(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!
