Sunday, March 13, 2016

Sri Aurobindo’s poetic interpretations of French revolution and Celtic anti-imperialism

madurai today The Hindu
Sri Aurobindo Study Forum: Discourse on Sri Aurobindo's 'Life Divine' by Subramany, Nithyatha, Auro Lab, Veerapanjan, 10 a.m.

A society known as Auroville (City of Dawn), is an experimental township of approximately 2,500 people has no politics, religion or physical currency.

MAHRS ‏@MQAHRS  7h7 hours ago Asian Spirituality and Violence: 1. In India. The divine revolution of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh as part of the... http://fb.me/89bTXYJrs 
Today, the popular perception of Aurobindo’s life is divided. The early political firebrand and later mystic are seen as separate identities, split by a year of imprisonment during which Aurobindo was spiritually ‘awakened’. However, for Alex Wolfers, a researcher at Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity, this dichotomy is a false one. The spiritual and political blurred throughout Aurobindo’s extraordinary life, particularly during his time as a leading light of radical Swadeshi, says Wolfers, who is investigating spirituality in Aurobindo’s early political writing. 

Through research at archives in Delhi, Kolkata and Aurobindo’s Ashram in Pondicherry, Wolfers has traced the emergence of a new theology of revolution in Aurobindo’s thoughts, one that harnessed the spiritual to challenge “the sordid interests of British capital”. Aurobindo fused the political and spiritual, mixing ideas from European philosophy, particularly Hegel and Nietzsche, with Hindu theology under the aegis of the Tantric mother goddess, Kali, and Bengali Shaktism – the worship of latent creative energy – to develop a radical political discourse of embodied spirituality, heroic sacrifice and transformative violence. He complemented this with poetic interpretations of the French revolution and Ireland’s growing Celtic anti-imperialism, as well as contemporary upheavals in Russia, South Africa and Japan. Through his polemical speeches and essays, Aurobindo furiously developed his political theology against a backdrop of assassination, robbery and bombings, weaving all of these strands into what Wolfers argues is the central symbolic archetype in his political theology: the ‘revolutionary Sannyasi’.

It was while in solitary confinement in Alipore jail that he experienced the ‘spiritual awakening’ that confirmed his mystic status. Over 60 years after his death in 1950, Aurobindo’s legacy continues to live on, despite often being misappropriated 
for political gain. “The figure of the ‘revolutionary Sannyasi’ has had an enormous afterlife: in its various guises and mutations, its influence is evident across the political spectrum from Gandhian mobilisation to Bengali Marxism and Hindu nationalism. Even today, it remains an important trope in Indian politics,” says Wolfers. “From as early as the 1920s, Hindu nationalist organisations began to recast Aurobindo in an increasingly right-wing mould to assert Hindu dominance against the subcontinent’s Muslim and Christian minorities,” he says. “But hyper-masculine Hindu chauvinism, still a major force in Indian politics today, stands in sharp contrast with his original inclusive and ‘anarchic’ outlook.”

"Even the non-violent Gandhi significantly borrowed from Aurobindo’s transgressive politics" Alex Wolfers - See more at

www.newindianexpress.com/ A certain MP from West Bengal quoted Sri Aurobindo out of context, trying to articulate his views on nationalism, which, however, is de rigueur these days.

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