In his defence of Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Bomb case in 1909, Deshbandhu CR Das stated: “Long after this controversy is hushed in silence, long after this turmoil, this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and a lover of humanity...”
With CR Das coming forward to defend him, the whole course of the historic Alipore Bomb Case changed. When the judgment was delivered on 6 May, 1909 by the district and sessions judge, Alipore, Charles Beachcraft, an ICS batch mate of Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo never joined the ICS, though he passed the ICS final examination in August 1892 having voluntarily skipped the riding test), he was acquitted along with 16 others, out of the 39 surviving accused persons.
Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother Barin Ghosh and Ullaskar Dutta were sentenced to death (on appeal, the death penalty was later reduced to transportation for life). Sri Aurobindo was a man of many parts, a bright student, a civil servant at Baroda, a brilliant teacher in English (his elder brother Manmohan Ghosh was a professor of English at Presidency College), political leader (expounding the cause of India’s complete independence ~ Swaraj), litterateur, editor, poet, philosopher and above all a rare yogi, with unparalleled spiritual vision.
Born to Dr Krishna Dhan Ghosh (a civil surgeon) and Swarnalata (daughter of famous intellectual Rajnarayan Bose) on 15 August, 1872 at Kolkata, young Aurobindo was sent to Loreto School, Darjeeling, for to years (1877-79), before he proceeded to England. He spent his formative 14 years (1879-93) at St Paul’s School, London and Cambridge. He earned his first class classical Tripos from Cambridge, though he never obtained the BA degree.
Sri Aurobindo knew nothing of yoga till then, though he was a keen participant at the Indian Majlis, a socio-political association of Indian students at Cambridge. Having spurned the ICS, Sri Aurobindo by accident landed a civil service job under Baroda state, sometimes directly working under Sayaji Rao Gaekwad. He was more interested in teaching than in a mundane administrative job. He joined Baroda College in 1897 first as teacher in French (Sri Aurobindo lived his last 40 years in French territory, Pondicherry), and then, from 1898, as professor in English. He rose to become vice-principal of Baroda College in 1905, the year of the partition of Bengal, a turning point in the history of freedom movement as also the career of Sri Aurobindo.
Sri Aurobindo had frequent contact with political workers in Bengal even before the partition of Bengal. He was deeply interested in the Sanskrit literature, the Vedas and the Upanishads, in particular from his days at Baroda and wrote on a variety of subjects, on Ramayana and Mahabharata and on Kalidasa’s literature during this period, through regrettably much of the literary works of this period were not preserved. Sri Ramakrishna’s life and teachings, Swami Vivekananda’s yoga discourses, and Bankim Chandra’s Anand Math cast a spell on him. Revolutionaries like Jatin Banerjee, Abinash Bhattacharyya, Barin Ghosh, Hemchandra Das were in touch with Sri Aurobindo. He was associated with barrister P Mitter, Sister Nivedita, CR Das, Surendra Nath Tagore, among others.
As he was getting interested in the activities of the Congress Party, he began practicing yoga (particularly since 1904). He was already writing forcefully advocating complete independence in Indu Prakash an English-Marathi weekly, to the discomfort of the moderate Congress leaders. After the partition of Bengal in October 1905, he realised that without the public movement in the direction of a political revolution and non-cooperation, independence from British rule was not possible. In February 1906, a few months after the announcement of Partition of Bengal, Sri Aurobindo left his college job at Baroda to plunge into the freedom movement openly, marking a short but tumultuous period of four years (1906-10) of his association with Bengal.
He became principal of National College (founded by Subodh Ch Mullick) and was the main writer in Bande Mataram (started by Bepin Chandra Pal), which became the mouthpiece of the Nationalist Congress group, proclaiming complete independence. Sri Aurobindo was eventually arrested on 14 August, 1907 for being the editor of Bande Mataram, which was charged with publishing seditious, anti-government articles. He was acquitted on 23 September the same year. Suddenly he became famous as a revolutionary and a nationalist leader. He led the nationalists against the moderates at the historic Surat Congress (1907) demanding resolutions on Swaraj, Swadeshi, boycott and national education with complete independence as the goal.
After the Surat Congress, which ended in a fiasco, Sri Aurobindo travelled to Baroda, Poona, Mumbai and many other towns of then Bombay Presidency, giving political speeches. It was during this visit to Baroda that Sri Aurobindo experienced nirvana at Sardar Majumdar’s house, at the suggestion of Sri Vishnu Baskar Lele, a Maharastrian yogi. By then, the impact of Sri Aurobindo’s patriotic writings had started to have their effect. Bombs thrown by revolutionaries killed two English ladies who where travelling in the carriage of the Muzzafarpur district magistrate, Kingsford, on 30 April, 1908. The alarmed British government arrested Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose. Two days later, more than 40 revolutionaries, including Sri Aurobindo, were arrested in Kolkata and the rest is history.
It was during the trial of the Alipore Bomb Case that the startling incident of assassination of Naren Gosain by two fellow accused, Kanailal Dutta and Satyendranath Bose, took place. Naren had turning an approver. After his release from year-long detention (from May 1908 to May 1909) from Alipore Jail, Sri Aurobindo lived in Bengal barely a year during which he brought out two weekly journals ~ Karmayogin (in English) and Dharma (in Bengali), publishing articles on nationalism, freedom movement, religion and philosophy. For his so-called seditious writings, the government planned another arrest. But Sri Aurobindo narrowly escaped the arrest but remained calm.
After about six weeks’ stay at Chandernagore, he finally left Kolkata on 1 April, 1910 for Pondicherry by a French ship called Dupleix, never to set foot in Bengal or for that matter any other part of the British India. Since then, Pondicherry and Sri Aurobindo remained inextricably linked. Sri Aurobindo succeeded in awakening the nation towards the goal of complete freedom from British rule. His writings in Bande Mataram, Karmayogin, Indu Prakash exercised profound influence. He spiritualised Indian politics and developed the theory and practice of passive resistance that gave birth to the non-cooperation movement with far reaching results.
He withdrew from the active and day-to-day politics because he believed that as per God’s command (adesh), nothing should interfere with his yoga sadhana, to ultimately realise the divine and attain a complete spiritual consciousness. He did not play a truant, nor was he an escapist, for he believed that the direction of the freedom movement he had given and the goal (of complete independence) that he had set would bear fruit without his active participation in the freedom struggle. On his attaining ‘‘siddhi’’ through integral yoga on 24 April, 1926, Sri Aurobindo retired to complete seclusion, though he would give darshan along with the Mother (Mirra Alfasso), who was instrumental in building the Aurobindo Ashram and occasional interviews.
Sri Aurobindo lived to see India free, the cherished goal, he had set 40 years back. Nothing would be more appropriate than to conclude this anniversary tribute to the philosopher patriot extraordinary with a quote from Sri Aurobindo’s message on the occasion of India’s first Independence day: ‘‘15 August, 1947 is the birthday of free India. It marks for her the end of an old era, the beginning of a new age. But we can also make it by our life and acts as a free nation an important date in a new age opening for the whole world, for the political, social, cultural and spiritual future of humanity. 15 August is my own birthday and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance. I take this coincidence, not as a fortuitous accident, but as the sanction and seal of the divine force that guides my steps on the work with which I began life, the beginning of its full fruition’’. (The author is a retired IAS officer.) The Statesman Thursday, 17 August 2006
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