Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 9

Hour of God

I

Sri Aurobindo's decisive plunge into the maelstrom of Indian politics and his tempestuous involvement in it occupied a mere fraction of his life - a matter of three or four years. But they were to prove momentous years in India's history. A convenient breakdown would be -

July 1905-July 1906: The "partition of Bengal", the "Hour of God" that roused and united the people of Bengal and if India as a whole against their unwanted British rulers. This year was the transitionary period of Sri Aurobindo's silent withdrawal from Baroda and of the beginnings of his open participation in Bengal and national politics.

August 1906-August 1907: Sri Aurobindo in Calcutta as Principal of the newly started National College and as de facto editor of the Bande Mataram. The year climaxed in the first prosecution against Sri Aurobindo as the supposed editor of the paper, ending in his acquittal for want of proof that he was indeed the editor.

September 1907-April 1908: The first prosecution had pushed Sri Aurobindo from comparative obscurity to national eminence. He was now recognised as one of the four outstanding leaders of the "extremist" or Nationalist party, the other three being Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Bepin Chandra Pal. The split at the Surat Congress (December 1907) was followed by Sri Aurobindo's first Yogic realisation at Baroda, and his "Midlothian" campaign from Bombay to Calcutta. His articles in the Bande Mataram and his public speeches made him the pace-maker and tone-setter of the movement for India's freedom.

May 1908-May 1909: Sri Aurobindo's arrest in connection with the Muzzaferpore outrage and the Manicktolla bomb factory, his imprisonment in the Alipur jail, the second great Yogic realisation, the prolonged trial, and the honourable acquittal.

May 1909-February 1910: Sri Aurobindo emerged from prison a changed man with an accession of spiritual strength and a new serenity, edited the Karmayogin and the Dharma, and in response to an adesh, an inner command, left for Chandernagore in February 1910.

During the first year (1905-6), Sri Aurobindo was hardly known outside the small circle of his students at Baroda, and his friends and immediate associates in Baroda and elsewhere, but he was already a recognised power behind the scenes of political jostlings and joustings. During the second year (1906-7), he was more widely known (though mainly in Bengal), as professor and as editor and as spokesman of the nationalist party; it was the first prosecution that overnight made him an all-India 

Page 201

figure. During the third year (1907-8) - it was really eight months - he took an active part organising nationalist opinion and forcing the split at Surat, while his first Yogic realisation of Nirvana at Baroda gave a new turn to the quality and intensity of the whole tenor of his future life. During the fourth period (1908-9), Sri Aurobindo was in jail at Alipur, and while India was anxiously following the tortuous course of his trial, he had his marvellous sadhana in prison, saw God and experienced Him every moment, and came out at last, not only without any legal stain on his character, but also as a new man altogether, poised and purposeful and radiant, verily a man of God. The last phase of his political career, a period of eight or nine months, was the time when his actions and utterances had the impress of spirituality and when he thought and wrote and spoke and acted as one whose real political work was fast concluding - as one who was preparing for a long and unpredictable journey into realms hitherto uncharted and even unsuspected.

II

Let us now cover the ground of these three or four years a little more leisurely and with some greater attention to detail. First, then, about the "partition", and its author. Lord Curzon.

After a brilliant career at Eton and Oxford, Curzon had already made his mark in law, letters and politics - and travelled extensively in Central Asia - before he was appointed at the age of forty as Governor-General and Viceroy of India in 1899. His mind was set on the ultimate prize, the Prime Ministership of Great Britain, and of course he had no doubt that he had the requisite talents. He felt that, in the meantime, his talents should be put to vigorous use, not allowed to rust unburnished through ignominious desuetude. He had a mind of his own, and he took very seriously indeed his stewardship of the Indian subcontinent. He wouldn't, he decided, leave all initiative and decision to his officials; he would rule as well as reign. He brought the new administrative unit of North-West Frontier Province into existence, the better to contain discontent and disorder; even so there was renewed trouble, but it was firmly put down. To check Russian influence in Tibet, he sent an expeditionary force under Sir Francis Younghusband who imposed the Treaty of Lhasa in 1904, which was acquiesced in by China two years later, both India and China agreeing to respect the sovereignty of Tibet. Curzon also tried to effect improvement in every branch of the administration, regardless of public opinion or official opposition. He reduced the salt tax twice and made the lower incomes free of tax, and generally brought a measure of economy and efficiency into financial administration. He settled the question of Berar with the Nizam, did much to preserve ancient monuments, and gave some thought to the problem of education. He was a man very liberally endowed by nature, he had an earnest and ardent temperament, and he didn't spare himself. But he was a little too sure of the

Page 202

infallibility of his own conclusions, he couldn't see that Britain's rule in India even at its best was an abnormal thing bound to be resented by India, and he was therefore intolerant of criticism however reasonably couched, and he didn't hesitate to make contemptuous references to Indian leaders and even to the Indian character. He wished to crush the spirit of nationalism, and he was surprised that the only result of his actions was to inject a new vigour into the movement. Curzon became more and more an embittered man.

In Curzon's time, the seat of the Government of India was at Calcutta, and Bengal was under a Lieutenant-Governor- not, like the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, under a Governor. Bengal had always been in the vanguard .of the Indian renaissance, and some of the finest, some of the most fearless, some of the most intrepid minds of the time - patriots, poets, lawyers, editors, educationists - were then concentrated at Calcutta. Curzon could do nothing, say nothing, but it was noticed and commented upon, and criticised when necessary. For an Englishman, Curzon alas! had little sense of humour, and he was thus quick to take offence and feel his august majesty wounded. He concluded that the free spirit of criticism, the dangerous sanctions of nationalism, the newly sharpened weapons of public association, debate and agitation must all be contained even if they couldn't be wholly suppressed. Didn't the Government - and he was the Government - know what was good for the people? How then did the "leaders" of the Congress - or why should they - come into the picture?

The old administrative divisions were no doubt haphazard contrivances, the result largely of accretions from successive campaigns of aggression and annexation; and the sprawling 'presidencies' were justifiable neither in terms of geography nor the imperatives of economics. They had grown, or rather fanned out, from the island of Bombay, the Fort St. George in Madras and Fort St. William in Calcutta. In the nineteenth century, the 'Bengal' administration had included present-day West Bengal and East Bengal (Bangla Desh), and Bihar (including Chota Nagpur), Assam and Orissa. Even when Assam was formed (along with some Bengali border areas like Sylhet, Cachar and Goalpara) as a separate province, residuary Bengal - with its population of nearly 80 millions looking up to Calcutta for leadership in politics, education, commerce, industry and administration - remained the principal constituent of the British Empire in India. Here was Curzon's chance to do something spectacular! In 1903, H.H. Risley of the Government of India - obviously on Curzon's initiative - put forward to the Government of Bengal a proposal to detach several districts from East and North Bengal, and with their addition to Assam to constitute the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. This was not motivated - like the later formation of Sind and Orissa, or the Post-Independence linguistic reorganisation - by the desire to forge linguistic unity in individual administrative units. The ostensible plea was administrative convenience or viability. But it was clear to almost everybody that the move had a more sinister purpose as well. It was given out that such a redistribution would help the "slim population - heavily concentrated in the districts to be separated from

Page 203

Bengal - to get a fairer deal than under the unwieldy administration centered in Calcutta. This sudden solicitude for the Muslims was rather suspicious, and it seemed more likely that the aim of the proposed partition was really to strike a blow at the heart of Bengali nationalism by dividing the nation itself into two. At any rate that was how it appeared at the time - and not without reason either - to the people of both West and East Bengal. Curzon himself hastened to make a tour of East Bengal and tried to win the Muslim over to the partition idea by putting it out that, in the new province, they would be a powerful community and thus come to their own at last. This aspect of the matter was later to be underlined by the egregious Sir Bamfylde Fuller, a senior civilian appointed to the lieutenant-governorship of the new province, who deliberately adopted a pro-Muslim (or anti-Hindu) attitude by referring to the two communities as his two wives, the Muslim being the favourite one! Both Curzon and Fuller were to come to grief not long after, and resign their posts and retreat to England, and the partition itself was to be annulled in due course. And yet the Curzon-Riseley-Fuller combination did succeed in sowing the seed that - like the proverbial Dragon's teeth - was ultimately to achieve, forty years later, a greater evil than what even they had intended or hoped for: the ill-fated, tragic and ever to be mourned partition of the country itself into India and Pakistan. Criticism of the proposed partition of Bengal was not slow in expressing itself. It is said that the people of the affected areas organised some 500 protest meetings during December 1903 and January 1904 alone,¹ and the tidal waves of this agitation were presently to overwhelm all Bengal, and the effects were to be felt in almost every part of the country. As Sir Henry Cotton, who had retired after serving the Bengal Government under seven Lieutenant-Governors, wrote in the Manchester Guardian of 5 April 1904:

The idea of the severance of the oldest and most populous and wealthy portion of Bengal and the division of its people into two arbitrary sections has given such a shock to the Bengali race, and has roused such a feeling amongst them, as was never known before. The idea of being severed from their own brethren, friends and relations... is so intolerable to the people of the affected tracts that public meetings have been held in almost every town and market-place in East Bengal, and the separation scheme has been universally and unanimously condemned.²

Again, as President of the Bombay session (December 1904) of the Indian National Congress, Sir Henry castigated the British administration in India and described their ignoration of the mounting opposition to the proposed partition as "a most arbitrary and unsympathetic evidence of irresponsible and autocratic statesmanship".

When Curzon saw that the idea of partition was most reprehensible to the people immediately concerned and the voice of protest was raised vehemently against the scheme - that the matter was even raised in Parliament by a member, Herbert Roberts - he lay low for a while, then suddenly, having in the meantime secured the consent of the Secretary of State, he had the Partition Act passed by  

Page 204

the Legislative Council on 20 July 1905 at Simla with only the official members present, and issued the Gazette Notification on 29 September, the operation to become an accomplished fact on 16 October 1905. Curzon had been given a second term as Viceroy in 1904, but acute differences developed between him and Lord Kitchener the Commander-in-Chief, and on the secretary of State upholding Kitchner's point of view, Curzon resigned in a huff and was promptly succeeded by Lord Minto - but the partition had already been effected. Curzon had sowed the wind, but Minto had to reap the consequent whirlwind.

The day partition became an "accomplished fact" was observed as a day of mourning in both the sundered parts of Bengal. As vividly described by Henry Nevinson in his The New Spirit in India:

On that day... thousands and thousands of Indians rub dust or ashes on their foreheads: at dawn they bathe in silence as at a sacred fast; no meals are eaten; the shops in cities and the village bazars are shut; women refuse to cook; they lay aside their ornaments; men bind each other's wrists with a yellow string as a sign that they will never forget the shame; and the whole day is passed in resentment, mourning, and the hunger of humiliation. In Calcutta vast meetings are held, and the errors of the Indian Government are exposed with eloquent patriotism.

Other British observers and commentators have since testified how the act of partition, far from stemming the tide of nationalism (as Curzon had hoped it would achieve), merely proved the fuse that set ablaze the nation-wide conflagration of anti-British agitation. "I am bound to say," admitted John Morley the new Secretary of State in the House of Commons, "nothing was ever worse done in disregard to the feeling and opinion of the majority of the people concerned." Curzon's biographer. Lord Ronaldshay, later described the act of partition as "a subtle attack upon the growing solidarity of Bengali nationalism", and Ramsey MacDonald the future prime Minister went further still and characterised the measure, in his book The Awakening in India (1910), as more than a blunder, for "it was an indictable offence. Lord Curzon's personal feelings entered into it in a most reprehensible way. He devised it, as the evidence shows most conclusively, to pay off scores".*

Furthermore, both within and outside Bengal, even so called "Moderate" opinion felt scandalised and gave bold utterance to the sense of shock and resentment. As Surendranath Banerjee put it years later:

We felt that we had been insulted, humiliated and tricked. We felt that the whole of our future was at stake, and that it was a deliberate blow aimed at the growing solidarity and self-consciousness of the Bengali-speaking population. ... The Partition would be fatal to our political progress and to that close union between Hindus and Muhammadans upon which the prospects of Indian advancement so largely depended.³

*The extent of the new province was 106,500 square miles, with a population made up of 10 lion Muslims and 12 million Hindus. It is, perhaps, arguable today that the earlier partition, had it been accepted, might have prevented the more disastrous partition of 1947!

Page 205

Sir Henry Cotton's words of caution at the Bombay Congress (1904) having gone unheeded, it was inevitable that the next Congress at Benaras (1905), following close upon the "settled fact", should take a somewhat more aggressive line. Minto had just displaced Curzon, and there was guarded expectation of a reversal of the old policy. Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Prince of the Moderates, was in the presidential chair, and he could hardly avoid making a reference to Curzon and the evil legacy he had left behind:

...how true it is that to everything there is an end! Thus even the Viceroyalty of Lord Curzon has come to a close!... For a parallel to such an administration, we must, I think, go back to the times of Aurangazeb in the history of our own country....

 A cruel wrong has been inflicted on our bengali brethren.... The scheme of Partition, concocted in the dark and carried out in the face of the fiercest opposition that any Government measure has encountered during the last half a century, will always stand as a complete illustration of the worst features of the present system of bureaucratic rule... it is difficult to speak in terms of due restraint of Lord Curzon's conduct throughout this affair.

But Gokhale also found a "soul of goodness" in the evil of partition, and read a message of bright hope for the future:

The tremendous upheaval of popular feeling... will constitute a landmark in the history of our national progress. For the first time since British rule began, all sections of the Indian community, without distinction of caste or creed, have been moved, by a common impulse and without the stimulus of external pressure, to act together in offering resistance to a common wrong.

When it came to constructive proposals, however, Gokhale could hardly hardly go the whole hog with the nationalists. Swadeshi was all right, of course, but "boycott", and of British goods alone? The very word had "unsavoury associations" for Gokhale! As for the national goal, like Cotton who had pleaded in the previous year for a "United States of India" within the British Empire, Gokhale too thought that whatever "advance" India sought "must be within the Empire itself, and such advance could only be "gradual". No wonder Tilak pulled Sri Aurobindo out of the pandal and expressed his wholehearted contempt for the Reformists and Gradualists of the Moderate camp.

III

What were Sri Aurobindo's reactions to the Curzonian decision to partition Bengal?

We have seen how, quite ten years earlier in 1893, Sri Aurobindo had exposed in his Indu Prakash articles, albeit anonymously, the shallowness, weakness and puerility of the politics of the Indian National Congress, - the politics of pettifoggery, prayer-mongering and perpetual petitioning. That had proved pretty

Page 206

strong meat at the time, and Sri Aurobindo had accordingly withdrawn into his shell cultivated poetry, and probed other possibilities. From 1899 onwards, he had begun the secret work of organising revolution in Bengal which was duly to take all India in its stride. For Sri Aurobindo the issue always was Indian independence, the recovery of India's soul, and the galvanisation of the prostrate body of Mother India. He had himself become a member of the Revolutionary Party with its base in Western India, and he had given the oath to others (including his brother Barin), he had enlisted some high Government officials (like C.C. Dutt) to the cause, he had toured Bengal secretly, he had watched with some satisfaction the stretching out of the tentacles of the revolutionary movement to the remotest villages of Bengal, and he had even tried through Yoga to perfect the instrument that was one day to be wholly consecrated to the service of the Mother. In the meantime, he was a Professor of literature at the Baroda College, and he was watching the shifting political scene and he was waiting for the divinely ordained moment when his open intervention would become imperative. He was like a tiger poised in readiness to leap upon its prey among the ominous silences of the forest at night, but the prey had yet to assume a recognisable form and spring into view.

To all outward appearances, Sri Aurobindo's life in Baroda pursued its even course. Nevertheless, some of the images of his home life at Baroda, etched from memory years later by his Bengali companion Dinendra Kumar Roy in Aurobindo Prasange, are themselves significant and bespeak a power containing itself with effort, a power waiting, watching - with more than human concentration and more than the gods' casual commitment to the service of man:

Though an inflexible will showed at the comers of his lips, there was not the slightest trace in his heart of any worldly ambition or the common human selfishness; there was only the longing, rare even among the gods, of sacrificing himself for the relief of human suffering....

For one hour every evening, he would pace up and down the verandah of his house with brisk steps.... He was fond of music, but did not know how to sing or play on any musical instrument.⁴

When the notorious Risley Letter first forced upon the attention of the public Curzon's unscrupulous move to divine the Bengali nation, Sri Aurobindo welcomed it because this calculated affront at least would knock the people out of "their lethargy and sting them into resolute action. For Sri Aurobindo (as it was to "is secret revolutionary party), the issue then as always was, not just the prevention or annulment of the hated partition, but rather the creation of a tempo of resistance in the country that would make British rule impossible - that would wee the British to make a virtue of necessity and withdraw from India, may be without a sanguinary fight, or more probably after a brief spell of guerilla warfare. Henry Nevinson has left a record of his impressions of Sri Aurobindo at the tune:

...a youngish man, I should think still under thirty. Intent dark eyes looked

Page 207

from his thin, clear-cut face with a gravity that seemed immovable.... Grave with intensity, careless of fate or opinion, and one of the most silent men I have known, he was of the stuff that dreamers are made of, but dreamers who will act their dreams, indifferent to the means.

What did Sri Aurobindo think of the partition? Sri Aurobindo welcomed it! It had brought a breath of rajasic fresh air into the old tamasic atmosphere. Hence Sri Aurobindo thought of the scheme, however diabolical in its motivation, "as the greatest blessing that had happened to India. No other measure could have stirred national feeling so deeply or roused it so suddenly from the lethargy of the previous years.... Indignation had again created patriotism when apparently it was dead."⁵

Again, when Sri Aurobindo was with Jatin Banerjee, Barindra and Abinash Bhattacharya, and the news was conveyed to him that the Partition Act was being passed by the Legislative Council, Sri Aurobindo merely said: "This is a very fine opportunity. Carry on the anti-partition agitation powerfully. We will get many workers for the movement."⁶ The partition was but one move in a long war, and the anti-partition movement was to be a means of mobilising public opinion on the more fundamental issue of Swaraj or complete national independence unshackled by notion of gradualism or colonial self-government. Sri Aurobindo attended, as we saw earlier, both the Bombay and Benares sessions of the Congress, and his pamphlet No Compromise, amateurishly set up and secretly printed at dead of night and distributed before daybreak, was meant to steel the hearts of the Nationalists and make them refuse to yield to the sweet and plausible persuasions of the Moderates. Unruffled and self-possessed, utterly dedicated to the service of the Mother, willing to be carried forward by the heavy current of nationalist fervour suddenly released by the Time Spirit, destined to incarnate in his life-movement the energy of impulsion and the sense of direction of awakened Mother India, Sri Aurobindo at this historic moment was "lone, limitless, nude, immune". Silent and purposeful and eagle-eyed and resilient, Sri Aurobindo flitted behind the scenes when occasion demanded - now at the Congress session, now at the Taj Mahal Hotel at Bombay to meet G.D. Madgaokar of the Civil Service and his associates to discuss the prospects of revolution in Gujarat, now lost in the ocean of Calcutta humanity scouring the underground waters of discontent and revolutionary idealism.

During 1905-6, Sri Aurobindo was ostensibly in the service of the Baroda College. From March 1905 to February 1906, he acted as Principal on a consolidated salary of Rs.. 710 per month. When a public meeting was held in Baroda in September to protest against the Bengal partition, Sri Aurobindo was present there - though he did not make a speech. At Thana he met at his friend C. C. Dutt's his brother-in-law Subodh Mullick, who presently became one of Sri Aurobindo's staunchest friends and closest colleagues in political as well as revolutionary work. When partition became a fact on 16 October 1905, Sri Aurobindo knew that the "Hour of God" had come indeed, and he was in Calcutta for a considerable time,

Page 208

helping to organise from behind the swadeshi and boycott agitations that were to rove such a phenomenal success in the months and years to come. In his inspired article entitled "The Hour of God" Sri Aurobindo writes:

There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being... when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny....

Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call. But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment....

In the hour of God cleanse thy soul of all self-deceit and hypocrisy and vain self-flattering that thou mayst look straight into thy spirit and hear that which summons it. .. .being pure cast aside all fear; for the hour is often terrible, a fire and a whirlwind and a tempest, a treading of the winepress of the wrath of God; but he who can stand up in it on the truth of his purpose is he who shall stand; even though he fall, he shall rise again; even though he seem to pass on the wings of the wind, he shall return. Nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear; for it is the hour of the unexpected.⁷

It is difficult to say when exactly this was written, but it certainly breathes the fierce spirit of Bhawani Mandir and is vibrant with the electric fervour and faith generated during 1905-6. The "partition" was truly "a moment in time and of time", yet a moment when (as T.S. Eliot might put it) "time was made through that' moment".

It was a time of unprecedented mass agitation against the ruling colonial power. "Swadeshi" became a clarion call, "boycott" resounded like a salvo. Piles of British textiles went up in flames in market-places, on roads, and street-crossings; in crowded public meetings the "National Proclamation" was passed with acclaim and the "Swadeshi Vow" was administered with something akin to religious "fanaticism". Priests are said to have refused to officiate at marriage ceremonies if either bride or bridegroom wore foreign (especially British) clothes. The picketing of shops dealing with foreign cloth became an exciting - if sometimes an explosive - item of the programme of protest. In short, everything British - even British salt and sugar, British shoes and suits, British chemicals and drugs, even the educational and judicial institutions modelled after the British - became anathema to a people maddened and enraged by what must have appeared as the cruel and wanton insolence behind the "partition" operation. So successful indeed was e agitation in its first flush that for a time the Calcutta warehouses were full of fabrics that couldn't be sold. The Englishman of Calcutta soon felt concerned enough to warn the Government against acquiescing in the "boycott" programme, for it must "more surely ruin the British connection with India than an armed revolution". The students in schools and colleges, of course, were bound to be drawn quickly into the vortex, and they were prompt to take a leading part in the

Page 209

campaigns of boycott and picketing and defying Government's prohibitive orders. This naturally led to more repression, which again only bred still more defiance, and so the spiral of repression-defiance-repression curved higher and higher and the whole air came to be charged increasingly and menacingly with the revolutionary temper.

Recapitulating these events two years later, Sri Aurobindo wrote: The unpremeditated and spontaneous declaration of the Boycott was the declaration of the country's recovery to life from its death-sworn of centuries, of her determination to live her own life - not for a master, but for herself and for the world. All was changed. Patriotism, the half-understood catchword of platform oratory, passed out of its confinement into the heart of the people, - the priest and the prince and the peasant alike - giving to each that power of sacrifice.... And the demonstrations of the sixteenth of October joined in by the Hindu and the Mahomedan, the Buddhist, the Jain and the Sikh, the police and the people, through the mystic compulsion of an instinctive fraternity, was the enchanting prevision of the India to be. Such a vision is vouchsafed only to the man or the nation that stands on the threshold of emancipation.... It remains but a moment, but those that have seen it can never forget or rest; they pursue the glory... till the vision is reached, realised and reinstalled in all the beauty of its first appearance.⁸

In the "Hour of God", compact of challenge, peril, promise and fulfilment, the Vision of a New World sustained the nameless numberless votaries who had dared everything, sacrificed everything. God had led them. God had (it seemed to many) taken a human form to vivify in his own life, in the flaming brazier that was his personality, in the sharp arrow-head of his unquailing leadership, the glow and the shape of the destiny unfolding, and the direction and the pace of the preordained change from the dying old to the dawning new. "There is a Divinity that has been shaping her ends - no mere might of man," Sri Aurobindo's article concludes, "for nothing but the renovating touch of Divinity can account for the difference between now and then, between the days before and after the Boycott."

There were leaders enough thrown up by the times, men of patriotism, idealism, and genius for suffering and sacrifice, men with the birth-mark of the fatality of martyrdom, men capable of swaying the multitudes and making them willingly canter to a possible holocaust at the altar of the Motherland - yet, even in that galaxy, Sri Aurobindo was a star apart, a born chief, a being who both summed up the ardours, agonies and aspirations of the time and also somehow stood above them, the Executant and the Witness Spirit at once. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in an article on "Historical Impressions"⁹:

There are times when a single personality gathers up the temperament of an epoch or a movement and by simply existing ensures its fulfilment. ...

Without the man the moment is a lost opportunity; without the moment the man is a force inoperative. The meeting of the two changes the destinies of nations....

Page 210

Every great flood of action needs a human soul for its centre, an embodied point of the Universal Personality from which to surge out upon others.

It hardly mattered that Sri Aurobindo had a name, a job, a salary, a distinctive personality, certain human affiliations - a brother, a sister, a wife, - an adhesion to a political group (the Nationalists) outside and to the secret Revolutionary Party. These labels and these terms of reference were there no doubt, but already - even  905 - he was emancipated from the cribbing and cabinning confusions of egoistic perversion and separativity. He could recognise the "Hour of God'' when it stridently rang itself into the ambiguous present, and he also incarnated in himself the will and the way of God during those months of singular happenings sixty-five years ago. From behind a veil of night he seemed still to cheer his men:

A little more and the new life's doors

Shall be carved in silver light

With its aureate roof and mosaic floors

In a great world bare and bright.¹⁰

IV

It was mentioned in an earlier chapter (III.vii) that, following his marriage to Mrinalini Bose in 1901, Sri Aurobindo went with her and his sister, Sarojini, to Naini Tal; and after their return to Baroda, Barin also joined them some time later. The next few years were the period of Sri Aurobindo's increasing association with secret revolutionary activity, practice of Yoga and steady withdrawal from the impulsions and imperatives of the average human mentality grounded in intractable egoism. This was not the kind of life that a beautiful young girl still in her teens and brought up in the sophistication of a Brahmo School would have expected. He had to be separated from her frequently, and at times for fairly long periods, and the range and altitude of his interests and preoccupations were unfortunately inaccessible to the simple girl full of tender human qualities who had come to share the life of her husband. Sarojini of course was an understanding and helpful companion and a source of considerable solace. But the fact that Sri Aurobindo was far off and far above her, that the distance was but increasing with the years, must have caused acute discomfort to Mrinalini; and doubtless there were not wanting persons who specialised in dropping hints to her, and putting pressure upon her, and trying to force the issue between her and her husband. The year 1905 was crucial in many respects and not least in respect of the relations between Sri Aurobindo and his wife.

The question is sometimes posed why Sri Aurobindo married at all, if he had no intention of leading what passes for "normal" family life. There have been others too, for example Gautama Siddhartha and Confucius and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. If there was to be a "change" soon afterwards, why did they marry

Page 211

at all in the first instance? Answering the correspondent who ventured to put this question, Sri Aurobindo wrote disarmingly:

Perfectly natural - they marry before the change - then the change comes and the marriage belongs to the past self, not to the new one.... Do you think that Buddha or Confucius or myself were born with a prevision that they or I would take to the spiritual life? So long as one is in the ordinary consciousness, one lives the ordinary life - when the awakening and the new consciousness come, one leaves it....¹¹

This was in 1936, nearly eighteen years after Mrinalini's death. But in 1905, when she was at Calcutta and Sri Aurobindo was at Baroda, letters passed between them, and the world would have probably known nothing about them; but some of his letters, written originally in Bengali, were seized by the police during the house-searches in 1908 and produced later in court at the time of the trial in the Alipur case. One of these letters, dated 30 August 1905, is of unique importance in the life-history of Sri Aurobindo and it also throws some needed light on his relationship with his wife during this critical period.

"Dearest Mrinalini" the letter begins, and is apparently a reply to one from" her dated 24th August. Her parents have suffered a bereavement (the death of a' son), and they are sorrow-stricken. Sri Aurobindo can offer no palliative (who; can?), for sorrow is, dukkha is the way of the world:

Seeking happiness in the world inevitably leads one to find suffering in the midst of that happiness, for suffering is always intertwined with happiness. This law holds good not only in regard to the desire for children, but it embraces all sorts of worldly desires.¹²

There is then some reference to a remittance of money for her expenses; he will  send her Rs. 20 next month.

We are soon launched upon the mainstream of this truly amazing letter. "Now, let me tell you about that matter". What "matter"? Evidently, in her letter of 24th August, she had remonstrated about his unconventional way of life. Without any beating about the bush, he proceeds to write with complete candour about himself. She must have realised by then that her destiny was linked with that of a "very strange person" - an uncommon person with "extraordinary ideas, uncommon efforts, extraordinary high aspirations". What do "ordinary" people think of these "extraordinary" things? Can they possibly understand what is truly beyond them:

They label all these as madness, but if the mad man succeeds in the field of  'action, then instead of calling him a lunatic, they call him a great man, a man of genius. But how many succeed in their efforts? Out of a thousand persons only five or six are extraordinary, and out of these five or six one succeeds.

Then Sri Aurobindo states as a self-evident fact that "it is very unfortunate for a woman to be married to a mad man; for all the hopes of women are limited to the joys and the agonies in the family. A mad man would not bring happiness to his wife - he would only inflict suffering". This is the stalemate in the relationship between Sri Aurobindo and Mrinalini. His pull towards the higher life, her attraction 

Page 212

to normal family life: how is the stalemate to be resolved? What has Hindu Dharma to say about it?

The uncommon, the exceptional, the unique had to be fostered; they were the salt of the earth. But the unpredictable genius put a great strain upon his wife. Not for her the primrose path, not for her the joys and agonies of family life! The Rishis, however, have given this code of conduct to the wife:

Know that, for you, the husband is the supreme guru; this and nothing else is the only mantra. The wife is the husband's co-partner in the practice of dharma. She will help him, advise him and encourage him in the work he chooses for his dharma; she will obey him as God, feel happy in his happiness and suffer in his suffering.

The new "so-called cultured Dharma" is supposed to give woman the right to go her own way, if necessary in opposition to her husband's; but Hindu Dharma has a different notion of the wife's duties. "That you have married a lunatic," says Sri Aurobindo, "is a fruit of faulty actions of your previous life." She has to come to terms with this situation, either by "blindly" following his way of life - or, "swayed by the opinions of others", dismissing him as a mad man! He cannot be held back, for he needs must rush headlong in the direction his daemon shows him. What will she do, then? Stand aside to weep and wail, - or "join him in his run and try to become the mad wife to match the mad husband", as Gandhari blinded herself with a piece of cloth around her eyes to be able to live with blind Dhritarashtra? "Mad" he may be in the world's eyes; but when a mad person achieves the thing his mind is set on, the same world will acclaim him as a "great" man. It is true Sri Aurobindo has not yet reached his goal, he has not even seriously and regularly thrown himself into his chosen work. But perhaps the day is not far off when the guerdon would be his - and shouldn't his wife stand by his side now, truly a sahadharmini, verily her husband's Shakti?

Sri Aurobindo proceeds to inform his wife that he is in the grip of three mighty convictions - mad ideas, the world will call them! - three obsessions, three manias, three madnesses, three supreme frenzies! Firstly, it is Sri Aurobindo's firm belief that all his possessions - "all the virtue, talent, the higher education and knowledge and the wealth God has given me" - are his only on trust, they really belong to God. Out of his earnings he could keep for himself no more than the barest minimum, the rest must be spent on dharmakarya. "If I spend all on myself, for personal comfort, for luxury, then I am a thief." So far he has returned only two annas in the rupee, or one-eighth of his income, to God - how imperfect the account he has rendered to Him! It is easy enough to give money to one's wife or one's sister, but "in these hard days, the whole country is seeking refuge at my door"; he must accordingly look upon all the thirty crores of Indians as his brothers and sisters. To live for oneself alone is not wise; and "half of the life has already been wasted; even an animal feels gratified in feeding itself and its family". It is Sri Aurobindo's duty - it is the condition under which wealth and talent have flowed from God to him - to do all that lies in his power to relieve the abysmal

Page 213

misery of the people of his country. Let us eat and dress like simple people, he tells her, "and buy what is really essential, and give the rest to the Divine".

Secondly, Sri Aurobindo desires with his whole heart to see God - see Him face to face, experience Him - however difficult the journey, and however lone the way. Popular religion has made God a formula, prayer a routine, godliness a show. Sri Aurobindo has no use for this kind of religion. But if God exists - and He does! - there must be a means of confronting Him tête-à-tête experiencing Him; the Hindu scriptures say that God too can be seen and experienced, and prescribe certain disciplines for the attainment of that end. "I have begun to observe them," says Sri Aurobindo, "and within a month I have been able to ascertain that the words of the Hindu Dharma are not untrue." Will not she his wife, will she not also keep abreast of him - at least follow him if she cannot come alongside of him - on his Godward journey? But nobody can force her to the path; it will be for her alone to decide what she will do.

Thirdly, there is the madness of his relationship with the country of his birth, Mother India:

...whereas others regard the country as an inert piece of matter and know it as the plains, the fields, the forests, the mountains and the rivers, I know my country as the Mother, I worship her and adore her accordingly. What would a son do when a demon, sitting on his mother's breast, prepared to drink her blood? Would he sit down content to take his meals or go on enjoying himself in the company of his wife and children, or would he rather run to the rescue of his mother? I know I have the strength to uplift this fallen race; not a physical strength, I am not going to fight with a sword or a gun, but with the power of knowledge....

He will do it, not by kshatratej, but by virtue of his brahmatej. It is his mahavrata, mighty vow, and he is resolved to carry it out. Nor is this a sudden whim or passing mood:

I was born with it, it is in my very marrow. God sent me to the earth to accomplish this great mission. At the age of fourteen the seed of it had begun to sprout and at eighteen it had been firmly rooted and become unshakable.

Will she not, she his own wife, stand by his side and be a source of encouragement and strength to him? Or will she diminish her husband's power by succumbing to the lure of sophistication? It is no answer to say that, being but a simple woman lacking intelligence and will power, she cannot possibly keep step with him. "There is a simple solution for it - take refuge in the Divine, step on to the path of God-realisation." Giving up all fear, putting her implicit trust in God in a mood of absolute self-surrender, she, even she an apparently weak woman, can dare and achieve much. Together they can then start fulfilling God's aims:

And if you have faith in me, and listen to what I say instead of listening to others, I can give you my force which would not be reduced (by giving) but would, on the contrary, increase. We say that the wife is the shakti of the husband, that means that the husband sees his own reflection in the wife, finds

Page 214

the echo of his noble aspiration in her and thereby redoubles his force.

Let her give up the common attractions of a worldly life and follow him: "we have come to the world to do God's work, let us begin it"..

Towards the close of the letter, Sri Aurobindo tells Mrinalini that she is "too simple" - too ready to "listen to all that people say" - and also that she has been infected to some extent by the spirit of the times, by her association with the Brahmo school. But her real nature will blossom if only she will trust in God and seek strength from Him. And she should always offer this prayer to Him: "May I not come in the way of my husband's life, and his ideals, and in his path to God-realisation; may I become his helper and his instrument". And the letter concludes with the appeal: "Will you do it?"

In this remarkable letter, a letter addressed to his wife "Dearest Mrinalini", a letter breathing love of the community of thirty crores of Indian humanity, and love of God and love of the country, a letter pleading, earnestly pleading, for his wife's total identification with him in his triune adventure of love for Man, God and Country, in this letter Sri Aurobindo has set the whole emotion of love to an orchestration that includes the divers strains of man and wife, the community, God and country, thereby making love, not the romantic tinsel it is in novels and cinemas, not the war of sexes it is in D. H. Lawrence, not a laborious exercise in egoistic domesticity that it is with most married couples, but an enlargement and emancipation of the self, a communion with bigger realities, a thrilled and ecstatic adoration and service of the community, of God, of country - of God in the community and the country. Here, again, what is perhaps particularly significant in Sri Aurobindo's attitude is the identification of the Mother in the geographical entity spotted with mountains and hills, veined with rivers and streams, and shaded with forests and plains. Sri Aurobindo always saw this spiritual reality of the Mother behind the physical body of the Indian sub-continent. One of his distinguished pupils, K.M. Munshi, has recorded how Sri Aurobindo once pointed to a wall-map of India and called it Bharat Mata's, Mother India's, portrait. The geography was the body of the Mother: the people were the cells that made the living tissues: the languages and literatures were the Mother's memory and speech: the spirit of the nation's culture was Her living soul: and the nation's freedom and happiness Her only salvation! "Behold Bharat as a living Mother," Sri Aurobindo had said, "meditate upon Her and worship Her in the ninefold way of Bhakti!" ¹³ Again, in 1933, in reply to Nirodbaran's query whether the expression "mother" applied to India was the utter truth or only a poetic or patriotic sentiment, Sri Aurobindo wrote in reply: "My dear sir, I am not a materialist. If I had seen India as only a geographical area with a number of more or less interesting or uninteresting people in it, I would hardly have gone out of my way to do all that for the said area."

In an article, "The Morality of Boycott", Sri Aurobindo returned to the theme of love in politics and as related to the adoration and worship of the country as the Mother.

Love has a place in politics, but it is the love of one's country, for one's countrymen,

Page 215

 for the glory, greatness and happiness of the race, the divine ananda of self-immolation for one's fellows, the ecstasy of relieving their sufferings the joy of seeing one's blood flow for country and freedom, the bliss of union in death with the fathers of the race. The feeling of almost physical delight in the touch of the mother-soil, of the winds that blow from Indian seas, of the rivers that stream from Indian hills, in the hearing of Indian speech, music, poetry, in the familiar sights, sounds, habits, dress, manners of our Indian life this is the physical root of that love.¹⁴

Much of the language of "the body's rapture", much of the poetry of romantic love, is reproduced here, but all is transferred to another level: love, and adoration, of the country and sacrifice on her behalf - delight of existence in the country's munificence of beauty and variety, burning laceration because of the maladies and difficulties that have now overtaken her, and the ultimate ecstasy in the orgasmic finality of resurrection-in-death in the holocaust of martyrdom. No wonder Ramsay MacDonald, when he met Sri Aurobindo and heard him expound his philosophy and theology of patriotism, felt quite taken aback and confused but also duly impressed: "He was far more a mystic than a politician. He saw India seated on a temple throne.... The matripuja - the worship of the Mother - has become a political rite.... He returns to his Gods and to the faith of his country, for there is no India without its faith... ,"¹⁵

V

From Sri Aurobindo's letter of 30 August 1905, it is clear he was engaged in sadhana at the time and was making progress in it; also that he had not yet entered his "field of action... fully", meaning political and revolutionary action. He had one foot in Baroda, one in Calcutta, but certainly his mind was with his associates in Bengal. In another of his letters to his wife, there is a reference to Madhavrao (a nephew of Khasirao Jadhav) being sent to Europe presumably to get military training, secure arms and learn about the making of explosives. Some time later, another also - Hemachandra Kanungo - was sent to Europe for the same purpose. What with one thing and another, there were numerous calls upon his resources: "I have spent a lot in the Swadeshi movement and I have another work yet to be done which requires enormous wealth."¹⁶

In December 1905, at the Benares Congress, Sri Aurobindo made his presence felt without, perhaps, actually participating in the open debates. Gokhale the President of the session was not in favour of extending boycott to the whole country, but at least its use as a weapon against the bureaucracy in Bengal was acknowledged. On Swadeshi, however, there was universal agreement; and, besides, the Congress could hardly ignore the new heightened urgency in the discussions. and the mood of anger and exasperation with which the Nationalists answered the air of prudence and expostulation on the part of the Moderates. Although it was

Page 216

mainly from the Maharashtra and Punjab contingents of delegates alone that the Bengali ginger-group received positive support, anybody could see that the Congress wouldn't remain the same much longer.

From Benares, Sri Aurobindo returned to Baroda, but a month later, in February 1906, he took privilege leave for two months, to which he attached the summer vacation and spent the whole period in Bengal. On 14 April, he attended the Barisal Conference which was specially scheduled to discuss the situation in Bengal created by the partition. Although Government promptly banned it, the organisers decided to defy the ban: the procession led by B.C. Pal, Sri Aurobindo and B.C. Chatterji in the first was sought to be stopped, and on the processionists refusing to disperse, they were lathi-charged by the police and many were injured in consequence. Thus did defiance of the law acquire respectability and sanctity at Barisal, and the abortive conference made history more than it would have, had it been allowed to be held in peace.

After Barisal, Sri Aurobindo and B.C. Pal toured East Bengal, where mammoth meetings were held against the partition, sometimes even in spite of Government's prohibitory orders. This was taking political education to the people, and it was equally the leaders educating themselves by getting to know at first hand the quickened pulse of the masses. Sri Aurobindo had written in the Indu Prakash twelve years earlier that "the proletariate is... the real key of the situation. Torpid he is and immobile... but he is a very great potential force, and whoever succeeds in understanding and eliciting his strength, becomes by the very fact master of the future".¹⁷ It was by means of such tours and other forms of uninhibited mass contact that Sri Aurobindo was able to penetrate the sealed nucleus of the heart of the proletariat, tap the illimitable store of potential energy, and release it for the national cause.

Sri Aurobindo returned to Baroda in June 1906, but presently took leave on loss of pay for a year, and after a visit to Chandod where he met the successor of Swami Brahmananda, came back to Calcutta in July. For all practical purposes, he was leaving the Baroda service for good. He hardly gave a thought to the settled salary, and the seductive prospects. The Mother had called him to Bengal, - he would go! Was he taking a blind leap into the Unknown? - he did not know, and he did not care, and he did not hesitate either. Here was work for him to do, here was Bhavani Bharati summoning him to action, - nothing else, nothing else mattered.

Before Sri Aurobindo reached Calcutta in July 1906, certain avenues of activity had been - or were being - opened for him. In the first place, he had permitted, on Barindra's suggestion, the starting of a weekly paper in Bengali, Yugantar, on 13 March 1906. The paper was to preach "open revolt and the absolute denial of the British rule", and Sri Aurobindo himself wrote some of the leading articles in the early issues, and "always exercised a general control".¹⁸ Among the editorial staff were able writers and committed revolutionaries like Barin, Upen Bannerji and Devabrata Bose. From the beginning the paper was a sensational success, the circulation leaping up from one to ten thousand in the course of a year, and sometimes

Page 217

times it had to be printed secretly at more than one press. As for the business side, it was hopeless; and "nobody bothered about the income and expenditure, for we were not out for money-making".¹⁹ Incidentally, the Yugantar office at Kanaidhar Lane in Calcutta also became Barin's base of operations for his secret revolutionary activity.

An English counterpart for the Yugantar was soon felt to be a necessity, and this was provided when Bepin Pal started the daily Bande Mataram on 6 August 1906, with barely Rs. 500, donated by Haridas Haldar, in his pocket. Pal wanted Sri Aurobindo to be Joint Editor of the Bande Mataram, and this was to give him another line of action - for the word was power, and Sri Aurobindo's words were a from of Sri Aurobindo's action, and they also stung others to action - with truly national ramifications.

Lastly, there was the question of "national education". The need of those times was to undo the mischief caused by the system of education that had been introduced by the British. It had its good points, but it was largely divorced from the currents of local tradition and even the hard realities of our economic situation. The result was that it emasculated Indian youth and made them mimic futilities in their own country. In his Indu Prakash articles of 1893-4, Sri Aurobindo had castigated the education of the day and thrown out hints for reform. Once of the Bengali pioneers of the new education was Satish Chandra Mukherjee (1865-1948). He founded the Bhagavat Chatuspati in 1895, the "Dawn" Magazine in 1897, the Dawn Society in 1902 and the National Council of Education in 1906. The Chatuspati aimed at giving a spiritual turn to education, the "Dawn" Magazine (started as the organ of the Chatuspati) soon broadened its scope and became one of the formative influences of renascent Bengal. Then came the Dawn Society, its aim being to provide moral and religious instruction and also to "supplement even the ordinary academic education imparted in the various colleges".* After the partition, the National Council of Education came into existence, and under its auspices the Bengal National College was established in 1906, facilitated by a munificent donation of Rs. one lakh from Raja Subodh Mullick, Sri Aurobindo's friend and close collaborator. Mullick seems to have stipulated that Sri Aurobindo should be appointed a professor in the College on a salary of Rs. 150, and this was of course done.²⁰ Thus on leaving the Baroda College, Sri Aurobindo had waiting for him the Principalship of the new Bengal National College, with Satish Chandra Mukherjee as its Superintendent. After a stay of almost fourteen years, Sri Aurobindo now shook the dust of Baroda from off his feet, and sprang into action at Calcutta, armed with the assurance of the Rishi to King Manu:

Of this be sure, the mighty game goes on,

The glorious strife,

Until the goal predestined has been won.²¹

* For a detailed history, the reader is referred to Haridas and Uma Mukherjee, The Origins of the National Education Movement (1905-1910), published in 1957.

Page 218