Shri Aurobindo’s view on India Culture

Name: Joshi Toral

Paper: 4 Indian Writing in English

Topic: Shri Aurobindo’s view on India Culture

SEM: 3,

M.A. part 2.

Year: 2012

Submitted to,

Dr.Dilip Barad,

M.K Bhavnagar University,

Bhavnagar

·       Sri Aurobindo’s View of Indian Culture

·       Introduction:

     India is famous for the myth, heritage and culture. Hear also Aurobindo’s discuss about over religion, spirituality and culture.

      The old Hellenic or Greece Roman civilization perished, among other reasons, because it only imperfectly generalized culture in its own society and was surrounded by huge masses of humanity who were still possessed by the barbarian habit of mind. Civilization can never be safe so long, confining the cultured mentality to a small minority, it nourishes in its bosom a tremendous mass of ignorance, a multitude, a proletariat.

“Either knowledge must enlarge from above or be always in danger of submergence by the ignorant night from below”

Europe boasts of her science and its marvels. But to the braggart intellect of Europe the Indian is bound to reply,

“I am not interested in what you know; I am interested in what you are. With all your discoveries and inventions, what have you become? Your enlightenment is great—but what are these strange creatures that move about in the electric light you have installed and imagine that they are human?”

 Is it a great gain for the human intellect to have grown more acute and discerning, if the human soul dwindles? Man in Europe is descending steadily from the human level and approximating to the ant and the hornet. The process is not complete but it is progressing apace, and if nothing stops the debacle, we may hope to see its culmination in this twentieth century. After all our superstitions were better than this enlightenment, our social abuses less murderous to the hopes of the race than this social perfection.

Ninety years later, what was then behind the veil is now out in the open. We have almost reached the “culmination” of the West’s failure. It has failed in spite of all its achievements because it has ignored what we “are,” scoffed at what we are expected to “become.” And that is precisely, for Sri Aurobindo, the heart of Indian civilization, its constant concern through ages, in art or science or yoga, in every activity of life.

“The laboratory of the soul has been India,”

 Indian culture is simply the culture of man’s inner richness. It is a realization that the entire universe is divine, tree, bird, man and star—and our Mother Earth, whom the West has for two thousand years regarded as a chunk of inanimate matter created to serve our ever-expanding greed.

This great and ancient nation was once the fountain of human light, the apex of human civilization, the exemplar of courage and humanity, the perfection of good Government and settled society, the mother of all religions, the teacher of all wisdom and philosophy. It has suffered much at the hands of inferior civilizations and more savage peoples; it has gone down into the shadow of night and tasted often of the bitterness of death. Its pride has been trampled into the dust and its glory has departed.

Hunger and misery and despair have become the masters of this fair soil, these noble hills, these ancient rivers, these cities whose life story goes back into prehistoric night. All our calamities have been but a discipline of suffering, because for the great mission before us prosperity was not sufficient, adversity had also its training; to taste the glory of power and beneficence and joy was not sufficient, the knowledge of weakness and torture and humiliation was also needed.

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 activity is for me a thing to be included in a complete spiritual life.

People care nothing about the spiritual basis of life which is India's real mission and the only possible source of her greatness, or give to it only a slight, secondary or incidental value, a something that has to be stuck on as a sentiment or a bit of colouring matter. Our whole principle is different.

We are sometimes asked what on earth we mean by spirituality in art and poetry or in political and social life—a confession of ignorance strange enough in any Indian mouth at this stage of our national history. We have here really an echo of the European idea that religion and spirituality on the one side and intellectual activity and practical life on the other are two entirely different things and have each to be pursued on its own entirely separate lines and in obedience to its own entirely separate principles. True spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our center, our essential way of being, and our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create.

To achieve India’s “renaissance,” Sri Aurobindo boldly and repeatedly called on his countrymen to develop the Kshatriya spirit, almost lost after centuries of subjection:

The Kshatriya of old must again take his rightful position in our social polity to discharge the first and foremost duty of defending its interests. The brain is impotent without the right arm of strength.

 It is the education which starting with the past and making full use of the present builds up a great nation. Whoever wishes to cut off the nation from its past is no friend of our national growth. Whoever fails to take advantage of the present is losing us the battle of life. We must therefore save for India that entire she has stored up of knowledge, character and noble thought in her immemorial past. We must acquire for her the best knowledge that Europe can give her and assimilate it to her own peculiar type of national temperament. We must introduce the best methods of teaching humanity has developed, whether modern or ancient. And all these we must harmonies into a system which will be impregnated with the spirit of self-reliance so as to build up men and not machines.

 “Mercenary and soulless education,”

 “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.”

This is clearly not the line Indian education has taken. If we see today that nothing even of the Mahabharata or the Ramayana is taught to an Indian child, we can measure the abyss to be bridged. That the greatest epics of mankind should be thrown away on the absurd and erroneous pretext that they are “religious” is beyond the comprehension of an impartial observer. A German or French or English child will be taught something of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, because they are regarded as the root of European culture, and somehow present in the European consciousness. He will not be asked to worship Zeus or Athena, but will be shown how the Ancients saw and experienced the world and the human being. But Indian epics, a hundred times richer and vaster in human experience, a thousand times more present in the Indian consciousness, will not be taught to an Indian child. Not to speak of other important texts such as the beautiful Tamil epics, Shilappadikaram and Manimekhalai. Even the Panchatantra and countless other highly educational collections of Indian stories—even folk stories—are ruled out.

It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very 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 will surely not happen; but it can’t be said that the danger is not there are indeed other numerous and difficult problems that country or will very soon face it.