Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram

Early Political Writings. 1890 — May 1908

A Note on “Bande Mataram” (2)

The new party was at once successful and the Bande Mataram paper began to circulate throughout India. On its staff were not only Bepin Pal and Sri Aurobindo but some other very able writers, Shyam Sundar Chakravarty, Hemendra Prasad Ghose and Bejoy Chatterjee. Shyam Sundar and Bejoy were masters of the English language, each with a style of his own; Shyam Sundar caught up something like Sri Aurobindo's way of writing and later on many took his articles for Sri Aurobindo's.... The Bande Mataram was almost unique in journalistic history in the influence it exercised in converting the mind of a people and preparing it for revolution. But its weakness was on the financial side; ... So long as Sri Aurobindo was there in active control, he managed with great difficulty... but ...when he was arrested and held in jail for a year, the economic situation of the Bande Mataram became desperate: finally, it was decided that the journal should die a glorious death rather than perish by starvation and Bejoy Chatterjee was commissioned to write an article for which the Government would certainly stop the publication of the paper.... The manoeuvre succeeded and the life of the Bande Mataram came to an end in Sri Aurobindo's absence.

Passage from a general note on Sri Aurobindo's political life. (More comlete version see here and here