Tilak and Sri Aurobindo advocated a mass base for the Congress

Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic Explorations - Page 16 - V R Mehta, Thomas Pantham - 2006 - Preview - More editions It is thus clear that Aurobindo relied on the Hindu religious texts and supernatural characters principally to create and sustain the nationalist zeal... And, since the constituency of the nationalist agitation against the 1905 Partition of Bengal was confined to the Hindu bhadralok, ...

Ideologies And Institutions In Indian Politics - Page 11 - Mahendra Prasad Singh, Rekha Saxena - 1998 - Preview Moreover, what inspired revolutionary terrorism in Bengal and elsewhere was the ancient Indian past and as an ideologue of this tradition Aurobindo merely articulated the bhadralok search for identity in the past. Not only did he disregard the ...

Political thought in modern India - Page 124 - Thomas Pantham, Kenneth L. Deutsch - 1986 - Aurobindo exposed the reality behind the illusion and emphasised the significance of politics as a means of national regeneration. ... effect of blinding the masses to the social and economic chasm that separated them from the bhadralok and eliciting their full support for a movement that was launched ... 

Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947 - Page 13 - Joya Chatterji - 2002 - Preview - More editions Just as the bhadralok had one foot in the city and the other in the countryside, so their nationalism, though radiating outward from ... Ghosh's rather curious and exceptionally westernised upbringing, see A. B. Purani, The Life of Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo and his contemporary thinkers - Page 66 - Indrani Sanyal, Krishna Roy, Jadavpur University - 2007 - This imported concept of "bhadralok" received attention from some of our contemporary scholars who concluded that the ... Karl Marx himself considered the birth of an English-educated middle-class

Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion - Page 165 Elleke Boehmer, Stephen Morton - 2011 - Preview - More editions Future Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad met Aurobindo Ghose “on two or three occasions” and “was attracted to revolutionary politics and joined ... Most members of terrorist groups came from the Bengali bhadralok (“respectable people”).

Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920: Resistance ... - Page 58 - Elleke Boehmer - 2005 - Preview - More editions The bhadralok's transactive nationalism was significantly informed by the internationalized political context of empire, itself moulded by nationalist ... In relation to Nivedita and Aurobindo, these influences will be examined in the next chapter.

A History of India - Page 281 - Burton Stein, David Arnold - 2010 - Preview - More editions Like the Bengal bhadralok, Maratha brahmans of Bombay province found their elite standing contested by ... Bombs were occasionally deployed by the revolutionary groups that began to be formed under leaders such as Aurobindo Ghosh.

Sri Aurobindo: The harmony of virtue; early cultural writings - Page 120 - Aurobindo Ghose - 1972 - Social Reform Reform is not an excellent thing in itself as many Europeanised intellects imagine; neither is it always safe and good to stand unmoved in the ancient paths as the orthodox obstinately believe. Reform is ...

Contemporary relevance of Sri Aurobindo - Page 55 - Kishor Gandhi - 1973 - It was this view and not any aversion to social reform per se, that led Sri Aurobindo to attack the moderate leadership for their misplaced obsession with social problems. We may turn now to his contribution to the theory ...

Sri Aurobindo: a biography and a history - Page 325 - K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar - 1985 - Sri Aurobindo therefore rightly insisted that the Reforms were a mockery and a trap, and that the cooperation expected from the people was not what true cooperation should be but merely a pitiful parody of the same: Co-operation can only be ...

Life and Works of Sri Aurobindo - Page 176 - S.R. Sharma - 2003 - Here a word may be added about the criticism levelled against Sri Aurobindo and other Radical leaders that they neglected the important issue of social reform. It is true that they did not lay much emphasis upon this aspect of public life which ...

Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic Explorations - Page 23 V R Mehta, Thomas Pantham - 2006 - Preview - More editions Tilak … So deep-rooted was his commitment that he blamed Max Mueller who defended movements for reform in Hinduism as a 'sentimental foreigner and [a] misguided ... Aurobindo Ghose's article 'Wither India' in Bande Mataram, 9 August 1907.

Political Thought and Leadership of Lokmanya Tilak - Page 333 N. R. Inamdar - 1983 - Preview - More editions It was Tilak's view that "the political movement could not afford to cut itself off from the great mass of the nation or split itself into warring factions by premature association of the social reform question with politics". Aurobindo Ghosh who had...

The Social Message of the Gita: Symbolized as Lokasaṁgraha : ... - Page 101 - Satya P. Agarwal - 1995 - Preview Aurobindo characterized social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, and all attempts towards the moral improvement of the race "without aiming first and foremost at political freedom", as Aravindasya Lokasamgraha sandesah ...

The Dialogue With Death (Sri Aurobindo`S Savitri, A Mystical Approach) - Page 353 - Rohit Mehta - 2003 - Preview - More editions All social changes, whether reforms or so-called revolutions, are of this nature. They are mere modification in the patterns that exist. Fundamental changes always come from the individual. Society, in the ultimate analysis is static; it is the ...

Tradition and the Rhetoric of Right: Popular Political Argument in ... - Page 61 - David J. Lorenzo - 1999 - Preview One analyst of Aurobindo's political activities, Jean Sherer, argues that only the modernist aspects of Aurobindo's early ... conception) and insisted on political independence for India without the preconditions of individual and social reform.

Through a Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination - Page 225 -John Charles Hawley - 1996 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo, as Reddy maintains, "steers clear of two extreme views of evil. The first extreme ... "Is it possible," wonders O'Connor, "that Aurobindo's impact might delay or even impede the progress of social reform in India" (318)? Works Cited ...

Evolutionary, Spiritual Conceptions of Life - Sri Aurobindo, ... - Page 32 - Michael Leicht - 2008 - Preview What is for me problematic, is Aurobindo's background in this topic. He is convinced that religious practice and not intellectual advancement could reform a man and put him on the spiritual path. This anti-Enlightenment philosophy stance is for ...

Sri Aurobindo and Karl Marx: Integral Sociology and Dialectical ... - Page 3 - Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya - 1988 - Preview It was from Comte, Saint-'Simon, Fourier and Owen that he [Marx] inherited his practical zeal for social and political reform. His insistence on the ... Sri Aurobindo's Approach Sri Aurobindo's concept of sociology is in a sense very unorthodox. True...

Principles Of Education - Page 294 - S.S. Chandra, Rajendra Kumar Sharma - 2004 - Preview - More editions Swami Dayanand insisted upon reforming education to suit the educational pattern that existed in ancient times. ... efforts, all other educational philosophers of the time, including Sri Aurobindo, Vivekanand, etc., favoured the modification of the ...

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion - Page 480 - Jeffrey J. Kripal - 2007 - Preview - More editions Although Chaudhuri was not a major influence on either Murphy or Price, it is interesting to note that his philosophical system, like Esalen's, was an artful synthesis of Aurobindo's Tantric yoga, evolutionary biology, the Western practice of social reform, and psychoanalysis.

Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion - Page 104 - Hugh B. Urban - 2007 - Preview - More editions I would argue, however, that Aurobindo's solution is better understood as another example of a strategy for dealing with a situation. Like Rammohun Roy's paradoxical use of the Mahanirvana Tantra in the service of his own cultural reforms,...

Tagores Chitra And Aurobindos SavitriA Comparative Study - Page 19 - Ketki N. Pandya - 2004 - Preview And a few years later when Tagore met Aurobindo at the latter's ashram, he wrote: Aurobindo, accept the salutation of Rabindra. He also published an Open Letter to My Countrymen, in which he opposed the Minto-Morley reforms.

Gandhi's Tiger and Sita's Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and ... - Page 48 - Ruth Vanita - 2005 - Preview - More editions Sri Aurobindo, studying in England, was not taught English literature as part of his formal education. ... Nineteenth- and twentieth century developments in Hinduism, especially reform movements such as the Brahmo

Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology - Volume 3 - Page 110 - K. M. George - 1992 - Preview - More editions East and West meet in many ways in the English epic of Sri Aurobindo and the reflective prose of Radhakrishnan and the plays of ... It was as much inward as outward and sought to understand and learn rather than to judge or reform. In all his ...

Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language - Page 92 - Srinivas Aravamudan - 2005 - Preview - More editions Opposing the compromising tactics of “moderate” leaders such as Pherozeshah Mehta who wanted incremental reforms, Aurobindo allied himself with the “extremist” wing of Lokmanya Tilak, Lajpat Rai, and Bepin Pal, who preached full ...

The White Woman's Other Burden: West Women and South Asia During ... - Page 210 - Visakha Kumari Jayawardena - 1995 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo made his mark in nationalist circles with a series of articles (in 1893 and 1894) entitled New Lamps for Old, which attacked the Indian National Congress policy of gradual constitutional reform. By the later 1890s Aurobindo had ...

The Idea of the Superman in the Plays of G.B. Shaw - Page 41 - D.K. Singh - 1994 - Preview For Sri Aurobindo, evolution does not mean merely addition of some new principle to those which are emergent. ... Shaw's views on politics and religion, on dictatorship and revolution, on marriage and divorce, penal reform and capital ...

Literature, Caste and Society: The Masks and Veils - Page 403 - S. Jeyaseela Stephen - 2006 - Preview Socio-Cultural Reforms in Bengal and the Indian National Movement : A Case Study of Prabartak Samgha in Nation ... the nation was passing through the momentous crdeal of fire, that with the blessing of Aurobindo Ghosh and Motilal Roy, ...

Science And the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore - Page 23 - David L. Gosling - 2007 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo Ghose Unlike most of the personalities who have so far been discussed, Sri Aurobindo was never the leader of an organized reform group, but his influence was quite extensive. He can conveniently be classified together with the ...

The Persistence of Religion: An Essay on Tantrism and Sri ... - Page 69 - Kees W. Bolle - 1971 - Preview - More editions An Essay on Tantrism and Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy Kees W. Bolle ... house of a potter. x) This text too gives evidence not of a social reform, but of a religious revaluation of "worldly" data, possible within the Tantric ritualization of the world.

Studies on Rabindranath Tagore - Volume 1 - Page 9 - Mohit Kumar Ray - 2004 - Preview - More editions Rabindranath did not relish the president's observations. Strongly criticising both Tagore and Dutt, Sri Aurobindo wrote in an article, "To attempt social reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming first and ...

Rebirth and Karma - Page 16 - Sri Aurobindo SA Ashram - 1992 - Preview There is a constant reforming of personality in new bodies, but this personality is a mutable creation of force at its work streaming forward in Time and never for a moment the same, and the ego-sense that makes us...

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: National Upsurge - Page 94 M. G. Chitkara - 2004 - Preview Aurobindo had his own vision of the Indian Renaissance which, he thought, had not yet emerged but the possibility of which came as a result ... The aim of reforms consisted in going back to real Hinduism by setting it free from later accretions.

World Religions and Islam: A Critical Study - Part 1 - Page 58 Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi - 2003 - Full view - More editions Still others who have made notable contributions to the renaissance were Rabindernath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Tilak and Gandhi Ji. Islamic values and beliefs indirectly influenced all of them. The earliest of the reform movements was the ...

Gurus and their followers: new religious reform movements in ... - Antony R. H. Copley - 2000 - This collection looks at the new religious reform movements that swept India in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Hinduism in Public and Private: Reform, Hindutva, Gender, and ... Antony Copley - 2009 - This volume investigates the nature of nationalism and modernization embraced by the nineteenth and twentieth-century religious reform movements and their relationship with contemporary Hindutva.

Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922: Occidental ... - Page 116 - Partha Mitter - 1995 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo Ghosh, soon to emerge as the theoretician of Hindu revolutionary politics, was a student in England a little ... Rao's reforms had turned Baroda into a modern state with an impressive record of literacy, especially female literacy.

National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema: 1947-1987 - Page 89 - Sumita S. Chakravarty - 1993 - Preview - More editions Made at the height of the freedom movement, the film makes obvious use of symbols such as the national anthem, the Bengali literary and social reform tradition (photographs of Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, Vivekananda), as well as references to ... Cultural History of Modern India - Page 89 - Dilip M. Menon - 2006 - Preview

The aim should be understanding of being and the world

Communication practicum from Auroville Radio by contact@aurovilleradio.org (Herman) Jan 17, 2013

This has been the fifth year running that communication and political science students from the American University of Paris have been coming to Auroville for their undergraduate practicum. Also for the past few years they have been joined by students from Linneaus University in Sweden. Auroville provides a perfect platform for the students with all the different projects and activities they can get involved in. To round of their 2-3 week visit they all gave a presentation of the work they have been doing in Auroville.

Lalit on Queens University & CEPT  from Auroville Radio by contact@aurovilleradio.org (Andrea) Jan 16, 2013

Auroville Integral Sustainability Institute shares the experience of hosting 2 different groups of visiting planning students from Queens University, Canada & CEPT, Ahmedabad - ‘It was very enriching for all’, says Lalit, Programme coordinator. Auroville being an inspiring & interdisciplinary learning field provided very conducive environment to experience a different way of life which gave them a very real life glimpse of integral life & sense of purpose.

“The Party” from Larval Subjects Jan 17, 2013

Among Heideggerians, for example, Heidegger research becomes an end in itself, whereas the aim should be understanding of being and the world.  Among the democratic party, perpetuation of the democratic party becomes an end in itself, rather than representing the interests of the people.  The first question we need to ask of any form of organization– and this is why we need anarcho-communism as a regulative ideal –is that of how we can insure that parties, groups, and organizations remain “complex, adaptive systems”, rather than becoming ends in themselves and machines of alienation.  How can we organize in a way that remains responsive to the alien and singular?

The second problem with group structures is of greater concern and has darker implications.  As I have argued for a number of years now, group identification has the structure of masculine sexuality (the left side of the diagram to the right).  I will not rehearse the intricacies of Lacan’s graph of sexuation here (readers who are curious can consult chapter 6 of The Democracy of Objects or my article “The Other Face of God“, .pdf)… Such was Zizek’s conclusion regarding the function of the symbolic figure of the Jew in anti-semitism.  Anti-semitism has nothing to do with real Jews, but is instead a fantasy structure designed to explain why the organic and harmonious communities dreamed of by conservative ideologies fail (today the figure of the Jew has been replaced by leftists and Middle Easterners).   

Most Overrated Philosopher Of The 20th Century Science 2.0 By Massimo Pigliucci January 16th 2013 Reprinted from Rationally Speaking, January 11, 2013 Willard van Orman Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bertrand Russell, &

Martin Heidegger, a major practitioner of the phenomenological and existentialist approaches in philosophy, buddy of the Nazi (the well! what the well!), and a top competitor with Derrida for most obscure philosophical writer of the 20th century. He talked a lot about Being (and Time).

Eric Schliesser Introduces Foucault from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Eric Schliesser follows last week’s ‘Philo of Economics’ with this week’s on “Foucault and the Invisible Hand”. Eric refers to Michel Foucault's treatment of Smith in “The Birth of Biopolitics”. While commenting on Smith's use of "invisible hand" in the Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN), Foucault insists that Smith is committed to the claim that:

“Everyone must be uncertain with regard to the collective outcome if this positive collective outcome is really to be expected. Being in the dark and the blindness of all the economic agents are absolutely necessary. The collective good must not be an objective... Invisibility is not just a fact arising from the imperfect nature of human intelligence which prevents people from realizing that there is a hand behind them which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own account. Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good” (Foucault 2008: 279-80).

Comment

I am not going to comment on Foucault’s general reasoning on Adam Smith’s use of the IH metaphor in this post.  His reasoning tends to be obscure. To argue that “human intelligence prevents people from realizing that there is a hand behind them which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own account” is a strange way of putting it. The “hand behind them which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own account” is either saying that “human intelligence” stops them fantasising about an IH that actually exists or prevents them fantasising about one that does not exist.  That is what makes philosophy such a tormented subject; it’s never really clear as to what they mean except by engaging in constant “deep thinking”. Those excellent teacher’s of philosophy (such as Eric Schliesser) are unfazed by textual ambiguity and are among the brightest and best of social scientists.  They are always stimulating when listened to in conversation or in seminars and stretch their student’s critical faculties…

I suggest Hayek’s defiant conjecture (Fatal Conceit) that knowing every action of 7 billion of people about matching possible choices among billions of products and services (36 billion choices in New York alone each minute of the day – only a few dozen choices for gatherer-hunter upper Amazonian tribes) is well beyond human comprehension or understanding, let alone practical even in a Providential fantasy of the imagination. Surely it is an extreme theological idea, even as a figure of speech. A Must Read New Book on Friedrich Hayek Eamonn Butler: “Friedrich Hayek: the ideas and influence of the libertarian economist”

The limits of Karl Polanyi’s anti-market approach in the struggle for economic democracy from The Memory Bank by Keith Hart Jan 16, 2013

I am a fully paid-up member of the Karl Polanyi fan club. In the past few years I have published, with my collaborators, a collection of essays on the significance of The Great Transformation for understanding our times (Blanc 2011, Holmes 2012) and have made him a canonical figure for my versions of economic anthropology, the human economy and the history of money. I have also published two short biographical articles on him. I have contributed in this way to the recent outpouring of new work on Polanyi to which this book is a significant addition. I am a believer, but some believers also have doubts. I still have reservations about a Polanyian strategy for achieving economic democracy and these are linked to his historical vision of “market society”.  Theories are good for some things and not for others and, in my view, the plural economy would be best served by a plural approach to theory and politics. But first let me summarise what I most value personally in what I have learned from Polanyi.

Most anthropologists take their lead from the academic work done by Polanyi and his collaborators at Columbia University after the war… Polanyi falls within this anti-market camp since he acknowledged Aristotle as his master and considered “the self-regulating market’s” contradictions to have been the principal cause of the twentieth-century’s horrors. A less apocalyptic version of socialism in the tradition of Saint-Simon acknowledges the social damage done by unfettered markets (what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”), but would not wish to do away with the wealth they produce… John Maynard Keynes produced the most impressive synthesis of liberalism and social democracy in the last century. Much recent writing on Polanyi would place him within this tendency rather than as a card-carrying anti-marketeer. He did recognize a role for the market and lined up with those who sought institutional means to correct capitalism’s ills… In either case, the post-war turn to social democracy or “embedded liberalism” – the apogee of national capitalism – was hardly anticipated by The Great Transformation. We should not repeat this error when we draw inspiration from Polanyi in the struggle for economic democracy today.   

09. Narad’s reading of The Mother on Savitri from Savitri 17 Jan 2013

Regarding a passage in Savitri in which Sri Aurobindo describes the universe as a play between He and She. "This whole wide world is only he and she," He, the Supreme in love with her, her servitor; She, the creative Force.

As one too great for him he worships her; … This whole wide world is only he and she. 

What a marvellous work! He goes into a completely different region, so much above thought! It's constant vision, it isn't something thought out—with thought everything becomes flat, hollow, empty, empty, just like a leaf; while this is full, the full content is there, alive.

A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs

To begin with, any successor must be someone who will swear personal loyalty to Manoj Das Gupta as against Sri Aurobindo. Some of the names being ...

Disciples - Sri Aurobindo Ashram - E-Library - Sri Aurobindo Ashram