It seems that RSS is expanding its intellectual reportoire beyond lambasting Marx and Macaulay as S. Gurumurthy recently tweeted criticising Weber and Popper: "India will go to pieces if Weberian and Popper theories are experimented and families and communities are disturbed. There will be no state." Being in power is probably forcing BJP & RSS to look beyond the Ram temple, Ram sethu, and Saraswati river. But, one wonders if Indian society is so fragile to be wrecked by worn out theories. No doubt, there are intellectual giants among Hindutva supporters but it's a mystery how they reconcile with mythological fiction and loads of superstition. Clinging to the falsehoods of tradition may be due to political compulsion and allied advantages but renouncing reason and its autonomy forces a serious temperamental and behavioural defect.
Sri Aurobindo was not happy about the RK Mission emphasis on Shankara's renunciation and Buddhist humanitarianism. Upon arrival of The Mother when the Ashram took shape in Puducherry, it was on the basis of enterprise and action. Many are insistent on Sri Aurobindo's debts from Vivekananda but the dissimimilarities are too many to be smoothly reconciled. His differences with Gandhi's fetish for nonviolence is well known. Tagore, he appreciated as a poet but not his political pronouncements or sociological assessments. Sri Aurobindo was also not in the same page with Theosophical Society. Further, despite his eulogy for Dayananda's pioneering work on Veda, he refrained from walking along the path of Arya Samaj.
Sri Aurobindo was not happy about the RK Mission emphasis on Shankara's renunciation and Buddhist humanitarianism. Upon arrival of The Mother when the Ashram took shape in Puducherry, it was on the basis of enterprise and action. Many are insistent on Sri Aurobindo's debts from Vivekananda but the dissimimilarities are too many to be smoothly reconciled. His differences with Gandhi's fetish for nonviolence is well known. Tagore, he appreciated as a poet but not his political pronouncements or sociological assessments. Sri Aurobindo was also not in the same page with Theosophical Society. Further, despite his eulogy for Dayananda's pioneering work on Veda, he refrained from walking along the path of Arya Samaj.
Thus, the ideological highway that Sri Aurobindo had built independently, a Century back, remains as relevant as it used to be then. He provides a robust bulwark against the dominant Nehruvian-Marxist-Hindutva narratives across disciplines and social practices. The liberal and intellectually-anchored environment that he inaugurates is sure to blossom into a rejuvenated India leading the world in matters of collective progress and harmonious living transcending all differences. [TNM55]
Many isuues discussed above from testimony to applied ethics have been duly dealt with by Sri Aurobindo in his epochal book titled, “The Life Divine” which deserves to be the point of departure for any rethinking on the status (or progress, if you will) of Indian Philosophy. Why no one ever refers to his insights on this blog is certainly a mystery, which, I feel, must melt. Why blame science; philosophy not recognising philosophy itself is the culprit. Just imagine, how much you are deprived of by ignoring Sri Aurobindo here! [TNM55]
