47 books and counting

“The grant took us less than halfway through,” says Ananda ruefully. “We have at least 47 books to publish, each between 220-320 pages, but we could only do 25. The commentaries on The Life Divine comprise 15 volumes; The Synthesis of Yoga will need 12 volumes; the Essays on the Gita 14 to 15 volumes; The Mother (chapter six only) one volume and then there is Savitri: I can’t even fathom how many volumes that will need. At Savitri Bhavan alone, I gave 250 hours of talks on Savitri. Add to that the many lectures I gave at the Hall of Harmony of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and elsewhere in India and abroad, then the hourly count will easily reach a thousand. We will need at least another 12 lakhs to finish all these works.”

How did this all start?

I lived in Bangkok from 1992-1995, teaching English and Philosophy. But as I was bred in the atmosphere of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, I felt uneasy without their books around me. Then someone sent me Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita. I was delighted and shared the news with four or five Indian nationals who were my friends. They asked if I couldn’t talk to them about the Essays. That’s how my ‘career’ started!

When I returned in 1996 to Pondicherry, the manager of the International Guesthouse, asked me to teach the Essays there. Soon afterwards, the Ashram school came with the request to speak about Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri. That, I felt, it would be beyond me. But then I realised that many years earlier, in 1964 when I was still a student at the Ashram school, I had received a message from the Mother in reply to a question I had asked. “You can count on my blessings for truly understanding Savitri in its profound and magnificent significance,” She had written. It dawned on me that with such a support, I could start giving classes on Savitri. From one came the other, and for about 12 years I offered three to four classes a week, on Savitri, The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, and on the Essays on the Gita. These were extremely detailed talks: line by line, para after para. And after 12 years, I had completed all these four books. In between, I was teaching at Savitri Bhavan, I gave lectures abroad, gave talks on The Mother and gave Darshan talks at SACAR. But those were summary talks, not as in-depth as I had done at the Ashram school.

Those talks were all recorded on audio cassettes. I used to give free copies to interested people, but it never occurred to me that my talks would ever be published. But my wife Deepshika had a different point of view. She wanted them all to be transcribed, and she organized a veritable team of transcribers from all over the country. This resulted in a cupboard full of handwritten notebooks, some of them barely readable. All of them would need to be retyped if the material ever would be published.

What to do next? I had no idea. Then Shruti joined SACAR. She had earned her Ph.D. on Sri Aurobindo’s Poetics and Aesthetics, had been teaching at the Auro University in Surat, and is deeply moored to Sri Aurobindo’s and The Mother’s teachings. She took upon herself the massive task of preparing these transcriptions for print. With our own means we were able to publish five books on The Life Divine, but we had no funds to even contemplate publishing the rest.

The flip came with this Government of India’s project of celebrating Sri Aurobindo’s 150th anniversary. We had submitted a 40 lakhs budget request. We were granted 12. We estimated that this would allow us to publish 10 to 12 books.

At the time, I had developed some health problems and decided to have a checkup in Hyderabad, where my family lives. I took the opportunity to get a quotation from one of the printers there. They offered the work at 1/3rd of the price quoted by the Pondicherry printer, who had done the earlier books. I realised we would be able to print 25 books with the same budget. Then we, that is Deepshika, Shruti, Larry Seidlitz, a couple of others, and myself, set to work. We typed the transcripts, edited the spoken language, eliminating repetitions and replacing bad examples with better ones, and made sure that there was a consistent flow in the logic of each section. I would give the last touch, sometimes deleting or rewriting sections that were no longer relevant or that I had come to see differently. We prioritized The Life Divine, which has now been completed. These books are based on my summary talks, not on the line-by-line talks I did at the Ashram. That’s a different set of recordings; if we would ever publish that, it would be another 25 volumes.

You have been studying Sri Aurobindo for a lifetime. Weren’t you, at some point in time, tired of trying to explain Sri Aurobindo? After all, there is this persistent belief that Sri Aurobindo cannot be mentally explained.

I agree that a drop of experience has more value than a ton of books. But that doesn’t mean that explanatory books have no value. India has a tradition of Bhashyas, the commentaries or expositions on religious or spiritual primary or secondary texts such as the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad_ Gita or the Sutras_ of Hindu schools of philosophy. The Indian sage Shankaracharya was one of the first to do so, and this was followed by hundreds of others.

My works falls in the category of commentaries on Sri Aurobindo’s writings. I have focused on five major books. For me, the interesting factor is that four of these five books were signed by the Mother – I would go to Her on my birthday and bring a book which She then gracefully signed. Only Essays on the Gita was not signed. (laughing) But once she came in a dream and signed this book as well. That strengthened my inner feeling that this is my work.

Looking back at what you said so many years ago, do you have a feeling that today you would say things differently?

When I started reading my own talks for the purpose of editing them I realized that many of them had been inspired. For I would hardly prepare for them, apart from finding some suitable quotations from Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. I knew I had to lecture about chapter X pages Y-Z, but the talk would come spontaneously. That was a period in my life when my mind was at its best for analysis and for expansion of ideas. I have come to the conclusion – with all humility, because being inspired only means being able to receive information without distorting it too much – that this was a commendable work done. But I don’t have that ability anymore. I am definitely a different person now than I was when giving those talks. My mind has matured, but that kind of analytical mind has been lost – or is no longer necessary, as its work has been done. I have since developed a different aspect of my mind, it is now more comprehensive, synthetic and more flexible and embrasive.

So you stopped giving classes?

No, I still give lectures if my health allows, but far less than before and they are vastly different. For example, four months ago I gave a class on one of the chapters from The Life Divine to some interested people. We studied that chapter for four months. I was thrilled to read Sri Aurobindo sentence by sentence, gaining a deeper insight, even finding new layers of meaning. My students were enthusiastic as well – ‘You have taught us how to read Sri Aurobindo,’ they said.

For example, the concept of the evolution of the spiritual man has undergone a sea-change in my mind. Previously, I thought in a linear manner – that is, man would become spiritual only after passing through several stages as described in The Human Cycle. I now realize that all life, at every moment, moves towards a spiritual fulfillment . It may not be very obvious but that’s the secret of evolution.

Isn’t the idea of publishing books a bit old-fashioned? And then 47+ of them?

Previous generations had no difficulty in taking up the books of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and studying them. But the times have changed. Nowadays, it is almost impossible for many students to take up those voluminous books. They need handholding, and for them, these commentaries are very helpful to get into the structure and thought of the book. If ever they get to the original works, they’ll understand them much better.

Given the cost of the printing and the problems of storage, we only print 100 copies of each book. However, through our app aurodarshan we make the books available as downloadable soft copies in Kindle and e-pub formats. This website also hosts some of my articles that were published over the years, and visitors can listen to some of my talks.

At some time in the past, SACAR was affiliated to the Indira Gandhi Open University, with the idea that SACAR could offer Master and Ph.D. degrees in Sri Aurobindo studies. For various reasons that did not work out. But recently, a Sri Aurobindo Chair was opened at the Pondicherry University.

We are very happy with this development. The Pondicherry University held a seminar on ‘Celebrating the life and Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo’ on March 28th, and opened the Sri Aurobindo Chair, which plans to conduct webinars and workshops and offer degrees and diplomas. The Chair is held by Dr. Richa Tiwari, who authored the book “Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo: Nationalism and Internationalism” and who did her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Rajasthan. She is very dedicated to the study and practice of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. At the event, the book “Sri Aurobindo: An Extraordinary Phenomenon” edited by Dr. Larry Seidlitz and myself was launched. We are now in the process of signing a Memorandum of Understanding between the University and SACAR.

A few years ago SACAR opened a branch office on the Utility road, to better interact with Auroville. How has this developed?

It hasn’t. We had hoped that we could sign an agreement with the Auroville Foundation that would allow Auroville residents to come and study there, but this did not work out. This idea needs to mature. The office is still there; it temporarily functions as a guesthouse.

You recently went through a severe health ordeal with an open heart surgery. Do you feel you are able to finish all this work?

I trust I will be. The secret of my coming back from the hospital is that I feel I still have some work to do. It is not only publishing these books: my inner growth depends on my work.