Science, Culture, Integral Yoga

The more Operation Green Hunt fails to decimate the Maoists and the more Maoists are able to expand and proliferate, the more assertive the liberal-left is going to get, proffering their approach and solution. No wonder Singh’s article comes after the massacre of the CRPF jawans, when it seemed like Operation Green Hunt is not taking off. The Maoist presence and Chidambaram’s failure to eliminate it will clearly bring cheers to the liberal-left and allow them great leverage within the corridors of power. If this happens of course this might mean a larger realignment within the ruling bloc in favour of more people-oriented policies and applying some restraint on private capital and economic reforms – thanks to the Maoist presence!

On the other hand, objectively speaking the Indian state and ruling classes have lost touch with vast masses of people, particulary adivasis so that Maoists came to be the only credible force, to fill up what CPI leader from Bastar Manish Kunjam called a ‘political vacuum’ (Frontline, April 24 – May 7, 2010). Now apart from the subjective intentions of the Maoists the point is that objectively speaking big capital and the state in India today might look to the Maoists as facilitating this mediation between the tribals and the corporates – unless big capital is willing to go for an all out extermination of the tribals and capture the land and resources. This is the context in which we must understand ruling class parties accusing each other of being soft on the Maoists to secure electoral victories in Maoist areas – the Congress is supposed to be soft on Maoists to secure electoral gains in states like Chattisgarh with a BJP government. This only means that one way or another these parties are forced to deal with the fact that the Maoists are the only credible force with mass support in certain areas of sharp struggle against corporate capital.

(Lauded as a favorite contemporary theorist by Slavoj Zizek, Saroj Giri, has been a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi since 2005)

In this book chapter from Jason M. Wirth’s The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time, the legacy of Indology in Schelling’s work is explored through a comparative meditation on Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita. The author here looks particularly on the issue of good and evil and the attempt to make sense of their co-existence through philosophy. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil can be seen as a direct consequence of this work, leading to his notion of the superman. Though the author here is not concerned with the existential status of the person who reflects on good and evil, Schelling’s philosophical meditation is shown as a form of jnana yoga meant for arriving at a proper relation with the cosmic reality.

Though certain aspects of the author’s and Schelling’s understanding of Hinduism and Buddhism in general and of Sri Aurobindo in particular, may be questioned, and though the reflections on Sri Arobindo are restricted to his views on the Gita and don’t touch on his darshan of the evolution of cosmic reality beyond the dualities, a rich and interesting form of comparative hermenutics is engaged by him, revealing the dalogic concerns of certain aspects of German Transcendentalism and its dependence on Indian thought.

An interesting occult relation exists perhaps between India and the US. Both obtained their liberation as modern colonies from Great Britain. The American struggle for independence was indirectly connected to India, in that it followed close on the heels of the first Indian War of Independence (earlier known as The Sepoy Mutiny) (1857). This is not merely coincidental but historically linked through the high taxation levied by GB on goods in America due to its losses in the Indian War (and the Seven Years War starting in the US against France).

In 1893, Vivekananda came to the US. What is commonly known is his legacy to America in the form of Indian yoga. What is less known is America’s legacy to Vivekananda through its message of world liberty. Vivekananda began composing a poem titled the Fourth of July on this day in 1898 and he died also on this day in 1902. We are carrying this poem by Vivekananda here.

As a late 19th c. American tribute to the message of India brought by Vivekananda, we are also carrying Walt Whitman’s poem “Passage to India” following Vivekananda’s poem. Sri Aurobindo viewed Walt Whitman as a harbinger of the future (Overhead) poetry, and configured his free verse as a loose quantitative meter. Whitman’s legacy to contemporary American poetry is immeasurable and continues to inspire a strand of the American poetic spirit.

The present war is following a trajectory that is beginning to feel unsettlingly familiar to students of the Great Game. In 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan on the basis of sexed-up intelligence about a non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was manipulated by a group of ambitious and ideologically driven hawks to create a scare – in this case, about a phantom Russian invasion – thus bringing about an unnecessary, expensive and entirely avoidable war.

Initially, the hawks were triumphant – the British conquest proved remarkably easy and bloodless; Kabul was captured within a few weeks as the army of the previous regime melted into the hills, and a pliable monarch, Shah Shuja, was successfully placed on the throne. For a few months the British played cricket, went skating and put on amateur theatricals as if on summer leave in Simla; there were discussions about making Kabul the summer capital of the Raj. Then an insurgency began and that first heady success slowly unravelled, first among the Pashtuns of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. It slowly gained momentum, moving northwards until it reached Kabul, so making the British occupation impossible to sustain.

What happened next is a warning of how bad things could yet become: a full-scale rebellion against the British broke out in Kabul, and the two most senior British envoys, Sir Alexander Burnes and Sir William Macnaghten, were assassinated, one hacked to death by a mob in the streets, the other stabbed and shot by the resistance leader Wazir Akbar Khan during negotiations. It was on the retreat that followed, on 6 January 1842, that the 18,000 East India Company troops, and maybe half that many again Indian camp followers, were slaughtered by Afghan marksmen waiting in ambush amid the high passes, shot down as they trudged through the icy depths of the Afghan winter. After eight days on the death march, the last 50 survivors made their final stand at the village of Gandamak. As late as the 1970s, fragments of Victorian weaponry and military equipment could be found lying in the screes above the village. Even today, the hill is said to be covered with the bleached bones of the British dead.

Michael Stoeber is Professor of Spirituality at Regis College, University of Toronto. In this article, he addresses the questions – how did Sri Aurobindo Ghose understand Tantra? Is the category of Tantra helpful in understanding Sri Aurobindo’s spirituality? How Tantric is his spirituality? In responding to these questions, this paper explores various threads in Sri Aurobindo’s spirituality: his conceptions of the Goddess and the Shakti-Ishvara Godhead; his integration of features of Shaktism and Shakta Tantra with his early revolutionary politics; his understanding of the cakra system and the embodied nature of his spiritual ideal; his stress on devotional surrender to the divine Mother; and his views of sexuality. Although Sri Aurobindo’s mature spirituality is clearly toned down and marked off from more antinomian forms of Tantra, the paper argues that it was shaped in significant ways by his understanding of Tantra.