Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram

Political Writings and Speeches. 1890–1908

Publisher’s Note on Part Five

Speeches. 22 December 1907 – 1 February 1908

On 21 December 1907, Sri Aurobindo left Calcutta to attend the Surat session of the Indian National Congress. The next day he addressed a meeting in Nagpur. After the violent break-up of the Congress he passed a few days in Baroda, and then visited a number of cities in Maharashtra at the invitation of Nationalist colleagues. In all of these places he gave speeches, most of which have been preserved in one form or another. See the next page for details.

All told, Sri Aurobindo delivered fourteen speeches in Maharashtra between 22 December 1907 and 1 February 1908. Reports of eleven of them survive. Two were published in the Bande Mataram shortly after their delivery. Another was published in the Mahratta, an English weekly newspaper. Five others are known only by means of Marathi translations, while three exist only in the form of summaries or transcriptions made by the British police. There are no surviving reports of the remaining three speeches.

In the following pages, nine reports are reproduced. Only the two published in Bande Mataram may be considered adequate representations of Sri Aurobindo’s words. The other reports are expressed in language that is sometimes awkward or defective; they have been edited to a greater or lesser extent to make them more clear and readable.