Sri Aurobindo’s Vision for a United India Misrepresented

Exactly two years ago there was an article entitled Sri Aurobindo's Vision for a United India on a website which is pretty damaging to our ideas of spirituality forming the basis of socio-political organisation. It does not seem to be there anymore, but we are concerned with the points it is trying to make and its presence or absence should not matter for us. The author of that article was extremely critical about Sri Aurobindo taking his stand on the fact of united India, the sage and yogi in him disregarding the present-day geo-political factors. According to our critic this was a case for claiming “lost land” by Sri Aurobindo, making him vulnerable to the charge of fundamentalism. He is thus viewed as one harbouring pernicious intentions which will stand in the way of the growth of harmonious relationship between nations. Let us read the author:

Since we are exploring the re-visioning of the term Hindutva … it would appear that Sri Aurobindo's use-value for political Hinduvta is in championing him as a staunch nationalist who would resort to warfare—citing his essays on the 5000 year old text of the Gita,—to restore her timeless Hindu Identity and reclaim her ancient territory, I think the following statement needs to be deconstructed; and I mean that in no small way. In doing so the following words need to first be removed and looked at individually: India; United; Vision (as in Sri Aurobindo's)

If one follows the European history as it prevailed two hundred years ago then, he asserts, one can see the genesis of a nation-state coming into existence on the basis of socio-political factors. From a purely rational point of view, practical or prudent socio-political and not any dubious occult-spiritual factors are the only things worth considering about when discussing the formation of nation-states. In course of time this process of socio-political factors leading to state formation was strengthened by the legislative mechanism. Such is the conclusion one would arrive at on the basis of these arguments. Each unit had its language and its own identity. This is absent in the Indian subcontinent. Take for example the question of language. It is the nation-state that imposes a language on everybody, in the present case English, and it is not the language of the people that is the state language. Our commentator goes on to say that “the unified nation-state of India today was the result of the British drawing arbitrary boundaries to establish it.” It was the British sense of order and efficiency that drew lines and organized what was otherwise a chaotic landscape; it made provinces or regions administratively meaningful and functional.

The British came and brought order—that is the chorus. As a result of that order also arose the nationalist home rule movement in pressuring the British to leave India. That was “one of the unintended consequences of British rule.” Therefore to talk of “unified India” is not to understand history, avows the author. This is so “because even today within the present nation states there are people and areas of the unified nation state of India who wish to secede from the Union…” A dangerous music is our friend playing, playing essentially to please himself and his non-thinking associates.

But this is not a new music being dinned into our ears. Even in the early days of the Independence Movement we had learned savants who always thought of the fair and benevolent sense of British rule. Petition and pleading for public good were considered the accepted norms of life by them. In fact, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Guru of Mahatma Gandhi, thought that it was immaterial as to who rules over the country as long as there is the sense of justice in that governance. That is what, he held, the Indians respected; that has been the Indian mentality throughout the history. So what is being proposed by the new author is not really altogether new or original to us. The patent mistake however is misapplying things of the socio-political nature to a visionary and a yogi.

Then, in the idea or notion of united India,—considering it made of several nations,—there is a self-contradiction. If there are shifting borders, and if there is no supra-national entity to take care of common interest, then there cannot be a United India. The subcontinent cannot have anything analogous to the European Union.

But the most damaging part of observation comes from our author’s views of the 1950 interview Sri Aurobindo had given to KM Munshi. That was vis-à-vis India’s Partition. He asks: “Does the fact that the times have radically changed since 1950 make a difference in the original vision of Sri Aurobindo?” In the wake of spiritual realizations after 1926, the question to be asked was: could not have his perceptions of geo-political events changed, seeing things from a transformed perspective? The answer is here: “Indeed they certainly did.  In short over time his perspective on the conflict changed as well. As I understand it in 1965 Mother urged a full assault on Pakistan during the War, yet in 1973 her message on Pakistan was that without the need of military intervention the nation state of Pakistan would implode itself. Did Mother's perspective change between 1965 and 1973? Well yes it appears to have changed measurably.”

That kind of shifting of grounds, according to him, makes, logically enough, one suspect the very validity of what Sri Aurobindo had held during his life; so too the Mother. But let us extend the same argument a little farther and check if Sri Aurobindo would have revised in a radical way his major works such as The Life Divine,—because, after all, he had now new realizations and they ought to get incorporated in the new presentation. If so, all our attempts to conduct skype classes on it would amount to teaching or propagating an outdated text. The fallacy lies in the fact that such a line of argument springs up simply because of non-understanding of the basic spiritual things, their essentials, their reality and functioning.

We have already noticed the terrible confusion that is present in such a kind of glum thinking. When logic gets muddled, one arrives at offensively erroneous conclusions. It must be well understood that Sri Aurobindo’s views about Partition would not undergo changes; what would undergo change are the methods of dealing with its problems. In fact, every time the opportunity came, it was squandered away. That makes the next step more and more difficult.  That is the occult law. We have been responsible to make the circumstance worse and worse with every occasion missed. It has become so bad now that we are facing an extremely dangerous situation when none would survive in this part of the world. That is the nature of things and we have to bear its severe consequences. This is what happens when the divine Word gets rejected. This is what happens when we do not establish contact with our inner or higher greater being, our superior self. Non-acceptance of Cripps Proposals led to Partition; the refusal of the government of Pakistan to sign the no-war Nehru-Liaquat Pact led to the imbroglio in Kashmir which is still persisting; and so on as we have already seen in other parts of the article. This failure of ours got repeated in history a number of times and after every failure the issue became more and more complex, more and more intractable, even more and more dangerous, eventually arriving on the threshold of nuclear threat in the warring subcontinent. This is exactly what happens when the vision of a Rishi and a Yogi is not accepted. In the process, we have already paid the price in the death of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1965, a death shrouded in specious mystery if not loaded with suspicious circumstances, of he being removed from the scene altogether. We have been digging our grave deeper and deeper,—because we did not trust the vision of a Rishi and a Yogi,—because we never prepared ourselves to be perceptive to such promptings coming from the higher spirit,—because we never had our soul’s contact with it. Surely enough, acceptance does not mean following a Rishi and a Yogi in a blind mechanical way, in fact, there has to be a safeguard against quackery and fraud and impersonation. The safeguard comes only when we are alert to the suggestions made by our deeper soul, when we can listen to it in the quiet of our thought and feeling and will, when we have contact with it. Actually that was precisely the kind of thing that was lacking among leaders of that time, is lacking even today. To develop that contact by doing national tapasya is the task that delves on those who have an innate sense of luminous responsibility with them, in whom has awakened the will, awakened the spirit to live in it and to grow in its multifold majesty and richness.

The article entitled Sri Aurobindo's Vision for a United India had originally appeared two years ago at http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2007/7/27/3122164.html but was pulled down within a week of its posting. I happened to download it and keep it in my file to rebutt it one of these days. Search for it at the site gives an error message: “Article # 3122164 not found”. However, it can still be accessed on the following blog: http://sepact.blogspot.com/2007/07/in-india-constitution-is-now-been-well.html Apropos of some of the aspects as presented by the author in this article of his, we shall examine in some detail their validity in the next section.