The first edition of this biography in 1945 contained corrections by Sri Aurobindo himself. The third edition in 1972 was rewritten in the light of new material
Sri Aurobindo : Biography
THEME/S
CHAPTER 27
I
On the eve of the fourth Darshan Day in 1938 (24 November), there was an accident as related in the previous chapter and Sri Aurobindo's right leg sustained an injury and had to be put in plaster. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who had been staying with some of their disciples in the house in Rue de la Marine (now known as 'Library House') from October 1922, moved to an adjoining house in the same street on 8 February 1927. This was the seventh and last of the houses in Pondicherry which Sri Aurobindo was to occupy. Known as 'Meditation House', this and the 'Library House' (with subsequent alterations and additions) now form a big complex, and constitute the hub of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and the Mother continued to stay there. Till November 1938, Sri Aurobindo usually attended to his comforts himself, although the ever-faithful Champaklal was always at his Master's service. Sri Aurobindo would thus himself daily light up the mosquito coils at the four corners of his bed before retiring for the night. He worked till late at night, using the hand of his chair as his table for writing. The furniture and fittings of the room were austere in the early years - a cot, a straight table, an easy chair, a time-piece, a waste-paper basket, and the usual tea things, jugs, cups, saucers. After the accident of 1938, some necessary changes took place. Fans for driving away the inevitable flies: walking sticks: a special dining table.
There were vases, and roses too. On 15 September 1939, the Mother offered to Sri Aurobindo the flower "Gratitude". It was a simple self-sufficing gesture.
Of the kind of constant human-divine life Sri Aurobindo lived in those days, who can bear witness except the Mother - or such reverent observant beloved attendants like Champaklal and Nirod? For example, the Mother has recalled a singular incident on the night of a cyclone when the noise was terrific and the rain-blast shook doors and windows and water splashed into the rooms. When the Mother went to Sri Aurobindo's room to help him shut the windows and keep out the rain, on noiselessly opening the door she "found him sitting quietly at his desk, writing. There was such a solid peace in the room that nobody would have dreamed that a cyclone was raging outside. All the windows were wide open, not a drop of rain was coming inside".1 What was this except the silent victory of the Spirit over matter and energy? And yet Sri Aurobindo was hardly the conscious or calculating miraculist: rather was he content to don humanity in all things. But however human he may have wanted to be in his contacts with others, his innate divinity irresistibly struck them in the eye. Even so, while something could surely be seen, something more inferred, much still remained beyond mere human comprehension or speculation. Typical of the double response was Nirodbaran's, who was perhaps nearer and closer to the Master than many:
Page 693
The tender expressions that dropped from his lips, the pointed flashes of his quick humour, the silent unassuming distinction of his manner and, above all, his vigilant and subtle protection guarding us against all adverse forces - all these had been our heritage, but could we ever reflect in our passing mirror even the slightest shadow of his wide universal action? His detached greatness, disinterested largeness, limitless compassion and sweetness, as if Shiva had come down to earth to deliver the world from its roots of ignorance - where shall we see such a parallel?
And here are some of Nirod's snaps of the Master whether in action or in repose:
Anyone who had seen Sri Aurobindo at close quarters could never forget this Divine Child with a body supple, radiant and pure. His half-bare body, when he used to sit before the table for writing, his shapely hands, his long delicate fingers, had nothing of the crude mortal flesh in them; they were suffused, as it were, with a white transparent light, une blancheur éclatante, that could like the X-ray make one see through and through. How often have I not seen this radiance, when he used to sit up writing, or when he would rest in his chair, or when he was lying on the bed as if on the lap of the Divine Mother, with unclad shoulders and chest, the hands held together behind the head, the lips smiling in a wakeful dream? Every part of the body presented the picture of a god in human guise...2
In November 1946, the overdue renovation of Sri Aurobindo's room took place. A new bed adjustable to various positions, whether for reclining and dictating, resting or sleeping, or for taking his meals. He had now a good work-table too, with a sofa-chair in front; also book-cases nearby. On the table were fountain-pens, blotter, paper-weight, paper-cutter and a lamp. Electric fans kept the flies away, and there were a few pieces of decoration also - a lion, some human figures, and parrots.
One agreeable-development after the 1938 accident was the resumption of talks with the disciples that had been discontinued after 24 November 1926. These talks took place in the mornings as well as evenings. Along with some of the older sadhaks like Purani, some of the younger like Nirod were of the company. The talks, as before, covered a wide range of topics, and Sri Aurobindo's interventions were anecdotal, serious, witty, humorous, expository, reminiscential by turns, but always unpredictable. In December 1939, for example, on two successive days, the discussion turned on Einstein and Gravitation, matter and energy, and on Time as the fourth dimension. Some months later, on 17 September 1940, the curvature of space as visualized by Einstein came up again in the course of the discussion. When on 15 January 1939 there was a reference to Spengler's The Decline of the West, Sri Aurobindo confessed that he had not read the book and on being given a summary of Spengler's conclusions, he conceded that there was "some truth in Spengler's idea of destiny, as also in his idea of cycles of human history".3 Four days later, the talk was about Aldous Huxley's Ends and Means and Eyeless in Gaza. Or as the random breeze blew, the conversation might for a moment light
Page 694
upon Greek sculpture or modem German art or on the impressionists or on Roger Fry's views on Art. On 24 January 1939, when the discussion was on the susceptibility of some races to beauty, Sri Aurobindo went into silence for a while, and then said:
I was thinking how some races have the sense of beauty in their very bones. Judging from what is left to us, it seems our people once had a keen sense of beauty.
The Japanese, although they had it once, were losing it "because of the general vulgarisation"; and as for Germany, "Hitler must have crushed all fine things out of Existence - German music, philosophy, etc. How can anything develop where there is no freedom?"4 On 12 May 1940, intervening in the discussion on modem art, Sri Aurobindo said:
What modem art is trying to do - at least what it began with - is to convey the vital sensation of the object; very often it happens to be the lower vital sensations. But it is the first effort to get behind the physical form.5
On a later occasion (14 January 1941), Sri Aurobindo made a critical reference to the work of Cezanne and Matisse:
In their 'nude' studies it is a very low sexuality which they bring out. They call it 'Life'! One can hardly agree. Even in the ugliest corner of life there is something fine and even beautiful that saves it.
Or the talk might turn on poets and poetry. Once he said that, although Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa was an earlier work and the more brilliant, Kumarasambhava was more deep and mature. Or the conversation skirted casually around Laurence Binyon, Stephen Phillips, Robert Bridges, Oscar Wilde, Manomohan Ghose, Bharati Sarabhai, the Hexameter, and the clue to it that a Cambridge friend, Ferrar, gave. Was Blake greater than Shakespeare? After Milton, what was the scope for the epic as a literary form? Of Hopkins, Sri Aurobindo said that he "becomes a great poet in his sonnets. He is not a mystic poet, but a religious one".6 Talking of T.S. Eliot, Sri Aurobindo said that he is "undoubtedly a poet", but added: "Why the devil does he go in for modernism when he can write such fine stuff as La Figlia che Piange?"7 Again, on Nirod once remarking that some people criticised Nishikanto's poetry for its lack of refinement, Sri Aurobindo asked: "Since when has Bengal become so Puritan?", and added:
Moni said that he was not allowed to sing in school by the teachers: it was considered immoral. If music is immoral, then there can be no question about dancing, and yet in ancient India even the princesses were taught dancing and used to dance before the public. Music, painting, dancing, all these were publicly encouraged.8
On another occasion, when a reference was made to Armando Menezes's book of poems. Chaos and Dancing Star, Sri Aurobindo quipped: "The Dancing Star will be taken for a cinema star!"9
From time to time, discussion would be sparked off by misrepresentations in biographies of Sri Aurobindo. In one of them, by Promode Sen, it was mentioned
Page 695
that Sri Aurobindo knew Hebrew; on being told about it, Sri Aurobindo queried laughingly: "Why not say that I knew Amhari and other African languages?" He also referred to the 'miracles' he was supposed to have performed, according to Motilal Mehta's biography. Once on being told that he couldn't see Sri Aurobindo, a visitor had ingenuously asked the Mother: "Does he fly away?"10 In a similar context on a subsequent occasion, Sri Aurobindo said:
I shall have to write [my autobiography] just in order to contradict the biographers. I shall have to title my book, 'What I did not do in my life'.
Again, commenting on P.B. Kulkarni's biography, Sri Aurobindo said on 10 March 1943: "The general impression he creates is that I must have been a very serious prig, all along very pious and serious. I was nothing of the kind."12
But of course, during the war years (1939-45), the fluctuating fortunes of the Allies, the performance in the several theatres of the war, the relative merits of statesmen and Generals on the two warring sides, the ambiguous gyrations of the neutral powers, the impact of the war with its vicissitudes on Indian political life, the probable course of future events, all came up for comment day after day. For Sri Aurobindo, retirement and spirituality did not mean a total indifference to what was happening in the world. The daily Hindu and other papers and magazines helped him to follow happenings in India and outside, and after the war started, arrangements were made to enable Sri Aurobindo to listen to news broadcasts, the war speeches of Allied leaders like Churchill, Roosevelt and General de Gaule, and also war commentaries, from a radio installed in Pavitra's room and relayed to Sri Aurobindo's room. The meteoric rise of Hitler in Germany and the dire possibilities flowing from it were a source of anxious concern to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, for they could not only see the Fuehrer for what he seemed to be, a ruthless dictator, but also see behind him the Asuric forces that were trying to make use of him for their own purposes. The sacrifice of Eduaurd Benes in 1938 by Chamberlain and Daladier to appease Hitler showed how by practising brinkmanship the Fuehrer had got what he wanted without firing a single shot. But both sides were merely playing for time, and by mid-1939 it was clear that Hitler did mean business this time. He signed a pact with Russia, and ordered his troops to attack Poland on 1 September. Hitler had his admirers even in India, and it was not unusual to bracket him with Napoleon. Sri Aurobindo saw how foolish the comparison was, and he expressed this in a poem 'The Dwarf Napoleon', written on 16 October 1939, six weeks after the war had started, and about a month after Poland had been overrun:
Napoleon's mind was swift and bold and vast,
His heart was calm and stormy like the sea,
His will dynamic in its grip and clasp.
His eye could hold a world within its grasp
And see the great and small things sovereignly....
Far other this creature of a nether clay,
Page 696
Void of all grandeur, like a gnome at play,
Iron and mud his nature's mingled stuff,...
Violent and cruel, devil, child and brute,
This screaming orator with his strident tongue,
The prophet of a scanty fixed idea,
Plays now the leader of our human march....13
LEARNING SANSKRIT THROUGH SONGSII
During the first months - the period of the so-called 'phoney war' - when the French army sat pretty behind the Maginot Line and Hitler and Stalin were allowed to overrun Poland from opposite sides and to partition it, Sri Aurobindo - according to his own admission - "did not actively concern himself with the course of the war. But when it appeared as if Hitler might crush all forces opposed to him and create conditions for Nazism to dominate the world, Sri Aurobindo began to intervene.14 While following the events with interest and anxiety, he thought at first that, after all, the French army and the British Navy were both powerful instruments of war with great traditions, and hence Hitler wouldn't be allowed to put out the light of freedom all over Europe. But the events of the next seven or eight months were to throw a revealing light on the relative strength of the opposing forces and put a new complexion on the developing world crisis.
Although Hitler was at first impatient to follow up his lightning success in Poland by a decisive attack on France, the operation had to be postponed from time to time throughout the 1939-40 winter months, and Neville Chamberlain misinterpreted this lull for weakness, and as late as 5 April 1940 he publicly declared that Hitler "had missed the bus". In France there was a change of government in March, Reynaud replacing Daladier. Sri Aurobindo thought that such unsteadiness looked like a bad sign, but added that Reynaud was the more intelligent man; "in fact, he is the only intelligent Minister, they say".15* Actually, when Hitler struck at last, it took the Allied powers by surprise. First he invaded Denmark and Norway on 9 April, and by adopting the tactics of surprise and attack in overwhelming force, occupied both countries - notwithstanding the opposition put up by the loyal forces and the Allied expeditionary force in Norway. The role of Quisling - the Norwegian traitor-stooge of Hitler - particularly disgusted Sri Aurobindo, who was also surprised at the ineffectiveness of the British Navy. On 10 April 1940 Sri Aurobindo said: "Hitherto Germany has not proved superior to the British Navy. But it depends on what proportion of the navy is there. ... If they [Britain and France] had possessed foresight, they would have gathered their fleet near about."16 On 15 April, when the disastrous happenings in Norway were the
* Earlier, on 9 December 1939, Sri Aurobindo had described Daladier as "a weak man, and weak men go into unnecessary violence at times," the reference being to an intemperate speech against Russia.
Page 697
theme of the conversation, Sri Aurobindo said:
This Quisling of Norway should have been shot. Do you know what he has done? When the Norwegians were defending Trondjheim with their coastal batteries. Quisling sent them directions to stop fighting and when they knew that Quisling had betrayed them it was too late.17
But even before the Allied forces could pull out of Norway, Hitler struck against Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France on 10 May 1940. The ruse of dropping German soldiers in Dutch and French uniforms by parachute to demoralise the Allies elicited the comment from Sri Aurobindo: "This Hitler seems to have a romantic head!"18 Every day - every hour almost - gave news of Hitler's triumphant march, and for his devilish ingenuities too there seemed to be no end.
In the meantime, there was an all-party attack in the British Parliament on Chamberlain's conduct of the war, and accordingly he resigned as Prime Minister, making way for Churchill. Sri Aurobindo thought Churchill had formed a strong Government, and on 15 May he remarked:
It is a remarkable Ministry. Most of the ablest men of England are there, except Hore-Belisha and Lloyd George. As I expected, Morrison and Evans have been taken. Morrison is one of the best organisers. Their coming in will help to prevent any quarrel with Labour.19
He also felt that the inclusion of Amery as the India Secretary might not, after all, be a bad thing, for he had said in an interview that India would soon have to be considered as independent.
The change in Government didn't at once change the direction of events in Europe. There were news only of fresh German victories. Rotterdam fell. The Maginot Line was being rendered innocuous. The Nazi divisions - including the all-powerful Panzer-divisions - were cutting across the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and the Allied High Command could hardly recover from the suddenness and force of the Hitlerian onslaught. Regarding the neutral nations' hesitant behaviour, Sri Aurobindo remarked:
The neutrals wanted to make the best of both worlds. If Germany does not attack they remain neutral. If she attacks, they know that the Allies will come to their help.20
Earlier, Sri Aurobindo had said that Denmark and Norway ought to have known about Hitler's movements and made some secret agreement with the Allies; it was their "imbecility" that was responsible for their plight. This no doubt applied to Holland too. Already the German army, by a surprise move, had moved swiftly through the Ardennes, crossed the French border on 12 may, and the Meuse the next day; and by 20 May, the Germans were at Abbeville. The Dutch and the Belgians capitulated without more ado, and the British expeditionary force and the French first army were isolated, a ready prey almost to the converging German forces. Between 27 May and 4 June, however, the Allies succeeded in evacuating 338,400 (mainly British) from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk. It was a remarkable operation short of the miraculous. On the other hand, the Germans
Page 698
relentlessly pressed on toward Paris, General Weygand (who had replaced General Gamelin) was unable to stop the rot, and on 14 June Paris itself was occupied by the Germans. Churchill's bold and imaginative offer of a union with France was rejected by the French Government (an action that was deplored by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother) - and on 16 June, Reynaud resigned, and the aged Marshal Petain formed a new Government with the sole aim of making peace with Hitler on any terms whatsoever. Mussolini's attack of France from the rear on 11 June and some easy conquests in that area further demoralised the French and compelled them to make an ignominious peace with the triumphant Hitler. A shaken and battered Britain was now left alone to face the might of Hitler, with most of Western Europe under his grip.
It was Hitler's expectation that, France thus humiliated and put out of action, all Northern Europe brought under the Nazi control or sphere of influence, and the East secured (as he thought) from Russian attack, Britain also would throw up the game and sue for peace. But on 18 June, Churchill reaffirmed in Parliament the determination of his Government to fight on, whatever the hazard. Even in France, the capitulation was not total, for General de Gaulle denounced Petain and the Armistice, and the Free French forces joined hands with the British to continue the war. Thus a month passed without Britain responding to Hitler's discreet peace feelers through neutral Sweden, and he had therefore no option but to decide upon a massive invasion of Britain ('Operation Sea-Lion') preceded by heavy air raids to weaken the morale of the people and to immobilise or destroy the defence machinery. Thus began the crucial 'Battle of Britain'. On 12 August a fierce air battle was fought, and on 15 August an even fiercer battle, in which the Luftwaffe lost 180 planes and retired in discomfiture. It was during those dark days of August 1940, when the future of Britain and the future of freedom hung as by a slender thread, when there were not wanting people everywhere who felt dazzled by Hitler's victories and displays of power out of the ordinary, it was then that Sri Aurobindo wrote that powerful poem. 'The Children of Wotan (1940)', a remorselessly vivid projection of the Hell that Nazi world-dominion would come to mean. It is cast in the form of question and answer, and while it is the conscience of mankind that articulates the questions, the answers are trotted out by the Asuric Nazi hordes that are the 'Children of Wotan':
"Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan?
Earth shudders with fear at your tread, the death-flame laughs in your eyes."
"We have seen the sign of Thor and the hammer of new creation,...
We march to make of earth a hell and call it heaven.
The heart of mankind we have smitten with the whip of the sorrows seven;
The Mother of God lies bleeding in our black and gold sunrise."
Does the broken world raise its heart-rending cries? But the 'Children of Wotan' reck not:
Page 699
"Question the volcano when it burns, chide the fire and bitumen!...
We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our laughter inhuman.
Our hearts are heroic and hard; we bear the belt of Orion:
Our will has the edge of the thunderbolt, our acts the claws of the lion."
Aren't they afraid of divine retribution, their "fate in the scales of God"? Indeed 'No", they answer:
"We mock at God, we have silenced the mutter of priests at his altar.
Our leader is master of Fate, medium of her mysteries.
We have made the mind a cypher, we have strangled Thought with a cord;
Dead now are pity and honour, strength only is Nature's lord.
We build a new world-order; our bombs shout Wotan's peace.
A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will,
We are born in humanity's sunset, to the Night is our pilgrimage.
On the bodies of perishing nations, mid the cry of the cataclysm coming,
To a presto of bomb and shell and the aeroplanes' fatal humming,
We march, lit by Truth's death-pyre, to the world's satanic age."21
An even more frightening picture of Hitler's promised new "world order" is inset in the Canto entitled The Descent into Night' in Savitri (11.7), and Sri Aurobindo had clearly Hitler in mind when he indited the passage:
A race possessed inhabited those parts,
A force demoniac lurking in man's depths
That heaves suppressed by the heart's human law,
Awed by the calm and sovereign eyes of Thought,
Can in a fire and earthquake of the soul
Arise and, calling to its native night,
Overthrow the reason, occupy the life
And stamp its hoof on Nature's shaking ground:
This was for them their being's flaming core.
A mighty energy, a monster god,
Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak,
It stared at the harsh unpitying world it made
With the stony eyelids of its fixed idea.
Its heart was drunk with a dire hunger's wine,
In others' suffering felt a thrilled delight
And of death and ruin the grandiose music heard.
To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good:
It claimed the whole world for Evil's living room,
Its party's grim totalitarian reign
The cruel destiny of breathing things.
Page 700
All on one plan was shaped and standardised
Under a dark dictatorship's breathless weight.22
It was more than mere human foresight - it was more than a poet's fancy or imagination - that inferred so unambiguously and described so arrestingly the full implications of the threat of Nazi world dominion. Sri Aurobindo saw as in a flash all the grim possibilities even in 1940, and the words came under compulsion as it were - words of warning that were to arrest the Rake's Progress towards the "satanic age".
LEARNING SANSKRIT THROUGH SONGSIII
15 August 1940 was the day Hitler had originally fixed for victory over Britain or Britain's capitulation, but the air battle went decisively against him that day. It was one of the turning points in the prolonged 'Battle of Britain'. These massive air raids continued all the same for months afterwards, but the R.A.F. fighter-pilots did a marvellous job and turned back the invader every time, with mounting losses. From 7 to 15 September, there were raids on London, and several hundreds of bombers and fighters were deployed by the Luftwaffe, but the enemy couldn't achieve air mastery over Britain, which was the essential condition for a successful invasion from the Continent. By 12 October, the idea of invasion was indefinitely postponed - and as good as dropped. Britain the bastion of freedom was saved, and freedom-lovers everywhere could now heave a sigh of relief.
The war unleashed on Europe by Hitler had its unavoidable repercussions on the Indian sub-continent. At the time of Hitler's invasion of Poland, popular Governments were functioning in the different States, while at the Centre the Viceroy's Executive Council was not responsible to the Legislative Assembly. With Britain and France ranged against Hitler, India (including French India) was involved in the hostilities too. The Congress was undecided as to what it should do. In so far as the Allies stood for freedom and democracy, the Congress leaders were with them rather than with the Axis Powers. But Britain and France were Colonial Powers as well, and this confused issues. Gandhi and Nehru alike openly expressed their sympathies with the Polish in their hour of trial, but support for the Allies in their war effort was hedged with conditions. The kind of response that the Congress wanted - namely, a clarification of the Allied war aims so as to include a positive statement about the future of the Colonies - was not forthcoming, and the Congress therefore asked its Ministries in the several States to resign. When asked for his opinion about this development, Sri Aurobindo said:
How can I say? It depends on what they do next and how they work things out. Nowadays there are no more resolutions, only speeches. Gandhi's and Nehru's resolutions are speeches.23
Towards the close of 1939, Surendra Mohan Ghose - a former revolutionary and
Page 701
the President of the Bengal Congress Committee at the time - was in Pondicherry, and when he suggested that Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo should meet and discuss things, the latter agreed: "He can come now; whatever political difference there was is no more. He can see me. You may convey this to him."24 This was done, but before he could arrange the meeting as requested by Gandhiji, Surendra Mohan had to offer "individual satyagraha", and was jailed again; and the interview between Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo did not, after all, take place.
The withdrawal of the Congress Ministries, the truculence of Mr. Jinnah and the Muslim League, the launching of individual satyagraha, the ignoble course of! the 'phoney war', the cold cynicism behind the partition of Poland between Germany and Russia, and the steep rise in the prices of essential commodities were among the factors that contributed to the confused political thinking in India at the time. The Congress was symbolically against both Hitler and the Allies! Under the circumstances it was inevitable that some people in India should deviate into a pronounced anti-British and hence pro-Hitler stance, applauding his victories and secretly (or even openly) gloating over the Allies' discomfiture .
At the Ashram in Pondicherry, too, opinion was divided among the sadhaks. It was known that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were apprehensive of the formidable Asuric power of Hitler, and that their sympathies were wholly with the Allies. In war-time, not to be with the Government was to be branded anti-Government, and to be forced to accept the consequences. The French administration in Pondicherry was, perhaps, even more sensitive to criticism than the British in India. After the first excitement of the Polish invasion and conquest and of Russia's invasion of Poland in December 1939, the tempo had more or less subsided till Hitler's blitzkrieg in April and May made things very serious indeed. At such a time, pro-Hitler sympathies could provoke fierce counter-action. Thus, when Sri Aurobindo came to know that it was not just five or six Ashramites but more than half were in sympathy with Hitler and wanted him to win, he said on the evening of 17 May:
It is a very serious matter. The Government can dissolve the Ashram at any moment. In Indo-China, all religious bodies have been dissolved. And here the whole Pondicherry is against us. Only because Governor Bonvin is friendly to us they can't do anything. But even he - if he hears that people in the Ashram are pro-Hitler - will be compelled to take steps.... If these people want that the Ashram should be dissolved, they can come and tell me, and I will dissolve it instead of the police doing it. They have no idea about the world, and talk like children. Hitlerism is the greatest menace that the world has ever met. If Hitler wins, do they think India has any chance of being free?... He is openly talking of world-empire.25
This was a forthright declaration, yet full of compassion. Foreknowledge was a cross, and only Sri Aurobindo knew how much was at stake. They talked "like children"; it was ignorance more than perversity; and he could neither let them down, nor be inattentive to his own clear intuitions about the menace of Hitlerism.
Page 702
The Mother too had spoken the same morning to Nolini about the situation:
It is treachery against Sri Aurobindo to wish for Hitler's victory. Sri Aurobindo's cause is closely connected with that of the Allies and he is working night and day for it. ... If Hitler or Stalin wins, spirituality is doomed.26
The next morning, on coming to know that some people were glad of the fall of Holland, Sri Aurobindo spoke out with a touch of exasperation:
Very strange, and yet they want freedom for India! That is one thing I can't swallow. How can they have sympathy with Hitler who is destroying other nations, taking away their liberty? It is not only pro-Ally sympathy but sympathy for humanity that they are jeering at.27
On 20 May 1940, Sri Aurobindo said that Hitler was actually possessed by the Asura, or perhaps was an incarnation of the Asura: "The Vital World has descended upon the physical. That is why the intellectuals are getting perplexed at the destruction of their civilisation, of all the values they had made and stood by."
A week later, when the course of the war had taken a decisive turn against the Allies, he was asked what message should be sent to a correspondent who needed guidance; and Sri Aurobindo said simply:
You may tell him that God's Front is the Spiritual front, which is still lagging behind. Hitler's Germany is not God's Front. It is the Asuric Front, through which the Asura aims at world-domination. It is the descent of the Asuric world upon the human to establish its own power on the earth.28
Presently the "epic of Dunkirk" was enacted, the Germans reached Paris, and France capitulated. French India, however, like many other French Colonies, declared for General de Gaulle's Free French movement, and this was very much to the liking of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And yet it was just at this time, when Britain stood practically all alone against Hitler's might, that worldly-wise people in India (and elsewhere) thought, as had General Weygand: "In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken"! On the other hand, the dauntless leadership of Churchill, the course of the Battle of Britain, the silent support of Roosevelt's U.S.A., the failure of the Luftwaffe to gain air mastery over Britain, and the gathering strength of the Free French under General de Gaulle slowly effected a change in attitude in the minds of all those who were prepared to pause and think and judge by these clearly discernible trends.
During the latter half of 1940, Hitler and Mussolini extended willy-nilly the theatre of the war to the Balkans and North Africa. Japan was also wooed to throw in her lot with the Axis Powers, but she held back for the time being. Then, on 21 June 1941, Germany attacked Russia on a wide front, and made rapid progress and won sensational victories. Although Russia had earlier ignored Britain's secret warnings of the planned attack, Churchill now openly came out on the side of Russia. After over five months' of humiliating retreat and terrific loss of men and territory, Russia counter-attacked on 6 December with astonishing success. On 7 December, Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, and on 11 December Hitler declared war against America. Japan also turned against the British, French and Dutch possessions
Page 703
in the Far East, bombed Calcutta, Visakhapatnam and Madras, and extended the war in the Pacific. Now it was truly a world war. And Britain didn't stand alone any longer; Russia and America were with her.
Just as Sri Aurobindo actively concerned himself with the war in Europe when he realised in April-May 1940 that Hitlerism was trying to overwhelm the forces of freedom, he felt equally concerned when Japan made the perfidious attack on Pearl Harbour and turned against India and South-East Asia. Even before Hitler's attack on Russia, the Mother with Sri Aurobindo's authority had declared on 6 May 1941:
It has become necessary to state emphatically and clearly that all who by their thoughts and wishes are supporting and calling for the victory of the Nazis are by that very fact collaborating with the Asura against the Divine and helping to bring about the victory of the Asura.
Already on 19 September 1940, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had made a contribution to the Viceroy's War Purposes Fund, and jointly signed a letter to the Governor of Madras stating their position without qualification or ambiguity:
We feel that not only is this a battle waged in just self-defence and in defence of the nations threatened with the world-domination of Germany and the Nazi system of life, but that it is a defence of civilisation and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity. To this cause our support and sympathy will be unswerving whatever may happen; we look forward to the victory of Britain and, as the eventual result, an era of peace and union among nations and a better and more secure world-order.
There was, indeed, never any wavering; they could see very clearly the issues at stake, and they made no secret of their commitment to the Allied cause.*
Aside from the modest monetary contribution to the War Purposes Fund, the advice to disciples asking them to join the fighting services if they could, and the open declaration of his adhesion to the Allied cause, Sri Aurobindo's essential action was of an occult and spiritual character. As he has himself acknowledged:
Inwardly, he put his spiritual force behind the Allies from the moment of Dunkirk... This he did, because he saw that behind Hitler and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind; it would lead also to the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in it of India, an enslavement far more terrible than any this country had ever endured, and the undoing of all the work that had been done for her liberation.29
What exactly this "spiritual force" was, how it operated, with what success and with whom - these are still matters that do not permit of clear analysis and statement. Reference has been made earlier to Sri Aurobindo's claim in a letter written
* The late M.N. Roy was another ex-revolutionary who also saw the issues clearly - though only from his rationalist point of view -*and openly pleaded for support to the Allies.
Page 704
on 12 July 1911 - probably to Motilal Roy of Chandernagore - about his being able to put himself "into men and change them, removing the darkness and bringing light, giving them a new heart and a new mind".* During the intervening thirty years, this power had evidently grown and proved susceptible to purposive application. But being still an Overmental - not a Supramental - power, it was not certain of success or of total success under all circumstances. Much must depend also on the receptivity of the instrument, the nature of the field of action, the concentration of Asuric forces at any particular point or in the individual or group against whom the force was being directed. As he explained later (July 1947) in a letter to K.D. Sethna:
...the spiritual force I have been putting on human affairs such as the War is not the supramental but the Overmind force, and that when it acts in the material world is so inextricably mixed up in the tangle of the lower world forces that its results, however strong or however adequate to the immediate object, must necessarily be partial.30
A global consciousness, even when it is rather less than the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, carries with it knowledge as well as power, and thus, although cooped up to all intents and movements in a small room in a far comer of South India, Sri Aurobindo's consciousness ranged over men and affairs and developments all over the world, and whenever it chose to act, or could act, as a power behind the scenes - and true consciousness is power, if anything - it did have a salutary influence: at any rate, even when apparently ineffective, it left open the possibility of future rectification. Some media were more responsive than most others: some threw back the influence, denied the light - with serious consequences. They are instances of people - soldiers, prisoners of war, politicians - who had been sustained in moments of life's extremity by the Vision of a Figure that only later they could recognise as that of Sri Aurobindo. But the true and complete story of Sri Aurobindo's occult ministry among combatants and non-combatants alike cannot as yet be told.
LEARNING SANSKRIT THROUGH SONGSIV
In the early months of 1942, Britain's position in the Far East was most vulnerable. By mid-February, Singapore had fallen, the Malaysian peninsula had been overrun, and still there was no halting the advance of Japanese arms. In this critical situation, the people of India heard only confused counsels. While Jinnah talked of the "Muslim Nation", Gandhi swore by non-violence. Subhas Chandra Bose had in the meantime joined hands with Japanese and formed an "army of liberation" or the Indian National Army, Nehru felt overtaken by events and enacted the role of an
* Writing on 'Foresight' in February 1950, the Mother too has said: "By Yogic discipline one can, not only foresee destiny, but can alter it, change it almost wholly."
Page 705
Indian Hamlet. The question of questions was: Were Indians now at least to cooperate with the British to resist a possible Japanese invasion, or were they to welcome the Japanese as liberators, - or were they to do just nothing? On 11 March 1942, Churchill rose to the occasion and offered to create a new India Union with a Dominion Constitution to be framed by India's own representatives after the war. In the meantime, Indian leaders were invited to participate in a responsible Central Government and help the Allies to prosecute the war to the point of victory. Presently, Sir Stafford Cripps came to India to work out the details, and on 31 March 1942, Sri Aurobindo openly welcomed his mission in forthright terms:
I have heard your broadcast. As one who has been a nationalist leader and worker for India's independence, though now my activity is no longer in the political but in the spiritual field, I wish to express my appreciation of all you have done to bring about this offer. I welcome it as an opportunity given to India to determine for herself, and organise in all liberty of choice, her freedom and unity, and take an effective place among the world's free nations. I hope that it will be accepted, and right use made of it, putting aside all discords and divisions. I hope too that friendly relations between Britain and India replacing the past struggles, will be a step towards a greater world union in which, as a free nation, her spiritual force will contribute to build for mankind a better and happier life. In this light, I offer public adhesion, in case it can be of any help in your work.
India's future - the need for unity of purpose and action - the future of Indo-British relations - the future of global unity - and India's role in a World Union, all are referred to in the Message, and nothing could have been more explicit than the sense of urgency he had imported into his words. Going further, he conveyed personal messages to both C. Rajagopalachari and B.S. Moonje, and sent S. Doraiswamy Aiyar as a personal emissary to the Congress Working Committee that was to meet at Delhi. India had more to fear from Japanese imperialism than from the British who were on their way out. It would be better to get into the seats of power, now that the chance had come, without squeamishly arguing about the exact legal basis of the power. It was, again, an opportunity for Hindus and Muslims to work together and thereby invalidate the "two nations" theory. And, above all, it was necessary to organise the collective strength of the country and repel the danger from Japan.31
It was all in vain. The Congress leaders - taking their cue, perhaps, from Gandhi's reported dismissal of the Cripps Proposals as a "post-dated cheque on a bank that was crashing" - thought that Britain was clearly fighting a losing war, and hence shied away from the invitation to join the Government. Divine wisdom was thus vetoed by shortsighted political calculation, and the possibility of a free and united India was jeopardised irreparably. As K. M. Munshi, mentioning Sri Aurobindo, acknowledged in a speech at Delhi later (16 August 1951);
He saw into the heart of things.... His perception of the political situation in India was always unerring. When the world war came in 1939... it was he of
Page 706
the unerring eye who said that the triumph of England and France was the triumph of the divine forces over the demoniac forces.... He spoke again when Sir Stafford Cripps came with his first proposal. He said, 'India should accept it.' We rejected the advice... but today we realise that if the first proposal had been accepted, there would have been no partition, no refugees, and no Kashmir problem.32 *
Commenting on this sad chapter of India's recent history, Nirodbaran has said that Sri Aurobindo sent his personal emissary to Delhi because he saw that Cripps had come "on the wave of a great inspiration" and it was incumbent on the Congress to make the right response. But his mission failed, and Cripp's mission failed:
There is such a thing as fate. When this Mission failed we told Him; "You see, your mission has failed." He said, "I knew it would!" And we pounced on this pronouncement: "If you knew, why did you send your emissary?" He smiled in his usual enigmatic way, and looking up said: "Well, I have done a bit of 'nishkāma karma' [disinterested work]."33
To make matters worse, the Congress launched the 'Quit India' movement in August 1942, which further confused the main issue. Of the senior Congress leaders, only Rajagopalachari stood apart, and in fact pleaded that the Allies should be supported because theirs was the more righteous cause, and also the winning side; and India's good too was inextricably bound with the success of the Allies. 'Quit India' notwithstanding, during the latter years of the war, the Indian army - greatly strengthened by new recruits - became a notable fighting instrument and acquired much valuable experience in the tasks of offensive and defensive war.
It was towards the end of 1942 that the tide of war in Europe took an unmistakable turn against Hitler. The German army of 22 divisions near Stalingrad was surrounded, and on 31 January 1943 the Russian captured or annihilated what remained of the encircled army, and Field Marshal von Paulus was himself taken prisoner. The position of the Allies in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific steadily improved thereafter during 1943 and 1944. By mid-1944 the Americans from the West and the Russians from the East were sweeping towards the German frontiers. "The 15th of August [1944] was the worst day of my life", Hitler was to moan later. And yet the war continued till next spring, and it was only a week after Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945 that the German forces surrendered unconditionally; and Japan followed on 15 August. Anyone who reads today the nightmarish history of those times and sees the Asuric maniac in Hitler will still feel surprised that, as early as 1939 and even earlier still,** Sri Aurobindo should have so correctly measured up the menace of the "Dwarf Napoleon" and the Fuehrer of the "Children o Wotan". And wasn't Sri Aurobindo thinking of Hitler, and of the Nazis, and of the concentration camps, and of the gas chambers, when he projected
* In July 1971, we might add: "No Bangla Desh tragedy either."
* * In 1934, in the course of a letter, Sri Aurobindo had referred to "earthquakes and Hitlers and a collapsing civilisation" [Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Second Series, (1948) p. 342]
Page 707
these images of infernal perversion in Savitri:
An insolence reigned of cold stone-hearted strength
Mighty, obeyed, approved by the Titan's law,
The huge laughter of a giant cruelty
And fierce glad deeds of ogre violence.
In that wide cynic den of thinking beasts
One looked in vain for a trace of pity and love...
Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power,
Signing the edicts of her dreadful rule
And using blood and torture as a seal,
Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world.34
But in 1942 and immediately after - with 'Quit India' in the air, with shortages of all kinds, with famine raging in Bengal and elsewhere - it was not easy in India to look at happenings in the right perspective. Doubts still assailed people regarding the outcome of the war. Hitler continued to cast a fatal spell on certain types of morbidly romantic people. And some thought that to fight even a defensive war was to sin against the holy principle of Ahimsa. And, above all, how could - so the question formulated itself - how could the Allied war be called a dharma yuddha? Were the Allies the modern Pandavas? - and were their enemies the neo-Kauravas?
Comparisons are often misleading and even at best are liable to be misunderstood. On 29 July 1942, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple underlining the deeper implications of the war. Superficially, of course, rival nations and oppositing armies were engaged in the struggle. But behind the rulers, the armies and even the peoples, certain forces were striving for mastery, and the issue of the struggle would decide whether mankind was going to evolve into a higher stage or relapse into barbarism:
...it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance... if one side wins... there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country do not dream of and cannot yet at all realise. If the other side that has declared itself for the free future of humanity triumphs, this terrible danger will have been averted and conditions will have been created in which there will be a chance for the Ideal to grow, for the Divine Work to be done, for the spiritual Truth for which we stand to establish itself on earth.
Over a year later - when the position had eased somewhat for the Allies - the question was raised again by Dilip Kumar Roy, and Sri Aurobindo took this opportunity to set forth in detail his point of view in a long letter, the full text of
Page 708
which has only recently been published.35 The Allies were by no means blameless paragons; only they happened to "stand on the side of the evolutionary forces". Britain, France, U.S.A. were the nations that had spread the ideas of democracy, liberty, equality and international justice etc. Their histories were no doubt dyed with Colonialist sins, but the forces of enlightenment had been active too. Britain herself was gradually moving away from imperialism towards the Commonwealth ideal: and this was "evolution in the right direction - however slow and imperfect and hesitating". Was there discernible a similar trend in the protestations of the Axis Power? Nazi Germany avowedly and openly stood only "for the reversal of this evolutionary tendency, for the destruction of the new international outlook, the new Dharma, for a reversion, not only to the past, but to a far-back primitive and barbaric ideal". Sri Aurobindo continued:
There can be no doubt or hesitation here; if we are for the evolutionary future of mankind, we must recognise that it is only the victory of the Allies that can save it. At the very least, they are at the moment the instruments of the evolutionary Forces to save mankind's future....
The Allies at least stand for human values, though they may often have acted against their own best ideals (human beings always do that); Hitler stands for diabolical values or for human values exaggerated in the wrong way until they become diabolical (e.g. the "virtues" of the Herrenvolk, the master race). That does not make the English or Americans nations of spotless angels nor the Germans a wicked and sinful race, but as an indicator it has a decisive importance.
As regards Nolini's giving the Kurukshetra example, it was not meant to be taken as an exact parallel in every minute particular; Kurukshetra was but "a traditional instance of a war between two world-forces in which the side favoured by the Divine triumphed, because its leaders made themselves his instruments". There was no idea that Cripps should be equated with Yudhishthira, Churchill with Bhima, or General Montgomery with Arjuna! On a total view, the Allied was undoubtedly the righteous cause, that was all. As for the Hitler-Duryodhana equation, - "Duryodhana, if alive, might complain indignantly that the comparison was a monstrous and scandalous injustice to him and that he never did anything like what Hitler had done". It was necessary not to be distracted by appearances, nor to be side-tracked by false similitudes. Then came the masterly conclusion:
The Divine takes men as they are and uses them as His instruments even if they are not flawless in character, without stain or fault, exemplary in virtue, or angelic, holy and pure. If they are of good will, if, to use the Biblical phrase, they are on the Lord's side, that is enough for the work to be done. Even if I knew that the Allies (I am speaking of the big nations, America, Britain and China) would misuse their victory or bungle the peace or partially at least spoil the opportunities open to the human world by that victory, I would still put my force behind them. At any rate things could not be one-hundredth part as bad as they would be under Hitler. The ways of the Lord would still be
Page 709
open - to keep them open is what matters.
As for ahimsā, didn't Krishna urge Arjuna to fight, assuring him: "Mayaivete nihatā pūrvameva nimitta mātram bhava" (By Me they are slain already, be thou only my instrument)? In a subsequent letter to Dilip, Sri Aurobindo pointed out that the Indian scriptures and tradition made room for both the spirituality of the renunciation of life and for the spiritual life of action. Works of all kinds - sarva karmāni including ghoram karma - were valid provided they were done in the right spirit.36
LEARNING SANSKRIT THROUGH SONGSV
Even before the war actually ended in 1945, it was already clear by mid-1944 that, sooner or later, the Allies were going to win, and it was not too early to think of the problems of peace and reconstruction. In India, the stalemate continued: a double stalemate, in fact, - in Indo-British and in Hindu-Muslim relations, respectively. Unfortunately, the Gandhi-Jinnah talks of September 1944 and the prolonged exchange of letters failed to produce a satisfactory agreement. Jinnah wouldn't budge from his demand for Pakistan, and Gandhi couldn't agree to it. The new Viceroy, Lord Wavell, was well-meaning, but a solution eluded him. The results of the post-war elections, too, only confirmed the stalemate in Hindu-Muslim relations, there had meanwhile been a change of Government in Britain, Attlee replacing Churchill; and a Cabinet Mission (comprising Pethick-Lawrence, Cripps and Alexander) came to India with proposals for a three-tier Constitution, and there hovered some hope that the unity of India would be somehow preserved. But communal riots started and raged, now here now there with their ominous chain reactions and serious loss to life and property. The Executive Council or 'Interim Government' worked at cross purposes, the Congress members pulling in one direction and the Muslim Leaguers in another. All efforts, whether in India or in England, to preserve a united India were successfully stalled by Jinnah and his Muslim Leaguers. At last, early in 1947, Attlee sent the Earl of Mountbatten as Viceroy, with the specific charge of effecting the transfer of power before June 1948. Actually, Mountbatten was able to advance the date to 15 August 1947, which would be Sri Aurobindo's 75th birthday as well. But the transfer was to be made to two new Dominions, India and Pakistan.
Although Sri Aurobindo felt relieved that the Allies had won the war in Europe as well as against Japan, he had no reason to be satisfied with the divisive developments in India. The situation in Bengal - as a result of the riots in Calcutta and Noakhali - particularly distressed him, and he wrote to a correspondent on 19 October 1946 that, although things were bad and might become worse, "we must not let our reaction to it become excessive or suggest despair". Neither the Bengal Hindus nor their culture could be so easily exterminated, and Hitler himself couldn't quite succeed in annihilating the Jewish people. The need of the hour was courage sustained by faith:
Page 710
There was a time when Hitler was victorious everywhere and it seemed certain that a black yoke of the Asura would be imposed on the whole world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule? Berlin and Nuremberg have marked the end of that dreadful chapter in human history. Other blacknesses threaten to overshadow or even engulf mankind, but they too will end as that nightmare has ended.37
Writing some months later, Sri Aurobindo referred to the sudden eruption of certain difficulties - psychological and other - both in the Ashram and outside, and added:
In the world outside there are much worse symptoms such as the general increase of cynicism, a refusal to believe in anything at all, a decrease of honesty, an immense corruption, a preoccupation with food, money, comfort, pleasure, to the exclusion of higher things, and a general expectation of worse and worse things awaiting the world.... I am not discouraged. ... after a time, the darkness will fade and begin to disappear and the Light will come.38
When Surendra Mohan Ghose came to Pondicherry and asked for Sri Aurobindo's opinion regarding the proposal for the division of the country, he seems to have said that at that stage the demand could not be resisted, but it should at least not be on a purely communal basis, and people should be given the option to stay in India or to opt for Pakistan. Soon afterwards, Surendra Mohan was summoned by telegram to Pondicherry and entrusted with a message to the Congress leaders: "Go and tell Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana, Sardar and Rajendra Prasad that it is for the good of India, and ultimately for the good of the world, that they should act on these lines...." At the Congress Working Committee, everybody said, "A very good thing, very good", but Sri Aurobindo's proposals were not implemented.* We do not know what it was exactly that Sri Aurobindo wanted the Congress leaders to do, but they didn't do it. Neither did they heed Gandhiji's firm advice against the acceptance of partition.
When the decision on partition was made known on 3 June 1947, the Mother issued a statement the next day with the full approval of Sri Aurobindo:
A proposal has been made for the solution of our difficulties in organising Indian independence and it is being accepted with whatever bitterness of regret and searchings of the heart by Indian leaders.
It was the "absurdity of our quarrels" that had engendered the partition proposal, and we had to live that absurdity down by accepting the proposal. But with her gift of far vision, the Mother added:
Clearly, this is not a solution; it is a test, an ordeal which, if we live it out in all sincerity, will prove to us that it is not by cutting a country into small bits that we shall bring about its unity and its greatness; it is not by opposing interests
* These disclosures were made by Surendra Mohan Ghose in a speech delivered early in 1971 A Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, and reproduced in Mother India, February 1971, p. 30.
Page 711
against each other that we can win for it prosperity; it is not by setting one dogma against another that we can serve the spirit of Truth. In spite of all, India has a single soul and while we have to wait till we can speak of an India one and indivisible, our cry must be:
Let the soul of India live for ever!
What was meant by the "soul of India"? Had a nation - a human aggregate inhabiting an arbitrary geographical area - a "soul"? As if answering these doubts, the Mother explained in the course of a talk on 'The Soul of a Nation' given at about the same time:
A nation is a living personality; it has a soul, even like a human individual. The soul of a nation is also a. psychic being, that is to say, a conscious being, a formation out of the Divine Consciousness and in direct contact with it, a power and aspect of Mahashakti. A nation is not merely the sum total of the individuals that compose it, but a collective personality of which the individuals are as it were cells, like the cells of a living and conscious organism.39
The slothful logic of expediency, the pros and cons of the arithmetic of selfish party calculation, the fear of the immediate little danger and the ignoration of the bigger ultimate danger, all had conspired to force partition on the country, but at least there was the hope - if not also the assurance - that the "soul of India" wouldn't be rent in two. And so, in the fullness of time, the great Friday dawned - Friday, 15 August 1947, the day of India's independence and Sri Aurobindo's seventy-fifth birthday as well. In his message for the day, Sri Aurobindo dwelt on the significance of the double event and the possibilities for the future;
I take this coincidence, not as a fortuitous accident, but as the sanction and seal of the Divine Force that guides my steps on the work with which I began life, the beginning of its full fruition.
Recapitulating the aims and ideals conceived by him in his childhood and youth, Sri Aurobindo put them in their natural order as follows: a revolution which would achieve India's freedom and unity; the resurgence and liberation of Asia; the emergence of 'One World' in the place of the many warring nationalisms; the assumption by India of the spiritual leadership of the human race; and, finally, a revolution in consciousness that would realise in our midst the ideal human society. Missing unity, India had won only "a fissured and broken freedom". Alas, alas:
...the old communal division into Hindus and Muslims seems now to have hardened into a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that this settled fact will not be accepted as settled for ever or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled: civil strife may remain always possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest. India's internal development and prosperity may be impeded, her position among the nations weakened, her destiny impaired or even frustrated.
What was the remedy, then? Simply this: "The partition must and will go". It could come about in a natural way:
Page 712
...by an increasing recognition of the necessity not only of peace and concord but of common action, by the practice of common action and the creation of means for that purpose. In this way unity may finally come about under whatever form -.... But by whatever means, in whatever way, the division must go; unity must and will be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India's future.
During the long years since this prophetic declaration was made, we have witnessed the fulfilment to the letter of the many fears then expressed: the mounting tension between India and Pakistan, the endemic prevalence of civil strife, the Chinese invasion in 1962, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, the terrible strain on our economy, the eruption and genocide in Bangla Desh (East Pakistan) in 1971, the coming often million refugees to India, and the death of the "two nations" theory that brought Pakistan into being. But whether - or when - and in what manner — Sri Aurobindo's positive forecast (that the partition "must and will go") would be accomplished is still for the future to unfold. Certain recent events, however, seem to offer a fair hope for the future, Pakistan, alas, was born in violence - violence in thought, speech and action. But violence used deliberately to gain particular political ends cannot be eschewed early or easily. In G.P. Gooch's words, "The cult of violence does not suddenly lapse; the brutalisation of mind and soul cannot be banished by a stroke of the pen... the craving for quick results breeds impatience with the leisurely process of peace." And so there was the invasion of Kashmir in the wake of the "partition", and the violence that was at first engineered at will either against the Hindu minority in Pakistan or against "Hindu" India was ultimately turned against the Muslim "second-class citizens" or "helots" of East Pakistan (Bangla Desh) on the night of 25 March 1971. And the mad Rake's progress of genocide went on for eight months, and it was a singular circumstance that Sri Aurobindo's birthplace in Theatre Road, Calcutta , should become for the nonce "Mujib Nagar" - after Bandhu Mujibur Rehman in Pak custody - and keep the embers of Bangla freedom alive during all those doleful and daring months. And since the appetite for violence grows by what it feeds on, on 3 December 1971 Pakistan's Yahya Khan struck against India too (as his predecessor, Ayub Khan, had done in 1965), this time however provoking swift and massive retaliation. Within a fortnight the war was decisively won by India and Bangla Desh, and albeit bruised and bleeding, Bangla has ended forever her helotage to West Pakistan; and the "two nations" theory that was supposed to have justified the partition of August 1947 has now died of its own sickened appetite. Already India and Bangla Desh have forged a union of hearts through their common aspirations, trials and sacrifices. But surely the world hasn't seen the end of miracles. Perhaps President Bhutto and other leaders of West Pakistan will now at least concede the falsity of the "two nations" theory, and annual in one master-stroke of statesmanship the rages and ravages of the last twenty-five years. It is the Phoenix hour, and India, Bangla, Desh and what remains of Pakistan could even now form a confederation or a sub-continental economic community, thereby redeeming the poisoned
Page 713
time and remoulding our common destinies. And if such a consummation should be brought about before 15 August 1972, that would be the glorious fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's prophecy that the division must go and that Mother India would again gather all her children together.
As regards the other aims and ideals that Sri Aurobindo had cherished, in August 1947 they did seem to be in a process of fulfilment:
Asia has arisen; large parts are now quite free or are at this moment being liberated....
The unification of mankind is under way, though only in an imperfect initiative, organised but struggling against tremendous difficulties. But the momentum is there and, if the experience of history can be taken as a guide, it must inevitably increase until it conquers. ...
The spiritual gift of India to the world has already begun....
The final dream was a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness.... Here too... the initiative can come from India and, although the scope must be universal, the central movement may be hers.
Such is the content which I put into this date of India's liberation; whether or how far this hope will be justified depends upon the new and free India.
A message nobly tuned to the occasion, conveying a warning as well as a prophecy; but the principal actors on the political scene were too preoccupied with getting into positions of power to heed the warning, and too shortsighted to bother about a Seer's dreams and visions. For men and women of good will, however, for the true. children of the Mother who now suddenly felt sundered by the mean calculations of the power-seekers, for the millions - Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Parsis - who still felt they were but the cells and arteries and tissues and blood-corpuscles of India the benevolent Mother, there came to them on Independence Day the right prayer for the auspicious-anguished occasion, a prayer given by the Mother in her vast compassionate understanding:
O our Mother, O Soul of India, Mother who hast never forsaken thy children even in the days of darkest depression, even when they turned away from thy voice, served other masters and denied thee, now when they have arisen and , the light is on thy face in this dawn of thy liberation, in this great hour we salute thee. Guide us so that the horizon of freedom opening before us may be also a horizon of true greatness and of thy true life in the community of the nations. Guide us so that we may be always on the side of great ideals and show to men thy true visage, as a leader in the ways of the spirit and a friend and helper of all the peoples.
The weeks and months following Independence Day were a sore testing time for the country. It was a period of mounting tragedy and colossal frustration. The brief moment of triumph and fulfilment was soon surpassed by shame-faced perplexity and the benumbing sense of fatality. The surgical act of division let loose unimaginable horrors and the desecration of the cherished national values. Tens of thousands were butchered, millions were uprooted from their native hearths.
Page 714
And those months witnessed too superhuman endeavours to stem the avalanching poisonous tide of reaction, - endeavours that somehow redeemed the time and slowly reared on the very ruins of shattered unity a fresh new house of integration. Then occurred the culminating crisis. On 30 January 1948, Gandhiji was struck down on his way to prayer. The Father of the Nation was no more. "The sun that warmed and brightened our lives has set, and we shiver in the cold and dark" - thus Jawaharlal Nehru feelingly expressed the pressure of agony in the country. Faith itself seemed for a while to cower before giant Despair, and almost ceased to be. Presently, however, there were signs of reviving faith. When a devotee wired to Sri Aurobindo "Darkness and sorrow spread after Bapuji's death", he replied on 4 February: "Remain firm through the darkness; the light is there and will conquer." And next day his fuller message was broadcast from All India Radio:
I would have preferred silence in the face of these circumstances that surround us. ...This much, however, I will say that the Light which led us to freedom, though not yet to unity, still bums and will bum on till it conquers. I believe firmly that a great and united future is the destiny of this nation and its peoples. The Power that brought us through so much struggle and suffering to freedom, will achieve also, through whatever strife or trouble, the aim which so poignantly occupied the thoughts of the fallen leader at the time of his tragic ending; as it brought us freedom, it will bring us unity. A free and united India will be there and the Mother will gather around her her sons and weld them into single national strength in the life of a great and united people.
On the other hand, the Kashmir question had bedevilled Indo-Pakistan relations, the scramble for power and position by careerist politicians had become too blatant, the reign of cynicism and corruption was too obvious, and in the outside world too, the former Allies (U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.) were drifting apart, and in China Mao was on the ascendant and Chiang was in retreat. What hope for India? What hope for the world? Asked for his opinion, Sri Aurobindo wrote on 18 July 1948:
I am afraid I can hold out but cold comfort.... Things are bad, are growing worse and may at any time grow worst or worse than worst if that is possible - and anything however paradoxical seems possible in the present perturbed world.... It is, as in Yoga, where things active or latent in the being have to be put into action in the light so that they may be grappled with and thrown out or to emerge from latency in the depths for the same purificatory purpose... night is darkest before dawn and... the coming of dawn is inevitable. But... the new,, world whose coming we envisage is not to be made of the same texture as the old and different only in pattern... it must come by other means - from within and not from without.. .40
Later in the year, on 11 December, the National Prize for Humanities was awarded in absentia to Sri Aurobindo at the Annual Convocation of the Andhra University. In his citation. Dr. C.R. Reddy the Vice-Chancellor hailed Sri Aurobindo as "the
Page 715
sole sufficing genius of the age":
He is more than the hero of a nation. He is amongst the Saviours of humanity, who belong to all ages and all nations, the Sanatanas, who leaven our existence with their eternal presence, whether we are aware of it or not.... He is a poet, dramatist, philosopher, critic, interpreter of an commentator on the Vedas, the Gita and all the transcendent lore and legend of India, and he is something higher than these, the Saint who has realised his oneness with the Universal Spirit, and fathomed the depths and brought up treasures of transcendent value and brilliance.*
After reviewing Sri Aurobindo's many-sided achievement as poet, patriot , philosopher and Yogi, Dr. Reddy asked the Chancellor to honour the University - and honour himself too - by awarding the National Prize to Sri Aurobindo. In his Message for the occasion, read out at the Convocation, Sri Aurobindo made a reference to the demand for the formation of "linguistic provinces" and elaborated the theory of unity in diversity as practised in ancient India and as it might still be wisely practised in the altered conditions of our time. Towards the end, he glanced at "the disordered world-situation left by the war, full of risks and sufferings and shortages and threatening another catastrophe" and at the crisis of conscience for India herself:
There are deeper issues for India herself, since by following certain tempting directions she may conceivably become a nation like many others evolving an opulent industry and commerce, a powerful organisation of social and political life, an immense military strength, practising power-politics with a high degree of success... but in this apparently magnificent progression forfeiting its Swadharma, losing its soul. Then ancient India and her spirit might disappear altogether and we would have only one more nation like the others, and that would be a real gain neither to the world nor to us.... It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light. ... we must not disguise from ourselves the fact that after these long years of subjection and its cramping and impairing effects a great inner as well as outer liberation and change, a vast inner and outer progress is needed if we are to fulfil India's true destiny.
The twenty-three years since this was said have justified the fears expressed above but not seen the realisation of Sri Aurobindo's ardently cherished hopes. India's map was re-drawn so as to provide for "linguistic" States, but this has been no unmixed blessing, for it has led to endless border claims and disputes regarding the sharing of river waters, and sometimes these are backed by belligerent speeches and violent agitations. Local feeling is increasingly waxing stronger than the feeling
* The entire citation was included as Appendix II to the second edition of this book published in 1950, but was omitted in its third edition (1972).
Page 716
for India the Mother. Again, although India has tried through central planning and massive "statism" to evolve "an opulent industry and commerce", this hasn't as yet had any effect whatsoever on what Gandhiji used to call "the grinding poverty" of the masses. Our foreign policy too has failed to yield the expected dividends. The long years of subjection have indeed had their impairing effects, and the "brown sahib" has more often than not proved a worse tyrant than the white one, and the ruling elite is more alienated from the nation's Svabhava and Swadharma than were the foreign rulers.
VI
While the world war with its anxieties, uncertainties and shortages did affect life in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, that was more on the surface and couldn't touch the deeper purposes or far aims of the Ashram. It was in 1939-40 that The Life Divine, revised and amplified, came out in two volumes. It was on 15 August 1942 - Sri Aurobindo's seventieth birthday - that his Collected Poems and Plays appeared, again in two large volumes. On 15 August 1942 was published also the first number of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual from Calcutta, carrying articles on Sri Aurobindo by sadhaks and others. The proliferation of interest in Sri Aurobindo's thought was further exemplified when The Advent— "A Quarterly devoted to the Exposition of Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Future" - started coming out from Madras in February 1944. Under the caption 'Ourselves', the editorial in the opening number declared as follows:
Sri Aurobindo's vision enrings the entire domain of human preoccupations; it embraces and relumes all truths that secretly build and inspire man's integral being - his mental and vital and even physical, his individual as well as collective formations. So one line of our interest will lie in the direction of scanning and understanding human movements - spiritual, intellectual, social, literary or scientific - in the light Sri Aurobindo has shed upon them. Naturally, it is the principles and forces behind external formulations that will principally, if not wholly, engage our attention.
In April 1945, the first number of Sri Aurobindo Circle came out from Bombay, rather on the lines of the Calcutta Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual. A bolder step was the launching of Mother India, a fortnightly from Bombay, edited by K.D. Sethna. It had a wider coverage in theme and aimed at a more popular presentation of views than the Advent and the two Annuals.
The war meant, among other developments, the coming of children to the Ashram, since several of Sri Aurobindo's disciples wished to send their families to the safety of the Ashram - and away from areas more directly exposed to the dangers and exigencies of the war. In course of time, this meant (as we saw earlier) the starting of an Ashram School for the children. Beginning with about 20 pupils on 2 December 1943, the enrolment steadily increased and a hostel had to
Page 717
be established. The Ashram ideal of integral education meant physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual education in harmonious flowering, but physical education was still the base or stem of the whole, and therefore from the outset the Ashram School gave special importance to sports, games and athletics. During his visit to the Ashram to hand over the national Prize in person to Sri Aurobindo, Dr. C.R. Reddy witnessed an exhibition of games and physical exercises by the Ashram children, and commented on it later with enthusiastic approval.
...this wonderful Ashram in which life and the joy of life are mingled in happy union with spirituality and spiritual progress....
But in many respects what impressed me most were the educational institutions maintained by the Ashram and the ancient spirit of strength and joy that pervades them. The Mother, the embodiment of grace, light and tenderness, ordered an exhibition of games and physical exercises by the boys and girls of the Ashram School. I said to myself, 'If all the schools were like this, won't India be unassailable by internal foes or external?' The parades were excellent. The exercises were gone through, not merely efficiently, but cheerfully. The girls... performed hazardous exercises like vaulting. Though there was risk of accident to limb, if not to life, they advanced, cool, calm and resolute, with bright looks and confident smiles, and went through the exercises without a single hitch or a single failure.... She [the Mother] told me that it was the Calcutta killings and the bestial abominations perpetrated on our helpless women and children that made her think of organising the students in her school - boys and girls - into a corps capable of self-defence. At the root is the great Vedic idea that without a strong body you cannot have a strong soul, undaunted in danger and ready to perform the great task, the root principle of all Dharma, of defending the weak and the helpless.41
As if to emphasise that the physical was the root of the rest, the first issue of the English-French quarterly journal. Bulletin of Physical Education, came out in February 1949, and it has since been a pace-maker for physical education in the country.*
But Sri Aurobindo seems to have had a special interest in Mother India - he is said to have looked upon it as "My paper" - and he generally approved the views of the editor and the line of argument followed by him even in his articles with a political slant. Sri Aurobindo's association with the Bulletin was, perhaps, closer still, for every issue carried something from him written for it exclusively. For the very first issue (February 1949), he wrote at the Mother's request a "Message", and subsequent issues carried a series of seven articles: The Perfection of the body'. The Divine Body', The Supermind and the Life Divine', 'Supermind and Humanity', 'Supermind in the Evolution', 'Mind of Light' and 'Supermind
* More recently, the name has been changed to Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, and it is published in English-French-Hindi.
Page 718
and Mind of Light', the last appearing in the issue of November 1950.* In the "Message", Sri Aurobindo pointed out that the "sporting spirit" includes:
...good humour and tolerance and consideration for all, a right attitude and friendliness to competitors and rivals, self-control and scrupulous observance of the laws of the game, fair play and avoidance of the use of foul means, an equal acceptance of victory or defeat without bad humour, resentment or ill-will towards successful competitors, loyal acceptance of the decisions of the appointed judge, umpire or referee.
These qualities have their value, not only in sport but in life as a whole, and will accelerate "the bringing about of unity and a more harmonious world order towards which we look as our hope for humanity's future".
There Sri Aurobindo might have stopped if his intention had merely been to give a word of encouragement to the Department of Physical Education in the Ashram. The following series of articles, however, heaved up wave upon wave of a high-arching argument that was, perhaps, a probe into possibility, perhaps the record of a new realisation, and perhaps a hint of imminent happenings - perhaps all three in unison. The ideal should be, not simply a healthy or beautiful mind in a healthy and beautiful body, but rather a perfect and divine life in a perfect and divine body. But, then, what are the badges of the current imperfection of the body and the divorce of the Divine from human life? Life in the ignorance, life yoked to the density and obscuration of the mind-life-matter tangle of imperfection and falsity, life alienated from the Divine springs of Sachchidananda! The bringing into action of the sovereign Knowledge-Power or Truth-Consciousness; of Supermind could alone change corruption into incorruption, imperfection into perfection, and earth-life into the Life Divine. In The Perfection of the Body', Sri Aurobindo said that bodily perfection might ultimately mean the body being "suffused with a light and beauty and bliss from the Beyond", thereby becoming the- "body divine". Now, the two basic needs of the human body - food for the maintenance of life and sex for the perpetuation of the species - must both be capable of transcendence in the "divine body". Perhaps the body might one day be able to draw the means of sustenance and self-renewal from the ocean of energy all around and within oneself as well. The Mother too had said in the same issue in the article 'Energy Inexhaustible':
A most powerful help that yogic discipline can bring to the sportsman is to teach him how to renew his energies by drawing them from the undying source of universal energy.
.. .there is a source of energy which, once discovered, never dries up, whatever the circumstances and the physical conditions in life. It is the energy that can be described as spiritual, that which is received not from below, from the
* These articles were published as The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth in 1952, and in America as The Mind of Light in 1953. In the Birth Centenary Library edition of 1972, they form part I of Volume 16, The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings.
Page 719
depths of inconscience, but from above, from the supreme origin of men and the universe, from the all-powerful and eternal splendours of the superconscious. It is there, everywhere around us, penetrating everything, and to enter into contact with it and to receive it, it is sufficient to sincerely aspire for it...42
Like the need for food, the need for sex too might be superseded, and the divine body might come into being "by intervention of an occult force and process".
In the remaining five essays Sri Aurobindo mingles apparent speculation with possible personal experience and realisation, and introduces, as it were casually, the new concept of 'Mind of Light', a direct power of the Supermind functioning as its accredited agent. In the normal process of evolution, the passage from Mind to Supermind might take aeons after aeons, but if the Supermind itself intervenes from above in the earth-nature - either by itself or through an agent - the pace of evolution may be accelerated, and in the result "evolution would itself evolve" - though it would not change its direction. As an advanced guard, these select men and women charged with the Mind of Light may prove the harbingers of the Supramental Age:
Thus there will be built up, first, even in the Ignorance itself, the possibility of a human ascent towards a divine living; then there will be, by the illumination of this mind of Light in the greater realisation of what may be called a gnostic mentality, in a transformation of the human being, even before the supermind is reached, even in the earth-consciousness and in a humanity transformed, an illumined divine life.
It would be an intermediate or forerunner race between our mentalised humanity and the ultimate supramentalised Gnostic beings.*
Along with Sri Aurobindo's articles, the Bulletin also carried the Mother's articles that indicated, rather more simply and succinctly, the contours of the Ideal and the direction of the desired and destined transformation:
We are not aiming at success - our aim is perfection.
We are not seeking fame or reputation; we want to prepare ourselves for a Divine manifestation.43
We want an integral transformation, the transformation of the body and all its activities.44
.. .the truth we seek is made of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty... .The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind that of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and a perfect harmony.45
Sports, tournaments, good works, artistic creation, Yogic discipline, all have but one aim: "transformation", so as to realise perfection. Perfect the individual - perfect the group - and thereby prepare the way for the perfection of the race. During the war years and after, Sri Aurobindo and some of those closest to him in
*'Mind of Light' has already been briefly discussed in an earlier chapter (18JV).
Page 720
his Ashram were in the vanguard of the battle for a new world. The far-flung struggle in the outside world between the Divine and the Asuric forces had its counterpoint in the Ashram too, but there it was fought-on another level and with other instruments. And the Ashram's survival, the great and meaningful expansion of its activities, and the widening circles of its influence overflowing the Ashram premises during the nineteen forties only betokened some of the milestones of the progress and the victory. The arrival of the 'Mind of Light' was but the most significant of these developments.
As Sri Aurobindo surveyed the shifting international scene in the post-war years, he noticed trends instinct with ominous possibilities. The collapse of the Axis Powers was a good thing no doubt, but the new alignment of forces boded ill for the future. Taking advantage of a reissue of The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo wrote a new chapter in 1949, and this appeared as a seventeen page 'Introduction' in the American edition of the book (1950) and as 'Postscript Chapter' in the Advent of February 1950. The war had ended, and the U.N.O. had come into existence; but the spectre of a third world war wasn't exorcised yet:
...the actual danger presents itself rather as a clash between two opposing ideologies, one led by Russia and Red China and trying to impose the Communistic extreme, ...and on the other side a combination of peoples, partly capitalist, partly moderate socialist who still cling with some attachment to the idea of liberty.... In Asia a more perilous situation has arisen, standing sharply across the way to any possibility of a continental unity of the peoples of this part of the world, in the emergence of Communist China. This creates a gigantic bloc which could easily englobe the whole of Northern Asia in a combination between two enormous Communist Powers, Russia and China, and would overshadow with a threat of absorption South-Western Asia and Tibet and might be pushed to overrun all up to the whole frontier of India, menacing her security and that of Western Asia with the possibility of an invasion and an overrunning and subjection by penetration or even by overwhelming military force to an unwanted ideology, political and social institutions and dominance of this militant mass of Communism whose push might easily prove irresistible.46
At a time when India was officially applauding Red China and fraternising with her, it is remarkable that Sri Aurobindo should have so penetratingly foretold the probable configuration of things to come.
On 25 June 1950, North Korea - a Communist stronghold in Asia - crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, whose president, Syngman Rhee, at once appealed to President Truman for help. When K.D. Sethna wanted Sri Aurobindo's guidelines for an article in Mother India on the Korean crisis, he wrote on 28 June:
.. .the whole affair is as plain as a pike-staff. It is the first move in the Communist plan of campaign to dominate and take possession first of these northern parts and then of South-East Asia as a preliminary to their manoeuvres with
Page 721
regard to the rest of the continent - in passing, Tibet as a gate opening to India.
If they succeed, there is no reason why domination of the whole world should not follow by steps....
Truman seems to have understood the situation if we can judge from his moves in Korea, but it is to be seen whether he is strong enough... to carry the matter through....
One thing is certain that if there is too much shilly-shallying and if America gives up now her defence of Korea, she may be driven to yield position after position until it is too late: at one point or another she will have to stand and face the necessity of drastic action even if it leads to war....
...for the moment the situation is as grave as it can be.
As a matter of fact, Truman did indeed rise to the occasion, for he felt that "firmness would be the only way to deter new actions in other portions of the world".47 Thus, after some initial reverses. General MacArthur was able to stem the tide of aggression and push the invader back.
Sri Aurobindo's letter was also published widely as a message in August, and when the Chinese aggression in Tibet in the last days of October brought the menace much closer to India, Sethna wrote in Mother India (11 November 1950):
The basic significance of Mao's Tibetan adventure is to advance China's frontiers right down to India and stand poised there to strike at the right moment and with the right strategy.... With Tibet incorporated in China, we shall have Mao touching Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Assam.
According to Truman, our ambassador in China at the time, K. M. Panikkar, "had in the past played the game of the Chinese Communist fairly regularly",48 and this too must have weakened India's stand in respect of Chinese moves in Tibet. In retrospect it is now clear that the "postscript chapter" as well as the letter of 28 June accurately assessed the strategic situation of Tibet as the gateway to India. When, years later, president Kennedy was shown a typed copy of Sri Aurobindo's statement, he is reported to have told Sudhir Ghose:
Surely, there is a typing mistake here. The date must have been 1960, not 1950! You mean to say that a man devoted to meditation and contemplation, sitting in one comer of India, said this about the intentions of Communist China as early as 1950?
In 1942, Sri Aurobindo's firm and urgent advice that the Congress should accept and implement the Cripps Proposals was rejected, and the result was partition and a fissured and weakened India, In 1950, Sri Aurobindo's categorical warning about China's moves in Tibet and her intentions in Asia were ignored again, and the result was the Chinese invasion of India twelve years later. The wages of the sin of partition and of the ignoration of Sri Aurobindo's advice and warnings is the tragedy of Bangla Desh in 1971, the alignment of Pakistan and China against India, and the wreckage of our attempts at self-sufficiency and planned economic growth.*
* Written in July 1971.
Page 722
VII
Sri Aurobindo's preoccupations with national and-international affairs, as indicated in the preceding Sections, should dispel the notion that he was something of a spiritual acrobat performing "miracles" and undergoing the most outlandish austerities and penances. In a life lived quintessentially "within", the outer life could be disappointingly normal! He read, he wrote, he dictated, he talked, he laughed, he read proofs, he revised poems written by others, he gave interviews though only very occasionally. Even during the years of complete retirement after 1926, he received friends and savants like Tagore, Sylvain Levi, M. Baron the Governor of Pondicherry, M. Schumann from Paris, C.R. Reddy, K.M. Munshi, and others. From behind the scenes, he helped the Mother whenever necessary with advice regarding the organisation and expansion of activities in the Ashram. The School, the Printing Press, the Golconde Guest House, the Dispensary, the Harpagon Workshop, the divers Services - in all activities the keynote of the work was the urge towards Perfection, which was spirituality in action. Golconde, for example, was a rare work of architectural beauty, and is daily ordering was a continual exercise in perfection. As a Guest House, it had (it still has) its own special rules, and in defence of these Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple on 25 February 1945:
As regards Golconde and its rules - they are not imposed elsewhere - there is a reason for them.... First, the Mother believes in beauty as a part of spirituality and divine living; secondly, she believes that physical things have the Divine Consciousness underlying them as much as living things; and thirdly that they have an individuality of their own and ought to be properly treated.... It; is on this basis that she planned the Golconde. First, she wanted a high architectural beauty, and in this she succeeded... one spoke of it as the finest building of its kind he had seen, with no equal in all Europe or America... also she wanted all the objects in it, the rooms, the fitting, the furniture to be individually artistic and to form a harmonious whole... each thing was arranged to have its own use, for each thing there was a place, and there should be no mixing up, or confused or wrong use.... That was why the rules were made.. .49
The cardinal aim being the flowering of consciousness towards the Divine, the "rules" (if any) were but incidental; and freedom and the play of variety were of the essence of the Ashram life. Sri Aurobindo didn't ever force on his disciples the limitations he had imposed on himself:
If I am living in my room, it is not out of a passion for solitude, and it would be ridiculous to put forward this purely external circumstance - or S's withdrawnness which is a personal necessity of his sādhanā - as if it were the obligatory sign of a high advance in the Yoga or solitude the aim: these are simply incidents which none are called upon to imitate.50
Secluded and calm and reticent he might be, but his pulses responded every second to the multitudinous affairs of "dear and dogged" humanity. Along with the
Page 723
Mother, he was the spiritual director of the Ashram -of the seven hundred and fifty permanent sadhaks who constituted its complex and harmonious life in 1950. Albeit for the most part unseen, he was nevertheless the hub of the Ashram's life and exerted an incommensurable influence on the inner and outer life of the sadhaks. Sri Aurobindo's central direction was really a fruitful benevolence and an invisible infusion of occult force, and each individual sadhak and the aggregate too were the happier and the securer for this direction. There was no dull or dead uniformity or standardisation, for each sadhak was encouraged to grow in spirit, each in his own way, even as in a flower garden a variety of plants blossom, but each puts froth its own unique best in form, hue and perfume. As K.D. Sethna wrote editorially in Mother India (15 August 1949):
The Ashram in Pondicherry that has sprung up around him is a scene of multifarious activity, a field for a hundred talents and aptitudes - men of diverse types developing by a series of inner Yogic experiences and the expression of those experiences in outer life. The Ashram is a glowing focus of India's innate spirituality, fraught with immense possibilities of irradiating the entire life of the nation.
Some years later, an American visitor wrote:
The atmosphere of the Ashram is discouraging to all pretence and vanity. 'Ego-antics', so common in the average small group, are rarely noted here, even among a thousand - blessed relief! Surely there is a powerful Force at work to subdue the Ego and bring forward the Soul.51
The 'ego' is a stifling prison-house and makes for increasing anxiety, calculation and fear, but the Soul is seraphically free, and can sport in the Infinite with puissance and happiness. The sadhaks too have their moments of doubt and gloom - even their "dark nights" - but the great aim is inner poise and calm reflected in outer unhurried demeanour and joy in action. Free from the grip of economic values, the lure of the competitive rat-race of the outer world, and the insidious promptings of our too sordid human bondage, the sadhaks are not only enabled to live the Gita's ideal "Yoga is skill in works" (Yogah karmasu kauśalam), but even to exemplify the truth, "Yoga is joy in works". There was in Sri Aurobindo's relations with his disciples the admixture of the Divine and the human, and wisdom and humour played at cards for the awakening of enlightenment, the growth at consciousness, and the diffusion of happiness. His letters - as we have seen - could mingle instruction with humour, and make admonition itself a honeyed sweetness, as in this to Nirod:
You have the reputation of being a fierce and firebrand doctor who considers it a crime for patients to have illness. You may be right, but tradition demands that a doctor should be soft like butter, soothing like treacle, sweet like sugar and jolly like jam. So!
With the coming of the children, and the springing up of the School, the dormitories and the playgrounds, life in the Ashram was charged with a new sunniness and grew new dimensions of possibility, for the School aimed, not at manufacturing
Page 724
matriculates and graduates, but rather at creating conditions for the right and full flowering of personality. The idea of flowering - of the unfolding of the self petal by petal - is subtly reinforced by the abundance of flowers in the Ashram. While they contribute, no doubt, to the colour and beauty and aroma of the Ashram, they also play a very significant part in the sādhanā itself. The ritual of the offering of flowers to the Mother is a potent symbolic act testifying to the reality of the spiritual kinship between the Divine and the sadhaks. Once a French visitor, profoundly responding to this ministry of flowers, remarked:
Amongst all the offerings made to the Divine, the flower is the most subtle, and also the most mysterious; for, in its simplicity, it carries the vibrations of the ākāśa, the ethereal element itself, - that is, all that is most abstract, pure and perfect. It is, above everything else, the form behind which is the sound, the all-powerful creative mantra.52
The offering of a flower, the receipt of a flower, could mean much, for flowers are verily the Divine's symbolic emanations of beauty and goodness and truth. Flowers in the Ashram have names of their own - not the names they are known by in the outside world, but Yogic names ('Psychological Perfection', 'Supreme descended on Earth', 'Divine Solicitude', 'Sincerity', 'Spiritual Healing', etc.) that insinuate their soul's power, their potentiality for spiritual engineering - and these angels and ministers of Grace in the Ashram agreeably mingle in the life-ways of the sadhaks, and make the Ashram something akin to a Garden of the unfolding Divine Manifestation.
After the passage of more than two decades, it is difficult today to convey in words the impression the Ashram made on a sensitive visitor during the late nineteen forties. The Ashram was spread over fewer buildings than now, the sadhaks were fewer, and, Pondicherry itself, still a French Colony, lived at a more leisurely pace than now. One felt too that there was a great deal of truth in Professor Tan Yun-shan's remark: "It is not the Ashram that is in Pondicherry, no, Pondicherry is in the Ashram!" And the Ashram's influence overflowed the main Ashram building in Rue de la Marine, overflowed the scattered houses where the sadhaks lived, overflowed Pondicherry and its environs too. As Sri Aurobindo admitted to a disciple:
Certainly, my force is not limited to the Ashram and its conditions. ... It is also used for individual purposes outside the scope of the Ashram and the practice of Yoga; but that, of course, is silently done and mainly by a spiritual action. The Ashram, however, remains at the centre of the work and without the practice of Yoga the work would not exist and could not have any meaning or fruition.53
The Ashram was the Ashram, a place selected by divine intention and sanctified for a great sacrificial work; and Sri Aurobindo's work, as Nolini explained, was "still of the nature of experiment and trial in very restricted limits, something in the nature of what is done in a laboratory when a new power has been discovered, but has still to be perfectly formulated in its process".54 But although inaccessible
Page 725
to most, Sri Aurobindo's influence was unmistakable, and even visitors felt that the very atmosphere of the place was charged with something ineluctable to which they could give no name. Whether one loitered among the trees and flowers in the Ashram, or sat by oneself in the cool and restful hours of the evening, or attended Anilbaran's, Purani's, Naren Banerji's, Dikshit's or Rishabchand's instructive readings from Sri Aurobindo's works, or visited Dilip's house to catch the strains of Mira bhajan, or exchanged words or smiles with Nolini, Amrita, Rishabchand, Pavitra, Prithwi Singh, Chandradip, Premanand, Gangadharam, or even if one merely watched the sadhaks at work - perhaps the rolling up or unrolling of mats at meditation time, or the culling and sorting of flowers, or the washing and piling up of plates and cups, or conscientiously doing "gate duty" - one was apt to say echoing Horace, "And seek for Truth in the Ashram at Pondicherry".*
After a few days' stay, one felt it would be a fair description of the Yoga-Ashram at Pondicherry to call it the first, faltering, none-the-less highly promising preliminary sketch of "a new Heaven and a new Earth". Meeting the Mother - his own mother - after the lapse of almost thirty-five years on 21 November 1949, M. Andre felt that he was "still a small boy seeking safety in the mother's lap"; and as for the Ashram, what struck him first was "the perfect harmony of the whole"; all details fitted together, all work was done "with an evident pleasure and not as a necessary duty". After darshan on 24 November, he wrote that no words could describe "the overwhelming impression of benevolence, knowledge and strength" which radiated from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother:
It is not at all surprising that so many people undertake long journeys in order to have the privilege of paying their tribute of devotion. What they get in return is a glimpse of a higher and truer life which responds to the most innate aspiration of human nature.55
The Mother gave darshan every day, and jointly with Sri Aurobindo on the four darshan days. For the sadhaks and other seekers, darshan was always a moment of mystic union between Guru and disciple, breaking through the casement of Matter and Mind. For the rest, one read Sri Aurobindo's published works or unpublished correspondence, one read the Mother's Conversations or Prayers and Meditations, one joined the evening Meditation, one tried to lose oneself in "her finite's multitude in an infinite space".56 Or one tried to take in the argument of books like The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity and wondered whether the Possibility outlined therein was not being actually put into practice - though only on the scale of a miniature - in the rhythm of daily life in the Yoga-Ashram. The seven hundred and fifty inmates were drawn from different parts of India, with a noticeable sprinkling of Europeans and Americans as well; there were young people and there were old people, there were men, women, children; and there were poets, painters, musicians, retired civilians, ex-professors and ex-revolutionaries,
* Atque inter silvas Academi quaerere verum. (Horace, Ep., II, 2,45; And to seek truth among the groves of Academus.)
Page 726
physicians and surgeons, nurses and teachers, engineers and entrepreneurs, sadhus and ecstatics, and all, high and low, - there was really no 'high' and 'low' in the Ashram scale of values, - engaged themselves in some fruitful action or another according to the Mother's direction. And the Mother dealt differently with each person, - as Sri Aurobindo once explained to a disciple, - "according to his true need (not what he himself fancies to be his need) and his progress in the sādhanā and his nature". In its outer organisation, the Ashram thus replaced the traditional sannyasi-ideal of alms-begging by purposive work, work offered as a sacrifice to the Divine; and at the same time, this arrangement delivered the sadhaks from all embarrassing preoccupations with money and the unending problem of bread-winning and the concomitant degradations and difficulties. The sadhaks were one in the Mother, and had put their adhara at the disposal of the Mother; by losing themselves - and to the extent they lost themselves - in the consciousness of Sri Aurobindo and of the Mother (it was the same consciousness, in fact, being verily the Cosmic Consciousness), they experienced a liberation of the self and a soul's puissance and ananda that admitted of no analysis or verbal description. In that ambience of freedom, all work ranked the same, all was the Divine's work, and all was done as a constant reaffirmation of the sankalpa of ātmasamarpana.
The stray responsive visitor to the Yoga-Ashram was thus sure to sniff at once the "atmosphere" of the place - its feeling for rhythm and its sense of harmony, its mellowed lights and whispered sweetnesses, its enveloping peace and its contained puissances. The complicated wheels of the Ashram - as complicated as the processes and concerns of Nature - nevertheless revolved unseen, almost as effortlessly and unconsciously as in the seething world of Nature. The Ashram, one felt convinced, was the rough first sketch of the Promised Land - just a few dots and dashes and shapely curves and dance of colours - but even then one could discover in them the vague configurations, the confident commencement, of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. And one hoped, one prayed, one almost felt certain that the Promise would be at last redeemed in human time:
One man's perfection still can save the world.
There is won a new proximity to the skies,
A first betrothal of the Earth to Heaven,
A deep concordat between Truth and Life:
A camp of God is pitched in human time.57
VIII
We have seen in chapter 22 how, ever since Sri Aurobindo's departure from Calcutta in 1910, attempts were made from time to time to bring him back to active political life. Lajpat Rai, Baptista, Moonje, C.R. Das were among the nationalist leaders who tried, at one time or another, to persuade Sri Aurobindo to
Page 727
return to India from his self-imposed exile and give a lead to the country. Invariably he excused himself. It wasn't likely that the Government would leave him free to pursue politics: it wasn't to be taken for granted that his views would be acceptable to the Nationalist party or the Indian National Congress: and, above all, his real work - the work that had brought him to Pondicherry - lay in a different sphere altogether. He had left politics not simply to evade arrest, or because he was seized by frustration regarding his innings in politics; he had come away because, as he told a disciple, he "got a very distinct adesh in the matter". The Divine had called him, he had obeyed the call! Nay more: he had found his "Cave of Tapasya" in Pondicherry, and there he would remain. And so firm was his resolution that he would not come out of his seclusion even to preside over the Ramakrishna Paramahamsa centenary celebrations in 1936.
Although he had cut his connection with politics, once at the time of the Cripps mission (as mentioned earlier) he did intervene, but without leaving his Ashram. And he did employ a spiritual action on behalf of the Allies during the war. But, then, he looked upon the war as a dharma yuddha, and hence there was no politics so far as he was concerned. He was a Yogi burdened with jñāna drsti or foreknowledge, a Rishi endowed with plenary understanding, and now and then he offered advice when it was sought or when he thought the occasion demanded it. It is said that the foreign policy resolution passed at the Jaipur session of the Indian National Congress after the war was almost wholly, word for word, the draft sent by him to Nehru through Surendra Mohan Ghose.* The situation in India after the partition - the influx of refugees from Pakistan, the Kashmir imbroglio, subversion by the Communists - was hardly reassuring. Already people were getting a little disillusioned with the record of the Congress Governments in the States ,. and at the Centre. When Nehru was in Calcutta early in 1949, "a bundle of leaflets ' was thrown into his car, demanding of him to bring Sri Aurobindo back to Bengal".58 But deeply concerned though Sri Aurobindo was about happenings in Bengal and in India, he had no intention of returning to the political fray. Founding the Life Divine was an absorbing task enough, and tolerated no diversions.
But one thing was clear: boy, or adolescent, or teacher of literature, or lover of fair Bengal, or knight-errant of Indian nationalism, or servant of humanity, or torch bearer of the Divine, Sri Aurobindo had travelled far a field indeed, but only along the same road and always towards the same goal. As early as 1906, Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya wrote in Sandhya about Sri Aurobindo:
Our Aurobindo is a rare phenomenon in the world. In him resides the sāttvika divine beauty, snow-white, resplendent. Great and vast - vast in the amplitude of his heart, great in the glory of his own self, his swadharma as a Hindu. So pure and complete a man a fire-charged thunder yet tender and delicate as the lotus-leaf. A man rich in knowledge, self-lost in meditation. You can nowhere
* The disclosure was made by Surendra Mohan in a speech at Pondicherry, now published in Mother India, February 1971, p. 30.
Page 728
find his like in all the three worlds. In order to free the land from her chains Aurobindo has broken through the glamour of Western civilisation, renounced all worldly comfort, and now as a Son of the Mother he has taken charge of the Bande Mataram. He is the Bhavananda, Jivananda, Dhirananda of Rishi Bankim, all in one.59
This inspired piece of writing by an idealist-revolutionary was a homage wrung from the heart as well as a piece of prophetic divination. Indeed, Sri Aurobindo had always been inclined to ask: What did they know of love and service who only themselves loved or served? The centre of gravity that motivated action should be shifted further and further away from oneself, accomplishing wider and richer integration all the time: "love not yourself, love Bengal, love India; serve not yourself, serve the Mother, the Mother and her three hundred million children; love India, serve her - liberate her, Mother India, Mother Bharati, Mother Durga, from the clutches of the foreign Rakshasa, help her to live once more in freedom and regain her former glory"!* The tune was presently gathered into a symphony, and the music of this love embraced all humanity; and the Yoga was "not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine".60 And there was a further deepening of vision and widening of horizons, the final and ultimate extension. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga was not for the sake of humanity; it was first, and last, and all the time only for the sake of the Divine. As the Mother explained:
It is not the welfare of humanity that we seek but the manifestation of the Divine. We are here to work out the Divine Will, more truly, to be worked upon by the Divine Will so that we may be its instruments for the progressive incorporation of the Supreme and the establishment of His reign upon earth.61
Sri Aurobindo, then, had always been forging ahead, the field of his action - first political, presently spiritual - had been broadening and growing ever new dimensions. At the near-culmination of his labours, he had now achieved what M. Jacques Maritain would have called a "universal integration", he had arrived at a total world-view that comprehended and transcended the earlier incomplete views. After almost a lifetime's ceaseless yearnings and arduous climbings on the steep stair of spirituality, Sri Aurobindo had won the beatific vision on the Pisgah heights of his own inveterate strivings. He had caught the vision, and he had also found the clue to the process of the transformation of earth-nature into super-nature. But the vision was not a concrete embodied reality yet upon the earth; something had come down of the power and the glory, but not quite the thing itself, far less the whole of it. And so, still stationed in his room in the Ashram, he continued his Divine ministry pressing steadily towards the goal.
After independence, the political mart in India heard only stimulated battle-cries,
* When Sir Akbar Hydari suggested that 'Durga' in Bande Mataram might be changed, Sri Aurobindo said by 'Durga' only the country 'India' was meant, not a Hindu Goddess. (Mother India, March 1971, p. 89.)
Page 729
and there was the deafening roar of loud opinion and propaganda. But Sri Aurobindo himself was like a star, he was indeed our Pole Star: or a lighthouse that shone through the mist and defied the cyclonic weather. On 29 October 1947, during the evening prayer meeting at Birla House in Delhi, Gandhiji praised a bhajan by Dilip, and added:
He [Dilip] has... retired from worldly life to practice Yoga at the feet of his great Guru, Rishi Aurobindo... at Sri Aurobindo Ashram there is no distinction of caste or creed. I heard this from the lips of the late Sir Akbar Hydari who... used to go there every year as on a pilgrimage.62
The Ashram had truly become a Yogic place of pilgrimage for all India, and for the entire world; and 15 August began to have a double significance, as the birthday of free India, and as the birthday of the avatar of the Supramental Age. On his seventy-seventh birthday, as on earlier birthdays, there were offerings, salutations, celebrations. Disciples - Romen, Norman Dowsett, Dilip, Nishikanto - made song-offerings. Thus Nishikanto:
India's sacrificial fire
In your high self has found its shrine...
In this dim land you came to pave
The swift white path to liberty,
And the world its freedom shall attain
And kiss your feet in ecstasy... .63
Sethna wrote editorially in Mother India about Sri Aurobindo: "He stands for the deepest and highest Independence, the freedom of the soul from the shackles of mortal ignorance, the liberation of the human into the Divine Consciousness."64
On 16 August 1949, Sri Aurobindo Abirbhava Mahotsava was celebrated in Calcutta, and at the general conference. Justice N.C. Chatterjee said in the course of his masterly presidential address:
On this auspicious occasion India offers her humble salutation to Sri Aurobindo as the real uplifter, the true path-finder, the prophet of Indian nationalism, the high-priest of Mother India, the maker of India's renaissance, the God-man who is sowing the seeds of immortality....
Free India today tragically suffers from disillusionment, a sense of frustration, a consciousness of settled disappointment and a progressive surrender to asuric forces working for her disintegration.... All eyes turn for light and guidance to the great Seer who by the unceasing sādhanā of his life worked and struggled for India's liberation....
Of all places and provinces, Bengal, the land of his birth, needs badly the magic thrill of his transforming touch....
Mass hunger, starvation, large-scale unemployment, the social disintegration caused by the migration of homeless and ruined refugees, the collapse of moral values, the steady loss of faith in the architects of our destiny have
Page 730
unhinged thinking humanity and there is a drift towards civil strife and chaos and anarchy....
Mr. Chatterjee thought that the leaders were paralysed by an "inner crisis" comparable to the impotence of anguish that overwhelmed Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra. Freedom and democracy in "independent" India were imperilled by the "New Despotism", and by the prevalence of corruption, nepotism and injustice. Many tamely surrendered to the "crazy materialism recently preached by the West with vehement ruthlessness", but that way lay despair and the denial of the Soul of India. Perhaps, Sri Aurobindo - as Krishna awoke Arjuna's slumbering soul - perhaps Sri Aurobindo would call India's leaders to order, and one hoped they would hearken to him. Mr. Chatterjee concluded his address with the exhortation:
No foreigner sits like an incubus on the nation. It is now for the people to save themselves, to save the soul of the nation.
It is in the Spirit that Shakti is eternal, and if we can win back the inner Swaraj, we can win back the outer Empire. In the midst of depression and defeatism, listen to the Voice of Sri Aurobindo, who is the living embodiment of the creative flow of India's soul....
Almost a year later, his pupil of Baroda days, K.M. Munshi - now a Cabinet Minister at the Centre - paid a visit to the Ashram on 9 July 1950, and met Sri Aurobindo after a lapse of more than forty years, and reminisced about it later: I saw before me a being completely transformed, radiant, blissful, enveloped in an atmosphere of godlike calm. He spoke in a low, clear voice which stirred the depths of my being... .65
I saw in him, not my old professor, but something different. It was absolute integration of personality; attachment, wrath and fear in him had been transformed into a power which was at the same time beautiful and calm, the Central Idea in Aryan culture materialised in human shape. He seemed to say .in his own language -
My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
My body is God's happy living tool,
My spirit a vast Sun of deathless light.
Visitors who met Sri Aurobindo thus saw in him a Power, a Personality, but the Power, the Personality refused to be cribbed within the confines of familiar material categories. What could people possibly know - or hope to know - about so unique a spiritual phenomenon as Sri Aurobindo? Could a frail boat ever comprehend the ocean's wideness or depth? One might try to establish a semblance of intimacy with one or another of his many powers and personalities: the dreamer, the idealist, the poet - the scholar, the critic, the teacher - the patriot, the revolutionary, the priest of the Temple of Bhavani Bharati - philosopher, the Master of Yoga, the architect of the Life Divine; but full comprehension eluded one's mental grasp, and one found it was far easier to feel awed, and to love and surrender.
Page 731
A reference has been made earlier to Sri Aurobindo's speculations about The Perfection of the Body' and The Divine Body'. These were only "far-off speculations about what might become possible in the future evolution of it by means of a spiritual force". "The immediate object of Sri Aurobindo's endeavours was rather to realise the Divine and establish spiritual life on earth, but even for this the body could not be ignored. As he wrote in a letter dated 7 December 1949:
I put a value on the body first as an instrument, dharmasādhanā, or, more fully, as a centre of manifested personality in action, a basis of spiritual life and activity as of all life and activity upon the earth, but also because for me the body as well as the mind and life is a part of the Divine Whole, a form of the Spirit and therefore not to be disregarded or despised as something incurably gross and incapable of spiritual realisation or of spiritual use.67
In another letter, written the very next day, he referred to Narayan Jyotishi, a Calcutta astrologer, who had made the prediction that Sri Aurobindo would prolong his life "by Yogic power for a very long period and arrive at a full old age", and added as if in corroboration: "In fact, I have got rid by Yogic pressure of a number of chronic maladies that had got settled in my body."68 In other words, it appeared as though the length of his "life" would depend entirely on his own deliberate choice.
On the other hand, certain events that took place during 1949-50, although they did not perhaps attract any special attention at the time, now seem to be invested with pointer-meanings. In April 1950, Henri Carder Bresson, the world-famous French photographer on a visit to Pondicherry, was permitted by the Mother to make a number of portrait-studies of Sri Aurobindo - thus breaking a rule that had been strictly observed for about thirty-five years. Again, once when the Mother had told Sri Aurobindo that she felt like leaving her body, he is reported to have remarked, "No, this can never be. If necessary for this transformation, I might go; you will have to fulfil our Yoga of supramental descent and transformation."69 In his letter of 7 December 1949, Sri Aurobindo explained why, unlike Sri Ramakrishna who wouldn't use spiritual force for preserving the body, he was not unwilling to maintain the body "in good health and condition as an instrument or physical basis" for Yoga sādhanā . In his reported conversation with the Mother, it is implied that it was open to the Mother as well as Sri Aurobindo to decide for themselves if, or when, they should leave the body, and if they wanted they could overcome physical ailments by means of spiritual force. And Sri Aurobindo was decided that, if one of them should go, it would be himself, not she.
Again, it was during 1950 that the composition of Savitri was done at a quickened pace. The whole of Book XI (The Book of Everlasting Day') was dictated, as if in one long spell. "I want to finish Savitri soon", Sri Aurobindo told Nirod one day, - but wherefore this seemingly sudden spurt of hurry? Having made his announcement, "he increased immensely the general tempo of composition and revision".70 But somehow, even when his attention was drawn to it, he seemed to defer to an indefinite "afterwards" the revision of The Book of Death' and the
Page 732
Sri Aurobindo - 1950
Epilogue ('The Return to Earth').
There were other strange and sinister indications too, straws in the wind perhaps, yet showing in what direction the wind was blowing. Soli Albless, for example, has made an important revelation:
On 15 August 1950, an old sadhak with a capacity for vision saw Sri Aurobindo drawing into himself dark fumes that were rising from the subconscious parts of the people as they were coming to him for darśan in a procession. He was gathering up the lower elements of earth-nature within the area of representative humanity and then drawing them into himself.71
Was he negotiating a deal of transformation with the bleak - or black - Nadir of existence? Was he hewing a pathway to Light by tunnelling through Night? As he said in the sonnet The Pilgrim of the Night', written in 1938 and revised in 1944:
I made an assignation with the Night;
In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:
In my breast carrying God's deathless light
I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.72
Another interesting circumstance was Surendra Mohan Ghose's consulting Bhrigu astrologer in Delhi in October 1950. On being shown Sri Aurobindo's horoscope, the astrologer found the correct reference which tallied "exactly with Sri Aurobindo's life", and the astrologer concluded:
After 78 years.... he will develop a ghrnā towards his body, and then he may leave his body; otherwise death is in his control.
Of course, if a certain yajña or sacrifice could be performed, the catastrophe might still be averted. Surendra Mohan hurried to Pondicherry and told, first Nolini, and then the Mother who promptly spoke to Sri Aurobindo, about the Bhrigu prediction. "Don't worry" was all that Sri Aurobindo said to Surendra Mohan. But on the Mother's suggestion, Surendra Mohan contacted the astrologer again and after some delay got a copy of the whole reading and sent it through a messenger to Pondicherry; but as things were to turn out, it was much effort to no purpose - the letter reached Nolini after 5 December 1950!73*
For days before 24 November 1950, Sri Aurobindo was ailing on account of the recurrence of a malady, uraemia, that had afflicted him earlier but soon retreated. From 17 November, the illness caused definite anxiety, yet the darśan on the 24th afternoon took place all the same, although a bit rushed through. Hardly any of the hundreds that filed past him and exposed themselves to the steady compassionate gaze of the Master had, however, the remotest suspicion that anything was wrong. On account of the annual School celebration on 1 and 2 December,
* Sri Aurobindo didn't have much faith in Bhrigu. In a letter written on 4 May 1936, he referred to the Bhrigu Samhita as the "old dodge", and added: "Long ago I had a splendiferous Mussolinic-Napoleonic prediction of my future made to me on the strength of the same old mythological Bhrigu." (SABCL.Vol.26, p. 365)
Page 733
even the post-darśan days were filled with the excitement of preparation and anticipation. Some few nevertheless knew about Sri Aurobindo's illness, but this didn't affect the usual round of Ashram activities, and the Mother presided over the Playground events every evening. As Sri Aurobindo's illness continued to cause deep concern, on Nirod's suggestion the eminent surgeon. Dr. Sanyal, was summoned telegraphically from Calcutta, and he came on 30 November. On being told that Sanyal had arrived, Sri Aurobindo opened his eyes fully, smiled - "a smile serene and beautiful, it carried one to ecstasy, lighting the innermost corners of the heart" - and he placed his hand on Sanyal's head. When asked what the "trouble" was, Sri Aurobindo said simply: "Trouble? Nothing troubles me. And suffering? One can be above it." As for the specific difficulties , there was already much relief; he felt nothing! As he had hinted, Sri Aurobindo seemed to be "above" the circumstances, calm, detached, even indifferent! It was as though he wasn't interested in the disease and its progress or arrest. Then once the Mother spoke to Sanyal in the ante-room: "He is fully conscious within, but he is losing interest in himself." It was the well-beloved, ever-faithful Champaklal who ventured to put the crucial question to the Master: "Are you not using your Force?" "No" came the ominous answer. But why? "If you don't use your Force, how is the disease to be cured?" interposed Nirod. "Can't explain," came the imperturbable reply, "you won't understand."*
The School celebrations on 1 and 2 December had gone without a hitch. Only on the 3rd the Mother had failed to come to the Playground, but although this was noticed, it was not connected with Sri Aurobindo's illness, for very few knew about it. The battle between the illness ("uraemia", symbolic of the "Inconscience", according to Sethna) and the doctors (with their sophisticated medical knowledge and expertise and, above all, their boundless devotion to the Master) went on, the patient himself being neutral at best. On 4 December, Sri Aurobindo was helped out of his bed at his Bequest; the distressing symptoms had "magically vanished", and he was able to walk to the arm-chair and take his seat. The disciples' eyes lighted up with joy, but it was after all to prove a false dawn. Late in the night of 4 December, it was clear Sri Aurobindo was withdrawing himself of set purpose. And at 1.26 a.m. on 5 December - with the Mother already in the room and the elect few watching - the Light seemed to flicker, the Light seemed to fade out:
A voyager upon uncharted routes
Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,
Adventuring across enormous realms,
He broke into another Space and Time.74
* The reader is referred to K.D. Sethna's "The Passing of Sri Aurobindo', Nirodbaran's 'Sri Aurobindo: "I am Here, I am Here"' and P. Sanyal's 'A Call from Pondicherry' for more detailed accounts of Sri Aurobindo's last illness.
Page 734
But for the millions awake on the morning of 5 December, it was as though they had been orphaned of a sudden; and the event overwhelmed many of them as a mystic holocaust that was both an end and a beginning:
It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,
Offered by God's martyred body for the world...
He who has found his identity with God
Pays with the body's death his soul's vast light.
His knowledge immortal triumphs by his death.75*
IX
Two hours after Sri Aurobindo's passing, the Mother announced the news to the Ashram inmates at 3.30 a.m. on 5 December. The news spread quickly, and was flashed at once all over the world. Sri Aurobindo's body was to lie in state till noon, and the Ashram gates were to be thrown open to enable all to pay their homage to the Mahayogi.
While Pondicherry was stunned by the news, the sadhaks were overwhelmed by a sudden sense of desolation. It was as though a fathomless zero was flung across the world.
Leaders and savants who had known Sri Aurobindo and those who had only followed his career from a distance or had merely read his works, all were equally shaken by the news that came over the air in the morning. The President of India, Rajendra Prasad, said in the course of the statement that he issued: "India will worship and enshrine his memory and place him in the pantheon of its greatest seers and prophets." The Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, referred to Sri Aurobindo's "astonishing brilliance of mind" and described him as "one of the greatest minds of our generation". The news took Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's mind to the "very beginnings of our struggle for freedom". Dr. C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar saw in Sri Aurobindo's spiritual life "a reduplication of the quest and the askesis of the Buddha and other apostles of humanity". Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, then India's ambassador in Russia, described Sri Aurobindo as "the greatest intellectual of our age and a major force for the life of the spirit". Numberless were such tributes, and they had the ring of spontaneity; many were wrung from the heart, many emanated from a genuine appreciation of the poet, the patriot, the philosopher, or the great sage of Pondicherry.
Sri Aurobindo's disciples and close associates, of course, could hardly recover from "the impact of the event and formulate their reactions. For instance, S. Doraiswami Aiyar could merely say: "I have been shaken out of my foundations
* The last three lines were one of the three passages dictated last by Sri Aurobindo as additions to Savitri. The autobiographical slant is unmistakable.
Page 735
to grasp the significance of what is apparently the greatest tragedy to humanity at this critical juncture in its history." Dr. R. Vaidyanathaswami remarked that "to the devotees and sadhaks, in the Ashram and outside it, he had been their Rocks of Refuge, and the world without him would lose its brightness".
An English disciple, Morwenna Donnelly, recorded in great anguish of spirit: Faced by this event, I felt that for the first time I could understand a little of that desolation of spirit which the followers of Jesus must have endured between the terrible Friday and the evening of the 'first day of the week'.
Jesus had warned his followers that his Kingdom was not of the earth, and Sri Aurobindo too had often warned his disciples not to visualise the promised Supramental descent in their own convenient mental terms. What Jesus had said to "doubting Thomas" was pertinent still: Be not faithless but believing!
Some disciples who were poets as well were able to invoke out of the fiery ordeal of their agony itself the "marvel bird" of ever-living love and gratitude and hope. Thus one of them, the Ceylonese-born J. Vijayatunga:
Are we sad today? Is the earth dark without light?
Nay, Master, Thou didst not live in vain
Thy life sublime and austere was not spent
For nought.... Holding to the hem
Of Thy garment we shall raise ourselves
To High Heaven, by Thy Grace, if not now
In some distant age, and once again
We shall behold Thee, O Master,
Shining with ever greater lustre, shining
Like the Sun, but unafraid we shall reach Thee
And touch Thee, and be burnt in the Fire
Of Thy love.
By 5 a.m., Sri Aurobindo's body covered in spotless white silk was laid in state on a cot, itself covered in pure white, in the room he had occupied for over 23 years. A painting of the Buddha from Ajanta adorned the eastern wall, and the whole room was strewn with flowers. The Ashram inmates had darshan first, between five and six; then the people of Pondicherry and others who had come from outside filed past silently and in the most orderly manner possible and paid their respects to the almost mythical Person who had made Pondicherry his home for a period of forty years.
Although it was intended at first that the body should be interred in the Ashram compound in the afternoon, the preparations were suddenly stopped, and late in the evening an announcement was made conveying the decision to postpone the interment:
The funeral of Sri Aurobindo has not taken place today. His body is charged with such a concentration of Supramental light that there is no sign of decomposition
Page 736
and the body will be kept lying on his bed so long as it remains intact.
By evening over 60,000 people, young and old, had queued past the sublime Master - their eyes dimmed with tears and their visible grief one with the spontaneous and solemn silence. For everyone -for almost everyone of the sixty thousand - it was a unique moment, a moment abstracted out of the stream of time when eternity was made out of the moment. Each took the burden of his (or her) own personality, carried his own inner climate of the soul; and the figure of the Purusha lying in the ananta-śayanam posture affected each a little differently perhaps, yet it was also on the whole a cleansing, cathartic and chastening experience for most.
One of the inmates, Dara (Aga Syed Ibrahim), had a singular experience that morning when he walked past Sri Aurobindo's body lying on the cot in its snow-white background:
I found myself in Sri Aurobindo's own room by the side of his cot. He seemed so peaceful and happy, and the flesh shone with a new lustre which I had failed to see at the darśan time on 24th November. Why could I not see it before?... I could not take my eyes off his face and arms. It seemed to me he was alive. It was certain that he was in a condition of deep and upward soaring trance just then.76
Many others too had similar experiences. Between 1.30 a.m. and 7.30 p.m. was a stretch of eighteen hours, yet Sri Aurobindo's body had not only not shown any signs of decomposition, it had actually acquired a new lustre and the radiant complexion of life! Death, where is thy sting? Whose, then, is the Victory?
The Mother described the new lustre as the Supramental light, and helped Dr. Sanyal also - who at first couldn't - to see it: "a luminous mantle of bluish golden hue around him." And Sethna's portrait has almost an epiphanic quality: "Spiritually imperial - this is the only description fitting the appearance of the body.... The atmosphere of the room was vibrant with a sacred power to cleanse and illumine, a power which appeared to emanate from the Master's poise of conquering rest and to invade the bodies of all the watchers... as if... there came pouring down to humanity the life-transcending grace of the Supermind." On the 6th, more and more pilgrims - including M. Andre Menard, the Commissioner for French Settlements in India - had darśan of the miracle of the living God in a lifeless body! It was not simply the delay in the body's decomposition; this was a superb positive leap of revelation as well, the glow of the Golden Purusha in majestic repose.
It was noteworthy that Sri Aurobindo's passing moved deeply all sections of the community throughout India. Officials and ministers of the French India Government and of the Government of India in Pondicherry were among those who paid their homage to the departed Seer. Floral wreaths on behalf of the President of India and the Prime Minister were placed before Sri Aurobindo. Telegrams from all corners of the world poured in continually, and letters and messages piled up in heaps. In West Bengal, a Government resolution described Sri Aurobindo as
Page 737
"the greatest Bengali Seer and savant of recent times", and as a mark of respect to him all Government offices, courts and educational institutions were ordered to remain closed for a day. In Bombay, the share market, the bullion market, and other markets and many institutions were closed on the fifth, and in Kanpur, Banaras, and many other centres too there were similar closures as a mark of respect to the great patriot who had become a Pilgrim of Eternity.
The press everywhere gave wide coverage to the event, and there were well-informed as well as appreciative editorial tributes in most papers. Among the best of these was the Hindu leading article on 6 December:
The news of the sudden passing of Sri Aurobindo will be received with profound sorrow throughout the civilised world. In an age of rampant materialism incorruptible witnesses to the supremacy of the spirit are none too many.... The seer of Pondicherry acknowledged no limits to man's capacity to realise the divine in himself, no inhibitions that might militate against the harmony that alone could establish the rule of righteousness on earth. He spoke with no provincial accent, nor did he make dogmatic assertions that might have had the effect of repelling open minds. His was a universal message and his marvellous mastery of the written word helped to secure for it a respectful hearing across the barriers of race and language. For Aurobindo the prophet the unity of the human family in the Divine consciousness was not merely a matter of faith, it was a goal to be realised.
A shining page in our history records his heroic part in the struggle for Indian freedom. Nurtured on the English poets, his ardent nature rallied early to the call of patriotism, spurning a life of elegant ease. He brought to public life a burning eloquence, a power of idealism and a dynamic leadership which roused the land from end to end and destroyed that consent which had been the charter of imperialism....
...it must be confessed that the very subtlety of his speculation and the dazzling opulence 'of its expression often combine to put off all except the most hardy intellect and the most persevering will; nor should it be forgotten that a philosophy that bases itself on the integral apprehension of truth cannot be understood merely with the discursive intellect. In insisting that philosophy is not merely ideas that are talked about but experience that transforms, Sri Aurobindo was in accord with age-long Indian tradition.... Sri Aurobindo taught a doctrine which may be correctly regarded as not a negation but an amplification of India's immemorial teaching. And generations to come will honour his memory as that of a great path-finder in the realm of the spirit.
On the 7th morning the Mother issued a statement that was prayer and benediction both:
Lord, this morning Thou hast given me the assurance that Thou wouldst stay with us until Thy work is achieved, not only as a consciousness which guides and illumines but also as a dynamic Presence in action. In unmistakable terms
Page 738
Thou hast promised that all of Thyself would remain here and not leave the earth atmosphere until earth is transformed. Grant that we may be worthy of this marvellous Presence and that henceforth everything in us be concentrated on the one Will to be more and more perfectly consecrated to the fulfilment of Thy sublime Work.
At 8 a.m. the same day. Dr. Sanyal and two other physicians examined Sri Aurobindo's body 54 hours after life had become extinct, and declared that the body was still intact showing no signs of decomposition. This was certified also by Dr. Barbet, the Chief Medical Officer of French India. Such of Sri Aurobindo's disciples and admirers that had come from outside - by car, train or plane - were permitted to have darśan , but the inmates and the local people who had already had darśan on the 5th or the 6th were excluded. This policy of selective darśan was enforced on the 8th also.
For over three days Sri Aurobindo's body had remained intact: the golden tint had persisted: the eyes closed serenely had yet radiated the Greater Life, not the extinction of life. Might it not be that Sri Aurobindo intended to return to the body? On the 8th December, the Mother asked Sri Aurobindo in their occult meeting place to resuscitate, to return to life, but he answered, according to her testimony: "I have left this body purposely. I will not take it back. I shall manifest again in the first Supramental body built in the Supramental way." That seemed to be final; "the lack of receptivity of the earth and men", said the Mother on the 8th, "is mostly responsible for the decision Sri Aurobindo has taken regarding the body":
Hard is it to persuade earth-nature's change;
Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch.. ,77
But the world-redeemer must redeem the world even in spite of the world, in spite of recalcitrant humanity:
The poison of the world has stained his throat....
He dies that the world may be new-born and live.78
On the 9th morning, after over 100 hours of Supramental sustenance, the first signs of decomposition were noticed at last, and it was decided to inter the body in the evening. The body was placed in a gleaming rose-wood coffin made under Udar Pinto's directions in the Ashram Harpagon Workshop. The box was lined with silver and satin, with a velvet cushion at the bottom. Sri Aurobindo's body was covered with a gold-embroidered cloth, and after India's Consul-General in French India, R.K. Tandon, had offered his homage, Champaklal covered his beloved father's face with a piece of white cloth, and the lid carrying Sri Aurobindo's symbol of the two intersecting triangles with the water and lotus at the
Page 739
centre,* all in gold, was screwed on the coffin. It was then carried by the sadhaks and laid in the cement concreted vault made ready in the Ashram courtyard under the "service tree", first planted in 1930, with its now wide-ranging multiple branches, covering almost the whole place and giving abundant shade and raining protective grace. The coffin was placed in such a way that Sri Aurobindo's head might still be turned to the east, and concrete slabs soon covered the vault. Floral wreaths were placed, and sadhaks - first Champaklal, then Nolini, then the rest - placed potfuls of earth on the covered vault. There was nothing credal or sectarian about the ceremony. Not a word was spoken, there were no audible hymns or prayers, and no rites that indicated adhesion to any particular religion. The enveloping silence was, however, more eloquent and more profound than all the funeral orations of the world. The scene, with the sun slowly setting, was ineluctably symbolic of the happenings.
The Mother in her great silent strength of suffering watched the solemn proceedings from upstairs, through a window overlooking the courtyard. Now that her spiritual comrade and Divine co-worker of over thirty-five years had chosen to withdraw from the scene, who could weigh the Atlas weight of responsibility that now lay on her shoulders? But, then, didn't Sri Aurobindo anticipate it all - and forewarn all - when he dictated just a few weeks before his passing:
A vast intention has brought two souls close
And love and death conspire towards one great end.79
Death, so-called "death", was "a beginning of greater life". Who could say what the Divine intention was - what was "God's secret plan"? Alone, alone, seemingly alone in her immaculate solitariness, alone in earth's transforming hour, alone when the "soul of the world that is Satyavan" is held to ransom by the Asuric hordes of the dark, the hideous spectres of a possible nuclear war, what was to be the Mother's role in the context of December 1950? Again, hadn't Sri Aurobindo divined and even created her predicament and also prescribed her course of action in the great passage in Savitri dictated almost as the last thing he did as a poet with the vision and the voice Divine:
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone....
A day may come when she must stand unhelped
On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,
* In Sri Aurobindo's symbol, the descending triangle represents Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence - Conscious-Force - Bliss), the ascending triangle stands for the aspiration from the lower material existence under the form of Life - Light - Love. The junction of both (the central square) is the perfect Manifestation - the water is multiplicity or creation and the Lotus at the centre is the Avatar of the Supreme.
Page 740
Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast,
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole
To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.
Alone with death and close to extinction's edge,
Her single greatness in that last dire scene,
She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
And reach an apex of world-destiny
Where all is won or all is lost for man. ...
For this the silent Force came missioned down;
In her the conscious Will took human shape:
She only can save herself and save the world.80
At last, "immobile in herself, the Mother gathered force, and gave the world the mantra of renewal, the Mother's hymn of gratitude to the Master in the name and on behalf of all the world and all humanity:
To THEE who hast been the material envelope of our Master, to THEE our infinite gratitude. Before THEE who hast done so much for us, who hast worked, struggled, suffered, hoped, endured so much, before THEE who hast willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all for us, before THEE we bow down and implore that we may never forget, even for a moment, all we owe to THEE.
For days and weeks following, Sri Aurobindo's closest disciples and most devoted admirers continued to speculate regarding the meaning of the mystic holocaust or self-immolation if such it was. The retention by the body of its natural complexion - if anything the Golden Purusha only more golden - and of its natural tight organic formation puzzled many, not least the medical men. Was it not a reversal of Nature's Law that Sri Aurobindo's body - under tropical conditions too, and without the induction of drugs or special conditions - should have defied decomposition for over 100 hours, and reposed "in a grandeur of victorious quiet, with thousands upon thousands having darśan of it?"81 Neither everyday experience nor medical science would give even half that much time as the outside limit for a body in the tropics to resist decomposition after death. And then, - the sustained glow, the supernal calm, the gracious mien! Did all that drama of immitigable death and radiant transcendence mean nothing? Was it not more than - at best - a freak of nature?
"Withdrawal, the great withdrawal!", they said - but hadn't Sri Aurobindo's life been a whole series of withdrawals? While yet young in years, he was withdrawn from his home to the residential school in Darjeeling, and then from India to England. Having qualified for the I.C.S. (the "heaven-born" Service), he manoeuvred to withdraw from it; having risen high in the Baroda Service and become Acting Principal of the Baroda College, he withdrew from that prison of affluent security and plunged into the maelstrom of politics and revolution; at the height of his influence after Surat, he withdrew to a quietude of Nirvanic calm in
Page 741
a small room in Baroda - then Narayana withdrew him to the Alipur jail so that he could continue his sādhanā - and still later Sri Aurobindo withdrew from politics altogether and proceeded from Calcutta to Chandernagore, and from Chandernagore to Pondicherry; and there, having won height after height of realisation and accomplished the God's Labour of the Arya, he withdrew to complete silence on 24 November 1926; and now, in December 1950, this climactic withdrawal from the body itself! Weren't the several withdrawals so many strategic retreats that were really purposive forced marches, each "withdrawal" merely signifying that one more phase of his campaign of conquest was over and another, in another but related field, had begun ? Why, then, regret the "great withdrawal" of 5 December 1950?
Or one reviewed Sri Aurobindo's divers roles on the terrestrial stage; a Kacha mastering an alien lore in England but rejecting the blandishments of Devayani; a young Augustus at Baroda, imposing his empire on the "realms of gold"; a Perseus or Prometheus of 'Bhavani Mandir'; an Arjuna surrendered to Krishna at Alipur; a Vyasa doing a neo-Mahabharata in the Arya, a neo-Vishvamitra giving us a new Gayatri in The Mother; a Yogishwara Krishna doubled with a Yogishwara Shiva playing an invisible hand in world happenings; and on 5 December 1950, "The Last Great Act of drawing off the 'halahala' that his own Mahakala action had precipitated out of the cosmic ferment".82
Or one tried to find solace in the classical symbol of the seed dying to give life to plant or tree. The whole rhythm of existence upon earth - life and birth and growth and death was a mystery. And the greater mystery at the heart of phenomenal life was the miracle of resurrection following the shock of the crucifixion. Nolini Kanta Gupta said some time after the event:
He has done it: he has made Nature take the final leap. The mental being with its triple node is at last bundled up and cast into the Supramental status. As he saw and assured us.
A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour...
Nature shall overleap her mortal step -
the formed seed is now in the womb developing fast and sure, it awaits the moment to break out into the light of material and universal day.83
There was a "death" certainly, and there was a phenomenon surpassing our notions of "death". The death was unnecessary because, had Sri Aurobindo been willing to use his Yogic force as he had done on former occasions, the "disease" couldn't have made headway and proved mortal. Not age, not disease, not just these; death was suffered, it was almost invited. But why? There must have been a capital reason; not a personal reason, but a cosmic reason - what was it? What was it Sri Aurobindo hoped to achieve - or avert - by making his tremendous assignation with the Night?
Since coming to Pondicherry, the whole aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga was to
Page 742
bring the Supermind here into our world, and make it a part of the earth-consciousness, as 'Life' and 'Mind' already are. When, during his interview on 4 February 1943, Dilip asked Sri Aurobindo, "Is your real work this invocation of the Supramental?" the Master answered very simply, "Yes, I have come for that."84 If that was the cardinal purpose of Sri Aurobindo's avatarhood and ministry on earth, anything he did - including his "self-immolation" - must have had a close connection with that fundamental objective. Even in 1938, the Mother used to see the Supermind descending into Sri Aurobindo, but it couldn't be settled for good in the earth-consciousness, especially in the physical or the physical mind. In the series of articles included in The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, Sri Aurobindo introduced, as we have seen earlier, the "realm between" - the Mind of Light - a limited or delegated power of the Supermind; and we have the Mother's word - reinforced by the experience of the Supramental radiance from his body from 5th to 8th December - that "as soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrawal from his body, what he called the Mind of Light got realised here". Was it, perhaps, necessary for Sri Aurobindo to receive the full force of the Supermind in the physical, retain it for a few days, so that the way might be cleared for the ultimate Supramentalisation of the earth and man?
It is the mark of the 'gentleman' that he would suffer himself, rather than inflict pain on others or even see them suffer. According to Nirod, Sri Aurobindo was a "Supramental perfect gentleman", and had a magnanimity of the kind described in the lines -
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatness all that came.
And it is of Shiva most that Sri Aurobindo reminded Nirod!85 And Yogiswara Shiva, what was his role in world-existence:
A dreadful cord of sympathy can tie
All suffering into his single grief and make
All agony in all the worlds his own....
The poison of the world has stained his throat.86
If he could himself invite and absorb - even at the cost of surrendering the material envelope that was his body - the first full impact of the Supramental descent (as Shiva received the impact of Ganga cascading in a downpour on the earth), both to make sure of the descent and to contain and consolidate the gains for the world, why;' certainly he would do it - as Shiva drank the poison and yet contained it in his throat! If the victory could be won somewhere somewhen by somebody, it would become possible ultimately for anybody to win it anywhere. To open the Possibility was the main thing. And the sacrifice of his body, as the first physical base for the demonstration of the Supramental possibility — if that could advance
Page 743
the date of the total descent of the Supramental light, or ensure the near descent — well, the sacrifice was worth making. Since, after all, even without his physical presence, he would be here, one with the Mother's consciousness and power, he could also accelerate, witness and participate in the decreed Divine manifestation upon earth.
"A meditative silence reigned in the Ashram for twelve days after the passing of the beloved Master," writes Rishabhchand; "then the normal activities began, but with a striking difference. One felt a pervading Presence in the Ashram atmosphere. .. ,"87 On 14 December the Mother half-admonished the sadhaks: "To grieve is an insult to Sri Aurobindo who is here with us, conscious and alive." And on 18 January 1951, she gave a firmer assurance still:
We stand in the Presence of Him who has sacrificed his physical life in order to help more fully his work of transformation.
He is always with us, aware of what we are doing, of all our thoughts, of all our feelings and all our actions.
The Samadhi itself, visited daily by hundreds in an attitude of devotion and prayer, seemed to testify to the reality of Sri Aurobindo's continued Presence, bathed in the life-giving rays of the Everlasting Day. In Nirodbaran's inspired language:
Out of his Samadhi, a thousand flames seem to be mounting up and, lodged in our soul, burning in an ever rejuvenating fire, while His Presence enveloping and merging with and radiating from the Mother's being and body is pervading the whole atmosphere. One can see His Presence, hear his footfalls, his rhythmic voice, ever vigilant, devoid of the encumbrance of the physical body.88
Still Nirod hears the Master's whisper, "lam here, I am here", and with the ear of faith we can hear the words too.
The mystic realisation of his presence in our midst - for his nectarean presence and beneficence is not confined to the Samadhi environs or even the Ashram alone - is the Promise of preservation, liberation and transformation to humanity poised perilously on the edge of the precipice: the deep Abyss on one side, the steep ascent to truth on the other. In this phoenix hour, the hour of the unexpected, when the Asuric and Divine forces are fighting the battle of man's future - the battle of Satyavan the Soul of the World - Sri Aurobindo gives us the all-sufficing Word that his coming will not have been in vain, that his ministry, "Sri Aurobindo's Action", is as pauseless and potent as ever.
Come, O Creator Spirit, come,
And make within our hearts thy home;
To us thy grace celestial give,
Who of thy breathing move and love.89
Page 744
Home
Disciples
K R Srinivas Iyengar
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.