Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

56

Divorce from the Past

Sri Aurobindo determined to continue the struggle.

Through his articles in the Karmayogin and Dharma he tried to dispel the confusion and show a path which the nation could tread. He toured the country, especially East Bengal, and he spoke in many towns and districts — Jhalakati (Barisal), Bakergunj, Khulna.... "Out on tour," reminisced Nolini, "Sri Aurobindo used to address meetings, meet people when he was free and give them instructions and advice. Most of those who came to his meetings did not understand English, they were common village folk. But they came in crowds all the same, men, women and children, just to hear him speak and have his darshan. When he stood up to address a gathering, pin-drop silence prevailed. His audience must surely have felt a vibration of something behind the spoken word. It is not that he confined himself to political matters alone. There were many who knew that he was a Yogi and spiritual guide and they sought his help in these matters too. I have myself seen as I spent whole nights with him in the same room, at Jalsuko, how he would sit up practically the whole night and go to bed only

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for a short while in the early hours of the morning....

"We toured the country for about ten or twelve days and then we came back."

Back in Calcutta he held meetings. His speech at Beadon Square, under the Presidentship of Ramananda Chat-terji, editor of The Modern Review, was delivered on 13 June, followed by a speech at College Square on 18 June where he had presided. He also spoke at the annual meeting of the Howrah People's Association, where he dwelt on the subject of 'The Right of Association.' But the attendance which had numbered formerly thousands full of enthusiasm, had now dwindled to hundreds and had no longer the same force and life. "Once while describing his experience of the ebb of political enthusiasm," Purani tells us, "he said humorously, 'The experience I had in Bengal gave me a good insight into our people's psychology. Even when all the leaders were jailed and some deported we continued to hold our political meetings in College Square. In all there used to be about a hundred persons, that too, mostly passers-by. And I had the honour to preside over several such meetings!' "

Those small matters could easily have been set right by Sri Aurobindo, as he proved at the Hooghly Conference in September. But the diagnostician that he was, he had perceived that India was already infected by a virus. Instead of a nation rising to fulfil her true function, India was rising "as a faithful pupil of Europe, a follower of methods and ideas borrowed from the West, a copyist of English politics and society." She was infected by the deep-seated moral disease that was gnawing at

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the European society. The malady had entered into the Indian national system and was threatening to corrupt its blood and destroy the soundness of its organ. "If India follows in the footsteps of Europe," he predicted, "accepts her political ideals, social system, economic principles, she will be overcome with the same maladies." He went on to sound a note of warning, "India must remain India if she is to fulfil her destiny. Nor will Europe profit by grafting her civilisation on India, for if India, who is the distinct physician of Europe's maladies, herself falls into the clutches of the disease, the disease will remain uncured and incurable and European civilisation will perish as it perished

when Rome declined____" His X-ray eyes had pierced the fair

appearance of the civilization of the West, and he had perceived 'this red evening of the West.' How it lingers, this red evening! It seems endless.

He had seen daily at close quarters the convicts in the jail —thieves, murderers, swindlers — and the ordinary jail employees—cook, waterman, sweeper, cleaner, "with whom one could not help coming into contact, and many times we would speak freely with each other." Sri Aurobindo said, "Even the ordinary criminals I found very human, they were better than European criminals." Darwin too had remarked on the human qualities of Indian convicts. "Such noble-looking persons," he wrote in the Voyage Round the World, after seeing convicts in the Andamans. "These men are quiet and well conducted; from their outward conduct, their cleanliness and faithful observance of their strange religious rites, it is impossible to look at them with the same eye as on our wretched convicts...."

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That was one side of the coin. The other was the rising generation. "Our first necessity," wrote Sri Aurobindo, "if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think —think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima."

But the blame for the notorious moral corruption in the young men could be laid directly at the door of the English system of education — "it was the direct result of the purely mental instruction."

X-ray eyes? Listen. "The debasement of our mind, character and tastes by a grossly commercial, .materialistic and insufficient European education..." he wrote in the Karma-yogin of 25 September 1909. The key word is 'insufficient.' The education given was neither universal nor sufficient. "The practical destruction of our artistic perceptions and the plastic skill and fineness of eye and hand which once gave our productions pre-eminence, distinction and mastery of the European markets, is also a thing accomplished." Worse. "Most vital of all, the spiritual and intellectual divorce from the past which the present schools and universities have effected, has beggared the nation of the originality, high aspiration and forceful energy which can alone make a nation free and great."

Free? Yes.

But great?

The question was: Was India going to cling "to the

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lassitude of decay and the laissez-faire of the moribund" and fall into an inevitable disintegration and collapse? Or did she have the will in the being to rise "in a mighty flame of renovation to the light of a more splendid life"?

How was the dice of chance loaded?

Was India going to realize the past and the future?

Or remain divorced from the past and crippled for the

future?

Had not the malady gone too deep into India's vitals?

How was she to be cured?

Who was to cure the 'physician of the world'?

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