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"He [Archer] tells us for instance that Inida has contributed only
one or at most two great names to the world's Pantheon. By that, of course,
he means Europe's Pantheon, or the world's Pantheon as constructed by
the mind of Europe, crammed with the figures of western history
and achievement which are near and familiar to it and admitting only a
very few of the more gigantic names from the distant east, those which
it finds it most difficult to ignore. ...If an Indian were to set about the same task
in the same spirit, he would no doubt similarly pour out an
interminable list of Indian names with some great names from Europe and
America, Arabia, Persia, China, Japan forming a brief tail
to this large peninsular body. ...And it is difficult to find out what
measure of values Mr. Archer is using when he relegates other great
Indian names, allowing for three or four only, to the second plan
and even there belittles them in comparison with corresponding
European immortals. In what is Shivaji with his vivid
and interesting life and character, who not only founded a kingdom
but organized a nation, inferior to Cromwell, or Shankara
whose great spirit in the few years of its mortal life swept
triumphant throughout India and reconstituted the whole religious
life of her peoples, inferior as a personality to Luther?
Why are Chanakya and Chandragupta who laid down the form of empire-building
in India and whose great administrative system survived with changes
often to the worse down to modern times, lesser men than rulers
and statesmen of European history? ... Again Mr. Archer speaks
with arrogant depreciation of the significant figures born of the creative Indian
mind which people its literature and its drama. Here too it is difficult
to follow him or to accept his measure of values. To an oriental mind
at least Rama and Ravana are as vivid and great and real characters as
the personalities of Homer and Shakespeare, Sita and Draupadi
certainly not less living than Helen or Cleopatra, Damayanti and
Shakuntala and other feminine types not less sweet, gracious and alive
than Alcestis or Desdemona. ...
“That perhaps is the one thing of significance, ... the difference of mentality
which is at the bottom of these comparisons. There is not any inferiority
of life or force or active and reactive will but, as far as the sameness of human nature
allows, a difference of type, character, personality, let us say, an emphasis
in different and almost opposite directions. Will-power and personality
have not been wanting in India, but the direction preferably given to them
and the type most admired are of a different kind. The average European mind
is prone to value or at least to be more interested in the egoistic or self-asserting
will which insists upon itself with a strong or a bold, an aggressive, sometimes
a fierce insistence; the Indian not only prizes more from the ethical standpoint, - that
is found everywhere, - but is more vividly interested in the calm, self-controling
or even the self-effacing personality; for the effacement of egoism seems to it
not an effacement, but an enhancement of value and power of the true
person and its greatness. Mr. Archer finds Ashoka pale and featureless; to an
Indian mind he is supremely vivid and attractive. Why is Ashoka to be called pale
in comparison with Charlemagne or, let us say, with Constantine? Is it
because he only mentions his sanguinary conquest of Kalinga in order to speak
of his remorse and the turning of his spirit, a sentiment which Charlemagne
massacring the Saxons in order to make good Christians of them could not
in the least have understood, nor any more perhaps the Pope who anointed him?
Constantine gave the victory to the Christian religion, but there is nothing
Christian in his personality; Ashoka not only enthroned Buddhism, but
strove though not with a perfect success to follow the path laid down by
Buddha. And the Indian mind would account him not only nobler will,
but a greater and more attracting personality than Constantine or
Charlemagne. It is interested in Chanakya, but much more interested in
Chaitanya.”
Sri Aurobindo
From “Foundations of Indian Culture”
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