A hagiography from an anti-hagiographic perspective—by Narendra

Mr Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s work says much about our media culture of readership as regards to Sri Aurobindo. His article represents a new dimension, a new layer, a scholarly-professionally sordid element in the patronizing of Mr Heehs. As yet the controversy was of content. Mr Mehta goes a step further, dismissing the objections to content as “ridiculous”, that the content is not really the real source of protesters’ “ire”; it is the protesters own lack of appreciation for The Lives of Sri Aurobindo; it is its “sophistication” that is evoking protesters ire! Mr Heehs has unfortunately become the target because of the crudeness and lack of training in “liberal education” and “religious sensibility” of the protesters. It is as though all that liberal education and sensibility is the singular trait or property of the new class of social thinkers only. But one wonders if they have any real contact with values of the Indian traditions bequeathed to us, traditions which also create values in the dynamics of time and life.Here is a brief summary of the article posted by Mr Pratap Bhanu Mehta at Book Clubbed Indian Express: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/book-clubbed/935545/0
dated 12 April 2012. We shall try to look at some of the points raised by him in it, but before that let us briefly summarise it. However, in a careful and critical review it could be easily, albeit quickly, asserted that the author has not really studied or read Sri Aurobindo with much attention; instead he is simply going about on the basis of the bits and pieces he gets from his feeder lines. The touch with the original seems uncertain, frail and shaky in its understanding and formulation.

The trouble with these neo social reformists and journalists, these professionals is, they must mention Sri Aurobindo to gain, if not purchase, a certain credibility and acceptability for their own projectionist views. They cannot ignore-bypass-dismiss him and yet they must refute or belittle him, careerists as they are. That seems to be the whole psychology behind the operation. Similar things happen in the field of literature also, where disparagingly they keep him away by calling him a Victorian, out-moded, ignorant of the modern idiom, or something similar to it. Such is the current projection of Sri Aurobindo. Such obviously is the technique which Mr Peter Heehs has honed to the sharpest and swiftest degree of perfection in his The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. Pratap Bhanu Mehtas and Gautam Chikermanes and Ramachandra Guhas in the newspaper media, and Sagarika Ghoses as TV anchors, have mastered the art very assiduously and systematically to an amazing grade of sophistication. So much the better for them. But let us get back to Mr Mehta’s post, only to quickly see the superficialities with which it abounds in several respects.

Mr Mehta opens the post with the following: “Crossfire over Heehs’s work says much about our public culture of readership India’s visa policy for scholars has long been a scandal unworthy of a liberal democracy. But the public culture of readership is even more disconcerting. Indian democracy now has to be defended book by book.”

The grudge of Mr Mehta against the public culture of readership is obscuration of a deeper point in the chaos and confusion arising out of the issues related with legalities and free speech. He states that our public culture seems to be satisfied to remain settled in its own comfort zones. When a challenge to it is posed by works such as Mr Heehs’s The Lives of Sri Aurobindo it reacts in an irrational if not a fundamentalist way. In the process the book gets maligned, and the author hounded if not dragged around as a criminal. These are nothing but symptoms of a wider cultural crisis.

However, it needs to be pointed out here that “the issue” as expressed by “protestors” of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo was of “denigration”, “belittling” and “spreading lies” as regards to our national sources of strength, in the present case Sri Aurobindo. Whereas media never took interest in reporting the said “the issue”, it picked up on the story after it found Mr Heehs to be on the brink of being shut out of India, though for entirely different reasons of legal violations. What was most disconcerting was the way media projected “the issue” to be that of Mr Heehs, the “world renowned” scholar, “guardian angel of India in the tradition of Humes”, being hounded out of India, for “the writing the best biography of Sri Aurobindo” by “religious fundamentalists” and “extremists”. Now Mr Mehta comes along and gives a new twist to “the projected issue”. According to him the issue is lack of training of Indians in “liberal education” and “religious sensibility” and consequent incapacity to appreciate sophisticated arguments. This is a mistaken analysis about the Indian mind and the Indian spirit.

Mr Mehta has had a “long professional interest in Aurobindo”, and for him Heehs’s book comes as “a revelation, one that elevates its subject rather than diminishes him.” He calls it a “first-rate piece of intellectual history”. It makes Sri Aurobindo’s “obscure thought” precise. He goes on to say that it is a “measure of its acuteness that it has grasped a deep philosophical fact: that most of Aurobindo’s oeuvre, including The Life Divine, is an extended reworking of the Isa Upanishad.” Therefore the question is: Why should such a book draw ire?

Mr Mehta then lists “three ridiculous charges against the book.” These are related to Sri Aurobindo’s self-confessed lack of physical courage, he a liar also; madness in the family not unconnected with his spiritual experiences; the relationship between the Mother and Sri Aurobindo being depicted in the biography as romantic. Such reactions to the historian’s scholarly work, argues Mr Mehta, “tell you a great deal about the fragility and close-mindedness of those who are shocked.”

This only means that the book is not at all offensive but there is a failure on part of them who feel offended. The causes are, first, the lack of liberal education in them. They do not recognize that Sri Aurobindo himself was conscious about his serious inability, for instance, to recover the meaning of the Vedas. Then, these people go by faith and not by experience or what may be called “enlarged empiricism”. “For followers, bereft of the experience, what remains is the assertion of faith. We put ourselves under the yoke of the Divine when we feel its presence the least.”

Mr Mehta concludes: “Aurobindo wanted to ‘prepare India for Truth’. But the relentless assault on scholarship, the cramped sensibility with which we approach tradition, and the reduction of intellectual life to questions of identity suggest one thing: we are not prepared for any truth, whether it comes with a small ‘t’ or a capital ‘T’.”

For details and nuances the link provides an access to Mr Mehta’s post. These are the points which need to be examined if at all we are going to attach any great importance to the professional rant and rave of a director of an institution. He forgets that one cannot talk of “any truth” in the absence of facts if empiricism has a place in his world. The simple fact is that, he is totally ignorant of any number of posts and comments critically examining the distortions and misrepresentations in his favourite Lives.

Mr Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s work says much about our media culture of readership as regards to Sri Aurobindo. His article represents a new dimension, a new layer, a scholarly-professionally sordid element in the patronizing of Mr Heehs. As yet the controversy was of content. Mr Mehta goes a step further, dismissing the objections to content as “ridiculous”, that the content is not really the real source of protesters’ “ire”; it is the protesters own lack of appreciation for The Lives of Sri Aurobindo; it is its “sophistication” that is evoking protesters ire! Mr Heehs has unfortunately become the target because of the crudeness and lack of training in “liberal education” and “religious sensibility” of the protesters. It is as though all that liberal education and sensibility is the singular trait or property of the new class of social thinkers only. But one wonders if they have any real contact with values of the Indian traditions bequeathed to us, traditions which also create values in the dynamics of time and life.

And what is this much-flaunted much-peddled sophistication of the Lives? According to Mr Mehta the sophistication is that Mr Heehs, the great devotee, has achieved a marvellous feat of “sraddha” from the standpoint of the non-believers’ Sri Aurobindo! In other words, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is a hagiography from an anti-hagiographic perspective! The author and the commentator have created a trap for themselves.

Mr Mehta does not stop at that. Because apparently he has ire against Sri Aurobindo as his “professional interest” can't understand mental sophistication of Sri Aurobindo's writings, or rather its spiritual coherence and simplicity. So he feels relieved to hurriedly read Mr Heehs's speculations of Isha Upanishad being the source of The Life Divine and of Sri Aurobindo's failure in interpreting the Vedas. And going beyond his brief of patronizing Mr Heehs, Mr Mehta could not resist claiming that the Isha Upanishad as the entire source of Sri Aurobindo's writings. By so doing he perhaps rescues his own mental vanity. He probably attempted only to read The Life Divine and, after some failures, gave it up; but of course this would have seriously afflicted his own sense of scholarship. Maybe Mr Mehta himself lacks in 'yogic education' and 'spiritual sensibility'. But can his mind have the humility to admit that, or consider that before judging matters of very important spiritual matters on the national stage? To restate: there seem to be present in him multiple layers of vanity.

It may be true that general Indian readership is lacking in “liberal education” and “religious sensibilities”; it may also be true that it falls short in organised desired mental application, requisite initiative and “sophistication”. But there is something else in the readership of Sri Aurobindo which is distinguished by a certain “aspiration” and “spiritual sensibility”, and it can’t be said that this generalised assessment, this sweeping conclusion is true everywhere. So really the weak link in the Mr Mehta’s argument is primarily in the two premises: that there is some hard-to-discern “sophistication” in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, and that readership of Sri Aurobindo does not possess a certain “liberal education” and “religious sensibilities” to discern. The fact is, the admirers of the Lives have never looked into those hundreds of posts and comments critiquing the so-called scholarly work of Mr Heehs. We are yet to see cogent well-argued responses from them. It would have been better had Mr Mehta just made a search and found for himself the faulty nature of Mr Heehs’s work. That is precisely the reason why such writings fail to make any appeal to the intelligent sense.

But Mr Mehta is to be primarily faulted not for his hasty, reverse-engineered premises of his main argument to patronize Mr Heehs. The shocking part is his direct presumptuous attempt to diminish Sri Aurobindo. Mr Mehta elevates Mr Heehs and diminishes Sri Aurobindo. He does it to the extent that he draws them level by suggesting that Mr Heehs too possess the same stock of experiences as Sri Aurobindo; he makes Sri Aurobindo’s “obscure thought” precise. If we assume, like devotees and scholars of Sri Aurobindo’s works do, that Sri Aurobindo’s work emanates entirely out of his experiences and realisations, then there will arise a piquant situation. It will entail Mr Heehs himself getting embarrassed at such ‘ridiculous’ patronization.

Let us take an example. Mr Mehta declares that “despite working laboriously, Aurobindo more or less admitted that he had not been able to recover the meaning of the Vedas”; but his claim remains totally unsupported. First we need to understand that the Vedas are written more in the manner of “experience” to “experience” in a symbolic way for direct yogic growth of consciousness unhindered by mind as that was the way of ancients of that time. As regards Upanishads, which is unique to Indian tradition for transition of civilization from Symbolic Age to Age of Mentality, the method was of “light” to “light” for direct realizations unhindered by scepticism or doubt. So in recovering the meaning of the Vedas and Upanishads Sri Aurobindo had undertaken the difficult task of presenting the same in the manner of “logic” to “logic” with full scope given to speculative mind and doubt. So the difficulty for Sri Aurobindo was in the immense bulk of recovery if he considered presenting all the different shades of meaning, nuances etc. And it is to that extent that Sri Aurobindo has admitted to the “difficulty”. Yet it is neither an admission of shortcoming nor a difficulty. In the logical framework he had chosen to present the theme, he could establish a few things in a definite manner and the rest he left unsaid. That can never imply admission or difficulty of any sort. Let us see what he says in the context. Talking about unravelling of the Vedic symbolism in The Secret of the Veda we read:

More we cannot at present attempt; for the Vedic symbolism as worked out in the hymns is too complex in its details, too numerous in its standpoints, presents too many obscurities and difficulties to the interpreter in its shades and side allusions and above all has been too much obscured by ages of oblivion and misunderstanding to be adequately dealt with in a single work. We can only at present seek out the leading clues and lay as securely as may be the right foundations. …

Is there at all or is there still a secret of the Veda? …

Our object is only to see whether there is a prima facie case for the idea with which we started that the Vedic hymns are the symbolic gospel of the ancient Indian mystics and their sense spiritual and psychological. Such a prima facie case we have established; for there is already sufficient ground for seriously approaching the Veda from this standpoint and interpreting it in detail as such a lyric symbolism. …

Finally, the incoherencies of the Vedic texts will at once be explained and disappear. They exist in appearance only, because the real thread of the sense is to be found in an inner meaning. That thread found, the hymns appear as logical and organic wholes and the expression, though alien in type to our modern ways of thinking and speaking, becomes, in its own style, just and precise and sins rather by economy of phrase than by excess, by over-pregnancy rather than by poverty of sense. The Veda ceases to be merely an interesting remnant of barbarism and takes rank among the most important of the world's early Scriptures.

Similar avowals we have, for example, in The Essays on the Gita and The Life Divine. In terms of the so-called ‘scholarly or academic’ presentations Sri Aurobindo was always to the point and, he was always rigorous. What fell out of its methodology, with that he did not occupy himself, and that only shows the respect for the framework he was placing himself in. In that respect the real freedom he had was only in his wonderful Savitri.

But let us examine here the following comment of Mr. Mehta:

... a deep philosophical fact: that most of Aurobindo’s oeuvre, including The Life Divine, is an extended reworking of the Isa Upanishad.

There cannot be anything more ridiculous than this—The Life Divine an extended reworking of the Isha Upanishad. I’d recommend the author to read the last few chapters of the magnum opus more carefully, if not perceptively, and compare with the several commentaries Sri Aurobindo had written on the Isha. Where do we find in the Upanishad “the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil as the path of our progressive self-enlargement”? It is only in The Life Divine we have it. Nowhere in the ancient scriptures are we told about the possibility, if not the inevitability, of the higher state of consciousness becoming a part of this world of ours. And then, the total non-mention of his grandest oeuvre, Savitri, only shows the superficiality of the hastily drafted article which lacks the needed depth to grasp the power, and the dimensions, of Sri Aurobindo’s writings.

That is Mr Mehta à la Mr Heehs. But, if Mr Mehta claims to hold grand judgements and proclamations regarding the works of Sri Aurobindo then we surely would request him to illuminate us more about them!