Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny

The Sri Aurobindo Ashram Today

Following the formal establishment of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926, a steady stream of seekers heard the inner call and came to form an integral part of the organisation. From among those who joined the Ashram in the first twelve years after the year of founding, we mention here the names of some of the notables who became well-known in later years. The respective years of their joining the Ashram are indicated within brackets:

1. Chunibhai Patel alias Dyuman (1927); 2. K.D. Sethna alias Amal Kiran along with his wife Daulat alias Lalita (1927); 3. Dilip Kumar Roy (1928); 4. Sahana Devi (1928); 5. John Chadwick alias Arjava (1930); 6. Rishabhchand (1931); 7. Margaret Woodrow Wilson alias Nishtha (c.1938); 8. Nirodbaran (1933); 9. Nishikanto (1934); 10. Kapali Shastry (1930).

From about 24 in 1926, the number of sadhaks residing in the Ashram went up to 36 by the end of the next year, and to 80 in 1928. As the years passed Sri Aurobindo Ashram waxed in strength of numbers and widening activities. Men and women started coming from all over India and many from abroad - from France, Germany, U.K., U.S.A., Africa, China, Italy, Russia, and several other countries. The various regions of India were represented in the Ashram.

In the last seventy years since its founding the Ashram

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at Pondicherry has grown from an informal grouping of a couple of dozen members into a diversified spiritual community with 1200 regular inmates. There is, besides, a significant number of non-members living in Pondicherry in the Ashram surroundings: they fully participate in Ashram life. Members are of both sexes and of all ages, from tiny tots of three or four years to people in their nineties. No distinction of creed, caste, religion or national origin is observed in this Ashram.

Disciples joining it have come from widely different backgrounds social, cultural and religious - and are drawn from a variety of professions. Philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, poets, artists, Sanskrit scholars, businessmen, engineers, industrialists, civil servants, diplomats, sophisticated urban people and simple village folks, are all represented in the variegatedly rich life of the Ashram.

The Yoga-Ashram of Sri Aurobindo is not a religious, social, educational or political organisation. It is basically and above everything else a spiritual institution but spiritual with a difference. Sri Aurobindo Ashram has nothing to do with asceticism or retreat from the world. "It includes life in Yoga, and once we admit life we can include anything that we find useful for life's ultimate and immediate purpose and not inconsistent with the works of the Spirit.... [In] an Ashram like ours we are trying to equate life with the Spirit." (Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, pp. 502, 503)

As all life comes within the purview of the Yoga of Transformation as propounded by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram presents the spectacle of a bewildering network of activities in which individual sadhaks may participate as an effective means of consecrated self-offering to the Divine, leading to a progressive growth of their consciousness. Some of the activities in the Ashram are as follows:

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"Teaching, printing, proof-reading, binding, typewriting, painting, music, gate-duty, paper-manufacture, perfume-making, doll-making, kitchen service, dining-hall service, banking, accountancy, plumbing, book-selling, photography, poultry- and dairy-management, farming, gardening, flower-arrangement, bakery service, civil, mechanical, electrical and sanitary engineering, nursing, health service, town planning, architecture, tailoring, furniture service, footwear service, construction and maintenance service, fuel service, weaving service, cottage industries, transport service, postal service, woodworking, stainless steel fabrication, hand-marbling of mill-fabrics, pottery, batik work, embroidery, etc." (Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram, p. 43 and Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, p. 567)

Surely the sumptuous account given above makes an imposing picture of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as it is today. But a question is pertinently asked in some quarters: In the medley of these variegated activities and in the inordinate expansion of the Ashram, do the Ashramites still keep in view the original and primary goal that inspired the founding of the Ashram in 1926? Do the inmates still seriously engage themselves in their spiritual pursuit? Do they sincerely make an effort to build up in the Ashram a spiritual collectivity harmonised on the basis of the unity of the Spirit in all? Or, who knows, perhaps many of the new Ashramites have for all practical purposes banished from the field of their consciousness any active awareness of the Goal set by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother!