Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

30

He Knows Latin, He Knows Greek

Though Governor Duprat gave a certificate of good conduct to the British secret police stationed in Pondicherry, in reality its conduct was not all that good. Even if the French government thought that with the Bengal Partition undone the threat from violence would subside, the British never thought so. That is why when they saw that the French were disinclined to expel the Swadeshi refugees from their territory, they tried to provoke some incidents there. After all, it is an English saying that 'all's fair in love and war,' isn't it? And hadn't they declared war on the Swadeshis?

Let us note that for the Anglo-Indian bureaucrats the hard core or 'the inner ring' (to use their words) of the extremists consisted of 'Arabindo Ghose' and his four or five 'satellites': Bharati, WS Aiyar, Srinivasachari, and Ramaswami. The Pondicherry administration shared the same idea. So the situation of the Swadeshis was quite critical as we can now learn by piecing together data from a variety of sources.

There was a father-and-son pair, Devanayagam and Mayuresan, who were spies in the pay of the British police. They made a good living by giving cooked-up information to their paymasters over the years. But like all employees they too wanted

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their pay enhanced which the chief of the secret police put off with mere promises of better payment 'next time.' So with hopes of better reward the two informers went to the French police. It was March 1912. They told the tale of a great conspiracy by the Swadeshis, not only against the British but against the French too, and to that end they, the Swadeshis, had formed a secret society and were hatching a plot to overthrow the colonial European governments. As proof they asked the French police to search the houses of the leaders of the Indian political refugees.

But the morning before the police could begin their search when the maid of V. V. S. Aiyar went to fetch water from the well she was shocked. "The back side wall of Aiyar's house," wrote Srinivasachari in his diary,' "which had fallen owing to recent heavy rains allowed any outsider to have easy access to a small well in the backyard. Into this well was thrown the hermetically sealed jar with a weight attached to it so that it may remain sunk till the French police come and examine the well on their complaint.... He [Aiyar] was living in that house just as before with his wife and children and the servant was attending to her work as usual. The jar must have been put into the well the previous night when all were asleep. At daybreak when it was yet dim the servant as usual went to the well and threw her bucket into it to draw water holding the other end of the rope. The bucket when filled with water went down and hit the jar which getting loose from the weight attached to it rose up to the level of the water and began to float visibly. The servant woman seeing it come up suddenly and float was taken aback and took it to be a child.

¹ Reproduced in Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, December 1985.

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"She ran to Aiyar and told him her suspicions. He went to the well and found something floating over the water. He got into the well and took hold of the object and finding it to be a jar, brought it to his room." Naturally enough he opened it. After a good look he closed it carefully, and when Bharati came they conferred and went to the house of Srinivasachari with the jar and the carefully packed contents. After conferring amongst themselves,V. V. S. Aiyar

Bharati went to Sri Aurobindo to

get his advice. Sri Aurobindo told him to inform the French police. The three wrote to Governor Duprat asking for an interview. It was granted. The three then went to the governor with the porcelain jar, told him how it was found and where, and placed the contents before the governor. There was a "receipt book with counterfoils, the rubber-stamp facsimile of my signature with a pad and some printed papers," noted Srinivasachari. Among the many seditious papers the jar contained, "was a photo of a temple of Kali with the heads of Europeans separated from their bodies scattered before the image made as offerings to her." There were several copies of such photos. Also included was a card written in Bengali, supposedly issued from the Mymensingh Sadhana Samaj. Sri Aurobindo studied it, and pointed out the many mistakes committed by a non-

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Bengali writer. After a detailed analysis he concluded that the card was a 'clumsy forgery' After a good look, the governor also said that it was a matter for the police to enquire and find out the culprit. Bharati, Aiyar and Srinivasachari accordingly went to the French police, delivered the jar with the contents, and preferred the necessary complaint.

"The next Saturday all the three of us, Aiyar, Bharati and myself went on Srinivasachari, "received summons from the Magistrate to be present at his court on the next day which was a Sunday at seven in the morning. It looked somewhat strange to us to be called on a Sunday at such a hour." When they went they found "the Procureur de la Republique [public prosecutor], one M. Nadau was there and we were called in." They were then told about the complaint by 'two French citizens.' They were also told the names of the complainants. Then they were told that a few policemen will go with them "immediately and search our houses to find out if there are incriminating documents or other articles there. When we said we had no objection, a batch of French Indian policemen were sent with us to search our houses. In my house the search began at about 10 A.M. and lasted till 2 to 3 P.M. In Bharati's house, it was over by
midday. In Aiyar's house it went on till 4 P.M., and the only objectionable article that the police confiscated in his house was the Nepalese kukree that I had lent him for the Ayudha Puja worship during the Dusserah. Sri Aurobindo's house was also searched towards the evening by two European officers from the Magistrate's court who on entering his house told him' Nous sommes venus flour en montrer l'inanite' (we have come to show its futility) and the search there was over within an

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hour. The police report was that nothing incriminating was found in the houses searched."

This is how Purani, who was not present, pieced together the incident: "The investigating magistrate who came to search Sri Aurobindo's house was one M. Nandot [sic] who arrived with the chief of police and the public prosecutor. He found practically no furniture in the house, only a few trunks, a table and a chair. On opening the drawers of the table he found only books and papers. On some of the papers Greek was written. He was very much surprised and asked if Sri Aurobindo knew Greek. When he came to know that he knew Latin, Greek and other European languages, his suspicion waned, yielding place to a great respect for Sri Aurobindo. He invited Sri Aurobindo to meet him in his chambers later and Sri Aurobindo complied with his request."

Nolini who was a witness to these events has left us a vivid remembrance. The affair of the police search took place in N°10 Rue Saint-Louis, known as 'Raghavan House.' We will go there later for a fuller visit.

"Those who tried most to stop Sri Aurobindo from settling down and were ever on the alert to move him from his seat were the British authorities. The British Government in India could never accept that Sri Aurobindo had come away to French territory for carrying on his yoga. Religion and spirituality, these to them were a mere subterfuge. They thought they knew what Sri Aurobindo was—the one most dangerous man in all India, the source of all the trouble. Pondicherry was the place from where were supplied the necessary instructions and advice and perhaps even the pistols and other weapons. Here was the

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brain-centre of the Indian independence movement. That Sri Aurobindo had been the mainspring of Indian independence they had been told by their life-instinct, although the superficial sense in which they understood it was not obviously the whole truth."

Exactly as the British secret police had decided to kidnap V. V. S. Aiyar, so did they decide to kidnap Sri Aurobindo "in a car with the help of one of the chiefs of the local bandes. We had to patrol all night the house in which Sri Aurobindo lived, lest there should be a sudden attack____"

"Nevertheless," went on Nolini, "force having failed they now tried fraud. An attempt was made to frame a trumped-up charge at law. Some of the local 'ghouls' were made to help forge the documents—some photographs and maps and charts along with a few letters—which were to prove that we had been engaged in a conspiracy for dacoity and murder. The papers were left in a well in the compound of one of our men The French police had even entered Sri Aurobindo's residence for a search. But when their Chief found there were Latin and Greek books lying about on his desk, he was so taken aback that he could only blurt out, '// salt du latin, ill suit du grec!'— 'He knows Latin, he knows Greek!'—and then he left with all his men. How could a man who knew Latin and Greek ever commit any mischief?"

When the father-and-son pair failed in their efforts to convince the French police about the sinister designs of the Swadeshis, they panicked. Here is a letter from the examining Magistrate, M. Nadau to the Attorney General.

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l0 July 1912

'Sir,

"During the month of May, there was no preliminary investigation for two reasons:

"1. The house searches at the Swadeshis' (on 4 and 7 April) and their interrogations showed that they did not form a secret society and did not meet clandestinely.

"2. [...] Since then, i.e., since the beginning of June, I ordered the documents seized in their houses to be returned to the accused: letters, newspapers and manuscripts, none of them being connected with the alleged offence.

"On 6 and 7june, I ordered a confrontation between the informer Deivanayagachetty and the Swadeshis.

"The accusation collapsed completely; following our searches of 4 and 7 April based on Deivanayagachetty's indications, which we had good reason to regard as suspect, all information coming from him was proved to be false.

"In their defence, the Swadeshis deposited a certain number of documents coming from Mr. Mayoressim, the informer Deivanayagam's son, proving the said Mayoressim's connection with the British police.

"This person had handed over to the Swadeshis his correspondence with the English police and confessed to the offers this police had made him in case he agreed to fabricate some affair against the refugees____

"In short, all our suspicions about the unworthiness of Messrs. Deivanayagachetty and Mayoressim stood confirmed. It was established that the Swadeshis were the victims of a slanderous denunciation (I remind you the British police has offered a 1000-rupee reward—or 1670 Fr.—for the

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arrest of each one of them). Messrs. Deivanayagachetty and Mayoressim took flight on 7 June. It was therefore impossible to determine, at least from their own confession, the exact nature of their relationship with the French police. Nevertheless, seeing that Deivanayagachetty and his son are from Pondicherry and live there, that neither has a respectable occupation and both must be well known to the local police, one may wonder how the local police could thoughtlessly and blindly receive their denunciation and go so far as to buy from them some obviously fake pieces of evidence.

"In conclusion, concerning the Swadeshis I am of the opinion that we must declare the charge as dismissed, nothing being left of it.

"For the Examining Magistrate" Signed: Nadau

On 3 July Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal Roy on the above episodes.

"The case brought against the Swadeshis (no one in this household was included in it although we had a very charmingly polite visit from the Parquet [Public Prosecutor's office] and Juge dInstruction [Examining Magistrate] has collapsed into the nether regions and the complainant and his son have fled from Pondicherry and become, like ourselves 'political refugees' in Cuddalore."

From Cuddalore, the informers wrote to the Public Prosecutor and to the Governor on 8 June a complaint against Magistrate Nadau. In it they told "the Governor that Nadau sided with the Swadeshis and was about to beat them during the enquiry for preferring a false complaint," Srinivasachari

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said with satisfaction. "To dispose of this new complaint the Governor had to call for an explanation from Nadau who had to defend himself by saying that it was utterly false and had to refer him to us who were the only persons present in his room at that time. So the poor investigating officer, Bharati said later on, had to cite us the accused as witnesses to get himself cleared of a false charge brought by the complainants against him, in a departmental enquiry." Sri Aurobindo had a good laugh when Bharati narrated the comical episode to him.

Srinivasachari summed up the embarrassment of the British secret police. "On the other side the situation had not been so funny as it had become to us. The complainants had become

a burden to the British secret police If they are caught and

prosecuted by the French police they will pitilessly expose all the intrigues, machinations of the British police there [in Pondicherry] and the inducements that they are constantly offering to men of their stamp to bring the Swadeshis to trouble. Their concoction of the supposed conspiracy, in the present case will be laid bare in public. The photos of the dismembered heads of Europeans, the receipt-book, the rubber-stamp facsimile and the way in which the hermetically sealed jar was dumped in the well in Aiyar's house would all be mercilessly exposed. Even their attempt to kidnap Aiyar may come out."

Governor Duprat, in his report of 18 June 1912 "to the Minister for Colonies regarding various complaints against Mr. Nadau, Examining Magistrate at Pondicherry," emphatically stated, "I am forced to conclude along with the Public Prosecutor that this allegation against Mr. Nadau cannot be maintained."

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