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Name: Joshi Tejasvi A
Paper no: 04
Roll no: 24
Sem: 01
Assignment Topic:
Sri Aurobindo’s view of Indian culture by Michel
Danino
Submitted To:
Department of English
Introduction of Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872.
At the age of seven he was taken to England for education and he also passed
the final examination for the Indian civil service. Returning to India in 1993
he worked for next three year in Baroda as a professor in Baroda College. He
was the first political leader In INDIA to openly put forward, in journal Bande
Mataram, the ideal of complete independence for the country.
The
first thing we see that the principle, the essential intention of Indian
culture was extraordinarily high, ambitious and noble, the highest indeed that
the human spirit can conceive.
Sri Aurobindo Foundation for Indian Culture
Carry out authentic research to rediscover the truth
and genius of Indian culture in its depth and fullness.
Re-awaken the capacity that enabled India to excel in
every aspect of life, and apply it dynamically to contemporary life and all its
activities.
Create new forms of philosophy, literature, art,
science and critical knowledge, based on a synthesis of the East and the West.
Look at existing problems of the world in the light of
Indian Spiritually and Psychology.
Introduction
about Michel Danino
Michel Danino born in 1956 at Honfleur
(France) into a Jewish family recently emigrated from Morocco, from the age of
fifteen Michel Danino was drown to India, some of her great yogis, and soon to
Sri Aurobindo and mother and their view of evolution which gives a new meaning
to our existence on this earth.
Sri Aurobindo’s view of Indian
culture by Michel Daino
In
this view Michel said individual that all I knew was that I could find nothing
in France or in the west that could give a full meaning to my life, nothing- in
its science, its philosophies , even its culture- that could convince me that
life is worth leaving. The first few pages I read by and about Sri Aurobindo
put an end to that quest- and were, of course, the beginning of another. Sri
Aurobindo always saw behind the appearances of the moment, however
disheartening they may be. He saw India’s ancient strength, the causes of her
decay, the certainly of her rebirth. For sixty years, from his student days in
Cambridge to his passing in 1950, his will for the fulfilment of India’s
destiny never wavered. He fought for it, suffered for it, poured all his
energies towards it. Sixty years is a long time in a man’s life.
We meet piles of garbage and are struck by a stench
emanating from the foundations. This is the experience of a number of westerners,
though few of them would be ready to put it as bluntly. Western society today
believes only in “expansion,” “efficiency,” “competitiveness”- and seeks to
transform its members into unthinking cogs in a huge Machine. We will certainly
find some remarkable individuals here
and there, but the mass is left to live in their hearts becomes a little too
acute. Or, if it is not depression, it is a bottomless pit of degradation.
Western civilisation, if it can be given this noble name, was built on cynical
greed, with a thin veneer of culture to give it a respectable appearance.
Anyone who finds this statement excessive should study the way “leading”
western nations spend their time selling weapons of death to everyone, then
sending peace missions to extinguish the wars they started, and more bombers in
case the peace missions are turned down. Not to speak of the countless
dictators and terrorists they constantly create, only to fight them in the name
of “human Rights” once they are found inconvenient. Or, again, look at those
giant corporate houses which think nothing of laying the earth waste as long as
they can make a few more dollars. No one knows where the whole machine is
heading, nor does anyone care- although many, especially among the ordinary
people, vaguely and anxiously sense that things cannot go on much longer. Such
unhealthy foundations are sure to decay before long, and the sings of impending
disintegration are not lacking, whether in the economic or the social fields.
Europe boasts of her science and its marvels. But to
the braggart intellect of Europe the India is bound to reply, “I am not
interested in what you know, I am interested in what you are. With all your
discoveries and inventions, what have you become? Your enlightenment is great
but what are these strange creatures that move about in the electric light you
have installed and imagine that they are human?” is it a great gain for the
human intellect to have grown more acute and discerning, if the human soul dwindles?
Man in Europe is descending steadily from the human level and approximating to
the ant and the hornet. The process is not complete but it is progressing
apace, and if nothing stops the debacle, we may hope to see its culmination in
this twentieth century after all our superstitions were better than this
enlightenment, our social abuses less murderous to the hopes of the race than
this social perfection.
Ninety years later, what was then behind the veil is
now out in the open. We have almost reaches the “culmination” of the West’s failure.
It has failed in spite of all its achievements because it has ignored what we
“are,” scoffed at what we are expected to “become.” And that is precisely, for
Sri Aurobindo, the heart of Indian civilization, its constant concern through
ages, in art or science or yoga, in every activity of life. “The laboratory of
the soul has been India,” he said. Indian culture is simply the culture of
man’s inner richness. It is a realization that the entire universe is divine,
tree, bird, man and star-and our mother Earth, whom the West has for two
thousand years regarded as a chunk of inanimate matter created to serve our
ever-expanding greed.
While fighting for India’s independence, Sri Aurobindo
reminded his countrymen: This great and ancient nation was once the fountain of
human light, the apex of human civilisation, the exemplar of courage and
humanity, the perfection of good Government and settled society, the mother of
all religions, the teacher of all wisdom and philosophy. It has suffered much
at the hands of inferior civilisations and more savage peoples; it has gone
down into the shadow of night and tasted often of the bitterness of death. Its
pride has been trampled into the dust and its glory has departed. Hunger and
misery and despair have become the masters of this fair soil, these noble
hills, these ancient rivers, these cities whose life story goes back into
prehistoric night. All our calamities have been but a discipline of suffering;
because for the great mission before us prosperity was not sufficient,
adversity had also its training; to taste the glory of power and beneficence
and joy was not sufficient, the knowledge of weakness and torture and
humiliation was also needed.
One hopes that the lesson of weakness and humiliation
is coming to its end. It has lasted long enough. But, for Sri Aurobindo, it can
only end if we get rid of a central misconception, a fatal misconception. When
we speak of the “laboratory of the soul,” of India’s wisdom and spirituality, a
widespread tendency is to think that all this is fine for those confined to
ashrams, or perhaps for old age, but of little practical use to build a nation.
Sri Aurobindo frankly disagrees. To him, inner growth can never contradict
outer growth, but can alone put it on a sound foundation. Referring to India’s
extraordinarily creative past, which certainly never neglected material life
and achievements, he observed:
Without this opulent vitality and opulent
intellectuality India could never have done so much as she did with her
spiritual tendencies. It is a great error to suppose that spirituality
flourishes best in an impoverished soil with the life half-killed and the
intellect discouraged and intimidated. When in 1920, Sri Aurobindo was asked to
resume politics, while spelling out his reasons for turning down the request,
he also said: I have always laid a dominant stress on the spiritual life, but
my idea of spirituality has nothing to do with ascetic withdrawal or contempt or
disgust of secular things. There is to me nothing secular, all human activity
is for me a thing to be included in a complete spiritual life.
With half-veiled causticity, Sri Aurobindo explained:
People care nothing about the spiritual basis of life
which is India’s real mission and the only possible source of her greatness, or
give to it only a slight, secondary or incidental value, a something that has
to be stuck on as a sentiment or a bit of colouring matter. Our whole principle
is different.
We are sometimes asked what on earth we mean by
spirituality in art and poetry or in political and social life-a confession of
ignorance strange enough in any Indian mouth at this stage of our national
history. We have here really an echo of the
European idea that religion and spirituality on the one side and
intellectual activity and practical life on the other are two entirely
different things and have each to be pursued on its own entirely separate lines
and in obedience to its own entirely separate principles. True spirituality
rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human
self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of
being, and our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve
out of it all we do and create. India can, if she will, give a new and decisive
turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling, for the
clue to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge. Whether she will
rise or not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance which is coming
upon her, is the question of her destiny.
To achieve India’s “renaissance,” Sri Aurobindo boldly
and repeatedly called on his countrymen to develop the Kshatriya spirit, almost
lost after centuries of subjection: the Kshatriya of old must again take his
rightful position in our social polity to discharge the first and foremost duty
of defending its interests. The brain is important without the right arm of
strength. What India needs especially as this moment is the aggressive virtues,
the spirit of soaring idealism, bold creation, fearless resistance, courageous
attack; of the passive tama sic spirit of inertia we have already too much. We
need to cultivate another training and temperament, another habit of mind.
And how do we cultivate that other training and
temperament? We can cultivate it on the individual or on the collective level.
Individually, that is yoga; it means opening ourselves to a wider consciousness
and a greater power; it means allowing them to fashion anew our hardly human
nature. And of course, it means discarding the misconception that yoga is good
only for escaping from this world. Recently, a young Indian friend asked me,
“But what is the benefit of yoga?” overlooking the rather mercantile aspect in
his question, I tried to explain that the “benefit” is all that ordinary life
cannot provide-all that the ancient Rishis were after: true mastery, true
power, true expansion, and a true understanding of the world, which is so
tragically lacking today. I don’t think my young friend was convinced it was
really worth all the trouble which is why Sri Aurobindo never expected too many
people to sincerely practise his exacting integral yoga. That brings us to the
slower but crucial collective level. Sri Aurobindo always laid great stress on
education. He himself had the best European education while in Cambridge, and,
between 1897 and 1906, was a professor in the Baroda state college, then in the
Bengal National College. So he knew the question in depth. And he had hopes in
the young. Our call is to young India. It is the young who must be the builders
of the new world- not those who accept the competitive individualism, the
capitalism or the materialistic communism of the west as India’s future ideal,
not those who are enslaved to old religious formulas and cannot believe in the
acceptance and transformation of life by the spirit, but all who are free in
mind and heart to accept a completer truth and labour for a greater ideal.
Sri Aurobindo never tired of calling for what he
termed “a national education.” He gave this brief definition for it:
The education which starting with the past and making
full use of the present builds up a great nation. Whatever wishes to cut off
nation from its past is no friend of our national growth. Whatever fails to
take advantage of the present is losing us the battle of life. We must
therefore save for India that entire she has stored up of knowledge, character
and noble thought in her immemorial past. We must acquire for her the best
knowledge that Europe can give her and assimilate it to her own peculiar type
of national temperament. We must introduce the best methods of teaching humanity
has developed, whether modern or ancient. And all these we must harmonise into
a system which will be impregnated with the spirit of self-reliance so as to
build up men and not machines.
Sri Aurobindo had little love for British education in
India, which he called a “mercenary and soulless education,” and for its
debilitating influence on the “the innate possibilities” of the Indian brain.
“In India,” he said, “the students generally have great capacities, but the
system of education represses and destroys these capacities.” As in every
field, he wanted India to carve out her own path courageously: the greatest
knowledge and the greatest riches man can posses are by inheritance; she has
that for which all mankind is waiting. The full soul rich with the inheritance
of the past, the widening gains of the present, and the large potentiality of
the future, can come only by a system of national education. It cannot by any
extension or imitation or imitation of the system of the existing universities
with its radically false principles, its vicious and mechanical methods, its
dead-alive routine tradition and its narrow and sightless spirit. Only a new
spirit and a new body born from the heart of the nation and full of the light
and hope of its resurgence can create it. Sri Aurobindo also insisted on
mastery of one’s mother-tongue, on the teaching of Sanskrit, which he certainly
did not regard as a “dead language,” on artistic values based on the old spirit
of Indian art, all of which he saw as essential to the integral development of
the child’s personality. In short, nothing whether Indian or Western was
rejected, but all had to be integrated in the Indian spirit.
This is clearly not the line Indian education has
taken. If we see today that nothing even of the Mahabharata or the Ramayana is
taught to an Indian child, we can measure the abyss to be bridged. That the
greatest epics of mankind should be thrown away on the absurd and erroneous
pretext that they are “religious” is beyond the comprehension of an impartial
observer. A German or French or English child will be taught something of
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, because they are regarded as the root of European
culture, and somehow present in the European consciousness. He will not be
asked to worship Zeus or Athena, but will be shown how the Ancients saw and
experienced the world and the human being. But Indian epics, a hundred times
richer and vaster in human experience, a thousand times more present in the
Indian consciousness, will not be taught to an Indian child. Not to speak of
other important texts such as the beautiful Tamil epics, Shilappadikaram and
Manimekhalai. Even the Panchatantra and countless other highly educational
collections of Indian stories-even folk stories-are ruled out. Certainly some aberration
worked upon the minds of those who devised Indian education after independence.
Or perhaps they devised nothing but were content with dusting off Macaulay’s
brainchild. It is painful to see that the teaching of Sanskrit is almost
systematically discouraged in India; it is painful to see that the deepest
knowledge of the human being, that of yogic science, is discarded in favour of
shallow Western psychology or psychoanalysis; it is painful to see that the
average Indian student never even hears the name of Sri Aurobindo, who did so
much for his country; and that, generally, Western intellectualism at its worst
is the only food given to a nation whom Sri Aurobindo described as once the
“deepest-toughed.”
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