The Asiatic RoleSri Aurobindo
Bande Mataram
Early Political Writings. 1890 — May 1908
Bande Mataram. April 9, 1908
The Asiatic Role
The genius of the Hindu is not for pure action, but for thought and aspiration
realised1 in action, the spirit premeditating before the body obeys the inward command.
The life of the Hindu is inward and his outward life aims only at reproducing the motions of his spirit.
This intimate relation of his thought and his actions is the secret of his perpetual vitality.
His outward life, like that of other nations, is subject to growth and decay, to periods of greatness and periods of decline, but while other nations have a limit and a term, he has none.
Whenever death claims his portion, the Hindu race takes refuge in the source of all immortality, plunges itself into the fountain of spirit and comes out renewed for a fresh term of existence.
The elixir of national life has been discovered by India alone.
This immortality, this great secret of life, she has treasured up for thousands of years, until the world was fit to receive it.
The time has now come for her to impart it to the other nations who are now on the verge of decadence and death.
The peoples of Europe have carried material life to its farthest expression, the science of bodily existence has been perfected, but they are suffering from diseases which their science is powerless to cure.
England with her practical intelligence, France with her clear logical brain, Germany with her speculative genius, Russia with her emotional force, America with her commercial energy have done what they could for human development, but each has reached the limit of her peculiar capacity.
Something is wanting which Europe cannot supply.
It is at this juncture that Asia has awakened, because the world needed her.
Asia is the custodian of the world's peace of mind, the physician of the maladies which Europe generates.
She is commissioned to rise from time to time from her ages of self-communion, self-sufficiency, self-absorption and rule the world for a season so that the world may come and sit at her feet to learn the secrets she alone has to give.
When the restless spirit of Europe has added a new phase of discovery to 
the evolution of the science of material life, has regulated politics, rebased society, remodelled law, rediscovered science, the spirit of Asia, calm, contemplative, self-possessed, takes possession of Europe's discovery and corrects its exaggerations, its aberrations by the intuition, the spiritual light she alone can turn upon the world.
When Greek and Roman had exhausted themselves, the Arab went out from his desert to take up their unfinished task, revivify the civilisation of the old world and impart the profounder impulses of Asia to the pursuit of knowledge.
Asia has always initiated, Europe completed.
The strength of Europe is in details, the strength of Asia in synthesis.
When Europe has perfected the details of life or thought, she is unable to harmonise2 them into a perfect symphony and she falls into intellectual heresies, practical extravagances which contradict the facts of life, the limits of human nature and the ultimate truths of existence.
It is therefore the office of Asia to take up the work of human evolution when Europe comes to a standstill and loses itself in a clash of vain speculations, barren experiments and helpless struggles to escape from the consequences of her own mistakes.
Such a time has now come in the world's history.
In former ages India was a sort of hermitage of thought and peace apart from the world.
Separated from the rest of humanity by her peculiar geographical conformation, she worked out her own problems and thought out the secrets of existence as in a quiet Ashram from which the noise of the world was shut out.
Her thoughts flashed out over Asia and created civilisations, her sons were the bearers of light to the peoples; philosophies based themselves on stray fragments of her infinite wisdom; sciences arose from the waste of her intellectual production.
When the barrier was broken and nations began to surge through the Himalayan gates, the peace of India departed.
She passed through centuries of struggle, of ferment in which the civilisations born of her random thoughts returned to her developed and insistent, seeking to impose themselves on the mighty mother of them all.
To her they were the reminiscences of her old intellectual experiments laid aside and forgotten.
She took them up, re-thought them in a new light and once more made them part of herself.
So she dealt with the Greek, so with the Scythian, so with Islam, so now she will deal with the great brood of her returning children, with Christianity, with Buddhism, with European science and materialism, with the fresh speculations born of the world's renewed contact with the source of thought in this ancient cradle of religion, science and philosophy.
The vast amount of new matter which she has to absorb, is unprecedented in her history, but to her it is child's play.
Her all-embracing intellect, her penetrating intuition, her invincible originality are equal to greater tasks.
The period of passivity when she listened to the voices of the outside world is over.
No longer will she be content merely to receive and reproduce, even to receive and improve.
The genius of Japan lies in imitation and improvement, that of India in origination.
The contributions of outside peoples she can only accept as rough material for her immense creative faculty.
It was the mission of England to bring this rough material to India, but in the arrogance of her material success she presumed to take upon herself the role of a teacher and treated the Indian people partly as an infant to be instructed, partly as a serf to be schooled to labour for its lords.
The farce is played out.
England's mission in India is over and it is time for her to recognise the limit of the lease given to her.
When it was God's will that she should possess India, the world was amazed at the miraculous ease of the conquest and gave all the credit to the unparalleled genius and virtues of the English people, a fiction which England was not slow to encourage and on which she has traded for over a century.
The real truth is suggested in the famous saying that England conquered India in a fit of absence of mind, which is only another way of saying that she did not conquer it at all.
It was placed in her hands without her realising what was being done or how it was being done.
The necessary conditions were created for her, her path made easy, the instruments given into her hands.
The men who worked for her were of comparatively small intellectual stature and with few exceptions did not make and could not have made any mark in European history where no special Providence was at work to supplement the deficiencies of the instruments.
The subjugation of India is explicable neither in the ability of the men whose names figure as the protagonists nor in the superior genius of the 
conquering nation nor in the weakness of the conquered people3.
It is one of the standing miracles of history.
In other words, it was one of those cases in which a particular mission was assigned to a people not otherwise superior to the rest of the world and a special faustitas or decreed good fortune set to watch over the fulfilment of the mission.
Her mission once over, the angel of the Lord who stood by England in her task and removed opponents and difficulties with the waving of his hand, will no longer shield her.
She will stay so long as the destinies of India need her and not a day longer, for it is not by her own strength that she came or is still here, and it is not by her own strength that she can remain.
The resurgence of India is begun, it will accomplish itself with her help, if she will, without it if she does not, against it if she opposes.
Later edition of this work: The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volumes 6-7.- Bande Mataram: Political Writings and Speeches. 1890–1908 .- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2002.- 1182 p.
1 2002 ed. CWSA, vol.6-7: realized
2 2002 ed. CWSA, vol.6-7: harmonize
3 2002 ed. CWSA, vol.6-7: peoples