Sri Aurobindo

Autobiographical Notes

and Other Writings of Historical Interest

Part Two. Letters of Historical Interest

1. Letters on Personal, Practical and Political Matters (1890–1926)

Letters and Telegrams to Political and Professional Associates 1906–1926

Note on a Forged Document¹

1 The card purports to issue from the Mymensingh Sadhana Samaj. The word is spelt Māymensingh with a long a. Every Bengali in Bengal knows that it is Moymensingh with a short a and would at once be able to point out the mistake.

2. The word Swaraj wellknown to everyone in Bengal, is spelt Saraj and that this is no casual slip of the pen is shown by its faithful repetition, the only other time that “Saraj” appears in the card (on the flag to the left).

3. “Bande Mataram” is twice spelt Bade Mataram. This is interesting because it shows that the card was written by a man unaccustomed to the Bengali character and more habituated to the Devanagari (Sanscrit) alphabet. In the Devanagari the n is usually represented by a nasalising dot over the previous letter which might easily be dropped by an unpractised writer. In Bengali the nd is a conjunct letter and even the most ignorant Bengali writer would be incapable of dropping the n. If by an inconceivable blunder he dropped [it], the most casual look at the word would show him what was wrong; but here the mistake is twice consistently repeated and not corrected even in a card the details of which have been so carefully and boldly executed.

4. The writer drops the characteristic dots which differentiate b from r (ব, র) and y from impure j in Bengali. Thus he writes Pujar as Pujab and Viceroy as Viceroj. Only a foreigner writing the Bengali character, would commit an error of this kind so easily and repeatedly or would fail to correct it at the first glance.

5. The peculiar form of the 1 in Balidan shows again a man accustomed to write the Devanagari and not accustomed to write the Bengali 1.

6. The formation of g in Durga Puja is a sheer impossibility to a Bengali eye or a Bengali hand. Other letters, m, p, etc give minor evidence in the same direction.

7. The mistakes are of such a nature that they could readily be made by a man copying his Bengali letters from the book forms and not accustomed to the written character. The convincing proof is the j in Samaj and Puja which is drawn rather than written by some foreigner acquainted with the printed j, but not acquainted with the very different form given to j in handwriting () [ddha]

8. Note beside that these few Bengali words have been written with great labour; but while some of the letters are very finely formed, almost as if they had been drawn, others are very rudely done – a difference so great that we must suppose either two writers of each word or else a man copying unfamiliar forms sometimes carefully, sometimes with deficient care and skill.

No tribunal in Bengal, presided over by a Bengali judge, would admit for a moment this clumsy forgery.

April 1912

¹ April 1912. Early in 1912 a Pondicherry resident named Mayuresan, who was acting as an informer to the British Government, planted some forged documents in the well of the house of V. V. S. Aiyar, a Tamil revolutionary who was living in the French colony. Mayuresan intended the documents to be discovered by the French police, providing support for his claims against Aiyar, Srinivasachari, Sri Aurobindo and others. Unluckily for him, the jar containing the forgeries was discovered by Aiyar’s maidservant. Some of the documents were shown to Sri Aurobindo, who wrote out this detailed refutation of one of them.

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