Philippe Barbier Saint Hilaire was born in Paris on 16 January 1894. An outstanding student, he studied physics, chemistry and mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique. When the First World War broke out in August 1914, he was called up for duty in the army. He served first as an artillery officer on the front lines and then as a reconnaisance officer. After the war he returned to the Ecole Polytechnique in order to complete his studies , and graduated with a degree in civil engineering. For about a year he worked as a junior engineer in Paris, repairing roads and bridges. In 1920 he left France for Japan , and four years later went to Outer Mongolia, where he lived for a year in a Buddhist lamasary.
Saint Hilaire had already read some of Sri Aurobindo's writings, and had heard about the Mother from friends. At the end of 1925, he went to meet them in Pondicherry. Sri Aurobindo accepted him as a disciple, guided him in the practice of Yoga, and gave him a new name, Pavitra, the Pure One.
At the end of 1926, Sri Aurobindo withdrew from public life and placed the Mother in charge of the disciples who had gathered around him; this was the beginning of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. For more than four decades, Pavitra helped to build up the Ashram by serving the Mother in various ways. As a qualified engineer, he carried out a number of electrical and mechanical works. For example, he installed the electrical wiring in the house where Sri Aurobindo and the Mother lived after February 1927. In the late 1920s, after three cars were given to the Mother, he became her mechanic and chauffeur. A few years later, he designed and built the Ashram's first automobile workshop. Pavitra made salads and sandwiches for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, growing the vegetables and greens in pots on the terrace outside his room. He set up a perfume laboratory in order to prepare perfumes and lotions for the Mother. And for several decades, he handled much of her foreign correspondence.
In 1951 the Mother founded the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre (later renamed Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education). Pavitra was one of its principal creators and its first director. He helped to develop the school's curriculum and its "free progress" system of instruction. He also set up its first chemistry and physics laboratories. For many years he edited the French portion of the school's bilingual quarterly journal.
Pavitra was a versatile man with many interests. An avid philatelist, he built up a large stamp collection. A civil engineer, he drew up the plan for the public park in the centre of Pondicherry. But always his primary interest was the spirituallife envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Pavitra made three compilations from their works. The first was The Future Evolution of Man (1963), compiled from several of Sri Aurobindo's major works. The second was Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Love (1966), compiled from their writings and talks. The third was Le Yoga de la Bhagavad Guita (1969), a translation and commentary comprising French translations of extracts from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita. He also wrote a book of his own, Education and the Aim of Human Life (1961), and several other essays on education.
Pavitra lived in the Ashram for forty-four years. Towards the end of his life, he contracted leukemia. Severely weakened, he continued to work as much as he could. And every day he slowly climbed the staircase to the Mother's room in order to see her for a short time. He passed away on 16 May 1969, at the age of seventy-five.
The Mother spoke in Agenda of May 1969 of how Pavitra left his body in a yogic way and merged with her.
Relevant links to Mother's Agenda
According to Satprem, Pavitra left memoirs of his conversations with Sri Aurobindo and Mother in 1925 and 1926, large parts of which were destroyed (almost a third of Pavitra's notebooks) by his closest collaborator, with the pretext that it would be "better left unsaid". What was left was published as Conversations avec Pavitra
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