Sri Aurobindo

Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta in 1872. His father, [[krishna|Krishna]] Dhun Ghose, was a Westernized doctor who held the unusual position of intentionally raising his sons without Indian cultural exposure; he sent Aurobindo and his brothers to England at age seven, with instructions to the Manchester family hosting them that the boys not be exposed to Indian language, religion, or news of India. Aurobindo lived in Britain from age seven to twenty, was educated at St. Paul’s School in London and at King’s College, Cambridge (where he was on a major scholarship), excelled in Latin and Greek, and finished first in his class on the Indian Civil Service examination — only to be disqualified after deliberately failing the riding test, which he had deliberately failed because he had no intention of serving the Raj.

He returned to India in 1893 at twenty-one. He spent thirteen years in the princely state of Baroda, teaching Western classics and serving the Maharaja, while privately learning Sanskrit, Bengali, and several other Indian languages and immersing himself in Indian religious and philosophical literature for the first time.

The political years

In 1905 the British partition of Bengal galvanized the Indian independence movement, and Aurobindo entered the radical wing — an extreme nationalist who advocated violent revolution against the Raj. He moved to Calcutta in 1906, became principal of the new Bengal National College, edited the radical English-language paper Bande Mataram, and worked behind the scenes with revolutionary cells. In May 1908 he was arrested following the Alipore Bomb Case, in which his younger brother Barin and others were charged with the bombing intended for the magistrate Douglas Kingsford. Aurobindo himself was held in solitary confinement for nearly a year before being acquitted.

The year in jail produced a contemplative opening that decisively redirected his life. He emerged in 1909 a different person — politically less interested, contemplatively much more developed. He continued briefly with public political activity, but in February 1910, on what he described as a clear inner instruction, he left Calcutta secretly and traveled to Pondicherry, a French colony on the southeast coast of India, where the British police could not pursue him. He arrived in April 1910. He spent the remaining forty years of his life there.

The Pondicherry years

In Pondicherry, Aurobindo took up sustained contemplative practice and writing. He developed what he called Integral Yoga — a synthesis drawing on [[the-upanishads|Vedānta]], Tantra, [[the-upanishads|the Upanishads]], the Bhagavad Gītā, the Vedas, his own contemplative experience, and a frame of reference that included Hegel, Bergson, and the European evolutionary tradition. The principal claim:

Consciousness has been evolving on Earth from matter through life through mind, and the next evolutionary step is the descent and embodiment of what Aurobindo called the supermind — a transformative principle that, descending into the human, would produce a new embodied consciousness, neither escapist nor world-rejecting but world-transforming.

The vision is genuinely unusual in [[hinduism|the Hindu tradition]]. Where [[advaita-vedanta|Advaita Vedānta]] tends to treat the manifest world as ultimately unreal (or only conventionally real), Aurobindo affirms the manifest world as the location of divine self-disclosure and the human as a participant in cosmic evolution toward the supramental.

In 1914 the French-Egyptian woman Mirra Alfassa arrived in Pondicherry and recognized Aurobindo from her dreams. She returned permanently in 1920 and became his spiritual partner; the two are referred to in the Aurobindonian tradition as Sri Aurobindo and [[sourdough-starter|the Mother]]. [[sourdough-starter|The Mother]] organized the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (founded 1926), and after Aurobindo’s death in 1950 led the community for another twenty-three years until her own death in 1973. She also founded Auroville in 1968, the experimental international township nearby Pondicherry.

The major works

Aurobindo’s literary output was enormous. The principal works:

• The Life Divine (serialized 1914–19, published 1939) — his major philosophical work; a sustained articulation of Integral Yoga and the evolutionary metaphysics.
• The Synthesis of Yoga (serialized in his journal Arya, 1914–21) — his major treatise on yogic practice.
• Essays on [[bhagavad-gita|the Gita]] (1922) — his commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā.
• Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (1950) — his epic poem, nearly 24,000 lines in blank verse, that he worked on for decades. The most ambitious modern Sanskritic-English literary work; underread.
• The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination — his political-philosophical works.
• The collected Letters on Yoga — extensive correspondence with disciples on the practice.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[hinduism]]
• Parallels: [[vedanta]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1939. Source class: book / primary.
2. Sri Aurobindo. The Synthesis of Yoga. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1948. Source class: book / primary.
3. Sri Aurobindo. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1950. Source class: book / primary.
4. Sri Aurobindo. Essays on [[bhagavad-gita|the Gita]]. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1922. Source class: book / primary.
5. Peter Heehs. The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. Columbia, 2008. Source class: book / contemporary biography (controversial within the Aurobindo community for its critical historical method, but widely respected academically).
6. Robert McDermott (ed.). The Essential Aurobindo. SteinerBooks, 1987 (rev. 2001). Source class: book / curated anthology.

Lenses still to grow

• [[sourdough-starter|The Mother]] (Mirra Alfassa) as a figure in her own right — currently under-named here.
• Auroville as an experimental community.
• The Integral Yoga as a continuing practice tradition.
• Aurobindo’s politics — the radical years, the eventual disengagement from the independence movement, the controversial neutrality during World War II.
• Savitri as a literary work; nearly invisible in mainstream English literary studies, despite being one of the longest serious poems in the language.