Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 16

Pondicherry: Cave of Tapasya

I

Having decided to leave Chandernagore for Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo first spoke to Motilal Roy about it. The idea was that Sri Aurobindo, accompanied by Bejoy Nag, should board the steamer Dupleix on the night of 31 March 1910. Motilal wrote to Sukumar Mitra (Krishna Kumar Mitra's son, and Sri Aurobindo's cousin) and Amar Chatterji of Uttarpara asking them to make the necessary arrangements. Everything had to be done in secret, for there was an oppressive air of suspicion everywhere, and police spies were posted at even the unlikeliest places. Sukumar Mitra therefore decided to work through safe intermediaries. He gave two trunks (filled with clothes and other items of personal use) to one Nagendra Kumar Guha Roy for temporary custody, and also asked him to buy two second class tickets and reserve a double cabin for Colombo by SS. Dupleix: it was hoped that "Colombo" instead of "Pondicherry" would throw the police off the scent when the inevitable chase began. Nagen and Surendra Kumar Chakravarty were instructed to convey the trunks to the steamer and put them in the reserved cabin well in time. Also, it was arranged that Amar Chatterji and Manmatha Biswas should hire a boat at Uttarpara on the appointed date and meet Sri Aurobindo at the Dumur Tala Ghat and bring him to the Calcutta side of the river, where they would be met by the others and taken to the steamer.

Unfortunately, there was a hitch in the arrangements. Nagen and Surendra who were to meet Sri Aurobindo missed the boat in which he came with Amar and Manmath. The latter, not finding anybody to receive them went to Sukumar's house in College Square; not finding him, they quickly returned to the riverside and waited there. On learning that Nagen and Surendra had failed to contact Sri Aurobindo, Sukumar directed that the trunks should be brought back from the ship to his house. When Nagen came with the trunks, Sukumar asked him to take them back to riverside, as he had learned that Sri Aurobindo was waiting there in a carriage. This time there was no mistake, but the problem was for Sri Aurobindo and Bejoy Nag to get their medical certificates. It being late, the doctor had left the port and returned to his house. Accordingly they went to his residence in Chowringhee at about 9.30 p.m., and after a brief examination received the certificates in the names they had assumed - Jyotindranath Mitra and Bankimchandra Basak - and the European doctor seems to have remarked that one of them spoke remarkably chaste English. So, after all, Sri Aurobindo and Bejoy Nag were able to board the ship that night.

During all this comedy of missed meetings (which could have turned into a disaster had the police been more vigilant), Sri Aurobindo seems to have maintained a marvellous calm, as if he couldn't care less - or as if he knew for a certainty  

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that all would be well. Besides, had things gone according to the original plan, a Calcutta police officer would have been present at the time of the medical inspection, and he might have suspected something. Thanks to the comedy of errors, however, the late passengers were examined at the doctor's residence, there was no police officer in attendance, and the doctor issued the certificates without any ado. A divinity shapes our ends, indeed, rough hew them how we will!

Once in their cabin, Amar gave Sri Aurobindo the money that had been sent by Rajendranath Mukherji, Zamindar of Uttarpara. Amar and Nagen respectfully took leave of Sri Aurobindo and Bejoy, and the steamer sailed out of Calcutta well past midnight.

In the meantime, Suresh Chakravarti (Moni) - who had been asked by Sri Aurobindo to proceed to Pondicherry in advance and make some arrangements for his stay - had left Calcutta by train on 28 March. He had disguised himself as an Anglo-Indian, and was seen off by Sukumar Mitra and Saurin Bose (Mrinalini's cousin). He carried with him a letter of introduction to Mandayam Srinivasachariar, a sterling Nationalist, who was bringing out India, Vijaya, Karmayogi and Bala Bharata with the help of his brother Tirumalachariar and other Nationalists like Subramania Bharati. Since Bharati's flight from Madras to Pondicherry, that obscure French town had begun to attract political exiles from India, and he had been followed by Srinivasachariar, Subramania Siva, and others. It was therefore thought that Srinivasachariar and his friends would be able to make suitable arrangements for Sri Aurobindo's stay at Pondicherry.

On arriving there on 31 March 1910, Moni duly met Srinivasachariar with the letter. At first Srinivachariar and his friends were incredulous that Sri Aurobindo - no less a person than Sri Aurobindo - might be seeking asylum in unimportant, inaccessible Pondicherry of all places. And a doubt crossed his mind too: suppose Moni himself were a spy employed by the Calcutta police? The authorities at Madras had made it impossible for Srinivasachariar to continue the publication of India, and he was himself experiencing no end of difficulties. Moni might be a decoy - a trap! On the other hand, should Moni be genuine and his letter authentic, was it not the duty of Srinivasachariar and his friends to organise a fitting reception for the great leader? Moni, however, won their confidence and also persuaded them that, since Sri Aurobindo was coming incognito, they should not give any publicity to his arrival or presence in Pondicherry. Accordingly, Srinivasachariar and Moni received Sri Aurobindo and Bejoy on 4 April in the afternoon at the Pondicherry port and took him to the house of a prominent citizen, Calve Shankar Chettiar.

II

At the Calcutta end, the mysterious disappearance of Sri Aurobindo and the continued mystery regarding his whereabouts and intentions were a constant irritant to the bureaucracy.

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The institution of proceedings against the printer of the Karmayogin was poor consolation at best; having let the big whale escape, of what use was the attempt to net the small fry? The Government, however, must have got wind of the departure of the two late passengers on board SS. Dupleix on the night of 31 March. The C.I.D. seem to have readily fallen into the trap laid for them, and they immediately took steps to restrain Sri Aurobindo from proceeding beyond Colombo - to France or elsewhere. After all, in case Sri Aurobindo wished to go to France, he would have to change streamers at Colombo, and might be obliged to use a local boat for the purpose; that would be the time to execute the warrant. The authorities in Ceylon were accordingly requested to watch for Sri Aurobindo of Calcutta and Sardar Ajit Singh of Lahore, both "absconders charged with sedition", and arrest them when they reached Colombo. The Government knew that two passengers had left on the night of the 31st; one of them was certainly Sri Aurobindo. Since Ajit Singh too was on the "wanted" list, might it not be that he was the second passenger?

From Madras, Papu Rao Naidu who had been nosing for information at that end, wired to Calcutta on 9 April that Sri Aurobindo had arrived at Pondicherry by SS. Dupleix on the morning of 6th April and was received by Srinivasachariar and the India people. On 13 April, the irrepressible Papu Rao wired again that Sri Aurobindo and Ajit Singh were at Pondicherry, and somebody might be sent to identify the men. By 17 April, the dossier was fairly complete at Calcutta. The C.I.D. had managed to put together a good deal of relevant (and some mightily irrelevant) information. The names of the midnight late passengers - "J. N. Mitter of Uluberia" and "B.C. Bhowmik of Nilphamari" - provoked inquiries that led nowhere. Although poor Mitter was a real person, it was obvious he hadn't gone on a sea voyage; and presently the doctor, on being shown Sri Aurobindo's portrait, identified the face as that of the "J.N. Mitter" to whom he had given a health certificate. As for "B .C. Bhowmik", who could it have been except Nolini Kanta Gupta, one of Sri Aurobindo's closest associates? It was also possible, ran bureaucratic speculation, that Sri Aurobindo had originally intended to embark at Bombay for Germany, but had actually left for Pondicherry instead, presumably because there had been some last minute "difficulty about money". Then came the welcome news to Calcutta that Sri Aurobindo had been identified at Pondicherry by comparison with the "Simla photo".¹

Before leaving Chandernagore, Sri Aurobindo had answered one of the anonymous letters addressed to his Calcutta residence asking him to come out into the open by saying that, after all, there was no public warrant against him, and no prosecution had been announced either; and there was thus no reason why he should emerge from his retirement simply to please his correspondent! The police took the bait, issued a warrant against Sri Aurobindo, and started proceedings against the printer of the Karmayogin for publishing in the paper the second open letter in the issue of 25 December 1909. As we saw in the preceding chapter (XV. iv), the case went against the printer in the lower court, but on an appeal to the  

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High Court, the conviction was set aside, the printer's release was ordered, and the impugned article was declared to be not seditious. On the same day (7 November 1910), but before he knew about the favourable judgement by Holmwood and Fletcher. J., Sri Aurobindo wrote to the Hindu of Madras from 42, Rue-de-Pavillon, Pondicherry:

I shall be obliged if you will allow me to inform every one interested in my whereabouts through your journal that I am and will remain in Pondicherry. I left British India over a month before proceedings were taken against me and, as I had purposely retired here in order to pursue my Yogic sadhana undisturbed by political action or pursuit and had already severed connection with my political work, I did not feel called upon to surrender on the warrant for sedition, as might have been incumbent on me if I had remained in the political field. I have since lived here as a religious recluse, visited only by a few friends, French and Indian, but my whereabouts have been an open secret, long known to the agents of the Government and widely rumoured in Madras as well as perfectly known to every one in Pondicherry. I find myself now compelled, somewhat against my will, to give my presence here a wider publicity. It has suited certain people for an ulterior object to construct a theory that I am not in Pondicherry, but in British India, and I wish to state emphatically that I have not been in British India since March last....

Sri Aurobindo had touched British India on the evening of 31 March when he came to Calcutta from Chandernagore to board SS. Dupleix; since that night he had not been in British India, and he had no intention of setting foot on British territory "even for a single moment in the future unless I can return publicly".

While Sri Aurobindo was thus firm in his intention to eschew political activity and make Pondicherry the seat of his sadhana, his cave of tapasya, the British authorities were not inclined to accept his words at their face value. No, no, it just couldn't be true: religion, spirituality. Yoga were mere subterfuges: the man was really at a deep game of conspiracy against the established British power in India. He needed to be watched closely. Indeed, it was imperative that he should be seized somehow - anyhow - and brought to British India.

In the early weeks, Sri Aurobindo's two constant companions were Moni and Bejoy. In October, Saurin Bose joined them and in November, Nolini. In answer to a letter from Manoranjan Guhathakurta and Shyamsundar Chakravarti from Calcutta seeking guidance in Politics, Sri Aurobindo wrote to them that he had severed all connection with politics, and that Bhagavan Sri Krishna had taken the responsibility for freeing India from alien rule. And yet the Government in India were obsessed with the idea that Sri Aurobindo and his group of four young friends were directing a diabolical conspiracy and perhaps even supplying pistols and other instruments of insurrection to the revolutionaries in India! It was therefore the considered view of the authorities in India that, by fair means or foul, Sri Aurobindo should be brought back to British India.

In the first instance, kidnapping by the local "bandes" or professional goondas  

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seems to have been thought of, but Moni, Bejoy and their friends were ever alert and patrolled all night to prevent a sudden assault. Next, a trumped-up charge against Sri Aurobindo and his young men was sought to be framed. In Nolini's words -

Some of the local "ghouls" were made to help forge the documents - some photographs and maps and charts along with a few letters - which were to prove that we have been engaged in a conspiracy for dacoity and murder. The papers were left in a well in the compound of one of our men, then they were "discovered" after a search by the police.²

At this time (1912), besides Sri Aurobindo and his associates from Bengal, there were also the revolutionaries from Tamil Nad - Bharati, Srinivasachariar, Subramania Siva, Nagaswami Aiyar and V.V.S. Aiyar (the last a close friend of the Maharashtrian revolutionary, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar). The stooge in this matter was Mayuresan, a French Indian, and the "documents" were placed in a tin box and dropped into the well in V.V.S. Aiyar's house. Accidentally the maid-servant caught up the tin box in her bucket while drawing water. Aiyar and Bharati took counsel together, and also consulted Sri Aurobindo who advised them to inform the police. On examination, the box was found to contain some seditious pamphlets and journals. On some there was the image of Kali and some writing in Bengali. The investigating magistrate, M. Nandot, came to Sri Aurobindo's house with the Chief of Police. But all they found was literature in Latin and Greek. The appropriate exclamation was, "Il sait du latin, il sait du grec!" ("He knows Latin, he knows Greek!") And was it possible that a classical scholar could ever entertain mischief? The prosecutors became friends and admirers.³ The trouble henceforth was, not with the French, but with the British spies in Pondicherry and the British authorities in India. For the French, Sri Aurobindo was an honoured political exile, entitled to their protection. Evil usually recoils upon itself, and such was the predicament of some of the evil-doers. Both Nand Gopal who had offered to do the kidnapping and Mayuresan who had engineered the plot to implicate the political exiles in criminal acts had ultimately to flee Pondicherry and seek asylum in British India. Writing of these events to Motilal Roy on 3 July 1912, Sri Aurobindo made the following neat summing-up: "I think the fangs have been drawn."⁴

Force and fraud, both having been tried and both having failed to produce the desired results, temptation was tried as a last resort. Word came to Sri Aurobindo that the Government of India would be pleased to grant him asylum at a secluded and salubrious hill-resort like Darjeeling to pursue his Yoga in complete freedom, and Lord Carmichael himself would like to discuss philosophy with him. What an honour! Yet Sri Aurobindo knew it to be but "an ointment to catch a fly". He declined to move out of Pondicherry. Later, the British persuaded the French Government to offer Sri Aurobindo a safe passage to Algeria in Africa, where he could live in peace with his chosen disciples and continue his own way of life. Some of the other political exiles were also wondering whether the French might not ultimately  

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yield to British pressure and hand them over to them. Would it not be better to explore the possibility of moving out of India altogether and going to Djibuti, Tripoli or French Indochina? And the Algerian offer, coming from the French, was too good to be rejected. And in case it was rejected, the French might consider themselves not bound to protect the exiles, should the British make an attempt to seize them forcibly! But Sri Aurobindo was firm. He wouldn't by himself move out of Pondicherry.⁵ That was his chosen place - or God-directed sanctuary - for continuing the work begun at Chandernagore; that was his Gaya where he would one day complete his siddhi; that was where the foundations of a New Heaven and a New Earth would be securely laid. Force, fraud or temptation, Sri Aurobindo endured them all and was master of the situation - "lone, limitless, nude, immune".

III

Sri Aurobindo's first four years in Pondicherry were for him a period of "silent Yoga". The outer circumstances - now disturbed, now humdrum - were rather like ripples on the surface which hardly affected the calm assurance and constancy of the ocean's depths. In his merely outward life, Sri Aurobindo was more or less like many others: yet how little this reflected the imponderables of the inner man, the granite strength of the Himalayas of his mind, the sheer infinitudes of his spirit?

Born in Calcutta thirty-seven years earlier, his Odyssey ad covered many places, many climes: Darjeeling, Manchester, London, Cambridge, Baroda - and with the return to Calcutta in 1906, the wheel had come full circle. Chandernagore was almost a new start, or more appropriately, the beginning of another upward swing of the spiralling ascent; and Pondicherry was a continuation, an acceleration towards the preordained summit.

Disembarking from SS. Dupleix on the afternoon of 4 April 1910, Sri Aurobindo (and Bejoy nag) had walked down to the Cours Charbol, and were taken in ft jutka (horse-drawn carriage) by Srinivasachariar and Moni to Shankar Chettiar's two-storey house in Rue Camoutty Chetti (Komutti Chetty Street). Sri Aurobindo occupied a room on the second floor of the spacious house till the end of September, and Moni and Bejoy also stayed in the same house. Sri Aurobindo's room had an antique quality about it, he had a wooden cupboard for his use, and he could reach by a ladder the terrace walled around to a height of three feet. Shankar Chettiar had food sent to his guests from his kitchen, but Moni and Bejoy prepared tea in the mornings. Life was bare in the extreme, and Sri Aurobindo kept himself very much in the background. In the silence of deep seclusion, Sri Aurobindo desired that casual visitors should not be allowed to disturb him.

Apart from the political exiles and revolutionaries already in Pondicherry, occasionally some outsiders too were permitted to meet Sri Aurobindo. One such was K.V. Rangaswami Iyenger. Zemindar of Kodialam, who first met

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Sri Aurobindo when he was still at Shankar Chettiar's house. Rangaswami Iyenger had been told by his Guru Nagai Japata at the time of his death that a Yogi from the North - Uttara Yogi - would one day come to the South, and could be recognised by three great affirmations of his. Rangaswami Iyenger concluded that the "affirmations" or "sayings" were none other than the "three madnesses" Sri Aurobindo had described in one of his letters to his wife, which had been produced in court during the Alipur Trial.⁶ Besides rendering some financial assistance, Rangaswami Iyenger also bore the cost of publication of Yogic Sadhan, which Sri Aurobindo had composed in a spell of automatic writing under the immediate influence of Rammohan Roy. Sri Aurobindo disclaimed personal responsibility for the views given in the book, and in fact it was withdrawn from circulation after 1927.

Another early visitor was 'Va Ra (V. Ramaswami Iyenger), a Tamil writer and patriot. Before he actually saw Va Ra, Sri Aurobindo had seen him in a vision - seen him, not as he was at the time of meeting, but as he came to look after a year's residence with Sri Aurobindo.!⁷*

A more unusual visitor was M. Paul Richard who had come to Pondicherry in mid-1910 on a mission of political campaigning on behalf of his friend Paul Bluysen. He was anxious to meet a Yogi, and accordingly a meeting with Sri Aurobindo was probably arranged by Zir Naidu a friend of Richard. Richard and Sri Aurobindo met twice, and held long conversations, he was requested to explain the symbolic character of the lotus, and Sri Aurobindo pointed out that the lotus stood for the opening of the consciousness to the Divine. He must have made a tremendous impression upon M. Richard, for in his book. The Dawn over Asia, he described Sri Aurobindo as the greatest of the great men or divine men of Asia, "the leader, the hero of tomorrow".

One interesting event during the six months' stay at Shankar Chettiar's house was Sri Aurobindo's 23-day fast. He had fasted once earlier - at the Alipur jail - for ten days, throwing away the prison food into the bucket; that had passed for illness with the warders! At Pondicherry it was a longer trial of endurance, but apparently there were no serious consequences. Sri Aurobindo could walk as usual, and engage in his customary work and continue his sadhana as intensely as ever. Later, Sri Aurobindo explained that, during such periods of fasting, he drew "energy from the vital plane instead of depending on physical sustenance".⁸

In October 1910, Sri Aurobindo moved from Shankar Chettiar's to a small rented house belonging to one Sundar Chetti in Rue Suffren, and remained there for the next six months. The house had a garden, and they had a little more elbow room. Saurin and Nolini now joined Sri Aurobindo, and thus there were four in the house besides him. In their experiment in communal living, the cooking was

* In his book in Tamil, Mahakavi Bharatiyar (1944), Va Ra writes that he had first been sent by Kodialam Rangaswami Iyenger to Pondicherry to find out whether Sri Aurobindo had indeed come to live there. Va Ra went to Subramania Bharati who took him to Sri Aurobindo.  

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done by turns or on a cooperative basis. "I did the rice," Nolini reminisces "Mom took charge of dal (pulses), and Bejoy being the expert cooked the vegetables and the curry."⁹

In April 1911, Sri Aurobindo and his disciples made a further move, from Sundar Chetti's to Raghav Chetti's house (4, Rue Saint Louis), where they remained for the next two years. It was during his stay there that Nand Gopal's plan to kidnap Sri Aurobindo and Mayuresan's fraudulent attempt to implicate Sri Aurobindo and the other revolutionaries both misfired and recoiled upon the offenders. Outwardly it was a precarious life still - financially and otherwise - but Sri Aurobindo and the small group around him carried on as though nothing mattered.* Nolini was known as Roy, Bejoy as Basak, Moni was called Sacra (short for Chakravarti). It is said that all five inmates had to share the same towel: they had to manage with a candle-lamp and a kerosene-lamp: and they couldn't afford a servant or help. But these privations didn't matter. The young men felt they were in heaven, for Sri Aurobindo was with them, and they basked in the sunshine of his boundless love. He was their teacher too, for he taught them Greek, Latin, French and Italian, and in fact life with Sri Aurobindo was perpetual education, a continual flowering of knowledge and wisdom. As at Calcutta in Shyampukur Lane, here at Pondicherry also, Sri Aurobindo's method of teaching a new language was, not through primers and grammars, but to make the pupil plunge into the living waters of its great literature. Nolini began Greek with the Medea of Euripides and the Antigone of Sophocles. Latin with the Aeneid, and Italian with Dante.** This was also the period when they felt they might indulge a little in the luxury of buying books. With a lavish provision of Rs. 10 per month, they were able to get some of the best English literature in the World's Classics and other popular series. They also secured in two volumes the original text of the Rig Veda for Sri Aurobindo who at that time was deeply interested in this scripture.

Sri Aurobindo's Chandernagore host, Motilal Roy, paid a visit to him in 1911 and stayed in Pondicherry for about six weeks, receiving some guidance in his sadhana. After his return to Chandernagore, he continued his financial assistance to Sri Aurobindo, and there was close collaboration between the two, at least till 1920. A letter from Sri Aurobindo to Motilal, dated 3 July 1912, gives a glimpse of the financial situation at the Pondicherry end:

The situation just now is that we have Rs. one and a half or so in hand.... my messenger to the South has not returned.... even when he returns, I am not quite sure about the cash and still less sure about the sufficiency of the amount.

* Va Ra mentions an occasion when there was no money to buy provisions. There was some rice, chillies, oil and salt, nothing else. But Sri Aurobindo said it was enough. The chillies were fried in oil, and mixed with cooked rice and salt - and that was a full meal! The same day financial help came from a friend. (Mahakavi Bharatiyar, p. 68)

** Describing what one gains by this method, Nolini writes: "One feels as if one took a plunge into the inmost core of the language, into that secret heart where it is vibrant with life, with the quintessence of beauty, the fullness of strength." (Reminiscences, p. 63)  

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No doubt. God will provide, but He has contracted a bad habit of waiting till the last moment. I only hope He does not wish us to learn how to live on a minus quantity...¹⁰

Continued financial stringency was the reason why they had to shift from Raghavan House to a still smaller house in Rue de Mission Étranger (now usually referred to as the Mission House). Here they stayed till October 1913 when they moved to a more spacious house in Rue Francois Martin, where Sri Aurobindo was to remain till October 1922. This house where Sri Aurobindo stayed for nine years is now known as the "Guest House", and is well preserved. Sri Aurobindo had two rooms on the first floor, and he used to have evening talks with his disciples in the veranda in front of one of his rooms. A portrait of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa in a state of trance among his disciples used to adorn Sri Aurobindo's table. Among the frequent visitors to the Guest House was Subramania Bharati, the greatest of modem Tamil poets.

It was when they were in this well-ventilated house in Rue Francois Martin that Nagen Nag, a relation of Bejoy Nag's, came to stay there, ostensibly for reasons of health but really to be with Sri Aurobindo, and be also in a position to tender some financial assistance to him. Nagen had brought with him a companion and cook, Birendra Roy, and he lived with the rest. When one day Biren shaved his head completely, on a sudden impulse Moni shaved his head as well. Actually Biren was a spy, and after a stay of six months in Pondicherry he wished to be replaced by another, who should be able to recognise him easily on account of his shaven head. But when Moni also shaved his head in spite of being requested not to do so, Biren concluded that the truth was out. A few days later, after taking a little wine, Biren felt moved - "partly out of fear and partly from true repentance, for the most part no doubt by the pressure of some other Force" - to confess that he was really a C.I.D. man, and to sustain his word he produced the money he had received and placed it at Sri Aurobindo's feet saying: "This is the reward of my evil deed. Never, I shall never do this work again...."¹¹ He wept, and the others kept silent.

But Pondicherry - although the ghouls were doubtless there and although the greed for money and the lust for power were strong among the corrupt officials and the goonda-chiefs - was sanctified by the presence of "five noble men" - Shankar Chettiar, Zir Naidu, Rasendran, Murugesh Chettiar and Le Beau. When an attempt was made by the French authorities, no doubt under British pressure, to enforce the Aliens Act which required all other than French citizens to register themselves, it was necessary for Sri Aurobindo, Subramania Bharati and the other political exiles to have their application for registration endorsed by at least five Honorary Magistrates. It was in that context that Shankar Chettiar and the other four "noble men" showed truly "remarkable courage and magnanimity". The crisis passed as though it had never been. It was in those days that Subramania Bharati wrote Jayam Undu ("Victory is Sure") breathing defiance and faith and hope in victory:

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Fear not, heart! Victory is sure!

Freedom is ours, here and now!

The mighty Mother lodges in my heart,

And bhakti shall bear nectarean fruit.

High are the shoulders, mountain-like,

And they carry the Mother's golden feet... .*

IV

Sri Aurobindo chose Pondicherry as his "Cave of Tapasya" because it was then French territory, removed further away from Calcutta than Chandernagore, and was yet a part of the Indian subcontinent, a living cell of the Mother India who had inspired millions of her children to sing the soul-stirring anthem, "Bande Mataram!" As we saw, he wouldn't by himself budge from Pondicherry, and neither Darjeeling nor Algeria had attractions for him;** and he wouldn't be coaxed or cajoled into returning to British India even after the coming of provincial autonomy in 1937 or to independent India in 1947. Was the choice of Pondicherry as the final seat of his sadhana dictated, not alone by political or patriotic, but even more peremptorily by other considerations? It was by no means a simple rational decision on his part; it was the ādeś - divine command - that sent him to Pondicherry. But we would be doing nothing improper if we tried to look behind the divine intention and peered a little into the antecedents of Pondicherry.

As to the sort of place Pondicherry was in 1910, Nolini has given an unforgettable picture:

The place was so quiet that we can hardly imagine now what it was really like. It was not quiet, it was actually dead; they used to call it a dead city. There was hardly any traffic, particularly in the area where we lived, and after dusk there was not a soul stirring. It is no wonder they should say, "Sri Aurobindo has fixed upon a cemetery for his sadhana."

It was a cemetery indeed.... It was like a back-water of the sea, a stagnant pool by the shore....

A cemetery it was no doubt, but one with its full complement of ghosts and ghouls.¹²

* Translation by Prema Nandakumar (Vide her Subramania Bharati in the National Biography Series, 1968, pp. 35-6). In his book Mahakavi Bharatiyar, Va Ra says that he accompanied Bharati to Shankar Chettiar's house to get his help. Shankar Chettiar, on being apprised of the situation, got the required five signatures (his own being one) within two hours. On being asked to sing his latest song , Bharati recited with gusto Jayam Undu (pp. 80-1).

** When the British made an attempt to exchange France's Indian possessions (notably Pondicherry) for certain areas in the West Indies, Sri Aurobindo may have written to some of his friends in Paris to stall the crucial decision. In the meantime, M. Poincaré became Premier and firmly decided against the Proposal. Pondicherry remained French, and Sri Aurobindo continued his tapasya there.

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Could any place have been more unpromising? Almost a cemetery — ghouls - cheap wine-shops - goonda-raj at night - the rule in theory of "liberty, equality, fraternity", but in reality the reign of crude officialism and decadent feudalism! Where there was not only no healthy and vigorous life, but where perversion passed for purity, where old negations clothed themselves as the new affirmations, where poverty and precariousness were the oxygen the people had to breathe, - where was the use of persevering in such a "god-forsaken" place with a difficult sadhana and trying to lay the foundations of a New Dispensation?

But there was the other side of the medal too, and this came to light by and by. A French savant. Professor Jouveau Dubreuil, who was then at the College de France in Pondicherry, did some valuable research in local history and archaeology and came upon the discovery that at one time long long ago the place had teen called Vedapuri and was a centre of Vedic studies in the South, with a temple dedicated to Vedapurishwara; and by tradition the sage Agastya himself was the guardian spirit of the city which was also a university. The French professor even proved - "from ancient maps and other clues" - that this old centre of Vedic studies had been located in the exact spot where Sri Aurobindo ultimately fixed his permanent dwelling in Pondicherry. The current Tamil name Puducheri ("New Town") seems also to be of considerable antiquity, and was referred to as "Poduka" by Ptolemy of the second century A.D. and by still earlier writers as well. Pondicherry, then, although superficially so barren and unpromising in 1910, had had its remote days of renown and glory, and therefore had also equally great potentialities for the future.

We have seen in an earlier chapter (III.vi) how Sri Aurobindo came to be interested in Yoga during the latter part of the Baroda period. What attracted him to Yoga is however, no mystery. He had spent fourteen years in a foreign country, and he had been both warmed up and depressed by the civilisation of the West; in the end he had found it imperfect and insufficient. Western civilisation flamed forth, indeed, on many sides, at once brilliantly alluring and scorchingly devastating; but wasn't its heart a nucleus of Darkness rather than a source of Light? How should it profit man if he gained the whole world but lost his own soul?

During his long stay in England, he had sharpened his intellect, heightened his awareness of things, deepened his sensibility, enriched his store of knowledge and awakened the psychic self which will not contentedly accept tinsel as gold. Returning to India, his one dominant thought was for service of the Mother, Mother India. He watched the barren political scene in India with anger and distress, and began preparing forces from behind the scenes so that he could come forward and act when the right moment came. His first organised work in politics was of the nature of grouping people who accepted the ideal of national independence and were prepared to take up an appropriate action when the call came. Although this was undertaken at an early age, it took a formal shape in or about 1902. Two years later he turned to Yoga - not, indeed, to clarify his ideals in political matters - but to find the spiritual strength that would see him through the task. What first attracted  

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him to Yoga has been described in these terms by Sri Aurobindo in the Uttarpara speech:

When I first approached Him, it was not entirely in the spirit of the Bhakta, it was not entirely in the spirit of the Jnani. I came to Him long ago in Baroda some years before the Swadeshi began and I was drawn into the public field. When I approached God at that time, I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion. I felt there must be a mighty truth somewhere in this Yoga, a mighty truth in this religion based on the Vedanta.¹³

He wished to wrest the Truth somehow and experience it, but not for any selfish reason. He didn't "ask for mukti" or personal salvation. He didn't desire power or success or fame for himself. Rather did he pray fervently to God:

If Thou art, then Thou knowest my heart. Thou knowest that I do not ask... for anything which others ask for. I ask only for strength to uplift this nation, I ask only to be allowed to live and work for this people whom I love and to whom I pray that I may devote my life.¹⁴

For himself he wanted nothing. He had always in him a great measure of equanimity, a natural imperturbability in face of the world and its difficulties. After some inward depression in his adolescence (not due to any outward circumstances, not yet amounting to sorrow or melancholy, but no more than a strain in the temperament), this mood of equanimity became fairly settled. His great passion was for work - work for the country, work in its varied forms that were still an offering to the Mother. Whatever results he had attained through his sadhana were striking enough and reinforced his faith in Yoga as a solvent for India's (and the world's) ills.

As regards his early spiritual experiences, some of these have been referred to already. These had begun, in fact, since the very moment he touched Indian soil on his return from England. A vast calm had descended upon him with his first step on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, his first recontact with the body and spirit of India; and this calm surrounded him and remained with him for many months afterwards. Again, while walking on the ridge of the Takht-i-Suleman in Kashmir, the realisation of the vacant Infinite stole upon him unbidden as it were. This was the experience recollected in the tranquillity of later years in the richly evocative sonnet Adwaita:

I walked on the high-wayed Seat of Solomon

Where Shankaracharya's tiny temple stands

Facing infinity from Time's edge, alone

On the bare ridge ending earth's vain romance.

Around me was a formless solitude:

All had become one strange Unnamable,

And unborn sole Reality world-nude,  

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Topless and fathomless, for ever still....

A lonely Calm and void unchanging Peace

On the dumb crest of Nature's mysteries.¹⁵

Again, the living presence of Kali in one of the temples at Karnali near Chandod on the banks of the Narmada came upon him unawares and filled him with an eerie and stupendous Power leaping out of the sculptured confines. This experience was to be immortalised in a sonnet of later years. The Stone Goddess:

In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine,

From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me, -

A living Presence deathless and divine,

A Form that harboured all infinity.

The great World-Mother and her mighty will

Inhabited the earth's abysmal sleep...

Now veiled with mind she dwells and speaks no word,

Voiceless, inscrutable, omniscient,

Hiding until our soul has seen, has heard

The secret of her strange embodiment...¹⁶

On another occasion, when he was in imminent danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay there, he had a vision of the Godhead surging up from within him and mastering and controlling with its gaze the threatening situation. This too Sri Aurobindo has rendered in a sonnet he wrote in 1939, The Godhead, forty-five years after the event:

I sat behind the dance of Danger's hooves

In the shouting street that seemed a futurist's whim,

And suddenly felt, exceeding nature's grooves,

In me, envelopping me the body of Him.

Above my head a mighty head was seen,

A face with the calm of immortality

And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene

In the vast circle of its sovereignty....

The moment passed and all was as before;

Only that deathless memory I bore.¹⁷

But these, and others like these, were inner experiences coming of themselves, with a sudden unexpectedness, and were not the clear results of any Yogic sadhana. When presently he started practising pranayama, he did so by himself, without a   

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Guru, getting the rule from one of the disciples of Swami Brahmananda of the Ganga Math. At one time, Sri Aurobindo used to practice pranayama for six hours or more a day! At this time there was no conflict between Yoga and politics, and he had no suspicion that there could be any opposition between them. He nevertheless wanted to find a Guru, a master of the secret, who would be able to tell him how to proceed in his endeavour to wrest the ultimate secret of Knowledge and Power from Nature and God. After the contacts with the Naga Sannyasi and Swami Brahmananda (mentioned in chapter III.vi), both of whom impressed him although neither became his Guru, Sri Aurobindo at last found in Yogi Lele a real helper in his sadhana, but this too was only for a short time. We have already explained in an earlier chapter (XI.v) the nature of the advice tendered by Lele and the first astonishing results of Sri Aurobindo's putting it into practice. When Sri Aurobindo was leaving Bombay for Calcutta, he asked Lele how he was to get further instructions for his sadhana. Lele after a little thought asked Sri Aurobindo whether he could surrender himself entirely to the Guide within him, and move as it moved him; if so, Sri Aurobindo needed no more instructions from Lele or indeed from anybody else. This Sri Aurobindo accepted, and made that thenceforth his rule of sadhana and of life.

And yet the whirl of politics and the ceaseless excitement of political journalism, in which he was unavoidably caught on his return to Calcutta about two months after the Surat Congress and the experience of the static Brahman in Baroda, wasn't an ideal background for Yogic sadhana. There were conflicting pulls, there were underground rumblings, there were lightning flashes in the sky. Where was the ground of sanity between mad acts of repression and maddened spurts of terrorism? Or between the cooings of the Moderates and the cater-waulings of the Anglo-Indian press? To function as a fearless nationalist leader and as an upright tribune of the people under those circumstances was as difficult and precarious a task as it would be for the juggler-horseman to keep six balls in the air all at once while riding the storm on a horse that was quite out of control. Even so, Sri Aurobindo ran the incredible race for some months, but it couldn't go on for ever. Sri Krishna intervened at last; and the Muzzaferpore bomb-action and the subsequent year-long incarceration of Sri Aurobindo proved, as we saw, a blessing in disguise to him.

A year's seclusion in the Alipur jail — a year's enforced sadhana - worked no doubt a great transformation in Sri Aurobindo. His horizon widened, the mists cleared, and he was able to see the Divine behind men, things, events, behind the phantasmagoria of the phenomenal world, he was able to see Vasudeva everywhere and in all things, he was able every moment to feel the protective embrace of the Divine Mother. The realisation at Baroda of the silent, spaceless and timeless Brahman had followed an abiding stillness of consciousness, a sense of the total unreality of the world, an immersion in a nirvanic and fathomless Zero. The Alipur realisation of the omnipresent Divine was the antithesis to that thesis, an infinite affirmation as against that transcendent negation. Nor was this all.

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Something like a clue to a synthesis had started unfolding itself as well:

To the other two realisations, that of the supreme Reality with the static and dynamic Brahman as its two aspects and that of the higher planes of consciousness leading to the Supermind he was already on his way in his meditations in the Alipore jail.¹⁸

Is Reality "nothing"? Is Reality "everything"? Is it both static and dynamic, sat and cit, nirguna and saguna7 In rare auspicious but unpredictable moments, one stumbles upon such experiences. One opens one's eyes, and there's nothing to see, for the world appears as a giant illusion. One opens one's eyes, and there's the apocalypse, there's Vasudeva everywhere. The One is also the Many: the transient is also the Illimitable Permanent. All this is wonderful, of .course, but during the play of the normal mental consciousness, it is the variety, the multiplicity, the distinctions, the dichotomies that stand foremost. The fateful "either - or" seems to be that one either seizes and clings to separativity or one plunges and loses oneself in the solvent Unity. One either clings to the mind, its analytical aptitudes, or one exceeds it in moments of trance or ecstasy. But is there no bridge? No easy two-way traffic? No technique of deliberately changing, purifying, transforming the separative consciousness to the unitive, the analytical to the creative? Are there no powers higher than the human mind? Cannot mind be surpassed by supermind? Cannot man become greater man or superman? Cannot earth-life with its obscurations and limitations transform itself into the Life Divine with its lights and puissances?

The classical approaches to the problem of human life on earth have been either to denounce it as Maya and try to get for ever beyond it; or accept it with its multitudinous contrarieties as the 'lila', as the shadow-play, of the Supreme. The physical, vital and mental: are they but rungs in a ladder, to be forgotten, to be castigated, the ladder itself to be kicked away, the moment one has effected the soul's take-off and it has lost itself in the Self? Human joys and miseries: are they but twists and turns in the Supreme's dance of self-delight? Are human beings no more than 'flies to wanton boys'? Phenomenal life - life in the body, senses, mind - is what we know and experience. Neither denying it totally nor reducing it to Somebody's playful rapture can charge life with purpose. But if the purpose of life is to evolve - not escape into some far-off Empyrean - if it is progressively to manifest the Divine (not become the Divine's toy), then surely the technology of transformation and manifestation remains to be discovered and put into practice. And this precisely was Sri Aurobindo's preoccupation.

According to his own admission, during his prison days at Alipur Sri Aurobindo was already on his way to the realisation of "the higher planes of consciousness leading to the Supermind". When he was asked many years later whether the "Supermind" was his own idea, he answered:

It is not my thought or idea. I have told you before that after the Nirvana experience I had no 'thoughts' of my own. Thoughts used to come from above. From the beginning I didn't feel Nirvana to be the highest spiritual achievement. 

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Something in me always wanted to go on further. But even then I didn't ask for this new experience. In fact, in Nirvana, with that peace, one does not ask for anything. But the truth of the Supermind-was put into me.¹⁹

Sri Aurobindo further explained that it was the spirit of Vivekananda that first gave him "a clue in the direction of the Supermind". Clarifying it further, he said:

He [Vivekananda] didn't say "Supermind". "Supermind" is my own word. He just said to me, "This is this, this is that", and so on. That was how he proceeded - by pointing and indicating. He visited me for 15 days in Alipur jail and, until I could grasp the whole thing, he went on teaching me and impressed upon my mind the working of the Higher Consciousness - the Truth-Consciousness in general - which leads towards the Supermind. He would not leave until he had put it all into my head.²⁰

Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo, with a back-look at the first tentative beginnings of his Yoga through prānāyāma and other practices, has said: "It took me four years of inner striving to find a real Way, even though the divine help was with me all the time, and even then, it seemed to come by an accident...."²¹ In those three days when he shut himself up with Lele in a room in Mazumdar's house at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo was a hijacked traveller in the worlds of vacant forms and a diver at last into the sea of Nirvanic immobility. That first realisation could have been the enduring last one too, for that itself brought "an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom".²² But, actually, with Sri Aurobindo it was only the start towards the ultimate goal. There were surges forward and bold leaps - all the worlds invited exploration and conquest. But, as regards "a real way", this meant ten more years of "intense Yoga under a supreme guidance to trace it out", and so much effort was necessary because "I had my past and the world's past to assimilate and overpass before I could find and found the future".²³ Without denying the Nirvanic experience, Sri Aurobindo was able at Alipur to rear on the foundations of the Peace and silence and freedom other and even greater realisations: first, a change of vision face to face with what had "the aspect of an illusionary world" - the triune perception of "an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow",²⁴ and, second, the exploration of consciousness beyond the Mind. If at Baroda Sri Aurobindo had plumped depths of incomprehensibility, movements of insensate shadows and prevalence of total formlessness, at Alipur the ambrosial taste of the Divine in all things and the feel of the Divine caress at all times helped him to take off - with Vivekananda playing the role of Paraclete - from Mind's long runway and soar into the regions of the Superconscious, soar higher and higher, careering towards the Supermind.

One result of these experiences and realisations was that Sri Aurobindo saw that the perennial truths of Sanatana Dharma or Eternal Religion both included and transcended the endless vicissitudes of political action. Even earlier, he had never as a rule brought any rancour into his politics; he never entertained any

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hatred for England or the English people. He had always based his claim for freedom on India's inherent right to freedom, not simply on any charges of misgovernment or oppression. And if he ever attacked persons, attacked even violently - as he did Gokhale, Morley or Minto - it was for their views or for the nature of their participation in public affairs, and not with reference to their personal or private life. After Alipur, Sri Aurobindo's politics underwent a further change and transformation, and became merely the image of niskāma karma a part of the broader discipline of Yoga. Withersoever it might lead him, he must now follow the inner direction so that he might gain perfect control over the instruments of purposive action that were lodged deep and veiled within. Rishi Vishvamitra is said to have created a whole new world so that King Trishuncou could sing his Hymn of Triumph:

I shall not die.

Although this body, when the spirit tires

Of its cramped residence, shall feed the fires,

My house consumes, not I. ...

I hold the sky

Together and upbear the teeming earth.

I was the eternal thinker at my birth

And shall be, though I die.²⁵

In received mythology, that was a Pyrrhic victory which wasted Vishvamitra's gains of tapas without winning for Trishuncou quite what he wanted. Neither here on earth, nor there in Indra's heaven, but in some incredible space-station in mid-air! What Sri Aurobindo strove for was something quite different: it was to change the world, this world, to transfigure into a New Heaven and a New Earth this bank and these meadows of Time. As he recapitulated in the course of an interview with Dilip Kumar Roy:

I too wanted at one time to transform through my Yoga the face of the world. I had wanted to change the fundamental nature and movements of humanity, to exile all the evils which affect mortality.... It was with this aim and outlook that I turned to Yoga in the beginning, and I came to Pondicherry because I had been directed by the Voice to pursue my Yoga here.²⁶

Between Alipur and Pondicherry, there had intervened the Karmayogin phase when an attempt was made to transform politics into Sanatana Dharma, the marching orders to go to Chandernagore, the startlingly unexpected experience of a fission and a fusion of consciousness, and the fresh marching orders to proceed further to complete the work in the preordained "Cave of Tapasya".  

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V

We have seen how, after his arrival in Pondicherry, on 4 April 1910, Sri Aurobindo lived at various places - Shankar Chettiar's house, Sundaram Chettiar's house, Raghavan House, Mission House, and the house in Rue Francois Martin ('Guest House'). Far from Calcutta's bureaucratic fever-paroxysms and the incessant rumble and rattle of politics, far from his closest relations (his wife, his sister and the rest), far from his colleagues and collaborators (Nivedita, Shyamsundar), far from Chandernagore and the cover afforded by Motilal Roy, at Pondicherry Sri Aurobindo started life anew and launched into an uncertain future that was also a future of infinite possibility. There were young men like Bejoy, Moni and Nolini to minister to his needs, and to receive the bounty of his love and instruction and silent guidance. There were the other political exiles and revolutionaries - Bharati, Srinivasachariar, V.V.S. Aiyar - who had frequent contacts with Sri Aurobindo with whom they made a seminal world within the bleak world of Pondicherry, at once a source of irritation and menace to the British authorities in India and the seed-bed for India's coming regeneration. Sri Aurobindo's outer circumstances - the obscurity, the insecurity, the enforced austerity - bore, however, no relation to the ardours and advances of his Yoga in the secret caverns of his soul.

We do not, of course, know what exactly happened during those four years of "silent Yoga". Sri Aurobindo had made certain test flights and divings at Alipur and at Chandernagore. Neither the heights nor the depths were thus foreign to him. The descent from mind to matter, the ascent from mind to Supermind: he had advanced in both. The problem was, at each stage of ascent, to link it with all the steps of descent; and, in each span of descent, to infer all the involved tiers of ascent. To mark the fission between the higher and lower spheres of Reality and at the same time to engineer a process - a whole chain-reaction - of fusion and thereby encompass a feat of transformation! If the ascent is not to be a flight and an escape for ever but is designed to bring the new gains to the depths: if the exploration of the depths is not to be a drowning and a dissolution but a scouring and churning resulting in the surfacing of involved nectar - then it follows that the upward and the downward movements, the ascent and the descent, must be continuously teamed together so that at every stage a reconciliation, consolidation and integration can be ensured. Of the kind of Yoga or tapasya on which Sri Aurobindo was engaged, tentatively at Alipur, experimentally at Chandernagore, and in sustained and total absorption at Pondicherry, we have random if significant hints in some of his later poems. Thus about the exploration of the forbidding depths of the Inconscience in 'A God's Labour':

He who would bring the heavens here

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way... 

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I have been digging deep and long

Mid a horror of filth and mire...

I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night

To bring the fire to man... ²⁷

Again, in a sonnet of 1938, 'The Pilgrim of the Night:

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God's deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.

I left the glory of the illumined Mind

And the calm rapture of the divinised soul

And travelled through a vastness dim and blind

To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.

I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime

And still that weary journeying knows no end;

Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,

There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,

And yet I know my footprints' track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality.²⁸

This is a far cry from the realisation described in 'Nirvana':

Only the illimitable Permanent

Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,

Replaces all....²⁹

or the thrilled delight of the soul's emancipation conveyed in the lines of 'Transformation':

My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,

My body is God's happy living tool,

My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.³⁰

Now it is deliberate descent, a purposeful push into the interior of Night; the descent is to bring up the hidden pearls of great price, the push is for the purpose of opening up a corridor for the Light streaming from above. Every upward leap is to be followed by a corresponding transformation below, and the total light of Superconscience must invade the total night of Inconscience wholly to transform it.

Between the Baroda experience of January 1908 and the completion of the  

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quest and discovery in 1914, there lay an arid stretch of years to all outward appearance (politics, prison-life, politics with a difference, self-exilement, poverty and privation), but under the surface the roots of life were rich with sap ready to burst into the sunshine of a glorious day. It took many years for the seeming waste-land to leap into life, but that was only because Sri Aurobindo had his past and the world's "to assimilate and overpass" before he could "find and found the future". Seekers in the past had made many an invasion of the Invisible, many an assault on Reality, and had experimented with divers beliefs and ways of living and divers techniques of self-realisation. The grand trunk road of human history was marked with the hooves of materialism, atheism, pantheism, theism, idealism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, hedonism, nihilism, and the atmosphere still reverberated with the sighs and groans and hopes and ecstatic cries of the votaries of one or another religion. And Sri Aurobindo had himself passed through the stages of rationalist, agnostic, sceptic, advaitin, bhakta, shakta - and he had to gather into one vast synthesis the variegated, and sometimes conflicting and contradictory, elements of his own and the world's spiritual experience and of the several Yoga disciplines of the past. But once he had discovered the key to the synthesis in the Supermind, the rest was not very difficult. The new synthesis of knowledge called also for a new integral Yoga for the translation of the logical possibility into realised actuality: this Yoga had to be a delicate, powerful and multi-pronged movement in consciousness, comprehending, reconciling and exceeding the two fundamental categories of experience. Matter and Spirit, and the three classical high roads to release and realisation, Jñāna, Karma and Bhakti, and harnessing above all the breakthrough spiritual force of sovereign Supermind.

It was a significant victory, no doubt; but the victory was also tinged with disappointment. As he told Dilip Kumar Roy:

It was then that my outlook changed with the knowledge born of my new Yogic consciousness. But then I found, to my utter disillusionment, that it was only my ignorance which had led me to think that the impossible was feasible here and now... in order to help humanity out, it was not enough for an individual, however great, to achieve an ultimate solution individually; humanity has to be ripe for it too.³¹

If this realisation of his powerlessness to alter the face of the world with a mere flourish of his Yogic wand did indeed disillusion him, it at least indicated clearly enough his future line of action. He would not attempt the establishment of a Golden Age, a Satya Yuga, a New Heaven and a New Earth, all at once; that might prove a fiasco no better than the Trishuncou-Swarga of Vishvamitra's creation. What Sri Aurobindo could do was to convey to others the lights that were the enduring gains of his Yoga and his well-grounded hopes for the supramentalisation of human nature and of all terrestrial existence. Perhaps some few choice spirits at least would hearken and respond to the paean of hope and the lure of the Light, and join Sri Aurobindo in structuring the conditions favourable for the descent of the Supramental Light and its acceptance and absorption by all the levels of terrestrial  

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existence down to the physical and the inconscient. In the meantime, he would work with the chosen instruments and await the phoenix hour when his "too too sullied" earth that was heavy and in travail would give birth to a supramentalised blissful world:

.. .for the golden age

In Kali comes, the iron lined with gold,

The Yoga shall be given back to men,

The sects shall cease, the grim debates die out

And atheism perish from the Earth,

Blasted with knowledge; love and brotherhood

And wisdom repossess Sri Krishna's world.³²  

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