Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

Part IV

Architect Of The Life Divine

CHAPTER 22

Lighthouse

I

The Arya continued to appear month after month throughout the period of the first world war, and discontinued publication only in 1921. The comprehensive Supramental Manifesto for the future - comprising the plea for change, the programme of spiritual evolution (or revolution) and the promise of individual, social and terrestrial transformation, involving man and collective man and global humanity - the grand Manifesto had been broadcast in all its sovereign amplitude and self-sufficiency . While this testament of the Life Divine was unfolding with a leisurely puissance of self-assurance, sending out rays of new understanding and opening up the human consciousness to truths and possibilities till then unsuspected, the outside world went its weary, dreary, unprofitable, even sanguinary way - on the national as well as world theatre of action. After the tāndava-dance of the wrath of Rudra that had devastated many countries, the armistice had brought an uneasy hush, followed soon by the bickerings of the Peace Conference, the devilish flourish of the weapons of blockade and reparations, the brandishing of words like "war guilt" and "self-determination", and the culminating mockery of the League of Nations. In India, the first faint hopes of self-government had been blasted by the statutory hypocrisy of "dyarchy" in the Provinces and leonine bureaucracy at the Centre, provoking a new tidal wave of national resentment recalling the days ' of the Bande Mataram agitation. It was the beginning of the Gandhi Age - what .C. R. Reddy called the modem Heroic Age - in Indian politics.

Gandhiji had already tested the instruments of passive resistance and satyāgraha during the struggles against the racist regime in South Africa that would not permit the Indian community of traders and labourers to live in self-respect in their adopted land. After his return to India, he had been slowly but inevitably drawn into the vortex of the national movement. It was as though a more than human power and more than human management had arranged the singular sequence of events: Sri Aurobindo's withdrawal to Pondicherry in 191O, Gandhiji's coming to India in 1914, the return of Tilak from Mandalay, the launching of the Home Rule Movement by Besant and Tilak, the "great shadow" of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, the rising new tempo of repression and the Mahatma's unruffled defiance of the bureaucracy! It now became his openly avowed object to preach disaffection against the "satanic" Government and to organise non-violent opposition to it. The bureaucracy had sown the wind, - and how long could they stave off the whirlwind?

There was a feeling in Nationalist circles that somehow Sri Aurobindo should be persuaded to return to active politics. At Tilak's instance, his colleague Joseph Baptista therefore wrote in December 1919 requesting Sri Aurobindo to accept  

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the editorship of a paper that was to be the organ of the Social Democratic Party of Bombay. Like the Bande Mataram thirteen years earlier, this new paper was to give Sri Aurobindo an opportunity to spread the message of patriotism and educate the nation in the tasks of political debate and action. In his long reply of 5 January 1920, Sri Aurobindo set forth the reasons that weighed with him when he felt compelled to reject the "tempting offer". Two reasons are given in the letter. First, the Government was unlikely to leave him free but would almost certainly intern or imprison him "under one or other of the beneficent Acts which are apparently still to subsist as helps in ushering in the new era of trust and co-operation".¹ That wasn't going to help the Party, - only the work he had in hand would suffer. Secondly, even if he were assured of "an entirely free action and movement", even then he felt he shouldn't leave his retreat just then:

I came to Pondicherry in order to have freedom and tranquillity for a fixed object having nothing to do with present politics - in which I have taken no direct part since my coming here, though what I could do for the country in my own way I have constantly done, - and until it is accomplished, it is not possible for me to resume any kind of public activity.... I must be internally armed and equipped for my work before I leave it [Pondicherry].

The answer indeed was No, but Sri Aurobindo was anxious not to create the impression that he was feeling superior to the claims of the world or even the prudential considerations of the normal human mentality. His idea of spirituality had nothing to do with asceticism or a high disdain for secular things; he would, in fact, include all human activity - and therefore politics too - in a complete spiritual life. From 1903 to 1910, he had actively involved himself in politics "with one aim and one alone, to get into the mind of the people a settled will for freedom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it". That aim had largely been achieved already. Moderatism had first been forced into the defensive, and was now no more a force in politics. In the wake of the Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwalla atrocity, the Amritsar Congress of December 1919 (under Motilal Nehru's presidentship) had "set the seal" upon Sri Aurobindo's revolutionary ideology of "a settled will for freedom" and his programme of self-help, passive resistance and political and economic boycott as outlined in his "Open Letter" of July 1909. The leadership of the Congress was in tried hands, and Sri Aurobindo thought that if the country maintained its current revolutionary temper (as he had no doubt it would), the "will to freedom" would prevail in the end through appropriate action. Under the circumstances, Sri Aurobindo would prefer to attend to a related but no less important task of immense consequence to India and the world: "What preoccupies me now is the question what it is going to do with its self-determination, how will it use its freedom, on what lines it is going to determine its future?"

Already Sri Aurobindo could see India's freedom as a thing, not only attainable, but as good as attained. Once in 1915, having gone to an occult plane, the Mother had told Sri Aurobindo: "India is free" - not "She will be free" but just "She is free"! It was a thing decreed and inevitable, and only its translation into

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material terms was in the process of fulfilment.² Sri Aurobindo too had this clear foreknowledge, and he had no desire to take part in the current political action because he knew that in the circumstances then prevailing he wouldn't be able to give that turn to politics which he thought desirable. As he put it, without mincing matters:

You may ask why not come out and help, myself, so far as I can in giving a lead? But my mind has a habit of running inconveniently ahead of the times, - some might say, out of time altogether into the world of the ideal.... I believe in something which might be called social democracy, but not in any of the forms now current, and I am not altogether in love with the European kind, however great an improvement it may be on the past. I hold that India having a spirit of her own and a governing temperament proper to her own civilisation should, in politics as in everything else, strike out her own original path and not stumble in the wake of Europe.

Sri Aurobindo was thinking, not of a mere change of masters (as we might say, from a 'white' to a 'brown' bureaucracy!), but of transformation in terms of "an uncompromising spiritual idealism of an unconventional kind". But he had still to work out the practical lines of such a comprehensive programme of social and political action, and it wouldn't do to jump into the fray before he was really ready "for either propaganda or action". It was not affectation or spiritual aloofness or want of sympathy with the work Baptista and others were "so admirably doing"; the causes were more fundamental and concerned, in fact, the need for the trans-valuation of the principles of Indian and world polity.

In the meantime, his brother Barindra had been released from the Andamans after the armistice, and finding the condition of affairs in Bengal not very promising, he had written to Sri Aurobindo about politics as well as Yoga. On 7 April 1920, Sri Aurobindo replied in Bengali at some length, and the letter not only carried the political argument of the earlier reply to Baptista a little farther, but opened some new Yogic vistas as well. The two themes of the letter are Yoga and politics, in that order; there is so much intertwining that the two themes become one in the end. Sri Aurobindo had engaged in active politics from 1903 to 1910, and he had commenced Yoga in earnest in about 1904; there had been circlings in many directions, there had been realisations, and at Pondicherry he had at last deciphered "the ten limbs of the body" of his integral and supramental Yoga and was trying to realise them. And it was only after the complete realisation that he could think of direct political action:

...as long as it is not finished, I doubt if I shall be able to return to Bengal. Pondicherry is the appointed place for my Yoga Siddhi, except indeed one part of it, and that is action. The centre of my work is Bengal, although I hope that its circumference will be all India and the whole earth.³

The fullness of Yogic realisation, first; then, perhaps, political action in Bengal. And yet, although Bengal might be the destined theatre of the experimentation, all India - the great world itself - would share the beneficent results of Sri Aurobindo's  

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action. But the Yoga had to come first, for to build except on strong foundations would be foolish in the extreme. But when would the preliminary work be over? Two years - or twenty - or more? "I am not impatient", he wrote:

I have no impulse to make any unbalanced haste and rush into the field of work in the strength of the little ego. Even if I did not get success in my work, I would not be shaken. This work is not mine but God's. I will listen to no other call; when God moves me then I will move.⁴

Again, apart from Sri Aurobindo's readiness to engage in political action, was Bengal ready ? Even for revolutionary action of the Western variety, Bengal wasn't quite ready. And Sri Aurobindo didn't want a repetition of that kind of action. He had been nurturing an ideal of an altogether different kind: not a social democracy of the Western type but a deva sangha, a Community Divine, that would begin somewhere as a pilot project and then spread out and envelop the whole world. It wasn't to be an exclusive or introvert affair:

We do not want to rule out any activity of the world as beyond our province. Politics, industry, society, poetry, literature, art will all remain, but we must give them a new soul and a new form.⁵

The politics of nineteenth and twentieth century India was an importation from Europe, and had proved an imitative exercise leading more and more to frustration. The time had come to go deeper: "We must get to the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works." The consummation to be aimed at was not detestation of the world or minimisation of man, but delight of existence in living every moment of one's life, and maximisation of man to the level of the Divine:

You must have delight in all things - in the Spirit as well as in the body. The body has consciousness, it is God's form.... The flow of that delight precipitates and courses through this body. When you are in such a state, full of spiritual consciousness, you can lead a married life, a life in the world. In all your works you find the expression of God's delight.... No one is a god but in each man there is a god and to make Him manifest is the aim of divine life.⁶

The goal wasn't of course to be reached in a sudden or single leap; Sri Aurobindo had himself faced the perils and difficulties and uncertainties of the journey and the struggle:

The God within takes no account of these hindrances and deficiencies. He breaks his way out. Was the amount of my own failings a small one? Were the obstacles less in my mind and heart and vital being and body? Did it not take time? Has God hammered me less? Day after day, minute after minute, I have been fashioned into I know not whether a god or what. But I have become or am becoming something.... Not our strength but the Shakti of God is the sādhaka of this Yoga.⁷

Towards the end of the letter, Sri Aurobindo enters a forceful caveat against the only too common Bengali - or Indian - tendency to skip the discipline of sheer thought-power. Sentiment, excitement, a kind of mistiness that passes for mysticism, the tamasic tendency to take things easy, the desire for results without the

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necessary sustained effort, the habit of helpless dependence on others - these were the causes of India's decadence; "the life-power had ebbed away". What sort of Siddhi could one hope for when the Sadhana was bereft of Shakti? Love and devotion had to be yoked to knowledge and power for great action to be possible:

Therefore I wish no longer to make emotional excitement or any intoxication of the mind the base. I wish to make a large and strong equanimity the foundation of the Yoga. I want established on that equality a full, firm and undisturbed Shakti in the system and in all its movements. I want the wide display of the light of Knowledge in the ocean of Shakti. And I want in that luminous vastness the tranquil ecstasy of infinite love, delight and oneness. I do not want hundreds of thousands of disciples. It will be enough if I can get a hundred complete men, purified of petty egoism, who will be the instruments of God.⁸

He wasn't himself very anxious to set up as a Guru. What he wanted, and India needed, was a group of men in whom - whether at Sri Aurobindo's touch or at another's - the sleeping godhead had fully awakened and become power-houses of the Life Divine. And Sri Aurobindo concluded this extraordinary letter with this truly extraordinary peroration:

...I too am packing my bag. Still I believe that this bundle is like the net of St. Peter, only crammed with the catch of the Infinite. I am not going to open the bag now. If I do that before the time, all would escape. Neither am I going to Bengal now, not because Bengal is not ready, but because I am not ready. If the unripe goes amidst the unripe, what work can it do?⁹

This is a cross between godly omniscience and brotherly raillery. The humility is sublime, and so is the sense of power and purpose. "The catch of the Infinite"! It was there all right, but he wouldn't open it as yet.

During his first ten years' stay in Pondicherry, in the eyes of the world Sri Aurobindo was in seclusion, for he seldom came out of his room, and only a few had ready access to him. He read books and newspapers, he wrote for the Arya, he received friends or visitors, but there was an inner life too, and thee were the ardours and the adventures of the sadhana; and Thought raced through "spirit immensities" - "past the orange skies of the mystic mind" - to be one with the "vasts of God".¹⁰ There were visitors in the evening. Bharati, V.V.S. Aiyar, Srinivasachariar; there were readings in the Veda; there were the younger men, Nolini, Bejoy, Moni, Va Ra, Saurin, Amrita, who were in attendance whenever necessary; there were occasional visitors. Paul Richard, Madame Alexandera David-Neel, K.V. Rangaswami Aiyengar, Motilal Roy, Khasirao Jadhav; and there was the all-important visit of Mirra Richard on 29 March 1914. When the Arya was launched, thought-power and revealing light were the nectarean merchandise that the monthly paper-boat carried to numberless ports during the next six and a half years. Mirra (the Mother of later years) had in the meanwhile left for France in 1915, and after a rewarding sojourn in Japan, she had returned to Pondicherry on 24 April 1920. During his āśramvās at Alipur, Sri Aurobindo had broadcast this mystic "Invitation":

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I sport with solitude here in my regions,

Of misadventure have made me a friend.

Who would live largely? Who would live freely?

Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend?...

Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger

Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side.¹¹

The Mother's "second coming" was a coming for good; and, besides, she had come with her own "catch of the Infinite"! But the Infinite was the Infinite; that was Whole, and this was Whole; and the two were really one. In 1914, as Mirra she had recognised in Sri Aurobindo the "well-known being" she had so often encountered in her dreams and visions - the being she had called Krishna. Her second coming six years after only meant that she was utterly convinced that her place and her work was near Sri Aurobindo in India;¹² she had come to share his kingdom and walk at his side! At first she stayed at the Magry Hotel and then at Subbu's Hotel before moving into a rented house. No. 1, Rue St. Martin. On 24 November 1920, tempestuous rain caused a lot of seepage and leakage of water in her house, and so Sri Aurobindo advised her to shift forthwith to his own residence, No. 41, Rue François Martin. With her came also an English lady. Miss Hodgson (better known as 'Datta', the name given by Sri Aurobindo), who had long known the Mother and had been living in the other house with her. Hadn't Sri Aurobindo perhaps dimly foreseen the event when he issued the urgent call:

With wind and the weather beating round me

Up to the hill and the moorland I go.

Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?

Henceforth the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were to fare forward together, climbing the same high hill of supramental ascent, and also beckoning countless others to follow them.

II

In 1920 and after, the developing political situation in India was anything but reassuring. The new Reforms had hardly come up to the expectations of the Nationalists, and they had decided to reject them; and this had led to the surviving Moderates finally seceding from the Congress and forming a Liberal Party of their own. The Jallianwalla massacre in April 1919 had queered the political pitch, and at the Amritsar Congress in December 1919 feelings had run high, and Gandhiji - with the halo of his South African victories and the more recent crown of the Champaran struggle - had suddenly emerged as a formidable power. National resentment against the alien rule had mounted a new dimension, Tagore had returned  

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his Knighthood in immitigable anguish, and in Madras S. Srinivasa Iyenger had resigned his Advocate-Generalship in February 1920. In the early months of 1920, Tilak began to think in terms of "responsible cooperation" (with an inbuilt provision for obstruction and agitation whenever required), while Gandhiji - with Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali - was feeling his way towards a programme of non-violent non-cooperation on the issue of the Punjab atrocities and the Kilafat affront to the Muslim community. Unwilling to let the grass grow under his feet, Gandhiji - with the enthusiastic support of the Ali Brothers - decided to launch his movement on 1 August 1920, although the Congress organisation as such hadn't yet made up its mind. The sudden death of Tilak on 31 July - on the eve of the inauguration of the movement - left the Nationalists without an effective leader at this crucial time, and their thoughts inevitably turned to Sri Aurobindo. On being asked to give his reactions to the tragic demise of the Lokamanya, Sri Aurobindo said in the course of his tribute that was published in Bepin Pal's paper, the Independent:

A great mind, a great will, a great pre-eminent leader of men has passed away.... He was one who built much rapidly out of little beginnings, a creator of great things out of an unworked material. The creations he left behind him were a new and strong and self-reliant national spirit, the reawakened political mind and life of a people, a will to freedom and action, a great national purpose....

How was India to complete the Lokamanya's work and continue his mission? 'Two things India demands," said Sri Aurobindo; "a farther future, the freedom of soul, life and action needed for the work she has to do for mankind; and the understanding by her children of that work and of her own true spirit." India had not only to win the battle of self-determination in the political sense; she had also to recover her true spirit, and in its light alone build her future national existence.

These ideas - here as it were casually thrown in - found fuller expression in an editorial article "Ourselves" which Sri Aurobindo contributed to the Standard Bearer, a new weekly journal launched at Chandernagore by Motilal Roy, the first issue appearing on 15 August 1920. The paper had come into the field, Sri Aurobindo said, with a special mission, which was to endeavour to effect ultimately a great and high change in "the future of the race and the future of India". The time had come indeed for a close alliance between the West's mastery of science and machinery and India's clue to spiritual mastery, and out of this alliance alone could emerge the desired union of life and the spirit:

An outer activity as well as an inner change is needed and it must be at once a spiritual, cultural, educational, social and economic action. Its scope, too, will be at once individual and communal, regional and national, and eventually a work not only for the nation but for the whole human people. The immediate action of this will be a new creation, a spiritual education and culture, an enlarged social spirit founded not on division but on unity... not on any Western model but on the communal principle native to India.

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Here in a few phrases Sri Aurobindo would seem to have prophetically outlined the genesis and whole direction of development of the Yogashram at Pondicherry. But the call went forth particularly to the young - the young in years and the young in spirit - for only they would be able to bear the impact of the new Light and bring to fruition the stupendous programme of change and transformation:

It is the young who must be the builders of the new world - not those who accept the competitive individualism, the capitalism or the materialistic communism of the West.... They will need to consecrate their lives to an exceeding of their lower self, to the realisation of God in themselves and in all human beings.... This ideal can be as yet only a little seed and the life that embodies it a small nucleus, but it is our fixed hope that the seed will grow into a great tree and the nucleus be the heart of an ever-extending formation.

With his mind dwelling on the possibility of realising this momentous change in human life, it was hardly surprising that Sri Aurobindo didn't want to be lured back to combative political action in India.

While Gandhiji and his hot-gospellers were canvassing support for the non-cooperation movement, the older Nationalists looked forward to the next regular session of the Congress to be held at Nagpur in December 1920. Sri Aurobindo's friend of former days Dr. B.S. Moonje of Nagpur, made a direct approach to the recluse at Pondicherry. Leaders like Lajpat Rai, G.S. Khaparde, Baptista, C.R. Das, Moonje himself and many others felt that the Gandhian emphasis on the Punjab excesses and the Kilafat question was an indefensible narrowing down of the Nationalist demand, while the religious overtones of the allergy to violence, the curious highlighting of hand-spinning and hand-weaving, and the doubtful efficacy of the triple boycott (of the Councils, the Courts and of the educational institutions) seemed to make the Gandhian programme no more than an exercise in derailing the national movement from its main political course. The special Congress at Calcutta would no doubt take a first look at the problem in September, but the issue would be finally settled only at Nagpur. Hence the importance of the Nagpur Congress Presidentship.

On Sri Aurobindo's part, there was no vacillation whatsoever. After the Mother's second coming, the practical side of his own work - for India and the world - was in a process of formulation. In August, then, he was clearer even than six months earlier when he wrote to Baptista declining the proffered editorship. And so Sri Aurobindo first wired his refusal, and then followed it up with a letter on 30 August 1920.¹³ As in the earlier letter, here too Sri Aurobindo moves from the more obvious but less important to the more basic but less obvious reasons. It wouldn't be possible for him to sign the Congress creed as it was, and if he became President, his accent on policy and programme was likely to be different from the ruling orthodoxy. "I am entirely in sympathy with all that is being done so far as its object is to secure liberty for India", he wrote, and added; "but I should be unable to identify myself with the programme of any of the parties." In critical times, the President of the Congress had not only to read a ceremonial speech at

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the annual session; he would also have to lead the Party throughout the year and keep in constant touch with its activities. Sri Aurobindo had no taste for that kind of harness, and perhaps no talent either. Then comes the main reason:

The central reason however is this: I am no longer first and foremost a politician, but have definitely commenced another kind of work with a spiritual basis, a work of spiritual, social, cultural and economic reconstruction of an almost revolutionary kind....

Finally, a personal explanation. Dr. Moonje and his friends seemed to think that only Sri Aurobindo could fill the void created by Tilak's death, but in this they were surely mistaken. In the first place, Tilak was Tilak, and no one - "myself least of all" - was capable of taking his place. In the second place, Sri Aurobindo hadn't Tilak's "suppleness, skill and determination" to carry out his policy of "responsible cooperation", and he hadn't either the adaptability to toe the Gandhian line. He couldn't put the Tilakite policy into practice, for "nothing could induce me to set my foot in the new Councils". As for the Gandhian way, Sri Aurobindo would be in even greater difficulties with it:

...a gigantic movement of non-cooperation merely to get some Punjab officials punished or to set up again the Turkish Empire which is dead and gone, shocks my ideas both of proportion and of common sense. I could only understand it as a means of "embarrassing the Government" and seizing hold of immediate grievances in order to launch an acute struggle for autonomy after the manner of Egypt and Ireland, - though no doubt without the element of violence.

For the Congress really to hold an attraction to a man like Sri Aurobindo, it should radically change its creed, function, organisation and policy, and this of course wasn't likely to happen. And Sri Aurobindo concluded his letter with the sentiment that the Congress had - and should have - its own collective inspiration and momentum, and the absence or presence of any particular leader should make little difference to its deliberation and decisions.

At the Calcutta special Congress presided over by Lajpat Rai, the resolution on non-cooperation was passed by the delegates, 1886 voting for it and 884 against. If some of the leaders felt that Nagpur would reverse the Calcutta decision, they were doomed to disappointment. C. Vijayaraghavachariar of Salem presided over the session, and made the demand 'for Swaraj more comprehensive than the mere redress of the Punjab and Kilafat wrongs. But the non-cooperation plank couldn't be successfully assailed, and C.R. Das himself, who came with a huge contingent of delegates from Bengal with the avowed purpose of wrecking non-cooperation, ultimately supported it instead. The Mahatma carried the day, and the Gandhian Congress heaved forward on the crest of tremendous popular excitement and mass involvement reminiscent of the great days of the Home Rule movement and the earlier Bande Mataram agitation. Leaders like M.A. Jinnah, Tej Bahadur Sapru and V.S. Srinivasa Sastri were now out of the Congress, but that meant no serious diminution in its strength, for it had swollen into a mighty flood for the time being

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and seemed to be possessed of almost irresistible momentum. But presently it was clear that the triple boycott wasn't producing any decisive results. And the Gandhian promise of "Swaraj in one year" seemed to have misfired, after all. Only repression was in full swing, and its provocation was such that "non-violence" couldn't always remain non-violent. Sir Sankaran Nair said, in his Gandhi and Anarchy, that "almost every item in his [Gandhi's] programme has been tried and found useless to attain Home Rule". Even the plank of Hindu-Muslim unity suffered serious cracks after the Moplah rebellion in Malabar, and communal strife began to erupt, now here now there, with dangerous frequency. And the word "non-violence" itself acquired a bad taste after the tragic exhibition of mob violence at Chauri Chaura. Gandhiji had at last to acknowledge his "Himalayan miscalculation" and call off his mass civil disobedience movement.

Although Sri Aurobindo had firmly declined to exchange his Cave of Tapasya at Pondicherry for the battle-field of political debate and action in India, he wasn't by any means indifferent to what was happening in Bengal or in India. There were visitors, and there were interviews, and there were discussions and there was also some significant action, as yet nameless, on the occult planes. Advocate S. Doraiswami Aiyar from Madras, W. W. Pearson from Shantiniketan, Dr. Moonje from Nagpur, Colonel Wedgewood from Britain, and Saraladevi Chaudhurani from Calcutta were among the more important visitors at this time, and the talks must have covered a very wide range. There is a record of the conversation with Saraladevi, which throws light on Sri Aurobindo's views on the programme and prospects of the non-cooperation movement. To the pointed question from Saraladevi, "Is it true you are against the non-cooperation movement?", Sri Aurobindo is reported to have answered: "I am not against it; the train has arrived, it must be allowed to run its own course." The "train" metaphor is then amplified by both with a touch of playful raillery. When Saraladevi asks, "Why don't you come out and try to run your own train?", Sri Aurobindo answers blandly: "I must first prepare the rails and lay them down, then only can I get the train to arrive." Then, more seriously, Sri Aurobindo told Saraladevi:

Uptil now only waves of emotion and a certain all-round awakening have come.... What is needed is more organisation of the national will. It is no use emotional waves rising and spreading, then going down.... What we should do is to organise local committees of action throughout the country to carry out any mandate of the central organisation. These local leaders must stay among the people.

Sri Aurobindo also returned to his earlier insistence - going back to the days of his editorship of the Bande Mataram - that India should learn to thirst for freedom "because of herself, because of her own spirit", and not merely because freedom would mean the redress of certain current grievances:

I would very much like India to find her own Swaraj and then, like Ireland, to work out her salvation even with violence - preferably without violence. Our basis must be broader than that of mere opposition to the British Government.  

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All the time our eyes are turned to the British and their actions. We must look to ourselves irrespectively of them, and having found our own nationhood, make it free.¹⁴

When the non-cooperation movement had exhausted its initial force by 1922, Chittaranjan Das, Motilal Nehru and others wished to give a new orientation to Congress activity. It was about this time that Chittaranjan requested Sri Aurobindo to return to Bengal and take up the leadership of the Congress. Sri Aurobindo's reply (18 November 1922) was again characteristic of him, and was of a piece with the earlier letters to Moonje, Barindra and Baptista:

I think you know my present idea and the attitude towards life and work to which it has brought me. I see more and more manifestly that man can never get out of the futile circle the race is always treading, until he has raised himself on to a new foundation. I have become confirmed in a perception which I had, always, less clearly and dynamically then, but which has now become more and more evident to me, that the true basis of work and life is the spiritual: that is to say, a new consciousness to be developed only by Yoga. But what precisely was the nature of the dynamic power of this greater consciousness? What was the condition of its effective truth? How could it be brought down, mobilised, organised, turned upon life? How could our present instruments - intellect, mind, life, body - be made true and perfect channels for this great transformation? This was the problem I have been trying to work out in my own experience and I have now a sure basis, a wide knowledge and some mastery of the secret.... I have still to remain in retirement. For I am determined not to work in the external field till I have the sure and complete possession of this new power of action — not to build except on a perfect foundation.¹⁵

Das and Motilal went ahead, however, and unmindful of the rebuff at the Gaya Congress (December 1922) where the "no-changers" led by Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari) had their way, the "rebels" organised the Swarajya Party with a policy and a programme that were a via media between Tilakite "responsible cooperation" and Gandhian non-cooperation. On 5 June 1923, Das visited Pondicherry during his South Indian tour, saw Sri Aurobindo and discussed the new Party's future course of action. Reminiscing about the meeting fifteen years later, Sri Aurobindo seems to have said:

He was the last of the old group. He came here and wanted to be a disciple.

I said he wouldn't be able to go through in Yoga as long as he was in the political movement. Besides, his health was shattered.*

* Talks with Sri Aurobindo, recorded by Nirodbaran (1966), p. 48. As recorded by V. Chidanandam (Mother India, February 1972, p. 22), Sri Aurobindo seems to have referred to Das in an earlier (1926) conversation also: "Das asked to come here, but I refused because he would have brought a different world here and because he was not ready. His psychic being would have easily opened. But there was much vital movement in his nature. His intellect was lucid."

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It is clear Sri Aurobindo advised Das to persevere in his political work and also attend to his spiritual life to the extent possible. One agonising question seems to have come up during the discussions: Hindu-Muslim relations in India generally, and in Bengal particularly. Almost twenty-five years later, Sri Aurobindo recalled how Das had told him when he came to Pondicherry that "he [Das] would not like the British to go out until this dangerous problem had been settled".¹⁶ Sri Aurobindo's own view of the matter changed little since he wrote in the Karmayogin in May 1909:

...Hindu-Mahomedan unity cannot be effected by political adjustments or Congress flatteries. It must be sought deeper down, in the heart and in the mind, for where the causes of disunion are, there the remedies must be sought. We shall do well... to remember... that love compels love and that strength conciliates the strong.... we must extend the unfaltering love of the patriot to our Musulman brother, remembering always that in him too Narayana dwells and to him too our Mother has given a permanent place in her bosom; but we must cease to approach him falsely or flatter out of a selfish weakness and cowardice.¹⁷

On his return to Calcutta, Das asked for a message for the daily paper. Forward, that he was launching as the organ of the Swaraj Party, but Sri Aurobindo replied on 25 August 1923 that he would prefer not to send such a message, for he felt that any public support on the physical plane was more likely to interfere with the effectiveness of the silent occult support that he was giving to the cause already. The phenomenal success of the Swaraj Party during the next two years made a deep impression on Lord Birkenhead, the India Secretary, who thought highly of Chittaranjan's patriotism as well as statesmanship. A rapprochement between Britain and India seemed imminent, but Chittaranjan's sudden death on 16 June 1925 put an abrupt end to those hopes. It was "a supreme loss", said Sri Aurobindo in his obituary tribute; "consummately endowed with political intelligence, magnetism, personality, force of will, tact of the hour and an uncommon plasticity of mind, he was the one man after Tilak who could have led India to Swaraj". A further attempt was made to get Sri Aurobindo to fill the political vacuum in Bengal created by Chittaranjan's death, but once again Sri Aurobindo firmly declined to be deflected from his own chosen course.

Between 1920 and 1926, it was customary for Sri Aurobindo to grant interviews to select visitors and to meet his close associates or disciples in the evenings. These meetings were held in the veranda in front of his room in the house (now the "Guest House") in Rue Fran9ois Martin, and after October 1922 in the upstairs veranda of his new house (now the "Library House"), No. 9, Rue de la Marine. When the others (seldom more than a dozen) had gathered, he would come in simple dhoti, part of which covered the upper part of his body as well; chaddar or shawl was used but rarely, and only "in deference to the climate". Recapitulating the atmosphere of these meetings, Purani writes as follows:

...there were days when more than three-fourths of the time passed in complete  

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silence... or there was only an abrupt "Yes" or "No" to all attempts at drawing him out in conversation. And even when he participated in the talk, one always felt that his voice was that of one who does not let his whole being flow into his words; there was a reserve and what was left unsaid was perhaps more than what was spoken. What was spoken was what he felt necessary to speak.¹⁸

Sri Aurobindo usually took the mood of the moment and the measure of the man into consideration when he made his comments or gave his replies. Naturally enough, certain subjects - Gandhi, Khaddar, Kilafat, non-violence, non-cooperation, Swarajist stances - cropped up rather frequently during this period, though there was no dearth of other topics either. Once when somebody remarked, "C. Rajagopalachari says one yard of Khaddar means one step towards Swaraj", the answer came readily, "It will be a very long way in that case".¹⁹ Again, on another occasion when someone made the assertion "Khadi is an emblem of purity", Sri Aurobindo deplored the habit of equating Khadi with purity, Swaraj, politics, religion, etc., and asked: "Nobody objects to Khadi being used on its own merits. Why not use it as such? Why put music, religion, Swaraj, etc. into it?"²⁰ After the rise of Kemal Pasha in Turkey and the end of the Kilafat in March 1924, the whole Kilafat agitation in India became in retrospect an exercise in the theatre of the absurd. Clarifying the historical aspect of the question, Sri Aurobindo said:

In the first four Khalifas there was the reality of the Kilafat. They were the centres of Islamic culture and had some spirituality. After that the Umayad and other dynasties came, and it became more and more religious and external. When it passed into the hands of the Turks, it became a mere political institution....²¹

On the question of non-violence and soul-force, it was usual to cite the Puranic example of Prahlad. The following exchanges reveal both the wisdom and the good humour that Sri Aurobindo brought to these informal talks:

Disciple: He [Gandhi] always calls it soul-force.

Sri Aurobindo: Really speaking, it is a kind of moral force or, if you like, will-force that is ethical in its nature....

Disciple: What about Prahlad? He succeeded because of soul-force.

Sri Aurobindo: I do not know; for that you must ask Prahlad.

Disciple: But the Mahatma says that Prahlad used soul-force and he derives his Satyagraha from him.

Sri Aurobindo: First of all, Prahlad was young. Then, his father was King. There was the natural love for the father - very strong at that time in the society. But you must also remember that the whole thing resulted in tearing out the entrails of his father. (Laughter)

Disciple: Sri Krishna and Arjuna can serve as examples of men who resorted to what the Mahatma calls "violence".

Another Disciple: But the Mahatma says, "I am not Krishna".  

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Sri Aurobindo: Any man can say, "I am not Prahlad".²²*

The interviews, on the other hand, were rather more formal occasions, but we have only a few records of these. A close associate of Andhraratna Gopalakrishnayya, G. V. Subba Rao met Sri Aurobindo in October 1923, and recalling the meeting many years later he said:

Sri Aurobindo was dazzling bright in colour - it was said that, in his earlier years, he was more dark than brown - and had a long, rather thin beard... with streaks of white strewn here and there. The figure was slender and not much taller than Gandhiji's.... His voice was low, but quite audible, quick and musical.. .. It seemed as though he could know a man by a sweep of his eyes... ²³

On 5 January, Lala Lajpat Rai, Purushottamdas Tandon and some others met Sri Aurobindo. First Lalaji and Sri Aurobindo conversed privately for about forty-five minutes, then they joined the others. The talk turned presently on the lust for power and the reign of corruption. What was the remedy, then? Sri Aurobindo seems to have remarked:

The lust for power will be always there. You can't get over it by shutting out all positions of power; our workers must get accustomed to it. They must learn to hold the positions for the nation. This difficulty would be infinitely greater when you get Swaraj. These things are there even in Europe.... Only, they have got discipline - which we lack - and a keen sense of national honour which we have not got.²⁴

Just as Gandhiji figured often in the interviews and talks at Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo was also often in Gandhiji's thoughts. He knew about Sri Aurobindo's unique contribution to political awakening in India and he too was intrigued by Sri Aurobindo's unwillingness to return to active politics. He toyed with the idea of meeting Sri Aurobindo and talking things over with him, and with this end in view he sent his son, Devadas, to Pondicherry to prepare the ground. When Devadas asked for Sri Aurobindo's views on non-violence, he seems to have posed the counter-question: "Suppose there is an invasion of India by the Afghans, how are you going to meet it with non-violence?" When this was reported to Gandhiji, he had evidently no further desire to meet Sri Aurobindo.²⁵ Still, one cannot but regret that such a unique confrontation never took place.

III

If Sri Aurobindo and his two collaborators had hoped in August 1914 to storm humanity into accepting the gospel of the Life Divine following the lead of the Arya, they were indeed asking for disappointment. Owing to the exigencies of the

* One thing to be remembered is that Sri Aurobindo didn't see or approve these records of his talks or interviews with him. The words put into his mouth are as the recorder remembers them to have been said. This limitation has to be steadily kept in mind by the reader.  

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war, the circulation of the Arya had been largely confined to India, and the French edition was - for the same reason - short-lived. And even in India, how many were really willing to impose on themselves the continuous intellectual strain that Sri Aurobindo demanded from them? No doubt, the journal had its receptive (if limited) audience in whom the seminal ideas took root. Especially, the young men who read it with avidity thought that the Arya really spoke to them, that it tried to deliver a new message to the world, that its supramental manifesto was of immense consequence to humanity's future. They didn't perhaps understand all that the Arya said, but what they understood was enough to make them thrill with the intimations of that new revelation and to sense with a wondrous new surmise a great future for man and the world.

The war and the first after-war years in Europe were a period of agonising self-appraisal for sensitive young men and women. And in India too the situation was not very different, thought not for quite the same reasons. In externals, the world still seemed a pitiful prey to the forces that were engineering conflict and chaos. Industrial civilisation and urban rattle and strife seemed a danger and a trap to those few who were afflicted with a quick sensibility and a wide-awake conscience. For the intellectuals, for the sophisticated, for the bright young things and the grey elderly wrecks, for the hollow men and the stuffed men and the electronic men, the world had the look of a rat's alley, a waste patch or a giant capsule, and in their struggle for existence men encountered only prickly pear, rattling bones or pursuing shadows. The mood found expression, in the West, in the chilling literature of disillusion - in works like James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. And not only the bleached and empty men and women of the war-weary West, but Indian youths too - recoiling from the death-stare of political, economic and spiritual frustration or writhing under the vulgarity of "civilisation" or maddened by the politics of selfishness and communalism - felt the invasion of cynicism and desperation, and found in Eliot the laureate of their moods and musings:

This is the dead land

This is the cactus land.

Try as they might, the idea would not crystallise into reality but would vaporise instead; there was an icy clutch at the heart, murderous fingers seemed to fly at one's throat, and the currents of life seemed to lose themselves in stretches of desert sand:

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow.²⁶

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They raised their voices to God, or whatever gods there be, and feeling a drying-up of the roots of life, they cried like Hopkins, Send our roots rain\ Some few read the Arya, and felt a sudden wrenching turn in their lives. This was the Light-house that those lone lost barks on the sea needed. They turned their gaze towards the Light, and late or soon they made for Pondicherry.

Even before the Arya had begun its career, young men like Nolini, Bejoy Nag, Saurin and Moni were already with Sri Aurobindo. "With those who accompanied me or joined me in Pondicherry," writes Sri Aurobindo, "I had at first the relation of friends and companions rather than of a Guru and disciples; it was on the ground of politics that I had come to know them and not on the spiritual ground."²⁷ In the early years at Pondicherry, these young men were almost a human curtain between Sri Aurobindo and the outside world. Some of them played football in the evenings, and they learnt the Veda, and the Latin and Greek classics. Others like Va Ra came, stayed for a time, then went away. Amrita came as a boy in 1912, and came for good in 1919. It was Amrita too who first took V; Chandrasekharam, an Andhra youth, to Sri Aurobindo. After an interview of only five minutes, he became an ardent disciple; and when he came to stay with Sri Aurobindo, he read the Rig Veda with him.

Ambalal B. Purani's coming was from far-away Gujarat, - and thereby hangs a tale. His brother, Chhotalal Purani, had received from Sri Aurobindo in 1907 certain broad directions for revolutionary activity in Gujarat, and Barindra had given the formula for making bombs. As a boy, Ambalal had heard Sri Aurobindo at Baroda in 1908, just after the Surat Congress - "heard him without understanding everything that was spoken".²⁸ In 1914, as a student in college, he had become an advance subscriber to the Arya having seen an advertisement in the Bombay Chronicle. By 1916 Ambalal had started corresponding with Sri Aurobindo and translating portions into Gujarati. When the war ended, Purani thought that he should meet Sri Aurobindo first before putting the original plan for revolutionary activity into effect. At last, one afternoon in December 1918, he went up to meet Sri Aurobindo in his Rue François Martin residence:

Sri Aurobindo was sitting in a wooden chair behind a small table covered with an indigo-blue cloth in the veranda upstairs. I felt a spiritual light surrounding his face. His look was penetrating.... I informed him that our group was now ready to start revolutionary activity. It had taken us about eleven years to organise.

The conversation that followed seemed at first to be at cross-purposes. While Purani wanted the "go ahead!" signal for revolutionary activity, Sri Aurobindo wanted Purani to take to a spiritual life. Surely, not so long as India had not shaken off subjection? Sri Aurobindo gently pointed out that politics was necessary, and Yoga was necessary; many were called to politics, but few to Yoga - and these chosen few should not reject the call. Purani was of course free to pursue the path of revolution, but Sri Aurobindo couldn't give his consent to it. Then followed these interchanges:  

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Purani: But it was you who gave us the inspiration and the start for revolutionary activity. Why do you now refuse to give your consent to its execution?

Sri Aurobindo: Because I have done the work and I know its difficulties. Young men come forward to join the movement being inspired by idealism and enthusiasm. But these elements do not last long. It becomes very difficult to observe and exact discipline. Small groups begin to form within the organisation, rivalries grow between groups and even between individuals.... The agents of the Government generally manage to join these organisations from the very beginning. And so they are unable to act effectively. Sometimes they sink so low as to quarrel even for money....

Purani still wasn't convinced: how could he concentrate on Sadhana when his mind would be inescapably preoccupied with the issue of India's freedom? This was an impasse - almost an impasse:

Sri Aurobindo remained silent for two or three minutes. It was a long pause. Then he said: "Suppose an assurance is given to you that India will be free?"

"Who can give such an assurance?" I could feel the echo of doubt and challenge in my own question.

Again he remained silent for three or four minutes. Then he looked at me and added: "Suppose I give you the assurance?"

I paused for half-a-minute - considered the question within myself and said: "If you give the assurance, I can accept it."

"Then, I give you the assurance that India will be free", he said in a serious tone.

At the time of taking leave of him again, Sri Aurobindo repeated the assurance: "You can take it from me, it is as certain as the rising of the sun tomorrow. The decree has already gone forth, it may not be long in coming." And so Purani found that his personal question and the problem for his revolutionary group had both been decisively solved. His work was over, and he returned to Gujarat - but only to come again in 1921. This time Purani noticed (as others had) the change in Sri Aurobindo's complexion: for it was no more that of the average Bengali - rather dark - though with a lustre on the face and the penetrating gaze. Now the "whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light". He saw the Mother too; and, like the Master, even his house seemed to .have undergone a transformation:

There was a clean garden in the open courtyard, every room had simple but decent furniture - a mat, a chair and a small table. There was an air of neatness and order. This was, no doubt, the effect of the Mother's presence.

After a stay of eleven days, Purani went away, and then returned early in 1923 to stay with Sri Aurobindo permanently.

Sri Aurobindo's younger brother, Barindra, who had given the formula for bomb-making to Chhotalal Purani, came to stay with his brother in 1920, having first (as we saw) corresponded with him about politics and Yoga. Ullaskar Datta, another revolutionary and close associate of Barin, also came towards the close of  1920.

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After the years in the Andamans, he wasn't now quite the same man who had once turned his home into a laboratory for making bombs, the man who had led the chorus when the Alipur prisoners were taken in the jail van to the Court. The head was bloodied, but unbowed! Another actor of the early days, Abinash Bhattacharya, who had kept house for Sri Aurobindo and had also been a revolutionary, was in Pondicherry for a while. Yet another associate of the political period, Amarendra of Uttarpara, who used to be known as "Gabriel" to the revolutionary group, now appeared in Pondicherry as Swami Kevalananda, complete with matted hair, as head of a group of Sadhus! Many came and went like sea-waves, but a few remained with Sri Aurobindo. Champaklal, for example, first came in 1921 as a young man of eighteen, went back to Gujarat, and returned in 1923 to stay with Sri Aurobindo till the end, the most steadfast and tender-hearted of his disciples.

And now, early in 1924, an unusual visitor to Pondicherry: Dilip Kumar Roy, son of Dwijendralal Roy the Bengali dramatist. A contemporary of Subhas Chandra Bose in college, like him Dilip too thought of Sri Aurobindo as a legendary figure almost, of whom people talked in whispers of rapturous excitement and enthusiasm. With his rich academic and cultural background, with influential friends the world over, and having already made his mark in music and trailing clouds of glorious promise in other fields, Dilip nevertheless felt a gnawing discomfort in his heart and so made a trip to Pondicherry and saw Sri Aurobindo on 24 January 1924. "Even before I met you for the first time," Sri Aurobindo was to confide to Dilip later, "I knew of you and felt at once the contact of one with whom I had that relation which declares itself constantly through many lives." Dilip was, for the time being at any rate, overwhelmed by that "radiant personality", and felt drawn and lost within the orbit of a great immaculate peace. But he had also to admit the justice of Sri Aurobindo's dismissal: "yours is still a mental seeking; for my Yoga something more is needed."²⁹ On the other hand, wherever he might go, whatever he might do, the worm of unease still stirred within, and there was no settled peace or even hope of it. He needed a Guru, and Sri Aurobindo hadn't accepted him! It was under very different circumstances and in a far-off village that sudden light was thrown upon his predicament. He had a sitting with a Yogi with occult powers, who asked Dilip at last: "But why are you hunting for a Guru, now that Sri Aurobindo himself has accepted you?" And, after some more explanation, he added:

You have been called, but remember it is even more difficult to be chosen. For that you will have to surrender your will utterly to your Guru so that he may mould you as he will... .³⁰

Perhaps there were hesitations still. He no doubt wished to bum his boats and take a leap towards that other shore - yet something held him back, he wasn't quite sure he would safely come through! When he spoke about this tussle within, a friend who saw where the trouble lay said bluntly: "You are bargaining with the Divine! Quid pro quo? This is not the spirit which has moved those who staked their all in the past for the All-in-all !"³¹ That was the needed "break", the shock of

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transcendence. He spent a sleepless night, and then he prayed again as he hadn't prayed before; and, suddenly, "something happened... this time it was he who came to me". Without further avoidable delay, he rushed to Pondicherry and arrived there towards the end of November 1928, this time to stay and do the sadhana of Sri Aurobindo's integral Yoga.

Then there was Philip Barbier de St. Hilaire, a young Frenchman of high intelligence and ardent aspiration, who first came from Japan to Pondicherry on 26 December 1925. Having accepted him as a disciple, Sri Aurobindo gave him a new name, 'Pavitra'. They had spiritual talks spread over several months in 1926, and the record of these talks makes enlightening reading. On one occasion (8 March), on Pavitra remarking, "It would seem easier to overcome the causes of agitation by retiring from the world", Sri Aurobindo answered that it would be "altogether futile" to make that kind of withdrawal, and added: "If we, here, retire a little from human contact, it is not for the same reason, but mainly in order to avoid the shock and pressure of the thoughts of others directed towards us."³²

Then Pavitra asked whether what was happening to him was "the second birth", and Sri Aurobindo answered serenely, "Yes - but in this Yoga one must pass through many new births." On another occasion (1O May), Pavitra asked whether his giving up the desire for a union between science and occultism was right and whether he could return to it again, Sri Aurobindo was categorical in his reply:

Indeed, in Yoga, one must give up everything, all ideals, even as all desires. A moment comes when what is true in the being, what is not mental but deeper, and which must be used by the Divine, - the moment comes when this is awakened. This happens when the force descends into the physical plane. What was mental or vital is rejected, but the true forms of action continue.³³

But hesitations, setbacks, uncertainties alternated with reviving hopes, forced marches and relaxations. There were disturbing extraneous influences, and there was the Guru's force counteracting them. Then, on 14 June, a crucial conversation:

Pavitra: I suppose there is no need to feel discouraged. I am not at all discouraged, or even sad, about this process taking so long a time.

Sri Aurobindo: No need at all.

Pavitra: When I came here you saw in me certain possibilities and also certain difficulties. Now is there any change in the outlook?

Sri Aurobindo: No.

Pavitra: I mean: do you think it will be possible for me to stay here?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, certainly. I have the conviction you will stay here.³⁴

Pavitra remained, the bud of his spiritual aspiration opened out gradually into a full efflorescence, and he became one of the most authentic sādhaks of the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Others came too - some remained, some went away - and some went away and returned to stay permanently. By 1926, there were about twenty-five sādhaks staying with Sri Aurobindo. Some from Bengal, Nolini, Barindra, Bejoy, Moni,

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Upendra; some from Gujarat, Purani, Champaklal, and the Punamchands; some from the South, Amrita, Chandrasekharam, Kothandaraman, Rajangam; and there were also the sadhaks from beyond the shores of India, Datta (Miss Hodgson) and Pavitra. "To the Lighthouse!" had been the cry of these distracted mariners on life's uncharted sea; and arrived at the haven at last, they were well content.

IV

We saw that Mirra, the Mother, whose second coming took place on 24 April 1920, had to move to Sri Aurobindo's house seven months later on a night of terrible storm and rain (24 November). On his second visit, Purani found that Sri Aurobindo's house had undergone a visible change for the better and attributed it rightly to the Mother's presence. There developed also an atmosphere of tension for more than one reason. In the first place, during the winter of 1921, a dismissed cook by name Vattal sought the help of a magician-fakir who used a boy servant in Sri Aurobindo's house as medium and caused stones to fall promiscuously, and even inside closed rooms. A police constable who came to investigate was himself hit by one of the mysterious stones, and fled in panic. Presently the missiles began to hit the boy servant and make him bleed. The Mother with her occult knowledge concluded that there was a nexus between the boy and the happenings, and so he was sent to another house; and the stone-throwing ceased at once. But the sequel was that the evil force, being thus thrown back, hit the ex-cook Vattal who fell seriously ill. His hapless wife appealed to Sri Aurobindo, who generously forgave the man, and he soon recovered.³⁵

In the second place, differences arose between the Pravartak Sangha of Chandernagore that was being run by Motilal Roy and the spiritual centre at Pondicherry. It was, of course, Sri Aurobindo himself who had first given the idea to Motilal Roy - it was evidently intended to be a sort of controlled experiment. But Motilal "took it up with all his vital being and in an egoistic way", with the result that the lower vital forces took possession of the work and gave it a direction that was far from satisfactory. The Chandernagore group made "Commune, Culture and Commerce" the watchwords of the Pravartak Sangha, and after the severance of connection in 1922, the Sangha developed in its own way, with no doubt some residual Aurobindonian inspiration still, but mainly deriving its impulse from Motilal, Arun Chandra Dutt and others. The whole episode convinced Sri Aurobindo that it was no use "rushing into work" except with tempered and tested instruments and on a sure basis of integral knowledge.³⁶

In the third place, there was some incipient - perhaps subconscious - objection on the part of a few to Mirra, the Mother assuming an increasing responsibility for the management of Sri Aurobindo's house and - what was even more to the point and purpose - an increasing responsibility for the welfare, both material and spiritual, of the sadhaks of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. But the clouds passed, and the

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small community came more than ever closer together; and one of the results was the practice of collective meditation, all the sadhaks gathering in the veranda of Sri Aurobindo's house to experience the joy of spiritual communion.

On 1 January 1922, the Mother took complete charge of the management of Sri Aurobindo's house, and in September the shift to the house in Rue de la Marine took place. The number of inmates was about half a dozen, but increased to over ten next year, and kept going up year by year. The "change" effected by the Mother had two aspects. First, with her French precision and orderliness, augmented by her infallible sense of artistic elegance acquired in Japan, she brought cleanliness, a quiet efficiency and a simple sufficiency into the life of the household that was now an Ashram. Here the testimony of one who has been through it all, Nolini, is of considerable significance:

We do not always notice how very disorderly we are: our belongings and household effects are in a mess, our actions are haphazard, and in our inner life we are as disorderly as in our outer life.... If the brain is a market-place, the heart is no better than a mad-house.... One of the things the Mother has been trying to teach us both by her word and example is this, namely, that to keep our outer life and its materials in proper order and neat and tidy is a very necessary element in our life upon earth.... The Mother taught us to use our things with care.... She uses things not merely with care but with love and affection.³⁷ *

Secondly, and this was more important still, she "installed Sri Aurobindo on his high pedestal of Master and Lord of Yoga". Again, Nolini has explained the difference, a difference amounting to a revolution in attitude. Previously, Sri Aurobindo was friend and comrade, the prophet of Nationalism and the leader of the Revolution, and although the young men inwardly looked up to him as to a Guru (and not merely as to a chief), this was not always reflected in the outer attitude. The Mother taught the others by her manner and speech and practice what it was to be "disciple" of a "Guru", how they were to condition their mind and soul to receive his Grace:

It was the Mother who opened our eyes and gave us that vision which made us say, even as Arjuna had been made to say:

"By whatever name I have called you, O Krishna, O Yadava, O Friend, thinking in my rashness that you were only a friend, and out of ignorance and from affection, not knowing this thy greatness; whatever disrespect I have shown you out of frivolity, whether sitting or lying down or eating, when I was alone or when you were present before me, - may I be pardoned for all that, O thou Infinite One."³⁸

This balance between efficiency in the details of external organisation and the inner attitude of consecration to the Master and Lord of Yoga gave a new form

* The Mother has said: "Not to take care of material things which one uses is a sign of inconscience and ignorance.... You must take care of it, not because you are attached t» it, but because it manifests something of the Divine Consciousness."

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and trembling vitality and a new intensity and tone to the collective life of the sadhaks with Sri Aurobindo. The talks and discussions didn't interfere with the collective meditation, and everything in fact seemed to find its proper place like the several notes in a piece of music. Sri Aurobindo's birthdays were special days to the sadhaks when a fresh self-examination and a renewal of aspiration were possible. Sri Aurobindo himself didn't like the usual outer exuberance in birthday celebrations. "I want to make it as ordinary as any other day", he said in 1923; "I do not like any sort of vital manifestation on that day after taking the new turn in Yoga."³⁹ Nevertheless, the Ashram became on such occasions a home of aspiration, an 'Hour of God' when fresh spiritual effort was possible, and when everyone beamed with joy and a sense of anticipatory fulfilment. It was customary for Sri Aurobindo to make a brief speech on his birthday and also to answer questions. On 15 August 1923, he made a reference in his speech to the descent of the supramental Truth, and added:

There is an idea that today every sadhak gets a new experience. That depends upon your capacity to receive the Truth in yourself. Real spiritual surrender is, of course, quite another matter; but if any of you have experienced even a degree of it, even some faint reflection, then the purpose on the fifteenth will have been served.⁴⁰

In the evening, Sri Aurobindo differentiated between the three layers of the Supermind - the interpretative, the representative and the imperative - and talking in a personal vein gave some indication of "the present state" of the Sadhana:

I cannot call it a state, or a condition. It is, rather, a complex movement. I am at present engaged in bringing the Supermind into the physical consciousness, down even to the sub-material....

One feels as if "digging the earth", as the Veda says. It is literally digging from Supermind above to Supermind below.... The Veda calls it "the two ends" - the head and the tail of the dragon completing and compassing the consciousness... so long as Matter is not supramentalised, the mental and the vital also cannot be fully supramentalised.⁴¹

On the fifty-second birthday in 1924, there was again the same subdued excitement and exhilaration. Recapitulating the events of the day, a sadhak writes:

...we see him every day, but today it is "Darshan"! Today each sees him individually, one after another.... There he sits - in the royal chair in the veranda - royal and majestic. In the very posture there is divine self-confidence.... As one actually stands in front, all curiosity, all pride, all thoughts, all questions, all resolutions are swept away in some terrific divine Niagara.⁴²

The "darshan" was in the morning, and in the evening there was a talk as usual and a brief discussion. He began the speech by remarking that he should have preferred "to communicate through the Silent Consciousness", for one could reach something deeper that way. When a disciple commented, "I was thinking of asking about your Sadhana, but I was afraid of being referred to the 'Silent Consciousness' ", Sri Aurobindo blandly asked: "Do you then want me to speak about

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the Silent Consciousness like Carlyle who preached his doctrine of silence in 40 volumes?"⁴³ Regarding the possibility of his own death, Sri Aurobindo said:

There are three things that can bring it about:

1. Violent surprise and accident; 2. Action of age; 3. My own choice, finding it not possible to do it this time, or by some thing shown to me which would prove it is not possible this time.⁴⁴

When he was asked to give some indication as to the time of the descent of the Supramental, he parried the question: "You want me to prophesy? It does not totally depend upon me; time is about the last thing one knows. And fixing the limit is more likely to prolong it like 'Swaraj in one year' ."⁴⁵

On his birthday in 1925, when a disciple asked in the course of the discussion following the talk, "How are the universal conditions more ready now for the coming down of the Supermind than they were before?", Sri Aurobindo returned a detailed answer:

Firstly, the knowledge of the physical world has increased so much that it is' on the verge of breaking its own bounds.

Secondly, there is an attempt all over the world towards breaking the veil between the outer and the inner mental, the outer and the inner vital and even the outer and the inner physical. Men are becoming more "psychic".

Thirdly, the vital is trying to lay its hold on the physical as it never did before.... Also, the world is becoming more united on account of the discoveries of modern science.... Such a union is the condition for the highest Truth coming down and it is also our difficulty.

Fourthly, the rise of persons who wield tremendous vital influence over large numbers of men.

These are some of the signs to show that the universal condition may be more ready now.⁴⁶

Next year, Sri Aurobindo went almost a little out of the way to lay stress on the importance of the day for the sadhaks' spiritual progress:

... if you came to me in the morning, it should not be in fulfilment of a customary ceremony but with your souls and minds prepared to receive. If you listen to me now, and if it is merely something that touches your mental interest and satisfies a mental interest, I had rather remain silent. But if it touches somewhere the inner being, the soul, then only this day has a utility or a purpose. And the meditation too ought to be under such conditions that even if nothing decisive descends, there would be a certain infiltration, the results of which would come afterwards.⁴⁷

Although Sri Aurobindo's birthdays could thus be turned into exceptional opportunities from the point of view of the Yoga, for the sadhaks, of course, every day in the Guru's house was a special day. The more sensitive among them had the feeling that increasingly they were basking in the ambience of the Spirit radiating from the Guru's power of personality. And the Mother's unfailing solicitude and compassionate understanding were there all the time as protective sheaths

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insulating the sadhaks from any possibility of mishap. The talks in the evening went on, the core of the company was the same, yet with peripheral changes day by day, owing to the presence of a new sadhak or of a casual visitor. Like bubbles on the surface of a lake, the topics used to come up and the light shone upon them, now on this now on that side, and so they subsided - and others sprang up claiming attention. Not a branch of knowledge was deliberately excluded - all approaches were permissible - and every mood, every quirk of sensibility, every leap of intelligence had its turn. Vaishnavism, Theosophy, Bahaism, Coueism, Gandhism, Nirvikalpa Samadhi, samatā. Grace and the Guru, Cosmic Consciousness, the Vedic Gods, Yogic miracles, Ouspensky, Jacob Boehme, M. Théon, astrology, the interpretation of dreams, Kaya Kalpa, Space and Time, Russian Communism, Tagore, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya's poetry, current literature, Islamic culture, Indo-English poetry. Art, Education, medicine, psychology - all these and the Sadhana of Supramental Yoga as well! Those of us who were not of the elect can still have some taste of those daily feasts of reason and flow of spirit from the records maintained by some of the participants. Besides the two series of Evening Talks that Purani has published, there are other recapitulations too of those early conversations - for example, V. Chidanandam's 'Sri Aurobindo at Evening Talk' .⁴⁸ The reporters would themselves readily admit that their renderings do but scant justice to the wondrous flow of speech from that reservoir of sovereign understanding and wisdom. And likewise any attempt at sampling here will do even less justice to Sri Aurobindo's wit or wisdom or vast reserves of intuitive understanding of life's variegated problems. Yet one or two excerpts may be given here chosen almost at random. On 23 August 1925, the talk turned on Shaw's St. Joan, and Sri Aurobindo said:

It is no drama at all. Joan talks like a pushing impertinent peasant girl and Charles VII talks like a school urchin and all the rest talk like London shop-boys except when they talk about high subjects, and then they talk like Shaw.⁴⁹

Thus of the Gayatri mantra:

It means: "We choose the Supreme Light of the Divine Sun; we aspire that it may impel our minds."

The Sun is the symbol of the divine Light that is coming down and Gayatri gives expression to the aspiration, asking that divine Light to come down and give impulsion to all the activities of the mind.

In this Yoga also, we want to bring down that divine Sun to govern, not only the mind, but the vital and the physical being also.... It is the capacity to bear the Light that constitutes the fitness for this Yoga.⁵⁰

And on one occasion, observing a spider frantically making web after web to catch insects, Sri Aurobindo exclaimed:

He has got quite a feast! He is again running to make the web strong. He ties up the moth in a corner and then goes about preparing the web. He knows mathematics.... You see, these spiders are very resourceful. They know what they have to do, and then they learn by experience and experiment.⁵¹

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It's all one - spider's web, Egyptian mummy, the Montessori method, Tantra sounds or Ananda consciousness: no subject is too trivial, _none too abstruse, but Sri Aurobindo's Light sets it in the right perspective and sheds the requisite clarity on it. It is the Supermind unobtrusively working through the mind and utilising the instrument of speech to say precisely the thing that is necessary and right in each fleeting situation.

V

During 1926, when the sadhaks already numbered about twenty-five, the "evening talks" often centered round the "supramental Yoga" and its practical implications. When some of the disciples tried to cabin the "supramental" in the customary "mental" moulds, Sri Aurobindo said:

All fundamental change will be inner and not outer. That is to say, we shall have attained a higher consciousness and all we do will proceed from that consciousness....

The one thing that Sadhana has done for me is that it has destroyed alt "isms" from my mind. If you had asked this question a few years back I would have told you "it is spiritual communism" or, perhaps, "commerce, culture and commune", as the Chandernagore people say. At that time it was my mind that received the knowledge from Above....

But now if you ask me, I would say "Wait and let us have the truth down here."...

What we are doing at present is to make ourselves fit instruments for the higher Truth, so that when it came down there would be the proper instrumentation for its working. We won't reject life; we have to bring a new consciousness into the external work. ...

So far as I am concerned, I have got my work... immediately at present we have to bring down a change in the physical mind, the nervous being, and the vital mind, so that they may become fit instruments of the Truth. That is a big enough work....⁵²

On 13 July, he said that, for bringing down any higher spiritual force (especially the Supermind) into the earth-plane and the physical being, one had to sit down to it and call it down and hold it, and not prematurely rush into inconsequential action. "Therefore I say," he added, "it would be foolish to expect me to go to the Bengal Council and work there."⁵³ The Supermind was a power of consciousness, and if brought down, it would sensitise and make perfect the instruments of mind, life and body. There could thus be no sublimer objective than the endeavour to bring the supramental force into the earth consciousness, and all temporary limitations, all necessary exclusions, would be permissible if they were meant only to advance this aim. Sri Aurobindo said in November 1926, as if pushed by a sense of urgency:

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I am trying to bring down the Supramental; things will happen, conditions for its descent will be created. Then there will be no obscurity in the vital or the physical. From the highest standpoint the coming of the Supramental is decided, you can't stand in the way. From the standpoint where we are working, it is an advantage to be aware of the difficulties and to take account of them, and deal with them.⁵⁴

On 6 November 1926, Sri Aurobindo made a direct reference to the world of the Gods - the Overmind world just below Supermind - and indicated that it might come down first, preparing the ground, as it were, for the climactic supramental descent:

It is possible that there may be a great complexity in manifestation - one can manifest different godheads in different parts of the being.... There should be no ego if there is to be a divine manifestation. ... I spoke about the world of the Gods because not to speak of it would be dangerous. I spoke of it so that the mind may understand the thing if it comes down. I am trying to bring it down into the physical as it can no longer be delayed and then things may happen.⁵⁵*

This is quite explicit. Sri Aurobindo was trying to bring the "world of the Gods" - in other words, the Overmental principle and power of cosmic Truth - into the physical "as it can no longer be delayed". Clearly, the descent is imminent, and "then things may happen...."

For five or six years previously, the small (if steadily growing) Ashram community were registering experiences - individual as well as collective - and the group seemed to be set on the high road to newer and newer goals of realisation. Several sadhaks had also the human - only too human! - tendency to be impatient, to "expect" miracles and to picture the supramental descent and the supramental transformation in mental terms which necessarily introduced elements of falsity and futility. The vital nature might sometimes think of the Supermind as just a superior vital force - Nietzschean, or something similar - but that kind of mental aberration could lead to megalomania and loss of balance. The Supramental was visualised by Sri Aurobindo as Truth-Consciousness, or complete Truth and complete effectivity seeping into all the levels of existence down to the material. The whole adventure of transformation of consciousness - the mind's movements, the conflicting pulls of the vital, the body's cells with their molecular energies: the charging of all these with the Truth and effectivity of the Supramental

* A roughly equivalent version appears in V. Chidanandam's 'Sri Aurobindo at Evening Talk' (Mother India, July 197O, p. 333): "I did not speak of many of these things before, for then it was dangerous. Now not to speak anything may be dangerous, for I am pulling down the supramental into the physical... [which] means the coming of the supramental Purusha, the supramental Principle, and also supramental beings and personalities. It can be delayed no longer....

From the highest standpoint the supramental descent has been decided and nobody can resist it. From the standpoint of the conditions in which we are working, we have to see the obstacles... it is an advantage to be aware of the difficulties and thus he prepared to deal with them."

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Consciousness so that no thought, no vital desire, no cellular activity might accomplish anything other than what is true, what is right and what is fully purposive - this adventure was the very pith and marrow of the Yoga; and for complete success in it, the aspiration, the descent and the transformation had to be total, and comprehend every layer and every comer and every tremor of human and of earth nature. Even if one individual could first succeed in this adventure, to the extent he succeeded, the benefits would flow to the whole world. As Sri Aurobindo said on his birthday in 1925:

I am not doing an isolated Yoga. ... It is true that my Yoga is not for humanity; but it is not for myself either; of course, my attaining to the Siddhi is the preliminary condition to others being able to attain it.⁵⁶

But if the forerunner was to have some chance of success - success in the total transformation of consciousness - he needs must concentrate wholly, or almost wholly, on the work. The gains of the Yoga, during the immediately preceding years, had been impressive enough. The higher powers were being progressively brought down to inform and interpenetrate the lower levels of consciousness. As the Mother has remarked:

The consciousness is like a ladder: at each great epoch there has been one great being capable of adding one more step to the ladder and reaching a place where the ordinary consciousness had never been. ... one more step to the ladder without losing contact with the material [consciousness],... to reach the Highest and at the same time connect the top with the bottom.... To go up and down and join the top to the bottom is the whole secret of realisation, and that is the work of the Avatar.⁵⁷

Not to break loose or escape, but to connect or enlarge, was the bridge-builder's task. The way up shouldn't mean a cancellation of the way down. As interpreted by T.V. Kapali Sastry, the first boon Nachiketas secures from Yama in the Kathopanishad really involves the power "to come back from the higher plane to the physical with the connection between this and the life beyond established, maintaining the thread of consciousness".⁵⁸ Always to extend, to connect, to integrate - to stand the magic ladder on the ground of the inconscient and against the summit of the Spirit - to throw a golden bridge between the hither and thither extremities - this had been the adventure of consciousness, and the adventure must go on.

In 1926, Sri Aurobindo decided that the time had come to make a new determined move: he would now entrust the Ashram - both the outer management and the spiritual direction - to the Mother, and retire into complete seclusion. From 1926, the Mother began to assume more and more of Sri Aurobindo's responsibility for the spiritual guidance of the sadhaks, as if giving him the needed relief so that he might attend to his own more important work. An air of intensity began building up slowly, an air of expectancy; and the sadhaks had the feeling that they were on the threshold of new developments. After Sri Aurobindo's birthday, the evening talks took on a new fervour and potency, and it was as though the light of

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a tremendous new realisation was transfiguring Sri Aurobindo's person into that of the Golden Purusha. In the evenings, the group meditation started later and later, not at half-past four as formerly, but at six or seven or eight, and once well past midnight. But the sadhaks, far from being put out, took it all as part of a preordained drama, and in fact many of them felt as though they were themselves being invaded by a terrific new force, as though they were undergoing the throes Of a spiritual rebirth.

Then came the great day, 24 November 1926. As she saw Sri Aurobindo emerge from his room in the evening, the Mother knew that a momentous descent had taken place, and she immediately sent word that all the sadhaks should assemble in the veranda, the usual place of meditation, and by six all were there. The rest had best be described in the words of A.B.. Purani, one of those present at the time to receive the Master's benedictions:

There was a deep silence.... Many saw an oceanic flood of Light rushing down from above. Everyone present felt a kind of pressure above his head. The whole atmosphere was surcharged with some electrical energy... .With a slow dignified step the Mother came out first, followed by Sri Aurobindo with his majestic gait. .. .The Mother sat on a small stool to his right.

Silence absolute... overflowing with divinity. The meditation lasted about forty-five minutes. After that one by one the disciples bowed to the Mother.

.. .After the blessings, in the same silence there was a short meditation.

In the interval of silent meditation and blessings many had distinct experiences. ... It was certain that a Higher Consciousness had descended on earth....

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went inside. Immediately Datta was inspired. In that silence she spoke: "The Lord has descended into the physical today."⁵⁹

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