Sri Aurobindo's Vision of India's Rebirth

Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth* Published in Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra, (ed.), The Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo: Indian Philosophy and Yoga in the Contemporary World, Bloomsbury, London, 2020, pp. 233–248 Sri Aurobindo’s faith in India’s rebirth took root when he was a student in England in the late nineteenth century, grew in Baroda as he explored India’s ancient culture, and deepened during his revolutionary days in Bengal. It never wavered after his withdrawal in 1910 to Pondicherry (today’s Puducherry), even as he drew attention to the considerable stumbling blocks and pitfalls on India’s long road to freedom — and beyond. In a message given in 1948, just two years before his passing, he spelt out the whole issue confronting free India: Ancient India and her spirit might disappear altogether and we would have only one more nation like the others and that would be a real gain neither to the world nor to us. ... It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light. This must not and will surely not happen; but it cannot be said that the danger is not there. There are indeed other numerous and difficult problems that face this country or will very soon face it. No doubt we will win through, but we must not disguise from ourselves the fact that after these long years of subjection and its cramping and impairing effects a great inner as well as outer liberation and change, a vast inner and outer progress is needed if we are to fulfil India's true destiny. (2006: 499–504) “A great inner as well as outer liberation and change, a vast inner and outer progress” is precisely an agenda for India’s resurgence. Indeed, in the course of numerous speeches, articles, talks and writings spanning almost sixty years, † Sri Aurobindo laid out a program for India to “rejuvenate the mighty outworn body of the ancient Mother” (1998: 511). Is his vision merely idealistic or mystic — perhaps “mist-ic,” as we often take the word to mean? Or does it offer actual solutions to the “numerous and difficult problems that face this country or will very soon face it”? India, as we know, is a maddeningly complex nationcum-civilization; there shall be no simple roadmap to her rebirth. But we may attempt to extract a few essential lines from Sri Aurobindo’s lifelong endeavor. This chapter is a revised and reworked version of a 2004 paper, “Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Resurgence”, published in Dialogue, Vol. 17, No. 2, October-December, 2015, pp. 83-101. † A selection of such texts can be found in (Danino 2018). * Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 2 Breaking the Mold Even as he fought for India’s political freedom, Sri Aurobindo saw her colonial shackles as a necessary evil, one that would compel her to let go of outworn forms and reshape her culture and purpose. In 1909, he wrote in Karmayogin, a weekly he founded and edited: The spirit and ideals of India had come to be confined in a mould which, however beautiful, was too narrow and slender to bear the mighty burden of our future. When that happens, the mould has to be broken and even the ideal lost for a while, in order to be recovered free of constraint and limitation.... The mould is broken; we must remould in larger outlines and with a richer content (1997a: 247). Sri Aurobindo thus set himself as a non-traditionalism, yet one attached to the deepest values that went into defining India. The task of “remolding” remains unfinished, but today, it is not merely the mold of tradition in its corrupting or stagnant aspects (for tradition also has enriching and progressive sides); what India is still grappling with is the corrupt relic of colonial mold. Here too, Sri Aurobindo looked beyond India’s political liberation: “What preoccupies me now,” he wrote in 1920, “is the question what [the country] is going to do with its self-determination, how will it use its freedom, on what lines is it going to determine its future?” (2006: 256) Despite the churning that preceded and followed India’s liberation from the colonial yoke, the new nation’s attempt at decolonization was less than half-hearted: its apparatus remained wedded to a British constitution, a British polity, a British judiciary, a British administration and a British educational system — a prison that is about the antithesis of what Sri Aurobindo envisioned. India’s Mission Before we examine a few symptoms of the malady, we must pause and go back to the fundamentals. If there is a thread running through Sri Aurobindo’s vision of India, it is that she does not exist without a spiritual base and a spiritual mission in the world; she is the creator of “a profound and wide-spread spirituality such as no other can parallel” (1997b: 45) But Sri Aurobindo’s view of spirituality is not an ascetic, world-shunning renunciation, the eyes fixed on some otherworldly goal; it is the full manifestation in life of the powers of the Spirit latent in every human being: “It is an error to think that spirituality is a thing divorced from life” (1998: 12). It is, to him, a living power, a source of life and strength, and in India’s case, the actual origin of her creativity, her ability to assimilate and integrate, and her unique cultural cement — therefore something wholly material in its manifestation. About 1915, Sri Aurobindo, a refugee in Pondicherry for five years, broke his silence in a revealing interview given to a correspondent of The Hindu: Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 3 I quite agree with you that our social fabric will have to be considerably altered before long. ... Our past with all its faults and defects should be sacred to us; but the claims of our future with its immediate possibilities should be still more sacred. I am convinced and have long been convinced that a spiritual awakening, a reawakening to the true self of the nation is the most important condition of our national greatness.... India, if she chooses, can guide the world. It is more important that the thought of India should come out of the philosophical school and renew its contact with life, and the spiritual life of India issue out of the cave and the temple and, adapting itself to new forms, lay its hand upon the world. I believe also that humanity is about to enlarge its scope by new knowledge, new powers and capacities, which will create as great a revolution in human life as the physical science of the nineteenth century. Here, too, India holds in her past, a little rusted and put out of use, the key of humanity’s future (Rishabhchand 1981: 410–11). India was thus not to rise for her own sake: “The spiritual life of India is the first necessity of the world’s future (Sri Aurobindo 2002: 611). Such is ultimately India’s mission. But to fulfill it, that “spirit” must first create a new body for itself: [India] 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. Whether she will rise or not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance which is coming upon her, is the question of her destiny (1997c: 40) A question that is today more acute than a century ago. Can something be done, individually or collectively, to hasten the process and shorten the birth pangs? Spiritualizing All Life In Sri Aurobindo’s concept of spirituality, all aspects of life must be brought under its influence, its regenerative and integrative power: My idea of spirituality has nothing to do with ascetic withdrawal or contempt or disgust of secular things. There is to me nothing secular, all human activity is for me a thing to be included in a complete spiritual life (2006: 255). Indeed, irrespective of her various philosophical sects, schools and doctrines, India more than any other civilization has insisted on spiritualizing all human life: Hinduism has always attached to [the organisation of the individual and collective life] a great importance; it has left out no part of life as a thing secular and foreign to the religious and spiritual life (1997c: 181). Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 4 Here, we begin to see how unhappy Sri Aurobindo would be with cliches about “secularism” being the foundation of Independent India: divorcing national life from religion has been Europe’s historical development and definition of secularism — a necessary liberation from Christianity’s straitjacket and political power, but also a failure to find deeper values and the actual source of liberty and fraternity, beyond both dogmatic religions and shallow humanism. A regeneration of India can only begin with a frank rejection of the European concept as unsuited to the Indian temperament, and a full acceptance of India’s principle of integration of spirituality in life — provided spirituality, again, does not mean a meditation removed from “worldly” affairs; it is a power, and as any other power, it needs instruments. Those are our mind, life and body; and just as individual yoga involves bringing them under the central rule of the soul or spirit, national resurgence acquires its true meaning when the national mind, life and body are shaped by the central Spirit of the land. India’s Intellectual Life Sri Aurobindo often deplored the inability of Indians to think for themselves, the unhappy result of a crippling educational system and an intellectual subservience to the West. He wrote in 1920: I believe that the main cause of India’s weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think — incapacity of thought or “thought-phobia” (Danino 2018: 147). We can still see it today. Most of India’s intellectual life is second-hand, a tiresome collection of substandard slogans, preferably of Western origin, with no real grasp of the concepts involved and no creative power. Among the numerous maladies stemming from this, we may mention lethargy (“What can I do?”), complacency (“Don’t worry, all will be well: satyameva jayate”), misplaced syncretism (“God is one and everything is the same”), lack of discernment (“All paths lead to the same goal”), inextricable confusion (“Hinduism is a way of life; its central teaching is tolerance and non-violence; for a casteless society, let us have caste-based reservations and parties; democracy is Britain’s greatest gift to India; minorities are secular; secularism means tolerance”; etc., etc.), indifference (“Anyhow science and technology alone can make us progress”), or outright hostility (“You want to take us to the age of obscurantism and the bullock cart? Anyhow whatever knowledge India may have had was elitist, upper-caste, and excluded the lower classes of the society.”) The only way out of this morass is to relearn the art of original thinking: Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 5 Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think, — to 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.... We must begin by accepting nothing on trust from any source whatsoever, by questioning everything and forming our own conclusions. We need not fear that we shall by that process cease to be Indians or fall into the danger of abandoning Hinduism. India can never cease to be India or Hinduism to be Hinduism, if we really think for ourselves. It is only if we allow Europe to think for us that India is in danger of becoming an ill-executed and foolish copy of Europe (1997d: 40–41). To stimulate original thinking should have been the first task of education in free India. Instead, it retained a perverse system which had been designed to rob Indians of their thinking power. If anything, it made the system worse over the years, burdening it with more and more irrelevant data to be mechanically memorized and regurgitated. Around 1900, Sri Aurobindo was already complaining that “the mental training [provided in Indian Universities] is meagre in quantity and worthless in quality” (2003: 358). A few years later, he added: The Indian brain is still in potentiality what it was; but it is being damaged, stunted and defaced. The greatness of its innate possibilities is hidden by the greatness of its surface deterioration (2003: 377). Besides teaching students to think, Sri Aurobindo wanted education to enrich them with their rightful Indian heritage. Along with his co-workers in the Independence movement, he called this “national education” and outlined it thus: In India ... we have been cut off by a mercenary and soulless education from all our ancient roots of culture and tradition (2003: 433). … The full soul rich with the inheritance of the past, the widening gains of the present, and the large potentiality of the future, can come only by a system of National Education. It cannot come by any extension or imitation of the system of the existing universities with its radically false principles, its vicious and mechanical methods, its dead-alive routine tradition and its narrow and sightless spirit. Only a new spirit and a new body born from the heart of the Nation and full of the light and hope of its resurgence can create it (2003: 411). Yet independent India chose to keep her culture and heritage more and more out of sight of students, as though it were something unimportant or perhaps shameful. Recent efforts to rectify this situation have been half-baked at best and drowned in irrationally hostile Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 6 clamor: any attempt to introduce into the school curriculum positive elements of Indian culture or some knowledge of genuine accomplishments from various fields of knowledge has been dubbed “nationalistic,” “chauvinistic” or worse. Indian education is neither Indian nor an education. Only when it becomes both will a new class of intellectuals emerge, who will regenerate India’s intellectual life not by looking up to, or down on, the West, but by having their feet firmly planted in the Indic worldview. India’s Vital Life The intellect is an essential tool of India’s resurgence, but the vital is often a better instrument, yielding more potent and quicker results. As Sri Aurobindo noted: Indeed without this opulent vitality and opulent intellectuality India could never have done so much as she did with her spiritual tendencies. It is a great error to suppose that spirituality flourishes best in an impoverished soil with the life halfkilled and the intellect discouraged and intimidated. The spirituality that so flourishes is something morbid, hectic and exposed to perilous reactions. It is when the race has lived most richly and thought most profoundly that spirituality finds its heights and its depths and its constant and many-sided fruition (1997c: 10). A glance at classical India confirms that spiritual efflorescence as well as massive artistic creation often went hand in hand. The creation of new forms of Indian aesthetics, poetics, music, dance, sculpture, architecture, crafts, is therefore another important condition. It can be encouraged to some extent by intelligent official patronage and encouragement, but much more so, again, by education: The system of education which, instead of keeping artistic training apart as a privilege for a few specialists frankly introduces it as a part of culture no less necessary than literature or science, will have taken a great step forward in the perfection of national education and the general diffusion of a broad-based human culture. ... It is necessary that those who create, whether in great things or small, whether in the unusual master-pieces of art and genius or in the small common things of use that surround a man’s daily life, should be habituated to produce and the nation habituated to expect the beautiful in preference to the ugly, the noble in preference to the vulgar, the fine in preference to the crude, the harmonious in preference to the gaudy. A nation surrounded daily by the beautiful, noble, fine and harmonious becomes that which it is habituated to contemplate and realises the fullness of the expanding Spirit in itself (2003: 453). Considering the all-pervasive ugliness of modern India — our chaotic, polluted cities and towns, our garbage-ridden streets, our ugly and garish buildings, our grid-iron offices, our Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 7 concrete homes and pigeonhole apartment blocks — we are clearly far from the goal. In the field of art, the flood of third-rate artistic creations from the West has produced professional copycats reveling in tortured art and celebrated ugliness from which all beauty has been perverted away, while humanity’s maladies are in full bloom. Still, there are signs that the demand for genuine Indian art, be it classical music, dance or traditional crafts, still exists — partly as a consequence of Western appreciation for them. But a mere ornamental addition of art in an otherwise beautyless and crude way of life will not suffice; what is required is a fusion of art in everyday life and activities: only then will Indian art recover its true function as a spiritualizing, enriching and refining agent, as well as a powerful social cement and vehicle of culture. India’s Physical Life — the Polity This brings us to the all-important physical organization of India’s body politic. There is, first, the question of India’s polity. As we know all too well, India’s unquestioning adoption of the Westminster type of democracy has led a serious dysfunction of democratic mechanisms, massive corruption, criminalization of politics and a host of other evils. Sri Aurobindo foresaw this long ago. In 1911, he wrote to a friend: Spirituality is India’s only politics, the fulfilment of the Sanatana Dharma its only Swaraj. I have no doubt we shall have to go through our Parliamentary period in order to get rid of the notion of Western democracy by seeing in practice how helpless it is to make nations blessed. India is passing really through the first stages of a sort of national Yoga (2006: 170). Almost a century later, we are perhaps touching the end of this first stage. As I briefly stated earlier, the European concept of secularism has no real meaning or application in the Indian context: no pre-Islamic Indian king or emperor ever attempted — or perhaps desired — to turn his chosen creed into a “state religion”. Conceivably, Ashoka could have tried to impose Buddhism on his empire; or Kharavela might have been tempted to make Jainism his kingdom of Kalinga’s religion. But that would have running against the grain of India’s ethos. Here, dharma, rather than “religion,” was regarded as underpinning the polity and the organization of society at all levels. Wrongly equating Dharma with religion has resulted in divorcing Dharma from national life, which can be done only at the risk of losing what has held this nation together: diversity without the unifying centre provided by Dharma is a sure road to fragmentation. Here is Sri Aurobindo’s considered verdict (in 1920): I do not at all look down on politics or political action or consider I have got above them. I have always laid a dominant stress and I now lay an entire stress on the spiritual life, but my idea of spirituality has nothing to do with ascetic withdrawal or contempt or disgust of secular things. There is to me nothing secular, all human Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 8 activity is for me a thing to be included in a complete spiritual life.... I believe in something which might be called social democracy, but not in any of the forms now current, and I am not altogether in love with the European kind, however great an improvement it may be on the past. I hold that India having a spirit of her own and a governing temperament proper to her own civilisation, should in politics as in everything else strike out her own original path and not stumble in the wake of Europe. But this is precisely what she will be obliged to do, if she has to start on the road in her present chaotic and unprepared condition of mind (2006: 255–56). The question remains what political system a resurgent India should build upon. In conversations with disciples, Sri Aurobindo remarked: The parliamentary form would be hardly suitable for our people. Of course, it is not necessary that you should have today the same old forms [as in ancient India]. But you can take the line of evolution and follow the bent of the genius of the race (Danino 2018: 166–167). … Parliamentary Government is not suited to India. But we always take up what the West has thrown off. ... [In an ideal government for India,] there may be one Rashtrapati at the top with considerable powers so as to secure a continuity of policy, and an assembly representative of the nation. The provinces will combine into a federation united at the top, leaving ample scope to local bodies to make laws according to their local problems (Danino 2018: 213). On the surface, this may look much like the present system, but there are crucial differences. The first lies in the quality and sincerity of the political effort. Sri Aurobindo had no illusions as regards our present ruling classes, whether Western or Indian: There is no guarantee that this ruling class or ruling body represents the best mind of the nation or its noblest aims or its highest instincts. Nothing of the kind can be asserted of the modern politician in any part of the world; he does not represent the soul of a people or its aspirations. What he does usually represent is all the average pettiness, selfishness, egoism, self-deception that is about him and these he represents well enough as well as a great deal of mental incompetence and moral conventionality, timidity and pretence. Great issues often come to him for decision, but he does not deal with them greatly; high words and noble ideas are on his lips, but they become rapidly the claptrap of a party. The disease and falsehood of modern political life is patent in every country of the world and only the hypnotised acquiescence of all, even of the intellectual classes, in the great organised sham, cloaks and prolongs the malady, the acquiescence that men yield to everything that is habitual and makes the present atmosphere of their lives (Sri Aurobindo: 1997e: 296–297). Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 9 The second essential difference is that in Sri Aurobindo’s scheme of things, there would no need or room for political parties, an institution which Sri Aurobindo consistently criticized in his talks and writings. In a single sentence, he spelt out the whole problem: Certainly, democracy as it is now practised is not the last or penultimate stage; for it is often merely democratic in appearance and even at the best amounts to the rule of the majority and works by the vicious method of party government, defects the increasing perception of which enters largely into the present-day dissatisfaction with parliamentary systems (1997e: 456). European democracy begins by dividing, pitting government against opposition, Right against Left, group against group. In smaller and simpler countries, it may work for a time — although Western masses are increasingly wearied by the merry-go-round in which everyone ends up with the same ideology and lies with equal skill. In a complex and endlessly diverse country like India, to assume that democracy cannot exist without political parties is a typical example of our inability to “think independently.” It means that Independence came with little self-questioning or bold search for new lines suited to a free India — all the old and already decrepit colonial structures were seen as the summum bonum or a panacea that no one could or should try to improve upon. India is paying decades of lost time and energy on account of this refusal to “be Indian, think Indian.” Western polity conceives of doing away with political parties and creating governments of national unity only in times of war or crisis; India, because of her long tradition of a unity underlying her diversity, should have shown that unity is not a freak phenomenon but a workable basis for new politics. Another difference lies in the phrase “ample scope to local bodies.” Sri Aurobindo elaborated in other conversations: In ancient times each community had its own Dharma and within itself it was independent; every village, every city had its own organization quite free from all political control and within that every individual was free — free to change and take up another line for his development. But all this was not put into a definite political unit. There were, of course, attempts at that kind of expression of life but they were only partially successful. The whole community in India was a very big one and the community culture based on Dharma was not thrown into a kind of [political or national] organization which would resist external aggression (Danino 2018: 159– 160). That is what we see at work in India’s early Republics (the Mahajanapadas) as well as in later kingdoms, such as the Chola’s: an elaborate structure starting from village assemblies and built upward, with strict codes for candidates to those assemblies as well as to village courts. The system was dynamic and ensured actual participation at all levels. Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 10 With necessary adaptations, a search for a genuine Indian polity should lie in this direction, for that is the native system that arose from India’s complex society. Sri Aurobindo elaborated further: In India we had ... a spontaneous and free growth of communities developing on their own lines. ... Each such communal form of life — the village, the town, etc., which formed the unit of national life, was left free in its own internal management. The central authority never interfered with it. There was not the idea of “interest” in India as in Europe, i.e., each community was not fighting for its own interest; but there was the idea of Dharma, the function which the individual and the community has to fulfil in the larger national life. There were caste organizations not based upon a religio-social basis as we find nowadays; they were more or less guilds, groups organized for a communal life. There were also religious communities like the Buddhists, the Jains, etc. Each followed its own law — Swadharma — unhampered by the State. The State recognized the necessity of allowing such various forms of life to develop freely in order to give to the national spirit a richer expression.... The machinery of the State also was not so mechanical as in the West — it was plastic and elastic. ... The English in accepting this system have disfigured it considerably. They have found ways to put their hand on and grasp all the old organizations, using them merely as channels to establish more thoroughly the authority of the central power. They discouraged every free organization and every attempt at the manifestation of the free life of the community. Now attempts are being made to have the cooperative societies in villages, there is an effort at reviving the Panchayats. But these organizations cannot be revived once they have been crushed; and even if they revived they would not be the same.* If the old organization had lasted it would have been a successful rival of the modern form of government.... You need not come back to the old forms, but you can retain the spirit which might create its own new forms (Danino 2018: 170–172). We will therefore refrain from attempting to spell out precise features of India’s future polity, but in its broad lines it will surely move away from party politics, aim at simplification, decentralization, local empowerment, true participation, ruthless transparency, and a suppleness that remains responsive to evolving situations. Other institutions, such as the judiciary or the bureaucracy, the penal system and policing, would necessarily be part of this change, and their unwieldy structures, a source of misery rather than service to the common Indian, would have to undergo a major overhaul. That is why the attempt to revive “Panchayati Raj” has failed. However well-intentioned, it could only end up burdening the administrative structure further and dividing villages along party lines. * Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 11 Let us add, as a word of caution, that even an ideal system, if at all there could be one, would not be able to solve human problems: “You can go on changing human institutions infinitely and yet the imperfection will break through all your institutions” (Danino 2018: 217), warned Sri Aurobindo in 1939. Again, the real foundation of the resurgence lies in a spiritual renewal — nothing less can wash away the immense corruption that has taken root in India’s institutions and official machineries. India’s physical life cannot be healthy without a sound economy. Sri Aurobindo made a few important remarks in this connection: It is better not to destroy the capitalist class as the Socialists want to: they are the source of national wealth. They should be encouraged to spend for the nation. Taxing is all right, but you must increase production, start new industries, and also raise the standard of living; without that if you increase the taxes there will be a state of depression (Danino 2018: 218–219). That is exactly what happened in Nehruvian India and one reason for its economic stagnation. A second reason is the excess of control it indulged in, which stifled the Indian’s natural sense of initiative: I have no faith in government controls, because I believe in a certain amount of freedom — freedom to find out things for oneself in one's own way, even freedom to commit blunders. ... Without the freedom to take risks and commit mistakes there can be no progress. ... Organize by all means, but there must be scope for freedom and plasticity (Danino 2018: 211–212). A degree of freedom of initiative having been restored in recent years (the so-called “liberalization,” which is not yet liberal enough), India appears to have taken off economically. However, global mechanisms apart, complex social and environmental factors will decide the long-term evolution of India’s economy. One such factor is caste, of course, which is intricately linked to community organization. Sri Aurobindo clearly wanted the caste system in its present decayed form to go: The spirit is permanent, the body changes; and a body which refuses to change must die. ... There is no doubt that the institution of caste degenerated. It ceased to be determined by spiritual qualifications which, once essential, have now come to be subordinate and even immaterial and is determined by the purely material tests of occupation and birth. By this change it has set itself against the fundamental tendency of Hinduism which is to insist on the spiritual and subordinate the material and thus lost most of its meaning (Sri Aurobindo 2002: 684). Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 12 Sri Aurobindo would therefore certainly not have approved of the clumsy caste-based reservation system, insofar as it has hardened caste differences, triggered a race to backwardness, encouraged mediocrity by compromising on academic and bureaucratic standards, and failed to uplift the weakest members of the society. At the same time, as stressed earlier, Sri Aurobindo recognized the importance of community organization (which is not the same as caste) in India’s development, and much of the current boom in Indian enterprise can be shown to respect this pattern. Another factor currently undergoing rapid evolution is the status of Indian woman, a key to change in most of the problems confronting today’s India. Sri Aurobindo, always ahead of his times, regarded the marginalizing of woman as a major reason for India’s degeneration. Around 1910, he went so far as to envisage that Indian woman’s superiority to man “is no more impossible in the future than it was in the far-distant past” (1997d: 53). A few years later, he asserted, “Whenever women have been given opportunity they have shown their capacity. ... We have to wait a few generations in order to see them at work” (Danino 2018: 174). Seeing the rise of woman in today’s India in many fields — from village life to the spiritual world — we are tempted to say that the wait will soon be over. Then India’s dormant energies will truly be unlocked. The Intercommunal Problem The so-called “communal” problem, the relationship of Hindus, Jains and Sikhs with Christians and Muslims, remains unsolved. Here Sri Aurobindo was quite clear that Hinduism’s tradition of tolerance posed no threat to non-Hindus, but needed to be reciprocated: You can live amicably with a religion whose principle is toleration. But how is it possible to live peacefully with a religion whose principle is “I will not tolerate you”? How are you going to have unity with these people? Certainly, Hindu-Muslim unity cannot be arrived at on the basis that the Muslims will go on converting Hindus while the Hindus shall not convert any Mahomedan. You can’t build unity on such a basis. Perhaps the only way of making the Mahomedans harmless is to make them lose their fanatic faith in their religion (Danino 2018: 161). The same can be said today of aggressive Christian campaigns of conversion spread to the remotest corners of India with the massive support of foreign finance, aiming ultimately at the same conquest of India as militant Islam does. From the Morley-Minto reforms to the Lucknow Pact and the Khilafat movement, Sri Aurobindo opposed all measures aimed at giving a separate treatment to Indian Muslims, instead of regarding them as Muslim Indians — or simply Indians. He would have equally opposed the privileges extended to so-called minorities under the Constitution, since they reinforce rather than blur the divisive “minority identity” and are unfairly denied to the Hindus, in contradiction of the spirit of equal rights. In fact, the whole burden of “tolerance” is laid at the Hindus’ feet; Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 13 “minorities,” portrayed as perennial victims, are not expected to share in the task; the “majority” alone is — even if there is in reality no coherent, monolithic Hindu majority. If, today, a few marginal groups have been indulging in criminal acts — while the vast chunk of Hindus remain peaceful and tolerant — such discriminations are partly to blame; they should have no place in a resurgent India. The solution for India’s communal problems was formulated long ago by Ashoka himself and may be summarized in three simple steps: do not praise your creed excessively (i.e., no fanaticism); do not criticize other creeds harshly; instead, study the positive elements of all creeds. However, in such a vision, there is no scope for religions claiming to be sole repositories of the truth (which Indic religions never did). India and Nature In the end, however, the above issues may be overtaken by the most silent of them all: the environmental degradation that is fast threatening the land’s life-sustaining ability. The problem was not yet acute in Sri Aurobindo’s time, although he once remarked that “the forests [in India] have to be preserved and also the wildlife. China destroyed all her forests and the result is that there is flood every year” (Danino 2018: 218). It was even less acute two millenniums ago, when Kautilya prescribed wildlife sanctuaries, assigned taxes to the use of various irrigation works, and enjoined penalties for the felling of trees. Today, despite bountiful monsoons, the illusion created by the “Green Revolution” is reaching the end of its tether. India is in the grips of a severe water crisis, the result of decades-long mismanagement and incompetence. The drying up of river after river, the poisoning of earth, air and water with toxic substances, the plunder of natural resources by industries, the extreme pollution of Indian cities, will lead at the very least to a collapse of the health system, at worst to the demise of India’s agriculture, traditionally her primary strength. The only silver lining is a growing awareness of the urgency, but that is yet to be reflected in long-term vision plans by the authorities. Only if this awareness grows exponentially and is absorbed by the rising grassroots movements will we be able to avoid a wide-scale catastrophe. The coming years will decide India’s destiny at the most physical level. Taking Stock Sri Aurobindo’s vision of a rejuvenated India calls for nothing less than a national yoga — an effort of transformation in which a critical mass of Indians must consciously take part, those who happen to be in a position to change things as well as those who have been victims of the system. In fact, way back in 1910, he himself said so: The soul of Hinduism languishes in an unfit body. Break the mould that the soul may live.... If the body were young, adaptable, fit, the liberated soul might use it, but it is decrepit, full of ill-health and impurity. It must be changed, not by the spirit of Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 14 Western iconoclasm which destroys the soul with the body, but by national Yoga (2003: 552–553). Going by the superficial signposts provided by the media, we might despair of this ever happening. “Hinduism” is not a fashionable word, to begin with, and many of our intellectuals seem to have developed a hatred for the core concepts and values of Indian civilization. Some of them even have even called Sri Aurobindo “communal” * — one of those convenient but reckless adjectives thrown at anyone who does not blindly subscribe to Western solutions or methods, or who has faith in India’s inherent strengths. Thankfully, however, circumstances speak a language and follow a path that are not intellectual. And discreet signs abound that we have entered a phase of change. Apart from the awakenings we have evoked above, or the calls for change in various fields from the educational to the ecological, the most important sign is the growing assertiveness of the masses. From self-help groups to village committees, women’s and citizens’ organizations, NGOs good and bad (mostly the latter), everywhere we can note attempts towards selfgovernment, an organic phenomenon that has been a feature of Indian society since antiquity. Indians seem to have understood that there is no point waiting endlessly for the administration to do everything for them. Provided such groups do not fall back into the trap of politicization, they can change the grassroots pattern of India and effectively erode the system from below — for it is unlikely to change willingly from above. Some of those endeavors for change have had a spiritual motive, in conformity with Indian history, which has seen the deepest social changes arising from spiritual impulses, from the Bhakti to the freedom movements. If this trend continues, the result will be not only lasting changes in Indian society, but also a welcome testimony that Indian spirituality is capable of tackling India’s pressing social problems. We may end where we began, by looking at the meaning of this strange curve in India’s history from the time of the colonial conquest: Whatever temporary rotting and destruction this crude impact of European life and culture has caused, it gave three needed impulses. It revived the dormant intellectual and critical impulse; it rehabilitated life and awakened the desire of new creation; it put the reviving Indian spirit face to face with novel conditions and ideals and the urgent necessity of understanding, assimilating and conquering them. The national This trend was stated by Nurul Hasan, a Communist minister for Education in Indira Gandhi’s government in the 1970s. A Marxist historian, Bipin Chandra, in Modern India – A History Textbook for Class XII (New Delhi: NCERT, 1990-2000, p. 207), held Sri Aurobindo’s “concept of India as mother and nationalism as religion” to be a “step back” because it had “a strong religious and Hindu tinge.” Recently, Jyotirmaya Sharma in his Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003) holds Sri Aurobindo partly responsible for the rise of “Hindutva” (along with Dayananda Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda, among others), calls him a “pamphleteer” and accuses him of having “inspired a jihadi Hinduism and political Hindutva” (p. 69). * Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of India’s Rebirth / p. 15 mind turned a new eye on its past culture, reawoke to its sense and import, but also at the same time saw it in relation to modern knowledge and ideas. Out of this awakening vision and impulse the Indian renaissance is arising, and that must determine its future tendency. The recovery of the old spiritual knowledge and experience in all its splendour, depth and fullness is its first, most essential work; the flowing of this spirituality into new forms of philosophy, literature, art, science and critical knowledge is the second; an original dealing with modern problems in the light of the Indian spirit and the endeavour to formulate a greater synthesis of a spiritualised society is the third and most difficult. Its success on these three lines will be the measure of its help to the future of humanity (1997c: 15). Sri Aurobindo regarded “the spiritual history of mankind and especially of India as a constant development of a divine purpose” (2012: 411). Which does not mean that the road to this divine purpose will be a smooth one: Sri Aurobindo often warned of “the perpetual danger of a barbaric relapse” for humanity (1997e: 77). Whether India will contribute to the relapse or will at last emerge from her long lethargy is the question now before her. References* *** Danino, Michel, ed. 2018. Sri Aurobindo and India’s Rebirth, New Delhi: Rupa, 2018 Rishabhchand. 1981. Sri Aurobindo: His Life Unique, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Sri Aurobindo. 1997a. Karmayogin, CWSA, Vol. 8. Sri Aurobindo. 1997b. Essays on the Gita, CWSA, Vol. 19. Sri Aurobindo. 1997c. The Renaissance in India, with A Defence of Indian Culture, CWSA, Vol. 20. Sri Aurobindo. 1997d. Essays Divine and Human, Vol. 12. Sri Aurobindo. 1997e. The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and SelfDetermination, CWSA, Vol. 25. Sri Aurobindo. 1998. Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, CWSA, Vol. 13. Sri Aurobindo. 2002. Bande Mataram, CWSA, Vols 6 & 7. Sri Aurobindo. 2003. Early Cultural Writings, CWSA, Vol. 1. Sri Aurobindo. 2006. Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest, CWSA, Vol. 36. Sri Aurobindo. 2012. Letters on Yoga – I, CWSA, Vol. 28. “CWSA” stands for Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, the new series of Sri Aurobindo’s works published since the 1990s by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Puducherry (these bibliographical details are not repeated with every reference). *