Sri Aurobindo

Autobiographical Notes

and Other Writings of Historical Interest

Part Two. Letters of Historical Interest

3. Other Letters on Yoga and Practical Life 1921–1938

To and about Public Figures 1930–1937

To Dr. S. Radhakrishnan¹

2.10.34

My dear Professor Radhakrishnan,

I regret that you should have had to wait for the publication of your book on account of the contribution I could not write. I had intimated to Dilip that it would be practically impossible for me and I could not make a promise I would most likely be unable to fulfil. I think he hoped I would still find time somehow to write.

I am entirely taken up by my present work which is exceedingly heavy and pressing and from which I cannot take my hands for a moment or spare the necessary energy or time for anything else. I have been obliged to put aside all mental or literary work and even to suspend sine die the revision for publication of the unpublished works in the “Arya” which I had undertaken. There is no chance of any alteration in this state of affairs in any near future. It is not a matter of choice but of necessity for me. I hope therefore you will excuse me for not being able to comply with your request. I regret very much that I have to disappoint you, but it is not possible for me to avoid it.

Sri Aurobindo

¹ 2 October 1934. At the time this letter was written, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), President of India between 1962 and 1967, was an academic in England. (In 1935 he was appointed Spaulding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford.) In August 1934 he approached Sri Aurobindo through Dilip Kumar Roy, asking him to contribute an article for a proposed volume on contemporary Indian philosophy. In a letter of September 1934, published in Letters on Himself and the Ashram, volume 35 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo asked Dilip to beg off for him. Radhakrishnan persisted, and Sri Aurobindo wrote this note to him directly. (Radhakrishnan’s book, Contemporary Indian Philosophy, was published, without a contribution by Sri Aurobindo, by George Allen and Unwin in 1936.)

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