Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram

Political Writings and Speeches. 1890–1908

Note on the Texts

Bande Mataram: Political Writings and Speeches 1890 – 1908 includes all of Sri Aurobindo’s surviving political writings and speeches from the years before his arrest in May 1908. Political writings and speeches from the period after his imprisonment are published in Karmayogin: Political Writings and Speeches 1909 – 1910, volume 8 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.

The bulk of the present volumes consists of articles published in the newspaper Bande Mataram in 1906, 1907 and 1908. They also include writings and a resolution from before the Bande Mataram period, speeches delivered during that period, writings from that period not published during the author’s lifetime and, in four appendixes, writings and jottings connected with the Bande Mataram, documents relating to the organisation of the Nationalist Party, and an interview.

Historical Background

Sri Aurobindo became interested in the problem of Indian independence while still a student in England. He once wrote, correcting a statement by a biographer:

At the age of eleven Aurobindo had already received strongly the impression that a period of general upheaval and great revolutionary changes was coming in the world and he himself was destined to play a part in it. His attention was now drawn to India and this feeling was soon canalised into the idea of the liberation of his own country.

At Cambridge University, between 1890 and 1892, Sri Aurobindo gave a number of “revolutionary speeches” before the “Indian Majlis”, a student club. These speeches have unfortunately been lost. The only record of his political thinking at this time are some jottings he wrote in a notebook under the heading “India Renascent” (page 3).

Returning to India in February 1893, Sri Aurobindo took up work in the Princely State of Baroda. Later that same year, he began to contribute articles on the Indian National Congress to the Indu Prakash of Bombay. These proved to be too outspoken for the proprietor of this newspaper. Compelled to tone them down, Sri Aurobindo soon lost interest in the project. For the next twelve years he published nothing on Indian politics. During this interval he wrote a few unfinished articles in his notebooks, which were not published until after his passing. In 1905, as the agitation against the partition of Bengal began to pick up steam, he again saw an opening for serious political journalism. Around this time he wrote and had printed two or three pamphlets, one of which, Bhawani Mandir, survives. All available political writings from the pre-1906 period are published in Part One of these volumes.

In February 1906, Sri Aurobindo left his job in Baroda and settled in Calcutta. Even before then he had made contact with the advanced nationalists of Bengal, who had begun to split off from the established group, whom they called “Moderates”. The advanced group, who called themselves the New Party or Nationalists, but were called by their opponents “Extremists”, wanted to make the Indian National Congress a dynamic political organisation with an aggressive policy. All the Indian-owned English-language dailies of Calcutta were in the control of men of moderate if not loyalist views. From the end of 1905, the Nationalists discussed the desirability of starting their own English daily; but nothing was done until August 1906, when Bipin Chandra Pal, the most important Nationalist leader of Bengal, launched the Bande Mataram. Its first issue appeared on 6 August 1906. That same day, Pal left on a political tour. Before his departure from Calcutta, he asked Sri Aurobindo to contribute articles to the new newspaper. Sri Aurobindo agreed, and from that time until his arrest two years later, he was one of the chief Bande Mataram writers.

Pal had started Bande Mataram “with only Rs 500 in his pocket”. Not surprisingly, the paper was soon in financial trouble. At Sri Aurobindo’s suggestion, it was reorganised in October 1906 as a joint-stock company. At that time, he and Pal were named co-editors. A few weeks later, Pal was forced to leave by Sri Aurobindo’s supporters, who wanted to put forward a more openly revolutionary programme. Sri Aurobindo later wrote that he “would not have consented to this departure, for he regarded the qualities of Pal as a great asset to the Bande Mataram”. He was “perhaps the best and most original political thinker in the country, an excellent writer and a magnificent orator: but the separation was effected behind Sri Aurobindo’s back when he was convalescing from a dangerous attack of fever”. In any event, from the moment Sri Aurobindo returned to work, he “controlled the policy of the Bande Mataram along with that of the party in Bengal”. Although never financially stable, the Bande Mataram was a success, and in June 1907, a weekly edition was begun. This consisted almost entirely of matter reprinted from the daily edition. Articles written by Sri Aurobindo while the Bande Mataram was under Pal’s editorship are published in Part Two; articles written while it was under Sri Aurobindo’s editorship and before the weekly edition started are published in Part Three; articles written during the first seven months after the start of the weekly are published in Part Four.

At the end of December 1907, Sri Aurobindo left Calcutta to attend the Surat session of the Indian National Congress. Before and after the session, he delivered a number of speeches in different cities. Many of these survive in one form or another. Transcripts of nine of them are published in Part Five.

Sri Aurobindo returned to Calcutta in February 1908 and resumed the editorship of the Bande Mataram. At the same time he addressed meetings in Calcutta and other parts of Bengal. This writing and speaking continued until 2 May 1908, when he was arrested and put on trial in what became known as the Alipore Bomb Case. His writings and speeches from February to May 1908 are published in Part Six. Sri Aurobindo remained in jail until May 1909, when he was acquitted and released. During his imprisonment the Bande Mataram was suppressed by the British government under the provisions of the Press Act of 1908.

At the time of Sri Aurobindo’s arrest, a number of documents were seized from his house. Among them were several articles on politics that he had written in 1907 and 1908 but never offered for publication. Some of these were used as evidence in the Alipore trial and later found their way into print. These writings are reproduced directly from Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts in Part Seven.

Only a few manuscripts of Bande Mataram articles survive; these are published in Appendix One. Nine memoranda or notes dealing with the newspaper’s management and promotion are reproduced in Appendix Two, while two documents dealing with Nationalist party politics are reproduced in Appendix Three. Appendix Four consists of an interview given by Sri Aurobindo during the preliminary trial of the Alipore Bomb Case.

The Authorship of the Articles

The Bande Mataram was a complete daily newspaper with the usual features: news, editorials, advertisements, etc. Most of its news was taken from other Calcutta papers (see Appendix Two, 5). The originality of the Bande Mataram lay in the articles printed on its editorial page. These were of four main kinds: (1) “leaders” or political editorials of some length; (2) “paras”, shorter pieces dealing with various topics, often citing and discussing leaders printed in other newspapers; (3) columns written in a personal, sometimes humorous style, under headings like “By the Way”; (4) articles on a variety of topics that were signed or marked “communicated”.

None of the articles in categories (1) to (3) were signed. Nationalist writers in British India were subject to prosecution for sedition, a crime carrying a maximum sentence of transportation for life. If the articles were left unsigned, the only person liable to prosecution was the registered printer of the paper. Many such printers (often not the actual printers of the paper) were convicted and sentenced to longer or shorter periods of imprisonment.

At least seven men wrote articles published anonymously in the editorial columns of the Bande Mataram: Bipin Chandra Pal, Sri Aurobindo, Hemendra Prasad Ghose, Shyam Sunder Chakravarti, Bijoy C. Chatterjee, Satish Mukherji and Upendranath Banerji. The following is known about the connection of these men with the paper:

Bipin Chandra Pal. The founder of Bande Mataram, Pal was its editor-in-chief between 6 August and 12 October 1906. (During most of this period he was away from Calcutta, but he often sent in articles.) On 12 October Pal was named joint-editor along with Sri Aurobindo. Between November 1906 and April 1908 he had no connection with the paper and contributed no articles.

Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose). Soon after joining the Bande Mataram in August 1906, Sri Aurobindo became its most important writer. On 12 October he was appointed joint-editor with B. C. Pal, and in November became editor-in-chief.¹ He remained in charge of the policy of the paper until his arrest on 2 May 1908.

Hemendra Prasad Ghose. He joined the staff of the Bande Mataram on 5 September 1906 and became an important writer, working on and off until the paper’s demise in 1908.

Shyam Sunder Chakravarti. After the departure of Pal in November 1906, Shyam Sunder became Bande Mataram’s second most important writer. Hemendra Prasad wrote of him in his diary: “Suffice it to say – he is an engine.” The number of articles that were written by him appears to be substantial. His contribution to the success and influence of the Bande Mataram has not been adequately recognised.

Bijoy C. Chatterjee. There is no evidence of his connection with the paper before January 1908. After that, he became one of its major writers.

Satish Chandra Mukherji. Head of the National Council of Education and editor of the Dawn, Satish Chandra had little time to write for the Bande Mataram. According to Hemendra Prasad, he contributed a few articles, which were invariably accepted.

Upendranath Banerji. A member of Barindra Kumar Ghose’s revolutionary group, Upendranath joined the Bande Mataram around December 1906. He also wrote for the Bengali paper Yugantar. From mid-1907 he was kept busy by revolutionary work.

It is known that Sri Aurobindo was the leading writer for the Bande Mataram from November 1906 to May 1908, except when he was absent from Calcutta. During such periods, he later wrote, “it was Shyam Sundar who wrote most of the Bande Mataram editorials, those excepted which were sent by Sri Aurobindo from Deoghar.” For information on Sri Aurobindo’s presence in or absence from Calcutta, see Table 1 on page 1153.

Selection of Articles Published in the Present Volumes

In the present volumes are published all editorial articles from surviving issues of the Bande Mataram that the editors believe were written by Sri Aurobindo. Since the articles were not signed, the selection was necessarily a matter of editorial judgment. In making their choice, the editors have based themselves on (1) documentary evidence, (2) internal evidence, (3) the opinions of other authorities.

(1) Documentary Evidence

Primary documents consulted consist of

(a) eyewitness evidence concerning the presence in or absence from Calcutta of Sri Aurobindo and other Bande Mataram writers;

(b) statements and other evidence by participants concerning the authorship of the articles in general or of particular pieces. Primary documents consulted include:

Bagchee, Moni. Letter dated 23 November 1971, listing a few articles known by him to be by his father-in-law Shyam Sunder Chakravarti. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives.

Banerji, Upendranath. List of articles said by him to be by Sri Aurobindo, compiled in 1939. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives.

Deb, Suresh Chandra. 1949. “When He Was a Political Leader”, Calcutta Municipal Gazette 50, 20 August, pp. viii – ix.

Deb, Suresh Chandra. 1950. “Sri Aurobindo as I Knew Him: Some Reminiscences of His Political Days”, Mother India 2 (15 August).

Ghose, Hemendra Prasad. Diary 1906 – 1908. Jadavpur University Library.

Ghose, Hemendra Prasad. 1949. “Reminiscences of Aurobindo Ghose”, Orient Illustrated Weekly 13 (27 February), pp. 11 – 12, 10.

Ghose, Hemendra Prasad. 1949. Aurobindo: Prophet of Patriotism. Calcutta: A. K. Mitra.

Pal, Bipin Chandra. 1907. The New Spirit. Calcutta: Sinha, Sarvadhikar and Co.

Pal, Bipin Chandra. c. 1910. “Aurobindo Ghose”. In Leaders of the National Movement in Bengal. London: n.p.

Pal, Bipin Chandra. 1932. “My Prison Experiences”, Liberty [Calcutta daily] (2 June).

Sri Aurobindo. Manuscripts of various dates in Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives.

Sri Aurobindo. 1972. On Himself. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.

Relevant data available in these documents are presented in the text and tables on pages 1153 to 1157.

Chronological Data

Sri Aurobindo joined the Bande Mataram a day or two after 6 August 1906, and continued to contribute to it until his arrest on 2 May 1908. Between these two dates he was several times absent from Calcutta and at least twice was incapacitated by illness. (During his absences from Calcutta he occasionally sent in articles for publication.) The following table presents all that is known from contemporary documents about his presence in or absence from Calcutta and periods of illness between August 1906 and May 1908.

Due to want of space, information on the presence in or absence from Calcutta of other Bande Mataram writers is not given in this chronology. Some information is given in the list of writers on pages 1150 – 51.

Table 1. Chronology

Documents by Participants

Only two handwritten drafts of Bande Mataram articles written by Sri Aurobindo survive. (These are identified in Table 2 as “SA draft”. They are published in Appendix One.) He made a list of articles he had written in one of his notebooks. Unfortunately only one of these articles survives (“SA NB” in the table). The only other contemporary document providing information on authorship of Bande Mataram articles is the diary of Hemendra Prasad Ghose (“HPG diary” in the table). During the 1940s, Sri Aurobindo was shown transcripts of 37 articles published in the weekly Bande Mataram. He identified 26 of them as his (“SA list” in the table). Around the same time, while correcting manuscripts of books or articles dealing with his own life and works or while preparing editions of his works, he provided information that establishes his authorship of a few Bande Mataram articles (“SA MSS” in the table). In 1939 Upendranath Banerji examined articles in issues of the daily Bande Mataram published between March and June 1907. He assigned 21 of them to Sri Aurobindo (“UB list” in the table). In 1949, in a booklet and an article on Sri Aurobindo, Hemendra Prasad Ghose discussed a few articles by Sri Aurobindo (“HPG 1949”).²

It should be noted that none of these attempts at ascription was systematic or comprehensive. Only a fraction of the surviving articles was dealt with. None of the participants considered articles published before February 1907 or after January 1908. Each individual dealt with articles in an even narrower range of dates. The earliest article Sri Aurobindo was shown was dated 18 March 1907, the latest, 25 November 1907. He was only shown articles that had been published in the weekly edition. Upendranath Banerji considered only articles published between March and June 1907. Hemendra Prasad Ghose mentioned only about twenty articles in his diary and fewer in his publications. In no case was his purpose in mentioning them to clarify questions of authorship. Several of the articles he mentioned are short and unimportant.

It should also be noted that none of the methods of identification was foolproof. Most of the documents date from twenty or more years after the period. The “lists” of Sri Aurobindo and Upendranath Banerji were compiled more than thirty years after the publication of the articles. Neither of them made a careful study of the articles they were shown. It is quite possible that mistakes of ascription occurred. One article definitely written by Hemendra Prasad (he mentioned it in his diary the day it was published) was later included in Sri Aurobindo’s and Upendranath’s lists of articles written by Sri Aurobindo.³ Another article ascribed to Sri Aurobindo by Upendranath Banerji is clearly not by Sri Aurobindo and has not been published in this book.⁴ Several articles on the list of those identified by Sri Aurobindo seem, on the basis of content and style, to be by another writer. They have nevertheless been given the benefit of the doubt and included in the present collection.⁵

Table 2.
Articles Ascribed by Participants to Sri Aurobindo

(2) Internal Evidence

Only fifty-six articles are listed in the above table. Sri Aurobindo unquestionably wrote many more. It is clear from the publications of B. C. Pal, Hemendra Prasad Ghose and Suresh Deb cited in footnote 2 that Sri Aurobindo was the principal writer for Bande Mataram between August 1906 and April 1908. During this period some 630 issues of Bande Mataram were published. It may be assumed that Sri Aurobindo contributed articles to most issues that came out while he was in Calcutta and in good health.

Since none of Bande Mataram’s editorial articles were signed, and only a few can be assigned to an author by means of the available documentary evidence, the question of the authorship of the rest, in particular the question of which of them were written by Sri Aurobindo, can only be decided by reference to the articles themselves. In selecting the articles to be included in this volume, the editors have taken the following factors into consideration:

Views. As editor-in-chief, Sri Aurobindo did not impose uniformity of opinion on the various Bande Mataram writers; their political views were however generally consistent. All agreed on basic matters of policy such as Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott and National Education. They differed occasionally on subordinate issues such as village uplift, caste, etc. Articles that express opinions at variance with Sri Aurobindo’s known views on such matters are assumed to have been written by others.

Approach and tone. Articles by writers other than Sri Aurobindo sometimes contain reasoned arguments concerning the legitimacy of India’s political demands, or appeals to the better feelings of the British public. Sri Aurobindo rarely took this approach. He once wrote, speaking of himself in the third person: “As a politician it was part of Sri Aurobindo’s principles never to appeal to the British people; that he would have considered as part of the mendicant policy.”

Personal references. The editorial tone adopted by the Bande Mataram writers was generally impersonal. However they occasionally made passing references to persons and events they had seen themselves. References to English university life and the Baroda state sometimes suggest that the article in question was written by Sri Aurobindo.

Citations. Articles known to be by Shyam Sunder Chakravarti and Hemendra Prasad Ghose often contain long quotations from or allusions to certain British prose writers (Mill, Macaulay) and poets (Shakespeare, Milton). Sri Aurobindo’s articles contain few quotations but occasional allusions to a wide range of Biblical, classical, European and Indian literary works.

Clichés. Writings known to be by Hemendra Prasad Ghose and other members of the Bande Mataram’s staff often contain clichés and other outworn expressions. The presence of such expressions is a sign that the article was not written by Sri Aurobindo.

English grammar and usage. Articles by writers other than Sri Aurobindo sometimes contain obvious errors in grammar and usage. Articles by Sri Aurobindo contain few or none.

Style. Sri Aurobindo’s style can generally be recognised even if its attributes cannot be enumerated. In deciding whether a certain article is in Sri Aurobindo’s style, the editors have relied on their subjective judgment, informed by a close familiarity with Sri Aurobindo’s writings of all periods. They have had to keep in mind, however, a fact noted by Sri Aurobindo – that “Shyam Sundar [Chakravarti] caught up some imitation” of his style, “and many could not distinguish between their writings”. He also noted, in an essay written some years before the start of the Bande Mataram, that it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish a given prose style from a good imitation of it:

In an English literary periodical it was recently observed that a certain Oxford professor who had studied Stevenson like a classic, attempted to apportion to Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne their respective work in the Wrecker, but his apportionment turned out [to] be hopelessly erroneous. To this the obvious answer is that the Wrecker is a prose work and not poetry. There was no prose style ever written that a skilful hand could not reproduce as accurately as a practised forger reproduces a signature.

The editors have made every effort to distinguish pieces actually written by Sri Aurobindo from those written in an imitation of his style. They acknowledge that such judgments are not infallible.

(3) The Opinions of Other Authorities

Attempts have been made by other scholars to determine the authorship of Bande Mataram articles. The editors of the present edition have consulted all available works in which articles are ascribed to Sri Aurobindo or to others. The principal works consulted are:

Mookerjee, Amalendu Prasad. 1974. Social and Political Ideals of Bipin Chandra Pal. Calcutta: Minerva Associates.

Mookerjee, Amalendu Prasad. 1975. Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives.

Mukherjee, Haridas, and Uma Mukherjee. 1957. “Bande Mataram” and Indian Nationalism. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay.

Mukherjee, Haridas, and Uma Mukherjee. 1958. Sri Aurobindo’s Political Thought. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyaya.

Mukherjee, Haridas, and Uma Mukherjee. 1964. Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought in Indian Politics. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay.

Mukherjee, Haridas, and Uma Mukherjee. 1994. Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives.

They also benefited from the research and opinions of the editors of Bande Mataram: Early Political Writings – I (1972), Jayantilal Parekh and Sanat Kumar Banerji.

However 37 articles published at the 1-st volume of SABCL were not reprinted now:

Not reprinted articles

New 120 articles and notes that was not included in the 1-st volume of SABCL:

New articles, notes, apeeches

Taking into consideration the documentary and internal evidence and the authoritative opinions available to them, the editors of the present volume have made their own list of 353 articles they believe were written by Sri Aurobindo. These may be placed in three categories:

(1) 56 articles for which there is documentary evidence of Sri Aurobindo’s authorship;

(2) 102 articles which, given the weight of internal evidence and/or authoritative opinions, may be assigned to Sri Aurobindo with a high degree of confidence;

(3) 195 articles, for which there is no such weight of evidence, but which the editors believe should be assigned to Sri Aurobindo rather than to any other Bande Mataram writer. The 56 articles in the first category are listed in Table 2 above.

The 102 in the second are listed in Table 3 below. The remaining articles are not listed, but may be determined by process of elimination from the complete list of articles in the Table of Contents (Parts Two, Three, Four and Six).

The articles listed in the following table are those for which there is no documentary proof of Sri Aurobindo’s authorship, but which the editors believe, with a high degree of confidence, to be his work. These 102 articles, together with the 56 listed in Table 2, constitute that portion of the extant articles of Bande Mataram that can confidently be regarded as the work of Sri Aurobindo.

Table 3.
Articles that Can Be Ascribed to Sri Aurobindo
with a High Degree of Confidence

Around 1300 unsigned political writings were published in surviving issues of the daily and weekly editions of the Bande Mataram between 20 August 1906 and 3 May 1908. The editors have examined all of them, and assigned 353 to Sri Aurobindo. If 300 articles are subtracted from the total as having been published while Sri Aurobindo was ill or away from Calcutta, the portion assigned to him comes to about one-third. Given that there were generally no more than three fulltime editorial writers working for the Bande Mataram, the number of articles assigned by the editors to Sri Aurobindo does not appear to be excessive.

The editors concede that they may have missed some articles written by Sri Aurobindo and that some of those they have assigned to him may have been written by others. In one sense, however, all the editorials published in the Bande Mataram between mid-October 1906 and May 1908 may be said to have his stamp on them. As the Nationalist leader Jitendra Lal Bannerji wrote in 1909:

From the very first, the hand of the master was visible in the writings of the “Bande-Mataram”, and that master the world tacitly agreed to accept as Aravinda Ghosh. And yet it will be a mistake to suppose that Aravinda did all or even much of the writing for the new paper. He was assisted in this undertaking by a fine band of co-adjutors, chief among whom must be mentioned Babu Shyam Sundar Chakravarti. . . . In one respect, however, the judgment of the public was sure and unerring. Whoever the actual contributor to the “Bande-Mataram” might be – the soul, the genius of the paper was Aravinda. The pen might be that of Shyam Sundar or who not – the world did not care about it; but the voice was the voice of Aravinda Ghosh: his the clear clarion notes calling men to heroic and strenuous self-sacrifice; his the unswerving, unfaltering faith in the high destinies of his race; his the passionate resolve to devote life, fame, fortune, all to the service of the Mother.⁶

The File of the Bande Mataram

There are several breaks in the sequence of articles published here as Sri Aurobindo’s. Some of these breaks are due, as noted above, to periods of illness or absence from Calcutta. Most of the others are due to gaps in the file of the Bande Mataram.

The Bande Mataram was published continuously from August 1906 to October 1908. (Sri Aurobindo was connected with the paper only until his arrest in May 1908.) Only a single file of the daily edition survives.⁷ Many issues are missing from it. Of the 540 issues of the daily Bande Mataram that appear to have been printed between 6 August 1906 (when Sri Aurobindo joined) and 2 May 1908 (when he was arrested),⁸ only 371 complete issues survive. This is roughly two-thirds of the issues that were printed during the period of Sri Aurobindo’s connection with the newspaper.⁹

The first volume of the weekly edition of the Bande Mataram consisted of fifty-one issues. All of these survive. Forty-eight of them came out during the period of Sri Aurobindo’s connection with the paper. The weekly edition consisted almost entirely of matter reprinted from the daily edition. Certain articles found in the weekly but not in any surviving issue of the daily evidently were printed in issues of the daily that have been lost.

The following month-by-month table will give some idea of places where the file of the daily Bande Mataram is deficient. It will be seen that most of the missing issues are from the first seven months of the newspaper’s existence. Note that one cannot always be certain whether the issue for a given date lacks because no issue was printed or because none was preserved.

Table 4.
Completeness of the File of the Daily Bande Mataram

Year Month Summary of Missing Issues

1906 August No issue survives before that of 20 August; only five issues survive for the rest of the month.

1906 September Only twelve issues survive.

1906 October Eleven issues survive up to 16 October; no issue was printed between then and 22 October; only four issues survive for the rest of the month.

1906 November No issue survives.

1906 December Only one complete issue survives.

1906 One incomplete issue (lacking editorial page) also survives.

1907 January Only one complete issue survives.

1907 February No issue is available before that of 13 February; nine issues survive for the rest of the month.

1907 March Issues for seven dates are lacking; for one of them perhaps no issue was printed.

1907 April The issue for one date is lacking; the issue for one date is incomplete.

1907 May Issues for three dates are lacking; the issue for one date is incomplete.

1907 June Issues for three dates are lacking; the issue for one is incomplete.

1907 July Issues for two dates are lacking; for one of them perhaps no issue was printed.

1907 August Issues for eleven dates are lacking.

1907 September Issues for four dates are lacking.

1907 October No issue was printed between 15 and 19 October

1907 (Puja holidays); issues for four other dates are lacking; the issue for one date is incomplete.

1907 November Issues for five dates are lacking; issues for two dates are incomplete.

1907 December Issues for seven dates are lacking; for one of them perhaps no issue was printed.

1908 January Issues for four dates are lacking.

1908 February Issues for two dates are lacking.

1908 March Issues for four dates are lacking; the issue for one date is incomplete.

1908 April Issues for five dates are lacking.

1908 May The issue of 1 May is incomplete; the issue of 2 May is lacking.

Notes on Specific Pieces

Part One. Writings and a Resolution 1890 – 1906

All the pieces in this part were written before the start of the Bande Mataram in August 1906. Many of them were not completed or published during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime.

India Renascent. 1890 – 92. Written in a notebook used by Sri Aurobindo at Cambridge.

New Lamps for Old with India and the British Parliament The ten articles comprising “India and the British Parliament” and New Lamps for Old were published anonymously in the Indu Prakash, a Marathi – English weekly newspaper of Bombay, in 1893 and 1894. Sri Aurobindo wrote these articles on the invitation of K. G. Deshpande, the editor of the English section of the journal, whom he had known at Cambridge. “The first two articles”, Sri Aurobindo later noted,

made a sensation and frightened [Mahadev Govind] Ranade and other Congress leaders. Ranade warned the proprietor of the paper that, if this went on, he would surely be prosecuted for sedition. Accordingly the original plan of the series had to be dropped at the proprietor’s instance. Deshpande requested Sri Aurobindo to continue in a modified tone and he reluctantly consented, but felt no farther interest and the articles were published at long intervals and finally dropped of themselves altogether.

“India and the British Parliament”. Published in Indu Prakash on 26 June 1893. Under the heading was printed “Communicated” (i.e., from a special correspondent). In the next issue of the newspaper, 3 July 1893, the editor (presumably K. G. Deshpande) referred to the essay in the following paragraph, also headed “India and the British Parliament”:

Under this heading we had a communication from a very able writer in our last issue. Our readers must have been struck with the tone and conclusions of that article. We shall be very happy to receive any communication from our readers on the subject. Meanwhile we are trying to get a series of articles on the question and the one implied therein as to where we are drifting and in what direction our political work should lie. The last article [i.e. “India and the British Parliament”] will thus be a kind of trumpet note.

New Lamps for Old. The promised series began on 7 August 1893. Below the first instalment was published the following editorial note:

We promised our readers some time back a series of articles on our present Political Progress by an extremely able and keen observer of the present times. We are very much pleased to give our readers the first instalment of that series. The title under which these views appear is “New lamps for old” which is very suggestive though a metaphorical one. The preface will take us over to the next issue. The views therein contained are not those that are commonly held by our Politicians, and for this reason they are very important. We have been long convinced that our efforts in Political Progress are not sustained, but are lacking in vigour. Hypocrisy has been the besetting sin of our Political agitation. Oblique vision is the fashion. True, matter of fact, honest criticism is very badly needed. Our institutions have no strong foundation and are in hourly danger of falling down. Under these circumstances it was idle – nay, criminal,– to remain silent while our whole energy in Political Progress was spent in a wrong direction. The questions at issue are momentous. It is the making or unmaking of a nation. We have therefore secured a gentleman of great literary talents, of liberal culture and considerable English experience, well versed in the art of writing and willing, at great personal inconvenience and probable misrepresentation, to give out his views in no uncertain voice, and, we may be allowed to add, in a style and diction peculiarly his own. We bespeak our readers’ most careful and constant perusal on his behalf and assure them that they will find in those articles matter that will set them thinking and steel their patriotic souls.

The eight remaining articles of the series appeared on the following dates: 2) 21 August 1893; 3) 28 August 1893; 4) 18 September 1893; 5) 30 October 1893; 6) 13 November 1893; 7) 4 December 1893; 8) 5 February 1894; 9) 6 March 1894.

At the Turn of the Century. Editorial title. Circa 1900. This piece evidently was written towards the beginning of the first year of the century. First published, along with the next piece, in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research in 1983.

Old Moore for 1901. Circa 1901. “Old Moore’s Almanack” (known also as Vox Stellarum) was an English almanac first brought out by Francis Moore in 1700. Along with the usual information found in almanacs – the time of the rising and setting of the sun and moon, etc. – Old Moore’s provided “predictions of coming events... by a notable astrologer of the nineteenth century”. Old Moore’s of 1901 contained a column of predictions for each month of the year. Basing himself on these predictions, Sri Aurobindo wrote, in his own words, summaries of what he thought would be the year’s most significant developments. First published, along with the preceding piece, in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research in 1983.

The Congress Movement. Editorial title. Circa 1903 (the Ahmedabad Congress, mentioned in passing in the piece, was held in December 1902). First published in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research in 1983.

Fragment for a Pamphlet. Editorial title. Circa 1901 – 5. Sri Aurobindo wrote this fragment in a notebook he first used in Baroda around 1901. It is impossible to determine the exact date of the piece. First published in Bande Mataram: Early Political Writings – I in 1972.

Unity: An open letter to those who despair of their Country. 1901 – 3. Written in a Baroda notebook, probably after the preceding piece, and almost certainly before “The Proposed Reconstruction of Bengal” (see below). First published in Bande Mataram: Early Political Writings – I in 1972.

The Proposed Reconstruction of Bengal: Partition or Annihilation. Circa 1904. This piece was written during an early stage of the agitation against the partition of Bengal, after the original announcement of December 1903 but before the full list of districts to be taken from Bengal and combined with Assam had been announced. First published in Bande Mataram: Early Political Writings – I in 1972.

On the Bengali and the Mahratta: Notes. Editorial title. 1902 – 6. Written on a sheet of paper that was among those seized by the police when Sri Aurobindo was arrested in May 1908. The sheet was put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial and subsequently reproduced in a government file containing transcripts of documentary evidence. This file was later reproduced in Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of Documents, volume 4 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1995), pp. 647 – 749. Published here for the first time in a book of Sri Aurobindo’s writings.

Bhawani Mandir. 1905. This famous pamphlet was written by Sri Aurobindo not long before August 1905, when a copy was received by a British official in Broach (a town not far from Baroda) and reported to the government (J. C. Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1917, pp. 33 – 34). It was used as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial, and later cited in the Rowlatt Report (1919). Rediscovered after independence among the Alipore Bomb Trial papers, it was reproduced in the Hindusthan Standard in October 1956 and later in various publications of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Of the genesis of the pamphlet, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “Bhawani Mandir was written by Sri Aurobindo but it was more Barin’s idea than his.” Barindra Kumar Ghose, Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother, actually went to central India to choose a site for the Temple to the Mother (Bhawani Mandir). Sri Aurobindo continued, “The idea of Bhawani Mandir simply lapsed of itself. Sri Aurobindo thought no more about it, but Barin who clung to the idea tried to establish something like it on a small scale in the Manicktala Garden.” The present text has been checked against a copy of the original pamphlet.

Ethics East and West. Editorial title. Circa 1902 – 6. There is no positive evidence by which this fragment might be dated. The handwriting is that of the Baroda period. It was seized when Sri Aurobindo’s house was searched in May 1908, put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial, and reproduced in a government file containing transcripts of documentary evidence and later in Terrorism in Bengal (see footnote 13). Published here for the first time in a book of Sri Aurobindo’s writings.

Resolution at a Swadeshi Meeting. Sri Aurobindo proposed this resolution at a Swadeshi meeting held in Baroda on 24 September 1905. A report of the meeting, which included Sri Aurobindo’s resolution, was published in Marathi in the Kesari of Poona on 3 October 1905. It has been retranslated into English by the editors of the present volume.

A Sample-Room for Swadeshi Articles. Editorial title. 1905 – 6. Sri Aurobindo wrote two drafts of this proposal sometime before he left Baroda in February 1906. The manuscript was seized and put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial, and subsequently reproduced in a government file containing transcripts of documentary evidence and later in Terrorism in Bengal (see footnote 13). The present text has been compiled by collating the fair-copy and rough draft, which have both undergone some damage since 1908, with the sometimes defective text reproduced in Terrorism in Bengal.

On the Barisal Proclamation. Editorial title. November 1905 or shortly thereafter. On 7 November 1905, Aswini Kumar Dutta and other Nationalist leaders of Barisal issued a proclamation in which they urged the people of the district to support the Swadeshi movement. A short while later Bampfylde Fuller, the Lieutenant-Governor of Eastern Bengal and Assam, summoned Dutta and the others and demanded that they withdraw the proclamation. A day or two later, they sent a letter to Fuller’s private secretary informing him that as Fuller was of the opinion that the proclamation contained “certain expressions that may tend to lead people to commit breaches of the peace, we withdraw the same”. The district magistrate thereupon issued a notification that the leaders “had withdrawn the appeal because they had understood that the appeal was seditious and provocative of breaches of the peace”. It was apparently after receiving news of this misleading notification (which ultimately caused the district magistrate to be fined for defamation) that Sri Aurobindo wrote this article. Its first pages are not available. They had been torn out of the notebook in which it was written even before it was produced as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial.

Part Two. Bande Mataram under the Editorship of Bipin Chandra Pal: 6 August – 15 October 1906

The articles published in this section all appeared in Bande Mataram on the dates given. They are not dealt with separately here.

Part Three. Bande Mataram under the Editorship of Sri Aurobindo: 24 October 1906 – 27 May 1907

The articles published in this section all appeared in Bande Mataram on the dates given. Most issues published between November 1906 and February 1907 have been lost. Sri Aurobindo certainly wrote many articles during this period. In one of his notebooks he made lists of certain articles, presumably those written by him, classified under subject headings. These lists are reproduced on pages 199 – 200. (It will be noted that an article in one of the surviving issues, “The Man of the Past and the Man of the Future”, is not among those listed by Sri Aurobindo. The editors nevertheless consider this article to be Sri Aurobindo’s on the basis of internal evidence.)

The Doctrine of Passive Resistance. This seven-part series of articles was published in the Bande Mataram on the following dates: 1) 11 April 1907; 2) 12 April 1907; 3) 13 April 1907; 4) 17 April 1907; 5) 18 and 19 April 1907; 6) 20 April 1907; 7) 23 April 1907. All but the last were published under the dual heading: “The New Thought: The Doctrine of Passive Resistance”. The editors have published the series in a single sequence since it comprises a single work with a single connected argument. It is probable that the series was completed before the first instalment was published. In all likelihood it was written in Deoghar, where Sri Aurobindo stayed from the beginning of January until the beginning of April 1907.

It is certain that the series was written by Sri Aurobindo. It was identified as his by Hemendra Prasad Ghose and Upendranath Banerji, as well as by Sri Aurobindo himself. When it was brought to his attention that a writer had ascribed the series to Bipin Chandra Pal, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

I was the writer of the series of articles on “Passive Resistance” published in April 1907 to which reference has been made. . . . I planned several series of this kind for the Bande Mataram and at least three were published of which “Passive Resistance” was one.

Another of these series apparently was “Shall India Be Free?”, which also appeared under the heading “The New Thought”. Four articles of this series were published between 27 April and 2 May 1907. The third series was apparently the one referred to in the first sentence of the first instalment of The Doctrine of Passive Resistance: “In a series of articles, published in this paper soon after the Calcutta session of the Congress [December 1906], we sought to indicate our view both of the ideal which the Congress had adopted . . . and of the possible lines of policy by which that ideal might be attained.” Unfortunately, this series has not survived, since almost all of the issues of the Bande Mataram from the two months following the Calcutta Congress have been lost.

Reflections of Srinath Paul, Rai Bahadoor, on the Present Discontents. Published in the Bande Mataram on 5 April 1907. A number of satirical poems were printed on the editorial pages of the Bande Mataram. According to Sri Aurobindo, these “were the work of Shyam Sundar Chakravarti”. There is, however, one exception. In his coverage of the Berhampore Conference (30 March – 1 April 1907), Hemendra Prasad Ghose devoted a paragraph to the speech of the chairman of the Reception Committee, a Moderate named Srinath Paul. Hemendra Prasad wrote that Paul’s loyalist utterances “provoked the audience to drown his words in hisses”, and that he finished his address “perspiring and short of breath” (Bande Mataram, 2 April 1907).¹⁰ After reading Hemendra Prasad’s report, Sri Aurobindo, who was then in Deoghar, wrote this take-off on Paul’s address. Thirty-five years later he remembered the piece while the book Collected Poems and Plays was being compiled. He wrote then to his secretary that he had published in the weekly Bande Mataram not only the play Perseus the Deliverer and the translation Vidula, but also “a political satire in verse purporting to be the report of the Reception Committee Chairman at a Moderate Conference”. The piece could not be located at that time because it had been published not in the weekly but in the daily edition, which was not then available. It is being reproduced here for the first time since 1907. It should be noted that Sri Aurobindo mentioned this verse satire and no other. There is no reason to believe that the long satirical verse-play The Slaying of Congress was written by him.

Rishi Bankim Chandra. Published in the Bande Mataram on 16 April 1907. In 1923 it was reprinted as a pamphlet entitled Rishi Bunkim Chandra by the Prabartak Publishing House, Chandernagore. In 1940 a slightly revised version was included in the booklet Bankim – Tilak – Dayananda, published by the Arya Publishing House, Calcutta. In the present volume, the text is reprinted as it appeared in the Bande Mataram.

Part Four. Bande Mataram under the Editorship of Sri Aurobindo: 28 May – 22 December 1907

The first issue of the weekly edition of the Bande Mataram appeared on Sunday, 2 June 1907. The weekly edition consisted almost entirely of articles and other features that had been published in the daily edition during the preceding week. It was intended for people in Calcutta who did not buy the daily, and for circulation in the outlying districts of Bengal and in other provinces. Some articles published in issues of the daily that have been lost are preserved only in the weekly edition.

The articles published in this part are not dealt with separately here. They all appeared in the Bande Mataram daily edition (and sometimes also in the weekly edition) on the date indicated. (If an article was first published in a now-missing issue of the daily edition, its exact date can be determined if only one issue of the week is missing. Otherwise, there are two or more possible dates.) The following is known about the one speech included in this part:

Advice to National College Students. This speech was delivered at the Bengal National College, Calcutta, on 23 August 1907. On 2 August, learning that he was about to be arrested for sedition, and wishing to spare the Bengal National College any embarrassment, Sri Aurobindo resigned the post of principal of that institution. Then, according to the Dawn and Dawn Society’s Magazine (September 1907):

On the 22nd August last the students and teachers of the Bengal National College in meeting assembled expressed their heartfelt appreciation of the eminent qualities as a teacher, of Srijut Aurobindo Ghose, their late beloved Principal, and recorded their deep regret at his resignation on the 2nd of August, 1907, of the high office which he had filled with such conspicuous ability and so much personal sacrifice during the first year of the existence of the college. They also expressed heartfelt sympathy with him in his present troubles in connection with his prosecution on the alleged charge of publishing certain seditious articles in the Bande Mataram. It was further resolved that a photograph of the late principal be taken to be hung up in the college hall. Accordingly the next day Srijukta Aurobindo Ghose was invited to come over to the college premises to be photographed. [The report here describes his reception by the students.] The teachers then requested him on behalf of the boys to speak to them a few words of advice. In response to the desire of the boys to hear from him he delivered in a voice choked with emotion a soul-stirring address of which we proceed to give the substance: –

The text of the speech was reproduced in Two Lectures of Sriyut Aravinda Ghose, B.A. (Cantab.) (Bombay, 1908), and was reprinted in Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose from the first edition (1922).

Part Five. Speeches: 22 December 1907 – 1 February 1908

During a trip to and from western India in the winter of 1907 – 8, Sri Aurobindo delivered at least fourteen speeches. Three of them were preserved in the form of transcripts published shortly afterwards in different newspapers, three others in the form of police reports in English, and five in the form of transcripts made first in Marathi by friends or police agents and subsequently retranslated into English. No transcripts of the other three speeches are known to exist.

Reports of nine of the fourteen speeches are reproduced in this part. Only two of them – those published in the Bande Mataram – may be considered reasonably adequate representations of his words. The other transcripts were recorded in language that is awkward or defective in one way or another. These have been edited to a greater or lesser extent to make them more clear and readable.

Our Experiences in Bengal. Speech delivered in Poona on 13 January 1908 at Gaikwad Wada, the residence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, at whose invitation Sri Aurobindo had come to the Maharashtrian city. The text reproduced here was first printed on 19 January in the Mahratta (Poona), an English newspaper with which Tilak was connected. Another transcript, longer but employing more defective English, was published in the Daily Telegraph and Deccan Herald on 15 January. The Deccan Herald version was included in the Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 1972 and subsequently in Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches. The Mahratta version is reproduced here for the first time in a book.

National Education. Speech delivered on 15 January 1908 in Girgaum, Bombay. A translation in Marathi was published in the Kesari on 21 January. This was retranslated into English by a police agent and published in the Bombay Native Paper Report (a police intelligence report) in 1908. This English text was included in the Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 1973, and subsequently in Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches. The present text has been retranslated by the editors from a Marathi report.

The Present Situation. Speech delivered at Mahajan Wadi, Bombay, on 19 January 1908. A transcript was published in the Mahratta on 2 February 1908. That text was revised by Sri Aurobindo and reprinted in the weekly Bande Mataram on 23 February. Subsequently it appeared in Two Lectures of Sriyut Aravinda Ghose, B.A. (Cantab.) (1908) and elsewhere. It has formed part of Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches from the first edition (1922).

The Meaning of Swaraj. Speech delivered in Nasik on 24 January 1908. A translation in Marathi was published the next day in the Nasik Vritta. This text was retranslated into English by a police agent and published in the Bombay Presidency Police Abstract of Intelligence, vol. 21, no. 6, of 1908. That English text was reproduced in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research in 1977, and subsequently in Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches.

Swadeshi and Boycott. Speech delivered in Dhulia on 26 January 1908. Notes were taken on the spot by a police agent, who later had a fair copy typed. This transcript is extensive but deficient in terms of English usage and grammar. (The most obvious defects have been corrected in the present text.) The notes and typed transcript were put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial. Reproduced here for the first time.

Bande Mataram. Speech delivered in Amravati, Maharashtra, on 29 January 1908. A third-person text was published as a news item in the daily Bande Mataram on 5 February 1908. It has formed part of Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches from the first editon (1922).

The Aims of the Nationalist Party. Speech delivered at the Venkatesh Theatre, Nagpur, on 30 January 1908. Marathi translations of this and the two speeches that follow were published in Nagpur soon after the event. Those texts were subsequently retranslated into defective English and printed in Government of India Political Home (Special) File 195-A, and reproduced in National Archives of India History of the Freedom Movement Papers, Region IV and V, file 94. From there they were reproduced in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research in 1980, and subsequently in Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches.

Our Work in the Future. Speech delivered at the Venkatesh Theatre, Nagpur, on 31 January 1908. See the note to “The Aims of the Nationalist Party”.

Commercial and Educational Swarajya. Speech delivered at the Itwari Bazar, Nagpur, on 1 February 1908. See the note to “The Aims of the Nationalist Party”.

Part Six. Bande Mataram under the Editorship of Sri Aurobindo: 6 February – 2 May 1908, with Speeches Delivered during the Same Period

The articles published in this section all appeared in Bande Mataram on the dates indicated. They are not dealt with separately here.

Speeches in Part Six

Speeches at Pabna. “Resolution at Bengal Provincial Conference” was moved at the Pabna session of the Provincial Conference on 12 February 1908. A report was published in the Dawn and Dawn Society’s Magazine in April 1908. This was included (with an incorrect date) in the 1993 edition of Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches. “Speech at the National Education Conference” was delivered at a public meeting in Pabna on 13 February 1908. A report was published in the Bande Mataram daily on 17 February 1908, and reproduced (in a slightly shortened form) in the Dawn and Dawn Society’s Magazine in April. That text was reproduced in Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches in 1993. In the present volume, the Bande Mataram text is reproduced.

Speech at Panti’s Math. Delivered at Panti’s Math, an open space in north Calcutta, on 3 April 1908. This brief transcript was noted down by a police agent and put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial. The last sentence was considered one of the most damaging things Sri Aurobindo said in his recorded speeches.

United Congress. Speech delivered at Panti’s Math, Calcutta, on 10 April 1908. A third-person report was published as a news item in the weekly Bande Mataram on 12 April. Reproduced in Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches from the first editon (1922).

Baruipur Speech. Delivered in Baruipur, Bengal, on 12 April 1908. A third-person transcript was published as a news item in the daily Bande Mataram on 17 April. Reproduced in Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches from the first editon (1922).

Palli Samiti. Speech delivered at a conference in Kishoregunj, Eastern Bengal and Assam, on 20 April 1908. A transcript was published in the weekly Bande Mataram on 26 April. Reproduced in Sri Aurobindo’s Speeches from the first editon (1922).

Part Seven. Writings from Manuscripts 1907 – 1908

All the pieces in this part were written while the Bande Mataram was being published but did not appear in it. All were seized by the police when Sri Aurobindo was arrested on 2 May 1908, and put in as evidence against him by the prosecution. Court transcriptions of two of the pieces were reproduced in a journal in 1909. After Sri Aurobindo’s passing, the original manuscripts of all five of the pieces were recovered. The texts in the present volume have been transcribed from these manuscripts.

The Bourgeois and the Samurai. Editorial title. 1906 – 7. This article was intended not for the Bande Mataram, but for a certain “Review”, presumably The Modern Review or another monthly journal. The notebook containing the manuscript was seized in May 1908 and never seen by Sri Aurobindo again. Four years after his passing, it and several other notebooks were rediscovered and restored to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The text was transcribed and published in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research in 1978. It is complete in that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, but it was never prepared by the author for publication. As a result certain passages were not fully worked into the text. These passages have been inserted by the editors either in the text itself (if the point of insertion was sufficiently clear) or in footnotes.

The New Nationalism. Editorial title. Late 1907 or early 1908. The present text follows the manuscript exactly. Sri Aurobindo first wrote, on separate pages, two incomplete paragraphs, each with a heading meant to be the title of the piece. Then, on a third page, he began again, this time without any heading. As neither of the existing headings was selected as the final title, the editors have placed a general editorial title above them both. The “former article, in this Review” referred to in the first complete paragraph is undoubtedly “The Bourgeois and the Samurai”. The text of “The New Nationalism” was put in as evidence by the prosecution in the Alipore Bomb Trial. In the beginning of 1909 this piece and “The Morality of Boycott” (see below) were reproduced from the court transcripts by Swaraj, a fortnightly review published from London by Bipin Chandra Pal. The London text was later reproduced in the Hindusthan Standard and elsewhere.

The Mother and the Nation. Editorial title. 1907 or 1908. Put in as evidence by the prosecution in the Alipore Bomb Trial. Published here for the first time.

The Morality of Boycott. 1908. This essay was found in Sri Aurobindo’s room at the time of his arrest on 2 May 1908. This circumstance suggests that it was meant to be published in the next or a forthcoming issue of Bande Mataram. It was transcribed and put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial, and reproduced from the court transcript in London in 1909 (see the note to “The New Nationalism”), and later in Selections from the Bande Mataram (see under Publication History below), in the Hindusthan Standard, and a number of other places. “A Fragment” (see the next note) has always been published as part of “The Morality of Boycott”, but it seems to be the incomplete opening of a separate piece.

A Fragment. 1908. This piece was found along with “The Morality of Boycott” at the time of Sri Aurobindo’s arrest in May 1908. It was apparently written at the same time but left unfinished.

Appendixes

The pieces in the first three appendixes were written during the period of publication of the Bande Mataram. Appendix Four comprises an interview given by Sri Aurobindo while he was under trial in the Alipore Bomb Case.

Appendix One. Incomplete Drafts of Three Articles

Among the papers seized from Sri Aurobindo’s house at the time of his arrest on 2 May 1908 are two sheets containing partial drafts of two Bande Mataram articles: “Nagpur and Loyalist Methods” (16 November 1907) and “By the Way. In Praise of Honest John”(18 November 1907). These are the only handwritten drafts of matter for the Bande Mataram that still exist. Also on 2 May 1908 a separate sheet was seized that contained a partial draft of another article on John Morley that was never published. The contents of these sheets are reproduced here for the first time.

Appendix Two. Writings and Jottings Connected with the Bande Mataram 1906 – 1908

These writings all deal with the organisation, finance, printing and promotion of the Bande Mataram. Written by Sri Aurobindo between 1906 and 1908, they show that he took an active interest in every aspect of the newspaper’s production.

“Bande Mataram” Printers and Publishers, Limited. This prospectus was first published in the Bande Mataram on 1 October 1906, or perhaps earlier (many issues from this period are missing), and reproduced thereafter in several issues of the journal. The joint-stock company it describes was Sri Aurobindo’s idea, and it is probable that he was the author of all or most of this text. It was signed by him and ten other prominent Nationalists. On 14 October, the Bande Mataram company was registered with the government. After that date the text of the prospectus was altered to reflect this fact.

Draft of a Prospectus of 1907. This text was written by Sri Aurobindo in his own hand on a loose sheet of paper. It is an incomplete draft of a prospectus for the Bande Mataram Publishers and Printers Company, offering shares to the public for their financial as well as their patriotic value. The text must have been written late in 1907, “a full year” after the Bande Mataram began to appear under the aegis of the company.

Notes and Memos. These seven pieces were written by Sri Aurobindo in notebooks or on loose sheets of paper between 1906 and 1908. They were among the papers seized by the police at the time of his arrest in May 1908, and were put in as evidence against him in the Alipore Bomb Trial.

[1] A draft memorandum on the budget and management of Bande Mataram, setting forth the powers of the Managing Director (Sri Aurobindo) and the subordinate officers and staff members. Date uncertain.

[2] A note on the budget and management of Bande Mataram. Written on a loose sheet found inserted in one of Sri Aurobindo’s notebooks.

[3] A note on payments to be made. Found jotted down in one of Sri Aurobindo’s notebooks.

[4] A note on editorial work, setting forth the areas of responsibility of Sri Aurobindo, the “Editor”, and Shyam Sunder Chakravarti (here spelled Chuckerbutty).

[5] A note on the use of Calcutta newspapers. The Englishman, Bengalee, Amrita Bazar Patrika, Empire, Statesman and Daily News were newspapers of Calcutta. Lacking its own reporters and the where withal to subscribe to the wire services, the Bande Mataram lifted most of its news from its rivals.

[6] A schedule of office work, giving the filing times for the different features, etc.

[7] A proposed schedule of Bande Mataram’s proofreading routine. The “Anucul” mentioned is apparently Anucul Mukherjee, who was recruited by the police to testify against Sri Aurobindo in the Bande Mataram sedition case (August – September 1907). The document may thus be dated to the period before the trial.

Appendix Three: Nationalist Party Documents

In 1907 and 1908, Sri Aurobindo was one of the leaders of the “Nationalist Party”, one of two factions within the Indian National Congress. (The Nationalists were called “Extremists” by the members of the rival faction, whom the Extremists referred to as Moderates. As foreseen by Sri Aurobindo in “The New Nationalism” [p. 1109], these “nicknames of party warfare have . . . passed into the accepted terminology used by serious politicians and perpetuated by history”, and it is by the nicknames that the parties are known today.) The two documents reproduced in this appendix were written by Sri Aurobindo as part of his effort to reform the existing Congress organisation or else to found a separate Nationalist Congress. They were among the papers seized by the police when his room was searched at the time of his arrest in May 1908. They are published here for the first time.

Letters and telegrams written by Sri Aurobindo as leader of the Nationalist Party of Bengal are published in On Himself.

[1] Suggested Rules of Business for the Congress. 1907 – 8. This typewritten document contains one or two small corrections in ink that seem to be in Sri Aurobindo’s handwriting. This, and the fact that it was found in Sri Aurobindo’s room, makes it likely that it was his work. He was among those who believed that the Congress ought to have a written constitution and rules of procedure. The present document is an attempt, from the Nationalist side, to formulate such a set of rules.

[2] Proposed Organisation of Separate Nationalist Party. The Nationalist and Moderate factions of the Indian National Congress split apart at the Surat Congress (December 1907). Around the time of the split, Sri Aurobindo was making plans to form a separate Nationalist Party, which would have its own branches and meet separately from the Moderate-dominated Congress. This document is an incomplete sketch of the organisation that such a separate Nationalist Party might have.

Appendix Four. An Interview

Sri Aurobindo gave this informal interview to a correspondent of the Empire, a Calcutta daily, on 15 August 1908, his thirty-sixth birthday. At that time he and a number of others were being tried in the Alipore Magistrate’s Court in what became known as the Alipore Bomb Trial.

Publication History

All the Bande Mataram articles reproduced in this volume first appeared in the newspaper on the dates indicated. After its demise, two collections of Bande Mataram articles, some of which were written by Sri Aurobindo, were published. The Vande Mataram Press, Poona, issued three volumes entitled The Bande Mataram in 1909 (this collection was quickly proscribed by the British government). The Swaraj Publishing House, Benares, published Selections from the Bande Mataram in 1922.

In 1957, 1958 and 1964 a number of Bande Mataram articles ascribed to Sri Aurobindo were published by Professors Haridas and Uma Mukherjee in three volumes: “Bande Mataram” and Indian Nationalism, Sri Aurobindo’s Political Thought, and Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought in Indian Politics (see footnote 8 for bibliographical details). The selection of the articles was the work of the Mukherjees, assisted in the first two volumes by Hemendra Prasad Ghose.

The seven articles making up The Doctrine of Passive Resistance were published as a booklet by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1948 and subsequently. In 1965 the same publisher brought out a selection of thirty-four articles thought to be by Sri Aurobindo in another booklet entitled On Nationalism. A new selection of fifty-six articles was brought out in 1996 as Part Three of the second edition of On Nationalism.

Two of Sri Aurobindo’s speeches were printed in Bombay in 1908 as Two Lectures of Sriyut Aravinda Ghose, B. A. (Cantab.). These and other speeches were subsequently reproduced in various collections in English and in Marathi and Gujarati translation. In 1922 six speeches from the Bande Mataram period, along with six from the Karmayogin period (1909 – 10) and “An Open Letter to My Countrymen” (1909), were published by the Prabartak Publishing House, Chandernagore, as Speeches of Aurobindo Ghose. This book was reproduced by the Arya Publishing House, Calcutta, in 1948 under the shortened title Speeches, and by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, in 1952. In the fourth edition, brought out by the same publisher in 1969, another open letter, “To My Countrymen”, was included. More additions were made to the fifth (1974) and sixth (1993) editions.

In 1972 an attempt was made to publish all Bande Mataram articles written by Sri Aurobindo, all speeches delivered by him during the Bande Mataram period, and all available political writings from his manuscripts under the title Bande Mataram: Early Political Writings – I. This book was reprinted in 1973 and 1995.

The present volume corresponds largely to Bande Mataram: Early Political Writings – I. The selection of the articles has been completely redone, but it does not differ greatly from the selection made for the 1972 volume. All available manuscript writings and speeches have been included, several of them appearing here for the first time in a book.

¹ As a matter of policy the name of the editor-in-chief was not printed after the departure of Bipin Chandra Pal. Once, in November 1906, Sri Aurobindo’s name was printed on the first page as “editor”, but this lapse was not repeated. Sri Aurobindo is referred to as editor-in-chief in Hemendra Prasad Ghose’s contemporary diary and in an article published by Bipin Chandra Pal in 1932.

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² See list above for bibliographical information. Bipin Chandra Pal and Shyam Sunder Chakarvarti never identified any articles as being written by Sri Aurobindo. However, Pal did publish certain articles as his own, and Shyam Sunder told his son-in-law, the writer Moni Bagchee, that certain Bande Mataram articles were his.

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³ The article in question is “Bankim Chandra (1893 – 1894)”, published as Sri Aurobindo’s in the Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (vol. 27, pp. 351 – 55). Both Sri Aurobindo and Upendranath apparently assumed that this article was a continuation of Sri Aurobindo’s “Rishi Bankim Chandra”, which had been published the previous week. If they had carefully read Hemendra Prasad’s poorly written, academic article, it would have been obvious to them that it could never have been written by Sri Aurobindo.

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⁴ The article in question is “No Common Ideal”, published as Sri Aurobindo’s in the Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library.

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⁵ A number of articles that seem overall to be by a writer other than Sri Aurobindo have openings that are very much in Sri Aurobindo’s style. It is possible that Sri Aurobindo, as editor-in-chief, rewrote the opening but let the body of the article stand. If later only the opening was read out to him, he might well have identified the article as his.

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⁶ Jitendra Lal Bannerji. “Aravinda Ghosh – A Study”, Modern Review 6 (November 1909): 483 – 84.

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⁷ Formerly in the possession of the Prabartak Sangha of Chandernagore, this file was donated to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives in 1978. Microfilm copies are available from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

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⁸ Because the file is incomplete and the numbering of issues was neither complete nor consistent, it is impossible to determine exactly how many issues were printed. To arrive at the figure 540, we have counted every weekday between 6 August 1906 and 2 May 1908, and subtracted dates where there is documentary evidence that no issue was brought out.

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⁹ Two articles printed in these volumes – “The Results of the Congress” (31 December 1906) and “Look on This Picture, Then on That” (6 May 1907) – are not found in the surviving file of the Bande Mataram. They have been reproduced from Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought in Indian Politics (see footnote 8).

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¹⁰ Hemendra Prasad told the story of the origin of this piece in “Reminiscences of Aurobindo Ghose” (see footnote 2).

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