What Sri Aurobindo saw as a spiritual necessity of united India not only in the context of her destiny but also the destiny of the world, is interpreted by a certain intellectual element as nothing but a need to reclaim lost land, to repair the broken dream. To a multi-dimensional reality of India, it is nothing but anachronistic-chauvinistic to hail the country as Mother and raise the cry “Bande Mataram”. It is further argued that the concept of the country as a nation is alien to it, is of foreign origin; it is something which has been imported from Europe, and therefore to address it as “Mother”, and to say that it has a soul, is a typical confusion which always prevails in the Indian mind. In India the idea of statehood never existed. One can think of harmonious living of people together, people from different parts, and speaking different languages, and following different religions and customs, but to talk of them all as belonging to a single nation is nothing short of fundamentalism, fundamentalism of another kind. “The idea of nation statehood as a European social construction,” says a critic, “does not exactly come to my mind when Sri Aurobindo says partition must go.”

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