Sri Aurobindo

Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta on August 15, 1872, the third son of Krishna Dhun Ghose, a civil surgeon who had studied medicine in Britain, and Swarnalotta Bose, daughter of the Brahmo reformer Rajnarayan Bose ^[1]. His father admired English culture and wanted his sons raised without Indian influence. The children spoke English at home, and at age five Aurobindo was sent to the Loreto Convent school in Darjeeling, run by Irish nuns ^[2].

In 1879 the family sailed for England, and the seven-year-old boy was placed with the Drewett family in Manchester alongside his two elder brothers. He would not see India again for fourteen years. Any Sri Aurobindo biography has to reckon with this strange fact: the future prophet of Indian nationalism grew up knowing almost nothing of Indian languages, religion, or custom ^[1].

He entered St Paul's School in London in 1884, where he mastered Latin and Greek and read widely in English and French literature. Money grew scarce after his father's remittances faltered, and Aurobindo endured periods of real poverty in London lodgings. A scholarship took him to King's College, Cambridge, in 1890, where he won prizes for classical verse and passed the demanding Indian Civil Service examinations ^[2]. He deliberately failed to appear for the compulsory riding test, an act biographers read as quiet rebellion against a bureaucratic career serving the empire ^[3].

Aurobindo landed in Bombay in February 1893 and took a post in the service of the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III. Over thirteen years he worked in the revenue department, drafted state correspondence, and eventually taught English and French at Baroda College, rising to vice principal ^[1]. The salary was modest but the duties left time for what mattered to him: recovering the country he had never known. He learned Bengali, Sanskrit, Marathi, and Gujarati, and read the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and Kalidasa in the original ^[3].

The Baroda period shaped everything that followed. Within weeks of arriving he began publishing anonymous articles in the Bombay paper Indu Prakash under the series title New Lamps for Old, attacking the moderate petitioning politics of the early Indian National Congress as timid and ineffective ^[1]. In 1901 he married Mrinalini Devi, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a Calcutta government official, in a match arranged in the customary manner ^[2].

During these years he also began practicing pranayama and yoga, initially, by his own later account, to gain energy for political work rather than for liberation. He established secret contacts with revolutionary groups in Bengal and Maharashtra, sending his brother Barindra Kumar Ghose to organize young militants in Calcutta ^[3].

The partition of Bengal in 1905 gave Aurobindo his moment. The following year he left Baroda for Calcutta, becoming the first principal of the newly founded Bengal National College and, more consequentially, the guiding editorial voice of the English daily Bande Mataram ^[1]. His articles argued for complete independence, or purna swaraj, at a time when most Congress leaders sought only limited self government within the empire. The paper's blend of legal caution and radical implication made it maddeningly difficult to prosecute ^[4].

Aurobindo stood with Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, and Bipin Chandra Pal in the extremist wing of the Congress, and the confrontation between moderates and extremists split the party at its Surat session in 1907 ^[3]. He promoted a fourfold program: swadeshi (Indian goods), boycott of British goods, national education, and swaraj. Among Sri Aurobindo achievements in the political sphere, historians count his early and unambiguous articulation of full independence as the goal, decades before the Congress formally adopted it ^[4].

In May 1908 he was arrested in connection with the Alipore Bomb Case after two revolutionaries linked to his brother's group killed two Englishwomen at Muzaffarpur with a bomb meant for a magistrate. Aurobindo spent a year as an undertrial prisoner in Alipore Jail. Defended by Chittaranjan Das, he was acquitted in May 1909 for lack of evidence ^[1]. The year in jail transformed him. He later wrote that he practiced intense meditation in his cell and experienced the presence of the divine everywhere, in the prisoners, the guards, and the very bars ^[5].

After his release Aurobindo briefly resumed political journalism through two new weeklies, Karmayogin in English and Dharma in Bengali, and delivered the widely reprinted Uttarpara speech describing his spiritual experiences in prison ^[5]. British officials continued building a case against him. In February 1910, acting on what he described as an inner command, he slipped away to the French enclave of Chandernagore, and in April he sailed south to Pondicherry, another French territory beyond British jurisdiction ^[1].

He never returned to active politics. In Pondicherry he gave himself to yoga and to a torrent of writing. Between 1914 and 1921 he published the monthly review Arya, in which most of his major prose works first appeared serially: The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of the Veda, The Human Cycle, and The Ideal of Human Unity ^[3]. Producing several book length works simultaneously, month after month, remains one of the more astonishing feats in modern Indian letters.

In 1914 he met Mirra Alfassa, a Paris born spiritual seeker of Egyptian and Turkish descent who had come to Pondicherry with her husband Paul Richard. She settled there permanently in 1920 and became his closest collaborator. Aurobindo recognized her as an embodiment of the divine creative force and she came to be known simply as the Mother ^[6]. When disciples gathered around them, she organized the community that was formally established as the Sri Aurobindo Ashram on November 24, 1926, the day Aurobindo experienced what he called the descent of the overmind consciousness. From that date he withdrew into near seclusion, appearing before disciples only a few times a year ^[1].

Aurobindo's central claim is easy to state and hard to exhaust: evolution is not finished. Life emerged from matter and mind emerged from life, and he argued that a further principle, which he named the supermind, must emerge from mind, transforming human existence rather than requiring escape from it ^[5]. Where much classical Indian philosophy treated the world as illusion to be transcended, The Life Divine defends the reality of the world as a progressive manifestation of the divine.

His practical method, Integral Yoga, aims not at personal liberation alone but at the transformation of body, life, and mind by a descending spiritual force. It deliberately synthesizes the traditional paths of knowledge, works, and devotion rather than choosing among them ^[6]. The Synthesis of Yoga lays out this program, while his thousands of letters to disciples, later collected in multiple volumes, apply it to the details of ordinary struggle and practice.

He was also a poet throughout his life, and he regarded Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol as his most important work. Begun in Baroda and revised across decades, the blank verse epic runs to nearly 24,000 lines, making it one of the longest poems in the English language. He was still dictating revisions in his final months ^[3]. Among Sri Aurobindo facts that surprise newcomers: he wrote virtually everything, including his philosophy and his epic, in English, the language of his exile childhood, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1943 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 ^[7].

Seclusion did not mean indifference to the world. During the Second World War Aurobindo took the unpopular position, for an Indian nationalist, of publicly supporting the Allied cause, seeing in the Axis powers a force hostile to human evolution. He contributed to war funds and in 1942 urged acceptance of the Cripps Mission proposals for Indian self government, advice the Congress rejected ^[1].

India became independent on August 15, 1947, his seventy fifth birthday. In a message broadcast by All India Radio he called the coincidence a sanction of his life's work and set out five dreams: a free and united India, the resurgence of Asia, a world union, the spiritual gift of India to the world, and a step in evolution raising humanity to a higher consciousness ^[5]. He regretted the partition of the country and hoped it would eventually be undone.

His health declined in 1950 with worsening symptoms of kidney failure. He refused extensive medical intervention and died in the ashram on December 5, 1950, at the age of 78 ^[1]. His body lay in state for over four days before burial in the ashram courtyard, where his samadhi remains a site of pilgrimage. Mrinalini Devi had died many years earlier, in the influenza epidemic of 1918, before she could join him in Pondicherry ^[2].

The Mother led the ashram for twenty three years after his death, and in 1968 she founded Auroville, an experimental international township near Pondicherry endorsed by UNESCO and dedicated to human unity. Today it houses residents from dozens of countries and operates under a foundation established by an act of the Indian Parliament in 1988 ^[6].

Aurobindo's influence runs through several distinct channels. In Indian political history he is remembered as an early and uncompromising voice for complete independence and as the intellectual center of the swadeshi movement in Bengal ^[4]. In philosophy his evolutionary spirituality drew responses from thinkers as different as the American integral theorist Ken Wilber and the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, and his complete works, published by the ashram in 37 volumes, remain in print and widely studied ^[3].

His life continues to attract serious scholarship, including Peter Heehs's 2008 archival biography The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, which stirred controversy among devotees for its critical method while winning praise from historians ^[3]. Universities in India bear his name, his birthday coincides with the national Independence Day, and the questions he posed about the future of consciousness keep his books circulating far beyond the ashram gates. Few figures of the twentieth century combined revolution, scholarship, poetry, and mysticism so completely in one person.