Aurobindo Ghosh

Aurobindo Ghosh: The Revolutionary Who Became a Sage

In 1892 a young Bengali raised in England since the age of seven placed eleventh out of 250 candidates in the written examination for the Indian Civil Service — and then deliberately failed the horse-riding test, disqualifying himself from serving the Empire. Sixteen years later he was in Alipore jail facing a bomb conspiracy charge. Two years after that he had abandoned politics entirely for a small French enclave on the Coromandel coast, where he spent forty years working out a philosophy of human evolution. Sixty thousand people came to his funeral.

An English Education

Aurobindo Ghosh was born on 15 August 1872 in Calcutta into a Bengali Kayastha family associated with Konnagar. His father, Krishna Dhun Ghosh, was an assistant surgeon who later became a civil surgeon; his mother was Swarnalata Devi. He had three brothers and a sister — Benoybhusan, Manmohan, Sarojini and Barindra Kumar, known as Barin, who would later be at the centre of his brother's revolutionary troubles.

His father wanted him thoroughly English. After Loreto House boarding school in Darjeeling, Aurobindo was sent to England in 1879, aged seven, to live with the Reverend W. H. Drewett in Manchester. He entered Manchester Grammar School in 1881, St Paul's School in London in 1884, and King's College, Cambridge, in 1890, where he prepared for the Indian Civil Service.

The preparation succeeded and the intention failed. He passed the written examination near the top of the field and then made certain he would not be appointed by refusing to sit the riding test properly. He had been educated to administer British India and had decided instead to oppose it.

Baroda

In 1893 Aurobindo joined the Baroda State Service under Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III. From 1897 to 1907 he worked at Baroda College, rising to vice-principal. In 1901 he married Mrinalini, who was fourteen; she died in December 1918.

These were the years in which the Anglicised young man reclaimed India. He learned the languages and literature he had been raised without, and he began organising. In 1902 he helped establish the Anushilan Samiti, one of the secret societies at the core of the Bengal revolutionary movement.

The Nationalist

By 1906 the politics had overtaken everything. Aurobindo was appointed the first principal of the National College in Calcutta, an institution of the swadeshi movement's alternative educational system. He attended the Indian National Congress meeting that year and took part in the Surat Split of 1907, the rupture between moderates who sought reform within the Empire and extremists who wanted the Empire gone. Aurobindo stood with the second group and wrote for them with a force that made him one of the most dangerous men in British India.

In 1907 he resigned the principalship. Politics had become full-time.

Alipore

In May 1908 he was arrested in connection with the Alipore Bomb Case, the conspiracy prosecution that followed a failed bombing and swept up his brother Barin's revolutionary network. He spent a year in custody.

The jail changed the direction of his life. In solitary meditation he underwent an experience he described plainly afterwards: "I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation." On 6 May 1909 he was acquitted, after a prosecution witness was murdered inside the jail.

Pondicherry

Continued persecution made Bengal impossible. In April 1910 Aurobindo left for Pondicherry, then French territory and beyond the reach of the British administration. He never re-entered active politics.

What followed was one of the most sustained programmes of writing in modern Indian thought. From 1914 to 1921 he published *Arya*, a monthly philosophical review in which the substance of his major works first appeared. In 1926 he founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram with Mirra Alfassa.

The Work

The philosophy he built — Integral Yoga — was a deliberate synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions, and it broke with a long ascetic consensus. Where much of Indian spiritual thought treated the material world as illusion to be escaped, Aurobindo insisted the point was world-transformation, not world-negation. Spiritual practice was to change life on earth, not exit it.

In *The Life Divine* he set out the metaphysics; in *The Synthesis of Yoga*, the practice. Central to both is what he called the Supermind: "the full Truth-consciousness of the Divine Nature in which there can be no place for the principle of division and ignorance." Human beings, in this scheme, are not the end of evolution but a transitional stage — consciousness itself is still evolving, and a higher form of it can be brought down into ordinary existence. Of the Brahman he wrote that "we must see it in eternal and immutable Spirit and in all the changing manifestations of universe and relativity" — a refusal to sever spirit from matter that runs through everything he produced.

Savitri

He was also a poet, and his poetic ambition was scaled to his philosophical one. *Savitri* runs to roughly 24,000 lines of blank verse, an epic that carries the metaphysics in narrative form. It occupied him for decades and is the longest sustained poem in English by an Indian author.

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1943 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.

Death

Aurobindo died on 5 December 1950 of uremia. Around sixty thousand people attended the funeral — a figure that measures the distance he had travelled from a Cambridge examination hall.

Why Aurobindo Matters

He is the rare figure who was genuinely major in two incompatible careers. As a nationalist he helped push the independence movement past the polite constitutionalism of its early years. As a philosopher he built a system that took evolution seriously and refused to treat the world as an error to be escaped, giving Indian spiritual thought a forward-facing, developmental character it had largely lacked.

And he did the second thing after formally renouncing the first, which is why the two halves fit. Aurobindo did not stop trying to transform India in 1910. He changed the timescale, and the instrument, from the political to the evolutionary.