Sri Aurobindo: the revolutionary who became a yogi
Part 7 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. Raised English from boyhood, he came home a stranger, became a revolutionary the British jailed — and emerged from prison one of the most ambitious philosophers India produced.
The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean — Part 7 of 12.
He is the master in this series who crossed the ocean the other way first. Sent to England as a small boy and raised almost entirely English, Sri Aurobindo came home a stranger to his own country — and became, in turn, a revolutionary, a fugitive, and the architect of one of the most ambitious spiritual philosophies India ever produced.
An English boyhood
He was born Aurobindo Ghose on 15 August 1872 in Calcutta. His anglophile father sent him to England in 1879; he was schooled at St Paul's in London and read at King's College, Cambridge, even passing the Indian Civil Service examination — before deliberately failing the riding test to avoid serving the Raj he would soon fight. He returned to India in 1893, to service in the princely state of Baroda, having to relearn the country of his birth.
The bomb case
Drawn into the freedom struggle after the 1905 partition of Bengal, Aurobindo became a leading nationalist voice and a clandestine organiser. In 1908 he was arrested in connection with a bombing and held in solitary confinement in Alipore Jail; his trial ran a year, and he was acquitted on 6 May 1909. It was in that cell that the politician became a mystic: he later described profound spiritual experiences during his imprisonment that turned him decisively inward.
Pondicherry
In 1910 he withdrew to Pondicherry, then under French rule and beyond British reach, and left politics for ever. There he developed Integral Yoga — a philosophy that broke with the old idea of the world as illusion to be escaped. For Aurobindo, evolution was not finished: the goal was the descent of a higher "Supermind" to transform life on earth itself. He poured it into vast works — The Life Divine and the 24,000-line epic poem Savitri.
The Mother, and Auroville
His spiritual collaborator was Mirra Alfassa, the French-born mystic known as "The Mother," around whom the Sri Aurobindo Ashram formed in 1926. He died on 5 December 1950 — some sixty thousand people came to see his body. In 1968 the Mother founded Auroville, the experimental "city of human unity" near Pondicherry that still tries to embody his vision, and his thought reached the West through disciples and institutions like the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Next in the series: Anandamayi Ma, the joy-permeated mother who reached the West through the most famous spiritual book of all.
Sources: Wikipedia: Sri Aurobindo.
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