Discuss Shri Aurobindo’s views on Culture Nationalism. (2016, 20 Marks)
Cultural nationalism grounds a nation in a shared civilisation, its memory, values and forms of life, rather than in a state or contract. Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose) gave it its most philosophical Indian form. Against the colonial denial of Indian nationhood, he argued that India had always been a nation because it had always been one culture with one soul.
The Colonial Challenge and His Reply
Sir John Strachey (India, 1888) held that there never was an India with any unity, physical, political, social or religious. The Moderates half-conceded this: India was a nation in the making, and British rule was making it. Aurobindo rejected the premise itself:
- India’s unity is cultural and spiritual, not administrative. Empires rose and fell, but the same texts, pilgrimages, languages of one family and philosophical vocabulary survived them.
- Therefore the nation is prior to the state. It can be subjected without being destroyed and recovered without being invented.
- The nation is a living organism with a soul, and following Bankim Chandra Chatterjee it is also the Mother. Swami Vivekananda‘s call to make the motherland the object of worship pointed the same way. Patriotism became devotion.
Swadharma of Nations
Each people, like each person, embodies some aspect of the universal spirit and grows by its own law. He took the Bhagavad Gita‘s maxim that one’s own dharma, even imperfect, is better than another’s well performed, and applied it to nations. India’s swadharma is spirituality. Imitating Europe would therefore be national self-loss, and India’s rise was in the world’s interest, not India’s alone.
Renewal, Not Revivalism
- The Renaissance in India (1918) set a three-part task: recover India’s spiritual knowledge; let it flow into new philosophy, literature, art and science; and apply it to modern problems towards a spiritualised society.
- The Foundations of Indian Culture (serialised 1918–21) answered William Archer‘s India and the Future (1917), which had called Indian civilisation barbarous.
- He was no archaist. India’s decline came from its own tamas, inertia and loss of creative energy. Western contact was a jolt to be used, taking what is sound from both.
- National education was its practical arm. As principal of the Bengal National College (1906), he sought an education rooted in Indian languages and heritage.
Perspectives in Dispute
- Rabindranath Tagore‘s novel Ghare Baire (1916) portrays the swadeshi cult of the nation overriding persons and conscience.
- Romila Thapar argues that pre-modern identities were plural and local, so a continuous national culture is read back from the present.
- Partha Chatterjee (The Nation and Its Fragments, 1993) shows how anti-colonial nationalism claimed sovereignty over an inner spiritual domain while conceding the material one. In his reading, this move shaped the nation around upper-caste, Hindu, middle-class norms.
- B. R. Ambedkar (Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar) would reply that the Sanskritic culture celebrated as unity was, for excluded castes, a system of graded inequality. Aurobindo wrote very little on caste.
- His defenders note that he treated Muslims as integral to the national life and ended in universalism, not chauvinism.
Present Debate
The question returns in policy. The National Education Policy 2020 and the Education Ministry’s Indian Knowledge Systems division, set up at AICTE in October 2020, seek to recover Indian intellectual traditions. Supporters see his recovery programme in them; critics warn of uncritical heritage.
Conclusion
Aurobindo’s cultural nationalism gave colonised Indians a nationhood independent of the ruler’s categories and joined it to a cosmopolitan end, human unity. Its weakness lies in its homogenising image of one Indian soul. It remains most defensible where it is least exclusive, as renewal through synthesis.