Sri Aurobindo: A Life Sketch
SRI AUROBINDO, IN HIS OWN WORDS
Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on August 15, 1872. In 1879,
at the age of seven, he was taken with his two elder brothers to England
for education and lived there for fourteen years. Brought up at first
in an English family at Manchester, he joined St. Paul's School in
London in [1884] [MS 1885. See Table 1, page 565.—Ed.] and in 1890 went
from it with a senior classical scholarship to King's College,
Cambridge, where he studied for two years. In 1890 he passed also the
open competition for the Indian Civil Service, but at the end of two
years of probation failed to present himself at the riding examination
and was disqualified for the Service. At this time the Gaekwar of Baroda
was in London. Aurobindo saw him, obtained an appointment in the Baroda
Service and left England in [January], 1893.
Sri Aurobindo passed thirteen years, from 1893 to 1906, in the
Baroda Service, first in the Revenue Department and in secretariat work
for the Maharaja, afterwards as Professor of English and, finally,
Vice-Principal in the Baroda College. These were years of self-culture,
of literary activity—for much of the poetry afterwards published from
Pondicherry was written at this time—and of preparation for his future
work. In England he had received, according to his father's express
instructions, an entirely occidental education without any contact with
the culture of India and the East. [It may be observed that Sri
Aurobindo's education in England gave him a wide introduction to the
culture of ancient, of mediaeval and of modern Europe. He was a
brilliant scholar in Greek and Latin. He had learned French from his
childhood in Manchester and studied for himself German and Italian
sufficiently to read Goethe and Dante in the original tongues. [He
passed the Tripos in Cambridge in the first division and obtained record
marks in Greek and Latin in the examination for the Indian Civil
Service.]] [Sri Aurobindo's note.]
At Baroda he made up the deficiency, learned Sanskrit and several
modern Indian languages, assimilated the spirit of Indian civilisation
and its forms past and present. A great part of the last years of this
period was spent on leave in silent political activity, for he was
debarred from public action by his position at Baroda. The outbreak of
the agitation against the partition of Bengal in 1905 gave him the
opportunity to give up the Baroda Service and join openly in the
political movement. He left Baroda in 1906 and went to Calcutta as
Principal of the newly-founded Bengal National College.
The political action of Sri Aurobindo covered eight years, from 1902
to 1910. During the first half of this period he worked behind the
scenes, preparing with other co-workers the beginnings of the Swadeshi
(Indian Sinn Fein) movement, till the agitation in Bengal furnished an
opening for the public initiation of a more forward and direct political
action than the moderate reformism which had till then been the creed
of the Indian National Congress. In 1906 Sri Aurobindo came to Bengal
with this purpose and joined the New Party, an advanced section small in
numbers and not yet strong in influence, which had been recently formed
in the Congress...
The new-born Nationalist party put forward Swaraj (independence) as
its goal as against the far-off Moderate hope of colonial
self-government to be realised at a distant date of a century or two by a
slow progress of reform; it proposed as its means of execution a
programme which resembled in spirit, though not in its details, the
policy of Sinn Fein developed some years later and carried to a
successful issue in Ireland…Sri Aurobindo hoped to capture the Congress
and make it the directing centre of an organised national action, an
informal State within the State, which would carry on the struggle for
freedom till it was won. He persuaded the party to take up and finance
as its recognised organ the newly-founded daily paper, Bande Mataram, of
which he was at the time acting editor. The Bande Mataram, whose policy
from the beginning of 1907 till its abrupt winding up in 1908 when
Aurobindo was in prison was wholly directed by him, circulated almost
immediately all over India. During its brief but momentous existence it
changed the political thought of India which has ever since preserved
fundamentally, even amidst its later developments, the stamp then
imparted to it. But the struggle initiated on these lines, though
vehement and eventful and full of importance for the future, did not
last long at the time; for the country was still unripe for so bold a
programme.
Sri Aurobindo was prosecuted for sedition in 1907 and acquitted. Up
till now an organiser and writer, he was obliged by this event and by
the imprisonment or disappearance of other leaders to come forward as
the acknowledged head of the party in Bengal and to appear on the
platform for the first time as a speaker. He presided over the
Nationalist Conference at Surat in 1907 where in the forceful clash of
two equal parties the Congress was broken to pieces. In May, 1908, he
was arrested in the Alipur Conspiracy Case as implicated in the doings
of the revolutionary group led by his brother Barindra; but no evidence
of any value could be established against him and in this case too he
was acquitted. After a detention of one year as undertrial prisoner in
the Alipur Jail, he came out in May, 1909, to find the party
organisation broken, its leaders scattered by imprisonment, deportation
or self-imposed exile and the party itself still existent but dumb and
dispirited and incapable of any strenuous action. For almost a year he
strove single-handed as the sole remaining leader of the Nationalists in
India to revive the movement. He published at this time to aid his
effort a weekly English paper, the Karmayogin, and a Bengali weekly, the
Dharma. But at last he was compelled to recognise that the nation was
not yet sufficiently trained to carry out his policy and programme. For a
time he thought that the necessary training must first be given through
a less advanced Home Rule movement or an agitation of passive
resistance of the kind created by Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa. But he
saw that the hour of these movements had not come and that he himself
was not their destined leader. Moreover, since his twelve months'
detention in the Alipur Jail, which had been spent entirely in the
practice of Yoga, his inner spiritual life was pressing upon him for an
exclusive concentration. He resolved therefore to withdraw from the
political field, at least for a time.
In February, 1910, he withdrew to a secret retirement at
Chandernagore and in the beginning of April sailed for Pondicherry in
French India… During all his stay at Pondicherry from 1910 to the
present moment [This "Life Sketch" was written in 1930 and published in
1937. Sri Aurobindo's retirement lasted until his passing in December
1950.—Ed.] he has remained more and more exclusively devoted to his
spiritual work and his sadhana. In 1914 after four years of silent Yoga
he began the publication of a philosophical monthly, the Arya. Most of
his more important works, those published since in book form, the Isha
Upanishad, the Essays on the Gita, and others not yet published, the
Life Divine, the Synthesis of Yoga, [These two works, and many others,
have since been published in book form.—Ed.] appeared serially in the
Arya. These works embodied much of the inner knowledge that had come to
him in his practice of Yoga. Others were concerned with the spirit and
significance of Indian civilisation and culture, the true meaning of the
Vedas, the progress of human society, the nature and evolution of
poetry, the possibility of the unification of the human race. At this
time also he began to publish his poems, both those written in England
and at Baroda and those, fewer in number, added during his period of
political activity and in the first years of his residence at
Pondicherry. The Arya ceased publication in 1921 after six years and a
half of uninterrupted appearance.
Sri Aurobindo lived at first in retirement at Pondicherry with four
or five disciples. Afterwards more and yet more began to come to him to
follow his spiritual path and the number became so large that a
community of sadhaks had to be formed for the maintenance and collective
guidance of those who had left everything behind for the sake of a
higher life. This was the foundation of the Sri Aurobindo Asram which
has less been created than grown around him as its centre. Sri Aurobindo
began his practice of Yoga in 1905. At first gathering into it the
essential elements of spiritual experience that are gained by the paths
of divine communion and spiritual realisation followed till now in
India, he passed on in search of a more complete experience uniting and
harmonising the two ends of existence, Spirit and Matter. Most ways of
Yoga are paths to the Beyond leading to the Spirit and, in the end, away
from life; Sri Aurobindo's rises to the Spirit to redescend with its
gains bringing the light and power and bliss of the Spirit into life to
transform it. Man's present existence in the material world is in this
view or vision of things a life in the Ignorance with the Inconscient at
its base, but even in its darkness and nescience there are involved the
presence and possibilities of the Divine. The created world is not a
mistake or a vanity and illusion to be cast aside by the soul returning
to heaven or Nirvana, but the scene of a spiritual evolution by which
out of this material Inconscience is to be manifested progressively the
Divine Consciousness in things. Mind is the highest term yet reached in
the evolution, but it is not the highest of which it is capable. There
is above it a Supermind or eternal Truth-consciousness which is in its
nature the self-aware and self-determining light and power of a Divine
Knowledge. Mind is an ignorance seeking after Truth, but this is a
self-existent Knowledge harmoniously manifesting the play of its forms
and forces. It is only by the descent of this supermind that the
perfection dreamed of by all that is highest in humanity can come. It is
possible by opening to a greater divine consciousness to rise to this
power of light and bliss, discover one's true self, remain in constant
union with the Divine and bring down the supramental Force for the
transformation of mind and life and body. To realise this possibility
has been the dynamic aim of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga.
Source: http://www.sacar.in/sri-aurobindo-life-sketch.php
