Sri Aurobindo came to Me

Introduction

IT is in our four capacities that I am related to this book of Dilip Kumar Roy's which I have been asked — or rather privileged — to introduce. As editor of the fortnightly review, Mother India, I had the delight of publishing it for the first time in serial form. I am also a friend of the author: I have known him for the last twenty three years and have valued his friendship from not only the personal standpoint but also the literary and the spiritual. Next, our friendship has resulted in a special relation on my part to his book: I actually figure in some vivid pages of it that are a most generous appreciation of me. This leads me to the fourth capacity, a pointer to which is already in the word "spiritual": we have sat at the feet of the same guru, Sri Aurobindo, in whose Ashram at Pondicherry I had been for nearly a year when Dilip Kumar Roy came there, "burning his boats" behind him but bringing with him the flame which had lit that bonfire — his colourful, many-shaded, complicated, questioning, impetuous, expansive and at the same time dreamily idealistic and Krishna-haunted personality.

We had several things in common. There was the intense love of literature, especially poetry. There was also the itch for writing, the urge in particular to write poems of a new beauty — what Sri Aurobindo, adapting a phrase of Meredith's, had called in The Future Poetry the expression of "our inmost in the inmost way". Like most people with the artistic turn we were very sensitive to the touch of earth and the deep call of the soul that had brought us here was no less a pang than a rapture, for, in our ignorance of Sri Aurobindo's all-embracing vision, it seemed to make renunciation of magic dawn and witching night and the heart-gripping loveliness that comes over things doomed to pass away, the price for the One who is infinite and eternal. Both of

us had gone through emotional entanglements and had ached for the Divine after much of the bitter-sweet of human love. Then there was the pull of "career" resisted by either of us — he had the prospect of becoming a musician of note and the lime-light had already played upon him: I, with some lucky academic distinction, had looked forward to a little fame in the higher ranges of journalism. Finally, we had westernised minds which, though borne towards the spiritual life by an incalculable surge from beyond the normal self, carried a habit of controversy into even the quiet atmosphere of an Ashram of Yoga.

His intellect was indeed keyed to a different note of controversy than was mine: I was argumentative about problems like unity and multiplicity, free-will and determinism, the personal God and the impersonal Absolute, and wanted the supra-sensible to be logically of a piece, amenable to analytic systematisation, while he had the sceptic's hesitation to accept what he could not personally verify and the positivist tendency to lay stress on perception by the outward-looking intelligence, something of the temper of Bertrand Russell whose cautions "clear-headedness" and poised "realism" he admired. But whatever the differences, we had a restlessness of thought often pursuing us in even "the moments when the inner lamps are lit". I, however, ceased argumentation after a time: close study of Sri Aurobindo's books took me with a convincing logic as far as thought could reach and, as for what lay beyond that bourne, I was fortunate — most to my own surprise — in discovering an abundant fount of faith unsealed in my heart at the touch of Sri Aurobindo and his radiant co- worker whom we addressed as the Mother. Of Course, all this did not prevent the world and the flesh from constantly tripping me up, but I escaped the long tussle my friend had with the irrepressible doubter his sojourn in the West had set up in him strangely side by side with the spontaneous devotee that was part of him from his boyhood in post-Ramakrishna Bengal and that I who was not a Hindu by race but a Parsi and a resident

not of Bengal but of Gujarat could hardly expect, for all my heart's faith, to find ready-made in myself.

There were other differences too in our psychologies. He could more easily be hurt, and impulse more frequently swayed him. On the other hand, hardly mine the warm amplitude of his social personality, the generous diversified contacts, the rich talent for hospitable laughter and boon companionship. Although on good terms with the whole Ashram and never in the habit of considering cheerfulness unphilosophical, I was more reserved and reticent and my circle of intimates was somewhat small. But in this circle Roy took a prominent place from the beginning. Many and happy have been the hours we have spent together — the differences in our temperaments, no less than our affinities, have attracted us to each other. And it is both the differences and the affinities that in a generalised form make up the human stuff on which Sri Aurobindo is shown at wonderful work in the present book. But I never fully realised how valuable from the standpoint of the world at large were the differences till I had perused chapter after fascinating chapter Roy had penned.

Because of his expansive nature and his somewhat unguarded susceptibilities he had always struck me as being, for all his special gifts and extraordinary powers, far more representative of essential humanity on the credit as well as the debit side than people like me could be, and also therefore, by virtue of those gifts and powers, capable of a greatness in which the mass could see not a thrusting of itself somewhat out into the cold but a taking up of its substance into a more opulent, a more intense life. What I had not sufficiently seen was that a vital part of his representative character was the peculiar clash in him of aspects of the Russellian sceptic with those of the Ramakrishnanian devotee, the typical bent of the general consciousness on the level of scientific cerebration cutting across its typical turn on the level of religious feeling. No doubt, there are other levels — for instance, the philosophical, the sociological, the political — but the majority of men live less on them than on those of science which is organised this-world sense and of religion which is

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organised other-world sense. Of course, here as elsewhere in Roy, many subtle factors refine and deepen all that is ordinary, so that the sceptic or the devotee in the majority lives in him with also a keener quality; but it is their brain-throb and their heart-beat in the midst of the aspirations and inspirations of his genius, that endow his individuality with a meaning that must go home to millions at once doubting the Unknown and yearning towards it.

On a grander scale and in a sublimer sense and in a profounder way, Sri Aurobindo is also a figure whose greatness holds the promise of a world-wide consummation, one who is not a superb freak but the leader of our evolution, the Yogi par excellence in whom man becomes God as much as God becomes man. The coming together, therefore, of Roy the seeker and Sri Aurobindo the adept and their relationship as disciple and master were perhaps in several respects the most highly significant phenomenon, so far as the psychology of man in general is concerned, in the history of an Ashram where more spiritual energy is concentrated for the creation of a new earth than material energy can be packed in any atom bomb for the destruction of the old.

The book Roy has written about this coming together and this relationship is thus bound to be a powerful help to his fellow beings on the same quest as he. The artist and the thinker will find much to appeal to them, but it is more eminently a book written by an artist and a thinker for the common human soul in all its frailty of vacillating thought as well as in its instinctive certitude of the Light of lights that, seen nowhere, may yet be felt everywhere. The writing is natural, almost conversational in places, though often with a subtle gracefulness and evocative skill and mostly with a graphic touch and a tang of personality which saves even a slightly discursive tendency here and there from being unattractive. The man Dilip Kumar Roy stands out clear -— at times astonishingly simple, at times peculiarly intricate — neither protected by amour propre nor covered by false modesty. There is a fine frankness here and, in addition,

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pervading the entire retrospect, an unobtrusive humility towards his spiritual mentors. Nor is the sparkle of humour absent: in fact it breaks out again and again — as indeed it cannot help doing, since Sri Aurobindo himself held that there is no lack of laughter in the Kingdom of Heaven and that the endeavour to establish that Kingdom on earth must bring with it a luminous gaiety.

Of Sri Aurobindo's own humour Roy gives many an invaluable instance. And without those examples he could not have made complete the picture that is the main object of this book about the many-sided interplay of the human and the divine. For the humour, besides being an element of a truth-revealing sunshine of the spirit, is part of the spontaneous close contact, the warm and happy intimacy, to which the God-realised guru admitted his chela. And it is this intimacy, implying not only the unhindered approach of the disciple but also the Master's own enfolding movement, that sets the pattern, mixes the colours and constitutes the high-lights of the picture.

The enfolding movement of the Master: this is indeed the central revelation of the book and the inspiration of its title: Sri Aurobindo Came To Me. A limitless understanding, compassion, mercy and love flowed out to Roy from the illumined and blissful depths of Sri Aurobindo's being: they surrounded him with warmth during his moods of anguish at Yoga tearing him away from the cherished follies of ordinary life, they upbuoyed him mightily yet most tenderly when he would sink back to the gilded vanity of the old self-bound existence, they penetrated him with a light which laid bare the hollowness of the human mind's pretensions not only with the power of a guru's wisdom but with the sweet persuasiveness of a father's superior experience and at times with the confiding appeal of a friend who stands on one's own level and would share the lucky fruits of his labour through the years. Always the giving was done with a curious nobility as if Sri Aurobindo's need of the recipient had been much greater than the latter's call and cry for his help. Forgiveness and forbearance without end in the midst of a

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ceaseless holding up of the Ideal, genuine personal respect for the frequently recalcitrant disciple, patient intellectual explanation to him again and again of spiritual motives and truths, assurance of a steady unconditional love for him at all moments and, throughout, a sustaining insight into his groping human nature on the one hand and on the other into his secret soul growing towards divinity within that nature's complex terms — it is thus that Sri Aurobindo with his towering spiritual realisations and with his promise of earth-transforming Supermind came to Dilip Kumar Roy and comes through his book to the commonalty no less than to the elite unsatisfied with the surface of things in the modem world.

The coming is the more effective because it takes place with a large ease, a smiling reasonableness, an almost matter-of-fact clarity and a natural awareness of twentieth-century hopes and fears. There is neither hot-gospelling nor mystagogism here. Yet the inner force and urgency cannot be mistaken. On Roy's side as well as on Sri Aurobindo's, there works a deep intensity without which the book would not be the important document that it is. Roy, the Krishna-haunted soul caught in the fretful surface mind, is burning in his heart of hearts to see in Sri Aurobindo the complete Avatar and in the Mother the Avatar's creative spiritual counterpart: short of that seeing, his life lacks real fruition. Sri Aurobindo, the wholly integrated embodiment of a luminous consciousness beyond the mere intellect, takes him as it were into his compassionate arms and tries to make the human heart feel the rhythm of the divine beatitude and the human mind perceive the face of divine knowledge. The inner climax of the drama is reached in an event which that heart and mind had never expected: the passing of Sri Aurobindo at the peak of his power of earth-transformation. The story of this passing and the unravelling of its inner significance as a tremendous sacrifice have been attempted elsewhere. Suffice it here to say that with the seeming sunset of Truth's presence on earth the flame in the disciple, so long shaken by doubt and contrariness, sprang up firm and full to bear testimony to that

Truth: it was as if Sri Aurobindo had died to make the vision of the Godhead in him take birth in those he had loved so profoundly and for whom he had laboured to bring down a new and perfect life. The sense of that poignant "as if is at work in the background of Roy's many-aspected presentation of his guru's dealing with human nature. And it is also active indirectly behind his account of his relationship with one who now stands alone to the outer eyes as bearer of the Life Divine and is therefore precious in the extreme to our frail body's outstretched hands, one whom Sri Aurobindo put before us as the mighty fulfiller of his own mission and as the fountain of a supreme Love and Light that shall reshape the world: the Mother.

Yes, Roy's book has a deep intensity at its back and also springing into the forefront at several points and ruling from there the entire narrative. But the ruling is subtle: nowhere the art-form of a narrative that is meant to be no esoteric thesis has been vitiated. The reminiscences and the confessions run along as lightly as the high seriousness of the central theme can permit and, expect perhaps for a somewhat "specialist" though valuable chapter on metrical experiments, they can be enjoyed by every intelligent reader who possesses "the upward-looking face". Glimpses of the Ashram's activity and development, portrayals of close friends, sketches of significant situations inner and outer, disclosures of both the bright and the obscure in the author's personality, reproductions of the spirited epistolary exchanges between the chela and the guru, flashings of apt anecdotes, evocations of Sri Aurobindo's rare intellectual no less than mystical genius and of the Mother's transcendent sweetness and strength — all these mingle in an unstrained manner to make an unforgettable book which can very well speak for itself and needs no introduction but which will inspire the introductory mood in every one to whom in a moving and marvellous way Sri Aurobindo came.

28-7-51 K.D. SETHNA

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