Ancient Indian Wisdom and Contemporary Challenges
Kireet Joshi
The hope built up by the Reason that humanity can be
so rationally governed that liberty, equality and fraternity can be actualized in
the life of humanity has now been demonstrably proved to be unrealisable, since
rationality is unable to provide equality, even at the minimum level, without strangulating
freedom, and fraternity does not find even an elbow room when Reason goes on
constructing, mechanising and dehumanising edifices. And yet it is not possible
to remain reconciled with the failures of the powers of Reason and to forget
the dreams of freedom, unity and brotherhood. The soul of humanity cries out to
look for the means by which the ideals of progress can be actualised as
urgently as possible…
We may hasten to add that while the importance of
the ancient wisdom of India
is to be underlined, we should not be blind to the need of exploring other systems
of wisdom and even new knowledge. Ancient Indian wisdom has always counselled
us to rise higher and higher and to be always more and more luminous, unfettered
by the past and any dogmas or preconceived beliefs. In India , we speak
of the Aryan spirit, and the Aryan spirit is not something narrow or communal or
racial, but the spirit of the free man that wants to labour and work with wisdom
and with one supreme motive of loka sangrah, the motive of preserving
and creating solidarity and unity of the people. (Reproduced from the author’s
book entitled Indian Identity and Cultural Continuity, 2011, pp. 35-49,
with the kind permission of The Mother’s Institute of Research, New Delhi) Sraddha
February 2012 Sri Aurobindo Centre for Research in Social
Sciences, Kolkata
Peter Heehs - Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes & Problems
in Indian Historiography Peter Heehs [published
in History and
Theory 42 (May 2003), pp.169-195 © Wesleyan University 2003 ISSN:
0018-2656]
Such scholars stress Aurobindo’s nationalistic
premises but miss the broader thrust of his arguments… The approach of the
nationalists was a product of their age, and much of it is obsolete. Their
essentializing of the Indian soul, for instance, is unjustifiable on historical
or anthropological grounds, and politically dangerous. On the other hand, the
dissolution of all cultural distinctiveness in the name of political stability,
which Said seems sometimes to propose,[109] would also be bad social science and would not provide
a solution to our political problems.
Writers like Chatterji, Tagore and
Aurobindo laid stress on India ’s
distinctiveness because it seemed threatened by absorption into a universalized Europe . But they were also internationalists who knew and
respected Europe and worked for
intercultural understanding.[110] Their defenders and detractors lay stress on their
essentialism, but they themselves went beyond it, contesting the validity of
Eurocentrism without promoting an equally imperfect Indocentrism. Pondicherry, India
11:14 AM
"Sri Aurobindo on Hinduism" by Peter Heehs --
reviewed by Raman Reddy 12 Aug 2010 – The following paragraph is
from a booklet by Peter Heehs entitled Sri Aurobindo on Hinduism and
published by the Sri Aurobindo Society, ...
What is postcolonial
predicament? Ranabir Samaddar, EPW
One of the reasons behind this return to antiquity
in the metropolitan world today is possibly due to an ahistorical notion of
critique, produced from within the realm of theory, that delinks knowledge from
social practices and makes critique an element in the self-referential cycle of
ideas and discourses, be they philosophical, literary, or scientific. This was the
reason why Marx broke with this idea of critique, argued that we must begin
critique by arms, expounded the famous theses eleven, in particular the 11th
thesis (1845), wrote the critique of political economy, and grounded critique
in modern empirical reality to show the inexhaustible nature of the reality that
a formal discipline cannot subsume. Knowledge, as distinct from theory, which
now appears rechristened as critique, on the other hand, progresses in a
continuously developing frame of ideas and material practices, perched on the
borderlines of these two domains. The question of limits, plasticity, etc, is
linked to this borderline existence. Therefore it is not enough to assimilate
humanities with critique or criticism unless we know what we are critiquing and
the limits we are reflecting thereby, the limits produced by the outside – the
reality – that we have to invoke in order to produce a critique. Through all
these we have before us emerging two worlds or styles of knowledge: In one, the
self-referential nature of producing knowledge is supreme, in the other the
production of data is supreme leaving no time for self-referential exercises in
terms of genealogy of knowledge, perhaps to its own good…
In our time Foucault became the American Foucault
through translation inasmuch as Tagore became the mystic Oriental in Europe , and Karl Marx became the academic Marx in the
Anglo-American universities. This is because in this site called translation there
is no engagement with the world and the milieu these figures represent or
represented. If there were some, it was only engagement with discourses. There
are all kinds of translation programmes (perhaps the most under-researched ones
by translation theorists are the Foreign Language Publishing Houses in erstwhile
socialist countries such as the Soviet Union ,
possibly the largest), not only translation between languages but between mediums
also. Therefore there cannot be any general theory of translation, save the
fact that it is part of the logistics of the global production of knowledge.
Good post, Tusar! the awakened Soul's desire is very different from what the 'reasoning' mind's agenda is.
ReplyDeleteI know this because She who is awake-in-me/ME hears the cries of the world.
In my blog I share what it's like to live (in my skin) with this terrible burden.