-17_chapter - 15 chandranagore- inn of tranquility.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 15   CHANDERNAGORE : INN OF TRANQUILLITY    I   Ever since his acquittal in the Alipur case - a turn of events not at all to the Government's liking - Sri Aurobindo had repeated intimations from divers sources that he was a "marked" man still, that the Damocles' sword might fall on him any day. Once before - twice before - he had been prosecuted without a "scrap of reliable evidence"; he had been acquitted on both occasions, but the acquittal was no insurance against the risk of a fresh prosecution on equally flimsy evidence or of arbitrary deportation by a devious recourse to the

-01_preface to the third edition.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION   The first edition of this book was published on 21 February 1945. When I started work on it late in 1942,1 was not slow to realise that the biographer of Sri Aurobindo had himself to be a poet and a prophet, a philosopher and a Yogi; and being fully conscious of my limitations, I knew that the task I had undertaken greatly exceeded my abilities. Nevertheless I persevered, benefiting by encouragement, counsel and criticism from several friends in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, and it was my unique good fortune that Sri Aurobindo himself was magnanimous enough to go through my first and se

-10_chapter - 8 bhavani mandir.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 PART II PATRIOT AND PROPHET CHAPTER 8    BHAVANI MANDIR   I   Sri Aurobindo's involvement in the evolution if India's destiny was, almost literally a life-long process. His birth on 15 August 1872 could itself be viewed, in retrospect, as an augury of the coming of independence to India, exactly seventy-five years later, on 15 August 1947. In a narrower sense, however, Sri Aurobindo's active and open participation in Indian politics was of a much shorter duration: a period of no more than three years and a half, from August 1906 when he joined the National College at Calcutta as its Principal to February 1910 wh

-15_chapter - 13 sadhana in prison.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 13   SADHANA IN PRISON   I   We saw in the previous chapter that during the months of march and April 1908 - especially April - an atmosphere of tension and crisis was building up, the known parties to the undeclared war being the Moderates, the alien bureaucracy and the Nationalists. The Moderates had their Convention and their new Congress Constitution, the bureaucracy were paring their nails to come to closer grips with the Nationalists so as to be able to liquidate them, and the underground revolutionaries were chafing at the Nationalists leash and were impatient to let go a campaign of terror

-23_chapter - 21 global comprehension.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 21 GLOBAL COMPREHENSION I   Strange, indeed, are the ironies concocted by the Time-Spirit. An alien bureaucracy sends a patriot to prison and he turns it, as Sri Aurobindo did at Alipur, into a Temple of Sadhana; or, like Tilak at Mandalay, he finds fulfilment in the composition of a masterly commentary, the Gita Rahasya; or he opens himself, as Jawaharlal Nehru did in The Discovery of India, to the influence of the winding movement of his nation's unfolding history. Or, again, a poetaster-laureate writes a foolish panegyric on a dead King, and a Byron answers with the gloriously entertaining satire, The

-24_chapter - 22 lighthouse.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 PART IV ARCHITECT OF THE LIFE DIVINE CHAPTER 22   LIGHTHOUSE     I   The Arya continued to appear month after month throughout the period of the first world war, and discontinued publication only in 1921. The comprehensive Supramental Manifesto for the future - comprising the plea for change, the programme of spiritual evolution (or revolution) and the promise of individual, social and terrestrial transformation, involving man and collective man and global humanity - the grand Manifesto had been broadcast in all its sovereign amplitude and self-sufficiency . While this testament of the Life Divine was un

-31_references.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 REFERENCES   All of Sri Aurobindo's quotations are from the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL) published in 1972. Almost all references from A.B. Purani's The Life of Sri Aurobindo are now from the fully revised and enlarged Fourth Edition of 1978. Most of the quotations from the Mother's writings have been given their references in the Collected Works of the Mother published in the late 70s. The Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education is herein referred to only as Bulletin. The other references have been left as they were in our 1972 Edition.   INTRODUCTION   Chapter 1: Renascent I

-21_chapter - 19 lights on scripture.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 19 LIGHTS ON SCRIPTURE   I If Sri Aurobindo gave the place of honour in the Arya to the The Life Divine, he started two other important sequences also in the very first issue of the journal - The Synthesis of Yoga and The Secret of the Veda. The Synthesis was planned as a survey and as an assessment of various systems of Yoga past and present with reference to their relevance to his own "integral Yoga" which was duly to grow into "supramental Yoga"; it was thus conceived as the practical side to the theoretical or philosophical foundations that were to be established in The Life Divine. The Synthesis appea

-14_chapter - 12 on the eve.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 CHAPTER 12   ON THE EVE   I   A brief retrospect may be timely here. When Sri Aurobindo left India for England in 1879, he was but a boy of seven and he had lived a sheltered life at home and at the boarding school at Darjeeling. During his stay of almost fourteen years in England, he first grew in general ignorance of conditions in India. But gradually, during the years at Cambridge, his eyes were opened to Indian realities when his father began sending copies of the Bengalee, with passages marked relating to the instances of British misgovernment in India. Even at the precocious age of eleven, Sri Aurobindo

-34.index.htm?IsHostedInContentPage=1 INDEX Abercrombie, Lascelles, 177 Agastya, 384 Ahana, 69, 71,169, 619; earlier version, The  Descent of Ahana, 620; dramatic cast, 620; the Divine Charter, 622; Eden and Brindavan, 623ff; a dream and a vision, 624; handling of the hexameter, 626ff Ahmed, Asanuddin, 259 Aiyar, S. Doraiswami, 530, 579, 706 Aiyar, V. Krishnaswami, 221 Aiyar, Nagaswami, 378 Aiyar, V. V. S., 266, 378, 391,405,525 Akbar, Emperor, 8, 11, 293 Ali, Muhammad, 527 Alt, Shaukat, 527 Alipur Case (Manicktolla Bomb Case), 310ff, 359. 367 Alipur Jail, 202, 307, 310, 330, 388, 444, 490,525 Ambedkar, B. R., 496-497 Ambirajan, S., 13fn. Amr