Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 11 

The Nation's Pace-maker

I

We saw that one of the developments that helped Sri Aurobindo to decide to leave the Baroda service for good and take the plunge into Bengal politics was the offer of the Principalship of the New National College at Calcutta. The college opened on 14 August 1906, and Sri Aurobindo began his work there on 15 August, his birthday. On the organisation side, there was Satish Chandra Mukherjee - already associated with the Dawn Society and the National Council of Education - as Superintendent, and among the other teachers was Radhakumud Mukherjee. Sri Aurobindo had on his hands the Bande Mataram too, besides his preoccupations with the Nationalist party and the secret Revolutionary party. He had to do his share of political touring also, an exhausting affair although often exhilarating as well. There was the resulting breakdown in his health, which made it necessary for him to spend three or four months at his grandfather's place in Deoghar, except for brief spells in Calcutta or trips to centres like Khulna. He had accordingly to take leave from the National College again and again, and the management of the college was almost wholly relegated to Satish Mukherjee.

On his return to India and during the years of his Baroda experience, Sri Aurobindo had found the British system of education disgusting: "He felt that it tended to dull and impoverish and tie up the naturally quick and brilliant and supple Indian intelligence, to teach it bad intellectual habits and spoil by narrow information and mechanical instruction its originality and productivity."¹ The adventure of starting the National College at Calcutta and other schools elsewhere evoked considerable enthusiasm at first, and the movement seemed to spread. The Risley Circular and the attempt to insulate Government and aided educational institutions from the breath of freedom and the breezes of Nationalism would, it was hoped, give a further fillip to national education. When Sir Bampfylde Fuller, as Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal, had tried to disaffiliate the Serajgunge schools for the crime of their teachers and pupils taking part in politics, Lord Minto's Government had disallowed the move and driven the Lieutenant-Governor to resign in a huff and get back to England. But with the Risley Circular, "the same Government and the same Lord Minto" began "out-Fullering Fuller" and flourishing the Damocles' sword of disaffiliation over all schools and colleges, and not only over the two Serajgunge schools. On 28 May, 1907, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Bande Mataram that what the Government seemed to object to was not mechanical learning but dynamic practice:

They do not care very much if certain academical ideas of liberalism or nationalism are imparted to the young by their teachers, but they desire to stop the active habit of patriotism in the young; for they know well that a mere  

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intellectual habit untranslated into action is of no value in after life. The Japanese when they teach Bushido to their boys do not rest content with lectures or a moral catchism; they make them practise Bushido and govern every thought and action of their life by the Bushido ideal. This is the only way of inculcating a quality into a nation, by instilling it practically into the minds of its youth at school and college until it becomes an ingrained, inherent, inherited national quality.

The proper way to meet the challenge of the Risley Circular would be to end all reliance on the Government college or school, but the establishment of a college here or a dozen schools at different centres - and that was all that could be done by the middle of 1907 - was "not a sufficient record of work for a movement nationally recognised and adopted".² Writing on 7 June, again, Sri Aurobindo said that "a general defiance of the Circular", that and that alone would make the provisions of the Circular unworkable:

What India needs especially at this moment is the aggressive virtues, the spirit of soaring idealism, bold creation, fearless resistance, courageous attack; of the passive tamasic spirit of inertia we have already too much.... We would apply to the present situation the vigorous motto of Danton, that what we need, what we should learn above all things is to dare and again to dare and still to dare.

.. .National education is by no means impracticable or even difficult, it needs nothing but a resolute enthusiasm in the country and the courage to take a leap into the unknown. This courage is common in individuals but not in nations, least of all in subject nations; and yet when the fire is lit, it is perhaps subject nations more than any other which are found ready to take the leap.

In an article in the issue of 8 July, the Bande Mataram succinctly stated yet once more the case against Government education:

It extends to a limited few and fails to inspire even them with any divine wonderment, the curiosity to know or the passion to leave the world better than they have found it by a single act or thought. Imparted with the predetermined purpose of reconciling the mind of its recipient with the order of things as they are, it has necessarily culminated in the production of a monstrous species whose object in acquiring knowledge cannot reach beyond the vision of mere luxurious animal life, who have been content with merely thinking of and describing the incident of their political slavery in the language of freedom learned from the noble literature of England, and then imagining themselves free; who have been content with the mere explanations their text-books give of their country's economic condition, content furthermore with their life of mere external conformity to ancient customs which they have ceased to have faith in, with the daily lies of their life, with the thousand and one defects, evils and insincerities of the disorganised society around them which they have not the moral force to reorganise.

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This passive life of acquiescence in things that be, lived by the average English-educated Indian, is the most effective piece of destructive criticism on the education given by the Indian Government.

It followed therefore, as night followed day and day followed night, that the individual and society in India couldn't be transformed "till you have thoroughly purged and purified his thoughts and aspirations by giving him free and impartial education in the place of the loyalty-ridden instruction with the motto of status quo fastened round its neck".

In a series of articles contributed two years later to the Karmayogin, Sri Aurobindo discussed the problem of education in rather greater detail and almost outlined a philosophy of National education for India. Modem Indian education, being an absurd copy and even a vulgarisation of the British model, had compelled us to barter away our ancient heritage for the proverbial mess of pottage; this education had debased us, and all but destroyed us. The clue to reform Should lie in reviving, as far as might be possible, the authentic in our ancient education:

What was the secret of that gigantic intellectuality, spirituality and superhuman moral force which we see pulsating in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, in the ancient philosophy, in the supreme poetry, art, sculpture and architecture of India? What was at the basis of the incomparable public works and engineering achievement, the opulent and exquisite industries, the great triumphs of science, scholarship, jurisprudence, logic, metaphysics, the unique social structure? What supported the heroism and self-abandonment of the Kshatriya, the Sikh and the Rajput, the unconquerable national vitality and endurance? What was it that stood behind that civilisation second to none, in the massiveness of its outlines or the perfection of its details? Without a great and unique discipline involving a perfect education of soul and mind, a result so immense and persistent would have been impossible.³

There were the ashramas, of course, and there were also the ancient universities, like those of Nalanda and Takshasila, Vallabhi and Vikamsila, Ujjaini and Kancheepuram, Amravati and Odantapuri; but were not these ashramas and universities themselves reared on a seminal principle? Where did the ancients locate and how did they build the reservoir of vital energy that alone could have upheld those stupendous superstructures in the realms of Matter, Thought and Spirit?

Sri Aurobindo thought that the clue to the whole secret lay in the practice of brahmacharya, so widely prevalent in those early days of pristine Hindu culture. Brahmacharya sought to "raise up the physical to the spiritual"; it gradually perfected the instruments of knowledge; it led to the heightening and ultimate perfection of the sattwic elements in human nature; it created, as it were, an infallible engine of universal knowledge within. But Sri Aurobindo was also careful to add that such a feat of mobilisation and perfect deployment of one's faculties was "only possible to the Yogin by a successful prosecution of the discipline of Yoga.4 Brahmacharya was the starting-point, but yoga was the means to the finality of fulfilment.

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Between these two poles did the ancient Hindus raise their systems of knowledge, their methods of education and their experiments in civilisation.

And yet Sri Aurobindo did not say that the old Brahmacharya-Yoga axis could be reproduced in all its details in twentieth century India. He contented himself, on the other hand, with setting forth the "nature and psychological ideas of the old system" so that we might consider the possibility of their adoption in a modified form to suit current conditions, or - better still - of their further refinement and improvement on the basis of "a still deeper psychology and a still more effective discipline".5 The system in vogue called upon the student to learn through a foreign medium "a variety of alien and unfamiliar subjects". The arrangement being unnatural, there resulted "the disuse of judgement, observation, comprehension and creation, and the exclusive reliance on the deteriorating relics of the ancient Indian memory".6 And, finally, odds and ends of information passed for Knowledge, and wisdom and creative intelligence were lost in this fog of pseudo-knowledge.

What National Education, in its primary inspiration, aimed at doing was to employ the mother-tongue wherever possible, restore "the use of the disused intellectual functions", and provide for "a richer and more real equipment of information, of the substance of knowledge and the materials for creation".7 Having made such a diagnosis of the evils of the Government education and entertained such high hopes from the New National education, it was hardly to be wondered at that Sri Aurobindo was not altogether satisfied with the actual functioning of the National College and the other schools that had come into existence in the first flush of the people's enthusiasm. These "national" institutions were not numerous enough, they had not really cut themselves free from the shackles of the old system, they had not adequate enough financial support, they had not teachers enough with the necessary sense of dedication or driving force, and they had not the requisite dynamism to dare and fare forward regardless of danger and difficulty. As Sri Aurobindo later recapitulated the causes of the failure of the movement:

...partly because it had to deal with minds already vitiated by the old system and not often with the best even of these, because its teachers had themselves seldom a perfect grasp of the requirements of the new system, and because its controllers and directors were men of the old school who clung to familiar shibboleths and disastrous delusions. ... While calling itself national, it neglected the very foundation of the great achievement of our forefathers and especially the perfection of the instrument of knowledge.⁸

And on a later occasion still:

National Education languishes because the active force has been withdrawn from it....

The National Council of Education, as it is at present composed, has convicted itself of entire incapacity whether to grasp the meaning of the movement or to preserve or create the conditions of its success. To the majority of the members it is merely an interesting academical experiment.... To others

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the only valuable pan of it is the technical instruction given in its workshops. The two or three who at all regard it as part of a great national movement, are unnerved by fear, scepticism and distrust and, by introducing the principles of Chanakya into its public policy, are depriving it of the first condition of its continued existence.⁹

It wasn't just the label "National" but the reality of the power and the glory evoked by the word: it wasn't a superficial tinkering with the curriculum or a half-hearted change in the content and mode of education but a new perception of the ends and a bold new forging of the required means: it wasn't merely a vocational "bias" or a practical "turn" but patriotism itself as the vocation and service of the Mother as the decisive turn in life - such was National education as Sri Aurobindo had visualised it, but the National College at Calcutta and the other National Schools that had sprung up in Bengal seemed incapable of rising to the heights of striving expected of them. While the new education was to have been an integral part of the great movement of national resurgence and patriotic upsurge, by dwindling too readily into anaemic reformism or even half-headed conformism it lost its initial momentum and transforming power and failed to enthuse students and teachers alike. And Sri Aurobindo certainly didn't mince matters when he said:

It is foolish to expect men to make great sacrifices while discouraging their hope and enthusiasm. It is not intellectual recognition of duty that compels sustained self-sacrifice in masses of men; it is hope, it is the lofty ardour of a great cause, it is the enthusiasm of a noble and courageous effort.¹⁰

But in the early morning glory of the National College - in August 1906 and the months following - all was resplendent hope and towering expectation. And Sri Aurobindo came to the class-room trailing clouds of glory - he was an inspiring teacher - his was a noble presence. A former pupil of the National College, Bala Dev Sharma has thus reminisced about the well-beloved and universally respected Sri Aurobindo: "He was clad in a shirt and a Chaddar.... I seem to recall his eyes, which were withdrawn from the outer world and concentrated on the inner spaces of his consciousness."¹¹ Addressing teachers and students together on one occasion, Sri Aurobindo had said that it was only when the Western nations' titanic power for organisation and practical work was united with the enfranchising, harmonising and creative spirituality of India, only then could our national character "evolve such a type as would be incomparable in the world". But alas! the Indian sensibility was prone to be sicklied over with the pale cast of tamas; that had to change - an inrush of primordial revitalising energy had to be brought about - and the music of a creative new harmony had to emerge from the lyre that the awakened Mother had taken in her hand.

A former colleague at the National College, Pramathanath Mukhopadhyaya (later Swami Pratyagatmananda) has also recorded his memories of those times:

When he started his work in the heaving politics of Bengal, it was the blazing, fiery aspect of Rudra that stood out in front. But those who associated with him in the National College saw his serene figure, glowing with a mellow lustre.

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These two aspects were fused into one in Sri Aurobindo as in the third eye of Shiva.¹²

Once at a meeting of the college staff, Sri Aurobindo took the chair, "his body framed in august silence"; the meeting discussed whether the Bankim Day should not be included among the "days of national festival", and the support to the proposal that came from Sri Aurobindo "had the benign vibrant blare of the trumpet of Shiva". On the Saraswati Puja day, again, Sri Aurobindo sat with the others in the courtyard, "silent and immobile, like Shiva in trance", and on that day, in a flash of intuition, Pramathanath saw Sri Aurobindo, not merely as a Jnana Yogi and Karma Yogi, "but as a Purna Yogi, lapped in the Yogic sleep of deep meditation".¹³ This was no learned colleague merely, this was an immaculate and ineluctable Power that had assumed a human form, this was a manifestation, a "resplendent divinity", this was a nectarean Promise and the prelude to the coming Fulfilment.

When the Government decided to prosecute Sri Aurobindo on account of his supposed editorship of the Bande Mataram, he resigned his Principalship of the National College so as not to embarrass the authorities by his continued association with the institution. But he was the idol of the students still, more so now than even before, and they organised a meeting on 21 August to record their regret at his resignation and express their sympathy with him in his "present troubles". On 23 August another meeting of the students and teachers was called, and on being requested to speak, Sri Aurobindo made a brief but moving speech, admirably pointed to the occasion but also carrying its accents of persuasion and authority to all time. What sort of advice was he to give, when "in these days... young men can very often give better advice than we older people can give"! They had referred to his "troubles":

I don't know whether I should call them troubles at all, for the experience that I am going to undergo was long foreseen as inevitable in the discharge of the mission that I have taken up from my childhood, and I am approaching it without regret.

There would be no cause for regret if he could be assured that the rising generation would carry on his work when he was removed from the field. The respect shown to him was really due "to the Mother in me", for whatever he had been able to do - whatever he had endured and suffered - had been for the Mother's sake alone. Then came the piece of "advice":

The only piece of advice that I can give you now is - carry on the work, the mission, for which this college was created.... When we established this college and left other occupations, other chances of life, to devote our lives to this institution, we did so because we hoped to see in it the foundation, the nucleus of a nation, of the new India which is to begin its career after this night of sorrow and trouble, on that day of glory and greatness when India will work for the world. What we want here is not merely to give you a little information, not merely to open to you careers for earning a livelihood, but to

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build up sons for the Motherland to work and to suffer for her.¹⁴

Suddenly the pitch is raised, the tone is heightened, the words are charged with a Messianic force, and the rhythm reverberates and carries its burden of urgency far, far beyond the hall, far beyond the Bengal of 1907, and it is almost as though the words are addressed to us:

There are times in a nation's history when Providence places before it one work, one aim, to which everything else, however high and noble in itself has to be sacrificed. Such a time has now arrived for our Motherland when nothing is dearer than her service, when everything else is to be directed to that end. If you will study, study for her sake; train yourself body and mind and soul for her service. You will earn your living that you may live for her sake. You will go abroad to foreign lands that you may bring back knowledge with which you may do service to her. Work that she may prosper. Suffer that she may rejoice. All is contained in that one single advice.¹⁵

A succession of words is like a string of numbers whose value depends on the position of the decimal point, and the power of words likewise depends on the man who speaks them. Sri Aurobindo's exhortation powerfully affected his audience because he (Rudra-Shiva) was the speaker, and Rudra's action had preceded Shiva's words. National service was a mission Sri Aurobindo had assumed since childhood, he had known all along that there would be danger, and the possibility of arrest and imprisonment and other tribulations. "I am nothing, what I have done is nothing"; but the son of the Mother - the Mother in him - was everything! Leadership was a form of service, and there was unending scope for service. The college was really a school for training in such national service. The college community was the nucleus of the New India - the India who would redeem herself and work for the whole world. By losing themselves in the adoration and service of the Mother, they would experience a great accession of strength in them and in the Mother, and that would be the higher fulfilment. "When in future I shall look upon your career of glorious activity," Sri Aurobindo concluded, "I may have the pride of remembering that I did something to prepare and begin it."

After his acquittal in the Bande Mataram case, Sri Aurobindo resumed his professorship - though not the Principalship - but his increasing involvement in politics which had become inevitable because of the blaze of publicity during the prosecution compelled him to give less and less time to the college. At last, during the Alipur case following the Muzzaferpore outrage on 30 April 1908, on the suggestion of the college authorities, Sri Aurobindo finally severed his connection with it. The National College thus lost its principal light-giver, its soul, and settled down to a pedestrian existence, very much like most other educational institutions in the country. In the fullness of time - after national Independence - the college duly attained its apotheosis as the Jadabpur University.

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II

While the Bande Mataram case was going on, there appeared in the paper three editorial articles from Sri Aurobindo's pen in which he joined issue with Mr. N. N. Ghose of the Indian Nation on the subject of nationality and sovereignty in the Indian context. Answering a question posed by himself - What are the elements of nationality? - Sri Aurobindo wrote in the first of the three articles:

We answer that there are certain essential conditions, geographical unity, a common past, a powerful common interest impelling towards unity and certain favourable political conditions which enable the impulse to realise itself in an organised government expressing the nationality and perpetuating its single and united existence.¹⁶

He maintained that these conditions were indeed present in India. In reply to Mr. N.N. Ghose's contention that the mixture of races was an insuperable obstacle to national unity, Sri Aurobindo resorted to a reductio ad absurdum:

One might just as well say that different chemical elements cannot combine into a single substance as that different races cannot combine into a single nation.¹⁷*

In "The Morality of Boycott", written for but not actually published in the Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo went to the very root of the matter and explained in vivid figurative language the raison d'être of Indian patriotism:

The pride in our past, the pain of our present, the passion for the future are its [i.e. the love of one's country's] trunk and branches. Self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness, great service, high endurance for the country are its fruit. And the sap which keeps it alive is the realisation of the Motherhood of God in the country, the vision of the Mother, the knowledge of the Mother, the perpetual contemplation, adoration and service of the Mother.¹⁸

There would be no "problem" of Indian unity to solve if only Indians could learn to realise themselves, not in the stifling burrow or groove of a section or segment of the community or the country, but in the infinite bounty of the Mother, the total strength of the beloved Mother who was Bhavani Bharati at the same time. Ira another article, Sri Aurobindo differentiated between a false facade of unity that was meaningless and the true unity that alone had the strength and will to dare and achieve. The cry for unity raised in season and out of season was but a "cant phrase", because the people who usually used it wished merely to discourage "independence in thought and progressiveness in action". Such double-talk was "a fosterer of falsehood" and could only encourage "cowardice and insincerity". And it was wrong to go about pleading for a patch-work unity, an anyhow-and-somehow kind of "unity" that involved the sacrifice of honest opinion, principle and conscientious action. The pseudo-unity-mongers seemed to say:

* The issue of 29 November asked: "Has not Sidgwick established it beyond any shadow of doubt that diversity of race, language and religion does not stand in the way of forming a nation?"

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"Be your views what they may, suppress them, for they will spoil our unity; swallow your principles, they will spoil our unity; do not battle for what you think to be the right, it will spoil our unity; leave necessary things undone, for the attempt to do them will spoil our unity."

A "dead and lifeless unity" was but the index of national degradation; a living unity would, on the other hand, be the "index of national greatness". What sort of "unity" - political unity - could be forged between the Loyalists, the Moderates and the Nationalists? Nor was it historically true that without flawless unity within nations had not liberated themselves and done great deeds:

On the contrary when a nation is living at high pressure and feelings are at white heat, opinions and actions are bound to diverge far more strongly than at other times. In the strenuous times before the American War of Independence, the colony was divided into a powerful minority who were wholly for England, a great hesitating majority who were eager for internal autonomy but unwilling to use extreme methods, and a small but vigorous minority of extremists with men like John Adams at their head who pushed the country into revolt and created a nation. The history of the Italian revolution tells the same story.

Even in Japan, it was when the issue between the moderate Shogun party and the extremist Mikado party was settled that the country's sensational regeneration became possible. Of course, as distinct from paper-unity or hypocritical platform-unity, there was the mystique of true national unity, which was "the unity of self-dedication to the country when the liberty and greatness of our motherland is the paramount consideration to which all others must be subordinated".¹⁹

In several other contributions too, nationalism, national unity, the philosophy of patriotism, the Kshatriya spirit, and politics and spirituality come under scrutiny, and these essays and the obiter dicta scattered in the rest invite the critical attention of students of political science generally and of Indian political thought in particular.* But there is room here only for random glances at a few of these sparks from Sri Aurobindo's well-worked anvil of the Bande Mataram days. The heat of political controversy sparked off many of these essays, yet the sparks leapt from the forge and anvil of a great and unique aspiration to which Nationalism was a living religion offering infinite scope for mighty effort and glorious realisation. A reference was made earlier to the audacious simile elaborated by Sri Aurobindo in the essay on "The Life of Nationalism" to equate the growth of the national spirit in India with the different stages in the life of Krishna: and Nationalism was an avatār! - an avatār that had taken birth to redeem the Mother from the clutches of the demon, Foreign Rule. Another essay, "Sri Krishna: and Autocracy",

* The reader is referred to V.P. Varma's The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (1960), Karan Singh's Prophet of Indian Nationalism: A Study of the Political Thought of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh 1893-1910 (1963, 1967 and Haridas and Uma Mukherjee's Sri Aurobindo's Political Thought: 1893-1908 (1958).

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went also to Krishna's life to draw a lesson in nation-building. The essay, however, begins rather unexpectedly with a glance at Brutus' killing of his friend Julius Caesar:

It was not in vain that Brutus polluted his hands with the blood of his own beloved comrade and exclaimed by way of palliating his sanguinary action, "As he was ambitious, I slew him". Ambition scorns humanity, believes that the world exists for serving him and him alone, and turns all abilities to questionable purposes.... Whoever does not delight in being one of the multitude and has no desire to share their joys and sorrows can hardly do any good to mankind....

And Krishna comes into the picture as the avatār who was also a man of the people. He was the nation-builder, not the builder of his own image; he made "overtures for peace" but took care to have some strength at his back.²⁰ In another essay that appeared five days later, Sri Aurobindo underlined the religious dimension that politics had acquired:

 The political strife has assumed a religious character, and the question now before the people is whether India - the India of the holy Rishis, the India that gave birth to a Rama, a Krishna and a Buddha, the India of Shivaji and Guru Gobinda - is destined for ever to lie prostrate at the proud feet of a conqueror.²¹

And in a later essay, the Bande Mataram affirmed that, "according to the Hindu idea of patriotism, none but those who look upon their Motherland as superior even to Heaven itself are patriots".²² And how was one to reconcile with this ideal of patriotism the notion of colonial self-government? Varieties of people there might be in a country so extensive as India, there might be a diversity of interests, rival groups and temperaments and enthusiasms; but all could coalesce nevertheless on a great common endeavour that was a matter of life and death to everybody. The Bande Mataram saw no lack of vitality in the people, the proletariat, who were perhaps the unawakened giant, still a giant, alive, and now waking up at last; it was from the so-called educated classes that vitality seemed to have been drained away:

The spirit that rose against the Colonisation Bill in the Punjab and prevented its passing into law, the spirit that has manifested itself in the Bengal Boycott, the spirit that has revolted against white insolence in the Transvaal is the spirit of the people....²³

Certain "leaders", some out of ignorance and others out of mischief, had been extolling a life of passivity, equating passivity with spirituality and rating spirituality as something far superior to the rough and tumble of practical politics, - the net result of these intellectual gyrations being to confirm whole masses of men and women in a placid acceptance of the condition of slavery and a sinking into tamas unqualified and unrelieved. Tamas invited subjection, and subjection confirmed tamas as a settled condition. A forthright article on "Politics and Spirituality" said:

Subjection makes a people wholly tamasic, a sort of physical, intellectual

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and moral palsy seizes them and keeps them down to a low level of being, they are like insects grovelling in the dust, and before they can be lifted up to the higher plane of sattva, they must pass through rajas.²⁴

Did not the champions of the new-spirituality (who were really the defenders of tamas) - did they not know what Sri Chaitanya himself once defied the Kazi when he tried to prevent Sankirtan and in fact so overwhelmed the Muslim Magistrate that he not only cancelled his earlier order but himself joined the Assembly that evening? Peace, peace, certainly, but not the peace of somnolence, not the peace of the prison-house, not the peace of the grave. The essay concluded with a masterly and memorable pronouncement:

Spiritual energy is not on this earth a thing apart but reposes and draws upon physical energies. Those who shrink from the supreme call of the present . crisis when a powerful bureaucracy has marshalled its full forces to crush Nationalism in the land will show a defeat, not merely of courage, but of true spirituality. It was an ebb in the spiritual sentiment which resulted in a complete nervousness with Arjuna on the eve of the great battle of Kurukshetra, and one spiritual ideal worked out in the Gita is that, if you allow spiritual timidity to intervene between you and your duty, all spiritual possibility is gone.... Those Hindus who give ungrudging audience to this unnational and unspiritual preaching of the denunciation of courageous resistance when there is occasion for it, are merely condemning themselves to the patient endurance of a life-long humiliation. Faith in the potential strength of our people is the basis of our national movement, and to realise that strength and energise it by taking every opportunity for unflinching courageous action is the only way in which the national movement can be pushed forward to the rapid and triumphant consummation which Asia needs and India demands.

One of the other contributions recalled the words of the French thinker, Turgot, that the great enemy of progress was not error but indolence, obstinacy and the spirit of routine25 - in a word, tamas. Like Danton's "No weakness!", Sri Aurobindo's "No tamas[" - reviving Swami Vivekananda's clarion-call - rang out, time and again, loud and peremptory; and Sri Aurobindo remarked with unconcealed bluntness that politics was for the kshatriya in spirit, for not otherwise could freedom and greatness be won or retained.²⁶

While it is no doubt these large declarations, these weighty generalisations, these luminous enunciations of policy and principle that raise Sri Aurobindo's contributions to the Bande Mataram to the level of political literature, there are other attractions too - brilliant fireworks, exhibitions of sword-play, exercises in political jousting - and it is thanks to these that some of Sri Aurobindo's victims are ever likely to be remembered at all. Who would remember Mr. N.N. Ghose today except for Sri Aurobindo's taking some notice of him, as for example in:

Men of all parties, except the party of Mr. N.N. Ghose which, as it consists of only one man, need not concern us.. .²⁷

We quite admit that it is difficult to understand the mystic wisdom of a

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sage [Mr. Ghose] who asserts that the soundness of his premises has nothing to do with the soundness of his conclusions.²⁸

Or who could have saved Mr. Asanuddin Ahmed from complete oblivion had not Sri Aurobindo written about "The Khulna Comedy": 

Mr. Asanuddin Ahmed is a very distinguished man. The greatest and most successful achievement of his life was to be a fellow-collegian of Lord Curzon. But he has other sufficiently respectable if less gorgeous claims to distinction. ... His mastery over figures is so great that arithmetic is his slave and not his master.... His triumphant dealings with logic were admirably exampled by the original syllogism which he presented to the startled organisers of the District Conference. "I, Asanuddin, am the District Magistrate; the District Magistrate is the representative of the district; ergo, I, Asanuddin, am the one and only representative of the district...." Mr. Ahmed's English is the delight of the judges of the High Court, who are believed to spend sleepless nights in trying to make out the meaning of his judgements....

The Khulna case has been from the point of view of Justice an undress rehearsal of the usual bureaucratic comedy; from the point of view of Mr. Asanuddin Ahmed it has been a brilliant exhibition of his superhuman power of acting folly and talking nonsense... .²⁹

John Morley - critic and biographer of distinction, though an ineffective, if not cynical. Secretary of State for India - is almost skinned alive in the satirical portrait "In Praise of Honest John". Morley may have his niche in England's political and literary history, but this comic twitch to the portrait will perhaps be always remembered too. This is, of course, political journalism at its most outspoken and no holds are barred:

Mr. Morley rises above the ordinary ruck of mortals in three very important respects; first, he is a literary man; secondly, he is a philosopher; thirdly, he is a politician. ... He has not only doubled his parts, he has trebled them... he is a literary philosopher-politician. Now this is a superlative combination; God cannot better it and the devil does not want to. For if an ordinary man steals, he steals and there are no more bones made about it.... But if a literary philosopher steals, he steals on the basis of the great and eternal verities and in the choicest English.

...Oh yes, a literary philosopher-politician is the choicest work of God, - when he is not the most effective instrument in the hands of the Prince of Darkness.³⁰

Like his own master, Gladstone, Morley was an opportunist too - and he had "served the devil in the name of God with signal success on two occasions". First, when he championed the cause of the European financiers in Egypt, exploiters who made money out of the groans of people, the blood of patriots and the tears of widows and orphans; and second, when he tried, in the interests of British capital, to crush the resurgent life of India. As a political-cum-reasoning animal who Was also a pre-eminently literary animal, Mr. Morley had made smart use of the phrase:

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"The anchor holds." On this Sri Aurobindo comments:

"It is true, gentlemen," says Mr. Morley, "that I am doing things which are neither liberal nor democratic; but, then, my anchor holds...." So might a clergyman detected in immorality explain himself to his parishioners.... So might Robespierre have justified himself for the Reign of Terror, "It is true, Frenchmen, that I have always condemned capital punishment as itself a crime, yet am judicially massacring my countrymen without pause or pity; but my anchor holds. Yes, citizens, I dare to believe that my anchor holds." So argues Mr. Morley and all England applauds in a thousand newspapers and acquits him of political sin.

Another of Mr. Morley's choice concoctions was the "furcoat" phrase. In Canada, you needed a furcoat - but not in Egypt or India! It was just so with principles - what was applicable in one place mightn't be applicable elsewhere! Sri Aurobindo is aghast at this kind of logic:

It is difficult to know what inequity reasoning of this sort would not cover. "I thoroughly believe in the Ten Commandments," Caesar Borgia might have said in his full career of political poisonings and strangulations, "but they may do very well in one country and age without applying at all to another. They suited Palestine, but mediaeval Italy is not Palestine. Principles are a matter of chronology and climate, and it would be highly unphilosophical and unpractical of me to be guided by them as if I were Christ or Moses. ... Still I am a Christian and the nephew of a Pope, so my anchor holds, yes, my anchor holds."

And, for a final illustration, there was the castigation of the whole class of Anglo-Indian administrators, both during their stay in India and after their return home. In India, they could forget they were Englishmen, and they could assume the god, affect his nod and seem to shake the spheres; but once back in England, alas, they found themselves misfits there:

...people refuse to mix with them; servants refuse to serve them, and hence retired Anglo-Indians have to live in their native country in special colonies of their own, away from the current of the nation's life. Their main talk is about the horses and carriages and the servants they had in India, the number of Indians they had gratuitously insulted, and the many clubs to which they had belonged.³¹

As the Bande Mataram saw it, the tragedy was that these administrators had behaved in India as if they were not Englishmen, as if they didn't belong to a country the purpose of whose history had been "the increasing realisation of its people's equality and freedom". And, after all, the "great labouring class, the main mass of the people" had little or no interest in England's connection with India.* The mischief had been largely the handiwork of these administrators in India, unthinkable

*And in l947, it was a Labour Government, headed by Clement Attlee, that conceded independence to India (and Pakistan) on 15 August.  

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perversions of what had once been Englishmen!

Need we be surprised now that all Anglo-India, all the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, the British Government itself, all gnashed their teeth, fumed in impotent fury, and vowed that the culprit who, veiling himself behind editorial anonymity, could perpetrate such offences against decorum, throw spoonfuls of prussic acid about and blast carefully built-up reputations, should be silenced and silenced as soon as possible. As for the Moderate stalwarts, they experienced a vast unease: was it wise to hurl such unbecoming epithets at a friend of India like Mr. Morley? Was it linguistically prudent to call a spade a spade - and even treble spade it into the bargain? Was it altogether judicious to hit at the entire phalanx of the bureaucracy? The average Moderate leader began to feel that, if the march of such Extremism was not halted in time, the promised sugar candy of installment constitutional reforms might be withdrawn unceremoniously - and, pray, who Would suffer in that unthinkable eventuality? Something resolute had to be done to prevent such a terrible catastrophe. On the other hand, the Nationalists knew mat once the alien rulers ceased to be respected and feared, that must be the beginning of the end of alien despotism.

III

We have seen how Sri Aurobindo took a decisive part at the Benares Congress (1905) and even more at the Calcutta Congress (1906) and succeeded, while still keeping out of the platform and hence out of the headlines as well, in getting the organisation to be, not "national" only in name, but also in some measure, alike in the tempo of its proceedings and in the substance and language of its resolutions, really "national" in its thinking and policy-making. The unanimity reached at Calcutta was at first accepted by the Indian press of all complexions with something like genuine relief, but it also provoked in the Anglo-Indian press "wild and hysteric shrieks of piercing harshness flying Morleyward".³² However, some time after the session was over, the Moderates began to think that they had committed themselves too readily and a little too much, and the Nationalists thought that they had weak-kneedly acquiesced in too much dilution of their original four-point programme. A kind of journalistic and platform trench warfare started since the early months of the new year, and as the year advanced, the forays were more frequent and the engagements more bitter. One new development was that Government resorted to repression in real earnest, especially in Bengal and in the Punjab. Another development was the vague and vain talk of the Minto-Morley constitutional reforms that were said to be in a process of gestation. The sugar plum distantly and discreetly dangled before the Moderates made them a little lukewarm in their denunciation of repression, but for the Nationalists themselves the proposed reforms were only one more insult added to the long-standing injury of the nation's enslavement. The Government-tolerated hooliganism in East Bengal

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enraged the Nationalists, and the Risley Circular was like adding fury to the leaping fire of resentment against the bureaucracy. Where fierce repression, as in Bengal and in the Punjab, seemed to have succeeded in extinguishing the flames of revolt, it had only driven it underground, ready to burst out again in redoubled fury:

Repression can never crush a force when it is once in operation, but to kill it is impossible. Conservation of energy is a law of nature, and she cannot be false to herself in the interests of the British bureaucracy. Energy changes for us, works in subtle and invisible ways, but is never destroyed.³³

In a notable article on "The Nationalist's Faith and Hope", the Bande Mataram traced the history of the Nationalist party, discussed the grounds of its faith and hope, and concluded by throwing this challenge to the Government that seemed to be bent on a career of repression:

...do you feel confident enough that for every Nationalist that you hurry into prison, you will not call into life Nationalists by the hundred-thousand who will take the vow before their God to live and work for the day when the punishment of the Nationalist shall be impossible, when Nationalism shall be the only passport to glory, honour, worship, the only deliverance from death?³⁴

With the Moderates reforming their forces, the bureaucracy on the offensive, the hooligans on the rampage, many Nationalists dispirited by the wave of repression and many spirited away to prison and many more losing all hope in the normal method of political agitation, it became Sri Aurobindo's crucial role to be the nation's pace-setter, to act the role of Krishna who buoyed up the drooping spirits of the Pandavas on the field of Kurukshetra, to foresee the developing destiny of the nation, to deploy the available forces (visible and invisible), to argue and to harangue, to plan and to execute. The whole of him none of his associates knew, but at least after the Bande Mataram prosecution, it was general knowledge among the Moderates as well as the Loyalists that he was a power to be reckoned with and that every one of his moves was worth watching.

It was easy for the Moderate leaders - the Lion of Bombay and the seagreen incorruptible of Poona, the two sonorous Pandits of Allahabad, the great lawyers and constitutionalists of Calcutta and Madras, and the clever calculators and formula-hunters everywhere - to try to dismiss the Nationalists with a snigger, poohpooh their adolescent extremism, and commiserate with their self-invited troubles which however took the country nowhere. Leaders like Tilak and Lajpat Rai were formidable figures indeed, built on a heroic mould, yet even they weren't always quite a match for the plausible sophistries of the Moderates. Sri Aurobindo was thus needed to match iron by steel, meet sword by sharper sword, counter specious argument and hypothetical formulation by clear logic and reference to the indisputable facts of history or the quiddities of human nature. He had to be ready for every move, he needed every weapon in his armoury, and he had an endless call on his battery of wit, humour, satire, sarcasm, ridicule and invective. Between Calcutta (1906) and Surat (1907) was a journey and a struggle - and the

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Bande Mataram case was but a specially significant episode on the way - and all along the route Sri Aurobindo was the nation's pace-maker, upholder of the nation's honour and keeper of the nation's conscience.

At the Congress in December 1906, it had been decided that the next session should be held at Nagpur. A local Reception Committee was formed at Nagpur, a predominantly Maharashtrian city and a Nationalist stronghold, and this Reception Committee elected an Executive Committee which had a Nationalist majority. Soon after, the Moderates unconstitutionally wanted to have a new Executive Committee elected. But when one secretary, Chitnavis, called a meeting of the Reception Committee for this purpose, another secretary. Dr. B.S. Moonje, would not allow the meeting to be held; and so a pandemonium resulted. The Moderates, having first started the trouble, now accused the Nationalists of rowdyism. Sri Aurobindo referred to this event in the Bande Mataram of 23 October ("The Nagpur Affair") and 29 October ("The Nagpur Imbroglio"). There had been a popular demonstration undoubtedly, but it was "absurd to make the Nationalist leaders in Nagpur responsible for the outburst. All that they did was to baffle a very discreditable attempt to defy all constitutional procedure and public decorum in the interests of party trickery, and in doing so they were entirely right".³⁵

The all-important issue, of course, was the election of the next Congress President. Nationalist opinion in India was unanimously in favour of Tilak. But for election, a three-fourth majority in the Reception Committee was required. If none could secure such a majority, the matter would rest with the All India Congress Committee. The Moderates' game was to prevent the election of Tilak and to shift the venue from Nagpur to a safer place like Madras or Surat, and have a worthy Moderate like Rash Behari Ghosh as President. In an article on 5 November, Sri Aurobindo adverted to the question of Tilak's presidentship. An unselfish and unassuming patriot, Tilak wasn't himself eager to be pushed into the Presidentship; it was the Nationalist party that had put forward his name, and that for the best of reasons:

Mr. Tilak by his past career, his unequalled abilities and capacity for leadership, his splendid courage and self-sacrifice, his services to the cause and the disinterestedness and devotion with which he used his influence, is naturally the most prominent of the Nationalist leaders, and our party looks up to his experience, skill, cool acuteness and moral strength for guidance on great occasion like the Congress session....

The Nationalists or Radicalists wanted Tilak to be President because that would break through the "oligarchic ring and establish the true nature of the Congress as no mere machinery to be engineered by a few wealthy or successful proprietors, but a popular assembly in which the will of the people must prevail". Others had used the Congress as a springboard for senior Government appointments or nomination to Government Councils; but the Nationalists felt that "leadership in the Ingress" must henceforth be "a post of danger and a position of service to the people and it must depend on service done and suffering endured for the cause".³⁶

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Even in 1906, the Nationalists had put up Tilak's candidature, but the Moderates had shied at Tilak because he had been convicted for sedition in the past and was anathema to the bureaucracy, but these were the very reasons that raised Tilak in the Radicals' eyes.

Three days later, on 8 November 1907, the Bande Mataram struck a more ominous note. The bureaucracy seemed determined to rally the Moderates and crush the Nationalists, and, what was much worse, Gokhale and Rash Behari Ghosh had made contemptuous references to the Nationalists in the Council Chamber. "They have betrayed", wrote the Bande Mataram, "a sad ignorance of the Nationalist literature in the country, its manly and truthful ring, its patriotic fervour, its success in stimulating race-consciousness, its certain drift towards self-realization, its clear logic, its historical insight, its spiritual inspiration." Taking its cue from Stephen Hopkin's words on the eve of the American Declaration of Independence and from Kossuth's to his Hungarian aristocratic compatriots, the article concluded thus:

He [Kossuth] told them, "With you, if you choose; but without you, or against you, if it must be". We also say the same to all who threaten to desert us in such a critical hour.

During the next few days, things moved pretty fast. The All India Congress Committee met on 10 November at Pherozeshah Mehta's house in Bombay and decided to shift the venue from Nagpur to Surat. Rash Behari Ghose was elected President of the coming session, and this was facilitated by Lajpat Rai's withdrawal from the contest. Failing Tilak, the Nationalists would have liked Lajpat Rai, just released from prison, to be President. But the die was cast anyhow, and all was set for the great confrontation at Surat. Perhaps Pherozeshah Mehta and his friends counted on the inveterate Moderates of Gujarat. Yet things might turn out quite differently, after all !³⁷

During his stay of about thirteen years at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo had had opportunities of gauging the potentialities of the Gujarati mind and character. He had friends and former pupils who were holding important positions in the public life of Gujarat. The Bande Mataram - the daily and weekly editions both - were read widely in Gujarat, and reprints from the paper had also been issued there, and these had enjoyed a tremendous vogue all over the country. It was thus with personal knowledge as well as with some intuition about the future that Sri Aurobindo wrote the following:

Gujarat was once part of the Rajput circle and her princes fought on equal terms with Mahmud of Ghazni. Her people form valuable and indispensable material for the building of the Indian nation. The savoir-faire, the keen-witted ability and political instinct of her Brahmins, the thrift and industry of her merchants, the robust vigour and common sense of her Patidars, the physique and soldierly qualities of her Kathis and Rajputs, the strong raw human material of her northern and southern hills, are so many elements of strength which Nationalism must seize and weld into a great national force.

As future events showed - the return of Mahatma Gandhi to India from South

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Sri Aurobindo - Calcutta - 1907

Nationalist Conference at Surat-1907

Africa, the founding of the Sabarmati Ashram, the launching of the non-Cooperation movement, the Bardoli Satyagraha under Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's leadership - Sri Aurobindo had been prophetic in his assessment of Gujarat's role in the fight for national independence.

In the meantime, as if it was meant to be a dress rehearsal of the coming Congress session, the Nationalists and Moderates of Bengal clashed at Midnapore where the District Conference was held from 7 to 9 December 1907. The imprisonment of some of his principal co-workers in Bengal, the exile or disappearance underground of some others, and the publicity that the Bande Mataram case had given to his work, all compelled him openly to lead the Nationalists at Midnapore. Surendranath, who led the Moderates, was unable to persuade Sri Aurobindo to agree to a resiling towards the Moderate position. In the open session, there was a "vehement clash" between the two parties, and the Moderate leaders called in the police to restore order. After the clash, the Nationalists held a separate conference with Sri Aurobindo as President, and thereby gave a lead to Bengal and a warning to the stage-managers of the Surat Congress. The Lokamanya was overjoyed and asked Sri Aurobindo to bring as many Nationalist delegates as possible to Surat so that their cause might not suffer by poor representation. Sri Aurobindo himself thought that, although the Midnapore experience showed how the Nationalists, young and old, smarted "under the autocracy of the old workers" and seemed to think of a separate movement instead of constant friction within the Congress, "for the present we must put all such thoughts from us".³⁸

On 6 December 1907, just before leaving for the Midnapore Conference, Sri Aurobindo wrote another letter to his wife, Mrinalini, who was apparently still staying at Deoghar. A letter dashed off in haste, it nevertheless provides us with a slender clue to the workings of his mind during this period. After answering one or two points raised in her letter of 3rd, he goes on to say that he had not a moment to spare; private and public work, the Bande Mataram responsibility and preoccupation with the "complex Congress organisation", all were taking up his time. Then the tone becomes suddenly earnest and weighted with urgency:

Would you listen to a request of mine? I am passing through very anxious times, the pressure from all sides is sufficient to drive one mad. And at such a time if you also get upset it will only add to my anxiety and worry; a letter of encouragement and comfort Will give me special force, and I will overcome all obstacles and dangers with a cheerful heart.

He was not unaware of her difficulties and her suffering - the separation, the misunderstanding by relations, the uncertainty - but, having married a man like him, she needs must put up with them:

This suffering is your inevitable lot... because, unlike ordinary Bengalis, I am unable to make the happiness of the relatives and of the family the main aim of my life. In these circumstances what is my Dharma is also your Dharma; and unless you consider the success of my mission as your happiness, there is no way out.

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This was no unusual situation either. In the early days of the Congress, when gentlemanly leaders met in conference off and on, the women as a rule kept in the background. Politics in those days was a conveniently part-time affair, a hobby almost, and involved no risks; professional or domestic life was hardly interrupted A colourful visitant like Sarojini Naidu was merely the proverbial exception. As the tempo of the movement changed, however, politics became a whole-time mission or vocation; and there was the danger of disruption of family life, and the possibility of persecution and incarceration. Revolutionaries like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, V.V.S. Aiyar and Jatindranath Mukherji (Bagha Jatin), of course, ran even greater dangers. When the fight for independence became a mass movement the women could hardly keep (or be kept) out. In South Africa as later in India, Kasturba Gandhi had to bear the cross in her own way as much as the Mahatma. After 1920, it became natural for the sahadharminis of the leaders to take some part in public life, and many went to jail. In 1930 and in 1942, the trend was more marked still. But in 1907, the situation was rather different. There were Bengali women like Sarala Ghoshal who were in active public life, but such instances were very rare. Sister Nivedita (she, like Annie Besant, was an exception too) was a burning brazier of the revolutionary spirit. Yet most women thought - or were made to think - that their place was in the home where sometimes they ate their hearts out worrying about their husbands, brothers or sons. Thus Mrinalini's was a typical, not an exceptional, case. If she felt puzzled, if she instinctively held back, if she occasionally even groused, it was understandable. And that Sri Aurobindo should have ardently invoked the Shakti in her to aid him in his great and difficult work was equally natural. He knew that the Nationalists and Moderates might clash at Midnapore, he knew that Midnapore would set the pace for Surat. He no doubt relied on his own inner strength, but he asked also for his wife's silent sovereign support, for he knew it had tremendous spiritual efficacy.

On his return to Calcutta from Midnapore, Sri Aurobindo was busy for a few days attending to arrears of work and organising the delegation to Surat. On 15 December, he addressed a public meeting supporting a resolution on the Nationalist programme that was to be forwarded to the Surat Congress. During the train journey, he halted at Nagpur for a couple of days and addressed a public meeting; after Midnapore, he had had to get used to this kind of public campaigning. One among his audience at Nagpur was his London colleague of the "Lotus and Dagger" - but Mr. Moropunt Joshi could now hardly believe the change in his friend, and went on gaping at him.

And so, carrying fate in his hands, Sri Aurobindo went to Surat.*

* Some of the Bengal Nationalists wanted to avoid Surat, and hold a separate Congress at Nagpur, Moonje and Chidambaram Pillai supported the proposal. But Tilak wired: "For God's sake, no split." Sri Aurobindo acquiesced, and so they went to Surat. C.C. Dutt has recorded that, along with Barin, a few boys also went to Surat carrying fire-arms, and had instructions from Dutt "to close round Aurobindo Babu in case there was a row." (Sunday Times, 17 December 1950)

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The Surat Congress was scheduled to begin on 26 December 1907. For some days previously, that historic town was agog with excitement, rumours, confabulations, discreet soundings, parallel war councils. The rival parties were busy massing their respective strengths, and most of the stalwarts on either side were already there. As the Moderates had substantial support in Surat itself, it was feared that the local people would be mobilised to any required extent by the party managers. But the Nationalists too were by no means so weak as to lose heart from the beginning. In fact, it seemed difficult for impartial observers to foretell which way the political wind would blow. This was the reason why party mobilisation went on till almost the opening of the regular session.

In the Moderate camp, Mehta was an imperious and dominant force, Gokhale was intellectually and morally the most distinguished, and Surendranath was the necessary counterpoise to the strong Extremist contingent from Bengal (which included even Revolutionaries like Barindra). As for Rash Behari Ghosh, the President-elect, he was known to be a brilliant lawyer with a lucrative practice, an erudite and polished speaker, and a perfectly safe politician from the point of view of the Moderates. In the opposite camp, there was Lajpat Rai wearing the crown of recent persecution and deportation; there was Sri Aurobindo - to many a dark horse still - who appeared calm in his ocean oneness on the eve of a storm; and there was Tilak, and on either side there was none at the time to equal him in his oak-like massiveness and stature. Surat was really Tilak's Congress.

In an Introduction that he contributed in 1918 to Speeches and Writings of Tilak, Sri Aurobindo divided the Lokamanya's active life into three periods. Born in 1856 in the year of the Mutiny at Ratnagiri, Tilak began as a teacher at Poona and started the Kesari in Marathi and the Mahratta in English. During the first period, 1880 to 1890, he was prosecuted for defamation and had to spend four miserable months in jail, prison conditions at the time being atrocious. He withdrew from the Deccan Education Society in 1890, and during the second period, 1890-1906, he brought about the political awakening of Maharashtra. Feeling chagrined that the average Hindu lacked purposeful initiative, Tilak organised - or perhaps only revived - the Ganapati Festival in 1893, which in course of time played an important part in promoting a sense of unity among all the Indian castes and in advancing the political education of the masses. Two or three years later, he likewise revived the Shivaji Festival, galvanising public enthusiasm on the issue of-it wasn't opportune to be too clear at the time about the ends! Ganapati was a very pleasant God, and Shivaji was the greatest of the Mahratta heroes: what was wrong in celebrating them? But Ganapati was also the slayer of the demon Gajasura, and Shivaji had given a crippling blow to the great Mughal. Wasn't Tilak actually Preparing a mass movement against the demon-rule of the foreigner, wasn't he really hoping to turn the rising tide of patriotism against the alien bureaucracy? Tilak attended the annual Congress sessions and he entered the Bombay Legislative

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Council in 1895, and in both forums he gave a vitriolic touch to the otherwise tepid proceedings. In 1897 he was arrested for sedition and tried by a jury consisting of a majority of Englishmen whose majority view led to his conviction. But the Government soon realised that, although legally convicted, Tilak had risen ten times in the estimation of his countrymen, and this belated recognition was responsible for his release in 1898.

The political climate in India towards the turn of century, the travail of the people, the rising tempo of disillusion with British rule, the blatant careering of the self-seekers and place-hunters, the endless wobblings of the 'orthodox' Congressmen, all served in due course to crystallise Nationalism (or Radicalism or Extremism) as a powerful philosophy of mass action. Tilak had read Sri Aurobindo's outspoken articles in the Indu Prakash (1893-4), they had first met at Baroda in 1901 and cultivated an immediate friendship, and their minds worked in much the same way. Like Sri Aurobindo, Tilak too had his affiliations with the Revolutionists; and again like Sri Aurobindo, he tried to keep civil agitation separate from revolutionary activity. As his biographers, G.P. Pradhan and A.K. Bhagwat, put it:

As a leader... it was his responsibility to see that all efforts for achieving freedom were carried on in the correct manner, and he therefore gave advice to the leaders of the revolutionary wing. He did not want the decision of the opportune moment to be entrusted to a less mature person.... He thought that only Aurobindo and himself could take such a momentous decision. He knew that a revolutionary action was too serious a matter to be decided by anyone except those who had attained a philosophic calm of mind.

Curzon's highhanded administration and his decision to cut Bengal into two offered the necessary fuel to the engine of Nationalism, and the Bande Mataram, Swadeshi and boycott agitations in Bengal and elsewhere defined with fierce clarity the sanctions behind the nation-wide movement for the early achievement of Swaraj or independence.

It was during this third and culminating period (beginning in 1906) of Tilak's career - when he was already the 'King of Poona' (Ay Poona-ke Raja) and the acknowledged leader of Maharashtra - that he was drawn into the field of all-India politics and became the principal spokesman of Nationalist India. He was, in Sri Aurobindo's words, "the very type and incarnation of the Maratha character, the Maratha qualities, the Maratha spirit, but with the unified solidity in the character, the touch of genius in the qualities, the vital force in the spirit which make a great personality readily the representative man of his people".³⁹ It was inevitable that the Zeitgeist should throw up such a colossus as he:

The condition of things in India being given, the one possible aim for political effort resulting and the sole means and spirit by which it could be brought about, this man had to come and, once in the field, had to come to the front. ⁴⁰

While he was peculiarly the representative man of his sub-nation, Maharashtra, hew as also the representative Indian whom the Vedic Rishis could have hailed as

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a comrade and whom it was also Mr. M.A. Jinnah's ambition to emulate as a fearless nationalist. Besides, Tilak - who was to be described as the Father of Indian Unrest by Sir Valentine Chirol - was no mere demagogue; a democrat he certainly was, moving with the common people as among equals, yet he was no demagogue, pandering to the common prejudices or soliciting cheap public applause. Neither was he a rabid revolutionary, intent merely to destroy; he wished rather to build the future on the sure foundations of the past, and he would have liked to work through existing institutions wherever possible. Again, although he had ideals, he was no simple dreamer or idealist; he had a practical shrewdness of judgement which was the despair of his political opponents. The man was so remarkable that the will of the nation could have said, "This man and his life mean what I have in my heart and in my purpose."⁴¹ With Tilak there was no difference between the aim and the strength of will that carried it into the domain of realisation. To this purity of aim and adamantine will were joined a capacity for sacrifice and a readiness to face suffering. It was this combination of qualities that made Tilak the Generalissimo of the Nationalists at the fateful Surat Congress.

On the eve of the Congress session, Surendranath Banerjee got together the delegates from Bengal and tried to make them accept a compromise draft agreement, but Satyen Bose tore up the paper, and the meeting came to an abortive end.42 The Nationalists from the different Provinces also met to review the position and plan their strategy.* As Nevinson had described the scene in The New Spirit of India:

Grave and silent -I think without saying a single word - Mr. Aravinda Ghose took the chair, and sat unmoved, with far-off eyes, as one who gazes at futurity. In clear, short sentences, without eloquence or passion, Mr. Tilak spoke till the stars shone out and someone kindled a lantern at his side.

A photographic snap of the meeting is available, and one can see Sri Aurobindo at the centre, sitting impassive and calm in the presidential chair, his hands resting on the table, his face slightly tilted to the left, as if watching Tilak, - and Tilak himself, masterful in his bearing, his body a little bent towards the audience in front, his right hand on the table, his left hand raised a little as if to emphasise a point. The audience - some squatting on the ground, some sitting on benches or chairs, and many standing - so grim, attentive, determined. Another group portrait of this time shows Sri Aurobindo and Tilak at the centre, a shawl thrown across Sri Aurobindo's torso, a walking-stick in Tilak's hand: Sardar Ajit Singh to Sri Aurobindo's right, sitting, and Saiyed Haider Reza, to Tilak's left, also sitting: Khaparde and Ashwini Kumar Datta sitting in front and Moonje, Ramaswami and Kuverji Desai standing behind. Holding the centre, Sri Aurobindo and Tilak make a unity in contrast, a totality of immeasurable strength. Sri Aurobindo the teacher, the poet, the man of imagination and reverie, of intuition and spiritual poise - Tilak

* The Nationalist contingent from Madras was quite strong and included V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, V. Chakkarai Chetti, Subramania Bharati the poet and S. Doraiswami Aiyar.

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the lawyer, the mathematician, the man of intellect and erudition, of incisive logic and imperturbable equanimity: these were the master-minding duumvirate of the Nationalist leadership and they enjoyed the unquestioned allegiance of their numerous followers.

It was clear to the Nationalists that the tactics that had been adopted earlier at the Midnapore Conference would be repeated at Surat. The Reception Committee at Midnapore had first passed the Nationalist resolutions on social boycott, self-defence and Swadeshi, but the Swaraj resolution was more anaemic, and the Nationalists had demurred. It was promised then that the question could be reviewed at the Subjects Committee before it went to the plenary session, but the president (Mr. K.B. Datta) had later gone back on his word. The Nationalists were therefore obliged to raise the matter at the time of the formal election of the President, but there they had been snubbed by Mr. Datta, the police had been called, and the Police Superintendent had taken his seat between Datta and Surendranath! There had been trouble over the constitution of the Subjects Committee too, and the Nationalists had had to leave the conference and hold their own separate session with Maulvi Abdul Haq in the chair. Just as at Midnapore that ignoble attempt had been made to retreat from the Calcutta stand of December 1906, at Surat too - and on a much bigger scale - the Moderate leaders tried to whittle down the Calcutta resolutions. The agenda with the draft resolutions was made available only at the eleventh hour, and was found to embody serious deviations from and dilutions of the Calcutta resolutions, whereas the Nationalists wanted to make these the base and proceed further. At the meeting of the Reception Committee, the Moderates had a comfortable majority and baulked every move of the Nationalists. It was also known that the Moderates wanted to push through the new Constitution for the Congress which would have helped them to retain control over the organisation for many more years to come. This was the reason why the Nationalists held their separate meeting under Sri Aurobindo's chairmanship and decided to "prevent the attempted retrogression of the Congress by all constitutional means, even by opposing the election of the President if necessary".43 The Moderates, on the other hand, were equally determined to have things their own way. The stage was set at last for a sensational trial of strength between the two parties. The Moderates managed to bring about 1300 delegates, while the Nationalists could muster only 1100. When the meeting began, Surendranath Banerjee proposed Rash Behari Ghosh for the presidentship, Tilak stood up immediately to propose Lajpat Rai instead. The temporary Chairman refused Tilak permission to speak, but Tilak insisted on his rights as a delegate, read his resolution, and started speaking. The rest may be described in Sri Aurobindo's words:

There was a tremendous uproar, the young Gujarati volunteers lifted up chairs over the head of Tilak to beat him. At that the Mahrattas became furious, a Mahratta shoe came hurtling across the pavilion aimed at the President, Dr. Rash Behari Ghosh, and hit Surendranath Bannerji on the shoulder. The young Mahrattas in a body charged up to the platform, the Moderate leaders fled;

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after a short fight on the platform with chairs, the session broke up not to be resumed. The Moderate leaders decided to suspend the Congress... .⁴⁴

Before coming to the meeting, the Nationalists had privately decided to break the Congress if they could not swamp it; this decision was unknown to Tilak and the older leaders, but Sri Aurobindo knew about it, and in fact it was he who, without consulting Tilak, "gave the order that led to the breaking of the Congress".⁴⁵ Presently, Lajpat Rai informed Tilak that a final split might provoke the Government to resort to ruthless repression of the Nationalists. Tilak too thought that, perhaps, the Nationalists should join the Moderates in their proposed "national conference" and even accept the new Constitution, lie low for a while, and wait for a more favourable time to assert themselves. But Sri Aurobindo was firm, and so the Nationalists decided to keep away from the Moderate Convention. The Congress had split, and that was that.⁴⁶

Sri Aurobindo thus took a heavy responsibility on himself by giving the order to bring about the split and by preventing a reunion on the Moderates' own terms. And when chairs were being raised and shoes were being hurled - when all that pandemonium was being enacted - Sri Aurobindo had remained imperturbably calm, only surrounded by a few younger revolutionaries from Midnapore. He knew - as warned by Lajpat Rai - that repression would now be in full swing. And, indeed, Tilak was arrested not long afterwards, tried and sentenced to transportation for six years on the majority verdict of seven Englishmen against two Indians. Sri Aurobindo himself was to spend a whole year at the Alipur jail. Nationalists all over the country were to experience the full rigours of despotic foreign rule during the next few years. The Moderates were to dwindle into increasing unimportance, the Nationalists were to be imprisoned, silenced or driven underground. Why did Sri Aurobindo take upon himself all this awesome responsibility?

Before leaving Calcutta for Surat, Sri Aurobindo had written in the Bande Mataram:

We must go... as pilgrims travelling to our Mother's temple. We have a great work to do and cannot afford to be negligent and half-hearted. Be sure that this year 1907 is a turning-point of our destinies, and do not imagine that the session of the Surat Congress will be as the sessions of other years. Let us fear to miss by absenting ourselves the chance of helping to put in one of the keystones of the house we are building for our Mother's dwelling in the future, the house of her salvation, the house of Swaraj.⁴⁷

It was in a religious, rather than a political, spirit he had gone - and had asked his fellow-Nationalists to go - to Surat. Compromise was unthinkable on certain issues, and Sri Aurobindo did not want to compromise on the question of Swaraj. Repression too did not frighten him. It might be, he thought, repression was needed to sting the nation to sovereign aspiration and mighty effort - as fire is needed to purify gold. If he took the decision - even over the head of Tilak, so to say, and against all the reasonings of the intellect - it was only because of the lightning clarity of his intuition. Speaking some months later, Sri Aurobindo said: "The

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breaking-up of the Congress at Surat was God's will.... We shall not be eager for compromise to avoid trouble and persecution as sufferings are welcome if it be God's will that we should suffer, so that our Mother India would be saved."⁴⁸ And of course, Sri Aurobindo was right in the long run. History is with him, not with the Mehtas, Gokhales and Rash Beharis. The Surat split led to the Home Rule movement during the first world war under the leadership of Tilak and Annie Besant, and then to Gandhiji's non-cooperation movement in 1920, Salt Satyagraha in 1930 and 'Quit India' in 1942, - and on to independence on 15 August 1947. The Moderates, on the other hand, became the Liberal party, and they became fewer and fewer and more and more ineffective, and lost at last their group and individual identity alike.

Perhaps, at this distance of time, it is hardly necessary to blame the leaders on either side for what happened at Surat. The Congress nearly split again at Tripura in 1939, and split spectacularly during 1969. The leaders who figured in the 1907 split were not all of a piece. Between Mehta at one extreme end and Sri Aurobindo at the other, there were so many gradations of moderatism and extremism, and Surendranath and Lajpat Rai were uncomfortably poised at the centre, Surendranath inclining a little towards the right and Lajpat Rai towards the left. They were all honest patriots enough, but they had their ideological and temperamental differences and limitations. There had to be that trial of strength at Surat and subsequent mud-slinging before the dialectic of the national movement could effect a forward swerve and jump, but this need not prevent our admiration from going out equally - though not necessarily to an equal extent - to both the Moderates and Extremists, or liberals and radicals, for they were all men who tried to grapple according to their lights with tasks of almost superhuman difficulty. After the split, the rival groups gave their own versions of the happenings, the Nationalist version being signed by Tilak, Sri Aurobindo, Khaparde, H. Mukherji and B.C. Chatterji.

Although Sri Aurobindo didn't return to Calcutta at once, his editorial and other contributions continued to appear in the Bande Mataram. In the series of articles entitled "Death or Life", the paper developed an argument not dissimilar to the line of thought underlying Cariyle's Sartor Resartus, notably the chapters 'Phoenix' and 'Organic Filaments'. Destruction and creation are for ever going on, and the future is in very truth being formed in the present. The debacle at Surat was but the preordained prelude to an imminent rebirth. And concluded the series with this prophetic declaration:

The old organisations have to be reconstituted to adapt themselves to the new surroundings. The death complained of is only a transition. The burial ground of the old Congress is, as the Saxon phrase goes, only God's acre out of which will grow the real, vigorous, popular organisation.⁴⁹

After the Pabna session of the Bengal Provincial Conference, held under Rabindranath Tagore's presidentship, there was a gleam of joy that the two parties could come together again on a common platform and pass agreed resolutions.

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Bengal had given the lead in 1906 at Calcutta, but "the gods were jealous as of old, and at last there was the split at Surat" - "a monstrous and unnatural division... a quarrel among comrades-in-arms"!50 But once again Pabna had given the lead to India, Rabindranath and Surendranath had helped the cause of unity, and it was as though the "martyrs of Nationalism" had not suffered in vain. Would India now follow the lead given by Bengal at Pabna?

The Surat happenings were also the theme of a satirical poem and a satirical drama, both the work of Shyamsundar Chakravarti. The verse skit was the supposed effusion of "Alexander-de-Convention during his unhappy abode in the Sleepy Hollow at Surat", and it was in obvious imitation of Cowper's Alexander Selkirk.51 The phrase "Sleepy Hollow" carried most of the indictment. The play - 'The Slaying of the Congress - a Tragedy in Three Acts" - was rather more elaborate and more pointed in its satire. In the first Act, Dadabhai Naoroji introduces to the assembled delegates in Calcutta the "Lady Congress":

Much have I laboured, toiled for many years

To see this glorious day. Our Lady Congress

Grown to a fair and perfect womanhood,

Who at Benares came of age, is now

With pomp and noble ceremony arrived

In this Calcutta to assume the charge

Of her own life into her proper hands.⁵²

Subsequent scenes are located in Bombay, Poona, Bombay again, and finally, Surat; the principal characters are the Moderate leaders, and there are also symbolic abstractions like Democracy. Nagpur and Surat. In the end, the Mehta group are shown as succeeding in their endeavour to "slay the Congress". A clever and amusing skit, it is interesting mainly because it tells us something about the way tempers were frayed at the time.

V

From Surat Sri Aurobindo went to Baroda and stayed there for about a fortnight. We have seen how he had begun prānāyāma some years earlier, and how its regular practice had yielded some rather striking results - improved health, ease and fluency in poetic composition, a general outflow of energy, and even a certain limited power of subtle sight. At Calcutta, owing to the pressure of political and journalistic activity, he had been irregular with prānāyāma, and that was partly the reason why he had a breakdown in health in the latter half of 1906. He had recovered substantially, and the pursuit of politics in the spirit of religion - service of the Mother, looking upon India as the Mother - had dominated his thoughts and activities throughout 1907. It was the time when the country came first, last,

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all the time, and if there was total consecration, it was to the country as the visible Divinity the Mother. But Sri Aurobindo had always felt that Yoga could help him to acquire Power, and as the difficulties of political realisation increased, he thought that he should harness that Power, brahmatej, and use it in the service of the country. The Mother had to be liberated first, and there would then be room for other service. And serving the country would also be serving humanity everywhere. Intuitions came to him like sudden shafts of lightning, and he could on those occasions by-pass or race beyond the intellect, relying only on the wisdom and power of the Unseen Guide. A great equanimity was indeed his, and he could be unruffled even when everybody else around him seemed to be disturbed or agitated. He was already a man apart, and he seemed to have gleams of a sixth sense denied to others. But he wished through Yoga to mobilise more fully, more creatively, the faculties within, and to convert the current calm into a positive and infallible power for action in the political field.

At Surat, Sri Aurobindo met a Maharashtrian Yogi, Sakhare Baba, and this confirmed him in his desire to pursue Yoga more systematically than he had hitherto done. It was suggested that Vishnu Bhasker Lele, another Maharashtrian Yogi, might be able to help Sri Aurobindo, and so Barindra wired to Lele to come from Gwalior (where he was staying at the time) to Baroda. Sri Aurobindo's own return after the lapse of a year and a half created a great sensation in Baroda. Although the Principal of the Baroda College had directed the students not to go out to meet Sri Aurobindo, they did just the opposite; they ran out of their classes, let loose the horses that were yoked to the chariot in which he was being taken in procession, and pulled the chariot themselves part of the way. Sri Aurobindo gave three lectures on the political situation, and these were very well attended. During this period of his life, Sri Aurobindo seems to have adopted an almost ascetic severity, wearing only cotton shirts, travelling in third class compartments, sleeping on the wooden seats with only the hand for a pillow. It being mid-winter in Baroda, he had to use the Pashmina shawl that Sardar Mazumdar gave him.

It was at Khasirao Jadhav's house, where Sri Aurobindo was staying with Barin, that the first interview with Lele took place. As regards Yoga, Lele told Sri Aurobindo that he should completely suspend all political activity, at least for a few days. Then the two closeted themselves in a small room in the top floor of Sardar Mazumdar's house for three days. Recollecting that time, Sri Aurobindo said later in 1932:

"Sit down," I was told, "look and you will see that your thoughts come into you from outside. Before they enter, fling them back." I sat down and looked and saw to my astonishment that it was so; I saw and felt concretely the thought approaching as if to enter through or above the head and was able to push it back concretely before it came inside. In three days - really in one - my mind became full of an eternal silence - it is still there.⁵³

Lele's advice was that Sri Aurobindo should strive to empty his mind of all mere mental stuff-to make the mind a sheet of white paper ready to receive a piece of

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Divine calligraphy - to purify the system by ejecting all ego-stuff so that the Divine might take possession of it and direct its future operations. It was but a little hint from "a man without fame... a Bhakta with a limited mind but with some experience and evocative power";⁵⁴ no more than a tiny seed, yet it fell on the most fertile soil, and grew into a mighty tree

Branching so broad and long that in the ground

The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow

Above the mother tree, a pillared shade

High overarched, and echoing walks between.⁵⁵

The three-day effort to insulate the mind from the invasion of extraneous thoughts had brought Sri Aurobindo to a condition of unbelievable silence of the mind, a. condition which he was able to maintain for many months, and indeed always thereafter. As he described the condition to one of his disciples subsequently:

In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit and then I saw one thought and then another coming in a concrete way from outside; I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited' to the narrow circle of personal thought as a labourer in a thought factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire.⁵⁶

The body, of course, continued its manifold functions of walking, talking, eating, seeing, hearing, sleeping, but without any obtrusive egoistic consciousness. It was as though he had dissolved and become one with the etheric oneness of omnipresent reality. By achieving this ineffable silence of mind and consciousness, Sri Aurobindo had become one with the ineffable Brahman, which made all else seem unimportant, it was this stupendous experience that Sri Aurobindo later described poetically in his Nirvana:

All is abolished but the mute Alone.

The mind from thought released, the heart from grief

Grow inexistent now beyond belief;

There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown.⁵⁷

This immaculate crown of Advaitic or Nirvanic realisation, while inducing the supernal inner calm, rendered even normal surface activities an unreal continuum f unconsciousness. Things were happening, he was apparently engaged in activity, but he himself didn't know how or why.

Once Sri Aurobindo came out of the little room in Sardar Mazumdar's house, he couldn't withstand political or even revolutionary activity. He was going through the customary motions, like a puppet as it were. He and Barin had discussions

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with Chotalal B Purani about the possibility of organising secret revolutionary groups all over Gujarat, along the lines this had been done in Bengal. Barin also gave the formula for making bombs to Chotalal. Ambalal, his younger brother had attended some of Sri Aurobindo's lectures at Vankaner Theatre and Dandia Bazar, and although not comprehending everything that was said, he had decided to work with his brother's group.⁵⁸ Presently, Sri Aurobindo was invited to Bombay, Poona and other places in Maharashtra to speak on the current political situation. He was in a fix because, after those incredible three days in Sardar Mazumdar's house, Sri Aurobindo's conscious mind had become a total blank How could he speak before an audience? How was he to develop a political theme? He could think nothing, and he would have nothing to say! But Lele, on being consulted, assured Sri Aurobindo that he might accept the invitations and all would be well.

First Sri Aurobindo went to Poona with Lele, and met Tilak's Guru, Annasaheb Patwardhan, and also met some of the Maharashtrian revolutionaries. He gave two lectures at Poona, on the 12th January on Ramamurti whose feats of physical prowess and endurance had made him a celebrity, and on the 13th on the National Movement in Bengal. The subjects were "given" to him, and he spoke straight on, as it were. Proceeding to Bombay, he spoke at Girgaum on the 15th January on National Education, drawing upon the Bengal experiment and experience. What was meant by National Education was that in teaching history, geography, philosophy and other subjects, an attempt was made to awaken the spirit of nationality among the pupils:

Nothing that is useful or important is neglected in the scheme, and instruction is, as far as possible, imparted in the vernacular.... In profiting by our contact with Western civilisation, we should be careful not to cut ourselves adrift from our original moorings, but should at the same time imitate the Japanese in taking the fullest advantage of modem scientific discoveries. In political matters we have much to learn from the Western nations, and we shall also turn to them for lessons in popular Government. ...Self-reliance forms the guiding principle of our scheme of education. We do not look to Government for help, as we think that State assistance will destroy our national stamina. ⁵⁹

The most important of the speeches, however, was the one Sri Aurobindo gave on 19 January before the National Union. Although the people knew about the lecture only three or four hours earlier, a gathering of over 3,000 had assembled to hear him. When he went to the meeting, the silence of the mind was the sole reality and there was no stir of activity at all on the surface. But Lele, who had accompanied Sri Aurobindo, asked him to make namaskar to the audience and wait, - and speech would come to him from some source other than the mind.* So

* Cf. Jesus: "Do not consider anxiously what you are to say or how you are to say it; words will be given to you when the time comes; it is not you who speak, it is the Spirit of your Father that speaks in you." [The New Testament, translated by Ronald Knox, (1947) p. 20]

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in fact the speech came, and ever since, all speech, writing, thinking, outward activity were to come to him from the same other-than-mind sovereign source. The Bombay speech, both on account of the subject-matter and the manner of delivery, became justly famous. Sri Aurobindo seemed to the audience as one in the grip of a trance; but as he rose to speak, he found the words. He spoke with feeling, the words carried conviction. He spoke in small, jerky, almost nervous sentences, very unlike the language of a Classical scholar, or the language of the Indu Prakash article or the Bande Mataram editorials. He spoke neither like a professional combative politician nor yet like a seasoned statesman. It was more in the tone of the evangelist, the prophet:

There is a creed in India today which calls itself Nationalism.... Have you realised, have you yet realised what that means?... What is Nationalism? Nationalism is not a mere political programme; Nationalism is a religion that has come from God; Nationalism is a creed which you shall have to live.... You must remember that you are the instruments of God. ...in Bengal, Nationalism has come to the people as a religion, and it has been accepted as a religion. But certain forces which are against that religion are trying to crush its rising strength. It always happens when a new religion is preached, when God is going to be born in the people, that such forces rise with all their weapons in their hands to crush the religion. ...Nationalism has not been crushed. Nationalism, is not going to be crushed. Nationalism survives in the strength of God and it is not possible to crush it, whatever weapons are brought against it. Nationalism is immortal; Nationalism cannot die.... God cannot be killed. God cannot be sent to jail.⁶⁰

How utterly devoid of mere political verbiage or legalistic qualification! The word "Nationalism" is repeated again and again with a caress almost, as if the word were really a "flame-word rune". And, as if anticipating the "brown sahibs" of the post-Independence era, Sri Aurobindo continues:

Have you got a real faith? Or is it merely a political aspiration? Is it merely a larger kind of selfishness? Or is it merely that you wish to be free to oppress others, as you are being oppressed?

The worldly-wise people, however, must have heard the speech (was the man raving?) with a shudder and a snigger, and gravely nodded their heads in disapproval. The cold rationalists were probably aghast that God - who, like the British Crown, should be above politics - was being trotted out as a clinching argument, or as the only argument, from a political platform. But the vast majority were awed into acquiescence, they were won over, they were clean bowled! Sri Aurobindo presently launched upon a frontal attack on the Beast of Intellectualism:

What then does this intellectual process lead you to? This intellectual process, if it is used honestly, if it is followed to the very end, leads you to despair. It leads you to death. You have nothing which can help you, because you have no material strength at present which the adversary cannot crush and the adversary will certainly not be so foolish as to help you, or to allow you to

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develop the necessary strength unmolested. ...The only conclusion is that there is nothing to be done. The only conclusion is that this country is doomed.

Vivekananda's great intellect readily submitted to something far greater in Ramakrishna. Brahmatej was greater than kshatratej, soul-force could defy the might of the mightiest. Programmes too - Swadeshi, Boycott, National Education - were not everything. What, then, was the one thing needful?

What is it that has helped the older men who have gone to prison? What is it that has been their strength, that has enabled them to stand against all temptations and against all dangers and obstacles? They have had one and all of them consciously or unconsciously one over-mastering idea, one idea which nothing can shake, and this was the idea that there is a great Power at work to help India, and that we are doing what it bids us.

Faith, then, was the primary thing; selflessness also was required, for the Nationalists were not pursing "a political self-interest"; it was a religion they were trying to live, they were trying to realise God in the nation, in the three hundred million fellow-countrymen. The third requirement was courage:

When you believe in God, when you believe that God is guiding you... what is there to fear?... What is it that you have to fear? There is nothing to fear.... What can all these tribunals, what can all the powers of the world do to that which is within you, that Immortal, that Unborn and Undying One, whom the sword cannot pierce, whom the fire cannot bum, and whom the water cannot drown?

The triune virtues and powers - faith, selflessness, courage - should carry them far, very far. Perhaps, people were confused because the leadership was divided, the leaders spoke at cross-purposes, and people didn't know whom to follow. Sri Aurobindo told them simply:

...you will not need any leader. The leader is within your selves. If you can only find him and listen to his voice, then you will not find that people will not listen to you, because there will be a voice within the people which will make itself heard. ... you will find that one word from you will awake an answering voice in others....

Towards the end, the short sentences suddenly cease and there is a magnificent winding-up in the peroration. Something was happening in Bengal, and in India; it was the Hour of God when Krishna was in a poise of readiness to emerge from Gokul and declare his godhead. And when that happened, it would be India's destiny, not to be like other nations, not to rise only by human strength to trample underfoot the weaker peoples, but to see that something came out that enabled resurgent India "to save the whole world".

A new music surely; not statistics, not citations from Burke and Mill and Morley, not appeals to British precedents like the Witenagemot and the Magna Carta and the Reform Bill, not even a harking back to the French Revolution or the American Declaration of Independence. Just an invocation to God and an exhortation to his audience that they should realise God in themselves and thereby

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shape the life of "this great nation" so that she may be ready to reveal the God in her. They were engaged in no political uprising, no mere political change, but in realising God in themselves and in the nation.

As might have been expected, the Bombay speech was widely discussed and commented upon, praised as well as criticised for the same reason - it made a religion of Nationalism! The Indian Patriot lamented Sri Aurobindo's fall from his cultural (or intellectual) eminence and his open derogation of the reasoning faculty. The Bande Mataram of 22 February made a direct reference to the Bombay speech and the furore it had caused, but unrepentant Sri Aurobindo reiterated his earlier affirmation:

When we first received a European education, we allowed ourselves to be misled by the light of science. Science is a light within a limited room, not the sun which illumines the world. The aparā vidyā is the sum of science but there is a higher vidyā, a mightier knowledge. ...Whoever has once felt the glory of God within him can never again believe that the intellect is supreme. .. .It is in the heart where God resides.

It was but human vanity that individual leaders lay the flattering unction to their egos that they were thinking, planning, executing. The imponderables in human' life often came like a flood and swept away all human calculations. "Revolutions are always full of surprises," wrote Sri Aurobindo in the course of the same article. "and whoever thinks he can play chess with a Revolution will soon find how. terrible is the grasp of God and how insignificant the human reason before the whirlwind of His breath." Has any war gone exactly according to the calculations of the war-lords? Was Mirabeau or Danton able to regulate the lava-flow of the French Revolution? What then? Does it mean the total abdication of reason? Not altogether - only, one has to be ready always to listen to the other Voice when it comes, one must be willing to permit the heart's sure promptings to supersede the intellect's cold calculations:

The great rule of life is to have no schemes but one unalterable purpose. If the will is fixed on the purpose it sets itself to accomplish, then circumstances will suggest the right course; but the schemer finds himself always tripped by the unexpected.

Before Sri Aurobindo left Bombay, one day he saw from the balcony of a friends' house the whole busy movement of the city "as a picture in a cinema show, all unreal and shadowy". This experience he was later to recapitulate in Nirvana:

The city, a shadow picture without tone,

Floats, quivers unreal; forms without relief

Flow, a cinema's vacant shapes...⁶¹

While parting from Lele at Bombay, Sri Aurobindo asked for further guidance in the Yoga. But a mantra had suddenly risen in his heart, and he was able to assure Lele that it was genuine; Sri Aurobindo could rely on Him from whom the mantra

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had come. Lele then told Sri Aurobindo that there was no further need for instructions; he could henceforth rely on the Guru within, and be guided by the inner Voice.

From Bombay to Nasik, Dhulia, Amraoti, Nagpur - centres of Maharashtrian culture which Tilak had persuaded Sri Aurobindo to visit - and everywhere a spontaneous welcome, and everywhere a memorable speech or two. On the 24th January, he spoke at Nasik on Swaraj: the favourite theme - Swaraj was amrta, Swaraj was mukti, and this was true as much for the individual as for the nation. Hadn't Shivaji, inspired by the gospel of Tukaram and Ramdas, led the country to freedom? That miracle could be re-enacted once more. On the 26th at Dhulia, the subject being Swadeshi and Boycott. At Amraoti on the 29th, the meeting commenced with the singing of "Bande Mataram", and Sri Aurobindo spoke on the history and significance of the song. The mantra was no poetic concoction of Bankim Chandra's, but a revivification of an old mantra that had gone into obscurity and desuetude. As with the individual, so with the nation: there were three sheaths or kośas, the sthūla, the sūksma and the kārana śarīra, the gross, subtle and causal bodies respectively. The reality of the soul of the nation was infinitely more important than the body or its apparent life-currents. It needed a Yogi and a Rishi to see this soul-truth about India and embody it in the mantra "Bande Mataram". From Amraoti to Nagpur, where Sri Aurobindo delivered three lectures, on "The Policy of the Nationalist Party", "The Work Before Us" and "Commercial Swaraj and Educational Swaraj" on 30 and 31 January and 1 February. Yet once again, Sri Aurobindo tore the veil of Appearance and showed that there was a spiritual reality behind the material facade, that behind the hurly-burly of political controversy and agitation, behind the glare of opinion and action. God was fulfilling Himself and leading the country to its destined goal. What he said had an unfamiliar ring, it was not the usual language of the political market-place, but its very novelty, its tone of deep sincerity, and its sheer Messianic fervour carried all before it, and the people who had seen and heard him even once could not be quite the same afterwards. It was the alchemic touch of a Man of God.

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