Contents Sraddha, August 2011
Our Ideal Sri Aurobindo 7
Aurobindo Ghosh Paul Richard 12
Prophet Of Nationalism And His Call Dasharathi Sengupta 15
Identity And Difference:Some Reflections On Sri Aurobindo’s Socio-Political Views Aparna Banerjee 27
The Dynamics Of India’s Culture Radharaman Chakrabarti 34
“Is India
Indian Democracy – Part 1 Kittu Reddy 50
Humanity At The Crossroads : Does Sri Aurobindo Offer An Alternative? Shakuntala A and Ajai R Singh 62
The Foundations Of Social Sustainability M. S. Srinivasan 77
Emerging Concerns And Procedures Related To Education Of Values: The Vision Of Sri Aurobindo Neeltje Huppes 92
Realising Sri Aurobindo’s Ideal Law Of Social Development : Possibilities And Challenges For Psychology As a Discipline Of Study Monica Gupta 104
Spirituality And Prison Life: Sri Aurobindo And Barindra Kumar Ghose Sachidananda Mohanty 110
Veda Vyasa’s Mahabharata In Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri Prema NandaKumar 122
The Development Of Sri Aurobindo’s Thought Georges van Vrekhem 131
Notes On Authors 141 Index To Authors And Articles
In Sraddha, August 2010 – April 2011 142
Cover : Krishnalal’s painting Towards Inner Light
Editorial
Mother once said ‘Sri Aurobindo does not belong to the past nor to history. Sri Aurobindo is the Future advancing towards its realisation’. What is this Future that beckons us? Sri Aurobindo’s message is very simple and clear. He says that man is a transitional being, a growing organism, that he is not the last term or the end product in the evolutionary process. He has to grow further and expand in consciousness till he reaches the perfect and complete consciousness. And what is that state of perfect consciousness? Sri Aurobindo says that just as life has evolved out of matter and mind out of life, so there rise beyond mind other statuses of consciousness, tier upon tier, where man can go, live and even bring down their powers into his normal life and transform it into their pattern. And the highest of these planes is what Sri Aurobindo calls Supermind or Truth-Consciousness. Its original stuff is made not of ignorance, but of truth. Unlike in the mental ranges, where there is always an element of doubt, uncertainty, groping and partial perception and realisation, where one moves from greater darkness to a shade of lesser hue, here in the Truth-Consciousness one lives always in full daylight and in the plenitude of consciousness and delight and ‘fulfilled harmony’ and the only progress is from light to a greater light, from knowledge to a superior knowledge. Such was the life mission of Sri Aurobindo, ‘the builder of the Life Divine’ – to build a new foundation for a new world. To follow Sri Aurobindo in this great adventure one has to be a warrior and a heroic soul. On this hallowed day of his 139th birth anniversary, let us once again rededicate ourselves unreservedly with a total submission and complete surrender of all the parts and planes of our being to his ideal and lay ourselves open to the dynamic or the supramental Divine which he calls the incarnate Divine Mother.
We have chosen to name this anniversary number a special issue on the Social and Political Writings of Sri Aurobindo as the bulk of the papers, with a few exceptions, concentrates on this theme. Readers will find special interest in the article by Paul Richard on Sri Aurobindo, taken from his book The Dawn of Asia published by Ganesh & Co. of Madras in 1919. The article has been translated by Sri Aurobindo himself.
Editorial
These are times of great moment, of unforeseen happenings and huge upheavals. Mighty unseen powers appear to be at play to take possession of this earthly life. The forces of darkness loom large over the horizon and seem to gain from strength to strength and there are signs of things growing from bad to worse and even worse than the worst if that is possible. Amid the spiralling gloom and uncertainty, amid ‘the wrestle of force’ and the cries of anguish and despair we seem to flounder and lose our way. The battle is now being waged on matter’s turf, and it is the physical mind with the vital as its ally with its brute and stubborn obduracy, its arrogance and ignorant pride that is refusing to budge from its small, safe territory for fear of ceding its fiefdom and losing itself in a larger continent of light and power and bliss and freedom and infinitude. The churning, the murk and the slime that are being thrown up, this mindless fighting, the rise of the demoniac forces lurking in man’s depths are a direct result of this resistance of the ‘cold material intellect’ to change and transform itself. It is at such times that we have to shed all self-deceit, insincerity and hypocrisy and make the irrevocable choice of standing firmly by the side of the Truth, the Higher Power that is pressing down to make earth its home. It is at times like these that we have to remain calm and vigilant and look straight into the spirit within and open ourselves to the light, the freedom, the bliss, the all-transforming power of love that is awaiting to descend. It is to such ‘calm continents of potency’, ‘homelands of beauty shut to human eyes’, ‘sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight’, ‘immortal spaces of cerulean hue’ that Savitri beckons us. As already stated in our previous issue, the remaining papers on Savitri, left over from the previous issue, appear in this number.
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