The unique conjuncture of Sri Aurobindo’s 150th birth anniversary and the 75th year of India’s independence affords us an exceptional opportunity to examine where we are headed as a nation. On January 24, 1908, almost two years before Gandhi wrote his seminal treatise Hind Swaraj on his way back from England to South Africa aboard S.S. Kildonan Castle, Sri Aurobindo made a speech in Nashik, Maharashtra. It is not one of his famous or well-known orations because it is not available in its original English. It was translated into Marathi and published the following morning in a Marathi paper, Nasik Vritta.
In fact, we know about it only because of a colonial intelligence report. Sri Aurobindo elaborates on the meaning of ‘Swaraj’ in this speech: ‘If we do not acquaint ourselves with the object in view, viz., Swaraj, I am afraid we, thirty crores of people, will become extinct.… Swaraj is life, it is nectar and salvation. Swaraj in a nation is the breath of life. Without the breath of life, a man is dead. So also, without Swaraj, a nation is dead. Swaraj being the life of a nation, it is essential for it.’ Notice how the word ‘nectar’ or ‘amrit’ is used for Swaraj, presaging the Modi sarkar’s slogan of today.
But the roots of Sri Aurobindo’s experiments and ideas for freeing India go back much farther, even to his days as a Cambridge undergraduate. In 1905, while still in the Maharaja of Baroda’s service, he received an intriguing message from ‘Sri Ramakrishna’ in a séance, with his younger brother Barindara serving as a medium. It consisted of only two words: Mandir Gado!—raise a temple! Sri Aurobindo interpreted it as a commandment to propagate a new revolutionary creed based on the consecration of a temple to Mother India.
This would not be a physical temple so much as a nation-wide invocation of Mother India as Bharat Shakti in a number of revolutionary cells spread across the country. To elaborate on this plan, Sri Aurobindo wrote a small but extraordinary manifesto, Bhawani Mandir. A copy of this pamphlet was submitted as evidence in the Alipur Bomb case in 1908, with Barindra’s signature on the cover, and police markings all over. Sri Aurobindo starts with a startling assertion, ‘WE IN INDIA FAIL IN ALL THINGS FOR WANT OF SHAKTI’ (caps. in original). He explains: ‘We have all things else, but we are empty of strength, void of energy.
We have abandoned Shakti and are therefore abandoned by Shakti.’ The consequences of such weakness are disastrous as the heading of another section avers: ‘OUR KNOWLEDGE IS A DEAD THING FOR WANT OF SHAKTI’. Why? Because it lacks strength; it is ‘a dead knowledge, a burden under which we are bowed, a poison which is corroding us rather than as it should be a staff to support our feet, and a weapon in our hands’. His reason is simple, ‘Our knowledge then, weighed down with a heavy load of tamas, lies under the curse of impotence and inertia.’ How true this is of today’s India! If India has been a knowledge society for millennia, we are also not lacking in ‘Bhakti’ or devotion.
But again, ‘OUR BHAKTI CANNOT LIVE AND WORK FOR WANT OF SHAKTI’ (ibid 82). Without strength, even devotion is useless: ‘in the absence of Shakti we cannot concentrate, we cannot direct, we cannot even preserve it.’ Sri Aurobindo believes that India must be reborn to manifest its strength and genius: ‘No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.’ The cultivation and exaltation of strength as the crying want of Indians is Sri Aurobindo’s motto in Bhawani Mandir, an idea that hearkens back to Swami Vivekananda’s injunction ‘Strength and manliness are virtue; weakness and cowardice are sin’ or ‘This is a great fact: strength is life; weakness is death.’
In his Bengali writings in Dharma, published in October 1909, Aurobindo elaborated his idea of Swaraj or full political independence, rather than Dominion Status within the British empire: ‘Aryan Rishis used to designate the practical and spiritual freedom and its fruit, the inviolable Ananda, as ‘Swarajya’, self-empire. Political freedom is but a limb of Swarajya, self-empire.… As long as there is an alien government or ruler, no nation can be called a free nation possessing self-empire.’ For Sri Aurobindo, freedom was the law of the soul: ‘For all people, subjection is a messenger and servitor of death. Only freedom can protect life and make any progress possible.’
The nation would die out of ‘weakness and sterility’ as long as the foreigner was in occupation of our country. ‘Therefore, if any nation loses its freedom by its own fault, an untruncated and full independence should be its first aim and political ideal.’ He said this long before Congress adopted ‘Purna Swaraj’ or full independence as its stated policy on December 19, 1929, in its Lahore session. While Sri Aurobindo was at the forefront of the national struggle for only a brief period of five years, 1905–1910, his actual contribution was much larger.
This sense of historical destiny is evident in his All India Radio Independence-eve broadcast: ‘August 15th is the birthday of free India.… To me personally, it must naturally be gratifying that this date which was notable only for me because it was my own birthday celebrated annually by those who have accepted my gospel of life, should have acquired this vast significance.’ This self-confidence in shaping India’s destiny is reflected in a realisation he had much earlier when he explained his ‘three madnesses’ to his young wife in a letter dated August 30, 1905:
‘While others look upon their country as an inert piece of matter—a few meadows and fields, forests and hills and rivers—I look upon Her as the Mother. What would a son do if a demon sat on his mother’s breast and started sucking her blood? Would he quietly sit down to his dinner, amuse himself with his wife and children, or would he rush out to deliver his mother? I know I have the strength to deliver this fallen race. It is not physical strength—I am not going to fight with a sword or gun—but it is the strength of knowledge.
This feeling is not new in me, it is not of today. I was born with it, it is in my very marrow.’ The first part of the passage, the duty of a son when a demon is drinking his mother’s life-blood, is also the theme of Aurobindo’s only Sanskrit poem, Bhavani Bharati. But what is striking is the unmistakable sense of a special mission to ‘deliver this fallen race’ by the special knowledge that he has, authorised by the Divine: ‘God sent me to earth to accomplish this great mission.’
During his incarceration in Alipur jail in 1908–1909, the conviction of India’s special role in world affairs is also renewed: ‘When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the Dharma and by the Dharma that India exists.’ But what is ‘Sanatan Dharma’? Sri Aurobindo explains this in terms that are quite unambiguous: ‘That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion because it is the universal religion which embraces all others.
If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose. This is the one religion that can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy.’ Before he ends, Sri Aurobindo offers this resounding summation of his theory of nationalism in the ‘Uttarpara Speech’: ‘I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it, it moves and with it, it grows.
When the Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatan Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatan Dharma it would perish.’ ‘The Sanatan Dharma that is nationalism’—this might sum up Sri Aurobindo’s credo of what we might term spiritual nationalism. Or still better, the nation of the spirit. Different from ethnic or civic nationalism, or even cultural nationalism based on language, region, religion, or ways of life and cultural practices, Sri Aurobindo’s nation of the spirit is about humankind’s march to higher consciousness.
In this manifest evolutionary destiny of the species, past and present forms of nationalism are fated to prove inadequate. Revisiting Sri Aurobindo’s idea of Swaraj suggests to us that we are a Sanatani nation with a secular constitution, that ‘Sanatana Dharma’ cannot be narrow and exclusionary, that the remnants of dead or encrusted knowledge of yesteryears will not suffice to make us a great civilisation again, and that patriotism or devotion to the nation cannot substitute a consistent quest for truth and understanding; and, finally, that new creation requires a new consciousness which cannot spring only from the past. For, as Sri Aurobindo famously said in Essays on the Gita, ‘We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future.’
Makarand R Paranjape
Professor of English at JNU
(Tweets @ MakrandParanspe)
(all views are personal)