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The theme chosen by this seminar is a very apt one. Having
suffered the burden of two centuries of British occupation,
India has, since Independence, tried to come to terms with
the impact of that exotic presence perhaps diametrically opposed
to her own temperament, culture and genius. If anything, this
introspection has only intensified in recent years, as Western
culture (if it deserves this noble name) aggressively spreads
around the globe. But it stands to reason that for an effective
“decolonization” to take place—even in order
to find out whether and how far it is desirable—we should
first take a hard look at the effects of this colonization,
what traces it has left on the Indian mind and psyche, and
how deep. That is what I have briefly attempted to do in this
paper—briefly, because it is a subject as vast and complex
as Indian life itself, and also because I am a mere student
of India, not a learned scholar like those present among us
today.
But first, an aside. I have only referred to the British
occupation, not to the Muslim invasions, though they stretched
over a much longer span of time and collided violently with
Indian civilization. Yet, strangely, in spite of their ruthlessness,
their proud and sustained use of violence to coerce or convert,
India’s Muslim rulers never attempted to take possession
of the Indian mind : in faithful obedience to Koranic injunctions,
they simply tried to stamp it out. That they did not succeed
is another story.
The British, too, dreamed of stamping it out, but not through
sheer brute force. As we know, besides their primary object
of plunder, they viewed—or perhaps justified—their
presence in India as a “divinely ordained” civilizing
mission. They spoke of Britain as “the most enlightened
and philanthropic nation in the world”[1]
and of “the justifiable pride which the cultivated members
of a civilised community feel in the beneficent exercise of
dominion and in the performance by their nation of the noble
task of spreading the highest kind of civilisation.”[2]
Such rhetoric was constantly poured out to the Britons at
home so as to give them a good conscience, while the constant
atrocities perpetrated on the Indian people were discreetly
hidden from sight.
To achieve their aim, the British rulers followed two lines
: on the one hand, they encouraged an English and Christianized
education in accordance with the well-known Macaulay doctrine,
which projected Europe as an enlightened, democratic, progressive
heaven, and on the other hand, they pursued a systematic denigration
of Indian culture, scriptures, customs, traditions, crafts,
cottage industries, social institutions, educational system,
taking full advantage of the stagnant and often degenerate
character of the Hindu society of the time. There were, of
course, notable exceptions among British individuals, from
William Jones to Sister Nivedita and Annie Besant—but
almost none to be found among the ruling class. Let us recall
how, in his famous 1835 Minute, Thomas B. Macaulay asserted
that Indian culture was based on “a literature ... that
inculcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects
... hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality ... fruitful
of monstrous superstitions.” Hindus, he confidently declared,
had nothing to show except a “false history, false astronomy,
false medicine ... in company with a false religion.”[3]
As it happened, Indians were—and still largely are—innocent
people who could simply not suspect the degree of cunning
with which their colonial masters set about their task. In
the middle of the 1857 uprising, the Governor-General Lord
Canning wrote to a British official :
As we must rule 150 millions of people by a handful
(more or less small) of Englishmen, let us do it in the
manner best calculated to leave them divided (as in religion
and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them
with the greatest possible awe of our power and with the
least possible suspicion of our motives.[4]
Even a “liberal” governor such as Elphinstone wrote
in 1859, “Divide et impera [‘divide and rule’
in Latin] was the old Roman motto and it should be ours.”[5]
In this clash of two civilizations, the European, younger,
dynamic, hungry for space and riches, appeared far better
fitted than the Indian, half decrepit, almost completely dormant
after long centuries of internal strife and repeated onslaught.
The contrast was so huge that no one doubted the outcome—the
rapid conquest of the Indian mind and life. That was what
Macaulay, again, summarized best when he proudly wrote his
father in 1836 :
Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully....
It is my belief that if our plans of education are followed
up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable
classes in Bengal thirty years hence.[6]
But if there is one thing that the British could not understand
about Indians, it is that they live more in the heart than
in the mind. And that heart the rulers could never touch or
influence, especially not with their shallow religion or science.
As for the mind, they did succeed in creating a fairly large
“educated” class, anglicized and partially Christianized,
which always looked up to its European model and ideal, and
formed the actual foundation of the Empire in India.
Came Independence. If India did achieve political independence—at
a terrible cost and by amputating a few limbs of her body—she
hardly achieved independence in the field of thought. Nor
did she try : the country’s so-called elite, whose mind
had been shaped and hypnotized by their colonial masters,
always assumed that anything Western was so superior that
in order to reach all-round fulfilment, India merely had to
follow European thought, science, and political institutions.
Swami Vivekananda was the first to give this call : “O
ye modern Hindus, de-hypnotise yourselves !”[7]
A hundred years later, at least, we can see how gratuitous
those assumptions were. Yet the colonial imprint remains present
at many levels. On a very basic one, it is almost amusing
to note that Pune is sometimes called “the Oxford of
the East,” while Ahmedabad is “the Manchester of
India”—and since Coimbatore is often dubbed “the
Manchester of South India,” we have at least out-Manchestered
England herself ! The Nilgiris are flatteringly compared to
Scotland (never mind that Kotagiri, where I live, is called
“the second Switzerland”), and I understand that
tourist guides refer to your own Alappuzha as “the Venice
of the East.” Pondicherry, also to attract tourists,
calls itself “India’s Little France” or “the
French Riviera of the East.” India’s map seems dotted
with European places. And “east” of what, incidentally
? This is something like India’s learned “Oriental”
institutes—what “orient” do they refer to ?
Thailand or Japan, perhaps ?
Things become more troublesome when Kalidasa is called “the
Shakespeare of India,” when Bankim Chatterji needs to
be compared to Walter Scott or Tagore to Shelley, and Kautilya
becomes India’s very own Machiavelli. We begin to see
how our compass is set due west. Would the British call Shakespeare
“England’s Kalidasa,” let alone Manchester
“the Coimbatore of Northwest England” ?
But I think the most alarming signs of the colonization of
the Indian mind are found in the field of education. Take
the English nursery rhymes taught to many of our little children,
as if, before knowing anything about India, they needed to
know about Humpty-Dumpty or the sheep that went to London
to see the Queen. When they grow older, some of them will
be learning Western psychology while remaining totally ignorant
of the far deeper psychology offered by Yoga, or they will
study medicine or physics or evolution without having the
least idea of what ancient India achieved—and often anticipated—in
those fields. Which teacher, for example, will tell his or
her students that Darwinian evolution was always at the back
of the Indian mind, as the sequence of the Dashavatar shows
? Or that the speed of light is clearly given, to an amazing
degree of precision, in Sayana’s commentary on the Rig-Veda
?[8]
And can it be a coincidence if a day of Brahma, equal to 4,320,000,000
years, happens to be the age of the earth ? Many such examples
could be supplied in other fields, from mathematics and astronomy
and quantum physics to linguistics and metallurgy and urbanization.[9]
If teachers were not so ignorant, as a rule, of their own
culture, they would have no difficulty in showing their students
that the much vaunted “scientific temper” is nothing
new to India. Even in medicine, we know how Ayurveda and Siddha
systems of medicine have been neglected under the illusion
that modern medicine is the only way to provide “health
for all.”
Our educational policies systematically discourage the teaching
of Sanskrit, and one wonders again whether that is in deference
to Macaulay, who found that great language (though he confessed
he knew none of it !) to be “barren of useful knowledge.”
In the same vein, the Indian epics, the Veda or the Upanishads
stand no chance, and students will almost never hear about
them at school. Even Indian languages are subtly or not so
subtly given a lower status than English, with the result
that many deep scholars or writers who chose to express themselves
in their mother-tongues (I have of course N. V. Krishna Warrior
in mind) remain totally unknown beyond their States, while
textbooks are crowded with second-rate thinkers who happened
to write in English.
If you take a look at the teaching of history, the situation
is even worse. Almost all Indian history taught today in our
schools and universities has been written by Western scholars,
or by “native historians who [have] taken over the views
of the colonial masters,”[10]
in the words of Prof. Klostermaier of Canada’s University
of Manitoba. All of India’s historical tradition, all
ancient records are simply brushed aside as so much fancy
so as to satisfy the Western dictum that “Indians have
no sense of history.” Indian tradition never said anything
about mysterious Aryans invading the subcontinent from the
Northwest, but since nineteenth-century European scholars
decided so, our children still today have to learn by rote
this invention now rejected by most archaeologists ; South
Indian tradition said nothing about the Dravidians coming
from the North, driven southward by the naughty Aryans, but
again that shall be stuffed into young brains. No Indian scholar
or grammar or tradition ever claimed that Sanskrit and Tamil
languages were great rivals belonging to wholly separate families,
but this shall be taught at school in deference to Western
linguists or to our own “Dravidian” activists. The
real facts of the destruction wreaked in India by Muslim invaders
and also by some Christian missionaries must be kept outside
textbooks and curricula, since they contradict the “tolerant”
and “liberating” image that Islam and Christianity
have been projecting for themselves.[11]
Even the freedom movement is not spared : as the great historian
R. C. Majumdar[12]
and others have shown, no serious, objective criticism of
Mahatma Gandhi or the Indian National Congress is allowed,
and the role of other important leaders is systematically
belittled or erased.
Nothing illustrates the bankruptcy of our education better
than the manner in which, just a year ago, State education
ministers raised an uproar at an attempt to discuss the introduction
of the merest smattering of Indian culture into the syllabus,
and at the singing of the Saraswati Vandana. *
The message they actually conveyed was that no Indian element
was tolerable in education, while they are perfectly satisfied
with an education that, at the start of the century, Sri Aurobindo
called “soulless and mercenary,”[13]
and which has now degenerated further into a stultifying,
mechanical routine that kills our children’s natural
intelligence and talent. They find nothing wrong with maiming
young brains and hearts, but will be up in arms if we speak
of teaching India’s heritage.
Ananda Coomaraswamy, the famous art critic, gave the following
warning early this century :
It is hard to realize how completely the continuity
of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of
English education suffices to break the threads of tradition
and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived
of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does
not belong to the East or the West, the past or the future.
The greatest danger for India is the loss of her spiritual
integrity. Of all Indian problems the educational is the
most difficult and most tragic.[14]
Swami Vivekananda had earlier said much the same thing in
his own forthright style :
The child is taken to school, and the first thing he
learns is that his father is a fool, the second thing that
his grandfather is a lunatic, the third thing that all his
teachers are hypocrites, the fourth, that all the sacred
books are lies ! By the time he is sixteen he is a mass
of negation, lifeless and boneless. And the result is that
fifty years of such education has not produced one original
man in the three presidencies.... We have learnt only weakness.[15]
The child becomes a recording machine stuffed with a jarring
assortment of meaningless bits and snippets. The only product
of this denationalizing education has been the creation of
a modern, Westernized “elite” with little or no
contact with the deeper sources of Indian culture, and with
nothing of India’s ancient view of the world except a
few platitudes to be flaunted at cocktail parties. Browsing
through any English-language daily or magazine is enough to
see how Indian intellectuals revel in the sonorous clang of
hollow clichés which, the world over, have taken the
place of any real thinking. If Western intellectuals come
up with some new “ism,” you are sure to find it
echoed all over the Indian press in a matter of weeks ; it
was amusing to see how, some two years ago, the visit to India
of a French philosopher and champion of “deconstructionism”
sent the cream of our intellectuals raving wild for weeks,
while they remained crassly ignorant of far deeper thinkers
next door. Or if Western painters or sculptors come up with
some new-fangled cult of ugliness, their Indian counterparts
will not lag far behind. If Western countries plan grand celebrations
for the “millennium” (not a third millennium of
darkness, one hopes), we in India follow suit—though
we appear to have forgotten to celebrate the fifty-second
century of our Kali era earlier this year. And let “politically
correct” Western nations make a new religion of “human
rights” (with intensive bombing campaigns to enforce
them if necessary), and you will hear a number of Indians
clamouring for them parrotlike. The list is endless, in every
field of life, and if India had been living in her mind alone,
one would have to conclude that India has ceased to exist—or
will do so after one or two more generations of this senseless
de-Indianizing. In Sri Aurobindo’s words :
... Ancient India’s culture, attacked by European modernism,
overpowered in the material field, betrayed by the indifference
of her children, may perish for ever along with the soul of
the nation that holds it in its keeping.[16]
The root of the problem is of course that we have ceased
to think by ourselves. We are spoon-fed and often force-fed
almost every one of our thoughts, or what masquerades as thought.
Independent reflection is discouraged at every step, especially
at school.
Yet it is not my point that English education in India has
been an unmitigated evil. It was a necessary, probably an
unavoidable evil. India had to be shaken from her lethargy,
to open up to the world and face its challenges, and that
was the fastest way to compel her to do so. There is also
no doubt that this opening to dynamic currents of thought
from the West contributed in no small measure to the quest
for independence, as has often been pointed out. Sometimes
indeed, one poison is needed to cure another. But to continue
taking poison after the cure is over is inexcusable. India’s
failure to boldly formulate and implement a truly Indian education
after Independence ranks as her most tragic, most ruinous
error. The blame for it must be laid at the door of the country’s
first education ministers, and even more so its first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself an undiscriminating product
of English education who was always prompt to pour scorn on
India’s culture and traditions and to make a cult of
modernity.
But subjection to Western influence does more than simply
impoverish the Indian mind or wean it away from Indian culture.
It also introduces serious distortions into its thinking processes.
With their clear and bold thought, Western thinkers since
the eighteenth century no doubt did much to pull Europe out
of the dark ages brought about by Christianity. But they had
to take shortcuts in the process : they needed sharp intellectual
weapons and had no time to develop the qualities of pluralism,
universality, integrality native to the Indian mind and nurtured
over thousands of years. Their thought was essentially divisive
and exclusive : God was on one side and the creation on another,
an abyss separated matter from spirit, one was either a believer
or an atheist, either a Christian or a Pagan, either ancient
or modern, determinist or indeterminist, empiricist or rationalist,
rightist or leftist. Whether one was an adept of idealism,
realism, positivism, existentialism or any of the thousand
isms the Western intellect cannot live without, Truth was
parcelled out into small, hardened, watertight bits, each
no wider than one line of thought or one philosophical system,
each neatly labelled and set in contrast or opposition with
the other.
The result of this Western obsession with divisiveness has
been disastrous in India’s context. Her inhabitants had
never called themselves “Aryans” or “Dravidians”
in the racial sense, yet they became thus segregated ; they
had never known they were “Hindus,” yet they had
to be happy with this new designation ; they had never called
their view of the world a “religion” (a word with
no equivalent in Sanskrit), but it had to become one, promptly
labelled “Hinduism.” Nor was one label sufficient
: India always recognized and respected the infinite multiplicity
of approaches to the Truth (what is commonly, but incorrectly,
called “tolerance”), but under the Western spotlight
those approaches became so many “sects” almost rivalling
each other (perhaps like Catholics and Protestants !). Hinduism
was thus cut up into convenient bits—Vedism, Brahmanism,
Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism, Tantrism, etc.—of which
Indians themselves had been largely unaware, or at any rate
not in this rigid, cut-and-dried fashion. As for Buddhism,
Jainism and Sikhism, which had been regarded in India as simply
new paths, they were arbitrarily stuck with a label of “separate
religions.” Similarly, thousands of fluid communities
were duly catalogued and crystallized by the British rulers
as so many permanent and rigid castes.*
Unfortunately, this itemizing and labelling of their heritage
became a undisputed truth in the subconscious mind of Indians
: they passively accepted being dissected and defined by their
colonial masters, and they learned to look at themselves through
Western eyes. The Indian mind had become too feeble to take
the trouble of assimilating the few positive elements of Western
thought and rejecting the many negative ones : it swallowed
but could not digest. Even some of the early attempts to lay
new foundations—the Brahmo Samaj and many other “reformist”
movements in particular—were, despite their usefulness
as a ferment, conceived apologetically in response to Europe’s
standards and judgement. If, for instance, they were told
that Hindus were “polytheistic idolaters,” rather
than show the fallacy of such a label, they would bend over
backward to build their new creeds on monotheism of a Judeo-Christian
type. Just recently we had a revealing echo of such an attitude
when our own President, on a recent visit to your State, felt
obliged to speculate that Adi Shankaracharya’s Monism
must have been influenced by Islam’s monotheism. This
is intellectual bankruptcy at its highest pitch.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once put it,
The mistake of the West is that it measures other civilizations
by the degree to which they approximate to Western civilization.
If they do not approximate it, they are hopeless, dumb, reactionary.[17]
Educated Indians virtually admitted they were “hopeless,
dumb, reactionary,” and could only stop being so by receiving
salvation from Europe : they pinned their hopes on its democracy
and secularism, ignoring all warnings that those European
concepts would wreak havoc once mechanically transposed to
India. Worse, they rivalled with one another in denigrating
their heritage. If even today a Western journalist or professor
utters the words of “caste” or “sati”
or “Hindu fundamentalism” (and I would like to ask
him what the “fundamentals” of Hinduism are), you
will hear a number of Indian intellectuals beating their chests
in unison—even as they keep their eyes tightly shut to
the most fatal aberrations of Western society. Some ninety
years ago already, Sri Aurobindo observed :
They will not allow things or ideas contrary to European
notions to be anything but superstitious, barbarous, harmful
and benighted, they will not suffer what is praised and
practised in Europe to be anything but rational and enlightened...[18]
As a result, many “modern” Indians (I have had
myself occasion to hear some of them), and even a number of
Swamis, especially those with Western following, will proudly
assert that they are “not Hindus.” (That fashion
was probably started last century by Keshab Chandra Sen.)
What they usually mean by that is that they are “tolerant”
of everything and anything (especially of Western anythings),
and therefore far too broad-minded to be Hindus. They forget
that Hinduism in its true form, Sanatana dharma, is as wide
as the universe and can include any path—provided that
path is, like itself, and unlike Semitic religions, respectful
of other paths, because it knows it is only one small parcel
of the whole Truth beyond all paths.
Ram Swarup, a profound Indian thinker who passed away recently,
was not afraid of swimming against this self-deprecating tide
nurtured by our intelligentsia and media :
A permanent stigma seems to have stuck to the terms Hindu
and Hinduism. These have now become terms of abuse in the
mouth of the very elite which the Hindu millions have raised
to the pinnacle of power and prestige with their blood, sweat
and tears.[19]
Such is the painful but logical outcome of two centuries
of colonization of the Indian mind.
The deeper meaning of this transitory dark phase has
been expressed thus by Sri Aurobindo:
The spirit and ideals of India had come to be confined
in a mould which, however beautiful, was too narrow and
slender to bear the mighty burden of our future. When that
happens, the mould has to be broken and even the ideal lost
for a while, in order to be recovered free of constraint
and limitation.[20]
There is no doubt that India’s old mould is being broken.
The question is what is going to take its place. There are
increasing and hopeful signs of an aspiration to a reawakening
and a liberation from this intellectual and cultural degeneration.
But for this aspiration to be fulfilled, I am convinced that
we shall have to go deeper than the intellect, and tap anew
the inexhaustible source of strength that has sustained India
over ages. Take care of India’s soul and the rest will
take care of itself, as Swami Vivekananda said.[21]
Only then will we recover our native suppleness and independence
of mind, and learn to question West and India alike, past
and present alike. Only then will we regain our discernment,
viveka, our only possible beacon in the growing gloom.
Permit me to quote Sri Aurobindo once more :
We must begin by accepting nothing on trust from any
source whatsoever, by questioning everything and forming
our own conclusions. We need not fear that we shall by that
process cease to be Indians or fall into the danger of abandoning
Hinduism. India can never cease to be India or Hinduism
to be Hinduism, if we really think for ourselves. It is
only if we allow Europe to think for us that India is in
danger of becoming an ill-executed and foolish copy of Europe.[22]
To recover her true genius in a new body is the task now
facing India. She needs it not only for herself but for the
world, as the West is fast being sucked into its own emptiness,
except for a few lucid thinkers desperately searching for
a deeper meaning to our human madness. “Europe is destructive,
suicidal,”[23]
said André Malraux to Nehru in 1936, whom he would
meet several times until the 1960s, trying in vain to persuade
him of the relevance of India’s spirituality in today’s
world. Malraux also reflected :
... To the West, whether Christian or atheist, the fundamental
obvious fact is death, whatever meaning it gives to it,
whereas India’s fundamental obvious fact is the infinity
of life in the infinity of time : “Who could kill immortality
?”[24]
This deeper view of the universe, and of ourselves as an
integral part of it, this bridge between matter and spirit
is what the world needs today. And that is not philosophy,
it is a practical question : India alone could show, as she
did in her ancient history from the Indus Valley civilization
to the Maurya times and after, how material and spiritual
developments can be harmonized—and indeed need each other
if society is to last. Because the West ultimately believes
only in death, it is destroying man as well as the earth ;
because India ultimately sought only the secret of life, it
could restore the divinity of the earth and of all creatures,
man included. Last century already, the French historian Michelet
marvelled :
Whereas, in our Occident, the most dry and sterile minds
brag in front of Nature, the Indian genius, the most rich
and fecund of all, knows neither small nor big and has generously
embraced universal fraternity, even the identity of all
souls! [25]
This Indian genius has now begun to percolate back to the
West, where it inspires new approaches, deeper thoughts, though
not yet the transforming shakti. Perhaps the tide of colonialism
will be reversed, after all. And without bloodshed.
Perhaps Rabindranath Tagore’s hope of April 1941, three
months before his death, will be fulfilled :
The spirit of violence which perhaps lay dormant in
the psychology of the West, has at last roused itself and
desecrates the Spirit of Man....
I had at one time believed that the springs of civilization
would issue out of the heart of Europe. But today when I am
about to quit the world that faith has gone bankrupt altogether....
Today I live in the hope that the Saviour is coming—that
he will be born in our midst in this poverty-shamed hovel
which is India. I shall wait to hear the divine message of
civilization which he will bring with him.... Perhaps that
dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the
sun rises.[26]
*
*
Sri Aurobindo’s
India’s Rebirth (3rd ed., 2000; also in
Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Oriya, Tamil and Gujarati translations)
is co-published and distributed by:
Mira Aditi
62 ‘Sriranga’, 2nd Main, 1st Cross
T. K. Layout, Saraswatipuram
Mysore - 570 009, India
miraditi@vsnl.com
[1]
Rev. John Wilson, India Three Thousand Years Ago, quoted
by Devendra Swarup in “Genesis of the Aryan Race Theory
and Its Application to Indian History,” The Aryan
Problem, eds. S. B. Deo and S. Kamath (Pune : Bharatiya
Itihasa Sankalana Samiti, 1993), p. 33-35.
[2]
Sidgwick, quoted by Sri Aurobindo in Bande Mataram
of 19 June 1907 : see India’s Rebirth (Mysore
: Mira Aditi, 2000), p. 24.
[3]
In British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, vol.
10 in The History and Culture of the Indian People
(Bombay : Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1991), p. 83-84.
[4]
Quoted by P. Hardy in The Muslims of British India,
p. 72.
[5]
In British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, p. 321.
[6]
Quoted by N. S. Rajaram in The Politics of History
(New Delhi : Voice of India, 1995) p. 105.
[7]
Swami Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora
(Calcutta : Advaita Ashram, 1992), p. 105.
[8]
See for example P. V. Vartak, Scientific Knowledge in the
Vedas (Delhi : Nag Publisher, 1995) ; Subhash Kak, “Sayana’s
Astronomy” (Indian Journal of History of Science, vol.
33, 1998, p. 31-36).
[9]See
for example A Concise History of Science in India,
eds. D. M. Bose, S. N. Sen & B. V. Subbarayappa (New Delhi
: Indian National Science Academy, 1989) ; History
of Technology in India, ed. A. K. Bag (New Delhi : Indian
National Science Academy, 1997) ; History of Science and
Technology in Ancient India, by Debiprased Chattopadhyaya
(Calcutta : Firma KLM, 3 vols., 1986, 1991, 1996) ; Computing
Science in Ancient India, eds. T. R. N. Rao & Subhash
Kak (Louisiana : Center for Advanced Computer Studies, 1998).
[10]
Klaus Klostermaier, “Questioning the Aryan Invasion Theory
and Revising Ancient Indian History,” in Iskcon Communications
Journal 1999.
[11]
See for example Arun Shourie, Eminent Historians (New
Delhi : ASA, 1998) and Missionaries in India (New Delhi :
ASA, 1994) ; Sita Ram Goel, History of Hindu-Christian
Encounters (New Delhi : Voice of India, 1997) and Hindu
Temples—What Happened to Them (New Delhi : Voice
of India, 2 vols., 1998, 1993).
[12]
See R. C. Majumdar, History of the Freedom Movement in
India (Calcutta : Firmal KLM, 3 volumes, 1988), in particular
Appendix to vol. 1 and Preface to vol. 3. See also N. S. Rajaram,
Gandhi, Khilafat and the National Movement (Bangalore
: Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, 1999).
[13]
Sri Aurobindo, “The National Value of Art,”
in Karmayogin, 20 November 1909, in India’s
Rebirth, p. 65.
[14]
Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva (New Delhi
: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997), p. 170.
[15]
Swami Vivekananda on India and her Problems (Calcutta
: Advaita Ashram, 1985), p. 38-39.
[16]
Sri Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth, p. 139 (emphasis mine).
[[17]
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, interviewed in Time of 24 July
1989.
[18]
Sri Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth, p. 90.
[19
Ram Swarup, quoted in Hinduism Today, October 1998,
p. 16.
[20]
Sri Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth, p. 61.
[21]
Adapted from Swami Vivekananda, in Ram Swarup, “His
Vision and Mission,” The Observer, 28 August
1993.
[22]
Sri Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth, p. 88.
[23]
In Malraux & India (New Delhi : Embassy of France
in India, 1996), p. 46
[24]
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