Sri Aurobindo or the Yogi of the Life Divine- 3rd part- Alipore Jail: A Great Turning Point

Aju Mukhopadhyay

13 June 2008, 07:44

Continued from Part Two

‘On Friday, May 1, 1908, I was sitting in the Bande Mataram office, when Srijut Shyamsundar Chakravarty handed over a telegram from Muzaffarpur. On reading it I learnt of a bomb outrage in which two European ladies had been killed…. At that time I had no idea that I happened to be the main target of suspicion and that according to police I was the chief killer…. I did not know that that day would mean the end of a chapter in my life… that for a whole year I would have to live, beyond the pale of society, like an animal in a cage…. It would have been more appropriate to speak of a year’s living in a forest, in an ashram or hermitage. For long I had made great efforts for a direct vision of the Lord of my Heart…. But due to the pull of a thousand worldly desires, the attachment towards numerous activities and deep darkness of ignorance I did not succeed in that effort. At long last the most merciful all-good Lord Sri Hari destroyed all these enemies at one stroke and helped me in my path, pointed to the yogashrama, Himself staying as guru and companion in my little abode of retirement and spiritual discipline. The British prison was that ashram…. The only result of the wrath of the British Government was that I found God.’ Sri Aurobindo wrote in the first chapter of his book Karakahini or Tales of Prison Life.

On that night he slept without worry but at about 5 am in the morning of 2 May he was arrested and taken to the Calcutta Police Commissioner. On 5 May the Chief Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta transferred the case to Alipore. ‘My prison life at Alipore began on May 5. Next year on May 6, I was released.’ He wrote. 42 other accused were arrested on the same day. The charge against Sri Aurobindo was revolt against the king, besides treason and murder. But all efforts of the Government failed and he was proved innocent.

At first he was put in a solitary cell- nine feet by five feet. It had no windows. In front stood iron bars and a hole in a wooden door beyond the small stony courtyard. He was given a plate and a bowl, to be used for all purposes- eating, drinking, bathing et al. He often refused food. It was verily a way to torture a prisoner beyond limit, to drive him mad, to kill him eventually.

Relating his experiences in the book which had begun to be published serially in a magazine titled Suprabhat, in the same year of his release, Sri Aurobindo sometimes revealed the fact of his intimate relationship with god, established for the first time, in an unusual place. Let us hear him very attentively, ‘Troubled by mental listlessness I spent a few days in agony in this manner…. One afternoon I could feel that the mind’s regulating power was about to cease… I called upon God… prayed to him…. That very moment there spread over my being such a gentle and cooling breeze, the heated brain became relaxed, easy and supremely blissful such as in all my life I had never known before. Just as a child sleeps, secure and without fear, on the lap of his mother, so I remained in the laps of the World-Mother…. The sufferings seemed as fragile as water drops on a lotus leaf…. Out of this came strength and I had an excess of kindness and sympathy for the victims of human cruelty and torture. I also realized the extraordinary power and efficacy of prayer.’

The authorities, in the course of time, took pity on him and allowed him to take a stroll in the morning and evening in front of his room. Strolling, he would chant mantras of the upanishads. He would try to fix the great upanishadic realization, sarvam Khalu idam brahma on all things around. Everything seemed to him vibrating with a universal consciousness.

‘Men, cows, ants, birds are moving, flying, singing, speaking, yet all is Nature’s play; behind all this is a great pure detached spirit rapt in a serene delight. Once a while it seemed God Himself was standing under the tree, to play upon his flute of Delight…. Always it seemed as if someone was embracing me, holding me on one’s lap…. It is impossible to describe that…. A spring of love for all creatures gushed from within…. The anxiety over the case had vanished from the beginning…. God is All-Good, He had brought me into this prison house for my good, my release and quashing of charge were certain, I grew firm in this faith. After this for many days I did not have to suffer any troubles in the jail.’

In his Tales of Prison life Sri Aurobindo did not relate much about his inner life. But admitted that he was doing Gita’s yoga. Once when an inmate, a co-accused, Upendranath Bondopadhyay asked him with astonishment as to how his hairs were glistening with oil though they knew that he usually did not get bathed there, he admitted that he was engaged in some yoga which gave it that appearance.

He was sometimes found in a posture of levitation. Even when he was allowed to live with others in jail, he would usually sit in a corner, aloof from anything else in the world, engaged in deep meditation. Nothing would disturb his peace. Sometimes he used to hear voices from beyond. Long after all this turmoil was over he recorded the Alipore Jail incidents on 13.9.1946, ‘It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence… The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject.’ (On Himself)

Even before the Karakahini saw the light of day, Sri Aurobindo, for the first time after coming out from the prison at Alipore, related his jai-experiences in his speech at Uttarpara on 30 May 1909, which was not premeditated and in difference with his line of thinking. He was invited to speak on the Hindu Religion on the occasion of the 2nd annual meeting of the Sanatan Dharma Rakshini Sabha. At the outset he admitted that, ‘The thing I had in my mind He had thrown from it and what I speak is under an impulse and a compulsion.’

He went by train accompanied by the main organizer. The train was emptied there as all the passengers had boarded the train to come to the venue of the meeting. He was given a hero’s welcome, with ten bomb-salutes. The meeting was arranged at the Uttarpara Public Library Compound on the Ganga. When he was garlanded with a huge floral wreath, which reached his feet, the sky was rent with the national slogan, Bande Mataram and the blowing of conch shells. When he came to the podium, soft spoken as he was, a ten thousand gathering became all ears with rapt attention in a pin-drop silence.

God-possessed, he poured his heart out, as if commanded by his inner divinity: ‘As I sat here, there came into my mind a word that I have to speak to you, a word that I have to speak to the whole of the Indian Nation. It was spoken first to myself in jail and I have come out of jail to speak it to my people.’

Earlier, he had spiritual experiences from time to time, culminating in the Nirvanic experience with V. B. Lele. But all those came without his asking for them seriously. Politics, the work of freeing the motherland from the foreign yoke, drew all his attention. He was not prepared to give up politics for the sake of anything. During his speech he candidly admitted this.

‘In Baroda…. when I approached God… I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu Religion.’

The pull was there and he was plunging in it. He was doing yoga-sadhana and politics at the same time. He was still not prepared to give up politics.

‘I remembered then that a month or more before my arrest, a call had come to me to put aside all activity, to go into seclusion and to look into my self, so that I might enter into closer communion with Him. I was weak and I could not accept the call. My work was very dear to me and in the pride of my heart I thought that unless I was there, it would suffer or even fail or cease; therefore I would not leave it. It seemed to me that He spoke to me again and said, “The bonds you had not the strength to break I have broken for you, because it is not my will nor was it ever my intention that that should continue. I have had another thing for you to do and it is for that I have brought you here, to teach you what you could not learn for yourself and to train you for my work.” ’

Sri Aurobindo related his intimate contacts with god whom he referred as Vasudeva, Narayana or Sri Krishna. He experienced god everywhere, in every animate and inanimate object around him; in trees, in the bars of the cell, in the prosecuting counsel, in the magistrate, in thieves, dacoits, swindlers, cowherds and others. ‘I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover.’

The counsel for his defense was suddenly changed, as if by providence, and the famous barrister, a friend of his, who later became a great Congress leader, C. R. Das, came to plead for him without any monetary consideration, giving up his roaring practice. ‘This is the man who will save you from the snares put around your feet…. I will instruct him’, was the message he received from within. Abandoning all efforts to help the counsel, he surrendered entirely to the god.

He was given the discerning capacity to recognize that some of the revolutionaries of the younger generation were more intelligent and mightier than him. ‘If you were cast aside tomorrow, here are the young men who will take up your work and do it more mightily than you have ever done.’ He was told by the god. Along with these things he was given to understand the full purport of the Hindu Religion, Sanatan Dharma or eternal religion, which is not bounded by any country but which has been developed in India by the gods through rishis, saints and avatars for going forth to nations for serving the divine purpose. The Hindu Nation was born with Sanatan Dharma, which to Sri Aurobindo was the nationalism. With its decline the nation will decline, with its rise the nation will rise. ‘I give you the Adesh to go forth and do my work,’ was the message received by him.

After his release he started publishing two weeklies, Dharma in Bengali and Karmayogin in English. The freedom of India and the spread of nationalism were the aims, as before. The Government planned to arrest him on some plea, as Sister Nivedita secretly informed him, advising him to leave British India or to go into secrecy. Instead of hiding he wrote ‘An Open Letter to my Countrymen (last will and testament)’ in Karmayogin, which compelled the Government to abandon the plan for the time being.

One day a boy came to inform suddenly that the police inspector Shamsul Alam who helped the Government in Alipore Bomb Case, was shot inside the High Court building. After a few days the news came that Sri Aurobindo’s arrest was imminent. Hearing this he remained silent for some time and then decided to go to Chandernagore, as he received the inner command. Without informing anyone he moved and reached the destination by boat with two followers. It was the third week of February, probably the 21st, though there has been dispute about the exact date. He lived there secretly for a month and a half and then received a similar divine Adesh or command, ‘Go to Pondicherry’.

He left by the ship Dupleix from Calcutta, incognito, on 1 April 1910 and reached Pondicherry on 4 April at 4 pm. He lived there, engrossed in sadhana, till his last day on earth, on 5 December 1950.

Understanding that the police were trying to arrest him, Sri Aurobindo had issued, before his departure, another letter in Karmayogin: ‘To my countrymen’. This was considered seditious by the Government and they issued arrest warrant against him on 4 April 1910 when he reached the shore of Pondicherry. It is not a fact that to avoid arrest he fled to Pondicherry. However, Sri Aurobindo was declared innocent by the Calcutta High Court on 7 November 1910. All charges against him were rejected as on all earlier occasions.

Apparently, it is a fact that Sri Aurobindo was impelled to leave the country in accord with the two Adeshas, but considering the events of his life up to his departure from Calcutta, we find that he was pulled by two opposing forces: One urging him to leave everything and plunge headlong in yoga-sadhana and the other was the call of the country, which meant violent political activity, as he was the leader of an extremist nationalist party. From the time he took to yoga until his jail term in Alipore, he could
somehow dodge the claim of the other world. But the epoch making experiences in the jail prepared him to leave the political field, as is evident from his Uttarpara Speech.

Though he liked much to fight for the country and he was mostly successful to inspire the people for the ultimate struggle to free the Nation, he could no longer continue to remain in the field. Unshaken, he was doing his work daily for the country but inwardly he was preparing to leave. More and more he was indrawn. At Shyampukur Street, Calcutta, from where the two new weeklies were published, Sri Aurobindo had begun learning Tamil from a Tamilian. He had contacts with the revolutionaries throughout the country, including those in Madras and with some of them who had absconded to Pondicherry. Long after, in a letter in October 1932, he wrote:

‘I came away because I did not want anything to interfere with my yoga and because I got a very distinct adesa in the matter. I have cut connection entirely with politics, but before I did so I knew from within that the work I had begun there was destined to be carried forward, on lines I had foreseen, by others, and that the ultimate triumph of the movement I had initiated was sure without my personal action or presence.’

His sudden departure saddened his true followers. They sought his help from time to time and he tried to help them as much as possible, at least for some years. On 7 November 1910 Sri Aurobindo announced through a Madras daily, The Hindu: ‘I left British India over a month before proceedings were taken against me and, as I had purposely retired here in order to pursue my yogic sadhana undisturbed by political action or pursuit and had already severed conncetion with my political work, I did not feel called upon to surrender on the warrant for sedition, as might have been incumbent on me if I had remained in the political field.’

Many calls came from friends and well-wishers to go back and resume his activities, so dear to him, but Sri Aurobindo remained firm in his conviction. In his reply to Joseph Baptista of the Nationalist party, inviting him to come and take the editorship of a paper from Bombay, he wrote on 5 January 1920: ‘ I came to Pondicherry in order to have freedom and tranquility for a fixed object having nothing to do with present politics in which I have taken no direct part since my coming here, though what I could do for the country in my own way I have constantly done,- and until it is accomplished, it is not possible for me to resume any kind of public activity…. Pondicherry is my place of retreat, my cave of tapasya, not of the ascetic kind, but of a brand of my own invention.’

Many allurements, threats and diplomatic efforts were made by the British Government for many years to bring him back to British India but every such effort failed. He was there like a rock, seated in his asana. What he did up to the end of 1950 is another history; literary, occult and spiritual. But during the period we got him as a philosopher of the Life Divine, as a Purna Yogi, as a poet of the largest epic in English language, Savitri. A major portion of his works were produced during the period.

Quite a good number of left minded intellectuals and politicians were chagrined. They completely misunderstood him and termed his coming out as escapism.

As they had or have no spiritual gift, they could not understand how from such a position of name and fame one could suddenly come out undisturbed, without a fear for life. Could anybody prove that Sri Aurobindo came out of British India making any sort of compromise with the Government? Can any body prove that Sri Aurobindo came out for any other gain than carrying on his spiritual practices?

Had he been killed or destroyed in any way, we would never have got the riches of a Sri Aurobindo as our heritage. At the most he would have received a martyr’s formal yearly garland from the most perfunctory people. Three-fourth of Sri Aurobindo would have been lost into oblivion.

N.B. Calcutta, Alipore and Chandernagore, the place names of the British period, as mentioned in the article, have now regained their actual names- Kolkata, Alipur and Chandannagar.

Continued in Part Four

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