Paper 4 Indian writing in English

Topic

India’s spirituality as exposed by Sri Aurobindo in his essay

Paper 4 Indian writing in English

Name Devendra A Joshi

Class M.A. Sem-1

Submitted To Prof. Dilip Barad (Head of English Dept. M. K. S. Bhavnagar University)

Ø    India’s spirituality as exposed by Sri Aurobindo in his essay.

Sri Aurobindo was in Calcutta on 15 August 1872.  At the age of seven he was taken to England for education and in 1890 went up to King’s College, Cambridge. Here he stood in the first class and also passed the final examination for the Indian Civil Services Returning to India in 1893, he worked for the next thirteen years in the Princely State of Baroda in the service of the Maharaja and as a professor in Baroda College. During this period he also joined a revolutionary society and took a leading role in secret preparations for an uprising against the British Government in India.

Introduction to Renaissance in India:

In an essay written in 1918 and entitled The Renaissance in India, Sri Aurobindo presents us with a masterly view of India’s culture through the age – her essential spirit and her characteristics soul, her unique genious and powers which gave her remarkably long periods of greatness and an unusually prolific creativity – that which allowed her to survive for so long when other ancient civilizations faded away.

“Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. The sense of infinity is native to it.” It is a defence of Indian civilization and culture, with essays on Indian spirituality, religion, art, literature, and polity.

“A spiritual aspiration was the governing force of this culture”, he wrote, “its core of thought, its ruling passion. Not only did it make spiritualty the highest aim of life, but It even tried… to turn the whole of life towards spirituality.”

“The Renaissance in India “consists of four essays that were first published in Arya

From August to November 1918. In the first and the longest essay, Sri Aurobindo discusses the appropriateness or lack thereof of the term “renaissance” for what happened in India. He refutes some common European misconceptions on the nature of Indian civilization.

He says that “spirituality is indeed the master – key of the Indian mind”; that ancient India is marked by

·     “her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life,

·     Her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness “; and, finally,

·     That the “third power of the ancient Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality”.

He then outlines “three movements of retrogression “; first, a

·     “shrinking of that superabundant vital energy and a fading of the joy of life and the joy of creation”;

·     Secondly, ” a rapid cessation the old free intellectual activity”; and, finally,

·     The diminution of the power of Indian spirituality.

Sri Aurobindo then identifies three “impulses” that arise from the “impact of European life and culture”.

In the second essay, Sri Aurobindo goes on to outline the phases of the renaissance: the first step was the reception of the European contact, a radical reconsideration of many the prominent elements and some revolutionary denial of the very principles of the old culture.

Sri Aurobindo predicts that if the last were to happen,” the result will be no more Asiatic modification of western modernism, but some great, new and original thing of the first importance to the future of human civilization “.

We see in present day India a great effort to attain such material prosperity. But whether the spiritual idea of India remains intact is a question that is not easily answered. To all appearances, India has gone the way of the rest of the world, worshipping mammon. Our religion too is consumerism. To say that spirituality is the master key to the Indian psyche these days would seem more the exception than the rule.

The most important contribution of Sri Aurobindo to the discussion on the Indian renaissance is, as is often the case with his work, in what is yet to be realized. Sri Aurobindo says that the rise of India is necessary for future of humanity itself.

This fusion will be instrumental in spiritualizing the world and in brining about what many have called a global transformation.

But true spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre,our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create.

“[it is] the education which starting with the past and making full use of the present builds up a great nation. Whoever wishes to cut off the nation from its past is no friend of our national growth. Whoever fails to take advantage of the present is losing us the battle of life. We must therefore save for India all that she has stored up of knowledge, character and noble thought in her immemorial past.

Sri Aurobindo had little love for British education in India, which he called a “mercenary and soulless education,” and for its debilitating influence on the “the innate possibilities” of the Indian brain. “in India,” he said,” the students generally have great capacities, but the system of education represses and destroys these capacities.” As in every field, he wanted India to carve out her own path courageously:

“The  greatest knowledge and the greatest riches man can possess are [India’s] by inheritance; she has that for which all mankind is waiting.[…] but the full soul rich with the inheritance of the past, the widening gains of the present, and the large potentiality  of the future, can come only by a system National Education.