Sri
Aurobindo and Indian Civilisation
By
Pradeep Krishnan
http://www.organiser.org/13aug2000/sri.html
Sri
Aurobindo, India's greatest Yogi, rishi, poet and philosopher prophesised the
rebirth of India's greatness. He had implicit faith in “her mission, her
gospel, her immortal life and her eternal rebirth”. His hope lay in the
conviction: “In India alone there is self contained, dormant, the energy and
the invincible spiritual individuality which can arise and break her own and the
world's letters.” His message has tremendous relevance in today's context.
Never before has humanity faced a crisis of such gravity. The present crisis is
truly multi-dimensional. Sri Aurobindo firmly believed that India is the country
providentially ordained and historically prepared for showing the world its
right path. Every moment of his life Sri Aurobindo discovered himself and
discovered India. The two texts in the book are papers prepared by Michel Danino
for recent seminars in New Delhi and Coimbatore. The first paper was presented
at a seminar in connection with the celebrations of Sri Aurobindo's 125th birth
anniversary held at New Delhi in November 1998 organised by the Department of
Culture, Ministry of HRD.
It deals with
Sri Aurobindo's view of Indian culture and confronts its state of deep neglect
in today's India, though it was precisely what gave the country its special
strength and its unique ability to survive the onslaughts of time. The author
lays emphasis on the field of education and asks why Indian education should
exclude the very materials that could easily transform the child into a rich
human being, even as we witness today a worldwide degradation of the human
substance. The second paper was presented at a seminar on value education
organised by the Chinmaya Mission at Coimbatore on February 1999. It deals with
a serious distortion found at the root of Indian history as it remains and is
taught today—the so-called “Aryan invasion theory”—and shows how all
scientific as well as traditional evidence argues against it. As a result, the
motives of the proponents of the old model, which seeks to divide Indian people
and languages into supposed “Aryan” and supposed “Dravidian”, become
suspect, and in any case run counter to both science and Indian tradition,
whether from the North or the South.
Making
use of recent archaeological findings, the author gives an overview of the
so-called Aryan problem which has distorted the roots of ancient India's history
and therefore of Indian civilization. The author Michel Danino was born in 1956
at Honfleur, in France. From the age of 16 he was drawn to India and to Sri
Aurobindo and Mother, and in 1977 cut short higher scientific studies to leave
for South India, where he has since been living. Working in close collaboration
with the Mother's Institute of Research (New Delhi), Mira Aditi (Mysore) and
Instituted Researches Evolutives (Paris), he has participated in the English
translation and publication of Mother's Agenda (13 volumes) and several other
works, in the preparation of India's Rebirth and India the Mother, and has
co-authored with Sujata Nahar The Invasion That Never Was.
His other
fields of activity include nature conservation and photography. For many years
he has also been studying Indian culture and India's ancient history in the
light of both Sri Aurobindo's pioneering discoveries and recent archaeological
research. The sadhak from France writes that as a young man he found nothing in
France or the West-in its science, its philosophies, even in its culture—that
could give a full meaning to his life until he read a few pages of Sri Aurobindo.
Living in India under the guidance of what Sri Aurobindo has written about the
nation's culture has been constantly enriching. It is true that the nation is
not “the heaven we would all dream her to be.” But Sri Aurobindo always saw
behind the appearances and spoke in 1910 to his countrymen, who had become apes
of the West, thus: “Was life always so trivial, always so vulgar, always so
loveless, pale and backward as the Europeans have made it? This well-appointed
comfort oppresses, me, this perfection of machinery will not allow the soul to
remember that it is not itself a machine.
Is this then
the end of the long march of human civilisation, this spiritual suicide, this
quiet putrefaction of the soul into matter? Was the successful businessman, that
grand culmination of manhood towards which evolution was striving? After all, if
the scientific view is correct, why not? An evolution that started with the
protaplasm and flowered in the orangutan and the chimpanzee, may well rest
satisfied with having created hat, coat and trousers, the British Aristocrat,
the American capitalist and the Farisian Apache. For these, I believe, are the
chief triumphs of the European englightenment to which we bow our heads... What
a bankruptcy. What a beggary of things that were rich and noble. Ninety years
after Sri Aurobindo made this pronouncement, we have reached the final movement
in the West's failure. It would be best to turn to him again for his
prescription to cure the ills that afflict humanity today.
He never said
that outer growth should be discarded, but pleaded for a corresponding growth
within. India was itself an example of reaching great heights in material life
as well as spiritual, both complementing each other with an integral vision.
Quoting profusely from Sri Aurobindo's writings on the cultural past of India,
and adding his own experiences, Shri Danino writes: “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 protext 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 roots of European culture, and somehow present in the
European consiousness. 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.
Even the Panchatantra and countless other highly educational collections of
Indian stories—even folk stories-are ruled out”. Shri Danino laments that
the young Indians were being deprived of their rightful heritage in this manner
and were being cut off from their rich roots and were being fed with “some
inspid, unappetizing hotchpotch, cooked in the West and pickled in India. He was
also anguished to note that the teaching of Sanskrit is systematically
discouraged in India, and that “the deepest knowledge of the human being, that
of yogic science, is discarded in favour of shallow Western psychology or
psychoanalysis; that the average Indian student never even hears the name of Sri
Aurobindo”. In more 54 pages, the author takes the reader on a journey of
Indian culture, or educational system, vedic civilisation, etc.
The work is a
storehouse of new insights. The well-researched and well-documented work is so
readable that one surely would like to finish it in one go. It is strongly
recommended for readers of every age. While the scholars would be struck by its
exactness, depth and simplicity, students and general readers would find it
extremely relevant and would be motivated to need read Sri Aurobindo further.
This book is the sixth in a series entitled Vande Mataram which has as its goal
to make known a number of texts inspired by a similar vision of a new Indian.
For, as Sri
Aurobindo saw, “India of the ages is not dead
nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to
do for herself and the human peoples...” He
further said “Indian is the guru of the nations, the physician of the human
soul in its profounder maladies; she is destined once more to new-mould the life
of the world and restore the peace of the human spirit.” Thus, “the sun of
India's destiny would rise and fill India with its light and overflow India and
overflow Asia and overflow the world.”
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