Peter
Heehs was born & educated in USA (says his bio-data on the inside cover of
his India’s Freedom Struggle, OUP,
1988). In 1971, at the age of 22, he settled
in Pondicherry [=not in the ashram
Aurobindo founded]. He is a research
scholar [=not member of S.A Ashram]
at the Sri Aurobindo [=not S.A Ashram’s]
Archives & Research Library, specializing in the life & politics of Sri
Aurobindo. In an earlier form the present book was awarded a State Prize in a
competition sponsored by the Delhi administration. Since then he has published many uninhibited
books, booklets & ‘papers’ on Aurobindo in his native English-English for
his type of non-disciples, & at least one in an inhibited Indian ungrezi
for Aurobindo’s Indian disciples. [Click here to read full article.]
28 Nov 2017
2 Sept 2017
Manoj Das Gupta Interrogated by the Police ─ Anirjeet
On
the 25th of August 2017 the Pondicherry Police whisked off Manoj Das Gupta in a
Police jeep around 7 a.m. from the Ashram Dining Room, where he had gone to
collect his breakfast. The Police took him to the station for questioning with
regard to the rape of a minor girl by a minor boy committed in the premises of
the Ashram School on 21 July, 2017. Manoj Das Gupta happens to be the Managing
Trustee of Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Registrar of the Ashram School, which
is a powerful and influential position to hold in Pondicherry, so it is
extremely surprising that the Police dared to treat him like a common citizen. He
was even made to undergo the utter humiliation of waiting in the Police Station
for two hours and told to come the next day for interrogation. The next day he
was accompanied by Dr. Dilip Datta (Trustee and head of the Ashram Medical
Services) and Matriprasad Satyamurthy (Secretary of the Ashram Trust) to the
Police station. The same week writer Manoj Das (Sahitya Academy award winner
and recipient of Padma Shri) was summoned to Chennai and interrogated by the
Intelligence Bureau. All of a sudden the long delayed karmic hand has caught up
with the actions of this nefarious group of the Ashram and the fortress of
invincibility they had built up in the public domain over the last twenty years
seemed to fall like a house of cards.
19 Aug 2017
Relinquishing Responsibilities – Anirjeet
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.
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!
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