The Revival of Industry in India   GENTLEMEN, —  IF I hesitated to accept your invitation to preside at the opening of this Exhibition, the importance of the occasion must be my excuse. You called me to step into the breach, to face publicly the most tremendous question of our times and to give you my solution of a problem on which no two people agree, except that it is urgent. But I do not think that we realise how urgent it is. Famine, increasing poverty, widespread disease, all these bring home to us the fact that there is some radical weakness in our system and that something must be done to remedy it. But there is an

Part Nine   Bankim ­ Tilak ­ Dayananda   Sri Aurobindo wrote the pieces in this part at various times between 1907 and 1920; he published five of them in periodicals and one as the introduction to a book.     Rishi Bankim Chandra   THERE are many who, lamenting the by-gone glories of this great and ancient nation, speak as if the Rishis of old, the inspired creators of thought and civilisation, were a miracle of our heroic age, not to be repeated among degenerate men and in our distressful present. This is an error and thrice an error. Ours is the eternal land, the eternal people, the eternal religion, whose strength, greatness, holiness may be over-clo

Passing Thoughts [2]   The Object of Government   It is the habit of men to blind themselves by customary trains of associated thought, to come to look on the means as an end and honour it with a superstitious reverence as a wonderworking fetish. Government and its great formulas, law and order, efficiency, administration, have been elevated into such a fetish. The principle of good government is not merely to keep men quiet, but to keep them satisfied. It is not its objective to have loyal servants and subjects, but to give all individuals in the nation the utmost possible facilities for becoming men and re

V   His Literary History   BANKIM'S literary activity began for any serious purpose at Khulna, but he had already trifled with poetry in his student days. At that time the poet Iswara Chandra Gupta was publishing two papers, the Sangbad Prabhakar and the Sadhuranjan, which Dwarkanath Mitra and Dinbandhu Mitra were helping with clever school-boy imitation of Iswara Chandra's style. Bankim also entered these fields, but his striking originality at once distinguished him from the mere cleverness of his competitors, and the fine critical taste of Iswara Chandra easily discovered in this obscure student a great and splendid genius. Like Madhu Sudan Dutt Bankim began by an

Originality in National Literatures   It is a singular and as yet unexplained phenomenon in the psychology of mankind that out of so many magnificent civilisations, so many powerful, cultured & vigorous nations & empires whose names and deeds crowd the pages of history, only a select few have been able to develop a thoroughly original and self-revealing literature. Still fewer have succeeded in maintaining these characteristics from beginning to end of their literary development. There have been instances in which a nation at some period of especial energy and stress of life has for a moment arrived at a perfect self-expression, but with the effort the

The Historical Method   Of Kalidasa, the man who thus represents one of the greatest periods in our civilisation and typifies so many sides and facets of it in his writing, we know if possible even less than of Valmekie and Vyasa. It is probable but not certain that he was a native of Malwa born not in the capital Ujjaini, but in one of those villages of which he speaks in the Cloud-Messenger and that he afterwards resorted to the capital and wrote under the patronage of the great Vicramaditya who founded the era of the Malavas in the middle of the first century before Christ. Of his attainments, his creed, his character we may gather something from his poet

IV   His Versatility   WHENEVER a literary man gives proof of a high capacity in action people always talk about it as if a miracle had happened. The vulgar theory is that worldly abilities are inconsistent with the poetic genius. Like most vulgar theories it is a conclusion made at a jump from a few superficial appearances. The inference to be drawn from a sympathetic study of the lives of great thinkers and great writers is that except in certain rare cases versatility is one condition of genius. Indeed the literary ability may be said to contain all the others, and the more so when it takes the form of criticism or of any art, such as the novelist's, which proc

Bal Gangadhar Tilak   NEITHER Mr. Tilak nor his speeches really require any presentation or foreword. His speeches are, like the featureless Brahman, self-luminous. Straightforward, lucid, never turning aside from the point which they mean to hammer in or wrapping it up in ornamental verbiage, they read like a series of self-evident propositions. And Mr. Tilak himself, his career, his place in Indian politics are also a self-evident proposition, a hard fact baffling and dismaying in the last degree to those to whom his name has been anathema and his increasing pre-eminence figured as a portent of evil. The condition of things in India being given, the one possible a

A System of National Education   Some Preliminary Ideas   Publisher's Note to the 1924 Edition   These essays were first published in the Karmayogin in the year 1910. They are, however, incomplete, and the subject of national education proper has not been touched except in certain allusions. It was not the author's intention to have them reprinted in their present form, but circumstances have made necessary the bringing out of an authorised edition. As it at present stands the book consists of a number of introductory essays insisting on certain

Appendix Two   Premises of Astrology   Sri Aurobindo wrote these notes around 1910. They were not intended for publication.   Chapter I   Elements   Astrology depends on three things, the position of the planets in the heavens and with regard to each other, the condition of the planets at the natal hour or at the moment of enquiry, and the general character or tout ensemble of the horoscope. Any error or deficiency with regard to any of these three elements separately or with regard to their mutual relations will affect the work of the astrologer and vitiate its correctness or its completeness. To cast a ho