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The most general charge against Indian culture in its practical effects
can be dismissed without any serious difficulty.
The critic with whom I have to deal has, in fact, spoiled his case by
the spirit of frantic exaggeration in which he writes. To say that there
has been no great or vivid activity of life in India, that she has had
no great personalities with the mythical exception of Buddha and the
other pale exception of Asoka, that she has never shown any will-power
and never done any great thing, is so contrary to all the facts of history
that only a devil's advocate in search of a case could advance it at
all or put it with that crude vehemence. India has lived and lived greatly,
whatever judgment one may pass on her ideas and institutions. What is
meant after all by life and when is it that we most fully and greatly
live? Life is surely nothing but the creation and active self-expression
of man's spirit, powers, capacities, his will to be and think and create
and love and do and achieve. When that is wanting or, since it cannot
be absolutely wanting, depressed, held under, discouraged or inert,
whether by internal or external causes, then we may say that there is
a lack of life. Life in its largest sense is the great web of our internal
and external action, the play of Shakti, the play of Karma; it is religion
and philosophy and thought and science and poetry and art, drama and
song and dance and play, politics and society, industry, commerce and
trade, adventure and travel, war and peace, conflict and unity, victory
and defeat and aspirations and vicissitudes, the thoughts, emotions,
words, deeds, joys and sorrows which make up the existence of man. In
a narrower sense life is sometimes spoken of as the more obvious and
external vital action, a thing which can be depressed by a top-heavy
intellectuality or ascetic spirituality, sicklied over with the pale
cast of thought or the paler cast of world-weariness or made flat, stale
and uninteresting by a formalised, conventional or too strait-laced
system of society. Again, life may be very active and full of colour
for a small and privileged part of the community, but the life of the
mass dull, void and miserable. Or, finally, there may be all the ordinary
materials and circumstances of mere living, but if life is not uplifted
by great hopes, aspirations and ideals, then we may well say that the
community does not really live; it is defective in the characteristic
greatness of the human spirit.
The ancient and mediaeval life of India was not wanting in any of the
things that make up the vivid interesting activity of human existence.
On the contrary, it was extraordinarily full of colour and interest.
Mr. Archer's criticism on this point, a criticism packed full of ignorance
and built up by a purely fictitious construction of what things logically
ought to have been on the theory of a dominating asceticism and belief
in the illusionary character of the world, is not and cannot be borne
out by anyone who has come close to the facts. It is true that while
many European writers who have studied the history of the land and the
people, have expressed strongly their appreciation of the vividness
and interesting fullness, colour and beauty of life in India before
the present period, - that unhappily exists no longer except in the
pages of history and literature and the broken or crumbling fragments
of the past, - those who see only from a distance or fix their eyes
only on one aspect, speak of it often as a land of metaphysics, philosophies,
dreams and brooding imaginations, and certain artists and writers are
apt to write in a strain as if it were a country of the Arabian Nights,
a mere glitter of strange hues and fancies and marvels. But on the contrary
India has been as much a home of serious and solid realities, of a firm
grappling with the problems of thought and life, of measured and wise
organisation and great action as any other considerable centre of civilisation.
The widely different view these perceptions express simply show the
many-sided brilliance and fullness of her life. The colour and magnificence
have been its aesthetic side; she has had great dreams and high and
splendid imaginations, for that too is wanted for the completeness of
our living; but also deep philosophical and religious thinking, a wide
and searching criticism of life, a great political and social order,
a strong ethical tone and a persistent vigour of individual and communal
living. That is a combination which means life in all its fullness,
though deficient, it may be, except in extraordinary cases, in the more
violent egoistic perversities and exaggerations which some minds seem
to take for a proof of the highest vigour of existence.
In what field indeed has not India attempted, achieved, created, and
in all on a large scale and yet with much attention to completeness
of detail? Of her spiritual and philosophic achievement there can be
no real question. They stand there as the Himalayas stand upon the earth
in the phrase of Kalidasa, prithivyâ iva mânadaNDdaH, “as
if earth's measuring rod,” mediating still between earth and heaven,
measuring the finite, casting their plummet far into the infinite, plunging
their extremities into the upper and lower seas of the superconscient
and the subliminal, the spiritual and the natural being. But if her
philosophies, her religious disciplines, her long list of great spiritual
personalities, thinkers, founders, saints are her greatest glory, as
was natural to her temperament and governing idea, they are by no means
her sole glories, nor are the others dwarfed by their eminence. It is
now proved that in science she went farther than any country before
the modern era, and even Europe owes the beginning of her physical science
to India as much as to Greece, although not directly but through the
medium of the Arabs. And, even if she had only gone as far, that would
have been sufficient proof of a strong intellectual life in an ancient
culture. Especially in mathematics, astronomy and chemistry, the chief
elements of ancient science, she discovered and formulated much and
well and anticipated by force of reasoning or experiment some of the
scientific ideas and discoveries which Europe first arrived at much
later, but was able to base more firmly by her new and completer method.
She was well-equipped in surgery and her system of medicine survives
to this day and has still its value, though it declined intermediately
in knowledge and is only now recovering its vitality.
In literature, in the life of the mind, she lived and built greatly.
Not only has she the Vedas, Upanishads and Gita, not to speak of less
supreme but still powerful or beautiful work in that field, unequalled
monuments of religious and philosophic poetry, a kind in which Europe
has never been able to do anything much of any great value, but that
vast national structure, the Mahabharata, gathering into its cycle the
poetic literature and expressing so completely the life of a long formative
age, that it is said of it in a popular saying which has the justice
if also the exaggeration of a too apt epigram, “What is not in
this Bharata, is not in Bharatavarsha (India),” and the Ramayana,
the greatest and most remarkable poem of its kind, that most sublime
and beautiful epic of ethical idealism and a heroic semi-divine human
life, and the marvellous richness, fullness and colour of the poetry
and romance of highly cultured thought, sensuous enjoyment, imagination,
action and adventure which makes up the romantic literature of her classical
epoch. Nor did this long continuous vigour of creation cease with the
loss of vitality by the Sanskrit tongue, but was paralleled and carried
on in a mass of great or of beautiful work in her other languages, in
Pali first and Prakrit, much unfortunately lost, and Tamil, afterwards
in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and other tongues. The long tradition of
her architecture, sculpture and painting speaks for itself, even in
what survives after all the ruin of stormy centuries: whatever judgment
may be formed of it by the narrower school of Western aesthetics, -
and at least its fineness of execution and workmanship cannot be denied,
nor the power with which it renders the Indian mind, - it testifies
at least to a continuous creative activity. And creation is proof of
life and great creation of greatness of life.
But these things are, it may be said, the things of the mind, and the
intellect, imagination and aesthetic mind of India may have been creatively
active, but yet her outward life depressed, dull, poor, gloomy with
the hues of asceticism, void of will-power and personality, ineffective,
null. That would be a hard proposition to swallow; for literature, art
and science do not flourish in a void of life. But here too what are
the facts? India has not only had the long roll of her great saints,
sages, thinkers, religious founders, poets, creators, scientists, scholars,
legists; she has had her great rulers, administrators, soldiers, conquerors,
heroes, men with the strong active will, the mind that plans and the
seeing force that builds. She has warred and ruled, traded and colonised
and spread her civilisation, built polities and organised communities
and societies, done all that makes the outward activity of great peoples.
A nation tends to throw out its most vivid types in that line of action
which is most congenial to its temperament and expressive of its leading
idea, and it is the great saints and religious personalities that stand
at the head in India and present the most striking and continuous roll-call
of greatness, just as Rome lived most in her warriors and statesmen
and rulers. The Rishi in ancient India was the outstanding figure with
the hero just behind, while in later times the most striking feature
is the long uninterrupted chain from Buddha and Mahavira to Ramanuja,
Chaitanya, Nanak, Ramdas and Tukaram and beyond them to Ramakrishna
and Vivekananda and Dayananda. But there have been also the remarkable
achievements of statesmen and rulers, from the first dawn of ascertainable
history which comes in with the striking figures of Chandragupta, Chanakya,
Asoka, the Gupta emperors and goes down through the multitude of famous
Hindu and Mahomedan figures of the middle age to quite modern times.
In ancient India there was the life of republics, oligarchies, democracies,
small kingdoms of which no detail of history now survives, afterwards
the long effort at empire-building, the colonisation of Ceylon and the
Archipelago, the vivid struggles that attended the rise and decline
of the Pathan and Mogul dynasties, the Hindu struggle for survival in
the south, the wonderful record of Rajput heroism and the great upheaval
of national life in Maharashtra penetrating to the lowest strata of
society, the remarkable episode of the Sikh Khalsa. An adequate picture
of that outward life still remains to be given; once given it would
be the end of many fictions.
All this mass of action was not accomplished by men without mind and
will and vital force, by pale shadows of humanity in whom the vigorous
manhood had been crushed out under the burden of a gloomy and all-effacing
asceticism, nor does it look like the sign of a metaphysically minded
people of dreamers averse to life and action. It was not men of straw
or lifeless and will-less dummies or thin-blooded dreamers who thus
acted, planned, conquered, built great systems of administration, founded
kingdoms and empires, figured as great patrons of poetry and art and
architecture or, later, resisted heroically imperial power and fought
for the freedom of clan or people. Nor was it a nation devoid of life
which maintained its existence and culture and still lived on and broke
out constantly into new revivals under the ever increasing stress of
continuously adverse circumstances. The modern Indian revival, religious,
cultural, political, called now sometimes a renaissance, which so troubles
and grieves the minds of her critics, is only a repetition under altered
circumstances, in an adapted form, in a greater though as yet less vivid
mass of movement, of a phenomenon which has constantly repeated itself
throughout a millennium of Indian history.
And it must be remembered that by virtue of its culture and its system
the whole nation shared in the common life. In all countries in the
past the mass has indeed lived with a less active and vivid force than
the few, - sometimes with the mere elements of life, not with even any
beginning of finished richness,- - nor has modern civilisation yet got
rid of this disparity, though it has opened the advantages or at least
the initial opportunities of a first-hand life and thought and knowledge
to a greater number. But in ancient India, though the higher classes
led and had the lion's share of the force and wealth of life, the people
too lived and until much later times intensely though on a lesser scale
and with a more diffused and less concentrated force. Their religious
life was more intense than that of any other country; they drank in
with remarkable facility the thoughts of the philosophers and the influence
of the saints; they heard and followed Buddha and the many who came
after him; they were taught by the Sannyasins and sang the songs of
the Bhaktas and Bauls and thus possessed some of the most delicate and
beautiful poetical literature ever produced; they contributed many of
the greatest names in our religion, and from the outcastes themselves
came saints revered by the whole community. In ancient Hindu times they
had their share of political life and power; they were the people, the
vishaH of the Veda, of whom the kings were the leaders and from them
as well as from the sacred or princely families were born the Rishis;
they held their villages as little self-administered republics; in the
time of the great kingdoms and empires they sat in the municipalities
and urban councils and the bulk of the typical royal Council described
in the books of political science was composed of commoners, Vaishyas,
and not of Brahmin Pundits and Kshatriya nobles; for a long time they
could impose their will on their kings, without the need of a long struggle,
by a single demonstration of their displeasure. So long as Hindu kingdoms
existed, something of all this survived, and even the entrance into
India of central Asian forms of absolutist despotism, never an indigenous
Indian growth, left some remnant of the old edifice still in being.
The people had their share too in art and poetry, their means by which
the essence of Indian culture was disseminated through the mass, a system
of elementary education in addition to the great universities of ancient
times, a type of popular dramatic representation which was in some parts
of the country alive even yesterday; they gave India her artists and
architects and many of the famous poets in the popular tongues; they
preserved by the force of their long past culture an innate aesthetic
sense and faculty of which the work of Indian craftsmen remained a constant
and striking evidence until it was destroyed or degraded by the vulgarisation
and loss of aesthetic sense and beauty which has been one of the results
of modern civilisation. Nor was the life of India ascetic, gloomy or
sad, as the too logical mind of the critic would have it be. The outward
form is more quiet than in other countries, there is a certain gravity
and reserve before strangers which deceives the foreign observer, and
in recent times asceticism and poverty and an increase of puritanic
tendency had their effect, but the life portrayed in the literature
of the country is glad and vivid, and even now despite certain varieties
of temperament and many forces making for depression laughter, humour,
an unobtrusive elasticity and equanimity in the vicissitudes of life
are very marked features of the Indian character.
The whole theory of a want of life and will and activity in the Indian
people as a result of their culture is then a myth.
The circumstances which have given some colour to it in later times
will be noted in their proper place; but they are a feature of the decline
and even then must be taken with considerable qualification, and the
much longer history of its past greatness tells quite another story.
That history has not been recorded in the European fashion; for the
art of history and biography, though not entirely neglected, was never
brought to perfection in India, never sufficiently practised, nor does
any sustained record of the doings of kings and great men and peoples
before the Mussulman dynasties survive except in the one solitary instance
of Cashmere. This is certainly a defect and leaves a very serious gap.
India has lived much, but has not sat down to record the history of
her life. Her soul and mind have left their great monuments, but so
much as we know - and after all it is not little - of the rest, the
more outward things, remains or has emerged recently in spite of her
neglect; such exact records as she had, she has allowed to rust forgotten
or disappear. Perhaps what Mr. Archer really means when he tells us
that we have had no personalities in our history, is that they do not
come home to his mind because their doings and sayings are not minutely
recorded in the Western manner; their personality, will-power and creative
force emerge only in their work or in indicative tradition and anecdote
or in incomplete records. And very curiously, very fancifully this defect
has been set down to an ascetic want of interest in life; it is supposed
that India was so much absorbed in the eternal that she deliberately
despised and neglected time, so profoundly concentrated on the pursuit
of ascetic brooding and quietistic peace that she looked down on and
took no interest in the memory of action. That is another myth. The
same phenomenon of a lack of sustained and deliberate record appears
in other ancient cultures, but nobody suggests that Egypt, Assyria or
Persia have to be reconstructed for us by the archaeologists for an
analogous reason. The genius of Greece developed the art of history,
though only in the later period of her activity, and Europe has cherished
and preserved the art; India and other ancient civilisations did not
arrive at it or neglected its full development. It is a defect, but
there is no reason why we should go out of our way in this one case
to attribute it to a deliberate motive or to any lack of interest in
life. And in spite of the defect the greatness and activity of the past
life of India reveals itself and comes out in bolder relief the more
the inquiry into her past unearths the vast amount of material still
available.
But our critic will still have it that India lived as it were in spite
of herself and that in all this teeming action there is ample evidence
of the dwarfing of individual will and the absence of any great individual
personality. He arrives at that result by methods which savour of the
skill of the journalist or pamphleteer rather than the disinterested
mind of the critic.
He tells us for instance that India has contributed only one or at most
two great names to the world's Pantheon. By that, of course, he means
Europe's Pantheon, or the world's Pantheon as constructed by the mind
of Europe, crammed with the figures of Western history and achievement
which are near and familiar to it and admitting only a very few of the
more gigantic names from the distant East, those which it finds it most
difficult to ignore. One remembers the list made by a great French poet
in the field of literature in which a sounding string of French names
equals or outnumbers the whole contribution of the rest of Europe! If
an Indian were to set about the same task in the same spirit, he would
no doubt similarly pour out an interminable list of Indian names with
some great men of Europe and America, Arabia, Persia, China, Japan forming
a brief tail to this large peninsular body. These exercises of the partial
mentality have no value. And it is difficult to find out what measure
of values Mr. Archer is using when he relegates other great Indian names,
allowing for three or four only, to the second plan and even there belittles
them in comparison with corresponding European immortals. In what is
Shivaji with his vivid and interesting life and character, who not only
founded a kingdom but organised a nation, inferior to Cromwell, or Shankara
whose great spirit in the few years of its mortal life swept triumphant
through India and reconstituted the whole religious life of her peoples,
inferior as a personality to Luther? Why are Chanakya and Chandragupta
who laid down the form of empire-building in India and whose great administrative
system survived with changes often for the worse down to modern times,
lesser men than the rulers and statesmen of European history? India
may not present any recorded moment of her life so crowded as the few
years of Athens to which Mr. Archer makes appeal; she may have no parallel
to the swarm of interesting but often disturbing, questionable or even
dark and revolting figures which illuminate and stain the story of the
Italian cities during the Renaissance, although she has had too her
crowded moments thronged by figures of a different kind. But she has
had many rulers, statesmen and encouragers of art as great in their
own way as Pericles or Lorenzo di Medici; the personalities of her famed
poets emerge more dimly through the mist of time, but with indications
which point to a lofty spirit or a humanity as great as that of Aeschylus
or Euripides or a life-story as human and interesting as that of the
famous Italian poets. And if, comparing this one country with all Europe
as Mr. Archer insists, - mainly on the ground that Indians themselves
make the comparison when they speak of the size of the country, its
many races and the difficulty so long experienced in organising Indian
unity, - it may be that in the field of political and military action
Europe has a long lead, but what of the unparalleled profusion of great
spiritual personalities in which India is preeminent? Again Mr. Archer
speaks with arrogant depreciation of the significant figures born of
the creative Indian mind which people its literature and its drama.
Here too it is difficult to follow him or to accept his measure of values.
To an oriental mind at least Rama and Ravana are as vivid and great
and real characters as the personalities of Homer and Shakespeare, Sita
and Draupadi certainly not less living than Helen or Cleopatra, Damayanti
and Shakuntala and other feminine types not less sweet, gracious and
alive than Alcestis or Desdemona. I am not here affirming any superiority,
but the bottomless inequality and inferiority which this critic affirms
exists, not in truth, but only in his imagination or his way of seeing.
That perhaps is the one thing of significance, the one thing which is
really worth noting, the difference of mentality which is at the bottom
of these comparisons. There is not any inferiority of life or force
or active and reactive will but, as far as the sameness of human nature
allows, a difference of type, character, personality, let us say, an
emphasis in different and almost opposite directions. Will-power and
personality have not been wanting in India, but the direction preferably
given to them and the type most admired are of a different kind. The
average European mind is prone to value or at least to be more interested
in the egoistic or self-asserting will which insists upon itself with
a strong or a bold, an aggressive, sometimes a fierce insistence; the
Indian mind not only prizes more from the ethical standpoint, - that
is found everywhere, - but is more vividly interested in the calm, self-controlling
or even the self-effacing personality; for the effacement of egoism
seems to it to be not an effacement, but an enhancement of value and
power of the true person and its greatness. Mr. Archer finds Asoka pale
and featureless; to an Indian mind he is supremely vivid and attractive.
Why is Asoka to be called pale in comparison with Charlemagne or, let
us say, with Constantine? Is it because he only mentions his sanguinary
conquest of Kalinga in order to speak of his remorse and the turning
of his spirit, a sentiment which Charlemagne massacring the Saxons in
order to make good Christians of them could not in the least have understood,
nor any more perhaps the Pope who anointed him? Constantine gave the
victory to the Christian religion, but there is nothing Christian in
his personality; Asoka not only enthroned Buddhism, but strove though
not with a perfect success to follow the path laid down by Buddha. And
the Indian mind would account him not only a nobler will, but a greater
and more attracting personality than Constantine or Charlemagne. It
is interested in Chanakya, but much more interested in Chaitanya.
And in literature also just as in actual life it has the same turn.
This European mind finds Rama and Sita uninteresting and unreal, because
they are too virtuous, too ideal, too white in colour; but to the Indian
mind even apart from all religious sentiment they are figures of an
absorbing reality which appeal to the inmost fibres of our being. A
European scholar criticising the Mahabharata finds the strong and violent
Bhima the only real character in that great poem; the Indian mind on
the contrary finds greater character and a more moving interest in the
calm and collected heroism of Arjuna, in the fine ethical temperament
of Yudhisthira, in the divine charioteer of Kurukshetra who works not
for his own hand but for the founding of the kingdom of right and justice.
Those vehement or self-asserting characters or those driven by the storm
of their passions which make the chief interest of European epic and
drama, would either be relegated by it to the second plan or else, if
set in large proportions, so brought in in order to bring into relief
the greatness of the higher type of personality, as Ravana contrasts
with and sets off Rama. The admiration of the one kind of mentality
in the aesthetics of life goes to the coloured, that of the other to
the luminous personality. Or, to put it in the form of the distinction
made by the Indian mind itself, the interest of the one centres more
in the rajasic, that of the other in the sattwic will and character.
Whether this difference imposes an inferiority on the aesthetics of
Indian life and creation, each must judge for himself, but surely the
Indian is the more evolved and spiritual conception. The Indian mind
believes that the will and personality are not diminished but heightened
by moving from the rajasic or more coloured egoistic to the sattwic
and more luminous level of our being. Are not after all calm, self-mastery,
a high balance signs of a greater and more real force of character than
mere self-assertion of strength of will or the furious driving of the
passions? Their possession does not mean that one must act with an inferior
or less puissant, but only with a more right, collected and balanced
will. And it is a mistake to think that asceticism itself rightly understood
and practised implies an effacement of will; it brings much rather its
greater concentration. That is the Indian view and experience and the
meaning of the old legends in the epics - to which Mr.
Archer, misunderstanding the idea behind them, violently objects, -
attributing so enormous a force, even when it was misused, to the power
gained by ascetic self-mastery, Tapasya. The Indian mind believed and
still believes that soul power is a greater thing, works from a mightier
centre of will and has greater results than a more outwardly and materially
active will-force. But it will be said that India has valued most the
impersonal and that must obviously discourage personality. But this
too, - except for the negative ideal of losing oneself in the trance
or the silence of the Eternal, which is not the true essence of the
matter, - involves a misconception. However paradoxical it may sound,
one finds actually that the acceptance of the eternal and impersonal
behind one's being and action and the attempt at unity with it is precisely
the thing that carries the person to his largest greatness and power.
For this impersonality is not a nullity, but an oceanic totality of
the being. The perfect man, the Siddha or the Buddha, becomes universal,
embraces all being in sympathy and oneness, finds himself in others
as in himself and by so doing draws into himself at the same time something
of the infinite power of a universal energy. That is the positive ideal
of Indian culture. And when this hostile critic finds himself forced
to do homage to the superiority of certain personalities who have sprung
from this “fine-spun aristocratic” culture, he is really paying
a tribute to some results of this preference of the sattwic to the rajasic,
the universal to the limited and egoistic man. Not to be as the common
man, that is to say, as the crude natural or half-baked human being,
was indeed the sense of this ancient endeavour and in that sense it
may be called an aristocratic culture. But it was not a vulgar outward
but a spiritual nobility which was the aim of its self-discipline. Indian
life, personality, art, literature must be judged in this light and
appreciated or depreciated after being seen in the real sense and with
the right understanding of Indian culture.
Sri Aurobindo
in SABCL, Volume 14, pages 183-195
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
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