111 years ago
Sri Aurobindo arrives in Pondicherry
On the 4th of April 1910— 111 years ago—Sri Aurobindo arrived in Pondicherry. I use this occasion to offer a sketch of his life up to that day.
Sri Aurobindo’s father, convinced of the superiority of European culture, did everything he could to prevent his son from becoming acquainted with the cultural and religious life of India. At the age of seven, he was sent to Manchester with instructions for his new guardian not to let him receive any religious instruction, and not to allow him to make the acquaintance of any other Indian. Sri Aurobindo returned to India fourteen years later, after completing a thorough classical education at King’s College, Cambridge. This was followed by thirteen years in the service of the Maharaja of Baroda, where he acted mostly as Vice-Principal of Baroda College. During this period Sri Aurobindo worked behind the scenes to establish a revolutionary movement.
In 1905, the announcement by the British Government that Bengal would be partitioned provoked unprecedented agitation. Seeing improved prospects for open political action, Sri Aurobindo accepted an offer to become the first principal of the newly founded Bengal National College, went to Calcutta, and plunged into the fray. Between 1905 and 1910 he acted primarily as a political journalist and as one of the leaders of the radical wing of the Indian National Congress. In 1907 a warrant for sedition was served against him as editor of the journal Bande Mataram. He was acquitted, but the trial made headlines around the country and brought him to national attention. The Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo later recalled, was almost unique in journalistic history in the influence it exercised in converting the mind of a people and preparing it for revolution.
Sri Aurobindo was the first Indian who had the courage to declare openly that the aim of political action in India was complete and absolute independence. Viceroy Lord Minto would later write in a letter to Viscount John Morley, Secretary of State for India: “As to the celebrated Arabindo, …I can only repeat what I said to you in my letter of April 14th [1910] that he is the most dangerous man we now have to reckon with.”
While his fame as a nationalist leader was at its height, Sri Aurobindo met a yogin named Vishnu Bhaskar Lele. During his stay at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo had already become interested in Indian philosophy, and had turned with increasing frequency to the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Initially he had accepted the prevailing illusionistic interpretation of these ancient Sanskrit scriptures, but soon he became convinced that this was not in accord with the texts. The Upanishads declared that everything was Brahman, not that everything except the world was Brahman. Once Sri Aurobindo realized that yoga was “skill in works,” as the Gita put it, he began to practice yoga in the hope of acquiring spiritual power for carrying out his political program.
When he met Lele, Sri Aurobindo explained to him that he wanted to practice yoga in order to obtain spiritual strength for his political work. They retired to a secluded place, and within three days Sri Aurobindo realized the state of consciousness which in India had come to be looked upon as the consummation of all spiritual seeking. In the absolute stillness of his mind there arose “the awareness of some sole and supreme Reality” which was “attended at first by an overwhelming feeling and perception of the total unreality of the world.” By a strange irony, Sri Aurobindo had been engulfed by the very experience that is the solid basis of the illusionistic philosophy which he had previously rejected. “There was no ego,” he recalls, “no real world, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indiscernible, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely and solely real.”
Sri Aurobindo lived in this selfless awareness for days and months “before it began to admit other things into itself and realization added itself to realization: What was at first seen “only as a mass of cinematographic shapes unsubstantial and empty of reality” eventually became real manifestations of One Reality. And this, he recalls, “was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always, with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine.”
While his body at first continued to act “as an empty automatic machine,” a new mode of action soon became evident. To quote from an autobiographical note written in the third person, “something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative.”
Before the two parted company, Lele told Sri Aurobindo to surrender to the guide within him. If he could do this completely, he would have no further need of a human guru. Sri Aurobindo accepted the advice. At least once, however, he took no heed of the inner guide. When a call came to him to put aside his political activity and go into seclusion, he was unable to accept it. About a month later he found himself in solitary confinement as an undertrial prisoner in the Alipore jail. It was not until a year and a day later that he was acquitted and released.
During his imprisonment, Sri Aurobindo's spiritual realization enlarged itself into an all-encompassing awareness of the One Reality. The bars of the cell, the high prison walls, the thieves and the murderers, the magistrate and the prosecution counsel—all became forms of the omnipresent Godhead. The passive, impersonal Brahman revealed its other side, the active and all-controlling personal Brahman.
After his acquittal, Sri Aurobindo carried on his political and journalistic activities for another nine months, but with a shift of emphasis. He no longer regarded the liberation of India as a goal in itself. If India must become a great and independent nation, it was to give to humanity the spiritual knowledge that a long line of Rishis, saints and Avatars had developed and perfected in the seclusion of the Indian peninsula.
One evening in 1910 Sri Aurobindo received an inner command to go to Chandernagore, one of the five enclaves that made up the French settlements in India. This time he obeyed at once. Outside the jurisdiction of the British police, Chandernagore had become an important center of nationalist activity. For a man with a British warrant against him, it was the best place near Calcutta to go.
About a month later, on April 4th, he moved on to the French enclave of Pondicherry, where he remained until his passing in 1950. Sri Aurobindo originally thought to return to politics after completing his yoga in a year or two at most. But before long “the magnitude of the spiritual work set before him became more and more clear to him.” It was no longer a question of “revolt against the British government; he was now waging a revolt against the whole universal Nature.”