The Never-Dying Fire: The Life and Thought of Sri Aurobindo

It takes a brave individual to write a biography of Sri Aurobindo. This is because Sri Aurobindo himself doubted the value of such an attempt – “Why write my biography at all? Is it really necessary? In my view, a man's value does not depend on what he learns, or his position or fame, or what he does, but on what he is and inwardly becomes” – and, besides, as he pointed out, only he could write such a book for “It would be only myself who could speak of things in my past giving them their true form and significance”. “The attempt is bound to be a failure,” he warned another aspiring biographer, “because neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life; it has not been on the surface for men to see”.

In fact, he never wrote a comprehensive account of his life, and what we know of his later years can only be gleaned from a few references in his correspondence with his disciples and others where he sometimes explained points by referring to some event in his own life, or some experience in his own yogic development. All these obstacles, however, did not deter some of his disciples from making the attempt, and Sri Aurobindo did give some assistance to three of his early biographers who submitted their manuscripts to him for verification. On several occasions, he also corrected misleading statements about himself published in journals and books.

The first biographies were hagiographic. And if they did not exactly portray him as emerging from the womb as a fully realised being, they tended to present his life as an almost effortless unfolding of avatarhood. More recent biographers have tended to emphasise not only his achievements but also his struggles, reflecting Sri Aurobindo’s statement that “My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities, from hardships, starvation in England and constant and fierce difficulties to the far greater difficulties continually cropping up here in Pondicherry, external and internal”.

The most recent biography in this line is Luc Venet’s The Never Dying Fire: The Life and Thought of Sri Aurobindo. This is a continuation of his previous work Sri Aurobindo and The Revolution of India, which covered Sri Aurobindo’s early years, his political activism and his early spiritual realisations and explorations. The earlier book ended with the adesh which commands him to go to Pondicherry.  

The first part of The Never Dying Fire covers the same period in an almost identical way, but the second part deals with the Pondicherry years. Luc first confronts the stereotype, shared by Nehru among others, 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, quoting 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”.

Luc then provides us with a picture of those first years in Pondicherry when Sri Aurobindo was accessible, describing his frugal lifestyle and easy interactions with the young men who followed him into ‘exile’, as well, of course, as the meeting with Mother and his subsequent identification of her as his “Shakti” who had “taken charge of the new creation”. He also gives brief synopses of the major works which appeared in the ‘Arya’, as well as lucidly presenting Sri Aurobindo’s new programme for consciousness research – which included experiments in predicting and influencing the movements of birds and squirrels – as documented in the Record of Yoga.

For most of the last 23 years, however, Sri Aurobindo was in seclusion, making only occasional public utterances, like his support for the Cripps Proposal and his Five Dreams on the occasion of India’s independence, and Luc, like other biographers, must resort to documenting the few snippets of information which Sri Aurobindo provided about his arduous work of anchoring the supramental consciousness in the physical.

It is instructive to compare Luc’s biography with Peter Heehs’ The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, both of which are modern treatments of Sri Aurobindo’s life and work. Peter’s intended readership is academic and consequently his approach is primarily objective, laying out the facts of Sri Aurobindo’s life as far as they can be established. He reports, without comment, Sri Aurobindo’s statements regarding his spiritual researches, while addressing the skepticism that some in the academic community may have regarding his subject’s siddhis and state of mind. On rare occasions, he is also willing to raise questions about the efficacy of certain of Sri Aurobindo’s political decisions.

Luc’s biography, while evading hagiography, is clearly the work of a devotee and consequently, because he does not have to anticipate the skepticism of academics, it is more immediately engaging, carrying the reader along in its flow. The writing of this biography was also a very personal process for Luc for, as he revealed in a recent online interaction, “I wanted to resolve things I had not previously understood in his writings. I was trying to get closer to Them”.

In some respects Luc’s biography is less detailed than Peter’s – for example, unlike Peter’s, it includes almost no discussion of Sri Aurobindo’s poetry or of a key text like The Human Cycle – and this makes it less comprehensive (although I am not convinced that either biographer pays sufficient attention to Sri Aurobindo’s poetic and yogic magnum opus, Savitri). But, contrary to Peter, Luc compares the work of Sri Aurobindo with that of Gandhi, pointing out that Sri Aurobindo had no sympathy for Gandhi’s doctrine of non-violence. Luc succeeds admirably in conveying the cut and thrust of Sri Aurobindo’s early political life as well as the extraordinary dimension and nature of the spiritual challenge which Sri Aurobindo confronts on behalf of all humanity. Interestingly, both biographers come to almost identical conclusions in the Epilogues of their biographies. Both agree that Sri Aurobindo’s role in changing the course of India’s freedom struggle is now widely acknowledged, and that his place as a leading thinker and politician is assured. However, they also point out that he never considered these achievements to be of first importance. Rather, his most important work, as he saw it, was to bring a new principle, that of the Supramental, into the ‘earth consciousness’. While occasionally revealing that he had made significant strides towards achieving this, both biographers believe that at his passing the final descent of the supramental power still eluded him, but that his work endures and continues to inspire individuals and centres around the world. “It is the silent practitioners of his yoga around the world,” concludes Luc, “who bring a concrete meaning – a body – to (his) vision: the appearance of a new human (sic) species on earth.”

The Never-Dying Fire: The Life and Thought of Sri Aurobindo by Luc Venet.

Published by BluOne Ink LLP, 2023.

Available on Amazon.in and Amazon.com.