K. D. Sethna

Kaikhosru Dadhaboy (K.D.) Sethna (26 November 1904 – 29 June 2011) was an Indian poet, scholar, writer, philosopher, and cultural critic. He was an author of works about Indian history and on Sri Aurobindos philosophy.

Quotes

• Hedged in though she [Savitri] is by mortality, her life‘s movement keeps the measure of the Gods. Painting her being and its human-divine beauty Sri Aurobindo achieves some of his supreme effects. Perhaps his grandest capture of the mantra are the nine verses which form the centre of a long passage, variously mantric, in which Savitri‘s avatarhood is characterised (...) A hieratic poetry, demanding a keen sense of the occult and spiritual to compass both its subjective and objective values, is in this audacious and multi-dimensioned picture of a highly Yogic state of embodied being. Not all might respond to it and Sri Aurobindo knew that such moments in Savitri would have to wait long for general appreciation. But he could not be loyal to his mission without giving wide scope to the occult and spiritual and seeking to poetise them as much as possible with the vision and rhythm proper to the summits of reality. Of course, that vision and that rhythm are not restricted to the posture and contour of the summits, either the domains of divine dynamism or (...) or the mid-worlds, obscure or luminous, fearsome or marvellous, of which Savitri‘s father, King Aswapathy, carries out a long exploration which is one of the finest and most fascinating parts of the poem. They extend to the earth-drama too and set living amongst us the mysteries and travails of cosmic evolution, like that dreadful commerce of Savitri with one to whom Sri Aurobindo gives no name:
  • On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri (Part One: Essays) - Writings by Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna)

• “the true nature of the campaign in which SudAs is engaged… (is the) conquest over supernatural agents who… stand inwardly antagonistic to the Divine light.”...[The DAsas ranged against SudAs,] were “supernatural deniers and destroyers of the inner and spiritual progress of spiritual initiates,”269 and the Aryas ranged against him were “the lords of higher states of being and consciousness in the inner world, beyond whom the Aryan man would go and who therefore resent his progress and join hands with the DAsas/Dasyus, the obstructors in that occult dimension.”
  • The Problem of Aryan Origins by K.D. Sethna, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 1992.

About

• "Here is the book I was looking for," I had said to myself aloud as I finished the first edition of The Problem of Aryan Origins by K.D. Sethna... [it was] undoubtedly a brilliant piece of research. I had seen in this book the birth of a new dawn on the horizon of Indian historiography... It was in the midst of this stifling atmosphere that K.D. Sethna's work came like a breath of fresh air. But now a whole school of historians is coming forward... All of them recognize K.D. Sethna as the forerunner in the field. Future generations are bound to hail him as the harbringer of a new dawn.
  • Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990), 2nd ed, ch 18., and in "Amal Kiran: Poet and Critic", 1994.

• It is telling that the pioneering work on this topic by K.D.Sethna has been thoroughly ignored by India's politically motivated historians.
  • Elst K. Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)