Tamara Chin on Aurobindo

A friend directed my attention to an article titled 'Anti Colonial Metrics' which focuses on Aurobindo's 'Ilion'- a poem he worked on when in prison.

The author- Tamara Chin- has done a remarkable job given that she is an expert in a quite different field- viz. that of Chinese literature.

She does make one or two trivial mistakes- e.g. thinking that Aurobindo's dad was putting him through College whereas the truth is Aurobindo was sharing his scholarship money with his brothers- but also some more glaring errors fatal to her case. This has to do with changes in the ICS exam. She believes that raising the Classical component and holding exams only in England had to do with keeping Native Indians out as opposed to barring the way for the 'country bottled' Anglo Indian as well as Britain's own poorer class.

The facts were quite different. Classical languages create a level playing field. It is the vernacular language which distinguishes between 'Babuism' and patrician speech. Calcutta and Bombay could easily cram sufficient Greek and Latin into an Indian lad- however this would have had a distortionary effect on Indian paideia. Families would want Greek and Latin to replace Sanskrit and Persian. The result would have been the mass production in the moffusil towns of budding Raja Ramohan Roys and Michael Madhusudhan Dutts- a terrible nuisance. ICS officers needed to know the Indian classical and vernacular languages. Aptitude for Greek and Latin was a good screening device for White kids. The ability to translate Homer and Virgil at 17 boded well for their ability to pass exams in Indian languages so as to get salary increments and promotions. Enoch Powell is an example of a Classicist who quickly mastered Urdu while in the Army. Such Indians as mastered English had, in general, already mastered either Persian or Sanskrit. Being able to cram Latin or Greek presented no great difficulty. The late Shri Upendra Goswami, who headed the Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, told me that his father had been ruined in the Great Depression and thus he'd had to mug up Latin and Greek from such dictionaries as he could find in Rangoon. He still got through the ICS exam.

The British were aware that Caste Hindus would not 'cross the black water' and thus it was sufficient for the ICS to have its training college in England for them to be kept out. This did not prevent men like Sir Subramaniyam Iyer from becoming High Court Judges or holding other senior positions in the administration. Muslims, Goan Christians, Parsees and so on, could cross the black water and take the ICS exams but, if they had sufficient capital to do so, they could make even more money for themselves by entering the medical or  legal profession. In practice, it was only Brahmos from already wealthy landed families- or a professional one, in the case of Aurobindo- who thought it worth the bother.

However, Indian ICS officers were at the mercy of their masters- much as IAS officers are now. That is why Motilal Nehru, seeing the plight of a 'Heaven born' nephew of his, resolved to dedicate Jawaharlal to Congress politics rather than Mandarin insignificance.

To be fair, Tamara Chin has been misled by her reliance on Indian origin scholarship of the sham sort we so delight in. Being of Chinese heritage herself, she can't be blamed too much for being naive in these matters.

She writes-

After the ICS was opened in 1855

Actually, it was 1861

to any successful examination candidate under twenty-five, it represented the highest paying profession available to Indians at that time.

This is utter nonsense. The Law was far more lucrative. It could be combined with becoming a 'Diwan' to a Prince and investing in various profitable concerns. This was the route taken by Shyamji Krishna Varma who rose from humble origins through his mastery of Sanskrit. Monier Williams took him to Oxford, where the young Pundit would get a degree, so as to help compile the monumental Sanskrit Dictionary I still use.

The problem with becoming an ICS District Collector was that it was a transferable job. You could make much more money as a 'Dipty' because you stayed in the same place and made alliances and cornered rents and could watch over your investments. The truth is, a sept which managed to capture the lower rungs of the Collectorate in a rural district, could grow very rich. They might buy themselves a son-in-law 'in Service' just for the prestige but no one got rich in the higher branches of the administration.

The ICS pension of upwards of a thousand pounds a year might sound quite good but a top notch Barrister could make more than that in a week.

Satyendranath Tagore, the elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore, became the first Indian to pass the exam in 1864. After this, the British educators and officials who set the annual London exam began to experiment with the entrance requirements precisely to restrict the number of successful Indian applicants.

There was no need to do so. The success of Otto Trevelyan's 'The Competition Wallah' (1864) had established the prestige of the ICS. The service could dream of recruiting from Eton and Harrow. It may have pretended, in a period when the franchise was being extended to the working class, that it was keeping the niggers out by making itself a fit career path for gentlemen, but this was mere pretense. Indian ICS officers soon became demoralized and learned to know their place or suffer in sullen silence.

By contrast, the 'barristocracy' could take an independent line while getting very rich.

As Phiroze Vasunia has recently demonstrated, increasing the weight given to Greek and Latin papers became one solution to “the official desire to keep the Indian Civil Service largely free of Indians themselves.”[6]

Vasunia is a Classicist who, seeking perhaps to show the relevance of his subject to the progeny of Tandoori chefs, has written some sophomoric tripe re.  ' interweaving relationships and patterns that link Virgil and the history of the' Raj.

All he can demonstrate is the worthlessness of his subject- save for screening and signalling purposes at the Common Entrance level- i.e. for eleven-year-olds.

Since Greek and Latin were not taught in Indian schools and were best taught in elite British universities, Macaulay, Benjamin Jowett, and others sought both to fashion the ICS into a new vocation for Oxbridge Classicists and to regulate the social backgrounds of new “gentlemen” civil servants of the empire.

This is idiotic. Christian Missionary Societies had plenty of otherwise unemployable  Classicists and would gladly have dumped them on moffusil India if the demand for such a thing had been created by the Raj. Cramming a little Catullus instead of Kalidasa presented no great difficulty. The Catholics and German Lutherans were ahead, not behind, the Anglicans in Classical philology. Indeed, many second rank Public Schools didn't adopt the Etonian- i.e. Italian- pronunciation of Latin till after the First War.

To minimize the number of Indians in the ICS, they refused to hold a simultaneous examination in India, refused to replace the Greek and Latin requirement with Sanskrit for Indian applicants, and in 1875 lowered the maximum age of application to nineteen.

The number of Indians was already minimal. Monomohan Ghose was making way more money at the Bar than his ICS buddy. Moreover, it was blindingly obvious, Indians in the ICS would play second fiddle and have to pocket insults from the 'Anglo-Saxon' party (this was the term Otto Trevelyan coined for post Mutiny carpet-baggers like the indigo planters of Champaran). The 'White Mutiny' against the Ilbert Bill (1883) made this abundantly clear.

It was directly in response to these measures that Dr. Krishna Dhan Ghose took the unusual step of sending his three sons in 1879 to be educated in England to receive the proper training for the ICS exam.

Dr. Ghose was a naive dreamer. He didn't have the money to get the job done properly. The Tyyabjis did. But it wasn't till the Nineteen Twenties that one of their number opted for the ICS because dyarchy was in effect and thus a wealthy family gained by having a member in the Mandarin class. However, it must be said, the Tyyabjis were motivated by patriotism.

After his return to India in 1896, Ghose self-consciously contributed to the nineteenth-century modernizing “Bengal Renaissance.” He took up its indigenizing call for “[t]he return of India to her eternal self, the restoration of her splendor, greatness, triumphant Asiatic supremacy” as “the ideal of Nationalism,” and for the “strenuous reassertion of all that is noble and puissant in the blood it draws from such an heroic ancestry as no other nation can boast.”

Aurobindo was working for a truly great Prince- the Gaekwad of Baroda- who won the loyalty of his people by occasionally twisting the tail of the British lion. Employing Aurobindo, like employing Ambedkar, had a signalling value of a Pan Indian sort. That both had remarkable intellects was not the main concern. In the case of Ambedkar, the Gaekwad had to back down because the trade unionism of what we now call the 'intermediate class' was a more subtle and miasmic thing than the feudalism of the 'Sirdars' which Sir Tanjore Madhava Rao had curbed so as to restore Baroda's solvency.

In Baroda, Aurobindo quickly mastered Sanskrit but was not confident of his Bengali. Nevertheless he was a useful conduit to the Bengali Jugantar movement. His sentiments were not very different from those of Vivekananda.

Rather than wholly renouncing Greece and Rome in favor of indigenous classicism, however, Ghose continued to reexamine and reappropriate aspects of Victorian classicism.

That was his little foible for which he was readily forgiven because he was prepared to risk his neck for the National cause.

His radical journalism from the period immediately leading up to his incarceration sheds some light on the Homeric theme of Ilion: An Epic in Quantitative Hexameters. After Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal in 1905 in order to “split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule,” Ghose moved from provincial Baroda to the political spotlight in Calcutta.

The Hindu bhadralok cut their own throats by protesting this Partition. Forty years later, they realized the extent of their folly. Tagore, to his credit, foresaw the outcome and tried to warn his people. Aurobindo, knowing little of his own country, may be forgiven his romantic naivete and  'uchchvaas' bombast. Bear in mind that, like Enoch Powell- or Boris Johnson, come to that- Classical Studies had excised the faculty of judgment from his brain leaving in its stead a wholly mischievous garrulity.

Between 1906 and his arrest in 1908, he devoted himself to a revolutionary struggle for Indian self-rule. In opposition to the reformist Congress, he promoted both passive resistance and armed revolt. He served as one of the main authors of the radical news journal Bande Mataram, within whose articles and manifestos Greece and Rome held a prominent position.

Which is why it was widely regarded as puerile.

The dozen or so discussions of Greece and Rome in Bande Mataram do not simply function as a marker of the erudition or class background of its editors.

How could they? Dadhabhai Naoroji (who was born in 1825) was attending the Second International along with Rosa Luxembourg and Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky in 1904. Japan defeated Russia triggering a revolutionary atmosphere in that vast Empire. Young Bengalis were acutely aware of these developments. They were not so foolish as to think Homer and Virgil had anything to teach them. Even Herbert Spencer (or Harbhat Pense as he was known to the Maharashtrians) was passe. The only things that mattered were STEM subjects and contriving ways to make bombs and get weapons.

They also make explicit the politics of classical reference. Macaulay’s popular Lays of Ancient Rome, so reviled by Arnold, exemplified the colonial dimension of Victorian classicism with which Ghose and others engaged.

There was no such 'colonial dimension'. Gauri Vishvanathan made the thing up. Macaulay's essay on Milton might have some salience- it said it was better for a Nation to be poor and free than prosperous and in chains- but no one gave a toss about Ancient Rome and its great lays coz Young Bengal had better things to do than getting laid. Indeed, Aurobindo did not consummate his marriage.

Colonial classicism was essentially structured around the identification of British administrators with the Alexandrian and Roman imperial rulers of India.

Nonsense! The Raj was essentially structured around Mughal or other pre-existing administrative and fiscal mechanisms. That's why people employed by the Government of India had to pass exams in Indian languages in order to get salary increments and promotions. You were welcome to amuse yourself by playing polo, or translating Theocritus or anything else you liked but you gained nothing by it. However producing a scholarly translation of the Tirukural won you brownie points and maybe a post-retirement sinecure as a Lecturer at Kings- or later, SOAS- or something of that sort.

“I amused myself in India with trying to restore” poems about the founders of Rome, Macaulay explained

That was cool coz Macaulay was only in India to make a bit of money so as to return to British politics. It was a peculiarity of the House of Commons that a new Member could make a name for himself by an apt quotation from Virgil in his maiden speech. Thus F.E Smith gained fame by this attack on Churchill, then Under Secretary for the Colonies,
Mr. Speaker, it is easy for the Under-Secretary to come to the House and state in the debate on the Address that he attempted to confine the issue at the election to the single point of Cobdenism, to the single merits of free trade, and that he had therefore no responsibility for an incendiary campaign. To that I reply, proximus ucalegon ardebat, which I may venture to construe proximus, in an adjacent constituency; ucalegon, the hon. and learned gentleman [Mr. T. G. Horridge]; ardebat, was letting off Chinese crackers.

Smith, a barrister, was making fun of Churchill- a simple soldier who had been elected as a Tory in the khaki election but who had then defected to the Liberals, probably because he didn't know his Aeneid from his arsehole.

His ballads celebrated the emergence of a Roman imperial self and its triumph in majesty over the Hellenic empires it simultaneously sought to emulate.

Cowper's Boadicea was learned by heart by British kids of that period. Most would recognize at least one or two of these verses-

Rome for empire far renown’d,

    Tramples on a thousand states,

Soon her pride shall kiss the ground -

    Hark! the Gaul is at her gates.

Other Romans shall arise,

    Heedless of a soldier’s name,

Sounds, not arms, shall win the prize,

    Harmony the path to fame.

Then the progeny that springs

    From the forests of our land,

Arm’d with thunder, clad with wings,

    Shall a wider world command.

Regions Caesar never knew,

Thy posterity shall sway,

Where his eagles never flew,

None invincible as they.

Macaulay and Matthew Arnold represented the Liberalism of the restricted franchise. Their Classicism was bloodless and brooded increasingly upon that crassness, if not Class War, which must erase every bildungsburgertum as Paideia becomes a rationing device for jobs as School Inspectors or Government Clerks.

Churchill's romanticism, it is true, was constrained by his obligation to battle Macaulay on his own terms- the latter had greatly maligned the first Duke of Marlborough- and also to compensate for the deficiencies in his own education which Asquith type aesthetes openly sneered at. Still, had he inherited or married money, perhaps no such constraint would have obtained.

Nevertheless, the fact remains, mid Victorian Classicism was as dead as a dodo by the time Aurobindo entered College. Pater had turned Philology into something rich and strange. Ernest Dowson, who was a few years ahead of Aurobindo, mentions an Indian friend who introduced him to cannabis. Nehru, a few years later, still feels the tug of this pagan Greece and Cyrenaic Rome.

This romance was understood to be a metaphor for British imperial rule in India and its superseding, in turn, of the Roman template. His anthology ends with a ballad that celebrates with imperial spoils that include “The belts set thick with starry gem/ That shone on Indian kings.”

That's why Macaulay's poetry was condemned as puerile, if not wholly prosaic. It is only his utter want of historical judgment that permits his bile to break out into a lapidary brilliance. This 'sphota' of spleen is what is missing in Aurobindo's turgid tomes though it occasionally flashes forth in his letters.

The Bande Mataram’s classicism was strategic rather than constructive.

It was mere uchchvaas bombast.

It variously deployed and critiqued the romantic modes through which both British colonials and Bengali reformists represented their actions through recourse to Greco-Roman antiquity. In a debate spanning several issues, Ghose rejected the proposal that the Greek system of city-states could ever serve as a political model for a unified Indian nation (BM, 7:908). Although he consistently championed the Greek ideals of democracy and freedom, he did not conflate these specific ideas with a classical cultural unity. The relation of post-classical Greece to Rome served as a warning.

This shows Ghose's stupidity. Bengal had to be partitioned, at least from the Hindu point of view, because otherwise British rule would be replaced by Islamic government.

Muslims well knew that 'Rum'- i.e. Rome- meant Anatolia, where the Turks ruled over the Greeks.  Before then, under the the Emperors of Byzantium, Greek became the language of the largest surviving part of the Roman Empire. It was not just the 'pale Galilean' who prevailed, so had the polished Greek. Both left the actual fighting to virile barbarians.

Aurobindo, a Kayastha like Vivekananda, was troubled by a double anxiety- firstly that his hereditary Ars Dictaminis missed the mark, second that his people ought to have been, like Clive- as celebrated by the Kayastha, Niradh Chaudhri- more adept with the sword than the quill.

Certainly, Aurobindo's terrorism misfired. The wrong mark was hit. Barrister Pringle had been a friend to Bagha Jatin. His womenfolk were killed.

Equally, the Kaula Brahman Nehru effortlessly erases Aurobindo's traces, precisely because they are a carmen solutem, not by design, but by reason of being programmatically, for by a cretin, botched.

If [India] is to model herself on the Anglo-Saxon type she must first kill everything in her which is her own. If she is to be a province of the British Empire, part of its life, sharing its institutions, governed by its policy, the fate of Greece under Roman dominion will surely be hers. (BM, 7:1084-88)

Very true. F.E Smith would hire a Pundit to teach his sons Sanskrit.  Eventually, Westminster would be relocated to Bombay.

Ghose condemned “anglicized Bengalis” for leading “a nation of Greeks with polished intellects and debased souls, body and soul helplessly at the mercy of alien masters” (BM, 7:37).

How could anglicized Bengalis lead anything? They were 'helplessly at the mercy of alien masters.'

Ghose cited Arnold when mocking the Bengali reformists’ promotion of English Liberty, but rejected Arnold’s ideal of Hellenism.

This is meaningless. Arnold said Hellenism is seeing things as they really are while Hebraism is mindless obedience.

Lord Curzon’s division of Bengali Hindus and Muslims had led to a popular swadeshi movement to boycott British goods, and Ghose applauded “the obscure villages and towns of East Bengal” that had “flung aside the devices of the Greek and took on herself the majesty of Roman strength and valour” (BM, 7:892).

So what if the man was an idiot? He risked his neck and, later on, turned into a Swami. Divine Mother even got him to give up brandy and cigars. That's the important thing coz a tipsy Yogi, dropping his cigar, might set fire to his own dhoti and become a Mahasuttee instead of a Maharishi which would confuse the fuck out of everybody.

Ghose’s point was not to remap India onto the Romans but, again, to trouble the colonial mode of classical identification.

Ghose was an idiot babbling nonsense. This did not matter because he genuinely had risked his neck. A stupid guy who is hanged for the cause is as good a martyr as someone with a high IQ and a Doctorate in Nuclear Physics.

He represented Alexander the Great’s much-celebrated conquests of Asia as the introduction of “absolutism” into India, and British imperial rule in a similar vein (BM, 7:945)

 Whitey be devil! Kill Whitey!

The Greek ideas of freedom and democracy had penetrated the European mind and created the great impulse of democratic Nationalism which dominated Europe in the nineteenth century. . . . Imperialism had to justify itself to this modern sentiment and could only do so by pretending to be a trustee of liberty, commissioned from on high to civilise the uncivilized. 

There are still some academics who write this sort of shite. They don't get that Imperialism had to justify itself by turning a profit.

One effect of Ghose’s revolutionary writings, then, was to clarify the politics of the classical idiom in British India.

Clarify? This guy clarified something? What? Where? He was an pedant who had to study some stupid shite so as to keep the scholarship money his brothers needed. Being an idiot, or having studied stupid shite, is not a bad thing in itself. Idiots make good martyrs or, if death is denied them, decent enough Swamis so long as they lay off the brandy and cigars.

Classical reference was not a mere trapping of political discourse but rather, as he later elaborated, part of more insidious philological arguments concerning race, nation, language, and religion.

Insidious philological arguments are as effective as sidious ones- id est, not at all. The fellow might as well have talked of Numerology or Nostradamus.

His anticolonial manifesto, “The Doctrine of Passive Resistance” (1907), foreshadowed Ilion’s Homeric plot, proclaiming: “Our attitude to bureaucratic concessions is that of Laocoon: ‘We fear the Greeks even when they bring us gifts.’ Our policy is self-development and defensive resistance” (BM, 6:300).

This was true enough. But it was a stupid policy. Lawyers who made money could become Judges or otherwise influence Policy. So could Statisticians and Economists and Industrialists. Writing high falutin' nonsense was merely a displacement activity. The sharp tongue of satire or the muck raking of the journalist had its place as did patriotic effusions of the 'sarfaroshi ki tammana' type. So could romantic but readable tripe of the Sarojini Naidu, or later on, the Nehru type. But, what really mattered was Economic critique backed up by Statistics.

The rhetorical “gifts” of bureaucratic reform align the English with the Greeks and the Indians with the Trojan recipients of the wooden horse.

The truth is, bureaucratic reform meant municipal authorities would have a representative character which in turn meant that local taxation would go up. This is what stuck in the craw of the Indians. They preferred no Taxation to some Representation because they viewed their own with glowering eyes of suspicion.

Ghose’s Ilion: An Epic in Quantitative Hexameters structured the history of the Trojan War around this same metaphor. Like Bande Mataram’s Laocoon, Ilion’s Laocoon played an enlarged role in urging the Trojans back to war.
Ghose’s first draft of Ilion was the sixteen-page The Fall of Troy: An Epic, which bore the postscript: “Composed in jail, 1909, resumed and completed in Pondicherry, April and May 1910.”[42] In 1908 one of Ghose’s associates killed two British women with a bomb intended for a British official.

These were the womenfolk of Barrister Pringle Kennedy who was sympathetic to the Indians and who had sought to help Bagha Jatin. It was an own goal.

Ghose was amongst those charged and jailed. Although he was acquitted a year later in a highly publicized trial, his brother was found guilty and sentenced to death (later commuted). By Ghose’s own account, the year he spent in jail transformed his politics. Whilst in solitary confinement he received his first adeshas (commands from the Divine), instructing him to perform spiritual work on his release. He heard other voices, including that of the recently deceased spiritual leader Swami Vivekenanda. He experimented with yoga and fasting, and with what he called the “conventions of our senses,” for example, when bitten by red ants in jail, he learned to experience the pain as Ananda (bliss).[43] In this context of solitary spiritual upheaval, Ghose began composing the first hexameter lines of Ilion, and memorized them for more than a year.[44] Shortly after his release, he left revolutionary activism in British India for a new life of politicized spiritualism in French Pondicherry. He continued working on Ilion over the next four decades in his Pondicherry ashram. Only part of it was published with On Quantitative Meter, and it remained unfinished at the end of his life.

Veer Savarkar, too, wrote very long boring poems in jail. So what? The important thing is Aurobindo risked his neck and, death being denied, set up as a Swami. However, unlike Savarkar, he gained no great constituency within his own country because of his eccentric orientation towards a vanishing Europe.

Ilion lacks the ideological clarity and optimism of Bande Mataram. The action of Ilion hinges on Trojan deliberations over Achilles’s offer of peace or war after ten years of fighting (rather than on Achilles’s choice as to whether or not to return to war, as in the Iliad). In the opening book Achilles’s herald, Talthybuis, expands the Homeric world to include India, effectively aligning Troy with India.

Please don't quote Aurobindo, Madam Chin. Whitey might read it and think Asiatics are completely shit. Well, not all Asiatics- just us brown ones.

Not from the panting of Ares’ toil to repose, from the wrestle

Locked of hope and death in the ruthless clasp of the mellay

Alright, already, Madam Chin. We get it. The guy was gay. So what?

Leaving again the Trojan ramparts unmounted, leaving

Greece unavenged, the Aegean a lake and Europe a province.

Choosing from Hellas exile, from Peleus and Deidamia,

Choosing the field for my chamber of sleep and the battle for hearthside

I shall go warring on till Asia enslaved to my footsteps

Feels the tread of the God in my sandal pressed to her bosom.

Rest shall I then when the borders of Greece are fringed with the Ganges.

Rest shall I then when thoroughly buggered by Whitey who, in haste, left Troy unmounted.

In Achilles’s message, the Trojans face two possibilities: victory (“Europe a province”) or defeat (“Greece . . . fringed with the Ganges”). If we read Ilion in the context of colonial and anticolonial classicisms in British India, then the specter of the Greeks at the Ganges invokes both Alexandrian and British rule.

Demetrius did reach Patna but the Indo-Greeks were thrown back by Karevail of Kalinga. No acts of mass sodomization occurred.

Elsewhere it becomes clear that the Trojan War prefigures, rather than allegorizes, these later conflicts. Towards the end of Ilion, the slave Briseis tells Achilles of her dream in which she foretells both his death and the future return of Europeans to India.

But Briseis was taken by Agammemnon coz his own slave girl had died. That's what got Achilles riled in the first place.

Then three times I heard arise in the grandiose silence,--

grandiose? How fucking Babu was this idiot?

Still was the sky and still was the land and still were the waters,--

Echoing a mighty voice, “Take back, O King, what thou gavest;

Strength, take thy strong man, sea, take thy wave, till the warfare eternal

Need him again to thunder through Asia’s plains to the Ganges.

(I, 7.95)

Funnily enough, something very similar happened to me when I last encountered a grandiose silence. Mighty voices start echoing all over the place coz of the cyclical pattern of something or the other.

This notion of a cyclical pattern of war is made explicit.

So on earth the seed that was sown of the centuries ripened;

Europe and Asia, met on their borders, clashed in the Troad.

All over earth men wept and bled and labored, world-wide

(I, 8.98)

I suppose this might be meaningful in the Khilafat context.

The Trojan War becomes the “seed” of a perennial tragedy of strife between Europe and Asia.

For Islam, the conflict between 'Rum'- that is the Ottoman Caliphate- and the yet lighter skinned kaffirs- was not a 'perennial tragedy'. The Khilafat movement hoped then, as ISIS hopes now, to reverse the verdict of the Balkan Wars and to crush Christendom. Savarkar saw this and, realizing that Hindu India would be the next domino, changed his position- which is why he retains relevance. Aurobindo didn't even embrace Socialism preferring to set up as a Swami burbling about 'Supermind'.

There is a striking tension between Ilion’s embrace of the Homeric medium and its deep ambivalence toward the Homeric theme. The grim futility of war replaces the Homeric glorification of the hero’s beautiful death on the battlefield. Given Ghose’s commitment to finding political, spiritual, and poetic solutions to his contemporary war between Asia and Europe, Ilion presents a hermeneutic challenge. On the one hand, Ghose casts the Greeks in particularly unfavorable light. They welcome the Trojan choice of war with “the lust of the young barbarian nations” (I, 2.23) and their “nethermost promptings” (I, 7.90).

Forging a brittle peace by a common hatred and yearning.

Joyous they were of mood; for their hopes were already in Troya

Sating with massacre, plunder and rape and the groans of their foemen.

(I, 7.90)

One the other hand, the Trojans do not rise above the Greeks. Their quarrels and desires do not present them as a heroic ideal for their Indian progeny.

Indian progeny? It was the Romans, and even the Britons, who claimed Trojan descent.

Ilion borrows the Homeric imaginary as a dramatic space for internal debate, and insight and blindness, amongst Greeks and Trojans. It leaves us not only with the basic Homeric plot of Trojan defeat, but also with the puzzlingly pessimistic model of perennial conflict between Europe and Asia.
To explain Ilion’s classical imagery, literary critics have focused on the role of the “eastern” Amazon queen Penthesilea, arguing that she represents Durga or Kali (forms of the Mother Goddess) of Hindu myth.[46] Penthesilea does not appear in Homer, but later traditions celebrated her ultimately unsuccessful intervention on behalf of the Trojans, and the remorse of Achilles upon killing her.

According to Robert Graves, he also fucked her corpse.

Ilion’s original and final drafts gave her a new prominence and the unfinished epic ends while she is still alive. In the final, unfinished book 9 she single-handedly battles the Greeks on behalf of the Trojans (“Back, ever back reeled the Hellene host with Virgin pursuing./ Storm-shod the Amazon fought and she slew like a god unresisted”) (I, 9.123). Ghose may indeed have intended Penthesilea allegorically. This would reflect Ghose’s commitment throughout his creative and critical work to all-powerful female deities. It would also make a work filled with Greek gods more coherent within the spiritual idiom of his other works. However it is also worth noting that his manifesto for poetic composition, The Future Poetry, explicitly rejects the use of allegory on grounds that it over-intellectualizes poetry (FP, 36). If Kali is the deus ex machina resolution for Ilion’s (rather unheroic) Trojans, why then not simply introduce her in the way that he simply inserts India (the Ganges) and the “warfare eternal” between Europe and Asia into the Homeric world? (I, 7.95)

Why not indeed? Did not Granny go off to Gallipoli to defeat the ANZAC hordes? Ayah similarly dealt with Adolph Hitler. Throughout history, if our womenfolk are absent when we call for tea or samosas, it is not because they have gone to the market to buy dhania from the bania, but rather that they are engaged in 'warfare eternal' with Europe or Amrika.

If we look beyond classical allegory, might we reconsider the spiritual politics of the Ilion using Ghose’s own representation of his composition, namely, as “the solution for introducing the hexameter into English verse”?

Gandhi kept giving everybody enemas. Ghose and his hexameters did something similar to English verse. Why mention the cretin now?

The answer, I believe, has to do with renewed interest in the political aspect of prosody in the context of the British Freedom Struggle directed against Brussels.

Thus Madam Chin writes-

Recent scholarship on Victorian poetry has drawn attention to the social meanings of meter, especially as a symbol of English national culture. Meredith Martin, Yopie Prins, and others have illumined how nineteenth and early twentieth century English poets used metrical selection as well as content to perform competing patriotic ideologies.

I am sorry to say to Madam Chin that this is not scholarship. It is stupidity. On the other hand, Yopie Prins is not a made up name. The creature actually exists. As does this Meredith Martin. Apparently the good folk at Princeton are under the impression that England is a primitive patchwork of tribes whose bards use 'metrical selection' to forge Game of Thrones type alliances against the White Walkers or the Orcs or something of that sort.

Matthew Arnold (1822-88), to give a key example to be addressed below, promoted English literature pedagogy to civilize the nation’s restive working-classes, and Homeric hexameters as an ideal for a renewed English cultural identity.

Whom did he promote it to? Elinor Glyn? Marie Corelli?

With the rise of modernist poetry, Arnold’s metrical politics failed but we should not, as Martin has compellingly argued, accept the conventional evolutionary narrative of English meter from a world of regulated Victorian verse to the more metrically emancipated poetry associated with progress, expansion, and the welfare state]

So Martin is an utter cretin. But it teaches a non STEM subject at Princeton. What else could we expect?

Instead, a project of “critical prosody” should re-embed poetic form in the historical politics of meaning. It should show how meter meant different things to different communities in a longer metrical discourse.

I disagree. A project of 'critical prosody' should make you a better poet. Arnold wrote some good lines. Aurobindo did not. However, Aurobindo was ready to die for his country and, later on, was a well behaved Swami whose 'Divine Mother' ran a tight enough ship. Thus his samadhi must not be disturbed by a disinterring of his boneless, brainless oeuvre.

Tamara Chin is, I believe, Chinese American and, clearly, is industrious and unafraid to rush in where angels fear to tread. However her reliance on a cretinous type of scholarship causes her to write ludicrous nonsense about both Britain and India. Her paper ends thus-

...this essay has emphasized the anticolonial force of his particular attention to meter. The Future Poetry, On Quantitative Meter, and Ilion together elaborated the importance of British India to a metrical debate about English national identity.

Wow! Which of us knew there was a 'metrical debate' about our identity? How did a couple of gals at Princeton discover a thing which the natives were completely unaware of? Kipling and Chicken tikka masala and Peter Sellers and Attenborough's Gandhi may be said to have some salience in this regard. But that's as far as things go.

How do I know? I asked Priti Patel who immediately tweeted back 'fuck off back to Bharat you benighted wog- and please, Uncleji, deliver a bottle of Gangajal to my Nanima in Surat. It may smell like single malt but it is actually Gangajal. Ta ta'.

Come to think of it, the friend who directed my attention to Madam Chin's article may have been playing a prank on me. Chinese Americans are smart people. They don't believe that a nigger on death row can wield hexameters to civilize Whitey's national culture with Greek Paideia. The most the said nigger could do is sing the Blues.

Clearly only a satirist would write-

The incarcerated Ghose did not, as he might have, wield Ilion’s hexameters in an Arnoldian attempt to civilize English national culture with Hellenism.

 There is another possibility. Perhaps this Chin has drunk the Kool Aid and believes in Yogic powers.

Rather, the poet’s yogic exercise with the hexameter reoriented meter from questions of national identity towards a polyglot pursuit of the spiritual Mantra. This forward-looking Mantra thereby displaced the Indo-European philology as the meeting ground for Indian and European literary traditions.

Mantras should be short and euphonious. Aurobindo was cretinous and cacophonous. 'M'illumino d'immenso' is a mantra. Savitri is vacuous shite.

Ghose applied a spiritual philology to the hexameter. The hexameter was one metrical resource or potential amongst many for the Mantra of the future poetry. The Mantra, to recall, was the “poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality.” Only through the Mantra could the future poet-seer see and make others see the spiritual truth of things. The Mantra required, amongst other things, “a highest intensity of rhythmic movement.” This was not simply a question of finding the right meter, but on each occasion the “rhythmical soul-movement entering into the metrical form and often overflooding it” (FP, 19). The Future Poetry did not single out any meter as especially appropriate for the Mantra, any more than it specified poetic content. Likewise, On Quantitative Meter did not explicate its rules for the English hexameter as a shortcut to the Mantra. However, The Future Poetry made clear that certain meters had more potential than others. “War poetry and popular patriotic poetry” could stir the “the vital being in us like a trumpet or excite it like a drum. But after all the drum and the trumpet do not carry us far in the way of music” (FP, 22). Conversely, the greatest promise of Walt Whitman’s free verse (“the most Homeric voice since Homer”) emerged precisely when his “great metrical cadences” consciously or unconsciously approximated the Greek dithyramb and hexameter (FP, 165, 167). Ghose rejected the drumbeat of patriotic war poetry for Ilion in favor of the hexameter’s higher spiritual potential. Although few European poets and critics encountered his writings, Ghose’s metrical deliberations deserve greater recognition for proposing a cosmopolitan spiritual prosody binding colony and metropole.

Oh dear. Madam Chin doesn't know India became independent long ago. Warren Hastings, in 1818, said that the time was not distant when India and England would be unconnected in every way save through Trade and perhaps some friendly Cultural intercourse. Hastings underestimated British commercial capacity and Indian mental vacuity. However nobody in either India or England or anywhere else was so stupid as to think that unreadable poetry written in some meter or the other could bind anything together.

Aurobindo's spiritual achievement was to give up brandy and cigars. But his cacoethes scribendi proved more obstinate. Still the man was a patriot and did not incessantly rape his disciples. That's quite an achievement for a Swami. Arnold, too, did not disgrace himself by offering to wank on demand- like the tosser Ruskin. These may be small mercies but, in the context of our catastrophic Brexit, we must tally them up as victories, however provisional, of the Human Spirit over the all annihilating deluge, or pralaya, of that universal incontinence of which Aurobindo's oeuvre is but presage.