Place · princely-state capital · India
Vadodara / Baroda
The former princely-state capital of the Gaekwads in Gujarat where Sri Aurobindo taught French and English at Baroda College from 1893 to 1906 — thirteen formative years during which he studied Sanskrit, Bengali and the Vedas, published his first political writings, and left for Calcutta to join the Swadeshi movement. The Gaekwad patronage, like that of Khetri for Vivekananda, is a case of a princely state underwriting the intellectual formation of a national-religious figure. The Baroda years produced Aurobindo's shift from Westernised Cambridge-educated administrator to Hindu nationalist and spiritual philosopher — the intellectual formation stage of the journey to Pondicherry.
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Tradition
- Biographical record
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.307, 73.181 (approximate)
Connections (2)
- Journey legSri Aurobindo Ashram, Puducherry
Aurobindo taught and studied Sanskrit at Baroda for thirteen years, went to Bengal for the Swadeshi agitation, was tried for the Alipore bomb conspiracy and acquitted, and crossed to French Pondicherry in 1910 ahead of a second prosecution. He never left. The move from a princely-state college to a colonial enclave beyond British warrant is the hinge of the life: a revolutionary in 1908, a writer of thirty volumes on yoga by 1950.
- Life routeSri Aurobindo
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.
Sources
Sri Aurobindo — Baroda years
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