For Nehru, spirituality was rooted in Indian tradition and connected to ethics | The Indian Express

For Nehru, spirituality was rooted in Indian tradition and connected to ethics | The Indian Express

Written by Purushottam Agrawal |Updated: November 14, 2019 10:06:12 am

Purushottam Agrawal is a writer, theologian, secularist and poet. He tweets @puru_ag

For Nehru, spirituality was rooted in Indian tradition and connected to ethics

The need to address the “spiritual” was not merely personal for Nehru. Reflecting on the human condition, he noted in a conversation with R K Karanjia in 1960, “the need to find some answer to the spiritual emptiness facing our technological civilisation”.

A nuanced and essentially Indic understanding of the spiritual quest guided Nehru’s endeavours in this respect. (Express Archives)

Jawaharlal Nehru was a rationalist but he did not dismiss the human mind’s spiritual quest. Being modern does not mean being unconcerned with or contemptuous of tradition and culture. It means identifying with the dynamism in tradition and accelerating its modernising tendencies.