Ananda Reddy addressed a letter to the Managing Trustee of Sri Aurobindo Ashram on 6 September, 2008. A significant feature of this letter is the cultural issues it raises. The Lives of Sri Aurobindo was written for publication in America and has been widely appreciated there. Some reactions to it in India, such as Reddy’s, have been markedly different. An understanding of the cultural factors underlying these varying responses might contribute to healing the division that has recently arisen in the international Sri Aurobindo community.

Ananda Reddy bases his criticisms of Heehs on impressions of his biography, not on personal acquaintance like the writers of “The Role of Peter Heehs in the Archives.” The quality of Reddy’s criticisms can be evaluated in the light of the comments below. A noteworthy aspect of this letter is that there appears to be an attempt to claim Sri Aurobindo almost exclusively for the Indian devotional tradition. What is perhaps surprising is that the writer of this letter is the director of an online educational institute, Sri Aurobindo Darshan: The University of Tomorrow. As stated on its websight, this institute does not insist on the acceptance of “any particular teaching, practice, or point of view,” and encourages “a thoughtful and critical examination of all ideas.”  (http://www.sacar.in/programmes/SACAR_TUT/about_TUT.html) Reddy’s letter to the Managing Trustee was sent to others with an introductory note headed “Mahakali’s saving Grace”.

Letter to the Managing Trustee, from Ananda Reddy

Mahakali’s saving Grace

Dear Friends,

Added to all these objections, written in the letter [below],  there is also the danger of the local politicians, the central govt.- anti-Sri Aurobindonean, leftists all converging on the Ashram and dig open for ‘inquisition’ just because of this malignant book! A public litigation could also pull the trustees into the open court … and the endless process of “washing the dirty linen in the public affair”!! May the Mother’s Mahakali aspect save the Ashram and the  devotees.

Love,

Ananda

The reference to an “inquisition” is interesting. Talk of an inquisition by leftists, etc., makes scant sense. Inquisitions were religious institutions that enforced uniformity of belief. They punished unorthodoxy and banned books. To some people, the movement against Heehs and his book looks like an inquisition to punish a “heretic” and suppress an alternative approach to Sri Aurobindo. These misgivings may be exaggerated, but any semblance of inquisitorial attitudes or procedures cannot be reconciled with the aims and ideals of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

To,

The Managing Trustee,

Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry

06-September-08

Dear Manoj-da,

I got the book by Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, and started reading it but I could not go  far  for it is too desiccated and uninspiring and to say the least, dull and dreary! It was as if composed by a computer, gathering some data from the Archives and putting them together in a catalogued manner. May be a computer would have done a better job because it would not have interspersed the writing  with  such perverted  and deliberately and camouflaged comments and prejudices which are most demeaning for any biographer on Sri Aurobindo and most of all for any person from the Archives of Sri Aurobindo Ashram! It is a writing without a soul or a heart!

Reddy bases his criticisms on a partial reading of the book, admitting that he “could not go far.” He claims that this was because the style “is too desiccated and uninspiring and to say the least, dull and dreary!” Yet his cousin and collaborator Raman Reddy has written: “Peter Heehs has a crisp and racy style; he comes straight to the essential points and there is a masterful weaving of historical data which hitherto has never been done in a biography of Sri Aurobindo.”  (http://www.mirroroftomorrow.org/blog/_archives/2008/12/21/4029920.html)

It claims to be an intellectual, rational and historical approach to biography as against the hagiographic writings which the author seems to condemn! But it is rationalism that is blind with its own blindfolds of deep prejudice and fundamentalism and I am sure we do not want to fall in for “The scientific, rationalistic, industrial, pseudo-democratic civilisation of the West [that] is now in the process of dissolution and it would be a lunatic absurdity for us at this moment to build on that sinking foundation.” (sabcl, 17, 196)

One wonders what it is in this biography that makes Reddy exclaim against a “rationalism that is blind with its own blindfolds of deep prejudice and fundamentalism.” There seems to be no basis for this charge. Heehs, for example, never casts doubt on the fact that, as he sums it up on the last page of the book, “Sri Aurobindo was trying to bring down the power of the supermind because he saw it as the key to transforming the individual and society.” It is hardly likely that such a project would be endorsed by a committed rationalist closed to anything higher. The sentence from “A Preface on National Education” quoted by Reddy concerns the foundation on which India is to build its future. It is not directly relevant to the discussion of a book written primarily to introduce Westerners to Sri Aurobindo’s life and thought. But it is followed by a sentence in which Sri Aurobindo speaks of “the most advanced minds of the occident” who are beginning to turn “for the hope of a new and more spiritual civilisation to the genius of Asia.” It is precisely to these that Heehs’s book is addressed. The book is already increasing the awareness of and respect for Sri Aurobindo in America.

On reading the book the first impression I had was that Peter Heehs is making the same  mistake that Mr William Archer had made: to attack Indian values and civilization in the name of the western superiority. Like Mr Archer, Peter too seems to be “a hostile critic, convinced of the inferiority of the culture in question” for he denounces: “The genre of hagiography, in the sense of the original sense of the term, is very much alive in India.” (PH: xii). And goes further to criticize it. India has never laid stress on the historical or the rational view of things and it has always had this tendency of hagiography for it was felt that  looking into the uplifting and inspiring aspects of a saint or the guru alone is useful for the spiritual disciple. We do not make looking into the ‘nakedness’ of a spiritual master a value to be pursued in the name of realism or transparency.

There is a natural tendency among people of every culture – Indians and Chinese as much as Westerners – to feel consciously or unconsciously that their own culture and its values are the best. Peter Heehs and Ananda Reddy could both be accused, fairly or unfairly, of such parochialism. But comparing Heehs with the said Mr. Archer is far-fetched. Archer knew next to nothing about India. Heehs has spent much of his life studying Indian culture and has a good reputation as a scholar among Indian academics. To equate his approach to Sri Aurobindo with Archer’s blatant hostility and ignorance of Indian culture shows a lack of discrimination and a tendency to exaggerate which are not to Reddy’s credit.

The question of different kinds of biography could no doubt have been handled with more subtlety and sensitivity than are evident in Heehs’s Preface, allowing for the validity of different cultural attitudes. This is not really a matter of West vs. East, though, since hagiography itself is a Western tradition. The writing of biographies in the modern sense emerged out of the writing of hagiographies, partly continuing and partly reacting against the older tradition. Heehs’s Preface has to be read in the context of this debate, since he is speaking mainly to a Western audience. But even in India it is not quite true that, as Reddy claims, “looking into the uplifting and inspiring aspects of a saint or the guru alone” is considered “useful for the spiritual disciple. We do not make looking into the ‘nakedness’ of a spiritual master a value to be pursued in the name of realism or transparency.” We have seen how “M,” the celebrated devotee of Ramakrishna, quite literally displayed the “nakedness” of his Master to the eyes of the world (see “The Genesis of a Controversy,” item 10). Yet his intentions were unassailable. There is nothing like this in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo and it is not clear what “nakedness” is supposed to mean in this case. But Heehs has evidently proceeded on the assumption that Sri Aurobindo had nothing to hide. Other disciples, not necessarily lacking in bhakti, might very well agree.

In the same vein Peter Heehs continues: “Biographers must take their documents as they find them.” Now the question is, has he done so? Has he not distorted the documents to suit his purpose? Distortion can be done in many ways: one is to take out some lines out of context and use them for a specific motive or veiled agenda in the author’s mind. Of this kind there are many quotes in the book which clearly betray the horrific intentions of the author.

If there are any such distortions, one would have liked to be shown at least one example before accepting this sweeping claim. Reddy provides no instance of this kind of distortion in Heehs’s book to support his presumption of “horrific intentions.” But he himself does not hesitate to take sentences from the book out of context in order to make Heehs appear to say the opposite of what he clearly intended. We will see some cases of this below. The “Extracts,” compiled by Raman Reddy and sent out by Ananda Reddy a few days after this letter, were full of distortions of this nature.