Comment on "Is India Civilized?" by Sri Aurobindo.

Aurobindo's essay is a strong example of how he
articulates that both a political and spiritual transformation can converge within one
another.  His primary target is the Western perception that India is lawless, a
collection of savage barbarians that require subjugation.  He says this is the
perception of the India from the West in the opening paragraph:  "[English commentators]
assailed the whole life and culture of India and even lumped together all her greatest
achievements, philosophy, religion, poetry, painting, sculpture, Upanishads,
Mahabharata, Ramayana in one wholesale condemnation as a repulsive mass of unspeakable
barbarism."  This helps to establish his Sri Aurobindo's fundamental premise that that
political liberation and spiritual liberation will be the natural result of an India
without British influence.  Throughout the article, the notion of progress is defined as
a lively and dynamic quality, one that cannot be contained by the Western conception of
progress, but rather one that has to be seen in both spiritual and political lights. 
Sri Aurobindo argues that Indian progress will never be seen in the same light as
Western progress, therefore always being condemned to the label of barbarism and
lawlessness:

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...India if she adheres to her own
civilisation,
if she cherishes its spiritual motive, if
she clings to its spiritual  principle of formation, will stand out as a living denial,
a hideous “blot” upon this fair, luminous, rationalistic world.  Either she must
Europeanise, rationalise, materialise her whole being and deserve liberty by the change
or else she must be kept in subjection and administered by her cultural superiors: her
people of three hundred million religious savages must be held down firmly, taught and
civilised by her noble and enlightened Christian-atheistic European warders and tutors.
A grotesque statement in form, but in substance it has in it the root of the
matter.

This is a
fairly powerful position not merely in its assertion, but in its belief that declaring
and achieving independence are two different realities.  For Sri Aurobindo, the call of
Congress leaders who want Independence is one that is "blind" in that it is not
addressing the spiritual dimension of how to actually manage the thorny issue of
independence and consciousness.  Both spiritual and political conceptions must be
embraced in this process.  In this light, the article reflects a different position of
Indian independence as a movement that is as much spiritual for this is intrnsic to
Indian consciousness as it is political.