Archival Notes
MORE ON SRI AUROBINDO IN DARJEELING AND IN ENGLAND
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.
Recent research in England has uncovered some new material on Sri Aurobindo's sojourn in that country as well as documents that give a glimpse of him and his family before he was taken abroad. In this issue of Archives and Researches will depart (once again) from our chronological sequence in order to present some of these findings.
London is a long way from Darjeeling, and Orbit House, the glass-and-steel tower housing the India Office Library and Records, may be compared to Kanchenjunga only in that it stands above the surrounding territory. Looking down at this seedy neighbourhood, listening to trains rumbling in and out of Waterloo Station, a scholar in the IOLR's reading room feels remote not only from the Himalayas but also from the celebrated buildings across the Thames. But once he has gone through the formalities of requisition, and bound volumes of documents have been placed before him, he finds himself in another world.
For me this world was that of the wife of a late-nineteenth-century civilian in rural Bengal. Annette Beveridge (née Akroyd) is known to admirers of Sri Aurobindo as the woman who gave the third son of Dr Kristo Dhone Ghose his middle name. Otherwise she is chiefly remembered as the mother of William Beveridge, one of the most outstanding English economists of this century. But she is an interesting figure in herself and deserves a digression of some length.
A Note on Annette Beveridge
Annette Susannah Akroyd was born in 1842, the daughter of a prosperous businessman of Stourbridge, near Birmingham. Anxious to continue her education even in those days when women were not granted degrees, Annette went to London and spent three years at Bedford College, one of England's first institutes of higher learning for women. After leaving Bedford College in 1863 she devoted herself to voluntary social work, one of the few occupations open to Victorian ladies
uninterested in marriage. In 1865 she helped establish the Working Woman's College in London.
The Akroyd family was Unitarian, and Bedford College, through nondenomina-tional, had a strong Unitarian influence. Since the time of Ram Mohun Roy, British Unitarians had had a special interest in India, and they embraced members of the Brahmo Samaj with brotherly arms. While in London Annette became acquainted with many Brahmos, among them Keshub Chunder Sen, the head of one of the factions of the Samaj.
One of the first Indian holy men to enthrall a credulous West, Keshub went to England in 1870 and "was welcomed by religious leaders of many denominations, but with special warmth by the Unitarians".1 He gave numerous lectures, at one of which he told a group of London ladies:
I sincerely and earnestly call upon you to do all in your power to effect the elevation of the Hindu women. . . . The best way in which that help can be given is for some of you to embark on the grand and noble enterprise of going over personally to that great country. ... A noble mission decidedly it is, to go across the ocean and scale hills and mountains, to surmount difficulties and risk health, in order to wipe the tears from the eyes of weeping Indian sisters, to rescue them from widowhood, from the evil customs of premature marriage, and to induce them to feel that there is something nobler and higher for them to aspire to.2
Annette was not present that evening, but "she heard all about it" and "took every remaining chance of seeing and hearing Mr. Sen". Soon, as her son later wrote, "Annette was in Keshub's net."3 It is not difficult to imagine the appeal that Keshub's summons had for Annette. An entry in her diary (Document 1) shows that she embodied all the strenuous moral earnestness we associate with the word "Victorian". Her life, reduced to "blankness and dreariness inexpressible" by the death of her father,4 acquired new meaning from her decision to plunge "in that illimitable abyss of work to be done". In India she would strive and perhaps suffer in the service of a noble cause.
Her final decision to go to India seems to have taken some time to congeal. She did not tell her sister about it until July 1871 (Document 1). By that time she had been acquainted with Dr Kristo Dhone Ghose for at least a month. It would appear that Annette got to know him as a friend of Mano Mohun Ghose, a Calcutta lawyer whom she had met in London between 1862 and 1866. Mano Mohun had come over with Satyendra Nath Tagore to try to enter the Indian Civil Service. Satyendra was successful, becoming the first Indian to be admitted to the elite corps. Mano Mohun failed the examination twice (his Latin was not up to scratch). Undaunted, he entered the Inns of Court and in 1866 was called to the bar. Back in Calcutta he became the first Indian barrister to practice in his homeland. His friend Kristo Dhone, a early graduate of the Calcutta Medical College, crossed the "black waters" in 1869. His ambition was to enter the Indian Medical Service, but like Mano Mohun he had to settle for a lesser distinction: a degree of M.D. with honours from King's College, Aberdeen.
Dr Ghose passed the summer of 1871 in London, where he saw a good deal of Annette Akroyd (Document 1). She came to a lecture he delivered, and attended
a tea that he hosted with a Mr Hunter. Together Annette and the doctor enjoyed the cultural life of London. Once (in midsummer!) they attended a performance of Handel's Messiah. At a later concert, and on a visit to Kew, they were joined by another bright young Bengali, Surendranath Banerjea, who had recently been admitted to the ICS.
Dr Ghose returned to Bengal in November 1871. Before his departure (apparently) he gave Miss Akroyd a calling-card photograph, taken in an Aberdeen studio in 1871 (Plate 1). In the same collection of photographs there is one of "a son of Dr K. D. Ghose" (Plate 2). If the doctor gave this picture to his friend while he was still in England, as seems likely, it cannot be of Aurobindo, as has sometimes been supposed, since he was not yet born.
Annette kept in touch with Dr Ghose and other Indian friends during 1872 (Document 2). It is quite possible that the doctor, replying from Rangpur to her letter of 24 July 1872, informed Annette of the birth of his third son in August. If he did, he may have told her also that he had named (or intended to name) the child Aurobindo Akroyd Ghose. (I give the correct spelling of the lady's name. In England Sri Aurobindo spelled it "Ackroyd" or "Acroyd"). Annette meanwhile was getting ready for the great journey and the noble work. She departed England in October and reached Calcutta on 15 December 1872. She was met there by her old friend Mano Mohun Ghose and his wife, who took her to their house at 14 South Circular Road (later Lower Circular Road and at present Acharya Jagadish Chandra Road).
It is quite possible that 14 South Circular Road was the house where Sri Aurobindo was born. It is certain that he was born in the house of Mano Mohun Ghose. Mano Mohun had two properties in Calcutta at this time. The other was in the Ballard's Buildings at 48 Chowringhee Road, at the corner of Theatre Road. Here, it appears, Mano Mohun had his chambers.5 Since he certainly was living in South Circular Road in December, it is reasonable to assume that he was living here in August as well, and that the wife of his friend Kristo Dhone stayed here during her confinement.
The house on Lower Circular Road was "a very nice one", located "quite in the best part of Calcutta" (Document 8). But the best part of Calcutta was a thin veneer on the Chowringhee side of the Maidan. This strip of stately buildings had given Calcutta the name "the city of palaces". But from her window Annette could see a number of far-from-palatial huts of the sort that most of the city's inhabitants lived in. There was also a tank in which the hut-dwellers washed, fished, and bathed, and from which they doubtless drank. It is extremely unlikely that they had access to the "pure water" brought by the "splendid new waterworks" that had "made Calcutta almost a healthy city" (Document 11). Even Annette's plumbing left much to be desired. The "comical" lack of WCs took some getting used to.
The bathing of the village women provided Annette with an interesting spectacle as she looked from her veranda over the "nice large" garden and the boundary wall. It was, she wrote her former students, "a very strange sight to our English eyes", adding with less sympathy, "& indeed must be condemned by everyone, on account of the publicity of the whole proceeding" (Document 11). This sentence epitomizes Annette's conflicting attitudes towards her new home. She was at the time one of the most enlightened Europeans in Bengal. The fact
that most of her friends were Bengali is enough to demonstrate this. Women at Belvedere, she wrote, declined even to speak to Bengali gentlemen, sniffing, "Ah! no! I never spoke to a native".6 But in other respects Annette was unable to rise above her English Victorian upbringing. Village women bathing in public might be excused since after all they had no choice. But Bengali men who dressed like Bengali men instead of imitation Englishmen (as did her friends Mano Mohun and Kristo Dhone [Plates 1 & 3]) could not be so excused. Annette's early encounters with men in dhotis, and with the legs that the dhotis revealed (Document 9), strike us today as ludicrous. Still more absurd was the professed horror with which Mano Mohun's wife beheld the same garment. She certainly had seen enough "legs" in her father's house, if not in her husband's. Her pictures (Plates 4 & 5) tell a before-and-after tale that is not without poignancy: an ordinary Bengali girl sent to convent school after marriage,7 from which she emerged wearing ruffled gowns, talking English, and (one must imagine) putting on airs before her ordinary Bengali friends.
Mano Mohun and his wife moved in the highest circles of "native" Calcutta society. A list of Annette's acquaintances reads like a Who's Who of late-nineteenth-century Bengal: Keshub Chunder Sen, Protap Chunder Mazoomdar, and other reformed Brahmos; Raj Narain Bose and other Adi Brahmos; and non-Brahmos or lapsed Brahmos like Mano Mohun Ghose, R. C. Dutt, W. C. Bonerjea, and Dr K. D. Ghose. With Raj Narain, whom she knew not only as a prominent Brahmo but also as Dr Ghose's father-in-law, Annette's relations were cordial but not especially close. She considered him to have in large measure what her future husband called "the besetting sin of the Bengalees", namely "that they will think and talk, talk and think, but that they will not act".8 During one of their meetings the venerable leader spoke to Annette on one of her favourite subjects, the education of women. She looked on this as a down-to-earth matter and was nonplussed when Raj Narain spent his whole time discussing "the abstract & impractical" aspects of the subject." Elevating manners to the dignity of metaphysics he soared aloft into trackless realms of words" (Document 7).
Annette had even more trouble getting on with W. C. Bonerjea. One can imagine her surprise when he opened their first meeting by remarking "that he did not know my opinion on the Athanasian creed".9 She found the barrister's talk superficial and sardonic, exhibiting a "tone of mind which scoffs at everything". After passing a tedious evening at Bonerjea's house she wrote in her diary: "there needs [to be] some binding association for high purposes to associate all these English educated men, who have gone beyond Brahmo limits" (Document 7). Twelve years after this was written Bonerjea became the first president of the Indian National Congress.
Whatever difficulties Annette had with anglicized Bengalis, she considered them better men than Keshub and others who clung to Bengali ways. She commended Bonerjea, Mono Mohun Ghose, Dr Ghose and other Brahmo apostates for living "in an enlightened way, preferring comfort and convenience & individual liberty to the disgusts of a genuine Bengali family house". Although she would not yet admit it, for Annette enlightenment meant Englishness. Her solution to the problem of dress for Hindu women was "the adoption of petticoats with the preservation of the remaining upper part of the dress", providing "a com-
promise . . . between indecency and denationalization".10 The absurdity of this "compromise", not to mention its ugliness, apparently did not strike her. Later she grew more overtly ethnocentric: the British way was the only correct way. In this she found one of her few supporters in Dr K. D. Ghose. "We know that they [the British] are as a race superior and can teach us much," she reports him saying in a letter of 1879 (Document 15).
Dr Ghose recanted such views when he learned how perfidious British officialdom could be. But the despair that was to mark his later years, due in part to his thwarted career, does not seem to have come out much during the years that he knew Annette. The unhappiness of his wife during the same period became manifest much earlier. The insanity that eventually possessed Swarnalotta Ghose seems to have had a heredity basis. But it may well have been aggravated by the cultural schizophrenia made graphic in the photos of Mano Mohun's wife. For like her friend (also, coincidentally, called Swarnalata), Swarnalotta Ghose was forced by her husband to act the part of an English lady.
The correspondence of Annette Akroyd provides us with the first evidences of Swarnalotta Ghose's madness. In a letter to her sister of 22 January 1873 (five months after the birth of Sri Aurobindo), Annette writes of Swarnalotta being "ill with a most alarming illness — fits of some kind" (Document 10). Four years later, shortly after the birth of the Glioses' only daughter Sarojini (Document 4), Henry Beveridge wrote to his wife Annette that Dr Ghose had told him "that his wife's eccentricity has entered a new stage & that she now is always laughing at herself (Document 14). This confirms a family tradition that Swarnalotta's condition was made worse by each succeeding pregnancy. No wonder Dr Ghose took her to England to have a British doctor supervise her last delivery. Unfortunately Swarnalotta's condition continued to deteriorate, and by the eighties she had become incurably insane.
Before that time many changes had taken place in the lives of Annette Akroyd and Dr Ghose. Very early in her stay Annette became disenchanted with Keshub Chunder Sen (Document 9), though she remained sensible to his charisma for some time (Document 12). Besides being repelled by such matters as the sartorial habits of his "missionaries" and the unsuitability of the "Asram" where he intended her to stay (an affair in which Dr Ghose came to her rescue [Document 9]), Annette differed from Keshub over issues of more fundamental importance. This proto-feminist was shocked to find that Keshub's attitude towards Indian women seemed to bear scant relation to the high pronouncements on the subject that had won him praise in England. The leader compensated for his own wife's lack of education by covering her with jewellery that she played with "like a foolish petted child".11 When later the preacher against "the evil customs of premature marriage" gave away his underage daughter to a maharaja's son, Annette could hardly have been surprised.
The controversy over woman's education was one of the issues that eventually caused the second Brahmo schism. Annette of course was with the progressives. In November she opened her own school, the Hindu Mahila Bidyalaya (Plate 6). Almost from the beginning she found the work frustrating, too much of a spoons-and-forks affair for someone with noble aspirations. Moreover she could not avoid embroilment in Brahmo controversies, which, as shown by Documents
8 and 10, could sometimes be rather nasty. Finally in 1875 Annette took the usual outlet, marrying a liberal district judge named Henry Beveridge.
Sri Aurobindo and his Family in Rangpur and in Darjeeling
Despite his remark on Bengali loquaciousness, Henry Beveridge had more sympathy for the people he worked with than most Britons in India, including his wife. His opinions both on and off the bench were so "pro-native" that he was never able to achieve his career ambition: a seat in the Calcutta High Court. In December 1876, after eighteen years in service, he was appointed Officiating District and Sessions Judge of Rangpur.12 Here his wife was reunited with her old friend Kristo Dhone Ghose, who had been the station's medical officer since 1871.13 Dr Ghose also was active in local government, having been elected to the Town Committee in 1876. The next year his medical and official interests came together to produce the biggest triumph of his career. In December 1877 he drove in the first stake at the camp of the drainage canal that still bears his name: the K. D. Canal (Document 4). The cutting of the canal was apparently the fulfilment of recommendations that Dr Ghose had made six years earlier in a report on the sanitation of Rangpur. The town, like many in Gangetic delta, was swampy and malaria-ridden. In recommending drainage Dr Ghose showed himself to be near the cutting edge of medical technology. The theory that mosquitos carried the disease was not confirmed until 1898.
Earlier in 1877 Annette Beveridge had gone with her infant daughter to Darjeeling. It happened that the doctor's three sons were studying there at a school run by nuns of the Loreto Convent. Annette saw the boys here at least three times. On her first visit, on 29 September 1877, they were so long in coming that she left before they arrived. Luckily she came across them walking down the road from the "boys' house". Her account of this casual meeting provides us with the earliest known description of Sri Aurobindo:
Coming up the very steep hill towards home I met the boys — all grown & looking so well-dressed in their blue serges & scarlet stockings. The little fellow [Aurobindo] had a grey suit, very becoming — & is greatly aged — grown tall and boyish. I was struck particularly by the broadening of his forehead. He was pleased to see me I think but all were quite silent except for an extorted yes! or no! . . . (Document 13)
Annette had apparently not seen the three boys for some time. This would indicate that Aurobindo had been taken to Darjeeling weeks or even months before his fifth birthday. The comment of one of the nuns "that the little one is now quite happy" suggests that he had not been happy to leave home at such a early age.
Until his departure on furlough in March 1877, the Collector of Rangpur was Edward George Glazier. It was apparently this man who made arrangements for Dr Ghose's sons to stay in England. The doctor took them to Manchester in 1879, leaving them in the care of the Reverend William H. Drewett of Manchester. In August Dr Ghose returned to India. His wife did not join him until the next year, after she had given birth to her fourth son. The three older boys remained in England for more than a decade.
The British still resist conversion to metric, so it is proper to say that Manchester lies about two hundred miles north-west of London. If you take the Ml and the M6, you can drive the distance in about three hours. Much of the countryside you pass through is not particularly inspiring, but it did not seem to me to merit the name "Black Country", except perhaps for the more heavily industrialized parts of Birmingham and Coventry.
Manchester too is industrialized, as it has been since the eighteenth century. At that time the city "became a convenient commercial centre for the mills scattered round at the various sites where water power was available. It possessed a coal supply close at hand. It became relatively easy, as roads were turnpiked and canals and later railways were built, to transport goods to Manchester and from there to send them all over the country and across the seas," particularly to India. The rapid growth that Manchester experienced during this period "was solely attributable to the extension of cotton factories". In 1871 it numbered 300,500 souls. By the end of the century it had passed the half-million mark. Although smaller than London, its population density was the highest in the United Kingdom. This meant of course that many Mancunians enjoyed unenviable conditions of living. "Many of the houses were built on the back-to-back principle and such rows were often formed into squares. Pigs were often kept in the house and the whole family slept in an indistinguishable heap under a pile of filthy straw or old sacking." First-hand observation of this side of nineteenth-century urban life prompted the Manchester mill owner Friedrich Engels to write his seminal study The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
These and other facts I noted while leafing through an optimistic little booklet published by the Manchester Publicity Office that I picked up in the local history room of the Manchester Central Library.14 Here I also looked through a microfilm copy of a street register of 1879, which showed that the Rev. Wm. H. Drewett lived at 84 Shakspeare [sic] Street, Stockport Road, Ardwick. In contemporary maps the township of Ardwick is shown just at the edge of the city. Today the city stretches far beyond it. Stockport Road is still a major thoroughfare, but Shakspeare Street, and the houses that once occupied it, no longer exist. An old sign on the side of Victorian building is the only material evidence of the street where the Ghose boys once lived (Plate 8).
Sri Aurobindo spent more time in the house on Shakspeare Street than his brothers, for he studied at home while they were sent to the Manchester Grammar School. Since the middle of the nineteenth century this school has enjoyed a reputation rivalling that of Eton, Winchester, and the rest. It no longer occupies its old premises in the centre of the city, but the old building still exists. I satisfied my archivist's recording instinct by taking photographs of the facade and of the door that Benoybhushan and Manmohan used to enter (Plate 9).
Sri Aurobindo in Keswick and Hastings
Where does one go in Northern England on a fine Sunday morning? For thousands the answer is "to the Lake District". Almost two hundred years after Wordsworth - saw his famous daffodils, Cumberland remains one of the most popular holiday
regions in the country. In this century, cars and motorways have made it possible to drive from Manchester in a couple of hours. In the last, visitors had to have a week or more in hand. In 1886 Sri Aurobindo and his brothers, now living in London, finished their examinations and took the train to Keswick, a pretty little town that is "the capital of the northern Lake District".
True to the rule that no English place-name is spoken as it is spelled, Keswick must be pronounced KEZ-ik. Approaching it from the south one passes Windermere, Grasmere, and Thirlmere, all lakes (mere is "lake" in Old English) and all beautiful. Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth wrote his best poetry, is located a quarter-mile from Grasmere village. My friends and I had no time to stop there. We were looking for another historic house.
In letters to his school chum Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose gave his Keswick address as "c/o Miss Scott, Ambleside Road". A call to the Keswick Historical Society established that in 1891 Miss A. Scott let apartments at Eskin House, 13 Ambleside Road. Entering Keswick we saw a sign for Eskin Street. We must be getting warm, we thought, since the road that we came in on passed through Ambleside. But we could not find number 13 and finally knocked on the door of an inn. A genial Englishwoman answered and told us that the Ambleside Road was on the other side of town. We would run into it if we followed Eskin Road to the end. We did, and found number 13, still called Eskin House, at the corner (Plate 10). While we were walking around the house taking pictures, we saw a curtain being moved from within. Wishing to dispel the occupant's apprehensions, we rang the bell. A nice old lady answered, who gave a patient hearing to our tale. Learning that our subject had lived in her house a hundred years before, she showed us a photograph of the place as it then was, standing in isolation with open country all around. Now of course it is surrounded by houses and other buildings. I was favourably impressed by the taste of the residents of this resort community. Even the main shopping district was pretty without being quaint. The Moot Hall still stands at the principal crossing, just as it did at end of the last century (Plate 11).
Hastings was and is another popular holiday spot, so popular that it has been spoiled in the same way that shore towns in New Jersey or California have been spoiled. There are more than enough souvenir shops and video games on the main street to keep day-trippers from London from being distracted by the town's natural beauty. We too were day-trippers one afternoon in September, having decided on the spur of the moment to make a dash down from London to find the house where Sri Aurobindo and his brothers stayed in 1887. We were looking for 2 Plynlimmon Terrace, which we knew (again from Manmohan's correspondence) to be the house where the young men stayed. The house register of 1887 showed that 2 Plynlimmon Terrace stood on Priory Road. The road was easy enough to find, but not the address. We asked several passers-by for information. They directed us to Plynlimmon Street. There was indeed a number 2 here but it did not seem to match either the old house directory or the description of the house that an English friend had given me. I continued my exploration, trying to find the streets that according to the directory intersected Priory Road. After a long and frustrating search (English streets are, briefly, not logically numbered) I finally managed to locate it. Plynlimmon Terrace (the name no longer is used) is a block
of "terraced houses" on Priory Road. It faces an open space that overlooks the Channel. "It is delightful on the cliffs, especially where we are staying", wrote Manmohan on 8 August 1887. My friends and I enjoyed the view, but we were unable to get a good photograph of the house. The former number 2 was disfigured by scaffolding. I had to content myself with a shot of the whole of Plynlimmon Terrace (Plate 12).
Sri Aurobindo at St Paul's School, London
Sri Aurobindo and his brothers had gone to Hastings as well as Keswick from London, where two of them, Manmohan and Aurobindo, were attending St Paul's School. Founded in 1509 by John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's (and a friend of Erasmus and Thomas More), the school has had a number of different locations. The first was in the churchyard of the old Cathedral. In 1884, the year Manmohan and Aurobindo entered, a new building was opened in Hammersmith, West Kensington. Less than a hundred years later, in 1968, this building was closed and new ones opened in Barnes, on the Surrey side of the Thames.
To get to Barnes by tube one must alight at Hammersmith station (not far from the site of the old school) and walk across Hammersmith Bridge. First, however, one must walk to the bridge, and this is a difficult if not life-threatening endeavour. There is a sort of roundabout there that cannot be crossed on foot. The city has thoughtfully provided a pedestrian subway, but this concrete rabbit-warren has many passages, strange inscriptions, and bizarre inhabitants. The bridge, on the other hand, is a charming Victorian structure opened in 1885 and so perhaps traversed by Sri Aurobindo and his brothers. The mighty Thames at this point (and at low tide) is just a muddy stream.
The Barnes campus of St Paul's is pleasant enough, and the students are well dressed, well behaved and obviously intelligent. So they were in the 1880s. The Archivist, Mr Christopher Dean, let me into the archives room, gave me some documents, showed me where to find others, and left me to myself. I had with me a list of possible sources; but first I occupied myself with what Mr Dean had given me. By far the most interesting of these documents were Sri Aurobindo's Class Reports. These had been separated out from the school's records, along with those of two other Old Paulines, G. K. Chesterton and Field Marshall Montgomery. The reports, reproduced as Document 16, provide remarkable confirmation of Sri Aurobindo's statement that during his early years at St. Paul's his teachers were enthusiastic about his promise but that later they lamented that he was wasting his remarkable gifts due to laziness.
In the short time available to me I was able to add a number of interesting materials to our file. Two documents that I found especially interesting had to do with Sri Aurobindo's knowledge of mathematics. I knew that in those days St Paul's placed most emphasis on Greek and Latin. I knew also that Sri Aurobindo excelled at these subjects, and disliked maths. I did not know how much mathematics he studied, but judging from comments made by other students (Manmohan once came to grief at Oxford because of his ignorance of the multiplication tables) I assumed it could not have been much. In fact, Sri Aurobindo not only was well grounded in algebra and plane geometry but also had taken two years of "analytical conies" (conic sections). Many of his classmates
on the "classical side", Manmohan among them, took no mathematics at all. Sri Aurobindo evidently was looking ahead to the ICS examination, in which 1000 marks were alloted to maths, more than to any other subject.15
Sri Aurobindo's Houses in London During the six years that Sri Aurobindo lived in London, he stayed in four or five different places. One morning two friends and I set off to find them, armed only with a recent edition of London A to Z. Flipping between the index and the maps of this indispensible volume, we could see that the houses we were looking for were all on the western side of the city. In the 1880s the neighbourhoods were relatively new and respectable. Now they would have to be considered mixed at best, at worst positively run down.
The house where Sri Aurobindo stayed first and longest was 49 St Stephen's Avenue, Shepherd's Bush (Plate 13). After a lengthy search (I've told you about English street numbers) we found Shepherd Bush Common, an open space that Sri Aurobindo must often have crossed. Now it is fenced in and not particularly attractive, though certainly more inviting than a similar place in New York or Philadelphia would be. St Stephen's Avenue is not far from Shepherd's Bush Common. After locating the house we decided to clear away the garbage cans before taking pictures. Not wishing to alarm anyone, we rang the bell. A young Englishwoman stuck her head out of an upper window. We told her that we wished to take pictures of the house, in which a famous person once had lived. "In this house?" she asked, rather surprised. "Go right ahead." Most of the other residents of the neighbourhood were Jamaican. One of them, a young man named Leon, also lived in number 49, which has been subdivided into a number of flats. My friend told Leon Sri Aurobindo's story starting from somewhere around the battle of Plassey. Leon listened to it all, and was suitably impressed. We all decided it would be a great thing if the London City Council would put up a plaque commemorating Sri Aurobindo's stay.
In 1887, just after their return from Hastings, Sri Aurobindo and his brothers moved to 128 Cromwell Road, which was then the headquarters of the South Kensington branch of The Liberal Club. They seemed to have stayed here through the generosity of the Club's secretary, James Cotton. James was a brother of Sir Henry Cotton, the well-known Bengal civilian (and president of the 1904 session of Congress), who was an acquaintance of the boys' father. We pilgrims had no difficulty finding Cromwell Road, but experienced much trouble getting a good picture on account of the traffic (Plate 14). Number 128 seems to have changed little in a hundred and ten years. The same cannot be said of the adjoining properties. Sri Aurobindo certainly never rushed downstairs to buy an order of take-away noodles from the Thai Taste Restaurant.
In On Himself we learn that "Aurobindo went separately into lodgings" after leaving Cromwell Road.16 The lodging house he chose was located at 28 Kempsford Gardens, Earls Court (Plate 15). Nearby was and is the Brompton Cemetery, mentioned by Manmohan in one of his letters to Binyon: "Kempsford Gardens, I must tell you, looks out upon Brompton Cemetery and funerals pass down it every day." Sri Aurobindo seems to have lived in Kempsford Gardens for just a short while before going up to Cambridge. In the "Tutor's Book" at King's College three
London addresses are given for him: Cromwell Road, Kempsford Gardens, and 42 Hogarth Road. The last-named place (Plate 16), located just off Cromwell Road, was the home of the South Kensington Liberal Club in 1892. Sri Aurobindo apparently stayed here after leaving Cambridge in the summer of that year.
He did not stay long, however. Two letters that he wrote in November 1892 to the Secretary of State for India give his address as 6 Burlington Road, Bayswater. When A. B. Purani visited London in the fifties, he discovered that 6 Burlington Road had been renamed 68, St Stephens Avenue some years earlier. He took a photograph of the house; but try as we might we could not find it. The numbers seemed to stop at 62. After my experiences with British street numbers I was ready for almost anything except disappearance. We asked local residents whether the block had been renumbered or whether the western part of the street had been destroyed to make way for the new buildings at the end of the block. No one was able to tell us, though a lady working in a hotel gave us a capsule history of the neighbourhood. It appears that at one time it was owned by a gangster who turned many of the houses into brothels. Later the police cleaned the area up. It was perhaps at this time that the street was renamed St Stephen's Avenue. At present the area is being gentrified by "yuppie-types" who call it North Kensington instead of Bayswater. The lady gave me the address of a local library where, she said, I might be able to find out more.
The local history librarian to whom I made my enquiry was friendly but said he could not help me. The relevant collections had been moved to the Marylebone Library. (Marylebone is pronounced something like MARL-bun, and the name comes, quite possibly, from Eglise de Marie la Bonne, which may or may not be the original name of the Old Marylebone Church, in which Byron was baptized and Browning was married.) I got to this library by way of the Baker Street tube station (no need for a literary digression here) and met another friendly librarian in another local history collection, who said that I had come to the right place. He showed me where to find the relevant ordnance map, which proved beyond a doubt that the western end of St Stephen's Gardens no longer existed. Noticing the catalogue of a photograph collection, I looked up Burlington Road. To my surprise a number of photographs were listed, one of which was dated c. 1910 (Plate 17). One cannot be sure which if any of the houses shown was Sri Aurobindo's. The photograph at least gives us an idea what the neighbourhood was like a decade or two after he lived there.
Sri Aurobindo at Cambridge
Sri Aurobindo went up to Cambridge in 1890. He must have taken the train; we went by car. Approaching from the south-east, whether by road or rail, one can see the college towers soaring above the town. Before entering, we picked up our Cambridge host, Dr Satyajit Ghosh, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. With him we walked up Trumpington Street, in the footsteps of E. M. Forster (and hundreds of other Kingsmen) "past the Fitzwilliam [Museum], towering upon immense substructures like any Roman temple, right up to the gates of one's own college [King's], which looked like nothing else in the world".17 Indeed it does (Plate 20). Within the gates I could understand what Sri Aurobindo meant when he spoke of Cambridge's "ancient and
venerable buildings, the mere age and beauty of which are in themselves an education".18 But we could not stand and admire them, for I had an appointment with Dr Michael Halls, Modern Archivist of the College Library. He received me graciously, showed me where to find useful materials, and left me to do my work. Later I asked him a number of questions about King's in the last century. Yes, he replied to a trivial query, students (not to mention faculty) had to wear cap and gown whenever outside their rooms. (Dress regulations, I noticed, have been greatly relaxed. Dr Halls himself wore jeans, motorcycle belt, and black leather jacket.) He also explained to me the relation between the University, the colleges, and the faculties. I can't say that I understood this fully, but I did grasp that Sri Aurobindo had to fulfil requirements set by Cambridge University, King's College, and the Classics faculty (and the Civil Service Commissioners as well).
Later I wandered about the College, taking pictures and trying to soak up a little atmosphere. At lunch I had mentioned to Satyajit that as picturesque as the colleges were one got the impression not of a museum but of a dynamic centre of life. Cambridge after all was the university not only of Newton but also of Stephen Hawking. As if to confirm this observation, as I walked down a pathway towards the back gate of the college I crossed Dr Hawking on his way to a conference at King's. The college has contributed to the intellectual life of England, and the world, for more than five centuries. A display of the pictures of old Kingsmen in the college office includes Sir William Draper, Rupert Brooke, Forster, Ruskin, Hardy, and Sri Aurobindo. Something else I saw in the office seemed to me an indication of the college's continuing vitality. On a notice board above the xerox machine, where I laboured during my last day at Cambridge, I saw an announcement headed "KING'S YOGA", offering instruction in "the ancient system of gentle exercises, breathing techniques and simple meditation procedures".
Sri Aurobindo's Return to India
Before leaving India I had written to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich for information on the voyage of the Carthage, the steamship on which Sri Aurobindo returned to India in 1893. Part of their reply is reproduced as Document 17. "RA Docks" stands for Royal Albert Docks, part of what the 1900 edition of Baedeker's London refers to as the Royal Victoria and Albert Docks. These are described as being "2 3/4 M. [miles] in length, lighted by electricity and provided with every convenience and accommodation for sailing-vessels and steamers of the largest size."19 Before driving me to the London City Airport my host told me that it was located in the docklands area. The dock from which Sri Aurobindo left for India must have been close by. He was right. The Royal Albert Docks occupy the same position on Baedeker's map as the airport does in London A to Z. I can't say I was particularly struck by the coincidence, but as my plane was taking off I looked down at the river and thought for a moment of that day a century ago when Sri Aurobindo began his voyage back to his homeland.
P.H.
NOTES
Special thanks to Ramesh Patel, Nila Patel, Alka Mishra, A. K. Mishra, and Satyajit Ghosh.
1 Lord [William] Beveridge. India Called Them. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1947, p. 83.
2 Speech of 1 August 1870, from Keshub Chunder Sen's English Visits, q. Beveridge, p. 84-5.
3 Ibid., p. 85.
4 Ibid., p. 81.
5 See Documents in the Life of Sri Aurobindo. A & R 1 (1): April 1977, pp. 78-80. Occupancy of 48 Chowringhee Road confirmed by Thacker's Bengal Directory 1872 (IOR).
6 Letter of 27 March 1873, q. Beveridge, p. 89.
7 David Kopf. The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 35.
8 Letter Henry Beveridge to Annette Beveridge, q. Kopf, p. 36.
9 Annette Akroyd. Diary and Notebook in India, 12 January 1873 (IOR).
10 q. Kopf, p. 37.
11 Beveridge, p. 89.
12 Bengal History of Services 1886.
13 Details on the service of Dr Ghose are from Bengal Service Lists and similar documents.
14 W. H. Shercliff. Manchester: A Short History of its Development. Manchester: Publicity Office, Town Hall, n.d., pp. 3, 27, 33.
15 Open Competition for the Civil Service of India. June, 1890. Regulations, examination papers, table of marks, and statistics. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office (IOR).
16 On Himself, p. 2.
17 E. M. Forster. The Longest Journey. London: Penguin Books, 1989, p. 58.
18 The Harmony of Virtue, p. 131.
19 Karl Baedeker. London and its Environs: Handbook for Travellers. Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, Publisher, 1900, p. 168.