The Mother

5: Aurobindo Ghose

In my view, a man’s value does not depend on what he learns or his position or fame or what he does, but on what he is and inwardly becomes.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

Aravinda Akroyd Ghose was born on 15 August 1872 in Calcutta, at 4 Theatre Road.⁹¹ ‘Aravinda,’ at the time an uncommon name given by his suddenly inspired father, means ‘lotus’ and ‘delicate, fragrant, pleasing to the gods.’ The newborn baby also received the name ‘Akroyd’ in honour of Annette Akroyd, an English acquaintance of his father who ran a Brahmo school in Bengal, and perhaps to give his name an English touch. Aravinda was the third son of Krishna Dhan Ghose, at the time the Civil Surgeon in Rangpur, a town in East Bengal, which is now Bangladesh.

Medical doctor Krishna Dhan Ghose (°1844) was a popular figure in Rangpur because of the idealism he showed in the execution of his office – ‘duty is my creed’ – and his generosity. He was a thoroughly anglicized Bengali, to the point of allowing only English (and a little Hindustani) to be spoken in his house. ‘After graduating from the Calcutta Medical College he had, in 1870, gone to Aberdeen in Scotland for further medical studies. He was one of the first Bengalis to do so [and must also have been one of the first to sail through the recently opened Suez Canal]. To cross the ‘black waters’ in those days, in defiance of orthodox Hindu injunction, was to lose caste and invite social ostracism, but Krishna Dhan had no hesitation in running the risk … He came back to India a ‘pucca sahib’ [accomplished gentleman], determined to model himself on the British and throw away all Indian ways of life, customs and manners. Krishna Dhan admired the English; at the same time, he had a very strong aversion to the inertia, blind orthodoxy and general degradation which were so prevalent in the Indian society at the time.’ ² ‘I have rarely met with one so highly educated, so spirited and with such a strong personality.’ (Bepin Chandra Pal) The doctor was also ‘a tremendous atheist,’ according to Sri Aurobindo, and he wanted his sons to be ‘beacons to the world.’

His wife Swarnalata was ‘stunningly beautiful,’ some say, so much so that in friendly circles she was called ‘the Rose of Rangpur.’ She was cultured and led the life of an anglicized ‘memsahib,’ but she gradually grew more and more mentally deranged, a flaw that apparently ran in the family as two of her siblings suffered from it too. For all that, her father, ‘Rishi’ Rajnarain Bose (1826-99), was one of the foremost Bengalis of his time. Exposure to Western rationalism caused him to lose faith in Hinduism, and he sought in Islam, Christianity and European philosophy a new synthetic framework for his beliefs. Like many other members of his generation, he discarded the ethical as well as the intellectual standards of his native culture and participated in the movement of student protest known as Young Bengal. The death of both his wife and father during this period of mental and moral experimentation cast Rajnarain into anguished introspection. He found support in the Vedanta philosophy, and, after coming into contact with Debendranath Tagore, became a member of the revived Brahmo Samaj.’ ³ It was the time of the Bengal Renaissance. The whole of India was dominated by the colonial masters, the British, under Queen Victoria, Empress of India. With a relatively small army, mainly consisting of Indian sepoys commanded by British officers, and a still smaller but greatly capable administration, the Indian Civil Service, they ran the huge subcontinent. They were directly in charge of the patchwork of British territories and indirectly, through their Regents, of the hundreds of tiny to quite large kingdoms ruled by colourful maharajahs and maharanis. The population moved in two layers: on top the British masters with the anglicized Indians occupying the lower-ranked positions; at the bottom traditional India as it had been for millennia, but now for the most part stagnant. The two cultures had only a superficial contact with each other, and sometimes they clashed, as in the Great Mutiny of 1857. This left a permanent scar on the British psyche, with the ever-present fear that something similar or worse might happen again at any time.

‘The Bengal Renaissance was the result of two complementary movements. The initial push was provided by the example and influence of Europe, exercised in particular through English education. This led, somewhat paradoxically, to a rediscovery by the people of the country of their own traditions. Sri Aurobindo’s grandfather and father, like other thinking men of the times, were affected by both of these trends.’ ⁴

The rediscovery of their own traditions went hand in hand with a critical re-evaluation of them. This resulted, for instance, in the foundation, in 1828, of the reformist Brahmo Samaj by Rammohan Roy. Having learned to look at their own religion through the eyes of Christian Westerners, Roy and his contemporaries wanted to discard its superfluous and superstitious excrescences and to return to the fundamentals. Fundamental was the One God (Brahman), as in Christianity and Islam; not considered to be fundamental were the Vedas, avatarhood, karma and reincarnation. The excrescences were the thousands of idols, pujas, sacrifices – animal sacrifices were still the common practice – ceremonies and pilgrimages. They condemned on humanitarian grounds widow burning (sati), prohibition for widows of the right to remarry, child marriages, and of course the omnipresent stratification of the Hindu society in castes. Some great names like Keshub Chander Sen, Debendranath Tagore and Rajnarain Bose were connected with the Brahmo Samaj and its various branches. In 1875 Dayanand Saraswati founded in Gujarat the much more nationalistic Arya Samaj. Dissatisfied with the watered-down Christianism of much of the mainly Bengali Brahmo Samaj and its offspring, he returned to the Vedas and the chief tenets of Hinduism, but kept the social reforms, so blatantly necessary for all to see, as part of his programme.

The political and cultural situation at the time of Aravinda Ghose’s birth closely influenced the life of his parents. We know already that Krishna Dhan was an enthusiastic Anglophile. Swarnalata was educated as a Brahmo in the house of her prominent Brahmo father, and Krishna Dhan was still a Brahmo at the moment of their marriage, which was celebrated according to the Brahmo rites.

Aravinda would not be deeply impregnated by this atmosphere, for after passing his first five years with his parents in Rangpur, he was sent, together with his two elder brothers Benoybhusan and Manmohan, to a Catholic nuns’ school in Darjeeling. The only event Sri Aurobindo later remembered about his stay in that school, in the foothills of the Himalayas, was the following: ‘I was lying down one day when I saw suddenly a great darkness rushing into me and enveloping me and the whole universe … After that I had a great tamas [inertia] always hanging on to me all along my stay in England. I believe that darkness had something to do with the tamas that came upon me … It left me only when I came back to India. If people were to know all the truth about my life, they would never believe that such a man could come to anything.’ ⁵

Dr. Ghose wanted his sons not only to come to something, but to be beacons to the world. To give them a chance of achieving that aim, he had to provide them with a Western education. The summit that could be reached in Indian society was the Indian Civil Service (I.C.S.), the corps of about five thousand well-trained, well-paid and highly respected functionaries running India. The I.C.S. was accessible to ‘natives’ too, but only with considerable difficulty. The examination they had to sit for could only be successfully taken after having undergone British schooling. Moreover, the age limit for taking the examination had in 1876 been lowered from twenty-one to nineteen, which meant that the exacting schooling had to be undergone in England itself.

Krishna Dhan was not deterred by all this. In 1879 he took his pregnant wife, his three sons of twelve, nine and seven, and their younger sister Sarojini on a voyage to Great Britain. A friend, the British magistrate of Rangpur, had given him the address of an excellent person to look after the boys: the Reverend William H. Drewett, Congregational minister at Manchester. And that is where Doctor K.D. Bose left his sons, with the recommendation that they would be allowed to choose their own religion when reaching the years of discernment, and with the strict instruction that all things Indian would be kept far from them. ‘I knew nothing about India or her culture,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in reference to these years.

Gentleman and Scholar

Manchester, centre of the cotton industry, was the second most important English city, the symbol of the new industrial society and the image of the world’s future. ‘It was the shock city of its age, busy, noisy and turbulent. It was the city Karl Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels associated with the Industrial Revolution.’ It was also for the most part ugly, dirty and unhealthy, for the Industrial Revolution had as little consideration for the human environment as it did for humans. Young Aravinda must have seen some of those horrors from nearby.

The Reverend Drewett and his wife took excellent care of the three Indian brothers. Benoybhusan and Manmohan joined Manchester Grammar School, but Aravinda was taught by the Drewetts themselves, and very well indeed, as his success in his future studies would bear out. The Rev. Drewett, a scholar in Latin (he had been a Senior Classics scholar at Oxford), taught him Latin and history, Mrs. Drewett French, geography and arithmetic. ‘As the young boy grew up, his studies covered a wide field: poetry, literature, history; Shakespeare, Shelley and the Bible were his habitual companions.’ ⁶ ‘Auro was a very quiet and gentle boy, but at times could be terribly obstinate,’ his elder brother would remember.

Proof of his early talent is a poem entitled ‘Light,’ recently discovered, written by Aravinda when he was ten years old and sent to an obscure and short-lived journal, Fox’s Weekly. It is an imitation of ‘The Cloud’ by P.B. Shelley. We quote the last stanza of eight:

I waken the [flowers] in their dew-spangled bowers,
The birds in their chambers of green,
And mountain and plain glow with beauty again,
As they bask in their matinal sheen.

O, if such the glad worth of my presence on earth,
Though fitful and fleeting the while,
What glories must rest on the home of the blessed,
Ever bright with the Deity’s smile. ⁷

W.H. Drewett must have been a broad-minded man for sure, for although a minister he never tried to impose his views or faith on the three young Indians of whom he was the guardian. ‘I never became a Christian,’ Sri Aurobindo would say, ‘and never used to go to church.’ However, a very strong feeling arose in the boy when he read Shelley. ‘The Revolt of Islam was a great favourite with me even when I was quite young and I used to read it again and again – of course, without understanding everything. Evidently it appealed to some part of the being. There was no other effect of reading it except that I had a thought that I would dedicate my life to a similar World-change and take part in it.’ ⁸

But the Drewetts emigrated to Australia, travelling via Calcutta to collect the arrears K.D. Ghose owed them for the boarding, lodging and education of his sons. The three brothers, under the tutelage of grandmother Drewett, moved to London. There, in September 1884, Manmohan and Aravinda were admitted to St Paul’s School, one of the best schools of its time. ‘Impressed by Aurobindo’s proficiency in Latin, [Headmaster] Walker awarded him a Foundation Scholarship and placed him directly in the upper fifth form … [He] taught him the rudiments of Greek … Before long Aurobindo was studying the Latin and Greek classics, writing poetry and prose in both languages, and reading English literature, ‘divinity’ (Bible studies), and French.’ ⁹

It is generally believed that Aravinda did not study mathematics and science, but this seems to be a misconception. For ‘Sri Aurobindo not only was well grounded in algebra and plane geometry but had also taken two years of “analytical conics” (conic sections). Many of his classmates on the “classical side,” Manmohan among them, took no mathematics at all. Sri Aurobindo evidently was looking ahead to the I.C.S. examination.’ ¹⁰ Aravinda did very well indeed, so well that his interest in the obligatory subjects slackened and his teachers suspected him of wasting his remarkable gifts because of laziness. In fact Aravinda spent most of his time in general reading, giving himself a kind of complementary education that would constitute the stock of his enormous erudition. He read especially English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of ancient, medieval and modern Europe. ‘He also taught himself Italian, German and Spanish in order to read Dante, Goethe and Calderon in the original tongues. A boy with so ambitious a programme could not rightly be accused of laziness.’ ¹¹ The Foundation Scholarship awarded him by his headmaster must have come in useful for Aravinda. Grandmother Drewett had suddenly grown furious when Manmohan, weary of her bigotry, insulted Moses, and she had thrown the three brothers out of her house. James Cotton had become acquainted with them through his father in India, Sir Henry, who was a friend of their father. Cotton paid Benoybhusan five shillings a week to assist him in his job as Secretary of the South Kensington Liberal Club. He also allowed the brothers to stay at the Club in a room under the roof. They were now living in poverty, for K.D. Ghose sent his sons hardly any money. ‘When they outgrew their old overcoats they could not buy new ones. At home there was no coal for the fire and hardly any food. During a whole year Aurobindo and Benoybhusan had to survive 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 [a kind of sausage]” … Manmohan by this time had gone up to Oxford and was receiving most of the scanty resources that their father was sending.’ ¹² K.D. Ghose’s reasons for withholding their allowances are not clear.

Sri Aurobindo would later say that when his father was in Rangpur, he was on friendly terms with the Magistrate (the highest British authority in a district), who did nothing without consulting him. When this magistrate was transferred and a new one came in his place, the latter found that he had no authority in the town, all power being in the hands of Dr. K.D. Ghose. The new magistrate could not tolerate that. He asked the Government to transfer the Civil Surgeon, who was sent to Khulna and felt deeply hurt by such treatment. He lost his previous respect for the English people and turned into a nationalist. All this had an increasing influence on Aravinda, for his father, from then onwards, sent his sons ‘the newspaper The Bengalee with passages marked relating maltreatment of Indians by Englishmen and he denounced in his letters the British Government in India as a heartless Government.’ ¹³

In the last year of his studies at St Paul’s, Aravinda joined the I.C.S. class, consisting of students who were preparing for the I.C.S. entrance examination. From that time onward he took on a double load of work, on the one hand the study of the normal school curriculum, on the other the preparations for the examination that might launch him on a successful career in the Indian Civil Service. Speaking in July 1890, Headmaster Walker was full of praise for the almost eighteen-year-old Aravinda A. Ghose. He is reported to have said that of all the boys who had passed through his hands during the past twenty-five or thirty years, Aravinda was by far the most richly endowed in intellectual capacity.

In December of the previous year Aravinda had taken the Scholarship Examination for King’s College at Cambridge University. As a result of his performance in this examination, he was elected to the first vacant open scholarship, which means that he was the best candidate. Oscar Browning, one of the examiners and a Cambridge celebrity, would take Aravinda aside and tell him: ‘I suppose you know you passed an extraordinary examination. I have examined papers at thirteen examinations and I have never during that time seen such excellent papers as yours … As for your essay, it was wonderful.’

Aravinda studied at King’s College, where he was known as A.A. Ghose, from October 1890 to October 1892. His scholarship earned him £ 80 a year, which he shared with his brothers; the time of the direst poverty was over. The burden of his studies was considerable. ‘As the recipient of a scholarship he had to prepare for the Classical tripos,⁹² taking that difficult honours examination after two instead of the usual three years. At the same time, as an I.C.S. probationer, he had to follow a completely different curriculum and demonstrate his mastery of a half a dozen subjects in three periodical examinations.’ ¹⁴ He did very well indeed on all fronts. And in addition to this was the general education received at that famous university, concisely but strikingly depicted by Peter Heehs: ‘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 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.’ ¹⁵

A.A. Ghose was ‘one of the two best Classics of his year in King’s College.’ The first year he won a prize for Greek iambics; the second year he ended his study with First Class Honours and won prizes again for Greek iambics and Latin hexameters. The same year he won ‘books bearing the College arms, to the value of forty pounds’ for having distinguished himself in the college examination in Classics. He would never get his B.A., as the Classical Tripos comprised three years and he had to stop after two. But he left Cambridge in October 1892 as a gentleman and a classical scholar who would keep the knowledge acquired there for the rest of his life, both as a generally recognized master of the English language and as one who was widely read, also in the life of revolutionaries such as Jeanne d’Arc, Giuseppe Mazzini, Garibaldi and Charles Parnell.

In August 1892 he passed his final examination for the I.C.S. with ease albeit without ambition. But the last part of it was a horse-riding test. After he returned to London, A.A. Ghose was summoned three times to the test; three times he failed to show up. The Senior Examiner of the Civil Service Commission gave him a last chance accompanied by a serious warning. Again the candidate did not show up, and he was consequently disqualified.

It is clear that the cause of Aravinda’s behavior was quite simply that he did not want to join the I.C.S. any more. ‘He felt no call for the I.C.S. and was seeking some way to escape from that bondage,’ Sri Aurobindo would write about himself later. Under his father’s influence he had started to look at the British colonial presence in India with new eyes. Besides, he abhorred the administrative aspect of all I.C.S. offices, with their routine and dreary paper work. And the British authorities, apart from wishing to keep the I.C.S. as British as possible, had reasons for being suspicious of this Indian candidate. In Cambridge he had been a member and for some time secretary of the ‘Indian Majlis’ (association or assembly) which on the surface was a kind of social organization, but which was in fact an assembly of patriotic Indian students. This group was infiltrated by government spies who reported Aravinda’s ‘many revolutionary speeches.’ And in London he had, together with his brothers, taken the oath in a secret Indian society, ‘Lotus and Dagger,’ in which ‘each member vowed to work for the liberation of India generally and to take some special work in furtherance of that end … This happened immediately before the return to India.’ ¹⁶ The secret society was short-lived, but its membership was nevertheless indicative of a mentality the colonial rulers and their I.C.S. could do without.

Aravinda was now without a job. As luck would have it, the Maharajah of Baroda, Sayaji Rao III of the Gaekwad dynasty, was in London on a visit, the first of his many visits to Europe. With an introduction from James Cotton, A. A. Ghose applied for a job in the Maharajah’s administration. The prince soon understood that he could acquire for a song the services of a highly qualified functionary, an I.C.S. man in fact, for Cotton had reckoned that Rs. 200 a month was a reasonable salary and had convinced his protégé of the same. A.A. Ghose was hired without more ado.

His father knew nothing of these developments. So proud was he of his third son that he travelled all the way to Bombay to welcome him and take him back in triumph. But the ship, the steamer Roumania on which he expected Aravinda, did not arrive and the disillusioned doctor returned home. There he was informed by telegram that the ship had gone down in a storm off the coast of Portugal. Krishna Dhan, who was already suffering from heart disease, succumbed to the shock and died on 14 December 1892 ‘while uttering Aravinda’s name in lamentation.’ Some years later Aurobindo would write in a letter: ‘In all my fourteen years in England I hardly got a dozen letters from him, and yet I cannot doubt his affection for me, since it was the false report of my death which killed him.’ ¹⁷

Aravinda had not booked his passage on the ill-fated Roumania but on the Carthage. He arrived in Bombay on 6 February 1893. From the moment he set foot on Indian soil, on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, a vast calm descended upon him; the black cloud, which had been hovering over him since that day some seventeen or eighteen years before at Darjeeling, dissolved and he began to have spiritual experiences. Two days later he joined the service of the Gaekwad in Baroda.

In the Maharajah’s Service

It must have been an enormous change for A.A. Ghose to find himself in princely but culturally backward Baroda of the end of the nineteenth century, after having lived for more than thirteen years in cities like Manchester, London and Cambridge. He was first posted in minor administrative offices such as the Stamp Revenue Department and the Survey Settlement Department, to accustom him to the place. After two or three years he joined the Dewan’s office, i.e. the State Secretariat. When asked what the difference was between all that pen-pushing and the I.C.S., Sri Aurobindo said: ‘Baroda was a native state under a native ruler. You did not have to be at attention to the superior English officer ruling your fate. There was much room for freedom and dignity.’ ¹⁸ Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III (1863-1939) had been put on the throne by the British when he was still a boy, but he had developed into a good ruler. As Aurobindo said to his Bengali teacher: ‘The present Maharajah is capable of ruling over a large empire. As a politician he has no peer in the whole of India.’ We find his opinion confirmed in Elisabeth Keesing’s biography of Inayat Khan, who hailed from Baroda: ‘This prince, Sayaji Rao III, reorganized the administration, even modernized his court, seriously reformed the system of justice, encouraged new industries, embellished the town with broad boulevards, and opened parks for his people from the suffocating alleys. For himself this maharajah built baroque-style palaces, but he still knew and honoured his own culture.’ ¹⁹

The Maharajah wanted to put his scholarly civil servant to good use and invited him to the palace time and again, often to a working breakfast. Aurobindo had to compose the Maharajah’s correspondence with the British, his speeches for all occasions, the narratives of his travels, a history of Baroda and, of course, his biography. Aurobindo was never his official secretary, but everybody was aware from where the Maharajah’s sonorous English came.

Aurobindo never let himself be daunted by his royal employer. His Bengali teacher had this anecdote: ‘The Prince of Baroda was going to be married [somewhere in 1904-05]. In those days monogamy was not particularly insisted on. Sri Aurobindo was then the vice-principal of the Gaekwad’s College. When the distinguished guests had assembled for the wedding dinner, the royal bridegroom came up to him dignified and demure. The grave vice-principal, revered by all, shook hands with “the cynosure of neighbouring eyes” and wished him “Many happy returns of the day”!’ ²⁰

Barely six months after his arrival in his motherland, Aurobindo Ghose made his entry into Indian politics with a bang. K.G. Deshpande, who together with Aurobindo had been a member of the Indian Majlis at Cambridge, asked him to express his opinion on the current political situation in a series of articles for the Indu Prakash, the newspaper of which Deshpande was the editor. Aurobindo complied and wrote New Lamps for Old, lambasting the Indian National Congress in such hard-hitting prose that Deshpande got much more than he had bargained for. Taking into account that the writer was only twenty-one years old, these articles were a remarkable feat and show how mature the political thinking of their young author already was. ‘My politics were shaped before I came to India,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo, and, designating himself in the third person: ‘He had already in England decided to devote his life to the service of his country and its liberation.’ ²¹

The Indian National Congress was founded in 1895, less than eight years before, mainly on the initiative of a retired English civilian, Allan O. Hume (1892-1912). It was the first and for the time being the only political party in India, and its function consisted in performing the role of a buffer or cushion between the Indian people – i.e. the articulate middle class – and their colonial rulers. Behind all its rhetorical flourishes there was an attitude of submission towards the British masters, allowing itself no more than to beg politely for some concessions, while at the same time being careful to dampen any aggressiveness or arrogance towards the government. ‘There is not the slightest evidence to show that we have at all learned to act together; the one lesson we have learned is to talk together, and that is a rather different thing,’ wrote Aurobindo.²²

It would be an illusion to suppose that there was much political activity in India at the time. The prevailing mood in that large, multifaceted and divided land was ‘apathy and despair.’ ‘The country which the mighty Muslims, constantly growing in power, took hundreds of years to conquer with the greatest difficulty and could never rule over in perfect security, that very country in the course of fifty years willingly admitted the sovereignty of a handful of English merchants and within a century went into an inert sleep under the shadow of their paramount empire.’ (Sri Aurobindo). The danger associated with the Indian National Congress, as Aurobindo saw it, was that it would perpetuate that situation and postpone any hope of self-rule and national dignity for decades to come, if not for ever.

The amazing fact about this young man from Bengal, Aurobindo Ghose,⁹³ is not only that he dared to write that the Queen-Empress was ‘an old lady so called by way of courtesy, and about whom few Indians can really know or care anything,’ nor that he depicted the situation as ‘a small coterie of masters surrounded by a nation of helots.’ It is that he took the standpoint of absolute independence for his motherland at his young age, even when still in England, and when everybody else held it to be ‘an insane chimera.’ Later, Sri Aurobindo would write about himself: ‘He always stood for India’s complete independence which he was the first to advocate publicly without compromise as the only ideal worthy of a self-respecting nation.’ And also: ‘I entered into political action and continued it … 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 then in vogue.’ ²³

New Lamps for Old, however, was too strong a medicine at the time the articles were published, from 7 August 1893 to 5 March 1894. ‘The articles were so fiery that M.G. Ranade, the great Mahratta [Maratha] leader, asked the proprietor of the paper not to allow such seditious things to appear in his columns, otherwise he might be arrested and imprisoned. Deshpande approached me with this news and requested me to write something less violent. I then began to write about the philosophy of politics, leaving aside the practical side of politics. But I soon got disgusted with it and when I heard that Bepin Pal had started a paper, the Bande Mataram, I thought of the chance to work through it.’ ²⁴

Aurobindo withdrew into the routine of his assignments in Baroda, and into an inner world. He read enormously, ordering case after case of books from Calcutta and from two Bombay booksellers. We know already about his phenomenal knowledge of the main Western languages, classical and modern. As he later briefly summed up that knowledge: ‘[Aurobindo] mastered Greek and Latin, English and French, and had also acquired some familiarity with continental languages like German and Italian.’ Now, living and working in India, he became acquainted with Gujarati and Marathi, the languages of the Baroda state, both of them closely related to Hindi. He also wanted to thoroughly learn Bengali, his ‘mother tongue’ which he had never spoken. The reason for this was twofold: he wanted to converse with his relatives in their own language, and he was becoming more and more involved in the political situation in Bengal. He therefore hired a Bengali teacher, Dinendra Kumar Roy, ‘a distinguished man of letters in Bengal.’

Aurobindo also perfected his knowledge of Sanskrit, of which the elementary notions, along with those of Bengali, had been part of the I.C.S. curriculum in England. Thus he read much secular Sanskrit literature, especially the works of Kalidasa, the pre-eminent poet of the golden age of Sanskrit. He translated his plays Meghaduta and Vikramorvasie, later published under the title The Hero and the Nymph. And it is self-evident that he read and reread the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the epics that even today remain alive in the heart and feed the imagination of the Hindus of all ages. He also started translating them – an interest which he retained over the course of many years, but which never reached fulfilment, as was the case with many other literary initiatives of his.

Aurobindo remained creative in the language in which he thought and which was his de facto mother tongue, English. In 1895 he published his first volume of poems, Songs for Myrtilla, comprising many poems which had been written in England. He wrote the long poem Love and Death practically at one go, and courteously dedicated it to his poet-brother Manmohan. And he embarked upon the first draft of Savitri, based on a story from the Mahabharata, which would, as the years went by, unfold into the magnificent masterwork of nearly twenty-four thousand lines as we know it today.

In 1897 Aurobindo Babu, though still frequently called on by the Gaekwad for secretarial work, became lecturer in French at the Baroda College. In 1898 he was appointed Professor of English, in addition to his other official duties. By now his financial position had become so secure that he advertised in Calcutta newspapers for a bride, and in April 1901 he married Mrinalini, eldest daughter of B.C. Bose, a State Agricultural Officer who had studied in England. Mrinalini, born on 6 March 1887, was fourteen years old. ‘She was beautiful, educated, and belonged to an aristocratic family.’

Both bridegroom and bride were supposed to undergo a ceremony of purification because the former had crossed the ‘black waters’ and the latter had been educated at the Brahmo Girls’ School in Calcutta. Aurobindo refused point-blank, even when he only had to shave his head. In the end a priest was found who, for some remuneration, consented to perform the ceremony. When Sri Aurobindo was later asked why he had married at all, he wrote in reply: ‘Do you think that Buddha or Confucius or myself were born with a prevision that they or I would take to the spiritual life? So long as one is in the ordinary consciousness, one lives the ordinary life. When the awakening and the new consciousness come, one leaves it – nothing puzzling in that.’ ²⁵ And so Aurobindo returned home in the company of his young wife and of his sister Sarojini, after having spent some time in Nainital, the beautiful hill station where the Gaekwad was holidaying. ‘Despite the differences in their ages and interests, Aurobindo and Mrinalini had an affectionate relationship. But his absorption in literary and political work, and later in spiritual practice, gave him little opportunity to enjoy a conventional marriage.’ ²⁶ Baroda in those years was not an easy place to live. Like so many other places in India it had been ravaged by famines in 1896 and 1899, and in the following years it was afflicted by droughts causing severe water scarcity.

Another family member who appeared at Baroda was someone who would play an important role in Aurobindo’s life: his youngest brother Barindra Kumar, or Barin for short. The reader may recall that Swarnalata was pregnant during the stay of the Ghoses in Great Britain in 1879. Barin was born in Upper Norwood, a suburb of London, in January 1880. His youth up to his tenth year or so had been extremely miserable as his mother, with whom he was staying in Deoghar, succumbed more and more to her mental illness. At last Krishna Dhan succeeded in kidnapping first Sarojini and then Barin from their mother’s house. (These painful episodes must have contributed considerably to undermining the doctor’s health.)

When Aurobindo had first seen Barin, somewhere in 1894, he was still a schoolboy in Deoghar. The young boy had a quick intellect and was gifted as a conversationalist, poet, prose writer, musician, and even as a painter. That he was fickle too will astonish nobody, considering the traumatic first years of his life. Barin first studied for a few months at Patna University and then tried his luck with his two eldest brothers, Benoybhusan, who was employed by the ruler of Cooch Behar, and Manmohan, at the time professor of English at Dacca University. Now, after the long train journey across India, he sought refuge with his sejda (third elder brother) Aurobindo.

Behind the Scenes

Though after the publication of New Lamps for Old Aurobindo had withdrawn to the sidelines of political life, it did not mean that he had lost interest. He followed it with all the means at his disposal and also studied the character, mood and inclinations of the Indian people. ‘He studied the conditions in the country so that he might be able to judge more maturely what could be done.’ ²⁷ The ideas thus gained and the subsequent political action he based on them were the following.

‘First there was the action with which he started, a secret revolutionary propaganda and organization of which the central object was the preparation of an armed insurrection. Secondly, there was a public propaganda intended to convert the whole nation to the ideal of independence which was regarded, when he entered into politics, by the vast majority of Indians as unpractical and impossible, an almost insane chimera. It was thought that the British Empire was too powerful and India too weak, effectively disarmed and impotent even to dream of the success of such an endeavour. Thirdly, there was the organization of the people to carry on a public and united opposition and undermining of the foreign rule through an increasing noncooperation and passive resistance.’ ²⁸

Later, when Aurobindo had become Sri Aurobindo, he would put straight certain misconceptions in the mind of his disciples: ‘In some quarters there is the idea that Sri Aurobindo’s political standpoint was entirely pacifist, that he was opposed in principle and in practice to all violence and that he denounced terrorism, insurrection, etc., as entirely forbidden by the spirit and the letter of the Hindu religion. It is even suggested that he was a forerunner of the gospel of Ahimsa. This is quite incorrect. Sri Aurobindo is neither an impotent moralist nor a weak pacifist … Sri Aurobindo has never, concealed his opinion that a nation is entitled to attain its freedom by violence.’ ²⁹

His first concrete political act was to send Jatindranath Banerji to Bengal, probably towards the end of 1901, as his lieutenant. ‘The idea was to establish secretly or, as far as visible action could be taken, under various pretexts and covers, revolutionary propaganda and recruiting throughout Bengal.’ ³⁰ Jatin Banerji was a young revolutionary idealist who wanted to train himself and acquire experience with weapons by enrolling in the army. As Bengalis were not allowed to serve in the British army, he tried in vain to enlist in various princely states. Finally he came to Baroda, in 1899, and Aurobindo got him enlisted in the Gaekwad’s troops. Jatin was an exemplary soldier, and equally exemplary was his dedication to the freedom cause. The cover of most secret societies at that time in India were the akharas, open air gymnasiums, where ‘lathi-play’ – a lathi is a metal-tipped bamboo stick – and wrestling were the main activities. The aspirant revolutionaries could certainly do with some tough martial training. ‘Military Jatin,’ with his good, virile looks and soldierly bearing, did a great job, founding many akharas or revitalizing existing ones in Calcutta and elsewhere.

Through one of the fortuities of history a Japanese baron, Kakuzo Okakura, appeared in Calcutta at the beginning of 1902. Although he was not a revolutionary but an art critic and historian, he would give Bengal a vigorous push towards revolution, so much so that Sri Aurobindo even considered him one of the founders of the secret society in Calcutta. Okakura was a traditionalist, fervently advocating the return in all Asian countries to national values and art, and vehemently opposing Western influence and political dominance. He had come to Calcutta to try to invite Swami Vivekananda to tour Japan. During his stay Okakura came in touch with the cream of Bengali society, impressing them with his black silk kimono, hand-painted fan and ever-present Egyptian cigarettes. At one meeting he told the bhadralok, Bengalis of the higher castes: ‘You are such a highly cultivated race. Why do you let a handful of Englishmen tread you down? Do everything you can to achieve freedom, openly as well as secretly. Japan will assist you.’ And making clear what he meant by ‘secretly,’ he said on another occasion: ‘Political assassinations and secret societies are the chief weapons of a powerless and disarmed people, who seek their emancipation from political ills.’ ³¹ What power the baron had at his command to promise Japan’s assistance is not known; nothing ever came of it.

Okakura’s exhortation did, however, contribute to the formation of ‘India’s first true revolutionary society’ under the able leadership of a Calcutta High Court barrister, P. Mitra, and called the Anushilan Samiti. Under its influence small groups and associations of young men who had not yet any clear idea or settled programme of revolution began to turn in that direction, while groups that already had a revolutionary aim began developing their activities on organized lines. It was with this Anushilan Samiti that Aurobindo came in touch on one of his now almost annual trips to Bengal. He himself had not long ago been initiated in the Western Secret Society in Bombay, to which Bal Gangadhar Tilak also belonged. Aurobindo administered the oath of secrecy to the chief members of the Anushilan Samiti. They had to hold the Bhagavad Gita in one hand and an unsheathed sword in the other, while pledging their lives, total dedication and secrecy to the society. P. Mitra would become president of a council of five consisting of Aurobindo, C.R. Das, whom Aurobindo had known in England, Surendranath Tagore of the famous Tagore family, and Sister Nivedita.

Sister Nivedita (1867-1911) was the foremost Western disciple of Swami Vivekananda. She was born Margaret Noble in northern Ireland. In 1895 she met the Swami, who was then on a European tour after his triumphal appearance at the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. She travelled with him to Calcutta in 1898. Swami Vivekananda initiated her into the newly formed Ramakrishna Mission and renamed her Nivedita. From then on she worked with the burning intensity of her love for India and with all her might for the resurgence of the country. She never hid her convictions from her British compatriots. Of her Sri Aurbindo said: ‘She was a true revolutionary leader. She was open, frank, and talked freely of revolutionary ideas. There was no concealment about her. It was her very soul that spoke … She was fire … She did India a tremendous service.’ ³² The two struck up a friendship that would last for the rest of her short life.

Having initiated Barin into the Secret Society, Aurobindo sent him to Calcutta to collaborate with Jatin Banerji. Unfortunately, the characters of ‘Military Jatin,’ considered to be a martinet, and Barin, ever romantic and shifting, did not agree and things took a turn for the worse. Even Aurobindo’s mediation on one of his trips to Calcutta could not overcome the confrontation. Jatin turned his back on the many associations under his guidance and became a sanyasi. Barin returned to Baroda together with his sejda. Much of the revolutionary grassroots work in Bengal came to nothing. Again the general mood was one of ‘apathy and despair.’

The restless Barin continued his search for gurus – he had several – and for anything that could further his spiritual development. It was he who introduced Aurobindo to spiritism and sessions with the planchette. Some of the experiments Aurobindo found interesting, others he participated in for his amusement. He soon discovered that most messages originate from the subconscious and others from invisible and untrustworthy little entities. Once the ‘spirit of Ramakrishna’ told them to ‘build a temple.’ Subsequently, and mainly on Barin’s insistence, Aurobindo wrote the pamphlet Bhawani Mandir. (‘Mandir’ means temple, and Bhawani, like Kali and Durga, is a warlike, terrible aspect of the Universal Mother.) Part of the inspiration behind this pamphlet was Bankim Chatterjee’s Anandamath (Monastery of Joy), a famous novel about an order of monks who were to undertake military operations and sacrifice their lives for the freedom of their country. Bhawani Mandir, with its veneration of the Great Mother and of the Mother-Country as one of her incarnations, is a very forceful piece of writing which was the fruit of Aurobindo’s inner development, although the time to actualize the ideas propagated in it was still to come.

A Side-Door to Spirituality

Aurobindo’s ascent on the path of spirituality was very different from that of Mirra Alfassa. In his case there was no early awareness and there were no early experiences, except the negative one of the dark cloud penetrating into him at Darjeeling. Still, in the last months of his stay in England, when reading Max Mueller’s translation of the Upanishads, he had come upon the idea of the Atman, the Self-in-all, with the feeling that ‘this was the true thing to be realized in life.’ We know about the calm that descended on him the moment he set foot on Indian soil in Bombay. From then onwards Aurobindo occasionally had spiritual experiences, and quite intense ones at that. Some of them he has described and even shaped into sonnets almost half a century later.

When in Baroda, Aurobindo had a horse and carriage at his disposal. The carriage was a four-wheeled ‘victoria’ with a folding hood, two passenger seats, and a seat in front for the driver. The horse was huge, but old, tired of working and therefore very moody. One day, about a year after his master’s arrival in Baroda, it bolted. ‘I sat behind the dance of Danger’s hooves …’ wrote Sri Aurobindo, when suddenly he saw a mighty head above his own:

His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze;
The world was in His heart and He was I;
I housed in me the Everlasting’s peace,
The strength of One whose substance cannot die.

‘The moment passed and all was as before; / Only that deathless memory I bore.’ ³³ Another sonnet, ‘Adwaita,’ describes an experience of the infinite about ten years later, and still another sonnet, ‘The Stone Goddess,’ tells us how for the first time he became aware of the reality of the Gods.

When in 1939 Nirodbaran asked Sri Aurobindo what had led him to yoga, he answered: ‘God knows what. It was while at Baroda that Deshpande and others tried to convert me to Yoga. My idea about Yoga was that one had to retire into mountains and caves. I was not prepared to do that, for I was interested in the work for the freedom of my country.’ ³⁴ Nevertheless, somewhere in 1904 K.G. Deshpande taught Aurobindo the principles of pranayama, the art of breathing. Thorough as always, Aurobindo practised pranayama for four, five and sometimes even six hours per day. The results were unexpected. He felt a sort of electricity all around him; there were visions of a minor kind; he began to have a rapid flow of poetry, which remained at his command ever after; he began to put on flesh, his skin became smooth and fair, and there was a peculiar new substance in the saliva. He also noticed that whenever he sat for pranayama, not a single mosquito would bite him, though plenty of them were humming around!

He also reasoned that ‘great men could not have been after a chimera.’ One of the great men he met was Swami Brahmananda, Deshpande’s guru, who had an ashram on the banks of the river Narmada and was supposed to be well over a century old. ‘He was, when I met him just before his death, a man of magnificent physique showing no signs of old age except a white beard and hair, extremely tall, robust, able to walk any number of miles a day …’ Usually when receiving pranams ‘Swami Brahmananda sat with closed eyes, but for Sri Aurobindo he made an exception and gazed at him with his eyes fully open as if some extraordinary person or kindred soul had come. “He had very beautiful eyes,” Sri Aurobindo said, “and his penetrating look saw everything inside me.”’ ³⁵

No document tells better where Aurobindo stood in 1905 than one of his letters written in Bengali to his young wife. ‘I have three madnesses. Firstly, it is my firm faith that all the virtue, talent, the higher education and knowledge and the wealth God has given me, belong to Him … The second madness has recently taken hold of me; it is this: by any means, I must have the direct experience of God … If the Divine is there, then there must be a way of experiencing His existence, of meeting Him; however hard be the path, I have taken a firm resolution to tread it. Hindu Dharma asserts that the path is there within one’s own body, in one’s mind. It has also given the methods to be followed to tread the path. I have begun to observe them and within a month I have been able to ascertain that the words of the Hindu Dharma are not untrue. I am experiencing all the signs that have been mentioned by it …

‘The third madness is this: whereas others regard the country as an inert piece of matter and know it as the plains, the fields, the forests, the mountains and the rivers, I know my country as the Mother, I worship her and adore her accordingly. What would a son do when a demon, sitting on his mother’s breast, prepares to drink her blood? Would he sit content to take his meals or go on enjoying himself in the company of his wife and children, or would he rather run to the rescue of his mother? I know I have the strength to uplift this fallen race; not a physical strength, I am not going to fight with a sword or gun, but with the power of knowledge … This is not a new feeling in me, not of recent origin, I was born with it, it is in my very marrow. God sent me to the earth to accomplish this great mission.’ ³⁶

Leader of Nationalism

Despite the inroads the Gaekwad made into his academic career, Aurobindo Babu became the vice-principal of the Baroda College in 1904 and its acting Principal in 1905. He had earned a reputation as a professor, filling the students with deep respect for ‘the Aurobindonian legend.’ The reason for this reputation was, on the one hand, his ample erudition and, on the other hand, his disapproval of the British methods of teaching and habits of studying. He often inveighed against the students for their industriously penning down, without a smatter of reflection, everything the professor dictated, and encouraged them instead to think for themselves.

Then, in 1905, there was the Partition of Bengal at the instance of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy – and in no time the political situation in Bengal underwent a sea change with repercussions in the rest of India. With regard to Bengal, or the ‘Calcutta Presidency’ as it was then administratively called, the British had long been in a quandary. That part of the imperial territory was too big to be governed by one lieutenant-governor and his staff. It comprised what is now West Bengal, Bangladesh, Orissa, Bihar, and Assam – a territory bigger than modern France and with half as many inhabitants. The British administration knew full well how sensitive the Partition was to the pride of the Bengali Hindus, who formed the most cultured and dominant part of the Presidency and who would lose this position because of the Partition. But Curzon, intelligent and capable, was also well endowed with the colonial superiority complex of the British. Moreover, like most others he may have underestimated the courage and the readiness to rebel of the Bengalis, for they were not exactly renowned for these qualities.

Another factor that turned the Bengal situation into a powder keg was the Russo-Japanese War. In February 1904 the Japanese had attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, in Manchuria; in May of the same year they defeated the Russians at the river Yalu, and in May 1905 at Mukden. The Japanese became the champions of a resurgent Asia; they showed that a Western nation could be beaten by an Eastern one. Their victory was cheered in the non-British Indian press and made the pulse of every patriotic Indian beat faster. Thanks to this and the indignation caused by the announced Partition of Bengal, an almost miraculous turnabout took place in the public mood, from one of ‘apathy and despair’ to fervent patriotism.

On 16 October 1905 the Partition of Bengal was effected. When shortly afterwards Aurobindo went on a visit to Bengal, ‘he found the once apathetic province in the grip of an unprecedented enthusiasm’ for the national cause. He at once saw that this was ‘a golden opportunity.’ Bhawani Mandir had already been printed in Baroda and was now printed and distributed in Calcutta. And when someone made the money available for the establishment of a Bengal National College, Aurobindo at last saw a chance to terminate his service of the Baroda Maharajah and to move to Calcutta to serve the revered Motherland full time. He took leave and boarded the train for Calcutta on 2 March 1906. Barin followed him shortly afterwards.

The Ghose brothers knew that at this crucial moment public opinion had to be informed, encouraged and guided. In March, at the suggestion of Barin, Aurobindo agreed to start a paper in Bengali, Yugantar (The Changing Age), ‘which was to preach open revolt and the absolute denial of the British rule.’ ³⁷ The aim of this publication was to openly popularize the idea of violent revolt. The editors of Yugantar, under the supervision of Aurobindo, ‘were in fact the leaders of the first revolutionary group in India to attempt organized armed resistance against the British.’ ³⁸ The paper was boldly outspoken. It published serials on guerilla warfare, fabrication of bombs and the formation of revolutionary groups. It would therefore be prosecuted not less than six times, and was ultimately repressed so ruthlessly that not a single copy remains today. The texts still available are translations by government servants for the perusal of the authorities.

In the beginning Aurobindo contributed some articles which set the course of the new weekly, but he was not yet fluent in the Bengali language and would, moreover, soon become a very busy man. First he went on a tour of East Bengal to probe the mood of the population there, after which he returned briefly to Baroda to make some arrangements in connection with his privilege leave. In June he was back in Calcutta, where he was offered the principalship of the new Bengal National College. The proposed salary was Rs. 150, while at Baroda he had earned more than three times that amount. But the money was not important for Aurobindo; he accepted straightaway and became the Principal of the College on 15 August 1906, his thirty-fourth birthday.

Not more than a couple of weeks before he took up the principalship, Bepin Chandra Pal and a few nationalist companions had started a new English daily, Bande Mataram. In this case language was no obstacle for Aurobindo, there was only a problem of the available time. But understanding the importance of this paper too, he readily consented to contribute. ‘The Bande Mataram shot into the limelight not only in Calcutta and Bengal, but across India, as the most courageous proponent of the ideals of the Nationalist Party.’ In the words of the historian R.C. Mazumdar: ‘Arabinda’s articles in the Bande Mataram put the Extremist Party on a high pedestal all over India. He expounded the high philosophy and national spirit which animated the Party, and also laid down its programme of action.’ ³⁹

Aurobindo was the Principal of a brand-new College, at which he was also Professor of English and History; he had to supervise Yugantar; he contributed regularly to Bande Mataram; he was active as a leader of the Bengal nationalists, having to go on tours and to attend meetings and conferences; and besides this he still mustered the strength to write the drama Perseus the Deliverer. No wonder that his daily practice of pranayama became irregular, something that does not go unpunished. He fell seriously ill, so seriously in fact that he would later say that the fever ‘almost took me off.’ During his illness a rift developed in the editorial group of Bande Mataram. B.C. Pal was pushed aside as editor and Aurobindo put in his place by some of his friends. However, this happened without Aurobindo’s consent, for he had a sincere appreciation of Pal.

The fact that the British did not react earlier to the threat posed by Yugantar, Bande Mataram and a couple of other extremist newspapers in Bengal astonished even Barin when he looked back many years later. One of the reasons may have been that the British did not yet consider the Bengalis as serious adversaries and so were not unduly concerned about the situation. They were to find to their surprise that the people had grown bold enough to defy their power. Another reason was the inborn British sense of fair play which extended to legal and political matters. They had, after all, a tradition of press freedom. And as Sri Aurobindo once said: ‘The English people are legal-minded. If they want to break a law they must do it legally.’ ⁴⁰ In addition, the government had trouble finding seditious material published in the by now nationally read Bande Mataram. ‘The paper reeked with sedition patently visible between every line, but it was so skillfully written that no legal action could be taken.’ ⁴¹

Yet there was a limit even to the patience of the colonial government. Aurobindo must have felt things coming, for he resigned as Principal of the Bengal National College, not wanting to compromise it and being much more interested in his revolutionary work. He had lost interest in the institution because it did not respond to his views on education. The council of the College wanted to base it upon the British models which, as we know, Aurobindo abhorred because they did not stimulate but rather smothered personal reflection and development. Besides, the College did not admit students who, because of their participation in manifestations or other activities against the British authorities, had been expelled from their studies elsewhere – and this, after all, had been the main motivation to set it up.

The police and the judiciary failed to lay hands on the editor of Bande Mataram, for no editor was mentioned on the paper’s masthead and none came forward to take legal responsibility. At long last Aurobindo Ghose was arrested, on 16 August 1907, in what became known as the Bande Mataram Sedition Case. This was the first time he had to stand trial. It should be recalled that he had undergone legal training during his studies for the I.C.S. and that consequently he was as qualified to sit on the bench as the British judge presiding over his case, who was the hated Douglas H. Kingsford. As a result of being prosecuted Aurobindo Ghose gained ‘immediate fame’ all over India. As Bande Mataram had no declared editor, Aurobindo had to be acquitted, which happened on 23 September. After his acquittal he became the recognized leader of Nationalism in Bengal. He who had preferred ‘to remain and act and even lead from behind the scenes, without his name being known in public,’ had been ‘forced into public view by the Government’s action in prosecuting him as editor of Bande Mataram.’ ⁴²

It was then that Rabindranath Tagore published in Bande Mataram his still well-known poem in honour of Aurobindo, with the following opening lines:

Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee!

O friend, my country’s friend, O voice incarnate, free,
Of India’s soul! …⁴³

The moderate stalwarts of the Indian National Congress, the first political party in India, had all become figures of national status, and were rather complacent and settled in their political attitudes. ‘The Congress was to us all that is to man most dear, most high and most sacred; a well of living water in deserts more than Saharan, a proud banner in the battle of Liberty, and a holy temple of concord where the races met and mingled.’ ⁴⁴ Now the position of its leaders, most of whom were advanced in age, was challenged with ever greater resoluteness by young extremist ‘upstarts’ such as Aurobindo Ghose and B.G. Tilak, with their programme of swaraj (independence), swadeshi (the use and consumption of Indian produce), boycott (of all things British) and upliftment of the Indian people. Ghose and Tilak had already met four or five years before and, although the latter was sixteen years older than the former, got on very well. ‘The men of extremer views were not even an organized group; it was Sri Aurobindo who in 1906 persuaded this group in Bengal to take public position as a party, proclaim Tilak as their leader and enter into a contest with the Moderate leaders for control of the Congress and of public opinion and action in the country.’ ⁴⁵

The 1906 Calcutta general conference of the Indian National Congress (I.N.C.) and the district conference in Midnapore a year later had led to serious clashes between Moderates and Extremists. A decisive confrontation was unavoidable. It would take place at the next general conference in Surat.

On 24 December 1907 Aurobindo chaired in this small town on India’s west coast a conference of the Nationalists, as the Extremists were also known. The general I.N.C. conference started on 26 December and ended the next day when pandemonium broke out and the Nationalists went their separate way. Tilak had not wanted this, but Aurobindo Ghose had. ‘It was known that the Moderate leaders had prepared a new constitution for the Congress which would make it practically impossible for the extreme party to command a majority at any annual session for many years to come. The younger Nationalists, especially those from Maharashtra, were determined to prevent this by any means and it was decided by them to break the Congress if they could not swamp it; this decision was unknown to Tilak and the older leaders. But it was known to Sri Aurobindo.’ ⁴⁶ ‘History very seldom records 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 …’ ⁴⁷

Aurobindo succeeded in bringing Tilak around to his point of view. ‘The split between the parties remained in force for more than ten years. “The Congress ceased for a time to exist …” Eventually Moderatism died a natural death. In 1929, more than twenty years after Sri Aurobindo defined Swaraj as full independence, Jawaharlal Nehru declared that “the word ‘Swaraj’ in Article 1 of the Congress Constitution shall mean Complete Independence.” After another score of years, the ideal was realized.’ ⁴⁸

The Extremists concluded their separate conference on the last day of the year 1907. In the following days Aurobindo, accompanied by Barin, went on a visit to Baroda, the town where he had spent thirteen years of his life. On his arrival at the railway station the students of the College unyoked the horses of his carriage, in which were also seated Sakharia Swami and Barin, and pulled it in triumphant procession to the house where he was to stay. Barin had not gone to Surat to participate in the I.N.C. conference, for the politicking of which he, as a terrorist, felt little more than disdain. He had gone to look for contacts with eventual Maratha terrorists, but he had found no activity of that kind there and was quite disillusioned.

Aurobindo, from his side, wanted to take up yoga again and asked Barin to invite the yogi Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, whom Barin had met in September and who was then in Gwalior, to come and meet him in Baroda. Barin sent Lele a telegram and he readily complied. Suddenly Aurobindo disappeared for ten days from the hustle and din, social and political, that surrounded him; nobody knew where he was or what had become of him.

In fact, Lele and Aurobindo had withdrawn to the upper floor of the house of a friend. ‘At this juncture I was induced to meet a man without fame whom I did not know, a Bhakta with a limited mind but with some experience and evocative power,’ Sri Aurobindo would later write. ‘We sat together and I followed with an absolute fidelity what he instructed me to do, not myself in the least understanding where he was leading me or where I was myself going. The first result was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness which he had never intended – for they were Adwaitic and Vedantic and he was against Adwaita Vedanta [Lele was a Bhakta] – and which were quite contrary to my own ideas, for they made me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman.

‘The final upshot was that he was made by a Voice within him to hand me over to the Divine within me enjoining an absolute surrender to its will – a principle or rather a seed force to which I kept unswervingly and increasingly till it led me through all the mazes of an incalculable Yogic development bound by no single rule or style or dogma or Shastra to where and what I am now and towards what shall be hereafter.’ ⁴⁹ It was an experience ‘which most Yogis get only at the end of a long Yoga.’ Aurobindo had it ‘in three days – really in one.’ It was the first of his four fundamental experiences, and the silence in his mind would never leave him any more.

In the Shadow of the Gallows

After returning to Calcutta, Barin became obsessed with the idea of killing Magistrate Kingsford. Douglas H. Kingsford was an unpopular man: he had presided over several cases against nationalist publications, among them Yugantar and Bande Mataram, and had condemned a boy to be flogged for protesting against actions by the police. The authorities knew that the judge was a prime target for a terrorist attack and therefore transferred him on 26 March 1908 as District Magistrate to Muzaffarpur, a small town north of Patna, in Bihar, where nothing of importance ever happened.

Barin chose his executioners: Sushil Kumar Sen and Prafulla Chaki, both not yet twenty. They travelled to Bihar on 4 April, but in Barin’s gang nothing ever went as planned. Sushil’s father was dying and the amateur terrorist left to be with him. He was replaced by Khudiram Bose, eighteen years of age. Several days went by before Khudiram, carrying the bomb, arrived in Muzaffarpur. On the night of 30 April, Kingsford played bridge at the Club with his wife and a couple of friends, Mrs. and Miss Kennedy. When their carriages left the club, Prafulla and Khudiram were waiting, but they threw their bomb into the wrong carriage. Miss Kennedy died almost on the spot, her mother two days later.⁹⁴

The British had by now revised their disdainful attitude to the Bengali race. They came down with a heavy hand throughout West and East Bengal on all people, organizations and publications known for or suspected of nationalist leanings. On 1 May the police had no trouble arresting Barin’s boys at the Maniktola Garden in a pre-dawn raid, finding there a good deal of weapons and evidence. Aurobindo, who had moved only four days earlier with his wife Mrinalini and sister Sarojini to the office of the Bengali weekly Navashakti in Grey Street, was awakened from his sleep and arrested the same morning. In all more than thirty suspected persons were arrested. Aurobindo entered the jail of Alipore, a Calcutta suburb, on 5 May; he would remain locked up there till 6 May 1909, for exactly one year. The Alipore Bomb Case was ‘the first state trial of any magnitude in India’ and ‘the most important state trial ever held in Calcutta.’

Aurobindo was locked in a solitary cell ‘nine feet long and five feet in width; it had no windows, in front stood strong iron bars, and this cage was my appointed abode.’ ⁵⁰ At first he ‘was shaken in his faith for a while,’ but very soon his Inner Voice began consoling and guiding him. He got a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and of the Upanishads, and his cell became a cave of tapasya in which he started a full-time spiritual effort, the practical application of what he read in those imperishable texts.

Again the results were much more powerful than he could have expected. ‘I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me his shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me.’ Narayan and Vasudeva are names of Krishna and Vishnu, and represent here the highest Godhead. Aurobindo had realized the cosmic consciousness, the second fundamental realization in his yoga.

During a certain period he was visited by the spirit of Swami Vivekananda, who had died in 1902, six years before. ‘I didn’t know about the planes [i.e. the gradations of being]. It was Vivekananda who, when he used to come to me during meditation in Alipore jail, showed me the Intuitive Plane. For a month or so he gave instructions about Intuition. Then afterwards I began to see the still higher planes … It was the spirit of Vivekananda who first gave me a clue in the direction of the Supermind. This clue led me to see how the Truth-Consciousness works in everything … He didn’t say “Supermind.” “Supermind” is my own word. He just said to me: “This is this, this is that,” and so on. That was how he proceeded, by pointing and indicating. He visited me for 15 days in Alipore Jail … He would not leave until he had put it all into my head … I never expected him and yet he came to teach me. And he was exact and precise even in the minutest details.’ ⁵¹

In his peroration at the end of the trial, C.R. Das, now Aurobindo’s lawyer, pronounced the following words about Aurobindo which are since then written in the pages of history: ‘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.’ ⁵²

The judgement was pronounced on 6 May 1909. Barin and Ullaskar Dutt, the chief bomb maker, were condemned to death; ten others were sentenced to deportation for life; seven more were sentenced from ten years to one year of transportation or imprisonment. The rest of the accused, including Aurobindo Ghose, were ‘acquitted and to be set at liberty.’ The British authorities were not satisfied with the verdict. To them Aurobindo Ghose was ‘the ringleader of the whole movement,’ as indeed he was. For the boys of the Maniktola Garden, Aurobindo had been the bara karta, the big boss, and Barin the chhota karta, the small boss. ‘[Aurobindo] is regarded and spoken of by all as the disciples regard a great Master. He has been in the forefront of all, advising seditious writing and authorizing murder. But he has kept himself, like a careful and valued general, out of sight of the “enemy.”’ Thus wrote none less than Sir Andrew Fraser, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal.⁵³

On 30 May a transformed Aurobindo gave his first speech after his liberation at Uttarpara, a small town on the banks of the Ganges north of Calcutta. It is one of the key texts in his life. He concluded that speech, spoken in Bengali, as follows: ‘It is only the word that is put into me that I can speak to you … I spoke once before with this force in me and said then that this movement is not a political movement and that nationalism is not politics but a religion, a creed, a faith. I say it again today, but I put it in another way. I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the sanatana dharma [the Eternal Law] which for us is nationalism … The Sanatan Dharma, that is nationalism. This is the message I have to speak to you.’ ⁵⁴

It may be doubted whether the audience realized what Aurobindo was saying; his words were most probably understood as those of the prophet of religious nationalism. However, though paying his respects to the Hindu nation, he spoke now as the prophet of the Sanatan Dharma, of the Spirit who has created the world, who sustains it, and who will bring it to its completion. ‘When I would re-enter the world of activity it would not be the old familiar Aurobindo Ghose. Rather it would be a new being, a new character, intellect, life, mind, embarking upon a new course of action that would come out of the ashram of Alipore.’ ⁵⁵

Sailing Orders

Aurobindo tried to take up his former political life again. ‘After the arrests and deportations we used to hold meetings in the College Square and some sixty or seventy persons used to attend, mostly passers-by; and I had the honour to preside over several of those meetings … That gave me an insight into my countrymen,’ said an ironical Sri Aurobindo later.⁵⁶ After Muzaffarpur, there had been a spate of bombings in Bengal, mostly organized by the terrorist group of Midnapur now that the Maniktola Garden boys were in prison. But the police were on the lookout everywhere, and the hangings, deportations and other punishments – not a single prominent Nationalist leader was still free – had their intended demoralizing effect.

Nevertheless Aurobindo, no longer capable of discouragement, did not give up. He started another English weekly, Karmayogin, on 19 June, and on 23 August a weekly in Bengali, called Dharma. Some of his writers were the young men who had belonged to the Maniktola Garden community. Their chhota karta, Barin, was no longer there to look after them and direct them. Aurobindo had hardly known any of them before his imprisonment in Alipore Jail. Now Nolini Kanta Gupta, Bejoy Nag, Suresh Chakravarti, Saurin Bose and others sought shelter with him and solace from his presence. Practically all of them had been students before they became activists, and Aurobindo did everything possible to give them some education and to act as their protector and elder brother.

The convicted in the Alipore Bomb Case were tried again in appeal before the High Court from 9 August to 12 October. Barin and Ullaskar Dutt had their death sentences commuted into deportation for life to the Andaman Islands. They were to be accompanied by eight others, most of whose terms were reduced, as were the other sentences. But life in Cellular Jail at Port Blair was pure hell. The British jailer’s standing joke when addressing newly arrived prisoners was: ‘God does not come within three miles of Port Blair.’ The terrorists were picked out for especially harsh treatment, so unbearable that Ullaskar Dutt went mad. (The jail in Port Blair is now a national monument.)

Aurobindo had been warned by Sister Nivedita that the government intended to deport him or to appeal Judge Beachcroft’s verdict. To remain a step ahead of the British and prevent himself from being deported, he published in the Karmayogin ‘An Open Letter to My Countrymen,’ informing the public at large of the government’s intentions and writing out his political testament. The ploy worked and the British reconsidered, but not for long. Aurobindo was named by some British authorities as ‘the most dangerous man in India,’ and ‘dangerous’ is an epithet attached to his name again and again in the letters of the highest office bearers, including the Viceroy Lord Minto.

On the evening of 15 February 1910 Aurobindo went to his office as usual and, at the request of his young companions, did some automatic writing. ‘The atmosphere was filled with fun and laughter’ when a staff member of the Karmayogin suddenly entered and informed Aurobindo that he had come to know from a high police official that a warrant of arrest had been issued against him. ‘There was a tense moment of silence as we sat in perplexity,’ writes Suresh Chakravarti. Then Aurobindo calmly said: ‘I will go to Chandernagore.’ ⁵⁷ ‘Usually the police kept a watch over Sri Aurobindo’s movements, but that evening, when he came out of the office, there was no vigil anywhere.’ A quarter of an hour later he and three companions arrived at a ghat (steps leading down to the river) of the Ganges, hailed one of the small boats for hire, and Aurobindo and two companions were rowed to Chandernagore, a French enclave some fifteen miles upriver from Calcutta. The journey took the whole night, under a full moon.

Why did Aurobindo take that sudden decision without informing anyone, not even his wife, and without making any preparations? ‘When I was listening to animated comments from those around on the approaching event [his arrest], I suddenly received a command from above, in a Voice well known to me, in three words: “Go to Chandernagore.” In ten minutes or so I was in the boat to Chandernagore … I may add in explanation that from the time I left Lele at Bombay after the Surat Sessions and my stay with him in Baroda, I had accepted the rule of following the inner guidance implicitly and moving only as I was moved by the Divine. The spiritual development during the year in jail had turned this into an absolute law of the being. This accounts for my immediate action in obedience to the adesha [command] received by me.’ ⁵⁸

In Chandernagore, Charu Chandra Roy refused to give shelter to Aurobindo although he was bound by oath to do so. He had been a member of the secret society and one of the accused in the Alipore Bomb Case, but he had now developed cold feet and suggested to Aurobindo that he should leave India and go to France. There was no room in that inn. However, Aurobindo was welcomed into the house of Motilal Roy, another young revolutionary, who would become Aurobindo’s confidant and collaborator. Aurobindo sent a note to Sister Nivedita asking her to continue the publication of the Karmayogin, which she did for some time. Chandernagore too was swarming with spies, for this French enclave was renowned for its weapons’ traffic, and its mayor had been attacked by Barin’s boys, escaping death only by the skin of his teeth. For the next six weeks the silent guest from Calcutta remained so completely secluded, often changing hiding places, that even Motilal’s wife did not know for whom she was cooking extra food.

Then Aurobindo once again heard the inner Voice commanding him: ‘Go to Pondicherry,’ the main French enclave on the Coromandel Coast. Through Motilal Roy he contacted his young companions in Calcutta and requested them to make the necessary arrangements. One was to book a passage on a French steamer of the Messageries Maritimes which plied between Calcutta and Colombo, calling on the way at Pondicherry. Another was to take him from Chandernagore to Calcutta. And a third arrangement consisted in sending a trustworthy person (Suresh Chakravarti) ahead to Pondicherry in order to make all necessary preparations with the freedom fighters there.

Everything turned out well. Aurobindo boarded the Dupleix in the company of Bejoy Nag; both travelled under assumed names. The Dupleix sailed in the early hours of 1 April from Chandpal Ghat. When they reached Pondicherry harbour, ships had to drop anchor and the passengers were rowed to the pier. Aurobindo set foot on that pier on 4 April 1910, at 4 p.m. He thought Pondicherry would be his refuge for a couple of years at the most – he never left.

On the same day in Calcutta an arrest warrant was issued against Aurobindo Ghose and the publisher and printer of the Karmayogin, but Aurobindo would have to be tried in absentia.

We have seen how Aurobindo met Paul Richard shortly after his arrival. Pondicherry was a haven for many Nationalists, especially from the south, and they had their own paper in the Tamil language, India. When he felt somewhat safer in his new hideout, the famous Aurobindo Ghose met all of them, including the poet Subramania Bharati, who became a regular house guest.

The small Calcutta group of young men re-formed around Aurobindo. Bejoy Nag had accompanied him; Suresh Chakravarti had prepared his arrival in Pondicherry; Nolini Kanta Gupta and Sauren Bose arrived a few months later. Nolini brought the good news that the third prosecution of Aurobindo, this time (like the first) for sedition, had resulted on appeal in the government having to withdraw the warrant against him. Aurobindo was now free to return to British India, but his inner Voice had assigned him Pondicherry as his ‘cave of tapasya.’ His young Bengali companions became famous locally as first-rate footballers, Nolini on the right wing, Suresh as centre forward and Bejoy as centre half. Aurobindo continued to teach them whatever they wanted to learn.

It did not take long before the British police discovered the whereabouts of ‘the most dangerous man in India.’ As Pondicherry was French territory, they had to get permission to send a detachment of their men to keep an eye on Aurobindo Ghose. ‘The British Indian police set up a regular station here, with a rented house and several permanent men,’ writes Nolini in his Reminiscences. ‘They were of course plain-clothes men, for they had no right to wear uniform within French territory. They kept watch both on our visitors and on ourselves.’ They also paid local crooks to hide false documents on the property of the revolutionaries. A spy from Bengal even succeeded in infiltrating Aurobindo’s house, thought that he had been discovered, and fell at Aurobindo’s feet confessing his undercover activities.

The financial situation of Aurobindo and his companions was far from brilliant and he often had to send letters to Motilal Roy asking for money. ‘Each of us possessed a mat, and this mat had to serve as our bedstead, mattress, coverlet and pillow; this was all our furniture. And mosquito curtains? [Pondicherry is famous for its dense mosquito population.] That was a luxury we could not even dream of. If there were too many mosquitoes, we would carry the mats out onto the terrace for a little air, assuming, that is, that there was any. [The south is oppressively hot in summer.] Only for Sri Aurobindo we had somehow managed a chair and a table and a camp cot. We lived a real camp life.’ ⁵⁹

Another visitor from France Aurobindo received towards the end of November 1911 was Alexandra David-Néel, who had started on the long journey which would ultimately take her to Lhasa. She wrote to ‘Mouchy,’ her husband: ‘In the evening I had a conversation with a Hindu about whom I have never spoken to you, since I have not been in correspondence with him, but know him only through the good opinion of friends [no doubt Mirra and Paul Richard]. I spent two wonderful hours reviewing the ancient philosophical ideas of India with a man of rare intelligence. He belongs to that uncommon category that I so much admire, the reasonable mystics. I am truly grateful to the friends who advised me to visit this man. He thinks with such clarity, there is such lucidity in his reasoning, such lustre in his eyes, that he leaves one with the impression of having contemplated the genius of India such as one dreams it to be after reading the noblest pages of Hindu philosophy.’ ⁶⁰

But Alexandra’s visit had not gone unnoticed and the British policemen on duty had signalled it to their headquarters. ‘When I arrived in Madras the head of the C.I.D. [Central Intelligence Department] was waiting for me in person. He asked me – very civilly and politely, I must say – what I had been doing in Pondicherry in the house of that suspicious character.’ The police chief agreed that Aurobindo Ghose was a learned man, but he held him also responsible for the death of the District Collector of Tirunelvelli, who had been killed by extremists based in Pondicherry. The latter part of the information was correct, but Aurobindo was in no way involved in this terrorist attack. However, Madame David-Néel, with her handbag full of recommendations, was not troubled any further.

In 1912 Aurobindo started noting down the details of his yogic practice – the same year in which Mirra Alfassa began writing her spiritual diary. Aurobindo’s extraordinary notebooks have recently been deciphered and published in the journal of the Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research under the title Record of Yoga. One of the chief editors writes: ‘This document is noteworthy in at least three respects. To begin with, it provides a first-hand account of the day-to-day growth of the spiritual faculties of an advanced yogi … Sri Aurobindo set down his experiences in Record of Yoga immediately after their occurrence, at times while they were still happening. This gives a strong sense of immediacy … What the Record does provide is a down-to-earth account of a multitude of events, great and small, inner and outer, in the life of a dedicated researcher. Sri Aurobindo once wrote to a disciple: “I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years” his spiritual knowledge and experience “more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane.” The Record bears this out in detail. It may be looked on as the laboratory notebook of an extended series of experiments in yoga.’ ⁶¹

Sri Aurobindo himself, writing in the third person, drew up the balance-sheet of his political life: ‘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.’ ⁶²

As Nirodbaran wrote: ‘Those concerned with day-to-day politics deplored his retirement and thought that he was lost to India and the world, being interested only in his own spiritual salvation. So he was called a truant and escapist. Even now there is insufficient understanding of what led to his decision.’

‘I may also say that I did not leave politics because I felt that I could do nothing more there,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1932, ‘such an idea was very far from me. I came away because I did not want anything to interfere with my yoga and because I got a very distinct adesh. I have cut connections entirely with politics, but before I did so I knew from within that the work I had begun there was destined to be carried forward on lines I had foreseen by others and the ultimate triumph of the movement I had initiated was sure without my personal action or presence. There was not the least motive of despair or sense of futility behind my withdrawal.’ ⁶³