Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3

Letter ID: 795

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

July 26, 1936

Last night I suddenly went to the French pictures – the mistake of my life-time – to see the famous Don Quixote. Came away fed up after half-an-hour. Served right after a hard day’s labour.

Another song of my father’s, and Nishikanta’s beautiful twin. See. This song can be read too.

Exceedingly beautiful.

Please note that Tagore recites too his Desh desh and writes in a letter to Anderson¹ (I quote from the book “Chhanda”): “In Bengali we recite poetry with a certain melody. Even while reading prose, there is some sort of melody. It is so because of the very nature of our language. Owing to this habit, we use melody even while reading English composition. Certainly to an English ear, it would sound strange.”

This is an extremely important (and inconsistent) admission from Tagore – inconsistent for one who washes his hands of laghu guru. He says, mind you, that in songs laghu guru wins because of the drawl supplied by the melody. But in recitation this drawl has always been supplied by this sur [melody] he speaks of and take the twin songs. When we recite it we apply this sur to them – Nishikanta too does, unconsciously, my father who was an eminent actor and declaimer also did – consciously. In sanmukh samare pan bīr churāmani [The gem among warriors fell fighting face to face in the battlefield] we all recite it in a wavy way. It is this wavy sur that makes laghu guru sound natural. So you see it is another reason, if reason were still needed, why laghu guru can be accepted. I hope I am clear? I mean we do not recite our poems as we speak, so why worry about laws of common parlance – since our recitation (yatra, kathakata² etc.) is made to resound with this sur? But Tagore I can quite admit does not remember his own arguments in favour of one point of view when he looks askance at it, what?

That is quite luminous and, after Tagore had expressed it so well it is surprising he should forget it at his convenience. But that is after all a thing natural to the human intelligence and not peculiar to anybody. For man is a reasoning, so an arguing animal – and when he argues, he chooses whatever will support his theses, no matter if it contradicts everything he had said before.

I have sent you this morning the letter of this Yuvarani of Kasmanda whose son died and who was about to come last February if you remember – having been given permission by you and Mother. She, let me remind you, is a friend of Raihana and lost her eldest son (of sixteen) lately. She wants to come on 14th August for darshan. I hope she will be given permission once more.

Of course permission is given. Inform Nolini.

As for her question about her bereavement do let me have at least a few lines which I will convey to her. I don’t relish the idea of philosophising about it when I am so far from the attitude of a nirdvandva [equable] yogi. Even a sentence or two from you will, I am sure, immensely help her, as you have both the knowledge and the grace which make the blind see.

It is a very intricate and difficult question to tackle and it can hardly be done in a few words. Moreover it is impossible to give a general rule as to why there are these close inner contacts followed by a physical separation through death – in each case it differs and one would have to know the persons and be familiar with their soul history to tell what was behind their meeting and separation. In a general way, a life is only one brief episode in a long history of spiritual evolution in which the soul follows the curve of the line set for the earth, passing through many lives to complete it. It is an evolution out of material inconscience to consciousness and towards the Divine Consciousness, from ignorance to divine Knowledge, from darkness through half-light to Light, from death to Immortality, from suffering to the Divine Bliss. Suffering is due first to the Ignorance, secondly to the separation of the individual consciousness from the divine Consciousness and Being, a separation created by the Ignorance – when that ceases, when one lives in the Divine and no more in one’s separated smaller self, then only suffering can altogether cease. Each soul follows its own line and these lines meet, journey together for a space, then part to meet again perhaps hereafter – often they meet to help each other on the journey in one way or another. As for the after-death period, the soul passes into other planes of existence, staying there for a while till it reaches its place of rest where it remains until it is ready for another terrestrial existence. This is the general law, but for the connections of embodied soul with embodied soul that is a matter of personal evolution of the two on which nothing general can be said as it is intimate to the soul stories of the two and needs a personal knowledge. That is all I can say, but I don’t know that it will be of much help to her as these things are helpful usually only when one enters into the consciousness in which they become not mere ideas but realities. Then one grieves no longer because one enters into the Truth and the Truth brings calm and peace.

¹ It was to “Kalyaniya Dilipkumar Roy” that Rabindranath dedicated his book Chhanda. The quote is from the very first letter to J.D. Anderson, I. C. S., Professor of Bengali at King’s College, Cambridge, where they met on 14 July 1912. Anderson passed away on 24 October 1920, at the age of 67.

Their correspondence – in Bengali and English – throws much light on the nature of Bengali prosody. Indeed, this “foreigner” was a lover of Bengali language. He loved French too. “Bengali rythmn is a different kind of rythmn from that of all other languages, so far as I know, except French.” “... my claim on behalf of French and Bengali verse is that – verse in these languages is the greatest and finest and most supple invention in the way of metre yet accomplished by man!”

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² Yatra – an open air village opera, or theatre without any stage.

Katbakata – religious discourses (professional practice of narrating scriptural and mythological stories).

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