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The Bengal National College & School : Calcutta, was set up in Calcutta by the National Council of Education on 14 August 1906 with Sri Aurobindo as principal & an elaborate syllabus in humanities, sciences, & technology. Eight days earlier, when Bepin Pal registered his paper Bande Mataram, he had joined him as assistant editor. Inevitably, not only did the Bengal Govt. refuse to recognise a College & School which was “exclusively under national control” & “standing apart from the existing systems of primary, secondary, & university education” & its alumni as bonafide graduates, but heartily approved loyalist Tarak Nath Palit’s Bengal Technical Institute (BTI) founded to churn out native Indian machinists to supplement the native clerks churned out by Government & Christian education as the alien rulers’ subservient work-force. And neither the Bombay University to which Baroda College was affiliated, nor the Calcutta University even noticed Sri Aurobindo’s recommendation on National Education. Inevitably also, Sri Aurobindo published the following in the Bande Mataram of August 22 under the title ‘National Education & the Congress’: “National Education received the seal of approbation from united Bengal at the Barisal Conference. It should be the aim of the nationalists to elicit from the Congress this year a solemn expression of the national will recognising the new movement & recommending it to all India. It is possible that there may be some difficulty in carrying the motion, for the small-minded & fainthearted figure largely in the Congress ranks. At Benares this element disgraced the nation by excluding Swadeshi, the universal national movement, from the purview of the national assembly. …. This time there should be no repetition of such pusillanimity. Such exhibitions of moral cowardice are one reason more why the Congress should be reconstituted on a basis sufficiently popular to prevent the sentiment of the people from being outraged or caricatured by self-constituted representatives. …. If the Congress had not been hopelessly out of date in its form & spirit, it would by this time have organised itself for work, with a department for the organisation of National Education on a basis of voluntary self-taxation figuring prominently in its list of national duties.” On July 30, 1907, the police search the Bande Mataram office & lodged a complaint against Sri Aurobindo. He resigned from the College on 2nd August; was arrested on the 16th on charge of sedition for his writing in the Bande Mataram, & released on bail. During the period of the trial Sri Aurobindo resigned his principalship of the College in order to save embarrassment to the Council & to enable them to run the institution. There were differences with the College Council – the Council, under the weak-kneed Moderate Rāshbehari Ghose did not dare make the National College anything more than imparting a place of learning that Govt. would approve; Sri Aurobindo wanted to make it a cradle of national regeneration [s/a Calcutta University] “Many people came to meet him,” writes Abinash, “during [the] period that he gave up the principalship of the Bengal National College & started editing Bande Mataram. He was always in a meditative state. When somebody came [to his residence at 23 Scott’s Lane] he talked & chatted cheerfully, then he fell silent & became absorbed in meditation. If someone came to him for articles or about other Bande Mataram matters, he would ask him to wait & would begin writing…. It is easy to imagine how difficult it was for such a man to look after his domestic affairs. Food or clothing did not matter to him. He ate whatever was there. There were holes in his shoes but he did not notice. He did not concern himself with the household at all. I had to look after everything. He got 150 rupees a month from the National College, but it did not always come & finally it stopped altogether.” [“Sri Aurobindo”, Mother India, July 2012, pp.528-39] “At an early period Sri Aurobindo left the organisation of the College to the educationist Satish Mukherji & plunged fully into politics. When the Bande Mataram case was brought against him he resigned his post in order not to embarrass the College authorities but resumed it again on his acquittal. During the Alipore case he resigned finally at the request of the College authorities. …. The final resignation was given from Alipore Jail after he was arrested on 2nd May, 1908.” [SABCL 26:43] After his acquittal on 23rd September, the Council could not but recall him to his post, but he preferred to be just one of the professors. That day he spoke to of the students & teachers of the College: “What I want to be assured of is not so much that you feel sympathy for me in my troubles but that you have sympathy for the cause, in serving which I have to undergo what you call my troubles…. When we established this college & left other occupations, other chances of life, to devote our lives to this institution, we did so because we hoped to see in it the foundation, the nucleus of a nation, of the new India which is to begin its career after this night of sorrow & trouble, on that day of glory & greatness when India will work for the world…. What has been insufficiently & imperfectly begun by us, it is for you to complete & lead to perfection…. I wish to see some of you becoming great, great not for your own sakes, not that you may satisfy your own vanity, but great for her, to make India great, to enable her to stand up with head erect among the nations of the earth, as she did in days of yore when the world looked up to her for light. Even those who will remain poor & obscure, I want to see their very poverty & obscurity devoted to the Motherland. There are times in a nation’s history when Providence places before it one work, one aim, to which everything else, however high & noble in itself, has to be sacrificed. Such a time has now arrived for our Motherland when nothing is dearer than her service, when everything else is to be directed to that end.” [SABCL 1:515-16] S. Bhattacharya: When the National Council of Education failed to attract a large enough number of students to the Humanities side, it abolished that section of its Bengal National College & helplessly watched the abolition of the other ‘national schools’ it had opened in Bengal. On 25 May 1910, the BNC was taken over by the Bengal Technical Institute…the united institution came to be known as the Bengal National College & Technical School. When its arts side failed, the technical side was developed into the Jādhavapur College of Engineering & Technology, which gradually assumed the form of the present Jādhavapur University. [Pages.677-78] Prabhākar Mukherjee: The press & the platform of Calcutta, made at that time a feeble attempt to name the University after Sri Aurobindo, but the successor of the British Empire in India – I mean our National Govt. – found no way to honour the National College in the manner suggested. [Mother India, March 1962, p.68]