-07_Archival Notes

Archival Notes

THE KARMAYOGIN CASE

In a previous issue (Archives and Research, vol.7, no. 1) we examined the British Government's three-pronged attack against Sri Aurobindo during the year 1909. From the moment of his acquittal at Alipore on 6 May, the bureaucracy attempted to remove him from the political field by means of appeal, prosecution or deportation. Legal experts began their study of Beachcroft's judgment the same month that it was delivered; by August the idea of appeal was effectively abandoned, and by November it became legally impossible. (See Documents, A & R, vol. 7, no. 1.) Meanwhile the police were keeping close track of Sri Aurobindo's writings and speeches, hoping he might say something indictable for sedition. A huge file was compiled and studied; but by 22 July the Bengal Government had vetoed any new prosecution. Even the appearance the next week of Sri Aurobindo's signed Open Letter—in which he made a dangerous claim for "absolute autonomy" — was not considered a serious enough provocation to risk undertaking a possibly unsuccessful sedition case. The easy device of deportation without trial was tempting; but the strong public reaction against the continuing detention of the "nine deportees" made the government abandon this strategy before the end of July. By the middle of August 1909, Sri Aurobindo, though still being carefully watched, was not in immediate danger of any form of imprisonment.

This state of affairs lasted until Christmas. On that day Sri Aurobindo published another open letter, headed "To My Countrymen", in the Karmayogin.¹ In this article he dealt with the situation in the country arising out of two important events — "the publication of the Councils' Regulations", which showed the hollowness of the Minto-Morley Reforms, and the breakdown of "the negotiations for the union of the Moderates and Nationalists in an United Congress" (dealt with at length in the last issue of Archives and Research). Seeing these two events as signs of the inevitable demise of Moderate politics in India, Sri Aurobindo called for a reorganisation of the Nationalist (Extremist) Party.

"To My Countrymen" was. signed—it was only the second political writing to appear over Sri Aurobindo's name in the Karmayogin. He knew that his signature made the article unusually vulnerable. The Government's whole difficulty in the Bande Mataram sedition trial of 1907 had been to prove Sri Aurobindo's connection with the paper. Here he was offering the clearest possible proof of authorship. The article was therefore "sufficiently moderate"^la in its tone. The matter of independence was not even brought up; Sri Aurobindo spoke of "the struggle for Indian liberties" — not liberty. This verbal nicety would later be noted by a judge who thought Sri Aurobindo "a very ingenious and subtle master of language" (see Document 1m).

Government of Bengal investigators do not at first seem to have found anything particularly offensive in "To My Countrymen". No mention is made of the article in a dossier assembled by them in February 1910 as part of a proposal to have fifty-three persons, Sri Aurobindo among them, deported under Regulation III of 1818.

1 Sri Aurobindo. Karmayogin (1972), pp. 324-28.

1a Sri Aurobindo, On Himself(1972), p. 36.

Bengal's unhappy experience with court cases — they had twice failed to obtain a conviction against Sri Aurobindo — made it favour the less complicated, if more controversial, expedient of Regulation III. To local (provincial) governments, deportation had one great advantage: it had to be carried out by the Viceroy after being approved by the Secretary of State for India. This meant, as the Viceroy later complained to the Secretary of State, that the brunt of the responsibility fell on them (Document 3c). Should the attempt miscarry or cause a public outcry, these officials could not ask Bengal's Lieutenant-Governor any embarrassing questions if they had been involved in the plan from the start.

As we have seen (A & R, vol. 7, p. 97) Bengal's deportation scheme was summarily vetoed by the Government of India on 7 March 1910. The Secretary of State, John Morley (Plate 4), had just escaped the pressure he had been under during the long internment of the nine deportees. He was not about to invite new troubles by allowing India, at Bengal's request, to imprison fifty-three men without trial. In regard to Sri Aurobindo, however, India had already initiated its own scheme. It was one that had the advantage of relying on "legal procedure" and that incidentally would shift the responsibility back to Bengal.

In a note dated 14 January 1910, Sir Harold Stuart, Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, informed F. W. Duke, his counterpart in the Bengal Secretariat, that in his opinion "To My Countrymen" was seditious. He asked the local government to consult its "legal advisers" on this point. He had to proceed in this way because the Code of Criminal Procedure specified that sedition prosecutions had to be instituted or sanctioned by the local government.² But local governments were not really independent, least of all the Bengal Lieutenant-Governorship, whose chief executive was appointed by the Viceroy. The unambiguous close of Stuart's letter shows how things stood: "If their answer [that of Bengal's legal advisers] is in the affirmative, I am to suggest the expediency of the early institution of proceedings against Arabindo Ghose" (Document lb). Behind the bureaucratic etiquette, this is a clear request for Bengal to take upon itself the trouble of a major political case.

Bengal was not itself inclined to do this. The Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Edward Baker, had already "decided not to prosecute"³ — if indeed he had at all considered the matter. This seems unlikely considering the lack of mention of "To My Countrymen" in the dossier referred to above. Baker was pinning his hopes on the big deportation scheme of which this dossier formed a part. If the plan went through, the Lieutenant-Governor would be rid not only of Sri Aurobindo but of fifty-two other causes of disturbance. This helps explain why Bengal waited two weeks even to acknowledge Stuart's note of 14 January. But by 25 February (when India's feeling about deportation must have been known) the local government decided to prosecute. Duke informed Stuart's undersecretary, apparently orally, that they would go

2 Parliamentary speech by Edwin Montague quoted in Manoj Das, Sri Aurobindo in the First Decade of the Century, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1972 (hereafter M.Das), p. 156-57.

3 Letter Baker to Hardinge (no date given, c. 1911) quoted by Prithwindra Mukherjee, "Some Documents on the Indian Revolutionary Movement and Sri Aurobindo", Mother India, vol.23 (1971) (hereafter P. Mukherjee). p. 533.

ahead "if connection of Arabindo Ghose with the Karmayogin can be definitely established". This was essential, the Bengal Chief Secretary added, "to avoid another fiasco such as that in 1907", i.e. the Bande Mataram case (Document lc).

It appears to this writer that Duke's caveat was just a delaying tactic. There may have been, as Bengal complained, "technical difficulties" in proving connection; but "To My Countrymen" was signed, and each issue of the Karmayogin proclaimed "Contributors:— Sj. Aurobindo Ghose and others". The legal difficulties could hardly have been insurmountable, and in fact the question of authorship caused no trouble in the courts. It would seem that the real reason Bengal spent more than a month sorting through the technicalities was that it had lost track of Sri Aurobindo. Police detectives had been watching him ever since his release from Alipore jail. It is said that the government was disbursing the then-not-inconsiderable sum of Rs. 400 a month for this shadowing.⁴ But sometime around the end of February, Sri Aurobindo gave them the slip. There was wide speculation about where he might be. "Reliable information" had it that he had become a sannyasi, and after spending some time at Dakshineshwar, had "probably gone off to some other sacred place to devote himself to a prolonged period of religious meditation".⁵ According to less reliable rumours he had got as far as, variously, Geneva or Tibet.⁶ It is not certain how much credence Bengal gave to these stories. It is true that the Calcutta Criminal Investigation Department (C.I.D.) sent information to C.I.D. offices in the major cities of the United Provinces (where there are many places sacred to Hindus) reporting Sri Aurobindo's "mysterious" disappearance, and asking to be informed if he was located.⁷ On the other hand Bengal's Special Branch later reported to the central C. I. D. office that Sri Aurobindo had gone underground in Calcutta,⁸ and the police seem to have based their actions on this information. In February or March Sri Aurobindo received a letter which he knew to be from a police spy "asking him to reappear and face trial". He replied that he had no reason to come out as "there was no warrant against him and no prosecution had been announced". He "thought this would have the effect of the police coming out into the open with a warrant, and in fact it had this effect".⁹

The Government of Bengal gave its sanction to a prosecution on 2 April 1910 (Document li). Two days later, on 4 April 1910, warrants were issued against Sri Aurobindo, the writer of "To My Countrymen", and Manmohan Ghose, publisher and printer of the Karmayogin.¹⁰ (The same day the Government of India decided

4 Daily Hitavadi, 11 April 1910, quoted in M. Das, p. 163.

5 "Illustrated Supplement to the United Provinces Secret Abstract of 26th March 1910." Commissioner of Police, Greater Bombay.

6 See M. Das, pp. 162-64.

7 File cited in footnote 5.

8 Government of India, Home Department, Political-A, Proceedings, December 1910, Nos. 14-42, p. 3. (Excerpts from this document are reproduced as Document 1 in the present issue. Unexcerpted parts of the document are referred to below in this form: GOI, HD-A, December 1910, 14-42.

9 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself (1972), p. 54.

10 GOI, HD-A, December 1910, 14-42, 2, 25. In the document the exact date of the warrant is not mentioned in any government communication, but only in an Indian News Agency Telegram dated 5 April that is quoted in the Notes of the document. The telegram says the warrant was issued "yesterday" (Document lc). Page 25 of the Notes gives the information that the warrant against Manmohan Ghose was issued the same day as Sri Aurobindo's. 4 April (a Monday) seems to be a likely date for issuing the warrant, since government sanction was given to the police the preceding Saturday.

to remind Bengal about the long-pending matter—Document lc.) Manmohan Ghose (no relation to Aurobindo Ghose) was arrested on the fourth in Calcutta. The writer of the article did not surrender, as the police had hoped he would. Everyone denied knowledge of his whereabouts.

In fact Sri Aurobindo was a thousand miles away. The very morning the warrant was issued, he arrived at the South Indian town of Pondicherry. A month and a half earlier, late in the evening of 15 February,¹¹ warned of planned Government action against him, he had, in obedience to a command from above, left Calcutta for the nearby French enclave of Chandernagore. Here he spent six weeks absorbed in yogic sadhana while the Bengal Government was (supposedly) investigating his connection with the Karmayogin and (certainly) trying to find out where he was. On 1 April, the day before local sanction to prosecute was obtained, Sri Aurobindo departed in exciting circumstances from Calcutta for Pondicherry, the sleepy port in the south that was the capital of the French etablissements dans l'Inde.

The Government of Bengal had not informed the Government of India when it began the prosecution. The Government of India consequently had not informed the Secretary of State. India's Stuart learned of the warrant against Sri Aurobindo from a news service telegram on 6 April (Document lc). He at once wrote a subordinate, "We ought to report to Secretary of State", and had a telegram sent to Bengal asking for particulars. It was a bad moment for a problem to crop up. The local government was preparing for its annual exodus to Darjeeling. The Government of India had already migrated to its summer capital of Simla, located at the other end of the Himalayan range. The Viceroy was not there, however, but in "Camp" — perhaps indulging in his favourite pastime of shikar. There could be no immediate report to the Secretary of State — but he did not need one.

Lord Morley was unpleasantly surprised on 7 April when he opened his morning Times and learned that "a warrant for the arrest of Arabindo Ghose had been issued" (see Plate 3). He at once sent a telegram to India asking if there was any truth in the report. He demanded a reply "fully and immediately" (Document 1d). In a letter sent the same day to the Viceroy, Morley wrote that he and his aides were "vastly puzzled" by the Times telegram. His greatest fear was adverse opinion at home. He dreaded Sri Aurobindo's coming to England, for "'fugitive offenders', where the offense has been a newspaper article, may prove awkward customers in a free country" (Document 3a).

Morley's apprehensions about adverse English opinion were promptly justified. Ramsay Macdonald, a leader of the increasingly powerful Labour party, had read the Times telegram too. Macdonald, who had met Sri Aurobindo half a year before,¹²stood up that very morning on the floor of the House of Commons and asked for information on the warrant. He was told, truthfully, that the Secretary of State had "seen the announcement" (along with thousands of other Times readers), but that he had "no official information" (Document 2).

The same day, before leaving for Darjeeling (and before receiving Simla's

11 The date of this important event has now been established with some certainty. A full account of the evidence will be given in the next issue. This will correct certain mistakes in footnotes 48 and 49 of the April 1983 instalment of Archival Notes.

12 Late in November 1909 in Calcutta. An account of the meeting is given in Macdonald's Awakening of India (London, Hodder and Stoughton, n.d.), p. 49.

telegram of the sixth), Bengal's officiating Chief Secretary sent a letter to the Government of India explaining that the Lieutenant-Governor "had sanctioned prosecution of Aurobindo Ghose and Manmohan Ghose" (Document le). This was Bengal's first official communication in the matter since its initiation three months before. The letter did not reach Simla until 12 April. By that time many anxious messages had been sent across telegraph line and cable.

The first reaction of the Viceroy, Lord Minto (Plate 5), to Morley's telegram was to demand "why issue of warrant for Aurobindo Ghose's arrest was, before it could be answered, made public?" (Document If). In other words, who was responsible for the leak? No answer to this was forthcoming (one would be sent from Darjeeling a week later—Document lg); meanwhile Simla had to provide Minto with something to tell the Secretary of State. True to the code of the bureaucrat, the first article of which is, Act always in the interests of your own skin, Sir Harold Stuart telegraphed the Viceroy: "Bengal Government sanctioned his [Sri Aurobindo's] prosecution . . . for article mentioned after their legal advisers were consulted."¹³Stuart omitted to mention that it was he who had "suggested" that Bengal consult its legal officers. The Home Department Secretary went on to summarise the article — no better than the Times correspondent had — and to give the news that Sri Aurobindo's whereabouts were unknown.

In fact the very day Stuart sent his telegram (9 April), Sri Aurobindo was located. A certain Deputy Superintendent Paupa Rao Naidu of the Madras C.I.D. informed his superiors that the man they wanted was in Pondicherry.¹⁴ It would be some time before positive identification could be established; meanwhile steps were taken to prevent him from going any farther. No one could believe that he intended to stay in such an out-of-the-way place, despite the fact that he was safe from British arrest there. G.C.Denham of the Bengal C.I.D. thought there was "no doubt that he is trying to escape from India to avoid arrest".^14a On 18 April warrants were sent from Calcutta to Bombay, Madras and Colombo. The Bombay C.I.D. was asked to search a certain Austrian steamer by which Sri Aurobindo was reported to be escaping to the continent. This was done — in Aden — but no Sri Aurobindo could be found. In another outpost of the Empire, Ceylon police officials received detailed information on how to arrest Sri Aurobindo if he arrived at Colombo. French law did not seem to permit the serving of a British warrant on a French ship, but after diligent study legal experts found passages in large tomes ("pages 231-232 of Hal-leck's International law and . . . paragraph 469 of Caluo's Le Droit Internationale") to justify doing so if required.¹⁵

While these developments were taking place in Calcutta and elsewhere, the Secretary of State had been left mostly in the dark. He cabled the Viceroy on the eleventh for information.¹⁶ In answer Simla simply forwarded to London a copy of Bengal's tardy letter of 7 April, which had finally arrived. The day this was done, 14 April, the Viceroy himself wrote a letter to Morley (Document 3b). He defended the prosecution on the grounds that Sri Aurobindo was "the most dangerous man we

13 GOI, HD-A, December 1910, 14-42, p. 3. 14 ibid., p. 7.

14a File cited in footnote 5.

15 ibid. , p . 6 .

16 GOI, HD-A, December 1910, 14-42, p. 4.

have to deal with at present". He also expressed displeasure at the questions raised in the House of Commons on the seventh. Ironically, Ramsay Macdonald asked his embarrassing questions again on the day of Minto's letter. This time, however, the Government of India had a champion ready to engage the Labour M. P. in a "passage of arms".

The white knight was a "certain man named" J. D. Rees, a Liberal member of parliament who was a confirmed opponent of Sri Aurobindo.¹⁷ Rees had formerly been a government servant in India and still had numerous financial investments in the country. He therefore represented the interests of Anglo-India. Rees accused Macdonald of acting "at the instance of a seatless syndicate". There followed a tussle, unconsciously humorous, over the meaning of the adjective "seatless". Rees then rephrased Macdonald's questions to the Secretary of State in such a way as to characterize Sri Aurobindo as a sedition-monger.¹⁸

In Simla there was a new turn of events. Bhupal Chandra Basu, Sri Aurobindo's father-in-law, had on the thirteenth written to his old friend Satyendra Sinha, now a member of the Viceroy's Council, asking him to move the Government to withdraw the case against his son-in-law. Basu, a loyal government servant and a concerned father, had received a letter from Sri Aurobindo posted from Calcutta four days after his departure—on the eventful fourth day of April. In the course of the letter (which must have dealt mainly with family concerns) Sri Aurobindo informed Basu that he had publicly announced his retirement from politics,¹⁹ and denounced the terrorism that had risen in the country. Basu, anxious for the safety of his son-in-law and the security of his daughter, construed passages in the letter as expressing a willingness on Sri Aurobindo's part to come to an understanding with the British —a most unlikely interpretation. At any rate neither the Lieutenant-Governor nor the Viceroy thought it right "to enter into any arrangement" with a "fugitive from justice", and Basu's letter was returned.²⁰

Despite the hard line taken by Baker and Minto in regard to the letter, it was becoming increasingly clear that the bureaucracy had blundered. The case against Sri Aurobindo was far from air-tight, and he had not surrendered himself as he was supposed to do. Even more disquieting were the protests made by Labour in Parliament. The two-month-old Liberal ministry was dependant on Labour's forty votes. Morley could not afford to ignore Ramsay Macdonald and Kier Hardie, the party's two leaders, who were both sympathetic towards Sri Aurobindo. The pressure Morley felt in England was passed along to Minto in Simla. Minto in turn transferred it to Baker, who by now must have deeply regretted letting himself be talked into sanctioning the prosecution. But like men in power everywhere he resisted backing out of a position he had taken publicly. In reply to a hint from Minto that they might have to cancel the prosecution "on orders from home", Baker wrote on 19 April that to withdraw the proceedings

17 See Rees's Venom-spilling, an article from Dharma reproduced and translated in the present issue. For details on Rees, see Notes on the Texts.

18 Government of India, Home Political-B, Proceedings, 37-41, 1-9.

19 Sri Aurobindo must have been referring to the jocular note published in the Karmayogin of 26 March 1910 (SABCL vol. 2, p. 413), in which he says he is not in Tibet "interviewing the Mahatmas", but pursuing his sadhana in silence.

20 GOI, HD-A, December 1910, 14-42, 12.

would afford more regrettable encouragement to those whose object it is to disseminate sedition through the press. ... It would discourage and bewilder our supporters, who would be quite unable to imagine any reason for showing exceptional favour to our most conspicious and most dangerous opponent.²¹

Baker was writing during a lull in the official correspondence. Meanwhile the case against Manmohan Ghose, printer of the Karmayogin, was proceeding in camera. The political side of the case warmed up considerably on the twenty-sixth when Ramsay Macdonald again demanded that members of Parliament be supplied a copy of the indicted article. The same day Lord Morley, who also had not seen the article, telegraphed for one to be sent "without the delay of a single mail" (Document 1h). This got Simla moving, and on the twenth-eighth the article was dispatched. The same day Minto wrote at length on Sri Aurobindo in his letter to the Secretary of State (Document 3c). In a repeated irony, his letter again coincided with questions asked in the House of Commons, which this time developed into a full scale debate. Ramsay Macdonald began an hour-and-a-half-long speech with a complaint that he had three times asked to see the article and, having this day asked a fourth time, had been given no more information than he had obtained from a daily newspaper three weeks earlier. He denied that discussion of the matter would, as claimed, prejudge the case, and announced that he had been sent several Indian newspaper reports announcing that Sri Aurobindo had left the public life in order to become a "religious recluse". In the course of lengthy remarks on Sri Aurobindo, Macdonald noted that "there is not a single thing he does but is twisted and misrepresented. Even as a matter of fact," the Socialist politician went on,

when he retires from public life to private life, although that again was known, and although all his friends said it was imminent, and although he himself practically told me when I saw him that he would not be very much longer in the affairs of the world and engaged in journalistic work — when that step was taken, and he did retire, it was apparently regarded by the Government of Bengal as a move in some deep-seated hidden political plot, and that was the thing which causes the issue of the warrant — at any rate that is my theory.

"What", Macdonald asked, "is this article about which so much has been said?" He noted with some irony that the Under-Secretary of State had not been able to secure him a copy — and then produced one of his own. He thereupon read out two passages from "To My Countrymen", adding his own commentary and answering a colleague's question along the way:

This is the key-sentence in the whole article:

"If the nationalists stand back any longer, either the national movement will disappear or the void created will be filled up by a sinister and violent activity. Neither result can be tolerated by men desirous of their country's development and freedom."

Surely, to any man who reads this article as it was meant to be read

21 Letter Baker to Minto 19 April 1910, cited in M. Das. 133-35.

the meaning of that sentence is perfectly clear, and Mr. Aurobindo Ghose, as is perfectly well known by those who have followed his actions and his writings, sincerely believes that the nationalist movement of which he is the head for the time being at any rate, or was till quite recently, is the one guarantee that there shall be no violence done in India and he blames the officials who have suppressed the free expression of Nationalist sentiment for the unfortunate circumstances which have led to murder and death and executions which everyone deplores.

Mr. J. King: May I ask in a friendly way whether this article is published in Bengali, and whether Mr. Aurobindo Ghose is not a Bengali?

Mr. Ramsay MacDonald: The article is in the most excellent English. There is not a line of Bengali in the whole of it [the issue of the Karmayogin] except the date of this issue and its own title. Mr. Aurobindo Ghose could no more write an article in Bengali than I could.²²

The second extract which will give an idea of the article is this:

"Fear of the law is for those who break the law. Our aims are great and honourable, free from stain and reproach. Our methods are peaceful though resolute and strenuous. We shall not break the law, and therefore we need not fear the law."

Then he turns to comment on certain things on which comments have been made again in the official Blue Books.

"But if a corrupt Police, unscrupulous officials or a partial judiciary—" that, of course is not justified by the Blue Books, but it is a matter of common discussion in India—

"Make use of the honourable publicity of our political methods to harass the men who stand in front by illegal ukases, suborned and perjured evidence or unjust decisions, shall we shrink from the toll that we have to pay on our march to freedom? Shall we cower behind a petty secrecy of dishonourable inactivity? We must have our associations, our organisations, our means of propaganda and if these are suppressed by arbitrary proclamations we shall have done our duty by our Motherland and not on us will rest any responsibility for the madness which crushes down open and lawful political activity in order to give a desperate and sullen nation into the hands of those fiercely enthusiastic and unscrupulous forces that have arisen among us inside and outside India."

There is a strong, sincere and effective criticism and condemnation of the practices which have been disgracing the extreme left movement in India during the last year or so. The gentleman of infamous associations who lodges in Paris [Shyamji Krishnavarma] and tries to stir up the youth of this country and India has had no stronger opponent and no more effective counteracting influence than Mr. Aurobindo Ghose in his attempt to say honestly and fearlessly, but yet lawfully and fairly, what he feels about the administration of our officials in India. As I said at the commencement I had

22 Macdonald, in his zeal to show that Sri Aurobindo wrote English like an Englishman, went too far here. At the time that he met Sri Aurobindo and until February 1910, Sri Aurobindo was editing a Bengali weekly newspaper, writing most of the editorial matter himself.

no desire to raise this question. I know perfectly well that the state of India at present moment is very difficult and a very dangerous one, and those who are best qualified to form a judgment about what may happen are perhaps more pessimistic than those who are less qualified to form that judgment. But I feel perfectly certain that unless the India Office will insist upon its officials administering India with some generosity, some catholicity of sentiment and some serious attempt to associate with themselves men like Mr. Aurobindo Ghose, the future is going to be very much darker than it at present is.²³

Macdonald was followed by Kier Hardie, who spoke for half an hour. The pioneer English Socialist read out a passage from "To My Countrymen" in which Sri Aurobindo spoke of the need of a re-organisation of the Nationalist Party. Hardie expressed the hope that this would "not be prevented by means taken to intimidate Mr. Aurobindo Ghose". He went on to ennumerate several cases of police oppression in India.²⁴

Then came the turn of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montague. After noting the absence of most of the Conservative members from the House, Montague addressed himself to the charges made by Macdonald and Hardie. His chief point was that the matter was under trial and therefore should not be discussed in Parliament. The Under-Secretary was followed by J.D. Rees. Sri Aurobindo's implacable opponent thought Ramsay Macdonald's suggestion "that because Mr. Arabindo Ghose had become un religieux he had washed his hands of all mundane affairs. . . was most amusing". Rees claimed that "there was no better platform for promoting sedition" in India than the religious platform.²⁵ This old India hand's attitude may be compared to that of a Calcutta police official who the previous month had given wide distribution to his opinion that Sri Aurobindo had "wavered between throwing in his lot openly with the physical-force party and devoting himself to religion".²⁶ The polarised Western mentality that could see only opposition between spirituality and political action was bemused by a mind that effortlessly embraced both. In Parliament Rees set aside Macdonald's praise of Sri Aurobindo's prose style with one curt sentence: "Mr. Arabindo Ghose was distinguished not merely for his literary ability, but, above all things, for his hostility to British rule in India." He closed the debate by saying, in regard to the lengthy quotations from the Karmayogin read out by Macdonald, Don't nail my ears to the pump.²⁷

Rees's attempt to trivialize the debate was not altogether successful. The Secretary of State for India was in fact answerable to the House of Commons. Morley's letter to Minto of 5 May 1910 makes it clear that he had taken the debate quite seriously. Moreover, he had by then read Sri Aurobindo's article and, in a remarkably candid statement, the for-once liberal Liberal told the Viceroy

As to the famous Arabindo, my satisfaction is not at all lively. You are

23 Quoted in M.Das, 147-50. Another version in The Times (London). 29 April 1910.

24 Quoted in M. Das, 150-54.

25 The Times (London), 29 April 1910.

26 File cited in footnote 5.

27 The Times (London), 29 April 1910.

mistaken if you think that there is any sympathy with him at home. That is not the point. The point is, in my mind that the institution of proceedings against him was a foolish blunder, from the side of policy. I have always understood that proceedings for sedition was only advised when a conviction was reasonably certain. Is a conviction reasonably certain in this case? I should think decidedly not, and I hope not. (Document 3d)

When Minto replied by letter to Morley on 26 May, he took up the Secretary of State's ironic opening, and referred to his surprising desire for Sri Aurobindo to be acquitted:

As to the celebrated Arabindo, I confess, I cannot in the least understand your hope that we shall not get a conviction against him! I can only repeat what I said to you in my letter of April 14th that he is the most dangerous man we now have to reckon with. . . . Surely you cannot hope that such a man should remain at large? . . . In the meanwhile Arabindo is in Pondicherry. (Document 3e)

This last fact Morley already knew. Indeed he had received reliable information about Sri Aurobindo's whereabouts as far back as 2 May. He had immediately cabled that "no extradition should be asked for".²⁸ He did not want a repetition of the incident arising out of Charu Chandra Roy's botched extradition from Chander-nagore in connection with the Alipore Case in 1908. He had had enough of bungling. The whole Karmayogin case, as he wrote the Viceroy on 15 June 1910, was "a thorough blunder from the first". He informed Minto he had not "met a single person, having read the indicted matter, who thinks there is any indictable sedition in a single line of it" (Document 3f).

It must have given Minto great pleasure to read this, for by the time he received Morley's letter "To My Countrymen" had been pronounced seditious. In his judgment, delivered 18 June, the officiating Chief Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta stated that the article "taken as a whole" was "a deliberate attack upon and an attempt to excite disaffection towards the Government". He therefore found Man-mohan Ghose, printer of the Karmayogin, guilty under section 124-A, and sentenced him to six months' rigorous imprisonment (Document li).²⁹

Minto was tactful enough not to crow about the magistrate's having proved him and his government right about the article. On 20 June he simply informed Morley about Manmohan Ghose's conviction. What this would mean in regard to Sri Aurobindo had to be dealt with by the Government of Bengal. On 4 July, in response to an order by Sir Edward Baker, the Chief Presidency Magistrate directed that Sri Aurobindo "should be proclaimed an absconder . . . and that his property should be attached".³⁰ Accordingly the defunct Dharmas press was seized, and Sri

28 GOI, HD-A, December 1910, 14-42, 12.

29 It would seem a great injustice that Manmohan Ghose was so severely punished merely for printing the article, particularly since part of his defence was that he could not understand English. But, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out to one of his biographers who showed excessive commiseration for Manmohan, "The printer was in fact only someone who took that title in order to meet the demand of the law for someone who would be responsible for what was printed. He was not always the actual printer." (A & R, vol. 7. p. 166).

30 GOI, HD-A, December 1910, 14-42, 16.

Aurobindo's share of the Manicktollah Garden was claimed by the government.

Bengal had apparently won its case; Sri Aurobindo seemed doomed to perpetual exile, or immediate arrest if he set foot outside Pondicherry. Officials in Simla, however, were apprehensive. On 6 July one of them wrote a note asking whether an appeal to Manmohan Ghose's conviction had been filed. The answer, at that time, was No. According to later police information, "the accused Monmohan personally had no wish to move the High Court against his conviction, as he feared an enhancement of the sentence". It may have been so, since notices published in the Karmayogin in April show that Manmohan's financial situation had become precarious. But after an "unaccountable delay" of two months, an application for an appeal was filed on 19 August. According to the police, the application appeared to be "preferred in the interests of Arabindo Ghose" (Document lk). The acquittal of Manmohan would mean that the warrant still out against Sri Aurobindo would have to be withdrawn. Owing to the delay in filing, the appeal would be heard by the Vacation Bench of the High Court, which could be expected to show some sympathy towards the accused. This suggests that the delay was not altogether "unaccountable", but at least in part was a tactical move on the part of Manmohan's lawyers. On 28 September the motion of the case was heard by the High Court. Justices Holmwood and Das, after deciding that "the articles needed careful consideration", adjourned the case to 20 October, at which time it would begin before yet another bench. This postponement gave Justice Das a chance to bow out, since he was about to retire (Document 1-1). This was a good thing for Das, if his intention was to avoid sitting in judgment on one of his countrymen; but it was probably also a good thing for Sri Aurobindo, since Indian High Court Judges were often more severe on their compatriots than their English colleagues.

The appeal was finally heard by Justices Holmwood and Fletcher on 25, 26 and 27 October 1910. On 7 November, in separate and concurring judgments, "their Lordships allowed the appeal, set aside the conviction and sentence, acquitted the appellant [Manmohan Ghose] and released him from bail".³¹ Both justices were of the opinion that "To My Countrymen" could not be considered seditious (Document lm). As a result, on 21 November, the warrant against Sri Aurobindo and the orders proclaiming him an absconder and attaching his property were withdrawn.

The High Court decision had important repercussions on British policy in India. When Lord Minto's successor, Lord Hardinge, was shown the file in December 1910, he was blunt in his condemnation of the whole affair: "This sort of prosecution does a great deal of harm and brings the Executive into contempt", the new Viceroy wrote (Document lp). Hardinge and Lord Crewe, the new Secretary of State for India, wanted nothing of the kind to happen again. A letter from Hardinge to Crewe written on 11 January 1911 —just a year after the Government of India had instigated the Karmayogin prosecution — refers to a proposal

that the Government of India should withdraw from Local Governments generally the discretion granted them in 1907 to institute prosecutions for

31 The Hindu, 8 November 1910 (Reprinted in The Hindu 13 November 1960).

sedition [or]. . . that this discretion should, as a result of the Karmayogin case, be withdrawn from the Government of Bengal.³²

Hardinge was evidently under the impression that the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal had started the whole affair. He wrote as much to Sir Edward Baker, who was at pains to convince the Viceroy that it was not his idea in the first place. "If the Government of India had not intervened", Baker wrote, "there would have been none of the 'trouble and tribulation' to which Your Excellency refers."³³ It is not certain whether Baker managed to clear himself; but it is unlikely that he ever let himself be coaxed into "venturesome action" (as Hardinge called it) against Nationalist leaders again.

The Karmayogin case opened with a remarkable synchronicity — the issuing of warrants in Calcutta on the very day that Sri Aurobindo reached the haven of Pondicherry. Another coincidence marked the conclusion of the case. On 7 November 1910, the day the High Court gave its ruling, but at least a day before Sri Aurobindo learned of it, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Madras daily The Hindu in which he announced his presence in Pondicherry. He closed by saying that he had

retired for the time from political activity of any kind and that I will see and correspond with no one in connection with political subjects. I defer all explanation or justification of my action in leaving British India until the High Court in Calcutta shall have pronounced on the culpability or innocence of the writing in the Karmayogin on which I am indicted.³⁴

The High Court's pronouncement, however, had little effect on Sri Aurobindo's retirement. For one thing, he had no way of knowing that after the warrant was withdrawn he could have returned "to British India without fear of molestation".³⁵Even if he had known, he would not immediately have gone back to Bengal. What was keeping him in Pondicherry was not external threat but inner necessity. As he declared in a private letter of July 1911:

I need some place of refuge in which I can complete my Yoga unassailed and build up other souls around me. It seems to me that Pondicherry is the place appointed by those who are Beyond. . . .³⁶

The "souls around" him included Bijoy Nag, who had accompanied Sri Aurobindo to Pondicherry, Suresh Chakravarty, who had prepared the way, Saurin Bose, who had comedown in September 1910, and Nolini Kanta Gupta, who arrived in November, just days after the High Court judgment was delivered.³⁷

For years Sri Aurobindo planned to return. He thought his siddhi would take a few months, a few years, an indeterminate amount of time. He would not undertake external work until he had achieved what he had set out to achieve within. Finally

32 Hardinge to Crew 11 January 1911, quoted in P. Mukherjee, 534.

33 Baker to Hardinge (no date given), quoted in P. Mukherjee, 533.

34 The full text of the letter is published on page 61.

35 GOI, HD-A, December 1910, 14-42, 16.

36 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself (1972), p. 423.

37 A photograph of Sri Aurobindo with Nolini Kanta Gupta, Suresh Chakravarty and three others, taken around 1914, is reproduced as Plate 1.

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. . . . During all his stay in Pondicherry from 1910 onward he remained more and more exclusively devoted to his spiritual work and his sadhana.³⁸

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A CLARIFICATION

We have received a letter from Mr. K. Dayananda Rao of Madras which clarifies the history of the sentences published as piece 82 of From Man to Superman (see Archives and Research, vol. 6, no. 2, p. 125). His informative letter is reproduced below in full:

I am writing to you this letter in connection with para. 82 at page 125 of "Archives and Research" — Vol. 6, No. 2, Dec. 82 and the connected notes at page 203.

The item in question is the birthday message to my father, the late Dr. K. Krishna Rao. The message written in Sri Aurobindo's hand is with me. At the top, He has written "Krishna Rao" and He has written the date after the message as 13.10.38, the 56th birthday of my father. The Mother has written "Blessings" after the message and signed the same.

At the time of publication the editors wrote that "the piece may have been written as a letter to a disciple". Mr. Dayananda Rao's letter confirms this supposition. The piece will be excluded from future editions of From Man to Superman; it will be placed instead in a volume of Sri Aurobindo's messages and letters.

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