Gopal Bhattacharjee
Sri Aurobindo had tremendous faith in young India. “Our call is to the young”, wrote Sri Aurobindo. “It is the young who can build the new world –– not those who accept the competitive individualism, the capitalism or the materialistic communalism of the West as India’s future, nor those who are enslaved to old religious formulas and cannot believe in the acceptance and transformation of life and spirit, but all who are free in mind and heart to accept a complete truth and a great ideal.” I would like to give a brief outline of Sri Aurobindo’s approach to nation-building and the role of young India in this task.
In all great creative endeavours, especially of a collective kind like nation-building, success depends on how effectively we are able to channelise the youthful energy of the nation into the task or, in other words, motivate the youth power. In 1907, Sri Aurobindo resigned as the Principal of the Bengal National College to join the fight for India’s independence. In his farewell address to the students, he said, “When I come back I wish to see some of you becoming rich, rich not for yourself, but that you may enrich Mother India with your riches. I wish to see some of you becoming great, great not for your own sake, not that you may satisfy your vanity but great for Her, to make India great, to enable her to stand up with her head erect among the Nations of the earth, as she did in days of yore.” In these words of Sri Aurobindo, we can find all the important clues and principles for devising an effective motivational strategy to harness the youth power of India for nation-building.
The first thing to be noted is that Sri Aurobindo was not making any impractically idealistic moral or spiritual demands on the young soul. He was not asking the young soul to repress or suppress his legitimate ambitions for wealth, power and success in life. Sri Aurobindo encouraged youths to seek wealth, power and success in life. He said, ‘For example, if India has to prosper economically, many of our youths have to enter into business, industry and professional careers to add to the wealth for the nation. But do not seek the mundane values of power and wealth from a narrow egocentric perspective, exclusively for the self. Live for a greater ideal beyond your self-interest and make these mundane gains a means for serving this higher and larger ideal. And let this ideal for the present be the greatness of Mother India.
But Sri Aurobindo is not a narrow nationalist. His nationalism is part of a larger spiritual humanism. Even during the early days of the freedom struggle when he was a firebrand nationalist, he wrote in ‘Bande Mataram’: “Patriotism is good, excellent, divine only when it furthers the end of universal humanity. Nationality divorced from humanity is a source of weakness and evil and not of strength and good.” He believed that each nation, like the individual, is an organic living being with a Body, Life, Mind and Soul and is a unique and integral part of the global consciousness of humanity and has an unique mission to fulfil. India’s mission is to awaken entire humanity and the world to its highest spiritual aim by providing guiding ideas, ideals, values and methods to this effect.
This brings us to Sri Aurobindo’s approach to nation-building. In Sri Aurobindo’s conception, a nation’s culture, not its economies, politics or technology, has to be the foundation and inspiring source of nation-building. But to a modern secular mind this approach based on culture may appear as somewhat antique and backward. What does culture have to do with the hardcore realities of economics, society, politics, industry and commerce? What we need today is not the lotus-eating exponent of culture but dynamic result-oriented executives, technocrats and managers. It is high time we looked at culture not merely as an object of admiration but as a source of development. But the popular rhetoric against culture springs from a lack of understanding of the same for the long-term wellbeing and “sustainable development” of the society. The progressive pragmatic mind of the West is growing wise and discarding its popular short-sighted outlook which refuses to see beyond the immediate utilitarian ends.
According to Sri Aurobindo, this progress towards a higher consciousness beyond reason is the next step in human evolution: it is something inevitable and decreed. Just like the human species with the self-conscious rational mind evolved out of the instinctive infra-rational consciousness of the animal, so also a new species, a new race with supra-rational and global consciousness will evolve out of the rational mentality of the human species.
This is the great nation-building task for which Sri Aurobindo gave the call to the youth of India. But the first step in this direction has to be in education. For as many modern thinkers are beginning to realize, education is the most vital source of Development. The “quality of life” of a nation depends on the quality of education imparted to its young minds who will be the future leaders of the nations. But for the regeneration of India on the lines of her own inborn genius, this education has to be based on the science of yoga.
(Above is an extract from a talk by Gopal Bhattacharjee, the International Secretary of Sri Aurobindo Society, Pondicherry, to the students of North Bengal University, Siliguri on February 14, 1993)
source: the sentinel assam
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