What is Hindutva? Known-Knower-Knowledge
Let us read a piece from one of the
early writings of Sri Aurobindo, dated 8 April 1906:
When a movement of national
resurgence is begun in any country or by any people, a large and noble
political ideal is needed for the purpose. Had the great spirit that was
Rousseau not proclaimed the egalitarian principle, the impassioned aspirations
of the French Revolution could not have awakened a half-dead
What does Sri Aurobindo want to
infuse into the heart of fallen
Our failure is due to the want of Shakti
In
The wish to be reborn we have in abundance, there is no deficiency there. How
many attempts have been made, how many movements have been begun, in religion,
in society, in politics! But the same fate has overtaken or is preparing to
overtake them all. They flourish for a moment, then the impulse wanes, the fire
dies out, and if they endure, it is only as empty shells, forms from which the
Brahma has gone or in which it lies overpowered with tamas and inert. Our
beginnings are mighty, but they have neither sequel nor fruit.
Now we are beginning in another direction; we have started a great industrial
movement which is to enrich and regenerate an impoverished land. Untaught by
experience, we do not perceive that this movement must go the way of all the
others, unless we first seek the one essential thing, unless we acquire
strength.
Our knowledge is a dead thing for want
of Shakti
Is it knowledge that is wanting? We
Indians, born and bred in a country where Jnana has been stored and accumulated
since the race began, bear about in us the inherited gains of many thousands of
years. Great giants of knowledge rise among us even today to add to the store.
Our capacity has not shrunk, the edge of our intellect has not been dulled or
blunted, its receptivity and flexibility are as varied as of old. But it is a
dead knowledge, a burden under which we are bowed, a poison which is corroding
us, rather than as it should be a staff to support our feet and a weapon in our
hands; for this is the nature of all great things that when they are not used
or are ill used, they turn upon the bearer and destroy him.
Our knowledge then, weighed down with a heavy load of tamas, lies under the
curse of impotence and inertia. We choose to fancy indeed, nowadays, that if we
acquire Science, all will be well. Let us first ask ourselves what we have done
with the knowledge we already possess, or what have those who have already
acquired Science been able to do for
Our bhakti cannot live and work for want
of Shakti
Is it love, enthusiasm, bhakti that
is wanting? These are ingrained in the Indian nature, but in the absence of
Shakti we cannot concentrate, we cannot direct, we cannot even preserve it. bhakti
is the leaping flame, Shakti is the fuel. If the fuel is scanty how long can
the fire endure?
When the strong nature, enlightened
by knowledge, disciplined and given a giant's strength by Karma, lifts itself
up in love and adoration to God that is the bhakti which endures and keeps the
soul for ever united with the Divine. But the weak nature is too feeble to bear
the impetus of so mighty a thing as perfect bhakti; he is lifted up for a
moment, then the flame soars up to Heaven, leaving him behind exhausted and
even weaker than before. Every movement of any kind of which enthusiasm and
adoration are the life must fail and soon burn itself out so long as the human
material from which it proceeds is frail and light in substance.
The deeper we look, the more we
shall be convinced that the one thing wanting, which we must strive to acquire
before all others, is strength—strength physical, strength mental, strength
moral, but above all strength spiritual which is the one inexhaustible and
imperishable source of all the others. If we have strength everything else will
be added to us easily and naturally. In the absence of strength we are like men
in a dream who have hands but cannot seize or strike, who have feet but cannot
run.
Whenever we strive to do anything,
after the first rush of enthusiasm is spent a paralysing helplessness seizes
upon us. We often see in the cases of old men full of years and experience that
the very excess of knowledge seems to have frozen their powers of action and
their powers of will. When a great feeling or a great need overtakes them and
it is necessary to carry out its promptings in action, they hesitate, ponder,
discuss, make tentative efforts and abandon them or wait for the safest and
easiest way to suggest itself, instead of taking the most direct; thus the time
when it was possible and necessary to act passes away. Our race has grown just
such an old man with stores of knowledge, with ability to feel and desire, but
paralysed by senile sluggishness, senile timidity, senile feebleness. If
Many of us, utterly overcome by tamas,
the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible,
that
What is a Nation? The Shakti of its
millions
For what is a nation? What is our
mother-country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a
fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the
millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha Mardini
sprang into being from the Shakti of all the millions of gods assembled in one
mass of force and welded into unity. The Shakti we call
It is our own choice whether we create a
Nation or perish
What is it that so many thousands
of holy men, Sadhus and Sannyasis, have preached to us silently by their lives?
What was the message that radiated from the personality of Bhagawan Ramakrishna
Paramhansa? What was it that formed the kernel of the eloquence with which the
lion-like heart of Vivekananda sought to shake the world? It is this, that in
everyone of these three hundred millions of men, from the Raja on his throne to
the coolie at his labour, from the Brahmin absorbed in his Sandhya to the Pariah
walking shunned of met, GOD
LIVETH. We are all
gods and creators, because the energy of God is within us and all life is
creation; not only the making of new forms is creation, but preservation is
creation, destruction itself is creation. It rests with us what we shall
create; for we are not, unless we choose, puppets dominated by Fate and Maya;
we are facets and manifestations of Almighty Power.
India cannot perish, our race
cannot become extinct, because among all the divisions of mankind it is to
India that is reserved the highest and the most splendid destiny, the most
essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from
herself the future religion of the entire world, the Eternal Religion which is
to harmonise all religion, science and philosophies and make mankind one soul…
But the destiny of
To get strength we must adore the Mother
of Strength
Strength then and again strength
and yet more strength is the need of our race. But if it is strength we desire,
how shall we gain it if we do not adore the Mother of Strength? She demands
worship not for her own sake, but in order that she may help us and give herself
to us. This is no fantastic idea, no superstition but the ordinary law of the
universe. The gods cannot, if they would, give themselves unasked. Even the
Eternal comes not unawares upon men. Every devotee knows by experience that we
must turn to Him and desire and adore him before the Divine Spirit pours in its
ineffable beauty and ecstasy upon the soul. What is true of the Eternal is true
also of her who goes forth from Him.
It is the power of this universal Shakti that will help create a nation.
Special souls had come to invoke her and persuade her to take charge of our
life first by moving towards
When this tapas-yajna ceased to
exist, the nation fell into desuetude; it languished and the ignominy of
slavery had to be suffered. But luckily in this land of ours the gods always
remained awoke thigh men slept the sleep of inaction. But we can take courage
in it and keep our epistemology well-kindled. It gave continuity over the
running cycles of the ages. That hope is yet again with us. We are using a
language that has lost the living power of the spirit and make fetishes of
inconsequential stuff. We have to acquire knowledge of another vision, make
another darshan our scripture or shastra of purposeful life that allows
the living powers of the spirit enter in us. Even while we shall retain the
best of the traditions that time does not wear them out, we have to find new
ones appropriate for the new powers of expression and realization. We are heir
to the sixteen formulations or samsakāras
of the past, but unless they pass the fire-test of the future they shall not
bind us. They must, after the fire-test create a new future of spiritual
prosperity. The spiritual prosperity as envisaged here is embedded in the Life
Divine given to us by Sri Aurobindo. We have to prepare ourselves to live in
it. At times it is said that Sri Aurobindo’s thought-visions should be located
in the Indian tradition; this may prove preposterous, in fact it should be the
other way round. In him is a greater and meaningful synthesis of the eastern
and western traditions and these could be foundations for the future.
Is today the concept of Sanatan Dharma anachronous?
The Mother and Sri Aurobindo
consistently refused to go by any credal religion. In fact they always held
that the days of religion are over. When after the siddhi of 1926 the Mother
created a new world, splendid and exceptionally marvellous, and it was ready to
descend upon earth, Sri Aurobindo told her that it was a world he did not want
to come down here. That world would make the Mother very famous and it would
create a new religion, glorious in its form and appeal. But it would rather
delay the descent or appearance of the supramental by millennia and millennia,
delay the supramental manifestation which was their real work. Yet religion as
an article of faith was never taboo to them in the sense of man’s urge and
aspiration towards the powers of the spirit who can promote his inner or
spiritual progress. There is in it the individual’s freedom and no rigid formal
or extraneous discipline of do’s and don’ts imposed upon him. Sanatan Dharma is
also similarly a formulation for the societal organization and working; it is
for the collective working in which each individual finds a place absolutely
suitable for him depending upon his intrinsic innate nature, his swabhāva. There is no creed in it, no
fixed dogma, no non-breathing perfunctory doctrine in it. It was the Dharma
that was revealed to Sri Aurobindo when he was an undertrial prisoner for one
year between 1908 and 09, revealed by Sri Krishna himself. The Gita was placed
in his hand and he was told to take it to the world. The ideal working of the
four powers of the spirit, the fourfold soul-forces is the necessary foundation
for the yet higher powers to enter into the cosmic operation. Obviously there
is universality in it which no religion can abrogate. Sanatan Dharma is not a
credal religion but a working of the spirit itself. This should never be
equated with the politically loaded things such Hinduism or Hindutva.
In a letter written to a disciple
Sri Aurobindo explains the workings of the cosmic will as follows: "…though
it is necessary to have faith in the existence of a cosmic will working
independently of the individual wills for a higher purpose, yet it is difficult
to understand its nature from the nature of the cosmic movements to which its
purpose is worked out. The cosmic movements seem to result out of the conflict
of innumerable individual wills, so much that it seems doubtful, whether we can
regard any purpose as applicable to them. The cosmos or the world seems to be
made of a network of relations between the individual selves and not possessed
of the kind of unity which we ascribed to an individual unified self. Worldly
movements do not seem to occur with reference to a comprehensive and unified
will and the psychological factors involved are extremely inchoate and obscure.
... It is not possible for the individual mind, so long as it remains shut up
in its personality, to understand the workings of the cosmic will, for the
standards made by the personal consciousness are not applicable to them. … It
is only if one enters into the cosmic consciousness that one begins to see the
forces at work and the lines on which they work and get a glimpse of the cosmic
self and the cosmic mind and will.” (29 January 1937)
In the context of the working of a group or national soul, eventually it is the
universal dharma, Sanatan Dharma which must come into play. When such a
formation acquires a definite psychic character then its imperative becomes
significantly compelling.
Surely enough, the aspiring soul of man cherishing spiritual transformation of
life on earth is not the prerogative of the Hindutva alone. Integral
Spirituality approach in practice is universal, whenever and wherever there is
the urge to find truth, the seeker looking for answers in his deep quest. Today
Hinduism itself is a temple in half-ruins, as Sri Aurobindo says, and it needs
be reconstructed with/by the present architects and engineers of the spirit, by
those who have experienced it and are living in it. Should that not happen? Our
concern should be to see if we can participate in it, instead of putting our
ideas based on traditional and circumscribed thought or feeling or action or
science or religion or philosophy or theology or political ideology, or
economics that comes from the Amartya Sens of our age. It is possible and we
should do it.
To be sincere and truthful, for
instance, in word, action and thought, is practically the most difficult thing
to do, for it requires not only the Knowledge, but also Strength and Courage of
the Divine Kshatriya to withstand the attacks of evil. For the divine change to
occur on a large scale than an individual the conditions on earth have to be
suitable for it. If the evil forces control the society then it prolongs the
coming of the spiritual transformation on earth. That is why we see Sri
Aurobindo saying that the earth is not yet ready for the Supramental change.
Prematurely jumping to change the conditions on earth and forgetting individual
dharma to discover the divine for oneself first can be dangerous to the
spiritual aspirant and can completely ruin the advent of spiritual change on
earth. First of all one has to be capable of not being an ignorant instrument
of egoistic forces which itself takes several years of spiritual practice. It
is up to the divine will either to make the perfected instrument to involve in
social change either in politics or for the good of the world.
Here is a relevant passage from the
Mother’s writings: (31 March 1967):
Till the birth of Sri Aurobindo, religions and spiritualities were always
centred on past figures, and they were showing as “the goal” the negation of
life upon earth. So, you had a choice between two alternatives: either a life
in this world with its round of petty pleasures and pains, joys and sufferings,
threatened by hell if you were not behaving properly, or an escape into another
world, heaven, nirvana, moksha...
Between these two there is nothing much to choose, they are equally bad.
Sri Aurobindo has told us that this was a fundamental mistake which accounts
for the weakness and degradation of
True,
Sri Aurobindo has shown that the truth does not lie in running away from
earthly life but in remaining in it, to transform it, divinise it, so that the
Divine can manifest HERE, in this PHYSICAL WORLD.
"
The Mother has said everything in this sentence.