Sri Aurobindo and the modern academic world

How does one make an estimate of Sri Aurobindo’s place in the modern academic world on his 150th birth anniversary? What are his singular contributions to intellectual history at the national and global level?

I shall argue that while the reception of Sri Aurobindo’s thought in the mainstream academia of India and the West has undergone a change after his passing, newer vistas like Global Studies, International Relations, Consciousness Studies, Cosmopolitanism, Indic Studies, and Integral Education may witness the growing influence of Sri Aurobindo in the academic world.

In his New Ways in English Literature (1917), Irish poet-critic James Cousins saw Sri Aurobindo as the harbinger of the poetry of the future. Aldous Huxley, the foremost novelist-thinker of the twentieth century and author of The Perennial Philosophy who had a great affinity with Indic traditions, cited the Master’s magnum opus The Life Divine as an extraordinary work of literature. Likewise, Nobel laureates Pearl S. Buck and Gabriela Mistral nominated Sri Aurobindo in 1949 for the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature.

Similar nominations were made by a group of eminent Indian academics and men of letters. Harvard professors of philosophy in the late 1940s recognised the world vision of Sri Aurobindo in philosophical terms. Dr S. Radhakrishnan, acclaimed philosopher-statesman of modern India and former President of the Indian Republic, called Sri Aurobindo “the greatest intellectual of our age”, and the distinguished historian R. C. Majumdar noted the outstanding contributions of Sri Aurobindo in the domain of Indian historiography, in particular the latter’s refutation of the so-called Aryan invasion theory that K. D. Sethna in later years would develop at considerable length in linguistic and archaeological terms.

The makers of modern India as well as leading politicians of all hues recognised Sri Aurobindo as a builder of modern India and his thought-vision worthy of study in the Indian university system. And yet Sri Aurobindo’s presence in mainstream Indian and Western academia today, barring notable exceptions, is evident by its absence. 

Generations of students in Indian higher education know about the philosopher K. C. Bhattacharya’s idea of Swaraj, M. K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, B. R. Ambedkar, and others. They know about the Western and Afro-Asian contributions to the decolonisation of the mind; they have read with profit the slave narratives of the United States and the Indian Subaltern historiography, as well as the works of Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak, Michel Foucault, and Walter Benjamin. 

But they do not hear the voice of Sri Aurobindo whose pioneering contributions in The Foundations of Indian Culture laid the ground for postcolonial studies. 

They know about the translation theories of Susan Basnett, but not those of Sri Aurobindo, who ably translated the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Indian epics. Surely, this must be on account of the Eurocentric bias in our knowledge system as well as the continued cultural imperialism in the so-called Third World.

Contextual factors and contested categories 

One must also dispassionately look for deeper reasons for the relative absence of Sri Aurobindo in today’s mainstream academic and intellectual culture. Post-colonial critic Leela Gandhi is correct in her assumptions in her path breaking book Affective Communities that fin-de-siècle Europe and the Edwardian era in England generated worldwide interest in counter-culture movements in the domains of occultism, vegetarianism, theology, and alternative living. D.H. Lawrence’s search for the ideal utopian commune in the deep Southwest of the United States led him to the company of the native American Indians of Taos, New Mexico; the journey of James and Margaret Cousins took them to India at the invitation of the noted theosophist Annie Besant; the romantic-mystical poetry of AE, W.B. Yeats, Stephen Philips, Manmohan Ghose, Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, and others dealt with the subjective experience of the inner world. 

The Bengal School of Art and art critics like A. C. Gangooly promised to usher in what Sri Aurobindo considered the subjective era in human civilisation, a new cosmology for the world.

However, by 1922 the publication of The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot and the rise of modernist imagist poetry spearheaded by Eliot and Ezra Pound began a new movement in literary modernism in the Anglo-American world. Now poetry must deal with commonplace, quotidian experience and capture the angst and anomie of modern existence, it was claimed. Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and the “Movement Poets” in England created newer modes of poetic idiom and sensibility. D.H. Lawrence, Philip Larkin and later poets like Ted Hughes influenced the newer generation of Indian English poets. Further, the reign of secular modernity and cultural Marxism in various disciplines led to the marginalisation of the earlier era of spiritual/mystical poetry and its underlying metaphysics/view of life.

However, the dominance of literary modernism and the larger project of Western modernity were challenged by philosophies/movements beginning in the 1960s. In language studies, the postulates of Ferdinand de Saussure were challenged by structuralism and post structuralism in Western academia. The “language turn” in literary-cultural theory/criticism came through Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller. The work of Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and others paved the way for the new era of cultural materialism/criticism. Meaning, cognition effect, and symbols came centre stage in the study of literature and culture.

Continued academic relevance of Sri Aurobindo

On the surface, the new paradigms may not share much with the Aurobindonean worldview; however, we may argue that Sri Aurobindo’s critique of Western modernity, anchored to the primacy of Reason and Rationality, merits the critical attention of scholars in the field. His twin essays in The Life Divine, “The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge” and “Reality and the Integral Knowledge” have much to offer Western epistemology.

Sri Aurobindo’s considered views are timely reminders about the pitfalls of the present tech culture and his neglected socio-cultural and global vision could pave the way for a new academic culture. For example, Sri Aurobindo sees the seminal importance of multilingualism, of diversity and decentralisation. Scholars may fruitfully turn their attention, in this context, to his works The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, and War and Self-Determination.

Sri Aurobindo’s views on internationalism, in contrast to the presently dominant and hegemonic “global modern” that stands for the Americanisation of the world, would appeal to the modern academic world rooted in a liberal culture and thinking. They would be found instructive to civic planners in the domain of multicultural education, envisioned by thinkers like Charles Taylor and Anthony Appiah.

The latter advocates the need and possibilities of maintaining a pluralistic culture of many identities and sub-cultures, while retaining the civil and political practices that sustain natural life in the classic sense. Such a view finds powerful echoes in Sri Aurobindo. As he writes:

“But uniformity is not the law of life. Life exists by diversity; it insists that each group, every being shall be, even one with all the rest in its universality, yet by some principle or ordered detail of variation unique.…Order is indeed the law of life, but not an artificial regulation. The sound order is that which comes from within as the result of a nature that has discovered itself and found its own law and the law of its relation with others. Therefore the truest order is that which is founded on the greatest possible liberty; for liberty is at once the condition of vigorous variation and the condition of self-finding.”

Sri Aurobindo’s progressive and futuristic views on education and the aim of life have also found powerful resonance in the domain of contemporary teacher-training institutes and centres for alternative education in India. His views on the theory and practice of an integral education find reflection in India’s New Education Policy 2020. Child-centred learning, the need to free students from bondages to textbooks and examinations for the sake of holistic education are now an article of faith at the National Council of Educational Research and Training [NCERT] and other centres of teacher education.

Discerning scholars in India and abroad today are also carrying out research in the field of yoga psychology and consciousness studies, following leads given by Sri Aurobindo. The pioneer in this field was clearly Professor Indra Sen from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram who shared close professional ties with his counterparts in India and abroad. Aligned to an interest in Indic Studies and the study of indigenous knowledge systems, the subject is presently being avidly researched in institutes such as the California Institute of Integral Studies in the United States and the Indian Psychology Institute in India.

Final thoughts

The newer views of life, literature, and society that have emerged in recent years in academia may find echoes in the prophetic writings of Sri Aurobindo. For him, the matter-spirit binary, the empirical and spiritual divide, has been a great stumbling block for the betterment of the planetary world.

All the same, a fundamental question remains: Why should a yogic consciousness bother about the rational mind that is at the heart of university education?

Sri Aurobindo, we may recall, devotes an entire chapter to ‘The Office and Limitations of the Reason’ in The Human Cycle. In The Synthesis of Yoga, he draws our attention pointedly to the “seeking intelligence”, while showing us the place of the intellect in spiritual life.  In this explanation, we may discover a larger truth, namely, the raison d'être of the modern university. 

As Sri Aurobindo says:

“The intellect cannot be a sufficient guide in the search for spiritual truth and realisation and yet it has to be utilised in the integral movement of our nature. And while, therefore, we have to reject paralysing doubt or mere intellectual scepticism, the seeking intelligence has to be trained to admit a certain large questioning an intellectual rectitude not satisfied with half-truths, mixtures of error or approximation and, most positive and helpful, a perfect readiness always to move forward from truths already held and accepted to the greater corrective, completing or transcending truths which at first it was unable or, it may be, disinclined to envisage.”

This is an edited version of the article that first appeared in SABDA Newsletter, August 2023 and is published courtesy of SABDA. The full article may be read at https://www.sabda.in/pdf/news/aug2023.pdf