O Sweetness, your strength and my destiny
Have moved together through the long ages,
And met offensive winds too; now they have
Merged, as would luminous faith and will-to-be,
And written a new story that presages
Hunger or birth only for them who are brave.

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... If the Congress cannot really face the light of a free and serious criticism, then the sooner it hides its face the better. For nine years it has been exempt from the ordeal; we have been content to worship it with that implicit trust which all religions demand, but which sooner or later leads them to disaster and defeat. Certainly we had this excuse that the stress of battle is not the time when a soldier can stop to criticise his weapon: he has simply to turn it to the best use of which it is capable. So long as India rang with turbulent voices of complaint and agitation, so long as the air was filled with the turmoil of an angry controversy between governors and governed, so long we could have little leisure or quiet thought and reflection. But now all is different; the necessity for conflict is. no longer so urgent and has even given place to a noticeable languor and passivity, varied only by perfunctory public meetings. Now therefore, while the great agitation that, once filled this vast peninsula with rumours of change, is content to occupy an obscure corner of English politics it will be well for all of us who are capable of reflection, to sit down for a moment and think. The hour seems to have come when the Congress must encounter that searching criticism which sooner or latter arrives to all mortal things; and if it is so, to keep our eyes shut will be worse than idle. The only good we shall get by it is to point with a fresh example the aphorism with which I set out. "If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into a ditch?"

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Today is a very special day. Sri Aurobindo had come here exactly a hundred years ago. It was at the instance of the Dharma Rakshini Sabha of Uttarpara that he had paid a special visit to this place and delivered a speech on the banks of the calm and wide majestic Ganges flowing in the greatness of its waters. It was not just an inspired and inspiring speech, but was something special, in the sense that he spoke the word that was first spoken to him in the jail. During the one year of his incarceration at Alipore he had extraordinary spiritual experiences, as if he was specially taken there for that purpose. The realization of the dynamic Brahman in its aspect of all-pervasive immanence, the Vasudeva-experience, was this second major spiritual realization. This he had within months of the great realization of the passive Brahman when he was in Baroda after the December 1907 Surat Congress. Two foremost Adwaitic spiritual realizations following each other in such quick succession, realizations which otherwise come after long spiritual practices during several lives,—that is something unparalleled in spiritual history. Therefore when Sri Aurobindo speaks something, the word he was told to give, it acquires a profound significance to us. He spoke of the sanatan or eternal dharma and hence it ought to have a special connotation carrying in it far-reaching consequences. What is the nature of that special word? Let us try to see it.

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After reading the translations pf Tagore’s compositions, WB Yeats says that there was nothing earlier that had stirred his blood as for years. He might have revised his opinion later, and he did it, but there is still something in the first impact the poetry had made on him, and all over the literary world of the time. An Indian friend of his said, “I read Rabindranath every day, to read one line of his is to forget all the troubles of the world.” Yeats responds: “For all I know, so abundant and simple is this poetry, the new renaissance has been born in your country and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.” In the world of the modern Rishi, “squirrels come from the boughs and climb on to his knees and the birds alight upon his hands.” That’s poetry. There’s everywhere “a sense of visible beauty and meaning”.

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Better known as a poet, novelist, composer and playwright, Tagore was also a writer of essays, travelogues, and polemics. And, as I have discovered, while his poems and stories and songs may perhaps speak more directly to his fellow Bengalis, in his non-fiction he speaks to, and for, the world.

In this column I have strung together some of my favourite Tagore quotes, with the hope that this will encourage readers to go to the originals, to get from them the same kind of education and pleasure that I have myself obtained. Here, first, is Tagore on the perils of an excessive love of one’s country. As he wrote in a letter to a friend on 19 November 1908.

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In proportion as the surrender and self-consecration progress the Sadhaka becomes conscious of the Divine Shakti doing the Sadhana, pouring into him more and more of herself, founding in him the freedom and perfection of the Divine Nature. The more this conscious process replaces his own effort, the more rapid and true becomes his progress. But it cannot completely replace the necessity of personal effort until the surrender and consecration are pure and complete from top to bottom.

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Lament, my friend, at the passing away of a generation of politicians with a voice, vision and reach that went far beyond our borders. Lament at our State-sponsored, abnormal and paranoid fixation with a particular country that has blinded us to the rest of the world, including the Third World, which we used to head not so long ago. And weep softly what we have reduced ourselves to the comity of nations. For a large country with a billion people, a country with a thriving industry and a large pool of scientific talent, a country, moreover, that is a nuclear power, India does not count for as much as it should. In terms of our influence in the world affairs, probably no other country is far below its potential as we are.

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... let me say that I am not much moved by one argument which may possibly be urged against me. The Congress, it will be said, has achieved miracles, and in common gratitude we ought not to express [towards] it any sort of harsh or malevolent criticism. Let us grant for the moment that the Congress has achieved miracles for us. Certainly, if it has done that, we ought to hold it for ever in our grateful memory; but if our gratitude goes beyond this, it at once incurs the charge of fatuity. This is the difference between a man and an institution; a great man who has done great things for his country, demands from us our reverence, and however he may fall short in his after-life, a great; and high-hearted nation—and no nation was ever justly called great that was not high-hearted—will not lay rude hands on him to dethrone him from his place in their hearts. But an institution is a very different thing. It was made for the use and not at all for the worship of man, and it can only lay claim to respect so long as its beneficent action remains not a memory of the past, but a thing of the present. We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery. However I will at once admit that if an institution has really done miracles for us—and miracles which are not mere conjuring tricks, but of a deep and solemn import to the nation,—and if it is still doing and likely yet to do miracles for us, then without doubt it may lay claim to a certain immunity from criticism. But I am not disposed to admit that all this is true of the Congress.

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In recent years I have been actively involved putting up photographic exhibitions. Last year I have put up three on macro photography of flowers with Mother’s spiritual significance and two on the villagers This year I came up with three exhibitions in two months; a fourth one is expected in April. Photography, Photoshop and exhibitions are the space where, shutting off the rest of the world, I return to the centre. Seeking for the way back to the original purity that once was our own, before the great fall; when mind was not split from intuition and the knowledge from within of sacred things directed human life, in a dreamlike state of innocence, harmony and oneness with each and all. The choice of the themes of those exhibitions, dictated from within, is part of that journey: great sadhaks and sadhakas at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram along with children; flowers and grasses as a guide to the psychic being; neighbouring villagers embodying the sacred and the numinous in daily life. And now, the Matrimandir building and its inhabitants—birds and squirrels—displayed in Pitanga until March 5th.

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