{"id":2928,"date":"2013-07-13T01:44:40","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2928"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:44:40","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:40","slug":"01-the-renaissance-in-india-vol-20-the-renaissance-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/20-the-renaissance-in-india\/01-the-renaissance-in-india-vol-20-the-renaissance-in-india","title":{"rendered":"-01_The Renaissance in India.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
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\nThe Renaissance in India<\/font><\/b>
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\n 
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\n
\nThe Renaissance in India<\/font><\/b>
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\nT<\/font>HERE <\/b>has been recently some talk of a Renaissance in India. A number of illuminating essays with that general
\ntitle and subject have been given to us by a poet and subtle critic and thinker, Mr. James H. Cousins, and others have
\ntouched suggestively various sides of the growing movement towards a new life and a new thought that may well seem to
\njustify the description. This Renaissance, this new birth in India, if it is a fact, must become a thing of immense importance both
\nto herself and the world, to herself because of all that is meant for her in the recovery or the change of her time-old spirit and
\nnational ideals, to the world because of the possibilities involved in the rearising of a force that is in many respects unlike any other
\nand its genius very different from the mentality and spirit that have hitherto governed the modern idea in mankind, although
\nnot so far away perhaps from that which is preparing to govern the future. It is rather the first point of view that I shall put
\nforward at present: for the question what India means to make of her own life must precede the wider question what her new
\nlife may mean to the human race. And it is besides likely to become before long an issue of a pressing importance.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThere is a first question, whether at all there is really a Renaissance in India. That depends a good deal on what we
\nmean by the word; it depends also on the future, for the thing itself is only in its infancy and it is too early to say to what
\nit may lead. The word carries the mind back to the turning-point of European culture to which it was first applied; that
\nwas not so much a reawakening as an overturn and reversal, a seizure of
\nChristianised, Teutonised, feudalised Europe by the old Graeco-Latin spirit and
\nform with all the complex and momentous results which came from it. That is
\ncertainly not a type of renaissance that is at all possible in India. There is   <\/span><\/p>\n

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\n a closer resemblance to the recent Celtic movement in Ireland, the attempt of a reawakened national spirit to find a new impulse of self-expression which shall give the spiritual force for a great reshaping and rebuilding: in Ireland this was discovered
\nby a return to the Celtic spirit and culture after a long period of eclipsing English influences, and in India something of the
\nsame kind of movement is appearing and has especially taken a pronounced turn since the political outburst of 1905. But even
\nhere the analogy does not give the whole truth. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nWe have to see moreover that the whole is at present a
\ngreat formless chaos of conflicting influences with a few luminous points of formation here and there where a new
\nself-consciousness has come to the surface. But it cannot be said that these forms have yet a sufficient hold on the general mind of
\nthe people. They represent an advance movement; they are the voices of the vanguard, the torchlights of the pioneers. On the
\nwhole what we see is a giant Shakti who awakening into a new world, a new and alien environment, finds herself shackled in all
\nher limbs by a multitude of gross or minute bonds, bonds self-woven by her past, bonds recently imposed from outside, and is
\nstruggling to be free from them, to arise and proclaim herself, to cast abroad her spirit and set her seal on the world. We hear on
\nevery side a sound of the slow fraying of bonds, here and there a sharp tearing and snapping; but freedom of movement has not
\nyet been attained. The eyes are not yet clear, the bud of the soul has only partly opened. The Titaness has not yet arisen.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nMr. Cousins puts the question in his book whether the word renaissance at all applies since India has always been awake and
\nstood in no need of reawakening. There is a certain truth behind that and to one coming in with a fresh mind from outside and
\nstruck by the living continuity of past and present India, it may be especially apparent; but that is not quite how we can see it
\nwho are her children and are still suffering from the bitter effects of the great decline which came to a head in the eighteenth and
\nnineteenth centuries. Undoubtedly there was a period, a brief but very disastrous period of the dwindling of that great fire of life,
\neven a moment of incipient disintegration, marked politically by  
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\nthe anarchy which gave European adventure its chance, inwardly by an increasing torpor of the creative spirit in religion and
\nart, \u2014 science and philosophy and intellectual knowledge had long been dead or petrified into a mere scholastic Punditism,
\n\u2014
\nall pointing to a nadir of setting energy, the evening-time from which according to the Indian idea of the cycles a new age has
\nto start. It was that moment and the pressure of a superimposed European culture which followed it that made the reawakening
\nnecessary. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nWe have practically to take three facts into consideration,
\nthe great past of Indian culture and life with the moment of inadaptive torpor into which it had lapsed, the first period of
\nthe Western contact in which it seemed for a moment likely to perish by slow decomposition, and the ascending movement
\nwhich first broke into some clarity of expression only a decade or two ago. Mr. Cousins has his eye fixed on Indian spirituality
\nwhich has always maintained itself even in the decline of the national vitality; it was certainly that which saved India always
\nat every critical moment of her destiny, and it has been the starting-point too of her renascence. Any other nation under
\nthe same pressure would have long ago perished soul and body. But certainly the outward members were becoming gangrened;
\nthe powers of renovation seemed for a moment to be beaten by the powers of stagnation, and stagnation is death. Now that
\nthe salvation, the reawakening has come, India will certainly keep her essential spirit, will keep her characteristic soul, but
\nthere is likely to be a great change of the body. The shaping for itself of a new body, of new philosophical, artistic, literary, cultural, political, social forms by the same soul rejuvenescent will, I should think, be the type of the Indian renascence,
\n\u2014 forms
\nnot contradictory of the truths of life which the old expressed, but rather expressive of those truths restated, cured of defect,
\ncompleted. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nWhat was this ancient spirit and characteristic soul of India?
\nEuropean writers, struck by the general metaphysical bent of the Indian mind, by its strong religious instincts and religious
\nidealism, by its other-worldliness, are inclined to write as if this  <\/span><\/p>\n

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\nwere all the Indian spirit. An abstract, metaphysical, religious mind overpowered by the sense of the infinite, not apt for life,
\ndreamy, unpractical, turning away from life and action as Maya, this, they said, is India; and for a time Indians in this as in other
\nmatters submissively echoed their new Western teachers and masters. They learned to speak with pride of their metaphysics,
\nof their literature, of their religion, but in all else they were content to be learners and imitators. Since then Europe has discovered that there was too an Indian art of remarkable power and beauty; but the rest of what India meant it has hardly at
\nall seen. But meanwhile the Indian mind began to emancipate itself and to look upon its past with a clear and self-discerning
\neye, and it very soon discovered that it had been misled into an entirely false self-view. All such one-sided appreciations indeed
\nalmost invariably turn out to be false. Was it not the general misconception about Germany at one time, because she was great
\nin philosophy and music, but had blundered in life and been unable to make the most of its materials, that this was a nation
\nof unpractical dreamers, idealists, erudites and sentimentalists, patient, docile and industrious certainly, but politically inapt,
\n\u2014 “admirable, ridiculous Germany”? Europe has had a terrible awakening from that error. When the renascence of India is
\ncomplete, she will have an awakening, not of the same brutal kind, certainly, but startling enough, as to the real nature and
\ncapacity of the Indian spirit. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nSpirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the
\nsense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning, \u2014 and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing
\nignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, \u2014 that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the
\nsole power of its externalities. She was alive to the greatness of material laws and forces; she had a keen eye for the importance
\nof the physical sciences; she knew how to organise the arts of ordinary life. But she saw that the physical does not get its full
\nsense until it stands in right relation to the supra-physical; she saw that the complexity of the universe could not be explained
\nin the present terms of man or seen by his superficial sight, that   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nthere were other powers behind, other powers within man himself of which he is normally unaware, that he is conscious only
\nof a small part of himself, that the invisible always surrounds the visible, the suprasensible the sensible, even as infinity always
\nsurrounds the finite. She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, \u2014 truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common
\nintelligence. She saw the myriad gods beyond man, God beyond the gods, and beyond God his own ineffable eternity; she saw
\nthat there were ranges of life beyond our life, ranges of mind beyond our present mind and above these she saw the splendours
\nof the spirit. Then with that calm audacity of her intuition which knew no fear or littleness and shrank from no act whether of
\nspiritual or intellectual, ethical or vital courage, she declared that there was none of these things which man could not attain if he
\ntrained his will and knowledge; he could conquer these ranges of mind, become the spirit, become a god, become one with God,
\nbecome the ineffable Brahman. And with the logical practicality and sense of science and organised method which distinguished
\nher mentality, she set forth immediately to find out the way. Hence from long ages of this insight and practice there was
\ningrained in her her spirituality, her powerful psychic tendency, her great yearning to grapple with the infinite and possess it, her
\nineradicable religious sense, her idealism, her Yoga, the constant turn of her art and her philosophy.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut this was not and could not be her whole mentality, her entire spirit; spirituality itself does not flourish on earth in the
\nvoid, even as our mountaintops do not rise like those of an enchantment of dream out of the clouds without a base. When we
\nlook at the past of India, what strikes us next is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost
\nunimaginably prolific creativeness. For three thousand years at least, \u2014 it is indeed much longer,
\n\u2014 she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly, with an inexhaustible manysidedness, republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies
\nand cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts and poems    <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nand all kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and
\ncodes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, systems of politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts
\nworldly, trades, industries, fine crafts, \u2014 the list is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity. She creates and
\ncreates and is not satisfied and is not tired; she will not have an end of it, seems hardly to need a space for rest, a time for inertia
\nand lying fallow. She expands too outside her borders; her ships cross the ocean and the fine superfluity of her wealth brims over
\nto Judaea and Egypt and Rome; her colonies spread her arts and epics and creeds in the Archipelago; her traces are found in the
\nsands of Mesopotamia; her religions conquer China and Japan and spread westward as far as Palestine and Alexandria, and the
\nfigures of the Upanishads and the sayings of the Buddhists are reechoed on the lips of Christ. Everywhere, as on her soil, so
\nin her works there is the teeming of a superabundant energy of life. European critics complain that in her ancient architecture,
\nsculpture and art there is no reticence, no holding back of riches, no blank spaces, that she labours to fill every rift with ore,
\noccupy every inch with plenty. Well, but defect or no, that is the necessity of her superabundance of life, of the teeming of the
\ninfinite within her. She lavishes her riches because she must, as the Infinite fills every inch of space with the stirring of life and
\nenergy because it is the Infinite. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut this supreme spirituality and this prolific abundance of
\nthe energy and joy of life and creation do not make all that the spirit of India has been in its past. It is not a confused splendour
\nof tropical vegetation under heavens of a pure sapphire infinity. It is only to eyes unaccustomed to such wealth that there seems
\nto be a confusion in this crowding of space with rich forms of life, a luxurious disorder of excess or a wanton lack of measure,
\nclear balance and design. For the third power of the ancient Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality, at once austere and rich,
\nrobust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle and curious in detail. Its chief impulse was that of order and
\narrangement, but an order founded upon a seeking for the inner  
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\nlaw and truth of things and having in view always the possibility of conscientious practice. India has been preeminently the land
\nof the Dharma and the Shastra. She searched for the inner truth and law of each human or cosmic activity, its dharma; that
\nfound, she laboured to cast into elaborate form and detailed law of arrangement its application in fact and rule of life. Her first
\nperiod was luminous with the discovery of the Spirit; her second completed the discovery of the Dharma; her third elaborated
\ninto detail the first simpler formulation of the Shastra; but none was exclusive, the three elements are always present.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIn this third period the curious elaboration of all life into a science and an art assumes extraordinary proportions. The
\nmere mass of the intellectual production during the period from Asoka well into the Mahomedan epoch is something truly prodigious, as can be seen at once if one studies the account which recent scholarship gives of it, and we must remember that that
\nscholarship as yet only deals with a fraction of what is still lying extant and what is extant is only a small percentage of what
\nwas once written and known. There is no historical parallel for such an intellectual labour and activity before the invention of
\nprinting and the facilities of modern science; yet all that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities and with no better record than the memory and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf. Nor was all
\nthis colossal literature confined to philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics,
\npoetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences; it embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting
\nto dancing, all the sixty-four accomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind,
\neven, for instance, to such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants, each of which had its
\nShastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature. In each subject from the largest and most momentous
\nto the smallest and most trivial there was expended the same all-embracing, opulent, minute and thorough intellectuality. On
\none side there is an insatiable curiosity, the desire of life to know  
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\nitself in every detail, on the other a spirit of organisation and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with
\na harmonised knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure. Thus an ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible
\nvital creativeness and gust of life and, mediating between them, a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence combined of
\nthe rational, ethical and aesthetic mind each at a high intensity of action, created the harmony of the ancient Indian culture.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndeed without this opulent vitality and opulent intellectuality India could never have done so much as she did with her
\nspiritual tendencies. It is a great error to suppose that spirituality flourishes best in an impoverished soil with the life half-killed
\nand the intellect discouraged and intimidated. The spirituality that so flourishes is something morbid, hectic and exposed to
\nperilous reactions. It is when the race has lived most richly and thought most profoundly that spirituality finds its heights and
\nits depths and its constant and many-sided fruition. In modern Europe it is after a long explosion of vital force and a stupendous activity of the intellect that spirituality has begun really to emerge and with some promise of being not, as it once was,
\nthe sorrowful physician of the malady of life, but the beginning of a large and profound clarity. The European eye is struck in
\nIndian spiritual thought by the Buddhistic and illusionist denial of life. But it must be remembered that this is only one side of its
\nphilosophic tendency which assumed exaggerated proportions only in the period of decline. In itself too that was simply one
\nresult, in one direction, of a tendency of the Indian mind which is common to all its activities, the impulse to follow each motive,
\neach specialisation of motive even, spiritual, intellectual, ethical, vital, to its extreme point and to sound its utmost possibility. Part
\nof its innate direction was to seek in each not only for its fullness of detail, but for its infinite, its absolute, its profoundest depth
\nor its highest pinnacle. It knew that without a “fine excess” we cannot break down the limits which the dull temper of the
\nnormal mind opposes to knowledge and thought and experience; and it had in seeking this point a boundless courage and yet a
\nsure tread. Thus it carried each tangent of philosophic thought,  
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\neach line of spiritual experience to its farthest point, and chose to look from that farthest point at all existence, so as to see
\nwhat truth or power such a view could give it. It tried to know the whole of divine nature and to see too as high as it could
\nbeyond nature and into whatever there might be of supradivine. When it formulated a spiritual atheism, it followed that to its
\nacme of possible vision. When, too, it indulged in materialistic atheism, \u2014 though it did that only with a side glance, as the
\nfreak of an insatiable intellectual curiosity, \u2014 yet it formulated it straight out, boldly and nakedly, without the least concession
\nto idealism or ethicism. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nEverywhere we find this tendency. The ideals of the Indian
\nmind have included the height of self-assertion of the human spirit and its thirst of independence and mastery and possession
\nand the height also of its self-abnegation, dependence and submission and self-giving. In life the ideal of opulent living and the
\nideal of poverty were carried to the extreme of regal splendour and the extreme of satisfied nudity. Its intuitions were sufficiently
\nclear and courageous not to be blinded by its own most cherished ideas and fixed habits of life. If it was obliged to stereotype caste
\nas the symbol of its social order, it never quite forgot, as the caste-spirit is apt to forget, that the human soul and the human
\nmind are beyond caste. For it had seen in the lowest human being the Godhead, Narayana. It emphasised distinctions only to turn
\nupon them and deny all distinctions. If all its political needs and circumstances compelled it at last to exaggerate the monarchical
\nprinciple and declare the divinity of the king and to abolish its earlier republican city states and independent federations as too
\nfavourable to the centrifugal tendency, if therefore it could not develop democracy, yet it had the democratic idea, applied it in
\nthe village, in council and municipality, within the caste, was the first to assert a divinity in the people and could cry to the
\nmonarch at the height of his power, “O king, what art thou but the head servant of the demos?” Its idea of the golden age
\nwas a free spiritual anarchism. Its spiritual extremism could not prevent it from fathoming through a long era the life of the
\nsenses and its enjoyments, and there too it sought the utmost   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nrichness of sensuous detail and the depths and intensities of sensuous experience. Yet it is notable that this pursuit of the
\nmost opposite extremes never resulted in disorder; and its most hedonistic period offers nothing that at all resembles the unbridled corruption which a similar tendency has more than once produced in Europe. For the Indian mind is not only spiritual
\nand ethical, but intellectual and artistic, and both the rule of the intellect and the rhythm of beauty are hostile to the spirit of
\nchaos. In every extreme the Indian spirit seeks for a law in that extreme and a rule, measure and structure in its application.
\nBesides, this sounding of extremes is balanced by a still more ingrained characteristic, the synthetical tendency, so that having
\npushed each motive to its farthest possibility the Indian mind returns always towards some fusion of the knowledge it has
\ngained and to a resulting harmony and balance in action and institution. Balance and rhythm which the Greeks arrived at by
\nself-limitation, India arrived at by its sense of intellectual, ethical and aesthetic order and the synthetic impulse of its mind and
\nlife. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nI have dwelt on these facts because they are apt to be ignored
\nby those who look only at certain sides of the Indian mind and spirit which are most prominent in the last epochs. By insisting
\nonly upon these we get an inaccurate or incomplete idea of the past of India and of the integral meaning of its civilisation and
\nthe spirit that animated it. The present is only a last deposit of the past at a time of ebb; it has no doubt also to be the
\nstarting-point of the future, but in this present all that was in India’s past is still dormant, it is not destroyed; it is waiting there
\nto assume new forms. The decline was the ebb-movement of a creative spirit which can only be understood by seeing it in the
\nfull tide of its greatness; the renascence is the return of the tide and it is the same spirit that is likely to animate it, although
\nthe forms it takes may be quite new. To judge therefore the possibilities of the renascence, the powers that it may reveal
\nand the scope that it may take, we must dismiss the idea that the tendency of metaphysical abstraction is the one note of the
\nIndian spirit which dominates or inspires all its cadences. Its real  
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\nkey-note is the tendency of spiritual realisation, not cast at all into any white monotone, but many-faceted, many-coloured, as
\nsupple in its adaptability as it is intense in its highest pitches. The note of spirituality is dominant, initial, constant, always
\nrecurrent; it is the support of all the rest. The first age of India’s greatness was a spiritual age when she sought passionately for
\nthe truth of existence through the intuitive mind and through an inner experience and interpretation both of the psychic and the
\nphysical existence. The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost, but rather always enriched it with fresh spiritual
\nexperience and discovery at each step of the national life. Even in her hour of decline it was the one thing she could never lose.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut this spiritual tendency does not shoot upward only to the abstract, the hidden and the intangible; it casts its rays downward and outward to embrace the multiplicities of thought and the richness of life. Therefore the second long epoch of India’s
\ngreatness was an age of the intellect, the ethical sense, the dynamic will in action enlightened to formulate and govern life in
\nthe lustre of spiritual truth. After the age of the Spirit, the age of the Dharma; after the Veda and Upanishads, the heroic centuries
\nof action and social formation, typal construction and thought and philosophy, when the outward forms of Indian life and
\nculture were fixed in their large lines and even their later developments were being determined in the seed. The great classical
\nage of Sanskrit culture was the flowering of this intellectuality into curiosity of detail in the refinements of scholarship, science,
\nart, literature, politics, sociology, mundane life. We see at this time too the sounding not only of aesthetic, but of emotional
\nand sensuous, even of vital and sensual experience. But the old spirituality reigned behind all this mental and all this vital activity, and its later period, the post-classical, saw a lifting up of the whole lower life and an impressing upon it of the values of the
\nspirit. This was the sense of the Puranic and Tantric systems and the religions of Bhakti. Later Vaishnavism, the last fine flower of
\nthe Indian spirit, was in its essence the taking up of the aesthetic, emotional and sensuous being into the service of the spiritual. It
\ncompleted the curve of the cycle.   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nThe evening of decline which followed the completion of the curve was prepared by three movements of retrogression.
\nFirst there is, comparatively, a sinking of that superabundant vital energy and a fading of the joy of life and the joy of
\ncreation. Even in the decline this energy is still something splendid and extraordinary and only for a very brief period sinks
\nnearest to a complete torpor; but still a comparison with its past greatness will show that the decadence was marked and
\nprogressive. Secondly, there is a rapid cessation of the old free intellectual activity, a slumber of the scientific and the critical
\nmind as well as the creative intuition; what remains becomes more and more a repetition of ill-understood fragments of past
\nknowledge. There is a petrification of the mind and life in the relics of the forms which a great intellectual past had created.
\nOld authority and rule become rigidly despotic and, as always then happens, lose their real sense and spirit. Finally, spirituality
\nremains but burns no longer with the large and clear flame of knowledge of former times, but in intense jets and in a dispersed action which replaces the old magnificent synthesis and in which certain spiritual truths are emphasised to the neglect
\nof others. This diminution amounts to a certain failure of the great endeavour which is the whole meaning of Indian culture, a
\nfalling short in the progress towards the perfect spiritualisation of the mind and the life. The beginnings were superlative, the
\ndevelopments very great, but at a certain point where progress, adaptation, a new flowering should have come in, the old civilisation stopped short, partly drew back, partly lost its way. The essential no doubt remained and still remains in the heart of
\nthe race and not only in its habits and memories, but in its action it was covered up in a great smoke of confusion. The
\ncauses internal and external we need not now discuss; but the fact is there. It was the cause of the momentary helplessness of
\nthe Indian mind in the face of new and unprecedented conditions.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt was at this moment that the European wave swept over India. The first effect of this entry of a new and quite opposite
\ncivilisation was the destruction of much that had no longer the  
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\npower to live, the deliquescence of much else, a tendency to the devitalisation of the rest. A new activity came in, but this was
\nat first crudely and confusedly imitative of the foreign culture. It was a crucial moment and an ordeal of perilous severity;
\na less vigorous energy of life might well have foundered and perished under the double weight of the deadening of its old
\ninnate motives and a servile imitation of alien ideas and habits. History shows us how disastrous this situation can be to nations
\nand civilisations. But fortunately the energy of life was there, sleeping only for a moment, not dead, and, given that energy,
\nthe evil carried within itself its own cure. For whatever temporary rotting and destruction this crude impact of European
\nlife and culture has caused, it gave three needed impulses. It revived the dormant intellectual and critical impulse; it rehabilitated life and awakened the desire of new creation; it put the reviving Indian spirit face to face with novel conditions and
\nideals and the urgent necessity of understanding, assimilating and conquering them. The national mind turned a new eye on
\nits past culture, reawoke to its sense and import, but also at the same time saw it in relation to modern knowledge and ideas. Out
\nof this awakening vision and impulse the Indian renaissance is arising, and that must determine its future tendency. The recovery of the old spiritual knowledge and experience in all its splendour, depth and fullness is its first, most essential work;
\nthe flowing of this spirituality into new forms of philosophy, literature, art, science and critical knowledge is the second; an
\noriginal dealing with modern problems in the light of the Indian spirit and the endeavour to formulate a greater synthesis of a
\nspiritualised society is the third and most difficult. Its success on these three lines will be the measure of its help to the future of
\nhumanity. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe Spirit is a higher infinite of verities; life is a lower infinite
\nof possibilities which seek to grow and find their own truth and fulfilment in the light of these verities. Our intellect, our will,
\nour ethical and our aesthetic being are the reflectors and the mediators. The method of the West is to exaggerate life and to call
\ndown as much \u2014 or as little \u2014 as may be of the higher powers   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 15<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nto stimulate and embellish life.1<\/font><\/sup> But the method of India is on the contrary to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden
\nintensities of the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as to make it responsive to and expressive of
\nthe spirit and in that way increase the power of life. Its tendency with the intellect, will, ethical, aesthetic and emotional being is
\nto sound indeed their normal mental possibilities, but also to upraise them towards the greater light and power of their own
\nhighest intuitions. The work of the renaissance in India must be to make this spirit, this higher view of life, this sense of deeper
\npotentiality once more a creative, perhaps a dominant power in the world. But to that truth of itself it is as yet only vaguely
\nawake; the mass of Indian action is still at the moment proceeding under the impress of the European motive and method and,
\nbecause there is a spirit within us to which they are foreign, the action is poor in will, feeble in form and ineffective in results,
\nfor it does not come from the roots of our being. Only in a few directions is there some clear light of self-knowledge. It is when
\na greater light prevails and becomes general that we shall be able to speak, not only in prospect but in fact, of the renaissance of
\nIndia. <\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1 Mr. Cousins’ distinction between invocation and evocation.
\n  
\n<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 16<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nThe Renaissance in India \u00ad 2 <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>HE PROCESS<\/b> which has led up to the renaissance now inevitable, may be analysed, both historically and logically, into three steps by which a transition is being managed,
\na complex breaking, reshaping and new building, with the final result yet distant
\nin prospect, \u2014 though here and there the first
\nbases may have been already laid, \u2014 a new age of an old culture transformed, not an affiliation of a new-born civilisation to
\none that is old and dead, but a true rebirth, a renascence. The first step was the reception of the European contact, a radical
\nreconsideration of many of the prominent elements and some revolutionary denial of the very principles of the old culture. The
\nsecond was a reaction of the Indian spirit upon the European influence, sometimes with a total denial of what it offered and a
\nstressing both of the essential and the strict letter of the national past, which yet masked a movement of assimilation. The third,
\nonly now beginning or recently begun, is rather a process of new creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind
\nremains supreme, recovers its truths, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modern idea and form,
\nbut so transmutes and Indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms it entirely into itself that its foreign character disappears and it
\nbecomes another harmonious element in the characteristic working of the ancient goddess, the Shakti of India mastering and
\ntaking possession of the modern influence, no longer possessed or overcome by it.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nNothing in the many processes of Nature, whether she deals with men or with things, comes by chance or accident or is
\nreally at the mercy of external causes. What things are inwardly, determines the course of even their most considerable changes;
\nand timeless India being what she is, the complexity of this transition was predestined and unavoidable. It was impossible that
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 17<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nshe should take a rapid wholesale imprint of Western motives and their forms and leave the ruling motives of her own past
\nto accommodate themselves to the foreign change as best they could afterwards. A swift transformation scene like that which
\nbrought into being a new modernised Japan, would have been out of the question for her, even if the external circumstances
\nhad been equally favourable. For Japan lives centrally in her temperament and in her aesthetic sense, and therefore she has
\nalways been rapidly assimilative; her strong temperamental persistence has been enough to preserve her national stamp and
\nher artistic vision a sufficient power to keep her soul alive. But India lives centrally in the spirit, with less buoyancy and vivacity
\nand therefore with a less ready adaptiveness of creation, but a greater, intenser, more brooding depth; her processes are apt to
\nbe deliberate, uncertain and long because she has to take things into that depth and from its profoundest inwardness to modify
\nor remould the more outward parts of her life. And until that has been done, the absorption completed, the powers of the
\nremoulding determined, she cannot yet move forward with an easier step on the new way she is taking. From the complexity
\nof the movement arises all the difficulty of the problems she has to face and the rather chaotic confusion of the opinions,
\nstandpoints and tendencies that have got entangled in the process, which prevents any easy, clear and decided development,
\nso that we seem to be advancing under a confused pressure of circumstance or in a series of shifting waves of impulsion,
\nthis ebbing for that to arise, rather than with any clear idea of our future direction. But here too lies the assurance that once the
\ninner direction has found its way and its implications have come to the surface, the result will be no mere Asiatic modification of
\nWestern modernism, but some great, new and original thing of the first importance to the future of human civilisation.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis was not the idea of the earliest generation of intellectuals, few in number but powerful by their talent and originative
\nvigour, that arose as the first result of Western education in India. Theirs was the impatient hope of a transformation such
\nas took place afterwards with so striking a velocity in Japan;  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 18<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nthey saw in welcome prospect a new India modernised wholesale and radically in mind, spirit and life. Intensely patriotic in
\nmotive, they were yet denationalised in their mental attitude. They admitted practically, if not in set opinion, the occidental
\nview of our past culture as only a half-civilisation and their governing ideals were borrowed from the West or at least centrally inspired by the purely Western spirit and type of their education. From mediaeval India they drew away in revolt and
\ninclined to discredit and destroy whatever it had created; if they took anything from it, it was as poetic symbols to which they
\ngave a superficial and modern significance. To ancient India they looked back on the contrary with a sentiment of pride,
\nat least in certain directions, and were willing to take from it whatever material they could subdue to their new standpoint,
\nbut they could not quite grasp anything of it in its original sense and spirit and strove to rid it of all that would not square
\nwith their Westernised intellectuality. They sought for a bare, simplified and rationalised religion, created a literature which
\nimported very eagerly the forms, ideas and whole spirit of their English models,
\n\u2014 the value of the other arts was almost entirely
\nignored, \u2014 put their political faith and hope in a wholesale assimilation or rather an exact imitation of the middle-class
\npseudo-democracy of nineteenth-century England, would have revolutionised Indian society by introducing into it all the social
\nideas and main features of the European form. Whatever value for the future there may be in the things they grasped at with this
\neager conviction, their method was, as we now recognise, a false method, \u2014 an anglicised India is a thing we can no longer view
\nas either possible or desirable, \u2014 and it could only, if pursued to the end, have made us painful copyists, clumsy followers always
\nstumbling in the wake of European evolution and always fifty years behind it. This movement of thought did not and could
\nnot endure; something of it still continues, but its engrossing power has passed away beyond any chance of vigorous revival.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nNevertheless, this earliest period of crude reception left behind it results that were of value and indeed indispensable to
\na powerful renaissance. We may single out three of them as   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 19<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nof the first order of importance. It reawakened a free activity of the intellect which, though at first confined within very narrow bounds and derivative in its ideas, is now spreading to all subjects of human and national interest and is applying itself
\nwith an increasing curiosity and a growing originality to every field it seizes. This is bringing back to the Indian mind its old
\nunresting thirst for all kinds of knowledge and must restore to it before long the width of its range and the depth and flexible
\npower of its action; and it has opened to it the full scope of the critical faculty of the human mind, its passion for exhaustive
\nobservation and emancipated judgment which, in older times exercised only by a few and within limits, has now become an
\nessential equipment of the intellect. These things the imitative period did not itself carry very far, but it cast the germ which
\nwe now see beginning to fructify more richly. Secondly, it threw definitely the ferment of modern ideas into the old culture and
\nfixed them before our view in such a way that we are obliged to reckon and deal with them in far other sort than would have
\nbeen possible if we had simply proceeded from our old fixed traditions without some such momentary violent break in our
\ncustomary view of things. Finally, it made us turn our look upon all that our past contains with new eyes which have not only
\nenabled us to recover something of their ancient sense and spirit, long embedded and lost in the unintelligent practice of received
\nforms, but to bring out of them a new light which gives to the old truths fresh aspects and therefore novel potentialities of creation
\nand evolution. That in this first period we misunderstood our ancient culture, does not matter; the enforcement of a reconsideration, which even orthodox thought has been obliged to accept, is the fact of capital importance.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe second period of reaction of the Indian mind upon the new elements, its movement towards a recovery of the national
\npoise, has helped us to direct these powers and tendencies into sounder and much more fruitful lines of action. For the anglicising impulse was very soon met by the old national spirit and began to be heavily suffused by its influence. It is now a
\nvery small and always dwindling number of our present-day  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 20<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nintellectuals who still remain obstinately Westernised in their outlook; and even these have given up the attitude of blatant
\nand uncompromising depreciation of the past which was at one time a common pose. A larger number have proceeded by a
\nconstantly increasing suffusion of their modernism with much of ancient motive and sentiment, a better insight into the meaning of Indian things and their characteristics, a free acceptance more of their spirit than of their forms and an attempt at new
\ninterpretation. At first the central idea still remained very plainly of the modern type and betrayed everywhere the Western inspiration, but it drew to itself willingly the ancient ideas and it coloured itself more and more with their essential spirit; and
\nlatterly this suffusing element has overflooded, has tended more and more to take up and subdue the original motives until the
\nthought and spirit, turn and tinge are now characteristically Indian. The works of Bankim Chandra Chatterji and Tagore,
\nthe two minds of the most distinctive and original genius in our recent literature, illustrate the stages of this transition.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nSide by side with this movement and more characteristic and powerful there has been flowing an opposite current. This
\nfirst started on its way by an integral reaction, a vindication and reacceptance of everything Indian as it stood and because it was
\nIndian. We have still waves of this impulse and many of its influences continuing among us; for its work is not yet completed.
\nBut in reality the reaction marks the beginning of a more subtle assimilation and fusing; for in vindicating ancient things it has
\nbeen obliged to do so in a way that will at once meet and satisfy the old mentality and the new, the traditional and the critical
\nmind. This in itself involves no mere return, but consciously or unconsciously hastens a restatement. And the riper form of the
\nreturn has taken as its principle a synthetical restatement; it has sought to arrive at the spirit of the ancient culture and, while
\nrespecting its forms and often preserving them to revivify, has yet not hesitated also to remould, to reject the outworn and
\nto admit whatever new motive seemed assimilable to the old spirituality or apt to widen the channel of its larger evolution.
\nOf this freer dealing with past and present, this preservation   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 21<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nby reconstruction Vivekananda was in his life-time the leading exemplar and the most powerful exponent.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut this too could not be the end; of itself it leads towards a principle of new creation. Otherwise the upshot of the double
\ncurrent of thought and tendency might be an incongruous assimilation, something in the mental sphere like the strangely
\nassorted half-European, half-Indian dress which we now put upon our bodies. India has to get back entirely to the native
\npower of her spirit at its very deepest and to turn all the needed strengths and aims of her present and future life into materials
\nfor that spirit to work upon and integrate and harmonise. Of such vital and original creation we may cite the new Indian art
\nas a striking example. The beginning of this process of original creation in every sphere of her national activity will be the sign
\nof the integral self-finding of her renaissance.  
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 22<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThe Renaissance in India \u00ad 3 <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>O ATTEMPT<\/b> to penetrate through the indeterminate confusion of present tendencies and first efforts in order
\nto foresee the exact forms the new creation will take, would be an effort of very doubtful utility. One might as well
\ntry to forecast a harmony from the sounds made by the tuning of the instrument. In one direction or another we may just detect
\ncertain decisive indications, but even these are only first indications and we may be quite sure that much lies behind them
\nthat will go far beyond anything that they yet suggest. This is true whether in religion and spirituality or thought and science,
\npoetry and art or society and politics. Everywhere there is, at most, only a beginning of beginnings.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nOne thing seems at any rate certain, that the spiritual motive will be in the future of India, as in her past, the real originative
\nand dominating strain. By spirituality we do not mean a remote metaphysical mind or the tendency to dream rather than to
\nact. That was not the great India of old in her splendid days of vigour, \u2014 whatever certain European critics or interpreters
\nof her culture may say, \u2014 and it will not be the India of the future. Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong
\nelement in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction; but
\nIndian metaphysics are as far removed from the brilliant or the profound idea-spinning of the French or the German mind as
\nfrom the broad intellectual generalising on the basis of the facts of physical science which for some time did duty for philosophy
\nin modern Europe. It has always been in its essential parts an intellectual approach to spiritual realisation. Though in later
\ntimes it led too much away from life, yet that was not its original character whether in its early Vedantic intuitional forms or in
\nthose later developments of it, such as the Gita, which belong   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 23<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nto the period of its most vigorous intellectual originality and creation. Buddhism itself, the philosophy which first really threw
\ndoubt on the value of life, did so only in its intellectual tendency; in its dynamic parts, by its ethical system and spiritual method,
\nit gave a new set of values, a severe vigour, yet a gentler idealism to human living and was therefore powerfully creative both in
\nthe arts which interpret life and in society and politics. To realise intimately truth of spirit and to quicken and to remould life by
\nit is the native tendency of the Indian mind, and to that it must always return in all its periods of health, greatness and vigour.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAll great movements of life in India have begun with a new spiritual thought and usually a new religious activity. What more
\nstriking and significant fact can there be than this that even the new European influence, which was an influence intellectual,
\nrationalistic, so often antireligious and which drew so much of its idealism from the increasingly cosmopolitan, mundane and
\nsecularist thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, precipitated in India from the very first an attempt at religious
\nreformation and led actually to the creation of new religions? The instinct of the Indian mind was that, if a reconstruction
\nof ideas and of society was to be attempted, it must start from a spiritual basis and take from the first a religious motive and
\nform. The Brahmo Samaj had in its inception a large cosmopolitan idea, it was even almost eclectic in the choice of the materials
\nfor the synthesis it attempted; it combined a Vedantic first inspiration, outward forms akin to those of English Unitarianism
\nand something of its temper, a modicum of Christian influence, a strong dose of religious rationalism and intellectualism. It is
\nnoteworthy, however, that it started from an endeavour to restate the Vedanta, and it is curiously significant of the way in
\nwhich even what might be well called a protestant movement follows the curve of the national tradition and temper, that
\nthe three stages of its growth, marked by the three churches or congregations into which it split, correspond to the three
\neternal motives of the Indian religious mind, Jnana, Bhakti and Karma, the contemplative and philosophical, the emotional and
\nfervently devotional and the actively and practically dynamic  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 24<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nspiritual mentality. The Arya Samaj in the Punjab founded itself on a fresh interpretation of the truth of the Veda and an attempt
\nto apply old Vedic principles of life to modern conditions. The movement associated with the great names of Ramakrishna and
\nVivekananda has been a very wide synthesis of past religious motives and spiritual experience topped by a reaffirmation of
\nthe old asceticism and monasticism, but with new living strands in it and combined with a strong humanitarianism and zeal
\nof missionary expansion. There has been too the movement of orthodox Hindu revivalism, more vigorous two or three decades
\nago than it is now. The rest of India has either felt vibrations of some of these great regional movements or been touched
\nwith smaller ones of their own making. In Bengal a strong Neo-Vaishnavic tendency is the most recent development of its
\nreligious mind and shows that the preparatory creative activity has not yet finished its workings. Throughout India the old religious sects and disciplines are becoming strongly revitalised, vocal, active, moved to a fresh self-affirmation. Islam has recently shared in the general stirring and attempts to return vitally to the original Islamic ideals or to strike out fresh developments
\nhave preceded or accompanied the awakening to life of the long torpid Mussulman mass in India.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nPerhaps none of these forms, nor all the sum of them may be definitive, they may constitute only the preparatory self-finding
\nof the Indian spiritual mind recovering its past and turning towards its future. India is the meeting-place of the religions and
\namong these Hinduism alone is by itself a vast and complex thing, not so much a religion as a great diversified and yet subtly
\nunified mass of spiritual thought, realisation and aspiration. What will finally come out of all this stir and ferment, lies yet
\nin the future. There has been an introduction of fresh fruitful impulses to activity: there has been much revival of the vitality
\nof old forms, a new study, rehabilitation, resort to old disciplines and old authorities and scriptures,
\n\u2014 we may note that Vedanta,
\nVeda, Purana, Yoga, and recently the same thing is being initiated with regard to the Tantra, have each in their turn been
\nbrought back into understanding, if not always yet to a perfect   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 25<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nunderstanding, to practice, to some efficacy on thought and on life; there has been an evolution of enlarging truth and novel
\nforms out of ancient ideas and renewed experience. Whatever the last upshot may be, this spiritual and religious ferment and
\nactivity stand out as the most prominent feature of the new India; and it may be observed that while in other fields the tendency
\nhas been, until quite recently, more critical than constructive, here every impulse has been throughout powerfully creative.
\nEspecially, we see everywhere the tendency towards the return of the spirit upon life; the reassertion of a spiritual living as a
\nfoundation for a new life of the nation has been a recognisable impulse. Even asceticism and monasticism are rapidly becoming,
\nno longer merely contemplative, self-centred or aloof, but missionary, educative, humanitarian. And recently in the utterances
\nof the leaders of thought the insistence on life has been growing marked, self-conscious and positive. This is at present the most
\nsignificant immediate sign of the future. Probably, here lies the key of the Indian renaissance, in a return from forms to the
\ndepths of a released spirituality which will show itself again in a pervading return of spirituality upon life.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut what are likely to be the great constructive ideas and the great decisive instruments which this spirituality will take
\nto deal with and govern life, is as yet obscure, because the thought of this new India is still inchoate and indeterminative.
\nReligions, creeds and forms are only a characteristic outward sign of the spiritual impulsion and religion itself is the intensive
\naction by which it tries to find its inward force. Its expansive movement comes in the thought which it throws out on life,
\nthe ideals which open up new horizons and which the intellect accepts and life labours to assimilate. Philosophy in India has
\nbeen the intellectual canaliser of spiritual knowledge and experience, but the philosophical intellect has not as yet decidedly
\nbegun the work of new creation; it has been rather busy with the restatement of its past gains than with any new statement
\nwhich would visibly and rapidly enlarge the boundaries of its thought and aspiration. The contact of European philosophy
\nhas not been fruitful of any creative reaction; first because the  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 26<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\npast philosophies of Europe have very little that could be of any utility in this direction, nothing of the first importance in
\nfact which India has not already stated in forms better suited to her own spiritual temper and genius, and though the thought of
\nNietzsche, of Bergson and of James has recently touched more vitally just a few minds here and there, their drift is much too
\nexternally pragmatic and vitalistic to be genuinely assimilable by the Indian spirit. But, principally, a real Indian philosophy
\ncan only be evolved out of spiritual experience and as the fruit of the spiritual seeking which all the religious movements of
\nthe past century have helped to generalise. It cannot spring, as in Europe, out of the critical intellect solely or as the fruit
\nof scientific thought and knowledge. Nor has there been very much preparing force of original critical thought in nineteenth
\ncentury India. The more original intellects have either turned towards pure literature or else been busy assimilating and at
\nmost Indianising modern ideas. And though a stronger thought tendency is now beginning, all is yet uncertain flux or brilliantly
\nvague foreshadowing. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIn poetry, literature, art, science there have, on the contrary,
\nbeen definite beginnings. Bengal in these, as in many other directions, has been recently the chief testing crucible or the first
\nworkshop of the Shakti of India; it is there she has chosen to cast in the greatest vivacity of new influences and develop her initial
\nforms and inspirations. In the rest of India there is often much activity of production and one hears here and there of a solitary
\npoet or prose-writer of genius or notable talent; but Bengal has already a considerable literature of importance, with a distinct
\nspirit and form, well-based and always developing; she has now a great body of art original, inspired, full of delicate beauty
\nand vision; she has not only two renowned scientists, one of the two world-famous for a central and far-reaching discovery,
\nbut a young school of research which promises to count for something in the world’s science. It is here therefore that we can
\nobserve the trend of the Indian mind and the direction in which it is turning. Especially the art of the Bengal painters is very
\nsignificant, more so even than the prose of Bankim or the poetry   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 27<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nof Tagore. Bengali poetry has had to feel its way and does not seem yet quite definitively to have found it, but Bengal art has
\nfound its way at once at the first step, by a sort of immediate intuition.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nPartly this is because the new literature began in the period of foreign influence and of an indecisive groping, while art in
\nIndia was quite silent, \u2014 except for the preposterous Ravi Varma interlude which was doomed to sterility by its absurdly barren
\nincompetence, \u2014 began in a moment of self-recovery and could profit by a clearer possibility of light. But besides, plastic art
\nis in itself by its very limitation, by the narrower and intense range of its forms and motives, often more decisively indicative
\nthan the more fluid and variable turns of literary thought and expression. Now the whole power of the Bengal artists springs
\nfrom their deliberate choice of the spirit and hidden meaning in things rather than their form and surface meaning as the
\nobject to be expressed. It is intuitive and its forms are the very rhythm of its intuition, they have little to do with the metric
\nformalities devised by the observing intellect; it leans over the finite to discover its suggestions of the infinite and inexpressible;
\nit turns to outward life and nature to found upon it lines and colours, rhythms and embodiments which will be significant of
\nthe other life and other nature than the physical which all that is merely outward conceals. This is the eternal motive of Indian
\nart, but applied in a new way less largely ideaed, mythological and symbolical, but with a more delicately suggestive attempt at
\na near, subtle, direct embodiment. This art is a true new creation, and we may expect that the artistic mind of the rest of India will
\nfollow through the gate thus opened, but we may expect it too to take on there other characteristics and find other ways of
\nexpression; for the peculiar turn and tone given by the Calcutta painters is intimate to the temperament of Bengal. But India is
\ngreat by the unity of her national coupled with the rich diversity of her regional mind. That we may expect to see reflected in the
\nresurgence of her artistic creativeness. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nPoetry and literature in Bengal have gone through two distinct stages and seem to be preparing for a third of which one  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 28<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ncannot quite foresee the character. It began with a European and mostly an English influence, a taking in of fresh poetical
\nand prose forms, literary ideas, artistic canons. It was a period of copious and buoyant creation which produced a number of
\npoets and poetesses, one or two of great genius, others of a fine poetic capacity, much work of beauty and distinction, a
\nreal opening of the floodgates of Saraswati. Its work was not at all crudely imitative; the foreign influences are everywhere
\nvisible, but they are assimilated, not merely obeyed or aped. The quality of the Bengali temperament and its native aesthetic
\nturn took hold of them and poured them into a mould of speech suitable to its own spirit. But still the substance was not quite
\nnative to the soul and therefore one feels a certain void in it. The form and expression have the peculiar grace and the delicate
\nplastic beauty which Bengali poetical expression achieved from its beginning, but the thing expressed does not in the end amount
\nto very much. As is inevitable when one does not think or create freely but is principally assimilating thought and form, it is thin
\nand falls short of the greatness which we would expect from the natural power of the poet.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThat period is long over, it has lived its time and its work has taken its place in the past of the literature. Two of its creators,
\none, the sovereign initiator of its prose expression, supreme by combination of original mentality with a flawless artistic gift,
\nthe other born into its last glow of productive brilliance, but outliving it to develop another strain and a profounder voice of
\npoetry, released the real soul of Bengal into expression. The work of Bankim Chandra is now of the past, because it has entered
\nalready into the new mind of Bengal which it did more than any other literary influence to form; the work of Rabindranath still
\nlargely holds the present, but it has opened ways for the future which promise to go beyond it. Both show an increasing return
\nto the Indian spirit in fresh forms; both are voices of the dawn, seek more than they find, suggest and are calling for more than
\nthey actually evoke. At present we see a fresh preparation, on one side evolving and promising to broaden out from the influence of
\nTagore, on the other in revolt against it and insisting on a more   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 29<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ndistinctively national type of inspiration and creation; but what will come out of it, is not yet clear. On the whole it appears
\nthat the movement is turning in the same direction as that of the new art, though with the more flexible utterance and varied
\nmotive natural to the spoken thought and expressive word. No utterance of the highest genius, such as would give the decisive
\nturn, has yet made itself heard. But some faint promise of a great imaginative and intuitive literature of a new Indian type is
\nalready discernible in these uncertain voices. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIn the things of the mind we have then within however
\nlimited an area certain beginnings, preparatory or even initially definitive. But in the outward life of the nation we are still in a
\nstage of much uncertainty and confusion. Very largely this is due to the political conditions which have ceased in spirit to be those
\nof the past, but are not yet in fact those of the future. The fever and the strain born from the alternation of waves of aspiration
\nwith the reflux of non-fulfilment are not favourable to the strong formulation of a new birth in the national life. All that is as yet
\nclear is that the first period of a superficial assimilation and aping of European political ideas and methods is over. Another
\npolitical spirit has awakened in the people under the shock of the movement of the last decade which, vehemently national in
\nits motive, proclaimed a religion of Indian patriotism, applied the notions of the ancient religion and philosophy to politics,
\nexpressed the cult of the country as mother and Shakti and attempted to base the idea of democracy firmly on the spiritual
\nthought and impulses native to the Indian mind. Crude often and uncertain in its self-expression, organising its effort for revolt against past and present conditions but not immediately successful in carrying forward its methods of constructive development, it still effectively aroused the people and gave a definite turn to its political thought and life, the outcome of which can
\nonly appear when the nation has found completely the will and gained sufficiently the power to determine its own evolution.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndian society is in a still more chaotic stage; for the old forms are crumbling away under the pressure of the environment, their spirit and reality are more and more passing out of  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 30<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nthem, but the facade persists by the force of inertia of thought \u00b8
\nand will and the remaining attachment of a long association, while the new is still powerless to be born. There is much of
\nslow and often hardly perceptible destruction, a dull preservation effective only by immobility, no possibility yet of sound
\nreconstruction. We have had a loud proclaiming, \u2014 only where supported by religion, as in the reforming Samajes, any strong
\neffectuation, \u2014 of a movement of social change, appealing sometimes crudely to Western exemplars and ideals, sometimes to the
\ngenius or the pattern of ancient times; but it has quite failed to carry the people, because it could not get at their spirit and itself
\nlacked, with the exceptions noted, in robust sincerity. We have had too a revival of orthodox conservatism, more academic and
\nsentimental than profound in its impulse or in touch with the great facts and forces of life. We have now in emergence an
\nincreasing sense of the necessity of a renovation of social ideas and expressive forms by the spirit of the nation awaking to the
\ndeeper yet unexpressed implications of its own culture, but as yet no sufficient will or means of execution. It is probable that
\nonly with the beginning of a freer national life will the powers of the renaissance take effective hold of the social mind and action
\nof the awakened people.  
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 31<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThe Renaissance in India \u00ad 4 <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>HE RENAISSANCE<\/b> thus determining itself, but not yet finally determined, if it is to be what the name implies, a
\nrebirth of the soul of India into a new body of energy, a ~ . <\/i>
\nnew form of its innate and ancient spirit, prajna purani<\/i>, must
\ninsist much more finally and integrally than it has as yet done on its spiritual turn, on the greater and greater action of the
\nspiritual motive in every sphere of our living. But here we are still liable to be met by the remnants of a misunderstanding or a
\nrefusal to understand, \u2014 it is something of both, \u2014 which was perhaps to a little extent justified by certain ascetic or religionist
\nexaggerations, a distrust which is accentuated by a recoil from the excessive other-worldliness that has marked certain developments of the Indian mind and life, but yet is not justified, because it misses the true point at issue. Thus we are sometimes asked what on earth we mean by spirituality in art and poetry or in political and social life,
\n\u2014 a confession of ignorance
\nstrange enough in any Indian mouth at this stage of our national history, \u2014 or how art and poetry will be any the better when
\nthey have got into them what I have recently seen described as the “twang of spirituality”, and how the practical problems
\neither of society or of politics are going at all to profit by this element. We have here really an echo of the European idea, now
\nof sufficiently long standing, that religion and spirituality on the one side and intellectual activity and practical life on the other
\nare two entirely different things and have each to be pursued on its own entirely separate lines and in obedience to its own
\nentirely separate principles. Again we may be met also by the suspicion that in holding up this ideal rule before India we are
\npointing her to the metaphysical and away from the dynamic and pragmatic or inculcating some obscurantist reactionary principle
\nof mystical or irrational religiosity and diverting her from the  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\npaths of reason and modernity which she must follow if she is to be an efficient and a well-organised nation able to survive
\nin the shocks of the modern world. We must therefore try to make clear what it is we mean by a renaissance governed by the
\nprinciple of spirituality. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut first let us say what we do not mean by this ideal.
\nClearly it does not signify that we shall regard earthly life as a temporal vanity, try to become all of us as soon as possible
\nmonastic ascetics, frame our social life into a preparation for the monastery or cavern or mountain-top or make of it a static life
\nwithout any great progressive ideals but only some aim which has nothing to do with earth or the collective advance of the
\nhuman race. That may have been for some time a tendency of the Indian mind, but it was never the whole tendency. Nor does
\nspirituality mean the moulding of the whole type of the national being to suit the limited dogmas, forms, tenets of a particular
\nreligion, as was often enough attempted by the old societies, an idea which still persists in many minds by the power of old
\nmental habit and association; clearly such an attempt would be impossible, even if it were desirable, in a country full of the
\nmost diverse religious opinions and harbouring too three such distinct general forms as Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, to
\nsay nothing of the numerous special forms to which each of these has given birth. Spirituality is much wider than any particular
\nreligion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad
\nsect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man’s seeking for the eternal, the divine,
\nthe greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of
\nhuman life with the eternal and the divine values. <\/span><\/p>\n

\nNor do we mean the exclusion of anything whatsoever from
\nour scope, of any of the great aims of human life, any of the great problems of our modern world, any form of human activity, any
\ngeneral or inherent impulse or characteristic means of the desire of the soul of man for development, expansion, increasing vigour and joy, light, power, perfection. Spirit without mind,  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 33<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nspirit without body is not the type of man, therefore a human spirituality must not belittle the mind, life or body or hold them
\nof small account: it will rather hold them of high account, of immense importance, precisely because they are the conditions
\nand instruments of the life of the spirit in man. The ancient Indian culture attached quite as much value to the soundness,
\ngrowth and strength of the mind, life and body as the old Hellenic or the modern scientific thought, although for a different
\nend and a greater motive. Therefore to everything that serves and belongs to the healthy fullness of these things, it gave free
\nplay, to the activity of the reason, to science and philosophy, to the satisfaction of the aesthetic being and to all the many
\narts great or small, to the health and strength of the body, to the physical and economical well-being, ease, opulence of the
\nrace, \u2014 there was never a national ideal of poverty in India as some would have us believe, nor was bareness or squalor the
\nessential setting of her spirituality, \u2014 and to its general military, political and social strength and efficiency. Their aim was high,
\nbut firm and wide too was the base they sought to establish and great the care bestowed on these first instruments. Necessarily
\nthe new India will seek the same end in new ways under the vivid impulse of fresh and large ideas and by an instrumentality
\nsuited to more complex conditions; but the scope of her effort and action and the suppleness and variety of her mind will not
\nbe less, but greater than of old. Spirituality is not necessarily exclusive; it can be and in its fullness must be all-inclusive.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut still there is a great difference between the spiritual and the purely material and mental view of existence. The spiritual
\nview holds that the mind, life, body are man’s means and not his aims and even that they are not his last and highest means; it
\nsees them as his outer instrumental self and not his whole being. It sees the infinite behind all things finite and it adjudges the
\nvalue of the finite by higher infinite values of which they are the imperfect translation and towards which, to a truer expression
\nof them, they are always trying to arrive. It sees a greater reality than the apparent not only behind man and the world, but within
\nman and the world, and this soul, self, divine thing in man it  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nholds to be that in him which is of the highest importance, that which everything else in him must try in whatever way to bring
\nout and express, and this soul, self, divine presence in the world it holds to be that which man has ever to try to see and recognise
\nthrough all appearances, to unite his thought and life with it and in it to find his unity with his fellows. This alters necessarily our
\nwhole normal view of things; even in preserving all the aims of human life, it will give them a different sense and direction.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nWe aim at the health and vigour of the body; but with what object? For its own sake, will be the ordinary reply, because it
\nis worth having; or else that we may have long life and a sound basis for our intellectual, vital, emotional satisfactions. Yes, for
\nits own sake, in a way, but in this sense that the physical too is an expression of the spirit and its perfection is worth having, is
\npart of the dharma of the complete human living; but still more as a basis for all that higher activity which ends in the discovery
\nand expression of the divine self in man.
\nŚarīram khalu dharma sādhanam<\/i>, runs the old Sanskrit saying, the body too is our
\nmeans for fulfilling the dharma, the Godward law of our being. The mental, the emotional, the aesthetic parts of us have to be
\ndeveloped, is the ordinary view, so that they may have a greater satisfaction, or because that is man’s finer nature, because so
\nhe feels himself more alive and fulfilled. This, but not this only; rather because these things too are the expressions of the spirit,
\nthings which are seeking in him for their divine values and by their growth, subtlety, flexibility, power, intensity he is able to
\ncome nearer to the divine Reality in the world, to lay hold on it variously, to tune eventually his whole life into unity and conformity with it. Morality is in the ordinary view a well-regulated individual and social conduct which keeps society going and
\nleads towards a better, a more rational, temperate, sympathetic, self-restrained dealing with our fellows. But ethics in the spiritual
\npoint of view is much more, it is a means of developing in our action and still more essentially in the character of our being the
\ndiviner self in us, a step of our growing into the nature of the Godhead. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nSo with all our aims and activities; spirituality takes them  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 35<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nall and gives them a greater, diviner, more intimate sense. Philosophy is in the Western way of dealing with it a dispassionate
\nenquiry by the light of the reason into the first truths of existence, which we shall get at either by observing the facts science
\nplaces at our disposal or by a careful dialectical scrutiny of the concepts of the reason or a mixture of the two methods. But
\nfrom the spiritual view-point truth of existence is to be found by intuition and inner experience and not only by the reason and by
\nscientific observation; the work of philosophy is to arrange the data given by the various means of knowledge, excluding none,
\nand put them into their synthetic relation to the one Truth, the one supreme and universal reality. Eventually, its real value is to
\nprepare a basis for spiritual realisation and the growing of the human being into his divine self and divine nature. Science itself
\nbecomes only a knowledge of the world which throws an added light on the spirit of the universe and his way in things. Nor will
\nit confine itself to a physical knowledge and its practical fruits or to the knowledge of life and man and mind based upon the idea
\nof matter or material energy as our starting-point; a spiritualised culture will make room for new fields of research, for new and
\nold psychical sciences and results which start from spirit as the first truth and from the power of mind and of what is greater
\nthan mind to act upon life and matter. The primitive aim of art and poetry is to create images of man and Nature which shall
\nsatisfy the sense of beauty and embody artistically the ideas of the intelligence about life and the responses of the imagination
\nto it; but in a spiritual culture they become too in their aim a revelation of greater things concealed in man and Nature and
\nof the deepest spiritual and universal beauty. Politics, society, economy are in the first form of human life simply an arrangement by which men collectively can live, produce, satisfy their desires, enjoy, progress in bodily, vital and mental efficiency;
\nbut the spiritual aim makes them much more than this, first, a framework of life within which man can seek for and grow into
\nhis real self and divinity, secondly, an increasing embodiment of the divine law of being in life, thirdly, a collective advance
\ntowards the light, power, peace, unity, harmony of the diviner  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 36<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nnature of humanity which the race is trying to evolve. This and nothing more but nothing less, this in all its potentialities, is what
\nwe mean by a spiritual culture and the application of spirituality to life.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThose who distrust this ideal or who cannot understand it, are still under the sway of the European conception of life
\nwhich for a time threatened to swamp entirely the Indian spirit. But let us remember that Europe itself is labouring to outgrow
\nthe limitations of its own conceptions and precisely by a rapid infusion of
\nthe ideas of the East, \u2014 naturally, essential ideas and
\nnot the mere forms, \u2014 which have been first infiltrating and are now more freely streaming into Western thought, poetry,
\nart, ideas of life, not to overturn its culture, but to transform, enlighten and aggrandise its best values and to add new elements
\nwhich have too long been ignored or forgotten. It will be singular if while Europe is thus intelligently enlarging herself in the new
\nlight she has been able to seize and admitting the truths of the spirit and the aim at a divine change in man and his life, we
\nin India are to take up the cast-off clothes of European thought and life and to straggle along in the old rut of her wheels, always
\ntaking up today what she had cast off yesterday. We should not allow our cultural independence to be paralysed by the accident
\nthat at the moment Europe came in upon us, we were in a state of ebb and weakness, such as comes some day upon all civilisations. That no more proves that our spirituality, our culture, our leading ideas were entirely mistaken and the best we can do is
\nvigorously to Europeanise, rationalise, materialise ourselves in the practical parts of life,
\n\u2014 keeping perhaps some spirituality,
\nreligion, Indianism as a graceful decoration in the background, \u2014 than the great catastrophe of the war proves that Europe’s
\nscience, her democracy, her progress were all wrong and she should return to the Middle Ages or imitate the culture of China
\nor Turkey or Tibet. Such generalisations are the facile falsehoods of a hasty and unreflecting ignorance.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nWe have both made mistakes, faltered in the true application of our ideals, been misled into unhealthy exaggerations. Europe
\nhas understood the lesson, she is striving to correct herself;   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 37<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nbut she does not for this reason forswear science, democracy, progress, but purposes to complete and perfect them, to use them
\nbetter, to give them a sounder direction. She is admitting the light of the East, but on the basis of her own way of thinking and
\nliving, opening herself to truth of the spirit, but not abandoning her own truth of life and science and social ideals. We should
\nbe as faithful, as free in our dealings with the Indian spirit and modern influences; correct what went wrong with us; apply our
\nspirituality on broader and freer lines, be if possible not less but more spiritual than were our forefathers; admit Western science,
\nreason, progressiveness, the essential modern ideas, but on the basis of our own way of life and assimilated to our spiritual
\naim and ideal; open ourselves to the throb of life, the pragmatic activity, the great modern endeavour, but not therefore abandon
\nour fundamental view of God and man and Nature. There is no real quarrel between them; for rather these two things need each
\nother to fill themselves in, to discover all their own implications, to awaken to their own richest and completest significances.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndia can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own nature. This does
\nnot mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or
\nhappens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd,
\nphysically impossible, and above all unspiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all
\nwe receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create. Religion has been a central preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have
\ntold us that too much religion ruined India, precisely because we made the whole of life religion or religion the whole of life, we
\nhave failed in life and gone under. I will not answer, adopting the language used by the poet in a slightly different connection,
\nthat our fall does not matter and that the dust in which India lies is sacred. The fall, the failure does matter, and to lie in the dust
\nis no sound position for man or nation. But the reason assigned  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nis not the true one. If the majority of Indians had indeed made the whole of their lives religion in the true sense of the word,
\nwe should not be where we are now; it was because their public life became most irreligious, egoistic, self-seeking, materialistic
\nthat they fell. It is possible, that on one side we deviated too much into an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an excessive
\nexternalism of ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship, on the other into a too world-shunning asceticism which drew away
\nthe best minds who were thus lost to society instead of standing like the ancient Rishis as its spiritual support and its illuminating
\nlife-givers. But the root of the matter was the dwindling of the spiritual impulse in its generality and broadness, the decline of
\nintellectual activity and freedom, the waning of great ideals, the loss of the gust of life.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nPerhaps there was too much of religion in one sense; the word is English, smacks too much of things external such as
\ncreeds, rites, an external piety; there is no one Indian equivalent. But if we give rather to religion the sense of the following of
\nthe spiritual impulse in its fullness and define spirituality as the attempt to know and live in the highest self, the divine, the
\nall-embracing unity and to raise life in all its parts to the divinest possible values, then it is evident that there was not too much
\nof religion, but rather too little of it \u2014 and in what there was, a too one-sided and therefore an insufficiently ample tendency.
\nThe right remedy is, not to belittle still farther the agelong ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude and give it a still
\nwider scope, to make in very truth all the life of the nation a religion in this high spiritual sense. This is the direction in
\nwhich the philosophy, poetry, art of the West is, still more or less obscurely, but with an increasing light, beginning to turn,
\nand even some faint glints of the truth are beginning now to fall across political and sociological ideals. India has the key to
\nthe knowledge and conscious application of the ideal; what was dark to her before in its application, she can now, with a new
\nlight, illumine; what was wrong and wry in her old methods she can now rectify; the fences which she created to protect the
\nouter growth of the spiritual ideal and which afterwards became   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nbarriers to its expansion and farther application, she can now break down and give her spirit a freer field and an ampler flight:
\nshe can, if she will, give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling, for the clue
\nto their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge. Whether she will rise or not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance
\nwhich is coming upon her, is the question of her destiny.  
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 40<\/font><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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