Sri Aurobindo
Autobiographical Notes
and Other Writings of Historical Interest
Part Two. Letters of Historical Interest
1. Letters on Personal, Practical and Political Matters
(1890–1926)
Open Letters. Published in Newspapers 1909–1925
To the Editor of the Hindustan1
In answer to your request for a statement of my opinion
on the intermarriage question, I can only say that everything will have my full
approval which helps to liberate and strengthen the life of the individual in
the frame of a vigorous society and restore the freedom and energy which India
had in her heroic times of greatness and expansion. Many of our present social
forms were shaped, many of our customs originated, in a [time]2 of contraction and decline. They had their utility for self-defence and
survival within narrow limits, but are a drag upon our progress in the present
hour when we are called upon once again to enter upon a free and courageous
self-adaptation and expansion. I believe in an aggressive and expanding, not in
a narrowly defensive and self-contracting Hinduism. Whether Mr. Patel’s Bill is
the best way to bring about the object intended is a question on which I can
pronounce no decided opinion. I should have preferred a change from within the
society rather than one brought about by legislation. But I recognise the
difficulty 
created by the imposition of the
rigid and mechanical notions of European jurisprudence on the old Hindu Law
which was that of a society living and developing by an organic evolution. It is
no longer easy, or perhaps in this case, possible to develop a new custom or
revert to an old – for the change proposed amounts to no more than such a
[reversion].3 It would appear that the
difficulty created by the legislature can only be removed by a resort to
legislation. In that case, the Bill has my approval.
1918