Sri Aurobindo
Based on Wikipedia: Sri Aurobindo
In May 1908, a young Indian revolutionary sat in solitary confinement in Alipore Jail, charged with plotting a bombing that had killed two British women. He faced the death penalty. What happened next would transform him from a wanted terrorist into one of the twentieth century's most influential spiritual philosophers—and it began, he later claimed, with the ghost of a dead monk speaking to him for two weeks straight.
Sri Aurobindo's life reads like three different biographies shuffled together. There's the English schoolboy who mastered a dozen languages and nearly joined the British civil service that ruled India. There's the firebrand revolutionary who organized secret cells, inspired bombers, and edited seditious newspapers. And then there's the mystic who spent his final forty years in a French colonial enclave, writing epic poetry and developing a spiritual system he believed would literally transform humanity into something beyond human.
The strangest part? All three versions were the same man.
An Anglicized Childhood
Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta on August 15, 1872—a date that would later become India's Independence Day, though this was pure coincidence. His father, Krishna Dhun Ghose, was a physician who had studied medicine in Edinburgh and returned with a fervent belief that British culture was superior to Indian culture in every way.
This wasn't uncommon among educated Indians of the era. The British Raj had created a peculiar class of colonial subjects who administered the empire alongside their colonizers, absorbing English customs, language, and often religion. Krishna Ghose took this further than most. He sent his children to an English-speaking boarding school in Darjeeling run by Irish Catholic nuns and forbade the teaching of anything Indian. When Aurobindo was seven years old, the entire family moved to England so the boys could be properly educated.
The three Ghose brothers were placed with the Reverend W.H. Drewett, a Congregational minister in Manchester, with explicit instructions: teach them Latin, prepare them for English schools, and don't teach them any religion. The last instruction proved impossible to follow. Living with a minister's family meant constant exposure to Christianity, which young Aurobindo found alternately boring and repulsive.
When Drewett emigrated to Australia in 1884, the boys moved to London to live with his mother—who was even more evangelical than her son. By the time Aurobindo enrolled at St. Paul's School, he had developed a lasting distaste for organized religion. He considered himself first an atheist, then an agnostic.
The Reluctant Imperial Servant
Meanwhile, Aurobindo was becoming exactly what his father had intended: a brilliant product of the British educational system. At St. Paul's, he learned Greek and added it to his growing collection of languages. By the turn of the century, he could speak, read, and write English, French, and Bengali; read and write Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit; speak and read Gujarati, Marathi, and Hindi; and read Italian, German, and Spanish.
Twelve languages. Most of them learned before he was thirty.
His father's dream was the Indian Civil Service, an elite corps of about a thousand administrators who actually ran British India. Entry required passing a brutally competitive examination and studying at an English university. Aurobindo won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, and placed eleventh out of 250 candidates on the written exam.
Then he deliberately failed the horse-riding test.
The Indian Civil Service required practical skills, and Aurobindo showed up to the equestrian examination with no intention of passing. He had decided, somewhere along the way, that he wanted no part of administering British rule over his own people. The colonial government that had so impressed his father now struck him as—in his father's own later words—"heartless."
This quiet act of rebellion set the pattern for his entire political career: working within systems while secretly undermining them.
The Double Life
In 1893, Aurobindo returned to India and entered the civil service of Baroda, a princely state ruled by the Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III. His father had died just before he landed—killed, ironically, by false news that Aurobindo's ship had sunk off the coast of Portugal.
For the next thirteen years, Aurobindo lived two lives simultaneously.
His public life was respectable, even distinguished. He worked his way through various government departments—Survey and Settlements, Revenue, the Secretariat—while also teaching French at Baroda College and eventually becoming its vice-principal. He wrote speeches for the Maharaja. He contributed articles to newspapers. He married a fourteen-year-old girl named Mrinalini, as was customary among Bengali families of the time.
His secret life was considerably more dangerous.
Aurobindo had become convinced that India needed complete independence from Britain—not the gradual reforms that moderate nationalists advocated, but genuine freedom. He began establishing contacts with revolutionary groups across Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, traveling constantly under the cover of visiting family members. He connected with Lokmanya Tilak, one of the most radical leaders in the independence movement, and with Sister Nivedita, an Irish-born disciple of Swami Vivekananda who had become a fierce Indian nationalist.
He also helped his younger brother Barin establish the Anushilan Samiti, one of the first revolutionary organizations dedicated to armed resistance against British rule.
Going Public
In 1905, the British Viceroy Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal, splitting the province along religious lines in what many Indians saw as a deliberate attempt to weaken nationalist sentiment. The plan backfired spectacularly. Public anger exploded into boycotts, protests, and increasingly violent resistance.
Aurobindo saw his moment. In 1906, he resigned from Baroda's civil service and moved to Calcutta, where he became the first principal of the newly established National College—an institution designed to provide Indian youth with an education free from British influence.
He also stopped hiding his politics.
At the Indian National Congress meeting that year, he helped craft the movement's new objectives: Swaraj (self-rule), Swadesh (indigenous industry), Boycott, and national education. When the Congress split the following year between moderates who sought gradual reform and extremists who demanded immediate independence, Aurobindo stood firmly with the extremists alongside Tilak.
Through 1907 and 1908, he traveled constantly—to Pune, Bombay, Baroda—giving speeches, meeting with revolutionary cells, firming up support for what he hoped would become open revolt against British rule.
The Bombing and the Trial
On April 30, 1908, two young revolutionaries named Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki attempted to assassinate Douglas Kingsford, a magistrate notorious for his harsh sentences against nationalists. They threw a bomb at what they believed was Kingsford's horse carriage.
They hit the wrong carriage.
The bomb killed two British women—the wife and daughter of a barrister named Pringle Kennedy. The assassination attempt became a murder case, and the British authorities saw their chance to destroy the revolutionary movement in Bengal.
Aurobindo was arrested in May 1908 and charged with planning and overseeing the attack. The evidence against him was substantial. His brother Barin was clearly involved with the bombers. Revolutionary literature and weapons had been found at locations connected to Aurobindo. Witnesses were prepared to testify about his leadership role in the conspiracy.
He was thrown into solitary confinement in Alipore Jail to await trial. The prosecution sought the death penalty.
The Voice in the Cell
What happened during that year of imprisonment changed everything.
Aurobindo later described experiencing profound spiritual transformations while sitting alone in his cell. Most remarkably, he claimed that Swami Vivekananda—the famous Hindu monk who had died in 1902—spoke to him continuously for two weeks.
"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."
Whether this was hallucination, spiritual experience, or metaphor, the effect was dramatic. The man who emerged from Alipore Jail was no longer primarily interested in politics. His aim, he later wrote, "went far beyond the service and liberation of the country."
He was acquitted on May 6, 1909. The case had collapsed after the chief prosecution witness was murdered inside the jail by another prisoner. His defense lawyer, Chittaranjan Das—who would later become a major nationalist leader himself—secured his release.
The Escape to Pondicherry
Aurobindo returned to public life, but differently. He started two newspapers—Karmayogin in English and Dharma in Bengali—and delivered what became known as the Uttarpara Speech, in which he publicly hinted at his shift toward spiritual concerns.
The British weren't finished with him. Colonial authorities monitored his writings obsessively, looking for grounds to prosecute him for sedition. In April 1910, a warrant was issued for his arrest based on an article titled "To My Countrymen."
By the time the warrant could be executed, Aurobindo was gone.
He had fled to Pondicherry, a small French colonial enclave on India's southeastern coast. Under French jurisdiction, British warrants meant nothing. The colonial police could watch him—and they did, for years—but they couldn't touch him.
Aurobindo would spend the remaining forty years of his life there, never returning to British India.
The Philosopher Emerges
What Aurobindo did in Pondicherry was genuinely extraordinary, whatever one thinks of his conclusions.
After four years of intensive meditation and what he called "secluded yoga," he began publishing Arya, a monthly philosophical magazine. Between 1914 and 1921, he wrote thousands of pages that would later become his major works: The Life Divine, which laid out his philosophical system; The Synthesis of Yoga, which described his spiritual practice; commentaries on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Vedas; essays on history, politics, psychology, and literature.
He also began composing Savitri, an epic poem that would eventually run to nearly 24,000 lines—longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined.
Integral Yoga
The spiritual system Aurobindo developed is called Integral Yoga, and it differs from traditional yoga in significant ways.
Most classical yoga traditions aim at liberation—escaping the cycle of birth and death, transcending the material world, merging the individual consciousness with the divine. The physical body, in these traditions, is often seen as an obstacle or illusion to be overcome.
Aurobindo argued the opposite. The goal wasn't to escape the world but to transform it. Physical existence wasn't an obstacle to spiritual development—it was the very medium through which divinity would manifest. Humanity, in his vision, was an intermediate stage in evolution, destined to develop into something he called the "supramental" being.
This wasn't metaphor. Aurobindo believed that just as life had emerged from matter and mind had emerged from life, a new form of consciousness would literally emerge from humanity—and that this transformation could be accelerated through spiritual practice.
It's easy to see why this vision has attracted followers and skeptics in roughly equal measure. The idea that humans are evolving toward divinity is either inspiring or grandiose depending on your perspective. The claim that one man's meditation practice could accelerate cosmic evolution requires either tremendous faith or a willingness to suspend disbelief entirely.
The Mother
In 1914, Aurobindo met Mirra Alfassa, a French artist and occultist of Egyptian and Turkish Jewish descent who had been having visions of a spiritual guide she didn't recognize—until she walked into Aurobindo's house in Pondicherry and saw him sitting there.
She later wrote that she recognized him immediately as the figure from her visions.
After returning to France during World War I and spending time in Japan, Alfassa came back to Pondicherry in 1920 and never left. Aurobindo eventually declared her his spiritual equal and gave her the title "The Mother." When they established Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926, she became its practical leader while Aurobindo withdrew into nearly complete seclusion.
For the remaining twenty-four years of his life, Aurobindo rarely appeared in public. He communicated primarily through letters—writing a massive correspondence that fills multiple volumes—and through The Mother, who ran the increasingly large ashram community.
This arrangement strikes many observers as unusual. A revolutionary who became a mystic, turning over daily management of his spiritual community to a French woman while he sat in his room writing poetry and letters? The Mother's role has been variously interpreted as that of a genuine spiritual partner, a practical administrator, or—by critics—a cult leader who used Aurobindo's name to build her own power.
The Writer
Whatever one makes of his spirituality, Aurobindo's literary output is undeniably impressive.
The Life Divine runs to over a thousand pages and attempts nothing less than a complete philosophical synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. It draws on Vedantic philosophy, evolutionary biology, Hegelian dialectics, and mystical experience to argue that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality of the universe—and that the evolution of consciousness is the purpose of existence.
His commentaries on Indian scriptures are dense but influential. His essays on poetry and literature show genuine critical insight. His political writings from the revolutionary period remain interesting historical documents.
And then there's Savitri.
Aurobindo worked on this epic poem for decades, revising it obsessively until his death. It retells a story from the Mahabharata—the tale of Savitri, a princess who follows her husband to the land of death and wins him back through the power of her love—but expands it into a vehicle for Aurobindo's entire philosophical vision.
The poem has its admirers, who consider it one of the great spiritual epics in English. It also has its critics, who find it bloated and impenetrable. Most honest assessments acknowledge both that it contains passages of genuine power and that reading all 24,000 lines requires considerable dedication.
The Legacy
Sri Aurobindo died on December 5, 1950, just three years after India finally won the independence he had fought for as a young man. The Mother continued running the ashram until her own death in 1973. Before she died, she oversaw the creation of Auroville, an experimental township near Pondicherry designed to embody the ideal of human unity—a project that continues today with about 3,000 residents from dozens of countries.
Aurobindo's influence is difficult to assess. Within India, he remains a respected figure—a freedom fighter who became a philosopher, his birthday a national holiday. His books remain in print and continue to find readers. The ashram he founded still operates, as does Auroville.
Whether his vision of supramental transformation represents genuine insight or spiritual overreach remains a matter of personal judgment. What's undeniable is the strangeness and scale of his journey: from an Anglicized childhood designed to produce a loyal servant of empire, through revolutionary violence and near-execution, to decades of seclusion spent writing about the evolution of consciousness.
The twelve-language scholar who failed his riding test on purpose. The newspaper editor who heard a dead monk's voice in his prison cell. The poet who spent his final years revising an epic no one had asked him to write.
Sri Aurobindo was, at minimum, one of the stranger figures of the twentieth century—and possibly, if his followers are right, one of its most important.