India’s true destiny

Sri Aurobindo’s View of Indian Culture - Part II by Michel Danino

That brings us to the slower but crucial collective level. Sri Aurobindo always laid great stress on education. He himself had the best European education while in Cambridge, and, between 1897 and 1906, was a professor in the Baroda State College, then in the Bengal National College. So he knew the question in depth. And he had hopes in the young.

Our call is to young India. It is the young who must be the builders of the new world - not those who accept the competitive individualism, the capitalism or the materialistic communism of the West as India’s future ideal, not those who are enslaved to ol d religious formulas and cannot believe in the acceptance and transformation of life by the spirit, but all who are free in mind and heart to accept a completer truth and labour for a greater ideal.

Sri Aurobindo never tired of calling for what he termed "a national education." He gave this brief definition for it : [It is] the education which starting with the past and making full use of the present builds up a great nation. Whoever wishes to cut off the nation from its past is no friend of our national growth. Whoever fails to take advantage of the present is losin g us the battle of life. We must therefore save for India all that she has stored up of knowledge, character and noble thought in her immemorial past. We must acquire for her the best knowledge that Europe can give her and assimilate it to her own peculia r type of national temperament. We must introduce the best methods of teaching humanity has developed, whether modern or ancient. And all these we must harmonise into a system which will be impregnated with the spirit of self-reliance so as to build up me n and not machines.

Sri Aurobindo had little love for British education in India, which he called a "mercenary and soulless education," and for its debilitating influence on the "the innate possibilities" of the Indian brain. "In India," he said, "the students generally ha ve great capacities, but the system of education represses and destroys these capacities." As in every field, he wanted India to carve out her own path courageously : The greatest knowledge and the greatest riches man can possess are [India’s] by inheritance ; she has that for which all mankind is waiting. [...] But the full soul rich with the inheritance of the past, the widening gains of the present, and the large po tentiality of the future, can come only by a system of National Education. It cannot come by any extension or imitation of the system of the existing universities with its radically false principles, its vicious and mechanical methods, its dead-alive rout ine tradition and its narrow and sightless spirit. Only a new spirit and a new body born from the heart of the Nation and full of the light and hope of its resurgence can create it.

It is beyond this brief presentation to spell out the features of a national education as Sri Aurobindo envisioned it ; let me just mention that he laid great stress on the cultivation of powers of thought and concentration, which runs counter to the present system of rote learning. The student had to be trained to think freely and deeply : "I believe that the main cause of India’s weakness," Sri Aurobindo observed in 1920, "is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think." Sri Aurobindo also insisted on mastery of one’s mother-tongue, on the teaching of Sanskrit, which he certainly did not regard as a "dead language," on artistic values based on the old spirit of Indian art, all of which he saw as essential to the integral development of the child’s personality. In short, nothing whether Indian or Western was rejected, but all had to be integrated in the Indian spirit. This is clearly not the line Indian education has taken.

If we see today that nothing even of the Mahabharata or the Ramayana is taught to an Indian child, we can measure the abyss to be bridged. That the greatest epics of mankind should be thrown away on the absurd and erroneous pretext that they are "religious" is beyond the comprehension of an impartial observer. A German or French or English child will be taught something of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, because they are regarded as the root of European culture, and somehow present in the European consciousness. He will not be asked to worship Zeus or Athena, but will be shown how the Ancients saw and experienced the world and the human being. But Indian epics, a hundred times richer and vaster in human experience, a thousand times more present in the Indian consciousness, will not be taught to an Indian child. Not to speak of other important texts such as the beautiful Tamil epics, Shilappadikaram and Manimekhalai. Even the ! ! ! ! Panchatantra and countless other highly educational collections of Indian stories - even folk stories - are ruled out.

The result is that young Indians are increasingly deprived from their rightful heritage, cut off from their deeper roots. I have often found myself in the curious position of explaining to some of them the symbolic meaning of an ancient Indian myth, for i nstance - or, worse, of having to narrate the myth itself. Again, a French or English child will be given at least some semblance of cultural identity, whatever its worth ; but here, in this country which not long ago had the most living culture in the wo rld, a child is given no nourishing food - only some insipid, unappetizing hodgepodge, cooked in the West and pickled in India. This means that in the name of some irrational principles, India as an entity is throwing away some of its most precious treasu res. As Sri Aurobindo put it : Ancient India’s culture, attacked by European modernism, overpowered in the material field, betrayed by the indifference of her children, may perish for ever along with the soul of the nation that holds it in its keeping.

Certainly some aberration worked upon the minds of those who devised Indian education after Independence. Or perhaps they devised nothing but were content with dusting off Macaulay’s brainchild. It is painful to see that the teaching of Sanskrit is almost systematically discouraged in India ; it is painful to see that the deepest knowledge of the human being, that of yogic science, is discarded in favour of shallow Western psychology or psychoanalysis ; it is painful to see that the average Indian student never even hears the name of Sri Aurobindo, who did so much for his country ; and that, generally, Western intellectualism at its worst is the only food given to a nation whom Sri Aurobindo described as once the "deepest-thoughted."

India will certainly be compelled to address these central questions in the very near future, even as the Western edifice crumbles. Again and again, in the clearest and strongest terms, Sri Aurobindo asserted that India can never survive as a nation if sh e neglects or rejects what was always the source of her strength. Again and again, he saw India as the key to humanity’s rebirth.

In 1948, just two years before his passing, Sri Aurobindo said in a message to the Andhra University : It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light. This must not and will surely not ha ppen ; but it cannot be said that the danger is not there. There are indeed other numerous and difficult problems that face this country or will very soon face it. No doubt we will win through, but we must not disguise from ourselves the fact that after these long years of subjection and its cramping and impairing effects a great inner as well as outer liberation and change, a vast inner and outer progress is needed if we are to fulfil India’s true destiny.