Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 12

On The Eve

I

A brief retrospect may be timely here. When Sri Aurobindo left India for England in 1879, he was but a boy of seven and he had lived a sheltered life at home and at the boarding school at Darjeeling. During his stay of almost fourteen years in England, he first grew in general ignorance of conditions in India. But gradually, during the years at Cambridge, his eyes were opened to Indian realities when his father began sending copies of the Bengalee, with passages marked relating to the instances of British misgovernment in India. Even at the precocious age of eleven, Sri Aurobindo had awakened strongly to the feeling that the world - and India - would soon see great revolutionary changes, and that he himself was destined to play a part in the movement; at Cambridge the feeling hardened into a settled conviction. He took a leading part in the Indian Majlis and was for a time its secretary. Later, in London, he joined the still-born secret society the 'Lotus and Dagger' when each member vowed to work for the liberation of India. His deep interest in the Irish revolutionary movement and his admiration for Parnell were a reflection of his increasing inner preoccupation with India's own predicament, which was indeed worse than Ireland's. His first spiritual experience of immense peace and calm and joy on touching Indian soil at Apollo Bunder in Bombay instantaneously quickened his political sensibility by giving it a mystical dimension. It did not take him long at Baroda to size up India's political life, the elegant petitioning, the ceremonial mendicancy and the general futility of it all. His "New Lamps for Old" articles in the Indu Prakash were meant to bring this home to the Indian politician, but they only shocked and scandalised the Congress leaders, and Sri Aurobindo was persuaded to stop that line of attack. Turning now to Bankim Chandra Chatterji, about whom Sri Aurobindo wrote a series of articles in 1894 in the Indu Prakash, he found in the Bengali novelist a true patriot, not less a patriot and a fighter for using only his pen as the flashing sword and the genre of creative fiction as the field of battle for the inauguration of an era of awakening in the country.

Since the kind of manly political activity he had tried to generate in India had been ruled out by the postures of the established Congress leaders, Sri Aurobindo began formulating - with Bankim's seminal ideas in his mind - an alternative plan of campaign, namely the organisation of secret revolutionary activity on a wide basis preparing for an armed insurrection at the appropriate time. He established contacts with existing groups in Western India, took the revolutionary oath himself, and administered it to others; and, in particular, he made Bengali his main field of operation, and among his principal executants were Jatin Banerjee who had received training in the Baroda army and Barindra, Sri Aurobindo's younger brother.

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In Bengal, there were already the revolutionary groups organised by Barrister P. Mitter and Sarala Ghoshal (Chaudhurani), and by 1903 a strong base had been established in Bengal, the central direction being vested in a committee of five consisting of Sister Nivedita, C. R. Das, P. Mitter, Suren Tagore and Jatin Banerjee.*

Then came the Partition of Bengal, the great upsurge in Bengal and in the country as a whole, the "Bhavani Mandir" pamphlet which acted as heady wine to numerous revolutionaries, and the launching of the Swadeshi, Boycott and National Education movements, and the stepping up of the national demand for "Swaraj" or Independence, and not merely colonial self-government on an unending instalment plan. Sri Aurobindo had, in the meantime, been initiated into certain Yogic practices like prānāyāma, and he had come to the conclusion that advance in Yoga might give him an accession of strength to pursue his political work, not only with greater efficiency, but also with an impulsion of irresistibility. By mid-1906, Sri Aurobindo had decided to leave Baroda service and take the overt plunge into the political maelstrom. He was in Calcutta now, teaching at the National College, editing the Bande Mataram, welding the scattered Nationalists in the Congress into a militant party, and secretly keeping in touch with the revolutionary groups.

It was, for Sri Aurobindo, an extraordinary feat of tight-rope dancing on the scene of Bengal and national politics, but he seemed to be able to accomplish it with the ease and naturalness of the fish swimming in water or the bird careering through air. As a professor, he was teaching his pupils the new dynamic of knowledge, not the knowledge that was conveniently marketable at the employment exchange, but the knowledge that was the means of self-realisation through the whole-hearted service of the nation. As editor of the Bande Mataram, he taught his readers - and through them the nation - the very alphabet of patriotism and the basic tenets of the religion of Nationalism. As the directing intelligence behind the Nationalists, he gave them a cohesion, a purpose, a plank of action - both long-term strategy and short-term tactics - to battle with the bureaucracy within the provisions of the civil law of the land. The Bande Mataram was both the accepted mouthpiece and the keeper of the conscience of the Nationalists of Bengal, and in course of time even of the Nationalist party of India. When the National Demand became nothing less than Swaraj or Independence, where were the sanctions behind the demand? The Nationalists were a political party working openly and with due regard to the limitations imposed by the law. A disarmed nation, and emasculated people - they had no resources, no will-power even! For a Demand pitched so high, what were the sanctions the Nationalists had in mind? Sri Aurobindo's answer was "Passive Resistance". Defy the law openly when necessary, and accept the consequences! This was the dress-rehearsal for the Gandhian non-cooperation,

* Among the Bengali revolutionaries of the time was Mujibur Rehman. It is not known, however, whether h? was 'v, relation of his namesake, the "Banga Bandhu" of 1971.  

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civil disobedience and 'Quit India' movements of the early twenties, thirties and forties.

But although Sri Aurobindo hoped that in India, And with an adversary like the British bureaucracy (a milder brand compared to the German or Russian), passive Resistance itself - if organised intensively and on a national scale - might be able to win the freedoms struggle, still he couldn't be quite sure on that point, because the history of nations that had fought their way to independence didn't promise such a prospect with anything like certainty. His political standpoint was by no means entirely pacifist, and he wasn't opposed to violence or violent revolution on principle or as being forbidden by the spirit and letter of the Hindu scriptures. He was later to elaborate, in the fifth chapter of the first series of his Essays on the Gita, his ideas on the subject holding out in favour of the idea of Dharma Yuddha. The rule of confining political action to passive resistance was adopted as the best policy for the national movement in the psychological and other conditions prevailing at the time, and not as part of a gospel of non-violence or ahimsāor peace. Sri Aurobindo at no time wished to conceal his opinion that a nation was entitled to attain its freedom by violence, if there was no other way and if the country had developed sufficient strength to organise guerrilla warfare or open insurrection. Whether a peaceful or a violent method was to be pursued would depend on what, in the given circumstances, was the best policy and not on purely ethical considerations like those that were put forward later by Mahatma Gandhi. Thus an article on 'The Realism of Indian Nationalist Policy' in the Bande Mataram of 24 April 1908:

The old politicians failed to recognise that what they called constitutional agitation was only a form of diplomacy, and that even prayers and petitions could succeed, not through the force of their logic, but absolutely through the creation of some other force in the country, the show of which could convert these prayers into demands, and by appealing to the sense of prudence in the bureaucracy, compel them to accede to the articulate wishes of the people.... As the preparedness for war and the maintenance of large armies and navies contribute to the maintenance of international peace more effectively than the disbandment of the national armies would possibly do, so the creation of a strong determination in a subject people to face every form of repression and tyranny and assert its will through organised measures of passive resistance against the despotic authority that rules them, can alone help the progress of peaceful reforms in their administration.

This was of course written long before the establishment of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Organisation, after the first and second world wars respectively. Sri Aurobindo must have been in favour of such attempts to put down war by international agreement and international force, but should these ever succeed completely (or to the extent they succeed), that again would not be ahimsā. But merely the containment or putting down of anarchic by legal force, and even so one couldn't be sure that such peace would be permanent. It was Sri Aurobindo's view that,  

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while peace was part of the highest ideal of individual and collective life, it must be spiritual or at the very least psychological in its basis; without a change in human nature - the supersession of egocentric thought and action by something far more widely based and sustained - real peace couldn't come with any finality. If attempted on any other basis like a mental principle or the gospel of ahimsā, it would not only fail but might also leave things worse than before.*

Since such was the inner reality of the Indian political situation as Sri Aurobindo saw it, he took steps to prepare the way for an armed insurrection also, if all else should fail. If possible, through constitutional means with or without passive resistance; but passive resistance too failing, armed revolution was inevitable - such was the inexorable logic behind Sri Aurobindo's two-pronged long-term plan of campaign against the alien bureaucracy. Hence Sri Aurobindo's affiliations with the revolutionaries in Western India and Bengal: hence his continuing close links with the Revolutionaries after his coming to Bengal in 1906: hence his anxious watch on the Yugantar, and later on the Nova Śakti, which were the de facto organs of the Revolutionaries. And all this was both facilitated and necessitated by the circumstance that his younger brother, Barindra, was among the chief brains behind the activities of the revolutionary groups in Bengal.

Tilak in Maharashtra, the other important centre of revolutionary activity was trying to exercise the same kind of distant control over the revolutionaries as Sri Aurobindo was doing in Bengal, and there was a great ground of common agreement between the two leaders. Their first certain meeting took place at the Ahmedabad Congress in December 1902, but their association may go back much further. They could work together because their national aims were identical, and in their equipment one was richly complementary to the other and together they made a formidable combination strong enough to throw out of gear the calculations and contrivances of the phalanx of Moderate leadership from Allahabad, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.

II

In this delicately poised situation, the Moderate-Extremist debate on the ends and means of Indian political activity gave the necessary handle to the Government to launch repression of the most ruthless kind. It was easy to pretend to assume that the Moderates represented responsible opinion, while the Nationalists

* See Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 22. It was perhaps, for this reason that, although the Congress had ostensibly accepted Gandhian ahimsā born 1920 onwards, yet when freedom came in 1946-7, unprecedented violence was let loose in the country, especially in Bengal and the Punjab, resulting 1" the killing of tens of thousands, acts of bestiality and brutality, and the uprooting of millions from their respective homelands.  

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were but a pack of hot heads whose postures of extremism were really setting back the clock of progress! Now repression invariably produces results that are very different from those expected. Some of the Moderates at least found it impossible to keep silent and therefore came out against the Government and condemned the policy of repression. The Nationalists, far from being cowed down by the repressive measures, only stepped up the tempo of their agitation. They gained fresh recruits too, some even from the Moderate fold. Quite a few of the Nationalists decided that the Government was beyond persuasion or redemption, and so went over to the ranks of the revolutionaries.

In the event, it was the revolutionaries that really found themselves in a quandary. They were no doubt wedded to a policy of preparation for an armed rebellion at the right time to overthrow the alien Government and seize power throughout the country. But this was a long-term policy, and had to be spread over a number of years, perhaps two or three decades. Physical exercises, lathi-and-rifle practice, collection and distribution of arms, bomb-making and bomb accumulation, organisational elasticity coupled with overall discipline, propaganda for new recruits and subversion of army units, and above all the religious accent to the movement by equating the whole revolutionary activity with worship of Bhavani, Bhavani Bharati - these were the essential ingredients of the secret revolutionary movement as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo. The aspiration to join the movement, the rejection and sacrifice of personal interests that the aspiration involved, the total surrender of everything (including one's life) at the altar of the Mother, all partook of a religious rite and a religious vocation. Nolini Kanta Gupta has recorded , how, as a mere boy, at dead of night in front of a picture of Kali, he took a vow written out in blood drawn from his chest that he would "dedicate his life to the whole-hearted service of the Motherland".¹ In an earlier chapter (8. IV), we have seen how Sri Aurobindo administered the revolutionary oath to Barindra, who had a sword in one hand and a copy of the Gita in the other.* The way would-be revolutionaries approached Sri Aurobindo and were then admitted into revolutionary fraternity may be illustrated from one case-study. One of the already initiated, Upendranath Bandhopadhyaya, had introduced an aspirant, Amarendranath Chatterji, to Sri Aurobindo, and the interview probably took place in 1907 at this Place in Scott's Lane. When Amarendra saw Sri Aurobindo, it was as though the mere sight or darshan was itself a kind of initiation or diksha; it was as though some current of energy was passing from Sri Aurobindo to Amarendra. The private conversation between the two, as recollected by Amarendra in 1950, was as follows, and seems to have been fairly typical of such encounters at the time:

Sri Aurobindo began: "I suppose Upen has talked to you about the work that

* In exceptional cases, the oath was not administered. It was, for example, in a house in Girgaun that Sri Aurobindo offered to take C.C. Dutt, I.C.S. into the secret organisation. Dutt said, "I am yours ""reservedly and unconditionally." Sri Aurobindo didn't give any oath, and Dutt adds: "I felt deeply grateful to him for this trust." (Sunday Times, 17 December 1950)  

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is to be done for the country. I hope there is no doubt or vacillation or fear in your mind about it."

Amar: "Will you not say something yourself?... I want to hear from you Have you heard anything about me?"

Sri Aurobindo: "I have heard about you. You have given a lot of money to the Swadeshi movement.... But is the country going to be freed by the politics of salt and sugar only? If we want to secure the freedom of the country we have to sacrifice everything for it, and we should be ready to give up even our life for it. If we want to free the country, we shall have to conquer the fear of death."

Amar: "How many would be able to do it, you think?"

Sri Aurobindo: "Is it so difficult to sacrifice oneself for the Motherland? Men go through so much suffering and trouble to get happiness in life. No sacrifice should be difficult to make for the freedom of the country. If India does not become free, man also will not be free...."

Amar: "Upen has told me about being ready to sacrifice myself and I have replied to him, on the basis of what Bankim has said, that as one day death is inevitable, why should one fear it? My fear comes from another quarter. I feel at present that I am not worthy of such a great mission. Is there any means of attaining that fitness?"

Sri Aurobindo: "Surrender yourself to God and in the name of the Divine Mother get along with the service of India. That is my Diksha to you."²

The religious background is unmistakable. Although the immediate aim is the liberation of India, the ultimate aim is the liberation of humanity: If India does not become free, man also will not be free! Again, for the neophyte the pass-word is Surrender! Lose all to gain all!

Many an Amarendra joined the secret party, but few knew about the exact number. Some high Government officers - C.C. Dutt, for example - even they had taken initiation from Sri Aurobindo. Others besides Sri Aurobindo too had been giving the oath to fresh entrants. And it was not surprising that the exact strength and extent of proliferation of the revolutionary party (or congeries of revolutionary groups) was always difficult to determine. Underground activity imposed secrecy, diversion and even a measure of calculated confusion.* But there was no doubt that the revolutionaries, at least an overwhelming majority of them, were young idealists who were ready in a spirit of religious fanaticism to put the country - India the Mother - above personal comfort, prospects or safety. They were resourceful too, fearless, reckless and occasionally even ruthless.

By and by, two developments tended to push the revolutionaries to the path of terrorism. In the first place, the method of systematic preparation for an ultimate nation-wide armed revolution seemed too slow, too indefinite, too intolerably fatiguing

* Surendra Mohan Ghose has said that both he and his father, unknown to each other, were members of a revolutionary group.

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to young, ardent and impetuous minds. In the second place, acts of repression on the part of the Government seemed to cry for immediate retaliation. The revolutionaries knew of course that terrorism wasn't the right way: that path, "as we have seen about Russia... led only to mutual assassinations, murder and revenge. .. in an endless succession, leading to no final issue".³ And yet, in the face of the Government repression - constant police searches, arrest and handcuffing of revered leaders, brutal sentences for minor offences, the merciless beating of Manoranjan at Barisal for shouting "Bande Mataram!", the flogging of mere boys in court - in the face of all this, were the revolutionaries to keep quiet? And so the desperate word sometimes went forth: Shoot the Governor! Kill the District Magistrate! Derail the train! Plant a bomb in a book to be presented! These activities were but rarely successful, and some were caught in the act and many while preparing to act and many more on mere suspicion. And money was required to defend the men so caught. Up to a point, free medical aid and free legal service were available. But revolutionary activity as well as expenses for defence required a lot of money, and thus the revolutionaries occasionally found themselves driven to commit political dacoities as well. This had been decided upon "as one of our methods of collecting funds, for the moneys that came from gifts were not sufficient, and people rather shied of making gifts for the world of such secret societies".⁴ This must have led sometimes to dacoits making use of terrorists, and the words terrorist and dacoit almost becoming interchangeable terms. This meant more police action, more repression and more terrorism, and more and more desperation all round. One of the great dare-devil revolutionaries of the time, Bagha Jatin (Jatindranath Mukherjee), was "Dada" to everybody, knew Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita, and among his staunchest followers was M.N. Roy who was to become a leading figure in international Communism and in his later life the prophet of Radical Humanism. Jatin Mukherjee met Sri Aurobindo in 1903, and thereafter he was one of his principal lieutenants in the revolutionary movement. "A wonderful man," Sri Aurobindo described him in his later years, "he was a man who would belong to the front rank of humanity anywhere. Such beauty and strength together I haven't seen, and his stature was like a warrior's."⁵ Even the British Commissioner of Police, Sir Charles Tegart, who was responsible for the final chasing and death of Jatin, felt compelled to say, "I have met the bravest Indian." On the other hand, Jatin too was driven to organise political dacoities to sustain the revolution and also to provide adequate legal defence to the accused revolutionaries. Those were, indeed, times out of joint, defying prim ethical categorisations, and making it difficult to draw a sharp line of distinction between the mad and the maddened, the criminal and the avenger, the creators of disorder and the defenders of order.

The position of leaders like Tilak in Maharashtra and Sri Aurobindo in Bengal was exceedingly difficult. Sarala Ghoshal, one of the pioneers of the revolutionary movement in Bengal, has been quoted as giving this important piece of information:  

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My lathi cult was in full swing in those days... and captured the heart of the Bengal youth. But to my dismay... some of my lathial boys felt tempted to join those bands (of political dacoits and terrorists).... Tilak told me distinctly that he did not approve of the dacoities, much less authorise them, if for nothing else, simply on the score of their being practically useless for political purposes. But looking to differences in human nature and the varying processes of evolution, suited to different temperaments, he did not condemn them openly.⁶

Sri Aurobindo too didn't approve those deviations and perversions of the revolutionary movement, for his idea throughout was an armed revolution after adequate preparation. Once, when Sister Nivedita asked him whether it was one of his revolutionaries that had threatened Gokhale with death, Sri Aurobindo was able to assure her that it wasn't so.⁷ But generally speaking, he found Bengal was too emotional, wanted results too quick, and wouldn't prepare through a long period of years.⁸

The Bengali paper, Yugantar, that had commenced its tempestuous career on 12 March 1906, was run by Barin, Upen Banerjee and Debabrata Bose and promulgated, week after week, its message of revolution and advocated guerrilla warfare in unambiguous terms. Sri Aurobindo came to Calcutta soon after, took charge of the Bande Mataram, and also exercised some control over the Yugantar. Early in 1907, Barin thought that the time had come to give some practical shape, in however modified or modest form, to the earlier Bhavani Mandir scheme. The idea then had been that a Mandir should be established in a suitable spot on the hills, and in fact Barin had gone in search of such a site on Kaimur Hill near Rhotargarh on the Sone but caught malignant fever there and returned. Now it occurred to Barin that a miniature Bhavani Mandir should be started in Calcutta to translate into action the vitriolic policies propagated by the Yugantar. There was a piece of family property, the Manicktolla Gardens, in Murari Pukur Bagan in north Calcutta, and Barin decided to move there and start operations. It was a wild place, about two and a half acres in extent, and "anybody could enter the Gardens from anywhere at any time and move about the place, for it was all open compound without any fencing or walls". There were two pools, more weeds and mud than water, and plenty of serpents, frogs and fish. The "gardens" were really "primitive jungle, a tangle of shrubs and creepers, with all sorts of insects and reptiles roaming within. And the one-storeyed house where we were supposed to live was in ruins".⁹ There were three rooms on the ground-floor and a connecting veranda, and around there were some coconut, mango and betelnut trees.

Whatever its shortcomings, it was an eerie enough place for the location of the Mandir, and Barin managed to recruit a group of about "a dozen or fourteen" ardent young men. Barin interviewed aspiring entrants before recruiting them, and easily communicated to them his own infectious enthusiasm for the cause. In the early days at least, Sri Aurobindo seems to have occasionally paid a visit to the Gardens; Nolini has recorded that he was once sent by Barin to bring Sri Aurobindo to the Gardens, but as he hadn't taken his lunch he couldn't come.¹⁰  

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The small group, with Barin at the head, all lived at the Gardens, cooked their own food and washed the dishes, read the Gita as expounded by Upendranath Bandopadhyaya, read revolutionary literature, and held discussions about the bomb. Barin wrote on the principles of Modem Warfare in the Yugantar, Nolini read at the Imperial Library books like Clausewitz's The Art of War and at his home town of Rungpur a book on the history of Secret Societies. They also meditated, prayed to Durga, and cultivated extreme austerity. The cooking was done in earthenware vessels once a day ("almost every day it was khichri), and something readymade bought from the market sufficed for a second meal. Several of them were but amateurs in almost everything, but sincerity, ardour, devotion, determination and the readiness to dare and suffer made up for all other deficiencies. Reading the Gita was part of the inner discipline, and partly it was a cover for other activities like bomb-making and the procurement - through purchase, theft or loot - of rifles and pistols and their deployment among the revolutionary groups. There was some shooting practice too in the Gardens, and at least the trunk of one mango tree showed abundant signs of having been used as a target.

After the Surat Congress and Sri Aurobindo's experience of Nirvana under Yogi Lele's guidance, it came as a brain-wave to Barin that Lele might be useful at the Manicktolla Gardens also and he might be able to put some new Yogic strength into the members of the revolutionary group. But when Lee came to Calcutta and found out that the young men had accepted the cult of the bomb and were engaged in terrorist activities, he tried to persuade them that such violently rajasic action had no part in spiritual life. Nor was it necessary, said Lele, to resort to violence and bloodshed, for freedom would come even through peaceful means. But the young men were in no mood to lend ear to such words. Even Lele's blunt warning that the path they had chosen would lead to no success but only land them in disaster made not the slightest effect on the boys. They were no Vaishnava ecstatics - they were hero-warriors of Durga!* They were determined to go their own way, and some five of them went to Deoghar to conduct a secret test-explosion of a bomb they had made at the Gardens. The bomb did explode among the hills, but also killed one of the young men, Prafulla Chakravarti, and injured another, Ullaskar Datta. They were shaken, and Barin could only say: "This is a field of battle. Our first soldier has given up his body in the battlefield, this is our first casualty."¹¹ The body was left where it was, and the four survivors returned to Calcutta.

The Manicktolla group were one less, but there was no diminution in their determination to push on with their dangerous programme of spasmodic terrorism. But the police too were not altogether asleep. It is true one Inspector of Police really took them to be a group of austere Brahmacharins and even joined their

* Lele was eager to take away one of the young men, Prafulla Chaki, and make a Rajayogin of him. But Prafulla preferred to stay with Barindra and the Manicktolla group.  

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Gita-classes But the antecedents of Barin and a few others at least were very well known to the police, and the young men found that they were being shadowed wherever they went. And the net seemed to be drawn closer and closer as the revolutionaries tried to be more and more careful and circumspect. It was the perfect cat-and-mouse for the police and the young men, and for Sri Aurobindo who knew what was going on at the Gardens, knew of the risks and dangers involved in such undertakings, yet could neither effectively restrain those uncertain course nor afford the young men any massive protection, - for Sri Aurobindo it was a most difficult situation indeed.* During the last months of 1907 and the early months of 1908, Sri Aurobindo was thus obliged to bear a burden of multiple responsibility - responsibility unaccompanied by the necessary backing - and only he the sthitaprajña could bear it all, self-poised and serene and self-reliant under all circumstances of tension and turmoil and terrible uncertainty.

III

Sri Aurobindo returned to Calcutta, after an absence of over a month, in the first week of February 1908. Here too he was now much in demand as a public speaker. The themes were the same old themes - Nationalism, self-help, arbitration, the ethics of suffering, the glory of unselfish service and the necessity for reviving all that was intrinsically good in Hindu dharma. But because of Surat, and even more because of the experience of Nirvanic calm, there was a haunting new intensity in his utterances, a new purity, a new flame-like glow like the rising Sun's touch of gold on casements opening on the East. The Surat events themselves made apparently little difference to him; he had taken them in his stride, that was all. While at Baroda, he had met the Maharaja once at his request; an attempt was made, perhaps, to detach Sri Aurobindo from active politics, but it couldn't make him swerve in the least from his chosen course. No doubt, the Yogic experience of Nirvanic calm caused a profound change within, but his outer activities seemed to go on as before except that all thought, speech and action now acquired a strange power of spontaneity and air of inevitability, as though it was not Sri Aurobindo but some great higher Power working through him that was the real source of the thoughts and words and the executant of the actions. The voidness in the mind didn't mean a drain of life-energies; it rather meant that all the movement of life was directed, not from the lower centres of consciousness (as with most people), but from a sovereign source above, and this force "made the body do the work without any inner activity"; "I carried on a daily newspaper,"

* Nevertheless, when C.C. Dutt offered to stay on in Calcutta to-look after the boys, Sri Aurobindo ("the Chief) told him with a gracious smile: "I assure you, Charu, I shall look after the boys here. But you must go back to your job.... Well, there are reasons why my best recruiting sergeant must be in Ahmedabad just now." (Sunday Times, 17 December 1950)  

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Sri Aurobindo said later, "and made a dozen speeches in the course of three or four days - but I did not manage that in any way; it happened."¹²

While Lele was in Calcutta, he met Sri Aurobindo in mid-February 1908. Lele was of the opinion that there was some danger in Sri Aurobindo following mechanically his "inner voice", for this might after all be from an Asuric force! After his encounter with Barin's Manicktolla group of reckless young men, Lele probably connected their activities remotely with Sri Aurobindo's inner voice and hence concluded it might have an Asuric origin. Sri Aurobindo released Lele from his responsibility as Guru, and informed him that he would henceforth pursue his sadhana on his own, for it was very clear to Sri Aurobindo that the Voice that guided him was indeed a genuine force from the Divine. The Guru-Sishya relationship thus terminated, Sri Aurobindo was now without an external guide for his Yoga, and he was equally without complete rapport with either Barin who was going his own way at the Manicktolla Gardens or Mrinalini who could not quite reconcile herself to the steep and narrow path of austerity and sustained sacrifice that her husband had chosen for himself. Sri Aurobindo was thus already lone in his nude self, splendid in his solitariness like a thin column of fire, a steady beacon unruffled by the storm-winds, mists and thunder-clouds all about.

There are two portraits of the period that give us some intimations of the vast potencies of strength that that lone figure seemed to contain during the fateful twelve months between mid-1907 and mid-1908. In the first, taken at Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo is seen seated in a chair:

A poise of unhurried power touched with something holy confronts us in the seated yet alert body, one foot thrust forward, the finely shaped fingers half-closed in a sensitive but strong grip, the mouth at once calm and set, the nostrils of the semi-acquiline nose a little dilated with ardour, the eyes wearing a firm look that goes far and still more far, the whole expression of the broad-browed and thick-moustached face in-drawn to a concentrated potentiality of leaping fierily forward... enough is here to convince us that whatever walk of life he may choose, he would be a grand doer no less than a grand dreamer, and that he is born to hold the helm of world-affairs.¹³

In the second, taken at Baroda immediately after the Surat Congress, Sri Aurobindo is seen standing, his left hand clasping a walking-stick as if it were a wand of destiny, a huge garland round his neck merging with the thick-folded Pashmina shawl thrown across the torso and falling over the shoulder in front, the whole attitude relaxed yet strangely intent, the eyes gazing into infinity - into all futurity. It is the same power, it is the same person, as in the other portrait, but everything is heightened or deepened, the man is greater Man, the man of vision is doubled with the man of action and both are trebled with the potential fulfiller of a world's vague and vast desire.

During the three months following, Sri Aurobindo made the utmost of the media at his command: platform-speech, leading article, or essay in exposition; and every week that passed, like every advancing moment of the reddening glory  

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of the Sun about to set in the evening (but, of course, only to rise some hours later in the splendour of a Greater Dawn) - it was the hour of tremendous poise and marvellous self-sufficiency in political and revolutionary leadership.

Although it was Sri Aurobindo who had taken the crucial decision to break the Congress at Surat and given the word at the proper time to bring that about, it was not that he wished to block reunion on honourable terms. The split had served its purpose and focussed public attention on what the Nationalists stood for, and therefore on his return to Calcutta he was not unwilling to do all in his power to get the two wings of the Congress under a common banner. As he pointed out on 10 April 1908 at a well-attended public meeting held at Panti's Math, the Congress at Surat had broken up, not over personalities, but over procedural irregularities and especially over certain basic differences in policy. The Moderates had tried to take too much advantage of a local majority to flout national opinion as it had crystallised earlier at the Calcutta Congress. The election of Rash Behari Ghosh as president was itself open to criticism on procedural grounds. But Sri Aurobindo added:

We are ready to condone this irregularity if a united Congress is to be held on the basis of the Calcutta resolutions. If the other party does not accept, the responsibility of breaking-up of the Congress and having a party institution in its place will be on their shoulders. Our position is, let us work on our different party lines through our own institutions, but at the same time let us have the united Congress of the whole people.¹⁴

Two days later, addressing a Swadeshi meeting at Baruipur (in the District of 24 Parganas), Sri Aurobindo said boldly:

People say there is no unity among us. How to create unity? Only through the call of our Mother and the voice of all her sons.... The voice is yet weak but it is growing. The might of God is already revealed among us.... It is not our work but that of something mightier that compels us to go on until all bondage is swept away and India stands free before the world.¹⁵

As for "practical steps", Sri Aurobindo realised from the outset the importance of organising village samitis and of carrying the gospel of Swaraj through them to the masses. Speaking on the Palli Samiti resolution at Kishoreganj in April 1908, Sri Aurobindo said:

If we are to survive as a nation we must restore the centres of strength which are natural and necessary to our growth, and the first of these, the basis of all the rest, the old foundation of Indian life and secret of Indian vitality was the self-dependent and self-sufficient village organism. If we are to organise Swaraj we must base it on the village.... The village must not in our new national life be isolated as well as self-sufficient, but must feel itself bound up with the life of its neighbouring units, living with them in a common group for common purposes.¹⁶

In an article 'Back to the Land' in the Bande Mataram of 6 March 1908, Sri Aurobindo deplored the fact that, lured by the lucrative jobs and professions in the  

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city, the people (the Bengali Hindus in particular) had migrated wholesale from the villages, thereby losing possession of the soil and "source of life and permanence". Intellectual eminence, as exhibited in the court room or the political platform or council chamber, was not enough:

Intellectual prominence often goes hand in hand with decadence, as the history of the Greeks and other great nations of antiquity has proved; only the race which does not sacrifice the soundness of its rural root of life to the urban brilliance of its foliage and flowering, is in a sound condition and certain of permanence.

The village should neither be weakened nor isolated from the stream of national life, and village-sufficiency should not be held up as a substitute for national unity and strength. The one without the other was meaningless, and would in fact be impracticable; if the villages were the root and the sap, the cities and the national entity were the foliage and the flowering. As Sri Aurobindo pointed out in another article entitled The Village and the Nation':

Nothing should be allowed to distract us from the mighty ideal of Swaraj, National and Pan-Indian. This is no alien or exotic ideal, it is merely the conscious attempt to fulfil the great centripetal tendency which has pervaded the grandiose millenniums of her history, to complete the work which Srikrishna began, which Chandragupta and Asoka and the Gupta Kings continued, which Akbar almost brought to realisation, for which Shivaji was born and Bajirao fought and planned.... The day of the independent village or group of villages has gone and must not be revived; the nation demands its hour of fulfilment and seeks to gather the village life of its rural population into a mighty, single and compact democratic nationality.¹⁷

But while Sri Aurobindo was not blind to the exigencies of practical politics or to the importance of village samitis and similar institutions of corporate life, in his main speeches and articles he confined himself to the stupendous generalities, the perennial imperatives, on which alone all durable social and political structures could be reared. Suffering itself was not necessarily a thing to flee from, for in that historic situation suffering had become the badge of our tribe - a discipline to ennoble us, purify us, and awaken the slumbering soul within. In his Baruipur speech, delivered on 12 April 1908, Sri Aurobindo related the well-known parable of the two birds and drew from it an elevating political lesson. The story is in the Rig Veda: "Two birds beautiful of wing, friends and comrades, cling to a common tree, and one eats the sweet fruit, the other regards him and eats not:..."18 But when the bird eats the bitter fruit, the spell is broken, and he looks at his brilliant companion, sitting higher up:

This is evidently a parable concerning the salvation of individual souls who, when they enjoy the sweets of the world, forget to look upwards -to the Paramatma who is really none else than their own highest self, and when they forget themselves in this way through the Maya of this world, bitterness comes to dispel the Maya and revive the true self-consciousness.

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The parable is equally applicable to national mukti. We in India fell under tile-influence of the foreigner's Maya which completely possessed our souls. It was the Maya of the alien rule, the alien civilisation, the powers and capacities of the alien people who happen to rule over us. These were as if so many shackles that put our physical, intellectual and moral life into bondage. ...

It is only through repression and suffering that this Maya can be dispelled and the bitter fruit of Partition of Bengal administered by Lord Curzon dispelled the illusion. We looked up and saw that the brilliant bird sitting above was none else but ourselves, our real and actual self. Thus we found Swaraj within ourselves and saw that it was in our hands to discover and to realise it.¹⁹

In his Kishoreganj speech, again, Sri Aurobindo went beyond the immediate subject of village samitis to lay the main stress on the basic problem of national "unity":

But the unity we need for Swaraj is not a unity of opinion, a unity of speech, a unity of intellectual conviction. Unity is of the heart and springs from love. The foreign organism which has been living on us, lives by the absence of this love, by division, and it perpetuates the condition of its existence by making us look to it as the centre of our lives and away from our Mother and her children. It has set Hindu and Mahomedan at variance by means of this outward outlook.... Each man is for himself and if anything is to be done for our brothers, there is the government to do it and it is no concern of ours. This drying up of the springs of mutual affection is the cause which needs most to be removed....²⁰

Wise and candid words, and as opportune today - over sixty years later, and almost twenty-five years after Independence - as when they were first spoken; and alas! as little heeded today, as they were then. People do not wish to think in terms of community and brotherhood, or of the common motherhood that the name of India must evoke; the bureaucracy - then white-dominated, now a matter of uniform brownness - is everything, and is expected to do everything, and must take the blame for everything.

IV

April 1908 was a month reverberating with sinister foreboding. In retrospect, one feels like recalling the opening lines of T.S.. Eliot's The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Although the Congress had split at Surat, the Moderate Convention - like the torn tail of a lizard -      

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made frantic attempts to wag agitatedly and pretend to the gorgeous proportions of the whole body. On the morrow of the split, on 28 December 1907 the two parties had met separately as the Moderate Convention and the Nationalist Conference respectively. The Convention appointed a Committee to draft a new Constitution for the Congress, and this Committee was to meet at Allahabad on 18 and 19 April with Rash Behari Ghosh as Chairman. Sri Aurobindo wished to warn the Committee against certain fallacious courses, and so he wrote in the Bande Mataram on 4 April:

The Convention is an attempt to drag back the Congress out of the twentieth century into the nineteenth. It is as much a futile piece of reaction as Mr. Morley's Council of Notables. The same exclusive, oligarchical spirit of the past trying to dominate the future, of the few with wealth, position and fame for their title claiming the monopoly of political life, animates the idea of the Convention.

While the leaders of the Convention seemed eager to keep the Nationalists out of the Congress at any cost, the Nationalists were ready for reunion, making "no stipulation except that no creed shall be imposed on the Congress from outside, no action be taken which implies that the Convention is the arbiter of the destinies of the Congress". From the public postures of the two parties, it was clear enough that the Convention being conscious of its inherent weakness wanted to get into a burrow of its own contriving, but the Nationalists, being likewise conscious of their growing strength, were quite willing to thrive in the open and free air.

Writing again two days later in the Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo pointed out that the Subjects Committee was "the brain of the Congress and must be democratised" if the Congress itself was to be democratic; and in any future Constitution, election to the Subjects Committee should be "regulated by the principles of democratic representation, not of oligarchic nomination". Two days later, on 8 April 1908, Sri Aurobindo warned again that the attempt of Pherozeshah Mehta and his associates to convert the Congress into a close preserve of the privileged was not only imprudent, but would be "soon found out by them to be impotent also". Sri Aurobindo returned to the subject on the day of the Allahabad Convention (18 April), and dealt squarely with the Moderates' objections to the Nationalists' supposed unruliness: "If the Nationalists are unruly, the Moderates are autocratic, and it is the autocratic misuse of power which creates the unruliness." Then Sri Aurobindo exposed, with a pretty devastating and remorseless clarity, the real reasons for the Moderates shying away from the Nationalists:

This loss of position and prestige with the bureaucracy is the ruling motive with the Bombay Moderates, the fear of being involved in the persecution to which the Nationalists willingly expose themselves, is the dominant thought among the respectabilities of Bengal. ... Whether the Nationalists have or have not the courage to face the full fury of bureaucratic persecution and the strength to survive it is a question which will probably be decided before another year is out. The Moderates, at any rate, imagine that they cannot and  

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rejoice over the pleasant expectation of seeing this over-energetic and inconveniently independent party being crushed out of existence by the common adversary of all. It is the spirit of Mir Jafar, the politics of Jagat Sheth repeating themselves in their spiritual descendants.

Answering Gokhale's ingenuous plea that the word "national" in the resolution on National Education was removed in the interests of literary elegance, Sri Aurobindo remarked:

.. .the resolutions of the Congress are not such literary masterpieces that this particular one should have evoked the dead and gone schoolmaster in Mr. Gokhale's breast. ... The change of a word for the sake of literary elegance was not surely so essential that the Moderates had to prefer breaking the Congress to breaking the rules of English rhetoric.

After the meeting at Allahabad had ended and confirmed the worst fears of the Nationalists, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Bande Mataram of 22 April 1908:

We have done our best to carry out the demand of the people for unity; the refusal comes from the other side and there the responsibility will rest. ... It is time for us to turn from the attempt to patch up matters with men who are pledged to disruption and concern ourselves with our own proper work.

The very next day, however, Sri Aurobindo threw off all restraint and launched a caustic attack on the Moderates and their stand. Few things that Sri Aurobindo did during his meteoric career of political journalism surpassed, or even quite equalled, this biting and scalding piece of denunciation, so full of vitriol, so unerring in its strokes, so lashing in its fury:

For a brief moment God placed the destiny of India in their hands and gave them a free choice whether they would serve Him or self, the country or the bureaucracy. They have chosen.... They too have made the great refusal.... It is well. ... The day of compromises is past. ... If any of them have it in them to repent, let them repent soon, for the hour of grace that is given them will be short and the punishment swift.

The Moderates might lay the self-adulatory unction to their souls that, because they signed petitions, opened funds, attended conferences, passed resolutions, wore deśī cloth on ceremonial occasions, extolled National Education, took shares in profitable Swadeshi concerns, held patriotic interviews with a Governor or even with a live Viceroy, therefore they could pass themselves off as Nationalists. But such chicanery and calculated self-deception wouldn't pass muster in the future. For the true Nationalists, however, a new era had begun on 19 April 1908:

The work now before us is of the sternest kind and requires men of an unflinching sternness to carry it out. The hero, the martyr, the man of iron will and iron heart, the grim fighter whose tough nerves defeat cannot tire out nor danger relax, the born leader in action, the man who cannot sleep or rest while his country is enslaved, the priest of Kali who can tear his heart out of his body and offer it as a bleeding sacrifice on the Mother's altar, the heart of firs and the tongue of flame whose lightest word is an inspiration to self-sacrifice  

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or a spur to action, for these the time is coming, the call will soon go forth. They are already here in the silence, in the darkness slowly maturing themselves, training the muscles of the will, tightening the strings of the heart so that they may be ready when the call comes. ... What the Mother needs is hard clear steel for her sword, hard massive granite for her fortress, wood that will not break for the handle of her bow, tough substance and true for the axle of her chariot. For the battle is near and the trumpet ready for the signal.

It is no wonder that, reading such a passage, the Moderate leaders felt chastely shocked and insulted: that the bureaucracy took it to be almost an incitement to an imminent insurrection: that the chafing young revolutionaries understood it as a declaration of war, at least as the prelude to an ultimatum. On 29 April, again, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Bande Mataram:

The sooner the struggle now commences, the sooner the fate of India is fought out between the forces of progress and reaction, the better for India and for the world. Delay will only waste our strength and give opportunities to the enemy. ... An immense and incalculable revolution is at hand and its instruments must be themselves immense in their aspiration, uncalculating in their self-immolation. ...

...Revolution, bare and grim, is preparing her battlefield, mowing down the centres of order which were evolving a new cosmos and building up the materials of a gigantic downfall and a mighty new creation. We could have wished it otherwise, but God's will be done.

Was Sri Aurobindo referring to the struggle between the Moderates and the Nationalists, or between the Nationalists and the bureaucracy, or between the forces of the future and the ghosts of the past? Perhaps a comprehensive three-pronged struggle! There was a good deal of symbolism in the writing, but what did the symbols mean? Were they really meant to signify the message of the dynamite? Actually, although Sri Aurobindo used strong figurative language, all that he meant to convey was that the calculations of the Moderates and the hopes of the bureaucracy were bound to go awry: that nationalism would emerge all the stronger from the ordeal: that the tactics of weakness, reaction, selfishness, compromise and exploitation would be decisively overwhelmed by the forces of strength, progress, service, determination and sacrifice. But it was April the cruellest month in Calcutta, and it was far easier to frighten or be frightened than to be calm or courageous. The last perverse twitch of the thread!

The Bande Mataram of 24 April 1908, made this rather startling statement:

There are two things which seem to us to distinguish the new from the old school of Indian politics: first, its intense realism, and, second, its fervent spirituality. The new thought is the direct fruit of the new appreciation of the actualities of their present political situation by the people; and the new ideal is the direct result of the revival of the old spiritual consciousness of the nation.

Realism and spirituality: a strange concatenation! Yet the extreme Nationalist and  

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the avowed revolutionary saw nothing strange in the marriage of realism and spirituality. The revolutionary usually took his oath with the sword of realism in one hand and the spirituality of the Gita in the other. At the Manicktolla Gardens meditation and prayer and Gita-reading went hand in hand with arms-gathering and bomb-making and the study of revolutionary literature.* Nothing could be more soul-stirring, yet more burning in its realistic intensity, than Sri Aurobindo's Bengali Hymn to Durga, the perfect invocation song for a perfectly realised Bhavani Mandir; and, in a true sense, wasn't the whole country - from Himavant to Kumari from Dwarka to Puri and Kamarupa - an extended and consecrated Bhavani Mandir? Here are a few verses from the Hymn in Nolini Kanta Gupta's powerful English version:

Mother Durga! Rider on the lion, giver of all strength. Mother, beloved of Shiva! We born from thy parts of Power, we the youth of India, are seated here in thy Temple. Listen, O Mother, descend upon the earth, make thyself manifest in this land of India....

Mother Durga! Giver of force and love and knowledge, terrible art thou in thy own self of might. Mother beautiful and fierce. In the battle of life, in India's battle, we are warriors commissioned by thee; Mother, give to our heart and mind a titan's strength, a titan's energy, to our soul and intelligence a god's character and knowledge....

Mother Durga! India lies low in selfishness and tearfulness and littleness. Make us great, make our efforts great, our hearts vast, make us true to our resolve. May we no longer desire the small, void of energy, given to laziness, stricken with fear.

Mother Durga! Extend wide the power of Yoga. We are thy Aryan children, develop in us the lost teaching, character, strength of intelligence, faith and devotion, force of austerity, power of chastity and true knowledge....

Mother Durga! Slay the enemy within, then root out all obstacles outside. May the noble heroic mighty Indian race, supreme in love and unity, truth and strength, arts and letters, force and knowledge, ever dwell in its holy woodlands, its fertile fields, under its sky-scraping hills, along the banks of its pure-streaming rivers....

Mother Durga! Enter our bodies in thy Yogic strength. We shall become thy instruments, thy sword slaying all evil, thy lamp dispelling all ignorance... .May our entire life become a ceaseless worship of the Mother, al! our acts a continuous service of the Mother, full of love, full of energy.²¹

Durga, Bhavani, Bharati - the Mother, the Mother Divine - was the ensouled image of India, and unless she inhabited again the hearts of her three hundred million

* In the course of a conversation on 28 February 1940, Sri Aurobindo said, regarding his actual connection with the Manicktolla terrorists: "It was all Barin's work.... I was never in direct contact with the movement, nor with the young men and didn't know them. Only in jail I came in contact with them, especially Nolini, Bejoy, etc." [Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, Part II (1971), pp. 244-45]

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children, unless she set aflame their darkened souls, there could be no hope of the country's regeneration. It was a spiritual or inner revolution that was needed first, and on its base alone could be enacted the political or outer revolution that would change the emasculated subject nation into a resurgent India, alive, strong and free. Alike for individual and national salvation, spiritual and material health had to go together.

In what was probably one of the last articles written for the Bande Mataram, 'The Parable of Sati', Sri Aurobindo reinterpreted the story of Daksha-Sati-Shiva in terms of the contemporaneous political struggle in India. The Congress was Daksha, at Surat he came to grief (as Daksha did during the great Sacrifice), and when he revived it was with a goat's head (the Convention) turned backwards to the past. Sati was the pure-souled Indian Nation, and Shiva or Mahadeva was India's Destiny. For the time, of course, their union had been frustrated:

But not for ever. For Sati will be born again, on the high mountains of mighty endeavour, colossal aspiration, unparalleled self-sacrifice she will be born again, in a better and more beautiful self-sacrifice she will be born again, in a better and more beautiful body, and by terrible tapasyā she will meet Mahadeva once more and be wedded to him in nobler fashion, with kinder auguries, for a happier and greater future. For this thing is written in the book of God and nothing can prevent it, that Sati shall wed Mahadeva, that the national life of India shall meet and possess its divine and mighty destiny.²²

The parallelism here (like the other one, referred to in Chapter 10, comparing the life of Nationalism with the life of Sri Krishna) is worked out at perhaps excruciating length, and the parable is here and there twisted to point the political moral. But the peroration is magnificent, for it has the thunderclap of a prophecy that must come true.

V

During the two hectic months of March and April 1908, there were other interests too besides the continually irritating challenges posed by the queer goings-on of the Moderates. There was, for instance, the happy occasion of the release of Bepin Chandra Pal after six months in prison. "We welcome back today not Bepin Chandra Pal," wrote Sri Aurobindo, "but the speaker of a God-given message; not the man but the voice of the Gospel of Nationalism."²³ In a subsequent article, he described Pal as "the standard-bearer of the cause [of Nationalism], the great voice of its heart, the beacon-light of its enthusiasm".²⁴ It was partly as a result of Bepin Pal's sensational tour of Madras in 1907 that, like Bengal, Maharashtra and the Punjab, the southern Province too witnessed Nationalist and revolutionary activity on a truly portentous scale. In his article on "The Tuticorin Victory', Sri Aurobindo paid a well-merited tribute to V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, Subramania Siva and Padmanabha Iyengar:      

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The Tuticorin leaders must be given the whole credit for the unequalled skill and courage with which the fight was conducted and still more for the complete realisation of the true inwardness of the Nationalist gospel which made them identify the interests of the whole Indian nation with the wrongs and grievances of the labourers in the Coral Mill.²⁵

From Tuticorin the trouble quickly spread to Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli), and Sri Aurobindo wrote a few days later to spell out the lessons of the outbreak for the authorities as well as the leaders:

For the bureaucracy,... it should be an index of the fierceness of the fire which is burning underneath a thin crust of patience and sufferance and may at any moment lead to a general conflagration. Whence does this fire come or what does it signify?... This is no light fire of straw, but a jet of volcanic fire from the depths, and that has never in the world's history been conquered by repression. ... every day of repression gives it a greater volume and prepares a mightier explosion. To the popular leaders it is a warning of the necessity to put their house in order, to provide a settled leading and so much organisation as is possible so that the movement may arrive at a consciousness of ordered strength.²⁶

Again, a fortnight later, Sri Aurobindo wrote on the death-grapple between the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company (floated by V.O. Chidambaram Pillai) and the British Steam Navigation Company, and it was in the course of this article that the following ominous passage occurred:

The persecution of Swadeshism which is now reaching the most shameless lengths in Madras, is a sure sign that God has withdrawn Himself from the British bureaucracy and intends their rapid fall. Injustice is an invitation to death and prepares His advent. The moment the desire to do justice disappears from a ruling class, the moment it ceases even to respect the show of justice, from that moment its days are numbered. ²⁷

And he concluded the article on this note of defiance and faith: "The British jails are not large enough to hold the whole population of Tinnevelly district; let every man follow the noble example of Chidambaram Pillai and, for the rest, let God decide."

On 7 April, Sri Aurobindo had occasion to comment again on Bepin Pal and on "The New Ideal" placed by him before the nation in a series of speeches. The nation was weak and enslaved, the nation must become strong and free: but how? The clue to the secret lay within. Sri Aurobindo had been some of Ramamurti's facts of physical endurance, and had spoken of them earlier at Poona. Now Sri Aurobindo drew a political moral from Ramamurti's spectacular display of physical strength:

We have seen Ramamurti, the modem Bhimasen, lie motionless, resistant, with a superhuman force of will-power acting through the muscles while two carts loaded with men are driven over his body. India must undergo an ordeal of passive endurance far more terrible without relaxing a single fibre of her  

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frame. We have seen Ramamurti break over his chest a strong iron chain tightened round his whole body and break it by the sheer force of will working through the body. India must work a similar deliverance for herself by the same inner force. It is not by strength of body that Ramamurti accomplishes his feats, for he is not stronger than many athletes who could never do what he does daily, but by faith and will. India has in herself a faith of superhuman virtue to accomplish miracles, to deliver herself out of irrefragable bondage, to bring God down upon earth.

That faith, that will, lay coiled within, and had to be roused to action by the force of a great enough ideal. And such an ideal had been placed before his countrymen by Bepin Pal:

The ideal is that of humanity in God, of God in humanity, the ancient ideal of the sanātan dharma but applied, as it has never been applied before, to the problem of politics and the work of national revival. To realise that ideal, to impart it to the world is the mission of India.

India's sanātan dharma embraced, and found free play for, the divers faculties of the body, mind and heart, but its purposeful dynamics had yet to be applied to the field of politics. If this too could be done, she would be in a position to lead the world as well. Her great "New Ideal", then, should go beyond National Education, Swadeshi, Boycott and Swaraj - important as they were - and should become the supreme humanistic ideal of saving herself to save mankind:

No lesser ideal will help her through the stress of the terrible ordeal which she will in a few years be called to face. No hope less pure will save her from the demoralisation which follows revolutionary strife, the growth of passions, a violent selfishness, sanguinary hatred, insufferable licences, the disruption of moralities, the resurgence of the tiger in man which a great revolution is apt to foster.

Sri Aurobindo was well aware, as Bepin Pal was, that although in a given situation revolution might be necessary and even inevitable, yet the course of revolutions was apt to be unpredictable, and revolutions had often a corrupting and rotting effect on the people concerned. The only safety-valve was for the revolutionary to ground his action on a great faith, on a great hope, embracing all humanity, and all future. In two articles written earlier in February, Sri Aurobindo had indicated the utterly impetuous nature of revolutions and also his hope that, by whatever means, India would rise again to greet her future:

Revolutions are incalculable in their goings and absolutely uncontrollable. The sea flows and who shall tell it how it is to flow? The wind blows and what human wisdom can regulate its motions? The will of Divine Wisdom is the sole law of revolutions and we have no right to consider ourselves as anything but mere agents chosen by that Wisdom.²⁸

This was not long after Surat, and the assumption here is that a revolution is hardly "an-made, though it may seem to be; the creatures of the revolution - the "heroes" and the "victims" alike - are no more than frail thistledowns carried briskly  

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forward or cast ashore by the revolutionary current. In the following passage written two weeks later, there is another assumption: the revolution in India would have a spiritual as well as a political impulsion, thereby ensuring the Sunrise of both inner and outer freedom:

God has set apart India as the eternal fountain-head of holy spirituality, and He will never suffer that fountain to run dry.... By our political freedom we shall once more recover our spiritual freedom. Once more in the land of the saints and sages will burn up the fire of the ancient Yoga and the hearts of her people will be lifted up into the neighbourhood of the Eternal.²⁹

But writing more than a month later, Sri Aurobindo seems to have felt the need of a giant anchor that will hold in spite of the tossings of the ship on the tempestuous sea of revolution. Nationalism, was a great ideal no doubt, but "a still mightier inspiration, a still more enthusiastic and all-conquering faith" was needed if the Nationalists and revolutionaries were to come safely through "the Valley of the Shadow of Death" that lay ahead of them, the long night of violence and repression and tribulation that seemed to stretch before them. A religion of humanity, a belief in the divinity of man, a faith in the compelling power of selfless action and high-spirited sacrifice - these were the cardinal needs of the moment.

In an article, 'India and the Mongolian', that appeared on 1 April, Sri Aurobindo threw out some amazing speculations about India, Asia and the world:

The position of India makes her the key of Asia. She divides the Pagan Far East from the Mahomedan West, and is their meeting-place. From her alone can proceed a force of union, a starting-point of comprehension, a reconciliation of Mahomedanism and Paganism. Her freedom is necessary to the unity of Asia.... When the inevitable happens and the Chinese armies knock at the Himalayan gates of India and Japanese fleets appear before Bombay Harbour, by what strength will England oppose this gigantic combination?

Sri Aurobindo's thesis could be summarised thus. If India's freedom was necessary for Asia, it was equally necessary for world peace. Continued British presence in India must sooner or later provoke a Sino-Japanese alliance and joint-action, first to eject the British, then to use India's mobilised strength to exclude Europe from Asia, Africa and Australia, and finally to smite down European pride, humiliate Western statecraft, power and civilisation, and subordinate them to the dominant Asiatic lead. But if Indian Nationalism could assert itself quickly and decisively and if British bureaucracy could see reason in time, then free India would become Britain's ally, and it might be even possible for a free and strong and self-reliant India, as Bepin Pal had suggested in one of his speeches, "to mediate between the civilisations of Europe and Asia, both of them so necessary to human development". All this was written in 1908, no doubt after Japan's great victory over Russia, but before the two world wars, before the revolutions in China, before Japan's bombing of Calcutta, Visakhapatnam and Madras, and long before Red China's invasion of India from the Himalayas in 1962. It was but a rapid newspaper article, but some of the speculations and warnings were breath-taking.

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and re-reading the article today with all the knowledge of recent world history that we have, we cannot but wonder how percipient, how forward-looking, Sri Aurobindo had been, how truly prophetic, how constructive and how wise.

Sri Aurobindo was proud of India, and proud of Asia, but from the beginning he had also cultivated a global outlook, and his concern ultimately was with the future health of the human race itself. His dispassionate global view helped him to appreciate the admirable traits in other nations and peoples - England's practical intelligence, France's clear logical brain, Germany's speculative genius, Russia's emotional force, America's commercial energy - but he also thought that the West's mastery of the arts of material life was certainly not enough. Asia's awakening was necessary to restore the balance: "Asia is the custodian of the world's peace of mind, the physician of the maladies which Europe generates."³⁰ And out of the nations of Asia, India was a land apart and unique:

In former ages India was a sort of hermitage of thought and peace.... Her thoughts flashed out over Asia and created civilisations, her sons were the bearers of light to the peoples; philosophies based themselves on stray fragments of her infinite wisdom; sciences arose from the waste of her intellectual production.

Then came the invasions, India's sheltered progress was ended, and the long day's journey into the night of enslavement began. She became passive, she grovelled in tamas, she chased imitative futilities. But that chapter too was ending. A new Dawn was coming up in the east, a new integration of all existing knowledge and experience was being forged, a bright new hope for India and Asia and the world was in the offing. And Sri Aurobindo wrote, almost at the very moment the clouds were gathering about him:

...the function of India is to supply the world with a perennial source of light and renovation. ...She sends forth a light from her bosom which floods the: earth and the heavens, and mankind bathes in it like St. George in the well of life and recovers strength, hope and vitality for its long pilgrimage. Such a time is now at hand. The world needs India and needs her free.³¹

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