The Making and Remaking of India as a Nation: Sri Aurobindo's The Renaissance in India and Other Essays on Indian Culture.

The concept of a nation is nebulous as a construct to be restricted within the confines of a definition and is relived and revisited through the chronicles of history across time and space (and not only academic spaces). The epistemological and ontological configurations of the construct of a nation depicts it as a liquefied narrative to be construed from diverse angles. In his work, The Renaissance in India and Other Essays on Indian Culture, Sri Aurobindo talks about India as a nation in the face of Western incursions and posits the concept of an Indian renaissance in the mode of a reawakening or revival of the original spirit of the nation along with its ideals. He refers to a new India trying to recover herself to arrive at a healthy revival by returning to the spiritual motif which is the basic foundation of her culture, but she must apply the same procedure to every aspect of the nation's life--art, literature, poetry, polity, and religion. She is the Bharata Shakti operating on the basis of her spiritual energy, trying to sustain a balance between the mind, body and spirit. This paper explores the diverse interpretations of the concept of nation as represented by Sri Aurobindo (2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]