The Abject Body and the Eternal Consciousness: the Human and the Non-Human Interface in Sri Aurobindo’s Karakahini by Subham Dutta

Sri Aurobindo’s memoir of the prison, Karakahini, has received very little critical attention. Looking at the voluminous range of his works on poetry, poetic criticism, philosophy and politics, one often tends to ignore a text like Karakahini, which seems to lend an alternative dimension to his thoughts. Sri Aurobindo’s politics is stridently anti-colonial and against its judiciary and materialist bias. His poetics remains replete with spiritual imagery and thoughts—distinctly articulating an urge for a cultural rootedness and identity. Although written in English, they follow a model of transcultural poetics, which justifies his belonging to multiple literary and cultural traditions. The cultural and national imaginary that impregnates Sri Aurobindo’s poetics and politics rests firmly on an anthropocentric discourse. This paper delves deeper into his autobiographical memoir to consider whether there is any departure from the anthropocentric bias in Sri Aurobindo’s Karakahini. 

Being born in an aristocratic family in 1872, Sri Aurobindo’s childhood was predominantly spent in England. Understandably, apart from some liberal, democratic affinities that he had in England or his association with an anti-colonial group namely Lotus and Dagger, his upbringing happened in a European setting where he felt an acute urge to return to his native land. The poems of his early career tellingly evoke this sense of loss and an affective pull towards the motherland. Since he was displaced quite early from India, this affective pull was predominantly mediated by imagination rather than memory. What is striking about Sri Aurobindo’s vision of India is in his early poetics is the constant reference to the divinization of the divinity of the land. 

           Karakahini, being published in 1909, remains part of his nationalist struggle built around cultural and national identity formation. The formation of this national identity was intrinsically related to a humanist episteme with an anthropocentric, culturalist bias. There are two questions that this paper seeks to explore: firstly, how Karakahini systematically departs from the anthropocentric bias that has been intrinsic to Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and politics, and second how can re-think the relationship between human and the non-human vis-à-vis Sri Aurobindo’s conceptual paradigms. Karakahini in 1909 arrives as a watershed moment in Sri Aurobindo’s literary and political career. The point that needs to be understood here is whether it comes as a radical departure from the conventional model of Aurobindonian negotiation or as a continuation of the interplay between the human and the non-human in Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts.           

Despite a strong commitment towards individual action and its transformative potential, the teleology of Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness rests its focus fundamentally on the dynamics of the human mind. The prioritization of the mind over the body places Sri Aurobindo’s early writings within in a Husserlian tradition where consciousness is determined by the phenomenology of experience and its intentionality. However, Karakahini deviates from this conventional troping of the self as the sole agent of consciousness. Instead, what constitutes Sri Aurobindo’s subjectivity in Karakahini is an acute realization of pain. As a result, the embodied experience plays an instrumental role in shaping Sri Aurobindo’s narration in the text.   Karkahini is a text written in Bengali. Interestingly, it departs from the conventional ways of looking at Sri Aurobindo. While Aurobindo as a poet, remains highly obsessed with imaginary literature and as a political critique remains a committed observer of the social reality, in Karakahini, there is a noticeable shift in Sri Aurobindo’s narrative. 

Before we delve into Karakahini, it is pertinent to explore how the question of alterity remains embedded in Sri Aurobindo’s ideological discourse. For an ‘integral’ thinker like Sri Aurobindo, literature, politics, philosophy, spirituality do not remain isolated or segregated by the laws of discursive formation. Rather, he traces a unified epistemic assemblage between them where the political is coterminous with the spiritual, and the ontological remains in a symbiotic relationship with the metaphysical. The search for a divine spirit that was so integrally embedded in his poetic registers became his lifelong obsession. It plays a pivotal role in structuring his politics as well. While in his poetics, India emerges as a spiritually binding imagined community, in his politics one finds a persistent quest for that spiritually binding aspect.

The national and the cultural imaginary of his poetics seem to share a close relationship with the materiality of his politics, the line along which Sri Aurobindo wanted to conceptualizate the image of India. This leads to his conceptualization of the nation as “Bhawani”—the embodiment of inner strength. While Sri Aurobindo’s poetics evocatively invokes natural imagery and imbues spiritual qualities within them, in his politics, one finds the articulation of selfhood where ideological merges into the search of a cosmic union. Even without getting into the gendered implications of this phraseology, it can certainly be said that Bharat Mata links the affective conception of motherhood and a political imaginary with a set of beliefs and attributes. Thus, it politicizes the affective and departs from the conventional ways of his representational politics.

In Sri Aurobindo’s romanticization of the space and the conceptualization of a national imaginary, one finds a curious amalgamation of the human and the non-human or extra-human forces. His poetry is replete with spiritual imagery. His politics can be seen in two fundamental ways: at one level structures itself around the notion of an affective unity among the sparse and heterogeneous group of Indian citizens. At another, it grounds itself in a futuristic direction leading to the emancipation of humanity from the native and the colonialist dogmas and practices. Structurally, Sri Aurobindo’s imbrication of politics and spirituality emanated from a goal of bringing the common populace under a common nationalistic rubric to lend it a proper shape and guiding principles. As historians like Sartori, Southward points out that the spiritual imagery was discursively embedded in Sri Aurobindo’s cultural and political registers. At one level, it acted as a departure from the ethnocentric bias of European nationalism; at another, it enunciated a type of resistance through the evocation of an alternative cultural and political idiom, remaining within the fold of the colonial governmentality.

This space of resistance stems from a journey from the ‘symbolic’ or the linguistic world and arrives at a world of the ‘real’ that refuses to be co-opted by any kind of symbolization. There are several gradations of consciousness in Sri Aurobindo. It is certainly an entry-point to this politics but in its ultimate turn it belongs to a realm of ex-cess which refuses any form of categorization. Prathama Banerjee in her recent book on the Elementary Aspects of the Political, interestingly raises a point that encapsulates the relationship between Sri Aurobindo’s politics, which forecloses any instrumentalization: 

Aurobindo, like Bankim, repeatedly invokes shakti, a term approximating “force” but distinct in its figuration from the force of mechanics. Force here is God. I am careful to not say, as one ordinarily would, that this is a metaphor or a superficial religious gloss on the secular scientific fact of force. Instead, taking shakti at face value, I reckon seriously with the proposition that force here is indeed god. Force here is a nonhuman or extra human phenomenon, which is impossible to harness as an instrument of human action. It is precisely this resistance to instrumentalization that makes force politically efficacious (81).

Banerjee’s argument is quite interesting. It goes against the reading of a strong anthropocentric bias in Sri Aurobindo. Instead, it questions the human and the non-human duality and argues how they co-constitute each other. Banerjee further argues that how Sri Aurobindo’s recognition of a friendship with the divine opens up a new space of sociality that “dangerously disrupts the norms of sociality” (82). Deconstructing the relationship between the material household of “graded inequalities” and “desire”, Sri Aurobindo forges a link between the material and the divine, in which the inequalities are (dis) placed beyond the human control: “To engage these larger forces, then, is to both inhabit and refute household life, that is, to admit to both life’s animation (in love, devotion, power, and desire) and its limits (in death, suffering, and meaninglessness)” (83).

           Sri Aurobindo’s experimentation with this type of symbolism questions the rigorousness of the human and the non-human binary. It also recognizes the non-human alterity to be an essential part of human life. The interplay between the human and the non-human shapes the aesthetics of transcendence in Sri Aurobindo. Interestingly, Sri Aurobindo’s teleology of transcendence remains premised on the concept of ‘evolution’ and ‘involution.’ Quite like Hegel, in Sri Aurobindo’s schema too, one finds a strong presence of the universal consciousness. However, the universality of Sri Aurobindo is not measured by the cartography of reason. Instead, he posits consciousness to be a “supramental awareness”—; “identifying Being and Consciousness with Supreme Bliss” (Ananda) (Odin 180). Going beyond the onto-phenomenology of consciousness Sri Aurobindo argues that 

… [a]ll phenomena, being particularized manifestations of the Absolute as Saccidananda, must exhibit three general elements, the ontological, the epistemological and the axiological, or the existential, logical, and aesthetic-value, aspects, corresponding to Sat, Cit, and Ananda respectively (Odin 180). 

Sri Aurobindo’s conceptualisation of the human self is trialectical, where consciousness appears as an intermediary or a gateway to the supramental awareness. This entire process takes place in the evolving routes of consciousness mediated by what Sri Aurobindo calls an ‘involution-evolution’ model. Notably, in the Aurobindonian eschatology, the ‘evolution’ and the ‘involution’ work in tandem recognizing the presence of an unknowable and uncontainable ‘other’. The evolution of individuals thereby becomes possible only through the ‘activation’ of the spiritual ‘other’ within the ‘self.’ Thus, the relationship between the spiritual ‘other’ and the ‘physical’ self remains perched on a paradoxical relationship where the ‘other’ determines the positionality of the self, both by remaining within and going beyond it. The recognition of this strong extra-human and extra-terrestrial forces negotiates the alterity of Sri Aurobindo’s thought or what he calls lila: 

[I]f we look at World-Existence rather in its relation to the self-delight of eternally existing being, we may regard, describe and realise it as Lila, the play, the child’s joy … perpetually inexhaustible, creating and re-creating Himself for the sheer bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation, Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground (The Life Divine 102-103).    

The presence of the metaphysical or the suprasensible entity determines the trajectory of the human selfhood. In a way, it also underlines the inherent self-sufficiency of the human self and renders it as a liminal intermediary between the ontological and the divine. The process of involution and evolution takes place through a process of human action, the doctrine of Karma and the subsequent intervention of the non-human into the human world. However, it is interesting and ironical at the time that Sri Aurobindo’s conceptualisation of the divine ‘other’ takes an anthropomorphic dimension, quite like Rabindranath’s Jiban Devta. 

In keeping with this model of consciousness, Sri Aurobindo hypothesizes the concept of a leader in his nationalist discourses. The messianic presence of the hero brings in a salvational hope for the humanity. Its ambition is marked by a spiritual inclination towards the emancipation of humanity from the shackles of colonialism and its possessive individualism. The presence of spirituality in his early poetry places Sri Aurobindo within a romantic tradition of excess which advocates the transcendental elevation of man into a greater being or the descent of a greater being into the fold of humanity—where two horizons will meet. Even his thrust on the idea of Shakti in his political writings calls for the activation of the self in light of a greater force or a greater being that lies beyond. This journey beyond the human—remaining within the corporeal self from the realm of ontology to metaphysics- leads to what I ague as the transhumanization of the human self in Sri Aurobindo. The supermanhood of Sri Aurobindo is processed through the evolution and the emergence of man into a new aura of introspection and development. This search for a new aura of supermanhood squarely places Sri Aurobindo within in a schema that calls for the articulation of a space that lies beyond the human and the corporeal world of action and the world of colonial biopolitics.

.          Karakahini is a retrospective account of Sri Aurobindo’s prison life. It commences with the account of his arrest on 1st May 1908. It brings together the brutish torture that he had encountered in the prison life and also his resistance towards the co-optive and the crippling policies of the colonial judiciary. In truth, a retrospectives account sieved through the meandering alleyways of memories always takes a political dimension. Sri Aurobindo’s narrative in Karakahini unlike an ordinary memoir foregrounds a stable narratorial self and the teleology of transformation and resistance. As a result, the narration does not verge on the affective experientiality or the treacherous fluidity of memory. Instead, it establishes the presence of a coherent narratorial self and portrays a journey of his evolution from a prisoner into a pilgrim. The liminal prisoner and the body subject to colonial repression emerge as an autonomous self that articulates its ethical and cultural alterity. The narrative of Karakahini quite strategically locates the performativity of the self and re-evaluates the human and the non-human binary. 

Karakahini, interestingly, combines the phenomenology of selfhood and an ontological reflection on the body. The body has always been an abstract signifier in Sri Aurobindo, especially in his poetic and political discourses. In the early works, Sri Aurobindo, there is a Descartesian distinction between the body and the mind. Although Sri Aurobindo stresses the necessity of cultivating Shakti as part of developing an anti-colonial self-fashioning, Shakti remains more of a spiritual force than a physical force. The development of a spiritually charged nation mediated by an inherent ethical consciousness—remains intrinsic to his poetics. As a result, his early poetics draws an ontological distinction between the body and the mind with a persistent focus on the intentionality of consciousness rather than the positionality of the being-in-the world. 

Karakahini offers a topography of the prison space. It recounts how Sri Aurobindo was incarcerated within a set-up that scarcely had any relation to the outside world as a prisoner. It clearly invokes the vignettes of the Foucauldian panopticon where the deviant body was observed and regulated by the panopticon surveillance: 

My solitary cell was nine feet long and five feet in width; it had no windows, in front stood strong iron bars; this cage was my appointed abode. Outside was a small courtyard, with stony grounds, a high brick wall with a small wooden door. On top of that door, at eye level, there was a small hole or opening. After the door had been bolted the sentry peeped, from time to time, in order to find out what the convict was doing. (14-15)

The prison of Sri Aurobindo is recurrently equated with a “Cage” in the narrative which brings to the fore how the human body was ‘animalized’ or ‘de-humanized’ in the prison. Sri Aurobindo’s topography of the prison experience comes with a realization of repressive state-apparatus of the imperial machinery and also with the recognition of the materiality of pain that was absent in his politico-spiritual discourse. The prisoner under the regulation of the colonial ontology, being stripped of its agency is reduced into, what can be called an “abject” condition (Fredriksson). Fredriksson, in an essay describes the carceral space as a Gothic space which challenges the borders between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the self:

While firmly cementing a border between itself and the space around it, the hole dissolves the borders between inside and outside within itself. The lights are unavoidable, “present even when you close your eyes”, visible through your eyelids it “throbs away in your mind” (Abbott 1981:29). The space thus seeps in; defying bodily borders and becoming coextensive with the mind of the inhabitant. Even if closing your eyes could shut the light out, it would do nothing to stave of the smell of the place from entering your nose. Since these lights are never extinguished, you cannot tell night from day. The only way to estimate the time spent in this space is by counting the number of times you have been fed. There is nothing on the walls to inspire one’s imagination, and there is no toilet, bed, or running water. Further adding to, and perhaps the most important for, the particular atmosphere of this space is the floor. It tilts; shifting one’s balance as it inclines towards the centre of the room. At the centre, there is a hole for waste disposal from which stains radiate outward; creeping across the floor, reaching for the room’s inhabitant. While it asserts borders, as an isolating space apart from the ordinary, the hole is ambiguous as a site of boundary maintenance in that it also dissolves borders. (Fredriksson) 

For Fredriksson, this constant pressure on the human self and its segregation from the outside world “abjectifies” the prison space, in which the ontology of the prisoner is marked by their “ejected object” (Fredriksson). Thus, the apparently stable dialectic between the subject and the object gets systematically erased. The erasure of subjectivity under the assault of repressive state-apparatus leads to the rise of a material “abject” that mediates the subject-object relationship. This topography of the carceral space sounds uncannily similar to Sri Aurobindo’s narration in Karakahini: “Attached bathrooms are, I know, oftentimes, a part of western culture, but to have, in a small cell, a bedroom, dining room, and w.c rolled into one—that is what is called too much of a good thing (17).”

What is recurrently narrated in Karakahini is the singularity of the prison experience and how the narrator was entirely stripped of a contact with the world outside. The issue of retaining the autonomy of the self was totally in jeopardy. It was the materiality of the pain and the food that differentiated the prisoner’s life from a dead person. This life-in-death experience of the prisoner is coupled with a narration that constantly offers a resistance to this narrative of suffering in Karakahini. Despite the afflictions and the brutish tortures that he had suffered in the prison, he hails it as a space of metamorphosis, rather than a space of de-humanization: “It would have been more appropriate to speak of a year’s living in a forest, in an ashram or hermitage…The British prison was that Ashram” (2). It is quite strange and curious at the same time that Sri Aurobindo hails the British prison as Ashram, space of transformation or metamorphosis. Interestingly, this metamorphosis is processed through his encounter with “being” as the “other”, in which the “being” is stripped off its metaphysical “aura”.   

Even though Sri Aurobindo’s thought remains premised on an interface between the human and the extra human forces, as pointed out by Prathama Banerjee, the extra human or the non-human has always been presented in an anthropocentric light in Sri Aurobindo. However, in Karakahini, there is a departure from the anthropocentric bias of Sri Aurobindo. The uncanny, intrusive presence of the unfamiliar and the grotesque in the prison life leads to a different form of self-realization for the prisoner: 

As I went on doing like this sometimes the prison ceased to appear to be a prison at all. The high wall, those iron bars, the white wall, the green leaved tree shining in sunlight, it seemed as if these commonplace objects were not unconscious at all, but they were vibrating with a universal consciousness, they loved me and wished to embrace me, or so I felt. Men, cows, ants, birds are moving, flying, singing, speaking, yet all is Nature’s play. (Karkahini 47)

This recognition of the presence the divine or the universal consciousness within the fold of the prison life seems to liberate Sri Aurobindo’s thought from an anthropocentric, anthropogenic bias. It is a state of what Sri Aurobindo calls “Knowledge-by-identity”, in which the distinction between the subject and the object becomes porous. The pure, non-human intentionality, instead, mediates the relationship between the subject and the object. From this perspective, in this state of consciousness, identity achieves a sense of plasticity through the relationship and recognition of a different ontology of prison that remains both within and beyond the humanist fold of negotiation. 

The animalized body perceives a symbiotic relationship between human and non-human agents like Cows, birds, ants. The way the autobiographical narration embeds the human and the non-human agents within the fold of a co-constitutive network—indicates a turn beyond the anthropocentric cartography of the prison. The bare life of the prison, the singularity of its experience and the narrative- reconstitution of the subjecthood accord the prisoner an agency to “resist” the “prison” by expressing “a disavowal, seeking ways of engaging the prison without hardening the carapace of its representation.” (Armstrong and Jefferson 244). This agency is paradoxically achieved through a departure from the anthropocentric bias with the simultaneous recognition and the urge for a journey beyond the “animalized” body: “A complete submission to the body is what constitutes the animal state, while in the conquest of the body and the effort at inner freedom lies man’s manhood. (79).”

Karakahini seems to be an entry point to the social thinker Sri Aurobindo, who conceptualises an inclusive network of harmony between humans, animals, and lifeless entities. Although his principal thrust remains on human consciousness, nevertheless this consciousness does not remain confined to the human sphere alone. The “Psychiasation” or the sublimation of consciousness happens through an encounter with the non-human unfamiliar which revises the cultural imaginary of Sri Aurobindo in the post-Pondicherry phase. Many of his writings and The Mother’s writings in this phase are replete with references to the animal having ‘Psychic beings’ and layers of transformation. Thus, Sri Aurobindo develops a new route of consciousness through Karakahini where the human and the non-human are involved in a symbiotic relationship, continually testing and dissolving the anthropocentric hierarchies.