Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 13

Sadhana in Prison

I

We saw in the previous chapter that during the months of march and April 1908 - especially April - an atmosphere of tension and crisis was building up, the known parties to the undeclared war being the Moderates, the alien bureaucracy and the Nationalists. The Moderates had their Convention and their new Congress Constitution, the bureaucracy were paring their nails to come to closer grips with the Nationalists so as to be able to liquidate them, and the underground revolutionaries were chafing at the Nationalists leash and were impatient to let go a campaign of terrorism. Such was the situation, generally in India, but to a much more pronounced degree in Bengal. In the eyes of the Moderates, Sri Aurobindo and his inflammable writings in the Bande Mataram were the major obstacle on the path of slow, orderly, constitutional "progress". In the eyes of the bureaucracy, Sri Aurobindo was Public Enemy Number One - all the more dangerous because he had a hypnotic hold on his numberless followers young and not so young, his writings were diabolically clever and often couched cunningly in the language of Vedanta or Tantra, and in his movements and actions he was altogether slippery like an eel. He talked of India resurgent, Asia triumphant, and Europe in frantic retreat. He spoke of individual salvation and of national mukti. He invoked Shiva's tandav death-dance so that Sati might achieve resurrection. Was he not the author of that notorious political dynamite, Bhawani Mandir? Did he not cause the split at Surat? And Sri Aurobindo didn't even hesitate to preach insurrection. The language of warfare and revolution came as second nature to him. There was the stamp of authority in even his casual utterances, and his speeches and editorials were like winging squadrons racing across the murky political sky, to cause confusion and terror among the Moderates and the bureaucracy. The man was too infernally clever, too terribly in earnest, and too utterly unpredictable and uncontainable. Danger was the name of the man. He had to be silenced, he had to be put out of the way.

For some time past, events had been moving swiftly to what seemed to be their preordained configuration and conclusion. Curzon had divided Bengal, and injured and insulted a great nation; and, by a strange irony of history, his successor Minto was called upon to face the music. As Sir Pratap Singh, a titled dignitary of the time, put it with charming naïveté, "Lord Curzon has strewn Lord Minto's bed with thorns, and he must lie on them."¹ "Sedition" was divined here - there - everywhere, and prosecution after prosecution was launched. Disaffection - of course! Which normal person in India could possibly have entertained "affection for the soulless heartless mindless bureaucracy? And wasn't it absurdly easy for "want of affection" to sour into downright "disaffection"? Yet the promiscuous

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prosecution and barbarous sentences continued with mounting ferocity. The arrest and trial of the saintly Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya and his death while in detention at the Campbell Hospital had sent out a wave of resentment all over Bengal, all over India. "His declaration in Court and his death," wrote Sri Aurobindo, "put a seal upon the meaning of his life and left his name stamped indelibly on the pages of history as a saint and martyr of the new faith."² Vivekananda's youngest brother, Bhupendranath Datta, did not defend himself and went to jail. And so - printer, publisher, editor, contributor, worker - anyone almost ran the risk of sudden apprehension on the slightest pretext, trial for sedition or conspiracy, and fine and incarceration - or worse.

These endless trials and the heavy sentences passed on the patriots seemed shocking to John Morley himself, and on one occasion he wrote to the Viceroy in an outspoken manner:

I must confess to you that I am watching with the deepest concern and dismay the thundering sentences that are being passed for sedition, etc. We must keep order, but excess of severity is not the path to order. On the contrary, it is the path to the bomb.³

Sri Aurobindo too, in an article on 'Indian Resurgence and Europe', referred to "the extreme of bomb-throwing Anarchism" as one of the symptoms of the modem Western malaise, and would have liked India to be free from such aberrations. But repression and terrorism fed upon one another in a competitive craze, almost as in the parable of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost.

hourly conceived

And hourly born, with sorrow infinite

To me... then, bursting forth

Afresh with conscious terrors vex me round,

That rest or intermission none I find.⁴

Morley had correctly evaluated the consequences of "excess of severity". The burning anger of the people was particularly directed against one D.H. Kingsford, the District Magistrate of Calcutta who had tried the case against Upadhyaya, - who was even otherwise known for his drastic sentences against the patriots, and who had especially earned undying infamy by ordering the flogging in Court of a boy of fifteen, Sushil Sen, till he fell down unconscious bleeding all over. This last atrocity had so horrified the country and evoked such a storm of protest that Kingsford had to be transferred from Calcutta to Muzzaferpore (now in Bihar). But the revolutionaries had their eyes upon him, and decided to visit him with swift punishment there. On the evening of 30 April 1908, two boys - Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki - threw a bomb at a closed carriage that was supposed to carry Kingsford, but the bomb actually killed two wholly innocent ladies, Mrs. and Miss Pringle-Kennedy, wife and daughter of a local advocate, as they were going out in the carriage from their Club. On 1 May, as Sri Aurobindo was sitting in the  

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office of the Bande Mataram in Calcutta, the wire from Muzzaferpore was shown to him. Sri Aurobindo also read in the Empire that the Police Commissioner had said that they knew who were in the murder plot, and they would all be arrested without delay. Whatever the provocation caused by men like Kingsford and the bureaucracy whom they represented, the Muzzaferpore bomb-outrage, even had it got at the intended victim, would have proved nothing and solved nothing. But as it actually turned out, it was a ghastly tragedy, a piece of pure terrorist excrescence. And Shyamsundar Chakravarti wrote editorially in the Bande Mataram:

Outrages of this kind have absolutely no sanction in our ancient tradition and culture.... Moderatism is imitation of British constitutionalism, this form of so-called Extremism, wherever it may be found to exist in this country, is imitation of European Anarchism; and both are equally different from and absolutely foreign to the spirit of the Nationalism which, though opposed by one and occasionally mistaken for the other, is bound in the long run to carve out the future of India, and realise the eternal destiny of her ancient and composite people.⁵

But - perhaps understandably, yet most unfortunately, under the circumstances - the Government lost their balance and sense of measure, and started arresting persons right and left. The police, of course, fastened their suspicion at once on the young men (whom they had shadowed before) camping at the Manicktolla Gardens.* Khudiram and Prafulla both belonged to this group, and the other members also must have known how things had turned out at Muzzaferpore. Sri Aurobindo too presumably sent word to his brother Barindra, advising him to clear out with his companions after wiping out all traces of their bomb-making activities. Some of the young men remembered that there were two or three rifles with Abinash Bhattacharya in Sri Aurobindo's house, and these were brought back and buried in the Garden along with the revolvers and bomb-making materials. Some of the group were sent away, and the others tried their best to destroy all their papers and all evidence of their identity and occupation. Tired out at last, they went to bed at night on 1 May, hoping to get away before daybreak, for they had, earlier in the evening, been suspiciously interrogated by seeming strangers. But they slept a little too long, and they were surprised before dawn by the police. The scene has been etched from memory by one of the young men, Nolini:

Shadowy forms were moving about the place, there was a clatter and a creaking of boots. Suddenly out of the dark silence, a conversation arose:

"Your are under arrest. Your name?"

"Barindra Kumar Ghose."

"Arabinda Ghose?"

"No, Barindra Kumar Ghose."

* "A spy, Rajani Sarkar by name, had gained admittance into the garden as a friend of one of the boys and conveyed information to the police. The police waited till the Muzzaferpore outrage, and then closed in." (C.C. Dutt, in an article in the Sunday Times, 17 December 1950)  

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"Well, we'll see."

The next thing I know was a handclapping on my shoulders. "Come," and a voice...

...we were all arrested in a body. The police made us stand in a line under the strict watch of an armed guard. They kept us standing the whole day with hardly anything to eat.... In the evening, the order came, "Follow us." But follow where?... We were taken to the lock-up at the Lal Bazar police station.⁶

They remained there for two days and two nights "berthed together like beasts and shut up in a cell". Then they were taken to the Alipur Jail, where they had cooked rice to eat (the first meal in three days), and "it tasted so nice and sweet that we felt as if we were in heaven".⁷

After Barindra and his companions had been taken away, the Gardens and the house were turned upside down, the weapons and bombs were unearthed, and some important papers - left behind carelessly - were secured. Simultaneously, house-searches were instituted in other places too, and many suspects were taken into custody. On the same day, 2 may, Prafulla Chaki was arrested at Wanai, but he made good his word that he wouldn't live to be tortured by the police and driven to confess any secrets; he pushed the revolver muzzle into his mouth, pressed the trigger with his fingers, and heroically ended his life. Among those arrested at the Manicktolla Gardens was Sushil Sen, whom Kingsford had earlier ordered to be flogged in the open court. The prosecution against Sri Aurobindo in 1907 had led to a procession and a protest: this had provoked some police action: this had led to Sushil's altercation with a policeman: and this to the flogging of Sushil which, in its turn, to the bomb-attempt on Kingsford: and the misfired attempt to Sushil's arrest (and to Sri Aurobindo's as well) - what a sinister chain-reaction!

There was now a wild leap of speculation, a quick spread of nameless terror; and the situation grew every hour more and more ominous and menacing. As the Bande Mataram said, it was the merest affection to deny that the Muzzaferpore outrage had "created a most critical situation in the country".⁸ It was, perhaps, not wholly unnatural that the panic-stricken authorities should have suspected that Sri Aurobindo - wasn't he the elder brother of Barindra Kumar Ghose? - was also somehow or other connected with the revolutionary organisation, the miniature bomb-factory at the Manicktolla Gardens, and perhaps even with the bomb-throwing at Muzzaferpore. The police Had, in fact, expected to surprise Sri Aurobindo at the Gardens, and were disappointed that they had found only Barindra and the smaller fry. In their secret files, the Government had doubtless a detailed dossier about Sri Aurobindo, and about a month and a half earlier an unknown gentleman had warned him that some wicked people were conspiring against him and his brother Barindra.* After the Muzzaferpore tragedy, the Government decided they

* In this section I have drawn liberally upon Sri Aurobindo's Tales a/Prison Life (authorised English version of his Kara Kahini, published in Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, No. 27, 1968). The reference to the 'unknown gentleman' occurs on p. 124 of the Annual.  

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would take no more chances. Orders were therefore issued for his immediate arrest. It was a Friday night, and Sri Aurobindo was sleeping peacefully in his first floor room at 48, Grey Street - the office of the Nava Sakti - to which he had moved some time earlier from his Scott's Lane residence. At about five in the morning next day (2 May), Sarojini his sister rushed into his room in terror and woke him up. The small room was now filled with armed policemen, some senior officers like Superintendent Craegan, and "red turbans, spies and search-witnesses". Pistols in hand, some of them struck heroic attitudes, as if they were out to storm a fortress. It was even reported that "a white hero had aimed a pistol" at Sarojini's heart. Sri Aurobindo was put under arrest, after he had read the search warrant and signed it. Under instructions from Craegan, Sri Aurobindo was handcuffed and a rope was tied round his midriff, and a constable stood behind holding the rope; but about half an hour later, these wanton indignities were removed. Abinash Bhattacharya and Sailen Bose were also put under arrest, and (as Sri Aurobindo recorded later in Kara-Kahini) Craegan behaved as though "he had entered into the lair of some ferocious animal, as if we were uneducated, wild lawbreakers".⁹ There was an intermittent passage at arms between Craegan and Sri Aurobindo, and when the former asked whether it wasn't shameful for a graduate, an educated man like him, to sleep on the floor of such a poky house, the answer was: "I am a poor man, and I live like one." "So you have worked up all this mischief to become a rich man!" What was the use of trying to explain to that thick-headed lump of insolence the love of the Motherland, the nature of sacrifice or the sublimity of the vow of poverty? Sri Aurobindo did not make the attempt.

The search operations continued from five-thirty to about eleven-thirty. " 'Search' was not the word for it," was the Reporter's account in the Bande Mataram; "it [the bedroom] was turned inside out. The ransacking went on for hours...." Exercise books, letters, poems, scraps, essays, translations, and other papers were seized with avidity and taken away. One of the officers, dark of 24 Parganas, looked suspiciously at a lump of clay kept in a cardboard box. Perhaps it was a new kind of explosive! Actually the earth had been brought to Sri Aurobindo from Dakshineshwar by a young man connected with the Ramakrishna Mission, and Sri Aurobindo had preserved it. Other rooms were also searched, and all kinds of things were seized. A bicycle, an iron safe - they were bodily removed.

At long last, the search came to an end and Sri Aurobindo was taken to the police station where he had his bath and lunch; and after being made to wait for about two hours at Lal Bazar, he was removed to Royd Street, where he stayed all evening being treated by the detective, Maulvi Shams-ul-Alam, "to a delicious lecture on religion". Under the cover of expatiating on the links between Hinduism and Islam, the Maulvi made a naive attempt to pump Sri Aurobindo for incriminating information, but of course without success. He was then taken in rain and storm to the lock-up at Lal Bazar and lodged for a while in a room in the company of Sailen Bose who had also been arrested. But presently, on the Police Commissioner Mr. F. L. Halliday's orders, Sailen was removed to another room.  

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Turning to Sri Aurobindo, Halliday put the rhetorical question: "Don't you feel ashamed to have been involved in this dastardly deed?" Sri Aurobindo snapped back: "What right have you to assume that I was involved?" And he added, "I totally deny having had anything to do with this murder." And Mr. Halliday kept silent.

The arrest of Sri Aurobindo - not the event alone, but even more, the manner in which the arrest had been made, the handcuffing and the other atrocities and humiliations - created a mighty sensation in the whole country. The Amrita Bazar Patrika asked editorially:

But why were they (Sri Aurobindo and others) pounced upon in this mysterious manner, handcuffed, and then dragged before the Police Commissioner? Where was the necessity for this outrage.... It served no other purpose than that of wantonly outraging public feeling.*

Besides Sri Aurobindo and Barindra, over thirty others had also been promptly rounded up - and more were to follow in the coming days - in connection with the Muzzaferpore outrage, the bomb-factory at Manicktolla Gardens, and the supposed wide-spread revolutionary conspiracy of which these were apparently but the startling first symptoms.

The next day (Sunday) was spent by Sri Aurobindo in the lock-up - some of the boys arrested at the Manicktolla Gardens had been brought there too. On being presented on Monday before the Commissioner, Sri Aurobindo, Abinash Bhattacharya and Sailen declined to make a formal statement, having already had some experience of legal procedures and quibblings. Nolini Kanta Gupta told Mr. Halliday that "he was oblivious of the reason for which he was charged". Barindra and some others, however, seem to have made a fairly full confession after their arrest, but only "with a view to save the party by the sacrifice of some of its members" (in other words, themselves). It was a deliberate attempt at self-sacrifice "so that, instead of all of us dying together, some might still live on to carry the work forward".¹⁰ Actually, this move didn't quite succeed, since most of those connected with the business were arrested and tried together.**

* It is not known why, having handcuffed Sri Aurobindo and tied him with a rope round his waist, the police officers had these removed after some time. Was it because of the protest of Bhupendranath Basu, the Congress Moderate leader, who had come to see things for himself when he heard about the arrest? Or was it on the intervention of Benod Kumar Gupta, as claimed by him? (Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, No. 27, p. 122)

** Cf. C.C. Dutt: "The Chief and a number of young men were arrested and put up for trial. The idea of a second line of defence came more or less to nought. But fresh people took up the work and carried it on. They wore different guises, uttered different slogans, but they moved forward steadfastly towards the goal. And the goal was achieved in God's own time." (Sunday Times, 17 December 1950) While C.C. Dutt "lakes it appear that he took an important part in the revolutionary and terrorist movement from behind the scenes under the leadership of his 'Chief, Sri Aurobindo, there is perhaps some romanticising in all this. "hen the talk once (28 February 1940) turned on C.C. Dutt's role and activities, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said: "Charu Dutt seems to be everywhere. Yet I never knew that he was actually in the movement." (Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, Part II, p. 243) Again: "Dutt seems to have a strong imagination. "e can't be entrusted with writing my biography." (Ibid., p. 192)  

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Next day (Tuesday) Sri Aurobindo and the other prisoners were produced before Mr. T. Thorn hill, Chief Presidency Magistrate, and the prosecution tried to make capital out of the fact that Sri Aurobindo was one of the proprietors of the Gardens where the bombs had been manufactured. On a point of right jurisdiction. Thornhill transferred the case to the Court of the District Magistrate at Alipur. Sri Aurobindo, along with a few others, was now taken in a carriage to the Alipur Court, and from there to the Alipur jail. An unknown gentleman told Sri Aurobindo that, as he was likely to be placed in solitary confinement, if he had any message to send to his people, he might make use of him (the speaker). "I am mentioning this fact," writes Sri Aurobindo in his prison memoirs, "as an example of my countrymen's sympathy and unsought kindness towards me."¹¹ The prisoners were permitted to bathe, and after being clothed in jail uniforms, each was taken to the cell assigned to him; "the bath, after four days, was heavenly bliss.... I, too, entered my lonely cell. The doors closed, and my prison life at Alipur began.... Next year, on 6 May, I was released."

II

The "Alipur Case" - or the Manicktolla Bomb-Factory Case - or the Muzzaferpore Bomb Outrage Case as it came to be variously called was the talk of the whole country for the next twelve months and more. Reactions of particular groups of people followed predictable lines. The Moderates unhesitatingly deplored the outrage but were guardedly anxious about the fate of Sri Aurobindo whom they could not fail to respect from a distance. The Nationalists deplored the event too, but also blamed the Government for unleashing a campaign of repression that alone had provoked such acts of terrorism, useless as they might be and even meriting condemnation. The Anglo-Indian community in India felt a shiver and exhorted the Government to take the sternest possible action against the offenders and to prevent the recurrence of such acts of infamy. The revolutionaries who had escaped arrest lay low for a while containing their anger. Jatindranath Mukherjee (Bagha Jatin) was one of the revolutionaries who had managed to escape arrest, and somehow tried to keep the organisation going. As for the bureaucracy, their overwhelming concern was with Sri Aurobindo. He was the core, he was the superbrain, he was the heart and soul of the whole movement of nationalism and the whole underground revolutionary organisation. The superlatively cunning creature had at last been caught and caged; and woe unto the bureaucracy if he should now be allowed to escape!

There were, perhaps, hesitations in high quarters whether it would be altogether wise to press the prosecution against a man so brilliant - a man admittedly endowed with such high intellectual and moral qualities - as Sri Aurobindo. Especially when there was so little direct evidence to connect him either with the diminutive bomb-factory or with the killing of the two ladies at Muzzaferpore.

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To set those feeble hesitations at rest, Mr. E.A. Gait, the Chief Secretary of Bengal, affirmed in his report to the Home Secretary of the Government of India on 16 May 1908:

Of Arabinda's connection with the secret society we have little direct evidence, the reason being that, here as in the case of the editorship of the paper (the reference here is to the Bande Mataram case of the previous year), he has been careful to avoid doing anything which would enable any charge to be proved against him. There is, however, no real doubt as to his being intimately connected with it.... The Lieutenant-Governor (of Bengal) has no doubt whatever on this point, nor has he any doubt that his is the master-mind at the back of the whole extremist campaign in Bengal.... The conviction of the other persons concerned would be of no avail if Arabinda were set free; for, in that case he would lose no time in starting a fresh conspiracy, and the work now done would be altogether in vain.... In the interest of peace and good government, it is absolutely necessary that this man should be removed from the political arena.¹²*

This is a very remarkable indeed, with a down-to-earth Machiavellian frankness about it! The Chief Secretary had no doubt and the Lieutenant-Governor had no doubt that Sri Aurobindo "should be removed from the political arena", with or without convincing evidence - if necessary even without the formalities of normal legal procedure, it was always possible to invoke the provisions of the Bengal Prisoners Regulation III of 1818, under which Governments were empowered to seize and remove from the scene anybody they thought inconvenient or undesirable. What happened at Muzzaferpore came handy, it was something of a godsend to the Government, for even without that bomb-action Sri Aurobindo was clearly a marked man and would have sooner or later found himself spirited away by a recourse to that infamous Regulation of 1818.

If Muzzaferpore thus helped the Government to make up their mind quickly and arrest Sri Aurobindo and convey him to the Alipur jail, these happenings also gave a decisive turn to his life and transformed, by a process of unbelievable alchemy, the solitary cell into a spiritual retreat and cave of sādhanā. As Sri Aurobindo later wrote in his Kara-Kahini:

At that time I had no idea that I happened to be the main target of suspicion and that according to the police I was the chief killer, the instigator and secret leader of the young terrorists and revolutionaries. I did not know that that day would mean the end of a chapter of my life, and that there stretched before me a year's imprisonment during which period all my human relationships would cease, that for a whole year I would have to live beyond the pale of society,

* The Lt. Governor, Andrew Fraser, also wrote on the same day to the same effect to Minto: "He is the ring leader. He is able, cunning, fanatical.... But he has kept himself, like a careful and valued General, out of sight of 'the enemy'." [Quoted from Min to Paper in M.N. Das's India Under Morley and Minto (1964),p. 114]  

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like an animal in a cage. And when I would re-enter the world of activity it would not be the old familiar Aurobindo Ghose. Rather it would be a new being, a new character, intellect, life, mind, embarking upon a new course of action that would come out of the ashram at Alipur.... For long I had made great efforts for a direct vision (sāksāt darśan) of the Lord of my Heart; had entertained the immense hope of knowing the preserver of the World, the Supreme Person (Purushottama) as friend and master. But due to the pull of a thousand worldly desires, attachment towards numerous activities, the deep darkness of ignorance, I did not succeed in that effort. At long last the most merciful all-good Lord (Shiva Had) destroyed all these enemies at one stroke and helped me in my path, pointed to the yogāśram staying as Guru and companion in my little abode of retirement and spiritual discipline.... The only result of the wrath of the British Government was that I found God.¹³

But this of course of Government couldn't know, and certainly it wouldn't ever have come into their calculations. They had got their man, and they wished to see he didn't escape the legal net this time, as he had done adroitly the previous year. The most eminent criminal lawyer at the time in India, Mr. Eardley Norton, then at the dizzy peak of his powers and reputation, was engaged by the Government to conduct the prosecution. It was therefore necessary to organise the defence of Sri Aurobindo on a reasonably efficient basis. His sister, Sarojini Devi, accordingly made the following fervent appeal for funds:

My countrymen are aware that my brother Aravinda Ghose stands accused of a grave offence. But I believe, and I have reason to think that the vast majority of my countrymen believe, that he is quite innocent. I think if he is defended by an able counsel he is sure to be acquitted.... I know all countrymen do not hold the same political opinions as he. But I feel some delicacy in saying that probably there are few Indians who do not appreciate his great attainments, his self-sacrifice, his single-minded devotion to the country's cause and the high spirituality of his character. This emboldens me, a woman, to stand before every son and daughter of India for help to defend a brother, - my brother and theirs too.¹⁴

This moving appeal, wrung from a sister's heart, was eloquently supported by the Bengalee, the Amrita Bazar Patrika and other leading papers. Response to the appeal was not very slow in coming; and it came - as it often does - from the most unexpected places. A blind beggar - all deathless honour to him! - gave Sarojini one rupee out of the alms he had assiduously collected over a period of months; an impecunious student, by denying himself his daily tiffin, gave a modest contribution; the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha bestirred itself to make collections for the Sri Aurobindo Defence Fund.¹⁵ And numerous other institutions and individuals and agencies - spread all over the country - also interested themselves in the matter, and a steady stream of support, psychological as well as financial, started pouring in. In spite of all this fund of general goodwill in the country, the actual amount collected was by no means very impressive at first, for after two months hardly 23,000 had been put together. 

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In those early weeks, the significant achievement was the rebuff administered to the Government, for they could now have no doubt that the people were with the supposed "criminal" and not with the prosecuting alien bureaucracy who were only the object of universal detestation. Nay more: contributions and messages of sympathy came even from Europe, from Australia, from America - and the bureaucracy felt isolated from civilised opinion and was left to fend for itself somehow.

Meanwhile the preliminary trial started in Alipur before Mr. L. Birley, the Officiating District Magistrate, on 19 May, a fortnight after Sri Aurobindo's arrest. Bail had been refused to the accused, and all if them were charged under Section 121-A, 122, 123 and 124 of the Indian Penal Code for "organising a gang for the purpose of waging war against the Government by means of criminal force". Even the preliminary trial was a tortuous process. The intended victim of the Muzzaferpore bomb-attack, Mr. Kingsford, in his evidence before Mr. Birley said with a breezy statistical complacency:

I was Chief Presidency Magistrate, Calcutta, from August 1904 to March 1908. I had to try many sedition cases.... I acquitted as many as I convicted.

The preliminary trial, a protracted affair, went on from 19 May to 19 August, when Mr. Birley framed charges at last and committed the accused to sessions. It was a macabre business, and Sri Aurobindo thought that he and his fellow-accused were sitting, not in a British Court of Justice, but in a world of fiction or fantasy. Of the prosecuting counsel, Mr. Norton, Sri Aurobindo has left a vivid sketch, which almost skins alive that once roaring hero of a hundred judicial theatres:

The star performer of the show as the government counsel, Mr. Norton. Not only the star performer, but he was also its composer, stage manager and prompter... he certainly was the king among beasts at the Alipur court....

Of the three kinds of great lawyers - the subtle legal analysts, the cunning cross-examiners of witnesses, and the loud-mouthed bullies - Norton was the foremost in the third category. No use criticising him, for that was, after all, his svabhāva! And his svadharma was to earn his daily fee of one thousand rupees by trying to win the case for the Government by hook or by crook. And what an adroit creative genius he was, almost a sort of Shakespeare:

And Mr. Norton happened to be the Shakespeare of this play... (he) never allowed any material, true or false, cogent or irrelevant, from the smallest to the largest, to go unused; on top of it he could create such a wonderful plot by his self-created and abundant imagination, inference and hypothesis that the great poets and writers of fiction like Shakespeare and Defoe would have to acknowledge defeat before this grand master of the art... just as Falstaff's hotel bill showed a penny-worth of bread and countless gallons of wine, similarly in Norton's plot "an ounce of proof was mixed with tons of inference and suggestion"....

If Norton was a creative genius, his epic needed a hero or villain - and Sri Aurobindo was cast for that role:  

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Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, in Mr. Norton's plot, at the centre of the mighty rebellion stood I, an extraordinarily sharp, intelligent and powerful, bold, bad man! Of the national movement I was the alpha and the omega, its creator and saviour, engaged in undermining the British Empire. As soon as he came across any piece of excellent or vigorous writing in English, he would jump and loudly proclaim, "Aurobindo Ghose!".... It is a pity I was not born as an Avatar, otherwise, thanks to his intense devotion and ceaseless contemplation of me for the nonce, he would surely have earned his release, mukti then and there....

When some of the witnesses deposed contrary to the requirements of his Poem. Norton "would grow red with fury and, roaring like a lion, he would strike terror in the heart of the witness and cower him down". He lost his temper equally whenever the defence counsel, Bhuban Chatterji, raised objections or points of order. As for the Magistrate, Mr. Birley, he was content to follow Norton's lead: "he laughed when Norton laughed, grew angry as Norton would be angry". Sri Aurobindo clinches the double-portrait with the remark: "Because such a counsel had been matched with a magistrate of the same calibre, the case had all the more taken on the proportions of a play."¹⁶

There were, then, among the numerous "minor characters" the different categories of witnesses: the police and the secret service men; the men eager to please the police; and the people dragged unwillingly to give evidence. The method of examination and cross-examination followed by Norton struck Sri Aurobindo as very perverse and foolish and utterly wasteful:

This sort of method for conducting cases is possible perhaps only in India.... Hauling hundreds of witnesses, gathered on a basis of guesswork, and without enquiring whether one was guilty or not, wasting the country's finances and keeping without any sense the accused for long periods under the hardships of prison life - it is worthy only of the police force of this country.¹⁷

As for the methods of identification, the less said the better. Two police officers declared on oath that they had seen Charuchandra Roy of Chandernagore at Shyambazar on a particular day; but on that day and at that hour, he had been talking with the Mayor of Chandernagore, his wife, the Governor of Chandernagore and a few other distinguished European gentlemen, at the Howrah railway station, and these were willing to depose in his favour. Charu Roy had to be released on a representation by the French Government, but the other accused - some of them equally innocent - were not so lucky. Commenting on this and other features of the trial, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

On the whole, during this trial at every stage I could find, in the British legal system, how easily the innocent could be punished, sent to prison, suffer transportation, even loss of life. Unless one stood in the dock oneself, one cannot realise the delusive untruth of the Western penal code. It is something of a gamble, a gamble with human freedom, with man's joys and sorrows, a life-long agony for him and his family, his friends and relatives, an insult, a living  

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death. In this system there is no counting as to how often guilty persons escape and how many innocent persons perish.... In a milieu like this... many liberal and kind-hearted men have started to say,... if society has to be preserved with the aid of so much sin and suffering, the burning sighs of the innocent and their heart's blood, its preservation would seem unnecessary.¹⁸

III

What were Sri Aurobindo's feelings when he found himself suddenly checkmated, torn from society, and thrown into solitary confinement? What did he think, how did he feel, in what manner did he bear the rigours of the imprisonment - the bad food, the prison clothes, the lack of books and journals, the want of light and free air, and, above all, the creeping solitariness of the gloomy nine by five feet windowless cell that was now his Ashram, his Sadhanalaya - his living tomb - in the worthy Government Guest House or Hotel at Alipur?

Sri Aurobindo has answered our questions in some detail, and he has done so using language that often acquires wings, and wafts us to the seventh heaven of radiant ecstasy and hope incommensurable. His Bengali work of reminiscences. Kara-Kahini, has been referred to already; and there is also his English Messianic speech at Uttarpara, and both belong to the period immediately after his release from prison a year later. In the early days of his life in the gloomy cell, he had indeed been subjected to a refinement of torture; and he had first to achieve, as a result of his long and desperate struggle with thirst and nausea, effective freedom from them. In that furnace that was his cell, he was given two coarse jail-made rugs as a makeshift bedding - he spread one on the floor and rolled the other into sort of pillow. He had often to roll on the bare ground to cool his body when the heat became unbearable, and he found the touch of Mother Earth so much more soothing than the embrace of the rugs. When the rains came, the cell would be flooded with water, dirt, leaves and straw, and he had to snuggle to a corner for the night.

As for the "fittings", there was a versatility about them. The plate and the bowl were expected to serve in a variety of ways, especially the all-sufficient bowl:

Among inert objects it was like the British civilian. Just as the civilian, ipso facto, is fit and able to undertake any administrative duty, be it as judge, magistrate, police, revenue officer; chairman of municipality, professor, preacher, whatever you ask him to do he can become at your merest saying, -just as for him to be an investigator, complainant, police magistrate, even at times to be the counsel for defence, all these roles hold a friendly concourse in the same hospitable body, my dear bowl was equally multi-purpose. The bowl was free from all caste restrictions, beyond discrimination.... Where else could I find such an aid and preceptor to get rid of the sense of disgust?¹⁹

Sri Aurobindo and the others hadn't yet been tried, nor found guilty; they were in prison on suspicion. Even so, they were herded together like thieves and dacoits, 

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and kept "like animals in a cage", given food unfit for animals, and made to endure water scarcity, thirst and hunger, sun, rain and cold! But Sri Aurobindo himself didn't mind it at all; rather he learned to welcome this abnormal communal life, as he had loved at the time of the Surat Congress to travel by train in the third class and to camp with the delegates, eating and sleeping together in a "wonderful feeling of brotherhood". The lesson in communal life went a further stage at the Alipur Jail:

During my stay... I ate, lived, went through the same hardships and enjoyed the same 'privileges' with the other convicts, my fellow nationals, peasant, iron-monger, potter, the dom and the bagdi, and I could learn of the ways of the Lord who dwells in everybody, and by this socialism and unity, this nation-wide brotherhood had put His stamp on my life's dedication....²⁰

The shift from the Lal Bazar lock-up to the solitary cell at Alipur was nevertheless welcome, and since Sri Aurobindo had faith in God, even the loneliness did not prey upon him. The food of course was atrocious - "coarse rice spiced with husk, pebbles, insects, hair, dirt and other such stuff - being tasteless as well as lacking any nutritive value whatsoever. Boiled rice itself was a trinity - appearing now in its Wisdom (Shiva) aspect as white, now in its Hiranyagarbha aspect as yellow stuff, and again in its Virat Purusha aspect of grey eminence. But that life too was bearable, for after all God gave the sufferers the strength to bear even that life. In answer to a Poona editor trying to raise a laugh over this "excess of Godwardness in prison", Sri Aurobindo wrote:

Alas for the pride and littleness of men.... The manifestation of God, should it not be in prisons, in huts, ashrams, in the hearts of the poor, instead of in the temples of luxury of the rich or the bed of repose of the pleasure-seeking selfish worldly fold? God does not look for learning, honour, leadership, popular acclaim, outward ease and sophistication. To the poor He reveals Himself in the form of the Compassionate Mother. He who sees the Lord in all men, in all nations, in his own land, in the miserable, the poor, the fallen and the sinner and offers his life in the service of the Lord, the Lord comes to such hearts...²¹

Subjected to a thousand indignities, privations, jeers, insults, was it not surprising that the prisoners could yet find restful sleep at night:

It is the time when the weak of heart weeps ever his misfortune or in anticipation of the hardships of prison life. And the lover of God feels the nearness of his deity, and has the joy of his prayer or meditation in the silent night. Then to these three thousand creatures who came from God, victims of a miserable social system, the huge instrument of torture, the Alipur jail, is lost in a vast silence.²²

The hardships hurt at first, but Sri Aurobindo soon learnt to tolerate them, then to ignore them, and finally to become wholly immune to them. The mind was able to soar above them, even to laugh at them; there could be no anger now, nor resentment; 'twas a Divinity that had shaped the ends, and regrets were wholly out of place.

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After the first few difficult and dreary days, Sri Aurobindo was permitted to obtain his clothes and books from home. He accordingly requested his maternal uncle, Krishna Kumar Mitra, the editor of the Sanjivani', to send him these - notably the Gita and the Upanishads. It was during that terrible interregnum, when he was cooped up in total loneliness and normal human supports were taken away, that he was able to gauge what effect such solitary confinement could have even on healthy or intelligent people: how such monstrous isolation might - unless God's Grace stood sentinel by one's side - drive one to distraction and lunacy.

There was the other side of the medal too, for there were not wanting officers - like Emerson the Jail Superintendent, Dr. Daly the prison physician and Baidyanath Chatterji the assistant doctor - who were polite, considerate and kindly. There was also a change for the better in the outer circumstances of Sri Aurobindo's life. Dr. Daly - "a gentleman and a most judicious person" - started visiting Sri Aurobindo in his cell daily, along with the Assistant Jail Superintendent, and there was some attempt at conversation; it was largely an one-sided affair though, for Sri Aurobindo was but a listener most of the time, and merely answered their queries. One day Dr. Daly informed Sri Aurobindo that he would be given permission to have a constitutional outside his cell, both in the morning and in the evening.²³ This freedom, which enabled Sri Aurobindo to walk between the jail workshop and the cowshed for anything from ten minutes to two hours, was most welcome, and Sri Aurobindo on those occasions used to recite the soul-stirring verses from the Upanishads or the Gita, to watch the other inmates of the prison engaged in their work, to realise the basic truth of the immanent Godhead, All this is Brahman. But already an inner change was taking place, and it had its effects on his outer experiences as well. We cannot do better than read the Uttarpara speech of over a year later when he took a backward glance at his prison days and reviewed the changes in his mental climate from "dark, dark... irrecoverably dark, total eclipse of day" through the tunnel of grim indifference and acceptance and out into the glory and brightness of a Divine mom when the whole world was seen bathed in His translucent light:

When I was arrested and hurried to the Lal Bazar Hazat I was shaken in faith for a while, for I could not look into the heart of His intention. Therefore I faltered for a moment and cried out in my heart to Him, "What is this that has happened to me? I believed that I had a mission to work for the people of my country and until that work was done, I should have Thy protection. Why then am I here and on such a charge?" A day passed and a second day and a third, when a voice came to me from within, "Wait and see." Then I grew calm and waited, I was taken from Lal Bazar to Alipore, and was placed for one month in a solitary cell apart from men. There I waited day and night for the voice of God within me, to know what He had to say to me, to learn what I had to do. In this seclusion the earliest realisation, the first lesson came to me.²⁴

He then remembered how, a month or more before his arrest, an inner call had come to him to put aside all activity - to go into seclusion and look within -

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so that he might enter into closer communion with Him. On that occasion, however, Sri Aurobindo had been too weak to resist the pull of the outside world, and he had therefore desisted from listening to that voice; politics and poetry were too dear to him, and he could not give them up completely. Had he not, indeed, told Lele that he, Sri Aurobindo, would follow the path of Yoga only if it did not interfere with his politics and his poetry? So long as he was a free man, Sri Aurobindo would not break the bonds himself - and therefore God, in his own utterly inscrutable manner, had to do it for him. God now seemed to speak to Sri Aurobindo in the infinite loneliness of the prison cell:

"The bonds you had not the strength to break, I have broken for you, because it is not my will nor was it ever my intention that that should continue. I have had another thing for you to do and it is for that I have brought you here, to teach you what you could not learn for yourself and to train you for my work.²⁵

In the vast and sombre stillness of the dungeon, the admonition and the exhortation seemed to insinuate their meaning into his disturbed heart, and it was as though he was enacting the inner spiritual drama so disturbingly described by T.S. Eliot:

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy...

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.²⁶

Sri Aurobindo had in the meantime secured his books, - the Upanishads and the Gita. As he began reading the Gita, the Lord's strength entered into him, and he was able to do the sadhana prescribed in the Book. He had already over a period of years tried to seize the true inwardness and glory of the Indian religious and spiritual tradition, the philosophic, perennis of the Sanatana Dharma, and intellectually to accept it in its entirety; now it all became, not only a matter of thrilling comprehension, but a fact of minutely intimate realisation. For one thing, there was the stupendous lesson and ineffable experience of Love. As he wrote in the Kara-Kahini:

The prisoners in the neighbouring cowshed would take out, in front of my room, the cows for grazing. Both cow and cowherd were daily and delightful sights. The solitary confinement at Alipur was a unique lesson in love. Before coming here, even in society my affection were confined to a rather narrow circle, and the closed emotions would rarely include birds and animals.... At Alipur I could feel how deep could be the love of man for all created things, how thrilled a man could be on seeing a cow, a bird, even an ant.*

* Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, No. 27, p. 131. A few pages later, Sri Aurobindo describes how, when he found a horde of big black ants killing a group of tiny red ants, he "felt an intense charity and sympathy for these unjustly treated red ants and tried to save them from the black killers." (p. 138)  

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Sri Aurobindo also saw by direct illumination the eternal truth of what Sri Krishna had demanded of Arjuna, and what He still demands of all those who wish to be counted among His true servants, - "to be free from repletion and desire, to do work for Him without the demand for fruit, to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high and low, friend and opponent, success and failure, yet not to do His work negligently".²⁷ The constant reading and re-reading of the Gita, and ceaseless pondering on its undying truths, made it possible for him at last to seize in an act of undivided attention "the core of the Gita's teaching", and now the Song of Songs seemed to tell him in friendly insinuating yet marvellously compelling words:

Desire and the passions that arise from desire are the principal sign and knot of ego.... Desire is the chief enemy of spiritual perfection.

Slay then desire; put away attachment to the possession and enjoyment of the outwardness of things. Separate yourself from all that comes to you as outward touches and solicitations, as objects of the mind and senses. Learn to bear and reject all the rush of the passions and to remain securely seated in your inner self even while they rage in your members, until at last they cease to affect any part of your nature. Bear and put away similarly the forceful attacks and even the slightest insinuating touches of joy and sorrow. Cast away liking and disliking, destroy preference and hatred, root out shrinking and repugnance. Let there be a calm indifference to these things and to all the objects of desire in all your nature. Look on them with the silent and tranquil regard of an impersonal spirit.²⁸

The doubts - the few that had persisted yet in prison - were now a thing of the past; Sri Aurobindo's soul already experienced a calm and rich lucidity. He was now able, while mentally repeating the mantra that all was Brahman, all was Vasudeva - sarvam khalvidam brahma, vāsudevah sarvamiti - to project that realisation upon everything and every creature in the range of his daily experience. The prison ceased to be a prison. As he opened his wondering eyes, it was an apocalyptic vision that he saw:

.. .it was while I was walking that His strength again entered into me. I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me his shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover. This was the first use of the deeper vision He gave me. I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the Swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies.²⁹

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Some of the prisoners were but thieves and dacoits, yet how good and how human they seemed to be, how well they seemed to be able to triumph over the adverse circumstances of jail life, how unconsciously they seemed to demonstrate that "sweet are the uses of adversity"! There was, in particular, an alleged dacoit sentenced to ten years' rigorous imprisonment, but to Sri Aurobindo he seemed a saint. As a result of these insights and illuminations, a transcendent peace now possessed Sri Aurobindo's mind and heart, and all was incomparable peace within. This singular immaculate inner equanimity and this miraculous gift of mystical vision helped him to see in the lower court - as in the sessions court as well - all the actors clothed in the garment of Narayana, of Vasudeva:

I looked and it was not the Magistrate whom I saw, it was Vasudeva, it was Narayana who was sitting there on the bench. I looked at the Prosecuting Counsel... it was Sri Krishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled, "Now do you fear?" He said, "I am in all men and I overrule their actions and their words. My protection is still without you..."³⁰

Incarceration and trial, then, far from breaking Sri Aurobindo, only re-made him in the hallowed mould of God's desire. The prison did not cramp his movements, but proved rather a temple of liberation and fulfilment. As he recapitulated this blissful experience in Kara-Kahini:

The high wall, those iron bars, the white wall, the green-leaved tree shining in the sunlight, it seemed as if these commonplace objects were not unconscious at all, but that they were vibrating with a universal consciousness, they loved me and wished to embrace me, or so I felt. Men, cows, ants, birds are moving, flying, singing, speaking, yet all is Nature's game; behind all this is a great pure detached spirit rapt in a serene delight. Once in a while it seemed as if God Himself was standing under the tree, to play upon His Flute of Delight; and with its sheer charm to draw my very soul out. Always it seemed as if someone was embracing me, holding me on one's lap. The manifestation of these emotions overpowered my whole body and mind, a pure and wide peace reigned everywhere....³¹

There was now neither peril nor shortcoming, but only the soul's utter joy and freedom; and even when he inhabited but an area of about forty-five square feet, he sensed the splendours of the Infinite and learned to lose himself in the "vasts of God".

IV

While thus a great peace reigned within and overflowed without, the preliminary trial went on its meandering course. At first Sri Aurobindo hardly met any of his co-accused. It was at an identification parade in the jail that he first chanced upon his brother, Barindra, after his arrest. It was at a parade, too, that one Narendranath Gossain (Goswami) thrust himself upon Sri Aurobindo's attention.  

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Fit and fat and tall and fair, "his eyes spoke of evil propensities". He claimed that his father was clever and influential enough to get him acquitted. After the trial began in the lower court on 19 May, the prisoners found some time to converse, either in the prison van or at tiffin time; otherwise they were kept in separate cells. There were jokes and pleasantries when they were thus occasionally thrown together, but Sri Aurobindo himself was generally taciturn. Gossain, however, would try to edge towards him, and try to make him talk, sometimes popping very suspicious questions. It was now found that the egregious Shams-ul-Alam was occasionally holding secret conversations with Gossain. Soon Gossain himself began saying with some bravado that he was being coaxed by the police to turn "King's approver" but that he was really trying to hoodwink them. On the other hand, his mind had by now become an open book to the other accused, and they were not a little apprehensive as to what he might do. And when he did give evidence at last, their fears proved only too true.

Whether it was on Dr. Daly's recommendation (as was likely) or at Gossain's suggestion (as he claimed), the prisoners were permitted to live together in the prison - a change not altogether to Sri Aurobindo's liking with his recently acquired taste for solitariness, but which facilitated Gossain's task of moving about and gathering "information". During this period of his stay with the others in a large room, Sri Aurobindo had plenty of opportunities of observing his companions in adversity. Most of them were strangers to him, but he was delighted to see the leaping light in their eyes and their general buoyancy of temperament:

Looking at these lads... one felt as if the liberal, daring, puissant men of an earlier age with a different training had come back to India. That fearless and innocent look in their eyes, the words breathing power, their carefree delighted laughter, even in the midst of great danger the undaunted courage, cheerfulness of mind, absence of despair, or grief, all this was a symptom, not of the inert Indians of those days, but of a new age, a new race and a new activity. If these were murderers, then one must say that the bloody shadow of killing had not fallen across their nature, in which there was nothing at all of cruelty, recklessness or bestiality... they passed their days in prison with boyish fun, laughter, games, reading and discussions. Quite early they had made friends with everyone... while the trial was going on, and the fate of thirty or forty accused persons was being wrangled over, whose result might be hanging or transportation for life, some of the accused persons without as much as glancing at what was happening around them, were absorbed in reading the novels of Bankimchandra, Vivekananda's Raja Yoga or Science of Religions, or the Gita, the Puranas, or European Philosophy.³²

As for the way Sri Aurobindo's unruffled demeanour struck the boys, we have the testimony of one of them, Upendranath Bandopadhyaya, as recorded in his book of reminiscences in Bengali:

Arabinda would also keep his comer and get lost in his spiritual meditations. Even the hell of the noise that the musical boys made did never disturb or  

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affect him. In the afternoons, he would pace up and down the room, and read the Upanishads or such holy things...³³

They noticed certain changes even in Sri Aurobindo's physical appearance. Although he used no oil, his hair looked shiny, as if it drew fat from the body itself. Once his eyes were set like glass-balls. When one of the boys mustered enough courage to ask him whether he had got anything out of his spiritual practices, Sri Aurobindo merely answered, "Why, my boy, the thing I looked for!" He had looked for God, and he had seen Him, and he was seeing Him all the time! To queries about the probable outcome of the case, Sri Aurobindo seems to have replied that he would be acquitted, and that, in fact, all their lives would be spared.³⁴

There were also certain other encounters and experiences. Sir Edward Baker, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, after a visit to the Alipur Jail where he happened to see Sri Aurobindo, told Charu Chandra Dutt: "Have you seen Arabinda Ghose's eyes? He has the eyes of a mad man!", and Dutt had to take great pains to convince Sir Edward that Arabinda wasn't mad at all but was really a true Karma Yogi.³⁵ There was a more portentous encounter when a Scotch Warder gave an insolent push to Sri Aurobindo when he was about to enter his cell. The boys around naturally got very much excited and might have exploded into violence, but Sri Aurobindo arrested it by giving the miscreant such a look that he instantaneously fled, burned within by the communicated fire of anger. The Jailor presently came upon the scene and, on things being explained to him, pacified everybody and said while going, "We have each to bear our cross."³⁶

Of some interest is Sri Aurobindo's experience of fasting once for a period of eleven days in the Alipur Jail. He was able to go through this "ordeal" (as it is usually called) without any great inconvenience, except that he lost ten pounds in weight during the period; and when he terminated the fast, he started taking the usual food again. Sri Aurobindo had also on one occasion the experience of the phenomenon known as "levitation". It was for him a time of intense Sadhana on the vital plane, and at the very moment he asked himself, "Are such things possible?", he found his body raised against the wall without any muscular exertion on his part - only a part of the body being in slight contact with the ground, and the rest remaining as if suspended precariously!³⁷

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

An even more significant experience was the sudden opening of a new frontier of his consciousness, - keen and infallible sensitiveness to painting and sculpture. He was meditating in his cell, and he saw - perhaps with his mind's eye - some pictures, some shapes, on the wall and it was as though an "Open Sesame!" had thrown the casements open to reveal the splendours in the firmaments of colour, line and form. Was the prison cell, not merely a sanctuary, but a School of Art as well?

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Once Sri Aurobindo had come out of the transient Dark and confronted the New Light of Divine Omnipresence, he knew he was beyond the slings and stabs of prison deprivations, bureaucratic perversity and the excruciation of legal proceedings. The sea of silence that had lain under the surface of his consciousness and held him in its vast supernal peace since the day he had stumbled upon it in the upstairs room of Sardar Mazumdar's house at Baroda six months earlier, - it was still there. The great Bass - the immaculate śruti - of the music of his life continued as before. But, after the blissful experience of Narayana Darshan in the Alipur Jail, it was as though a thousand little beautiful ships plied on the sea, it was as though numberless notes swelled and swayed and resounded and reverberated making melodies that charmed the human soul to inhabit the Life Heavens. It was not as though Sri Aurobindo had - by his ready response to love, to beauty, to the grandeur of God in everything - it was not as though Sri Aurobindo had lapsed into worldliness or this-worldliness, that he had tamely surrendered to the attachments, blandishments and entanglements of the world of samsāra, the deceptive realm of the dichotomies and dualities. The sea of silence was not lost: the śruti had not snapped - it was not the stirring of the senses, it was the witness-spirit that was now seeing and recognising the truth behind the appearances, the multiplicity of the phenomenal world in their innate God-suffused magnificence. This was really the upper hemisphere of knowledge - the hemisphere of Divine manifestation - and was only complementary to the lower hemisphere of knowledge, the arc of immitigable Nirvanic calm. As Sri Aurobindo explained later:

This is the integral knowledge, for we know that everywhere and in all conditions all to the eye that sees is One, to a divine experience all is one block of the Divine. It is only the mind which for the temporary convenience of its own thought and aspiration seeks to cut an artificial line of rigid division.... The liberated knower lives and acts in the world not less than the bound soul and ignorant mind but more,... only with a true knowledge and a greater conscient power. And by so doing he does not forfeit the supreme unity.... For the Superior, however hidden now to us, is here in the world no less than he could be in the most utter and ineffable self-extinction, the most intolerant Nirvana.³⁸

The splendid monotony of the blue sky and the gorgeous orange skies of the evening are both valid images of Reality!

V

Although the bunch of lads accused in the case along with him appeared in Sri Aurobindo's eyes to be a new type of children growing on the Mother's lap, it was the compulsion of fatality that every fine flock should have its black sheep, every Eden its serpent. The young men realised that it was necessary to hush up Judas-Gossain before he could do more mischief, and accordingly one of his fellow  

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accused pretended to want to turn approver too, supplied Gossain with false information which he duly transmitted to the police and made them run many a fool's errand. There was now no doubt at all that Gossain was 'miching mallecho' he meant mischief; he was the sort of person who could "adduce economic and political justifications in support of running his companions through treachery".³⁹ And so, on 31 August, Kanailal Dutt and Satyendra Bose found the chance to kill the wretched Gossain in a narrow alley leading from the jail hospital to jail gate, and thereby to silence him for ever. At once the little freedom that had been given to the prisoners was now taken away, and once again they were removed to their respective cells. Collected in two installments the accused numbered forty-four. As for Kanailal and Satyendra, although their audacious action predictably attracted summary punishment. They nevertheless won renown, in Sisirkumar Mitra's words, as "two of the greatest martyrs in the cause of India's liberty, compared by a British paper with Harmodius and Aristogeiton of Greek fame"; and Lajpat Rai wrote in his Autobiography that "a day will come when people will take wreaths of homage to their statues".

Sri Aurobindo was superficially a part of all this ghastly drama, yet not of it; he was one of the undertrial prisoners, yet he seemed, like a star, to stand aloof and above. When he was brought before Mr. Birley on 11 June, "a black ring was distinctly visible around Aurobindo Babu's eyes"; two days later, he "laughed heartily while conversing with his pleaders, only he looked paler than before".⁴⁰ In the early part of August, he was reported to be ill in jail.* And thus with interesting vicissitudes which affected different people in different ways, the trial laboriously dragged itself to a conclusion. Mr. Birley had examined 222 witnesses, and recorded the evidence or statements of several of the accused, including the approver. On 19 August, Mr. Birley framed charges against Sri Aurobindo and the others, and the case was now to go to the sessions. Notwithstanding the silencing of Gossain twelve days later, Norton was confident of getting a conviction at the sessions. Sri Aurobindo's sister Sarojini, therefore made a further appeal for funds to her countrymen to raise the defence fund from Rs. 23,000, where it then stood, to at least Rs. 60,000, the absolute minimum required to organise Sri Aurobindo's defence to match Mr. Norton's prosecution.

In the meantime, the position of the Bande Mataram became shaky owing to the lack of financial support and the withdrawal of Sri Aurobindo from the editorial sanctum. The paper carried on desperately for a time, thanks to the courage and resourcefulness of Shyamsundar Chakravarti, Hemendra Prasad and Bejoy Chatterjee, but this could not go on for ever. It was decided, therefore, that the paper should die with a bang rather than cease with a whimper, and so "Bejoy Chatterjee was commissioned to write an article for which the Government would

* Bande Mataram, 16 August 1908: vide sub-leader on "Very 111 in Jail". This seems to have been an exaggeration. There was only "a superficial ailment for some time which was of no consequence". (Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 53)

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certainly stop the publication of the paper".⁴¹ And that was how this great paper that had made history as the flaming standard-bearer of Indian Nationalism went down in blazing colours, fighting till the last.

Wasn't Sri Aurobindo shaken - wasn't he at least disturbed - by the chain of events: the framing of charges, the committal to sessions, the killing of Gossain, the martyrdom of Kanailal and Satyen, the closure of the Bande Mataram'] What was the meaning of it all? Weren't blind or evil forces operating, turning everything awry? But no! Sri Aurobindo's faith stood like a rock in the storm. His recently acquired calm remained as a settled thing, and declined to be ruffled any more. What had happened, and what was happening, only called for a spirit of reverence and an attitude of total surrender. The gains of his first weeks in prison - the inner poise and equanimity, the total trust in God, the constant feeling of the Mother's embrace - stood the test of these new difficulties and challenges. In His Will was his peace, and he knew that the Divine Will was working out its inscrutable purposes in its own way:

There is no event - great or small or even the smallest - from which some good had not accrued. He often fulfils three or four aims through a single event. We frequently see the working of a blind force in the world; accepting waste as part of nature's method, we ignore God's omniscience and find fault with the divine intelligence. The charge is unfounded. The Divine Intelligence never works blindly, there cannot be the slightest waste of His power; rather, the restrained manner in which, through the minimum of means, He achieves a variety of results is beyond the human intelligence...⁴²

VI

While thus all was felicity within, the world outside continued to be agitated by the imprisonment of Sri Aurobindo and the protracted and sensational trial that made the headlines day after day for weeks, and months, on end. The case commenced in the Alipur Sessions Court on 19 October 1908. Mr. C. P. Beachcroft, the District and Sessions Judge, who tried the case, had been with Sri Aurobindo at Cambridge, and had stood second in Greek while the other - now the accused - had stood first. Beachcroft had now (he very unpleasant task of "trying" the caged Sri Aurobindo on a charge of waging war against the King. So dangerous were the accused in the eyes of the panicky Government that they were kept throughout in a cage during the trial, with wire-netting and locking arrangements. Another of his Cambridge contemporaries and class-mates, Ferrar, who was a practising barrister in Malaya, happened to pass through Calcutta at the time, and felt most concerned when he saw Sri Aurobindo in the court-case. He would have liked to get Sri Aurobindo at least out of the cage, but didn't know how. Everyday as the prison authorities escorted the accused in the prison van from the jail to the Court Room, Ullaskar Datta used to give a lead to the singing and shouting all along the  

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way.⁴³ Indifferent to the proceedings in the Court where legal wranglings and examination and cross-examination of an apparently endless succession of witnesses were taking place, the prisoners in their caged isolation used to engage in serious discussions, and on one occasion Sri Aurobindo traced the history of the revolutionary spirit, how Mironow the Russian revolutionary had told Hemchandra Kanungo in Paris: "We learnt revolutionary methods from the Chinese, who claim they got them from India. How is it, then, that you now come to us for light?"

When the trial at last began, there was - as might have been expected - a tense atmosphere in the Court. Not content with putting the accused into a cage, police with fixed bayonets stood guard everywhere in the Court and its environs, and Mr. Norton himself, the great indefatigable Counsel-in-Chief for the prosecution, found it necessary to keep a five-chambered loaded revolver on his brief throughout the trial.⁴⁴ Drama was thus being queered more and more into Elizabethan melodrama, while the men in the cage were also giving it a half-tragic and a half-farcical touch. For the first few days, a leading Calcutta barrister appeared for Sri Aurobindo and Barindra, but as they couldn't afford the fees he demanded, he soon gave up the case. It was then that Chittaranjan Das - the "Deshabandhu " of a later day - agreed to appear for Sri Aurobindo. It is said that the spirit of Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya, who had died during captivity in the Campbell Hospital, appeared in a dream to Das and told him that he should take up the defence of Sri Aurobindo. Das's mother too seems to have asked him not to hesitate, for his duty lay in taking up the case. Sarojini Ghose and her friends had thus succeeded in avoiding the "sharks" of the legal profession, and they found in Chittaranjan a true Defender of the Faith and a great prophet of the Future. At that time, Chittaranjan was known to be a rising criminal lawyer, a sensitive poet, a dedicated patriot, a flaming idealist and an adoring son and servant of the Mother. He came upon the court scene at Alipur, and the prospect brightened up at once for the Defence.

Chittaranjan, although he was not then the power in the legal world that he became soon after, gave his whole heart and soul to the organisation of the Defence, and during the next six months devoted himself day and night to the task, and took practically no fees. It was the discipline of a Titan's labour, it was the ministry of a noble mission. We learn that in this case 206 witnesses were examined and over 4000 documents were filed, and exhibits consisting of bombs, revolvers, ammunition, detonators, fuses, poisonous acids and other explosive materials, numbering about 300 to 400 were presented.⁴⁵ Poet, visionary, patriot Chittaranjan had come to his brother poet's defence, put away from him "all other thoughts and abandoned all his practice" and had for months overworked himself and ruined his health ⁴⁶ - but it was a great cause and it was heroic service of the Mother as well. Not Sri Aurobindo, but the Mother's great and unique son. Her conscience made manifest, Her flaming heart and radiant soul - these were under trial. It was the Divine's working too that, not a gluttonous shark of the profession, not a merely superlatively clever Barrister, but a valiant St. George of the Bar  

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should come forward to give battle to the Dragon.

It is not necessary here to go over the whole exasperating legalistic ground once again. The prosecution, although they moved heaven and earth in order to achieve their object, just couldn't prove their case against Sri Aurobindo. Asked by the Court, Sri Aurobindo had said that he would leave the case entirely to his lawyers; he himself did not wish to make any statement or even to answer the Court's questions. As in Perseus the Deliverer, there was here too the vast invisible struggle between the dark nether forces of the foreign bureaucracy on the one hand and, on the other, the forces of light striving to break into the theatre of Chaos and Old Night and put them to flight. While, like Andromeda lying in chains on the nude high rock, Sri Aurobindo sat in his comer of the exposed cage absorbed in meditation, not listening to the evidence, not attending to the trial; while, in the background, like Poseidon and Pallas Athene the powers of the Bureaucracy and of Nationalism were anxiously awaiting the outcome of the issue; there, in the foreground - like the formidable sea-monster and the bright Sun-God Perseus - the redoubtable Eardley Norton and the young Apollo Chittaranjan fought out the issue between the Old and the New, slavery and freedom, death and life. Norton's massive experience and sheer driving intellectual power met Chittaranjan's jets of emotion and lightning intuitive leaps. Was it Goliath against David, or the Dragon against Perseus? The Alpine edifices of evidence, the superb dialectics, the ruthless browbeatings, the hectorings and the innuendoes, the banterings and the baitings, the legal quibblings and the trained ventriloquisms, all ultimately availed nothing in the face of the clear stream of Ganga that reflected a thousand lights yet flowed majestically, bringing the benediction of success. Much of the dark pillared heights of the prosecution case was eaten up by the gleaming lights from Chittaranjan's Lamp of Defence. It was almost as in the climactic scene in Savitri:

He called to Night but she fell shuddering back,

He called to Hell but sullenly it retired...

His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.⁴⁷

The case for the defence simply was that it was perfectly true that Sri Aurobindo had taught the people of India the, name and meaning and content of Swaraj or National Independence. If that by itself was a crime, Sri Aurobindo would very willingly plead guilty to the charge. The guilt was writ large in his writings and in his speeches, and he would be prepared to reiterate yet once again that particular "guilt". There was no need at all to bring witness after witness to prove something that the accused himself did not dispute, and wouldn't dream of disputing. If to take the name of Swaraj and to propagate its meaning was to be deemed guilty, he would be ready to suffer to the uttermost for having preached the message of Independence to the people. But let not the prosecution charge Sri Aurobindo with things he had not done, which were in fact repugnant to his whole philosophy and scheme of things.   

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He had taught the people of India how the ideals of democracy and national independence could be translated into reality in terms of Vedantic self-awakening self-discipline and self-realisation. He had never approved spasmodic terrorist acts he had never thought that such acts would usher in independence. Sri Aurobindo was a Vedantic Nationalist, not a mere bomb-throwing terrorist.

Chittaranjan's speech for the defence was spread over eight days, and came to be praised universally as an eloquent epic of forensic art. What was Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of action? What was it - in the individual as well as National planes? Just this, affirmed Chittaranjan: Vedantism. Sri Aurobindo was not a politician in the ordinary. Western sense of the term, but a deeply committed person to whom politics was as profoundly spiritual an experience as was religion itself. Elucidating this point, Chittaranjan continued:

As in the case of individuals you cannot reach your God with extraneous aid, but you must make an effort - that supreme effort - yourself before you can realise the God within you; so also with a nation. It is by itself that a nation must grow; a nation must attain its salvation by its unaided effort. No foreigner can give you that salvation. It is within your own hands to revive that spirit of nationality. That is the doctrine of nationality which Aurobindo has preached throughout, and that was to be done not by methods which are against the traditions of the country... the doctrines he preached are not doctrines of violence but doctrines of passive resistance. It is not bombs, but suffering..;. He says, believe in yourself; no one attains salvation who does not believe in himself. Similarly, he says, in the case of a nation.⁴⁸

How Chittaranjan proved that the letter purported to have been written by Barindra to his elder brother Sri Aurobindo was no more than a forgery - "as clumsy as those Piggott had got up to incriminate Parnell after the murder of Lord Cavendish in Phoenix Park"⁴⁹ - is of course among the most thrilling denouements in the history of criminal cases. O Bureaucracy! all that and forgery too? And Sri Aurobindo too must have found a certain grim satisfaction in the parallelism between the two prosecutions - both fathered ultimately by the same imperial Power.

Having thus masterfully demolished what must have initially appeared to be a piece of damning evidence against Sri Aurobindo, Chittaranjan in his memorable peroration - delivered as if he was a man divinely possessed - made a unique appeal to Mr. Beachcroft the Judge and the two Assessors:

My appeal to you is this, that long after the controversy will be hushed in silence, long after this turmoil, the agitation will have ceased, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone, his words will be echoed and re-echoed, not only in India, but across distant seas and lands. Therefore, I say that the man in his position is not only standing before the bar of this Court, but before the bar of the High Court of History.⁵⁰

Prophetic words - and more than prophetic words. When the hearing had concluded, the two Assessors returned a unanimous verdict of "Not Guilty" about  

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Sri Aurobindo on 14 April 1909. Three weeks later, on 6 May, accepting the assessors' verdict, Mr. Beachcroft acquitted Sri Aurobindo.

Of the rest, Barindra and Ullaskar received death sentences; some were exiled to the Andamans for life, some were sentenced to transportation or rigorous imprisonment for several years; and some fifteen, including Nolini Kanta Gupta, were acquitted along with Sri Aurobindo. Presently, C.R. Das appealed to the High Court on behalf of those who had been convicted, and as a result Barindra and Ullaskar had their death sentences commuted into transportation for life. There were other reductions too in course of time, and so they were all permitted to return to normal life before many years passed. But at the moment the death sentences were passed, Ullaskar had merely thrown up a sardonic smile and remarked, 'Thank God, this damn'd show is ended after all." They had all aspired nobly, dared greatly, lived dangerously, and they were able also - at life's extremity - to laugh at death. Although it is not to our purpose here to follow the fortunes of the various accused in later years, two of them at least deserve more than a passing mention. Of Barindra, the brain and heart of the Manicktolla enterprise, Mr. Norton himself said while introducing a book on the trial:

The ringleader was a young man of unusual qualities. No lawyer can defend his action; no statesman applaud it. None the less, Barindra Kumar Ghose was sincere, and in a great measure chivalrous.

Ullaskar, as a college student, had thrashed his professor, one Mr. Russell, for having spoken deprecatingly of the Bengalis. He had then joined the Manicktolla group and started making bombs. Love of the Motherland was a consuming passion with him, and nothing else mattered. Like Barin, Ullaskar too spent ten or more years in the Andamans, and that must have affected both body and mind. "But this, after all, was part of the ritual of sacrifice", says Nolini, and concludes with Barin's defiant words: "Such indeed was the vow in this kind of marriage." Barin and Ullaskar and the rest of those young men who suffered prison life at Alipur for a year and some more years undergoing their sentences were all children of the Mother born with a feeling of tragic fatality. They counted not the cost of patriotism, they didn't compromise and prevaricate to buy freedom at the cheapest market, they didn't put comfort and security and quickest getting on in life above single-minded service of the Mother. If they were "misguided", they paid the penalty for it. But what at this distance of time cries to be remembered is that those young men, parched with the thirst for freedom, couldn't go into nice prudential calculations but sought the drink that came handy - resolute action regardless of consequences. They could both sing exultingly this chorus and also live in the light of its uncompromising code:

A day indeed had dawned,

When a million hearts

Have known not to fear

And leave no debts unpaid.  

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Life and death are

Bondslaves at our feet;

Our hearts have forgotten to care.⁵¹

VII

Sri Aurobindo, while still in the Alipur Jail (the Government Hotel at Alipur, as he once humorously called it), had written a number of articles with titles such as 'The Morality of the Bomb', 'The Psychology of the Bomb' and 'The Policy of the Bomb', and these had been sent out of the prison through a friend. But the friend too was afraid that the police might seize the articles, and so he put them in a piece of hollow bamboo and buried it in the earth; when he dug up the bamboo later, the papers were found to have been eaten away by white ants. A better fate, however, overtook some of the poetic compositions of this period. The experience of Divine manifestation in everything and everybody was a new ground of realisation. But he had reached this spot only by battering his way through thorns and brambles, defying hazards and dieting on difficulties:

With wind and the weather beating round me

Up to the hill and the moorland I go.

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

Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?

Not in the petty circle of cities

Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;

Over me God is blue in the welkin,

Against me the wind and the storm rebel.⁵²

In another poem, The Mother of Dreams, written in long lines of 'linked sweetness' and interior multiple-rhymes, Sri Aurobindo's Muse rides triumphantly on the crest of a complicated rhythm and achieves a memorable articulation in eloquent praise of the Mother - "the home-of-all, the womb-of-all", in Hopkins's suggestive phrase - who in myriad ways manifests Herself to terrestrial men and women. What visions are these that visit us as we are lapped in grey, soft and restful slumber? What sights, what sounds are these, what are these images, what is this bliss profound, - what are these intimations that thus implicate us in their grandeur and in their impenetrable and ineluctable mystery? Sri Aurobindo's imagination and his spiritual fervour weave a velvet magic about these meandering and soul-enchanting lines, and the poem itself is a dream-world of incommunicable beauty and felicity. One must read and chant the whole poem slowly, for it is endowed with something of the mantra sakti of the revealed word, and once we surrender ourselves to the magic of its rhythmic sound, we find easy entrance into

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the deathless world of its mystic harmony. We can quote the concluding lines here, as powerful a piece of utterance as any in the whole body of Sri Aurobindo's poetry:

Doors have swung wide in the chambers of pride where the Gods reside and the Apsaras dance in their circles faster and faster.

For thou art she whom we first can see when we pass the bounds of the mortal.

There at the gates of the heavenly states thou hast planted thy wand enchanted over the head of the Yogin waving.

From thee are the dream and the shadows that seem and the fugitive lights that delude us;

Thine is the shade in which visions are made; sped by thy hands from celestial lands come the souls that rejoice for ever.

Into thy dream-worlds we pass or look in thy magic glass, then beyond thee we climb out of Space and Time to the peak of divine endeavour.⁵³

From the fullness of such poetic recordation, it is surely sacrilege to detract anything, and mere exegesis must only end in such detraction. Suffix for us to know that Sri Aurobindo had become, while cooped up supposedly m petty space, the sort of man who could peep into Infinity and render its untranslatable wonders in streams of such vibrant melody. Stone walls made no prison to him, nor iron grating a cage; for a soul enfranchised as his, the dungeon was very hermitage, and his soul moved unhorizoned with angel-wings and glimpsed the Lord in everything. There is a sovereign sense of bareness in the shorter poem, an there is a like sovereign suggestion of richness and magnificence in the second - but both partake of the Bliss of Brahman in the infinite manifestations of the Divine play. Sri Aurobindo has safely come through the devouring coils of adverse circumstance; he has baffled the sudden intrusion of the Everlasting No and affirmed the incandescent hues of the Everlasting Yea. He has ceased to be a "traveller between life and death", and he has become instead a Pilgrim of Eternity.

After a whole year in prison, Sri Aurobindo came out on 6 May 1909, and went straight to C.R. Das's residence and later to his maternal uncle's house - the Sanjivani Office - at 6, College Square. One who saw him then has since recorded that Sri Aurobindo sat "outwardly unconcerned and unperturbed. He had, as it were, drawn his mind into the depth of his being. He looked up to the skies - a distant look in his eyes - oblivious of his immediate surroundings."⁵⁴

A wide God-knowledge poured down from above,

A new world-knowledge broadened from within... 

The human in him paced with the divine.⁵⁵  

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