Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

22

Palleri Cap

It was a Marathi student of Sri Aurobindo's, Sanker B. Didmishe, who gave another comprehensive statement (in Marathi). "I was in Inter at that time. Sri Aravind was teaching Burke's French Revolution. As his method of teaching consisted in going to the roots, one could never forget what he taught, even though the whole text was not completed. His mastery of the English language was phenomenal. Sometimes," disclosed Didmishe, "he examined our composition books. He wrote on them such remarks as 'Fit for Standard III' and 'How have you come to the College ?'

"I was in the B.A. Class in 1906. At that time he was giving us (students of Jr. B.A. with voluntary English) notes on English literature. The College started at 11.00 A.M., but Sri Aravind Babu came exactly at 11.30, went straight to his room and began teaching. We eight students used to sit in his office. Before beginning he would ask us to read seven or eight lines from the previous day; then his dictation and our writing commenced." Other students confirm this, some saying that Prof. Ghose asked them to read only the last sentence. "While dictating," went on

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Baroda College early this century

Didmishe, "he sat on the chair and looked at the photo of Principal Tait on the wall in front. He had no books or notes with him; everything was extempore. This procedure went on for one and a half hours. These notes were on the Augustan Age of English literature.

"That same year agitation began in Bengal and his attention turned to it." The College students decided to have a photograph taken with their Professor before he left for good. Each of the three classes had one group photo taken. At the time A. Ghose was taking the Senior and the Junior B.A. classes, and French. S. B. Didmishe was in the Junior B.A. group. "I was sitting at the feet of Sri Aravind Babu," he said. "My dress at that time consisted of a long coat, Hungarian cap and dhoti. Sri Aravind Babu used to wear English dress —coat, waistcoat and pants —but on his head a white turban, with an embroidered border. It was not customary at that time for students to go to his residence and so we did not go to the bungalow." One small detail clung to Didmishe's memory. "The buggy in which he went to the College from Khaserao Saheb's bungalow had purple glass panes."

S. B. Didmishe's remembrance of Sri Aurobindo's passage in Baroda a year later, after the Surat Congress, had remained vivid. "Then," Didmishe recalled, "after the break-up of the Congress at Surat, he came to Baroda for five or six days to speak on behalf of the Extremist party. There four lectures were delivered in the Bankaneer Theatre.¹ We used to go

1. Two lectures there and one at Manik Rao's gymnasium according to Purani.

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and sit two hours before the time. His dress then was Bengali dhoti, shirt and a shawl wrapped around him, but nothing on his head." The shawl was a concession to the biting cold of January; it was a Pashmina shawl offered by Sardar Mazumdar who saw Sri Aurobindo going about in a shirt.

The Baroda Collegians so idolized their former Professor that when he came to Baroda from Surat they unharnessed the horses from his carriage and pulled it themselves.

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Charu Chandra Dutt had heard much about Sri Aurobindo from different sources. But it was finally in 1904 that he met him. It was at the Baroda station. Dutt was on his way to Bombay, and he was with an English colleague; while Sri Aurobindo had gone to the station to see the artist Sashikumar Hesh off. "Magistrate Keshavrao Deshpande and Jatin Banerji were also with him." Just before the train's halt at the Baroda station the Englishman asked C. Dutt, "Do you know where Ghosh is now?"

"Which Ghosh?"

"That Classical scholar of Cambridge who has come away to India to waste his future."

"He is at Baroda," replied Dutt.

When the train stopped Hesh saw Dutt and shouted to him, "Dutt, do you know Ghosh?"

All that was narrated to Sri Aurobindo by Nirod decades later. Sri Aurobindo was hugely amused. Nirod continued C. C.

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Dutt's story. "Then Hesh introduced you. Dutt said to the Englishman: 'Here is Ghosh.'

"'That?' the Englishman exclaimed in great surprise, because you had come to the station in the Indian official dress and turban."

"Turban?" Sri Aurobindo cut in. "Does he mean Palleri cap?... But the official dress also? I don't remember. It is true that at times I used to put on the Marathi dress."

C.C. Dutt in his book added a few more details. "After the introduction, I said to Aurobindo Babu, 'Your brother Benoybabu knows me from long.' He smiled a beautiful sweet smile and replied, 'I know all about you. Now that we are both in Gujarat we shall meet often.'"

C.C. Dutt's father, Kalikadas Dutt was the Dewan of the Maharaja of Coochbehar, where Charu Chandra was born on 16 June 1876. After his return from England, Benoybhusan was engaged by the Maharaja of Coochbehar, as we have already seen. That is how C.C. Dutt was so well acquainted with Benoybhusan, and heard from him many stories about his younger brother. C.C. Dutt too was an I.C.S. and served as judge at several places in western India, such as Thane and Bombay. After his retirement he authored several Bengali storybooks; and in 1928 he was entrusted with writing a history of the Indian National Congress which he accomplished with credit. Born twenty years after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 he was a revolutionary at heart and joined the Revolutionary Movement. When queried, Sri Aurobindo confirmed it. "Oh yes. Everybody knew of it and so he was called by the Europeans 'Disloyal

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Benoybhusan with his wife Umarani

Judge.' That's the kind of man I like. He used to talk openly and frankly about his revolutionary ideas to Englishmen." Many of them appreciated him.

In 1910 Sri Aurobindo left Bengal for Pondicherry. Thereafter for thirty years there was no direct contact between them. There was some contact in a roundabout way though. C.C. Dutt was in Santiniketan from 1931 to 1938. We too lived there in the early 30s. My father, P.S. Nahar, who knew Dutt and his past relationship with Sri Aurobindo, would pass on to him copies of some of Sri Aurobindo's letters to his disciples. This was disclosed by Dutt himself in his book.

Thirty years after they last saw each other, when C.C. Dutt wrote asking permission to visit the Ashram, Sri Aurobindo readily granted it; but he did not forget to cut a joke! "Does he still smoke a pipe like old times? Then how can he stay in the Ashram?" Retorted Dutt, "The pipe is my servant, I am not the servant of the pipe."

A disciple asked Sri Aurobindo whether he was well-acquainted with C.C. Dutt from days of yore. "Charu Dutt?" wrote back Sri Aurobindo. "Yes, saw very little of him, for physically our ways lay apart, but that little was very intimate, one of the band of men whom I used most to appreciate and felt as if they had been my friends and comrades and fellow-warriors in the battle of the ages, and could be so for ages more. But curiously enough, my physical contact with men of this type —there were two or three others —was always brief. Because I had something else to do this time, I suppose."

Charu Chandra Dutt passed the last years of his life

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near the living Idol of his heart.

Then he passed away on 22 January 1952, about thirteen I months after Sri Aurobindo's departure.

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Sri Aurobindo had not forgotten Sashikumar Hesh either. When he was explaining that not only a Yogi but even an ordinary man can have a change of skin colour, he gave the example of Hesh. "I know a dark lower-middle-class Bengali named Hesh who returned from Europe after some years. He looked almost like a European. He came to see me at Baroda but I couldn't recognize him. Then he said, 'Don't you recognize me?'"

Sponsored by Maharaja Suryakanta Acharya of Mymen-singh, Hesh had gone to Europe to study art, which he did at several schools —in London, Paris, Venice, etc. His 'Letter from Europe' was a weekly feature in K. K. Mitra's Sanjibani. At Baroda, the Gaekwad offered him and his French wife hospitality at his Guest House which normally was reserved for important guests. Of an evening, recalls D. K. Roy, the artist —who looked like an Italian —would drop in on them, driving in style in a brougham with liveried coachman and a groom behind. There was quite a distance between the royal Guest House and Baroda Camp which was then the residence of A. Ghose. Sometimes Hesh would invite both of them to take a drive with him. According to Roy the only daily exercise Sri Aurobindo did in those days was walking up and down the

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verandah for a long time, before dusk; except the days he went for a drive in the brougham. When Hesh expressed a wish to do his portrait in oil, Sri Aurobindo gave several sittings at the Guest House. Roy says that Sashikumar Hesh was really a very good artist as, just with a few strokes of his brush, he was able to bring out Sri Aurobindo's serene brightness.

What happened to that oil painting? We don't know.

Nor have we come across a photo of Dinendra Kumar Roy with Sri Aurobindo taken by Fadke.

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"Why, if I had followed the line of external success," exclaimed Sri Aurobindo in the course of a conversation with his disciples, "I would have been somewhere in Baroda! That life was easy.... If I had stuck to my job I would have been a Principal, perhaps, written some poetry and lived in comfort like a bourgeois."

But Sri Aurobindo did not care a whit for any personal comfort, nor for amassing wealth. "Poverty has never held any terrors for me nor is it an incentive," he said in his forthright manner. "You seem to forget that I left my very safe and 'handsome' Baroda position without any need to it, and that I gave up also the Rs.150 of the National College Principalship, leaving myself with nothing to live on. I could not have done that if money had been an incentive." It was in January 1935 that Sri Aurobindo made this reply to Nirod's ignorant remarks.

"If you don't realise that starting and carrying on for

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ten years and more a revolutionary movement for independence ' without means in a country wholly unprepared for it meant living dangerously, no amount of puncturing of your skull with words will give you that simple perception."

Sri Aurobindo chose to live dangerously.

By 1903 —actually before that —Sri Aurobindo got more and more drawn into the vortex of all-India politics, and took long leaves of absence to go to Calcutta which was then the seat of the British Government. Three years later he gave up his 'safe' Baroda job and dove head foremost into the uncertain turbulence of politics.

Sri Aurobindo's sweetness and affection had filled the hearts of his students. R. N. Patkar, while going back over his college days, said, "The day of his departure came at last and it was extremely touching.... In the evening, Aravind Babu, though he had a very busy time, called me in his room and I sat by his side. With a caressing touch of his hand on my shoulder he affectionately said to me, 'Well, Rajaram, we part after all. We part in body but not in soul —which is omnipresent. I leave Baroda because Supreme Duty demands my presence elsewhere and I cannot shirk.... You will come out successful and triumphant only if you remain honest and good and obey the dictates of your conscience. If you observe this dictum your path will be smooth and you will be happy.' He finished these words and got up. He went straight to his book case, and knowing my love for Sanskrit picked up Kalidasa's Shakuntala and Vikramorvasie and presented them to me as a token of his love. He also gave me / his book of poems: Songs to Myrtilla and another, Urvasie. I

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quietly bowed, touched his feet and left the room with a heavy heart and wet eyes. Though an old man now, with one foot in the grave," said Patkar in 1956, "I still remember the parting * scene with a heavy heart."

R. S. Dalai, the Gujarati novelist, recorded among other things that "While we were in the B.A. class, Mr. S. K. Mullick, a friend of Prof. Ghose, delivered us a lecture laying stress on Swadeshi, and many of us took to the Swadeshi vow from that date. Prof. Ghose also spoke and we were enamoured of his Rhetorics full of sentiments and ardour. Every syllable that he spoke was full of patriotic spirit."

Dr. Sarat Kumar Mullick, a reputed physician, was an enthusiastic patriot. He was perhaps the first to take the initiative in forming an army of Bengalis by inducting Bengalis into the Bengal regiment; similarly he was foremost in forming the Bengal Territorial Force. As Chairman of the Baroda College Union, Professor A. Ghose was required to deliver "a few speeches at functions in the Palace itself such as the reception of Dr. S. K. Mullick."

Now, it so happened that Dr. Manilal —my friend Chandanbala's father—who hailed from Baroda, had been a student of A. Ghose. After Sri Aurobindo's accident to his knee in November 1938, the doctor, who had come for the Darshan with his family (in those days we saw Sri Aurobindo only three times a year), became one of the attendant doctors. Once in the course of the daily talk, he remarked to Sri Aurobindo, "I heard your lecture after the Surat Congress. You had some paper in your hand."

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"That was the speech I made from an entire silence of the mind," replied Sri Aurobindo, "and that was my first experience of the kind." Then he asked, "You didn't hear me at Baroda?"

"Yes, Sir, once only," replied Dr. Manilal. "I was in the Matric class then. Only one sentence I remember of that speech. Dr. Mullick had come to Baroda. The meeting was held in his honour. Prof. Saha proposed you to the chair saying, 'Dr. Mullick is a Bengali and Mr. Ghose is a Bengali. So I propose him to the chair.' You replied: 'I consent to take the chair not because Dr. Mullick is a Bengali and I am a Bengali, but because I am an Indian and Dr. Mullick is an Indian.'"

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