IY Fundamentalism

Remarks: 2-6 are the five trustees of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. With their petition the plaintiffs, who are members of the Ashram, seek the leave of the court to institute a suit against the Ashram Trust and its Trustees.

Paragraphs 1-3: Reddy introduces himself as petitioner 4 and as an inmate of the Ashram since 1978. He notes that the other four petitioners have been inmates since 2003, 1968, 1996, and 1968.

Remark: the average year of admission to the ashram of the five petitioners is 1982. Four of the five Trustees have been inmates of the ashram since the 1940s or 1950s.

Paragraph 4: Reddy claims that the Trustees, “instead of promoting Sri Aurobindo’s tenets and philosophy … have and continue to harbour, defend and openly extend support to one Mr. Peter Heehs, who authored ‘The Lives of Sri Aurobindo’, a sacrilegious book…” etc. He then gives a dramatized account of a movement against Heehs and his book. He claims that the Trustees refusal to expel Heehs from the Ashram on the advice of himself and various co-conspirators constitutes breach of trust.

Remark: Reddy’s opinion of the book in question is biased and without support. The movement against Heehs was organized by Reddy, Sraddhalu Ranade, and a few others for reasons that are personal and malicious. The book in question has in fact been favourably received by critics and readers, many of whom credit it with having increased their knowledge of and devotion for Sri Aurobindo.

Sacrilege is a Christian concept, and has no equivalent in Indian religion, nor any place in Indian law.

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The author of this article, Ramachandra Guha, is one of India's best known historians.
Published in The Telegraph on July 30, 2011.

Earlier this year, the Gujarat government banned a book on Mahatma Gandhi by an American writer. The book was not then available in India, and no one in Gujarat had read it. The ban, ordered by the chief minister, Narendra Modi, was on the basis of a tendentious news report and a still more tendentious book review.

After Modi announced his ban, the first instinct of the government of India was to emulate him. Congress spokesmen called for a countrywide ban. The then law minister, Veerappa Moily, indicated that he would follow their lead. There was a spirit of competitive chauvinism abroad; how could the Congress allow a non-Congress politician to claim to be defending the reputation of the Mahatma?

In the event, the government of India did not enforce a ban on the book. This was principally because of two quick, focused interventions by Rajmohan Gandhi and Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Both are grandsons of the Mahatma; both, besides, are scholars and public figures in their own right. Rajmohan and Gopalkrishna wrote signed articles in the press saying that a ban would be contrary to the spirit of Gandhi, a man who encouraged and promoted debate; it would also call into question India’s claims to be the world’s largest democracy.

A ban makes news; the withdrawal of a ban does not. Gandhi scholars in particular, and Indians in general, owe Rajmohan and Gopalkrishna a debt of gratitude, for pressurizing the government to allow the free circulation of Joseph Lelyveld’s The Great Soul in 27 states of the country. It remains illegal to own or possess a copy of the book in the 28th state of the Union, which happens to be Gandhi’s own. By banning the book before it was available, Modi thought he could camouflage his sectarian leanings in the protective cloak of the Mahatma’s pluralism. In the event, once the government of India — bowing to the sensible advice of Gandhi’s grandsons — allowed the free circulation of the book, the fact that it is not yet legally available in Gujarat only exposes the insularity and xenophobia of that state’s chief minister.

Sadly, the bravery (and decency) of Gandhi’s grandsons has not been emulated by defenders or descendants of some other great men of modern India. Consider the fate, within India, of a biography of Sri Aurobindo written by Peter Heehs. Heehs is a real scholar, the author of several substantial works of history (among them The Bomb in Bengal). What’s more, he was for many years in charge of the archives in the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.

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