India The Mother (Words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother)

India The Mother

This book is a companion volume to India’s Rebirth, a selection from Sri Aurobindo’s writings and talks which presented his vision of India and the way out of her most pressing problems. India’s Rebirth, first published in 1993, has generated much enthusiasm in India and abroad; it has been translated into Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Oriya, as well as French, and translations into other languages are under preparation.

In India the Mother, we have collected excerpts from the writings, messages, letters and talks of Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s companion, who joined him in 1920 and worked tirelessly until 1973 to materialize his vision. As with India’s Rebirth, we have followed a chronological order, which covers almost sixty years. The greater part of the extracts are drawn from Mother’s Agenda (13 volumes), the record of the private conversations which Mother had with her confidant Satprem between 1954 and 1973. (The reader should remember that the extracts presented here have been edited for the purpose of this compilation; the integral text will be found in Mother’s Agenda, 12 volumes of which have now been published in English translation.)

For Mother, as for Sri Aurobindo, India is more than a piece of land, however lovable it may be; it is the Ancient Mother, a form of the Shakti who fashions worlds and ages as well as her recalcitrant children, and pursues her goal through progress, defeat or even destruction. When the world is experiencing the last years of the West’s “long decomposition,” when we are being compelled to understand that Man is not the ultimate product of our Evolution and that this earth is not meant to satisfy our petty destructive greeds, the dormant strengths of India’s civilization are destined to shape the path of our future humanity and give the world the inner impetus and vision that the West’s fast-fading glitter failed io provide.

Book Details

Author: The Mother
Print Length: 307
Publisher: MIRA ADITI, Mysore
Book format: Pdf, ePub, mobi (Kindle)
Language: English

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Editors’ Note
Part One 1916-1950
Part Two 1951-1958
Part Three 1958-1973
Chronology
Bibliography

Sample

PART ONE
1916-1950

(Mother first met Sri Aurobindo in 1914 when she came to see him in Pondicherry, where he had taken refuge from the British. In 1915 she returned to France, then journeyed to Japan, where she would stay for four years.)

July 7, 1916

(Extracts from a speech to women in Japan, in the middle of World War I.)

If there is one field in which women have shown remarkable gifts, it is that of powers of organization. Those powers of administration had long been acknowledged in Brahminical India, the India prior to the Muslim conquest…. But in the West, Semitic thought together with Roman legislation had too deep an influence on customs to give women much opportunity to show their powers of organization….

It is certain that exclusively male politics has proved itself incapable: it has too often sunk into the search for narrow personal interest and into arbitrary and violent action. A politics of women would doubtless bring about a tendency to disinterestedness and to more humanitarian solutions…. To reduce woman’s role to exclusively internal and familial occupations, and man’s role to exclusively external and social occupations, thus separating what should be united, would be to perpetuate the present sorry state of things both equally suffer from.

…

The present hour is serious. A stern, painful lesson is being taught to nations. On the ruins now piling up, new, more beautiful and harmonious constructions can be erected.