What to do With Markandey Katju

Former Supreme Court Justice Markandey Katju has become like the drooling, farting idiot who embarrasses all polite company, and there’s no point in condemning him (as the Rajya Sabha just did), for calling Mahatma Gandhi a “British agent” and Netaji Subhas Bose a Japanese one.

Predictably, his response to the action has been buffoonish, and nothing is to be gained by any arm of the government trying to change his behavior.

However, there should be action – perhaps a “sense of the house” resolution in parliament – taking note of Katju’s statements that indicate a seriously impaired judgment and urging a review of all his major decisions on the Bench.

The resolution should cite statements made when he was a sitting judge -- in one he said black money offenders should be hanged -- and others since his retirement asserting that  “90 per cent of Indians are idiots,” and that Gay relationships are “humbug and nonsense”.

His comparison of Indian to European history and his pontifications on the nature of economic development can be adduced as further proof of an extremely confused mind.  

Finally, the house should express sympathy for Katju's advanced senility and note the need for vigilance on the part of care givers to ensure that he does not hurt himself or others as the condition worsens.

Has Ambekar "Beaten Gandhi Hollow"?

The dishonesties of newspaper columnists are usually petty and insignificant, but not so with Swaminathan Aiyar's assault on the Mahatma in the Times of India on 9 February; it is a very large attack on the truth.

Its first sentence claims that: "January 30, the death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, drove home the growing irrelevance of the father of the nation."

How?

Why, Trinamool cabinet ministers in Calcutta did not attend the official ceremonies on the occasion, and the Mayor of Mumbai forgot too. Also, a "newspaper poll some years ago," showed "two-thirds of all voters thought that Sonia Gandhi was related to Mahatma Gandhi."

This is very weak tea and Aiyar moves quickly to a new brew: he claims Bhimrao Ambedkar "has posthumously beaten the Mahatma hollow."

He does not explain how that contest was arranged. Perhaps the statement that Ambedkar is "the icon of all dalits" is a gesture in that direction. For some reason, Aiyar seems to disregard the millions of us non-dalits who also consider Babasaheb iconic; not to mention the hundreds of millions who consider both men heroes.
 
But all this is preliminary throat-clearing; Aiyar's main theme is Ambedkar's opposition to Gandhi's idea that India should be composed of self-ruling villages. He quotes Ambedkar's rejection of panchayat raj in the Bombay Legislative Council on the grounds that a “population which is hidebound by caste ... infected by ancient prejudices ... flouts equality of status and is dominated by notions of gradations in life" cannot "be expected to have the right notions even to discharge bare justice.”

That view "continues to ring true eight decades later," Aiyar declares. As evidence of village-level infamy he points to the "mass killing of Muslims in Muzaffarnagar; the regressive "khap panchayats" in Haryana and Punjab; the recent West Bengal khap panchayat that ordered gang rape of a woman with a Muslim lover; the 2012 arson in a Tamil Nadu village after a dalit boy eloped with a  Vanniyar girl; and, in the same state, the "several cases" of intimidation that kept dalits from occupying reserved panchayat seats.

That is still a very weak case against Panchayat Raj, and to shore it up Aiyar throws in a reference to World Bank "research" confirming that "the world over, central governments tend to be far more egalitarian and secular in outlook than villages." He adds: "What Ambedkar said of hidebound villages is a global truth."

As a student of the Bank's research output for over four decades, I find it a bit hard to believe that it produced that definitive hold-all finding. I could be wrong, but it sounds more like something out of an Oxfam brochure or, at a stretch, a Human Development Report from UNDP. 

If Aiyar had looked closer home he would have found that the actual Indian experience with Panchayati Raj has been overwhelmingly positive.

Things got off to a slow start because Ambedkar's fears were widely shared. Parliament took 40 years to enact constitutional provisions into law and enable a system of directly elected bodies with quotas for women and Scheduled Castes/Tribes; and in the early years funding was limited and progress slowed by a corrupt nexus of conservative bureaucrats and caste leaders threatened by democracy.

However, by the beginning of the 11th Five Year Plan (2007-2012), there were some 250,000 elected village-level bodies, with 3.2 million elected members, over a third of them women.

By then, their functioning had finally won the confidence of the Planning Commission. It increased funding 471 percent to Rs.775 crores (approximately $168 million), noting that although achievements in the past had not been commensurate with expenditures, the Panchayat system had proved to be a laboratory “of multi-level pluralist democracy, facilitating the achievements of consensus on development issues at the lowest level of government."

Experience had shown that at “the local level, groups learn to co-exist, cooperate, negotiate and arrive at acceptable decisions and even marginalized groups can gain confidence and move on from token participation to higher forms of direct social action for the collective good."

The realization of the effectiveness of Panchayat Raj has not led to any rethinking of the main thrust of Indian economic development. It has continued in the 12th Five Year Plan (2013 -2018) towards industrialization, with tall talk of "corridors" for manufacturing across the length and breadth of the country.

This points to a basic disconnect at the highest levels of Indian policy-making, and it should make ordinary Indians extremely anxious, for it shows that our leaders still think of "development" purely in terms of GDP growth and not the welfare of the people. Consider the following facts:

1. India is tooling itself to fit into a world economy that is in a state of terminal crisis. 
2. It is making itself part of patterns of global production and exchange that are killing the life-sustaining systems of the planet.
3. In the process, it is destroying the basis for Indian productivity, both by unbalancing the complex patterns of social and ecological interdependence in the countryside and by paving over rich farmland for luxury housing and shopping malls.
4. The result is an ever more obscene gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else: the net worth of India's billionaires increased 12-fold in 15 years. As IMF chief Christine Lagarde noted recently, that money could have eliminated poverty in the country -- twice over.
5. There is massive proof, made concrete in China, that rapid industrialization will cause a whole slew of new problems, including massive despoliation of air, land and water, and a huge new burden of environment-related illnesses, especially cancer.  
6. The more we industrialize, the sharper we will feel international pressures through manipulated energy prices and rigged currency markets. 

Mahatma Gandhi's advice that India should seek to revive its villages as the means of advance was not some idealistic pipedream. He knew Indian ground realities better than any other politician of his generation or since; what he proposed would have brought growth where it mattered most, to the poor. 

As things stand, if India is to survive with its traditions intact, we have no alternative but village-based development. 

Britain and Hinduism 4: The Current Situation

Homer gives credit to an Eastern Prince for leading the Greeks into what became their homeland, and Alexander the Great grew up with the belief that he belonged to an ancient Indian royal line.

That belief, more than world conquest, fired his ambition, and in noting this in The History of Philosophy, Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) wrote that Alexander “destroyed the Persian kingdom and burnt Persepolis, the old enemy of Indian religion, in order to take revenge upon it for all the violence exercised through Darius on the Buddhists and their co-religionists.”

Hegel also observed that Alexander had “found on the lower Ister [the Danube] Indian priestly states where the immortality of the soul was taught,” an idea he was familiar with, “certainly not without the counsel of Aristotle, who, through Plato and Pythagoras, was initiated into Indian wisdom.”

Ironically, when Alexander confronted Darius at the fateful battle of Gaugemala a contingent of Indian cavalry was the most potent threat he faced: it broke through his lines, killed 60 of the elite “Companions” and could have wreaked further devastation had it not chosen at that point to loot the Greek camp.

 Four centuries after Alexander’s death “Arrian of Nicomedia” (86–160) wrote about the last days of Europe’s greatest military hero. In doing so, he devoted one short book (better described as a chapter), to a description of India, basing it on the reports of earlier writers, especially Nearchus, Alexander’s contemporary.

Arrian recounted at length what Nearchus had to say about Indian philosophers. Alexander chanced upon a number of them “in a meadow, where they used to meet to discuss philosophy.” When they saw him “these venerable men stamped with their feet and gave no other sign of interest;” he asked them through interpreters “what they meant by this odd behavior” and they replied: ‘King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth' surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others. Ah well! You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of this earth as will suffice to bury you’.”

In Taxila, Alexander met with some “Wise Men whose practice it is to go naked, and he so much admired their powers of endurance that the fancy took him to have one of them in his personal train.” The leader of the group, Dandamus, responded: “If you, my lord, are the son of god, why, so am I. I want nothing from you, for what I have suffices. I perceive, moreover, that the men you lead get no good from their worldwide wandering over land and sea, and that of their many travels there will be no end. I desire nothing that you can give me; I fear no exclusion from any blessings which may perhaps be yours. India, with the fruits of her soil in due season, is enough for me while I live; and when I die, I shall be rid of my poor body, my unseemly housemate.”

Seeing that Dandamis was, “in a true sense, a free man” Alexander did not try to compel him. However, another of the group, Calanus, did accompany Alexander. Declaring that no account of Alexander’s withdrawal from India “would be complete without the story of Calanus,” Arrian then told of what happened to the Indian sage.

He fell seriously ill in Persia, and became an invalid, a condition in which he did not wish to remain. He decided to kill himself on a funeral pyre. Alexander tried to dissuade him but to no avail. So one of the elite Companions built the funeral pyre Calanus wanted. At the appropriate time, he was carried on a litter to the pyre “by a solemn procession – horses, men, soldiers in armor and people carrying all kinds of precious oils and spices to throw upon the flames.”

At the pyre he distributed all the gifts Alexander had given him, and then mounted the pyre and laid himself down. “All the troops were watching. Alexander could not but feel that there was a sort of indelicacy in witnessing such a spectacle – the man, after all, had been his friend; everyone else, however, felt nothing but astonishment to see Calanus give not the smallest sign of shrinking from the flames. We read in Nearchus’ account of this incident that at the moment the fire was kindled, there was, by Alexander's orders, an impressive salute: the bugles sounded, the troops with one accord roared out their battle-cry, and the elephants joined in with their shrill war-trumpeting. This story and others to a similar effect have been recorded by good authorities; they are not without value to anyone who cares for evidence of the unconquerable resolution of the human spirit in carrying a chosen course of action through to the end.”

 That high opinion of Indian philosophers, and indeed of Indian society in general is notable in all early Western writings.

A year after Alexander’s death, one of his Generals who had installed himself as ruler of Syria, sent an Ambassador to India, Megasthenes, whose book, Indica, is by far the most extensive account we have of our society at the time.

The country, he wrote, was “peopled by races both numerous and diverse, of which not even one was originally of foreign descent, but all were evidently indigenous. Moreover, India neither received a colony from abroad, nor sent out a colony to any other nation.” Of “several remarkable customs existing among the Indians,” the one that impressed Megasthenes most was that according to the prescription of “their ancient philosophers which one may regard as truly admirable,” no one “under any circumstances” was to be a slave. Thus, they had “learned neither to domineer over nor to cringe to others.”

Why We Are Different

 Why were Indians of that era so different from us?

 The answer lies in a simple, glaring fact: our ancestors had internalized the values their philosophers taught; the values that prevail today are those forged in centuries of defeat and humiliation.

It is not that the values of Sanatana Dharma have disappeared from our midst. They are evident in the massive endurance of our people, in the grace and tolerance of our society amidst heart-rending loss, in our survival as a nation and a democracy; but when it comes to individual Indian behavior it is quite a different matter. The tragedy is that even after independence there has been no one to remind Indians of the people they once were. That is because the intellectual scene has been dominated by “secular” amnesiacs and the voices raised in defence of traditional values have been regressive and reactionary.

 Remedying the matter has become urgent because the emerging battle lines for the 2014 elections could precipitate an ugly level of confrontation between “Secular” and “Hindutva” unless there is a new level of awareness of the past – which is to say, of ourselves.

The best way to that end might be to clarify what exactly we mean by “Hindu.”

The British have been trying for generations to make the case that there is no such thing. In their view, taken up by a number of paid Indian proxies, the concept arose as part of the Indian nationalist response to their rule, unifying under the “Hindu” umbrella a multiplicity of caste and tribal faiths.

The only reason that claim has not met with general ridicule is that most Indian intellectuals are too ignorant of history to assert a counter-claim.

 The story is essential knowledge for every Indian regardless of religion for it explains the nature of our society. 

The Emergence of Hinduism

Hinduism began as a peace project in a land of many tribes. The Saptarishis (Seven Sages) of ancient tradition probably initiated it by collecting all tribal religious lore into what became the Vedas (literally, “what is seen”). Successive generations of thinkers extracted from that collection the teachings of the Upanishads, a word that means to “talk sitting together;” today we would call them “conference reports.” The concepts that India’s best and brightest distilled from the Vedas became popular knowledge through two great epics that have inspired every generation of Indian storytellers to poetry, drama, dance and song. In that process, they united India culturally.

 The core of the Hindu belief system thus created and celebrated is the concept of the Universal Soul, known more fondly now as God. In Hindu cosmology God is not in Heaven or separate from the Universe but immanent. Everything is God, including ourselves. What separates the essence from the dross of the Universe is the delusion of Maya: to have a material body is to be part of its endless shadow play.

How does God control the Universe? Through Dharma (with a capital D): Universal Law. The subsection of it that applies to living beings is Karma (with a capital K); it is the Law governing Action. Lower case dharma and karma bring those concepts down to the level of individuals.

 It is important to understand how these concepts shaped Indian society and what effect their migration out of the country had on the rest of the world.

 Within India, the individual soul, being a part of the Universal Soul, is seen as eternal; it moves from one life form to another, the passage determined by the unbreakable matrix of dharma and karma. Parents and Teachers can help as guides but no more; how a young person’s fate evolves depends entirely on his/her past karma and present effort.

Where every soul is subject to karmic law, no priest can offer redemption from bad karma, no Inquisitor can pass judgment on another's faith. The basic concepts of Hinduism assured freedom of faith and worship in a broadly tolerant society.

Those safeguards were lost when Indian ideas migrated to the Mediterranean world, and through the teachings of Plato and Judaism, entered the mainstream of Western civilization. The Universal Spirit held firmly in place by Dharma and Karma in India, became the remote male “God in Heaven” of West Asia and Europe, His will interpreted on earth by the founders of religions and their interpreters. Power struggles invoking God were inevitable and, as so amply illustrated by past and current events, unending.

When rationality finally rebelled against religious madness in Europe, it took the form of Science, founded on the same basic beliefs as Hinduism: Universal Law (Dharma) made manifest in the law of causality (Karma). Those are the two cardinal elements of the Scientific Method.

In the last century, Western Science has validated other fundamental Hindu beliefs, including the existence of the individual soul and its reincarnation. That little noted development has been the result of two discoveries, one that matter and energy exist in an indestructible continuum, and the other that each individual has a unique genetic code. In combination, those two scientific discoveries mean that at death the genetic design of the individual survives as an energy pattern; it is only a matter of time before scientists discover how it is transmitted to a new body.

A Time of Peril

 All this is relevant to us today – and especially to the outcome of the 2014 elections – because it underlines a basic fact about Hindu society. At its most successful, and even in its millennium of defeat and loss, it has given pride of place to the intellectual. The Indian Renaissance, beginning with Guru Nanak’s bid to heal the Hindu-Muslim rift, to Raja Rammohun Roy’s counter to Christian evangelism, to Gandhi’s spiritual politics, has been guided by a towering acuity of intellect at its humane best.

It is the one critical quality missing in Indian national life today.

 The deficit lies not just with the “secular” and “Left” intellectuals. Their ignorance of the Indian past, insensitivity to fundamental Hindu values, their inability to chart an independent course for Indian development or even to deal with the manipulations of British proxies in their midst, are widely shared on the Hindutva Right.

So much so that Hindutvadis have welcomed into their ideological ranks a number of “White Hindus,” Europeans who have such violent, intemperate views as to be wholly alien to the Indian ethos. Going by what L.K. Advani has reportedly said, the destruction of the Babri Masjid was a direct result of activism inspired by one of them.

It is no wonder that foreigners have taken control of the Hindutva brigade for its homegrown ideologues seem incapable of recognizing basic realities. Writing about modern India at a time of historic resurgence, one of the most vocal of them titled a 2011 tract "Eclipse of the Hindu Nation" with the subtitle "Gandhi and his freedom struggle."

 We cannot afford such an obtuse level of discourse on matters of national importance. When the world order is caught in deep currents of epochal change the Indian political elite cannot continue in its current state of intellectual torpor without putting the country in very great danger.

Part 5 will focus on how we can address this situation.

Read Part1, Part 2, Part 3

1001 Things Every Indian Should Know

"1001 Things Every Indian Should Know"  is the title of the e-version of my book just published on Amazon's Kindle.

The book is priced at $3.99 (approx Rs.270) and can be read on any computer or tablet.  I believe there are several promotional days to come on which the book can be downloaded free. I will let you know when they are scheduled.

As a print version is in the works would be grateful for all feedback!

Here is the book description as it appears on the Amazon web site:

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1001 Things Every Indian Should Know is a book about India and its place in the world. Written by a veteran journalist with a lifetime of experience covering international affairs, it tells of the country's millennial history and how our understanding of it was distorted during the period of British colonial rule. It also provides an Indian view of Britain and tells how the largest of colonial empires segued into a new career as the center of a global black market that is now estimated to be twice the GDP of the United States.

Britain and India are polar opposites. One invented the industrial revolution and the modern corporate apparatus of the market economy; the other has a rich material culture but its traditional approach to reality is essentially spiritual. Despite the end of colonial rule the interaction of the profoundly different approaches to reality of the two nations has continued into the 21st Century and it will decide the fate of the world. The book tells of that interaction in terms of Mahatma Gandhi's life and legacy, and Britain's deeply negative response.

The globalization of industrial civilization has brought the world into a situation of deep interlocked crises that have grown steadily worse despite all efforts by governments for over four decades. The book explains why that is so and reprises the case that Gandhi first made in 1910: industrial civilization is too violent and corrupting to be redeemed; it must be replaced.

However, India sans Mahatma is now on an ill-considered course to integrate with the industrial world: The repercussions for Indian society and for the world will be dismal. The rising tide of violence and crime in India is the direct result of its so-called "development" in recent decades. For the world, an industrialized India will be disastrous in terms of ecological impact.

How do we deal with this situation? Governments have shown they cannot do so. The book recommends how ordinary Indians can correct their country's course through civil action. It sets out a plan for a nonviolent Gandhian revolution that can transform not just India but the world.


END

To Change the World

The piece below is the Introduction to the book I have just finished writing. It is long and complex, as is the book. Anyone interested in knowing more or commenting on what I have to say should contact me at  bhaskarpmenonATgmail.com or papamenon04ATyahoo.com. DO NOT use the Blogger interface; it seems to convert most messages to gibberish  (The 15 August piece on Sri Aurobindo elicited, in addition to the few published comments, over 50 identical pieces of spam!)  If you send me a message and do not get a polite and considered response it means I have not got it. Please feel free to circulate or post this note and the piece below wherever you want.

1001 Things You Should Know

The world is now trapped in deep interlocked crises that could precipitate an extended economic depression, global environmental disasters and war; but we have the capacity to deal with them by effecting a global spiritual transformation. This book is a guide to what ordinary people can do to direct the course of events. Its recommendations emerge from a tradition and history that are uniquely of India, a legacy that Mahatma Gandhi brought into politics and Martin Luther King made global.
 
As our national legacy is not well understood even in India -- perhaps especially in India because of deliberate colonial era distortions that have endured into the 21st Century -- much of the book is history, with a particular focus on the confrontation of India and Britain as that of two fundamentally different approaches to reality, the spiritual and the material. In addressing that issue the book examines several venerable clichés about India -- its spirituality, its "unity in diversity" and the unparalleled tolerance of its society -- that no one has felt the need to explain. Why is India so famously spiritual, united in its diversity and tolerant?

The answers, necessarily hypothetical, point to the time when efforts began to to tone down the endemic hostilities of the fiercely territorial hunter gatherers inhabiting India. Probably taken in hand by the legendary Saptarishis, the seven sages at the beginnings of Indian tradition, the effort most likely began with the collection of the sacred lore of all the tribes into a compendium -- the Vedas -- that everyone could venerate. (The colonial era theory that blond White protoEuropean "Aryans" composed them while herding cattle and riding their chariots up and down the high Himalayan passes is laughably absurd.)

The word Veda is from the same root as video; it is what is seen or known. To seek the significance of that body of collected tribal knowledge India's best and brightest gathered in forest retreats and produced the Upanishads (a composite word that means to talk sitting together). Those ancient conference reports conceptualized familiar realities: a universe governed by law extending from the starry sky to the endless cycling of nature's seasonal transformations in which death was but a step to rebirth and human actions propelled fate.

The Upanishads postulated an eternal and immanent power governing by immutable Dharma (Law), the endless flux of the universe. In human affairs that law operated as Karma, the unbreakable chain of cause and effect binding an individual’s actions to personal destiny. As death is but a door to rebirth, the karmic chain was seen as extending over many lives, determining the soul's evolution or regression in awareness and understanding. In the happiest of circumstances the individual soul could achieve enlightenment, escape from the cycle of life, and merge with the Paramatma, the Universal Soul. The guiding lights on that positive track were defined as Sat Chit Ananda — Truth Knowledge Bliss — three separate elements that can be read as a statement: the bliss of knowing the truth.

The Indian world view shaped by the Upanishads is profoundly hopeful; individuals face no Judgment Day but have endless opportunities for trial and error in their progress towards God. Existence is a constant teacher of the need for spiritual understanding and evolution. Although human society suffers a long decline in virtue through great cycles of time, the immanent power of the Universe never allows the defeat of the Good. The darkest age, the Kali Yuga (now current), ends with the return of virtue in full flood.

The philosophy of the Upanishads flowed into the life of ordinary people through two masterly epics written some seven millennia apart and marking key points in the evolution of Indian society. Endlessly retold as sacred legend, folk tale and life’s eternal drama, celebrated in music, song and dance, the Ramayana and Mahabharata carried the philosophy of the Upanishads down to the lowliest village. By popularizing the view that all Creation is Vasudev kutumbakham, God's family, they made it impossible to define a tribal "Other" and enforce a group identity on the basis of fear. Thus defanged, tribes became castes, autonomous in certain customs and traditions but parts of a larger society; the law-giving Manu of the current Yuga compared them to the functionally different but interdependent parts of a human body.

 The Ramayana marked the evolution of caste federations into unitary kingdoms; it set the ideal of Ramrajya, the rule of a virtuous monarch dedicated to the welfare of his people and beloved by all castes. When that ideal lay trampled in the struggle for imperial power the Mahabharata carried instructions for corrupt and confusing times: people were not of high or low caste by birth but by personal merit and action; the individual must maintain his moral equilibrium and do his duty regardless of immediate success or failure.

The attributes of personal freedom and tolerance, combined with the acceptance of law and specialization of labor, made India a cultural and economic powerhouse that influenced all of Eurasia. The Universal Soul of the Upanishads migrated West to ancient Greece, and its Platonic version entered the Semitic world when, some 300 years before Jesus, a learned council convened by Ptolemy II in Alexandria produced the first Greek translation of the Torah. The council rendered the tribal war god Yahweh into the almighty God of the Pentateuch, beginning the monotheistic tradition that flowed into the Bible and the Koran. Meanwhile, the Buddha's spare non-deistic retelling of universal reality centered on the creative core of Sunnyata (emptiness) fathered the Zero and revolutionized mathematics globally; his philosophy found a receptive home in East Asia and endured there as India itself returned to the richly personified deism of the old religion.

As trade with all parts of Eurasia and parts of Africa added to India's great wealth the country became a magnet for migrants, many filtering in peacefully and others invading to conquer and rule. With one exception, all of them settled into the unifying amalgam of Indian society.

The British were the exception. Arriving initially as traders, they rose to power at a time of great disorder in the country by using to advantage an acute capacity for political manipulation and treachery. Their rise coincided with two significant changes in the world view of the British elite. One reflected the demolition of the Biblical God-centered universe by Newton's mechanistic concept of it. The other was the fond fantasy that Europeans were the descendants of a superior "Aryan race." Atheism, racial arrogance and consistent perfidy put the British fundamentally at odds with Indian society and precluded their settling into it. Their nonviolent expulsion after two massively murderous world wars fought in the ruthless pursuit of imperial interests highlighted the stark contrasts between Britain and India.

The "Soul Force" that Mahatma Gandhi mobilized to end British rule has been missing in most of what has been reported as happening in India since independence. In addition, the massive corruptions afflicting the country now seem to signal the death of our traditional values. However, such conclusions are premature, for our history lies largely unexamined and misunderstood, as indeed, does the force that Gandhi mobilized. It is urgent to remedy those deficits now because the world is in deepening peril from the industrial “progress” that Gandhi correctly described as malignant and unsustainable in his seminal 1910 book, Hind Swaraj.

Corrective action will not come from governments: for some four decades they have done little in the face of disastrous environmental trends that are driving species to extinction at a rate not seen since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. They have taken only the most desultory action in the face of the threat that global warming could force radical changes in the cropping patterns of major food crops, precipitating possibly genocidal wars. The elite groups in control of the world's governments are loath to change economic arrangements that bring them vast wealth. If their suicidal inertia is to be overcome without ruinous disruption of the world economy ordinary people must mobilize the transformational power of Gandhian "Soul Force." 

Gandhi himself refused to explain how other people could use that force, saying to one interlocutor, “I have it all in my head. When the occasion comes I take out what is applicable to the situation.” When pressed to write a “treatise” on the matter he replied “I cannot do what you want me to do. It is beyond my power. ... I am not the man who can write a treatise. I speak under inspiration. I cannot decide as to how I shall tackle a particular situation until I am faced with it.” But even in the absence of written instructions, we can make out that he acted on the fundamental tenets of Hindu faith. If all Creation is part of the divine, all must share in and resonate to the force of the Soul, the spiritual truth. Satyagraha sought to mobilize the spiritual force of those he led and engage adversaries at the level of their highest common denominator. The essence of the Gandhian approach is the belief that once spiritually engaged, people can resolve any problem.

Gandhi based himself in the mainstream of a spiritual tradition Indians have sustained for some 15 millennia in an effort to comprehend the nature of reality. As noted earlier, that effort began in the Vedas, intensified in the Upanishads, and entered the lives of ordinary people with the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It has coursed unbroken down the centuries into the contemporary world, albeit with major blockages and periods of great difficulty. When the Vedic tradition became crusted over with ritual and superstition the Buddha emerged to cleanse and reform it. When Buddhism lost energy, Adi Sankara revived the old religion and set off the Bhakti tradition that strengthened resistance to invading Islam and eventually softened the foreign faith into the indigenous Sufi movement.

 Emerging from that milieu, Kabir and Guru Nanak, healers of caste and religious division, set off the streams of poetry and faith that became modern Indian nationalism. It is that extended background that explains why, when Raja Rammohun Roy took up the British challenge in Bengal in the 18th Century, the response came not just from there but from the whole country, reaching fruition in Gandhi. Britain’s empty boast that it created Indian unity flies in the face of the world’s most ancient nationalism, emerging not from conquest and oppression as in Europe but by consensus and culture shaped by sages, poets and philosophers.

The spiritual has always been a structural element of Indian history. With Satyagraha in South Africa Gandhi rendered it overtly political, opening the door to its globalization by Martin Luther King. The trajectory of Gandhian ideas from Africa and India to America is what allows their use to change the world in the 21st Century. That does not mean that we do not need to innovate. Gandhi's experience in leading a spiritually attuned people to confront oppressive authority is not directly relevant to a situation in which activists must deal with a hugely diffuse system with its decision-making centres dispersed among corporate elites obedient to no single institutional centre.

Satyagraha remains useful in situations like Koodankulam, where elite groups promote poisonous patterns of “development;” and it can be used to protest an entire range of policies as Spain’s Indignado and American “Occupy” movements have done. But it cannot transform the existing world situation without bringing local efforts into global synergy. The Information and Communications Revolutions have made that possible. The next decade will see most of the world's seven billion people connected by mobile telephone networks; the number of those on the Internet will be nearly five billion by 2020. The number of online machines that process and store most of human knowledge ─ the "Internet of things" as Yuri Milner the Russian IT strategist calls it ─ will grow much faster in the same period, increasing from five billion to 20 billion. Meanwhile, vastly improved Internet search functions and geospatial presentations integrating complex data streams will change the content and quality of the Web. Widespread use of smart phones will enable billions of people to access that information and contribute to online data banks. In sum, we will have the beginnings of what Milner calls a "global brain."

The impact of such a new planetary consciousness will depend on how it is used. If it is committed to help the poor and weak, to deal with social and environmental problems and promote peace and nonviolence, it could develop into a composite Mahatma, a collective "Great Soul" to guide the world out of its current state of generalized crisis and along a path beneficial to all. Its immoral use to control and manipulate people, to generate corporate profits without regard to social and environmental impact would produce a violent dementia. Much of the book is devoted to examining the negative factors that must be neutralized to prevent such a perversion. It also suggests how activists working at the level of their own communities can engage in a global matrix to build the synergies necessary to transform the world.

The first step towards mobilizing global action must be to spread a balanced understanding of what happened during the era of Europe's global dominance. At present such an understanding is not possible because imperial Europe has buried its record in fabricated histories. The motivation has not been national pride but elite profit; the truth cannot be told because it would reveal that exploitative violence and bloody treachery have continued unabated long past the supposed end of the colonial era. This is especially true of Britain, where a cohesive elite has engaged in a campaign of active and widespread propaganda. This is not because of the long afterlife of imperial arrogance; the propaganda hides the fact that the British Empire has been resurrected as a global underground economy that fosters every form of organized crime and corruption.

"Islamic terrorists," drug lords and criminal mafias in every country are the foot soldiers of that new imperium, as are wealthy tax cheats around the world. Their alliance is rooted in the use of "tax havens," of which there are now about 70, most of them established as the British Empire declined in the second half of the 20th Century. Tax havens help major multinational banks launder the proceeds of crime; they constitute a system with its hub in The City (financial district) of London. There is hard evidence of the system at work. Just in the last year Britain's largest bank, HSBC, incurred a fine of about a billion dollars in New York for laundering drug money. (The bank was only being true to its roots: HSBC stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation, which rose to international prominence by financing the opium trade in the 19th Century.)

 In effect, the tax haven system has created within the world's existing financial architecture a shadow criminal enterprise hidden in plain sight: mass media regularly report the obscenely large "bonuses" major banks pay to their staff but they never explain why. Journalists avoided explanations even when such payments continued in the aftermath of the 2009 financial meltdown, as banks wallowed in public funds to stave off bankruptcy. If the thought has ever crossed their minds that bank bonuses are payoffs to people managing trillion dollar flows of black money, reporters and editors have kept it a very close secret.

The New British Empire is far more powerful than the old one ever was. It manipulates a wide range of proxies around the world to generate a massive flow of illicit earnings. Revenues come from the theft of natural resources, drug trafficking and the arms trade. Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have been the primary victims. Since the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China, Britain has also tied into the lucrative corruptions of that largest of tyrannies. The lurid downfall in 2012 of Bo Xi-lai, the rising political "Princeling" whose wife murdered a British money launderer, brought that fetid reality to world attention; or rather, it would have done so if the mainstream Press had not presented the murder victim as a respectable "British businessman."

The media have given scant attention to expert estimates valuing the global black market at over $30 trillion and annual money laundering at $2 trillion. To put those figures in perspective: the entire American economy is valued at about $15 trillion. The cooperation of Western mass media in disguising Britain's multifaceted post-colonial criminality points to the corrupting power of real-life Mordor. Unfortunately, there is no single magic ring that can be tossed into hellfire to destroy its dark empire; that will require a concerted global effort to promote understanding of its violent nature and corrupting role. Whoever accepts the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the European Union will have a golden opportunity to kick-start that process.

Will the people of Middle Earth mobilize against the great evil threatening them? I believe they will for two reasons. One is that the old order is spent. Corporations, the central institution of the colonial and industrial eras, are no longer the most efficient means to organize economic activity; increasingly, the giant transnational entities that dominate the world economy are like lumbering dinosaurs in a networked world. Although they have accumulated enormous political, economic and social power, the corporate elite have come up against a new reality they cannot master, the lightning fast connectivity of the Information Age.

To understand how that has changed economic fundamentals we have to look at the historical context, specifically, the evolution of the European concept of “capital.” It appeared first when elite groups enclosed common lands, claimed property rights, and imposed rent on weaker sections of society, thus monetizing their labour. Those without property could not get land without laying their lives on the line with a mortgage – a word that in the original French means “engaged to the death.”

Land ceased being the primary form of capital when the development of ocean-going ships and new navigation capabilities made long distance trade hugely profitable. The “capital” of the mercantile era was the money necessary to fund risky and expensive ventures. It was raised and spent by a new institution, the joint-stock corporation: the East India Company founded in 1600 was the first one. With industrialization the concept of “capital” changed again: it became the capacity to bundle money, technology, raw materials, labour and marketing skills.

At every step in its radical evolution "capital" remained under the control of elite groups; but the Information Age has changed that. The social connectivity now necessary to generate the most lucrative profits is a form of "capital" that cannot be easily controlled from the top. In fact, corporate advertisers using the Internet and Worldwide Web are the tenant farmers of the Information Age, monetizing the social connective. Without fascist measures similar to those in China they cannot control the vast potential of that connectivity or block its potential to mobilize transformational change.

As an illustration of that altogether new power, consider that the current "housing crisis" in the United States could be resolved in a week by organizing a Web-based state-regulated lottery of overpriced real estate. The overpriced properties now stalling the market could be transferred to new owners who would need no mortgage. Properly institutionalized, the entire housing market could be driven by lottery, generating a steady flow of funds for builders and erasing banks from the picture. The power of connected collectives can be similarly exerted in every area of economic and social activity. It can clean up politics, initiate and sustain action to protect the environment, eradicate poverty and illiteracy, and dramatically bring down the incidence of preventable and communicable diseases.  

The second reason for my optimism is that the world seems primed for a spiritual revolution. To see why that is so, we have to bring into focus the net result of four grim centuries of Europe's global hegemony. All things negative in that era have had unexpected positive outcomes:

• The racist genocides, slave trades and exploitation of indentured and migrant labour have mixed the human gene-pool into an unprecedented unity.
• War has ploughed under many national parochialisms and cross fertilized traditions.
• Opposition to Europe's racist and colonial oppressions brought to life the moral revolution that for the first time in history demanded the equality of men and women of all races.
• Mass-market consumerism with its color blind pursuit of profit undermined racism everywhere.
• The ecological ravages of the industrial era underlined humanity’s close and custodial relationship with Nature; the deepening environmental crises they triggered have made urgent and fundamental change imperative.
• The current world economic crisis has made clear to many millions of people that the existing economic and political systems are deeply corrupt and must be changed.

To read an epochal transformation into this negative-to-positive progression is admittedly an intuitive leap but it can be defended scientifically by considering the nature of thought. Scientists have demonstrated that thoughts are patterns of electrons that can not only be mapped and projected visually in the laboratory, but used to control equipment, most innocuously to help grievously disabled people. They have done this without venturing an opinion on the provenance of more complex thoughts. Is "thinking" individually generated? Or does the "thinker" merely perceive existing patterns? If thought is individually generated, it would support the view of our universe as an accidental evolutionary development with no set direction or purpose. If it is the perception of existing structures of electrons -- as in the intuitive leap above -- it would imply that a purposeful universe is transmitting a message.

The mainstream of Indian spiritual tradition has affirmed that human beings are part of a purposeful Universe. That belief is the basis for yogic meditation which seeks to tune the individual to the Universal essence. This is not to say that the Universe is deterministic in human terms: it can be perceived in many different ways, and that can change its course: “You attain what you worship” says the Bhagavad Gita. The world we now have is the result of Europe’s worship of wealth and unscrupulous power; to transform it we must perceive and want a different reality.

There is little doubt that since Gandhi’s advent turned the tide against the colonial era there has been a continuous improvement in the moral quality of human actions. We have seen a widening altruism, a growing sensitivity to the need to protect all life on the planet, and a strengthening effort to promote human rights and democracy. Even neo-colonial Europe amidst its continuing depredations has bowed to the trend and instead of glorying in domination and rapacity, provides “official development aid” to its victims. It is within our power to push that positive trend into an evolutionary quantum jump. Out of the titanic gloom of the current global crisis we can bring another world into being; this book is a basic guide to how we can do so.

A Hatchet Job on Sri Aurobindo

Peter Heehs, the American author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press 2008), has been an archivist at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry for over 40 years. However, long familiarity with his subject and with India has not translated into insight or even understanding. His 496-page tome seems to have been written by some racist koi-hai from the colonial era.

The "genre of hagiography ... is very much alive in India" Heehs writes. "Any saint with a following is the subject of one or more books that tell the inspiring story of his or her birth, growth, mission, and passage to the eternal. Biographers of literary and political figures do not differ much from the model. People take to the received version of their heroes’ lives very seriously. A statement about a politician or poet that rubs people the wrong way will be turned into a political or legal issue or probably cause a riot. The problem is not whether the disputed statement is true, but whether anyone has the right to question an account that flatters a group identity.”

Obviously written for foreigners who know little of India (the people at Columbia University Press?), those lines are absurd. How many “riots” can we Indians remember that were sparked by a comment in a book about some poet or politician? How many law suits? The overkill continues in a comparison Heehs offers between two photographs of Aurobindo, one retouched to erase wrinkles and make him fairer. Such retouching is a common free service provided unasked by Indian darkroom assistants and their modern computerized counterparts; but Heehs sees it as devious hagiography, intended to make Aurobindo look more saintly. Upon that overblown conclusion he hangs the following startling declaration:

“Hagiographers deal with documents the way that retouchers deal with photographs. Biographers must take their documents as they find them. They have to examine all sorts of materials, paying as much attention to the subject’s enemies as by his friends (sic), not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events.” There is no mention of the biographer’s responsibility to try and arrive at the truth, an omission we could consider an oversight if the book were not such a study in dishonesty.

Another astonishing element of the book is Heehs’ assessment of Aurobindo’s mystical experiences. “In trying to trace the lines of Aurobindo’s sadhna, a biographer can use the subject’s diaries, letters and retrospective accounts," says the Preface. "There is also for comparison, accounts by others of similar mystical experiences. But in the end, such experiments remain subjective. Perhaps they are only hallucinations or signs of psychotic breakdown.” Even if that is not so, he asks, “do they have any value to anyone but the subject?”

Heehs gives short shrift to the claim that mystics access “a kind of knowledge that is more fundamental, and thus more valuable, than the relative knowledge of words and things.” A mystic absorbed “in inner experience … is freed from the problems that afflict men and women who are caught in the dualities of knowledge and ignorance, pleasure and pain, life and death,” he writes. “A mystic thus absorbed often is lost to the human effort to achieve a more perfect life.” Rather lamely he then adds that the value of Aurobindo’s life lies in his 40-year effort to “bring the knowledge and power of the spirit into the world.”

The Preface makes it abundantly clear that Heehs does not write of spiritual experience from personal knowledge. That conclusion is hammered in by the rest of the book, structured to reflect his view that Aurobindo had five discontinuous “lives:” as Son, Scholar, Revolutionary, Yogi/Philosopher, and Guide. Despite the admission that the “five lives were not sealed off from one another,” and that “in the end, [there was] only one,” it is obvious that Heehs suffers from a fundamental incapacity as Aurobindo's biographer: he cannot validate anything beyond the physical. In fact, even his understanding of the physical appears shaky. For instance, he thinks (page 203) the electron microscope rendered invalid Aurobindo's statement that a seed holds the "idea" of the plant it will become.

All that the electron microscope has done, all that modern physics as a whole has done, is to examine more closely the logistics and mechanics of natural processes; the Scientific Method cannot assess purpose and significance, the vital components of the "idea" driving them. That is why Science has been silent on such issues as the meaning of the Universe and human destiny. The discontinuities that Heehs perceives in Aurobindo's life are meaningless in the face of the "idea" incarnate in the foremost of India's modern mystics. However, they do help the reviewer filet the author’s misunderstandings.

Life 1: “Son”
Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872, the third son of a young anglophile doctor in the employ of the colonial regime. Dr. Ghose was posted in the nearby provincial town of Rangpur, a name that Heehs says means "City of Delight." It actually means Colourful Place. Errors like that cast doubt on almost everything he reports. When Heehs asserts that Aurobindo's middle name was an afterthought, honouring Annette Ackroyd, an Englishwoman who came to India six months after his birth, the reader is inclined to ask for a verifiable source. And what is one to make of the completely gratuitous comment that Keshub Chunder Sen in 1870 was “the first Indian with flowing robes and an agile tongue to captivate a credulous West"? Raja Rammohun Roy and Dwaraknath Tagore made grand public tours of Britain several decades before Sen, and it was not just in the "credulous West" that crowds gathered to hear them.

When Aurobindo was five Dr. Ghose sent his sons to a mission school in Darjeeling, and two years later took them to Britain (along with his pregnant wife and infant daughter). The boys were left in the charge of an Anglican clergyman, William Drewett, who was asked not to teach them anything about India; Dr. Ghose hoped if they were raised British it would ease their path into the Indian Civil Service. The minister and his wife initially tutored the boys at home. Aurobindo was the brightest of the three and excelled at English, French and Latin. He won a scholarship to London’s prestigious St Paul’s School and did well enough in the first of a succession of ICS examinations to win an additional stipend. That allowed the brothers to scrape by, ill clad and ill fed through years in which they received little from home. Heehs makes no attempt to explain why their father stopped sending money, or why he began sending snippets from newspapers to show how "heartless" the British were.

Penury did not prevent Aurobindo from thriving at school. He excelled at Latin and Greek, wrote poetry, avoided games, kept pretty much to himself, and passed out with another merit scholarship, to King’s College at Cambridge. There he acquired his first knowledge of Sanskrit and went through the motions of studying Bengali from a British "pundit" who, when given a novel by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, asked in what language it was written. He took the "Tripos," the most difficult examination at the BA honours level, in two years instead of the usual three. (The exam got its name from the three-legged stool scholars sat on as they wrangled with complex questions posed by a panel of examiners.) Aurobindo got a first in the test but not a degree: that would have required another year at Cambridge.

Not to disappoint his father, Aurobindo sat for the final ICS entry exam; but he had no interest in becoming a member of that supposedly elite service. “He just did not like the English” writes Heehs. “Though he kept up cordial relations with individuals” he developed what he described later as “a ‘strong hatred’ of Englishmen in general.” The carefully tweaked image of the ICS was that it drew from the cream of British youth; Aurobindo found the reality of the exam hall different. The candidates were “shallow schoolboys” from “cramming” establishments, the “sons of small tradesmen … promoted from the counter … Bad in training, void of culture, in instruction poor … unmannerly, uncultivated, unintelligent.”

Aurobindo placed near the top in all the written exams but avoided recruitment by not appearing for the mandatory riding test. The ICS Commissioners wrote asking him to reschedule the test. He set a date but did not turn up; an official then told him to see the riding instructor, which he did not do. “Called to the office to explain, Aurobindo told a series of lies,” Heehs writes; he neither explains that serious charge nor says on what source it is based. After yet another missed appointment the Commissioners dropped him. It is legitimate to wonder if Heehs would have considered it less discontinuous if Aurobindo had joined the ICS.

Life 2: “Scholar”
From 1893 to 1906 Aurobindo worked for the Gaekwad of Baroda, initially as a bureaucrat, then as a teacher of English literature at the college established by that most liberal of Indian rulers. He also wrote the Gaekwad’s letters and speeches, continued his self-education in Sanskrit and Bengali, took up the practice of yoga, and immersed himself in the study of the Upanishads, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Gita and Kalidasa. On visits to Bengal he reclaimed other aspects of his Indian self. His father had died suddenly just before his return to India, but he re-established contact with his supposedly “mad” mother, his younger sister and brother, and an extended family. Aurobindo married, read voraciously on all manner of topics, wrote poetry, plays and political commentary; and under the guidance of a yogi from Maharashtra, Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, experienced for the first time “the silent, spaceless, timeless Brahman.”

His purely British upbringing and subsequent immersion in Indian life and lore gave Aurobindo the capacity, unmatched by any other Indian leader of the time, to see through the bluff of British power. He pilloried the pallid state of Indian resistance, declaring the country’s worst enemies to be "our own crying weakness, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.” He was capable of seeing the true worth of Indian literature and religion in a way impossible for those accustomed to them from childhood. The Indian tendency to accept European “Orientalist” assessments of the country’s traditions irritated him. The Mahabharata was a far greater work than the Iliad, to which European scholars often compared it, in the process telling Indians their national epic was “a mass of old wives’ stories without a spark of poetry or imagination.”

He asserted the importance of Hinduism to the Indian future: if “we are not to plunge into the vortex of scientific athieism and the breakdown of moral ideals which is engulfing Europe, it must survive as the religion for which the Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga combined to lay the foundations, which Sri Krishna announced and which Vyasa formulated.” If Providence had set out to design a leader to energize Indian nationalism there could have been no better plan than to have an exceptionally gifted boy sent off at a tender age to be raised British. Far from being discontinuous, the first two of Aurobindo’s “lives” shaped him for the seminal role he would play in the rapidly changing politics of the country.

Heehs is badly misinformed about the political background of the time. "With one exception," he writes, "any stirrings of revolt in the country at the time were momentary ripples on the tranquil sea of the Pax Britannica. The exception came from an unexpected quarter. Toward the end of 1903, the government of Bengal announced its intention to transfer the eastern districts of the province to Assam for reasons of administrative efficiency. Bengal was almost as large as France and much more populous, and there had long been calls to divide the province into more manageable units." In accepting the entirety of the regime’s rationalization of the 1905 division of Bengal Heehs turns a blind eye to malignant intent: the creation of a Muslim majority East Bengal was meant to divide Hindus and Muslims and weaken the mainstream Indian National Congress.

The "tranquil sea of Pax Britannica” Heehs perceives was actually the aftermath of the worst series of famines inflicted on India by British rapacity. In the last quarter of the 19th Century, as millions of people were starving to death around the country, the British exported rice at record rates, held a barbarously gluttonous "Durbar" in Delhi, made ruinously expensive efforts to control Afghanistan, and raised the regressive Salt Tax to pay for it all. Ill feelings against the regime were high everywhere. It was to channel them into a loyalist forum that a retired "Agriculture member" of the Viceroy's Council took the initiative to found the Indian National Congress in 1885. However, the Congress did not long remain as loyal as the British wanted and soon they had an additional cause of worry: the Muslim membership of the party rose in its first six years from two of 72 delegates (2.7 per cent) to 156 of 702 (22 per cent). As Muslim luminaries like Mohammad Ali Jinnah rose to the front ranks of the Congress leadership, the British took fright. The one indelible lesson they had drawn from the great uprising of 1857 was that Hindu-Muslim unity posed the most extreme threat to their rule.

The British motive in dividing Bengal was underlined by another initiative of the Viceroy in 1905: he got the Agha Khan (the third of his line to be a willing foreign tool), to assemble a collection of feudal landowners and establish the All India Muslim League. With rather less ostentatious prompting the Hindu Mahasabha also came into being a few years later. Like the League it was a British proxy, and over the next few decdes they drove the great communal bloodletting that climaxed in the Partition "riots" that killed over a million people and made 14 million homeless in their ancestral lands.

To begin with, however, the division of Bengal and creation of the Muslim League did not siphon off support and weaken the Congress. The League remained a paper organization for decades, with an affluent feudal membership so small that into the 1930s the quorum at its annual meetings was 10. The Congress, on the other hand found itself suddenly more popular than it had ever been. As its staid leaders took to addressing mass meeting to promote swadeshi and the boycott of British goods, legions of new young activists joined the national cause. The most radical of the young, including Aurobindo’s brother Biren, found inspiration in Italian and Irish revolutionaries and began plotting opposition to British rule with bomb and gun. From Baroda Aurobindo supported those conspiratorial initiatives, but there was a limit to what he could do without getting his employer into trouble. As a passionate new nationalism grew in Bengal he quit the Gaekwad’s service and moved to Calcutta in 1906.

Life 3: Revolutionary
Seemingly ignorant of the nationalist advances that precipitated the course of events described above, Heehs asserts that “between 1885 and 1905 the Congress achieved virtually nothing.” He turns a blind eye on the active British role in fomenting Hindu-Muslim antagonisms; in fact, he comes across as their apologist. “Faced with growing opposition from upper class Hindus, the British were in need of ‘native’ allies,” he writes. “One third of India’s population was Muslim. Lagging behind the Hindus in education and employment, the Muslims had come to believe that it was in their interest to establish a bloc to offset Hindu influence.” In that quote, note how it is “upper class Hindus” who opposed the British, while “the Muslims” had come to believe in the need for a bloc. That essentially British bias makes Heehs an unreliable reporter not only of Aurobindo as a leading opponent of colonial rule, but of Indian history overall. This is how he reports the Jallianwallah Massacre: “In Amritsar the British Army was called in to suppress a meeting. Hundreds were killed or injured.”

Some examples of bias are vicious. Heehs writes that Aurobindo, short of funds for two would-be assassins “suggested that they look for someone to rob.” The source of that monstrous charge is hearsay in a 1928 book in Bengali. Heehs does not examine the strong possibility that it was police propaganda; as with the earlier allegation that Aurobindo told a "series of lies," he is content to hit and run. At another point he describes the repressive “Seditious Meetings Act” of 1907, used to brutalize thousands of peaceful protesters, as “the bureaucracy’s way of dealing with violence and unrest.” Other examples of bias merely show his preference of perspective. The account of Aurobindo at the crucial Surat meeting of the Congress, an event widely covered by Indian media because it marked the parting of ways between the party's Moderates and Radicals, is based almost entirely on British newspaper reports. Inherent bias is the only explanation for Heehs' use of "Extremist" rather than "Radical" (the usual Indian usage), to label the Tilak-Aurobindo faction.

In recounting that “Hindu-Muslim rioting broke out in East Bengal” in 1906, Heehs notes (page 115) that “Aurobindo blamed the British. The Muslims had not planned the attacks but had been goaded by the government. The Hindus retaliated only after ‘serious and even unbearable provocation’.” Heehs himself ignores the ample evidence that the British pushed the country into a religious civil war to stem the rise of the nationalists. Instead, he blames Aurobindo and the "Extremists" for "giving a Hindu slant to the [independence] movement” (page 116). Evidently forgetful of the quote on page 115, Heehs says on page 211 that "Aurobindo regarded religious conflict as a purely social matter, refusing to see it as a vital political issue." On page 212 there is a more direct indictment: "Partition and the bloodletting that accompanied it were the [nationalist] movement's principal failings, and Aurobindo and his colleagues have to take their share of the blame." While holding Aurobindo responsible for events that occurred four decades after his retirement from active politics, Heehs makes not a single mention of the cold blooded British manipulations over that period to precipitate what is arguably the most murderous civil conflict in history!

After he moved to Calcutta from Baroda Aurobindo quickly became the leading spokesman of radical opinion. As the editor of Bande Mataram and working with Tilak within the Congress he helped shape the expectations and attitudes of a pan-Indian generation that Gandhi would mobilize in the final push to drive the British out. Although never an active member of his younger brother’s various plots, Aurobindo remained an important supporter and guide. There is no doubt that in marked contrast to Gandhi, he considered it entirely legitimate to avoid self-incrimination under repressive laws and to resort to violence when necessary. He made that explicit in responding to Rabindranath Tagore’s criticism of the hatred that drove the boycott of British goods. A “certain class of minds shrinks from aggressiveness as if it were a sin … The Gita is the best answer to those who shrink from battle as a sin and aggression as a lowering of morality. … Another question is the use of violence in the furtherance of boycott. This is, in our view, purely a matter of policy and expediency. An act of violence brings us into conflict with the law and may be inexpedient for a race circumstanced like ours. But the moral question does not arise.”

He discovered all too soon that it did arise: in the wake of an assassination attempt on a British judge that miscarried and killed two Englishwomen, the police raided Aurobindo’s house on 2 May 1908 and took him away in handcuffs with a rope around his waist. He was charged with being part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. During the year he spent in jail waiting for judgment in the “Alipore conspiracy case,” Aurobindo experienced a spiritual transformation. As a schoolboy in Britain he had felt it his duty to work for the freedom of India; as he matured, that developed into a sense that he had divine protection in carrying forward the fight against the British. His faith was shaken during the first few days in prison.

“I faltered for a moment and cried out in my heart to Him: ‘What is this that has happened to me? I believed that I had a mission to work for the people of my country and until that work was done, I should have thy protection. Why then am I here and on such a charge?” There was no answer. Days of inner turmoil followed in his solitary cell in Alipore Jail until, in desperation, he asked for divine help and felt an instant calmness. Then came the voice of his inner guide: “The bonds you had not strength to break I have broken for you … I have another thing for you to do, and it is for that I have brought you here, to teach you what you could not learn for yourself and to train you for my work.”

Life 4: Yogi/Philosopher
Aurobindo has described the transformation that followed. "On one side was the jail workshop, on the other side the cowshed; these were the two limits of my free domain. Strolling back and forth ... I would recite the profound, inspiring and inexhaustibly strength-giving words of the Upanishads. Or else, watching the movements and activities of the prisoners, I would try to realize the fundamental truth that the Lord dwells in all. Repeating silently in my mind the words sarvam khalvidam brahma, 'All is verily the Eternal', I would project that realization on everything in existence -- trees and houses and walls, man and beast and bird, metal and earth. As I did this I would get into a state in which the prison no longer appeared to be a prison at all. It was as if this high rampart, this iron grating, these high walls, this sunlit tree with its bluish leaves and these ordinary material things were no longer inert objects."

Eventually he reached a point when he saw only God in everything around him. "I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell, but it was not a tree. It was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me his shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door, and again I saw Vasudeva. … I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and … it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies.” His inner Guide continued to steady him, holding out the prospect of a new mission in life.

On several occasions he believed that the spirit of Swami Vivekananda spoke to him "about the processes of the higher truth consciousness" that later turned out in his own experience to be "precise even in the minutest detail." There were other voices too, but Aurobindo was careful to heed only those he recognized as meaningful and worthy. Looking back on this experience in later life he allowed that the voices could have been emerging from parts of his own subconscious, but that did not reduce their significance. Midway through his imprisonment he got what he considered an “adesha” that the case would end in acquittal and that he should thereafter undertake a spiritual mission so that a free India could be of “service to the world.” As it turned out, Aurobindo alone was acqutted of all charges: the judge, a former schoolmate, found the prosecution case against him too circumstantial.

After the year in Alipore prison Aurobindo returned to his life as a journalist by founding a new magazine, Karmayogin. It aimed at uniting India's spiritual and material worlds. The task, he wrote in its second issue, is "moral and spiritual. We aim not at the alteration of a form of government but at the building of a nation. Of that task politics is a part, but only a part." Karmayogin would seek to unite all aspects of life in articulating "the dharma, the national religion which we also believe to be universal." That universal religion was the Sanatana Dharma (the eternal law) that lay at the core not only of Hinduism but of all religions, and in bringing that message to the world India had a special role and destiny.

Heehs misunderstands the whole thrust of Aurobindo's thinking. "Although by no means a chauvinist" he writes, "Aurobindo was convinced of the essential superiority of Indian culture. A century later, when all forms of essentialism are suspect and national exceptionalism -- whether American, Russian, Chinese, Japanese or other -- is subject to well-deserved condemnation, one might wonder whether Indian essentialism and exceptionalism have much to recommend themselves."

It is difficult to understand how Heehs can have studied one of the most articulate spokesmen of the Indian renaissance for so long and yet be oblivious to the fact that one does not have to be a "chauvinist" to see that India is unique among nations. It is not only that unlike all other national claims to exceptionalism, Aurobindo's conception of India's special mission was "moral and spiritual;" its "essentialism" lay in the recognition of the universal in all humanity.

There is also the incontrovertible fact that India is the only nation that has a multimillennial history defined primarily by a sustained effort to comprehend the nature of Universal reality. The Indian national tradition flows from the Vedas to the Upanishads, to the Puranas, enters popular culture through the Ramayana and Mahabharatha, and courses unbroken down the centuries into the contemporary world. This is not to say it did not encounter blockages and periods of great difficulty. When the original tradition became crusted over with ritual and superstition the Buddha emerged with the spare re-telling of its great truths. When Buddhism lost energy, Sankara revived the old religion and set off the Bhakti tradition that strengthened Indians against invading Islam and eventually softened the foreign faith into the indigenous Sufi movement. Emerging from that milieu, Kabir and Guru Nanak, healers of caste and religious division, set off the streams of poetry and faith that became modern Indian nationalism. It is this extended background that explains why, when Raja Rammohun Roy took up the British challenge in Bengal in the 18th Century, the response came not just from there but from the whole country, reaching fruition in Gandhi.

That long continuum of some 15 to 20 millennia transformed tribes into castes, caste federations into unitary kingdoms, kingdoms into empires, and unified the whole with a common culture and philosophy. No other nation has a comparable history. In Europe nations resulted from conquest and oppression. Those who shaped Indian unity were sages, poets and philosophers inspired by a profound mystical perception of universal realities; they emerged from all parts of the country and from high and low castes. Heehs is blind to a history in which spirituality has been a primary structural element; he cannot see that Aurobindo’s significance lies in the fact that his thought and practice brought into the modern world the great insight of the Upanishads that under the material diversity of the world there is an indestructible Universal Spirit.

It was during Aurobindo’s lifetime that Western Science arrived at an understanding of that basic duality, first discovering that light existed as both particle (matter) and wave (energy), and then, in Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2, postulating the indestructible duality of the universe. Heehs seems to be ignorant of that aspect of science. “If Aurobindo is right that matter and spirit are different forms of a single unity” he writes, “it follows that there is a ‘scale of substance’ that links the two” (page272). In the long section of the book that deals with Aurobindo’s work in Pondicherry, the archivist in Heehs provides a useful overview while the author in him provides confused and misleading commentary.

For nine months after his acquittal Aurobindo stayed on in Calcutta, editing Karmayogin and practicing yoga. He was widely in demand as a public speaker. Amidst rumors that the British were preparing to arrest and deport him without the niceties of prosecution and trial he fled to French-controlled Chandernagore near Calcutta, and after a few weeks there, left for Pondicherry, traveling under an alias on a French vessel, the Dupleix. He arrived in Pondicherry on 4 April, 1910. Arrangements for his stay were made by the publisher of the Madras-based nationalist magazine India, Srinivasacharya Iyengar, who had also fled for refuge to Pondicherry. The editor of India, the poet Subramania Bharati, was also a refugee there. Like Aurobindo, he was a man of wide intellectual interests, and their talks were considered "variety entertainment" by the others in their group.

The refugees from Bengal led a Spartan existence in Pondicherry, eating just one meal a day, sleeping on the floor, sharing a single bar of soap and even forced to use a common towel. It was years before money ceased to be a problem. Beyond mentioning "supporters" in Bengal and a Madras businessman whose own dying guru 30 years earlier had predicted the coming of a guide from the north, Heehs makes no effort to explore the issue of who financed Aurobindo. He does, however, conduct yet another hit and run attack, citing speculation in a police report that violent secret societies in Bengal "probably helped him financially." If true, he comments, "this would mean that some of the funds ... were collected at gunpoint in Bengal, as armed robbery was the [Dacca Anushilan] samiti's principal means of fundraising."

Money only ceased to be a problem after a French devotee, Mirra Alfassa Richard, later known as "Mother," took matters in hand. She had arrived in Pondicherry with her husband Paul Richard before the outbreak of World War I. Both were spiritually inclined, and Paul was a prime mover in the founding of Arya, a monthly magazine of literature, philosophy and commentary; however, the war called him away almost immediately after its launch and it was left to Aurobindo's prolific pen to fill the pages of the magazine. The postwar influenza pandemic killed Aurobindo's wife, who had remained in Bengal, and it almost killed Mirra Alfassa, who had gone to Japan while her husband was a combatant. The Ashramites offended by Heehs' book have focused on his innuendo filled account of how she and Paul returned to Pondicherry, their estrangement, and her attachment to Aurobindo.

Life 5: Guide
In the final phase of his life Aurobindo's sadhna, spiritual effort, was directed at realizing and thus bringing into the world the potent supra-consciousness he perceived as part of the directive force of the universe. He kept a diary of his efforts for long periods, at other times he did not. The subject is highly esoteric and only those who have some personal sense of that superior energy can really appreciate what he was trying to do; there is little doubt that the long and lonely road of his experience was and remains important, pointing to a more spiritually evolved human future. Heehs' account of this period is without insight, and he has no real idea of Aurobindo's historical significance. (That incapacity seems to be widely shared among Indians: Aurobindo did not even make it into the top 50 listing in The Greatest Indian poll conducted by CNBC-18 to find the most revered personality after Gandhi.)

There are several levels at which we can assess Aurobindo's importance. His veering trajectory from boyhood in Britain to revolutionary nationalism and then yogic meditation in Pondicherry highlighted the value and worth of Indian tradition and flagged down violence in Indian politics. That prepared the way for Gandhi. For the inchoate generations that have struggled in free India to escape the deadening influence of our brainwashed historians and Golliwog media, Aurobindo has bannered the potential and scope of individual spiritual effort. Perhaps what history will hold his most important achievement is that in an age of insanely violent material ideologies his long fierce pursuit of a singular spiritual reality held out the alternative.

How real is Aurobindo's expectation that humanity is on the brink of broad-based spiritual progress? The answer is not all airy hope. Something of what he foresaw as the descent of the Supermind into human affairs is happening in the emergence of what Yuri Milner, the Russian Information Technology guru, calls the "global brain." The unprecedented global connectivity resulting from the spread of mobile telephone and broadband networks, engaging not only people but the machines that now process and store most of human knowledge, is creating a new level of consciousness. The "Internet of things" as Milner calls it, is expanding much faster than its human counterpart. There are some two billion people and five billion machines connected to the Internet today; in the next decade the number of individuals will more than double while that of machines is projected to reach 20 billion. In the same period almost everyone on the planet will be connected by mobile phone networks.

If the flashing synapses of this global brain are to develop positive patterns of thought and creativity, if we are to ensure that the planetary consciousness now descending on humanity will not take malignant and schizophrenic forms, we must look for guidance from India's spiritual masters, especially Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo.