Beyond Man

Chapter One: A Perfect Gentleman

Sri Aurobindo wrote to one of his first biographers: ‘I see you have persisted in giving a biography — is it really necessary or useful? The attempt is bound to be a failure, because neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life; it has not been on the surface for men to see.’¹

It is not the intention to include in this book an extensive biography of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, not even a concise one, but it seems indispensable to narrate some of the principal facts and events in their lives, for otherwise much of our story of their work might be difficult to follow. Besides, a brief glimpse of their lives will provide readers who have no idea of who they were with some points of reference.

Aurobindo Akroyd Ghose, the third son of a medical doctor, Kristo Dhan Ghose, was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872. (Afterwards the family would be expanded by a girl and another boy.) His father, ‘a thoroughly anglicized Bengali,’ demanded that English be exclusively spoken in his house and not a word in Bengali, the local Indian language. Consequently Aurobindo grew up speaking English as his mother tongue.

Let us glance back at that period for a moment. A considerable part of India, ‘the jewel in the crown,’ was a British colony ruled with gusto by the subjects of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. They were the masters not only of the territories they had conquered, but indirectly also of the 635 kingdoms, big and small, ruled by colourful rajahs and maharajahs. The latter, absolute despots, could act out to their heart’s content their sometimes enlightened but often obscure fancies and desires as long as they did not displease the British authorities. A relatively small British Army, and especially a well-trained body of able functionaries, kept the colony under their thumb. After the revolt of 1857 the Indian populace had accepted the situation practically without exception, continuing their traditional way of living under the watchful eye of the haughty white masters.

Dr K.D. Ghose had done his medical studies in England; he was ‘a terrible atheist’ and a fervent admirer of all things British. It was his ambition that his children would become the best of the best, ‘beacons to the world’. Only one career would do for them, the Indian Civil Service (ICS), that exemplary body of colonial civil servants, accessible to Indians too on condition of their passing an entrance examination. This was only practicable for those who had been studying in Great Britain. And so it came to pass, in 1879, that Dr Ghose took his three eldest sons to Manchester, then the most populous city in the United Kingdom. The boys were put into the care of the Reverend William H. Drewett, with the explicit order that they must be kept away from anything or anybody even remotely connected with India. ‘Aurobindo spent his formative years totally cut off from the culture of his birth,’² writes his biographer Peter Heehs.

Drewett and his wife personally looked after Aurobindo’s education. He seemed to have a gift for languages. He absorbed English automatically from his environment and made remarkable progress in Latin. Recently his first published poem, ‘Light’, has been found; it was written inspired by Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’, and published in a local magazine when he was ten years old.

He was so advanced in Latin that he was allowed to skip the first class at St Paul’s secondary school in London. Along with the normal curriculum, by following which he made rapid progress in Latin, Greek and French, he also taught himself Italian, German and Spanish to read Dante, Goethe and Cervantes in the original. As to English literature, he showed much interest in the Elizabethan theatre and for the great romantic poetry, particularly that of Keats, Shelley and Byron. He was also fascinated by Jeanne d’Arc, Mazzini and other heroes from history who had fought for the liberation of their motherland. As later told by him, he felt the urge to work for the freedom of India already at that time.

Aurobindo passed the entrance examination for the ICS brilliantly, his marks for Latin and Greek being the highest ever. To become a member of the ICS he now had to study for two years at a university. This was a well-nigh insurmountable problem, for his father could no longer send any money and Aurobindo and his brothers were living in poverty. Their daily sustenance consisted of ‘a slice or two of sandwich bread and butter and a cup of tea in the morning and in the evening a penny saveloy [sausage]’,³ and there was no money to buy new clothes. Aurobindo decided to try and obtain a scholarship offered by King’s College of Cambridge University. He sat for the examination in December 1889 and came out first. Oscar Browning, then a renowned linguist and writer, confided later to Aurobindo that his papers for Greek and Latin had been the best submitted to him as an examiner in thirteen years.

In his recently published Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, Peter Heehs writes: ‘King’s College, founded in 1441, is among the older foundations of Cambridge University. As a classical scholar, Aurobindo was participating in an educational system whose traditions went back to the Renaissance. To master Greek and Latin, to read Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, to absorb the culture of classical Greece and Rome — these were considered the proper training of an English gentleman. And what one learned in the classroom and lecture hall was only a part, and not the most important part, of the Cambridge experience. The university’s atmosphere took hold of those who entered it and wrought a comprehensive change.’⁴

Aurobindo Ghose became an exceptional classical scholar and was soon also generally known as a master of the English language. An Englishman in later years travelling in India asked: ‘Do you know where Ghose is now, the classical scholar of Cambridge, who has come away to India to waste his future?’⁵ All his life Sri Aurobindo would refer back to the knowledge he had acquired during his youth. At the end, when his eyes had become too weak to continue writing himself, he dictated a series of articles to Nirodbaran. ‘As he was dictating,’ remembers Nirodbaran, ‘I marvelled at so much knowledge of Ancient Greece and Ancient India stored up somewhere in his superconscious memory and now pouring down at his command in a smooth flow. No notes were consulted, no books were needed, yet after a lapse of so many decades everything was fresh, spontaneous and recalled in vivid detail!’⁶

Sri Aurobindo’s unfinished epic, Ilion, about the last day of the siege of Troy, is a monument of classical knowledge. There is his drama, Perseus the Deliverer. There is Heraclitus, an essay on the pre-Socratic philosopher, which reads fluently even after seventy years and would still be accorded a place of honour in any philosophical publication. There is his essay on quantitative hexametres in the English language, his book, The Future Poetry, still undiscovered by the contemporary poets and theorists of poetry, and his writings on ‘overhead poetry’ — on the ‘overmental’ poetical sources. There is his abundant correspondence about poetry with his disciples, for it looked as if he had made his Ashram into a breeding-ground of poets. There are his poems such as ‘Rose of God’, ‘A God’s Labour’ and ‘Musa Spiritus’, belonging to the highest range of mystical poetry. And above all there is his epic, Savitri. All this would, by itself, suffice to justify the efforts of a lifetime — a lifetime of a scholar in the Western classical languages and of a poet in the English language.

But Aurobindo Ghose did not become an ICS officer. The call to serve his mother country had grown more insistent, and he had developed an aversion of colonial officialdom however highly esteemed. Ranked among the best in his class, he would have had no difficulty in bringing his training to a satisfactory end — he had won the awards for classical poetry at the end of each academic year — but he failed because he did not show up for the decisive horse riding test. I say, a gentleman should be able to ride on horseback! But the nearest connection Aurobindo ever had with sports was his (nonplaying) membership of the cricket club at Baroda⁹¹ — and at the first riding test for the ICS he had fallen from the horse. Nevertheless, he was called three more times to prove he was an able horseman, but he preferred to roam about in the streets of London instead. Those who knew him thought his eventual rejection of the ICS a scandalous waste. But the Maharajah of Baroda, Sayaji Gaekwad, was in luck; he found himself in London precisely at that moment and so got the chance to hire a young man with the capabilities of Aurobindo Ghose, an ICS trainee, for 200 rupees per month.

Swami Vivekananda, the great disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahansa, travelled to the West in 1893; in the beginning of the same year, Aurobindo Ghose sailed on the SS Carthage back to his motherland after an absence of thirteen years. His father had expected him on the SS Roumania and died of grief after being told that this ship had perished in a storm before the coast of Portugal. Two days after his arrival on Indian soil, at the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, Aurobindo had to report for service in Baroda.