Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

Part II

PATRIOT AND PROPHET

CHAPTER 8 

Bhavani Mandir

I

Sri Aurobindo's involvement in the evolution if India's destiny was, almost literally a life-long process. His birth on 15 August 1872 could itself be viewed, in retrospect, as an augury of the coming of independence to India, exactly seventy-five years later, on 15 August 1947. In a narrower sense, however, Sri Aurobindo's active and open participation in Indian politics was of a much shorter duration: a period of no more than three years and a half, from August 1906 when he joined the National College at Calcutta as its Principal to February 1910 when he left for Chandernagore in French India. Of this period, again, a whole year (May 1908 to May 1909) was spent in jail at Alipur when Sri Aurobindo was an under-trial prisoner in connection with the Manicktolla bomb case. Barely thirty months of active politics, yet Sri Aurobindo was destined to change the whole character of political activity in India and set the freedom movement firmly towards the goal of complete national independence.

But of course, both before and even after the hectic Calcutta period, Sri Aurobindo was involved in - or at least deeply concerned with - the tenor and tempo of political life in the country (and the world); and whether from behind the scenes as in the Baroda period or from occult planes as in his later years, Sri Aurobindo was always a power, a guiding and activising spirit, for he was verily the true son of the Mother, the sword-arm of Bhavani Bharati, the creator-spirit of the unfolding New Age. Period-divisions of a human life - especially a life so rich, so many-sided, so incommensurable as Sri Aurobindo's - can only be props of convenience; but real life, like deep underground water, has a continuous flow, and one has to learn to look beneath the sharp surface angularities to be able to infer the oneness of the inner flow and the creative dynamism of the immortal human spirit.

We have seen that, while still in England, Sri Aurobindo had been following the course of events in India by perusing the Bengalee, copies of which Dr. Krishnadhan had been mailing regularly from India - with passages underlined that related to the Government's acts of commission or omission. His political consciousness thus awakened, Sri Aurobindo took an active part in the debates of the Indian Majlis at Cambridge, and later joined the secret society, the "Lotus and Dagger" in London. His interest in the Irish liberation movement under Parnell s, perhaps, a reflection of Sri Aurobindo's increasing concern with the situation in India. And his rejection from the Indian Civil Service - partly manoeuvred "y himself and partly provoked by his political activities at Cambridge - opened the way for him to engage in politics, first covertly and later openly, after his return to India in February 1893.

Within a few months of his arrival in India, Sri Aurobindo had begun contributing  

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anonymously the "New Lamps for Old" articles to the Indu Prakash, and this he could not have done unless these questions had occupied his mind even in England. A reference to these articles has been made already in an earlier chapter and we have seen how penetrating was Sri Aurobindo's analysis of the political situation in India at the time and how trenchant were his comments and criticisms. It was, perhaps, no fortuitous circumstance that, as it were simultaneously, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo - the former at the Parliament of Religions at Chicago, the latter in the columns of the Indu Prakash - should have both made history, shaking complacency, making people think anew, highlighting the importance of self-knowledge, exhorting people, be it the question of "man-making" or nation-building, "to commence from within and not depend on any exterior agency".¹ In his first speech, Vivekananda had told the vast congregation: "Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal spirits free, blest and eternal...." And in his first article, Sri Aurobindo had named our actual enemy, not as any outside force, but rather as our cowardice, our weakness, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our "purblind sentimentalism". Neither of them had any respect for Congress mendicancy and perorative politics. If Sri Aurobindo condemned the Congress leaders as the one-eyed (if not the totally blind) who were trying to lead the masses, Vivekananda was to tell Aswini Kumar Datta in the course of a conversation:

"Can you tell me what the Congress is doing for the masses? Do you think merely passing a few resolutions will bring you freedom? I have no faith in that. The masses must be awakened... the essence of my religion is strength.... Strength is religion, and nothing is greater than strength."²

Petitioning and prayer and pseudo-parliamentary posturing were unlikely to rid the country of foreign rule and redeem the dumb millions. Sri Aurobindo boldly cited the examples of France and Ireland that had undergone baptismal purification through blood and fire:

It was not a convocation of respectable citizens, but the vast and ignorant proletariat [of France], that emerged from a prolonged and almost coeval apathy and blotted out in five terrible years the accumulated oppression of thirteen centuries.... Is it at all true that the initiators of Irish resistance to England were a body of successful lawyers, remarkable only for a power of shallow rhetoric, and deputed by the sort of men that are turned out at Trinity College, Dublin?... just as the main strength of that ancient strenuous protest resided in the Irish populace led by the princes of their class, so the principal force of the modem subtler protest resides in the Irish peasantry led by the recognised chiefs of an united people.³

Even when, after this series of incendiary political articles had been discontinued, Sri Aurobindo wrote for the Indu Prakash on a more subdued key a set of seven essays (signed "by a Bengali") on Bankim Chandra Chatterji, although the interest was mainly literary, the political slant too revealed itself sharply, for example in a passage like the following:

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Calcutta is yet a stronghold of the Philistines; officialdom is honey-combed with the antinational tradition: in politics and social reform the workings of the new movement are yet obscure... [but] already we see the embryo of a new generation soon to be with us, whose imagination Bankim has caught and who care not for Keshab Chandra Sen and Kristo Das Pal, a generation national to a fault.... With that generation the future lies and not with the Indian Unnational Congress or the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. Already its vanguard is upon us. ... Let it only be true to itself and we shall do yet more marvellous things in the future than we have done in the past.⁴

Even the grand achievement of ancient Greece where once occurred "an unbroken succession of supreme geniuses" might now be repeated in India, and for this to happen "all we need is not to tie ourselves down to a false ideal, not to load our brains with the pedantry of a false education, but to keep like those first builders a free intellect and a free soul".⁵

II

During the next few years, say from 1894 to 1899, Sri Aurobindo was more or less absorbed (apart from his official duties) in studies and writing: explorations, translations, original poems, critical essays. From 1899 or 1900 onwards, Sri Aurobindo began in earnest a work - secret revolutionary organisation - that was as yet "nameless". He was drawn to Yoga too, but not for the usual reasons, but with a view to success in politics. It is thus hardly surprising that the writings of the Baroda period should show up here and there the sharp edges of his current political and revolutionary preoccupations.

It was seen earlier that Sri Aurobindo's Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou, Chitrangada and Vidula are not merely notable for their evocative power, but they are also poems - or translation - with a purpose. How shall man conduct himself on what seems to be no better than the constant challenge of "life's scaffold"? The challenge taken for granted, how was manly man to meet it, master it and exceed it? Love like Pururavas' for Urvasie or Ruru's for Priyumvada was a marvellous and glorious experience, but even such love by itself was not enough! The individual might find his felicity, but only at the cost of the greater good of the community, the country, or future humanity. To be able to serve others, not solely oneself, one must acquire the larger vision and the capacity for self-abnegation that makes one ready to sacrifice one's personal happiness, one's very life even, at he altar of a noble cause. Pururavas failed; Rum failed; Sunjoy was weak and miserable. They failed their people, they failed Bharat; and Sunjoy wished to seek noble ease in preference to possible death in battle. There was no doubt a touch of greatness in Pururavas and Rum, for they were willing to give up everything to gain an Urvasie or a Priyumvada; yet in the larger national, human or evolutionary context, they were not great enough. But Chitrangada was able to see her lover  

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Arjuna in his heroic role of fighter and conqueror, and not only she did not try to hold him back, she actually encouraged and almost induced him to break away from the bonds of love and fare forward seeking avenues of heroic action. Baji Prabhou, of course, was a pure flame of sacrifice that won the day for Shivaji -

Thirty and three the gates

By which thou enterest heaven, thou fortunate soul,

Thou valiant heart.⁶

As regards Sri Aurobindo's plays, they too are unmistakably dyed with purpose. Eric is Norway's unifier, but he sees the wisdom of balancing the claims of Thor and Odin with those of Freya - in other words, of Power and Love. Bappa the Prince of Edur is both liberator and redeemer, and regains his Kingdom as well as wins a bride in Kamal Kumari. In the maturer play, Perseus the Deliverer, Sri Aurobindo projected his dialectical idea of progress through the Poseidon-Pallas Athene confrontation as played in terrestrial Syria by Polydaon and the sea monster on the one hand and Andromeda and Perseus on the other. Translated in general terms, the Asuric and Divine forces wage a fierce war through willing instruments; but the Divine must ultimately triumph over the Asuric, and thus evolutionary advance and progress is an assured thing. This cosmic struggle between these opposed forces is particularised, now with greater now with lesser intensity, in individual human conflicts or more wide-spread conflicts between whole nations and peoples. When giant forces join issue in this manner, people usually pin their faith on a messiah, an Avatar, a divine-human personality. Perseus is presented as such a power and personality; he is, one might say,

the divine Seer-Will descending upon the human consciousness to reveal to it the divine meaning behind our half-blind action and to give along with the vision the exalted will that is faithful and performs and the ideal force that executes according to the vision.⁷

And yet, transcending both the individual and cosmic conflicts, Reality is for ever the same; "All alters in a world that is the same". Both the horror of the conflict and the peaceful close of its periodical resolution are but interlocked terms of the unescapable Law of Becoming. The same promise is held out also in a poem of the Baroda period, In the Moonlight:

The old shall perish; it shall pass away,

Expunged, annihilated, blotted out;

And all the iron bands that ring about

Man's wide expansion shall at last give way....

This is man's progress; for the Iron Age

Prepares the Age of Gold. What we call sin,

Is but man's leavings as from deep within  

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The Pilot guides him in his pilgrimage.⁸

It should be clear from all this that Sri Aurobindo was, profoundly preoccupied, even when he was fully engaged in his exacting official duties or in the tasks of teaching or in the ardours of poetic composition, with other things as well, more important things - the problem of ends and means, the existential problem of right aspiration and right action, the evolutionary problem of storming through the shocks of difficulty to the far peak of realisation. From the very first, the idea of individual felicity or personal salvation did not seem to Sri Aurobindo anything like a supreme or even worthwhile aim; a freak isolated salvation that left the world to its fate was positively distasteful to him. No doubt he would read and he would think and he would write poetry, he would ponder and he would plan and he would strive - but on whose behalf? and to what end? Not for his own sake - he was very sure about that; for whose sake, then?

Years later, Sri Aurobindo was to declare: "The Yoga we practise is not for ourselves alone, but for the humanity. Its object is not personal mukti [salvation]... but the liberation of the human race."⁹* At about the same time, recapitulating his political days he wrote to a friend:

I entered into political action and continued it from 1903 to 1910 with one aim and one alone, to get into the mind of the people a settled will for freedom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it in place of the futile ambling Congress methods till then in vogue.¹⁰

In the first years after his return to India, it had appeared to Sri Aurobindo that his duty lay in prodding his countrymen - especially his brothers and sisters in Bengal - from their all too humiliating stupor. An alien rule had brought in its equipage an entirely new set of values which had with fatal ease and all too quickly become the ruling ideas of the Indian intelligentsia. Not merely Bengal, but the whole of India, was "drunk with the wine of European civilisation and with the purely intellectual teaching that it received from the West. It began to see all things, to judge all things through the imperfect instrumentality of the intellect. When it was so, Bengal [and, let us add, all India] became atheistic, it became a land of doubters and cynics".¹¹ The newly-educated Indian - especially if he happened to be an "England-returned" gentleman as well - became a ridiculous perversion of his European contemporary; as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan has pointed out, "his voice became an echo, his life a quotation, his soul a brain, and his free spirit a slave to things". Deformed though such people were in the physiognomy of their mind and soul, they would not admit - they could not even recognise - the fact;

*In the final version Sri Aurobindo has written: "The Yoga we practise is not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; its aim is to work out the will of the Divine in the world, to effect a spiritual transformation and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity. Its object is not personal Mukti... but the liberation and transformation of the human being." (SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 411. See also Vol. 23, p. 503.)  

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rather, as with the followers of Comus,

so perfect is their misery,

Not once perceive their foul disfigurement,

And boast themselves more comely than before.¹²

Sri Aurobindo revolved these things in his mind and deplored the apathy, the selfishness, the frivolity, the superficiality and the cynicism that seemed to have so completely mastered the intellect and the sensibility of the average educated Indian, and although the rot had been arrested somewhat by the stupendous spiritual phenomenon of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, still a great deal remained to be done. The paramount need was a movement of regeneration and a return to sanity, strength and national self-respect. But how was this movement to be initiated, engineered and brought to a triumphant conclusion? The Indu Prakash articles were but transient ripples on the placid waters of Indian political life. The poems and dramas were partly exercises in self-exploration and partly a necessary means of significant self-expression. These were but preliminary assaults or tentative essays that perhaps helped to decipher the magnitude of the opposing forces or to define the directions of counter-action and liberation. The difficulty, however, was in choosing the moment for effective action. Sri Aurobindo knew well enough that "a man capable of self-sacrifice, whatever his other sins, has left the animal behind him; he has the stuff in him of a future and higher humanity"¹³; and having long rigorously tested himself on the anvil of privation and suffering, it was a mere item of self-knowledge for him that he wouldn't flinch from the extremes! trial when the time came. He knew too that "a nation capable of a national act of self-sacrifice ensures its future".¹⁴ The crucial question was whether the Indian nation was as yet capable of such a national act of self-sacrifice. The old mood of slothful complacency and lazy acquiescence in foreign rule was still dominant enough in 1893 and for several years afterwards. But although Sri Aurobindo had for the time being withdrawn into silence, not for a second did he abandon his hope of an eventual effective action in the political sphere.

III

When Sri Aurobindo went to Bengal about the turn of the century "to see what was the hope of revival, what was the political condition of the people, and whether there was the possibility of a real movement", what he actually found there was "that the prevailing mood was apathy and despair. People had believed that regeneration could only come from outside, that another nation would take us by the hand and lift us up", and there was nothing we had ourselves to do!¹⁵ That illusion had to go, and go it would some day. But was it wise on Sri Aurobindo's part to sit meanwhile with folded hands, waiting patiently (or pathetically) 

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for the auspicious moment when the country - the slumbering Indian nation - got ready for action? The people had first to be awakened to the triune lights of self-respect, self-reliance and resolute co-operative action. It was mentioned in an earlier chapter (III.v) that Sri Aurobindo sent Jatin Banerjee in 1898 or 1899 to establish contacts with the scattered few revolutionary groups in Bengal that Sri Aurobindo had himself followed later to bring the groups together when they tried to pull in different directions, that his younger brother Barindra had tried to establish a chain of samitis and youth organisations in the villages of Bengal, that Bal Gangadhar Tilak had likewise brought about an awakening in Maharashtra through the institution of Ganapati Festivals, that Sri Aurobindo found an unexpected ally in Sister Nivedita for his revolutionary work, and that he had (on K.G. Deshpande's advice) tried to seek through Yoga an accession of strength for political work. Yoga and rifle-practice may seem to us an odd combination, but once at least in Sri Aurobindo's life, this seems to have come about. Among the early influential converts to the revolutionary cause was the young I.C.S. officer, Charu Chandra Dutt, whom Sri Aurobindo met at Thana early in 1904*, and on one of his visits an interesting event too place which may be described in the host's own words:

It was raining heavily on that day. As we could not stir out, we fell to target-shooting to beguile the time. My wife proposed that Aurobindo should be given the rifle so that he might also have a try, but Aurobindo refused, saying that he had never handled a rifle. But because we insisted, he agreed. We had only to show him how to hold the rifle and take aim. The target was the black, tiny head of a match-stick, hung at a distance of ten or twelve feet. Aurobindo took aim, and, lo and behold! the very first shot flew slick into the target, and the first hit was followed up by the second, and the second by the third! It took our breath away. I remarked to my friends: If such a man doesn't become a siddha, who would become?'^l6

Sri Aurobindo had once failed to pass the Riding Test, but there would be no more failures now, for wasn't Yoga, after all, "skill in works?" It is to C.C. Dutt too that we owe another anecdote that throws an equally revealing light on Sri Aurobindo's capacity for concentration. While some of his friends were engaged in a game of chess, Sri Aurobindo picked up a novel and started reading it, but put it down after half an hour, as if he had finished it. On being now subjected to a viva voce test, Sri Aurobindo was able to satisfy them that he had indeed read the book and fully mastered its contents. How shall we explain this except by citing again the mahavakya, yogah karmasu kauśalam?

Apart from his adroit incursions into the world of secret revolutionary activity and his rather calculated moves towards organising the people for an eventual

*Sri Aurobindo met C.C. Dutt first at the Baroda Railway platform by chance, and told him while parting: "Now that we are both in Gujarat, we are sure to see each other often." (C.C. Dutt's article in "the Sunday Times, 17 December 1950.)  

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armed insurrection, - and this meant, not only forging the required instruments of propaganda and collective action, but also fishing unerringly for ardent adherents like C.C. Dutt and Jogendranath Mukherji even from the ranks of Government officials, - Sri Aurobindo began taking counsel with the more advanced political leaders in the country so that the Congress could be first pushed from behind and then, when the time was opportune, the "moderate" leadership displaced by the vanguard men. In 1902, he attended the Ahmedabad session of the Congress, and once Lokamanya Tilak (who had been among the first to be impressed by the New Lamps for Old articles of 1893) took Sri Aurobindo out of the pandal "and talked to him for an hour in the grounds expressing his contempt for the Reformist movement and explaining his own line of action in Maharashtra".¹⁷ Tilak seemed to Sri Aurobindo "the one possible leader for a revolutionary party", an impression that was only to be confirmed by future developments. Sri Aurobindo also attended the Bombay Congress (1904) and the Benares (Varanasi) Congress (1905), and tried to bring together the few like-minded leaders who were prepared to fight for nothing less than swaraj or complete independence free of all foreign control. With a view to reinforcing his plea for "independence" (as against some attenuated form of colonial self-government), Sri Aurobindo seems at this time to have written a forthright pamphlet entitled No Compromise, which at first no printer was willing to handle. Barindra's friend, Abinash Bhattacharya, secured the necessary type, stick, case and other things and had the matter composed secretly by a Marathi young man, Kulkarni, and printed overnight in an obliging press. The copies were widely distributed, and Surendranath Banerjee, on being given a copy, wondered who the writer could be, for he thought that it was not possible for an Indian to write such English, with such a bold and striking presentation of facts and arguments. On being told who the author was, Surendranath is said to have exclaimed that Sri Aurobindo alone could have written it.¹⁸

The word 'Swaraj' itself had first been used by Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, one of the ablest members of the Bengali revolutionary groups, in his popular biography of Shivaji in Bengali. He also wrote, on Sri Aurobindo's suggestion, Desher Katha, a book giving in overwhelming detail the sordid story of foreign exploration leading to India's economic servitude, and this book seems to have had an enormous influence on the young men of Bengal and turned many of them into revolutionaries and prepared them for the Swadeshi movement. Swaraj and Swadeshi thus came to be linked together, and to these were added a vitriolic third ingredient. Boycott of British goods, and these three formed the base-plank of the programme of the secret revolutionary organisation, whose aim of course was to make the programme adopted by the Congress and the nation as a whole. The magic word 'Swaraj' was later popularised by the Bengali paper, Sandhya, edited by Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya. At the Calcutta Congress (1906), Dadabhai Naoroji - "in an inspired moment" - described "self-government" as swaraj, at once conferring official recognition on the word and also, in some measure, containing its connotation. But the term soon broke out of the container, and it was

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left to Sri Aurobindo to use the unambiguous English equivalent "independence" and reiterate it constantly in his articles and speeches as the one and immediate aim of national politics.

Secret revolutionary propaganda and preparation: a more overt collaboration with nationalist leaders like Tilak and a behind-the-scenes jostling with a view to converting the Congress to the new programme of Swaraj-Swadeshi-Boycott: and, finally, the nation-wide mobilisation of the people's idealisms and energies through a movement of non-cooperation and passive resistance on the issue of immediate national independence - these were the three levels of Sri Aurobindo's political thinking and activity, at first distinct enough from one another, but really meant to coalesce, sooner or later, into a single "Triveni", facilitating our baptism of rebirth as a new nation and a new people. Sri Aurobindo did not think that the first (secret revolutionary action) would by itself be effective in a subcontinent like ours "if there were not also a wide public movement which would create a universal patriotic fervour and popularise the idea of independence as the ideal and aim of Indian politics".¹⁹ He had studied with interest the history of the freedom movements in mediaeval France, and in latter-day America, France, Ireland and Italy, and he learnt a good deal from those movements, and from their leaders as well - notably Joan of Arc and Mazzini.²⁰ Sri Aurobindo admired Parnell too and wrote poems about him, but the kind of Parliamentary activity that was possible for the Parnellites was ruled out for the Indian revolutionaries. In effect, perhaps, Sri Aurobindo's movement was more like the Irish Sinn Fein, but had actually preceded it. While in public Sri Aurobindo advocated non-cooperation and passive resistance as the means to Swaraj, and no doubt hoped that things might turn out that way, he also shrewdly kept in reserve the weapon of secret revolutionary activity to be brought into the open and used to clinching effect when all else failed. He knew that India was indeed woefully unarmed, but on a balance of probabilities it seemed to him - this was almost seventy years ago! - that "in so vast a country as India and with the smallness of the regular British armies, even a guerilla warfare accompanied by general resistance and revolt might be effective".²¹ Besides, from his intuitive knowledge of British character, Sri Aurobindo had the feeling that, driven to a comer, the "alien" rulers - unlike, for example, the Russians - would try to salvage what they could, and "in an extremity prefer to grant independence rather than have it forcefully wrested from their hands".²²

Such were Sri Aurobindo's ideas and activities (secret and open), such were his plans and hopes, such his far-sighted vision of the unfolding future possibility. To the outside world, he was still a Professor of English at the Baroda College, and presently its Vice-principal, and for a time its Acting Principal. But poetry, politics and Yoga were the ruling elements within, and meantime he waited, - and even when he was ready and poised for action, he watched and waited, for he knew the "Hour of God" was approaching, the phoenix hour of the nation's unfurling destiny.  

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IV

Sri Aurobindo's younger brother, Barindra, was like an orbiting planet round the Sun that was the elder brother. Barindra was born in England, and while still a boy lost his father and was denied a mother's constant affection and solicitude. He first leaned on his sister Sarojini, but from early years he had also a mind and a style of his own. After passing the Entrance examination, he joined the Patna College, then moved to the Dacca College where his brother Manomohan Ghose was Professor of English, giving up his studies a few months hence. Barin toyed with agriculture, then ran a tea-shop at Patna, and at last made a bee-line to Baroda where he arrived one morning in 1901 "with a dirty canvas bag and very dirty clothes". After a bath, he was presentable enough, and made a fourth in the family, with Sri Aurobindo, his wife Mrinalini, and his sister Sarojini already there.²³

Barin, however, had even earlier caught the revolutionary "virus", and he reached Baroda at the time when Sri Aurobindo was fast sending out his revolutionary tentacles to remote Bengal. Barin too took the customary oath before Sri Aurobindo, with the unsheathed sword in one hand and a copy of the Gita in the other:

As long as there is life in me and as long as India is not liberated from her chains of subjection, I will carry on the work of revolution. If at any time I disclose a single word or a single event of the Society or harm it in any way, it shall be at the cost of my own life.

With his inborn enthusiasm that jumped at exciting possibilities and courted danger and unpredictability, Barin was game for anything, and in fact he was ready to canter when Sri Aurobindo wanted him only to run.

During his stay at Baroda, Barindra who had been reading about the then widely popular phenomenon of "Spiritualism" started experimenting with planchette writing, table tapping and mediumistic communication. Sri Aurobindo sometimes joined the séances, partly out of amusement and partly as an experiment worth watching that tried to break the barriers between life and death. Among the persons or spirits for whom Barin acted as medium was his own father Dr. Krishnadhan. Once when Tilak was present, and Dr. Krishnadhan's spirit was asked what kind of man the Lokamanya was, the answer came: "When all your work will be ruined and many men bow their heads down, this man will keep his head erect." This was an anticipation of the greatness of Tilak's compelling eminence after the first suppression of the nationalist movement and his solitary confinement at Mandalay. In after-years, Sri Aurobindo testified to Barin's "very extraordinary automatic writing at Baroda in a very brilliant and beautiful English style and remarkable for certain predictions which came true and statements of fact which also proved to be true although unknown to the persons concerned or any one else present".²⁴

On another occasion, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was called, and after a long silence his spirit seems to have said (as recorded by Barin), "Mandir gado! Mandir  

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gado! (Make a temple! Make a temple!)".²⁵ Such disclosures were intriguing and tantalising enough, and Sri Aurobindo was to make further experiments, both at Calcutta and at Pondicherry, before reaching the final conclusion that "though there are sometimes phenomena which point to the intervention of beings of anther plane... the mass of such writings comes from a dramatising element in the subconscious mind".²⁶ Commenting on these phenomena of mediumistic writing or speaking, Nolini Kanta Gupta has also remarked:

There are worlds upon worlds in a regular series, from the most gross to the most subtle.... Any of the beings from any of these worlds or planes can manifest himself. But he has to manifest through the instrumentality of the human medium, through the substance of the medium's mind, life and body.... Very often it is the make-up of the medium that predominates and the being that manifests preserves very little of its own.²⁷

A sensitive and honest medium is one thing, but with an impure and dishonest medium charlatanism must take full control.

Since Barin himself was an unusual and extremely sensitive medium, what did the Paramahamsa mean by "Mandir gado! Make a temple!" One more temple added to so many in the country? A special kind of temple? Or did he merely mean that one should make one's body itself a temple for the indwelling spirit? Sri Aurobindo himself interpreted "Make a temple!" in later years as Sri Ramakrishna's "command to make in ourselves a temple to the Mother, to effect such a transformation of ourselves that we become the temple of the Mother".²⁸ What was wanted was not a mortal material edifice but an ineluctable imperishable spiritual abode for the Mighty Mother, Mother Free! And yet it is hardly a matter for surprise that, the place, time and circumstances being what they were, the message Mandir gado! should have seemed to Barin a corroboration of his intuition that the one thing necessary for the effective propagation of the new revolutionary gospel was a Temple consecrated to the Divine Mother, a Temple invoking Mother India as Bharat Shakti, as Bhavani Bharati. Sri Aurobindo fell in with the idea, which was to find a solitary place somewhere among the hills and erect the proposed temple there and train a band of sannyasins solemnly dedicated to the task of liberating the country from foreign rule. Barin himself set out to find a suitable site in the Vindhyas, but caught a malignant fever while wandering among the Amarkantak hills, abandoned his search and returned. He was then cured (as mentioned in an earlier chapter) by a Naga sannyasi. But the idea of a Temple for the Divine Mother persisted, and indeed won numerous adherents who were aflame with enthusiasm for the project. Some like Haribhau Modak and Kakasaheb Patil, however, wanted the purely religious part of the project dropped but greater emphasis laid on the collection of arms and the manufacture of bombs.²⁹ When C.C. Dutt demurred that the scheme seemed to hinge too much on Yoga, Sri Aurobindo is said to have laughed and said: "Your aim and ours are exactly the same. Why not look upon the ochre garb as a uniform?"³⁰ It was Charu Dutt too who accompanied Sri Aurobindo and K.G. Deshpande when they visited the Ashram at  

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Ganganath where a school called "Bharati Vidyalaya" was run by Swami Rakshananda.³¹ The boys in the school received spiritual as well as secular education, and there was some considerable stress on physical training as well - team games, drill, marching, attack-and-defence with bamboo sticks - supervised by a retired Havildar. On Sri Aurobindo's part, Bhawani Mandir was the result, a piece of writing done probably in 1905, and better described as a tiny packet of political and spiritual dynamite that was to cause endless nightmares to high British officials in Bengal, but was to prove, on contrary, a mighty inspiration and supreme  driving force to countless revolutionaries.

The worship of the Divine Mother as Durga, as Kali, as Lakshmi - or in anyone of her many manifestations - comes down from very ancient times, and is even now universal in India; and of particular significance is the worship of Mahalakshmi, otherwise known as Mahishasuramardini or Destroyer of the demon Mahisha the buffalo-faced a phenomenal victory that occurred in far past times and is still annually recapitulated during the Dussera celebrations all over India. The induction of fighting sannyasins into the Temple may seem a novel feature, but for this too there have been precedents as well as anticipations. In Assam centuries ago, some of the followers of Madhava Deva, the Mayamariy as, took to fighting and suffered persecution and martyrdom. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, different bands if sannyasins organised guerilla or open warfare against the British in places so widespread as Dacca, Coochbehar, Saran, Dinajpur, Rajshahi, Rungpur, and "in most of these encounters they used to carry the day", and so much of a menace they were that Warren Hastings wrote in 1773: "These sannyasins appear so suddenly in towns or villages that one would think they had dropped from the blue. They are strong, brave, and energetic beyond belief."³² And, of course, the Mutiny of 1857 had among its leaders quite a few sannyasins and Gurus who swayed the population against the British rulers.

It is possible that Bankim Chandra's most famous novel, Ananda Math (1882), usually cited as the main inspiration behind the 'Bhavani Mandir' scheme, was itself inspired by the sannyasins' revolt of 1772 at Rungpur. That Bankim's novels generally, and Ananda Math in particular, exercised a potent influence on Sri Aurobindo may be inferred both from his early articles in the Indu Prakash (1893-4) and his 1907 essay on 'Rishi Bankim Chandra' in the columns of the Bande Mataram. It is almost as though Sri Aurobindo is drawing our attention to the filiations between 'Bhavani Mandir' and 'Ananda Math':

The Mother of his [Bankim's] vision held trenchant steel in her twice seventy million hands and not the bowl of the mendicant. It was the gospel of fearless strength and force which he preached under a veil and in images in Ananda Math and Devi Chaudhurani. And he had an inspired unerring vision of the moral strength which must be at the back of the outer force. He perceived that the first element of the moral strength must be tyāga, complete self-sacrifice for the country.... His workers and fighters for the motherland are political  

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byrāgees.... Whoever loves self or wife or child or goods more than his country is a poor and imperfect patriot; not by him shall the great work be accomplished. Again, he perceived that the second element of the moral strength needed must be self-discipline and organisation. This truth he expressed in the elaborate training or Devi Chaudhurani for her work, in the strict rules of the Association of the 'Ananda Math' and in the pictures of perfect organisation which those books contain. Lastly, he perceived that the third element of moral strength must be the infusion of religious feeling into patriotic work.... In Ananda Math this idea is the key-note of the whole book and received its perfect lyrical expression in the great song [Bande Mataram] which has become the national anthem of United India.³³

Actually the song had been composed seven or eight years before mantra of the sannyasins and helps them to challenge the might of the Muslim rulers and the British traders, as other sannyasins had fought the British over a century earlier.

There was, finally, the example of Swami Vivekananda who, viewing from a jutting rock off Cape Comorin as if in a mood of trance the whole mass of Indian humanity famished and hungry and ignorant, had asked himself whether a new order of sannyasins couldn't be trained to take the message of modern science and education, with accessories like maps, globes, cameras and other instruments to the millions in the villages, even (or particularly) to the so-called chandalas (untouchables). In the past, sannyasins had wandered wide and far and imparted religious instruction, helping the people to cultivate the garden of the spirit. But the hungry people had to be fed first, and freed from squalor, disease and ignorance, before one could think of ministering to their spiritual needs. Hence the need, Vivekananda thought, for the new order of sannyasins he had in mind. The human image in India had shrunk pitifully, and the collective image of the Virat Purusha had suffered too; perhaps the sannyasins, brahmacharins, the parivrajakas may be able to meet the challenge and set things right again.

Well, 'Bhavani Mandir' was meant to train sannyasins too, who would then carry political education and revolutionary action into the country. Barin seems to have told the advocate, R.N. Patkar, that "a message from the Goddess has been received with detailed instructions"³⁴; but this must have been an exaggeration. Even without the planchette and Sri Ramakrishna's peremptory Mandir Gado!, Bhavani Mandir' would have issued forth in panoply of shining gold, calling young men to glorious unselfish action, for it was the very atmosphere of the troubled times that asked for noble idealism and great sacrifices. There had been talk of the "partition" of Bengal in the air for quite some time, and now the Act was on the anvil of the legislature, and the hated evil was soon to become an accomplished fact. This was the approaching Hour of God, this was the ripening Phoenix Hour. Sri Aurobindo seized the opportunity and turned his pamphlet on 'Bhavani Mandir' into a veritable Brahmastra or secret weapon to fight the British. It was not Barin's revolutionary fervour nor his evangelical drive, but rather the intensity of Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Mother and the winged power of his

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writing that made Bhavani Mandir a decisive blow struck on the Mother's behalf and - incidentally - such a classic in India's political literature.

V

"A temple is to be erected and consecrated to Bhavani, the Mother, among the hills." Thus begins the unique document.³⁵ Bhavani* is the Mother, the Infinite Energy that "looms up in the vision of man in various aspects and infinite forms. Each aspect creates and marks an age". Love, Knowledge, Power, Strength characterise different ages as the dominant aspect of the Mother, and she reveals herself, now as Radha the Beloved, and at other times as Lakshmi, Kali, Bhavani - and each may assume for us a multiplicity of forms. In our age, the Mother's characteristic aspect is Shakti, or masterful strength; in this aspect her name is Bhavani. Modem science and technology, increasing as they do in geometric progression (the doubling period being ten years), make our world an unbelievable dynamo of accelerating strength:

All is growing large and strong. The Shakti of war, the Shakti of wealth, the Shakti of Science are tenfold more mighty and colossal, a hundredfold more fierce, rapid and busy in their activity, a thousandfold more prolific in resources, weapons and instruments than ever before in recorded history. Everywhere the Mother is at work... remoulding, creating. She is pouring Her spirit into the old; She is whirling into life the new.

It is only in India that the pace is slow. Tamas or lethargy has taken possession of us, and there is no will to achieve an accession of strength: "We have abandoned Shakti and are therefore abandoned by Shakti. The Mother is not in our hearts, in our brains, in our arms." In education, in religion, in society, in industry, everywhere and in everything our efforts are weak and vacillating, and although "our beginnings are mighty... they have neither sequel nor fruit".

Haven't we here knowledge enough, sastras enough, accumulated during countless ages? But lacking the ignition of Shakti, they have become mere lumber, almost a deadweight. Like the old knowledge, the new knowledge from the West too is for us mere dead-sea fruit, unassimilated and unassimilable. Brazen mimicry of England, or mimicry of Japan, - how far can this take us? "The mighty force of knowledge which European Science bestows is a weapon for the hands of a giant, it is the mace of Bheemsen; what can a weakling do with it but crush himself in the attempt to wield it?"

Can it be that we have failed in love? - we who live in the land where, from Kamarupa to Dwaraka and from Himavant to Kumari, we have for ages floated and laved in heady streams of Bhakti! But without Shakti the fuel, how are Bhakti's tongues of flame to leap in abandon? The adhara has become brittle and weak,

* I am spelling the name with a 'v' in conformity with the present usage.  

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the physical base has become insecure, the vital fire has exhausted itself. Without a renewal of strength and energy, how is the light to be lit again? The present decrepitude that has spread over the body and mind of the people - and hence of the nation - must be arrested, and a rejuvenation effectively induced. Under present conditions, people grow senile all too soon; in an emergency they are unable to act decisively, but are content to "hesitate, ponder, discuss, make tentative efforts and abandon them or wait for the safest and easiest way to suggest itself... Our race has grown just such an old man with stores of knowledge, with ability to feel and desire, but paralysed by senile sluggishness, senile timidity, senile feebleness". The dark and heavy pall of tamas covers and confines us - as if in a tomb. And it will be death indeed if we cannot - if we will not - cast this shroud aside and spring into life and action. Have seers blest and mighty prophets like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda occurred in vain? Don't we remember Vivekananda's ringing exhortation:

My India, arise! Where is your vital force?... If any nation attempts to throw off its national vitality, the direction which has become its own through the transmission of centuries, that nation dies...

Again, on another occasion:

Your Bhakti is sentimental nonsense which makes one impotent.... Who cares for your Bhakti and Mukti?... I will go into a thousand hells cheerfully if I can rouse my countrymen, immersed in tamas, to stand on their feet and be men inspired with the spirit of Karma Yoga.

My India, arise! But how? And what is India our mother-country? Without ambiguity comes Sri Aurobindo's answer:

It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha Mardini sprang into being from the Shakti of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity. The Shakti we call India, Bhavani Bharati, is the living unity of the Shaktis of three hundred million people; but she is inactive, imprisoned in the magic circle of Tamas, the self-indulgent inertia and ignorance of her sons.

But if we could awaken the God within, if everyone - "from the Raja on his throne to the coolie at his labour, from the Brahmin absorbed in his Sandhya to the Pariah walking shunned of men" - if everyone could manifest the living God, then indeed the whole nation would be able to enact Almighty Power here and now.

Again, India must shake off her lethargy and rise to her true stature, not for her own sake alone, but even for the world's sake, for she has a role to play in the evolution of earth's destiny which no other nation can:

...it is to India that is reserved the highest and the most splendid destiny, the most essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from herself the future religion of the entire world, the Eternal Religion which is to harmonise all religion, science and philosophies and make mankind one soul.

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By reaffirming the truths of Shintoism and drawing inspiration from the Vedantic teachings of Oyomei, Japan had arisen from the sleep of centuries and asserted her strength against the sprawling might of Tsarist Russia. It is India's turn to repeat - and more than repeat - that miraculous rebaptism in the waters of Shakti:

Strength can only be created by drawing it from the internal and inexhaustible reservoirs of the Spirit, from that Adya Shakti of the Eternal which is the fountain of all new existence. To be born again means nothing but to revive the Brahma within us, and that is a spiritual process - no effort of the body or the intellect can compass it.

The three things needful are, firstly, a temple for the Mother, the white Bhavani, the Mother of strength, a temple "in a high and pure air steeped in calm and energy"; secondly, a Math with a new Order of Karma Yogis attached to the temple, "a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to the uttermost extent, in whom it fills every comer of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth"; and thirdly, the nectarean message of so-aham, "the mighty formula of the Vedanta... the knowledge which when vivified by Karma and Bhakti, delivers man out of all fear and all weakness". Then comes the fitting peroration:

Come then, hearken to the call of the Mother. She is already in our hearts waiting to manifest Herself, waiting to be worshipped, - inactive because the God in us is concealed by Tamas, troubled by Her inactivity, sorrowful because Her children will not call on Her to help them. You who feel Her stirring within you, fling off the black veil of self, break down the imprisoning ' walls of indolence, help Her each as you feel impelled, with your bodies or with your intellect or with your speech or with your wealth or with your prayers and worship, each man according to his capacity. Draw not back, for against those who were called and heard Her not She may well be wroth in the day of Her coming; but to those who help Her advent even a little, how radiant with beauty and kindness will be the face of their Mother.

There is an Appendix too, spelling out in some detail the Rules of the new Order of Sannyasins and indicating the nature and scope of their activity under four heads. Work for the People; Work for the Middle Classes; Work for the Wealthy Classes; and General Work for the Country. The Brahmacharins are to vow themselves to Bhavani Bharati's service for at least four years, they are to observe the prescribed discipline and rules of Achar and purity, bodily and mental, and they are to practise strength and self-effacement without seeking for distinction or mere personal fame. Work for the people will be in the direction of "mass instruction and help to the poor and ignorant" - lectures and demonstrations, night schools, religious teaching, nursing the sick and works of charity. Works for the middle classes will include "various works of public utility". Work with the wealthy classes will be of the nature of converting them to a sense of trusteeship and of forging the links of common humanity between all classes. When funds are available, some of the members of the order may be sent abroad to study "lucrative arts and manufactures" so that, on their return, they may establish factories and workshops  

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in India; and some may also be sent out as missionaries to prepare for a global acceptance of Aryan ideals. The Appendix is decidedly Perhaps understandably on a lower key than the main text of Bhavani Man, and probably it was really Barin's work. 

Reading this extraordinary document today - from the bold opening statement the splendid exordium, the piled up mass of passion and prophecy and imagination and argument, and careering through to the magnificent peroration - we are at once struck by its perfervid eloquence and weight of thought, its tone of high idealism, its terrifying integrity and earnestness;  what is, perhaps, even more surprising is its continuing relevance sixty-five yes after its composition, its burning contemporaneity. Most of it might have been written for us, with a few omissions and additions - and some heavy underlinings as well. For Bhavani Mandir is in itself a reservoir of Shakti and is fed by the perennial springs of the Spirit.

That Bhavani Mandir set youthful hearts aglow with adoration of the Mother, that it turned many of them to the path of heroic exertion and unstinted sacrifice, is by no means difficult to understand. But why did it act - as act it did - as a red rag to the mahisa-like alien bureaucracy and its staunch local allies? Overtly there is hardly a mention of politics. Even the Rules and programme of work seem on the whole quire innocuous, unless of course one tried ingeniously to read between the lines for sinister hidden meanings and dangerous directives.

And yet, - how rattled, how intrigued, how scandalised were the pillars of the bureaucracy! How they early lost their balance, their sense of measure, their very common sense almost! Mr. Denham, the Superintendent of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta, thought it fit to observe:

Bhawani Mandir was nothing but a gigantic scheme  establishing a central religious Society, outwardly religious, but in spirit, energy and work political. From this centre, missionaries well-versed in relics-Political argument were to go on their wanderings over India, to form fresh centres and gain fresh recruits. The argument in the pamphlet is ingenious and when examined shows that extraordinary adroitness with which its author has "interpreted the Vedantist ideas for his own purposes, and to adorn his talk and point his moral....³⁶

With a kind of hind-sight, the Government of the day tried to read Bhawani Mandir in the light of some later happenings and developments, for example the articles in cantor preaching open revolt and giving instructions on guerilla warfare, and the shading off of nationalism towards terrorism. In the words of Haridas and Uma Mukherjee:

But even within the left camp further extremism developed by 1906 (the year after the composition of Bhawani Mandir) and it was taking the shape of terrorism. Of this new school in Bengal, Aurobindo was in a sense the spiritual father whose influence on Bhupendra Nath Dutta (Vivekananda's brother) and Barindra Kumar Ghose was considerable. Bhupendra Nath and Barindra  

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Kumar were upholders of the cult of triumph through terror.³⁷ Many years later, the Rowlatt Committee's Report (1917) also pointed out, as if taking its cue from Mr. Denham, that Bhawani Mandir "really contains the germs of the Hindu revolutionary movement in Bengal", and further indicted the pamphlet as "a remarkable instance of the perversion of religious ideals for political purposes".³⁸ On the other hand, the Marquess of Zetland writing long afterwards sees in the pamphlet "the idea which was to form the core of the philosophy which he [Sri Aurobindo] was to formulate later on... [stressing] the need for a reinterpretation of spiritual experience to relate it to the changing conditions evolved in the outward progress of mankind".³⁹

As a matter of fact, neither the Mandir nor the Math actually came into existence. "The idea of Bhavani Mandir", said Sri Aurobindo later, "simply lapsed of itself.'⁴⁰ Why then did the mere pamphlet - a few hundred copies, perhaps, in circulation - generate so much fright in official circles, and inspire so much hope among the young revolutionaries? The reason was that the idea behind Bhawani Mandir was something akin to "nuclear" action. It aimed at releasing infinite energy in every Indian and fusing these three hundred million such infinities into one gigantic, one irresistible, one inimitably stupendous dynamo of Bharat Shakti. It was but an idea as yet, a visionary possibility, but even so its utter mathematical simplicity and its terrifying cumulative grandeur inspired, astonished and frightened all at once. Besides, there was the idea that India was to be the Guru of the world: not a subject nation, not an appendage of Britain, but a nation awakened, a puissant nation on the march, a nation leading other nations, not by recourse to war, but by giving a new religion to the world - the true religion of humanity reared on spiritual foundations. All this came as a boost to the revolutionaries, and as a warning to the Ruling Race. No mere analysis or comment, however, can really measure the impact of Bhawani Mandir on the generation that passed from adolescence to early manhood during 1905-6 and the years immediately following. Sri Aurobindo had succeeded in conveying much though saying little, he had made Bhawani Mandir both the Virgin and the Dynamo, both a Manifesto for Change and Transformation and an ultimatum to the colonial power. Like all great political literature (like Milton's Areopagitica, for example), Bhawani Mandir too was both admirably pointed to the occasion and yet was seraphically free from the taint of the merely local or temporal.  

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