"Is India Civilised?"     "Is India Civilised?"   A BOOK under this rather startling title was published some years ago by Sir John Woodroffe, the well-known scholar and writer on Tantric philosophy, in answer to an extravagant jeu d'esprit by Mr. William Archer. That well-known dramatic critic leaving his safe natural sphere for fields in which his chief claim to speak was a sublime and confident ignorance, assailed the whole life and culture of India and even lumped together all her greatest achievements, philosophy, religion, poetry, painting, sculpture, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana in one wholesale condemnation as a repulsive mass of unspeakable bar

Indian Culture and External Influence     Indian Culture and External Influence   IN CONSIDERING Indian civilisation and its renascence, I suggested that a powerful new creation in all fields was our great need, the meaning of the renascence and the one way of preserving the civilisation. Confronted with the huge rush of modern life and thought, invaded by another dominant civilisation almost her opposite or inspired at least with a very different spirit to her own, India can only survive by confronting this raw, new, aggressive, powerful world with fresh diviner creations of her own spirit, cast i

The Renaissance in India with A Defence of Indian Culture     VOLUME 20   THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO   © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1997 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA    Publisher's Note   Most of the essays that make up this volume have appeared until now under the title The Foundations of Indian Culture. That tit

List of Illustrations     1. Cave Cathedral, Ajanta 2  Kalahastishwara Temple, Andhra Pradesh 3 . Sinhachalam Temple, Andhra Pradesh 4. Kandarya Mahadeo Temple, Khajuraho 5. Humayun's Tomb, New Delhi 6 . Taj Mahal, Agra 7.Itimad-ud-Daulah's Tomb, Agra 8.Panch Mahal, Fatehpur Sikri 9.Dhyani Buddha, Ajanta 10.Maheshwara Murti, Elephanta Caves

XII   Indian Art   A GOOD deal of hostile or unsympathetic Western criticism of Indian civilisation has been directed in the past against its aesthetic side and taken the form of a disdainful or violent depreciation of its fine arts, architecture, sculpture and painting. Mr. Archer would not find much support in his wholesale and undiscriminating depreciation of a great literature, but here too there has been, if not positive attack, much failure of understanding; but in the attack on Indian art, his is the last and shrillest of many hostile voices. This aesthetic side of a people's culture is of the highest importance and demands almost as much scrutiny and carefuln

XVI   Indian Literature   THE ARTS which appeal to the soul through the eye are able to arrive at a peculiarly concentrated expression of the spirit, the aesthesis and the creative mind of a people, but it is in its literature that we must seek for its most flexible and many-sided self-expression, for it is the word used in all its power of clear figure or its threads of suggestion that carries to us most subtly and variably the shades and turns and teeming significances of the inner self in its manifestation. The greatness of a literature lies first in the greatness and worth of its substance, the value of its thought and the beauty of its forms, but also in the degree

The Renaissance in India     The Renaissance in India   THERE has been recently some talk of a Renaissance in India. A number of illuminating essays with that general title and subject have been given to us by a poet and subtle critic and thinker, Mr. James H. Cousins, and others have touched suggestively various sides of the growing movement towards a new life and a new thought that may well seem to justify the description. This Renaissance, this new birth in India, if it is a fact, must become a thing of immense importance both to herself and the world, to herself because of all that is meant for her in the recovery or the change

'The Renaissance in India and Other Essays on Indian Culture' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 34 Note on the Texts     Note on the Texts   The thirty-two essays that make up this volume were first published in the monthly journal Arya between August 1918 and January 1921. Each essay was written immediately before its publication.   The Renaissance in India. Four essays appeared in the Arya between August and November 1918 under the title The Renaissance in India. In September 1920 they were published under the same title by the Prabartak Publishing House, Chandernagore, after being revised lightly by Sri Aurobindo. The publisher's note to this edition stated: "The subject m

A Defence of Indian Culture         I   A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture   WHEN we try to appreciate a culture, and when that culture is the one in which we have grown up or from which we draw our governing ideals and are likely from overpartiality to minimise its deficiencies or from overfamiliarity to miss aspects or values of it which would strike an unaccustomed eye, it is always useful as well as interesting to know how others see it. It will not move us to change our view-point for theirs; but we can get fresh light from a study of this kind and help our self-introspection. But

XXI   Indian Polity   I HAVE spoken hitherto of the greatness of Indian civilisation in the things most important to human culture, those activities that raise man to his noblest potentialities as a mental, a spiritual, religious, intellectual, ethical, aesthetic being, and in all these matters the cavillings of the critics break down before the height and largeness and profundity revealed when we look at the whole and all its parts in the light of a true understanding of the spirit and intention and a close discerning regard on the actual achievement of the culture. There is revealed not only a great civilisation, but one of the half dozen greatest of which we have a s