On Savitri
THEME/S
II
Sri Aurobindo was born on 15 August 1872, an hour before sunrise, in Calcutta. His parents were Krishnadhan Ghose, a physician, and Swarnalata Ghose. Sri Aurobindo's elder brother, Manomohan, became a poet of considerable distinction and a Professor of English. His younger brother, Barindra Kumar, became a revolutionary. Sri Aurobindo's own birth on 15 August 1872 has a double national significance: it was the centenary year of the birth of Raja Rammohan Roy, the Father of Modern India and seventy-five years later, on 15 August 1947, India became a free country. Thus Sri Aurobindo's birthday and India's Independence Day are now being celebrated together.
Sri Aurobindo's father, Krishnadhan, had himself received his higher education in England, and wished his children to have an English education, as far as possible uncontaminated by 'native' ways and 'native' speech. He accordingly sent Sri Aurobindo, along with his elder brothers Benoy Bhushan and Manomohan, to the Loretto Convent School at Darjeeling. Thus, from the age of five, Sri Aurobindo moved mainly with English children and learned to speak English as a matter of course. In 1879, Krishnadhan took his sons to England and left them there to continue their studies. For fourteen years, from 1879 to 1893, Sri Aurobindo lived in England, partly at Manchester, partly in London, and finally at Cambridge.
Since even at home, in India, Krishnadhan had employed an English nurse, Miss Pagett, Sri Aurobindo had no—or very little knowledge of—Bengali when he arrived in England. At Manchester, he stayed with friends of his father, the Rev William H. Drewett and Mrs Drewett, and learned from them Latin, French, history, geography and arithmetic. Even in England, the Ghose boys were carefully insulated, under instructions from their father, from the
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influence of Indians and Indian ways. Sri Aurobindo and his two brothers grew up practically as English children.
After five years at Manchester, Sri Aurobindo proceeded to St Paul's School, London, in 1884 and remained there for another six years. He was an apt pupil in every way and secured the Butterworth Prize for Literature and the Bedford Prize for History. Dr Walker took personal interest in Sri Aurobindo, impressed by his character and abilities, taught him Greek, and pushed him rapidly into the higher forms. Did the Head Master of St Paul's already see something of Sri Aurobindo's future destiny? Sri Aurobindo's school record mentions the fact that he went up to Cambridge with a scholarship to enter King's. Before leaving for Cambridge, he seems to have acquired a high degree of proficiency in the Classics, some intimacy with French (and, of course, English), and more than a nodding acquaintance with German, Italian and Spanish. He had also begun to write verse in English.
At King's, too, Sri Aurobindo did very well. He had his £80 scholarship, and, having passed his preliminary test for the I.C.S., he had a probationership stipend as well. However, all three brothers —Benoy Bhushan, Manomohan and Sri Aurobindo—were often in difficulty, owing to irregular or insufficient remittances from their father but Sri Aurobindo seems on the whole to have done somewhat better than his two brothers. One of his tutors, G.M.Prothero, certified that, as a student, Sri Aurobindo displayed, "very unusual industry and capacity...Besides his classical scholarship he possessed a knowledge of English literature far beyond the average of undergraduates and wrote a much better English than most young Englishmen."10
Oscar Browning remarked that, although he had examined papers at thirteen examinations, he had never during that period seen such excellent papers as Sri Aurobindo's and his 'essay'—a comparative study of William Shakespeare and John Milton—was "wonderful".11 Sri Aurobindo passed the Classical Tripos in the first division, and
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also secured a prize for Greek and Latin iambics. Besides he passed the I.C.S.final examinations with credit. Of extra-curricular activity, too, there was much: for example, nationalist speeches at the Indian Majlis and writing poetry. But, from another point of view, it was a life bereft of the usual consolations of a home.
Sri Aurobindo left Cambridge for London in October 1892. He was expected to join the I.C.S., but as he repeatedly failed to appear for the Riding test, he was ultimately disqualified. It is clear Sri Aurobindo himself, "felt no call for the I.C.S. and was seeking some way to escape from that bondage...he managed to get himself disqualified for riding without himself rejecting the Service."12 A friend, James S. Cotton, now negotiated with the Maharaja of Baroda and secured for Sri Aurobindo a job at Rs 200 per month. This seemed to settle his future, and so he sailed by S.S.Carthage and arrived in India early in 1893 and took up his duties in Baroda on 8 February. He moved from the Land Settlement Department, where he had his first assignment, to the Stamps Office, then to the Central Revenue Office and the Secretariat, and so at last to Baroda College, first as Lecturer in French, and later as Professor of English and Vice-Principal.
Fourteen years in England, especially at so impressionable a period of his life, should have completely de-nationalised Sri Aurobindo. This was not how things worked, however; he no doubt grew attached to English and European thought and literature, but not to England or the West; he had no personal ties there.13 On the contrary, he was happy to be back in India. When he stepped on the soil of India, "a vast calm descended upon him...and surrounded him and remained with him for long months afterwards."14 He experienced on a later occasion a sense of the vacant Infinite while walking on the bridge of the Takht-i-Suleman in Kashmir, and Mahakali's living presence once filled him with rapture on the banks of the Narmada.15
Soon after his return to India, Sri Aurobindo employed special tutors and quickly mastered his mother tongue, Bengali and Sanskrit.
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As he was serving in Baroda, it was easy for him to learn Marathi and Gujarati as well. His years at Baroda were years of ceaseless striving and achievement in many fields of activity: teaching, scholarship, political journalism, poetry, Yoga. He dieted on the poets of the West and India, and his library had all the great English poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Algernon Charles Swinburne. His Bengali tutor, speaking of the 1898-9 period, has recorded that among the English poems on which Sri Aurobindo was then engaged there was one on Savitri also. And, referring to a later period (probably 1905), C.R. Reddy has stated that once A.B. Clark, then Principal of the Baroda College, remarked to him: "So you met Aurobindo Ghose. Did you notice his eyes? There is mystic fire and light in them. They penetrate into the beyond....If Joan of Arc heard heavenly voices, Aurobindo probably sees heavenly visions."16
Meanwhile certain developments were taking place in the country and Sri Aurobindo could not be a disinterested spectator. India was the Mother, and foreign rule was a curse. The politicians of the old school, who believed in petitioning to the British rulers to vouchsafe doses of self-government, seemed to be out of tune with the temper of the people. The decision of Lord Curzon's Government to partition Bengal was felt as a blow to the unity of the Bengalees and a challenge to awakened India. Sri Aurobindo had been for some time playing an important part in the behind-the-scenes activities of the Indian National Congress. Now he decided to come into the open, leave the Baroda Service, and take the plunge into politics. He became the de facto editor of the 'extremist' Calcutta daily, Bande Mataram. The paper took its name from the opening line of a song in a famous Bengali novel—Ananda Math by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and meant simply, "Mother, 1 bow to Thee"! But now it became a rallying political slogan, a powerful battle-cry, and even a potent mantra. As Sri Aurobindo himself remarked:
The mantra had been given and in a single day a whole people had
been converted to the religion of patriotism. The Mother had
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revealed herself. Once that vision has come to a people, there can
be no rest, no peace, no further slumber till the temple has been
made ready, the image installed and the sacrifice offered. A great
nation which has had that vision can never again bend its neck, in
subjection to the yoke of a conqueror.17
Sri Aurobindo simultaneously took charge of the new Bengal National College, though later on he gave up the Principalship to devote himself entirely to politics. He was now content with a salary one-fifth of what he had been drawing at Baroda for some years.
Sri Aurobindo's open involvement in politics lasted about three and a half years, from the middle of 1906 to the beginning of 1910. This included a whole year of incarceration in the Alipore Jail in connection with the Muzzaferpore outrage which had caused the death of two innocent European ladies. A few dates may be given as the significant landmarks of Sri Aurobindo's political period:
August 1906
Sri Aurobindo was in effective charge of both Bande Mataram and the Bengal National College.
December 1906
At the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress, Sri Aurobindo played a prominent part, along with noted fellow Nationalists like Bal Gangadhar (Lokamanya) Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai.
July-September 1907
Arrested in July but released on bail, Sri Aurobindo stood trial in September with regard to certain articles that had appeared in Bande Mataram, but the prosecution failed, and he was acquitted.
December 1907
Sri Aurobindo attended the Surat Congress and in alliance with Tilak and other Nationalist 'Extremists' broke with the Moderates led by Phirozeshah Mehta and G.K. Gokhale, so the Congress ended in a fiasco.
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January 1908
Sri Aurobindo was with Yogi Lele for three days in Baroda, and had an ineffable Advaitic-Vedantic experience which enabled him to see, "with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman."18 During the next four months, Sri Aurobindo was simultaneously engaged in yoga and politics; a union of inner calm and hectic outer activity.
May 1908
On 4 May 1908, Sri Aurobindo was arrested in connection with the Muzzaferpore outrage, and was later moved to Alipore, and placed in solitary confinement.
19 May 1908 to 5 May 1909
The Alipore Bomb Case and the trial of Sri Aurobindo provoked nationwide interest. It was in the course of his solitary confinement in the Alipore Jail that Sri Aurobindo had his great mystic experience —Narayana darshan—which he was later to describe in his Uttarpara speech. The prosecution failed once again, and Sri Aurobindo was acquitted and released on 6 May 1909.
30 May 1909
Sri Aurobindo made his celebrated speech at Uttarpara. His new sense of spiritual direction was revealed, not merely by this speech, but also by the two weekly newspapers that he now launched, the Karmayogin (in English) and Dharma (in Bengali).
25 December 1909
Sri Aurobindo published his 'Open Letter to My Countrymen, which was to be his "last political will and testament", in the Karmayogin in case he was deported by the Government.
February 1910
Sri Aurobindo secretly left British India and reached the French settlement of Chandernagore, near Calcutta.
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April 1910
Leaving Chandernagore, Sri Aurobindo reached Pondicherry, another French possession but further to the South of India, on 4 April, and remained there—his place of retreat, his cave of tapasya 19—till he passed away in the early hours of 5 December 1950.
The period of Sri Aurobindo's active participation in politics was short, yet he shot to prominence quickly, and his words moved men's hearts more than the proverbial trumpet. His direction of Bande Mataram was an illustrious page in the history of Indian journalism. Not only did he wield a brilliant pen in political controversy, but his pen also did him yeoman's service in political, philosophical and literary exposition. Some of his poetry and translations were published—the five-act blank verse drama, Perseus the Deliverer, Vidula or "The Mother to her Son' (from the Mahabharata) in Bande Mataram, and Baji Prabhou in Karmayogin. At the time of publication, all these had a pointed political appeal. In the play the stress was on the word 'deliverer'; Vidula exhorts her son to fight while Baji lays down his life in defence of his country. Several of Sri Aurobindo's unpublished writings, including poems, were taken away by the police and filed among the 4,000 exhibits in the Alipore Case. Many are totally lost, but some have been recently recovered and posthumously published.20
The Alipore Trial served in no small measure to make Sri Aurobindo's name a household word in India. Having sensationally demolished the prosecution's case against Sri Aurobindo, his counsel C.R. Das, a great name in Indian politics during the 1920s, ended his moving peroration as follows:
...Long after the controversy will be hushed in silence, long
after this turmoil, this agitation will have ceased, long after he is
dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism,
as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long
after he is dead and gone, his words will be echoed and re-
echoed, not only in India, but across distant seas and lands.
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Therefore, I say that the man in his position is not only standing
before the bar of this court, but before the bar of the High
Court of History.21
Sri Aurobindo continued to be a controversial figure even when he was in prison and when he came out a year later, he was hailed as a prophet, as a leader of humanity. What Tagore says about the prophet and his true role now applied to Sri Aurobindo:
Then comes the great prophet; and in his life and mind the
hidden fire of truth suddenly burns out into flame. The best in
the people works for long obscure ages in hints and whispers till
it finds its voice which can never again be silenced. For that voice
becomes the voice of Man.22
Arriving at Pondicherry, which was already a sort of political asylum to several Indian revolutionaries, Sri Aurobindo lived in comparative seclusion after all the blaze of publicity in which he had spent the previous three or four years.
"The lives of the saints", writes William James, "are a history of successive renunciations of complication, one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the purity of the inner tone."23 Schopenhauer adds that,"the more a man belongs to posterity, in other words to humanity in general, the more of an alien is he to his contemporaries."2'1 This 'sacrifice' Sri Aurobindo was continually making all his life. Further, to test his power of endurance, he fasted in 1910 for over twenty days. In the Alipore Jail, as a result of fasting for over ten days, Sri Aurobindo lost ten pounds in weight, but otherwise felt stronger at the end of the period. In Pondicherry, his twenty-three-day fast didn't interfere with his full mental and vital vigour and when he broke the fast, he started taking the normal food as before without any problems. Although such austerities didn't really appeal to him, these experiments nevertheless demonstrated that one could, if one wished, draw energy from the vital plane, instead of depending daily on the physical food but of course, this could not go on for ever.
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Sri Aurobindo lived in Pondicherry for nearly forty-one years. This was the last, greatest and most unique phase of his life. Here too a few landmarks may be indicated:
4 April 1910
Sri Aurobindo arrived in Pondicherry and stayed at Shanker Chetty's house as his guest till October, when he moved into a rented house, a few disciples gathering around him there.
1910-1914
These were the years of 'silent yoga'. Sri Aurobindo dropped all political activities and felt free to concentrate on spiritual work, seeing clearly that Britain would be forced by the inexorable march of events to concede independence to India. He felt that all human activity was a "thing to be included in a complete spiritual life".25 In the course of his yoga he was able to posit the dynamic spiritual principle, which he called the Supermind (after vijnāna in Sanskrit), and he felt that the way was now open for the emergence of the Gnostic Man or the Superman.
29 March 1914
Madame Mirra Richard (the Mother) meets Sri Aurobindo and recognises him as the Krishna of her visions and spiritual experiences, the Guru she had been seeking all her life.
15 August 1914
Arya, a monthly journal devoted to "a systematic study of the highest problems of existence", was launched on Sri Aurobindo's forty-third birthday. Madame Richard and Paul Richard collaborated in the venture till they were obliged, owing to the exigencies of the war, to leave for France. The main burden of running the journal fell upon Sri Aurobindo, who wrote most of it. After regularly appearing for about six and a half years, the journal ceased publication in 1921.
24 April 1920
Madame Richard came again, after a residence of some years in Japan, and now stayed on. The circle around Sri Aurobindo gradually
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grew. Arya had spread the Aurobindonian message far and wide, and people with a 'call' to yoga were now drawn to Pondicherry.
1 January 1922
The Mother took entire charge of the house occupied by Sri Aurobindo and his disciples. This became the nucleus of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, exemplifying the old Hindu ideal of guru-grha-vāsa (living with the teacher). There were 'evening talks', with the disciples gathering round Sri Aurobindo: and the 'talks' covered almost all subjects under the sun.26
24 November 1926
This was the day of realisation (siddhi), for on that day Sri Aurobindo experienced the descent of a new power of consciousness, the Overmind, which would prepare the ground for the ultimate descent of the Supermind. Sri Aurobindo now completely withdrew into seclusion, leaving the management of the ashram to the Mother. The 'evening talks' and visitors' interviews ceased. The disciples, however, were able to see Sri Aurobindo on certain days in the year—15 August, 24 November, 21 February and 24 April—and receive his blessings.
23 November 1938
There was a relaxation in the rules relating to Sri Aurobindo's complete retirement, "owing to circumstances, inner and outer, that made it possible for him to have direct physical contacts with the world outside."27 For the past twelve years he had maintained contact, even with his ashram inmates, only through letters. Now some of his disciples at least were able to meet him almost daily, so the 'evening talks' were resumed. The ashram was growing, and so were Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's responsibilities. On the 'Darshan Days', however, people from all over India gathered in Pondicherry and received the blessings of the Master and the Mother. All through his Pondicherry period, Sri Aurobindo's literary and spiritual work went hand in hand, his writing appearing first in the Arya, then in book form (usually revised), and
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again, after 1942, in the various journals dedicated to the exposition of his vision of the future.
11 December 1948
The National Prize (for eminent merit in the Humanities) was awarded to Sri Aurobindo in absentia at the Andhra University Convocation. In his citation, the Vice-Chancellor C.R. Reddy said:
In all humility of devotion, I hail Sri Aurobindo as the sole
sufficing genius of the age...He is among the Saviours of
Humanity, who belong to all ages and all nations, the Sanatanas,
who leaven our existence with their eternal presence, whether we
are aware of it or not.. .His soul is like a star and dwells apart.28
5 December 1950
After a brief illness, Sri Aurobindo passed away at 1.26 a.m., his body reposing "in a grandeur of victorious quiet". For the next four days the body seemed "charged with such a concentration of supramental light that there was no sign of decomposition."29 On 9 December, the body was buried in the ashram premises at 5 p.m.
The above bare recital of the cardinal events of the Pondicherry period of Sri Aurobindo's life is but the mockery of a biography, for the real life of an 'enlightened one' like him is not lived on the outside for the curious eyes of prying men or for cheap reportage. When the body was consigned to its last resting place, the Mother read the following message, which was both a prayer to Sri Aurobindo and a benediction to the assembled congregation:
To Thee who hast been the material envelope of our Master, to
Thee our infinite gratitude. Before Thee who hast done so much
for us, who hast worked, struggled, suffered, hoped, endured so
much, before Thee who hast willed all, attempted all, prepared,
achieved all for us, before Thee we bow down and implore that
we may never forget, even for a moment, all we owe to Thee.30
Since his passing away the ashram which grew round him at Pondicherry has grown in strength of numbers and in the variety
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and intensity of its dedicated work. Although the Mother, Sri Aurobindo's spiritual collaborator during the last thirty-five years of his life, has also left her physical body, she still guides the ashram's destiny.
A couple of points should be stressed before we pass on to a brief—necessarily very brief—consideration and "assessment" of Sri Aurobindo's work in many fields of activity. His retirement to Pondicherry, and later complete seclusion in his own ashram, did not mean a divorce from the ways and problems of average humanity. On the contrary in fact; for the very principle of his yoga, "was not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness, but also to take all life and all world activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness and action and to base life on the Spirit and give it a spiritual meaning." In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action?31 During the Second World War, he advised all support to the Allies, and later, during the Cripps Mission, he advised acceptance of the British offer. The purblind Congress leaders— M.K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, A.K. Azad and the rest, though not Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari)—rejected his advice, with the consequences (one of them being the Partition) that we all deplore.
Although he did not encourage casual visitors, who generally had only a sightseer's interest or a prying journalistic curiosity, on important occasions he relaxed the rule of seclusion. Prominent Nationalist leaders like C.R. Das, the poet Tagore, the educationists James H. Cousins and C.R. Reddy, his former pupil K.M. Munshi, and several others met Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry and had fruitful discussions with him.
After his interview, James H. Cousins noted: "I retain a flavour of gentleness and wisdom, breadth of thought and extent of experience that marked him out as one among millions."32 Tagore's impressions have been cited at the head of this chapter. Of the visitors—poets,
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painters, musicians, politicians, professors, waifs, sadhus, ecstatics, romantics, idealists, capitalists, labourers—who came to see the Master (or the Mother) and remained as permanent sadhaks (practitioners of Yoga) there was no end. President Woodrow Wilson's daughter became a permanent inmate of the ashram.
The community grew month by month, and although variety seemed to be the key-note—variety in colour, creed, community, language, race and occupation—the emotional attachment to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the feeling of 'belonging' to them, the sense of dedication to their cause, made the sadhaks a true community, a family, an ashram and not just a random collection of all sorts of individuals. And the family overflowed the physical limits of the ashram at Pondicherry, for Sri Aurobindo's disciples were—and are —to be found all over India, and the world.
Many were the tributes that were paid to Sri Aurobindo when the news of his passing away was flashed forth on the radio on the morning of 5 December 1950. One English disciple, Norman Dowsett, wrote on The Immaculate Hour of Passing:
THEN STILL THE NIGHT
Only the breath of a sigh
Is heard in the leaves,
Only a whispered goodbye
The earth still cleaves;
Only the sound of His flute
Astir on the breeze—
Then still the night—mute As the silent trees.33
And the Indo-Ceylonese poet, J.VTjayatunga, wrote no less feelingly:
Out of Thy love
For God Thou lovedst us with all our weakness
And animality; Thy radiance cut across
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The grossness of our lives, and touched dark corners,
Thy wisdom shed drops upon our dry hearts,
Thy glory, wide as the sea, touched the shores of our darkness.
Are we sad today? Is the earth dark without light?
Nay, Master, Thou didst not live in vain
Thy life sublime and austere was not spent
For naught.. .Holding to the hem
Of Thy garment we shall raise ourselves
To High Heaven, by thy Grace, if not now
In some distant age, and once again
We shall behold Thee, O Master,
Shining with ever greater lustre, shining
Like the Sun, but unafraid we shall reach Thee
And touch Thee, and be burnt in the Fire
Of Thy love.34
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