LANGUAGE IN INDIA

TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF
AUROINDO'S STYLE SUBLIME

V. V. B. Rama Rao, Ph.D.

Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech
Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,
Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,
They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers
In meters that reflect the worlds,
Sight's sound waves breaking from the soul's great deeps. -- Sri Aurobindo in Savitri.

1. TO HIM WHO STANDS BEHINDS US

That which the Gita teaches is not a human, but a divine action, not the performance od social duties, but the abandonment of all other standards of duty or conduct for a selfless performance of the divine will working through our nature, not social service, but the action of the Best, the God-possessed, the Master-men done impersonally for the sake of the world and as a sacrifice to Him who stands behind man and Nature. -- Sri Aurobindo in Essays on the Gita

2. STYLE IS MAN

As students of English literature, we are told that style is the skin and not a coat, and that style is the man. We are told about the le mot juste, and then that the proper word in the proper place tells most. We are told that the level of the subject or theme determines the stylistic level.

The FAQs on style in undergraduate examinations are about the style of those like a Milton, a Burke, a Carlyle, a Ruskin, or an Arnold. While all these are great stylists and the statements made above are true, style is a matter of the given writer's upbringing and education; scholarship and accomplishment in terms of creative expression, the quality and level of thinking, the choice of the subject and the object of writing.

3. UPANISHADIC SOUL INWARD AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE OUTWARD

For an efficient and fruitful understanding of Sri Aurobindo's style both in prose and poetry, the admiring should go into all these aspects. Sri Aurobindo was born in India, but at five he was sent to a convent school in Darjeeling and at seven taken to England to be put to school in Manchester and slightly later in London. He was brought up, not in his mother tongue but in English. His father, an avowed atheist, was particular that he shouldn't be allowed to mix with Indians. He studied in the best of schools and later at the best of institutions in England. At Cambridge he studied Greek and Latin.

This upbringing under the Drewitts (to whose charge his father committed him) and the education lent richness to a thinking creative mind. He declined Civil Service for which he had qualified brilliantly to take up service in India under the Gaekwar of Baroda only to emerge as a sage, a seer, a prophet and poet, for, the culture of Aryavarta, the Upanishadic vision of Man, ran in his blood. This new orientation was a factor of his upbringing and education. What remained in him of England as the motivating force had just been the language.

4. ABSTRACT AND ABSTRUSE LANGUAGE IN SPIRITUAL MATTERS

In matters spiritual, god-related, abstract and abstruse language cannot be helped. The author does not a have any target reader in his mind: he writes basically to perceive his own clarity, the vision that he has the good fortune in him to see. Egalitarianism and elitism are not terms either pejorative or adulatory in by themselves. Exclusivity and elitism, say, while talking of egalitarian concept of democracy are not complementary terms.

5. LANGUAGE AND BOOKS FOR ALL TIME

Higher learning and higher capacity of understanding are essential for understanding any spiritual discourse. Ruskin, Carlyle's disciple and himself another prose master of the Victorian Age, makes the point while talking to the members of the Working Men's Institute. The author's meaning is the rich gold. The reader has to be an ardent Australian mine and dig deep. This is particularly relevant in the case of the books for all time as against the books of the hour. The miner's trope (Ruskin goes on to talk of pickaxes and muscular arms too) is relevant for all books on spirituality and the other world.

The scriptures demand greater effort, sharper, stronger and sterner tools to dig deep into the intended meaning of the great author. The great ones do not and cannot come down to the level of the common reader. The common reader has to become an initiated one. Therein he must help himself.

6. LANGUAGE OF SAVITRI

Savitri is scripture as pregnant as lofty as the Upanishad. The lines cited above as an epigraph are from the holy text. The lines are mantra, revealed to the drashtas of yore with blessed resources of spiritual inwardness describing how language offers itself and performs the most sublime function through a visionary.

We find another exegesis of the workings and ascent of thought in the drashta, the seer Sri Aurobindo's poem Thought the Paraclete. The mystic mind bursts forth in effulgent thought (the very spur to expression and language) aspiring to become one with the universal radiance and ultimately merging itself into its origin. The heightened sensibility in the inspired mind releases expressive, electrifying language. It flows forth bubbling, seeking, electrifying expression.

7. A FLOOD OF DISCOVERED LIGHT: A HEIGHTENED LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE

The virtue of such language is that, in the initiated reader, it is capable of throwing a flood of discovered light through the medium of speech, vaak or musical sound, naada. The poem speaks of Thought as the Holy Spirit leading the mind upward through stages: the higher mind, the illumined mind, the intuitive mind and the over mind to the supra mental region which finally leads to the identification of the finite to the infinite.

8. SO MUCH A MATTER OF THE DIMENSION OF THE INNER SPIRIT

What is significant here is that it is not so much a matter of style as a dimension of the inner spirit, which defies analysis. It is a highly 'intuited' revelation. P.Lal who translated The Mahabharata into English calls some passages in the master narrative epiphany passages. Sri Aurobindo's writing is replete with such.

9. HERO AS POET

Sri Aurobindo remains a perfect example of Hero as Poet and Hero as Man of Letters expounded by Thomas Carlyle. The poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess. He is the vates sacer, the sacred seer seen by Carlyle in Dante and Shakespeare. Carlyle delivered his Hero lectures in 1840 and had he lived into another century he would have talked of Sri Aurobindo too. A scholar in England during 1877-1893, Sri Aurobindo could not have been unfamiliar with this Calvinist thinker and his magnum opus Sartor Resortus (Tailor Retailored) and his Hero lectures.

10. TO BRING NEW FIRE FROM HEAVEN

Sri Aurobindo answers Carlyle's description of the Poet and inspired Maker; who Prometheus-like, can shape new symbols, and bring new fire from Heaven to fix it here. "A musical thought," we are told by the Sage of Chelsea, Carlyle, "is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the innermost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it; namely the melody hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul whereby it exists, and has a right to be here in the world.

11. POWER OF LANGUAGE TO ALTER HUMAN LIVES

All inmost things, we may say are melodious, naturally utter themselves in song." In this sense there is little difference between prose and poetry for the seer, the drashta. Everything is music and every thing is mantra. Everything is sweet and everything is luminous and light emitting. But, Sri Aurobindo as he said himself somewhere about his Savitri, wrote the poem just for himself. We don't find in Sri Aurobindo the despair Carlyle was said to have felt "in the face of a nature dis-godded and language desacralized." Our seer and saint Sri Aurobindo has in him the power of language to alter human lives, to take the initiated reader, his disciple and follower godward. He did re-god nature and re-sacralize language.

12. AUROLANGUE: VEHICLE FOR DEEPER SUBLIMITY

When a devout reader approaches the Gita , an Upanishad or a piece of any sacred text of an inspired genius, say like Sri Aurobindo, the very subject of the discourse is sublime and the appreciation of style is automatic along with the loftiness of thought, understanding, insight and intuition. The quality of communication itself is holy. Understanding. Aurolangue goes to the domain of saadhakas and enlightened ones slowly initiated and introduced to the higher realms. This is caviar to the general.

13. A SPRINGBOARD: NOT A BOARD FOR DISSECTING

Aaryavarta has a hoary tradition of language reflecting the complexity and the sublimity of thought of her great sages, saints and seers. This unique aspect of language is reason for its glory amidst diversity and multiplicity. Here language is only a springboard to launch the reader into the spiritual. Modern models of the emerging stylistic evaluation, translation technology and procedures of splitting, and dissecting discourse to the level of morpheme and phoneme is not much of an aid to understanding Aurolangue. Hard effort in terms of pondering and contemplation is essential to get at the pure metal of the author's intuition and intent.. Hence the relevance of Ruskin's famous trope. This could even be a worthwhile caveat to readers approaching Sri Aurobindo.

14. CHEWED AND DIGESTED!

Sri Aurobindo's works are for all time and for all mankind. A mere reading would never do. Each line or each sentence has to be taken in slowly (chewed and digested is the Johnsonian dictum) for contemplation, eventual enlightenment, and ultimate spiritual joy, aananda. Here is a very brief example, a bit of the poem The Rose of God, that could be a useful beginning for fruitful contemplation:

Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire
Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colours' lyre!
Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and musical rhyme,
Bridge our earthward and heavenward, make deathless the children of Time.

What more aspiration or prayer could there be than this? Does this not echo many an Upanishad invocation? The harnessing of the polychromatic variations in the poem would take a separate paper for itself. The springs of spiritual aspiration lay at the bottom of the cadence and naada, which always runs as an undercurrent yielding a benediction.

15. IMPOSSIBILITY OF INITIATION DIRECTED BY OTHERS

As for initiation, the individual reader must fend for himself. Initiation is to being led into. A reader would do well to slowly get familiar with the seer's turn of expression with a degree of reverence. His own thought should be above the mundane, the commonplace and the routine. A basic familiarity with or an understanding of spirituality would be a great help.

16. ALLUSIVENESS OF AUROBINDO'S STYLE

A great deal has already been written by competent scholars about the allusiveness of Sri Aurobindo's style both in prose and verse compositions. Brought up on the Western classics in Greek and Latin along with English poetry of the highest order produced there, the spiritual navigator's mind soars higher and higher charting the areas of Over Mind and Super Mind. There have been Shakespeare scholars, Milton scholars, and scholars who have specialized in Eliot of recent years, for these are of a different order.

The meandering and flights of noble minds yield such infinitude of thought that it takes several exegetes each pursuing a line of one's own in for its exegesis. Sri Aurobindo's writings, whether in prose or verse, demand and deserve to be studied as scriptures and with the same reverence, devotion and equipment as one approaches the Upanishad of yore.

17. COMING INTO CONTACT WITH THE SPIRIT

Nolini Kant Gupta, one of the great disciples of the seer-sage, in his book, A Century's Salutation to Sri Aurobindo, wrote this:

If art is to express the soul of things, and since the true soul of things is the divine element in them, then certainly spirituality, the discipline of coming in conscious contact with the spirit, the Divine, must be accorded the regal seat in the hierarchy of arts.

During the last several years, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondichery has been publishing the saint-seer's works. Eventually, it is hoped that the scholars there and elsewhere would produce bhashyaas helpful to the uninitiated lay as well as the enlightened saadhakas to get a comprehensive understanding of one of our greatest spiritualists. Genuine saadhakas look forward to this. Writing extensive exegetic pieces on the saint-seer-saadhaka would surely enable our scholars to redeem what is termed rishi runa (the debt one owes to a rishi, the teacher) in the hoary culture.

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Suggested Further Reading

1. Gokak, V. K. Sri Aurobindo Seer and Poet. Abhinav Publications, New Delhi, 1973.
2. Mathur, O. P. (Ed). Sri Aurobindo -- Critical Considerations, Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, 1997.

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