Sri Aurobindo and the Revolution of India

This book is partly motivated by a process of personal discovery and partly by Luc's perception that Sri Aurobindo is still largely unknown to the general public in India. This is particularly true of his vital contribution to the freedom struggle in the early 20th century, which is why the book concentrates on the period from his return to India, in 1893, until his decision to leave British India and sail for Pondicherry in 1910.

It is a period of huge importance for India’s struggle for freedom as well as for Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual development. When Sri Aurobindo returns from England, India is firmly under the yoke of the British. There is no organized opposition to British rule for the only legalized political body, the Indian Congress, has no intention of disturbing the status quo. However, by the time Sri Aurobindo departed for Pondicherry, he had helped establish the concept of independence firmly in the Indian mind, and strategies like swadeshi and armed and passive resistance have been adopted, albeit with mixed results.

As Luc’s biography makes clear, much of this radical transformation was due to a handful of Bengali activists. Sri Aurobindo was the intellectual leader, providing the movement with its programme and philosophy through speeches and numerous inspirational articles in the magazines that he edited.

The biography covers the main political events of these years – the struggles between the ‘Moderates’ and the ‘Extremists’ in Congress, Britain’s ‘divide and rule’ policy regarding the Muslim minority, the Alipore bomb trial, Sri Aurobindo’s Uttapara speech, the British suppression of the opposition etc. It also covers the key events in Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana. This begins with his experience of ‘infinite oneness’ on landing at Apollo Bundar, continues with his meeting with Lele and the achievement of silent mind and climaxes in his Alipore jail experiences, before he receives the adeshas that summon him first to Chandernagore and then to Pondicherry.

Luc’s biography is outstanding in presenting extracts from the key articles and speeches through which Sri Aurobindo invigorated the Indian mind. Sri Aurobindo began by forensically analysing the effects of foreign rule, then redefined nationalism in spiritual terms: “The new nationalism is an attempt at a spiritual transformation of the 19th century Indian.” Luc also succeeds very well in clarifying the nature of the spiritual turning points in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga during this period and explaining how they influenced his subject’s political activities.

Inevitably, comparison will be made with Peter Heeh’s recent biography, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, for while The Lives covers the whole of Sri Aurobindo’s life, it also devotes a considerable amount of space to these years.

While both biographies cover the same material well and both are eminently, even compulsively, readable there are some differences. Whereas Peter patiently builds a picture out of an accumulation of details and facts, Luc sweeps us along from the very first page.

Luc, we feel, is fully engaged in the unfolding of events, confirmed by his statement, “I was discovering his story as I wrote it.” And what concerns him more than the surface incidents is what lay behind: the foundational spiritual realizations that enabled Sri Aurobindo to act so effectively in the midst of the outer turmoil of those years.

Luc’s Sri Aurobindo is pre-eminently the revolutionary whose speeches and articles are pervaded more and more by his spiritual realizations. Peter devotes more space to his other activities, to the poet, playwright and philosopher of education and art.

While Peter preserves a certain distance, Luc is more clearly identified with his subject. As he explained later, “At first I was a Westerner, trying to understand Sri Aurobindo through the mind. But, at a certain point, his love for India penetrated me and I came to totally accept and identify with his experience.”

Peter is fulsome in his acknowledgement of Sri Aurobindo’s achievements during these years but, unlike Luc, he is also willing to ask questions. He wonders, for example, if Sri Aurobindo’s “intransigence” at certain points in negotiations with the Moderates in Congress and his lack of practical political nous (as Sri Aurobindo himself acknowledged, Tilak was far more able in the rough and tumble of politics) may not have hindered the progress of his own party at times. More seriously, he wonders if Sri Aurobindo and the other leaders did not pay sufficient attention to the threat of religious communalism, the seeds of which were being planted in these years by the British Government for its own ends.

Both biographies are outstanding in clarifying the nature of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual and inclusive nationalism and in distinguishing his methods from Gandhi’s, topics that continue to be misinterpreted by politicians and academics. Luc’s biography also confronts another stereotype, which is that Sri Aurobindo’s decision to remain in Pondicherry after 1910 represented some kind of ‘betrayal’ of the revolutionary movement for independence that he had initiated, a view shared even by Nehru.

Luc quotes Sri Aurobindo to the effect that he abandoned conventional politics only when he was sure that “the ultimate triumph of the movement I had initiated was sure without my personal action or presence”. Of course, the real nature and scope of his subsequent ‘political’ work, work that assumed a global dimension, can only be fully appreciated when one understands, for example, his public stand in support of the Cripps’ proposal as well as his spiritual activities during the Second World War.

Luc’s biography is very readable and inspiring. It should bring Sri Aurobindo to a much larger audience and cause even fine historians like Ramachandra Guha (who did not see fit to include Sri Aurobindo in his Makers of Modern India) to reconsider the huge contribution made by Sri Aurobindo to the cause of India’s freedom.

Sri Aurobindo and The Revolution of India by Luc Venet. Available from Amazon.in. Price in India Rs 1,317.