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The soul of Britannia
- as published in the 'Letters Page' of Auroville Today, September
1997. The article is written by Judith, a longtime British
Aurovilian.
I was really impressed by your edition of June
'97 on Human Unity and the quality of the articles on the nation
souls of five great nations. It would be interesting to see this
series continued.
As a Briton, the reflections of my fellow
countrymen were deeply thought provoking. My first reaction was to
be rather shocked that they saw themselves as English rather than
British and England as the nation. I do not think that would strike
our Welsh and Scottish brethren as modest charm but as typical
Sassenach gall.
As I read in the concluding paragraph of
Alan's article, "The Bulldog and the Gentleman: What makes the
English English?" (AVT #101), "I don't think England is
one of the great nation souls. Just as Britain itself is a land of
modest scale, modest charm, so our strength is more in the middle
region of pragmatism and ethics than idealism and spiritual
discovery," I had an overwhelming feeling that we were not
seeing the wood for the trees and our soul searching had not quite
grasped a profound significance.
When I look at the modern world so totally
transformed in the last 300 to 400 years from anything that preceded
it within known history, I cannot think of any major secular
idea-force which did not fist arise, if only in seed-form, within
those island shores, or any people whose culture and society has not
been turned upside down by them, even if many have rooted and
flourished more fully elsewhere.
Britain first united as a nation centuries
before the rest of Europe woke up to the ideal of nationalism and it
was there that the germ of the ideal of democracy first emerged, her
revolution preceding the French one by more than 150 years. Nor
should we forget that it was the direct ideological descendants of
the Roundheads who a hundred years later dumped the tea in Boston
harbour and authored that extraordinary Declaration of Independence,
to teach another uppity English king the limits of his power.
Britain was the first nation to throw off the
yoke of feudalism and replace it with scientific agriculture and
industrialisation. As a consequence she pioneered urbanisation,
banking, capitalism, socialism and can even lay half a claim to
birthing communism. It was Britain that evolved bureaucratic
organisation and first developed a civil service, a police force, a
post office. It was Britain that championed the abolition of
slavery, who first banned child labour and introduced compulsory
elementary education for both boys and girls. The genius of Isaac
Newton, Adam Smith and Charles Darwin revolutionised the basic
paradigm of western culture and society.
Using world-wide trade as her arm of conquest,
Britain spread her ideas, her language, her inventions and her
religion, for she always was firmly convinced she had God on her
side, to the four corners of the globe. And as her influence spread
like lava from a gigantic volcano, she touched the souls of the
nations and forced them to awake. She aroused Great Mother India
from her profound slumbers and brow-beat her into taking up again
the burden of her transforming spiritual destiny. It could not be
haphazard chance that Sri Aurobindo spent his youth in Britain and
there took his first tentative steps on his path to the Supermind.
While searching within for an image of the
British nation soul, I was incredulous to find myself face to face
with Britannia, seated on her throne, armed with her shield of
faith, her spear of aspiration and her helmet of indomitable
courage, looking out with clear brow and far-seeing eye, across the
seas the surround her. A female soul, a warrior soul, more akin to
Durga than to Lakshmi. Not a comfortable soul to live with.
Materialistic, pragmatic, ethical, definitely; small and of modest
charm, most definitely not. And perhaps that is why she is so hard
for us to look at. For now that the great outpourings of her
puissance are exhausted, it is we that have to confront to the earth
shaking consequences of our nation having, so arrogantly but so
wholeheartedly, followed her Dharma.
As modern Britain, still leader of her
world-wide Commonwealth, carries her newly multi-racial people into
a united Europe, struggling to find her rightful place in the global
society to which she gave birth, the British in Auroville can offer
to the quest for an actual living human unity the very important
discovery that pragmatism is mankind's most powerful and effective
tool for transformation. But someone else will have to bring the
gentler gift of modest charm.
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