What Sri Aurobindo Found Wrong With India
Introduction
This article is based on The Renaissance in India by Sri Aurobindo, volume 20 of the Complete Works, which carries under that title four related sets of essays: The Renaissance in India, Indian Culture and External Influence, "Is India Civilised?" and the long unfinished A Defence of Indian Culture. All page numbers in parentheses refer to that edition.
Eight criticisms of Indian culture can be drawn out of this book, and the eight chapters below take them one at a time. One caution about that number. Sri Aurobindo never lists or counts his criticisms. The book is unfinished, its arguments are spread across four essay series written over three years, and its main business is answering someone else. The grouping into eight is mine. The criticisms and the reasoning are his.
Sri Aurobindo wrote these essays for the Arya, the monthly review he edited from Pondicherry, publishing them one at a time between August 1918 and January 1921 (p. 447). He had left active politics eight years earlier. The essays belong to a moment when the live question among educated Indians was no longer whether British rule would end but what would be left standing when it did.
The occasion was a book. William Archer's India and the Future, published in 1917, argued that Indian civilisation was not really a civilisation. Sir John Woodroffe answered it the following year, and Sri Aurobindo came in on Woodroffe's side and then kept going for three years (p. 448). The volume's publisher's note is blunt about the purpose: Archer's views were "typical of a very general attitude of the European mind" at the time, and Sri Aurobindo meant "to combat the self-depreciation awakened in the Indian mind by this hostile impact" (p. 449).
So it is a book of defence, and it reads like one. Anyone who opens it looking for criticism will spend most of the pages watching Sri Aurobindo take Archer apart. The criticism is there all the same, and it is severe, because he thought a defence that could not admit fault was worth nothing. The sentence that licenses the rest sits in the middle of "Is India Civilised?":
"The courage to defend our culture against ignorant occidental criticism and to maintain it against the gigantic modern pressure comes first, but with it there must be the courage to admit not from any European standpoint but from our own outlook the errors of our culture." (p. 89)
Note what he does with the standpoint. Faults are to be measured against what India said she was trying to do, not against whatever irritates a foreign observer. That is why so little of what follows resembles Archer's list, even where the two men are pointing at the same institution.
He then makes a distinction that governs everything after it. On one side are "phenomena of decline or deterioration." On the other are "those things in our creeds of life and social institutions which are in themselves mistaken and some of them indefensible" (p. 89). Seven of the eight criticisms below sit on the first side. They describe a civilisation that lost something it once had. Only untouchability sits on the second.
He gave the general point away at once. Indian civilisation had "dark spots, positive imperfections, heavy shortcomings," along with "considerable lacunae, many blind alleys, much uncultured or ill-cultured ground" (p. 79). Then he asked which civilisation has not.
What holds the eight together
These are not eight separate grievances. They come out of one picture of what Indian civilisation was, and without that picture they sound like a list.
Sri Aurobindo saw three powers in the old culture, working together. There was the spirituality. There was an enormous appetite for living, an "inexhaustible vital creativeness and gust of life." And between the two, doing the work of joining them, "a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence" made up of the rational, ethical and aesthetic mind (p. 10). The object of the whole arrangement was what he called "the perfect spiritualisation of the mind and the life" (p. 14): not an escape from the world, but ordinary existence soaked through with spiritual truth.
His account of the decline follows the same three-part shape. Vital energy sank and the joy of creation faded. Then came "a rapid cessation of the old free intellectual activity, a slumber of the scientific and the critical mind as well as the creative intuition," until what was left had become "a repetition of ill-understood fragments of past knowledge" and "a petrification of the mind and life in the relics of the forms which a great intellectual past had created." Spirituality survived, but it burned "in intense jets and in a dispersed action," a few truths pressed hard and the rest dropped (p. 14).
"At a certain point where progress, adaptation, a new flowering should have come in, the old civilisation stopped short, partly drew back, partly lost its way." (p. 14)
Everything else rests on that. India's trouble was arrest rather than error. Her ideals were not wrong; she stopped carrying them out, and then fortified the place where she had stopped. Each of the eight chapters names somewhere this happened.
He is deliberate about not chasing the causes. "The causes internal and external we need not now discuss; but the fact is there" (p. 14). His subject is what the arrest did and how it might be undone, and he keeps the argument there.
The eight criticisms
Indians stopped thinkingThe scaffolding became the buildingVarna gave way to casteUntouchabilityRenunciation grew top-heavyReligion turned outwardThe ideals didn’t reach societyIndia could not unite herself
1. Indians stopped thinking
The first complaint, and the one the rest lean on, is that enquiry died out in India and nobody noticed. He does not mean Indians stopped producing books. He means that enquiry gave way to commentary, and commentary to recitation. Of the eighteenth century he writes that "science and philosophy and intellectual knowledge had long been dead or petrified into a mere scholastic Punditism," alongside an "increasing torpor of the creative spirit in religion and art" (p. 5). Learning survived. Curiosity did not. And once a tradition stops thinking it starts enforcing: "old authority and rule become rigidly despotic and, as always then happens, lose their real sense and spirit" (p. 14).
This matters more in his scheme than it would in most people's. He had made intelligence the middle term between spirit and life, so its failure is not one loss among several. It is the thing that breaks the machine. With no thinking apparatus to turn spiritual insight into social and practical form, spirituality shrinks back into ritual and private experience; with nothing to organise it, vitality scatters. A mystic defending a spiritual civilisation spends a surprising amount of his indictment on the collapse of scholarship, and this is why.
The fullest version of the charge comes as a thought experiment. Suppose a man of the age of the Upanishads, or of the classical centuries, were set down in nineteenth-century India. He would be "amazed by the extent of a later degeneracy, its mental poverty, immobility, static repetition, the comparative feebleness of the creative intuition, the long sterility of art, the cessation of science," and would "deplore a prone descent to ignorance, a failing of the old powerful will and tapasya, almost a volitional impotence" (p. 83). In place of "the great adaptable civilisation which assimilated with power and was able to return tenfold for what it received," he would find "a helplessness that bore passively or only with a few ineffectual galvanic reactions the forces of the outside world" (p. 84).
The same thing shows up in the language. Sanskrit went on being written, but "the genius rapidly fades out from it, it becomes stiff, heavy and artificial and only a scholastic talent remains to keep it in continuance" (p. 376). A tongue kept alive by scholars after it had stopped being used to think in.
His handling of Indian historiography is the part of this chapter most worth watching, because of what he refuses to say. The near-absence of sustained historical and biographical record he calls "a defect" that "leaves a very serious gap": "India has lived much, but has not sat down to record the history of her life," and "such exact records as she had, she has allowed to rust forgotten or disappear" (p. 249). A flattering explanation was available to him, and it would have suited his own thesis nicely: India, absorbed in the eternal, disdained mere time and "took no interest in the memory of action." He throws it out. "That is another myth," he says, pointing out that Egypt, Assyria and Persia left the same gap without anyone crediting it to otherworldliness (pp. 249–250).
The chapter cuts two ways at once, which is easy to miss. Against Archer, Sri Aurobindo is insisting that India did once have a scientific and critical tradition, and that its absence in the nineteenth century says something about a decline rather than about Indian character. Against the orthodox, he is insisting that the tradition really had died, and that reverent repetition of the Shastras is not its survival but the evidence of its death.
2. The scaffolding became the building
Indian civilisation, on Sri Aurobindo's reading, was unusually serious about machinery. It did not simply announce a spiritual aim. It built a whole social order to walk people towards it: four varnas, four ashramas, a minutely worked-out law of dharma, each stage pitched at the capacity of the people in it. The apparatus was meant to come down eventually, the way scaffolding does.
It never came down. As the civilisation thickened, "the intellect towered and widened, but intuition waned or retreated into the hearts of the saints and adepts and mystics," and "the free flood of intuitive knowledge was forced to run in hewn channels." Society "became more artificial and complex, less free and noble; more of a bond on the individual, it was less a field for the growth of his spiritual faculties." Interest and desire, artha and kama, were chased at the expense of dharma, while "the lines of the dharma were filled and stamped in with so rigid a distinctness as to stand in the way of the freedom of the spirit" (p. 176). The end of it he puts in a sentence: "Spiritual liberation was pursued in hostility to life and not as its full-orbed result and high crowning" (p. 177). A structure built to carry people up into a fulfilled life finished by making escape from life the only way out.
Why was none of this corrected? Sri Aurobindo points to an odd asymmetry in how the culture distributed its freedoms. In philosophy, speculation and religious experience it allowed almost anything; in social matters it did the reverse, imposing "a rigorous law and authority," a tendency that "in the end became greatly exaggerated and prevented the expansion of the society into new forms more suitable for the need of the spirit of the age, the Yugadharma" (p. 229).
That asymmetry does a lot of explanatory work. A culture free to think anything, and forbidden to rearrange itself, will end up run by institutions its own best minds have stopped believing in, and it will have no way of finding out, because dissent is licensed to go anywhere except into practice. By his own day, he observed, a good many social forms "are now a fiction and no longer in accordance with the ideas they assume or with the facts of life" (p. 90).
His image for all this is the best short statement of the book's argument:
"The fences which she created to protect the outer growth of the spiritual ideal and which afterwards became barriers to its expansion and farther application, she can now break down." (pp. 39–40)
The fences were not a mistake. They were protective, and they were needed when they went up. The fault lies in keeping them long after the thing they protected had outgrown them.
3. Varna gave way to caste
On caste Sri Aurobindo draws a distinction that has to be followed closely, because everything else he says on the subject depends on it.
He insists first that the ancient fourfold order and the caste system of his own day are two different things: "The ancient Chaturvarnya must not be judged by its later disintegrated degeneration and gross meaningless parody, the caste system" (p. 170). The original, as he read it, was not primarily an economic ranking at all. Its "true originality and permanent value was in the ethical and spiritual content which the thinkers and builders of the society poured into these forms," starting from the idea that the growth of the individual is "the central need of the race" and that society "is only the necessary framework for this growth" (p. 172). Status was to be fixed "not by his birth, but by his capacities and his inner nature" (p. 171).
Then he concedes that it never worked. "In practice we find that birth became the basis of the Varna," because "even the best society is always something of a machine and gravitates towards the material sign and standard," and building a social order on a test of inner nature "would have been in those times a difficult and vain endeavour" (p. 171). He goes on to state the law that all such systems obey. They "stiffen into a fixed hierarchy which cannot maintain permanently its purity or the utility it was meant to serve," turning into "a soulless form" that "prolongs itself in a state of corruption, degeneracy or oppressive formalism when the uses that justified it are no longer in existence." India "did not escape this general law; it was overtaken by these deficiencies, lost the true sense of the thing which it set out to embody and degenerated into a chaos of castes, developing evils which we are now much embarrassed to eliminate" (p. 172). In the polity essays he calls caste flatly "the historic and still tenacious though decadent institution" that pushed aside the guild system and "became the one basis of economic function everywhere" (p. 418).
What is striking is how much he gives away while making the case. He could have rested on the ideal and let the history look after itself. Instead he grants that practice went the other way almost from the start, and records on the following page that "heredity to the Indian mind has always ranked as a factor of the highest importance," read even "as a sign of the nature" carried over from earlier lives (p. 172). He keeps the ideal and the record apart without pretending the record was better than it was, and he does not soften the verdict on what the scheme turned into.
He follows the consequence into public life at the far end of the book. The castes, "multiplying themselves without any true necessity or true relation to the spiritual or the economic need of the country, became mere sacrosanct conventional divisions, a power for isolation," where once they had been "factors of a harmonious functioning of the total life-synthesis." Even here he is careful, denying that caste was historically a source of active political strife, before concluding that it became "a passive force of social division and of a stagnant compartmentalism obstructive to the reconstitution of a free and actively united life" (p. 433).
4. Untouchability
Everywhere else in the book Sri Aurobindo weighs. On untouchability he does not.
It falls on the other side of the line he drew on p. 89, among the things "in themselves mistaken and some of them indefensible, things weakening to our national life, degrading to our civilisation, dishonouring to our culture." He introduces it without preamble: "A flagrant example can be found in the treatment of our outcastes" (p. 89).
Three defences were current among his contemporaries, and he goes through all of them. Some called it an unavoidable error of circumstance. Others held it was the best solution available at the time. Others again wanted it continued, with modifications, as necessary to the social synthesis. "The contention is highly disputable. The excuse was there, but it is no justification for continuance" (pp. 89–90). Explaining how something came about, in other words, is not the same as licensing it to go on.
"A solution which condemns by segregation one sixth of the nation to permanent ignominy, continued filth, uncleanliness of the inner and outer life and a brutal animal existence instead of lifting them out of it is no solution but rather an acceptance of weakness and a constant wound to the social body and to its collective spiritual, intellectual, moral and material welfare." (p. 90)
What gives the passage its weight in a book otherwise busy defending Indian institutions is that the argument does not stay moral. "A social synthesis which can only live by making a permanent rule of the degradation of our fellowmen and countrymen stands condemned and foredoomed to decay and disturbance." The damage may be slow, working "by the subtler unobserved action of the law of Karma," but "once the light of Truth is let in on these dark spots, to perpetuate them is to maintain a seed of disruption and ruin our chances of eventual survival" (p. 90).
He is saying that untouchability is not a stain on an otherwise sound order but one of the causes of that order's collapse, and that a civilisation which needs a permanently degraded sixth of its people in order to work has lost the right to be defended in its own terms. From a writer whose entire project was the vindication of Indian culture against European attack, that is the most expensive thing in the book, and he says it without hedging.
5. Renunciation grew top-heavy
This chapter is easy to mistake for the very complaint Sri Aurobindo spent hundreds of pages refuting, so the difference has to be held firmly. He is not against renunciation. "There can be no great and complete culture without some element of asceticism in it," he writes, and Indian asceticism in particular he describes as "a noble effort towards a higher joy and an absolute possession of the spirit" rather than "a painful mortification of the flesh in morbid penance" (p. 131). What he objects to is how much of it there was, and where it was placed.
The older culture, as he tells it, had graded human possibility across the four classes and the four stages of life, so that renunciation came at the end of a life fully lived rather than as a standing alternative to living it. Then the balance broke. "Buddhism first gave an exaggerated and enormous extension to the ascetic ideal and the monastic impulse, erased the transition and upset the balance. Its victorious system left only two orders, the householder and the ascetic, the monk and the layman, an effect which subsists to the present day." This is the disturbance of dharma for which Buddhism is attacked in the Vishnu Purana under the veil of an apologue; it "weakened in the end the life of society by its tense exaggeration and its hard system of opposites" (p. 127). The damage lies in the erased transition. A ladder had been replaced by a pair of alternatives, and a pair of alternatives gives nobody anywhere to walk.
Later came "the lofty illusionism of Shankara," after which "life thenceforward was too much depreciated as an unreality or a relative phenomenon, in the end not worth living, not worth our assent to it and persistence in its motives" (p. 127).
"The ascetic ideal which in the ancient vigour of our culture was the fine spire of life mounting into the eternal existence became latterly its top-heavy dome, and tended under the weight of its bare and imposing sublimity to crush the rest of the edifice." (p. 128)
The sharper half of the argument is about who took it up. An ideal that suits a few becomes destructive when pressed on everyone. "Practised not by the comparatively few who are called to it, but preached in its extreme form to all and adopted by unfit thousands, its values may be debased, counterfeits may abound and the vital force of the community lose its elasticity and its forward spring." And then he declines the escape route: "It would be idle to pretend that such defects and untoward results have been absent in India" (p. 131). Elsewhere he names the cost precisely. A world-shunning asceticism "drew away the best minds who were thus lost to society instead of standing like the ancient Rishis as its spiritual support and its illuminating life-givers" (p. 39). His grievance is not that people renounced the world; it is that the people most capable of leading society were the ones who walked out of it.
He is careful, though, to keep the charge from swelling into the European caricature. Shankara's Maya "was not universally accepted, nor admitted without a struggle," and Shankara "was even denounced by his adversaries as a masked Buddhist"; popular sentiment "was never wholly shaped by it," inclining instead to the devotional religions that "see in life a play or Lila of God" (p. 128). He also has a pointed word for his own generation: "It is only recently that educated India accepted the ideas of English and German scholars, imagined for a time Shankara's Mayavada to be the one highest thing, if not the whole of our philosophy, and put it in a place of exclusive prominence" (p. 128). The idea that Indian thought is essentially world-denying is, on his account, partly something Indians had learned from European scholarship and then repeated about themselves.
6. Religion turned outward
Here Sri Aurobindo turns on the reformers. The standard explanation of India's decline in his lifetime, common to Brahmo and liberal-nationalist opinion, was that India had spent too much of herself on religion and too little on practical life. He accepts the fact of the decline and rejects the explanation.
He begins by refusing a consolation that was available to any nationalist. Against the poetic line that India's fall did not matter because the dust she lay in was sacred, he writes: "The fall, the failure does matter, and to lie in the dust is no sound position for man or nation" (p. 38). Having granted that much, he disputes the cause:
"If the majority of Indians had indeed made the whole of their lives religion in the true sense of the word, we should not be where we are now; it was because their public life became most irreligious, egoistic, self-seeking, materialistic that they fell." (p. 39)
Two things had genuinely gone wrong, he thought. On one side, "an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an excessive externalism of ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship." On the other, "a too world-shunning asceticism." But both are symptoms. "The root of the matter was the dwindling of the spiritual impulse in its generality and broadness, the decline of intellectual activity and freedom, the waning of great ideals, the loss of the gust of life" (p. 39). The same collapse as in the first two chapters, described from the religious side.
Much of this turns on a definition, and he says so himself. "Perhaps there was too much of religion in one sense; the word is English, smacks too much of things external such as creeds, rites, an external piety; there is no one Indian equivalent." Take religion instead to mean the effort "to know and live in the highest self" and "to raise life in all its parts to the divinest possible values," and the conclusion changes: "there was not too much of religion, but rather too little of it, and in what there was, a too one-sided and therefore an insufficiently ample tendency" (p. 39). The English word runs the outward machinery and the inward aim together under one heading. India had a surfeit of the first and a shortage of the second, and a vocabulary that could not tell them apart made the diagnosis impossible.
The distinction has more behind it than a choice of words. It rests on the doctrine of adhikara, the graded fitness of different people for different approaches, which he calls essential to understanding Indian religion at all (p. 220). Indian religion, as he reads it, built its ceremony, symbol and outward rule deliberately, for people at the earliest stage of development. He defends these as having "their concealed truth and their psychic value" and as "indispensable in this stage for the development and difficult awakening of the soul shrouded in the ignorance of material Nature," even where they look to a more developed mind like "an ignorant or half awakened religionism" (p. 221).
He is not attacking ritual, then, and not attacking popular religion. He is attacking a civilisation that designed ritual as a first step and let it become the last one.
7. The ideal didn’t reach society
Of the eight, this is the one that costs him most, and he states it plainly at the close of "Is India Civilised?". India realised her highest ideas inwardly, in individuals, and never carried them into the arrangement of common life. "India's internal and individual seeking of them was earnest, powerful, effective. But the application in the collective life of society was subjected to serious reserves. Never sufficiently bold and thoroughgoing, it became more and more limited and halting when the life-force declined in her peoples." (p. 91)
The other seven describe things that went wrong over time. This one was there from early on and was never made good. He grants that the gap "has pursued all human living and was not peculiar to India," but holds that here "the dissonance became especially marked with the lapse of time and it put at last on our society a growing stamp of weakness and failure." There had been "a large effort in the beginning at some kind of synthesis between the inner ideal and the outer life; but a static regulation of society was its latter end," with "an increasing element of strict bondage and minute division and fissiparous complexity in the social mass" (p. 91). "The great Vedantic ideals of freedom, unity and the godhead in man were left to the inner spiritual effort of individuals." (p. 91)
The damage in that sentence comes from his own premises, which is what makes it hard to answer. A tradition had found the divine in every human being and made the discovery the foundation of its philosophy, and the society it produced was stratified by birth and closed to revision. The doctrine was never turned into an institution. Chapters three and four are this general charge in particular form: if the godhead is in every man, then caste by birth and permanent untouchability are not only cruel, they contradict what the same civilisation was teaching upstairs.
The consequence he states without softening. When Islam and then Europe arrived, "the later Hindu society was content with an imprisoned and static self-preservation, a mere permission to live." India lasted. "Duration, survival was achieved, but not in the end a really secure and vital duration, not a great, robust and victorious survival" (p. 91). Merely continuing is no defence; a civilisation that survives by shrinking has lost the argument while remaining alive.
8. India could not unite herself
The essays on polity came last, and they apply the same reasoning to the state. Sri Aurobindo thought India's political genius was federal. The underlying principle of her system was "a synthesis of communal autonomies, the autonomy of the village, of the town and capital city, of the caste, guild, family, kula, religious community, regional unit," with the kingdom as the frame holding these together "in a free and living organic system" (p. 432).
The imperial version was the Chakravarti, "a uniting imperial rule, uniting without destroying the autonomy of India's many kingdoms and peoples, from sea to sea," in which the suzerain was "not allowed by the Dharma" to destroy the liberties of the peoples under him, "nor to dethrone or annihilate their royal houses or replace their archons by his officials and governors" (pp. 434–435).
He does not pretend this was ever achieved. "There is no historical evidence that this ideal was ever successfully carried into execution," he writes; when Alexander came there was no united empire to meet him (p. 436). The ideal stayed an ideal, which is chapter seven appearing again in political dress.
What history produced instead was centralisation, and his account of its effects is a piece of political mechanics rather than a lament. Centralised rule tends, "if not actively to destroy, still to wear down and weaken the vigour of the subordinated autonomies," so that whenever the centre grew weak, regional autonomy came back destructively instead of working as part of a federation. The village community kept some of its vigour but, "losing the larger national sense, was willing to accept any indigenous or foreign rule that respected its own self-sufficient narrow life" (p. 433). Local bodies that survive by ignoring the centre cannot be summoned by it, and a state in that position has nothing to call on when it is invaded. He applies the test to the Mughals with some care.
The empire was magnificent, and "in spite of Aurangzeb's fanatical zeal, infinitely more liberal and tolerant in religion than any mediaeval or contemporary European kingdom or empire." But Akbar's attempt to build a common political patriotism was "foredoomed to failure," because an autocratic empire cannot manufacture such a thing by recruiting princes and nobles into imperial service: "the living assent of the people was needed and that remained passive for want of awakening political ideals and institutions." So it "failed like the empires before it, more disastrously even, and in the same way, crumbling not by external attack but by internal disintegration" (p. 443). Underneath lay the harder problem he had already named, "the struggle between two civilisations, one ancient and indigenous, the other mediaeval and brought in from outside," each carrying a powerful religion (p. 442).
The Hindu revivals get no easier treatment. The Maratha movement, inspired by Ramdas and shaped by Shivaji, "was an attempt to restore what could still be understood or remembered of the ancient form and spirit, but it failed, as all attempts to revive the past must fail"; its bid for empire "was inspired by a regional patriotism that failed to enlarge itself beyond its own limits and awaken to the living ideal of a united India" (pp. 443–444). The Sikh Khalsa he rated more original, "a premature drive towards an entrance into the third or spiritual stage of human society," but it "could not create between the spirit and the external life the transmitting medium of a rich creative thought and culture," and so "began and ended within narrow local limits, achieved intensity but no power of expansion" (p. 444). A missing medium between spirit and life: the same thing he had been describing since the first chapter.
What he thought of the cures on offer
The eight above are criticisms of Indian culture. A further strand of the book is aimed elsewhere, at the two remedies then circulating among educated Indians, and he had no patience with either.
The first was wholesale modernisation. He describes the earliest Western-educated generation as "intensely patriotic in motive," yet "denationalised in their mental attitude," having "admitted practically, if not in set opinion, the occidental view of our past culture as only a half-civilisation." Their method "was, as we now recognise, a false method, an anglicised India is a thing we can no longer view as either possible or desirable , and it could only, if pursued to the end, have made us painful copyists, clumsy followers always stumbling in the wake of European evolution and always fifty years behind it" (p. 19). His objection is not that the ideas were foreign. It is that imitation guarantees you arrive late.
The second was orthodox revivalism, which he treats with more contempt than he ever shows Archer. There were, he writes, "plenty of Indians now who are for a stubbornly static defence, and whatever aggressiveness they put into it consists in a rather vulgar and unthinking cultural Chauvinism which holds that whatever we have is good for us because it is Indian or even that whatever is in India is best, because it is the creation of the Rishis" , as though "all the later clumsy and chaotic developments were laid down by those much misused, much misapplied and often very much forged founders of our culture" (p. 75).
"It is a determination to live only on our past cultural capital, to eke it out, small as it has grown in our wasteful and incompetent hands, to the last anna: but to live on our capital without using it for fresh gains is to end in bankruptcy and pauperism." (p. 75)
What worries him about national pride is what it does to the will. "Our sense of the greatness of our past must not be made a fatally hypnotising lure to inertia; it should be rather an inspiration to renewed and greater achievement" (p. 87). And: "There cannot be a healthy and victorious survival if we make of the past a fetish instead of an inspiring impulse" (pp. 90–91).
The muddle between the two positions impressed him no more. Unassimilated borrowing produces "an unintelligent mixture" of "rash, crude and undigested borrowings" (p. 78), and the intellectual result is likely to resemble "the strangely assorted half-European, half-Indian dress which we now put upon our bodies" (p. 22). What he wanted was neither imitation nor restoration but new creation, and his example is Vivekananda: a "preservation by reconstruction" that keeps old forms where they can be revived and drops the ones that cannot (pp. 21–22).
What the eight amount to
Read together, the eight say one thing in eight places. India did not fail because her ideals were wrong. She failed because she stopped putting them into practice, and then built defences around the place where she had stopped. Enquiry died; the forms already in existence hardened; the two largest of them decayed into hereditary caste and the permanent degradation of a sixth of the population; the spiritual ideal itself went lopsided, heavy with renunciation at the top and merely ceremonial at the bottom; and so the best of Indian thought was never built into the way Indians actually lived, which in turn is why the country could never unite itself except by a centralisation that destroyed what it was uniting.
He holds himself to the same standard he applies to Europe, which is part of what gives the criticism its authority: "every culture suffers by the limitations or defects of its qualities and, an almost infallible consequence, by the exaggerations too of its qualities" (p. 234). Of India and Europe together: "We have both made mistakes, faltered in the true application of our ideals, been misled into unhealthy exaggerations" (p. 37).
Two things are worth remembering about how the book came into being. It was written month by month under the pressure of a live argument, and the running reply to Archer keeps crowding the criticism towards the margins, which is why the eight have to be gathered rather than read straight off the page. And Sri Aurobindo never regarded it as finished. Asked in 1949 about publishing A Defence of Indian Culture, he said it was an unfinished book, that he had meant to alter much of it and cut nearly all reference to Archer, and that it would need considerable alteration and some sort of conclusion before it could stand (p. 449). He never made the changes, and what we have is a defence still carrying the shape of the attack it was answering.
Even so, the self-criticism in it is the part that has worn best. Writing in the middle of a defence, at a moment when the whole weight of European opinion was pressing on Indian self-confidence, he was still willing to say that untouchability condemned the social order that permitted it, that the castes had become a stagnant compartmentalism, that Indian learning had petrified into Punditism, and that the greatest ideas his tradition had produced were never carried into the way Indians actually lived. Very little of that had to be said in order to answer Archer. He said it anyway.
What is left is an unusual kind of nationalist argument: a defence of Indian civilisation whose central claim is that India had not been too faithful to her own ideals but nowhere near faithful enough. The remedy follows from it exactly. "Correct what went wrong with us; apply our spirituality on broader and freer lines, be if possible not less but more spiritual than were our forefathers" (p. 38). And so does the test he thought India should be judged by: not what she had once achieved, but whether she could pull down the fences she had built around her own ideal (pp. 39–40).
