In the previous post Leela Gandhi contrast her study of cross-cultural friendship with Ashis Nandy’s intimate enemy in studies of such figures as Mira Alfassa (the Mother) This is the first part of Nandy’s classic in post-colonial studies in which he theorizes colonialism and resistance in India. He does this in part through studies in the biographies and works of a number of interesting historical figures among these Kipling, Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo. When we get there we will interrogate his analysis of Sri Aurobindo and among other things explore how it differs from Gandhi’s “intimate friendships” and Heeh’s biography . We begin with the preface and first part of the book:
“Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order. These hierarchies opened up new vistas for many, particularly for those exploited or cornered within the traditional order. To them the new order looked like and here lay its psychological pull the first step towards a more just and equal world. That was why some of the finest critical minds in Europe and in the East were to feel that colonialism, by introducing modern structures into the barbaric world, would open up the non West to the modern critic-analytic spirit. Like the ‘hideous heathen god who refused to drink nectar except from the skulls of murdered men’, Karl Marx felt, history would produce out of oppression, violence and cultural dislocation not merely new technological and social forces but also a new social consciousness in Asia and Africa. It would be critical in the sense in which the Western tradition of social criticism from Vico to Marx had been critical and it would be rational in the sense in which post Cartesian Europe had been rational. It is thus that the a historical primitives would one day, the expectation went, learn to see themselves as masters of nature and, hence, as masters of their own fate.” A. Nandy
Many many decades later, in the aftermath of that marvel of modern technology called the Second World War and perhaps that modern encounter of cultures called Vietnam, it has become obvious that the drive for mastery over men is not merely a by product of a faulty political economy but also of a world view which believes in the absolute superiority of the human over the nonhuman and the subhuman, the masculine over the feminine, the adult over the child, the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern or progressive over the traditional or the savage. It has become more and more apparent that genocides, ecodisasters and ethnocides are but the underside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic technologies wedded to new secular hierarchies, which have reduced major civilizations to the status of a set of empty rituals. The ancient forces of human greed and violence, one recognizes, have merely found a new legitimacy in anthropocentric doctrines of secular salvation, in the ideologies of progress, normality and hyper masculinity, and in theories of cumulative growth of science and technology.”
Seamus Heaney– The Poet and his Tradition by Suzana Stefanović
Sri Aurobindo’s seems to have privileged the strain of Celtic influence in English language poetry and the Irish Poets Yeats and A.E. are among the last that he favorable considers in The Future Poetry. If we trace the Celtic fringe of poetry since Yeats the figure we arrive at today is Nobel prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. There are important differences in Heaney’s work from Yeats, for one he eschews Yeats Neo-Platonism and his occult vision of history but he cant escape what is Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence that Yeats had upon him. This article explore Heaney’s relationship not only to Yeats but also to Wordsworth and especially to Joyce and the tradition from which he emerges.
Heaney’s poetic heritage, therefore, has presented two distinct directions, the Joycean and the Yeatsian, which offer the poet a choice. The poet must be faithful to experience to give his poetry authority and authenticity, but he must also be careful to allow some subjectivity in order to provide a personal and unique shaping of material. Heaney has explained this dichotomy as the need for a structure and a sustaining landscape and at the same time the need to be liberated and distanced from it, the need to be open, unpredictably susceptible, lyrically opportunistic. 28
It is possible to see Heaney straining towards both these literary traditions. One part of his sensibility inclines naturally toward Joyce and his admirer Patrick Kavanagh, who drew from simple details of everyday life, believing that real poetic strength came from a trust in the local and the familiar. Heaney alludes to this tendency in a recent interview: “Whatever success I’ve had has come from staying within the realm of my own imaginative country and my own voice.” 29 At the same time, another part of him recognizes the need for detachment in favor of the cultivation of a poetic persona and the creation of intellectual poetry, both of which were characteristic of Yeats.