Beyond Man

Chapter Two: The Most Dangerous Man in India

My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle.¹

— Sri Aurobindo

In Baroda, Aurobindo was at first given the tasks of a lowly functionary at the office of revenue stamps and other administrative agencies. After about a year the Maharaja found a way to make a better use of Aurobindo’s talents, appointing him as his unofficial private secretary and calling him to the palace whenever an important document had to be composed in English. Aurobindo also began to teach part-time at the University of Baroda in 1897; a year later he was nominated professor of English and lecturer of French. He would eventually become vice-principal of the College. If such had been his ambition, he would easily have been able to obtain a top post in the state with all the honours, comforts and financial benefits thereof; for the Maharaja continued to call for his services as a private secretary, and it would not have been that difficult for Aurobindo to influence the prince to his own advantage.

However, such possibilities did not interest Aurobindo in the least, not even after his marriage in 1901 to the fourteen-year-old Mrinalini Bose. After five years of marriage, he wrote to his father-in-law: ‘I am afraid I shall never be good for much in the way of domestic virtues. I have tried, very ineffectively, to do some part of my duty as a son, a brother and a husband, but there is something too strong in me which forces me to subordinate everything else to it.’² This ‘something’ was Mother India.

‘I entered into political action and continued it from 1903 to 1910 with one aim and one alone, to get into the mind of the people a settled will for freedom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it in place of the futile ambling Congress methods till then in vogue,’³ wrote Sri Aurobindo. The Congress, founded in 1885 on the initiative of an Englishman, was at that time still the sole political party. Aurobindo’s aim meant no less than a complete reorientation of its political strivings — a daunting task for a young man who did not even speak his mother tongue.

Barely four months after his arrival in India he had already written a series of articles, in sonorous English of course, for the daily Indu Prakash, titled ‘New Lamps for Old’, in which he criticized the subservient attitude of the Congress towards the British rulers without mincing his words. These words sounded so bold that he was asked to tone them down. Aurobindo was not willing to do so and preferred to remain silent for the time being. Those articles are unmistakable proof of the early maturity of his political thought, of which the main elements must already have been present at the time he stepped ashore in Bombay.

When he entered politics, the idea of an independent India ‘was regarded … by the vast majority of Indians as unpractical and impossible, an almost insane chimera,’⁴ wrote Sri Aurobindo later; and again in the third person he wrote about himself: ‘He has always stood for India’s complete independence which he was the first to advocate publicly and without compromise as the only ideal worthy of a self-respecting nation.’⁵

During his last years in Baroda, his political activity grew more and more intense. He met with like-minded people and sounded out the possibility of an openly waged freedom struggle. The collaboration with his younger brother, Barindrakumar or Barin for short, grew more frequent, and he used his holidays in Bengal for revolutionary purposes.

The partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905 caused general public indignation — an atmosphere conducive to the spread of the spirit of revolution. In Calcutta, the National University of Bengal was founded for students who had participated in political manifestations and who were for that reason expelled from the official educational institutions. Aurobindo accepted the invitation to be the first vice-principal of the new university, which opened its doors on 15 August 1906, his birthday. The Baroda interlude now belonged to the past.

An incredibly busy time started for Aurobindo, for he soon became one of the leaders of the nationalists, often called ‘extremists’, who strove single-mindedly for India’s unconditional and total independence. Because of his contributions to the newly founded weekly Bande Mataram (‘Hail the Mother’, a title that was to become the rallying cry everywhere in the country), he had acquired the stature of a nationally known political personality. It was of Bande Mataram that S.K. Ratcliffe, Chief Editor of The Statesman, wrote that it was ‘full of leading and special articles written in English with brilliance and pungency not hitherto attained in the Indian Press … the most effective voice of what we then called nationalist extremism.’⁶ That English flowed out of the pen of Aurobindo Ghose, who became after a short while himself the unnamed chief editor of the weekly.

Sri Aurobindo at the National College in Calcutta, 1907

He also supervised the ideological contents of another weekly, Yugantar. This was the organ of the youthful revolutionaries who clustered around Aurobindo’s younger brother Barin; impatient, they preferred acting instead of talking and wanted to accelerate the realization of their holiest aim, the liberation of Mother India, through terrorism. They were naïve and inexperienced, committing one blunder after another, but they made the British nervous. Around this time Aurobindo fell seriously ill, though he still found time to write plays.

In 1907 he was prosecuted for the first time for ‘activities against the state’ and acquitted. He made no secret of his demand for unconditional independence, neither in his articles nor in his speeches at public or private meetings (teeming with police spies), but he always knew how to formulate his words without crossing the red line of illegality.

Within the Congress, he worked together with other extremists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal for the acceptance of a radical programme. It was tough going for the young idealists to take a stand against the established and highly respected political stalwarts, most of whom had had their share in the founding of the party. ‘I used to practise what you may call voluntary self-effacement or self-denial, and I liked to keep myself behind,’⁷ said Sri Aurobindo many years later. He wrote about himself: ‘He preferred to remain and act and even to lead from behind the scenes without his name being known in public.’⁸ But his prosecution in 1907 had ended his anonymity; no longer was he a hero only in Bengal, he had become a national celebrity.

Such was the situation in 1907 when the Bengal leaders of the Congress travelled in a chartered train to Surat, a town on the west coast of the Indian subcontinent. The whole thousand-mile route from Kharagpur to Surat was a triumphal journey of lights, crowds, and continued cheering,’ wrote Barin, who had accompanied his brother. ‘Aurobindo, the new idol of the nation, was hardly known then by his face, and at every small and big station a frantic crowd rushed about on the station platforms looking for him in the first and second class carriages, while all the time Aurobindo sat unobserved in a third class compartment.’⁹

It was in Surat that the Congress split into a conservative and an extremist wing. Historians had all along supposed that Tilak was responsible for the break-up, although he denied it himself time and again. A letter of Sri Aurobindo’s was published in 1954, written twenty years before, in which the truth finally surfaced: ‘History very seldom registers the things that were decisive but took place behind the veil; it records the show in front of the curtain. Very few people know that it was I (without consulting Tilak) who gave the order that led to the breaking of the Congress …’¹⁰

After the indescribable confusion on the day of the schism, Aurobindo presided over two meetings of the extremists in which all efforts at reconciliation were rejected. The Congress would be reunited only in 1917. It was Aurobindo’s aim ‘to imprint in the spirit of the people the will for freedom’. Because of his decisive interventions in Surat, this would henceforth be an integral part of the political programme, ultimately leading to India’s independence.

At the time of the Surat Congress, December 1907

Front row left to right: G.S. Khaparde, Aswini Kumar Dutta
Middle row: Sirdar Ajit Singh, Sri Aurobindo, B.G. Tilak, Saiyad Haider Reza
Back row: Dr. B.S. Munje, Ramaswamy, K. Kuverji Desai

Sri Aurobindo at Amravati, January 1908, after the Surat Congress

Barin and his young terrorists committed one of their blunders when they killed two British ladies in Muzaffarpur with a primitive bomb destined for a British Magistrate. This time the colonial authorities retaliated mercilessly. At the top of their list was written the name of Aurobindo Ghose. He was arrested on 5 May 1908 and locked up in the prison of Alipore, a suburb of Calcutta, together with more than twenty other suspects, under the charge of ‘waging war against the king,’ the British-Indian equivalent of high treason. ‘The Alipore Bomb Trial, as it became known, was “the first state trial of any magnitude in India.”’¹¹ The judge was C.E. Beachcroft, ICS, a classmate of Aurobindo’s at Cambridge. (In the entrance examination of their ICS class Beachcroft had come second to Aurobindo in Greek; ironically, in the final examination, Beachcroft had done better than Aurobindo in Bengali.)

After some early experiences Aurobindo’s spiritual path had broadened considerably, and he paid but scant attention to the proceedings in the courtroom and the goings-on in jail. His inner voice had told him that he would be acquitted for lack of evidence, and so it happened.

In his peroration an inspired C.R. Das, Aurobindo’s lawyer, had spoken the following words about his client: ‘Long after this controversy is hushed in silence, long after this turmoil, this agitation ceases, 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. 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.’¹²

Aurobindo was free again, but he stood alone in a desolate political landscape. The other extremist leaders were in exile or doing long prison sentences, and the publication of their daily newspapers and weekly magazines was forbidden. Barin and Ullaskar Dutt were condemned to death by hanging, but their sentence was later commuted to lifelong exile in the infamous prison of Port Blair, on the Andaman Islands, now a national monument. (Only in 1920 would Barin return to his motherland.)

In the course of the trial the British prosecution had already remarked that ‘Aurobindo was treated with the reverence of a king wherever he had gone,’ and that he ‘in fact was considered not only as the leader of Bengal but of the whole country.’ His fame had spread even more because of the Alipore Trial, and the British authorities regretted that they had let him go scot-free once more. Letters of that time prove that the highest circles examined the possibility of doing away once and for all with ‘the famous Aurobindo.’ The First Secretary of the Bengal government described him as ‘the most dangerous of our adversaries now at large.’ The same epithet was used by the Lieutenant-Governors of Bengal and Eastern Bengal and Assam, and afterwards by the Viceroy of India, who called him ‘the most dangerous man we have to deal with at present.’¹³

In the beginning of 1910 Aurobindo was warned by Sister Nivedita, an English disciple of Swami Vivekananda, that the trap set for him could be sprung at any moment. It was time for him to leave the scene. As a farewell he penned an article in which he expressed his ideals openly. This article, his political testament, he published in the Karmayogin — the weekly he had started after being acquitted and which after his departure was kept going for a while by Sister Nivedita, who was a nationalistic activist. His inner Voice gave him his ‘marching orders’. ‘When thou hast the command, care only to fulfil it,’¹⁴ reads one of his aphorisms. Less than half an hour after the warning he was on the Ganges in a rowing boat that took him to Chandernagore, a French enclave a few miles to the north of Calcutta. Then, after more than a month spent in absolute seclusion, he travelled, under the name of Jitendranath Mitra and in the company of a young revolutionary, on the SS Dupleix from Calcutta to Pondicherry. He arrived there on 4 April 1910 and was received and housed by local freedom fighters.

The political period in Aurobindo Ghose’s life had come to an end. The numerous articles and other writings he left behind are there to show that he was the first to discern and to define the essential objects of the freedom struggle: unconditional independence; the use of indigenous goods and materials; boycott of all things British; political disobedience of the colonial authority; a new educational system suitable to the Indian nature and character; and, perhaps of all his ideas to be later on the most distorted, non-violence as a political weapon.

As Sri Aurobindo has written about himself: ‘The part Sri Aurobindo took publicly in Indian politics was of brief duration, for he turned aside from it in 1910 and withdrew to Pondicherry; much of his programme lapsed in his absence, but enough had been done to change the whole face of Indian politics and the whole spirit of the Indian people to make independence its aim and non-cooperation and resistance its method, and even an imperfect application of this policy heightening into sporadic periods of revolt has been sufficient to bring about the victory. The course of subsequent events followed largely the line of Sri Aurobindo’s idea. The Congress was finally captured by the Nationalist Party, declared independence its aim, organised itself for action … and eventually formed the first national, though not as yet independent, Government in India and secured from Britain acceptance of independence for India.’¹⁵

Each time Doordarshan, the Indian national television, reports the daily parliamentary proceedings in New Delhi, it shows first a picture of the parliament building, then a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, then a statue of Dr Ambedkar, a defender of the backward classes, and then a bust of Sri Aurobindo.