Sunday, July 05, 2026

Sri Aurobindo's Supermind represents a radical ontological break

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

samimasgoralijnu Nehru Dialogues presented the release of the book Thank You, Gandhi authored by Krishna Kumar at Jawahar Bhawan in New ...

A Shattered Dream? Nostalgia, Partisanship and the Studied Indifference Towards Democratization

Manish Thakur - Journal of Human Values, 2026
Hindutva. All the weapons in their intellectual arsenal are blunt and have failed to
serve them well so far: that Hinduism is much wider in scope than Hindutva … see if
they could be used to contain the euphoria around Hindutva: to discover a Kabir and …

Taking Krishna Kumar’s book Thank you, Gandhi as its point of engagement, this review essay critically examines the conflict of political values in post-Independence India. It presents a synoptic review of the defence of the Nehruvian India amidst the growing rise of Hindu nationalism. While highlighting the role of democratization in the political negotiation of competing ideological frameworks, it assesses the role of intelligentsia in furthering sectional interests in the name of high nationalism. After all, nation-building is an endless contestation and everyday plebiscite over the hegemonic values of our times. And, democracy remains one of the most potent mechanisms to help us choose one set of values over others. 

[Democracy is not a single dramatic overthrow; it is a slow, stubborn, repeating insistence. It bends under pressure with real and sometimes painful frequency. It does not, over any meaningful stretch of time, break.] https://countercurrents.org/2026/07/democracy-has-a-life-of-its-own/

5 Aug 2025 — Thank You, Gandhi, a book blending novel and reflection, portrays conversations between two friends and Gandhi, exploring India's identity ...
This is a richly insightful and deeply moving book about what Gandhi means to India and the world today. Thank You, Gandhi.Thank You, Gandhi

Krishna Kumar - Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 30 Sept 2024 - Fiction - 224 pages

When a bureaucrat who witnessed the Bhopal gas tragedy firsthand passes away from Covid, he leaves behind his oldest friend and an unfinished book.

An impassioned lament, a nostalgic tribute and a poignant ode to boyhood, Thank You, Gandhi is a unique blend of fiction and nonfiction, past and present, memoir and social commentary, and ultimately an uncategorizable book that pays homage to the enduring legacy of the father of our nation. At its epicentre sits the profound bond between K and Munna whose lives are inextricably intertwined with India’s tumultuous history and Gandhi’s teachings.

The ingenious metafictional device of the book inside the book becomes a timely conversation between two nations, one of the past and one of the present. When K pieces together Munna’s manuscript, feeling honour-bound to complete it, he discovers his late comrade all over again. Even as he grapples with India’s complex political landscape and the challenges of upholding Gandhi’s ideals in a rapidly changing world, the bifocal lenses of Munna’s experiences and his own introspections serve as a turbulent reckoning.

A novel unlike any other, Thank You, Gandhi takes readers into a liminal space beyond the confines of genre and invites them to confront the difficult questions of where we are and how we got here through a layered and rare exploration of male camaraderie.

https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Thank_You_Gandhi.html?id=UzbTEQAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y

27 Dec 2025 — Krishna Kumar's Thank You, Gandhi is a short narrative with epic dimensions. For those born around the time of India's independence, it will ...
13 Jan 2026 — Gandhi's Hind Swaraj—the book in which Gandhi's vision of freedom and happiness for India is best described.
21 Jul 2025 — The book explores the violent nature of modern governments and India's effort to resist this is fading, leading to potentially serious consequences.
Manindra Nath Thakur teaches courses on Indian Intellectual Traditions and Radical Movements in India at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru ...
Manindra Nath Thakur's Hindi book Gyan ki Rajniti (Politics of Knowledge) examine the Indian modernity debate. Thakur explores the hegemonic power of the West
26 Jun 2022 — Manindra Nath Thakur, the author, challenges the Hindutva argument that whatever existed in India in the past can only be understood in Hindu ...

16 Sept 2025 — The book highlights the unresolved tensions between the two ideologies and their implications for India's future. 'Hindutva and Hind Swaraj' ...


[PDF] SPIRITUAL NATIONALISM IN LIGHT OF SRI AUROBINDO

S Mukherjee
… It is true that more than half of rishi Aurobindo’s life was spent in humanistic
thought and … Rishi Aurobindo played a leading role in Indian nationalism early in
life and he did not accept … In establishing unity among the entire human race, Sri …

[PDF] The Subtle Body as Ontological Stratum: A Cross-Traditional Inquiry

MA Kazlev, C Sonnet - 2026
… The Blavatsky-Theon-Aurobindo tradition cluster receives particular attention at
the higher strata, where its granularity has no cross-… Mirra Alfassa was Theon's
student in occultism for several years before later joining Aurobindo and becoming …
Within the Blavatsky-Theon-Aurobindo tradition cluster, the region corresponding to 
Stratum IV is mapped with a granularity that has no equivalent elsewhere. Blavatsky's 
schema of seven principles, inspired by Samkhya and Vedanta, assigns Manas (mind) a 
central and complex role: higher Manas, oriented toward the spiritual, is distinguished 
from lower Manas, oriented toward the vital and personal. The causal body (karana 
sharira) is the vehicle of the higher Manas and the repository of the karmic essence that 
persists across incarnations (Blavatsky 1888). 
Theon's Cosmic Philosophy develops a detailed schema of states and planes that, while 
structurally homologous to Blavatsky's account, represents an independent investigation 
— or rather, a parallel stream within what appears to be a shared tradition cluster — 
with its own distinctive terminology and emphases (Theon 1907). A clarification is 
warranted here: while Theon's system and Aurobindo's account of the higher planes are 
broadly homologous (it's not clear how much borrowing there was, if any. Mirra Alfassa 
was Theon's student in occultism for several years before later joining Aurobindo and 
becoming the Mother of the Aurobindo Ashram), they are not identical. Aurobindo's 
Supermind, in particular, represents a radical ontological break — a truth-consciousness 
that mediates between the upper hemisphere of Sachchidananda and the lower 
hemisphere of mind, life, and matter — that Theon's schema does not fully parallel in 
the same way (Aurobindo 1977). Aurobindo's own account distinguishes a series of 
planes of mind above the ordinary rational intellect — the higher mind, the illumined 
mind, the intuitive mind, the overmind — each characterised by a distinct quality of 
cognition and a correspondingly subtler vehicle. The overmind is for Aurobindo the 
highest individual attainment short of the supramental transformation: the plane of the gods, of universal archetypes, and of the highest mystical states available within the 
existing evolutionary framework. 
The philosophical significance of Aurobindo's schema is considerable. His graded 
account of the higher mind planes demonstrates that Stratum IV is not a single 
homogeneous level but a complex region with multiple distinguishable sub-strata — a 
finding that explains why traditions working at lower resolution either conflate these 
levels or omit them entirely.

[PDF] Deceptive Gurus and Babas in Anuradha Roy's Sleeping on Jupiter

SK Misra, S Shishodia - The Voice of Creative Research, 2026
Religious hypocrisy has deep roots in Indian society. It is widely spread throughout
the entire spectrum of society, from the top to the lower rungs. Anuradha Roy’s novel
Sleeping on Jupiter depicts deceptive gurus and babas. Recently, these things have …

[PDF] Integrating the Concept of Brahmacharya into the Modern Education System

R Majhi, E Islam, P Dixit
In today’s world, the modern system of education has made a significant change in
the learning environment with technical progress. Alongside this success, pupils
face lots of problems such as anxiety, lack of attention, emotional instability, and lack …

National Education Policy, 2020: The Colonial Maintenance of Indian Nation and State

S Karmakar - Transforming Education with India's National Education …, 2026
Although the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 employs the rhetoric of “holistic,”
“multilingual,” and “Indian knowledge,” its structural foundations continue to reflect a
colonial educational framework. The policy reinforces centralized governance …

[PDF] Thematic Analysis of Swami Vivekananda's Poetic Works

AP Singh, R Trivedi
This paper offers a thematic analysis of Swami Vivekananda’s (1863-1902) English
poetry–a body of work that until now has been neglected in scholarship on Indian
English literature. Although his philosophy, public speeches and religious teachings …

[PDF] Dissolving Consciousness Dogmatism

NM Aliman
Dogmatists employing easily forgeable notions of intelligence have spread the
repeated credo that intelligence and consciousness must necessarily correspond to
two fundamentally different, entirely unrelated concepts and declared the ignorance …

[PDF] Goodness cannot flower in the field of fear

J Krishnamurti
Untitled Page 1 Page 2 In all our schools the educator and those responsible for the
students, whether in the classroom, on the playing field or in their rooms, have the
responsibility to see that fear in any form does not arise. The educator must not …

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