Five artists from Auroville exhibited their works jointly at the Cymroza Gallery, Mumbai, in September 2007. A German, an Italian, a Belgian and an Indian Parsi, four women painters and a Dutch male sculptor, made up the group. Apart from the shared inner orientation towards the discovery and expression of spiritual or cosmic realities and coherences or intensities, what makes up the specific contribution of these artists? ...more

Arvind Akki has been able to contact and manifest a radiant and plasmatic earth – with its landscapes of liquid fire and its spirit forms of aspiration and floating or descending shakti. From flat gentle suspended washes of light through fields of colored sparks and fluid dunes to glassy molten rocks, forms of flight and powerful etheric storms, Arvind’s eye strips the inconscient materiality of the familiar earth and reveals another materiality which pulsates and glows beneath waiting its hour of manifestation – an earth at once of the primordial pre-human past of the gods and of the beckoning post-human future. His art is an invitation to this deepening of sight, the illuminated perception of the primal concentration of consciousness kindling the fire of tapas, tapo-agni, formative of sense and world and the symbols of the Beyond. ...more

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 19th century. A number of 19th 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 19th c. invention, specifically reified for nationalistic purposes. Undoubtedly, a number of revisionary crystallizations developed in late 19th/early 20th 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 19th/early 20th 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". ...more

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. ...more

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; 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. ...more

As in all his other works, Jugal Kishore marshalls a most impressive set of quotes from Sri Aurobindo 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. ...more

Derrida deftly dodges attempts to disclose the traumas and ecstacies of his life (though of this more later) and his "philosophy" remains unexplored in its major aspects. ...more