The Foundations of Indian Culture And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo | POST 29

The Foundations of Indian Culture

And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo

POST 29

The Renaissance in India - I

While we recommend you read the link above for the full text, see below its Summary:

Summary

THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA*

There has been recently some talk of a Renaissance in India. If it is a fact, it must become a thing of importance, both to itself and the world. It is, however, the first issue that we shall take up: for the question what India means to make of her life must precede the wider question what her life may mean to the human race.

Has there really been a Renaissance? That depends on what we mean by the word as well as on the future. Renaissance in the European sense is not at all possible in India. It is more like the Celtic movement, though here too the analogy does not give the whole truth.

Some have held that India has always been awake and stood in no need of reawakening. All the same, there had been a brief and disastrous period which came to a head in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

We have to take three facts in consideration: the great past of Indian culture; the first period of Western contact in which it seemed for a moment likely to perish; and the recent ascending movement.

Struck by the general metaphysical bent of the Indian mind, its strong religious instinct and idealism, its other-worldliness, European writers are inclined to write as if this were all the Indian spirit. Since then Europe has discovered that there was too an Indian art of remarkable power and beauty; but the rest of what India means it has hardly at all seen. But meanwhile the Indian mind began to emancipate itself and to look upon its past with ‘a clear and self-discerning eye', and it very soon discovered that it had been misled into an entirely false self-view.

Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; she never lost sight of the insight that life cannot be rightly seen or lived in the sole power of its externalities. She was alive to the material laws, but she saw that the physical does not get its full sense until it stands in right relation to the supra-physical, that there were other powers behind or within man himself, that man is normally conscious of a small part of himself. She saw too that he has the power of exceeding himself. But spirituality itself does not flourish on earth in the void. When we look at the past of India, what strikes us next is her stupendous vitality. But this spirituality and this abundance is not a confused splendour. For the third power of the ancient Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality, an impulse of order and arrangement. India has been pre-eminently the land of Dharma and the Shastra.

An ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and a powerful, scrupulous intelligence created the harmony of ancient Indian culture.

The European eye is struck in Indian spiritual thought by the Buddhistic and Illusionist denial of life. But this too was one result of a tendency to follow each motive to its extreme point. We find this tendency everywhere: in heights of self-assertion and self-abnegation; in the emphasis on distinctions (as in caste) and in the denial of all distinctions; the exaggerated monarchic principle set off by the democratic; spiritual extremism balanced by intensities of sensuous experience. Yet the pursuit of the most opposite extremes never resulted in disorder since the synthetic impulse was inborn.

Undeterred by the impressions of the immediate past, we must dismiss the idea that the tendency of metaphysical abstraction is the one and only note of the Indian spirit. Its real keynote is the tendency to a many toned, total spiritual realisation. The first age of India’s greatness was a spiritual age, when she sought passionately for the truth of existence through the intuitive mind and an inner experience. The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost.

The evening of decline which we see was prepared by three movements of retrogression. First, a sinking of that superabundant vital energy; secondly, a rapid cessation of the old, free intellectual activity as well as the creative intuition; thirdly, spirituality remains but burns no longer with the large and clear flame of knowledge of former times. This amounts to a certain failure, a falling short in the progress towards the perfect spiritualisation of mind and life. At a certain point the old civilization stopped short, partly drew back, partly lost its way. The causes, internal and external, we need not now discuss; but the fact is there.

It was at this moment that the European wave swept over India. A less vigorous energy of life might well have foundered under the double weight of the deadening of its old innate motives and a servile imitation of alien ideas and habits. But fortunately the energy was there, sleeping, not dead. Whatever temporary rotting and destruction this crude impact of European life and culture has caused, it gave three needed impulses. Out of this awakening vision and impulse the Indian renaissance is arising. The recovery of the old spiritual knowledge and experience in all its depth and fullness is the first, most essential work; the flowing of this spirituality into new forms of philosophy, literature, art, science and critical knowledge is the second; an original dealing with modern problems in the light of the Indian spirit and the endeavour to formulate a greater synthesis of a spiritual society is the third and most difficult that will determine the destiny of the renaissance under way.

*First published in Arya, Aug. to Nov., 1918.

by -Unknown

Previous POSTS here

----------------

For the full reference & book, go here: https://incarnateword.in/sabcl/14