In the previous parts, we saw Sri Aurobindo looking at the greatness of Indian culture in the domains of spirituality, arts, and literature. In the final part, he looks at the unique ideas of Indian political systems and how they differ significantly from the modern ideas of democracy with its increasing tendency towards centralisation. He also talks about the correct way to go forward from here, a true renaissance, which places spirituality as its essence. Indeed, the future of human civilisation lies in this renaissance, which assimilates western ideas. This assimilation should not result in the destruction or deformation of Indian culture beyond recognition.
INDIAN POLITY
There is an ill-founded charge that the achievements and greatness of ancient India were only in things of the mind and spirit but failed in the external social, political, and economic spheres. The legend of Indian political incompetence arose from a lack of knowledge of history. Western parallels and standards, like industrialism and parliamentary democracy, are misleading. Indian polity dealt with these things in its own way according to its natural capacity.
Indian society evolved from the wandering clans (kula) to the meeting of the people (visah), with the king as the head. The Varna, or classes, then came, though not hereditary at first. Despite their predominance, the Brahmins did not usurp the political powers. The most important person in Indian culture was the Rishi, the man of higher spiritual knowledge, born in any Varna but exercising authority over all and instrumental in casting the life of the people into the well-shaped ideals and significant forms of a self-conscious civilisation.
Dharma in Polity and the Ideal of Dharmic Monarchy
The political evolution was towards an increasing emphasis on a Dharmic king as the head. However, absolute monarchism was in check by a contrary tendency towards republicanism, centred on either a democratic assembly or an oligarchy. The Indian monarchy previous to the Mahomedan invasion was not the religious head of the people. Normally there was no place in the Indian political system for religious oppression and intolerance.
The social lives of the people were also free from autocratic interference. Change was brought about not artificially from above but automatically from within, principally by the freedom granted to families or particular communities. The king, bound by Dharma to maintain it, had limited rights in taxation or the creation of laws. The ancient Indian system lacked room for autocratic tendencies or monarchical violence, as it was subject to numerous checks. The monarchical institution was only one element of the Indian socio-political system. What was hidden was the key to understanding the fundamental nature of the entire system.
There are three stages for any human society. The first is a condition of spontaneous play in the community. The second is when the communal mind becomes more intellectually self-conscious with the growth of exact knowledge and luminous ideals. The danger here is an exaggerated dependence on systems and institutions. It is only by reaching a third stage, spiritual existence—with its power of unity, sympathy, and spontaneous liberty—that it becomes an imperative need of the being. The last is yet to happen.
The right order of human life and the universe is preserved according to the ancient Indian idea by each individual and group following faithfully the svadharma, the true nature and its norm. There is also the dharma regulating relations as well as that of the age and environment, yugadharma. The self-determining individual and self-determining community are the ideal. But in the actual, unideal condition of humanity, there is a need for a king or a governing body.
Indian polity was the system of a complex communal freedom and self-determination. Each well-demarcated unit of the community administered its own life but connected with the whole through well-understood relations within a framework of communal existence. The State, sovereign or supreme political authority, was an instrument of coordination and general control but not an absolute authority. Law (dharma) and the will of the people limited the state’s powers. The latter was only a co-partner with the other members of the socio-political body.
The Organisation of Indian Polity
Sri Aurobindo writes:
The true nature of the Indian polity can only be realised if we look at it not as a separate thing, a machinery independent of the rest of the mind and life of the people, but as a part of and in its relation to the organic totality of the social existence. A people then, which learns to live consciously not solely in its physical and outward life but in the soul and spirit behind, may not at all exhaust itself and pass without death through many renascences. The history of India has been that of the life of such a people. Indian polity never arrived at that unwholesome substitution of the mechanical for the natural order of the life of the people, which has been the disease of European civilisation now culminating in the monstrous artificial organisation of the bureaucratic and industrial State, outcomes of the mechanising rational intelligence.
In effect, the ethical law coloured the political and economic spheres and imposed itself on every action. The life of the society itself was a significant framework for the development from the natural to the spiritual existence.
At its height, India had an admirable political system combining communal self-government with stability and order. More than individual freedom, it implied a communal freedom—primarily of the village and the clan. The rationale of the four orders, often misunderstood, was that each had its place, duty, and rights as a natural portion, but none of its fundamental activities was exclusive. Facts counter the claim that the Brahmins, for instance, monopolised knowledge and there was denial of knowledge to shudras. No one denied women their rights. The whole Indian system was in close cooperation with all the orders in common life, each predominating in its own field. There were never exclusive forms of class rule, as in the political history of other countries like Greece, Rome, and mediaeval Europe.
Three governing bodies occupied the political structure: the king and his ministerial council, the metropolitan assembly, and the general assemblies of the kingdom. The members of the Council were from all orders. The great metropolitan (paura) assembly and general assembly kept the king and the council from degenerating into autocracy. It is not clear when these institutions went out of existence, whether before the Mahomedan invasion or as a result of foreign conquest. But two elements seemed to survive: the social law of an order, kula-dharma, and of caste, Jati-dharma. The village community and the townships, two tangible bases of Indian society, continued their function. The joint family, now breaking down, was another community, though more of a synthetic form.
The Indian civilisation evolved an admirable political system, combining monarchical, democratic, and other principles. The excessive mechanising turn is a defect of the modern European state. If the greatness of a people and a civilisation is to be reckoned by its military aggressiveness, triumphs, annexation, and exploitation, then definitely India ranks the lowest.
Political Unification: Was it Important?
People talk of the inability of Indians to unite and of the divisions imposed by religion and caste. Why should we apply European ideas of unity, which are still far from reality, to India? The whole basis of the Indian mind is its spiritual and inward turn. An external rule could not initiate the process of political unification. The spiritual and cultural continuum is the only enduring unity, and though the western mind cannot concede this, the proofs are across the pages of history with a thriving Indian culture despite the dents. Spiritual unity does not insist, like in politics, on the centralisation of an imperial state. The Pathan and Moghul imperial systems suffered from the evils of centralisation due to their autocratic character.
The Vedic Rishis, however, recognised the necessity for political unification and embraced the ideal of the cakravartin, symbolised by the sacrifices of Aswamedha and Rajasuya. Not a destructive and predatory invasion, but a confederacy under an imperial head would be the nearest western analogy to the conception they sought. The successive rise of the consolidated Maurya, Sunga, Kanwa, Andhra, and Gupta dynasties could not impair the free, organic, diversified life at the village and town levels, the true expression of the mind and temperament of the people.
The Greek incursion did not seriously affect the nation. The Mussulman conquest was primarily concentrated in the more devitalised north. The south, especially the Vijayanagara and Marathas, long preserved its freedom. The Rajput and Sikh princes, like Rana Sangha, Ranjit Singh, and the Khalsa, held out against the Muslim and British rulers. These facts question the crude, sweeping statement that India has always been politically incapable. The real problem introduced by the Muslim conquest was not subjection but the struggle between two civilisations, each attached to a powerful religion and a different way of life.
Invasions and foreign rule, starting with the Greeks, through the Parthians, Huns, and Islamic, to finally British occupation, have not been able to crush the ancient Vedic soul of India. India has not spoken her last creative word; she must awaken not as a docile pupil of the West but as the ancient, immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self to discover a vaster form of her Dharma.
INDIAN CULTURE AND EXTERNAL INFLUENCE
Uniformity kills life. Real well-founded unity becomes fruitful through rich variation. Mechanical imitation, subordination, and servitude mean swallowing up a weaker culture or deforming it significantly. “Taking the good and leaving the bad” is a crudity of the superficial mind. “Take over” brings the good and the bad together pell-mell. If we take over, for instance, the monstrous European industrialism, our wealth and economic resources may improve, but assuredly we shall get to its social discords, moral plagues, and cruel problems, losing the spiritual principle of our culture.
Assimilation means to take whatever justifies our highest purport in the spiritual conception. To everything European, we should be applying its proper Dharma and its spiritual, intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, and dynamic utility. In every individualised existence, a double action exists: self-development from within and the reception of impacts from outside, which can either destroy the first or stimulate it to grow higher and fuller. It is the latter, which is the true meaning of assimilation.
The man who most lives from the inner self (svarat) embraces the universal and becomes the samrat, or possessor of the world. Finally, he grows one with all in the Atman. This is one of the greatest secrets of old Indian spiritual knowledge. Therefore, to live in one’s self, in accordance with one’s own law of being, svadharma, is the first necessity. Not being able to do that means disintegration of life and decline of inner powers. Fidelity to our own spirit, nature, and ideals is important, but masterful dealing with external influences need not be total rejection. There must be an element of successful assimilation.
India can only survive by confronting the raw, new, aggressive world with fresh creations of her own spirit. We have taken over the English way of writing stories, inductive science, the press, and so on. The point is not the taking over of some formal detail but a proper dealing with great effective ideas, like social and political liberty, equality, and democracy. We must not take them crudely in their European forms but work them out in keeping with our own conception of life. It is neither desirable nor possible to exclude everything that comes to us from outside. A living organism must recast the things it does to suit its own laws, forms, and characteristic actions.
Indian culture never excluded altogether external influences but harmonised the new elements with the spirit of its own culture. Each capable Indian must think it out or, better yet, work it out. The spirit of the Indian Renaissance will take care of the rest, creating a new and greater India.
THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA
Spirituality is indeed the master key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. European critics complain that in her ancient architecture, sculpture, and art there are no blank spaces. But that is no criticism; she lavishes her riches because she must. Every inch of space is filled with the stirring of life and energy from the Infinite. India has been preeminently the land of the Dharma and the Shastra. Her first period was the discovery of the Spirit. She then searched for the inner truth and law of each human or cosmic activity—its dharma. Once she found it, she applied it to practical life as Shastra. The three were not exclusive; they were always present. An ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness, and a powerful intelligence created the harmony of ancient Indian culture.
The European eye understands Indian spiritual thought only through the Buddhist and illusionist denial of life. Yet the pursuit of the extremes never resulted in disorder. India, from the beginning, was alive to the greatness of material laws and forces with a keen eye for the sciences and arts. However, she was always aware of the other invisible powers behind. She saw the myriad gods beyond man, God beyond the gods, and beyond God— his own ineffable eternity. With the calm audacity of her intuition, she declared that with the training of will and knowledge, the limited mind could conquer all the higher planes to become one with God, or Brahman. This was ingrained in her philosophy: Yoga, arts, and even the sciences.
For three thousand years at least, she has been creating abundantly and incessantly republics, kingdoms, empires, philosophies, cosmogonies, sciences, arts, poems, monuments, palaces, temples, public works, communities, societies, religious orders, laws, codes, rituals, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, systems of politics and administration, trades, industries, fine crafts, and so on. The list is endless and encompasses a wide range of activities. Her arts, philosophies, and other works spread through sea and land routes outside her borders to Egypt, Rome, the Far East, Mesopotamia, China, Japan, Palestine, and Alexandria. Christ echoes the figures of the Upanishads and the Buddhists’ sayings.
There has been recently some talk of a Renaissance in India after the disastrous period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. India never lost sight of its first spiritual age, despite all its degradations. At a certain point, the ancient civilisation paused and partially lost direction. A less vigorous energy of life might have foundered under the European attack. But the energy was sleeping, not dead. The rough influence of European culture sparked the Indian Renaissance in three important ways: a) the revival of old spiritual knowledge; b) the incorporation of this spirituality into new types of literature, art, science, and philosophy; and c) a fresh look at contemporary issues through the lens of the Indian spirit. The last and most difficult will determine the destiny of the renaissance underway.
The earliest generation of talented intellectuals, arising from Western education, hoped to modernise India wholesale and radically in mind, spirit, and life. They were patriotic but agreed with the Occidental view of our past culture as only a half-civilization needing ideals from the West. They drew away from mediaeval India in revolt and looked at ancient India with a tinge of pride but not grasping its original sense and spirit.
Their westernised intellectuality sought a rational religion, modelled its literature on the English spirit, ignored the arts, and made the middle-class pseudo-democracy of nineteenth-century England the supreme ideal. They had conviction, but their false method of anglicising India would have made us clumsy followers. Fortunately, this movement of thought could not endure.
There was a later reaction to this initial rejection of everything Indian after European contact. This meant a total denial of Europe and a strict stressing of only the national past. Finally, there started an assimilation process, the beginning of renaissance in its true sense. India has to work from a profound inwardness, and the later-forward steps would become an original factor in the future of human civilisation.
The obstinately westernised mind, bent upon blatant depreciation of the past, has ceased to exist. Indeed, there has been a better insight into the meaning of Indian things, as in the works of Bankim Chandra Chatterji. Swami Vivekananda was the leading exemplar of the subtle assimilation and fusing of the third stage. It is still an incongruous mix, like a half-European and half-Indian dress. India has to get back entirely to the native power of her spirit and harmonise the future of civilisation.
India is the meeting place of the religions, and among these, Hinduism—vast and complex—is not so much a religion as a subtly unified mass of spiritual thought, realisation, and aspiration. The spiritual motive will be the originating and dominating strain of India. All great movements in India have begun with a new spiritual thought and a new religious activity. The Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, and the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movements are recent examples of a wide synthesis of Vedic philosophy, spiritual experiences, asceticism, humanitarianism, and a missionary zeal. Spiritual experience, not critical intellect, is the source from which a true Indian philosophy can evolve. The contact of European philosophy has not been fruitful of any creative reaction. The past philosophies of Europe have little of any utility in this direction— nothing of the first importance that India has not already stated in forms better suited to her own spiritual temper and genius.
Spiritual Motive
What does spiritual motive mean? It does not mean preparing for the monastery or moulding national life to suit a particular faith. Spirituality, much wider, represents man’s seeking, in all his activities, for the eternal, the divine, and the source of unity. The spiritual view holds that the mind, life, and body are man’s means and not his aims. It sees the infinite behind all things— a greater reality than the apparent. The mental, vital, aesthetic, and ethical parts are also expressions of the spirit. Art, poetry, politics, society, economy, and science, which take the spirit as the first truth, become a framework within which man can seek and grow into his real self and divinity. This is what we mean by the application of spirituality to life. From the spiritual point of view, intuition and inner experience are more vital than the reasoning intellect.
Europe is admitting the light of the East, but on the basis of her own thinking and living. We should be as faithful in our dealings with the Indian spirit and modern influences. India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and keeping to her own centre. Perhaps there was too much religion in one sense; the word is English and smacks too much of things external, such as creeds, rites, and external piety; there is no one Indian equivalent. If we define religion as following the spiritual impulse, then there is too little religion—not too much. The right remedy is not to belittle the agelong ideal of India but to give it a still wider scope.
The European idea is that religion and spirituality stand on one side while intellectual activity and practical life are on the other as two entirely different things. The spiritual idea of renaissance does not try to convert entire humanity into monastic ascetics. Spirituality must not belittle the mind, life, or body. There was never a national ideal of poverty in India as some would have us believe, nor was squalor the essential setting of her spirituality.
Morality ordinarily is a well-regulated individual and social conduct that keeps society going. But ethics in the spiritual point of view is a means of developing our action and character into the nature of the Godhead. Philosophy is, in the Western way, a dispassionate inquiry by reason into the first truths of existence, placed by the facts of science or by a scrutiny of the concepts of reason. The spiritual viewpoint places intuition and inner experience above reason and scientific observation. Philosophy organises knowledge data into a synthetic relationship to the one Truth. The primitive aim of art and poetry is to create images of man and nature that will satisfy the sense of beauty. In a spiritual culture, they become, with their aim, a revelation of the deepest spiritual and universal beauty.
We should correct what went wrong with us; apply our spirituality on broader lines; admit Western science and other modern ideas but on the basis of our own way of life, not abandoning our fundamental view of God, man, and Nature. There is no real quarrel; rather, these two things need each other to fill themselves into their complete significance.
India has the key to the knowledge and conscious application of ideals. She can now break down the barriers and give her spirit an ampler flight. She can give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling; the clue to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge. Whether she will rise or not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance, which is coming upon her, is the question of her destiny.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Sisirkumar Ghose writes in the introduction to the book: “In the meditation between life and spirit—the essence of the Indian civilisation and experiment—Sri Aurobindo has given us a passionate purpose, the hope of a generalised spiritual life or society in the true sense of the past.” This is the central point of the phenomenal work of Sri Aurobindo. Reading Sri Aurobindo’s essays evokes a joy and thrill beyond words. However, reading him can be a little difficult, especially for those in the modern era who are used to the idea of speed reading and rapid assimilation.
My personal view (I could be wrong here, of course) is that normally we tend to read, focusing on important words in a sentence and then constructing the whole sentence in the mind at a rapid pace. Modern-day sentences tend to be short too; hence, picking the important words and ignoring the link words seems to be the key to reading for most. This is the core challenge of reading Sri Aurobindo. He tends to write long sentences, and at regular intervals, a single sentence with plenty of commas, colons, semi-colons, and dashes constitutes a whole lengthy paragraph! Speed reading in the usual manner does not help here at all, and someone not truly exposed to his works would drop reading either due to loss of interest, patience, or both. My only solution is to read him slowly, word by word, and it is sure to make a tremendous impact. The power of Sri Aurobindo—the saint, poet, writer, freedom fighter, nationalist, and humanist—then emerges, leaving one amazed at the sheer brilliance of his divine writings. One question that comes up repeatedly, at least to me, is why and how did we miss him for so long?
A wonderful resource in recent times is the book “Reading Sri Aurobindo” by Gautam Chikermane and Devdip Ganguly, which is a beautiful introduction to the individual works of Sri Aurobindo. The essence of all his books has been dealt with in different chapters by a host of expert writers. It would not be a bad idea to read the relevant essay from this book before embarking on the most fulfilling journey into Sri Aurobindo’s world—a world that puts India at the centre of hope for the achievement of universal harmony and peace.
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