The Foundations of Indian Culture And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo | POST 31

The Foundations of Indian Culture

And the Renaissance in India - By Sri Aurobindo

POST 31

The Renaissance in India - III

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Summary

The attempt to foresee the exact forms of the new creation will be of doubtful utility. But one thing seems certain, that, as in the past, the spiritual motive will be the originating and dominating strain. Not a remote metaphysical mind or the tendency to dream rather than act, that was not—except during certain periods of decline—the India of old and it will not be the India of the future.

All great movements of life in India have begun with a new spiritual thought and usually a new religious activity and so it has been even now. The Brahmo Samaj had in its beginning a large cosmopolitan, even eclectic, idea; the attempts to restate the Vedanta, through its three stages, recapitulated the three motives of the Indian religious mind, Jnana, Bhakti and Karma. The Arya Samaj tried to reinterpret and apply the Vedic principles of life to modern conditions. The Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement has been a wide synthesis of past religious motives and spiritual experiences topped by the old asceticism and monasticism but combined with a strong humanitarianism and missionary zeal. There has been too an orthodox Hindu revivalism. Indeed the old religious sects and disciplines, including Islam, are becoming reinvigorated, moved to a fresh self-affirmation.

What will come out of this stir and ferment, lies yet in the future. We, however, see everywhere the tendency towards the return of the spirit upon life. Probably, here lies the key of the Indian Renaissance.

But what are likely to be its great constructive ideas and instruments is as yet obscure, because the thought of this new India is still inchoate and indeterminative. A real Indian philosophy can be evolved out of spiritual experience and not out of the critical intellect. So far there has been more of restatement than of new thought and experience. The more original minds have turned either towards pure literature or else been busy assimilating and at most Indianising modern ideas.

In poetry, literature, art, science, there have been, on the contrary, definite beginnings, with Bengal as the first workshop. Bengal has already a considerable literature of importance; a great body of art, full of delicate beauty and vision; two renowned scientists, one world-famous for a central and far-reaching discovery. Especially the art of Bengal painters is significant, more so even than the prose of Bankim or the poetry of Tagore, partly because it began in a moment of self discovery and their whole power springs from the deliberate choice and hidden meaning in things rather than their form and surface meaning. It is intuitive and its forms are the very rhythm of its intuition.

Poetry and literature in Bengal have gone through two distinct stages and seem to be preparing for a third. It began with a European and mostly an English influence, but was not at all crudely imitative, even if one feels a certain void in it. The work of Bankim Chandra is now of the past, Rabindranath still largely holds the present, and has opened ways for the future. No utterance of the highest genius, such as would give the decisive turn, has, however, yet made itself heard.

In the outward life of the nation we are still in a stage of much uncertainty and confusion, very largely due to the political conditions. But the first period of superficial assimilation and aping of European ideas is over and a vehement religion of Indian patriotism has expressed itself, though not, as yet, with any finality or fullness.

Indian society is in a still more chaotic stage; the old forms are crumbling away while the new is still powerless to be born. We have had a loud proclaiming of Westernised reform, but it has failed to carry the people . We have had a revival of orthodox conservatism and have now in emergence an increasing sense of the necessity of a renovation of social ideas and expressive forms by the spirit of the nation awaking to the deeper yet unexpressed implications of its culture. Only a freer national life can give shape to or actualise this possibility.

The renascence thus determining itself but not yet finally determined, must insist on the greater action of the spiritual motive in every sphere of our living. But in some minds there persists a misunderstanding or a refusal to understand the true significance and content of spirituality. We must therefore try to make clear what we mean by a renaissance governed by the principle of spirituality.

Negatively, it does not mean a preparation for the monastery or the moulding of national life to suit the limited dogmas, forms and tenets of a particular faith. Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion and represents man’s seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and divine values. Nor do we mean the exclusion of anything whatsoever from our scope, of any of the great aims of human life, or of the problems of the modern world. Spirit without mind, spirit without body is not the ideal type of man. The ancient Indian culture attached quite as much value to the soundness, growth and strength of the mind, life and body as the old Hellenic or the modern scientific thought, though for a different and a greater motive. There was never a national ideal of poverty as some would have us believe. Spirituality is not necessarily exclusive; it can be and in its fullness must be all-inclusive.

The spiritual view holds that the mind, life and body are man’s means and not his aims. It sees them as his outer instrumental self and not his whole being. It sees the infinite behind all things, a greater reality than the apparent and it is this that everything else in him must bring out and try to express. It is this that, even in preserving all the aims of human life, gives a different sense and direction to our normal view.

The mental, vital, aesthetic, ethical parts have to be developed because so man feels more alive and fulfilled and also because these things too are the expressions of the spirit, a step of our growing into the nature of the Godhead. So with our other aims and activities: philosophy, science, art, poetry, politics, society and economy. From the spiritual point of view truth of existence is to be found by intuition and inner experience and the work of philosophy is to arrange the data given by the various means of knowledge and put them into their synthetic relation to the one Truth. In this view Science becomes not merely a physical knowledge and its practical fruits but will make room for new fields of research, which start from spirit as the first truth and from the power of mind and what is greater than mind to act upon life and matter. Art and poetry are seen to be a revelation of greater things concealed in man and Nature and the deepest spiritual and universal beauty.

Even politics, society, economy may become a framework within which man can seek and grow into his real self and divinity; an increasing embodiment of the divine law of being and a collective advance towards the light, power, peace, unity, harmony which the race is trying to evolve. This and nothing more but nothing less is what we mean by the application of spirituality to life.

Europe herself is trying to outgrow the limitations of its own conceptions into something like this and it would be singular if we were to continue taking up its cast-off clothes of yesterday. We should not allow our cultural independence to be paralysed by the accident that, at the moment Europe came in upon us, we were in a state of ebb and decline.

We have both made mistakes. Europe has understood the lesson. She is admitting the light of the East, but on the basis of her own thinking and living, not abandoning her own truth of life and science and social ideals. We should be as faithful and free in our dealings with the Indian spirit and modern influences; be if possible not less but more spiritual than were our forefathers.

India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own nature, by keeping to her own centre. This does not mean the rejection of everything new that comes to us. Religion has been the central preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined India. Perhaps so. But if we give religion the sense of the following of the spiritual impulse in its fullness and define spirituality as the attempt to know and live in the highest self, the divine, the all embracing unity and to raise life in all its parts to the divinest possible values, then it is evident that there was not too much of religion, but rather too little. The right remedy is not to belittle the agelong ideal of India but to give it a still wider scope. India can, if she will, give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring, for the clue to their solution is there in her ancient knowledge. Whether she will rise to the height of her opportunity is the question of her destiny as of the renaissance.

by -Unknown

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