India has one of the greatest intellectual traditions in the
world and it has nothing to do with modern Indian leftist scholars and writers.
It is the tradition of numerous yogis, sages and seers going back to the Vedas,
extending through Vedanta, Buddhism and related dharmic traditions to their
many exponents today.
Dharmic traditions teach us how to develop the mind in the
highest sense of universal consciousness, not simply logic and conceptual
thought. India’s great minds, centuries ago, produced the many paths of yoga
and the largest variety of exalted spiritual philosophies and psychologies in
the world. And their teachings remain alive and vibrant even today, spreading
globally.
Yet, India’s dharmic tradition has not just addressed
consciousness and spirituality, but has also produced a vast literature on art,
science, medicine, mathematics and politics – all the main domains of thought
and culture.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Swami Vivekananda
transformed world thinking, introducing yoga, meditation and higher states of
consciousness at a time before Einstein had discovered the relativity of time
and space and the illusory nature of physical reality, something long taught in
Vedanta and Buddhism.
Sri Aurobindo unfolded the idea of a higher evolution of
consciousness in humanity and produced Savitri, the longest blank verse poem in
the English language, revealing transformative yogic secrets that the West had
yet to conceive. Yet, many of these great Indic thinkers wrote in Sanskrit or
regional languages of India and have not been properly noted, much less
studied.
Vedantic teachers like Swami Chinmayananda and Swami
Dayananda have guided India in recent decades, commenting on cultural as well
as spiritual affairs, using English as their main language of expression, so
that the modern audience can easily understand them. Ram Swarup and Sitaram
Goel produced excellent critiques of communism and Western religious
fundamentalism.
New Yoga teachings have come out from India’s modern gurus,
too numerous to mention, and there is now a detailed modern literature on
Ayurvedic medicine in English. New books on India’s past have been written by
important archaeologists and historians, uncovering the depth and antiquity of
India’s many-sided civilisation.
Meanwhile, there is a dynamic new generation of insightful and
articulate Indic/dharmic writers with new books and articles, and active in the
social media, including Sanjeev Sanyal, Hindol Sengupta, Vamsee Juluri, Tufail
Ahmad, and Amish Tripathi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been an important
part of this intellectual/media awakening of pro-India scholars and writers,
who honour the profound traditions of the country going back to ancient times.
The Left’s false claim to intellectual superiority
India’s Left has long claimed that Hindus are not
intellectual and are unscientific, mindlessly repeating old racist colonial and
missionary propaganda. Yet the Left has not produced any original thinkers,
much less sages. It hasn’t even understood India’s own vast culture, which is
the saddest commentary on its endeavours. India’s leftist scholars are largely
Lord Macaulay’s children, promoting Western thought, disowning India’s older
and more extensive cultural heritage.
India’s Left has no understanding of higher states of
consciousness, as clearly explained in the dharmic traditions, or any interest
in exploring them. It is wedded to gross materialism and physical reality,
preferring to write about sex and politics, not anything transcendent. While
traditional Hindu thought recognises seven chakras from basic human urges to
the highest cosmic consciousness, leftist writers are happy to wallow in the
lower one or two, as if they were contributing something exalted to the world.
While modern physics is embracing the idea of cosmic
consciousness and great physicists like Oppenheimer have quoted the Bhagavad
Gita, India’s Left is firmly caught in the outer world of maya, which it does
not question. It has little sense of cosmology and not much vision beyond
political propaganda. Yet, India’s scientists honour their own spiritual
traditions like Subhash Kak and George Sudarshan, who are not products of the
Left.
India’s leftists seldom learn Sanskrit or study the great
philosophers, thinkers and poets of the country. While they can quote
Shakespeare they deem it’s beneath their dignity to honour Kalidas. They cannot
examine the Ramayana or Mahabharata except in terms of Marxist or Freudian
theories. They may discuss women’s rights but have no experience of India’s
powerful traditions of Goddess worship. They are like the children of the old
British Raj for whom anything Indian, particularly Hindu, is primitive
superstition to be frowned upon.
Indian immigrants now make up the highest strata of Western
society in terms of education and affluence, comprising doctors, engineers,
scientists, and software developers, most of who are respectful of India’s
spiritual traditions. They are not products of the Left either.
India’s leftists, meanwhile, take academic posts both in
India and the West, from which they can take potshots at their own culture and
pretend to be wise while drawing comfortable salaries from the very governments
they like to criticise. They would never practice yoga, mantra or meditation,
as the people in the West are now doing more and more – including many thinkers
and innovators. Note the example of Steve Jobs of Apple Computers, who carried
Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi with him, and probably never
heard of Romila Thapar, Ram Guha or Irfan Habib.
Intellectual arrogance of the Left
The problem is that India’s leftist intellectuals are
products of the ego-mind, what is called the rajasic buddhi in yogic thought,
which is marked by intellectual arrogance. Without first learning deep
meditation, one cannot go beyond the prejudices of the outer intellect and its
attachment to name, form and personality. One needs to become silent and
receptive within in order to truly know oneself and the universe. This teaching
has been clearly articulated since the ancient Upanishads did so in a series of
inspired dialogues and debates over 3,000 years ago.
It is time for India’s leftist intellectuals to honour their
own profound dharmic traditions. Then they might be capable of something more
original and transformative than to imitate the superficial views of the
western leftists, which is their current state of affairs. It might give them
better ethical rules of behaviour to emulate as well.
The role of India’s true intelligentsia should be to sustain
India’s cultural unity, spirituality and creativity, for the nation and the
world – not trying to replace their own venerable traditions with worn out
leftist agendas that have failed everywhere they have been implemented.
By David Frawley
Courtesy: Swarajya
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