Response to FIRSTPOST on the Scheme Suit issue – by Bireshwar Choudhury

On 14 January 2016, the Editor of the FIRSTPOST has referred in passing to the petitioners of the Scheme Suit in a most disparaging manner in an article titled “SC has shown great foresight in striking against proxy PILs as instruments of intimidation”.  As an admirer of this website, which has dared to take on the likes of Wendy Doniger, it is strange that it has now decided to support one of “Wendy’s children” – Peter Heehs (read this post). But I hope I can attribute this error to factual ignorance and unfamiliarity with the recent problems in Sri Aurobindo Ashram. If that be the case, I would like to point out a few outright errors in the write-up for the clarification of the larger readership connected with the FIRSTPOST, which hopefully would set the record right or at least give us a chance to give our version of events on its website. I quote from the article:

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Campaign to censor Rajiv Malhotra proves that Dinanath Batra was right – by Govind Nishar

The attack against Rajiv Malhotra is being portrayed as a kind of revenge for the court case against Wendy Doniger’s book “The Hindus” that led to its withdrawal from the Indian market. The implicit assumption behind this view is the hypothesis that had Doniger’s book not been withdrawn, Rajiv Malhotra’s enemies in the US & India would have rolled out the red carpet for his books. No proposition could be further from the truth.

The coordinated attack against Malhotra, initiated by followers of Sheldon Pollock & led by Richard Fox Young, an internet troll consumed by an anti-Malhotra obsession, has come at this time solely to prevent the launch of his forthcoming book “The Battle for Sanskrit” which has the explosive potential to seriously hurt future funding & thus endangering the work of those who Malhotra refers to as “American Orientalists” and who he has exposed as seeking to dominate global discourse about the ancient traditions of the Hindus.

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A Bluffer in a Scholar’s Clothing? -- by Govind

A brief, non-hagiographic peek into the lives

of a "founder" of the Ashram Archives

In his book, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (TLOSA), Peter Heehs declares himself to be a “founder” of the Ashram Archives. People are buying his book, not just purchasing it but also buying it in the sense of believing in it, solely on the basis of Heehs’ self-promoting claims of apparent expertise and authority on Sri Aurobindo. However, few of these are in a position to independently verify the credibility of the author's self-portrayal. In this article I attempt to take a critical look at the primary claim that the author makes about himself in his book, which is that he is a "founder" of the Archives department in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and share my conclusion that he is, in all likelihood, bluffing the reader by pretending to be something he is not.

[click on main title for full article]

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Govind's Reply to Ajit & Co ref Partition of India

[Here is Govind’s reply to Ajit Reddy, Arindam Das, Bulu and Gautam Chatterjee on whether Sri Aurobindo and his colleagues can be held partly responsible for the Partition of India. Ajit & Co’s defence of Peter Heehs is produced below for reference.]

So many words and so little sense! How depressing it is that in a forum of people from the Mother's school we have ex-students, acting as sadhaks of Rich Carlson, who seems to have penned this little write up word-for-word, defending a nakedly hostile and evidently false claim that Sri Aurobindo is in any way to be blamed for the partition that happened nearly 40 years after He left active politics. Such a claim can only be made by one who is either ignorant of history or one who is deliberately in the business of hurling grossly distorting speculative accusations against Sri Aurobindo. Since the former is not a possibility, no doubt the latter is the category to which our scholarly calumniator and his gaggle of supporters here belong.
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Govind Rajesh: The “intensity” of bhakti yoga, according to Peter Heehs, is turning the spiritually symbolic into the sexually suggestive

Peter has filled his biography The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (TLOSA) with insidious suggestions about Sri Aurobindo, speculating about lurid and sensational topics such as his sexuality or apparent lack of it, his seeming inadequacy as a husband, his inaptitude as a politician, his potentially scandalous legitimization of a possible marital relationship with his spiritual collaborator, the Mother (to describe whom Peter conveniently uses the ambiguous word 'partner', which has very well-known connotations in common parlance). The list goes on and on. On page after page in the book, Peter’s convoluted mental prism distorts the life and image of Sri Aurobindo into a pock-marked caricature of itself.

Furthermore, Sri Aurobindo’s literary work is diminished into a poor and pitiful shadow of the true puissance and sublimity one experiences when it is encountered and imbibed directly in its original form. In his inadequate, uninformed and uninspired treatment of these works, Peter distorts and devalues them by inserting misleading criticism or deviant perversions, even ridicule, into otherwise harmless descriptions that serve as a shell of neutral scaffolding around the negative kernel, betraying not only his lack of understanding when it comes to Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and system of spiritual discipline, but also a kind of latent, perhaps even subconscious, hostility that manifests itself in the core of his critical pronouncements and disparaging judgments.

In fact, this is a well-known literary device called an "Oxford Sandwich", which W.W.Robson in his book "The Definition of Literature and Other Essays" describes as follows "you begin by praise, then say something quite lethal, and round it off by praise again" (page 133). This literary device could be a perfect allegory for the book as a whole, and is precisely what makes it so contentious. While seeming to present a façade of objectivity and even positivity on the surface, the book, in fact, bristles with insidious suggestions designed to worm their way into the minds and hearts of readers and fill them with perverse distortions of Sri Aurobindo’s life and works.   ...full text...