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ON
INDIAN CULTURE - A
Great Heritage
"Indian
civilisation has been the form and expression of a culture as great as any of
the historic civilisations of mankind, great in religion, great in philosophy,
great in science, great in thought of many kinds, great in literature, art and
poetry, great in the organisation of society and politics, great in craft and
trade and commerce ."
- Spirituality
and Philosophy
"In
what field indeed has not India attempted achieved, created, and in all on a large
scale and yet with much attention to completeness of detail? Of her spiritual
and philosophic achievement there can be no real question... But if her philosophies,
her religious disciplines, her long list of great spiritual personalities, thinkers,
founders, saints are her greatest glory, as was natural to her temperament and
governing idea, they are by no means her sole glories, not are the others dwarfed
by their eminence."
- Science
and Medicine
"It
is now proved that in science she went farther than any country before the modern
era, and even Europe owes the beginning of her physical science to India as much
as to Greece, although not directly but through the medium of the Arabs. And,
even if she had only gone as far, that would have been sufficient proof of a strong
intellectual life in an ancient culture.
Especially in mathematics, astronomy
and chemistry, the chief elements of ancient science, she discovered and formulated
much and well and anticipated by force of reasoning or experiment some of the
scientific ideas and discoveries which Europe first arrived at much later, but
was able to base more firmly by her new and completer method. She was well-equipped
in surgery and her system of medicine survives to this day and has still its value,
though it declined intermediately in knowledge and is only now recovering its
vitality."
- Literature
"In literature,
in the life of the mind, she lived and built greatly. Not only has she the Vedas,
Upanishads and Gita, not to speak of less supreme but still powerful or beautiful
work in that field, unequalled monuments of religious and philosophic poetry,...but
that vast national structure, the Mahabharata, gathering into its cycle the poetic
literature and expressing so completely the life of a long formative age, that
it is said of it in a popular saying which has the justice if also the exaggeration
of a too apt epigram, "What is not in this Bharata, is not in Bharatavaraha (India)"
and the Ramayana, the greatest and most remarkable poem of its kind, that most
sublime and beautiful epic of ethical idealism and a heroic semi-divine human
life, and the marvellous richness, fullness and colour of the poetry and romance
of highly cultured thought, sensuous enjoyment, imagination, action and adventure
which makes up the romantic literature of her classical epoch. Nor did this long
continuous vigour of creation cease with the loss of vitality by the Sanskrit
tongue, but was paralleled and carried on in a mass of great or of beautiful work
in her other languages, in Pali first and Prakrit, much unfortunately lost, and
Tamil, afterwards in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and other tongues."
- Architecture
Sculpture and Painting
"The
long tradition of her architecture, sculpture and painting speaks for itself,
even in what survives after all the ruin of stormy centuries:...it testifies at
least to a continuous creative activity. And creation is proof of life and great
creation of greatness of life."
- Statesmen
and Soldiers
"But
these things are, it may be said, the things of the mind, and the intellect, imagination
and aesthetic mind of India may have been creatively active, but yet her outward
life depressed, dull, poor, gloomy with the hues of asceticism, void of will-power
and personality, ineffective, null. That would be a hard proposition to swallow;
for literature, art and science do not flourish in a void of life. But here too
what are the facts?
India has not only had the long roll of her great
saints, sages, thinkers, religious founders, poets, creators, scientists, scholars,
legists; she has had her great rulers, administrators, soldiers, conquerors, heroes,
men with the strong active will, the mind that plans and the seeing force that
builds. She has warred and ruled, traded and colonised and spread her civilisation,
built polities and organised communities and societies, done all that makes the
outward activity of great peoples.
A
nation tends to throw out its most vivid types in that line of action which is
most congenial to its temperament and expressive of its leading idea, and it is
the great saints and religious personalities that stand at the head in India and
present the most striking and continuous roll-call of greatness, just as Rome
lived most in her warriors and statesmen and rulers. The Rishi in ancient India
was the outstanding figure with the her just behind, while in later times the
most striking feature is the long uninterrupted chain from Buddha and Mahavira
to Ramanuja, Chaitanya, Nanak, Ramdas and Tukaram and beyond them to Ramakrishna
and Vivekananda and Dayananda. But there have been also the remarkable achievements
of statesmen and rulers, from the first dawn of ascertainable history which comes
in with the striking figures of Chandragupta, Chanakya, Asoka, the Gupta emperors
and goes down through the multitude of famous Hindu and Mahomedan figures of the
middle age to quite modern times.
 In
ancient India there was the life of republics, oligarchies, democracies, small
kingdoms of which no detail of history now survives, afterwards the long effort
at empire-building, the colonisation of Ceylon and the Archipelago, the vivid
struggles that attended the rise and decline of the Pathan and Mogul dynasties,
the Hindu struggle for survival in the south, the wonderful record of Rajput heroism
and the great upheaval of national life in Maharashtra penetrating to the lowest
strata of society, the remarkable episode of the Sikh Khalsa. An adequate picture
of that outward life still remains to be given; once given it would be the end
of many fictions."
- A
Nation is Building
"A
nation is building in India today before the eyes of the World so swiftly, so
palpably that all can watch the process and those who have sympathy and intuition
distinguish the forces at work, the materials in use, the lines of the divine
architecture."
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OUR
OBJECTIVE
- The Essential
Work
"Out
of this awakening vision and impulse the Indian renaissance is arising, and that
must determine its future tendency. The recovery of the old spiritual knowledge
and experience in all its splendour, depth and fullness is its first, most essential
work; the flowing of this spirituality into new forms of philosophy, literature,
art, science and critical knowledge is the second; an original dealing with modern
problems in the light of Indian spirit and the endeavour to formulate a greater
synthesis of a spiritualised society is the third and most difficult. Its success
on these three lines will be the measure of its help to the future of humanity."
This
in essence is the objective of the Sri Aurobindo Foundation for Indian Culture
inspired by the above quotations from Sri Aurobindo.
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SAFIC
PROJECTS & ACTIVITIES
The
task before us is to rediscover the truth of our culture and apply it dynamically
to life and all its activities. The Society carries out insightful research in
every aspect of Indian Culture and sees how it can be integrated with other world
cultures to hasten the process towards an eventual world unity.  To
facilitate the task of reaching out to more people we are working on books, audio-video
cassettes, CD's and CD-ROM's on Indian music, dance, drama, architecture, sculpture,
painting, literature and other related subjects, revealing the deeper dimensions
of Indian Culture.
Sanskrit
The
ancient and classical creations of the Sanskrit tongue both in quality and in
body and abundance of excellence, in their potent originality and force and beauty,
in their substance and art and structure, in grandeur and justice and charm of
speech and in the height and width of the reach of their spirit stand very evidently
in the front rank among the world's great literatures. The language itself, has
been universally recognised by those competent to form a judgement, is one of
the most magnificent, the most perfect and wonderfully sufficient literary instruments
and developed by the human mind, at once majestic and sweet and flexible, strong
and clearly-formed and full and vibrant and subtle, and its quality and character
would be of itself a sufficient evidence of the character and quality of the race
whose mind it expressed and the culture of which it was the reflecting medium.
 "It
is not armlets that adorn a man, nor necklaces all cramped with moon bright pearls,
nor baths, nor ointments, nor arranged curls.
'Tis art of excellent speech
that only adorn him: Jewels perish, garlands fade, this only abides and glittery
undecayed ."
Bhartrihari
(Nitishatakam, 19).
Translated by Sri Aurobindo We
believe that Sanskrit is the language of India's soul, through which India has
expressed itself in every field throughout the ages and the only language which
can be the national language of India. We also believe that if India has to rise
again Sanskrit must also be brought from neglect and oblivion and occupy its rightful
place. Finally Sanskrit
has something to give not only to India but also to world culture. It is one of
the most ancient, one of the most perfect and beautiful of languages. The largest
number of manuscripts in all subjects from spirituality, philosophy, art, literature,
science, medicine, to even houses and elephants is in Sanskrit. Sri
Aurobindo society has taken up several projects on all aspects of Sanskrit including
efforts to search for the roots of Indian culture in Sanskrit and to popularize
spoken Sanskrit. It is working on books, audio cassettes, video cassettes and
CD Roms on a variety of topics. Details of these can be had on request and will
also be presented on our web-site as the work progresses. We
will be happy to have the participation of all those who are in how many with
these objectives. Indian
Sculpture A
treatise on Indian Iconography ('Pratrima Mana Lakshanam') is under printing.
It contains detailed illustrations with explanations on various aspects of Indian
Iconography. top |
