New works of The Mother

Auroville Today: When did you come to the Ashram?

Bob: I came in 1971. When I came I didn’t know if I would stay. I was looking for someone to guide me and I hoped it might be Mother, but I had to see her face-to-face to be sure. For me the highest value in life has always been freedom. I did not want to put myself under anybody’s thumb who I could not trust completely. When I saw her, she blew me away. I have been here ever since.

And when did you join the Archives?

I joined in 1973. About a year before The Mother’s centenary in 1978, my boss Jayantilal called me to his room and said: “Bob, The Mother’s birth centenary is coming up in 1978. We should issue her collected works. Would you like to be the editor?” “Well,” I thought to myself, “no. I’m just a poor boy from Appleton, Wisconsin. I never finished college. I really don’t know if I have the stuff it takes.” But I couldn’t say that to the boss, so I said, “Yes, I will try.” Since then, one of my main works has been preparing Mother’s writings and talks for publication.

Did you have any idea what you were taking on?

No. Ignorance can be a blessing!

But I learned that if you have faith in Mother and if you chip away at the work day by day, it happens because she gives you the ability to do it, and it is a joy to work for her. In this case, by 1980 we had published most of the 17 volumes of her Collected Works. Much of the material had been published before in one place or another. We just had to find it and package it in the right order.

But there were some new books that we put together from scratch, such as Volume 2, Words of Long Ago, which contains The Mother’s writings and talks before 1920.

However, the Centenary edition of the Collected Works does not contain everything that The Mother had written or said?

No. We published what was available then. But 45 years have passed since the Collected Works came out and much new material has come to light. We have found new prayers, new essays, new public messages, new letters. I also received some of her private notes from her room upstairs. But, mainly, many new letters came. Some were in books and in Ashram journals, but most came when people passed away; then their correspondence with Mother came to the Archives. When there were only a few letters, we published them by subject as “words” of The Mother. When they were big correspondences with many letters, we published them by person as “correspondences”.

For four decades I made it my work to collect this material.

Then, in 2019, Covid happened. I am over 70, so I was told that I could not go outside. I spent one year alone and I got a lot of work done. And I got a bright idea: I decided it was time to bring The Mother’s works up to date by preparing her new writings and talks for publication. By ‘new’ I meant anything that had not appeared in The Mother’s Collected Works. In fact, most of the new material had never been published before.

In 2020, the first book, New Correspondences of The Mother, featuring correspondences with 12 sadhaks, was published. It is a beautiful book because you sense the relationship of each sadhak with The Mother; each person is different and she deals with each one differently. Often in reading you identify with the sadhak and then you feel that Mother is talking directly to you.

Were these correspondences mainly with Ashramites?

Yes. Only one person, Surendranath Jauhar who founded the Delhi school, lived outside the Ashram. Several correspondences are with well-known sadhaks, such as Dyumanbhai, Champaklal, Dilip Kumar Roy, Ambu, Jayantilal and Indra Sen.

Three years later, we issued a second book of her correspondences with nine different people. These included Amrita — nobody had ever seen his correspondence before — and Amal Kiran. Amal’s correspondence is interesting because it includes his correspondence with Mother concerning how he should edit Mother India magazine. He would ask her if he could publish an article, and Mother would reply ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Once she replied, “I say yes, but without enthusiasm.”

However, when he wanted to publish an article on the Indo-Pakistan conflict in 1965, Mother crossed out the entire article with big black Xs and wrote a big “NO” at the bottom. On the cover letter she wrote, “No politics in any of our publications”, underlining ‘no politics’ twice.

So Mother could be strong with some people. But when she corresponded with Dilip Kumar Roy who was a very sensitive person, she only sent him words of assurance and shared her love for him because that’s all he could take; he couldn’t take criticism. So with each person she corresponded according to their nature and need.

In 2024 we published a third book of new material called New Words of The Mother. It is largely composed of letters, but there are also some private notes which I received from Mother’s room and some public messages. The book is organised by subject, not person. The advantage is that you get several entries on the same subject.

And a fourth book is on the way?

Yes, it will be called New Writings and Talks of The Mother. We hope to publish it by the end of this year, and I think people are going to love it!

Part One has some new early writings, including six new Tales of All Times. These are stories for young people to help develop their character. They are based on stories by F. J. Gould which Mother translated but also added her own touches; she called them “adaptations”.

Other early writings include eight occult visions which first appeared in the Revue Cosmique, the organ of the Cosmic Movement of Max Théon. These visions are beautiful, iridescent.

Also, in this first part will be six articles by Mother on art and fashion. Here we encounter Mother as an art critic – she reviews the work of artists in three different Paris art salons. Then there are three articles on women’s dress and men’s dress. In the first article she inveighs against the corset which was popular at that time — she said it was unnatural, unhealthy and ugly. She did not like frills and ruffles and stiff collars. She wanted clothes that were simple, comfortable and followed the natural contours of the body.

The final article is on menswear. She says: if you think women’s dress is ugly, look at what the men are wearing today! They are dressed in tubes, in cylinders of various lengths and diameters. The suit is all tubes: the trunk is a tube, the arms are tubes, the trouser legs are tubes.

Part Two of the book is letters to people living outside the Ashram. They include letters to her Japanese friend, Madame Kobayashi, and to her lifelong friend, the explorer Alexandra David-Neel. In one letter Alexandra, who was 73 years old, confined to a wheelchair by rheumatoid arthritis and without close intellectual friends, wrote that she was feeling so lonely that she was thinking of taking her own life.

Mother writes to her that as long as we are alive we have something to do or at least something to learn, and this knowledge should give us strength to face all vicissitudes.

There are also 26 letters to her own mother, Mathilde Alfassa. In Mother’s Agenda we learn that her mother was a very strong person whose will was “like an iron bar”; she took no nonsense from her children. But in this correspondence of 1920-1922 we find the roles reversed. It is our Mother who is comforting her mother who was always filled with worldly concerns and anxiety. Mother tells her that it doesn’t help to worry; everyone has problems in life, and her problems are no worse than those of others. So she should face them and move on.

There are also drafts of two letters to her occult mentor, Max Théon. He was the head of the Cosmic Movement to which Mother dedicated her life for three years, from mid 1905 to mid 1908. In March 1908, Théon wrote her a letter, which we quote in full, in which he accuses her of harming the Cosmic Movement and being the cause of its troubles and discords. In the first draft Mother answers him point by point. She says that while the Movement has troubles, she is not their cause and it is she who has suffered most from them; no one has felt more pain or grief. She tells him: your mind has been poisoned by a woman who has slandered me and made treacherous insinuations, and you have believed her rather than me, I who have devoted my life to this movement for three years.

She says, you write that I have acted out of impulse and passion. That is not true: I am not passionate or impulsive by nature. You say that I have been the cause of this “shameful” state of disorder, but shameful things are deeply repugnant to my nature. Théon asks her, “Why are you doing this? What are your intentions?” She replies that her intentions are now the same as they were at the beginning, to serve the Movement to the best of her ability.

This is a letter in which the mighty Mother is defending what she stands for. It makes magnificent reading; she is not holding back. My guess, however, is that she never sent this draft because there is a second one, far milder, in which she says: you have accused me of many things and they are not true, but if I were to write about them you probably wouldn’t understand. Since you are coming to Paris soon, we will talk about them then.

They may have met, but in any event soon afterwards Théon broke with Mother – she did not leave the Movement, he broke with her. Then the Movement itself collapsed because Max’s wife died tragically and he was a broken man.

Part Three of the new book has letters to 30 persons living in the Ashram. These include Pranab, who Mother calls her beloved child and faithful companion in building up the new world, and Sunil, whose musical compositions she found to be “exceptionally beautiful”. She calls her secretary, Maggi Litchi-Grassi, “my dear little fairy”, saying that she had a vital that came from the land of the fairies.

There is also correspondence with AuroArindam, a colourful early Aurovilian. In one letter he writes that sometimes he would like to have a wife and children, and he asks Mother if he should get married. She replies: this sounds like a free man asking if he should become a slave!

The last part of the upcoming volume contains six new talks, ranging from 1957 to 1972.

Will these four books exhaust all the new material you have collected?

No, there is more material, and more is still coming in, enough for at least one more volume of correspondence. This will be brought out in due course.

While each correspondence is personal, do common themes emerge?

The thread which is common to all of them is Mother’s solicitude, how much she loved her children. She wanted only the best for them, and she sacrificed her time and energy to help them in any way she could. In this yoga we are asked to sacrifice our lives for the Divine. Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have shown us how to do that.

Some of her ‘solicitude’ was delivered with a very firm hand!

Very true. In the third book there is one section called ‘Relations between men and women in the Ashram’, and there she gets right down to it. One respected senior sadhak wrote to her about the ‘psychic relation’ he had formed with a lovely young damsel. Mother quickly disabused him of that notion!

She could also be very firm with senior Ashramites like Amrita and Dyuman because she knew they were strong enough to take it, and because she wanted to ensure that her right-hand people always acted responsibly and well.

Another thing I note that she often stresses in the correspondence with Ashramites is the importance of the spirit in which the work is done. Responding to people who complained that their dining room work was looked down upon, she said there is no such thing as inferior, less important work.

Absolutely. Many of the most respected people in our Ashram are not the big shots running the show but people like Babaji, a very sincere sadhak who dried pots and pans in the dining room all his life.

Another thing that really comes through in these letters was Mother’s attention to detail and her practicality.

She was a most skilled and capable administrator, she took care of all the details. She didn’t let things slide.

At some point will there be a new Collected Works of The Mother which will include the recent material?

Yes, all of this material will be included in a revised and enlarged Collected Works of The Mother. I am 79 years old and I don’t know if I will be around to see this new edition materialise, but I have written down for others where all this new material would fit into a new edition. I would also like to see some of the translations in the present Collected Works improved.

You had already read so much by The Mother. Did reading this previously unpublished material provide you with any new insights or understandings of her?

It has been my privilege to be steeped in the writings and talks of The Mother for the past 45 years, but still I have gained something in preparing the new material.

When one reads her articles, her essays and even her prayers, it can be a little impersonal. When one reads her talks, they are a little more personal. But it is in her correspondences that The Mother is most personal, most intimate, for through them one can feel the connection of one’s own consciousness with her consciousness in a very direct way. These new letters have brought me closer to Mother and I believe that the same thing will happen to others who read them.

What has doing this work over so many years brought to you personally?

Back in the early 1970s when I joined the Archives, I kind of stumbled into the work: I had no idea what it would involve. But doing this work has been a privilege because it has kept me in close contact with the words of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and surrounded me with their atmosphere. In my work I try to be honest and faithful to them. It is a wonderful work for which I am deeply grateful.