The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: a Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought by Sugata Bose
Posted by debbanerji | Published: February 15, 2010
Cdoi:10.1017/S1479244306001089 Printed in the United Kingdom
Modern Intellectual History, 4, 1 (2007), pp. 129–144 . 2007 Cambridge University Press
The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: a Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought*
Sugata Bose, Harvard University
“[L]ong after this controversy is hushed in silence”, Chitta Ranjan Das had said of Aurobindo Ghose during the Alipore bomb trial in 1909, long after this turmoil, this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone, his words will be echoed and re-echoed, not only in India, but across distant seas and lands. Therefore, I say that the man in his position is not only standing before the bar of this court but before the bar of the High Court of History.”1The future Deshbandhu’s forensic skills contributed in no uncertain measure to Aurobindo’s acquittal by Judge C. P. Beachcroft, who by a strange coincidence had read classics with the accused at King’s College, Cambridge. Aurobindo Ghose had beaten Beachcroft to second place in an examination in Greek, but the broad-minded judge did not hold that against his prisoner. C. R. Das persuaded the court that a letter allegedly written to Aurobindo by his younger brother Barindra Kumar Ghose—presented by the prosecution as clinching evidence of a terrorist conspiracy—was nothing but a forgery, “as clumsy as those Piggott had got up to incriminate Parnell after the murder of Lord Cavendish in Phoenix Park”. 2 Sifting through Aurobindo’s letters and essays, his counsel showed him to be motivated by the “lofty ideal of freedom” in the pursuit of which he had preached the doctrine of “not bombs, but suffering”. 3
Acquitted by a British judge presiding over the trial at the sessions court, one would have thought that Aurobindo would be hardly in need of an argument to exonerate him before the High Court of History. He is certainly revered in popular memory as one of the iconic leaders of the great Swadeshi (“own country”) movement that swept Bengal a hundred years ago between 1905 and 1908. Yet half a century of indoctrination in the dulling ideology of statist secularism has led to profound misunderstandings of Aurobindo’s political thought and an utter inability to comprehend its ethical moorings. Latter-day Bengali scholars of great distinction, even more so than his British prosecutor Eardley Norton, have provided sterile, literalist interpretations of Aurobindo’s nationalism. The misappropriation of Aurobindo by the Hindu right has been facilitated by the secularists’ abandonment of the domain of religion to the religious bigots. To a secularist historian like Sumit Sarkar the invocation to sanatan dharma by Aurobindo is deeply troubling and makes him implicitly, if not explicitly, the harbinger of communalism in the pejorative sense the term came to acquire some two decades after Aurobindo had retired from active political life.4 To an anti-secularist scholar like Ashis Nandy the “nationalist passions” of Aurobindo located in “a theory of transcendence” are mistakenly deemed to be too narrowly conceived compared to the broader humanism of the more universalist, civilizational discourses ascribed to Tagore and Gandhi.5 The specific failures in fathoming the depths of Aurobindo’s thought are related to more general infirmities that have afflicted the history of political and economic ideas in colonial India. Both Marxist and non-Marxist preoccupations with interest to the exclusion of sentiment have led, as Andrew Sartori puts it, to a “vacuum of ideological content”, while the tendency to view nationalist thought as derivative of European discourses has resulted in a “vacuum of native subjectivity”. 6 Indian intellectual history needs to be rescued from this impoverished state.
Modern Indian nationalism, far from being exclusively derived from European discourses, drew significantly on rich legacies of precolonial patriotism and kept it alive through a constant process of creative innovation. Indians in the late nineteenth century were also intensely curious about social and political experiments elsewhere in the world. In order to imagine one’s own nation, as
C. A. Bayly has contended, it was important to figure out how other nations were being imagined.7 In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth the Indian nation was very much in the process of its own making, with a variety of individuals, linguistic groups and religious communities seeking to contribute to imagining it into being. There were territorial as well as universalist aspects of this nation in formation, even though it is only the former that has been emphasized by theorists of the nation as “imagined community”. 8 These theorists tracked the global dispersal, replication and piracy of the nation-state form from the West to the East, leaving out of account the multiple meanings of nationhood and alternative frameworks of states that were imagined in the colonized world of Asia and Africa. Indian anti-colonialism was nourished by many regional patriotisms, competing versions of nationalism and extraterritorial affinities of religiously informed universalisms. It is a travesty to reduce to the trope of piracy the engagement in colonial India with ideas circulating in contemporary Europe. The Indian intellectual deserves to be put on a par with the European thinker and, as Kris Manjapra argues, ought to be viewed “as engaging and revising through phronesis” the full range of Indian, European and in-between ideational traditions which he or she encountered.9 The varieties of liberalism 6 in the nineteenth century and the multiple voices of Marxist internationalism of the post-World War I era are beginning to be studied in this new light. The Swadeshi conjuncture of the early twentieth century deserves the same sophisticated treatment in order to elucidate the meaning of nationalism and its connection to religious universalism as a problem of ethics.
This essay engages in that exercise of elucidation by interpreting a few of the key texts by Aurobindo on the relationship between ethics and politics. This interpretation owes a debt to an insight gleaned from Ranajit Guha’s delicate reading of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s autobiography An Indian Pilgrim.In putting moral sentiments back into the study of nationalism, Guha notices “a movement of individuation that ran parallel” to the mass campaigns of the nationalist era and suggests that the mass aspect was nourished by “the energies of such individuation”. The young Subhas found in Vivekananda’s maxim aatmano mokshaartham jagaddhitaya [ca] the central principle to which he could devote his whole being. “For your own salvation and for the service of humanity—that was to be life’s goal”, he wrote, adding that the service of humanity “included, of course, the service of one’s country”. The triad of seva (service), shraddha (respect) and tyag (sacrifice) would form the ethical bedrock of this existential dimension of nationalism.10
Aurobindo’s biographer, Srinivasa Iyengar, regards some of his early poetical works, including Urvasie, Love and Death and Perseus the Deliverer, as indicative of an engagement with “the problem of service and sacrifice and of right aspiration and conduct”. 11 Even though the young Aurobindo had tried to light new lamps for old through his powerful political journalism in the 1890sand nursed a desire to enter the fray of anti-colonial politics since 1902, the die had not yet been cast. The trials of becoming a nationalist had not yet been fully negotiated. The moment of individual commitment in Aurobindo’s case coincided with the affront to the Bengali nation in the form of Curzon’s partition.12 In an intense letter to his wife in August 1905 he described himself to be seized of three great convictions—first, that all his worldly possessions belonged truly to God; second, that he wished to encounter God face to face; and third, that he viewed his country as the Mother whom he was determined to free from a demon’s grasp through the application of his brahmatej (divine power). The world might consider these mad ideas, but he assured his wife that a mad man upon the fulfillment of his mission was usually acknowledged a great man.13
Aurobindo’s brahmatej in the cause of the Mother was mostly on display in the editorials of Bande Mataram, the paper he jointly edited from July 1906 with the other intellectual giant of the Swadeshi era (1905 to 1908), Bepin Chandra Pal. The most important series of articles from Aurobindo’s pen to appear in this paper were those on the doctrine of passive resistance published between 9 and 23 April 1907. He could see that organized national resistance to alien rule could take three possible forms. First, there could be passive resistance of the sort orchestrated by Charles Parnell in Ireland. Second, resistance might take the shape of “an untiring and implacable campaign of assassination and a confused welter of riots, strikes and agrarian risings” that had been witnessed in Russia. The third path for an oppressed nation was the time-honoured one of “armed revolt, which instead of bringing existing conditions to an end by making their continuance impossible sweeps them bodily out of existence”. A subject nation had to make its choice by taking account of “the circumstances of its servitude” and Indian circumstances indicated passive resistance to be the correct path. While anticipating many elements of Mahatma Gandhi’s methods, Aurobindo argued from a different ethical standpoint. He was certainly not prepared to regard other methods as “in all circumstances criminal and unjustified”. “It is the common habit of established Governments and especially those which are themselves oppressors”, he wrote, “to brand all violent methods in subject peoples and communities as criminal and wicked”. The refusal to listen to “the cant of the oppressor” attempting to lay “a moral as well as a legal ban on any attempt to answer violence by violence” had the approval of “the general conscience of humanity”. Passive resistance could turn into a battle in which the morality of war ruled supreme. In those situations to “shrink from bloodshed and violence” deserved “as severe a rebuke as Sri Krishna addressed to Arjuna”. 14
In spelling out the limits of passive resistance Aurobindo—for all his adoration of the Mother—made a few unfortunate, gendered remarks that were not unusual for the times, but nevertheless have a jarring quality. He was not in favour of “dwarfing national manhood” in the face of coercion as that would be a sin against “the divinity in our motherland”. Passive resistance had to be “masculine, bold and ardent in its spirit” and capable of switching over to active resistance. He did not want to develop “a nation of women” who in his essentialized view knew “only how to suffer and not how to strike”. Passive resistance was an exercise in “peaceful and self-contained Brahmatej”. But, as “even the greatest Rishis of old could not, when the Rakshasas were fierce and determined, keep up the sacrifice without calling in the bow of the Kshatriya”, that weapon had to be kept “ready for use, though in the background”. 15
In what way was the quality of patriotism in the Swadeshi conjuncture different from the “liberal” conjuncture that is often seen to have preceded it? It would be a mistake to imagine a complete break since ideas about a religion of humanity and the theme of Mazzinian suffering supplied connecting threads. But the Swadeshi era did offer a compelling and intellectually sophisticated critique of the abstract nature of late nineteenth-century liberal nationalism. In 1905 Bepin Pal wrote of the new patriotism in India, different from the period when Pym, Hampden, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth and Washington were “the models of young India”. The old patriotism “panted for the realities of Europe and America only under an Indian name”. “We loved the abstraction we called India”, Pal wrote, “but, yes, we hated the thing that it actually was”. But the new patriotism was based on “a love, as Rabindranath put it. . . for the muddy weed-entangled village lanes, the moss-covered stinking village ponds, and for the poor, the starved, the malaria-stricken peasant populations of the country, a love for its languages, its literatures, its philosophies, its religions; a love for its culture and civilization’.16
One finds an echo of this sentiment in Aurobindo’s essay “The Morality of Boycott”, written for Bande Mataram but not actually published in it. He wrote lyrically of love of one’s country and “the joy of seeing one’s blood flow for country and freedom”:
The feeling of almost physical delight in the touch of the mother-soil, of the winds that blow from Indian seas, of the rivers that stream from Indian hills, in the hearing of Indian speech, music, poetry, in the familiar sights, sounds, habits, dress, manners of our Indian life, this is the physical root of that love. The pride in our past, the pain of our present, the passion for the future are its trunk and branches. Self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness, great service, high endurance for the country are its fruit. And the sap which keeps it alive is the realization of the Motherhood of God in the country, the vision of the Mother, the knowledge of the Mother, the perpetual contemplation, adoration and service of the Mother.
A deep affective bond with the motherland was, then, to replace the abstract nationalism of the preceding decades. But just as there were several strands within “liberal” thought,17 so too Swadeshi patriotism had a number of variants.
Aurobindo’s essay justifying the morality of boycott was written partly in response to “a poet of sweetness and love” who had deprecated boycott as “an act of hate”. While wishing to discharge minds of hate, Aurobindo at this stage was prepared to see even hatred if it came “as a stimulus, as a means of awakening”. As for violence, it was not reprehensible from the point of view of political morality. It had been “eschewed”, “because it carried the battle on to a ground where we are comparatively weak, from a ground where we are strong”. In different circumstances Indians might have followed the precedent set by the American War of Independence and, had they done so, “historians and moralists would have applauded, not censured”. “The sword of the warrior”, Aurobindo concluded, “is as necessary to the fulfilment of justice and righteousness as the holiness of the saint”.
Until the end of 1907 Aurobindo’s exhortations to the youth were balanced in his articles by the application of a razor-sharp intellect. Charged with sedition, he stepped down as principal of the Bengal National College with a parting advice to his students to serve the motherland: “Work that she may prosper; suffer that she may rejoice.”19 While the sedition case was going on, Aurobindo wrote three important articles in Bande Mataram entitled “The Foundations of Sovereignty”, “Sankharitola’s Apologia” and “The Unities of Sankharitola” that were masterpieces of political polemic. Already in his pieces on passive resistance, he had identified the need for a central authority to guide the movement. He now answered those who contended that the diversity of races in India doomed the prospect of national unity. “One might just as well say”, he wrote, “that different chemical elements cannot combine into a single substance as that different races cannot combine into a single nation”. 20 His more nuanced studies on Indian unity belong, however, to a much later phase of his writing career.
In 1908 Aurobindo’s rhetoric was elevated to an altogether different spiritual plane. In January of that year he spent a few days practising yoga under the direction of Bishnu Bhaskar Lele in Baroda. When he rose to speak before the Bombay National Union on 19 January 1908, “he seemed to the audience as one in the grip of a trance”. 21 Bengal had once judged all things through “the imperfect instrumentality of the intellect”, but the work of “unaided intellect” was now done. “What is Nationalism?” he asked. “Nationalism”, the answer came, “is not a mere political programme. Nationalism is a religion that has come from God. . . Nationalism is immortal. . . God cannot be killed, God cannot be sent to jail.” The country could not be saved merely by boycott, national education or Swadeshi.
In place of the pure intellect, the need of the hour was faith of which another name was selflessness. “This movement of nationalism”, Aurobindo clarified, “is not guided by any self-interest, not at the heart of it . . . We are trying to live not for our own interests, but to work and die for others”. The third name for faith and selflessness was courage which came not from being “a Nationalist in the European sense, meaning in a purely materialistic sense”, but from a realization that “the three hundred millions of people in this country are God in the nation”. 22
Aurobindo carried this message of the spirit from Bombay to Bengal, from Baruipur to Kishoreganj. He spoke of faith and the dispelling of illusion through suffering, but he was no traditionalist, which is why he is probably so misunderstood today by neo-traditionalists like Ashis Nandy. Speaking to the Palli Samiti of Kishoreganj, he accepted the virtues of village upliftment, but was not ensnared by the mirage of self-sufficient village communities. “The village must not in our new national life be isolated as well as self-sufficient”, he advised, “but must feel itself bound up with the life of its neighbouring units, living with them in a common group for common purposes”. The unity that he urged was not of opinion or speech or intellectual conviction. “Unity is of the heart”, he was convinced, “and springs from love”. 23
Aurobindo’s spiritual fervour deepened further during his nearly year-long stay in Alipur jail during the bomb-case trial of late 1908 and early 1909.There he read the Gita and saw visions of Sri Krishna as his protector and guide. He gave a vivid description of his experiences in jail in his famous Uttarpara speech delivered immediately after his release from detention. It is a speech hugely misunderstood by historians thoroughly imbued with the secular ideology of the postcolonial Indian state. “I spoke once before with this force in me”, Aurobindo declared near the conclusion of this speech, and I said then that this movement is not a political movement and that nationalism is not politics but a religion, a creed, a faith. I say it again today, but I put it in another way. I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, faith; I say that it is the Sanatana Dharma which for us is nationalism.24
Sumit Sarkar cites these lines disapprovingly in his book on the Swadeshi movement indicating an inversion from the cultivation of religion as “a means to the end of mass contact and stimulation of morale” to religion as “an end in itself ”. The implication here is that the instrumental use of religion for the purpose of mass nationalism can perhaps be condoned from the secular standpoint, but the protection of religion as a goal of the campaign for swaraj—an end sought by anti-colonial leaders from Aurobindo to Gandhi—cannot. Dipesh Chakrabarty has been right in pointing to “the remarkable failure of intellect” and, one might add, imagination not only in Sarkar’s book in particular, but in works by secularist historians in general, in dealing with the question of religion in public life.25 Sarkar sees the Uttarpara speech as the product of a moment of “strain and frustration” without caring to delve into what Aurobindo might have meant by sanatan dharma.
The speeches Bepin Pal and Aurobindo Ghose gave in Uttarpara after their release from Buxar jail and Alipur jail respectively in 1909 were certainly different in tenor from Surendranath Banerjee’s Uttarpara speech on Mazzini in 1876. Both spoke of their realization in jail “of God within us all”. “I was brought up in England amongst foreign ideas”, Aurobindo recalled, “and an atmosphere entirely foreign”. He had believed religion to be a delusion and when he first approached God he had “hardly had a living faith in Him”. But now he not only understood intellectually but realized what it was to “do work for Him without demand for fruit”. The sanatan dharma that Aurobindo invoked in his Uttarpara speech was no narrow or bigoted creed, but as large as “life itself”. It was that dharma that had been cherished in India for “the salvation of humanity”. India was rising again not “as other countries do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak”; she was rising “to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world”. “India has always existed for humanity and not for herself”, Aurobindo contended at Uttarpara, “and it is for humanity and not for herself that she must be great”. 26 The inversion of the humanistic aspiration in Hinduism and Islam alike to a parody called communalism is the signal achievement of our secularist historians, not of Aurobindo.
The relationship between the nationalism of the age and an eternal humanistic religion was articulated with even greater vigour in Aurobindo’s new journal Karmayogin in 1909. The ideal of the karmayogin was clearly stated to be “building up India for the sake of humanity”. Yet each nation had its character distinct from “the common nature of humanity”. India in the nineteenth century had been “imitative, self-forgetful, artificial”. In that situation the resistance of even “the conservative element in Hinduism, tamasik [dark], inert, ignorant, uncreative though it was”, prevented an even more thorough disintegration and gave some respite for the “national self to emerge and find itself”. Nationalism so far had been “a revolt against the tendency to shape ourselves into the mould of Europe”. But it was also necessary to guard “against any tendency to cling to every detail that has been Indian”, for that had “not been the spirit of Hinduism in the past” and ought not to be in the future. In an essay entitled “The Doctrine of Sacrifice” Aurobindo warned that the “national ego may easily mean nothing more than collective selfishness”. The only remedy for that tempting evil was to “regard the nation as a necessary unit but no more in a common humanity”. Nationalism at its first stage makes stringent demands on the individual. But at the second stage “itshouldabate itsdemands …and shouldpreserveitself in aCosmopolitanism somewhat as the individual preserves itself in the family, the family in the class, the class in the nation, not destroying itself needlessly but recognizing a larger interest”. 27 Aurobindo spoke not only of the sacrifice of the individual, but also of the greatness of the individual. As his biographer puts it, “if all and sundry begin talking about ‘inner voices’ and proclaiming themselves to be agents of the Divine, ordinary life would grow quickly untenable”. 28 In Aurobindo’s view only that individual who had mastered the discipline of yoga could interpret and implement the divine will. “The greatness of individuals”, he concluded, “is the greatness of the eternal Energy within”. 29 “All great movements”, he believed, “wait for their Godsent leader”. In his farewell open letter to his countrymen in 1910 he restated once more the ideal Bengal had aspired to in the first decade of the twentieth century. “Our ideal of patriotism proceeds on the basis of love and brotherhood”, he wrote in what he thought might be his last will and political testament, “and it looks beyond the unity of the nation and envisages the ultimate unity of mankind. But it is an unity of brothers, equals and freemen that we seek, not the unity of master and serf, of devourer and devoured”. 30
“And so”, Sumit Sarkar writes somewhat derisively, “the revolutionary leader becomes the yogi of Pondicherry”. 31 Aurobindo may have retired from active participation in politics, but his days as a thinker on the problem of ethics and politics were far from over. In that respect the best was perhaps yet to come. On his forty-third birthday in 1914 Aurobindo launched a new journal called Arya, a philosophical review, which did not cease publication until 1921. The tainted history of European racism and totalitarianism has cast a cloud over the meaning of this term. In Aurobindo’s connotation the word had nothing to do with race. “Intrinsically”, Aurobindo explained, “in its most fundamental sense, Arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming”. 32 Much like the term jihad, therefore, also much maligned in the contemporary world, arya signified an aspiration and endeavour towards self-perfection and the surmounting of forces within and without that stood in the way of human advance. In the pages of the Arya for seven years Aurobindo wrote prolifically on philosophy, literature, art, culture, religion and politics. In a short sequence entitled “The Renaissance in India” he offered a clarification of his opinion on the place of religion in the public life of India. He noted that there was no real synonym for the word “religion” in Sanskrit. He ventured to suggest that the ethical malady in India was caused not by too much religion, but too little of it, in the most generous sense of the term. “The right remedy is”, he recommended, “not to belittle still farther the age-long ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth all the life of the nation a religion in this high spiritual sense”.
The major sequence in Arya of the greatest relevance for students of cultural criticism, political thought and human values today is the one published under the title “The Defence of Indian Culture” between 1918 and 1921. One of its components, called “The Significance of Indian Art”, a scintillating essay on the aesthetic side of Indian civilization, anticipates Edward Said’s critique of orientalism by some sixty years.34 More pertinent to our immediate concerns is another component, “The Spirit and Form of Indian Polity”, from which the title of this essay takes its inspiration. In it Aurobindo resoundingly rejected the charge that India had “always shown an incompetence for any free or sound political organisation”. A “summary reading of Indian history” that India was “socially marked by the despotism of the Brahmin theocracy” and “politically by an absolute monarchy of the oriental” had been “destroyed by a more careful and enlightened scholarship”. But the attempt by some Indian scholars to read back modern parliamentary democracy into India’s past Aurobindo considered to be “an ill-judged endeavour”. He recognized “a strong democratic element”, but “these features were of India’s own kind”. While Aurobindo’s treatise rehearses in some detail the history of Indian ethics of good governance, the normative lesson to be derived from it was clearly meant for the future. It was “perhaps for a future India”, Aurobindo modestly expressed a hope, “to found the status and action of the collective being of man on the realisation of the deeper spiritual truth”. 35
Aurobindo’s discourse began with a consideration of republican freedom in India’s ancient past which turned out to be deeper and more resilient than in either Greece or Rome. Even after the drift in India as elsewhere from republican towards monarchical forms, Indian monarchy was not “a personal despotism or an absolutist autocracy”. The power of the Indian king was balanced by a council as well as metropolitan and general assemblies which were “lesser co-partners with him in the exercise of sovereignty and administrative legislation and control”. The social hierarchy was not replicated in the political hierarchy and “all the four orders had their part in the common political rights of the citizen”. In theory women in ancient India were “not denied civic rights”, even though in practice, Aurobindo conceded, “this equality was rendered nugatory for all but a few by their social subordination to the male”. “A greater sovereign than the king was the Dharma”, which Aurobindo defined as “the religious, ethical, social, political, juridic and customary law organically governing the life of the people”. Secular authority was denied “any right of autocratic interference” with this dharma. The “subjection of the sovereign power to the Dharma was not an ideal theory inoperative in practice”. In practical terms it exercised a restraint on the king’s power of legislation. More importantly, the “religious liberties of the commons were assured” against infringement by secular authority. Powerful sovereigns like Asoka might have attempted to increase royal influence in this domain. But even Asoka’s edicts, Aurobindo felt, had “a recommendatory rather than an imperative character”. A sovereign aspiring to promote change in the area of religious beliefs or institutions had to abide by “the Indian principle of communal freedom” or make a reference to “a consultative assembly for deliberation, as was done in the famous Buddhist councils”. Whatever the sovereign’s personal predilections, “he was bound to respect and support in his public office all the recognised religions of the people with a certain measure of impartiality”. “Normally”, as a consequence, “there was no place in the Indian political system for religious oppression and intolerance and a settled State policy of that kind was unthinkable”. 36 It is odd that a set of restraints and responsibilities enjoining secular authority in an ethical Indian polity to respect religious freedom is today appropriated as one of the meanings of secularism alongside a contrary meaning of the separation of religion from politics.
There were further safeguards in the ancient Indian polity against the “autocratic freak”. Notwithstanding the “prestige attaching to the sovereign”, obedience to the king was no longer binding “if the king ceased to be the faithful executor of the Dharma”. In extreme cases of oppression “the right or even the duty of insurrection and regicide” was acknowledged. “Another more peaceful and more commonly exercised remedy”, Aurobindo noted, “was a threat of secession or exodus”. He cited a case of such a threat against an unpopular king in south India as late as the seventeenth century. What, then, was “the theory and principle” as well as “the actual constitution of the Indian polity”? It was “a complex of communal freedom and self-determination with a supreme coordinating authority, a sovereign person and body”, but “limited to its proper rights and functions”. The “economic and political aspects of the communal life” were “inextricably united” with “the religious, the ethical, the higher cultural aim of social existence”. To take dharma out of politics would have been to erode its ethical foundations. By not taking apart the yoke of dharma, Indian civilization had in Aurobindo’s view “evolved an admirable political system”, but “escaped at the same time the excess of the mechanizing turn which is the defect of the modern European state”. 37
The ancient Indian polity propounded an imperial idea of unity that was at sharp variance with “a mechanical western rule” that had “crushed out all the still existing communal or regional autonomies and substituted the dead unity of a machine”. Indian history did, of course, afford an instance of expansion or conquest that spread “the Buddhistic idea” and its associated thought and culture to the lands abutting the eastern Indian Ocean. “The ships that set out from both the eastern and western coast were not”, as Aurobindo correctly pointed out, “fleets of invaders missioned to annex those outlying countries to an Indian empire”. But he slipped inadvertently into the language of cultural imperialism when he described this as a movement of “exiles or adventurers carrying with them to yet uncultured peoples Indian religion, architecture, art, poetry, thought, life, manners”. But this slippage did not vitiate the main point that he wished to make about the imperial idea. “The idea of empire and even of world-empire was not absent from the Indian mind”, Aurobindo argued, “but its world was the Indian world and the object the founding of the imperial unity of its peoples”. It was this idea that animated efforts at unity through the ages of the Vedas, the Epics, the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Mughals and the Marathas until there came a final failure, after which the British imposed “a uniform subjection in place of the free unity of a free people”. 38
Aurobindo then touched upon “the secret of the difficulty in the problem of unifying ancient India”. It was that “the easy method of a centralized empire could not truly succeed in India”. The rishis from the Vedic age onwards, therefore, propounded “the ideal of the Chakravarti, a uniting imperial rule, uniting without destroying the autonomy of India’s many kingdoms and peoples, from sea to sea”. The dharma of a powerful king was to set up a suzerainty. The “full flowering” of this ideal Aurobindo found in “the great epics”. The Mahabharata narrates the legendary and quasi-historic pursuit of this ideal of empire which even “the turbulent Shishupala” is represented as accepting in his attendance at Yudhisthira’s dharmic Rajasuya sacrifice. The Ramayana too presents “an idealized picture of such a Dharmarajya, a settled universal empire”. It is, in Aurobindo’s words, “not an autocratic despotism but a universal monarchy supported by a free assembly of the city and provinces and of all the classes that is held up as the ideal”. The “ideal of conquest” is “not a destructive and predatory invasion”, but “a sacrificial progression” aiming at “a strengthening adhesion to a suzerain power”. According to this ideal, unification “ought not to be secured at the expense of the free life of the regional peoples or of the communal liberties and not therefore by a centralized monarchy or a rigidly unitarian imperial State”. The closest Western analogy that Aurobindo could find for this conception was “a hegemony or a confederacy under an imperial head”. 39
Aurobindo doubted whether this ideal was ever executed in practice with full success even though he regarded the empire created and re-created by the Mauryas, the Sungas, the Kanwas, the Andhras and the Guptas as “among the greatest constructed and maintained by the genius of the earth’s great peoples”. It contradicted “the hasty verdict” that denied India’s ancient civilization “a strong practical genius or high political virtue”. With the benefit of more recent historical evidence Aurobindo might have found that the actually existing empire in ancient India was not that far removed from the ideal as was commonly supposed in the early twentieth century. The Muslim conquest, in Aurobindo’s temporal scheme, occurred at a moment when India “needed a breathing space to rejuvenate itself by transference from the Sanskrit to the popular tongues and the newly forming regional peoples”. The early Muslim sovereigns generally respected this process of vernacularization so that, in Aurobindo’s terms, “the Mussulman domination ceased very rapidly to be a foreign rule”. “The vast mass of the Mussulmans in the country were and are Indians by race”, he wrote, “and even the foreign kings and nobles became almost immediately wholly Indian in mind, life and interest”. Aurobindo had no doubt that “the British is the first really continuous foreign rule that has dominated India”.
The Muslim conquest did not, therefore, introduce the difficulty of “subjection to a foreign rule”, but it did pose a challenge of “the struggle between two civilizations”. Aurobindo could see that there were “two conceivable solutions” to this problem: one, “the rise of a greater spiritual principle”, or two, “a political patriotism surmounting the religious struggle”. Akbar tried the first from the Muslim side, but his religion was too intellectual to receive “the assent from the strongly religious mind of the two communities”. Nanak tried it from the other side, but his religion, “universal in principle, became a sect in practice”. Akbar also fostered a common political patriotism, but, in Aurobindo’s estimation, “the living assent of the people was needed” in the creation of “a united imperial India” beyond the administrative talent of nobles from both religious communities. The Mughal Empire was, in Aurobindo’s very positive assessment,a great and magnificent construction and an immense amount of political genius and talent was employed in its creation and maintenance. It was as splendid, powerful and beneficent and, it may be added, in spite of Aurangzeb’s fanatical zeal, infinitely more liberal and tolerant in religion than any medieval or contemporary European kingdom or empire and India under its rule stood high in military and political strength, economic opulence and the brilliance of its art and culture.
But it eventually disintegrated because, in Aurobindo’s view, “a military and administrative centralized empire could not effect India’s living political unity”. Here the sage from Pondicherry was overestimating the Mughal tendency towards military–administrative centralization, the best new research having suggested that the Mughal emperor sought no more than an overarching suzerainty that was India’s imperial ideal. But he was closer to the mark in presaging at least in part the revisionist historiography of the eighteenth century when he wrote that “although a new life seemed about to rise in the regional peoples, the chance was cut short by the intrusion of the European nations”. 41
Aurobindo noted two final creative attempts by “the Indian political mind” in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth. He interpreted the Maratha revival crafted by Ramdas and Shivaji as “an attempt to restore what could still be understood or remembered of the ancient form and spirit”. But the Peshwas succeeded in setting up nothing more than “a military and political confederacy”. Their imperial ambition floundered because it was “inspired by a regional patriotism that failed to enlarge itself beyond its own limits”. The second attempt by the Sikh Khalsa, despite its originality, “achieved intensity but no power of expansion”. After that came “a temporary end to all political initiative and creation”. “The lifeless attempt of the last generation”, Aurobindo concluded, “to imitate and reproduce with a servile fidelity the ideals and forms of the West has been no true indication of the political mind and genius of the Indian people”. 42
In the late seventeenth century Ramdas’s philosophy of regional patriotism and Shivaji’s statecraft had formed the basis of a Maratha swarajya (“independent kingdom”). The Marathas emerged in the eighteenth century as a strong regional power in western India led by the Peshwas and seemed the most likely inheritors of the Mughal imperial mantle. The Sikh Khalsa (literally, “the pure”) had established a powerful regional kingdom in the Punjab.
By the time Aurobindo completed his arya on Indian political ethics in 1921, a new God-sent leader had arrived on the scene to take charge of a new phase of Indian mass nationalism. Aurobindo’s doctrine of sacrifice contributed to the recruitment of a young firebrand to Mahatma Gandhi’s movement. “The illustrious example of Arabindo Ghosh looms large before my vision”, Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to his elder brother Sarat as he prepared to resign from the Indian Civil Service in 1921. “I feel that I am ready to make the sacrifice which that example demands of me.” Subhas Bose comments in his autobiography that “it was widely believed about this time” that Aurobindo “would soon return to active political life”. 43 But Aurobindo’s political work was done and the baton hadbeenhandedover. Theyear 1921,not 1910, marks the close of Aurobindo’s career in inspiring the spirit and fashioning the form of an ethical polity. He had done his bit as a great individual in contributing to the dynamics that, in Ranajit Guha’s words, “made dignity and self-respect the very condition of Indian nationalism”. 44 But he had done more. He had shown that in the domain of creating a state Indian nationalism was not condemned to pirating from the gallery of models crafted by the West.45 The imitative fidelity of the Nehruvian moment of arrival has been “no true indication of the political mind and genius of the Indian people”. The alternatives that lost out in that battle for power at the helm of a centralized state were represented not just by Gandhi or even Tagore, but a broad spectrum of moral personalities who had adopted nationalism as the religion of the age. Although Aurobindo believed that night had descended on Indian political creativity under colonial rule, he could still see “amid all the mist of confusion” the possibility of “a new twilight, not of an evening, but a morning Yuga-sandhya”. As the world stands at the threshold of a new dawn in the realm of political thought, if not political practice, it may not be inappropriate to recall Aurobindo’s words of hope: “India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples.”46
* An earlier version of this essay was given as the Sri Aurobindo Memorial Oration at the Centre for Human Values, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, on 12 August 2005.
1 Bejoy Krishna Bose, The Alipore Bomb Trial (Calcutta: Butterworth, 1922), 140–41. Chitta Ranjan Das served as Aurobindo Ghose’s defence counsel in 1909.Das laterrosetobecome the pre-eminent leader of the Indian nationalist movement between 1917 and 1925 and was given the honorific title Deshbandhu (“Friend of the Country”). 129
2 P. C. Ray, Life and Times of C. R. Das (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1927), 62.
3 Bose, Alipore Bomb Trial, 111.
4 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 315–16.
5 Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994),
6 Andrew Sartori, “The Categorical Logic of a Colonial Nationalism: Swadeshi Bengal, 1904–1908”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23, 1 and 2 (2003), 271–85, 272.
7 C. A. Bayly, The Origins of Nationality in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and C. A. Bayly, “Liberalism at Large: Giuseppe Mazzini and Nineteenth Century Indian Thought”, Tufts University, 7 April 2005.
8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World:A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
9 Kris Manjapra’s important doctoral research at Harvard University on intellectual encounters between Germany and India is based on this approach.
10 Ranajit Guha, “Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming”, Oracle, 24, 2 (August 2002), 1–20, 12, 15, 17–20.
11 K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1945), 119.
12 The Viceroy had divided this province, proud of its linguistic and cultural unity, largely along religious lines. The anti-partition agitation grew into the Swadeshi (“own country”) movement with the goal of winning swaraj (“self-rule”).
13 Ibid., 124–7.
14 Sri Aurobindo, The Doctrine of Passive Resistance (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1948), 27–30.
15 Ibid., 62, 65, 78.
16 Bipin Chandra Pal, “The New Patriotism”, in idem, Swadeshi and Swaraj (The Rise of New Patriotism) (Calcutta: Yugayatri Prakashak, 1954), 17–20.
17 Biman Behari Majumdar, History of Political Thought: From Rammohun to Dayananda (1821–84), Volume I: Bengal (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1934), 284–320.
18 Aurobindo, Doctrine of Passive Resistance, 81, 83–5, 87–8.
19 Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose (Chandernagore: Prabartak Publishing House, 1922), 7.
20 Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, 149–50.
21 Ibid., 160. 136
22 Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose, 10–12, 15, 27, 35–9.
23 Ibid., 65, 70, 75.
24 Ibid., 108.
25 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories and the Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies”, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 April 1995, 256–80, 753.
26 Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose, 86–7, 90–93, 100–1, 108.
27 Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of the Karmayogin (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1945), 6, 20–22, 26–7, 30–32.
28 Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, 213.
29 Aurobindo, Ideal of the Karmayogin, 61.
30 Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose, 225, 231.
31 Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, 316.
32 Sri Aurobindo, Views and Reviews (Madras: Sri Aurobindo Library, 1946), 7.
33 Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1946), 81.
34 Sri Aurobindo, The Significance of Indian Art (Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1953).
35 Sri Aurobindo, The Spirit and Form of Indian Polity (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1947), 3–5, 22.
36 Ibid., 10–15, 42, 45, 47–8.
37 Ibid., 16–18, 34, 62.
38 Ibid., 65–6, 75.
39 Ibid., 72, 76–8.
40 Ibid., 78–80, 86–7.
41 Ibid., 88–9.
42 Ibid., 90–91.
43 Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose (eds.), Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Collected Works, Volume 1: An Indian Pilgrim (Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau, 1997), 112.
44 Guha, “Nationalism”, 20.
45 This point is conceded a little too easily in Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–7.
46 Aurobindo, Spirit and Form, 91.
The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: a Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought by Sugata Bose
Cdoi:10.1017/S1479244306001089 Printed in the United Kingdom
Modern Intellectual History, 4, 1 (2007), pp. 129–144 . 2007 Cambridge University Press
The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: a Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought*
Sugata Bose, Harvard University
“[L]ong after this controversy is hushed in silence”, Chitta Ranjan Das had said of Aurobindo Ghose during the Alipore bomb trial in 1909, long after this turmoil, this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone, his words will be echoed and re-echoed, not only in India, but across distant seas and lands. Therefore, I say that the man in his position is not only standing before the bar of this court but before the bar of the High Court of History.”1The future Deshbandhu’s forensic skills contributed in no uncertain measure to Aurobindo’s acquittal by Judge C. P. Beachcroft, who by a strange coincidence had read classics with the accused at King’s College, Cambridge. Aurobindo Ghose had beaten Beachcroft to second place in an examination in Greek, but the broad-minded judge did not hold that against his prisoner. C. R. Das persuaded the court that a letter allegedly written to Aurobindo by his younger brother Barindra Kumar Ghose—presented by the prosecution as clinching evidence of a terrorist conspiracy—was nothing but a forgery, “as clumsy as those Piggott had got up to incriminate Parnell after the murder of Lord Cavendish in Phoenix Park”. 2 Sifting through Aurobindo’s letters and essays, his counsel showed him to be motivated by the “lofty ideal of freedom” in the pursuit of which he had preached the doctrine of “not bombs, but suffering”. 3
Acquitted by a British judge presiding over the trial at the sessions court, one would have thought that Aurobindo would be hardly in need of an argument to exonerate him before the High Court of History. He is certainly revered in popular memory as one of the iconic leaders of the great Swadeshi (“own country”) movement that swept Bengal a hundred years ago between 1905 and 1908. Yet half a century of indoctrination in the dulling ideology of statist secularism has led to profound misunderstandings of Aurobindo’s political thought and an utter inability to comprehend its ethical moorings. Latter-day Bengali scholars of great distinction, even more so than his British prosecutor Eardley Norton, have provided sterile, literalist interpretations of Aurobindo’s nationalism. The misappropriation of Aurobindo by the Hindu right has been facilitated by the secularists’ abandonment of the domain of religion to the religious bigots. To a secularist historian like Sumit Sarkar the invocation to sanatan dharma by Aurobindo is deeply troubling and makes him implicitly, if not explicitly, the harbinger of communalism in the pejorative sense the term came to acquire some two decades after Aurobindo had retired from active political life.4 To an anti-secularist scholar like Ashis Nandy the “nationalist passions” of Aurobindo located in “a theory of transcendence” are mistakenly deemed to be too narrowly conceived compared to the broader humanism of the more universalist, civilizational discourses ascribed to Tagore and Gandhi.5 The specific failures in fathoming the depths of Aurobindo’s thought are related to more general infirmities that have afflicted the history of political and economic ideas in colonial India. Both Marxist and non-Marxist preoccupations with interest to the exclusion of sentiment have led, as Andrew Sartori puts it, to a “vacuum of ideological content”, while the tendency to view nationalist thought as derivative of European discourses has resulted in a “vacuum of native subjectivity”. 6 Indian intellectual history needs to be rescued from this impoverished state.
Modern Indian nationalism, far from being exclusively derived from European discourses, drew significantly on rich legacies of precolonial patriotism and kept it alive through a constant process of creative innovation. Indians in the late nineteenth century were also intensely curious about social and political experiments elsewhere in the world. In order to imagine one’s own nation, as
C. A. Bayly has contended, it was important to figure out how other nations were being imagined.7 In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth the Indian nation was very much in the process of its own making, with a variety of individuals, linguistic groups and religious communities seeking to contribute to imagining it into being. There were territorial as well as universalist aspects of this nation in formation, even though it is only the former that has been emphasized by theorists of the nation as “imagined community”. 8 These theorists tracked the global dispersal, replication and piracy of the nation-state form from the West to the East, leaving out of account the multiple meanings of nationhood and alternative frameworks of states that were imagined in the colonized world of Asia and Africa. Indian anti-colonialism was nourished by many regional patriotisms, competing versions of nationalism and extraterritorial affinities of religiously informed universalisms. It is a travesty to reduce to the trope of piracy the engagement in colonial India with ideas circulating in contemporary Europe. The Indian intellectual deserves to be put on a par with the European thinker and, as Kris Manjapra argues, ought to be viewed “as engaging and revising through phronesis” the full range of Indian, European and in-between ideational traditions which he or she encountered.9 The varieties of liberalism 6 in the nineteenth century and the multiple voices of Marxist internationalism of the post-World War I era are beginning to be studied in this new light. The Swadeshi conjuncture of the early twentieth century deserves the same sophisticated treatment in order to elucidate the meaning of nationalism and its connection to religious universalism as a problem of ethics.
This essay engages in that exercise of elucidation by interpreting a few of the key texts by Aurobindo on the relationship between ethics and politics. This interpretation owes a debt to an insight gleaned from Ranajit Guha’s delicate reading of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s autobiography An Indian Pilgrim.In putting moral sentiments back into the study of nationalism, Guha notices “a movement of individuation that ran parallel” to the mass campaigns of the nationalist era and suggests that the mass aspect was nourished by “the energies of such individuation”. The young Subhas found in Vivekananda’s maxim aatmano mokshaartham jagaddhitaya [ca] the central principle to which he could devote his whole being. “For your own salvation and for the service of humanity—that was to be life’s goal”, he wrote, adding that the service of humanity “included, of course, the service of one’s country”. The triad of seva (service), shraddha (respect) and tyag (sacrifice) would form the ethical bedrock of this existential dimension of nationalism.10
Aurobindo’s biographer, Srinivasa Iyengar, regards some of his early poetical works, including Urvasie, Love and Death and Perseus the Deliverer, as indicative of an engagement with “the problem of service and sacrifice and of right aspiration and conduct”. 11 Even though the young Aurobindo had tried to light new lamps for old through his powerful political journalism in the 1890sand nursed a desire to enter the fray of anti-colonial politics since 1902, the die had not yet been cast. The trials of becoming a nationalist had not yet been fully negotiated. The moment of individual commitment in Aurobindo’s case coincided with the affront to the Bengali nation in the form of Curzon’s partition.12 In an intense letter to his wife in August 1905 he described himself to be seized of three great convictions—first, that all his worldly possessions belonged truly to God; second, that he wished to encounter God face to face; and third, that he viewed his country as the Mother whom he was determined to free from a demon’s grasp through the application of his brahmatej (divine power). The world might consider these mad ideas, but he assured his wife that a mad man upon the fulfillment of his mission was usually acknowledged a great man.13
Aurobindo’s brahmatej in the cause of the Mother was mostly on display in the editorials of Bande Mataram, the paper he jointly edited from July 1906 with the other intellectual giant of the Swadeshi era (1905 to 1908), Bepin Chandra Pal. The most important series of articles from Aurobindo’s pen to appear in this paper were those on the doctrine of passive resistance published between 9 and 23 April 1907. He could see that organized national resistance to alien rule could take three possible forms. First, there could be passive resistance of the sort orchestrated by Charles Parnell in Ireland. Second, resistance might take the shape of “an untiring and implacable campaign of assassination and a confused welter of riots, strikes and agrarian risings” that had been witnessed in Russia. The third path for an oppressed nation was the time-honoured one of “armed revolt, which instead of bringing existing conditions to an end by making their continuance impossible sweeps them bodily out of existence”. A subject nation had to make its choice by taking account of “the circumstances of its servitude” and Indian circumstances indicated passive resistance to be the correct path. While anticipating many elements of Mahatma Gandhi’s methods, Aurobindo argued from a different ethical standpoint. He was certainly not prepared to regard other methods as “in all circumstances criminal and unjustified”. “It is the common habit of established Governments and especially those which are themselves oppressors”, he wrote, “to brand all violent methods in subject peoples and communities as criminal and wicked”. The refusal to listen to “the cant of the oppressor” attempting to lay “a moral as well as a legal ban on any attempt to answer violence by violence” had the approval of “the general conscience of humanity”. Passive resistance could turn into a battle in which the morality of war ruled supreme. In those situations to “shrink from bloodshed and violence” deserved “as severe a rebuke as Sri Krishna addressed to Arjuna”. 14
In spelling out the limits of passive resistance Aurobindo—for all his adoration of the Mother—made a few unfortunate, gendered remarks that were not unusual for the times, but nevertheless have a jarring quality. He was not in favour of “dwarfing national manhood” in the face of coercion as that would be a sin against “the divinity in our motherland”. Passive resistance had to be “masculine, bold and ardent in its spirit” and capable of switching over to active resistance. He did not want to develop “a nation of women” who in his essentialized view knew “only how to suffer and not how to strike”. Passive resistance was an exercise in “peaceful and self-contained Brahmatej”. But, as “even the greatest Rishis of old could not, when the Rakshasas were fierce and determined, keep up the sacrifice without calling in the bow of the Kshatriya”, that weapon had to be kept “ready for use, though in the background”. 15
In what way was the quality of patriotism in the Swadeshi conjuncture different from the “liberal” conjuncture that is often seen to have preceded it? It would be a mistake to imagine a complete break since ideas about a religion of humanity and the theme of Mazzinian suffering supplied connecting threads. But the Swadeshi era did offer a compelling and intellectually sophisticated critique of the abstract nature of late nineteenth-century liberal nationalism. In 1905 Bepin Pal wrote of the new patriotism in India, different from the period when Pym, Hampden, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth and Washington were “the models of young India”. The old patriotism “panted for the realities of Europe and America only under an Indian name”. “We loved the abstraction we called India”, Pal wrote, “but, yes, we hated the thing that it actually was”. But the new patriotism was based on “a love, as Rabindranath put it. . . for the muddy weed-entangled village lanes, the moss-covered stinking village ponds, and for the poor, the starved, the malaria-stricken peasant populations of the country, a love for its languages, its literatures, its philosophies, its religions; a love for its culture and civilization’.16
One finds an echo of this sentiment in Aurobindo’s essay “The Morality of Boycott”, written for Bande Mataram but not actually published in it. He wrote lyrically of love of one’s country and “the joy of seeing one’s blood flow for country and freedom”:
The feeling of almost physical delight in the touch of the mother-soil, of the winds that blow from Indian seas, of the rivers that stream from Indian hills, in the hearing of Indian speech, music, poetry, in the familiar sights, sounds, habits, dress, manners of our Indian life, this is the physical root of that love. The pride in our past, the pain of our present, the passion for the future are its trunk and branches. Self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness, great service, high endurance for the country are its fruit. And the sap which keeps it alive is the realization of the Motherhood of God in the country, the vision of the Mother, the knowledge of the Mother, the perpetual contemplation, adoration and service of the Mother.
A deep affective bond with the motherland was, then, to replace the abstract nationalism of the preceding decades. But just as there were several strands within “liberal” thought,17 so too Swadeshi patriotism had a number of variants.
Aurobindo’s essay justifying the morality of boycott was written partly in response to “a poet of sweetness and love” who had deprecated boycott as “an act of hate”. While wishing to discharge minds of hate, Aurobindo at this stage was prepared to see even hatred if it came “as a stimulus, as a means of awakening”. As for violence, it was not reprehensible from the point of view of political morality. It had been “eschewed”, “because it carried the battle on to a ground where we are comparatively weak, from a ground where we are strong”. In different circumstances Indians might have followed the precedent set by the American War of Independence and, had they done so, “historians and moralists would have applauded, not censured”. “The sword of the warrior”, Aurobindo concluded, “is as necessary to the fulfilment of justice and righteousness as the holiness of the saint”.
Until the end of 1907 Aurobindo’s exhortations to the youth were balanced in his articles by the application of a razor-sharp intellect. Charged with sedition, he stepped down as principal of the Bengal National College with a parting advice to his students to serve the motherland: “Work that she may prosper; suffer that she may rejoice.”19 While the sedition case was going on, Aurobindo wrote three important articles in Bande Mataram entitled “The Foundations of Sovereignty”, “Sankharitola’s Apologia” and “The Unities of Sankharitola” that were masterpieces of political polemic. Already in his pieces on passive resistance, he had identified the need for a central authority to guide the movement. He now answered those who contended that the diversity of races in India doomed the prospect of national unity. “One might just as well say”, he wrote, “that different chemical elements cannot combine into a single substance as that different races cannot combine into a single nation”. 20 His more nuanced studies on Indian unity belong, however, to a much later phase of his writing career.
In 1908 Aurobindo’s rhetoric was elevated to an altogether different spiritual plane. In January of that year he spent a few days practising yoga under the direction of Bishnu Bhaskar Lele in Baroda. When he rose to speak before the Bombay National Union on 19 January 1908, “he seemed to the audience as one in the grip of a trance”. 21 Bengal had once judged all things through “the imperfect instrumentality of the intellect”, but the work of “unaided intellect” was now done. “What is Nationalism?” he asked. “Nationalism”, the answer came, “is not a mere political programme. Nationalism is a religion that has come from God. . . Nationalism is immortal. . . God cannot be killed, God cannot be sent to jail.” The country could not be saved merely by boycott, national education or Swadeshi.
In place of the pure intellect, the need of the hour was faith of which another name was selflessness. “This movement of nationalism”, Aurobindo clarified, “is not guided by any self-interest, not at the heart of it . . . We are trying to live not for our own interests, but to work and die for others”. The third name for faith and selflessness was courage which came not from being “a Nationalist in the European sense, meaning in a purely materialistic sense”, but from a realization that “the three hundred millions of people in this country are God in the nation”. 22
Aurobindo carried this message of the spirit from Bombay to Bengal, from Baruipur to Kishoreganj. He spoke of faith and the dispelling of illusion through suffering, but he was no traditionalist, which is why he is probably so misunderstood today by neo-traditionalists like Ashis Nandy. Speaking to the Palli Samiti of Kishoreganj, he accepted the virtues of village upliftment, but was not ensnared by the mirage of self-sufficient village communities. “The village must not in our new national life be isolated as well as self-sufficient”, he advised, “but must feel itself bound up with the life of its neighbouring units, living with them in a common group for common purposes”. The unity that he urged was not of opinion or speech or intellectual conviction. “Unity is of the heart”, he was convinced, “and springs from love”. 23
Aurobindo’s spiritual fervour deepened further during his nearly year-long stay in Alipur jail during the bomb-case trial of late 1908 and early 1909.There he read the Gita and saw visions of Sri Krishna as his protector and guide. He gave a vivid description of his experiences in jail in his famous Uttarpara speech delivered immediately after his release from detention. It is a speech hugely misunderstood by historians thoroughly imbued with the secular ideology of the postcolonial Indian state. “I spoke once before with this force in me”, Aurobindo declared near the conclusion of this speech, and I said then that this movement is not a political movement and that nationalism is not politics but a religion, a creed, a faith. I say it again today, but I put it in another way. I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, faith; I say that it is the Sanatana Dharma which for us is nationalism.24
Sumit Sarkar cites these lines disapprovingly in his book on the Swadeshi movement indicating an inversion from the cultivation of religion as “a means to the end of mass contact and stimulation of morale” to religion as “an end in itself ”. The implication here is that the instrumental use of religion for the purpose of mass nationalism can perhaps be condoned from the secular standpoint, but the protection of religion as a goal of the campaign for swaraj—an end sought by anti-colonial leaders from Aurobindo to Gandhi—cannot. Dipesh Chakrabarty has been right in pointing to “the remarkable failure of intellect” and, one might add, imagination not only in Sarkar’s book in particular, but in works by secularist historians in general, in dealing with the question of religion in public life.25 Sarkar sees the Uttarpara speech as the product of a moment of “strain and frustration” without caring to delve into what Aurobindo might have meant by sanatan dharma.
The speeches Bepin Pal and Aurobindo Ghose gave in Uttarpara after their release from Buxar jail and Alipur jail respectively in 1909 were certainly different in tenor from Surendranath Banerjee’s Uttarpara speech on Mazzini in 1876. Both spoke of their realization in jail “of God within us all”. “I was brought up in England amongst foreign ideas”, Aurobindo recalled, “and an atmosphere entirely foreign”. He had believed religion to be a delusion and when he first approached God he had “hardly had a living faith in Him”. But now he not only understood intellectually but realized what it was to “do work for Him without demand for fruit”. The sanatan dharma that Aurobindo invoked in his Uttarpara speech was no narrow or bigoted creed, but as large as “life itself”. It was that dharma that had been cherished in India for “the salvation of humanity”. India was rising again not “as other countries do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak”; she was rising “to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world”. “India has always existed for humanity and not for herself”, Aurobindo contended at Uttarpara, “and it is for humanity and not for herself that she must be great”. 26 The inversion of the humanistic aspiration in Hinduism and Islam alike to a parody called communalism is the signal achievement of our secularist historians, not of Aurobindo.
The relationship between the nationalism of the age and an eternal humanistic religion was articulated with even greater vigour in Aurobindo’s new journal Karmayogin in 1909. The ideal of the karmayogin was clearly stated to be “building up India for the sake of humanity”. Yet each nation had its character distinct from “the common nature of humanity”. India in the nineteenth century had been “imitative, self-forgetful, artificial”. In that situation the resistance of even “the conservative element in Hinduism, tamasik [dark], inert, ignorant, uncreative though it was”, prevented an even more thorough disintegration and gave some respite for the “national self to emerge and find itself”. Nationalism so far had been “a revolt against the tendency to shape ourselves into the mould of Europe”. But it was also necessary to guard “against any tendency to cling to every detail that has been Indian”, for that had “not been the spirit of Hinduism in the past” and ought not to be in the future. In an essay entitled “The Doctrine of Sacrifice” Aurobindo warned that the “national ego may easily mean nothing more than collective selfishness”. The only remedy for that tempting evil was to “regard the nation as a necessary unit but no more in a common humanity”. Nationalism at its first stage makes stringent demands on the individual. But at the second stage “itshouldabate itsdemands …and shouldpreserveitself in aCosmopolitanism somewhat as the individual preserves itself in the family, the family in the class, the class in the nation, not destroying itself needlessly but recognizing a larger interest”. 27 Aurobindo spoke not only of the sacrifice of the individual, but also of the greatness of the individual. As his biographer puts it, “if all and sundry begin talking about ‘inner voices’ and proclaiming themselves to be agents of the Divine, ordinary life would grow quickly untenable”. 28 In Aurobindo’s view only that individual who had mastered the discipline of yoga could interpret and implement the divine will. “The greatness of individuals”, he concluded, “is the greatness of the eternal Energy within”. 29 “All great movements”, he believed, “wait for their Godsent leader”. In his farewell open letter to his countrymen in 1910 he restated once more the ideal Bengal had aspired to in the first decade of the twentieth century. “Our ideal of patriotism proceeds on the basis of love and brotherhood”, he wrote in what he thought might be his last will and political testament, “and it looks beyond the unity of the nation and envisages the ultimate unity of mankind. But it is an unity of brothers, equals and freemen that we seek, not the unity of master and serf, of devourer and devoured”. 30
“And so”, Sumit Sarkar writes somewhat derisively, “the revolutionary leader becomes the yogi of Pondicherry”. 31 Aurobindo may have retired from active participation in politics, but his days as a thinker on the problem of ethics and politics were far from over. In that respect the best was perhaps yet to come. On his forty-third birthday in 1914 Aurobindo launched a new journal called Arya, a philosophical review, which did not cease publication until 1921. The tainted history of European racism and totalitarianism has cast a cloud over the meaning of this term. In Aurobindo’s connotation the word had nothing to do with race. “Intrinsically”, Aurobindo explained, “in its most fundamental sense, Arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming”. 32 Much like the term jihad, therefore, also much maligned in the contemporary world, arya signified an aspiration and endeavour towards self-perfection and the surmounting of forces within and without that stood in the way of human advance. In the pages of the Arya for seven years Aurobindo wrote prolifically on philosophy, literature, art, culture, religion and politics. In a short sequence entitled “The Renaissance in India” he offered a clarification of his opinion on the place of religion in the public life of India. He noted that there was no real synonym for the word “religion” in Sanskrit. He ventured to suggest that the ethical malady in India was caused not by too much religion, but too little of it, in the most generous sense of the term. “The right remedy is”, he recommended, “not to belittle still farther the age-long ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth all the life of the nation a religion in this high spiritual sense”.
The major sequence in Arya of the greatest relevance for students of cultural criticism, political thought and human values today is the one published under the title “The Defence of Indian Culture” between 1918 and 1921. One of its components, called “The Significance of Indian Art”, a scintillating essay on the aesthetic side of Indian civilization, anticipates Edward Said’s critique of orientalism by some sixty years.34 More pertinent to our immediate concerns is another component, “The Spirit and Form of Indian Polity”, from which the title of this essay takes its inspiration. In it Aurobindo resoundingly rejected the charge that India had “always shown an incompetence for any free or sound political organisation”. A “summary reading of Indian history” that India was “socially marked by the despotism of the Brahmin theocracy” and “politically by an absolute monarchy of the oriental” had been “destroyed by a more careful and enlightened scholarship”. But the attempt by some Indian scholars to read back modern parliamentary democracy into India’s past Aurobindo considered to be “an ill-judged endeavour”. He recognized “a strong democratic element”, but “these features were of India’s own kind”. While Aurobindo’s treatise rehearses in some detail the history of Indian ethics of good governance, the normative lesson to be derived from it was clearly meant for the future. It was “perhaps for a future India”, Aurobindo modestly expressed a hope, “to found the status and action of the collective being of man on the realisation of the deeper spiritual truth”. 35
Aurobindo’s discourse began with a consideration of republican freedom in India’s ancient past which turned out to be deeper and more resilient than in either Greece or Rome. Even after the drift in India as elsewhere from republican towards monarchical forms, Indian monarchy was not “a personal despotism or an absolutist autocracy”. The power of the Indian king was balanced by a council as well as metropolitan and general assemblies which were “lesser co-partners with him in the exercise of sovereignty and administrative legislation and control”. The social hierarchy was not replicated in the political hierarchy and “all the four orders had their part in the common political rights of the citizen”. In theory women in ancient India were “not denied civic rights”, even though in practice, Aurobindo conceded, “this equality was rendered nugatory for all but a few by their social subordination to the male”. “A greater sovereign than the king was the Dharma”, which Aurobindo defined as “the religious, ethical, social, political, juridic and customary law organically governing the life of the people”. Secular authority was denied “any right of autocratic interference” with this dharma. The “subjection of the sovereign power to the Dharma was not an ideal theory inoperative in practice”. In practical terms it exercised a restraint on the king’s power of legislation. More importantly, the “religious liberties of the commons were assured” against infringement by secular authority. Powerful sovereigns like Asoka might have attempted to increase royal influence in this domain. But even Asoka’s edicts, Aurobindo felt, had “a recommendatory rather than an imperative character”. A sovereign aspiring to promote change in the area of religious beliefs or institutions had to abide by “the Indian principle of communal freedom” or make a reference to “a consultative assembly for deliberation, as was done in the famous Buddhist councils”. Whatever the sovereign’s personal predilections, “he was bound to respect and support in his public office all the recognised religions of the people with a certain measure of impartiality”. “Normally”, as a consequence, “there was no place in the Indian political system for religious oppression and intolerance and a settled State policy of that kind was unthinkable”. 36 It is odd that a set of restraints and responsibilities enjoining secular authority in an ethical Indian polity to respect religious freedom is today appropriated as one of the meanings of secularism alongside a contrary meaning of the separation of religion from politics.
There were further safeguards in the ancient Indian polity against the “autocratic freak”. Notwithstanding the “prestige attaching to the sovereign”, obedience to the king was no longer binding “if the king ceased to be the faithful executor of the Dharma”. In extreme cases of oppression “the right or even the duty of insurrection and regicide” was acknowledged. “Another more peaceful and more commonly exercised remedy”, Aurobindo noted, “was a threat of secession or exodus”. He cited a case of such a threat against an unpopular king in south India as late as the seventeenth century. What, then, was “the theory and principle” as well as “the actual constitution of the Indian polity”? It was “a complex of communal freedom and self-determination with a supreme coordinating authority, a sovereign person and body”, but “limited to its proper rights and functions”. The “economic and political aspects of the communal life” were “inextricably united” with “the religious, the ethical, the higher cultural aim of social existence”. To take dharma out of politics would have been to erode its ethical foundations. By not taking apart the yoke of dharma, Indian civilization had in Aurobindo’s view “evolved an admirable political system”, but “escaped at the same time the excess of the mechanizing turn which is the defect of the modern European state”. 37
The ancient Indian polity propounded an imperial idea of unity that was at sharp variance with “a mechanical western rule” that had “crushed out all the still existing communal or regional autonomies and substituted the dead unity of a machine”. Indian history did, of course, afford an instance of expansion or conquest that spread “the Buddhistic idea” and its associated thought and culture to the lands abutting the eastern Indian Ocean. “The ships that set out from both the eastern and western coast were not”, as Aurobindo correctly pointed out, “fleets of invaders missioned to annex those outlying countries to an Indian empire”. But he slipped inadvertently into the language of cultural imperialism when he described this as a movement of “exiles or adventurers carrying with them to yet uncultured peoples Indian religion, architecture, art, poetry, thought, life, manners”. But this slippage did not vitiate the main point that he wished to make about the imperial idea. “The idea of empire and even of world-empire was not absent from the Indian mind”, Aurobindo argued, “but its world was the Indian world and the object the founding of the imperial unity of its peoples”. It was this idea that animated efforts at unity through the ages of the Vedas, the Epics, the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Mughals and the Marathas until there came a final failure, after which the British imposed “a uniform subjection in place of the free unity of a free people”. 38
Aurobindo then touched upon “the secret of the difficulty in the problem of unifying ancient India”. It was that “the easy method of a centralized empire could not truly succeed in India”. The rishis from the Vedic age onwards, therefore, propounded “the ideal of the Chakravarti, a uniting imperial rule, uniting without destroying the autonomy of India’s many kingdoms and peoples, from sea to sea”. The dharma of a powerful king was to set up a suzerainty. The “full flowering” of this ideal Aurobindo found in “the great epics”. The Mahabharata narrates the legendary and quasi-historic pursuit of this ideal of empire which even “the turbulent Shishupala” is represented as accepting in his attendance at Yudhisthira’s dharmic Rajasuya sacrifice. The Ramayana too presents “an idealized picture of such a Dharmarajya, a settled universal empire”. It is, in Aurobindo’s words, “not an autocratic despotism but a universal monarchy supported by a free assembly of the city and provinces and of all the classes that is held up as the ideal”. The “ideal of conquest” is “not a destructive and predatory invasion”, but “a sacrificial progression” aiming at “a strengthening adhesion to a suzerain power”. According to this ideal, unification “ought not to be secured at the expense of the free life of the regional peoples or of the communal liberties and not therefore by a centralized monarchy or a rigidly unitarian imperial State”. The closest Western analogy that Aurobindo could find for this conception was “a hegemony or a confederacy under an imperial head”. 39
Aurobindo doubted whether this ideal was ever executed in practice with full success even though he regarded the empire created and re-created by the Mauryas, the Sungas, the Kanwas, the Andhras and the Guptas as “among the greatest constructed and maintained by the genius of the earth’s great peoples”. It contradicted “the hasty verdict” that denied India’s ancient civilization “a strong practical genius or high political virtue”. With the benefit of more recent historical evidence Aurobindo might have found that the actually existing empire in ancient India was not that far removed from the ideal as was commonly supposed in the early twentieth century. The Muslim conquest, in Aurobindo’s temporal scheme, occurred at a moment when India “needed a breathing space to rejuvenate itself by transference from the Sanskrit to the popular tongues and the newly forming regional peoples”. The early Muslim sovereigns generally respected this process of vernacularization so that, in Aurobindo’s terms, “the Mussulman domination ceased very rapidly to be a foreign rule”. “The vast mass of the Mussulmans in the country were and are Indians by race”, he wrote, “and even the foreign kings and nobles became almost immediately wholly Indian in mind, life and interest”. Aurobindo had no doubt that “the British is the first really continuous foreign rule that has dominated India”.
The Muslim conquest did not, therefore, introduce the difficulty of “subjection to a foreign rule”, but it did pose a challenge of “the struggle between two civilizations”. Aurobindo could see that there were “two conceivable solutions” to this problem: one, “the rise of a greater spiritual principle”, or two, “a political patriotism surmounting the religious struggle”. Akbar tried the first from the Muslim side, but his religion was too intellectual to receive “the assent from the strongly religious mind of the two communities”. Nanak tried it from the other side, but his religion, “universal in principle, became a sect in practice”. Akbar also fostered a common political patriotism, but, in Aurobindo’s estimation, “the living assent of the people was needed” in the creation of “a united imperial India” beyond the administrative talent of nobles from both religious communities. The Mughal Empire was, in Aurobindo’s very positive assessment,a great and magnificent construction and an immense amount of political genius and talent was employed in its creation and maintenance. It was as splendid, powerful and beneficent and, it may be added, in spite of Aurangzeb’s fanatical zeal, infinitely more liberal and tolerant in religion than any medieval or contemporary European kingdom or empire and India under its rule stood high in military and political strength, economic opulence and the brilliance of its art and culture.
But it eventually disintegrated because, in Aurobindo’s view, “a military and administrative centralized empire could not effect India’s living political unity”. Here the sage from Pondicherry was overestimating the Mughal tendency towards military–administrative centralization, the best new research having suggested that the Mughal emperor sought no more than an overarching suzerainty that was India’s imperial ideal. But he was closer to the mark in presaging at least in part the revisionist historiography of the eighteenth century when he wrote that “although a new life seemed about to rise in the regional peoples, the chance was cut short by the intrusion of the European nations”. 41
Aurobindo noted two final creative attempts by “the Indian political mind” in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth. He interpreted the Maratha revival crafted by Ramdas and Shivaji as “an attempt to restore what could still be understood or remembered of the ancient form and spirit”. But the Peshwas succeeded in setting up nothing more than “a military and political confederacy”. Their imperial ambition floundered because it was “inspired by a regional patriotism that failed to enlarge itself beyond its own limits”. The second attempt by the Sikh Khalsa, despite its originality, “achieved intensity but no power of expansion”. After that came “a temporary end to all political initiative and creation”. “The lifeless attempt of the last generation”, Aurobindo concluded, “to imitate and reproduce with a servile fidelity the ideals and forms of the West has been no true indication of the political mind and genius of the Indian people”. 42
In the late seventeenth century Ramdas’s philosophy of regional patriotism and Shivaji’s statecraft had formed the basis of a Maratha swarajya (“independent kingdom”). The Marathas emerged in the eighteenth century as a strong regional power in western India led by the Peshwas and seemed the most likely inheritors of the Mughal imperial mantle. The Sikh Khalsa (literally, “the pure”) had established a powerful regional kingdom in the Punjab.
By the time Aurobindo completed his arya on Indian political ethics in 1921, a new God-sent leader had arrived on the scene to take charge of a new phase of Indian mass nationalism. Aurobindo’s doctrine of sacrifice contributed to the recruitment of a young firebrand to Mahatma Gandhi’s movement. “The illustrious example of Arabindo Ghosh looms large before my vision”, Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to his elder brother Sarat as he prepared to resign from the Indian Civil Service in 1921. “I feel that I am ready to make the sacrifice which that example demands of me.” Subhas Bose comments in his autobiography that “it was widely believed about this time” that Aurobindo “would soon return to active political life”. 43 But Aurobindo’s political work was done and the baton hadbeenhandedover. Theyear 1921,not 1910, marks the close of Aurobindo’s career in inspiring the spirit and fashioning the form of an ethical polity. He had done his bit as a great individual in contributing to the dynamics that, in Ranajit Guha’s words, “made dignity and self-respect the very condition of Indian nationalism”. 44 But he had done more. He had shown that in the domain of creating a state Indian nationalism was not condemned to pirating from the gallery of models crafted by the West.45 The imitative fidelity of the Nehruvian moment of arrival has been “no true indication of the political mind and genius of the Indian people”. The alternatives that lost out in that battle for power at the helm of a centralized state were represented not just by Gandhi or even Tagore, but a broad spectrum of moral personalities who had adopted nationalism as the religion of the age. Although Aurobindo believed that night had descended on Indian political creativity under colonial rule, he could still see “amid all the mist of confusion” the possibility of “a new twilight, not of an evening, but a morning Yuga-sandhya”. As the world stands at the threshold of a new dawn in the realm of political thought, if not political practice, it may not be inappropriate to recall Aurobindo’s words of hope: “India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples.”46
* An earlier version of this essay was given as the Sri Aurobindo Memorial Oration at the Centre for Human Values, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, on 12 August 2005.
1 Bejoy Krishna Bose, The Alipore Bomb Trial (Calcutta: Butterworth, 1922), 140–41. Chitta Ranjan Das served as Aurobindo Ghose’s defence counsel in 1909.Das laterrosetobecome the pre-eminent leader of the Indian nationalist movement between 1917 and 1925 and was given the honorific title Deshbandhu (“Friend of the Country”). 129
2 P. C. Ray, Life and Times of C. R. Das (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1927), 62.
3 Bose, Alipore Bomb Trial, 111.
4 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 315–16.
5 Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994),
6 Andrew Sartori, “The Categorical Logic of a Colonial Nationalism: Swadeshi Bengal, 1904–1908”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23, 1 and 2 (2003), 271–85, 272.
7 C. A. Bayly, The Origins of Nationality in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and C. A. Bayly, “Liberalism at Large: Giuseppe Mazzini and Nineteenth Century Indian Thought”, Tufts University, 7 April 2005.
8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World:A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
9 Kris Manjapra’s important doctoral research at Harvard University on intellectual encounters between Germany and India is based on this approach.
10 Ranajit Guha, “Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming”, Oracle, 24, 2 (August 2002), 1–20, 12, 15, 17–20.
11 K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1945), 119.
12 The Viceroy had divided this province, proud of its linguistic and cultural unity, largely along religious lines. The anti-partition agitation grew into the Swadeshi (“own country”) movement with the goal of winning swaraj (“self-rule”).
13 Ibid., 124–7.
14 Sri Aurobindo, The Doctrine of Passive Resistance (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1948), 27–30.
15 Ibid., 62, 65, 78.
16 Bipin Chandra Pal, “The New Patriotism”, in idem, Swadeshi and Swaraj (The Rise of New Patriotism) (Calcutta: Yugayatri Prakashak, 1954), 17–20.
17 Biman Behari Majumdar, History of Political Thought: From Rammohun to Dayananda (1821–84), Volume I: Bengal (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1934), 284–320.
18 Aurobindo, Doctrine of Passive Resistance, 81, 83–5, 87–8.
19 Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose (Chandernagore: Prabartak Publishing House, 1922), 7.
20 Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, 149–50.
21 Ibid., 160. 136
22 Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose, 10–12, 15, 27, 35–9.
23 Ibid., 65, 70, 75.
24 Ibid., 108.
25 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories and the Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies”, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 April 1995, 256–80, 753.
26 Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose, 86–7, 90–93, 100–1, 108.
27 Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of the Karmayogin (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1945), 6, 20–22, 26–7, 30–32.
28 Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, 213.
29 Aurobindo, Ideal of the Karmayogin, 61.
30 Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose, 225, 231.
31 Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, 316.
32 Sri Aurobindo, Views and Reviews (Madras: Sri Aurobindo Library, 1946), 7.
33 Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1946), 81.
34 Sri Aurobindo, The Significance of Indian Art (Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1953).
35 Sri Aurobindo, The Spirit and Form of Indian Polity (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1947), 3–5, 22.
36 Ibid., 10–15, 42, 45, 47–8.
37 Ibid., 16–18, 34, 62.
38 Ibid., 65–6, 75.
39 Ibid., 72, 76–8.
40 Ibid., 78–80, 86–7.
41 Ibid., 88–9.
42 Ibid., 90–91.
43 Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose (eds.), Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Collected Works, Volume 1: An Indian Pilgrim (Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau, 1997), 112.
44 Guha, “Nationalism”, 20.
45 This point is conceded a little too easily in Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–7.
46 Aurobindo, Spirit and Form, 91.