Ashis Nandy’s construction of Sri Aurobindo (some comments)

Asish Nandy’s construction of Sri Aurobindo
(some comments)

by

R.

Even though written some time ago, the portrait Ashis Nandy paints of Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, and the Ashram in Intimate  Enemy is in many respects fascinatingly complex. The final conclusion that he draws on to evaluate the success (or not) of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual politics is in fact stunningly original:

“In his own odd way, Aurobindo did try to recognize this on behalf of his culture. To trivialize both the English language and the categories popularized by nineteenth‑century Western social criticism, one could perhaps say that in the chaos called India the opposite of thesis is not the antithesis because they exclude each other. The true ‘enemy’ of the thesis is seen to be in the synthesis because it includes the thesis and ends the latter’s reason for being. It is Sankara’s Vedanta, carrying the clear impress of Buddhism, which finished Buddhism as a living faith in India, and not either Brahmanic orthodoxy or any state‑sponsored anti‑Buddhist ideology.64 Successfully or unsuccessfully, Aurobindo did try to evolve such a response to the West.” (Nandy)

Although from time to time the methods he employs to reach his ends I believe to be a bit suspect. For example:

“Kipling and Aurobindo, the latter’s response to colonialism included a cultural self‑affirmation which had a greater respect for the selfhood of the ‘other’ and a search for a more universal model of emancipation, however sick or bizarre that search may seem to many of us. In fact, it could be argued that the ‘sickness’ or the ‘bizarreness’ was itself a product of the colonial culture, telescoped deep into the personal life of Aurobindo.” (Nandy)

At other times the conclusions he arrives at seem to have mixed results, especially when one contrast his results by deploying other epistemological or cultural frameworks:

“In May 1909 Aurobindo was acquitted. Sedition in British law was fortunately defined by principles compatible with the philosophy of John Locke, and what in our times, following Isaiah Berlin, we have learnt to call the idea of negative liberty; sedition was not defined under the guidance of the philosophical forebears of Sigmund Freud, or of those of this narrator. Thus, the Oedipal meanings of the private crisis of authority in Krishnadhan’s son‑through all his political defiance, trial, acquittal and conformity‑could remain buried under legal documents” (Nandy)

Although Nandy’s reading of Sri Aurobindo is interesting in that he believes Aurobindo succeeded in spiritually formulating an effective resistance to Colonialism, in his analysis of Sri Aurobindo one finds a particular irony, as well as in Nandy’s project of theorizing the post-colonial subject in that self-admittedly he is employing an instrument of analysis that is also a Western invention being uses as a cultural intervention namely; Freudian social psychology.

“Secondly, a comment about the more academic concerns called psychological anthropology and Freudian social psychology with which I have maintained a close relationship for two decades and from which this book,” (Nandy)

And although he claims to move away from this orientation in his book;

“if written even five years ago, would have borrowed much of its theoretical frame. There is a clear tradition in works of this kind and one must state in what way this book deviates from that tradition. I have not tried to interpret here Indian personality or culture and to show their fate under colonial rule according to any fixed concept of health, native or exogenous. Instead, I have presumed certain continuities between personality and culture and seen in them political and ethical possibilities. “ (Nandy)

In the case of Sri Aurobindo he seems not to have strayed far from his Freudian theoretical frame he writes:

“It is impossible to read the life of Aurobindo without sensing the ‘inner’ pain which went with imperialism in India. Much of the pain was inflicted and much of the destruction of his cultural self undertaken within the confines of his family. “(Nandy)

He then goes on to analyze this inner pain in Sri Aurobindo almost exclusively in Freudian terms.  His approach in this respect is similar to that used by Jeffery Kripal in the biography of Ramakrishna, Kali’s Child in which his Freudian perspective leads him to some startling conclusions that reduces Ramakrishna to a  homo-sexual and pedophile. This is a method of scholarship that the historian of religions Huston Smith has referred to as intellectual imperialism. Now Nandy certainly does not suffer from the problems that beset Kripal in his misunderstanding and possible misrepresentations of the Bengali he translated from,  because Nandy has been there, he’s done it, in his bones he comprehends the post-colonial subject. His prose often beautifully navigates cross cultural boarders to create novel ways of negotiating differences. But, at times that ironically, he falls under the spell of the same project of modernity that he otherwise skillfully deconstructs.

While Nandy recognizes the universalizing project of Modernity is cloaked in various colonialist guises and are in fact adopted by both colonizer and colonized, the theoretical framework he employs in much of the book, and almost entirely in his construction of Sri Aurobindo’s subjectivity, is to universalize Freud’s middle European invention: psychoanalysis. No doubt Nandy raises important matters of concern regarding gender and especially male castration and compensation however, to prescribe the invention of a Jewish physician in Vienna as a sole narrative to examine the psychological development of an Indian Revolutionary fighting the British in Bengal is especially ironic, because in some ways his analytic approach intellectually represents the very forms of European Imperialism that Sri Aurobindo had rebelled against.

To apply Freudian social or psychological analysis to an entirely other cultural context than what produced it is wrought with problems, especially when other indigenous or cultural constructions of the unconscious (psychology) (or in Aurobindo’s case supraconscious) are at great odds in ascribing motivations to conscious behaviors. Indeed, Sri Aurobindo himself specifically critiques Freudian analysis as at times being anti-theoretical method of analysis of life than was his yoga. Although Nandy has every right to use whatever theoretical framework he chooses in his study, his failure to acknowledge his subject’s critique of the very system he employs is problematic. But also a problem is the fact that Nandy is less certain of Aurobindo’s view of psychology and metaphysics than he is of his politics.  ( see 1)

In fact much of Freudian psychology has been undermined substantially by recent research in the field of clinical psychology. The Freudian narrative about human psychology far from eliciting universal affirmation have been interrogated mercilessly by both psychiatry and clinical psychology and in all too many instances it has not held up very well. It has been used across an entire spectrum of European social theory from Adorno to Zizek in many different ways, and they have brought no revolution, and well know therapist proclaim   claiming that we have over one hundred years of psychotherapy and the world is getting worse.. While no doubt Freud’s contribution of facilitating a discourse of the unconscious in the West has been invaluable,  -and one could argue that Sri Aurobindo did not understand its full influence to late modernist discourse- but to assume its theoretical frameworks and methods of analysis provide a universal standard for measuring truth claims about unconscious processes that generate behaviors in subjects in other cultures whose own narratives of the phenomena are violently displaced, is in its own way as intellectually colonizing a project as inscribing many of the codes of Colonialism on to  the docile subjects under their control.

Nandy’s other strong theoretical framework is provided by Marx, (yet, another instance of a great universalizing Western theory) and Adorno that he avails himself of, to give voice to his social theorizing. Leela Gandhi however, finds the same limits to using the Marxist/Adornoesque framework with Nandy’s portrayal of Mira Alfassa (aka the Mother) as I have noted here with his problems in universalizing Freudian narrative.  Here is Nandy on the Mother:

“This seclusion allowed the Mother’s control to become tighter and, after Aurobindo’s death, absolute; much of the open‑endedness and imagination of Aurobindo’s mysticism was slowly but surely removed by her. The Ashram. itself became, under her powerful presence and efficient guidance, highly status‑conscious, politically conservative and a means of oppressing the people around. After Aurobindo’s death, for a while it even opposed the decolonization of Pondichery.57 Increasingly and inevitably, it acquired the trappings of a well organized modern cult and of a church‑as‑corporation.”

While one certainly denounces the religion, corporatization, and Hindu nationalist politics that has grown up in the Aurobindo Ashram after his death -and to some extent must hold the founding leadership responsible- with regards to the person of Mira Alfassa (the Mother) and her relationship to Sri Aurobindo there is an alternative framework of analysis available, and that is of “spiritual friendship” within the context of an “affective community” that is put forth by Leela Gandhi. I will conclude and let the reader draw their own conclusion on these contrasting portraits of the Mother’s Sri Aurobindo by contrasting Leela Gandhi’s assessment of the Mother given in her work: OTHER(S) WORLDS: MYSTICISM AND RADICALISM AT THE FIN DE SIECLE.
Going East, Or, How to Read Late-C19 Spirtualism

In March 1914, Mirra Alfassa (1878 – 1973), a French-Jewish socialist, materialist, ‘new woman’ and occultist, traveled to the French enclave of Pondicherry in Southern India with her politician husband Paul Richard, also an amateur occultist. This trip, ostensibly undertaken for electoral purposes, resulted in a momentous meeting between Alfassa and Aurobindo Ghosh, the Indian nationalist, extremist and mystic, self-exiled in French territory beyond the jurisdiction of the imperial British administration.1 Enthralled by the mutual recognition which marked this first encounter2, Mirra returned permanently to in 1920, where she became, in due course, the Mother of the devotional Ashram community and Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator.

One among numerous European women and men who arrived in colonial India, at the turn of the last century, to fulfill the secret imperatives of a spiritual vocation or destiny, the Mother, similarly to her counterparts, strongly identified with the cause of Indian independence and with the contingent reformation of Indian social and political life. Yet, notwithstanding their radical disaffiliation from the spoils and privileges of European imperialism, these strangely liminal figures have met with a less than hospitable reception among two groups of postcolonial critics and historians. The first, drawing upon a nationalist idiom, tends to assess Alfassa and others in terms of a narrowly orientalist typology, and the second, with whose objections this paper is principally concerned, invokes a broader liberal/marxist thematic to announce the dramatic incompatibility of spiritualist endeavour and (progressive) ethical/political capacity. So, for instance, Parama Roy, discredits the anti-colonial efforts of Margaret Noble, or Sister Nivedita (1867 – 1911), the Irish disciple and collaborator of the nationalist-mystic Swami Vivekananda, on the grounds that her nostalgic spiritualism appealed exclusively to the recessive strains within Indian nationalism, favouring orthodoxy and revivalism over rationalism and reformism.3 Likewise, and in an uncharacteristically Adornoesque reading of mysticism4,

Ashis Nandy discerns a contaminating authoritarianism in the Mother’s spiritual influence over Sri Aurobindo and their devotees which, he argues, reinforced rather than mitigated colonial hierarchies: ‘The Ashram itself became, under her powerful presence … highly status conscious, politically conservative and a means of oppressing the people around. After Aurobindo’s death, for a while it even opposed the decolonisation of Pondicherry.’5 And, in an otherwise sensitive account of Western women in British South Asia, Kumari Jayawardene consistently postulates spiritualism as a distraction from, or constraint upon, the ethico-political agency of her historical protagonists. Privileging those ‘foreign’ women whose critique of Western imperialism was accompanied by an unambiguous rejection of ‘orthodox Asian reformers, religious gurus, and leaders whose nationalism lacked a Socialist vision of the future’,6 Jayawardene extols the exemplary secular focus of the marxist-feminist Evelyn Roy (1892 – 1970), whose summary dismissal of Western soul- searchers is resonant in the context of the present discussion:

The tired intellectuals of Europe may look to the East in search of a new Messiah … But to all honest revolutionaries who understand … great movements as the Russian and Indian revolutions, all talk about “spiritual welfare” … is … the babble of children or the fevered eloquence of intellectual degeneration in search of new illusions7 Evelyn Roy’s paradigmatic insistence on the gap between ‘honest revolution’ and ‘spiritual welfare’ (the one adult, rational, scientific, the other immature, incoherent, utopian) presupposes a modern conception of politics as a modality proper to secular rational calculations alone, and one, as I would like to argue, ill-equipped to account for the complementarity of, for example, theosophy and socialism in Annie Besant (1847 – 1933), feminism and spiritualism in Mirra Alfassa, anti-colonialism and ahimsa in the Gandhian Madeleine Slade (1892 – 1982), among others. Aiming to enter into dialogue with non-secular conceptions of the social and the political this paper takes issue with what Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently identified as the two central ontological assumptions of European political thought. These are, in his words, first, ‘that the human exists in a frame of a single and secular historical time that envelops other kind of time’, and second, ‘that the human is ontologically singular, that gods and spirits are in the end “social facts,” that the social somehow exists prior to them’.8 These assumptions in turn, and the modern/liberal conception of justice through which they are sustained, owe their inheritance to a specifically Kantian understanding of moral agency and knowledge.

1Although Sri Aurobindo had amnesty from British laws in Pondicherry, both he and his visitors remained under close government surveillance. In 1911, one of these visitors, Alexandra David-Neel, also the first European woman to enter Tibet and a close friend of the Richards through theosophical circles, was officially reprimanded by the British intelligence in Madras for her contact with Sri Aurobindo. For an account of Sri Aurobindo’s political extremism in the context of Indian anti-colonial nationalism see Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India 1900-1910 (Oxford University Press: Delhi, 1993). 2See Sujata Nahar, Mother’s Chronicles: Mirra Meets the Revolutionary (Institut De Recherches Evolutives & Mira Aditi: Paris, Mysore, 1997), vol 5, p. 580, ‘I came here … But something in me wanted to meet Sri Aurobindo all alone the first time. Richard went to him in the morning and I had an appointment for the afternoon. He was living in the old Guest House. I climbed up the staircase and he was standing there, waiting for me at the top of the stairs … EXACTLY my vision! Dressed in the same way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head toward me … and I saw in his eyes that it was He.’ 3See Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), pp. 123 -124: ‘She was necessary for the consolidation of his nationalism, his guruness, his masculinity, his heterosexuality …One might speculate that Nivedita’s fervent defence of Hindu gender orthodoxy is also a meditation on her own discipleship …’
4For Adorno, of course, mystical, occultist and spiritualist practices are inherently antithetical to the project of social justice for reasons of their affinity to authoritarianism. See, for example, his reading of astrology columns in The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays, ed. Stephen Cook (Routledge: London and New York, 1994), pp. 38, 43: ‘Under present conditions, the astrological system can function only as “secondary superstition”, largely exempt from the individual’s own critical control and offered authoritatively … Indulgence in astrology may provide those who fall for it with a substitute for sexual pleasure of a passive nature. It means primarily submission to unbridled strength of the absolute power’. Cf. Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay: A Study of Gurus (Harper Collins: London, 1997), p. xiii: ‘Gurus tend to be elitist and anti-democratic, even if they pay lip-service to democracy. How could it be otherwise? Conviction of a special revelation must imply that the guru is a superior person who is not as other men are … Once established, gurus must exercise authority, which … precludes making friends on equal terms’. While the guru-disciple relationship is necessarily bound by hierarchical obligations, it is absurd to invoke dictatorship as the only model for the enactment of such obligations. Consider, eg., the relationship between the inspirational teacher and his students, the revolutionary leader and her followers etc.

5Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Oxford University Press: Delhi, 1983), p. 95. It is worth noting that Nandy reserves his suspicion for Mirra Alfassa while remaining deeply sympathetic to Sri Aurobindo’s spiritualist politics. 6Kumari Jayawardene, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule (Routledge: New York and London, 1995), p. 225
7Evelyn Roy, “Mahatma Gandhi: Revolutionary or Counter-Revolutionary?”, in Labour Monthly, September 1993, p. 158, also cited in Jayawardene, The White Woman’s Other Burden, p. 229.

……….

footnotes

1) For instance in one of his footnotes Nandy claims :

56 This idea of the superman had nothing to do with the Nietzschean world view; Aurobindo’s superman was to carry forward the evolution of consciousness and be more universal in his orientation and more powerful in his ability to change the world through spiritual attainments.

The assertion that Sri Aurobindo’s superman has nothing to do with Nietzsche’s Ubermensch is not true.  Although they do differ in many profound ways to say that they have nothing to do with one another is incorrect.  For example:

Both Nietzsche’s overman and Sri Aurobindo’s superman affirm life in the world, both also come into being through the aspirations of extraordinary individuals rather than the by the actions of the masses. Just as Nietzsche champions nature’s underlying creative will as the vehicle of transformation that takes man to overman Sri Aurobindo affirm nature’s underlying occult action that he calls “nature’s yoga ” as that primal evolutionary force driving the transformation of man to superman.

Sri Aurobindo however, develops his ideas on the subject by tracing a genealogy that leads back to ancient India, and so contextualizes it within the tradition of Indian spirituality. By contrast Nietzsche’s view of the overman can be traced back to ancient Greece and so he contextualizes the creation of a superior being within the European philosophical tradition. Among other things the move toward Indian spirituality results in Sri Aurobindo developing a concept that is not only of an immanent god in nature but also of a Godhead with a cosmic and transcendental poise. Although Nietzsche views the “will to power” as a metaphysical force underlying the primal forces of nature and claims the “world is the will to power — and nothing besides” he would disdained the association of this will with a supernatural god. Moreover, Nietzsche views “will to power” purely in terms of its Becoming in the world whereas Sri Aurobindo views natures yoga not only in terms of Becoming but also in terms of Being.

But for these qualitative differences that result largely from their cross cultural encounter, Sri Aurobindo’s view mirrors Nietzsche’s in conceiving of a metaphysical will/force as driving creation of a new superior being and in suggesting that it is not collective human progress but the extraordinary individual who will facilitate the creation of the superman. Moreover, both Sri Aurobindo and Nietzsche agree that the morality of the superman (overman) will transcend conventional ideas of good and evil therefore, one should not be surprised in their rhetorical styles of affinity.