ARTICLE : Sri Aurobindo on India's Oneness
Posted By Srinivasa Chakravarthy (srini@monod.neusc.bcm.tmc.edu)
Fri, 06 Dec 1996 11:39:18 -0600
"The whole basis of the Indian mind is its spiritual and
inward turn, its propensity to seek the things of the spirit and the
inner being first and foremost and to look at all else as
secondary, dependent, to be handled and determined in the light of the
higher knowledge and as an expression, a preliminary or field
or aid or at least a pendent to the deeper spiritual aim, - a tendency
therefore to create whatever it had to create first on the inner plane
and afterwards in its other aspects. This mentality and constituent
tendency to create from within outwards being given, it was
inevitable that the unity India first created for herself should be
the spiritual and cultural oneness. It could not be, to begin with,
a political unification effected by an external rule centralised,
imposed or constructed, as was done in Rome or ancient Persia,
by a conquering kingdom or the genius of a military and organizing
people.
It cannot, I think, justly be said that this was a mistake or a proof
of the unpractical turn of the Indian mind and that the single
political body should have beeen created first and afterwards
the spiritual unity could have securely grown up in the vast body
of an Indian national empire. The problem that presented itself at
the beginning was that of a huge area containing more than a hundred
kingdoms, clans, peoples, tribes, races, in this respect another
Greece, but Greece on an enormous scale, almost as large as modern
Europe. As in Greece a cultural Hellenic unity was necessary to
create a fundamental feeling of oneness, here too and much more
imperatively a conscious spiritual and cultural unity of all these
peoples was the first, the indispensable condition without which
no enduring unity could be possible. The instinct of the Indian mind
and of its great Rishis and founders of its culture was sound in
this matter. And even if we suppose that an outward imperial
unity like that of the Roman world could have been founded
among the peoples of the early India by military and political
means, we must not forget that the Roman unity did not endure,
that even the unity of ancient Italy founded by the Roman conquest and
organization did not endure, and it is not likely that a similar
attempt in the vast reaches of India without a previous spiritual
and cultural basis would have been of an enduring character. It cannot
be said either, even if the emphasis on the spiritual and cultural
unity be pronounced to have been too engrossing or excessive
and the insistence of political and external unity too feeble,
that the effect of this precedence has been merely disastrous
and without any advantage. It is due to this original pecularity,
to this indelible spiritual stamp, to this underlying oneness amidst
all diversities that if India is not yet a single organized
political nation, she still survives and is still India.
"After all, the spiritual and cultural is the only
enduring unity and it is by a persistent mind and spirit much
more than by an enduring physical body and outward organization
that the soul of a people survives. This is a truth the positive
western mind may be unwilling to understand or concede, and yet
its proofs are written accross the whole story of the ages.
The ancient nations, contemporaries of India, and many younger born
than she are dead and only their monuments left behind them.
Greece and Egypt only on the map and in name, for it is not
the soul of Hellas or the deeper nation-soul that built Memphis
which we now find at Athens or Cairo... But India still lives and
keeps the continuity of her inner mind and soul and spirit
with the India of the ages. Invasion and foreign rule, the Greek,
the Parthian and the Hun, the robust vigor of the Islam,
the levelling steam-roller heaviness of the British occupation
and the British system, the enormous pressure of the occident
have not been able to drive or crush the ancient soul out of the
body her Vedic Rishis made for her. ... she has been able
to resist and survive either with an active or a passive resistence.
And this she was able to do in her great days by her spiritual
solidarity
and power of assimilation and reaction, expelling all that would
not be absorbed, absorbing all that could not be expelled, and
even after the beginning of the decline she was able to survive
by the same force, abated but not slayable, retreating and maintaining
for a time her ancient political system in the south, throwing up
under the pressure of Islam, Rajput and Sikh and Mahratta to defend
her ancient self and its idea, persisting passively where she could
not resist actively, condemning to decay each empire that could
not answer her riddle or make terms with her, awaiting always
the day of revival. And even now it is a similar phenomenon that
we see in process before our eyes. And what shall we say then
of the surpassing vitality of the civilization that could
accomplish this miracle and of the wisdom of those who built its
foundation not on things external but on the spirit and inner mind
and made a spiritual and cultural oneness the root and stock
of her existence and not solely its fragile flower, the eternal
basis and not the perishable superstructure?"
Sri Aurobindo
From "Foundations of Indian Culture"
