Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

27

'Spasa' Means Spy

Those who have read the Ramayana know how one day Rishi Vishwamitra came to the court of King Dasaratha of Ayodhya. Welcoming him and expressing great happiness at his coming, the king said that he was ready to do any bidding of the Rishi. Pleased, Vishwamitra replied that he had "begun to perform a yajna (sacrificial rites), but two Rakshasas, Marich and Subahu, along with their hosts, were giving too much trouble. They were raining down flesh and blood over the sacrificial platform. Would the king send his eldest son Rama with him for the ten nights of the ceremonies, so that Rama might protect the performing priests and destroy the Rakshasas?" Dasaratha was very upset but a word given is a word given. With great reluctance the king accepted to send his beloved Rama, not even sixteen years old, to such a dangerous mission. That is how Rama and Lakshmana went to Siddhashram where Vishwamitra was trying to perform his yajna. That is how the two young princes killed Taraka Rakshasi, killed Subahu and other Rakshasas, but a wounded Marich escaped. Vishwamitra also taught them the use of sophisticated weapons which came in very useful when later they fought with Ravana and his army in Lanka.

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Sri Aurobindo's situation was no different. Except that in each age the disrupting forces put on a different mask. It had become so bothersome that Sri Aurobindo had again to write to The Hindu. We give some relevant portion from his letter.

"I am obliged to seek the protection of publicity," he wrote on 23 February 1911, "against attempts that are being made to prejudice my name and reputation even in my retirement at Pondicherry. A number of individuals have suddenly begun to make their appearance here to whom my presence seems to be the principal attraction. One of these gems heralded his advent by a letter in which he regretted that the Police had refused to pay his expenses to Pondicherry, but informed me that in spite of this scurvy treatment he was pursuing his pilgrimage to me 'jumping from station to station' without a ticket. Since his arrival he has been making scenes in the streets, collecting small crowds, shouting Bande Mataram, showing portraits of myself and other Nationalists along with copies of the Geneva Bande Mataram and the Indian Sociologist as credentials, naming men of advanced views as his 'gurus', professing to possess the Manicktola bomb-formula, offering to kill to order all who may be obnoxious for private or public reasons to any Swadeshist and informing everyone, but especially French gendarmes, that he has come to Pondicherry to massacre Europeans. The man seems to be a remarkable linguist, conversing in all the languages of Southern India and some of the North as well as in English and French. He has made three attempts to force or steal his way into my house, once disguised as a Hindustani and professing to be Mr. Tilak's durwan [doorkeeper]. He employs his spare time, when not employed in these antics for which

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he claims to have my sanction, in watching trains for certain Police-agents as an amateur detective. I take him for a dismissed police spy trying to storm his way back into the kingdom of heaven. Extravagant and barefaced as are this scoundrel's tactics, I mention them because he is one of a class, some of whom are quieter but more dangerous."

The satirical stamp of Sri Aurobindo!

It is quite striking to note that with the development of his sadhana—we shall come to that, of course, in due time— Sri Aurobindo was rapidly developing certain inner faculties. For instance, between late January and early February 1911 he wrote in his diary (Record of Yoga):

"Two people applied to see me at the door, not seen by me. Cognition that they were detectives. I heard immediately afterwards that they had asked for 'Sociologist' and 'Liberator'."

He also specified:

"I had a cognition formerly that the man calling himself Rama Rao Yogi was a detective—independent of all inference. Learned on Feb 1 of a police report in which he is mentioned as watching the trains and taken for some time by the others as a Bande Mataram man."

Then on 10 February: "A man came calling outside. Immediate cognition by prakamya' on seeing him and revelation acting in confirmation of each other that he was a detective. It turned out to be Ram Rao Yogi, the detective from Maharashtra side."

There were others. In an undated letter he wrote to Motilal Roy, who had sheltered him at Chandernagore, 'Your R.S. Sharma

' Prakamya: a Siddhi of knowledge by which the mind and senses surpass the ordinary limits of body.

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I hold to be a police spy. I have refused to see him because originally when he tried to force his way into my house and win my confidence by his extravagances I received a warning against him from within which has always been repeated. This was confirmed afterwards by two facts,—first that the Madras Police betrayed a very benevolent interest in the success of his mission, secondly, that he came to Pondicherry afterwards as sub-editor of a new Pondicherry paper, the Independent, subsequently defunct and replaced by another the Argus, belonging to the same proprietor who has been openly acting in concert with the British Police against us in Pondicherry. In this paper he wrote a very sneering and depreciatory paragraph about me, (not by name but by allusion) in which he vented his spite at his failure. Failing even so to get any footing here, for the Swadeshis were warned against him, he returned to Madras. He seems now to have tried his hand with you at Calcutta and succeeded, probably, beyond his expectations! I wonder when you people will stop trusting the first stranger with a glib tongue who professes Nationalist fervour and devotion. Whether you accept my estimate of him or not, you may be sure that his Bhakti for me is humbug,—as shown by the above newspaper incident,— and you must accept at least the facts I have given you and draw any conclusions that common sense may suggest to you."

So we now know what prompted the above letter to The Hindu.

In actual fact however, the spies had dogged the footsteps of the Swadeshis from the very beginning. Here is Moni¹ with

Smritikatha.

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his customary vivacious tale, of which I give just the gist in English translation. After the first three months in Shankar Chetty's house, when Moni and Bejoy were allowed by Sri Aurobindo to go out, they regularly set forth towards five in the evening for a stroll along the sea, walking up and down the pier for about an hour. A few days later they noticed two Bengalis doing the same. One of them was dressed Bengali style, the other in European style, in a silk suit. As Moni and Bejoy showed no inclination to get acquainted with them, the silk-suit sort of gate-crashed, and began to show great interest in the boys. He even lent a copy of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, which Moni read. But Moni and Bejoy were quite sure that he, Silk-suit, was a spy. Things would have gone on for how long nobody knows, but for the intervention of Bharati. "One evening, twilight had turned to dusk, just as I reached the entrance to the pier I saw the same Silk-suit with Bharati. Silk-suit with an ashen face was trying to get in a word from time to time. But Bharati, oh, goodness gracious, what an image he then presented! As though his soul had been possessed by the accumulated anger of all the Greek tragedies. Words flowed from him like a flood of lava. It seemed to me that Bharati was determined to pulverize his prey." Poor Silk-suit, he ended up weeping, weeping copiously. "Well, in the event, Silk-suit was totally devastated, and Bharati emerged victorious." Silk-suit and his companion disappeared for ever, no doubt with a grudging admiration for Bharati's address!

Nolini adds his bit. "I have said," referring to an earlier talk to the Ashram students, "that this cemetery that was Pondicherry had been infested by ghosts and goblins. These had a

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special category known ordinarily as spies. The word 'spy' carries with it, as you know, an association of all that is low and disgusting and unspeakable things of dark import. But did you know," said the Sanskritist, "that the word is pure Sanskrit? It was spasa in the old Vedic language. The Vedic Rishi describes Indra as sending out these spasa to trace the movements of his enemies.... So, the Vedic gods had their spies, just as the modern British government had theirs, though of course there was bound to be a certain difference. These government spies tried to collect information as to who came to our houses, who were the people who met us, what places we frequented and how our guests spent their time The British Indian police set up a regular station here, with a rented house and several permanent men. They were of course plainclothes men, for they had no right to wear uniform within French territory. They kept watch, as I have said, both on our visitors and guests as well as ourselves. Soon they got into a habit of sitting on the pavement round the corner next to our house in groups of three or four. They chatted away the whole day and only now and again took down something in their notebooks. What kind of notes they took we found out later on Strange records, these: the police gave reports all based on pure fancy, they made up all sorts of stories at their sweet will. As they found it difficult to gather correct and precise information, they would just fabricate the news." Should we call them 'spies' or 'rumourmongers' ? The Superintendent of Police, in charge of the British post in Pondicherry, was ... well, judge for yourself. "He was a Muslim," Nolini recalled, "named Abdul Karim if I remember aright, a very efficient and clever man, like our old friend Shamsul Alam

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of the Calcutta Police. We used to go to a friend's house very often, particularly myself. This gentleman too, we found, was a visitor there and we used to meet him as if by accident. He was very nice and polite in his manners. He even expressed a desire once to have Sri Aurobindo's darsan so that he might pay his respects. Sri Aurobindo did not refuse, he was given the permission. The gentleman arrived with a huge bouquet by way of a present and had the darsan."

But it was WS Iyer who drew the British CID's anger to himself, as he had proved to be too clever to land in their net. His activities in Pondicherry made the spies gnash their teeth in impotent rage. For, it was alleged that WS had trained Vanchi Iyer to shoot with a revolver. Vanchi was a married Brahmin from Shencottah who shot dead Ashe, the Collector of Tinnelvelly on 17 June 1911. Then he committed suicide. The savage treatment meted out to patriots like Chidambaram Pillai had entered the soul of Indian youth like a hot iron.

However, it was poor Bharati who bore the brunt of the colonial rulers' ire. "Endless were the mischiefs played by the policemen," Bharati was to write later, "unbearable to the political refugees—men like Mr. Aurobindo Chose, whose spiritual realisations were greatly hampered by the extraordinarily hard conditions brought upon them by the police activities. Imagine 200 policemen, constituting a fatly financed department by themselves, spending all their time in writing reports against you, stopping your letters and money orders, setting up rogues to rob your house or to make nocturnal attacks upon your homes in organised bands, concocting cases of conspiracy and murder against you, carefully, elaborately and circumstantially,

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thus bringing you to trials in French courts: trials which cost you much money and anxiety and which [might] have brought you most serious trouble but for the keen sense of justice on the part of certain French magistrates."'

After the assassination of Ashe the British government put a lot of pressure on the French government. This time the French government in Pondicherry yielded. The 'Aliens Act' was resurrected. "But now the law was made stringently applicable to refugees from our own country." Nolini explained, "It was laid down that all foreigners, that is, anyone who was not a French citizen, wanting to come and stay here for some time must be in possession of a certificate from a high government official of the place from where he came, such as a Magistrate in British India, to the effect that he was a well-known person and that there was nothing against him; in other words, he must be in possession of a 'good-conduct' certificate." It does seem rather peculiar to me that Indians from one part of India could not seek refuge in another part of the country without a certificate of good-conduct from a foreigner! Never before had Indians been so shackled in their movements, not even when kings were at war with each other. In fact, it is with the advent of different European nations occupying different parts of India that all sorts of restrictions were imposed on Indians in their own country.

Well, the upshot of it all was that the 'foreigners' chose the alternative option. They had to register themselves with the French Police, and the registration form had to be signed by

¹ From Saroja Sundararajan's Madras Presidency 1884-1915.

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"five gentlemen of standing belonging to Pondicherry." Bharati collected the forms from the 'alien' patriots all duly filled in, and took these to Shankar Chetty. The latter went immediately into action. By the afternoon he procured all the necessary bureaucratic signatures. In this way all the 'aliens' were registered at the French police station. Do you know who "the five noble men who affixed their signatures" were? Nolini recorded their names. "1) Rassendren (the father of our Jules Rassendren), 2) De Zir Naidu, 3) Le Beau, 4) Shankar Chettiar (in whose house Sri Aurobindo had put up on arrival), 5) Murugesh Chettiar."

Those were the Five Good Men.

"The names of these five should be engraved in letters of gold," said a grateful Nolini. "They had shown on that occasion truly remarkable courage and magnanimity. It was on the strength of their signatures that we could continue to stay here without too much trouble."

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