Bhawani MandirSri Aurobindo
Bande Mataram
Political Writings and Speeches. 1890–1908
Part One. Writings and a Resolution 1890 – 1906
Bhawani Mandir
Cover of Bhawani Mandir
This copy of the pamphlet was put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Case (1908–09). Note the signature of Barindrakumar Ghose (Sri Aurobindo’s brother and the chief accused in the case), police and court indentification numbers, and other markings.
A temple is to be erected and consecrated to Bhawani, the mother, among the hills. To all the children of the mother, the call is sent forth to help in the sacred work.
Who is Bhawani, the mother, and why should we erect a temple to Her?
Bhawani is the infinite energy.
In the unending revolutions of the world, as the wheel of the Eternal turns mightily in its courses, the Infinite Energy which streams forth from the Eternal and sets the wheel to work, looms up in the vision of man in various aspects and infinite forms. Each aspect creates and marks an age. Sometimes She is Love, sometimes She is Knowledge, sometimes She is Renunciation, sometimes She is Pity. This Infinite Energy is Bhawani. She also is Durga, She is Kali, She is Radha the Beloved, She is Lakshmi. She is our Mother and the Creatress of us all.
In the present age, the Mother is manifested as the mother of Strength. She is pure Shakti.
The whole world is growing full of the Mother as Shakti.
Let us raise our eyes and cast them upon the world around us.
Wherever we turn our gaze, huge masses of strength rise before 
our vision, tremendous, swift and inexorable forces, gigantic figures of energy, terrible sweeping columns of force.
All is growing large and strong.
The Shakti of war, the Shakti of wealth, the Shakti of Science are tenfold more mighty and colossal, a hundredfold more fierce, rapid and busy in their activity, a thousandfold more prolific in resources, weapons and instruments than ever before in recorded history.
Everywhere the Mother is at work; from Her mighty and shaping hands enormous forms of Rakshasas, Asuras, Devas are leaping forth into the arena of the world.
We have seen the slow but mighty rise of great empires in the West, we have seen the swift, irresistible and impetuous bounding into life of Japan.
Some are Mleccha1 Shaktis clouded in their strength, black or blood-crimson with tamas or rajas, others are Arya Shaktis, bathed in a pure flame of renunciation and utter self-sacrifice: but all are the Mother in Her new phase, remoulding, creating.
She is pouring Her spirit into the old; She is whirling into life the new.
We in India fail in all things for want of Shakti.
But in India the breath moves slowly, the afflatus is long in coming. India, the ancient mother, is indeed striving to be reborn, striving with agony and tears, but she strives in vain. What ails her, she, who is after all so vast and might be so strong? There is surely some enormous defect, something vital is wanting in us; nor is it difficult to lay our finger on the spot. We have all things else, but we are empty of strength, void of energy. We have abandoned Shakti and are therefore abandoned by Shakti. The Mother is not in our hearts, in our brains, in our arms.
The wish to be reborn we have in abundance, there is no deficiency there.
How many attempts have been made, how many movements have been begun, in religion, in society, in politics!
But the same fate has overtaken or is preparing to overtake them all.
They flourish for a moment, then the impulse wanes, the fire dies out, and if they endure, it is only as empty shells, forms from which the Brahma has gone or in which it lies overpowered 
with tamas and inert.
Our beginnings are mighty, but they have neither sequel nor fruit.
Now we are beginning in another direction; we have started a great industrial movement which is to enrich and regenerate an impoverished land. Untaught by experience, we do not perceive that this movement must go the way of all the others, unless we first seek the one essential thing, unless we acquire strength.
Our knowledge is a dead thing for want of Shakti.
Is it knowledge that is wanting? We Indians born and bred in a country where Jnana has been stored and accumulated since the race began, bear about in us the inherited gains of many thousands of years. Great giants of knowledge rise among us even today to add to the store. Our capacity has not shrunk, the edge of our intellect has not been dulled or blunted, its receptivity and flexibility are as varied as of old. But it is a dead knowledge, a burden under which we are bowed, a poison which is corroding us rather than as it should be a staff to support our feet, and a weapon in our hands; for this is the nature of all great things that when they are not used or are ill used, they turn upon the bearer and destroy him.
Our knowledge then, weighed down with a heavy load of tamas, lies under the curse of impotence and inertia. We choose to fancy indeed, now-a-days, that if we acquire Science, all will be well. Let us first ask ourselves what we have done with the knowledge we already possess, or what have those, who have already acquired Science, been able to do for India. Imitative and incapable of initiative, we have striven to copy the methods of England, and we had not the strength: we would now copy the methods of the Japanese, a still more energetic people; are we likely to succeed any better? The mighty force of knowledge which European Science bestows is a weapon for the hands of a giant, it is the mace of Bheemsen: what can a weakling do with it but crush himself in the attempt to wield it?
Our Bhakti cannot live and work for want of Shakti.
Is it love, enthusiasm, Bhakti that is wanting? These are ingrained in the Indian nature, but in the absence of Shakti we cannot concentrate, we cannot direct, we cannot even preserve it. Bhakti is the leaping flame, Shakti is the fuel. If the fuel is scanty how long can the fire endure?
When the strong nature, enlightened by knowledge, disciplined and given a giant’s strength by Karma, lifts itself up in love and adoration to God, that is the Bhakti which endures and keeps the soul for ever united with the Divine. But the weak nature is too feeble to bear the impetus of so mighty a thing as perfect Bhakti; he is lifted up for a moment, then the flame soars up to Heaven, leaving him behind exhausted and even weaker than before. Every movement of any kind of which enthusiasm and adoration are the life, must fail and soon burn itself out so long as the human material from which it proceeds is frail and light in substance.
India therefore needs Shakti alone.
The deeper we look, the more we shall be convinced that the one thing wanting, which we must strive to acquire before all others, is strength – strength physical, strength mental, strength moral, but above all strength spiritual which is the one inexhaustible and imperishable source of all the others. If we have strength, everything else will be added to us easily and naturally. In the absence of strength we are like men in a dream who have hands but cannot seize or strike, who have feet but cannot run.
India, grown old and decrepit in will, has to be reborn.
Whenever we strive to do anything, after the first rush of enthusiasm is spent, a paralysing helplessness seizes upon us.
We often see in the cases of old men full of years and experience 
that the very excess of knowledge seems to have frozen their powers of action and their powers of will.
When a great feeling or a great need overtakes them and it is necessary to carry out its promptings in action, they hesitate, ponder, discuss, make tentative efforts and abandon them or wait for the safest and easiest way to suggest itself, instead of taking the most direct; thus the time when it was possible and necessary to act passes away.
Our race has grown just such an old man with stores of knowledge, with ability to feel and desire, but paralysed by simple2 sluggishness, senile timidity, senile feebleness.
If India is to survive, she must be made young again.
Rushing and billowing streams of energy must be poured into her; her soul must become, as it was in the old times, like the surges, vast, puissant, calm or turbulent at will, an ocean of action or of force.
Many of us utterly overcome by tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying now-a-days that it is impossible; that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.
What is a nation? The Shakti of its millions.
For what is a nation? What is our mother-country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha-Mardini sprang into being from the Shaktis3 of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity. The Shakti we call India, Bhawani Bharati, is the living unity of the Shaktis of three hundred millions of4 people; but she is inactive, imprisoned in the magic circle of tamas, the self-indulgent inertia and ignorance of her sons. To get rid of tamas we have but to wake the Brahma within.
It is our own choice whether we create a nation or perish.
What is it that so many thousands of holy men, Sadhus and Sannyasis, have preached to us silently by their lives? What was the message that radiated from the personality of Bhagawan Ramkrishna5 Paramhansa? What was it that formed the kernel of the eloquence with which the lionlike heart of Vivekananda sought to shake the world? It is this that in every one of these three hundred millions of men from the Raja on his throne to the coolie at his labour, from the Brahmin absorbed in his sandhya to the Pariah walking shunned of men, God liveth. We are all gods and creators, because the energy of God is within us and all life is creation; not only the making of new forms is creation, but preservation is creation, destruction itself is creation. It rests with us what we shall create; for we are not, unless we choose, puppets dominated by Fate and Maya: we are facets and manifestations of Almighty Power.
India must be reborn, because her rebirth is demanded by the future of the world.
India cannot perish, our race cannot become extinct, because among all the divisions of mankind it is to India that is reserved the highest and the most splendid destiny, the most essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from herself the future religion of the entire world, the Eternal religion which is to harmonise all religion, science and philosophies and make mankind one soul. In the sphere of morality, likewise, it is her mission to purge barbarism (mlecchahood6) out of humanity and to aryanise the world. In order to do this, she must first re-aryanise herself.
It was to initiate this great work, the greatest and most wonderful work ever given to a race, that Bhagawan Ramkrishna7 came and Vivekananda preached.
If the work does not progress as it once promised to do, it is because we have once again allowed the terrible cloud of tamas to settle down on our souls 
– fear, doubt, hesitation, sluggishness.
We have taken, some of us, the Bhakti which poured forth from the one and the Jnana given us by the other, but from the lack8 of Shakti, from the lack of Karma, we have not been able to make our Bhakti a living thing.
May we yet remember that it was Kali, who is Bhawani mother of strength, whom Ramkrishna9 worshipped and with whom he became one.
But the destiny of India will not wait on the falterings and failings of individuals; the mother demands that men shall arise to institute her worship and make it universal.
To get strength we must adore the Mother of strength.
Strength then and again strength and yet more strength is the need of our race. But if it is strength we desire, how shall we gain it if we do not adore the Mother of strength? She demands worship not for Her own sake, but in order that She may help us and give Herself to us. This is no fantastic idea, no superstition but the ordinary law of the universe. The gods cannot, if they would, give themselves unasked. Even the Eternal comes not unaware10 upon man11. Every devotee knows by experience that we must turn to Him and desire and adore Him before the Divine Spirit pours in its ineffable beauty and ecstasy upon the soul. What is true of the Eternal, is true also of Her who goes forth from Him.
Those who, possessed with western ideas, look askance at any return to the old sources of energy may well consider a few fundamental facts.
I. There is no instance in history of a more marvellous and sudden up-surging of strength in a nation than modern Japan.
All sorts of theories had been started to account for the uprising, 
but now intellectual12 Japanese are telling us what were the fountains of that mighty awakening, the sources of that inexhaustible strength.
They were drawn from religion.
It was the Vedantic teachings of Oyomei and the recovery of Shintoism with its worship of the national Shakti of Japan in the image and person of the Mikado that enabled the little island empire to wield the stupendous weapons of western knowledge and science as lightly and invincibly as Arjun wielded the Gandiv.
India’s greater need of spiritual regeneration.
II. India’s need of drawing from the fountains of religion is far greater than was ever Japan’s; for the Japanese had only to revitalise and perfect a strength that already existed. We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts, to be born again. There is no scientific process, no machinery for that. Strength can only be created by drawing it from the internal and inexhaustible reservoirs of the Spirit, from that Adya-Shakti of the Eternal which is the fountain of all new existence. To be born again means nothing but to revive the Brahma within us, and that is a spiritual process,– no effort of the body or the intellect can compass it.
Religion the path natural to the national mind.
III. All great awakenings in India, all her periods of mightiest and most varied vigour have drawn their vitality from the fountain-heads of some deep religious awakening.
Wherever the religious awakening has been complete and grand, the national energy it has created has been gigantic and puissant; wherever the religious movement has been narrow or incomplete, the national movement has been broken, imperfect or temporary.
The persistence of this phenomenon is proof that it is ingrained in the temperament of the race.
If you try other and foreign methods, we shall either gain our end with tedious slowness, painfully and imperfectly, or we shall not attain it at all.
Why abandon the plain way which God and the Mother have marked out for you to choose faint and devious paths of your own treading?
The spirit within is the true source of strength.
IV. The Brahma within, the one and indivisible ocean of spiritual force is that from which all life material and mental is drawn. This is beginning to be as much recognised by leading western thinkers as it was from the old days by the East. If it be so, then spiritual energy is the source of all other strength. There are the fathomless fountain-heads, the deep and inexhaustible sources. The shallow surface springs are easier to reach, but they soon run dry. Why not then go deep instead of scratching the surface? The result will repay the labour.
We need three things answering to three fundamental laws.
I. Bhakti – the temple of the Mother.
We cannot get strength unless we adore the Mother of strength.
We will therefore build a temple to the white Bhawani, the mother of strength, the Mother of India; and we will build it in a place far from the contamination of modern cities and as yet little trodden by man, in a high and pure air steeped in calm and energy. This temple will be the centre from which Her worship is to flow over the whole country; for there worshipped among the hills, She will pass like fire into the brains and hearts of Her worshippers. This also is what the Mother has commanded.
II. Karma – a new order of brahmacharins.
Adoration will be dead and ineffective unless it is transmuted into Karma.
We will therefore have a math with a new Order of Karma-Yogins attached to the temple, men who have renounced all in order to work for the Mother.
Some may, if they choose, be complete Sannyasins13, most will be Brahmacharins who will return to the grihasthasram14 when their allotted work is finished; but all must accept renunciation.
Why? For two reasons15: –
(1) Because it is only in proportion as we put from us the pre-occupation of bodily desires and interests, the sensual gratifications, lusts, longings, indolences of the material world, that we can return to the ocean of spiritual force within us.
(2) Because for the development of Shakti, entire concentration is necessary; the mind must be devoted entirely to its aim as a spear is hurled to its mark; if other cares and longings distract the mind, the spear will be carried out from its straight course and miss the target. We need a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to its uttermost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.
III. Jnana – the great message.
Bhakti and Karma cannot be perfect and enduring unless they are based upon Jnana.
The Brahmacharins of the Order will therefore be taught to fill their souls with knowledge and base their work upon it as upon a rock. What shall be the basis of their knowledge? What but the great so-aham, the mighty formula of the Vedanta, the ancient gospel which has yet to reach the heart of the nation, the knowledge which when vivified by Karma and Bhakti delivers man out of all fear and all weakness.
स्वल्पमप्यस्य धर्मस्य त्रायते महतो भयात् ।16
When, therefore, you ask who is Bhawani the mother, She herself answers you, “I am the Infinite Energy which streams forth from the Eternal in the world and Eternal17 in yourselves. I am the Mother of the Universe, the Mother of the Worlds, and for you who are children of the Sacred land, aryabhumi, made of her clay and reared by her sun and winds, I am Bhawani Bharati, Mother of India.”
Then if you ask why we should erect a temple to Bhawani the mother, hear Her answer, “Because I have commanded it and because by making a centre for the future religion, you will be furthering the immediate will of the Eternal and storing up merit which will make you strong in this life and great in another. You will be helping to create a nation, to consolidate an age, to aryanise a world. And that nation is your own, that age is the age of yourselves and your children, that world is no fragment of land bounded by seas and hills, but the whole earth with her teeming millions.”
Come then, hearken to the call of the Mother. She is already in our hearts waiting to manifest Herself, waiting to be worshipped,– inactive because the God in us is concealed by tamas, troubled by Her inactivity, sorrowful because Her children will not call on Her to help them. You who feel Her stirring within you, fling off the black veil of self, break down the imprisoning walls of indolence, help Her each as you feel impelled, with your bodies or with your intellect or with your speech or with your wealth or with your prayers and worship, each man according to his capacity. Draw not back, for against those who were called and heard Her not, She may well be wroth in the day of Her coming; but to those who help Her advent even a little, how radiant with beauty and kindness will be the face of their Mother!
Earlier edition of this work: Sri Aurobindo Birth Century Library: Set in 30 volumes.- Volume 1.- Bande Mataram: Early Political Writings. 1890 - May 1908.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1973.- 920 p.
1 1973 ed. Vol. 1: Mlechchha
2 1973 ed. Vol. 1: senile
3 1973 ed. Vol. 1: Shakti
4 1973 ed. Vol. 1: million
5 1973 ed. Vol. 1: Ramakrishna
6 1973 ed. Vol. 1: Mlechchhahood
7 1973 ed. Vol. 1: Ramakrishna
8 1973 ed. Vol. 1: from lack
9 1973 ed. Vol. 1: Ramakrishna
10 1973 ed. Vol. 1: unawares
11 1973 ed. Vol. 1: men
12 1973 ed. Vol. 1: now the intellectual
13 1973 ed. Vol. 1: Sannyasis
14 1973 ed. Vol. 1: Grihasthashram
15 1973 ed. Vol. 1: For Reasons
16 Bhagavat Gita 2.40. svalpamapyasya dharmasya trāyate mahato bhayāt — The sentence is absent in the edition of 1973 year
17 1973 ed. Vol. 1: and the Eternal