Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Sun 05 Aug 2007 09:35 AM PDT  

FIVE AUROVILLE ARTISTS

By Debashish Banerji

The group of 5 artists showing together at the Cymroza gallery in Mumbai, seem at first to have little in common. A German, an Italian, a Belgian and an Indian Parsi, four women painters and a Dutch male sculptor, make up the group. What joins them is the fact that they all live and work at Auroville, a spiritual community founded by Mirra Alfassa, also known as the Mother, a collaborator of the modern Indian yogi, Sri Aurobindo. This is, no doubt, a profound source of likeness, a shared inner orientation towards the discovery and expression of spiritual or cosmic realities and coherences or intensities. This, indeed, is evident, in the large generic titles given to the artworks and even the very courage to title abstractions against the grain of most modern and contemporary practice. The question of content in abstraction, or the division into style and content is generally considered problematic or non-significant in modernism- the style is the content, which needs no further reference. Of course, post-modern practice has challenged this modernist purism, and has attempted to return to art its vehicular function as a signifier or metonym for social and psychological experiences and interpretations. From a sealed hermetic testament offered as surface only to an uncomprehending anonymity dehumanized by the global regime of techno-capitalism, there is a shift towards the re-affirmation of art as language, a tool in the salvaging, re-membering or re-creation of shared values and experiences. Participants in a communitarian context of a shared material, social, ideal and dynamic psychological reality and process, the Auroville artists are exemplars of this post-modern practice of the alphabet, vocabulary and grammar of an art culture which inheres in a common universe of perceptions, experiences, orientations and movements.

However, this culture must not be mistaken for an isolated island, nor its art for an internal cult-dialect of prefabricated signifiers. The Auroville artists come from a variety of life-situations and cultures, but they also share the ubiquitous condition of modernity which encircles the earth today with its neo-liberalist homogenization, its conditioning of experience and its flattening and fragmentation of subjectivity and this is what has brought them to Auroville. Their work is marked by a distrust for ideologies, propaganda or advertisational hypnosis and what unites them also is a culture of freedom and personal intuition in the exploration of experiences of subjective universality or non-dual consciousness or perceptions of harmony and beauty behind the bewildering diversity and chaos of appearances.  This imparts to their work the freshness of an optimism born of a lived collective culture of progressive experience and it is in this sense that their art becomes a language of shared perceptions far subtler and more primordial than the language of words.

Just as one may identify a common faith in the human ability to experience states of universal consciousness and harmony and a common culture of experimental seeking for these experiences and realizations which bestows meaning and content uniting these artists, one may also identify a shared language in their expression. This is what one might now call the global tradition of modern abstraction. From its foundations in the work of Wassily Kandinsky and other European artists attempting to salvage a universal and non-sectarian spirituality out of the ruins of pre-modern civilization between two world wars, through its phase of bold experimentation and self-confidence in the post-World War II manifestation of American abstract expressionism, abstraction in art has accumulated a repertory of expressive means that marks it as a visual language of the independence of consciousness from national or multi-national or ethnic or sectarian or even human identifications or identity politics. It has received its share of castigation for this – berated for an insensitivity to postcolonial inequalities or international humanist or socialist struggles, equated with the belligerence and arrogant individualism of American modernity, dismissed as domesticated neo-liberal décor, put down as inhuman or anti-human, it continues nevertheless to draw diverse gifted adherents and enrich itself with extensions of its expressive possibilities. In Auroville, it finds a natural crucible for its furtherance through artists attempting to overcome the division between subject and object in the realization of states of non-duality or to disengage identity from its entrapment in forms so as to invoke new potentia of a transcendental creativity, or expressing perceptions of matter as force, idea and quality of consciousness or questioning the limits of the human in its transpersonal stretch towards universality. To the specter of anonymity, dehumanization and homogenization of modern global humanity, these expressions of a social consciousness stretching towards a self-exceeding of our present boundaries and the discovery of powers of universality and harmony in shaping the future, are a welcome alternative, to say the least.

The revision of human subjectivity that could be said to have launched itself as an omni-disciplinary revolution around the turn of the 19th/20th c., found its inspirations in modalities of being and expression rooted in pre-modern and non-western cultures. Modern vehicles for synthetic ideas of world spirituality, such as Theosophy or Neo-Platonism or trans-cultural reconstructions of Vedanta, Daoism or Zen Buddhism, were important acknowledged or unacknowledged sources behind Euro-American abstraction. The independent hierarchic world of Platonic Ideas or the mergence of forms in the formless indivisibility of the Vedantic Brahman or the animistic or occult energy patterns of the consciousness-beings of Theosophy became the legitimate descriptive field of the new art, as proclaimed by its prophets, such as Wassily Kandinsky, in his “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” A variety of creative movements and groupings followed, a seminal one in which Kandinsky himself, along with a number of other innovators of form were involved, being the design and architectural creative community of Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. Bauhaus design veered in a direction which attempted to validate structure, technological precision, simplicity and the high polish or transparency of ultra-modern materiality walking the borderline between form abstraction and functionality in a self-conscious non-ethnic “international style.” It also spawned a new interest in geometric abstraction in painting. All these tendencies were inherited and powerfully reconfigured by American Abstraction in the post-World War II period. The descendents of Abstract Expressionism, such as Action Painting or Color Field or Minimalism, opened up overlapping visual language domains marked by an immediacy of optical experience without idea content, which could only be described in terms of the conditions of their creation – a spontaneous performance of dynamic intuition which sought its prehistory in the art of accident of the color drip ceramics of Tang China or the crazy spontaneity of splashed ink paintings and their calligraphic counterparts or the chromatic intensity or cosmic geometry of Tantric yantras.

In the Auroville artists, we may find a completion of the circle of the forms and languages of abstract experimentation developed in Euro-American modernism through its re-assimilation in new traditions of Asiatic consciousness practice. For example, Nele Martens draws her inspiration from the play of conscious energy in or as form, universally active in nature. Structural modeling through variations of color density combine with controlled or swift rhythmic and textured brush dynamism to convey an impression of archetypal energy-events at the subtle interface between substance and force. While Martens, of German origin, with her early cultural immersion in the work of Bauhaus artists, can be seen furthering the traditions of Kandinsky, Klee and Johannes Itten, she brings to her paintings a color sensitivity and intensity which introduces an element of quality of consciousness missing in her European sources and only beginning to be hinted at in the later American Color Field artists. One may see this most clearly in a painting like Immersion, where the simplicity and contrast of the two-color scheme and the luminosity of pigment project a powerful visual immediacy through which a synaesthetic sixth-sense experiences the consciousness-world of flowers. The bold and expressive structural power of Martens’ work predominates in paintings like “Breakthrough,” while the dream-like monochromatic It Touches My Soul, stands apart for its evocation of interiority. These two paintings may, in fact, be taken together as exemplifying the sunlight and moonlight polarities of Martens’ consciousness explorations.

Nele Martens' Paintings (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size)

Another artist relying on intensity of color as a primary qualitative constituent of her work is Hufreesh Dumasia. Dumasia’s canvases present an all-over attention, placing her inheritance closer to the American Abstract Expressionists. But unlike Pollock or de Kooning or their descendents, her centreless expanses radiate an intense exuberance and light, the subtle shades of the qualitative language of an impersonal and transcendental Delight, which as the Upanishads say, is the originating power of all Becoming. But these shades of Delight are not abstractions or even symbols for Dumasia. As in Martens’ case, a direct and mindless optical impression is the carrier of a synaesthetic experience of these universal Delight-states in their cosmic materiality. Dumasia’s layered densities of scattered color-particles and stretches of expanding amorphous shape are subtly organized through underlying rhythmic circularities or sinusoids and impress the viewer as descriptions of archetypical processes and realities at atomic or astrophysical levels of consciousness-matter.

Hufreesh Dumasia's Paintings (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size)

Annamaria is a third artist of this group to rely on non-formal elements of abstraction to express herself. Anna Maria, draws her inspiration from an intimate lived relationship with the world of natural contours and vegetation. These forms, looming out of thin evocative patina-washes, are reminiscent of Chinese splashed ink landscapes or other conceptual abstractions of the Chinese literati (wen-ren) painters. She clarifies that she paints out of an inner intuition but it was only after discovering studies of chaos and fractal theory that she consciously sought the capture of similar processes in her work. In this, I feel more confirmed that her inspiration parallels the Daoist ideas of expressive spontaneity arising out of a meditative union with the creative shakti in Nature - giving body to the elemental lines behind natural forms and processes. However, to these microcosmic exercises, color lends a dimension of inner dynamism and drama, as brought out most clearly in a painting like The Invading Light.

Annamaria's Paintings (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size) 

If the previous three artists depend more on color, line or texture, Belgian painter, Agnus and Dutch sculptor, Henk van Putten put to work a progressive intuition in the expressive power of geometric form. With a predisposition towards the retention of the marks of natural or historical ageing processes in the perpetual recyclings of cultural materials, the marks of the passage of time bearing within them the insignia of imperishable or eternal gestures, Agnus uses the patina settled covers of aged ferrous boxes as the surfaces for her brushed acrylic subtle symbols of the hermetic life of devotion and self-transcendence. These symbols serve as watermarks, burned or etched into the inevitable decay of forms, a reminder of the persistent imperishable in perishable things (nityo’nityanam), formed of the enigmatic language of familiar similitude, yet uniquely distinct in every instance.

Agnus' Paintings (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size)

Finally, the work of Henk van Putten, the only sculptor in the group, draws us further into the pure geometries of form and the properties of material substance with their immediate modern roots in Bauhaus design. The machined purity and perfection of deceptively simple forms, extruded or interlocking curvatures painted in intense primary colors bring to concrete focus a fusion of the worlds of rational order and the spontaneous symbols of earth fertility, while at the same time presenting and resolving the ambiguous relations between inside and outside and stillness and movement. Pythagorean geometry, Platonic Ideas and the perpetual circulations of Tantric meditation machines (yantras) form the archaic presences enlivening and rendering perennial these ultra-modern solids, offering themselves as inexhaustible bodies of contemplation.

Henk van Putten's Sculptures (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size)
 

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Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Sat 30 May 2009 03:38 PM PDT

Review of India and Europe

by Wilhelm Halbfass

Reviewed by Debashish Banerji

With the ascendency to Indian politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a plethora of literature has appeared paying serious attention to the phenomenon of "Neo-Hinduism" in India, and by and large relating it to fascist possibilities.  This postcolonial literature, swelling the shelves over the last five years, has piggybacked onto a larger more international body of postmodern writing on nationalism and its dangers that has been growing in stridency ever since the pseudo-religion of Nazism made its alarming bid to subject the world to its national racist ideology.  Nationalism has become particularly prominent as an academic object of derisive attention since the wave of post-structuralism initiated by a number of modern thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and the like, has swept the ideological landscape since the 1960s.  This intellectual trend has worked to expose the complicit relationship between epistemological structures and political subjugation - the power of intellectual reductionisms to invent mythologies which are then utilized by mechanisms of power to sort and organize reality in keeping with political designs.  In terms of colonial studies, this discourse has been very powerfully applied by thinkers such as Edward Said (Orientalism, 1968) and Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983, 1991).  Said has highlighted the power of 19^th c. western orientalist thinking in "othering" the orient, rendering it stereotypical, ahistorical, exotic, spiritual and therefore, incapable of historical transformations. In this version, developed bitingly in its Indian implications by Ronald Inden, colonized territories  are reduced to tourist preserves, where domesticated natives cater to the escapist fantasies of a capitalist west. Nationalism in colonized territories is shown by these writers to follow in the wake of Orientalism, by internalizing the discourse of identity initiated by the latter, and rejecting western cultural, economic and political domination after accepting the Orientalist stereotypes. Thus in spite of (and perhaps because of) its political decolonization, the "third world" eminently fulfils the western Enlightenment dream of a rationally organized earth, demarcated into distinct ethnographic regions, hierarchically arranged to suit the cultural, economic and political centrality of Euro-America.

But to describe the phenomenon of nationalism in these terms only, is to leave indistinct its  most pernicious and potent aspect, that of its teleology. The roots of modern Nationalism may be found in the European Enlightenment of the 17^th century. The Enlightenment replaced the religious teleology of a Christianized world with a new technological teleology - a world organized by the powers of reason, rendered rationally transparent and thereby fulfilling the highest capacity of Man, the measure of all things. Latent to this ideology was the sense of an evolution from darkness to light, but light conceived as the power of Reason. Man, the measure was of course, European Man, armed with the omnipotent machinery of Science, bringing civilization to the darker continents.  There is a latent ambiguity here - in that, though reason was supposed to be the universal possession of all human beings, clearly western man could be credited with its most systematic and full-blown use. Thus Asians, Africans, South Americans and other "natives" world-wide, patristically liberated through subjection to colonization, needed to be accounted for in their "otherness" to the west. Were these "humans" the same as westerners, capable of the same manifestation of rational divinity or were they somehow never up to the mark, always xenologically inferior to the civilized standards of western man? This ambiguity was to find a number of remarkable expressions in the 18^th century, in which racism and cultural ethnocentrism became the dominating narratives in the divvying up of the world-pie. Undoubtedly the most seminal of these narratives was that provided by GWF Hegel, in his all-encompassing Philosophy of History.  In Hegel, the teleological bases of Christianity and the Enlightenment come together and find relational fulfillment in a historicized world-scheme. According to Hegel, the basis of unbridgeable racial differences across the world was spiritual.  The human species expressed through its history the progressive manifestation of Spirit, evolving inexorably towards perfect rational embodiment. In this evolution, the world was seen as inhabited by different races, involved in manifesting historically partial evolutionary experiments, expressing Spirit in its temporal embodiment as Zeitgeist or "spirit of the age". Such historical developments were however, structurally predictable, entirely conditioned by a dialectic relating to a form of consciousness, which was specific to each race. These forms of consciousness could be arranged hierarchically in a classification which led from brute matter to the perfect embodiment of spirit.  In Hegel's view, the non-European peoples of the world represented races which had been involved in earlier phases of the Spirit's evolution, which had reached its culmination in German rational Protestantism of his time. 

Thus the notions of racial essences, of unchanging cultures and nations based on these, which our early 21st century finds itself obsessively engaged with, received their clearest philosophical articulation in a grand totalizing narrative by Hegel. Moreover, this teleological narrative, prioritizing rational and Christian Europe, took into its purview all aspects of human culture, spanning the world spatially and temporally and classifying these in a singular structure.  Thus, in Heidegger's phrase, Hegel can be seen as the initiator of the modern "Age of the World-Picture", though his real achievement lies in articulating within an integrated edifice the totalizing epistemological assumptions already implicit in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.  Further, germane to our present consideration, his relational history of world cultures presents an evolutionary view of the cultural expression of different "nations", including that of India.  India merits consideration in Hegel's evolutionary scheme by dint of exactly what he considers its primordial ahistoricality, its non-evolutionary imperviousness to political change through its permanent and eternal subjection to religious structures such as the varnashrama and the normative pressure of a world-negating moksha. Hegel classes this as the pre-historical and Symbolic stage of world-culture, spirit as disembodied imagination, static and incapable of finding any adequate material expression.

It is not difficult to extrapolate a strident German nationalism from the Hegelian historical teleology. Since the Zeitgeist had supposedly found its culmination in Hegel's Germany, the political alignment of Germany with a world-dominating stance was but a step away.  In the Indian context, Ronald Inden and others have shown how the eternal, apolitical and spiritual India of Hegel found its way into the Orientalist myth and therefrom into the self-imaging of early Indian nationalism. What is not so clearly worked out by these thinkers are the theoretical consequences of the politicization of the apolitical that this implies. What form of nationalism would arise from this marriage of contraries? What manner of power would it exert over the ideological terrain of world politics? Inden and others were more concerned with the denial of democratic self-determination that the Hegelian structure and its Orientalist descendants have imposed on India's self-imaging. However, with the rise of Hindu politics in modern India, attention has been focussed with greater intensity on the phenomenon of Neo-Hinduism and its political consequences, particularly as it formulated itself at its inception in early Indian nationalism.

A plethora of publications have appeared in the last decade from the western academy, expressing alarm at the Hinduizing of Indian politics. A variety of foci have arisen from this attention, relating the congruence of a national identity with Hinduism as an Orientalist-Nationalist construction of the 19^th century. A number of 19^th c. ideological inventions are seen as the fruits of this labor, with its localized concentration among the bhadralok intelligentsia of Bengal. Among the more extreme of these views is the consideration of "Hinduism" as an unitary religious phenomenon itself as a 19^th c. invention, specifically reified for nationalistic purposes. Undoubtedly, a number of revisionary crystallizations developed in late 19^th/early 20^th c. Bengal, spurred by the catalytic inserton of alien colonial cultural, economic and political factors, but not all of these were explicitly nationalistic in intent nor can they all (or even mostly) be unequivocally considered "inventions". Nevertheless, the complex east-west idea-forces availing in late 19^th/early 20^th c. India in their mutual trajectories and entanglements have been brought under scrutiny as never before and the implications of modern Hinduism in its political effects begun to be positioned in an expanding field.  In this burgeoning discourse, one of the most influential books to appear in recent years is Wilhelm Halbfass' "India and Europe".

"India and Europe" is not explicitly a book about nationalism or politics. It is about the philosophical and cultural implications of the 18^th/19^th c. east-west encounter, particularly as it concerns the appearance of what Halbfass calls "Neo-Hinduism".  Halbfass studies the hermeneutical difficulties involved in translating from one body of cultural and philosophical ideas to another and the revisions, refractions and transformations that ensue as a result. Apart from its specific content and conclusions, the work is an example of what Halbfass, following Gadamer calls the "hermeneutics of dialogue", where entry into a foreign terrain is tested carefully for its underlying contextual connotations in their underpinnings in civilizational unities. I'm not sure that Halbfass is entirely successful in this endeavour, but the effort is laudable and opens up a new methodological approach in Indology, conducive to a better understanding of India in its similarity and difference from the west.

The present essay is not meant to be a systematic review of "India and Europe", but a consideration of some of its keynotes. Of course, the term "Hindu" is of relatively recent mint (Delhi Sultanate times), but the real question in issue concerning its "invention" or otherwise is whether a sense of an unified religious tradition existed in pre-modern times and if so, what was its nature.  Halbfass points out that even the term "Sanatana Dharma" does not find its modern sense as philosophia perennis in earlier and traditional uses, as evidenced in the Mahabharata, Manusmriti and Puranic literature, where the word makes its appearance.  He considers its modern usage to be an example of Neo-Hindu translation, influenced by and in response to western ideas of religion and philosophy. Nevertheless, he disagrees with the followers of Said who believe that the notion of a Hindu "tradition" was a 19th century Orientalist construct, a reification internalized by Indian Hindus for nationalistic reasons. For him, this (mis)understanding reveals an inadequate study of the history of self-identification in India.  Although Halbfass rejects the notion of Hinduism as an ahistorical essence, he nevertheless affirms a continuous tradition or "cluster of traditions" which share(s) an identity that has persisted through historical transformations.  Referring to India and Europe in a later essay, he says, "I have tried to record and understand how people who called themselves arya and identified themselves as guardians of the Veda and legitimate residents of bharata (or, earlier, aryavartha) responded to others, outsiders, both within "South Asia" and abroad, how this ancient sense of identity and otherness was transformed and yet reaffirmed through the vast array of intersecting traditions which we call Hinduism, and how it lives on even in the radical reinterpretations of modern Hindu thought." (Halbfass 1997:153).

The first half of Halbfass' book has to do with European perceptions of India, while the second half is about India's transformative self-identification in modern times. It is this second half I am more concerned with here, as it studies critically the phenomenon of "Neo-Hinduism" and sees its roots in what has been called the "Bengal Renaissance", in which figures such as Rammohun Roy, Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo find a prominent place. Another two figures, though outside of the Bengal Renaissance, who merit consideration by Halbfass along with the above personalities, are Radhakrishnan and to a lesser extent, M.K. Gandhi. Even at first sight, the clubbing of these figures together poses a problem, which is symptomatic of all all intellectual procedures - that of reductionism. Though these personalities have all evidently contributed to modern India's understanding of itself, vastly different versions of what "India" means have emanated from these figures, with different historical sources, philosophical priorities and consequent future trajectories. Undoubtedly, a sense of mismatched bedfellows is not absent from Halbfass' considerations, but also an attempt is clearly made to arrive at fundamental transformative issues and commonalities and differences in answering these.

In identifying these fundamental issues, Halbfass explicitly draws on another modern German thinker, Paul Hacker. Much of the second half of "India and Europe" bears the stamp, in fact, of an invisible conversation with Hacker. Halbfass clearly does not agree with the latter on many points, but has to acknowledge their importance as discursive counters in the ongoing hermeneutical dialogue between India and Europe. With respect to Neo-Hinduism, one major issue dealt with is that of the idea of dharma. Halbfass follows Hacker in pointing out that dharma had distinctly casteist meanings before Rammohun Roy, Bankimchandra Chatteree and Vivekananda gave it a modern meaning, related to an intrinsic property of an individual. The stanzas from the Bhagavad Gita quoted by Hacker and Halbfass to fix a casteist interpretation on dharma are more ambiguous then they make it seem and can certainly be read as "intrinsic property". Halbfass admits that from the early Upanishads and Brahmanas, meanings alternate to that circumscribed by varnashrama have also been attributed to the term dharma. Moreover, he points out that the Bhagavad Gita itself clearly transcends all credal definitions of dharma in its theistic soteriology. However, he also affirms that the specific expansion of context that occurs for this term from the 19^th c. in the writings of Bankimchandra (Dharmatattva) or Vivekananda evidence an acknowledgement of the need for the universalistic inclusion of "others" (mlecchas) into the semantic scope of dharma, influenced by western liberal humanist ideas. This is certainly true of Bankimchandra, who prioritizes Manavadharma, the dharma of humanism, over all limiting definitions based in the varnashrama. It is also true of Brahmo revisions of the term introduced by Rammohun Roy. With Vivekananda, we begin treading more tricky ground. Whereas I believe it is certainly true that liberal humanistic ideas have had their part to play in the formulation of a "practical Vedanta" and the emphasis paid to the service of the downtrodden in Vivekananda's thinking, the notion of dharma, in Vivekananda, takes on a more individualistic turn, based in personal intrinsic aptitude. Regarding Vivekananda's "practical Vedanta" and his social uplift programs, Halbfass correctly points out that this is not in keeping with traditional Advaita Vedanta nor with the views of Sri Ramakrishna, who felt such "worldly" concerns to be merely distractions to the central task of god-realization. Halbfass does not explore the connotations of dharma in its usage by Sri Aurobindo, but here, in the affiliation of the varnas with the four aspects of the Mahashakti, we find a full-blown affirmation of dharma related to varna, but stripped of its hereditary basis and emerging from soul-quality, swabhava. Swadharma as a personal way of works to soteriological attainment becomes, in this interpretation, the sense in which the Gita uses this concept. Of course, for a full appreciation of this usage, an explication of Sri Aurobindo's teleological worldly fulfilment is also necessary, also barely touched upon by Halbfass.

In excavating the bases for a hermeneutical dialogue between Europe and India, another major area related to dharma is, of course, the complex composed of karma, moksha and punarjanman (Causation, Liberation and Rebirth). This complex forms one of the central pillars of Indic civilizational thought and accounts for the difficulty in the easy digestion of Judeo-Christian religious philosophies into its doxographies. However, Halbfass does not give any explicit consideration to this complex, its transformations within alternatives within Indic thought as well as in modern times. This omission robs "India and Europe", I feel, of an essential and important muscle.

However, perhaps the greatest strength of the book lies in its identification of the concepts of "experience" and "inclusivism" as forming two of the most important transformational building-blocks of the modern discourse of Neo-Hinduism. Both in its emphasis on the darshana aspect of Indian philosophies as well as the identification of the primary goal of all Indic thought as "experience", Neo-Hinduism according to Halbfass carves a distinguishing niche for itself in the field of world-thought. Halbfass considers here, apart from modern thinkers, the lives of such figures as Sri Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi as exemplifications of the primacy of "experience". He brings in Sri Aurobindo as an unique case of an original "thinker" who bases all his "thought" on experience. Of course, followers of Sri Aurobindo may contend here that there is no "thought" in Sri Aurobindo, only statement of experience, but such statement is made in a logically discursive mode, which does not negate the instrument of "thinking" and so, from this point of view, Halbfass' characterization may stand.  However, he goes on to consider if the primacy of experience, not merely as soteriological goal, but as primary basis of philosophy, was indeed a traditional norm, as claimed by modern Indian thinkers such as Vivekananda or Radhakrishnan.  For this, he looks to Shankara and shows that Shankara does not make reference to his own or to others' "experiences" in the development of his philosophical arguments. Instead, he rests ulitmately on the primary truth of the Veda, which he considers to be authorless. Undoubtedly, Halbfass agrees that the goal of Shankara's philosophy is the experience of the One Reality, but this is a bodiless "experience", where even the distinction of experiencer and experienced disappear, so that the term "experience" per se as a translation of this state runs into difficulties. He also draws attention to several Buddhist thinkers who explicitly warn against reliance on personal experience without guidance from guru or shastra as conducive to error. In Halbfass' delineation, the neo-Hindu emphasis on "experience" as the basis of Indian philosophy is an innovation, an "internal" correlate of the western "external" scientific empiricism based on experiment and observation. He also points to William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" as a source for the prominence of the term "experience" in Neo-Hindu thought. It is true that both Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo present comparisons between yoga and science, particularly in the understanding of their processes and the universal reproducibility of their results, arrived at through experiment and observation. Also, particularly in Sri Aurobindo (as also in Sri Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi) there is a trust in the self-evident nature of Truth and the power of experience to illuminate shastra and not vice versa. But Halbfass' exclusive selection of Shankara and a few Buddhist thinkers (all examples of an excessive dependence on logic) to make his point of the absence of "experience" as a basis of thinking in Indian philosophy is a gross over-simplification that caricatures the rich and complex field of traditional Indian thought. Though Halbfass draws attention to Bengal Vaishnavism in a footnote when dealing with Debendranath Tagore's deviation from Rammohun Roy in trusting to the primacy of his experience, we find no mention of either Vaishnava, Tantric or Shaivite sources in his discussion of "experience" in Indian tradition. Why this prioritization of Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism? Unmethodical inconsistencies of this kind mar "India and Europe" at several places.

An idea which Halbfass borrows from Paul Hacker to characterize Neo-Hindu thinking is that of "inclusivism".  Halbfass points to the way in which this idea develops in Hacker's own writings on India, starting as a related concept to "religious tolerance", more appropriate in a variety of Indian contexts and ending, in his last writings, as the essential Indian alternate to "tolerance", categorically opposed to the latter and exclusive to India. The nationalistic resonance of "inclusivism" is also immediately evident when we consider that what we normally consider as dangerous in nationalism is its "exclusivism" and its "expansionism". But whereas expansionistic dynasties, races, religions, ideologies have gone abroad in the multitudes, invading their surroundings with the exclusive reality of the truth they represent, India presents the image of the infinite receptacle, into which the exclusive expanders enter and become included. Hacker makes the case that this image of India is not just an invention of the 19^th century, a form of self-imaging deliberately constructed to counter the western idea of exclusivistic national identities. Undoubtedly, it becomes articulate in this form in modern times, but according to Hacker, it has been the characteristic response of India to "outsiders" from time immemorial. Moreover, and more importantly, by appearing as the opposite of "exclusivism", "inclusivism" has not thereby per se neutralized the natural danger of nationalism, but holds other and unique forms of danger that have manifested in the past and hold the promise of future manifestation.

In his discussion of inclusivism, Halbfass points to the discursive tendency of traditional sectarian Indian thought to develop doxographies in which "others" are neutralized through inclusion and subordination.  In this, he divides the strategy of inclusivism into two major types, based on images developed within the Indic tradition. The two images are: (1) that of the ocean into which rivers merge, discharging their waters and losing their names, but remaining preserved in essence and substance; (2) that of the elephant's footstep, which includes through exceeding the footsteps of other animals, covering larger terrain than any of them individually and erasing or obliterating them in the process. Halbfass characterizes these strategies as hierarchism and perspectivism respectively, and sees examples of the first in Advaita Vedanta and the second in Jaina doxographies. Halbfass considers several textual instances of either type, exposing their inclusive strategies in the process. As may be clear from such an understanding of inclusivism, it is certainly not the same as "religious tolerance" as claimed by modern thinkers, mainly of an Advaita Vedanta bent, such as Vivekananda or Radhakrishnan. The Advaita Vedanta doxographies are shown to include other systems of thought and practice as stages leading to partial results, in an ascending scale at whose apex is the nameless and formless transcendental sole Reality, which is the goal of the Advaita soteriology. However, Halbfass also points out that such strategic inclusivism is not exclusive to India. Indeed, does it not ring a striking resonance from the Hegelian world-scheme?

The difference, of course, is to be sought in that other self-characterization of Neo-Hinduism, "experience". The truth claimed for Advaita doxographies in modern times rests on an appeal to reproducible experience. Vivekananda bolsters his case by drawing attention to the experience of Sri Ramakrishna. Sri Ramakrishna's personal life may be seen as a compendium of the experiences of different Indic as well as non-Indic (Islamic, Christian) religious soteriologies. But is this a case of hierarchism or perspectivism? Sri Ramakrishna's own statements on the matter are ambiguous. Whereas there is often the statement that all paths lead to the same goal or that the One Goal is called differently, we also come across the statement that the sky appears blue from a distance but colorless when one enters it. Vivekananda selectively prioritizes the second statement equating the "apparent blueness" of the sky to the "experience" of theistic paths and its "real colorlessness" to that of Advaita. But Sri Ramakrishna was a mystic, not a thinker and did not feel the necessity to be logically consistent. This leaves us with a dilemma. How does one philosophically reconcile Advaita hierarchism with perspectivism or relativism? If, as per Vivekananda, Sri Ramakrishna affirms the Advaita hierarchism, he more characteristically echoes Ramprasad and other advocates of theism in his statement: "I want to eat sugar, not become it". Halbfass does not explicitly raise this question, but I would call this a mystic refusal to pass hierarchic judgement on the nature of Reality, affirming its ultimate mysteriousness. This is a basis for religious tolerance, which we also find variously in the Indian tradition. Another such basis is the concept of adhikaravada, which Halbfass explores somewhat, without making the explicit connection with tolerance. Adhikaravada can work in the favor of any sectarian doxography while keeping a tolerant attitude towards "others" on the ground of the privilege or failure of inborn spiritual capacity. On the whole, however, Halbfass does, indeed, draw attention to the existence of religious tolerance in the Indian tradition, in opposition to Hacker's more exclusive claim for inclusivism, but he nevertheless heightens the traditional importance of inclusivism and its nationalistic espousal in modern neo-Hinduism.

If the mystic can claim immunity from hierachic judgement, the problem for philosophy remains. Doctrinal debates, never fully resolved, have dogged the evolution of Indian thought, sectarian differences remaining intact with their relative prioritizations to this day. The Advaitin sees the Nameless and Formless Transcendental as the supreme reality and all theistic adoration of form as inferior. The Gaudiya Vishnav sees the formless aspect of the One Reality to be merely the aura of the Supreme Person, whose Transcendental Form is the supreme reality. The Shaivites see the soteriological goal of service to and adoration of the supreme Person as advocated by Vaishnavism to be inferior to its own goal of liberation in and complete identification with Shiva. The Tantrics prioritize the feminine principle as the Goddess or Mother with her boons of worldly power and enjoyment over the sole emphasis on transcendental liberation or service to the Divine. One of the failures of "India and Europe" is Halbfass' inability to make these distinctions. There is clearly a heavier leaning towards Advaita Vedanta for drawing his examples and making his conclusions. What is under-stated by this is the hegemonic role played by Advaita Vedanta in Indian philosophical historiography, particularly in the formulations of Neo-Hinduism and Halbfass' participation in this history. An acknowledgement of this on the part of Halbfass would have enabled him to sort out the thinkers he has so often indiscriminately clubbed together. Indeed, Advaitin hierarchism is clearly at work in Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan and more recently, Chinmayananda, figures that can be classed as the transmitters of mainstream Neo-Hinduism, and more centrally related to Halbfass' consideration. Others such as Rammohun Roy, Debendranath and Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, etc. make only fuzzy contributions to his categorizations and are not granted the full attention they deserve in their alternate philosophical stances.

In his characterization of Sri Aurobindo, Halbfass does acknowledge the radical nature of his contribution. He echoes Hacker in calling him "the most original" Neo-Hindu thinker. He notes that Sri Aurobindo does not, unlike the others in his consideration, feel that the Hindu tradition has said its last word, or that his own "philosophy" is an apologetic re-statement of some or all sectarian interests of the past. However, he considers Sri Aurobindo's explorations of the ranges of mentality transcending human capacity and leading to the Supermind as speculative and does not have much to say about Sri Aurobindo's philosophical solutions. Unlike Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo does not shy away from philosophizing. Moreover, in Halbfass' own characterization, Sri Aurobindo "clearly exceeds [Vivekananda] in intellectual and visionary power". What then is Sri Aurobindo's attitude to other sectarian soteriologies? Is it inclusivistic? And if so, does it embody the image of the ocean or that of the elephant's foot?

In his letters and talks regarding his personal experiences, in his writings on yoga (The Synthesis of Yoga) and in his major philosophical work (The Life Divine), Sri Aurobindo makes ample reference to both Indic and non-Indic soteriological systems of theory and practice. He does not prioritize Advaita over the theistic schools - in fact, if one were to consider the evolution of his own spiritual experience, the opposite would appear to be the case. On the other hand, it would be difficult to call his yoga or philosophy theistic.  No pre-eminent place is given to any of the traditional deities in his teaching. But is Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaitism, as the name itself suggests, a form of inclusivism? And if so, what form?

In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo points out that the Formless Transcendentalism of Advaita, the Theistic Universalism of Vishishtadvaita and the Devotional Relativism of Dvaita, each consider themselves to be the highest Truth, with the others as subordinate. He provides a reason for this in the limitation of Mind.Calling attention to what he calls the Triple Status of the Supermind, he shows how these three Truths coexist as necessary aspects of a Supramental Truth, a simultaneity of Real-Existences which Mind cannot comprehend in its totality, due to the limitation of its capacity to experience more than one Reality at a time. Thus he attributes the hierarchic inclusivisms of these schools to their phenomenal bondage to the limitations of Mind. A tranquil mind, reflecting the Transcendental Truth of the Supermind, asserts the primacy of Advaita; the same reflecting the Universal Truth of Supermind asserts the primacy of Vishishtadvaita; reflecting the Individualized Truth of the Supermind, it asserts the primacy of Dvaita. A change of experiencing consciousness from Mind to Supermind enables the possibility of the simultaneous, non-hierarchic assertion of these Truths. Does this mean that in Supermind one sees that all spiritual paths are equal aspects of the One Reality? And if Sri Aurobindo is claiming that this One Reality is the Supramental, then is his philosophy not hierarchism and perpectivism rolled into one, the One Truth which subsumes all others, while at the same time rendering them redundant?

All spiritual paths are not indiscriminately equal aspects of the One Reality according to Sri Aurobindo. In Supermind, a change of consciousness allows a totalism of experience, which positions all manner of truths related to spiritual soteriologies in a multi-dimensional supramental space, whose topology, if expressed  in Mind's language, necessarily renders false its reality. We are reminded of Arjuna's experience of the Vishwarupa, where multitudinous hierarchized forms coexist with formlessness (a mass of radiance with no beginning, middle or end) in a single indescribable Form. As for inclusivism, if we accept to view things from the domain of this term, the reasoning mind, then the Supermind, as Sri Aurobindo develops it, is certainly inclusivistic, in a grander sense than Advaita or the various theistic schools. It is the ocean and the elephant's foot at once, with the difference that neither do the rivers disappear into it, nor are the smaller feet obliterated, each remains intact with a simultaneity of distinctness, a mental impossibility. And if, in spite of the apparent mismatch of modalities, we insist on stretching this analogy further, is this a form of tolerance or is it a totalitarianism, a subjection of all "lesser" truths to the supremacy of the Supermind? Indeed, for Sri Aurobindo, the Supermind is the One Reality, the One as the One, the One as the All and the One as the Each. But Sri Aurobindo is not interested in convincing everyone or anyone, for that matter, of the superiority of this Truth. He upholds the characteristic Indic value of adhikaravada, the spiritual capacity of an individual, which determines the scope of his or her experience.

But at the same time, let us not forget, that of all Indic soteriologies, Sri Aurobindo's is the only one which has an universal teleology associated with it, the inevitable evolution of consciousness from Ignorance to Knowledge, Matter to Supermind and beyond. Does this not remind us of Hegel and is there not the same political danger associated with it? Sri Aurobindo makes it amply clear that the Supermind is not the property or possession of any race, nation or culture. No religion can lay hold of it and yet, in his view, it is the ultimate goal of history. How then will it come about, if not by human agency, by praxis, as all teleologies project for themselves? Here we come to Sri Aurobindo's master idea, the crux of his message. This does not lie in philosophy, religion or politics. It lies in a change of human consciousness through the power of yoga. Moreover, in this the activation of the Supermind in the terrestrial consciousness, hitherto unrealized, is a necessity. Such an activation would make possible the conditions, primarily inner, but as trigger and consequence, outer also, for an universal change of consciousness, leading to an accelarated and infallibly guided evolution to the Supermind. The disciples of Sri  Aurobindo believe that he and the Mother have brought about such an activation of the Supermind through their yoga, that the world has entered into a new age, the Age of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga as a result, that all human beings living in the planet today, are whether they are aware of it or not, within the force-field of the supramental yoga, their lives experiencing its pressure towards a change of consciousness. No wonder, from the standpoint of Halbfass' adhikara, though he acknowledges the "intellectual and visionary power" of Sri Aurobindo, he sees so much speculation in him. In the meantime, the agents for this change must bring it about in themselves, their faith the consequence of their adhikara, their inner intuition of the reality of its Truth, and of the emergence from latency of the faculties experiencing its certitude.

- end -

Following the publication of “Understanding Thoughts of Sri Aurobindo,” Indrani Sanyal and Krishna Roy of the Centre for Sri Aurobindo Studies, Calcutta have complied a set of eighteen scholarly essays on Sri Aurobindo and his contemporaries in the ideational context of what has been called the Bengal Renaissance. Sri Aurobindo’s physical involvement in the politics and culture of early Bengal nationalism was of relatively short duration (1905-1910), albeit an intense and all-sided participation which internalized the entire regional history of the movement and left a powerful creative impress in the milieu of its time and space. Moreover, the discursive background of this involvement continued to develop organically and find voice throughout his life in his subjective articulation just as his own situated contribution continued to resonate in later Indian nationalism. Thus this collection of considered interpretive contemplation fills an important need in our historical understanding. But more importantly, it is the post-colonial legacy of these engagements which draws us today by their fertile and future-gazing content, inviting reflection not merely for India’s but the world’s re-generation at a time of global ferment.

Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Thu 19 Oct 2006 01:21 AM PDT  

'The Religious, the Spiritual and the Secular' by Robert Minor

Reviewed by Debashish Banerji

In this slim paperback, Robert Minor sets out with a double intention: (a) to tell the legal story of the power struggle between the Sri Aurobindo Society and Auroville, leading to the involvement and eventual control by the Indian government of the township; and (b) an exploration of the legal and cultural epistemological ambiguities surrounding the terms "religion", "spirituality" and "secularism" and their shaping of the discourse of modern political contestation in India, as exemplified in the story of Auroville.

The text is sectioned into nine chapters, which can be divided thematically into five major foci: nationalistic constructions of a modern Indian identity and the part played by religion in this; what Minor calls Sri Aurobindo's Weltanschauung and its implications for socio-religious pluralism; the Mother's adherence to this Weltanschauung and the "nationally" and "internationally" supported emergence of Auroville as one of its results; the tussle for power over the shaping of Auroville between the community and the Sri Aurobindo Society, culminating in state intervention; and the parliamentary debates and court decisions resulting in government control of Auroville. Framing the story of Auroville prior to its inception in the spiritual philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and consequent to the court cases upholding the state decision to take over the governance of the township, Minor lays out and conducts his broader theoretical discussion on the practical ambiguities of interpreting terms such as "religious", "secular" and "spiritual", the ideological agendas invested in these interpretations and the implications for community, nation and world of such agendas.

The book begins with a chapter exploring the notion of "secularism" as it has developed in modern Indian understanding. This part of the discussion is a continuation of a wider recent discourse on "Neo-Hinduism" and its complicit relationship with Indian nationalism. Common to this discourse is the view that the formation of an Indian nationhood in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, has proceeded through a reification of an universalistic Hinduism as the ahistorical essence of Indian identity. A term has been coined by the German thinker Paul Hacker to describe such universalism as a form of national identity. This is "inclusivism" (see my review of "India and Europe"). Whereas the usual and more predictable danger of nationalism has been the opposite - i.e. exclusivism, the dangers of inclusivism are no less real, say the scholars who hold this view. For inclusivism is a hegemonic obliteration of "difference" under the guise of an uniting Truth. The implications of this discourse are far-reaching and powerful, and we will have occasion to explore further its application to modern society and particularly, to the social theory and practice of Sri Aurobindo and his followers. However, in this early section of the book, Minor is mainly concerned with the identification of "secularism" as it emerges in the Indian national context. Tracing the roots of modern Indian inclusivism to Vivekananda, Minor tries to show how this semblance of a tolerant universalism is a cover for a hegemonic Neo-Advaitism, which acknowledges the existence of soteriological viewpoints other than its own as partial and entirely assimilable to its goals. Thus, the neo-Advaitic stand views the sectarian differences of other Indian religious/spiritual traditions, such as Vaishnavism, Tantra, etc. as subordinate to its experience of the Reality as an undifferentiated formless Infinity, in which all manifestation ceases. The "others" then become steps towards its goal, necessary for some due to the human limitations of attachment to Name, Form and Relation, but unnecessary after a point. This stand towards other Indian traditions is then extended to non-Indian ones, such as Islam, Christianity, etc. as well. Minor shows the politicization of such a Neo-Advaitic inclusivism through India's scholar-President, S. Radhakrishnan. He also references Gandhi as practicing a form of religious inclusivism, though Gandhi could hardly be called Neo-Advaitic. According to Minor, figures like Gandhi and more explicitly, Radhakrishnan have been responsible for a modern Indian definition of "secularism", which equates the term with religious inclusivism. Thus, unlike the accepted western understanding of the term with its own historical investments, "secularism" in modern India elides the distinction between Church and State. Minor points also to an alternate understanding of "secularism" in India, closer to the western one - that upheld by Nehru, who viewed the religious concerns of Gandhi and Radhakrishnan with distrust and extended only conditional approval to them. Nehru's, of course, is the defining model of the Indian state as a socialist democracy and the segregation of social domains into "religious" and "secular" as necessary to a rationally governable pluralistic modern state based on a western model is the context within which Nehru understood "secularism." Two competing but unclearly differentiated understandings of the word "secularism" thus co-exist in the modern Indian public arena, setting the stage for a confused tussle and exploitation of its ambiguities.

Side by side with the haziness resulting from the coexistence of competing epistemes in the understanding of the term "secular" has arisen a similar confusion surrounding the word "religion" in the modern Indian mind. The "religious", assumed to be the natural opposite to the "secular" in the western genealogy of the term, finds itself in a far more complex and contested terrain in India. Minor points out how a related, but in his view, unclearly defined term has gained currency in modern Indian discourse on "religion", to differentiate Indian understandings of the transcendental domain. This is the word "spiritual." Though the term itself is of western origin, Minor's inability to gather the locus of the term in an Indian context is symptomatic of its indistinctness in the western mind. Minor points to the emergence of this term in modern Indian discourse as being closely related to the formation of a national identity as Neo-Vedantic/Advaitic. Thus figures like Vivekananda and later Radhakrishnan, are shown to be heavily invested in the drawing of a distinction between the "religious" and the "spiritual." Roughly, the "religious", to these thinkers corresponds to the realm of social regulation and sectarian ritual, to be distinguished from yogic practice leading to the experience of Truth. What Minor finds questionable here is the assumption on the part of the Neo-Advaitins that there is one Truth, the one which they experience. Behind the nationalistic construction of such an unitary spirituality, Minor points to the subordination through inclusion of other experiences of Reality, staking their alternate claims to Truth. In this understanding, the "spiritual" becomes paradoxically equated with the "secular" in the constitution of the Neo-Vedantic nation, obliterating the distinction between material and spiritual domains. Moreover, an understanding of the "religious" is not so easily localizable to credal adherence and ritual, bereft of any ontological transformation as in the case of the "spirtitual", according to Minor. "Religion" in the western understanding has tended to be conflated with the "spiritual", and thus has assumed connotations much wider than the merely credal or ritualistic. These ambiguities also co-exist in modern Indian understandings of the "religious", adding to the jurisdictional uncertainty already noted in the case of the "secular." However, though I tend to agree with this conclusion of Minor's, I also believe that the distinction drawn between the "religious" and the "spiritual" in the modern Indian context is a dialogically important and necessary one in a post-colonial Indian discourse, quite apart from any nationalistic or Neo-Advaitic intention, since it articulates an important ontological component of Indian existence, not recognized adequately in the west. The primacy of yogic experience in Indian life may be debated, but its active presence, historically exerting its influence from the periphery of social life and making available forms of uncommon experience and ontic possibility is undeniable.

Minor follows his discussion of basic ambiguities in the terms "secular", "religious" and "spiritual" in the modern Indian national context with a study of Sri Aurobindo's views on reality and society. He first situates  Sri Aurobindo's early nationalistic activity in the context of Neo-Vedanta as discussed above. Here, he shows that Sri Aurobindo equates nationalism with Sanatana Dharma as "the religion" defining Indian identity. Minor points to the prominence of the term Sanatana Dharma, construed as "eternal religion", as a major polemic device in Neo-Vedantic nationalist thought, utilized by the principal thinkers of this persuasion, such as Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan. In this, he follows other contemporary western scholars of Neo-Vedanta in modern India. Particularly, Wilhelm Halbfass deals at length with the modern origins of the term "Sanatana Dharma" in his India and Europe (see review). Minor does not go into these details, except to note that the term has overt Advaitic connotations, but is used by Indian nationalists of a Neo-Vedantic slant to club all Indic religious traditions under its rubric and thereby to substantiate the claim for the existence of a single monolithic ahistorical religion in India, "Hinduism." This religion is also, by this polemical strategy, cast as the one which is, therefore, the true religion or simply, the Truth. It must be noted that technically speaking, in claiming a predominantly Advaitic origin for the term "Sanatana Dharma", Minor is mistaken. He does not provide any reference for his view, and there does not exist any. Though a case could be made (and has been made by Halbfass) for a new nationalist understanding of "Sanatana Dhrama", certainly the term does not derive from an exclusively Advaitic history. As for Sri Aurobindo's use of the term "religion" here, Sri Aurobindo rarely uses English words in a legalistic sense, contextually establishing the connotational density of his terms. He is not averse to using the term "religion", and sometimes "true religion" in a way synonymous with his use of "spirituality." As far as the monolithic construction of "Hinduism" as an inclusivistic Neo-Advaita is concerned, unlike Vivekananda or Radhakrishnan, Sri Aurobindo does not subscribe to a traditional Advaitic Vedanta as being the apex of all spiritual realization, necessarily subsuming all others. As Minor himself points out elsewhere in this chapter, Sri Aurobindo clearly distinguishes between the soteriological goals of different Indian spiritual traditions, not prioritizing any. Sri Aurobindo's use of the term "Sanatana Dharma" similarly does not translate an Advaitic hierarchical doxography, but points to the vast and complex field of Indian experiential "truth-seeking", seen as a cluster of closely related traditions that reference one another in an ongoing and historically expanding discourse.

Minor's concern (as that of most other contemporary western academic scholars of modern Indian "religion"), underlying his discussion of Indian nationalism, Sri Aurobindo, the Mother or Auroville, is ultimately with the constitution of the public domain in India and more broadly, in the modern world. Such a domain is one of contestation, and the rational ethics of plurality dictate that if any power can prevent such a clash of relativities from tearing the world apart, it must be tolerance. Exclusive claims for Truth pose a real danger here, as, in a pluralistic field, they can have no recourse to self-justification other than the conversion or erasure of all dissident "others." This is the basis of fanaticism. However, the Neo-Vedantic strategy of inclusivism, though seemingly tolerant of othernerss, leads to the same effective obliteration of difference, according to Minor. In his words, it "does not consider the viewpoint of the believer as objector as significant. Though the believer may say otherwise, it eliminates the viewpoint... as a significant other." [12] Speaking of Radhakrishnan, it goes on: "Radhakrishnan's position does not consider that other a significant viewpoint and does not consider that the other understands his or her position accurately. In fact it destroys the sense that there can be a significant other. The other is dissolved into the inclusivistic viewpoint, understood only in terms of the inclusivist's view." [Ibid.] Of course, what is not explicitly acknowledged by Minor is that the domain of spirituality bases itself on the assumption that there is an absolute Truth and that the human is capable to knowing it. Thus, to expect religions to accept their relativity is an alien rational imposition that the religious and spiritual domains do not acknowledge. Minor understands this when he tries to interpret a desirable religious tolerance as being the standpoint of "a person who considers the alternative viewpoint of another seriously, believes that the other does understand his or her own position though it may be wrong, and then agrees to tolerate that person in a civil and humane manner." [Ibid] Here, it needs to be stated that (a) inclusivistic religious/spiritual traditions are not a modern fabrication in India; and (b) these traditions have developed their own indigenous devices to uphold tolerance, which is what accounts historically for the comparative lack of serious conflict among Indic spiritual traditions. Indeed, Paul Hacker holds the view that inclusivism has been the innate response of Indian religious traditions to account for difference through the years, though this view has been contested by Halbfass and others. Sectarian traditions in India have largely resorted to the construction of doxographies inclusive of other co-existing and recognized traditions, affording them a respected, though subordinate position in their hierarchies. One of the principal devices that has been used traditionally to promote tolerance under these circumstances is the notion of "adhikaravada." Adhikara or spiritual capacity determines the affinity and scope of an individual's spiritual realization, according to this view. At times when this idea is kept in mind, tolerance is not so difficult to achieve.

Undoubtedly, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother believe that their teaching leads to the Truth, but they do not expect all human beings to believe this, nor do they encourage their disciples to convince others of it. Without being overt, Minor directs some rational skepticism at Sri Aurobindo's Truth-claim as being based on no authority other than personal experience and the disciples' consequent need to accept his word for it. Though Sri Aurobindo's Truth-claim does proceed on the basis of his personal experience, it also justifies itself through a hermeneutic analysis based on Veda, Vedanta and Bhagavad Gita. This again, is nothing new in the Indian spiritual context, Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhavacharya, Chaitanya and numerous others establishing their claims for Truth based on these same double foundations of experience and textual interpretation. As for Sri Aurobindo's inclusivism, it does not obliterate its "others", but as Minor himself notes, is not averse to criticize what it considers their failings and limitations as seen from its own standpoint. Thus, they are not erased in his realization, and are free to hold their self-identifying differences. At the same time, Sri Aurobindo does show how these alternate traditions may be extrapolated into his own integral Truth, not losing themselves or being pre-empted in the process as in Advaita. The absolutism of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, encompassing Being and Becoming and all the historical approaches to a realization of Reality can undoubtedly be called a grand form of inclusivism. Contemporary western thinking, operating in the wake of Hitler and Stalin and under the shadow of the Enlightenment's self-fulfilling prophecy of capitalistic globalization, is particularly fearful of and averse to grand narratives, equating intellectual totalism with political or capitalistic totalitarianism. But if the seeking for a total rational description of Reality characterizes the trajectory of western metaphysics, it is no less present in Indian philosophical systems either, with the difference, that the Indian systems rely not merely on the mind's plausible speculations on the nature of Reality, but on the power of a spiritual or supramental experience and its reproducibility. This is a critical distinction for two reasons: (1) The Truth-claim of a mental model is not experientially fulfilling and is much more likely to seek its fulfillment in the "outside world" through a conversion or erasure of otherness, particularly if there is a teleology attached to it; while a "spiritual" or "supramental" Truth-claim directs its fulfillment "within", through individual practices aimed at reproducing universal subjective experiences. (2) Whereas a mental rationality is constrained to view logical opposites as irreconcilable, a "supramental rationality" is under no compulsion to do so, appealing to an experience that transcends mind. Thus, in a quotation of Minor from Sri Aurobindo, "... the Absolute, obviously, finds no difficulty in world-manifestation and no difficulty either in a simultaneous transcendence of world-manifestation; the difficulty exists only for our mental limitations which prevent us from grasping the supramental rationality of the co-existence of the infinite and finite or seizing the nodus of the unconditioned with the conditioned. For our intellectual rationality these are opposites; for the absolute reason they are interrelated and not essentially conflicting expressions of one and the same reality." [Minor, 26 quote from SABCL XVIII, 377] Thus, Sri Aurobindo's "thought" and practice need to be located in an Indian philosophical tradition, whose epistemological bases are different from those of the West. It is a failure to recognize this or to give adequate credence to it that is the source of Minor's fear and skepticism and results in a perpetuation of a form of intellectual neo-colonialism.

Minor's consideration of the Mother and her founding of Auroville follows the same argument as that in the case of Neo-Advaita and Sri Aurobindo's claim for Truth. Minor points to the Mother's more trenchant distinction between "religion" and "spirituality" and her explicit disavowal of "religion" from Auroville. He goes on to document the formation of the township of Auroville, under the Mother's guidance and authority in 1968, and the important part played by the Sri Aurobindo Society in the fund-raising, organization and obtainment of Indian government and UNESCO support for the city. Throughout this documentation, Minor brings to light the ambiguities relating to the categories of "religious", "spiritual" and "secular" that encircle all discussions relating to the city. He makes note of the Mother's claim for the basis of the township being "the Truth", by which she means the vision of Reality taught by Sri Aurobindo and herself. He explores the presentation of the idea to the Indian government and UNESCO and their resultant understandings. Here, he shows the strategic presentation of the project to the Government by the Sri Aurobindo Society, underplaying the specifics of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's world-view and the location of Auroville within its teleology and amplifying the "secular" aspects of world harmony and environmental awareness. It also played on the "cultural hero" status of Sri Aurobindo in the "national" consciousness. The Indian state, on its part, supported it for these reasons. It also satisfied its national agenda of playing an important role in UNESCO as a promoter of international understanding and cultural harmony, and hence, the government sought and obtained UNESCO support for the project. Minor points out that the Mother was well aware of the fact that the support of the Indian government and UNESCO had been given for the wrong reasons, promoting "tolerance", not "integration" [Minor, 107]. He quotes the Mother's message to UNESCO on February 1, 1972, as aimed at correcting this shortcoming by making a direct reference to the supramental:

"Auroville is meant to hasten the advent of the supramental Reality upon earth. The help of all those who find the world not as it ought to be is welcome. Each one must know if he wants to associate with an old world ready for death, or to work for a new and better world preparing to be born." [Minor, 107 quoting from the Mother, Collected Works XIII, 221]

Minor's chapter on the power struggle in Auroville following the Mother's passing, puts much of this grey area in perspective. The tussle between the Sri Aurobindo Society (backed by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram) and the residents of Auroville leading finally to the intervention of the Indian government is detailed concisely but with clarity. The parliamentary debates that follow on whether the government should take over Auroville form the most carefully detailed documentation and serve to bring out the confusions of understanding stemming from the connotational ambiguities of the terms "secular", "religious" and "spiritual." According to the Indian constitution, India is a "secular" nation and legally speaking, the government is not justified in interference in the actions of religious institutions, except through an Act of Internal Security, when national interests are seriously jeopardized. The Parliamentary debates on the advisability of the government take-over of Auroville revolved around three possible scenarios: (1) Auroville is a "religious" organization, and the government should not interfere in its operations; (2) Auroville is a "non-religious" ("secular" or "spiritual") organization, dedicated to the memory of the "cultural hero" Aurobindo and the governmemt should take it over to safeguard his vision of international harmony; and (c) It does not matter whether Auroville is a "religious" or "secular" organization, it is a shame to the nation and to the memory of the "cultural hero" Aurobindo and the government should dissolve it. Of course, as known, the decision was that Auroville is not a "religious" organization, based on the Mother's and the residents' statements, and the government did step in to administer the township, at first temporarily. The Sri Aurobindo Society did not however, let this go uncontested, and took the matter to the Supreme Court, making the claim that Auroville was a "religious" organization and that the Indian Governmemt had no right to takeover its administration. Minor details the arguments of the ensuing court case and shows that both the majority and minority judgmental opinions of the Court upheld the government's decision to take-over the administration of Auroville, though they each construed the question of whether Auroville was a "secualr" or "religious" organization differently. Thus, according to the majority opinion, Auroville, based on the teaching of Sri Aurobindo, was not a "religion" and the government was justified in its administration. The minority opinion, by one Justice Reddy, on its part, held that Auroville was a "religious" organization, but that the government was justified in taking over the administration of the "secular" aspects of this organization.

Minor concludes from this that the understanding of the terms "secular" and "religious" are highly ambiguous in the modern Indian context, creating serious difficulties in the rational constitution of a public domain. In this, he feels that the present key to the understanding of these terms lies with their Neo-Advaitic connotations, as developed by Radhakrishnan et al. As against this, he himself, quite obviously, leans more favorably towards Nehru's rational and western definitions of the terms. These definitions, though clearly unambiguous from a mental standpoint, are a product of western liberal humanism, with its roots in the western Enlightenment and its faith in a rational humanity. Such a morally normative and idealistic faith, whatever its (highly questionable) utility in western socio-politics, finds little resonance in the Indian historical context, where the division between Church and State lacks much reality. Moreover, as far as Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's vision of a future society is concerned, this division into clear "secular" and "religious" domains is, in the long run, an impractical impossibility, alien to the transformed epistemological and ontological basis of an integral evolution of humanity. Thus all in all, the book is an interesting one, exposing some of the real difficulties pertaining to governance in modern India, without being able to provide any credible analytical insights or solutions to the problem.

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Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Sun 16 Oct 2005 03:21 AM PDT  

Mysteries of Death, Fate, Karma and Rebirth

by Jugal Kishore Mukherjee.

Reviewed by Debashish Banerji

Shortly after his masterly exposition on the practice of the integral yoga, Shri Jugal Kishore Mukherjee has come out with a slim but packed volume on the rather grim and esoteric subject of death, rebirth and karma. The subject itself is shrouded in mystery as noted in the Mahabharata with the question asked by the yaksha of the lake to Yudhisthira: “What is the most amazing thing in human life?” Yudhisthira’s answer relates to a fundamental and universal human incapacity to deal adequately with death: “The most amazing thing is this, that all human beings die but each person conducts himself as if there is no death.” Though the yaksha approves of this answer, we can ask ourselves the question as to why this is so. I may hazard two guesses for an answer: (1) to the inmost being death has no reality, so it cannot give any finality to it in its life-experience; (2) to the outer being, death represents the fear either of the unknowable or of the extinction of consciousness, and it readily suppresses this fear through a wholesale socially sanctioned denial. Perhaps there is a little of both of these in all of us, but whatever be the truth, it goes to highlight the enigma that death presents to all human beings, an unanswered mystery and anxiety we either ignore or can at best speculate about.  Acknowledging this hidden enigma at the center of human existence, Jugal Kishore starts his exposition by fore-fronting the fear of death and analyzing its causes.

In today’s materialistic age, which sees consciousness as an accidental epiphenomenon of matter, the popular widespread belief denies any persistence to consciousness after death. But in other times and in cultures not invested in the materialistic standpoint, there are a variety of alternate ideas regarding the “other side.” All these admit of an afterlife beyond death, but differ often radically about its character and purpose. Jugal Kishore explores all these varieties of approaches and brings them into comparative focus against what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have to say about this subject. For example, the Judeo-Christian tradition holds that there is only one life and a soul which persists beyond the death of the body, but goes to sleep until a Day of Judgement when God decrees eternal heaven or eternal hell based on its one life on earth. Pythagorean Greece, on the other hand, believed in a soul which is immortal inhabiting the body and a form of earthly rebirth of this soul or “transmigration” after death, by which they meant the assumption of a continuous succession of physical bodies from life to life without any respite. Indic thought, such as Buddhism and the various Hindu schools also believe in rebirth but unlike the Greeks, the consciousness after death passes through a succession of invisible worlds before being reborn in a new body on earth. However, here too there are a variety of differences, from the belief in a soul inhabiting the body for Hindus to a soulless non-substantial persistence of consciousness driven by the momentum of desire for the Buddhists. Indic thought also includes a rationale for the nature of life-experiences based on the accumulation of “karma”, a ledger of good or bad deeds which leave inexorable and universal consequences outlasting one’s lifetime. Jugal Kishore, following Sri Aurobindo points out that these theories combine two disparate motives, not always integrated into a consistent scheme – on the one hand, a moral system of reward and punishment and on the other, a metaphysical explanation for the purpose of human life on earth. Most modern day Hindu or Buddhist understandings of human life and rebirth, for example, are pessimistic in nature, life on earth seen as an entrapment in a wheel of karma (karma-chakra) over which we have little or no control and from which the best we can aspire for is eventual escape, the cessation of rebirth.

To these notions of life, death, psychic persistence of consciousness, rebirth and karma, Jugal Kishore brings the light of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s explanations. The sources he draws on for these mainly include Sri Aurobindo’s The Problem of Rebirth, The Life Divine and his Letters on Yoga and the Mother’s Questions and Answers. In this regard, the question may be asked as to whether this is merely a believers’ lesson book in yet another relative and speculative theory on these mysteries of the invisible or whether there is anything more objective about this presentation. The answer, implicit in this work as in most other works by this author, lies in the overwhelming sense of the integral perfection of the view presented in the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. One of the principal intuitions of the ancient western world, carried over into modern times through the assumptions of Science, is that the universe is ultimately simple and that its apparent complexity can be explained by a single or at most a very few rational principles. Modern Enlightenment philosophy assumes this cosmic rationality to be identical with the human faculty of reason and seeks to find the one law systemically uniting all other laws through rational enquiry.  But as Sri Aurobindo points out, human reason works by piecing together fragments and arrives, thereby only at larger fragments masquerading as wholes. The intuition of a cosmic rationality, on the other hand, proceeds from an overmental or supramental source of unity and proportional harmony which is compact even in its infinite extension and seamlessly one. Its integrality is evidenced in the overmastering presence of the whole in itself and in every part. It is this of which the Upanishad says purnam adah purnam idam purnat purnam udachyate, purnasya purnam adaya purnam evavashishyate. And it is this which impresses itself in its undeniable reality in the ideas and writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - which, in their absolute consistency and miraculous integrality, make them different from other relative attempts at explanation.

As in all his other works, Jugal Kishore marshalls a most impressive set of quotes from the Master and the Mother to make his points. He clarifies the closely knit ideas relating to death as part of the perpetual process of life and to the evolution of consciousness through the progressive growth of the psychic being in its mastery over mental, vital and physical nature and the further infinite expression of higher powers of consciousness that form the bases of Sri Aurobindo’s description of life, death and rebirth. He indicates the inner necessity and meaning of karma as a temporary automatism of universal nature aiding such an evolution and the possibility and means of overcoming it through growth of consciousness, divine Grace or yogic intervention. He describes the occult process of the inner being’s journey through the non-physical worlds and the soul’s part in this journey and its long or short sleep of assimilation in the psychic world before rebirth. And finally, as a most edifying last chapter, he addresses “some knotty problems of rebirth” in question form with relevant quotes from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as the answers.  As a final conclusion to this last chapter, he raises the question which forms the distant fringe of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s vision of a supramental life – “Is death necessary?” Sri Aurobindo’s philosophical view on this, stated briefly is that if indeed, as he maintains, humankind is here to fully realize its divinity in time and space, it must translate the eternity which is an essential attribute of this divinity into temporal terms as perpetuity – in other words, a mastery of the physical consciousness which amounts to a physical immortality. The author draws attention to his earlier work The Destiny of the Body which addresses this question centrally before closing the present work.

Overall, I would recommend this book as an impressive work which sheds light on all the innumerable complexities of death, the purpose of life, the afterlife, karma and rebirth, as taught by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in an integral view of human existence and its destiny.

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