Dictionary of Proper Names

Selected from Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo’s Works (1989/1996)

B

Baal the most important god in the pantheon Canaanites; the Old Testament speaks frequently of the Baal of a given place or refers to Baalim in the plural.

Babel the Tower of Babel; ancient multi-ethnic Babylonian city & tower “with its top in the heavens” to reunite humanity with its Creator. The god of the Genesis condemned this city & tower by making diversity of languages a curse – which why each of the creedal religion it created imposes its own tribal tongue as the only means of communing with the Creator of mankind. Sri Aurobindo: “In reality, this diversity has been rather a blessing than a curse laid on mankind, a gift rather than a disability. For its disadvantages tend more & more to be minimised by the growth of civilisation & increasing intercourse. Diversity of languages serves two important ends of the human spirit: it brings those who speak it into a certain large unity of growing thought, formed temperament, ripening spirit; & most powerful of all, it is not a barren principle of division but a means of a fruitful & helpful differentiation. [CWSA Vol. 25]

Bacchae tragedy by the Greek poet Euripides in 5^th cent BC, on the Pentheus story.

Bacchus Roman god of wine, identified with Dionysus (q.v.). He was also a god of vegetation & fertility, & the protector of vines. [Cf. Soma]

Bach Johann Sebastian (1685-1750), principal figure of the Baroque Age of European music.

Bacon Francis (1561-1626), English lawyer, courtier, statesman, philosopher, writer, best-known for his Essays.

Roger Bacon (1220-92), thinker, reformer, zealous in experimental science.

Bactria region between Hindukūsh & Amu Darya or Oxus; its capital was Bactra, ancient Vahlika & Balkh [s/a Ashōka]

Baghdad city of ancient Mesopotamia on the Tigris, closest to Euphrates. From 5^th millennium BC, it was a nodal point of desert travel & trade, & later the capital of the Abbasside Caliphate. Abu Ja’far Abdallah ibn Muhammad al-Mansur (714–75 AD), the second Abbasid Caliph is generally regarded as the real founder of the Abbasid Caliphate. Al-Mansur is also known for founding the ‘round city’ of Madinat al-Salam which was to become the core of imperial Baghdad. Al-Mansur was proclaimed Caliph on his way to Mecca in the year 753 & installed the next year. Under the Abbassides Baghdad’s commercial position became unrivalled & became, under Haroun Al Rashid, the greatest city of Islam. By 1200 Chenghiz Khan’s conquests began to shake the Abbasside Empire; upon conquering Baghdad Chenghiz put up a tower of one lakh skulls there. In 1258 Chenghiz’s grandson Hulagu Khan overthrew the Abbasside Caliphate. By 1638, when it became part of the Ottoman Empire its population was a mere 14,000. In 1920 it became the capital of the newly constituted kingdom of Iraq.

Bāgdī mid-6^th century it was one of the five divisions of Gauḍa (see Bengal). Later its natives, who became mainly fishermen, palanquin-bearers, & labourers in central & western Bengal & Bihar, became known as Bāgdīs.

Bahadur Shah (1) Bahadur Shah I, 7^th Moghul Emperor (1707-12). (2) Bahadur Shah (1775-1862), 19^th & last Moghul emperor (1837-1857): a philosopher-poet ‘convicted’ by the blood-thirsty Octopus on the blatantly false charge of being the kingpin of 1857-58 Mutiny against its ‘legal’ possession of the subcontinent, & hanged after being made to witness the public massacre of all his possible successors.

Baha’ism founded in 1862 by “Bahā’-Ullāh” (born Mīrzā Hosayn’-Alī Nūrī, 1817-92), sprang from Persia’s Shi’ite Shaikhism & Bābism. The former, who believed that a perfect Shi’ite would declare himself the Twelfth Imam in 1844 AD, accepted Sayyed’-Alī-Mohammad Šīrāzī when he proclaimed himself the Bāb-ed-Din (Gate of Faith) of the Twelfth Imam. Bābis were persecuted by orthodox Shi’ites supported by the Shah of Iran who executed the Bāb in 1850 & imprisoned their leaders among whom was Bahā Ullāh. He was exiled to Iraq, then to Istanbul & Edirne in Turkey. At Edirne, in 1863, he declared himself the spiritual “return” of the Bāb. In 1868 he was imprisoned in Akkā in Palestine but lead his Iranian followers by sending them his epistles & tablets. In 1873, he set down al-Ketāb-al-aqdas (Most Holy Book) in which among other things he emphasised the education of children of both sexes. In spite of continued persecution by the Iranian Govt. & Shi’ite Ulemas, Baha’ism spread not only among Iranian Shi’ites but also among Zoroastrians & Jews. By 1892 it had spread to Iraq, Turkey, Ottoman Syria, Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, Turkish Central Asia, India, & Burma. In the Arya, August 1915, Sri Aurobindo cited Baha’ism as one of the forms of Asian spiritual energy (with Buddhism, Vedantism, & other Oriental forms) which, along with European idealism, mysticism, & religionism, was attempting to usher a period of light & efflorescence in humanity’s evolution [SABCL Vol.16; CWSA 13:142]. In an informal talk in April 1924, he said, Bahā Ullāh used to see a Light descend on him when he was in meditation; it is with that force that he created Baha’ism; he had a remarkable power of telepathy & the power of the word which is regarded as a sign of a prophet; some of his prophecies came true. Abdul Bahā, his eldest son whom he had named his successor, also used to see some Light in meditation & used it to influence his disciples. He accepted certain mental concepts like toleration, universal brotherhood, equality of man & woman, etc., & was open even to Buddhism. If Mahomedans, Sri Aurobindo added, get a religion of that sort it is much better than what they are having now [A.B. Purani, Evening Talks…, 2007:459-61].

The website of Baha’ism (2016) says that God sent a series of his divine Manifestations… including Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, & Muhammad. Bahā Ullāh says: “The religions of the world come from the same Source & are in essence successive chapters of one religion from God.”

Bāhuka alias of King Nala while in disguise as a trainer of horses & charioteer at the court of Ṛtuparṇa, the king of Ayodhya.

Baidyanath The Boidyonātha dhāma at Deoghar claims to be Paralyām Vaidyanātham, fifth of the twelve in Dwādasha Jyotirlingam Stotram. However, the Vaidyanātha at Parali, near Pune, has been traditionally worshipped as the original. The legend: In one of his anusthānas in his worship of Shiva, Rāvaṇa built, consecrated & worshipped a Shivalinga. But Shiva did not appear until after he offered his ten heads one after the other; Rāvaṇa then obtained a boon with which he hoped to destroy all his enemies. Since Shiva attended to Rāvana’s injuries as would a Vaidya, that Shivalinga & temple & location are known as Vaidyanātha.

Baital Pachisi Betal-Panchvimśati (1847) by Īśvara Chandra Vidyāsāgara, based on Shiva Das Bhatt’s Vaitala-Pancha-vimsaka, was the first prose work of Bengali literature. It is a set of 25 tales of King Vikramāditya: each consists of a conundrum question by a Vaital (spirit haunting a dead body) & Vikramāditya’s solution.

Bāji Prabhou one of the longer poems by Sri Aurobindo, based on the historical incident of the heroic self-sacrifice of a fearless general of Shivaji. The obvious reason he wrote it along with “The Mother to her Son” & Prince of Edur, was to implant the spirit of fearlessness in those who loved their motherland.

Bāji Rao Bāji Rao I (18Aug1700–28Apr1740) was eldest son & successor of Bālāji Vishwanath Bhat. Bālāji, one of eight ministers of Chhatrapati Shahu (grandson of Shivaji), became the first Peshwa (Prime Minister) in 1713. That Aurangzeb, after Shivaji’s death, personally descended into the Deccan, proved that the Mahrattas were his only rivals. Taking advantage of the Mogul Empire’s decline after Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, Bālāji entered into treaties with his weak successor Md. Shah, taking back not only the territories of Shivaji that Aurangzeb had usurped but also Khāndesh, & the right to levy chauth (a quarter of the annual revenue of an area as tribute) on the Moghul provinces of Gondwānā, Berar, & parts of Hyderabad & Karnataka. He also extracted the right to levy chauth in Gujarat from its Mogul governor, which Shahu awarded to his Senāpati, Khanderao Dabhāde. Upon Bālāji’s death in 1720, Shahu appointed Bāji Rao the next Peshwa & Dabhāde’s son Triambakrao, Senāpati. Bāji Rao proposed the creation of an all-India Hindu empire replacing the Moghul. His policy: “Strike at the root, & the branches will fall of themselves” was opposed not only by senior ministers who resented at being superseded, but also Mahratta chieftains such as Ranoji Shinde, Malharrao Holkar, Udājirao Pawār, Tukojirao Pawār & Jivājirao Pawār who were collecting chauth from several areas in Mālwā & later carved out their own kingdoms of Gwalior, Indore, Dhār & the two Dewas States. In 1723, Bāji Rao invaded Mālwā & Shahu gave him the right to collect chauth from Mālwā. When Triambakrao rebuffed Bājirao’s proposal to share each other’s levy, Bāji Rao appointed an agent of his own for collecting chauth in Gujarat where three Mahratta commanders: Kanthāji & Kadam Bande for Shahu, & Triambakrao’s Deputy Pilāji Gaikwād for himself & Triambakrao, were already active. While Bājirao went on to raise the Mahratta power to an all-India level with outposts like Indore & Gwalior in the north, Nagpur in the centre & Miraj & Ramdurg in the south, Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah I, Delhi’s viceroy of Deccan, sent an army to Ahmedabad in 1730 to replace the Mogul governor of Gujarat there by his own. Seeing Pilāji & Kanthāji going over to the Nizam’s fold, Bājirao sent a column under Chimnāji. Since the Governor of Gujarat, ceded to Chimnāji, the right to collect chauth & sardeshmukhi from Gujarat, he was replaced by Abhay Singh, who also recognized Bājirao’s right to collect taxes. Incensed at this, Triambakrao who felt Bājirao had usurped his family’s rights formed an alliance against Bājirao with Bangash, the Nizam, Shambhāji II of Kolhapur (who had become a rival claimant to the title of Chhatrapati), Pilāji, Kanthāji, & Bande. Hearing of this, Bājirao set out for Gujarat at the head of a formidable army & in the battle at Dabhoi (q.v.) in 1731, Triambakrao & Pilāji’s son were killed & Pilāji badly injured. The Nizam signed a treaty whereby he would never stray north of Hyderabad &, defeated again by Bājirao at Rohe-Rameshwar in December 1732, promised not to interfere with Maratha expeditions. Shahu & Bājirao resolved the dispute with Shambhāji II by signing the Treaty of Warna, which demarcated the territories of the Chhatrapati & Kolhapur. They avoided a rivalry with the powerful Dabhāde clan by appointing Triambakrao’s son Yashwantrao Senāpati with the right to continue collecting chauth from Gujarat on the condition that he would deposit half the collections in the Chhatrapati’s treasury. Pilāji, still bent on carving out a kingdom of his own, wheedled the right out of the naïve boy & created lifelong enmity between the Gaikwād & the Peshwa. Meanwhile, Shambhāji II had claimed the title of the Maratha Chhatrapati. The Nizam offered to act as an arbitrator. Bājirao convinced Shahu not to accept the Nizam’s arbitration offer, & instead launch an assault against him. In August 1727, Bājirao raided & plundered several of Nizam’s territories, such as Jalna, Burhanpur & Khāndesh. The Nizam invaded Pune, where he installed Shambhāji II as the Chhatrapati, leaving behind a contingent of his army headed by Fazal Beg. On 28 February 1728, the armies of Bājirao & Nizam faced each other at the Battle of Palkhed. The Nizam was defeated, & forced to make peace. On 6 March, he signed the Treaty of Mūngi Shevgaon, recognizing Shahu as the Chhatrapati as well as the Maratha right to collect taxes in Deccan. Bājirao moved his base of operations to Pune in 1728 & in the process laid the foundation for turning it into a large city. Bājirao also started construction of Shaniwār Wādā on the right bank of the Mutha River. The construction was completed in 1730, ushering in the era of Peshwa control of the city. [Cf. Tilak purchasing Gayakawādā which was thence known as Sardar-griha]

Meanwhile, after death of Triambakrao, the Mughal Emperor recalled Bangash from Mālwā & re-appointed Jai Singh II as its governor. On 4 March 1736, Bājirao & Jai Singh came to an agreement at Kishangadh & on Jai Singh’s advice the Emperor appointed Bājirao Deputy Governor of the province. Jai Singh is also believed to have secretly informed Bājirao that it was a good time to subdue the weakening Mughal emperor. Bājirao had already built the Mahratta Confederacy with the Scindhia, Holkar, Bhonsle, & the Gaikwād. He also allied himself with the Rajput ruler of Amber & the Bundelās. On 12 November 1736, he started a march to the Mughal capital Delhi from Pune. On hearing about the advancing Maratha army, the Emperor asked Sādat Khan to march from Agra & check the Maratha advance. Malharrao Holkar & Pilāji Jādhav crossed Yamuna & plundered the Mughal territories in the Ganga-Yamuna Doab. Sādat Khan led a force of 150,000 against them, & defeated them. He then retired to Mathura, thinking that the Marathas had retreated. However, Bājirao advanced to Delhi & encamped at Talkotara. The Mughal emperor dispatched a force led by Mir Hasan Khan Koka to check his advance which the Marathas defeated on 28 March 1737.

The Portuguese had captured several territories on the west coast of India, violating an agreement to give the Marathas a site on Salsette Island (c.241 sq. miles), north of Bombay, for building a factory, & had been practising religious intolerance against the Hindus in their territory. Bājirao dispatched an army under his brother Chimnāji against them. Chimnāji captured the Thana fort & almost all of Bassein, & gained control of Salsette after a prolonged siege. However, Bājirao was forced to turn his attention away from the Portuguese due to the invasion of Nadir Shah (q.v.) in the north. He died on 28 April 1740, at the age of 39 en route to Delhi at Khargaon, near Indore. He was cremated on 28 April 1740, at Raver-Kheda on the river Narmada. After him Nana Fadnavis managed to hold the Confederacy together in spite of the internecine squabbling among them ignited by the British. “With his death,” writes Grant Duff, “departed all the wisdom & moderation of the Mahratta Confederacy.” Ignoring Shivaji’s & Nana’s warnings never to “sign even an innocuous treaty with the English, for they have the cruel cunning to grab the whole at the first opportunity”, Gaikwād, Bhonsle, Bājirao II, Sindhia, & Holkar, all signed suicidal bi-lateral treaties with the Octopus which, by 1818 reduced them to pitiable feudatories, & laying the seed of slavery under Pax Britannica.

Sri Aurobindo: Swaraj has been sometimes interpreted as a return to the old conditions of self-sufficient village life leaving the imperial authority to itself, to tax and pass laws as it pleased – ignored because it is too strong to be destroyed. Even those who see the futility of ignoring Government which seeks to destroy every centre of strength, however minute, except itself, sometimes insist on the village as the secret of our life and ask us to give up our ambitious strivings after national Swaraj and realise it first in the village. Such counsel is dangerous, even if it were possible to follow it. Nothing should be allowed to distract us from the mighty ideal of Swaraj, National and Pan-Indian. This is no alien or exotic ideal, it is merely the conscious attempt to fulfil the great centripetal tendency which has pervaded the grandiose millenniums of her history, to complete the work which Srikrishna began, which Chandragupta and Asoka and the Gupta Kings continued, which Akbar almost brought to realisation, for which Shivaji was born and Bājirao fought and planned.” Which work his son Bālāji Bājirao attempted to realise (see Pāṇīpat), & which work Tilak & Sri Aurobindo too attempted to complete; but as in all such previous attempts, in their case too, the betrayal was worse from within that from without. [Based on Sayājirao of Baroda..., Fatehsingh Gaikwād, 1989; S. Bhattacharya; Lōkamānya B.G. Tilak..., Karandikar; SABCL-1:738-39]

Baker, Sir Edward (1857-1913), educated at Christ’s College, Finchley: passed ICS & went out to Bengal 1878 as Under Secretary to the Governor of Bengal & Govt. of India, Finance Dept. 1885: Deputy Secretary 1892-5, Secretary 1902-05: Financial Secretary to the Govt. of Bengal & Member Bengal Legislative Council 1898-1902: Companion of the Star of India 1900: Financial Member of the Supreme Council of India, 1905-08: knighted 1908: Lt. Governor of Bengal 1908-11 [Buckland].

Balarām(a)/ Rām(a) The Puranas, which identify him with Lord Vishnu’s Seshanāga, speak of him as the fiery tempered Lakshmaṇa, younger brother of Sri Rāma, in Tretā, & the fiery tempered elder brother of Sri Krishna in Dwāpara. “Symbolically Balarāma is the second of the four Powers of God (Srikrishna-Balarāma-Pradyumna-Aniruddha) who rule the mighty game of evolution & govern each a cycle of the Chaturyuga, the other three incarnate to help him. In the Tretā Yuga, Balarāma, the Kshatriya, manifests God’s force & strength & wrath; he is identified with Rudra & his Shakti is Mahākāli.” [SABCL Vol. 3:452-53; s/a Yuga(s)]

Bālabhārat Bāla Bhāratam, English monthly edited by Subramania Bhārati in which he published his patriotic songs & poems, scriptural hymns & philosophy.

Balfour, A.J. Arthur James (1848-1930), British politician who dominated Britain’s Conservative Party for 50 years, was Prime Minister (1902-5) & Foreign Secretary (1916-9). On 2^nd November, 1917, he sent a letter to Lord Rothschild in regard to the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people: “I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of his Majesty’s Govt., the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to & approved by the Cabinet.... I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”

Bali principled king of the Asūras, who after obtaining the boon of lordship over the three worlds, held a Yajña. After which, as required by Dharma he gave whatever alms mendicants asked as Dāna from him. Lord Vishnu incarnated as Vāmana (q.v.) a child mendicant, & obtained the right to the land he covered in three steps. Resuming His universal form, he covered Swarga & Pṛthvi (Heaven & Earth) in two steps. Bali, recognising the Lord, offered his head as the third for Him to step on. Pleased, Vishnu gave him the kingdom of Pātāla.

Balkan(s)/ ~ Confederacy/ ~ Wars The Balkan Peninsula comprised all of Albania, continental Greece, Bulgaria, European Turkey, most of Yugoslavia, & south-eastern Rumania. These six countries, successors to the Ottoman Empire, were called the Balkan States or the Balkans. The Balkan Confederacy or Balkan League (comprising Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, & Montenegro – a republic South-West of Yugoslavia) was originally formed at the instigation of Bulgaria & Serbia with the aid of Russian diplomacy to limit increasing Austrian power in the Balkans. During 1912, however, the alliance became more anti-Turkish than anti-Austrian. First Balkan War began with Montenegro’s declaration of war against the Turks on 8 October 1912 (see Adrianople above, & Chatalja below) & the entry of its three allies of the Balkan Confederacy (q.v.) into the war ten days later. The Balkan States were victorious, & a treaty was signed in London on 30 May 1913. The League was victorious, but it disintegrated when its members quarrelled over the division of their territorial spoils. This dispute resulted in the Second Balkan War, against Bulgaria, in 1913.

Balkh ancient Bactra, capital of Bactria. As capital of Khorasan under the Abbassides & Samanids, it was a noted centre of Islamic learning.

Balkis Queen of Sheba (see Sheban).

Ballad of the White Horse poem by G.K. Chesterton.

Balzac Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), French novelist; he converted what had been styled romance into a record of human experience.

Bāṇa Bāṇabhaṭṭa was the court-poet of King Harshavardhana of the Pushyabhūti dynasty of Thāneshwar & Kanauj. His work Harsha-charita, written about AD 620, is a contemporary account of the deeds of Harsha during the earlier years of his reign. His other work the Kādambari is a famous classic of Sanskrit literature [S. Bhattacharya, p.112] “Bāṇa’s Harsha-charita provides the best account of the killing of the Śaka king tyrannising the people of western Mālwā & Kāṭhiāwād by the Gupta emperor Chandra Gupta II who, on many coins, receives the epithet Vikramāditya. In certain records of the 12^th century, he is represented as the lord of Ujjain as well as Pātaliputra in Magadha, the capital of the Gupta Empire. The cool courage he showed in fighting the Śakas & killing their chieftain in the enemy’s own city entitles him to the epithets Sāhasāṅka & Śakāri. These facts have led scholars to identify him with the Vikramāditya Śakāri of legend, whose court is said to have been adorned by nine gems including Kālidāsa & Varāhmihira. .... The province of Sindh figures in the narrative of Bāṇa as one of the territories overrun by Prabhākarvardhana & his more famous son Harsha. …. A list of the important religious sects that flourished at the close of the Gupta age is given in Bāṇa’s Harsha-charita. It mentions the Jains, both Digambaras (sky-clad, that is naked) & Śvetāmbaras (white-robed), Vaishnavas, both Bhāgavatas & Pancharātras – perhaps the worshippers of Vāsudeva & Nārāyaṇa respectively, Saugatas or Buddhists, Mashkarins, possibly identical with the Ājivikas, & adherents of various schools of philosophy including the Sāṅkhya, the Lokāyatika, the Vaiśeshika, the Vedānta & the Nyāya. .... The 7^th century saw the composition of poetic works of Bāṇa, Mayūra, Bhartŗihari, Subandhu & the royal poets, Harsha, & Mahendravarman. .... The most notable among the post-Gupta period literary works were Harsha-charita of Bāṇa, Rāma-charita of Sandhyākara, Vikramānka-charita of Bilhaṇa, & Rājataraṅginī of Kalhaṇa.” [Advanced History of India, R.C. Majumdar et al, 3rd Ed., MacMillan India 1973-74:141-2, 153, 171, 194, 198, 201]

Bande Mataram/ Vande Mātaram ‘Hymn to the Mother’, was composed by Bankim Chandra Chatterji in 1876 at Chinsurah (q.v.) as a hymn to his native Bengal. In 1882 he incorporated it in his novel Ananda Math. In 1905, it shot into popularity in the agitation against Bengal’s partition; & later India’s national hymn.

S. Bhattacharya: M.M. Haraprasād Shāstri observed: ‘Whatever Bankim did had led to one goal. That goal is the worship of the motherland – to address the motherland as the mother – to love the motherland – to adore her. Nobody else in India has done this – it is his work. So he deserves our respect, he deserves our salutation, he is our Āchārya, he our rishi, he is the maker of our mantram & that mantram is Vande Mataram.”

A.B. Purani: Disciple: Some people object to Vande Mataram as a national song… because it speaks of the Hindu goddess Durga & that is offensive to the Muslims. Sri Aurobindo: But it is not a religious song! It is a national song & the Durga spoken of is India as the Mother.

Why shouldn’t Muslims accept it? It is an image used in poetry. If in the conception of Indian nationality the Hindu viewpoint cannot find a place then the Hindus may as well be asked to give up their culture; to comes to this that we all become Mohammedans. They don’t say it now they will say it later on, because they have begun to object to the worship of Hindu Gods in national institutions. Why shouldn’t the Hindu worship his Gods? Otherwise, the Hindus must either become Mohammedans or adopt the European culture, or become atheists. The Hindus don’t object to their “Allah ho Akbar”! – Dec.1939 [Purani, Evening Talks…]

Bande Mataram (1) nationalist English daily started in August 1906 by Bepin Chandra Pal with Sri Aurobindo as its joint editor. By year-end Sri Aurobindo was forced to assume full control of its policy. It ceased publication in October 1908. A weekly edition of the paper was also brought out from June 1907 to September 1908. (2) English monthly edited by Mme Cāmā (see India House) issued on 10^th Sept.1909 from Geneva, terming itself “a monthly organ of Indian Independence”.

Bandopadhyaya, Basant Kumar (b. c.1883), a revolutionary of Chandernagore, who, in an interview with undertrial prisoners in Alipore Jail, passed to them the revolvers used for killing Noren Gossain.

Bandopadhyaya, Jitendralal one of four persons representing the Nationalist Party on the committee formed at the Hooghly Provincial Conference in 1909 to bring about unity in the Congress.

Banerjee, Kali Charan (1847-1907) literally ‘by Grace of Kāli’s Feet’: born in a Brahmin family: obtained his M.A. & B.L. at Calcutta University: converted to Christianity in 1863: a leading pleader in the Calcutta High Court: Member Bengal Legislative Council: Registrar of the Calcutta Univ.: President Young Men’s Christian Association, Calcutta: founder-member of Indian National Congress (1885): gifted writer & orator, a leading light of Moderates in Bengal. [Buckland]

Banerjee, Panchcowri (1866-1923), journalist & stylist in Bengali prose, a master of Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, & English. He was connected with Bangabāsi, Telegraph, Bāsumati, Sandhyā, Hitabādi, & other nationalist papers.

Banerji, Ashwini (1866-1945), barrister at the Calcutta High Court, & leader of mill hands, he is considered as the founder of the Labour movement in Bengal.

Banerji, Hemchandra (1838-1903), educated in his village & at the Hindu College, Calcutta: entered Govt. Service in the Military Auditor General’s office: obtained B.A. in English literature, esp. poetry: munsif at Howrah & Serampur: obtaining another degree, began practise as a High Court Vakil from 1862 & became a Senior Govt. Pleader: began his poetic career by translating Shakespeare, Dante, Dryden, Pope, & Shelley into Bengali & graduated to creating his own Bengali poetry. ― His epic poem Vritra Samhāra (1875-77) & his shorter poems are inspired by patriotism & zeal for social reform, but he became famous overnight by Bharat Sangeet (published in Bhudev Mukherji’s Education Gazette in 1872) which called for recovering the independence of India. In some poems he contrasted the Chinese & the Japanese who were free nations with India which was asleep. His brilliant satire on the Anglo-Indian agitation against the Ilbert Bill (1883) & on a Bengali bhadraloka presenting the ladies of his family to the Prince of Wales, strove to inspire self-respect among Bengalis. B.C. Pal said: “The intense patriotic passion that breathed through his poems captured our youthful minds in a way which no other Bengalee poems had done. The new generation of English-educated Bengalees had already commenced to advance themselves to positions of trust & responsibility in the new Administration. In the learned professions of law & medicine also, they were gradually asserting themselves against the British members. A new spirit of independence & self-assertion was increasingly manifesting itself in the conduct & conversations of the English-educated Bengalee. All these had already commenced to provoke a racial conflict in the country. Hem Chandra was, in a special sense, the poet of this new conflict & of the racial self-respect & sensitive patriotism, born of it.” [Based on Buckland; S.P. Sen’s Dictionary of National Biography, in 4 volumes, Calcutta, 1972; S. Bhattacharya; R.C. Majumdar’s History of the Freedom Movement in India, Vol.1, Calcutta, 1963.]

Banerji, Jatin Jatindra Nath Banerjee (Nirālamba Swami) (1877–1930). Jatindra was born at Channa village in Burdwan district. His father, Kāli Charan Banerjee (q.v.), worked as a government official at Bangaon of Jessore district (now North 24-Parganas) of undivided Bengal. From his village school, Jatin went on to the Burdwan Raj College (affiliated to Calcutta Univ.). Having passed its First Year Arts with high marks, he was admitted to B.A. class in the college. After obtaining his degree he joined the Kāyastha Pāthashāla in Allahabad where, encouraged by Rāmānanda Chatterjee, he devoured books on European & American revolutions. ― In 1899, he went to Baroda to meet Sri Aurobindo since the British Army refused to admit Bengalis. He got admitted, through Sri Aurobindo’s friend Madhavrao Jādhav to the 4^th Baroda Infantry & was soon recruited to the Gaikwād’s Bodyguard, where Madhavrao was an adjutant. After two years of training Sri Aurobindo sent him to Bengal “to establish secretly or, as far as visible action could be taken, under various pretexts & covers, revolutionary propaganda & recruiting throughout Bengal”. [D.K. Roy, Aurobindo Prasanga, published 1923; translated by Sanat Kumar Bannerji under his series “Glimpses of Sri Aurobindo”, Mother India, Dec., 1959; & CWSA Vol. 36:49]

Abinash: Jatindranath came to our village, Arballia as a guest of Surendranath Sen, the famous orator, headmaster of Arballia School [&] an eminent disciple of the renowned Ashwinikumar Dutt…. From the house on 108C, Upper Circular Road, Jatin-babu, Barin & I began the work of collecting boys for the secret society. Jatin-babu was older than we were; in appearance he was tall, well-built & handsome. He took up work among the pleaders, barristers & rich men…. Opposite our house was a big vacant plot; here the first akhāra was started for teaching lāthi & gadkā [short lāthi], horse-riding, cycling, etc…. After the three of us worked together for six months, there was a clash between him & us – personal clash, not a difference of opinion…. Jatin-babu moved from the house on Circular Road to one on Sitaram Ghosh Street…. In the early part of 1903, Aurobindo-babu…came as planned. He put up at Jatin-babu’s residence…. When [Barin & I] arrived we saw Aurobindo-babu & Jatin-babu sitting on a mat spread on the floor, talking & laughing…. We stayed together for a few days after that. Then one day Jatin-babu put on the saffron robe of a sannyasi & went away.” [“Sri Aurobindo”, Mother India, July 2012]

Purani: After leaving Barin & others, Jatin concentrated on the worship of the goddess Bishalakshmi (Durga) which he had begun in his college days. He began to feel the need for a guru & after his parents died he became a wandering monk. At Kāshi a monk assured him that he would find his destined guru at Nainital. There he managed to find Soham Swami, who immediately accepted him as a disciple & admitted him to his ashram. Soham Swami was a disciple of Tibbeti-baba, a legendary yogi. After some time Soham Swami asked Jatin to stay in his ashram at Haridwar & concentrate on his sādhanā. Later, pleased with Jatin’s spiritual progress, Soham Swami renamed him Srimat Nirālamba Swami. After some years Jatin obtained his guru’s permission to establish an ashram at his own village & returned there. Significant among his teachings were the following axioms: “Wake up & realise Self-Consciousness.” – “Know yourself. If you do not know yourself, then how can you know your country?” – “If you want to get rid of the sufferings of your country, then you have to become strong. To make yourself strong you have to first acquire Self-Knowledge. Self-strength makes human beings to cross difficult deserts & mountains. Nothing is impossible for a race possessing Self-strength.” One day, not long after Sri Aurobindo’s presence in Pondicherry became common knowledge, Nirālamba Swami suddenly turned up for a visit. [Life of Sri Aurobindo]

Banerji, Shyamakanta his stunning physical strength & extraordinary calm, courage, & self-confidence created the legend of wild & ferocious animals crouching at his feet, awed by the current of his dynamic vitality. He became a sannyasi, took the name Soham Swami, & dwelt in the Himalayas near Nainital. He composed & published Soham Gita.

Banerji, Surendranath (1848-1925) Sir S.N. Bannerjea educated at Doreton College, Calcutta: B.A. 1868: ICS entrance exam (1869) & went up to Univ. College, London: joined ICS in 1871 as Asst. Magistrate, Sylhet; rejected from the Service 1874: Prof. English Literature in Metropolitan Institution & founder Indian Association 1876: joined Free Church Institution & Duff College 1881: founded Ripon College 1882: proprietor & editor the weekly Bengalee 1878-25: Member, Bengal Legislative Council 1893-1901: represented Calcutta Corporation in Bengal Legislative Council 1893: President, INC Poona 1895 & Ahmedabad 1902: Fellow, Calcutta University 1904: Member, Viceroy’s Imperial Legislative Council 1913: knighted 1921. [CEB]

After dismissal from ICS on account of what was considered an irregular manner of trying a case, Surendranath tried to be enrolled as a barrister in England but was refused as he was dismissed from ICS. On his return to India in 1875, he became a professor at the Metropolitan Institution (now Vidyāsāgara College); the Ripon College he founded & became its principal was renamed Surendranath College. He played a prominent part in founding the Indian Association (q.v.) in 1876, & also led the opposition to the Vernacular Press Act of 1878; under the auspices of his Indian Association, the Indian National Conference first met in Calcutta from 28 to 30 December; Surendranath took a prominent part in supporting the Ilbert Bill. After the founding of the Indian National Congress he helped merge All-India National Conference into it. [SB]

Convinced by his study of the national movements in Europe that INC must copy the stirring activity recorded in the glorious annals of English constitutional history & take up constitutional agitation as that alone will secure for us those rights & privileges which in less favoured countries are obtained by sterner means, he declared: We rely on the liberty-loving instincts of the greatest representative assembly in the world, the palladium of English Liberty, the sanctuary of the free & brave, the British House of Commons. In 1887, adopting Bannerjea’s idea of setting up a committee of English “friends” to lobby in England, the INC set up a group under ex-Civilians Hume, Wedderburn, Cotton, & Naoroji on an annual budget of Rs.45,000. But within a decade this ineffective & expensive committee had to be dropped. This blind faith in the English model was not perturbed even when Dufferin publicly ridiculed it on 30 November 1888 thus: Some intelligent, loyal, patriotic & well-meaning men are desirous of taking… a big jump into the unknown… by the application to India of democratic methods of government, & the adoption of parliamentary system, which England herself had only reached by slow degrees & through the discipline of many centuries of preparation… Well, gentlemen, I am afraid that the people of England will not readily be brought to the acceptance of this programme. “There is no doubt,” writes Sitāramayyā, “that the progress of the Congress from 1885 to 1905 was an even march based on a firm faith in constitutional agitation in the unfailing regard for justice attributed to the English. [SA; APK; PS]

When Lord Curzon decided to carry out the partition of Bengal [first announced in 1903, carried out in October 1905], Aurobindo-babu wrote: “A golden opportunity has come. Lay special stress on the Anti-Partition movement. Many workers will come from this movement.” He sent us a little pamphlet he had written entitled No Compromise. No press would print it. With no other course open, we bought types, sticks, lead, case, etc. And got the matter composed at our house by a young Marathi man named P.B. Kulkarni. Needless to say this Kulkarni used to stay with us. One night we got a press to print about a thousand copies of the pamphlet. It was distributed among all the newspaper editors & among the respectable educated classes. Barin & I took a copy to the venerable Surendranath Banerjee. At first he asked us to leave the pamphlet & go, but as we stood there obstinately, he took it up to glance at it – & could not put it down. He read the entire thing with great concentration, utterly stunned. He asked who the author was. “No Indian, why, not even a Bengali, could write such English, & present the facts so cogently”, but when he was told that Aurobindo-babu was the author, he said: “Yes, he is the only person who could write in this way.” [ACB]

Surendranath strongly opposed the Partition of Bengal effected in 1905 & led such a strong & popular agitation against it that he came to be recognised as the undisputed leader of Bengal, indeed “as the uncrowned king” of Bengal, for this partition was strongly resented by the people of Bengal, especially the Hindus, & they resorted to Swadeshi or use of indigenous manufactures & boycott of British goods. The Partition was modified in 1911 & was a great triumph for Surendranath. [SB]

A comment of Sri Aurobindo in 1926: “Some people have a knack of using high-sounding words; once I listened to Surendra Nath for half-an-hour & I found no thought, it was all words. But he carried the audience, because what people require is some kind of vital emotion – they do not require thought. They get tired of listening of thoughts. [ABP]

Opposition had already begun to grow amongst a section of Indians who thought that the constitutional agitation INC had so long been carrying on had proved a failure... [That section] known as the Extremists, was not afraid of resorting to violent methods, even if this led to a revolution. The attempt that the British Govt. made to suppress by force the anti-Partition agitation led by Surendranath, had driven discontent underground & terrorism raised its head in Bengal under the leadership of Aravinda Ghose. But Surendranath who had been reared upon the English literature of the 18^th century…would have nothing to do with revolution or revolutionary methods & could not think of a separation between India & England. [SB]

On 5 January 1939, Sri Aurobindo said, “My answer to Surendranath when he invited our party to unite with his group in order to jointly fight the dominant right wing of the Moderates at the U.P. Convention (in 1909), was ‘No’. For it would have necessitated our being appointed as delegates by his party & accepting the constitution imposed at Surat. I spoke at most twenty or thirty words & the whole thing failed…. At the Hooghly Provincial Conference we Nationalists had the majority…[but] in order to keep unity I asked the Nationalists not to oppose the Moderate resolution & leave the hall quietly so that they would not have to vote. The Moderate leaders were very angry that people did not any more follow their tried & veteran leaders but so completely obeyed the young leaders. Surendranath could not realise the difference between old, upper middle class leadership due to their influence & money & the new leadership of those who stood for a principle & commanded a following. Surendranath had a personal magnetism & he was sweet-spoken; he could get round anybody. His idea was to become the undisputed leader of Bengal by using the Nationalists for the sword & the Moderates for the public face. In private he would go up to & accept the revolutionary movement. He even wanted to set up a provincial board of control of the revolutionaries! Barin once took a bomb to him & he was full of enthusiasm. He even had a letter from Surendranath, when he was arrested at Manicktolla Garden. But in the court they hushed up the matter as soon as Norton pronounced S. N. Banerji. [ABP]

“There is also no doubt that since the beginning of 1907 the Moderates practically left the Extremists in the lurch & veered round to the Govt. The following extract from Minto’s letter to Morley dated March 19, 1907, makes it quite clear: ‘...a Deputation of Mahommedans & Hindus...came to see me last Friday.... The Deputation consisted of the Maharaja of Darbhanga, Surendra Nath Banerjee, Mr Chowdry, a member of the Congress, Narendra Nath Sen, Editor of the Indian Mirror, & three Mahommedan gentlemen.....It was simply marvellous...to see the “King of Bengal” sitting on my sofa with his Mahommedan opponents, asking for my assistance to moderate the evil passions of the Bengali, & inveighing against the extravagances of Bepin Chandra Pal.’ [RCM]

Gokhale’s letter to Wedderburn, 24 September 1909: “I fear one of our numerous disintegrations has overtaken us again – this time it is the national movement that appears to be going to pieces, throwing us back on Provincialism & one grieves to find that there is no influence available anywhere in the country, capable of staying the process. The organisation evolved by Mr Hume out of the material prepared by a succession of workers in different parts of the country is crumbling to pieces & the effort of the nation’s heart & mind that brought us together in that organization seems to have almost exhausted itself. The split at Surat, followed by the vigour with which the Government came down on the Extremists everywhere, has turned the whole Extremist party into active enemies of the national constitutional movement. And the Moderates placed between the officials & the Extremists have not the necessary public spirit & energy of character to hold together effectively for long, thought they are numerically strong in the country. In addition to the incessant attacks of the extremists, the conduct of the Bengal Moderates is hastening the disintegration of the national movement. Bengal really has no leader on our side. Surendranath B is an orator, but he has no great courage or backbone, & he cannot keep in hand the unruly pack whom he presses to lead. Moreover there is no doubt that the position of the constitutional party has been rendered almost impossible by the Govt.’s refusal to reconsider the partition & the continued incarceration of the deportees. [BRN]

Surendranath succeeded after the Surat Congress (1907) in preventing the Extremists from dominating the Congress…. The terrorism that had raised its head in Bengal under the leadership of Aravinda Ghose led to his trial in the famous Alipore Bomb Case. The trial ended in Aravinda’s acquittal, though many of his associates were sentenced to imprisonment for life. But ere long the Congress organisation passed under the control of Mahatma Gandhi with the result that when the Govt. of India Act of 1919 (q.v.) was on the basis of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, Surendranath accepted it as fulfilling to a large extent the demand that the Congress had made in its earlier days but the Congress itself [all including its president Motilal Nehru & his closes colleague C.R. Das, excepting Tilak, were mesmerised by Gandhi] refused to accept it. Thus a definite breach took place between INC & Surendranath who, along with other older leaders of the Congress formed a new organisation called the Liberal Federation which, however, failed to secure much popular support. Surendranath, however, was nominated to the new Bengal Legislative Council, was knighted in 1921 & became a Minister of the Bengal Govt.; he piloted through the Legislature the Calcutta Municipal Bill of 1923 which undid the mischief of Lord Curzon’s earlier Act on the organisation & established complete popular control over the Calcutta Corporation. Surendranath had no faith in Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement started in 1920. [SB]

The breakaway Swarājya party headed by C.R. Das won handsomely the seats in the Bengal Legislative Assembly. Veterans of public life were defeated by unknown men set up by Deshbandhu. Surendranath Bannerjea…defeated by Dr Bidhān Chandra Roy…. The Calcutta Municipal Act of 1923 was one of the major contributions of Sir Surendra Nath Bannerjea to the development of local self-government in India. It widened the franchise & made the Calcutta Corporation a democratic body. Under the Act, the Corporation was to have 85 councillors & five Aldermen. The Act abolished the post of the Chairman & provided instead a Mayor elected by special meetings of the Corporation…. Deshbandhu Das decided to contest the elections to the Corporation in the name of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee. The Congress won most of the seats without contest…. It was the unanimous wish of the entire city that Deshbandhu Das should be the first Mayor of Calcutta & after some initial reluctance he agreed. [HDG]

Notwithstanding therefore his important legislative achievement his countrymen ceased to regard him, as before as their accredited leader. He was defeated in the election to the Calcutta Corporation in 1923 & was henceforth practically excluded from public life till his death in 1925…. He therefore did not die in a blaze of glory, but there is no doubt that he had been one of the makers of modern Indian nationalism of which independent India is a product. (Reference: A Nation in Making). [SB]

[CEB = C.E. Buckland, Dict. of Indian Biography; SB = S. Bhattacharya, Dict. of Indian History, Calcutta Univ., 1972, pp.114-16, 130-31; APK =A.P. Kaminsky, The India Office – 1880-1910, 1986; SA = Sri Aurobindo, New Lamps for Old; PS = Pattabhi Sitāramayyā, History of INC (1885-1935), 1935, pp.89-99; ACB =Abinash Chandra Bhattacharya, “Sri Aurobindo”, Mother India, July 2012, pp.528-39; ABP = A.B. Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, 2007, 615-16; (8) RCM = R.C. Majumdar, History &…, X-II: 543, 481, 484, 557: HDG = Hemendranath Das Gupta, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, Builders of Modern India series, Pub. Div., Govt. of India, 1960, 1969, 1977, pp. 93-103; BRN = B.R. Nanda, G.K. Gokhale – The Indian Moderates & the British Raj, 1979, p.365]

Banerji, Upen(dranath) (1879-1950), revolutionary of Chandernagore & one of Sri Aurobindo’s associates (sub-editor) on the Bande Mataram staff. Master of Bengali prose, he was also one of the real editors & writers of Yugantar. He helped Barindra in recruiting & training suitable boys for their secret society & was in charge of their religious, moral & political education. In the Alipore Bomb Case he & Barin were among the few sentenced to transportation for life in the Andamans & released after World War I. “One day while sitting in the dock,” during the year-long Bomb Trial at Alipur, he writes, “my gaze fell on Arabinda Babu: his eyes were as still as pieces of glass & devoid of any emotion.... I was strongly convinced that an entirely new chapter had begun for this strange man.”

Bangabāsi School/ Bangabāsi College the School was founded in 1886 by G.C. Bose & Bhupal Chandra Bose, with the former as principal, on Scott’s Lane (q.v.) near Sealdah railway station, Calcutta. The next year the School was transformed into a College.

Bangadars(h)an Bengali monthly founded in 1872, under the editorship of Bankim Chandra; a literary journal & review, it serialized some of Bankim’s later novels.

Banga Lakshmi (Cotton) Mill established by Byomkesh Chakravarti (q.v.), along with others of the Indian Association in 1906 to meet the demand for Swadeshi cloth.

Banquet The Banquet or The Symposium, title of a dialogue by Plato in which Socrates, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, & others discuss the nature of love, at the house of the poet Agathon. [Oxford Companion to English Literature, Paul Harvey, London, OUP, 1967]

Bāpat Case F.A.H. Elliot (d.1910), an ICS officer of Bombay presidency, was appointed principal tutor to 12-year old Sayājirao to groom him into a cringing dependent. Not only did the boy develop a will of his own, consulted experienced elders like Tilak, Gokhale & others inimical to British Paramountcy, went on foreign travels to learn modern ideas & means, he initiated administrative reforms for his subjects’ benefit. The Bāpat Case (1894-5) was the first, if not the most perilous encounter created by the Octopus to result as it did with Sayājirao’s predecessor Malharrao in 1875, in Sayājirao’s deposition & exile. In June 1881, the spies of the Resident, or AGG (Agent of Gov.-Gen.), ‘discovered’ a pamphlet vilifying the Viceroy’s appointee, Diwan Mādhava Rao & imputed it to Bāpat, Samarth (Subā of Baroda), Athavale (Naib-Dewan), & Tilak, & claimed Sayājirao “was privy to it”. Indicting Bāpat & attacking Elliot was the first step to entrap him. Succeeding Residents kept trying to convict & punish Sayājirao but never succeeded.

Under British rule the first posting of European ICS boy-officers was usually as Collector with unlimited power over districts often larger than England itself. Its cruellest impact on agriculture was its zamindari, ryotwari & mahalwari systems of land revenue fixation & collection, & the most debilitating was the commercialisation of agricultural products, anything felt useful as raw material for British industries was sent there, their products imported duty-free & forced on India. In 1883, after a tour of Kadi Sayājirao set up his Land (Revenue) Survey & Settlement Department under Elliot, to deal with the vexed question of barkhāli lands, lands wholly or almost free from taxation. Sri Aurobindo’s first posting was in Elliot’s Dept., then to the Revenue Dept. expressly charged “to study most fully, the details connected with the work of subordinate officers”. One of Elliot’s tasks was to device means to revive panchayati rule. In 1888, the Resident opened a dossier targeting Elliot & Sayājirao to which their well-meaning land-revenue legislation of 1889 provided an opening to inflate trivial plaints. In 1890, Sayājirao unwittingly provided the Resident a potent ally by making Manibhai Jashbhai (former aide to the Resident) Dewan who at the Resident’s bidding inserted British moles into Elliot’s Dept. to subvert it & blame Sayājirao & Elliot. One of them was A.F. Machonochie, a Machiavellian ICS officer from Bombay Presidency. Their prime target was Vāsudeva Sadāshiv Bāpat whom the Maharaja had, on Elliot’s recommendation, appointed Assistant Commissioner in 1893. Bāpat, a friend of Tilak, owed his rapid rise to that rank to hard work, intelligence & integrity. Mr Elliot had realised on taking charge of the Land Survey Dept. that Bāpat would be of real help in the disposal of claims to exemption from payment of the State dues. Bāpat’s rise had wounded Machonochie & some other English officers who sought, with the aide of some vested interests in the State, to turn departmental looseness to their own advantage. This combination against Elliot & Bāpat was backed up by a more powerful combination headed by the Resident & Manibhai Jashbhai, the Dewan. In October 1893, Sayājirao returned from his fourth foreign trip; next month fooled by the Resident-Dewan duo, he signed Elliot’s removal from the Council that officiated in his absence & authorised Col. Biddulph (Resident 1893-95) to intervene at will in his absence, & escaped to Europe. In January 1894, Sayājirao instructed Elliot that before going on leave he was to introduce elective councils in at least 100 villages, as “it will be the keystone of what I wish to develop in my State.” Immediately Biddulph got the ICS to probe into Elliot’s work. After successfully warding off that attack, Elliot left on leave. Now Manibhai brought charges of corruption, extortion, & provincialism. When it became clear in June 1894, that it was not safe for Bāpat to continue in Baroda, Tilak sent Mr Joshi, proprietor of Poona’s Chitrashāla to Baroda; with great difficulty this resourceful gentleman succeeded in snatching Bāpat away from the State. Rebuffing Tilak’s efforts at reconciliation, Manibhai suspended Bāpat retrospectively from Jan. 1894; & appointed a Commission of Inquiry. Accompanied by two attorneys provided by Tilak, Bāpat returned to stand the trial, which began in September 1894. Sir P.M. Mehta conducted the prosecution in the early stages. When he left the case in disgust, Mr Branson of Bombay Bar was briefed in his place. Sayājirao, who had heard of the goings-on in August, decided not to return until the Inquiry concluded. In spite Tilak (who had to replace of Bāpat’s attorney who had died midway) invalidating all charges, the Commission demanded a very harsh sentence. It was only on the advice of Lord Reay (q.v.) to return immediately to Baroda & handle the case that Sayājirao returned from that longest escape to Europe. And even then he merely transferred the matter to Baroda High Court & escaped to Ooty where he called Sri Aurobindo “to prepare a précis of the whole case & the judicial opinions on it”! The Court exonerated Bāpat. In reprisal, ICS authorities demoted & banished Elliot to obscure Bijāpur, & sent its thug Machonochie to Junāgadh to ruin his ‘friend’ Shyamji Krishnavarma then its Dewan; SK too ran to Tilak to save him. The shrewd Gaekwad dismissed both Bāpat & Manibhai, albeit with compensation. In a letter to Elliot, penny-pinching Sayājirao regretted the loss of two to three lakhs for not having nipped the conspiracy in the bud, but pupil Sayājirao confessed he procrastinated due to “fear of the Residency”. [Based on Sergeant’s biography of Sayājirao; Indulal Yāgnik’s Shyamji Krishnavarma…., 1950; Karandikar’s Lōkamānya Tilak, 1957; H.H. Buch’s Sayājirao III, M.S. Univ., Baroda, 1988; Fatehsingh Gaikwād’s Sayājirao…, , 1989; Lajpat Rai’s Young India – An Interpretation & a History of the Nationalist Movement from Within, Lahore, 4th Reprint, 1927]

Bāppā Bāppā Rāwal was born Prince Kālbhoj (c.713-810) at Eklingji (q.v.), Mewār. He became the 8^th ruler (c.734-53) of the Guhilot or Gehlot Rajput dynasty & founded the Mewār Sāmrājya. After the fall (mid 5^th cent.) of Vallabhipur (west Gujarat) the capital of the Maitraka king Shiladitya, his queen took refuge in a cave in the hills where she gave birth to a son Guhā, cave-born, he founded the Guhilot Vamsha. Bāppā’s father, Rāwal Mahindra II (7^th scion of the Guhilot dynasty) ruled Idar, Bhomat & Nāgda. His mother was the daughter of a Paramāra Rajput who ruled from Chandrāvati in Mount Ᾱbu – its peak (Guru Shikhar) rises to 1722 metres above sea level. After his father’s assassination (c.716), his mother & he were spirited away by their Bheel attendants to their village in Nāgda. Raised & trained by Bheel warriors who were accomplished archers, he was guided by the priest of their Shiva Eklingji temple. At the age of 18, he won back his father’s kingdom of Idar, then led his mixed army northwards & captured Chittodgadh (see Chitore), then the capital of Mān Mori. From there Bāppā expanded the boundaries of Mewār from Ᾱbu to Jaisalmer & Ajmer. The invasions of Arabs began as an extension of their invasion of Persia. In order to ward off these invasions across the western & northern borders of Rājputāna, Bāppā united the smaller states of Ajmer & Jaisalmer & turned the tide for a while. When Bin Kāsim defeated king Dahir of Sindh, Bāppā rushed there & saved Sindh. Some accounts say that when Kāsim attacked Chitore, Bāppā pursued him through Saurāshtra right into present Baluchistan. He then marched on to Ghazni & defeated the local ruler Salim & after nominating a representative returned to Chitore. After Raja Mori named Bāppā Rāwal his successor & crowned him King of Chitore, Bāppā Rāwal & his armies invaded various kingdoms including Kandahar, Khorasan, Baghdad, Turan, Isfahan, Iran & made them vassals of his kingdom. Thus he not only defended India’s frontiers but for a brief period was able to expand them. Around 753, he abdicated the throne in favour of his son & took up sanyāsa to surrender himself solely to Lord Shiva.

Baptista, Joseph (1864-1930), a barrister of Bombay & one of the leaders of Tilak’s nationalist party. In 1919, on behalf of the Socialist Democratic Party of Bombay, he invited Sri Aurobindo to accept the editorship of a paper to be started at Bombay.

Barabbas in Christian mythology, a robber & murderer named Barabbas (‘son of the master’ in Aramaic) was held in jail by the Roman authorities of Judea when they were led to arrest Jesus, the Son of God. When Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator who annually released a prisoner at the Jewish festival of Passover, offered to release Jesus, ‘the entire Jewish community’ proclaims this Christian myth, held Him a worse criminal than Barabbas & voted for His death & Barabbas’ release implying Jews are genetically vile. The most actively or passively approved or not disapproved of the countless barbarities (which Christ wants uprooted from human nature) resulting from this bigotry was executed under Hitler.

Barbary name originates from the Berbers, chief & oldest known inhabitants of the region, & for centuries stood for pirates who preyed upon Mediterranean shipping.

Barcelona capital of Barcelona province in North-Eastern Spain, a major Mediterranean port, & the second largest city of Spain. It was repeatedly bombed by the state-of-art warplanes of Hitler & Mussolini in the civil war was triggered by their ally, General Franco who was fully backed by the Catholic Church, against the legally elected Republican Government. It was a foretaste of what awaited all humanity when Hitler, Mussolini, & their allies unleashed their New World Order.

The Bard Pindaric ode by Thomas Gray) based on a tradition current in Wales; namely, when Edward I of England conquered Wales, ordered that all the bards that fell into his hands be put to death. It is a lamentation by a Welsh bard, & a curse pronounced by him & the ghosts of his slaughtered companions on Edward’s race, whose misfortunes are foretold.

Bardoli town in Surat district of Gujarat. The Khilafat Agitation, having led to riots & massacres, was put down by the British Govt. in November 1921. At the annual Congress the next month at Ahmedabad, Gandhi was unanimously voted the sole national executive authority of INC. In 1922, he launched a ‘constructive programme’ from Bardoli. In a private letter Sri Aurobindo called this ‘constructive programme’, a “narrow & rigid cadre…which seems to me to construct nothing” but create a “fetish-worship of non-cooperation as an end in itself rather than a means” which is not “favourable for the wide & complex action necessary to prepare the true Swarājya”. When Gandhi’s satyagrahis in Chauri-Chaura, Uttar Pradesh, burned down the police station along with the policemen in retaliation for police atrocities against them, Gandhi called off the programme – to the chagrin of his amazed lieutenants like Nehru (see his Autobiography). ― Extract from a talk with Sri Aurobindo on 21 Aug.1926: Disciple: Perhaps he would have succeeded if he had continued his Satyagraha in Bardoli? Sri Aurobindo: No, that would have ended in a miserable failure. There would have been massacres & India’s political progress would have been checked for decades. Gandhi had the right inspiration when he stopped it; he saw he was going beyond his depths. – So it was only pretence when he stopped civil disobedience at Bardoli? – It was not pretence. It was actually something behind his mind which, without his knowledge, stopped him; his mind only supplied the justifications. [“Conversations”, Sri Aurobindo Circle, No. 39, 1983]

Barhaspathas descendants of Rishi Bhrihaspati.

Barisal town & district which pioneered the anti-partition movement in 1905. To suppress the growing nationalism in Bengal, Curzon created East Bengal predominated by loyalist Mahommedans & appointed Bampfylde Fuller its Lt Governor. Fuller promptly issued two circulars which restricted public processions of the nationalists & subjected teachers & students to police surveillance. In April Bengal’s nationalists held their provincial conference there with Bar-at-Law Mohammad Rasul (q.v.) as president-elect. On the day of the Conference the delegates & Mr Rasul marched in procession to the place of the conference. On the pretext that someone from among them had shouted “Bande Mataram” the police brutally assaulted & arrested the leaders & lāthi-charged the others.

Barmecide In The Arabian Nights in the story “Barber’s Sixth Brother” a Barmecide prince invites a hungry beggar to a banquet & serves a succession of imaginary dishes. The beggar pretends to enjoy them with such gusto & good-humour that he finally earns a real sumptuous feast. In another version, the beggar, entering into the spirit of the jest, also pretends to be intoxicated by the imaginary wine offered him, & falls upon his entertainer. Hence ‘Barmecidal’ is used for one who offers illusory benefits & ‘Barmecide feast’ for something that appears highly desirable but proves to be imaginary, illusory.― Barmecides or Barmekids is patronymic of a Persian family whose origin is traceable to hereditary Pramukhas, administrators, of the Buddhist monastery Nava-Vihāra west of Balkh. Converted during the Arab-Muslim invasion of the Persian Sasānian Empire, the Skt. Pramukha was arabized to Barmak. The first member of the family whose name ‘Barmak’ is preserved in historical records was a physician of Balkh. His son Khalid ibn Barmak or Khalid al-Barmaki (705-782 AD; s/a “Khaled of the Sea”) supported the civil war that brought in the Abbasside Caliphate governing from Baghdad. He became the prime minister of Al Saffah, the first Caliph of the Abbasside dynasty in Baghdad, with powers such a tax collecting & overseeing the army; later he was appointed governor of Fars & Tabaristan. His son Yaḥyā ibn Khālid (d.806), at one time Governor of Arminiya, was entrusted by Caliph al-Mahdi (ruled 775-85) with the education of his son, Haroun, the future Caliph Haroun al-Rasheed. “We know of Yaḥyā ibn Khalid al-Barmaki as a patron of physicians (writes a historian) &, specifically, of the translation of Hindu medical works into both Arabic & Persian. In all likelihood however, his activity took place in the orbit of the Caliphal court in Iraq, where at the behest of Hārūn al-Rashīd (786–809), such books were translated into Arabic. Thus Khurāsān or Khorasan (q.v.) & Transoxiana were effectively bypassed in this transfer of learning from India to Islam, even though, undeniably the Barmaki’s cultural outlook owed something to their land of origin, northern Khurāsān, & Yaḥyā al-Barmaki’s interest in medicine may have derived from no longer identifiable family tradition.” The Barmekids were highly educated, respected & influential throughout Arabia, Persia, Central Asia & the Levant. In Baghdad, the Barmekid court became a centre of patronage for the Ulema, poets, & scholars alike. Many Barmekids were patrons of the sciences, which greatly helped the propagation of Indo-Iranian science & scholarship into the Islamic world of Baghdad & beyond. They are also credited with the establishment of the first paper mill in Baghdad. The power of the Barmekids in those times is reflected in Arabian Nights or the book of One Thousand & One Nights, e.g. Yaḥyā’s son Ja’far ibn Barmak appears in several stories as Caliph Harun al-Rashid’s vizier. As mentor & aide to Hāroun & later his prime minister, Yaḥyā became the most able administrator of the Caliphate. Yaḥyā’s sons Al-Fadl (766–808) & Jā’far (767–803), both occupied high offices under Hāroun, until they & the family fell from his grace in 803.

Barmeky or Barmeki, son of Barmak; here it refers to Jā’far bin Barmak

Barnesville subdivisional officer of Jamalpur was transferred after he had executed to a ‘T’ Lt-Gov. Bampfylde Fuller’s wishes to actively promote & protect the jihadis let loose on Hindu shops & peoples by Salimullah & declared curfew as soon as the Hindus were forced to retaliate – a policy adhered to by the Secular Socialist Republic of India in its early decades.

Barnum Phineas Taylor (1810-91), American showman famed for innovative forms of public amusements like museums, concerts, & circus.

Baroda Ankotakka (present-day Akota), a settlement on the western bank of Vishwāmitri, burgeoned into a vital commercial centre in Vallabhipur in north-west Gujarat [see Bāppā, Harshavardhana], due to its location on the ancient trade route between Gujarat & Mālwā. In 600 AD, a flooded Vishwāmitri forced the inhabitants of Ankotakka to migrate to a village on the opposite bank. During its evolution as the Gaikwād’s capital its name changed from vaṭa-udara (trunk of a Vada, banyan tree) though Wadōdarā to Vadōdarā to Baroda. The city was built with the palace in Māndavi at its centre & on four sides the massive carved stone Darwājas, gateways, named Leheripurā, Chāmpāneri, Baranpuri, & Pāni. The region around Baroda was first taken by the Gaikwāds in 1725 & finally occupied in 1734. It became their capital in 1770s by when their territories extended from Songadh in the south to Rajpipla & Idar in the east, from Aṇhilwād-Pātan & Kadi & Pālanpur in the north to Amreli & Dwārkā in the west. But of these, those left for Sayājirao III to ‘rule’ over when the British (the Paramount Power as it called itself) ‘crowned’ him Gaikwād of Baroda on 26^th Dec.1881, extended over some 300-400 miles east to west & 200 miles north to south & were grouped into five districts: Vadodara (1922 sq. miles), Kadi (3050 sq. miles), Navasāri (1811 sq. miles), & Amreli & Okhāmaṇdal: 1352 sq. miles. The population at the time was roughly two million. ― The famine that raged in most parts of the country since 1895, struck Mahārāshṭra in 1897. A new scourge followed: a ship that came to Bombay from China carried bubonic plague. It swept Bombay presidency, killing 20,000 & invaded Baroda State & relief-measures led to popular displeasure. In 1899, the monsoon failed leading to, perhaps, the severest famine of the century that the State had seen. Among the preventive schemes started was sinking wells, digging tanks, drainage construction, soft loans to farmers, & the assimilation of the State currency to the British. The Census of 1891 showed the population at 2,415,396 that of 1901 put it at 1,952,692 – the blessings of maternal Pax Britannica!

The most revolutionary achievement of Sayājirao was (1) starting free compulsory primary education first in Kadi in 1883 & making it state-wide in 1906. Of the thousands of his poor subjects whose lives were transformed was Dr. Ambedkar. (2) On 31^st March 1908, O’Grady, a member of the British Parliament rose in the House of Commons & asked: “Is the Secretary of State for India aware that the Maharaja of Baroda has separated the judicial from the executive functions, has restored local self-government, has instituted compulsory primary education throughout his State, & has further instituted popularly elected members in his Legislative Council? If so, will the Gov.-General’s Council of India consider the application of such reforms to other Native States & to India as a whole?” Naturally imperialist Minto-Morley “could not undertake introduction of similar measures in the whole of British India”. (3) Again, while English replaced Latin-French as judicial courts’ language in England only 1731 – 500 years after the Magna Charta, Sayājirao made the native tongues of his kingdom official court languages. Alas, this most advanced native state during British Raj was honoured by ‘our’ Socialist Secular Republic by refusing to accept any of the three of its unique achievements mentioned above, & only decades later tolerated the restoration of its capital’s original name – Vadōdarā.

Baroda College Sri Aurobindo began working in this College (then affiliated to Bombay University) in 1897 while continuing with his other official duties. In January 1905, he was appointed Vice Principal & was for a time Acting Principal & also officiated as Education Minister. He gave his resignation in 1906 to move to Calcutta where he had been appointed as Principal of the Bengal National College. The Baroda College is now incorporated in the Maharaja Sayājirao University. The room in the old building in which he took his classes has been specially maintained. On 22 July, 1899, addressing its students Sri Aurobindo said: “I think there is no student of Oxford or Cambridge who does not look back in after days on the few years of his undergraduate life as… that which calls up the happiest memories. He goes up from the restricted life of his home (see Manchester & St Paul’s School) & finds himself in surroundings which with astonishing rapidity expand his intellect, strengthen his character, develop his social faculties, force out all his abilities & turn him in three years from a boy into a man. His mind ripens in the contact with minds which meet from all parts of the country & have been brought up in many various kinds of trainings, his unwholesome eccentricities wear away & the unsocial, egoistic elements of character are to a large extent discouraged. He moves among ancient & venerable buildings, the mere age & beauty of which are in themselves an education. He has the Union which has trained so many great orators & debaters, has been the first trial ground of so many renowned intellects…. The result is that he who entered the university a raw student, comes out of it a man & a gentleman, accustomed to think of great affairs & fit to move in cultivated society, & he remembers his College & University with affection, & in after days if he meets with those who have studied with him he feels attracted towards them as to men with whom he has a natural brotherhood. This is the social effect I should like the Colleges & Universities of India also able to exercise, to educate by social influence as well as those which are merely academical & to create a feeling among their pupils that they belong to the community, that they are children of one mother.” [CWSA Vol.01, pp.353-54]

Besides his own experience at the College, he had the advantage of his bond with James Cotton who met him at the College during a visit to India. In 1904, when Viceroy Curzon passed the Indian Universities Act based on the opinion of the Education Commission headed by Thomas Raleigh the Law Member of his Executive Council (for details see Calcutta University), Maharaja Sayājirao discussed the issue with his chief officers & also Tilak whom he held in high esteem.

Extract from the notes from which Sri Aurobindo addressed the meeting: “Your Highness & Gentlemen, the subject on which I wish to address you this evening... is Education…. I have to say this that the Govt. of India is in the first place not the fit body to formulate the necessary improvements & in the second place not the fit instrument to put them into force. It is not fit to formulate them because it cannot realise & feel as we do where the shoe pinches us & therefore in mending it…. The Indian University system has confined itself entirely to [the intellectual branch/ part of education which is not more important than physical training & edification of character]…. The real source of the evil we complain of is… a fundamental & deplorable error by which we in this country have confused education with the acquisition of knowledge & interpreted knowledge itself in a singularly narrow & illiberal sense. To give the student knowledge is necessary, but it is still more necessary to build up in him the power of using his knowledge.... [The] graduate from our colleges may be a good clerk, a decent Vakil or a tolerable medical practitioner, but unless he is an especial genius, he will never be a great administrator or a great lawyer or an eminent medical specialist. These eminences have to be filled up mainly by Europeans. It an Indian wishes to rise to them, he has to travel thousands of miles over the sea in order to breathe an atmosphere of liberal knowledge, original science & sound culture. And even then he seldom succeeds, because his lungs are too debilitated to take in a good long breath of that atmosphere…. The easy assumption of our educationists that we have only to supply the mind with a smattering of facts in each department of knowledge & the mind can be trusted to develop itself & take its own suitable road, is contrary to science, contrary to human experience & contrary to the universal opinion of civilised countries. Indeed the history of intellectual degeneration in gifted races always begins with the arrest of these three mental powers by the excessive cultivation of mere knowledge at their expense. Much as we have lost as a nation, we have always preserved our intellectual alertness, quickness & originality; but even this last gift is threatened by our University system, & if it goes, it will be the beginning of irretrievable degradation & final extinction. ..... The very first step in reform must therefore be to revolutionize the whole aims & methods of our education. We must accustom teachers to devote nine-tenths of their energies to the education of the active mental faculties, while the passive retaining faculty, which we call the memory, should occupy a recognised & well-defined but subordinate place, & we must direct our school & university examinations to the testing of these active faculties & not of the memory…. There is in fact hardly any subject, the sciences of calculation excepted, which in the hands of a capable teacher does not give room for the development of all the general faculties of the mind. The first thing needed therefore is the entire & unsparing rejection of the present methods of teaching in favour of those which are now being universally adopted in the more advanced countries of Europe.... But even in the narrower sphere of knowledge acquisition to which our system has confined itself, it has been guilty of other blunders quite as serious. Apart from pure mathematics, which stands on a footing of its own, knowledge may be divided into two great heads, the knowledge of things & the knowledge of men, i.e. to say of human thought, human actions, human nature & human creations as recorded, preserved or pictured in literature, history, philosophy & art.... The humanities, mathematics & science are therefore the three sisters in the family of knowledge & any self-respecting system of education must in these days provide facilities for mastery in any one of these as well as for a modicum of all. The first great error of our system comes in here. While we insist on passing our students through a rigid & cast-iron course of knowledge in everything, we give them real knowledge in nothing. What does an average Bombay University graduate who has taken English Literature for his optional subject, know of that literature? He has read a novel of Jane Austen or the Vicar of Wakefield, a poem of Tennyson or a book of Milton, at most two plays of Shakespeare, a work of Bacon’s or Burke’s full of ideas which he is totally incompetent to digest & one or two stray books of Pope, Dryden, Spenser or other, & to crown this pretentious little heap of a mass of second-hand criticism dealing with poets & writers of whom he has not studied a single line. When we remember that English is the main study of our schools & colleges, what a miserable outturn is this, what a wretched little mouse out of that mountain of drudgery from which the voice of the oppressed student is heard painfully & monotonously repeating like Valmekie, his marā, marā, marā has not been converted into Rāma, Rāma, Rāma; for while he thinks he has been repeating the saving word which gives intellectual salvation, it has been unknown to him converted into a death dealing word which causes intellectual sterility & impotence.” [CWSA-1:357-62]

Barrack Room Ballads by Rudyard Kipling.

Bartamān Rananīti booklet published in 1907 by Abinash Bhattacharya dealing with military data of some European countries.

Saint Bartholomew one of the apostles charged with baptizing the damned souls of North India. Bartholomew is the patronymic of the common name Nathanael.

Basanti Chakravarti, Sri Aurobindo’s cousin, daughter of Krishna Kumar Mitra, the first person to receive a letter written by Sri Aurobindo in Bengali. (See Mrinālini)

Bassora Basra, a port-city of Iraq, was a centre of Arabic literature, poetry, science, commerce, & finance in 8^th & 9^th centuries [s/a Abbasside].

Bāsumati Bengali weekly started in 1896 by Upendra Nath Mukherji. In 1914, he founded the Dainik Bāsumati, a Bengali daily.

Basuto a tribe of Basutoland (a plateau in the Drakensberg range in South Africa) which was used by British invaders to block the advancing Boers (q.v.).

Battala woodcut relief prints produced in the Battala region of Calcutta. Although woodblock printing on fabrics has been in India for centuries, the paper adaptation of woodblock printing appeared relatively late, because of the late entry & early exit due to advent of lithography the Battala woodcut printing had a remarkably short run. The Battala woodcuts were printed on cheap newsprint like paper to keep the cost of these prints low. Because of the short run, cheap paper & humid conditions of the region very few of these prints have survived. In the early 19th Century, the Battala area became known for the prints, which typically had a religious or mystical theme. They made their first appearance in the 1820s as book illustrations; by the mid-19^th century printmakers started printing smaller prints, which often represented Kālighāt painting. Demand for the prints began to decline with the introduction of colour lithography printing.

Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-67), French poet whose theories were a source of the European symbolist movement.

Bauls Bengali sannyāsis (comprising Hindu & Muslim Sufis) known for the spontaneity of their mystical verse.

Baxter, Richard (1615-91), Presbyterian preacher.

Bayard Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (d.1524), French military hero, called le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, the knight without fear or blame.

Beachcroft Sir Charles Porten (1871-1927); son of an ICS man he entered Rugby School, Warwickshire. Founded in 1567, Rugby is one of the 10 original public schools & one of the most famous & expensive of the independent schools in Britain. In 1889-90, he was Head of the School, won a Major Leaving Exhibition & passed the same Open Examination for the ICS as did Sri Aurobindo – he standing 36^th to the latter’s 11^th of the 45 who passed. Both went up to Cambridge, he to Clare & Sri Aurobindo to King’s. Yet, said Sri Aurobindo, they “met only in the ICS classes & at the ICS examinations & never exchanged two words together”. Beachcroft began his ICS career in 1892 as Asst. Magistrate & Collector & was Puisne Judge when he retired in 1921. He was knighted in 1922. As Sessions Judge of the High Court of Calcutta; he presided over the Alipore Bomb Trial in which, of the 40 revolutionaries arraigned he acquitted 17.

Lord Beaconsfield Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), novelist, Prime Minister (1868, 1874-80).

Beatrice Beatrice Portinari (1260-90), believed to be the Beatrice of Dante’s Divina commedia (The Divine Comedy) & Vita nuova (The New Life).

Beatrice Joanna of The Changeling by Thomas Middleton & William Rowley.

Beattie, James (1735-1803); his The Minstrel was one of the earliest poems of the Romantic Movement.

Beau Brummel/ Brummell George Bryan (1778-1840), an English playboy.

Beautiful White Devil see Vittoria Corombona.

Bedlam a hospital in 1330, handed over to the City of London in 1547 as a mental asylum; the term is colloquial for pandemonium.

Beecham, Sir Thomas (1879-1961), English conductor who championed the music of Frederick Delius & used his personal fortune for the improvement of orchestral & operatic performances in England.

Beelzebub Lord of Flies, an epithet of Satan known as Prince of Devils.

Beethoven Ludwig van (1770-1827), German musician & composer considered one of the greatest in the history of Western music. He was the first major composer of program music & a prototype of late 19^th century Romantic composers.

Begbie, Harold (1871-1929), didactic English journalist & novelist.

Belial epithet for evil or subversive person in Old Testament.

Bell, Beatson Sir Nicholson Dodd Beatson Bell (1867-1936): entered the ICS in 1896, served in Bengal & Assam: Chief Commissioner in Assam (1918-21).

Bellerophon Greek hero originally named Hipponus, an ancestor of Sarpedon & a native of Ephyre (Corinth), who rode the immortal winged horse Pegasus & destroyed the Chimaera & killed the giant Bellerus (q.v.). On completing numerous labours given to him by Iobates, king of Lycia, he was married to the king’s daughter. “Bellerophon’s city”, in Ilion, refers to Lycia, where Sarpedon was buried.

Belloc, H. Joseph-Pierre Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), French-born poet, historian, essayist, & novelist, one of the most versatile of popular English writers.

Bellona Roman goddess of war.

Belphegor Syrian god who symbolised the Sun; Israelites also paid homage to him. Sri Aurobindo’s uses the term for a transfiguring spiritual light.

Belshazzar (died c.539 BC); co-regent of Babylon at whose feast the words Mene, Mene, Tekel, & Parsin appeared on the wall. The prophet Daniel (q.v.), interpreting this, foretold the destruction of the city in 539 BC.

Belton English commander of the army of Mulai Hamid, the Sultan of Morocco; he resigned in protest against Hamid’s barbaric treatment of political prisoners.

Belvedere former viceregal mansion in South Calcutta, presently housing Govt. of India’s National Library. ‘Belvedere’ is Italian for “beautiful view”, structure built in an elevated position to command a fine view. The caption under this Belvedere’s photograph in volume 1 of Claude Campbell’s Glimpses of Bengal [Campbell-Medland, 3/4 Hare Street, 1907, p.130-31] reads: “The Belvedere, Calcutta, 1903: The official residence of the Lt. Governor of Bengal, situated at Alipur, about three miles south of the Govt. House; it stands on 882 sq. mile tract ceded to the East India Co. by Mir Jā’far in 1757 after his defeat at Plassey. Its drawing room (used as durbar hall on occasions) is 114 ft. long.”

Benares spelling before 1937 of Banaras, the popularised form of Vārānasi. Most of the district currently known as Vārānasi was acquired by Gangāpur’s zamindar Mansa Ram (1737-40), when Moghul suzerainty weakened after Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. His successor Balwant Singh (1711-70) took over the territories of Jaunpur, Vārānasi, & Chunar in 1740 from the Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah & declared himself the Raja of Banaras. Later he added the territories of Chandauli, Gyānpur, Chakia, Latif Shah, Mirzapur, Nandeshwar, Mint House, & Vindhyāchal. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, the bhūmihārs (zamīndārs) under Balwant Singh strengthened their sway in the area south of Awadh & in the fertile rice growing areas of Benares, Jaunpur, Gorakhpur, Basti, Deoria, Azamgarh, Ghazipur, Ballia & Bihar & on the fringes of Bengal. There were as many as 100,000 men backing their power which proved a decisive advantage when they faced the Nawab of Oudh in the 1750s & the 1760s. An exhausting guerrilla war, forced the Nawab to withdraw his main force. After Balwant Singh’s death in 1770, the kingdom was ruled by his successor Chait Singh (d.1810), still as feudatory of the Nawab. From the day in 1775, Chait Singh signed a treaty with Gov.-Gen. Warren Hastings – the then-face of the blood-thirsty jaws of the Octopus, excuse after excuse followed until practically nothing was left for him & his successors to administer. The British Prime Minister Pitt (q.v.), tired with the criticism he faced in Parliament, declared Hastings’s conduct in the Chait Singh affair cruel, unjust & oppressive & made it one of the counts on which the Parliament agreed to impeach Hastings. The Raja of Benares & his family & successors were quarantined to their Ramnagar Fort situated to the east of Vārānasi, across the Ganges; until 1947 they retained certain revenues from rents, & certain administrative rights in the rest of the territory, which the British administered as Benares Division of its United Provinces.

When the 21^st session of the Congress met at Benares in December 1905, 758 delegates elected Gokhale president. It was the first INC Session where the divisions between the Moderates, led by Pherozshah Mehta & Gokhale, & the Nationalist party led by Tilak, came to the fore. “At the 1905 Benares Congress, Sri Aurobindo made his presence felt without, perhaps, actually participating in the open debates.” [K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo – a biography & a history] It was also the first INC session that Subramania Bhārati attended & for the first time he came in contact with Sri Aurobindo & Sister Nivedita. The Nationalists wanted to extend the Boycott & Swadeshi movements to start a nationwide mass movement, & boycott the visit of the Prince of Wales in protest against the Bengal Partition. The Moderates held that the Nationalists’ methods of passive resistance were impractical or even injurious by denying themselves educational opportunities & also opposed a boycott of the Prince of Wales’ visit. In the end the Benares Congress only condemned the Government repression & justified boycott only as a “last protest” & repeated their demands for reform of the legislative councils. In 1910, Benares became a part of the British India’s United Provinces. In 1911, its Raja was made a slave-cum-feudatory of the Queen-Empress & the vanity of 13-gun salute. However, even today the majority of the Hindu populace of the region holds on to tradition of revering the Kāshi Naresh as an incarnation of Lord Shiva who is believed to have founded the city of Kāshi. The Naresh is also the chief cultural patron & an essential part of all religious celebrations. [S. Bhattacharya, pp.118, 127; R.C. Majumdar et al’s Advanced History of India; Sanderson Beck’s article “India’s Freedom Struggle” in India’s Renaissance, & ‘Banaras State’ on Internet]

Benaras (Hindu) College/ Central Hindu College “Warren Hastings encouraged the revival of Indian learning & to him we owe,” says Dr. R.C. Majumdar, “the foundation of the Calcutta Madrāsā. Inspired by the same spirit, Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in 1784, & a Sanskrit College was established at Benares by the Resident Jonathan Duncan, in 1791…. In her autobiography (1893), Annie Besant writes: ‘The Indian work is, first of all, the revival, strengthening, & uplifting of the ancient religions. This has brought with it new self-respect, a pride in the past, a belief in the future, &, as an inevitable result, a great wave of patriotic life, the beginning of the rebuilding of a nation.’ She started the Central Hindu School in Benares as a chief means of achieving her object. She lavished her resources & energy on this institution, which gradually developed into a College, & was ultimately merged into the Hindu University.” [An Advanced History of India, 1973-74, pp.810, 881-82]

Mrs Annie Besant, who had been a member of the London School Board (1887-90), was eager to establish learning institutions in India based on Hindu philosophy. In 1898 she founded the Central Indian College in the Kāmāchha area of Vārānasi; because, “she wanted to bring men of all religions together under the ideal of brotherhood in order to promote Indian cultural values & to remove ill-will among different sections of the Indian population.” [S. Bhattacharya] In 1903 Malaviya, who had supported Besant’s cause, raised Rs 250,000 to finance the construction of the school’s hostel. In 1907 Besant had applied for a royal charter to establish a university. However, there was no response from the British government. In April 1911, the two agreed to join forced to build a university in the same city, & in November, Mālaviya registered the Hindu University Society to gather support & raise funds for building the university. He spent the next 4 years gathering support & raising funds for the university. He sought & received early support from the Kāshi Naresh Prabhu Narayan Singh & Maharaja Sir Rameshwar Singh Bahadur of Raja Darbhanga. In November 1915, Besant, Bhagawan Das (q.v.), & other trustees of the Central Hindu School agreed to the government’s condition that the school become a part of the new university. Thus the Banaras Hindu University (BHU), formerly Central Hindu College, was established in 1916 by Pandit Madan Mohan Mālaviya, with over 12,000 students residing in campus.

Bengal is the anglicised form of Bānglā evolved from the Bengali Baṇga of the Sanskrit Vaṇga which denoted Eastern & Central Bengal in the age of the Dharma sutras & the Epics. Western & north-western Bengal was then known as Gauḍa. Vaṇga & Gauḍa were both included in the empires of the Mauryas & the Guptās (q.v.). In the middle of 6^th century Gauḍa became quite a powerful state. The Sena dynasty that ruled in Bengal in the 11^th & 12^th centuries built a powerful kingdom, promoted Sanskrit learning & patronised poets like Jayadeva. Vidyāpati’s “five Bengals’ stood for the five divisions of Gauḍa made by Vallalasena, Gaudesh (the king of Gauḍa), who ruled from 1159 to 1179, & whose father Vijayasena (ruled 1095-1158) had brought west & north Bengal under his control. The five divisions were: Bāgdī (q.v.), Rarha, Varendra, Vaṇga, & Mithila.

In British India, Bengal proper, Bihar, & Orissa formed a single province from 1765 up to 1905, when it was divided by Lord Curzon: fifteen districts of eastern Bengal were separated & united with Assam to form a new province called “East Bengal & Assam”. The capital of this new province was Dacca; its people were mainly Muslims. The purpose of the division of the large province of Bengal, announced in July 1905, was to increase the conflicts between nationalist Hindus & Muslims in Bengal. The plan was approved by the Secretary of State without consulting the Parliament. The Bengal Legislative Council strongly denounced the plan on July 8, & the Indian press in Bengal & other provinces condemned the proposal. The weekly Sanjivani suggested a boycott of British goods on July 13, & a public meeting at Bagerhat adopted it three days later. The boycott idea spread as two thousand public meetings were organized in the cities & in hundreds of villages. In the town of Barisal students & even teachers went to school barefoot & were threatened with expulsion. On 16 Oct. 1905, Ananda Mohan Bose (q.v.) laid the Foundation Stone of the Akhanda Buṇga Bhavan, Hall of Indivisible Bengal, or Milan Mandir, Temple where East & West Bengal unite; – later known as Federation Hall. In 1911 because of continuing public agitation the British Govt. reunited East & West Bengal. Assam again became a chief commissionership, & Bihar & Orissa were separated to form a new province.

The 1922 Gaya session of the Congress was followed by the resignation of C.R. Das as the President of the organisation. He then formed within the Congress a party called the Swaraj Party (q.v.). In the election to the Bengal Legislative Council held in 1923, the Swaraj Party led by C.R. Das became the largest single party capturing 46 seats out of its 139 seats but Das declined the offer made by Lord Lytton, the Governor of Bengal, to form a new ministry. He held discussions with prominent Muslim leaders of Bengal & early in December 1923 came to an agreement with them. The terms of the Bengal Pact, were passed in the meeting of the Swaraj Party Councillors held on 16 December 1923 & also passed in the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee meeting held on 18 December 1923.

Chitta Ranjan Misra: The Terms of the Bengal Pact of 1923 included: (a) Representation in the Bengal Legislative Council would be on population basis with separate electorates; (b) Representation in the local bodies would be on the proportion of 60 per cent to the majority community & 40 per cent to the minority community; (c) Regarding Government appointments, it was decided that fifty five per cent of the appointments should go to the Muslims. Till the above percentage was attained, 80 per cent of posts would go to the Muslims & the remaining 20 per cent should go to the Hindus; (d) No resolution or enactment would be allowed to be moved without the consent of 75 per cent of the elected members of the affected community; (e) Music in processions would not be allowed in front of the mosques; (f) No legislation in respect of cow killing for food would be taken up in the Council & endeavour should be made outside the Council to bring about an understanding between the two communities. Cow killing should be taken up in such a manner as not to wound the religious feelings of the Hindus & cow killing for religious purpose should not be interfered with…. S.N. Bannerjea & B.C. Pal were among the Hindu leaders who stood up against the Pact…. Emphasising the necessity of the Pact, Das remarked that Swaraj would not come without Hindu-Muslim unity. He was supported in his stance by a considerable number of Congressmen in Bengal [&] got whole-hearted support for his scheme from the majority of the Muslims of Bengal. The latter welcomed the Pact wholeheartedly because in their opinion it was the sensible solution to their problems. The Muslim leaders of Bengal held that, if implemented, the Pact would strike at the root of communal strife. The Muslim press thanked those Hindu leaders for their greatness in meeting the just demands of the Muslims through formulating the Pact in consultation with them. But the Muslims were very disheartened when the Bengal Pact was rejected by the Cocānada (q.v.) Session of the Indian National Congress held in December 1923. The decision of the Congress was characterised by Muslim leaders of Bengal short-sighted & aggressively selfish. In their opinion the Cocānada Congress had committed the worst blunder in the history of the Congress movement for it dealt a serious blow to the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity, the cause for which the INC stood. But C.R. Das…criticised the stand of the INC & declared: “You may delete the Bengal Pact from the resolutions but you cannot delete Bengal from the Indian National Congress….” And he succeeded in getting the terms of his Bengal Pact ratified by the Bengal Provincial Congress Conference, held at Sirajganj in June 1924. Unfortunately his premature death in 1925 came as a blow to the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity. His death was followed by the repudiation of the Pact, even by some of his own followers. A large number of Bengali Muslim politicians became shocked at this act & began to move away from the Congress as well as the Swarājya Party. The defection of the Muslims was marked by the formation of the Independent Muslim Party in 1926 by some prominent Muslim leaders of the province like Maulvi Abdul Karim, Maulānā Abdur Rauf, Khan Bahadur Azizul Huq, Maulvi Abdullahil Baqi, Maulvi Ashraf ud-din Ahmed, Dr A. Suhrawardy, A.K. Fazlul Huq, & others. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy became the Provisional Secretary of the Party. Indeed, from this time on, the Muslims of Bengal began to reconsider their stand in Bengal politics. The result of all these manoeuvrings was a revival of communal politics in the province.” [“Bengal Pact”, Banglapedia]

Abinash Bhattacharya: I was the first to return from the Andamans. Almost four years later, Hem-da & Ullāskar came back. I met Aurobindo-babu again for the first time in fourteen years in Pondicherry [in 1923]. I was with him for a month. Every day we used to talk on various subjects. I have brought out excerpts of these talks in the monthly Bāsumati. I mention one or two things here. When I first saw him he told me: “Chitta has made a big mistake.” – What has Chitta done this time? – “Signed this pact – this pact means admitting that there are two races in India, the Hindus & Muslims. Now we will have to face the virulent consequences.” – You are engaged in the discipline of yoga & have become a sadhu, why do you have to concern yourself with all this? – “I am not doing this yoga for my personal liberation; my sādhanā is for the good of the whole world. To lift man to a higher state of progress is my endeavour. – In that case you shouldn’t make a distinction between the Hindus & the Muslims. – “That is just what I say. In India there will be no Hindus & no Muslims, All will be one Indian.” – How are Europe & America to blame? – “I do not reproach or hate them. But I still want our fallen Mother India to rise once again, resplendent & glorious. I also want – without the others being diminished – that my Mother should stand out as the foremost among them – my mother Bengal. Let the Bengali be the foremost – this is my heartfelt desire.”

I was fortunate enough to have lived together with Sri Aurobindo for a few days. I called him Sejda & addressed him as tumi [familiar form of the second person.] I had the opportunity to observe him at close range at his daily work…. He gave me affection & sometimes scolded me for my childish conduct. [Original published in Golpo-Bharati, Vol.6, 1950-51, pp. 829-50; its translation from the Bengali in Srinvantu, November 1984, was reproduced under title “Sri Aurobindo” in Mother India, July 2012, pp.528-39]

Sri Aurobindo on 19 October 1946: “…the conditions of the Hindus [in Bengal] are terrible & they may even get worse in spite of the interim mariage de convenance at Delhi. But we must not let our reaction to it become excessive or suggest despair. There must be at least 20 million Hindus in Bengal & they are not going to be exterminated, – even Hitler with his scientific methods of massacre could not exterminate the Jews who are still showing themselves very much alive &, as for Hindu culture, it is not such a weak & fluffy thing as to be easily stamped out; it has lasted through something like 5 millenniums at least & is going to carry on much longer & has accumulated quite enough power to survive. What is happening did not come to me as a surprise. I foresaw it when I was in Bengal & warned people that it was probable & almost inevitable & that they should be prepared for it. At that time no one attached any value to what I said although some afterwards remembered & admitted, when the trouble first began, that I have been right; only C.R. Das had grave apprehensions & he even told me when he came to Pondicherry that he would not like the British to go out until this dangerous problem had been settled.” [CWSA 36:208]

S. Bhattacharya: In 1947, Bengal was partitioned into West Bengal & East Pakistan with the consent of the Indian National Congress resulting in the uprooting of millions of people, mostly Hindus of East Bengal. The truncated West Bengal is only one-third of its old self & is confronted with many problems of which the resettlement of the Hindu refugees is the most tremendous & at the same time the most baffling.

Bengalee English weekly started in 1862 & edited by Girish Chandra Ghose. Dr. K.D. Ghose, Sri Aurobindo’s father, used to mail copies of this paper to his sons when they were in England. S.N. Banerjee, its principal editor during the anti-partition agitation became its proprietor & converted it into a daily.

The Bengal National College & School, Calcutta, was set up in Calcutta by the National Council of Education on 14 August 1906 with Sri Aurobindo as principal & an elaborate syllabus in humanities, sciences, & technology. Eight days earlier, when Bepin Pal registered his paper Bande Mataram, he had joined him as assistant editor. Inevitably, not only did the Bengal Govt. refuse to recognise a College & School which was “exclusively under national control” & “standing apart from the existing systems of primary, secondary, & university education” & its alumni as bonafide graduates, but heartily approved loyalist Tarak Nath Palit’s Bengal Technical Institute (BTI) founded to churn out native Indian machinists to supplement the native clerks churned out by Government & Christian education as the alien rulers’ subservient work-force. And neither the Bombay University to which Baroda College was affiliated, nor the Calcutta University even noticed Sri Aurobindo’s recommendation on National Education. Inevitably also, Sri Aurobindo published the following in the Bande Mataram of August 22 under the title ‘National Education & the Congress’: “National Education received the seal of approbation from united Bengal at the Barisal Conference. It should be the aim of the nationalists to elicit from the Congress this year a solemn expression of the national will recognising the new movement & recommending it to all India. It is possible that there may be some difficulty in carrying the motion, for the small-minded & fainthearted figure largely in the Congress ranks. At Benares this element disgraced the nation by excluding Swadeshi, the universal national movement, from the purview of the national assembly. …. This time there should be no repetition of such pusillanimity. Such exhibitions of moral cowardice are one reason more why the Congress should be reconstituted on a basis sufficiently popular to prevent the sentiment of the people from being outraged or caricatured by self-constituted representatives. …. If the Congress had not been hopelessly out of date in its form & spirit, it would by this time have organised itself for work, with a department for the organisation of National Education on a basis of voluntary self-taxation figuring prominently in its list of national duties.”

On July 30, 1907, the police search the Bande Mataram office & lodged a complaint against Sri Aurobindo. He resigned from the College on 2^nd August; was arrested on the 16^th on charge of sedition for his writing in the Bande Mataram, & released on bail. During the period of the trial Sri Aurobindo resigned his principalship of the College in order to save embarrassment to the Council & to enable them to run the institution. There were differences with the College Council – the Council, under the weak-kneed Moderate Rāshbehari Ghose did not dare make the National College anything more than imparting a place of learning that Govt. would approve; Sri Aurobindo wanted to make it a cradle of national regeneration [s/a Calcutta University]

“Many people came to meet him,” writes Abinash, “during [the] period that he gave up the principalship of the Bengal National College & started editing Bande Mataram. He was always in a meditative state. When somebody came [to his residence at 23 Scott’s Lane] he talked & chatted cheerfully, then he fell silent & became absorbed in meditation. If someone came to him for articles or about other Bande Mataram matters, he would ask him to wait & would begin writing…. It is easy to imagine how difficult it was for such a man to look after his domestic affairs. Food or clothing did not matter to him. He ate whatever was there. There were holes in his shoes but he did not notice. He did not concern himself with the household at all. I had to look after everything. He got 150 rupees a month from the National College, but it did not always come & finally it stopped altogether.” [“Sri Aurobindo”, Mother India, July 2012, pp.528-39]

“At an early period Sri Aurobindo left the organisation of the College to the educationist Satish Mukherji & plunged fully into politics. When the Bande Mataram case was brought against him he resigned his post in order not to embarrass the College authorities but resumed it again on his acquittal. During the Alipore case he resigned finally at the request of the College authorities. …. The final resignation was given from Alipore Jail after he was arrested on 2^nd May, 1908.” [SABCL 26:43]

After his acquittal on 23^rd September, the Council could not but recall him to his post, but he preferred to be just one of the professors. That day he spoke to of the students & teachers of the College: “What I want to be assured of is not so much that you feel sympathy for me in my troubles but that you have sympathy for the cause, in serving which I have to undergo what you call my troubles…. When we established this college & left other occupations, other chances of life, to devote our lives to this institution, we did so because we hoped to see in it the foundation, the nucleus of a nation, of the new India which is to begin its career after this night of sorrow & trouble, on that day of glory & greatness when India will work for the world…. What has been insufficiently & imperfectly begun by us, it is for you to complete & lead to perfection…. I wish to see some of you becoming great, great not for your own sakes, not that you may satisfy your own vanity, but great for her, to make India great, to enable her to stand up with head erect among the nations of the earth, as she did in days of yore when the world looked up to her for light. Even those who will remain poor & obscure, I want to see their very poverty & obscurity devoted to the Motherland. There are times in a nation’s history when Providence places before it one work, one aim, to which everything else, however high & noble in itself, has to be sacrificed. Such a time has now arrived for our Motherland when nothing is dearer than her service, when everything else is to be directed to that end.” [SABCL 1:515-16]

S. Bhattacharya: When the National Council of Education failed to attract a large enough number of students to the Humanities side, it abolished that section of its Bengal National College & helplessly watched the abolition of the other ‘national schools’ it had opened in Bengal. On 25 May 1910, the BNC was taken over by the Bengal Technical Institute…the united institution came to be known as the Bengal National College & Technical School. When its arts side failed, the technical side was developed into the Jādhavapur College of Engineering & Technology, which gradually assumed the form of the present Jādhavapur University. [Pages.677-78]

Prabhākar Mukherjee: The press & the platform of Calcutta, made at that time a feeble attempt to name the University after Sri Aurobindo, but the successor of the British Empire in India – I mean our National Govt. – found no way to honour the National College in the manner suggested. [Mother India, March 1962, p.68]

Benoy (Bhūshan) (1867-1947), eldest brother of Sri Aurobindo, known as Beno in the family circle; he failed at the entrance test for St. Paul’s, & in 1884, when the brothers were abandoned by the family who had sheltered them, Benoy was employed by James Cotton & for some time he & Sri Aurobindo lived together. He returned to India early in 1894 & sometime later found employment under the Maharaja of Coochbehar & sent money to Manmohan for his return to India.

Bent author of Life of Garibaldi.

Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1831), English economist & political theorist whose inventions of ‘scientific solutions to social problems’, founded the Utilitarianism of European socio-political nostrums.

Bentinck, Lord William (Henry Cavendish) (1774-1839), entered the Army 1791, saw service in Netherlands & Italy: Governor of Madras 1803-07 but held responsible for a mutiny of sepoys against their officers at Vellore, recalled by East India Co.’s Court of Directors: employed in Portugal as Brigadier: Commander-in-Chief in Sicily 1811: served in Spain: led expedition against Genoa 1814: Governor of Bengal from July 1828, C-in-C from May 1833, first Gov.-General of India 1834-35: annexed the Princely State of Mysore: attacked Ranjit Singh of Punjab on the Sutlej: ‘restored financial equilibrium’ in favour of Europeans, ‘reformed land revenue settlement’ in NW Province in favour of the British, ‘reorganised judicial courts’ in favour of Europeans (see Indian Penal Code), devoted funds to education through English medium to increase employment of native jee-huzur clerks in Govt., resulting in the eloquent inscription on his statue in Calcutta written by Macaulay, Legal Member of his Council from 1834. Naturally he greatly regretted his retirement for not being able to bring more prosperity to England; became M.P. for Glasgow in 1837 to help govern the Empire. [Disinfected Buckland]

Ber, J.M. In Dec.1912, he talked “about Mantras” to some spiritual seekers in Paris.

Berber a north African tribe inhabiting the region from Sahara to the Mediterranean & from Egypt to the Atlantic coast, whose civilisation is dated to pre-2400 BC.

Bergson, Henri (1859-1941), French philosopher, exponent of process philosophy. His works won him the 1927 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Berkeley, George (1685-1753), Irish intellectual & exponent of immaterialism.

Berni, Francesco (1497/98-1535), Italian poet & translator, important for his Tuscan version of Boiardo’s epic poem Orlando innamorato & for the distinctive style of his Italian burlesque, which was called after him bernesco, & imitated by many poets.

Besant Annie (1847-1933) born in London to Mr William Page Wood: educated privately in England, Germany & France: married Rev. Frank Besant, 1867, divorced 1872: became a free-thinker & for the next eleven years she worked in close association with Charles Bradlaugh in Labour & Socialist movements: joined National Secular Society 1874: worked co-editor of National Reformer, member Fabian Society & Social Democratic Federation: but a breach occurred between them in 1889 when she turned to Blavatsky’s philosophy [Buckland]. ― Mrs Besant was member of London School Board 1887-90, & in India evince a keen interest in national education, & in 1898, she founded the Central Hindu College Benares which later merged into the Benares Hindu University. She threw in her lot with the Indian National Congress which she joined (says Sitāramayyā) in 1914. In 1916 she founded the Indian Home Rule League which proposed a different programme & goal than the Home Rule League one already formed by Tilak, resulting inevitable clashes of their ideologies based on their vastly different knowledge & experience of Indian politics. Ultimately Gandhi’s juggernaut crushed both movements (see Khilafat Agitation) & put Besant practically out of the Congress. In her How India Wrought Freedom, she called India her ‘motherland’. She joined Theosophical Society in 1880, became a devoted pupil of Mme Blavatsky & President of Theosophical Society 1907 until her death.

Beulah in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a land of rest at end of life’s journey.

Bhadracar king & people oppressed by Jarāsandha fled their kingdom.

Bhaga Lord of Enjoyment, classed among the Ādityas & the Vishwadevas (q.v.). He is one of the four powers of the Truth of Surya, & represents a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment dispelling the evils of sin & error & suffering.

Bhāga Dutt king of Pragjyotishpur (Kāmarūpa); in the Mahabharata war he sided with the Kauravas, & was killed by Arjūna.

Bhagalpur a town just south of Ganga, in Bhāgalpūr district, Bihar. It was the place Dr K.D. Ghose was first sent by the Govt.’s Medical Department. “Sri Aurobindo’s paternal uncle, Bāmā Charan was head-clerk in the Bhagalpur Commissioner’s office,” says D.K. Roy who, hired by Sri Aurobindo to enrich his Bengali, lived in his house in Baroda c.1898-1900: “Once, Sri Aurobindo went there to meet him. I remember he was invited to dine at his uncle’s house. In fact, it doesn’t seem that Sri Aurobindo was close to his father’s family. He rather preferred his maternal uncle & grandfather & was close to his mother’s family.” [D.K. Roy, Aurobindo Prasanga, Mother India, Dec.1959; Buckland] This is epitaph on a tomb of Augustus Cleveland (1755-84) built by Warren Hastings at Bhāgalpūr in 1784: “Who, without bloodshed or terrors of authority, employing only the means of conciliation, confidence, & benevolence, attempted & accomplished the entire subjection of the lawless & savage inhabitants of the jungle-territory of Rājmahal, who had long infested the neighbouring lands by their predatory incursions, inspired them with a taste for arts of civilised life, & attached them to the British Govt. by a conquest over their minds, the most permanent as the most rational mode of dominations.” Sri Aurobindo knew that Hastings had Cleveland interred in South Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta, under a lengthier epitaph. The empty tomb was just so the local natives knelt at it to venerate Cleveland’s arrogant reign as collector & judge of Bhagalpur, Monghyr & Rājmahal districts. Which thinking Indian would fail to conclude Hastings’ conquest over their minds, the most permanent as the most rational mode of dominations. [See Scott’s Lane]

Bhagavadgita/ Gita “The secret of action, so we might summarise the message of the Gita, the word of the divine Teacher, is one with the secret of all life & existence. Existence is not a machinery of Nature, a wheel of law in which the soul is entangled for a moment or for ages; it is a constant manifestation of the Spirit. Life is not for the sake of life alone, but for God, & the living soul of man is an eternal portion of the Godhead. Action is for self-finding, for self-fulfilment, for self-realisation…. There is an inner law & meaning of all things dependent on the supreme as well as the manifested nature of the self; the true truth of works lies there & can be represented only incidentally, imperfectly & disguised by ignorance in the outer appearances of the mind & its action. The supreme, the faultless largest law of action is therefore to find out the truth of your own highest & inmost existence & live in it & not to follow any outer standard & dharma…. Know then yourself; know your true self to God & one with the self of all the others; know your soul to be a portion of God. Live in what you know; live in the self, live in your supreme spiritual nature, be united with God & God-like. Offer first, all your actions as a sacrifice to the Highest & the One in you & the Highest & One in the world; deliver last all you are & do into his hands for the supreme & universal Spirit to do through you his own will & works in the world. This is the solution I present to you & in the end you will find that there is no other.” [SABCL 13:553-54]

Bhagavat(a)/ Bhagawat(a) (Purana) made up of 18,000 shlokas in 12 skandhas or books; its 10^th book narrates in detail the events of Krishna’s life.

Bhagawan Das (1869-1958), scholar & educationist of Benaras, founder-member of the Central Hindu College, Varanasi, connected with Kāshi Vidyapeeth, was later awarded Bharat Ratna.

Bhagirath(a)/ Bhagiruth/ Bhogiratha descendant of the Vedic King Sāgara of the Ikshvākū Kūla which ruled the kingdom of Koshala from Ayodhyā, whose saga is found in several Puranas. King Sāgara had two wives, Késhini & Sumati. The Rishi Aurva offered them two boons: one would lead to the birth of only one son, the other produce 60,000. When the shenanigans of the 60,000 sons of Sumati grew unbearable, Rishi Kapila asked the king to perform an Ashwamedha (q.v.) Yajna & involve them in its success. To prevent the 60,000 from getting more power to harass the people Indra seized the horse & tied it in Kapila’s ashram. The 60,000 went on rampage & the Rishi’s curse burned them to ashes. Taking pity on grief-stricken Sāgara he assured him that if Gungā flowed over those ashes his sons would revive. The penance of Sāgara & several of his successors failed to invoke Goddess Gungā; Bhagiratha’s Tapasyā succeeded & the Goddess consented but only Shiva could withstand the force of her descent, so Bhagiratha prayed to Ashutosh Shiva, who received the impetuous Gungā’s earth-shattering force & locked her up in his mighty Jatā. This, it is said, is the origin of Gangōtri which flowing down from 3100 meters above sea-level forms the river Bhāgirathie. Ultimately, led by Bhagiratha, Gungā flowed into the plains where after some 1500 miles she ran over the ashes of the 60,000. Thence the Gungā begins the last leg of her journey ending into the embrace of the vast Sāgara – the confluence called Gungā-Sāgara. There, on an island south of Kolkata, is held annually the Gungā Sāgara Mela.

Bhāgirathie a headstream of the holy Gungā which is also the name of its tributary in West Bengal forming western boundary of Gungā delta.

Dr Bhandārkar Sir Rama Krishna Gopal (1837-1925); educated at Ratnāgiri & Elphinstone College, Bombay (M.A., 1866): Dakshīna Fellow there & Dekkan College, Poona: Head-master of Hyderabad (Sind) & Ratnāgiri High Schools: Professor of Sanskrit & Oriental languages at Elphinstone College: Fellow Bombay Univ.: Educ. Dept. 1864-93: Vice-Chancellor 1893-5: Member Governor’s Legislative Council 1903-4: Fellow of Calcutta Univ., Royal Asiatic Societies of London & B’bay: German & American Oriental Societies: Asiatic Society Italy, Imperial Academy of Science St. Petersburg: Foreign Member of French Institute: delegate at International Congress of Orientalists at London & Vienna: Hon. Phil. Dr. Gottingen Univ., etc.: a leader of the enlightened religious movement of the Prārthanā Samāj founded by Justice Ranade: supported widow-remarriage & in politics was a moderate progressive. [Buckland] His conviction that if the British, “our rulers by Divine Providence” left India, “we Hindoos would immediately return to the old state of things, for we lack a national consciousness” reflected in his wearing English suits & shoes at home in his native land’s tropical climate, & zealous promotion of European Orientalists’ methods to the study of Sanskrit & Indian antiquities, earned him his knighthood at the Delhi Durbar held by Viceroy Hardinge in 1911.

Bhao, Sadāshiv Rao was a first cousin (bhāo) of Bālāji Bāji Rao (son of Bāji Rao I), the 3^rd Peshwa, & one of his generals. In 1747, Ahmed Shah Abdali (d.1772) a commander of Nadir Shah (q.v.) seized Kandahar, Kabul & Lahore; in 1757 he attacked the Moguls, plundered Delhi, Agra & Mathura & withdrew to Kandahar. The next year he returned with a larger army, reinforced by the Afghan-spawned Najib-ud-daulah of Rohilkhand, laid siege to Emperor Shah Alam II’s Delhi, assured that Shah Alam’s Wazir Shuja-ud-daulah (Nawab of Oudh) & his ally the British octopus would stand by waiting to share in the spoils of war. Ignorant of this conspiracy, the armies of the Maratha Confederacy led by Bālāji Bājirao, treaty-bound to fight for Shah Alam II “as protectors & auxiliaries”, that had taken the field against invaders were caught in the trap. This set the stage for the legendary 3^rd battle of Pāṇīpat (q.v.). Encouraged by Bhao’s resounding victory over the Nizam the previous year, Bālāji had placed the Confederacy’s armies under his command. Sadāshiv Rao & scores of veteran generals & warriors died or disappeared.

Bhao Girdī may mean “Bhao & Gardī”, i.e., Sadāshiv Rao Bhāo & Ibrahim Khan Gardī who commanded a large train of artillery maintained by Bhāo; or the utter confusion & girdī (stampede) that occurred in the 3^rd battle Pāṇīpat after Bhao fell from his horse – his fate was never discovered.

Bharat(a)/ Bharutha son of Dushyanta & Shakuntalā & one of the greatest Chandra-Vamshi rulers; his empire became known as Bhāratavarsha & his descendants Bhāratas. The name is especially applied to the Pandavas, whose ancestor Kuru was ninth in descent from King Bharata.

Bharat(a)/ Bharath son of Dasharatha & Kaikeyi; he ruled Ayodhya as an agent of his elder brother Rama, during the latter’s 14-year exile.

Bharat/ Bharuth a Rishi whose Nāṭya-Shāstra, treatise on dramatic arts, is still the basic manual for dancers & actors.

Bhārata the epic written by Vyāsa, later enlarged into the Mahābhārata.

Bharat Dharma Mahāmandala a duly registered association of Hindus formed at Mathura in 1902. In the December 1903 Session of the Congress, Sir Subramania Ᾱyyar & Prof Rangāchāri left its Social Conference & started the Hindu League & induced Tilak to write a few articles on this subject. Extracts from Tilak’s articles in Kesari: “The principles of Hinduism do not absolutely preclude reform. If it had drawn its shutters completely both Hinduism & Hindu Rāshtra would have disappeared long ago.” – “Every reform must aim at the awakening of national consciousness. The only consciousness which we as a nation can proudly retain & foster ought to have its springs in Hindutva.” – “It would not be wrong to say that the present-day votaries of social reform do not care for religion.... They cry themselves hoarse as champions of widow-remarriage. The appalling number of converts to Christianity, however, leaves them cold & inactive.” – “Every successive generation of English educated Indians is getting hardened as an advocate of utilitarianism & materialism. The gulf between this class & the masses is yawning wider & wider.” [Lōkamānya B.G. Tilak…, S.L. Karandikar, Pune, 1957, p.198] ― In 1905, the headquarters of the Bharat Dharma Mahāmandala moved to Benaras. The orthodox character of the association & its avowed object to maintain the Hindu Dharma secured for it the support of religious pontiffs the majority of lay Hindus, & some ruling Rajas & Maharajas. In 1912, the Association elected the Maharaja of Darbhanga as its president.

Sri Aurobindo (c.1912?): Neither antiquity nor modernity can be the test of truth or the test of usefulness. All the Rishis do not belong to the past; the Avatars still come; revelation still continues…. But to all things there is a date & a limit. All long-continued customs have been sovereignly useful in their time, even totemism & polyandry. We must not ignore the usefulness of the past, but we seek in preference a present & a future utility…. One is repelled by the ignorant enthusiasm of social reformers. Their minds are usually a strange jumble of ill-digested European notions.... Almost every point that the social reformers raise could be settled one way or the other without effecting the permanent good of society. It is pitiful to see men labouring the point of marriage between subcastes & triumphing over an isolated instance. Whether the spirit as well as the body of caste should remain, is the modern question. Let Hindus remember that caste as it stands is merely jāt, the trade guild sanctified but no longer working, it is not the eternal religion, it is not chaturvarnya. I do not care whether widows marry or remain single; but it is of infinite importance to consider how women shall be legally & socially related to man, as his inferior, equal or superior; for even the relation of superiority is no more impossible in the future than it was in the far-distant past. And the most important question of all is whether society shall be competitive or cooperative, individualistic or communistic. That we should talk so little about these things & be stormy over insignificant details, shows painfully the impoverishment of the average Indian intellect. If these greater things are decided, as they must be, the smaller will arrange themselves…. In the changes of the future the Hindu society must take the lead towards the establishment of a new universal standard. Yet being Hindus we must seek it through that which is particular to ourselves. We have one standard that is at once universal & particular, the eternal religion, which is the basis, permanent & always inherent in India, of the shifting, mutable & multiform thing we call Hinduism…. The eternal religion is to realise God in our inner life & our outer existence, in society not less than in the individual. Esha dharmah sanātanah. God is not antiquity nor novelty: He is not the Manava Dharmashāstra, nor Vidyāranya, nor Raghunandan; neither is He an European…. Whatever is consistent with the truth & principle of things, whatever increases love among men, whatever makes for the strength of the individual, the nation & the race, is divine, it is the law of Vaivaswata Manu, it is the sanātanah dharma & the Hindu Shāstra…. I seek a light that shall be new, yet old, the oldest indeed of all lights. I seek an authority that accepting, illuminating & reconciling all human truth, shall yet reject & get rid of by explaining it all mere human error. I seek a text & a Shāstra that is not subject to interpolation, modification & replacement, that moth & white ant cannot destroy, that the earth cannot bury nor Time mutilate. I seek an asceticism that shall give me purity & deliverance from self & from ignorance without stultifying God & His universe. I seek a scepticism that shall question everything but shall have the patience to deny nothing that may possibly be true. I seek a rationalism not proceeding on the untenable supposition that all the centuries of man’s history except the nineteenth were centuries of folly & superstition, but bent on discovering truth instead of limiting inquiry by a new dogmatism, obscurantism & furious intolerance which it chooses to call common sense & enlightenment; I seek a materialism that shall recognise matter & use it without being its slave. I seek an occultism that shall bring out all its processes & proofs into the light of day, without mystery, without jugglery… I seek… – the truth about Brahman, not only about His essentiality, but about His manifestation, not a lamp on the way to the forest, but a light & a guide to joy & action in the world, the truth which is beyond opinion, the knowledge which all thought strives after – yasmin vijñate sarvaṃ vijñātaṃ. I believe that Veda to be the foundation of the Sanātan Dharma; I believe it to be the concealed divinity within Hinduism, – but a veil has to be drawn aside, a curtain has to be lifted. I believe it to be knowable & discoverable. I believe the future of India & the world to depend on its discovery & on its application, not to the renunciation of life, but to life in the world & among men. [CWSA-12: 50-54, 61-62]

Bhārat Mitra nationalist Hindi daily published by Bal Mukund Gupta & Ambika Prasad Bajpai; suppressed by the Press Act of 1910.

Bharatachandra Raya (1712-60), the first writer of power & elegance in Bengali, a court poet of Raja Krishnachandra of Nadia (Bengal), who bestowed on him the title of Raya Guṇākara. Besides a trilogy entitled Annadamangal, his principal work, he also composed Vidyāsundar& Rasa-manjari.

Bhārathī, Suddhānanda (1893-1990), a yogi, a prolific writer & distinguished poet in Tamil & other languages. He practised yoga first under Raman Maharshi & then under Sri Aurobindo who renamed him Rādhānanda. An inmate of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from c. 1929 to 1951/52, his magnum opus Bhārathi Sakthi is an epic in which he seeks to convey Sri Aurobindo’s vision of a “super race” in terms of allegory & symbolism. This book won him in 1984 the first Rajrājan Award instituted by the Tamil University for the best creative work in Tamil. He also translated the whole of it into English & part of it into French.

Bhārati Bengali monthly started in 1878 & edited by Dvijendranath Tagore.

Bhārati, Subramania (1882-1921) also known as Chinnaswami Subramania Bhārathiyār, was born in the village of Ettayapuram (now Toothukudi), Tirunelveli district. He lost his mother at the age of five, & was brought up by his father. At fifteen (just a year before his father died) Bhārati was married to seven-year-old Chellamma. In Madras, he lived in Ramaswamy Street, Mannādy, George Town, Madras, the street where also lived Thyāga Aiyer & Veena Kuppu Aiyer (uncle & grandfather of Doraiswamy Iyer q.v.). Bhārati composed many of his powerful patriotic songs in Kuppaiyar’s house. Doraiswamy spent his boyhood with his grandfather & naturally became a life-long friend of Bhārati who was only eleven months younger & already a poet & musician. Inspired by Sri Aurobindo’s Bande Mataram, they & their friends sought the guidance of the spiritual & cultural knowledge of ancient India possessed by Ramana Maharshi’s foremost disciple Ganapati Muni, & formed a small nationalist group. It was Doraiswamy who, when Bhārati passed away, bore the funeral expenses. Though he passed an entrance exam for a job, Bhārati returned to Ettayapuram during 1901 & started as the court poet of Raja of Ettayapuram for a couple of years. He was a Tamil teacher from August to November 1904 in Sethupathy High School in Madurai. During this period, Bhārati understood the need to be well-informed of the world outside & took interest in the world of journalism & the print media of the West. Bhārati joined as Assistant Editor of Swadeshamitram, a Tamil daily in 1904. In December 1905, Bhārati attended the All India Congress session held in Benares under the presidentship of Gokhale where he came in contact with Annie Besant & Sister Nivedita. Bhārati joined the group of Tamil nationalists which included his colleague Srinivasachari (q.v.), Doraiswamy, & Chidambaram Pillai, that attended the 1907 Surat Congress – the most crucial turning point in the independence movement. He was then assistant editor of Swadeshamitram & India (q.v.) & also edited the English monthly Bāla Bhāratam (q.v.). In these newspapers he published his patriotic songs & poems along with scriptural hymns & Hindu philosophy. In 1908, with their arrest imminent, he & his associates moved to Pondicherry. Here he came in touch with Kulla Swami who imparted a powerful spiritual experience to him. Kula Swami was also a mentor of Doraiswamy. Several times the Swami who never stayed long in any place, once took up a unique sādhanā – he would walk to Tiruvannamalai to wordlessly worship Ramana Maharshi from outside his ashram, then return to do the same in front of Sri Aurobindo’s house at 41, Rue Francois Martin (later named Guest House); during this sādhanā, he once went up into Sri Aurobindo’s house & gave him a silent crucial spiritual hint. Bhārati & his colleagues continued to publish Bāla Bhāratham & India, & started Vijaya, a Tamil daily, & Suryodayam. The British stopped remittances & letters sent to these revolutionaries by normal post from British India to them & in 1909 banned the circulation of India & Vijaya in British India. However, their communications with friends & well-wishers in Madras continued, e.g. through couriers posing as beggars. In 1910, Bhārati, Srinivasachari & their close friends received Sri Aurobindo when he arrived in Pondicherry, arranged for his stay, & were regular visitors to his place for several years. A thought-provoking incident noted by an eye-witness N. Nagasami: “They used to meet in the evenings at Sri Aurobindo’s residence & discuss various subjects. On one occasion, a Bengali youth blurted out: ‘Tamils are inferior to Bengalis.’ That was all! Bhārathi flared up. His lips trembled, his eyes were sparks of Agni, his mind boiled over, his gaze fixed the impertinent youth: ‘To begin with you have no idea of Tamil, you have never lived in Tamil society, you are ignorant of its history & culture & its architecture, its achievements in modern scholarship, in science, in politics.... Don’t you know it is a Tamil who eliminated the notorious Ashe? Tamilians have given asylum to Aurobindo Babu & you all, & helped in easing his financial stringency.... In my opinion Tamilians, if not superior to Bengalis are at least their equals.’ Saying this Bhārathiyār banged his fist on the table.... Keenly listening to all this, Sri Aurobindo said with a smile, ‘All that Bhārati says is true; I accept it wholeheartedly.’ He also admonished the youth for speaking without due thought.” [Puduvail Deshabhaktagal, 1966, pp.62-33] Sri Aurobindo: The Dravidians of the south, though they no longer show that magnificent culture and originality which made them the preservers and renovators of the higher Hindu thought and religion in its worst days, are yet, as we all know, far more genuinely learned and philosophic in their cast of thought and character than any other Indian race. [SABCL 3:214]

K. Amrita: Because of Bhārati’s association with Sri Aurobindo & his immense respect & devotion for him, I felt in me a great inexplicable attraction to Bhārati. Every evening, a little after dark, Bhārati would go to Sri Aurobindo’s house…. Sri Aurobindo used to come out of his room & receive friends only after seven in the evening. An exception was made for close friends like Bhārati & Srinivasachari, who, at a very urgent need, could see him at any time of the day. Their visits to Sri Aurobindo’s house after seven had become a regular affair. Bhārati would visit without fail…. There was hardly any subject which they did not talk about…literature, politics, the various arts; they exchanged stories, even cracked jokes, laughed & had a lot of fun. In the absence of Srinivasachari their talks would no doubt disregard all limits of sect or cult…. Bhārati delighted in pouring out to Sri Aurobindo, all that he had read in the dailies, all about local affairs & happenings in the suburbs…. [The] moment Bhārati arrived in my life, they [my orthodox rites & rituals] began to crumble away; in his presence all rules & ceremonies, my Brahmin habits & customs slipped off from me…. Whether in Bhārati’s house or by the tanks or beside the big lake in my village, at the time of collective dining the so-called pariahs & the Brahmins would all sit together without any distinction of caste or creed & take their meals…. At times Bhārati made us hear what Sri Aurobindo had told him on the Shakti cult…. [“A Pilgrimage to Sri Aurobindo”, 1st edition 2015]

Three of Bhārati’s greatest works namely, Kuyil Pattu, Pāñchāli Shapatham & Kannan Pattu were composed during 1912. He also translated Vedic hymns, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra & Bhagavad Gita to Tamil. In November 1918, Bhārati left Pondicherry & entered British India at Cuddalore. He was arrested & imprisoned on 20 Dec. & released 14 December when he was released by the intervention of Annie Besant & C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar. He returned to Madras & though stricken by poverty & ill health, resumed editing Swadeshamitram. Employing novel ideas & techniques in his devotional poems, mostly using the Nondi Chindu metre used earlier by Gopalakrishna Bhārathiyār, Bhārati combined classical & contemporary elements & covered diverse subjects: Shakti, Kali, Vinayagar, Murugan, Sivan, Kannan, Allah, Jesus, Nationalism, love songs, children’s songs, songs of nature, glory of the Tamil language. He also translated speeches of Sri Aurobindo, Tilak, & Swami Vivekananda. In Pāñchāli Shapatham he compares Pāñchāli (Draupadi) with Bhārat Mātā, the Pandavas with nationalist Indians, the Kauravas with the British & Indian Moderates, & the Kurukshetra war with the independence movement. In 1910-20, he wrote about a new & free India….

Bhāravi 7^th century classical Sanskrit poet; some consider him, just on the strength of his Kirāta-arjūniya, almost the peer of Kālidāsa.

Bhārgava (the Vidarbhan) descendant of Bhrigu, he came to Rishi Pippalāda from Vidarbha in search of knowledge.

Bhartrihari Some researchers ascribe c.450-510, some c.570, & some c.651, as the period he lived in, while some believe there were two Bhartriharis: The author of Vākyapadīya (Words in a Sentence), the most outstanding work on the philosophy of language; & the poet of the philosophical trilogy Centuries of Verses: Shringāra shataka, Neeti shataka, & Vairāgya shataka. Some identify him as a brother of Raja Vikramāditya; some as the author of Vākyapadīya, & some a disciple of Yogi Goraksha Nath – but none is definite about which of these three wrote the Shatakas!

Bhāsha the earliest known dramatist, believed to have written thirteen plays, of which critics consider Svapna-vasavadatta the best.

Bhāskara There were two Bhāskaras recognized for their significant contributions in astronomy field. The first, a contemporary of Brahmagupta, was a leading exponent of the Āryabhatta I system of astronomy & wrote a commentary on this. The second, a leading astronomer & a leading mathematician, was born in 1114, & authored six important works including Lilāvati, Bijaganita, & Siddhanta-Shiromani. He also published a number of works on mathematical astronomy dealing with planetary motions, the lunar & solar eclipses, conjunctions of the planets with stars, principles of spherical trigonometry, & eclipse calculations.

Bhāskarānanda, Swami (1833-99) was born in the village in Kanpur, Rajasthan; at eight he learnt the elements of Sanskrit & completed his study on Panini at seventeen: studied Vedanta at Ujjaynie: took up Sanyāsa at twenty-seven under the name Bhāskarānanda (the Sun-enchanted): taking up the mauna-vrata, for several years he roamed along the banks of the Gungā with head uncovered for several hours under the sun: lived for several years at Hardwar, absorbed in the study of the Gita & the Upanishads, & later moved to Varanasi. No Raja or Maharaja coming to Vārānasi left without having his darshan.

Bhātkhande Vishnu Narayan (1875-1936), modernised the science of Hindustani music. The Mādhava Music College of Gwalior & Marris College of Music in Lucknow owe their existence to him.

Bhatpara an ancient seat of Sanskrit learning running several traditional Sanskrit schools or tols; it is a town in 24-Parganas east of the Hooghly.

Bhatta, Nagoji commentator on Chandi or Chandipātha, a 700-stanzed Tantric invocation & celebration of Goddess Durgā’s victories over the Asūras.

Bhattacharjee, Basanta printer & publisher of Yugantar, who in September 1907 was sentenced to 2 years’ rigorous imprisonment & fined Rs.1000.

Bhattacharya, Abinash Chandra (1882-1962) published Bartamān Rananīti (modern method of warfare), Mukti kon Pothe (Which Way Freedom?), & other books.

In his reminiscence on Sri Aurobindo in 1950, he wrote: – Towards the end of 1902…at a house at 108C Upper Circular Road in Calcutta…a thin young man called me inside & asked me to sit down…. [He] told me he was Aurobindo Ghose’s younger brother…. Sri Aurobindo had sent him to work along with Jatin-babu (see Banerji, Jatin)…. [We] began the work of collecting boys for the secret society. In the evenings we used to read & discuss all sorts of books on revolution & biographies of such men as Garibaldi, Cavour & Mazzini…. Opposite our house there was a big vacant lot; here the first akhāra was started for teaching the use of lāthi & gadkā, as well as horse-riding, cycling, etc. When the boys began to get numerous, it was decided, on Barrister P. Mitra’s advice, to delegate the charge of opening new akhāras of this type in different parts of Calcutta to Satish-babu, a resident of Bechu Chatterji Street. We handed over to him our two horses & all our lāthis & sticks…. In the early part of 1903, Aurobindo-babu…came [&] put up at Jatin-babu’s residence…. I did pranam to him & hardly had sat down before him when Barin said: “Sejda, his name is Abinash Bhattacharya, Bengal’s first volunteer.” I said, “I’m not the first…. Barin countered: “No…. You were the first person we found in Bengal, the first to give up everything & plunge into our work. So you are Bengal’s first volunteer.” With great concentration Aurobindo-babu looked into my eyes for a long time. I felt completely thrown off balance – it seemed as if he were wringing out my inmost being. I could neither shut my eyes nor avert them. My heart began to pound. Then Aurobindo-babu looked at my forehead, examined it by pressing; after this he looked at my eye-brows. He lifted my eyelids & looked. Suddenly he pushed my head down & began examining it by pressing. Finally he said: “Your first recruit is quite fine. He is a determined, faithful & silent worker.” In March 1906, Our Yugāntar appeared. A few days later, after settling all his affairs in Baroda, Aurobindo-babu joined us. [He] stayed in Raja Subodh Mullick’s house. I went to see him almost every day. One day he told me: “Abinash, I can’t stay here – can you arrange something else?”…. [I] rented a house on Chakku Khānsama Lane, where Barindra, I, Sarojini-didi, & others stayed with him for some time. Later we moved to No. 23 Scott’s Lane. Barindra did not stay at No. 23. Our work was steadily developing into something serious & so for reasons of security & convenience Aurobindo-babu divided it up. Barindra was to look after the bombs & so forth in the Muraripukur Garden. He would direct the bomb-section from there while I would be in charge of the publication-section…. In the house on Scott’s Lane, Aurobindo-babu stayed with his wife Mrinālini Devi, his sister Sarojini-didi & myself. After a while, I brought Sailen Bose too. I observed Aurobindo-babu’s day-to-day life very attentively…. Sometimes I borrowed from Mr Hemendraprasad Ghosh & then tried to pay him back at my convenience. Those who came in touch with Aurobindo-babu were captivated by his simple, childlike laughter & behaviour. Whenever I gave him a fond scolding, he broke out in laughter. On Shivarātri day, all of us fasted & went to Belur Math. When the evening prasād was distributed Aurobindo-babu noticed I was wondering whether to eat it or not, & said: “Eat up, eat up.” I replied: “I was wondering whether I should, since we’re fasting today.” He smiled: “But isn’t this the prasād of Ramakrishnadev? Eat it up quickly.”

All the sedition cases – against Yugāntar, Bande Mataram, Sandhyā, etc. – were heard by Kingsford. When I learned that the respected Manoranjan Guhā Thākurtā had decided to wind up his daily Navashakti, I told Aurobindo-babu that if he allowed me, I would speak to Manoranjan about taking over the charge of running the paper. Aurobindo-babu consented gladly. The very next day, I went to Manoranjan-babu’s house in Giridih & asked him to hand over the charge of the paper to me. He… said: “I will give you the whole press & everything else if you can save Navashakti.” ― “You don’t have to give it away; the press & everything having to do with Navashakti will still be yours. I will only manage it, you will be the editor. I just need four thousand rupees for the preliminary expenses. After this you won’t have to give anything else.” He thought a while & then said: “Fine, here is what remains of my capital.” In the last issue of Navashakti there was a notice that Abinash Bhattacharya had taken over the management of Navashakti & that for two weeks there would be no issue so that the new arrangements could be made. In two weeks’ time Navashakti would appear again in a new form, & so forth. Many handbills were distributed with the same information. After I returned from Giridih, we all left the house at Scott’s Lane & put up at the Navashakti office. Aurobindo-babu used to go to the Bande Mataram office from here. I got especially caught up in the preparations for the publication of Navashakti. Before two full weeks had passed (on 30 April 1908) the bomb exploded at Muzaffarpur. On the night of May 1^st at 8 o’clock, I brought five rifles & five bags of cartridges & kept them in a room downstairs on the ground floor. The reason I had brought this stuff – much against my wishes – was that someone was to take it from me. It had to be removed that very night. I waited anxiously for Aurobindo-babu, to ask him where to take it. He came at 10 o’clock at night. I told him everything including the possibility of our being arrested the next morning. For that evening I had gone to the Lal Bazar Police Court area to try to find out the reactions there to the Muzaffarpur bomb explosion. I told Aurobindo-babu what I had learned. He asked me to go to the Garden at once & ask Barindra to remove everything from the Navashakti office & to shift all the boys that were living at the Garden to another place that very night. I went to the Garden & brought back Barindra & six other workers. They took everything & disappeared. Our fears were realised. On the second of May, early in the morning, Aurobindo-babu, Sailen-babu & I were arrested from 23, Scott’s Lane. Barindra, Upen, Ullāskar & others were arrested at the same time at the Muraripukur Garden. This case against us was called the Alipur Bomb Case or the Manicktolla Bomb Case. In May 1909 Abinash was sentenced to transportation for life & sent with others to the Andamans. I was the first to return from the Andamans (May 1915). Almost four years later, Hem-da & Ullāskar came back. I met Aurobindo-babu again for the first time in fourteen years in Pondicherry. I was with him for a month. Every day we used to talk on various subjects.” [“Sri Aurobindo” in Mother India, July 2012, pp.528-39] ― Thereafter, Abinash was associated with many journals, including the Nārāyaṇa.

Bhatti Bhattikāvya or Rāvana-Vadha, a narrative poem of 22 cantos, written by Bhatti with the object of illustrating the rules & principles of grammar & rhetoric. The poem depicts the life-history of Lord Rāmachandra from his birth up to the time of Rāvana’s death. Some scholars attribute Bhattikāvya to Bhartrihari.

Bhavabhuti (c.700), dramatist, poet & author of three of the best extant dramas, Vīra-Charita, Uttara Rāma-Charita, & Mālati Mādhava. These plays, noted for their suspense & vivid characterisation, rival the outstanding plays of Kālidāsa. Bhavabhuti was the court-poet of King Yashovarman of Kanauj.

Bhawani Mandir a brochure written by Sri Aurobindo around 1902-05) for his brother Barindra to circulate among patriotic Indians willing to dedicate their lives & works to Bhawani – Mother of the Universe, Infinite Energy, Shakti, who is divine Knowledge & Love, Durga & Kali & Radha & Lakshmi. During his stay in Baroda in Sri Aurobindo’s house Barindra began experimenting with occultist practices like planchette & table-tapping. At times, Sri Aurobindo also joined. Once Sri Ramakrishna was called; he kept silent for a long time, then, while going he said, Mondir Gḥodo, Mondir Gḥodo – Make a temple, make a temple. Barindra took this mean that Sri Ramakrishna had advised them to build a temple to Bhawani Bhārati. At that time the idea of independence was dominant & it is possible that, influenced by Bankim Chandra’s inspiring historical fiction Ananda Math, Barindra decided to search for a suitable place in a forest or a mountain-top. He set out to find such a site in the Vindhya Mountains where they could build a temple to Bhawani & beside that an ashrama where dedicated freedom-fighters could reside in a spirit of complete sanyāsa helped in their work by those who could not renounce everything but were committed to the freedom of the motherland. But he could not find a suitable site & returned to Baroda with a severe mountain fever. However, his scheme eventually took shape in a miniscule form for the core of his revolutionary group at Manicktolla in a plot of land owned by him & his brothers. According to Sri Aurobindo Sri Ramakrishna’s exhortation was: “Make in yourself a temple to the Divine Mother; effect such a transformation of yourself that you become a living temple to Her.” Inevitably British C.I.D. added the booklet in its Rowlett Committee Report of 1917. [A.B. Purani’s Life of Sri Aurobindo, 1978]

Bheel(s)/ Bhils a hill-tribe referred to as Nishādhas in Vedic literature. In feudal times, many were employed in various capacities because of their knowledge of the terrain & expertise in guerrilla warfare. According to 2001 Census, they form the largest tribal group in India followed by the Gond tribe. Bheels are divided into a number of endogamous territorial divisions, which in turn have a number of clans & lineages. Officially listed as the Scheduled Caste of Ᾱdivāsies, the majority reside in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra & Rajasthan, some in Chhattisgarh & Tripura, & some perhaps in Andhra Pradesh & Karnataka. In Gujarat & Maharashtra, they are now mainly a community of settled farmers, with a significant minority who are landless agricultural labourers, a significant subsidiary occupation remains hunting & gathering. The majority are now Hindu, with the Nidhi & Tadvi Bheels following Islam, & few sub-groups in the Dangs region following Christianity.

Bhis(h)ma Bhīṣma was in reality Prabhāsa, the youngest of the eight Vāsūs (q.v.). Once, when they visited Maharshi Vasishtha’s ashram with their wives, compelled by his wife he & his brothers carried away Kāmadhenu, the wish-bearing cow of the Rishi. Cursed by the Rishi they were cast to earth but, relenting on their pleas, he granted the accomplices the boon of dying soon after birth but Prabhāsa was to endure lifelong earthly suffering. All eight were born as Gungā’s sons by King Shāntanu, the Kuru emperor who ruled from his capital Hastināpura. To fulfil the curse, she drowned the first seven into her waters, & transported Prabhāsa, whom she named Devavrata, into the higher realms. There he was taught the duties of kings (Dandaneeti) & other Shāstras by Bhrihaspati; all branches of knowledge by Shukrāchārya, son of Bhrigu & preceptor of the Asūras; the Vedas, Vedāṇgas, & other scriptures by Vasishtha & Chyavana; Anvikshiki, all mental & spiritual sciences, by Sanatkumāra, eldest son of Brahma; duties of Brāhmaṇas by Mārkandeya, who had acquired everlasting youth from Shiva; all forms of warfare by Parashurāma; & provided celestial weapons by the Devas. This made him an invincible warrior, capable of defeating four mahārathis (chariot-borne master-warriors) at once. The Devas named him Bhīṣma for the bhīṣma pratigyā (awesome oath) when in order that his father Shāntanu could marry Satyavati &, as demanded by her father, only her children could claim the throne, he renounced his birth right to his father’s throne, vowed to serve Satyavati’s progeny unto death as well as to never marry to eliminate the possibility of his progeny claiming the throne. A grateful Shāntanu granted him the boon of ichchā-mrityu by which he could choose the time of his death. ― In the Kurukshetra war, since he was too powerful to be defeated by anyone, Sri Krishna advised the Pandavas to beg him for a way out. Bhīṣma hinted that he would lay down his arms if he was forced to face Shikhandi who in his past life had been the princess Amba whom he had brought to Hastināpura to marry his half-brother Vichitravīrya (q.v.). When she refused since she was betrothed to a king she loved, he had returned her to her father, the King of Kāshi. After her fiancé refused to marry her, she had obtained the boon from Brahmā, to be born a man & kill Bhīṣma. Thus, on the tenth day of the battle, when Shikhandi stood beside Arjūna on his chariot & challenged him, Bhīṣma threw down his arms. After Arjunā’s arrows pierced his body, he fell on the ground with the arrows forming a bed under him. Arjūna made him a pillow of three of his arrows, &, to his thirst, shot an arrow into the earth for his mother Gungā to erupt from underground & quench her son’s thirst. On the last day of his life, on Sri Krishna asking him, Bhīṣma imparted his knowledge of the Rājadharma to Yudhishthīra who was soon to be crowned emperor.

Bhishmuc/ Bheeshmuc king of Vidarbha in the Bhōja dynasty of Chandra-Vamsha & his daughter Rukminie married Sri Krishna.

Bhōja(s) (1) proper name borne by several princes of Kanauj & Mālavā; (2) the royal designation applicable to the monarchs of the southern mid-region; (3) common name used by the people of a community in Berar.

Bhonsle dynasty founded by Chhatrapati Shivaji – a leading power in Marāthā Confederacy. Sri Aurobindo uses ‘Bhonsle’ an epithet of Bāji Prabhou (q.v.).

Bhopatkar Bhāskara Balwant (1874-1949), lawyer of Poona, who in 1905 started Bhālā, a Marathi weekly, in support of nationalism. The High Court of Bombay sentenced him 6 months’ rigorous imprisonment in February 1906.

Bhrig(o)u (Vāruni) a Vedic Rishi & one of the Prajāpatis; “the most august & venerable name in Vedic literature” [SABCL 27:152]. As son of Varuna, Bhrigu bears the patronymic Vāruni. He authored Brighu Samhita, & contributed to the Manusmriti addressed to the survivors of the Pralaya that destroyed the previous creation about 10,000 years ago. He married Daksha Prajāpati’s daughter Kayāti who bore him two sons & a daughter; his descendants are called Bhārgavas.

Bhrigūs semi-divine beings connected with Agni; producers or nourishers of Fire. In their work they are associated with the Āṇgirasas, Atharvāns, Ribhūs & other family of Rishis.

Bhrigu (Samhita) a voluminous work on astrology by Rishi Bhrigu. It is said to contain several thousand horoscopes depicting all possible relative positions of the nine planets, together with an account of the destiny of persons born or to be born at the time when the particular relative position shown in each chart occurred or will occur in future.

Bhūr/ Bhū/ Bhū(r)loka the material world, symbolically the physical consciousness. It is the lowest of the seven worlds of Purāṇas, & one of the three vyāhṛtis of the Vedas. Vyāhṛtis are the three mystical words uttered by Manu (the first Man) to have been milked from the Vedas by Prajāpatis – Bhūr from Rig, Bhūvah from Yajur, & Swar from Sāma – which became respectively Earth, Firmament, & Sky.

Bhuriśrava(s) son of Sōma Datta & an ally of the Kauravas.

Bhūvar/ Bhūvah/ Bhūvarloka the world of various becomings – symbolically the intermediate dynamic vital & nervous consciousness. It is the second lowest of the seven worlds of Purāṇas, & one of the three vyāhṛtis of the Vedas (see Bhūr).

The Bible the main written source of the life history of Jesus Christ is divided into two parts: the Old Testament & New Testament. The first, compiled in Hebrew from 13^th to 1^st century BC, contains 39 books (which are also Jewish scriptures) with a supplement of 14 books known as the Apocrypha. The second was written probably in Greek during the 1^st century AD. No original manuscripts of either survived. The first Latin translation-version of the whole Bible was done in the 4^th century by St. Jerome (c.347-419?), the Father of the Catholic Church. The first English translation-version of the New Testament done in 1382 & followed by many others – the chief among them is the Authorized or King James Bible of 1611. Controversies on the inerrancy of the Bible led the Roman Catholic Church to insist that only her interpretations published as notes on the text in its various editions are authentic, while the Protestants claim that individuals have Right to interpret it as they read it.

Sri Aurobindo: The letter of the Scripture binds & confuses, as the apostle of Christianity warned his disciples when he said that the letter killeth & it is the spirit that saves [for it] is only a verbal form of the inner self-luminous Reality which, being the infinite Truth is greater than its word…. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible & Koran, & the books of the Chinese, Veda & Upanishads & Purana & Tantra & Shāstra & the Gita itself & the sayings of thinkers & sages, prophets & Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there…. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the Knower of the eternal Veda. [SABCL Vol.13:86]

Bijoli Bengali political weekly edited by Nalinikanta Sarkar & Barindra Kumar Ghose, published from Calcutta; it appeared from 1920 to 1924.

Bijoy/ Bejoy/ Bijoy Kumar Nag (1892-1935) born at Rajshahi in 1892: arrested in 1908 in the Alipore Bomb Case: acquitted at the Sessions Court in 1909: accompanied Sri Aurobindo to Pondicherry in 1910. During the War (1914-18) he left French Pondicherry & was arrested by English police at Villupuram & confined until end of the war. He returned to Pondicherry but after some years left the Ashram & died at Khulna in February 1935.

Billingsgate oldest of London’s markets, by the River Thames at the north end of London Bridge. Since 16^th century, a fish market – hence “Billingsgate” was used to designate the coarse vituperation of scolding fishwives. It is now also used as a common noun meaning “abuse” or “violent invective”.

Bilwamangal a well-known Vaishnava saint of South India, son of a devout Brahmin, Ramdas. He had received a devotional education from his father. But after the death of his parents Bilwamangal fell into bad society & got completely engrossed in the love of a prostitute, Chintamani, till one day a biting reproach from her for his blind infatuation, suddenly opened his eyes & his love turned towards God with the same intensity of emotion. Once again, however, the sight of a beautiful woman gave him a jolt, but soon after he came to himself. Holding his eyes responsible for the slip he pierced them each with a thorn & became blind, Sri Krishna himself used to come to him as a boy to provide him food, & one day led him to Vrindāvana.

Binyon, Laurence Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) was born in Lancaster, Lancashire. He took up drawing & painting seriously when still at St. Paul’s School where he formed a life-long friendship with classmate Manmohan Ghose. Both, promising poets, went up to Oxford to read Classics (Honour Moderations) – Ghose to Christ Church in 1887 & Binyon to Trinity in 1888. At that time, Sri Aurobindo, while preparing for King’s open entrance scholarship in Classics, showed them his translations from Latin & Greek into English, & vice-versa, & his translation of a Greek poem entitled Hecuba upon which they encouraged him to take up poetry. In 1890 Binyon took a first-class degree in classical moderations; & published four poems in a volume called Primavera: Poems by Four Authors – the three other young Oxford undergraduates were Manmohan, Binyon’s cousin Stephen Phillips, & Arthur Shearly Cripps (1869-1952), who joined Huddleston Theological College & settled in Southern Rhodesia in 1902 to propagate the Gospel. Primavera was reviewed favourably by Oscar Wilde in the Pall Mall Gazette. In 1891, his poem “Persephone” was awarded the Newdigate Prize, & in 1892, he obtained a second-class degree in litterae humainoires. Immediately after graduating in 1893, Binyon started working for the Department of Printed Books of the British Museum, writing Exhibition catalogues for the museum & art monographs for himself, & published his first book of poetry Lyric Poems (1894). Manmohan, who had returned to India in 1894 & maintained a correspondence for some years, inspired Binyon’s poem “Asoka or The Indian Prince” in 1900, & introduced Binyon to Rabindranath Tagore & his poetry. In 1895 Binyon moved into the Museum’s Department of Prints & Drawings under Campbell Dodgson. In 1909, he became its Assistant Keeper. In 1910, he joined the India Society in London, designed to promote Indian Fine Art, where he became friends with Coomaraswamy who introduced him to Rajput paintings. In June 1912, he met Tagore at William Rothenstein’s house & became his lifetime admirer. In 1913, on the death of Poet Laureate Alfred Austin, British Media counted him with Hardy, Masefield, & Kipling as the likely successor to the post which finally went to Robert Bridges. ― Moved by the high number of casualties in the first few weeks of the War, Binyon wrote For the Fallen, with its Ode of Remembrance (as its 3^rd or 4^th or simply the 4^th stanza became known) referring to the rear-guard action of the British Expeditionary Force during the retreat from Mons in late August & the Battle of Le Chateau on 26^th August, & its participation with the French Army in holding up the Imperial German Army at the First Battle of the Marne between 5^th & 9^th September 1914. For the Fallen became a touchstone, frequently anthologized & inscribed on war monuments throughout England. The fourth stanza came to him first:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun & in the morning

We will remember them.

Binyon volunteered in 1915 at the British Hôpital Temporaire d’Arc-en-Barrois, Haute-Marne, France. He lost several close friends & his brother-in-law in the war. He returned in the summer of 1916 & took care of soldiers taken in from the Verdun battlefield. He was named a Chevalier of French Foreign Legion & on 11 November 1985, was among 16 Great War poets including Rupert Brooke, commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. ― Shortly before the Armistice, in November 1918, Binyon met Kedar Nath Das Gupta in London. Das Gupta, a friend of Tagore’s, was organizer of the Union of the East & West. He had prepared a rough translation of Śākuntalam, which he wished to put on the stage; Binyon agreed to rewrite Kālidāsa’s play for the stage, & two performances were put on in November 1919. After the war he returned to the British Museum & wrote numerous books on art; in particular on William Blake, Persian art, & Japanese art. Binyon’s duality of interests continued the traditional interest of British visionary Romanticism in the rich strangeness of Mediterranean & Oriental cultures. In 1920, Binyon gave the inaugural address for the Indian Students’ Union & Hostel opened in Gower Street. Another connection to India was realized through Binyon’s introduction to the Indian artist, Mukul De’s My Pilgrimages to Ajanta & Bagh, Mukul). When Manmohan Ghose died in 1924, his daughter Lotika & brought his manuscripts to Binyon in England. Binyon to write a lengthy introductory memoir for Ghose’s poems published in 1926 under the title Songs of Love & Death. But he could not manage to visit India in his lifetime, despite the desires he expressed to the Oxford Majlis society in 1929. Binyon was often described as a perfectionist. His most memorable poems are considered to be For the Fallen, In Memory of George Calderon, & Ypres. He died in Dunedin Nursing Home, Bath Road, Reading, on 10 March 1943 after an operation. A funeral service was held at Trinity College Chapel, Oxford; a slate memorial was made in St. Mary’s Church, Aldworth, where Binyon’s ashes were scattered; & the Oxford Majlis passed a resolution in his honour as a ‘lifelong friend’ of India. [This England, autumn, 1993:18-21]

Bipāsha Vipāshā, one of the five rivers of Panjab, now called the Beas.

Biren Roy, a spy who had infiltrated Sri Aurobindo’s household as a servant of Nāgen Nag, a cousin of Bijoy Nag who had come with Sri Aurobindo in April 1910. Nāgen was allowed because he had TB & doctor had advised him move to a resort on the sea or a hill. Nāgen & Biren came in July 1913. The next year, when exposed, Biren went back.

Birkbeck, George (1776-1841), English physician who pioneered schools for workmen. In 1823, he helped found the London Mechanic’s Institution of which he was president until his death. In 1907 the institution was renamed Birkbeck College.

Birkenhead Frederick Edwin Smith, 1^st Earl of Birkenhead (1872-1930), a very successful English lawyer, orator, & statesman who was Secretary of State for India (1924-28) in Baldwin’s 2^nd ministry. On 25 March 1925, Das issued a manifesto condemning unreservedly all acts of violence for political purposes [see Chittaranjan]. On the 29th, at Lord Lytton (Lt.-Gov. Bengal)’s behest Das publicly declared: “...I am opposed to the principle of political assassination... if violence is to take root in the political life of our country it will be the end of our Swaraj.... I equally abhor any form of [Govt.] repression, [for] it will only encourage political assassination.” A pleased Birkenhead publicly promised to consider any constructive proposals Das could make. This Das did in his last public speech, “Swaraj & Dominion Status”, given as President of the Faridpur Conference on 2^nd May. After consulting Viceroy Reading, Birkenhead announced he would “make an important announcement” on 7 July. But to India’s misfortune Das died on 16 June. Promptly Gandhi stymied the constructive goal Das & Birkenhead had initiated, by pulling out the Swaraj Party (q.v.) then under Motilal Nehru from any further dialogue with Govt. & intensifying his own disruptive agenda. In October, Reading regretted “We have lost the chance of reconciliation with C.R. Das’s death.” Early in 1926 Gandhi thrust the Swaraj Party into suspended animation by ordering its members elected to Govt. councils to resign from the Central Assembly. [Based on Durga Das, Hemendranath Das Gupta, & R.C. Majumdar]

Birley District Magistrate of 24-Parganas who committed the accused in the Alipore Bomb Case to the Sessions Court.

Birrell Augustine (1850-1933), English Chief Secretary for Ireland (1907-16), dismissed for failing to prevent Irish nationalists’ Easter Week revolt in Dublin.

Bis(h)abriksha (Poison-Tree) a Bengali novel (1873) by Bankim Chandra.

Bismarck, Otto von (1815-98), first chancellor of the German Empire.

Bitōṣtā Bengali accent of Vitastā, the ancient river which flows through Kashmir & Punjab.

Black Hundred(s) ‘League of the Russian People’, organization of anti-Semitic groups formed during the 1905 revolution with off-the-record approval of the Czar. Black Hundreds, primarily landlords, rich peasants, bureaucrats, police officials & clergymen, staged raids against revolutionary groups, & organized massacre of Jews.

Blake, William (1757-1827), English poet, painter, engraver, & visionary.

Blavatsky, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91), born at Ekaterinoslav: daughter of Col. Peter Hahn of a noble family of Mecklenburg, settled in Russia: married at 17 a husband of 60 but soon separated: travelled widely, in Europe, America & Asia round the Cape to Bombay: after an unsuccessful attempt to enter Tibet via Nepal, she entered it in disguise in 1855 via Kashmir, was lost in the desert & brought back to the frontier: after numerous adventures & further travel in India, she went to USA in 1873 & studied spiritualism: in 1875 founded, with Col. Alcott, the Theosophical Society, wrote books & pamphlets promoting Theosophy, an occult philosophical-religious system. Theosophists believe in a pantheistic evolutionary process integrating deity, cosmos, & self. She came to India in 1879 & established a Theosophical temple at Ādyār near Madras. [Buckland]

Bloomfield Murder Case Early in August Justices Mitter & Fletcher) of the Calcutta High Court annulled the death sentences pronounced by the Sessions judge on four bonded labourers for the death of a certain Bloomfield. On 14^th, Bande Mataram commented: “Cases like this Bloomfield murder raise a crucial point. When the whole basis of a political system is the despotic rule of a small alien handful over the immense indigenous numbers, it is an essential condition of its continuance that the persons of the foreigners should be held sacred…. While therefore there may be two opinions among Anglo-Indians as to the advisability of allowing European murderers of Indians to go free, there can be no two opinions on the necessity of avenging every loss of a European life by the execution of as many Indians as the police can lay their hands upon…. Terrorism is indispensable, whether it be the naked, illegal & unashamed terrorism of Denshawi or terrorism in the fair disguise of legal forms & manipulating for its own purposes the Criminal Procedure Code & the Evidence Act.” On 28^th, a London news-report: “The planters at Behar, the cradle of Buddhism, are incensed by the judgment of the Calcutta High Court annulling the death sentences pronounced by the Sessions judge on the murderers of Mr Bloomfield, the owner of an indigo factory. For refusing to accede to the demand of a number of villagers to change their names in the Kacheri registers Mr Bloomfield was assaulted & left senseless, dying a few hours later without regaining consciousness. Of seven men arrested four were sentenced to the extreme penalty, against which the successful appeal was made.” [S/a Pouchepadass’ Champāran & Gandhi, OUP]

Blotton character in Dickens’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

Blunt, Wilfrid W. Scawen Blunt (1840-1922), English poet whose sympathy for weak & oppressed led him to champion Indian, Egyptian, & Irish home rule.

Boadicea poem in galliambics by Tennyson. Boadicea or Boudicca was an English queen who died in the year 60 while leading a revolt against Roman rule.

Boccaccio Giovanni (1313-75), Italian poet & novelist, author of the Decameron.

Bodas/ Ghose Committee a provincial conference convened by (Mahādev Rajaram?) Bodas & Sri Aurobindo in 1908 after the Moderates split Congress at Surat, to devise ways & means to uphold the 1906 Calcutta Resolutions while re-establishing unity in the Congress.

Bodhisattva In the Mahayana School, Buddhists or saints, who have qualified themselves to attain Nirvana in this life but voluntarily forego that state in order to help their fellowmen to attain it, are called Bodhisattvas. They receive veneration, respect, & worship like that given to Gautama Buddha himself. “Love is the turning of the Self from its false self in the mind or body to its true Self in another…. So is it finally with the lover of the whole world, of whom the mighty type is Buddha, the one unapproachable ideal of Divine Love in man, he who turned from perfect divine bliss as he had turned from perfect human bliss that not he alone but all natures might be saved. To see your Self in all creatures & all creatures in your Self – that is the unshakable foundation of all religion, love, patriotism, philanthropy, humanity, of everything which rises above .selfishness & gross utility.” [SABCL Vol.12:484]

Boeotian of Boeotia, a district of ancient Greece, with a distinctive military, artistic, & political history. It lay north of Attica. The Athenians taunted the Boeotians with being dull & slow-witted. So the word Boeotian has come to mean “dull (person)”.

Boer(s) name applied to South Africans of Dutch or Huguenot descent, especially to early settlers of the Transvaal & the Orange Free State. Imperial Britain ignited the Boer War (1899-1902), defeated the natives & settlers & created the Union of South Africa.

Boiardo Matteo Maria, Conte Boiardo (1441-94), Italian poet writing in Latin & Italian.

Boithorini(e)/ Bhogavat(h)ie Vaitarini, the river to be crossed, before Pātāla-lōkas can be entered; “the Ganges of the dead”, in the Pātāla-lōkas; “the river dolorous”, described as being filled with blood, ordure, & all sorts of filth, & as flowing with great impetuosity. Bhōgavati is the lōka of the Nāgas in Pātāla.

Bolingbroke Henry St. John, 1^st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), prominent in the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14); later a major propagandist in opposition to the Whigs.

Bomba, King Ferdinand II, Bourbon king of Naples (1830-59), called “Bomba” on account of his bombardment of Messina in 1848.

Bombay On the morning of 6^th February 1893, as soon as S.S. Carthage (that brought Sri Aurobindo back to India) entered the Aura of his motherland, the great Tamas that had had rushed into him & enveloped him all through his 14-year stay in England, fell off like a cloak. The ship cast anchor at about 4.25 p.m. IST. From the moment he stepped on Indian soil at Apollo Bunder, Sri Aurobindo stated in a letter to a disciple on 28 April 1949, “I began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner & infinite bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Infinite pervading material space & the Immanent inhabiting material objects & bodies. At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds & planes with influences & an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence & all that lies between them. For me all is Brahman & I find the Divine everywhere.” Sri Aurobindo was taken to Sardar Majumdar’s mansion which was situated in close proximity to the Apollo Bunder. The mansion, afterwards used as an annexe of the Esplanade, was close to the ‘Esplanade hotel’ – a ‘Watson’s hotel’, one of the principal hotels in India, while the Great Western Hotel was on Apollo Street. At the Church Gate Station (then housing the Headquarters of the Western Railways), built in 1876, he boarded the train to Baroda which deposited him at Baroda Railway Station on 8^th February 1893. [For a word-sketch of that part of Bombay in 1892, see The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes by Jamyang Norbu.]

Bombay Chronicle English daily founded in 1913 by Pherozshah Mehta as an organ of the Moderates & edited by B.G. Horniman.

Bombay University The first Indian Universities were created in 1857 by Charles John Canning (1812-62), then Gov.-Gen. of India under the East India Company, & from1^st November 1858, Great Britain’s first Governor General–cum–Viceroy of India on the model of the University of London – they were set up in Calcutta (then capital of British India), Madras, & Bombay. That they were in effect a fleshing out the xenophobic Minute on Education by Macaulay which just 22 years before had laid the seed of India’s debilitating Anglo-phobia, is proved by the fact that they were merely affiliated & examining bodies with a nominated Vice-Chancellor, who held office on an honorary basis, & was to act with the advice & consent of a Senate & a Syndicate. The earlier Vice-Chancellors were all Europeans while the European Governor of the province was, as its Chancellor, the ultimate authority. In 1859, an Education Department was set up to administer & supervise all education institutions. [Based on S. Bhattacharya; R.C. Majumdar et al, History & Culture of the Indian Peoples, vol. X, part II: 50-60; See also Baroda College, & Calcutta University]

“In the last letter that Sir George Clarke (later Lord Sydenham of Combe) wrote to the Vice-Chancellor on 4^th July 1912, besides making some suggestions which could not be rejected, it was as if he was lending justification for the actions that embroiled his tenure as the Governor of Bombay Presidency…. During his entire tenure (1907-13), in fact, Lord Sydenham, perhaps Lord Curzon in miniature, had raised hornet’s nest in his dealing with the University & its affairs that made him most unpopular in Western India…. His administration made a series of ‘suggestions’, covertly & overtly, that ‘the courses of study of the University were too antiquated & inadequate to meet the demands of a scientific & industrial age’; he attempted to dabble in the curriculum that made the nationalist Senators & Syndics of the University, some of whom (such as Sir Pherozshah Mehta q.v., & G.K. Gokhale q.v.) were acknowledged national leaders, not only to deplore the attempt but on the contrary they did smell foul.... Though Sir George had taken over the reins of administration in the late 1907, it was only after Dr. F.G. Selby’s retirement in late 1908 that he chose to make those ‘suggestions’ which Vice-Chancellor Sir Narayan Chandavarkar (q.v.) found difficult to dodge.” [Aruna Tikekara’s, Cloister’s Pale: A Biography of the University of Bombay]

Bonnerji, Umesh Chandra Bonnerjee Woomesh Chandra (1844-1906) an anglicised barrister of Calcutta High Court & vocal advocate of British connection, hence the first choice of the retired English civilians (ICS men) to ‘preside’ over the inaugural Session (Bombay, 1885) of the so-called Indian National Congress.

Booth, ‘General’ William Booth (1829-1912), English religious leader, founder & first ‘general’ of the Salvation Army charged with salvaging the souls of pagans.

Borderers a tragedy by Wordsworth composed in 1795-96.

Borgia, Caesar Cesare Borgia (c.1476-1507), Italian soldier & politician, & his father, Pope Alexander VI, enhanced the political power of the papacy. His policies led his Machiavelli to cite him as an example of his Il principe, ‘the Prince’ (q.v.).

Bose, Anandamohan (1847-1906), graduate of Presidency College, Calcutta with First Class First in mathematics (1867) & first Indian ‘wrangler’ of Cambridge University (1873): called to the Bar in London: founder-president of Indian Association (1876): a convener of Indian National Conference (1883): founder-member of Indian National Congress, he presided over its Madras Session (1898): first president of Sādhāran Brahmo Samāj: active in Anti-Partition agitation & Swadeshi movement: laid foundation of the Federation Hall (q.v.).

Bose, Bhupal Chandra (1861-1937) entered Govt. service in 1888: agricultural officer for 28 years in Bengal & Assam: collaborated with his friend Girish Chandra Bose in founding Bangabāsi School & College in 1886. In April 1901, he gave his eldest daughter Mrinālini in marriage to Sri Aurobindo – a match arranged by Girish Chandra. The marriage took place at Baithak-khānā Road, Calcutta, in one of the houses belonging to the Hatkholā Dutt family. Byomkesh Chakravarty (q.v.), Lord Sinha (q.v.), & Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose & his wife attended the marriage. It was performed according to Hindu rites. During a serious illness of his, Sri Aurobindo stayed in Bhupal Chandra’s house in Calcutta from October to December 1906. After Sri Aurobindo left Calcutta for Pondicherry in 1910, Mrinālini spent the rest her life with her parents at Shillong & Ranchi. In 1918, Bhupal babu, decided to take Mrinālini to Pondicherry. Since the Govt. finally granted permission he brought her to Girish babu’s residence in Calcutta at 123, Lower Circular Rd., (since demolished). But she fell a victim to the scourge of influenza which was raging everywhere, & passed away on 17 December.

On 19^th February 1919, Sri Aurobindo wrote the following letter to Bhupal babu:

“My dear Father-in-law, I have not written to you with regard to this fatal event in both our lives: words are useless in face of the feelings it has caused, if even they can ever express our deepest emotions. God has seen good to lay upon me the one sorrow that could still touch me to the centre. He knows better than ourselves what is best for each of us, & now that the first sense of the irreparable has passed, I can bow with submission to His divine purpose. The physical tie between us is, as you say, severed; but the tie of affection subsists for me. Where I have once loved, I do not cease from loving. Besides she, who was the cause of it, still is near though not visible to our physical vision. . . . It is needless to say much about the matters of which you write in your letter. I approve of everything that you propose. Whatever Mrinālini would have desired, should be done, & I have no doubt that this is what she would have approved of. I consent to the chūdis being kept by her mother; but I should be glad if you would send me two or three of her books, especially if there are any in which her name is written. I have only of her, her letters & a photograph.” [SABCL 27:422]

Bhupal babu first visited the Ashram in 1930 for the February Darshan. On seeing Sri Aurobindo he made an sāshtāṇga-dandavata praṇām later, asked how he could do this to his son-in-law, he exclaimed, “Son-in-law? It was Nārāyaṇa Himself to whom I was offering my praṇāms!” He returned that year for the November Darshan; in 1933 he came early in August & left after the November Darshan, & the next year stayed here from August to October. [A.B. Purani’s Life of Sri Aurobindo, 1978; Shailendra Nath Basu, Sri Aurobinder Sohodhormini Mrinālini Debir ShmritiKotha, 1917, p.17; Nirodbaran, Mrinālini Devi, Sri Mira Trust, 1988, pp.19-21; K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s Sri Aurobindo p.365fn]

Bose/ Basu, Bhupen(dranath) (1859-1924), advocated boycott of British goods during the anti-Partition campaign: 1914, president of INC session at Madras: 1915, joined Annie Besant in appealing for inclusion of Tilak in INC: 1917, appointed Member & Undersecretary in the Council of the Secretary of State for India: 1923, member of Executive Council of the Governor of Bengal: 1924, Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University.

Bose, Debabrata/ Devabrata Bose/ Devavrata (c.1879-1918), member ‘Yugantar’ revolutionary group, a real editor/ columnist of the Yugantar, he was a master of Bengali prose. After his acquittal in the Alipore Bomb Case, he joined the Ramakrishna Mission & as Swami Prajñānanda contributed to its journals.

Bose, Dr. Sir Jagadish Chandra (1858-1937), born in Dacca district, educated at St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, graduated with Honours from Cambridge 1884, awarded Doctor of Science by Cambridge Univ. 1896, was Professor of Physical Sciences at Presidency College, Calcutta (1885-1915), founded in 1917, the Bose Research Institute, Calcutta of which he was director till his death. Blacklisted by Govt. for being a prominent nationalist when the topmost scientists in England expressed great admiration of him & his discoveries in physiology, Whitehall wired to the Viceroy: “the little man, who is undoubtedly the foremost scientific authority amongst the educational officers of the Indian Govt.… receives, however, the native salary, only two-thirds of the salary of an European”, & hoped Viceroy’s “ingenuity could suggest some other means of meeting his merits” than equal salary with Europeans in Education Dept. in India. Bose authored Response in the Living & the Non-Living (1902); Plant responses (1906) & Motor Mechanism of Plants (1928).

Bose, G.C./ Girish Bose/ Girish Babu Girish Chandra Bose (1853-1939), friend of Sri Aurobindo’s father-in-law Bhupal Chandra Bose, his relations with Bhupal Babu since 1883 were so intimate that to most of their acquaintances the latter was known as his younger brother. After his return from Europe where he had gained considerable experience in the new methods of education, Girish babu founded in 1886, in collaboration with Bhupal Chandra Bose, the Bangabāsi School which was the following year transformed into a college. He looked after Bhupal babu’s daughter Mrinālini’s education while she was in Calcutta. It was he who negotiated her marriage & did everything in connection with that ceremony; & it was under his roof that Mrinālini passed away.

Bose, Jogendra/ Boromama eldest son of Rajnarayan Bose; maternal uncle of Sri Aurobindo, addressed by him as Boromama.

Bose, Nandalal (1882-1966), disciple of Abanindranath Tagore, exceptional artist & teacher at Santiniketan, founder of School of New Calcutta Art, & devout Gandhian.

Bose, Premtosh (d.1912), promoter of Jamalpur’s Union of Railway Workmen, he donated most of his property to fund Bengal’s Swadeshi & revolutionary movements.

Bose, Rajnarayan (1826-99) Sri Aurobindo’s maternal grandfather. To turn the anglicised English-educated Bengalis towards their own culture & customs, he issued a Prospectus for the Establishment of a Society for the Promotion of National Feeling among the Educated Natives of Bengal in 1861. Its most significant trait was an intense love of the motherland, based on a conception of its past greatness & future potentialities. Another movement he inspired, the Hindu Mela, was chiefly organised by Nabagopal Mitra. Its object was to encourage the use of indigenous products, the revival of Indian industries & handicrafts, Indian methods of physical culture & the feeling of national self-respect & self-reliance.

Bose, Rāshbehari (1885-1945), the only front-rank Indian revolutionary whom the police force of the British Empire could never capture. Educated at Dupleix College, Chandernagore he returned there after a short stint of Govt. service in Shimla came in touch with Amar Chatterjee & Srish Ghose (q.v.) of the Yugāntar group & so with Jatin Bannerji & the Calcutta group under Barindra. When Barindra’s group were arrested he took up a job in Dehra Dun Forest Research Institute picking up the links formed by Jatin in Punjab & Delhi. When Govt. shifted India’s capital from Calcutta to Delhi he planned an attack on Hardinge. At his request Amar & Srish sent Basanta of their group. Bose’s complicity in the assassination attempt of 23 Dec. 1912 was known by the police, but they could only charge him for it & the Delhi, Lahore, & Benares Conspiracy cases of 1913-14. In 1915, Bose escaped to Japan where he took a prominent part in organising Subhash Bose’s Azad Hind Fauj. He died there on 21 January 1945.

Bose, Sailen(dra) (c.1888-1977), sentenced to 3 months’ rigorous imprisonment in the Yugantar case in 1907. In the Manicktolla Conspiracy case in 1909 he was awarded transportation for life by the Sessions Court, but the sentence was reduced to 5 years’ rigorous imprisonment after an appeal to a third judge (Harrington) at the High Court stage.

Bose, Satyendra (1882-1908), son of a younger brother of Rajnarayan Bose. A native of Midnapore, heading its group of National Volunteers, he was also an undertrial prisoner in at Alipore. He & Kanailal shot dead Noren Gossain & were hanged.

Bose, Sudhira (1889-1920) sister of Debabrata Bose, & classmate of Mrinālini Devi, with whom she lived in close intimacy till Mrinālini’s death in 1918. Sudhira Bose, following her brother, joined the Ramakrishna Mission, & worked as a teacher in the Sister Nivedita School, becoming its head after Sister Christine left for America shortly before World War I. She was killed in a railway accident at Benares.

Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne (1627-1704), French bishop, spokesman for Rights of the French Church against papal authority, chiefly remembered for his literary works.

Boswell, James (1740-95), Scottish biographer for his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

Botha, General Louis Botha (1862-1919), soldier & first prime minister of the Union of South Africa, a staunch advocate of reconciliation between Boers & Britons.

Bothie (of Tober-na-Veduolic) poem in hexameters, one of the major works of Arthur Clough (q.v.), originally called The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (1848). In spite of its occasional humorous touches the poem is essentially preoccupied with social problems.

Botticelli Sandro (1445-1510), one of the greatest of early Renaissance Florentine painters whose “Birth of Venus” & “Primavera” express to modern viewers the spirit of the Renaissance itself.

Boutros Pasha Butrus Ghali, a Coptic premier of Egypt, killed in 1910 few days after the General Assembly quashed his bill to extend Suez Canal Co.’s 99-year franchise by 40 years.

Bradlaugh Charles (1833-91), English social reformer, secularist, & Liberal M.P., who attended the 1889 Congress Session at Bombay. Since its inception in 1885, the sycophantic Congress had repeated begged for a representation in the administration, the only result of which was catching the fancy of Bradlaugh & opportunists like him in that ‘Mother of All Parliaments’. Bradlaugh attended the 1889 annual Congress session held at Bombay. In that session Tilak moved an amendment to the resolution of Congress Big Guns praying for a skeleton scheme “for the reform & reconstruction of the Council of the Gov.-Gen. for making Laws & Regulations, & the Provincial Legislative Councils”. His plea was that as indirect representation had been adopted in the Provincial Councils, the natural sequel was that the Provincial Councils should elect the Imperial Council. This amendment, supported by G.K. Gokhale, was defeated on the ground that this delegation of the function of the electorate to the Provincial Legislatures would be illegal. Bradlaugh deluded the loyalist members by a sugary speech & they prayed to him to table a Bill in Parliament embodying their resolution. The shrewd Brit avoided committing himself by speaking of the possibility of the Govt. of Gladstone, his Liberal prime minister, introducing the Bill. A deputation of Congress representatives visited England to press for the consideration of the British public, the political reform which it prayed for. A journal called India (q.v.) was started in London in 1890 “to place before the British public the Indian view of Indian affairs.” The India Councils Act that Gladstone passed in 1892, the INC claimed, “yielded partly” to its 7-year old prayer for “reform & reconstruction” of the Imperial & Provincial Councils. In Sri Aurobindo’s view, instead of learning from the 700-year-old Irish struggle not to appeal to the British sense of justice but to their own sense of manhood, the INC was crowing over a mere sleight-of-hand, for what Gladstone had yielded was “a loaf of plaster-of-Paris” with an assurance that his Govt. “would do its best to make plaster-of-Paris taste exactly like wheat.” The British, he warned INC in 1893, innovate their political institutions only to suit their immediate needs; they are not exactly panting to do justice to all whom they have to govern, though they liked to think themselves, & to be thought by others, just & a moral. Yet INC wallowed in eulogies while muttering toothless protests & pitiable petitions but “failed to secure any substantial grant of political reforms” until 1905.

Bradlaugh Hall in Lahore

Bradley Francis Herbert (1846-1924), English philosopher of the Idealist school which based its doctrines on Hegel.

Brahmā the Eternal’s Personality of Existence, the Power of the Divine that stands behind formation & the creation. “Brahmā, Vishnu, & Shiva, are only three Powers & Personalities of the One Cosmic Godhead…. All three are often spoken of as creating the universe – even Shiva who is by tradition the Destroyer.” [SABCL 22:390-91]

The Vedas & Brāhmaṇas describe Brahmā as born of Hiraṇyagarbhā, the Golden Egg; they name him variously as Prajāpati, Brāhmaṇaspati etc. The Shatapatha Brāhmaṇa says that Brahma was born of the Supreme Being Brahman & the female energy known as Maya. Wishing to create the universe, Brahman first created the water, in which he placed his seed. This seed transformed into a golden egg, from which Brahma appeared. For this reason, Brahma is also known as ‘Hiraṇyagarbhā’. Later scriptures describe him as self-born out of a lotus that issued from Lord Vishnu’s navel, hence often depict him as seated on a lotus. The Vedas are attributed to Brahmā, & he is thus regarded as the father of Dharma. In order to help him govern the universe he created, he gave birth to his Mānasputras (mind-born sons) – the eleven Prajāpatis (forefathers) & the Saptarishis.

Brahmā presides over Brahmalōka. The universe he creates is believed to exist for a single Brahmakalpa (a year equivalent to four billion earth-years) at the end of which it gets dissolved in a Pralaya, 100 such years is said to Brahma’s lifespan. After Brahma’s “death”, it is necessary that another 100 of his years pass until he is reborn & the whole creation begins anew. The Linga Purana says that Brahmā’s life is divided in one thousand cycles or Mahā Yugas. Note: Brahmā, nominative of the masculine noun Brahman, is not to be confused with Brahman, the neuter noun, which is the Ultimate Reality.

Brahmacharya Sri Aurobindo: The sex-energy utilised by Nature for the purpose of reproduction is in its real nature a fundamental energy of Life. It can be used not for the heightening but for a certain intensification of the vital-emotional life; it can be controlled & diverted from the sex-purpose & used for aesthetic & artistic or other creation & productiveness or preserved for heightening of the intellectual or other energies. Entirely controlled it can be turned into a force of spiritual energy also. This was well known in ancient India & was described as the conversion of retas into ojas by Brahmacharya. Sex-energy misused turns into disorder & disintegration of the life-energy & its powers. [SABCL Vol. 24:1516]

Manomohan Gangopadhyaya: In 1909, after his acquittal, I once invited Sri Aurobindo for lunch. He came with a shawl draped over his shirt, & had a shaggy beard.... We discussed whether one can maintain brahmacharya after marriage. I was of the opinion that one can’t. He was explaining how it was in fact possible. I was curious to know whether Sri Aurobindo himself maintained it but could not muster the courage to ask him. After a while he told me, “I can see what is in your mind. You are eager to know whether I have sexual relations with my wife or not. I don’t. I have been able to maintain my brahmacharya even after marriage.” [Shruti-Smriti, part I, 1927, p.13] ― Abinash Bhattacharya: I asked Aurobindo-babu him one day: “Sejda, on the one hand you practise the austerities of yoga & on the other you sleep in one bed with your wife. What kind of austerity is that?” Smiling sweetly he said: “It is not simply by sharing a bed with one’s wife that brahmacharya is lost. To form a group of naked ascetics is not my intention. We have thirty-three lakhs of such ascetics in India. I want grihastha sannyāsis… men leading the full life in the world who when the need arises will renounce everything at the call of duty.” [“Sri Aurobindo”, Mother India, July 2012, pp.528-39]

Brahmalōka/ Brahman-world the first of the eight lōkas or regions of material existence recognised by the Sāṅkhya & Vedanta schools of philosophy. It is, says Sri Aurobindo, the “world of the Brahman in which it [the soul] is one with the infinite existence & yet in a sense still a soul able to enjoy differentiation in the oneness”; & “the condition of being near to Hiraṇyagarbhā in the causal body”.

Swami Brahmānanda believed to have been Bhao Sadāshiv Rao (q.v.) who after the battle at Pāṇīpat (q.v.) in 1761, roamed around the country & finally settled on the banks of the Narmadā. His ashram near Chāndod (q.v.) is on a hill called Ganganath. He died from infection caused by a nail that pierced his foot when he was walking on river bank.

In May 1905, a ‘national school’ was started at Ganganath called Ganganath Vidyālaya. Keshavānanda, a disciple of Brahmānanda, was already running a school for boys there. He helped in collecting donations & getting the school building constructed. The school, its curriculum & people associated with it in various ways, are all mentioned in at least four known reports of the British CID. One of them refers to it as ‘a quasi-religious school with which the anarchist gang of Calcutta had a close connection’. The police believed that the idea of the school originated with K.G. Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo, Madhavrao Jādhav, Barindra, & A.B. Deodhar, who was also in the Baroda Service. Along with some of the rich businessmen in the region, Sayājirao was also one of the financiers of the school.

Swami Brahmānanda (1863-1922) born Rakhāl Chandra, after coming in contact with Sri Ramakrishna, he renounced worldly life & became a sannyasi. When Vivekananda founded the Sri Ramakrishna Mission he made him its first president.

Brāhmaṇa(s) commentaries on the Vedas.

Brāhmaṇaspati Lord of the divine Word, the Creator by the Word.

Brahmasutras/ Vedanta Sutras by Bādarāyana or Vyāsa, consists of 555 Sutras, aphorisms.

Brahmavarta the vast land (including the region later known as Kurukshetra) that in the Vedic times lay between the sacred rivers Saraswati & Drishdāwati.

Brahma Samāj/ Brahmo (Samāj) a religion founded by Raja Rammohan Roy in 1828 which spread throughout Bengal. It rejected the Vedas & Hindu forms of worship & caste system without caring or daring to see that evils of caste-creed-class have always been universally practised in East & West, South & North of this blessed earth, but generously accepting ‘some’ Christian doctrines & rituals then introduced to save the souls of Hindu natives. In 1860s the religion split into two – one under Debendranath Tagore & the other under Keshab Sen. In 1878, some of Keshab’s followers formed the Sādhāran Brahmo Samāj.

Braja Vraja-bhumi (dominated by living reminders of the lives of Sri Krishna & Radha) covering an area of about 3,800 sq. km. comprises places like Gokul, Mahāvan, Baldeo, Mat & Bajna to the east of Yamuna & the Mathura region encompassing Vrindāvana, Govardhan, Kusum Sarovar, Barsāna & Nandagāon (Nandagram) on Yamuna’s west. Its most popular anecdotes are in Vraja-bhāśa, a dialect of classical Hindi popularised by Mirābāi, Sūradāsa, & Vallabhācharya.

Brajendra Kishore B.K. Roy Choudhury (1884?-1957), a prominent zamindar of Gauripore in Mymensingh district, promoted the Swadeshi movement by helping some of its key figures. He also donated munificently to the cause of education.

Brasidas (d.422 BC), Spartan officer generally considered the only commander of genius produced by Sparta during the Archidamian War (431-21 BC), the first decade of the Peloponnesian War (431-04 BC), between Athens & Sparta.

Brati-Samiti association of national volunteers at Faridpur; banned in January 1909.

Breci Italian regicide. The judge of his case, instead of ordering him to be hanged, gave him seven years’ solitary imprisonment. Within a year Breci went mad.

Briareus or Aegaeon, one of the three 100-armed & 50-headed sons of Uranus & Ge.

Bridges, Robert (1844-1930), English poet laureate from 1913 (s/a Binyon), he was noted for his technical mastery of prosody & for his sponsorship of the poetry of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins. He produced short lyrics, long poems, plays in verse, & critical studies of Milton & Keats.

Bright, John (1811-89), English parliamentarian.

Brihadāranyaka/ Brihadaranyakopanishad/ Brihad Aranyaka/ Great Aranyaka ascribed to Rishi Yajñavalkya, belongs to the Kāṇvī branch of Vājasaneyi Brāhmaṇa of Shukla Yajur Veda.

Bṛihadratha a Rishi of the Rig Veda.

Brihaspati/ Brihuspathy/ Brihuspati (1) In Vedas Bhrihaspati is also called Brāhmaṇaspati; (2) In Puranas, he is the Guru of Indra & the gods; (3) a planet.

Brinda a dootī (feminine of doota, envoy or messenger) who re-unites lovers.

Briseis daughter of Briseus, a Trojan leader of Lyrnessus; Achilles sacked his town, killed him & carried off his daughter making her his slave. Agamemnon (q.v.) stole her setting off the “wrath of Achilles”, which forms the central “problem” of the Iliad.

Bristow Tragedy poem by Chatterton, hero to the Romantic & Pre-Raphaelite poets.

Broceliande the Forest of Broceliande in Brittany, France. Only a little of this vast forest now remains as the Forest of Paimpont.

Broderick William St. John Fremantle (1856-1942), eldest son of 3^rd Viscount Middleton, made 1^st Earl of Middleton: educated at Eton & Balliol College, Oxford, president of Oxford Union Society: M.P. for West Surrey 1880-5 & for Guildford Division of Surrey 1885 onwards: Financial Secretary to War Office 1886-92: Under Secretary for War 1885-95 & Secretary 1900-03: Privy Councillor 1897 & Justice of the Peace: Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1898-1900: Secretary of State for India 1903, supported Earl Kitchener (q.v.) against Baron (Lord) Curzon, leading to the latter’s resignation in 1905. [Buckland]

Bromius Bromios, “the roaring god”, an epithet of Dionysus.

Bronson a barrister who abused Bengalis in their agitation against Ilbert Bill. Lalmohan Ghose (q.v.) retaliated in a speech at Dacca; as a result Bronson found himself boycotted by Indian attorneys & was compelled to leave India.

Bront・ three English sisters, all writers: Charlotte (1816-55), novelist; Emily Jane (1818-48), novelist & poet; & Anne (1820-49), novelist; there was also a brother, Patrick Branwell (1817-48), writer, painter, & classical scholar. The heroes & heroines of their great novels were imbued with the same emotional intensity as their own lonely & tragic personal lives.

Brooke, Rupert (1887-1915) Rupert Chawner or Chaucer; he went to a prep school in Rugby at Hillbrow & Rugby. His thesis John Webster & the Elizabethan Drama won him a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. His first collection of poems was published in 1911. Like his contemporaries in the pre-war poetry scene, he was preoccupied with trying to shake off the long Victorian hangover. At the outbreak of the War, Rupert was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant. He died on 23 April 1915 on a French hospital ship while on his way to the landing at Gallipoli – attended throughout by the Prime Minister’s son, his comrade Arthur. He was buried in an olive grove on Skyros. His most famous collection of poetry, containing all five of his wartime sonnets, 1914 & Other Poems, was published in May 1915. The most famous of them remains “The Soldier” (originally entitled “The Recruit”). Naturally, its opening lines became the best remembered, hence its most quoted lines:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

On 11 November 1985, Brooke was, with Binyon, among the sixteen War Poets commemorated on a slate monument in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Brotteaux an unabashed scoffer in Anatole France’s Les Dieux ont soif.

Browning/ Mrs Browning Robert (1812-89) was a great poet noted for his dramatic monologue & psychological portraiture. The reputation of his wife Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806-61) rests chiefly upon her Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Browning, Oscar (1837-1923), Lecturer in history at Cambridge. A clever conversationalist, he entertained largely & showed kindness to innumerable young men. He was associated as a founder, head, or otherwise, with a large number of educational & cultural organizations. It must have been in that connection that Sayājirao invited him to visit Baroda & he arrived in Baroda in 1902. The Gaikwād had appointed Sri Aurobindo to be his guide during the duration of Browning’s visit. Browning described this visit in his Impressions of Indian Travel, London, 1903. He authored several books, historical, biographical etc. He received the O.B.E. in 1923.

Bruce Robert the Bruce, or Robert I (1274-1329), king of Scotland (1306-29). Discouraged after his defeat at Methven, he took refuge in wild country where he acquired courage & hope from watching a spider persevere in spinning its web.

Brumaire second month in French Republican Calendar. The coup d’état of 18-19 Brumaire (November 9-10, 1799) established the Consulate under Napoleon.

Brummagem colloquial form of Birmingham, England; name given to a counterfeit coin first made in Birmingham. Hence the term is applied to anything not genuine.

Bruno, Giordano (1548-1600), Italian astronomer, mathematician, philosopher. Frightened by the truth of his pronouncements the Inquisition (q.v.) burnt him alive.

Bryan William Jennings (1860-1925), American Democrat opposed to imperialism became Secretary of State (1913-1915), after thrice failing to be elected President.

Buckingham George Villiers (1628-87), politician, poet, playwright, chief author of The Rehearsal, a satire on heroic drama, directed in later version against John Dryden.

Budaricāshram/ Budaricayshwur respectively, the place Badrināth & its presiding Deity Badri-Nārāyana (Lord Vishnu’s dual form of Nara-Nārāyaṇa). Badrināth is situated on the snowy banks of the Alacanandā (q.v.).

Buddha/ Gautama Buddha (c.563-c.483 BC) Sri Aurobindo: “Buddhahood according to the doctrine of the Buddhists… is the soul awakened from its mundane individuality into an infinite super-consciousness.” ― “Krishna opened the possibility of Overmind with its two sides of realisation, static & dynamic. Buddha tried to shoot from mind to Nirvana in the Supreme, just as Shankara did in another way after him. Both agree in overleaping the other stages & trying to get at a nameless & featureless Absolute. Krishna on the other hand was leading by the normal course of evolution. The next normal step is not a featureless Absolute, but the Supermind.” [CWSA 13:153 & 28:488]

Buddha Gaya Bōdh Gaya, a village in the Gaya district. Here, meditating under a Bōdhi or Bo (Peepal) tree, Gautama attained Buddhahood.

Buddhism a religion & philosophy that repudiates the authority of the Vedas & the existence of a soul or God, & in which rebirth & karma cease when one extinguishes their root-cause, namely Desire. They are based on the Four Noble Truths & the Noble Eightfold Path enunciated by the Buddha. “The first Buddhist Council met Rājagriha (present Rājgir in present Bihar), soon after the death of Buddha. It was attended by the Theras (Buddhist elders) & presided over by their senior Mahākassapa. As Buddha had left none of his teachings in writing so at this Council three of them, Kashyapa – the most learned, Upāli – the oldest, & Ananda, the Buddha’s favourite disciple, recited his teachings which were thereafter transmitted orally by teachers to disciples. A century later the Second Council met at Vaishāli to settle a dispute on questions of discipline; it decided on rigid discipline & revised the Buddhist scriptures which were still unwritten. (In Buddha’s lifetime, Vaishāli was the capital of the Lichchhavis who had an aristocratic republican form of government in which every noble had an equal role. It is believed that it was on this form of administration that the Buddha, who visited the city several times, had organised his Buddhist Saṇgha.) The Third Council met under the patronage of Emperor Ashōka, according to tradition, 236 years after the Buddha’s death. It is believed to have drawn up the Buddhist canon in the final form of Tripitaka or Three Baskets. The Fourth & last Council met during the reign of the Kushān king Kanishka (c.120-144 AD) & adopted authorised commentaries on the Buddhist canon. It was attended mainly by the followers of Hināyāna (Theravada), & also those of Mahāyāna which included eminent Buddhists like Ashwaghosha, Nāgārjuna & Vāsumitra who enjoyed the patronage of Kanishka, had gained greater followers. [S. Bhattacharya: 185, 538, 583, 889]

Sri Aurobindo: “Every time the Light has tried to descend it has met with resistance & opposition. Christ was crucified…. Buddha was denied. Sons of Light come, the earth denies & rejects them; afterwards, accepts them in name to reject them in substance. Only a small minority grows towards a spiritual birth, & it is through them that the Divine manifestation takes place…. If kings & emperors had left Buddhism to those people who were really spiritual it would have been much better for real Buddhism. It was after Constantine embraced Christianity that it began to decline…. The same thing happened to Mohammedanism (see Islam)…. When kings & emperors try to spread religion they become like Asoka, i.e., they make the whole thing mechanical, & the inner truth is lost.” [Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, 2007:576-79]

Budha (1) a planet named after Budha, the son of god Soma (the Moon) by Tāra, wife of Bhrihaspati. (2) Author of a hymn the Rig-Veda.

Bug a tributary of the Vistula, rising in western Ukrainian. For about 125 miles of its course she forms the international frontier between Poland & Russia.

Bunyan John (1628-88), English preacher, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Burke Edmund (1729-97), educated at Ballitore & Trinity College, Dublin 1743-8: founded the Annual Register 1759: Private Secretary to Lord Rockingham, Prime Minister 1765: attacked East India Co. 1766: opposed Lord North’s “Regulating Act” 1773: Member of Committee on affairs of E.I. Co. 1783, wrote both the Ninth Report on the trade of Bengal & the system pursued by Warren Hastings, & the Eleventh Report on the system of presents: drafted Fox’s East India Bill 1783: attacked Hastings in a speech on the debts of the Nawab of Arcot in 1785, & again on the Rohillas in 1786: impeached Hastings before the House of Lords May 1787: led the impeachment at the trial of Hastings in Westminster Hall Feb 1788: secured its continuation in a new Parliament 1790: spoke for nine days in May-June 1794, in reply to Hastings’ defence: his speeches delivered in connection with the impeachment of Warren Hastings “made for an awareness of the responsibilities of empire & the injustices in India unknown before in England”: Hastings was acquitted in April 1795: Burke died July 9, 1797. [Buckland]

Burma now Myanmar. By 2^nd century Bhāratavarsha had developed important trading relations with the Far East which they called Suvarṇa-bhūmi. Hindu colonists established great kingdoms some of which lasted for thousands of years & continued to flourish even long after the end of Hindu rule in India. On the mainland were the two powerful kingdoms: Champā & Kambōja. The latter rose to far greater power than Champā & in its hay days covered the whole of present Cambodia, Cochin-China, Laos, Siam, parts of Myanmar, & the Malay Peninsula. In 13^th century, Ahoms (a people of Mongoloid origin) settled in Upper Burma & occupied a part of the Brahmaputra valley & were gradually Hinduised. A Tibeto-Burman-speaking people who established the Pyu city-states ranged as far south as Pyay & adopted Theravada Buddhism. Another group, the Bamar people, entered the upper Irrawaddy valley in the early 9^th century. They went on to establish the Bagan Kingdom in 1044, the first-ever unification of the Irrawaddy valley & its periphery. Between 1750 & 1823, Myanmar conquered Arākān, Pegu in the Irrāwaddy valley, Tenāserim situated south of the Chittāgong, Manipur, Assam, & an island near Chittāgong. The last was then occupied by the white Octopus which between 1795-1811, first incited revolts in Manipur & cross-border raids into Myanmar & dragooned her into treaties loaded in its favour, then cooked up an excuse to invade in 1824 – its costliest exploit. Myanmar’s skills in building stockades surpassed those of the most ingenious European sappers & its exceptional courage to fight in the most hopeless conditions failed, only because Brit standbys poured in at the critical moment. Though crushed for years by repaying an indemnity of one million pounds (then US$5 million), she refused to be tyrannised by the British profiteers thrust on her & that provided fodder for another invasion which came in 1885, when a Brit trader-raider was not kowtowed as Brit Law demanded. When the King’s appeals to the French imperialists (warned off by their Brit brothers) were refused, the Octopus gobbled up Myanmar & renamed her ‘Burma’ (Bamar-land?). “The case of Burma affords an interesting parallel to that of Afghanistan on the opposite frontier. In both, British policy was dictated by the fear that another first-class European power, Russia or France, would establish political influence in an Asiatic State bordering on British territories. The rulers of these States defied the English in the hope of obtaining aid from rival European power, & in both cases they were disappointed at the critical moment. Only the geographical & ethnical factors made the sequel different.” [An Advanced History of India, R.C. Majumdar, H.C. Raychaudhuri, Kalikinkar Datta, 1973, 1974]

Burns, Robert (1759-96), national poet of Scotland.

Burton, Captain Sir Richard Francis (1821-90), English explorer, soldier, linguist, diplomat, spy: educated on the continent without system & Trinity College, Oxford for 5 terms from 1840: joined the Indian Army 1842: made himself proficient in Oriental languages, studied Muhammedan life & customs thoroughly at Baroda & in the Sind Survey: wrote in Pushto (Pashtu?) & Baluchi: in England (1849-53) published works on languages & his Indian experiences; e.g. “The British Empire in the East is founded upon the good opinion of us entertained by natives & their bad opinion of themselves”: his works exceeded 50 volumes. [Buckland]

Bushido Code of Warriors of the Samurais of Japan. In mid-19^th century it was made the basis of ethical training for the whole country.

Bushman member of a nomadic tribe in the Kalahari Desert in south-western Africa.

Lord Byron George Gordon, 6^th Baron of Byron (1788-1824), poet & satirist whose ironic despair & aspirations for political liberty made a symbol of Romantic poetry.

Byshak, Gaurdas (1826-99), Deputy Magistrate of Calcutta. Intimate friend of Madhusudan Dutt, he associated with several literary, cultural, & social organizations.

Byzantine Empire Eastern counterpart & successor to the Roman Empire of the West, also called the Eastern Empire & the East Roman Empire. It was named after Byzantium, which Emperor Constantine I rebuilt (AD 330) as Constantinople (present Istanbul) & made the capital of the entire Roman Empire.