Blessings

The story behind the last portraits of Sri Aurobindo is a truly remarkable one. They were taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson who passed away on August 3, 2004, at his home in Paris aged 95. Widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of photo-journalism and a pioneer in the art of photography, his pictures are admired for their spontaneity and mastery of form. A painter both at the beginning and end of his career, Cartier-Bresson took up photography in 1930 and went on to shoot some of the most memorable photographs of the 20th century.

Cartier-Bresson always said his aim was to capture “the decisive moment,” i.e. the essence of a situation or event that was unfolding before his eyes. Armed with a small hand-held Leica camera, and using as little artificial light as possible, for four decades he roamed the globe capturing human beings in the midst of action. From the historic events, such as the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi and the rise of China’s Mao Zedong, to the smaller moments of workers relaxing or a family picnicking by the river Marne, he had a knack for being in the right place at the right time, and seizing the spirit of the moment.

There certainly was a yogic element to Cartier-Bresson’s art. He loved perfection, and his quest as a photographer was to have a glimpse of eternity in the fleeting instant. Inspired by Zen Buddhism, he once said that his photographic method consisted in using his open eye to look through the viewfinder upon the outer scene, while with his other, closed eye he was looking within. It was, perhaps, this inward gaze that caught the Mother’s attention and prompted her to grant him permission to photograph the Ashram in April 1950.

When Cartier-Bresson arrived in Pondicherry on April 23, in time for the Darshan on the 24th, he was in the midst of a truly extraordinary series of events. He had just come from Tiruvannamalai, where he had photographed Sri Ramana Maharshi’s leaving his body, and borne witness to the fireball that passed slowly over the Arunachala Hill at 8.47 p.m., the exact time of the sage’s absorption into the Self. On the 24th, Cartier-Bresson was destined to take the only photographs ever taken of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo giving darshan together, and on the 25th to conduct the last photoshoot of Sri Aurobindo, thus completing a series of ‘final statements’ on the life and passing of three remarkable sons of modern India: Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, and Sri Aurobindo.

Why Cartier-Bresson was blessed with a chance to get pictures of India’s three great thinkers, yogis and spiritual figures of the 20th century as they stood on the threshold of life and death, we can only speculate. What is certain is that it had a deep reason. When Cartier-Bresson arrived in Pondicherry in April 1950, Sri Aurobindo had been in seclusion for over 20 years, and had repeatedly declined requests to be photographed. In retrospect, we also know that Sri Aurobindo had already decided to leave the body, and was deeply engaged in two Herculean tasks: completing Savitri, and preparing for the first fully conscious descent into Death in the history of mankind. In a very real sense, Sri Aurobindo was poised on the edge of his own ‘decisive moment’.

IInitially, the Mother gave Cartier-Bresson permission to photograph only the premises of the Ashram, as well as the Ashramites engaged in their daily activities. However, she soon allowed him to take shots with herself in the background, and as the trust grew, she even let him take portraits of herself although she never sat for a formal photoshoot. Cartier-Bresson’s diary shows that he distinctly felt the Mother’s sweetness and kindness, and his photographs of her distributing flowers certainly express these qualities.

Yet the greatest photos were yet to come. On the morning of April 25, 1950, the day after the Darshan, Cartier-Bresson went to thank the Mother for the favours granted and to ask for one more – permission to photograph Sri Aurobindo. According to Cartier Bresson, he finally persuaded her with the statement, “I am only photographing the female aspect of the Divine. What about the male aspect?” In any case, the Mother consulted with Sri Aurobindo and – surprisingly – consent was given.

From the technical perspective, the session was quick and quiet. Cartier-Bresson took about ten minutes, during which Sri Aurobindo impressed the photographer with his complete immobility. In his diary, Cartier-Bresson recorded: “The room was so neat and tidy and impersonal. Sri Aurobindo did not wink an eye during the entire ten minutes I was watching him, he did not seem to belong to that impersonal setting.” During the interview given in Paris 40 years later to the day (25 April 1990), Cartier-Bresson recalled: “My impressions of the Mother – a power woman. Sri Aurobindo was very remote. I had ‘a tremendous meditation’ far away.”

From the spiritual perspective, on the other hand, Cartier Bresson’s portraits of Sri Aurobindo sitting in his armchair stand among the most substantial documents of human history. The side shots, in which Sri Aurobindo’s face is less prominent, are unproblematic. What one sees in these photos is a meditating sage who seems to have materialized on the film from the future. Sri Aurobindo barely appears to belong to this time and place.

The frontal compositions are, on the contrary, more perplexing, especially the head-on portraits. The first and most obvious feature of Sri Aurobindo’s last portraits is that he is not smiling. Also, he gives no revealing gesture or motion of note, and the composition seems rather static. There is nothing here to suggest transcendent bliss, not even that distantly tender smile from the Beyond, like Mona Lisa expresses so delicately in her portrait made by Leonardo da Vinci.

On the surface, at least, Sri Aurobindo seems almost the opposite of the jivanmukta that he was: his face is lined, his expression serious, and the atmosphere grave. This is not the delightful face of Krishna, rather the appearance of a warrior who has marched a thousand miles on foot and has yet miles to go before he sleeps. Even the Mother later commented that she was surprised by Sri Aurobindo’s look, for it was not the ever-patient and sweet visage she had come to know and love.

And yet, there is a deeper message behind Sri Aurobindo’s solemnity. For what we do see in Sri Aurobindo’s bare, frank look is the face of the sacramental Avatar preparing to confront Death, to plunge into the very heart of Darkness and sow there the first seeds of the Life Divine. Sri Aurobindo looks grave here because the moment literally is grave. This is no light lila of a God who does not feel the pain of human clay, it is the full conscious surrender of the Godhead who has become the death-bound suffering that we are.

When one looks to Sri Aurobindo’s last portraits in such times of critical need, then suddenly he looks different: one will see that Sri Aurobindo’s face is one’s own face, is every human face, is the Divine who has taken birth on earthly soil. As if his fatigue is our fatigue, is all human fatigue, is the Divine who has assumed the burden of human toil.

Looking into Sri Aurobindo’s left eye, one may be taken in by the soft, receptive compassion of the Avatar who understands our pains because he shares them, whose sympathy is boundless because he walks right at our side and knows intimately every rock and pitfall on the Path. In his right eye, one is met by the steady gaze of Wisdom that looks dispassionately upon the labour of ages and fills the viewer with a calm knowledge that the final fruits of evolution are as certain as the failures of the moment now seem. One looks again upon the lined visage of the great Divine Warrior who has fought so much, endured so much, and a new resolve enters one’s soul. Since He has borne so much for us, we should give something small in return. Let us go one more step forward on the Path – in honour of Him. And so, one’s heart warms again and one’s resolve strengthens. One feels the arm of the great Protector around oneself. And suddenly the grim predator of darkness that has been long stalking one’s soul retreats, banished by the bright Light that blazes from behind this very human visage.

This is likely the significance of Cartier-Bresson’s final portrait of Sri Aurobindo. It extends to struggling mortals ‘the helping hand’ of an Avatar who otherwise might have remained forever impersonal and distant to us. For though Savitri and The Life Divine bring us glowing intimations from a brighter future, the weaker parts of us needed something else, too – this visual reminder that the sacramental Avatar was also human like us. He is not only above and beyond us, He is also with and inside us, feeling our feelings, fighting our battles, facing the same mortality we face. Evidently, Sri Aurobindo knew exactly what he was getting in Cartier-Bresson, and he decided the French photographer was the right instrument to convey the Avatar’s parting gift to a suffering humanity.

As Sri Aurobindo declares in his essay The National Value of Art,

“Art can express eternal truth, it is not limited to the expression of form and appearance. So wonderfully has God made the world that a man using a simple combination of lines, an unpretentious harmony of colours and contrasts, can raise this apparently insignificant medium to suggest absolute and profound truths with a perfection which language labours with difficulty to reach… What Nature is, what God is, what man is can be triumphantly revealed in stone or on canvas.”

Looking at the last pictures of an Indian sage taken by a French photographer, one is tempted to add: “and on film,” for a camera, if placed in skillful hands, can capture the essence of the Divine no less effectively than a brush or a chisel.

This account has been based on the article “The Decisive Moment” by Dr. Michael Miovic, edited by Alexander Pereverzev, which appeared in Mother India, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.

Sri Aurobindo’s The National Value of Art has been published in the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. I, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 2003.