12-24-2005, 02:59 PM
In one of his book (vol 5) there is a lecture on Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kala (i think he means Kaal though he spells kala) which is amazing. It wouldnt be fair if i were to quote parts of it but just to give some idea (not that this is the best part) ..
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->We have to find some way out of such a state of rootlessness. We have to somehow find an anchor again in our civilisational con-sciousness, in our innate chitta and kala. Some four or five years ago, the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust had organised an interna-tional gathering of scholars to deliberate on the fundamental questions of Indian identity. In that gatheringâit is reportedâa European scholar had suggested that the only way out for India was in her taking to Christianity in a big way.
This, of course, is not an entirely new thought. For at least the last two hundred years, the Christianisation of India has been seriously thought of as an option for taking India out of what had seemed to many, especially in Britain, as the morass of her civilisational memory; giving her a more easily understand-able identity. There have also been large scale governmental efforts to help in this direction. And the so-called Westernisa-tion of India, which even the governments of independent India have been pursuing with such seeming vigour, is not very differ-ent from Indiaâs Christianisation.
If all these efforts had led to a thoroughgoing Westernisation of the Indian mind so that the people of India on their own could start associating themselves with the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries of the West, then that perhaps would have been some sort of a solution of Indiaâs problems. If that change of Indian civilisational consciousness had taken place, then the ordinary Indian today would think and behave more or less like the ordinary man of Europe and America, and his priorities and seekings would have become similar.
Indians would then have also lost the peculiarly Indian belief, which even the most ordinary of the ordinary Indians harbours in his heart: that he is a part of the ultimate Brahman, and by virtue of this relationship with Brahman, he too is completely free and sovereign in himself. In place of this feeling of free-dom and sovereignty, that so exasperates those who seek to admin-ister or reform India, the Indian too would have then acquired the Western manâs innate sense of total subordination to the prevailing system, a subordination of the mind that man in the West has always displayed irrespective of whatever the system was in any particular Western phase: whether a despotic feudal oligarchy, a slave society like that of ancient Greece and Rome, a society of laissez faire, or of Marxist communism, or the currently ascendant society of market forces.
Notwithstanding the prosperity and affluence that the West has gained during the last forty or fifty years, the innate con-sciousness of the Western man seems to have remained one of total subordination to the given system. At the level of the mind, he is still very much the slave of the imaginary Republic of Plato, and the very real empire of Rome. The consciousness of the Indian people would have also been moulded into the same state of subor-dination as that of the Western man, if the attempts of the last two hundred years to Westernise or Christianise India had reached anywhere. And, even such slavery of the mind might have been a way out of the present Indian drift.
But perhaps such simple solutions to civilisational problems are well nigh impossible. It does not seem to be given to man to completely erase his civilisational consciousness and establish a new universe of the mind. Not even conquerors are able to so metamorphose the mind of the conquered. The only way such meta-morphosis can be achieved is by completely destroying the conquered civilisation, eliminating every single individual, and starting afresh with an imported population. This is what oc-curred, more or less, in the Americas and Australia. India has so far been saved this denouement at the hands of Europe, though not for any lack of trying.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->We have to find some way out of such a state of rootlessness. We have to somehow find an anchor again in our civilisational con-sciousness, in our innate chitta and kala. Some four or five years ago, the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust had organised an interna-tional gathering of scholars to deliberate on the fundamental questions of Indian identity. In that gatheringâit is reportedâa European scholar had suggested that the only way out for India was in her taking to Christianity in a big way.
This, of course, is not an entirely new thought. For at least the last two hundred years, the Christianisation of India has been seriously thought of as an option for taking India out of what had seemed to many, especially in Britain, as the morass of her civilisational memory; giving her a more easily understand-able identity. There have also been large scale governmental efforts to help in this direction. And the so-called Westernisa-tion of India, which even the governments of independent India have been pursuing with such seeming vigour, is not very differ-ent from Indiaâs Christianisation.
If all these efforts had led to a thoroughgoing Westernisation of the Indian mind so that the people of India on their own could start associating themselves with the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries of the West, then that perhaps would have been some sort of a solution of Indiaâs problems. If that change of Indian civilisational consciousness had taken place, then the ordinary Indian today would think and behave more or less like the ordinary man of Europe and America, and his priorities and seekings would have become similar.
Indians would then have also lost the peculiarly Indian belief, which even the most ordinary of the ordinary Indians harbours in his heart: that he is a part of the ultimate Brahman, and by virtue of this relationship with Brahman, he too is completely free and sovereign in himself. In place of this feeling of free-dom and sovereignty, that so exasperates those who seek to admin-ister or reform India, the Indian too would have then acquired the Western manâs innate sense of total subordination to the prevailing system, a subordination of the mind that man in the West has always displayed irrespective of whatever the system was in any particular Western phase: whether a despotic feudal oligarchy, a slave society like that of ancient Greece and Rome, a society of laissez faire, or of Marxist communism, or the currently ascendant society of market forces.
Notwithstanding the prosperity and affluence that the West has gained during the last forty or fifty years, the innate con-sciousness of the Western man seems to have remained one of total subordination to the given system. At the level of the mind, he is still very much the slave of the imaginary Republic of Plato, and the very real empire of Rome. The consciousness of the Indian people would have also been moulded into the same state of subor-dination as that of the Western man, if the attempts of the last two hundred years to Westernise or Christianise India had reached anywhere. And, even such slavery of the mind might have been a way out of the present Indian drift.
But perhaps such simple solutions to civilisational problems are well nigh impossible. It does not seem to be given to man to completely erase his civilisational consciousness and establish a new universe of the mind. Not even conquerors are able to so metamorphose the mind of the conquered. The only way such meta-morphosis can be achieved is by completely destroying the conquered civilisation, eliminating every single individual, and starting afresh with an imported population. This is what oc-curred, more or less, in the Americas and Australia. India has so far been saved this denouement at the hands of Europe, though not for any lack of trying.
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