Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
Letter ID: 469
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
August 4, 1934
Very glad that the reconciliation has proceeded all right and I am glad too that your tendency is so readily towards “harmony” and away from “disharmonies” that have been too rife. As for Moni he is very stiff in a quarrel and to make him ease his backbone when he has once straightened it for a fight is not easy.
Your strictures on Moni’s present tendencies in poetry are largely correct, but although he always had a flow of language and flow of verse – and when he has the right subject and substance he can do something very fine – I have never put so high a value on his poetry – it is his prose which at its 
best seemed to me remarkable. Nishikanta’s poem is very good indeed. But the parallel or rather contrast between them from the Ashram residence point of view is not very much to the point. Moni comes in from a mental and vital past; with Nishikanta the question is whether he has stuff enough, not poetic or artistic – for he is a good poet and clever painter – but Yogic to stand the spiritual future.
I have read your preface and have some idea of reading your mammoth suffix in some [aeonian?] future – I will try to read also the pages you point out at the same time. But what strange ideas you have about the relative intensities of the vital joys and the psychic joy or the spiritual peace!
Glad to hear about the appreciation of O.C. Ganguli1 – and OK about the singing.
P.S. I was forgetting about Harmony. After a forced halt of several days it has started again and is proceeding with a grim tortoise-like determination to its goal.
1 Ordhendra Kumar Gangopadhyay (1.8.1881 – 9.2.1974), himself a good artist and musician, he is better known as an art-critic. Although he was a practising lawyer, art was his first love. As the general secretary of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, the Rupam magazine stands testimony to his brilliance. In countries like China and Burma (Myanmar), he gave lectures on Indian Art. Among the many books he wrote on art, are: Vedic Painting, South Indian Bronze, Masterpiece of Rajput Paintings, and his research work on music, Ragas and Raginis.