On The Mother

CHAPTER 31

Coming of the Children

II

In the Ashram during the War years, especially after 1941, as if in answer to the violence and destruction outside, there were assembled day after day for the adoration of the Lord all the flowers of the Ashram gardens and as if in answer to the adult lunacies and horrors in the War theatres there, in the Ashram, more and more of the flowers of humanity - the children of the sadhaks and disciples - found a free atmosphere for integral growth. The War, for one thing, had forced the hands of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and made them agree to the withdrawal of the earlier rule of exclusion of children from the Ashram; and for another, the harbouring and training of children could be the best insurance for the future, the best way of preventing the post-war world from falling back into "the same stupidities" of all our poisoned yesterdays. By 1944, the number of sadhaks alone was over 350, and there was also the steep rise in the cost of living. In August 1944, the Mother is reported to have informed Sri Aurobindo that every month the cost of milk alone was Rs. 2000, and food-grains and other marketing expenses came to another Rs. 8000; an annual expenditure of Rs. 1,20,000 on these basic items alone¹. And now there were the children, an incommensurable responsibility! As the Mother said in 1953:

It was only after the war that children were taken. But I do not regret that they have been accepted. For I believe there is much more stuff for the future among children who know nothing than among those grown-ups who believe they know everything.

Then the Mother cited the example of sculpture: without wet plastic clay, no modelling could be done. Once the model was baked, nothing more could be done:

Something like that happens in life. You must not attain something and then remain crystallised, fossilised, immobilised....

So long as one remains thus clay-like, very soft, very malleable, not yet formed, not aware of being formed, something can be done. And as long as one remains a child... it is a blissful state.²

The Mother added that, whereas people in general walked round and round a whole lifetime to reach the heights of a mountain and arrived there exhausted, with the proper guidance children could be taken - as it were, by the funicular railway - right to the top by the shortest way.

If the coming of the children was forced by the War, their coming was

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also an exciting and an all-absorbing experience. Their arrival immediately brought about an agreeable change in the physiognomy and character of the Ashram, for these children of different age-groups seemed to be ready one and all to open themselves out like the petals of a bud responding to the rays of the morning sun. Everything had to be organised for them - dormitories, classrooms, playgrounds - and everything had to turn around them, and the very organisation of the Ashram had to suffer a sea-change. There had to be a relaxation of the old austerity, for children had first to attain maturity before they could be made to choose aright:

In order to choose you must at least know a little the elements to choose from. And for that you must have a certain inner formation, a certain culture. And you certainly do not have that when you are five years old - except some.³

The Mother had come across a few who, even at the age of five, had an intense aspiration, although they could not express it in words, and they wouldn't leave the Ashram when their parents wanted to take them away:

Even at the age of five... the psychic consciousness was there, and they could feel. Well, these children are of an infinitely higher stuff than that of people who have already had three-fourths of their head blunted by the education they have been given in the ordinary schools....⁴

II

When the number of children increased and several were found to be of a schooling age, the Mother took the decision to open a School. This was done on 2 December 1943,⁵ with Pavitra and Sisirkumar Mitra in charge of the twenty pupils. The ultimate direction and guidance in every detail was of course the Mother's, who accepted this burden of divine responsibility with a light heart. There is the story of a seasoned educationist meeting the Mother when the School had been functioning for some time, and suggesting to her that a principal should be appointed to run the place on proper lines. The Mother is reported to have concentrated for a while, and then asked the educationist as if in bewilderment: "A principal?... Then what am I here for?" The educationist understood at once. The soul of the School was the Mother herself, even as she was the soul of the Ashram.

Beginning with but a few pupils, the School increased its enrolment in the coming months and years. The pupils were all children of the sadhaks or of disciples living in distant places, and the teachers also were recruited from the sadhaks. But what gave distinction and a spiritual aura to the School was the Mother's daily and active participation in its life. She spent the evenings with the children, took classes herself, narrated stories and

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blessed the divers functions, games, sports and entertainments with her divine presence. In Narayan Prasad's words:

It looked as if she had lost herself in the younger section of the Ashram.... Her evening classes of little children, ending with distribution of sweets, were beautiful scenes in which restless and noisy children grew quiet and silent, as if discipline had sprung into being among them.⁶

The Mother's hope was that some of the children she taught would one day become teachers in their own right and start the intended and necessary revolution in teaching. When she was once asked, some years later, why the education given in the Ashram School was not very different from what was imparted in the outside schools, and why a true Aurobindonian orientation hadn't been given to the instruction, the Mother said:

Yes, my child. And for years I have been fighting for it to be otherwise. When you - you children, here - when you are old enough and ready to become professors, then you will be entrusted with teaching the newcomers the right thing, in the right way.⁷

But even otherwise, there was something indefinable, yet of seminal value, in the Ashram education from the very beginning. What was it except a question of atmosphere? As the Mother explained:

You are plunged in a sea of consciousness full of light, aspiration, true understanding, essential purity, and whether you want it or not it enters... There is an action here during sleep which is quite considerable... visitors, people just passing by - they are all quite bewildered: "But you have children here as I have never seen elsewhere!" For us, we are used toil, aren't we? They are spontaneously like that, quite naturally. But there is an awakening in the consciousness, there is a kind of inner response and a feeling of blossoming, of inner freedom which is not found elsewhere.⁸

III

In the developing life of the Ashram under the sovereign aegis of the Mother, the coming of the children meant, in the first place, a larger freedom, a freshness and an exhilaration, a play of variety, a rush of innocence, an opulence of unfolding experience; and in order to contain, temper and transform it all there was, in the second place, a well-knit yet silken organisational set-up, partly through the extension of the existing Ashram organisation and partly through the new physical education with its mystique and its many-sided discipline. The influx of children was at once an upsetting as well as a tonic experience for the older sadhaks accustomed to a measure of austerity and a regimen of silence, sobriety,

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order and a strenuously self-imposed tapasya. Being drawn from all over the country, the children were a cosmopolitan crowd, and being young and fresh and open, they easily mingled in one another's life-ways making a pool of refreshing new consciousness. The old hermitage-like place, the Ashram, now rang with scintillating cries, and the lights of miscellaneous smiles and buoyant laughter filled and enriched the atmosphere. As Nolini Kanta Gupta reminisces about the children's coming:

Under the influence of that green new life, dry branches flowered, as it were, in the external life also of us, who were the old... at the age of 60,1 had to join the playground and do gymnastic drill....⁹

The participants were divided into groups by the Mother, Nolini being in the Blue Group with Udar Pinto as Captain. By bringing the young and old together on the Playground, the Mother aimed at a purposeful communion and transcendence, hinting at the ultimate emergence of a new race of supermen.

The children of course - most of them, at any rate - hadn't deliberately opted for Ashram life as the elder sadhaks had; the children had only been brought or sent to the Ashram by their parents, and there was no question of the children doing anything like conscious Yoga. They were there to have a chance to grow into boyhood and girlhood under the Mother's omnicompetent care. Once the Mother accepted children, she also assumed all the attendant responsibilities. If she found in Sisirkumar Mitra, formerly of Shantiniketan, a seasoned academic head, she likewise found Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya a dedicated exponent of physical culture; and there was Pavitra to give purpose and shape and proper direction to the School. While the academic courses were organised on efficient lines, physical culture received equal importance. As Nirod saw it, the daily regimen of physical education "served the most important purpose of keeping the inflammable material of young boys, girls and children under a strict supervision through compulsory activities from 4.30 to 7.00 p.m. or so".¹⁰ Without such canalisation of their energies the children may have gone astray, all the more so because of the large freedom they enjoyed in their Ashram life. Studies, group life, physical culture, the ambience of the elected Presence, the psychic opening stimulated by the Ashram environment, all helped the promotion of a gymnastic fused in the harmony of the Spirit, the flowering of a bright young race with the flame of freedom in their souls and the light of knowledge in their eyes. Perhaps, it was with heir coming efflorescence in his mind that Sri Aurobindo painted this apocalyptic picture of the future humanity:

I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;

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Forerunners of a divine multitude ...

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,

The great creators with wide brows of calm,

The massive barrier-breakers of the world ...

Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,

Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy, ...¹¹

IV

More and more sadhaks joined the sports activities, partly because it helped them to keep fit, but also because it meant basking in the golden sunshine of the Mother's presence. One thing led to another, and the Mother began playing table-tennis, finding it a light exercise as well as a means of contact with the children. Why not tennis, then? After discussing the matter with Sri Aurobindo, the Mother secured from the Government on long lease a stretch of wasteland on the northeast of the town along the seaside, and gave directions that the whole apparently God-forsaken area should be reclaimed and turned into a ground with facilities for tennis and several other sports; it came to be called the Tennis Ground since the Mother played tennis there. The building of a long rampart as a bulwark against the lashing sea-waves had to be done first, and asked for bold and imaginative planning and resourceful execution. As if an alchemic technology were at work, in an incredibly short time the whole miserable and filthy area now underwent a marvellous change:

The stink and the loathsome sight made the place a Stygian sore and a black spot on the colonial Government. The Mother changed this savage wasteland into a heavenly playground, almost a supramental transformation of Matter. The sea-front was clothed in a vision of beauty and delight,¹²

And of course, as with other massive enterprises in the Ashram - the construction of Golconde for example - here too the Mother took sustained and informed interest in the execution of her plan. Since she worked, not from the mental but from a much higher level of consciousness, once she had taken the decision, it meant that the necessary resources would be found and the right men would turn up to translate her ideas into realities.

V

The opening of the Tennis Ground fringing the sea was an invitation to the sadhaks to participate in a number of games and a variety of sports and athletics including swimming. The Mother herself played tennis in the

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evenings daily for about an hour with the younger people by turns, and even took part in tournaments. In her younger years she had played excellent tennis, but taking it up again around the age of seventy was quite an astonishing feat. An hour's strenuous play every evening, and this, in addition to her heavy and variegated load of work spread over nearly the twenty-four hours of the day! Having observed her closely at play, and often played against her, Nirodbaran writes:

She played very well for her age and her claim that she had become a champion in her youth was amply borne out by her steady, sharp forehand strokes which were above all a marvel of precision. Naturally she could not run a great deal, but her agility was remarkable. In her vision tennis is the best game spiritually and physically. She used it not only for her physical fitness, but as in everything else, as a medium for her spiritual action on the players. It was this inner movement that interested her as much the other. For, playing with the Divine meant an aspiration, opening, right attitude, reception of her force through the game....¹³

After her daily game of tennis, the Mother used to go to the Playground and complete her usual round of activities, returning to her rooms after eight, or even as late as nine. Her evenings were thus crowded, and for the pupils and the sadhaks they were a period packed with miscellaneous fulfilment. When the evening's schedule was over, Pranab would offer a garland to the Mother, and back in the Ashram, she would in her turn place it at Sri Aurobindo's feet.

VI

When the Mother found that it was rather cumbersome for women to complete their round of exercises in pyjamas, as was initially the custom, she had second thoughts. The pyjamas were too loose and impeded free movement of the limbs, and sometimes even occasioned a fall. The Mother accordingly decided to introduce a simpler, but boldly functional uniform. After a couple of days, she called one of the sadhikas and said, "I have solved the problem of the uniform. The girls will put on white shorts, a white shirt and a kitty-cap on the head for their hair. Prepare them and try them yourself. Pyjamas are unwieldy".¹⁴ Being approved by the Mother, this revolution was soon carried out with remarkably little fuss. Conservatism and timidity of course raised their eyebrows, and some few gave vent to shocked whispers: Was it wise? Was it necessary? Was it prudent to permit boys and girls so "scantily dressed" to do exercises together? And - what will people say? But the Mother said with calm certitude:

Why should we follow the others? They have no ideas, we have ideas.

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I have come to break down old conventions and superstitions.¹⁵

It was not the itch for mere novelty either: the changes had really their sanction from above. In Nirod's words:

I believe, she prepares the ground in the occult planes and manipulates the forces to her advantage before she takes any hazardous step.... We can realise now the wisdom of her vision... I think it was one of the most effective means to eliminate sex-consciousness between the male and the female. We are in this respect much better than before now that shorts have become almost our normal dress.¹⁶

The Mother certainly didn't subscribe to the philosophy of education that asked for different types of education and different kinds of physical culture for boys and girls, even as she firmly discountenanced the only too common tendency of women to overemphasise their femineity and men their masculinity. For the Mother, as for Sri Aurobindo, men and women alike, boys and girls alike, were but vessels of the immortal spirit, and the whole aim of education - and of Yoga - should be to get people to grow more and more conscious of this potentiality and progressively to realise it in their everyday life.

VII

In this context it may be recalled how, since her early years the Mother had always held the view that the 'male-female' antinomy was but mischievous and pointless. During the First World War she wrote an essay on "Women and the War" in which she exposed once again the "futility of the perpetual oppositions between men and women". The War had shown how easily women could replace men "in most of the posts they [men] occupied before". What was the lesson of the War, then? It was "a severe, a painful" lesson:

It is no longer the moment for frail competitions and self-interested claims; all human beings, men or women, must associate in a common effort to become conscious of the highest ideal which asks to be realised and to work ardently for its realisation.¹⁷

Men and women alike had first to station themselves on the firm ground of spiritual equality; the rest would follow as a matter of course.

Many years later, the question was once posed whether, during their monthly periods girl pupils could join in the sports and athletics as usual, or whether a modified regimen was necessary. The Mother answered both in general terms about the physical education of girls and in specific terms on the particular points raised.¹⁸

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There was little sense, the Mother felt, in the supposed boy-girl contrast being constantly projected before adolescent pupils in school or college. It would be far wiser to remember that both boys and girls were alike human beings, equally emanations of the Spirit. The human body is doubtless shaped like an animal's, a mammalian's, and it is the allotted role of the female body to conceive the child, build it up for about nine months in the womb, and deliver it to start its independent existence. The surplus blood in the woman is designed by Nature to help the mother to build and nurture the child in the womb. At other times, however, "the surplus blood has to be thrown out to avoid excess and congestion". This being Nature's arrangement, there is no need to get upset, or to resort to all sorts of frantic defensive reactions.

But while the human-animal body cannot be cast away, there is no justification to make a fetish of it or to sentimentalise over it. What has to be remembered is that our cumbrous mammalian body is not everything, for there are other dimensions too to our existence:

We have in us an intelligent will more or less enlightened which is the first instrument of our psychic being. It is this intelligent will that we must use in order to learn to live not like an animal man, but as a human being, candidate for Divinity.

The human body is in part the animal of yesterday, and potentially the man-god to be. In this context, proper physical culture can help the body to grow sufficiently and serve as the means of fulfilment of the ideal that man sets before himself. Scientific advancement on the one hand and the evolutionary influx of a new consciousness on the other pose challenges of adjustment to present-day man, and the body should accordingly be in readiness to meet with self-assurance the coming events. Hence the primacy the Mother gave to physical culture in her scheme of integral education.

As regards the particular questions Whether there should be different sets of exercises for boys and girls? Whether the muscular woman was for that reason alone ugly as well? Whether participation in games and athletics was likely to create difficulties at the time of childbirth? - the Mother was no less forthright. Girls should face problems as they come, relying only on Nature's strength and their own native fortitude. They should shed their acute sense of diffidence and difference from the boys, and act with ease, poise and complete self-reliance. Many troubles are really of psychological origin, and should hence be met at that level in an attitude of "quiet forbearance". Where pains have a sexual origin, the only too common human tendency to succumb, hoping thereby for cure through satisfaction or satiation, must prove tragically illusory. But there is of course "another way, a better way, - control, mastery, transformation; this is more dignified and also more effective".

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Nor is it necessary, in the name of the 'blessed feminine', to insulate girls from all association with boys. The organisation of separate sets of exercises for boys and girls would create more problems than it would solve, and might even congeal the superficial differences into unwholesome rigidities. Robust health in women couldn't possibly be inimical to beauty. It was but superstitious stupidity and aesthetic perversion to equate weakness and fragility with feminine elegance and charm. And as for childbirth, for the healthy woman it is no problem at all. If such easy childbirth (as is even now natural with the working woman in the countryside) is something that "cannot occur in a civilised world with all the so-called progress that humanity has achieved", well, so much the worse for civilisation! In the age now unfolding it should be woman's privilege as also man's to try to become a fit instrument for the Divine Work, and, as children of the same infinite Mother to be "aspirants to the one Eternal Godhead". And the New Woman should opt only for this integral ideal of Beauty:

A perfect harmony in the proportions, suppleness and strength, grace and force, plasticity and endurance, and above all, an excellent health, unvarying and unchanging, which is the result of a pure soul, a happy trust in life and an unshakable faith in the Divine Grace.

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