Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Letters
To Pavitra (Philippe Barbier Saint Hilaire)
Pavitra,
The account which seems to have been given to Lizelle
Reymond and recorded by her on pages 318–319 of her book1 is, I
am compelled to say, fiction and romance with no foundation in actual facts. I
spent the first part of my imprisonment in Alipore jail in a solitary cell and
again after the assassination of Noren Gosain to the last days of the trial when
all the Alipore case prisoners were similarly lodged each in his own cell. In
between for a short period we were all put together. There is no truth behind
the statement that while I was meditating they gathered around me, that I
recited the Gita to them and they sang the verses, or that they put questions to
me on spiritual 
matters and received instructions from me; the whole description is quite
fanciful. Only a few of the prisoners had been known to me before I met them in
prison; only a few who had been with Barin had practised sadhana and these were
connected with Barin and would have turned to him for any help, not to me. I was
carrying on my yoga during these days learning to do so in the midst of much
noise and clamour but apart and in silence and without any participation of the
others in it. My yoga begun in 1904 had always been personal and apart; those
around me knew I was a sadhak but they knew little more as I kept all that went
on in me to myself. It was only after my release that for the first time I spoke
at Uttarpara publicly about my spiritual experiences. Until I went to
Pondicherry I took no disciples; with those who accompanied me or joined me in
Pondicherry I had at first the relation of friends and companions rather than of
a guru and disciples; it was on the ground of politics that I had come to know
them and not on the spiritual ground. Afterwards only there was a gradual
development of spiritual relations until the Mother came back from Japan and the
Ashram was founded or rather founded itself in 1926. I began my yoga in 1904
without a guru; in 1908 I received important help from a Mahratta yogi and
discovered the foundations of my sadhana; but from that time till the Mother
came to India I received no spiritual help from anyone else. My sadhana before
and afterwards was not founded upon books but upon personal experiences that
crowded on me from within. But in the jail I had the Gita and the Upanishads
with me, practised the yoga of the Gita and meditated with the help of the
Upanishads; these were the only books from which I found guidance; the Veda
which I first began to read long afterwards in Pondicherry rather confirmed what
experiences I already had than was any guide to my sadhana. I sometimes turned
to the Gita for light when there was a question or a difficulty and usually
received help or an answer from it, but there were no such happenings in
connection with the Gita as are narrated in the book. It is a fact that I was
hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in
the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence, but this had
nothing to do with the alleged circumstances narrated in the book, circumstances
that never took place, nor had it anything to do with the Gita. The voice spoke
only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience
and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that
subject.
Then about my relations with Sister Nivedita – they
were purely in the field of politics. Spirituality or spiritual matters did not
enter into them and I do not remember anything passing between us on these
subjects when I was with her. Once or twice she showed the spiritual side of her
but she was then speaking to someone else who had come to see her while I was
there. The whole account about my staying with her for 24 hours and all that is
said to have passed between us then is sheer romance and does not contain a
particle of fact. I met Sister Nivedita first at Baroda when she came to give
some lectures there. I went to receive her at the station and to take her to the
house assigned to her; I also accompanied her to an interview she had sought
with the Maharaja of Baroda. She had heard of me as one who “believed in
strength and was a worshipper of Kali” by which she meant that she had heard of
me as a revolutionary. I knew of her already because I had read and admired her
book “Kali the Mother”. It is in these days that we formed our friendship. After
I had started my revolutionary work in Bengal through certain emissaries, I went
there personally to see and arrange things myself. I found a number of small
groups of revolutionaries that had recently sprung into existence but all
scattered and acting without reference to each other. I tried to unite them
under a single organisation with the barrister P. Mitra as the leader of the
revolution in Bengal and a central council of five persons, one of them being
Nivedita. The work under P. Mitra spread enormously and finally contained tens
of thousands of young men and the spirit of revolution spread by Barin’s paper
“Yugantar” became general in the young generation; but during my absence at
Baroda the council ceased to exist as it was impossible to keep up agreement
among the many groups. I had no occasion to meet Nivedita after that until I
settled in Bengal as principal of the National College and the chief editorial
writer of the Bande 
Mataram. By that time I had become one of the leaders of the public movement
known first as extremism, then as nationalism, but this gave me no occasion to
meet her except once or twice at the Congress, as my collaboration with her was
solely in the secret revolutionary field. I was busy with my work and she with
hers, and no occasion arose for consultations or decisions about the conduct of
the revolutionary movement. Later on I began to make time to go and see her
occasionally at Bagbazar.
In one of these visits she informed me that the
Government had decided to deport me and she wanted me to go into secrecy or to
leave British India and act from outside so as to avoid interruption of my work.
There was no question at that time of danger to her; in spite of her political
views she had friendly relations with high Government officials and there was no
question of her arrest. I told her that I did not think it necessary to accept
her suggestion; I would write an open letter in the Karmayogin which, I thought,
would prevent this action by the Government. This was done and on my next visit
to her she told me that my move had been entirely successful and the idea of
deportation had been dropped. The departure to Chandernagore happened later and
there was no connection between the two incidents which have been hopelessly
confused together in the account in the book. The incidents related there have
no foundation in fact. It was not Gonen Maharaj who informed me of the impending
search and arrest, but a young man on the staff of the Karmayogin, Ramchandra
Mazumdar, whose father had been warned that in a day or two the Karmayogin
office would be searched and myself arrested. There [have]2 been many legends spread about on this matter and it was even
said that I was to be prosecuted for participation in the murder in the High
Court of Shamsul Alam, a prominent member of the C.I.D. and that Sister Nivedita
sent for me and informed me and we discussed what was to be done and my
disappearance was the result. I never heard of any such proposed prosecution and
there was no discussion of the kind; the prosecution intended and afterwards
started was for sedition only. Sister Nivedita knew nothing of these new
happenings till after I reached Chandernagore. I did not go to her house or see
her; it is wholly untrue that she and Gonen Maharaj came to see me off at the
Ghat. There was no time to inform her; for almost immediately I received a
command from above to go to Chandernagore and within ten minutes I was at the
Ghat, a boat was hailed and I was on my way with two young men to Chandernagore.
It was a common Ganges boat rowed by two boatmen, and all the picturesque
details about the French boat and the disappearing lights are pure romance. I
sent someone from the office to Nivedita to inform her and to ask her to take up
editing of the Karmayogin in my absence. She consented and in fact from this
time onward until the suspension of the paper she had the whole conduct of it; I
was absorbed in my sadhana and sent no contributions nor were there any articles
over my signature. There was never my signature to any articles in the
Karmayogin except twice only, the last being the occasion for the prosecution
which failed. There was no arrangement for my staying in Chandernagore at a
place selected by Nivedita. I went without previous notice to anybody and was
received by Motilal Roy who made secret arrangements for my stay; nobody except
himself and a few friends knew where I was. The warrant of arrest was suspended,
but after a month or so I used a manoeuvre to push the police into open action;
the warrant was launched and a prosecution commenced against the printer in my
absence which ended in acquittal in the High Court. I was already on my way to
Pondicherry where I arrived on April 4. There also I remained in secrecy in the
house of a prominent citizen until the acquittal, after which I announced my
presence in French India. These are all the essential facts and they leave no
room for the alleged happenings related in the book. It is best that you should
communicate my statement of facts to Lizelle Reymond so that she may be able to
make the necessary corrections or omissions in a future edition and remove this
wrong information which would otherwise seriously detract from the value of her
life of Nivedita.
13 September 1946