Evolving India

The world-leader of tomorrow

Sri Aurobindo through a Biographer's Eyes

"ETERNITY !·how learnt I that strange word?" asks Laurence Binyon in a poem. The question might more appropriately have been put by a young Bengali to himself during his student days in England with his two elder brothers, one of whom was an intimate friend of Laurence Binyon. For this young Bengali was caught in puzzling psychological cross-currents. Educated in England from early boyhood, he was as completely Westernised as any Indian could be-Westernised not only in the sense that the whole world of European culture, ancient, me diaevaland modern, became part of him; but also in the sense that a strong stamp was laid upon his mind of what Shaw has called the infidel half-century, the period in which scientific materialism. and atheism rose like an irresistible flood. Yes, that Bengali youth was swayed by the agnostic Time-Spirit. But even while his mind doubted and denied, the Indian in him was troubled by uncharted profundities. "Eternity" seemed indeed a strange word to the surface of his being; and yet from his own unplumbed depths it appeared to .come

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like a simple and natural utterance.

Although he knew scarcely anything of Indian ideals, a sudden concrete expansion of consciousness such as India has always sought_hadJiappened to him momentarily at the age of fourteen, an expansion which neither Huxley nor Haeckel allowed to be possible. So Binyon's query may be considered as setting the secret basic rhythm to the life of the boy from Bengal who had been taken out of India in 1881 when seven years old, tutored privately at first in an English family at Manchester, sent later to St. Paul's School in London and finally to King's College at Cambridge.

The slowly unfolding answer to this query is the tale Professor K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar has to tell in the neatly got-up and chastely printed book of four hundred and odd pages entitled Sri Aurobindo.* The book is the first full-length biographical picture of one whose name has been for long on people's lips. Professor Iyengar is perhaps the best man for undertaking such a work. Not that he is the deepest student of Sri Aurobindo's vision; but he has a bright and quick intelligence, an attractive easy style of writing and the valuable attitude of an observer who is at once inside and outside his subject. There is no esoteric heaviness in his book; any layman can pick it up and run through it; the clear graceful sentences ripple on, rising here and

* Published by Arya Publishing House, College Street, Calcutta, price Rs. 8

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there to a beautiful glittering crest, bending in several directions but keeping always a recognizable course, carrying a good deal of academic knowledge but with a light glancing gesture. The author is no dry pedant with his head among cobwebs, he is in touch with contemporary movements in various fields and has ever the living voice, the tone of a causeur and raconteur. As a first comprehensive introduction nothing more suitable than his survey can be thought of—so lucid and charming it is, finely popular, with not a trace of the shallow, the dogmatic and the flashy that usually mar popular writing.

The story is centrally of a mystical quest: Sri Aurobindo is above all a pilgrim of Eternity. But he is a very remarkable pilgrim in two ways. While seeking Eternity he never ignores Time and both the acts are done by an individual in whom a multitude of personalities flame up into genius. The merit of Professor Iyengar's biography lies chiefly in the thoroughness with which the author has travelled round his many-sided subject. From every imaginable angle he has viewed it. The result is striking. Like a rare aroma the impression is received by us that here is presented a man who is truly "integral".

History is not bare of figures that have been "multifoliate" (to use a favourite term of Professor Iyengar's)—but the rich phenomenon here is not just multifoliate: it emerges as "integral" from the all-round treatment given to it. Integrality implies

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more than a diversity organised about a centre: it implies a harmonious completeness, the manifestation of an Archetype, so to speak—Man full and whole. What Sri Aurobindo seems to have is harmonious completeness and not complex versatility alone. However, to judge properly what it means to be harmoniously complete, we must remember that the full and whole man does not rest with combining opposed factors—realism and idealism, intellect and emotion, practicality and artistry, scientific analysis and religious fervour. Rare as such a combination may be, it is not the full and whole man. Human fullness and wholeness come when the entire range of conscious being possible to the human creature is compassed. Behind our common experience are occult regions of abnormal gleams and shadows which Western psychologists vaguely call the "subliminal". Beyond these are regions still more marvellous, which the Yogis of the East especially search for—the deep concealed Soul that is a growing spark of divinity, the vast Cosmic Spirit at once witness and worker, the ineffable Transcendent where both the individual and the universe find their perfect source. The full and whole man has to be a mystic par excellence. That is one indispensable condition. The other is that, having become a mystic par excellence, he must turn back to all that is apparently undivine and, seeing it as the Divine involved, attempt to evolve its secret potentialities, so that all may be

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divinised, the earth-existence rendered a pure and powerful instrument of the Supreme Light.

Sri Aurobindo fulfils either indispensable condition of integrality. Nor is everything said when this has been said. The earth-existence of his into which he channels the Supreme Light contains each essential aspect of manhood equally extensive and each aspect lives in him with the utmost colour and force. That is why from Professor Iyengar's sympathetically constructed picture he steps out as the world-leader of tomorrow.

The first point that engages our attention before we have gone far afield in the book is the genius-glow attained in Sri Aurobindo by a synthesis of cultures. The Orient and the Occident meet in him and catch intense fire. Having spoken nothing except English as a boy and having lived in its very home from his seventh to his twenty-first year, he has a spontaneous mastery of its turns and nuances. But English is not the only tongue he knows nor the literature of England the only "monument of the mind's magnificence" he is familiar with.

From St. Paul's School, London, he went with a senior classical scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he took away in one year all the prizes for Greek and Latin verse. In the open I.C.S. examination in which he competed he scored record marks in these ancient languages that lie at the very foundation of European culture. Among Europe's modern languages, he has been intimately acquainted

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with French from his early Manchester years. Nor are Italian and German any strangers: he rubs shoulders with Dante and Goethe in the original. The speech of Calderon too is on more than nodding terms with him: I am told that once inspiration seized him with force enough to pour through him a couple of hundred lines of brilliant poetry in Spanish! On his return to India he set about getting to the heart of Eastern culture. He steeped himself in Sanskrit and took in his rapid linguistic stride many present-day vernaculars. India's hoary civilisation unveiled its real form to him and holding in his two hands the treasures of the two hemispheres he stands between as a creative mediator.

Creative—because Sri Aurobindo is not simply a superb scholar and man of culture; he is also a thinker and an artist of towering proportions. Professor Iyengar gives us a wide-sweeping review of the work after luminous work in poetry no less than prose that has taken birth under Sri Aurobindo's pen. Rich and sensuous yet strong and supple, shot with tones of body as well as soul, touching a vast variety of themes in rhyme and blank verse and quantitative metre, his poetry moves with a tempo and atmosphere ever-changing, an inspiration now delicate and exquisite,

Whose laughter dances like a gleam Of sunlight on a hidden stream That through a wooded way Runs suddenly into the perfect day—

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now audacious and enormous and remote:

Snow on ravine and snow on cliff and snow Sweeping in strenuous outlines to heaven. With distant gleaming vales and turbulent rocks. Giant precipices black-hewn and bold Daring the universal whiteness—

now in the same breath far and near, mysterious and concrete:

Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's; Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway Words that live not save upon Nature's summits, Ecstasy's chariots.

Accents like these confer on Sri Aurobindo a commanding voice in the kingdom of art. Nor is he wanting in perfection where prose is concerned. For over six years, almost single-handed, he carried on a monthly magazine named Arya of subtle, penetrating and puissant thought on innumerable world-issues. To measure the range of his mind we have only to glance at the titles of the diverse series he kept running simultaneously: The Life Divine (its final expanded version, recently published, was recommended by Sir Francis Young-husband for the Nobel Prize and called by him the greatest book of our times), The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of the Veda, A Defence of Indian Culture, The Psychology of Social Development, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Future Poetry.

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And the vast mental range here disclosed bore upon it the play of a vitalizing sunshine that fused logical acumen with supra-intellectual insight. The words that etched and painted, broadly outlined and minutely shaped the panorama for us showed not the least sign of fatigue or failure in any place. Precision, clarity, élan side by side with manysuggestioned beauty and plastic rhythm, a Shavian trenchancy mingling with a sensitive splendour that is half Landoresque and half Newmanish, a Bergsonian lucidness and felicity companioned by a haunting polyphonic revelation a la Sir Thomas Browne—this is the highly original prose of Sri Aurobindo everywhere in its voluminous manifestation.

It is natural that Professor Iyengar, himself a gifted writer, should dwell with lingering relish on Sri Aurobindo's literary output and cannot in addition resist reprinting as an appendix an article which is a little gem of expository treatment, a detailed analysis making us enter into the "organism" as well as the "mechanism" of a poem by Sri Aurobindo and lighting up at the same time its art and its mystical substance. But Professor Iyengar does not permit the scheme of his book to get lop-sided. He devotes a good number of pages to Sri Aurobindo the politician in order to reveal his subject as a most dynamic dreamer through action.

He is aware that without the plunge into politics

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—and to a lesser degree the secretarial service to the Gaekwar of Baroda and the educational enterprise for a short spell—Sri Aurobindo would not cut the figure of a world-leader. The world needs guidance by a man who can lay moulding hands on whole nations. Professor Iyengar shows vividly how Sri Aurobindo stirred Bengal and, through Bengal, India from end to end to a magnificent nationalism which was yet neither narrow rior isolationist. In eight crowded years Sri Aurobindo, choosing for leader the sincere clear-headed resourceful and dauntless Tilak, changed the entire countenance of Indian politics, giving it a positive and creative bent. What is more, he infused into nationalism a spiritual ideal, an intense aspiration to revive the true genius of India, which is the realisation of a divine consciousness. It was the Vedic Rishis and the Seers of the Upanishads and the shining procession of Saints and Yogis down the centuries, that had kept the civilisation of India so bright and beautiful. Unless in the days of her decline we evoked the Godward instinct, we would never lift her up. She whose sons in myriads had communed for ages with the Eternal must be herself a Goddess, an aspect of the Divine Mother, the world-creatrix. Wrapped in the atmosphere of the Supreme Being must she be visioned and worshipped. That was the core of the Aurobindonian nationalism.

Out of it sprang the mighty movements of the

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Aurobindonian politics. It was the fountain of countless constructive articles, a host of practical programmers, a tireless run of meetings and sessions. The enthusiasm and energy it inspired we can imagine by looking at the photograph Professor Iyengar has put into his book, of Sri Aurobindo in Calcutta. A poise of unhurried power touched with something holy confronts us in the seated yet alert body, one foot thrust forward, the finely shaped fingers half-closed in a sensitive but strong grip, the mouth above the rounded chin at once calm and set, the nostrils of the semi-aquiline nose a little dilated with ardor, the eyes wearing a firm look that goes far and still more far, the whole expression of the broad-browed and thick-moustached face in-drawn to a concentrated potentiality of leaping fierily forward. Though the luminous height and depth and wideness that the later photograph of Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry suggests are still to come, enough is here to convince us that, whatever walk of life he may choose, he would be a grand doer no less than a grand dreamer and that he is born to hold the helm of world-affairs.

The quick-shifting drama of Sri Aurobindo's career as politician is brought out very thrillingly by Professor Iyengar. The agitations, the arrests, the house-searching's, the legal attacks and counterattacks are resurrected with vivid strokes. The climax of the drama was the year-long detention of Sri Aurobindo as under-trial prisoner in Alipore

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Jail and the subsequent court-scenes with Eardley Norton the most brilliant criminal lawyer in India as Crown Prosecutor, Chittaranjan Das shielding Sri Aurobindo by a case for defence worked out through feverish months at the cost of his own health and the loss of a lucrative practice, Mr. Beach croft sitting in judgment over a man who had been with him at Cambridge and had beaten him there to second place in Greek and Latin! The charge of implication in the bomb-outrage at Muzzaferpore was torn to shreds by Das in a historic speech: Sri Aurobindo was acquitted. This was the second time he had been accused and acquitted. A third prosecution was launched against him a little while later—but he was no more in British India then and it was diverted against the printer of his paper. Nothing again could be proved and with its fizzling out the last political storm round Sri Aurobindo died down. For years the Congress kept wooing the self-exiled lion to return to his ldngdom. Chittaranjan Das and Lala Lajpat Rai delivered in person their earnest appeals. All to no avail, for though Sri Aurobindo still remained leonine a Call more pressing than that of any Congress or national spokesman had come and he had to answer it, since without doing so he felt he would never fulfil what the Eternal Spirit whom India worshipped had destined for him.

Mystical experiences had visited him at intervals throughout his early life. There was the shock of

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an inner immensity once in England. "A vast calm", writes Professor Iyengar, "descended upon him with his first step on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, his first contact with the soil and spirit of India; and this calm surrounded him and remained with him for long months afterwards. Again, while walking on the ridge of the Takht-i-SuIeman in Kashmir, the realisation of the vacant Infinite came upon him, unbidden as it were; the living presence of Kali in the shrine on the banks of the Narmada came upon him unawares and filled him with its stupendous majesty; and he had, on another occasion, when he was in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay there, a vision of the Godhead surging up from within him and mastering and controlling with its gaze all events and surroundings." But these and other experiences like them were unexpected unlinked outbreaks: there was no constant Yoga behind them for methodically dynamising life with spirituality.

In 1905, at the age of thirty-one Sri Aurobindo took to Yogic discipline. One of his helpers in Yoga, the Mahratta Lele, relates that three days of meditation in Baroda in 1908 brought Sri Aurobindo the complete cessation of the mind's activity in a Nirvanic peace: henceforth all his movements, inward or outward, derived from some divine spaciousness above the brain-clamped mind. A year's detention in Alipore Jail gave him the

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precious opportunity to dive single-pointedly into the synthetic Yoga taught in the Bhagwad Gita: the figure of Sri Krishna became an omnipresent reality to him, which he beheld even in the court where his trial took place-behind judge and prosecutor and counsel for defence and every wines Sri Krishna was seen standing and working out the future! And it was Sri Krishna's command he obeyed when he withdrew from British India to Chandernagore and ultimately to Pondicherry. But Sri Aurobindo withdrawn or retired is no world-forgetful ascetic. .Professor Iyengar makes this abundantly and interestingly clear by his account of the years in the capital of French India, the growth of the Ashram there, the diverse writings and publications, the innumerable letters of wisdom and wit to the disciples on every conceivable topic, the unbroken touch with the world's events, the emphatic enlightened anti-Hitler and pro-Allies attitude and action throughout the War in the midst of the wavering Yeas and Nays of Indian politics. "My life", says Sri Aurobindo in a letter quoted by Professor Iyengar, "has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle; the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference to its character." Only, we must understand that what Sri Aurobindo wields is-to quote a phrase from his own poctry-

Force one with unimaginable rest .

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A luminous drive, based on and issuing from the boundless tranquillity of the Everlasting, wages the Aurobindonian battle.

And it is a drive whose aim is a divinisation of our embodied nature such as no Yoga has ever contemplated in the past, a perfect and integral divinisation and not a mere reflected radiance in our members, a divinisation of all our parts down to our physical body. Yes, this very body must become Godlike and incorruptible with the descent of the Supreme Light. "A quixotic hope!" cries the doubter in us, but it is Sri Aurobindo's vision that, if all things have sprung originally from the Divine into the evolutionary process, there must be in the Divine their secret truth, their archetypal reality, and this truth and reality they are meant to evolve on the earth: matter no less than mind and vital stuff can undergo a total transformation and flower into a new substance. The dream of a terrestrial heaven can never be actualised without such a transformation. And it has not been actualised up to now because a certain crowning dynamis of the Spirit which Sri Aurobindo terms Supermind has not been fully possessed and turned upon earth-problems. What Sri Aurobindo sets working in his Ashram is that dynamis. Armed with it, he serenely marches onward over titanic difficulties, beckoning us to follow him along the path he carves out. His whole character and career convince us that he can be no chaser of splendid

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phantoms: the man's clear-headed honesty and keen practical trend are also evident when we consider that for nearly a decade and a half during his stay in Pondicherry he kept saying to his disciples each time they inquired whether his goal would be reached, "I must wait and see", and that only in 1926 he gave a positive assurance of his success in the future.

Sri Aurobindo's unique insistence on bodily divinisation completes his equipment as the world-leader of tomorrow. It is in utter tune with our modern age of science. It brings him into the laboratory, as it were, to meet the challenge of materialism and atheism on the grounds they have themselves chosen, and with results of the exact concreteness they require. It must have a tremendous repercussion on physics, biology, physiology and medicine. A Planck, a Julian Huxley, a Pavlov, a Steinbach will not feel they are groping for the invisible and the intangible when they deal with the final triumphs of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. At the heart of the Ashram in Pondicherry is the power of a super-spirituality that is super-science as much as super-culture, super-art, super-philosophy and super-organisation of outward active life. In the days ahead, when from the ruins of the War and from the smoke of the present a new order will cry out to be born, the integral personality of Sri Aurobindo will be the most creative figure; for, he alone can justly declare in

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the words of Lascelles Abercrombie:

I have Golden within me the whole fate of man.

"He alone", I have said. But a qualification is demanded, which yet diminishes nowise the essence of the statement. Sri Aurobindo does not stand solitarily at the Ashram's centre: he shares it with one whom, except in appearance and for purposes of distribution of labour, he does not regard as distinct from himself. The joint centre, among other important things, is evident in a letter which Professor Iyengar cites. "We", affirms Sri Aurobindo, "know well what is the difference between a subjective experience and a dynamic outgoing and realising Force. So, although we have Faith— and whoever did anything without faith in his mission or the Truth at work behind him?—we do not found ourselves on Faith only, but on a great ground of Knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives." At several places hints are scattered by Professor Iyengar about the significance of this "we"—a radiant figure working side by side with Sri Aurobindo and known as the Mother. She strikes the reader as the Master's feminine counterpart in spiritual attainment and manifestation—co-parent with him of the golden tomorrow. Professor Iyengar's brief tantalising glimpses of her make us avid for her biography as the next venture of his accomplished

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pen. It will carry more richly, more intimately home to our benighted souls the secret of the divine dawn that is Sri Aurobindo.

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