Sunil Kumar's Blog - Posts Tagged "existential-angst"
Dara Shikoh and the Yog Vasisht
In the Rajdhani, the 'so-called' graveyard of empires. The Puranic Indraprastha or Dillika. Received an invite to a lecture on a fascinating topic by a research scholar Mohsin Ali on 'Dara Shikoh and the Yoga Vasishta'.
Dr. Ravi Mishra, the director of the PMML talked about the long history of translations of Sanskrit texts from the Greco-Roman world to the 17th century and the times of Dara Shikoh. Texts such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Panchatantra were bandied about. A surprising fact was the 4 times Islamic scholars translated the Yoga Vasishta.
Rumi, the new age darling of the aesthete was mentioned as having praised 'Hindustan' and the Veda vriksha -the tree of knowledge and the Brahman, adhyatma and many of the concepts of the Indic philosophies. However, the jury is still out on Rumi as according to some sources, he was a toxic hater of infidels- read Hindus. and other faiths.
Akbar was also mentioned by Mr. Mohsin as having commissioned the translation of the Panchatantra thrice. The Yoga Vasishta was translated by Nizam al-Din Panipati as the Jug Basisht. An abridged version by Abhinanda of Kashmir known as the Laghu Vasishta which has 6000 verses compared to the prolixity of the 29000 verse translation was supposedly the basis of the translation.
Some problems in translation were mentioned as the world view of Islam influenced Persian and the profundity of Samskritam and its cultural context had to be surmounted to make sense to a target audience. Dr. Mishra also talked about the heresy implicit in the world-view of Akbar and Dara Shikoh when it came to the hardcore traditionalist interpretation. Iqbal, that polemic poet and his praise of Aurangzeb in the Hikayat-e-Sher-O-Shahanshah were mentioned. Could sense the subtle interplay and exchange of ideas where criticism was not overt and there was a scholarly, civil exchange of ideas that I liked.
The dreams of Dara Shikoh were discussed where he supposedly had visions of Sage Vasishta and Bhagavan Rama. Also listened to speculations about the Sufi silsila tradition of taking permission from the August figures on whom poetic works are conceived.
My questions to Mohsin and Dr. Mishra were more on the lines of the Lord Rama story where an alternative story which I read which mentioned Shikoh believing that he was Lakshmana, whether any other translation was commissioned post Dara Shikoh and the latter declining half of the Mughals starting with the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. I also wanted to know what elements of Yoga Vasishta remained in the Islamic mindscape before transmission to the post-Enlightenment West.
An interesting discussion with Dr. Mishra followed where he contrasted the pre-modern Mughal empire and the relatively more sophisticated manipulation of the British and the Macaulay based education system. All in all, a fruitful insightful discussion on the maverick outlier of the Mughal empire and one of the most profound texts of the Indic Darshana tradition.
Dr. Ravi Mishra, the director of the PMML talked about the long history of translations of Sanskrit texts from the Greco-Roman world to the 17th century and the times of Dara Shikoh. Texts such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Panchatantra were bandied about. A surprising fact was the 4 times Islamic scholars translated the Yoga Vasishta.
Rumi, the new age darling of the aesthete was mentioned as having praised 'Hindustan' and the Veda vriksha -the tree of knowledge and the Brahman, adhyatma and many of the concepts of the Indic philosophies. However, the jury is still out on Rumi as according to some sources, he was a toxic hater of infidels- read Hindus. and other faiths.
Akbar was also mentioned by Mr. Mohsin as having commissioned the translation of the Panchatantra thrice. The Yoga Vasishta was translated by Nizam al-Din Panipati as the Jug Basisht. An abridged version by Abhinanda of Kashmir known as the Laghu Vasishta which has 6000 verses compared to the prolixity of the 29000 verse translation was supposedly the basis of the translation.
Some problems in translation were mentioned as the world view of Islam influenced Persian and the profundity of Samskritam and its cultural context had to be surmounted to make sense to a target audience. Dr. Mishra also talked about the heresy implicit in the world-view of Akbar and Dara Shikoh when it came to the hardcore traditionalist interpretation. Iqbal, that polemic poet and his praise of Aurangzeb in the Hikayat-e-Sher-O-Shahanshah were mentioned. Could sense the subtle interplay and exchange of ideas where criticism was not overt and there was a scholarly, civil exchange of ideas that I liked.
The dreams of Dara Shikoh were discussed where he supposedly had visions of Sage Vasishta and Bhagavan Rama. Also listened to speculations about the Sufi silsila tradition of taking permission from the August figures on whom poetic works are conceived.
My questions to Mohsin and Dr. Mishra were more on the lines of the Lord Rama story where an alternative story which I read which mentioned Shikoh believing that he was Lakshmana, whether any other translation was commissioned post Dara Shikoh and the latter declining half of the Mughals starting with the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. I also wanted to know what elements of Yoga Vasishta remained in the Islamic mindscape before transmission to the post-Enlightenment West.
An interesting discussion with Dr. Mishra followed where he contrasted the pre-modern Mughal empire and the relatively more sophisticated manipulation of the British and the Macaulay based education system. All in all, a fruitful insightful discussion on the maverick outlier of the Mughal empire and one of the most profound texts of the Indic Darshana tradition.
Whispers Among Ruins: Angkor, Bhārata Shakti, and the Future She Beckons
Whispers Among Ruins…
By Sunil Kumar(Published in the Renaissance Aurobindo journal)
When I walked beneath the towering stone faces of Bayon, their eyes closed in half-smiles of serene mystery, I was not a tourist. I was a pilgrim to memory, though I did not yet know it.
People often speak of Angkor Wat, draped in morning mist and laced with tendrils of jungle, as a Khmer marvel. But to me, it echoed something deeper. Something older. Something unmistakably Indian.
India does not colonise with steel, weapons, or invasions. She seeds consciousness. She exports not armies but aspiration. In Angkor, as I wandered in the cloisters and the uppermost terrace of Vishnu’s shrine (Preah Vishnuloka), now a Buddhist wat for centuries, and traced my fingers along the devatas and divinity etched in a transcendental dance, I felt the touch of Bhārata Shakti—the spirit of India as Mother, Giver, Awakener.
It was not a cultural imprint, but a transmission. A whisper across time. Probably the spirit Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay felt when he penned the immortal ‘Vande Mataram’, invoking a land ‘Sujalam, Suphalam, Malayaja-Shitalam,” it was a trembling recognition of the Divine Mother breathing through the soil, the river and the winds of India and beyond.
I realised that the contemporary world had trivialised complex emotions on the altar of news-bytes and smug judgments. It was neither jingoism nor flag-waving nationalism — not the crass monikers that trivialise a complex, aching love for the motherland.
Thousands of kilometres away from home, the spirit of our nation shone through even in the name of the river Mekong in Cambodia — Mae Khong (mother of water), a reference to the Ganges.
Both in the river of a thousand lingas in the Kulen Mountains and many temples in the Angkor Archaeological Complex, Shiva made his presence felt invisibly as the Mahayogi and the dancing Nataraja and a primal force. Trampling on apasmara — ignorance and ego. Also, Shakti was not invisible; she shimmered in every apsara, every curve of grace carved in sandstone.
The Khmer did not merely borrow Indian motifs—they received and transformed them. They made India their own. This, I realised, was the beauty of a civilisation that gives without seeking return.
As Sri Aurobindo wrote,
“Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence.”
~ CWSA, Vol. 20, p. 57
To further paraphrase Sri Aurobindo, the expansive universality of the ancient Bharatiya conception of the world ensured the export of a spiritual and universal world view that stressed on a higher conception of the spirit without compromising on innate virtues and the artificial cartography of nation-states.
How far has this spirit travelled? From the snow-fed valleys of Kashmir, where Lalleshwari once walked in luminous silence, singing of union with Shiva in the voice of a woman utterly her own, to the dense jungles of Cambodia, where another people, another land, embraced those very truths without losing their own soul.
Sadly, the shadow of darkness has invaded Sharada’s land, bringing with it the grim spectre of an icy nuclear winter — two nations on the brink of the very precipice of annihilation.
Lalla’s verses—“My guru gave me but one precept: from without withdraw your gaze within”— resonate in the stillness of Angkor’s sanctums. It is this descent into the inner world that unites the mystics of all lands.
***
Yet beauty alone does not explain Angkor’s hold on me. I have seen magnificent monuments crumbling, decrepit structures crying out for resurrection. But Angkor does not merely survive. It endures. It breathes.
This resilience of stone, of spirit, of a people who endured the genocidal madness of Pol Pot and still greet strangers with gentleness, is to me a testament not only to Khmer strength, but to the sustaining power of spirit. Shakti, once awakened, does not die. She transforms. She returns.
In Sri Aurobindo’s vision, it is the Overmind that gives us a glimpse of cosmic consciousness; through ranges of mind — illumined, intuitive and higher mind — sends its radiant beams into culture, into art, into myth. Perhaps this is what I felt in Angkor—a residue of Overmind influence: high art imbued with a sacred ethos, where even ruin glows with the perfume of the Eternal. Yatha pinde tatha brahmande — the relation between the microcosm and the macrocosm
And yet, our age is one of conflict. Nations jostle for dominance. Borders bristle. The region around Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and China also shifts like tectonic plates. Nations bomb for ideologies and influence, and then run away.
Even India, my motherland, forever finds itself caught in tense geopolitics. But amidst this, I ask: what if India returned to her truest strength, not economy, not military, but the radiance of her spirit? Would this be feasible, practical? It would certainly be ideal and resonant with her indefatigable essence.
among all the divisions of mankind it is to India that is reserved the highest and the most splendid destiny, the most essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from herself the future religion of the entire world, the Eternal religion which is to harmonise all religion, science and philosophies and make mankind one soul.”
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 4, p. 84
I was reminded of my trip to Auroville a few years back. Walking its wooded paths, reading the thoughtful signs, the banyan tree and into the golden sphere of the Matrimandir, I felt the same silence I had felt in Angkor. The stillness and divinity of the present moment.
Not emptiness—but fullness. The quiet of a deep intention. A descent of spirit. Sri Aurobindo called this the supramental evolution—not escape from life, but its transfiguration. “The spirit shall take up the human play, the earthly life become the life divine.” (Savitri:710) This was not a bland theory. It was vibration, the Spandana of an all-pervading consciousness. Tangible for a short while.
Angkor. Auroville. Kashmir. Lalla. The apsaras. Shiva and Shakti. The feminine current that flows through all of them is not accidental. It is essential. It is the soul-force of Bharat—what Sri Aurobindo might call Bharat Shakti—that manifests not in meaningless dominance, but in beauty, in art, in sacred economy, in the grace to endure and uplift.
What then is the future? The future, I believe, lies in remembrance—not of history alone, but of what India has always carried within: the light that does not fade.
That light must now reawaken, not in nostalgia, but in action. In poetry, in policy, in presence. In an India that once again offers a higher vision for humanity, as it has always done. Builds, not competes. Gives not grabs. Stands up for its interests but does not conform to the worldview that seeks to enslave and exploit the globe-Mother Earth.
If the apsaras could whisper, I think they would say this: Don’t forget what you are. Don’t forget what you gave. And don’t forget what you can still become.
By Sunil Kumar(Published in the Renaissance Aurobindo journal)
When I walked beneath the towering stone faces of Bayon, their eyes closed in half-smiles of serene mystery, I was not a tourist. I was a pilgrim to memory, though I did not yet know it.
People often speak of Angkor Wat, draped in morning mist and laced with tendrils of jungle, as a Khmer marvel. But to me, it echoed something deeper. Something older. Something unmistakably Indian.
India does not colonise with steel, weapons, or invasions. She seeds consciousness. She exports not armies but aspiration. In Angkor, as I wandered in the cloisters and the uppermost terrace of Vishnu’s shrine (Preah Vishnuloka), now a Buddhist wat for centuries, and traced my fingers along the devatas and divinity etched in a transcendental dance, I felt the touch of Bhārata Shakti—the spirit of India as Mother, Giver, Awakener.
It was not a cultural imprint, but a transmission. A whisper across time. Probably the spirit Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay felt when he penned the immortal ‘Vande Mataram’, invoking a land ‘Sujalam, Suphalam, Malayaja-Shitalam,” it was a trembling recognition of the Divine Mother breathing through the soil, the river and the winds of India and beyond.
I realised that the contemporary world had trivialised complex emotions on the altar of news-bytes and smug judgments. It was neither jingoism nor flag-waving nationalism — not the crass monikers that trivialise a complex, aching love for the motherland.
Thousands of kilometres away from home, the spirit of our nation shone through even in the name of the river Mekong in Cambodia — Mae Khong (mother of water), a reference to the Ganges.
Both in the river of a thousand lingas in the Kulen Mountains and many temples in the Angkor Archaeological Complex, Shiva made his presence felt invisibly as the Mahayogi and the dancing Nataraja and a primal force. Trampling on apasmara — ignorance and ego. Also, Shakti was not invisible; she shimmered in every apsara, every curve of grace carved in sandstone.
The Khmer did not merely borrow Indian motifs—they received and transformed them. They made India their own. This, I realised, was the beauty of a civilisation that gives without seeking return.
As Sri Aurobindo wrote,
“Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence.”
~ CWSA, Vol. 20, p. 57
To further paraphrase Sri Aurobindo, the expansive universality of the ancient Bharatiya conception of the world ensured the export of a spiritual and universal world view that stressed on a higher conception of the spirit without compromising on innate virtues and the artificial cartography of nation-states.
How far has this spirit travelled? From the snow-fed valleys of Kashmir, where Lalleshwari once walked in luminous silence, singing of union with Shiva in the voice of a woman utterly her own, to the dense jungles of Cambodia, where another people, another land, embraced those very truths without losing their own soul.
Sadly, the shadow of darkness has invaded Sharada’s land, bringing with it the grim spectre of an icy nuclear winter — two nations on the brink of the very precipice of annihilation.
Lalla’s verses—“My guru gave me but one precept: from without withdraw your gaze within”— resonate in the stillness of Angkor’s sanctums. It is this descent into the inner world that unites the mystics of all lands.
***
Yet beauty alone does not explain Angkor’s hold on me. I have seen magnificent monuments crumbling, decrepit structures crying out for resurrection. But Angkor does not merely survive. It endures. It breathes.
This resilience of stone, of spirit, of a people who endured the genocidal madness of Pol Pot and still greet strangers with gentleness, is to me a testament not only to Khmer strength, but to the sustaining power of spirit. Shakti, once awakened, does not die. She transforms. She returns.
In Sri Aurobindo’s vision, it is the Overmind that gives us a glimpse of cosmic consciousness; through ranges of mind — illumined, intuitive and higher mind — sends its radiant beams into culture, into art, into myth. Perhaps this is what I felt in Angkor—a residue of Overmind influence: high art imbued with a sacred ethos, where even ruin glows with the perfume of the Eternal. Yatha pinde tatha brahmande — the relation between the microcosm and the macrocosm
And yet, our age is one of conflict. Nations jostle for dominance. Borders bristle. The region around Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and China also shifts like tectonic plates. Nations bomb for ideologies and influence, and then run away.
Even India, my motherland, forever finds itself caught in tense geopolitics. But amidst this, I ask: what if India returned to her truest strength, not economy, not military, but the radiance of her spirit? Would this be feasible, practical? It would certainly be ideal and resonant with her indefatigable essence.
among all the divisions of mankind it is to India that is reserved the highest and the most splendid destiny, the most essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from herself the future religion of the entire world, the Eternal religion which is to harmonise all religion, science and philosophies and make mankind one soul.”
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 4, p. 84
I was reminded of my trip to Auroville a few years back. Walking its wooded paths, reading the thoughtful signs, the banyan tree and into the golden sphere of the Matrimandir, I felt the same silence I had felt in Angkor. The stillness and divinity of the present moment.
Not emptiness—but fullness. The quiet of a deep intention. A descent of spirit. Sri Aurobindo called this the supramental evolution—not escape from life, but its transfiguration. “The spirit shall take up the human play, the earthly life become the life divine.” (Savitri:710) This was not a bland theory. It was vibration, the Spandana of an all-pervading consciousness. Tangible for a short while.
Angkor. Auroville. Kashmir. Lalla. The apsaras. Shiva and Shakti. The feminine current that flows through all of them is not accidental. It is essential. It is the soul-force of Bharat—what Sri Aurobindo might call Bharat Shakti—that manifests not in meaningless dominance, but in beauty, in art, in sacred economy, in the grace to endure and uplift.
What then is the future? The future, I believe, lies in remembrance—not of history alone, but of what India has always carried within: the light that does not fade.
That light must now reawaken, not in nostalgia, but in action. In poetry, in policy, in presence. In an India that once again offers a higher vision for humanity, as it has always done. Builds, not competes. Gives not grabs. Stands up for its interests but does not conform to the worldview that seeks to enslave and exploit the globe-Mother Earth.
If the apsaras could whisper, I think they would say this: Don’t forget what you are. Don’t forget what you gave. And don’t forget what you can still become.
