Sri Aurobindo in Baroda

Foreword

Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on August 15, 1872. In 1879, at the age of seven, he was taken with his two elder brothers to England for education and lived there for fourteen years. Brought up at first in an English family at Manchester, he joined St. Paul's School in London in 1884 and in 1890 went from it with a senior classical scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied for two years. In 1890 he passed also the open competition for the Indian Civil Service, but at the end of two years of probation failed to present himself at the riding examination and was disqualified for the Service. At this time the Gaekwar of Baroda was in London. Sri Aurobindo saw him, obtained an appointment in the Baroda Service and left England in February, 1893.

When he had left India, he was a boy of seven; when he returned, he was a young man of twenty-one, burning to realise his dreams and visions.

Even when he was eleven years old, he had a sort of premonition that great revolutions were going to take place in the future and that he had a part to play in some of them. Not a mental idea, but a kind of inner feeling was growing within him that he had some great work to do, a mission to fulfil.

It was thus that although his mind was nourished and developed by the classical spirit in Western culture, his soul remained untouched, his heart's love flowed towards India and his will flamed to fight and suffer for her freedom.

Sri Aurobindo passed thirteen years, from 1893 to 1906, in the Baroda Service, first in the Settlement and Revenue Department and in secretariate work for the Maharaja, afterwards as Professor of English and, finally, as Vice- principal in the Baroda College. These were years of self-culture, of literary activity for much of the poetry afterwards

published from Pondicherry was written at this time – and of preparation for his future work. In England he had received, according to his father's express instructions, an entirely occidental education without any contact with the culture of India and the East. At Baroda he made up the deficiency, learned Sanskrit and several modem Indian languages, especially Marathi and Gujarati, the two official languages of the Baroda State. He learnt Bengali very quickly and for the most part all by himself.

An exceptional mastery of Sanskrit at once opened to him the immense treasure-house of the Indian heritage. He read the Upanishads, the Gita, the Puranas, the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, the dramas of Kalidasa, etc. Ancient India, the ageless India of spiritual culture and unwearied creative vitality, revealed herself to his wondering vision, and he discovered the secret of her unparalleled greatness. In discovering the greatness of India, he discovered himself, the greatness of his own soul, and the work it had come down to accomplish.

Thus his stay at Baroda was a transforming revelation whereby ancient India furnished him with the clue to the building of the greater India of the future.

In order to get an insight into the life of Sri Aurobindo in Baroda which had many different and perhaps apparently conflicting aspects, it has been categorised into various chapters given in this book.

However, it is to be constantly remembered that his vision was never confined to any personal gain or the political, economic, cultural and moral freedom of his country only; it embraced all mankind. Seen in this perspective, his whole life appears to be of one piece, a gradual, though at times sudden, unfolding of a single aim and purpose-the steady pursuit and accomplishment of a single mission. All this is revealed in the chapter on his personal life, particularly his letters to his wife Mrinalini Devi.

The chapter on his life as a teacher throws light through

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the reminiscences of some of his students, testifying to his unique style of teaching, his personal qualities and his views on many subjects including the education given by the British system with which he was quite disgusted. This chapter also briefly touches upon his early literary and political writings.

A great part of the last years of this period was spent on leave in silent political activity for he was barred from public action by his official position at Baroda. The out- break of the agitation against the partition of Bengal in 1905 gave him the opportunity to give up the Baroda service and join openly the political movement. He left Baroda in 1906 and went to Calcutta as Principal of the newly-founded Bengal National College.

The chapter on his Political Life deals with these developments in great detail. Reading this chapter will clearly show that the patriotism which fired his being was not mere love of the country of his birth and a yearning for its freedom and greatness. It will be seen that it was the worship of India, as the living embodiment of the highest spiritual knowledge and the repository of the sublimest spiritual achievements of the human race.

The last chapter deals with his spiritual life. It is stressed once again that in order to fully understand the significance of his political activities and create a continuum between the first and the last parts of his life, it would be necessary to take special note of the spiritual side of his nationalism. In his The Yoga and Its Objects he has said, "The whole heart and action and mind of man must be changed but from within and not from without, not by political and social institutions, not even by creeds and philosophies, but by realisation of God in ourselves and the world and a re-moulding of life by that realisation."

He did not consider it a sacrifice at all to throw away his brilliant prospects at Baroda in order to be able to serve his country as a politician; he gave them up because he believed and knew that it was really God and His approaching

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 manifestation that he was serving.

Thus, politics offered him the first means to rouse an ancient nation into a compelling sense of its inherent spiritual potentiality and a sustained endeavour to recover its rightful place in the world. He also knew that India is the land of the most virile and dynamic spirituality, the land where every action of life was sought to be done as a sacrament and a living sacrifice to the Supreme.

The Postscript written after the last chapter is a brief life- sketch of Sri Aurobindo starting from his stay and early sadhana at Baroda and various spiritual experiences leading to two of the four great realisations on which his yoga and spiritual philosophy are founded.

Further, the Postscript includes an interesting account of his sudden departure to Pondicherry and a brief unfoldment of the steps that directed his sadhana to its goal. This goal was the work of world-transformation to which he had dedicated himself. The Postscript ends with a summary of Sri Aurobindo's teaching and the dynamic aim of his Integral Yoga to realise that goal.

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A morn that seemed a new creation's front,

Bringing a greater sunlight, happier skies,

Came, burdened with a beauty moved and strange

Out of the changeless origin of things.

An ancient longing struck again new roots.

— Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

Arrival in India

Sri Aurobindo returned to India in early February, 1893. Unfortunately his arrival in India was preceded by his father Dr. Krishnadhan's death in peculiarly tragic circumstances. Even as late as 2 December 1892, as may be inferred from his letter of that date to his brother-in-law Jogendra, Dr. Krishnadhan was feeling almost certain that his son Aurobindo would be entering the Indian Civil Service and making his mark as a brilliant administrator. Sometime later information seems to have reached Krishnadhan of Sri Aurobindo's failure to get into the Service and of the Baroda appointment. He also heard from Grindlays, his bankers, of Sri Aurobindo's departure from England by a particular boat which, however, went down off the coast of Portugal near Lisbon and many lives were lost. When the news was telegraphed to Krishnadhan by Grindlays (who didn't know that Sri Aurobindo actually left by a later boat), it came as a stunning blow; he concluded that his beloved son Aurobindo was lost for ever, and as he suffered from a weak heart he collapsed the same night and died uttering Aurobindo's name in lamentation. A slightly different recital of events occurs in Brajendranath De's Reminiscences of an Indian Member of I.C.S. that appeared in 1954 in The Calcutta Review.

"Dr. Ghose believed up to the very end, that his son had been admitted into the Indian Civil Service, and was in fact , coming out. He, in fact, took a month's leave to go and meet him in Bombay and bring him back in triumph, but he could not get any definite news as to when he was coming out and returned from Bombay in a very depressed frame of mind. At last one afternoon he got a wire from his agents in Bombay to the effect that his son's name did not appear in the list of the passengers by the steamer in which he had been expecting his son to come out to India.

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"It so happened that, that very night he and the Superintendent of Police were coming to dine at my house. The dinner was ready, the Superintendent came, but there was no sign of the doctor, although his bungalow was quite close to my house. After waiting for some time I sent an orderly to remind him of the fact that he had agreed to dine at my house that night. The man came back and informed us that the doctor was very ill. I at once went round, heard of the telegram and found the doctor very ill and quite unconscious. The other medical men in the station were assiduous in their attentions. I did all I could. But it was all of no avail. The poor man lingered on for a day or two and then passed away.... I had to take the body to the cremation grounds and to attend the cremation."¹ 

As a matter of fact, Sri Aurobindo left England not by the Roumania but by the mail steamer Carthage and, though it encountered a violent storm in the Mediterranean, he reached India quite safely on 6 February 1893 at Apollo Bunder, Bombay, at 10.55 a.m.

And how did India receive her beloved child? What gifts, what presents had she kept ready for him? She bestowed upon him, as an unsolicited grace, one of .the brightest gems of her immemorial heritage a high spiritual experience, "a vast calm descended upon him... this calm surrounded him and remained for long months afterwards." This is one of the experiences that came to him unasked:²

That was the characteristic way in which India greeted her son when he returned to her bosom after a long sojourn in a foreign land. This greeting was at once a symbol and a prophecy. It was an index to the glory of his life's mission.

¹ The Calcutta Review. Vol. 132, No. 3 (September 1954), p. 181.

²  For details, please see chapter on 'Spiritual Life Experiences'.

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Apollo Bunder

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Steamer Carthage

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 Baroda Service

The Gaekwar of the State of Baroda, one of the most enlightened rulers of the Indian states of that period, happened to be in England when Sri Aurobindo was there. One James Cotton, brother of Sir Henry Cotton (for some time Lt. Governor of Bengal), had been taking interest in Sri Aurobindo and his brothers and was well-acquainted with them. He negotiated with the Gaekwar on behalf of Sri Aurobindo. The result of the negotiation was that Sri Aurobindo "obtained an appointment in the Baroda Service..." The Gaekwar offered to pay him Rs. 200/per month and, shrewd man that he was, felt glad that he had been able to engage a brilliant young man of the I.C.S. calibre for such a paltry remuneration. But Sri Aurobindo was indifferent to money matters.

Sri Aurobindo served in the Baroda State from 8 February 1893 to 18 June 1906. His age was twenty-one when he joined, thirty-four when he left. The period of his service was 13 years 4 months and 11 days.

During this period Sri Aurobindo often stayed with Khaserao Jadhav in his house at Dandia Bazar. In his absence he stayed with Khaserao's brother Madhavrao Jadhav. Several other houses also were occupied at different times in Baroda.

Houses in Baroda

Sri Aurobindo came to Baroda in February 1893. His "first friend" there was Bapubhai Majumdar, a young man he had known in England. "He took me to his house and I stayed there for some time," Sri Aurobindo once remarked. (Purani, Evening Talks, Series One, pp. 305-06.) During the next thirteen years, the period of his active service in Baroda State, Sri Aurobindo lived at one time or another in as many as a half-dozen houses in the city of Baroda. One of these was in the Camp near the bazaar and another

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Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwar of Baroda

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Khaserao Jadhav's House

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behind the College on the way to the Camp (Government Quarters). There was also Mir Bakarali's wada, near Shiapura, and Kiledar's wada, on the way to Makerpura Palace. Sri Aurobindo seems to have stayed in the latter house during the first outbreak of plague in Baroda (1896-97). Another house occupied for some time was a certain bungalow on Race-course Road. It was probably to this place that Sri Aurobindo was referring when, in September 1903, in response to a request from King's College, Cambridge, he gave his address as "Racecourse Road, Baroda, or the Baroda Officers Club, Baroda Gymkhana."

But the house where Sri Aurobindo seems to have spent most of his time at Baroda was the bungalow of his friend Khaserao Jadhav. This place. Bungalow 15 in Dandia Bazar, was built especially for Khaserao by the Maharaja and was completed in 1896. It was around this time that Sri Aurobindo first made Khaserao's acquaintance. The following passage, which includes a description of the bungalow, is taken from an unpublished biography of Sri Aurobindo by his younger brother, Barindra Kumar.

"One morning I took a rickshaw at Baroda railway station of G.I.P. line and with my cheap canvas valise and in travel-stained clothes appeared before the red brick-built two-storied house of Khaserao Jadhav, Naib-Suba (Chief Collector)¹of Navsari in Guzrat.

"The butler of the house met me at the door and dubiously ushered me into the fine drawing room near the portico. He was hard put to it to believe me and take such a loafer in dirty clothes as the brother of the great Ghose Saheb of the Maharaja Sahib of Baroda. He disappeared somewhere upstairs to announce my arrival. Almost immediately after, Sri Aurobindo came hurriedly down the grand staircase and spirited me away to a bath-room before his friends could find his youngest brother in that sorry plight.

¹  Naib-Suba means Assistant Collector; Khaserao was in fact Sar Suba or Chief Collector. [Ed.]

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After a refreshing bath, [in] new clothes borrowed from him and a shirt too long at the sleeves, I came out a shy callow juvenile youth and had to meet Khaserao at the table the wittiest tormenter in Baroda society. Khaserao's house was a sweet nest of repose and culture after my arduous and sordid life at B. Ghose's tea stall near the College gate, which I had started in Patna along with a small stationery shop.

"Madhavrao Jadav, Khaserao's younger brother, a lieutenant in the army, was just then getting ready to go to Japan for his military education.

"A rather big hall, facing the lawn, beyond which ran the main street from the railway station to Luxmi Vilash Palace, two rooms on its right and a covered inner courtyard, with a dining-room on one side and servants' quarters on the other, this was how the house was built. The same number of rooms were repeated upstairs, of which the hall was Sri Aurobindo's study. A table, a sofa, a number of chairs, all heaped pell-mell with books and a revolving book-case groaning under their weight all thinly covered with dust; a quiet small unassuming man buried there for hours in a trance of thought and very often writing page after page of poetry, that was the habitual picture I became accustomed to daily.

"Aurobindo was a late riser, waking up at nine in the morning. He used to sit down to his study after a cup of tea and toast. My room downstairs, nestling in the remote corner of the lawn, was the rendezvous of the family for gossip and merry talk. There used to come at noon my sister with her austere, silent face, Sri Aurobindo with his far-off detached look and absent-minded smile and his wife Mrinalini with her timid eyes and shy half-veiled face."

A picture of Khaserao's bungalow, taken some years ago, before it was presented to the Sri Aurobindo Society, Baroda, is reproduced.

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 Services in Various Departments

He was first put in the Survey Settlement Department, not as an officer, but to learn the procedural formalities of the administration; he then moved to the Stamps and Revenue Departments; and he also worked for some time in the Secretariat drawing up important despatches. From 1897, he became part-time lecturer in French at the Baroda College, and presently other work was also added, and in 1900 he was appointed, on the strong recommendation of Principal Tait, as permanent Professor of English on a pay of Rs. 360 per month. In 1904, he was appointed Vice- Principal on Rs. 550 per month, and he acted as Principal from March 1905 to February 1906 on a consolidated salary of Rs. 710 per month. This steady advancement at the Baroda College notwithstanding, Sri Aurobindo's services seem to have been utilised, from time to time, partly in the Government Departments and partly by the Maharaja himself in a confidential capacity. Whenever he thought fit, he would send for Sri Aurobindo for writing letters, composing speeches or drawing up documents of various kinds which needed special care in phrasing. At one time, the Maharaja asked Sri Aurobindo to give instruction in English grammar by giving exact and minute rules for each construction! On another occasion, he was asked to advise on travel after consulting the time-tables of European railways. But all this was quite informal, Sri Aurobindo being usually invited to breakfast with the Maharaja and staying on to do the work entrusted to him, like the writing of an order, or a letter to the British Government, or some other important memorandum.

Sri Aurobindo once was called to the South Indian hill-station of Ootacamund (or "Ooty") in order to prepare a precis of the Bapat case for the Maharaja. Bapat was a land settlement officer of the Baroda State who was defended in this celebrated and long-drawn-out trial by B.G. Tilak. Recent research in the Central Record Office, Baroda, has

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established the dates of Sri Aurobindo's visit. Contemporary documents show that he was called to Ooty on 24 May 1895 and arrived there on the twenty-sixth. He was at that time twenty-two years old.

Also on two more occasions, Sri Aurobindo joined him on his holidays in the summer of 1901 at Naini Tal and in May 1903 in Kashmir. In a letter from Naini Tal to Bhuvan Chakravarty, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The place is a beautiful one, but not half so cold as I expected. In fact, in daytime it is only a shade less hot than Baroda except when it has been raining." During the Kashmir trip, Sri Aurobindo was appointed Secretary to the Maharaja, but there was much friction between them during the tour and the experiment was not repeated. It is said that, on one occasion, the Maharaja sent for Sri Aurobindo twice in the course of a morning; not meeting with any response, the Maharaja went himself to Sri Aurobindo's room, found him asleep, and returned without disturbing him. Another interesting sidelight on the relations between Sri Aurobindo and the Maharaja is given by Nirodbaran. The Maharaja had once issued a circular requiring all officers to attend office even on Sundays and other holidays. But Sri Aurobindo seems merely to have said, "Let him fine as much as he likes, I am not going." The Maharaja had to give up!

The following extract from Sayaji Rao Gaekwar Yancha Sahavasat by Govind Sakharam Sardesai (the famous Marathi historian) referring to Sri Aurobindo, affords contemporary evidence about his Baroda state service and life:

"Sri Aurobindo and myself were together with Sayaji Rao very often.... Sometimes men like Sri Aurobindo would pen out lectures for him.

"Once the Maharaja had to address a social conference. Sri Aurobindo prepared the speech. We three [i.e., the Maharaja, G.S. Sardesai, and Sri Aurobindo] sat together and read it. The Maharaja after hearing it said: 'Can you

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not, Arabind Babu, tone it down? It is too fine to be mine.'

"Sri Aurobindo replied smiling: 'Why make a change for nothing? Do you think, Maharaja, that if it is toned down a little, people will believe it to be yours? Good or bad, whatever it be, people will always say that the Maharaja always gets his lectures written by others. The main thing is whether the thoughts are yours. That is your chief part.' "

Sardesai also states that Sri Aurobindo carried on the major part of the correspondence that passed between the Indian government and the Baroda state about the insult which Curzon felt when the Maharaja, who was in Paris, was called by the Indian government (as Curzon was visiting Baroda in 1900), and the Maharaja did not come.

Notwithstanding these stresses and strains. Prince and Professor seem to have entertained high mutual regard and respect. On the whole, Sri Aurobindo was brilliant and quick and efficient in work, though he was not exactly the ideal servant for an Indian Maharaja. On his part, the Maharaja gave Sri Aurobindo a certificate for ability and intelligence, but also for lack of regularity and punctuality. With the Maharaja's Court as such, however, Sri Aurobindo had hardly anything to do during the whole course of his stay at Baroda, though very occasionally he may have participated in a function in the Palace itself.

Different aspects of Sri Aurobindo's personal and family life are presented in the following chapter.

Certificate of the Maharaja of Baroda

HUZUR ORDER

His Highness the Maharaja Saheb has been graciously pleased to order that

(1) A monthly increase of Rs 90. Ninety British is given to Mr. Aravind Ghose.

(2) His Highness is pleased to note that he has found Mr. Ghose a very useful and capable young man. With a little

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more of regularity and punctual habits he can be of much greater help; and it is hoped that Mr. Ghose will be careful in future not to injure his own interests by any lack of these useful qualities.

(3) The Minister should try to make a good use of Mr. Ghose's abilities in entrusting him with the compilation of Annual Administration Reports and other important compilations. He is a man of great powers and every use should be made of his talents.

(4) The Minister should also suggest from time to time the different uses to which Mr. Ghose's abilities can be advantageously put. The Huzur will also occasionally direct the uses to be made of Mr. Ghose's services.

(5) If convenient Mr. Ghose's services can be utilised in the Baroda College; only care should be taken that his interests do not suffer in any way by his services being lent to the College for some time.

Sayaji Rao Gaekwar

6 August 1902

Camp Coonoor.

N.B. This is the order referred to by Sri Aurobindo in the letter to his wife and also on page 10 of Centenary Volume 26. The Huzur is the Crown, i.e. the Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwar, under whom Sri Aurobindo worked for many years. From Baroda College papers, English Education Department, Huzur File, 1902-03.

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ARCHIVAL NOTES

RETURN TO INDIA

I

The Date of Sri Aurobindo's Arrival in India

A letter from Miss F.M.M. Beall, International Relations Division, The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, London, to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and Research Library. 25 September 1972.

Thank you for your letter of 22 September.

I am extremely sorry that we have misled you concerning the date of CARTHAGE'S arrival in Bombay in January 1893. The entry in the Nautical Reports, dated 1892, led us to believe this referred to the month of December, but in fact we discovered it referred to the month of January and we therefore gave you the itinerary for the previous year. The following itinerary is the true one, which seems to fit in more neatly with your presumed date of Sri. Aurobindo's arrival about 8 February 1893:

London	12 January	1893
Gibraltar	17   "	"
Port Said	26    "	"
Aden	1 February	"
Bombay	6    "	"

Lloyd's was able to give us some information on a ship wrecked off Portugal towards the end of 1892. She was a vessel of the Anchor Line (owned by Henderson Brothers) named ROUMANIA, which was wrecked in heavy weather at the mouth of the river Arelho, near Peniche (about 50 miles from Lisbon), on 27 October 1892 while on passage from Liverpool to Bombay. There were 55 passengers and

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67 crew on board. A total of 113 people were lost — only two passengers and seven seamen being saved.¹

We have not yet heard from the Public Record Office on the results of their search, but in order not to delay sending you the information we have so far managed to find, any supporting evidence they may unearth that Sri Aurobindo was on board CARTHAGE will be forwarded to you later.

2

An examination of the relevant Board of Trade Passenger Lists (B.T. 27/135) has revealed that a person by the name of Mr. A. Ghose appears on the list of passengers who embarked on the S.S. Carthage at London on January 11,² 1893.

Part of a letter from A.R. Ford, Public Record office,

London, to the Archives, 19 February 1975.

HIGHLIGHTS OF SRI AUROBINDO'S SERVICE IN BARODA  

His Highness the Maha Raja Saheb has been pleased to order that Mr. Arvind A. Ghose who had been recently employed in the service of this State on a salary equivalent in Baba Shai currency³ of British Rupees (200) two hundred, per mensum, should be instructed to work as an attaché in the Settlement Department and also to learn the

¹It was after hearing a report of this disaster that Dr. K.D. Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's father, thinking his son had set sail on the Roumania, died with the name "Aurobindo" on his lips. — Ed.

 ² Perhaps Sri Aurobindo boarded the Carthage on the eleventh, and the ship departed from London on the twelfth (see Document 1). Ed.

³  Money minted by the Baroda state: worth slightly less than British rupees.

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Gujarati language within six months.¹

His salary will commence from the 8th instant.

Memo of Dewan in Huzur Cutcherry Book dated 18 February 1893.

2

Mr. Ghose should be given Rs. 50 more from the first of this month and the Dewan should take responsible work from him and inform this office accordingly.

Huzur Order² dated 10 October 1895 (translated from Marathi).

3

His Highness the Maharaja Saheb has been pleased to order that Mr. Aravind Ghose should be appointed as attaché in the Dewan Office and should do the important cases given to him. 

Huzur Order dated 19 November 1895 (translated from Marathi).

4

His Highness was kind enough to say that Mr. Ghose might teach in the College for one hour a day. Also that he was

¹Sri Aurobindo was rather remiss about learning Gujarati. Although he picked up a little of this language and also of Marathi during his stay at Baroda, he was reprimanded in 1895 and again in 1898 for not attending the vernacular language examination. Threats of a cut in his salary were to no avail, and finally the matter was dropped. Sri Aurobindo, apparently, was more interested in Sanskrit and Bengali literature than in papers written in the two official languages of the Baroda state.

 ² Crown Edict, signed by the Maharaja (Huzur) himself, "or by the Dewan (Prime Minister) or another high officer in his place.

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wanted in the afternoons by His Highness. Accordingly I made a time-table that would leave Mr. Ghose free in the afternoons. He was to have begun work on Monday at 1, but was telephoned for to go out to Makerpura¹ to His Highness instead. Naturally the students are greatly disappointed. They see a gift made with one hand and taken away with the other. Mr. Ghose has not come, as he says (quite reasonably) that until hours are fixed it will be impossible for him to guarantee regularity of attendance. I think it very desirable that Mr. Ghose should [be] lent to us for an hour a day. But after all it is the Baroda State that gets the credit of having a well-equipped or badly-equipped College, and I can only ask for equipment, it is for Government to grant or withhold it.

Letter Principal. Baroda College to Dewan dated 27 January 1897.

5

His Highness the Maharajah is willing to share the services of Mr. Ghose for the present for employment in the College. His Highness at the same time states that it is possible that Mr. Ghose may have to be employed a couple of months hence in another capacity and in that case he will have to be withdrawn from the College for some months.

Letter Dewan to Principal dated 8 January 1898.

6

This tippan ² for continuing the services of Prof. A.A. Ghose in the Baroda College until further orders having been

 ¹Makerpura Palace, a residence of the Maharaja on the outskirts of the city of Baroda.

² Formal proposal.

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submitted to H.H. the Maharaja Sahib he has been pleased to order that the proposal of the Department is sanctioned until a successor is appointed to Mr. Littledale or until the Sirkar¹ sees it fit, even within that time, to order otherwise.

Huzur Order dated 12 March 1900.

7

His Highness the Maharaja Saheb has been pleased to order that Mr. Aravind Ghose, who works with His Highness the Maharaja Saheb at his [Ghose's] leisure time, should be given Rs. 60 over and above his pay for the additional work he does.

Huzur Order dated 11 April 1900

 (translated from Gujarati).

8

I have just sent in a tippan to the Dewan Saheb pointing out that for various reasons it is essential to retain Mr. Ghose as a Professor in the College, and requesting him to obtain the orders of His Highness to that effect. What I have stated I herewith append for your information. You know as well as I do how necessary it is that the College staff should be strengthened in order that it may emerge from second class rank. I therefore trust that you will mention this matter to His Highness, and ask him to be kind enough to assist me in making the College a better Institution than it has hitherto been. At the same time you may add any more arguments of your own that occur to you in favour of my proposal.

Letter Principal to Dewan dated 6 September 1900.

¹I.e. the Maharaja.

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9

His Highness the Maharaja Saheb approves of Mr. Tait's suggestion for the present and Mr. Ghosh should continue in the College as an Extra Professor.

In case a change is required His Highness will duly communicate his desire to Mr. Tait after his return to Baroda.

Huzur Order dated 26 September 1900.

10

His Highness the Maharaja Saheb has an idea of getting the memoirs of his life and of his reign, together with a Review of the last twenty years' Administration in Baroda written soon after his return to Baroda. For this purpose the services of Professor Aravind A. Ghose of the Baroda College will be required for about a year or so. Arrangements should therefore be made to relieve Mr. Ghose from his college duties soon after the return of His Highness.

By the above arrangement Mr. Ghose will not lose his lien upon the college appointment, which he may have at present, nor would he be prevented from reverting to the college after his temporary work is finished.

Confidential Huzur Order dated 30 November 1900.

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His Highness the Maharaja Saheb has been pleased to order that -

(1) During the absence of Mr. French on duty in Europe, Professor Aravind A. Ghose will be in charge of the tuition of the younger Princes; and will superintend over their education.

(2) This special work, Mr. Ghose will do, over and above

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the work of compiling a Report on the Twenty Years' Administration of the Baroda State, entrusted to him.

From a Huzur Order dated 19 April 1901.

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A tippan No.19 dated the 30th December 1902 having been submitted to the Huzur with the request to spare the services of Mr. Ghose for about 6 hours a week for the purpose of lecturing on French books assigned for the University Examinations, His Highness the Maharaja Sahib has been pleased to pass the following order

Huzur Order

(1) The proposal is sanctioned.

(2) The services of Mr. Ghose should be utilized in the College for other subjects also for more than the 6 hours in a week proposed.

Memo by Principal dated 30 January 1903 citing Huzur Order dated 21 January 1903.

13

His Highness the Maharaja Saheb was, in the Huzur Order No. 12 dated 21.1.03, pleased to place the services of Mr. Ghose at the disposal of the College for the purpose of lecturing on the French Books assigned for university Examinations. He moreover ordered that his services should be utilised for other subjects also, so as to occupy him in the College for a longer period. Accordingly he reported himself to the Principal on the 3rd February, and worked upto the 17th February as directed. Since then he has not put in an appearance and the undersigned knows nothing whatever about him.

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Of course it is obvious that no French lectures or any work whatever can be carried on under such a system. The undersigned therefore brings the matter to the notice of the Dewan Saheb and requests that due orders may be issued discharging Mr. Ghose from all work in connection with the College or else causing him to return there for regular and systematic duty.

"Concise History” in Tippan of Principal dated 26 March 1903.

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1. From the 22nd February I was absent on leave for a month. I had written to the Principal reporting my departure, but it appears the letter was not received.

2. Previous to that for two or three days I was called to the Palace on urgent work.

3. Subsequent to my return from leave I was taking the classes in the afternoon at my own house, as three-quarters of an hour in the morning were insufficient. I may mention that I was always in the habit of making my own arrangements with the students, which was the more necessary as I had several branches of work to attend to.

4. As I am now attached to the Swari¹ in charge of the Secretary's work during the Cashmere trip, 1 shall not be able to take the French classes this term.

From a letter Aravind A. Ghose (Sri Aurobindo) to Principal dated Srinagar, 4 June 1903.

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In the interests of the College I may also remark that Mr. Ghose had acquired a reputation in the College when he

¹ I.e., was part of the staff attending the Maharaja during his Kashmir tour.

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was Professor of English, about 4 years back. If his services could be wholly spared to the College, he may be advantageously entrusted with the work that I have chalked out above for a new Oxford man. With the University also, he will carry as much weight as another Englishman.

From the opinion of the Vidyadhikari (Minister of Education) dated 5 August 1904, to a Tippan of the Vice-Principal dated 2 August 1904 requesting the Huzur "to appoint an English graduate in the College to carry on Mr. Tail's [the Principal's] work after his retirement.”

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His Highness the Maharaja Saheb after being shown the Tippans No.1 dated 2.8.04 and No. 51 of 14.7.04 of the English Educational Department has been pleased to order that with regard to the proposal in the first, the services of Mr. Arvind A. Ghose can be spared for English work in the College, as suggested in the opinion of the Vidyadhikari. Mr. Ghose's work should be so arranged that he may be able to spare two hours in the day to attend for work in the Huzur whenever required by His Highness. When he finds that this double work is becoming more than he can manage, he must inform His Highness so that he may either be entirely spared to the College or replaced by someone else. The Principal will make whatever readjustment of the College work may be required as a result of the appointment.

2. Mr. Ghose's official designation will be that of Vice- Principal and from the time he takes up the duties of the post, his pay will be increased by Rs.100 British.

From a Huzur Order dated 6 September 1904.

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17

I have been directed by H.H. the Maharaja Saheb to join the College immediately if that were possible so that there might be no delay in my beginning to draw the increment in my salary. In accordance with these instructions I have reported myself to Mr. Clarke today, having forwarded the original order of my appointment in due course. I am also instructed, as there will be vacation for three months, to continue to help Mr. Karandikar in the work of Huzur Kamdar as before.

These directions will, I presume, emend the last paragraph of the Huzur Order of the 26th September 1904 on the tippan for Mr. Clarke's confirmation as Principal, since in the original order it is directed that the increment shall begin from the day I join the College.

From a letter Aravind A. Ghose, Huzur Kamdar (Crown Secretary), to Dewan dated 28 September 1904.

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Handed over charge of the office of the Principal, Baroda College to Aravind A. Ghose Esq., Vice-Principal, Baroda College today after office hours.

A.B. Clarke

Principal, Baroda College

Received the above in charge from A.B. Clarke Esq. Principal, Baroda College, today after office hours.

Aravind A. Ghose

Vice-Principal

Baroda College

Notes of 3 March 1905.

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In these hard days, the whole country is like a dependent at our doors, I have thirty crores of brothers and sisters in this country many of them die of starvation, most of them are weakened by suffering and troubles and are somehow dragging on their existence. They must be helped. What do you say, will you be my wife sharing this Dharma with me?

— Sri Aurobindo

Personal and Family Life

Sri Aurobindo's most intimate friend at Baroda was Lieutenant Madhavrao Jadhav, who was associated with him in his political ideas and helped him in later years, whenever possible, in his political work. Among his other friends were Khasirao Jadhav and Keshava Rao G. Deshpande, the  latter of whom Sri Aurobindo had known at Cambridge.

Sri Aurobindo was quite indifferent to the type of house wherever he stayed. Once he stayed in an old bungalow with a tiled roof. It was so old and in such bad repair that it used to be unbearably hot in summer, and, during the months of the monsoon, rain water leaked through its broken tiles. But, as Dinendra Kumar Roy records in his Bengali book, Aurobindo Prasanga, it made no difference to Sri Aurobindo whether he lived in a palace or a hovel. Where he really dwelt, no tiles ever burned, nor did rain water leak. He was, to use an expression of the Gita, aniketah, one who had no separate dwelling of his own in the whole world. But it was different with Dinendra Kumar. What with swarms of flies by day and pitiless mosquitoes at night, burning tiles in summer and leaking roofs during the rains, the poor man was so disgusted that he damned the poky, ramshackle domicile as being worse than a rich man's stable.

Life-Style

The routine of his daily life was as follows: After morning tea Sri Aurobindo used to write poetry. He would continue up to ten o'clock. Bath was between ten and eleven o'clock and lunch was at eleven o'clock a cigar would be by his side even while he ate. Sri Aurobindo used to read journals while taking his meals. He took less of rice and more of bread. Once a day there was meat or fish.

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There were intervals when Sri Aurobindo took to complete vegetarian diet. He was indifferent to taste. He found Marathi food too hot (with its chillies) and Gujarati food too rich in ghee. Later, he once had a dinner at B.G. Tilak's, which consisted of rice, puri, legume (dal) and vegetables. He liked it for its "Spartan simplicity".

At one time, according to the testimony of R.N. Patkar (who had been his student), Sri Aurobindo took no cooked food in the evenings but only fruit and milk. When he was absorbed in reading, he could be wholly oblivious of his surroundings. One evening his servant had brought his meal with the words. Sāb, khānā rakhā hai (Master, the meal is served); Achchā (All right) was the answer. But an hour later, the servant found that the master was still reading, the dishes on the table being untouched!

Some more points from a statement of R.N. Patkar are reproduced here to give an idea of Sri Aurobindo's life at Baroda:

... When I came to Baroda—I was a school-going lad hardly sixteen in age and as such I cannot be expected to give a detailed account of [Sri Aurobindo's] life during this short period. However I note down as few points that struck me and made a vivid impression on me....

He was remarkably simple in his mode of living. He was not at all fastidious in his tastes. He did not seem to care much either for his food or dress, because he never attached any importance to either. Any dish served to him at his meal time was welcome to him. Similarly about his dress -I never saw him visiting the cloth market for making selection of cloth for his dress as he had no choice to make. At home he was clad in plain white sadara and dhoti and outside invariably in white drill suits. He never slept on a soft cotton-bed, as most of us do, but on a bed made of coir (coconut fibres) on which was spread a Malbar grassmat which served as a bed-sheet. Once I asked him why he used such a coarse hard bed and he said with his characteristic laugh, "My boy, don't you know that I am a

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Brahmachari? Our shastras enjoin that a Brahmachari should not use a soft bed, which may induce him to sleep." I was silenced but I thought to myself that he must be a great man....

Sri Aurobindo learnt both Marathi and Gujarati at Baroda. He also learnt a dialect of Marathi called Mori from a pundit. He had an aptitude for picking up languages with an amazing ease and rapidity. He learnt Bengali himself, and learnt it so well as to be able to read the poetry of Michael Madhusudan Dutt and the novels of Bankim Chandra Chatterji; and both of these authors are anything but easy. "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. The course of study provided was a very poor one: his teacher, a retired English Judge from Bengal, was not very competent...." It is rather amusing to note that one day when Sri Aurobindo asked his teacher to explain to him a passage from Bankim Chandra Chatterji, he looked at the passage and remarked with the comic cocksureness of shallow knowledge: "But this is not Bengali!" Sri Aurobindo learnt Sanskrit himself without any help from anybody. He did not learn Sanskrit through Bengali, but direct in Sanskrit or through English. But the marvel is that he mastered it as thoroughly and entered as deeply into its spirit and genius as he had done in the case of Greek and Latin. He "never studied Hindi, but his acquaintance with Sanskrit and other Indian languages made it easy for him to pick up Hindi without any regular study and to understand it when he read Hindi books or news-papers."

In the autumn of 1898 Sri Aurobindo managed to get Sj. Dinendra Kumar Roy as his paid tutor in order to familiarise himself with spoken Bengali. Roy came to Baroda after the Puja holidays. As already stated, Sri Aurobindo had commenced learning Bengali while at Cambridge, and he read many authors during his stay at Baroda. He wanted

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to make himself familiar with the growth of Bengali literature, to understand the idiom of the spoken language and to learn to speak it. Dinendra Roy tried to learn French and German from Sri Aurobindo. The study that Sri Aurobindo did with Roy was not of the nature of regular lessons, but was more of an informal arrangement. It happened at times that he would read and converse for a day and then for days there would be no learning at all.

It is to the Bengali tutor, Dinendra Kumar Roy, that we owe some particulars regarding Sri Aurobindo's everyday life at Baroda. After all, they lived together on terms of friendly companionship, and the tutor had every opportunity of observing and forming an opinion of Sri Aurobindo's life in action. "Desireless, a man of few words, balanced in his diet, self-controlled, always given to study"; reading far into the night, and hence a late riser.

"Aurobindo talked very little, perhaps because he believed it better to speak as little as possible about oneself." "It was as if acquiring knowledge was his sole mission in life." "Aurobindo is not a man of this earth, he is a god come down from heaven by some curse."

Those his friends and relations, his colleagues and pupils who came into close contact with him, at least some of them, were conscious also of the power behind the person, the fire that seemed to bum within, the light that shone in the eyes. The late Dr. C.R. Reddy, who succeeded Sri Aurobindo as Vice-Principal of the Baroda College, has left this on record:

"I had the honour of knowing him.... We had a number of friends in common. Mr. A.B. Clark, the Principal of the Baroda College, remarked to me, 'So you met Aurobindo Ghosh. Did you notice his eyes? There is mystic fire and light in them. They penetrate into the beyond.' And he added, 'If Joan of Arc heard heavenly voices, Aurobindo probably sees heavenly visions.' dark was a materialist of materialists. I have never been able to understand how that worldly but delightful person could have glimpsed the

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truth, then latent, about Aurobindo. But, then, does not the lightning's blinding flash, which lasts but a moment, leap forth from the dark black bosom of the cloud?¹

Books, books were his major preoccupation; the Bombay firms of booksellers, Thacker Spink and Radhabai Atmaram, supplied him regularly with the latest catalogues, and he then placed orders for selected books which duly arrived in bulky parcels by passenger train. His personal library thus came to include some of the latest books in English, French, German, Latin, Greek and of course all the major English poets from Chaucer to Swinburne. A cousin of Sri Aurobindo's, Basanti Devi, has given us this amusing account of his addiction to books and his habit of carrying trunkloads of them wherever he went:

"Auro Dada used to arrive with two or three trunks. We always thought they would contain costly suits and other luxury items like scents, etc. When he opened them I used to look and wonder. What is this? A few ordinary clothes and all the rest books and nothing but books! Does Auro Dada like to read all these? We all want to chat and enjoy ourselves in vacations. Does he want to spend even this time in reading these books?

"But because he liked this reading did not mean that he did not join us in our talks and chats and our merrymaking. His talk used to be full of wit and humour."

In the choice of books, Sri Aurobindo seems to have had a natural partiality for literature (especially poetry), history and even some politics, but not for philosophy. He was not attracted to metaphysics, and he found the disputes of dialectical ratiocination too abstract, abstruse and generally inconclusive. Before coming to Baroda, he had read something of Plato, as well as Epictetus and the Lucretian statement of the ideas of Epicurus. Only such philosophical ideas as could be made dynamic for life interested him.

¹ From Dr. C.R. Reddy's citation before the Andhra University Convocation (11 December 1948) on the occasion of the award in absentia of the National Prize in Humanities to Sri Aurobindo.

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Beyond a nodding acquaintance with the broad ideas of certain European philosophers, he had no interest in the highways and byways of Western philosophical thought. Of the Indian philosophers also he had read only some of their main conclusions. Actually, his first real acquaintance with Indian spirituality was through the reported sayings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and the speeches and writings of Swami Vivekananda. Sri Aurobindo had certainly an immense admiration for Vivekananda and a still deeper feeling for Ramakrishna.

Sri Aurobindo seems to have been equally indifferent to money as to personal comforts, food or clothes. Mr. Patkar's report on this point is worth quoting, as it gives a hint of the shape of things to come:

"It was his practice to receive his salary once in three months. In those days, payment was made in cash and not in currency notes as now. He used to get the lump sum for the three months in a bag which he emptied in a large tray lying on the table in his room. He never bothered to keep it in a safe box, under lock and key.... He never cared to keep an account of what he spent. This struck me and one day I casually asked him why he kept his money like that. He simply laughed.... He said, 'Well, it is a proof that we are living in the midst of honest and good people.' I asked him again, 'You never keep any account which may testify to the honesty of the people round about you?' Then with a serene face he said, 'It is God who keeps an account for me. He gives me as much as I want and keeps the rest to Himself. At any rate He does not keep me in want; then why should I worry?' "

He had always enough, and never less than enough, and never more than enough. "He was alone," writes Dinendra Kumar Roy (with reference to 1898-9, the time he spent with Sri Aurobindo), "he did not know what it was to run after pleasures, he never spent even a paisa in the wrong way, and yet at the end of the month he did not have a paisa in his hand."

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Sarojini's education was very dear to his heart, and he used to make remittances regularly to meet the expenses of her education at Bankipore and the maintenance of their mother. His younger brother, Barindra, was also with Sarojini at the time, though later he often stayed at Baroda. Even after their return to India, Benoybhushan and Manomohan were not in a position to help the family. For this Sri Aurobindo offered a good-humoured yet disarming explanation: "Dada is in Coochbehar State service and so he has to maintain a certain high standard of living. Manomohan is married and marriage is an expensive luxury!"

The letters written by Sri Aurobindo to his family were few and are hard to find. The following letter to Sarojini shows him as an affectionate brother. It also shows that Benoybhushan did not return to India till 1894. One sees how scarce the correspondence between the brothers was.

Baroda Camp

25th August, 1894

My dear Saro,

I got your letter the day before yesterday. I have been trying hard to write to you for the last three weeks, but have hitherto failed. Today I am making a huge effort and hope to put the letter in the post before nightfall. As I am now invigorated by three days' leave, I almost think I shall succeed.

It will be, I fear, quite impossible to come to you again so early as the Puja, though if I only could, I should start tomorrow. Neither my affairs, nor my finances will admit of it. Indeed it was a great mistake for me to go at all; for it has made Baroda quite intolerable to me. There is an old story about Judas Iscariot, which suits me down to the ground. Judas, after betraying Christ, hanged himself and went to Hell where he was honoured with the hottest oven in the whole establishment. Here he must burn for ever and ever; but in his life he had done one kind act and for

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this they permitted him by special mercy of God to cool himself for an hour every Christmas on an iceberg in the North Pole. Now this has always seemed to me not mercy, but a peculiar refinement of cruelty. For how could Hell fail to be ten times more Hell to the poor wretch after the delicious coolness of his iceberg? I do not know for what enormous crime I have been condemned to Baroda, but my case is just parallel. Since my pleasant sojourn with you at Baidyanath, Baroda seems a hundred times more Baroda.

I dare say Beno may write to you three or four days before he leaves England. But you must think yourself lucky if he does as much as that. Most likely the first you hear of him will be a telegram from Calcutta. Certainly he has not written to me. I never expected and should be afraid to get a letter. It would be such a shocking surprise that I should certainly be able to do nothing but roll on the floor and gasp for breath for the next two or three hours. No, the favours of the Gods are too awful to be coveted. I dare say he will have energy enough to hand over your letter to Mano as they must be seeing each other almost daily. You must give Mano a little time before he answers you. He too is Beno's brother. Please let me have Beno's address as I don't know where to send a letter I have ready for him. Will you also let me have the name of Bari's English Composition Book and its compiler? I want such a book badly, as this will be useful for me not only in Bengalee but in Gujerati. There are no convenient books like that here.

You say in your letter "all here are quite well"; yet in the very next sentence I read "Bari has an attack of fever". Do you mean then that Bari is nobody? Poor Bari! That he should be excluded from the list of human beings is only right and proper, but it is a little hard that he should be denied existence altogether. I hope it is only a slight attack. I am quite well. I have brought a fund of health with me from Bengal, which, I hope it will take me some time to exhaust; but I have just passed my twenty-second milestone,

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Sri Aurobindo during early days of Baroda Service

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Sarojini

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 August 15 last, since my birthday and am beginning to get dreadfully old.

I infer from your letter that you are making great progress in English. I hope you will learn very quickly; I can then write to you quite what I want to say and just in the way I want to say it. I feel some difficulty in doing that now and I don't know whether you will understand it.

With love,

Your affectionate brother,

Auro

When, after about 7 years of service, he had become the Vice-Principal of the college, Sri Aurobindo decided to marry. He was then 29 years of age. He had put an advertisement in a Calcutta paper that he would marry a girl of a Hindu family according to Hindu rites. He had already become a name in Calcutta.

In April 1901 Sri Aurobindo was married to Mrinalini Bose, daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose. Her age was fourteen years (birthday 6 March 1888). Sri Aurobindo had had many prospective offers from which he selected Mrinalini. Principal Girish Chandra Bose, a friend of Bhupal Chandra Bose, arranged the match. The marriage took place at Baithakkhana Road, Calcutta, in one of the houses belonging to the Dutt family of Hatkhola. As Sri Aurobindo had gone to England the question of purificatory rites was raised. Sri Aurobindo flatly refused, even as his father Dr. K.D. Ghose had in his day. At last there was a proposal of shaving the head. When that too was turned down "an obliging Brahmin priest satisfied all the requirements of the Shastra for a monetary consideration!"

After marriage the couple went to Deoghar, and from there to Naini Tal, his sister Sarojini also accompanying them; they reached Naini Tal on 29 May and remained for a month amidst those utterly beautiful and gorgeous Kumaon ranges of hills, with the Himalayas looming immense behind. The Maharaja of Baroda was at Naini Tal

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The house at Nainital where Sri Aurobindo stayed with his wife in 1901

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too, but left for Baroda earlier. By the beginning of July, Sri Aurobindo returned to Baroda with his wife and sister, and Barin also soon joined them.

It is difficult, almost impossible, to reconstruct the story of Sri Aurobindo's marriage and married life. The scanty external facts that we happen to know do not seem to tell the whole story: they even give a confused, or perversely blurred, picture. Mrinalini came to Sri Aurobindo as a beautiful girl, steeped in the Hindu tradition of unswerving wifely devotion to one's husband and willing and eager to play her appointed role. After three or four years, they seem to have somewhat drifted apart, yet owing to no fault of either. Perhaps it was the 'generation gap' that was responsible; more probably still, it was due to the conflict of their respective preoccupations, Sri Aurobindo was getting entangled, deeper and deeper, in the meshes of politics-, especially the organisation of secret revolutionary activity, and he was also feeling drawn towards Yoga.

Sri Aurobindo started the journals Karmayogin and Dharma. Mrinalini was living with him for some time. They also passed short periods together at Deoghar with Sri Aurobindo's maternal uncle's family. The following episode took place probably at this time or it may be at another time before Sri Aurobindo's arrest. It is narrated by Mrinalini's cousin; he gives no date. Sarojini and Mrinalini could not get on well together. It was Sarojini who used to pick quarrels with Mrinalini over trifles. Mrinalini would complain to Sri Aurobindo about Sarojini's bad temper, but each time his advice would be, "Endure, endure", which did not please her much. She wanted that at least for once Sarojini should be administered a mild rebuke, but entreaties went unheeded. At last Mrinalini told Sri Aurobindo in a Firm tone that unless he did something she would refuse to do any household chores. Now Sri Aurobindo had to act. Fixing his gaze upon Mrinalini he said, "Look here, do you think anybody's conduct can be changed in the way you want it? If I rebuke you or Sarojini,

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will it immediately make either of you give up your defects? Rather, instead of the peace you are asking for, it will have quite the opposite effect. I have told you to endure. If you follow sincerely the path advised by me, you will see that everything will move on peacefully as if by magic, after a few days." From then, as Mrinalini reported, there was no discord in their dealing with each other. Their domestic life took a sudden turn for the better without their knowing. Of course Mrinalini resolved to follow Sri Aurobindo's advice.

When Sri Aurobindo took the plunge into politics after 1906, he gave up the security of the Baroda job, and invited the rigours of privation, persecution and incarceration, Mrinalini's unease only deepened all the more. For a girl, it is always a cross between glory and penance to marry a man of genius; and Sri Aurobindo was more than a man of genius. He was afflicted with Divine madnesses; he was verily a descended god! But a god is to be worshipped from a distance, not viewed from close quarters; and Mrinalini often felt ill at ease. Both at Baroda and later at Calcutta, she tried with Sarojini's assistance to hold the home-front with a brave face. Sometimes, for a change, she lived with her parents. Long letters passed between husband and wife, and some of these letters are now among the classics of Bengali epistolary art. Mrinalini thus wandered between two worlds, and she wasn't quite at home in either; and she didn't know where and how and when she could find her peace. She was "destined to suffer for marrying a genius", writes R.R. Diwakar; "she had rarely the privilege of living with her husband for long, though their relations were most cordial and full of affection from the beginning to the end.... She was a high-souled woman of great devotion and piety, and by her dignity made suffering itself a step towards a higher life".

However, there were a few short interludes of sweetness like oases in a desert.

For instance, when Sri Aurobindo had once returned to

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Calcutta from political tours in the mofussils with a virulent attack of malaria he stayed with Bhupalbabu and was nursed by Mrinalini. Here is what her cousin says about it:

"Nursing and service of the sick was Mrinalini's forte. She poured all her heart into it and those who were blessed with her ministration could never forget the care and solicitude she had bestowed upon them.

"I remember how Mrinalini served him during his illness sitting by his bed-side, she would fan him, gently massage his head and feet. She would herself prepare his diet. At other times, when he was absorbed in writing, Mrinalini would wait till he had finished his work. She would attend to his ablutions, serve his meals or tea at the appointed time. Her father would procure cauliflowers and other vegetables of Sri Aurobindo's preference, from special markets and her mother herself would cook dishes for him. Sri Aurobindo would relish every bit of the various dishes. It pleased Bhupalbabu immensely to see him enjoying the meal to the last morsel and remark that it was a matter of great joy to feed such people."

Poor Sri Aurobindo! During his long stay in Baroda he was utterly deprived of good cooking. .

During the brief period of Sri Aurobindo's hectic political life, his wife and sister were even more often left alone than at Baroda, and the year following the Muzzaferpore out- rage the long months of trial and prison-life at Alipur — must have proved particularly excruciating.

There came the rude shock on the night of Sri Aurobindo's arrest, the last day when Sri Aurobindo and Mrinalini were living together in Grey Street, Calcutta. While relating that nightmarish event afterwards to her young cousin, Mrinalini's voice used to get choked and her eyes fill with tears. She said:

"One night we were in deep sleep. Suddenly in the early morning there were loud knocks at the door. I got up quickly and opened the door to see a sergeant¹ pointing a

¹It was the Police Superintendent, in fact.

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pistol at me and asking me to show where Sri Aurobindo was. He was sleeping. Dumbfounded I pointed towards him. The entire house was filled with a posse of the police. I was then asked to move to the next room. Sri Aurobindo was sleeping on a rug spread on the floor. I heard the police telling him: 'Are you Mr. Ghosh? An educated person like you sleeping on such a bed and leading such a dirty life? It is most shameful.' To which he retorted, 'What is shameful to you is a thing of honour to us. For us Hindus, such a life is a symbol of renunciation as well as an ideal.' The sergeant could only give him a hard stare. At last he broke open my box and with gusto caught hold of some letters written to me by Mr. Ghosh.

"I had collected some soil from Dakshineswar and kept it in a vessel. When the police discovered it, there was such a mad dance! I couldn't understand what made them so ecstatic as if they had discovered America. I learnt later on that they had thought it to be material for making a bomb.

"What happened next is beyond a woman's delicate nature to describe. The sergeant asked Mr. Ghosh to follow him; he wouldn't allow him even to use the bathroom. Mr. Ghosh asked, 'Where have I to go?' 'To Lalbazar'¹, he replied. Then they tied a rope around his waist. Seeing this I lost all control and felt like falling upon them and snatching him away from the police's clutch, but checked myself somehow. I tried to call God, but couldn't, as I had lost faith in Him. If He was present, I thought, how could He allow such savage treatment to a guiltless soul? But all my prayer was of no avail. The police took him away to the van. What happened next I didn't know. When I regained my senses, I found myself in the house of Mr. K.K. Mitra, a relative of Mr. Ghosh."

"Since then a period of intense darkness descended upon Mrinalini's life," writes her cousin. "Aimless and bewildered she didn't know what to do, where to go. One day she was talking to me about this critical phase, 'I couldn't call

¹A Police station.

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even God. How could I? I had no other God except my husband. I have seen God's manifestation in him alone. When he spoke I felt as if a distant bodiless sound was coming out of his mouth. When he looked at me, I felt as if two dreamy eyes were pouring their effulgent rays on my body. When such an unearthly person was snatched away from my world, I felt that death alone was my resort without him. But still death did not come. At that moment Sudhira¹came and clasped me.' Henceforth Mrinalini began to frequent the Ramakrishna Ashram, escorted by Sudhira."

Anxious about her disturbed mental condition, Sudhira introduced Mrinalini to Sarada Mata, Sri Ramakrishna's wife, and prayed for her help. She listened quietly and said, "My daughter, don't be disturbed. Your husband is under the full protection of God. With Thakur Ramakrishna's blessings he will soon be proved innocent. But he will not lead a worldly life." Then she advised Mrinalini to read Sri Ramakrishna's books and visit her now and then. On coming to know that she had received spiritual solace and initiation from Sarada Devi (of Dakshineshwar), Sri Aurobindo felt glad that his wife "had found so great a spiritual refuge".

After this, according to Mrinalini's cousin, her father took her away to Shillong. They used to come to Calcutta to visit Sri Aurobindo in the jail. Mrinalini always remained calm and composed.

We have a reminiscent account of Mrinalini's sojourn in Shillong from Ila Devi, mother of Dr. Satyavrata Sen:

"I learnt about Sri Aurobindo's arrest from Minudi's young sister who was of our age. He became the topic of the day. Minudi used to hear the talks but never lost her composure. She was leading a very simple life and eating simple food, avoiding meat and fish. They had a lovely garden from which she would pick flowers in the early morning and enter her Puja House (House of the Deity)

¹Mrinalini's life-long friend since school-days.

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and spend many hours there. It was kept beautifully decorated with pictures of Kali, Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Sarada Mata. Two small pictures of Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo were placed on either side of a shelf. One day I entered the room after she had left and I saw flowers offered at Sri Aurobindo's feet and incense burning by the side."

When Sri Aurobindo left, in the early months of 1910, first for Chandernagore and from there for Pondicherry, she was living elsewhere in Calcutta. She and her people knew nothing about his whereabouts. Only after he had reached Pondicherry, they got the news. Naturally their anxiety was in the extreme. Then Mrinalini was taken back to Shillong by her father.

Now begins the most crucial chapter of her life a life of austere tapasya for 8 long years. Outwardly her marriage had come to an end, but the inner bond continued and became more intense. What Sri Aurobindo wanted her to do when he was near, but she could not, now the painful separation induced her to pursue. A true Hindu wife, she embraced the ideal of the Godward life indicated by her husband. But her God was Sri Aurobindo. He was the Alpha and Omega of her existence. Meditating on him and trying to live in his consciousness brought about a radical change in her life. Eventually she united herself in death with her Lord.

There are two accounts of her life in Shillong at that period, one by her young sister and the other by her young cousin who was very fond of her; the accounts are complementary to each other. Here is the sister's account:

"Every early morning, after her bath she would pluck flowers from the garden. She would look incomparably beautiful amidst countless flowers of all varieties of colour. She would then enter the Puja House and pass hours in meditation. After that, she would attend to the usual chores and spend the rest of the day in the study of religious books, mostly of Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna.

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 In the evening, she shut herself up for hours again in the Meditation Room. At times, at the request of her parents and friends she would take up the harmonium and sing devotional songs composed by Tagore and others.

"She was always simply but neatly dressed and looked like a Yogini. In the matter of food, meat, fish and sweets were excluded from her diet. Only at the request of her parents she would waive this austere rule.

"Letters from Sri Aurobindo arrived at long intervals addressed to her as Mrs. Ghosh. That would revive her spirit for a few days. But never did she seek sympathy or open her heart to anyone except her mother and Sudhira. My cousin who had gone to Pondicherry wrote to us that Sri Aurobindo was plunged deep in yoga. Sri Aurobindo asked Mrinalini to follow the same path. She began the practice according to the directions given by Sri Aurobindo. We hoped for a long time that he would return to Bengal when the political situation had eased. But it was a vain hope, for it was feared that he would be arrested as soon as he set his foot on Indian soil. My father tried hard to take Mrinalini to Pondicherry, but the Government refused permission."

Now let us read the other account. The cousin writes:

"During these last 8 years, occasional letters from Sri Aurobindo were her only solace and support. Shillong was a hilly place, one of the loveliest spots of Nature. Mrinalini would wander about in the garden in her leisure time. One day I asked her, 'Didi, you seem to love flowers best of all!' She replied, 'You know, your Gurudev was like a flower. I used to smell the fragrance of flowers in his presence." [The Mother also has said that a lotus-fragrance used to emanate from Sri Aurobindo's body.] One evening meandering through a pine wood, Mrinalini sat upon a hillock. From there, the range of hill-tops beyond was exposed to view, clear like an enormous picture. Looking at the beautiful scene, Mrinalini fell into a meditative mood. I also enjoyed the charm of the place, but since her meditation lasted too

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long I got fidgety. When she opened her eyes, I asked her, 'Didi, there is so much beauty all around us and you pass the entire period in darkness!' She answered, 'Silly boy, you don't know that this infinite splendour helps me to plunge into the source of its beauty. You were annoyed perhaps! You know, in your Gurudev's heart is a heavenly city many times more beautiful than this outer beauty.' I have alluded to her love flowing towards all. During her stay in Calcutta all followers of Sri Aurobindo had her touch of love and care. Sudhir Sarkar, when he used to go on secret missions incognito, would relate with tears how Mrinalini used to dress him with Sri Aurobindo's suits.

"She had a strong attraction for the English language and wanted to improve her knowledge of it. With this object she began to coach me which was a great blessing indeed to me. She used to correct our pronunciation, and teach us how to read and articulate properly. One day I asked her, 'Didi, tell me why you are taking so much trouble to teach me English. What do you gain by it?' A bit irked, she replied, 'Leave those wise talks. Tell me, aren't you profiting by it and am I not gaining too? Do you know that your Gurudev's mother tongue 'is English?' 'What?' I exclaimed, 'he is the son of Bengali parents!' Then she told me the whole story of his life and added, 'If I have to follow him, I must have a good knowledge of English. Do you see now, my boy, how I gain by teaching you? I receive now and then a few letters from him. One or two happen to be in English. His letters written in Bengali are so accomplished that they put our own usage to abject shame.' " Here is the sister's account about Mrinalini's death:

"At last arrived the year 1918, December. She received the call from Sri Aurobindo, saying, 'My sadhana is over. I have achieved my object, siddhi. I have a lot of work to do for the world. You can come now and be my companion in this work.' This naturally made Mrinalini and all others extremely happy.

"Now our father thought of taking my sister to Pondicherry.

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The Government gave permission. So they arrived in Calcutta via Ranchi. But Mrinalini Devi fell a victim to the scourge of influenza which was raging everywhere. After a week's illness she passed away on 17 December at the age of 32. The mental agony that she had kept suppressed for years exploded during the illness in her delirium, particularly the frightful nightmarish scene of Sri Aurobindo's arrest.

"There was a mention in her horoscope that her 32nd year would be critical. Sri Aurobindo knew it and wanted us to remind him about it when she would be 32. But all of us forgot except my mother. She was at that time in Ranchi. Hearing about the illness she hastened to Calcutta but Mrinalini Devi passed away within half an hour of her arrival. When she learnt that we had not informed Sri Aurobindo, a telegram was sent to him. On reading it, Sri Aurobindo said, 'Too late!' My cousin who was there at the time wrote to my mother: 'Today I saw tears in the eyes of your stone-hearted son-in-law. With the telegram in one hand, he sat still and tears were in his eyes.' Sri Aurobindo told him too that Mrinalini's soul had come to him soon after her death. Also a photo of Mrinalini Devi that was on the mantel-piece is said to have fallen.

"In the evening after Mrinalini's expiry Sudhira took my mother to Sri Sarada Devi. She was at that time in deep meditation. When she opened her eyes and saw them, she said, 'You have come? I was seeing in my vision my daughter-in-law, Mrinalini. She was a goddess born as your daughter in consequence of a curse. Now that her karma is exhausted her soul has departed.' She often used to enquire after her health."

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historical fame and her name certainly falls in line with them. Mrinalini's soul chose this destiny to hold up an example of an ideal Hindu wife in this materialistic age.

In the life-history of Sri Aurobindo, Mrinalini Devi seems but to play a minor role: but so does Urmila, Lakshmana's wife, in the Ramayana. They also serve who suffer in silence and with their silence contribute to the unfoldment of the Divine play.

Sri Aurobindo wrote to Bhupalbabu after Mrinalini's demise. Here is the letter:

Pondicherry

19 February 1919

My dear father-in-law,

I have not written to you with regard to the fatal event in both our lives; words are useless in face of the feelings it has caused, if even they can express our deepest emotions. God has seen good to lay upon me the one sorrow that could still touch me to the centre. He knows better than ourselves what is best for each of us, and now that the first sense of the irreparable has passed, I can bow with submission to His divine purpose. The physical tie between us is, as you say, severed; but the tie of affection subsists for me. Where I have once loved, I do not cease from loving. Besides, she who was the cause of it, still is near, though not visible to our physical vision.

It is needless to say much about the matters of which you write in your letter. I approve of everything that you propose. Whatever Mrinalini would have desired, should be done and I have no doubt this is what she would have approved of I consent to the chudis (gold bangles) being kept by her mother; but I should be glad if you would send me two or three of her books, especially if there are any in which her name is written. I have of her only her letters and a photograph.

Aurobindo

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To conclude: Bhupalbabu visited the Ashram with his wife in the thirties and did pranam to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, his son-in-law, during the Darshan. The Mother seems to have told him that Mrinalini's soul was with her. Dyuman adds that Bhupalbabu had the vision of Mrinalini in the Mother when he went to the Darshan and bowed to her and he was very much consoled.

Before we pass on to the next subject, it would be rewarding to look a little more carefully into Sri Aurobindo's letters to his wife, for they not only show that he had a clear prevision of the mission of his life, but mirror the crucial stages of spiritual development through which he was sweeping during the latter part of his stay at Baroda and the beginning of his political life in Bengal. They are, as it were, a blueprint of his whole life and, from that standpoint at least, most important.

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ARCHIVAL NOTES

Correspondence with Mrinalini Devi

Sri Aurobindo was married to Mrinalini Bose in April 1901. In the years that followed the two often lived apart. From this separation issued the correspondence that, since being used as evidence in the Alipur Bomb Trial, has become famous. The prosecution tried to show that certain references in the letters established Sri Aurobindo's complicity in the terrorist activities of his brother Barin's secret society. The judge of the case, disagreeing with this and other contentions of the prosecution, found Sri Aurobindo innocent. Eleven letters from Sri Aurobindo to Mrinalini exist in some form. Three those dated 30 August 1905, 6 December 1907, and 17 February 1908-were published while the trial was in progress; authorised versions of their original Bengali texts were published around 1920. Six other letters (including one written in English) were first published in 1977. The manuscripts of the two letters that remain, those of 2 July 1902 and 22 October 1905, no longer exist. They are known only in the form of English translations made for use in court. Crude renderings by Bengalis in the hire of the police, these translations can only suggest and that badly what the originals must have been like. Happily, the valuable biographical and historical material the letters contain comes through without much distortion in the translations. For this reason the English versions have been reproduced in the present issue. It would of course not be possible to print them as "texts". They have been published as the first and second of the Documents in the Life of Sri Aurobindo.

The first letter was written after Sri Aurobindo returned to Baroda from the west Indian hill resort of Lanabali (usually spelled Lonavala). He had gone there to attend on his employer, the Maharaja of Baroda. The letter is remarkable

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 mainly for showing Sri Aurobindo's interest in astrology, which, at this period of his life, was profound. Around this time he went through and made notes on a large Sanskrit and Bengali astrological tome entitled Horajivan Rahasyam, by Narayan Chandra Jyotirbhusan Bhattacharya. Sri Aurobindo seems also to have met this prominent astrologer, for he once referred in a letter to "Narayan Jyotishi, a Calcutta astrologer, who predicted, not knowing then who I was, in the days before my name was politically known, my struggle with Miechchha enemies and afterwards the three cases against me and my three acquittals."

The letter published as Document 2 is not dated in its available printed form. Fortunately it was spoken of in court as having been written on 22 October 1905 six days after the Partition of Bengal became an "accomplished fact". At that time Sri Aurobindo was in Baroda. He writes of his younger brother Barindra, who had already begun the work of revolutionary organisation ("the service of his country"); their sister Sarojini was involved in more mundane concerns. Sri Aurobindo's "evening prayer" (one does not know what expression was used in Bengali) refers evidently to his practice of yogic meditation, taken up seriously only two months before.

The substitution of a dash for the signature is curious, but not unprecedented. Only once in his whole correspondence with Mrinalini did Sri Aurobindo sign his name; and then, oddly, he used his full, formal appellation "Sri Aurobindo Ghose". Hindu married couples are often rather sparing in their use of personal names; but Sri Aurobindo's anonymity may have had more to do with a certain caution developed by revolutionaries when they communicate by post. Some manuscripts of Sri Aurobindo's sent from Chandernagore to Pondicherry have holes where his signature used to be.

One of Sri Aurobindo's best known letters to Mrinalini is dated 23 Scott's Lane, Calcutta, 17 Feb. 1907. It is certain

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that the year is in error; it should be 1908. The question of the date of this letter was taken up even by the Alipur sessions judge. He concluded that 1907 was "obviously a mistake for 1908". His decision was based on two facts known to the court, which was extremely interested in Sri Aurobindo's whereabouts during 1907 and 1908. First, in February 1907 Sri Aurobindo was recovering from illness in Deoghar, hundreds of miles from Calcutta. Secondly, Sri Aurobindo did not take the house at 23 Scott's Lane before February 1908.

LETTERS TO MRINALINI*

I

c/o K.B. Jadhav, Esq.

Near Municipal Office

Baroda

25th June 1902

Dearest Mrinalini,

I was very sorry to learn of your fever. I hope since then you have begun to look after your health a little more. It is a cold place, so you must be careful not to catch cold. I am sending ten rupees today. Buy some medicine and take it daily. Don't forget. I have heard of a medicine that will cure you of your disease. You don't have to take it daily. One or two doses will cure you; but it won't be possible to take it in Assam. You'll be able to take it in Deoghur. I'll write Sarojini about what is to be done.

Sarojini is in Deoghur. Baudidi [elder brother's wife] has left Darjeeling for Calcutta. Darjeeling did not suit her. Sarojini writes to say that she will remain in Bengal until

* All these letters are translated from the Bengali except the one dated 20th August 1902, which was in English.

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winter. Grandmother is putting a lot of pressure on her. She hopes Baudidi will be able to arrange a marriage for Sarojini. I don't think there is much hope. If Sarojini gives up her excessive demands in regard to looks and attainments, there will be some chance.

'Kencho' went to the Lonavala Hills. He called me there too. He called me because he wanted to write a document. It was written but he did not send it. At the last minute he suddenly changed his mind. Another very big and secret work came up. I had to do it. When he saw my work 'Kencho' was very satisfied and he promised to raise my salary. Who knows whether he will do it or not. 'Kencho's' word is not worth very much. But he may give the raise. It seems to me that the day of 'Kencho's' downfall is coming. All of the signs are bad.

I am staying now in Khaserao's house. When you come we will go to the "Navalakha". There probably will not be much rain this year. If there is no rain, there certainly will be a terrible famine. In that case your visit here will have to be cancelled. If you come it will only mean a lot of trouble—trouble as regards food, water and prices. It is not hot in Baroda this summer. A beautiful breeze is blowing, but this beautiful breeze has blown away the hope of rain.. Now only ten or twelve days remain. If we have good rain within ten or twelve days we may yet be saved from the stroke of a great misfortune.

I will send your photo soon. Jotin Banerji is staying with us. Today I will go to see him and select the best photo.

Give my respects to your father and your mother. You will understand all that I leave unexpressed.

Your husband

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(2)

(A Passage from the Court Translation)

C/o Rai Bahadur

K.B. Jadhav,

Baroda.

July 2nd 1902.

Dearest Mrinalini,

... You said you have got a horoscope; send it to me. Jotin Banerjee is here and I wish to show it to him. I have faith in astrology ten years' experience confirmed. But also amongst a thousand, nine hundred know nothing about it. Few know but more make mistakes, e.g. non-performance of the coronation ceremony of the English King this year was declared several months ago causes even. If there be evil consequences then there are means of knowing them beforehand as they can be cured often. If horoscope can't be found, exact time of birth will do, but even the very minute must be correct....

Your husband

C/o K.B. Jadhav, Esq.

Near Municipal Office

Baroda

20th August 1902

Dearest Mrinalini,

I have not written to you for a long time because I have not been in very good health and had not the energy to write. I went out of Baroda to see whether change and rest would set me up, and your telegram came when I was not here. I feel much better now, and I suppose there was nothing really the matter with me except overwork. I am sorry I made you so anxious; there was no real cause to be

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so, for you know I never get seriously ill. Only when I feel out of sorts, I find writing letters almost impossible.

The Maharajah has given me Rs.90 promotion this will raise my pay to Rs.450. In the order he has made me a lot of compliments about my powers, talent, capacity, usefulness etcetera, but also made a remark on my want of regularity and punctual habits. Besides he has shown his intention of taking the value of the Rs 90 out of me by burdening me with overwork, so I don't feel very grateful to him. He says that if convenient, my services can be utilized in the College. But I don't see how it will be convenient, just now at least; for it is nearly the end of the term. Even if I go to the College, he has asked the Dewan to use me for writing Annual Reports etc. I suppose this means that he does not want me to get my vacations. However, let us see what happens.

If I join the College now and am allowed the three months' vacation, I shall of course go to Bengal and to Assam for a short visit. I am afraid it will be impossible for you to come to Baroda just now. There has been no rain here for a month, except a short shower early this morning. The wells are all nearly dried up; the water of the Ajwa reservoir which supplies Baroda is very low and must be. quite used up by next November; the crops in the fields are all parched and withering. This means that we shall not only have famine but there will be no water for bathing and washing up, or even, perhaps for drinking. Besides if there is famine, it is practically sure that all the officers will be put on half-pay. We are hoping, rather than expecting, that there may be good rain before the end of August. But the signs are against it, and if it comes, it will only remove the water difficulty or put it off for a few months. For you to come to Baroda and endure all the troubles and sufferings of such a state of things is out of the question. You must decide for yourself whether you will stay with your father or at Deoghur. You may as well stay in Assam till October, and then if I can go to Bengal, I will take you to

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Deoghur where you can stop for the winter at least. If I cannot come then, I will, if you like, try and make some arrangement for you to be taken there.

I am glad your father will be able to send me a cook when you come. I have got a Maratha cook, but he can prepare nothing properly except meat dishes. I don't know how to get over the difficulty about the maid-servant. Sarojini wrote something about a Mahomedan ayah, but that would never do. After being so recently readmitted to Hindu society, I cannot risk it; it is all very well for Khaserao and others whose social position is so strong that they may do almost anything they like. As soon as I see any prospect of being able to get you here, I shall try my best to arrange about a maid-servant. It is no use doing it now.

I hope you are able to read and understand this letter; if you can't, I hope it will make you more anxious to learn English than you have been up to now. I could not manage to write a Bengali letter just now—so I thought I had better write in English rather than put off writing.

Do not be too much disappointed by the delay in coming to Baroda; it cannot be avoided. I should like you to spend some time in Deoghur, if you do not mind, Assam somehow seems terribly far off; and besides I should like you to form a closer intimacy with my relatives, at least those among them whom I especially love.

Your loving husband

4

30th Aug. 1905

Dearest Mrinalini,

I have received your letter of the 24th August. I am sorry to learn that the same affliction has fallen once more upon your parents. You have not written which of the boys has passed away from here. But then what can be done if the affliction comes. This is a world in which when you seek

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happiness you find grief in its heart, sorrow always clinging to joy. That rule touches not only the desire of children, but all worldly desires. To offer, with a quiet heart, all happiness and grief at the feet of God is the only remedy.

I read ten rupees instead of twenty and so I said I would send ten rupees. If you need fifteen rupees I will send fifteen. This month I sent money for the clothes Sarojini bought for you in Darjeeling. How was I to know that you had borrowed money to stay there? I am sending fifteen rupees you need. If you need three or four rupees I will send it next month. I will send twenty rupees at that time.

Now I will write the other thing of which I spoke before. I think you have understood by now that the man with whose fate yours has been linked is a man of a very unusual character. Mine is not the same field of action, the same purpose in life, the same mental attitude as that of the people of today in this country. I am in every respect different from them and out of the ordinary. Perhaps you know what ordinary men say of an extraordinary view, an extraordinary endeavour, an extraordinary ambition. To them it is madness; only, if the madman is successful in his work then he is called no longer a madman but a great genius. But how many are successful in their life's endeavour? Among a thousand men there are five or six who are out of the ordinary and out of the five or six one perhaps successful. Not to speak of success I have not yet even entirely entered my field of work. There is nothing then for you but to consider me mad. And it is an evil thing for a woman to fall into the hands of a mad fellow. For woman's expectations are all bound up in worldly happiness and sorrow. A madman will not make his wife happy, he can only make her miserable.

The founders of the Hindu religion understood this very well. They loved extraordinary characters, extraordinary endeavours, extraordinary ambitions. Madman or genius, they respected the extraordinary man. But all this means a terrible plight for the wife, and how could the difficulty be

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solved? The sages fixed on this solution; they told the woman, "Know that the only mantra for womankind is this: 'The husband is the supreme guru.'¹ The wife shares the dharma of her husband. She must help him, counsel him, encourage him in whatever work he accepts as his dharma. She should regard him as her god, take joy in his joy, and feel sorrow in his unhappiness. It is for a man to choose his work; the woman's part is to give help and encouragement."

Now the point is this. Are you going to choose the path of the Hindu religion or follow the ideal of the new culture? Your marriage to a madman is the result of bad karma in your previous lives. It is good to come to terms with one's fate, but what sort of terms will they be? Will you also dismiss your husband as a madman on the strength of what other people think? A madman is bound to run after his mad ways. You cannot hold him back; his nature is stronger than yours. Will you then do nothing but sit in a corner and weep? Or will you run along with him; try to be the mad wife of this madman, like the queen of the blind king who played the part of the blind woman by putting a bandage across her eyes? For all your education in a Brahmo school you are still a woman from a Hindu home. The blood of Hindu ancestors flows in your veins. I have no doubt that you will choose the latter course.

I have three madnesses. The first one is this. I firmly believe that the accomplishments, genius, higher education and learning and wealth that God has given me are His. I have a right to spend for my own purposes only what is needed for the maintenance of the family and is otherwise absolutely essential. The rest must be returned to God. If I spend everything for myself, for my pleasure and luxury, I am a thief. The Hindu scriptures say that one who receives wealth from God and does not give it back to Him is a thief. So far I have given two annas to God and used the other

¹Here finishes Barin's translation revised lightly by, Sri Aurobindo.

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fourteen annas for my own pleasure; this is the way I have settled the account, remaining engrossed in worldly pleasures. Half my life has been wasted—even the beast finds fulfilment in stuffing his own belly and his family's and catering to their happiness.

I have realized that I have been acting all this time as an animal and a thief. Now I realize this and I am filled with remorse and disgusted with myself. No more of all this. I renounce this sin once and for all. What does giving to God mean? It means to spend on good works. The money I gave to Usha or to Sarojini causes me no regret. To help others is a sacred duty; to give protection to those who seek refuge is a yet greater sacred duty. But the account is not settled by giving only to one's brothers and sisters. I have three hundred million brothers and sisters in this country. Many of them are dying of starvation and the majority just manage to live, racked by sorrow and suffering. They too must be helped.

What do you say, will you come along with me and share my ideal in this respect: We will eat and dress like ordinary people, buying only what is truly needed and offering the rest to God: this is what I propose to do. My purpose can be fulfilled, once you give your approval, once you are able to accept the sacrifice. You have been saying, "I have made no progress." Here I have shown you a path towards progress. Will you take this path?

My second madness has only recently seized me. It is this: by whatever means I must have the direct vision of God. Religion these days means repeating the name of God at any odd hour, praying in public, showing off how pious one is. I want nothing of this. If God exists, there must be some way to experience His existence, to meet Him face to face. However arduous this path is, I have made up my mind to follow it. The Hindu religion declares that the way lies in one's own body, in one's own mind. It has laid down the rules for following the way, and I have begun to observe them. Within a month I have realized that what

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the Hindu religion says is not false. I am experiencing in myself the signs of which it speaks. Now I want to take you along this way. You will not be able to keep step with me, for you do not have the requisite knowledge. But there is nothing to prevent you from following behind me. All can attain perfection on this path, but to enter it depends on one's own will. Nobody can drag you on to it. If you consent to this, I shall write more about it.

My third madness is that while others look upon their country as an inert piece of matter—a few meadows and fields, forests and hills and rivers—I look upon Her as the Mother. What would a son do if a demon sat on his mother's breast and started sucking her blood? Would he quietly sit down to his dinner, amuse himself with his wife and children, or would he rush out to deliver his mother? I know I have the strength to deliver this fallen race. It is not physical strength—I am not going to fight with sword or gun—but it is the strength of knowledge. This feeling is not new in me, it is not of today. I was born with it, it is in my very marrow. God sent me to earth to accomplish this great mission. The seed began to sprout when I was fourteen; by the time I was eighteen the roots of the resolution had grown firm and unshakable. After listening to what my aunt said you formed the idea that some wicked people had dragged your simple and innocent husband on to the bad path. But it was this innocent husband of yours who brought those people and hundreds of others on to that path, be it bad or good, and will yet bring thousands of others on to that same path". I do not say that the work will be accomplished during my lifetime, but it certainly will be done.

Now I ask you, what are you going to do in this connection? The wife is the shakti, the strength of her husband. Will you be Usha's disciple and go on repeating the mantras of Sahib-worship? Will you diminish the strength of your husband by indifference or redouble it by your sympathy and encouragement? You will say, "What

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can an ordinary woman like me do in these great matters? I have no strength of mind, no intelligence, I am afraid to think about these things." But there is an easy way out. Take refuge in God. And if you can put your trust in me, if you can listen to me alone and not to all and sundry, I can give you my own strength; that will not diminish my strength but increase it. We say that the wife is the husband's shakti, his strength. This means that the husband's strength is redoubled when he sees his own image in his wife and hears an echo of his own high aspirations in her.

Will you remain like this for ever: "I shall put on fine clothes, have nice things to eat, laugh and dance and enjoy all the pleasures"? Such an attitude cannot be called progress. At the present time the life of women in this country has taken this narrow and contemptible form. Give up all this and follow after me. We have come to this world to do God's work; let us begin it.

You have one defect in your nature. You are much too simple. You listen to anything anyone might say. Thus your mind is for ever restless, your intelligence cannot develop, you cannot concentrate on any work. This has to be corrected. You must acquire knowledge by "listening to one person only. You must have a single aim and accomplish' your work with a resolute mind. You must ignore the calumny and the ridicule of others and hold fast to your devotion.

There is another defect, not so much of your personal nature, as of the times. The times are such in Bengal that people are incapable of listening to serious things in a serious manner. Religion, philanthropy, noble aspirations, high endeavour, the deliverance of the country, all that is serious, all that is high and noble it wants to ridicule. People want to laugh everything away. At your Brahmo school, you picked up a little of this fault. Bari also had it; all of us are tainted by this defect to some extent. It has grown up in surprising measure among the people of

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Deoghar. This attitude must be rejected with a firm mind. You will be able to do it easily. And once you get into the habit of thinking, your true nature will blossom forth. You have a natural turn towards doing good for others and towards self-sacrifice. The one thing you lack is strength of mind. You will get that through worship of God.

This is the secret of mine I wanted to tell you. Do not divulge it to anybody. Ponder calmly over these matters. There is nothing to be frightened of, but there is much to think about. To start with, you need do nothing but meditate on the Divine each day for half an hour, expressing to him an ardent desire in the form of a prayer. The mind will get prepared gradually. This is the prayer you are to make to Him: "May I not be an obstacle in the way of my husband's life, his aim, his endeavour to realize God. May I always be his helper and his instrument." Will you do this?

Yours

5

3 October 1905

Dearest,

For the last fifteen days the college examinations have been going on. Besides that a Swadeshi samiti is being established. I have been so busy with these two things that I haven't had a chance to write you. But I haven't had a letter from you for quite some time. I hope all of you are well. The college closes tomorrow. Certainly my work will continue, but I won't have to put in more than an hour a day.

I am sending twenty rupees with this letter. You may give ten rupees to the clerks of Burn Company or else you may spend it on some other good purpose. I can't understand what this Burn Company affair is all about. No clear account is given in the newspapers. Nowadays it is not an

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easy thing to keep up this sort of strike. Almost always the poor lose, the rich win. It will be a great day for India when the Indian middle class gives up its desire for petty posts and goes into business on its own. I can't send you any more money because I have to send 60 to 70 rupees for Sarojini's Darjeeling expenses and Madhavrao has been sent abroad for some special work. Much money has to be given for the Swadeshi movement and besides that I'm trying to start another movement and I will need no end of money for that. I can't put anything away.

I have sent the Floriline. I hope you got it. Dhanji was not here, then he came but Lakshmanrao was busy with the examinations and so was I, both of us forgot. I shall send the prescription soon.

Why do you want to read the "Seeker"? It is an old poem. I knew nothing about religion then. The poem is very pessimistic. I don't know the Bengali word for "pessimistic". In Marathi they say nirashavadi. Now I have realized that pessimism is just a form of ignorance.

The other day I went over to Khaserao's. Anandrao has grown quite tall. He is going to be a big swindler.

Shri

6

[This letter, apparently written in Bengali, survives only

in the form of a court translation, which has

been transcribed verbatim.]

22 October 1905

My dearest Mrinalini,

I am in receipt of your letter. I have not written you since a long time. Do not take it amiss. Why are you so much anxious about my health. I never suffer you know, except for cough and cold. Bari is here. He is in an exceedingly bad state of health. His fever is often accompanied by complications

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but with all his ailments, his energy never flags. He never sits quiet. As soon as he gets a little better, he goes out in the service of his country. He will never take up service. I will of course not write Sarojini about these matters, nor should you do so. She would then get mad with anxiety. I hope I will go to Calcutta in November. Then I have many things to do.

That long letter of yours gave me no reason to despair. I was rather glad. If Sarojini learns to practice self-denial like you, it will help me much in my future (plan of) work. But this is not to be. Her desire for future happiness is very strong. I know not whether she will ever be able to overcome it. God's will be done. Your letter is lost amongst a heap of papers. I will write again as soon as I have found it out. It is time for evening prayer. I stop here for the day. I am well, you should not give way to anxiety even if you do not hear from me. What ailment will overtake me (that you are afraid of)? I hope you are all quite well.

Yours

What need have you for my name.

Will not this dash do?———

7

c/o Babu Subodh Chandra Mullick

 12, Wellington Square

Calcutta

 [1905 December]

Dearest Mrinalini

I have received your letter. I was sorry to read it. I wrote you a letter from Bombay in which I expressed my intention to go to Bengal. In addition I spoke about many other important matters. I did not inform anyone else of my going to Bengal. There was no reason why I did not inform others. Now I realize that you did not receive that letter. Either it was not posted or it was lost in the post office. In

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any case it is unfortunate that you get impatient so quickly. For I say again, you are not the wife of an ordinary worldly man. You must have a great deal of patience and strength. A time may come when you will be without news of me not for a month or a month and a half but for as much as six months. So you will have to learn a little patience; otherwise there will be endless sorrow for you in the future.

I had written about many important matters. I don't have time to write about all that again. I will write a little later. Very soon I will go to Benares. From Benares I will go to Baroda. Once I arrive I will take leave and return to Bengal. But if Clarke has not come back there will be some difficulty.

Bari is in Deoghar. He is always getting fever. If I do not get leave he may come back to Baroda.

A.G

8

2 March 1906

Dearest Mrinalini

Today I will leave for Calcutta. I was due to go long ago. The leave was sanctioned but the big men in Baroda couldn't find time to sign it, so I have lost ten days for nothing. At any rate I shall reach Calcutta on Monday. I don't know where I will stay. It may not be possible to stay at Na-mashi's.¹ I have given up fish and meat. I may not eat them again in my life. But why should Na-mashi listen to that? Besides it would not be good if I could not find a secluded place. I have to do a number of things alone for an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the evening. All that cannot be done in front of others. 12 Wellington Square was quite suitable for me, but Hem

¹ Na-mashi in Bengali means fourth maternal aunt.

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Mallick has just died, so I can't go there now. But I will receive letters addressed to me there.

I will try to go to Assam as you ask. But once I set foot in Calcutta everyone catches hold of me. I will have a thousand things to do. I won't get time to visit my relatives. If I do go to Assam I will only be able to stay three or four days. Bari can very well bring you. I can send Ranchhod along with him. If I go, it probably won't be this month. I'll see when I get to Calcutta. Another possibility is that if Sarojini wants to go to Calcutta, Bari can take her there and I can bring her back a month later when I go. I'll fix things up when I get to Calcutta.

Sri Aurobindo Ghose

9

6th December, 1907

Dear Mrinalini,

I received your letter the day before yesterday. The shawl was sent the very same day. I do not understand why you did not get it....¹

Here [in Calcutta] I do not have a minute to spare. I am in charge of the writing; I am in charge of the Congress work; I have to settle the Bande Mataram affair. I am finding it difficult to cope with it all. Besides, I have my own work to do; that too cannot be neglected.

Will you listen to one request of mine? This is a time of great anxiety for me. There are pulls from every side that are enough to drive one mad. If at this time you also get restless, it can only increase my worry and anxiety. But if you could write encouraging and comforting letters, that would give me great strength. I should then be able to

 ¹ A passage that came here has been lost. The manuscript of the letter has disappeared. The text survives in the form of a transcription in the original Bengali made at the time of the Alipore trial and later published along with transcriptions of two other letters.

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overcome all fears and dangers with a cheerful heart. I know it is hard for you to live alone at Deoghar. But if you keep your mind firm and have faith, your sorrows will not be able to overcome you to such an extent. As you have married me, this kind of sorrow is inevitable for you. Occasional separations cannot be avoided, for, unlike the ordinary Bengali, I cannot make the happiness of family and relatives my primary aim in life. Under these circumstances there is no way out for you except to consider my ideal as your ideal and find your happiness in the success of my appointed work. One thing more. Many of those with whom you are living at present are our elders. Do not get angry with them even if they say harsh or unfair things. And do not believe that everything they say is what they mean or is intended to hurt you. Words often come out in anger, without thought. It is no good holding on to them. If you find it absolutely impossible to stay on, I shall tell Girish Babu; your grandfather can come and stay with you while I am at the Congress.

I am going to Midnapur today. On my return I shall make the necessary arrangements here, and then proceed to Surat. That will probably be on the 15th or 16th. I shall be back on the 2nd of January.

Yours

10

23 Scott's Lane,

Calcutta,

17th Feb. [1907]

Dear Mrinalini,

I have not written to you for a long time. This is my eternal failing; if you do not pardon me out of your own goodness, what shall I do? What is ingrained in one does not go out in a day. Perhaps it will take me the whole of this life to correct this fault.

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I was to come on the 8th January, but I could not. This did not happen of my own accord. I had to go where God took me. This time I did not go for my own work; it was for His work that I went. The state of my mind has undergone a change. But of this I shall not speak in this letter. Come here, and I shall tell you what is to be told. But there is only one thing which must be said now and that is that from now on I no longer am the master of my own will. Like a puppet I must go wherever God takes me; like a puppet I must do whatever He makes me do. It will be difficult for you to grasp the meaning of these words just now, but it is necessary to inform you, otherwise my movements may cause you regret and sorrow. You may think that in my work I am neglecting you, but do not do so. Already I have done you many wrongs and it is natural that this should have displeased you. But I am no longer free. From now on you will have to understand that all I do depends not on my will but is done at the command [adesh] of God. When you come here, you will understand the meaning of my words. I hope that God will show you the Light He has shown me in His infinite Grace. But that depends on His Will. If you wish to share my life and ideal you must strive to your utmost so that, on the strength of your ardent desire. He may in His Grace reveal the path to you also. Do not let anyone see this letter, for what I have said is extremely secret. I have not spoken about this to anyone but you; I am forbidden to do so. This much for today.

Your husband

P.S. I have written to Sarojini about household matters. When you see the letter you will understand that it is unnecessary to write to you separately about them.

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11

23 Scott's Lane,

Calcutta,

21-2-08

Dearest Mrinalini,

As there will be a delay in my obtaining my salary from the College I have borrowed Rs 50 from Radha Kumud Mukherjee and am sending it. I asked Abinash to have it sent. He ought to have sent it by wire, but he forgot to send it in your name. Take the rent money from this and after keeping aside something for mother, pay off some of the debt. Next month I will get my salary for February and January, three hundred rupees. Then we can pay off the rest of the debt.

I will not say anything of what I wrote in my last letter. I will tell you everything when you come. I have got permission and cannot avoid speaking. Enough for today.

Your husband

12

[Fragmentary undated letter-draft found among

Sri Aurobindo's papers.]

I have not written you a letter for a long time. I believe there may soon be a great change in our life. If so, if that happens we will be free from all want. We wait on the will of the Mother. Within me as well the final transformation is taking place. The Mother's inspiration has become very compact. Once this transformation is complete, the descent stable, our separation cannot continue any more. For the day of the yogasiddhi is coming near. After that will be the How of the entire body. Tomorrow or the day after a sign will manifest itself. After that I will be able to see you.

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13

[Fragmentary undated letter-draft found among

Sri Aurobindo's papers.]

Mrinalini,

I received a letter from you some time ago. I have not answered it. For some time I have been in a jadavat [inert yogic] state and all kinds of work and writing have been impossible. Today some impulsion has come and I can answer your letter.

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What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world's history is not a teaching,

not even a revelation: it is a decisive action

direct from the Supreme.

–The Mother

As a Teacher

Sri Aurobindo was loved and highly revered by his students at Baroda College, not only for his profound knowledge of English literature and his brilliant and often original interpretations of English poetry, but for his saintly character and gentle and gracious manners. There was a magnetism in his personality, and an impalpable aura of a lofty ideal and a mighty purpose about him, which left a deep impression upon all who came in contact with him, particularly upon young hearts and unsophisticated minds. Calm and reserved, benign and benevolent, he easily became the centre of respectful attention wherever he happened to be. To be close to him was to be quieted and quickened: to listen to him was to be fired and inspired. Indeed, his presence radiated something which was at once enlivening and exalting. His power sprang from his unshakable peace, and the secret of his hold on men lay in his utter self- effacement. His greatness was like the gentle breath of spring invisible but irresistible, it touched all that was bare and bleak around him to a splendour of renewed life and creative energy.

When Professor Littledale went on leave in 1898 Sri Aurobindo was appointed professor of English. In 1899 he spoke on Oxford and Cambridge on the occasion of the Baroda College Social Gathering. In the year 1900 Principal Tait asked the Maharaja to appoint Sri Aurobindo as permanent professor of English in the Baroda College. In his proposal the principal spoke highly of his work and ability. The Maharaja granted the request. Sri Aurobindo's pay was raised to Rs.360. Unlike his brother Manmohan (also a professor in English) Sri Aurobindo never prepared himself for the class with elaborate notes.

About his career as a professor Sri Aurobindo said in the course of a talk: "I was not so conscientious a professor as

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Manmohan. I never used to look at the notes and sometimes my explanations did not agree with them at all. I was professor of English and sometimes of French. What was surprising to me was that students used to take down everything verbatim and mug it up by heart. Such a thing would never have happened in England. There [at Baroda] the students besides taking my notes used to get notes of some professor from Bombay, especially if any of them was , to be an examiner.

"Once I was giving a lecture on Southey's Life of Nelson. My lecture was not in agreement with the notes. So the students remarked that it was not at all like what was found in the notes. I replied: I have not read the notes-in any case they are all rubbish! I could never go to the minute details. I read and left my mind to do what it could. That is why I could never become a scholar. Up to the age of fifteen I was known as a very promising scholar in St. Paul's. After fifteen I lost that reputation. The teachers used to say that I had become lazy and was deteriorating because I was reading novels and poetry only; at examination time I used to prepare a little. But now and then when I wrote Greek and Latin verse my teachers used to lament that I was not utilising my remarkable gifts because of my laziness.

"When I went up for Scholarship at the King's College, Cambridge, Oscar Browning remarked that he had not seen such remarkable papers before."

The reminiscences of some of his students, reproduced below, are very interesting inasmuch as they throw some authentic light upon the way he lived at Baroda and did his teaching at the college:

Letter of Sanker Balwant Didmishe dated 18 September 1967 (Translated from Marathi)

I was in Inter in 1905. Sri Aravind was teaching Burke's French Revolution. As his method of teaching consisted in

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going to the roots, one could never forget what he taught, even though the whole text was not completed. His mastery of the English language was phenomenal. Sometimes he examined our composition books. He wrote on them such remarks as "Fit for Standard III" and "How have you come to the College?"

"I was in the B.A. Class in 1906. At that time he was giving us (students of Jr. B.A. with voluntary English) notes on English literature. The College started at 11.00 a.m., but Sri Aravind Babu came exactly at 11.30, went straight to his room and began teaching. We eight students used to sit in his office. Before beginning, he would ask us to read seven or eight lines from the previous day; then his dictation and our writing commenced. While dictating he sat on the chair and looked at the photo of Principal Tait on the wall in front. He had no books or notes with him; everything was extempore. This procedure went on for one and a half hours. These notes were on the Augustan Age of English literature.

That same year agitation began in Bengal and his attention turned to it. He went on leave and the Bande Mataram paper was founded. We were subscribing to it in the College Reading Room. After his return from leave we asked if he was going away. He replied in the negative, but it was certain that he was leaving. We, therefore, thought of giving him a send-off. Principal Clarke declined to permit the use of the College Hall, so we decided to have a photograph taken and refreshments served in the studio of the Vivid Kala Mandir, which was in Pawar's Wada opposite Ramji Mandir. Three group photographs were taken there:

(1) Sri Aravind with Sr. B.A. Eng. Vol. students

(2) Sri Aravind with Jr. B.A. Eng. Vol. students

(3) Sri Aravind with French students.

There, of course, while speaking, he told us that he was going and reprimanded us for asking for the use of the Central Hall, as if there was no other place. Of those in the

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Baroda College

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Sri Aurobindo with the students of his French class, Baroda

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second group I was sitting at the feet of Sri Aravind Babu. My dress at that time consisted of a long coat, Hungarian cap and dhoti. Sri Aravind Babu used to wear English dress — coat, waistcoat and pants but on his head a white turban [rumāl or pheta], with an embroidered border. It was not customary at that time for students to go to his residence and so we did not go to the bungalow.

Then, after the break-up of the Congress at Surat, he came to Baroda for five or six days to speak on behalf of the Extremist party. There four lectures were delivered in the Bankaneer Theatre. We used to go and sit two hours before the time. His dress then was Bengali dhoti, khamis (shirt) and a shawl wrapped around him, but nothing on his head.

One story which I heard:

While taking tea in the morning in a group with His Highness in Kashmir, he put a question and answered it himself. Seeing the mehatar doing his work of sweeping, he put the question: "Who is happy in this camp?" Answer: "The Maharaja as he has the company of the Maharani and next this mehatar, as his wife is also here with him". When this tale was carried to His Highness, he enjoyed a hearty laugh.

Another hearsay story is that after the Delhi Darbar incident, the letter which was sent to Lord Curzon was drafted by Sri Aravind Babu.

Both these stories are matters of hearsay.

The buggy in which he went to the College from Khaserao Saheb's bungalow had purple glass panes.

I have no more information than this."

The Baroda College Golden Jubilee Commemoration Volume (Ed. Prof. A.K. Trivedi [Bombay: Times of India press, 1933]) contains the. following statements by other students of Sri Aurobindo.

"Mr. Littledale was succeeded [as Professor of English] by Mr. Arwind Ghosh, now of all India reputation and whose

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command over English was second to that of none, not even to that of an Englishman.

The speech he delivered at one of the annual social gatherings was a piece of chaste and polished English, the like of which I have never heard. It occupied only three pages of the College Miscellany, but it set an example in classical English. Professor Ghosh gave us essays to write. He corrected all the essays. He used to teach us that every sentence should logically follow from the preceding sentence and similarly every para, should logically follow from the preceding one. Correct composition leads to correct thinking." (Mr. M.H. Kantavala, p. 24)

"Professors Manubhai and Arvind Ghose, no doubt, held the students spell bound during the time of their lectures; but they did not mix with the students as much as Masani, Tapidas and Naik....

Professor Ghose too dictated notes to the students and in doing so, asked the students to give out to him the last sentence of his previous notes and would then continue his notes further." (Mr. M.K. Sharangpani, pp. 39-40)

"Mr. Aravind Ghose who joined service about 1894 also used to grace the Debating Society's meetings with his presence. Once or twice he was accompanied by Mr. K.G. Deshpande, B.A., Bar-at-Law.... Rarely they addressed the meeting but when they did it was really an intellectual feast that seemed to us.

Later on Ghose was appointed Lecturer in French and English. His tutorial work was much appreciated. He took an active part in the literary activities of the College boys." (Mr. N.K. Dikshit, p. 42)

"He was revered by all, but being by nature shy and reserved was not easily accessible. His reading of English Texts was very simple and did not create an impression in students' minds of his Rhetorics, but we were all stunned at

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his genius when he dictated extemporaneous notes in a very lucid style. One sentence followed another naturally. I owe to him and his notes on "Pride and Prejudice" for my effort in writing a Gujarati novel. While we were in the B.A. class, Mr. S.C. Mallick, a friend to Prof. Ghose, delivered us a lecture laying stress on Swadeshi, and many of us took to the Swadeshi vow from that date. Prof. Ghose also spoke and we were enamoured of his Rhetorics full of sentiments and ardour. Every syllable that he spoke was full of patriotic spirit." (Mr. R.S. Dalal, p. 46)

Sri K.M. Munshi, ex-governor of the Uttar Pradesh, who was one of the students of Sri Aurobindo at the Baroda College, writes:

"My own contact with Sri Aurobindo dates back to 1902 when, after passing the Matriculation examination, I joined the Baroda College. Though previously I had, only on occasions, the privilege of being in personal contact with him, the Aurobindonian legend in the College filled me with reverence, and it was with awe that I hung upon his words whenever he came to College as. Professor of English."

In Bhavan’s Journal (Vol. VIII, No. 26, 22 July 1962) Munshi reminisced about his former teacher:

"Prof. Arvind Ghosh, later to be known as Sri Aurobindo, was our Professor of English, though at times he acted as private Secretary to Sayajirao III, the Gaekwad of Baroda.

To the students of our College, Prof. Ghosh was a figure enveloped in mystery. He was reputed to be a poet, a master of many languages and in touch with Russian nihilists. Many stories of his doings were whispered from mouth to mouth among the students almost with awe.

The Russo-Japanese War, declared in 1904, shook some

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of us in the College to our very depth. Port Arthur fell to the Japanese in January 1905. Admiral Togo destroyed the Russian Fleet in May. Asia had successfully challenged the mastery of Europe!

Prof. Ghosh, as our acting Principal, declared a prize in an essay-cum-debate competition on "Japan and the Japanese"....

Under the influence of Prof. Arvind Ghosh, which, however, was remotely felt through Mohanlal Pandya, an employee of the Agricultural Department of Baroda State, a group of young students in the College were highly agitated over the question [of the partition of Bengal]. We heard of the echoes of coming army movements to overthrow the British and of plans of terrorist activities by secret societies.

We became ardent revolutionaries. We talked of Garibaldi and the French Revolution, and hoped to win India's freedom by a few hundred drachms of picric acid....

I remember only one occasion when I directly talked to Prof. Arvind Ghosh. "How can nationalism be developed?" I asked. He pointed to a wall-map of India and said something to this effect:

Look at that map. Learn to find in it the portrait of Bharatmata. The cities, mountains, rivers and forests are the materials which go to make up Her body. The people inhabiting the country are the cells which go to make up Her living tissues. Our literature is Her memory and speech. The spirit of Her culture is Her soul. The happiness and freedom of Her children is Her salvation. Behold Bharat as a living Mother, meditate upon Her and worship Her in the nine-fold way of Bhakti....

During the Partition movement. Prof. Arvind Ghosh resigned his post of the professor in our College. While leaving Baroda, he gave us a stirring speech, the substance of which I noted down on the spot. The summary of that speech and his messianic utterance, the Uttarpara Speech. remained the source of inspiration for me for years."

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Here are some interesting extracts from the memoirs of R.N. Patkar.

"Being in close contact with this great man I sometimes used to take liberty with him. While I was in Matriculation class, I once asked him how I should improve my English, what author I should read and study. I had read some portion of Macaulay's "Lives of Great Men" and I was fascinated by his style. I asked him if I should read Macaulay. Then, as was usual with him he smiled and replied, 'Do not be anybody's slave, but be your own master. By reading Macaulay or any other writer you will never be like him. You will not be a Macaulay but a faint echo of Macaulay. You will be but a copy to be derided by the world, but never an original. Therefore you may read any good author carefully, but should think for yourself and form your own judgment. It is likely you may differ from the views of the writer. You should think for yourself and cultivate a habit of writing and in this way you will be the master of your own style.' "

Describing Sri Aurobindo's usual method of. teaching, Mr. Patkar writes:

"In the beginning he used to give a series of introductory lectures for initiating the student into the subject-matter of the text.... After preparing the student to understand the text... he used to start reading the text... stopping wherever necessary to explain the meaning of difficult and obscure sentences. Then... dictate general lectures bearing on the various aspects pertaining to the text.

"The method must have yielded salutary results, especially when applied to a classic like Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, which Sri Aurobindo taught in 1902. After the first years, Sri Aurobindo seems to have taken the measure of his wards and they too seem to have made the most of their exceptional opportunities, thereby turning

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the classes into adventures in the realms of ideas and values.

"The influence Sri Aurobindo exercised on his students was not of course confined to the class-room, important as it was; he was, besides, the Chairman of the Baroda College Union and Debating Society, and this brought him into contact, though less frequently, with the entire student body. He had to introduce visiting lecturers to the Union; he had to regulate the course of debates in such a way that the best in the students came out and they didn't miss the spirit of intellectual inquiry in the excitement of the moment. His own speeches though they were not many were doubtless memorable events in the history of the Union. "He was never an orator", says Mr. Patkar recapitulating the scene, "but a speaker of a very high order, and... the audience used to listen to him with rapt attention. Without any gestures or the movements of the limbs, he stood... and the language used to flow like a stream from his lips with a natural ease and melody that kept his audience almost spell-bound." Without the impact of the speaker's personality and the magic of his living voice, it must be next to impossible to form a measure of Sri Aurobindo's power of public speech on the basis of a reported summary alone. Even so, a speech like the one he delivered before the College Social Gathering in 1899, and later printed in the Baroda College Miscellany, can give us some idea at least of the content and quality of his speeches at the Baroda College. The subject is Oxford and Cambridge, and what Indian Universities should learn from them. What does life at Oxford or Cambridge mean to a student who is privileged to be in residence for three years? Sri Aurobindo warms up to the answer and finds the right words:

"He goes up from the restricted life of his home and school and finds himself in surroundings which with astonishing rapidity expand his intellect, strengthen his

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character, develop his social faculties, force out all his abilities and turn him in three years from a boy into a man. His mind ripens in the contact with minds which meet from all parts of the country and have been brought up in many various kinds of trainings, his unwholesome eccentricities wear away and the unsocial, egoistic elements of character are to a large extent discouraged. He moves among ancient and venerable buildings, the mere age and beauty of which are in themselves an education. He has the Union which has trained so many great orators and debaters, has been the first trial ground of so many renowned intellects. He has, too, the athletics clubs organised with a perfection unparalleled elsewhere, in which, if he has the physique and the desire for them, he may find pursuits which are also in themselves an education. The result is that he who entered the university a raw student, comes out of it a man and a gentleman, accustomed to think of great affairs and fit to move in cultivated society, and he remembers his College and University with affection, and in after days if he meets with those who have studied with him, he feels attracted towards them as to men with whom he has a natural brotherhood. This is the social effect. I should like the Colleges and Universities of India also to exercise, to educate by social influences as well as those which are merely academical and to create the feeling among their pupils that they belong to the community, that they are children of one mother...

The academy (college or university) as a hallowed place that facilitates emotional integration, as a nursery for the children of the mother (Mother India), and as a means of building up a noble race, the future humanity in India: such, indeed, was the university ideal that Sri Aurobindo wished to set before his student-audience, and he thought too that, even with all our limitations, we could make an effort to realise the ideal. But Sri Aurobindo hastened to remind his hearers that the college or the university

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couldn't be expected to do everything, not even to give a 'complete' education:

"'But the University cannot and does not pretend to complete a man's education; it merely gives some materials to his hand or points out certain paths he may tread, and it says to him, 'Here are the materials I have given into your. hands, it is for you to make of them what you can'; or 'These are the paths I have equipped you to travel; it is yours to tread them to the end, and by your success in them justify me before the world.' "

Words, words even the most eloquent words have effect on the audience only in proportion to the power with which they are charged by the speaker's personality. Sri Aurobindo stood before his eager-eyed audience composed largely of Gujarati and Marathi youths as a Bengali who had mastered, like Kacha in the asuric world, the lore of the West, but who had rejected (as Kacha did Devayani's) the blandishments of Western civilisation; they saw him as a scholar steeped in Greek, Latin, English and French classics but who nevertheless incarnated the spirit of Indian culture, the oneness in the Mother. They could sense that Sri Aurobindo's words were more than words; they were pointers to action, a call to realisation; and the words went home.

But of course Sri Aurobindo could not help contrasting Indian educational conditions with conditions at St. Paul's or King's. The puny stature of the typical Indian under- graduate must have sorely pained Sri Aurobindo. How true was it of the Indian scholar, as it was true (though the context is different) of Dryden's Achitophel:

A fiery soul, which working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy body to decay:

And o'erinformed the tenement of clay.

The average Indian scholar didn't care for physical culture,

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he had no joy in the art of robust and healthy living; on the contrary, becoming a spectacled bookworm at a tender age, he was given to excessive intellectual inbreeding. What wonder, then, that his general outlook was severely pessimistic in consequence? The Indian scholar ripened fast all too fast and there an end! What Sri Aurobindo wrote about the "cultured Bengali" was thus capable of a general application also:

The cultured Bengali begins life with a physical temperament already delicate and high-strung. He has the literary constitution with its femineity and acute nervousness. Subject this to a cruel strain when it is tenderest and needs the most careful rearing, to the wicked and wantonly cruel strain of instruction through a foreign tongue; put it under the very worst system of training; add enormous academical labour, immense official drudgery in an unhealthy climate and constant mental application...'

and need one be surprised by the results? Sri Aurobindo pondered over all these engines of our limitation, and sought the key that would turn limitations-into opportunities, and frustration into triumph.

Sri Aurobindo's 9 articles in the 'New Lamps for Old' series¹ and the 7 (also anonymous) that followed, from the issue of 16 July to that of 27 August 1894, on the personality and achievement of Bankim Chandra are among the earliest exhibits that we have of Sri Aurobindo's English prose style. Excepting in their boldness of thought and energy of expression, they do not betray the age of the author (he was barely 22 then). Already we notice in them the sinuosity and balance, the imagery and colour, the trenchancy and sarcasm, that were to distinguish Sri

¹"This title ('New Lamps for Old')... is not used in the sense of the Aladdin story, but was intended to imply the offering of new lights to replace the old and faint reformist lights of the Congress." (Sri Aurobindo, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 13)

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Aurobindo's later and maturer writings. He argues with cogency and subtlety; he describes with picturesqueness and particularity; and he denounces, if denounce he must, with pitiless deadly accuracy. This about the 'civilians' of almost a century ago:

"A shallow schoolboy stepping from a cramming establishment to the command of high and difficult affairs, can hardly be expected to give us anything magnificent or princely. Still less can it be expected when the sons of small tradesmen are suddenly promoted from the counter to govern great provinces.... Bad in training, void of culture, in instruction poor, it [the best education men of that class can get in England] is in plain truth a sort of education that leaves him with all his imperfections on his head, unmannerly, uncultivated, unintelligent."

In his speech before the Baroda College Union referred to on an earlier page, Sri Aurobindo had painted the bright side of British education and here we have the antithesis! Sri Aurobindo is speaking, not of the finest flowers of British education, but of the humdrum or worse than humdrum that found a way to India. "They are really very ordinary men," said Sri Aurobindo, "and not only ordinary men but ordinary Englishmen types of the middle-class or Philistines... with the narrow hearts and commercial habit of mind peculiar to that sort of people." Nor is the Anglicised Babu spared in the least: he is the man of endless perorations in the Congress, he "frolics in the abysmal fatuity" of interpellations on the floor of the Legislative Council, and he ekes out his "scanty wardrobe with the cast-off rags and thread-bare leavings" of his English masters. The educational system in India was "the most ingeniously complete machine for murder that human stupidity ever invented, and murder not only of a man's body but of a man's soul". Of a certain Mr. Munro (alas, oblivion has all but swallowed him up, but in his day

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he seems to have done some injury to Bankim Chandra), all that is said is that he "had the temper of a badly educated hyena!" As for Bankim himself, here is Sri Aurobindo's splendid summing up:

"And when Posterity comes to crown with her praises the Makers of India, she will place her most splendid laurel not on the sweating temples of a place-hunting politician nor on the narrow forehead of a noisy social reformer but on the serene brow of that gracious Bengali [Bankim] who never clamoured for place or power, but did his work in silence for love of his work, even as nature does, and just because he had no aim but to give out the best that was in him, was able to create a language, a literature and a nation."

He was deeply stirred by the creations of Bankim....

As for Bankim, there are two poems: the shorter 'Saraswati with the Lotus' and the longer 'Bankim Chandra Chatterji'. "Thy tears fall fast, O mother" begins the first, the emotion held taut in its six poignant lines; but the second is more elaborate:

O master of delicious words! the bloom

Of chompuk and the breath of king-perfume

Have made each musical sentence with the noise

Of women's ornaments and sweet household joys...

All nature in a page, no pleasing show

But men more real than the friends we know...

His nature kingly was and as a god

In large serenity and light he trod

His daily way, yet beauty, like soft flowers

Wreathing a hero's sword, ruled all his hours.

Thus moving in these iron times and drear,

Barren of bliss and robbed of golden cheer

He sowed the desert with ruddy-hearted rose,

The sweetest voice that ever spoke in prose.

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Sri Aurobindo translated some portions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, some dramas of Kalidasa, the Nitishataka of Bhartrihari, some poems of Vidyapati and Chandidas etc. into English. Once, when R.C. Dutt, the well-known civilian, came to Baroda at the invitation of the Maharaja, he somehow came to know about Sri Aurobindo's translations and expressed his desire to see them. Sri Aurobindo showed them to him (though not without reluctance, for he was by nature shy and reticent about himself), and Dutt was so much struck by their high quality that he said to Sri Aurobindo: "If I had seen your translations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata before, I would not have published mine.¹ I can now very well see that, by the side of your magnificent translations, mine appear as mere child's play."

Sri Aurobindo wrote many English poems during his stay at Baroda, and also began some which he finished later. His first book of poems. Songs to Myrtilla and Other Poems, was published there for private circulation. It contained many poems written in England in his teens, and five² written at Baroda. Urvasie, a long poem, was also written at Baroda and published for private circulation.³

Soon after his arrival in India, Sri Aurobindo was invited by his Cambridge friend K.G. Deshpande, who was then English editor of the Indu Prakash of Bombay, to write articles on the political situation in the country. These appeared serially under the challenging caption 'New Lamps for Old' from 7 August 1893 to 6 March 1894, but they did not carry Sri Aurobindo's name. Introducing the series to the readers, K.G. Deshpande wrote in the issue of 7 August:

¹  R.C. Dutt's translations of the two Epics were published in England and highly acclaimed.

²  These five were: One on Madhusudan Dutt, one on Bankim Chandra Chatterji, a sonnet on his maternal grandfather. Rajnarayan Bose. and two English adaptations from Chandidas, the reputed Bengali mystic poet whom he read along with Vidyapati and others at Baroda.

³ Love and Death, a long poem, and the drama, Perseus the Deliverer, belong also to Baroda period.

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"Hypocrisy has been the besetting sin of our political agitation. Oblique vision is the fashion. True, matter of fact, honest criticism is very badly needed.... The questions at issue are momentous. It is the making or the unmaking of a nation. We have therefore secured a gentleman of great literary talents, of liberal culture and of considerable English experience, well-versed in the art of writing and willing, at great personal inconvenience and probable misrepresentation, to give out his views in no uncertain voice, and,... in a style and diction peculiarly his own. We... assure them [our readers] that they will find in those articles matter that will set them thinking and steel their patriotic souls."

What was unusual about the articles was the fusion of a young man's intolerance and idealism and a wise man's deep and abiding wisdom. Sri Aurobindo began the series with the well-known, yet none the less always startling, question: "If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into a ditch?" It was some nine years since the Indian National Congress had commenced its activities with a blazing fanfare of trumpets and deafening bugle-sounds, but where was the Promised Land?

"The walls of the Anglo-Indian Jericho stand yet without a breach, and the dark spectre of Penury draws her robe over the land in greater volume and with an ampler sweep."

What had gone wrong, then? Almost everything! The indictment is direct, at point-blank range as it were:

"I say, of the Congress, then, this that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and wholeheartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders; in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed."

Hadn't there been "a little too much talk about the

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blessings of British rule, and the inscrutable Providence which has laid us in the maternal, or more properly the step-maternal, bosom of just and benevolent England?" Its grandiose name notwithstanding, the Congress was not a popular body, its leaders were apt to swear by the false political gods of British manufacture, and they were only too ready to make a virtue of timidity, mere good manners and the disinclination to tell the direct truth. How could a set of complacent comfortabe middle-class individuals speak and act on behalf of the millions comprising the proletariat? Pherozeshah Mehta and his friends might think that the proletariat was not important, but the heart of the matter was that without "the elevation and enlightenment of the proletariat" nothing really could be achieved. Sri Aurobindo therefore urged that only a mass awakening an organisation of the entire power of the country could redeem the time, cause discomfiture to the alien rulers and usher in national independence.

While charging the generality of British officials in India with rudeness and arrogance and meanness, while describing their conduct as that of "a small coterie of masters surrounded by a nation of Helots", Sri Aurobindo never- the-less exhorted his countrymen, neither to nurse hatred for the foreigner nor merely cringe before him, but rather to seek strength and the clue to salvation within:

"Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.... If we were not dazzled by the artificial glare of English prestige, we should at once acknowledge that these men are not worth being angry with.... Our appeal, the appeal of every high-souled and self-respecting nation, ought not to be to the opinion of the Anglo-Indians, no, nor yet to the British sense of justice, but to our own reviving sense of manhood, to our own sincere fellow-feeling... with the silent and suffering people of India."

In another place, Sri Aurobindo remarked that the

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Indian patriot had more to learn from the French republican experiment (or even the Athenian) than from the British:

"But if we carry our glance across the English Channel, we shall witness a very different and more animating spectacle. Gifted with a lighter, subtler, and clearer mind than their insular neighbours, the French people have moved irresistibly towards a social and not a political development."

Sri Aurobindo then showed that if, like the British, we had laid the foundations of social collapse, we had also, like the French, learned to enact the drama of political incompetence. Our national effort, then, "must contract a social and popular tendency before it can hope to be great and fruitful".

The first two articles in the series, with their white-heat brilliance and uncompromising hammer-blows, caused dismay and indignation in Congress circles, and Mahadev Govind Ranade warned the proprietor of the Indu Prakash that, should the series continue in the same strain, he would be prosecuted for sedition. As requested by the proprietor, the original plan was abandoned,-but at K.G. Deshpande's instance the series was continued on a much more subdued key, the articles appeared at long intervals, and then ceased altogether. As Ranade was rather anxious to meet the writer of the sensational articles, Sri Aurobindo had an interview at Bombay for half an hour when the veteran leader tried to persuade the firebrand to turn to some less incendiary, but more constructive, cause like jail reform!

When Sri Aurobindo went to prison he remembered Ranade's advice and ironically wrote afterwards that he had begun the prison-reform by going to prison!

The necessity to tone down the "New Lamps for Old" articles in the Indu Prakash to the point of pointlessness, doling out doses of the philosophy of politics instead of outlining the rites of sacrificial purification by blood and

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fire, made Sri Aurobindo withdraw into a shell for the time being, hoping for a more favourable opportunity for the exposition of revolutionary theory and its translation into practice.

He looked about him, and he could see that the times were not propitious. In a poem he wrote soon after. Lines on Ireland: 1896, under cover of describing the abasement and agony of Ireland after Parnell's fall and death and the defeat at the 1895 polls of Gladstone's move to grant Home Rule, Sri Aurobindo managed by sleight of hand to picture the Indian predicament too, the flight of idealism, the hugging of slavery, the loss of self-respect, the reign of sloth, the peace of the grave. The subject is Ireland, but by poetic implication or dhwani, we are made to think of India more than of Ireland:

"O mutability of human merit!

How changed, how fallen from her ancient spirit!

She that was Ireland, Ireland now no more,

In beggar's weeds behold at England's door...

Yet thine own self a little understand,

Unhappy country, and be wise at length.

An outward weakness doing deeds of strength

Amazed the nations, but a power within

Directed, like effective spirit unseen.

Behind the mask of trivial forms, a source

And fund of tranquil and collected force....

But thou to thine own self disloyal, hast

Renounced the help divine, turning thy past

To idle legends...

Therefore effective wisdom, skill to bend

All human things to one predestined end

Renounce thee...."

Instead of a god-anointed leader, the nation has a "self- appointed crew"

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... for seldom men refuse

Credence, when mediocrity multiplied

 Equals itself with genius —

that is courageous enough to effect the "country's ruin"! But this couldn't last long, for although for a little while the gods might permit these little men to thrive in their pride, the time must come when they would be sent packing to the "loud limbo of futilities". The poem was evidently an attempt on Sri Aurobindo's part to achieve a katharsis of the temporary feeling of frustration that may have grated upon his consciousness.

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ARCHIVAL NOTES

MORE ON SRI AUROBINDO AS A TEACHER

... We have recently found, in a notebook used by Sri Aurobindo at about the time he wrote the lectures (i.e. about 1898), lists of authors and poems which seem to be either selections for a course he was giving or the contents of a compilation he intended to publish. One of the lists consists of the names of a number of mostly minor eighteenth-century poets, many of whom are mentioned in the written lectures. But more prominence is given to three major poets: Keats, Milton and Dryden. Sri Aurobindo's lists of their works, entitled collectively "English Extracts", run as follows: Keats: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"; "On the Grasshopper and Cricket"; "When I have Fears..."; "Staffa"; Endymion "Hymn to Pan", "Beneath my palm trees..."; "On Fame"; "On the Sonnet"; "On a Dream"; "To the Nile"; "La Belle Dame sans Merci"; "On Ailsa Rock"; "In a drear-nighted December..."; "Ben Nevis"; "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; "To Homer"; "To Fancy"; "On Melancholy"; "The Human Seasons"; "Ode to Maia", "Ode to Psyche"; "Ode to Autumn"; "Ode to a Nightingale" (omitting the stanza, "Fade far away..."); 'Time's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb...";"Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art". Milton: "On the Death of a Fair Infant"; "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" — "It was the winter wild..."; "On Shakespeare"; "L'Allegro"; "II Penseroso"; "Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester"; "Nymphs and Shepherds, dance no more..." [from Arcades}; "The star that bids the shepherd fold...", "Sabrina fair..." [both from Comus}; "To Cyriack Skinner"; "Lycidas"; "When the Assault Was Intended on the City"; "To the Lord General Cromwell"; "On his Deceased Wife"; "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont"; "On his Blindness"; "It is not virtue, wisdom, valour, wit..."; "While their hearts were jocund and sublime...".

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Dryden: "The longest tyranny that ever swayed... Had been admired by none but savage eyes" [lines 1-20 of "To Dr. Charleton"]; "The Tears of Amynta"; "St. Cecilia's Day"; "Alexander's Feast"; "Great God of Love..." (Song to Chloris) (i.e. "A Song to a Fair Young Lady"]; "Chloe and Amyntas" ["Rondelay"]; "Fair, sweet and young..." ["A Song"].

Baroda Reading

... Dinendra Kumar Roy, who lived with Sri Aurobindo as his companion and Bengali tutor in 1898 and 1899, writes that Sri Aurobindo regularly received books "by railway parcel" from two Bombay firms. All the books would soon be read and he would place fresh orders. Sri Aurobindo was in the habit of listing in his notebooks titles of books that interested him. Such lists, which include books in French, German, Greek, etc., as well as English, show his tastes to be very decidedly literary. A similar impression is given by a collection donated by Sri Aurobindo to the Bengal National College shortly after he left Baroda in 1906. Of a total of 155 books, 79 are works of English (and American) poetry and 21 of other forms of English literature. 21 books are biographies of English men of letters and 7 works of other literatures. There are 8 works on history or geography (travel), and 5 books about philosophy (but not one philosophical text). Among the remaining volumes there is no single book on science or mathematics.

Some of the books in the National College collection contain marginal notes. These are mostly glosses on hard words, e.g. this note on "Codille" in Pope's Moral Essays: "in quadrille when those who defended the pool made more tricks than those who stood the game (ombre & his partner who held the king he called for) won the codille"; or this one on the word in the Nitishataka: "boiled rice of fine kind/ – food, boiled rice". Other notes explain biographical or historical allusions, like this

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one on "Linian", mentioned in Chaucer's Clerk's Prologue: "Giovanni di Lignano/Prof. of Canon Law at Bologna 1363 died 1383."

The National College collection includes two Sanskrit literary texts. In another set of books owned by Sri Aurobindo in Baroda there are some other works in that language as well as a large number of Bengali books and bound periodicals. The Bengali books include Ananda Math, the sonnets of Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Sri Chaitanya Charitamrita.

During the years 1900 and 1901 Sri Aurobindo was in the habit of noting down the books he was studying and sometimes also the number of pages read each day. These notes give us some idea of the diversity and rapidity of his reading. In September 1900 Sri Aurobindo was engrossed in a Sanskrit text of the Mahabharata. On the fourth of September, besides correcting his class's examination papers, he read the 63 ślokas of sūktas  53 and 54 of the Virataparva. He had read up to this point (i.e. 54 sūktas containing 1533 ślokas} in just eight days. In three more days he read twice over the whole first part ("Purvamegha") of Kalidasa's famous Meghaduta or Cloud-Messenger.

On 3 January 1901 Sri Aurobindo began another poem of Kalidasa, his epic the Raghuvansha. At the same time he was studying other works in Sanskrit, English and German. The following is a verbatim extract from one of Sri Aurobindo's notebooks:

 

¹ Commentary.

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¹A German play, written in 1852 by Gustav Freytag (1816-1895).

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On the Congress platform he had stood up as a champion of left-wing thought and a fearless advocate of independence at a time when most of the leaders, with their tongues in their cheeks, would talk only of colonial self-government. He had undergone incarceration with perfect equanimity... when I came to Calcutta in 1913, Aurobindo was already a legendary figure. Rarely have I seen people speak of a leader with such rapturous enthusiasm and many were the anecdotes of this great man, some of them probably true, which travelled from mouth to mouth.

— Subhas Chandra Bose, An Indian Pilgrim

Political Life

Life at Baroda was full, though the political career that followed was like a tornado.

During these years (the years of teaching at Baroda) Sri Aurobindo used to pass his vacations in Bengal, especially the second vacation which generally coincided with the Puja holidays. His first visits to Bengal after his return to India helped him to gauge the temper of the people, and he also came into contact with certain individuals, certain ideas, certain trends, that were working, however obscurely, however tardily, for the liberation of the country from the nightmare death-in-life of alien bureaucratic rule.

In 1899 or possibly 1898 Jatindranath Banerjee (afterwards Niralamb Swamy) came to Baroda for military training in the Baroda army in order to prepare himself for revolutionary work. Sri Aurobindo, with the help of Khaserao and Madhavrao Jadhav, got him admitted to the army for training. Jatin was declared as a U.P. man, not a Bengali. Sri Aurobindo persuaded him to join the revolutionary movement he intended to launch in Bengal. Jatin agreed.

When he had received adequate military training, Jatin was sent by Sri Aurobindo to Bengal with a clear-cut programme of revolutionary work. Jatin soon managed to establish contact with Barrister P. Mitter, Bibhuti Bhushan Bhattacharya and Mrs. Sarala Ghoshal, who had already started some revolutionary work (ostensibly on the plea that the groups of young men were learning lathi play) on the inspiration of Baron Okakura. Sri Aurobindo himself came to Bengal in 1900 or a little later and met these revolutionaries on Jatin's initiative. About this Sri Aurobindo comments: "I simply kept myself informed of their work. My idea was for an open armed revolution in the whole of India. What they did at that time was very

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childish — things like beating magistrates and so on. Later it turned into terrorism and dacoities, which were not at all my idea or intention." His own idea was "a programme of preparation and action which he thought might occupy a period of 30 years before fruition could become possible". Returning to Baroda, Sri Aurobindo met Mr. Mandavale, a member of a Secret Society in Western India which had as its directing chief a Thakur of the Udaipur State, and took the oath of the Revolutionary Party. This meant Sri Aurobindo making a special journey into Central India to try to win over Indian sub-officers and men in certain regiments to the revolutionary cause.

Probably this same year Barin passed his Entrance Examination. He spent six months with Manmohan at Dacca and then tried to learn agriculture but received no monetary support. He tried to run a tea shop in Patna but there also he did not succeed and so he went to Baroda to stay with Sri Aurobindo.

One day even before he had got up from his bed, Sri Aurobindo found Barin with a dirty canvas bag and very dirty clothes. He exclaimed, "How is it that you are here in this state?" He sent him straight to the bathroom! Even before this time, whenever Sri Aurobindo used to go to. Deoghar, he used to inculcate the revolutionary spirit in Barin. When Barin came to Baroda it was an opportunity to prepare him for the revolutionary work. Soon he became fully infected with the revolutionary fever.

Sri Aurobindo became the secret link between the revolutionary groups in Western and Eastern India. By and by the revolutionary spirit spread in Bengal, especially in the villages and among the common people of whom Sri Aurobindo had written in one of the 'New Lamps for Old' articles of 1893: "The proletariat among us is sunk in ignorance and overwhelmed with distress." The darkness was lifting at last, the stupor was ending. Barin too had found his vocation, and he was now able to translate into action the ideas and programmes of Sri Aurobindo:

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"Barindra's work in Bengal was the organisation in the villages even the most remote of a chain of Samitis, or youth organisations, which would meet under all kinds of pretexts, but with the real aim of providing a civic and political education and opening the eyes of the young to the 'affairs of the nation'.... In smoky little grain shops, on the terraced roofs of private houses, young men would meet to hear about the lives of Mazzini and Garibaldi, to read exhortations from Swami Vivekananda, to listen to the warlike incidents of the Mahabharata and to comments on the Bhagavad Gita. The number of samitis increased daily."

In Maharashtra, under Lokamanya Tilak's unparalleled leadership, political education came to be imparted during the Ganapati Festivals that attracted old and young alike. In course of time, this breeze of revolutionary fervour blew almost all over the subcontinent. One particular feature of the movement was that several of the leaders were either Yogis themselves or disciples of Yogis at least they were men endowed with great strength of character. Men like P. Milter, Satish Mukherji, Bepin Pal and Manoranjan Guha-thakurtha were disciples of the famous Yogi Bejoy Goswami. It was as though the soul of the race had awakened and was throwing up such fine personalities.

The patriotism which fired Sri Aurobindo's being since his boyhood was not a mere love of the country of his birth, and a yearning for its freedom and greatness. It was worship of India, as we have already seen, as the living embodiment of the highest spiritual knowledge, and the repository of the sublimest spiritual achievements of the human race. He had no narrow partisan patriotism that attaches a person to his own country and makes him regard it as the greatest and best. He loved and adored India, because he knew that in the present Chaturyuga (a cycle of four ages: Satya, Treta, Dwapara, and Kali) India was destined to be the custodian of the supreme knowledge, and the leader of the world in the ways of the Spirit — a

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fact which is being more and more realised and acknowledged by the master minds of the present age.¹ He looked upon India as the spiritual battlefield of the world where the final victory over the forces of the Ignorance and darkness would be achieved. The following lines from his The Yoga and Its Objects throw a flood of light on this point and explain his spiritual nationalism:

"God always keeps for Himself a chosen country in which the higher knowledge is, through all chances and dangers, by the few or the many, continually preserved, and for the present, in this Chaturyuga at least, that country is India.... When there is the contracted movement of knowledge, the Yogins in India withdraw from the world and practise Yoga for their own liberation and delight or for the liberation of a few disciples; but when the movement of knowledge again expands and the soul of India expands with it, they come forth once more and work in the world and for the world.... It is only India that can discover the harmony, because it is only by a change not a mere readjustment of present nature that it can be developed, and such a change is not possible except by Yoga. The nature of man and of things is at present a discord, a harmony that has got out of tune. The whole heart and action and mind of man must be changed but from within and not from without, not by political and social institutions, not even by creeds and philosophies, but by realisation of God in ourselves and the world and a remoulding of life by that realisation."

In 1902 Sri Aurobindo was occupied in teaching French and English at the college. Southey's Life of Nelson and Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution were the text books in the first two classes. Sri Aurobindo presided over Sarat Chandra Mallick's lecture in the college.

This year Sri Aurobindo went to Midnapur for the first time during the vacation. There he met Hemchandra Das.

 

¹"India must become dynamic and effect the conquest of the world through her spirituality." -Vivekananda

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There was practice of rifle shooting on Das's lands. It was resolved to form six centres of revolutionary work in Bengal. Jatin Banerjee and Barin accompanied Sri Aurobindo to Midnapur. Jatin had already started an organisation of young men at Calcutta in the compound of P. Mitra. When Sri Aurobindo went to Calcutta, Jatin arranged an interview between the two Sri Aurobindo gave the oath of the revolutionary party to P. Mitra.

Sri Aurobindo later went to Midnapur for a second time and gave the oath to Hemchandra Das who, during the ceremony, held a sword in one hand and the Gita in the other. The content of the oath was to secure the freedom of Mother India at any cost and to declare the secret of the society to no one.

The idea of forming secret revolutionary societies had been in the air in Bengal for a long time. Even Rajnarayan Bose, Sri Aurobindo's grandfather, had started a society which Tagore had joined when young! But these efforts did not result in any achievement. There was a secret society in Maharashtra presided over by Thakur Ramsingh, the Rajput prince. The Bombay branch was managed by a council of five. Sri Aurobindo was able to contact this body and joined it. This was after he had already started his activity in Bengal.

During this year (1902) a society was started at Deoghar under Satyen Bose. The revolutionary spirit was so rampant that even government servants were sympathetic to it and men like Jogendranath Mukherji, a magistrate, actively joined the movement.

From 28 April 1902 to 29 May 1902 Sri Aurobindo was on privilege leave in Bengal. It was mainly for the revolutionary work that Sri Aurobindo visited Bengal during these years.

Sister Nivedita came to Baroda in October of this year. She had identified herself with the political ideology of Vivekananda. She had an ardent aspiration for India's freedom. She had ultimately to sever her connection with

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the Ramakrishna Mission on account of her political activity.

The relation between Sister Nivedita and Sri Aurobindo is not well known and many conjectures and rumours have appeared in the Indian press. We give here in Sri Aurobindo's own words the truth of the matter.

"Then about my relations with Sister Nivedita they were purely in the field of politics. Spirituality or spiritual matters did not enter into them and I do not remember anything passing between us on these subjects when I was with her. Once or twice she showed the spiritual side of her but she was then speaking to someone else who had come to see her while I was there.... I met Sister Nivedita first at Baroda when she came to give some lectures there. I went to receive her at the station and to take her to the house assigned to her; I also accompanied her to an interview she had sought with the Maharaja of Baroda. She had heard of me as one who 'believed in strength and was a worshipper of Kali' by which she meant that she had heard of me as a revolutionary. I knew of her already because I had read and admired her book Kali the Mother. It was in these days that we formed our friendship. After I had started my revolutionary work in Bengal through certain emissaries, I went there personally to see and arrange things myself. I found a number of small groups of revolutionaries that had recently sprung into existence but all scattered and acting without reference to each other, I tried to unite them under a single organisation with the barrister P. Mitra as the leader of the revolution in Bengal and a central council of five persons, one of them being Nivedita.... I had no occasion to meet Nivedita after that until I settled in Bengal as Principal of the National College and the chief editorial writer of the Bande Mataram. By that time I had become one of the leaders of the public movement known first as extremism, then as nationalism, but this gave me no occasion to meet her except once or twice at the Congress, as my collaboration with her was solely in the secret revolutionary field. I

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was busy with my work and she with hers, and no occasion arose for consultations or decisions about the conduct of the revolutionary movement. Later on I began to make time to go and see her occasionally at Bagbazar.

"In one of these visits she informed me that the Government had decided to deport me and she wanted me to go into secrecy or to leave British India and act from outside so as to avoid interruption of my work. There was no question at that time of danger to her; in spite of her political views she had friendly relations with high Government officials and there was no question of her arrest. I told her that I did not think it necessary to accept her suggestion; I would write an open letter in the Karmayogin which, I thought, would prevent this action by the Government. This was done and on my next visit to her she told me that my move had been entirely successful and the idea of deportation had been dropped. The departure to Chandernagore happened later and there was no connection between the two incidents...."¹

Sri Aurobindo took one month's leave from 22 February 1903. The reason for the leave was to patch up the differences that had arisen between Jatin Banerjee and Barin at Calcutta. It appears that Jatin, after his military training at Baroda, had become a strict disciplinarian and insisted on imposing discipline on the young men in the organisation. Barin was not capable of working under anyone except the topmost leaders. Jatin became unpopular because of his strictness. One may say that there was rivalry between him and Barin for leadership. When Sri Aurobindo went to Bengal he stayed with Jogendra Vidya Bhushan, who was a Government servant and a sympathiser of the revolutionary movement. Devavrata and Suresh Samajpati were on Barin's side. Even Hemchandra Das was for Barin. Hemchandra Das writes: "He [Jatin] had an intense desire for doing work. He was, besides, a military

 

¹  Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, pp. 68-70.

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man. For a Bengali this fact of becoming a military man is such an unimaginable thing that his temper became that of 'general'. Jatin used to exercise his generalship fully upon his young men."

Sri Aurobindo heard both the sides and gave his ruling that Jatin must continue to work. The final authority was not to be vested in either Jatin or Barin but in a committee of five members including P. Mitra and Sister Nivedita. It should be noted here that the differences were not really removed and occasional bickerings continued. Sri Aurobindo took no interest in the affair. He met the members only for work.

One of those he met was Abinash Bhattacharya, a young man who was among the first to join the nationalist movement in Bengal. Abinash got his chance to see Sri Aurobindo when one day Barin took him to Jatin's house, where Sri Aurobindo was talking with Jatin. Sri Aurobindo spoke with Abinash and welcomed him into the movement.

Sri Aurobindo has written: "The work under P. Mitra spread enormously and finally contained tens of thousands of young men and the spirit of revolution spread by Barin's paper Yugantar became general in the young generation; but during my absence at Baroda the council ceased to exist as it was impossible to keep up agreement among the many groups."

On 28 September 1904 Sri Aurobindo was appointed Vice-Principal of the college; his pay was raised to Rs. 550 per month. He was very popular with the students and the principal also liked him very much. The Maharaja kept a provision for his personal work even while making this permanent appointment.

Previous to this time Sri Aurobindo had met Shri Charu Chandra Dutt, I.C.S., who was working at Thana. The Bhawani Mandir scheme was explained to Dutt and he joined the revolutionary party. In September 1904 Sri Aurobindo again passed through Thana, met Charu

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Chandra Dutt and discussed the Bhawani Mandir scheme with Haribhai Modak, editor of Rastramat, Kaka Saheb Patil, a pleader of Vasai, and one or two other men. Their viewpoint was that the spiritual element should be left out, the political side stressed and, on the material side, that bombs and pistols should be gathered.

From March 1905 to February 1906, Sri Aurobindo acted for the Principal, who was on leave; his pay was Rs550 plus an acting allowance of Rs. 160, or a total of Rs. 710. He was liked very much by the students.

The government announced the partition of Bengal on 20 July 1905. This was the signal for tremendous agitation throughout India and particularly in Bengal. From Baroda Sri Aurobindo wrote to the revolutionary workers in Calcutta, 'This is a fine opportunity. Carry on the anti-partition agitation powerfully. We will get many workers for the movement." Later Sri Aurobindo wrote and sent them a pamphlet entitled "No Compromise". No press in Calcutta was willing to print it. Finally Abinash and his friends got it composed at their house by Kulkarni, a Marathi revolutionary who was staying with them. At night they had a few thousand copies of the pamphlet printed and later distributed them freely.¹

It was around this same time that Sri Aurobindo wrote the famous revolutionary booklet Bhawani Mandir. We have already mentioned the Bhawani Mandir scheme. The idea for it was mostly Barin's. A temple of Mother India was to be built somewhere in the forest or on some mountain-top. Here workers who would dedicate themselves, in the spirit of complete renunciation, to India's freedom, would be prepared. Others who could not rise to this pitch of renunciation of everything were to help these political Sannyasins in other ways. It is possible that the basic conception of this scheme was derived from Ananda Math of Bankim Chandra.

 

¹ Abinash Bhattacharya, "Aurobindo", pp. 832-33.

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The following words of R.N. Patkar also make an interesting reading regarding the book "Bhawani Mandir".

"One day... in the beginning of 1905, Messrs. Aravind Babu, Deshpande and Jadhav went to Chandod, a small town on the bank of the Narmada, and a place of pilgrimage. There they passed a day with a Yogi and then proceeded to Ganganath¹, a place a few miles distant from Chandod. There is a beautiful Ashram there where Swami Brahmanand spent his life. At that place they passed another day, discussed some spiritual problems with the disciple of Brahmanand Swami and then returned to Baroda. After this trip I saw a marked change both in Aravind Babu and Deshpande. Both of them changed their life altogether. They started worshipping the Goddess and taking only one meal — a pure vegetarian meal a day; both started living a life of austerity. But between the two I saw a greater change in Aravind Babu. He was never as free with me as he used to be before. He looked serene and calm with the gravity of a man of ripe old age. I always found him alone in his own room in a contemplative mood or closeted with his friends Deshpande and Jadhav. One evening I saw Barindra going with the planchette into the room where all the three used to meet. Successively for three days they met in that very room, along with Barindra with the planchette. On the fourth day I met Barindra and asked him what all of them were doing. Without the least hesitation he told me that a message from the Goddess has been received with detailed directions, which after being put in a readable form will be printed and published in the form of a book. The book was out in a few days under the title of "Bhawani Mandir"², or The Message of the Goddess. It was for private circulation only...."

During the year 1906, even though Sri Aurobindo served in the state, the greater part of his time was spent in Bengal. From February 1906 he applied for privilege leave. The

 

¹More about the Ganganath school at the end of this chapter, p. 132.

 ² This booklet is reproduced at the end of this chapter, p. 120.

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leave was granted from 1 March. Thus it was possible for him to pass the whole of the first term of the college as well as the summer vacation in Bengal.

On 12 March 1906 the declaration of the Yugantar, a Bengali journal, was filed.

On 14 April 1906 the famous Barisal conference was held. Sri Aurobindo attended. The conference was declared illegal by the government and the participants were ordered to disperse. Krishna Kumar Mitra, Sri Aurobindo's uncle, refused to leave the pandal. There was a procession to protest against the government's action. In the first row were Sri Aurobindo, Bepin Chandra Pal, B.C. Chatterji. Behind them were delegates to the conference in rows of four. The procession was charged by the police. They allowed the leaders to pass and stopped the delegates from proceeding further. The delegates stood on the highway and refused to disperse. They were lathi-charged. Many ran away. Chittaranjan son of Monoranjan Guha, was wounded in the head.

It was criminal to shout "Vande Mataram" in the street in those days; so the young men were instructed to shout in the streets in defiance of the order. If they happened to see a policeman they first went over to the verandahs of the houses and shouted "Vande Mataram" from there the verandah is not the road!

After the conference Sri Aurobindo went round the districts of East Bengal in company with Bepin Chandra Pal and a young man named Sarat. This was done for observation and study of these parts and also to bring political awakening by personal contact.

About this period Sri Aurobindo later said: "There was a sudden transformation during the Swadeshi days. Before that people used to tremble before an Englishman in Bengal. And then the position was reversed. I remember when I wanted to do political work I visited Bengal and toured the districts of Jessore, Khulna, etc. We found the people steeped in pessimism, a black weight of darkness

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weighing over the whole country. It is difficult nowadays to imagine those times.

"I was travelling with Devavrata Bose. He was living on plantains only and he used to speak to the people. He had a very persuasive way of talking. It was at Khulna that we had a right royal reception, not so much because I was a politician as because I was the son of K.D. Ghose. They Served me with seven rows of dishes and I could hardly reach out to all of them and even from the nearer ones I could eat very little. My father was extremely popular at Khulna. Wherever he went he became a power. When he was at Rangpur he was very friendly with the English magistrate. We went and stayed with his cousin in England afterwards, Mr. Drewett. It was always 'doctor' who got things done at Rangpur.

"When the new magistrate came he found that nothing could be done without Dr. K.D. So he asked the Government to remove him and he was transferred to Khulna. It was from that time that he became a politician. That is to say, he did not like English domination. Before that everything Western was good. He wanted, for example, all his sons to be great; at that time to join the I.C.S. was to become great.

"He was extremely generous. Hardly anybody who went to him for something came back empty-handed."

In June 1906 Sri Aurobindo came to Baroda. He presented himself when the second term opened in the month of June and took one year's leave without pay from 18 June 1906. After passing a total of a week or two at Baroda, he went back to Bengal.

It is clear that since 1902 Sri Aurobindo's interest had moved more and more towards politics and the service at Baroda ceased to interest him.

The best thing for us would be to see what his politics really was; how it envisaged its ultimate goal and meant to attain it.

There were three sides to Sri Aurobindo's political ideas

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and activities. First, there was the action with which he started, a secret revolutionary propaganda and organisation of which the central object was the preparation of an armed insurrection. Secondly, there was a public propaganda intended to convert the whole nation to the ideal of independence which was regarded, when he entered into politics, by the vast majority of Indians as unpractical and impossible, an almost insane chimera. It was thought that the British Empire was too powerful and India too weak, effectively disarmed and impotent even to dream of the success of such an endeavour. Thirdly, there was the organisation of the people to carry on a public and united opposition and undermining of the foreign rule through an increasing non-cooperation and passive resistance.

At that time the military organisation of the great empires and their means of military action were not so overwhelming and apparently irresistible as they now are: the rifle was still the decisive weapon, air power had not yet been developed and the force of artillery was not so devastating as it afterwards became. India was disarmed, but Sri Aurobindo thought that with proper organisation and help from outside this difficulty might be overcome and in so vast a country as India and with the smallness of the regular British armies, even a guerrilla warfare accompanied by general resistance and revolt might be effective. There was also the possibility of a general revolt in the Indian army. At the same time he had studied the temperament and characteristics of the British people and the turn of their political instincts, and he believed that although they would resist any attempt at self-liberation by the Indian people and would at the most only concede very slowly such reforms as would not weaken their imperial control, still they were not of the kind which would be ruthlessly adamantine to the end: if they found resistance and revolt becoming general and persistent they would in the end try to arrive at an accommodation to save what they could of their empire or in an extremity prefer to grant

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independence rather than have it forcefully wrested from their hands.

These were the three planks of Sri Aurobindo's political programme.

Within a few years of his return, then, Sri Aurobindo saw very clearly that salvation could come to India, then fallen upon evil days, not through dialectical skill and intellectual subtlety, but through renewed faith and stem spiritual discipline; not by a brazen mimicry of Western models and Western mores, but rather by recapturing, amplifying and re-living the eternal truths of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita:

Yet thine own self a little understand,

Unhappy country, and be wise at length.

On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo was no mere revivalist, or obscurantist, or parrotist of outworn formulas. As he wrote later in the course of a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy, "The traditions of the past are very great in their own place in the past. But that is no reason why we should go on repeating the past. In the evolution of a spiritual consciousness upon earth, a great past ought to be followed by a greater future."

In his own life and in the life of the nation, what Sri Aurobindo wanted, what he set out to achieve, was a veritable transformation not a retreat to the past, not a return to obsolete forms, but a rediscovery of the soul and rebuilding around it of a life full of vigour and vitality, and in consonance with the imperatives of the present and also ready to meet the challenges of the future. All that divided him and divided the people from the Mother "Glory of moonlight dreams!" all that fed the virus of alienation, all that emasculated or maimed Indian humanity: all that had to be ruthlessly attacked at the source, and rooted out or chased away. In short, individual and nation alike had deliberately to will and achieve the difficult feat of re-nationalisation.

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 For him, it did not simply mean acquiring a knowledge of Bengali, Gujarati or Marathi; or delving into the treasures of Sanskrit literature; or showing a preference for Indian dress or Indian dishes. For the nation too, the change required was something far deeper than a shuffling of the externals or a pathetic exhumation of all our dead yesterdays. The problem rather was, alike for the individual and for the race, to get at the living past and structure on its sure foundations alone the present and the future.

Sometime during his stay at Baroda Sri Aurobindo had another personal experience of the power of occult knowledge when Narayana Jyotishi, without any reference to the horoscope, foretold his three political trials and also his release by saying that he would come to trouble while fighting against "white enemies". At that time Sri Aurobindo had not seriously thought of taking up open political activity.

That Sri Aurobindo's politics and militant nationalism were nothing but a seething focus of a world-transforming spirituality is amply attested even by his very early writings. In his The Ideal of the Karmayogin he says:

"There is a mighty law of life, a great principle of human evolution, a body of spiritual knowledge and experience of which India has always been destined to be guardian, exemplar and missionary. This is the Sanatana Dharma, the eternal religion. Under the stress of alien impacts she has largely lost hold not of the structure of that dharma, but of its living reality. For the religion of India is nothing if it is not lived. It has to be applied not only to life, but to the whole of life; its spirit has to enter into and mould our society, our politics, our literature, our science, our individual character, affections and aspiration. To understand the heart of this dharma, to experience it as a truth, to feel the high emotions to which it rises and to express and execute it in life is what we understand by Karmayoga. We believe that it is to make Yoga the ideal of human life that

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India rises today; by the Yoga she will get the strength to realise her freedom, unity and greatness; by the Yoga she will keep the strength to preserve it. It is a Spiritual revolution we foresee and the material is only its shadow and reflex."

ADDENDA -1

BHAWANI MANDIR

 

OM NAMAS CHANDIKAYAI

A temple is to be erected and consecrated to Bhawani, the Mother, among the hills. To all the children of the Mother the call is sent forth to help in the sacred work.

Who Is Bhawani?

Who is Bhawani, the Mother, and why should we erect a temple to her?

Bhawani Is the Infinite Energy

In the unending revolutions of the world, as the Wheel of the Eternal turns mightily in its courses, the Infinite Energy, which streams forth from the Eternal and sets the wheel to work, looms up in the vision of man in various aspects and infinite forms. Each aspect creates and marks an age. Sometimes She is Love, sometimes She is Knowledge, sometimes She is Renunciation, sometimes She is Pity. This Infinite Energy is Bhawani, She also is Durga, She is Kali, She is Radha the Beloved, She is Lakshmi, She is our Mother and the Creatress of us all.

Bhawani Is Shakti

In the present age the Mother is manifested as the Mother of Strength. She is pure Shakti.

The Whole World Is Growing Full of the Mother as Shakti

Let us raise our eyes and cast them upon the world

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around us. Wherever we turn our gaze, huge masses of strength rise before our vision, tremendous, swift and inexorable forces, gigantic figures of energy, terrible sweeping columns of force. All is growing large and strong. The Shakti of war, the Shakti of wealth, the Shakti of Science are tenfold more mighty and colossal, a hundredfold more fierce, rapid and busy in their activity, a thousandfold more prolific in resources, weapons and instruments than ever before in recorded history. Everywhere the Mother is at work; from Her mighty and shaping hands enormous forms of Rakshasas, Asuras, Devas are leaping forth into the arena of the world. We have seen the slow but mighty rise of great empires in the West, we have seen the swift, irresistible and impetuous bounding into life of Japan. Some are Mlechchha Shaktis clouded in their strength, black or blood-crimson with Tamas or Rajas, others are Arya Shaktis, bathed in a pure flame of renunciation and utter self-sacrifice; but all are the Mother in Her new phase, remoulding, creating. She is pouring Her spirit into the old; She is whirling into life the new.

We in India Fail in All Things for Want of Shakti

But in India the breath moves slowly, the afflatus is long in coming. India, the ancient Mother, is indeed striving to be reborn, striving with agony and tears, but she strives in vain. What ails her, she who is after all so vast and might be so strong? There is surely some enormous defect, something vital is wanting in us, nor is it difficult to lay our finger on the spot. We have all things else, but we are empty of strength, void of energy. We have abandoned Shakti and are therefore abandoned by Shakti. The Mother is not in our hearts, in our brains, in our arms.

The wish to be reborn we have in abundance, there is no deficiency there. How many attempts have been made, how many movements have been begun, in religion, in society, in politics! But the same fate has overtaken or is preparing to overtake them all. They flourish for a moment,

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then the impulse wanes, the fire dies out, and if they endure, it is only as empty shells, forms from which the Brahma has gone or in which it lies overpowered with Tamas and inert. Our beginnings are mighty, but they have neither sequel nor fruit.

Now we are beginning in another direction; we have started a great industrial movement which is to enrich and regenerate an impoverished land. Untaught by experience, we do not perceive that this movement must go the way of all the others, unless we first seek the one essential thing, unless we acquire strength.

Our Knowledge Is a Dead Thing for Want of Shakti

Is it knowledge that is wanting? We Indians, born and bred in a country where Jnana has been stored and accumulated since the race began, bear about in us the inherited gains of many thousands of years. Great giants of knowledge rise among us even today to add to the store. Our capacity has not shrunk, the edge of our intellect has not been dulled or blunted, its receptivity and flexibility are as varied as of old. But it is a dead knowledge, a burden under which we are bowed, a poison which is corroding us, rather than as it should be a staff to support our feet and a weapon in our hands; for this is the nature of all great things that when they are not used or are ill used, they turn upon the bearer and destroy him.

Our knowledge then, weighed down with a heavy load of Tamas, lies under the curse of impotence and inertia. We choose to fancy indeed, nowadays, that if we acquire Science, all will be well. Let us first ask ourselves what we have done with the knowledge we already possess, or what have those who have already acquired Science been able to do for India. Imitative and incapable of initiative, we have striven to copy the methods of England, and we had not the strength; we would now copy the methods of the Japanese, a still more energetic people; are we likely to succeed any better? The mighty force of knowledge which European

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Science bestows is a weapon for the hands of a giant, it is the mace of Bheemsen; what can a weakling do with it but crush himself in the attempt to wield it?

Our Bhakti Cannot Live and Work for Want of Shakti

Is it love, enthusiasm, Bhakti that is wanting? These are ingrained in the Indian nature, but in the absence of Shakti we cannot concentrate, we cannot direct, we cannot even preserve it. Bhakti is the leaping flame, Shakti is the fuel. If the fuel is scanty how long can the fire endure?

When the strong nature, enlightened by knowledge, disciplined and given a giant's strength by Karma, lifts itself up in love and adoration to God, that is the Bhakti which endures and keeps the soul for ever united with the Divine. But the weak nature is too feeble to bear the impetus of so mighty a thing as perfect Bhakti; he is lifted up for a moment, then the flame soars up to Heaven, leaving him behind exhausted and even weaker than before. Every movement of any kind of which enthusiasm and adoration are the life must fail and soon burn itself out so long as the human material from which it proceeds is frail and light in substance.

India Therefore Needs Shakti Alone

The deeper we look, the more we shall be convinced that the one thing wanting, which we must strive to acquire before all others, is strength strength physical, strength mental, strength moral, but above all strength spiritual which is the one inexhaustible and imperishable source of all the others. If we have strength everything else will be added to us easily and naturally. In the absence of strength we are like men in a dream who have hands but cannot seize or strike, who have feet but cannot run.

India, Grown Old and Decrepit in Will, Has to Be Reborn

Whenever we strive to do anything, after the first rush of enthusiasm is spent a paralysing helplessness seizes upon

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us. We often see in the cases of old men full of years and experience that the very excess of knowledge seems to have frozen their powers of action and their powers of will. When a great feeling or a great need overtakes them and it is necessary to carry out its promptings in action, they hesitate, ponder, discuss, make tentative efforts and abandon them or wait for the safest and easiest way to suggest itself, instead of taking the most direct; thus the time when it was possible and necessary to act passes away. Our race has grown just such an old man with stores of knowledge, with ability to feel and desire, but paralysed by senile sluggishness, senile timidity, senile feebleness. If India is to survive, she must be made young again. Rushing and billowing streams of energy must be poured into her; her soul must become, as it was in the old times, like the surges, vast, puissant, calm or turbulent at will, an ocean of action or of force.

India Can Be Reborn

Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.

What Is a Nation? The Shakti of Its Millions

For what is a nation? What is our mother-country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha Mardini sprang into being from the Shaktis of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity. The Shakti we call India, Bhawani Bharati, is the living unity of the Shaktis of three hundred million people; but she is inactive, imprisoned in

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the magic circle of Tamas, the self-indulgent inertia and ignorance of her sons. To get rid of Tamas we have but to wake the Brahma within.

It Is Our Own Choice Whether We Create a Nation or Perish

What is it that so many thousands of holy men, Sadhus and Sannyasis, have preached to us silently by their lives? What was the message that radiated from the personality of Bhagawan Ramakrishna Paramhansa? What was it that formed the kernel of the eloquence with which the lion- like heart of Vivekananda sought to shake the world? It is this, that in every one of these three hundred millions of men, from the Raja on his throne to the coolie at his labour, from the Brahmin absorbed in his Sandhya to the Pariah walking shunned of men, GOD LIVETH. We are all gods and creators, because the energy of God is within us and all life is creation; not only the making of new forms is creation, but preservation is creation, destruction itself is creation. It rests with us what we -shall create; for we are not, unless we choose, puppets dominated by Fate and Maya; we are facets and manifestations of Almighty Power.

India Must Be Reborn. Because Her Rebirth Is Demanded by the Future of the World

India cannot perish, our race cannot become extinct, because among all the divisions of mankind it is to India that is reserved the highest and the most splendid destiny, the most essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from herself the future religion of the entire world, the Eternal Religion which is to harmonise all religion, science and philosophies and make mankind one soul. In the sphere of morality, likewise, it is her mission to purge barbarism (Mlechchhahood) out of humanity and to Aryanise the world. In order to do this, she must first re-Aryanise herself.

It was to initiate this great work, the greatest and most wonderful work ever given to a race, that Bhagawan

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Ramakrishna came and Vivekananda preached. If the work does not progress as it once promised to do it is because we have once again allowed the terrible cloud of Tamas to settle down on our souls fear, doubt, hesitation, sluggishness. We have taken, some of us, the Bhakti which poured forth from the one and the Jnana given us by the other, but from lack of Shakti, from the lack of Karma, we have not been able to make our Bhakti a living thing. May we yet remember that it was Kali, who is Bhawani, Mother of Strength whom Ramakrishna worshipped and with whom he became one.

But the destiny of India will not wait on the falterings and failings of individuals; the Mother demands that men shall arise to institute Her worship and make it universal.

To Get Strength We Must Adore the Mother of Strength

Strength then and again strength and yet more strength is the need of our race. But if it is strength we desire, how shall we gain it if we do not adore the Mother of Strength? She demands worship not for Her own sake, but in order that She may help us and give Herself to us. This is no fantastic idea, no superstition but the ordinary law of the universe. The gods cannot, if they would, give themselves unasked. Even the Eternal comes not unawares upon men. Every devotee knows by experience that we must turn to Him and desire and adore Him before the Divine Spirit pours in its ineffable beauty and ecstasy upon the soul. What is true of the Eternal is true also of Her who goes forth from Him.

Religion, the True Path

Those who, possessed with Western ideas, look askance at any return to the old sources of energy, may well consider a few fundamental facts.

The example of Japan

I. There is no instance in history of a more marvellous

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and sudden up-surging of strength in a nation than modem Japan. All sorts of theories had been started to account for the uprising, but now intellectual Japanese are telling us what were the fountains of the mighty awakening, the sources of that inexhaustible strength. They were drawn from religion. It was the Vedantic teachings of Oyomei and the recovery of Shintoism with its worship of the national Shakti of Japan in the image and person of the Mikado that enabled the little island empire to wield the stupendous weapons of Western knowledge and science as lightly and invincibly as Arjun wielded the Gandiv.

India's Greater Need of Spiritual Regeneration

II. India's need for drawing from the fountains of religion is far greater than was ever Japan's; for the Japanese had only to revitalise and perfect a strength that already existed. We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts, to be born again. There is no scientific process, no machinery for that. Strength can only be created by drawing it from the internal and inexhaustible reservoirs of the Spirit, from that Adya-Shakti of the Eternal which is the fountain of all new existence. To be born again means nothing but to revive the Brahma within us, and that is a spiritual process— no effort of the body or the intellect can compass it.

Religion, the Path Natural to the National Mind

III. All great awakenings in India, all her periods of mightiest and most varied vigour have drawn their vitality from the fountain-heads of some deep religious awakening. Wherever the religious awakening has been complete and grand, the national energy it has created has been gigantic and, puissant; wherever the religious movement has been narrow or incomplete, the national movement has been broken, imperfect or temporary. The persistence of this phenomenon is proof that it is ingrained in the temperament

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 of the race. If you try other and foreign methods we shall either gain our end with tedious slowness, painfully and imperfectly, or we shall not attain it at all. Why abandon the plain way which God and the Mother have marked out for you, to choose faint and devious paths of your own treading?

The Spirit Within Is the True Source of Strength

IV. The Brahma within, the one and indivisible ocean of spiritual force is that from which all life, material and mental, is drawn. This is beginning to be as much recognised by leading Western thinkers as it was from the old days by the East. If it be so, then spiritual energy is the source of all other strength. There are the fathomless fountain-heads, the deep and inexhaustible sources. The shallow surface springs are easier to reach, but they soon run dry. Why not then go deep instead of scratching the surface? The result will repay the labour.

Three Things Needful

We need three things answering to three fundamental laws.

1. Bhakti the Temple of the Mother

We cannot get strength unless we adore the Mother of Strength.

We will therefore build a temple to the white Bhawani, the Mother of Strength, the Mother of India; and we will build it in a place far from the contamination of modern cities and as yet little trodden by man, in a high and pure air steeped in calm and energy. This temple will be the centre from which Her worship is to flow over the whole country; for there, worshipped among the hills. She will pass like fire into the brains and hearts of Her worshippers. This also is what the Mother has commanded.

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II. Karma A New Order of Brahmacharins

Adoration will be dead and ineffective unless it is transmuted into Karma.

We will therefore have a Math with a new Order of Karma Yogins attached to the temple, men who have renounced all in order to work for the Mother. Some may, if they choose, be complete Sannyasis, most will be Brahmacharins who will return to the Grihasthashram when their allotted work is finished, but all must accept renunciation.

Why? For Two Reasons:

1. Because it is only in proportion as we put from us the preoccupation of bodily desires and interests, the sensual gratifications, lusts, longings, indolences of the material world, that we can return to the ocean of spiritual force within us.

2. Because for the development of Shakti, entire concentration is necessary; the mind must be devoted entirely to its aim as a spear is hurled to its mark; if other cares and longings distract the mind, the spear will be carried out from its straight course and miss the target. We need a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to its uttermost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.

III. Jnana the Great Message

Bhakti and Karma cannot be perfect and enduring unless they are based upon Jnana.

The Brahmacharins of the Order will therefore be taught to fill their souls with knowledge and base their work upon it as upon a rock. What shall be the basis of their knowledge? What but the great so-aham. the mighty formula of the Vedanta, the ancient gospel which has yet to reach the

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heart of the nation, the knowledge which when vivified by Karma and Bhakti delivers man out of all fear and all weakness.

The Message of the Mother

When, therefore, you ask who is Bhawani the Mother, She herself answers you, "I am the Infinite Energy which streams forth from the Eternal in the world and Eternal in yourselves. I am the Mother of the Universe, the Mother of the Worlds, and for you who are children of the Sacred Land, Aryabhumi, made of her clay and reared by her sun and winds, I am Bhawani Bharati, Mother of India."

Then if you ask why we should erect a temple to Bhawani, the Mother, hear Her answer, "Because I have commanded it, and because by making a centre for the future religion you will be furthering the immediate will of the Eternal and storing up merit which will make you strong in this life and great in another. You will be helping to create a nation, to consolidate an age, to Aryanise a world. And that nation is your own, that age is the age of yourselves and your children, that world is no fragment of land bounded by seas and hills, but the whole earth with her teeming millions."

Come then, hearken to the call of the Mother. She is already in our hearts waiting to manifest Herself, waiting to be worshipped, inactive because the God in us is concealed by Tamas, troubled by Her inactivity, sorrowful because Her children will not call on Her to help them. You who feel Her stirring within you, fling off the black veil of self, break down the imprisoning walls of indolence, help Her each as you feel impelled, with your bodies or with your intellect or with your speech or with your wealth or with your prayers and worship, each man according to his capacity. Draw not back, for against those who were called and heard Her not She may well be wroth in the day of Her coming; but to those who help Her advent even a little,

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how radiant with beauty and kindness will be the face of their Mother!

APPENDIX

The work and rules of the new Order of Sannyasis will be somewhat as follows:

1. General Rules

1. All who undertake the life of Brahmacharya for the Mother will have to vow themselves to Her service for four years, after which they will be free to continue to work or return to family life.

2. All money received by them in the Mother's name will go to the Mother's Service. For themselves they will be allowed to receive shelter and their meals, when necessary, and nothing more.

3. Whatever they may earn for themselves, e.g., by the publication of books, etc., they must give at least half of it to the service of the Mother.

4. They will observe entire obedience to the Head of the Order and his one or two assistants in all things connected with the work or with their religious life.

5. They will observe strictly the discipline and rules of Achar and purity, bodily and mental, prescribed by the Heads of the Order.

6. They will be given periods for rest or for religious improvement during which they will stop at the Math, but the greater part of the year they will spend in work outside. This rule will apply to all except the few necessary for the service of the Temple and those required for the central direction of the work.

7. There will be no gradations of rank among the workers, and none must seek for distinction or mere personal fame but practise strength and self-effacement.

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II. Work for the People

8. Their chief work will be that of mass instruction and help to the poor and ignorant.

9. This they will strive to effect in various ways:

1. Lectures and demonstrations suited to an uneducated intelligence.

2. Classes and nightly schools.

ADDENDA — II

THE GANGANATH SCHOOL

Again, on the borders of the Baroda State, there was a quasi-religious school with which the anarchist gang of Calcutta had a close connection and to which the following sympathetic reference was made in a Marathi paper of Baroda in August 1908:

"Ganganath Bharatiya Vidyalaya. This institution is about 20 or 25 miles from this place and is on the banks of the Narbadda, near Chandod. It was opened about two years ago, and it was hoped that by this time it would have been in a prosperous state; but as Government looks with suspicion on all such private institutions and besides, on account of the evil deeds of some mischief-makers, it is liable to diverse dangers. It is helped by several eminent rich people and was visited last year by Arabinda Ghose,¹ and for these reasons several detectives have been making minute enquiries about it. Yesterday many of the students from this institution came to Baroda, and it is under contemplation to transfer it before long to Baroda on account of the spite shown above."

The idea of opening this school originated with K.G. Deshpande (a graduate of Cambridge and Barrister-at-Law, who is a close friend of Tilak's, and is said to have defended him when he was tried for sedition in 1897.), M.B. Jadav.

 

¹Sri Aurobindo was in Baroda in 1906 and 1908, but not 1907.

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Arabinda Ghose, Barindra Ghose and A.B. Devdhar, who are said to have consulted the spirit of Ramkrishna Paramhansa on the subject.

They approached a sannyasi, named Keshawanand, who had a school in the temple of  Mahadev on the top of a small hill, called Ganganath, about 3'/a miles from Chandod, where he taught some 19 boys Sanskrit assisted by a certain Brahmanand from Benares.

Keshawanand collected some 25,000 rupees, principally from rich Bhatyas, but also, it is believed, from the Ruler of Baroda, and with the funds, built a new edifice at Ganganath which was opened on the 17th May 1905, under the title of Shri Ganganath Bharat Sri Vidyalaya with a staff of 4 teachers, M.B. Talvalkar, B.A., LL.B., Government Prosecutor, Baroda District, acting as Secretary and Treasurer.

In June 1908 the institution was removed to Baroda and located in the Kashi Vishweshwar temple of Mahadev, which was secured chiefly through the influence of K.G. Deshpande, its principal supporter.

There are 37 students on the rolls of the school which consists of two divisions, Vedic and Vehabaric. To the former, instruction is given in the Vedas and modern science. The latter are taught their mother-tongue, Hindi, Sanskrit, English, modern history, and Science.

Only boys between the ages of 10 and 14, and who are unmarried, are admitted; their guardians have, moreover, to promise not to withdraw them for a period of from 6 to 10 years after admission.

From "Note on Political Sadhus”. Criminal Intelligence Circular No. 2 of 1909. CID Report (1909) Vol. VII. pp. 80-81 (Tamil Nadu State Archives).

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List of Early Political Writings, 1893-1908

(SABCL Volumes 1-2)

The Bourgeois and the Samurai

An Early Fragment on the Congress Movement

The Heart of Nationalism

India and the British Parliament

The Morality of Boycott

Nagpur Speeches

Nasik Speech

On the Barisal Proclamation.

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A lonely freedom cannot satisfy

A heart that has grown one with every heart:

I am a deputy of the aspiring world,

My spirit's liberty I ask for all.

Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

Spiritual Life — Experiences

...spiritual experiences interested Sri Aurobindo greatly, and he had had some himself. He was not quite inclined to the actual practice of yoga in his early days. His experiences began in England, perhaps in 1892, and from the moment he stepped on the shores of India they became more frequent and more intense. But he did not associate them with yoga about which he knew nothing at the time.

When, after an absence of fourteen years, Sri Aurobindo set foot on the soil of India, when he touched the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, "a vast calm descended upon him... and this calm surrounded him and remained for long months afterwards". It was as though the Mother had received her child back and enveloped him with her infinite immaculate love. Many years later, Sri Aurobindo made a reference to this transfiguring experience in the course of a letter to one of his disciples:

"My own life and my yoga have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly without any exclusiveness on either side... since I set foot on the Indian soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner and infinite bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies. At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them."

As the days, months and years passed, as Sri Aurobindo became more and more a witness spirit beyond his normal activities of eating, sleeping and waking up, of teaching,

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reading and writing, as he saw the total Indian situation steadily and searchingly, from out of the confusions and irrelevances and side-tracking occupations of the hour, two things seemed to emerge with shining clarity: first, the paramount necessity for Revolution to redeem the Mother, Mother India; and second (though this was not at once apparent), the indispensability of Yoga to perfect the human instrument that is to plan the revolution, give it a push at the right time, and see it safely through.

During his stay at Baroda, Barin read a book on spiritualism and began experimenting with the planchette and with table-tapping. Sri Aurobindo also used to join in the evenings. Two or three experiences are remarkable. Once Barin called his father Dr. K.D. Ghose. A reply came that his spirit was there. He was asked to give a sign or proof of his identity. He reminded Barin about a gold watch which he had presented to him. Barin had completely forgotten this fact but said it was true. Then he was asked to give another proof. He mentioned the existence of a certain picture on the wall in the house of Mr. Devdhar, who was an engineer. An enquiry was made but no such picture was found. The matter was reported to the spirit .that claimed to be Dr. K.D. Ghose. In reply he said that they should enquire again. Then they made another and more detailed effort, and found that there was a picture which had been covered over by whitewash. At another séance Tilak was present. The spirit of Dr. K.D. Ghose was called and asked "What kind of man is this?" He answered: "When all your work is ruined and many men bow their heads down, this man will keep his head erect." This proved true.

Once Ramakrishna Paramahansa was called and was asked questions. But he kept silent for a long time. Then while going he said, "Make a temple, make a temple (Mandir karo).”

At that time the idea of independence for India was dominant and so all believed that Ramakrishna had given his consent to the "Bhawani Mandir" scheme. But the true

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significance of Ramakrishna's statement was interpreted by Sri Aurobindo years later as a command to make in ourselves a temple to the Mother, to effect such a transformation of ourselves that we become the temple of the Mother.

These séances have not much value from the point of view of Yoga. But they show clearly the limitation of the view that the physical is the only reality. Their importance to Sri Aurobindo lies in the fact that they showed him the existence of supraphysical agencies and planes of consciousness, and the possibility of attaining them.

Sri Aurobindo kept a horse-carriage at Baroda. For a description of it see page 33 of D.K. Roy's book, Aurobindo Prasanga. An incident involving this carriage is important. Once Sri Aurobindo was going from the Camp Road towards the city. Just by the side of the public gardens an accident was narrowly averted. As he saw the possibility of the accident he found that, with the will to prevent it, there appeared a Being of Light in him who was as it were the master of the situation and was able to control the details. This experience, which came before the beginning of Sri Aurobindo's sadhana, must be the seed of the following poem:

THE GODHEAD

I sat behind the dance of Danger’s hooves

         In the shouting street that seemed a futurist’s whim,

And suddenly felt, exceeding Nature’s grooves,

         In me, enveloping me the body of Him.

 

Above my head a mighty head was seen,

         A face with the calm of immortality

And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene

         In the vast circle of its sovereignty.

 

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His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze;

         The world was in His heart and He was I:

I housed in me the Everlasting’s peace,

         The strength of One whose substance cannot die.

 

The moment passed and all was as before;

Only that² deathless memory I bore.

 

¹ unseizable  ²  its

 

During the year 1904 Sri Aurobindo began yoga somewhat seriously.

"No, I had no knowledge. I did not know what God was", said Sri Aurobindo later about the beginning of his sadhana. "Deshpande at that time was doing Hatha Yoga, Asanas and other such Kriyas and as he had a great proselytising tendency he wanted to convert me to his view. But I thought that a Yoga which required me to give up the world was not for me. I had to liberate my country. I took to it seriously when I learnt that the same Tapasya which one does to get away from the world can be turned to action. I learnt that Yoga gives power, and I thought why the devil should I not get the power and use it to liberate my country?... It was the time of 'country first, humanity afterwards and the rest nowhere'. It was something from behind which got the idea accepted by the mind; mine was a side-door entry into the Spiritual Life.".¹

Sri Aurobindo consulted engineer Devdhar, who was a disciple of Swami Brahmananda of Chandod, for details about Pranayama. There was an idea current that yoga could not be done without Pranayama. Sri Aurobindo describes the results of his practice as follows:

"My own experience is that the brain becomes Prakashmaya full of light. When I was practising Pranayama at Baroda, I used to do it for five to six hours in the day, three hours in the morning and two in the evening. The mind worked with great illumination and power. At that time I

¹ Cf. A.B. Purani, Evening Talks, Second Series (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1961), p. 171.

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used to write poetry. Usually I wrote five to eight or ten lines per day, about two hundred lines in a month. After the Pranayama I could write two hundred lines within half an hour. Formerly my memory was dull, but afterwards when the inspiration came, I could remember the lines in their order and write them down conveniently at any time. Along with this enhanced mental activity I could see an electric energy all around the brain.'¹

On another occasion he spoke of Pranayama as follows:

"The results were remarkable. Many visions of scenes and figures I used to see. I felt an electric power around my head. My powers of writing were nearly dried up; they revived with a great vigour. I could write prose and poetry with a flow. That flow has never ceased since then; if I have not written afterwards it is because I had something else to do. But the moment I want to write it is there. Thirdly, great health: I grew stout and strong, the skin became smooth and fair and there was a flow of sweetness in the saliva. I used to feel a certain aura round the head. There were plenty of mosquitoes but they did not come to me....

"When I went to Bengal and took to political work [in 1906] Pranayama became irregular and I had a great illness which nearly carried me off."²   

And in a letter of May 1932 he referred to Pranayama in the following terms: "After four years of prānāyāma and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some psychophysical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest...." ³

During this period of the beginning of sadhana Sri Aurobindo used to see things on the subtle planes, as

¹Cf. A.B. Purani. Evening Talks, First Series, p. 204.

² Cf. A.B. Purani, Evening Talks. Third Series, pp. 95-96.

³  Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, pp. 78-79.

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mentioned in the letter above. He describes in the following letter how he began to see inwardly: "I remember when I first began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open eye), a scientific friend of mine began to talk of after-images 'these are only after-images'! I asked him whether after-images remained before the eye for two minutes at a time he said, 'no', to his knowledge only for a few seconds; I also asked him whether one could get after-images of things not around one or even not existing upon this earth, since they had other shapes, another character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements and values he could not reply in the affirmative. That is how these so-called scientific explanations break down as soon as you pull them out of their cloudland of mental theory and face them with the actual phenomena they pretend to decipher."¹

Barin went away into the Vindhya mountains to search for a "place far away from the atmosphere of cities, into solitude, to find a peaceful and ennobling atmosphere" to establish there a temple of Mother India (Bhawani Mandir). He came back with very persistent mountain fever! He was being treated, but not being -cured, when a Naga Sannyasi came, from whom Sri Aurobindo had a direct proof of the powers and utility of Yoga. Sri Aurobindo later said about this incident: "I first knew about Yogic cure from a Naga Sadhu or Sannyasi. Barin had mountain fever when he was wandering in the Amarkantak. The sadhu took a cupful of water and cut it crosswise with a knife while repeating a Mantra. He then asked Barin to drink it; saying he wouldn't have fever the next day, and the fever left him." It was perhaps the same Sannyasi who gave Sri Aurobindo a Stotra of Kali. "It was a very violent Stotra with 'Jahi, Jahi' in it. I used to repeat it, it did not give any results.... It was at this time that I gave up meat diet and found a great feeling of lightness

¹ Ibid., p. 90.

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and purification in the system."

Sri Aurobindo had besides the experience of certain unusual psycho-physical phenomena. Sri Aurobindo had darśan of Swami Brahmananda at his ashram. During his stay in Gujarat he went to Chandod for the last time. He had been there twice or thrice before, during his stay at Baroda, with K.G. Deshpande and others. On one of these visits, at Karnali, near Chandod, he saw Swami Brahmananda. At the time of leaving the Swami, each one who was present did pranām (bowing). Brahmananda generally kept his eyes closed and those who bowed used to get up and leave. But when Sri Aurobindo did pranām and looked at him, he found Brahmananda with his eyes open looking full at him as if he saw something extraordinary or as if he recognised somebody. Sri Aurobindo once said that Brahmananda's eyes were very beautiful. It seems that by 1906 Brahmananda had passed away and on his last visit Sri Aurobindo met Brahmananda's successor, Swami Keshavananda.

During one of his visits to Chandod Sri Aurobindo went to one of the temples of Kali on the bank of the Narmada. He went there because of the company. He never had felt attracted to image-worship if anything at that time he was averse to it. Now when he went to the temple he found a presence in the image. He got a direct proof of the truth that can be behind image-worship. The following poem was written about the same experience.

 

THE STONE GODDESS

In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine,

         From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me, -

A living Presence deathless and divine,

         A Form that harboured all infinity.

 

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The great World-Mother and her mighty will

         Inhabited the earth’s abysmal sleep,

Voiceless, omnipotent, inscrutable,

         Mute in the desert and the sky and deep.

 

Now veiled with mind she dwells and speaks no word,

         Voiceless, inscrutable, omniscient,

Hiding until our soul has seen, has heard

         The secret of her strange embodiment,

One in the worshipper and the immobile shape,

A beauty and mystery flesh or stone can drape.

What he saw was not just an image but a Presence, even as he had in experience of the vacant Infinite when walking on the ridge of the Takht-i-Suleman in Kashmir in 1903.¹ In 1939, he wrote the following sonnet on this experience:

 

ADWAITA²

I walked on the high-wayed Seat of Solomon

         Where Shankaracharya’s tiny temple stands

Facing Infinity from Time’s edge, alone

         On the bare ridge ending earth’s vain romance.

 

Around me was a formless solitude:

         All had become one strange Unnamable,

An unborn sole Reality world-nude,

         Topless and fathomless, for ever still.

¹Vivekananda describes the beginning of a somewhat similar experience:

But in the twinkling of an eye he (Ramkrishna) placed his right foot on my body. The touch at once gave rise to a novel experience within me. With my eyes open I saw that the walls, and everything in the room, whirled rapidly and vanished into naught, and the whole universe together with my individuality was about to merge in an all-encompassing mysterious Void".

 ²Last Poems by Sri Aurobindo.

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Swami Brahmananda

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Idol of Mahakali — Chandod Karanali

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A Silence that was Being’s only word,

         The unknown beginning and the voiceless end

Abolishing all things moment-seen or heard,

         On an incommunicable summit reigned,

 

A lonely Calm and void unchanging Peace

On the dumb crest of Nature’s mysteries.

It is to these two singular experiences that Sri Aurobindo refers in the following passage in one of his letters:

"A philosophic statement about the Atman is a mental formula, not knowledge, not experience; yet sometimes the Divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks down, something is seen, a profound change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon a mountain ridge and glimpses or mentally feels a wideness, a pervasiveness, a nameless Vast in Nature; then suddenly there comes the touch, a revelation, a flooding, the mental loses itself in the spiritual, one bears the first invasion of the Infinite. Or you stand before a temple of Kali behind a sacred river and see what? — a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother."

But all this was merely preparatory. Sri Aurobindo realised that he was being more and more irresistibly drawn to the path of Yoga. But he had no Guru yet, for although he had had darśan of Brahmananda and received blessings from him, it was to a great Yogi he had gone, not to an accepted Guru. The ground of course was already prepared, and contacts like those with Brahmananda and the Naga sannyasi helped to plant the seed of faith whose potentialities were immense. Was it not a priceless gain in itself that Sri Aurobindo had realised like Teufelsdrockh in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus — that "Thought without reverence

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Sri Aurobindo in Kashmir

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Takht-e-Suleman, Shankaracharya's Temple, Kashmir - where Sri Aurobindo had a spiritual experience in 1903

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 is barren, perhaps poisonous"? The Beast of Intellectualism was now contained within its proper sphere, and Sri Aurobindo could therefore soar unhampered into the illimitable above-mind regions; his spiritual fire-baptism had thus commenced at last in real earnest. "It is a wonderful phenomenon," writes Swami Nikhilananda, "that the consummation of our spiritual life is reached only when the student comes in contact with the teacher." Even though Sri Aurobindo had not yet found a Guru, already he felt powerfully drawn to the path of Yoga; he poised himself on its razor-edged precariousness and perilousness he pushed forward confidently although he could not glimpse with any certitude his precise destination!

Regarding the details of the exact location of the Kali Mandir and its historical background, we are quoting Ranadhir Upadhyaya's letter, dated November 10, 1974.

"The temple is generally called 'Mahakali Mandir of Karanali'. It is situated on the northern bank of the river Narmada, just near the famous Kubereshwar Temple. One has to climb about 100 steep steps to reach the Kali Temple after about a mile's boating in Narmada from Chandod. The Shrine is approximately 300 years old. Sri Somvargiriji Maharaj, a Mahant of Niranjani Akhada took to the Sri Chakra Upasana worship of the Divine Shakti three centuries ago. He got the three Sri Chakras drawn on three triangular pieces of metal and did Tantra Sadhana for some years. Ultimately he got "siddhi" and acquired occult powers, with great spiritual consciousness. It is said that he had realised Mahakali through the Siddha Chakras and She used to manifest before him often. He was a great yogi and Tantrik. A few days before his death he installed the three Siddha Chakras and Kali idol in front of his yajna-kund by the side of a wall and erected a small temple. Since then it is looked after and worshipped by Niranjani Sadhus. The beautiful idol of Mahakali in the temple is about three feet high and a folding wooden tiger is fixed near her feet in such a way that it appears as if the Goddess is mounted on

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the tiger with Her face in the west direction. An iron trisul is placed by the side of the idol. The three yantras are not visible. The entire atmosphere of the place is surcharged with powerful spiritual vibrations. The temple is not at all famous and is in a dilapidated condition.

From the year 1903 to 1922, Niranjani Mahant, Sri Himmatpuriji was worshipping the Kali idol. With Lele and Deshpande Sri Aurobindo visited the temple in 1906 during this Mahant's lifetime and when he looked at the idol of Kali, he saw the Mother Mahakali a living Presence, deathless and divine'."

Beginning of Yoga

When Sri Aurobindo was at Surat he met Sakhare Baba, a Maharashtrian yogi, who was intensely interested in the question of Indian independence. Sri Aurobindo found his own sadhana becoming very irregular and disorganised on account of the political work. So he told Barin to arrange a meeting with someone who would help him in his sadhana. One of the disciples of Vishnu Bhaskar Lele was at Baroda. Barin had come to know about him and learnt that Lele was at that time in Gwalior. A wire was sent to Lele asking him to come to Baroda. So, when Sri Aurobindo went to Baroda after the break-up of the Congress, Lele had already arrived there. Lele told A.B. Purani in 1916 that when he received the telegram telling him to go to Baroda he had an intuition that he would have to give initiation to a very great soul. Thus the political activity on one side and sadhana on the other were both being intensely pursued.

Lele met Sri Aurobindo for the first time in Khaserao Jadhav's house at Dandia Bazar. It was probably during the first week of January 1908 that the meeting, which lasted half an hour, took place.

Lele showed his readiness to help Sri Aurobindo in his sadhana. He said he would try to give him some concrete results on condition that he would suspend for he was

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Sri Aurobindo as a Professor, 1906

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Vishnu Bhaskar Lele

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not ready to give up entirely-his political activity. Sri Aurobindo was ready to fulfil the conditions. Lele wanted him to separate himself from others and stay with him. Sri Aurobindo agreed. He suddenly disappeared from the tumultuous political scene of which he was an important centre. Friends knew where he was but no one disturbed him. He remained with Lele for three days in the small room on the top floor of Sardar Majumdar's wada in Baroda. Lele asked him to make his mind blank which he did. Sri Aurobindo has himself described this incident more than once. Below several accounts of his experience in his own words are reproduced.

"I am glad you are getting converted to silence, and even Nirvana is not without its uses in my case it was the first positive spiritual experience and it made possible all the rest of the sadhana; but as to the positive way to get these things, I don't know if your mind is quite ready to proceed with it. There are in fact several ways. My own way was by rejection of thought. 'Sit down,' I was told, 'look and you will see that your thoughts come into you from outside. Before they enter, fling them back.' I sat down and looked and saw to my astonishment that it was so; I saw and felt concretely the thought approaching as if to enter through or above the head and was able to push it back concretely before it came inside.

"In three days really in one — my mind became full of an eternal silence it is still there. But that I don't know how many people can do. One (not a disciple -1 had no disciples in those days) asked me how to do Yoga. I said: 'Make your mind quiet first.' He did and his mind became quite silent and empty. Then he rushed to me saying: 'My brain is empty of thoughts, I cannot think. I am becoming an idiot.' He did not pause to look and see where these thoughts he uttered were coming from! Nor did he realise that one who is already an idiot cannot become one. Anyhow I was not patient in those days and I dropped him

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and let him lose his miraculously achieved silence.

"The usual way, the easiest if one can manage it at all, is to call down the silence from above you into the brain, mind and body."

"I think you have made too much play with my phrase 'an accident', ignoring the important qualification, 'it seemed to come by an accident'. After four years of prānāyāma and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet a man without fame whom I did not know, a Bhakta with a limited mind but with some experience and evocative power. We sat together and I followed with an absolute fidelity what he instructed me to do, not myself in the least understanding where he was leading me or where I was myself going. The first result was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical Changes of consciousness which he had never intended for they were Adwaitic and Vedantic and he was against Adwaita Vedanta and which were quite contrary to my own ideas, for they made me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman."

"As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One can get it even on the level of Higher Mind which is the next above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908, 27 years ago, and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough in all conscience without any need of supramentality to make it more so. Again, 'a calm that looks like action and motion' is a phenomenon of which I know nothing. A calm

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Majumdar's House

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The room in Majumdar's house where Sri Aurobindo sat for meditation with Lele. January 1908.

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or silence that is what I have had the proof is that out of an absolute silence of the mind I edited the Bande Mataram for 4 months and wrote 6 volumes of the Arya, not to speak of all the letters and messages etc. I have written since."

"I myself had my experience of Nirvana and silence in the Brahman, etc. long before there was any knowledge of the overhead spiritual planes; it came first simply by an absolute stillness and blotting out as it were of all mental, emotional and other inner activities the body continued indeed to see, walk, speak and do its other business, but as an empty automatic machine and nothing more. I did not become aware of any pure 'I' nor even of any self, impersonal or other, there was only an awareness of That as the sole Reality, all else being quite unsubstantial, void, non-real. As to what realised that Reality, it was a nameless consciousness which was not other than That; one could perhaps say this, though hardly even so much as this, since there was no mental concept of it, but not more. Neither was I aware of any lower soul or outer self called by such and such a personal name that was performing this feat of arriving at the consciousness of Nirvana....

"Mark that I did not think these things, there were no thoughts or concepts nor did they present themselves like that to any Me; it simply just was so or was self-apparently so."

"It was my great debt to Lele that he showed me this. 'Sit in meditation,' he said, 'but do not think, look only at your mind; you will see thoughts coming into it: before they can enter throw these away from your mind till your mind is capable of entire silence.' I had never heard before of thoughts coming visibly into the mind from outside, but I did not think either of questioning the truth or the possibility, I simply sat down and did it. In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit and then I saw one thought and then another

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coming in a concrete way from outside; I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought as a labourer in a thought factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought- empire."

During his stay at Baroda Sri Aurobindo met Chhotalal Purani in a private interview and explained to him a scheme for the revolutionary work by drawing a pencil sketch on a blank piece of paper. He then advised him to meet Barin who met C.B. Purani for three consecutive days, explaining to him the details of the revolutionary organisation. It was thus that the seeds were sown of that movement in Gujarat which became so well known afterwards. The inspiration for it came from Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo also met the Maharaja at the latter's request. When the Maharaja wanted to meet Sri Aurobindo a second time, Lele asked Sri Aurobindo not to meet him and so he did not.

Sri Aurobindo gave three lectures at Baroda on the political situation — two at Bankaneer Theatre and one at Manik Rao's gymnasium. Sardar Mazumdar presented Sri Aurobindo with a Pashmina shawl as it was severe winter then and Sri Aurobindo was going about in a shirt with no covering over it. He kept no bedding. While travelling he slept on the sitting board and used his hand for pillow.

In the second week of January Sri Aurobindo went to Poona from Baroda. Sri Aurobindo asked Lele to come with him and Lele agreed. Sri Aurobindo gave a lecture at the Gaekwar Wada, Poona, on the thirteenth. Then he went to Bombay. At Girgaum (Bombay) he delivered a lecture on the fifteenth.

In Bombay the spiritual experience that had begun at

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Baroda became more intense. The vacant condition of the mind turned into the experience of the silent Brahman Consciousness. The multifarious activities of the city of Bombay, the rows of tall houses, etc. all became as if things moving on the surface, mere appearances, things unreal against the background of the silent Infinite which alone seemed real.

"When I was in Bombay, from the balcony of the friend's house I saw the whole busy movement of Bombay as a picture in a cinema show, all unreal and shadowy. Ever since I have maintained that poise of mind never lost it even in the midst of difficulties.'¹ This sonnet, written in the 1930s, is a poetic expression of the same experience:

NIRVANA

All is abolished but the mute Alone.
    The mind from thought released, the heart from grief
    Grow inexistent now beyond belief;
There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown.
The city, a shadow picture without tone,
    Floats, quivers unreal; forms without relief
    Flow, a cinema's vacant shapes; like a reef
Foundering in shoreless gulfs the world is done.

Only the illimitable Permanent
    Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,
        Replaces all,—what once was I, in It
A silent unnamed emptiness content
    Either to fade in the Unknowable
        Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.

When Sri Aurobindo got an invitation from the Bombay

¹Cf. A.B. Purani, Evening Talks, Second Series (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1974), p. 62.

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National Union to address a meeting at the Mahajan Wadi on the nineteenth, he was in a fix. His mind had become calm, blank how was he to deliver a speech? He could not very well decline the invitation as he was an active political worker and a prominent all-India leader. He asked Lele, who said that it would be all right to accept and that all would be well. Here is a description of what happened in Sri Aurobindo's own words: "In that silent condition without any thought in the mind -I went to Bombay. There I had to lecture at the National Union and so I asked Lele: 'What should I do?' He asked me to pray. But I was so absorbed in the silent Brahman Consciousness that I could not pray. So I said to him that I was not in a mood to pray. Then he replied that it did not matter. He and some others would pray and I had simply to go to the meeting and make Namaskar to the audience as Narayana and then some voice would speak. I did exactly as he told me. On my way to the meeting somebody gave me a paper to read. When I rose to speak the impression of the headline flashed across my mind and then all of a sudden something spoke out. That was my second experience from Lele...."¹

It was thus that Sri Aurobindo got the clue not only to the practicality of the yoga but to its dynamism. To the sadhana leading to passivity or inactivity was added the important element of divine dynamism. Not only did he understand it, but he put it to the test throughout his tour from Bombay to Calcutta. As already mentioned above, all activities initiated afterwards were taken up in the same way. The basis of his ideal of divine life as a result of complete transformation of human nature was derived from solid experience gained in the midst of a stormy political activity.

Thus, Sri Aurobindo's yoga does not rest upon the basis of a  miracle, or a blind faith in something occult or some

¹ Cf. Purani, Evening Talks. Second Series, p. 62.

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intellectual abstract principle of philosophy. It is based on concrete experience and tested in the struggle of life.

From Bombay Sri Aurobindo began his journey back to Calcutta. He gave speeches in several cities on the way: 24 January 1908 at Nasik, 26 January at Dhulia, 28 and 29 January at Amravati, 30 and 31 January and 1 February at Nagpur (Shyam Sunder Chakravarty was present).

"All the speeches I delivered on my way to Calcutta were of the same nature with some mixture of mental working in some parts.

"Before parting from Lele I asked for his instructions. He was giving me detailed instructions. In the meantime I told him of a Mantra that had arisen in my heart. Suddenly while giving instructions he stopped and asked me if I could rely absolutely on Him who gave me the Mantra. I replied that I could always do that. Then Lele said that there was no need of further instructions."¹

"The final upshot", as Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple many years later, "was that he was made by a Voice within him to hand me over to the Divine within me enjoining an absolute surrender to its will a principle or rather a seed force to which I kept unswervingly and increasingly till it led me through all the mazes of an incalculable Yogic development bound by no single rule or style or dogma or Shastra to where and what I am now and towards what shall be hereafter."

In his further development in yoga, Sri Aurobindo saw that all the voices heard in sadhana are not from the Divine. Not only so, but there are voices coming from Ignorance and even Asuric voices, which the sadhak has to be on his guard against. In the light of his later development Sri Aurobindo declared that a direct Divine Guidance was possible after the attainment of the Divine and that then one could dispense with the need of the guidance (or working) of the voice.

¹ Cf. ibid.

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In February 1908 Barin wrote a letter to Lele inviting him to Calcutta. It was considered necessary for revolutionary youths to have training in the spiritual life. It was when Lele visited Calcutta that he came to know about the secret political movement of Barin and others. He became very serious and drew their attention to the grave dangers, but nobody listened to his warning. All were full of enthusiasm and unmindful of consequences. Prafulla Chaki was then in Calcutta and Lele wanted to take him to Bombay with him for sadhana. The proposal was referred to Sri Aurobindo who left it to Prafulla's own choice. Prafulla refused to be parted from Sri Aurobindo.

Lele also went to Deoghar, where he stayed at Seal's Lodge. He wrote a letter to Sri Aurobindo on 10 February. When they met, Lele asked him not to follow the path he was pursuing. He warned him that the voice that was guiding him was Asuric. He also said he would not be responsible for the consequences if he continued the same practice. Sri Aurobindo freed him from the responsibility of his sadhana.

"When Lele came to Calcutta in February 1908 he asked me about my yoga. I had stopped the old kind of meditation as it was practically going on all the time. Then he said that the Devil had taken possession of me and wanted to give me instructions. I did not act upon his advice but I did not want to insult him. I then received the command from within that a human Guru was no longer necessary for me now."

He thenceforward relied entirely on the inner guidance. Here in fact ended his relation with Lele as Guru. Sri Aurobindo ever afterwards felt greatly indebted to Lele and acknowledged his debt with deep gratitude. In March (most probably) Lele returned to Bombay.

An interesting narration regarding Sri Aurobindo's association with Lele is given below in the words of Barin Ghose who played an important role in bringing them together.

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"Aurobindo's Spiritual Initiation"

Excerpts from a chapter of Barin Ghose’s book

"Sri Aurobindo (As I Understand Him)”

After the break-up of the Congress at Surat Aurobindo came to Baroda, the capital city of His Highness the Gaekwar. A few months back while searching for a spiritual guide for our political workers I had been to Swami Brahmananda's Asram at Chandod on the banks of the river Nurbada. At that time there was a dawning sense growing in us the young dedicated workers that the deliverance of India was not possible without spiritual power. An idea of a Bhawani Mandir in the hills (a temple dedicated to that aspect of the Shakti which was worshipped by the great Sivajee of Aurangzib's time) was in the air among the secret workers. I was sent along with another friend¹ to Northern India to look for a Guru or spiritual guide who could guide India's destiny and train us the future builders of the nation along spiritual lines.

Deeply imbued with the cult of violence, learnt from the Irish Seinfeinners and Russian secret societies,' and equally ignorant of what spiritual power actually meant, we in our blindness wanted to harness Divine power to our dark mission.... It was no wonder then that we wished to take to spiritual means for a holy war against the British, this idea of God helping the righteous even in murder and bloodshed being ingrained in man from his savage days.

The great Yogi Brahmananda of Nurbada had passed away some years before and I found his disciple Keshavananda to be a dry as dust pedant and a mechanical Hatha Yogi knowing no higher yoga at all. But quite accidentally I had met for a few minutes a Maharashtra Brahmin, Vishnu Bhaskar Lele by name, in the Chandote Asram. I did know that this man was a great and real Yogi. While returning to

¹ Upendranath Banerjee. Upen's account of the journey is contained in the first chapter of his Nirbasiter Atmakatha (Memoirs of a Revolutionary).

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Bengal quite disappointed in my quest, I met Lele again in a friend's house at Navasari. He made me sit in a dark room with him for a few minutes and as a result three days afterwards I had my first glimpse of spiritual awakening, my first psychic experience.

Aurobindo hearing about him from me had expressed a desire to meet this wonderful devotee of love. As soon as the Surat Congress was over I wired to Lele requesting him to come to Baroda to meet Aurobindo. Crowds with flags and national cries followed us from the station and students unyoked a carriage and putting Aurobindo, myself and a Sannyasi, Sakhariaswami, on it, pulled it for some distance. In the midst of a surging crowd we reached Khasirao's [sic] Bungalow at 8 a.m. and immediately after Vishnu Bhaskar Lele arrived. I left Aurobindo alone with him for half an hour. When he had left I asked my brother how he found him so far as Yoga was concerned. Aurobindo said in his characteristic cryptic way, "Lele is a wonderful Yogi."

The next day Lele came again and requested Aurobindo to sit with him continuously for seven days all alone and in silence in a quiet place. At that time nothing was more difficult than this to arrange. Aurobindo had become the idol of the nation and a wonderful halo surrounded him producing a mysterious magnetic attraction for him in the hearts of our young men. Anybody, who was in national work anywhere, needed and sought his advice and guidance. Day in and day out, crowds surrounded our house and programmes of public meetings were being arranged for him.

Lele suddenly spirited Aurobindo away from the midst of all this commotion to a lonely old place tucked away in the heart of the city. There, day in and day out, the two of them sat wrapped in deep meditation facing each other. Their simple needs were looked after by Vishnu Bhaskar's wife, a matriculate girl of small stature of very subdued nature. I was also there and used to sit in meditation with them

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morning and evening in my restless and perfunctory way. My mind was divided between my ambitious national work and this inner life of Yoga.

Seven days passed almost in continuous and silent meditation¹ while batches of young men traversed the town in search of their newly-found leader who had so suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from among them upsetting all their crowded programmes and arrangements. When Aurobindo was at last permitted to come out and attend a meeting in the famous gymnasium there among his ardent admirers, a great and abiding peace had descended on him which from thence forward formed the basis of all his future Sadhana....

Lele had certainly acquired great yogic powers, yet he had his frailties too. He was really a khanda yogi or an imperfect Yogi. While leaving Baroda, Aurobindo could feel and clearly detect the very human frailty of this wonderful man. In the presence of the vast concourse of people assembled on the station platform to see Aurobindo off, Lele most unnecessarily made him come down from his compartment and bow down to his feet in the full view of the multitude. The whole thing was such a childish trick to show himself off as the spiritual preceptor of this great leader of all-India political fame! A yogi, conscious of his own vital nature and its weakness, will seldom yield to it as Lele did.

Aurobindo had asked him earlier in the day,² how he could possibly do such vast amount of mental work and address meetings when his mind had become so very calm and passive but his political works demanded from him continuous application of active mental labour and efforts.  

¹According to Sri Aurobindo he obtained the experience of the Silent Brahman in three days (or two or "really in one" day) of meditation with Lele. See On Himself, pp. 49, 82, 84, 85. He may have remained in seclusion with Lele for some days more before going out to give lectures etc.

² Not necessarily this day. Barin seems to have been writing under the impression that Sri Aurobindo and Lele parted at the station, but Lele in fact accompanied Sri Aurobindo to Poona and Bombay.

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Lele said in answer, "You need not think at all. Be calm and remain surrendered, leaving everything to the higher power to arrange for you. A voice will wake up in you, be your guide and speak with your tongue. When I am away, this voice will tell you what to do. You have only to obey it and both your Sadhana and your work will develop side by side automatically."

Straight from this Aurobindo went to Poona. He had to face a huge audience in a monster meeting. He rose to speak without preparing his speech and almost went through the identical experience which had come to Vivekananda before delivering his maiden speech at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Aurobindo got up to speak not only without previous preparation, but with a mind completely empty of thoughts. A thunder roared in his ear and threw him inward and when he came out of this semi-involved state he found that the required speech had been already delivered. The next morning's papers showed him what he had actually said. It was a unique speech, and gave the already famous Aurobindo an unrivalled position as a political leader with spiritually prophetic vision unknown before in the history of India.

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What is there new that we have yet to accomplish? Love, for as yet we have only accomplished hatred and self- pleasing; Knowledge, for as yet we have only accomplished error and perception and conceiving; Bliss, for as yet we have only accomplished pleasure and pain and indifference; Power, for as yet we have only accomplished weakness and effort and a defeated victory; Life, for as yet we have only accomplished birth and growth and dying; Unity, for as yet we have only accomplished war and association.

In a word, godhead; to remake ourselves in the divine image.

— Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo with Tilak and other Nationalists. December 1907

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Sri Aurobindo at Baroda in 1908, after the Surat Congress

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Postscript

Sri Aurobindo's stay in Baroda and his involvement in political activities for the freedom of his country described in the preceding chapters should help us to understand his spiritual development after his arrival in Pondicherry.

It is already seen that Sri Aurobindo began his practice of Yoga in 1904; but even before this he had a number of preliminary spiritual experiences, such as the mental experience of the Atman or Self, the realisation of the "vacant Infinite" and the awareness of the Godhead active within him and in the world.

Sri Aurobindo met Lele in January 1908, just after the Surat session of the Indian National Congress, remembered as one of the major turning points in the course of India's freedom-struggle. Sri Aurobindo's political influence was then at its height. He was recognised as one of the half- dozen most prominent men in the country. Less than a week later he found himself closeted with Lele. Following his instructions, Sri Aurobindo succeeded in establishing "a complete and abiding stillness of (his) whole consciousness." This led to the realisation of the "silent, spaceless and timeless Brahman," the "inactive" side of the one Reality. This realisation which is otherwise called Nirvana, and which often cannot be achieved even after a lifetime of effort, had come to Sri Aurobindo in less than three days.

Many, after obtaining this realisation, retire from a world now perceived as vain and illusory, to become absorbed in the peace or bliss of the Unmanifest. Such was not the path of Sri Aurobindo. The force that had impelled him into the political arena still drove him to action, and he did not resist it.

Four months after the Surat congress, Sri Aurobindo was arrested as a revolutionary conspirator. While under trial for the capital offence of "waging war against the king", he

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was placed in solitary confinement in the jail at Alipore, a locality of Calcutta. Soon he was plunged in an intensive practice of yoga.

The chief landmark of Sri Aurobindo's Alipore sadhana was his experience of "the cosmic consciousness and of the Divine as all beings and all that is." This was his second great realisation, and with it disappeared the "overwhelming feeling and perception of the total unreality of the world" which had accompanied his first realisation, that of the silent Brahman. Sri Aurobindo was now aware that it was the "dynamic side of the Brahman, the Ishwara" (Lord and Master) who had been moving him and continued to move him "in all his sadhana and action."

During the year that he was imprisoned at Alipore, Sri Aurobindo had a number of ancillary experiences, some of an "occult" nature. Among them were various types of subtle vision and hearing, the "first movement" of the powers which lead to "utthapana" or levitation, and a multifarious experience of spiritual bliss.

By this time-early in 1909-Sri Aurobindo had "realised in full two of the four great realisations, on which his yoga and his spiritual philosophy are founded"; the silent Brahman or Nirvana, the dynamic Brahman, the Divine as all that is.

These realisations represent the two ends impersonal and personal, nirguna and saguna of traditional spirituality. Each of them, to one who has attained it, is complete in itself. Indeed the two are often considered to be mutually exclusive.

Sri Aurobindo was acquitted and released from jail 'in May 1909. Still absorbed in sadhana, he re-entered the political field, and soon found himself again the object of unfriendly British attention. Early in 1910, one night at the office of the Karmayogin (an English weekly started by Sri Aurobindo), he received information of the Government's intention to search the office and arrest him. While considering what should be his attitude, he received a sudden

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command from above to go to Chandernagore in French India. He obeyed the command at once, for it was now his rule to move only as he was moved by the divine guidance and never to resist and depart from it; he did not stay to consult with anyone, but in ten minutes he was at the river ghāt, engaged a boat plying on the Ganges and in a few hours he was at Chandernagore where he went into secret residence. He sent a message to Sister Nivedita asking her to take up the editing of the Karmayogin in his absence. This was the end of his active connection with his journal. At Chandernagore he plunged entirely into solitary meditation and ceased all other activity. Then, there came to him a call to proceed to Pondicherry. A boat manned by some young revolutionaries of Uttarpara took him to Calcutta; there he boarded the Dupleix and reached Pondicherry on April 4, 1910.

It is interesting to note that before Sri Aurobindo's arrival at Pondicherry, a famous South Indian Yogi had made a prediction which, in Sri Aurobindo's words, was that "thirty years later (agreeing with the time of my arrival) a Yogi from the North would come as a fugitive to the South and practise there an integral Yoga (Poorna Yoga), and this would be one sign of the approaching liberty of India. He gave three utterances as the mark by which this Yogi could be recognised and all these three were found in the letters to my wife..."¹

At Pondicherry, from this time onwards Sri Aurobindo's practice of Yoga became more and more absorbing. Ten years afterwards he wrote to his brother Barin:

"What I started with, what Lele gave me, what I did in jail all that was a searching for the path, a circling around looking here and there, touching, taking up, handling, testing this and that of all the old partial yogas, getting a more or less complete experience of one and then going off in pursuit of another. Afterwards, when I came to Pondicherry,

 

¹ Sri Aurobindo, On Himself and on The Mother.

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 this unsteady condition ceased. The indwelling Guru of the world indicated my path to me completely, its full theory, the ten limbs of the body of the yoga." Thus, it was only after his arrival in Pondicherry that "a certain programme" was laid down that he thereafter followed.

He passed on in search of a more complete experience uniting and harmonising the two ends of existence. Spirit and Matter. Most ways of Yoga are paths to the Beyond leading to the Spirit and, in the end, away from life; Sri Aurobindo's rises to the Spirit to redescend with its gains bringing the light and power and bliss of the Spirit into life to transform it. Man's present existence in the material world is in this view or vision of things a life in the Ignorance with the Inconscient at its base, but even in its darkness and nescience there are involved the presence and possibilities of the Divine. The created world is not a mistake or a vanity and illusion to be cast aside by the soul returning to heaven or Nirvana, but the scene of a spiritual evolution by which out of this material Inconscience is to be manifested progressively the Divine Consciousness in things. Mind is the highest term yet reached in the evolution, but it is not the highest of which it is capable. There is above it a Supermnind or eternal Truth-consciousness which is in its nature the self-aware and self-determining light and power of a Divine Knowledge. Mind is an ignorance seeking after Truth, but this is a self-existent Knowledge harmoniously manifesting the play of its forms and forces. It is only by the descent of this Supermind that the perfection dreamed of by all that is highest in humanity can come. It is possible by opening to a greater divine consciousness to rise to this power of light and bliss, discover one's true self, remain in constant union with the Divine and bring down the Supramental Force for the transformation of mind and life and body. To realise this possibility has been the dynamic aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga.

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Chronology of Events

(1872-1908)

1872

August 15 - Birth in Calcutta.
1872-1879

At first in Rangpur, East Bengal; later sent to the Loretto Convent School, Darjeeling.
1879

Taken to England.
1879-1884

In Manchester (84, Shakespeare Street) in the charge of tile Drewett family. Tutored at home by the Drewetts.
1884

September - Admitted to St. Paul's School, London. Takes lodgings at 49, St. Stephen's Avenue, Shepherd's Bush, London.

1889

December - Passes Matriculation from St. Paul's.

1890

July - Admitted as a probationer to the Indian Civil Service.
October 11 - Admitted on a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, joins the Indian Majlis, a student group; makes speeches advocating Indian freedom.

1892

May - Passes the first part of the Classical Tripos, in the First Class.
August - Passes the Indian Civil Service final examination.
October-Leaves Cambridge. Takes lodgings at 6, Burlington Road, London. In London, takes part in the formation of a secret society called the "Lotus and Dagger".

Has first "pre-yogic" experience, the mental experience of the Atman.
November - Disqualified for the Indian Civil Service due to his failure to take the riding examination.
December- Obtains employment in the service of the Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda.

1893
January 12-Leaves England by the S.S. Carthage. Travels via Gibraltar, Port Said and Aden.

February 6 — Arrives in India, landing at the Apollo Bunder, Bombay.
A "vast calm" descends upon him as he sets foot on Indian soil and remains for months afterwards.
February 18 - Officially joins the Baroda State Service; his pay is retroactive to February 8, probable date of his arrival in Baroda.
His first work is in the Land Settlement Department.
During the first year of his stay in Baroda, has a vision of the Godhead surging up from within him when in danger of a carriage accident.
March-April - Works at translations from the Mahabharata.

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June 26 - Contributes an article, "India and the British Parliament", to the Indu Prakash, Bombay.
August 7-March 5, 1894 - Contributes a series of articles, New Lamps for Old, to the Indu Prakash.

1894

July 16-August 27 - Contributes a series of articles on Bankim Chandra Chatterii to the Indu Prakash.

1895

Publication of Songs to Myrtilla, a collection of poems.

1896

Probable year of publication of Urvasie, a narrative poem.

1897

Begins pan-time work in the Baroda College as a lecturer in French.

1898

Appointed acting Professor of English in the College.

1899

Serves as acting Professor of English and lecturer in French.
June-July - Writes Low and Death, a narrative poem.
July 22 - Lecture at the Baroda College Social Gathering.

1900

Acting Professor of English in the College.
c. 1900

First political move: sends Jatindranath Banerji to Bengal as his lieutenant for the work of revolutionary organisation and propaganda.

1901

Chairman of the college debating society.
April 17-Transferred from the College to the Revenue. Department, Baroda State.
April 30 - Marriage to Mrinalini Bose, eldest daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose, in Calcutta. Afterwards goes to Nainital with Mrinalini and his sister Sarojini.

1902
Works in the office of the Huzur Kamdar (aide to the Dewan, the chief  administrative officer of the State).
April 28 - On privilege leave until May 29.
Sri Aurobindo uses his leaves and vacations, especially from 1902 onwards, for the organisation of revolutionary action in Bengal.
December - Meeting with Lokmanya Tilak at the Ahmedabad session of the Indian National Congress:

1902-1903

Contacts and joins a secret society in western India.

1903

January - Recommences regular teaching at the Baroda College.
February 22 - On leave for one month.

May-August - Accompanies the Gaekwar on his tour of Kashmir as his Private Secretary.

In Kashmir on Takht-e-Suleman has an experience of the vacant infinite.

1904

Works as Huzur Kamdar, often doing secretarial work for the Gaekwar.

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September 28 — Directed to leave the Huzur Kamdar's office and join the College full time.
December - At the Bombay session of the Indian National Congress.

1904
Begins the practice of Yoga.

1905

January - Assumes the post of Vice-Principal, Baroda College.
March 3 - Becomes acting Principal of the College.
October 16 — The Partition of Bengal becomes an "accomplished fact". Sri Aurobindo writes the pamphlets "No Compromise" and "Bhawani Mandir" during the agitation that precedes the Partition.
December - At the Benares session of the Indian National Congress.

1906

February 19 - Takes privilege leave; goes to Bengal.
March 11 - Present at the formation of the National Council of Education in Calcutta.
March 12 - Declaration of the Yugantar. a Bengali weekly. Sri Aurobindo writes some articles in the early numbers of this revolutionary journal and always exercises general control over it.
April 14 — At the Barisal Conference. Afterwards, makes a political tour of East Bengal with Bepin Chandra Pal.
June - Returns to Baroda.

1906

June 19 - Takes one year's leave without pay from Baroda College. Returns to Bengal.

1907

December 21 - Leaves Calcutta for Surat, the venue of the 1907 session of the Indian National Congress.

1908

January - In Baroda.

Meets Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, a Maharashtrian yogi. Following Lele's instructions, establishes complete silence of the mind, attaining to the experience of the Silent Brahman or Nirvana.
Gives three public speeches.

Periodicals with which Sri Aurobindo was associated while in Baroda

Indu Prakash (English-Marathi Weekly, Bombay)

Sri Aurobindo contributed two series of articles to this newspaper, which was edited by his Cambridge friend K.G. Deshpande. New Lamps for Old appeared in nine instalments from August 7, 1893 to March 5, 1894. This series was preceded by another political article, "India and the British Parliament" (June 26, 1893).The second series, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, written after the passing of the Bengali writer, appeared in seven instalments from July 16 to August 27, 1894.

Yugantar (Bengali Weekly, Calcutta)

A revolutionary journal started by Sri Aurobindo's brother Barindra and others in March 1906. Sri Aurobindo wrote articles for some of the earlier issues of the paper, and always exercised general control over it. It ceased publication in May 1908.

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REFERENCES

Foreword

Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, April 1985, Vol. 9, No. 1, p. 66.
Rishabhchand, Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique (1981), pp. 14, 27, 28, 46, 49, 171.

Arrival in India

Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, April 1978, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 77, 107.

A.B. Purani, The Life of Sri Aurobindo (1987), pp. 36, 37, 38, 39.

K.R. Srinivasa lyengar, Sri Aurobindo—a biography and a history (1985), pp. 44. 46.

Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo (1966), p. 191.

Rishabhchand, Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique (1981), pp. 12, -15.

Personal and Family Life

Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, April 1981, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 85,86.

A.B. Purani, The Life of Sri Aurobindo (1987), pp. 38,43,44,45,46,47,50,61,62.

K.R. Srinivasa lyengar, Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history (1985), pp. 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 64, 65.

Nirodbaran, Mrinalini Devi (1988), pp. 2, 8, 9, 11-21, 24-29.

Rishabhchand, Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique (1981), pp. 26, 27, 45.

As a Teacher

Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, December 1978, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 217-20.

A.B. Purani, The Life of Sri Aurobindo (1987), pp. 45, 47, 48, 57, 58.

K.R. Srinivasa lyengar, Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history (1985), pp. 49-57.

Rishabhchand, Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique (1981), pp. 5, 28, 29.

SABCL, Vol. 8, pp. 359, 362, 371, 378, 382; Vol. 26, pp. 9, 252-3.

Political Life

Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research April 1979, Vol. 3, No. 1, p. 114.

A.B. Purani, The Life of Sri Aurobindo (1987). pp. 48, 49, 50-56, 60, 64-79, 85, 86.

K.R. Srinivasa lyengar, Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history (1985), pp. 59- 60.

Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo (1966), p. 58.

Rishabhchand, Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique (1981), pp. 46. 47, 49, 107-8.

SABCL, Vol. 26, pp. 14, 16, 23, 43.

Spiritual Life - Experiences

Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, December 1978, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 209- 210; December 1980, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 220-21.

A.B. Purani, The Life of Sri Aurobindo (1987), pp. 51, 52, 57-60, 87, 97-104.

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K.R. Srinivasa lyengar, Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history (1985), pp. 45, 47, 60, 63, 64.

Rishabhchand, Sri Aurobindo - His Life Unique (1981), pp. 32, 33.

SABCL, Vol. 26, pp. 79. 82, 84, 116, 163; Vol. 5, pp. 139, 161; Vol. 22, p. 121; Vol. 26, p. 50.

Postscript

Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, April 1985, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 70-71; April 1986, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 99-102.

Sri Aurobindo - A Life Sketch and His Teaching, Sri Aurobindo's Action, No. 19 (1971), p. 29.

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Sri Aurobindo came to tell us: "One need not leave
the earth to find the Truth, one need not leave the
life to find his soul, one need not abandon the world
or have only limited beliefs to enter into relation
with the Divine. The Divine is everywhere, in
everything and if He is hidden, it is because we do
not take the trouble to discover Him.”

— The Mother