Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on
15 August, 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 for India,
arriving there in February, 1893.
Sri Aurobindo passed thirteen years, from 1893 to
1906, in the Baroda Service, first in the Revenue
Department and in secretariate work for the Maharaja,
afterwards as Professor of English and, finally,
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.(1)
At Baroda he made up the deficiency, learned
Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages,
assimilated the spirit of Indian civilisation and its
forms past and present. A great part of the last years
of this period was spent on leave in silent political
activity, for he was debarred from public action by his
position at Baroda. The outbreak of the agitation
against the partition of Bengal in 1905 gave him the
opportunity to give up the Baroda Service and join
openly in the political movement. He left Baroda in
1906 and went to Calcutta as Principal of the
newly-founded Bengal National College.
The political action of Sri Aurobindo covered eight
years, from 1902 to 1910. During the first half of this
period he worked behind the scenes, preparing with
other co-workers the beginnings of the Swadeshi (Indian
Sinn Fein) movement, till the agitation in Bengal
furnished an opening for the public initiation of a
more forward and direct political action than the
moderate reformism which had till then been the creed
of the Indian National Congress.
In 1906 Sri Aurobindo came to Bengal with this
purpose and joined the New Party, an advanced section
small in numbers and not yet strong in influence, which
had been recently formed in the Congress. The political
theory of this party was a rather vague gospel of
Non-cooperation; in action it had not yet gone farther
than some ineffective clashes with the Moderate leaders
at the annual Congress assembly behind the veil of
secrecy of the "Subjects Committee".
Sri Aurobindo persuaded its chiefs in Bengal to come
forward publicly as an All-India party with a definite
and challenging programme, putting forward Tilak, the
popular Maratha leader at its head, and to attack the
then dominant Moderate (Reformist or Liberal) oligarchy
of veteran politicians and capture from them the
Congress and the country. This was the origin of the
historic struggle between the Moderates and the
Nationalists (called by their opponents Extremists)
which in two years changed altogether the face of
Indian politics.
The new-born Nationalist party put forward Swaraj
(independence) as its goal as against the far-off
Moderate hope of colonial self-government to be
realised at a distant date of a century or two by a
slow progress of reform; it proposed as its means of
execution a programme which resembled in spirit, though
not in its details, the policy of Sinn Fein developed
some years later and carried to a successful issue in
Ireland.
The principle of this new policy was self-help; it
aimed on one side at an effective organisation of the
forces of the nation and on the other professed a
complete non-cooperation with the Government. Boycott
of British and foreign goods and the fostering of
Swadeshi industries to replace them, boycott of British
law courts, and the foundation of a system of
Arbitration courts in their stead, boycott of
Government universities and colleges and the creation
of a network of National colleges and schools, the
formation of societies of young men which would do the
work of police and defence and, wherever necessary, a
policy of passive resistance were among the immediate
items of the programme.
Sri Aurobindo hoped to capture the Congress and make
it the directing centre of an organised national
action, an informal State within the State, which would
carry on the struggle for freedom till it was won. He
persuaded the party to take up and finance as its
recognised organ the newly-founded daily paper,
Bande Mataram, of which he was at the time
acting editor.
The Bande Mataram, whose policy from the
beginning of 1907 till its abrupt winding up in 1908
when Sri Aurobindo was in prison was wholly directed by
him, circulated almost immediately all over India.
During its brief but momentous existence it changed the
political thought of India which has ever since
preserved fundamentally, even amidst its later
developments, the stamp then imparted to it. But the
struggle initiated on these lines, though vehement and
eventful and full of importance for the future, did not
last long at the time; for the country was still unripe
for so bold a programme.
Sri Aurobindo was prosecuted for sedition in 1907
and acquitted. Up till now an organiser and writer, he
was obliged by this event and by the imprisonment or
disappearance of other leaders to come forward as the
acknowledged head of the party in Bengal and to appear
on the platform for the first time as a speaker. He
presided over the Nationalist Conference at Surat in
1907 where in the forceful clash of two equal parties
the Congress was broken to pieces.
In May, 1908, he was arrested in the Alipore
Conspiracy Case as implicated in the doings of the
revolutionary group led by his brother Barindra; but no
evidence of any value could be established against him
and in this case too he was acquitted.
After a detention of one year as undertrial prisoner
in the Alipore Jail, he came out in May, 1909, to find
the party organisation broken, its leaders scattered by
imprisonment, deportation or self-imposed exile and the
party itself still existent but dumb and dispirited and
incapable of any strenuous action.
For almost a year he strove single-handed as the
sole remaining leader of the Nationalists in India to
revive the movement. He published at this time to aid
his effort a weekly English paper, the Karmayogin, and
a Bengali weekly, the Dharma. But at last he was
compelled to recognise that the nation was not yet
sufficiently trained to carry out his policy and
programme.
For a time he thought that the necessary training
must first be given through a less advanced Home Rule
movement or an agitation of passive resistance of the
kind created by Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa. But he
saw that the hour of these movements had not come and
that he himself was not their destined leader.
Moreover, since his twelve months' detention in the
Alipore Jail, which had been spent entirely in practice
of Yoga, his inner spiritual life was pressing upon him
for an exclusve concentration. He resolved therefore to withdraw
from the political field, at least for a time.
(2)
In February, 1910, he withdrew to a secret
retirement at Chandernagore and in the beginning of
April sailed for Pondicherry in French lndia. A third
prosecution was launched against him at this moment for
a signed article in the Karmayogin; in his absence it
was pressed against the printer of the paper who was
convicted, but the conviction was quashed on appeal in
the High Court of Calcutta. For the third time a
prosecution against him had failed.
Sri Aurobindo had left Bengal with some intention of
returning to the political field under more favourable
circumstances; but very soon the magnitude of the
spiritual work he had taken up appeared to him and he
saw that it would need the exclusive concentration of
all his energies. Eventually he cut off connection with
politics, refused repeatedly to accept the
Presidentship of the National Congress and went into a
complete retirement. During all his stay at Pondicherry
from 1910 onward he remained more and more exclusively
devoted to his spiritual work and his sadhana.
In 1914 after four years of silent Yoga he began the
publication of a philosophical monthly, the Arya. Most
of his more important works, The Life Divine, The
Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Isha
Upanishad, appeared serially in the Arya. These works
embodied much of the inner knowledge that had come to
him in his practice of Yoga.
Others were concerned with the spirit and
significance of Indian civilisation and culture (The
Foundations of Indian Culture), the true meaning of the
Vedas (The Secret of the Veda), the progress of human
society (The Human Cycle), the nature and evolution of
poetry (The Future Poetry), the possibility of the
unification of the human race (The Ideal of Human
Unity).
At this time also he began to publish his poems,
both those written in England and at Baroda and those,
fewer in number, added during his period of political
activity and in the first years of his residence at
Pondicherry. The Arya ceased publication in 1921 after
six years and a half of uninterrupted appearance.
Sri Aurobindo lived at first in retirement at
Pondicherry with four or five disciples. Afterwards
more and yet more began to come to him to follow his
spiritual path and the number became so large that a
community of sadhaks had to be formed for the
maintenance and collective guidance of those who had
left everything behind for the sake of a higher life.
This was the foundation of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
which has less been created than grown around him as
its centre.
Sri Aurobindo began his practice of Yoga in 1904. At
first gathering into it the essential elements of
spiritual experience that are gained by the paths of
divine communion and spiritual realisation followed
till now in India, 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 Supermind 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.
Sri Aurobindo left his body on December 5, 1950. The
Mother carried on his work until November 17, 1973.
Their work continues.
Footnotes
1 It may be observed that Sri Aurobindo's
education in England gave him a wide introduction to
the culture of ancient, or mediaeval and of modern
Europe. He was a brilliant scholar in Greek and Latin.
He had learned French from his childhood in Manchester
and studied for himself German and Italian sufficiently
to study Goethe and Dante in the original tongues. (He
passed the Tripos in Cambridge in the first class and
obtained record marks in Greek and Latin in the
examination for the Indian Civil Service.) Back to footnote
reference
2 For a
more complete statement about Sri Aurobindo's political
life see Volume 26, On Himself, pp. 21-41. Back to footnote
reference
