The Divine gives itself to those who give themselves without reserve and in all their parts to the Divine. For them the calm, the light, the power, the bliss, the freedom, the wide-ness, the heights of knowledge, the seas of Ananda. Sri Aurobindo

I

THE MOTHER AWAKES

IT is midnight, the world is asleep in silence,

The Earth is asleep in the lap of darkness;

Asleep are heavens, breathless the wrathful winds;

The stars twinkle not in the dense blackness of the clouds.

The birds wrap their eyes with their wings

And rest self-absorbed in their nests;

Animals wander not, nor are footsteps heard.

Then the Mother awakes;

The Mother awakes with a terrible cry.

The Mother awakes, opens Her frightful eyes,

A pair of suns as though.

 

The Mother awakes, not a leaf moves;

The still flame of the lamp is dying in the room:

In the lonely paths of the city, in the fields and the woodlands and the hills

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Plunges in sleep all life.

The surges of the sea-waters

Break not in laughter upon the shores:

Utterly still, unmoving, the ocean is voiceless.

Why then the Mother awakes?

Who can tell, what has She heard and is awake?

In the night whose is the silent prayer that has awakened the Mother To rise with a terrible cry?

 

When the Mother fell asleep, who ever hoped

That even in the midst of blind darkness She will awake?

Sunk in the night, void of hope, the heart broken for good in sorrow

Even in sleep is startled to hear the fall of a leaf.

The royal Fortune of the mighty Asura,

Proud and cunning and overpowering,

Has besieged the earth.

Suddenly a terrible cry is heard, the cry of the Mother;

Suddenly like the roar of hundreds of oceans is heard the voice of the Mother;

To awaken Her sons called aloud the Mother Like a thunder-clap.

 

With a grieving heaving heart was there none awake

In the darkest of night for the sake of the Mother?

A few only with saffron robes covering their bodies

Sat in the temple with the bare sword in hand;

Devotees of the terrible Mother, To anoint with their own blood

The Mother's feet, wakeful they passed the night.

Hence rose the Mother:

With a mighty thirst, in wrath awoke the Mother;

With a lion's roar filling the universe awoke the Mother To awaken the world.

 

A raucous laughter spurts out of Her mouth, a Ughtning flash gleams in Her eyes;

Frightful is the blood-red flower of Her anger,

In wrath She swings in Her hands the heads of two titans.

The Mother rises and sends out a grim invocation.

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Who art Thou at this dead of night swinging the titan heads in Thy hands?

 

Thou sprayest rain of blood over the land.

The two eyes are like hearths of fire; fearful is the Mother,

Shaking the earth She roams about.

 

With a loud roar "Arise! Arise!"

Thy voice rises to chase

All sweet indolence.

It is our Mother!

She comes, on Her forehead burns Her eye of death.

Dancing to the rhythm of the clanging of Her necklace of human skulls,

Lo! the Mother comes.

 

"Arise, arise," a violent voice calls

Gods and titans and men, all,

A cruel roar here, a high cry of joy there.

It is my Mother!

With burning eye of death upon Her forehead comes our Mother.

Our Mother comes, the human skulls of Her garland dance to tune.

 

In the midst of storm and battle, sword crashes against sword, body to body resounding;

Fire rains and rushes about in the fight, the skies are deafened

With all the fierce noises, the ears burst, the earth sways,

Blood flows and flows free as though flowing streams.

When, Oh when shall we know the Mother?

When Her call goes out like the ocean roar

Wiping off with Her mighty breath the whole kingdom of the titans and the violent goddess comes smiling

 

Then shall we know the Mother.

The Mother, when She dances bathing in the stream of flowing blood

Then surely we know, it is the Mother awakened at last.

SRI AUROBINDO

(Translated from the original Bengali by Nolini Kanta Gupta)

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II

THE TITAN

YOGIN supreme, O Lord of all attainments, easy of approach even as Thou holdest the trident,

Thy abode is on the crest of Mount Kailash. It is Thy power

That plunges the universe into the first cause, secreted in its own seed;

 

Protect me, O Mighty Lord, dear to the titans.

Titan I am, a part of Thee; a flaming force

Terrible, fierce, cruel, unbearable

Burns ever in my soul like a forest-fire.

I know Thy power; so I never opposed it, O Lord.

I am under its sway, heartless and violent in action;

With a mighty lion's roar I fill all the ten quarters

And ever roam about in the universe, trampling man's

Momentary creation, slaying the proud Kshatriyas,

The sinful hypocrite Brahmins: in the flowing stream of this force

I break and shatter the old — I attempt the new.

The Brahmin's falsehood has made the human race blind,

The Brahmin's wrong teaching has made them underdogs always;

Losing human dignity they have become grovelling slaves.

Man has forgotten his own virtue, become ignoble and weak,

Low and petty. To the great teaching of the Vedanta

They have given a wrong twist, hypocrites they play with it about as they like;

They have spread the cult of division, clever in pursuing their selfhood

 

"Great, great am I, fall at my feet, O men",

Thus proclaiming they ruin dharma and truth and happiness

Of man, and bind him in iron fetters for ever.

O Mighty Ascetic, Thou hast the knowledge that conquers division;

Thou art the refuge of Thy followers,

O equal-minded; In Thy kingdom the Brahmin and the outcaste Are equal.

Always impartial is the Godhead.

One is high or low, great or small, according to one's own action and nature.

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This division is transient; permanent within

Is the soul without division, sinless and pure, of perfect equality.

Its effort has been the hundred different tribes of mankind to bind

With the tie of love and justice into one life and into one race.

Age after age the great Lord in the heart of mankind

Flames up like fire, and injustice and falsehood

And lawlessness and tyranny He burns into ashes.

Even then Falsehood does not give up its selfness

Putting on the robe of truth it lures away man.

In the name of dharma (the divine Law) false adharma (undivine law)

 

Again occupies the royal throne in the world.

I burn with anger, O Lord, ever I want to swell up

Like the ocean in a loud roar, and with a mighty force;

I want to destroy all falsehood on earth

And create a new world where lies and quarrels and selfishness

Will have no room. A single life

Always in the depth inspires a happy mankind

Full of delight, full of love, in vast human community

Bound in unity with the tie of an unruffled friendliness;

In utter delight they are like gods in the Garden of Eden.

Forgetting division, selfishness and conflict they will enjoy

An earthly paradise. A mighty hope dwells always

In this heart. The opposition is from the sly Brahmin,

The selfish Royalty, the hoarder Vaishya,

The envious race of gods in heaven.

This heart can no longer bear the torture of the world.

No longer can it tolerate these lamentations.

O Mighty Lord, I shall rise, I shall rise; in the fire of my mighty rage,

 

I shall burn the enemies and spread abroad

Equality, Truth and Love in the world.

I shall rise and wash and purify with blood this unclean earth.

In the blood of the Brahmin will be drowned falsehood and untruth,

 

In the blood of the Kshatriya will be drowned all injustice,

In the blood of the Vaishya will be drowned all selfishness,

And they will perish, perish at last.

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The earth, suffering under a load, will revel no more

In the victorious cry of the strong and the weeping of the weak.

I will slay, I will slay the gods in their paradise.

I will tear to, tatters their heaven. The home of pleasure

Polluted by selfishness will be a funeral ground. Give me strength

That I may bring death even to the life of the Immortal.

The wrathful Mother asks for blood and blood.

SRI AUROBINDO

(Translated from the original Bengali by Nolini Kanta Gupta)

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THE INTEGRAL YOGA OF THE MOTHER

"THE Synthesis of Yoga' of Sri Aurobindo is a clear and a full presentation of the system of Integral Yoga. Rut only 'The Yoga of Divine Works' (Part I) of it was revised and then 'the psychic being' was introduced. The place of the psychic being is obviously of capital importance. It makes consecration spontaneous and joyful. It easily evokes Divine Presence and creates a vivid feeling for the Divine Will and thus makes Divine Works possible. Its emergence makes us distinctively aware of the ego selfhood and thus a progressive liberation from the ego becomes possible. It then reintegrates the myriad movements of mind, life and body under its own form of consciousness and also turns them towards the Divine, which makes divinisation possible. Of such fundamental importance is the psychic being.

Its importance is even more in 'The Yoga of Divine Love', as the psychic being is 'the Bhakta', a true child of the Divine Mother. It is with the psychic being that Bhakti comes to its own. The Bhakti of the Mind and the Vital lack that purity, that intensity, that constancy. But this part of the 'Synthesis' stands as it was in the 'Arya' and the psychic being does not clearly figure in it. However, in the 'Letters on Yoga' it is prominently there.

In the 'The Yoga of Divine Knowledge', again it is through the psychic being that identification with the inner being of things and persons becomes possible, which makes sure intuitive knowledge available. Again in the 'Yoga of Self-perfection', it is the psychic being which makes first perfection of nature possible. But in these two parts again the psychic being does not distinctively figure. However, in the 'Letters' dealing with knowledge and self-perfection, it does. 'The Life Divine' was completely revised and there, as is borne out by the chapter entitled 'The Triple Transformation' and otherwise, the psychic being has its due place of honour and distinction.

It is extremely interesting, the psychic being is said to be the Mother's contribution to our system of Integral Yoga. But the Mother's early writings do not give a clear indication of it. The first clear mention and characterisation of it is available in the Mother's 'Conversations' published in 1931. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have been explorers and experimentalists in the realm of the Spirit

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and possibly it is during 1920 and '31 that this crucial discovery was made. Sri Aurobindo once wrote that during 1914 and'20 while He was busy writing for 'The Arya', Sadhana was waiting for the Mother's coming. It was possibly after Her coming when Sadhana picked up that this divine evolving element of human nature was identified and made the primary object of Sadhana.

The complete body of Integral Yoga as it stands today thus comprises the 'Synthesis', the 'Letters on Yoga' and 'The Life Divine'. Other writings on the subject would be supplementary.

Now, the Mother pursued a Sadhana, as is evident from Her 'Prayers and Meditations', clearly integral in its approach (covering Knowledge, Love and Works) as also integral in its aim (that of integral transformation of life). Sri Aurobindo has, in fact, said that His and the Mother's paths have been the same from the beginning.

The Mother guided in Sadhana on the lines of Integral Yoga and ordinarily Sri Aurobindo's writings on the subject and the Mother's writings are identical or complementary. But the Mother developed certain new emphases in Her writings as well as the actual life of the Ashram, which much enrich Integral Yoga as such. And it may be useful to contemplate these distinctive emphases and to continue to avail of them in our sadhana fully.

The Mother's own writings, which constitute Her Integral Yoga, are these: 'Prayers and Meditations', 'On Education', 'Four Austerities and Four Liberations' and 'Flowers and their Messages'. Each one of these gives in itself a complete form of the Sadhana of Integral Yoga. 'Prayers and Meditations' give it in the form of flaming aspirations, self-offerings, intense concentrations, meditations and intimate communions and achieve progressive self-perfection and Divine realisation. It is a personal pursuit and it gives to the Sadhak the same approach, which has a unique advantage of its own — a personal relation with the Divine, a settled inwardness, high sincerity and a vivid feeling for inner growth.

'On Education' and 'Four Austerities and Four Liberations' are systematic expositions of Integral Yoga in an intellectual form. The former gives the details of the processes by means of which the physical, the vital, the mental, the psychic and the spiritual parts of the integral personality have to be developed to their supramental perfection. The book gives a complete and a clearly stated plan of

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work for a seeker of Integral Yoga and integral perfection.

The other book too is a similar exposition and gives a complete guidance. It lays down four lines of Sadhana or approaches and aims at a realisation of the Divine in all His four primary aspects of Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. In a brief compass, a clear guidance on the approach and the aim of Integral Yoga are stated.

The 'Flowers and their Messages' is a large volume with striking and vivid pictures of a large number of flowers along with their spiritual significances and occasional directives for Sadhana. It is a vivid aesthetic feeling that we enjoy, while living in the company of the flowers of the book and it moves us in all the planes of our being and tends to lift us by innumerable approaches to the Supramental ideal. It is again by itself a complete guidance on Integral Yoga.

These four books of the Mother constitute a beautiful and a powerful scheme of Sadhana of Integral Yoga, — the first through vivid spiritual urges and feelings, the next two through large and wide intellectual expositions and the last one through aesthetic enjoyment. How complementary and mutually helpful are these approaches! And how wide and varied does Integral Yoga become! It is extremely enjoyable to dwell on the pictures of the flowers, see their spiritual significances and contemplate the spirit of each flower, when we are not inclined to read a book on yoga. Similarly to turn to the 'Prayers and Meditations' and just live in a feeling of adoration of the Divine is a marvellous relaxation and decampment.

Other writings of the Mother, 'Conversations', 'Words of Long Ago,' the numerous volumes of 'Questions and Answers' are all on Sadhana and inspire a reader to pursue integral perfection of life. But the four books mentioned earlier present Integral Yoga as a whole from distinctive approaches.

We may, in the end, briefly mention the special emphases of the Mother, which are of great practical value for a Sadhak of Integral Yoga.

One important thing stated above may be considered again. One interested in Integral Yoga normally limits oneself to the 'Synthesis' and the 'Letters on Yoga'. But reading of these two works demands intellectual concentration and that cannot be sustained for a long time. This can be easily supplemented by the activities of aesthetic enjoyment (of 'Flowers and their Messages') and spiritual adoration

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(of 'Prayers and Meditations') and that would indeed be a great advantage in the pursuit of Sadhana.

The Mother's Integral Yoga, as a whole, lays a special emphasis on beauty as a distinctive and powerful approach. Beauty can be, according to the Mother, a complete pathway to the Divine. Surely, if one had faith in the Beauty of the Divine, recognised the Divine as Param Sundar, could feel allured by His attractiveness, the seeking of of the Divine and the Sadhana would tend to become easy and spontaneous, the problem of the recalcitrant elements of nature would cease to be a serious affair. In the moral and mental approach, there is strain, tension and struggle. In the aesthetic approach, the mood of enjoyment is dominant. There is relaxation, there is receptivity, there is easier assimilation.

Beauty also means an appreciation of harmony, of peace, of unity. That means an intensification of the aspiration for the same. Thus the approach of beauty has obvious advantages and Sadhana stands to gain from it a great deal. We should have more and more a sense and feeling for beauty, harmony, peace and unity in us and around and then continually move on to the highest perception of these in the Divine.

Another emphasis of the Mother is regarding the place of Works in Sadhana. Ordinarily, we consider meditation as the representative activity of the spiritual pursuit. But does it or can it bring about a release from the ego, which is the primary aim of Sadhana? It may and it may not. But work done as consecration can do so more easily. The attitude of self-giving is the essence of the matter. Our ordinary attitude is acquisitive, self-appropriating and that builds up the ego personality. This has to be replaced by the inner attitude of self-giving and of the appreciation of a larger, wider, an all-comprehending selfhood. This can be done more easily when we are at the physical level and are concerned with bodily actions and the palpable good of others than when we are dealing with the subtle mental processes within. Self-giving and self-effacing attitude in meditation is extremely difficult, while it is much easier in Works. The Mother considers the approach through Works much more useful in Sadhana. Of course, one must keep a watch over the spirit in which Works are done. Works must be done more and more disinterestedly, for the good of others, as service to the Divine, out of love. Such works are a powerful means

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of bringing about release from the ego, which leads to spiritual realisation.

Works also provide a test for the state more or less achieved in and through meditation. We can easily feel detached and free from external situations in a state of meditation. But if we feel the same when we are in a working relation with the world, then alone we are really free and detached.

Further, Works give us a mastery over the physical conditions and that is essential for the manifestation of the Divine in the world and an integral transformation of life.

Thus Works receive a high emphasis in the Mother's Integral Yoga. And it is a wonderful advantage for the modern man interested in Yoga. He need not complain that he cannot manage to find time for meditation. His heavy occupation can itself become a constant yoga by progressively changing the inner spirit and attitude of his Works. And that can lead him to the highest spiritual fulfilment.

The Mother's identification with the earth and the material creation is profound and She disapproves of any world-renouncing trend in nature. She strongly feels that it is a loss to the world that people with self-sacrificing impulses should think of giving up the world. The world is the Divine's creation, is intended for His manifestation, and it should be our aim and ambition to realise the Divine in normal life and manifest His sublime laws in the same.

Our entire life and behaviour proceeds from certain attitudes and the quality of all our thoughts, feelings and actions depends upon the quality of the attitudes. And these attitudes are basically few and through them our whole life can be more easily controlled and guided. The 'champak' flower was a great favourite with the Mother, its colour, its fragrance, its form of five petals opening out and upwards are so wonderful. She called it 'Psychological Perfection' and said it stood for 'Surrender' as the base which supported five attitudes and they bring about all the perfection which a Sadhak needs in order to be successful in his spiritual adventure. If the attitudes are set right and duly cultivated, all the ideas, feelings and actions will automatically get into proper form. What a simplification of Sadhana!

Surrender means the resolution to abandon the ego selfhood of anxiety, insecurity, struggle, strain and narrowness and seek the soul selfhood of essential joy, sureness of existence, clarity, confidence and

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perfect hopefulness. On this basic attitude rest five other attitudes and these are — (1) Sincerity or Transparency, (2) Faith or Trust, (3) Devotion or Gratitude, (4) Aspiration or Courage, (5) Endurance or Perseverance.

Now, is this not a most interesting, extremely simple and perfectly effective pursuit of Integral Yoga? Are Jnana, Bhakti and Karma, all the three fundamental capacities of the being, not duly mobilised? And will they not prepare the Adhara for an integral realisation of the Divine as Knowledge, Love and Will?

The Mother's Integral Yoga and Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga are identical. Their paths were the same from the very beginning. Yet there are interesting distinctive emphases in the Mother's Integral Yoga, and it is well worth bearing them in mind and availing of them in Sadhana.

In the end, here is, in one sentence the Mother's Integral Yoga:— The Integral Yoga of the Mother tends to inspire a life pursued and lived in a deep feeling of love and beauty for the Divine — the highest and most cherished being and fulfilment — in increasing awareness, concentration, meditation and consecration in Works, seeking and discovering the psychic being within and the Divine Reality in the universe and then manifesting the same normally in life, even in the bodily constitution itself, more and more.

INDRA SEN

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THE GOLDEN BRIDGE

(a study of the Literary genius of The Mother)

WHEN I reflect upon the precise role of the Mother in her present earthly incarnation, the following lines of Sri Aurobindo about Savitri naturally come to my mind:

At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate,

In their slow round the cycles turn to her call;

Alone her hands can change Time's dragon base.

Hers is the mystery the Night conceals;

The spirit's alchemist energy is hers;

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

(Savitri: Book III, Canto II, lines 314-319)

At any rate, it is from this Aurobindean description of the legendary and symbolical figure of Savitri that I have taken the title of my subject, and I understand, it is the most apt one for the Mother in all aspects of her present earthly manifestation during the years: 1878-1973. But I am not concerned, in my present monograph, with her role of "the golden bridge" as a spiritual leader and teacher of the modern world or as the creator, organiser, builder and administrator of Sri Aurobindo Ashram for more than half a century or the dreamer and designer of the up-coming international city, called Auroville, about four miles away from Sri Aurobindo Ashram, near Pondicherry. I am chiefly concerned here with her literary genius which has received very scanty attention so far even in the Ashram. On the occasion of the 80th birthday of The Mother in 1958, Sri Aurobindo Path Mandir, Calcutta, had organised a seminar on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Though I could not attend it in person, yet I contributed one paper entitled The Literary Genius of The Mother, to it and this was subsequently published in, if I remember aright, the February issue of Mother India that year and in the book, entitled Loving Homage, published by Sri Aurobindo Path Mandir, Calcutta, in August, 1958.

On re-reading it recently I find that it will serve as a good introduction to an exhaustive and detailed study of the literary genius of The Mother, which will follow in the subsequent issues of The

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Advent, and in which one whole chapter, each, will be devoted to her Words of Long ago, Prayers and Meditations; her messages and replies to the letters she used to receive, and her play lets. And three or four chapters will seek to cover the large corpus of her Questions and Answers which constitute the basic title of the various centenary volumes of the Mother's conversations, talks and writings.

I

INTRODUCTION

The Mother's writings and conversations are originally in French. In order to appraise fully her literary genius, it is necessary to know the French language well. As, however, I know little of it at present, my observations here are based upon the English translations of her works and words.

It is significant that the only medium which the Mother has so far chosen for her literary expression" is prose. Whether it is her Words of Long Ago or her recent talks and conversations or her Prayers and Meditations, and the few play lets she has written for staging on the occasion of the anniversary of the International University Centre, it is always the form of prose through which she has expressed her literary genius. And another significant thing about her literature is that its principal and characteristic mode of communication is the conversation, the talk. Even her book, Prayers and Meditations; is, in form, a series of conversations which she used to hold from day to day, for some years, with the Divine or her own inmost being. Moreover, a sensitive reader has the invariable feeling here that the writer is establishing a direct conversational contact with him in order to put him in touch, step by step, with the Divine as well as his own psychic being. And we shall discover that in her play lets also which are outwardly concerned with certain characters and their situations and actions, the general pervasive tone is so naturally intimate and close to the audience or the reader that one does not get from them the impression of the usual kind of dramatist who keeps himself detached and aloof and watches life and people mostly as a kind of spectacle or show. On the contrary, here the writer's point of view as well as preference can be clearly perceived and her distinctive voice unmistakably

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heard with all the living power, warmth and sweetness of a graciously radiant presence.

One may explain both these aspects of the Mother's literary expression by saying that her literature is of a piece with her true earthly role which is, one may hazard to say, essentially that of a creator and builder and organiser of a new consciousness and life here. It is true, as Sri Aurobindo said, that in her consciousness the Mother is identified with all aspects of the Divine but he also said that "she is working here in the body to bring down something not yet expressed in this material world so as to transform life here." And we shall see that her literary expression is just a part — one may say, an integral part — of this work of wholesale transformation of human nature and life. It is never an end in itself and not intended just to give an artistic shape and beauty to her spiritual experiences, profound and new and vast and dynamic as they are. Thus the one thing that we have to keep clear in our mind is that it is not at all for the satisfaction of any mere literary or aesthetic impulse in her that she brings into play her artistic sensibility. It is, on the contrary, a part and parcel of her dynamic role in life itself. It may be, then, safely inferred that such a literary sensibility can find its best and most effective expression largely through the medium of prose which, as compared with poetry, is chiefly concerned with the practical and dynamic side of life, our day-to-day problems and business. Also, prose is meant for all, even the commonest man in the street and addresses itself directly in a language which can be readily understood by the majority. It need not surprise us, therefore, if the Mother's literary expression invariably takes on the mode of a direct, intimate conversation with humanity as a whole. She, as the Divine Shakti, has not only to work upon us but work with us and so it is quite natural for her to come down from her heights and speak to us on our own level, in terms which we can easily understand and assimilate. And it is through this technique of warm and intimate association and conversation with us that she makes her literature a means of raising us to the heights she has kept in store for us. This fact may also be explained a bit differently. Her chief task here is to bridge the vast gulf between the transcendent Supreme Reality above and the worlds of Ignorance and Inconscience below. It is only thus that the movements of ascent and descent can be fruitfully combined here and the

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reign of the Supermind firmly and progressively established upon earth. Naturally, for this, as far as her outward relations with people are concerned, she has to depend mostly upon the mode of personal, direct communication. We feel when we read or listen to her words that it is the very embodiment of the Supreme Being who is addressing us; it is the Divine Shakti incarnate who is communicating, through the medium of words and talks, the light and power of wisdom and truth to us.

Hers being the practical dynamic role in life, it follows, that she cannot afford, if she means business, as they say, to write with the leisurely sweep and comprehensiveness and patience and sonority and picturesque ness and polish of a poet-philosopher like Sri Aurobindo, nor has she the need to speak, as though from some public platform, with the powerfully ringing and resonant voice of a prophetic orator. Her style of writing as well as her voice, on the contrary, is always calm and quiet, intimate and homely and direct. It is just like the Mother talking to her own children. Almost a classic example of the basic difference in the style of writing between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is to be found in the message which each gave to America in August 1949. The substance of the message of both is the same but what a marked difference in the expression! The Mother seems to summarise, as it were, the whole of Sri Aurobindo's message, running to a length of more than 1,000 words that look on diverse sides, lay bare subtle shade on shade, gather them all together and come to a powerful grand finale. The Mother has just thirty-three words, and her tone, too, is quite obviously and immediately direct as well as pointed when she wrote: "Stop thinking that you are of the West and others of the East. All human beings are of the same divine origin and meant to manifest upon earth the unity of this origin." This is, indeed, typical of her style of writing: precise and concise, direct and dynamic. But even when she is not so extremely precise and concise, as in the following passages, and appears to be talking a little at ease with a view to making herself understood as fully as possible, her basic style of ideal précis writing remains unchanged. The following is, one may say, a typical specimen of her mode of expression:

"When a child is full of enthusiasm, never throw cold water upon his enthusiasm, never tell him: "You know, life is not like that!"

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On the contrary, you should always encourage him, tell him: "Yes, at present things are not always like that, they appear ugly, but behind the appearance, there is a beauty that seeks to realise itself. That you must love, that you must draw to you, that must be the object of your dreams and your ambitions."

"If that were done from childhood, there would be much less difficulty than what would be if one were to undo, undo all the bad work done by a bad education, undo that flat vulgar common sense which is the reason why one expects nothing good from life, and why it appears dull and irksome and why all hopes and all so-called illusory dreams of beauty are contradicted." (Bulletin of Physical Education, Nov. 1957, pp. 105-107).

Or this paragraph where she is explaining "transformation":

"We want an integral transformation, the transformation of the body and all its activities. But there is a first step, absolutely indispensable, which has to be completed before anything else can be undertaken; it is the transformation of the consciousness. The starting-point, it goes without saying, is the aspiration towards this transformation and the will to realise it; without that nothing can be done. But if to the aspiration is added an inner opening, a kind of receptivity, then one can enter at a bound into this transformed consciousness and remain there. This change of consciousness is abrupt, so to say; when it happens, it happens all on a sudden, although the preparation for it might have been slow and long. I am not speaking of a simple change in the mental outlook, but a change of the consciousness itself. It is a complete and absolute change, a revolution in the basic poise; it is somewhat like turning a ball inside out. In the changed consciousness everything appears not only new and different, but almost the reverse of what it looked like to the ordinary consciousness. In the ordinary consciousness you move slowly, through successive experiments, from ignorance to some far-off and even doubtful knowledge. In the transformed consciousness, you start from knowledge, and proceed from knowledge to knowledge. Yet it is only a beginning, for the external consciousness, the different planes and parts of the external and active being are transformed only slowly and gradually as the result of an inner transformation." (Bulletin of Physical Education, August 1950, p. 9).

Though the first passage is a piece of talk and the second presumably

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a piece of writing, yet there is the same direct, intimate, simple, lucid, brief and precise, and colloquial phrasing and tone in both; the same quiet persuasive flow of a style which is natural, spontaneous, living, assured; in brief, psychic in its essential expression. Psychic? If we look into the matter well, we shall see that it is really so and this is, in fact, the deeper reason why her prose style is so very natural, simple, direct and precise. In conformity with the psychic mode of education which she advocates and herself follows, it is directly to the psychic part of our being and not the vital and mental, which she would like to address. And this naturally makes a lot of difference to her specific mode of communication. The psychic does not need a long, elaborate explanation or argument for its understanding, as our mind often does. Nor does it need the pressure of emotional fervour and stimulant, like our vital. Its approach is quiet, straight, immediate, intimate and assured. It feels the power of conviction and certitude with the minimum of utterance. Even when, therefore, the Mother has something profound and complex to convey to us, as for example, in the passage on transformation above, she is always lucid and brief and immediately effective and convincing in her expression.

And yet there is, also, always a dignity, a stateliness, a chaste-ness and purity, a restraint coupled with an urgent intensity and earnestness behind her words. Her sentences and paragraphs do not have the usual looseness of structure of colloquial speech, nor do they have a too free or rambling movement of a literary gossip or chitchat. They are supple, no doubt, as they should be, and flexible but also firm, well-knit and compact; 'they are balanced and symmetrical; and what's more, they have a developing, dynamic movement; they have the very accent of truth in them, and we all along feel that her talks and writings are not at all a matter of conscious literary expression, that is, of verbal skill and technique, of putting the right words in the right places. It looks as if whatever the subject in hand — it may be the supramental light and force or transformation or integral education or diet or illness for dreams or games, — it is from some fountainhead of truth itself, some secret source of Light and Life and Bliss that her words flow to us, drop by drop, and not only enlighten us by their simple luminosity but also purify and regenerate us by their dynamically bracing waters of transformation. Indeed, this may

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be one of the chief reasons why the Mother can combine with such sovereign ease and suppleness all the severe beauties of precision and concision, balance and harmony, intensity and restraint, lucidity and profundity of classical prose with the homeliness and intimacy, the seemingly unliterary plainness of colloquial speech. Therein he the chief beauty and power of her prose style.

(To be continued)

SRIKRISHNA PRASAD

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IQBAL'S CREDO

AN OUTSIDER'S VIEW

INCISIVE and original, poet and thinker in three languages, a controversial, contradictory Colossus, fate has been unkind to Iqbal. A man of Brahmin extraction, but versed in the mystic lore of Rum and Tabriz, these were his own words. But, in spite of the versatility and the vision, how ignored in India and Pakistan, the land of his birth and the land to which his vision gave putative birth. People have little idea of the deeper content of his thought, educational, metaphysical, religious, juridical, prophetic. For a while the wrong sort of people had made the wrong sort of noise and have been silent since. Clearly there was hurt, pathos and annoyance in his fateful 1930 Presidential Address to the Muslim League that a national integration might have been a fact if the teachings of Kabir or Din Ilahi of Akbar had seized the imagination of the Indian masses. That 'if', what a leaning tower atop an exploding volcano! No words can be as true of him as his own:

When, gathering my chattels, I forsook the world

All and sundry said: "We knew him well."

Forsooth none knew about the traveller —

What he said, whom he addressed, whence he hailed.

With little Urdu and less Persian, it will be risky for an outsider to assess his poetry, be it Asrar-i-Khudi or Javid-Nama. Luckily, we have such expository works in English as The Development of Metaphysics in Persia and, later, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, from which to draw a small-scale map of his faith as a poet and person, if not a politician. For an intellect like his an occasional comparison with Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo would be quite in order, perhaps even instructive.

I

Though a poet, Iqbal admits religion to be a superior value, for it is man's total reaction to life. Faith, he says, has something cognitive about it. More than action, feeling and what we call knowledge,

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religion is an expression of the whole man. But religion without knowledge, without rational support is not enough. The search for rational foundations in Islam goes back to the Prophet. And since the spirit of the Quran is "essentially un classical", Iqbal holds Hellenic humanism as largely responsible for distorting the Quranic world-view. As he says, rightly: "Socrates concentrated his attention on the human world alone." Enamoured of theory Plato, his disciple, despised sense-perception and the concrete. It was late in life that the once sceptical Al-Ghazzali admitted the intuitive components of the religious life, ma rifa, and exit or opening that, by the way, did not exist for Kant.

For more than 500 years religious thought in Islam has been in the doldrums. It is time to look at its essentials in the light of contemporary experience and say, once more, 'yes' to the world of matter "and discover a basis for the realistic regulation of life". The affirmation of the spiritual self in man — which, perhaps because of an Arabic affinity and a Teutonic pupillage, Iqbal refers to as the Ego — is basic to the Quranic injunction.

A proponent of Personalism, Iqbal defines his position with the help of a catechism: "What then is life?" It is individual: its highest form so far is the Ego (khudi) in which the individual becomes a self-contained exclusive centre. But the exclusive, self-contained centre, an ordinary consciousness, or aggressive Philistine, is of course not the ideal, the complete individual. As he says: "The greater his distance from God the less his individuality. He who comes nearest to God is the complete person." But not even nearness to God can make Iqbal forget the pragmatic test. Therefore it is that "The idea of personality gives us a standard of value: it settles the problem of good and evil. That which fortifies personality is good, that which weakens it is bad. Art, religion and ethics must be judged from the standpoint of personality." This may not satisfy the sophisticated avant-garde of today; but it has a simple, no-nonsense about it.

The Introduction of Asrar-i-Khudi begins with a passionate description of his credo: What is this centre of intuitional unity, this bright spot of consciousness which illuminates all human thought, serves to correlate the scattered and unlimited potentialities of human nature? What is this 'ego' or 'self' or 'I' which, although it reveals itself through actions, remains concealed so far as its true nature is

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concerned, and which, in spite of being the creative source of all human observations, cannot be submitted to the scrutiny of an observer? Is it an eternal Truth, or has life invented this illusion or plausible deception merely to help in the attainment of its objective? Looking from the moral and ethical standpoint the behaviour of individuals and nations will depend upon the answer to this extremely vital question."

Briefly, it is a doctrine for a sensitive but also heroic, responsible living, responsible to reality and the race. Man is the bearer and trustee of the Cosmic Intention, a creative, ascending, aspiring spirit. In a typical, dangerous inversion Iqbal declares God to be a co-worker of man. What the Quran had said was slightly different: "Verily God will not change the condition of men, till they know what is in themselves."

Islam puts its emphasis on empirical experience, the concrete, but without ignoring the claims of the heart (Qalb). The Prophet himself showed a critical interest in psychic phenomena. However, the first Muslim scholar to understand the subliminal self or selves was Iba-i-Khaldum. Himself not unsympathetic to the mystical afflatus, Iqbal had one serious misgiving in the matter: the pragmatic test showed that the mystics tended to deny the world and serial time. This has often led to enervation or decadence, which he was not prepared to overlook. Listening to the ecstatic sufi plaints one cannot avoid a little scepticism. Listen to this from Al-Hasan: "This Believer wakens grieving and goes to bed grieving ... Beware of this world (Duniya) with all wariness; for it is like a snake, smooth to the touch, but its venom is deadly." Shades of the Serpent and the Rope!

Iqbal's attitude to Sufi doctrine and practice, especially to 'unityism' (Wahdat-al-Wujud), was highly ambivalent, one of love-hate. Yet in spite of his allergy and repeated attacks on certain features of Sufism, Iqbal belongs, as Arberry insists, to the history of Sufism. He is a Sufi who is also rational, a mystic no less than a prophet. Theoretically an activist, is he not also a restless dreamer?

Iqbal divides the religious life into three periods or categories: faith, thought and discovery, or obedience, metaphysics and psychology. His own bias would seem to be for the second, towards rethinking. The third, tending towards the mystical, he admits to be "a genuine effort to clarify consciousness". But, for reasons already

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given, he tends to dismiss mysticism as a danger and a deviation. According to him, the mystical experience is essentially individual; hence incommunicable, also it tends towards the other-worldly.

Religion is connected with the idea and experience of deity. Iqbal examines the cosmological, ideological and ontological arguments only to reject their claims and authority. Experience within and without lead him to a belief in the ultimate unity of being and thought (the Hindu might prefer the word 'consciousness' but both probably mean the same). Iqbal recognises levels of existence (or being) and, finally, a Creative Self, not a mechanic contriver of the cosmos. The limitations of the scientific world-view are again stated and underlined. Science is as much a projection as any other idolatry. He quotes Eddington (Space, Time and Gravitation) with approval: "Is it too much to say that the mind's search for permanence has created the world of physics?" Not only science, but also philosophy, since it reduces the rich variety of experience to a system, comes lower than religion. Philosophy is but theory, the other is actual experience.

"The fulfilment of the religious life is in prayer", the last word on the Has of the Prophet. The motive of prayer, its "higher recognition" can be understood only when the nature of the Deity is clarified. Iqbal agrees with William James that "in spite of all that science may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect." He goes forward to a brilliant obiter dictum: "The truth is, all search for knowledge is essentially a form of prayer." Iqbal has no doubt that congregational prayer secures a better communal end than the cloistered virtue of the recluse and the solitary, wrapt up in his self-intoxicated bliss of being: "Oh Shamsi Tabriz, I am so drunken in this world, That except of drunkenness and of revelry I have no tale to tell." Association in prayer does away with all man-made social barriers. In a rare piece of unsolicited advice Iqbal turns to the Pharisaic Hindu: "What a tremendous spiritual revolution will take place, practically in no time, if the proud aristocratic Brahmin of South India is daily made to stand shoulder to shoulder with the untouchable!" If it were that easy! Then how could Islam countenance monarchy?

But religion, deity and prayer centre round a basic question: "What is the nature of the ego, this 'I'?" The unity and uniqueness

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of the person spells his Quranic, that is heroic destiny. Yet, except perhaps for Shah Wali Ullah and Jamaluddin Afghani, Islamic thought has played down or played truant to the bold, personalist philosophy. With his modern temper and training, Iqbal seeks support from Bradley and draws a distinction between the ego's sense of time and space and that of the body. He also emphasizes the privacy of the ego, which includes its directive attitude, a free, personal causality. Wills, aims and aspirations are part of the growing personality. This suggests a different quality and direction of existence, because of the body-mind alliance, which is not to be found in other forms of creation. As the Quran has it: "Then He brought forth men of another make." To this Iqbal adds: "The Ultimate Ego that makes the emergent emerge is innermost in nature, and is described by the Quran as 'the First and Last, the visible and the invisible'." Recognition of this fact shows prayer to be "the ego's escape from mechanism to freedom". In His will is not only our peace but our freedom.

If, in spite of such clear indications, Islam has been dogged by a depressing and continuing sense of destiny or fatalism, taqdir and qismet, and the theory of "accomplished facts", the reasons are complex: psychological, historical no less than political. Iqbal is on the side of the primacy of the will, willingly submissive to the spirit of the Law and the Lawgiver.

As for immortality, it must not be confused with the survival of the same body or the person. Barzakh, as the Sufis suggest, is a state of consciousness characterised by a change in the ego's attitude towards experience, especially time and space. The chance of creative unfoldment never ceases: an eternity of failure could also be one of endless opportunity, to mend and to master. The severely biologic approach of today — rather yesterday — calls for an uptodate Rumi to give wings to the meta-biological hope of transformation and define anew the ascent of man, from level to level:

I died as inert matter and became a plant.

And as plant I died and became an animal.

I died as an animal and became a man,

When did I lose by dying?

So why should I fear for losing my human character?

I shall die as a man, to rise an angel.

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And when I leave as angel, it will be to reach the Ineffable.

Truly an astounding insight and inspiration, whose echoes may be heard in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin. Whether this means a physical envelope analogous to the past body or not we do not know and the Quran is discreetly silent. Incidentally, Heaven and Hell, says Iqbal, are states and not locations — a simple enough statement that had caused a furors among the faithful and the literalists.

II

Turning to the spirit of Muslim culture, and drawing his inspiration from the Quran and the Prophet, Iqbal underlines the prophetic and yet rational character. While the Sufis, it is true, have systematised the world within, two other sources of knowledge: Nature and History, have not been neglected by Muslim thinkers. That the Muslims had a profound sense of history and evolution comes out in the works of Ibn-i-Khaldun and Maulana Jalaluddin. Not only the principle of Cartesian doubt, but criticism of Greek logic, as well as laying down the foundations of modern science — Roger Bacon had studied in the Muslim universities of Spain — go to the credit of Islam, which would have more to show but for the mystic disinclination to be concerned with the mundane. As Dr. Sachau has said a la Iqbal: "Were it not for Al-Ash ari and Al-Ghazzali, the Arabs would have been a nation of Galileos and Newtons." The concept of power, so dear to the Renaissance and post-Renaissance science, was anticipated in the Quran: "O company of djinns and men, if you can overpass the bounds of Heaven and Earth, then overpass them. But by power alone shall you overpower them." Of course 'power' is a tricky word and should not be torn out of the context. Berating Spengler for his many misunderstandings, Iqbal shows, in some detail, how the problem of ego as well as time and space, in fact varieties of time and space, were questions of life and death for the follower of Islam.

The world-affirming dynamism of Islam (and no doubt his own expansionist psyche) compel Iqbal to point to the need  change, or heroic "reconstruction". Eternal principles do not imply immunity. As we have seen, this is what makes him almost unduly critical of the Sufis, content with their distinction between zahir and batin, appearance

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and reality, content to let the world go by. Coming to the present times Iqbal had — at least to begin with — nothing but praise for the Turkish Nationalists about to make a clean sweep of the cobwebs of the past. Misled by the movement, and flying facts in the face, Iqbal asserts that a republican form of government is not only consistent with the spirit of Islam but, what is more true, in keeping with contemporary needs and pressures. He is, however, in favour of a collective Caliphate. What he is really looking for is a liberal movement in Islam, what he elsewhere calls International Islam. On the vexed question: Is the Law of Islam capable of evolution, that is change? his own answer, based on a profound study, is in the affirmative.

Taking a larger view, Iqbal, poet no less than prophet, announces the universal gospel: "Humanity needs three things today — a spiritual interpretation of the universe, spiritual emancipation of the individual, and basic principles of a universal import directing the evolution of human society on a spiritual basis" towards a spiritual democracy as part of the Islamic heritage, still but partly realised.

Turning to science, he underlines the limitations of its casualitybound world picture. Paradoxically, modern man's control over nature seems to have robbed him of his faith in the future. The western theories of evolution, red in tooth and claw, have little to offer to the cause of a worthwhile human becoming. He criticises Nietzsche, with whom his thought is unduly and excessively compared, to prove the point. Misled by the materially-minded evolutionists, Nietzsche had gone off the track. As for his doctrine of eternal recurrence, Iqbal, cruelly, calls it "the most hopeless idea of immortality ever formed by man." Entirely cut off from the depths of his own being, modern man is in conflict with himself no less than with others. As for the Islamic world, sunk in the false renunciation of a mediaeval mysticism, ignorance and superstitions, there have been newer, flashy ersatz loyalties like Nationalism and Atheistic Socialism, none of which is enough or true to the spirit of Islam. About Nationalism Iqbal said elsewhere: "I am opposed to Nationalism as it is understood in Europe .... Patriotism is a perfectly natural virtue and has a place in the moral life of man. Yet that which really matters is a man's faith, his culture, his historical traditions. These are the things worth living and dying for and not the piece of earth with which the spirit of man happens to be temporarily associated."

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In its higher form neither dogma nor priest-ridden ritual, religion alone can prepare man for the task facing the critical world in which science and socialism are in the throes of a New Order. The meaning-value of religion, a "world of directive energy" (Alam-i-Amr), has still a role to play in the making of man and society. Nietzsche too, Iqbal generously admits, had an imperative vision — imperious no less! — but he failed because his intellectual premises and progenitors had blinded him to the real significance of the higher life.

Iqbal goes on to assert that religion is more anxious — and no doubt more able — to reach the Real than science. There is no mystery, nothing emotional or abnormal about religious experience or what we would call realisation. It is this, the religious premise and proof, that creates the new centre of being and existence, helps the 'ego' in "rising higher than mere reflection and mending its transiency by appropriating the eternal".

How, in man's "search for a purely psychological foundation of human unity", the self and the society interpenetrate, or could interpenetrate, has been suggested by Iqbal in a manner which illuminates the core of traditional culture. "The new world finds its foundation of world unity in the principle of Tawhid", says Iqbal and goes on to add: "Islam as a polity is only a practical means of making this principle a living factor in the intellectual and emotional life of mankind. And since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man's loyalty to one's own ideal nature." The restless, creative Ego, one might say, is his only dogma. Restless till one finds rest in the Real. It may be doubted if such men make good disciples or wholly belong to the here and now. The intensity of his vision isolates the visionary.

The secret of self-renewal is simple and perennial. In the closing words of Javid-Nama: "Re-chisel, then, thine ancient frame; And build up a new being." When we do that there shall arise, as if from nowhere, a profoundly theocratic order, not its parody, which is all that we have and all that we are likely to get from the rabble and the rabble-rousers of the world.

III

This resume of Iqbal's thoughts reveals many points of contrast

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and comparison with those of say, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. Though overlooked by their respective critics, no student of the modern Indian scene can afford to ignore these.

Here we shall draw, in the most general terms, to only a few of the striking features. As in Vivekananda, in Iqbal too there is an unmistakeable emphasis on the Will and the Ego, on what the Swami loved to call strength and fearlessness (abhih). And if, for his purpose of a renascent Islam, Iqbal was wary of the charms of the Sufi lifestyle and world-view, of Ibnul Arabi and Hafiz, the Swami too was unsparing in his criticism of the markat vairāgya (monkeying with renunciation) and the ladylike, swooning bhakti of the pseudo-Vaish-nava, the insanities of theistic devotion as James phrased it. Both men looked upon the world as essentially a theatre for heroism. 'Man-making' was the motto of Vivekananda's virile life and his idea of education. "Strength is the medicine of the world's worst disease", said one. "My life is the falcon's, fanatic and stern," said the other. Both were men of Khudi (Self) but also of Faqr and Ishq, renunciation and love, not an improbable or undesirable combination. Their definition of atheism uses almost the same language. Said the Swami: "He is an atheist who does not believe in himself. The old religions said that he was an atheist who did not believe in God. The new religion says he is an atheist who does not believe in himself." Compare this with Iqbal's: "A disbeliever in God is a Kafir according to the Mulla, But to me one who does not affirm Self is a greater Kafir." If some of Iqbal's opinions were frowned upon by the orthodox Mulla and Maulavi, Ash rites and Mu tazalites, so were Vivekananda's frequent sallies and obiter dicta. For instance: "Be strong, my young friends, that is my advice to you. You will be nearer heaven through football than through the study of Gita."

By definition Islam bases itself on the fulfilment of the will of the Almighty. Vivekananda says much the same, though he uses a slightly different language: "My ideal, indeed, can be put into a few words, and that is to preach to mankind their divinity and how to manifest it in every movement of life." Of course the tolerant background of Vedanta gives him a larger horizon. And so we hear him say: "We want to lead mankind to the place where there is neither the Vedas, nor the Bible, nor the Koran. That this has to be done by harmonizing the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran. Mankind ought to

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be taught that religions are but the varied expressions of THE RELIGION, which is Oneness, so that each may choose the path that suits him best." Such a higher negation would not have been to the taste of Iqbal, however independent and individual. Again, as contrasted with the implied elitism of the poet and the thinker, the lonely Messiah, Vivekananda voices a robust grassroot revolutionary ethics that is yet to be justified: "Let new India arise — out of the peasants' cottage, out of the huts of fishermen, the cobblers and sweepers. Let her spring from the grocer's shop, from beside the oven of the fritter-seller. Let her emanate from the factories, from marts and markets. Let her emerge from groves and forests, from hills and monasteries." Further, the Swami points to a trans-religious, trans-political, trans-national idealism with nothing local or limited about it, a sort of ne plus ultra of idealism. "I know my mission in life", said Vivekananda, "and there is no chauvinism in it. I belong as much to India as to the world. I do not believe in any politics. God and truth are the only politics in the world, everything else is trash." With much of it Iqbal would have agreed, the Iqbal who wrote: "Unknown to Ataturk and Reza Shah, The soul of the East is still in search of a body".

Between Iqbal and Sri Aurobindo, contemporaries virtually unknown to each other, one senses in many areas an immediate kinship. Truth to tell, the differences are no less revealing. Poet and prophet, each had his model or archetype: for Iqbal it was the Quran, for Sri Aurobindo the Vedas and the Upanishads. Original thinkers, neither was an old-time conformist. Sri Aurobindo's "realistic Ad-vaita" was consistently critical of the dominant ascetic-illusionist world-view. Iqbal was deeply suspicious of the Sufi strategy of letting the world alone. In both we find innovative interpretations in keeping with the Time-Spirit. Spokesmen for self-respect and self-determination, both make profound, relevant, rooted, of the modern West, "a land unblessed by visionary light", in terms of a wider and deeper harmony that goes beyond the squabble of categories and continents. Both looked upwards as well as towards the future. The Aurobindean optimism is the more striking: No use clinging to the ice-floes of the past, said Sri Aurobindo. Again: "We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future." Iqbal too had high hopes, but rarely so unclouded. His Naya Shivala (New Shrine) was never

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built. The reason for this ought to be looked into. Was it his deraciné role, the extra-territorial loyalties that hampered him?

A one-time extremist in politics, Sri Aurobindo later opted for the yogic life, in the process updating and giving it an integral orientation. So far as one can judge, there was no such inward plunge or discipline in Iqbal, who was neither Sannyasi nor Yogi. Another contrast is that though Sri Aurobindo is credited with large philosophical works, he refused to be called a philosopher. Iqbal was trained to be one; he was also a jurist and a theologian. Iqbal's intellectual equipment is impressive. Sri Aurobindo, though a thinker's thinker, is more remarkable for his massive insights, born no doubt of a higher consciousness or altered states of awareness available to the Yogi.

Interestingly, both are aware of Nietzsche, without being in any way his follower. Both seem passionately involved in the idea of an ideal evolution, culminating in the Superman, Insani-i-Kamil the Gnostic Being, and a matching society based on a change from within. In a letter (April 7, 1920) Sri Aurobindo had written: "What God wants in man is to embody Himself here in the individual and in the community, to realise God in life." In their passion for unseen psychological foundations on which the future would rest, how far were they following traditional lines? Pace Syed Abdul Wahid, Sri Aurobindo's exposition of the new society and the evolution of consciousness is much more exhaustive. But it is hard not to notice an overall similarity in the two heroic dreamers, who apparently worked within inherited religious frameworks and in complete isolation from each other. To see them together, at once, is the task of those who have come after, and who have to make sense of their immense indications for a brighter tomorrow not only for the xenophobic orthodox but for mankind, the world's unborn soul.

In dreams begin responsibilities. Beyond the soiled and servile pursuit of politics, and of warring faiths and fanatics, lies the heaven of the Ideal, the Fatherland of the sensitive of all ages. In Iqbal's own words: the Paradise of free men is eternal voyaging. Let us salute the ardent pilgrim, the musafir of the immemorial quest and honour, if not fulfil his faith and his exhortations, share his agony and ecstasy:

I am waiting for the votaries who arise at dawn,

They who shall worship my fire,

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I have no need of the ear of today,

I am the voice of the poet of tomorrow.

SlSIRKUMAR GHOSE

(Courtesy - Kashmir University, Srinagar, Kashmir)

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CADENT DEGENERATION

IT may be that the time has come, or nearly so, for me to stop browsing in libraries; for I have sufficient background, and ground too on which to stand, and most of the recent material is quite unrewarding. But then again, some of it at least prompts me to add to my observations of and about what is currently wrong; and so perhaps does service. Whether it does service for the reader he must decide for himself, and here I shall give him another chance: the book featured being 31 New American Poets - edited with an Introduction by Ron Schreiber and supplied also with a Foreword by Denise Levertov - New York, 1969. The offerings have been previously published in many places, including some of the currently most prestigious magazines and reviews; Mr. Schreiber is or then was an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts; and Miss Levertov seems to have had some professorial station also, and if I am not mistaken is literarily prominent for some reason: I think that she is herself a poet by contemporary acceptance: and thus we may consider ourselves both in good hands, and in the forefront.

And we might rejoice at the idea that so many new poets are here discovered and presented to us between the covers of one volume. It would seem like one of the Renaissances we keep hearing about, but perhaps find it hard to see. But what may be seen here, alas, is only a kind of thing that almost anyone could do, if he did not care what he did, perhaps, and if he had sufficient pretensions and encouragement from those who now count in this line. That is, we have only spew-arranged stuff not worth arranging or presenting at all.

Miss Levertov is moderately eloquent in a business-like way about the fact as she considers it that so much poetry is being written now, in so much variety, and that so much of it is good. Then Mr. Schreiber comes and starts out by assuring us that the situation as thus presented truly does obtain; after which he says that all this new poetry really sounds like something new — not the kind of thing that was being written fifty years ago — and that it gives us something like "free verse", but "tamed into cadence". We are said to have not so much "free" as "direct" verse, with great vigor as well as variety, and without anything like meter to get in the way — and to "tame" perhaps the real true spontaneous utterance even beyond

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the possibility of an up-to-date observer's finding something new to say about it all.
And let us now look at a little of this new poetry so liberally given. So:

 It was simply a dark,
laboring mass.
Now and then it gave off
some half-stifled
animal noises.

 

Night enters the skin's pores.
It is time. In those same holes
broken of bead-sweat, now a curtain

 

blows, flaps, and an evening sea
is waved. Winds chill and gulls
quiet in cluster under dock and eaves.

 

The vast blubber is rotting.
Scales of fat ripple over the waters
until the taste of it
like a sulphur yellow factory of chemical plenty
dyes every tongue. .

 

I have stolen the sun from the moon's black mouth
But not without some loss of innocence.
Be not against me Old Herodotus
For when the wind whistles among the silent winter oaks

 

A man must do
What a man must do.

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These are excerpts from four different "poets"; they are not the complete "poems", but that does not matter — nothing is lost by the taking out of context, if that is the word for it. These "lines" might in fact be read as one "poem", and be thus as valid as anything in the book.

And in said book, it is true, there is nothing that sounds like what was being written "fifty years ago". But what there is is just exactly the kind of stuff we have been getting now these fifty years, since that nebulous cut-off date: the same attempts, at any cost, simply not to sound like anything in the great tradition. Mr. Schreiber tells us that metrical poems tend to sound alike, whereas here we have distinct and distinctive voices. But the exact opposite is the truth (as so often in Modern matters): our great distinctive voices in poetry are distinctive because of their relationship to the true foundation and standards established by long effort and rich achievement — whereas what we have here is an indistinct mumbling, the only thing new about it (regarding that cut-off date) being the progress of the degeneration. There is a noticeable shadow of Imagism in the book, and also of Surrealism; and the "beat" dabbling with Buddhism and ignorant pretence to "enlightenment"; but nothing really new that was not new with the early flourishing of Ezra Pound. And indeed Mr. Schreiber notes that Pound proclaimed that the trouble with the old forms is that they have been perfected. But to a real poet this is their glory, and his opportunity. He will perfect the achievement again in his own way. Cultivating imperfection for its own sake is the way to nothing; and Milton's "perfecting" of the Italian sonnet for English by no means put Wordsworth in the shade, for one example. And for another, the perfection of certain forms made a high level of poetry possible for centuries, in China and Japan; and this is poetry that Pound (with his usual brash ignorance) has professed to admire and even sought to emulate: failing by neglect of the formal requirements (of the minimum formal requirements, in fact, for any poetry) and by not being a poet anyway.

But the alleged distinctive voices of these 31 are said to come out and become plain in their own reading of their productions aloud. But then if two different people read William Morris aloud he would no doubt sound like two different poets: or certainly they could make him do so. The full test of a poem, as a lasting or even genuine piece

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of literature, is how it reads on the page: this being true though it may originally have been written for oral delivery, or even for chanting or singing to music. The full subtlety and power of any real poetry cannot come out in recitation before a crowd. But this is rather an academic or idle subject here, for even more than most things made especially for public recitation these specimens have little subtlety and less genuine poetic power; and this book demonstrates once again that Modernism is just incompetence.

We may sum it up with this excerpt:

call it a crescent

crescent of rock

 

an island facing east

Indeed, call it that, or call it anything — what does it matter? I have not seen good reason to name the writers of the other excerpts: but this is an exception, summing up as it does: and it was written by one who is a relative old-timer in this crowd — he reports having been born in that fateful Hulme-haunted year 1915—and whose name is Robert Lax. In this context this is as good and appropriate a name as in another context that of a flourishing Modern scholar and critic — Wylie Sypher. For Lax it is; there is nothing but laxity, and sheer unwillingness to accept the necessary discipline in the poetic art, that makes even a supreme poet more of a poet (as Sri Aurobindo has observed), and sets on him the Muse's final seal. This "new" stuff is not new by any meaningful use of the word; and while it may pass as prose (one may see by arranging it that way), it is not good prose, or at least nothing at all exceptional. It is nothing but noise, and a waste of time and paper.

Mr. Schreiber would tell us something about being "organic", of course — that is standard procedure now; but a thing that is really organic grows according to a determined, that is a predetermined form and pattern, and rhythm too, and finds its perfection and its spontaneity, its freedom, in the docility to the mastering rhythm and the worthiness, the perfection of the pattern, the form, the finished and rounded nature: like a rose, for example, or even a tiger. But the new productions we are given here are like conglomerate rocks

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thrown together at haphazard, and not living organic things at all: a backward step, that is, in our cultural evolution. And writing poetry-is something like gardening, or selective breeding: not gouging (or spreading) with a shovel.

Again, Mr. Schreiber tells us that we get the pauses right, hearing the poets read aloud; and notes with apparent admiration that all the "lines" of one of these "poets" are end-stopped, no matter what it may look like — even though they may end with articles or prepositions. And what do such pauses matter? It is just the old story, the sterile and gross aberration that we have been afflicted with these fifty years — desperate dodges, all on the surface, without meaning, significance or power. Fundamentally it was "old hat" before most of these youngsters were born, and they are too ignorant to know it.

For most of them, we are told, are still quite young: they are of that "generation" (better called "degeneration") that can only repeat that everything is wrong, and rejects everything old because it is old, and for no better reason of the kind that is now recited in coffeehouses to guitar accompaniment to people "stoned" on drugs, and rabid with "rock" music, that most powerful force of depravity: and to those who are receptive to the baleful influences that are behind these growing blights and dangers to human civilization. In this volume we do not have examples of the worst corruption: the vulgarity in every sense, the sheer filth, perversion, depravity of the "vanguard" of this disorganized and disintegrating consciousness. "But what we have is fundamentally of the same provenance and dark insistence, hammering and leeching away at us with the fact that poetry is now even worse than dead in this Modern world. That this kind of thing is now invading the universities — which one would have thought were degenerate and futile enough already — is not a happy omen of things to come.

II

There are some points here that may call, not for extenuation, but for explanation and further treatment. As for the individual voice within the tradition — the voice made individual by the tradition — of course Chaucer, as an initiator, may seem an exception — at least

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in his own time — as Spenser and Sidney, perhaps to a lesser extent, in theirs. But their voices are distinctive and powerful because they had found the true prosody, with sufficient inspiration to use it with fullness and at a high level; they had mastered a form of utterance that was in consonance with the character and requirements of the language; and so their voices, greatly individual, become all the more powerful as the tradition grows. They found, and proved in their own work, what time has abundantly built on and furthered. And this is what no Modern, no "poet" of the twentieth century breakdown, has done. A new prosody, a new form, has not been discovered. And thus we have no great and distinctive voices, but only various kinds of indeterminate noise which all blend, if that is the word, in one chaotic clamor. We have no genuine new departures, but only fallings away that are just more of the same futility and incompetence, to one who appreciates the real requirements. The tradition has been violated and broken and replaced by nothing, for the true prosodical basis has been abandoned. The incoherent shoutings of Pound were the natural heralds of a movement of degeneracy. Then, about the Englishing of the Italian sonnet: of course Milton made more a solid block of it than the "classical" division into octave and sestet. But this is a legitimate development, one way of using a great form — and one, indeed, that Milton learned from the Italian developments. Wordsworth followed here, and also wrote masterly sonnets that preserve the two-part division: which in time Keats did in his own way, by no means put off by previous perfection. And so might a poet do nowadays, if he could; and he would enrich the language and help to revive the true course of poetry, by doing so. (As indeed Sri Aurobindo has done, as one part of his great work of carrying and increasing the flame). As for my reference to Chinese and Japanese poetry — I refer to the form only, and not to the dense literary allusiveness and the use of the same themes over and over. In the case of English poetry it has been well demonstrated that the same fundamental form can be used for a great variety of purposes and expressions; whereas it has not been demonstrated that spew and sprawl can give us anything of literary value — whatever "shock value" some of it may have for a crude consciousness. All this Modernism has given us is that "dark laboring mass", that gives off a few stifled — if raucous — noises. A true poet will not show us the wasteland

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we live in, but to overcome it with a new creation. He will not try to make a virtue of his debility, or put it forth as something "significant" — (though a confused and degenerating world, with no cultural leadership, may accord him a considerable "success" in this line.— for a while). As for Wylie Sypher, I do not wish to assert that he himself quite lives up to his name, as it were. But laxness in "poetry" and devious nullity in "criticism" we have very much of, and they do not serve well our cultural development.

III

In one of the most impenetrable areas of contemporary criticism, one may feel at times that he has come near a clue to the position of that fundamental cleavage that besets us, that impassable gulf between poetry, and what is called "modern poetry"; which latter marvel remains nondescript, after these sixty years or so of its usurping presence: a jungle in which the real thing cannot grow. The standards by which one judges poetry do not apply to the present product; and what may apply, is a consideration never to be clarified among those champions or rather slobbering touts of "newness" and "progress" to whom the thickest fog is the true breath of such life as they can afford.

When dealing with the past achievement, these modern critics may sometimes deliver something perceptive and valuable, for they are building largely on agreements arrived at in the days when poetry was still evident as a living force, written by contemporaries, and are thus preserved from a too exigent exposure of their own poverty. But when they come to touch on figures of our happy day, everything is reversed — or rather, nothing salient applies; and all that one can gather from the ineffable muddle is that these things are, and thus apparently for some reason to be borne, and chattered about — the only real question, for their exponents, being that of their own academic preservation. So they manipulate their categories of discourse, and let one know that they have heard of such things as light, largeness and elevation, assurance and power; also letting us know that these things are quite foreign to their own experience, and that if they were to attempt to put in an appearance again in the world, they would not be tolerated.

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Here a book in point is A Short History of American Poetry, by Donald Barlow Stauffer (New York, 1974). Though never more than mediocre, the book is worth reading, until it comes to the twentieth century; and then perhaps even more worth reading, for the flagrant support it gives to the contentions above advanced. Let us take one sufficient illustration, culled from the embarrassment of riches: no more than Mr. Schreiber can Mr. Stauffer contain his amazement over the fact as he apprehends it that we live in such a flourishing time for poetry; here is one of his illustrations, chosen rather diffidently from the very cream of the offerings:

Oh well, I will say here,

knowing each man,

let you find a good wife too,

and love her as hard as you can.

The name of the "poet" responsible for this need not be mentioned. But some attention should be paid to what Mr. Stauffer says about it, running on for nearly a page. He speaks of "inwardness", of course — what else, when there is no out ward ness worth noting; and finds a kind of antiverbal honesty, a near resentment against words, in fear perhaps of not being immediate enough— or perhaps of stumbling and fumbling to say something that has already been said better before. There is an honesty here, it seems, in a search for the "speech of the place." And it seems that the man recites his productions with a kind of desperate earnestness, with varying emphases, as if he feels that some of his words have some particular importance! It is part of the preoccupation with which Mr. Stauffer credits most of the Moderns in America: that of exploiting the possibilities of the language to the full, and making it over, until it is a flawless vehicle of the "national spirit." Of course any kind of ineptitude can be defended in terms like these.

With all the plethora of such virtuosi that we have, we may reflect searchingly on a critical and perhaps indispensable insistence that we have heard: that, far from destroying poetry, minute analysis enhances it, with a fuller understanding. Indeed, it should be so: for, as has been observed by one of our most competent analysts, Poe, in poetry it is the little things that make all the difference. And so,

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"other things being equal" — if only one could depend on that contingency! But the world stubbornly wags otherwise.

Thus, Poe's own poetry has received little serious attention from the sober-headed of our day; and it seems still a forlorn hope that "The Haunted Palace," for example, shall have analysis befitting it: revealing how, with the simplest and smallest metrical changes, a continual variety is kept up, a well-established pattern being yet not quite apprehend able, and affording a perpetual, aesthetically powerful, surprise. Abstractly, this kind of achievement is so much in favor now, with nothing more surely calculated to invoke insupportable shuddering than the least idea, notion or whiff of a "mechanical regularity," that one may wonder how the opportunity can have been missed.

But a mature and generous acquaintance with "modern" developments or rather vagarious complexities will douse wonder of this kind. For it is all too apparent that the present thirst for minute analysis has sprung up and is enlisted in the service of ends ulterior to a simple and honest search for truth. That is, we have been given, not a serious study of poetry, in all its forms, but rather a kind of special pleading for one particular and minor kind of poetry, as if it were the only true and genuine article. Proceeding uncomfortably and arrogantly (if sometimes covert-arrogantly — or sneaky-maliciously) with a never clarified sense of grievance, it does its best to make all our central poetic tradition, with all its greatest and most powerful gifts to our cultural heritage, seem something meretricious and shoddy, and beneath the kind of responsible mind that one should have. What is desiderated is a logical juggling that makes any serene and large assurance impossible; or rather is the natural product of incapacity for serenity and largeness. Donne's confusions, unresolved cross-purposes, desperate false emphases, wild empty conceits and sodden failures of expression are a veritable spring of obscurity here, which suits well with the critical prepossessions and pretensions of small minds alike strained, crabbed and ill at ease. A Poe is too clear for them: he does not seem to give them any nice bones to gnaw, and so is suspect — or rather to be rejected out of hand. His explicitly avowed and surely organized poetic purpose was to create a certain impression; and what can this be, to men who insist that the only legitimate poetical-cum-critical mind must be a kind of nut-cracker?

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In such a "cultural" climate we can have only deterioration; until there is no healthy revulsion at such a spectacle as a Kenneth Burke's making such an ass of himself (or revealing himself such an ass) with praise of the inanities of a William Carlos Williams.

That this Williams is still one of the biggest names in the "modern" movement, should be a sufficient indication to the wise of the lack of something fundamental. Effectively, if all this close-reading has not destroyed poetry, it has yet proceeded in a climate in which poetry has become increasingly impossible — until now there is a positive aversion to it in nearly everyone. Better to work cryptograms and crossword puzzles, after all — there is less pretension there. And there one is in less danger of being "hurt", perhaps, by something larger and more significant than he is disposed to feel comfortable with.

When applied to great poetry, with really serious purpose, the close method soon becomes inapplicable; for its logical meshes are not subtle and acute enough to catch the real essence — which if caught would not be itself. A man who enjoyed largeness and elevation and was at home with the rigorous if undefinable discipline of nobility, was Paul Elmer More; who stood gratefully baffled before Milton's art and particular grandeur of consciousness, and admitted that he could not analyze the power of a music that nevertheless never failed to transport him. One thing egregiously lacking in most of our present critics, is this humility of a seasoned mind, the instrument of a generously developed nature, secure in itself and thankful for the greatness it is given to feed upon. More, in sheer analytical capacity, can well stand comparison with any critic that this century has produced; but he did not have to have the last word, or try for the "final analysis", and so is really of the breed "before the flood" — before obscurantist inanity overwhelmed us as it has. It is the natural tendency or reaction of the new breed to hate Milton; to hate all greatness, because it feels too small before it. Poetry is not served, by the application of such a consciousness.

But used for its real purposes, applied to the kind of things it finds acceptable, this "modernism" need never come to the end of its road: it can go on forever multiplying and manipulating its categories, and raising mirages for the happy denizens of the cultural desert. But where, in all this there is any place for a poet, is a question

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to which I have seen no answer. We have droves of the contemporary product, of course; and there need be no end to the numbers who can do the kind of thing now acceptable. All it requires, aside from a certain easy knack of catching the "trend," is a lack of a genuine human consciousness, aspiring upward. Such a consciousness has been finding it increasingly difficult to live in the modern climate; until now, if one wants to have some inkling of what poetry really is, he must first forget all that he has heard and been told, and first, last and forever stand firm against the present stream. And if he is to be a poet he must be equal to our great language, and thus carry it forward to greater things, purposes, developments and achievements; he must not seek to "remake" it in the service of his very own degenerate dullness.

JESSE ROARKE

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REVIEW

Gnana Boomi (Tamil) by Sri R.N. Fayanarayanakannan. Published by Ongaram, 18, Nadu Street, Solai Nagar, Pondicherry-605003. Rs. 25/-

HISTORY and legend both invest Pondicherry and its environs with a rare spiritual and religious significance. Prof. Jouveau Dubrevil, the eminent French archaeologist, has spoken of Puducheri as being once the site of Vedapuri, Centre of Vedic Knowledge, founded by the legendary Sage Agastya. Many a Saint has hallowed this soil both in his lifetime and after, as the continuing experience of the residents testifies. Thiru. Jayanarayanakannan reveres this ancient tradition and by his patient researches and industry, has given a permanent, historically factual position to it.

It has taken over four full years for the author to collect data, evidence and local traditions about as many as thirty three saints whose samadhis he in this sacred area. He has delved into tomes of history, scriptural classics, epigraphical records, taken endless pains to find corroboration from every available source, before producing this authentic record of these God-Men.

Not all of these high personages come from the South. There are some from Andhra, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Sri Lanka. Each of the subjects has his special aroma, his own fine of experience and way of life, his unique message. There is Tholla Kathu Swamy of the 17th century A.D. who is recorded to have appeared in several places at the same time; Bala Siddhar of Mailam who lived in the 13th century, mainly upon the milky juice of a thorny shrub; Siddha-nanda Swamy of Muthialpet who had mastered the Dhananjaya Yoga, Kullaswamy, commonly mistaken for a lunatic but really a man of deep realisation, to which no less a person than Sri Aurobindo testifies; Govindaswamy who gave poet Bharathi a living vision of his parents long departed; Rama Paradesi Swamy of Villianur fame, celebrated in the records of the local French Government; and so on, the narrative proceeds unrolling a panorama of the Sentinels of the Spirit before the reader's eye.

The chapters on Sri Aurobindo and The Mother whose presence and work in Pondicherry have brought worldwide renown to this

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spiritual centre are notable for the detailed account of their lives that the author has given, drawing from the ample biographical material that is available.

A work of this type knows no end. It is a continuing quest, for the Truth and the Message for which this illustrious line of saints stands are boundless.

All the income from this book goes to the construction of an Orphanage Institution, a Dhyana Mandapam with herbs and a Nava Sakti Temple.

M. P. PANDIT

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