Savitri

  IV

Politics

Not much need be said about Sri Aurobindo's politics. While an undergraduate at Cambridge, he was not only an active member of the Majlis but he also joined an Indian Secret Society, functioning from London, known as the 'Lotus and the Dagger'. On his return to India, he contributed a series of articles to the Indu Prakash, entitled 'New Lamps for Old', criticising the old leaders for their weak-kneed policy of political mendicancy. His own ideas regarding the emancipation of India were as yet nebulous; there was plenty of idealism and impatience, but little constructive thinking.

      It was after his turn to yoga in the early years of the new century that his political ideas began to acquire definiteness and the accents of authority. In fact, he first went to yoga to be able to perfect his instruments so that they might serve the country more efficiently and purposefully. The Curzonian policy of repression and the decision to split Bengal into two halves brought matters to a head. In 1905 Sri Aurobindo wrote the pamphlet, Bhawani Mandir, and this 'packet of political dynamite' circulated privately and rattled the bureaucracy. Recovered but recently, the 'scheme' is reproduced in full in A.B. Purani's Life of Sri Aurbindo, and reading it today we can see both why Sri Aurobindo could not but write that pamphlet and why the bureaucracy tried to suppress it.

      Bhawani Mandir is partly a diagnosis of India's ills and partly the prescription of a radical cure. India's ills flowed from her want of strength; what was the remedy, then? "We have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts", he said. "Strength can be created only by drawing it from the internal and inexhaustible reservoirs of the Spirit, from that Adya-Shakti of the Eternal which is the fountain of all new existence." In a stirring oration Sri Aurobindo asked for dedicated men, even as Jesus said,

Page 27

"Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." "Come then", said Sri Aurobindo,

...hearken to the call of the Mother. She is already in our hearts

waiting to manifest Herself, waiting to be worshipped—inactive

because the God in us is concealed by tamas...You who feel Her

stirring within you, fling off the black veil of self, break down

the imprisoning walls of indolence, help Her each as you feel

impelled, with your bodies or with your intellect or with your

speech or with your wealth or with your prayers and worship

each man according to his capacity. Draw not back...⁵³

The practical part of the scheme envisaged the organisation of a band of political sannyasis, dedicated to brahmacharya (single-blessedness or celibacy), who would (like the Jesuits of old), be ready to "do or die" (in Gandhi's famous phrase of 1942) for the country An inaccessible hill-temple dedicated to Bhawani, the Mother as the supreme Shakti, would be the refuge and the training-place of these political knights-errant who would draw their strength, not from the fact of numbers or the possession of arms, but from the home of the Spirit.

      The scheme also gave in an appendix, rules for the new order of sannyasis under various heads. Although the scheme may be read today as just an idealistic plan or programme for training a band of selfless, self-perfecting workers dedicated to the service of the country and the community, the Rowlatt Committee Report has recorded that the pamphlet "really contains the germs of the Hindu revolutionary movement in Bengal". Anyhow, soon after writing Bhawani Mandir, Sri Aurobindo was in the 'thick of the fight' and no wonder the bureaucracy interpreted the pamphlet in the worst possible light. There was much reading between the lines, and Bhawani Mandir was freely (though wrongly) thought to be an invitation to political extremism and even the cult of the bomb.

      We have seen, in an earlier section, how Sri Aurobindo's brief sojourn in the political arena was nevertheless a sensational one.

Page 28

While he was getting deeper into politics, he was at the same time also being drawn more and more towards yoga. The mystic experience at Baroda in January 1908 was a turning point in his life. Henceforth he was in politics, but not quite of it. He was like a man in a trance; he seemed to work and talk as other men but he also seemed to be detached from it all. In 1907 Henry Nevinson had found Sri Aurobindo, "grave with intensity, careless of fate or opinion, and one of the most silent men I have ever known...of the stuff that dreamers are made of..."⁵⁴ In 1908 Sri Aurobindo was, if anything, graver and serener, unattached to the ebb and flow of the political flood.

      The second great spiritual experience which came to him in the Alipore Jail completed the transformation; from the 'still centre' of detachment he passed on to the circle of purposeful commitment. So far his surface mind had attended to problems like the formulation of a programme for India's regeneration, self-development through self-help—swadeshi, national education, arbitration, etc.—and passive resistance to evil in any of its forms. He did not, of course, make a fetish of the word 'passive'; as K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar points out. "Sri Aurobindo did hot rule out violence in all circumstances, but it appeared to him that the bureaucracy, not being of the ruthless Russian kind, could be effectively countered by passive resistance."" In many respects-—though not in all— the Gandhian 'Constructive Programme' and Civil Disobedience (or satyagraha) movements of a later day both flower from the Aurobindonian policies and programmes.

      When he came out of prison in May 1909, Sri Aurobindo felt that the movement of national redemption would now take its own proper course and achieve ultimate victory, and he could therefore devote himself entirely to the much vaster problem of human perfection and earth-transformation. But even from his retreat in Pondicherry he had a clear view of the Indian and world situation, and was ready to exert the force that was in his hands—a higher mental or intuitive power of consciousness and, after 1926, an overmental consciousness. Mere words could be misleading, yet the point might be made (hazardous though all such generalisations must be) that the two great creative spirits of modern India—Mahatma Gandhi used moral force in politics while Sri Aurobindo used a spiritual force, and both sought, in their different ways, to purge politics of its asuric and egoistic evils.

Page 29