In our exploration of the theme Literature and Nation, we feature in the current issue an essay titled  Woman and Nation in 'Rajmohan's Wife' by Beloo Mehra. Read it in two parts.

Editor's Note: The conversation presents an evolving view of a woman's personal understanding of her rightful place and work in the context of family and the larger society and nation. What is her duty, her responsibility, her dharma? Towards her self, her husband and her home, her nation, and her inner truth? What is the ideal relation – if an ideal is possible – between a woman and a man in the conjugal context? Readers will find in this conversation a range of viewpoints which help explore these questions in their complexity and inherent diversity.

According to Sri Aurobindo, an individual “is not merely a social unit” (CWSA, 25: 24). Our societal role, work and function alone do not determine our individual existence, right and claim to live and grow. An individual is a soul within, a deeper being who must fulfil his or her own individual truth and law as well as his or her natural or assigned part in the truth and law of the collective existence. 

But just “as the society has no right in suppressing the individual in its own interest, so also the individual, in Sri Aurobindo’s view, has no right to disregard the legitimate claims of society upon him in order to seek his own selfish aims” (Kishor Gandhi , Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the New Age, p. 67). Thus, it is important to understand the level of consciousness from which an individual’s ‘choice’ is arising.

Any call for 'freedom of choice' becomes, in the light of an integral spiritual perspective on human development, a much wider, higher and deeper movement of the human spirit – progressively evolving and expressing itself through physical-vital to rational to deeper subjective levels of consciousness. Also, this view does not leave out the truth of the larger collective life, starting from family to nation and beyond. Hence, choice does not remain merely an aggressively individualistic notion in this deeper view, but integrates within itself the necessity for a harmonious co-existence and interdependent growth of individual and the collective.

An awakened woman, one who is awakened to the shakti that she is in her essence, one who is awakened to the call of her inner progress and evolution, will feel more and more empowered as she begins to recognise within herself the working of the Four Great Powers – Wisdom, Courage, Harmony and Perfection – through which the Force of the Mahashakti, the Divine Mother, works and manifests in all. The corresponding Indian names of these Four Great Powers that Sri Aurobindo invokes in his powerful work titled The Mother are: Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati.

This imagined conversation between Shanti, Suryamukhi and Kapalkundala magnificently illustrates many of these aspects. The small explanatory note by the translator will be helpful for those unfamiliar with these characters.

Beloo Mehra, Editor

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Editor's Note: Preeti Mahurkar joins Renaissance authors team, and in her debut piece reminds us of the profound difference between recent attempts to unite science and spirituality and the Integral vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Unlike the scientists, the Supramental Yogins Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were not content to explain reality; they sought to transform it, to work for the divinisation of life on Earth. 

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