Sri Aurobindo's views on Rebuilding of Nation

Name: Gohil Hetalba C

Paper: 4 Indian Writing in English

M.A 2 SEM 1

Roll: 5

Topic: "Sri Aurobindo's views on Rebuilding of Nation "

Submitted To,

Dr Dilip Barad

Dept of English

Mk Bhavnagar University

Bhavnagar

Kshatriya Spirit

The Kshatriya of old must again take his rightful position in our social polity to discharge the first and foremost duty of defending its interests. The brain is impotent without the right arm of strength.

          What India needs especially at this moment is the aggressive virtues, the spirit of soaring idealism, bold creation, fearless resistance, courageous attack; of the passive tamasic spirit of inertia we have already too much. We need to cultivate another training and temperament, another habit of mind

 Yoga

 Individually, that is yoga; And how do we cultivate that other training and temperament? We can cultivate it on the individual or on the collective level. it means opening ourselves to a wider consciousness and a greater power; it means allowing them to fashion anew our hardly human nature.

Youth

Our call is to young India. It is the young who must be the builders of the new world—not those who accept the competitive individualism, the capitalism or the materialistic communism of the West as India's future ideal, not those who are enslaved to old religious formulas and cannot believe in the acceptance and transformation of life by the spirit, but all who are free in mind and heart to accept a completer truth and labor for a greater ideal.

                         “IF AGE BUT COULD

                  AND IF YOUTH  BUT  KNEW”

 Mingling of Past and Present

 It is education by which starting with the past and making full use of the present builds up a great nation. Whoever wishes to cut off the nation from its past is no friend of our national growth. Whoever fails to take advantage of the present is losing us the battle of life. We must therefore save for India that entire she has stored up of knowledge, character and noble thought in her immemorial past. We must acquire for her the best knowledge that Europe can give her and assimilate it to her own peculiar type of national temperament. We must introduce the best methods of teaching humanity has developed, whether modern or ancient. And all these we must harmonies into a system which will be impregnated with the spirit of self-reliance so as to build up men and not machines.

A German or French or English child will be taught something of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, because they are regarded as the root of European culture.But Indian epics, a hundred times richer and vaster in human experience, a thousand times more present in the Indian consciousness, will not be taught to an Indian child. Not to speak of other important texts such as the beautiful Tamil epics, Shilappadikaram and Manimekhalai. Even the Panchatantra and countless other highly educational collections of Indian stories—even folk stories—are ruled out.

The result is that young Indians are increasingly deprived from their rightful heritage, cut off from their deeper roots.

 It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light. No doubt we will win through, but we must not disguise from ourselves the fact that after these long years of subjection and its cramping and impairing effects a great inner as well as outer liberation and change, a vast inner and outer progress is needed if we are to fulfil India's true destiny.

Conclusion

          Indeed the harmony of the ancient culture was built up both of spirituality, philosophy, science, art and intellectual creation .It was never one-sided one as her western rulers wrongly supposed.