If we read the history of civilization, we get a mixed feeling. There have been glorious moments. There have also been disappointments, terrible disapointments. Yet the best in man was ever driven by a secret urge. There was always an urge in him that spoke of the nobility of life. Whether he was aware of it or not, a kind of compulsion, an impetus towards perfection ever pushed him towards loftier aims. The sculptures by Phidias, the caves of Ajanata whose artists have preferred to remain unknown, the tall and massive Gopurams of the South Indian temples, tpaintings of the Sistine Chapel have given to the soul of man a loftiness that is born of something sublime and marvellous, given a character of divinity itself. In him he possesses a sense of immortality. In his quest he is secretly guided by some authentic truth. Even today the study of Nature is taking him to occult domains which were unknown to him until a year ago. Stepping into the vastness of space or mustering the power of a laptop practically in every walk of our life is undeniably a most astounding achievement of the modern man. Cycles of evolution in the past went through rough and difficult times, and they did tumble, but mankind was always on the march.

As early as 1914, almost a century ago, Sri Aurobindo saw a promising future for the human race. Not only that. He set himself to work out the deeper possibilities that wait for it. He brought those richer possibilities closer to us, that we could almost touch them. They are now realisable certainties. He has established on earth heavenly foundations that Light, Freedom, Immortality, God may dwell here.

Man is a fourfold being. In him operates the fourfold force of the soul. He is a worker and a skilled craftsman; he is engaged in commerce; he is a warrior and a conqueror; he is also a seeker of knowledge and a savant. Through the occupations according to his nature, his innate quality, swabhāva, is his search, the search of life in the affirmative spirit. Thus functions the order of the society for man’s authentic welfare. In it is assured his true progress. In fact, where is it that, and when was that absent?

In that progress man is the link between what must be and what is. He is the footbridge thrown across the abyss, as the Mother says.

Even in our present excessive materialistic mood we strive to exceed ourselves. A certain degree of solidity is the valuable gain of this endeavour. But we should also be on our guard. Today the dichotomy of spirit and matter seems to have deepened enormously, got fixed to unmanageable proportions. If the philosophy of yesteryears desubstantiated everything material, science has despirited human effort and human dignity. Our literature and art, our religion, our thought, everything is driven by crude vitalistic enjoyment. We are branded as a consumerist society, and one sign of it is of the repugnant flatness that has come due to business-related globalization. We are alienating ourselves from the sense of truth and beauty. We know not affection and aesthetic happiness so well cherished by a refined soul.

Today man of commerce is the supreme ruler. The world trade center is the symbol of our prosperity. Man of learning, man of art, man of strength, man of works, everyone is meant for the man of industry and business. Everything, every nut and bolt of the collective machinery is organised around him. Everyone has to participate in the economic enterprise. The elaborate state apparatus, legal system, wage structure, market mechanism, media, pressure groups, the entire system serves only his purpose. He is the wielder of political power. He is the shaper of even democracy. Our creativity and professional commitments have to be functional to meet his demands. In the process we have become efficient slaves. We have lost something precious. The integrality of man’s personality is absent. In the harsh commercial buzz no voice of the soul is heard. Affluence has made us empty and superficial.

Is there a deeper relationship between economics and culture? If culture does not take note of poverty then it is bound to disappear. But in the absence of culture if we are to get economic crudity, our gain becomes a pathetic loss. The earlier dichotomy of spirit and matter now gets transferred to the dichotomy of economics and culture.

The spectacle we witness today is the spectacle of what Sri Aurobindo called long decades ago “economic barbarism”. We are in service of the vital man, man of ambition and greed and lust. The successful capitalist and organiser of industry is the superman of the commercial age. Today the craving of this superman has grown on a ubiquitous scale. It is even argued that we are reaching the End of History. The days of petty battles are over, and man can devote himself to the pursuits of life. This is the picture given to us by Fukuyama. In it globalised capitalism would usher in unending progress and prosperity. But we are full of hubris, full of self-assertive arrogance. Another clash of a more subtle kind has entered into the world of inequalities. Conflict of civilisations is becoming acuter. We are unable to resolve the disharmonies that issue out from it. Values that make life warm and endearing are lacking in our money-based relationships. Life has become efficient, sans enjoyment of a deeper kind.

We must therefore ask the question whether India should follow the western model of a competitive economic system. By doing so, we might acquire a certain discipline and organisational efficiency. We might become a nation like many other commercially prosperous nations. We might possess social, political, industrial, military system as powerful as of an advanced nation. But that would spell disaster if we are to lose our national character, our innate swadharma and swabhāva. That would be a tragic irony, says Sri Aurobindo, if this is to happen. We will have failed to ourselves as well as failed in the world. Which also implies that we will have failed in our soul’s profound expectations of ourselves. What is swadharma, one’s own dharma? It does not belong to the formalized religious practices; it is the commitment to what one is engaged in. The dharma of a warrior is to fight for the protection of the values of life; the dharma of a student is to study in order to get prepare himself for the life waiting ahead of him; the dharma of an academic professor is to enlarge the frontiers of rational knowledge; the dharma of a scientist is to probe into the secrets of nature, something without his knowledge bordering almost on the occult; the dharma of a businessman is to produce wealth, the dharma of a technician is to perfect the skills and tools in a well-related sequence of operations; the dharma of a Brahmin is to engage himself with knowledge that comes only by higher instruments of cognition, the possibilities of superior intuition entering into his thoughts and perceptions; and so on—the dharma of the athlete and the gymnast, the musician and the comedian, the mountaineer, the deep-sea diver. And what is swabhāva? It is the soul’s innate character and that in manifestation tries to express it in an evolutionarily progressive manner. Thus if one is a thinker, it will be nigh impossible for him to be a warrior or a merchant. But when one is a thinker or a warrior or a merchant, he follows that corresponding dharma.

We study the ideas of Kenneth Arrow and James Buchanan and Amartya Sen. But we never ask if these are pertinent to us at all, to the Indian psyche. The aspect of relationship between the individual and the society is rarely seen in the Indian context. The fact that we are also a product of an outstanding culture is not taken into account. Individual choices leading to collective decisions is one side of the coin, the pragmatic or the down-to-earth side. But there is the other side also, that of an enlightened society promoting the prospects of an individual. Both are complementary to each other. One cannot be severed from the other. But the unfortunate thing is that, progress and economics become synonymous in the entire business of the day.

Money is undoubtedly a force of action and has enormous power over men and matters, and its role in the commerce of the world cannot be dismissed. It is necessary for the fullness of the outer life. But it cannot possess us. It is meant for a truer and more harmonious ordering of vital and physical existence.

In ancient India vitta included wealth, riches, prosperity, management, finance. It was given a preeminent position and formed a part of the national development. It was recognised that economic well-being does not depend only on the material resources. The entrepreneurial class, the Vaishya had a significant role to play in the organisation of the society. The emphasis was not on consumption, on acquisition and possession. It was on spending, sharing, giving. Thus the Mahabharata advocates in unmistakable terms the patronage of commerce and trade. “The power of production in the Vaishyas should always be encouraged. They make the realm strong, enhance agriculture, develop its trades... A wise king should be favourable to them. There is no greater wealth in the kingdom than its merchants.”

But in the ancient Indian wisdom economic development and wealth maximisation were not the aims in their own right. Progressive socio-principled fitness and increasing commitment to the Law of the Right were held as its culminating ideal. Dharma, Artha, Kama were not ends in themselves, but were a means to a nobler end. That end was Moksha, liberation from the littleness of our mortality, the human limitations. The trader was also accompanied by the sage, and the warrior, and the labourer, Moksha being equally available for all the types—because, after all, these divisions are bssed on the soul-forces operating universally.

The ancient Rishis recognised the origin of the fourfold order of society in the wisdom of the spirit. The Vedic hymn describes the four limbs of the great Cosmic Being. The Avatar of the Gita asserts that it is he who created this division of quality. In its active functioning we have the truth of creative organisation itself. In fact everywhere and always was present this fourfold order. The chaturvarņa system is not a Hindu but a spiritual way of organisation. It has been present in all the epochs and in all societies. There might have been crude and unacceptable imbalances and distortions. But they are smuttiness, a deformation which must be immediately corrected. Elimination of crudity and distortion is of course essential. But they cannot discredit the axiomatic truth of things. The fourfold organisation of society is a dispensation of the Spirit. This means that all our actions should be established in its nature. That is what the Gita tells us. It speaks of niyatam karma, ordained duty. The source of our action is in our swabhāva. It is that which constitutes our true personality. Our prosperity, our happiness, our progress are assured in it. The Veda speaks of corn rich with milk. Let us eat and drink the milk of that richness.

Today we have made artificial divisions of every kind. We have divisions between the haves and have-nots, between the capitalist and socialistic doctrines, between the corporate management and federated working classes. In India we have imported class struggle from the West. We do not accept any more the principle of regulated action, niyatam karma. We expect dividends without attending to our duties. This is alien to the Gita’s doctrine of desireless work, nishkāma karma.

Society must organise itself around the living vision of the Rishi. It cannot be done in a mechanical manner. We must discover the creative springs of the truths that sustain it. In them is the effective social order and social harmony. Non-recognition of this basic principle of our life has already caused considerable damage to us. We should inquire as to where lies Indianness for the Indians.

The Socialist world got crushed under its own inadequacies. The Capitalist mode brought disaster to itself because of its arrogance and excessive self-assertiveness. We need not, and better not, go through that experience. In it the sight of our own identity and our own destiny are absent. Our social organisations never looked for opportunities elsewhere. Rather they generated them in their own folds.

But we have introduced ideas of socialistic economics, secularism, parliamentary democracy of a particular brand. We take these as infallible instruments of progress. This has resulted in the sponsorship of state agenda. In all the walks of life, industry, trade, commerce, transport, education, art, literature, thought, science, sports everything has come under public ownership. The result is a stiff and unbending bureaucracy with lack of national commitment. It looks as though in the pursuit of ideas of secularism and democracy whatever was Indian had to go.

In a multi-religious and tradition-bound psychology secularism and democracy become operationally complicated. Failure of secularism is often taken as failure of democracy, as much as the other way around also. In it everything gets institutionalised. Freedom of the individual, equality of opportunities, fundamental rights, sharing of the nation’s wealth start coming under state enforcement. In our constitution all religions enjoy equal status. This is because theocratic democracy is a contradiction in terms. But that seems to be strange in many respects. In it the division between religions gets hardened. It becomes difficult to apply the principle of equal-to-all, sarvadharma samabhava. Instead, what we have are legalistic-doctrinaire guarantees. As a result, the practise of one’s faith without state interference turns out to be impossible. The expression of true national spirit thus remains insecure.

Secularism assumes that the state is independent of faith or creed. This is perhaps understandable. Retrograde religious biases have done more harm to society than good. The traumatic experience of history is witness to it. But not to recognise the intrinsic character of human nature is also a severe limitation. Rationalised psychology of the age cannot be a substitute for the ills of fundamentalism. The measure that must be applied is the pursuit of perfection in the greatness of the human soul and human spirit. what can be more noble than that?

According to St Augustine, God created man and left him free with justice and grace. But man has always sinned against God; he misused the gifts. In contrast to this, the Platonic freedom based itself upon the aspect of pure reason. In it, free democracy becomes the glory of the state republican. We have in it trans-religious seeds of secularism. But the Grecian emphasis is more on the socio-political aspects. It does not see the possibilities that are there beyond the republican thinking.

But perhaps to see the country as a personification of power is occultly more significant. We must see the country as a goddess, the giver of rich fruits. Identification with her is the only greatness that we should cherish and possess. In that identification will come to us everything, all the boons of life and thought and culture, the boons of the spirit itself. Thus only we become Indians.

Religion is not a state subject; nor is education, nor can be arts and literature and sports and advancement of knowledge. Sponsorship of Art and Culture by a government office is a laughable matter. Never will a living 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 expressive spirit. The foolish notion of human resources development by the state is a dehumanising degradation. It is altogether non-Indian. Academic excellence, arts, skills, vocative training, planning, professionalism, these are surely the concerns of the society. They cannot be the concerns of baboos and bureaucrats and careerists, least those of politicians. We should not hand over our freedom to the snatchers of freedom, to servants and slaves.

Sri Aurobindo is specific about our role in shaping the destiny of the world. We have to first discover our soul. We have to know the truth of our being. We have to establish ourselves in the greatness of values that sustained us even in our difficult days. Not that we should not assimilate what is noble and progressive in other societies and in other cultures. We speak of social rights and social obligations in the manner of Westerners. But we have forgotten ourselves. In Bande Mataram dated 16 March 1908 Sri Aurobindo wrote about these issues. He is forthright to say that the ideas of rights and duties are not our ideas, but are European ideas. In the Indian conception we think differently. To us dharma is the foundation of every activity. In it there is no division between the worldly and the spiritual aspects of life. In it rights and duties lose their artificial antagonism. Dharma is the basis of democracy. Indeed we have to be ready to follow dharma, dharma as we have defined, dharma that which holds us.

Dharma here of course does not mean the credal prescriptions, rites and rituals, laws of social conduct, obeying the dicta of decadent Brahminical authority. But what is true and eternal, what is sanatana, what has the foundation in the higher principles, it is that we have to comply with in our entire endeavour. Being driven by the inner urge is to live in dharma. That is what India has to do. She must awake to her nature; she must live in the dynamism of her glowing spirit. That is nationalism. That is to be Indian. Let us be so. Let us be Indians.