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THE TRANSFIGURATION OF DUTY IN AUROBINDO'S ESSAYS ON THE GITA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2010

ANDREW SARTORI
ANDREW SARTORI*
Affiliation:
Department of History, New York University E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Aurobindo Ghose was a major nationalist intellectual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who rose to prominence as one of the most radical leaders of the Swadeshi movement before retreating to the French colony of Pondicherry to dedicate his life to spiritual exercises and experiments. Aurobindo, like so many others of the nationalist period, produced a major commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. I will argue that his appeal to the Gita in the late 1910s represented, however, not a continuation of his nationalist project, but rather a radical reformulation of it in the wake of the defeat of the Swadeshi mobilization of 1905–8.

Type
Forum
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 319 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 For a discussion of this phase of Aurobindo's career see Heehs, Peter, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Sartori, Andrew, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 “Documents in the Life of Sri Aurobindo: Sri Aurobindo, The Mother and Paul Richard, 1911–1915,” available at http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/research/show.php?set=doclife&id=29. See also Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 94–6Google Scholar; and Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 118–26Google Scholar.

3 Sarkar, Sumit, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1973), 107–8, 313–16Google Scholar.

4 Haridas and Mukherjee, Uma, India's Fight for Freedom: Or the Swadeshi Movement, 1905–1906 (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1958)Google Scholar; Southard, Barbara, “The Political Strategy of Aurobindo Ghosh: The Utilization of Hindu Religious Symbolism and the Problem of Political Mobilization in Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 14/3 (1980), 353–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986)Google Scholar.

5 Gordon, Leonard, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 85–100; and Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, chap. 2.

6 Heehs, Peter, “Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography,” History and Theory 42 (May 2003), 169–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bose, Sugata, “The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: A Meditation on Aurobindo's Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (2007), 129–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Nandy, Intimate Enemy, xvii.

8 The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 1, Early Cultural Writings (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2003), 3–85.

9 I discuss his early essays, New Lamps for Old, in more detail in Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, 139–42.

10 See Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, chap. 5; and Sartori, Andrew, “Beyond Culture-Contact and Colonial Discourse: ‘Germanism’ in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (April 2007), 77–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Harder, Hans, ed., Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's Srimadbhagabadgita: Translation and Analysis (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 60Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., 42.

13 Ibid., 105.

14 Ibid., 37–8.

15 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, Dharmatattva: Anushilan, in Bankim Racanabali: Sahitya Samagra, ed. Basu, Bishnu (Calcutta: Tuli-Kalam, b.s. 1393), 658Google Scholar.

16 Bankim Racanabali, 661.

17 Cf. Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, chap. 4.

18 Ibid., chap. 5.

19 Aurobindo, Sri, Essays on the Gita: First Series (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1944), 5–8, 19–20Google Scholar; and cf. Harder, Srimadbhagabadgita, 41–2.

20 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 10.

21 Ibid., 13–14.

22 Manu Goswami in currently working on an account of a major shift in temporal horizon in early twentieth-century India, in which the disjuncture between Bankim and Aurobindo could be readily subsumed.

23 Aurobindo, Sri, Essays on the Gita: Second Series (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1942), 197Google Scholar.

24 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 52–3.

25 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: Second Series, 197.

26 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 52–3.

27 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: Second Series, 197–8.

28 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 52–3.

29 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: Second Series, 198.

30 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 58. For a discussion of the theme of ethical struggle in Aurobindo's post-Swadeshi writings, comparing Aurobindo's concept of arya to jihad, see Bose, “The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity.”

31 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 39.

32 Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, 91–119, 639–40.

33 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 49–50.

34 Ibid., 41.

35 Harder, Srimadbhagabadgita, 76–7.

36 Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 31.

37 Ibid., 34–5.

38 Ibid., 36.

39 Ibid., 47–49.

40 Ibid., 48.

41 Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, vol. 26, On Himself, Compiled from Notes and Letters (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972), 34–8.

42 See Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, chap. 6.