Our task as individuals is to seek and reveal the authentic

THE ORIGINS OF INTEGRAL THOUGHT derive principally from the writings and teachings of Sri Aurobindo, the great Hindu mystic philosopher who lived until 1950. Aurobindo conceived of an Integral Yoga that provided for the practical real-world manifestation and realization of spiritual experience. KRIS TINER

RITUAL MUSICS: functional/symbolic-metaphor/mythic/prepersonal (premodern)
ABSTRACT MUSICS: contemplative/signification-meaning/rational/personal (modern)
TRANSPERSONAL MUSICS: integral/intuitive-experiential/spiritual/transpersonal (postmodern)

The ritual musics (folkloric and ceremonial musics) function to solidify group membership and reinforce traditional communal (and often religious) values. Ritual music, art, and dance are not differentiated from the processes of everyday life, and the creative performer has not yet assumed the separate, solitary role of artist. Abstract or contemplative musics place primary importance on the individual creative force, which has been exemplified by the role of the great Western composer as an authoritative, godlike creative figure that emerged from Enlightenment-era humanism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This heroic archetype persisted well into the popular music of the early twentieth century and was partly responsible for the early success of figures as diverse as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, George Gershwin, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Bob Marley before it was all but dismantled by the deconstructionist wing of high art, and at the same time gradually drained of any authentic creative value (and hence transformed into a disposable commercial product) by the pop culture industry.
It is important to remember at this point that the thrust of evolution, in the integral view, is to "transcend and include", meaning that while abstract, contemplative music proceeds from ritual music, it does not completely bypass or exclude ritual music, nor does it have to exceed the communal functionality of it. In a given social system abstract and ritual musics may even exist side-by-side and operate in conjunction with each other. As musical praxis extends into the mental-logical dimension it retains aspects of ritual that remain necessary or useful in that new dimension. To be specific, concert music cannot exist without some trace of ritual (particularly the ritual of concert performance), without a mythical framework upon which to construct, interpret, and reinterpret its themes and deify its great composer-heroes, without communal interdependency to make possible the cultural preservation of old works and the ongoing creation of new ones. So it follows that a transpersonal music must be able to differentiate itself but NOT dissociate from the functional identities of both ritual and abstract musics if the overall goal is to transcend and include.
It is also important to note that even though we are dealing with hierarchical organization of holons (or holarchies), it does not necessarily follow that all abstract music is more advanced than all ritual music. Those familiar with Wilber’s writings will understand that he repeatedly emphasizes the point that evolution often proceeds very unevenly, and an individual or a society may be very well advanced in one line of development, and simultaneously very underdeveloped or even pathological in another (Wilber’s common example is the Nazi doctor – one who is very intellectually advanced but morally and ethically stunted).

THE NEXT PHASE of creative music will be initiated by breaking through the old systems and not simply breaking them up; it will be creative, not destructive. I have always felt a particular repulsion to the deconstructionist tendencies in literary criticism, early postmodernism, and various strains of free improvisation in music. Why tear a system apart if you are not willing (or able) to reveal anything beyond the mere failure of that system? Disillusionment alone does not constitute a progressive artistic philosophy, and neither does deconstruction or primitivism. Problems require solutions; failed systems require new kinds of systems. And in order for a new system to be successful, it must transcend and include previous systems (and avoid pathology in its own).

In his Tri-Axium Writings Anthony Braxton speaks of this in terms of "the composite realness of creativity", and indeed his Tri-Centric system is essentially a complex, multi-hierarchical synthesis (or integration) of ritual and ceremonial activity, philosophical abstractions and systemic compositional structures (for an excellent (and recent) overview in Braxton’s own words, Mike Heffley’s Third Millenial Interview is indispensable).
So the challenge now is to adapt the integral view of evolution to a musical point of view. How exactly does a transpersonal music work, being a form of communication that transcends (and includes) symbolic communal function as well as language-based rational/mental perspectives and philosophical concepts? Might this line of inquiry provide a clue as to what is truly meant by the old axiom, "Music is the universal language"?
Here we might take a cue from the visual arts, which in the twentieth century were more immediately successful at escaping the confines of literal representation than music (even though music as an abstract form was the initial inspiration for abstract art vis-à-vis Kandinsky):

"The ‘pure’ red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist, no matter how one shifts its physical contexts. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunter’s caps, and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we should have no feeling toward red or its relations, and it would be useless as an artistic element." - Robert Motherwell, "Beyond the Aesthetic" (1946)

Motherwell understood that the experience of abstract art (abstract expressionism in this case) was dependent upon an underlying symbolic association. It is unfortunate that the ideal of the artist who creates an experience, not simply an art object, lost so much currency with the early deconstructionist tendencies of postmodernism. Mark Rothko, one of the greatest abstract expressionists, expressed profound joy when people experienced the same emotions viewing his paintings as he had when he painted them. Rothko was conscious of the fact that the art experience involved a mutual self-encounter, and he bitterly resisted the commodification of the "art object" as such.
There is a telling scene in the movie Pollock where Jackson Pollock’s character, played by Ed Harris, is asked about the "meaning" of his paintings. Pollock relates the experience of art to looking at a sunrise, "You don’t ask what it means…" This statement gets to the core of what a transpersonal art should do; it ought to be as simple as looking at a sunrise. We don’t need to see a sign posted to tell us to sit down and enjoy it, or even a program to interpret its meaning for us. The sensitive individual already knows intuitively what to do. Everything that has ever been known about beauty comes into play at that point, as we experience the sunrise as a brand new synthesis of emotional values, symbolic associations, and literal meanings that were in place previous to this experience. We create experience – we improvise at that point, by discovering and forging new connections to our prior experience, our prior knowledge.

We get into an interesting philosophical terrain here. What, for instance, is the difference between reading the word "sunrise" and actually being present for the event? Symbology and semiotics come into play, as there are multiple ways one can perceive the same basic information, albeit with obviously different psychical impact:

SYMBOLIC: pre-rational/pre-language - making or looking at a picture of a sunrise.
SEMIOTIC: rational/language - writing, telling or listening to a story about a sunrise.
INTUITIVE: trans-rational/trans-language - experiencing an actual sunrise.

A transpersonal art, whether it be music, painting, dance, poetry, literature, etc, facilitates an experience that is more like being there – a direct intuitive experience of the thing in itself, beyond (but inclusive of) symbolic association and literal meaning. Such an art challenges people to encounter themselves through creative experience. If the experience of art is reduced to simple intellectualizing and categorizing what is heard or seen, the full potential of creativity has not been revealed and nothing has really been discovered. Old information has not been synthesized with new, and the experience is simply filed away amongst that which is already known. To experience art on a transpersonal level involves the discovery of process and the intuitive construction of meaning, rather than simply decoding a narrative or uncovering the artist’s intent.

TAKE A MUSICAL PERFORMANCE like Blind Willie Johnson’s wordless vocal on "Dark Was the Night" (1927), in which he is able to say so much without literally saying anything. The melody itself is based on an old spiritual tune, but it is sung and played in the manner of the blues, and the result is a jumble of symbolic associations: religious vs. secular, sacred vs. profane, pain vs. deliverance, transcendent vs. worldly. It is a profound expression of extremely complex and conflicted emotion that can take on a myriad of different meanings and interpretations depending on the experience of the listener. In this sense, the abstracted vocal performance functions much more effectively than lyrical or literal storytelling, as it has inspired a multitude of different stories, interpretations, and experiences. Therefore, a transformation occurs whereby the artist’s initial inspiration is converted into new kinds of information – setting off a pattern of creative responses that continues indefinitely beyond the actual artistic act or performance, beyond a single interpreter or audience, and eventually into and beyond the culture at large (and even beyond the solar system in Blind Willie’s case).

An integral interpretation of music must deal with metaphor and meaning in the representation of musical experience, but not to the point of entrapment in a finite world of literal narrative and mental concepts. At the root of any integral theory of music is a close experiential examination of music, involving both the artist’s intent and the audience’s interpretation and how those dimensions continuously expand to inform the dynamic cultural significance and social functionality of a work. This is the Opera aperta of Eco, where the ultimate value of a work lies in its potential to differentiate (but not dissociate!) itself from dogma, from reductionist schools of thought that are limited to certain times and places, and in the case of the greatest art, to become essentially universal.

HERE IS A SYNOPSIS of the creative model that has been engaged in the music that Jason Mears and I have developed with the Empty Cage Quartet. This should demonstrate one example of what an integral creative music might look like (correlations with Wilber’s quadrants are indicated in parentheses). The assumption here is that such a music ought not to be considered simply as an entertainment, but as an actual philosophical proposition in its own right:
1. CULTURAL: style-associations (LL)

2. PERSONAL: expressions of individuality (UL)

3. TECHNICAL: purity of materials (UR)

4. SOCIAL: systemic interrelations of performers (LR)

Where: (1) is represented by an inclusiveness of styles and communicative references that is not for the sake of eclecticism but to reflect a certain transcultural openness – which is to say that for the audience there are many "entry points" to understanding this music in terms of a number of different musical styles, although the total music is not reducible to any one "style" in the traditional sense of genre categorization (or for marketing purposes);

(2) is represented by the possibility of assertion of individual control over the ensemble music by any one member at almost any point in the music, whether in terms of a solo improvisation, the cueing of a composition form, or the introduction of an original composition to the repertoire;

(3) is represented by a post-Cage, post-Coltrane adherence to the idea that a sound is a sound - that any sound can exist autonomously and in fact comprise its own "piece" of music at the same time as it may simultaneously participate in the construction of larger sound combinations (larger pieces) - as in biology where there is a holarchical continuity from atoms to cells to organs to organism;

(4) is represented by a diversity of approaches to the organization of written and improvised material among the musicians in the ensemble, both traditional ("classical" or "jazz") and experimental, based on diverse political, religious, ritualistic, and theoretical systems of social organization.

In such a music, written material usually functions to establish an agreed-upon systemic structure from which emergent zones of expanded group interaction become possible as new connections are established during an improvised performance. Over time these temporary states of spontaneous activity tend to solidify into new sound-structures that indicate holarchical stages of collective awareness. As each new performance builds upon the last, these structures can be analyzed, catalogued and mapped, and the development of an ensemble consciousness can be measured against the decreasing degree of dependence upon the written material.

THE YOGA OF CREATIVE MUSIC involves the integration of soul and system, product and process, prerational body and rational mind, worldly identity with mystical investigation… and the focusing of the resultant energies into manifestations of musical form. Much like Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, the creative musician pursues a practice that examines the progression of individual consciousness through improvisation as practical meditation, gradually transforming peak experiences into developmental structures, and the overall process is evidenced by composition and performance as the concrete sound-manifestation of psychic and spiritual inquiry.
"It is the artists who guard the spiritual in the modern world." - Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter’s World" (1944)

Mysticism has to do with experience, creativity with establishing experience as realization. In this way the artist reveals something hidden behind and beyond mysticism. The art work in this context assumes a spiritual dimension, becomes a spiritual text.
This integral spirit is obvious in the music of Bach, Beethoven, Ives, Stockhausen, Ellington, Sun Ra, Mingus, Braxton, Dylan, Zappa… these figures are not so much innovators as they are integrators, having that rare ability to perceive the breadth of information available to their time period and craft a holistic, profoundly artistic and culturally apposite statement from it. As well or as little known as some of these figures have become, so far this potential is yet to be fully realized on a global scale. There is no reason not to believe that the heights of creativity achieved by the great master artists might someday be universally accessible, as the scientific inventions of Edison, for instance, are now available to us all.
But contemporary art culture praises focus, which may be why we don’t reward our Bachs and our Ellingtons anymore (and possibly why they weren't so rewarded in the first place). The integral-thinking artist is considered unfocused, unable to be pigeonholed or explained in terms of style, or summed up in a tidy feature article or a concisely written grant proposal. The obvious example of this is Braxton, who has completely repositioned literal meaning in his music with the pictorial and systemic titling of his works, and after nearly four decades continues to mystify his critics.
Creativity is evolution, integration, the continuous revealing of the full spectrum of consciousness – the completion of which is the unfolding or involution of spirit in the world. Our task as individuals is to seek and reveal the authentic, and to learn to understand that the only absolute is that which is so completely beyond and within oneself. The task of the creative musician is to chip away at this essential truth, one sound at a time. There are many small revolutions within the one Revelation. Posted by KRIS TINER at 4:31 PM Labels: aqal, integral, the open work

Nirod was aware that faculties can grow, in fact, had the firm conviction that they must grow

Re: A Spiritual Biography of Savitri by RY Deshpande on Wed 12 Sep 2007 09:05 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link A Road by the Heart

Apropos of the series Spiritual Biography of Savitri, Arun Vaidya calls my comments a “Katha by Deshpande” which, I must say, is an inspired and felicitous description, an apt description also. This is indeed an interesting way of putting things together, of the associations with the educative tradition of the Indian society of the recent era, of the religious discourses that, during the days of political subjugation, kept the spirituality intact at the collective level in another way, and of the symposia-colloquia of the learned gatherings of the professionals debating matters of deeper concern. Also, Arun almost suggests that the present work, belonging to the bloggers of the web-age, is a worthwhile undertaking which can be quite rewarding from many points of view. His general assessment that it is “a highly refined and noteworthy scholastic undertaking… enriched with spiritual insight” is flattering to me, flattering in more than one respect. I must feel happy if it should mean that the past cultural and the present techno-based approaches can come together and serve a useful purpose of self-discovery and of cosmicisation of thought, that it could possibly open the prospects of post-human destiny in a more agreeable, more acceptable, more comprehensive a manner.

Arun brings the reference of the 13th century yogi-poet Jnaneshwar who, just at the age of fifteen or so, gave us in Marathi the text of the Gita; the work is popularly known as Jnaneshwari which consists of about ten thousand verses. Such was the power of the devotional and authoritative rendering by Jnaneshwar, that it was immediately accepted as a dependable commentary on the Scripture, the Gita. He had achieved “two most significant goals: first, he brought the spiritual teachings of Bhagavat Gita to the Marathi speaking community that did not adequately know Sanskrit; secondly, he paved the path of devotional practice—Bhakti Yoga in the Marathi speaking community that was predominantly and traditionally pursuing Jnana Yoga only.” Carrying forward this comparison, of the work on the Gita, the Jnaneshwari, and the present one on Savitri, Arun says enthusiastically that the Spiritual Biography will succeed in arousing the “meditative and contemplative affinity” in the minds and hearts of its readers, readers of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri.

It will be wonderful if this happens, if the Spiritual Biography should prove to be spiritually contagious, communicable, transmittable. More it will be if it can bring out revelatory subtleties, provide intuitive understanding of the yogic-occult matters. But… and frankly, I don’t know. There are blue turquoise depths below bright blue turquoise depths in Savitri, and there are topaz heights above luminous topaz heights, and there are creamy white widenesses of the wide transcendental Vast, the Brihat. It will therefore be too presumptuous on our part to make any claim that we can ‘know’ Savitri. The prescription that we should approach Savitri with the heart, that, as the travel guide says, “the direct road to Savitri is by the heart”,—this is compelling indeed, unmistakably, luminously valid for Savitri.

Sri Aurobindo himself wrote in a letter “…what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced.” How can that then be grasped unless that something is seen, that something felt or experienced by us? Our difficulty lies exactly there. Unless we grow spiritually, we cannot know what Savitri is. But then Savitri itself can become a wondrous means to grow spiritually; by it one can have all those loaded golden experiences, by it can come its own transformative realisations—and more than what is said in its richness.

One needs spiritual experiences—says the Mother apropos of understanding Savitri: “I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand it, grasp it, for it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual experiences in order to understand and assimilate it. The farther one advances on the path of Yoga, the more does one assimilate and the better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which He has spoken in The Future Poetry. It is too subtle, too refined,—it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed.”

And can that understanding be universal? Sonia Dyne recollects one of her meetings with Nirodbaran: “A few years ago I had the good fortune to be sitting near to Nirodbaran, the ‘scribe’ to whom Sri Aurobindo dictated so much of the final version of Savitri. I told him very briefly about our plan to try a new approach. He commented: ‘Do you want everyone to learn Savitri by heart?’ Since then, how many others have asked the same question! The answer is ‘Regretfully, no, we have something else in mind’—regretfully, because learning favourite passages by heart, enjoying them, meditating upon them, making them part of our lives, allowing them to inspire and guide us, is the best approach of all.” Yes, we always have something in mind and we miss Savitri. The Mother said, “all that we need we will find in Savitri.” But, regretfully, we always have something in mind.

Let me also refer to Arun attending Nirodbaran’s brief Savitri-sessions in the evenings: “In my opinion, possibly the greatest value contribution anyone can make about helping others to learn from or about Savitri is to kindle an aspiration to seek Sri Aurobindo within and use Savitri as the magnificent divine grace made available to each of us. It was my great privilege to attend to Nirod-da’s Savitri Sessions during my visits to Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He used to recite and briefly comment but he never discoursed. He used to uplift my spirit to the serene spiritual domain. I would go into a trance and experience the mantric vibrations of Sri Aurobindo’s written words with Nirod-da’s utter devotion. It used to be a very exhilarating and almost metamorphic experience.” Nirod was the first and only person to have received Savitri directly, to have heard it directly from the lips of Sri Aurobindo,—and surely listening to him, to Nirod, has its deep occult connotations.

In the same informal vein, I too might quickly recount a part of my Savitri-association with Nirod. This was a little more than twenty years ago. One day he made, all of a sudden, a very surprising suggestion. This was in the nature of a question: “Why shouldn’t we read Savitri together?” I don’t know what had prompted him but, of course, I immediately jumped at this opportunity. This was at the beginning of our school vacation. And the result was, straightaway, we started reading, rather doing, Savitri together. Later also, during holidays and on Sundays, we used to meet regularly in the morning, the sessions consisting of breakfast in his small downstairs ‘pantry-cum-kitchen-cum-living-room’ followed by Savitri in the upstairs verandah, in front of the Darshan Room. We used to have quite a good breakfast, and assuredly enough his ‘famous’ tea also, prepared by himself; he served me always with warm gracious care and fondness, with a parental touch. This would be over by 7.30 or so, when he used to take ‘rest’ for about half an hour; but then this gave me a wonderful opportunity of going upstairs and being there of my own, till his arrival at 8. Our sessions would end by 9.15 when arrangements for the visitors to Sri Aurobindo’s Room would commence.

We started doing Savitri not at the beginning but with Book II Canto VII, The Descent into Night. What a strange beginning, straight with the most frightful part of the Epic! Nirod asked me to open the book and it opened there, in that Canto, almost in the middle of Part I of the two-volume edition of Savitri. The Canto has some eighteen pages (pp. 202-19) with 609 lines. After completing this Canto, in little more than half a dozen sessions, we continued onward, in a regular sequence, till we finished the last Book, Epilogue; the earlier five Cantos of Book I and six Cantos of Book II, the first two hundred pages, were then serially covered, thus completing the ‘reading’ of the whole of Savitri. This easily took us a couple of years to go through the entire poem, line by line, page by page, canto by canto. After this Savitri-reading we didn’t take any other work of Sri Aurobindo though in various contexts we used to meet often and talk everything under the sun.

About our Savitri-sessions, about Savitri-reading, let me briefly explain the procedure we followed. I thought he would read the text and I would quietly, contemplatively, listen to it, without asking a single question. It was not so. Firstly, he wanted me to read the text. He would have his copy of Savitri open in front of him and I would read the text. I would read the text in my own manner, in the manner of an Indian reading English, more particularly in the manner of a stiff abrasive Maharashtrian, reading heavily and ponderously.

Naturally, Nirod just didn’t like it. He told me bluntly: “You don’t know how to read Savitri.” I was mortified, but then I replied to him: “Nirod-da, you are absolutely right! How can you really appreciate anyone else reading Savitri when you heard Savitri directly from the lips of Sri Aurobindo himself?” I told him effectively: “It is impossible to speak English the way Sri Aurobindo spoke it.” That pure English tone, that grandeur, that softness, that beauty of the language,—it doesn’t come out in our recitations, cannot come out. In fact he even said at one time that the Mother’s reading of Savitri is somewhat forceful—it is not the kind of Savitri which he heard from Sri Aurobindo, the Master. So I said: “Nirod-da, how can you appreciate anyone else’s reading Savitri when you have heard it from Sri Aurobindo himself?” With that, I kept quiet. He understood what I meant and asked me to read in my own way.

But the sessions were not just reading the Savitri-text. They cannot be, reading hardly a couple of pages for about hour and a quarter. In fact, Nirod wished to ‘discuss’ everything that was there in the text and all that is connected with it, its poetry, its philosophy, its spirituality, its occultism, all that was feasible for us to do, all that could be reached by our best faculties. And of course he was aware that faculties can grow, in fact, had the firm conviction that they must grow. Promoting human faculties is an aspect of the widening spirit, the spirit expressing itself in countless ways in this creation. Well, it was an experience for me, of mind leaping into the possibilities intuition. “You can bite quite a bit into Savitri”—he said on one occasion and encouraged me to do so. There are many aspects connected with this and we could take them later. RYD Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

His words are alive in his works and one can read and listen to his voice

A Rishi’s Integral Vision of Society by RY Deshpande

on Mon 10 Sep 2007 06:30 AM PDT Permanent Link
Science, Culture and Integral Yoga Auroville AV Galaxy Plan Home

The tradition of dialogue to discuss and elucidate important issues dates as far back as ancient civilisations. The Greek philosophers would walk with their students in the academy and, through questions and answers, formulate their ideas on philosophical, social, political, ethical, literary and scientific matters. These peripatetic teachers have left behind them perennial systems of thought and wisdom that are as fresh, as living as they were in their own great times. Symposia belong to the same classical spirit of active interaction between several propounders and thinkers. The Greek drama itself is an excellent example of multi-ranging and wide simultaneous thinking, at once taking care of many conflicting viewpoints in the statement and resolution of secular issues, issues of concern to men and society and the state.

In India, of yore, there was the teacher-disciple or Guru-Shishya relationship for imparting esoteric knowledge to the chosen and the fit, the initiate. In the Upanishads we have any number of such instances. Thus was the young Bhrigu taught about the fivefold Brahman by his father Varuna; the boy Nachiketas learnt about death from Yama himself; Rishi Pippalada gave the Knowledge of the supreme Spirit to the seekers who had approached him with due reverence and preparation. Similarly, the whole of Bhagavad Gita with all its luminous spirituo-metaphysical contents is in the nature of a dialogue between the divine Teacher and the human disciple standing on the battlefield of life, kŗşņārjuna samvāda. In fact, Vyasa adopted the technique of such discussions to narrate the entire Mahabharata. The merit of the technique is always to bring into focus the fundamental issues of concern and give to them straight and immediate answers, leaving no ambiguity of any sort, nor any scope for parenthetical statements that otherwise tend to distract the attention, statements that can be long-winding.

In our own times we have professional seminars, workshops, colloquia, panel discussions, rendezvous, conferences, Internet video-sessions, even blogs or web discussions within or among groups, and similar such modes of meeting and exchange of ideas. We are reminded here of a well-documented interview between the famous historian Arnold Toynbee and his son Philip Toynbee, himself a literary and creative writer, they spanning not too long ago two generations of upbringing and thinking, they coming together and talking about the present-day civilisation, about earlier cultures, religion, the arts, and the newer sciences. The technique of introducing a great contemporary or presenting his works through a dialogue is a modern innovation and has the advantage of putting forward a brief and pointed argument rather than labouring through full-length biographies or treatises on difficult and abstruse topics. Thus in Comparing Notes: a dialogue across a generation there is a passage as follows:

Philip Toynbee: If you try to believe in a God who is both good and omnipotent, the problem of absolutely superfluous suffering, gratuitous suffering, is a real one, isn’t it?

Arnold Toynbee: Oh, it is. I have thought quite a lot about it and I admire Indian religion and philosophy for grasping that nettle. I think Christianity has always tried to evade the problem. It has made the Devil responsible -- saving God’s omnipotence by saying He created the Devil, and yet that He isn’t responsible for the thing He created. Now the Indians say that God is evil as well as good because He is omnipotent and He includes everything. In the Bhagavadgita there’s that terrifying vision of Krishna as a sort of trampling monster, grinding everything to bits with his gnashing teeth.

On this point of omnipotence and goodness, the comprehensiveness, the catholicity, of Indian religion have made a great impression on me, and I feel very much in sympathy with it. I feel that this is the kind of religion that is needed for our times.

The informality of a discussion of this kind avoids all ponderous considerations of scholarship and forthwith puts us in touch with the truth perceived and realised by the speaker, with his life-matured convictions standing behind it. The mode makes the idea immediately graspable.

N.B.: Author's (RYD"s) Foreword to Freedom and Future—an Imaginary Dialogue with Sri Aurobindo by Daniel Albuquerque, published in 1998 by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. Print Article Keywords: IntegralYoga, India, History, Culture 5:38 PM

Include the phenomenologico-existential experience of music in our discussion of musical aesthetics

What Makes Music Beautiful? By Cynthia R. Nielsen September 10, 2007

Comparing and contrasting two leading twentieth century composers, Pierre Boulez and John Cage, the former a strict adherent and promoter of “total serialism” (a compositional method that organizes music according to mathematical patterns) and the latter the champion of chance music, where just about anything turns out to be music, Jeremy Begbie makes the following astute observation. Begbie first points out a deficiency in Boulez’s music noted by Boulez himself, viz., that in his music the excess of order tends to produce the perception of disorder when heard. Then Begbie writes, “[a]lthough a piece of music does not have to yield all its meaning in perception, a modicum of perceptual intelligibility would appear to be necessary to apprehend it as music . Total serialism seemed to engender a kind of ‘entropic’ anarchy. Boulez came to describe his Livre pour Quantuor as an ‘accumulation that springs from a very simple principle, to end in a chaotic situation because it is engendered by material that turns in on itself and becomes so complex that it loses its individual shape and becomes part of a vast chaos’. The prescriptive determinacies of notation coincide with sonorous effects which are largely indeterminate” (Theology, Music, and Time, p. 188). The point being that though these composers are more or less on the opposite ends of the spectrum, Boulez representing overly rigid mathematical calculation and Cage representing chance music in the extreme, when one listens to the music of Boulez its unnatural, machine-like mathematical precision ends up sounding as indeterminate as Cage’s random chance music.

Here a number of questions arise when Begbie’s findings are brought to bear on Socrates’ account of music as found in the Republic. First, how is it that something so mathematically precise seems to produce that which sounds like mere chaos? Perhaps Socrates would claim that this in fact proves his point, viz., the senses can lead one astray and thus we must listen only to reason. But Socrates has also conceded that music making is able to shape the soul in a way that simply understanding the mathematico-theoretical intervallic [i.e., proportional] relationships of music cannot. He has also claimed (on what we might call a traditional reading) that the best music is that which most closely imitates the Forms. If this is the case, then we again have to ask how such mathematical precision (the reality “behind” the imitations) can produce that which is indiscernible from something as random as chance music? In other words, shouldn’t that which participates in the Forms reflect those Forms in a clear and evident way? At any rate, Begbie’s findings seem to highlight Socrates’ conflicting account of music—an account which leaves us wondering whether we should embrace or exile the “honeyed muse.” In short, can we really make a rigid distinction between the phenomenological experience of music (the non-rational, but not irrational and mystical) and the mathematical reality “behind the music” (the true and rational aspect of music)? Stated slightly differently, is the beauty of music to be discerned only or primarily in terms of proportional relationships or must we also necessarily include the phenomenologico-existential experience of music in our discussion of musical aesthetics? If the latter, how do we avoid an over-subjectivized understanding of musical aesthetics in which anything can count as beautiful music? Posted by geoff holsclaw in Aesthetic Theology Permalink Technorati Tags: Jeremy Begbie, music, theology, theology of music Comments

This reminded me of a few quotes I had posted quite a while back.
“We may say that the independent aesthetic value of an artistic artefact is higher and more enduring to the extent that the work does not lend itself to literal interpretation from the standpoint of a generally accepted system of values of some period and some milieu.”- Jan Mukarovsky
Art is as good as it is both engaging and elusive.
On music,

“After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had not committed, and mourning over tragedies there were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears. I can fancy a man who has led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.” - Oscar Wilde
But before I find someone to wax too eloquently on music I also offer the following,
“Where we try to speak of music, to speak music, language has us, resentfully, by the throat”- George Steiner
Whether intentional or not our "investigations" into beauty tend to be scouting reports for colonization. As George Steiner I think has correctly intimated in Real Presences we can only hope to respond with a contribution that offers an equally high degree of aesthetic integrity. Sorry that probably does not address your question directly. Posted by: IndieFaith September 10, 2007 at 02:09 PM

Tagore felt mortified by many of the nationalist leaders behaving like terrorists

TAGORE NOVEL FROM 1915: THE HOME AND THE WORLD September 10, 2007 at 5:31 am In Globalization, Literary, Third World, India, Philosophy, Books, History, Asia, Art Blog About
MAIN WEBSITE: WWW.CAMBRIDGEFORECAST.ORG Ghare Baire [The Home and the World] (1915) Author: Tagore, Rabindranath.

Tagore never had a political temperament and found politics wasteful and morally debilitating; it is politics, he said, “which in every country has lowered the standard of morality, [and] given rise to a perpetual contest of lies and deception, cruelties and hypocrisies.” A poet, he sought to keep his mind above politics. However his destiny determined otherwise: “I have been chosen by destiny to ply my boat there where the current is against me”; “Politics is wholly against my nature; and yet, belonging to an unfortunate country, born to an abnormal situation, we find it so difficult to avoid their [sic] outbursts.”

When the swadeshi movement broke out in Bengal, in the wake of its partition in 1905, Tagore soon found himself at its vortex: writing songs, giving speeches, and taking part in mass rallies. He also set up a match factory, a local bank, and a weaving centre as his way of giving leadership to the movement. Ironically, he even set the movement’s theme song, Bande Mataram, or “Hail to thee Mother”, to music himself. The song was composed by another Bengali writer, Bankim Chatterjee, and is used as a potent fetish by the manipulative Sandip in the novel.

Swadeshi literally means “of our own country”. It was a nationalist movement meant to boycott British goods and buy homemade products, so that the British would suffer economically for their dark designs of divide and rule policy, while the local industries grew, with less competition from imported goods. But what was conceived as a non-violent non-cooperation movement soon turned violent and ugly, owing to the heavy handed policies of the government, and wilful meddling by self-seeking and sinister bhadroloks. Tagore felt mortified by many of the nationalist leaders behaving like terrorists and traumatising innocent people for their indifference to the cause, and impassioned youths turning to the cult of the bomb to liberate their homeland from the foreign yoke.

Thus, especially after Khudiram Bose, a radical youth who is still widely regarded as a hero in the annals of Bengal, hurled a bomb in 1908, killing two innocent British civilians, Tagore decided not to participate in the movement any more, nor associate with a nationalist uprising again, in spite of the recurrent charges of pusillanimity and insincerity by his detractors. His response came, instead, in the form of The Home and the World, seven years later...

Post-colonial critics such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and Tom Nairn have pointed out how nationalism cultivates the sentiments of irrationality, prejudice and hatred in people, and Leela Gandhi has spoken of its attendant racism and loathing, and the alacrity with which citizens are willing to both kill and die for it. Frantz Fanon has explained that although the objective of nationalism is to create a horizontal relationship and fraternity within its people, in reality the nation never speaks of the hopes and aspirations of the entire “imagined community”, and hierarchy, factional hegemony, inequality and exploitation remain a daily occurrence in its body. In Sandip’s actions, Tagore has insightfully and shrewdly anticipated all these pitfalls of nationalism pointed out by later literary-cultural critics.

Tagore is not perhaps entirely historically accurate in his portrait of the swaraj. He has not, for example, incorporated in his narrative the extreme policies of brutality adopted by the Raj to crack the movement. Minto’s mischievous manifesto that “the strong hand carries more respect in India than even the recognition of British justice” led to widespread atrocities against the participants of the movement; university students were “harassed, persecuted and oppressed”, while those at lower levels were “flogged, fined and expelled.” Police were advised to beat up marchers with their long, metal-tipped lathis, and leaders who were found guilty were sentenced to “rigorous imprisonment”.

After the Khudiram incident, the British reaction was predictably strident, declaring that “ten of them would be shot for every life sacrificed.” However, although the writer has advertently left out this side of the story, his portrait of Sandip seems typical of the activities of the New Party, the revolutionary wing of Congress, under the leadership of Bipin Chandra Pal, who led a group of radical youths and edited a popular journal called Bande Mataram, and of Aurobindo Ghosh’s younger brother, Barindra Kumar, who was the leader of a group of young terrorists who were inspired by Russian anarchist activities and apotheosised violence.

Tagore was so deeply frustrated by swadeshi turning into a terrorist movement that he would spurn even Gandhi’s swaraj in later years. He was not to participate in a nationalist movement again because he came to believe that radical nationalism, like religious orthodoxy, breeds divisiveness and blind fanaticism: “Formalism in religion is like nationalism in politics: it breeds sectarian arrogance, mutual misunderstanding and a spirit of persecution”, he wrote in a letter to his friend C.F. Andrews. In another letter, he explained how nationalism, a cult of devil worship, was inherently destructive to the spirit of global unity and the creative bond of wholeness:

The nations love their own countries; and that national love has only given rise to hatred and suspicion of one another…. When we hear “Bande Mataram” from the house-tops, we shout to our neighbours: ‘You are not our brothers’…. Whatever may be its use for the present, it is like the house being set on fire simply for roasting the pig! Love of self, whether national or individual, can have no other destination except suicide.

In art alone you are completely free because there you impose laws upon yourself

The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library THE ASSAULT ON THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

Fichte and Romantic Self-Assertion

If every man followed his own free ideal, might there not be certain collisions? – Schiller escaped this criticism by saying that of course he was not talking about the empirical world: in the empirical world men were parts of this hideous causal treadmill which they could not avoid; after all, they had bodies and these bodies obeyed certain physiological and physical laws which could not be altered by any amount of pursuit of liberty. But they must rise above this, and in their minds they must live pure, dedicated and free lives. He illustrated this by saying that the salvation of men from oppression and enslavement by material factors was to be attained through what he called ‘play’.

Play he identified with art. Briefly, the view is that in art alone you are completely free because there you impose laws upon yourself. We go back to Rousseau again. Schiller does not give this example, but if you are, say, a boy playing at being a red Indian, then you are a red Indian, for these purposes, and the laws you obey are the rules which you invented for the purposes of the game. Everything you do obeys your own creative fantasy and imagination, and not some rigorous yoke derived from the external world which bends you to its inexorable necessity.

Art for Schiller is a sort of free self-expression. But certainly it does not have very much to do with actual political or social life. What he thought was that in the rather gloomy world of the minor German principalities, in what was to him, in some ways, the even gloomier world of the Jacobin Terror in France, the only way for a free man to escape was to dedicate himself to purely spiritual activity and try to ignore as far as possible the grim necessities of actual life. This form of escapism did not commend itself to people who were actually faced with acute and concrete problems of life, but it had a profound effect upon artistic and aesthetic thought both in Germany and in other countries.

Let me make one more observation before I come to Fichte himself. If you ask at what stage, exactly, you get this notion of the tragic hero, that is to say, the notion of a man oppressed by the necessities of empirical existence, who escapes them by rising above them, ignoring them, or at any rate fighting against them, whichever way out he takes –whether he takes what is called the barbarian way out, which is to try to struggle against necessity unsuccessfully, and go under in some fearful, heroic duel, which is presumably what Karl Moor does in Schiller’s play The Robbers, or whether it is a question of his rising above necessity to some artistic empyrean and trying to detach himself from the world and live in the pure world of art and imagination and thought, like the Olympian gods, as Schiller says – if you ask at what particular point this notion emerged, it should be placed, it seems to me, between 1768 and 1783. [From "a lightly edited transcript of a text of a lecture in Isaiah Berlin’s papers."]

These masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog

WAYS OF AN ANTIQUE LAND - Anglophone Indians and their odd habits
Mukul Kesavan mukulkesavan@hotmail.com The Telegraph

Front Page > Opinion > Thursday, September 06, 2007

Every English-speaking Indian man between 25 and 60 has written about the Hindi movies he has seen, the English books he has read, the foreign places he has travelled to and the curse of communalism. You mightn’t have read them all (there are a lot of them and some don’t make it to print) but their manuscripts exist and in this age of the internet, these masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog. A cultural historian from the remote future (investigating, perhaps, the death of English in India) might use up a sub-section of a chapter to explore the sameness of their concerns.

• Why did a bunch of grown men, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, write about the same movies, novels, journeys and riots?
• Why Naipaul? Why not nature? Or Napier? Or the nadeswaram?
• Why Bachchan? And not Burma? Or Bhojpuri?
• And, most weirdly, why pogroms and chauvinism? Why not programmes on television?

This seems mysterious but isn’t. Our historian will have to be content with the ordinary cause instead of the off-centre insight. The obsession with Hindi movies is the easiest to explain. In the life of every anglophone Indian occurs an epistemological break. Those of you who think this means a letter-writing recess should know that this is a precise way of describing a big change in knowing things. The big change comes about when the child acquires English. All the stuff the child liked before learning English becomes connected with uncomplicated enjoyment in the grown-up’s mind because the child is father of the man. (I know Wordsworth wrote that line but it needs another ‘the’.)
Since English becomes the language in which he learns things, the Indian man begins to associate Hindi films with unlearnt pleasure. This is a delusion: metropolitan children begin learning English around the time they go to school and how many Hindi films can you remember seeing before you were five? Or six? Somewhere in the range of not many and none. This doesn’t matter because the adult middle-class Indian male, now socialized so thoroughly into English that he finds it hard to summarize an abstract thought in his mother tongue, begins to see Hindi films as the lost hinterland that connects him to the Bharat that isn’t India. The Hindi film becomes his passport to des and his ability to write about Hindi films demonstrates (both to himself and the world) his authentic connectedness. None of this rules out the possibility that he actually enjoys Hindi films: it just explains why he writes about them.
He reviews English novels for the opposite reason that he sees Hindi films: if Hindi films are his umbilical connection to his authentic mofussil self, reading and writing about English fiction is the open sesame that gives him entry to a properly metropolitan world. His delight in Hindi films springs from a precious, nurtured state of innocence whereas his connoisseurship of English fiction allows him to be knowing in a cosmopolitan way. The ability to put out a view about the ouevre of Robert Musil or Anthony Powell or Machado de Assis (for him these are all English novelists because he reads them in translation) is for him the literary equivalent of a one-arm push-up: something most people can’t do.
He travels and writes about his travels for reasons very similar to the ones behind his interest in English fiction, but on the whole he does this less successfully. Travel writing, as invented by English and then American writers, is a form of amused knowingness. Reading Robert Byron or Paul Theroux is a bit like tuning into Radio Supercilious: the funny bits, such as they are, are generated by the discomfort of travelling to out-of-the-way places or via encounters with amusing aboriginals. This form of knowingness isn’t easily replicated: you have to be First-World and better off than the natives. If you’re Indian, this is a problem, so the dominant form of Indian travel-writing is the short magazine article because it’s hard to act richer (or whiter) than you are for any length of time. The scope of knowingness and sophistication is consequently limited. It isn’t a coincidence that writing about food and drink is the fastest growing segment in Indian journalism because writing about Chinese restaurants in Juhu is a way of travelling without a passport, of being sophisticated on a budget.
(Interestingly, on the rare occasions that Indian writers attempt travel books — Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake, Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land, Allan Sealy’s From the Yukon to the Yucatan — they produce work that in tone and form redefines the genre because they treat the landscapes they move through as dense, real places, not as props and cues to help the sophisticated traveller to rehearse his world-weary routines.)

But it is the English-writing Indian’s interest in communalism, particularly his near-obsessive interest in the way in which majoritarian politics picks on religious minorities, that would draw the attention of our historian. Perhaps he would take his cue from that acute critic, Lal Krishna Advani, who coined a useful term for this tendency: pseudo-secularism. In this view, since the majority of secularist critics are nominally Hindu, this peculiar interest in Muslim or Christian welfare is to be charitably understood as a form of misguided chivalry, misguided because it’s the Hindus who are harassed and discriminated against in the name of secularism. When a critic of the Advani school isn’t feeling charitable, this chivalric tendency is put down to the self-hatred that afflicts deracinated Hindus. Other hostile observers see the ‘secularist’ tendency as an extension of the knowingness and superiority affected by the Anglophone Indian in other matters, such as fiction or travel-writing, a posture intended to place the posturer above the common herd.
Whatever their explanation, these regularities in the behaviour of Anglophone Indians await their historian and their anthropologist; the purpose of this piece is limited to persuading you that their habits are odd enough to be interesting.

I see the historical problem of growth through the lens of culture more than through the economic history

Marginal Revolution Small steps toward a much better world.
A Farewell to Alms, through p.272 by Tyler Cowen

Core Europe, starting in late medieval times, developed a new and still poorly understood organizational technology. This was, very roughly, the ability to work in groups, cumulate technologies and advances, and learn from each other in competitive environments. Most notably, this new technology led the Florentine and Venetian Renaissances, especially in the visual arts. But there was more. The rise of printing. The rise of classical music, starting in 1685 or whenever. The rise of early modern philosophy. Europe goes crazy with inventiveness, albeit in splats and bursts. (Clark's own chapter 12 gives good evidence for this tendency, though it will play a less central role in his version of the story.)...

England, by the way, also had the literary revolution of the 18th century, and England plus Scotland drove the rise of modern economics. There is no Chinese Adam Smith and that is because that Europe was pulling decisively ahead in ideas production. I consider this a fact of great importance whereas for Clark it is a sideshow to some other story.

Most generally, I see the historical problem of growth through the lens of culture -- in the sense of the history of the arts, music, and letters -- more than through the economic history literature. I am very taken by Max Weber's writing on Western music and also his conception of the broader style of Western rationality. And I see the rise of these organizational improvements as a central -- the central? -- story of early modern Europe and the move to prosperity... Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 4, 2007 at 06:49 AM in Books Permalink 10:58 AM

The Titans birthed the Mount Olympus deities

HOME::News-and-Society/Religion
The Forgotten Greek Gods By Richard Monk

Mention Greek gods and people immediately think of Zeus and the like. Before these well-known gods came on the scene, however, there were another group of Gods.
There were many figures featured in the Greek mythological world, from gods and goddesses to mythical fantasy creatures. While the gods and goddesses themselves often got the most attention, it was the mythical characters that really made the stories work. Without the interaction of the god figures, mortals and these creatures, the stories told would not have been fully fleshed. One of these groups of characters was the Titans, and their story is an interesting one.
The Titans were a race of gods and goddesses that ruled Greece during the Golden Age. There were originally twelve Titans, with a thirteenth Titan coming into play after a literary appearance in the Bibliotheke. The mother and father of the Titans were Uranus and Gaia, and Uranus was overthrown by his son Cronus, who was the youngest of the group. Additionally, the Titans gave birth to more Titans, including Prometheus, Epimetheus, Atlas and Menoetius; these were the sons of Iapetus.
The Titans preceded the twelve gods of Mount Olympus, who were headed by Zeus and battled them in the Titanomachy (War of the Titans). The Titans lost this war, and were imprisoned by the Olympic gods in Tartarus, the lowest points of the underworld. The twelve Titans were grouped in pairs, or couples; they included Oceanus and Tethys, Hyperion and Theia, Coeus and Phoebe, Cronus and Rhea and four separate gods: Mnemosyne, Themis, Crius and Iapetus. The thirteenth Titan was Dione, who was a double of Theia.
It is said that Chronos was the most monstrous and cunning of the twelve, and when he was born to his mother Gaia, he formed an intense hatred of his father. Uranus sensed this, and imprisoned his son in the bowels of the Earth. Once there, Chronos enlisted the help of the Cyclopses and other creatures and escaped; then he castrated his father Uranus and took the beautiful Rhea for his bride. From this union, the new generation of gods was born, including Zeus.
The Titans played an important role in the creation myth of the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus, and while they themselves did not mean much in the religious arena past the Classical Age of Greece, the fact that they birthed the Mount Olympus deities made them an important part of Greek culture. Richard Monk is with http://www.factsmonk.com - a site with facts about everything. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Richard_Monk

Bengal Theatre was inaugurated on 16th August, 1873

Theatre Halls In Calcutta

BENGAL THEATRE (1873) This was literally the first permanent stage in the history of professional Bengali Theatre. On 16th August,1873, this theatre was inaugurated with the staging of 'Sharmistha', an immortal creation by Madhusudan Dutta. Sri Biharilal Chattopaddhyay was inextricably linked with the Bengal Theatre. He was a prolific actor and an equally adept impressario. After his death in 1901, this theatre ceased to exist. In later days, the Beadon Street Post Office was built at this place. It still exists with glory at Dani Ghosh Sarani (former Beadon Street).

GREAT NATIONAL THEATRE (1873) 6, Beadon Street The Great National Theatre was established on 29th September, 1873. Sri Bhuban Mohan Niyogi donated a large sum of money for founding this theatre. Sri Dharamdas Sur had made the blue-print of this building. On 31st December, that year, the play 'Kamyakanan' was staged here. In 1877, Girish Chandra Ghosh became its owner and rechristened this Theatre as 'National Theatre'. But he could not run the theatre for long. Later on, Sri Pratap Chandra Jahoori took charge of this theatre and theatrical performances were resumed on this stage. This theatre was renamed as 'Minerva Theatre' in course of time. catchcal.com

The “national consensus” among the SMS-sending crowd

People's Democracy (Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Vol. XXXI No. 35 September 02, 2007 “TWO NATIONS” Prabhat Patnaik 11:54 AM

And the media at its command, the opinion-forming devices it controls, work overtime to obliterate the marginalised, to present the “nation of the rich” as the “true nation”. The la dolce vita of the former is passed off as “India shining”. The economic bonanza reaped by the former is passed off as the “nation’s progress”.

And nowhere has this role of the so-called “opinion makers” manifested itself so clearly as in their response to the Left’s rejection of the Indo-US nuclear deal. One commentator was simply amazed how anybody could reject such a relationship with the US, when “our children” go there! One newspaper (The New Indian Express August 23) editorially commented: “the Left’s knee-jerk opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal again suggests a lack of empathy for the national consensus, and a sympathy for China’s position on the issue.”

Obviously, since no sample survey covering the entire country has been conducted on the issue, the “national consensus” referred to in the editorial is the consensus among the SMS-sending crowd! The nation apparently consists of those whose children go to the US, and those who send SMS messages to the questions accompanying the so-called TV “discussions” where the audience is drawn from the same crowd. The “nation of the rich” simply appropriates for itself the mantle of the Indian nation!

A few of the liberals sought to strike a balance. With all our writers, however, Hindu or Brahmo, the democratic content remained weak

People's Democracy (Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Vol. XXXI No. 35 September 02, 2007 Bengali Literature Before And After 1857 Gopal Haldar

BENGALI literature, in the years 1856 to 1861, was in the first throes of creative activity, the like of which it had never seen before. It had completed its preparatory period (roughly from 1800 to 1856), which may be said to have included four phases, viz.., the Fort William phase (1815 to 1831), the “Young Bengal” (“Derozians”) and Sambad Prabhakar phase (1831 to 1843), and, lastly, the Vidyasagar and Tatwabodhini Patrika phase (1843 to 1856).

Of course, literary activities formed only one of the facets of that complex and many-sided movement which has been called Banglar Jagaran (the Awakening of Bengal). In a broad sense, it included the Bengali renaissance and what is known as the Bengali reformation (religious and social reform activities), and lastly, political awakening –– the complex of responses generated in our people by their growing contact with the bourgeois world, represented by the British rulers. It is supposed to have commenced with the activities of Ram Mohan Roy (1774-1833) in Calcutta in 1815 and to have reached its heyday in the latter half of the 19th century. Personally I should view Banglar Jagaran as commencing with the foundation of the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817. For, the Hindu College brought into existence a new and dynamic force, the urban middle-class intelligentsia, or the educated bhadraloks, of Bengal. And the bhadraloks virtually shaped the life and thought of Bengal for about a century, i.e. roughly again, until 1914-1918 when World War I threw up new forces in the national and international arena.

COLONIAL RENAISSANCE

There lay then behind the intelligentsia of 1857 a “colonial renaissance” at least 40 years old. Two generations of the intellectuals had been reared on the liberal bourgeois ideology, and they energetically tried to overthrow the deadweight of Indian feudal ideas and institutions. The Indian reformation (started in 1815 by Ram Mohan Roy) was proceeding with renewed vigour (1843) under Devendra Nath Tagore (1817-1905), while social reform recorded its great victory under the leadership of Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-1891) in the passing of the Widow Remarriage Act in 1856, which was said to have added to the distrust of the sepoys and the orthodox section.

Politically also the middle-class intelligentsia had just discovered their way forward. For example, they learnt to agitate under Ram Gopal Ghosh (1815-1863) for doing away with the invidious privileges of the Europeans in the mofussil courts (the so-called “Black Acts” of 1849); founded political institutions (1843) and united their organised strength in the British Indian Association (in 1851) “to promote the improvement and efficiency of the British Indian government by every legitimate means in their power.

They had formulated their liberal demand in the petition, said to be drafted by Harish Chandra Mukerji (1824-1861), when the charter of the East India Company was about to be renewed in 1853, and demanded in that, among other things, the creation of an Indian legislature with an Indian majority. And lastly, they had just secured new openings for their educational aspirations and advancement through Sir Charles Wood’s educational dispatch of 1845 and the foundation of the three universities of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay in January, 1857.

History has its paradoxes, some may call them “contradictions” and they cannot easily be explained away. To many of us it may seem strange that this intelligentsia of Bengal in the years of the “sepoy mutiny,” 1857-1858, appeared to have been so little interested in the gigantic upheavals which shook the foundations of the British power in, at least, North India. It seems amazing that the most enlightened section of the Indian people was genuinely opposed to the sepoys. For the very same Bengali intelligentsia plunged headlong on the morrow of the 1857 revolt, or even before the night had really passed, in 1858-1859, into the Nil Vidroha (Indigo revolt) of central Bengal. Here was patriotism, here was courage, here was undeniable evidence that the intelligentsia of Bengal, who may be said to be allied to the “upper classes,” were fighting with all their passion and skill for the cause of the oppressed peasantry, and were fulfilling their role in the national life of Bengal as the new leaders of all sections of the community.

Any narrow “class interpretation” then of the conduct of the Bengali intelligentsia during the 1857 revolt would fail to satisfy a good many students of Bengali life and letters of the 19th century. Whatever be the final verdict of history with regard to the character of the 1857 rebellion, the understanding of the Bengali people and the Bengali intelligentsia at the time was very different – and bound to be in the circumstances – from that of the Indian people and the Indian intelligentsia of a later date. Not merely the liberal aristocrats, like Raja Dakshina Ranjan (Mukherji), an ex-derozian, of Lucknow were opposed to it. Even Bengali clerks in UP did not respond to the call for revolt. The graphic account of his experiences by Durga Das Bandyopadhyay (1835-1922) as narrated later in his Vidrohe Bangala (in the pages of the weekly Vangavasi at the encouragement of its nationalist editor) showed that the revolt in UP (i.e. Bareilly) could not shake his loyalty to his employers.

The fundamental fact, of how the 1857 rebellion was understood by the Bengali intelligentsia, has to be recognised and its causes properly analysed even though one should not agree to make light of the “class character” of the intelligentsia, which was so largely dependent for its fortune on the British Raj. An intelligentsia as mature as that we know, could not allow itself to be swerved from its liberal bourgeois policy by what it conceived to be an adventurist, haphazard and spontaneous feudal-reactionary military rising.

NEW BENGALI LITERATURE

Bengali literature was prepared for the “leap” into the new world of ideas and forms that was revealed to the educated Bengali by the English language and literature. Let us examine briefly this new Bengali literature.

Bengali prose as an instrument of knowledge and enlightenment had been created between 1801 and 1856. Writing in the Tatwabodhini Patrika of 1856 Raj Narain Bose (1826-1899), the “grand father of nationalism” referred to this particular development of Bengali prose “in the last 10 or 12 years” and mentioned the three stalwarts, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, aksay Kumar Datta (1820-1886) of the Tatwabodhini writers and Rajendra Lal Mitra (1822-1891), the great Indologist who edited from 1851 Vividartha-Sangraha, the first illustrated monthly devoted to “archaeology, zoology, arts and crafts and literature.”

Raj Narain Bose could have included himself and Devendra Nath Tagore, the father of the poet, as pioneers of reflective prose of real beauty, and at least another, Pyari Chand Mitra, (1814-1883), who as “Tek Chand Thakur” was already writing (1854) the first Bengali novel, Alaler Gharer Dulal, (Pet Son of a Big House) in the pages of the Masik Patrika that Pyari Chand and Radhanath Sikdar (1813-1870) of “Everest discovery” fame brought out in 1854.

Poetry of the transition as practiced by its master, the patriot-poet Iswar Chandra Gupta or “Gupta Kavi” (1812-1859), had secured the services of an English-educated section, including Ranga Lal Bandyopadhyay (1827-1887), who was an avowed admirer of the great English poets. Bengali poetry waited now for the advent of that genius Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873), who returned to Calcutta from Madras in 1856.

Bengali drama and stage had its first modern initiation thanks to the Russian Gerasim Lebedeff as early as 1795 and was on the eve of significant developments. Adaptations of Sanskrit and even Shakespearean plays were being made all along; but the Kulin-Kula-Sarvasva, written and published in 1854 by Ram Narayan Tarkaratna (1822-1885), marked the birth of new Bengali drama as an instrument of social reform and entertainment. It was first staged at Nutan Bazar in Calcutta in March, 1857, when the sepoys were already restive at Barrackpore. But the Bengali stage had also reached in 1856 its “Age of the Patrons” when Kali Prasanna Sinha’s (1840-1870) Jorasanko house stage came into existence. The Paikpara garden stage was to follow it in two years (1858)

The years of the rebellion were the very time in which the Bengali drama and stage was born under the patronage of the urban rich, the absentee landlords, and upper classes. The panic and disturbances did not curb their enthusiasm for new dramas and entertainment after the European model. And, it is this enthusiasm and literary regard for drama, that was immediately responsible for the advent of the two geniuses of the times, Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Dinabandhu Mitra (1830-1873).

PATRIOTISM AS A VIRTUE

No section of the intelligentsia appears about that time to have set any store by the heroic endeavours of the sepoys and their leaders. Yet it must be noted at the same time that none of the writers, small or great, or even of the aristocracy depending on the British Raj, forgot that patriotism was a virtue. Almost all lamented the “fallen state of mother India,” her enslavement by “foreigners,” and exhorted their readers to unity, to courage, and obviously to liberty.

A typical device as we shall see later, was to take up a theme of the pre-British period of Indian history and to inveigh against the Yavanas (etymologically Yavanas were Ionians, i.e. Greeks, but were meant to include in the context obviously the Muslim invaders, and in an implied way, the British rulers, too, were hinted at). Or, they would turn to a theme from the Puranas or ancient lore which supplied them with an invader-invaded or oppressor-oppressed situation.

We have to note that intellectual efforts at this time were to a great extent still carried on in English. Particularly the problems of public life were discussed and debated mostly in English, though Bengali journalism (started about 1820) was already a force because of Sambad Prabhakar (1831, but a daily from 1839) and Soma-Prakas (1858).

Harish Chandra Mukherji of the Hindoo Patriot (1853) was a brilliant personality and forceful writer in English who commanded attention from the rulers (particularly from Lord Canning) and the ruled alike during the years of the rebellion. While repudiating the sepoys as misguided and superstition-ridden, Harish Chandra strongly counseled moderation at the hour of their suppression. But fiery was his denunciation of the indigo-planters and for three years, until his premature death in 1861, this champion of the cultivators of Bengal spared neither time nor money and become almost a national figure, ruined through litigation by the planters:

The press, we should remember, whether English or Bengali, was at that time a nursery of the new born literary aspirants. One of the bilingual newspapers, Samachar-Sudha-Varsan (Hindi and Bengali) was suppressed during the rebellion, and another, Hurkaru, faced prosecution. This fact has to be given due weight in judging the anti-rebellion professions of the rest of the press or of literature, as we do later. But the measures, it appears, did not act as a deadweight on the literary and cultural activities. There was an urgency in them and the rebellion cast no shadow.

Let us recall only the outstanding examples in literature at this time.

Alaler Gharer Dulal by “Tek Chand” was published in 1853. It is a didactic novel upholding the cause of education and new culture and a brilliant sketch of contemporary life and of some typical personalities. It did not however, concern itself with anything else, though patriotism was a frequent theme with Bengali writers of the time (1857-1858).

Iswar Gupta, who was the poet of transition as we said, was also a poet of patriotism and would go so far as to maintain: “Rather have in affectionate regard the dog of your country than the god of the foreigners.”

He is full of topical references to the famine and other such crises including the 1857 revolt. But the frightful courage and cruelty of the rebels are only noted in wordy verses. His satirical song (Chitan) on the Nilkar, the indigo-planters, written before his death in 1859 (the queen’s direct rule, had begun), is quite clear in its tone and temper – “WE Bengalis are a herd of cattle, oh mother, Queen Victoria,” the poet appears to plead satirically, “We don’t even know how to use our horns. The fodder grass and husks of corn are all that we want. Let not your white officers then despoil us of that,” and so on.

The Bengali poets and writers never ceased lashing their people for their alleged timidity in anger and self-pity. It is a recurring them in Bengali poetry up to the Swadeshi times (1905), and accounts to some extent for the reckless courage that the Bengali revolutionaries have evinced even since. Anyway, patriotism was a staple food for Bengali literature even before 1850 and Todd’s Annals of Rajasthan (it was later translated) fired Bengali imagination from about that time.

The new expression of this patriotism in literature was given in 1858 in the epic narrative poem, Padmini Upakhyan (“Tale of Padmini”). The poet Ranga Lal Bandyopadhyay was admittedly an admirer of Byron, Moore and Scott. The epic has little poetry, but the poet broke forth into a sincere cry in the exhortation that his hero Bhim Sinha addressed to the Kshatriyas of Chitore:

Swadhinata-hinatay ke banchite chay re ke banchite chay?Dasatva srinkhal balo ke paribe pay he ke paribe pay? (Who is there willing to live without freedom, willing to live like that? Who wants to wear the fetters, ah wear the fetters?)

There is no direct or indirect contemporary reference, however, to the events of 1857 revolt in the plays that were being staged at Jorasanko or Belgachia garden, Kali Prasanna Sinha’s adaptation of Vikram-Urvasi (stage 1857), Savitri-Satyavan (staged 1858, the year when Kulin-Kula Sarvasva was also on the boards) and Ram Narayan’s Ratnavali (staged at Belgachia garden on July 31, 1858) bore no trace of it. And we have to remember that both prose and poetry were aglow with direct references to the Nil Vidroha, which came to a head after 1859.

The 1857 revolt was suppressed; and urged by its own creative aspirations Bengali literature took gigantic strides in the post-rebellion years. It had no time as yet to look back to re-examine that phenomenon.

NIL VIDROHA

All the humanism and patriotism of the intelligentsia found a ready outlet in the Nil Vidroha. Moreover it was a revolt and not a revolution, for which they were not prepared. For humanity was not an empty term with the generation of Vidyasagar; and the European planters with the British government ranged behind them, brought ruin to men like Harish Chandra Mukherji and imprisonment to a European missionary like Rev. J. Long (for publishing the English version of the drama Nil-Darpan as we shall see). But even the indigo revolt did not absorb all the energy and literary emotion that had been unleashed. Let us recall the outstanding achievements of Bengali literature in 1859-1862, when the literary renaissance, along with the reform movement led by young Keshab Chandra Sen (1828-1844), came to flower.

The Belgachia patrons of the stage first requisitioned (1858) the service of Michael Madhusudan Dutt for an English translation of the drama Ratnavali that they were staging (July, 1858), and then Madhusudan undertook to write for them original dramas in Bengali. So Madhusudan turned to Bengali literature. The miracle happened and dramas, farces, epics and lyrics poured forth almost simultaneously, and all in full blaze of colour and life. Sarmistha was the first to see the light (January 1858) and to be staged (September 1859) even as the first blank verse (Canto I. Tilottama-Sambha Kavya) was being written and presented (July-August 1859, in the pages of Rajendra Lal Mitra’s Vividartha-Sangraha) to the wondering readers. The tragedy Padmavati (1860) was produced when Meghnadvad Kavya, (1861), Brajangana Kavya (1860-61), and Virangana Kavya (1862) took the world by storm.

The poet was drunk with the grand themes of classical times. In typical renaissance spirit Madhusudan, however, produced also two social farces. Ekei ki Bale Sobhyata? (Is this civilization?) in 1860 satirised his own fellow-spirits, the English-educated Bengalis, for their loose morals and drunkenness. Buro Saliker Ghare Rom (1860) satirized with equal sharpness the older generation of Bengal for their profligacy and hypocrisy.

It is impossible, however, to read any political implications in any of his works. The great epic Meghnadvad Kavya (1861) may be interpreted in a way to uphold a rebel or an invaded ruler (Ravana and his brave son) as the hero. But even in that case it reflected, first Madhusudan’s own revolt against feudalism i.e. the accepted gods and codes of Hinduism, and, secondly, the influence of Milton who unconsciously had made out of Satan (Paradise Lost) a defeated Cromwellian hero.

Madhusudan’s own eagle flight was, however, of very short duration (1859-62). He wrote little after 1862, except for the sonnets, Chaturdas-padi Kavitavali, (1866), in which he spoke in faultless pathos of his personal hopes, faith and despair.

Madhusudan was proud and must have felt awkward when he saw the Rev. J. Long being fined and imprisoned for publishing the English translation of Nil-Darpan (The Indigo Plantation Mirror) that Madhusudan was commissioned to do anonymously (under the signature, “A Native”).

It has to be remembered that, even the original drama, the epoch-making Nil-Darpan had to be published anonymously at first from Dacca in 1860. The dramatist Dinabandhu Mitra had to describe himself there as Kenachit Pathikena. (Wayfarer). Long’s prosecution showed forcibly that the liberal intelligentsia was far from being free to express itself on the question of the indigo trouble, not to speak of the 1857 revolt. It can be surmised then that if any contemporary writer had any sympathy for the sepoys, certainly he could speak his mind only to court disaster. He had to take recourse, therefore, to innuendoes for the purpose.

One or two such guarded hints of latter days, the late sixties of the 19th century, may be traced. Some of these are in the early published comments (1868-1870) of Sisir Kumar Ghose of the Amrita Bazar Patrika (Bengali). The writer, frequently upheld (e.g., on May 28, 1868) the battles of 1857-58 as battles for liberation; objected (on March 3, 1870) in that connection to the word “mutiny”, and held that the battle failed in 1857-58 only because Indians lacked unity. Criticizing the colonial ruin of native industries, he referred to the desperation to which this would drive men like, for example, the “Sepoy Mutiny, which we do not approve.”

Another interesting reference is found in the Huttum Pynchar Naksa (1861-1864), (sketches by Huttum, the Owl). Huttum was no other than the same young radical Kali Prasanna Sinha mentioned before. He referred to the gathering of the Indian at Gopal Mullick’s garden under the leadership of Raja Radha Kanta Dev, after the suppression of the revolt to declare their loyalty to the Queen. In Huttum’s inimitable words they are suggested to have said “Mother, we are your Bengali sheep; we have no desire to be Americans,” i.e., to revolt and become free.

It is doubtful, however, if any Bengali of any position and education did have any unmixed sympathy with the 1857 rebels when the rising took place. As time passed it seemed that the “unmixed denouncement” of the “mutiny” was also becoming, about 1870, a thing of the past in the circle of Bengali educated classes. The Amrita Bazar Patrika was an example of it (1868). Nationalism was becoming the dominant note of our literature when Bankim Chandra Chattopadhay (1838-1894) appeared on the scene in 1865 with Durgesh Nandini (1865). It was the first historical romance in Bengali, if we leave out Bhudev Chandra Mukhopadhyay’s long story Anguri Binimay (1862).

ERA OF CREATIVE ASSURANCE

A more self-composed era of creative assurance was now entered, and with the founding of Vanga-Darsan in 1872 (the year of the foundation of the National Theatre and the first public stage) Bankim undertook the task of formulating the philosophy of Bengali nationalism. The word “national” had the highest premium now (about 1870) and Naba Gopal Mitra, who was the chief spirit behind the Jatiya Mela (1867) movement, came to be known as “national” Nabagopal. Brahmo liberalism and the reform movement of Sri Keshab Chandra Sen and his companions was outwardly still dominant, but critical conservatism was organizing itself (under Bankim’s leadership) on the basis of national pride and “national” cultural, to be revitalized with the science and rational thought of the West. (and showed.) British rule was also revealing itself about the time as imperialism in India; and trust in its progressive role diminished day after day. Lord Lytton’s repressive policy (1876-80) further helped the process of Indian disillusionment.

The liberals organised a new political institution (Indian Association, 1875) and Surendra Nath Banerji ran campaigns (1877-78) throughout northern India. Literature between the years 1865 and 1885 (1882 was the year of the publication of Bankim’s Ananda Math, and politically the year of the Ilbert Bill Agitation) was in full flower.

Poets and novelists and essayists had all found their own. They took up the challenge on their plane. There were scores of them; and almost all took up from the pre-British historical or Hindu Puranic sources the invader invaded situation or the oppressor-oppressed relation as their theme, and projected their own ideas and emotions against foreign domination of India. Literature was on the side of nationalism and freedom. The veil was at times was seen through as in the case of Bankim’s Ananda Math and Hemchandra Banyopadhyay’s (1838-1903) Bharat Sangit (1870), a stirring call to freedom. A similar call by Mohanlal in Babin Chandra Sen’s Palasir Yuddha (1875), however, escaped bureaucratic displeasure.

The 1857 rebellion came to be regarded as a patriotic struggle of valiant men led by valiant leaders, like Rani Laxmi Bai, Kunwar singh, Tatya Tope etc. of course, it was judged futile but then it was thought that it had been “betrayed” y the Indian feudal princes and Indian mercenaries in British services. Rajani Kanta Gupta’s first volume of the monumental work Sipahi Yuddher Itihas, (History of the SEpoy War) was published in 1876. It was necessarily limited to the British sources and guarded in its views. But the Itihas is unmistakable in its purpose. Hindu nationalism was a new force, and it did not consider the religious fear and fanaticism of the sepoys of 1857 harmful and distasteful as the contemporary Hindu (and Barhmo) liberals (1857-1861) had found them. Young Rabindra Nath Tagore, a lad of seventeen then, wrote in the pages of Bharati (1878) in open admiration of the heroes of the sepoy war even though their efforts were ‘useless” (ayatha), and upheld in particular Rani Laxmi Bai, Tatya Tope and old Kunwar Singh, as examples of heroic courage and patriotism, national heroes whom the British historians had sedulously blackened with their brush. He however, was not a Hindu revivalist as such. In 1898 Rabindra Nath in his short story Durasa (Disenchantment) tried in his masterly way to puncture this Hindu revivalism had no halo for the son of Devendra Nath Tagore and admirer of Raj Narain Bose.

So we may presume a gradual change in the climate of opinion (1864-85). Let s also realize in this connection the psycho-aesthetic twists and devices by which social reality is transformed, consciously and unconsciously, in the process of artistic creation. It would be permissible then to presume that the 1857 revolt might have had its influence on Ananda Math (1882) of Bankim Chandra, the evident subject matter of which was the Sannyasi rebellion of 1778-79. It breathed though Virbahu Vadh Kavya (1864) and Vitra-Samhar Kavya (1875-77), Bharat Sangit (1870) and other poems of Hemchandra.

It will be an unwarranted generalisation, however, to hold that any of the Bengali writers unequivocally supported or condemned the revolt of 1857-58 even in these later times. Contradiction was almost inherent in the mental make-up of the colonial middle classes and of their writers and thinkers. Those, for example, who were bitterly anti-feudal were mildly anti-imperialist, and those who were definitely anti-imperialist upheld, out of a false sense of nationalism, at times feudal ideology and institutions. A few of the liberals sought to strike a balance. With all our writers, however, Hindu or Brahmo, the democratic content remained weak.

A third fact remains certain that the contemporaries did not develop any love for the 1857 revolt even in later times. Pandit Shivnath Sastri described it in balanced terms in his account of Ram Tanu Lahiri and his times (1904); but he discreetly evaded this in his autobiography (1918). Raj Narain Bose, writing his autobiography about 1888, gave a picture of Bengali panic and suspicion of the sepoys which showed how alien they were to the Bengalis. Devendra Nath Tagore in his autobiography (written 1895), published 1899, studiously avoided politics and narrated his experience of the rising in the Simla hills. Panic and fright, he found, had completely unnerved the European all around. At least, the “mutiny” had proved that all Europeans were not heroes born to rule, and its suppression showed that sanity and justice were not to be expected from the British ruling class. Literature began to draw on that feeling more and more in the closing decades of the 19th century. (From Rebellion 1857 – A Symposium, Edited by P C Joshi, National Book Trust 2007 reprint; First published in 1957)