Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

Part I

HUMANIST AND POET

CHAPTER 2

Childhood, Boyhood and Youth

I

The district of Hooghly in West Bengal — the district that has given to Bengal and to India two such world-famous figures as Raja Rammohan Roy and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa — can almost be called the cradle of the Bengali or even of the Indian renaissance.* Konnagar is a thickly populated area, almost a small town, in the Hooghly district; situated on the west bank of the river Hooghly (otherwise known as the Bhagirathi), it is about eleven miles to the north of Calcutta. Konnagar is apparently a place of considerable antiquity, for it is mentioned in old Bengali literature. The Mitras and the Ghoses of Konnagar have carved out creditable names for themselves in the political and cultural history of Bengal. Among the many outstanding men who have sprung up from the fertile cultural soil of Konnagar, special mention may be made of Sib Chandra Deb, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj movement and one of the great philanthropists of Bengal and, besides, one whose munificence gave Konnagar most of its public institutions; Dr. Trailokyanath Mitra and Raja Digambar Mitra, once well-known figures in Bengal's political life; Raja Dr. Rajendralal Mitra, the famous antiquarian and author of The Aryan Vernacular of India; and Mahamahopadhyaya Dinabandhu Nyayaratna, the eminent Sanskrit scholar.

The Ghoses of Konnagar were a no less distinguished family than the Mitras. Perhaps all the Ghoses "came originally from the Punjab on the Afghan border. The word means 'fame', and they were a tribe of the proud warrior caste".¹ Krishnadhan Ghose was born in this family about the year 1845, his parents being Kaliprasad Ghose and Kailasabasini Devi, a lady known for her remarkable beauty, her feeling for religion and her exceptional piety. In Krishnadhan's time the family was not in affluent circumstances, and "the family house or palace, a very noble building", was not far from Calcutta but "quite in ruins". Nevertheless Krishnadhan, although "living almost entirely by charity of friends", by his "superhuman perseverance" had a meritorious school and college career.² He passed the Entrance Examination of the Calcutta University from the local school in 1858 and then proceeded to the Calcutta Medical College. When he was in his fourth year at the Medical College, he married Swarnalata Devi, aged twelve and the eldest daughter of Rishi Rajnarain Bose, according to the rites of Adi Brahmo Samaj. It was the alliance of two authentic and forceful currents in the inner life of Bengal. A contemporary of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a student of Henry Derozio and David Hare, Rajnarain Bose was an early synthesis of the East and the West, and in the heyday of his hallowed life "represented the high water-mark of the

* I am indebted to Sisirkumar Mitra of Sri Aurobindo Ashram for much of the information contained in this section.  

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composite culture of the country — Vedantic, Islamic and European" .* He has been called "the militant defender of his country, the Olympian champion of truth, the ruthless antagonist to sham";³ he was a leader of the Brahmo Samaj in its palmiest days, and Devendranath Tagore said of his books: "Whatever falls from the lips of Rajnarain Babu creates a great sensation in the country"; undoubtedly one of the makers of modern Bengal, he is not inaptly described as the "grandfather of Indian nationalism" .⁴ At the same time, the fire of spirituality burned steadily within him, and his ardent love for India, his capacity to translate into action the motions of his thought and his sturdy sense of direction into the future were revealed in many creative expressions of friendship, adoration and benevolence. On  the occasion of his death in 1899, his grandson, Sri Aurobindo, wrote a touching sonnet entitled Transiit, Non Periit:

Not in annihilation lost, nor given

To darkness art thou fled from us and light,

O strong and sentient spirit; no mere heaven

Of ancient joys, no silence eremite

Received thee; but the omnipresent Thought

Of which thou wast a part and earthly hour,

Took back its gift. Into that splendour caught

Thou hast not lost thy special brightness. Power

Remains with thee and the old genial force

Unseen for blinding light, not darkly lurks...⁵

When Krishnadhan Ghose left Calcutta for Great Britain in 1869 to undergo a course of advanced medical studies, it was his father-in-law's earnest wish that the young sojourner in the West would not allow himself to be too easily dazzled and denationalised by the civilisation of the Occident^† Nevertheless, when Dr. Krishnadhan Ghose returned to India in 1871 with a further degree in Medicine from Aberdeen University, full of honours and bristling with plans for the future, he was a confirmed believer in Western civilisation and wished that India could transform herself, overnight if possible, into another self-confident and puissant and purposeful Britain. But although he was, as a result of his stay in Britain, an agnostic in religion ("My father was a tremendous atheist", Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said once),⁶ this only gave a new edge to his humanism, and he decided to dedicate himself to the unstinted service of the people. He had a noble and lovable countenance too, and on one occasion a Christian missionary spoke

* The quotation is taken from an article on the life of Sri Aurobindo in Swaraj, republished in Karmayogin, from the seventh issue onwards.

†At one stage of his life, Rajnarain seems to have "remorsefully declared that it would have been much better if they had not at all learnt English" (Arabinda Poddar, Renaissance in Bengal: Quests and Confrontations, p. 40).  

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to Rajnarain about his son-in-law: "I have never seen such a sweet face as his!" With his specialist training and his unwearying commitment to the cause of public health. Dr. Krishnadhan came soon to be acclaimed as one of the most successful civil surgeons of his day.

On his return from Britain, the orthodox sections in Konnagar wanted Krishnadhan — as was the custom in those days and till recently — to go through the ceremony of prāyascitta or purification for having crossed the black waters and sojourned in an alien land. Dr. Krishnadhan, however, refused to make this concession to superstitious custom and preferred rather to leave Konnagar for good. He sold away — "for a song" as it were — his ancestral house and property to a local brahmin, turning down a more tempting offer from a relation; the word had been given, and Krishnadhan wouldn't go back on it! Having thus left the place of his birth, Krishnadhan moved from district to district as the Government Civil Surgeon, endearing himself to the people everywhere by his innumerable acts of charity and benevolence. In Bhagalpur, Rungpur and Khulna — especially in the last place — Dr. Krishnadhan's name became almost a household word. "Wherever he served," writes Purani, "he was very popular and highly respected by all. He used to take a very prominent part in civic life, and interested himself in schools, hospitals, municipalities and other public bodies. The people of Khulna afterwards started a school in his name and his photograph was placed in the town hall. It is said that he changed the whole face of the town of Khulna."⁷ Krishnadhan's generous and uncalculating nature seems to have made him give away without let or hindrance, and individuals and institutions alike benefited by their fruitful association with him. "Keen of intellect, tender of heart, impulsive and generous almost to recklessness, regardless of his own wants but sensitive to the sufferings of others — this was the inventory of the character of Dr. Krishnadhan Ghose."⁸

Not only. was Dr. Krishnadhan a capable Civil Surgeon and a true friend of the people, but he was also agreeably and alertly responsive to the social and literary cross-currents of his day. He took keen interest in the general welfare of the people around him and he evinced — despite the fact that he was "essentially a product of English education and European culture"⁹ — a genuine enthusiasm for the works of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Being a persona grata with European as well as Bengalee society. Dr. Krishnadhan was able to act as a link, a bridge, between the two; and, indeed, he came to be called the "Suez Canal", for his house served as a common meeting place, day after day, for both Europeans and Bengalees. During the greater part of his active life. Dr. Krishnadhan was also blessed with the companionship of his charming wife, Swarnalata Devi, who was in fact known as the "Rose of Rungpur" during their stay in that district town. It was only in the latter part of her life that she fell a victim to an unfortunate malady that clouded the last years of Dr. Krishnadhan's life.  

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II

Sri Aurobindo was born around 5 a.m., that is, about twenty-four minutes before sunrise, at the house of Dr. Krishnadhan's friend. Barrister Manmohan Ghose in Theatre Road,¹⁰ Calcutta, on 15 August 1872. Benoy Bhushan and Manmohan had preceded Sri Aurobindo, who was thus the third son of Dr. Krishnadhan and Swarnalata Devi. The time of unfolding dawn, an hour before sunrise:

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

Across the path of the divine Event

The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone

In her unlit temple of eternity,

Lay stretched....

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god.

Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

Outpoured the revelation and the flame.¹¹

As Dr. Kalidas Nag aptly remarks, "Sri Aurobindo... was born in 1872 to celebrate, as it were, the centenary of the birth of Rammohan Roy." At the christening ceremony. Dr. Krishnadhan gave the name "Aravinda Ackroyd Ghose' to the child. A Miss Annette Ackroyd was present at the ceremony, and Krishnadhan, with his penchant for things English, probably added the name to 'Aravinda'.¹²

True to his own deep convictions and in conformity with the practice of many other educated Indians of his time who had all too easily capitulated to the glamour of English ways and English speech. Dr. Krishnadhan too decided to give his children an entirely European type of education and upbringing. The children had an English nurse. Miss Pagett, and easily picked up English, but couldn't speak Bengali; from the butler, however, they learnt some broken Hindustani, as well. Although we know very little of Sri Aurobindo's childhood days, one interesting incident may be recorded. Once, when his eldest maternal uncle, Jogendra, held up a mirror before Sri Aurobindo and said, "See, there is a monkey!", the boy seems to have shown the mirror back to Jogendra and added:

"Great uncle, great monkey! Bado māmā bado bānar!"¹³

In 1877, when Sri Aurobindo was five years old, he was sent along with his elder brothers to the Loretto Convent School at Darjeeling, run by Irish nuns. About his school life, again, little is known, but he seems to have made a profound impression on his teachers at Darjeeling by his sparkling and wide-awake intelligence and the singular sweetness of his nature. The companions of the Ghose brothers in the school and in the boarding-house were mostly English children and, of course, English was the sole medium of instruction in school and the channel of communication outside. A sort of exile in his own country, Sri Aurobindo thus

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started lisping in English at the age of five: "In the shadow of the Himalayas, in the sight of the wonderful snow-capped peaks, even in their native land they were brought up in alien surroundings."¹⁴ In later years, Sri Aurobindo recapitulated a dream of his Darjeeling days:

I was lying down one day when I saw suddenly a great Tamas rushing into me and enveloping me and the whole universe. After that I had a great darkness always hanging onto me all through my stay in England. I believe that darkness had something to do with the Tamas that came upon me. It left me only when I was coming back to India.¹⁵

The impressionable Darjeeling period must nevertheless have opened the boy's psyche to the beauty and splendour of Himalayan scenery, for a passage like the following from one of his poems seems to be born of intense personal experience:

He journeyed to the cold north and the hills

Austere...

...to a silent place he came

Within a heaped enormous region piled

With prone far-drifting hills, huge peaks o'erwhelmed

Under the vast illimitable snows, —

Snow on ravine, and snow on cliff, and snow

Sweeping in strenuous outlines to heaven,

With distant gleaming vales and turbulent rocks,

Giant precipices black-hewn and bold

Daring the universal whiteness; last,

A mystic gorge into some secret world.

He in that region waste and wonderful

Sojourned, and morning-star and evening-star

Shone over him and faded, and immense

Darkness wrapped the hushed mountain solitudes

And moonlight's brilliant muse and the cold stars

And day upon the summits brightening.¹⁶

Is it Pururavas or Sri Aurobindo that thus stands charmed and enraptured, gazing at the "immortal summits"? Probably, it is both!

III

In 1879, Dr. Krishnadhan and his wife took Sri Aurobindo and his brothers, Benoy Bhushan and Manomohan, and their sister, Sarojini, to England. The boys were entrusted to an English family, the Rev. William Drewett, a congregational minister, and Mrs. Drewett, who lived at 84, Shakespeare Street, Manchester. Mr. Drewett was a cousin of a magistrate at Rungpur, Mr. Glazier, with whom Dr. Krishnadhan was on friendly terms.  

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He left strict instructions with the Drewetts that the boys "should not be allowed to make the acquaintance of any Indian or undergo any Indian influence".¹⁷ It was expected that under the fostering care of the Drewetts the children would grow up into typical products of Western culture, uncontaminated by Oriental ways and ideas and in total ignorance of India, her people, her religion, her languages and her culture. It was during this visit that Swarnalata Devi gave birth to another son, Barindra Kumar; but in the birth register, his name was as "Emmanuel Ghose", another instance of Dr. Krishnadhan's predilection for European names!

While Sri Aurobindo's two elder brothers were sent to the Manchester Grammar School, Sri Aurobindo himself — he was only seven — was educated privately by the Drewetts. Himself an accomplished scholar, Mr. Drewett gave Sri Aurobindo a good grounding in Latin and made him proficient in English, and taught him history, etc. While Mrs. Drewett taught him geography, arithmetic and French, Sri Aurobindo found time at home to read on his own Keats and Shelley, Shakespeare and the Bible, and he even wrote some verse for the Fox's Weekly. While games did not appeal to him, he seems to have played cricket in Mr. Drewett's garden, though not at all well.

An interesting incident of the Manchester period is worth recording. Once when a meeting of non-conformist ministers was being held at Cumberland, old Mrs. Drewett (Mr. Drewett's mother) took Sri Aurobindo there. To continue in Sri Aurobindo's own words, —

After the prayers were over nearly all dispersed, but devout people remained a little longer and it was at that time that conversions were made. I was feeling completely bored. Then a minister approached me and asked me some questions. I did not give any reply. Then they all shouted, 'He is saved, he is saved', and began to pray for me and offer thanks to God. I did not know what it was all about. Then the minister came to me and asked me to pray... I did it in the manner in which children recite their prayers before going to sleep in order to keep up an appearance.... I was about ten at that time.¹⁸

It was partly because of this incident and partly also because of his apparently christianised name 'Aravinda Ackroyd Ghose' that there was once current the unfounded rumour that Sri Aurobindo had been converted to Christianity.

Three or four years after Sri Aurobindo and his brothers had taken residence with the Drewetts, on account of differences with the deacons Mr. Drewett resigned the pastorage of the Stockport Road Congregation Church and emigrated to Australia with his wife, leaving the three boys in charge of his mother. Presently old Mrs. Drewett took lodgings for the Ghose brothers in London at 49, St. Stephen's Avenue, Uxbridge Road, Shepherd's Bush. Sri Aurobindo was admitted to St. Paul's School in September 1884 and remained there till December 1889. At the time of admission, the Head Master, Dr. Walker, was impressed by Sri Aurobindo's character and abilities, and especially his knowledge of Latin, and took him up to ground him in Greek and then pushed him rapidly into the higher

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Sri Aurobindo — Manchester —1883

classes of the school. At first Mrs. Drewett, who had taken lodgings for them, was with the boys in London, for St. Paul's was but a day school. At the St. Stephen's Avenue house, the old lady, who was pious Christian, used to have passages from the Bible read at prayer time. The boys were expected to participate in all this, and Benoy Bhushan often conducted the worship. On one occasion, however, Manomohan was in a puckish mood and said that old Moses got only his deserts when his people disobeyed him! Mrs. Drewett was understandably furious and declared she would not live with an atheist, since the whole house might fall down! After she had left, Benoy Bhushan and Sri Aurobindo moved to 128, Cromwell Road. and Manomohan went into lodgings. From August or September 1887 to April 1889, Sri Aurobindo was at this Cromwell Road residence, and then went to stay at 28, Kempsford Gardens, Earl's Court, South Kensington, and remained there till almost the end of the year.¹⁹

Sri Aurobindo's five years at St. Paul's were a period when — albeit desultorily — he garnered extensively from classical and modern European literature. Strictly in academic terms, his school record speaks for itself. He won the Butterworth 2nd Prize in Literature, and an Honourable Mention in the Bedford History Prize. Twice in November 1889, he participated in debates, once on the inconsistency of Swift's political views and on the second occasion on 'Milton'.²⁰ When he had caught up with Greek during the first two years, Sri Aurobindo was able to take his regular studies easy in the last three years and devote his spare time to general reading, especially English and French literature, some Italian, German and Spanish, and the history of ancient, mediaeval and modem Europe.

The period of about two years between old Mrs. Drewett's going away and Sri Aurobindo's winning a classical scholarship of the value of £80 per year tenable at King's College, Cambridge, was a time of "the greatest suffering and poverty",²¹ and for a whole year at least, he had to subsist on a slice or two of sandwich, bread arid butter and a cup of tea in the morning, and only a penny saveloy (a kind of sausage) in the evening — generally skipping lunch and dinner. Remittances from Dr. Krishnadhan had become more and more irregular and inadequate, and the boys were thus increasingly left to their own resources. Benoy Bhushan, the eldest, became an assistant on five shillings a week to James S. Cotton, who was Secretary on the South Kensington Liberal Club. Manomohan went up to Christ Church, Oxford, and was thriving as a scholar and as a poet. But financial worries were not soon to leave any of them. The Cromwell Road residence had no proper bedrooms at all, nor any heating arrangements; there was a railway behind, and trains passed to and fro with some frequency. But since the rooms were in the building that housed the office of the South Kensington Liberal Club, the boys had the use of its good reading-room. Life was trying on the whole, and Sri Aurobindo hadn't even an overcoat to face the rigours of winter in London.

But there were other compensations. Reading poetry, and even writing poetry, and going out of London during the vacations. One of his boyhood enthusiasm seems to have been Shelley's The Revolt of Islam. He read it often "without  

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understanding everything"; and perhaps it struck a chord within, and he had a thought that he too would dedicate his life to a similar world change and take part in it.²² During his last years at St. Paul's, Sri Aurobindo began writing poetry in earnest. There was the catalytic effect of Manomohan's association on his younger brother, and there was Manomohan's friend and class-mate, Laurence Binyon. Manomohan, Binyon, Stephen Phillips and Arthur Cripps were to collaborate on Primavera, a collection of poems, that came out in 1890. Having first experimented on Greek and Latin verses, Sri Aurobindo turned a passage from the Greek into English verse when he was seventeen. This piece, 'Hecuba', was liked by Binyon who suggested that Sri Aurobindo should write more poetry. Thus was he properly launched on his career as a poet.²³

From some of Manomohan's letters of this period that have fortunately survived, it is possible to have some glimpses of vacationing by the brothers, — more often by Manomohan and Sri Aurobindo alone. One or two extracts from the letters may be given here:

We have been having very rainy and unsettled weather of late — that is the worst of the Lake District — when the weather once becomes unsettled, there's no telling when it will be fine again... a little while ago I and my younger brother went together to Thirlmere, with Helvellyn looming up on one side all the way, but we did not see the lake which is a very pretty one — for, being a bleak, misty day, it came on to rain when we were a mile from it and we had to turn back.... [Letter dated 13 August 1886].  

On Friday we went all three of us with a gentleman to Thirlmere... a lovely lake, and wonderfully placid and calm.... We crossed the lake in the middle by the Bridges, and came back by the beautiful Vale of St. John and a path round Naddle Fell, getting home at 6 p.m. and eating a tremendous tea (the four of us getting through two considerable loaves).

On Saturday we went to Watendlath which is certainly the loveliest place I have yet seen in the Lake District.... My younger brother, myself, and the same gentleman walked along Lake Derwentwater and then up the barrow woods, a steep hill climb into Watendlath.... [Letter dated 23 August 1886].

We came here [Hastings] last Tuesday... it is delightful on this cliff especially where we are staying. But I confess the sea is better than the land.... [Letter dated 8 August 1887].²⁴

It may be inferred from another letter of Manomohan's that Sri Aurobindo probably spent his 1888 vacation at Galway on the invitation of a friend he had met at the Club.²⁵

During his last two years at St. Paul's, besides successfully competing for a Senior Classical Scholarship of £80 per year, Sri Aurobindo also registered as a candidate for the Indian Civil Service examination, relying mainly on his proficiency in the classics. He couldn't afford — and he didn't need — any coach, but he

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passed the examination in July 1890, securing the eleventh place, and scoring record marks in Greek and Latin. Added to the Senior Scholarship tenable at King's College Cambridge, the I.C.S. stipend for the probationary period placed Sri Aurobindo in a much better position financially than during the two immediately preceding years of privation and poverty. After his success at the I.C.S., Sri Aurobindo could have (if he had so wished) stopped or at least taken easy his further studies in the classics at King's, but that was not his way — and, besides, he couldn't afford to give up the scholarship. He was still hard-pressed for money because, besides supporting himself, he had also occasionally to help his brothers. It was a double strain all the same, this work as a classical scholar and his work as I.C.S. probationer, but Sri Aurobindo did brilliantly and in may 1892 passed the First Part of the Classical Tripos examination in the first class even at the end of the second year of his residence in Cambridge. He also won the Rowley Prize for Greek iambics, and other prizes, in King's College. Writing of him to James Cotton, Sri Aurobindo's senior tutor G.W. Prothero said:

His pecuniary circumstances prevented him from resigning [his scholarship (classical)] when he became a Selected Candidate [for the I.C.S.].... He performed his part of the bargain, as regards the College, most honourably.... That a man should have been able to do this (which alone is quite enough for most undergraduates), and at the same time to keep up his I.C.S. work, proves very unusual industry and capacity. Besides his classical scholarship he possessed a knowledge of English literature far beyond the average of undergraduates, and wrote a much better English style than most young Englishmen....

Moreover the man has not only ability but character. He has had a very hard and anxious time of it for the last two years... yet his courage and perseverance have never failed. I have several times written to his father on his behalf, but for the most part unsuccessfully. It is only lately that I managed to extract from him enough to pay some tradesmen who would otherwise have put his son into the County Court. I am quite sure that these pecuniary difficulties were not due to any extravagance on Ghose's part....²⁶

When sending the money at last. Dr. Krishnadhan seems to have reprimanded Sri Aurobindo for his "extravagance"; but as Sri Aurobindo used to say later on, "There was not money enough to be extravagant with!"²⁷

To the testimony of G. W. Prothero may be added that of Oscar Browning, who told Sri Aurobindo (as reported by him in the course of a letter to his father):

Last night I was invited to coffee with one of the Dons and in his rooms I met the great O.B., otherwise Oscar Browning, who is the feature par excellence of King's. He was extremely flattering, passing from the subject of cotillions to that of scholarships, he said to me, 'I suppose you know you passed an extraordinarily high examination. I have examined papers at thirteen examinations and I have never during that time [seen] such excellent papers as yours.... AS for your essay, it was wonderful.' In this essay (a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton),  

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I indulged in my Oriental tastes to the top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without restraint or reservation. I thought myself that it was the best thing I have ever done....

When Sri Aurobindo had answered a question about his rooms, Oscar Browning exclaimed, "That wretched hole!" and, turning to Mahaffy, added: "How rude we are to our scholars! We get great minds to come down here and then shut them up in that box! I suppose it is to keep their pride down."²⁸ In his well-documented Life of Sri Aurobindo, Purani has also given extracts from letters to him written by two of Sri Aurobindo's contemporaries at Cambridge. One of them refers to Sri Aurobindo as "a brilliant young classical scholar... of marked literary and poetic taste, and as far as I ever saw a young man of high character and modest bearing, who was liked by all who knew him". The other letter refers to Sri Aurobindo's complete lack of interest in sports while at Cambridge and to his general attitude towards England:

His interests were in literature: among Greek poets for instance he once waxed enthusiastic over Sappho, and he had a nice feeling of English style. Yet for England itself he seemed to have small affection; it was not only the climate that he found trying: as an example, he became quite indignant when on one occasion I called England the modem Athens. This title, he declared, belonged to France: England much more resembled Corinth, a commercial state, and therefore unattractive to him.²⁹

Aside from his disinclination for sports and his commitment to literary studies and the writing of poetry, there was something else too that marked his last years in England: his growing interest in Indian politics. His father used to send the Bengalee with passages marked relating to cases of British misgovernment. Even at the age of eleven, Sri Aurobindo had already received strongly the impression that he was destined to play a role in the coming revolutionary upsurge in India and the world. Some time after he came to London, he joined a secret society romantically called the "Lotus and Dagger", each member taking a vow to work for the liberation of India generally and also to take up one particular line of work in furtherance of that aim. While at Cambridge, Sri Aurobindo had participated in the meetings of the Indian Majlis, acted as their secretary for a time, and made many speeches breathing a revolutionary spirit. These facts must certainly have come to the notice of the authorities in England. The "Lotus and Dagger" was practically still-born, but that was nevertheless the first time Indian students in England had come together with a purpose that beyonded the mendicancy and moderatism of the accredited political leaders in India. Again, through his participation in the debates of the Indian Majlis, Sri Aurobindo had been able to throw out the first suggestive hints of the idea of revolution that was already slowly unfolding within his political consciousness.

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IV

Although Dr. Krishnadhan Ghose was unable to keep his sons in England above want, he had a high opinion of their abilities and had great expectations about their future. In the earlier years, he used to send £360 per year for their maintenance, but latterly he had become very careless and even improvident. His wife was afflicted with insanity and he had taken to drinking. The boys were separated from their parents, and they knew besides about the mother's malady and the father's sufferings. A letter of February 1888 from Manomohan to Laurence Binyon almost uncovers the whole horror and pity of the predicament of the Ghose brothers during their stay in England:

All childhood and boyhood is expansive. This human ivy stretches passionately forth its young tendrils, and the warm feelings are at the forefront, yearning to bestow and to be reciprocated: it is all heart; its brain lies undeveloped. It is the wise forethought of Nature that this should be so; but, in my case. Fate came between and cancelled her decrees; and, what to others is the bright portion of their life, its heaven and refuge, was for me bitterly and hopelessly blighted.... I had no mother. She is insane.... Crying for bread I was given a stone. My father was kind but stern, and I never saw much of him.³⁰

To some extent, such must have been the feelings of Benoy Bhushan and Sri Aurobindo also. On the other hand, they couldn't really come to the point of blaming their father; rather would they speak of him with undisguised admiration and pride. Manomohan himself had written earlier to Binyon:

My father's character may well be called 'thorough'. He is determined to give them [his children] a good education, tho' he is toiling under difficulties. He must be a man of iron nerves.... Indeed he says, 'my body is as stern as my mind to have survived all the trouble which I have endured'. I cannot but be proud with admiration at the sight of such dauntless self-sacrifice and heroic perseverance.³¹

Sri Aurobindo was no less effusive in praise of his father, and said almost fifty years after his death: "He was extremely generous. Hardly anybody who went to him for something came back empty-handed."³² On his part. Dr. Krishnadhan was also uncommonly proud of his sons, as may be seen from this letter that he wrote, shortly before his death, to his brother-in-law Jogendra Bose:

The three sons I have produced, I have made giants of them. I may not, but you will live to be proud of the three nephews who will adorn your country and shed lustre to your name.... Beno [Benoy Bhushan] will be his 'father' in every line of action — self-sacrificing, but limited in his sphere of action. Mano [Manomohan] will combine the feelings of his father, the grand ambitions of a cosmopolitan spirit that hate and abhor angle and corner feelings, with the Poetry of his grandfather, Rajnarain Bose. Ara [Arabinda], I hope, will yet glorify his country by a brilliant administration.... He is at King's College, Cambridge, now, borne there by his own ability.³³

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The letter was written from Khulna on 2nd December 1891. At that time Sri Aurobindo was supposed to be undergoing his I.C.S. probationship, and his father had every reason to believe that "Ara... will yet glorify his country by a brilliant administration". And, indeed, although it was a strain to be classical scholar as well as civil probationer, Sri Aurobindo did very well in both. On the other hand, as the months passed, he was unable to bring his heart into the I.C.S. career. He got through the terminal examinations all right, but didn't retain the rank he had won in July 1890. There, however, remained one or two more hurdles. On 24 August 1892, Mr. Lockhart, Secretary to the Civil Service Commissioners, reported to the India Office that A. A. Ghose (Aravinda Ackroyd Ghose) was still to satisfy the Commissioners in respect of health and riding proficiency. He passed his medical examination in due course, but even as late as 4 November 1892, Sri Aurobindo was yet to pass the riding test. Four different chances were apparently given to him (from 9 August to 15 November), but he failed to appear for the test. On 17 November, therefore, the Civil Service Commissioners informed the India Office that they were "unable to certify that he is qualified to be appointed to the Civil Service in India".³⁴

The question has often been asked why, having secured the 11th place in the open competitive examination in July 1890, and passed subsequently two periodical and the final examination, Sri Aurobindo repeatedly failed to take the riding test? Later on, in one of his 'evening talks' at Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said:

It was partly father's fault that I failed in the riding test. He did not send money and riding lessons at Cambridge at that time were rather costly. And the Master was also careless; so long as he got the money he simply left me with the horse and I was not particular... ³⁵

On the crucial day, 15 November 1892, when Sri Aurobindo should have been at Woolwich for the riding test, he didn't go there, and he wasn't at his house either. Actually, according to his own admission later, he was wandering in the streets of London and came home late in the evening and told Benoy Bhushan "I am chucked" with a faint derisive smile. Manomohan, dropping in later and learning how matters stood, "set up a howl as if the heavens had fallen" .³⁶ From all this, perhaps, it might be inferred — as indeed Sri Aurobindo himself later explained — that: "He felt no call for the I.C.S. and was seeking some way to escape from that bondage. By certain manoeuvres he managed to get himself disqualified for riding without himself rejecting the Service, which his family would not have allowed him to do."³⁷ His father was thinking great things about Sri Aurobindo's future as a brilliant administrator in India and had even, through Sir Henry Cotton, arranged provisionally to get a posting in the district of Arrah. But "all that came down like a wall"; as for Sri Aurobindo himself, he remarked quizzically: "I wonder what would have happened to me if I had joined the Civil Service. I think they would have chucked me for laziness and arrears of my work!"³⁸

There is an interesting sequel too to this affair. The "rejection" came as a  

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disappointment, not only to Sri Aurobindo's brothers in England, but also to well-wishers like his tutor Mr. Prothero and his friend, Mr. James S. Cotton. The former wrote to Cotton a letter which he transmitted to the Civil Service Commissioners. After giving an enthusiastic account of Sri Aurobindo's character and abilities, Prothero added:

That a man of this calibre should be lost to the Indian Government merely because he failed in sitting on a horse or did not keep an appointment appears to me, I confess, a piece of official short-sightedness which it would be hard to beat.

...If he is finally turned out, it will be, however legally justifiable, a moral injustice to him, and a very real loss to the Indian Government.³⁹

Benoy Bhushan and Cotton also persuaded Sri Aurobindo himself to present a petition to the Earl of Kimberley, the India Secretary, on 21 November. While Mr. G.W. Russell, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, noted that Sri Aurobindo might be given another chance for qualifying and added that "the candidate seems to me a remarkably deserving man, and I can quite believe that poverty was the cause of his; failures to appear". Lord Kimberley took the opposite view: "I am sorry that I cannot take a compassionate view as Mr. Russell suggests.... I should much doubt whether Mr. Ghose would be a desirable addition to the Service."⁴⁰ The final rejection came on 7 December, but a subsequent communication authorised the payment of the probationership allowance of £150 still due to Sri Aurobindo. And it was actually paid on 22 December 1892.

On a review of the available evidence it seems probable that an unnamed reason too must have taken a hand in finally determining Sri Aurobindo's exclusion from the Service. If he tried "certain manoeuvres" to get himself disqualified without himself rejecting the Service, Government too seems to have been only too ready to grasp at the straw of a technical reason for throwing out Sri Aurobindo. Lord Kimberley's ominous "obiter dictum" ("I should much doubt whether Mr. Ghose would be a desirable addition to the Service") leaves a bad taste. How did he; arrive at his "obiter dictum"? It doesn't seem unlikely that he had come to know of Sri Aurobindo's speeches at the meetings of the Indian Majlis, his association with the "Lotus and Dagger", and even of his revolutionary bent of mind. As Sri Aurobindo recorded later, these must have had their part "in determining the authorities to exclude him from the Indian Civil Service; the failure in the riding test was only the occasion, for in some other cases an opportunity was given for remedying this defect in India itself'.⁴¹

Sri Aurobindo had left Cambridge finally in October 1892 and taken lodgings in London at 6, Burlington Road, Bayswater (later 68, St. Stephen's Gardens). He seems to have been lucky in his landladies, one of whom he described as an angel. With the rejection from the Service an unalterable fact, it now became necessary to think of an alternative avenue of employment. He had his First in the First Part of the Classical Tripos, which would have given him his Cambridge degree had he passed the examination at the end of his third year in residence. 

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But since he had but two years at his disposal, he had taken the examination at the end of the second year. To stay on to be able to appear for the Second Part at the end of four years was unthinkable. But even so he might have got the degree had he made an application for it, but he did not think it necessary to do so; he did not presumably think that a degree as such was particularly valuable, since he had no intention then of taking up a purely academic career.⁴² His friend, James Cotton, was able to arrange an interview with the Gaekwar of Baroda, the late Sayaji Rao, who was then on a visit to England. The interview was a success, and Sri Aurobindo secured appointment in the Baroda State Service. Mr. Cotton had completed the negotiations, and the Gaekwar was indeed "very pleased to have an I.C.S. man for Rs. 200 per month".⁴³ It was also decided that Sri Aurobindo would leave for India by the Carthage on January 12, 1893. He had already decided to drop 'Ackroyd' from his name and would henceforth be 'Aravinda Ghose' or 'Aurobindo' only.

V

Sri Aurobindo, like his brother Manomohan, — they were, indeed, in the Horatian phrase par nobile fratrum, a noble pair of brothers, — had, as mentioned earlier, started writing English verse even during his stay in England. Several of the poems written by Sri Aurobindo between his eighteenth and twentieth year and a few written later were published as Songs to Myrtilla and Other Poems in 1895 at Baroda for private circulation only, and carried the inscription, "To my brother Manomohan Ghose these poems are dedicated". The authorised edition appeared in 1923 from Calcutta with the addition of Transiit, Non Periit, the commemoration piece on his grandfather, Rajnarain Bose, who died in 1899. We shall glance at some of these poems here before we follow Sri Aurobindo to Baroda.

A poet's first essays in verse are akin to promissory notes; they have some value, no doubt, — their "face value" as we might call it; but what is even more important is that they give the reader a foretaste of the future, open up vistas of possibility when the promissory notes would be fully redeemed at last. Sri Aurobindo's early adventures in English verse were thus the promissory notes of a millionaire confident of his credit. "No one with an ear for sound-values, an eye for apt images and a little ability to look below the surface," writes K.D. Sethna, "can fail to observe that his juvenilia bold just the right kind of promise.... And who can deny either music or imaginative subtlety to Sri Aurobindo when in his Songs to Myrtilla, written largely in his late teens under the influence of a close contact with the Greek Muse, he gives us piece after finely-wrought piece of natural magic?"'⁴⁴

"Juvenile" these poems may be, yet are they the "juvenile" poems of a truly exceptional talent that had won through a mastery of the classics of Greece and Rome the master-key that unlocked the sumless treasuries of Western culture.

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Sensitive to beauty in its diverse forms and intensities, he could respond to the authentic with his whole soul. Since early childhood he had felt a strong hatred and disgust for every kind of cruelty and oppression, and this feeling had but deepened and grown (more poignant in his years of adolescence and youth. Naturally enough, these early poems snap Sri Aurobindo in various emotional and intellectual attitudes and reveal also his tightening craftsmanship in verse, making a significant record of the education and ideas, imagination and feelings, engendered by a purely European culture. The derivative element is prominent enough, the names and lineaments and allusions appearing rather exotic to an Indian reader; but, then, knowing a§ he did at the time hardly anything about India and her culture, Sri Aurobindo couldn't have written in any other strain. In like manner, the poems on Indian themes the — Radha poems, for example, or those on Madhusudan and Bankim Chandra — were attempts to express his "first reactions to India and Indian culture after the return home and a first acquaintance with these things".⁴⁵ The literary echoes are certainly there, and in profusion, but these — whether Western or Indian — only enhance the poetic flavour; and the result always is very good poetry.

Songs to Myrtilla, the title-piece in the volume of that name, is cast in the form of a debate between Glaucus and Æthon, who expatiate on the attractions and felicities of night and day respectively. Glaucus'

Sweet is the night, sweet and cool

As to parched lips a running pool....

When earth is full of whispers, when

No daily voice is heard of men,

But higher audience brings

The footsteps of invisible things...

Pleasant 'tis then heart-overawed to lie

Alone with that clear moonlight and that listening sky....

is nearly met by Æthon's;

But day is sweeter; morning bright

Has put the stars out ere the light.. .⁴⁶*

It is a variation of the II Penseroso-L'Allegro colloquy, for like Milton, Sri Aurobindo was a classicist too, and a classicist when young cannot choose but see and hear, tie cannot choose but catch like the shower in the sunshine, dazzling rainbow his and present them for our edification and delight. These early poems

     * Æthon's words might recall Fitzgerald's:

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight.  

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of Sri Aurobindo's are the effusions of a rich mind burdened by an adolescent sensibility; they are sensuous and impassioned, and there are brilliant evocations of sound and colour as in the following passages from the same song-sequence. This is Æthon speaking:

Behold in emerald fire

The spotted lizard crawl

Upon the sun-kissed wall

And coil in tangled brake

The green and sliding snake

Under the red-rose briar... ⁴⁷

And this is Glaucus, votary of Night:

Love's feet were on the sea

When he dawned on me....

His rose-lit cheeks, his eyes' pale bloom

Were sorrow's anteroom;

His wings did cause melodious moan;

His mouth was like a rose o'erblown;

The cypress-garland of renown

Did make his shadowy crown... .⁴⁸

and here is Æthon again, on the claims of Love:

And I have ever known him wild

And merry as a child,

As roses red, as roses sweet,

The west wind in his feet,

Tulip-girdled, kind and bold,

With heartsease in his curls of gold,

Since in the silver mist

Bright Cymothea's lips I kissed,

Whose laughter dances like a gleam

Of sunlight on a hidden stream.. ,⁴⁹

Oh yes — oh dear yes — the lines trip merrily, glide along easily, the very conceits are pretty and convincing, and we are not, after all, put out by the company of the Florimels and Cymotheas and Myrtillas and Dryads who seem to people this strange and far country.

This is what has apparently happened: a supersensibility for Greek and an impeccable feeling for the nuances of English sound and rhythm have enabled the youthful Sri Aurobindo to invoke the blushful Hippocrene herself with infallible  

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success. What can be more sensuously Greek and reminiscently Keatsian than Night by the Sea, with its lilt and sparkle, and its suggestion of mystery and love's languor and romance:

Love, a moment drop thy hands;

Night within my soul expands.

Veil thy beauties milk-rose-fair

In that dark and showering hair.

Coral kisses ravish not

When the soul is tinged with thought....

Not we first nor we alone

Heard the might Ocean moan

By this treasure-house of flowers

In the sweet ambiguous hours....

Beauty pays her boon of breath

To thy narrow credit. Death,

Leaving a brief perfume; we

Perish also by the sea.⁵⁰

Didn't Keats say: "Ay, in the very temple of delight/Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine"? Live and perish, love and cease—  night and sea cover up everything. It is a long poem, but the trochaic measure and the regular rhyme-beat carry the reader along, past "soft narcissi's golden camp", "the widening East" and the "rose of Indian grain".

The same metrical proficiency can also be seen in poems like The Lover's Complaint and Love in Sorrow, neither the burden of classical allusion in the former nor the accents of romantic frustration that punctuate the latter should blind us to the reality of poignant grief that sustains the two lyrics as moving poetic utterances. The reader, however, is occasionally intrigued: what, for instance, could be the contextual relevance of these six lines:

For there was none who loved me, no, not one.

Alas, what was there that a man should love?

For I was misery's last and frailest son

And even my mother bade me hornless rove.

And I had wronged my youth and nobler powers

By weak attempts, small failures, waster hours.⁵¹

Whose "glorious beauty stained with gold" the poet will behold no more? Who is Nisa, and who is Mopsus for whom she has forsaken the lover in The Lover's complaint (based in the main on Virgil's Eighth Eclogue):  

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O plaintive, murmuring reed, renew thy strain;

O solace anguish yet again.

I thought Love soft as velvet sleep,

Sweeter than dews nocturnal breezes weep,

Cool as water in a murmuring pass

And shy as violets in the vernal grass,

But hard as Nisa's heart is he

And salt as the unharvestable sea.⁵²

It is unwise — and usually futile — to turn from poetry to poetolatry. The poems are, perhaps, just poems, temperamental effusions in terms of impassioned verse; or — who knows? — Sri Aurobindo has turned into image and myth his personal emotions and feelings on the eve of his departure from England.

Another early poem, the elegiac The Island Grave, opens magnificently:

Ocean is there and evening; the slow moan

Of the blue waves that like a shaken robe

Two heard together once, one hears alone.⁵³

Estelle is almost radiant with a spiritual glow, and foreshadows the maturer Sri Aurobindo:

Why do thy lucid eyes survey,

Estelle, their sisters in the milky way?

The blue heavens cannot see

Thy beauty nor the planets praise.

Blindly they walk their old accustomed ways.

Turn hither for felicity.

My body's earth thy vernal power declares,

My spirit is a heaven of thousand stars,

And all these lights are thine and open doors on thee.⁵⁴

Besides love and death and day and light and soul's immensity, Sri Aurobindo had other things too to occupy his thoughts, politics,—  for instance, and the career of poets and political leaders. Hic Jacet (Glasnevin Cemetery) and Charles Stewart Parnell (1891) are both vigorous expressions of Sri Aurobindo's political sensibility, and are immediately effective by reason of their clarity and strength. Like Macaulay's A Jacobite's Epitaph, Sri Aurobindo's Hic Jacet also achieves its severe beauty through sheer economy of words: Jacobean or Irish patriot, the end is the same:

Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear

O'er English dust. A broken heart lies here. (A Jacobite's Epitaph)  

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Patriots, behold your guerdon....

Where sits he?...

Beneath this stone

He lies: this guerdon only Ireland gave,

A broken heart and an unhonoured grave. (Hic Jacet)

The influence of Macaulay's poem on Sri Aurobindo must, however, have been unconscious, for he seems never to have read The Lays of Ancient Rome after early childhood; and A Jacobite's Epitaph, in particular, had made little impression on Sri Aurobindo, and he had not probably read it even twice.⁵⁵ Yet the parallelism is striking enough, and the two poems deserve to be read together.

The six lines on Parnell, again, have a pointed adequacy in phrasing, and their juxtaposition with The Lost Deliverer would be very suggestive. Parnell, even he — once most feared and most hated — even he was to prove but a "child of tragic earth"! No less deserving of praise is the metallic finish of this portrait of Goethe:

A perfect face amid barbarian faces,

A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme,

Traveller with calm, inimitable paces,

Critic with judgment absolute to all time,

A complete strength when men were maimed and weak,

German obscured the spirit of a Greek.⁵⁶

Admirer of Parnell and Goethe, lover of Greece and Ireland, young Sri Aurobindo wanted to lay deep the foundations of his faith, to plan and work out the details of his future course of action. Even when he was gripped by the march of events in Ireland, wasn't he thinking in the hinterland of his consciousness of his own country, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the insolence of office and the pangs of subjection — and of the things that needed to be done there before she could redeem herself in her own and in the eyes of the world?

Sri Aurobindo's nonage was over; he would be an exile in England no more. He was going back to India, — to India the Mother. He looked back at the past fourteen years, — years of study and striving, of loneliness and privation, of aspiration and partial fulfilment. During this period he had developed an attachment to English poetry and European though and literature, though not to England as a country. While his brother Manomohan had for a time actually looked upon "gland as his adopted country, Sri Aurobindo had never done so; and it was France — not England — that intellectually and emotionally fascinated Sri Aurobindo, not withstanding the fact that he had neither lived in it nor even seen it. Thus the thought of leaving England induced no real regrets in Sri Aurobindo. He had developed no sentimental attachment to the immediate past — his stay of fourteen years in England — and he had no misgivings about the future either. He had made but few friendships in England, and none very intimate comparable to

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Manomohan's with Laurence Binyon; Sri Aurobindo had, as a matter of fact, never found the mental atmosphere of England congenial to the movements of his mind and the tremors of his sensibility. Anyhow, he was leaving England, — but why had he ever been sent away by his Mother, — "Mother of might. Mother free" — to that distant country? Sri Aurobindo felt the flutter of unutterable thoughts. It is in his Envoi, which appears at the end of Songs to Myrtilla, that Sri Aurobindo casts one last look at the Western world that he is leaving and also thrills in anticipation of the beloved country he is returning to —

For in Sicilian olive-groves no more

Or seldom must my footprints now be seen,

Nor tread Athenian lanes, nor yet explore

Parnassus or thy voiceful shores, O Hippocrene.

Me from her lotus heaven Saraswati

Has called to regions of eternal snow

And Ganges pacing to the southern sea,

Ganges upon whose shores the flowers of Eden blow.⁵⁷

No more would be devote himself to Greek poetry as he had done during the past few years; no more would he exchange alexandrines and hexameters with the faded poets of ancient Greece and Rome; no more would he feel the heart-beats of European culture in their warmth and vivacity. That chapter was ended for good; and — "Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new!" It is significant too that Sri Aurobindo is already talking of the Ganges and of the "regions of eternal snow" rather than of Baroda or Narmada or Mount Abu. Baroda would be a steppingstone, convenient and welcome enough, but Sri Aurobindo's real work would embrace all India; and he seems to have known it — somehow very clearly glimpsed it — from the very outset.  

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