Volume VII, Issue 1
Author: Beloo Mehra
In his writings on National Education, Sri Aurobindo reminds us that our efforts to rebuild a New India must be on the lines of the living spirit of the nation, her innate genius, the nation-soul of India. Our concern should not be about a conflict between modernism and antiquity, but rather between “an imported civilisation and the greater possibilities of the Indian mind and nature, not between the present and the past, but between the present and the future” (CWSA, 1: 420). As children belonging to Noons of the Future, we must move forward to our own “greater innate potentialities that is demanded by the soul, by the Shakti of India”.
Sri Aurobindo emphasises that it is an “old and effete superstition of the reason” which believes that the mind of man is the same everywhere and hence it can be prepared everywhere and cut to order uniformly using similar methods. He speaks of the mind of a nation, the soul of a people as an intermediate power, between the universal mind and soul of humanity and the mind and soul of the individual in its infinite variation. A meaningful education must take account of all three as it works towards a true building or a living evocation of the powers of the mind and spirit of the human being.
Launching of a fortnightly paper called Mother India in 1949 was one of the ways to disseminate the The New Ideal that Sri Aurobindo placed before a New India that was raising itself to a new light after a long dark night of colonial rule. India’s rise was never meant for India alone, but before she could give to the world her spiritual light she had to discover it for herself. This was the work she had to do for the coming New Age.
The specific aim of Mother India was to examine all concerns and problems related to the multi-faceted contemporary life and explore solutions in the light of the highest spiritual ideal of integrating matter and spirit. In the very first issue (February 19, 1949, Vol. 1, Issue 1, p. 1), Amal Kiran, the editor, described the paper’s objectives under the title ‘What is Mother India?’ The most remarkable part of this writing is that it also provides a to-the-point description of the essence of Mother India, Ma Bharati – “the face and form of our presiding genius”. In the feature titled Mother India, a Spiritual Light read an extract from this writing.
In our exploration of The New Ideal given to us by Sri Aurobindo, we must revisit one of the most important writings of Sri Aurobindo, The Hour of God, circa 1918. We reproduce a a brief but inspiring commentary on these deeply revelatory words of the Master. Norman Dowsett wrote this for the 1955 issue of the annual journal Sri Aurobindo Circle (pp. 115-117).
As the new and rising India continues to wake up to the timeless truths of her heritage and carefully re-examine their significance in the contemporary world, it is also walking steadily on the path to discover erased or forgotten chapters of her more recent history. For instance, new India refuses to believe that freedom was won by ahimsa alone, and has been steadily bringing to light the immense role played by revolutionaries of many hues in India’s long struggle for freedom from the British colonial rule. We present a review of recent book by Sanjeev Sanyal titled Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom by Ashish Iyer, a new author to join Renaissance team.
Literature and Nation
Literature, like other creative pursuits, can be an important medium to orient the society towards a higher new vision, a greater ideal. It can also progressively shape the collective mind through its sustained influence. Sri Aurobindo spoke of “the awakening and stimulating influence” of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee on the national mind. “Young Bengal gets its ideas, feelings and culture not from schools and colleges, but from Bankim’s novels and Robindranath Tagore’s poems”, he once wrote (CWSA 1: 118).
About Bankim’s immense contribution to Bengali language and literature, Sri Aurobindo remarked that he “divined the linguistic need of his country’s future” (CWSA, 1: 639). Through his pen Bengali language became a means “of expression capable of change and expansion” and “by which the soul of Bengal could express itself to itself”. Bankim gave to his country the religion of patriotism through his characters who were workers and fighters for the motherland, who demonstrated immense moral strength, self-discipline and organisational capabilities, and infused religious feeling into their patriotic work. “Of the new spirit which is leading the nation to resurgence and independence, he is the inspirer and political guru,” wrote Sri Aurobindo (CWSA, 1: 640).
The essay titled Woman and Nation in ‘Rajmohan’s Wife’ in the current issue highlights Bankim’s poetic style, vivid imagery, and nuanced portrayal of feminine character, particularly Matangini, whose inner conflict symbolizes India’s struggle between tradition and modernity. Drawing on Meenakshi Mukherjee’s and Makarand Paranjpe’s analyses, the essay interprets the novel as an allegory of emerging national consciousness, emphasizing its relevance to India’s ongoing quest for cultural integration and progress. A longer version of this article was first published in New Race: A Journal of Integral and Future Studies, April 2015, Volume I (1), pp. 54-59. Read it in the current issue in two parts: PART 1 & PART 2.
We feature an imagined conversation among three female characters from three of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novels. Excerpted from the original Bengali writing of Nolini Kanta Gupta, it is available in his Complete Works in Bengali, Volume 3 (pp. 149-153) in the section titled, Mriter Kathopokathan, ‘Conversations of the Dead’. Narendra Murty has translated it into English.
Bankim’s Heroines: A Conversation Translated from Bengali presents an evolving view of a woman’s personal understanding of her rightful place and work in the context of family and the larger society and nation. What is her duty, her responsibility, her dharma? Towards her self, her husband and her home, her nation, and her inner truth? What is the ideal relation – if an ideal is possible – between a woman and a man in the conjugal context? Readers will find in this conversation a range of viewpoints which help explore these questions in their complexity and inherent diversity.
According to Sri Aurobindo, an individual “is not merely a social unit” (CWSA, 25: 24). Our societal role, work and function alone do not determine our individual existence, right and claim to live and grow. An individual is a soul within, a deeper being who must fulfil his or her own individual truth and law as well as his or her natural or assigned part in the truth and law of the collective existence.
But just “as the society has no right in suppressing the individual in its own interest, so also the individual, in Sri Aurobindo’s view, has no right to disregard the legitimate claims of society upon him in order to seek his own selfish aims” (Kishor Gandhi, Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the New Age, p. 67). Thus, it is important to understand the level of consciousness from which an individual’s ‘choice’ is arising.
Any call for ‘freedom of choice’ becomes, in the light of an integral spiritual perspective on human development, a much wider, higher and deeper movement of the human spirit – progressively evolving and expressing itself through physical-vital to rational to deeper subjective levels of consciousness. Also, this view does not leave out the truth of the larger collective life, starting from family to nation and beyond. Hence, choice does not remain merely an aggressively individualistic notion in this deeper view, but integrates within itself the necessity for a harmonious co-existence and interdependent growth of individual and the collective.
An awakened woman, one who is awakened to the shakti that she is in her essence, one who is awakened to the call of her inner progress and evolution, will feel more and more empowered as she begins to recognise within herself the working of the Four Great Powers – Wisdom, Courage, Harmony and Perfection – through which the Force of the Mahashakti, the Divine Mother, works and manifests in all. The corresponding Indian names of these Four Great Powers that Sri Aurobindo invokes in his powerful work titled The Mother are: Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati.
This imagined conversation, featured in the current issue, between Shanti, Suryamukhi and Kapalkundala magnificently illustrates many of these aspects. The small explanatory note by the translator will be helpful for those unfamiliar with these characters.
Science and Spirituality
We continue our ongoing series by Jugal Kishore Mukherji on Science and Spirituality: An Unnecessary Antimony and a Harmonious Reconciliation. In part 3, the author emphasises that an integral spirituality harmonises all knowledge and all experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness. It ordains man to cross beyond death through avidyā and enjoy Immortality by the Knowledge, avidyayā mṛtyuṁ tīrtvā vidyayā’mṛtamaśnute.
To its vision, Matter too is Brahman, annam brahma, and so it does not seek to annul or deny the positive knowledge which Science has gathered from an elaborate investigation and exploration of the processes of life and nature. It only completes it by pointing out that the true foundation is above while the branchings are downward, so that to know the essential truth of things as distinguished from their phenomenal appearances, one has to probe upward and inward instead of remaining content with only surface scrutiny.
Preeti Mahurkar joins Renaissance authors team, and in her debut piece titled Science and Spirituality: A Tango of Spirit and Matter reminds us of the profound difference between recent attempts to unite science and spirituality and the Integral vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Unlike the scientists, the Supramental Yogins Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were not content to explain reality; they sought to transform it, to work for the divinisation of life on Earth.
We hope our readers will enjoy going through the various offerings in this issue. As always, we offer this work at the lotus feet of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
In gratitude,
Beloo Mehra (for Renaissance Editorial Team)
