Sri Aurobindo’s writings have been embraced by religious zealots

Response to Jyotirmaya Sharma by Rich Science, Culture & Integral Yoga on Sat 19 Aug 2006 07:33 AM PDT Permanent Link

I first should like to apologize for any and all remarks which may be categorized as a hurling of “personal invective” in my reviews of Jyotirmaya Sharma’s Hindutva, and for that matter for my review of Professor Kittu Reddy’s Karghil Essay and his History of India. Mr. Reddy has been a gentleman and a scholar and I am certain that Mr. Sharma is as well, as his response indicates. I can also add that both of you gentleman have been gracious in disregarding my personal polemic. The blog format is a new technology for me and I will be the first to admit my limitations in wielding it effectively, indeed my application has sometimes been stylistically challenged. That I was raised in Texas; certainly also does not help my sometimes pejorative style.

The perspective of both Jyotirmaya Sharma and Kittu Reddy could not be further apart in orientation, one a secular leftist critique and the other an interpretation from the far right, of the Indian political spectrum, (my discussion and review of Dr Reddy’s work can be found under my discussion with “Sri Kanth” which began in a brief review I made of Amartya Sen’s “the argumentative Indian”) In my reading of both these authors, both misrepresent Sri Aurobindo’s stated aspiration of Human Unity in which he advocates the ideal of universal brotherhood and also expresses his preference for secular democracy at this evolutionary vista in history. In matters of government in the present era, at least, Sri Aurobindo, is in my reading, at times - Jeffersonian in matters of liberty, Marxist in matters of equality, and certainly Gandhian in his view of fraternity. He clearly intends an all inclusive secular polity founded on liberty, equality, fraternity as he repeatedly states in most all his socio-political writing.

I am not sure how one would miss this, if one actually read in depth his socio-political thought of which The Human Cycle and the Ideal of Human Unity are foremost in scope, or for that matter in any other of the major works in which a complex spiritual psychology is revealed. But, then again this would not be the first time a gaff was made regards to deciphering Sri Aurobindos massive opus, and so perhaps some leniency must be given. In fact, the well known American philosopher Ken Wilber, who often quotes very favorably from Aurobindo and models much of his own work on him, still could not parse the complexity of Aurobindo’s writings, and entirely misstated his position on race, which he admits with embarrassment in the forward to A.S. Dalal’s edited book of Sri Aurobindo: A Greater Psychology (2002).

Since Joytirmaya brings up the views of Peter Heehs to support his claim that he gives Sri Aurobindo a balanced treatment. I will add that biographers and historians - even good ones - are forced to select, disregard, and interpret facts which they consider important from their own perspective. Jyotirmaya Sharma’s perspective is no different. To anyone who has studied Sri Aurobindo in any depth at all it will be painfully obvious just how egregiously, Jyotirmaya selects his facts to fit his thesis. For example, here are the works of Sri Aurobindo which are quoted in the book: On Himself, India’s Rebirth, On Nationalism, Bande Mataram, Essays on the Gita. Oddly enough, Jyotirmaya completely ignores Aurobindo’s major works including: The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Savitri, the Ideal of Human Unity, and only briefly quotes a few words from the Human Cycle. So forgive me if I do not agree with whomever may be the reviewer but, “in no way”, do I find that the neglect of the major corpus of an author’s work achieves balance.

Jyotirmaya choice is to focus on Sri Aurobindo role as an independence leader in what he hoped to be a united secular India of all faiths, but according to Jyotirmaya – and forgive my characterization – he was the narrow minded communalist leader of a bunch of Lingam worshipping Hindu zealots, who not only screamed for the blood of their Muslim neighbors but, who intended to sacrifice secular Indian democracy in a fire ceremony to their ravenous goddess Kali.

In this manner Jyotirmaya contrives, what is a close resemblance to an Orientalist approach in this study. Rather than rooting out the cause of Hindutva in its social political and even economic dimensions, which involves the exploitation of communal differences in the power agendas of a cold calculating leadership, Sharma seeks to uncover the cause of the social malady by invoking the mystical visions of India’s most prominent spiritual leaders. (Although I am only concerning myself with Sri Aurobindo in this review, both Vivekananda and Dayananda from what I understand of their teachings, have also been the misplaced target of Jyotirmaya’s historical thesis. However, I do not claim the same for Savarkar, in whom the author’s has found a more fitting target)

In no part of Jyotirmaya’s study does he explore the works for which Sri Aurobindo was nominated for the Nobel Prize -“by such radical Hindus”- as American Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck and French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland. What is more disheartening however, is that Jyotirmaya fails ever to take account of the actual clash of secularism, which Aurobindo advocated, with the intolerant fundamentalist variety of Islam which opposed this position. This version of Islam was advanced by the vision of the poet Iqbal and materialized into the exclusivity of a communal Muslim state by Jinnah, and the support of the Muslim League. But indeed, Jyotirmaya never mentions Iqbal, mentions Jinnah just once, and the Muslim League only three times in his book on radical Hindu Nationalism. It as if Hindu Nationalism, suddenly emerged alone, without any greater historical context, which would include British Nationalism, and Muslim Nationalism as well. Like Athena emerging whole from the Head of Zeus, Jyotirmaya portrays Hindu nationalism as arising from the skull of Kali, seemingly without environmental cause, fully mature and dressed in warrior costume.

Due to these omissions by Jyotirmaya, almost the entire historical context is missing in which Aurobindo at times advocates taking a hard line with Muslim fundamentalist, in their intolerance of secular democracy. Is this not the setting up of a straw man thesis? According to Sharma’s description one would believe Aurobindo to only be interested in kshatriyahood and his ideal of sanatan dharma merely an excuse for the re-aryanization of India. He entirely ignores anything Sri Aurobindo wrote on human unity, the spiritual evolution of consciousness, and any purely optimistic view he had about Islam as he makes clear in the following quote from the Foundations of Indian Culture : “The Mogul empire was a great and magnificent construction and an immense amount of political genius and talent was employed in its creation and maintenance. It was in spite of Aurangzeb’s fanatical zeal infinitely more tolerant than any mediaeval or contemporary European Kingdom or empire and India under her rule stood high in military and political strength, economic opulence and the brilliance of its art and culture” (page 379) Now, I think even Islamic scholars agree that Aurangzeb could be a “fanatic jerk” at times, who treated Hindus unequally and sometimes cruelly, and while Sri Aurobindo also understood why the Moguls, would ultimately crumble through internal disintegration, I certainly don’t get from the preceding passage that Sri Aurobindo views Muslims as an underclass, or implies they could not govern properly.

Nor does Jyotirmaya mention Aurobindo’s whole hearted embrace of the Cripps proposal which would have recognized autonomous Muslim provinces in a greater India. The Cripps proposal in all likelihood would have been accepted by the Muslim League, if Congress and Gandhi had agreed. If Congress had done so India could have at least avoided the painful partition of the sub-continent, and tried one more non-lethal experiment, before the holocaust, but unfortunately Congress, did not agree to the plan. It should be clear that Sri Aurobindo was certainly willing to negotiate for a greater India which valued and even privileged Muslims with some form of their own Islamic law. So it would seem inexcusable that, in a book which relies upon partition to locate its meanings and cosign its condemnations, that Jyotirmaya never even mentions the Cripps proposal with regards to Sri Aurobindo, or in his entire book at all.

It is certainly true that there are many who quote Sri Aurobindo out of context to further their own couch hidden agenda on the Hindutva side, just as is done by Jyotirmaya Sharma in making the facts fit his thesis. However, to reduce the voluminous works of Sri Aurobidno to a simple interpretation of Hindu Nationalism is a failure of hermeneutic integrity. This has been the problem with the misreading of Sri Aurobindo by those on the right and now it seems by those on the left as well.

That Sri Aurobindo’s writings have been embraced by religious zealots who chant Bande Mataram and champion nuking Pakistan is nothing short of ironic and perverse (on this point my views are quite forcefully presented in my dialog with Sri Kanth). That these folks have a right to their beliefs along with Islamic extremist, so long as they do not harm the common good itself however, is certainly in tune with a truly secular India, which of course Aurobindo would have agreed.

In my opinion it would have been much better if a more nuanced argument could have been made which took into account the current state of deconstructive textual criticism. This style of criticism studies the historical and cultural context through which the author is speaking, and proceeds through following the pattern of deferrals and differences within the whole system of text to arrive at an interpretation. By following this course the whole system of text gradually reveals a semiotics of the will of the individual.

In this style of criticism one certainly does not employ a methodology of splicing snippets and edited versions of text together to fit a preconceived thesis, but must undertake an open understanding of the whole system of text which the author furnishes. This is especially true when the author’s output was as encyclopedic as Sri Aurobindo.

If this style of scholarship was followed, the story told by Jyotirmaya would have certainly become more complex, but it also would have been more constructive in its ability to heal the national wounds which have been opened by these issues of religion and politics, rather then to merely accentuate the differences and widen the gulf between communities.

In my reading of the corpus of Sri Aurobidno’s work, be it as it may an “American reading”, it is my opinion that if Jyotirmaya would have taken account of the whole system of text produced by Sri Aurobindo, he would have had a more valuable book. In such a book the all inclusive secularism of Sri Aurobindo which advocated human unity in its embrace of all faiths would be examined. Moreover, the tragedy of interpretation could also be explored, in how Sri Aurobindo’s message of human unity have been misappropriated by the Hindu Right….. and now it seems by the Left!

(I should add this also invites a greater comparison, with other spiritual teachings, whose civic polity, advocates an affective inter-subjectivity rooted in agape and a multi-dimensional unity of Spirit, and how this inclusive vision, is collapsed by a fundamentalist mental structure, of intolerance, in what Whitehead called a move toward “ misplaced concreteness”)

Finally, if we are to accept the metric which Jyotirmaya uses by quoting Peter Heehs to substantiate his treatment of Sri Aurobindo I will end by quoting Heeh’s in his article for the publication entitled Life Positive April-June 2004, Although this publication is certainly not an academic journal he does clearly state the following:

A journalist Jyotirmaya Sharma (in his recent book Hinutva: Exploring the idea of Hindu Nationalism) draws most of his quotations from edited compilations. In concluding he perpetuates the following anachronism: “The Maharishi (Sri Aurobindo) has turned pamphleteer of the Hindu rastra concept without being conscious of it”. It is certainly regrettable that proponents of Hindu Rashtra should selectively appropriate Sri Aurobindo’s works, even when he explicitly stated that he was opposed to the very idea. “We do not understand Hindu nationalism as a possibility under modern conditions” he wrote in 1909. “Under modern conditions India can only exist as a whole” It is equally regrettable that opponents of Hindutva should combine out of context snippets from Sri Aurobindo’s works in a distorted presentation that excludes key portions of his thought” (Heehs 2004)

I would certainly be nice some time to find a place to have a wider discussion between the diametrically diverging perspectives of both Professor Reddy and Professor Sharma, so that a more enlightened understanding could be arrived at concerning their reading of the Aravinda Ghosh texts.

Here the epistemological workings of Sri Aurobindo could be very helpful, for although the systems of differences in Aurobindo’s work may seem at times quite paradoxical, it is always so, because he is in the process of achieving a greater synthesis. Any authentic reading of this author will find this synthesis when it concerns society and culture champions, equality, liberty, fraternity, in a multicultural society whose vision, like the great founding documents of democratic nations, advocates a vibrant diversity, in order to form a more perfect union; a unity which is greater than the sum of its parts. rich Posted to: Main Page - Book reviews