UP polls and the end of India’s (un)civil war
Sat, 25 Mar 2017-08:05am , DNA
For the other side, nothing less than a brave new narrative of India is demanded. While it is the worst of times for the SLLs, do the best of times for Hindutvavadis guarantee that the latter will rise to the occasion? Will they deliver something more convincing, more enduring, and more satisfying than the feeble alternative attempted during NDA 1.0? What is required is not only to let go of that failed experiment at Hindutva disguised as liberalism, but also not to return to Sarvarkarism either.
What we need is not to go back, but forward to something new, what Sri Aurobindo called “new creation” in Foundations of Indian Culture. It includes and exceeds what was attempted thus far. The times demand nothing less than that; we must not fail India this time.
The author is poet and professor at JNU, Delhi.
Yes, bring on Bharatiyata
The Indian Express -
Indigenisation would require confronting the self as much as confronting the other. The insidious claim in the call to indigenisation is this: What counts as Indian? Who gets to set these terms? What about western ideas? What about Islam? Will we recognise, as Aurobindo did, “However much we may deplore some of the characteristics of that intervening period which were dominated by the western standpoint or move away from that standpoint back to our own characteristic way of seeing existence, we cannot get rid of a certain element of inevitable change it has produced upon us, any more than a man can go back in life to what he was some years ago?” Will we recognise as Aurobindo did, that Islam nourished India and was nourished by it? Or will the choice of indigenous be determined by Golwalkar who said non-Hindu peoples must “stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation”? A genuine indigenisation would require embracing all of India; not parts of it. So, bring on the indigenisation that embraces all, the Western and the Islamic, the Aghoris and the Tantriks, the Marxists and the Liberals, as Indian.
Jay Bhattacharjee
- Swarajya-13-Mar-2017
Sri Aurobindo, as early as in 1905, had said: “We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men ...
However, I would return to our own sages. Sri Aurobindo, as early as in 1905, had said: “We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts, to be born again…We need a nucleus of men in whom the shakti is developed to its utmost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.”
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