Mother's Chronicles - Book Four

28

The Brilliant Student

Who could believe that the shy young man, poet, brilliant scholar, with such a fine sense of quiet humour and so frail could ever be a revolutionary?

Most of his school and college mates had a very high regard for A. A. Ghose both as a person and as a scholar. "The present writer was at school with him," wrote an ex-Pauline, Phillip W. Seargent, "and can bear witness to his brilliant attainments as a boy. It would have been difficult in those days to regard him as a firebrand!"

"Fancy Ghose a ragged revolutionary!" exclaimed an Englishman in utter disbelief to his colleague C. C. Dutt, another I.C.S. who knew Sri Aurobindo. "He can with far greater ease write a lexicon or compose a noble epic." No, Sri Aurobindo never wrote a lexicon but he did compose 'a noble epic': Savitri.

Another Englishman, a fellow-scholar of A. A. Ghose at King's, gave the following reply to a query. "Though he was in my year, I saw but little of him so that I can give no information of interest. At the same time I did occasionally come

Page 206

across him. He was a very able Classical Scholar, easily first in this subject in the entrance Scholarship Examination. . . . With regard to his life at Cambridge a complete lack of interest in games must have lessened his enjoyment of the place." There speaks the Englishman, although Sri Aurobindo may not have agreed with that opinion. "His interests were in literature: among Greek poets for instance he once waxed enthusiastic over Sapphic and he had a nice feeling of English style. Yet for England itself he seemed to have small affection; it was not only the climate that he found trying: as an example, he became quite indignant when on one occasion I called England the modern Athens. This title, he declared, belonged to France; England much more resembled Corinth, a commercial state, and therefore unattractive to him."

A. A. Ghose had a keenness of perception salted with a sense of humour. "If the Athenians were mushrooms," he wrote picturesquely, "and the lowland Scotch are oaks, the mushroom is preferable. To be slow and solid is the pride of the Saxon and the ox, but to be quick and songful and gracile is the pride of the Celt and the bird."¹

Though A. A. Ghose evinced no interest in taking part in games, he did take part in debates and discussions. "At Cambridge," reminisced Sri Aurobindo, "we were once discussing about physical development. Then one fellow, in order to show how splendid his health was, began to take his garments off. He took off his coat, waistcoat, shirt, one vest, then

1. Beauty in the Real, in The Harmony of Virtue, p. 68.

Page 207

another, and still another and so on. We found that there were ten or twelve pieces of clothing on his body!"

Sri Aurobindo, like Mother, had an eye for anything funny or absurd and never forgot it. Dilip once wrote to Sri Aurobindo, "But we all lie, Guru! So why are we so profoundly shocked when others repeat our favourite pastime? Please elucidate." Which Sri Aurobindo did. "Lies? Well, a Punjabi student at Cambridge once took our breath away by the frankness and comprehensive profundity of his affirmation: 'Liars! But we are all liars!' It appeared that he had intended to say 'lawyers,' but his pronunciation gave his remark a deep force of philosophic observation and generalisation which he had not intended. But it seems to me the last word in human nature. Only the lying is sometimes intentional, sometimes vaguely half-intentional, sometimes quite unintentional, momentary and unconscious. So there you are! ..."

C. C. Dutt reports a glowing reference to Sri Aurobindo by another Englishman. "During the first year of my service I had a superior, a young man named Percy Mead. . . . He asked me, 'Dutt, aren't you a Bengali?' 'Yes, but why do you want to know?' I asked. 'During my days at Cambridge there was an extraordinary Indian student, with a profound knowledge in Greek and Latin, named Aurobindo Akroyd Ghose. I was acquainted with him, a very fine man; I got a lot of help from him for my studies. Do you know him? He was perhaps a Bengali.'" At the time Dutt had not met Sri Aurobindo but knew his relatives, specially Benoybhusan at Coochbehar where Dutt's father was the Dewan.

Page 208

An Irishman, who later became a professor, was an undergraduate with Sri Aurobindo at King's College during 1890-91. He too acknowledged what a wiz his fellow student was at Classics. "I knew him in those days quite well, and have happy recollections of him as a brilliant young classical scholar, an open Entrance Scholar of the College, of marked literary and poetic taste, and as far as I ever saw a young man of high character and modest bearing, who was liked by all who knew him. He was, of course, also a student of Sanskrit, and having passed his Entrance Examination for the Indian Civil Service, as well as for Part I of the Classical Tripos. In the latter he secured a First Class at the end of his second year, a highly creditable success."

It was no mean achievement, we ought to say, considering that students normally took three years to complete the same course. Besides, our A. A. Ghose did not pass the grade just anyhow, he was one of the two best Classics scholars of his year. Yes, Krishna Dhan Ghose's Ara had a most brilliant academic career. At the end of the first year at King's College he won a prize for Greek Iambics. At the end of the second year he was awarded prizes for Greek Iambics again, as well as for Latin Hexameters. Having distinguished himself in the College Examination in Classics, A. A. Ghose was given "books bearing the College arms, to the value of forty pounds" —an amount equivalent to half his Scholarship stipend.

But he did not graduate at Cambridge in spite of passing high in the First Part of the Tripos in his second year. The First Part gave the degree of B. A. only if it was taken in the third year. He might have got the degree if he had applied for

Page 209

it, but he did not care to do so.

Let us not forget that given his pecuniary circumstances, A. A. Ghose could not afford to engage a tutor. Let us not forget either that he was at the same time a probationary candidate for the Indian Civil Service. He had therefore not only to fulfil the obligations of the Classical Scholarship —which he did surpassingly well — but also to study all the subjects which a future administrator of India had to master: British and Indian laws, history and geography of India, Political Economy, vernacular languages, and classical languages. A. A. Ghose's mother tongue, Bengali, "was not a subject for the competitive examination for the I.C.S. It was after he had passed the competitive examination that Sri Aurobindo as a probationer who had chosen Bengal as his province began to learn Bengali." He took Hindustani as optional. Sanskrit was the classical Indian language he chose: "I learnt Sanskrit by reading the Nala-Damayanti episode in the Mahabharata . . . with minute care several times." Actually, so well did he master the Sanskrit language that one day he was to unveil the secrets of the Veda for us.

"I don't remember having any teacher in Sanskrit," said Sri Aurobindo mildly contradicting somebody's statement. "I think I learnt it by myself. Many languages, in fact, I learnt by myself—German and Italian, for instance. In Bengali, however, I had a teacher." That was several years later, in Baroda. The course of study provided at Cambridge was a very poor one. Poorer still was their teacher! "Of course," said Sri Aurobindo, "we started learning it in Cambridge, the judge Beachcroft was

Page 210

one of us, under an Anglo-Indian pundit ('Pundit Towers,' the students called him). He used to teach us Vidyasagar.¹ One day we hit upon a sentence of Bankim's and showed it to him. He began to shake his head and said: 'This can't be Bengali!'"

One of Sri Aurobindo's interests was in "learning languages" for which he had a natural aptitude. He learnt German and Italian so well by himself that he could study Goethe and Dante in the original. In Baroda he picked up Gujarati "as I had to read the Maharaja's files." It was also in Baroda that Sri Aurobindo for the most part learnt Bengali for himself; before engaging a teacher he "already knew enough of the language to appreciate the novels of Bankim and the poetry of Madhusudan." His engaging a teacher was for the purpose of familiarizing himself with spoken Bengali and its idiomatic usage.

Thus Sri Aurobindo had "mastered Greek and Latin, English and French and had also acquired some familiarity with continental languages like German and Italian," and a little Spanish; among the Indian languages were Sanskrit and Bengali, Gujarati and Hindi, some Tamil, and Marathi which "he spoke better than Bengali," remarked his Bengali teacher Dinendra Kumar Roy.

1. Pandit Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar (1820-91), was an eminent educationist and social reformer. His Bengali prose works earned for him the title of father of Bengali prose literature. An orthodox Hindu, he refused to attend Government functions where his garb of dhoti, chaddar and slippers was banned, even though he was the Principal of the Government College, Calcutta. He was a great personality, charitable, benevolent, but unbending where self-respect was in question. He was one of the towering personalities of Bengal who significantly contributed to its re-awakening in the nineteenth century.

Page 211

A. A. Ghose found philosophy very dry. He tried to read Kant's Critique, "and after two pages I gave it up." Sri Aurobindo commented, "I made in fact no study of metaphysics in my school and College days. What little I knew about philosophy I picked up desultorily in my general reading.... German metaphysics and most European philosophy since the Greeks seemed to me a mass of abstractions with nothing concrete or real that could be firmly grasped, and written in a metaphysical jargon to which I had not the key. ... In sum, my interest in metaphysics was almost null and in general philosophy sporadic."

We see then that in England young A. A. Ghose almost excluded Europe's philosophy, and also science —"it was not in fashion at that time" —from his reading, but devoted his time to the study of her literature and history. History, let us not forget, is not a mere chronicling of who warred with whom and when, devasted how much land, and killed how many people. History becomes truly History when it chronicles the advance made by a people —the progress of a civilization. "But the real and perfect civilisation yet waits to be discovered," he wrote decades later, giving the net result of his studies, "for the life of mankind is still nine-tenths of barbarism to one-tenth of culture."

But it seems quite significant to me that from his very youth what interested Sri Aurobindo was the great movements of human consciousness through the ages.

Page 212