Sri Aurobindo : A Literary Evaluation

 

Sri Aurobindo needs no introduction to a student of Indology and Indian Spirituality.  He has been a reputed scholar in those areas. He was an inspiring figure in the Indian freedom struggle, a philosopher who wrote voluminous works on Indian philosophy and spirituality, a yogi, a poet and a literary critic.  While one may think that there is no need to re-evaluate this well-established writer, there are still areas where he hasn’t been rightly evaluated or has not been given much attention to.  Sri Aurobindo became a great yogi after his initial involvement with India’s freedom struggle; as a Yogi he was involved in a few practical experiments with the human psyche.  Hence, it became a common practice among his critics to view his works in the background of his spirituality or his Yoga.  Or perhaps, because of the immense contributions he made to the spiritual discipline of Yoga which overshadowed his other achievements, his critics were mostly those who were associated with similar spiritual interests.  His contribution to the Indian freedom movement and his achievement as a literary critic are those areas overshadowed by the greater personality he eventually became.   As a student of literature, I am trying here to see how his first exposure to thought through Literature was significant in the making of the great writer he became. 

 

 

Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta, India, on August 15, 1872. His parents sent him with his two elder brothers to England for education when he was seven and he lived there for fourteen years. Brought up at first in an English family at Manchester, he joined St. Paul's School in London in 1884 and in 1890 went from it with a senior classical scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied for two years.  He developed a passion for English and French literature during his stay there; he learned a few other languages of Europe as well and was well versed in Greek and Latin.   He devoured the best poetry, literary criticism and philosophy that Europe had produced.  Sri Aurobindo's education in England gave him a wide introduction to the culture of ancient, or mediaeval and of modern Europe. He was a brilliant scholar in Greek and Latin. He had learned French from his childhood in Manchester and studied for himself German and Italian sufficiently to study Goethe and Dante in the original tongues. He passed the Tripos in Cambridge in first class and obtained record marks in Greek and Latin in the examination for the Indian Civil Service.[1] We find that it was first through English Literature and subsequently through the Literature of the other European tongues that Sri Aurobindo had his first acquaintance with the world of letters.  Young Aurobindo spent a great deal of time reading--from the Bible and Shakespeare to Shelley and Keats. He mastered Latin and Greek and won literature and history prizes. But poetry totally captivated him. At age eight, he was already writing poetry for Fox Family Magazine…[2].  It was English Literature, particularly its poetry, that captured his imagination first.  Sri Aurobindo's earliest writings were poems that he penned as a student in England.[3] He wrote his first poem at the early age of thirteen and even after his return to India and all along his life he never ceased to write poetry.  A writer who had such a start with the literary achievements of Europe should have had his mind and sensibility shaped by it. I propose to deal with one of his works to demonstrate how this literary sensibility that he had acquired shaped and gave a finer content to them.  Such an analysis would be worthwhile for two reasons: one, we could relate the study of literature to sensible reflections and two, we could bring to light Sri Aurobindo’s genius from a literary perspective.   There has been critical attention to most of the poetry he wrote, but as I mentioned earlier they tend to look more at the Yogi and philosopher behind the work rather than the poet, to whom poetry is, as Mathew Arnold would define it, a criticism of life itself.

 

 

The Foundations of Indian Culture is a collection of essays that appeared in the journal Arya, which published the periodical articles of Sri Aurobindo.  This work was a reply to an ill-informed critical evaluation of India by William Archer, an English dramatic critic. It is also an enquiry of what makes Indian civilization and a defense of it.  There have been similar defenses and studies of Indian civilization by other prominent personalities like Mahatma Gandhi, Sister Niveditha and Jawaharlal Nehru, but what strikes one at the very first reading of this book itself is the critical clarity of the issue being defended.  When we look at what makes this work so different and original in its defense, we find that it is the literary sensibility and its related critical awareness that gives the vigor to its expression.  Let us now look at this work in detail as related to our study.

 

 

A study of literary criticism could be a study of the possibilities of rightful thinking itself.  The best literary critics have only showed how an issue has to be approached in its right perspective.  Sri Aurobindo displays this remarkable ability throughout this book in his enquiry and defense of Indian past.  The first thing that strikes one while reading the book is that he identifies the political motive behind Archer’s rhetoric: The motive of Mr.Archer’s attack is frankly political. It is the burden of all his song that the reconstruction of the world must take place in the forms and follow the canons of a rationalistic and materialistic European civilization…Either she must Europeanize, rationalize, materialize her whole being and deserve liberty by the change or else she must be kept in subjection and administered by her cultural superiors…[4].                                     Can there be anything worth in a work that wanted only to show the impossibility of any self-governance by deliberately disparaging Indian civilization and also wanted to show that pre-independent India could have a better possibility of well-being only under a culturally superior British rule? At a time when education itself meant ill-informed ‘enlightenment’ in pre-independent India that was just getting acquainted with European education, everything European was positive.  Every educated Indian revered European thought blindly and thought it to be the panacea for mankind.  It is remarkable that Sri Aurobindo, who was entirely educated in England and acquainted only with the European languages till he returned home, was quick enough not only to imbibe the spirit that India always stood for, but also to look at European culture dispassionately for it was by itself without any blind emulation. How was it possible for him when so many Europe-educated Indians were not able to see through the innumerable writers like William Archer? We saw that Sri Aurobindo had a fine sense of European achievements through its literature and philosophy during his stay in England.  His passion for study was not an academic one, but an inward search for a content to human life as related to cultural achievements.  The moment he landed in India after 14 long years, he took to studying Indian Literature of the past.  For one who had mastered the essential spirit of European Literature, it didn’t take long to evaluate the real merits of the thought content that ancient India had produced.  His inward grasp of Indian achievements gave him a clear picture as to how they ought to be looked upon, against all the prejudices of ill-informed western criticism like that produced by William Archer.  He is never partisan to Indian Culture, though he is very critical of a few aspects of Western culture.  When looking at a foreign culture, there is, he writes, the eye of sympathy and intuition and a close appreciative self-identification…These are attempts to push aside all concealing veils and reveal the hard outward fact, but we are enlightened of something deeper which has its greater reality; we get not the thing as it is in the deficiencies of life, but its ideal meaning.  The soul, the essential spirit is one thing, and the forms taken in this difficult human actuality are another, and are often imperfect or perverted; neither can be neglected if we would have a total vision.[5]  It is this attempt to grasp at the essential sense of an issue that is of worth to us.  

 

 

Such a sense of critical discrimination is nurtured by literary studies. Sri Aurobindo displays so much of an Arnoldian sense of critical sensibility in such critical judgments.  In his work The study of poetry, Mathew Arnold, while emphasizing the kind of standards we must hold on to while judging poetry, makes this point: In poetry, which is thought and art in one, it is the glory, the eternal honor, that charlatanism shall find no entrance; that this noble sphere be kept inviolate and inviolable. Charlatanism is for confusing or obliterating the distinctions between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true. It is charlatanism, conscious or unconscious, whenever we confuse or obliterate these. And in poetry, more than anywhere else, it is unpermissible to confuse or obliterate them. For in poetry the distinction between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true, is of paramount importance.[6]  This sense of value judgments became a distinct feature of the best literary critics, and we find Sri Aurobindo displaying the same.  We need to note that while Archer makes remarks which have no basis, Sri Aurobindo, with the sensibility of a true literary critic, doesn’t counter with equally vague remarks, but with a sharp critical awareness in looking at issues.

 

 

Criticism may be of any nature, appreciatory or condemning, sympathetic or hostile, but it must state things as they are by themselves.  Sri Aurobindo in his rebuttal does not turn a blind eye to the criticism of Archer just because it is hostile.   He has the critical readiness of mind in trying to see the standpoint of such hostility, to see if there is a point that has been made which he might have missed by personal impressions.  For one who tries to see the issue in its totality, even hostile criticism, he says, when it states facts honestly without exaggeration has some value: hostile criticism…is good for the soul and the intellect, provided we do not allow ourselves to be afflicted, beaten down or shaken from the upholding center of our living faith and action.  Most things in our human world are imperfect and it is sometimes well to get a strong view of our imperfections.  Or, if nothing else, we can at least learn to appreciate opposite standpoints and get at the source of the opposition; wisdom, insight and sympathy grow by such comparisons.[7]  But even there, Sri Aurobindo finds Archer of no significance since hostile criticism to be of any sound value must be criticism, not slander and false witness, not vitriol-throwing: it must state the facts without distortion, preserve consistent standards of judgment, observe a certain effort at justice, sanity, measure.[8] Note his emphasis on preserving standards of judgment and observing certain efforts at justice while criticizing.  This marks his finer critical sensibility as has been evinced in all the great literary critics.

 

 

Though the very motive of Archer’s book is false and his purpose is only to slander Indian civilization so that it can be dismissed without any attention, Sri Aurobindo, by his critical awareness still takes it as a case. Archer raises issues with pretensions to a rationalistic point of view characterizing modern European thought.  And this very way of reasoning went very much against the very standards of literary criticism itself while looking at Indian culture even by educated Indians themselves.  This rationalistic stand needed to be analyzed, for it stood in the way of a right critical understanding of the Indian past.  In spite of his political motive, William Archer displays the common pattern of critical misunderstanding of the western mind in looking at Indian past.  Archer’s descriptions of Indian philosophy are a grossly ignorant misrepresentation of its idea and spirit, but in their essence they represent the view inevitably taken by the normal positivist mind of the Occident.[9] Sri Aurobindo doesn’t dismiss this standpoint, for it is one of the virtues of critical thinking, but tries to relate it to a cultural environment and see how it could be applied within its context. The book, hence, becomes a gallant study as to how Indian civilization has to be perceived with a true sense of critical awareness.  Thanks to Archer, it fired up a critical inquiry of the Indian past by one of the finest minds that India ever produced. 

 

 

Indian civilization has a unique spiritual turn of mind, much different from the spirituality developed in Europe.  There have been a few exponents of Indian culture but they mostly lack the clarity that Sri Aurobindo displays throughout his work. This clarity, needless to say, was acquired by his acquaintance with European literature and through some of the finest literary critics it produced.  It served two purposes: one, it demonstrated the limitations of the western critical intelligence into looking at Indian past, and two, it brought out the real merits of Indian culture as expressed in its philosophy, literature, arts, sculpture and polity.  This was possible for Sri Aurobindo alone among all the exponents of Indian civilization, for he was critically trained and had mastered European thought; his finer perception of Western achievements had only sensitized his mind to an inward perception of the Indian past to which he belonged in spirit.  Immediately after he had returned home, he plunged into a study of Bengali, his mother tongue, and Sanskrit, a classical language of India, in which most of the Indian classics find expression, knowing that he can identify himself in spirit with his cultural past only when he can master its literary achievements.  During his early career in India as a professor of English and French and later as vice-principal in a college, he devoured most of the Indian classics which gave shape to this later enquiry of Indian civilization.  

 

 

Before getting into his critical study of the Indian past as related to its religion and spirituality, arts, literature and polity, he comments more on William Archer, how unqualified he was in judging an alien culture and then moves on to evaluate the real worth of Indian past. What kind of a critic is William Archer? The writer was evidently no authority on metaphysics which he despises as a misuse of the human mind; yet he lays down the law at length about the values of Indian philosophy.  He was a rationalist to whom religion is an error, a psychological disease, a sin against reason; yet he adjudges here between the comparative claims of religions, assigning a proxime accessit to Christianity, mainly, it seems, because Christians do not seriously believe in their own religions, --let not the reader laugh, the book advances quite seriously this amazing reason, -- and bestowing the wooden spoon on Hinduism. He admits his incompetence to speak about music, yet that has not prevented him from relegating Indian music to a position of hopeless inferiority.  His judgment on art and architecture is of the narrowest kind; but he is generously liberal of his decisive depreciations.  In drama and literature one would expect from him better things; but the astonishing superficiality of his standards and his arguments here leaves one wondering how in the world he got his reputation as a dramatic and literary critic: one concludes that either he must have used a very different method in dealing with European literature or else it is very easy to get a reputation of this kind in England.  An ill-informed misrepresentation of facts, a light hearted temerity of judgment on things he has not cared to study constitute his critic’s title to write on Indian culture and dismiss it authoritatively as a mass of barbarism.[10] What can one expect from a writer like Archer, who has only collected together in his mind all the unfavorable comments he had read about India, eke them out with casual impressions of his own and advance this unwholesome and unsubstantial compound as his original production…[11].  How can one account for such a work, which, along with the fact that it did not have a valid motive, also displayed such shallowness? Sri Aurobindo here makes a very fine critical judgment. He says: The book is a journalistic fake, not an honest production.[12]

 

 

The above statement needs to be emphasized, for it clearly shows the ability to discriminate between the good and the bad, and the true and the half-true.  This is so typical of all the best literary critics.  I made a point earlier that to identify the real perspective of an issue in question is one of the goals of literary criticism.  Man’s response to a work of art, as his sensibility became varied and multi-dimensional in the course of time, more often tended towards the superficial.  Our consciousness is like a sheet of paper, wide but without any depth, says D.H.Lawrence. It needs a sharp literary sense of values to identify the falsity of such writing which would offer a range of information but wouldn’t have the depth of sensible perception in it. Sri Aurobindo had the finer sense of values of cultural phenomena as exhibited through literature to make such a comment of discrimination.  He is clearly able to see the difference between a superior and an inferior mind.  He says of Archer: What we have before us are the ideas of an average and typical Occidental mind on Indian culture, a man of sufficient education and wide reading, but no genius or exceptional capacity, rather an ordinary successful talent, no flexibility or broad sympathy of mind, but pronounced and rigid opinions which are backed up and given an appearance of weight by the habit of using to good effect a varied though not always sound information.  This is in fact the mind and standpoint of an average Englishman of some ability formed in the habit of journalism.  [13] We must note again that while English education was blindly revered by the educated Indians of that time, Sri Aurobindo, by his sense of literary values, was able to make a sensible comment at the general nature of such criticism by Archer.  He knew what kind of degradation of taste and sensibility has happened to the modern generation of readers, because of the journalistic turn of mind.  The modern reader, he says, has a thirst for general information of all kinds which he does not care or has not time to co-ordinate or assimilate…[14].  He has pinpointed here the malady of the modern mind which has lost depth in its perception owing mostly to the kind of journalistic interests it developed.  Only the finest of literary critics have clearly identified how the development of journalism went against the very interests and possibilities of life. 

 

 

It is worth noting that in a different context he elaborates on the sort of mental human being such a turn of mind has produced.  It has resulted in producing the sensational modern man: he is the great reading public; the newspapers and weekly and monthly reviews are his; fiction and poetry and art are his mental caterers, the theatre and the cinema and the radio exist for him: science hastens to bring her knowledge and discoveries to his doors and equip his life with endless machinery; politics are shaped in his image… He is open to new ideas, he can catch at them and hurl them about in a rather confused fashion….[15] The philistine of the yesteryears has been replaced by this modern enlightened human being.  Archer is only a product that caters to the needs of such a reading mass which seldom has any sense of discrimination.

 

 

So much for Archer. Archer needed to be dealt with, for it shows the kind of literary standards Sri Aurobindo had in mind.   He knew what it is to be serious, and could distinguish sensible criticism which arose out of value judgments and the “journalistic” kind of superficial criticism.  Such criticism could have “sufficient education and wide learning” behind it but he had acquired the necessary standards to look into the falsity of such expressions, however appealing they were to the generality of readers.

 

 

After exposing Archer, Sri Aurobindo turns to look at the values of Indian civilization with the impartial eye of the true literary critic. I emphasize the word literary, for how he looks at the issue isn’t partisan to one way of thinking or a partial understanding alone; it is, in the Arnoldian sense, a seeing of things as they are by themselves.  Indian civilization has been unique in its religio-philosophical stand; for it is not just a cultural system alone, but an immense religious effort of the human spirit.  It is much more than a creed, a cult, a dogma; it is a continuously enlarging tradition of the Godward endeavor of the human spirit.  The European critics, even when they were sympathetic to the Indian past and made an attempt to look at the appreciatory aspects of it, were only unsatisfactory for their very inability to enter into an entirely different spirit, and by the difference in their very outlook of religion.  On the other hand, most of the Indian exponents of it only stammered when it came to applying the canons of western critical judgment, for they were unable to arrive at a stand where there was a consistency in looking at this issue with some critical standards.  Indian civilization had to be looked at with the critical consistency of a mind mature with the clarity of Western thought and which also lived the essential breath of the glorious past of India.  Sri Aurobindo took this task and this book, by his intelligence and erudition, becomes a refreshing study of some of the finest cultural aspects of mankind.

 

 

A culture’s superiority can never rest on a small initiated group of people alone.  It needs a practical and social manifestation too.  It needs to be both inward and outward.  The very value of a cultural achievement is the way it leads to a better harmony of mind, soul and intellect in a given social condition. Sri Aurobindo had this sense of culture as he had seen in European achievements and hence he is able to look at the totality of Indian culture from the standpoint of a literary critic trained with western intelligence; he is not satisfied to explain the ideal meaning alone of the Indian past as so many other Indian exponents had done. His value lies in the fact that he was the first one and qualified to do so, because of his training in European thought and his mastery of Indian achievements. Romain Rolland, on this point, remarks: Sri Aurobindo [is] the foremost of Indian thinkers, who has realized the most complete synthesis between the genius of the West and of the East.[16]

 

 

Why has western intelligence been, despite its critical brilliance, unable to get into the spirit of the various manifestations of Indian civilization, say, for instance, Indian religion? Sri Aurobindo is able to pinpoint such issues to the farthest clarity.  To the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its dogma; the religious spirit matters, not the theological credo.  On the contrary, to the western mind a fixed intellectual belief is the most important part of a cult; it is its core of meaning, it is the thing that distinguishes from others.[17] The truth of being as perceived by the Indian mind was not a philosophical speculation, a theological dogma, an idea to be indulged by the thinker in his study, but was a living spiritual truth and could be seized in a thousand ways through life and beyond life.  The very fact that it was “alive” all the time gave birth to the hundreds of shapes, which itself baffles the western mind to conclude as a proof of formlessness.  One has to get a grasp of this living spirit, an ever-expanding consciousness of the realization of the divine, to have a right perception of the myriad forms it gave rise to.  This is much akin to identifying the creative spirit behind the various literary forms, Poetry for instance, within their specific limits of the conditions of time and environment.

 

 

The western mind, he argues, is not only baffled by its inability in entering into the living spirit of Indian civilization, but even when it finds itself guided by a similarity in aesthesis when looking at Indian poetry only gets intrigued later by the spiritual difference in similarity to conclude that Indian poetry at the most had only at the most a ‘form’ but seldom a satisfactory ‘substance’.  Indian poetry, very much like the poetry produced by the European languages, starts apparently from similar motives, moves on the same plane, and uses cognate forms.  The very similarity in its outward forms, unlike an entirely different kind of poetry like the Chinese, which could make possible a finer appreciation because it is not checked or hampered by any disturbing memories or comparisons, stands in its way of a right appreciation to the western mind.  The mind accustomed to the European idea and technique expects the same kind of satisfaction here and does not meet it, feels a baffling difference to whose secret it is a stranger, and the subtly pursuing comparison and vain expectation stand in the way of a full receptivity and intimate understanding[18].   Now this kind of statement is possible only for one who knew inwardly the spirit of the two cultures in question.  Sri Aurobindo scores so much over a critic like William Archer because of this ability to look at Indian culture with a well-informed understanding of it and with the critical eye of the western mind.  He could look at the Indian past with the sensibility of the western mind and at the same time without being limited by its cultural bounds.

 

 

Sri Aurobindo’s critical clarity that arose out of his literary background is seen all through his enquiry of the various manifestations of Indian culture, but as would be naturally expected, it is seen at its best in his interpretation of Indian Literature as related to the obscure Vedas.  The western mind had mostly found in the Vedas the primitive babblings of a half-savage pastoral group of men. The major issue in looking at the early literature of India, he finds, lies in the fact that we put our own mental conceptions in the images and symbols of those seers for whom a spiritual truth was not a mental abstraction of the philosophical thinker, but one which was intensely lived.  The word in the Veda didn’t have a fixed sense association as in its modern sense, but had different dynamic suggestions in different levels of perception.  The Vedas are couched in a language which apparently displays no logical consistency, but then one needs to remember that the Vedic Rishis used for their expression a fixed and yet variable body of other images and a glowing web of myth and parable, images that became parables, parables that became myths and myths that remained always images[19].  The modern mind needs to grasp this perception to have any understanding of the Vedas and its later off-shoot, the Upanishads, and in fact the whole stream of Indian Literature, which upheld the central spirit of the Vedas in its different forms.  He gives one fine example of the common kind of error in looking at it: The western critic sneers at the bold and reckless and to him monstrous image in which Indra, son of earth and heaven is said to create his own father and mother; but if we remember that Indra is the supreme spirit in one of its eternal and constant aspects, creator of earth and heaven, born as a cosmic godhead between the mental and physical worlds and recreating their powers in man, we shall see that the image is not only a powerful but in fact a true and revealing figure, and in the Vedic technique it does not matter that it outrages the physical imagination since it expresses a greater actuality as no other figure could have done with the same awakening aptness and vivid poetical force.  The Bull and Cow of the Veda, the shining herds of the Sun lying hidden in the cave are strange enough creatures to the physical mind, but they do not belong to the earth and in their own plane they are at once images and actual things and full of life and significance.  It is in this way that throughout we must interpret and receive the Vedic poetry according to its own spirit and vision and the psychically natural, even if to us strange and supranatural, truth of its ideas and figures.[20]  Such fine sense of literary value judgments on the Vedas displayed in this book form the basis of a later scholarly work The Secret of the Veda in which he analyses the various critical interpretations of the Vedas, and shows how the dynamic sense value of the verses, which were not only spiritual truths but lofty poetic expressions of it comparable to any best poetry of Europe needs to be grasped at for a just appreciation. These sense associations were often sacrificed with emphasis on outward rituals in the course of time as mankind developed.  He traces this even in the later Sanskrit poetry which became rigid in its expression because it lost the fluidity of the movement of the unique spirituality found in the Vedas and later in the Upanishads and the great epics, Ramayana and Mahabharatha. 

 

 

I have only attempted here to relate the literary background of Sri Aurobindo to his study of Indian culture.  His identification of the nature of Archer’s work and his subsequent defense as seen from a few passages above show the sensibility of a trained literary critic.  It is beyond the scope of this paper to look into the details of Indian Civilization as put forward in this book.  As a student of English literature I find he had a remarkable sense of literature and that guided him constantly in his search for the inward values of Indian culture, which is displayed at its best in this work, The Foundations of Indian culture.  His critical judgments and discriminations, hence, become valuable to the student of Literature, for they show how literature is not an isolated study but something of an organic development related to all the human faculties. They also show that the sensibility acquired relates to human life itself and is hence vital in studying it and, more than that, preserving it.

 

Vishvesh Obla

ovishvesh@yahoo.com

Albany, NY.

USA.

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