953 comprises three distinct groups of essays: first three essays with the title 'The Issue: Is India Civilised?', next the series 'A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture' (this was the main "reply" to Archer), and finally the comprehensive 'A Defence of Indian Culture' with sections on 'Religion and Spirituality', 'Indian Art', 'Indian Literature' and 'Indian Polity', All these had originally appeared in the Arya from December 1919 to January 1921, but were later subjected to some revision before publication in book form. The four essays that make The Renaissance in India were published even earlier, between August and November 1918. Together, the Foundations and the Renaissance give us a view of India's living past and throbbing present that is refreshingly original as well as stimulating and enlightening. Coming after The Life Divine, The Secret of the Veda, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Psychology of Social Development and The Ideal of Human Unity (only the Synthesis not yet concluded), these new series of essays that appeared during the last two and a half years of the Arya were more directly concerned with India; and although not at first designed to be a treatise - and even now the garner of essays hasn't the configuration of a forbidding treatise - the Foundations and the Renaissance add up to a very reliable guide to the multiverses of India's cultural history. While the Veda and the Gita and two of the shorter Upanishads have been studied in depth separately (as reviewed in an earlier chapter), the complementary works, the Foundations and the Renaissance, recapture with a compellingly sure insight the essence of scripture, religion, literature, social, political and cultural history; and, in the result, there emerges a comprehensive image of the Tree of Indian Culture, with its roots in the Vedic age several thousand years ago, its oak-like  

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trunk of historical times altogether impressive though rugged and weather-beaten, and its branches and foliage responding readily to the life-giving rays of the rising Sun of the unfolding present and carrying in its secret folds the flowers of the future.

Many are the Westerners who have with what looks like wilful purblindness and perversity seen Indian culture upside down and broadcast their fantastic findings. There have been others too, who have felt the call of India and succumbed to the fascination of her infectious spirituality. If there have been denigrators of Indian culture like Abbe Dubois, Macaulay and William Archer, there have been stout apologists too like Sir William Jones, Max Muller and Sir John Woodroffe: negative and positive responses seem to cancel one another out; but this does not absolve Indians from the duty to gauge their heritage aright, to cherish and make proper use of it, and help it too to put forth new leaves of promise during the current dawns to meet the noons of the future. It was this consideration that made Sri Aurobindo write at so much length, first with a view to dispelling the clouds of present misunderstanding and then turning the light of right understanding on India's unique cultural heritage.

II

William Archer was on the whole a sound dramatic critic, although some of his animadversions on the lesser Elizabethans were too harsh and needed a T.S. Eliot to put the record straight. But when Archer ventured, with more valour than discretion, to indict the culture of a sub-continent like India, he was really asking for trouble.¹ The provocation he gave was outrageous enough, for otherwise a sthitaprajña, a supramental Yogi, like Sri Aurobindo would not have found it necessary to take notice of it. Archer was not Archer merely, but a type, a phenomenon, the type of the West's supercilious castigation of India, the ugly phenomenon of incomprehension playing a critical Momus, the rusted and leaky bucket making faces at the waters of the Ganga. And hence Sri Aurobindo felt impelled to string his bow and release such a lightning series of arrows to hit unerringly the offending target. It is not that criticism by itself, honest criticism, is unwelcome, but it can have no value when it is mere slander and "vitriol-throwing"; besides, Archer had his political axes to grind - to prove India barbarous "in order to destroy or damage her case for self-government", and that sort of "extraneous motive at once puts his whole pleading out of court". Then comes the main indictment:

...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

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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, - .. .all this is not the occasional freak of a well-informed critic suffering from a fit of mental biliousness.... 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, - in addition to his illegitimate motive and his deliberate unfairness this is a third and worst cardinal defect, - that for the most part he knew absolutely nothing about the things on which he was passing his confident damnatory judgements... 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.²

And yet it is this book that is no book, this fake that is a sackful of tortuous misrepresentation, this jaundiced "rationalist" onslaught on Indian culture that has occasioned Sri Aurobindo's own "aggressive defence", a defence that is not only a call to new creation but is itself creative criticism at its best.

And, first, how was it possible at all to pose the question "Is India civilised?" - as if the obvious answer could only be an emphatic "No!" Better to define one's terms at the outset: what is "civilisation"? and what is "culture"? Here Sri Aurobindo at once touches the heart of the controversy:

A true happiness in this world is the right terrestrial aim of man, and true happiness lies in the finding and maintenance of a natural harmony of spirit, mind and body. A culture is to be valued to the extent to which it has discovered the right key of this harmony and organised its expressive motives and movements. And a civilisation must be judged by the manner in which all its principles, ideas, forms, ways of living work to bring that harmony out, manage its rhythmic play and secure its continuance or the development of its motives. A civilisation in pursuit of this aim may be predominantly material like modern European culture, predominantly mental and intellectual like the old Graeco-Roman or predominantly spiritual like the still persistent culture of India.³

The present contrast, then, is between the Western science-based materialist civilisation and India's "still persistent" spiritual culture. Before we venture to decide which is the better of the two, we should begin by acknowledging their honourable separative existence without summarily damning one as barbarous and extolling the other as the only possible civilisation. Unfortunately, in a discussion like this which should be conducted on an informed intellectual level, politics often romps in to confuse the issues. That the British (a Western power) happened to rule India at the time didn't by itself prove that Western civilisation was superior at all points to India's; but not only imperialist spokesmen intoxicated by the sense of power, even many Indians too felt hypnotised by the West's political ascendency and castigated unreservedly India's "decadent" civilisation. On the other hand, the reform movements of the nineteenth century and the spiritual phenomenon of

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Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda's sensational appearance at Chicago gave the needed break, opened the world's eyes to the persisting vitality of India's spiritual culture, and there was no reason to be apologetic or defeatist as before. Sri Aurobindo thought that the time had come to ask the right questions about culture and to formulate answers in a spirit of "aggressive defence":

This question of Indian civilisation, once it has raised this greater issue, shifts from its narrow meaning and disappears into a much larger problem. Does the future of humanity lie in a culture founded solely upon reason and science?... Or is not the truth of our being rather that of a Soul embodied in Nature which is seeking to know itself, to find itself, to enlarge its consciousness, to arrive at a greater way of existence, to progress in the spirit and grow into the full light of self-knowledge and some divine inner perfection?⁴

Whatever had been the petrified attitudes of the past on the East-West question, in the twentieth century the world was awakening at last, both to the insufficiency of reason and science and technology, and to the possibilities promised by the integral Indian view that made spirituality the bass of the whole music of existence. And the very necessity for an "aggressive defence" of the Indian view would make it incumbent on the advocate to take a larger perspective as well:

Certainly we must repel with vigour every disintegrating or injurious attack; but it is much more important to form our own true and independent view of our own past achievement, present position and future possibilities, - what we were, what we are and what we may be.... Our sense of the greatness of our past must not be made a fatally hypnotising lure to inertia; it should be rather an inspiration to renewed and greater achievement.⁵

If there had been triumphs, there had been failures too, even catastrophic reverses; and a critical review of both must help us to draw the right lessons so that we may be in a position, from a sure ground of self-knowledge, to take a leap into the future:

If we are to live at all, we must resume India's great interrupted endeavour; we must take up boldly and execute thoroughly in the individual and in the society, in the spiritual and in the mundane life, in philosophy and religion, in art and literature, in thought, in political and economic and social formulation the full and unlimited sense of her highest spirit and knowledge.⁶

It was with these large aims, and not in any narrow spirit of disputation, that Sri Aurobindo launched upon this "aggressive defence" that is, perhaps, more correctly described as an impassioned exercise in global comprehension.

But of course it is inevitable, since Archer had cast himself in the role of Devil's Advocate, that his head should show up from time to time above the even surface of the argument; it is as though he provides the Puruvapaksha for Sri Aurobindo's Siddhanta. It is not necessary to follow the debate all along the way, for even two or three citations would reveal the measure of Archer's critical ineptitude. For example. Archer's opinion of Sita that she is so excessive in her virtue "as to verge on immorality" elicits Sri Aurobindo's comment that "meaningless  

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smart extravagance has reached its highest point when it can thus verge on the idiotic".⁷ Paced with exhibitions of such monumental obtuseness, Sri Aurobindo can hardly hide his exasperation, but he is also anxious to get behind the skin of this stupidity and perversity, and discover if he can the bone-structure supporting such a sustained asinine mascularity of invective against Indian culture. Quite simply, Indian spirituality - the surge and rise of the soul in man to the Truth, the Right, the Vast (satyam-rtam-brhat) at the heart of all existence - is the red rag to Archer' bullish "rationality". The only brand of "spirituality" that Archer can recognise is a high Rajasic activity or the Homeric type of heroism and noble endurance, and hence he needs must belittle Indian life and literature:

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.⁸

Archer is allergic to philosophy, and particularly to India's inward-looking spiritual philosophy. Measuring the creations of Indian art and literature with a yard-stick fashioned by Mammon in Science's forge and on Moloch's anvil. Archer finds everything Indian a negation of culture and a denial of life. An excessive emphasis on the elusive claims of the Spirit: a religion that sports polytheism with a reckless extravagance and permits too great a chasm to divide ethical precepts from actual practice: a ruling attitude that is pessimistic, obscurantist and riddled with superstitions: an addiction to the theories of Karma and Reincarnation that minimises the importance of the present life and encourages an extreme inertia and an enervating other-worldliness - these are among the major counts in the "self-constituted prosecuting judge" Mr. Archer's indictment, and "Mr. Archer" is merely shorthand for a whole school of denigration, primarily of Western origin no doubt, but not lacking its Indian practitioners. From the general counts, presently, flows particular and painstaking criticism in respect of Indian poetry, art, and Indian life - and accordingly, Sri Aurobindo too states the Siddhanta with a lucid clarity, force of authority, and apposite and adequate marshalling of detail. Even as the criticism is general as well as particular, the "aggressive defence" too has the same dual cast.

Did Indian religious thought really preach universal asceticism or a total flight from life? Sri Aurobindo points out that ordinarily - in the Indian way of life - moksa (spiritual liberation) comes as a feat of transcendence out of the fullness of the other three, kāma (enjoyment), artha (material well-being) and dharma (right conduct); "there was no preaching of a general rush to the cave and the hermitage".⁹ Again, was the characteristic Indian attitude corrosively pessimistic - or more pessimistic than, say. Western or Christian thought? A divine discontent with  

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the normal concert of human activities is not pessimism, and the hope of "a luminous ascent into godhead" is not pessimistic either. Nor are pessimism and asceticism peculiar to India, and the central point to be pressed is that "Indian spirituality in its greatest eras and in its inmost significance has not been a tired quietism or a conventional monasticism, but a high effort of the human spirit to rise beyond the life of desire and vital satisfaction and arrive at an acme of spiritual calm, greatness, strength, illumination, divine realisation, settled peace and bliss."¹⁰ And so with the other charges: irrationality and incipient or open immorality, the hiatus between what is said and what is done, the flight from responsibility, and total defeatism in the face of current challenges and the alarming uncertainties of the future. Alas for the West: the Age of Reason and Science had by slow gradations emptied life of all mystery and towering hope, pinned the circuit of activity to an almost exclusive preoccupation with what is visible and tangible and graspable, and reached "the atheistic or agnostic cult of secularism, the acme of denial, the zenith of the positive intelligence".¹¹ How could that mentality of material all-sufficiency cope with the imponderables of the Indian view of life, its relativities, its stairway of possibilities and its integral spiritual vision? Feeling confused and in a desperate effort to hide the confusion, an Archer can only make faces and shout abuses, - an extreme Western reaction to the West-East confrontation: for the Western mind, in its attempt to grapple with the Indian, "finds that 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".¹² There is "the still surviving force of Indian religion, thought, culture" that laves in the Infinite, sees the Divine behind the phenomenal play, dares the great adventure of invading the Invisible and makes a mighty science of the experiences of Yoga.

Sri Aurobindo concedes that Western culture, although "narrow at the top, shut in under a heavy lid, poor in its horizons, too much of the soil",¹³ is still imbued with a strenuous and noble purpose. But Indian culture has sworn by other standards, and grown other dimensions of understanding and realisation. It had its early period of pristine spiritual flowering - then went through a period of strong intellectuality - and finally stumbled upon an age of progressive decadence of the outer structure. But even in its degenerate days the embers of the old vitality remained unextinguished, and the shock of the blast from the West brought a reviving breeze as well, and the old force has been lately asserting itself once again. And one judges a nation's culture, not by its perversions or its decadent futilities, but rather by its positive achievements and the promise it holds for the future. What, then, was the image of Indian civilisation and culture in is heyday, an image tarnished indeed in later times, but not wholly invisible, nor wholly without its power of inspiration:

...a thing rich, splendid and unique. While it filled the view with the last mountain prospect of a supreme spiritual elevation, it did not neglect the life of the levels. It lived between the busy life of the city and village, the freedom and seclusion of the forest and the last overarching illimitable ether. Moving

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firmly between life and death it saw beyond both and cut out a hundred high roads to immortality. It developed the external nature and drew it into the inner self; it enriched life to raise it into the spirit. Thus founded, thus trained, the ancient Indian race grew to astonishing heights of culture and civilisation; it lived with a noble, well-based, ample and vigorous order and freedom; it developed a great literature, sciences, arts, crafts, industries; it rose to the highest possible ideals and no mean practice of knowledge and culture, of arduous greatness and heroism, of kindness, philanthropy and human sympathy and oneness; it laid the inspired basis of wonderful spiritual philosophies; it examined the secrets of external nature and discovered and lived the boundless and miraculous truths of the inner being; it fathomed self and understood and possessed the world.¹⁴

Two thousand or more years later - after the periods of further enrichment and complexity, artificiality and stratification, self-indulgence and accelerated self-enfeeblement, asceticism and defeatist hostility to life - the memories of our spiritual birth and state returned fitfully but often enough to prevent the soul of the nation from being smothered out, and now in India's reviving hour of a new Dawn we see that old force asserting itself once again in all its native strength "to give the impulse of a great renaissance".¹⁵

III

We are now launched at last on the all-absorbing theme: a facet-by-facet study of Indian culture, historical as well as interpretative, illuminated by revealing beams of comparative criticism: an eighteen-chapter sequence entitled "A Defence of Indian Culture", yet much more than a "defence", - rather is it a re-statement, a robust stock-taking, and almost a tonic manifesto for the future. The four roughly equivalent sections are devoted to 'Religion and Spirituality', 'Indian Art', ' Indian Literature' and 'Indian Polity' respectively. Four self-sufficient sections these, but united by the under-ground waters of the Spirit: the one power, the one inspiration, is seen to achieve varied self-expression, a satisfying play of multiplicity originating from a single fount of all-sustaining energy. It is like wave following wave, advancing and retreating and advancing again; the chapters had originally appeared in the Arya month after month, and this alternate glancing backward and cantering forward became necessary to call the reader's attention and carry it easily onward. There is thus a rhythm in the seeming reiterations, and this too is part of the fascination of the work and augments its expository charm and power of persuasion.

The initial difficulty that militates against an understanding of Hinduism is that it seems to be many things to many people. Has it a single scripture like the Bible or the Koran? a single Founder like the Buddha, Christ or Mahomet? "The only thing fixed, rigid, positive, clear is the social law," says Sri Aurobindo; "and even that varies in different castes, regions, communities."¹⁶ No wonder

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Dr. Ambedkar once said, stung by exasperation, that Hinduism is not a religion, but a contagious disease! But that is not the truth either. To help us out of our perplexity, Sri Aurobindo isolates certain essential strands in the bewilderingly complex web of Hindu religious thought and practice. There is, first, the belief in an omnipresent Reality; there is, second, the individual's acceptance of the need for inner development and outer discipline; third, the practice of one of the prescribed religious or spiritual disciplines with a view to Grace or Knowledge; and, fourth, conformity to the laws of individual and collective life. For the Hindu, then, "all life and thought are in the end a means of progress towards self-realisation and God-realisation".¹⁷ And one particular feature of Indian religion has been the periodic occurrence of "messengers of the Spirit" - Nammalvar, Andal, Manikkavasagar, Tukaram, Kabir, Mira, Sankara Deva and Nanak - who were minstrels of God and ambassadors of the Absolute. But although many were these witnesses, these Seers, Rishis, Alvars, Acharyas, Prahladas, although many notes make the marvellous symphony of Indian religious aspiration and realisation, still there is the great bass too, the sruti, the etheric ambience supporting the multitudinous play: the three-stringed harmony of the affirmation of the One, the manifoldness of approach to Him and the secret of the soul's sanctuary, in the Divine was best invoked and realised there. "These three things put together", says Sri Aurobindo, "are the whole of Hindu religion, its essential sense and, if any credo is needed, its credo."¹⁸

Man has a soul, and it is one with the Divine; to awaken man to this Truth and help him to realise it is the whole aim of Indian religion and spirituality. The Veda with its symbol-pointers and seer-wisdom, the Upanishads with their lightning flashes and leaps of thought, the Gita with its high-arching reasoning and culminating revelation, Purana and Tantra with their more pronouncedly rich and complex appeal to the human psyche, all addressed themselves to the same elemental task of man's self-transcendence, only the changing times compelling a change in the terminology. The basic Hindu or Indian assumptions have always been that man is more than animal, that this flawed life is not the be-all and end-all, and that man carries in himself a divine destiny realisable by one and all: first by living in society in conformity with the accepted Dharma, then by a conscious inner development of the mind and the aesthetic sensibility and the soul, and finally by accomplishing a "breakthrough" to the realm of the Spirit:

Thus we may observe that there was created a Yoga of knowledge for the self-exceeding of the thinking intellectual man, a Yoga of works for the self-exceeding of the active, dynamic and ethical man, a Yoga of love and Bhakti for the self-exceeding of the emotional, aesthetic, hedonistic man, by which each arrived to perfection through a self-ward, spiritual. God-ward direction of his own special power.... ¹⁹

It can be seen that the spiritual aim that made God-realisation or life-transformation in the image of the Divine the goal of life, by the very fact of its being the noblest possible aim, imposed a tremendous strain on the aspirants and practitioners, and naturally in its actual working there have been "great limitations, great

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imperfections"; but that can be no argument against the ideal itself, nor can it abridge the glory of the many leaders of the march. "India has lived and lived greatly, whatever judgement one may pass on her ideas and institutions";²⁰ and the history of her great men is not a record of saints and ecstatics alone, but includes also poets, sculptors, painters, scientists, polymaths, rulers, statesmen, conquerors, administrators. Asoka, Chanakya, Chandragupta, Akbar, Shivaji, Guru Govind Singh, these are in the golden roll-call as much as Gautama Buddha, Mahavira, Sankara, Ramanuja, Chaitanya, Nanak:

All this mass of action was not accomplished by men without mind and will and vital force, by pale shadows of humanity in whom the vigorous manhood had been crushed out under the burden of a gloomy and all-effacing asceticism, nor does it look like the sign of a metaphysically minded people or dreamers averse to life and action.²¹

India has of course laid great emphasis on the extinction of the egoistic personality, but such extinction has also been the means to the conquest of infinity:

The perfect man, the Siddha or the Buddha, becomes universal, embraces all being in sympathy and oneness, finds himself in others as in himself and by so doing draws into himself at the same time something of the infinite power of a universal energy. That is the positive ideal of Indian culture.²²

Indian art - comprising architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance and drama - being more an expression of Indian life in its true inwardness with its insistent religious commitment and reserves of the spiritual sublime, than a vivid imaginative imitation of outward reality, has been a constant invitation to Western detractors. The gravamen of the charge is that Indian art is not "realistic". What do these ancient sculptors mean by giving four arms to Vishnu, eight or ten to Shiva, eighteen to Durga, or three heads to Brahma? Aren't such images unnatural, aren't these only masses of "monstrous and abortive miscreation"? Dhanam's incomparable melodies on the Veena once struck a European missionary at Madras as intolerable cacophony, and bits of classical Western music seem to an untrained Indian as mere immitigable wailing. Andersen's story of the Ugly Duckling is germane to most cavalier judgements on art and literature; alas, the duckling that is adjudged "ugly" is no duckling at all - it is a swan!

Sri Aurobindo was acquainted with European art in its early classical, renaissance and recent experimental phases, and also with Chinese, Japanese and Indian art. His intimacy with the Hellenic and the Hindu spirit, and the cultural achievements of the West and the East, gave him the clue to a catholic and universal aesthesis; and his appreciation of art and of individual works of art flowed from a wide background of knowledge as well as an intuitive understanding of motive, media and techniques. It is no small privilege, then, to be initiated by Sri Aurobindo into the oneness and manifoldness of art and the arts - their converging ultimate origins, their career of divergence from their source, the sovereign powers and difficulties of the several art forms, the unity of diversity in the visions of the Infinite in the divers form-determined finite works of art. There are passages of  

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comparative criticism that only a global comprehension and an infallible eye for right discrimination could have made possible. Sri Aurobindo correctly lays down at the outset that art criticism should first take note of "the spirit, aim, essential motives from which a type of artistic creation starts".²³ No doubt all great art springs ultimately from "an act of intuition". Where, then, begins the immense divergence between Western and Indian art? It can only be in the practical details of the functioning of the intuition, where it works and how and for achieving what results:

The European artist gets his intuition by a suggestion from an appearance in life and Nature or, if it starts from something in his own soul, relates it at once to an external support... [Indian art's] highest business is to disclose something of the Self, the Infinite, the Divine to the regard of the soul, the Self through its expressions, the Infinite through its living finite symbols, the Divine through his powers.... A seeing in the self accordingly becomes the characteristic method of the Indian artist... .²⁴

There are two ways of "covering" a circle. One can start from a point on the circumference, dive and grope towards the centre - or be diverted to the circumference again! In its own way, it is an interesting experience, and it could be a fascinating one as well. On the other hand, one may start from the centre, and wind one's way to the circumference - or rather, take a leap from the centre, in one mad canter as it were, to the farthest point on the circumference. Of course, analogies are not the whole truth, but this nearly hits the mark. Aesthetic insight is enough to take the measure of a European work of art, but spiritual insight too is needed if one is to take in the full meaning - the spiralling connotation - of a typical Indian artistic creation grounded on the Spirit.

Aside from the originating "intuition", there is also the enveloping force of "form", for "all art reposes on some unity and all its details, whether few and sparing or lavish and crowded and full, must go back to that unity and help its significance; otherwise it is not art".²⁵ There is a striking difference between the massive and gorgeous architecture of the South Indian temples (those at Chidambaram, Conjeevaram, Madura, Tanjore and Srirangam, for example), the immediate opulence of the Gothic cathedrals and the utter and noble simplicity of the Parthenon, but each style has its own distinctive "form", significant enough in relation to its purpose, and the world of art would be very poor indeed if a single style electronically operated everywhere. In the following passage, Sri Aurobindo states the criteria of the different styles without condemning any:

Now it may readily be admitted that the failure to see at once the unity of this [Indian] architecture is perfectly natural to a European eye, because unity in the sense demanded by the Western conception, the Greek unity gained by much suppression and a sparing use of detail and circumstance or even the Gothic unity got by casting everything into the mould of a single spiritual aspiration, is not there. And the greater unity that really is there can never be arrived at at all, if the eye begins and ends by dwelling on form and detail and ornament, because it will then be obsessed by these things and find it difficult

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to go beyond to the unity which all this in its totality serves not so much to express in itself, but to fill it with that which comes out of it and relieve its oneness by multitude. An original oneness, not a combined or synthetic or an effected unity, is that from which this art begins and to which its work when finished returns or rather lives in it as in its self and natural atmosphere. Indian sacred architecture constantly represents the greatest oneness of the Self, the cosmic, the infinite in the immensity of its world-design, the multitude of its features of self-expression, laksana, (yet the oneness is greater than and independent of their totality and in itself indefinable), and all its starting-point of unity in conception, its mass of design and immensity of material, its crowding abundance of significant ornament and detail and its return towards oneness are only intelligible as necessary circumstances of this poem, this epic or this lyric - for there are smaller structures which are such lyrics - of the Infinite.²⁶

After sprawling towns and smoky cities have grown round many of these ancient temples, it is becoming difficult if not impossible to look at such architectural marvels as they are intended to be. The Japanese, Sri Aurobindo reminds us, have wisely raised their temples and installed their Buddhas "as often as possible away on mountains and in distant or secluded scenes of Nature and avoid living with great paintings in the crude hours of daily life".²⁷ Perhaps, it is easier to appreciate the mystical tremendum of Indian sacred architecture by viewing in a mood of tranced attention the temples at Kalahasti and Simhachalam:

The straight way here is not to detach the temple from its surroundings, but to see it in unity with the sky and low-lying landscape or with the sky and hills around and feel the thing common to both, the construction and its environment, the reality in Nature, the reality expressed in the work of art.... There is in both a constant, subtle yet pronounced lessening from the base towards the top, but at each stage a repetition of the same form, the same multiplicity of insistence, the same crowded fullness and indented relief, but one maintains its multiple endeavour and indication to the last, the other ends in a single sign.... Not absence of unity, but a tremendous unity is revealed.²⁸

In such hallowed spots at least it is still possible to see those ecstasies in stone, not in the cavalier mood of sight-seer curiosity (with cameras clicking all the time), but "in loneliness, in the solitude of one's self, in moments when one is capable of long and deep meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material life".²⁹ Man and Nature and God are then inseparable to our understanding, and the One and the Many, the visible and the invisible, seem lost in the ineffable experience of harmony and peace. And as for the great architectural wonders of the Moghul period, isn't the Taj - when seen with an intuition matching the intuition in which it had its origin - "not merely a sensuous reminiscence of an imperial amour or a fairy enchantment hewn from the moon's lucent quarries, but the eternal dream of a love that survives death"?³⁰ The great mosques too, incarnate a noble religious aspiration, and the tombs "reach beyond death to the beauty and joy of Paradise".  

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In sculpture and painting, again, without the key to a catholic and universal aesthesis, it would be difficult to get at the heart of the masterpieces of all times and all countries. What you look for is not what the artist has intended, and you pull a long face, or you grunt your irritations and sore" disappointments; you have no patience, no inclination, no inner resilience to find the motivation behind the work of art and to establish rapport with it. Is one to look in sculpture only for anatomy, or an exact reproduction of a fact of natural science? Realism, naturalism, pre-Raphaelism, impressionism cubism, surrealism, in their several ways all are valid enough renderings of Reality. Indian sculpture and painting - at least the best of it - has had its origins in the depths of the human soul, and then alone risen to the vital and mental levels, to fulfil itself at last in a radiant, if not always rounded, perfection in terms of form and rhythm and line and colour. Originating in the soul, such art appeals also to the soul. And when the coldly rationalistic Archer tries to weigh and consider this art and comment upon it, he can hardly avoid presenting the "spectacle of a blind man discoursing on colours".³¹ Now turn to Sri Aurobindo, and what a difference! Here he is writing of the sculptures of the Olympian and the Indian gods:

The Olympian gods of Phidias are magnified and uplifted human beings saved from a too human limitation by a certain divine calm of impersonality or universalised quality, divine type, guna: in other work we see heroes, athletes, feminine incarnations of beauty, calm and restrained embodiments of idea, action or emotion in the idealised beauty of the human figure. The gods, of Indian sculpture are cosmic beings, embodiments of some great spiritual power, spiritual idea and action, inmost psychic significance, the human form a vehicle of this soul meaning, its outward means of self-expression.... The divine self in us is its theme, the body made a form of the soul is its idea and its secret.³²

Again, in a review of O. C. Gangoly's South Indian Bronzes, Sri Aurobindo makes the point more tellingly still:

These deities are far removed indeed from the Greek and the Christian conceptions; they do not live in the world at all, but in themselves, in the infinite. The form is, as it were, a wave in which the whole ocean of being expresses itself.... But always one has to look not at the form, but through and into it to see that which has seized and informed it... most art expresses the play of Prakriti; Buddhistic art in its most characteristic creations expresses the absolute repose of the Purusha; Hindu art tends to combine the Purusha and Prakriti in one image.... This is the motive of the Natarajan, the Dancing Shiva... the self-absorbed concentration, the motionless peace and joy are within, outside is the whole mad bliss of the cosmic movement.³³

In painting, too, it is the same story. Sri Aurobindo feels he has not been able to steep himself in the spirit of the European renaissance art, as in the hellenic; and this is the reason why he is more at home in a Greek Aphrodite than in Tintoretto's paintings like Adam and Eve or St. George slaying the Dragon:

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...I am aware of standing baffled and stopped by an irresponsive blankness somewhere in my being.... When I try to analyse my failure, I find at first certain conceptions which conflict with my expectation or my own way of seeing. This muscular Adam, the sensuous beauty of this Eve, do not brine home to me the mother or the father of the race, this dragon seems to me only a surly portentous beast in great danger of being killed, not a creative embodiment of monstrous evil.... But the cause of my failure is there, that I am seeking for something which was not meant in the spirit of this art and which I ought not to expect from its characteristic creation.³⁴

Indeed, Sri Aurobindo is just and more than just, and would rather attribute his failure to appreciate a work of art to an inappropriate approach on his own part than to a deficiency in the picture itself in its own level of execution. And so he says elsewhere: "The perspective, the psychic vision of the Chinese and Japanese painters are not the same as those of European artists; but who can ignore the beauty and the wonder of their work?"³⁵

All discussions on Indian painting must start - and end - with the Ajanta marvels. Even in their ruins they are a silent reminder to us that at one time - two thousand years ago - the whole country must have witnessed a similar splendour of artistic activity. This means a tradition of at least two millenniums, placing Indian painting on a par with Indian architecture and sculpture. Buddhist, Hindu and later Rajput painters - amidst all the changes in style - reveal nevertheless the oneness and continuity of all Indian art and its essential spiritual tradition. Unlike sculpture, which has to wrestle with a more intractable medium, painting with the freedom that comes from the use of colours is able to "dwell on the mobilities of the soul rather than on its static eternities". Here Sri Aurobindo elaborates the difference between sculpture and painting, as Lessing had done earlier in his contrastive study of Laocoon in the python's coils by the poet and the sculptor respectively:

The sculptor must express always in static form; the idea of the spirit is cut out for him in mass and line, significant in the stability of its insistence, and he can lighten the weight of this insistence but not get rid of it or away from it; for him eternity seizes hold of time in its shapes and arrests it in the monumental spirit of stone or bronze. The painter on the contrary lavishes his soul in colour and there is a liquidity in the form, a fluent grace of subtlety in the line he uses which imposes on him a more mobile and emotional way of self-expression.... There is less of the austerity of Tapasya in his way of working... but there is in compensation a moved wealth of psychic or warmth of vital suggestion, a lavish delight of the beauty of the play of the eternal in the moments of time... .³⁶

The Indian painter, exploiting to the full the scope, turn and possibility of his medium, finds it a fascinating means for rendering the fluidities and exaltations and openings and soarings of the human soul caught in the ambience of the Eternal. He begins where the average Western painter usually ends, the soul's stirrings

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towards sovereignty; and Sri Aurobindo singles out for particular comment the adoration group of the Mother and Child before the Buddha, "one of the most profound, tender and noble of the Ajanta masterpieces". The moment the painter has successfully caught is the child's awakening (as the mother has already awakened) to the spiritual joy of adoration of the Buddha: .

...the motive of the soul-moment the painting interprets is the dedication of the awakening mind of the child, the coming younger humanity, to that in which already the soul of the mother had learned to find and fix its spiritual joy. The eyes, brows, lips, face, poise of the head of the woman are filled with this spiritual emotion which is a continued memory and possession of the psychical release, the steady settled calm of the heart's experience filled with an ineffable tenderness, the familiar depths which are yet moved with the wonder and always farther appeal of something that is infinite, the body and other limbs are grave masses of this emotion and in their poise a basic embodiment of it, while the hands prolong it in the dedicative putting forward of her child to meet the Eternal. This contact of the human and eternal is repeated in the smaller figure with a subtly and strongly indicated variation, the glad and childlike smile of awakening which promises but not yet possesses the depths that are to come.... The two figures have at each point the same rhythm, but with a significant difference.³⁷

Of the painting of the Great Renunciation, again, Sri Aurobindo speaks with a thrilled imaginative insight, finding in the picture nothing purely personal but everything poignantly universal, the agony and unreality of the world and the anguished seeking for a way out; "hence the immense calm and restraint that support the sorrow, in the true bliss of Nirvana".³⁸ These chapters on Indian architecture, sculpture and painting are the quintessence of art criticism, and the Indian student as well as the unbiased Westerner will find in these pages insights and explorations of immeasurable value.

Then follow five chapters on Indian literature, the first three being devoted to the Veda, the Upanishads and the two great epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata - respectively; the fourth, to Kalidasa and the poets of the Classical age, and the last, to Purana and Tantra, to the Tamil poets, and the minstrels of God all over the country. What Sri Aurobindo is attempting is nothing less than a bird's eye-view of a three-thousand-year old fairly continuous and reasonably diversified literary tradition. It is not, of course, professor Dryasdust doling out dates and engineering whirls of names, currents, cross-currents, trends, movements, tendencies and reactions; what we have instead is a quick voyage of discovery - or animated re-discovery - of the great landmarks, the lighthouses, the hills rich with green and the lakes full of life-renewing waters. As elsewhere, here too the ghost of Archer makes a momentary appearance. He would seem to have missed everything essential and made mock of what he had deliberately misunderstood, or what is merely peripheral or casual. Sri Aurobindo's reply takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum in reverse:  

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The fit parallel to this motive and style of criticism would be if an Indian critic who had read European literature only in bad or ineffective Indian translations, were to pass it under a hostile and disparaging review, dismiss the Iliad as a crude and empty semi-savage and primitive epos, Dante's great work as the nightmare of a cruel and superstitious religious fantasy, Shakespeare as a drunken barbarian of considerable genius with an epileptic imagination, the whole drama of Greece and Spain and England as a mass of bad ethics and violent horrors, French poetry as a succession of bald or tawdry rhetorical exercises and French fiction as a tainted and immoral thing, a long sacrifice on the altar of the goddess Lubricity, admit here and there a minor merit, but make no attempt at all to understand the central spirit or aesthetic quality or principle of structure and conclude on the strength of his own absurd method that the ideals of both Pagan and Christian Europe were altogether false and bad and its imagination afflicted with a "habitual and ancestral" earthiness, morbidity, poverty and disorder. No criticism would be worth making on such a mass of absurdities... .³⁹

Having thus exorcised the comic ghost of Archer, Sri Aurobindo turns to the Veda, which is "a remarkable, a sublime and powerful poetic creation" by Rishis (a Vishvamitra, a Vamadeva, a Dhirghatamas) touching "the most extraordinary heights and amplitudes of a sublime and mystic poetry".⁴⁰ The constant feeling of the presence of the Infinite, the sixth sense to see and render this Presence through multifoliate imagery drawn from the psychic plane, and the leap of intuition that repeatedly achieves the transcendence of the terrestrial into vaster spiritual realms: these three distinguishing marks of the best Vedic poetry provide also the inspiration for all the best Indian poetry to come.

The Upanishads add a more specifically intellectual dimension to the poetry and the speculation, but they also connect with the higher spiritual thought of the civilised world, ancient and modern:

The ideas of the Upanishads can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profoundest part of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West, and Sufism only repeats them in another religious language. The larger part of German metaphysics is little more in substance than an intellectual development of great realities more spiritually seen in this ancient teaching, and modem thought is rapidly absorbing them with a closer, more living and intense receptiveness.... There is hardly a main philosophical idea which cannot find an authority or a seed or indication in these antique writings.... and even the larger generalisations of Science are constantly found to apply to the truth of physical Nature formulas already discovered by the Indian sages in their original, their largest meaning in the deeper truth of the spirit.⁴¹

The Upanishads. it must be admitted, are not all of a piece; there are the shorter metrical Upanishads, and there are the discursive tropically-rich Upanishads; and

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often story, fable, debate, hair-splitting, poetry, all co-exist cheek by jowl. But on a total view, it is a legacy unparalleled elsewhere; and, besides, they reveal to us the contours of an extraordinary society, a unique culture, a rare intellectual and spiritual camaraderie:

The scenes of the old world live before us in a few pages, the sages sitting in their groves ready to test and teach the comer, princes and learned Brahmins and great landed nobles going about in search of knowledge, the king's son in his chariot and the illegitimate son of the servant-girl, seeking any man who might carry in himself the thought of light and the word of revelation, the typical figures and personalities, Janaka and the subtle mind of Ajatashatru, Raikwa of the cart, Yajnavalkya militant for truth, calm and ironic, taking to himself with both hands without attachment worldly possessions and spiritual riches and casting at last all his wealth behind to wander forth as a houseless ascetic, Krishna son of Devaki who heard a single word of the Rishi Ghora and knew at once the Eternal, the Ashramas, the courts of kings who were also spiritual discoverers and thinkers, the great sacrificial assemblies where the sages met and compared their knowledge. And we see how the soul of India was born and how arose this great birth-song in which it soared from this earth into the supreme empyrean of the spirit. The Vedas and the Upanishads are not only the sufficient fountain-head of Indian philosophy and religion, but of all Indian art, poetry and literature.⁴²

Then intervened the age when the Shastras were formulated or codified, but more important were the two great epics, the Mahabharata (containing the Gita as well) and the Ramayana - which are not primitive edda or saga, nor just heroic epics, but itihāsas, chief instruments of popular education and culture that have been moulding people's thought for ages.

It is to little purpose to apply Aristotelean criteria to the structure or action or characters of these enormous poems; these are national epics, odysseys of the soul, reports of the Battle of Dharma, and the chief characters are not just human beings but apocalyptic projections of spiritual visions and psychic ecstasies. Great substance is wedded to equally great style - the Mahabharata with a sustained manliness of its own, the Ramayana with its silken flow and grace and strength and warmth - and perennial indeed is their appeal, and truly inexhaustible their power for shaping human character:

These epics are... a highly artistic representation of intimate significances of life, the living presentment of a strong and noble thinking, a developed ethical and aesthetic mind and a high social and political ideal, the ensouled image of a great culture. As rich in freshness of life but immeasurably more profound and evolved in thought and substance than the Greek, as advanced in maturity of culture but more vigorous and vital and young in strength than the Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems were fashioned to serve a greater and completer national and cultural function... .⁴³

Sri Aurobindo finds in Kalidasa a poet who ranks with Milton and Virgil, but with  

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"a more subtle and delicate spirit and touch in his art than the English, a greater breath of native power informing and vivifying his execution than the Latin poet"; and Abhijnana Shakuntalam is the "most perfect and captivating romantic drama in all literature".⁴⁴

The last of the five chapters unavoidably hurries through the later centuries and takes a sweeping glance at the many regional literatures. The cardinal notes everywhere are spiritual, intuitive and psychic. If the Puranas are essentially a true religious poetry, the Tantras outline "a complete psycho-spiritual and psycho-physical science of Yoga." The great period of Tamil literature was contemporary with the classical Sanskrit age, and there is brief mention of Tiruvalluvar, Avvai, the Vaishnava and Saiva saint-singers, the great epics of Kamban and Tulsidas, and the proliferation of the Bhakti poetry including that of Nanak and the other Sikh Gurus. Of the poetry of the Radha-Krishna cult, Sri Aurobindo writes:

The desire of the soul for God is there thrown into symbolic figure in the lyrical love cycle of Radha and Krishna, the Nature soul in man seeking for the Divine Soul through love, seized and mastered by his beauty, attracted by his magical flute, abandoning human cares and duties for this one overpowering passion and in the cadence of its phases passing through first desire to the bliss of union, the pangs of separation, the eternal longing and reunion, the līlā of the love of the human spirit for God.⁴⁵

It is literary history with a difference, history seen inwardly and integrally in relation to the other arts and the whole matrix of India's evolving life and thought.

IV

In four self-contained chapters of A Defence of Indian Culture - now also separately issued as The Spirit and Form of Indian Polity (1947) - Sri Aurobindo examines the question whether, for all her manifold achievements in the things of the mind and spirit - in art, in literature, in philosophy and religion - achievements that give us the image of a great civilisation, "one of the half dozen greatest of which we have a still existing record",⁴⁶ India hasn't really failed in life, failed in her attempts to forge efficiency on the social, economic and political levels. In other words, isn't Indian culture and civilisation a failure, a stupendous and magnificent failure perhaps, yet a failure all the same? After a new look at such evidence as may be gathered from literature, from coins, and from the recorded impressions of foreign travellers, Sri Aurobindo finds himself in a position to counter the persistent "legend of Indian political incompetence". In the remote past, Indian polity - as elsewhere in other early Aryan settlements - was a tribal system founded upon "the equality of all the freemen of the clan or race".⁴⁷ In course of time, the freely chosen leader became the hereditary King, but his authority still flowed from the collective consent of his people. More than the King, it was the Rishi - who might come from any class - that wielded real authority, and this he  

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did on account of his spiritual personality. Alongside of the Kingdoms, there were also small republican States, and these were "already long established and in vigorous functioning in the sixth century before Christ, contemporary therefore with the brilliant but ephemeral and troubled Greek city commonwealths".⁴⁸ After the traumatic effects of Alexander's conquest, there was the impulse towards the unification of the smaller political units, and the monarchical idea became the nucleus of the larger political formations. But till the arrival of the Muslims, the ruler in India was very seldom a pure despot, and he had always to submit to the imperatives of Dharma - "the religious, ethical, social, political, juridic and customary law organically governing the life of the people"⁴⁹ - which was the impersonal, sacred and eternal authority. An unjust and oppressive King, said Manu, could even be killed by his subjects like a mad dog; and "this justification by the highest authority of the right or even the duty of insurrection and regicide in extreme cases is sufficient to show that absolutism or the unconditional divine right of kings was no part of the intention of the Indian political system".⁵⁰

So much for the dawn and morning glory of Indian history. But the career of a society, of a nation, is broadly similar to the career, the life-history, of an individual. A nation, even like an individual, "passes through a cycle of birth, growth, youth, ripeness and decline, and if this last stage goes far enough without any arrest of its course towards decadence, it may perish, - even so all the older peoples and nations except India and China perished, - as a man dies of old age".⁵¹ But, then, if there are possibilities of decay and death, there are also possibilities of renewal and growth. A people or a race that learnt the art of living, "not solely in its physical and outward life", says Sri Aurobindo, "but in the soul and spirit behind, may not at all exhaust itself... but having itself fused into its life many original smaller societies and attained to its maximum natural growth pass without death through many renascences".⁵² Othello says in a famous passage:

.. .once put out thy light,

Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,

I know not where is that Promethean heat

That can thy light relume.

When the inner spark is extinguished, there is no art, no craft, no science, that can renew that spark, and give life back to the inert body. In the past, India mastered the arts of peace no less than the arts of war - the technique of good government and technique of wise and happy living as well. Theirs was a self-poised and balanced polity, in which the urges of self-interest and hedonistic desire were effectively held in check by the categorical imperatives of Dharma. The political and economic structure was supported by the social compact, which in its turn was reared on immaculate spiritual foundations:

The spiritual mind of India regarded life as a manifestation of the self: the community was the body of the creator Brahman, the people was a life body

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of Brahman in the samasti, the collectivity, it was the collective Narayana, as the individual was Brahman in the vyasti, the separate Jiva, the individual Narayana; the king was the living representative of the Divine and the other orders of the community the natural powers of the collective self, prakrtayah. The agreed conventions, institutes, customs, constitution of the body social and politic in all its parts had therefore not only a binding authority but a certain sacrosanct character.⁵³

Ancient Indian polity knew neither industrialism nor parliamentary democracy of the kind that we associate with modern England or America (or, for that matter, post-Independence India). Indian civilisation passed from the simple Aryan community of pre-history, through many transitionary experimental formations in political structure and synthesis, to the complicated monarchical State -

...a complex of communal freedom and self-determination with a supreme co-ordinating authority, a sovereign person and body, armed with efficient powers, position and prestige, but limited to its proper rights and functions, at once controlling and controlled by the rest, admitting them as its active co-partners in all branches, sharing the regulation and administration of the communal existence, and all alike, the sovereign, the people and all its constituent communities, bound to the maintenance and restrained by the yoke of the Dharma.⁵⁴

But this delicate balance, so purposive and so fruitful, was upset in course of time. Tension started within, and the impact of foreign cultures completed the disturbance of the old harmony and the old unity. Barbaric invasions for a millennium, alien domination for another millennium, - in the face of these ugly facts, how shall it profit us to make a song about the glory that was Ind?

In the third of the four chapters on Indian Polity, Sri Aurobindo goes into somewhat greater detail - drawing freely upon the researches of scholars like K.P. Jayaswal - about the organisation of government in ancient India, a system that was efficient as well as elastic, and secured authority for the State as well as freedom for the communities constituting the nation. Before the system deteriorated, it permitted and indeed thrived upon the close participation of all the "four orders" in the common life; and as a result there was "a wise and stable synthesis... of all the natural powers and orders, an organic and vital coordination respectful of the free functioning of all the organs of the communal body".⁵⁵ The King with his ministerial Council, the metropolitan assembly and the general assembly of the Kingdom, between them worked a sort of three-tier government that was viable enough till decadence or breakdown overtook it either immediately before, or as a result of, the Muslim invasions. Even so, the South preserved the old polity for some more centuries, till at last the British overran all India and imposed their own bureaucratic regime. The vitality of the old system is nevertheless proved by the fact that it was able to persist so long, and its native strength lay in its complex of "self-determined and self-governing communal bodies",⁵⁶ but as with the way of all flesh, weakness and collapse overwhelmed it in the end:  

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It was the combination of foreign invasion and conquest with the slow decline and final decadence of the ancient Indian culture that brought about the collapse of considerable parts of the old structure and the degradation and disintegration, with no sufficient means for revival or new creation, of the socio-political life of the people.⁵⁷

A rigid political unity - like the unity of the Persian and Roman Empires of old — was never attempted in ancient India; and had it been attempted successfully, it would not have lasted long. The ideal of conquest held up was not "a destructive and predatory invasion... but a sacrificial progression bringing with it a trial of military strength of which the result was easily accepted because defeat entailed neither humiliation nor servitude and suffering but merely a strengthening adhesion to a suzerain power concerned only with establishing the visible unity of the nation and the Dharma".⁵⁸ As our nation-builders wisely structured unity on spiritual and cultural foundations - for that alone is the only enduring unity - India has miraculously survived the shocks of the ages, the long centuries of travail; the spark hasn't been extinguished, and a new India re-enacting her past glory though in conformity with the exacting conditions of today is not quite an impossibility. Sri Aurobindo saw the morning Yuga-sandhya over fifty years ago, and at the present moment when the twilight is lost in the new dawn, the noon of the future cannot long be denied to our aspirations and strivings. But we might find it all Darkness at Noon if we failed to keep steadily before us Sri Aurobindo's guiding light or ignored his stern word of caution:

India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an Anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the Occident's success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma.⁵⁹

If the India of long past ages had built on the foundation of the spiritual mind and the broad and durable framework of Dharma a great and stable civilisation and a free and noble people, ancient Greece developed to a remarkable extent intellectual reason and form and beauty, ancient Rome likewise grew on power and patriotism and law and order, and the modern Western world has been exploiting to the uttermost practical reason and economic growth and science and technology. But the future has still other and greater tasks and still richer possibilities, and would need all these and still other powers. The renaissance in India that began a century and a half ago, and more vigorously with the turn of the present century, is still determining itself - it is not yet, almost twenty-five years after independence, finally defined or determined. On the one hand, India must not lose touch with her own soul; and on the other, India can survive and make good only by confronting squarely the raw, aggressive, powerful Western world, not by resorting to blind

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imitation or the creation of a "bastard twy-natured culture" (which will be a no-natured culture), but by adopting the policy of selective acceptance and assimilation, practising the art of ātmasātkarana or "assimilative appropriation". A double strategy is thus called for so that future India may be both svarāt and samrāt:

Therefore to live in one's self, determining one's self-expression from one's own centre of being in accordance with one's own law of being, svadharma, is the first necessity. Not to be able to do that means disintegration of the life; not to do it sufficiently means languor, weakness, inefficiency, the danger of being oppressed by the environing forces and overborne; not to be able to do it wisely, intuitively, with a strong use of one's inner material and inner powers, means confusion, disorder and finally decline and loss of vitality. But also not to be able to use the material that the life around offers us, not to lay hold on it with an intuitive selection and a strong mastering assimilation is a I serious deficiency and a danger to the existence.⁶⁰

The renaissance in India in the wake of the British impact was not like the European renaissance, awakening to the old Greco-Roman spirit; a closer parallel would be the Celtic renaissance. A great past had been followed by a period of decline, and the coming of the West meant the stir of new life and fresh creation. In the first flush of excitement, their was free inquiry, the old culture was reconsidered in the light of the new ideas, and much of it was found wanting. After the initial excitement had passed, there was an interfusion of the new and the old, the primacy of the West was no more accepted as a matter of course, and in the work of Bankim Chandra, Tagore and their contemporaries in Bengal and elsewhere, and in the vision of Vivekananda, a synthesis was attempted. Still later, there have been attempts at fresh and new creation, as distinct from mere synthesis or reconstruction. The Japanese renaissance in the nineteenth century had brought about a swift modernisation through rapid industrialisation. But the real India has always lived in the spirit, and here the renaissance couldn't be achieved through a wholesale outer change alone. Ultimate success would thus depend on the extent to which a deeply spiritual turn is given to all our activities. Indian spirituality has never meant a heady flight from life, and hasn't been wedded to dogma or asceticism or mere sectarianism. On the contrary, it is an all-inclusive or integral force of becoming, comprising matter, life, mind, and implying fullness, wholeness and harmony, and striving towards a creative universal consciousness. Indian art, literature , science, polity should provide a beneficent framework within which one's real self could be sought and made to grow into the image of the Divine, and the truly cultured Indian would try to become increasingly the embodiment of the divine law and being in everyday life. In the concluding passage of The Renaissance in India, Sri Aurobindo has summed up his great hope for India when the renaissance would have perhaps fulfilled itself:

We should... apply our spirituality on broader and freer lines... open ourselves to the throb of life, the pragmatic activity, the great modem endeavour, but not therefore abandon our fundamental view of God and man and Nature....

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India has the key to the knowledge and conscious application of the ideal; what was dark to her before in its application, she can now, with a new light, illumine; what was wrong and wry in her old methods she can now rectify; the fences which she created to protect the outer growth of the spiritual ideal and which afterwards became barriers to its expansion and farther application, she can now break down and give her spirit a freer field and an ampler flight: she can, if she will, give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling, for the clue to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge.⁶¹

Following the lead of the pioneers and the light from Sri Aurobindo, the Indian race could make a collective advance towards the Knowledge, Power, Harmony and Unity. But whether the New India will actually reach these goals is still for the future to unfold.

V

Of Sri Aurobindo's other contributions to the Arya, the two major sequences, The Synthesis of Yoga and The Future Poetry (the latter being a critical history of English poetry that started as a book-review), will be discussed more appropriately in two of the later chapters. There are some minor sequences and collections too, Heraclitus, The Superman, Evolution, Views and Reviews and Thoughts and Glimpses. There are, again, perceptive pieces of criticism like Sri Aurobindo's review-article on Harindranath Chattopadhyaya's first book of poems. The Feast ofYouth(1918), another review-article on H.G. Well's God, the Invisible King, a review of the journal Shama'a with a gallant defence of Professor Radhakrishnan ("well known as a perfectly competent philosophic critic and thinker") against the ill-tempered attack by one J.B. Raju, and a review of another journal Sanskrit Research with Sri Aurobindo's comments on articles by Tilak and R.D. Ranade, which are now included in Volume 17 (The Hour of God) of Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. In the same volume appear Sri Aurobindo's articles on the two poets of bhakti - Nammalvar and Andal - who are held in great veneration by the Tamils. Take it all in all, the Arya heritage is a formidable body of writing, and knowledge and wisdom, variety and versatility, are its distinguishing marks. There is not a page but hits the eye with its own sparkling gems of thought, its glow of purpose, or its radiance of peace. It is verily a global - a universal - consciousness that is displayed everywhere, it is the voice of indubitable authority that is heard, it is the sovereign assurance of a Master that is communicated to a distracted world. It would be fitting, however, to make a special reference to Heraclitus, rather an unusual book; but this little treatise too will be seen to fall into right relation with the rest of the canon, just another chord that contributes to the magnificent Aurobindonian symphony.

Heraclitus appeared serially in the Arya during 1916-17; having begun as a

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review of R.D. Ranade's paper on the philosophy of Heraclitus, it presently expanded into a fresh study of the Greek philosopher of the sixth century B.C., whose cryptic sayings have exercised such a strange fascination for posterity. Himself a profound student of Greek literature and thought, Sri Aurobindo is here on ground quite familiar to him, and his reading of Heraclitus has thus a very special value for the modern reader. Heraclitus was evidently teased by the "first and last things" of philosophy, and the lines of his reasoning seem to be reminiscent of some of the boldest adventures and loftiest flights in the Veda and the Upanishads, thereby pointing to the close filiations between ancient Greek and Hindu thought.

Sri Aurobindo rightly maintains that Heraclitus was much more than a clever maker of aphorisms or enigmatic epigrams; in his own right he was a mystic as well, though of the Apollonian and not of the Dionysian kind:

And though no partaker in or supporter of any kind of rites or mummery, Heraclitus still strikes one as at least an intellectual child of the Mystics and of mysticism, although perhaps a rebel son in the house of his mother. He has something of the mystic style, something of the intuitive Apollonian inlook into the secrets of existence.⁶²

This is important, for it makes Heraclitus a seer who spoke from the level of illumination, and not of mere cerebration.

Heraclitus had his moments of illumination when ideas raced in his head, but not caring to reduce them into a formal system, he turned them into knotted or pregnant aphorisms, often couched in a language that is as much of a riddle as the riddle of the universe that he would fain unriddle if he could. He did indeed say, "All is in flux... nothing stays still" and "you cannot step twice into the same stream, for ever other and other waters are flowing in upon you"; but he also said, "It is wisdom to admit that all things are one" and "One out of all and all out of One."⁶³ * In his attempt to reconcile the many and the one, time and eternity and being and becoming, like the Indian Rishis of old Heraclitus too preferred to view Reality as somehow including the divers opposites. "By his conception of existence as at once one and many," says Sri Aurobindo, "he is bound to accept these two aspects of his ever-living Fire as simultaneously true, true in each other; Being is an eternal becoming and yet the Becoming resolves itself into eternal being."⁶⁴ There is the truth of the cosmos ("all things are one"), and there is the cosmic process ("One out of all and all out of One"); but did Heraclitus have a vision of pralaya too when he said "Fire will come on all things and judge and convict them"? If he had, that would be another Heraclitean parallelism to Hindu thought, here the "periodic pralaya, the Puranic conflagration of the world by the appearance of the twelve suns, the Vedantic theory of the eternal cycles of manifestation and withdrawal from manifestation".⁶⁵

Of particular interest to Sri Aurobindo are these two apophthegms:

* Sri Aurobindo on such an utterance: "It is enigmatic in the style of the mystics, enigmatic in the manner of their thought which sought to express the riddle of existence in the very language of the riddle." (SABCL Vol. 16, pp. 336-37)

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But although the Word (Logos) is common to all, the majority of people live as though they had each an understanding peculiarly their own.

The road up and down is one and the same.

These two aphorisms, by a curious coincidence, serve also as epigraphs to T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton, published twenty years later. Like Sri Aurobindo and Eliot, Heraclitus too had wrestled with seeming opposites only to forge a firm reconciliation at last. Commenting on the first of the above, Sri Aurobindo writes:

...day and night, good and evil are one, because they are the One in their essence and in the One the distinctions we make between them disappear. There is a Word, a Reason in all things, a Logos, and that Reason is one; only men by the relativeness of their mentality turn it each into his personal thought and way of looking at things and live according to this variable relativity. It follows that there is an absolute, a divine way of looking at things: "To God all things are good and just, but men hold some things to be good, others unjust." There is then an absolute good, an absolute beauty, an absolute justice of which all things are the relative expression.⁶⁶

Heraclitus clearly countenanced relative standards, but all derived from one immaculate divine standard: "Fed are all human laws by one, the divine."

If the first aphorism is amenable to being linked with our ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti ("One Existent the sages call by various names"), the second connects with the Aurobindonian theory of Involution-Evolution:

Out of Fire, the radiant and energetic principle, air, water and earth proceed, - that is the procession of energy on its downward road; there is equally in the very tension of this process a force of potential return which would lead things backward to their source in the reverse order. In the balance of these two upward and downward forces resides the whole cosmic action; everything is a poise of contrary energies.⁶⁷

Heraclitus thought of Fire as the source of all. Fire being Force as well as Intelligence; and Fire was for him also Zeus the Eternal. But beyond Force and Intelligence - universal energy and universal reason - there is the third principle, "a third aspect of the Self and of Brahman, besides the universal consciousness active in divine knowledge, besides the universal force active in divine will, it saw the universal delight active in divine love and joy".⁶⁸ But this third constituent of the ultimate triune Reality seems to have escaped the Greek thinker, as it has escaped many other Western thinkers and philosophers. Yet, perhaps, Heraclitus' most profound saying - "The kingdom is of the child" - "touches, almost reaches the heart of the secret. For this kingdom is evidently spiritual, it is the crown, the mastery to which the perfected man arrives; and the perfect man is a divine child."⁶⁹ As Eliot flashes forth the revelation -

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

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Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always....⁷⁰

And did Heraclitus experience something even of this, a ripple of the divine ānanda? Perhaps; "the Paramhansa, the liberated man, is in his soul bālavat even as if a child"; and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.⁷¹

VI

While the rich content and the revolutionary message of the Arya has been already discussed in the earlier sections and chapters, it may be appropriate to say a word or two here about Sri Aurobindo's prose style, - more particularly about the Arya style. He was forty-two when the first issue of the journal came out on 15 August 1914, and already he was a master of many languages - classical and modern. Western and Indian - and of diverse realms of knowledge as well. Primarily a poet, he had turned his hand to brilliant journalism at Calcutta and found it equally easy to cultivate verse or "the other harmony of prose". If one takes a total view, his prose writing covers a period of almost sixty years of ceaseless literary activity. The "New Lamps for Old" and Bankim Chandra articles in the Indu Prakash in the early eighteen-nineties; the editorial and other contributions to the Bande Mataram, the Karmayogin and the Arya: the letters - thousands of them - to the disciples: one who views all this variegated opulence of writing can have little doubt that one is confronting a born lord of language, for Sri Aurobindo scatters words about (or so it seems), at once with precision and liberality; he is both voluble in appearance and compact in effect; and his writing, with its effortless ease, has the native force of Nature itself. There is not, of course, one 'style' but many 'styles', each with its sufficiency and appropriateness. Samuel Butler once said that he never knew a writer who took the smallest pains about his 'style' and was at the same time readable. Neither did Sri Aurobindo take "pains" about his prose. Nevertheless, it would not be far from the truth to say that Sri Aurobindo's most characteristic means of self-revelation is a polyphonic style that recalls English masters of the ornate like Burton and Browne and Lamb and Lander at different times, but is in fact sui generis, a style which Arjava (J.A. Chadwick) named "global", descriptive of the range of thought as well as the manner of communication.* And, indeed, the Arya style - the style of The Life Divine, Essays on the Gita, The Synthesis of Yoga and the other massively weighted and strikingly illuminating sequences - is truly "global" in its oceanic sweeps and vast heaves of comprehension.

* Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1947 to a disciple about the epithet "global": "I heard it first from Arjava who described the language of Arya as expressing a global thinking and I at once caught it up as the right and only word for certain things, for instance, the thinking in masses which is a frequent characteristic of the Overmind." (On Himself. Vol. 26, p. 368)

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In his Arya writings, Sri Aurobindo was a teacher and prophet - or nothing. It was the authority gained by his experience that weighted his writing with rich content and it was the force of his personality that gave a glow and urgency to his mode of utterance. Madame Gabriel Mistral has correctly noted that Sri Aurobindo's writing presents "the rare phenomenon of an exposition clear as a beautiful diamond without the danger of confounding the layman", and she further adds:

Six foreign languages have given the Master of Pondicherry a gift of coordination, a clarity free from gaudiness, and a charm that borders on the magical.... We have before us a prose which approximates to that of the great Eckhart, German classicist and fountain-head of European mysticism.... These are indeed 'glad tidings' that come to us: to know that there is a place in the world where culture has reached its tone of dignity by uniting in one man a supernatural life with a consummate literary style, thus making use of his beautifully austere and classical prose to serve as the hand-maid of the spirit.⁷²

Another 'foreigner', Raymond F. Piper, has spoken with equal enthusiasm about the quality of Sri Aurobindo's philosophic thought and prose style:

I could pick a thousand sentences from his writings and say of any one of them: trace its implications, and you will be led into the deep wonderlands of philosophic wisdom. I have never read an author who can compact so much of truth into one sentence as this master.*

Structurally, any piece of writing by Sri Aurobindo - a letter, a newspaper article, a treatise - would be found, on close analysis, to have adequacy of content as well as concord of parts: no faltering at the exordium, no thinness in the argument or the hard central block, no weakness in the peroration. The bigger sequences, of course, have their visible amplitude and force of style, but even a 'trifle' - one of a score of letters written in the course of a night - has its form and finish too, nothing laboured, nothing for effect, but marked by its distinctive flavour and grace and its spontaneous tightness of form. Sri Aurobindo wouldn't agree that writing letters was a waste of time. As he once explained to Dilip:

Each activity is important in its own place; an electron or a molecule or grain may be small things in themselves, but in their place they are indispensable to the building up of a world, it cannot be made only of mountains and sunsets and streamings of the aurora borealis - though these have their place there. All depends on the force behind these things and the purpose in their action....

Even a casual piece of prose composition carries the force of the spirit, and is charged with serious intent; and 'style' is but a function of this source of origin and the power of the intention. Although his prose writings (which account for nearly twenty-five large volumes out of the twenty-nine in the Centenary Edition) were mostly done under the exigencies of journalistic hurry or with a continual race against time, cumulatively and in their total effect the canon can successfully

* Message to Sri Aurobindo birthday meeting in New York on 15 August 1949. See also Ninian Smart on Sri Aurobindo's style (The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, edited by Spiegelberg and Chaudhuri, 1960, p. 167).

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claim for Sri Aurobindo a place among the supreme masters of English prose.

Of the major works, only The Life Divine was fully revised, amplified and reorganised before publication in book form, and naturally it has a rounded structure and an incandescent finish that some of the other prose sequences lack.* But even these others - Essays on the Gita, The Synthesis of Yoga, and the rest - do not lack the sense of organic growth in argument or final fullness of form. Many readers who make their first contact with Sri Aurobindo by trying to read at a stretch a work like The Life Divine feel enchanted no doubt by the opening pages or chapters, but presently feel somewhat put out by the higher and ever higher ocean-waves of thought and the matching roll of majestic articulation. Sri Aurobindo himself did not intend his book to be treated as 'light reading' to be gulped down with ease without the slightest ruffling of the cognitive faculty. The Life Divine was, in fact, vision and experience rendered into inspired language, and without some rapport with such a world of intensities and radiances all cavalier attempts at mere "understanding" must fail to come through.** And yet, on closer scrutiny, even the massed paragraphs and seemingly endless sentences would be seen to be fully organised, with carefully wrought interior stitching and the needful soldering of the joints. Here is a random sample:

Infinite being loses itself in the appearance of non-being and emerges in the appearance of a finite Soul;

infinite consciousness loses itself in the appearance of a vast indeterminate inconscience and emerges in the appearance of a superficial limited consciousness;

infinite self-sustaining Force loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of atoms and emerges in the appearance of the insecure balance of a world;

infinite Delight loses itself in the appearance of an insensible Matter and emerges in the appearance of a discordant rhythm of varied pain, pleasure and neutral feeling, love, hatred and indifference;

infinite unity loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of multiplicity and emerges in a discord of forces and beings which seek to recover unity by possessing, dissolving and devouring each other.⁷³

The mere breakdown of the clauses and key-words can sometimes highlight the perfect structuring of the sentence, however unwieldy it may appear when merely massed together on the printed page. A timid writer might have attempted elegant

* In the Advent of April 1951, N. Pearson has tried to show how well the 28 chapters of the first Volume of Tile Life Divine have been organised: four chapters each to the three principles - Spirit, Soul, Divine Nature - of the Higher Nature, then four chapters to Supermind, followed by four chapters each to the three principles - Mind, Life, Matter - of the Lower Nature. Pearson further sees this internal organisation "symbolised in the ancient occult sign of the pentacle (or double triangle) enclosing a central square," which was also Sri Aurobindo's symbol.

** Cf. Dr. R. Vaidyanathaswami: "...the reasoning and exposition in the book are not of the 'dialectical' kind proper to the divided mentality, but are of the same nature as, and cannot be separated from, direct vision". (Review of The Life Divine, in the Indian Express, 15 August 1940)

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variation in the wrong places and refrained from repeating the clauses "loses itself in the appearance" and "emerges in the appearance" no less than five times in the course of a single sentence. But Sri Aurobindo had courage enough, not only to call a spade a spade, but to call it five times a spade; and the repetitions, in the result, sound almost like refrains contributing to the rich orchestration of the whole passage.*

There is another sentence - in the chapter on 'The Ascent towards Supermind' - which brilliantly and figuratively describes both the direction and the ever-accelerating pace of the adventure of Evolution upon the earth:

The first obscure material movement of the evolutionary Force is marked by an aeonic graduality;

the movement of life-progress proceeds slowly but still with a quicker step, it is concentrated into the figure of millenniums;

mind can still further compress the tardy leisureliness of Time and make long paces of the centuries;

but when the conscious Spirit intervenes, a supremely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible.

Matter-Life-Supermind (or Truth-Consciousness): such is the swing upwards, faster and faster, dizzier and dizzier, and only the power of the spirit can prevent a slip, a derailment, a forced landing or disintegration! Numerous are such passages in Sri Aurobindo's prose writings, and their steady ascent in thought, the vigour of their phrasing, and their total build or reasoning and revelation make them worth careful and reverent study.

Not infrequently, however, Sri Aurobindo's prose art emits flashes of poetry which illumine arid transfigure whole sentences and paragraphs. Simile and metaphor trespass upon the domain of cogent prose and language crystallises into glittering images like these:

We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future.

It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouths that gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction; it has faces like the fires of Death and Time.

She labours to fill every rift with ore, occupy every inch and plenty.

Knowledge waits seated beyond mind and intellectual reasoning, throned in the luminous vast of illimitable self-vision.

The sword has a joy in the battle-play, the arrow has a mirth in its hiss and its leaping, the earth has a rapture in its dizzy whirl through space, the sun has the royal ecstasy of its blazing splendours and its eternal motion. O thou self-conscious instrument, take thou too the delight of thy own appointed workings.⁷⁴

In such utterances - their number is legion - dialectical skill gives place to direct vision, the knife-edge clarity and sharpness of prose dissolve into poetic imagery

* In my book A Big Change (1970), a key sentence from the chapter on "The Evolution of the Spiritual Man' is analysed on pp. 125ff. See also pp. 77ffand 87ff, for other sentences similarly analysed.

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and symbolism, and Sri Aurobindo is seen to be poet no less than the wielder of an animated and effective English prose style.

Some of Sri Aurobindo's characteristically epigrammatic or aphoristic molecules of prose are included in Thoughts and Glimpses and Thoughts and Aphorisms, and are also scattered in the letters and the "minor" works. One is occasionally overwhelmed by a whole shower as in -

Be wide in me, O Varuna; be mighty in me, O Indra; O Sun, be very bright and luminous; O Moon, be full of charm and sweetness. Be fierce and terrible, O Rudra; be impetuous and swift, O Maruts; be strong and bold, O Aryama; be voluptuous and pleasurable, O Bhaga; be tender and kind and loving and passionate, O Mitra. Be bright and revealing, O Dawn; O Night, be solemn and pregnant. O Life, be full, ready and buoyant; O Death, lead my steps from mansion to mansion. Harmonise all these, O Brahmanaspati. Let me not be subject to these gods, O Kali.⁷⁵

Haven't we here the very quintessence of the Veda? Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo's imagination and intellectual brilliance fuse into gem-like images, flashing on every side, and also illuminating the inner countries of mind, heart and soul:

Love is the key-note. Joy is the music. Power is the strain. Knowledge is the performer, the infinite All is the composer and audience. We know only the preliminary discords which are as fierce as the harmony shall be great; but we shall arrive surely at the fugue of the divine Beatitudes.

God and Nature are like a boy and a girl at play and in love. They hide and run from each other when glimpsed so that they may be sought after and chased and captured.

What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.

They say that the gospels are forgeries and Krishna a creation of the poets. Thank God then for the forgeries and bow down before the inventors.

Great saints have performed miracles; greater saints have railed at them; the greatest have both railed at them and performed them.

Fling not thy alms abroad everywhere in an ostentation of charity; understand and love where thou helpest. Let thy soul grow within thee.

My lover took away my robe of sin and I let it fall, rejoicing; then he plucked at my robe of virtue, but I was ashamed and alarmed and prevented him. It was not till he wrested it from me by force that I saw how my soul had been hidden from me.⁷⁶

Wisdom without tears. Truth garbed in the colours of the rainbow, catharsis effected with a smile! " A God who cannot smile", says Sri Aurobindo, "could not have created this humorous universe." Neither could a Prophet who cannot smile have structured The Life Divine while yet suffering the citizenship of the life mundane, the life purgatorial and the life infernal. The author of The Life Divine was not the forbidding metaphysician many took him to be; he was a humanist and poet before ever he dreamt of Yoga, and he remained a humanist and poet till the last.

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