Sri Aurobindo
Autobiographical Notes
and Other Writings of Historical Interest
Part One. Autobiographical Notes
2. Sri Aurobindo’s corrections of statements in a
proposed biography
The Departure from Calcutta, 1910
To Pavitra (Philippe Barbier Saint Hilaire)
Pavitra,
The account which seems to have been given to Lizelle
Reymond and recorded by her on pages 318–319 of her book1 is, I
am compelled to say, fiction and romance with no foundation in actual facts. I
spent the first part of my imprisonment in Alipore jail in a solitary cell and
again after the assassination of Noren Gosain to the last days of the trial when
all the Alipore case prisoners were similarly lodged each in his own cell. In
between for a short period we were all put together. There is no truth behind
the statement that while I was meditating they gathered around me, that I
recited the Gita to them and they sang the verses, or that they put questions to
me on spiritual 
matters and received
instructions from me; the whole description is quite fanciful. Only a few of the
prisoners had been known to me before I met them in prison; only a few who had
been with Barin had practised sadhana and these were connected with Barin and
would have turned to him for any help, not to me. I was carrying on my yoga
during these days learning to do so in the midst of much noise and clamour but
apart and in silence and without any participation of the others in it. My yoga
begun in 1904 had always been personal and apart; those around me knew I was a
sadhak but they knew little more as I kept all that went on in me to myself. It
was only after my release that for the first time I spoke at Uttarpara publicly
about my spiritual experiences. Until I went to Pondicherry I took no disciples;
with those who accompanied me or joined me in Pondicherry I had at first the
relation of friends and companions rather than of a guru and disciples; it was
on the ground of politics that I had come to know them and not on the spiritual
ground. Afterwards only there was a gradual development of spiritual relations
until the Mother came back from Japan and the Ashram was founded or rather
founded itself in 1926. I began my yoga in 1904 without a guru; in 1908 I
received important help from a Mahratta yogi and discovered the foundations of
my sadhana; but from that time till the Mother came to India I received no
spiritual help from anyone else. My sadhana before and afterwards was not
founded upon books but upon personal experiences that crowded on me from within.
But in the jail I had the Gita and the Upanishads with me, practised the yoga of
the Gita and meditated with the help of the Upanishads; these were the only
books from which I found guidance; the Veda which I first began to read long
afterwards in Pondicherry rather confirmed what experiences I already had than
was any guide to my sadhana. I sometimes turned to the Gita for light when there
was a question or a difficulty and usually received help or an answer from it,
but there were no such happenings in connection with the Gita as are narrated in
the book. It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda
speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt
his presence, but this had nothing to do with
the alleged circumstances narrated in the book, circumstances that never took
place, nor had it anything to do with the Gita. The voice spoke only on a
special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it
ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject.
Then about my relations with Sister Nivedita – they
were purely in the field of politics. Spirituality or spiritual matters did not
enter into them and I do not remember anything passing between us on these
subjects when I was with her. Once or twice she showed the spiritual side of her
but she was then speaking to someone else who had come to see her while I was
there. The whole account about my staying with her for 24 hours and all that is
said to have passed between us then is sheer romance and does not contain a
particle of fact. I met Sister Nivedita first at Baroda when she came to give
some lectures there. I went to receive her at the station and to take her to the
house assigned to her; I also accompanied her to an interview she had sought
with the Maharaja of Baroda. She had heard of me as one who “believed in
strength and was a worshipper of Kali” by which she meant that she had heard of
me as a revolutionary. I knew of her already because I had read and admired her
book “Kali the Mother”. It is in these days that we formed our friendship. After
I had started my revolutionary work in Bengal through certain emissaries, I went
there personally to see and arrange things myself. I found a number of small
groups of revolutionaries that had recently sprung into existence but all
scattered and acting without reference to each other. I tried to unite them
under a single organisation with the barrister P. Mitra as the leader of the
revolution in Bengal and a central council of five persons, one of them being
Nivedita. The work under P. Mitra spread enormously and finally contained tens
of thousands of young men and the spirit of revolution spread by Barin’s paper
“Yugantar” became general in the young generation; but during my absence at
Baroda the council ceased to exist as it was impossible to keep up agreement
among the many groups. I had no occasion to meet Nivedita after that until I
settled in Bengal as principal of the National College and the chief editorial
writer of the Bande 
Mataram. By that time I had
become one of the leaders of the public movement known first as extremism, then
as nationalism, but this gave me no occasion to meet her except once or twice at
the Congress, as my collaboration with her was solely in the secret
revolutionary field. I was busy with my work and she with hers, and no occasion
arose for consultations or decisions about the conduct of the revolutionary
movement. Later on I began to make time to go and see her occasionally at
Bagbazar.
In one of these visits she informed me that the
Government had decided to deport me and she wanted me to go into secrecy or to
leave British India and act from outside so as to avoid interruption of my work.
There was no question at that time of danger to her; in spite of her political
views she had friendly relations with high Government officials and there was no
question of her arrest. I told her that I did not think it necessary to accept
her suggestion; I would write an open letter in the Karmayogin which, I thought,
would prevent this action by the Government. This was done and on my next visit
to her she told me that my move had been entirely successful and the idea of
deportation had been dropped. The departure to Chandernagore happened later and
there was no connection between the two incidents which have been hopelessly
confused together in the account in the book. The incidents related there have
no foundation in fact. It was not Gonen Maharaj who informed me of the impending
search and arrest, but a young man on the staff of the Karmayogin, Ramchandra
Mazumdar, whose father had been warned that in a day or two the Karmayogin
office would be searched and myself arrested. There [have]2 been many legends spread about on this matter and it was even
said that I was to be prosecuted for participation in the murder in the High
Court of Shamsul Alam, a prominent member of the C.I.D. and that Sister Nivedita
sent for me and informed me and we discussed what was to be done and my
disappearance was the result. I never heard of any such proposed prosecution and
there was no discussion of the kind; the prosecution intended and afterwards started was for sedition only. Sister Nivedita knew nothing of these
new happenings till after I reached Chandernagore. I did not go to her house or
see her; it is wholly untrue that she and Gonen Maharaj came to see me off at
the Ghat. There was no time to inform her; for almost immediately I received a
command from above to go to Chandernagore and within ten minutes I was at the
Ghat, a boat was hailed and I was on my way with two young men to Chandernagore.
It was a common Ganges boat rowed by two boatmen, and all the picturesque
details about the French boat and the disappearing lights are pure romance. I
sent someone from the office to Nivedita to inform her and to ask her to take up
editing of the Karmayogin in my absence. She consented and in fact from this
time onward until the suspension of the paper she had the whole conduct of it; I
was absorbed in my sadhana and sent no contributions nor were there any articles
over my signature. There was never my signature to any articles in the
Karmayogin except twice only, the last being the occasion for the prosecution
which failed. There was no arrangement for my staying in Chandernagore at a
place selected by Nivedita. I went without previous notice to anybody and was
received by Motilal Roy who made secret arrangements for my stay; nobody except
himself and a few friends knew where I was. The warrant of arrest was suspended,
but after a month or so I used a manoeuvre to push the police into open action;
the warrant was launched and a prosecution commenced against the printer in my
absence which ended in acquittal in the High Court. I was already on my way to
Pondicherry where I arrived on April 4. There also I remained in secrecy in the
house of a prominent citizen until the acquittal, after which I announced my
presence in French India. These are all the essential facts and they leave no
room for the alleged happenings related in the book. It is best that you should
communicate my statement of facts to Lizelle Reymond so that she may be able to
make the necessary corrections or omissions in a future edition and remove this
wrong information which would otherwise seriously detract from the value of her
life of Nivedita.
13 September 1946