Sri Aurobindo did not consider the West as a model for India

Prithwindra Mukherjee commented on Prof. Reddy is a visionary who dreams of the unification of India and Pakistan

The specificity of an Indian - be he Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Jew - reminds me of "angaara shatadhautena malinatva na munchate": you may well wash a piece of coal for a hundred times, it will not rid the coal of its black hue. This specificity prevents Indian Jews settled in the Promised Land from getting assimilated to the local population. This undefined specificity makes us feel closer to the Muslims from Bangladesh or Pakistan than from elsewhere.
Some kind of an intuition had helped the colonial administration stick to the vision of a cultural unity that was the characteristics of the erstwhile British India. Champions of "divide and rule" policy issuing bills favourable to the Partition of Bengal, these administrators were capable of such paradoxical urges also.
Behind the present disparity mostly in the name of religion, deeper interests in the name of survival will lead us first of all to a Federation of the erstwhile British Indian model, consolidated and expanded into at least a common entity like the European or the African Union, leading a harmonious relationship with the neighbouring Yellow Union. Prithwindra Mukherjee

Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology - Page 72 - Lewis Spence - 2003 - Preview - More editions With the approval of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the ashram at Pondicherry inaugurated many 'Sri Aurobindo Action' centers throughout India, and Aurobindo centers were also established in most major European cities and...

The Religious, the Spiritual, and the Secular: Auroville and ... - Page 79 - Robert Neil Minor - 1999 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo Ghose has written: "If an ancient Indian of the time of the Upanishad, of the Buddha, or the later classical age were ... a "National Committee for Sri Aurobindo Centenary" was formed under the Chair of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Savitri Unveiled: A Selection - Page iii Aurobindo Ghose, Syed Mehdi Imam - 1980 - Preview - More editions A Selection Aurobindo Ghose, Syed Mehdi Imam. twh *p4h mw ... The present work is an interpretation of the thought of one of the great sages our country has produced - Sri Aurobindo. I hope that it ... (Indira Gandhi) New Delhi, March 2.3, 1980.

Integral Relationships: A Manual for Men - Page 230 - Martin Ucik - 2010 - Preview 168 Sri Aurobindo, an Indian nationalist and freedom fighter, poet, philosopher, and yogi developed his vision and...

Conversations and Transformations: Toward a New Ethics of Self and ... - Page 272 - Ananta Kumar Giri - 2002 - Preview - More editions Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity ... "Social Policy and the Challenge of Post-industrial Transformation. ...1994c. "The Quest for a Universal Morality: Jurgen Habermas and Sri Aurobindo.

Hinterlands and Horizons: Excursions in Search of Amity - Page 51 - Margaret Chatterjee - 2002 - Preview - More editions 10. The Spirit of God, 10. 11. The reference to "realizing" ... Sri Aurobindo, Works, Sri Aurobiruio Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 15 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1965), 39. 33. Arya, III ...

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 ... Her thesis is that during the Partition crisis and after, Aurobindo "encountered" the world in a way typical of modernism, ...

Page 62 To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery. As I will argue below, this position makes Aurobindo resemble more a postmodernist in Habermas's description than a modernist in Sherer's. This point may be ...

The Lives of Sri Aurobindo - Page 306 - Peter Heehs - 2008 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo witnessed the rise of Modernism and found it difficult to align with his own ideas of beauty and significance. Reviewing an issue of Shama'a, an Indian cultural journal, in September 1920, he noted that modernist poetry, though it had...

Dwell - Dec 2004 - Page 94 Vol. 5, No. 2 - Magazine - Full view His espousal of a progressive modernism capable of assimilating the local vernacular resonated with Sri Aurobindo's vision of an evolving spiritual and aesthetic union. Raymond sought a design solution that would mitigate the effects of ...

Japanese Style: Designing With Nature's Beauty - Page 62 - Sunamita Lim - 2007 - Preview Golconde is on the American Institute of Architects Web site (aia.org) as the first, and one of the finest, enduring examples of International Modernism; it was completed in 1945. Nakashima was one of Sri Aurobindo's first disciples.

Altered Destinations: Self, Society, and Nation in India - Page 37 - Makarand R. Paranjape - 2009 - Preview - More editions I think that the Uttarpara Speech is central to the corpus of Aurobindo and to the literature on Indian nationalism. Communists, materialists, Macaulayites, mercenaries, secularists, modernists, post-modernists and anti-Sanatanis of various ... Sri Aurobindo did not consider the West as a model for India.

Indian Political Thought: Themes and Thinkers - Page 116 Prof. Mahendra Prasad Singh - 2011 - Preview - More editions Nationalism thus does not discount inequality and variations but has the capacity to dissolves the differences arising out of them. Aurobindo thus gave an argument very different from some of the modernists like E. Hobsbawm who used the ...

Indian Philosophy in English:From Renaissance to Independence - Page 14 Nalini Bhushan, Jay L. Garfield - 2011 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo was largely responsible for popularizing the līlāvāda, as opposed to māyāvāda, most clearly in The Life Divine. ... which the interplay of classical reference and Modernism in the development of Indian cultural identity works itself out ...

Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of ... - Page 90 - Anthony D. Smith - 1998 - Preview - More editions ... it makes it very difficult to do justice to the role of influential cultural nationalists like Yeats, Ahad Ha'am or Aurobindo, or of ... religious models and traditions, but given a new activist social and political form through 90 Varieties of modernism.

Reading Gandhi in the Twenty-First Century - Niranjan Ramakrishnan - 2013 - Preview - More editions This book explores how ideas Gandhi expressed over a century ago can be applied today to issues from terrorism to the environment, globalization to the 'Clash of Civilizations.

Religion and Ecology in India and Southeast Asia - Page 66 - David L Gosling - 2013 - Preview - More editions In other respects, however, Anna Hazare appears less Gandhian than, say, Sunderlal Bahuguna, who challenged the entire industrial-commercial onslaught against the forests. Hazare has more in common with Chandi Prasad Bhatt, who has ...

Routledge Handbook of Indian Politics - Page 183 Atul Kohli, Prerna Singh - 2013 - Preview - More editions Anti-corruption and Anna Hazare In response to these cases, a number of individuals, many of whom had been involved in anti-corruption activities in the past, began to coalesce into a new national movement. At the center of this movement...   

Applications of Dialogical Self Theory: New Directions for Child ... - Issue 137 - Hubert J. Hermans - 2012 - Preview - More editions See also Collective identity; Self India: Anna Hazare's anticorruption movement in; anticorruption movement using passion of nationalism in; DST for framing collective identity and sense of self in; Gandhi's ideals of satyagraha forming social ...

International Management: Explorations Across Cultures - Page 180 - Elizabeth M Christopher - 2012 - Preview - More editions In India in April 2011 Anna Hazare, aged 74, began a 'fast unto death' in protest against corruption within the United Progressive Alliance ... 180 exploring International operations and activities Beyond Maslow: the case of Anna Hazare in...

The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu - Page xxii - Meera Nanda - 2011 - Preview - More editions IAC turned to two men to rally support for their cause— Baba Ramdev, a prominent tele‐yogi and Ayurvedic healer with millions of admirers, especially among the lower-middle classes in small towns, and Anna Hazare, the Gandhian ...

India today international - Volume 23 - Page 176 1998 - They are not teaching Mahatma Gandhi and Aurobindo in West Bengal and Kerala. If somebody says teach something Indian, he is immediately called ... Look at Anna Hazare. All international organisations are inviting him. INDIA TOUAY ...

India International Centre quarterly - Volume 24 - Page 109 - India International Centre - 1997 - ... an at once liberating and transcendent worldview through Shantiniketan, Shri Aurobindo's leaving the political mainstream ... Bindeshwari Pathak who founded the Sulabh International, Anna Hazare of the Ralegan Siddhi fame and others.

Foundations of Indian Psychology Volume 1: Theories and Concepts - Page 74 - Cornelissen R. M. Matthijs - 2011 - Preview The Mental Mind is what Sri Aurobindo calls in Savitri the Self of Mind, the Cosmic or Universal Mind. The Vital Mind is the Universal Life's Mind and the Physical Mind is the one which manifests the physicality of the Universe. Human mind is ... 

Some thoughts on Darwin Day: Centre Right India by Aravindan Neelakandan - Later Jesuit and anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin speculatively and geologist Vernadsky more emphatically ponder over the subject of how human evolution is qualitatively different and give us the concept of ‘noosphere’. And in Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Savitri’, evolution becomes an epic song of spiritual odyssey. In the poetry of Tamil poet Bharathi are lines which are artistic premonition of Gaia. 

ABA Journal - Feb 1962 - Page 155 Vol. 48, No. 2 - Magazine - Full view In his stimulating book, The Uses of the Past, Herbert Muller emphasizes the importance of values in these words: Our business as rational beings is not to argue for what is going to be but to strive for what ought to be . . . It is this pursuit of truth ...

Battle the forces of casteism, illiberalism, and injustice

Caste Wars in Tamil Nadu: a Sanghathan Perspective from Centre Right India by Aravindan Neelakandan

Thus Hindutva has both ideological as well as institutional capacity to battle the forces of casteism which have been unleashed by the Smrithi-based psyche that centuries of social stagnation has produced. In Tamil Nadu context, this psyche has been reinforced by perverted racism of Dravidian politics which has only added anti-Brahminical hatred to the Dalit hatred in the name of social reform movement. To reach out to the Dalits who have been singled out by Dravidian casteists and who have been denied justice for centuries by Hindu society, Hindu Sanghathanists can take a cue from that film of 1980s.

It is time to create a popular spiritual culture that is based on the Vedantic ideal of Integral Humanism – all humanity is part of the same Divinity. Scriptural barriers become meaningless before the vision of compassion of the Mother. If Hindutva movement can take this message forcefully through all possible media to all sections of the society and liberate caste-Hindus from the shackles of their casteism and Dalit Hindus from the injustice they are suffering from the mindset of the caste Hindus that shall be the day Hindu Sanghathan has arrived in this ancient land of Tamils.

Gurcharan das exposes the illiberalism at the core of India's ruling caste of dynasts and bureaucrats from Shadow Warrior by nizhal yoddha The Economist Modern India: Liberal worries

India desperately needs a fiercer push for liberal capitalism. Mr Das calls his new book “India Grows at Night”, a clarion call for such ideas. He wants a pro-market political party to be founded (like the Swatantra centre-right movement of the 1960s—see article) and for the dysfunctional, “flailing” state to be shrunk and improved. The author is likely to be ignored, even if his case is broadly convincing.

India enjoys a rich liberal heritage. For every story about feudalism, caste repression and the ongoing backwardness of a largely rural country, Mr Das counters with optimism about a bright, fast-rising, urban middle class. Indian society, he says, is by nature strong, free and tolerant…

The book raises some excellent questions. But what is missing, perhaps surprisingly given Mr Das’s connections, is a real insider’s account of why the sort of ideas he is promoting so often fail to get implemented. Relatively few Indians claim to be avowed classic liberals, yet a clutch of powerful people, including the current prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and others in cabinet, would agree with much of Mr Das’s argument.

The Hindu : Book Review : Integration of the sacred and the secular 6 Mar 2007 – PREMA NANDAKUMAR - ANCESTRAL VOICES - Reflections on Vedic, Classical and Bhakti Poetry: Ramesh Chandra Shah

Nearer our times we have Sri Aurobindo writing poetry as part of his `Yoga sadhana'. Ramesh Chandra Shah asks himself: "How exactly is Yoga, that realm of silent wordless inward action related to the same man's unrelenting passion for the order of words?" Relation there must be, a connection with our earliest dawns but which we have lost by limiting our visions to our own "egoistic shells of separativity." These ideas and more are woven with expertise by Shah in a seamless argument. 

Ancestral Voices: Reflections on Vedic, Classical and Bhakti Poetry - Page 32 - Ramesh Chandra Shah - 2006 - According to Sri Aurobindo, 'an itihasa was an ancient historical or legendary ...

Plain & Simple: Sri Aurobindo views the adventure of ...

Yeats and Eliot: perspectives on India Ramesh Chandra Shah - 1983 - 174 pages - This is not entirely unjustified, because Samkaric monism does tend to world-negation in a way that the original Vedanta doesn't. That is why Sri Aurobindo ... 7:48 PM 

A Writer in the Role of a Teacher

What happens to our culture conditioning – our actual cultural boundaries when we come to face the ‘final facts’? Doesn’t it demonstrate conclusively the fact, poetry can sometimes speak across cultures and thus acquiring a universal voice, make its unique contribution towards realisation of what Sri Aurobindo calls ‘the ideal of Human Unity’.

And it’s not just poetry which has this potential: fictional and other kinds of creative prose too can incarnate and enact a similar force and capability. Only he can be credited with the capacity of real ‘seeing’ who can become everybody, i.e. who can empathise with and embody all sorts of human types and states of being. Now, if you consider this in depth, you come to understand how great novelists and dramatists can produce such more than real-life impact upon you. It is precisely by dint of their personally acquired and superior knowledge by – indwelling, i.e. by their powers of empathy that they are enabled to reproduce the illusion of actual life – situations and actual characters which affect you like real-life events. The competent teacher of literature has to re-enact this capacity of literature experientially and not just through academically ‘correct’ procedures. Correctness after all is a rather tame ideal and there is a yawning gulf between mere correctness and real clarity of understanding. There in lies the challenge, before the real teacher. Professor Ramesh Chandra Shah, Padmashri, is an eminent scholar, thinker, creative writer and critic. Dialogue (A quarterly journal of Astha Bharati) - Astha Bharati

Interview with Ian Bogost - anotherheideggerblog Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Here I find McLuhan's invitation to investigate the properties of specific technologies to be liberating... not to mention a hell of a lot clearer! ... (As a sidenote, McLuhan does take things too far when he insists that the content of media doesn't matter)] 10:42 AM