Q1.
Conduct a class discussion on the two quotations at the start of the chapter.
Answer
The two quotations on page 125 say the same thing in two very different voices — one a poet's prayer, one a philosopher's argument. Read each slowly before discussing.
| The quotation | What it says, line by line |
|---|---|
| Rabindranath Tagore: “Oh, grant me my prayer, that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of the many.” | It is a prayer, not a statement — the poet is asking to be kept from something. What he fears losing is the ability to feel the one while enjoying the many. ‘Play’ is the key word: the variety of the world is not a muddle but a delight. ‘Touch’ tells you this is something felt, not proved |
| Sri Aurobindo: “… The principle of unity in diversity which has always been normal to [India] and its fulfilment the fundamental course of her being and its very nature, the Many in the One, would place her on the sure foundation of her Swabhava and Swadharma.” | He calls unity in diversity ‘normal’ to India — not an achievement or a slogan but her ordinary condition. Swabhava means one's own nature, swadharma one's own duty or way of being. His claim is that India is on firm ground only when she is being herself, that is, many-in-one |
Questions that make the discussion go somewhere:
- Tagore says the many are a ‘play’. Sri Aurobindo says the many-in-one is India's ‘nature’. Which of the two words fits your own experience of the country better, and why?
- Tagore asks that he may ‘never lose’ this sense. What could make a person lose it? (Living only among people exactly like oneself; treating one's own way as the only right way; refusing to travel or to listen.)
- Sri Aurobindo says a country is strongest when it follows its own swabhava. Does that idea apply to a person too — is a student strongest when copying others, or when being fully himself or herself while belonging to the class?
- Both were writing long before this textbook. Does anything in the chapter — the grain map, the sari, the January festival, the tribal Rāmāyaṇas — prove either of them right?
Why the chapter opens with poetry and philosophy rather than facts: the facts come later, and there are plenty of them. What the two quotations supply is the idea that makes the facts add up — that variety is a form of richness rather than of disorder. Without that idea, 325 languages is just a large number.