33 The Revolutionary A public propaganda to convert the whole nation to the idea of independence was a later acquisition in Sri Aurobindo's armoury. He had started out with a secret revolutionary propaganda and organization of which the central object was the preparation of an armed insurrection. "We wanted," he said, "to give battle after awakening the spirit of the race through guerilla warfare.... My idea was for an open armed revolution in the whole of India." It was in 1901 that Sri Aurobindo made his first move by sending Jatin Banerji "as his lieutenant to Bengal with a programme of preparation and action which he thought might occupy a period of 30

48 A Seed Force It was "in that condition of Nirvanic silence that I went first to Poona and then to Bombay." Lele went with him. They visited together the Parvati hill, where Sri Aurobindo had that experience at the 'Hill-Top Temple.' During his visit at Poona, supposedly a private one, "citizens thronged to see him whenever he appeared," reports the Bande Mataram. On 12 January Sri Aurobindo was invited by Professor Ramamurti, the 'Indian Hercules,' to witness his extraordinary feats of strength. Sri Aurobindo thanked the Professor for his performance, invited him to Bengal, and requested the audience to develop their physical faculties so as to serve the coun

7 Auro-Dada In Bengal, the Puja season in autumn is the time for fun, frolic and family gatherings. Whenever he could, Sri Aurobindo would take time off from his Baroda job to rejoin his family at Deoghar. He had a large family on his mother's side : uncles and aunts and cousins. One of the cousins, Basanti Chakraborty, gave reminiscences of her 'Auro-dada' in a Bengali magazine, Galpa Bharati. Sri Aurobindo was very close to her family, and whenever he passed through Calcutta he always dropped in to see his aunt Lilabati, 'Na-mesi,' and Krishna Kumar Mitra, his 'Na-mesi,' at their residence. K. K. Mitra and Lilabati were married at Calcutta in April 1881. A large number

A Word With You, Please! Hello, friends. Good morning to you. Are you well rested? Ready for the next leg of our journey? Then come along. We shall make further acquaintance with Sri Aurobindo. For that we have to go back to days not yet beyond recall. To the dawn of the twentieth century. Of course, he was not yet 'Sri' Aurobindo, just Arabindo Babu. This Cambridge-educated young man seemed to have gathered into himself all the qualities and more of his illustrious predecessors like Bacon, Darwin, Milton, Newton, Wordsworth, all Cambridge men. Arabindo Babu's keen wit was more than a match for the subtle and daring policy of Curzon, who was a statesma

55 The Laboratory of the Soul When he came out from jail Sri Aurobindo found the whole political aspect of the country altered. Most of the Nationalist leaders were in prison or in self-imposed exile "and there was a general discouragement and depression, though the feeling in the country had not ceased but was only suppressed and was growing by its suppression," he wrote. Suppression. Repression. The colonial government had let loose severe repression over the whole country. A steamroller of repression. And passed a profusion of strangling laws. Bengal bore the brunt of its wrath. Under an arbitrary 'law' of deportation the police had suddenly hurried aw

20 God Contracts a Bad Habit We have gone far ahead in time. Sri Aurobindo's Yogic activities were still hidden in the mists of the future, while his political activities were still concealed from the public eye. Let us take a journey back into time. A. Ghose was known to all ranks of people at Baroda from the Maharaja to the street sweeper —and esteemed by all. The educated community of Baroda had a great respect for the young man's uncommon gifts. From February 1898, when he was first appointed Extra Professor of English, Sri Aurobindo was associated with the Baroda College until he left the State Service in 1906; at the time he was the Act

23 K. M. Munshi When Sri Aurobindo wholly gave up his job at Baroda, the College students were naturally sad at losing such a teacher, but their pride in him more than offset their sadness: 'their' Professor was now a political leader of all-India stature. We may note too that many of those who served the country under B. G. Tilak's leadership were Sri Aurobindo's students from Baroda College. Just as Auro-dada had tried to kindle the spirits of his brother and cousins at Deoghar with patriotic fire, so did Prof. A. Ghose with his students. K. M. Munshi was one of them. Munshi was the founder of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, an organ to revitalize Indian culture

40 The Man and the Moment "God prepares the man and the moment," wrote Sri Aurobindo in Historical Impressions. "Without the man the moment is a lost opportunity; without the moment the man is a force inoperative. The meeting of the two changes the destinies of nations and the poise of the world is altered by what seems to the superficial an accident." He was giving his impressions of the French Revolution of 1789 and its four central personalities. In India the 'moment' was the partition of Bengal. From the spontaneous outpourings from his countrymen Sri Aurobindo stands out as the 'man.' Some of his greatest contemporaries and the most ordinary of th

18 The Invasion of the Infinite It was here in Srinagar that Sri Aurobindo had an experience about which he spoke often. It was the experience of the Infinite. Atop the nearly 300-metre high Shankaracharya Hill — also called by Muslims Takht-i-Suleiman, meaning the seat of Solomon —there is a temple. The temple can be seen from any part of Srinagar. And from the temple one gets a scenic view of the valley: the Dal Lake to the north-west and the Jhelum on the other side, both dotted with shikaras or house-boats. The serpentine roads and the dense clusters of houses interspersed with patches of green are a feast for the eyes. The temple stands at t

42 Taken at the Flood "There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures." "My eyes first set themselves on Sri Aurobindo," said Suresh Chandra Deb at the beginning of his narrative, "on a November evening on the eve of the Benares Congress held during the last days of December, 1905. The place of the meeting was a room at the Field and Academy Club in the Sib Narayan Das Lane just north-east of the present Vidyasagar College on Cornwallis Street.... Leaders of thought and society had