Abstract
There is a general trend among Western critics, and scholars influenced by the West, to stereotype Third World Literatures, particularly those from India, either as the voice of national consolidation or as providing the emancipated West with the required dose of mysticism and spiritualism. Sri Aurobindo’s works have fallen within either of these two categories. As a result, much of the aesthetic autonomy of his writings have been ignored. This article focuses on the unique quality of Sri Aurobindo’s works, with particular reference to his epic poem Savitri, and shows how he recreates indigenous and classical Indian legends, myths and symbols to subvert sovereign control initiated by the West. Savitri emerges as the representative epic for a new nation that has much more to offer to the future generations apart from the intangible ideas of mysticism and spiritualism. By reinforcing the concept of Shakti and the Mother as the primal Universal Consciousness the mythopoesis in Savitri stands in opposition to the anthropocentric and the anthropogenic machines of sovereignty, both ancient and modern. It establishes the fact that in the human resides the divine and that divinity is a kind of life that can be lived on this earth.
Highlights
In Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Elleke Boehmer explains how, in the West, Third World literatures are seen as the voice of national consolidation, as inevitable outcome of nationalist movements in the erstwhile colonies and as the representations of the subsequent achievement of political independence
A term from economic theory, neo-colonialism signifies the continued economic control by the West of the once-colonized world, under the guise of political independence. Though they may differ in ascribing causes, many theorists broadly agree that the decline of one sort of colonialism in the 1950s led to the rise of another, less overt, some might say more insidious, form ― what has been called a super or new imperialism. [...] Despite anti-imperial movements, despite apparently subversive energies of postcolonial writing, in a world supervised by the new imperial powers of multinational companies, colonialism is not a thing of the past. (9-10) Within the rubric of neo-colonialism, as was evident in the case of colonialism, critics, either belonging to the West or inspired by the West, search for an exotic Other in the works of Third World writers
It is to point out the necessity of an alternative critical discourse, one that would not merely dig into Third World literatures for outbursts of mysticism and spiritualism, that this article grounds itself on Sri Aurobindo’s works with particular reference to Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol
Summary
In Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Elleke Boehmer explains how, in the West, Third World literatures are seen as the voice of national consolidation, as inevitable outcome of nationalist movements in the erstwhile colonies and as the representations of the subsequent achievement of political independence. Western mainstream discourses revel in highlighting the mysticism and spiritualism of intellectuals like Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo though these writer-philosophers had concrete and tangible ideas to offer to their country and to the world.
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