Renaissance in India by Shree Aurobindo

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Q Renaissance in India- Shree Aurobindo.

Shree Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872. He stood first in King’s College, Cambridge in England. He also passed the final examination of the Indian Civil Service.

When he was professor in Baroda College, he joined revolutionary society and took a leading role in secret preparations for an uprising against the British Government in India.

The essay was written in 1918. In it he presented the old Indian spirit and how it should be converted into renaissance. It also shows the Indian culture and its soul, the creativity in it. The strength due to the spirit, the outcome of it is shown in this essay.

“Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. The sense of infinity is native o it.”

He believes that Indian civilization is the best civilization as it stands on spirituality which is infinite. The sole creativity and sheer intellect are the children of it. It has its own high spiritual aim. With the help of effective mannerism, it forms & effect the rhythm of life. In his words:

“A spiritual aspiration was the governing force of this culture”

He also believes that the spirituality is the highest aspect of life as it tries to be and ruling the passion of a single man. And he also turns the core of the man towards it.

Foe him ‘Renaissance’ is the new birth of India. It is very important for her. Here he personified India as ‘Mother India’. He wants to put her on the world in such a way that it evokes the new creativity in the mentality. She should relearn the age-old ideas and light up the spirit within and emboss herself among other nations’ eye. So that it help her to govern her future. The important is what India makes her own life must precede the wider question what her new life may be mean to human race.

He also compares the term of renaissance with the European ones due to Greek-Latin with special reference to India. He denies the likeness with European renaissance. It is the long period of eclipse as India is under the baseless and confusing influences of different culture of West. There are various loop-holes in it and it gives new self-consciousness or just it creates an illusion of modernization.

But the wholeness, the feeling of fulfillment, from within is not there. The influence can’t touch the soul of every common man. But the louder call of the pioneers had shaken the inner soul of the “general minds of the people”. They represent the advanced movement. On the whole we see is a giant Shakti who is awakening the whole world a new and alien environment. In doing so India finds herself bond with past strings and scratches, wounds and weakened minds. She tries herself to be free from it, to arise and proclaim herself. And impose her importance and set her seal on the world. “The bud of the soul” is partly open.

He further adds that none can come from outside with the knowledge and reforms India. It is not the basic need of it. It should break the shackles of other countries’ influences. Her true reawakening is that gave her rebirth as a whole and enlightens the spirit.

He praises the Indian spirit. The spirituality is very vital & is always maintains itself. It is that which saved India always at every critical moment of her destiny. It has been the starting point of the renaissance. It is the vitality of the spirit that saves India every time and under the rule-its soul and body soon destroyed. The spirit is the strength of India to fight and stand against the circumstances.

Now it’s time for India to shed all her fears & influences as it reaches nowhere and become still.  The stagnation of spirit mars the liveliness of the India. The spirit will keep her going. It sharpens herself with new philosophical, artistic, literary, cultural, political and social forms and rejuvenises itself. It reestablishes the old truths with new undefeated strength, completeness and permanence.

The master key of the dead lock is spirituality. She was alive of the greatness of material laws and forces; she had a keen eye to see beyond it and also had great hold on the insight. She could see the complexity of the universe as well as the unity in the spirit. She is also well aware about the hidden powers of human kind about which he himself is ignorant. She had seen God behind many Gods. And knows about the vastness of spirituality. Then with that calm audacity of her intuition which know no fear and littleness and shrank from no act whether of spiritual or intellectual, ethical or vital courage, she declared that there was none of these things which man could not attain if he trained his will and knowledge; he could conquer these rages of mind become the sprit, become a God, become one with God, become the ineffable Brahmin. Here Aurobindo talks about the real Brahmin. It shows the relation between national spirit and castisism. The cast is based on the form od one’s freewill about learning, work and sphere of knowledge and spirituality. The person who is high in spirit, having great carving of the rising of soul and longing to reach the capability flourish from within is true Brahmin. And with the help of the Brahmins vast knowledge of logic, science, with the sense of management and practicality she set forth the way to progress.  But this spirituality and this prolific abundance of the energy and joy of life and creation do not make all that the spirit of India has been in its past.

Indeed 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. The spirituality that so flourishes is something morbid, hectic and exposed to perilous reactions. It is when the race has lived most richly and thought most profoundly that spirituality finds its heights and its depths and its constant and many-sided fruition. In modern Europe it is after a long explosion of vital force and a stupendous activity of the intellect that spirituality has begun really to emerge and with some promise of being not, as it once was the sorrowful physician of the malady of life, but the beginning of a large and profound clarity. The European eye is struck in Indian spiritual thought by the Buddhistic and illusionist denial of life. But it must be remembered that this is only one side of its philosophic tendency which assumed exaggerated proportions only in the period of decline. In itself too that was simply one result, in one direction, of a tendency of the Indian mind which is common to all its activities, the impulse to follow each motive, each specialisation of motive even, spiritual, intellectual, ethical, vital, to its extreme point and to sound its utmost possibility. Part of its innate direction was to seek in each not only for its fullness of detail, but for its infinite, its absolute, its profoundest depth or its highest pinnacle. It knew that without a “fine excess” we cannot break down the limits which the dull temper of the normal mind opposes to knowledge and thought and experience; and it had in seeking this point a boundless courage and yet a sure tread. Thus it carried each tangent of philosophic thought, each line of spiritual experience to its farthest point, and chose to look from that farthest point at all existence, so as to see what truth or power such a view could give it. It tried to know the whole of divine nature and to see too as high as it could beyond nature and into whatever there might be of supradivine. When it formulated a spiritual atheism, it followed that to its acme of possible vision. When, too, it indulged in materialistic atheism, - though it did that only with a side glance, as the freak of an insatiable intellectual curiosity, yet it formulated it straight out, boldly and nakedly, without the least concession to idealism or ethicism.

Everywhere we find this tendency. The ideals of the Indian mind have included the height of self-assertion of the human spirit and its thirst of independence and mastery and possession and the height also of its self-abnegation, dependence and submission and self-giving. In life the ideal of opulent living and the ideal of poverty were carried to the extreme of regal splendour and the extreme of satisfied nudity. Its intuitions were sufficiently clear and courageous not to be blinded by its own most cherished ideas and fixed habits of life. If it was obliged to stereotype caste as the symbol of its social order, it never quite forgot, as the caste-spirit is apt to forget, that the human soul and the human mind are beyond caste. For it had seen in the lowest human being the Godhead, Narayana. It emphasised distinctions only to turn upon them and deny all distinctions. If all its political needs and circumstances compelled it at last to exaggerate the monarchical principle and declare the divinity of the king and to abolish its earlier republican city states and independent federations as too favourable to the centrifugal tendency, if therefore it could not develop democracy, yet it had the democratic idea, applied it in the village, in council and municipality, within the caste, was the first to assert a divinity in the people and could cry to the monarch at the height of his power, “O king, what art thou but the head servant of the demos?” Its idea of the golden age was a free spiritual anarchism. Its spiritual extremism could not prevent it from fathoming through a long era the life of the senses and its enjoyments, and there too it sought the utmost richness of sensuous detail and the depths and intensities of sensuous experience. Yet it is notable that this pursuit of the most opposite extremes never resulted in disorder; and its most hedonistic period offers nothing that at all resembles the unbridled corruption which a similar tendency has more than once produced in Europe. For the Indian mind is not only spiritual and ethical, but intellectual and artistic, and both the rule of the intellect and the rhythm of beauty are hostile to the spirit of chaos. In every extreme the Indian spirit seeks for a law in that extreme and a rule, measure and structure in its application. Besides, this sounding of extremes is balanced by a still more ingrained characteristic, the synthetical tendency, so that having pushed each motive to its farthest possibility the Indian mind returns always towards some fusion of the knowledge it has gained and to a resulting harmony and balance in action and institution. Balance and rhythm which the Greeks arrived at by self-limitation, India arrived at by its sense of intellectual, ethical and aesthetic order and the synthetic impulse of its mind and life.

The Spirit is a higher infinite of verities; life is a lower infinite of possibilities which seek to grow and find their own truth and fulfilment in the light of these verities. Our intellect, our will, our ethical and our aesthetic being are the reflectors and the mediators. The method of the West is to exaggerate life and to call down as much - or as little - as may be of the higher powers to stimulate and embellish life. [Mr. Cousins' distinction between invocation and evocation.]

But the method of India is on the contrary to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden intensities of the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as to make it responsive to and expressive of the spirit and in that way increase the power of life. Its tendency with the intellect, will, ethical, aesthetic and emotional being is to sound indeed their normal mental possibilities, but also to upraise them towards the greater light and power of their own highest intuitions. The work of the renaissance in India must be to make this spirit, this higher view of life, this sense of deeper potentiality once more a creative, perhaps a dominant power in the world. But to that truth of itself it is as yet only vaguely awake; the mass of Indian action is still at the moment proceeding under the impress of the European motive and method and, because there is a spirit within us to which they are foreign, the action is poor in will, feeble in form and ineffective in results, for it does not come from the roots of our being. Only in a few directions is there some clear light of self-knowledge. It is when a greater light prevails and becomes general that we shall be able to speak, not only in prospect but in fact, of the renaissance of India.

In the second essay, he rephrases them.  The Western impact reawakened “a free activity of the intellect”; “it threw definitely into ferment of modern ideas into the old culture”; and “it made us turn our look upon all that our past contains with new eyes”.  These are a revival of “the dormant intellectual and critical impulse”; the rehabilitation of life and an awakened “desire for new creation”; and a revival of the Indian spirit by the turning of the national mind to its past.  It is this “awakening vision and impulse” that SriAurobindo feels is the Indian renaissance.  Such a renaissance would have three tasks to accomplish: in the light of Indian spirit, the endeavour to formulate a greater synthesis of a spiritualised society is one of the most difficult. 

Nothing in the many processes of Nature, whether she deals with men or with things, comes by chance or accident or is really at the mercy of external causes. What things are inwardly, determines the course of even their most considerable changes; and timeless India being what she is, the complexity of this transition was predestined and unavoidable. It was impossible that she should take a rapid wholesale imprint of Western motives and their forms and leave the ruling motives of her own past to accommodate themselves to the foreign change as best they could afterwards. A swift transformation scene like that which brought into being a new modernised Japan, would have been out of the question for her, even if the external circumstances had been equally favourable. For Japan lives centrally in her temperament and in her aesthetic sense, and therefore she has always been rapidly assimilative; her strong temperamental persistence has been enough to preserve her national stamp and her artistic vision a sufficient power to keep her soul alive. But India lives centrally in the spirit, with less buoyancy and vivacity and therefore with a less ready adaptiveness of creation, but a greater, intenser, more brooding depth; her processes are apt to be deliberate, uncertain and long because she has to take things into that depth and from its profoundest inwardness to modify or remould the more outward parts of her life. And until that has been done, the absorption completed, the powers of the remoulding determined, she cannot yet move forward with an easier step on the new way she is taking. From the complexity of the movement arises all the difficulty of the problems she has to face and the rather chaotic confusion of the opinions, standpoints and tendencies that have got entangled in the process, which prevents any easy, clear and decided development, so that we seem to be advancing under a confused pressure of circumstance or in a series of shifting waves of impulsion, this ebbing for that to arise, rather than with any clear idea of our future direction. But here too lies the assurance that once the inner direction has found its way and its implications have come to the surface, the result will be no mere Asiatic modification of Western modernism, but some great, new and original thing of the first importance to the future of human civilisation.

In the second essay, Sri Aurobindo goes on to outline the three phases of the renaissance:

The first step was the reception of the European contact, a radical reconsideration of many of the prominent elements and some revolutionary denial of the very principles of the old culture.  The second was a reaction of the Indian spirit upon the European influence, sometimes with a total denial of what it offered and a stressing both of the essential and the strict letter of the national past, which yet masked a movement of assimilation. The third, only now beginning or recently begun, is rather a process of new creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind remains supreme, recovers its truths, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modern idea and form, but so transmutes and indianises it, so absorbs and transforms it entirely into itself that its foreign character disappears and it becomes another harmonious element in the characteristic working of the ancient goddess, the Shakti of India mastering and taking possession of the modern influence, no longer possessed or overcome by it.

Sri Aurobindo predicts that if the last were to happen, “the result will be no mere Asiatic modification of Western modernism, but some great, new and original thing of the first importance to the future of human civilization”.

In the third essay, Sri Aurobindo offers an overview of some of the movements and figures of the renaissance, all the while pointing to what lies ahead.  Finally, in the fourth essay, he once again stresses that the best course of action to India lies in being herself, recovering her native genius, which is a reassertion of its ancient spiritual ideal.  It only in “the knowledge and conscious application of the ideal” that the future of both India and the world lies.  Whether she can rise up to this task or not is a question that he leaves open.

If we were to evaluate the recent cultural history of India in the light of this essay, we will clearly see that the course of post-independence India has stressed the regaining of material, even military might, not necessarily the reaffirmation of India’s spiritual ideal.  So, to that extent, Sri Aurobindo has been proved both right and wrong.  Right in that the spiritual is realized not in the denial of the material but actually in the robust plenitude of the material subordinated to the spiritual ideal.  We see in present day India a great effort to attain such material prosperity.  But whether the spiritual idea of India remains intact is a question that is not easily answered.  To all appearances, India has gone the way of the rest of the world, worshipping mammon.  Our religion, too, is consumerism.  To say that spirituality is the master key to the Indian psyche these days would seem more the exception than the rule.      

When we re-examine Sri Aurobindo’s ideas today, we can even conclude that the true gift of the renaissance was the modern Indian nation.  Despite all its drawbacks and failings, this nation seems to be the best means that we have to preserve our culture and to express our own destiny.  This nation has not only survived the ravages of the partition, but every conceivable threat, both internal and external, its very existence.  But having met and overcome these challenges, it seems to be poised to take our civilization to new heights.  This is not an inconsiderable achievement.  Can India embody the best of its unique cultural heritage and also become a modern nation?  This is the question that we must wait for the future to answer.      

The most important contribution of Sri Aurobindo to the discussion on the Indian renaissance is, as is often the case with his work, in what is yet to be realized.  Sri Aurobindo says that the rise of India is necessary for future of humanity itself.  The third and most difficult task for the Indian renaissance has been the new creation that will come from a unique fusion of ancient Indian spirituality and modernity.  This fusion will be instrumental in spiritualizing. the world and in brining about what many have called a global transformation.  In our present times of the clash of civilizations, such an idea may seem utopian, but the very survival of the planet depends on a hope and belief that something of this sort is not only possible but inevitable.