Mother's Chronicles - Book One

Acknowledgement

The material in this book is drawn mostly from Satprem's works.

Satprem was Mother's confidant for over 17 years. From their taped conversations was born MOTHER'S AGENDA, in volumes.

Finally, it is due to his encouragement that this book was written.

A Word With You, Please!

I have been asked to say something about myself: who I am, what prompted me to share with you Mother's story, how I met Mother in the first place, and so on and so forth. Well, I am not inclined to spill all the beans at this stage. You will soon find out for yourself some of the answers as you go on with the Real Story.

For now, suffice it to say that I am an elderly lady. But when I first met Mother I was just nine. Then, soon after, she took me under her wing. Up until 1973, when I was forty-eight years old, I lived securely with Mother, cocooned in the warmth of her love and affection. It is to the feast of Mother's love that you are invited.

I was born in Calcutta in the house of my grandfather, P. C. Nahar. Though a lawyer by profession, it was his wide-ranging cultural activity that made him a well-known figure all over India. These activities embraced a variety of spheres: education, literature, collections of all kinds, from matchbox labels to sculptures. He was also a social reformer. But above all, he was a devout Jain. My father, P. S. Nahar, was his fifth child of nine. My father wanted his children —we were eight —to have a broader education. To that end we were taken to Santiniketan, the campus of poet Rabindranath Tagore's "Vishwabharati" (World University). Our family lived in the house of Tagore's

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eldest brother which our father had rented. Thus, our formative years were spent in a clean open air, and we imbibed the cultural and artistic atmosphere prevailing there under the influence of the poet himself, and others, like the great artist Nandalal Bose. As was to be expected, we children spent more than half our time monkeying up trees.

Then my mother, S. K. Nahar, died. My father, who had built his world around her, suddenly found himself without a base. He was only thirty-four. Although pressured, he refused to remarry. No, he wanted another kind of life. As it was, from his childhood he had been greatly attracted to sadhus and sannyasins. So now he went in search of a Master, someone who could guide him to his inner life, who could reveal to him the purpose of his being on earth. He started travelling all over India.

On his way down south, to the magnificent temple of Rameswaram, he halted at Pondicherry. There, in that French enclave, lived Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo was the great Bengali revolutionary leader of the early decade of this century. He had been jailed by the British, but they could not bring enough evidence against him to satisfy the judge. So, after one year in prison, he was released. But the British government did not give up. They soon got ready to rearrest Sri Aurobindo on some other trumped-up charges. It was then that Sri Aurobindo quietly left Calcutta and went away to Pondicherry, not only to evade arrest, but to pursue the experiences he had had while in prison.

There, in the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo, my father met

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Mother. In Sri Aurobindo and Mother he found the Guides he was seeking. And, as is natural with fathers, he wanted his children also to meet Sri Aurobindo and Mother. That is how we brothers and sisters came into contact with Them. Finally, one by one, we chose to stay under the wing of Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

They certainly did not allow us to run wild —if we were to do yoga, we needed discipline —but kept a vigilant eye on us young people and even arranged for our education. We had different tutors for different subjects. An English lady taught us English and French, so that we could read in the original the books written by Sri Aurobindo and Mother. A French gentleman, P. B. de Saint-Hilaire, was our science and maths teacher. We knew him as "Pavitra" (the pure one). A product of the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris, he was entrusted with running a variety of departments in the Ashram. As these began to get expanded, my brothers and I were quickly roped in, and very soon he left the day-to-day running of the affairs in our hands. My two younger sisters taught at the Ashram School, and during a number of years I was his personal secretary. Among other things, his office was responsible for the correspondence of Sri Aurobindo and Mother with the overseas disciples.

Then Satprem arrived on the scene. By this time Mother was getting pretty fed up with the unresponsiveness of the youth in the Ashram. She had wanted to mould them into a new shape, but these young people were not much interested in the Life Divine that Sri Aurobindo and Mother wanted to embody upon this earth. So Mother was glad when Satprem came.

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He was fresh from the Amazonian jungle, with a rebellious heart for all existing human ways—had he not suffered inhumanly in the Nazi concentration camps where he was imprisoned as a member of the French Resistance, just as he turned twenty? He was ready to give anything a try. He was hungry for something ELSE. In Satprem, Mother found the stuff she could mould —a stuff honest enough to let itself be moulded. As it happened, he had a natural mastery over the French language. That gift served as a pretext; Mother started calling him in Pavitra's office in order to consult him. She would tell him things from the past or the present, events in her own life, to illustrate some points or in answer to his questions. As their intimacy grew, as Satprem grew more and more understanding of what was at stake, Mother confided more and more what was REALLY happening to her, taking him along with her in to the future of the human species, describing to him the topography of the word she was exploring. Their recorded talks (in French) have been published in 13 volume as MOTHER'S AGENDA.

As far as possible, I have tried to let Mother herself speak of her own life. All I have done was to put these events in as chronological an order as possible.

Enough of these preliminaries.

On with the Real Story.

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