Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

5

The Godhead

Strange things had happened to the Western-educated rationalist since his return from England. From the moment he set foot on her soil India began to prepare the ground for the full blossoming of her Lotus. She began giving him spiritual experiences. They were as ununderstandable to the agnostic's mind as they were unexpected. "I can't help that. It happened," Sri Aurobindo was to reply simply to Nirod's query years later. "The mind's canons of the rational and the possible do not give spiritual life and experience."

At London A.G. had thought that the Self, Atman, was the true thing to be realized in life. But, naturally, he had no notion of how to set about it. Then, the experience of the Self came unbidden. "A thing I knew nothing about, never bargained for, didn't understand either..........This began in London, sprouted the moment I set foot on Apollo Bunder, touching Indian soil, flowered one day in the first year of my stay in Baroda, at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage."

One day, Sri Aurobindo was driving from Camp Road

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in Baroda and had just reached the side of the public gardens when his carriage was threatened with an accident. The carriage was known as a 'victoria,' that is, a low and light four-wheeled carriage with seat for two, a raised driver's seat and a falling top. "Nobody could guess its age," recorded D. K. Roy. "The horse was very big, but in speed it was the elder brother of a donkey! Even a whip could not get it moving faster!" But something could startle it. And then? Then danger. And the vision. It was the vision of the Godhead surging up from within. In a sonnet written in September 1939, Sri Aurobindo described his experience.

The Godhead

" I sat behind the dance of Danger's hooves

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

And suddenly felt, exceeding Nature's grooves,

In me, enveloping me the body of Him.

Above my head a mighty head was seen,

A face with the calm of immortality

And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene

In the vast circle of its sovereignty.

His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze;

The world was in His heart and He was I:

I housed in me the Everlasting's peace,

The strength of One whose substance cannot die.

The moment passed and all was as before;

Only that deathless memory I bore."

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At Baroda there was an 'Officers' Club' which was patronized by the Maharaja. A. Ghose had enrolled himself as a member. But he was a rare member of the Club. He did not have a herd instinct. A small congenial circle of friends was more to his taste and he spent most evenings with them whenever free from his studies or other works. We can now have a pleasant nodding acquaintance with one of them, Lt. Madhavrao Jadhav. He was a very close friend of A. G. 's.

Madhavrao would often drop in of an evening for a chat. A. G. himself was not talkative, but he was a very good listener. And, oh, how he would laugh I

The Jadhavs were three brothers, noted D. K. Roy. This noble and cultured family was loyal to the Gaekwad. The eldest brother was a Police Commissioner somewhere in the Baroda State. The second brother, Khaserao Jadhav was about the same age as the Maharaja, and a distant relation of his. He was a graduate in agriculture from a British college. He had entered the Baroda Civil Service where he first served as a District Collector, then was posted at Baroda itself as Revenue Commissioner. He looked after the education of the Maharaja's grandson for some time. The Gaekwad got a house built for Khaserao at Baroda: Bungalow 15 in Dandia Bazar. The two-storeyed redbrick house was completed in 1896. Among the various residences Sri Aurobindo occupied during his thirteen years' sojourn in Baroda, he spent most of his time at Khaserao's bungalow. In 1898, when he brought his Bengali teacher, Dinendra Kumar Roy, with him, both lodged at first with the Jadhavs in this bungalow.

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The youngest Jadhav brother, Lieutenant Madhavrao Jadhav, was in the Baroda army. He was trained at a military school in England. "He was the same age as Aurobindo," wrote D. K. Roy in his book, "and they were great friends. Aurobindo was of a grave temperament; but when he and Madhavrao talked together, his gravity would vanish completely. From both would flow rolling laughter. No outsider could even imagine Aurobindo's lambent humour, his extraordinary artistry in brightening up a company with merry tales —as though behind a stern exterior flowed an undercurrent of humour full of flavour. That was pure, crystalline, enjoyable."

Though in society Sri Aurobindo "generally withdrew into the shell of his deep, congenial reserve," reports Dilip, "with his intimates of the inner circle he had always loved to indulge in banter and laughter and quips of every description." Dilip goes on to give an instance of Sri Aurobindo's 'pre-yogic humour,' as he heard it from an old friend of his, which occurred in a social gathering. "The Prince of Baroda was going to be married," said Sri Aurobindo's old friend. "In those days monogamy was not particularly insisted on. Sri Aurobindo was then the Vice-Principal of the Gaekwar's College. When the distinguished guests had assembled for the wedding dinner, the royal bridegroom came up to him dignified and demure. The grave Vice-Principal, revered by all, shook hands with 'the cynosure of neighbouring eyes' and wished him 'Many many happy returns of the day I' "

Dinendra K. Roy went on with his description. "Madhavrao mostly spoke in Marathi, and Sri Aurobindo generally

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replied in English. Nine tenths of the time it was Madhavrao who talked, Aurobindo talked only one tenth of the time." However, the Bengali teacher observed that his pupil was more fluent in Marathi than in Bengali.

The Bengali 'novelist' — as Madhavrao called him —was quite surprised to see the close friendship between a serious-natured man like Sri Aurobindo, who was a poet and a philosopher, and a 'military' man with a European soldier's temperament. Sri Aurobindo himself spoke in 1940 of his two intimate friends in Baroda. "One was Deshpande who was very intimate: he is dead. Madhavrao was another: he is also dead." Lt. M. R. Jadhav was associated with Sri Aurobindo's political projects, and was one among four or five with whom "I was planning to work on more extremist lines than the Congress," recounted Sri Aurobindo in 1938. In one of his letters to his wife, Mrinalini Devi, Sri Aurobindo mentions that he needed money to send Madhavrao to Europe for arms training so he was unable to send her more.

The Bengali novelist was to witness many other things during his two years of day-to-day life near Sri Aurobindo. But that was to be a few years later, in 1898. We were in 1894.

So let us pick up the thread where we left it.

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Young Barin