SRI AUROBINDO:

SECULARIST?
OR
NATIONALIST?

Dr. K.S. NARAYANACHARYA

KAUTILYA INSTITUTE OF NATIONAL STUDIES, MYSORE

Sri Aurobindo – Secularist? Or Nationalist?
By Dr. K.S. Narayanacharya, Published by Kautilya Institute of National Studies,
Chamaraja Mohalla, Mysore 570 005, Karnataka, India.

The Kautilya Institute of National Studies has no animosity for anyone, no

disrespect for difference of views, and no dislike for any segment of humanity, ancient or
present. It is simply interested in bringing together all the best from all the quarters, that
is necessary and vital to make our life collectively safe, beautiful, enjoyable, meaningful in a
forward flow that providence has set for it so strongly that inimical forces are doomed for
extinction by nature as it were. These are holding on to artificial, cruel, terrorist aids and
for too long. The time for reckoning has arrived at long last, let us hope.

The beautiful, hopeful and meaningful vision of an Indian Renaissance held by Swamy
Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, Netaji and millions of martyrs has been frustrated by
false men, usurpers, "men of straw" in the past half century. Let us defeat these internal
inimical forces also and march on.

Publications so far:
1. Semetic Challenges
2. Fundamentalism versus Hinduism
3. Sri Ramanuja, Melukote and Srivaishnavism
4. T.S. Eliot, and Hindu Influence on his 'The Wasteland' (in Kannada)
5. Relevance of Kautilya for Today
6. ÑÚÈÚáÛd ÈÚß}Úß¡ A¨ÛÀ~½ÞOÚÁÚy JM¥Úß-ÑÚÈÛÄß

In the Press:
1. Society and the Challenges of Spiritualisation in the Hindu Context
 About the Author

Born in 1933, and educated at Mysore, (Maharaja's College and

Yuvaraja's College), Sri K.S. Narayanacharya, popularly known as
Ramayanacharya, is a B.Sc. (P.C.M), B.A. (Hons) English, and M.A. (Modern English
Literature) coming from an orthodox and devout family of Vedic scholars. His Doctoral
thesis is on The Influence of Indian thought on the poetry of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot.
He has studied the Krishna Yajurveda under the guidance of great masters like the late
Dandavati Siva Dixit Somayaji of Dharwad, where he has worked as Professor and
Principal of the famed Karnataka Arts College, Karnataka University, for over 32 years
as a teacher of English literature. Author of over 70 works in Kannada and English on
varied subjects like the Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharatha, Bhagavata, the Hymns of
Alwars, Vedanta, Haridasa literature, D.R. Bendre, and Kautilya, Sri Acharya is a
recipient of several State awards like Sangeetha Nritya Academy's ‘Karnataka Kala Sri’,
the Sahitya Academy prize, ‘Gamaka Rathnakara’ from the State Government, and titles
from Religious Heads, like Veda Bhushana, Valmiki Hridayajna, Pravachana
Kalanidhi and so on. Music, lndology, poetry, discourses and lecture tours are among
the abounding interests of the Acharya. He is an invincible debater and a passionate
advocate of Hindu values as lasting solutions for the maladies of our society. He is a
novelist too, turning our Epics into popular moulds of fiction. His serials in the Kannada
weeklies like Tharanga and Karmavira are very popular and run for months at a stretch.
The Acharya is a master of English, Kannada, Sanskrit and Tamil and has lectured all
over the country.

For his services to Indian literature and spirituality through works, speech and
discourses, the Karnataka State Open University, Mysore has awarded him recently
(18th, March, 2005) an Hon D.Litt. degree.
Dedicated to the memories of

Swamy Vivekananda,
Swamy Dayananda and
Maharshi Sri Aurobindo

Who stood in the forefront of Hindu

Renaissance accepting all challenges
from within and without and showed
us the way to the future yet to be
achieved
“The resplendent Sun is but the
Child of Mother Darkeness”
- Taittiriya Aranyaka

“For even out of the darkness the day

is born and lightning has its uses.”
- Sri Aurobindo: On the importance of Original
thinking,
Essays Divine and Human p.47.

“I said to my soul, be still, and let

the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God…
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;
There is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all
in the waiting.”
“The difficulties that surrounds her* now may increase for a time, especially with regard
to the Pakistani imbroglio, were also things that had to come and to be cleared out.
Nehru’s efforts to prevent the inevitable clash are not likely to succeed for more than a
short time, and so it is not necessary to give him the slap you wanted to go to Delhi to
administer to him. Here too there is sure to be a full clearance, though unfortunately, a
considerable amount of human suffering in the process is inevitable. Afterwards the
work for the divine will become more possible and it may well be that the dream, if it is
a dream, of leading the world toward the Spiritual Light, may even become a reality. So
I am not disposed even now in these dark conditions to consider my will to help the
world as condemned to failure.Ӡ

*
India (from a letter to a disciple dated April 4, 1950) – Sri Aurobindo’s prophecy.
†
India’s Rebirth, p.253.
Preface ...............................................................................................................................8
Why all this?................................................................................................................. 9
Chapter 1: Attempts to Hijack and ‘Secularise’ Sri Aurobindo!.....................................13
Mischievous Semantics .............................................................................................. 14
Illustration................................................................................................................... 15
Who Are The Misinterpreters? ................................................................................... 16
The Apologists............................................................................................................ 17
The Agenda................................................................................................................. 18
Chapter 2: Examination of Wrong Views, Insinuations and Rebuttals...........................20
Personal Note.............................................................................................................. 20
Sri Aurobindo’s Own Views ...................................................................................... 20
The Open End, But the Warning!............................................................................... 22
Chapter 3: Sri Aurobindo on Revivalism ........................................................................25
‘Spirituality’ and Sri Aurobindo................................................................................. 27
Chapter 4: On Education, and the Place of Sanskrit in it ................................................32
Sanskrit ....................................................................................................................... 34
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 36
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................38
Preface
The name of the disease is “Secularitis”; like jaundice which makes everything you look
at appear yellow; ‘Secularitis’ is now like mass-hysteria, covering up even academia,
intelligentsia, the press, the learned and the lay, the sophisticated, the snobbish and the
rustic alike. You require this label ‘Secular’ for anything, any idea, ideology,
programme to pass of for ‘civilised’, ‘entertainable’ and ‘respectable’ phenomenon.
Otherwise you are despicable, contemptible, ridiculous in a topsy-turvy situation,
irredeemably secure in its deadly jaws.

The symptoms: at the mention of the mere word ‘Hindu’, the patient goes into profound
fits of madness, fury, rage; if he regains self-consciousness, by miracle, he becomes
apologetic, and tries to explain that it stands for an act of historical blunder, which has
no place or meaning in a fast current of ‘internationalism’, which ought not to take route
in any form of ‘nationalism’. Hindu means ‘communal’, ‘revivalistic’, even
‘fundamentalist’ as against Islam and Christianity which are really secular, broad-
minded, forward-looking and modern. ‘Godhra’ is secular; ‘post-Godhra’ is communal;
Cow-protection is communal, astrology a superstition, Indian history by Indians is
hopelessly communal, but Indian history by communist comrades is secular, authentic,
scientific and ‘impartial’. ‘Ram Janmabhoomi’ movement is communal, but vandalism
by Muslim hoodlums is secular. Conversion to Islam and Christianity by force and
fraud is secular as guaranteed by the open ‘socialist, secular constitution’, but
reconversion to Hinduism or anti-conversion laws and legislations are incurably
communal. Street riots protesting the bulldozing of a Darga in the middle of a road or in
the footpath, as per the court’s order, are entirely secular and in order, but the voluntary
peaceful, shifting of 24 other temples on the same road sides, as per the same court
order must not even be reported in secular newspapers, as it would contrast the
behaviour patterns of peaceful and antinational communities, which would be
communal! And so on and on.

The causes, or factors leading to this disease and expressible in symptoms as have been
pointed out:
(i) allergy to Indian history,
(ii) allergy to Truth and the daring to accept it,
(iii) fear of antagonising the votes of the ‘minorities’ behaving as if they are
more major than the ‘majority’ community, on the part of secular politicians,
and unthinking docility, and comfort in ignorance as contrasted with
discomfort with knowledge and truth on the part of the public, too long
under the spell of alien rulership.
(iv) various inhibitions, untraceable, for want of expressions of more symptoms,
(v) monetary considerations, temptations of various kinds, for the press, the
public men, and opinion-creators, the lobby agents and many others.

The cure, the treatment, the prescription:

(a) expose to sunlight, the diseased body in all its affected parts,
(b) call them for debate, where they pick up courage,
(c) drown the market, or the public reading-rooms with materials warning of the
contagion and the consequence,
(d) retrieve the saveable through persuasion, hard endurable food and civilised
feelings, educate them,
 (e) mobilise an intellectual army to fight this war by propaganda, disinformation,
and mud-singling campaign,
(f) expose the poison in the concerned literature,
(g) have recourse to healthy national roots of culture, national honour, national
history and its heroes, and promote respect for all these, and so on.

Why all this?

In the cases of Swami Vivekananda and Maharshi Sri Aurobindo, a peculiar class of
savants, explicators of their thoughts and vision, interpreters of their valuable insights
for our present and future applications, is cropping up, standing for exactly the opposite
of what they stand for! They are selective, self-deceptive, myopic, and ‘secular-
educated’ so that they exhibit all the above-mentioned symptoms in their write-ups!
One such is under scrutiny in this booklet. These ridicule ‘Shivaji’ as a ‘misguided
patriot’; but are silent when efforts are made to celebrate Afzal Khan’s and
Aurangazeb’s for their festivals, commemorative occasions, and renovations of their
tombs! They forget that Sri Aurobindo has said that “it is not enough we have
Ramdasses, we must have Shivajis” (See inside the text). In the face of the gravest
provocations threatening the very existence of Hinduism and its numerous Institutions,
these savants are silent unlike Vivekananda, and Aurobindo; they condemn the Hindus
for their mild reactions even! Christians have converted an Executive Officer of the
TTD and acquired lands on the Holy Hills and are building Churches, with no
Christians around, anywhere! They distribute Bible copies on the TTD busses that take
the Hindu pilgrims onto the Hills. They distribute abusive pamphlets on idol worship,
under the patronage of a Christian Chief Minister and a Christian Super Prime Minister!
Our Ramakrishna Muth heads are silent. Our Aurobindo-savants are silent!

Swamy Sri Vidyaranya got the Vijayanagar Empire established through two reconverts
to Hinduism from Islam, Harihara and Bukka, who had once been generals under the
Bahamani muslim leaders. They were earlier of the Shepard community, but the Swamy
made them Kshatriyas, true to the Catholic Hindu core of the teaching. But the
Swamy’s present-day followers have failed their founder, leader, by keeping silent and
blind to Muslim and Christian onslaughts in similar but graver circumstances!

Swamy Ramananda (Ramanuja-follower) and after him Sant Tulsidas established not
only Muths for reorganisation of Hindu society to reclaim the weak, trodden and stolen,
but also gymnasia (Akharas) for body-building and Hindu defence. The Northern
Swamies, the saints, Mahants are keeping up their tradition to this day. But in the South
our Acharyas are fast asleep!

Reading newspapers, entertaining political opinions, and guiding society and leaders in
political matter is considered ‘unreligious’! Our concept of Spirituality is less than even
Gandhian! We do not realise that in Hinduism Religion and Spirituality both mean the
same, Dharma; and it is only in Semitic terms religion is regimented and spirituality is
totally wanting. We must educate our old leaders in these simple matters.

All ‘savants’ gather together to condemn a VHP, a Bajrang Dal, ABVP and other
patriotic organisations as “Hindu-upsurge-outfits” in a language they inherit from a
prejudiced press. An ‘outfit’ means something that has outgrown a body beyond its
form! An ‘upsurge’ is a futile uprisal. This is the language of the British, our erstwhile
colonisers, who described our First Freedom Struggle as a ‘Mutiny’! Lord Sri Rama
thought it fit that an untrained monkey-army with its guerrilla methods was best suited
for overthrowing, weeding out Ravana!! Have you read the Ramayana, sir? If in the
contexts of proxy wars both within the nation and across the borders with Islamic and
Christian terrorists we employ similar armies, what is wrong? In fact, we want more of
Shiva Sainiks, Hindu Sainiks, and Bajrang Dal people to match the armies of Bin
Laden, a Bush and ISI traitors! Not to speak of Naxal armies of leftists ideologists, or
foreign backed LTTE.

But what do we do? We dispute the existence of a Rama or a Hanuman, we dispute the
burning of Lanka; or we condemn it; we blame Rama, instead of receiving inspiration
from him!

Will the Upanishads save us, the way they are being interpreted as entirely other-
worldly? “Nayamatma bala hinena labhyah” – “God cannot be attained by the weak”,
“Uttishtata, jagrata, prapya varan nibodhata” – “Arise, awake and stop not till the goal is
reached” – this is what the Upanishads meant to Swamy Vivekananda! But to his
followers? They declare themselves as ‘non-Hindus’! They claim that Ramakrishna
founded a new religion! “Ramakrishaism”. “All religions, Terrorists and Non-terrorists
are equal!”

This is the fate of Sri Aurobindo in the hands of a coterie handling a cult built in his
name recently.

I have tried to place facts as they are, by showing Sri Aurobindo’s own views, side by
side of the views attributed to him, in high presumption and arrogance.

Let the readers judge for themselves the truth of the matter!

I shall try to persuade again.

Spirituality in the Hindu context, interpreted outside national, political, social

applications, and divorced of all involvement or commitment in inhibited
circumstances, would bring them a sense of modernity or impartiality, they imagine!

This is the spiritual problem of modern man, according to Carl Jung, the celebrated
psychologist1. See his analysis:

“Nothing is easier than to affect the consciousness of the present. As a matter of fact, a
great hoard of worthless people give themselves the air of being modern by overleaping
the various stages of development and the tasks of life they represent. They appear
suddenly by the side of the truly modern man as uprooted human beings, bloodsucking
ghosts, whose emptiness is taken for the unenviable loneliness of the modern man and
cast discredit upon him. He and his kind… are hidden from the undiscerning eyes of
mass-men by these clouds of ghosts, the pseudo-moderns… unless he can atone by
creative ability for his break with tradition he is merely disloyal to the past. It is shear

1
Window on the World, Ed. L. Brander OUP, p.43, 45.
juggling to look upon a denial of the past as the same thing as consciousness of the
present. ‘Today’ stands between ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’.”

The savant who denies contextual meanings of the past utterances of a Vivekananda, or
Aurobindo or avoids them, circumvents them to escape their overtones for the present
and future, and the Stalinist historians like a Romilla Thapar, Irfan Habib and other
comrades who dispute the entire past of a Hindu history and its glory, fall, strongly, into
the category of ‘pseudo moderns’, I would add ‘pseudo-seculars’ also.

Arnold Toynbee, the historian, warns us2: “Whatever maybe the relief that Hindu souls
are going to find for themselves eventually, it seems clear that for them, their can be no
relief from the impact of Western civilisation by opening themselves to the influence of
communism; for communism a Western heresy adopted by an ex-orthodox Christian
Russia – is as much part and parcel of the Graeco-Judaic heritage as the Western way
of life is, and the whole of this tradition is alien to Hindu spirit.”3 Our ‘pseudo-moderns’
would dispute the relation between spirituality and religion, altogether to escape being
stigmatised as narrow, sectarian or denominalised into ‘outfits’ they would like avoid,
and if possible, avoid being branded as ‘Hindu’! The result is just the opposite!! The
more they try to avoid it, the more they are likely to be branded as Hindu, perhaps
courageless Hindus. What else is the opposite of moral-courage? Is it not moral
cowardice? We are not asking them to join the army, become parts of mass movements
or openly fight Christian, Muslim or communist vandals in public streets. All that we
ask is: shed your inhibitions; be bold to speak the truth in context of Hindu humiliation,
and where Hindu values are at stake; do not take shelter under ‘pseudo-modernism’,
‘pseudo-secularism’ to escape your responsibility, do not distort ancient or modern
leaders to suit your cowardly minds, do not speak of empty spirituality divorced of
actual contexts of life with political, social, economic overtones. Sri Krishna shall be
your role-model; He applied spiritual values to the political context of Mahabharata-
times to show light to a bewildered Arjuna on the war-field! Bringing to politics to
spirituality is one thing; bringing spirituality to politics is another. You are hopelessly
confused between the two! Silence would have been better for you than irresponsible
and misleading writing. But actually your duty is speaking the truth.

Why should you be ashamed of religion in the Hindu context? Read this comment by
A.N. Whitehead4: “Religion is the vision of something that stands beyond, behind, and
within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to
be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present
facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension;
something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach, something
which is the ultimate ideal and the hopeless quest.”

If this does not suit Christianity or Islam, they can go to Hell differently in their own
pervert senses of religion as commandments, regimented creeds. But why should you
join them, as you are a Hindu? Do you want the stamp of Sri Aurobindo on this? See:

2
India and the West, Ed. V. Satchidanandan: A Toynbee Anthology OUP, p.39.
3
I am not suggesting that our Aurobindo savants are being directly influenced by communism. They are
unwittingly in their clasp and company by denying the link between the ‘Hindu’ past, and their
directionless present and by shunning comments of moral courage on compelling situations where Hindu
identity is in danger. All that we ask of them is, ‘be bold, truthful and honest’.
4
Science and the Modern World, p.171.
“If we define spirituality as the attempt to know and live in the highest self, the divine,
and to raise life in all its parts to the divinest possible values, then it is evident that there
was no too much of religion, but rather too little of it”5. “The right remedy is not to
belittle still further the age-long ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude, and
give it a still wider scope, to make it in very truth all the life of the national religion in
this high spiritual sense”6. “It was in religion that the soul of India awoke and
triumphed. There were always indications, always great fore-runners, but it was when
the flower of the educated youth of Calcutta bowed down at the feet of an illiterate
Hindu ascetic, a self-illuminated mystic without a single trace or touch of the alien
thought or education upon him that the battle was won”7. “The master idea of the Indian
people has been the seeking of man for his true spiritual self and the use of life as a
frame and means for that discovery and man’s assent from the ignorant and natural into
the spiritual existence”8.

Untouchability in spiritual compartments of political and social organisations, in

scientific and technological fields, in jurisprudence and daily worship, in the relation of
man and woman, the ruled, has never been the Indian practice. All our Dharmasastras
bear ample proof of their mutual interdependence. Pure ‘spirituality’ is a creature no one
has seen! It is the creation of sterile minds.

The least that one expects of misinterpreters, if they are still honest, is an unconditional
apology.

Mysore Dr. K.S. Narayanacharya

June 6, 2006

5
The Culture of India, as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo, Ed. K.M. Munshi and R.R. Diwakar, p.21., the
passage is from Renaissance in India.
6
ibid. Same p.
7
ibid. Same p.73.
8
ibid. Same p.72.
Chapter 1: Attempts to Hijack and ‘Secularise’ Sri
Aurobindo!
Cultural suicide or cultural amnesia cannot be mistaken for spiritual Renaissance. The
will to live, expressed through an upsurge in cultural roots that ‘clutch’ (in the phrase of
T. S. Eliot) cannot be mistaken for ‘revivalism’ in the bad sense of that term. Even
doctors try to ‘revive’ a patient that collapses by artificial devices for breathing, by
blood providence, by drips and whatever treatment possible. What is wrong in
‘revival’? They mere adding up of three extra letters – ‘i-s-m’ cannot make good sense,
acquire a bad odour. This is pervert semantics. The process of living involves cyclic
‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ in the very roll of seasons. Shelley prayed for such a
regeneration of life in his Ode to the Westwind, without a sense of shame. Resurrection,
Revitalisation, Rejuvenation, Revival, and Renaissance – all are healthy terms
indicating that life must be saved, the past and the future must be connected through
purposeful, meaningful efforts in the present. Behind these terms lies the grasp that life
is worth saving. Even scoundrels, thieves and ‘anti-life’ persons are attempted to be
‘saved’ in hospitals, on operation tables, with nobody asking the medically unethical
question, whether the patient’s life is worth saving. ‘Value’ of life is immaterial there!
Saving is all that matters as long as the patient possesses the potency to be saved – good
heart condition, pulse beat, enough blood and responsiveness to medical treatment, and
of course economic support for hospital treatment.

When this is so, how much more responsible, fear-free, muddle-free and realistic-
minded should one be while talking of cultural renaissance, spiritual revival and cultural
revitalisation, unification and assertion of an ancient society like the Hindu society at
present!

Most English-educated, leftist oriented, chicken-hearted pseudo intellectual are vowed

to see this society, its traditions and values, its glorious culture in fading conditions of
today, totally die, in preference to slogan=supported abstract notions of a ‘socialistic
society’, secular (anti-Hindu_ society, based on pure scientific temperament, without
caste, class or social conflicts. Those that are wedded to see this society flower up again
are branded as ‘revivalists’, as all ‘progress’ is the monopoly of socialists, leftists of all
hue and the medley of rulers that have usurped political power since the advent of
Freedom since 1947. The terms ‘revivalism’ and ‘progressivism’ have taken thus a
communist bias, meaning thereby “that any attempts to revive Hindu culture is a sin, is
undesirable, is unfashionable, and is setting the past against the future, is obscurantist, is
fundamentalist, retrograde, and planned by vested interests to bring back the proletariat
under the tyranny of feudal forces reorganising themselves for a further onslaught on
the hapless masses; the larger credit for popularising this criminal notion, and lending
support to all manners of anti-Hindu forces, notions, movements, political and social
forces and steps in administration must go to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress
led by him and his dynastic successors till date. The complimentary, erroneous and
suicidal notion that all ‘progress’ meant, suppression, distortion, destruction and
erasement of Hindu cultural values, Hindu history, Hindu spirituality and political and
social polarisation in such a way as to prevent the nation from coming back to itself, on
its own feet, reshape its Individuality and not imitate falsely alien role-models has been
monopolised by the communist forces and their various outfits in education, labour
fronts, political movements, some sections of the Press, and foreign forces behind them
that do not tolerate a strong, united self-sufficient, trouble-free, harmonious Hindu
society and a government reflecting these true aspirations of a nation too long under
foreign rule, now free, and attempting to rebuild itself, reshape itself, and flower up
again like the mighty Oak tree or our Ashvattha tree.

Mischievous Semantics
Any talk of cultural or spiritual renaissance today in contexts of Aurobindonian
thoughts, Vivekananda’s visionof future Hindustan, or Gandhian concept of Hindu-
Muslim unity, or Sarvodaya, must take into account this mischief of communist
semantics, and the poison infiltrated into hundreds of thousands of words and phrases in
English and through them into local languages.

Just, for example, see the difference between these two words – ‘Initiative’ and
‘Incentive’ being now wrongly equated, creating confusions with irresoluble disastrous
effects in the common usage in the press, public speech and private talk, political and
social circles, even in well meaning mouths of innocent folk.
(1) ‘Initiative’ means, self-efforts, in a free atmosphere by an individual who
chooses to come up, in endeavours, in enterprise, in organisation, in
industry, business, so that it connotes all the healthy meanings and
intentions in a ‘democratic’ setup or frame of mind, in the best senses of
this term. If a man requires an ‘initiative’, all that the government has to
do is to give or provide him with such free opportunities, without
external or artificial support or interference, and creating healthy
conditions and traditions in society that are congenial for the practice of
that ‘initiative’. This is freedom, unfettered, without crutches.
(2) ‘Incentive’ means a tempting support, attractive prompting or temptation
to do something which the individual might not like to do or practice on
his own. There is every scope for the government or the ideology behind
it to ‘encourage’ (in innocent looking terms), the individual to undertake
what he may not want to do on his own. This has a communist
background, with violent ideas of artificial creating of conditions suited
to achieve chosen purposes of the greater bosses behind the individual,
who is no more now than a ‘cog in the machine’ (in Bertrand Russell’s
phrase). The cog is just a useful part of a machine, useless by itself, and
useful only in the context of a machine. The machine may be a party like
CPI (M) or CPI, IUML or ULFA, LTTE, Naxalites or even the Congress,
or an international ideology like Pan-Islamism or Christianity with no
national boundaries, where the individual has no use except to serve
someone’s interest, which he on his own does not share. So he requires
an artificial motivation, for the moment to egg him on to do something
that serves the interests of that someone else who has the real stakes. So
he gives him money, muscle support promises (that may or may not be
fulfilled later on, fooling devices, as in our election campaigns)
instruments to achieve that goal, slogans, press lobbying, political
encouragement and social coercion and what not. There is no individual
flowering up here of Purushartha as we would say. Shall we illustrate? It
is a poet, a philosopher, a scientific researcher, an artist, a free-trader
 who requires Initiative; while it is a murderer, mercenary, a gangster,
hired audiences, regimented sections of society that require Incentive.

Illustration
The prophet raised his armies to ‘spread’ Islam on the basis of Incentive, by paying no
salaries, but by telling his followers, whatever they loot is theirs, and what they
conquered was theirs, whichever woman among the ‘unfaithful’ he captured he could
sell or have for a concubine, whichever man he caught he could enslave and so on, as
his officially accepted, non-disputed biographies bear testimony to.

Our modern day ‘Reservations’ in ‘free’ India come under this category, unfortunately,
also. All manners of state subsidies, free distribution of pumpsets, power supply, of TV
sets, distribution of lands (the DMK move) come under incentives, preventing the
individual from growing from within, with self-efforts. Once a public issue is made, and
tempers rise, and mad sensitivities are aroused in alarming proportions, public debate
dies, and people become docile, imbecile and dumb,(as in West Bengal and Kerala) so
that the rule of ‘might’ rules, undisturbed by sanity, freedom, debate and the possibility
of change for the better.

‘Revivalism’ is being stuffed down our throats in this very fashion today, along with
similar words and phrases which we are unable to examine in a coercive atmosphere.

Can we forgive people who ought to know better? People well educated, claiming to be
custodians of treasures of Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts, and vision? People who talk of
spiritual renaissance, without the equally necessary backdrop of social and political
changes appropriate to them? How can you talk of renaissance in a vacuum? How
would it be different from escapism into the ‘other world’, if a programme for
renaissance is not backed up by necessary social or political conditions, or if it cannot
face this job? Is this not ‘medievalism’ in the condemnable sense of that term, seeking
refuge in the world of the spirit, as it is unable to and afraid of meeting environmental,
external, and material challenges before it?

Did Swamy Vivekananda preach it or practise it? This silk-cocoon attitude? Did Sri
Aurobindo mean it in all his works? (Can you equate him with Sri Ramana?) Is spiritual
renaissance an isolated phenomenon like a rainbow, a flash in the skies, with no ground
realities to meet or fulfil or oppose, reform, recreate?

In practical terms, do we not need a revival of all ancient Hindu institutions, minus the
crusts overgrown on them, minus the evils that have cropped up in their place? Temple
worship, bhajans, muths, efflorescence of philosophic thinking, artistic creations, our
own political and social institutions to suit our changing needs, changing times? Do we
not need modern maharshis like Arun Shourie, Gurumurthy, Jagmohan, Sita Ram Goel,
Sri Ram Swarup and others, to continue the works of a Tagore, an Aurobindo and a
Vivekananda or a Dayananda? Or no? Do we not need a new Kshatra – militant – force
to protect and promote our interests? What Vivekananda called Bauddhika Kshatriyas,
as well as really those dedicated to the protection of Hindu interests which are the really
lasting benefiting interests of the nation, of our society? Do we not need indigenous
trade values or valid theories and practice to protect ourselves from the onslaughts in the
false name of globalisation? Do we not need an army, navy or air force fully wedded to
national, social, politically legitimate interests? Or do we afford the debauching of these
with communal reservations? In short, do we want a Shivaji, a Ranjit Singh, a Subhash
Chandra Bose, a Jhansi Rani, or a Sarvarkar today, in our altered circumstances, but
with unfinished tasks they contributed to? Christian and Muslim vested interests inside
and outside the country want to balkanise the nation and capture power at the centre
today. Our communist comrades are hell-bent on helping these realise this vile goal of
the anti nationals. So, what does your empty talking of ‘spiritual renaissance’ minus
‘reviving’ suitable conditions to realise this goal, come to mean or achieve?

Who Are The Misinterpreters?

I read this valuable comment by Sri Sita Ram Goel in this context, for example, to
support my views:
“It was not that voices in defence of Gods and their worship as idols were not raised
while Hindu reform movements surged forward. Some of these voices came from the
tallest figures in the saga of India’s re-awwakening to her ancient heritage. Swamy
Vivekananda had said if idol-worship could produce a spiritual master like Sri
Ramakrishna, all honour to it. Sri Aurobindo had expounded at length how the concrete
images to which Vedic Rishis addressed their hymns had emerged out of the deepest
intuitions of spiritual conciousness. Mahatma Gandhi had allowed his reverence for
idols and temple in unmistakable terms. But the voices it seems, failed to impress the
followers of these great men. The Ramakrishna Mission installed life-like statues of Sri
Ramakrishna in the temples it built. Sri Aurobindo Ashram raised their own gurus to the
same status. Mahatma Gandhi has so far been spared the ‘honour’. His followers,
however are not known for their fondness for Hindu idols or temples… What was
worse, the Ramakrishna Mission and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram imbibed the theology
of Monotheism in another respect, namely the cult of the latest and the best which will
not be bettered. In the eyes of the Mission, Sri Ramakrishna is no more a saint who
sought and verified in his own experience the truths of Sanatana Dharma; he has
become a ‘synthesis of all faiths’ including Islam and Christianity, such as has never
been seen in the past and will not be witnessed again in the future. The Ashram hails Sri
Aurobindo not as a great Yogin and sage who explored and explained to the modern
world the deepest insights of the Hindu spiritual tradition, but as the highest
manifestation of the Divine in human history! Shades of Christ and Muhammad… The
stalwarts of India’s reawakening never claimed to be founders of new religions. Nor
were they interested in Hinduism because it carried some exclusive message made
known to mankind by some Hindu at some point in time. For them, Hinduism was
Sanatana Dharma, that is, a spiritual vision valid at all times, in all places and for all
people, and directly accessible to all seekers without the help of a historical
intermediary. To the Buddha, a new was suspect. He described his own way as that on
which the Buddhas of the past had walked and the Buddhas of the future will work.”9

The thrust of what I want to say in this write up has been beautifully summed in the
words I have just quoted!
Let me explain: I am a great admirer of Sri Aurobindo’s powerful presentation of
Hinduism, its many splendours, achievements, its excellences, its wide embrace, its
openness, its galaxy of great thinkers and visionaries, whose experiences are for all
human application, its resilience, and eternal novelty. I am no part of any closed cults of

9
History of Hindu – Christian Encounters p.370, 371
any kind in any great thinker’s name. Sri Aurobindo is great and unique among all
Renaissance luminaries for various reasons: he himself was wedded to the goal of this
country’s all round upliftment – not only spiritual but also political and social. He
among all, was the one who knew the Vedas directly by personal yogic experience to
rank among Vasishta, Jamadagni and Visvamitra. Nothing great and contributory to the
main stream of Hindu culture ever escaped his scrutiny or study or reverence – be it the
Puranas, the Epics, classical Sanskrit literature, Hymns of Alwars and Nayanmars or
even Dharmasastras. [Swami Dayananda based his vision only on the Vedas, excluding
puranas and epics, and even the Upanishads! Rajaram Mohan Roy selected only some
portions of the Upanishads for his Hind Bible and his prayer book. Both were under
terrible inhibitions of Christianity and denounced idonl worship, but served as steps
backwards towards Hinduism to those who were being brainwashed and bombarded by
misleading Christian missionaries. ‘Make some trivial concession, and attempt to keep
the core, to keep our people within the fold’ – seemed to be their policy, consciously or
unconsciously. Other steps were equally needed, but they felt the time was not ripe and
as urgent attention on the Vedas, as the missionaries were targeting the Vedas for abuse,
misinterpretation, distortion and anti-Hindu propaganda. That was what the great
Shankara had done several centuries earlier to Buddhist challenges also. Defensiveness,
being apologetic and compromising elsewhere to fight on the main-front has always
been the main strategy of reformers and savants of Hinduism, for the time-being,
leaving the future followers to retrace their full steps completely and comprehensively
in stages later on. Whether the followers of these great savants have done so or not is
for anybody to see! Where they have not done so, it has invariably become a closed cult.
Where it stopped, Swami Vivekananda took it further forward. Even then he wrote more
on the Upanishads and Yoga, and less, hardly anything, on the Vedas themselves, and
their symbolic meanings of a full inner yoga. It was this that Sri Aurobindo completed
leaving nothing in his grasp of the full glory of Hinduism. In recent times another great
Bengali Saint and reformer Sri Prabhupad Bhakti Vedanta Swamy of ISKCON went a
further step taking all doubters, sceptics, and apologists back into idol worship, Bhajan,
Bhagavat Purana and through them to Veda and Yoga. There is no contradiction of
intentions in all these glorious steps of recovery of Hinduism for the Hindus as well as
the non-Hindus, from Christian and Muslim onslaughts, through steps are separated yet
in the same Direction. Dayananda-followres would lose nothing if they admire the
Puranas or Gita, and attend temple worship as a means to Yoga. It is enough that
everything conforms to Veda. So also Vivekananda-followers and others.]

The Apologists
But there is a tendency among all these followers to be afraid of the word ‘Hindu’, and
anything to strengthen it except in terms of ‘meditation’, silence and Gandhian Ahimsa,
and aberrations particularly with political overtones, or social reforms exceeding self-
inhibited parameters!

The inhibiting factors of today are ‘Secularism’ of the Nehruvian legacy and
‘sarvadharma samata bhava’ of Gandhi, in the foremost. To the anti-Hindu brigade of
Christians and Muslims, are added now the communists of all hues, and Gandhian
followers of ‘Equality, equal validity of all religions’. Obviously religions with agendas
of ‘kill, conquer, rape, and loot’ and Hindu Dharma (Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism
included) asking for introspection and perfecting the art of inner yoga for the attainment
of Perfection and Immortality of the human personality and its core, are not the same!
Gandhi erred personally and collectively, misleading millions of Hindus, being
responsible for partition and atrocities on Hindus, and paid in personal tragic terms, for
not knowing the Quaran or the Bible in their entireties, and their true intentions, their
histories of Prophets, their historical records, even in our own country. He lived in a
fool’s paradise! It hurts one to say all this. He was undoubtedly a great Hindu reformer
standing for eradication of untouchability and other evils befalling Hinduism. But he
paid, and made us pay dearly, for divorcing political vigilance, political strategy and
other aspects of strengthening the Hindu society from purely other-worldly activities
like mere prayer and piety. He helped Muslims become strong, and discouraged all
Hindu attempts of resurgence, upsurge and rejuvenation under the inhibitions of his own
new-found and erroneous concept of ‘Equality of all Religions’; something that is still
going on in this country under the Congress and allied partners in political
mismanagement and social misdirection.

Should the followers of Sri Aurobindo be victims too?

This is our present question here.

Sri Aurobindo himself was a full revolutionary like Vyasa, Krishna, Visvamitra and
Vasistha, keeping no aspects of life as mutually untouchable, exclusive, or
irreconcilable. It was integral and yogic everywhere. There is evidence both in his
personal life and in all his abundant writings.

Is it enough for one to read merely his Life Divine (imperfectly) or Savitri as spiritual
and literary masterpieces to claim to be an authority or spokesman of his collective
thought or what he stood for comprehensively? Sri Aurobindo has said lots on
Christianity and Islam, their true nature and how their separatist ideologies are
impediments to the goal of Integral India or Akhand Bharath (We shall quote profusely
to show this). This is no exclusive or impracticable ideology of some ‘extreme Hindu
outfits’. This is one among his chief cherished goals left for us to achieve here and now.
Let us state these goals in full:

The Agenda
(1) Achievement of Akhand Bharath,
(2) Asian resurgence,
(3) World unity with Indian leadership,
(4) Spiritual gift of India to the world and
(5) The advent of a new race of human beings with what he called ‘Superamental
consciousness’ (meaning thereby a new community of men without ego,
selfishness, hatred and other imperfections, but with knowledge, understanding,
love cooperation and will to live to achieve perfection in an integrated life.)

Among the means to ahieve this, among other things he suggested that:
(6) Sanskrit be made the National language of India,
(7) Integral yoga be made a part of general education,
(8) Sanatana Dharma be made national Dharma and
(9) Also India be renamed as Bharatha Varsha.
Do all these look like an obscurantist programme or ideology? Do you therefore include
Sri Aurobindo among ‘Sangh Parivar’ people or those belonging to some ‘extreme
Hindu outfits’? Or do you give up the essential Aurobindo for your own secularised
version of his words and mission for your own false satisfaction? Do you share his
vision or do you feel apologetic for being associated with him? Is it for you to shed your
own inhibitions or to try to reform Sri Aurobindo and cast him in Gandhian and
Nehruvian role-models? Why are you scared, sir, to be associated with attempts to
revitalise the Hindu society, reorganise it, reform it, and make it survive the onslaughts
by Christian and Muslim vested interests? Are you ashamed of calling yourself a
Hindu?
Chapter 2: Examination of Wrong Views, Insinuations
and Rebuttals
Read these funny sentences of a timid apologist, claiming to be a savant of Sri
Aurobindonian thought10. (We shall answer all these.)
(1) “A spiritual civilisation like the Indian does not endure and progress by sticking
to reviving its old forms whether in religion, arts, or socio-economic institutions
but by breaking their mould and creating new ones which are appropriate to the
changing times and true to its innate trend and genius.”
(2) “Therefore a Hindu religious revival is to my thinking an absurdity.”
(3) “Those who want to resurrect a particular manifestation of Hinduism, in this
case a medieval one, lose sight entirely of the predominantly spiritual nature of
this culture.”
(Emphasis added.)
Comment: This is an attack on Sangh Parivar for their attempts to revive the Hindu
pride, and rediscover our national and cultural identity and integrity. The charge is that
this attempt is merely revivalistic and worth discarding. What then must be the new
identity? It is not stated openly but implicitly we are to understand that we must stop
attempting becoming “Hindus” or stop ‘Hinduise’ the non-Hindu elements or obstacles,
but simply accept “Indianism” – instead of “Hinduism” (precisely the Nehruvian
hallucination!) What particular manifestation of ‘Hinduism’ does the objector want to
be given up? The R.S.S. brand, the V.H.P. Brand or the old classical Hindu cultural
brands, we still see in Hindu scholarship, Hindu ways of worship, Hindu thinking based
on Vedas and all that has sprung from it? Perhas all these, so that “Hindu-Muslim Bhai
Bhai”, “Ishvara Allah Tere Nam”, “Mera Bharath Mahan” type of goody goody thing is
what is mistaken for the emergence of a new identity. For, all the rest are presumably
‘medieval’. Is this what Sri Aurobindo stands for?

Personal Note
I am not an RSS man and am not part of any of their ‘outfits’. But I respect all attempts
to revive Hindu values, protect Hindu interests, culturally, spiritually and politico-
socially. I am not ashamed of calling myself a Hindu nor feel shy of inheriting its
traditions, treasures and its thoughts and achievements. I am proud of anyone who joins
attempts to defend Hinduism against its detractors or denigrators, and does research,
writing, debating and if it comes to that, fight on the war field also in direct or indirect
wars.

Sri Aurobindo’s Own Views

After all, Aurobindo is on my side in this respect, what if some Aurobindoneans refuse
to read or understand the main spirit of all his writings? Read for example these:

10
The Current Hindu upsurge in Sri Aurobindo’s Light – By Mangesh Nadkarni
(i) ”A certain class of minds11 shrink from aggressiveness as if it were a sin. Their
temperaments forbid them to feel the delight of battle and they look on what they cannot
understand as something monstrous and sinful. ‘Heal hate by love, drive out injustice by
justice, slay sin by righteousness’ is their cry. Love is a sacred name, but it is easier to
speak of love than to love… The Gita is the best answer to those who shrink from the
battle as a sin and aggression as a lowering of morality… The sword of the warrior is as
necessary to the fulfilment of justice and righteousness, as the holiness of the saint.
Ramadas is not complete without Shivaji.”12

How do you like this Mr. Objector? There was no RSS when Sri Aurobindo wrote these
words! What does it matter? What wrong is there if RSS is born of such views of Sri
Aurobindo and most other Renaissance thinkers of India, and efforts in that direction to
rebuild Hindu society and form a nation wedded to the ideals of Rishis and Rajarshis
who are still relevant? If RSS derives its inspiration thus justifiably from Sri Aurobindo,
what is your loss? How can you belong to him as well as to Congressism, unthinkingly?

Read this again:

(ii) “It is an error, we repeat, to think that spirituality is a thing divorced from life… It is
an error to think that the heights of religion are above the struggles of this world. The
recurrent cry of Sri Krishna to Arjuna insists on the struggle: ‘Fight and overthrow thy
opponents!’, ‘Remember me and fight’, ‘Give up all thy works to me with a heart full of
spirituality, and free from craving, free from selfish claims, fight! Let the fever of thy
soul pass from thee.”13
Commentary: We talk of spirituality as isolated from life’s struggles not only on the
mental plane but on all others also! Is this what Sri Aurobindo understood? To Sri
Aurobind all forms of fight against untruth, ugliness, cowardice, distortion and
disintegration meant spiritual in the most comprehensive sense of the term, as he
derived this meaning from the Gita, the Upanishads, and more pre=eminently from the
Veda-Samhitas themselves. Mere passive meditation is not the meaning of this term.
This negative, unvedic ‘yoga’ is often criticised by him profusely in his Life Divine,
Essays on the Gita, and elsewhere. (I shall show instances hereafter.) M. Gandhi was
moving in this passive, suicidal direction and taking the Congress with him in this un-
Hindu, unheroic way, as Aurobindo knew, as our objector must know also.

Read again:
(iii) “The Mahommedans base their separateness and their refusal to regard themselves
as Indians first and Mahommedans afterwards on the existence of great Mahommedan
nations to which they feel themselves more akin, in spite of our common birth and
blood, than to us. Hindus have no such resource. For good or evil, they are bound to the
soil and to the soil alone. They cannot deny the Mother, neither can they mutilate her.
Our deal therefore is an Indian Nationalism, largely Hindu in its spirit and traditions,
because the Hindu made the land and the people and persists, by the greatness of his
11
The reference seems to be to Gandhians and Congressists under him, and by extension of logic to all
pacifists, who are apologetic about Hinduism, and condemn our efforts to stand up again after thousands
of years of suppression, humiliation, distortion and damage to our institutions.
12
India’s Rebirth, p.45-46, letter dated April 1908. All references hereafter in this write-up are to such
letters in this anthology.
13
The Rebirth of India, p. 51, letter dated June 19, 1909. Sri Aurobindo’s central throught revolves round
the idea of Deva-Asura fight which is Vedic, Puranic, Epical, and even in yogic terms. That is how he has
been able to synthesise Buddhism with Vedic thought – a marvel that was not possible for even eminent
thinkers before him and even later till date. Forget this and you loose his main focus.
past, his civilisation and his culture and his invincible virility, in holding it, but wide
enough also to include the Moslem and his culture and traditions and absorb these into
itself.”14

(iv) Also: “The congress movement was for a long time purely occidental in its mind,
character and methods, confined to the English-educated few, founded on the political
rights and interests of the people read in the light of English history and European
ideals, but with no roots either in the past of the country or in the inner spirit of the
nation… To bring in the mass of the people, to found the greatness of the future on the
greatness of the past, to infuse Indian politics with Indian religious fervour and
spirituality are the indispensable conditions for a great and political awakening in India.
Others, writers, thinkers, spiritual leaders, had seen this truth. Mr. Tilak was the first to
bring it into the actual field of practical politics.”15

Here is ample proof that Sri Aurobindo knew the infinite, potential dangers of
Congressism which stood against all that the nation had achieved or represented in the
main stream of Hindu culture in its identity. He knew of the impossibility of Muslims
living in harmony with the Hindus, as long as their separatist mentality persisted; this
persistence is because of the basic tenets and teachings and practices of the founder of
Islam, the Prophet – a detail Sri Aurobindo might not have known, as most savants of
‘unity’ took it for granted that Islam too was a ‘religion’ like any other, without
realising its diabolic, predatory nature. Only recent researches are waking us up all over
the world. It is remarkable that Sri Aurobindo knew of it, even in the absence of
penetrative researches then, and had the daring to warn us, lone among our Renaissance
leaders, as no other did! If RSS agrees with him, all the better for RSS, and to us
through them. An attack on RSS in this respect as ‘medieval’, ‘revivalist’,
‘fundamentalist’ is really an attack on Sri Aurobindo only and the ideals, agenda,
programmes he stood for! Note in particular his optimistic view that one day or the
other the Muslims also will be absorbed into the larger Hindu culture under emergence,
by making them shed their jehadist ideology! Are not things moving in this direction
today? Whether the Muslims will reform himself or no, whether he will give up his
jehad or no, or prefer to be alienated, isolated, liquidated is left to the forces of history
which are not under any control of any human agency any longer. With this ‘opening’
still left at the other end, if we try to mend our fences, repair our mansion of culture, and
remove cobwebs, and strengthen the building on unalterable foundations, why should
anybody ridicule it as ‘revivalism’? What do we care even if someone hurls this
undignified abuse on us?

The Open End, But the Warning!

How did Sri Aurobindo keep that ‘open end’ for Hindu culture? What was his answer
for the charge of ‘Revivalism’? What was the reality he knew? What did he think of the
Gandhian attempts of artificial unity?
Read this:

14
India’s Rebirth, p.64, Letter dated November 6, 1909. This is in the context of Separate Electorate idea
of Morley-Minto ‘Reforms@. This is also an answer to Dr. U.N. Mukherji who published a brochure with
the thesis that ‘Hindus were a dying race and would do well to imitate’ the Mohammedans in social
freedom and equality. P.63
15
India’s Rebirth, p.132, from an introduction to a book entitled Speeches and Writings of Tilak.
“We must know our past and recover it for the purpose of our future. Our business is to
realise ourselves first and to mould everything to the law of India’s eternal life and
culture.”16

Contrast this with our objector’s view already quoted: “A spiritual civilisation like the
Indian does not endure and progress by sticking to or reviving its old forms whether in
religion, arts or socio-economic institutions but by breaking their mould and creating
new ones…”17

The objector is clearly not merely twisting Aurobindo, he is violating and even
condemning Aurobindo! This is what I called ‘secularising’ and hijacking! See for
yourself if I am not right in my inferences.

Read further Sri Aurobindo:

“Recover the patrimony of your forefathers. Recover the Aryan thought, the Aryan
discipline, the Aryan character, the Aryan life. Recover the Vedanta, the Gita, the Yoga.
Recover them not only in intellect but in your lives.”18

Read this open end he keeps for Muslims:

“We do not fear Mahomedan opposition; we do not shun, we desire the awakening of
Islam in India even if its crude efforts are misdirected against ourselves; for all strength,
all energy, all action is grist to the mill of the nation-builder. In that faith we are ready,
when the time comes for us to meet in the political field, to exchange with the
Musulman, just as he chooses, the firm clasp of the brother, or the resolute grip of the
wrestler… Of one thing we may be certain, that Hindu-Mahomedan unity cannot be
effected by political adjustments or congress flatteries. It must be sought deeper down,
in the heart and the mind, for where the cause of disunion are, there the remedies must
be sought. We shall do well in trying to solve the problem to remember that
misunderstanding is the most fruitful cause of our differences, that love compels love
and that strength conciliates the strong… but we must cease to approach him falsely or
flatter out of a selfish weakness and cowardice. We believe this to be the only practical
way of dealing with the difficulty”19

Comments:
There are a good number of suggestions of far-reaching consequences here, with respect
to the “agenda” unfulfilled still of Sri Aurobindo, as stated earlier.
(a) Akhand Bharath is eminently realisable, and not a day-dream if we can handle
the Muslim problem (and the Christian problem, as corollary_ in the right way.
(b) That way would not be the Gandhian way of ‘false flattery’ or the Nehruvian
‘selfish weakness’.
(c) We shall try to remove the misunderstandings sincerely on our parts and leave
the only two choices possible for the Muslims –
i. “the firm clasp of the brother.”
ii. “the resolute grip of the wrestler.”

16
India’s Rebirth, p.52 (Emphasis added.)
17
Already quoted (but now with added emphasis.)
18
Ibid p.52. Is this “revivalism” that our objector condemns, without examination? Is this RSS or Sri
Aurobindo speaking? Where do you stand now Mr. Objector? Whom do you fool now?
19
India’s Rebirth p.53. Letter, June 19, 1909. (Emphasis added.)
(You know what this means even now: either the negotiation table or the war-field, as
Sri Krishna offered to Duryodhana! A Mahabharatha awaits, and let there be no tom-
foolery.) In another phrase
i. “love compels love,”
ii. “strength conciliates the strong.”
(This is a language no Congressman has used so far! This looks like RSS;
what can we do?)
(d) The inner message for us is: “Become strong, and the adversary will listen to
you, if you speak in a position of advantage and strength.”20
(e) We can still form a sort of Indian commonwealth with a subdued Pakistan, a
humbled Bangladesh, a friendship-earned Myanmar, and culturally coerced
Malaysia or Indonesia, and strength-backed Nepal and Sri Lanka. The
instruments are (1) strength, military and scientific might, (2) cultural-bonds
revived, (3) our intentions of Asian unity made transparent, and (4) conjointly
facing terrorism on all sides. Afghanistan seeks our aid, so also Iraq and Iran,
which were parts of a Greater India, the Bharatha Varsha, till about 10 century
A.D. (5) avoid the Gandhi-Nehru legacy of blunders, hypocrisy, selfishness and
insincere, unpatriotic politics once for all.
(f) Once the “Hindu commonwealth” is so formed, with individual sovereignty of
each member respected, guaranteed and protected, (unlike NATO or SEATO,
which were merely military pacts_ we can then isolate the West, with China and
Japan playing a definite and decisive role in ‘Asian Resurgence’.
(g) The spiritual gift of India, through the spread of Yoga and Vedanta is already on
the forward progress, and requires our official backing in a positive and involved
way.
(h) Sanskrit being restored to its rightful place, and
(i) Sanatana Dharma being recognised as our National integrated view in all matters
will follow simultaneously.
(j) The renaming of India as Bharatha Varsha is no difficult talk, if we have the
will, and unity, once the Muslim/Christian problems are solved as directed
above either by reconciliation or a decisive ‘Mahabharatha’ repeat, but with
vote-bank politics ended and defranchising anti-national terrorist elements of all
kinds.

I am not underestimating the problems as they have cropped up, or have been
created by Congress, and other parties taking disadvantage of its weaknesses. The
solution is not impossible. Sri Aurobindo has showed us a clear direction. It is for us
to follow, but first create the right kind of leaders. Blaming or stigmatising RSS will
be a difficulty as long as inhibited, cynical, pen-pushers write irresponsibly from
positions that are too large for them!

20
Sri V.D. Savarkar said similarly: “Militarise the Hindu, and Hinduise the army”, an advice we should
have heeded at least after 1947. How many millions more of martyrs do we have to sacrifice?
Chapter 3: Sri Aurobindo on Revivalism
Let us go back to the question of what is ‘revivalism’, or whether it is good or bad for
our nation.

If by this term one means the complete going back to the past, and abandonment of the
present and blocking the future, it is anti-life, anti-nature and must be condemned
wholeheartedly. In the Islamic context, the ‘purdah’ for women, beards for men, skull
cap, jihad as ideology being still taught in every mushrooming thousands of madrasas
all over the Asian countries, and countries and ideas ill-suited to a cooperative collective
living for all mankind, and cause ill-will, hatred and wars – this is revivalism. It is
strange that Nehru or his followers never blamed the Muslim community for this
obscurantism which is the same as revivalism and the equivalent of fundamentalism in
its extreme form. Till today no one condemns these attempts! Not Congressists or
leftists.

The Christian version of revivalism is the bringing back of inquisition, (burning of the
heretics) and conversion through fraud and foul methods, prevention of free thinking,
opposition to science, attempts to divide the world as followers of the Messiah and
followers of Satan, mad and wild doctrines of “one God, one book, the only son of God,
and the only means of salvation as belief in Christ” and a host of doctrinaire teachings
not in conformity with civilised communal life.

In Hinduism, revival of “cast” (if it is possible at all) and if anyone talks of it, could be
considered as revivalism in the bad sense. But nobody talks of it; not the RSS, not the
VHP, ABVP and not the BHMS or any other “outfit”. “Cow-protection” was considered
one! But it is a programme enshrined in the constitution itself, with obvious economic
rationale!

It is the Congress that has persistently stood for ‘caste’ revival in the reverse gear, for
vote advantages, and reservations beyond reasonably stipulated periods in the
constitution! Who is the real revivalist? “Mandal I” of V.P. Singh, now Mandal II of
Arjun Singh are not RSS creations!

Dynastic rule, feudal hierarchy is what no sensible man would want. That would have
been revivalist. Nehru “abolished” it. Sardar Patel got all the princely states merged in
free India – a staunch Hindu supporter that he was accused of being, in the rebuilding of
Somnath temple in Gujarat – and Smt. Indira Gandhi abolished even privy purses, going
back on guarantees issued under the constitution! Hindus never fought against it as
Muslims did ‘Shah bano’ case judgement of even the Supreme Court. Who is the
revivalist?

Nehru declared factories are our temples and places of worship. Hindus did not fight
him. Nor were temples closed, as Churches got converted into government godowns in
Russia under communists! DMK, DK, leftists in Tamil Nadu, in Kerala sought and
brought their best in ruining the traditions of temples and one-sided land reforms (the
Congress even in Karnataka) harming the Hindu cause and wanting religion to be a
closed chapter in Indian history in programmes of progressivism, revolution and
ushering in dynastic rule at the same time! Nehru, Indira, Rajiv, Sonia and now Rahul!
Who is the real ‘revivalist’, sir? Every Congressman of political clout has a private
army like the feudal lords of the past in England, like ‘palegars’ here, and wants his
son/daughter to continue in his office! Mr. Objector, why don’t you condemn all this?
The Hindu knows what to revive, what to preserve, what to transform, what new
identities are needed, and how to forge them. The RSS is nobody’s feudal army. If
patriotism is equated with Hitlerism, we can equate democratic freedom also with
British or American arrogance! In fact Sri Aurobindo says that this imitative democracy
is a passing phase and we must find our own!

“Be very careful to follow my instructions in avoiding the old kind of politics.
Spirituality is India’s only politics, the fulfilment of the Sanatana Dharma its only
Swaraj. I have no doubt we shall have to go through our parliamentary period in order
to get rid of the notion of Western democracy by seeing in practice how helpless it is to
make nations blessed. India is passing through really, the first stages of a sort of
national Yoga… God has struck it all down – Moderatism, the bastard child of English
liberalism; Nationalism the mixed progeny of Europe and Asia; Terrorism the abortive
offspring of Bakunin and Mazzini… it is only when this foolishness is done with that
truth will have a chance, the sattwic mind in India emerge and a really strong spiritual
movement begin as prelude to India’s regeneration”21.

What is wrong with the love of revival of India, with its true mission restored, as a
visionary sees it? It was Nehru who had “romantic misunderstandings” (T.S. Eliot’s
phrase in another context), of India’s present and future, and was “discovering India”
for himself in British-maintained jails in this country! He had nothing to learn, or be
inspired by our rich past, and made incorrigible blunders in understanding our own
history. Indian history started for him from 1947, and died with his death, when he
could not known or learn anything even from it. He, through Moulana Abdul Kalam
Azad, instructed the Education Ministry, that is our curricula, no gloating over the
Gupta period should be done, or the Mughal period condemned as foreign conquest, and
so forth. All that was “buried and over”. That was how, anyone who talked of Shivaji, a
Jhansi Rani, Rana Pratap and others came to be branded as Revivalists. But how can
you change history> It is like changing your parents! The Communists in Russia and
China had attempted doing so, and so Nehru the ‘Modernist’ also wanted to change! No
Hindu would say, all must float beards like a Shivaji, ride horses like him, and dress like
a Rana Pratap. That would have been revivalism, if it were so.

What Shivaji means for the Hindu is the spirit of self-assertion, spirit of reorganising
Hindu society to recover the lost pride, and if it comes to that, fight the terrorist like
Aurangzeb in his own way, using guerrilla ambushes, to end his tyrannical rule. The
real revivalists are those who invented road names in New Delhi after notorious
plunderes like Aurangzeb, Tughlaq, Khilji, Imbrahim Lodhi, Babur, Akbar and their
tribe!(Nehru was alive and initiated all this, at the time!) So it came to mean in
congress-psyche, that justified attempts to revive Hindu pride were “revivalist”, while
similar but unjustified attempts to “revive” the aggressor’s pride was “progressive”!

I shall not accuse people of this perversity of having any brains! It is a superstition that
you can bring them back to sanity!!
21
India’s Rebirth, p.93. Letter dated July 13, 1911. See the amazing and pointed reference to terrorism
more than a century ago! Terrorism must die, not love of freedom!
http://www.voiceofdharma.com/books/ir/IR_part2.htm
An ex-president of India once described Aurangzeb as a “socialist” and a “secularist” on
a national occasion! Very good discovery! No revivalism, this?

You still have a city in Vasco-da-Gama’s name, a sea pirate that looted Goa! Don’t
speak of this as “revivalism”! You will be ridiculed! But try to rebuild a temple for Lord
Rama, that had been devastated by Babur and Aurangzeb; you will be branded as a
“revivalist”! Ask for anything that is likely to boost up the Hindu pride, you are a
‘revivalist’.

Let us see what Aurobindo has to say about this: “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 loosing us the battle of life. We must therefore save India all that she has
stored up of knowledge, character and noble thought in her immemorial past.”22

“Most vital of all, the spiritual and intellectual divorce from the past which the present
schools and universities have effected, has beggared the nation of the originality, high
aspiration and forceful energy which can alone make a nation free and great. To reverse
the process and recover what we have lost is undoubtedly the first object to which we
ought to devote ourselves. And as the loss of originality, aspiration and energy was the
most vital of all these losses, so their recovery should be our most important objective.
The primary aim of the prophets of nationalism was to rid the nation of the idea that the
future was limited by the circumstances of the past, that because temporary causes had
brought us low and made us weak, low therefore must be our aims and weak our
methods… To raise the mind, character and tastes of the people, to recover the ancient
nobility of temper, the strong Aryan character, and the high Aryan outlook, the
perceptions which made earthly life beautiful and wonderful, and the magnificent
spiritual experiences, realisations and aspirations which made us the deepest-hearted,
deepest-thoughted and most delicately profound in all life of all the peoples of the earth,
is the task next in importance and urgency… We must not cabin the expanding and
aggressive spirit of India in temporary forms which are the creation of the last few
hundred years. That would be a vain and disastrous endeavour. The mould is broken;
we must remould in larger outlines and with a richer content.”23

If there was a ‘revivalist’ among the renaissance luminaries heralding a free and full
Hindustan, here was one, in Sri Aurobindo, Mr. Objector should know.

‘Spirituality’ and Sri Aurobindo

We shall now examine what kind of ‘spirituality’ was it that Sri Aurobindo envisaged,
preached and practiced. When this term is currently being used by all sorts of people as
if it excludes ‘religion’, ‘worship’ and ‘lower forms of faith’ to which common men are
used, we have to verify that claim by some that spirituality is unfettered by all that is
meant by religion, in the Hindu context. Confusions created in this regard by the creedal
religions of the Abrahamic tradition of a monotheistic God, and unverifiable claims of
22
India’s Rebirth, p.38. Letters of Feb 24, 1908
23
India’s Rebirth, p.60, 61. Letter dated Sep 25, 1909. The warning was against confining to the ‘present’
as created by the British or the Mughals before them. But by foresight it applies even more eminently to
Nehru’s attempts to continue the foreign tradition and keep India unaltered by preventing all attempts to
rebuild culturally ourselves.
exclusive revelations sought to be imposed on the whole world through violent and
fraudulent means, as the ‘only faiths’, have further complicated the matter to confound
our already confused secularist in Sri Aurobindo’s camp. We shall see what the master
himself meant by these terms, religion and spirituality to expose those who dub ‘Hindu
religious revival’ as absurdity as earlier pointed out.

Here is Sri Aurobindo: “My idea of spirituality has nothing to do with ascetic
withdrawal or contempt or disgust of secular things. There is to me nothing secular, all
human activity is for me a thing to be included in a complete spiritual life, and the
importance of politics at the present time is very great.”24

Comment: This gags the mouth of our objector who wants Aurobindo to be included
among other-wordly ‘spiritualists’, having nothing to do with nationalistic ideas, even
if the country is passing through violent convulsions, vivisection, and vilification of its
values, its history, its great antiquity and uniqueness. Do we see today in the RSS or
VHP any “particular manifestation of Hinduism, in this case a medieval one”? Which
one, if the charge is true? Mr. Objector, you must know that European medievalism is
different from our medievalism! It was Christianity, its anti-progress, anti-science,
closed approach to life that threw Europe into medievalism, during which same period
by Christian count, our country was in its most efflorescent evolution – the 1100 years
that you say which is “generally recognised as the period of decline of the spiritual
culture”. No; this is misinterpretation, sir. The Chalukyas in the South, the Guptas in
the North, and the flowering up of a Kalidasa, a Varahamihira, a Pāṇini, a Patanjali, a
Vararuchi, the re-edition of the Epics and our Puranas, Harshavardhana,
Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya, the Alwars, the Nayanmars, Samudragupta,
Vikramaditya, Baskaracharya, the Hoysalas, Shivaji, Vijayanagar emperors, Sayana – to
dub all these as medieval figures is madness to say the least. Medievalism (i.e. anti-
cultural, anti-human, vandalistic barbaric waves of destruction) came to India with the
advent of Islam with the Ghaznis, Ghoris, Tughlaqs, Khiljis and Mughals. Cultural
India struggled hard all over this period to fight ‘medievalism’ and keep its ever
youthful ‘renaissance’ spirit, unlike any other cultural entity, ancient or modern.
‘Medievalism’ by expression has acquired a backward mindset as meaning and stands
for anti-cultural, anti-human trends. Islam and Christianity are promoting this frame of
mind wherever they set foot. Not Hinduism. See what the spread of Hinduism did in
Indonesia, Malaysia, Gandhara (now Afghanistan), China, Tibet and even Japan and
Korea! How can one brush aside Hinduism, any aspect of it, as a medieval
manifestiaon?

You may say ‘asceticism’ is an aspect of Hindu medievalism. But see how Sri
Aurobindo dispels even this ignorance: “Indian asceticism is not a mournful gospel of
sorrow or a painful mortification of the flesh in morbid penance, but a noble effort
towards a higher joy and an absolute possession of the spirit… I do not accept the
ascetic ideal as the final solution of the problem of the human existence.” “But even its
exaggerations have a noble spirit behind them than the vitalistic exaggerations which
are the opposite defect of Western culture.”25

24
India’s Rebirth, p.149. Letter of Jan 5, 1920 written to Joseph Baptista, a co-worker of Tilak
25
India’s Rebirth, p.143. Letter of Apr 1919
Are you answered? Sri Aurobindo does not spare any great name, when it comes to
upholding the right attitudes in life for its betterment. Not even Shankaracharya. Read:
“I find that Shankara had grasped much of Vedantic truth, but that much was dark to
him. I am bound to admit what he realised; I am not bound to exclude what he failed to
realise. Aptavakyam, authority, is one kind of proof; it is not the only kind: pratyaksha
(direct knowledge) is more important.”26

Then come to religion. Creedal religions like Christianity and Islam have brought a bad
name for this word, this concept, this expression. That does not mean religion is
restricted to this bad sense of unverifiable commandments, of prophets and cruel gods
and crude heavens and cruder hells. You quote, Mr. Objector, from Aurobindo, a
sentence from his Essays on Gita in the context of his criticism of Christianity and
Islam “a grotesque creation of human unreason, the parent of so much intolerance,
cruelty, obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism” etc. , and want to use it against
Hinduism, and “those” (God knows who!) that want to make it “institutionalised”. Good
God! Is there any institutionalised brand of Hinduism anywhere, anytime in our history?

But I know what is meant: this is a baseless attack on RSS or VHP, as they are
presumed to be “regimenting” Hindu youth for something abominable, as Congress and
fellow travellers think. You have never visited an RSS camp, never mixed with them,
read their literature to know that RSS is as general and catholic as Hinduism, they never
discuss or encourage doctrinal, communal or cast differences. In fact RSS is a big
program for reuniting the Hindu society (listen to their Aikya mantra), respect-
promoting for our cultural indivisibility, national sovereignty, our ancient cultural
achievements, the Hindu pride. Nehru came to know of it in his last years. J. P.
[Jayaprakash Narayan27] was cured of his prejudices in this respect (read Sri Sita Ram
Goel’s testimony), when he visited one of their annual meetings; Lal Bahadur Sastry
sought their help in kicking out Pak aggressors! They use “lathis” for training cadets in
heroic exercises, which they do not want our soldiers to use in the army (that would be
revivalist!). They cannot use guns (as the police and military use) as they respect law,
unlike your Naxals, PWG, ULFA and other ‘respectable’ law-breakers, negotiating with
docile governments, encouraging them privately. You must know all this to shed your
language and unjustified, irrational prejudices. In fact, it is the Hindutva forces that are
the hope of this country, as Sri Aurobindo as amply implied in his profuse writings.
Why try to bring a wedge between the two?

Read this:
“There is no word so plastic and uncertain in its meaning as the word religion. The word
is European. The average Christian believes that the Bible is God's book, but ordinarily
he does not consider anything in God's book binding on him in practice except to
believe in God and go to Church once a week; the rest is only meant for the
exceptionally pious. On the whole, therefore, to believe in God, to believe that He wrote
a book, - only one book in all these ages, - and to go to Church on Sunday is the
minimum of religion in Europe…Religion in India is a still more plastic term and may
mean anything from the heights of Yoga to strangling your fellowman and relieving him

26
India’s Rebirth, p.95. (Emphasis added) Letter 1910-1914: This is from manuscripts between these
years, in the first years of his stay at Pondicherry
27
JP's visit to an RSS camp, as told by Sita Ram Goel in "Perversion of India's Political Parlance"
http://www.voi.org/books/pipp/ch1.htm
of the worldly goods he may happen to be carrying with him…28 Briefly, however, it is
dharma or living religiously, the whole life being governed by religion. But again what
is living religiously? It means, in ordinary practice, living according to authority. The
authority generally accepted is the Shastra… The one superiority of average Indian
religion is that it does really reverence the genuine Bhakta or Sannyasin provided he
does not come with too strange a garb or too revolutionary an aspect… The average
Hindu is right in his conception of religion as dharma, to live according to holy rule; but
the holy rule is not a mass of fugitive and temporary customs, but this, to live for God in
oneself and others and not for oneself only, to make the whole life a sadhana the object
of which is to realise the Divine in the world by work, love and knowledge.”29

We may add that philosophy or metaphysics (a spiritual inquiry) concerns with the
ultimate general principles of life called Rita or Dharma, as experienced in the Veda,
Upanishads and Gita while Religion concerns with individual particularities, and
requirements, deduced from them, as applied in varying individual contexts of life.
There is no clash in Hinduism. Practices may change, evolve, replace one another,
without violating the general principles available for rational inquiry and verification in
individual lives. Nothing is hard, rigid, and frozen in Hinduism. The ethics-makers,
moral codifiers, law givers, emperors, lay-men, the learned and professionals are all
governed by it. There is nothing like “pure spirituality”, as opposed to all religious
practices, and exclusive of political governance, commerce, war-rules, administration,
jurisprudence and punishments for criminals.

Read this:
“You must understand that my mission is not to create Maths, ascetics and Sannyasis;
but to call back the souls of the strong to the Lila of Krishna and Kali.... Every ascetic
movement since the time of Buddha has left India weaker and for a very obvious reason.
Renunciation of life is one thing, to make life itself, national, individual, world-life
greater and more divine is another. You cannot enforce one ideal on the country without
weakening the other. You cannot take away the best souls from life and yet leave life
stronger and greater. Renunciation of ego, acceptance of God in life is the Yoga I
teach,—no other renunciation.”30

The RSS is an eminent answer to the fulfilment of this kshatra (militant) element of
Dharma, to balance the other spiritual-pursuit aspect individually and collectively. Sri
Krishna embodied both aspects in Him, as the Gita shows. Illustrius examples abound in
the Hindu Epics and Puranas. Sri Aurobindo has already been quoted to show he wanted
not only a Ramadas, but also a Shivaji!
Mr. Objector! Where are you driving in the wilderness of your confused thoughts?
Whom are you trying to fool?

See this sarcastic comment on the Ramakrishna Mutt ascetics increasingly taking to
‘withdrawal’ instead of trying to protect Hindu interests in the wake of grave

28
This may be an allusion to the Kapalikas, Bhairavas and other tribal forms of worship where they
waylay people, rob, and offer part of the earnings to crude conceptions of God as ‘killer’. But you can’t
damn Yoga or higher forms for this. As George Santayana puts it: “If religion is profound it becomes
obscure; if simple profane”. Perfect religion is perfect spirituality. You cannot condemn Hindus for
Christian or Islamic barbarities in the name of God and damn all religion as unspiritual.
29
India’s Rebirth, p.68-70. Early 1910
30
India’s Rebirth, p.106-107. Letter to Sri Motilal Roy, Sep 1914
provocation and communal clashes. Let alone action or support! They are deadly silent
and mortally afraid of saying a word in support of Hindus morally and mentally.

Read this:
“The work that was begun at Dakshineswar is far from finished, it is not even
understood. That which Vivekananda received and strove to develop, has not yet
materialised.”31

I do not understand why our objector is afraid of the term religion! See this explanation
of Sri Aurobindo:

“The religious culture which now goes by the name of Hinduism…gave itself no name,
because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no
sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a
creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the Godward endeavour of the
human spirit. An immense many-sided many-staged provision for a spiritual self-
building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew,
the eternal religion, sanâtana dharma.”32

Mr. Objector, what is your argument against striving to make this our national Dharma,
and later on world-Dharma? How is this ‘revivalist’ or “a particular manifestation of
Hinduism” or “an absurdity” as you dismiss it? Do you have an alternative? Come out
with it please, if there is one!

Read this also:

“Spirituality…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.”33

31
India’s Rebirth, p.76. We have quoted Sita Ram Goel to the same effect earlier. Swamy Vivekananda
proudly called himself a “Hindoo Sanyasi”, as the servant of the Hindu community. See Aurobindo’s
drive and direction, to see for yourself whether he’s a secularist or a nationalist (emphasis added).
32
India’s Rebirth, p.145-146.
33
India’s Rebirth, p.139. Nov 1918
Chapter 4: On Education, and the Place of Sanskrit in it
This is for Mr. Arjun Singh or someone else better in his place to note and follow:

Read this:
“The country has yet to evolve a system of education which shall be really national. The
taint of occidental ideals and alien and unsuitable methods has to be purged out of our
minds, and nowhere more than in the teaching which should be the foundation of
intellectual and aesthetic renovation. The spirit of old Indian Art must be revived, the
inspiration and directness of vision which even now subsists among the possessors of
the ancient traditions, the inborn skill and taste of the race, the dexterity of the Indian
hand and the intuitive gaze of the Indian eye must be recovered and the whole nation
lifted again to the high level of the ancient culture and higher.”34

Is this revivalism? Nationalism? Cultural Universalism? Spiritual education envisaged

for everyone’s betterment? Or is it anti-secularism? Sectarianism? ‘Religiosity’ as the
objector says? On the role of India had to play in the world-betterment in spiritual,
cultural, educational and aesthetic terms, in the job of what Vivekananda called man-
making, see these emphatic words of Sri Aurobindo:
“But in Europe and India, alike, we seem to stand on the threshold of a vast revolution,
political, social and religious. Whatever nation now is the first to solve the problems
which are threatening to hammer governments, creeds, societies into pieces all the
world over, will lead the world in the age that is coming. It is our ambition that India
should be that nation. But in order that she should be what we wish, it is necessary that
she should be capable of unsparing revolution. She must have the courage of her past
knowledge and the immensity of soul that will measure itself with her future.”35

Note: Nearly a century ago here is Sri Aurobindo visualising for our country a new
world-leadership, unique and in agreement with her capacity, potential, culture, temper
and in keeping with historically past experiments and precedents. Our leader must wake
up to the new Western challenges, give up succumbing to their world domination
programmes, assert themselves in not only cultural matters, but also science,
technology, space-craft, defence and the now world-wide phenomenon of Information
Technology and Business management. Some of these fields never could have been
imagined when Sri Aurobindo wrote these words. But it is testimony to his prophethood
that conditions are being created where dreams can be fulfilled, if statesmanship and
patriotism can still be possessed or acquired by our leaders, by shedding the tendency
for mere imitation. There were people, however, like Nehru, who understood by
‘Revolution’ more Westernisation, more contempt for our own resources, our own self-
identity, more imitation, more uprooting. This was the way the country was fooled of
‘modernisation’. Even Gandhi was bamboozled to believe that Nehru was his ‘heir’-
apparent, as if the country was some kind of Joint Jahgir or Inam between them. Gandhi
was no one to appoint or anoint Nehru in this regard. His prophesy: “He will speak my
34
India’s Rebirth, p.67. (Dec. 25, 1909) See how these words are charged with an unparalleled
enthusiasm for the reconstruction and recreation of the Hindu model of education, as the panacea for all
the ills affecting us today.
35
India’s Rebirth, p.72. (Feb. 19, 1910) Sri Aurobindo is not talking of abortive revolutions like the
Soviet or Chinese Communist experiments. He is talking of ‘revolution’ in the sense of advancement in
Man-making processes and conditions congenial for them. Few could understand it, then. But now?
language” was a complete flop, as the two talked totally different languages – Gandhi
speaking of Hinduism, to the little extent he knew of it, was proud of, and lived its
values and Nehru speaking of socialism, Westernisation in complete contempt for
Hinduism or what it stood for, and in total ignorance of its infinite and unfathomable
potentialities to solve its own problems as well as those of the rest of the world! Gandhi
was fooled completely and overpowered through mean tactics by Nehru and his coterie,
to usurp the rightful place of Sardar Patel as the first P.M., both by legitimacy and
consensus in tragic circumstances which are described identically by the biographers of
all these three leaders. That is another story. But it happened in spite of Sri Aurobindo’s
strong optimism, and clear visualisation of such opportunity for world leadership for our
country. On the world scene, then or now, nobody invites you to take over the
leadership. It happens – and happens in all sorts of ways! A thief and vagabond like
Robert Clive laid the foundations of the British Empire, accidentally! Nobody expected
Britain to lead for three centuries. Seafarers and pirates like Vasco da Gama, Columbus
and others similarly made histories for their countries for a while. Hitler came like a
bolt from the blue and tried the idea of German world-leadership for a while, to fail.
Among such failed world leaders we can include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini and
other present day American presidents. War-machinery, science potential, wealth,
power of mercantile organisations, trade tactics alone cannot produce leaderships to
endure, be successful and benefit the rest of the world. Spiritual power alone is the most
essential requirement.

See these words:

“How shall we recover our lost intellectual freedom and elasticity? By reversing, for a
time at least, the process by which we lost it, by liberating our minds in all subjects
from thraldom to authority. That is not what reformers and the Anglicised require of us.
They ask us, indeed, to abandon authority, to revolt against custom and superstition, to
have free and enlightened minds. But they mean by these sounding recommendations
that we should renounce the authority of Sayana for the authority of Max Muller, the
Monoism of Shankara for the Monoism of Haeckel, the written Shastra for the
unwritten law of European social opinion, the dogmatism of Brahmin Pandits for the
dogmatism of European scientists, thinkers and scholars. Such a foolish exchange of
servitude can receive the assent of no self-respecting mind. Let us break our chains,
venerable as they are, but let it be in order to be free, - in the name of truth, not in the
name of Europe. It would be a poor bargain to exchange our old Indian illuminations,
however dark they may have grown to us, for a derivative European enlightenment or
replace the superstitions of popular Hinduism by the superstitions of materialistic
Science... Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the
world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,—to think on all subjects, to think
independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free
of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword,
smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima…”36

This is the focus Sri Aurobindo wants for the education of youth in this country. A job
which we have not even begun! Again see this emphatic, prophetic vision:
”I am convinced and have long been convinced that a spiritual awakening to the true
self of the nation is the most important condition of our national greatness…India, if she
chooses, can guide the world. I quite agree with you that our social fabric will have to

36
India’s Rebirth, p.87-88.
be considerably altered before long… our past with all its faults and defects should be
sacred to us… but the claims of our future with its immediate possibilities should be
still more sacred.” “I believe also that humanity is about to enlarge its scope by new
knowledge, new powers and capacities, which will create as great a revolution in human
life as the physical science of the nineteenth century. Here, too, India holds in her past, a
little rusted and put out of use, the key of humanity’s future.”37

Sanskrit
Our objector has said enough number of ‘good for nothing’ things, to escape being
branded as anti-Hindu. For example he refers to the Shah Bano case and the way the
Muslim community behaved in pressurising the parliament to undo a Supreme Court
order. (Nothing is gained on this now.) He mentions Article 370, and the plight of
Kashmiri pandits, Christian and Muslim conversions-spree unchecked, uniform civil
code, its necessity, Godhra and its aftermath, the partiality or the ruling junta and the
press. Not to agree with general public opinion in this regard would be risky. But it
fools no one.

But he condemns Astrology being prescribed as a course of study in some universities,

observance of Ganesha festival with pomp and grandeur, cry for cow-protection, as
‘revivalist’ without realising their organisational value or practical daily use or effects.
He makes much of Hindu tolerance in the face of mass-massacres by Muslim terrorists
of international networks and wants Hindus, to take them as we have been tolerating all
these days, in Gandhian ways, and continue to suffer as ever before. He has no
solutions. For they are not readily available for him for approval, like reaction in the
wake of Rama Janma Bhoomi uprisals, Godhra post-mortem, and he is perhaps not sure
of what side to take. See this advice for Hindus: “I would be the last person to suggest
we emulate Israel in this respect.”38

Would you not be, sir! I pity you. Is this the spirit of Sri Aurobindo? Or is this Congress
ideology or policy? A legacy of Gandhi-Nehru foolishness clamped on unthinking
populace?

Let us get it right and see Jewish history. Israel was once their homeland. Jerusalem
their town of worship. They believed themselves as the chosen race of God; but did not
believe in proselytisation or conversion. They did not impose their concepts of God,
Heaven and Hell on others. Then came their conquest by Egyptians. They were captured
and sold as slaves as drawers of water and hewers of wood and stone. Their lands were
taken away. Then came the Christian menace. The so called “Jesus” was crucified by
Roman rulers against whom, these Christian rebels had organised revolts by forming
secret societies. The wily Christians put the blame on the innocent Jews; the Jewish
punishment was of pelting stones on traitors! But this misconception is still ruling the
roost. Christians despised the Jews and pictured them as Devil’s disciplines, even in
plays (The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice bear proof). Then came the
Muslim deluge, the Muslim avalanche. The holy prophet himself massacred thousands
of them for not following him.

37
India’s Rebirth, p.110.
38
The Current Hindu Upsurge in Sri Aurobindo’s Light – Mangesh Nadkarni, p.8.
The Jews became an emaciated community; their numbers dwindled, they scattered to
save themselves, their lands were taken away. They remained a race without a land of
their own (like our Sindhi brethren today) and took refuge in Germany and other
countries. Their industriousness, self-confidence, power of endurance and love of peace
enriched the lands where they settled. Then came Hitler to hound them out! Mr.
Objector sir, you would have known how many millions of them were killed in the gas
chambers of Hitler! Would you not want justice for the Jews?

After the Second World War, the Allies resettled them in Israel, which is still not to the
liking of Arab countries.

But listen; a man called Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858 – 1922) worked for the revival of
Hebrew, a language which the Jews, as they were scattered all over the world, could no
longer use as their spoken language; he dedicated himself to this ‘lost’ cause, to make it
once again a spoken language, by starting newspapers in that language, by bringing out
a dictionary in 12 volumes, by creating new words where there was need, by
encouraging conversations, and all else that was needed! A dead language was again
brought to life, long before Israel attained freedom. His own people opposed it under
the superstition that only gods should speak their language! But he took up this
challenge. Today Israel has regained its language, its freedom, its pride, its might and its
due place in the international world.39

Under Nehru and Congress we did not have the courage even to recognise Israel as a
state! That would displease the Arab lords!! That was our fear. The NDA government
dared to break this taboo.

Would you still be “the last person to suggest we emulate Israel”, Mr. Objector? How
eccentric of you! How inhuman of you! I pity your weakness and fear!

Have we no lessons here? Can we not do a similar revival of Sanskrit in this country?

Read this from Sri Aurobindo:

“Each language is the sign and power of the soul of the people, which naturally speaks
it. Each develops therefore its own peculiar spirit, thought-temperament, way of dealing
with life and knowledge and experience… A nation, race or people, which loses its
language, cannot live its whole life or its real life. And this advantage to the national life
is at the same time an advantage to the general life of the human race.”40

“Sanskrit ought still to have a future as the language of the learned and it will not be a
good day for India when the ancient tongues cease entirely to be written or spoken (yet
Sanskrit, the only language that was ever used over the whole of India and one best
expressive of her spirit and richness, is today on the way to extinction, its study
discouraged in both North and South India).”41

What is possible for Israel should be possible for India, at least now.

39
Read in Kannada, Matte Hottitu Hebrew Hanate (The lamp of Hebrews was lit up again) by Dr. H.R.
Viswas, pub. Rashtrotthana Parishat, Bangalore 2006
40
India’s Rebirth, p.129-130. Dec 1917
41
India’s Rebirth, p.118. Mar 1916
Conclusion
I generally ignore unintelligent attacks on any programme of Hindu reconstruction of
society, Hindu-resurgence, and the need to rebuild a strong Hindu nation, which
accommodates all peace lovers, and believers in coexistence.

But when ‘knowledgeable’ people in responsible positions, (but in fear, inhibition and
suffering from inferiority complex) make bold to exhibit their ignorance publicly as a
form of ‘knowledge’ or ‘enlightenment’ I generally do not keep quiet. That was how I
started my 10 volumes scheme on Introducing the Culture of the Vedas (in Kannada) in
1973, and have authored over 85 books to date in languages I know to read and write.
Some students of the Sanskrit department of Karnataka university came to me for help
to write a seminar paper on the famous “Gambler’s Hymn” that year. I was deeply
under the spell of Sri Aurobindo by then, in addition to mastering of the Veda in a
traditional style, both in recitation and interpretation. Sri Aurobindo was my light and
delight then and now. I helped in deciphering the symbolic meaning of the hymn and
guided the boys. When the paper was presented, the professor was all fury-incarnate for
violating the great “orientalists” (Max Muller, Kagi, Peterson, Wilson, Griffith and
others) and striking a ‘new’ path. He threatened he would fail them if they attempted
‘originality’ or resorted to traditional or ‘outrageous’ meanings that nobody had
discovered. He then asked for the source of ‘mischief’, came to know of me, came to
me and warned: “Look, you are a professor of English Literature. Sanskrit is no
business of yours. Veda is not your chosen field. Do not misguide my students”.

I told him of similar confrontations between Sri Aurobindo and Dr. Radhakrishnan! I
asked him: “Do you encourage mugging up, and inheriting western prejudices even in
matters of Veda?”

He fumbled for words and failed. Ultimately I won and he said: “Your interpretations
might be right; I may agree in private. But publicly Western authorities I respect. They
are the quotable quotes in exams; not your native meanings.”

I asked him: “If I also write books of reference, would you agree with me, uphold my
right to views and being quoted?”

He said grumblingly: “By all means”, and disappeared! Dr. Bendre encouraged me in
all my later endeavours and I authored tomes not only on the Vedas but on Ramayana,
Mahabharata, Bhagavata, Bhagavad Gita, Alwars and books on Indological studies.

I hope our present Objector will also see reason, one day, come round, and change his
pervert views of Sri Aurobindo, and not act as an impediment between him and the
general reading public, in a true understanding of the true spirit of the master and what
he stood for really.

I have quoted from one source only in this write up, generally not much known to the
Aurobindo readers. But I can show similar proof from his other better known works
also, if need be.
We cannot quote Aurobindo against himself! Can we? Let the wise readers decide for
themselves what Sri Aurobindo really stood for, and his programme for us today in this
country.
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