The Mother

9: Three Dragons

[The Mother] has descended upon earth to participate in [her children’s] nature. Because if she did not participate in their nature, she could not lead them farther. If she remained in her supreme consciousness where there is no suffering, in her supreme knowledge and consciousness, she could not have any contact with human beings. It is for this that she is obliged to take on the human consciousness and form: to be able to enter into contact with them.¹

– The Mother

‘Siddhi Day’

‘In 1926 I had begun a sort of overmental creation,’ said the Mother, ‘that is, I had brought the Overmind down into matter, here on Earth (miracles and all kinds of things were beginning to happen). I asked all those gods to incarnate, to identify themselves with a body [on Earth]. (Some of them absolutely refused.) Well, with my very own eyes I saw Krishna, who had always been in rapport with Sri Aurobindo, consent to come down into his body. It was on 24 November and it was the beginning of “Mother.”

‘Previously he used to go out on the veranda every day to meet and talk with all who came to see him … I was living in the inner rooms and seeing no one; he was going out onto the veranda, seeing everyone, receiving people, speaking, discussing. I saw him only when he came back inside. After a while I too began having meditations with people. I had begun a sort of ‘overmental creation’ to make each God descend into a being [on Earth]. There was an extraordinary upward curve! Well, I was in contact with these beings and I told Krishna (because I was always seeing him around Sri Aurobindo): “This is all very fine, but what I want now is a creation on Earth. You must incarnate.” He said, “Yes.” Then I saw him … I saw him with my own eyes (inner eyes, of course), join himself to Sri Aurobindo.

‘Then I went into Sri Aurobindo’s room and told him, “This is what I have seen.” “Yes, I know,” he replied. “That’s fine. I have decided to retire into my room, and you will take charge of the people. You take charge.” (There were about thirty people at the time.)’ ²

It is clear that somewhere around 15 August 1926 a new phase in the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother started.⁹¹ To the question ‘On what date in 1926 did Mother take up the full charge of the Ashram?’ Sri Aurobindo’s answer was: ‘Mother does not at all remember the correct date. It may have been a few days after 15th August. She took up the work completely when I retired.’ ³ In practical terms she had taken care of Sri Aurobindo’s household as soon as she went to live in the same house.

Her ‘overmental creation,’ to make the gods incarnate in human bodies on Earth, was not restricted to Sri Aurobindo’s – which, whoever he may have essentially been, was also a human body – but equally extended to the bodies of some disciples. This can only mean that she must have deemed the time and the people concerned ready for such a tremendous undertaking.

Sri Aurobindo knew about this, of course. On 6 November 1926 he said during his evening talk: ‘I spoke about the world of the Gods because not to speak of it would be dangerous. I spoke of it so that the mind may understand the thing if it comes down. I am trying to bring it down into the physical, as it can no longer be delayed, and then things may happen. Formerly, to speak of it would have been undesirable, but now not to speak of it might be dangerous.’ ⁴ Two dates on which he had spoken about the gods were 22 and 24 August, which tallies with the time the Mother took up an active role.

For what happened on 24 November 1926, we follow the account of an eyewitness, A.B. Purani. ‘From the beginning of November 1926 the pressure of the Higher Power began to be unbearable. Then at last the great day … arrived on 24 November. The sun had almost set, and everyone was occupied with his own activity – some had gone out to the seaside for a walk – when the Mother sent round word to all the disciples to assemble as soon as possible in the veranda where the usual meditation was held. It did not take long for the message to go round to all. By six o’clock most of the disciples had gathered. It was becoming dark.

‘In the veranda on the wall near Sri Aurobindo’s door, just behind his chair, a black silk curtain with gold lace work representing three Chinese dragons was hung. The three dragons were so represented that the tail of one reached up to the mouth of the other and the three of them covered the curtain from end to end. We came to know afterwards that there is a prophecy in China that the Truth will manifest itself on Earth when the three dragons (the dragon of the Earth, of the mind region and of the sky) meet …

‘There was a deep silence in the atmosphere after the disciples had gathered there. Many saw an oceanic flood of Light rushing down from above. Everyone present felt a kind of pressure above his head. The whole atmosphere was surcharged with some electrical energy. In that silence, in that atmosphere full of concentrated expectation and aspiration, in the electrically charged atmosphere, the usual, yet on this day quite unusual, tick was heard behind the door of the entrance. Expectation rose in a flood. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could be seen through the half-opened door. The Mother with a gesture of her eyes requested Sri Aurobindo to step out first. Sri Aurobindo with a similar gesture suggested to her to do the same. With a slow dignified step the Mother came out first, followed by Sri Aurobindo with his majestic gait. The small table that used to be in front of Sri Aurobindo’s chair was removed this day. The Mother sat on a small stool to his right.

‘Silence absolute, living silence – not merely living but overflowing with divinity. The meditation lasted about forty-five minutes. After that one by one the disciples bowed to the Mother. She and Sri Aurobindo gave blessings to them. Whenever a disciple bowed to the Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s right hand came forward behind the Mother’s as if blessing him through the Mother. After the blessings, in the same silence there was a short meditation … Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went inside. Immediately Datta was inspired. In that silence she spoke: “The Lord has descended into the physical today.”’ Purani names the twenty-four persons present, with most of whom we are now acquainted.⁵ In the Sri Aurobindo Ashram 24 November 1926 is known as its foundation date, and as ‘Siddhi Day’ (Day of the Realization) or ‘Victory Day.’

The Mother said many years later about that 24 November: ‘He called everyone together for one last meeting. He sat down, had me sit next to him, and said: “I called you here to tell you that, as of today, I am withdrawing for purposes of sadhana, and Mother will now take charge of everyone. You should address yourselves to her. She will represent me and she will do all the work” … These people had always been very intimate with Sri Aurobindo, so they asked: “Why, why, why?” He replied: “It will be explained to you.” I had no intention of explaining anything and I left the room with him, but Datta began speaking … She said she felt Sri Aurobindo speaking through her and she explained everything: that Krishna had incarnated and that Sri Aurobindo was now going to do an intensive sadhana for the descent of the Supermind; that it meant Krishna’s adherence to the Supramental Descent upon Earth and that, as Sri Aurobindo would now be too occupied to deal with people, he had put me in charge and I would be doing all the work.’ ⁶

(The reports about Datta’s words vary considerably. Rajani Palit writes: ‘Now Datta came out, inspired, and declared: “The Master has conquered death, decay, hunger and sleep!”’ According to Nolini, it went as follows: ‘Datta … suddenly exclaimed at the top of her voice, as though an inspired Prophetess of the old mysteries: “The Lord has descended. He has conquered death and sorrow. He has brought down immortality.”’ ⁷ And Champaklal noted down: ‘Datta spoke: “Krishna the Lord has come. He has ended the hell of suffering. He has conquered pain. He has conquered death. He has conquered all. He has descended tonight, bringing immortality and Bliss.”’ ⁸)

This means that from that moment onwards Sri Aurobindo’s adhara contained two Great beings, he himself and Shri Krishna. It also means that Shri Krishna was embodied on Earth from 24 November 1926 to 5 December 1950 – and no one knew of it then or knows of it now. There had always been a close association between Sri Aurobindo and Krishna, as we have seen on several occasions. Sri Aurobindo would write that it was Krishna ‘who was the guide of my Yoga and with whom I realized identity.’ ⁹ It was Krishna who gave him the commands (adesh) which, because of his unconditional and immediate obedience, worked such important changes in his life, as it was Krishna who drew the plan of his sadhana (the saptachatushtaya). Some utterances by the Mother even suggest that Sri Aurobindo had been Krishna, ‘a formation of the past,’ and the fact that the light of the aura of both of them is the same seems to confirm this. ‘Whitish blue is Sri Aurobindo’s light or Krishna’s light,’ Sri Aurobindo himself wrote.¹⁰

The Word of Creation

‘I had begun a sort of overmental creation,’ said the Mother, and she continued with it ‘for some months’ after 24 November. The reader will recall that the Overmind is the highest level of the lower hemisphere of the manifestation. It is the gradation of existence directly under and in essential contact with the Supramental, itself a world of many gradations, each one existing within the divine Unity-Consciousness where reign omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. In the Overmind the divine Unity is, by the process of involution, split up into an endless variety of forces, cosmic forces. These forces are also called Gods, for every force is a being.

‘If we regard the Powers of Reality as so many Godheads,’ writes Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine, ‘we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence.’ ¹¹

‘The Gods … are in origin and essence permanent Emanations of the Divine put forth from the Supreme by the Transcendent Mother,’ writes Sri Aurobindo in a letter.¹² In his correspondence with Nirodbaran he clarifies this: ‘Men can build forms [of the Gods] which [the Gods] will accept, but these forms too are inspired into men’s mind from the planes to which the Gods belong. All creation has two sides, the formed and the formless; the Gods too are formless and yet have forms, but a Godhead can take many forms, here Maheshwari, there Pallas Athene. Maheshwari herself has many forms in her lesser manifestations, Durga, Uma, Parvati, Chandi, etc. The Gods are not limited to human forms – man also has not always seen them in human forms only.’ ¹³

As the gods are descended from the One, or That, or Brahman, but remain part of It, so through involution are we humans descended from the gods. (In other words, we are children of Mother Earth and through her of the Cosmos.) ‘Everyone’s inner being is born in the ansha [portion] of some Devata’ or god, wrote Sri Aurobindo.¹⁴ This enables us to understand Nolini’s words about what happened after that momentous 24 November. ‘The Mother’s endeavour at that time was for a new creation … She had placed each of us in touch with his inner godhead. Every individual has what may be described as his line of spiritual descent and also ascent, for into each individual consciousness has come down from the supreme Maha Shakti an individual divine being, a particular godhead following a particular line of manifestation of divine power, Vibhuti. To bear inwardly the touch of this divinity and found it securely within oneself, to concentrate on it and become one with it, to go on manifesting it in one’s outer life, this was the aim of the sadhana at the time.’ ¹⁵

‘Is the descent of the Overmind a necessity in the sadhana?’ asked a disciple. ‘Certainly,’ answered Sri Aurobindo, ‘it is necessary for those who want the supramental change [the ultimate aim of the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother]. Unless the Overmind opens, there can be no direct supramental opening of the consciousness. If one remains in the mind, even in the illumined mind or the intuition, one can have indirect messages or an influence from the Supramental, but not a direct supramental control of the consciousness or the supramental change.’ ¹⁶ This makes it clear why Sri Aurobindo had started talking about the gods and deemed it ‘dangerous’ for the disciples not to know about them: the Mother was trying to bring the Gods with their powers down into them, and she was succeeding in her effort, though with mixed results.

‘Between the end of 1926 and the end of 1927,’ writes Narayan Prasad, ‘the Mother was trying to bring down the Overmind Gods into our beings. But the adharas were not ready to bear them; on the contrary there were violent reactions, though some had very good experiences. There was a sadhak whose consciousness was so open that he could know what the Mother and the Master were talking about. One sadhak would get up while meditating and touch the centre of obstruction in somebody else’s body. There were others who thought that the Supermind had descended into them. One or two got mentally unbalanced because of the inability to stand the pressure. T. left off taking food saying that he was having nectar and had no need of ordinary food, but he could not pull on for long. So the whole procedure of the sadhana had to be changed.’ ¹⁷

‘At the time you speak of we were in the vital, the brilliant period of the Ashram,’ Sri Aurobindo would say. ‘People were having brilliant experiences, big push, energy, etc. If our yoga had taken that line, we could have ended by establishing a great religion, bringing about a big creation, etc., but our real work is different, so we had to come down into the physical. And working on the physical is like digging the ground; the physical is absolutely inert, dead like stone. When the work began there, all former energies disappeared, experiences stopped; if they came they didn’t last. The progress is exceedingly slow.’ ¹⁸

K.D. Sethna reports: ‘The months after the descent [of Shri Krishna on 24 November] were indeed of an almost miraculous nature, culminating in the moment when the Mother, as she told me as well as recounted in one of her talks at the Playground, got what she termed “the Word of Creation.”’ ¹⁹ Elsewhere he writes: ‘She said [to Sethna] she had come to possess the Word of Creation. When I looked a little puzzled she added: “You know that Brahma is said to create by his Word. In the same way whatever I would express could take place. I had willed to express a whole new world of superhuman reality. Everything was prepared in the subtle dimension and was waiting to be precipitated upon Earth.”’ ²⁰

The Mother herself narrates the events as follows: ‘Sri Aurobindo had put me in charge of the outer work because he wanted to withdraw in concentration in order to hasten the manifestation of the supramental Consciousness, and he had announced to the few people who were there that he was entrusting to me the work of helping and guiding them, that I would remain in contact with him as a matter of course, and that through me he would do the work. Suddenly, immediately, things took a certain shape: a very brilliant creation was worked out in extraordinary detail, with marvellous experiences, contacts with divine beings, and all kinds of manifestations which are considered miraculous. Experiences followed upon experiences, and, well, things were unfolding altogether brilliantly and, I must say, in an extremely interesting way.

‘One day, I went as usual to relate to Sri Aurobindo what had been happening. We had come to something really very interesting, and perhaps I showed a little enthusiasm in my account of what had taken place. Then Sri Aurobindo looked at me and said: “Yes, this is a creation of the Overmind. It is very interesting, very well done. You will cause miracles which will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able to turn the course of events on Earth upside down. In brief …” and then he smiled and said: “It will be a great success. But it is a creation of the Overmind. And it is not success that we want, we want to establish the Supermind upon Earth. One must know how to renounce immediate success in order to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.” With my inner consciousness I understood at once: a few hours later the creation didn’t exist any more, and from that moment we started anew on other foundations.’ ²¹ In another conversation she said that she undid everything ‘in half an hour,’ withholding the things ‘prepared in the subtle dimension.’ Had the Mother continued this new creation with the help of the Gods, some of them incarnated in human beings, a new religion would have appeared on Earth with a force and a lustre we cannot even imagine. Now, nobody knows about it. As K.D. Sethna writes: ‘This was surely the mightiest act of renunciation in spiritual history.’

Accepting the Mother

I have no intention of altering the arrangement I have made for all the disciples without exception that they should receive the light and force from [the Mother] and not directly from me and be guided by her spiritual progress.²²

– Sri Aurobindo

From 24 November onwards there was a kind of ‘division of tasks’ between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. They remained of course essentially one, and ‘all the realizations he had, I had too, automatically.’ But now it was Sri Aurobindo who remained ‘hidden,’ as he said ‘to work things out,’ and the Mother who moved in front. We remember how, in Japan, she defined the role of women as primarily executive and organizational, mirroring the role of the Great Executrix who manifested, organized and supported the worlds. And as always – for instance when bringing about her overmental creation – she threw herself into her work with a total dedication and with a Power that drew upon the all-manifesting Shakti. Sri Aurobindo said that she was ‘a Force in action’; and she herself said, with a touch of humour, that her way of advancing was ‘at a gallop.’ She also compared herself to a cyclone and even to ‘a jet plane.’

The task at hand consisted in building a world in miniature, representative and symbolic of the world as a whole. To this end many more ‘samples’ of humanity were needed, and it is significant that the number of disciples shot up from twenty-five in 1926 to eighty in 1928. This required more accommodation, food, etc., to be organized with restricted means. ‘The Ashram Services had to be reorganized on a departmental footing, reasonable economies had to be imposed, work had to be assigned to the individual sadhaks, and departmental headships had to be instituted,’ writes Iyengar. ‘There was room for rivalry, friction, misunderstanding, sulking, even insubordination. But more than all this there was the question of the spiritual Motherhood itself, and its authority over the day-to-day functioning of the Ashram. There was rumbling discontent, and some wrote directly to Sri Aurobindo lodging protests or seeking clarifications.’ ²³

Sri Aurobindo wrote a few years afterwards: ‘The opposition to the Mother’s consciousness was an invention of the old days (due mainly to X, Y and others of that time) and emerged in a time when the Mother was not fully recognized or accepted by some of those who were here at the beginning. Even after they had recognized her they persisted in this meaningless opposition and did great harm to them and to others.’ ²⁴

When things came to a head, he had to put matters straight, as in this letter from April 1930: ‘The Mother is in sole charge and arranges things as best they can be arranged within the means at her disposal and the capacities of her instruments. She is under no obligation to act according to the mental standards or vital desires and claims of the Sadhaks; she is not obliged to use a democratic equality in her dealings with them. She is free to deal with each according to what she sees to be his true need or what is best for him in his spiritual progress. No one can be her judge or impose on her his own rule and standard; she alone can make rules, and she can depart from them too if she thinks fit, but no one can demand that she shall do so. Personal demands and desires cannot be imposed on her … This is the spiritual discipline of which the one who represents or embodies the Divine Truth is the centre. Either she is that and all this is the plain common sense of the matter; or she is not and then no one need stay here. Each can go his own way and there is no Ashram and no Yoga.’ ²⁵

‘As to the Mother, I could not reconcile myself to how a European lady could establish herself as the Mother in Pondicherry Ashram and even more as the Divine Mother,’ writes Rakhal Bose.²⁶ And M.P. Pandit writes: ‘There was quite a consternation at this development [of Sri Aurobindo putting the Mother at the head of the Ashram]. It was hard to accept a situation where members had no more access to Sri Aurobindo. For some it was harder to accept Mirra as the Mother. Why is she the Mother? Who is the Mother? These were the questions asked by some and unasked openly by some others.’ ²⁷

‘Her status after 24 November 1926 as the spiritual head of the Ashram, the “Mother” … caused some eyebrows to be raised. There was no question about her managerial ability, her unfailing friendliness and her personal spiritual eminence. And yet … the Mother of the Ashram? … with complete authority to direct its affairs and ordain the destinies of the inmates? After all, some of the sadhaks – so they felt – had been doing quite well in their sadhana under the old dispensation. Why, then, this drastic change? Was it sanctified by Indian tradition? Would it work at all?

‘The new dispensation meant: first, an unquestioning acceptance of her as the Mother; second, a total surrender to her of one’s whole life; and third, a ready and happy submission to the discipline laid down by her for the smooth and efficient functioning of the Ashram. All this posed problems and difficulties for several of the sadhaks, especially some of the old-timers who had been used to a larger uninhibited “freedom.” While some were openly critical of the new order, some merely found themselves unequal to the demands made upon them by the changed situation. Of course, people like Nolini, Amrita, Champaklal and Pavitra had already accepted unquestioningly whatever Sri Aurobindo proposed or approved. But it was otherwise with rebellious spirits like Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother, Barin.’ ²⁸ (K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar)

Barin, after having come back from Bengal where his efforts to found centres and raise funds had borne little fruit, had been acting as a cook for Sri Aurobindo, looking after a small garden near the central Ashram building, and taking lessons in oil painting from the Mother. Though in his life he had often changed course without warning, he had always had great respect for his sejda and accepted his authority, but he seems not to have been able to accept his brother being replaced as head of the community by a French lady. He left the Ashram on 25 December 1929 without informing anyone beforehand. One of the Ashramites at the time writes: ‘As the distribution was coming to a close, Nolinida⁹² discovered that Barinda had not yet arrived and asked me to fetch him immediately. What a strange situation to find that Barinda was not in his room. By the time I returned to inform about it the Mother had gone up [to her room]. Next morning both Nolinida and Amrita visited Barin’s room and found a letter addressed to Sri Aurobindo on a table. Later I learned that he had written to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother saying that he was leaving the Ashram.’ ²⁹

When ten years later Nirodbaran remarked that ‘Barin had great energy and capacity,’ Sri Aurobindo commented: ‘Yes, he had brilliance, but he was always narrow and limited. He wouldn’t widen himself. [Sri Aurobindo showed the widening by a movement of his hands above his head.] That’s why his things won’t last. For instance, he was a brilliant writer and he also composed devotional poetry, but, because of his limitedness, nothing that will endure. He was an amusing conversationalist, he had some musical ability, he was good at revolutionary activity. He did well in all these matters, but nothing more. He was also a painter, but it did not come to much in spite of his exhibitions.’ ³⁰

Barin – who left the Ashram at about the same time as Bejoy Nag, another original companion – played such an important role in Sri Aurobindo’s life that he deserves to be taken leave of here. It is said that he wrote on 21 February 1940: ‘Today is the Mother’s birthday. On this blessed day this is a tribute at her feet from her erring child. Whatever my deviations into wrong paths, however grave my errors, my labyrinthine movements will at length lead me into the Temple of the Mother’s consciousness, for where else except in the Mother’s lap can her son find the end of his journey?’ ³¹

Some were leaving but many more were coming, among them several of those who would be among the best known disciples. K.D. Sethna and his wife Daulat, both Parsis, joined the Ashram in 1927, when Sethna was twenty-three years old. Sri Aurobindo would name her Lalita, after one of the companions of Radha, and him Amal Kiran, meaning ‘The Clear Ray.’ (As most of his writings are published under the name K.D. Sethna, we will continue to use this name.) Sethna was ‘a brilliant philosophy graduate’ with a ready sense of humour and a broad ‘Renaissance mind.’ Besides his countless writings about Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and their yoga, he has published books on comparative religion, Christianity, the origin of the Aryans, science and the scientific paradigms, Greece and its culture, and on many other subjects. He is also considered the primus inter pares among the Ashram poets and was on this account held in high esteem by Sri Aurobindo. Sethna became the editor of Mother India, a publication started in 1949 and considered by Sri Aurobindo to be his mouthpiece. His contribution to the knowledge and understanding of the life and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are invaluable.⁹³

Chunnibhai Patel, whose Ashram name was Dyuman, settled in the Ashram a few months earlier than K.D. Sethna. When still a young boy he had had an intimation that nothing would satisfy him except the spiritual life. Though married at the tender age of eight, he had started seeking in the four corners of India for his guru, but without finding the right one. He had also been closely involved in the Non-cooperation Movement and knew personally leaders such as Vallabhbhai Patel and Mohandas K. Gandhi; with the latter he went on corresponding till 1947. In the Ashram, Dyuman was looked up to because of his reliability and steadfastness, and became the exemplar of ‘the worker,’ the karmayogin. The Mother put him in charge of the dining room and of everything in connection with the feeding of the Ashram population; she also made him one of the Ashram trustees.

Chandulal Shah and his younger sister Vasudha arrived in the Ashram in the beginning of 1928. Chandulal became the Ashram engineer. His sister, only fourteen or fifteen at the time, would be called ‘My Little Smile’ in the many letters and notes which the Mother wrote to her. The Mother also drew several portraits of her, now published in The Mother: Paintings and Drawings. Vasudha would become her personal assistant till illness prevented her from carrying out her duties any longer.

Together with Dilip K. Roy came Sahana Devi, ‘whose music used to send Rabindranath Tagore into the seventh heaven of rapture.’ (Iyengar). At that time the women members of the Ashram numbered ‘hardly a dozen.’ It is, however, important to point out that this was the only Ashram in India where women and men were treated on an equal footing, and where the communal life was led without discrimination. Sahana would give several recitals together with Dilip K. Roy. She was also one of the group of Ashram poets cultivated and directly inspired by Sri Aurobindo. He and the Mother considered all kinds of artistic inspiration and expression a help in the yoga and a direct opening to the higher, invisible worlds.

Another Ashram poet was the Englishman John A. Chadwick, ‘stiff but polite,’ whom Sri Aurobindo named Arjava. He was a philosopher of mathematics from Cambridge University, where he had been ‘a distinguished Don as well as a Fellow of Trinity College.’ He had discovered Rosicrucianism and, through Krishnaprem, also Sri Aurobindo, in whom he had found his guru and ‘to whom he clung one-pointedly till his death.’ (Dilip K. Roy) Arjava suffered from a complex of illnesses which were mysterious in origin and a nightmare to diagnose for Nirodbaran, the Ashram doctor, but which were very concrete in their ravaging effects. After receiving all possible inner and outer care and support in the Ashram, he finally collapsed in the train to Bangalore, on his way to be treated by a German specialist. ‘Totalitarian’ is one of Arjava’s poems, valued by Sri Aurobindo as ‘exceedingly original and vivid – the description with its economy and felicity of phrase is very telling.’ ³²

Night was closing on the traveller
When he came
To the empty eerie courtyard
With no name.

Loud he called; no echo answered;
Nothing stirred:
But a crescent moon swung wanly,
White as curd.

When he flashed his single sword-blade
Through the gloom,
None resisted – till he frantic,
Filled with doom,
Hurled his weapon through the gloaming,

Took no aim;
Saw his likeness around him
Do the same:
Viewed a thousand swordless figures
Like his own –
Then first knew in that cold starlight
Hell, alone.

The most improbable of all the poets in the Ashram was Nirodbaran Talukdar, the Ashram doctor just mentioned. Nirodbaran had obtained his medical degree in Edinburgh, as had Sri Aurobindo’s father. Coincidentally he ran into Dilip K. Roy in Paris (around the time Roy met Richard in Nice); Roy went to visit Nirodbaran and the latter’s niece in Edinburgh and talked to them about Sri Aurobindo and his own intention to become a member of his Ashram. It seems that it was actually the niece who, after their return to India in 1930, took Nirodbaran along to Pondicherry. Doctor Talukdar, considering himself an empiricist and very suspicious of spiritual hocus-pocus, was on his guard, but he was all the same touched by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

After some disastrous experiences in Burma, Nirodbaran returned to Pondicherry and was accepted as a member of the Ashram. First he did some work in the building department; then he supervised the house painting department; after which he was put in charge of the timber godown – till he finally agreed to be put into his most useful function, that of Ashram doctor. As everything had to be reported to Sri Aurobindo via the Mother, Nirodbaran had to undertake an extensive correspondence with them. Against all expectations, Sri Aurobindo’s tone in this correspondence became more and more confidential and humorous. It is no exaggeration to say that Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo is unique in spiritual literature, treating both the most elevated and the most down-to-earth subjects in a way never done before.

Nirodbaran, however, wanted also to become ‘a literary gent’ and looked up to poets like Sethna, Roy, Sahana, Harin and Nishikanto. Unfortunately, he lacked even the most elementary literary talent. But Sri Aurobindo started working on him, and Nirod blossomed into a fine surrealist poet, yet without being aware in the least how he wrote what he wrote or what was the quality of his poetic products. His testimony, in Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo and other books, to events in the life of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is, along with that of Purani, Nolini and Sethna, priceless.

It is important in the life of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo to have an idea of the persons who surrounded them and who constituted an intimate and essential part of their spiritual effort. It is in their disciples that many loose ends in the life of the Masters are tied together. One regrets not being able, for reasons of available space, to write more about Ashram members like Nishikanto, the great Bengali poet, and many less well-known sadhaks, although the measure in which they are known is not necessarily equivalent to their spiritual realization, known to their gurus alone. Let us conclude with a woman who ‘looked like a volley-ball on top of a balloon,’ the quarrelsome Mridu.

Mridu was born in a village in Bengal in 1901, lost her husband early – a catastrophe for an Indian wife – and joined the Ashram in 1930. ‘She was a great cook, one of the greatest, for she cooked for the Lord [Sri Aurobindo] for sixteen years. She would make choice dishes for Him and He had no choice but to have them, at least taste them.’ ³³ If Sri Aurobindo for some reason did not touch them and she came to know of it, all hell broke loose. She would threaten, as on any occasion when she felt thwarted, to put an end to her life. Each time Sri Aurobindo had to console her, often with the words: ‘Who will then prepare luchis for me?’ – luchis being one of the delicious Bengali preparations.

Nirodbaran, however, writes in his Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo: ‘One regular interlude during [Sri Aurobindo’s] meal was the arrival of our rampageous luchi-maker, Mridu. I do not know how she obtained this exceptional privilege. [Nobody was allowed to approach Sri Aurobindo.] She would come like an innocent lamb with incense and flowers, kneel down in front of the door and wait with folded hands for her “father’s blessings.” On our drawing Sri Aurobindo’s attention to her presence, he would stop eating and cast a quiet glance at her. Her boisterous, unruly nature would become humble for a while before Sri Aurobindo. Whenever it was reported that she had manifested her violent temper, which was not infrequently, she was threatened with the loss of this darshan.’ ³⁴

Stranger still, the Mother would talk much later about some deceased sadhaks who were together with Sri Aurobindo in his dwelling in the subtle worlds, after he had left his body in 1950. She named several of those sadhaks, and among them was Mridu! Which goes to show how difficult it is to judge by appearances with our ordinary human knowledge.