Mother's Chronicles (Book 2)

2

And India?

And India ?

While France was undergoing those upheavals and exploding into light, was she still slumbering, our India?

No. A great awakening was taking place.

India was struggling to be free of all the bonds that shackled her: bonds self-woven by her past, bonds imposed from outside by her foreign rulers. These bonds were caused by "a great decline which came to a head in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries," wrote Sri Aurobindo.¹ "Undoubtedly there was a period, a brief but very disastrous period of the dwindling of that great fire of life, even a moment of incipient

1. The words of Sri Aurobindo in this chapter are to be found in The Renaissance in India and The Significance of Indian Art, unless otherwise mentioned.

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disintegration, marked politically by the anarchy which gave European adventure its chance, inwardly by an increasing torpor of the creative spirit in religion and art—science and philosophy and intellectual knowledge had long been dead or petrified into a mere scholastic Punditism — all pointing to a nadir of setting energy, the evening-time from which, according to the Indian idea of the cycles, a new age has to start."

Inherent in the reawakening was this promise of a new age.

Bengal, in the person of Ramakrishna Parama-hansa (1833-86), rediscovered the spiritual fountain of India. This discovery was taken to the West by his disciple Swami Vivekananda (1862-1902).

The newly emancipated Indian mind looked upon its past with a clear and discerning eye and saw that the past of India was not wholly or solely its spirituality. For, although it was the master key of the Indian mind, yet ancient India knew that "spirituality does not flourish on earth in the void, even as our mountain-tops do not rise like those of an enchantment of dream out of the clouds without a base."

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It may not be amiss here to cast a glance at India's past.

Thanks to archaeologists, we know that some five thousand years ago India was trading the fine superfluity of her wealth, her gold and copper for example, for ornaments of lapis lazuli and other items from Akkad, the pre-Chaldean Semitic kingdom. The sands of Mesopotamia have revealed traces of Harappan seals with the figure of zebu and Indus Valley script. Dilmun (Bahrain Island) was most probably the main port of call for the Indian ships that crossed the seas.

Recent marine archaeological research off the Saurashtra coast in Gujarat and radiocarbon dating have fixed the date as 1400 B.C. when Dwaraka of Sri Krishna was submerged by the rising sea. Thus confirming the facts as given in the epic Mahabharata.¹

The Maurya empire (approx. 322-182 B.C.) brings us into historical period. Takshila and Benares were

1. A team of archeologists, led by Dr S.R. Rao, began in 1979 off- and onshore explorations which have revealed that Dwaraka was indeed a major port specialising in overseas trade, metal, shell and other crafts, defence architecture, etc., and served as a gateway to the Indian subcontinent. This discovery may well one day mean to the Mahabharata

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renowned international universities, where students came from far-flung countries like China. The Maurya emperors took great care to spread learning among their subjects. The cities were well-planned and beautiful. The governing system was minutely worked out: farmers paid tax at the rate of one quarter or one sixth of the grains produced, depending on the quality of the soil and its yield.

The Gupta empire (end of the third to the sixth century A.D.) had cultural and commercial relations with far eastern countries like Java, Sumatra, Cambodia. It was during the Gupta period that everywhere in India, as on her soil, so in her works, there was a teeming of a superabundant energy of life. She created lavishly, with an inexhaustible many-sidedness, sciences and arts and poems and all kinds of monuments and public works, systems of politics and administration, trades, industries, fine crafts —the list is endless and in each item there was a plethora of activity.

One thing is certain. The ideal of the Indian mind was not charity; it believed in human dignity. "It was the first to assert a divinity in the people and could

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cry to the monarch at the height of his power, 'O king, what art thou but the head servant of the demos?' "

Very recent excavations on the bank of the Noyyal river in Tamil Nadu in South India have revealed the existence of a flourishing cottage industrial centre for making coral, shell, onyx, jasper, beryl, moonstone, transparent quartz beads and bangle shells, dating back to the second century B.C. More important still is the discovery of what appears to be the earliest iron foundry for melting iron from iron ore along with precision instruments used by the artisans. Archaeologists of various countries had already narrowed down to South India the source of supply of innumerable iron pieces found by them from many excavation sites spread over Egypt and other Mediterranean countries and dating from the beginning of the Christian era.

There were many powerful dynasties in the Dravidian land, whose reign spanned centuries. The Cholas ruled from 400 B.C. to A.D. 1400. During the reign of Rajendra (1012-44), the Cholas with their formidable naval flotilla extended their empire over Sri Lanka and the Nicobar Islands, as well as many

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parts of modern Indonesia and Malaysia. The Cholas established the administrative system of elected representatives to govern the land. This was quite an elaborate system.

Mind you, these kings and emperors were not only great fighters and conquerors, they were builders too; they were not only statesmen and administrators of great ability, they were also poets and writers of standing.

South of the Vindhya range, along the banks of the Godavari and Cauvery, the Krishna and Tunga-bhadra, many powerful dynasties have left their mark on our land: the Satabahanas, Pallavas, Pandyas, Badami Chalukyas, Cher as of Kerala and others. They are our bridge to the past.

But although some of us may have an inaccurate or incomplete idea of India's past and of the integral meaning of its civilization and the spirit that animated it, most of us have forgotten or are completely unaware of what this great past was.

Roughly speaking, there were three great ages of India's greatness: the spiritual, the intellectual and the classical.

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In Sri Aurobindo's words: "The first age of India's greatness was a spiritual age when she sought passionately for the truth of existence through the intuitive mind and through an inner experience and interpretation both of the psychic and the physical existence." The age of the Rishis. "The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost, but rather always enriched it with fresh spiritual experience and discovery at each step of the national life. Even in her hour of decline it was the one thing she could never lose.

"The second long epoch of India's greatness was an age of the intellect, the ethical sense, the dynamic will in action enlightened to formulate and govern life in the lustre of spiritual truth.... After the Veda and Upanishads, the heroic centuries of action and social formation, typal construction and thought and philosophy, when the outward forms of Indian life and culture were fixed in their large lines and even their later developments were being determined in the seed.

"The great classical age of Sanskrit culture was the flowering of this intellectuality into curiosity of detail in the refinements of scholarship, science, art,

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literature, politics, sociology, mundane life."

In actual fact, there is no historical parallel for such an intellectual labour and activity before the invention of printing and the facilities of modern science; yet all that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities and with no better record than the memory and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf.

"But the old spirituality reigned behind all this mental and all this vital activity, and its later period, the post-classical, saw a lifting up of the whole lower life and an impressing upon it of the values of the spirit."

It was certainly this 'old spirituality,' which has always maintained itself even in the decline of the national vitality, that saved India at every critical moment of her destiny. Any other nation under the same pressure would have long ago perished soul and body.

Then came her evening of decline. India's mind and life were petrified in the relics of the forms which a great intellectual past had created. This is a strange fact of life that if we but reduce our ideal to a system it at once begins to fail.

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"Spirituality remains but burns no longer with the large and clear flame of knowledge of former times, but in intense jets and in a dispersed action which replaces the old magnificent synthesis and in which certain spiritual truths are emphasised to the neglect of others."

But what brought on her decline?

Sri Aurobindo goes on to explain: "This diminution amounts to a certain failure of the great endeavour which is the whole meaning of Indian culture, a falling short in the progress towards the perfect spiritualisation of the mind and the life. The beginnings were superlative, the developments were great, but at a certain point where progress, adaptation, a new flowering should have come in, the old civilisation stopped short, partly drew back, partly lost its way. The essential no doubt remained and still remains in the heart of the race and not only in its habits and memories; but in its action it was covered up in a great smoke of confusion."

It was at this moment of confusion that the European wave swept over India.

India's creative spirit which lay in torpor felt the

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pressure of a superimposed European culture. And the reawakening became necessary. A giant Shakti awakened into a new world.

For long the eyes were not clear. For long the Indian mind was misled by an alien education, view and influence. But now the new mind of India was returning to a sound and true idea of its past and future.

The reawakened eye, clear at last, looking at the past of India, was struck by "her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost inimaginable prolific creativeness."

This vitality was much in evidence in the renascent India of the latter half of the last century. There was not a single walk of life which did not have its giver of a new direction. Given the situation that prevailed in the country, most of these Pathfinders were reformers. Social reformer, religious reformer, scientist, educationist, industrialist and journalist, poet and artist, writer and politician . . . inexhaustible was India's power of life. Each Renovator was a man of various gifts, containing in himself India's own diversity, as it were.

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As many parts of the country send their streams to mingle with Ganga, the great river of India, and enrich it, so did now every corner of the country send forth its streams to mingle with the mainstream of India's life. Let us pick out a few at random.

From Bengal, where Ganga widens to plunge into the ocean's heart after her long trek, came:

—Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-91), the educationist. He was the great social reformer whose tireless effort made the Widow Marriage Act of 1856 possible.

—Keshav Chandra Sen (1838-84) was a religious reformer. He founded the Brahmo Samaj.

It was Kathiawar (Gujarat), that land of rocks and hills, whose fair and robust humanity hears the voice and the puissance of the sea that flings itself upon those coasts and, hearing, becomes instinct with a fresh and primal vigour, that gave birth to the puissant renovator and new-creator,

—Dayananda Saraswati (1827-83). In the words of Sri Aurobindo, "He brought back an old Aryan element into the national character. He seized on the Veda as India's Rock of Ages and had the daring conception to build on it a whole education of youth, a whole manhood and

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a whole nationhood." Sri Aurobindo is referring to the Arya Samaj founded by Dayananda.

The West coast, lapped by the Arabian Sea, is the home of the Parsees. Hounded out by the Muslim conquerors from their age-old homeland in Persia, these followers of Zarathustra had taken refuge on the hospitable shores of India. It was in the middle of the seventh century that they first landed in Diu, an islet in Gujarat, where its king, Jayadeva, made them feel at home. The Parsee community's contribution to the nation is considerable.

—Sir Jamsetji N. Tata (1839-1904) is perhaps the best known figure among his Parsee brethren of the time. As an industrialist he set standards and traditions far in advance of his days when, in 1869, he laid the first foundation stone of the present Tata industrial empire, Tata & Sons. It is his grandson, Jehangir Ratan Dadabhai Tata (J.R.D. - 1904), a legendary figure of our time, who has made the Tatas what they are today.

-Feroz Shah Mehta (1845-1915) was one of the founding fathers of the Indian National Congress. -Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) began his career as an educationist but later turned to politics. He was the first Indian to be elected a member of the British Parliament.

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From the land of Shivaji came the Maharash-trians. "The Maratha race, as their soil and their history have made them, are a rugged, strong and sturdy people, democratic in their every fibre, keenly intelligent and practical to the very marrow, following in ideas, even in poetry, philosophy and religion the drive towards life and action, capable of great fervour, feeling and enthusiasm, like all Indian peoples, but not emotional idealists ... in life simple, hardy and frugal, in their temperament courageous, pugnacious, full of spirit, yet with a tact in dealing with hard facts and circumventing obstacles, shrewd yet aggressive diplomats, born politicians, born fighters."

-Mahadev Govind Ranade (1852-1904) was an economist, a reformer and an erudite scholar. He gave a new orientation to the country's reform movement. His wife, Ramabai Ranade (1862-1924) was a pioneer in promoting female education and social service by women.

- Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1857-1920) embodied in himself, with a singular and eminent completeness, the spirit of the Maratha race. Tilak did not love the do-nothingness of the Congress and, when still an isolated leader of a handful of enthusiasts in a corner of the country, he set out to do what the Congress would not do —a national

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agitation in the country to make the Congress movement a living and acting force. He was the leader of the 'extremist' group at Surat in 1907 when the first split occured in the National Congress. He was "one of the two or three leaders of the Indian people who were in their eyes the incarnations of the national endeavour and the God-given captains of the national aspiration." He was the Lokamanya Tilak. A politician, a lawyer, an educationist, a social reformer, a journalist and an erudite writer —Tilak was all this and more.

The land of the five rivers sent:

-Lala Lajpat Rat (1868-1928), the fiery politician. He was called the Lion of Punjab.

From Bengal, which produced so many idealists, came:

—Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932), the great orator and journalist who worked with Sri Aurobindo. Along with Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Pal formed the famous trinity of Indian politics, Lal-Bal-Pal.

Uttar Pradesh (the erstwhile United Provinces), where the daughters "of the Himalayas come dancing down and first touch the plains of India, is a land replete with ancient lore. Here are Hardwar and Rishikesh, Kedarnath and Badrinath where pilgrims

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flock. Here are the age-old towns that stand dreaming of the past glory: Ayodhya of Rama of the Raghus, Mathura and Vrindaban of Krishna, Sarnath of Buddha, Allahabad where Ganga the daughter of Himavan meets Yamuna the daughter of the Sun, Agra with its Tajmahal like a teardrop on the cheeks of Time. And here lies its brightest jewel, Benares, where Shiva the Godhead reigns as Vishwanath, the Lord of the Universe.

This land gave us:

-Pandit Madan Mohan Malavya (1861-1946).He established the Benares Hindu University (1915). An advocate, a scholar, a journalist, he was also a politician of all-India calibre.

- Motilal Nehru (1861-1931), who, as one of the foremost lawyers in India, had a fabulous earning and whose luxurious life style was a byword, earned the respect of his countrymen by sacrificing everything at the altar of patriotism. He and his wife and their three children were repeatedly imprisoned by the British, including his granddaughter Indira Gandhi. Three generations participating in a country's freedom movement is a rare event in history.

Bengal in India, like France in Europe, is the

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land of clear and keen intellect. From there came:

-Sir Asutosh Mukherjee (1864-1924). Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University for four consecutive terms, then Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, he wrote a strongly worded letter to Lord Litton, then Viceroy of India (1876-80), vehemently protesting against the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 passed to muzzle the Indian vernacular newspapers' criticism of the British rulers in handling the famine that had then broken out. For this letter he came to be known as the Tiger of Bengal. His able son, Shyama Prasad (1901-53), was also an educationist (it was him that Mother invited as the Chief Guest-cum-Speaker when she founded the Ashram's Centre of Education in 1951); but he soon turned into a fearless, frank-spoken politician of all-India calibre. In 1953, he died in prison in Kashmir.

-Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1864-1937), the internationally renowned physicist and plant physiologist. He proved scientifically to the Western world that plants too have life. A fact rooted in the Indian mind.

- Acharya Prafulla Chandra Roy (1861-1944). That renowned chemist and science teacher, who wrote primary science textbooks in Bengali and who foresaw the role of science in the social and economic fields, gave practical shape to his patriotic sentiments by starting his company The Bengal Chemical & Pharmaceutical Works in 1893. His sympathies were with those who followed the cult of the

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bomb against the British rulers.

-Romesh Chandra Dutt (1848-1909), that many-sided Bengali, is perhaps best remembered for his English renderings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which familiarized the average readers in England with the stories of these epics.

— Rakhaldas Banerjee (1886-1930), the renowned numismatist and archaeologist. It was he who discovered the ancient Indus Valley civilization while engaged in excavation work in Mohenjodaro in 1922.

At the confluence of Ganga and Sone stands Patna, the capital of Bihar. This is the Pataliputra of yore. This was the capital of the Maurya empire whose founder Chandragupta (reign: 322 to 298 B.C.) left everything at the height of his power, went down south to Sravanabelgola (Karnataka), and became a Jain monk. His grandson Asoka was the emperor who proclaimed, "All men are my children." The boundaries of the Maurya empire stretched from the river Brahmaputra to the east to the Arabian Sea to the west, and included Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Kashmir, as well as some portions of Nepal. Just as his forefathers, through their colonies, had spread India's arts and epics and creeds in the Archipelago (the Aegean

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Sea), so now the message of Buddha which Asoka sent conquered China and Japan and spread westward as far as Palestine and Alexandria, and the figures of the Upanishads and the sayings of the Buddhists were re-echoed on the lips of Christ.

Pataliputra has played an important role in the history of ancient India. And Guru Govind Singh, the tenth guru of the Sikhs, was born there in 1669. Fittingly enough then,

- Dr Rajendra Prasad (1884-1963), the first President of independent India, hailed from there. He was an eminent advocate, a scholar of no mean repute as well as an essayist.

The South, which was not repeatedly mauled by invaders as was India's North, has conserved for us all its magnificent temples, its sculpture in stone and its bronzes. The great temples of the South of India are the signs, the architectural self-expression of an ancient spiritual and religious culture. "Indian temple, to whatever godhead it may be built, is in its inmost reality an altar raised to the divine Self, a house of the Cosmic Spirit, an appeal and aspiration to the Infinite." Take the stone carvings of the Chalukya

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period, for instance, with its turn towards grace and beauty and rapture and an outburst of lyric ecstasy and movement. Or what of the marvellous genius and skill in the treatment of the cosmic movement and delight of the dance of Shiva? India's south has preserved for the whole of mankind an assured history of two millenia of accomplished sculptural creation, which is a rare and significant fact in the life of a people. This greatness and continuity of Indian sculpture is due to the "close connection between the religious and philosophical and the aesthetic mind of the people." From such a land came:

-Subramaniam Bharati (1882-1921),the great Tamil poet, whose mind was familiar with eternal things, who was capable of cosmic vision. He lit a fire of love for the Motherland in the Dravidian heart.

-Sir C. V. Raman (1888-1970) was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1930. His discovery is known as the Raman effect: the appearance of additional lines in the spectrum of light when scattered by the molecules of a substance.

Strictly speaking, Bengal not only epitomized the renascent India but was in the vanguard of the national movement. And for sheer 'prolific activity' she led the whole of India. This was very much visible in the fields

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of politics (of which later), and art and literature. In fact it was from the early nineteenth century that Calcutta, the capital of British India, became the centre of the new-found culture of the country.

- Bankim Chandra Chatterjee¹ (1838-98), the first graduate of Calcutta University, remoulded the Bengali language. "It was Bankim's first great service to India that he gave the race which stood in its vanguard such a perfect and satisfying medium of expression." Thus commented Sri Aurobindo in 1907. Bankim's second great service to the country was that he pointed out to it the way of salvation. "He, first of our great publicists, understood the hollowness and inutility of the method of political agitation which prevailed in his time. . . . He bade us leave the canine method of agitation for the leonine. The Mother of his vision held trenchant steel in her twice seventy million hands and not the bowl of the mendicant." He was the Rishi, the Seer. "The third and supreme service of Bankim to the nation was that he gave us the vision of our Mother." He was the political guru who gave the mantra which became the national anthem of united India. "In a sudden moment of awakening from long delusions the people of Bengal

1. Sri Aurobindo's comments on Dayananda, Tilak, Ranade and Bankim are from his Bankim-Tilak-Dayananda.

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looked round for the truth and in a fated moment somebody sang Bande Mataram. The mantra had been given and in a single day a whole people had been converted to the religion of patriotism. The Mother had revealed herself."

-Sarala Debi Chowdhurani (1873-1945).It was she who sang Bande Mataram 'in a fated moment.' She was a poetess and ably edited Bharati, a magazine run by the Tagores. This formidable lady had close links with India's revolutionary activities and knew well Barindra Kumar Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother.

-Upendra Kishore Roy Chowdhuri (1863-1915) brought about a revolution in children's literature. The versatile Satyajit Ray (1921), the world-renowned film-maker, is his grandson. The members of this illustrious family have greatly contributed to the Bengali literary and cultural life.

-Dwijendra Lai Roy (1863-1913), a magistrate who used his pen to write historical dramas and satirical songs. His son Dilip Kumar Roy (1897-1980) was a novelist and a renowned musician. Warm, refined and a gentleman, his extensive correspondence with Sri Aurobindo stands testimony to their relationship.

-Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (1876-1938), was an artist with words. The themes in his novels dealt with the social conditions of his times. He shone like the full moon in the sky of Bengali literature.

Rabindranath Tagore

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In fact a galaxy of writers graced Bengal's literary firmament. But outshining them all, like the midday sun, was:

— Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). He took up where Bankim left off. He was a poet in whom there was "the double seeking of the truth and reality of the eternal self and spirit in man and things and the insistence on life. He gave us more of this discovery and fusion for which the mind of the age was in quest than any other creative writer of the time." Thus Sri Aurobindo in The Future Poetry. And he sums up, "His work is a constant music of the over-passing of the borders, a chant-filled realm in which the subtle sounds and lights of the truth of the spirit give new meanings to the finer subtleties of life."

The artists were not far behind. But we owe it in the main to the Tagores, who bathed in the well-spring of Indian culture, for the revival of Indian art and giving it a new direction.

The Industrial Art Society of Calcutta was first instituted in 1854 by a few art enthusiasts, Indian and British. It ran a school of Industrial Art which was later (between 1872 and 1876) converted into the Calcutta Art School (or Government Art School). In

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its early years the School had developed on the lines of a British art school of the time. But soon the Indian artists discarded copying the Western style. Leaving the beaten track they cut out their own path. The leaders of this new direction were Rabindranath's nephews: Abanindranath Tagore (Aban Thakur, 1871-1951) and his elder brother Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938). It was the help of Ernest Benfield Havell, who was the Art School's Principal from 1896 to 1906 and who recognized that the whole basis of Indian artistic creation is directly spiritual and intuitive, that made this new thrust possible. Havell persuaded Aban Thakur to become the Art School's Vice-Principal; Gagan Thakur became its energetic General Secretary.

-Ramananda Chatterjee's (1876-1938) practical help in this field is inestimable. He founded the two monthlies Prabasi (Bengali) and Modern Review (in 1901). It is difficult to overestimate the role of these two magazines in putting across the new art and educating the public in it.

Sri Aurobindo had said, "Bengal art has found its way at once at the first step, by a sort of immediate intuition." And we can be grateful to the Tagores for it. Abanindranath's role in the rebirth of taste and

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understanding and the release of creativity in the world of Indian art is uncontested. He had his roots deep and widespread in the mind of Bengal, of India, in the life and culture of her people. Aban Thakur's work and influence spread all over India directly as well as through his pupils and, if we may say so, his grand-pupils. From Lahore to Madras, from Dacca to Baroda, from Karachi to Calcutta, the new movement spread and developed in a diversity of ways.

As Sri Aurobindo stated, "This art is a true creation and we may expect that the artistic mind of the rest of India will follow through the gates thus opened."

The artistic mind of India did follow through

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the opened gates, leaving no room for doubt that in the sphere of creative art and culture the whole of India was once integrated into one unit through the influence of Abanindranath Tagore. It had become United India.

In all fairness, it must be said that utilitarianism was not the sole commodity exported by Britain. She spread the language of Shakespeare, of Shelley and Keats. True, the general run of the officers, who practised the oppressive policies of their government, left much to be desired. Yet many from the British Isles, in their individual capacities, greatly helped the people. A few are universally known, some others are less known, while still others have sunk into oblivion.

Sister Nivedita, the Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda, and Justice John Woodroff, who made a deep study of Indian tantrism and wrote under the pen name of Arthur Avalon, tremendously encouraged Abanindranath. In this they were joined by the great Japanese artist Kakuzo Okakura, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), the renowned Sinhalese art connoisseur and critic, and by Ordhendu Coomar Gangoly (1881-1974) who wrote illuminating articles on

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'modern' Indian painting. Aban Thakur had supporters in his huge ancestral home, Jorasanko. He always acknowledged that his uncle Rabindranath was his chief mentor. He also shared to some extent his uncle's literary gift.

But it is indeed hard for us in this late twentieth century to realize the difficulties the pioneers of the time had to face, for India was as yet only vaguely awake to the truth of itself; the mass of Indian action was still proceeding under the impress of the European motive and method. Only in a few directions was there some clear light of self-knowledge. The new Indian art could be cited as a striking example. But here too the dominant theme was an all-absorbing passion for the Mother and her service. For, had not the Motherland revealed herself to the eye of the mind as something more than a stretch of earth or a mass of individuals? Had she not taken shape in a form of beauty that seized the hearts of her sons?

Indeed, the first decade of the twentieth century was a stirring time in India. Curzon's effort to divide Bengal in 1905 the State of Bengal then consisted of the present West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar,

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Chota Nagpur and Orissa —inflamed the nationalistic sentiments of the people on a hitherto unprecedented scale and gave rise to the Swadeshi¹ movement. The Indian intelligentsia realized that unless they went back to their roots and discovered their cultural ethos, and faced their challenges against the background of their history, they would never be able to hold their own against the foreign rulers. To use the words of O. C. Gangoly, "Running like a thread through the varying forms of unrest with which India is tormented is a spirit of revolt against the denationalisation of a proud and sensitive people."

Revolt and revolution were in the air.

Naturally.

For it was the era of Sri Aurobindo.

1. Literally: indigenous. The Swadeshi movement encouraged indigenous goods and industries and the boycott of foreign goods.

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