Your caricature of Sri Aurobindo was extremely pejorative

Re: Response to Jyotirmaya Sharma by Jyotirmaya on Tue 22 Aug 2006 10:26 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link I must express my gratitude to you for one thing: You have made me understand George Bush, another Texan, better. But I feel sorry for Sri Aurobindo. Reading you, someone who is unfamiliar with the Maharshi's work might suspect that he was a millenarian fanatic like you!

Re: Response to Jyotirmaya Sharma by Rich on Tue 22 Aug 2006 09:49 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link That I have been accused of being a blind zealot because my figure of veneration has been attacked is certainly noteworthy. Sri Aurobindo is certainly stands out as a figure of veneration for the for me, but I guess I should provide a short veneration list this millenarian’s fanaticism is better understood, which would certainly include works by the following

Jacques Derrida, James Joyce, John Coltrane, Che Guevara, Ingmar Bergman, Mohammed Rafi, Rainer Marie Rilke, Johann Wolgang Goethe, Marshall McLuhan, Aikro Kurosawa, Igor Stravinski, Ravi Shankar, the Beatles, T.S. Eliot, Gustav Mahler, Albert Einstein, Noam Chomsky, Italo Calvino, Jobim & Glibert, Theolonius Monk, Sarah Vaughn, Ali Akbar Kahn, Owen Barfield, Jean Gebser, Yeats, Blake, the Dead, David Bohm, Richard Lewinton, Vandana Shiva, Neils Bohr, Frank Loyd Wright, Antonio Gaudi, Frank Gehry, Franz Schubert, Nat Cole, Claude Debussy, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Miles, Nelson Mandala, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Michael Jordan, Mohammed Ali, Charlie Chaplin, Charles M. Schultz, Alfred Steglitz, Frank Zappa. So be prepared to duck if you throw a wrong invective their way!

Perhaps as Jyotirmaya asserts that it is my pathological need to be liked or agreed with, but I would like to better understand why the folks on The Hindu right have accused me of being a Marxist for my chastisement of them for using Sri Aurobindo as a mascot and now the left accuses me of being a blind zealot for admonishing them for using him as a whipping boy. Ok admittedly my pejorative style has not helped matters, but to my defense I will say that you all have not exactly been kind to Sri Aurobindo in holding him accountable (directly or indirectly) for all sorts of zealotry committed by real fanatics.

I certainly gave a review of your book which I feel exposed the fatal flaws in an unbalanced thesis and admittedly was not really kind in doing, and if that pisses you off (in an American sense) you have every reason to call me an ignorant Texan, a jerk, an asshole, although calling me the former implies the later two. I would urge everyone however, who is tuned in, to read your book and make the judgment for themselves and see what they think, if my critique has value it will become apparent to the reader. I believe that the aspects of Sri Aurobindo's thought that you assert form the genealogy and patrimony of political Hindutva today are presented in a manner which is far from critically argued at all. In short it is the manner you have stacked the deck in selecting facts and presenting your argument, which becomes irritating to this Zealot.

I don’t discount the entirety of the whole thesis and I must say you write well and it has promise I believe in showing how higher ideals are co-opted and debased. However, I simply think that you neglect critical historical context in not way presenting the full range of Sri Aurobindo’s thought to balance your presentation, but choose only to focus on quips and quotes taken largely out of context and juxtaposed in an argument, in which you seem to slough off blame, for a complex contemporary cultural phenomena on a Maharishi whom you had made a convenient fall guy! I also have had confirmation of this from Peter Heehs who says of my critique: Two comments in your long reply to him (below) stand out. First "almost the entire historical context is missing". This certainly is so. Secondly, if Sharma used a more sophisticated hermeneutic, the story he tells would be "more complex".

You write: Aurobinbdo’s contribution to political Hinduvta is second to none….. Aurobindo in one of his mystical flights had written that no one really knows anything about his life. It has not been on the surface to see he said. His writings however have inspired a jihadi Hinduism and political Hinduism that might require the coming of the Shakti of Peace, the Shakti of Reason and the Shakti of Moderation to undo the damage.

Now when you write that someone inspired a Jihad it certainly gives the impression that you are directly tracing the holy war back to this person. I will also add, that to your credit you do say within this passage that Aurobindo has become the pamphleteer of Hindu rashtra “without being conscious of it”. But I find no elaboration on this point, and in his review in PCS even Peter seems to lament that your view really misses the point and the proper location of causality. As I say it would have been nice if you would have presented more critical argument which challenge the notion that the complex phenomena of Hindutva can simply be traced back to a lineage of gurus and mystics.

Your caricature of Sri Aurobindo was extremely pejorative – perhaps for you because he is a fallen hero – but, nor do you ever quote from his major works on social political thought to balance your treatment of him. So you are not exactly kind to Sri Aurobindo in your treatment of him, which of course is what I stand guilty of in my critique of you as the author of Hindutva. But if you have further evidence to present be it in your Master’s thesis or otherwise, I say to you - just as Frank Zappa said to his tenor saxman Ian Underwood to cook up a jam – whip it out! Please post it, especially if you can elaborate on historical context and hermeneutic context. I am certainly open to having my heroes dethroned if the circumstances cause me to re-evaluate them (this was the case when Woody Allen slipped off my veneration list.

When one lives in Texas and something really bad happens (e.g. the rise of the Bush family which I have watched since the 60s) one either shoots it out or leaves. I have actually left and now reside near Seattle The interesting thing in this whole shoot out we have been having is that, I actually think that the rise of fundamentalist religion of all types (e.g. Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Zionist), coupled with the hegemony of the US government and the "virtual class" are two of the greatest conundrums facing the world today, and at least I think its best to identify the real culprits making things rough on the evolving world today, and not hold to account someone whose works deliberately advocated Human Unity, the spiritual transformation of consciousness, and an inclusive multi-cultural society. It was in this spirit that I have and still do advocate dialog by the left and right in a larger integral conversation (and I hope this don’t upset the theory of my need to be liked, but if it makes you all feel better, you may just want to come together so both sides can stone me.) rich