Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910 — No.33
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 19th February 1910 — No.33
Passing Thoughts
The Bhagalpur Literary Conference
The prevalence of annual conferences in the semi-Europeanised life of Bengal is a curious phenomenon eloquent of the unreality of our present culture and the inefficiency of our modernised existence.
Our old life was well, even minutely organised on an intelligent and consistent Oriental model.
The modern life of Europe is well and largely organised on an intelligent and consistent Occidental model.
It materialises certain main ideas of life and well-being, provides certain centres of life, equips them efficiently, serves the objects1 with which they are instituted.
Our old life did the same.
But this is precisely what our modern life does not do.
Its institutions are apes of a foreign plan, unintelligent expressions of an idea which is not ours; they serve no civic, no national purpose.
They are the spasmodic movements of an organism whose own life is arrested, but which feels itself compelled to move, however awkwardly and uselessly, if only to persuade itself that it is not dead.
We have for instance a Literary Conference which meets once a year, if nothing occurs to prevent it.
But such an annual celebration has no intelligent purpose except as the centre of an organised literary life.
The pulse of our literary life is feeble and artificial.
Its centres are conspicuous by their absence.
In Europe the club, the literary 
paper, the coterie, the school of writing, the Academy are distinct entities in which the members of the organism have living relations, a common atmosphere, a common intellectual food.
They have no Literary Conference because the literary life of Europe is a reality.
We in India have neither these institutions nor any other centres of our own.
The Conference is a convulsive attempt to relate ourselves to each other, which evinces a vague desire for united living, but no capacity to effect it.
There was a time when a vigorous literary life seemed about to form itself in Bengal, and its relics are seen in the literary magazine and the Sahitya Parishad; but at present these serve only to record the extremely languid pulsation of our intellectual existence.
The great intellectual stir, hopefulness and activity of the last century has disappeared.
The individual lives to himself, vigorously or feebly, according to the varying robustness of his personality or intensity of his temperament.
Coordination is still far from us.