Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

Sri Aurobindo — Baroda —1906  

CHAPTER 3

Baroda

I

Sri Aurobindo's arrival in India early in February 1893 was preceded by his father Dr. Krishnadhan's death in peculiarly tragic circumstances. Even as late as 2 December 1892, as may be inferred from his letter (referred to in the previous chapter) of that date to his brother-in-law Jogendra, Dr. Krishnadhan was feeling almost certain that his son Aurobindo would be entering the Indian Civil Service and making his mark as a brilliant administrator. Sometime later information seems to have reached Krishnadhan of Sri Aurobindo's failure to get into the Service and of the Baroda appointment. He also heard from Grindlays, his bankers, of Sri Aurobindo's departure from England by a particular boat which, however, went down off the coast of Portugal near Lisbon and many lives were lost. When the news was telegraphed to Krishnadhan by Grindlays (who didn't know that Sri Aurobindo actually left by a later boat), it came as a stunning blow; he concluded that his beloved son Aurobindo was lost for ever, and as he suffered from a weak heart he collapsed the same night and died uttering Aurobindo's name in lamentation.¹ A slightly different recital of events occurs in Brajendranth De's Reminiscences of an Indian Member of I.C.S that appeared in 1954 in The Calcutta Review. Till the end Dr. Krishnadhan had believed that his son had been admitted into the Service and had, in fact, gone to Bombay to receive him and bring him home in triumph. Unable to get any definite news. Dr. Krishnadhan had returned to Khulna feeling depressed, and one afternoon he received a wire from his agents in Bombay that his son's name was not in the list of passengers who were travelling by the boat in which his son too was supposed to be coming:

It so happened that, that very night he and the Superintendent of Police were coming to dine at my house. The dinner was ready, the Superintendent came, but there was no sign of the doctor, although his bungalow was quite close to my house. After waiting for some time, I sent an orderly to remind him.... The man came back and informed us that the doctor was very ill. I at once went round, and heard of the telegram and found the doctor very ill and quite unconscious. The other medical men in the station were assiduous in their attentions. I did all I could. But it was all of no avail. The poor man lingered on for a day or two and then passed away.²

The accounts, however, agree in essentials: hope deferred — disappointment — shock. And so Dr. Krishnadhan died before he could set his eyes on any one of the three sons on whom he had built such high hopes.

It was all a tragic misunderstanding due to defective communication, for as a latter of fact Sri Aurobindo had left England by a later boat, the Carthage. His elder brothers too arrived, though later; Benoy Bhushan was to serve under the  

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Maharaja of Cooch-Behar, and Manomohan was to become Professor of English at the Presidency College, Calcutta. The prodigal boys returned home at long last, Sri Aurobindo first, the others later; they were now stalwart young men, well-set apparently in life — but Dr. Krishnadhan's strong heroic soul had already passed away.

When, after an absence of fourteen years, Sri Aurobindo set foot on the soil of India, when he touched the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, "a vast calm which descended upon him... [and] this calm surrounded him and remained for long months afterwards" .³ It was as though the Mother had received her child back and enveloped him with her infinite immaculate love. Many years later, Sri Aurobindo made a reference to this transfiguring experience in the course of a letter to one of his disciples:

My own life and my yoga have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly without any exclusiveness on either side. .. .since I set foot on the Indian soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner and infinite bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies. At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them.⁴

In my end is my beginning, in my beginning is my end. The end of the sojourn to England meant the beginning of the Indian experience which, in the fullness of time, was to embrace "the two ends of existence and all that lies between them".

Sri Aurobindo spent about thirteen years in the Baroda State Service. He joined on 8 February 1893 and he severed his connection finally on 18 June 1907. He was first put in the Survey Settlement Department, not as an officer, but to learn the procedural formalities of the administration; he then moved to the Stamps and Revenue Departments; and he also worked for some time in the Secretariat drawing up important despatches. From 1897, he became part-time lecturer in French at the Baroda College, and presently other work was also added, and 1900 he was appointed, on the strong recommendation of Principal Tait, as permanent Professor of English on a pay of Rs. 360 per month. In 1904, he was appointed Vice-Principal on Rs. 550 per month, and he acted as Principal from March 1905 to February 1906 on a consolidated salary of Rs. 710 per month. This steady advancement at the Baroda College notwithstanding, Sri Aurobindo's services seem to have been utilised, from time to time, partly in the Government Department and partly by the Maharaja himself in a confidential capacity. Whenever he thought fit, he would send for Sri Aurobindo for writing letters, composing speeches or drawing up documents of various kinds which needed special care in phrasing. At one time, the Maharaja asked Sri Aurobindo to give instruction in English grammar by giving exact and minute rules for each construction! On another occasion,  

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he was asked to advise on travel after consulting the time-tables of European railways. But all this -was quite informal, Sri Aurobindo being usually invited to breakfast with the Maharaja and staying on to do the work entrusted to him, — like the writing of an order, or a letter to the British Government, or some other important memorandum. Once Sri Aurobindo was specially sent for to Ootacamund in order to prepare a précis  of the whole Bapat case and the judicial opinions on it.

At least on two occasions, Sri Aurobindo joined him on his holidays — in the summer of 1901 at Naini Tal and in May 1903 in Kashmir. In a letter from Naini Tal to Bhuvan Chakravarty, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The place is a beautiful one, but not half so cold as I expected. In fact, in daytime it is only a shade less hot than Baroda except when it has been raining."⁵ During the Kashmir trip, Sri Aurobindo was appointed Secretary to the Maharaja, "but there was much friction between them during the tour and the experiment was not repeated".⁶ It is said that, on one occasion, the Maharaja sent for Sri Aurobindo twice in the course of a morning; not meeting with any response, the Maharaja went himself to Sri Aurobindo's room, found him asleep, and returned without disturbing him.⁷ Another interesting sidelight to the relations between Sri Aurobindo and the Maharaja is given by Nirodbaran. The Maharaja had once issued a circular requiring all officers to attend office even on Sundays and other holidays. But Sri Aurobindo seems merely to have said, "Let him fine as much as he likes, I am not going." The Maharaja had to give up!⁸ Notwithstanding these stresses and strains. Prince and Professor seem to have entertained high mutual regard and respect. On the whole, Sri Aurobindo was brilliant and quick and efficient in work, though he was not exactly the ideal servant for an Indian Maharaja. On his part, the Maharaja gave Sri Aurobindo a certificate for ability and intelligence, but also for lack of regularity and punctuality. With the Maharaja's Court as such, however, Sri Aurobindo had hardly anything to do during the whole course of his stay at Baroda, though very occasionally he may have participated in a function in the Palace itself like the reception to Dr. S.K. Mullick.*

Sri Aurobindo's most intimate friend at Baroda was Lieutenant Madhavrao Jadhav, who was associated with him in his political ideas and helped him in later years, whenever possible, in his political work. Among his other friends were Khasirao Jadhav and Keshavrao G. Deshpande, the latter of whom Sri Aurobindo had known at Cambridge. In the early years at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo often stayed either with Khasirao or his brother Madhavrao, but later he used to rent a house or lived in quarters provided by the Government. Books, books were his major preoccupation; the Bombay firms of booksellers, Thacker Spink and Radhabai Atmaram, supplied him regularly with the latest catalogues, and he then placed orders for selected books which duly arrived in bulky parcels by passenger train.

*Dr. Karan Singh mentions in a footnote on p. 43 of his book Prophet of Indian Nationalism (Bhavan's Edition, 1967) that the Maharaja's only daughter, now the dowager Maharani of Cooch-Behar, gave the information that Sri Aurobindo used to come to the Palace to teach her and her brothers, but he was too immersed in himself to pay much attention to them.

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His personal library thus came to include some of the latest books in English, French, German, Latin, Greek — and of course all the major English poets from Chaucer to Swinburne. A cousin of Sri Aurobindo's, Basanti Devi, has given us this amusing account of his addiction to books and his habit of carrying trunkloads of them wherever he went:

Auro Dada used to arrive with two or three trunks. We always thought they would contain costly suits and other luxury items like scents, etc. When he opened them I used to look and wonder. What is this? A few ordinary clothes and all the rest books and nothing but books! Does Auro Dada like to read all these? We all want to chat and enjoy ourselves in vacations. Does he want to spend even this time in reading these books?⁹

In the choice of books, Sri Aurobindo seems to have had a natural partiality for literature (especially poetry), history and even some politics, but not for philosophy. He was not attracted to metaphysics, and he found the disputes of dialectical ratiocination too abstract, abstruse and generally inconclusive. Before coming to Baroda, he had read something of Plato, as well as Epictetus and the Lucretian statement of the ideas of Epicurus. Only such philosophical ideas as could be made dynamic for life interested him. Beyond a nodding acquaintance with the broad ideas of certain European philosophers, he had no interest in the highways and byways of Western philosophical thought. Of the Indian philosophers also he had read only some of their main conclusions. Actually, his first real acquaintance with Indian spirituality was through the reported sayings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and the speeches and writings of Swami Vivekananda. Sri Aurobindo had certainly an immense admiration for Vivekananda and a deeper feeling still for Ramakrishna. But Sri Aurobindo did not accept altogether Vivekananda's philosophy or Advaitic standpoint; and though spiritual experiences interested him greatly, and he had had some himself, he was not — not as yet — inclined to the actual practice of yoga. His experiences began in England, perhaps in 1892, and from the moment he stepped on the shores of India they became more frequent and more intense. But he did not associate them with yoga about which he knew nothing at the time. Even when he was asked by Keshavrao Deshpande, himself a sadhak, to take up the practice of yoga, Sri Aurobindo declined since it seemed to him then merely a retreat from life.

II

Some months after reporting himself to duty at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo paid a visit to Bengal and met all his relations. His Mother could hardly recognise him; "My Aurobindo was not so big, he was small," she is said to have exclaimed. But she remembered a childhood cut on his finger, and finding it still there, she was satisfied that it was her own Aurobindo. His younger sister, Sarojini, found that he had "a very delicate face, long hair cut in English fashion; and she described him

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as "a very shy person".¹⁰ Sri Aurobindo was also delighted to see again his uncle, Jogendra, and especially his grandfather, Rajnarain Bose. The return to Baroda after family reunion was not quite to Sri Aurobindo's liking, as may be inferred from a letter he wrote to Sarojini on 25 August 1894:

There is an old story about Judas Iscariot, which suits me down to the ground. Judas, after betraying Christ, hanged himself and went to hell where he was honoured with the hottest oven in the whole establishment. Here he must bum for ever and ever; but in his life he had done one kind act and for this they permitted him by special mercy of God to cool himself for an hour every Christmas on an iceberg in the North Pole. Now this has always seemed to me not mercy, but a peculiar refinement of cruelty. For how could hell fail to be ten times more hell to the poor wretch after the delicious coolness of his iceberg? I do not know for what enormous crime I have been condemned to Baroda, but my case is just parallel. Since my pleasant sojourn with you at Baidyanath, Baroda seems a hundred times more Baroda.¹¹

How prettily Sri Aurobindo laughs away his sense of exile; and how sweetly, yet indirectly, he compliments his sister! No wonder people found his private talk full of wit and humour and gentleness and infinite understanding. The latter part of the letter shows that Benoy Bhushan and Manomohan were still in England (though they were expected any day in Calcutta), and that Sri Aurobindo was trying to learn in real earnest both Bengali and Gujarati. The letter concludes with a reference to his recent birthday ("I have just passed my twenty-second milestone, August 15 last, since my birthday and am beginning to get dreadfully old") and also to Sarojini's progress in her English studies:

I hope you will learn very quickly; I can then write to you quite what I want to say and just in the way I want to say it. I feel some difficulty in doing that now and I don't know whether you will understand it.¹²

Sarojini's education was very near to his heart, and he used to make remittances regularly to meet the expenses of her education at Bankipore and the maintenance of their mother. His younger brother, Barindra, was also with Sarojini at the time, though later he often stayed at Baroda. Even after their return to India, Benoy Bhushan and Manomohan were not in a position to help the family. For this Sri Aurobindo offered a good-humoured yet disarming explanation: "Dada is in Cooch-Behar State service and so he was to maintain a certain high standard of living. Manomohan is married and marriage is an expensive luxury!"¹³

Already, while still at Cambridge, he had tried to learn a little Bengali, since  as an I.C.S. probationer he had opted for service in Bengal. His teacher in Bengali, Mr. Robert Mason Towers ("Pandit Towers", as he came to be called), himself knew little, his knowledge of Bengali being limited to Vidyasagar's works. Once  he seems to have told Sri Aurobindo that Bankim's writing was not Bengali!¹⁴  After coming to India, Sri Aurobindo soon learnt enough by his own efforts and was able to appreciate the novels of Bankim Chandra and the poetry of Madhusudan. Indeed, Sri Aurobindo went further still, for in 1898 he engaged a teacher  

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— a young Bengali litterateur by name Dinendra Kumar Roy — perhaps as a companion more than as a teacher, for his work was merely "to help Sri Aurobindo to correct and perfect his knowledge of the language and to accustom him to conversation in Bengali."¹⁵ Sri Aurobindo also started, unaided, to delve into the treasures of Sanskrit literature, and presently to familiarise himself with Marathi and Gujarati as well. He was thus able by and by to read and appreciate the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the masterpieces of Kalidasa, the shatakas of Bhartrihari, not to mention the classics of modem Bengali literature. Sri Aurobindo was in this manner happily restored to his great cultural heritage, and never again would he be induced to lose it! He was thrilled by the poetry of Madhusudan, he was deeply stirred by the creations of Bankim. Of Madhusudan, Sri Aurobindo sang an anthem that is both a melodious dirge and a piece of critical appraisement:

Poet, who first with skill inspired did teach

Greatness to our divine Bengali speech,— ...

No human hands such notes ambrosial moved;

These accents are not of the imperfect earth;

Rather the god was voiceful in their birth,

The god himself of the enchanting flute,

The god himself took up thy pen and wrote.¹⁶

As for Bankim, there are two poems: the shorter 'Saraswati with the Lotus' and the longer 'Bankim Chandra Chatterji'. "Thy tears fall fast, O mother" begins the first, the emotion held taut in its six poignant lines; but the second is more elaborate:

O master of delicious words! the bloom

Of chompuk and the breath of king-perfume v

Have made each musical sentence with the noise

Of women's ornaments and sweet household joys...

All nature in a page, no pleasing show

But men more real than the friends we know....

His nature kingly was and as a god

In large serenity and light he trod

His daily way, yet beauty, like soft flowers

Wreathing a hero's sword, ruled all his hours.

Thus moving in these iron times and drear,

Barren of bliss and robbed of golden cheer,

He sowed the desert with ruddy-hearted rose,

The sweetest voice that ever spoke in prose.¹⁷

And although Sri Aurobindo mastered Bengali sufficiently to be able, later on, to conduct a weekly (Dharma) in Bengali, writing most of the articles himself, his 

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control over the language was not quite as consummate or fluent as over English. While he could make the English language, a fit and natural vehicle for the expression of the roll and thunder of politics as also of the peaceful sublime of spiritual fervour or ecstasy, he could never address, to his regret, a Bengali audience in their own mother tongue.^l8 That price, at any rate, he had to pay for his long a d enforced separation from the Mother.

It is to the Bengali tutor, Dinendra Kumar Roy, that we owe some particulars regarding Sri Aurobindo's everyday life at Baroda. After all, they lived together in terms;, of friendly companionship, and the tutor had every opportunity of observing and forming an opinion of Sri Aurobindo's life in action. "Desireless, a man of few words, balanced in his diet, self-controlled, always given to study"; reading far into the night, and hence a late riser; "Sri Aurobindo is not a man of this earth, he is a god comedown from heaven by some curse."¹⁹ Sri Aurobindo's morning hours were usually devoted to the writing of poetry, and he read newspapers and journals while taking his meals. More bread than rice, fish or meat once a day, and from time to time a pure vegetarian diet — generally indifferent to taste, although he found Marathi food too hot (because of the chillies) and Gujarati food too rich (because of the ghee). At one time, according to the testimony of R.N. Patkar (who had been his student), Sri Aurobindo took no cooked food in the evenings but only fruit and milk. When he was absorbed in reading, he could be wholly oblivious of his surroundings. One evening his servant had brought his meal with the words. Sāb, khānā rakhā hai (Master, the meal is served); Achchā (All right) was the answer. But an hour later, the servant found that the master was still rereading, the dishes on the table being untouched! Sri Aurobindo seems to have been equally indifferent to money as to personal comforts, food or clothes. Mr. Patkar's report on this point is worth quoting, as it gives a hint of the shape of things to come: 

It was his practice to receive his salary once in three months. In those days, payment was made in cash and not in currency notes as now. He used to get the lump sum for the three months in a bag which he emptied in a large tray lying on the table in his room. He never bothered to keep it in a safe box, under lock and key...   He never cared to keep an account of what he spent. This struck me and one day I casually asked him why he kept his money like that. He simply laughed.... He said, "Well, it is a proof that we are living in the midst of honest and good people." I asked him again, "You never keep any account which may testify to the honesty of the people round about you?" Then with a serene face he said "It is God who keeps an account for me. He gives me as much as I want and keeps the rest to Himself. At any rate He does not keep me in want; then why should I worry?"²⁰

He had always enough, and never less than enough, and never more than enough. "He was alone", writes Dinendra Kumar Roy with reference to 1898-9, the time he spent with Sri Aurobindo), "he did not know what it was it was to run after pleasure,  he never spent even a paisa in the wrong way, and yet at the end of the

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month he did not have a paisa in his hand."²¹

During the first years at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo usually managed to get away to spend the Puja holidays in Bengal with his family and relations. He had a deep attachment to his grandfather, Rajnarain, and his death in September 1899 seemed the end of an age, the great river having lost itself in the infinite ocean oneness:

As when a sacred river in its course

Dives into ocean, there its strength abides

Not less because with vastness wed and works

Unnoticed in the grandeur of the tides.²²

III

As a professor at the Baroda College at different times he taught French or English and sometimes both Sri Aurobindo effortlessly won the admiration and love of his pupils. Many of his pupils of those distant days K. M. Munshi, for instance, who was Sri Aurobindo's student in 1903 have eloquently testified to his tremendous hold on the undergraduates. At first, perhaps he could not quite acclimatise himself to Indian conditions. His pupils found his lectures a bit "too stiff', and on his part he found his wards too passive. "What was surprising to me was," he said many years later, "that students used to take down everything verbatim and mug it up. This sort of thing could never have happened in England." One reason was that, in Oxford or Cambridge and in the British universities generally, there was "a demand for the student's point of view". But in India the students were apt, not only to take down whatever their professors said, but more particularly to secure the notes of professors from Bombay, "especially if they happened to be examiners". Sri Aurobindo knew that, unlike his brother Manomohan who was painstaking with books interleaved and crammed with notes, he himself "was not so conscientious as a professor". He had his sense of the text before him, he seized the meaning by direct intuitive grasp, and spoke as his mind and the moment directed him. Once while giving a lecture on Southey's Life of Nelson he said things not in agreement with what was given in the Notes of the edition being used by the students. When they brought this to his attention, he replied that he hadn't looked into the Notes, and they were mostly rubbish in any case! The main thing in the study of literature was to let the mind absorb what it could²³ by coming into direct contact with 'the precious life-blood of a master-spirit'. Describing Sri Aurobindo's usual method of teaching, Mr. Patkar writes:

In the beginning he used to give a series of introductory lectures for initiating the student into the subject-matter of the text.. .. After preparing the student to understand the text. .. he used to start reading the text. .. stopping wherever necessary to explain the meaning of difficult and obscure sentences. Then ... dictate general lectures bearing on the various aspects pertaining to the text. ²⁴ 

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The method must have yielded salutary results, especially when applied to a classic like Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, which Sri Aurobindo taught in 1902. After the first years, Sri Aurobindo seems to have taken the measure of his wards and they too seem to have made the most of their exceptional opportunities, thereby turning the classes into adventures in the realms of ideas and values.

The influence Sri Aurobindo exercised on his students was not of course confined to the class-room, important as it was; he was, besides, the Chairman of the Baroda College Union and Debating Society, and this brought him into contact, though less frequently, with the entire student body. He had to introduce visiting lecturers to the Union; he had to regulate the course of debates in such a way that the best in the students came out and they didn't miss the spirit of intellectual inquiry in the excitement of the moment. His own speeches though they were not many were doubtless memorable events in the history of the Union. "He was never an orator", says Mr. Patkar recapitulating the scene, "but a speaker of a very high order, and ... the audience used to listen to him with rapt attention. Without any gestures or the movements of the limbs, he stood ... and the language used to flow like a stream from his lips with a natural ease and melody that kept his audience almost spell-bound."²⁵ Without the impact of the speaker's personality and the magic of his living voice, it must be next to impossible to form a measure of Sri Aurobindo's power of public speech on the basis of a reported summary alone. Even so, a speech like the one he delivered before the College Social gathering in 1899, and later printed in the Baroda College Miscellany, can give us some idea at least of the content and quality of his speeches at the Baroda College. The subject is Oxford and Cambridge, and what Indian Universities should learn from them. What does life at Oxford or Cambridge mean to a student who is privileged to be in residence for three years? Sri Aurobindo warms up to the answer and finds the right words:

He goes up from the restricted life of his home and school and finds himself in surroundings which with astonishing rapidity expand his intellect, strengthen his character, develop his social faculties, force out all his abilities and turn him in three years from a boy into a man. His mind ripens in the contact with minds which meet from all parts of the country and have been brought up in many various kinds of trainings, his unwholesome eccentricities wear away and the unsocial, egoistic elements of character are to a large extent discouraged. He moves among ancient and venerable buildings, the mere age and beauty of which are in themselves an education. He has the Union which has trained so many great orators and debaters, has been the first trial ground of so many renowned intellects. He has, too, the athletics clubs organised with a perfection unparalleled elsewhere, in which, if he has the physique and the desire for them he may find pursuits which are also in themselves an education. The result is that he who entered the university a raw student, comes out of it a man and a gentleman, accustomed to think of great affairs and fit to

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move in cultivated society, and he remembers his College and University with affection, and in after days if he meets with those who have studied with him he feels attracted towards them as to men with whom he has a natural brotherhood. This is the social effect I should like the Colleges and Universities of India also to exercise, to educate by social influences as well as those which are merely academical and to create the feeling among their pupils that they belong to the community, that they are children of one mother... .²⁶

The academy (college or university) as a hallowed place that facilitates emotional integration, as a nursery for the children of the mother (Mother India), and as a means of building up a noble race, the future humanity in India: such, indeed, was the university ideal that Sri Aurobindo wished to set before his student-audience,  and he thought too that, even with all our limitations, we could make an effort to realise the ideal. But Sri Aurobindo hastened to remind his hearers that the college or the university couldn't be expected to do everything, not even to give a 'complete' education:

But the University cannot and does not pretend to complete a man's education; it merely gives some materials to his hand or points out certain paths he may tread, and it says to him, — "Here are the materials I have given into your hands, it is for you to make of them what you can"; or — "These are the paths I have equipped you to travel; it is yours to tread them to the end, and by your success in them justify me before the world."

Words, words — even the most eloquent words — have effect on the audience only in proportion to the power with which they are charged by the speaker's personality. Sri Aurobindo stood before his eager-eyed audience composed largely of Gujarati and Marathi youths as a Bengali who had mastered, like Kacha in the asuric world, the lore of the West, but who had rejected (as Kacha did Devayani's) the blandishments of Western civilisation; they saw him as a scholar steeped in Greek, Latin, English and French classics but who nevertheless incarnated the spirit of Indian culture, the oneness in the Mother. They could sense that Sri Aurobindo's words were more than words; they were pointers to action, a call to realisation; and the words went home.

But of course Sri Aurobindo could not help contrasting Indian educational conditions with conditions at St. Paul's or King's. The puny stature of the typical Indian undergraduate must have sorely pained Sri Aurobindo. How true was it of the Indian scholar, as it was true (though the context is different) of Dryden's Achitophel:

A fiery soul, which working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy body to decay:

And o'er informed the tenement of clay.²⁷

The average Indian scholar didn't care for physical culture, he had no joy in the art of robust and healthy living; on the contrary, becoming a spectacled book-worm  

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at a tender age, he was given to excessive intellectual inbreeding. What wonder, then, that his general outlook was severely pessimistic in consequence? The Indian scholar ripened fast — all too fast — 87and there-an end! What Sri Aurobindo wrote about the "cultured Bengali" was thus capable of a general application also:

The cultured Bengali begins life with a physical temperament already delicate and high-strung. He has the literary constitution with its femineity and acute nervousness. Subject this to a cruel strain when it is tenderest and needs the most careful rearing, to the wicked and wantonly cruel strain of instruction through a foreign tongue; put it under the very worst system of training; add enormous academical labour, immense official drudgery in an unhealthy climate and constant mental application...²⁸

and need one be surprised by the results? Sri Aurobindo pondered over all these engines of our limitation, and sought the key that would turn limitations into opportunities, and frustration into triumph. 

The superficial observer, indeed, saw no more than the externals of Sri Aurobindo's life: the professor who wore white drill suits, who kept a horse and carriage, who ordered quantities of books, who made visits to the Palace; but those — his friends and relations, his colleagues and pupils — who came into close contact with him, at least some of them, were conscious also of the power behind the person, the fire that seemed to bum within, the light that shone in the eyes. The late Dr. C. R. Reddy, who succeeded Sri Aurobindo as Vice-Principal of the Baroda College, has left this on record:

I had the honour of knowing him.... We had a number of friends in common. Mr. A. B. Clark, the principal of the Baroda College, remarked to me. "So you met Aurobindo Ghosh. Did you notice his eyes? There is mystic fire and light in them. They penetrate into the beyond." And he added, "If Joan of Arc heard heavenly voices, Aurobindo probably sees heavenly visions." dark was a materialist of materialists. I have never been able to understand how that worldly but delightful person could have glimpsed the truth, then latent, about Aurobindo. But, then, does not the lighting's blinding flash, which lasts but a moment, leap forth from the dark black bosom of the cloud?*

The reference to Joan of Arc was prophetic: if St. Joan was ultimately to redeem France, wasn't Sri Aurobindo destined likewise to be the redeemer of India?

IV

Soon after his arrival in India, Sri Aurobindo was invited by his Cambridge friend K. G. Deshpande, who was then English editor of the Indu Prakash of Bombay, to write articles on the political situation in the country. These appeared

* From Dr. C. R. Reddy's citation before the Andhra University Convocation (11 December 1948) e occasion of the award in absentia of the National Prize in Humanities to Sri Aurobindo.

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serially under the challenging caption 'New Lamps for Old' from 7 August 1893 to 6 March 1894, but they did not carry Sri Aurobindo's name. Introducing the series to the readers, K. G. Deshpande wrote in the issue of 7 August:

Hypocrisy has been the besetting sin of our political agitation. Oblique vision is the fashion. True, matter of fact, honest criticism is very badly needed.... The questions at issue are momentous. It is the making or the unmaking of a nation. We have therefore secured a gentleman of great literary talents, of liberal culture and of considerable English experience, well-versed in the art of writing and willing, at great personal inconvenience and probable misrepresentation, to give out his views in no uncertain voice, and,... in a style and diction peculiarly his own. We... assure them [our readers] that they will find in those articles matter that will set them thinking and steel their patriotic souls.²⁹

What was unusual about the articles was the fusion of a young man's intolerance and idealism and a wise man's deep and abiding wisdom. Sri Aurobindo began the series with the well-known, yet none the less always startling, question: "If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into a ditch?" It was some nine years since the Indian National Congress had commenced its activities with a blazing fanfare of trumpets and deafening bugle-sounds, but where was the Promised Land?

The walls of the Anglo-Indian Jericho stand yet without a breach, and the dark spectre of Penury draws her robe over the land in greater volume and with an ampler sweep.³⁰

What had gone wrong, then? Almost everything! The indictment is direct, at pointblank range as it were:

I say, of the Congress, then, this, — that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in  which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right  methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be ; leaders; — in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed.³¹

Hadn't there been "a little too much talk about the blessings of British rule, and the inscrutable Providence which has laid us in the maternal, or more properly the step-maternal, bosom of just and benevolent England?" Its grandiose name notwithstanding, the Congress was not a popular body, its leaders were apt to swear by the false political gods of British manufacture, and they were only too ready to make a virtue of timidity, mere good manners and the disinclination to tell the direct truth. How could a set of complacent comfortable middle-class individuals speak and act on behalf of the millions comprising the proletariat? Pherozeshah Mehta and his 'friends might think that the proletariat was not important, but the heart of the matter was that without "the elevation and enlightenment of the proletariat" nothing really could be achieved. Sri Aurobindo therefore urged that only a mass awakening — an organisation of the entire power of the country — could redeem the time, cause discomfiture to the alien rulers and usher in national independence.

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While charging the generality of British officials .in India with rudeness and arrogance and meanness, while describing their conduct as that of "a small coterie of masters surrounded by a nation of Helots", Sri Aurobindo nevertheless exhorted his countrymen, neither to nurse hatred for the foreigner nor merely cringe before him but rather to seek strength and the clue to salvation within:

Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, ours selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.... If we were not so dazzled by the artificial glare of English prestige, we should at once acknowledge that these men are really not worth being angry with.... Our appeal, the appeal of every high-souled and self-respecting nation, ought not to be to the opinion of the Anglo-Indian, no, nor yet to the British sense of justice, but to our own reviving sense of manhood, to our own sincere fellow-feeling... with the silent and suffering people of India.³²

In another place, Sri Aurobindo remarked that the Indian patriot had more to learn from the French republican experiment (or even the Athenian) than from the British:

But if we carry our glance across the English Channel, we shall witness a very different and more animating spectacle. Gifted with a lighter, subtler and clearer mind than their insular neighbours, the French people have moved irresistibly towards a social and not a political development.³³

Sri Aurobindo then showed that if, like the British, we had laid the foundations of social collapse, we had also, like the French, learned to enact the drama of political incompetence. Our national effort, then, "must contract a social and popular tendency before it can hope to be great and fruitful."

The first two articles in the series*, with their white-heat brilliance and uncompromising hammer-blows, caused dismay and indignation in Congress circles, and Mahadev Govind Ranade warned the proprietor of the Indu Prakash that, should the series continue in the same strain, he would be prosecuted for sedition. As requested by the proprietor, the original plan was abandoned, but at K.G. Deshpande's instance the series was continued on a much more subdued key, the articles appeared at long intervals, ,and then ceased altogether. As Ranade was rather anxious to meet the writer of the sensational articles, Sri Aurobindo had an interview at Bombay for half an hour when the veteran leader tried to persuade the firebrand to turn to some less incendiary but more constructive, cause like jail reform!

Sri Aurobindo's 9 articles in the 'New Lamps for Old' series and the 7 (also anonymous) that followed, from the issue of 16 July to that of 27 August 1894, on

*This title ('New lamps for old')... is not used. in the sense of the Aladdin story, but was intended to imply the offering of  new lights to replace the old and faint reformist lights of the Congress." Sri Aurobindo,, Vol. 26, p. 13.)

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the personality and achievement of Bankim Chandra are among the earliest exhibits that we have of Sri Aurobindo's English prose style. Excepting in their boldness of thought and energy of expression, they do no betray the age of the author (he was barely 22 then). Already we notice in them the sinuosity and balance, the imagery and colour, the trenchancy and sarcasm, that were to distinguish Sri Aurobindo's later and maturer writings. He argues with cogency and subtlety; he describes with picturesqueness and particularity; and he denounces, if denounce he must, with pitiless deadly accuracy. This about the 'civilians' of almost a century ago:

A shallow schoolboy stepping from a cramming establishment to the command of high and difficult affairs, can hardly be expected to give us anything magnificent or princely. Still less can it be expected when the sons of small tradesmen are suddenly promoted from the counter to govern great provinces.... Bad in training, void of culture, in instruction poor, it [the best education men of that class can get in England] is in plain truth a sort of education that leaves him with all his original imperfections on his head, unmannerly, uncultivated, unintelligent.³⁴

In his speech before the Baroda College Union referred to on an earlier page, Sri Aurobindo had painted the bright side of British education — and here we have the antithesis! Sri Aurobindo is speaking, not of the finest flowers of British education, but of the humdrum or worse than humdrum that found a way to India. "They are really very ordinary men," said Sri Aurobindo, "and not only ordinary men but ordinary Englishmen — types of the middle-class or Philistines... with the narrow hearts and commercial habit of mind peculiar to that sort of people." Nor is the Anglicised Babu spared in the least: he is the man of endless perorations in the Congress, he "frolics in the abysmal fatuity" of interpellations on the floor of the Legislative Council, and he ekes out his "scanty wardrobe with the cast-off rags and thread-bare leavings" of his English masters. The educational system in India was "the most ingeniously complete machine for murder that human stupidity ever invented, and murder not only of a man's body but of a man's soul". Of a certain Mr. Munro (alas, oblivion has all but swallowed him up, but in his day he seems to have done some injury to Bankim Chandra), all that is said is that he "had the temper of a badly educated hyena!" As for Bankim himself, here is Sri Aurobindo's splendid summing-up:

And when Posterity comes to crown with her praises the makers of India, she will place her most splendid laurel not on the sweating temples of a place-hunting politician nor on the narrow forehead of a noisy social reformer but on the serene brow of that gracious Bengali [Bankim] who never clamoured for place or power, but did his work in silence for love of his work, even as nature does, and just because he had no aim but to give out the best that was in him, was able to create a language, a literature and a nation.³⁵

There is no need to multiply quotations: these early prose compositions are so striking in their force of individuality that they invite attention and appreciation,  

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even as his 'juvenile' poems do — because their author was Sri Aurobindo.

The necessity to tone down the 'New Lamps for Old' articles in the Indu Prakash to the point of pointlessness, doling out doses of the philosophy of politics instead of outlining the rites of sacrificial purification by blood and fire, made Sri Aurobindo withdraw into a shell for the time being, hoping for a more favourable opportunity for the exposition of revolutionary theory and its translation into practice. He looked about him, and he could see that the times were not propitious. In a poem he wrote soon after, Lines on Ireland: 1896, under cover of describing the abasement and agony of Ireland after Parnell's fall and death and the defeat at the 1895 polls of Galdstone's move to grant Home Rule, Sri Aurobindo managed — by sleight of hand — to picture the Indian predicament too, the flight of idealism, the hugging of slavery, the loss of self-respect, the reign of sloth, the peace of the grave. The subject is Ireland, but by poetic implication or dhvani, we are made to think of India more than of Ireland:

O mutability of human merit!

How changed, how fallen from her ancient spirit!

She that was Ireland, Ireland now no more,

In beggar's weeds behold at England's door...

Yet thine own self a little understand,

Unhappy country, and be wise at length.

An outward weakness doing deeds of strength

Amazed the nations, but a power within

Directed, like effective spirit unseen

Behind the mask of trivial forms, a source

And fund of tranquil and collected force....

But thou to thine own self disloyal, hast

Renounced the help divine, turning thy past

To idle legends...

Therefore effective wisdom, skill to bend

All human things to one predestined end

Renounce thee... ³⁶

Instead of a god-anointed leader, the nation has a "self-appointed crew" —

...for seldom men refuse

Credence, when mediocrity multiplied

Equals itself with genius —

that is courageous enough to effect the "country's ruin"! But this couldn't last long, for although for a little while the gods might permit these little men to thrive in their pride, the time must come when they would be sent packing to the "loud limbo of futilities". The poem was evidently an attempt on Sri Aurobindo's part to

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achieve a katharsis of the temporary feeling of frustration that may have grated upon his consciousness.

V

It was alas only too true that several of the Indians who were (in the expressive phrase) "England returned" — often, indeed, "returned with thanks" — tried absurdly to assume the god, affect a superior nod, and seemed to shake the spheres of indigenous life and culture. Sri Aurobindo was different; a stay of fourteen years in England had enabled him, not only to observe the variegated lineaments of European culture, but also to see through them and discriminate between what was good and what was evil. Returning to India, he found to his chagrin that the so-called "educated" classes were desperately trying to ape the foreigner in almost everything. Our educational machinery, our ruling ideas, our imported models, all were shoddy in appearance and poisonous in their effects. As he wrote many years later in an article entitled 'The Awakening Soul of India':

The nineteenth century in India was imitative, self-forgetful, artificial. It aimed at a successful reproduction of Europe in India, forgetting the deep saying of the Gita, "Better the law of one's own being though it be badly done than an alien dharma well-followed; death in one's own dharma is better, it is a dangerous thing to follow the law of another's nature." For death in one's own dharma brings new birth, success in an alien path means only successful suicide.³⁷

And yet, miraculously, India did not die a spiritual death; that tragedy, "enacted more than once in history", was somehow barely — though only barely — averted in the case of India. And the reasons are not far too seek. The Indian countryside had all along remained inveterately Indian; and men like Ramalinga Swami, Dayanand Saraswati, Sri Ramakrishna, Mahadev Govind Ranade and others were able, in varying degrees, to stem the tide of denationalisation and assert the claims of the Indian genius to live its own life and win its own spiritual laurels even in our blatantly materialistic age. Here was the "irrational" phenomenon that saved India! The Paramahamsa himself but lived "what many would call the life of a madman, a man without intellectual training, a man without any outward sign of culture or civilisation, a man who lived on the alms of others, such a man as the English-educated Indian would ordinarily talk of as one useless to society...." What could such a man know that is relevant to the modem world of science and technology and representative democracy? What had such a mere sadhu to offer to the young men steeped in the latest knowledge of the West? But there's a Divinity that shapes our ends still:

God knew. what he was doing. He sent that man to Bengal and set him in the temple of Dakshineshwar in Calcutta, and from North and South and East and West, the educated men, men who were the pride of the university, who  

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had studied all that Europe can teach, came to fall at the feet of this ascetic. The work of salvation, the work of raising India was begun.³⁸

Within a few years of his return, then, Sri Aurobindo saw very clearly that salvation could come to India, then fallen upon evil days/not through dialectical skill and intellectual subtlety, but through renewed faith and stem spiritual discipline; not by a brazen mimicry of Western models and Western mores, but rather by recapturing, amplifying and re-living the eternal truths of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita:

Yet thine own self a little understand,

Unhappy country, and be wise at length.

On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo was no mere revivalist, or obscurantist, or parrotist of outworn formulas. As he wrote later in the course of a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy, "The traditions of the past are very great in their own place — in the past. But that is no reason why we should go on repeating the past. In the evolution of a spiritual consciousness upon earth, a great past ought to be followed by a greater future."

In his own life and in the life of the nation, what Sri Aurobindo wanted, what he set out to achieve, was a veritable transformation — not a retreat to the past, not h return to obsolete forms, but a rediscovery of the soul and rebuilding around it of a life full of vigour and vitality, and in consonance with the imperatives of the present and also ready to meet the challenges of the future. All that divided him and divided the people from the Mother — "Glory of moonlight dreams!" — all that fed the virus of alienation, all that emasculated or maimed Indian humanity: all that had to be ruthlessly attacked at the source, and rooted out or chased away. In short, individual and nation alike had deliberately to will and achieve the difficult feat of re-nationalisation. For him, it did not simply mean acquiring a knowledge of Bengali, Gujarati or Marathi; or delving into the treasures of Sanskrit literature; or showing a preference for Indian dress or Indian dishes. For the nation too, the change required was something far deeper than a shuffling of the externals or a pathetic exhumation of all our dead yesterdays. The problem rather was, alike for the individual and for the race, to get at the living past and structure on its sure foundations alone the present and the future.

VI

As the days, months and years passed, as Sri Aurobindo became more and more a witness spirit beyonding his normal activities of eating, sleeping and waking up, of teaching, reading and writing, as he saw the total Indian situation steadily searchingly, from out of the confusions and irrelevances and side-tracking Pupations of the hour, two things seemed to emerge with shining clarity: first,  

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the paramount necessity for Revolution to redeem the Mother, Mother India; and second (though this was not at once apparent), the indispensability of Yoga to perfect the human instrument that is to plant the revolution, give it a push at the right time, and see it safely through.

Decades earlier, Sri Aurobindo's grandfather, Rajnarain Bose, had organised a secret society (enrolling young Rabindranath Tagore himself as a member) and also established an institution for revolutionary propaganda and action, but the climate of the time being what it was, neither the secret society nor the institution could prove effective. Knowing the fate of his grandfather's pioneering revolutionary effort and the fate, too, of the abortive London secret society, the "Lotus and Dagger", Sri Aurobindo wasn't eager to take another leap in the dark. His first visits to Bengal after his return to India helped him to gauge the temper of the people, and he also came into contact with certain individuals, certain ideas, certain trends, that were working, however obscurely, however tardily, for the liberation of the country from the nightmare death-in-life of alien bureaucratic rule. Towards the close of the century (1898 or 1899), when Jatindranath Banerjee (later known as Niralamb Swami) came to Baroda, Sri Aurobindo got him admitted into the State Army with the help of the Jadhavs, and it had to be given out that Jatin was not. a dangerous Bengali but a harmless man from North India. When he had received adequate military training, Jatin was sent by Sri Aurobindo to Bengal with a clear-cut programme of revolutionary work. Jatin soon managed to establish contact with Barrister P. Mitter, Bibhuti Bhushan Bhattacharya and Mrs. Sarala Ghoshal, who had already started some revolutionary work (ostensibly on the plea that the groups of young men were learning lathi play) on the inspiration of Baron Okakura. Sri Aurobindo himself came to Bengal in 1900 or a little later and met these revolutionaries on Jatin's initiative. About this Sri Aurobindo comments: "I simply kept myself informed of their work. My idea was for an open armed revolution in the whole of India. What they did at that time was very childish — things like beating magistrates and so on. Later it turned into terrorism and dacoities, which were not at all my idea or intention."³⁹ His own ideas was "a programme of preparation and action which he thought might occupy a period of 30 years before fruition could become possible".⁴⁰ Returning to Baroda, Sri Aurobindo met Mr. Mandavale, a member of a Secret Society in Western India which had as its directing chief a Thakur of the Udaipur State, and took the oath of the Revolutionary Party. This meant Sri Aurobindo making a special journey into central India to try to win over Indian sub-officers and men in certain regiments to the revolutionary cause.⁴¹

Presently Barindra, who had already tried without success one or two occupations, joined his brother at Baroda and became fully infected with the revolutionary fever. In 1902, Sri Aurobindo went to Midnapore accompanied by Jatin and Barin, and there was some practice of rifle shooting on the lands of Hemachandra Das. It was about this time that Sri Aurobindo decided to establish six centres of revolutionary work in Bengal, and gave the oath of the Revolutionary Party to P. Mitter and Hemachandra Das. Holding a sword and the Gita in  

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their hands, they took the oath to strive to secure at any cost the freedom of Mother India. Sri Aurobindo thus became the secret link between the revolutionary groups in Western and Eastern India. By and by the revolutionary spirit spread in Bengal, especially in the villages and among the common people of whom Sri Aurobindo had written in one of the "New Lamps for Old' articles of 1893: "The proletariat among us is sunk in ignorance and overwhelmed with distress." The darkness was lifting at last, the stupor was ending. Barin too had found his vocation, and he was now able to translate into action the ideas and programmes of Sri Aurobindo:

Barindra's work in Bengal was the organisation in the villages — even the most remote — of a chain of Samitis, or youth organisations, which would meet under all kinds of pretexts, but with the real aim of providing a civic and political education and opening the eyes of the young to the "affairs of the nation".... In smoky little grain shops, on the terraced roofs of private houses, young men would meet to hear about the lives of Mazzini and Garibaldi, to read exhortations from Swami Vivekananda, to listen to the warlike incidents of the Mahabharata and to comments on the Bhagavad Gita. The number of samitis increased daily.⁴²

In Maharashtra, under Lokamanya Tilak's unparalleled leadership, political education came to be imparted during the Ganapati Festivals that attracted old and young alike. In course of time, this breeze of revolutionary fervour blew almost all over the subcontinent. One particular feature of the movement was that several of the leaders were either Yogis themselves or disciples of Yogis — at least they were men endowed with great strength of character. Men like P. Mitter, Satish Mukherji, Bepin Pal and Manoranjan Guhathakurtha were disciples of the famous Yogi Bejoy Goswami. It was as though the soul of the race had awakened and was throwing up such fine personalities.⁴³

In 1902, Sister Nivedita — Vivekananda's great disciple — came to Baroda, and Sri Aurobindo along with Khasirao Jadhav received her at the station. When she had an interview with the Maharaja, Sri Aurobindo was present. When she urged that the Maharaja should support the secret revolution, he hedged and said he would send word through Sri Aurobindo, which of course he never did; "Sayajirao was much too cunning to plunge into such a dangerous business".44 Nivedita saw in Sri Aurobindo the divinely ordained successor to the revolutionary side of her great Guru, Swami Vivekananda; Sri Aurobindo, on his part, had admired her distantly as the author of Kali the Mother, and now found in her a fiery spirit utterly consecrated to the cause of the liberation of Mother India from despotic foreign rule. They discussed neither spiritual questions nor Ramakrishna or Vivekananda; they saw themselves as fellow-votaries of Kali the Mother, as children of Bhavani Bharati, and this was the adamantine basis of their collaboration on the political field.

After a period of close cooperation, differences — personal as well as organisational — arose between Jatin and Barin at Calcutta. For a time Jatin had worked among lawyers, doctors and other professional men, while Barin and  

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Abinash Bhattacharya had fished for recruits for revolution among the students. Jatin was thought by some of his comrades to be too much of a military martinet and Barin, Abinash and Hemachandra were all allergic to that kind of mechanical discipline. Sri Aurobindo found it necessary, on learning how matters stood, to visit Calcutta in the early months of 1903 and try to heal the breach to the extent possible. This he did, firstly by patiently listening to both points of view, and then by setting up a supreme controlling committee of five consisting of Barrister P. Mitter, Chittaranjan Das, Sister Nivedita, Jatin himself and Surendranath Tagore, to be in overall charge of revolutionary work in Bengal. Although this committee was no conspicuously successful in its work of coordination, the movement itself spread — presently fanned to a furious blaze by the legislature passing the Act that partitioned Bengal — to a phenomenal extent, and for this growing body of young men and dedicated workers Sri Aurobindo became the supreme (if absentee) leader of the coming revolution. As for Sri Aurobindo himself, he knew he couldn't come out in the open so long as he was in service, but he knew too that, when the preordained hour struck, he wouldn't hesitate to cut his connection with the Baroda College and plunge openly into the political fray.

When he was first advised by Keshavrao Deshpande to take to Yoga, Sri Aurobindo (as mentioned earlier) had declined, viewing Yoga as a mere retreat from life. Spiritual experiences like the vast calm that descended upon him when he set foot on Apollo Bunder  — and on later occasions too (for example an effort of will seeming to materialise as a Being of Light and preventing a carriage accident in Baroda in 1893)45 — were a different matter, and had nothing to do with Yogic sadhana as such. It was some years after his return to India that he started certain practices on his own, just getting the rule from an Engineer friend, Mr. Devadhar, who was a disciple of Swami Brahmananda of Ganga Math, Chandod, on the banks of the Narmada; this was, however, confined for the time being to sustained prānāyāma, for three hours in the morning and two in the evening. The immediate effect was a marvellous mental illumination, prakāśmaya; from this resulted an unprecedented flow of poetry, for whereas he could hardly write ten lines of poetry before in the course of a day, now as many as 200 seemed to come as in a flood in less than an hour. His health improved too, his memory became sharp, the brain seemed to race with a new energy and a clearer sense of direction, and Sri Aurobindo had besides the experience of certain unusual psycho-physical phenomena. Sri Aurobindo had darśan of Swami Brahmananda at his ashram. He also visited one of the temples of Kali in the neighbourhood, and what he saw was not just an image but a Presence, even as he had an experience of the vacant Infinite when walking on the ridge of the Takht-i-Suleman in Kashmir in 1903. It is to these two singular experiences that Sri Aurobindo refers in the following passage in one of his letters:

A philosophic statement about the Atman is a mental formula, not knowledge, not experience; yet sometimes the Divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks down, something is seen, a profound  

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change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon a mountain ridge and glimpses or mentally feels a wideness, a pervasiveness, a nameless Vast in Nature; then suddenly there comes the touch, a revelation, a flooding, the mental loses itself in the spiritual, one bears the first invasion of the Infinite. Or you stand before a temple of Kali behind a sacred river and see what? — a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother.⁴⁶

At one point, Barin returned after wandering in the Amarkantak in the Vindhya mountains, with a malignant fever which proved unresponsive to medical treatment. A Naga sannyasi arrived just then, and on coming to know of Barin's predicament, asked for a cup of water and cut it crosswise with a knife while repeating a mantra. Barin was given the water to drink, and was promptly cured of the fever. It was probably this Naga sannyasi who gave Sri Aurobindo the stotra of Kali with the powerful refrain Jahi Jahi, conducted certain kriyās and even a Vedic yajña with a view to promoting success in his political mission.⁴⁷

But all this was merely preparatory. Sri Aurobindo realised that he was being more and more irresistibly drawn to the path of Yoga. But he had no Guru yet, for although he had had darśan of Brahmananda and received blessings from him, it was to a great Yogi he had gone, not to an accepted Guru. The ground of course was already prepared, and contacts like those with Brahmananda and the Naga sannyasi helped to plant the seed of faith whose potentialities were immense. Was it not a priceless gain in itself that Sri Aurobindo had realised — like Teufelsdrockh in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus — that "Thought without reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous"? The Beast of Intellectualism was now contained within its proper sphere, and Sri Aurobindo could therefore soar unhampered into the illimitable above-mind regions; his spiritual fire-baptism had thus commenced at last in real earnest. "It is a wonderful phenomenon," writes Swami Nikhilananda, "that the consummation of our spiritual life is reached only when the student comes in contact with the teacher."⁴⁸ Even though Sri Aurobindo had not yet found a Guru, already he felt powerfully drawn to the path of Yoga; he poised himself on its razor-edged precariousness and perilousness — he pushed forward confidently — although he could not glimpse with any certitude his precise destination!

VII

It was in April 1901 that Sri Aurobindo, then 28, took an important step in his life; he married Mrinalini Bose, who was barely half his age (she was born on 6 March 1887). He had no doubt had several offers, but he seems to have also inserted an advertisement for a bride; and he finally selected Mrinalini, daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose of Jessore, who had settled down at Ranchi. The marriage  

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took place in Calcutta according to Hindu rites. When it was suggested that he should shave his head and undergo purificatory rites for having crossed the seas and lived in England, Sri Aurobindo firmly refused, and the matter was conveniently smoothed over by the obliging brahmin priest who did some parihāra or neutralisation for monetary consideration. Among those who attended the marriage were Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose the scientist and Lady Bose.

After marriage the couple went to Deoghar, and from there to Naini Tal, his sister Sarojini also accompanying them; they reached Naini Tal on 29 May and remained for a month amidst those utterly beautiful and gorgeous Kumaon range of hills, with the Himalayas looming immense behind. The Maharaja of Baroda was at Naini Tal too, but left for Baroda earlier. By the beginning of July, Sri Aurobindo returned to Baroda with his wife and sister, and Barin also soon joined them.

It is difficult, almost impossible, to reconstruct the story of Sri Aurobindo's marriage and married life. The scanty external facts that we happen to know do not seem to tell the whole story: they even give a confused, or perversely blurred, picture. Mrinalini came to Sri Aurobindo as a beautiful girl, steeped in the Hindu tradition of unswerving wifely devotion to one's husband and willing and eager to play her appointed role. After three or four years, they seem to have somewhat drifted apart, yet owing to no fault of either. Perhaps it was the 'generation gap' . that was responsible; more probably still, it was due to the conflict of their respective preoccupations. Sri Aurobindo, as we have seen in the earlier pages, was getting entangled, deeper and deeper, in the meshes of politics, especially the organisation of secret revolutionary activity, and he was also feeling drawn towards Yoga. Mrinalini, on the other hand, was still no more than a girl, she had been used to the ordinary comforts and sense of security in a middle-class Bengali home, she was no diamond-edged intellectual, and no god-intoxicated bhakta either; and notwithstanding the reassuring presence of Sarojini most of the time, Mrinalini very likely found her admired and adored husband rather difficult to understand. When Sri Aurobindo took the plunge into politics after 1906, gave up the security of the Baroda job, and invited the rigours of privation, persecution and incarceration, Mrinalini's unease only deepened all the more. For a girl, it is always a cross between glory and penance to marry a man of genius; and Sri Aurobindo was more than a man of genius. He was afflicted with Divine madnesses; he was verily a descended god! But a god is to be worshipped from a distance, not viewed from close quarters; and Mrinalini often felt ill at ease. Both at Baroda and later at Calcutta, she tried with Sarojini's assistance to hold the home-front with a brave face. Sometimes, for a change, she lived with her parents. Long letters passed between husband and wife, and some of these letters are now among the classics of Bengali epistolary art. Mrinalini thus wandered between two worlds, and she wasn't quite at home in either; and she didn't know where and how and when she could find her peace. She was "destined to suffer for marrying a genius", writes R.R. Diwakar; "she had rarely the privilege of living with her husband for long, though their  

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relations were most cordial and full of affection from the beginning to the end... She was a high-souled woman of great devotion and piety, and by her dignity made suffering itself a step towards a higher life".⁴⁹

During the brief period of Sri Aurobindo's hectic political life, his wife and sister were even more often left alone than at Baroda, and the year following the Muzzaferpore outrage — the long months of trial and prison-life at Alipur — must have proved particularly excruciating. When Sri Aurobindo left, in the early months of 1910, first for Chandernagore and from there for Pondicherry, the distance (psychological more than physical) between husband and wife seemed to be greater and more unbridgeable than ever. Her cousin, Saurin Bose, came to Pondicherry soon after Sri Aurobindo's arrival, but saw that things were not as yet propitious for Mrinalini joining her husband. The separation continued through the war years, and it has been recorded on the testimony of her brother. Dr. Sisir Kumar Bose, a medical practitioner at Ranchi, that "she always bore the separation well and with satisfaction, as she realised that, although she was high in the estimation of her husband, she would not be helping him in his way of life by insisting on his continuous company".⁵⁰ On coming to know that she had received spiritual solace and initiation from Sarada Devi (of Dakshineshwar), Sri Aurobindo felt glad that his wife "had found so great a spiritual refuge".⁵¹ He also intimated to her that she might join him at Pondicherry, but just when, after the war, she was preparing to make the journey to the South, she succumbed to a severe attack of influenza in December 1918. In the life-history of Sri Aurobindo, Mrinalini Devi seems but to play a minor role: but so does Urmila, Lakshmana's wife, in the Ramayana. They also serve who suffer in silence and with their silence contribute to the unfoldment of the Divine play.  

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