Hitler and his God

Scholar and Revolutionary

Aravinda Akroyd Ghose was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872. His father, Civil Surgeon K.D. Ghose, was an anglophile who saw to it that in his house no Bengali but only English and a smattering of Hindustani were spoken. He had great ambitions for his sons and sent, in 1879, the three eldest to Great Britain. There Aravinda should study to prepare his entrance examination to the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the highest and highly valued position an Indian could attain under the colonial regime. At first the three brothers stayed with the family of a Congregational minister at Manchester, the centre and model of the industrial revolution, where Aravinda received an excellent private education. “I knew nothing of India and her culture”, he would write later. In the young boy, a precocious poet, a very strong feeling arose when he read Shelley’s Revolt of Islam. “I used to read it again and again – of course without understanding everything. Evidently it appealed to some part of the being … I had a thought that I would dedicate my life to a similar world-change and take part in it.” 948

In 1885 Aravinda went to the esteemed St Paul’s School in London. He became proficient in Greek and Latin, and in English literature. He also studied “divinity” (the Bible), French and mathematics. His reports show that these subjects provided him with no difficulty, and he found time to study on the side Italian, German and Spanish in order to be able to read Dante, Goethe and Calderón in the original. At that time he led a life of poverty because his father, for unknown reasons, practically stopped sending money for him and his second brother, while most of their scanty resources went to the eldest one who was studying at Oxford. When growing up Aravinda had to survive during a whole year on “a slice or two of sandwich bread and butter and a cup of tea in the morning and in the evening a penny saveloy”, some sort of sausage.

Aravinda took the scholarship examination for King’s College at Cambridge University; he was elected to the first vacant open scholarship, which means that he was the best candidate. Known as A.A. Ghose, Aravinda studied at King’s College from October 1890 to October 1892. The time of direst poverty was now over thanks to the scholarship. “As the recipient of a scholarship he had to prepare for the classical tripos [the equivalent of a BA], taking that difficult honours examination after two instead of the usual three years. At the same time, as an ICS probationer, he had to follow a completely different curriculum and demonstrate his mastery of half a dozen subjects in three periodical examinations.” 949 He did very well on all fronts.

In addition to this there was the general education received at that famous university, concisely depicted by Peter Heehs as follows: “As a classical scholar, Aravinda 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 – this was considered the proper training of an English gentleman. And what one learned in the classroom and lecture hall was only 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.” 950 A.A. Ghose left Cambridge as a classical scholar and a gentleman; he would keep the knowledge acquired there for the rest of his life, both as a generally recognized master of the English language and as a man possessing a broad general knowledge.

But Aravinda did no longer want to join the Indian Civil Service. Influenced by his father, who sent him examples of colonial misrule from the press, he began to look at the British presence in India with new eyes and joined nationalist associations of Indian students. These organizations were infiltrated by government spies, who reported A.A. Ghose’s revolutionary speeches. Moreover, he abhorred the routine and dreary paper work of the ICS administration. He was summoned three times for the horse-riding test and three times he failed to show up. He was disqualified and thereby eliminated as an ICS probationer.

As luck would have it, the Maharajah of Baroda, on one of his many visits to Europe, happened to be in London. He was delighted that he could hire a trained Cambridge and ICS man, higher qualified than most, for less than a reasonable salary. Aravinda sailed for India in February 1903. He set foot ashore in his motherland on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay and entered the service of Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III (1863-1939) two days later. It must have been an enormous change for Aravinda to find himself in the princely but culturally backward Baroda of the end of the nineteenth century after having lived for more than thirteen years in places like Manchester, London and Cambridge. In due course he became at the Baroda College lecturer in French, professor of English and Vice-Principal. The prince also used him as his unofficial private secretary, especially for writing his speeches and the history of his reign.

Hardly six months after his arrival in India Aravinda was asked to contribute a series of articles to a newspaper called Indu Prakash. This may be considered his entrance into Indian politics. In this series, called “New Lamps for Old”, he lambasted the Indian National Congress Party (founded in 1885) for its submissive attitude towards the British masters in such hard-hitting prose that he was requested to tone down or write on less controversial topics. “New Lamps for Old” remains proof of the precocious political maturity of A.A. Ghose and of the fire that burned in him. It is a historical fact that he was the first to take the standpoint of absolute independence for his motherland, even when the general atmosphere was one of “apathy and despair” and absolute independence was still held to be “an insane chimera”.

For a time Aravinda preferred to act behind the scenes. He was initiated in the Western Secret Society in Bombay, and administered in his turn the oath of secrecy and unconditional service of the Motherland to the Anushilan Samiti, “India’s first true revolutionary society”, in Calcutta. By now he had married a young girl from the city of his birth, which at that time was still the capital of British India – Delhi would become the capital in 1911 – and he travelled there almost every year during his holidays. These occasions he put to use for secret revolutionary activities, after a while helped by his younger brother Barin. It would be an exaggeration, though, to say that these efforts were even moderately successful.

But then Lord Curzon decreed the partition of Bengal (which would ultimately lead to the formation of what are now the Indian federal state of Bengal and Bangladesh). Such was the indignation of the Bengal people at the division of their holy land that they seemed to have caught a hot patriotic fever and that revolutionary action at last became possible. Their fervour was also fed by the victories of the Japanese over the Russians at Port Arthur (1904) and Mukden (1905), which proved for the first time that an Asian nation could beat the haughty Westerners. In 1906 a Bengal National College was founded in Calcutta. Aravinda took leave from the Maharajah’s service and became the first principal of the College; that his payment was but a fraction of what he earned at Baroda was not an issue.

A period of hectic activity followed. Not only did Aurobindo – as he now spelled his name – have a full-time job in helping the National College afloat, he also supervised a revolutionary Bengali weekly, the organ of the militant extremists Yugantar (the changing age), edited by his brother Barin; he wrote for Bande Mataram, an English weekly which followed the line of the revolutionary nationalists and made Aurobindo Ghose’s voice heard throughout India; and he even found time to write a play, Perseus the Deliverer. Aurobindo’s articles were so skilfully written that they propagated the idea of unconditional independence and non-collaboration without ever crossing the line of sedition. Still he was put on trial in the Bande Mataram Sedition Case (1907), but as nothing could be proved against him the only result was that he shot to immediate all-India fame.

Aurobindo Ghose was now a recognized leader of the Extremists, the Congress faction dissatisfied with the docile political programme of the Moderates. He was in fact the most extreme Extremist, and brought matters to a head at the Surat congress in December 1907, where his insistence on full independence of his country from the colonial occupation led to a split between the two trends in the Congress. Political moderation gradually died a natural death. In 1929, more than twenty years after Aurobindo defined swaraj as “full independence”, Jawaharlal Nehru declared “the word ‘swaraj’ in article 1 of the Congress Constitution shall mean Complete Independence”. Again eighteen years later the ideal was realized.

The year 1908 would be a landmark in Aurobindo’s eventful life. First there was the decisive inner change which came about because of his search for a firm psychological foothold amid the fleeting stream of outer events. He met the yogi Vishnu Baskar Lele in Baroda shortly after the Surat congress. The event would prove determinative for Aurobindo’s further life as, totally unexpected, he had the stunning experience of “the silent Brahman” which he has described on several occasions. This was in fact more than an experience, it was a permanent realization, for the state of inner silence never left him anymore. Along with it he followed Lele’s recommendation to surrender himself unreservedly to his inner voice as the directive of his spiritual exploration called yoga, “the art of conscious self-finding”.

But the British authorities knew what a dangerous man the politician Aurobindo Ghose was and they were looking for an occasion to get rid of him. This occasion came when, on 30 April 1908, Barin and his group of young militant patriots, of whom Aurobindo was the secret leader, bungled another of their bombing attempts. This time the colonial authorities came down with a heavy hand. Aurobindo Ghose was one of the first to be arrested. His trial and that of the other revolutionaries, mostly young students who had broken off their studies to fight for the Motherland, is known in Indian history as “the Alipore Bomb Case”, after Alipore Jail in Calcutta where the accused were imprisoned. The trial, presided over by a former Cambridge acquaintance of Aurobindo, lasted a full year. Barin and one companion were sentenced to death, but afterwards deported to the horrors of the jail in Port Blair, in the Andaman Islands; others were given prison sentences; Aurobindo was acquitted for lack of evidence as to his involvement in the attack.

Aurobindo’s year-long stay in Alipore Jail was used by him as an intensive retreat which resulted in a series of ever widening spiritual realizations. The Aurobindo who left Alipore Jail on 6 May 1909 was not the same who had entered it with his hands tied together and a rope around his waist. He now saw his political work and the liberation of India as part of a spiritual tide which would carry the world into a new era. Nationalism, he said in his Uttarpara speech, had to be seen as part of the sanatana dharma, the eternal law.

But the British authorities did not forget Aurobindo Ghose; on the contrary, even the highest-placed among them, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal and the Viceroy called him in their correspondence “the most dangerous man in India”. When once more a warrant for his arrest was signed, Aurobindo left Calcutta instantly at the command of his inner voice. He was taken in a rowing boat to Chandernagore, a French enclave to the north of Calcutta; shortly afterwards he sailed to Pondicherry, another French enclave on the Coromandel Coast below Madras. He thought of his stay there as temporary, but he would never leave Pondicherry again.

He was joined by a handful of the young Bengali revolutionaries who would become his first disciples. Once more he traversed, together with his companions, a period of extreme poverty. But no external circumstances could shake him anymore, nor could the constant presence of the British spies around the house where he was staying. His notebooks about the yoga he was practising, or for a great deal discovering, have been preserved. It was a full-time occupation which would soon make him “the Master of Pondicherry” or the Mahayogi (great yogi), as he is still called today. More disciples came to stay with him, in some cases crossing the whole subcontinent in their quest. And then somebody arrived who had realized the same vision and who would help to initiate a new period in what Aurobindo called his “integral yoga”.