Sri Aurobindo and the Renaissance in India

Abstract

This chapter offers a new reading of Sri Aurobindo’s famous essay “The Renaissance in India.” It starts with a “semiology of gravestones,” by invoking the names of some young men who, though separated from us by almost 200 years, died before reaching their prime. What makes these men important is that they were all participants, even makers, of what we call the renaissance in India. What can we learn by revisiting their graves? What story do they tell us? Can we build a narrative around these memorials? These are some of the questions that I hope to ask before I go on to discuss Sri Aurobindo’s eponymous essay, “The Renaissance in India.” In the title of my paper, I have put a question mark after “The Renaissance in India.” I do this both to underscore the doubtfulness of calling the transformation of India a renaissance and also to suggest that that we are still far from reaching the desired goal of that transformation. From William Jones to Sri Aurobindo is a long way. In the nearly 200 years that elapsed from the birth of the former to the death of the latter, India itself changed irrevocably. When Jones died, the challenge before India was nothing short of a cultural death or subjection, besides material and mental subordination under colonialism. But by the time Sri Aurobindo left his body in 1950, many of these challenges had been met and overcome. India reengineered itself on an unprecedented scale, even becoming a modern nation in the process. The widespread turmoil and alteration of Indian society in the nineteenth century paved the way to this transition. Whether or not it was a renaissance is questionable, but it did open up the avenues to the progress of Indian society so that India itself has moved ahead to recapture the means to study and disseminate its own culture. From colonialism to nationalism and beyond—such is the trajectory of our ongoing journey.