Archival Notes

SRI AUROBINDO, THE MOTHER AND PAUL RICHARD 1911-1915

     

This article does not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers of Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research. The writer, a member of the staff of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and Research Library, accepts full responsibility for the contents of the article, which is the result of his own research and his own interpretation. The purpose of the biographical portions of Archival Notes is to present materials dealing with the period of Sri Aurobindo's life covered by the current instalment of Documents in the Life of Sri Aurobindo. The form of presentation selected is a variety of the classic biographical narrative, one that, owing to the nature of this journal, makes rather heavy use of documentary quotations. Any historical narrative must be written from a particular point of view, and, however much the writer may follow the ground rules of objectivity, this point of view must necessarily be subjective. Evaluations, judgments and conclusions, explicit or implicit, must be made at every step. The references given in the notes will enable the reader to turn to the sources and, after study, to form his own conclusions.

On 29 March 1914 the Mother came to Pondicherry and met Sri Aurobindo. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of that event we will depart slightly from the usual format of this journal by including among the texts and documents reproduced and commented on several that relate to the Mother's life between 1911 and 1915.

     

THE MOTHER AND PAUL RICHARD IN FRANCE 1911-1914

 

      Shortly after his return to France from India, Paul Richard changed his Paris residence. His new address was 9 Rue du Val de Grace, a cozy little house in the Latin Quarter, fronting a small private garden (Plates 1 and 2). The Mother lived here between 1911 and 1914, and again in 1915. Not far away, across Boulevard Saint-Michel, was the famous Luxembourg Garden. She once spoke of something that happened to her while she was on her way to the Garden. It was a time when she was in a state of intense inner concentration, having resolved that within a certain number of months she would unite with the inner Divine. An admirable condition from the psychic point of view, but not the best if one has to cross a busy thoroughfare. "There is a sort of intersection there", she later recalled. "It's not a place for crossing while in an inner state. It was not very reasonable!"

     

I went ahead, when, suddenly, I felt a shock, as if I'd received a blow, as if something had given me a blow, and I jumped back instinctively. And when I jumped back a tram-car passed by. It was the tram-car that I had



felt at a little more than the length of an outstretched arm. It touched my aura, the protective aura—at that moment it was very strong, a state of full occultism, and I knew how to maintain it—the protective aura had been touched and that literally threw me back, as if I had received a physical blow. And the insults of the conductor! I jumped and the tram passed—just in time!1

 

      On 5 May 1911 the Mother and Paul Richard were married in the town hall of the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris. Having already been married and divorced, and having no high regard for the sacrament of matrimony, the Mother was not very keen to get married again; but Richard, who had children from his previous marriage, had to regularize his marital status. He asked the Mother if she would go through the formalities with him, and she agreed. "I was always completely indifferent to these things", she later explained. She saw besides that some occult work had to be done on Richard, and that marriage was the best way to accomplish this.2

      Several months after their marriage, the Mother and Richard went on a tour of the French alpine regions. On 9 September they were staying in Cluses (Haute-Savoie), a small town in the valley of the Arve, halfway between Lake Geneva and Mount Blanc. Here the Mother and Richard wrote a postcard to Johannes Hohlenberg, a Danish painter who was living in Paris.3 An anecdote concerning Hohlenberg is familiar to readers of the Mother's Questions and Answers. Once, possibly before departing on this trek of 1912, the Mother and some others had a discussion about the things that people on the trail had to carry. Hohlenberg announced that when he travelled he took nothing but his toothbrush. Someone replied, Why your toothbrush? You can use your finger.4

      Between 1911 and 1914 Richard worked as a political journalist, writing articles on foreign affairs for the Paris newspaper L'Aurore. But his literary ambitions soared much higher. In 1911 he began work on a long metaphysical essay called Les Dieux (The Gods).5 This book was published in 1914. Richard's name alone appears on the title page, but Les Dieux, like the earlier Ether Vivant, owes much of its substance, and even its language, to the Mother. She spoke more than once about the writing of these two books. The anecdote in Words of Long Ago6 about a writer whose dream of rearranging furniture represented his need to rearrange paragraphs of a chapter refers apparently to Richard and Les Dieux. A revealing insight concerning Richard's method of writing was once provided by the Mother's son Andre:

They came to live at rue du Val de Grace and I used to go and have lunch with them every Sunday. After lunch, specially when the weather was bad, we went to the studio, Paul Richard stretched on a couch, lit his pipe, and they started working. That is, my mother wrote in her own handwriting what he dictated. I could not help but notice that Mother was rectifying most of Paul's dictation.7

Another work the Mother collaborated on with Richard was Les Paroles Eternelles, a compilation of spiritual sayings partly published in English as The Eternal



Wisdom.8 The Mother drew many citations for this collection from her extensive reading, which now included works from Eastern spiritual traditions. Somewhat earlier she had been introduced to the Bhagavad Gita by an Indian named Jnanendra Nath Chakravarti.* Giving her a French translation of the text, Chakravarti told her, "Read the Gita, and take Krishna for the symbol of the immanent Divine, the Divine within you." She did so, "and in a month the whole work was done".9 Another book the Mother came across around this time was Swami Vivekananda's Raja Yoga. She once related that before reading it she had already gone far in sadhana entirely on her own. But when "I held in my hands... the Raja Yoga of Vivekananda, it seemed to me such a marvellous thing... that someone could explain something to me! It helped me accomplish in a few months what it might have taken years for me to do."10 We learn from the Mother's postcard to Alexandra David-Neel11 that by the end of 1912 her mind was "deeply ... impregnated with Buddhism". Among Buddhist texts, the Dhammapada was particularly important to her; but she also translated (from English translations) all or parts of a number of other scriptures, for example The Discourse of Asvaghosha on the Awakening of Faith. During the same period (1910-12) the Mother also translated a few of the shorter Upanishads, parts of the Gita, some sayings of Ramakrishna, etc.

      In the autumn of 1912 the Mother met the Indian sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan. On 7 November Inayat Khan gave a talk on sufi doctrines to a small group assembled at 9 Rue du Val de Grace.12 Forty years later the Mother once spoke of Inayat Khan, possibly in reference to this very meeting:

I heard from a great sufi mystic (who was besides a great musician, an Indian) that for the sufis there was a state higher than the state of adoration and surrender to the Divine, or devotion—that was not the final stage. The final stage of progress was when one no longer made any distinction ... between the Divine and oneself....There is no longer that ecstatic submission to "Something" that surpasses you in every respect, which you no longer understand.... When the union is perfect, there is no longer any difference.13

The Mother certainly understood what Inayat Khan was saying. A few days after the meeting at Rue du Val de Grace, in the course of a conversation with an English artist who was one of the sufi's associates, she said that she "had found"

 

 

      * Sri Aurobindo. talk of 13 December 1940 (Mother India 39 [1986]: 340). Chakravarti later became Vice-Chancellor of Lucknow University. His wife Monika Devi became the guru-mata of Sri Krishna-prem, known to disciples of Sri Aurobindo through his correspondence with Dilip Kumar Roy.

      The Mother never mentioned the sufi by name, but there can be little doubt that it was Hazrat Inayat Khan whom she met. Born in Baroda in 1882, Inayat Khan early showed "outstanding gifts as a singer and player of the Vina". From the age of eighteen he toured widely in India, giving recitals of his music. In 1904 he met his master, the sufi Sayed Mohammed Abu Hassan Madani. In 1908 Abu Hasan Madani summoned Inayat Khan to his deathbed and instructed him to go the West. Inayat Khan departed for America in 1910, and become the founder of the Sufi Movement in America and in Europe. In Paris (where he met Abdul Baha in February 1913) Inayat Khan resided at 143, Boulevard Saint-Michel, not far from Paul Richard's residence on Rue du Val de Grace. Among Richard's papers is one of Inayat Khan's calling cards. After many years in Europe. Inayat Khan returned to India in 1919. He passed away in New Delhi in 1927.



the Divine "definitively, that the union was constant".14 These words she recorded in her diary on 19 November 1912. Years later, this and other extracts from this spiritual journal were published under the title Prieres et Meditations (Prayers and Meditations). The first published entry is dated 2 November 1912, but the diary had been started earlier, possibly in 1911. It is interesting to note here that Sri Aurobindo's spiritual diary, Record of Yoga, also was begun a year or two before November 1912, at which time "the regular record of the sadhana" was commenced." Both diaries continued with some regularity until 1919 or 1920; both included a few entries from later years; and both contained more entries for 1914 than for any other year. Neither the Mother nor Sri Aurobindo seems to have known that the other was keeping a spiritual journal. He did not learn of hers until the 1930s; she does not appear to have made any reference to his at all.

      At the same time that the Mother was recording her individual sadhana in Prayers and Meditations, she also was taking part in a collective intellectual and spiritual endeavour. Between 1911 and 1913 she was associated with several related groups of seekers in Paris. One of these was the Union de Pensee Feminine, at whose meetings she delivered several lectures on "thought" in late 1911 and early 1912.16 In the second half of 1912 she spoke a dozen or more times before several different groups on such subjects as "The Power of Words".17 She also attended programmes given by others, for example the talk by Inayat Khan mentioned above, and, on 12 December 1912, a lecture by a certain Mr Bernard, who spoke on mantras. When the Mother heard Bernard pronounce the syllable OM "it was like a revelation". The sacred syllable set her "whole body" vibrating "in an extraordinary way....Everything began to vibrate, and I said, 'At last I have heard the true sound.'"18

      Some of the members of the groups addressed by the Mother were disciples of Abdul Baha, the son and successor of Baha Ullah, the founder of the Bahai religion.* Abdul Baha (Plate 3) had visited Paris in 1911, and when he returned in 1913 the Mother and Richard became closely associated with him. According to a Bahai historian, on 18 May 1913 Abdul Baha "sat up with M. and Mme Richard until midnight, talking about mysticism and $ufi tenets and practices, in answer to their questions".19 Speaking of the great teacher forty years later, the Mother commented, "I liked Abdul Baha very much." "He had an excellent nature," she said, "with an aspiration as strong as his heart was simple."20 At Abdul Baha's request, the Mother gave several talks to his Paris congregation. When Abdul Baha left the city in June, he asked the Mother to remain and look after his disciples. She answered respectfully that she could not do so as she had not accepted the Bahai faith as her own.21 According to information gathered by the British police in India, Abdul Baha gave the Mother and Paul Richard "a written commission... to preach Bahaism" (Document 22). But when the two came to India in 1914, they did little or no Bahai teaching.

 

 

      * The eldest son of Baha Ullah (1817-92), Abbas Effendi (later known by the title Abdul Baha, "servant of Baha") was born in Teheran in 1844. During his childhood and youth he shared his father's life of persecution and exile. Before his passing, Baha Ullah appointed Abdul Baha as his successor. Despite the hostility of the Persian and Turkish governments, the Bahai faith spread widely during the years of Abdul Baha's ministry. He travelled in Europe and America between 1911 and 1913, afterwards retiring to Haifa (Palestine), where he passed away in 1921.



      It will be recalled that Paul Richard had come to Pondicherry in 1910 to take part in the French legislative elections. Deputies sat for a term of four years. As the election of 1914 approached, Richard resolved to mount a vigorous campaign for the seat. He did so without official backing. The letters of recommendation he received from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (one of which is reproduced as Document 4) refer to his voyage as a pleasure-trip. He had to fight an unequal battle against the incumbent, Paul Bluysen (whose election he apparently had worked for in 1910), as well as two other candidates, both of whom had better connections than he.

     

THE MEETING WITH SRI AUROBINDO

 

      The Mother accompanied Richard to India. She had never gone on such a long journey before. A few days prior to her departure, she looked with emotion on the many loved objects in her house, thinking that now they might pass temporarily or permanently into other hands. Then she turned her regard towards the future, not knowing, or caring to know, what it held in store for her.22 Three days later, on 6 March, she and Richard were in Geneva on route to Marseille. The next day they boarded the Japanese ship Kaga Maru, bound from London to Yokohama via Suez and intermediate ports. The ship departed Marseille on the eighth, reaching Suez five days later. During its passage of the Canal, the Mother got a glimpse of "the immutable solitude of the desert".23 Over the next two weeks, she grew familiar with the solitude of the ocean. On 27 March the Mother and her husband disembarked at Colombo. They remained in Ceylon only for one day, spending part of their time with a noted Buddhist monk named Dharmapal. On the twenty-eighth, the Richards crossed over to India, landing at Dhanushkodi. The next day they were in Pondicherry.

      In his Record entry of the 29 March, Sri Aurobindo wrote that the afternoon and evening were taken up partly by "R's visit".24 Regrettably he made no note of his first impressions of the Mother. Her first impressions of him are contained in the famous passage from Prayers and Meditations quoted in the last issue. Later she spoke more than once of the importance of this meeting to her:

I was seated close to him, simply, like that, on the floor. (He was sitting on a chair, with a table in front of him, and on the other side of the table was Richard, and they were talking. Myself, I didn't listen, I sat. I don't know how long they remained, but suddenly I felt within me as if a great Force—Peace! Silence! massive. It came, did like this [a gesture of sweeping at the level of the forehead], descended like that, and stopped there [the chest]. And when they finished talking, I stood and went out. And then I noticed that I didn't have a thought in my mind—that I knew nothing any more, understood nothing any more, that I was absolutely in a complete blank. Then I gave thanks to the Lord, and thanked Sri Aurobindo in my heart.25

It was doubtless because of the Mother's remarkable openness to this descent of Silence, a major yogic experience, that Sri Aurobindo later told one of his disciples that he "had never seen anywhere a self-surrender so absolute and unreserved".26



      In a letter of April 1914, Sri Aurobindo wrote of Richard as "a personal friend of mine and a brother in the Yoga". He considered the Richards to be "rare examples of European Yogins who have not been carried away by Theosophical and other aberrations" (Document 6a).* But he could see that Paul Richard lacked the calm and concentrated mind necessary for sustained spiritual realization. He took Richard's book Les Dieux seriously enough to read it attentively, but he disagreed with a number of the Frenchman's ideas, for example his "theory of Kama and ego as the seed of the world".27 Years later the Mother recalled a conversation between Sri Aurobindo and Richard on this subject:

Richard had put Desire as the origin of the world. They were always in disharmony because Richard said, "It is Desire", and Sri Aurobindo said, "It is Joy that is the initial force of the manifestation....God had the Joy of knowing himself."28

     

THE ELECTIONS

 

      This discussion most likely took place after the Pondicherry elections were over. Sri Aurobindo supported Richard's candidacy. It is always useful to have a friend in government, particularly if one's political status is insecure. "If Richard were to become deputy for French India", Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal Roy, "that would practically mean the same thing as myself being deputy for French India" (Document 6a). Sri Aurobindo knew that "humanly speaking" there was no chance of Richard's winning the election. He put his force behind his friend in order to "form a nucleus of tendency and, if possible, of active result, which would be a foundation for the future". Sri Aurobindo asked Motilal Roy to work on Richard's behalf in Chandernagore. Motilal seems to have done this fairly diligently. Richard received more votes in Chandernagore than in any other settlement (Document 7). The candidate himself campaigned in Pondicherry and in Karikal, another French enclave on the Coromandel Coast, about a hundred kilometers south of Pondicherry. He and his wife were in Karikal on 13 April. It was here, wrote Nolini Kanta Gupta, that the Mother first experienced the harsh realities of Indian life (Document 3). Although obliged to stay in a squalid, dilapidated room, she yet was able to feel only the divine peace, see alias "beautiful, harmonious and calm".29

      Sri Aurobindo took keen interest in the elections. His analysis of the situation (Document 6b) shows the workings of the mind of a born politician. Although aware of the hopelessness of Richard's position, he yet could see in the matrix of forces certain positive possibilities that, properly exploited, might eventually have led to fulfilment. The polling took place on 28 April. Richard came in last of the four candidates (Document 7). The corrupt electoral practices described by Sri Aurobindo in his letter of 5 May (Document 6c) no doubt deprived Richard and the other losers of many votes; but it seems likely that the incumbent would have retained his seat even if he had played fair.

 

 

      * It may be noted here that on 8 April, Sri Aurobindo wrote of a "tendency" in him "to consider favourably the bases of European & Theosophical mysticism" (A & R 12 [1988]: 158).



      After the election, Richard could turn his attention to his non-political interests. He wished to remain in India for two years (Document 6c). The first thing that he needed was a house, and Sri Aurobindo and his companions helped him to find one. It took them about a month. In the Record of 8 May Sri Aurobindo noted the lipi: "The house will be found with a little more difficulty". Some three weeks later, in the draft of a letter to Saurin Bose,30 Sri Aurobindo wrote of "the house that has been found for M and Madame Richard", describing it as one "on the other side of the street" from the place where he was living. The house referred to, 7 Rue Dupleix (now 3 Nehru Street), still exists (Plate 4). Sri Aurobindo informed Saurin that the Richards would be occupying the house "within a week or so". The draft-letter is not dated, but it apparently was written a short while after Sri Aurobindo received a letter from Saurin on 30 May (see Record entry for that date). On 1 June, Sri Aurobindo noted in the Record that the Mother had told him: "In one or two days perhaps we shall go into the house."

      At this time Sri Aurobindo was living at 41 (now 37) Rue Francois Martin, a "decent house" (in the words of Srinivasachari) located near the centre of Pondi-cherry's "White Town" (Plate 5). This place had been acquired only a few months previously, at least partly with the idea of providing Sri Aurobindo with a suitable place for receiving foreign visitors (see Document 2). The Record entry of 8 May 1914 shows that the Richards used to meet him regularly here. After the French couple had occupied their new house, Sri Aurobindo and his companions made it a habit to call on them every Sunday.

      In his draft-letter to Saurin, Sri Aurobindo wrote that the Richards' new house would be the temporary headquarters of a review that he and Paul had decided to publish. In an autobiographical note written years later, Sri Aurobindo wrote that this decision was taken on 1 June 1914.* Contemporary letters show that the idea of a review had been in the air for about a month. On 5 May Sri Aurobindo mentioned to Motilal that he had in mind certain proposals regarding publication, as well as a society that he planned to call "The New Idea". Some time during May he must have informed Saurin that he and Richard intended to bring out a review having this same name, for in his later draft-letter he wrote, "We have changed the name of the review from The New Idea to Arya". This was the name that Sri Aurobindo used in a letter written to Motilal a day or two later. In this letter he gave a detailed plan of the journal in which his major prose works would appear during the next seven years. The Arya proved indeed to be "the intellectual side" of Sri Aurobindo's "work for the world" (Document 12a).

      Sri Aurobindo's statement in the tongue-in-cheek letter partly reproduced as Document 10 that he undertook the writing of Arya just because Richard wanted to bring out a philosophical review need not be taken literally. For four years he had been filling notebooks with articles on the Vedas, Upanishads, comparative linguistics, and other subjects. He certainly intended to present this material in print—to do so was part of the karma that he considered part of his sadhana. But it also is true that on 1 June 1914 Sri Aurobindo had nothing ready for the press. By the middle of the month, when the prospectus of the proposed journal was

 

 

      * On Himself (1972): 368. Possibly 1 June was the day that the name "Arya" was decided on. See below.



issued,* he had worked up some of his Vedic material into the first of his "Selected Hymns". Before 15 August, when Arya's first issue was published, he had written one or more instalments of four different books: The Secret of the Veda, The Life Divine, The Isha Upanishad, and The Synthesis of Yoga. The first three of these series were based loosely on existing material. The Life Divine, announced in the prospectus as "an exposition of Vedantic thought in accordance with the Isho-panishad", grew out of the commentary on the Isha that Sri Aurobindo called "The Life Divine".31 But from its very first instalment, the Arya series went far beyond the confines of the Upanishad. The translation of the text of the Isha appearing in Arya also was new, although based on many years of study and writing. The Secret of the Veda owed little except its title to the articles on the Veda that Sri Aurobindo had been writing since 1912. The Synthesis, described in the prospectus as "a practical exposition of a new method of inner development", was written completely from scratch, though it certainly was based on the "personal experimentation" logged in Record of Yoga. Between 15 June and 15 August Sri Aurobindo also found time to translate the first instalments of Richard's two contributions, The Wherefore of the Worlds and The Eternal Wisdom.

      During the same two months that Sri Aurobindo performed this astounding intellectual labour, he also saw to all the details of the production and distribution of the new review (see Documents 12a-c). The Mother meanwhile translated Sri Aurobindo's articles for the French edition, and even pitched in to help with the office work (Document 11). She also took part in the activities of the short-lived society known as L'Idee Nouvelle or The New Idea (Documents 17 and 18). And all this time, as Sri Aurobindo's Record and the Mother's Prayers reveal, both of them were deeply engrossed in sadhana.

     

THE SITUATION DURING THE WAR

 

      On 28 June 1914, a week after the Arya was announced, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. A month later Austria declared war on Serbia, and by 4 August all the European powers had entered the conflict. Speaking about these things a half-century later, the Mother observed that the sequence of events was "very interesting". Several years earlier a disciple of Sri Aurobindo's had suggested that there was some occult significance in the fact that the war broke out just after the Arya was announced. Sri Aurobindo conceded only that a certain "'parallelism' of dates" was evident.32 It may be observed in this connection that two of the key terms of his yoga and philosophy, "supermind" and "superman", occur first in something like their final senses in the Record under the date 28 June 1914.

      Whatever effect the war might have had on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's inner work, its effect on their outer lives was swift and drastic. In a previous issue I presented and discussed a number of documents pertaining to Sri Aurobindo's

 

 

      * Document 14. Plate 6 is a photograph of the cover of the French edition of the prospectus. (No copy of the English prospectus is known to exist.) The prospectus is mentioned in the letters to Saurin and Motilal cited above, and was advertised by Motilal on 1 July 1914 (Document 13). In a talk of November 1961, the Mother said that the Arya was announced publicly on 21 June, Paul Richard's birthday (Richard's birthday was in fact 17 June).



altered situation after 4 August 1914.33 A further comment may be made in regard to the proposed deportation of Sri Aurobindo and the other "swadeshis" to North Africa. In a talk of 1947, the Mother said that her Prayer of 17 January 1915 referred to the possibility of Sri Aurobindo's expulsion to a place like Djibouti. According to the best record of the Mother's words, the British government "brought pressure on the French Premier at Paris and an order signed by the government was sent to the government of Pondicherry to expel Sri Aurobindo". The Governor received it, but "managed to keep that order unexecuted". The Mother's prayer shows that she was actively involved (whether on the inner or outer planes is not made clear) in causing the Governor to forget about the order.

      Richard's situation in Pondicherry also was undermined by the outbreak of war, but in his case no intervention, inner or outer, could prevent his expulsion from the colony. Like all Frenchmen on the service rolls, Richard was called up in the general mobilization of 3 August 1914.34 He remained in Pondicherry for six months, during which time he made a belated attempt to cultivate good relations with the British (Document 22). During his visit to the British consul, Richard tried to get permission for Bijoy Nag, one of the young men living in Sri Aurobindo's house, to enter British India. "No permission was given", and when Bijoy, a former Alipore undertrial, crossed the border a few days later, he was seized and imprisoned under the draconian "Ingress into India Ordinance" (Document 20). Richard's unsuccessful negotiations on Bijoy's behalf were a prelude to his own fruitless struggle against deportation.

      The Government of India had looked with disfavour on Richard since his arrival in Pondicherry. The CID considered him a "rabid socialist" (Document 8), and took umbrage at his association with Sri Aurobindo, Bharati and other "extremists". British pressure apparently was behind a French warning issued to Richard "that his intimacy with the extremists must cease, or his removal from Pondicherry will be considered" (Document 19). (The British government already had succeeded in having another man who had associated with Sri Aurobindo, a certain Stair Sidhar, deported.)* Richard did not mend his ways, and late in January the Government of Pondicherry acceded to British insistence and ordered his expulsion. Richard's appeal against this ruling was unsuccessful, and on 22 February, the day after the Mother's thirty-seventh birthday, he and she departed from Pondicherry. It was a great blow for the Mother—"bitter solitude", followed by illness, and five years of exile. Not until April 1920 was she able to return to Pondicherry.

     

A CORRECTION

     

In the December 1988 issue of this journal, the second line of the caption to Plate 2 should read: "(V. Srinivasa Iyengar is seated second from left, V. Rangaswami Iyengar is standing first from right)".

     

P. H.

 

      * This "mysterious individual", as one Briton called him (Document 19), was mentioned by Sri Aurobindo in his letter to Motilal of 5 May 1914 (Document 6c).



NOTES

 

  1. Pensees et Aphorismes de Sri Aurobindo: Traduction et Commentaires (1979): 167-68 (translated from the French).

  2. Talk of 5 November 1961.

  3. The text of this postcard is published elsewhere in this issue.

  4. Talk of 5 May 1951. Entretiens 1951 (1978): 431.

  5. See postcard written by the Mother to Alexandra David-Neel published in this issue. The book was reviewed in Mercure de France on 16 May 1914.

  6. Paroles d' Autrefois (1983): 40.

  7. Sri Aurobindo Circle 34 (1978): 64-65.

  8. Volume One: Ganesh & Co., Madras, 1921. Most of this volume (apparently the only one published) first appeared in Arya 1914-21.

  9. Talk of 25 August 1954. Entretiens 1954 (1980): 341.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Published elsewhere in this issue.

  12. Diary of Marie Potel, 8 November 1912.

  13. Talk of 20 May 1953. Entretiens 1953 (1978): 63-64 (translated from the French).

  14. Prieres et Meditations (1978): 4 (translated).

  15. A & R 11 (1987): 1.

  16. Paroles d'Autrefois (1983): 25-33, 86-107.

  17. Paroles d'Autrefois (1983): 55-81.

  18. Talk of 24 December 1969.

  19. H. M. Balyuzi. 'Abdul-Baha: The Centre of the Covenant of Baha'u'llah (London: George Ronald, 1971): 394.

  20. Paroles d'Autrefois (1983): 120 (translated from the French). For more on the Mother

 

and Abdul Baha see Ibid. 121-28, and talk of 14 April 1951 [Entretiens 1950-51 [1978]: 351-52). See also Anil Sarwal, "Sri Aurobindo Movement and the Baha'i Faith". Baha'i North 4(3) (145 B.E.): 9-11.

  1. Paroles d'Autrefois (1983): 120.

  2. Prieres et Meditations (1980): 95 (translated).

  3. Ibid. 107.

  4. A & R 12 (1988): 150.

  5. Talk of 25 July 1962 (translated from the French). See also "Notes from a Sadhak's Diary", Sri Aurobindo Circle 32 (1976): 48; 33 (1977): 64,65; also diary of K. S. Venkata-raman, in M. P. Pandit, ed., Breath of Grace (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust): 367; talk of 29 June 1955, in Mother India 30 (1978): 572.

  6. Nolini Kanta Gupta Reminiscences (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1973): 81. Cf. a similar statement made to Barindra-kumar Ghose, reported by Mrityunjoy in M. P. Pandit, ed., Breath of Grace (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1973): 65.

  7. A & R 12 (1988): 153; see also ibid. 167.

  8. Talk of 5 November 1961 (translated from the French).

  9. Prieres et Meditations (1980): 136.

  10. Reproduced on pp. 76-77 of this issue.

  11. See A & R 2-5 (1978-81).

  12. On Himself (1972): 368.

  13. A & R9 (1985): 214-17 and 225-26.

  14. Military record. Paul Richard papers.