Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Renascent India and Sri Aurobindo

I

When, by the end of the eighteenth century, the foreigner consolidated his power in India, the country was to all appearance a spiritual "waste land". The Western impact on the Orient had completed the discomfiture of the latter; the old order was seemingly dead, the new one could not be as much as thought of — and only a terrible stupor prevailed, paralysing the secret springs of the nation's high creative endeavour.

For nearly three thousand years — or more — India had been in the vanguard of human civilisation. She had, almost continuously, thrown out with exuberant self-confidence an amazing variety of literatures, philosophies, schools of painting and architecture and dancing and music, sound systems of government, fruitful traditions in medicine and engineering, and the elaborate sciences of grammar, mathematics, chemistry and astrono my, "One of the oldest races and greatest civilisation on this earth, the most indomitable in vitality, the most fecund in greatness, the deepest in life, the most wonderful in potentiality", India had taken into itself "numerous sources of strength from foreign strains of blood and other types of human civilisation", and over a long stretch of years dared gloriously and raced forward adventurously.¹* Wave upon wave of invasion had passed over the vast subcontinent, but the stream of Indian culture, deep and broad at once, had pursued its august and serene course, little affected by the periodic spurts of foam or froth on the undulating surface. How, then, was the miracle — for miracle surely it was — of such abundant vitality preserved over so enormous a stretch of time? How did such vitality manage ever to tame the up surging forces of disintegration into submission or to force even out of them new syntheses, new harmonies, new creations? The answer stares us in the face if we correctly read the story of the rise and fulfilment of ancient Indian civilisation:

Her first period was luminous with the discovery of the Spirit; her second completed the discovery of the Dharma; her third elaborated into detail the first simpler formulation of the Shastra; but none was exclusive, the three elements are always present.

In this third period the curious elaboration of all life into a science and an art assumes extraordinary proportions.... On one side there is an insatiable curiosity, the desire of life to know itself in every detail, on the other a spirit of organisation and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with a harmonised knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure. Thus an ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and

*The number stands for the reference and is placed at the end of the book, while the asterisk stands for a footnote and put, as in this case, at the foot of the page.  

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gust of life and, mediating between them, a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence combined of the rational, ethical and aesthetic mind each at a high intensity of action, created the harmony of the ancient Indian culture.²

At the time of the Vedic dawn, the Rishis, the seer-poets, having already won their way to the triune vision of satyam-rtam-brihat (the True, the Right, the Vast), opened the eyes of the people to the Flame that lights up the dark spaces of consciousness and liberates the soul long cabinned in its impotent (if also self-forged) separativity. The Rising sang, the Rishis exhorted, the Rishis led the way:

A perfect path of the Truth

has come into being

for our journey

to the other shore

beyond the darkness.³

Beholding the higher Light

beyond the darkness

we came to the divine Sun

in the Godhead,

to the highest Light of all.⁴

We have crossed through

to the other shore

of this darkness,

Dawn is breaking forth

and she creates and forms

the births of Knowledge.⁵

Our fathers found out the hidden light,

by the truth in their thoughts

they brought to birth

the Dawn.⁶

This was more than poetry, this was revelation, this was the recordation of the dynamics of spiritual action. It is easy to get lost in the hymnal wealth of the Rig Veda — over 1,000 poems and 10,000 verses. But with this clue to the labyrinth, one might venture unafraid into the Veda's symbolistic world:

...the central idea of the Vedic Rishis was the transition of the human soul from a state of death to a state of immortality by the exchange of the Falsehood for the Truth, of divided and limited being for integrality and infinity. Death is the mortal state of Matter with Mind and Life involved in it; Immortality  

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is a state of infinite being, consciousness and Bliss. Man rises beyond the two firmaments, rodasī. Heaven and Earth, mind and body, to the infinity of the Truth, Mahas, and so to the divine Bliss. This is the "great passage" discovered by the Ancestors, the ancient Rishis.⁷

Seer-poets like Vishwamitra, Vasistha, Vamadeva, Dirghatamas, Madhuchchandas, Bharadwaja and Medhatithi were indeed ecstatics, diviners, poets, illuminants and law-givers rolled in one, and the Indian mind has always — and especially in times of perplexity or distress — turned back to the Vedic home of origins and its springs of perennial Truth.

In the Upanishadic Age that followed, the marvellous insights of the Veda acquired clearer definition, and intuitive seeing went hand in hand with logical reasoning to structure those superb dialectics, those Himalayas of striving and realisation, that have since compelled the awe and admiration of the world. There is an utter incandescent finality in affirmations like —

He whose self has become all existences

(for he has the knowledge),

how shall he be deluded?

He who sees everywhere oneness,

whence shall he have grief?⁸

Verily, O Gargi,

at the command of the Imperishable

the sun and the moon stand apart

the earth and the sky stand apart

the moments, hours, days, nights, fortnights,

months, seasons, years

stand apart...⁹

For who could live or breathe

if there were not this delight of existence

as the ether in which we dwell?

From Delight all these beings are born,

by Delight they exist and grow,

to Delight they return.¹⁰

Through self-mastery to world-mastery, from the science of the Self to the technology of social well-being such was the fool-proof sequence of inner and outer "mastery, inner realisation and outer fulfilment.

In the next Age — the Indian "Heroic Age" imaged in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — there was a further significant development. It is of course difficult (if not impossible) to dissociate mythic from historic truth, but mythic truth — the truth of Rama's fight with the Rakshasa, the truth of Krishna's singular ministry  

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in the field of Kurukshetra — verily transcends history.* And so we find reared upon the foundations of Veda and Upanishad the crowning edifice of the Bhagavad Gita, the harmony of the three great means and powers of jñāna, bhakti and karma — Knowledge, Love and Works — through which man may infallibly achieve both self-realisation and world-redemption. It would be unwise to tear the Gita from its Kurukshetra context, for the Gita is not only a wide-ranging treatise on ethical doctrine and spiritual philosophy but also — and no less pointedly — a complete (and apparently convincing) answer to the problem of facing an acute crisis in human life. The crisis recurs from time to time, for we too find ourselves unpredictably trapped in our own Kurukshetras; we are overcome by sudden distress, we feel paralysed in body and mind, we are cast down by despair. But the Gita still comes to us with terrific urgency, giving us a shot in the arm and energising us into right and resolute action.

In the days of its plenitude, Indian civilisation took equal note of the primacy of the Spirit and the immediate claims of phenomenal life. Life was a movement, a progression, a battle; and life was complex, and human nature was complex. Whether for individual or collective man, the key to progressive development lay in the realisation of inner unity and the willing acceptance of the play of outer variety. Ātma-vidyā, certainly; but also the minutiae of Dharma — "special for the special person, stage of development, pursuit of life or individual field of action, but universal too in the broad lines which all ought to pursue".¹¹ The culture of ancient India was a grand synthesis indeed, a field where patterns of order — like the four graded classes (Varnas) of society and the four successive stages (Ashramas) of a developing human life — permitted abundant variation within them and where heaven found a kin-soil on the earth:

Indian culture raised the crude animal life of desire, self-interest and satisfied propensity beyond its first intention to a noble self-exceeding and shapeliness by infusing into it the order and high aims of the Dharma. But its profounder characteristic aim — and in this it was unique — was to raise this nobler life too of the self-perfecting human being beyond its own intention to a mightiest self-exceeding and freedom.... Not a noble but ever death-bound manhood is the highest height of man's perfection: immortality, freedom, divinity are within his grasp....

On this first firm and noble basis Indian civilisation grew to its maturity and became a thing rich, splendid and unique. While it filled the view with the last mountain prospect of a supreme spiritual elevation, it did not neglect the life of the levels. It lived between the busy life of the city and village, the freedom and seclusion of the forest and the last overarching illimitable ether. Moving firmly between life and death it saw beyond both and cut out a hundred

* Cf. Sri Aurobindo: "If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual being, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of Mary physically lived and suffered and died in Judea. So too the Krishna who matters to us is the eternal incarnation of the Divine and not the historical teacher and leader of men." (Essays on the Gita, SABCL, Vol. 13, p. 12)  

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high roads to immortality. It developed the external nature and drew it into the inner self; it enriched life to raise it into the spirit. Thus founded, thus trained, the ancient Indian race grew to astonishing heights of culture and civilisation; it lived with a noble, well-based, ample and vigorous order and freedom; it developed a great literature, sciences, arts, crafts, industries; it rose to the highest possible ideals and no mean practice of knowledge and culture, of arduous greatness and heroism, of kindness, philanthropy and human sympathy and oneness; it laid the inspired basis of wonderful spiritual philosophies; it examined the secrets of external nature and discovered and lived the boundless and miraculous truths of the inner being; it fathomed self and understood and possessed the world.¹²

It was a delicate balance, but as long as it was maintained, people lived freely and purposively, participating in the delight of existence, and fairly poised between the kindred points of earth and heaven.

Yet human situations are far from static and every Age needs its own creative synthesis, its own clue to dynamic action. The march of time erupts a succession of challenges, and these challenges must needs be met and mastered and gathered into a new — a more comprehensive — synthesis, a more infallible engine of integral action. When that fails to happen, the process of decadence must start and gather increasing momentum from the shock of every successive challenge. Such times are marked by the persistence of 'forms' but the ignoration of the spirit behind them, the preoccupation with intellectual debate, personal advancement and egoistic assertion, and the loss of the wider vision and the inattention to the greater good. Following that glorious Age of creative harmony, India did go through a period of decadence, a time of narrow ends and muddled means, of individual decay and social disruption. At first, it was no more than a slight disturbance of the old delicate balance: a shift towards artha and kama and away from dharma and moksa, a craving for luxury and artificiality, and a cultivated distaste for the older simplicity and humanity; also an excessive assertion of this-worldliness — or a frantic and total retreat to other-worldliness. Soon the evils became more pronounced, and it needed Gautama Siddhartha the Buddha, with his message of freedom and gospel of compassion, to restore dhamma and re-establish sangha.

The Buddha made Asoka possible, and even after Asoka, in the Age of the imperial Guptas, India retained much of her vitality, strength and mastery of the arts of life and the key to the kingdoms of the Greater Life. For about 1,000 years since the beginning of the Christian era, Indian culture was a living thing, an expression of the sanity, vitality and intellectual keenness of the Indian people; and "though sophistication set in and proliferated, the links with the spirit were not snapped:

It is still and always spiritual, philosophical, religious, ethical, but the inner austerer things seem to draw back a little and to stand in the background.... It is the great period of logical philosophy, of science, of art and the developed  

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crafts, law, politics, trade, colonisation, the great kingdoms and empires with their ordered and elaborate administrations, the minute rule of the Shastras in all departments of thought and life, an enjoyment of all that is brilliant, sensuous, agreeable, a discussion of all that could be thought and known, a fixing and systemising of all that could be brought into the compass of intelligence and practice, — the most splendid, sumptuous and imposing millennium of Indian culture.¹³

Then came Islam. The Punjab, all North India, and even South India felt the effects of the traumatic impact of invader, conqueror and proselytiser. Hinduism was still deeply entrenched, certainly in South India, but also in many parts of North India. In areas of Muslim domination and persecution, however, the average Hindu was apt to feel demoralised. On the other hand, the divine singers of Tamil Nad, the Virasaivas and Dasas of Andhra-Karnatak, the Saints of Maharashtra, and the followers of divers bhakti cults in Assam, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and the Punjab did keep the embers of spirituality alive and hold the people together even in those dark dark days. The Muslim rulers (with notable exceptions) were a prey to ambition, greed and fanaticism, and fought among themselves as well as oppressed their Hindu subjects; and the Hindu rulers and ruling classes were no better. Generally speaking, India during the period of Muslim domination (except for brief oases like the reign of Akbar) was a desert of bleak unease and poverty of spirit. Guru Nanak's description of his own times (fifteenth to sixteenth century) may be said to fit the whole period almost:

In this Kali age

flaming passion is the chariot

and falsehood the charioteer..,    (Asa, 470)

This Kali age is like a drawn knife

with butchers for kings;

and righteousness has taken wings;

in this dark night of total falsehood,

the Moon of Truth isn't visible....

How shall deliverance be secured?      (Var Majh, 145)

This distinguishes the Kali age:

the tyrant is readily approved....  (Ramkali, 902)

In language so familiar to Indian thought, the country was getting enveloped more and more in "tāmasic ignorance and rājasic impulsion".¹⁴ It was an Asuric age, native Asuras fought among themselves and fought the foreign Asuras, forced the sāttvic men into obscurity and brought about the reign of tamas.

At the time of the Muslim advent, the widespread knowledge had already begun to shrink and the Rajputs who were predominantly rajasic occupied  

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the throne of India. Northern India was in the grip of wars and internal quarrels and, owing to the decadence of Buddhism, Bengal was overcome with tamas. Spirituality sought refuge in South India and by the grace of that sattwic power South India was able to retain her freedom for a long time. Yearning for knowledge, progress of knowledge slowly declined; instead, erudition was more and more honoured and glorified; spiritual knowledge, development of yogic power and inner realisation were mostly replaced by tamasic religious worship and observance of rajasic ceremonies to gain worldly ends.... Such an extinction of the national dharma had brought about the death of Greece, Rome, Egypt and Assyria; but the Aryan race... was saved by the rejuvenating flow of heavenly nectar which gushed from time to time from the ancient source. Shankara, Ramanuja, Chaitanya, Nanak, Ramdas and Tukaram brought back to life a moribund India by sprinkling her with that divine nectar. However, the current of rajas and tamas was so strong that by its pull, even the best were altered into the worst.... In the eighteenth century this current attained its maximum force.... Power was not lacking in the country, but owing to the eclipse of the Aryan dharma and of sattwa, that power unable to defend itself, brought about its own destruction. Finally, the Asuric power of India, vanquished by the Asuric power of Britain, became shackled and lifeless. India plunged into an inert sleep of tamas.¹⁵

The decadence of the brahman caste that was ready enough to compromise on •both ends and means, the decline of the warrior kshatriya caste that lost its high ideals and its native vigour, the precarious predicament of the 'lower' orders in those times of political uncertainty and economic chaos, the steady obscuration of ethical lights, the general weakening of family and community ties, all contributed to India's ignoble and fallen condition in the eighteenth century and after. In Sisir Kumar Mitra's words,

There were corruptions in every walk of life, social, cultural and political. Bengal seemed to be slowly sinking into a morass of decay and degeneration. Not only in Bengal, this tendency prevailed more or less in the whole of India, and its evils crept into the entire life of the Indian people, the forms and institutions of which were either dead or dying.¹⁶

The native vitality and robust zest for life that had once seemed verily inexhaustible now showed clear signs of emasculation and drying up, the sustaining force 'of spirituality seemed to have retreated to the farthest interior, and the old subtle mechanism of intelligence seemed to be too easily put out of action by the shock of new phenomena. And so — with a fatal rapidity — the centrifugal forces defiantly asserted themselves, the blood-streams of culture ceased to flow as of old with their innate gusto, and Bharatavarsha became anaemic and wasted and diseased and degraded. It looked as though the twin movements, Vaishnavite and Saivite, for the revival of Hinduism, and the movement of Sufism in Islam, had also lost their great spiritual drive, and only a memory of god-intoxicated singers like Eknath and Kabir and Tulsi Das and Chaitanya and Farid and Nanak lay behind  

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to keep the obscured embers of Indian spirituality yet alive. Palsied in its outer forms, miserably racked within, breathing but an atmosphere of violence or sloth and caught helplessly in the tangle of oppression and sword-law, the condition of India was indeed pitiable:

Any other nation under the same pressure would have long ago perished soul and body. But certainly the outward members were becoming gangrened; the powers of renovation seemed for a moment to be beaten by the powers of stagnation, and stagnation is death.¹⁷

And yet, — was it really possible? How indeed had a change so catastrophic really come to pass? Having spiralled up to the peaks of divine endeavour in the Vedic and Upanishadic Ages, and in the Ages of Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa, how had the curve of Indian civilisation been deflected from its high altitudes, how had its movements been strained lower and lower, even to be level with the rugged and forbidding sterility of the "waste land"?

Obviously, then, as already indicated, the change had been brought about in different stages, and as a consequence of the operation of a number of adverse circumstances. There was, firstly, the failure of the fount of vital energy resulting from the studied denial of the ascetic, his systematic refusal to look at the world and its million-petalled munificence of colour and sound and taste and smell,, or at the human complex with its imponderables of ardour, agitation, love, hope, struggle, despair and renewal. There was, secondly, a failure of the fount of intellectual energy, "a slumber of the scientific and the critical mind as well as the creative intuition"¹⁸; dialectical reasoning, with its endless propensity for hairsplitting and for the projection of multiple categories and minute differentiations, now acquired an oppressive vogue, and mere sectarianism assumed the garb of omniscience, sat on the high judgement seat, and doled out fitful doses of stale counsel or authoritarian regulation to the mass of the people who looked up for guidance and spiritual food. Above all, spirituality was no more an all-embracing phenomenon, giving strength and significance to every minor and major department of life and conduct, but a vague something whose existence was admitted indeed as a matter of safe policy, but whose influence was reduced to a meagre minimum. Thus, while spirituality remained a formally acknowledged factor in the life of the Hindu, being insulated against effective functioning it could burn "no longer with the large and clear flame of knowledge of former times, but in intense jets and in a dispersed action"; and whatever the splendours of India's past achievement, "at a certain point where progress, adaptation, a new flowering should have come in, the old civilisation stopped short, partly drew back, partly lost its way".¹⁹

These, then, were the causes of the decline and fall — the temporary fall — of India's great civilisation: the will to live was lacking, the intellect had grown moribund, and spirituality would not (or could not) assert itself and revitalise the rest but was unaccountably quiescent or at best was only feebly and haphazardly alive. The impact of the West, and the subsequent national confusions and disasters,  

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quickened the process of decay and disintegration, and the stream of Indian culture and civilisation was in very truth lost — as if for ever — amidst the brambles and quicksands of the eighteenth century. The wheel had turned and turned and brought the season of drought and difficulty, and for the Indian nation the prospect seemed unpromising in the extreme:

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.²⁰

II

What the British conquest did to India is a large subject, and the whole truth of the matter hasn't been said yet. In his Foreword to a formidable tome. Modern India and the West: A Study of the Interaction of Their Civilisations, first published in 1941 and reprinted in 1968, Lord Meston remarked that "the metaphor of the impact is inappropriate"; there has been "nothing, or very little, of a clash" between the two cultures! The trauma of conquest of an alien power was nothing. It had all been so gentle, so civilised — like a stream flowing, like a breeze blowing — and it had been entirely to the advantage of India; no violence, no clash at all, just peaceful penetration! The editor of the volume, L.S.S. O'Malley, pointed out that Hindu rulers had charged one-sixth of the produce as tax. Akbar raised it to one-third, and Shah Jehan to one-half. Predatory chieftains — Muslim, Maratha, Jat — had laid the country waste; the great ones ate up the little ones, and the king robbed one and all. It was a dismal tale of poverty, oppression and misery. Having found India in such a condition of chaos and bankruptcy, the British had succeeded — as it were, in spite of the people of India with their abysmal ignorance of the first principles-of science, their chronic habit of arranging marriages by comparing horoscopes, and their stupid addiction to superstitions of all sorts — in establishing the rule of law and setting the country on the royal road to progress. Lest one should demur that this is, perhaps, a too partisan view, impartial authority is invoked in the person of one Professor D. A. Buchanan (of U.S.A.) who seems to have said somewhere that "in maintaining peace, unifying the country, developing communications and setting up a standard of integrity and industry", the British Government had "accomplished more than could have been expected of any other government, Indian or foreign, during this period". A Daniel indeed come to judgement!

On the other hand, books like Dadabhai Naoroji's Poverty and Un-British Rule m India and Romesh Chunder Dutt's Economic History of India have highlighted the evil effects of the British presence in India. It is hardly necessary to labour the point that the loss of political freedom meant, not merely the economic exploitation of the country,  

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but also a warping of the sensibility, a demoralisation of the intellect and the impoverishment of the spirit of the people of India. Writing in 1837, F. J. Shore admitted that India "has been drained of a large proportion of the wealth she once possessed; and her energies have been cramped by a sordid system of misrule to which the interests of millions have been sacrificed for the benefit of the few".²¹ And, writing next year, Montgomery Martin gave these startling figures:

This annual drain of £3,000,000 on British India amounted in thirty years, at 12 per cent compound interest, to the enormous sum of £723,997,917 sterling; or at a low rate, as £2,000,000 for fifty years, to 8,400,000,000 sterling!²²

The East India Company was always inclined to put the prosperity of India in the future tense, and as for its administration, was it not described by Burke as "one of the most corrupt and obstructive tyrannies that probably ever existed in the world"? Even the explosive events of 1857 and the assumption of direct responsibility by the British Crown hardly effected a sea-change, for in a sermon delivered on 29 March 1874, the Bishop of Manchester felt compelled to make the sad admission:

The question may be asked, "What have we done for India?" India has been the nursery of great soldiers, administrators, financiers, statesmen; yet even to this hour, she has hardly been governed with higher aims than as a field in which cadets of English families may push their fortunes, or as a market in which English merchants may with advantage sell their wares.*

The typical Sahib in India, on his own chosen ground, was a self-confident and self-important figure enough, but neither his writ nor his understanding went very far — hardly a stone's throw beyond (in Kipling's phrase) "the well-ordered road". How much does the yardstick understand the man it seeks to measure? This was also the predicament of the British ruler in India. To feel India, says John Masters, "you must become Indian, gain one set of qualities and lose another. As a race we don't do it — we can't".²³ To become Indian was to be able to understand and serve India; this the British rulers didn't even attempt to do. To help themselves (or Britain), and in the process to injure India, was far easier; and this is what generally happened.

But that too, perhaps, is not the whole truth, for the Western impact was ultimately to prove somewhat of a blessing in disguise. "The English came," says Sisir Kumar Mitra, "at a crucial stage of India's evolution to fulfill a Will of the Shakti that guides her destiny."²⁴ It was rather like the darkest hour that precedes the dawn:

For whatever temporary rotting and destruction this crude impact of European life and culture has caused, it gave three needed impulses. It revived the dormant intellectual and critical impulse; it rehabilitated life and awakened the desire of new creation; it put the reviving Indian spirit face to face with

* My attention to this passage was drawn by my son, S. Ambirajan.

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novel conditions and ideals and the urgent necessity of understanding, assimilating and conquering them.²⁵

Naturally enough, new times threw up new men, and the clash between the old and the new led to ready acceptances and affirmations — or violent revulsions and retreats — and, finally, to revisions, readjustments and revaluations. There were sympathetic and understanding scholars like Sir William Jones, Henry Colebrooke and Horace Hayman Wilson who opened the way to Indo-British cultural understanding. The European Christian missionaries, of course, had their own axes to grind, but they too indirectly helped to lift the cultural iron curtain between the rulers and the ruled. But, after all, it is for the nation's own sons and daughters to strive for her redemption — break fresh ground when necessary, to beat back the false, and to assimilate the good.

In the first important phase of India's reaction to the Western impact, there were the stirrings of intellectual activity stimulated by contact with the new rulers, their language and literature, their social and political institutions, their religion, their whole attitude to life. The missionaries had established printing presses in different parts of the country, and books in English and in the languages of India had begun to appear since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Hicky's Bengal Gazette (1780) had been followed by other papers, and Indian journalism was born. Private English schools were established as early as 1717 at Cuddalore (near Pondicherry), in 1718 at Bombay and in 1720 at Calcutta. The East India Company having assumed, after 1813, educative and cultural (and not alone police) functions, and having shed its commercial monopoly, attempts were made to revive Oriental learning through Government initiative or subsidies. But presently, following current trends and also bowing to the weight of authoritative opinion (Rammohan Roy on the one hand, Macaulay on the other), Lord William Bentinck's Government resolved in 1835 to give official support to "English education alone". This was the real effective beginning of the "new education".

The role of Raja Rammohan Roy in this phase of India's renaissance was most important, and indeed the turning of the tide of India's fortunes after the blight of the eighteenth century may be said to have been marked by his occurrence in Bengal, his advocacy of English education, his fervent plea for urgent social reform (like the abolition of sati), his founding of the Brahmo Samaj, and his success in starting a dialogue with the British ruling class — a dialogue conducted with authority and responsibility as well as mutual esteem and regard. Rammohan was truly an Olympian figure, and he inaugurated, in Mahendranath Sircar's words, "a new revival in culture, in social reform and in religious awakening.... He was essentially a builder. He came to fulfill and not to destroy".²⁶ And yet, although he seemed to wander between two worlds (the old Hindu and the new British), his was no split sensibility, he knew where he was going, and where he wanted his country (and even the world) to go. As Dr. Wingfield-Stratfold has put it, Rammohan "was no mere Deist or unbeliever, but a loyal Hindu, a Brahmin of the Brahmins, steeped in the lore of the Upanishads and making his life's work  

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the restoration of the Hindu faith to its pristine simplicity".²⁷ When to the steady inner deterioration caused by the wrangles among selfish ambitious native chieftains and war-lords was added the shock of the Western impact, there followed the collapse of the old order; and the establishment of British rule over the greater part of India occasioned, even if unconsciously, the first rumblings of a social and cultural revolution. But Rammohan's was a move as much from within as from without, and hence his work has been the more enduring. With his vast self-acquired wealth and his varied intellectual interests, he could have lived a life of luxurious ease or scholarly benevolence, but he preferred rather to lead a life of contention and controversy and hectic activity. It is but just appraisement when Nolini Kanta Gupta describes Rammohan as the first

...to draw the country's consciousness from ages past, from the ancient ways, out into the free light and air of the modem day, the first to initiate the country into the new religion of the new age; in him appeared in seed-form the potentialities of all future creation; sparks of his illumined mind entered into every important domain of the collective life of the race — politics, society, religion, education, literature, language — and brought to the country a new birth, a new life, a new creation.²⁸

A Colossus though Rammohan was, he too had his collaborators, and he .was blessed in his successors who in their own several ways continued his noble work of galvanising the Hindu fold and the Indian nation. Even a critic of Rammohan like Radhakanta Dev served only to temper the quality of the new thought and the new life it wished to generate. He was shrewd enough to utter the grave warning:

Nothing should be guarded against more carefully than the insensible introduction of a system whereby, with a smattering knowledge of English, youths are weaned from the plough, the axe, and the loom, to render them ambitious only for the clerkship for which hosts would besiege the Government and Mercantile Offices, and the majority being disappointed (as they must be), ' would (with their little knowledge inspiring pride) be unable to return to their trade, and would necessarily turn vagabonds.²⁹

But the new education through the English medium found more supporters than critics, and like heady wine it turned young men's minds and sensibilities. There were the "Derozio Men" — as the students of the Calcutta Hindu College who had studied under Henry Derozio were called — who could salute Kali with "Good morning, madam!", who thought (in Surendranath Banerjee's words) that "everything English was good — even the drinking of brandy was a virtue; everything not English was to be viewed with suspicion". Even so eminently seasoned a scholar like Iswarchandra Vidyasagar — the very opposite of a mere iconoclast — seems to have once remarked:

That the Vedanta and Sankhya are false systems of philosophy is not more a matter of dispute.... While teaching these in the Sanskrit course, we should oppose them by sound philosophy in the English course to counteract their influence.³⁰  

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Vidvasagar was a giant among men, and his burning humanism shot out in many directions of religious, educational and social reform. But his formula of enlightenment plus unorthodoxy was not capable of easy realisation, not certainly in mid-nineteenth century. Study in missionary schools often led to conversion, and the taste of English education often led to alienation from traditional backgrounds. Families were divided, homes were divided, for while the elders and the women still swore by traditional values, the young things shouted and acted their defiance of orthodoxy. The converted Christian and the anglicised Indian soon awoke to the realisation that they were neither here nor there, being acceptable neither to orthodox Hindu society nor to the privileged English ruling class. They became very nearly exiles in their own country.

But this was no more than a temporary phase. When the first excitement had passed, there was a healthy interfusion of the new and the old, and the primacy of the West was no more blindly accepted. In the creative work of Bankim Chandra and Rabindranath, in the tremendous visions of Vivekananda, in the spectacular ministry of Dayanand Saraswati, in the seasoned evangelism of Ranade and Telang, the 'new' forged syntheses with the yet living, the perennially enduring past of India. Brahmo Samaj (with its later variations), Arya Samaj, Prarthana Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission, Theosophical Society are among these syntheses, each with its own secret of power and its own circle of influence. The greatest of these was undoubtedly the stupendous spiritual phenomenon of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, followed by the global ministry of his great disciple, Vivekananda, resulting in a movement with a "wide synthesis of past religious motives and spiritual experiences topped by a reaffirmation of the old asceticism and monasticism, but with new living strands in it and combined with a strong humanitarianism and zeal of missionary expansion".³¹

There is a third phase too, an attempt at sheer fresh creation, as distinct from even the best reconstruction or the highest synthesis:

The third, only now beginning or recently begun, is rather a process of new . creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind remains supreme, recovers its truth, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modem idea and form, but so transmutes and Indianises it, so absorbs and so transforms it entirely into itself that its foreign character disappears and it becomes another harmonious element in the characteristic working of the ancient goddess, the Shakti of India mastering and taking possession of the modem influence, no longer possessed or overcome by it.³²

III

India is traditionally the land of Rishis, men cast in heroic or almost superhuman? mould, men with some Vision to project, some Word or mantra to communicate some new Order to establish. From Vedic times, and through all the ages of our long history, 

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a succession of Rishis have appeared, now here now there, often (or especially) in the very epochs of immitigable darkness or distress; and modern India too has been rich in Rishis who have glimpsed the Vision, uttered the Word, and led the Way. In a speech delivered in 1896, Mahadev Govind Ranade mentioned habitual sincerity of purpose, sustained earnestness of action, originality, imagination, personal magnetism and genius for leadership as the qualities that mark "greatness" in men, and ended by saluting Rammohan Roy as a man who thus fully qualified for greatness. A Rishi, a Mahapurusha, Rammohan was — and Ranade himself has been called a modern Rishi by V.S. Srinivasa Sastri. What an inspiring calendar of modern Rishis: Rammohan, Keshab Chunder Sen, Debendranath Tagore, Vidyasagar, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Narayana Guru, Dayanand, Bankim Chandra, Ranade, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Subramania Bharati, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo: these are among the more well-known names of the last one hundred and fifty years, men of light who had striven to throw back the recurring invasions of darkness. The old Fire that burnt in the Rishis and Prahladas of ancient India survives still, and from time to time it blazes forth in the latter-day Mahapurushas who come with a mission and are enabled to fulfill it in defiance of all adverse forces.

And among the Rishis of our own times, Sri Aurobindo must take the preeminent place. His personality loomed so immense on spiritual India's horizon that he was rather like the great Dayanand whom he once described in these vivid and winged words:

It is as if one were to walk for a long time amid a range of hills rising to a greater or lesser altitude, but all with sweeping contours, green-clad, flattering the eye even in their most bold and striking elevation. But amidst them all, one hill stands apart, piled up in sheer strength, a mass of bare and puissant granite, with verdure on its summit, a solitary pine jutting out into the blue, a great cascade of pure, vigorous and fertilising water gushing out from its strength as a very fountain of life and health to the valley.³³

Such was indeed the impression created on our minds by the spiritual phenomenon that was Sri Aurobindo except that the "sweeping contours" too were not lacking but were harmoniously grafted on the lone, imperious, sky-arching hill.

The representative men of the East and the West have already paid their homage to Rishi Aurobindo. As early as 1907, Rabindranath addressed this poem to Sri Aurobindo, then only thirty-five:

O Aurobindo,

Rabindranath bows to thee!...

When I behold thy face, 'mid bondage, pain and wrong

And black indignities, I hear the soul's great song

Of rapture unconfined... the spirit of Bharat-land,

O poet, hath placed upon thy face her eyes afire  

With love, and struck vast chords upon her vibrant lyre.³⁴

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Twenty-one years later, Rabindranath saw Sri Aurobindo again — but now at Pondicherry in his "cave of Tapasya" — and recorded the following impression of his visit:

At the very first sight I could realise that he had been seeking for the soul and had gained it, and through this long process of realisation had accumulated within him a silent power of inspiration. His face was radiant with an inner light and his serene presence made it evident to me that his soul was not crippled and cramped to the measure of some tyrannical doctrine, which takes delight in inflicting wounds upon life.

I felt that the utterance of the ancient Hindu Rishi spoke from him of that equanimity which gives the human soul its freedom of entrance into the All. I said to him, "You have the Word and we are waiting to accept it from you. India will speak through your voice to the world, Hearken to me!"...

Years ago I saw Aurobindo in the atmosphere of his earlier heroic youth and I sang to him, "Aurobindo, accept the salutations from Rabindranath." Today I saw him in a deeper atmosphere or reticent richness of wisdom and again sang to him in silence, "Aurobindo, accept the salutations from Rabindranath!"

After his darshan of Sri Aurobindo in April 1950, K.M. Munshi wrote: "A deep light of knowledge and wisdom shone in his eyes.... He was the absolute integration of personality, the Central Idea in Aryan culture materialised in human shape, one of the greatest architects of creative life."³⁵ In his India on the March, Romain Rolland described Sri Aurobindo as "the completes! synthesis that has been realised to this day of the genius of Asia and the genius of Europe... the last of the great Rishis holds in his hand, in firm unrelaxed grip, the bow of creative energy". "I have never known a philosopher", said Frederic Spiegelberg, "so all-embracing in his metaphysical structure as Sri Aurobindo, none before him had the same vision." Of Sri Aurobindo's treatise. The Life Divine, Sir Francis Younghusband said that it was "the greatest book which has been produced" in our time; and of Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri, Sri Krishnaprem said that it is "neither subjective fancy nor yet philosophical thought, but vision and revelation of the actual inner structure of the Cosmos and of the pilgrim of life within its sphere" .³⁶ And Dorothy M. Richardson, the English novelist, wrote to me in 1950: "Has there ever existed a more synthetic consciousness than that of Sri Aurobindo? Unifying he is to the limit of the term."

IV

From the birth of Rammohan to the birth of Sri Aurobindo was a whole century's span. When Rammohan was born, it was fifteen years after Plassey and  

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eleven years after the third Battle of Panipat, both decisive events that paved the way for Britain's overlordship of India; also, it was in 1772 that Warren Hastings was appointed Governor of Bengal. The terrible Bengal famine of 1770 had devastated that province, and demoralisation had followed reducing all vestiges of life to a dull stupor:

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

Across the path of the divine Event

The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone

In her unlit temple of eternity,

Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;

A fathomless zero occupied the world.³⁷

This magnificent exordium with which Sri Aurobindo begins his description of the 'Symbol Dawn' vividly brings out — as if by sleight of poetic connotation — the dense apathy, the vast misery, the sheer inconscience that seemed to have generally overtaken the country as a result of centuries' misrule, Asuric infighting and the overwhelming invasion of tamas.  In the hinterland of the unconscious, slumbering men dully remembered things long past, the faded glories, the grandeur gathered up in oblivion, the great men of the past who had become mere names, the great deeds that had since been completely undone. Memory, dream, nightmare busied  themselves

Repeating for ever the unconscious act,

Prolonging for ever the unseeing will,

Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force

Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns

And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl....

Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs

Forgetful of her spirit and her fate.

But that emptiness, stillness, stupor, death-stance and total darkness couldn't last for ever. At long last there were the first obscure rumblings of returning life, reviving sensibility and awakening mind:

Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;

A nameless movement, an unthought Idea

Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,

Something that wished but knew not how to be,

Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.  

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When Rammohan was born in 1772, it was as though

An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.

Insensibly somewhere a breach began:

A long lone line of hesitating hue

Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart

Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.

After the long dreary hours of the night, the breach into darkness had somehow to he made, and the first streamers of the Dawn had to be coaxed into movement, the first seeds of new life had to be sowed in the desert heart. Then, in a brief blinding jet of pure flame, the Sun spirited out its native glow; it was — in India's national context — the occurrence of Dayanand in 1824:

Arrived from the other side of Boundlessness

An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps;

A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun...

Intervening in a mindless universe,

Its message crept through the reluctant hush

Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy...

Not long afterwards, in 1836, a still greater wonder was witnessed when Ramakrishna was born, who as the Paramahamsa was to incarnate God on earth at Dakshineshwar:

All can be done if the God-touch is there....

Into a far-off nook of heaven there came

A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.

The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch

Persuaded the inert black quietude

And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.

Bankim Chandra, who was born two years after Ramakrishna, inaugurated the literary renaissance and gave India the reviving mantra, Bande Mataram; and twenty years after Ramakrishna (who was to restore spiritual sovereignty to India), there was born in 1856, in Maharashtra, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Lokamanya who was destined to galvanise political activity and to teach his countrymen the other reverberating mantra, Swaraj is my birthright. In education, in literary activity, in spiritual, social and political action — in all fields of national life, in fact — there were visible the sure signs of an awakening into a "new life". Then came the climactic moment, the birth of Sri Aurobindo on 15August 1872:

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

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From the reclining body of a god.

Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

Outpoured the revelation and the flame.

That would be one way of reading the history of the Indian renaissance from 1772 to 1872, from Rammohan to Sri Aurobindo, from the Forerunner to the Redeemer. Not only was Sri Aurobindo "the greatest living philosopher on earth" (as Spiegelberg called him in 1949); not only has Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine been described by S.K. Maitra as the last arch in "The bridge of thoughts and sighs which spans the history of Aryan culture"; not only is Sri Aurobindo's Savitri "probably the greatest epic in the English language" (as Raymond F. Piper has described it); Sri Aurobindo was also the perfervid prophet of Indian nationalism, and a great patriot, a great thinker, and a great Yogi, a versatile poet and dramatist in English and a supreme master of English prose with a 'global' style uniquely his own. His many-faceted personality, as it casts its lambent flame on his poems and his letters and his luminous essays and his massive treatises, attracts us and fascinates us, and at times even awes us. As for the power of his Personality, the multiple consciousness that inhabited him and lighted up his Presence, how shall we seek its measure, how may we hope to contain it in a biography? But .that Power was also Love, and we may therefore trustingly venture to draw near to him, read falteringly significant pages from the Book of his immaculate Life, and try to follow diligently and reverently the evolution and consummation of his Personality.

V

The biographer's task, however, is by no means easy. Sri Aurobindo himself once wrote to his disciple, Dilip Kumar Roy: "Neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life; it has not been on the surface for men to see." Again, in the course of a conversation, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said: "To write my biography is impossible... Not only in my case but in that of poets, philosophers and yogis it is no use attempting a biography, because they do not live in their external life.... It is different with men of action like Napoleon or Julius Caesar...."³⁸ What do we know of Valmiki, for instance? Only this and what more do we want? that he was the kind of man (or superman) who could have written (because he did in fact write) the immortal Ramayana. Likewise, Sri Aurobindo was the kind of man (or superman) who was able to live the kind of life he actually lived, who was able to snap the panorama of the Spirit's landscape in works like The Life Divine and Savitri, who was able to invade and conquer and bring down the Invisible, who was able to live in the Light of Truth and catch its rays in his many beautiful poems and his innumerable letters and his great prose treatises.  

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As Sri Aurobindo himself once wrote:

...what matters in a spiritual man's life is not what he did or what he was outside to the view of the men of his time (that is what historicity or biography comes to, does it not?) but what he was and did within; it is only that that gives any value to his outer life at all. It is the inner life that gives to the outer any power it may have and the inner life of a spiritual man is something vast and full and, at least in the great figures, so crowded and teeming with significant things that no biographer or historian could ever hope to size it all or tell it.³⁹

Few amongst those of the younger generation have had the liberating experience of seeing him in person. They can but gaze at the published photographs (much as they look at the supposed portraits of Homer or of Sophocles or of Shakespeare), and make whatever conjectures or conclusions may seem valid or appropriate.

There were, however, those who knew Sri Aurobindo in person, as pupils or as friends or as collaborators; and there were those who were privileged to have his darshan off and on in his Yogashram at Pondicherry, and they were vouchsafed on those rare occasions a vision of the Purusha in all his god's grandeur of suffused spirituality, and they did see then something of the unique Person, felt the steady light of his Power, and received the purifying vibrations from his Personality; and certainly, their testimony is most valuable. Reference has been made already to Rabindranath's and K.M. Munshi's reactions, but those were by no means exceptional. Ambalal Purani, after meeting Sri Aurobindo in 1918, wrote: "I felt a spiritual light surrounding his face. His look was penetrating."⁴⁰ Having met Sri Aurobindo in 1942, Dilip Kumar Roy made this record of his impressions in Among the Great:

"A radiant personality! " — sang the air itself about him. A deep aura of peace ringed him round, an ineffable yet concrete peace which drew you into its orbit. But it was the eyes which fascinated me most — shining like two beacons in life's grey waste of waters. His torso was bare except for a scarf thrown across... he smiled gently, his deep glance spraying peace upon me somehow, giving me a feeling of his compassion... not a mere human compassion but something far greater!

The young neophyte was deeply stirred, he had indeed found his guru — the guru of gurus — at last. And the poet, Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna), could merely say:

All heaven's secrecy tit to one face

Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry

A soul of upright splendour like the noon!⁴¹

The many things that, in a strictly material of "factual" sense, have happened to Sri Aurobindo are certainly nor his life, his quintessential life, — yet they may serve to sketch the varied backgrounds in which the life was lived. If we cannot see the secret processes of Sri Aurobindo's life, if we cannot infer the harmony  

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underlying and triumphing over — including and exceeding — the apparent fluctuations in his outer life, if we may not follow the wide-ranging movements of his thought, the steep climb of his consciousness, of his heady descent into the dark waters of Inconscience, we may at least mark the stages in the visible pan of the journey of his life, we may at least record some of the so-called "facts and dates" of his terrestrial life!

And yet, — if one may boldly pose the question! — isn't reading and getting into the "inwardness" of The Life Divine or Savitri, isn't that too a way of reading Sri Aurobindo's life? "The Life Divine is not philosophy but fact," Sri Aurobindo once said; "it contains what I have realised and seen."⁴² And as for Savitri, what is it except the poetic recordation of Sri Aurobindo's own experiences? As the Mother has said in the course of a conversation with a sadhak, the realities and cosmic truths projected in Savitri were those actually experienced by Sri Aurobindo "as one experiences joys or sorrows physically"; and further:

He walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighbourhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition and emerged from the mud, the earth's misery, to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda.... He accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme.

Teaching, poetry, politics, philosophy, Yoga — all were part of Sri Aurobindo's sadhana of self-transformation and world-transformation, and an integral study, as the present one aspires to be, may at least hope to get reasonably close to the Aurobindo Saga. There can be no failure since the assurance has already been given:

The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze

And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face.⁴³  

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