Our last post of 7th August,
2017 (Two Shocking Incidents – by Anirjeet) has set the alarm bells ringing,
not in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, as much as in the Sri Aurobindo
Centres closely connected with it. The inmates of Sri Aurobindo Ashram will naturally
pretend ignorance and vehemently deny these incidents out of sheer fear of retribution
from the Trustees, for whom it is a question of public shame and accountability. And even if the
inmates reluctantly admit in private a watered-down version of the two incidents,
they would gallantly come to the rescue of the Trustees by saying that these
were after all isolated incidents in the otherwise island of peace and psychic
growth of the children in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Centre of Education. But
then if you look backwards, these kinds of incidents (relating to drugs,
sex and alcohol) have happened before, and it is only recently that the
skeletons are tumbling out of the musty and suppressed annals of Ashram history.
19 Aug 2017
7 Aug 2017
Two Shocking Incidents – Anirjeet
The following post, dated 6 August, 2017 on indiatoday.in with the title “SC rejects plea of woman ‘abused’ at Puducherry’s Aurobindo Ashram” is highly misleading, even going by the report that follows underneath.
On 28 July 2017, Chief Justice Khehar dismissed the impleadment petition of
Hemlata Prasad in the Writ Petition filed by Gayatri Satpathy & Others against
the Ashram Trustees in August 2014 for a number of complaints, including sexual
harassment of minors, death by medical negligence, shady land dealings and other
financial irregularities. The Chief Justice however granted the liberty to
Hemlata Prasad to “initiate proceedings if the applicant is so advised in her
own right”. In other words, the Chief
Justice did not reject her plea of being abused but instructed her to file it
separately on her own. So while the title gives the impression of the Ashram
Trustees coming out clean in the eyes of the Supreme Court, the actual content
of the story should hardly make them comfortable, especially when the Centre (MHA
is a party to the Writ Petition) has “favoured an independent inquiry into
the affairs of the Ashram”.
In the meanwhile two more shocking
incidents have come to light in the Ashram, which should make the Ashram Trustees
literally squirm in their seats and regret why they ever sat on them.
4 Mar 2017
The Wrong Notion that Sri Aurobindo Rejected Hinduism – Raman Reddy
(With
specific reference to The Clasp of
Civilisations (2015) by Richard
Hartz, published by Nalanda International,
and Nationalism,
Religion, and Beyond (2005), a
compilation of Sri Aurobindo’s writings on Politics, Society and Culture, edited
by Peter
Heehs.)
I was rather disappointed
after reading The Clasp of Civilisations
by Richard Hartz because I expected from him a better understanding of Hinduism
than most Western scholars.[1]
The book starts off well with a sense of universality in spiritual matters
which justifies the title, but gets caught halfway through with the usual
antipathy towards Hinduism that is so common among secular scholars of India. The
chapter on Vivekananda’s famous address in the Parliament of Religions held in
Chicago in September 1893 is indeed well-written and the circumstances of the historic
event depicted in a most interesting manner with an undercurrent of humour. But
the chapter on Hinduism titled “Untold
Potentialities: Jawaharlal Nehru, Sri Aurobindo and the Idea of India”, in
which Nehru is elevated into a spiritual figure and Sri Aurobindo converted
into a secular icon, shows the fundamental flaws of Richard’s scholarship. One immediately gets the impression of
encountering one more Hinduphobic armchair scholar, who meticulously builds his
arguments on the works of other Hinduphobic scholars who also have never
empathised with Indian culture. Ironically, Richard Hartz has studied the Vedas
and is an expert in Sanskrit, but this only shows that mere scholarship does
not open the gates of spiritual comprehension. After all, Peter Heehs, his
colleague, did the same, wasting forty years of research on Sri Aurobindo and producing
such a hostile biography that the disciples of Sri Aurobindo had to go to the
Court to take him to task. But let us come back to Richard Hartz who could have
easily come to his own conclusions instead of following the path of Peter Heehs
with regard to Hinduism, or what is in fact the path of leftist secular
scholars of India and abroad which Peter Heehs himself follows faithfully for
the sake of his academic career. After all, for him academic success is more
important than stating the fundamental truth of Hinduism!
17 Oct 2016
Timeline of the Controversy
1978
Nirmal Singh’s rejoinder to Peter Heehs on the birthplace of Sri
Aurobindo. According to Peter Heehs, Sri Aurobindo was wrong about where he
was born.
12.02.1984
Appointment
of Manoj Das Gupta as Trustee of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust after the passing
away of Nolini Kanto Gupta. He was recommended as Trustee by Nolini Kanto
Gupta through a dubious note signed (or made to sign) in his last days and
left in the custody of Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya. We do not know why Nolini
did not give the note to Padmanabhan Counouma, who was then the Managing
Trustee of the Ashram, and why he did not recommend Manoj Das Gupta earlier through
a formal meeting of the Board of Trustees. Manoj Das Gupta’s policy of not
rocking the boat even when the boat is about to be wrecked, as in the controversy
over the Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter
Heehs, makes him undoubtedly the most vehemently criticised Trustee in the
history of the Ashram. He is also known to protect the guilty and punish the
victims or those who have raised the alarm.
|
11 Sept 2016
Bagha Jatin: The Bengal Tiger Whom The British Feared – swarajyamag.com
Saswat
Panigrahi - September 10, 2016, 11:45 am
Exactly 101 years ago, on this day, the nationalist-revolutionary succumbed to severe bullet injuries in Balasore hospital following a gallant battle with the British-controlled police.
Indian history has discounted the significant contributions of Bagha Jatin towards the freedom movement, thanks to the Left-leaning historiographers. This, despite the fact that there is no dearth of well documented historical records available on the vast revolution the great freedom fighter had conceived!
4 Jul 2016
Dr. Hedgewar (founder of the R.S.S) met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry
In
January 1920, Dr. L.V. Paranjpe started the Bharat Swayamsevak Mandal. Doctorji
[Dr. Hedgewar] was his chief colleague. Efforts began in the month of
July that year to organise a corps of some 1000-1500 volunteers for the
Congress session. Doctorji threw himself heart and soul into that task.
While
such fervent efforts were afoot, the tragic news of the passing away of
Lokmanya Tilak at Bombay on the night of 31st July came like a bolt from the
blue. The entire nation was plunged in indescribable grief. And more so the
people of Nagpur. With a heavy heart, Doctorji attended to the work for organising
hartal, mourning and condolence meetings on the tenth day, and offered his
tearful homage.
Consequent
on Lokmanya’s demise, the organisers were faced with the task of finding another
Extremist leader for the presidentship. It was decided that a deputation should
go to Pondicherry and bring Babu Aurobindo Ghose for the session. Dr. Moonje
accordingly set out for Pondicherry. Doctorji also accompanied him as a
representative of the youth of Nagpur.
12 Jun 2016
Sri Aurobindo's Response to K.R. Kripalani's Article on the Swadeshi Movement
Did you enjoy the
article “Fifty Years of Growth” by K. R. Kripalani in the Visva-Bharati?[i]
Fifty years of growth refers by the way to the Congress. About the Swadeshi
period he writes: “Along time was to elapse before we were to appreciate the
infinite possibilities of the muddy waters at hand. In the meantime something
startlingly romantic happened. . . .
“The fountain [of
undefiled water] was cut by the fiery shafts of Tilak, Vivekananda, and
Aurobindo, among others. They gave to Indian Nationalism its fiery basis in
India’s ancient cultural glory and its modern mission. . . . It is always more
beautiful and more inspiring to contemplate the Idea and be drunk with it than
to face the actual facts and touch the running sores. . . .
“But this spirit,
fiery and beautiful as it was, was fraught with grave dangers. The glory that
it invoked and the passion that it aroused were so intensely Hindu that Muslims
were automatically left out. Not that they were deliberately excluded. . . .
However that may be, it seems now not unlikely that had the influence of Tilak
and Aurobindo lasted in its original intensity, we might have had two Indias
today— a Hindu-istan and a Pak-istan, both overlaying and undermining each
other. . . .
31 May 2016
Why India Is A Nation – Sankrant Sanu
Introduction
One of the oft-repeated
urban myths that sometimes pops-up in conversation even among many educated,
well meaning Indians is that India as a nation is a British creation. The
argument goes roughly as follows – India is an artificial entity. There are
only a few periods in history when it was unified under the same political
entity. It was only the British that created the idea of India as a single
nation and unified it into a political state. A related assumption, in our
minds, is that the developed Western countries have a comparatively far greater
continuity of nationhood, and legitimacy as states, than India.
This urban myth is not
accidental. It was deliberately taught in the British established system of
education. John Strachey, writing in `India: Its Administration and Progress’
in 1888, said “This is the first and most essential thing to remember about
India – that there is not and never was an India, possessing … any sort of
unity, physical, political, social or religious; no Indian nation.
10 May 2016
Revivalism and Secularism – by Amal Kiran
[This article was published in the “Mother India” issue of 14 October
1950. How relevant it is even today!]
For a number of days
after the election of Purushottamdas Tandon to the Congress Presidentship the
talk of the whole nation turned on Congress’s future policy under the direction
of the new President. Perhaps feelings ran high more about the issue of the
Secular State and the question came to the fore: Should our country, with its
huge Hindu majority, be revivalist or, because of its multi-communal character,
secular?
14 Apr 2016
The Sage and his idea of India – Anirban Ganguly
The Pioneer, 14 April 2016
Sri Aurobindo's vision of India had no place for pseudo-secularism,
vote-bank politics and repudiation of Bharatiya civilisation. The Sage was also
the quintessential internationalist, yet his internationalism was not a
rootless cosmopolitanism but steeped in Sanatana Dharma [extract – read full article below]
25 Mar 2016
Sri Aurobindo was certainly not for the Disintegration of India – by Raman Reddy
Secular
intellectuals obfuscate the obvious, by which I mean, they use every
intellectual argument to undermine what is pretty obvious to the common man. Of
late, the idea of breaking India has been so flaunted about by the secular
brigade under the cover of free speech (especially in the columns of a national
newspaper) that one wonders what is happening to the country. Why would one
support free speech when it undermines national security, especially when it
supports criminals and Asuras and denigrates Hindu goddesses? Fortunately, the majority of Indians will not
give much credence to this outright falsehood, so that we can rest in peace and
not bother about its practical consequences.
11 Mar 2016
Sri Aurobindo’s Concept of the Nation-Soul (2) – Kishor Gandhi
(3)
Admitting that the society or
group, like the individual has, besides its soul, also a mind, life and body,
the important question immediately arises: What exactly is the nature of the
group-mind, group-life, group-body? We have a fairly clear idea of the mind,
life and body of the individual man by direct experience aided by scientific
knowledge, but our notions of these parts of the group-being, even when we
admit their real existence, are altogether vague and uncertain. Taking first
the most external part, the physical body, what really is meant by the body of
a society or a group?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)