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

    II   A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture         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 deficiences 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 viewpoint for theirs; but we can get fresh light from a study of this kind and help our self-introspection. But there

             

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE                   THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN CULTURE comprises under a single connecting title the series of articles that appeared in the Arya from December 1918 to January 1921 in the following sequence: “Is India Civilised?”, “A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture” and “A Defence of Indian Culture”. These articles were later revised by the author.         The essay “Indian Culture and External Influence” which appeared in the Arya of March 1919 was also included in the first edition as it bears on the same subject.         THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN CULTURE was first published in book-form in 1953 by the Sri Aurobindo Library, New York

    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 in the mould of her own spi

I  The Issue: Is India Civilised? Is India Civillsed?   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 dʼesprit 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 unspe

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 peopleʼs culture is of the highest importance and demands almost as much scrutiny and carefulness of appreciation as the

            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 bec

    III A DEFENCE OF INDIAN CULTURE     Religion  and  Spirituality           I  HAVE described the framework of the Indian idea from the outlook of an intellectual criticism, because that is the standpoint of the critics who affect to disparage its value. I have shown that Indian culture must be adjudged even from this alien outlook to have been the creation of a wide and noble spirit. Inspired in the heart of its being by a lofty principle, illumined with a striking and uplifting idea of individual manhood and its powers and its possible perfection, aligned to a spacious plan of social architecture, it was enriched not only by a strong philosophic, intellectual a