An interview in 1950
Pertinent to this aspect is the
brief but significant reference to the special interviews granted during later
years by Sri Aurobindo to some of the prominent political figures of the time,
dignitaries like KM Munshi,—he was Sri Aurobindo’s student in
Baroda,—CR Reddy, Surendra Mohan Ghose, etc. We must also mention here that Surendra
Mohan was very keen that Sri Aurobindo should consent to have an interview with
Mahatma Gandhi which he did but, unfortunately, it did not materialise. “Fate
stepped in and foiled what could have been a momentous meeting,” says
Nirodbaran. Perhaps it was not meant to be. Perhaps Fate saw that it did not
happen. There were also a number of important letters Sri Aurobindo had
dictated during this period.
Apropos of
Today we dismiss those words as
time-barred, forgetting that he had put his yogic force in them in the context
of what he saw as falsehood and fraud. By forgetting them, we are entrenching
ourselves more and more into falsehood and fraud. We are strengthening
falsehood and fraud more and more. Has the power which Sri Aurobindo put in his
words waned and disappeared? Or is it that we are putting more and more
obstacles in its working? It seems there is no end to our stupidity.
In this context we have to only
remember the Nehru-Liaquat Pact and the
But we should not take Sri
Aurobindo as “Read-Only Text” frozen for all time without the contents of
dynamism in time. We should lend ourselves to its dynamism, to its tangible efficacy.
Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter to a disciple that
Let us recall one of the early
conversations Sri Aurobindo had with his disciples, as recorded by AB Purani in
the Evening Talks, in 1923. It brings
out one specific aspect of the Hindu-Muslim unity. About the Muslims, Sri
Aurobindo says that their fanatic faith in their religion is harmful to
everybody, even for themselves. It is necessary that they inculcate liberal
ideas, of right and liberty. The mildness of the Hindus has always given way in
the face of the Muslim aggressive approach. The best solution would be to allow
the Hindus to organize themselves and the Hindu-Muslim unity would take care of
itself; it would automatically solve the problem. Here is the clue available to
us. Though spoken in 1923, its fundamental truth, of liberal ideas for the
Muslims and the Hindus organizing themselves, remains valid even today.
The Khilafat question
In contrast to that, Mahatma Gandhi
had different views. Take the example of the
Sri Aurobindo saw the necessity of
the freedom of
Are we awake?
But what about today? Are we awake?
Maybe we are just emerging out of the distasteful sleep of history. But we have
not yet shed the dullness of the night which is still weighing heavily on our
souls. We have not recovered our true and proper national identity. We are
still slaves of habits that have no business to persist. In every field of our
activity we want to be a la mode, adapting ideas and manners of the
industrially advanced societies. We are apish. We are copyists, twice removed
from reality; we are a copy of copy. And, then, a corrupt society can never be
creative. Imitative societies can never be taken seriously. Once a young French
student wrote: “The pyramids have been eroded by the desert wind, the marble
broken by earthquakes, and gold stolen by the robbers. But the Veda is recited
daily by an unbroken chain of generations.”
But today we have lost contact with
the Veda. We are importing ideas from the Western masters. We are adopting
their models. We are after the “winner’s version” of life, the so-called life.
We have been looking outside
The
In this context let us recall the
historical proceedings of the March 1940 All
In Jinnah’s words, “Hindus and
Muslims derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have
different epics, different heroes and different episodes. Very often the hero
of one is a foe of the other, and likewise, their victories and defeats
overlap. To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a
numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent
and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government
of such a state.”
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was the first
exponent of the Two-Nation Theory in the modern era. “He believed that
In the 1944 Gandhi-Jinnah talks,
Gandhi told Jinnah that “he had come in his personal capacity and was
representing neither the Hindus nor the Congress. Gandhi's real purpose behind
these talks was to extract from Jinnah an admission that the whole proposition
of
The Indian
The British Parliament passed the
Indian Independence Act on 18 July 1947. The Act created two dominions, Indian
Union and
Thus was the deed done. But let us
read what Irfan Husain, in Jinnah’s Dawn coming from
However, let us get back to
During the colonial days there was
a set of people who thought that, for them, there should always be an
Where is authentic nationalism?
No wonder, we lack the spirit of
authentic nationalism. No wonder we do not have our own programmes. We are
ashamed of singing the National Anthem in the company of foreigners. We do not
have our own priorities. No wonder that, we do not have our own science, our
own literature, our own national life. There can be Indian life only when
We do not have men “fit for the
times”. But there is the expectation that the soul of the country shall awake.
It shall arise from the Yajna of the Tapasvins. It shall arise like a radiant
goddess. The ancient Rishis lived in the forests, but one-sixth of their
tapasya went as a state tax for the welfare of the land. It is that which
sustained every excellence of the society. We have to do that kind of national
tapasya.
We Indians believe that everything
should be done for us by the government. We do not tell what we are going to do
for the country. We forget that religion is not a state subject; nor is education,
nor can be arts and literature and sports and advancement of knowledge.
Organisation of Art and Culture activities by a government office is a strange
laughable matter. Never will a dynamic society allow these things to happen. A
government’s concern should be governance. It is the society that has to build
cultural foundations. It has to put forward progressive social aims. It has to
generate awareness to fulfil its own longings. It must do things in the
nobility of its creative-expressive spirit.
The native power of the spirit
This means that we must get back to
the native power of the spirit. We must discover it and live in it. This is the
great agenda for us to work upon. If spiritual unfolding is the hidden truth,
then man as he is cannot be the last term of this evolution. His mind is
capable of opening to what exceeds it. Therefore there is a possibility that
man will arrive at supermanhood. This is what Sri Aurobindo asserts. It is
towards it that the Mother had been working all along. The authentic post-human
potentials find their meaning and contents in such a possibility.
When this is recognised and carried
out, we might say that we stand on the verge of the last definitive
transformation. When it is achieved, the passage of the soul through the abyss
of ignorance shall get terminated, leading it into the realms of knowledge.
Supramental Truth and Light and Force shall descend. This shall open out the
way for the appearance of the gnostic life upon the earth. The epiphanic
possibilities of the spirit shall become a part of the evolutionary growth and
manifestation. That will be the beginning of the new era in the evolutionary
history of the earth.
The possibilities of the future
Sri Aurobindo presented his
world-vision and God-vision in the possibilities of the future of the human
race in the very opening issue of the monthly philosophical review Arya that he
launched on 15 August 1914. It begins as follows: “The earliest preoccupation
of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate
preoccupation… is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests
itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search
after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality.”
The formula of God, Light, Freedom,
Immortality was discovered long ages ago, and many were the attempts made for
its application in the course of evolving cycles of human destiny, cycles
turning through rough and strenuous, even recalcitrant times. Great religions
came, philosophies sprang up, and social institutions busied themselves to
advance the cause of man, even as deeper esoteric pursuits brought fruits of
unexpected wonders. However, this “transient and sorrowful world” has yet
remained sorrowful and transient. Stretched and tortuous has been the path on
which imperious history marched. Thinkers and saints and prophets moulded the
destiny of mankind and took it nearer and yet nearer towards its seemingly
unattainable goal. But, unfortunately, all these thousand ceaseless strivings
have been, at their best, only partially successful. We are still struggling to
meet God in God’s vast creation.
In recent times, the problem of
humanity’s prospects is posed in a different manner—as a fixating aspect of
post-human destinies for the advancement of human capabilities and human
expectations. Very often the tremendous gains of our science and technology are
taken as reassuring gains to bring to man and society the marvels of some unknown
but rewarding satisfaction and abundance. It is vigorously claimed that Aldous
Huxley’s “human potential” will be in a position to deliver all the wonderful
goods man endeavours to have. The development of human faculties, including the
tools of cognition, is no doubt a very desirable step in the direction of man’s
progress; but there is no clue whatsoever in the thesis of human potential
belonging to the social and intellectual milieu, nothing in its claim for
happiness and in its creativity to suggest that his own assets and capabilities
can actually take him beyond himself. The “human potential” approach might
sound perfectly rational, but that itself is its severe limitation.
The human potential
The human potential movement
basically emphasises the so-called secular individual values and human
capabilities within its understandable boundaries. This certainly is an asset
when there is so much of inelegance and à peu près, so much of obscurantism of
one kind or the other. There is also a suggestion that the psychology of
individuation can correct the wrongs of the human psyche. But such itself could
just be a matter of belief, and the very restrictive approach would keep the
will of man, his emotions, his aesthetic pursuits, his genuine religious and spiritual
aspirations, the cosmic sense, the universality of the spirit, and the deeper
longings of his soul away from the bright possibilities of his vision. The
immortal in the mortal would continue to languish, and what would get sharpened
might be only the outer persona, the surface self and not the inner reality
that constitutes his inner personality and his true being. An integral view of
life fulfilled in an integral way, as of an individual or of a group-soul, can
alone be the valid and enduring foundation for the new age. Recognition of this
spiritual fact and movement in its dynamism can alone assure the opening of
horizons of the new consciousness in the glory of the spirit. This is what an
enlightened soul, wherever it be, must strive to achieve.
If the authentic human potential
has to emerge in the transformative action of the human race, then it is
necessary that, by a sustained effort, we should discover ourselves first and,
in that discovery, identify our will with the higher will. This is what we see
in the intense as well as extensive yogic tapasya of Sri Aurobindo and the
total identification of the Mother’s will with the Supreme’s Will. The Mother
was concerned with the almighty powers that are locked in the physical; she
awoke them and the result was that, even the body’s cells started spontaneously
responding to the Divine’s Presence. Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1928: “The
supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the
earth-consciousness.” The supramental change was decreed by him and he and the
Mother had set themselves to work out this inevitability.
Humanity’s conscious participation
Our hope lies in being open to the
subtler nuances of the working of the forces of life that operate always within
and around us. In the totality of our approach we will have to perhaps move
from the rational to the luminous intuitive modes and tools of knowledge and
action. Fortunate we will be if we can accept, understand and apply what has
been given to us by the Seer of the New Age. The vastness of Sri Aurobindo's
vision embraces the human difficulties in their several dimensions and offers
to them fulfilling solutions. The real problem of the society, as in the case
of the individual, is for it to find its soul, the true collective soul.
Certainly, it is that which alone can guide it on its evolutionary march
towards the emergence of a spiritualised humanity. In its absence, the external
ego-self is bound to prove to be a false light; this will also imply that
excessive subjectivism of the crude vitalistic kind cannot but lead it to
disintegration and destruction. There has to be a conviction that, culmination
of the social development into the Age of the ageless Spirit is the secret urge
and motivating force behind the evolutionary Nature’s long painstaking and
patient working. Humanity’s conscious participation in it will assuredly hasten
this triumph and this glory. The soul of
PS
Sri Aurobindo’s letter to Dilip
Kumar Roy, dated 4 April 1950:
Perhaps this situation, of
“considerable amount of human suffering”, would not have arisen had the Cripps
Proposals in 1942 been accepted. In their rejection the Mother saw ‘calamity’
befalling