Person · revolutionary & philosopher

Sri Aurobindo

Also known as Aurobindo Ghose, Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo Ghose

Date

1872 – 1950

Function

Military & resistance

Tradition

The Life Divine; Savitri; Integral Yoga

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

He wrote that his politics ended and his yoga began in the Alipore jail, where he was held a year awaiting trial. The move to Pondicherry was in the first instance a legal one: French territory put him outside British reach.

Connections (6)

• Life routePuducherry (Pondicherry)

  Aurobindo came to French Pondicherry in 1910 to escape British prosecution and stayed forty years, leaving his room almost never after 1926. The territory's legal separateness is the whole reason the ashram is where it is — a colonial accident produced a place of retreat. He had been tried for the Alipore bomb conspiracy and acquitted, and wrote afterwards that his politics ended and his yoga began in the year he spent in that jail awaiting trial.

• Life routeVadodara / Baroda

  He spent thirteen years at Baroda in Sayajirao Gaekwad's service, teaching and writing, and ran his nationalist journalism from there before moving to Bengal. The princely states' relative autonomy gave more than one nationalist a salary and a shelter the British provinces would not. Baroda also employed him as the Gaekwad's private secretary and as a professor of English, so a future mystic spent his thirties writing state correspondence and teaching Shakespeare.

• Alternative toBhikaiji Cama

  Cama in Paris and Aurobindo at Pondicherry both used somebody else's empire to escape British law, and both were connected to the same Bengal revolutionary network — Aurobindo's brother Barin ran the Manicktolla bomb factory, and Cama's Paris circle sent literature and, on at least one occasion, bomb manuals home in French colonial mail. Aurobindo abandoned politics for yoga in 1910; Cama kept the press going for thirty more years.

• PrecursorBhagat Singh

  The Bengal revolutionary tradition that Aurobindo's circle began after the 1905 partition — secret societies, bomb-making, the Alipore case — is the direct ancestor of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association that Bhagat Singh belonged to twenty years later, with the Punjab and United Provinces cells taking over what Bengal had started. What Bhagat Singh added was the socialism and the deliberate use of the trial as a public platform.

• Disciple ofMira Alfassa (The Mother)

  Mira Alfassa first met Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry on 29 March 1914, returned permanently in 1920 and became the central institutional partner of his Integral Yoga. After Aurobindo withdrew from public contact in 1926 she ran the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as its sole administrator for the next forty-seven years, until her death in 1973. Their relationship is the subcontinent's clearest twentieth-century case of a male spiritual teacher explicitly nominating a woman as his equal-rank institutional and spiritual successor.

• Court associationSubramania Bharati

  Subramania Bharati and Sri Aurobindo lived in parallel at Puducherry 1910-1918 (both using French territory to escape British prosecution) and shared the Swadeshi nationalist philosophy. Bharati's 1909 poem 'Senthamizh Nadu' explicitly engaged with Aurobindo's 1907 'Bande Mataram' editorial philosophy, and the two met regularly at the Easwaran Dharma Raja Koil Street in Puducherry.

On these journeys

• The armed movement and the exiles

Sources

Wikipedia, “Sri Aurobindo”. Trial records and the Home Political files, National Archives of India; Bhagat Singh, Why I Am an Atheist.

• Wikipedia — Sri Aurobindo