Note on the Texts

Autobiographical Notes and other Writings of Historical Interest consists of notes, letters, telegrams and public statements written by Sri Aurobindo at various times that are of special interest to students of his life. The volume does not, as a rule, include letters written between 1927 and 1950. Most letters of biographical or historical interest from that period are included in Letters on Himself and the Ashram, volume 35 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.

The contents of the present volume have been arranged by the editors in four parts, each of which is divided into two or three sections.

PART ONE. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Sri Aurobindo never wrote, of his own volition, anything autobiographical in the ordinary sense of the word. He wrote most of the notes in this part to correct statements made by others.

Section One. Life Sketches and Other Autobiographical Notes

Sri Aurobindo: A Life Sketch. Sri Aurobindo wrote this piece in June 1930 for publication in Among the Great, a book written by his disciple Dilip Kumar Roy. He used the third person because he wished the piece to appear as an impersonal statement from an anonymous “authoritative source”. Among the Great consists of accounts of Dilip’s meetings and excerpts from his correspondence with five eminent contemporaries – Romain Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. Dilip began working on his manuscript sometime during the late 1920^s. Around September 1928, he sent portions of it, including a life sketch written by him, to Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo’s remarks on this life sketch are published as item [1] of the Appendix (see page 11). In November 1928, Dilip became a member of the Ashram. A year and a half later, in March 1930, he learned that a publisher in New York was interested in his book. On the fifteenth of that month, he wrote giving this information to Sri Aurobindo and submitting some material he wished to have included in the book. Sri Aurobindo’s response is reproduced as item [2] of the Appendix (page 11). Dilip was unwilling to accept Sri Aurobindo’s suggestion to “omit all account or narrative”. He sent another draft of a life sketch, which Sri Aurobindo commented on in a letter of 25 March (pages 11–12). Finally Sri Aurobindo agreed to write a brief life sketch himself. On 1 June, in the course of a letter on another subject, he noted: “I shall see whether I can get the thing done (the facts of the life) in these ten days.” The work was completed before 27 June, the date of the letter published on pages 12–13.

Among the Great was not accepted by the New York publisher. It was first brought out in India in 1945 (Bombay: Nalanda Publications). The “Life Sketch” appeared as an appendix to this edition, below the following note by Dilip: “For the benefit of Western readers I append here a brief statement of the principal facts of Sri Aurobindo’s public and merely outward life from an authoritative source.” But the text of the “Life Sketch” had already been in print for several years. On 15 August 1934 the Calcutta fortnightly journal Onward reproduced an abridged version. (Other newspapers subsequently printed the complete text.) In 1937 Radhakanta Nag of the Arya Publishing House proposed bringing it out as a pamphlet. This idea was put before Sri Aurobindo on 23 February 1937. He gave his consent with a lukewarm “Very well.” The booklet was published later the same year. In 1948 the text was reproduced, with a few editorial additions, in a booklet entitled “Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram” (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House). In subsequent editions of this booklet, the text of the “Life Sketch” underwent further editorial modifications. In 1975 a modified text appeared in Volume 30, Index and Glossary, of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. In April 1985 the original text was reproduced in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research. This was the first time that the “Life Sketch” was published as a text written by Sri Aurobindo. The editors of Archives and Research added two letters from Sri Aurobindo’s correspondence with Dilip, which explain the circumstances of the text’s composition and make it clear why he did not want it to be published as his. The same letters, along with three others, are published in the Appendix that follows the “Life Sketch” in the present volume.

Appendix: Letters on “Sri Aurobindo: A Life Sketch”. [1] Circa September – October 1928. Sri Aurobindo wrote these sentences in the margin of a letter written by Dilip Kumar Roy shortly before he joined the Ashram in November 1928. [2] This paragraph is part of a letter from Sri Aurobindo to Dilip dated 16 March 1930. The balance of the letter deals with various writings by Sri Aurobindo that Dilip wanted to include in Among the Great. [3] 25 March 1930. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter after reading a “biography” (that is, a life sketch) written by Dilip for Among the Great. [4] The manuscript of this letter is not dated, but it apparently was written in June 1930. [5] 27 June 1930. This letter deals with the draft of a proposed note on Sri Aurobindo’s “occidental education” (see the last sentence of letter [4]), which Dilip intended to add to Sri Aurobindo’s “Life Sketch”. In the printed text of the “Life Sketch” the paragraph that Sri Aurobindo placed here between inverted commas was printed as a footnote. The sentence about Sri Aurobindo’s prizes and examinations, which he wanted to have omitted, was tacked on rather awkwardly as a closing parenthesis. In a typescript of the text that was submitted to him, Sri Aurobindo emended “to study Goethe and Dante” to “to read Goethe and Dante”.

Incomplete Life Sketches. These pieces are from Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts of the 1920s. The circumstances of their writing are not known.

Incomplete Life Sketch in Outline Form, c. 1922. Sri Aurobindo wrote this outline of his life up to 1914 sometime during the early 1920s. (The non-cooperation movement, mentioned in the text, began in August 1920 and ended in February 1922.)

Fragmentary Life Sketch, c. 1928. Sri Aurobindo wrote this isolated passage in 1928 or 1929 in a notebook used otherwise for notes on philosophy and yoga.

Autobiographical Notes. Two of these unrelated pieces are from the year 1903. The third (a revision of the second) is from 1928.

A Day in Srinagar. 1903, probably 30 May. Sri Aurobindo was in Kashmir from late May to mid September 1903. During this time he served as the private secretary to the Maharaja of Baroda. Letters that he wrote for the Maharaja while in Kashmir show that the royal party was in Srinagar at least three times: from 28 May (or slightly before) to 6 or 7 June, for a few days around 23 June, and again for ten days or more after 5 September. References in these diary notations make it seem likely that they were written during the first of the visits to the Kashmiri capital, that is, between 28 May and 6 June. The only Saturday during this period (omitting 6 June itself, which must have been spent making preparations to go to Icchabal, or “Archibal”, as Sri Aurobindo spelled it) was 30 May 1903. This then is the likely date of these notes. The longer and shorter pieces separated here by an asterisk were written by Sri Aurobindo on separate pages of his notebook. The Sardesai mentioned in the first piece is no doubt Govind Sakharam Sardesai, the Marathi historian, who was an officer in the Maharaja’s service. The Maharaja was often referred to as His Highness (H.H.). His chief Baroda residence was Lakshmi Vilas Palace, an imposing building that unsuccessfully tries to combine Italian, Indian and other architectural elements.

Information Supplied to the King’s College Register. [1] 16 September 1903. While in Srinagar, Sri Aurobindo received a form from the editors of the Register of Admissions of his Cambridge college, asking him for information about his university and subsequent career. He filled out the form on 16 September and returned it. The text is reproduced here from the original form, which is preserved in the King’s College Library. [2] 31 August 1928. A short biographical entry based on the information Sri Aurobindo submitted in 1903 was published in A Register of Admissions to King’s College Cambridge 1850–1900, compiled by John J. Withers (London, 1903). In 1928 the editors of the second edition of this work sent a copy of the 1903 entr y to Sri Aurobindo, asking him to correct and update it in the spaces provided. In the present text, the old entry is printed as it was submitted to Sri Aurobindo. Passages cancelled by him are set in “strike-out” mode, his additions in regular type. The text is reproduced from the original form, which is preserved in the King’s College Library. The revised entry was published in A Register of Admissions to King’s College Cambridge 1797–1928, compiled by John J. Withers (London, 1929).

Section Two. Corrections of Statements Made in Biographies and Other Publications

Sri Aurobindo wrote these notes between 1943 and 1947 to correct erroneous or misleading statements about his life made in biographies, other books or newspaper articles that were submitted to him by the authors before publication or brought to his attention by others after publication. For the convenience of readers, the editors of the present volume have arranged the notes according to the dates of the events dealt with. In the paragraphs that follow, however, the editors discuss the notes in the approximate order in which Sri Aurobindo wrote them, treating notes occasioned by a given biography or article as a group.

(1) Notes on Sri Aurobindo, by K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar. In February 1943, Dr. Iyengar, then Professor of English at Basaveshvar College, Bagalkot, brought to the Ashram the 133-page manuscript of a biography of Sri Aurobindo that he had written, in the hope that Sri Aurobindo would read and comment on it. Sri Aurobindo agreed, and made numerous corrections directly on Iyengar’s manuscript. Around 35 of these corrections were typed, further corrected by Sri Aurobindo, retyped and corrected again. A copy of the final typed pages, consisting now of 39 notes, was given to Iyengar for incorporation in his book. Over the next ten months, Iyengar enlarged his manuscript to more than 300 pages. In November 1943 he brought it to the Ashram and left it with Sri Aurobindo for further correction. Sri Aurobindo did some work directly on the manuscript but wrote longer corrections on small note pads. Twenty-eight of these notes were typed and further revised. He finished this work before May 1944. A copy of his corrections was given to Iyengar, who incorporated them in the final manuscript of his book, which was published by the Arya Publishing House, Calcutta, in 1945. Most of the 67 notes that Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1943 and 1944 for Iyengar’s use were published in Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother in 1953. They were reprinted in On Himself: Compiled from Notes and Letters in 1972. All the published notes, along with a few smaller ones, are included in the present volume.

(2) Notes on Yogi Arvind, by V. D. Kulkarni. This book, written in Marathi, was published in 1935. Eight years later, in March 1943, a copy of it was shown to Sri Aurobindo, who wrote eight comments in the margins. These comments were first published in Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother in 1953.

(3) Notes on material gathered by A. B. Purani, author of The Life of Sri Aurobindo. A disciple of Sri Aurobindo from 1918 and a member of the Ashram from 1923, Purani collected biographical material about Sri Aurobindo for a number of years, and published a biography of him in 1957. Sometime around 1943–45, Purani obtained three typed accounts of Sri Aurobindo’s service in Baroda State, which he presented to Sri Aurobindo for correction. Sri Aurobindo wrote nine notes in the margins or between the lines of two of the sheets. He corrected the other account, entitled “Sri Aurobindo – An Officer in the Baroda State”, by writing ten notes on separate sheets. All these notes were published for the first time in the journal Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research in 1978.

(4) Notes on Sri Aurobindo o Banglay Swadeshi Jug, by Girijashankar Raychaudhuri. This work appeared serially in the Bengali monthly Udbodhan during the 1940s and was published as a book by Navabharat Publishing, Calcutta, in 1956. Around 1943–45, A. B. Purani typed translations or paraphrases of passages from two Udbodhan instalments and gave them to Sri Aurobindo. In response, Sri Aurobindo wrote seven notes of various lengths. Around the same time he made the following comment about Girijashankar’s biographical work:

Girija Sankar’s statements about Sri Aurobindo cannot be taken as they are; they are often based on false or twisted information, tend towards misrepresentation or are only inferences or guesses.

In one of the chapters of Sri Aurobindo o Banglay Swadeshi Jug, Girijashankar cited a letter written to him by Swami Sundarananda of the Udbodhan office, in which Sundarananda claimed that Sri Aurobindo visited Saradamani Devi, the widow of Ramakrishna Paramahansa, on his way to Chandernagore in 1910. This and other parts of Girijashankar’s articles were shown to Sri Aurobindo, who on 15 December 1944 replied in the form of a letter to Charu Chandra Dutt, the substance of which was published in the Udbodhan (Phalgun 1351). The story about Sri Aurobindo’s visit to Saradamani Devi was repeated by a certain K. Ghosh in a letter published in the Hindusthan Standard of 6 June 1945. In response, Sri Aurobindo dictated another letter, which was published in the Sunday Times of Madras on 24 June. Around the same time, Sri Aurobindo’s disciple Sureshchandra Chakravarty, who was with him on his trip from Calcutta to Chandernagore, published an article dealing with that event in the Baishakh 1352 issue of Prabasi. In reply to this, Ramchandra Majumdar, who was with Sri Aurobindo and Sureshchandra for part of that night, published an article (Prabasi, Sraban 1352) questioning Sureshchandra’s account. When this was brought to Sri Aurobindo’s attention, he dictated a final statement in which he tried to set the record straight. This was not published during his lifetime, but it was used by his disciple Nolini Kanta Gupta in writing an article that was published in Prabasi in Phalgun 1352. The first two letters by Sri Aurobindo referred to above were published in Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother in 1953. The third was published in On Himself in 1972.

(5) Notes on Nivedita: Fille de l’Inde, by Lizelle Reymond. This biography of Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble) was published by Éditions Victor Attinger, Paris and Neuchâtel, in 1945. In 1946, passages of Reymond’s manuscript dealing with Sri Aurobindo were read out to him, and on 13 September of that year he dictated a reply in the form of a letter to his disciple Pavitra (P. B. Saint Hilaire). The letter to Pavitra was first published in Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother in 1953.

(6) Notes on Shri Aurobindo, by Gabriel E. Monod-Herzen. A scientist and professor, Monod-Herzen lived in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram during the 1940s. In or around 1946, he submitted a manuscript of a biography he had written to Sri Aurobindo, who dictated 38 corrections to his amanuensis. These were typed and given to Monod-Herzen for use in his biography, written in French and published in 1954. Most of these notes were included in Sri Aurobindo on Himself and the Mother in 1953.

While correcting Monod-Herzen’s manuscript, Sri Aurobindo decided to write a separate note on his political life. This eventually became the twenty-page “General Note on Sri Aurobindo’s Political Life” reproduced on pages 47–66. The typescript of this note is dated “Nov 7 1946”. It was later revised and enlarged and in 1948 published anonymously in the booklet “Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram” (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House). It has appeared in all subsequent editions of that work, and also was included in On Himself (1972).

(7) The other notes in this section are corrections of statements made in various publications. The note dealing with Sri Aurobindo’s learning of English (p. 25) was written in reply to a review of Sri Aurobindo’s Collected Poems and Plays published in the Times Literary Supplement (London) on 8 July 1944. The note was incorporated in a letter by R. Vaidyanathaswamy, editor of the Advent (Madras), that was published in the TLS on 6 January 1945. The note on Sri Aurobindo’s education and religious background in England (p. 26) and on his “first turn towards spiritual seeking” (p. 106) are from his manuscripts. The circumstances of their writing are not known. The first was written around 1940, the second around 1942. The notes referred to in this paragraph were first published in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research in December 1977.

The origin of the notes in the Appendix is not known. Unlike the other notes, which have been preserved in the form of handwritten or dictated manuscripts, these survive only in printed form. They may be transcriptions of oral remarks by Sri Aurobindo. Some of them were published in Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953), the others in On Himself (1972).

Table 1. Emendations of Matters of Fact (Simple Cases)

This table lists editorial emendations of matters of fact in pieces reproduced in Part One. (Similar emendations in pieces in other Parts are dealt with in the note to the piece in question.) Emendations of matters of fact have been made only in cases of slips involving (1) dates, (2) place names, (3) names of events and offices, and (4) bibliographical details. In every case these slips could be rectified by reference to contemporary documents and reliable secondary sources that are clear and unambiguous. The documents and publications consulted are listed in column four. (Full bibliographical details on printed and internet sources are given on page 569.) More complex problems are listed in Table 2.

Table 2. Other Questions regarding Matters of Fact (Complex Cases)

This table lists statements of matters of fact that are not in accord with contemporary documents and reliable secondary sources, but which cannot be set right by means of simple verbal emendation. Relevant observations are provided in column three along with the documents and publications consulted. (Full bibliographical details on printed and internet sources are given on page 569.)

Printed and Internet Sources for Data in Tables

[Archival sources are listed in full in the last column of the Tables.]

• Buckland, C. E., ed., Dictionary of Indian Biography. Reprint edition. Delhi: Indological Book House, 1971.

• “Burton on Trent Grammar School”

• Gardiner, Robert Barlow, ed., Admissions Registers of St. Paul’s School from 1876–1905. London: George Bell and Sons, 1906.

• Ghosh, Pansy Chhaya, “Cotton, Henry (Sir)”. In Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 1. Calcutta: Institute of Historical Studies, 1972.

• Moulton, Edward C., “Cotton, Sir Henry John Stedman (1845–1915)”. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/47183.

• “Provinces of British India”,
  www.worldstatesmen.org/India_BrProvinces.htm (link is not valid now).

• Purani, A. B., The Life of Sri Aurobindo. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1978.

• Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram: Political Writings and Speeches 1890–1908. Volumes 6–7 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2002.

• Sri Aurobindo, Bangla Rachana. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1999.

• Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin: Political Writings and Speeches 1909–1910. Volume 8 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1997.

• Zaidi, A. M., et al., eds., Encyclopedia of the Indian National Congress, volumes 9 and 10. New Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1980–81.

PART TWO. LETTERS OF HISTORICAL INTEREST

Most of Sri Aurobindo’s published letters were written to members of his Ashram and outside disciples between 1927 and 1950. Such letters are published in the following works: Letters on Yoga, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, The Mother with Letters on the Mother, and Letters on Poetry and Art. Most of the letters included in Part Two of the present volume were written before 1927. Those that were written after that date are parts of sequences that began earlier, or deal with special subjects, such as Indian politics.

The material in this part has been arranged by the editors in three sections: (1) Letters on Personal, Practical and Political Matters, 1890–1926; (2) Early Letters on Yoga and the Spiritual Life, 1911–1928; and (3) Other Letters of Historical Interest on Yoga and Practical Life, 1921–1938.

Section One. Letters on Personal, Practical and Political Matters, 1890–1926

The letters in this part have been arranged by the editors in five subsections: (1) Family Letters, 1890–1919; (2) Letters Written as a Probationer in the Indian Civil Service, 1892; (3) Letters Written While Employed in the Princely State of Baroda, 1895–1906; (4) Letters and Telegrams to Political and Professional Associates, 1906–1926; (5) Open Letters and Messages Published in Newspapers, 1909–1925.

Family Letters, 1890–1919. Sri Aurobindo passed most of his youth, from 1877 to 1893, in England. Only part of one letter survives from this period. He wrote the next five letters in this subsection while living in Baroda between 1893 and 1906. The two letters to his father-in-law were written from Calcutta in 1906 and Pondicherry in 1919.

Extract from a Letter to His Father. 1890. This passage is from a letter that Sri Aurobindo wrote to his father Dr. K. D. Ghose (1844–1892) shortly after his arrival in Cambridge in October 1890. His father copied out the passage in a letter written to his brother-in-law Jogindranath Bose in December 1890.

To His Grandfather. 11 January 1894. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter to his grandfather Raj Narain Bose (1826–1899), a well-known writer and leader of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, while posted in Gujaria, a town in northern Gujarat, which then was part of the princely state of Baroda.

To His Sister. 25 August 1894. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter to his younger sister Sarojini (1877–1956) shortly after his first visit to his home province after his return from England. Sarojini had been an infant when he went to England. The letter was published by their brother Barindra Kumar in Jugantar (Puja number 1364 B.S.).

Extract from a Letter to His Brother. 1899–1900. Sri Aurobindo made a typed copy of these pages from a letter written to his second brother Manmohan (1869–1924). His intention was to use them as an introduction to his poem Love and Death, written in 1899. At the top of the transcript he typed “To my Brother”. This apparently was meant to be the dedication of the poem and not the salutation of the letter. When he was preparing Love and Death for publication in 1920, he dropped both the dedication and the introduction. The first of the two Latin quotations, from Virgil’s Georgics (3.8–9), may be translated: “A path . . . by which I too may lift me from the dust, and float triumphant through the mouths of men”. The second, from Horace’s Satires (2.7.21, with a change in the mood of the verb), means “whither does such wretched stuff tend”.

To His Uncle. 15 August 1902. Jogindranath Bose, the recipient of this letter, was Sri Aurobindo’s eldest maternal uncle (baḍa māmā).

To His Wife. 20 August 1902. Sri Aurobindo was married to Mrinalini Bose (1887–1918) in 1901. He generally corresponded with her in Bengali. Several letters from him to her in that language are reproduced in Writings in Bengali and Sanskrit, volume 9 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. The present item is the only surviving letter from him to her that was written in English.

To His Father-in-Law. [1] 8 June 1906. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter to his father-in-law Bhupal Chandra Bose (1861–1937) towards the beginning of his active political career. [2] 19 February 1919. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter after Mrinalini’s death from influenza in December 1918.

Letters Written as a Probationer in the Indian Civil Service, 1892. Sri Aurobindo passed the open examination for the Indian Civil Service (I.C.S.) in 1890. He completed his course work successfully, but was rejected in 1892 after failing to take advantage of the last chance offered him to pass the mandatory test in horse-riding. According to his own retrospective account, he had developed a distaste for Civil Service work and was delighted to be rejected on these trivial grounds.

To Lord Kimberley. [1] 21 November 1892. After he was rejected from the I.C.S., Sri Aurobindo was advised that his only hope, if he wished to remain in the service, was to write directly to the Secretary of State for India. The holder of this cabinet-level post was John Wodehouse, the first Earl of Kimberley (1826–1902). It is probable that Sri Aurobindo wrote to Kimberley at the insistence of James S. Cotton, who at this time was trying to pull strings to get the rejection overturned (see A. B. Purani, The Life of Sri Aurobindo [1978], pp. 326–33). [2] 12 December 1892. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter after Lord Kimberley refused his request to grant him another chance to take the riding test. As a candidate who had successfully completed all the requirements but riding, he was due the last instalment of the allowance given to probationers. This and the previous letter are reproduced here from the originals preserved in the Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.

Letters Written While Employed in the Princely State of Baroda, 1895–1906. Sri Aurobindo wrote the letters reproduced in this section while working as an administrative officer and professor in the erstwhile princely state of Baroda. Then known as Arvind or Aravind or Aurobindo Ghose, he began work in the state in February 1893, just after his return from England, and continued until March 1906, when he joined the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. During the first part of this period he worked in various administrative departments. From 1898 to 1901 he was a professor of English and of French in the Baroda College. There followed a stint of three years (1901–4) when he worked in a secretarial capacity under Sayajirao Gaekwar, the Maharaja of Baroda. (In many of the documents the Maharaja is referred to as “the Gaekwar” or “H.H.” [His Highness].) Finally, in 1905, he returned to the College as vice-principal and professor of English. These documents are a representative selection from the scores that have survived. They are arranged in chronological order.

To the Sar Suba, Baroda State. 1 June 1895. In May 1895 Sri Aurobindo was summoned by the Maharaja to Ootacamund, a hill station in South India, in order to prepare a précis of a complex legal case. He wrote this letter to his superior shortly after his arrival in “Ootie”.

To Bhuban Babu. June 1901. This letter (actually a postcard) is the only non-official item in this subsection. It was written by Sri Aurobindo to a friend or acquaintance about whom nothing is known. Sri Aurobindo went to Naini Tal, a resort in what is now Uttaranchal, after his marriage to Mrinalini Bose in April 1901. The Banerji mentioned in the last paragraph was probably Jatindranath Banerji (c. 1877–1930), a young Bengali who had come to Baroda to obtain military training. In 1902 Sri Aurobindo sent Banerji to Calcutta to begin revolutionary work in Bengal.

To an Officer of the Baroda State. 14 February 1903. The “letter to the Residency” mentioned in this note is the one published next in sequence. Sri Aurobindo was anxious to leave Baroda at this time because he had to go to Bengal to settle a quarrel among members of the revolutionary society he and others had founded the year before.

Draft of Reply to the Resident on the Curzon Circular. 1903. In 1900 Lord Curzon, Viceroy and Governor-General of India, issued a circular letter requiring the rulers of princely states to obtain the permission of the government before leaving the country. Although worded in general terms, the circular was directed specifically against the Maharaja of Baroda, who had refused to return from Europe to meet the Viceroy that year. Two years later the Maharaja informed Baroda’s Resident – the name given to British political agents in the larger states – that he intended to revisit Europe. He was told that the Government of India would not grant him the necessary permission. A protest was submitted to “the Residency” (that is, the office of the Resident). The Resident replied in February. The present document is a draft of a reply to the Resident’s letter. The final version would have been sent over the signature of the Naib Dewan or Dewan.

To the Dewan, on the Government’s Reply to the Letter on the Curzon Circular. 14 August 1903. Unable to go to Europe, the Maharaja passed the summer of 1903 in Kashmir. Sri Aurobindo accompanied him there as his private secretary. The present document, addressed to R. V. Dhamnaskar, the Dewan or prime minister of the state, contains the Maharaja’s first reactions to the Government’s reply to the final version of the previous document.

To the Naib Dewan, on the Infant Marriage Bill. 8 July 1903. Written by Sri Aurobindo during the Kashmir tour of 1903 to an officer working under the Dewan.

A Letter of Condolence. 10 July 1903. Another letter written by Sri Aurobindo as secretary to the Maharaja during the Kashmir tour.

To R. C. Dutt. 30 July 1904. Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909) was an officer in the Indian Civil Service from 1871 to 1897. He rose to the position of Divisional Commissioner of Orissa, the highest post in the British administration yet held by an Indian. A few years after Dutt retired from the I.C.S., the Maharaja of Baroda offered him the position of Councillor (virtually the same as Dewan, a fact that would later cause some difficulties). The correspondence between the Gaekwar and Dutt was handled by Sri Aurobindo, who had met Dutt earlier.

To the Principal, Baroda College. 18 September 1904. During part of 1904 Sri Aurobindo held the post of assistant Huzur Kamdar (Crown Secretary). This is one of many letters he wrote on behalf of the Maharaja during this period.

To the Dewan, on Rejoining the College. 28 September 1904. In September 1904 Sri Aurobindo was allowed to leave the state administration and to return to Baroda College, where he had served as professor between 1898 and 1901. He was given the post of vice-principal.

To the Maharaja. 29 March 1905. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter to his employer, Sayajirao Gaekwar (1863–1939), Maharaja of Baroda from 1875 to 1939, on behalf of his younger brother, Barindra Kumar Ghose, who then was living with him in Baroda. Barin had just returned from Bengal, where for two or three years he had been helping to organise the revolutionary secret society that Sri Aurobindo, Jatin Banerji and others had set up. The Maharaja agreed to give Barin a job, but Barin went back to Bengal before he could begin work.

A Letter of Recommendation. 28 February 1906. Written just before Sri Aurobindo left Baroda to take part in the Swadeshi Movement. The Vividh Kala Mandir was a photographic studio and metal engraving shop founded by former students of Baroda’s Kalabhavan, an art school associated with Baroda College.

Letters and Telegrams to Political and Professional Associates, 1906–1926. In August 1906 Sri Aurobindo began work as principal of the Bengal National College and as an editorial writer for the daily newspaper Bande Mataram. In May 1908 he was arrested in connection with the Alipore Bomb Case. A year later he was released. In 1910 he settled in Pondicherry and cut off all direct connection with the freedom movement, though he continued to be regarded by the British government as a dangerous revolutionary. For a while he remained in indirect contact with the movement through Motilal Roy of Chandernagore.

To Bipin Chandra Pal. 1906. Bipin (also spelled “Bepin”) Chandra Pal (1858–1932) was a nationalist speaker and writer. Sri Aurobindo apparently wrote this note to him in September or October 1906. At this time, Pal was editor-in-chief of the nationalist newspaper Bande Mataram and Sri Aurobindo was its chief writer. This note was put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial (1908–9). The original has been lost. The text is reproduced here from a “paperbook” or printed transcript of the documentary evidence.

A Letter of Acknowledgment. 9 March 1907. Sri Aurobindo was in Deoghar (a hill-resort in what is now Jharkhand) from mid January to early April 1907. He had gone to Deoghar for rest and recuperation after the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress (December 1906). While there he took care of some pending office work, such as writing this acknowledgement of a small donation to the National College Fund. Sri Aurobindo’s note was put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial (1908–9). The original has been lost. It was reproduced in a British government report on the trial, which was later reprinted in the collection Terrorism in Bengal, volume 4 (Calcutta, 1995), p. 682.

To Hemendra Prasad Ghose. 19 April 1907. Hemendra Prasad Ghose (1876–1962) was one of the principal writers for the Bande Mataram. Sri Aurobindo wrote this note to him at a moment when there was much internal conflict in the office of the newspaper. Hemendra Prasad copied the note out in his diary, from which it is reproduced.

To Aswinicoomar Banerji. Sri Aurobindo wrote these letters to Aswinicoomar Banerji (1866–1945), a barrister, labour leader and nationalist politician, shortly before Sri Aurobindo was arrested for sedition in August 1907. [1] This letter is dated 26 June 1907. The biography of Garibaldi mentioned is J. Theodore Bent’s The Life of Giuseppe Garibaldi (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882). [2] On 7 June 1907 the editors of the newspapers Jugantar, Sandhya and Bande Mataram were warned by the Government of Bengal that they would be prosecuted if they continued to publish inflammatory articles. On 5 July police arrested Bhupendranath Bose, whom they believed to be editor of Jugantar. He was tried and sentenced on 24 July. Six days later, the police searched the office of the Bande Mataram. It was evidently around this time that Sri Aurobindo wrote this note to Aswinicoomar. The originals of these two letters are in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi (Banerji papers).

To Dr. S. K. Mullick. 8 February 1908. Dr. Sharat Kumar Mullick (1869/70–1923/4), a physician with an interest in nationalist politics and national education, was a lecturer in the National Medical College in 1908. Sri Aurobindo was principal of the Bengal National College in 1906 and 1907, and kept some connection with it until May 1908. From the end of 1906, however, his main occupation was the editing of the newspaper Bande Mataram. He dated this letter Calcutta, 8 February 1907. The year is certainly wrong. He is known to have been in Deoghar without a break between January and April 1907, and is known to have been in Calcutta on 8 February 1908. On that day he attended a meeting of the Bande Mataram company in the office of the newspaper. It may be this meeting to which Sri Aurobindo alludes in his letter.

Telegrams about a Planned Political Reception. 6 March 1908. In September 1907 Bipin Chandra Pal was sentenced to six months imprisonment for refusing to testify in the Bande Mataram Sedition Case. He was released in March 1908. On 6 March Sri Aurobindo and some of his colleagues sent telegrams to fifteen nationalist leaders in different parts of the country asking them to organise celebrations and make donations to a purse that would be offered to Pal. Sri Aurobindo varied the wording of his telegrams according to the recipient. A total of seven different versions were sent, all of which are reproduced here. These telegrams were put in as evidence in the Alipore Bomb Trial.

Extract of a Letter to Parthasarathi Aiyangar. 13 July 1911. Parthasarathi (1880–1929) was a friend and associate of Sri Aurobindo’s from 1910, when the two met in Calcutta. He was the younger brother of Mandayam Srinivasachari, who was one of Sri Aurobindo’s closest friends in Pondicherry.

Note on a Forged Document. 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.

To Anandrao. Sri Aurobindo mentioned Anandrao Jadhav, the eldest son of his friend Khaserao Jadhav, in his letter to Jogindranath Bose of 15 August 1902 (see pp. 138–44). He presumably was the recipient of this letter. It is possible that the present letter, undated but apparently written in June 1912, is the “letter to our Marathi friend” mentioned in the second paragraph of the letter to Motilal Roy of 3 July 1912 (but see the note to that letter). The “Baroda friend” mentioned in the first sentence of the letter to Anandrao is probably Keshavrao Ganesh Deshpande, who was a close friend of Sri Aurobindo’s in England and in Baroda.

To Motilal Roy. {{1}}In February 1910, Sri Aurobindo left Calcutta and took temporary refuge in Chandernagore, a small French enclave on the river Hooghly about thirty kilometres north of Calcutta. There he was looked after by Motilal Roy (1882–1959), a young member of a revolutionary secret society. After leaving Chandernagore for Pondicherry in April, Sri Aurobindo kept in touch with Motilal by letter. It was primarily to Motilal that he was referring when he wrote in the “General Note on Sri Aurobindo’s Political Life” (p. 64 of this volume): “For some years he kept up some private communication with the revolutionary forces he had led through one or two individuals.” In these letters, which were subject to interception by the police, he could not of course write openly about revolutionary matters. He developed a code in which “tantra” meant revolutionary activities, and things connected with tantra (yogini chakras, tantric books, etc.) referred to revolutionary implements like guns (see Arun Chandra Dutt, ed., Light to Superlight [Calcutta: Prabartak Publishers, 1972], pp. 27–30). The code sometimes got rather complicated (see the note to letter [3] below). Sri Aurobindo did not use his normal signature or initials in the first 22 letters. Instead he signed as Kali, K., A. K. or G. He often referred to other people by initials or pseudonyms. Parthasarathi Aiyangar, for example, became “P. S.” or “the Psalmodist”.

[1] 3 June 1912. The “letter to our Marathi friend” referred to in the second paragraph may be the letter to Anandrao (see above). Note however that according to Arun Chandra Dutt (Light to Superlight, pp. 4–5), the Marathi friend was a merchant named Madgodkar, apparently the same as the Madgaokar mentioned in letter [9] below. The “case” mentioned in the penultimate paragraph is the one that Mayuresan tried to set up; see “Note on a Forged Document” above.

[2] August 1912 or after. (In April 1914, Sri Aurobindo wrote of “the Parabrahma darshana”, apparently the experience mentioned in this letter, as happening “two years ago”; see Record of Yoga, volume 10 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, p. 447.)

[3] Circa January 1913. According to Arun Chandra Dutt (Light to Superlight, pp. 50–51), the “experiment in the smashāna” mentioned in this letter was the attempt to assassinate the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, in Delhi on 23 December 1912. Śmaśānas or graveyards are believed to be good places for tantric sadhana. The term applies also to Delhi, the graveyard of vanished empires. Other terms in the letter make use of the same “tantric” metaphor.

[4] February 1913.

[5] June – July 1913. The “tantric books” referred to are almost certainly revolvers sent from Pondicherry to Chandernagore (see Light to Superlight, pp. 27–28). The explanations in cypher concerning these “books” have not survived.

[6] June – July 1913.

[7] August 1913. The manuscripts (“MSS”) referred to are Sri Aurobindo’s translation of Chittaranjan Das’s Bengali poem cycle Sagar Sangit, for which Das agreed to pay him Rs. 1000.

[8] Circa 1913.

[9] 1913 (between April and October 1913, Sri Aurobindo lived in a house on Mission Street, Pondicherry, for which the rent was Rs. 15).

[10] March 1914. Rashbehari Bose was a revolutionary of Chandernagore who orchestrated the bomb-attack against Lord Hardinge in Delhi in December 1912. On 8 March 1914, British police officers, armed with an extradition warrant of arrest, raided Rashbehari’s house in Chandernagore. They were unable to arrest him, as he had slipped out some time before. News of the raid appeared in the newspapers on 12 March or before. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter to Motilal a short while after he read the news. He was interested not only in Rashbehari’s fate, but also in the legal precedent that might be set by the issuance of an extradition warrant against a French subject for a crime committed in British India.

[11] April 1914. For Paul Richard, see the note to “Extracts from Letters to the Mother and Paul Richard” in Section Two below. Every four years an election was held in Pondicherry to choose a Deputy to represent the colony in the French Chamber.

[12] 17 April 1914. This letter was written shortly after the results of the election were announced. According to the Journal Officiel, Bluysen received 33,154 votes, Lemaire 5624, La Porte 368 and Richard 231.

[13] 5 May 1914.

[14] June 1914. The “New Idea” was officially sanctioned by the government of French India in June 1914.

[15] July 1914.

[16] July –August 1914.

[17] 29 August 1914.

[18] After October 1914. Bijoy Nag, a member of Sri Aurobindo’s household, was imprisoned in October 1914 under the Defence of India Act after he entered British India. He remained in jail for the duration of the war. V. V. S. Aiyar was a revolutionary from the Madras Presidency who had taken refuge in Pondicherry. (Despite the “a certain”, Sri Aurobindo knew Aiyar well.)

[19] Undated, but after the launch of the Arya in August 1914.

[20] After September 1915, the month in which Motilal began to publish the Bengali journal Prabartak.

[21] Undated, but apparently shortly after the armistice in November 1918. Haradhan Bakshi (1897–1962), a young man of Chandernagore, served in Mesopotamia during the war.

[22] Apparently towards the end of 1919; certainly earlier than the next letter, which refers to the Standard Bearer by name.

[23] 2 January 1920. A short time before this letter was written, M. K. Gandhi sent his son Devdas to speak to Sri Aurobindo on his behalf (see Gandhi’s letter to Sri Aurobindo on page 442).

[24] May 1920. Barindra Kumar Ghose (Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother, see Section Two below) was released from the penal colony of the Andaman Islands in January 1920. Paul and Mirra Richard returned to Pondicherry from Japan on 24 April 1920.

[25] 2 September 1920. For information on the “marriage idea”, see Light to Superlight, pp. 93–96.

[26] 11 November 1920. The portion of this letter placed by Sri Aurobindo within inverted commas was reproduced in the Standard Bearer on 21 November 1920. See pages 278–79.

[27] In 1922, Motilal’s relationship with Sri Aurobindo soured. In May 1925 Motilal wrote asking for permission to visit Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry. This telegram of 13 May was Sri Aurobindo’s reply. It is reproduced from a notebook in which A. B. Purani wrote down Sri Aurobindo’s conversations and bits of household news.

[28] 8 May 1930. When Motilal wrote to Sri Aurobindo in April or May 1930, Sri Aurobindo wrote this draft and asked Nolini Kanta Gupta to reply in Bengali in his own name. This explains Sri Aurobindo’s use of the third person.

Draft of Letter to Saurin Bose. June 1914. Saurin Bose, brother of Sri Aurobindo’s wife Mrinalini, was a member of Sri Aurobindo’s household in Pondicherry between 1911 and 1919. At the time this letter was written, he was on a visit to Bengal. On 30 May 1914, Sri Aurobindo noted in his diary (Record of Yoga) that he had received a letter from Saurin that day. The present draft-letter was evidently written in reply to Saurin’s letter. It may be dated, through references to known events, to 1 or 2 June 1914. (Paul and Mirra Richard were planning on 1 June to occupy the house mentioned in the letter “in one or two days”. The prospectus that is mentioned in the draft as being due out “later this month” was issued in mid June. Note also that the sum of Rs. 400, mentioned in this letter and in letter [14] to Motilal Roy, is also mentioned in the Record of 29 May.) This draft was not sent to Saurin; presumably a fair copy was written and sent in its place.

To K. R. Appadurai. 13 April 1916. Appadurai was the brother-in-law of the poet Subramania Bharati. Bharati was living as a refugee in French Pondicherry at the time this letter was written. The “Mr. K. V. R” to whom Sri Aurobindo refers was K. V. Rangaswami Iyengar, who sometimes helped him out financially.

Fragmentary Draft Letter. 1916–1920. The surviving portion of this draft (its beginning is not available) was written on one side of a sheet of paper that on the other side was used for part of a relatively early draft of the poem Savitri. It is not possible to assign an exact date to the Savitri draft, but it must have been written between 1916, when Sri Aurobindo began work on the poem, and 1921, when he temporarily stopped all forms of writing. The “volume of poems” mentioned was probably Ahana and Other Poems (1915). The intended recipient of the letter is not known for sure, but it is likely that it was Chittaranjan Das (see below).

To a Would-be Contributor to the Arya. 3 September 1919. A letter to an unknown person who had sent a poetry manuscript to Sri Aurobindo for publication in the Arya.

To Joseph Baptista. 5 January 1920. Joseph Baptista (1864–1930) was a barrister and nationalist politician who was associated with Bal Gangadhar Tilak. In 1919 a group of nationalists of Bombay who took their inspiration from Tilak decided to form a party and to bring out an English daily newspaper. They deputed Baptista to write to Sri Aurobindo and offer him the editorship of the paper. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter in reply.

To Balkrishna Shivaram Moonje. B. S. Moonje (1872–1948) was a medical practitioner and political activist of Nagpur. When Sri Aurobindo knew him in 1907–8, Moonje was one of the leaders of the Nationalist or Extremist Party. (Later he helped to found the Hindu Mahasabha; see Sri Aurobindo’s telegram to Moonje in Part Three, under “On the Cripps Proposal”.) Sri Aurobindo stayed with Moonje when he visited Nagpur in January 1908. Twelve years later, Moonje and others invited Sri Aurobindo to preside over the forthcoming Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress. In letter [1], dated 30 August 1920, Sri Aurobindo set forth his reasons for declining this honour. [2] In this telegram, date-stamped on arrival 19 September 1920, he reiterated his decision.

To Chittaranjan Das. 18 November 1922. A barrister of Calcutta who became famous for successfully defending Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Bomb Case (1908–9), Chittaranjan Das (1870–1925) later entered politics and became the leader of the Swarajya Party, which advocated entering the government’s legislative assemblies in order to “wreck them from within”. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter to Das on the same day that he wrote another to his brother Barin (see the first letter under “To Barindra Kumar Ghose and Others” in Section Two below).

To Shyamsundar Chakravarty. 12 March 1926. Shyamsundar Chakravarty (sometimes spelled Chakrabarti or Chakraborty) (1869–1932) was a nationalist writer and orator. When Sri Aurobindo was editor-in-chief of the nationalist newspaper Bande Mataram, Chakravarty was one of its main writers. Eighteen years later he became editor of the Bengalee, a moderate nationalist newspaper of Calcutta. At that time he wrote to Sri Aurobindo inviting him to send contributions. This letter is Sri Aurobindo’s reply. The original manuscript is not available. The text is reproduced from an old typed copy.

Open Letters Published in Newspapers, 1909–1925. In this subsection are included all known letters written by Sri Aurobindo for publication in newspapers, with the exception of the two open letters he published in his own journal Karmayogin in 1909 and 1910, and his reply to the writer of a review of his Secret of the Veda. (These letters are reproduced in Karmayogin: Political Writings and Speeches 1909–1910 and The Secret of the Veda, volumes 8 and 15 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.)

To the Editor of the Bengalee. 14 May 1909. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter eight days after his acquittal from the charges brought against him in the Alipore Bomb Case. It was published in the Bengalee on 18 May 1909. The “defence fund” mentioned was set up by his uncle Krishna Kumar Mitra in the name of Sri Aurobindo’s sister Sarojini.

To the Editor of the Hindu. [1] 7 November 1910. Sri Aurobindo left Calcutta for Pondicherry on 1 April 1910. Shortly thereafter the Government of Bengal issued a warrant for his arrest on the charge of sedition for an open letter that had been published in the weekly newspaper Karmayogin on 25 December 1909. Sri Aurobindo remained incognito in Pondicherry until 7 November 1910, when he wrote this letter announcing his presence in the French enclave and his retirement from politics. He deferred “all explanation or justification of [his] action” until the Calcutta High Court had ruled on the appeal of the conviction of the printer in the Karmayogin sedition case. Coincidentally, that same day the Calcutta High Court threw out the printer’s conviction, thus nullifying the charges against Sri Aurobindo. His letter was published in the Hindu on 8 November. [2] 23 February 1911. This letter was published in the Hindu on 24 February 1911, the day after Sri Aurobindo wrote it. [3] July 1911. On 10 July 1911, the Madras Times published a short editorial (“leaderette”) entitled “Anarchism in the French Settlements”, which dealt with “political suspects” who had taken refuge in Pondicherry and were carrying out anti-British activities there. The writer cited a letter “from a correspondent in Pondicherry” that had been “published recently” in its columns, adding “if our correspondent is correctly informed, there is an organised Party in French India which supports Mr. Arabindo Ghosh and his friends”. The next week the same newspaper published an article that spoke openly of Sri Aurobindo as “a criminal and an assassin”, thus connecting him with the assassination of the British Collector Robert Ashe, which had taken place on 17 June 1911. Sri Aurobindo wrote a letter to the editor of the Madras Times denying these charges, but was not given “the opportunity of reply”. He therefore wrote this letter to the editor of the Hindu. Published in that newspaper on 20 July 1911, it probably was written the previous day. [4] July 1911. This letter, a continuation of the previous one, was published in the Hindu on 21 July 1911. It probably was written the previous day. The “exposition” of the author’s views promised in the last sentence has not been found. It does not appear to have been published in the Hindu, and possibly was never written.

To the Editor of the New India. [1] April 1918. Sri Aurobindo wrote this message on national education at the request of Annie Besant (1847–1933), president of the Theosophical Society, leader of the Indian Home Rule League, and editor of New India, a newspaper of Madras. She published it in New India on 8 April 1918, under the heading: “MESSAGES FROM SONS OF THE MOTHERLAND TO THEIR BROTHERS”. Sri Aurobindo’s was the longest of nine messages contributed by India’s “leading patriots”. This item is also published in Early Cultural Writings, volume 1 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. [2] July 1918. Besant wrote to Sri Aurobindo again in July 1918, asking him for his opinion of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, which had been announced earlier that month. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter in reply. After receiving it, Besant wrote asking whether she could “use it (with or without your name) as a valuable opinion on the ‘Reforms’ ”. Sri Aurobindo consented, and the letter was published in New India on 10 August 1918.

To the Editor of the Hindustan. 1918. The Hindu Marriages (Validity) Bill was introduced by Vithalbhai Patel (1873–1933) in the Imperial Council on 5 September 1918. Its purpose was to provide legal sanction to marriages between Hindus of different castes. (At that time Hindu Law, as interpreted in the courts, considered inter-caste marriages to be invalid unless sanctioned by custom.) Patel’s bill was condemned by the orthodox and considered inadequate by reformers. But certain eminent Indians, among them Rabindranath Tagore and Lala Lajpat Rai, believed that it was a step in the right direction. Sri Aurobindo was asked his opinion of the bill by Lotewalla, Managing Director of Hindustan. His reply, undated, but apparently written in the last quarter of 1918, is reproduced here from Gordhanbhai I. Patel’s Vithalbhai Patel: Life and Times, Book One (Bombay: Shree Laxmi Narayan Press, 1950), p. 305.

To the Editor of the Independent. August 1920. This obituary article was written at the request of Bipin Chandra Pal, editor of the Independent, after the death of Bal Gangadhar Tilak on 1 August 1920. The piece was published in the Independent on 5 August 1920. The present text has been compared both against the version published in the newspaper and against a draft found among Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts. The same piece is published under the title “A Great Mind, a Great Will” in Early Cultural Writings, volume 1 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.

To the Editor of the Standard Bearer. On 11 November 1920, Sri Aurobindo wrote to Motilal Roy, editor of the Standard Bearer, in regard to certain claims that had been made about his political opinions in the Calcutta press. His letter is published on pages 248–49 of the present volume. In it he wrote, within inverted commas, a statement that he wanted Motilal to publish. Motilal did so on 21 November 1920. The text is reproduced here as it was printed in the Standard Bearer.

To the Editor of the Bombay Chronicle. June 1925. This message was written at the request of the editor of the Bombay Chronicle a day or two after the passing of Chittaranjan Das on 16 June 1925. The message was published in the newspaper on 22 June 1925.

Section Two. Early Letters on Yoga and the Spiritual Life, 1911–1928

Sri Aurobindo began the practice of yoga in 1905. Between then and 1911 he made few references to yoga in his letters. The first people to whom he wrote about spiritual things were Motilal Roy (see Section One above) and Paul and Mirra Richard. Around 1920, he began to reply to letters written to him by people in India and abroad who were interested in practising his system of yoga. At the end of 1926, he stopped seeing even the members of his household (which soon became known as an ashram), but he continued to answer some of the letters written to him by people living outside. Gradually, he began to write to members of the ashram as well. His letters on yoga of 1927–1950 have a different character from those written between 1911 and 1926. All surviving letters on yoga from the early period, along with a few from the late period that are parts of series that began earlier, are included in the present section. All significant letters from the 1927–1950 period are reproduced in Letters on Yoga, volumes 28–31 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.

Extracts from Letters to the Mother and Paul Richard, 1911 – c. 1922. Paul Richard (1874–1967) was a French lawyer and writer. He came to Pondicherry in 1910 seeking election to the French Chamber of Deputies, but found that the ticket he had been promised had been given to someone else. Before returning to France, he asked to be introduced to a yogi, and friends arranged a meeting between him and Sri Aurobindo. During the next four years, he and Sri Aurobindo remained in touch by letter. In 1914, Richard returned to Pondicherry to stand for election. This time he was accompanied by his wife Mirra (1878–1973), who later became known as the Mother. Richard was defeated, but he and Mirra remained in India until February 1915, when Paul was ordered to join his regiment. The Richards remained in France until March 1916, when they departed for Japan. After a four-year stay in that country, they returned to Pondicherry in April 1920.

To Paul Richard. Sri Aurobindo wrote these letters to Richard after their meeting in 1910 and before Richard returned to India in 1914.

To the Mother and Paul Richard. These letters presumably were addressed both to Mirra and Paul. The one dated 31 December 1915 deals with an experience of the Mother’s which is recorded in her Prayers and Meditations under the date 26 November 1915.

Draft of a Letter. 1920s. The circumstances referred to in this letter suggest that it was written during the early 1920s, when Sri Aurobindo was partly retired. The reference to Le seigneur des nations (“The Lord of the Nations”), a book by Paul Richard, suggests that Richard was the intended recipient. Sri Aurobindo’s reply was meant to be sent over the signature of a secretary. This explains his use of the third person.

To People in India, 1914–1926. Only thirteen of the twenty-three items included in this subsection exist in the form of letters or drafts in Sri Aurobindo’s hand. Some of the others were dictated or (in one or two cases) written by someone else following Sri Aurobindo’s instructions. Such letters generally were revised by Sri Aurobindo, sometimes extensively, before they were sent.

To N. K. Gogte. Nothing is known about the recipient of these letters, except that he wrote to Sri Aurobindo after the appearance of the first issue of the Arya asking some questions about meditation. Gogte was perhaps hoping that his question would be answered in “The Question of the Month”, a feature in early issues of the journal. Sri Aurobindo in fact wrote an answer to the question “What exactly is meant by meditation in Yoga? And what should be its objects?” in the October 1914 issue (published in Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, volume 13 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 445–47). This essay bears some resemblance to the answer he sent directly to Gogte.

[1] 9 September 1914. This is a postcard sent by Sri Aurobindo to Gogte explaining that he was unable to answer his letter immediately.

[2] 21 September 1914. This reply of Sri Aurobindo to Gogte was the first of thousands of “letters on yoga” he would eventually write. Towards the end of the letter, Sri Aurobindo referred to a section at the end of the third instalment of Isha Upanishad, which was published in the Arya in October 1914. He wrote that the heading of this section was “The Vision of the All”. In fact the section is headed “The Vision of the Brahman” both in the Arya and in the book edition of Isha Upanishad (see Isha Upanishad, volume 17 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, p. 30). A section that appeared in the November instalment of the Arya is headed “The Vision of the All” (Isha Upanishad, p. 35). A partial copy of Sri Aurobindo’s letter to Gogte was published in the Standard Bearer on 13 March 1921. Another partial text was included in Sri Aurobindo’s Letters on Yoga.

Draft of a Letter to Nolini Kanta Gupta. A young member of Barindra Kumar Ghose’s revolutionary secret society, Nolini Kanta Gupta (1889–1984) was arrested and tried for conspiracy in the Alipore Bomb Case. Acquitted, he worked with Sri Aurobindo on the Bengali weekly Dharma in 1909 and 1910. In October or November 1910, he joined Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry. After remaining there for most of the next nine years, he returned to Bengal, where he got married in December 1919. Sri Aurobindo drafted this letter to him a little before that time. The Latin phrase seems to be a variant of the quotation from Horace found on page 137. It would mean “whither does this uncertainty lead”.

To A. B. Purani. 21 February 1920. Ambalal Balkrishna Purani (1894–1965) met Sri Aurobindo in 1918, when he came to Pondicherry to report on the progress of a revolutionary secret society that had been set up in Gujarat under Sri Aurobindo’s inspiration. Sri Aurobindo advised the young man to give his attention to sadhana. Purani corresponded with members of Sri Aurobindo’s household, and with Sri Aurobindo himself, until 1923, when he settled in Pondicherry.

To V. Chandrasekharam. Veluri Chandrasekharam (1896–1964) took his B.A. from Madras University, standing first in his class in philosophy. He often visited Pondicherry during the early 1920s, reading the Veda and practising yoga under Sri Aurobindo’s guidance. In 1928 he returned to his village in Andhra Pradesh, where he passed the remainder of his life.

To K. N. Dixit. 30 March 1924. Kesarlal Nanalal Dixit or Dikshit (1891–1988) was from Baroda. He visited Pondicherry five times during the 1920s, and settled in the Ashram in 1929. Sri Aurobindo wrote this paragraph in his own hand at the end of a letter written on his instructions by A. B. Purani. This explains his use of the third person.

To Ramchandran. 30 September 1925. Nothing is known about the recipient of this letter.

To and about V. Tirupati. An enthusiastic sadhak, Tirupati practised an extreme form of bhakti yoga, as a result of which he lost his mental balance. Sri Aurobindo advised him to go back to his home in Vizianagaram, coastal Andhra, to recuperate. From there Tirupati wrote a number of letters to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Sri Aurobindo wrote these twelve replies at this time.

[1] 21 February 1926. The manuscript of this letter was written by the Mother but was apparently a transcript of something written or dictated by Sri Aurobindo.

[2] 24 February 1926. This telegram was sent by Sri Aurobindo to S. Duraiswami, an advocate of Madras, to whom Tirupati had gone while on his way to Pondicherry.

[3] 26 February 1926. Written in reply to a letter from Dasari Narayana Swamy Chetty, Tirupati’s father-in-law, explaining Tirupati’s condition.

[4] February 1926. An incomplete draft of a letter.

[5] 4 March 1926. Manuscript in the Mother’s hand.

[6] 5 March 1926. Manuscript in the Mother’s hand.

[7] 22 March 1926.

[8] 27 March 1926. Manuscript in the Mother’s hand.

[9] 30 March 1926. Manuscript partly in the Mother’s and partly in Sri Aurobindo’s hand.

[10] Circa March–April 1926. This letter was written in reply to one written by Tirupati on “the 28^th”, presumably 28 March 1926.

[11] Circa March–April 1926. This draft-letter was written in reply to a letter written by Tirupati on “the 29^th”, presumably 29 March 1926.

[12] 6 May 1926. Tirupati came to Pondicherry on 6 May 1926. Sri Aurobindo refused to see him. He gave him this letter instead. It is reproduced here from one of the notebooks of A. B. Purani.

To Daulatram Sharma. 26 March 1926. Little is known about the recipient of this letter. He entered into correspondence with Barindra Kumar Ghose in 1923. After a visit to Pondicherry early in 1926, he wrote to Barin about his sadhana on 17 March. Barin drafted a reply following Sri Aurobindo’s instructions. This was so completely revised by Sri Aurobindo that it may be considered his own letter.

To Barindra Kumar Ghose and Others, 1922–1928. Sri Aurobindo wrote or dictated the letters in this section to his brother Barindra Kumar and to some others who were connected with a yoga centre that Barin had opened in Bhawanipore, Calcutta, in 1922. Several of the letters deal with prospective members of the centre, about whom Barin had written. (Many such candidates were asked to submit a photograph for the Mother and Sri Aurobindo to evaluate.) Barin also wrote about the progress and setbacks of those who were staying at the centre. Sri Aurobindo wrote at least two of his replies by hand, but appears to have dictated most of them. Multiple handwritten and typed copies of his replies were made after they were written. Sixteen of the eighteen letters exist only in the form of these copies. The texts published here have been established by collating three or more copies of each letter. The copies were widely circulated during the 1920s. Sri Aurobindo later remarked that he did not want this “out of date stuff” to remain in circulation; but in another letter he stated that it was “not necessary to withdraw anything”, though the pre-1927 letters were not to be circulated as freely as later letters.

To Barindra Kumar Ghose. Sri Aurobindo’s youngest brother Barindra Kumar Ghose (1880–1959) was born in England and raised in Bengal. He first got to know Sri Aurobindo after the latter’s return from England in 1893. Around 1902 Barin became involved in a nascent revolutionary society that Sri Aurobindo and others had set up in Calcutta. In 1906 Barin and other members of this society began to plan to assassinate British officials. An unsuccessful attempt to kill a British judge in May 1908 led to the arrest of Barin, Sri Aurobindo and two dozen others. The prisoners were tried for conspiring to wage war against the king. Sri Aurobindo was acquitted, Barin and several others convicted. The death-sentence against Barin was later commuted to life imprisonment in the Andaman Islands penal colony. In 1920, as part of the amnesty declared at the end of the First World War, Barin and the other prisoners were released. Barin visited Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry that year and again in 1921. In 1922 he set up a yoga centre in Bhawanipore, Calcutta.

[1] 18 November 1922. This letter was written on the same day as the letter to Chittaranjan Das reproduced on pages 260–62. Both letters were concerned with fund-raising.

[2] 1 December 1922. When Das received Sri Aurobindo’s letter of 18 November, he wrote for permission to quote certain passages from it. Sri Aurobindo gave his reactions to this proposal in the present letter.

[3] 9 December 1922. Written to Barin in response to a letter from Jyotish Ghose, a Bhawanipore sadhak.

[4] 30 December 1922. Krishnashashi, a young man from Chittagong, became a member of the Bhawanipore centre, but soon began to experience serious difficulties. This is the first of several letters written by Sri Aurobindo in connection with his case. (There is also a letter written directly to Krishnashashi. See below.) In the present letter he also transmitted to Barin the evaluations of Mirra (the Mother) of three candidates whose photographs had been submitted.

[5] January 1923. Another letter about Krishnashashi.

[6] 23 January 1923. Another letter about Krishnashashi.

[7] January 1923. Apparently written after the letter of the 23^rd and before the letter of the 31^st

[8] 31 January 1923. About Krishnashashi and other matters.

[9] 14 February 1923. About Krishnashashi and other matters.

[10] 2 April 1923. About various candidates and also about Rathin, a son of Rajani Palit. (See also the letter to Rajani Palit below.)

[11] 16 April 1923. About various candidates.

[12] 30 May 1923.

[13] 16 June 1923. About Jyotish Mukherjee, a Bhawanipore candidate. Barindra Kumar returned to Pondicherry from Calcutta in August 1923. The Bhawanipore centre went on for some time, but was closed at Sri Aurobindo’s suggestion in September 1925. Barin remained in Pondicherry until December 1929, when he left the Ashram and returned to Bengal.

[14], dated 7 June 1928, was written to him a year and a half before his departure. Part of it was included in the collection Bases of Yoga in 1936.

To Hrishikesh Kanjilal. Circa 1922. A member of Barin Ghose’s revolutionary group, Hrishikesh Kanjilal (born 1879) was one of the defendants in the Alipore Bomb Trial. Convicted, he spent ten years in the Andamans. After his release he visited Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry. In Calcutta he was associated with Barin in his various enterprises, one of which was the Cherry Press.

To Krishnashashi. January 1923. A young sadhak from Chittagong, East Bengal, Krishnashashi went insane while practising yoga at Barin’s centre in Bhawanipore. See also letters [4] – [9] to Barindrakumar Ghose above.

To Rajani Palit. 6 April 1923. A government servant, Rajani Palit (born 1891) lived in Calcutta and attended meetings at Barin’s Bhawanipore centre. Later he was a frequent visitor to the Ashram. This letter is about the occult illness of his son Rathin.

Draft Letters to and about Kumud Bandhu Bagchi. Born in 1901, Kumud Bandhu Bagchi was the head of the Bhawanipore centre from 1923, when Barin Ghose settled in Pondicherry, till it was closed in 1925. [1] 6 February 1926. A letter on Kumud’s sadhana dictated by Sri Aurobindo. [2] 23 March 1926. A note on the psychic being, dictated by Sri Aurobindo and revised by him before being sent.

To People in America, 1926–1927. These letters were written to people in the United States of America who had read the Arya and written to Sri Aurobindo. Most of them are preserved only in the form of drafts found among his manuscripts.

To Mr. and Mrs. Sharman. Early 1926. Maude Ralston Sharman was an American woman of Detroit who was married to a Punjabi.

To the Advance Distributing Company. [1] 9 March 1926. Draft of a letter written in reply to one dated 18 January 1926 from the Advance Distributing Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (a small firm about which nothing is known) to the Arya Publishing House (the principal publisher of Sri Aurobindo’s books in India). The manager of the Advance Distributing Company wished to purchase some issues of the Arya and also proposed bringing out a selection of Sri Aurobindo’s works in the United States. [2] 2 July 1926. Reply to a letter from the same company dated 2 May 1926, in which the writer spoke of practical matters relating to the publication of Sri Aurobindo’s books in the United States, and the nature of spiritual seeking in that country. The book Some I-L-O-F Letters had been sent to Sri Aurobindo by Mr. C. E. Lefebvre of Glenfield, Pennsylvania, earlier in the year.

Draft of a Letter to C. E. Lefebvre. Undated draft, written in reply to a letter from C. E. Lefebvre dated 13 June 1926. In his letter Lefebvre identified himself as the “student” mentioned in the letter from the Advance Distributing Company dated 18 January 1926. Various internal and external references in the letters make it clear that Lefebvre also was the writer of both letters from the Advance Distributing Company. In his letter of 13 June 1926, Lefebvre spoke about the nature of spiritual seeking in the United States, concluding: “It would seem that America is only ready for elementary instruction.”

To and about Anna Bogenholm Sloane. According to a printed curriculum vitae enclosed in one of her letters to Sri Aurobindo, Anna Bogenholm Sloane, B.A., M.A., was a native of Sweden who settled in the United States sometime before 1907. She was active in various educational institutions, and wrote pedagogical stories for children. Interested in spirituality, she became a student of Ralph Moriarity deBit (an American guru later known as Vitvan, 1883–1964). DeBit, then head of the School of the Sacred Science in Los Angeles, introduced Sloane to Sri Aurobindo in a letter of 30 June 1926. Sloane arrived in Pondicherry early in 1927, a few months after Sri Aurobindo had retired.

[1] 3 August 1926. Written in reply to a letter from Sloane dated 5 June 1926, in which she enumerated certain inner experiences, which she called “initiations”.

[2–4] August – September 1927. Undated drafts, written in reply to a letter from Sloane in which she asked Sri Aurobindo if he was “the Krishna, the Supreme God of the Planet Earth”, and expressed doubts about the ability of the Mother to guide her. She asked to be guided by Sri Aurobindo instead. There is some evidence that Sri Aurobindo never sent a fair copy of these drafts to Sloane.

[5] 13 October 1927. This is a report written by Sri Aurobindo after Sloane made certain allegations against him, the Mother and the Ashram to the British Consul in Pondicherry. The date appears on a copy of a French translation of the letter, which presumably was sent to the French authorities in Pondicherry.

Draft Letters, 1926–1928. These four draft letters were found in two note pads used by Sri Aurobindo around 1926–28. Internal references make it clear that the last three were written to Marie Potel, who lived in the Ashram during this period. The intended recipient of the first letter is not known.

To an Unknown Person. Circa 1927–28.

To Marie Potel. Marie Léon Potel (1874 – c. 1962) met the Mother in France in 1911 or 1912. She was perhaps the first person to regard the Mother as her master and spiritual Mother. Potel came to the Ashram in March 1926 and remained until March 1928.

[1] Draft of a letter found among Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts of 1926–27.

[2] Probably April 1927. A reply to a letter written in French by Potel. The three paragraphs beginning “Again who is the Father here” and ending “supported by the Ishwara” were struck through in the manuscript. Sri Aurobindo took up these ideas in the sixth chapter of The Mother, which he wrote towards the end of 1927.

[3] Circa 1928. The subject of this letter almost certainly was Marie Potel, who left the Ashram in March 1928.

Section Three. Other Letters of Historical Interest on Yoga and Practical Life 1921–1938

The letters in this section are of two types. Those in the first group are addressed to disciples who had undertaken to collect or provide funds for the Ashram. Those in the second are to public figures who had written to Sri Aurobindo for various reasons.

On Yoga and Fund-raising in the Ashram, 1921–1938. These letters were written to two people who helped raise funds for the Ashram in Bengal and Gujarat. Besides fund-raising, the letters deal with the sadhana of the two individuals, and with other subjects as well.

To and about Durgadas Shett. A member of a wealthy family of industrialists based in Chandernagore, Durgadas Shett (1895–1958) sent significant amounts of money to Sri Aurobindo through Motilal Roy before 1922. In 1934 his family property was distributed, and he gave most of his share to Sri Aurobindo. Afterwards he lived an austere life; at times he was dependent on Sri Aurobindo for cash for ordinary expenses. These twenty-three letters from Sri Aurobindo to Durgadas are interesting in showing Sri Aurobindo’s attitude towards money and the interest he took in the spiritual and material welfare of his disciples. Letters [2], [4] and [5] were written by Sri Aurobindo to his secretary Nolini Kanta Gupta, whom he asked to reply to Durgadas on his behalf.

To Punamchand M. Shah. Punamchand Mohanlal Shah (born 1898), of Patan, Gujarat, met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1919. Four years later he became a member of his household. Between 1927 and 1931, he spent much of his time in Gujarat trying to collect money for the newly founded Ashram. In August 1927 Sri Aurobindo wrote three letters to Punamchand on fearlessness, work and money, which were published in 1928 as chapters 3, 4 and 5 of The Mother. Here thirteen other letters to Punamchand on fund-raising and other subjects are reproduced.

To and about Public Figures, 1930–1937. These letters were written to or about people who held positions of responsibility or were otherwise in the public eye. They have been grouped together here for the convenience of students of modern Indian history.

Draft of a Letter to Maharani Chimnabai II. 1930. Gajrabai Ghatge (1871–1958), later Maharani Chimnabai II, was married to Maharaja Sayajirao III of Baroda in 1885. Sri Aurobindo met her while working under the Gaekwar between 1893 and 1906. More than two decades later, she wrote to him about her personal life. In replying, Sri Aurobindo used, out of courtesy, the form of address required by official protocol in writing to Indian royalty.

On a Proposed Visit by Mahatma Gandhi. 1934. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) visited Pondicherry on 17 February 1934. At that time he was temporarily retired from politics. As he related in his letter to Sri Aurobindo (part of which is reproduced above Sri Aurobindo’s reply of 7 January 1934), he had been anxious to meet Sri Aurobindo since he returned to India from South Africa in 1915. In order to arrange a meeting, he wrote to Govindbhai Patel, a disciple of Sri Aurobindo’s who previously had been connected with Gandhi’s movement. (There is some evidence that Govindbhai had written earlier to Gandhi to suggest a meeting.) On 2 January 1934 Gandhi wrote directly to Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo’s replies to Govindbhai and to Gandhi are reproduced in chronological order.

To Dr. S. Radhakrishnan. 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.)

To and about Morarji Desai. Morarji Desai (1896–1995) was Prime Minister of India between 1977 and 1979. [1] 15 February 1935. In 1934, Desai proposed coming to the Ashram with his friend Chandulal Manibhai, who wrote to A. B. Purani asking for permission to attend darshan. Sri Aurobindo’s reply was addressed to Purani. [2] 17 August 1935. Desai came to the Ashram in August 1935. During his stay he wrote a letter to Sri Aurobindo, asking him questions about spiritual matters. Desai published Sri Aurobindo’s reply in The Story of My Life (New Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1978), vol. I, pp. 126–27.

On a Proposed Visit by Jawaharlal Nehru. 5 October 1936. India’s first Prime Minister (1947–64), Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) was a leader of the Congress Party during the freedom movement, serving as its President four times. In 1936 Dilip Kumar Roy, a member of the Ashram who was acquainted with Nehru, proposed inviting Nehru to stay with him if and when Nehru came to Pondicherry. Sri Aurobindo jotted down these remarks on Dilip’s letter.

Birendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury. 21 February 1937. A member of the landed aristocracy of East Bengal, Birendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury was also an industrialist and a politician. He was elected to the Bengal Legislative Council in January 1937. Today, however, he is best remembered as a musician (he played the veena in the Hindustani style) and as a musical scholar.

PART THREE PUBLIC STATEMENTS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS ON INDIAN AND WORLD EVENTS, 1940–1950

Section One. Public Statements, Messages, Letters and Telegrams on Indian and World Events, 1940–1950

After his withdrawal from the national movement in 1910, Sri Aurobindo ceased to write on contemporary political issues. His letters to the editors of New India and Hindustan in 1918 (see Part Two, Section One) were his last public statements on political topics for more than twenty years. He first broke his silence in 1940 in connection with the Second World War. Later he spoke in support of the Cripps Proposal and other British offers to the leaders of the Indian national movement. Still later he provided, on invitation, messages when India achieved independence and on other occasions.

On the Second World War, 1940–1943. After opposing European imperialism for the better part of his life, Sri Aurobindo came out in support of the British and their allies after the fall of France. Whatever errors the Allies might have made in regard to their colonies, he thought, they still were open to the influence of the forces of higher evolution, while Hitler’s Germany was possessed by forces that were positively anti-divine.

Contributions to Allied War Funds. This letter, dated 19 September 1940, was signed jointly by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It accompanied a contribution of Rs. 500 to the Madras War Fund. The letter was published on the same date in the Hindu (Madras). Later the second paragraph was included in a leaflet entitled “Sri Aurobindo’s views on the War” and headed “For Sri Aurobindo’s Sadhaks only”, which was distributed in the Ashram and among friends of the Ashram. Still later it was included in the booklet On the War (see below).

Notes on the War Fund Contribution. [1] This letter, undated but evidently written shortly after the above message, is reproduced from Sri Aurobindo’s handwritten manuscript. It was not published during his lifetime. [2] Sri Aurobindo wrote this note on the back of a letter written by Anilbaran Roy to one of his friends. Anilbaran’s letter is dated 22 October 1940.

On the War: An Unreleased Statement. On 23 September 1940, Anilbaran Roy wrote an article defending Sri Aurobindo’s position on the war as set forth in the letter of 19 September. He submitted his article to Sri Aurobindo, who thoroughly revised and enlarged it, leaving almost nothing of Anilbaran’s original text. Sri Aurobindo had his secretary make a typed copy of the enlarged piece, which he further revised, but he does not seem to have shown the result to anyone, and it remained unpublished during his lifetime.

India and the War. [1] 6 April 1942. The Japanese armed forces captured Singapore on 15 February and Rangoon on 7 March 1942. Quickly moving north, they forced British and Indian forces to retreat into India. At this point many disciples of Sri Aurobindo living in Calcutta and elsewhere asked to be admitted to the Ashram for their own and their children’s safety. This text does not seem to have been printed during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime, but it apparently was communicated privately to individuals. [2] Sri Aurobindo wrote this text around the same time as the above piece. It was not published during his lifetime.

On the War: Private Letters That Were Made Public. [1] 29 July 1942. This letter or extract from a letter was published in a leaflet and in two or more pamphlets that also contain the war fund letter of 1940. The leaflet and pamphlets were headed “For Sri Aurobindo’s Sadhakas Only”. This piece, piece [2] and the 19 September 1940 letter on the war fund contribution were subsequently brought out in a booklet entitled On the War: Letters of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1944). [2] 3 September 1943. This item is an abridged version of Sri Aurobindo’s reply to a letter from Dilip Kumar Roy, in the course of which Dilip said: “I have received of late from correspondents and friends objections to our dubbing the allies as ‘modern Pandavas’. Those were protagonists of virtue (dharma) and unselfishness which can hardly be said of the Allies and . . . are they not all exploiters of the weaker races and essentially imperialistic – more or less?” Sri Aurobindo’s complete reply is published in Letters on Himself and the Ashram, volume 35 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. The extracts making up the present item were published in the first issue of the quarterly journal The Advent (February 1944), under the following note: “Sri Aurobindo has made known to the public his standpoint with regard to the present war. He is for unconditional and unreserved help – an all-out help to the Allies whose cause, according to him, is humanity’s and also India’s cause. The present extracts from a private letter written some time ago in answer to certain doubts and misgivings will further elucidate his position.” The extracts were also included in On the War: Letters of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (see above).

On Indian Independence, 1942–1947. After his retirement from active politics in 1910, Sri Aurobindo turned down all offers to rejoin the national movement or to play any other role in politics. The seriousness of the situation during World War II caused him to speak out in favour of the Cripps Proposal of 1942. Later, on request, he issued messages on two other British initiatives: the Wavell Plan and the Cabinet Mission Proposals.

On the Cripps Proposal. In March 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps (1889–1952), a Labour member of the War Cabinet, came to India with a proposal from the British government. Indian leaders were invited to take part in the councils of war, and were promised a constitution-making assembly after the cessation of hostilities. Cripps announced the details of the proposal in a radio talk of 30 March 1942. Sri Aurobindo responded in several ways.

[1] On 31 March, he sent a telegram to Cripps endorsing the proposal and offering his “public adhesion”. Cripps replied to Sri Aurobindo in a telegram of 1 April 1942. Sri Aurobindo’s telegram was published in many newspapers and reproduced in the pamphlet Messages of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (1949) and subsequently.

[2] On 1 April, Sri Aurobindo sent his disciple S. Duraiswami, a prominent advocate of Madras, to Delhi to speak to members of the Congress Working Committee: Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Azad, C. Rajagopalachari and others. He gave Duraiswami this letter authorising him to speak on his behalf.

[3 and 4] On 2 April, Sri Aurobindo telegraphed Dr. B. S. Moonje, a former nationalist colleague, now head of the Hindu Mahasabha, and C. Rajagopalachari, the Congress leader of Madras.

[5 and 6] On 9 April and again on a later date, Sri Aurobindo telegraphed his old revolutionary associate Amarendra Chatterjee, now a member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly, who had written, asking him to play a more active role.

On the Wavell Plan. On 14 June 1945, the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, offered Indian leaders a new plan intended “to ease the present political situation and to advance India towards her goal of full self-government”. Sri Aurobindo expressed his approval in two ways.

[1] On 15 June 1945, he dictated to his secretary a message that was subsequently released and printed in the Hindu and other Indian newspapers under the date 19 June.

[2] Also on 15 June, he telegraphed Dr. Syed Mahmood, a member of the Congress Working Committee, who communicated Sri Aurobindo’s views to Gandhi and the rest of the committee.

On the Cabinet Mission Proposals. On 24 March 1946, three members of the British Cabinet came to India in order to find a solution to the constitutional deadlock brought about by the unwillingness of the Muslim League to work with the Congress and other Indian parties. After surveying the situation, the Cabinet Mission offered a new proposal on 16 May. Its most salient feature was the so-called group system, by which provinces in the Northwest, the Northeast, and the rest of the country would form semi-autonomous groups within the larger Indian union. (The idea was to grant the substance of the League’s demand for Pakistan without partitioning the country.)

[1] In March 1946, before all the details of the proposal were known, Sri Aurobindo was asked his initial reaction by the Amrita Bazar Patrika. He wrote this response on 24 March. Issued in the name of his secretary Nolini Kanta Gupta, it was published in the Patrika on 26 March and later reprinted in other newspapers.

[2] Nine months later, after the details of the group system had come out, Sri Aurobindo was asked for his opinion by Surendra Mohan Ghosh, the President of the Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee, with whom he occasionally held talks about political developments. He dictated this reply to Surendra Mohan’s letter on 16 December 1946.

The Fifteenth of August 1947. India became independent on 15 August 1947. This was Sri Aurobindo’s seventy-fifth birthday. Before the event he was asked by All India Radio, Tiruchirapalli, to give a message for broadcast. Sri Aurobindo agreed and wrote two versions of a message, one of which was selected. On 9 August, AIR technicians made a recording of the Mother reading the message. This was broadcast on 14 August. (The recording, apparently made on a perishable wax medium, was not preserved.) Sri Aurobindo’s message exists in two versions, one long and the other short. [1] This version, which was found to be too long for broadcast in the allotted time-slot, was printed as a leaflet and reproduced in newspapers such as the Sunday Times of Madras. [2] This short version was broadcast by AIR and subsequently printed as a leaflet. Two years later it was reproduced in Messages of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (1949). Since then it has been reprinted many times.

On the Integration of the French Settlements in India, 1947–1950. Pondicherry, where Sri Aurobindo lived between 1910 and 1950, was at that time one of five French établissements or settlements in India. As one who was regarded by the British as a danger to the Empire, he was grateful for the hospitality that successive French administrations extended to him. When it became clear that British India would become independent, pro- and anti-French parties in Pondicherry engaged in political debate and violent clashes in order to decide the colony’s future. Sri Aurobindo wished Pondicherry to become part of the Indian union, but to retain some measure of autonomy, which would permit it to serve as a “window” between India and France. The situation remained unsettled until 1954, when all French possessions in India became de facto parts of the Indian Union. The de jure transfer took place in 1962.

The Future Union. Sri Aurobindo dictated this text in or before June 1947. It was published, anonymously, in a pamphlet marked “Issued by the French India Socialist Party/June 1947”. Sri Aurobindo supported this party’s stance on the issue of Pondicherry’s political future, though not necessarily its position on other issues.

On the Disturbances of 15 August 1947 in Pondicherry. 20 August 1947. In the evening of 15 August 1947, the day of India’s independence, armed rioters attacked the Ashram, killing one member and injuring several others. Subsequently it was reported in the Statesman of Calcutta that “Satyagraha” (non-violent passive resistance) was offered by political workers in front of the Ashram. Sri Aurobindo dictated this reply to be sent to the editor of the Statesman on 20 August. It was issued over the signature of the Secretary, Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Letters to Surendra Mohan Ghosh. For details on the recipient of these letters, see below under Section Two. The letters in the present subsection were occasioned by a diplomatic conflict between the government of free India and the government of French India. [1] In April 1949, the Government of India put a customs cordon around French Pondicherry. This made it difficult for the Ashram to obtain food and other necessities. Sri Aurobindo dictated this letter to Surendra Mohan on 1 April 1949 when the crisis was beginning. [2] Sri Aurobindo dictated this letter on 6 May 1949, when the problems created by the customs cordon were at their worst.

Note on a Projet de loi. 12 February 1950. Sri Aurobindo made these comments on a French projet de loi (proposed article of legislation) that had been submitted to him for comment by Sanat Kumar Banerji, a disciple of his who was a member of the Indian Administrative Service and who had been named India’s consul general in Pondicherry. In the event the projet was not discussed by the French and Indian governments.

Messages on Indian and World Events, 1948–1950. Sri Aurobindo dictated three of these messages on invitation. The other three were private letters (in one case, an extract from a private letter) that were released for publication after being sent.

On the Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi was murdered on 30 January 1948. [1] On 4 February a certain Mr. Kumbi of Gadag, Karnataka, telegraphed to Sri Aurobindo: “Darkness sorrow spreads fast India Bapuji death children pray message.” Sri Aurobindo telegraphed this message in reply. It was published in the Hindu on 7 February. [2] Asked on 5 February for a message on the subject by All India Radio, Tiruchirapalli, Sri Aurobindo wrote this paragraph, which presumably was broadcast by the station. On 8 February it was published in the Hindu, and at the end of February was reproduced in the Advent, a quarterly journal of Madras, and also as a separate leaflet. Both messages were also reproduced in the pamphlet Messages of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (1949).

On the World Situation (July 1948). 18 July 1948. This letter from Sri Aurobindo to his disciple Dilip Kumar Roy was reproduced in the Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, Calcutta, and also as a separate leaflet, in August 1948. It was included in Messages of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (1949).

On Linguistic Provinces (Message to Andhra University). December 1948. On 28 June 1948, Dr. C. R. Reddy, Vice-Chancellor of Andhra University, Waltair, wrote to Sri Aurobindo asking whether he would allow his name to be considered for the university’s National Prize for eminent merit in the humanities. On 15 July Sri Aurobindo wrote to say that he would accept the prize if offered. On 30 October the Governor of Madras (who was ex-officio Chancellor of the university) wrote saying that the syndicate of the university had resolved to give the award to Sri Aurobindo. Subsequently Reddy wrote asking Sri Aurobindo for a message to be read out at the award ceremony. Sri Aurobindo replied by telegram that while he “usually does not give any message unless it comes by some inner inspiration”, he felt sure “in this case inspiration and message will not fail to come”. The message – which dealt at some length with the question of linguistic provinces, then a charged political issue, particularly in the Andhra country – was completed and sent on 5 December. On 11 December 1948 it was read out at a convocation at the university. The message was published in the Hindu on 12 December 1948, and subsequently in other newspapers, such as in the Amrita Bazar Patrika (22 December 1948). In 1949 it was reproduced in the pamphlet Messages of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Letters Related to the Andhra University Award. [1] This letter, in which Sri Aurobindo authorised his name to be considered for the C. R. Reddy National Prize, was written on 15 July 1948. [2] This letter, addressed to the Governor of Madras, was sent on 6 November, a week after the university offered him the prize. [3] This letter, sent to Dr. Reddy along with the message, is dated 5 December 1948.

The Present Darkness (April 1950). 4 April 1950. This paragraph is an extract from a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy, which was released for publication shortly after it was written. It was printed in the Hindusthan Standard on 17 April 1950, and in other newspapers shortly thereafter. This paragraph also formed part of a larger extract from the letter that was published in the April 1950 issue of the Advent of Madras. Whenever the text was printed, all or part of the sentence mentioning Prime Minister Nehru was omitted. The “Pakistan imbroglio” Sri Aurobindo referred to was the crisis created by attacks on Hindus in East Pakistan, retaliatory attacks in India, and the consequent movement of populations in both directions. For more on this crisis see the note to “On the Nehru-Liaquat Pact and After” in the next section.

On the Korean Conflict. 28 June 1950. In 1949 and 1950, Sri Aurobindo wrote a number of letters in answer to questions posed by his disciple K. D. Sethna, editor of Mother India, a newspaper of Bombay, in regard to various national and international problems (see Section Two, subsection two below). Sri Aurobindo wrote the present letter in reply to Sethna’s questions on the Korean Crisis. His letter subsequently was released to the Press Trust of India, and published in the Amrita Bazar Patrika and other journals under the date 17 August.

Section Two. Private Letters to Public Figures and to the Editor of Mother India 1948–1950

Private Letters to Public Figures, 1948–1950. Sri Aurobindo dictated these four letters between 1948 and 1950 in reply to political leaders who approached him for guidance.

To Surendra Mohan Ghosh. 12 June 1948. As a youth, Surendra Mohan Ghosh (1893–1976) was a member of the Anushilan Samiti, a revolutionary organisation that had been founded by Sri Aurobindo and others in 1902. Later he joined the Indian National Congress. From 1938, he was president of the Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee. During the 1940s, he had a series of private meetings with Sri Aurobindo, during which the two spoke of political and yogic matters. In 1946 he became a member of the Constituent Assembly, which was charged with drafting India’s constitution. In 1948 and 1949 Sri Aurobindo wrote several letters to him about political matters. Two are published in the subsection containing material dealing with the integration of the French Settlements; another, on the Cabinet Mission Proposals, appears in the subsection containing material dealing with Indian independence. The letter in the present subsection was written on 6 June 1948, after Surendra Mohan informed Sri Aurobindo that he wished to resign from the position of president of the Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee (B.P.C.C.).

To Kailas Nath Katju. 3 September 1949. Dr. Kailas Nath Katju (1887–1968) was a lawyer and, after 1937, a Congress leader. In 1948 he was appointed Governor of West Bengal. In this capacity he presided over a public celebration of Sri Aurobindo’s seventy-seventh birthday in Calcutta in August 1949. On the twentieth of that month, he wrote to Sri Aurobindo, telling him about his past and present activities, and his hopes and apprehensions in regard to the country. Sri Aurobindo dictated this reply two weeks later.

To K. M. Munshi. Educated at Baroda College while Sri Aurobindo was a professor there, Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi (1887–1971) became a leading member of the Congress in Gujarat. In 1946 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly and after independence joined the union cabinet as agriculture minister. In 1949 and 1950 he asked Sri Aurobindo for advice on two occasions. [1] 3 September 1949. While serving on the Constituent Assembly, Munshi telephoned the Ashram in Pondicherry, asking for Sri Aurobindo’s opinion on the question of the numerals to be used with Hindi, which was being promoted as the national language. Sri Aurobindo dictated his reply to A. B. Purani. The substance of his remarks was published in at least two newspapers on 15 September. [2] 3 August 1950. On 30 July 1950, Munshi wrote to Sri Aurobindo asking him for guidance in regard to his personal sadhana and his plans to work for the sake of Indian culture. Sri Aurobindo dictated his reply to A. B. Purani.

Notes and Letters to the Editor of Mother India on Indian and World Events, 1949–1950. In February 1949 a new fortnightly newspaper, Mother India, was launched in Bombay. Its editor was K. D. Sethna, who had been a resident member of the Ashram between 1928 and 1938, and remained in close contact with Sri Aurobindo. Along with articles on yoga, literary criticism, and poetry, Mother India published commentary on political affairs. Sethna wrote to Sri Aurobindo for guidance when writing such articles, and Sri Aurobindo often replied. Eleven of his letters are reproduced in this section. (A twelfth, on the Korean Conflict, is published in the subsection containing messages on Indian and world events [see above], since it was released as a message during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime.)

On Pakistan. This comment was written in reply to a letter from Sethna dated 12 March 1949.

On the Commonwealth and Secularism. This note was written in reply to two remarks in a letter from Sethna dated 5 April 1949. Sethna’s first remark was: “Perhaps a concluding para should be added in which the suggestion could be made that the term ‘secular’ in our constitution should as soon as possible be qualified and the significance which does not contradict but rather confirms spirituality be openly introduced; or else the term ‘spiritual’ should be substituted, with an explanation that it goes nowise against but supports all the best that ‘secularity’ might connote.” Sethna’s second remark was: “What is Sri Aurobindo and Mother’s view on the Commonwealth question?”

On the Unity Party. 25 April 1949. Written in reply to a letter from Sethna dated 21 April 1949, in which he asked Sri Aurobindo whether people in agreement with Mother India’s position on the reunification of India ought to be referred to the Unity Party, a group then active in Bengal, whose Secretary, S. P. Sen, was an occasional contributor to Mother India. In a telegram written a few days after his letter, Sri Aurobindo wrote further: “Policy [of the Unity Party] not dictated by me – so how Aurobindonian? Policy guided mostly by A [Anilbaran]. Neither against nor for shall judge them by what they do.”

On French India and on Pakistan. 27 June 1949. On 25 June 1949, the following text was published in Mother India under the title “Sri Aurobindo Supports Merger of French India”:

Sri Aurobindo in his own supreme spiritual way strives for India’s solidarity and greatness, Sjt. Nolini Kanta Gupta the Secretary of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram told the A.P.I. special representative on June 14.

Sri Aurobindo feels certain and has expressed it more than once, the Secretary said, that the different parts of India, whoever may be their present rulers, are bound to join the mother country and that India, free and united, will become a dynamic spiritual force bringing peace and harmony to the war-scarred world and suffering humanity in general.

Asked whether this meant that Sri Aurobindo desired Chandernagore, Pondicherry and other French Settlements in India to join India, the Secretary said: “Certainly so. He has prophesied that these small foreign pockets in India would sooner or later become one with India and India would become the spiritual leader of the world. Sri Aurobindo’s great Yoga-Shakti is directed to that end.” . . .

As a spiritual home, the Ashram as such adopts a neutral attitude towards the burning question of the day in Pondicherry, namely, the referendum to decide the future of the French settlements in India, the Secretary said. He, however, strongly refuted the notion in certain quarters that the Ashram is pro-French, and referred to one of his public statements wherein he had stated: “Nobody here (Ashram) is for the continuation of French rule in India.”

On 22 June, before publishing the statement, Sethna wrote to Nolini asking for Sri Aurobindo’s views on Franco-Indian culture and on “the Contravention question”. He concluded: “The statement on behalf of the Ashram by your honourable spokesman self will be featured on top of page 12 in the next issue.” On receipt of this letter, Nolini drafted a letter to Sethna saying that the statement ought not to have been published as it “does not adequately represent Sri Aurobindo’s views”. Sri Aurobindo corrected and considerably enlarged Nolini’s draft, making it his own letter. He also added a paragraph on the Pakistan problem. The revised text was typed and sent to Sethna in Bombay.

On Cardinal Wyszynski, Catholicism and Communism. 3 August 1949. Stefan Wyszynski (1901–1981) was made archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw and primate of Poland in 1949, and a cardinal in 1953. He was an opponent of the Communist government’s efforts to limit the influence of the Catholic Church.

On the Kashmir Problem. Circa September 1949. This letter was written around the same time as the letter to Kailas Nath Katju (see above, previous subsection). The article of Sethna’s to which Sri Aurobindo referred is no longer available.

On “New Year Thoughts”. 1 January 1950. Sethna sent a copy of an editorial entitled “New Year Thoughts on Pacifism” to Sri Aurobindo at the end of December 1949. Sri Aurobindo wrote this reply on the first day of the new year.

Rishis as Leaders. 3 January 1950. This letter was written in reply to a letter from Sethna dated 31 December 1949.

On Military Action. Written on 6 March 1950, in reply to a letter from Sethna that is not now available. For Indo-Pakistan relations in 1950, see the next note.

The Nehru–Liaquat Pact and After. 3 May 1950. Early in 1950, tension between India and Pakistan rose as a result of widespread communal rioting in East Pakistan, retaliatory attacks in India, and the consequent flight of Hindus from East Pakistan into West Bengal, Assam and Tripura, and Muslims from India into Pakistan. On 2 April 1950, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan came to India to discuss these problems with Prime Minister Nehru. Six days later the two men signed a pact addressing the refugee problem and guaranteeing the rights of religious minorities in both countries. The “letter to Dilip” that Sri Aurobindo referred to in the first sentence was the one written on 4 April 1950, a portion of which was published in the newspapers later in April. (See “The Present Darkness (April 1950)” in the preceding subsection.) On the 21^st Sethna asked Sri Aurobindo if his position had changed since the letter of the 4^th was written. Sri Aurobindo replied by wire: “Letter to Dilip written before Pact. Nothing changed in my direction.” The letter of 3 May 1950 published here was written two weeks after the telegram.

On the Communist Movement. On 13 September 1950, Swatantra Party leader Minoo Masani sent Sethna a draft of an anti-Communist tract entitled “Manifesto for the Defence of Democracy and Independence in Asia”. He asked Sethna: “Do you think Sri Aurobindo would consider signing the manifesto? Do try.” Later, at a private meeting, Masani told Sethna, “I would be very happy if Sri Aurobindo saw the manifesto and made his suggestions. They would indeed be valuable.” On 16 September, Sethna sent Masani’s letter and the draft manifesto to Sri Aurobindo, along with a letter of his own in which he noted: “The Manifesto is meant to rally the largest possible support to the anti-Communist front and it studiously avoids open or direct siding with the Western powers.” He added that even socialist leader Jai Prakash Narayan was thinking of signing it. On the other hand, Morarji Desai, with whom Masani had spoken, was opposed to getting the signatures of men like Narayan, as they were, he said, “not really democratic”. Desai “was strongly in favour of declaring our adherence to the western democracies”. In closing his letter, Sethna asked Sri Aurobindo for his views. Sri Aurobindo’s answer, reproduced here, was drafted on 19 September 1950.

PART FOUR. PUBLIC STATEMENTS AND NOTICES CONCERNING. SRI AUROBINDO’S ASHRAM AND YOGA 1927–1949

Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry in 1910 and devoted himself to the practice of yoga. He lived at first with a few young men from Bengal. Afterwards they were joined by a handful of others from different parts of the country. By 1926 the household had some two dozen members. After a major yogic experience in November 1926, Sri Aurobindo stopped seeing or speaking with visitors and most members of the community that had grown around him. Around this time, this community became known as Sri Aurobindo’s Asram. Later the name was changed to Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Section One. Public Statements and Notices concerning the Ashram 1927–1938

The statements in the first subsection below were written for the general public. Those in the second subsection were written for members of the Ashram.

Public Statements about the Ashram, 1927 and 1934. On two occasions after the founding of the Ashram in 1926, Sri Aurobindo wrote short statements about it for publication. These are published here for their historical interest. It should be noted that what he wrote in the contexts of 1927 and 1934 does not necessarily apply to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram of today, which is differently organised. It may be observed that Sri Aurobindo, while writing in English, spelled the Sanskrit word āśrama as “Asrama” or “Asram”. Ashram became the established spelling sometime during the late 1940s.

On the Ashram’s Finances (1927). On 6 May 1927 an article by Jatindranath Sen Gupta entitled “Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram: Daily Life of Inmates: A Visitor’s Account” was published in the Hindu of Madras. Sen Gupta noted in his first paragraph: “Though everywhere in India and even outside India there is a keen desire to know what is really going on inside this Ashram at Pondicherry, not only very few get the opportunity of knowing what is going on here, but, on the other hand, all sorts of false and ugly rumours have been assiduously spread by interested persons.” Sen Gupta’s piece was the first article about the Ashram to be published anywhere. It seems also to have been the first published writing in which the name “Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram” was used. Sri Aurobindo saw and approved of the article as a whole, and wrote one paragraph for it himself. This paragraph, concerning the financial arrangements of the Ashram as of May 1927, is reproduced here. This was the only time Sri Aurobindo made a public appeal for funds. Later he specifically disallowed this approach.

On the Ashram (1934). February 1934 (probably the 16^th of the month). In February 1934, the Government of French India, apparently under pressure from the British Consul, began an inquiry into the functioning of the Ashram. At question was the legal status of the community. Press reports had spoken of it as an “institution” that had a “common fund”, but no attempt had been made to register it with the government as a legal or financial entity. In fact the Ashram was not, at that time, a public institution. All the houses that composed it were registered in the name of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. Individuals who wished to practise yoga under their guidance were allowed to use the facilities only so long as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother allowed. Sri Aurobindo nevertheless was obliged to take the government’s inquiry seriously. To clarify the situation, he wrote this statement on the Ashram and the one known as “Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching” (see the next subsection), apparently on 16 February 1934 (see below). The two texts were published together in the Hindu of Madras on 20 February 1934 under the title “Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Some Misconceptions Cleared”. A short while later, both texts were published in Pondicherry and in Madras in brochures entitled “The Teaching and the Asram of Sri Aurobindo” (Pondicherry: Barathy Press; Madras: Kesari Printing Works). Also around this time a brochure containing a French translation of both texts was printed in Pondicherry at the Imprimerie de Sandhanam. (In this French brochure the first text, “L’ensignement et l’ashram de Sri Aurobindo”, was dated 16 February 1934. This may be the date of writing of the original English text of one or both pieces.) Five months later, in August 1934, both texts were published in English, along with Bengali and Hindi translations, in a booklet entitled “The Teaching and the Asram of Sri Aurobindo” (Chandernagore: Rameshwar and Co.). A second edition, with English texts only, was published in 1945 (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House). Both texts were included in the first and second editions of Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1948 and 1951).

“Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching” has continued to appear, notably in On Himself (1972), but “Sri Aurobindo’s Asram” has not been printed since 1951 [Not quite: this text was published in The Mother’s Agenda, July 23, 1969]. A letter written by K. D. Sethna to the Mother in 1937 helps explain why. Wondering whether he should send a copy of “The Teaching and the Asram of Sri Aurobindo” to someone, Sethna noted that the passage about there being “no public institution” etc. “was written in this downright way when that anti-Asram movement [of 1934] was in full career in Pondy”. The Mother agreed and said that Sethna need not send the pamphlet. What Sri Aurobindo said in “Sri Aurobindo’s Asram” does not necessarily apply to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram of today. The text is reproduced here for its historical interest.

Notices for Members of the Ashram, 1928–1937. This subsection consists of notices written by Sri Aurobindo himself (and not on his behalf by a secretary) that were posted or circulated in the Ashram between 1928 and 1937. Most of them were written in response to temporary situations. A few were incorporated into lists of rules of the Ashram.

Notices of May 1928. Sri Aurobindo wrote these three notes after the Mother suffered a serious illness. He insisted at this time on introducing changes in the schedule of Ashram activities in order to lessen the pressure of work on her.

Notices of 1929–1937. These are notices that were posted on the Ashram notice board between 1929 and 1937. Many of them were attempts to regulate the correspondence between the members of the Ashram and Sri Aurobindo, which took him as much as ten hours a day during the middle 1930s.

Section Two. Public Statements about Sri Aurobindo’s Path of Yoga 1934 and 1949

Sri Aurobindo wrote these essays in 1934 and 1949 to explain his system of yoga to the general public.

Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching. This essay was published in the Hindu on 20 February 1934 immediately below the article entitled “Sri Aurobindo’s Asram”, which is described above in the note to “On the Ashram (1934)”. It was published along with that article in leaflets and pamphlets of 1934 and 1945. Subsequently it was included in Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram, first published in 1948 and reprinted many times. It was also included in Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953) and On Himself (1972 and subsequently).

A Message to America. 11 August 1949. This message was written for release at a public celebration of Sri Aurobindo’s seventy-seventh birthday in New York City. Leaflets containing the text and a message by the Mother were printed in New York at that time. The message was reprinted in Indian newspapers, and has since appeared many times, notably in Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953) and On Himself (1972 and subsequently).

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Only a few of the items in this book appeared in print during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime. Sri Aurobindo: A Life Sketch was published anonymously as a booklet in 1937 and subsequently. The information provided to King’s College appeared, in edited form, in the Register of Admissions to King’s College, Cambridge in 1903 and 1929. One of the letters on the departure to Chandernagore was printed in 1945. “A General Note on Sri Aurobindo’s Political Life” was published in “Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram” in 1948. All the “Open Letters and Messages Published in Newspapers” came out in the newspapers in question immediately after they were written. Most of the letter to Gogte was published in the Standard Bearer in 1921. Three of the statements on the Second World War, four of the statements on Indian independence, one of the texts on French India, all the messages on India and world events and one of the messages to Munshi were published as leaflets and /or in newspapers shortly after they were written. In 1949, six of these messages – the telegram to Cripps, the message of 15 August 1947, the two messages on the death of Gandhi, “On the World Situation (July 1948)” and “On Linguistic Provinces (Message to Andhra University)” – were reproduced in Messages of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram). The note of 1934 on the Ashram and the essays of 1934 and 1949 on Sri Aurobindo’s yoga were issued in leaflets and pamphlets and later reprinted. See the notes on specific pieces for details.

In 1953, many of the pieces making up this book, and others now appearing in The Mother with Letters on the Mother and Letters on Himself and the Ashram (volumes 32 and 35 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo), were published in a collection entitled Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother. Portions of the present book that appeared in that collection include most of the notes in Part One, Section Two, “Corrections of Statements Made in Biographies and Other Publications”, some of the letters to the Mother and Paul Richard, and the message of 15 August 1947.

In 1972 Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother was divided into two volumes. Notes and letters dealing with Sri Aurobindo or with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother jointly were published, along with much hitherto unpublished material, in volume 26 of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, On Himself: Compiled from Notes and Letters. Letters dealing with the Mother, some of which had been brought out separately in 1951 in a volume entitled Letters of Sri Aurobindo on the Mother, were included in volume 25, The Mother with Letters on the Mother and Translations of Prayers and Meditations. Both On Himself and The Mother with Letters on the Mother were reprinted several times after 1972.

Most of Sri Aurobindo’s letters to Motilal Roy, along with the letter to Anandrao, were first published in Light to Superlight by Prabartak Publishers, Calcutta, in 1972. These letters were included in the Supplement (volume 27) to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. The letters of Sri Aurobindo to his father, his sister and his brother, one of the letters to his father-in-law, the letter to the Maharani of Baroda, one of the letters to the editor of the Hindu, and one of the letters to the editor of New India were included in the same volume. Some of the “Early Letters on Yoga and the Spiritual Life” and “Letters and Telegrams to Political and Professional Associates” came out in Champaklal’s Treasures (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1976). The letters to Lord Kimberley were first printed in A. B. Purani’s Life of Sri Aurobindo (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1957). The letter to Morarji Desai was published in Desai’s The Story of My Life in 1978. Most of the messages on the Second World War appeared in the Bulletin of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in 1978. Many other items included in this book first appeared in the journal Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research between 1977 and 1994.

In The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, the material making up On Himself, together with related material first published after 1972, has been placed in two volumes: the present one and Letters on Himself and the Ashram. The latter volume is made up of letters written by Sri Aurobindo to his disciples between 1927 and 1950. Earlier letters, autobiographical writings and public messages appear in the present volume. Several items are being published here for the first time: the information supplied to the King’s College Register; a few of the corrections of statements made in biographies and other publications; most of the letters written while Sri Aurobindo was employed in Baroda; some of the letters to political and professional associates; some of the letters to Durgadas Shett and Punamchand Shah; most of the letters to public figures; many of the “Early Letters on Yoga and the Spiritual Life”; some of the messages on the integration of the French settlements in India; all the letters to the editor of Mother India; and some of the statements and notices concerning the Ashram.