{"id":926,"date":"2013-07-13T01:31:17","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=926"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:31:17","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:17","slug":"25-the-renaissance-in-india-vol-14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14\/25-the-renaissance-in-india-vol-14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14","title":{"rendered":"-25_The Renaissance in India .htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


\n
\n            The
\nRenaissance in India<\/font><\/span><\/b> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 \n<\/p>\n

\n                           
\n<\/font><\/span>
\n
\n <\/font><\/span>T<\/span>HERE<\/span><\/font> has been recently
\nsome talk of a Renaissance in India. A number of illuminating essays with that
\ngeneral title and subject have been given to us by a poet and subtle critic and
\nthinker, Mr. James H. Cousins, and others have touched suggestively various
\nsides of the growing movement towards a new life and a new thought that may well
\nseem to justify the description. This Renaissance, this new birth in India, if
\nit is a fact, must become a thing of immense importance both to herself and the
\nworld, to herself because of all that is meant for her in the recovery or the
\nchange of her time-old spirit and national ideals, to the world because of the
\npossibilities involved in the rearising of a force that is in
\nmany respects unlike any other and its genius very different from the mentality
\nand spirit that have hitherto governed the modern idea in <\/font> <\/span>
\nmankind, although not so far<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>away<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nperhaps from that which is <\/font> <\/span>
\npreparing to govern
\nthe future. It is rather the first point of view that I shall put forward at
\npresent: for the question what India means to make of her own life must precede
\nthe wider question what her new life may mean to the human race. And it is,
\nbesides, likely to become before long an issue of a pressing importance.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>There is a first question, whether at
\nan 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
\nin its infancy and it is too early to say to what it may lead. The word carries
\nthe mind back to the turning-point of European culture to which it was first
\napplied; that was not so much a reawakening as an overturn and reversal, a
\nseizure of Christianised, Teutonised, feudalised Europe by the old Graeco-
\nLatin spirit and form with all the complex and momentous results which came
\nfrom it. That is certainly not a type of renaissance that is at all possible in
\nIndia. There is a closer resemblance to the recent Celtic movement in Ireland,
\nthe attempt<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nof a <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-397<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nreawakened national spirit to find a new
\nimpulse of self-expression which shall give the spiritual force for a great
\nreshapihg and re- building: in Ireland this was discovered by a return to the
\nCeltic spirit and culture after a long period of eclipsing English influences,
\nand in India something of the same kind of movement is appearing and has
\nespecially taken a pronounced turn since the political outburst of 1905. But
\neven here the analogy does not give the whole truth.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>We have to see, moreover, that the
\nwhole is at present a great formless chaos of conflicting influences with a few
\nluminous points of formation here and there where a new self-consciousness has
\ncome to the surface. But it cannot be said that these forms have yet a
\nsufficient hold on the general mind of the people. They represent an advance
\nmovement; they are the voices of the vanguard, the torch-lights of the
\npioneers. On the whole, what we see is a giant Shakti who, awakening into a new
\nworld, a new and alien environment, finds herself shackled in all her limbs by
\na multitude of gross or minute bonds, bonds self-woven by her past, bonds
\nrecently imposed from outside, and is struggling to be free from them, to arise
\nand proclaim herself, to cast abroad her spirit and set her seal on the world.
\nWe hear on every side a sound of the slow fraying of bonds, here and there a
\nsharp tearing and snapping; but freedom of movement has not yet been attained.
\nThe eyes are not yet clear, the bud of the soul has only partly opened. The
\nTitaness has not yet arisen.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Mr. Cousins puts the question in his
\nbook whether the word ‘renaissance’ at all applies since India has always been
\nawake and stood in no need of reawakening. There is a certain truth behind that
\nand to one coming in with a fresh mind from outside and struck by the living
\ncontinuity of past and present India, it may be especially apparent; but that
\nis not quite how we can see it who are her children and are still suffering
\nfrom the bitter effects of the great decline which came to a head in the
\neighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Undoubtedly there was a period, a brief
\nbut very disastrous period of the dwindling of that great fire of life, even a
\nmoment of incipient disintegration, marked politically by the anarchy which
\ngave European adventure its chance, inwardly by an increasing torpor of the
\ncreative spirit in religion<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-398<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>and art,
\n– science and philosophy and intellectual knowledge had long been dead or
\npetrified into a mere scholastic Punditism, <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nall
\npointing to a nadir of setting energy, the evening-time from which, according
\nto the Indian idea of the cycles, a new age has to start. It was that moment
\nand the pressure of a super-imposed European culture which followed it that
\nmade the reawakening necessary.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>We
\nhave practically to take three facts into consideration, the great past of
\nIndian culture and life with the moment of inadaptive torpor into which it had
\nlapsed, the first period of the Western contact in which it seemed for a moment
\nlikely to perish by slow decomposition, and the ascending movement which first
\nbroke into some clarity of expression only a decade or two ago. Mr. Cousins has
\nhis eye fixed on Indian spirituality which has always maintained itself even in
\nthe decline of the national vitality; it was certainly that which saved India
\nalways at every critical moment of her destiny, and it has been the
\nstarting-point too of her renascence. Any other nation under the same pressure
\nwould have long ago perished soul and body. But certainly the outward members
\nwere becoming gangrened; the powers of renovation seemed for a moment to be
\nbeaten by the powers of stagnation, and stagnation is death. Now that the
\nsalvation, the reawakening has come, India will certainly keep her essential
\nspirit, will keep her characteristic soul, but there is likely to be a great
\nchange of the body. The shaping for itself of a new body, of new philosophical,
\nartistic, literary, cultural, political, social forms by the same soul
\nrejuvenescent will, I should think, be the type of the Indian renascence,<\/font><\/span> – <\/font> <\/span>
\nforms not contradictory of the truths of life which the old expressed,
\nbut rather expressive of those truths restated, cured of defect, completed.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>What was this ancient spirit and
\ncharacteristic soul of India? European writers, struck by the general
\nmetaphysical bent of the Indian mind, by its strong religious instincts and
\nreligious idealism, by its other-worldliness, are inclined to write as if this
\nwere all the Indian spirit. An abstract, metaphysical, religious mind
\noverpowered by the sense of the infinite, not apt for life, <\/font> <\/span>
\ndreamy, unpractical, turning<\/font><\/span> away
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nfrom life and action as Maya, <\/font> <\/span>
\nthis, they said, is India; and for a time Indians
\nin this, as in<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-399<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nother matters, submissively echoed their new
\nWestern teachers and masters. They learned to speak with pride of’ their
\nmeta-physics, of their literature, of their religion, but in all else they were
\ncontent to be learners and imitators. Since then Europe has discovered that
\nthere was too an Indian art of remarkable power and beauty; but the rest of
\nwhat India meant it has hardly at all seen. But meanwhile the Indian mind began
\nto emancipate itself and to look upon its past with a clear and self-
\ndiscerning eye, and it very soon discovered that it had been misled into an
\nentirely false self-view. All such one-sided appreciations indeed almost
\ninvariably turn out to be false. Was it not the general misconception about
\nGermany at one time, because she was great in philosophy and music, but had
\nblundered in life and been unable to make the most of its materials, that this
\nwas a: nation of unpractical dreamers, idealists, erudites and sentimentalists,
\npatient, docile and industrious certainly, but politically inapt, –
\n"admirable, ridiculous Germany"? Europe has had a terrible awakening
\nfrom that error. When the renascence of India is complete, she will have an
\nawakening, not of the same brutal kind, certainly, but startling enough, as to
\nthe real nature and capacity of the Indian spirit.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Spirituality is indeed the master-key
\nof the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from
\nthe beginning, – and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance,
\nshe never lost hold of the insight, – that life cannot be rightly seen in the
\nsole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.
\nShe was alive to the greatness of material laws and forces; she had a keen eye
\nfor the importance of the physical sciences; she knew how to organise the arts
\nof ordinary life. But she saw that the physical does not get its full sense
\nuntil it stands in right relation to the supra-physical; she saw that the
\ncomplexity of the universe could not be explained in the present terms of man
\nor seen by his superficial sight, that there were other powers behind, other
\npowers within man him- self of which he is normally unaware, that he is
\nconscious only of a small part of himself, that the invisible always surrounds
\nthe visible, the suprasensible the sensible, even as infinity always surrounds
\nthe finite. She saw too that man has the power of<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-400<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nexceeding himself, of becoming himself more
\nentirely and profoundly than he is, – truths which have only recently begun to
\nbe seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence. She
\nsaw the myriad gods beyond man, God beyond the gods, and beyond God his own
\nineffable eternity; she saw that there were ranges of life beyond our life,
\nranges of mind be- yond 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
\nor littleness and shrank from no act whether of spiritual or intellectual,
\nethical or vital courage, she declared that there was none of these things
\nwhich man could not attain if he trained his will and knowledge; he could
\nconquer these ranges of mind, become the spirit, become a god, become one with
\nGod, become the ineffable Brahman. And with the logical practicality and sense
\nof science and organised method which distinguished her mentality, she set
\nforth immediately to find out the way. Hence from long ages of this insight and
\npractice there was ingrained in her spirituality, her powerful psychic tendency,
\nher great yearning to grapple with the infinite and possess it, her
\nineradicable religious sense, her idealism, her Yoga, the constant turn of her
\nart and her philosophy.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>But this was not and could not be her
\nwhole mentality, her entire spirit; spirituality itself does not flourish on
\nearth in the void, even as our mountain-tops do not rise like those of an
\nenchantment of dream out of the clouds without a base. When we look at the past
\nof India, what strikes us next is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible
\npower of life and joy of life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness.
\nFor three thousand years at least,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nit is indeed much longer, – she has been creating
\nabundantly and incessantly, lavishly, with an inexhaustible many- sidedness, republics
\nand kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds
\nand arts and poems and all kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public
\nworks, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and
\nrituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, systems of
\npolitics and administration, arts spiritual, arts <\/font> <\/span>
\nworldly,
\ntrades, industries, fine crafts,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe
\nlist is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity. She
\ncreates and <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-401<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ncreates and is not satisfied and is not tired;
\nshe will not have an end of it, seems hardly to need a space for rest, a time
\nfor inertia and lying fallow. She expands too outside her borders; her ships
\ncross the ocean and the fine superfluity of her wealth brims over to Judea and
\nEgypt and Rome; her colonies spread her arts and epics and creeds in the
\nArchipelago; her traces are found in the sands of Mesopotamia; her religions
\nconquer China and Japan and spread westward as far as Palestine and Alexandria,-
\nand the figures of the Upanishads and the sayings of the Buddhists are
\nre-echoed on the lips of Christ. Everywhere, as on her soil, so in her works
\nthere is the teeming of a super-abundant energy of life. European critics
\ncomplain that in her ancient architecture, sculpture and art there is no
\nreticence, no holding back of riches, no blank spaces, that she labours to fill
\nevery rift with ore, occupy every inch with plenty. Well, but defect or no that
\nis the necessity of her superabundance of life, of the teeming of the infinite
\nwithin her. She lavishes her riches because she must, as the Infinite fills
\nevery inch of space with the stirring of life and energy because it is the
\nInfinite.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nBut this supreme spirituality
\nand this prolific abundance of the energy and joy of life and creation do not
\nmake all that the spirit of India has been in its past. It is not a confused
\nsplendour of tropical vegetation under heavens of a pure sapphire infinity. It
\nis only to eyes unaccustomed to such wealth that there seems to be a confusion
\nin this crowding of space with rich forms of life, a luxurious disorder of
\nexcess or a wanton lack of measure, clear balance and design. For the third
\npower of the ancient Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality, at once austere
\narid rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle and
\ncurious in detail. Its chief impulse was that of order and arrangement, but an
\norder founded upon a seeking for the inner law and truth of things and having
\nin view always the possibility of conscientious practice. India has been
\npre-eminently the land of the Dharma and the Shastra. She searched for the
\ninner truth and law of each human or cosmic activity, its Dharma; that found,
\nshe laboured to cast into elaborate form and detailed law of arrangement its
\napplication in fact and rule of life. Her first period was luminous with the
\ndiscovery of the Spirit; her second com-<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-402<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>pleted the discovery of the Dharma; her third elaborated
\ninto detail the first simpler formulation of the Shastra; but none was
\nexclusive, the three elements are always present.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nIn this third
\nperiod the curious elaboration of all life into a science and an art assumes
\nextraordinary proportions. The mere mass of the intellectual production during
\nthe period from Asoka well into the Mahomedan epoch is something truly
\nprodigious, as can be
\nseen at once if one studies the account which recent scholarship gives of it,
\nand we must remember that that scholar- ship as yet only deals with a fraction
\nof what is still lying extant and what is extant is only a small percentage of
\nwhat was once written and known. There is no historical parallel for such an
\nintellectual labour and activity before the invention of printing and the
\nfacilities of modem science; yet all that mass of research and production and
\ncuriosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities and with no
\nbetter record than the memory and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf. Nor was
\nall this colossal literature confined to philosophy and theology, religion and
\nYoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama,
\nmedicine and astronomy and the sciences; it embraced all life, politics and
\nsociety, all the arts from painting to dancing, all the sixty-four
\naccomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or
\ninteresting to the mind, even, for instance, to such practical side minutiae as
\nthe breeding<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nand training of horses and elephants, each of which
\nhad its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious
\nliterature. In each subject from the largest and most momentous to the smallest
\nand most trivial there was expended the same all-embracing, opulent, minute and
\nthorough intellectuality. On one side there is an insatiable curiosity, the
\ndesire of life to know itself in every detail, on the other a spirit of
\norganisation and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life
\nwith a harmonised knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure. Thus an
\ningrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and
\ngust of life and, mediating between them, a powerful, penetrating and
\nscrupulous intelligence combined of the rational, ethical and aesthetic mind
\neach at a high intensity of action, created the<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-403<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nharmony of the ancient Indian culture.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Indeed without this opulent vitality and
\nopulent intellectuality India could never have done so much as she did with her
\nspiritual tendencies. It is a great error to suppose that spirituality
\nflourishes best in an impoverished soil with the life half-killed and the
\nintellect discouraged and intimidated. The spirituality that so flourishes is
\nsomething morbid, hectic and exposed to perilous reactions. It is when the race
\nhas lived most richly and thought most profoundly that spirituality finds its
\nheights and its depths and its constant and many-sided fruition. In modem
\nEurope it is after a long explosion of vital force and a stupendous activity of
\nthe intellect that spirituality has begun really to emerge and with some
\npromise of being not, as it once was, the sorrowful physician of the malady of
\nlife, but the beginning of a large and profound clarity. The European eye is
\nstruck in Indian spiritual thought by the Buddhistic and illusionist denial of
\nlife. But it must be remembered that this is only one side of its philosophic
\ntendency which assumed exaggerated proportions only in the period of decline.
\nIn itself too that was simply one result, in one direction, of a tendency of the
\nIndian mind which is common to all its activities, the impulse to follow each
\nmotive, each specialisation of motive even, spiritual, intellectual, ethical,
\nvital, to its extreme point and to sound its utmost possibility. Part of its
\ninnate direction was to seek in each not only for its fullness of detail, but
\nfor its infinite, its absolute, its profoundest depth or its highest pinnacle.
\nIt knew that without a "fine excess" we cannot break down the limits
\nwhich the dull temper of the normal mind opposes to knowledge and thought and
\nexperience; and it had in, seeking this point a boundless courage and yet a
\nsure tread. Thus it carried each tangent of philosophic thought, each line of
\nspiritual experience to its farthest point, and chose to .look from that farthest
\npoint at all existence, so as to see what truth or power such a view could give
\nit. It tried to know the whole of divine nature and to see too as high as it
\ncould beyond nature and into whatever there might be of supradivine. When it
\nformulated a spiritual atheism, it followed that to its acme of possible
\nvision. When, too, it indulged in materialistic atheism,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>though it did that only with a
\nside glance, as the<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-404<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>freak of
\nan insatiable intellectual curiosity,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nyet it formulated it straight out, boldly and nakedly,
\nwithout the least concession <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nto idealism or ethicism.<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Everywhere we find this tendency. The
\nideals of the Indian mind have included the height of self-assertion of the
\nhuman spirit and its thirst of independence and mastery and possession and the
\nheight also of its self-abnegation, dependence and sub- mission and
\nself-giving. In life the ideal of opulent living and the ideal of poverty were
\ncarried to the extreme of regal splendour and the extreme of satisfied nudity.
\nIts intuitions were sufficiently clear and courageous not to be blinded by its
\nown most cherished ideas and fixed habits of life. If it was obliged to
\nstereotype caste as the symbol of its social order, it never quite forgot, as
\nthe caste-spirit is apt to forget, that the human soul and the human mind are
\nbeyond caste. For it had seen in the lowest human being the Godhead, Narayana.
\nIt emphasised distinctions only to turn upon them and deny all distinctions. If
\nall its political needs and circumstances compelled it at last to<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>exaggerate the monarchical principle and declare the divinity of the king and
\nto abolish its earlier republican city states and independent federations as
\ntoo favourable to the centrifugal tendency, if therefore it could not develop
\ndemocracy, yet it had the democratic idea, applied it in the village, in
\ncouncil and municipality, within the caste, was the first to assert a divinity
\nin the people and could cry to the monarch at the height of his power, "O
\nking, what art thou but the head servant of the demos ?" Its idea of the
\ngolden age was a free spiritual anarchism. Its spiritual extremism could not
\nprevent it from fathoming through a long era the life of the senses and its
\nenjoyments, and there too it sought the utmost richness of sensuous detail and
\nthe depths and intensities of sensuous experience. Yet it is notable that this
\npursuit of the most opposite extremes never resulted in disorder; and its most
\nhedonistic period offers nothing that at all resembles the unbridled corruption
\nwhich a similar tendency has more than once produced in Europe. For the Indian
\nmind is not only spiritual and ethical, but intellectual and artistic, and both
\nthe rule of the intellect and the rhythm of beauty are hostile to the spirit of
\nchaos. In every extreme the Indian spirit seeks<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-405<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nfor a law in that extreme and a rule, measure
\nand structure in its application. Besides, this sounding of extremes is
\nbalanced by a still more ingrained characteristic, the synthetical tendency, so
\nthat having pushed each motive to its farthest possibility the Indian mind
\nreturns always towards some fusion of the know- ledge it has gained and to a
\nresulting harmony and balance in action and institution. Balance and\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>rhythm\u00a0
\n<\/span>which the Greeks arrived at by self-limitation, India arrived at by its
\nsense of intellectual, ethical and aesthetic order and the synthetic impulse of
\nits mind and life.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>I have dwelt on these facts because they
\nare apt to ignored by those who look only at certain sides of the Indian mind
\nand spirit which are most prominent in the last epochs. By insisting only upon
\nthese we get an inaccurate or incomplete idea of the past of India and of the
\nintegral meaning of its civilisation and the spirit that animated it. The
\npresent is only a last deposit of the past at a time of ebb; it has no doubt
\nalso to be the starting- point of the future, but in this present all that was
\nin India’s past is still dormant, it is not destroyed; it is waiting there to
\nassume new forms. The decline was the ebb-movement of a creative spirit which
\ncan only be understood by seeing it in the full tide of its greatness; the
\nrenascence is the return of the tide and it is the same spirit that is likely
\nto animate it, although the forms it takes may be quite new. To judge therefore
\nthe possibilities of the renascence, the powers that it may reveal and the<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nscope
\nthat it may take, we must dismiss the idea that the tendency of metaphysical
\nabstraction is the one note of the Indian. spirit which dominates or inspires
\nall its cadences. Its real key- note is the tendency of spiritual realisation,
\nnot 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
\nspirituality is dominant, initial, constant, always recur- rent; it is the
\nsupport of all the rest. The first age of India’s greatness was a spiritual age
\nwhen she sought passionately for the truth of existence through the intuitive
\nmind and through an inner experience and interpretation both of the psychic and
\nthe physical existence. The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never
\nlost, but rather always enriched it with fresh spiritual<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-406<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nexperience and discovery at each step of the
\nnational life. Even in her hour of decline it was the one thing she could never
\nlose.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>But this spiritual tendency does not
\nshoot upward only to’ the abstract, the hidden and the intangible; it casts its
\nrays downward and outward to embrace the multiplicities of thought and the
\nrichness of life. Therefore the second long epoch of India’s greatness was an
\nage of the intellect, the ethical sense, the dynamic will in action enlightened
\nto formulate and govern life in the lustre of spiritual truth. After the age of
\nthe Spirit, the age of the Dharma; after the Veda and Upanishads, the heroic
\ncenturies of action and social formation; typal construction and thought and
\nphilosophy, when the outward forms of Indian life and culture were fixed in
\ntheir large lines and even their later developments were being determined in
\nthe seed. The great classical age of Sanskrit culture was the flowering of this
\nintellectuality into curiosity of detail in the refinements of scholarship,
\nscience, art, literature, politics, sociology, mundane life. We see at this
\ntime too the sounding not only of aesthetic, but of emotional and sensuous,
\neven of vital and sensual experience. But the old spirituality reigned behind
\nall this mental and all this vital activity, and its later period, the
\npost-classical, saw a lifting up of the whole lower life and an impressing upon
\nit of the values of the Spirit. This was the sense of the Puranic and Tantric
\nsystems 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
\nand sensuous being into the service of the spiritual. It completed the curve of
\nthe cycle.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The evening of decline which followed
\nthe completion of the curve was prepared by three movements of retrogression.
\nFirst there is, comparatively, a sinking of that super-abundant vital energy
\nand a fading of the joy of life and the joy of creation. Even in the decline
\nthis energy is still something splendid and extraordinary and only for a very
\nbrief period sinks nearest to a complete torpor; but still a comparison with
\nits past greatness will show that the decadence was marked and progressive.
\nSecondly, there is a rapid cessation of the old free intellectual activity, a
\nslumber of the scientific and the critical mind as well as the creative
\nintuition; what remains becomes more and more a re-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-407<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\npetition of i1l-understood fragments of past
\nknowledge. There is a petrification of the mind and life in the relics of the
\nforms which a great intellectual past had created. Old authority and rule
\nbecome rigidly despotic and, as always then happens, lose their real sense and
\nspirit. Finally, spirituality remains but burns no longer with the large and
\nclear flame of knowledge of former times, but in intense jets and in a dispersed
\naction which replaces the old magnificent synthesis and in which certain
\nspiritual truths are emphasised to the neglect of others. This diminution
\namounts to a certain failure of the great endeavour which is the whole meaning
\nof Indian culture, a falling short in the progress to- wards the perfect
\nspiritualisation of the mind and the life. The beginnings were superlative, the
\ndevelopments very great, but at a certain point where progress, adaptation, a
\nnew flowering <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>should have come in, the old civilisation stopped short, partly
\n<\/font> <\/span>drew back, partly
\nlost 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
\ncovered up in a great smoke of confusion. The causes internal and external we
\nneed not now discuss; but the fact is there. It was the cause of the momentary
\nhelplessness of the Indian mind in the face of new and unprecedented
\nconditions.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>It was at this moment that the European
\nwave swept over India. The first effect of this entry of a new and quite
\nopposite civilisation was the destruction of much that had no longer the power
\nto live, the deliquescence of much else, a tendency to the devitalisation of
\nthe rest. A new activity came in, but this was at first crudely and confusedly
\nimitative of the foreign culture. It was a crucial moment and an ordeal of
\nperilous severity; a less vigorous energy of life might well have foundered and
\nperished under the double weight of the deadening of its old innate motives and
\na servile imitation of alien ideas and habits. History shows us how disastrous
\nthis situation can be to nations and civilisations. But fortunately the energy
\nof life was there, sleeping only for a moment, not dead, and, given that
\nenergy, the evil carried within itself its own cure. For whatever temporary
\nrot- ting and destruction this crude impact of European life and culture has
\ncaused, it gave three needed impulses. It revived the<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-408<\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ndormant intellectual and critical impulse; it
\nrehabilitated life and awakened the desire of new creation; it put the reviving
\nIndian spirit face to face with novel conditions and ideals and the urgent
\nnecessity of understanding, assimilating and conquering them. The national mind
\nturned a new eye on its past culture, reawoke to its sense and import, but
\nalso, 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
\nthat must determine its future tendency. The recovery of the old spiritual
\nknowledge and experience in all its splendour, depth and fullness is its first,
\nmost essential work; the flowing of this spirituality into new forms of
\nphilosophy, literature, art, science and critical knowledge is the second; an
\noriginal dealing with modern problems in the light of Indian spirit and the
\nendeavour to formulate a greater synthesis of a spiritualised society is the
\nthird and most difficult. Its success on these three lines will be the measure
\nof its help to the future of humanity.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The Spirit is a higher infinite of
\nverities; life is a lower infinite of possibilities which seek to grow and find
\ntheir own truth and fulfilment in the light of these verities. Our intellect,
\nour will, our ethical and our aesthetic being are the reflectors and the
\nmediators. The method of the West is to exaggerate life and to call down as
\nmuch<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nor as little – as
\nmay be of the higher powers to stimulate and embellish life. (Mr. Cousins’
\ndistinction <\/font><\/span>
\nbetween invocation and evocation.) <\/font> <\/span>
\nBut the method of India is, on
\nthe contrary, to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden intensities
\nof the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as to make
\nit responsive to and expressive of the spirit and in that way increase the
\npower of life. Its tendency with the intellect, will, ethical, aesthetic and
\nemotion- al being is to sound indeed their normal mental possibilities, but
\nalso to upraise them towards the greater light and power of their own highest
\nintuitions. The work of the renaissance in India must be to make this spirit,
\nthe higher view of life, this sense of deeper potentiality once more a
\ncreative, perhaps a dominant power in the world. But to that truth of itself it
\nis as yet only vaguely awake; the mass of Indian action is still at the moment
\nproceeding under the impress of the European motive and method and,<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-409<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

because there is a spirit
\nwithin us to which they are foreign, the action is poor in will, feeble in form
\nand ineffective in results, for it does not come from the roots of our being.
\nOnly in a few directions is there some clear light of self-knowledge. It is
\nwhen a greater light prevails and becomes general that we shall be able to-
\nspeak, not only in prospect but in fact, of the renaissance of India.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-410<\/font><\/p>\n

\n
\n

\n\t\t2<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n       <\/font>
\n
\n T<\/font><\/span>HE<\/span><\/font> process which has
\nled up to the renaissance now inevitable, may be analysed, both historically and
\nlogically, into three steps by which a transition is being managed, a complex
\nbreaking, reshaping and new building, with the final result yet distant in
\nprospect,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthough
\nhere and there the first bases may have been already laid, – a new age of an
\nold culture transformed, not an affiliation of a new-born civilisation to one
\nthat is old and dead, but a true rebirth, a renascence. The first step was the
\nreception of the European contact, a radical reconsideration of many of the
\nprominent elements and some revolutionary denial of the very principles of the
\nold culture. The second was a reaction of the Indian spirit upon the European
\ninfluence, sometimes with a total denial of what it offered and a stressing
\nboth of the essential and the strict letter of the national past, which yet
\nmasked a movement of assimilation. The third, only now beginning or recently
\nbegun, is rather a process of new creation in which the spiritual power of the
\nIndian mind remains supreme, recovers its truths, accepts whatever it finds
\nsound or true, useful or inevitable of the modem idea and form, but so
\ntransmutes and Indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms it entirely into
\nitself that its foreign character disappears and. it becomes another harmonious
\nelement in the characteristic working of the ancient goddess, the Shakti of
\nIndia mastering and taking possession of the modern influence, no longer
\npossessed or overcome by it.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>Nothing in the many processes of Nature, whether she deals with men or
\nwith things, comes by chance or accident or is really at the mercy of external
\ncauses. What things are inwardly, determines the course of even their most
\nconsiderable changes; and timeless India being what she is, the complexity of
\nthis transition was predestined and unavoidable. It was impossible that she
\nshould take a rapid wholesale imprint of Western motives and their forms and
\nleave the ruling motives of her own past to accommodate themselves to the
\nforeign change as best they<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-411<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ncould afterwards. A swift transformation scene
\nlike that which brought into being a new modernised Japan, would have been out
\nof the question for her, even if the external circumstances had been equally
\nfavourable. For Japan lives centrally in her temperament and in her aesthetic
\nsense, and therefore she has always been rapidly assimilative; her strong
\ntemperamental persistence has been enough to preserve her national stamp and
\nher artistic vision a sufficient power to keep her soul alive. But India lives
\ncentrally in the Spirit, with less buoyancy and vivacity and therefore with a
\nless ready adaptiveness of creation, but a greater, intenser, more brooding
\ndepth; her processes are apt to be deliberate, uncertain and long because she
\nhas to take things into that depth and from its profoundest inwardness to
\nmodify or remould the more outward parts of her life. And until that has been
\ndone, the absorption completed, the powers of the remoulding determined, she
\ncannot yet move forward with an easier step on the new way she is taking. From
\nthe complexity of the movement arises all the difficulty of the problems she
\nhas to face and the rather chaotic confusion of the opinions, standpoints and
\ntendencies that have got entangled in the process, which prevents any easy,
\nclear and decided development, so that we seem to be advancing under a confused
\npressure of circumstance or in .a series of shifting waves of impulsion, this
\nebbing for that to arise, rather than with any clear idea of our future
\ndirection. But here too lies the assurance that once the inner direction has
\nfound its way and its implications have come to the surface, the result will be
\nno mere Asiatic modification of Western modernism, but some great, new and
\noriginal thing of the first importance to the future of human civilisation.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThis was not the idea of the
\nearliest generation of intellectuals few in number but powerful by their talent
\nand originative vigour, that arose as the first result of Western education in
\nIndia. Theirs was the impatient hope of a transformation such as took place
\nafterwards with so striking a velocity in Japan; they saw in welcome prospect a
\nnew India modernised wholesale and radically in mind, spirit and life.
\nIntensely patriotic in motive, they were yet denationalised in their mental
\nattitude. They admitted practically, if not in set opinion, the occidental<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-412<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nview of our past culture as
\nonly a half-civilisation and their governing ideals were borrowed from the West
\nor at least centrally inspired by the purely western spirit and type of their
\neducation. From mediaeval India they drew away in revolt and inclined to discredit
\nand destroy whatever it had created; if <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthey took anything from it, it was as poetic
\nsymbols to which they <\/font> <\/span>
\ngave a superficial and modern significance. To ancient
\nIndia they looked back, on the contrary, with a sentiment of pride, at least in
\ncertain directions, and were willing to take from it whatever material they
\ncould subdue to their new standpoint, but they could not quite grasp anything
\nof it in its original sense and spirit and strove to rid it of all that would
\nnot square with their westernised intellectuality. They sought for a bare,
\nsimplified and rationalised religion, created a literature which imported very
\neagerly the forms, ideas and whole spirit of their English models, <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe value of the other arts was almost entirely
\nignored,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nput their political
\nfaith and hope in a wholesale assimilation or rather an exact imitation of the
\nmiddle-class pseudo-democracy of nineteenth-century England, would have
\nrevolutionised Indian society by introducing into it all the social ideas and
\nmain features of the European form. Whatever value for the future there may be
\nin the things they grasped at with this eager conviction, their method was, as
\nwe now recognise, a false method,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–
\n<\/font> <\/span>an anglicised India
\nis a thing we can no longer view as either possible or desirable, – and it
\ncould only, if pursued to the end, have made us painful copyists, clumsy
\nfollowers always stumbling in the wake of European evolution and always fifty
\nyears behind it. This movement of thought did not and could not endure; something
\nof it still continues, but its engrossing power has passed <\/font> <\/span>
\naway <\/font> <\/span>
\nbeyond any chance of vigorous revival.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nNevertheless, this earliest
\nperiod of crude reception left behind it results that were of value and indeed
\nindispensable to a powerful renaissance. We play single out three of them as of
\nthe first order of importance. It reawakened a free activity of the intellect
\nwhich, though at first confined within very narrow bounds and derivative in its
\nideas, is now spreading to all subjects of human and national interest and is
\n<\/i>applying itself with an increasing curiosity and a growing originality to
\nevery field it<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-413<\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nseizes. This is bringing back
\nto the Indian mind its old unresting thirst for all kinds of knowledge and must
\nrestore 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
\nfaculty of the human mind, its passion for exhaustive observation and emancipated
\njudgment which, in older times exercised only by a few and within limits, has
\nnow become an essential equipment of the intellect. These things the imitative
\nperiod did not it self carry very far, but it cast the germ which we now see
\nbeginning to fructify more richly. Secondly, it threw definitely the ferment of
\nmodem ideas into the old culture and fixed them <\/font> <\/span>
\nbefore
\nour view in such a way that we are obliged to reckon and <\/font> <\/span>
\ndeal with them in
\nfar other sort than would have been possible if we had simply proceeded from
\nour 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
\npast contains with new eyes which have not only enabled us to recover something
\nof their ancient sense and spirit, long embedded and lost in the unintelligent
\npractice of received forms, but to bring out of them a new light which gives to
\nthe old truths fresh aspects and therefore novel potentialities of creation and
\nevolution. That in this first period we misunderstood our ancient culture, does
\nnot matter; the enforcement of a reconsideration, which even orthodox thought
\nhas been obliged to accept, is the fact of capital importance.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe second period of reaction of
\nthe Indian mind upon the new elements, its movement towards a recovery of the
\nnational poise, has helped us to direct these powers and tendencies into
\nsounder and much more fruitful lines of action. For the anglicising impulse was
\nvery soon met by the old national spirit and began to be heavily suffused by
\nits influence. It is now a very small and always dwindling number of our
\npresent-day intellectuals who still remain obstinately westernised in their
\noutlook; and even these have given up the attitude of blatant and uncompromising
\ndepreciation of the past which was at one time a common poise. A larger number
\nhave proceeded by a constantly increasing suffusion of their modernism with
\nmuch of ancient motive and sentiment, a better insight into the meaning of
\nIndian<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-414<\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>things and their characteristics, a free acceptance
\nmore – of their spirit than of their forms and an attempt at new
\ninterpretation. At first the central idea still remained very plainly of the
\nmodem type and betrayed everywhere the Western inspiration, but it drew to
\nitself willingly the ancient ideas and it coloured itself more and more with
\ntheir essential spirit; and latterly this suffusing element has overflooded,
\nhas 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
\nof Bankim Chandra Chatterji and Tagore, the two minds of the most distinctive
\nand original genius in our recent literature, illustrate the stages of this
\ntransition.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Side by side with this movement and
\nmore characteristic and powerful there has been flowing an opposite current.
\nThis first started on its way by an integral reaction, a vindication and
\nre-acceptance of everything Indian as it stood and because it was Indian. We
\nhave still waves of this impulse and many of its influences continuing among
\nus; for its work is not yet completed. But in reality the reaction marks the
\nbeginning of a more subtle assimilation and fusing; for in vindicating ancient
\nthings it has been obliged to do so in a way that will at once meet and satisfy
\nthe old mentality and the new, the traditional and the critical mind. This in
\nitself involves no mere return, but consciously or unconsciously hastens a
\nrestatement. And the riper form of the return has taken as its. principle a
\nsynthetical restatement; it has sought to arrive at the spirit of the ancient
\nculture and, while respecting its forms and often preserving them to revivify,
\nhas yet not hesitated also to remould, to reject the outworn and to admit whatever
\nnew motive seemed assimilable to the old spirituality or apt to widen the
\nchannel of its larger evolution. Of this freer dealing with past and present,
\nthis preservation by reconstruction, Vivekananda was in his lifetime the
\nleading exemplar and the most powerful exponent.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nBut this too could not be the end;
\nof itself it leads towards a principle of new creation. Otherwise the upshot of
\nthe double current of thought and tendency might be an incongruous
\nassimilation, something in the mental sphere like the strangely assorted
\nhalf-European, half-Indian dress which we now put<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

Page-415<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nupon our bodies. India has to
\nget back entirely to the native power of her spirit at its very deepest and to
\nturn an the needed strengths and aims of her present and future life into
\nmaterials for that spirit to work upon and integrate and harmonise. Of such
\nvital and original creation we may cite the new Indian art as a striking
\nexample. The beginning of this process of original creation in every sphere of
\nher national activity will be the sign of the integral self-finding of her
\nrenaissance.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

Page-416<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n


\n
\n   
\n3<\/font><\/span><\/b>
\n<\/font><\/b> <\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t
\n\t\t 
\n<\/font> <\/b>      
\n<\/font> <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n               
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nT<\/font><\/span>O<\/font><\/span>
\nATTEMPT to penetrate through the indeterminate confusion of present tendencies
\nand first efforts in order to foresee the exact forms the new creation will
\ntake, would be an effort of very doubtful utility. One might as well try to
\nforecast a harmony from the sounds made by the tuning of the instrument. In one
\ndirection or another we may just detect certain decisive indications, but even
\nthese are only first indications and we may be quite sure that much lies behind
\nthem that will go far beyond anything that they yet suggest. This is true
\nwhether in religion and spirituality or thought and science, poetry and art or
\nsociety and politics. Everywhere there is, at most, only a beginning of
\nbeginnings.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>One thing seems at any rate certain,
\nthat the spiritual motive will be in the future of India, as in her past, the
\nreal, originative and dominating strain. By spirituality we do not mean a
\nremote metaphysical mind or the tendency to dream rather than to act. That was
\nnot the great India of old in her splendid days of vigour,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>whatever certain European
\ncritics or interpreters of her culture may say, – and it will not be the India
\nof the future. Metaphysical thinking will always, no doubt, be a strong element
\nin her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her
\nsovereign powers in that direction; but Indian metaphysics is as far removed
\nfrom the brilliant or the profound idea-spinning of the French or the German
\nmind as from the broad intellectual generalising on the basis of the facts of
\nphysical science which for some time did duty for philosophy in modern Europe.
\nIt has always been in its essential parts an intellectual approach to spiritual
\nrealisation. Though in later times it led too much away from life, yet that was
\nnot its original character whether in its early Vedantic intuitional forms or
\nin those later developments of it, such as the Gita, which belong to the period
\nof its most vigorous intellectual originality and creation. Buddhism itself,
\nthe philosophy which first really threw doubt on the value of life, did so only
\nin its intellectual tendency; in its dyna- <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-417<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nmic parts, by its
\nethical system and spiritual method, it gave a new set of values, a severe
\nvigour, yet a gentler idealism to human living and was therefore powerfully
\ncreative both in the arts which interpret life and in society and politics. To
\nrealise intimately truth of spirit and to quicken and to remould life by it is
\nthe native tendency of the Indian mind, and to that it must always return in
\nall its periods of health, greatness and vigour.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>All great movements of life in India
\nhave begun with a new spiritual thought and usually a new religious activity.
\nWhat more striking and significant fact can there be than this that even the
\nnew European influence, which was an influence intellectual, rationalistic, so
\noften anti-religious and which drew so much of its idealism from the increasingly
\ncosmopolitan, mundane and secularist thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth
\ncenturies, precipitated in India from the very first an attempt at religious
\nreformation and led actually to the creation of new religions? The instinct of
\nthe Indian mind was that, if a reconstruction of ideas and of society was to be
\nattempted, it must start from a spiritual basis and take from the first a
\nreligious motive and form. The Brahmo Samaj had in its inception a large
\ncosmopolitan idea, it was even almost eclectic in the choice of the materials
\nfor the synthesis it attempted; it combined a Vedantic first inspiration,
\noutward forms akin to those of English Unitarianism and something of its
\ntemper, a modicum of Christian influence, a strong dose of religious rationalism
\nand intellectualism. It is noteworthy, however, that it started from an
\nendeavour 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
\nthe national tradition and temper, that the three stages of its growth, marked
\nby the three churches or congregations into which it split, correspond to the
\nthree eternal motives of the Indian religious mind, Jnana, Bhakti and Karma, the
\ncontemplative and philosophical, the emotional and fervently devotional and the
\nactively and practically dynamic spiritual mentality. The Arya Samaj in the Punjab founded itself on
\na fresh interpretation of the truth of the Veda and an attempt to apply old
\nVedic principles of life to modem conditions. The movement associated with the
\ngreat names of<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-418<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nRamakrishna and Vivekananda has been a very wide
\nsynthesis of past religious motives and spiritual experience topped by a
\nreaffirmation of the old asceticism and monasticism, but with new living
\nstrands in it and combined with a strong humanitarianism and zeal of missionary
\nexpansion. There has been, too, the movement of orthodox Hindu revivalism, more
\nvigorous two or three decades ago than it is now. The rest of India has either
\nfelt vibrations of some of these great regional movements or been touched with
\nsmaller ones of their own making. In Bengal a strong Neo- Vaishnavic tendency
\nis the most recent development of its religious mind and shows that the
\npreparatory creative activity has not yet finished its workings. Throughout
\nIndia the old religious sects and disciplines are becoming strongly
\nrevitalised, vocal, active, moved to a fresh self-affirmation. Islam has recently
\nshared in the general stirring and attempts to return vitally to the original
\nIslamic ideals or to strike out fresh developments have preceded or accompanied
\nthe awakening to life of the long torpid Musulman mass in India.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Perhaps none of these forms, nor all
\nthe sum of them may be definitive, they may constitute only the preparatory
\nself-finding of the Indian spiritual mind recovering its past and turning
\ntowards its future. India is the meeting-place of the religions and among these
\nHinduism alone is by itself a vast and complex thing, not so much a religion as
\na great diversified and yet subtly unified mass of spiritual thought,
\nrealisation and aspiration. What will finally come out of all this stir and
\nferment, lies yet in the future. There has been an introduction of fresh
\nfruitful impulses to activity: there has been much revival of the vitality of
\nold forms, a new study, rehabilitation, resort to old disciplines and old
\nauthorities and scriptures,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nwe
\nmay note that Vedanta, Veda, Purana, Yoga, and recently the same thing is being
\ninitiated with regard to the Tantra,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nhave each in their turn been brought back into
\nunderstanding, if not always yet to a perfect understanding, to practice, to
\nsome efficacy on thought and on life; there has been an evolution of enlarging
\ntruth and novel forms out of ancient ideas and renewed experience. Whatever the
\nlast upshot may be, this spiritual and religious ferment and activity stand out
\nas the most prominent feature of the new<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-419<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nIndia; and it may be observed that while in
\nother fields the tendency has been, until quite recently, more critical than
\nconstructive, here every impulse has been throughout powerfully creative.
\nEspecially we see everywhere the tendency towards the return of the spirit upon
\nlife; the reassertion of a spiritual living as a foundation for a new life of
\nthe nation has been a recognisable impulse. Even asceticism and monasticism are
\nrapidly becoming, no longer merely contemplative, self-centred or aloof, but
\nmissionary, educative, humanitarian. And recently in the utterances of the
\nleaders of thought the insistence on life has been growing marked,
\nself-conscious and positive. This is at present the most significant immediate
\nsign of the future. Probably, here lies the key of the Indian renaissance, in a
\nreturn from forms to the depths of a released spirituality which will show
\nitself again in a pervading return of spirituality upon life.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nBut what are likely to be the great
\nconstructive ideas and the great decisive instruments which this spirituality
\nwill take to deal with and govern life, is as yet obscure, because the thought
\nof this new India is still inchoate and indeterminative. Religions, creeds and
\nforms are only a characteristic outward sign of the spiritual impulsion and
\nreligion itself is the intensive action by which it tries to find its inward
\nforce. 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
\nlabours to assimilate. Philosophy in India has been the intellectual canaliser
\nof spiritual knowledge and experience, but the philosophical intellect has .not
\nas yet decidedly begun the work of new creation; it has been rather busy with
\nthe restatement of its past gains than with any new statement which would
\nvisibly and rapidly enlarge the boundaries of its thought and aspiration. The
\ncontact of European philosophy has not been fruitful of any creative reaction;
\nfirst, because the past philosophies of Europe have very little that could be
\nof any utility in this direction, no- thing of the first importance in fact
\nwhich India has not already stated in forms better suited to her own spiritual
\ntemper and genius, and though the thought of Nietzsche, of Bergson and of James
\nhas recently touched more vitally just a few minds here and there, their drift
\nis much too externally pragmatic and vitalistic<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-420 <\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nto be genuinely assimilable by the Indian
\nspirit. But, principally, a real Indian philosophy can only be evolved out of
\nspiritual experience and as the fruit of the spiritual seeking which all the
\nreligious movements of the past century have helped to generalise. It cannot
\nspring, as in Europe, out of the critical intellect solely or as the fruit of
\nscientific thought and knowledge. Nor has there been very much preparing force
\nof original critical thought in nineteenth century India. The more original
\nintellects have either turned towards pure literature or else been busy
\nassimilating and at most Indianising modern ideas. And though a stronger
\nthought tendency is now beginning, all is yet uncertain flux or brilliantly
\nvague foreshadowing.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>In poetry, literature, art, science
\nthere have, on the contrary, been definite beginnings. Bengal in these, as in
\nmany other directions, has been recently the chief testing crucible or the
\nfirst workshop of the Shakti of India; it is there she has chosen to cast in
\nthe greatest vivacity of new influences and develop her initial forms and
\ninspirations. In the rest of India there is often much activity of production
\nand one hears here and there of a solitary poet or prose-writer of genius or
\nnotable talent; but Bengal has already a considerable literature of importance,
\nwith a distinct spirit and form, well-based and always developing; she has now
\na great body of art original, inspired, full of delicate beauty and vision; she
\nhas not only two renowned scientists, one of the two world-famous for a central
\nand far-reaching discovery, but a young school of research which promises to count
\nfor something in the world’s science. It is here therefore that we can observe
\nthe trend of the Indian mind and the direction in which it is turning.
\nEspecially the art of the Bengal painters is very significant, more so even
\nthan the prose of Bankim or the poetry of Tagore. Bengali poetry has had to
\nfeel its way and does not seem yet quite definitively to have found it, but
\nBengal art has found its way at once at the first step, by a sort of immediate
\nintuition.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Partly this is because the new literature
\nbegan in the period of foreign influence and of an indecisive groping, while
\nart in India was quite silent,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nexcept
\nfor the preposterous Ravi Varma interlude which was doomed to sterility by its
\nabsurdly barren incompetence,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nbegan
\nin a moment of self-recovery<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-421<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nand could profit by a clearer possibility of
\nlight. But, besides, plastic art is in itself by its very limitation, by the
\nnarrower and intense range of its forms and motives, often more decisively
\nindicative than the more fluid and variable turns of literary thought and
\nexpression. Now the whole power of the Bengal artists springs from their
\ndeliberate choice of the spirit and hidden meaning in things rather than their
\nform and surface meaning as the object to be expressed. It is intuitive and its
\nforms are the very rhythm of its intuition, they have little to do with the
\nmetric formalities devised by the observing intellect; it leans over the finite
\nto discover its suggestions of the infinite and in- expressible; it turns to
\noutward life and nature to found upon it lines and colours, rhythms and
\nembodiments which will be significant of the other life and other nature than
\nthe physical which all that is merely outward conceals. This is the eternal
\nmotive of Indian art, but applied in a new way less largely ideaed,
\nmythological and symbolical, but with a more delicately suggestive attempt at a
\nnear, subtle, direct embodiment. This art is a true new creation, and we may
\nexpect that the artistic mind of the rest of India will follow through the gate
\nthus opened, but we may expect it too to take on there other characteristics
\nand find other ways of expression; for the peculiar turn and tone given by the
\nCalcutta painters is intimate to the temperament of Bengal. But India is great
\nby the unity of her national coupled with the rich diversity of her regional
\nmind. That we may expect to see reflected in the resurgence of her artistic
\ncreativeness.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Poetry
\nand literature in Bengal have gone through two distinct stages and seem to be
\npreparing for a third of which one cannot quite foresee the character. It began
\nwith a European and mostly an English influence, a taking in of fresh poetical
\nand prose forms, literary idea, artistic canons. It was a period of copious and
\nbuoyant creation which produced a number of poets and poetesses, one or two of
\ngreat genius, others of a fine poetic capacity, much work of beauty and
\ndistinction, a real opening of the flood-gates of Saraswati. Its work was not
\nat all crudely imitative; the foreign influences are everywhere visible; but
\nthey are assimilated, not merely obeyed or aped. The quality of the Bengali
\ntemperament and its native aesthetic turn took hold of<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-422<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>them and poured them into a mould of speech suitable
\nto its own spirit. But still the substance was not quite native to the soul and
\ntherefore one feels a certain void in it. The form and expression have the
\npeculiar grace and the delicate plastic beauty which Bengali poetical
\nexpression achieved from its beginning, but the thing expressed does not in the
\nend amount to very much. As is inevitable when one does not think or create
\nfreely but is principally assimilating thought and form, it is thin and falls
\nshort of the greatness which we would expect from the natural power of the
\npoet.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>That
\nperiod is long over, it has lived its time and its work has taken its place in
\nthe past of the literature. Two of its creators, one, the sovereign initiator
\nof its prose expression, supreme by combination of original mentality with a
\nflawless artistic gift, the other born into its last glow of productive
\nbrilliance, but outliving it to develop another strain and a profounder voice
\nof poetry, released the real soul of Bengal into expression. The work of Bankim
\nChandra is now of the past, because it has entered already into the new mind of
\nBengal which it did more than. any other literary influence to form; the work
\nof Rabindranath still largely holds the present, but it has opened ways for the
\nfuture which promise to go beyond it. Both show an increasing return to the
\nIndian spirit in fresh forms; both are voices of the dawn, seek more than they
\nfind, suggest and are calling for more than they actually evoke. At present we
\nsee a fresh preparation, on one side evolving and promising to broaden out from
\nthe influence of Tagore, on the other in revolt against it and insisting on a
\nmore distinctively national type of inspiration and creation; but what will
\ncome out of it, is not yet clear. On the whole it appears that the movement is
\nturning in the same direction as that of the new art, though with the more
\nflexible utterance and varied motive natural to the spoken thought and
\nexpressive word. No utterance of the highest genius, such as would give the
\ndecisive turn, has yet made itself heard. But some faint promise of a great
\nimaginative and intuitive’ literature of a new Indian type is already
\ndiscernible in these uncertain voices.
\n<\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>In
\nthe things of the mind we have, then, within however limited an area, certain
\nbeginnings, preparatory or even initially<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-423<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\ndefinitive. But in the outward life of the
\nnation we are still in a stage of much uncertainty and confusion. Very largely
\nthis 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
\nstrain born from the alternation of waves of aspiration with the reflux of
\nnon-fulfilment are not favourable to the strong formulation of a new birth in
\nthe national life. All that is as yet clear is that the first period of a
\nsuperficial assimilation and aping of European political ideas and methods is
\nover. Another political spirit has awakened in the people under the shock of
\nthe movement of the last decade which, vehemently national in its motive, proclaimed
\na religion of Indian patriotism, applied the notions of the ancient religion
\nand philosophy to politics, expressed the cult of the country as Mother and
\nShakti 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
\nits self-expression, organising its effort for revolt against past and present
\nconditions but not immediately successful in carrying forward its methods of
\nconstructive development, it still effectively aroused the people and gave a
\ndefinite turn to its political thought and life, the outcome of which can only
\nappear when the nation has found completely the will and gained sufficiently
\nthe power to determine its own evolution.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Indian society is in a still more chaotic
\nstage; for the old <\/font> <\/span>
\nforms are crumbling<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\naway<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nunder the pressure of the environment,
\n<\/font> <\/span>their spirit and
\nreality are more and more passing out of them, but the facade persists by the
\nforce of inertia of thought and will and the remaining attachment of a long
\nassociation, while the new is still powerless to be born. There is much of slow
\nand often hardly perceptible destruction, a dull preservation effective only by
\nimmobility, no possibility yet of sound reconstruction. We have had a loud
\nproclaiming, – only where supported by religion, as in the reforming Samajas,
\nany strong effectuation, – of a movement of social change, appealing sometimes
\ncrudely to Western exemplars and ideals, sometimes to the genius or the pattern
\nof ancient times; but it has quite failed to carry the people, because it could
\nnot get at their spirit and itself lacked, with the exceptions noted, in robust
\nsincerity. We have had too a re-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-424<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nvival of orthodox conservatism, more academic
\nand sentimental than profound in its impulse or in touch with the great facts
\nand forces of life. We have now in emergence an increasing sense ‘of the
\nnecessity of a renovation of social ideas and expressive forms by the spirit of
\nthe nation awaking to the deeper yet unexpressed implications of its own
\nculture, but as yet no sufficient will or means of execution. It is probable
\nthat only with the beginning of a freer national life will the powers of the
\nrenaissance take effective hold of the social mind and action of the awakened
\npeople.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-425<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n4<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/span>
\n
\nT<\/span><\/font>HE renaissance thus
\ndetermining itself, but not yet finally determined, if it is to be what the name
\nimplies, a rebirth of the soul of India into a new body of energy, a new form of
\nits innate and ancient spirit, <\/font> praj<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00f1\u00e3 <\/font> <\/span>
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>pur<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>ni,
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nmust insist much more finally and integrally than it
\nhas 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
\nbe met by the remnants of a misunderstanding or a refusal to <\/font> <\/span>
\nunderstand, <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> it is something of both,
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> which was perhaps to <\/font> <\/span>
\na little extent justified by
\ncertain ascetic or religionist exaggeration, a distrust which is accentuated by
\na recoil from the excessive other-worldliness that has marked certain
\ndevelopments of the Indian mind and life, but yet is not justified, because it
\nmisses the true point at issue. Thus we are sometimes asked what on earth we mean
\nby spirituality in art and poetry or in political and social life, – a
\nconfession of ignorance strange enough in any Indian mouth at this stage of our
\nnational history,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n– or how <\/font> <\/span>
\nart and poetry will
\nbe any the better when they have got into them what I have recently seen
\ndescribed as the "twang of spirituality", and how the practical
\nproblems either of society or of politics are going at all to profit by this
\nelement. We have here really an echo of the European idea, now of sufficiently
\nlong standing, that religion and spirituality on the one side and intellectual
\nactivity and practical life on the other are two entirely different things and
\nhave each to be pursued on its own entirely separate lines and in obedience to
\nits own entirely separate principles. Again, we may be met also by the
\nsuspicion that in holding up this ideal rule before India we are pointing her
\nto the metaphysical and away from the dynamic and pragmatic or inculcating some
\nobscurantist reactionary principle of mystical or irrational religiosity and
\ndiverting her from the paths of reason and modernity which she must follow if
\nshe is" to be an efficient and a well- organised nation able to survive in
\nthe shocks of the modem world. We must, therefore, try to make clear what it is
\nwe mean<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\nPage-426<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nby a renaissance governed by the principle of spirituality.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>But first let us say what we do not mean by this ideal. Clearly, it does
\nnot signify that we shall regard earthly life as a temporal vanity, try to
\nbecome all of us as soon as possible monastic ascetics, frame our social life
\ninto a preparation for the monastery or cavern or mountain-top or make of it a
\nstatic life without any great progressive ideals but only some aim which has
\nnothing to do with earth or the collective advance of the human race. That may
\nhave been for some time a tendency of the Indian mind, but it was never the
\nwhole tendency. Nor does spirituality mean the moulding of the whole type of
\nthe 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
\nstill persists in many minds by the power of old mental habit and association;
\nclearly, such an attempt would be impossible, even if it were desirable, in a
\ncountry full of the most diverse religious opinions and harbouring too three
\nsuch distinct general forms as Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, to say nothing
\nof the numerous special forms to which each of these has given birth.
\nSpirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger
\nideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no
\nmore than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion; by which we
\nshall under- stand in the future man’s seeking for the eternal, the divine, the
\ngreater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation,
\nsome increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and
\nthe divine values.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Nor do we mean the exclusion of
\nanything whatsoever from our scope, of any of the great aims of human life, any
\nof the great problems of our modem world, any form of human activity, any
\ngeneral or inherent impulse or characteristic means of the desire of the soul
\nof man for development, expansion, in- creasing vigour and joy, light, power,
\nperfection. Spirit without mind, spirit without body is not the type of man,
\ntherefore a human spirituality must not belittle the mind, life or body or hold
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\nthem of small account; it will rather hold them of
\nhigh account <\/font> <\/span>of immense importance, precisely because they are the conditions and
\ninstruments of the life of the spirit in man. <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe ancient<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-427<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nIndian culture attached quite as much value to
\nthe soundness, growth and strength of the mind, life and body as the old
\nHellenic or the modern scientific thought, although for a different end and a
\ngreater motive. Therefore to everything that serves and belongs to the healthy
\nfullness of these things, it gave free play, to the activity of the reason, to
\nscience and philosophy, to the satisfaction of the aesthetic being and to all
\nthe many arts great or small, to the health and strength of the body, to the
\nphysical and economical well-being, ease, opulence of the race,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n– there was never <\/font> <\/span>
\na national ideal of poverty in
\nIndia as some would have us believe, nor was bareness or squalor the essential
\nsetting of her spirituality,<\/font><\/span> –
\n<\/font> <\/span>and to its general military,
\npolitical and social strength and efficiency. Their aim was high, but firm and
\nwide too was the base they sought to establish and great the care be- stowed on
\nthese first instruments. Necessarily, the new India will seek the same end in
\nnew ways under the vivid impulse of fresh and large ideas and by an
\ninstrumentality suited to more complex conditions; but the scope of her effort
\nand action and the suppleness and variety of her mind will not be less, but
\ngreater than of old. Spirituality is not necessarily exclusive; it can be and
\nin its fullness must be all-inclusive.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>But still there is a great difference between the spiritual and the
\npurely material and mental view of existence. The spiritual view holds that the
\nmind, life, body are man’s means and not his aims and even that they are not
\nhis last and highest means; it sees them as his outer instrumental self and not
\nhis whole being. It sees the infinite behind all things finite and it adjudges
\nthe value of the finite by higher infinite values of which they are the
\nimperfect translation and towards which, to a truer expression of them, they
\nare always trying to arrive. It sees a greater reality than the apparent not
\nonly behind man and the world, but within man and the world and this soul,
\nself, divine thing in man it holds to be that in him which is of the highest
\nimportance, 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
\nbe that which man has ever to try to see and recognise through all appearances,
\nto unite his thought and life with it and in it to find his unity with his
\nfellows. This alters necessarily our whole<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-428<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nnormal view of things; even in preserving all
\nthe aims of human life, it will give them a different sense and direction.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>We aim at the health and vigour of the
\nbody; but with what object? For its own sake, will be the ordinary reply,
\nbecause it is worth having; or else that we may have long life and a sound
\nbasis for our intellectual, vital, emotional satisfactions. Yes, for its own
\nsake, in a way, but in this sense that the physical too is an expression of the
\nspirit and its perfection is worth having, is part of the Dharma of the
\ncomplete human living; but still more as a basis for all that higher activity
\nwhich ends in the discovery and expression of the divine self in man, <\/font>
\nsariram
\nkhalu dharma- s<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>dhanam, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nruns the old Sanskrit saying, the body too is our means for fulfilling
\nthe Dharma, the Godward law of our being. The mental, the emotional, the
\naesthetic parts of us have to be developed, is the ordinary view, so that they
\nmay have a greater satisfaction or because that is man’s finer nature, because
\nso he feels himself more alive and fulfilled. This, but not this only; rather
\nbecause these things too are the expressions of the spirit, things which are
\nseeking in him for their divine values and by their growth, subtlety,
\nflexibility, power, intensity he is able to come nearer to the divine Reality
\nin the world, to lay hold on it variously, to tune eventually his whole life
\ninto unity and conformity with it. Morality is in the ordinary view a
\nwell-regulated individual and social conduct which keeps society going and
\nleads towards a better, a more rational, temperate, sympathetic, self-
\nrestrained dealing with our fellows. But ethics in the spiritual point of view
\nis much more, it is a means of developing in our action and still more
\nessentially in the character of our being the diviner self in us, a step of our
\ngrowing into the nature of the Godhead.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nSo with all our aims and
\nactivities; spirituality takes them all and gives them a greater, diviner, more
\nintimate sense. Philosophy is, in the Western way of dealing with it, a
\ndispassionate enquiry by the light of the reason into the first truths of
\nexistence, which we shall get at either by observing the facts science places
\nat our disposal or by a careful dialectical scrutiny of the concepts of the
\nreason or a mixture of the two methods. But from the spiritual viewpoint truth
\nof existence is to be found by intuition<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-<\/span><\/font>429<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nand inner experience and not only by the reason
\nand by scientific observation; the work of philosophy is to arrange the data
\ngiven by the various means of knowledge, excluding none, and put them into
\ntheir synthetic relation to the one Truth, the one supreme and universal
\nreality. Eventually, its real value is to prepare a basis for spiritual
\nrealisation and the growing of the human being into his divine nature. Science
\nitself becomes only a knowledge of the world which throws an added light on the
\nspirit of the universe and his way in things. Nor will it confine itself to a
\nphysical knowledge and its practical fruits or to the knowledge of life and man
\nand mind based upon the idea of matter or material energy as our
\nstarting-point; a spiritualised culture will make room for new fields of
\nresearch, for new and old psychical sciences and results which start from
\nspirit 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
\nto create images of man and Nature which shall satisfy the sense of beauty and
\nembody artistically the ideas of the intelligence about life and the responses
\nof the imagination to it; but in a spiritual culture they become too in their
\naim a revelation of greater things concealed in man and Nature and of the
\ndeepest spiritual and universal beauty. Politics, society, economy are in the
\nfirst form of human life simply an arrangement by which men collectively can
\nlive, produce, satisfy their deires, enjoy, progress in bodily, vital and
\nmental efficiency; but the spiritual aim makes them much more than this, first,
\na framework of life within which man can seek for and grow into his real self
\nand divinity, secondly, an increasing embodiment of the divine law of being in
\nlife, thirdly, a collective advance towards the light, power, peace, unity,
\nharmony of the diviner nature of humanity which the race is trying to evolve.
\nThis and nothing more but" nothing less, this in all its potentialities,
\nis what we mean by a spiritual culture and the application of spirituality to
\nlife. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Those who distrust this ideal or who
\ncannot understand it are still under the sway of the European conception of
\nlife which for a time threatened to swamp entirely the Indian spirit. But let
\nus remember that Europe itself is labouring to outgrow the limitations of its
\nown conceptions and precisely by a rapid infu<\/font><\/span>–<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-430<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>sion of
\nthe ideas of the East,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nnaturally,
\nessential ideas and not the mere forms,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nwhich have been first infiltrating and are now more
\nfreely streaming into Western thought, poetry, art, ideas of life, not to
\noverturn its culture, but to transform, enlighten and aggrandise its best
\nvalues and to add new elements which have too long been ignored or forgotten.
\nIt will be singular if while Europe is thus intelligently enlarging herself in the
\nnew light she has been able to seize and admitting the truths of the spirit and
\nthe aim at a divine change in man and his life, we in India are to take up the
\ncast-off clothes of European thought and life and to straggle along in the old
\nrut of her wheels, always taking up today what she had cast off yesterday. We
\nshould not allow our cultural independence to be paralysed by the accident that
\nat the moment Europe came in upon us, we were in a state of ebb and weakness,
\nsuch as comes some day upon all civilisations. That no more proves that our
\nspirituality, our culture, our leading ideas were entirely mistaken and the
\nbest we can do is vigorously to Europeanise, rationalise, materialise ourselves
\nin the practical’ parts of life, – keeping perhaps some spirituality, religion,
\nIndianism as a graceful decoration in the background,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthan the great catastrophe of the war proves that
\nEurope’s science, her democracy, her progress were all wrong and she should return
\nto the Middle Ages or imitate the culture of China or Turkey or Tibet. Such
\ngeneralisations are the facile falsehoods of a hasty and unreflecting
\nignorance.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>We have both made mistakes,
\nfaltered in the true application <\/font> <\/span>
\nof our ideals, been misled into unhealthy
\nexaggerations. Europe has understood the lesson, she is striving to correct
\nherself; but she does not for this reason forswear science, democracy,
\nprogress, but purposes to complete and perfect them, to use them better, to
\ngive them a sounder direction. She is admitting the light of the East, but on
\nthe basis of her own way of thinking and living, opening herself to truth of
\nthe spirit, but not abandoning her own truth of life and science and social
\nideals. We should be as faithful, as free in our dealings with the Indian
\nspirit and modern influences; correct what went wrong with us; apply our
\nspirituality on broader and freer lines, be if possible not less but more
\nspiritual than were our forefathers; admit Western<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-431<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nscience, reason, progressiveness, the essential
\nmodern ideas, but on the basis of our own way of life and assimilated to our
\nspiritual aim and ideal; open ourselves to the throb of life, the pragmatic
\nactivity, the great modem endeavour, but not there- fore abandon our fundamental
\nview of God and man and Nature. There is no real quarrel between them; for
\nrather these two things need each other to fill themselves in, to discover all
\ntheir own implications, to awaken to their own richest and completest
\nsignificances.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/font><\/span>India can best develop herself and serve
\nhumanity 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
\nthat comes to us in the stream of Time or hap- pens to have been first
\ndeveloped or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be
\nintellectually absurd, physically impossible and, above all, unspiritual; true
\nspirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human
\nself- development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of
\nbeing, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of
\nit all we do and create. Religion has been a central preoccupation of the
\nIndian mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined India, precisely
\nbecause 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
\nused by the poet in a slightly different connection, that our fall does not
\nmatter and that the dust in which India lies is sacred. The fall, the failure
\ndoes matter, and to lie in the dust is no sound position for man or nation. But
\nthe reason assigned is hot the true one. If the majority of Indians had indeed made
\nthe whole of their lives religion in the true sense of the word, we should not
\nbe where we are now; it was because their public life became most irreligious,
\negoistic, self-seeking, materialistic that they fell. It is possible, that on
\none side we deviated too much into an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an
\nexcessive externalism of ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship, on the
\nother into a too world-shunning asceticism which drew away the best minds who
\nwere thus lost to society instead of standing like the ancient Rishis as its
\nspiritual support and its illuminating life-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-432<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\ngivers. But the root of the matter was the
\ndwindling of the spiritual impulse in its generality and broadness, the decline
\nof intellectual activity and freedom, the waning of great ideals, the loss of
\nthe gust of life.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nPerhaps there was too much of
\nreligion in one sense; the word is English, smacks too much of things external
\nsuch as creeds, rites, an external piety; there is no one Indian equivalent. But
\nif we give rather to religion the sense of the following of the spiritual
\nimpulse in its fullness and define spirituality as the attempt to know and live
\nin the highest self, the divine, the all- embracing unity and to raise life in
\nall its parts to the divinest possible values, then it is evident that there
\nwas not too much of religion, but rather too little of it<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>and in what there was, a too
\none-sided and therefore insufficiently ample tendency. The right remedy is not
\nto belittle still farther the agelong ideal of India, but to return to its old
\namplitude and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth all the life
\nof 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,
\nbut with an increasing light, beginning to turn, and even some faint glints of
\nthe truth are beginning now to fall across political and sociological ideals.
\nIndia has the key to the knowledge and conscious application of the ideal; what
\nwas dark to her before in its application, she can now, with a new light,
\nillumine; what was wrong and wry in her old methods she can now rectify; the
\nfences which she created to protect the outer growth of the spiritual ideal and
\nwhich afterwards became barriers to its expansion and farther application, she
\ncan now break down and give her spirit a freer field and an ampler flight: she
\ncan, if she will, give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all
\nmankind is labouring and stumbling, for the clue to their solutions is there in
\nher ancient knowledge. Whether she will rise or not to the height of her
\nopportunity in the renaissance which is coming upon her, is the question of her
\ndestiny.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\nT<\/span>HE<\/span><\/font> E<\/span>ND<\/span><\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nPage-433<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

            The Renaissance in India \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0                                THERE has been recently some talk of a Renaissance in India. A number of illuminating essays with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14","wpcat-18-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}