nature. Let us hope he will yet wake and change.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 213
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
February 16, 1932
Yes, the attitude of Shankar is pitiable but all too human. “Not for the wife’s sake, but for oneself’s sake is the wife dear.”1 Let Maya come in August; the future will look to the future. The attitude towards Esha2 is also very parent-like: the child is the parents’ property, to be brought up according to his own ideas, not according to her need, her powers, her nature. Let us hope he will yet wake and change.
I have suggested some retouches in the two poems you sent me. It is a matter of details of language, but such details have their importance.... I have explained the reason for the other changes.
“Krishnaprem”3 has been snowed under for the last two days. I will see if I can extricate it. But at this rate your “Appendix” will become as long as Sheshnāga [the king of snakes].
1 An ironic variation on Yajnavalkya’s “one loves the wife not for the sake of the wife, but for the self’s sake” (as quoted by Sri Aurobindo in his own letter to Dilip of 27 December 1930).
2 Dilip’s niece, Shankar’s and Maya’s daughter.
3 Krishnaprem (Ronald Nixon) was professor at Lucknow University where Dilip met him in 1922. A few years later he gave up his lectureship for a post in Benares where he went with his Guru, Yashoda Ma. When the latter retired to a temple-retreat in Almora, he accompanied her and became a Sannyasin in the name of Krishna. Dilip had sent Sri Aurobindo a few letters from Krishnaprem.