positively (?) to let her come here in February. I only hope the fellow won’t find another trick to prevent her then!Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
Letter ID: 471
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
August 1934
I had forgotten one thing about the Fenêtres1 room. When Sada went there, we made it a rule that there should not be too much “receiving” of friends, etc. (Sada has an array of them); but I think this will not incommode Nishikanta, as he is of the quiet type, I understand, and will besides be seeing much of his friends over there. If he prefers that room, he can have it as soon as it is repaired and everything ready.
I was relieved to get a more cheerful letter from Maya2. It appears that to stop her hunger strike Sh. has promised positively (?) to let her come here in February. I only hope the fellow won’t find another trick to prevent her then!
I am rather perplexed by your strictures on Rama. Cowardice is the last thing that can be charged against Valmiki’s Rama; he has always been considered as a warrior and it is the “martial races” of India who have made him their god. Valmiki everywhere paints him as a great warrior. His employment of ruse against an infrahuman enemy does not prove the opposite – for that is always how the human (even great warriors and hunters) has dealt with the infrahuman. I think it is Madhusudan who has darkened Valmiki’s hero in Bengali eyes and turned him into a poor puppet, but that is not the authentic Rama who, say what one will, was a great epic figure – Avatar or no Avatar. As for conventional morality, all morality is a convention – man cannot live without conventions, mental and moral, otherwise he feels himself lost in the rolling sea of the anarchic forces of the vital Nature. Even the Russells and Bernard Shaws can only end by setting up another set of conventions in the place of those they have skittled over. Only by rising above mind can one really get beyond conventions – Krishna was able to do it because he was not a mental human being but an overmental godhead acting freely out of a greater consciousness than man’s. Rama was not that, he was the Avatar of the sattwic mind – mental, emotional, moral – and he followed the Dharma of the age and race. That may make him temperamentally congenial to Gandhi and the reverse to you; but just as Gandhi’s temperamental recoil from Krishna does not prove Krishna to be no Avatar, so your temperamental recoil from Rama does not establish that he was not an Avatar. However, my main point will be that Avatarhood does not depend upon these questions at all, but has another basis, meaning and purpose.
1 Fenêtres: name of a house.
2 Maya was Dilip’s only sister. She was married to Sri Bhava Shankar Banerjee, the only son of Sir Surendranath Banerjee, the great nationalist leader. They mostly lived in Barrackpur, near Kolkata.