mother and sri aurobindo

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SRI AUROBINDO -

Archives and Research

Vol.S December 1981 No.2 '

On Poetical Genius

AN UNUSED PASSAGE FROM THE MANUSCRIPT OF KALIDASA 's "SEASONS"

The imagination of the West has not been trained to recognize that the body is an entity different and initially independent of the spirit within . Yet such a division helps materially to the proper understanding of man and is indeed essential to it unless we rule out a great mass of recorded experience as false or illusory. Each cell out of which the body is built has a life of its own and therefore tendencies of its own. These tendencies are largely, if not entirely determined by heredity. The spirit too comes into the womb with an individuality already determined, a future development already built up; and its struggle is to impose the law of that individuality and that development on the plasm of matter in which it has to encase itself. It is naturally attracted to birth in a race and a family where the previous dispositions are favourable to the production of a suitable body; and in the case of great minds this is oftenest where attempts at genius have occurred before, attempts which being unsuccessful have not U1;1frequently led to madness and physical or moral disease resulting from the refusal of the body to bear the strain of the spirit. Even from the womb it struggles to impose itself on the embryonic plasm, to build up ,the cells of the brain to its liking and stamp its individuality on every part of the body. Throughout childhood and youth the struggle proceeds; the spirit not so much developing itself, as developing the body into an image of itself, accustoming the body to express it and respond to its impulses as a musical instrument responds to the finger of the performer. And therefore it is that the Upanishad speaks of the body as the harp of the spirit. Hence natural gifts are much more valuable and work with much more freedom and power than acquired; for when we acquire, we are preparing fresh material for our individuality in another existence; when we follow our gifts, we are using what we have already prepared for this. In the first case we are painful and blundering learners , in the second , to the extent we have prepared ourselves, masters. This process of subjecting the personality of the body to the personality of the spirit, of finding one's self, lasts for various periods with various men. But it is seldom really over before the age of 30

112 SRI AUROBINDO: Archives and Research

in men of a rich and varied genius, and even afterwards they never cease sounding themselves still farther, finding fresh possibilities, developing mightier masteries, until the encasing plasm wears away with the strain of life. The harp grows old and shabby, the strings are worn and frayed, the music deteriorates or ceases, and finally the spirit breaks and throws away its instrument and departs to assimilate its experiences and acquirements for a fresh existence. But that the man of genius may successfully find himself, he must have fit opportunities, surroundings, influences, training. If he is not favoured with these, the genius will remain but it will be at the mercy of its body; it will express its body and not its self. The most famous ballads, those which never perish, have been written by such thwarted geniuses. Although the influence of romanticism has made it a literary fashion to couple these ballads with Homer, yet in truth ballad-writing is the lowest form of the poetical art; its method is entirely sensational. The impact of outward facts on the body is carried through the vital principle, the sensational element in man, to the mind, and mind obediently answers the knocking outside, photographs the impression with force and definiteness. But there has been no exercise of the higher faculty of understanding, considering, choosing, moulding what it receives. Hence the bare force and realism which so powerfully attracts in the best ballads; but this force is very different from the high strength and this involuntary realism very different from the artistic, imaginative and self-chosen realism of great poetry. There is the same difference as separates brilliant melodrama from great tragedy. Another sign of the undeveloped self is uncertainty of work. There are some poets who live by a single poem. In some moment of exaltation, of rapt excitement, the spirit throws off for a moment the bonds of the flesh and compels the body to obey it. This is what is vulgarly termed inspiration. Everyone who has felt this state of mind can recall its main features . There is a sudden exaltation, aglow, an excitement and a fiery and rapid activity 'of all the faculties; every cell of the body and of the brain feeling a commotion and working in excited unis'Jn under the law of something which is not themselves; the mind itself becomes illuminated as with a rush of light and grows like a crowded and surging thoroughfare in some brilliantly lighted c ity, thought treading on the heels of thought faster than the tongue can express or the hand write or the memory record them .. And yet

On Poetical Genius 113

while the organs of sense remain overpowered and inactive, the main organs of action may be working with abnormal rapidity, not only the speech and the hand but sometimes even the feet, so that often the writer cannot remain still, but has to walk up and down swiftly or if he sits down, is subject to an involuntary mechanical movement of the limbs. When this state reaches beyond bounds, when the spirit attempts to impose on the mind and body work for which they are not fitted, the result is, in the lower human organisms insanity, in the higher epilepsy. In this state of inspiration every thought wears an extraordinary brilliance and even commonplace ideas strike one as God-given inspirations. But at any rate the expression they take whether perfect or not is superior to what the same man could compass in his ordinary condition. Ideas and imaginations throng on the mind which one is not aware of naving formerly entertained or even prepared for ; some even seem quite foreign to our habit of mind. The impression we get is that thoughts are being breathed into us, expressions dictated, the whole poured in from outside ; the saints who spoke to Joan of Arc, the daemon of Socrates, Tasso' s familiar , the Angel Gabriel dictating the Koran to Mahomet are only exaggerated developments of this impression due to an epileptic, maniac or excited state of the mind; and this, as I have already suggested, is itself due to the premature attempts of the Spirit to force the highest work on the body. Mahomet's idea that .in his epileptic fits he went up into the seventh heaven and took the Koran from the lips of God, is extremely significant ; if Caesar and Richelieu had been Oriental prophets instead of practical and sceptical Latin statesmen they might well have recorded kindred impressions. In any case such an impression is purely sensational. It is always the man 's own spirit that is speaking, but the sensational part of him feeling that it is working blindly in obedience to some irresistible power which is not itself, conveys to the mind an erroneous impression that the power comes from outside, that it is an inspiration and not an inner process ; for it is as naturally the impulse of the body as of the mind to consider'itself the self of the organism and all impressions and impulses not of its own sphere as exterior to the organism.! If the understanding happens to

I The facl. (supported byJ overwhelming evidence. that Jeanne could fore te ll the immediate future in a ll maHers affectin g her missio n. does no t miJita le agai nst thi s theory; past present and fu ture arc

1


be firm and sane, it refuses to encourage the mind in its error, but if the understanding is overexcited or is not sufficiently master of its instruments, it easily allows itself to be deluded. Now when the spirit is no longer struggling with the body, but has become its master and lord, this state of inspiration ceases to be fortuitous and occasional, and becomes more and more within the will of the man and, subject to the necessarily long intervals of repose and recreation, almost a habitually recurring state. At the same time it loses its violent and abnormal character and the outward symptoms of it disappear; the outer man remains placid and the mind works with great power and illumination indeed, but without disturbance or loss of equilibrium. In the earlier stages the poet swears and tears his hair if a By happens to be buzzing about the room; once he has found himself, he can rise from his poem, have a chat with his wife or look over and even pay his bills and then resume his inspiration as if nothing had happened. He needs no stimulant except healthy exercise and can no longer be classed with the genus irritabile vatum ; nor does he square any better with the popular ide;i that melancholy, eccentricity and disease are necessary concomitants of genius. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Goethe, the really great poets, were men of high sanity -except perhaps in the eyes of those to whom originality and strong character are in themselves m~dness.

merely conventio ns of the mind, to the spirit time is but one, tomorrow as present as today. At the same time I do not wish to exclude the possibility of supracorporeaJ beings outside her own guiding Jeanne within the limits of her mission ; the subject is too profound and subtle a problem to be settled otlhand. [The exact place of insertion of this passage was not marked by Sri Aurobindo. A piece of the manuscript has broken offnear the beginning. "Supported by";s a conjectural reconstruction.]

IN THE GARDENS OF VIDISHA or

MALAVICA AND THE KING

a drama by Kalidasa

rendered into English by

Aurobind Ghose

AGNIMITRA,

VAHATAVA,

GAUTAMA,

HORODUTTA,

GANOOASA,

MAUDGALYA ,

DHARINIE,

IRAvATIE,

MALAVICA,

COWSHIQIE,

VOCOOLAVALlCA,

[COMUDlCA,

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

King in Vidisha his Minister the Court jester Master of the Stage to the King Master of the Stage to the Queen the King's Chamberlain

Queen in Vidisha a royal princess, wife of Agnimitra daughter of the Prince Madhavsena of Vidurbha, disguised as a maid in waiting on the Queen a female anchorite, sister of Madhavsena's Minister maid in waiting on the Queen, friend of Malavica maid in waiting on the Queen, friend of Vocoola valica]

Act I

SCENE

Place. Outside the Hall of Music in the Palace grounds.

INVOCATION

The One who is Almighty, He Who showers Upon His worshippers all wealth, all joy, Yet wears Himself a hide, nought richer; - Who With His beloved is one body and yet The first of passionless ascetics stands; Who in His eightfold body bears the world Yet knows not egoism, may He from you Dispel the darkness and reveal the light, The paths of righteousness to reillume.

And after the invocation the Manager speaks.

MANAGER

Here, friend. Enter his Assistant.

ASSISTANT

Behold me.

MANAGER

Friend, the audience bid me Stage for this high and jovial feast of Spring The drama, Malavica and the King Plotted by Kalidasa. Therefore begin The overture.

ASSISTANT

But, Sir, 'tis very strange. Are there not classics old, are there not works Of Bhasa and Saumilla, famous plays, Great Kaviputra's name and more to match

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That thus the audience honours, all these scorned, A living poet's work?

MANAGER

Not well hast thou Spoken in this nor like a judging man. For learn, not all that's old is therefore good Nor must a poem straightway be condemned Because ' tis new. The critic watches, hears, Weighs patiently, then judges, but the fool Follows opinion' s beaten track and walks By others' seeing.

ASSISTANT

Well, Sir, you are the judge.

MANAGER

Haste then, for since with bended head I took The learned audience' will, I have no ease Till its performance, to which my forward mind Speeds like yon maiden, Dharinie's attendant, Light-footed to her royal mistress' will.

Exeunt. Enter Vocoolavalica.

VOCOOLAVALI C A

My lady bids me seek out Ganodasa, Her Master of the Stage, from him to learn How in the Dance of Double Entendre progresses Our Malavica, a recent scholar yet Here in this Hall of Music.

Enter Comudica. a ring in the palm of her hand.

Comudica, What, have you taken to religion then That you go sailing past me with an eye Abstracted, nor one glance for me?

In the Gardens of Vidisha

COMUDICA

What, you, Vocoolavalica? I was absorbed In the delightful jewel on this ring Fresh from the jeweller's hands for oUl: great lady. Look, 'tis a Python-seal.

VOCOOLAVALICA

o heavens, how lovely! Well might you have no eyes for aught besides. Your fingers are all blossoming with the jewel! These rays of light are golden filaments Just breaking out of bud.

COMUDICA

Sweet, whither bound?

VOCOOLA V ALICA

To the Stage-Master. Our lady seeks to know What sort of pupil Malavica proves, How quick to learn.

COMUDICA

o tell me, is it true That Malavica by this study kept Far from his eye, was by our lord the King Seen lately?

VOCOOLAVALICA

Seen, but in a picture, - close Beside my lady.

COMUDICA

How chanced it?

VOCOOLA V ALICA I will tell you.

119


My lady in the Painting-School was seated Studying the marvellous colours that en hue The Master's great design; when suddenly My lord comes on her.

COMUDICA

Well, what followed?

VOCOOLAVALICA

Greetings; Then sitting down by her he scanned the painting, There saw of all the attendants Malavica Nearest the Queen and asked of her.

COMUDICA

Marked you the words?

VOCOOLAVALICA

"This face the like of which I not remember, And yet she stands just by you - who is she?"

COMUDICA

Beauty's indeed a magnet to the affections And seizes at first sight. My lady?

VOCOOLAVALICA

Made No answer. He in some astonishment Urged her with questions. Then my lady's sister The princess Vasouluxmy all in wonder Breaks out, "Why, brother, this is Malavica!"

COMUDICA

Oh good! How like the child's sweet innocence! Afterwards?


VOCOOLA V ALICA

Why, what else? Since then still more Is Malavica from the royal eye Kept close secluded.

COMUDICA

Well , I should not stop you Upon your errand. I too will to my lady Carry the ring.

VOCOOLAVALICA

Who comes out from the Hall Of Music? Oh, ' tis Ganodas himself. I will accost him.

GANODASA

Each worker doubtless his own craft exalts Practised by all his sires before him. Yet not A mere vain-glory is the drama's praise. For drama is to the immortal Gods . A sacrifice of beauty visible. The Almighty in his body most divine Where Male and Female meet, disparted it Twixt sweet and terrible. Drama unites In one fair view the whole conflicting world, Pictures man's every action, his complex Emotions infinite makes harmony ; So that each temperament, in its own taste However various, gathers from the stage, Rapt with some pleasing echo of itself, Peculiar pleasure. Thus one self-same art Meets in their nature' s wants most various minds.

VOCOOLAVALI C A (coming for ward)

Obeisance to the noble Ganodasa .

121

E x it .

Enter Ganodasa.


GANODASA

Live long, my child.

VOCOOLA v ALiCA

My lady sent me here To ask how Malavica makes progress. Sir, Does she learn quickly yet?

GANODASA

Tell my lady, No swifter brain, no apter delicate taste Has ever studied with me. In one word,

. Whate'er emotion to the dance translated I show the child, that she improving seems To teach her teacher.

VOCOOLAVALICA (aside)

Victory! I foresee Iravatie <tlready conquered. (aloud) Sir, The pupil gains his every aim of stl.jdy Of whom a Master says so much.

GANODASA

Vocoola, Because such genius is most rare, I ask thee, -Whence did my lady bring this matchless wonder?

VOCOOLA VALICA

The brother of my lady in a womb Less noble got, 'Who for my lord commands His watchful frontier fortress by the stream Mundaqinie, Verosegn, to his great sister, For mistresshood and office in the arts Deemed worthy, sent her.


GANODASA (aside)

So rare her form and face, Her nature too so modest and so noble, I cannot but conceive that of no mean Material was composed this beauty. (aloud) Child , I shall be famous by her. The Master' s art Into a brilliant mind projected turns To power original, as common rain Dropping into that Ocean-harboured shell Empearls and grows a rareness.

VOCOOLAVALICA

Where is she now?

GANODASA

Tired with long studying the five parts of gesture Yonder she rests; enjoying the cool breeze Against the window that o'erlooks these waters, There you shall find her.

VOCOOLAVALICA

Sir, will you permit me To tell her how much you are pleased with her? Such praise will be a spur indeed.

GANODASA

Go, child, Embrace your friend. I too will to my house, Taking the boon of this permitted leisure.

123

. Exeunt.

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SCENE II

In a room of the Palace the King is seated with the Minister, Vahatava in attendance, Vahatava reading a letter. The attendants at some distance in the background of the stage.

AGNIMITRA

Well, Vahatava, what answers the Vidurbhan?

VAHATAVA

His own destruction.

AGNIMlTRA

Let me hear this letter.

VAHATAVA

Thus runs his present missive: - In these terms Your Highness writes to me, "Prince Madhavsen, Thy uncle's son, then journeying to my court For the fulfilment of contracted bonds, Within thy dungeons lies; for by. the way The governor of thy frontiers leaped on him And prisoned. Thou, if thou regardest me, Unbind him with his wife and sister straight." To which I answer thus, " Your Highness knows What conduct kings should use to princes born Their equals. In this quarrel then I look From your great name for just neutrality. Touching his sister, she in the quick scuffie Of capture disappeared , whom to seek out I shall not want in my endeavours. Yet if Your Highness.wills indeed to free my cousin, Hear then my oQly terms. First from your dungeons The Premier of the Maurya princes loose And brother of my queen: this done, at once Are Madhavsena's farther bonds excused.


AGNIMITRA (angrily)

How! dares the weakling trade with me in favours? Knows he himself so little? Vahatava, Command towards Vidurbha the division That under Verosegn new-mobilized Stands prompt to arms. I will exterminate This man who rises up my enemy. Vidurbha was my natural foeman first But now grows such in action.

VAHATAVA

As the King wills.

AGNIMITRA

Nay, Vahatava, but what thinkst thou in this?

VAHATAVA

Your Highness speaks by the strict rule of statecraft. Then is a foeman easiest to pluck out When new upon his throne; for then his roots Have not sunk deep into his people's. hearts, And he is like an infant shooting tree Loose in its native earth; soon therefore uprooted.

AGNIMITRA

Wise is the Tuntra's author and his word A gospel; we will seize this plea to set Ourwar in motion.

VAHATAVA

I shaH so give order.

125

Exit. The Attendants resume" their places each

in consonance with his office. To them enter Gautama.


GAUTAMA (aside)

Now can I tell the King that not in vain He looked to me for counsel, when he said "Gautama, know you not some exquisite cunning, Whereby that face of Malavica by chance At first beheld and in dumb counterfeit With the dear life may bless my vision?" By this I think I have planned somewhat worth the telling.

AGNIMITRA

Here comes my premier in another branch Of politics .

GAUTAMA

I greet the King.

AGNIMITRA

Be seated. Well, Gautama? What, was your wisdom 's eye Busy with plan and purpose, has its roving Caught somewhere any glimpse ?

GAUTAMA

Ask me, my lord, Of your desire's accomplishment.

AGNIMITRA

So soon!

GAUTAMA

I'll tell you in ypur ear, Sir.

AGNIMITRA

Gautama, Most admirable. Thou hast indeed devised


The cunningest adroitness. Now I dare To hope for things impossible, since thou Art of my counsels part. In difficulty How necessary is a helpful friend ; For when one is befriended, every hindrance Turns to a nothing. Even so without a lamp The eye beholds not in night's murky gloom Its usual objects.

VOICE WITHIN

Enough, enough, thou braggart. Before the King himself shall be decision Of less and greater twixt us twain.

AGNIMITRA

Listen! Here is the flower on your good tree of counseL

GAUTAMA

Nor will the fruit lag far behind.

127

Enter the Chamberlain. Maudgalya.

MAUDGALYA

The Premier Sends word, Sire, that Your Highness' will ere now Is set in motion. Here besides the great Stage-Masters, Horodutt and Ganodasa, Storming with anger, mad with emulation, Themselves like two incarnate passions, seek Your Highness' audience.

AGNIMITRA

Admit them instantly. Exit Maudgalya and re-enter ushering in

the Stage-Masters .


MAUDGALYA

This way, high sirs, most noble, worthy signiors.

GANODASA

How queUing-awful in its majesty Is the great brow and aspect of a King. For nowise unfamiliar is this face Of Agnimitra, - no, nor stern, but full Of beauty and kindness ; yet with awe I near him. So Ocean in its vast un resting surge Stales never, but each changing second brings New aspects of its grandeur to the eye That lives with waves, even as this kingly brow Each time I see it.

HORODUTTA

For 'tis no mortal greatness But God 's own glory in an earthly dweUing. Thus I, admitted by this janitor Of princes, led to the foot of his high throne By one that in his eye and puissance moves, Feel wordlessly forbidden by his glories That force me to avert my dazzled gaze.

MAUDGALYA

Here sits my lord ; approach him, worthies.

GANODASA AND HORODUTTA

Greeting, Our sovereign!

AGNIMITRA

o welcome, both! Chairs for these signiors. Wha t brings into the presence at this hour Usual to study both the high Stage-Masters?


GANODASA

Sire, hear me. From a great and worshipped Master My art was studied; I have justified My genius in the scenic pomps of dance ; The King and Queen approve me.

AGNIMITRA

Surely we know this .

GANODASA

Yet being what I am, I have been taxed, Insulted, censured by this Horodutta. "You are not worth the dust upon my shoes";Before the greatest subject in the land Thus did he scorn me.

HORODUTTA

He first began detraction; Crying to me, "As well, sir, might your worship Compete with me as one particular puddle Equal itself to Ocean." Judge, my lord, Betwixt my art and his as well in science As in the execution. Than Your Highness Where can we find a more discerning critic Or just examiner?

GAUTAMA

A good proposal.

GANODASA

Most excellent . Attend, my lord, and judge.

AGNIMITRA

A moment's patience, gentlemen. The Queen Might in our verdict tax a partial judgment.

12 9


Were it not better then she too should watch This trial ? The most learned Cowshiqie Shall give her aid too.

GAUTAMA

This is well-urged , my lord.

HORODUTTA AND GANODASA

Your Highness ' pleasure shall command our patience.

AGNIMITRA

Then go, Maudalya, tell Her Highness all That here has chanced and let her come to us With the holy Mother.

MAUDGALYA

Sire, I go. Exit and re-enter with the Queen and CowshilJie .

Approach, My lady, Dharinie .

DHARINIE

Tell me, Mother, Wha t think you of this hot and sudden passion Between the two Stage-Masters?

COWSHIQIE

Idly, daughter, You fear your side 's defeat, since in no point Is Ganodasa less than his opponent.

DHARINIE

'Tis so , but the King' s favour weighs him down Wresting preeminence to that other.


COWSHIQIE

Forget not That you too bear the style of Majesty. Think that you are an Empress . For if fire From the sun's grace derive his flaming glories, Night too, the imperial darkness, solemnizes The moon with splendour.

GAUTAMA

Ware hawk, my lord the King. Look where the Queen comes and with her our own Back-scratcher in Love's wrestling-match, the learned Dame Cowshiqie.

AGNIMITRA

I see her. How fair, how noble My lady shines adorned with holy symbols And Cowshiqie before her anchorite. Religion's self incarnate so might move When high Philosophy comes leading her Into the hearts of men.

COWSHIQIE

Greeting, Your Highness.

AGNIMITRA

Mother, I greet thee.

COWSHIQIE

Live a hundred years Blessed with two queens alike in sweet submission And mothers of heroic births, the Earth That bears aJl creatures and the wife who loves thee.

131

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DHARINIE

Victory attend my lord.

AGNIMITRA

Welcome, my Queen. Pray you, be seated, Mother ; in this collision Of two great masters, it is just that you Should take the critic's chair.

COWSHIQIE

Your Highness seeks To laugh at me ; for who is the fond man Would leave the opulent, great metropolis To test his jewels in some petty village?

AGNIMITRA

No , no, you are the learned Cowshiqie. Then too the Queen and I are both suspect For partial judges.

GANODASA AND HORODUTTA

It is no more than truth. Unbiassed is the learned Mother's mind; Her censure by defect and merit swayed Leaves no reserves behind.

AGNIMITRA

Begin debate then.

COWSHIQIE

The soul of drama in performance lies And not for tilting theories is a field . How says my lady?


DHARINIE

If I have any voice, I say I quite mislike the whole debate.

GANQDASA

Her Highness must not dwarf me in her thin kings Misdeeming me inferior to my equal.

GAUTAMA

Come, come, my lady, do not let us lose Tbe sport of these great rams butting each other. Why should they draw their salaries for nothing?

DHARINIE

You always loved a quarrel.

GAUTAMA

Good mouse, no . Rather I am your only peacemaker. When two great elephants go mad with strength And counter, until one of them is beaten, There ' s no peace in the forest.

DHARINIE

But surely, Mother, You have already seen them in performance, Judged of their action ' s each particular And every studied grace of movement.

COWSHIQIE

Surely.

DHARINIE

What else is ' t then of which yet uninstructed You need conviction ?

/ 33


COWSHIQIE

This. One man has art, Another science; performance admirable Distinguishes the first , but in himself Is rooted and confined; the other's skill, Ranging, in swift transmission lightens forth , At home inert or poor. In both who's perfect, Him a t the head we put of art's instructors.

GAUTAMA

Sirs, you have heard the Mother's argument, The brief and marrow being this, that judgment Goes by some visible proof of your instruction.

HORODUTTA

We both consent.

GANODASA

Thus then it stands, my lady.

DHARINIE

Then if a pupil brainless or inapt Blur in the act the Master's fine instruction, Reflects the blot upon her teacher ?

AGNIMITRA

Madam, So still ' ti s judged.

GANODASA

For who, a block unworthy Accepting, hews from it a masterpiece, Shows the quick marrow of his genius.


DHARINIE (aside) What more?

Too much already I give my lord the rein , Feeding his eagerness with my indulgence. (aloud)

Desist , desist , this is an idle movement And leads to nothing worth.

GAUTAMA

Well said, my lady. Come, Ganodasa, eat in peace your sweetmeats Upon the Muse's day, a safe renown Enjoying, while you teach our girls the dance. But in this path of rugged emulation To stumble's easy and disgrace expects you. Caution were gooel.

GANODASA

Indeed my lady's words Lend themselves to no other fair construction. To all whic h hear the just and sole reply : That man , styled artist, who, of his mere wage Careful or place established, censure- brooks, Most cowardlike withdrawing from debate, To whom the noble gains of learning serve Merely for livelihood, - that man they call A hawker trafficking in glorious art, No artist.

DHARINIE

But your pupil , recently Initiate, just begins to learn. Teaching Yet inchoate, art of itself not sure 'Tis 'gainst all canons to make public yet.

GANODASA

Even therefore is my strong persistence, lady.

135


DHARINIE

If it be so, unto the Mother both Their show of fair instruction make.

COWSHIQIE

This were Against all rule; for even with a mind Omniscient in art it were a fault To mount the judge's seat in camera, Without assessors: the unaided judgment Was ever fallible.

DHARINIE (aside)

I am awake, fool, And see, though you would to my waking eyes Persuade me that I am asleep and blind.

She turns injealous anger her face from the King. Agnimitra. motioning to Cowshiqie, points to the Queen.

COWSHIQIE

Though it be moonlike bright, yet turn not thus Thy face of beauty, child, from eyes that love, For a nothing. Even o ' er their subject lords Fair women nobly bred use not to wield, Causeless, a tyrant wrath.

GAUTAMA

Not causeless, lady. The loyal mind must by whate'er device Save its own pa,-ty from defeat. You're lucky, Good Ganodas, - rescued by woman's wit Under this fair pretence of wrath! I see. Good training always can be bettered, sirs, And tutoring makes perfect.

In the Gardens of Yidisha

GANODASA

Listen, lady, Thus are we construed! Therefore must J deem Myself cast off, disowned, discharged my place Who , challenged in debate and confident To show the skilful transference of my art, Stand by my lady interdict.

137 .

Rises from his seat as if to go .

DHARINIE (aside)

What help? (aloud) The Master of his school is autocrat , His pupils' sovereign. I am dumb.

GANODASA

In vain Was I so long alarmed then; still I keep My lady's favour. But since the Queen, my ·lord, Has given her sanction, name the scenic plot Whose rendering into studied dance shall prove The teacher masterly.

AGNIMITRA

You rule here, Mother.

COWSHIQIE

Something still works within my lady's mind Yet ireful-unappeased. This gives me pause.

DHARINIE

Apprehend nothing, speak. Always I am Lady and absolute over mine own household.

AGNIMITRA

O'er these and over me too , dearest lady.

138 SRI AURO BINDO: Archives and Research

DHARINI E

C ome, Mother, speak .

COWSHIQIE

I choose, my lord, the dance They call the Dance of Double Entendre, complete In four brief parts of lyric motion. Both Shall so enact a single argument And the gradations twixt these two shall best Be judged of worse or better point by point.


This we approve.

GAUTAMA

Let both your factions then Make in the Theatre-Hall good scenic show And when all's ready, send your messenger To call us, or better the deep tambour's bruit Shall draw us from our chairs.

HORODUTTA

We shall do so. Ganodasa looks at the Queen.

DHARINIE (to Ganodasa)

Go and prevail! Think me not heart-opposed Or careless of my Master's victory.

COWSHIQIE _

Stay! More to mark each studious grace of limb, Movement and beauty, let the characters Enter, not by their stage apparel cumbered, But loosely robed as in their natural hours.

They are about to go.


I speak this in my office as a judge To both of you .


We had done this, uncounselled .

DHARINIE

My lord, my lord, in your affairs of State Could you but show as deft a management, As supple a resource, the realm indeed Would profit!

AGNIMITRA

Let not your swift brain conceive Misunderstanding merely ; not of mine Is this an acted plot. Ever we see Equal proficiency in one same art Breed jealousies emulous of place and justling Each other's glory.

139

E xeunt .

The sound of a tambour within .

COWSHIQIE

Hark, the overture! To the deep Peacock-passion modulated Twixt high and base, the tambour' s rolling voice Its melody half-thundrous measures out To the exultant mind, that lifts itself To listen . Hark! The peacocks cry, misled, With rain-expectant throats upraised to heaven, Thinking a reboant thunder-cloud' s alarum Is riding on the wind.

AGNIMITRA (to Dharinie )

We should be swift To form the audience, madam.

140 SRI AUROBINDO : Archives and Research

DHARINIE (aside)

How has my lord Forgot his breeding!

GAUTAMA (aside)

Softly ho! Too quick A gallop and my lady puts the snaffle Of disappointment on.

AGNIMITRA

I strive for patience, But the loud tambour thunders haste to me ; It seems the passionate feet of my desire As it descends to me with armed tread Sounding gigantic on the stairs of heaven.

Exeunt.

V ikramorvasie: The Characters

T HERE is nothing more charming, more attractive in Kalidasa than his instinct for sweet and human beauty; everything he touches becomes the inhabitant ofa moonlit world of romance and yet - there is the unique gift , the consummate poetry - remains perfectly natural, perfectly near to us, perfectly human. Shelley' s Witch of Atlas and Keats' Cynthia are certainly lovely creations, but they do not live; misty, shimmering, uncertain, seen in some half dream when the moon is full and strange indefinable shapes begin to come out from the skirts of the forest , they charm our imagination but our hearts take no interest in them. They are the creations of the mystic Celtic imagination with its singular intangibility, its fascinating other-worldliness. The Hindu has been always decried as a dreamer and mystic There is truth in the charge but also a singular inaccuracy. The Hindu mind is in one sense the most concrete in the world. It seeks after abstractions, but is not satisfied with them so long as they remain abstractions. But to make the objects of this world concrete, to realise the things that are visited by sun and rain or are, at their most ethereal, sublimated figures of fine matter, that is comparatively easy, but the Hindu is not contented till he has sei4ed things behind the sunlight also as concrete realities. He is passionate for the infinite, the unseen, the spiritual, but he will not rest satisfied with conceiving them, he insist s on mapping the infinite, on seeing the unseen, on visualising the spiritual. The Celt throws his imagination into the infinite and is rewarded with beautiful phantoms out of which he evolves a pale, mystic a nd intangible poetry ; the Hindu sends his heart and his intellect and eventually his whole being after his imagination and for his reward he has seen God and interpreted existence. It is this double aspect of Hindu temperament, extreme spirituality successfully attempting to work in harmony with extreme materialism, which is the secret of our religion, our literature, our life and our civilisation. On the one s ide we spiritua lise the material out of all but a phenomenal and illusory existence, on the other we materialise the spiritual in the most definite and realistic forms; this is the secret of the high philosophic idealism which to the less capable European mind seems so impossible an intellectua l

141


atmosphere and of the prolific idolatry which to the dogmatic and formalising Christian reason seems so gross. In any other race-temperament this mental division would have split into two broadly disparate and opposing types whose action, reaction and various attempts at compromise would have comprised the history of thought. In the myriad-minded and undogmatic Hindu it worked not towards mental division, but as the first discord which prepares for a consistent harmony; the best and most characteristic Hindu thought regards either tendency as essential to the perfect and subtle comprehension of existence ; they are considered the positive and negative sides of one truth, and must both be grasped if we are not to rest in a half light. Hence the entire tolerance of the Hindu religion to all intellectual attitudes except sheer libertinism; hence also the marvellous perfection of graded thought-attitudes in which the Hindu mind travels between the sheer negative and the sheer positive and yet sees in them only a ladder of progressive and closely related steps rising through relative conceptions to one final and absolute knowledge.

The intellectual temperament of a people determines the main character-stamp of its poetry. There is therefore no considerable poet in Sanskrit who has not the twofold impression, (spiritual and romantic in aim , our poetry is realistic in method) , who does not keep his feet on the ground even while his eyes are with the clouds. The soaring lark who loses himself in light, the ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in the void are not denizens of the Hindu plane of temperament. Hence the expectant critic will search ancient Hindu literature in vain for the poetry of mysticism; that is only to be found in recent Bengali poetry which has felt the influence of English models. The old Sanskrit poetry was never satisfied unless it could show colour, energy and definiteness, and these are things incompatible with true mysticism. Even the Upanishads which declare the phenomenal world to be unreal, yet have a rigidly practical aim and labour in every line to make the indefinite definite and the abstract concrete . But of all our great poets Kalidasa best exemplifies this twynatured Hindu temperament under the conditions ' of supreme artistic beauty and harmony. Being the most variously learned of Hindu poets he draws into his net all our traditions, ideas, myths, imaginations, allegories, the grotesque and the trivial as well as the sublime or lovely, but touching them with his

Vikramorvasie: The Characters 143

magic wand teaches them to live together in the harmonising atmosphere of his poetic temperament; under his touch the grotesque becomes strange, wild and romantic; the trivial refines into a dainty and gracious slightness; the sublime yields to the law of romance, acquires a mighty grace, a strong sweetness; and what was merely lovely attains power, energy and brilliant colour. His creations in fact live in a peculiar light, which is not the light that never was on sea or land but rather <JUT ordinary sunshine recognizable though strangely and beautifully altered. The alteration is not real; rather our vision is affected by the recognition of something concealed by the sunbeams and yet the cause of the sunbeams; but it is plain human sunlight we see always. May we not say it is that luminousness behind the veil of this sunlight which is the heaven of Hindu imagination and in all Hindu work shines through it without overpowering it? Hindu poetry is the only Paradise in which the lion can lie down with the lamb.

The personages of Kalidasa's poetry are with but few exceptions gods and demigods or skiey spirits, but while they preserve a charm of wonder, sublitnity or weirdness, they are brought onto our own plane of experience, their speech and thought and passion is human. This was the reason alleged by the late Bankim Chandra Chatterji, himself a poet and a critic of fine and strong insight, for preferring the Birth of the War-God to Paradise Lost; he thought that both epics were indeed literary epics of the same type, largely planned and sublime in subject, diction and thought, but that the Hindu poem if less grandiose in its pitch had in a high degree the humanism and sweetness of simple and usual feeling in which the Paradise Lost is more often than not deficient. But the humanism of which I speak is not the Homeric naturalism; there is little of the sublime or romantic in the essence of the Homeric gods though there is much of both in a good many of their accidents and surroundings. But Kalidasa's divine and semi-divine personages lose none of their godhead by living on the plane of humanity. Perhaps the most exquisite masterpiece in this kind is the Cloud Messenger. The actors in that beautiful love-elegy might have been chosen by Shelley himself ; they are two lovers of Faeryland, a cloud, rivers, mountains, the gods and· demigods of air and hill and sky. The goal of the cloud's journey is the ethereal city of Alaka crowned by the clouds upon the golden hill and bathed at night


in the unearthly moonlight that streams from the brow of Shiva, the mystic's God. The earth is seen mainly as a wonderful panorama by one travelling on the wings of a cloud. Here are all the materials for one of those intangible harmonies of woven and luminous mist with which Shelley allures and baffles us. The personages and scenery are those of Queen Mab . Prometheus Unbound and the Witch of Atlas. But Kalidasa's city in the mists is no evanescent city of sunlit clouds ; it is his own beautiful and luxurious Ujjayini idealised and exempted from mortal affection ; like a true Hindu he insists on translating the ideal into the terms of the familiar , sensuous and earthy.

For death and birth keep not their mystic round In Ullaca ; there from the deathless trees

The blossom lapses never to the ground But lives for ever garrulous with bees

All honey-drunk - nor yet its sweets resign. For ever in their girdling companies ...

And when he comes to describe the sole mourner in that town of delight eternal and passion unsated , this is how he describes heLl How human, how touching, how common it all is; while we read, we feel ourselves kin to and one with .a more beautiful world than our own. These creatures of fancy hardly seem to be an imaginary race but rather ourselves removed from the sordidness and the coarse pains of our world into a more gracious existence. This , I think, is the essential attraction which makes his countrymen to this day feel such a passionate delight in Kalidasa; after reading a poem of his the world and life and our fellow creatures human , animal or inanimate have become suddenly more beautiful and dear to us than they were before ; the heart flows out towards birds and beasts and the very trees seem to be drawing us towards them with their branches as if with arms. The vain cloud and the senseless mountain are no longer senseless or empty , but friendly intelligences that have a voice to our souls. Our own common 'thoughts, feelings and passions have also become suddenly fair to. us ; they have received the sanction of beauty. And then through the passion of delight and the sense of life and of love

I II appears that Sri Aurobindo intended 10 insert a passage from his now /osl fra ns/al io ll he re .


in all beautiful objects we reach to the Mighty Spirit behind them whom our soul recognizes no longer as an " object of knowledge or of worship but as her lover, to whom she must fly, leaving her husband the material life and braving the jeers and reprobation of the world for His sake" Thus by a singular paradox, one of those beautiful oxymorons of which the Hindu temperament is full, we reach God through the senses, just as our ancestors did through the intellect and through the emotions; for in the Hindu mind all roads lead eventually to the Rome of its longing, the dwelling of the Most High God. One can see how powerfully Kalidasa's poetr) must have prepared the national mind for the religion of the Puranas, the worship of Kali, our Mother and of Sri Krishna, of Vrindavan, our soul's Paramour. Here "indeed lies his chiefc1aim to rank with Valmiki and Vyasaas one of our three national poets, in that he gathered the mind-life of the nation into his poetry at a great and critical II).oment and helped it forward into the groove down which it must henceforth run.

This method is applied with conspicuous beauty and success in the Urvasie. 2

PURURAVAS

Pururavas is the poet's second study of kinghood ; he differs substantially from Agnimitra. The latter is a.prince, a soldier and man of the world yielding by the way to the allurements of beauty, but not preoccupied with passion; the subtitle of the piece might be, in a more innocent sense than Victor Hugo's, Le Roi s'amuse. He is the mirror ofa courteous and self-possessed gentleman, full of mildness and grace, princely tact, savoir-faire, indulgent kindliness, yet energetic withal and quietly resolute in his pleasure as well as in his serious affairs. "Ah, Sire," says Dharinie with sharp irony, "if you only showed as much diplomatic skill and savoir-faire in the affairs of your kingdom, what a good thing it would be." But one feels that these are precisely the gifts he would show in all his action, that the innocently unscrupulous and quite delightful tact and diplomacy with which he pursues his love-affair is but the mirror of the methods he pursued in domestic

2 In Sri Aurobindos manuscript this sentence introduces the fifth paragraph under "Apsaras", beginning "The Apsaras are Ihe most beautiful ..


politics. We see in him the typical and ideal king of an age hedonistic, poetic, worldly but withal heroic and capable.

Pururavas is made of very different material. He is a king and a hero, a man of high social and princely virtues, otherwise Kalidasa would not have taken the trouble to depict him; but these qualities are like splendid robes which his nature has put on, and which have become so natural to him that he cannot put them off if he would; they are not the naked essential man. The fundamental Pururavas is not the king and the hero but the poet and lover. The poet on a throne has been the theme of Shakespeare in his Richard I I and of Renan in his Antechrist; and from these two great studies we can realise the European view of the phenomenon. To the European mind the meeting of poet and king in one man wears always the appearance of an anomaly, a misplacement, the very qualities which have fitted him to be a poet unfit him to rule. A mastering egotism becomes the I1).ainspring of the poetic temperament so placed; the imagination of the man is centred in himself, and the realm and people whose destinies are in his hands, seem to him to be created only to minister to his ingenious or soaring fancies and his dramatic, epic or idealistic sense of what should be; his intellect lives in a poetic world of its own and thinks in tropes and figures instead of grappling with the concrete facts of the earth; hence he is unfitted for action and once absolute power is out of his hands, once he is no longer able to arrange men and events to his liking as if he were a dramatist manoeuvring the creatures of his brain but is called upon to measure his will and ability against others, he fails and his failure leads to tragic issues; for he persists in attempting to weave his own imaginations into life; he will not see facts; he will not recognize the inexorable logic of events. Hence, though not necessarily a coward, though often a man of real courage and even ability, he plays the part of an incompetent or a weakling or both. Moreover he tends to become a tyrant, to lose moral perspective and often all sense of proportion and sanity; for he regards himself as the centre of a great drama, and to all who will not play the part he assigns them and satisfy his emotional needs and impulses, to all who get in the way of his imaginative egotism he becomes savage and cruel; his rage when a word of his life-drama is mispronounced or a part ill-studied or a conception not complied with is a magnified reflection of the vexation felt by a dramatist at a similar contretemps in the performance of his


darling piece; and unfortunately unlike the playwright he has the power to vent his indignation on the luckless offenders in a fashion only too effective. 3 The last end of the poet-king is almost always tragic, the madhouse, the prison, suicide, exile or the dagger of the assassin. It must be admitted that this dramatic picture largely reflects the facts of history. We know some instances of poet-kings in history, Nero and Ludwig of Bavaria were extreme instances; but we have a far more interesting because typical series in the history of the British Isles. The Stuarts were a race of born poets whom the irony ·of their fate insisted upon placing one after the other upon a throne; with the single exception of Charles II (James VI was a pedant, which for practical purposes is as bad as a poet) they were all men of an imaginative temper, artistic tastes or impossible ideals, and the best of them had in a most wonderful degree the poet's faculty of imparting this enthusiasm to others. The terrible fate which dogged them was no mysterious doom of the Atridae, but the natural inexorable result of the incompatibility between their temperament and their position. Charles II was the only capable man of his line, the only one who set before him a worldly and unideal aim and recognizing facts and using the only possible ways and means quietly and patiently accomplished it. The first James had some practical energy, but it was marred by the political idealism, the disregard of a wise opportunism, and the tyrannical severity towards those who thwarted him which distinguished his whole dreamy, fascinating and utterly unpractical race. Nor is the type wanting in Indian History. Sriharsha of Cashmere in the pages of Kalhana affords a most typical picture of the same unhappy temperament. It is interesting therefore to see how Kalidasa dealt with a similar character.

To our surprise we find that the Hindu poet does not associate incompetence, failure and tragedy with his image of the poet-king; on the contrary Pururavas is a great Emperor, well-loved of his people, an unconquered hero, the valued ally of the Gods, successful in empire, successful in war, successful in love. Was then Kalidasa at fault in his knowledge of the world and of human nature? Such a solution would be inconsistent with all we know of .the poet's genius as shown in his other work. The truth is that Kalidasa simply gives us

3 Or in something more effective than muttered expletives.


the other side of the shield. It is not an invariable law of human nature that the poetic temperament should be by its temperament absolutely unfitted for practical action and regal power. Nero and Charles I were artistic temperaments cursed with the doom of kingship. But Alexander of Macedon and Napoleon Buonaparte were poets on a throne, and the part they played in history was not that of incompetents and weaklings. There are times when Nature gifts the poetic temperament with a peculiar grasp of the conditions of action and an irresistible tendency to create their poems not in ink and on paper, but in living characters and on the great canvas of the world; such men become portents and wonders , whom posterity admires or hates but can only imperfectly understand. Like Joan of Arc or Mazzini and Garibaldi they save a dying nation, or like Napoleon and Alexander they dominate a world. They are only possible because they only get full scope in races which unite with an ardent and heroic temperament a keen susceptibility to poetry in life, idealism and hero worship. Now the Hindus, before the fibre of their temperament had been loosened by hedonistic materialism on the one side and Buddhistic impracticability on the other, were not only the most ardent and idealistic race in the world, the most ready to put prose behind them, the most dominated by thought and imagination, but also one of the most heroic, and they still preserved much of this ancient temper in the days of Kalidasa . It was only natural therefore that the national dramatist in representing the great legendary founder of the Kurus as of the poetemperor type, should mould him of stronger make and material and not as one of the beautiful porcelain vessels that are broken. Yet always, even when gifted with the most extraordinary practical abilities, the poetic temperament remains itself and keeps a flaw of weakness in the heart of its strength . The temperaments of Alexander and Napoleon were both marked by megalomania, gigantic imaginations , impossible ideals ; though not wantonly cruel or tyrannical , they at times showed a singular insensibility to moral restraints and the demands of generous and humane feeling; especially in times of abnormal excitement or temporary indulgence of their passions , the birthmark came out and showed itself in acts of often insane tyranny. This was especially the case with Alexander; but Napoleon was not free from the same taint. Alexander, we know, strove consciously to mould his life into an Iliad ; Napoleon regarded his as a Tita nic epic and when facts would not


fit in ideally with his conception of himself as its great protagonist, he would alter and falsify them with as little scruple as a dramatist would feel in dealing licentiously with the facts of history. All men of this type, moreover, show a strange visionary impracticability in the midst of their practical energy and success, make huge miscalculations and refuse to receive correction, insist that facts shall mould themselves according to their own imaginations and are usually dominated by an unconquerable egoism or self-absorption which is not necessarily base or selfish; their success seems as much the result of a favouring destiny as of their own ability and when the favour is withdrawn, they collapse like a house of cards at one blow. Joan of Arc dreamed dreams and saw visions, Mazzini and Garibaldi were impracticable idealists and hated Cavour because he would not idealise along with them. The rock of St. Helena, the blazing stake at Rouen, the lifelong impotent exile of Mazzini, the field of [ ... ]4 and the island of Caprera, such is the latter end of these great spirits. Alexander was more fortunate, but his greatest good fortune was that he died young; his next greatest that the practical commonsense of his followers prevented him from crossing the Ganges; had Napoleon been similarly forced to recognize his limit, his end might have been as great as his beginning. Pururavas in the play is equally fortunate; we feel throughout that the power and favour of the Gods is at his back to save him from all evil fortune and the limits of a legend help him as effectually as an early death helped Alexander.

Kalidasa's presentation of Pururavas therefore is not that of a poetic nature in a false position working out its own ruin; it is rather a study of the poetic temperament in a heroic and royal figure for no issue beyond the study itself. This is in accordance with the temper of the later poetry which, as I have said, troubles itself little with problems, issues and the rest, but is purely romantic, existing only to express disinterested delight in the beauty of human life and emotion and the life and emotion of animate and inanimate Nature.

When Pururavas first appears on the scene it is as the king and hero, the man of prompt courage and action , playing ~he part which he has assumed like a royal robe of purple; but it is not ill the practical side

4 Blank in manuscr;pl . Apparenlly A spromonle o r M e n/ana . s ites of defeals suffered by Garibaldi. was in/ended.


of his character that Kalidasa is interested . He has to introduce it only as a background to his inner temperament, in order to save him from the appearance of frivolous weakness and unworthiness which always surrounds the dilettante in life, the epicure of his own emotions. This he does with his usual consummate art. Pururavas is introduced to us at the very beginning in a scene of extraordinary swiftness, decision and tumultuous excitement like an eagle cleaving the winds in the rushing swoop upon his prey. The remembrance of this rapid and heroic episode lingers with us and gives us a sense of concealed iron behind his most feminine moods as lover and poet. Then again at the end of the play Kalidasa skilfully strikes the same note and when we take leave of the Ilian it is again as the King and hero whose strong arm is needed by the Gods in their approaching war with the Titans . Thus finding and leaving him as the warlike prince, we always have the impression that however great the part played by his love for Urvasie in his life, it is not the whole, that we are listening only to a love episode in some high epic. This impression again is skilfully aided by brief but telling touches in each Act, such as the song of the Bards, for example, which remind us of the King of Kings, the toiling administrator and the great warrior; in not a single Act are these necessary strokes omitted and the art with which they are introduced naturally and as if without design is beyond praise. But here again Kalidasa does not depart from his artistic principle of " nothing too much, nothing too little" ; the purple robes of the Emperor and the bow of the hero being needed only for the background are not allowed to intrude upon the main interest, which is Pururavas the man in his native temperament.

From the very first utterance that temperament reveals itself; the grandiose and confident announcement of his name and his communion with the Gods is characteristic of the epic megalomaniac; we are not deceived by his proud assumption of modesty, which he only wears as a fit outward ornament of the role he is playing on the world's stage, part of the conventional drapery of the heroic king. "For modesty was ever valour's crown." Through this drapery we see the man glorying in himself as a p<:>et migh t glory in some grea t creation and when madnt<ss has removed all conventional disguise, his temper breaks out with the most splendid frankness. We see his mind empurpled with the consciousness of his worldwide fame, "This is too much. It is not possible He should not know me" ; of his marvellous


birth, "the grandson to the Sun and Moon" ; of his matchless achievements as "the chariot-warrior, great Pururavas" ; of his mighty empire, "The universal sceptre of the world And sovran footstool touched by jewelled heads Of tributary monarchs" . The glory of this triple purple in which he has wrapped himself, matchless valour, matchless fame, matchless empire, dominates his imagination, and he speaks in the proud brief language of the hero but with an evident consciousness of their fine suitability to the part. We seem to see Napoleon robing himself in the dramatic splendour of his despatches and-proclamations or Alexander dragging Batis at his chariot wheels in order that he may feel himself to be Achilles. Shall we accuse these men as some do of being liars, theatrical braggarts, inhuman madmen, mountebanks? Let us not so in our feeble envy spit our venom on these mighty souls to half whose heights we could never rise even if we have no opportunity given us of sinking to their depths!

. And then ashe rushes in pursuit of the Titan and revels in the speed of his chariot and the scenic splendour of the crumbling thunderclouds flying up like dust beneath it, all the poet in him breaks out into glories of speech. Surely no king before or after, not even Richard II, had such a royal gift of language as this grandson of the Sun and Moon. It is peculiar to him in the play. Others, especially those who habitually move near him, Manavaka, the Chamberlain, the Huntsman , the Charioteer, catch something at times of his enthusiastic poetry, but their diction is usually simple and unpretending and when it is most ambitious pale to the colour, energy and imaginativeness which floods all his utterance. For example in the scene of the vulture how he catches fire from a single trope of the Huntsman' s and his imagination continues coruscating and flashing over the jewel until it has vanished from sight. I have said that his imagination has become empurpled, but the tendency is really inborn in him; he sees, thinks and speaks in purple. Not only is his mind stored with pictures which break out in the most splendid tropes and similes , but he cannot see any natural object or feel any simplest emotion without bathing it in the brilliant tones of his imagination and expressing it in regal .poetry. He has also the poet's close and inspired observation, the poet's visualizing power, the poet ' s sensuousness and aim at the concrete. Little things that he has seen in Nature, a portion of the bank of a river collapsing into the current, the rapid brightening of a Qark night by the moon,


fire at night breaking its way through a volume of smoke, a lotus reddening in early sunlight , a wild swan flying through the sky with a lotus fibre in his beak, remain with his inner eye and at a touch burst out in poetry. So inveterate is this habit of seizing on every situation and emotion and turning it into a poem, that even when he affects a feeling as in his flattery of the queen, he takes fire and acts his part with a glory and fervour of speech which make the feigned emotion momentarily genuine. Thus with a mind stored and brimming with poetry, a habit of speech of royal splendour and fullness and an imagination fired and enlarged by the unequalled grandeur of his own destiny, Pururavas comes to the great event which shall be the touchstone of his nature. Such a man was alone fit to aspire to and win the incarnate Beauty of the world and of its sensuous life , the Apsara who sprang from the thigh of the Supreme. The Urvasie of the myth, as has been splendidly seen and expressed by a recent Bengali poet, is the Spirit of imaginative beauty in the Universe, the unattainable ideal for which the soul of man is eternally panting, the goddess adored of the nympholept in all lands and in all ages. There is but one who can attain her, the man whose mind has become one mass of poetry and idealism and has made life itself identical with poetry , whose glorious and starlike career has itself been a conscious epic and whose soul holds friendship and close converse with the Gods. This is Pururavas , "the noise of whom has gone far and wide", whose mother was I1a, divine aspiration, the strange daughter of human mind (Manu), who was once male and is female, and his father Budha, inspired and mystic wisdom, Hermes of the moonlike mind, and his near ancestors therefore are the Sun and Moon. For Urvasie he leaves his human wife, earthly fame and desire , giving her only the passionless kindness which duty demands and absorbs his whole real soul in the divine. Even he, however, does not enjoy uninterrupted the object of his desire; he transgresses with her into that fatal grove of the Virgin War-God where ethereal beauty and delight are not suffered to tread but only ascetic self-denial and keen swordlike practical will; at once she disappears from his ken. Then must his soul wander through all Nature seeking her , imagining her or hints and tokens of her in everything he meets, but never grasping unless by some good chance he accept the Jewel Union born from the crimson of the marvellous feet.of Himaloy's Child , Uma, daughter of the


mountains, the Mighty Mother, She who is the Soul behind Nature. Then he is again united with her and their child is Ayus, human life and action glorified and ennobled by contact with the divine. It is therefore one of the most profound and splendid of the many profound and splendid allegories in the great repertory of Hindu myth that Kalidasa has here rendered into so sweet, natural and passionate a story of human love and desire. [The religious interpretation of the myth, which is probably older than the poetical, is slightly but not materially different.J5

In one sense therefore the whole previous life of Pururavas has been a preparation for his meeting with Urvasie. He has filled earth and heaven even as he has filled his own imagination with the splendour of his life as with an epic poem, he has become indeed Pururavas, he who is noised afar ; but he has never yet felt his own soul. Now he sees Urvasie and all the force of his nature pours itself into his love for . her like a river which has at last found its natural sea. The rich poetry of his temperament, the sights and images with which his memory is stored, his dramatic delight in his own glory and greatness and heroism , are now diverted and poured over this final passion of his life, coruscate and light it up and reveal it as in a wonderful faery land full of shimmering moonlight. Each thought , image, emotion of his mind a s it issues forth , connects itself with his love and for a moment stands illumined in the lustre of his own ·speech. The same extraordinary vividness offeeling and imagination is poured over Ayus when Pururavas finds himself a father; never has the passion of paternity been expressed with such vivid concreteness or with such ardent sensuousness of feeling. Yet the conventions oflife and the dramatic part in it he feels bound to sustain cling about him and hamper his complete utterance. In order therefore to give him his full opportunity, Kalidasa has separated him from Urvasie by a more romantic device than the dramatically unmanageable contrivance of the original legend , and liberated him into the infinite freedom of madness. The fourth Act therefore, which seems at first sight episodical , is really of essential importance both to the conduct of the play and the full revelation of its protagonist.

Yet madness is hardly the precise word for the condition o f

S The square b rackets are Sr i A urobindo ·5.


Pururavas; he is not mad like Lear or Ophelia;6 itis rather a temporary exaltation than a perversion or aberration from his natural state. An extraordinarily vivid and active imagination which has always felt a poetic sense of mind and sympathy in brute life and in "inanimate" Nature leaps up under the shock of sudden and inexplicable loss and the encouragement of romantic surroundings into gigantic proportions; it is like a sudden conflagration in a forest which transfigures and magnifies every petty object it enlightens and fills the world with the rush and roar and volume of its progress. The whole essential temperament of the man comes whirling out in a gyrating pomp of tropes, fancies, conceits, quick and changing emotions; everything in existence he gifts with his own mind, speech, feelings and thus moves through the pageantry of Nature draping it in the regal mantle of his imagination until the whole world exists only to be the scene and witness of his sorrow. For splendour of mere poetry united with

. delicate art of restraint and management, this scene is not easily surpassed. We may note one of the smaller and yet essential features of its beauty, the s1611 with which the gradations of his excitement are indicated. When he first rushes in he is in the very height and tumult of it mistaking the cloud for a Titan who carries off his Urvasie and threatening him with a clod of earth which he imagines to be a deadly weapon. But he is not really mad; the next moment he realises his hallucination, and the reaction produces a certain calming down of the fever; yet his mind is still working tumultuously and as he ranges through the forest, every object is converted for a moment into a sign of Urvasie and the megalomaniac in him bursts out into the most splendid flights of self-magnification. But each fresh disappointment brings a reaction that sobers him just a little more; he turns from the inanimate objects of nature to the bee in the flower, then to the birds, then to the beasts; he gifts them with a voice, with articulate words, with thoughts lent out of the inexhaustible treasury of his teeming imagination. Next he appeals to the God of the mountain and fancies the Echo to be his answer. Mark that now for the first time it is a real

6 That accomplished scholar and litterateur Prof. Wilson, in introducing the Vikramorvas;e to English readers, is at pains to inform them that in the "mad scenc" of this play they must not expect the sublime madness of King Lear. but a much tamer affair conformable to the mild, domestic and featureless Hindu character and the feebler pitch of Hindu poetic genius. The good Professor might have spared himself the trouble. Beyond the fact that both Lear and Pururavas go about raving in a storm, there is no point of contact between the two dramas.


articulate voice that he hears, though but the reflection of his own. Immediately afterwards his mind, coming nearer and nearer to sanity, hits upon something very close to the truth; he realises that a divine force may have transformed her to some object of nature and at first by a natural misapprehension imagines that it must be the river which · has the appearance Urvasie wore when she fled from him. Then reason as it returns tells him that if he wishes to find her, it must be nearer the place where she disappeared. As he hurries back, he appeals for the last time to an animal to speak to him, but does not lend him a voice or words; again also he sees tokens of her in flower and tree, but they are no longer hallucinations but real or at least possible tokens. H e touches the Jewel Union and hears the actual voice of the sage ; he is now perfectly restored to his normal state of mind and when he embraces the creeper, it is not as Urvasie but as an "imitatress of my beloved". Through the rest of the scene it is the old natural Pururavas we hear - though in his most delicate flights of imagination. What a choice of a "conveyance" is that with which the scene closes and who but Pururavas could have imagined it! I dwell on these subtle and just perceptible features of Kalidasa's work, the art concealing art, because the appreciation of them is necessary to the full reception on our mind-canvas of KaJidasa's art and genius and therefore to the full enjoyment of his poetry.

And while Pururavas glorifies and revels in his passion, he is also revealed by it ; and not only in the strength of the poetic temperament at its strongest, its grasp of, devotion to and joy in its object, its puissant idealism and energy and the dynamic force with which for a time at least it compels fate to its will, but also in its weaknesses. I have spoken of his self-magnification and touches of megalomania. There is besides this a singular incompetence or paralysis of activity in occasional emergencies which, as I have before suggested, often overtakes the poetic temperament in action even in its most capable possessors. His helplessness when confronted by Aushinarie compares badly with the quiet self-possession and indulgent smile with which Agnimitra faces Iravatie in a much more compromising situation. Characteristic too is his conduct when the jewel is lost. We feel certain that Agnimitra when 7 rushing out of his tent would have

10,. befol"e.


caughtup his bow and arrows and shot the thiefon the spot; Pururavas occupies time in pouring out splendid tropes and similes over the bird and the jewel and appeals helplessly to Manavaka for advice. This is characteristic of the poetic temperament whose mind has long trained itself to throw out its imagination to meet every new object or situation and not its acting faculties ; except in natures of a very fi= balance the habit must lead to paralysis of the wilL Such a sapping of vigour has been going on in Pururavas during the long years of absorption in his romantic passion. 8 One must hope that when he stands again in the forefront of battle, "Heaven's great soldier" will have sufficient elasticity of character to recover in the shock of action what he has lost in tl).e peace of the seraglio. Then there are certain moral insensibilities, certain feelings which seem to have been left out in his composition. It is part of his self-assumed role in life to be the ideal king, the mirror of gallantry and conjugal duty, the champion of the gods and of religion. Yet it is Urvasie and not he who rc<members that his "high capital awaits him long" and who shrinks from the displeasure of the people. He exhibits deference and a show of love to Aushinarie because he " owes" her respect and affection, but in spite of his glowing language and fine acting we feel that he cherishes towards her none of the genuine respect and affection or of the real and indulgent kindliness Agnimitra feels for Dharinie and Iravatie. In the last Act he expresses some fear that he may lose religious calm ; one feels that religious calm in Pururavas must have been something like the King's robe in Hans Andersen's story. But it was one of the necessary "belongings" of the great semi-divine king which Pururavas considered his "part" in life, just as impassive calm and insensibility to human misfortune and grief was one of the necessary "belongings" of the great demigod, the human Jove which Napoleon thought to be his destined role. If that vast, flaming and rushing mass of genius and impetuosity which we call Napoleon was incompatible with stoical calm and insensibility, so was the ardent mass of sensuousness and imagination which Kalidasa portrayed in Pururavas incompatible with the high austerity of religion. It is in the mouth of this champion of Heaven KaJidasa has placed one of the few explicit protests in

8 Alternative : This growing incompetence is the result of vigour being sapped by lo n g. indulgence in th l.." poetical sens ibilities to the comparative exclusion of the practical side of the tempera m ... ·nt

Vikramorvasie: The Characters 15 7

Sanskrit of the ordinary sensuous man against the ascetic idealism of the old religion:

And yet I cannot think of her Created by a withered hermit cold. How could an aged anchoret dull and stale With poring over Scripture and oblivious To all this rapture of the senses build A thing so lovely?

The minor male characters of the piece look too wan in the blaze of this great central figure to command much attention except a s his adjuncts. As such the Charioteer, the Huntsman and the Chamberlain, Latavya , appear; the former two merely cross the stage and are only interesting for the shadow of tropical magnificence that their master's personality has thrown over their mode of speech.

APSARAS

In nothing does the delicacy and keen suavity of Kalidasa's dramatic genius exhibit itself with a more constant and instinctive perfection than in his characterisation of women. He may sometimes not care to individualise his most unimportant male figures, but even the slightest of his women· have some personality of their own, something which differentiates them from others and makes them better than mere names. Insight into feminine character is extraordinarily rare even among dramatists for whom one might think it to be a necessary element of their art. For the most part a poet represents with success only one or two unusual types known to him or in sympathy with his own temperament or those which are quite abnormal and therefore easily drawn ; the latter are generally bad women, the Clytaemnestras, Vittoria Corombonas, Beatrice Joannas. The women ofVyasa and of Sophocles have all a family resemblance ; all possess a quiet or commanding masculine strength of character which reveals their parentage. Other poets we see succeeding in a single feminine character and often repeating it but failing or not succeeding eminently in the rest. Otherwise women in poetry are generally painted very much from the outside. The poets who have had an instinctive insight into women, can


literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. Shakespeare in this as in other dramatic gifts is splendidly and unapproachably first, or at least only equalled in depth though not in range by Valmiki; Racine has the same gift within his limits and Kalidasa without limits, though in this as in other respects he has not Shakespeare's prodigal abundance and puissant variety. Other names I do not remember. There are a few poets who su=eed with coarse easy types, but this is the fruit [of] observation rather than.an unfailing intuitive gift. The Agnimitra is a drama of women ; it passes within the women's apartments and pleasure gardens of a great palace and is full of the rustling of women's robes, the tinkling of their ornaments, the scent of their hair, the music of their voices. In the Urvasie where he needs at least half the canvas for his hero, the scope for · feminine characterisation is of necessity greatly contracted, but what is left Kalidasa has filled in with a crowd of beautiful and shining figures and exquisite faces each of which is recognizable. These are the Apsaras and Urvasie the most beautiful of them all. To understand the poetry and appeal of these nymphs of heaven, we must know something of their origin and meaning.

In the beginning of things, in the great wide spaces of Time when mankind as yet was young and the azure heavens and the interregions between the stars were full of the crowding figures of luminous Gods and gigantic Titans by the collision of whose activities the cosmos was taking form and shape, the opposing forces once made a truce and met in common action on the waves of the milky ocean. The object for which they had met could not have been fulfilled by the efforts of one side alone; good must mingle with evil, the ideal take sides with the real, the soul work in harmony with the senses, virtue and sin, heaven and earth and hell labour towards a common end before it can be accomplished; for this object was no less than to evolve all that is beautiful and sweet and incredible in life, all that makes it something more than mere existence; and in especial to realise immortality, that marvellous thought which has affected those even who disbelieve in it with the idea of unending effort and thus lured m:en on from height to height, from prt>gress to progress, until mere beast though he is in his body and his sensations, he has with the higher part ofhimselflaid hold upon the most distant heavens. Therefore they stood by the shore of the milky ocean and cast into it the mountain Mandara for a churning stick and wound round it Vasuqie, the Great Serpent, the snake of

Vikramorvasie: The Characters 15<)

desire, for the rope of the churning and then they set to with a will, god and devil together, and churned the milky ocean, the ocean of spiritual existence, the ocean of imagination and aspiration, the ocean of all in man that is above the mere body and the mere life.

They churned for century after century, for millennium upon millennium and yet there was no sign of the nectar of immortality. Only the milky ocean swirled and lashed and roared, like a thing tortured, and the snake Vasuqie in his anguish began to faint and hang down his numberless heads hissing with pain over the waves and from the-lolling forked tongues a poison streamed out and mingled with the anguish of the ocean so that it became like a devastating fire. Never was poison so terrible for it contained in itself all the long horror and agony of the ages, all the pain of life, its tears and cruelty and despair and rage and madness, the darkness of disbelief and the grey pain of disillusionment, all the demoniac and brute beast that is in man, his lust and his tyranny and his evil joy in the sufferings of his fellows. Before that poison no creature could stand and the world began to shrivel in the heat of it. Then the Gods fled to Shankara where he abode in the ice and snow and the iron silence and inhuman solitudes of the mountains where the Ganges streams through his matted locks; for who could face the fire of that poison? who but the great ascetic Spirit clothed in ashes who knows not desire and sorrow, to whom terror is not terrible and grief has no sting, but who embraces grief and madness and despair. 9

*

And now wonderful things began to arise from the ocean ; Ucchaisravus arose, neighing and tossing his mighty mane, he who can gallop over all space in one moment while hooves make music in the empyrean; Varunie arose, Venus Anadyomene from the waters, the daughter of Varuna, Venus Ourania, standing on a lotus and bringing beauty, delight and harmony and all opulence into the universe; Dhunwuntari arose, cup in hand, the physician of the Gods, who can heal all pain and disease and sorrow, minister to a mind diseased and pluck out from the bosom its rooted sorrow; the jewel Kaustubha arose whose

Y H('re there is an abrupl break in the lext,


pure luminousness fills all the world and worn on the bosom of the Saviour and helper becomes the cynosure of the suffering and striving nations. IO

*

The Apsaras are the most beautiful and romantic conception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky ocean robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornments, waking melody from a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformed the world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash and gleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beauty of the sky; they are the light of sunrise and sunset, and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of the soul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through his lines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor seeking aform in his marble; for the joy of their embrace the hero flings his life into the rushing torrent of battle; the sage, musing upon God, sees the shining of their limbs and falls from his white ideal. The delight of life, the beauty of things, the attraction of sensuous beauty, this is what the mystic and romantic side of the Hindu temperament strove to express in the Apsara. The original meaning is everywhere felt as a shining background, but most in the older allegories, especially the strange and romantic legend of Pururavas as we first have it in the Brahmanas and the Vishnupurana.

But then came in the materialistic side of the Hindu mind and desired some familiar term, the earthlier the better, in which to phrase its romantic conception; this was found in the Hetaira. The class of Hetairae was as recognized an element in Hindu society as in Greek, but it does not appear to have exercised quite so large an influence on social life. As in the Greek counterpart they were a specially learned and accomplished class of women, but their superiority over ladies of good families was not so pronounced; for in ancient India previous to the Mahomedal'l episode respectable women were not mere ignorant housewives like the Athenian ladies. They were educated though not in a formal manner; that is to say they went through no systematic

10 Here there ;s another abrupt break with nothing /0 Imk this paragraph to what follows.


training such as men had, but parents were always expected to impart general culture and accomplishments to them by private tuition at home; singing, music, dancing and to some extent painting were the ordinary accomplishments. General knowledge of morality, Scripture and tradition was imperative, and sometimes the girls of highborn, wealthy or learned families received special instruction in philosophy or mathematics. Some indeed seem to have pursued a life of philosophic learning either as virgins or widows; but such instances were in pre-Buddhistic times very rare; the normal Hindu feeling has always been that the sphere of woman is in the home and her life incomplete unless merged in her husband's. In any case the majority of the Kulavadhus, women of respectable families, could hardly be more than amateurs in the arts and sciences, whereas with the Hetairae (Ganikas) such accomplishments were pursued and mastered as a profession. Hence beside their ordinary occupation of singing and dancing in the temples and on great public occasions such as coronations and holy days, they often commanded the irregular affections of highborn or wealthy men who led openly a double life at home with the wife, outside with the Hetaira. As a class, they held no mean place in society; for they must not be confused with the strolling-actor or mountebank caste who were a proverb for their vileness of morals. Many of them, no doubt, as will inevitably happen when the restraints of society are not recognized, led loose, immoral and sensual lives; in such a class Lais and Phryne must be as common as Aspasia. Nevertheless the higher and intellectual element seems to have prevailed; those who arrogated freedom in their sexual relations but were not prostitutes are admirably portrayed in Vasuntsena of the Toy Cart, a beautiful melodrama drawn straight from the life; like her they often exchanged, with the consent of their lover's family, the unveiled face of the Hetaira for the seclusion of the wife. This class both in its higher and lower type lasted late into the present century, but are now under the auspices of Western civilisation almost entirely replaced by a growing class of professional prostitutes, an inevitable consummation which it seems hardly worthwhile to dub social reform and accelerate by an actrve crusade.

*

We see then the appropriateness of the Hetaira as a material form


into which the vague idea of sensuous beauty in the world might run. For the charm of the Apsara even when working on the plane of the mind, is still vital and sensational; it does not belong to the more rarefied regions of the spirit. Now vital and sensational charm in seeking its fulfilment demands that the pursuit of sensuous beauty. shall be its sole object, that it shall be without check as without any side-glance or afterthought; it does not seek to be immoral, but simply rejects all moral tests ; it recognizes no law but the fulfilment of its own being . This is the very spint of the Hetaira . The beauty of nakedness sculptured, painted or shaped into words, is not immoral; but the moment we apply the test of morality, it becomes clear that we must either rule it out as not belonging to the world of morality, or rule out morality itself for the moment as not belonging to the world of beauty, which is essentially a world of nakedness, in the sense that dress there is an occasior;lal ornament, not a necessary covering - not because there is any essential opposition between them but because there is no essential connection or necessary point of contact. The ideals of all the plastic and sensuous arts fall within the scope of the Apsara ; she is actress, songstress, musician, painter. When they arose from the waves neither the gods nor the demons accepted them ; accepted by none, they became common to all; for neither the great active faculties of man nor the great destructive recognize sensuous delight and charm as their constant and sufficient .mistress; but rather as the joy and refreshment of an hour, an accompaniment or diversion in their constant pursuit of the recognized ideal to which they are wedded. Moreover sensuous beauty has a certain attraction and splendour which seem to some minds finally and occasionally to most, fairer and brighter than that other ideal which by daily occupation with it, by permissibility and by sameness, grows stale for some, fades into homeliness and routine for others and preserves its real undying, unageing and unforsakeable freshness and delight only to the few constant and unswerving souls, who are the elect of our human evolution. In all this the idea of the Apsar a coincides with the actua lity of the Hetaira. In choosing the H etaira the refore for the Apsara's earthly similitude, the Hindu mind showed once more that wonderful mythopoeic penetra tiveness which is as unerring and admirable in its way as the G ree k m yth o poeic felicity a nd ta ct.


URVASIE

But in the Apsaras the beauty and allurements of the sensuous universe are diffused, scattered, broken up into a million facets just as they first present themselves to human observation. The Hindu imagination needed some one figure into which all this should be compressed, a figure essential and superlative, compressed and running over with beauty. This was at first sought in Tilottama, the wonderful maiden to whose loveableness every gracious thing in the world gave a portion of its own subtlest charm; but this was too much of a fancy, not sufficiently profound and searching for the Hindu mind. It attempted to find a more perfect expression of its idea and created for the purpose a characteristic and therefore favourite legend.

When Narayan, the primeval · and dateless sage of old, entered upon austerities in the most secret and desolate recesses of the Snowy Mountains, Indra, prince of the air, always hostile to asceticism, always distrustful of the philosophic and contemplative spirit, was alarmed for the balance of the world and the security of his own rule. He therefore sent the Apsaras to disturb the meditations of Narayan . Then upon the desolate Himalaya Spring set the beauty of his feet; the warm south wind breathed upon those inclement heights, blossoming trees grew in the eternal sn()w and the voice of the cuckoo was heard upon the mountain tops. It was amidst this vernal sweetness that the Apsaras came to Narayan. They were the loveliest of all the sisterhood who came, and subtlest and most alluring of feminine arts and enchantments was the way of their wooing; but Narayan , who is Vishnu the World-Saviour when he comes in the guise of the ascetic, moved neither by the passion of love nor by the passion of anger, smiled in the large and indulgent mood of his world-embracing nature and opening his thigh took from it a radiant and marvellous creature of whose beauty the loveliest Apsaras seemed but pale and broken reflections. Ashamed they veiled their faces and stole silently away from the snowy hermitage. But Narayan called this daughter of his creation Urvasie (she who lies in the thigh of the Supreme, the thigh being the seat of sensuousness) and gave her to Indra to be his most potent defence against the austerities of spiritual longing.

The legend is characteristic of the Hindu mythopoeic faculty both


in its slight and unpretentious build and the number of searching and suggestive thoughts with which it is packed. Indra is the universal cosmic energy limited in the terrestrial forces of conservation; like all active and conservative forces he distrusts the contemplative spirit of philosophy because it is disruptive and tends to cast thought and therefore life into solution towards the creation of fresh forms. Thus he is besieged by a double anxiety; on one side the spirits entrusted with the work of destruction and anarchy are ever endeavouring to seat themselves in the place of Indra, the high conserving forpe, on the other he dreads to be dethroned by some embodiment of the contemplative spirit, examining, analysing, synthetising new forms. His method of defence against the former is usually though by no means invariably open warfare, against the latter sensuous seduction. He tempts the mind of the philosopher to sacrifice that aloofness from ordinary sensuous life and its average delights on which his perfect effectiveness depends ; or if he cannot succeed in this, to move him to an angry and abhorrent recoil from sensuousness which is equally fatal to complete philosophic efficiency. This then is the inwardness of the sending of the Apsaras by Indra. Narayan conquers the temptation, not by ignoring or repelling it, but by producing out of the sensuous in himself a lovelier sensuousness than any that can be brought to tempt him. Here is a peculiarity in the highest Indian conception of ascetism. The sage who delivers the world by his philosophy must not be a half nature; he must contain the whole world in himself. It is told that the great Shankaracharya in the midst of his triumphant religious activity had to turn aside and learn by personal experience the delights of sensuous life and the love of women, because the defect of this experience left him maimed for his philosophic task. The philosopher must be superior to sensuousness not because he is incapable of experiencing passion and delight, but because he has fathomed their utmost depth and measured their utmost reach, and far passed the stage of soul-evolution where they can satisfy.

And yet the work of the philosophic mind incidentally serves sensuous and material life by increasing its resources and the depth of its charm. For the power of the philosophic ideals which have profoundly affected humanity is not limited to the domain of the intellect but also affects, enlarges and strengthens man's aesthetic outlook upon the world. The sensuous world becomes fuller of


beauty, richer in colours, shades and suggestions, more profound and attractive with each widening of the human ideal. It is Urvasie who sprang from the thigh of the withered hermit cold and not any of those original daughters of the incoRstant waves who is the loveliest and most dangerous of the Apsaras.

Such then is Urvasie, Narayan-born, the brightness of sunlight and the blush of the dawn, the multitudinous laughter of the sea, the glory of the skies and the leap of the lightning, all in brief that is bright, far-off, unseizable and compellingly attractive in this world; all too that is wonderful, sweet to the taste and intoxicating in human beauty, human life, the joy of human passion and emotion; all finally that seizes, masters and carries away in art, poetry, thought and knowledge, is involved in this one name.

Of these outward briIIiances Kalidasa's conception of Urvasie is entirely void. His presentation of her is simply that of a beautiful and radiant woman deeply in love. Certainly the glories of her skiey residence, the far-off luminousness and the free breath of the winds are about her, but they are her atmosphere rather than part of herself. The essential idea of her is a natural, frank and channing womanliness; timidity, a quick temper, a harmless petulance and engaging childishness afterwards giving way to a matronly sedateness and bloom, swift, innocent and frank passion, wann affections as mother, sister and friend, speech always straight from the heart, the precise elements in fact that give their greatest chann to ideal girlhood and womanhood are the main tones that compose her picture. There is nothing here of the stately pace and formal dignity of the goddess, no cothurnus raising her above human stature, no mask petrifying the simple and natural play of the feelings, the smile in the eyes, the ready tears , the sweetness of the mouth, the lowered lashes, the quick and easy gesture full of spontaneous chann. If this is a nymph of heaven, one thinks, then heaven must be beautifully like the earth. Her terror and collapse in the episode of her abduction and rescue, where Chitralekha manages pretty successfully to keep up her courage as a goddess should, is certainly not Apsaralike - Chitralekha with sisterl,y impatience expresses her sense of that, "Fie, sweet! thou art no Apsara" - but it is nevertheless attractively human and seizes our sympathies for her from the outset.


There is also a sensitiveness in her love, a quickness to take alarm and despond which makes her very human. If this is jealousy, it is a quick and generous jealousy having nothing in it of "jealous baseness", but born rather of a panic of timidity lWld an extreme diffidence and ignorance of the power of her own beauty. This detail is very carefully observed and emphasized as if Kalidasa wished to take especial pains to prevent even the most hidebound commentator from reading any touch of the heavenly courtesan into her character. The ostentatious splendours, the conscious allurements of the courtesan are not here, but rather a divine simplicity and white candour of soul. It is from an innate purity and openness that the frankness and impulsiveness of her love proceeds. Incapable of disguise, hastily open, even tremulously playful at times, she is easily dashed in her advances and quick to distrust her own merit. There are few more graceful touches in lighter love-drama than her hasty appearance, unconsciously invisible, before Pururavas, and her panic of dismay when he takes no notice of her. In the same scene, her half-playful, half-serious self-justification on embracing her lover and her immediate abashed silence at his retort, portray admirably the mixture of frank impulsiveness and shy timidity proper to her character. These are the little magic half-noticeable touches of which Kalidasian characterisation is mainly composed, the hundred significant trifles which Kalidasa's refined taste in life felt to be the essence of character in action. A shade of wilfulness, an occasional childlike petulance, a delighted abandonment of herself to her passion which are part of her charm proceed also from the same surface lightness and quickness of a deep and strong nature. With all this she can be very sweet and noble too, even dignified as in a few utterances of the Third Act, her reunion with Pururavas in the fourth and all through the fifth where she is wife and mother and while losing the girlishness, petulance and playfulness of the earlier scenes has greatly deepened her charm. I see nothing of the heavenly courtesan which some over-precise commentators insist on finding in her; within the four corners of the play, which is all Kalidasa allows us to consider, she is wholly delightful, innocent, even modest, at any rate not immodest. Certainly she is more frank and playful in her love than Shacountala or even Malavica could venture to be, but something must be allowed to a goddess and her demeanour is too much flavoured with timidity, her advances too easily dashed to give any disagreeable


impression of forwardness. Urvasie's finest characteristic, however, is her sincerity in passion and affection. The poet has taken great pains to discharge her utterance of all appearance of splendour, ornament and superfluity; her simple, direct and earnest diction is at the opposite pole to the gorgeous imaginativeness of the Ilian. And while her manner of speech is always simple and ordinary, what she says is exactly the unstudied and obvious thing that a woman of no great parts, but natural and quick in her affections, would spontaneously say under the circumstances; it is even surprisingly natural. For example when she sees Ayus fondled by Pururavas, " Who is this youth?" she asks with the little inevitable undertone of half jealousy,

Himself My monarch binds his curls into a crest! Who should this be so highly favoured?

and then she notices Satyavatie and understands. But there is no poetical outburst of maternal joy and passion. " It is My Ayus. How he has grown!" That is all ; and nothing could be better or truer. Yet for all the surface colourlessness there is a charm in everything Urvasie says, the charm of absolute sincerity and direct unaffected feeling. Her passion for Pururavas is wonderfully genuine and fine from her first cry of"O Titans, You did me kindness!" to her last of "Oh, a sword is taken Out of my heart!" Whatever the mood its speech has always a tender force and reality. Her talk with Chitralekha and the other Apsaras from the outburst, "0 sisters, sisters, take me to your bosoms" to her farewell "Chitralekha, my sister, do not forget me" is instinct, when moved, with "a passion of sisterliness" and at other times, bright and limpid in its fair kindness and confidence. To her son she comes "with her whole rapt gaze Grown mother," the veiled bosom heaving towards him " And wet with sacred milk", and her farewell to the Hermitess sets a model for the expression of genuine and tender friendship. Urvasie is doubtless not so noble and strong a portraiture as Shacountala, but she is inferior to no heroine of Sanskrit drama in beauty and sweetness of womanly nature.

* In dramatic tone and build therefore this is an admirable creation,


but there is so far no hint of the worldwide divineness of Urvasie, of the goddess within the woman. In direct allegory Kalidasa was too skilful an artist to deal, but we expect the larger conception of this beautiful and significant figure to enter into or at least colour the dramatic conception of the woman; some pomp of words , some greatness of gesture, some large divinity whether of speech or look to raise her above a mere nymph, however channing, into the goddess we know. Yet in rigidly excluding the grandiose or the coloured Kalidasa has shown, I think, his usual unerring dramatic and psychological tact. Dramatically, to have made Pururavas and Urvasie equally romantic in spirit and diction, to have clothed both in the external purple of poetry, would have been to offend the eye with unrelieved gorgeousness and converted the play from an interesting and skilfully woven drama into a confused splendour of lyrical dialogue. Psychologically, the divinity and universal charm of Urvasie would have been defaced rather than brought out by investing her with grandeur of feeling or a pomp of poetic ornament. Perfect beauty has in it a double aspect, its intrinsic self and the impression it makes on the vivid and receptive mind. In itself it is simple, unconscious and unadorned, most effective when it is most naked; ceasing to be these, it loses its perfection and a great part of its universal charm. The nude human figure in painting and sculpture, unadorned magic or strength of style and conception in poetry, clear, luminous and comprehensive thought in philosophy, these are what the pursuing human spirit feels to be ideal, highest, most worthy of itself. Drapery blurs the effulgence of the goddess, ornament distracts the spirit and disappoints it of its engrossed and undisturbed sense of possession. On the other hand the mind while most moved by what is simple and natural in its appeal, is romantic in its method of receiving the impression; becoming engrossed and steeped with the idea of it, it directs to it and surrounds it with all the fresh impressions that continually flow in on the consciousness, gathers from it colour, fire and passion, creates around it a host of splendid associations and clothes it in the pomp of its own passionate imagery. The first period of a literary race when its mind is yet virgin and has to create beauty is invariably simple and classical, the last period when its mind is saturated and full of past beauty is always romantic and aesthetic. The relations of Urvasie and Pururavas are true to this psychological principle. She herself is mere beauty and


chann sufficient to itself and commanding delight and worship because she is herself, not because of any graces of expression. imagination [or) intellectual profundity. But the mind of Pururavas receiving her pure and perfect image steeps her in its own fire and colour, surrounding her with a halo of pomp and glory which reveals himself while seeking to interpret her:

MINOR CHARACTERS

Nothing more certainly distinguishes the dramatic artist from the poet who has trespassed into drama than the careful pain he devotes to his minor characters. To the artist nothing is small; he bestows as much of his art within the narrow limit of his small characters as within the wide compass of his greatest. Shakespeare lavishes life upon his minor characters, but in Shakespeare it is the result of an abounding creative energy; he makes living men, as God made the world, because he could not help it, because it was in his natuie and must out. But Kalidasa's dramatic gift, always suave and keen, had not this godlike abundance; it is therefore well to note the persistence of this feature of high art in all his dramas. In the Urvasie the noble figure of Queen Aushinarie is the most striking!! evidence of his fine artistry, but even slight sketches like the Apsaras are seen upon close attention to be portrayed with a subtle and discriminating design ; thought has been bestowed on each word they speak, an observable delicacy of various touch shows itself in each tone and gesture they employ. A number of shining figures crowded into a corner of the canvas, like in meaning, like in situation, like in nature, they seem to offer the very narrowest scope for differentiation; yet every face varies just a little from its sister, the diction of each tongue!2 has its revealing individuality. The timid, wann-hearted Rambha, easily despondent, full of quick outbursts of eagerness and tenderness, is other than the statelier Menaka with her royal gift of speech and her high confidence. Sahajanya is of an intenser, more silent, less imaginative, more practical type than eithet· of these. It is she who gives Pururavas the information of the road which the ravisher has taken, and from that point onward amid all the anxious and tender chatter of her sisters she is silent until she has the

IIOr excellent 120r in all of them the speec h


practical fact of Pururavas' reappearance to seize upon. This she is again the first to descry and announce. Her utterance is brief and of great point and substance. From the few words she has uttered we unconsciously receive a deep impression of helpfulness, earnestness and strength ; we know her voice and are ready [to] recognize it again in the Fourth Act. Her attitude there is characteristic ; she will not waste time over vain lamentation since help she cannot. Fate has divided the lovers, F a te will unite them again; so with a cheerful and noble word of consolation she turns to the immediate work in hand.

Chitralekha, more fortunate than the other Apsaras in obtaining through three acts a large canvas as the favourite and comrade of Urvasie, suffe r s dramatically from her good fortune, for she must necessarily appear a little indistinct so near to the superior light of her companion. Indeed dramatic necessity demands subdued tones in her portraiture lest she should deflect attention from Urvasie where it is her task to attract it to her; she must be always the cloud's dim legion that prepares us to watch for the lightning. Richness of colour and prominence of line are therefore not permissible ; yet in spite of these hampering conditions the poet has made her a sufficiently definite personality. Indeed her indulgent affection, her playful kindliness, her little outbreaks of loving impatience or sage advice, - the neglect of which sohe takes in excellent part - her continual smiling surrender to Urvasie' s petulance and wilfulness and her whole nalfmatronlike air of elder-sisterly protection, give her a very sensible charm and attractiveness; there is a true nymphlike and divine grace, tact and felicity in all that she says and does.

Outside the group of Apsaras the Hermitess Satyavatie is a slighter but equally attractive figure, venerable, kind, a little impersonal owing to the self-restraint which is her vocation, but with glimpses through it of a fine motherliness and friendliness. The perpetual grace of humanness, which is so eminently Kalidasian, forming the atmosphere of all his plays, seems to deepen with a peculiar beauty around his ascetics, Kanwa, Satyavatie, the learned and unfortunate lady of the Malavica. The "little rogue of a tiring-woman" Nipunika, sly and smooth-tongued, though with no real harm in her beyond a delight in her own slyness and a fine sense of exhilaration in the midst ofa family row, pleasantly brings up the rear of these slighter feminine personalities.

Vikramorvasie: The Characters 1 71

The few masculine sketches are drawn in more unobtrusive outlines and, after Kalidasa's manner, less individualized than his women. The Charioteer and the HUntsmen are indeed hardly distinct figures; they have but a few lines to utter between them and are only remarkable for the shadow of the purple which continual association with Pururavas has cast over their manner of speech. The Chamberlain again, fine as he is in his staid melancholy, his aged fidelity, his wornout and decrepit venerableness and that continual suggestion of the sorrowfulness of grey hairs, is still mainly the fine Kalidasian version of a conventional dramatic figure . The one touch that gives him a personal humanity is the sad resignation of his "It is your will , Sire" when Pururavas, about to depart to asceticism in the forests, commands the investiture of his son. For it is the last and crowning misfortune that the weary old man must bear; the master over whose youth and greatness he has watched, for whose sake he serves in his old age, with the events of whose reign all the memories of his life are bound up, is about to depart and a youthful stranger will sit in his place. With that change all meaning must go out of the old man's existence ; but with a pathetic fidelity of resignation he goes out to do his master' s last bidding uttering his daily formula, - how changed in its newly acquired pathos from the old pompous formality , "It is your will, Sire. "

Manavaka imd Ayus need a larger mention, yet they are less interesting in themselves than for their place, one in the history of Kalidasa' s artistic development, the other among the finest evidences of his delicacy in portraiture and the scrupulous economy, almost miserliness, with which he extracts its utmost artistic utility, possibility, value from each detail of his drama.

The age of childhood, its charm and sportive grace and candour, seems to have had a peculiar charm for Kalidasa's imagination ; there is an exquisite light and freshness of morning and dew about his children ; an added felicity of touch, of easy and radiant truth in his dramatic presentation. There is a child in each of his plays. Vasuluxmie in the Malavica does not even appear on the stage, yet in that urbane and gracious work there is nothing more charm.ing than her two fateful irruptions into the action of the play. They bring up a picture of the laughing, light-hearted and innocent child, which remains with us as vividly as the most carefully-drawn character in the piece. The scene of the child playing with the lion ' s cub in the Shacountala has


the same inevitable chann ; ninety-one poets out of a hundred would have hopelessly bungled it, but in Kalidasa's hands it becomes so admirably lifelike and spontaneous that it seems as natural as if the child were playing with a kitten. In Ayus we find not quite the same beauty, but the same tender and skilful portraiture and the same loving knowledge of child-nature.

Kalidasa's marvellous modesty of dramatic effect and power of reproducing ordinary, hardly observable speech, gesture and action magicalising but not falsifying them saves him from that embarrassment which most poets feel in dealing dramatically with children. Even Shakespeare disappoints us. This great poet with his rich and complex mind usually finds it difficult to attune himself again to the simplicity, irresponsibility and naive chann of childhood.

Arthur, whom the Shakespeare-worshipper would have us regard as a masterpiece, is no real child ; he is too voulu, too eloquent. too much dressed up for pathos and too conscious of the fine sentimental pose he strikes. Children do pose and children do sentimentalise , but they are perfectly naive and unconscious about it ; they pose with sincerity, they sentimentalise with a sort of passionate simplicity, indeed an earnest businesslikeness which is so sincere that it does not even require an audience. The greatest minds have their limitations and Shakespeare' s overabounding wit shut him out from two Paradises, the mind of a child and the heart of a mother. Constance, the pathetic mother, is a fitting pendant to Arthur, the pathetic child, as insincere and falsely drawn a portraiture, as obviously dressed up for the part. Indeed throughout the meagre and mostly unsympathetic list of mothers in Shakespeare's otherwise various and splendid gallery there is not even one in whose speech there is the throbbing of a mother's heart ; the sacred beauty of maternity is touched upon in a phrase or two; but from Shakespeare we expect something more, some perfect and passionate enshrining of the most engrossing and selfless of human affections. And to this there is not even an approach. In this one respect the Indian poet, perhaps from the superior depth and keenness of the domestic . feelings peculiar to his nation, has outstripped his greater English c.ompeer.

Kalidasa like Shakespeare seems to have realised the paternal instinct of tenderness far more strongly than the maternal; hjs works both dramatic and epic give us many powerful and emotional ex-


pressions of the love of father and child to which there are few corresponding outbursts of maternal feeling. Valmiki's Cowshalya has no parallel in Kalidasa. Yet he expresses the true sentiment of motherhood with sweetness and truth if not with passion.

Ayus and Urvasie in this play were certainly not intended for the dramatic picture of mother and child; this mother has abandoned her child to the care of strangers; this child is new to the faces of his parents. Such a situation might easily have been made harsh and unsympathetic but for the fine dramatic tact of the poet which has purified it from everything that might repel and smoothed away all the angles of the incident. But here the circumstances excuse if not justify Urvasie. Acting under hard conditions, she has chosen the lesser of two evils; for by keeping Ayus, she would have lost both her child and Pururavas; by delivering him into wise and tender hands, she has insured his welfare and for her part only anticipated the long parting which the rule of education in ancient India demanded from parents as their sacrifice to the social ideal. Knowing that the child was in good hands she solaces herself with the love of her husband, but it is not from maternal insensibility that she bears quietly the starvation of the mother within her. When he returns to her, there is a wonderful subdued intensity characteristic of her simple and fine nature in the force with which that suppressed passion awakes to life. She approaches her son, wordless, but "her veiled bosom" heaves towards him and is " wet with sacred milk"; in her joy over him she forgets even that impending separation from the husband to avert which she has sacrificed the embrace of his infancy. It is this circumstance, not any words, that testifies to the depth of her maternal feeling; her character forbids her to express it in splendours of poetic emotion such as well spontaneously from the heart of Pururavas. A look, a few ordinary words are all; if it were not for these and the observation of others, we should have to live with her daily before we could realise the depth of feeling behind her silence.

Ayus himself is an admirable bit of dramatic craftsmanship. There is a certain critical age when the growing boy is a child on one side of his nature and a young man on the other, and of all psychological states such periods of transitional unstable equilibrium are. the most difficult to render dramatically without making the character either a confused blur or an ill-joined piece of carpenter's work. Here Kalidasa excels. He has the ready tact of speech gradations, the power of simple and


telling slightness that can alone meet the difficulty. By an unlaboured and inevitable device the necessary materials are provided. The boy comes straight from the wild green and ascetic forest into the luxurious splendours of an Oriental court and the presence of a father and mother whom he has never seen; a more trying situation could not easily be imagined; he inevitably becomes self-conscious, embarrassed, burdened with the necessity of maintaining himself against the oppression of his surroundings. He attempts therefore to disguise his youthful nervousness behind the usual shield of an overdone and formal dignity, a half-unconscious pompousness and an air of playing the man. We are even aware of a slight touch of precocity not unbecoming in one who has been put through the "complete education of a prince" by the mightiest scholar and sage of his time. Confronted with all these new faces making claims upon him to which his past consciousness is an alien , the whole adult side of his nature turns uppermost. But fortunately for our comprehension of his true state of mind, something of the green forest which is his home has come with him in the person of his foster mother, Satyavatie. With her he feels as a child may feel with his mother. When he turns to her or speaks to her, he is again and instinctively in manner, utterance and action the C;hild who ran by her side clutching the skirts of her dress in the free woodland. He speaks like a child, thinks like a child, acts docilely at her bidding like a child. Nothing could be more finely artistic in execution or more charmingly faithful to nature in its conception.

Manavaka on the other hand is an element of weakness rather than of strength. I have already spoken of the progressive attenuation of the traditional buffoon part which keeps pace with Kalidasa's dramatic development. Gautama in the Malavica is a complete and living personality who has much to say to the action of the plot; witty, mischievous, mendacious and irresponsible, he adds to the interest of the play even independently of this functional importance. But in the Urvasie to have made the main action of the plot tum in any way on the buffoon would have been incongruous with the high romantic beauty of the drama and therefore a serious dramatic error. The function of Manavaka is accordingly reduced to that of an interlocutor; he is there because Pururavas must have somebody to confide in and talk with, otherwise his only dramatic purpose is to give rise by his carelessness to the episode of Aushinarie's jealousy and self-


subdual. Nevertheless his presence affects the composite tone of the picture. He is other than the buffoons of the Malavica and Shacountala, far more coarse in the grain, far less talented and high-spirited than Gautama, yet not a mere stupid block like [Madhavya]. He has, along with the stock characteristics of gluttony, ugliness and cowardice, an occasional coarse humour, infertile and broad, and even a real gift of commonsense and rather cynical practicality, to say nothing of that shadow of the purple flung across the speech of all those who associate habitually with Pururavas; he is at the same time low in mind, unable to understand characters higher than his own. His best virtue is perhaps his absence of all pretensions and readiness to make a gibe of himself. Such a figure necessarily tends to set off by its drab colour and squat dimensions the lyric idealism of Pururavas, the radiant charm of Urvasie and the pale loftiness of the Queen. But it is by his place in the picture and not by what he is in himself that he justifies his existence. He does not attract or interest, indeed he at times only just escapes being tiresome. At the same time he lives.

Among all these minor figures who group themselves around the t'vo protagonists and are of purely accessory interest there is one who stands out and compels the eye both by her nobler proportions and her independent personality. Queen Aushinarie has no real claim by any essentiality in her actions to the large space she occupies in the play; her jealousy does not retard and her renunciation sanctifies rather than assists the course of Pururavas' love for Urvasie. The whole episode in which she figures fits more loosely into the architecture of the piece than can be exampled elsewhere in Kalidasa's dramatic workmanship. The interest of her personality justifies the inse,rtion of the episode rather than the episode that justifies the not inconsiderable space devoted to her. The motif of her appearance is the same conventional element of wifely rivalry, the jealousy of the rose-in-bloom against the rose-in-bud, that has formed the whole groundwork of the Malavica. There the groundwork, here its interest is brief and episodical. And yet none of the more elaborated figures in the earlier play, not even Dharinie herself, is as fine"and deep a conception as the wife of Pururavas. Princess of Kashi aDd daughter of the Ushinars, acknowledged by her rival to deserve by right of her noble majesty of fairness the style of Goddess and of Empress, we feel tha t she has a right to resent the preference to her even of an Apsara from


heaven and the completeness of Pururavas' absorption in Urvasie gives a tragic significance to her loss which is not involved ih the lighter loves and jealousies of Vidisha. The character is more profoundly and boldly conceived. The passion of her love strikes deeper than the mere heyday of youth and beauty and the senses in Iravatie as the noble sadness of her self-renunciation moves more powerfully thah the kind and gentle wifeliness of Queen. Dharinie. And in the manner of her delineation there is more incisiveness and restraint with a nobler economy of touch. The rush of her jealousy comes with less of a storm than Iravatie's but it has a fierier and keener edge and it is felt to be the disguise of a deep and mighty love. The passion of that love leaps out in the bitter irony of her self-accusal:

Not yours the guilt, my lord! I am in fault Who force my hated and unwelcome face Upon you.

and again when in the very height of her legitimate resentment she has the sure consciousness of her after-repentance :

And yet the terror Of that remorse I know that I shall feel If I spurn his kindness, frightens me.

Anger for the time sweeps her away, but we are prepared for her repentance and sacrifice in the next act. Even in her anger she has been imperially strong and restrained and much of the poetic force of her renunciation comes from the perfect sweetness, dignity and selfcontrol with which she acts in that scene. The emotion of self-sacrificing love breaks out only once at the half-sneering reproach of the buffoon:

Dull fool! I with the death of my own happiness Woul-d give my husband ease. From this consider How dearly I love him.

Putting gently but sorrowfully away from her the King's half-sincere

Vikramorvasie.' The Characters 177

protestations of abiding love, she goes out of the drama, a pure, devoted and noble nature, clad in gracious white "and sylvanly adorned with flowers, Her raven tresses spangled with young green Of sacred grass"; but the fragrance of her flowers of sacrifice and the mild beauty of the moonlight remain behind her. She does not reappear unless it is in the haste of Urvasie to bring her recovered child to his "elder mother". This haste with its implied fullness of gratitude and affection is one of Kalidasa's careful side touches telling us better than words that in spirit and letter she has fulfilled utterly the vow she made on the moonlit terrace under seal of

The divine wife and husband, Rohinie And Mrigalanchhan named the spotted moon.

The deepening of moral perception, the increase in power and pathos, the greater largeness of drawing and finer emotional strength and restraint show the advance Kalidasa has made in dramatic characterisation. Grace, sweetness, truth to life and character, perfect and delicate workmanship, all that reveals the presence of the artist were his before; but the Urvasie reveals a riper and larger genius widening its scope, raising mightier vans before yet it take its last high and surpassing flight.

The First Hymn of the Rig-veda

MANDALA I, SUKTA I

I. The Fire I pray, the divine vicar of the sacrifice and ordinant of the rite, the Summoner l who most founds the ecstasy.

2. The Fire, desirable to the ancient seers, so even to the new, -may he come to us with the gods.

3. By the Fire one obtains a wealth that increases day by day, glorious and fulI of hero-powers.

4. 0 Fire, the pilgrim sacrifice which thou encompassest on every side, reaches the gods.

5. Fire, priest of the call, the seer-will rich in brilliant inspirations, may he come to us, a god with the gods.

6. 0 Fire, the happy good that thou wilt create for the giver, is that Truth of thee, 0 Angiras.

7. To thee, 0 Fire, day by day, in the dawn and in the dark, we come bringing to thee by the thought our obeisance,

8. To thee, who rulest the sacrifices of the Way, the shining Guardian of the Truth, growing in thy own home.

9. 0 Fire, be easy of access to us like a father to his son; cleave to us for our weal. .

lOr, priest of th e offering.

Selected Hymns

HYMNS OF GOTAMA RAHUGANA

MANDALA I, SUKTA 90

1. Bya straight leading may Varuna lead us and Mitra with the knowledge and Aryaman, in harmony with the gods.

2. For they are the masters of substance who become in us substance of being and they are the illimitable by their vastnesses

' and they maintain the laws of their activity in the universality of forces .

3. May they work out for us peace, immortals for us who are mortals, repelling inimical powers.

4 . May Indra and the Maruts discern for us paths for our easy progress and Pushan and Bhaga, gods desirable.

5. Yea, and ye three 0 Pushan, Vishnu and thou who movest in all motions, make for us our thoughts such as are led by the rays of illumination and full of happiness.

6. Sweetness in the winds of life to him who grows in the Truth, sweet flow for him the rivers of being; sweet for us be its growths.

7. A sweetness be our night and our dawnings, full of sweetness the terrestrial kingdom; a sweetness be to us Heaven, our father .

8. Full of sweetness to us be the Lord of Pleasure, full of sweetness Surya, the luminous; sweet become to us the herds of his rays.

9 . 0 Mitra be a peace in us, peace Varuna, peace in us Aryaman ; peace Indra and Brihaspati, peace Vishnu wide-striding.


MANDALA I, SUKTA 91

I . Thou, 0 Soma, becomest subject to perception by the intelligence; thou leadest us along a path of utter straightness. By thy leadings our fathers, 0 lord of delight, were established in thought and enjoyed ecstasy in the gods.

2. Thou, 0 Soma, by our willings becomest strong in will, thou by our discernments perfect in discernment and universal in knowledge, - thou by our strong abundances strong and abundant in thy might, thou by our illuminations luminous and of puissant vision.

3. Thine now are the activities of Varuna the King, vast and profound, 0 Soma, is thy seat; pure art thou and delightful like Mitra ; thou art powerful like Aryaman, 0 Soma.

4. The seats that are thine in our heaven and on our earth and on the hills of being and in its growths and in its waters, in those, even all of them, do thou, well-minded and free from wrath, receive to thyself, 0 Soma, 0 King, our offerings.

5 . Thou, 0 Soma, art master of Being; King art thou and slayer of the Coverer ; thou a blissful power of will.

6. And thou, 0 Soma, hast control to make us live, that we should not die, - the lord of pleasure who has delight in the song of his affirmation.

7. Thou, 0 Soma, for him who is already great in the Truth and for him who is young in the Truth, establishest Bhaga in joyance that has power for life.

8. Keep us, 0 Soma, 0 King, from all that seeks to become evil in us; let not him come to hurt who is a friend of such an one as thou.

9. 0 Soma, with those thy increasings that are creative of the

Selected Hymns 181

Bliss for the giver, become the preserver of our being.

10. Come to us taking pleasure in this sacrifice, in this Word; be in us, 0 Soma, for our increase.

11. We, 0 Soila, know how to find expression and we increase thee by our Words; then with a gentle kindness enter into us.

12. Become in us, 0 Soma, a distender of luminous movements, a slayer of unfriendly powers, a finder of substance, an increaser of growth, a perfect friend.

13. 0 Soma, take thy delight in our hearts as the Herds in their pastures, as the Man in his own dwelling.

14. He, 0 Soma, who, a mortal has delight in thy friendship, a god's, to him c1eaveth the discerning Seer of things.

IS. Keep us far from the attack that divides, 0 Soma, protect us from the evil; flourish in us, a friend taking the ease of his perfect pleasure.

16. Yea, nourish thyself in us, let strong abundance come together to thee from all things and do thou become in the meetingplace of that plenty.

17. Grow full in us with all thy rays, 0 Soma of the complete ecstasy; be in us full of perfect inspirations that we may grow.

18. Together may they come, thy nourishments, and thy plenties and the abundances of thy strength while thou overcomest the attack that would obstruct; so growing in fullness towards Immortality, 0 Soma, hold for us the highest inspirations in the heaven of the mind.

19. Those thy seats that they effect by sacrifice ,by the offering, may they all be encompassed by the action of the sacrifice; 1

I Apparent ly a corrupt text, requiring the reading yaj;;aIJ for yajnam: as it stands. it can only mean,


distending the movement, pushing ever onward, perfect in energy, slaying all weakness travel forward to the gates of the unconscious, 0 Soma.

20. Soma giveth the fostering Cow, Soma giveth the swift Steed, Soma giveth the active Hero within who hoilleth the seat, who winneth the knowledge, who is fit for the Wisdom, who hath the inspiration of the Father, - these he giveth to the man who divideth for him the offering.

21. Unconquered thou in our battles and art satisfied in the throngs of war, winner of Heaven, winner of the Waters, and our defender in the Crookedness (or of our strength); born in our fullnesses, firmly dwelling in us thou art rich in inspirations and victorious, - by thy raptures , 0 Soma, may we be intoxicated.

22. Thou hast created all these growths of earth, 0 Soma, thou the Waters, thou the Rays ; thou hast extended wide the midworld, - thou by the Light hast smitten apart the covering darkness.

23. With the divine mind in us, thou who art divine, 0 Soma, 0 forceful fighter, war towards our enjoyment of the felicity . Let none extend thee in grossness,2 thou hast power over all energy; do thou have the perceiving vision for gods and men in their seeking of the Light.

MANDALA J, SUKTA 92

I. Lo these are those Dawns that create for us the perception; in the highest realm of the luminous kingdom they brighten the Light perfecting it like violent men who furbish their arms; the ruddy mothers come, the radiant herds .

.. May the sacrificeI'" encompass with bis beings aU of them as the sacrifice" o r "and the sacrificc". - neither of which renderings makes any toler-able sensc.

2 Sayana renders. HLet none torture thee"; but it refers to the extension in the gross and o bscure material of being natural to [illegible phrase] the covering darkness, as opposed to the luminous subtlety of the divine mind which moves towards the higher Light.

Selected Hymns 183

2. Upward have soared the red-active lustres covering heaven ; yoked are the ruddy Rays that set themselves perfectly to the work. The Dawns have made the manifestations of things even as before and their ruddinesses have entered into the reddening Light.

3. For as forces that work the bright Energies give their illumination by entering into all things with an equal self-yoking from the supreme realm and thence they bring energy to the right doer, the right giver (who perfectly effects his aims) ; yea, a ll things here they bring to the sacrificer who expresses the So ma bliss.

4 . Like a dancing-girl she lays bare her clear forms of beauty, like a Paramour she opens her breast casting aside its defences creating Light for the whole world. The radiant herds have left their pen; Dawn has uncovered herself of her robe of darkness.

5. Reddening, the illumination of her has appeared in front , it spreads and assails the Black Dense. They adorn her body as if sunshine in the things of the knowledge, - the Daughter of Heaven has entered into the varied Lustre.

6 . We have crossed over to the other side of this darkness a nd Dawn widening makes her revelations of Light ; she smiles and shines wide as joy towards beauty; she manifests in a front of fairness that the mind may be glad and perfect.

7 . Luminous guide to true thinkings, the Daughter of Heaven has been affirmed in praise by the Gotamas (the men of ligh t). Thou supportest in us plentifulnesses rich in creations and energies, perceptively received in the nervous movements, led by the rays of illumination. •

8. 0 Dawn, may I enjoy a victorious and energetic felicity; delivered from the Enemy, perceptively received in the nervous powers, thou who shin est wide by an inspiration perfect in


activity giving birth to richnesses, - 0 blissful one, to a plenty vast.

9. Divine she beholds all the worlds, wide shines l her vision and she gazes straight at things; she awakens every living soul for action and finds the Word for all that aspires to mind.

10. Again and again is she born, she, the Ancient Goddess, and she glorifies one equal form. She as the slayer and cleaver of the Animal, diminishes its strength and in her deity wears away the being of the Mortal.

II. She has awakened opening wide the very ends of Heaven and continually she pushes away her sister Night diminishing our mortal periods. Paramour of the Sun, she has her light from her lover's eye of vision.

12. Varied in light and richly enjoying, it is as if she widens her animal Powers and wide she distends like a sea that breaks its way and she limits not our divine activities when she is seen in our perceptions by the rays of the Sun of illumination.

13. 0 Dawn energy of plenty, bring to us that varied richness whereby we can found our creation and our extending.

14. Here and today, 0 Dawn of the radiant herds, Dawn of the forceful steeds, Dawn of the wide illumination, shine out upon us with ecstasy, 0 Lady of the Truths.

15. 0 Dawn, energy of the plenty, yoke today thy steeds of red activity, then bring to us all enjoyable things.

16. Ye, O bounteous Ashwins, drivers of the Steed, with one mind direct yO'Ur downward car along the path of the luminous rays, the path of the golden Light.

I Or illumines

Selected Hymns 185

17. Ye who have made for the creature the Light of heaven thus a splendour, carry force to us, ye, 0 Ashwins.

18. Twin bounteous gods with your luminous movements who create the bliss, you may those steeds that are awakened by the Dawn bring to the drinking of the wine of Bliss.

Letter to "The Hindu"

I am obliged to seek the protection of publicity against attempts that are being made to prejudice my name and reputation even in my retirement at Pondicherry. A number of individuals have suddenly begun to make their appearance here to whom my presence seems to be the principal attraction. One of these gems heralded his advent by a letter in which he regretted that the Police had refused to pay his expenses to Pondicherry, but informed me that in spite of this scurvy treatment he was pursuing his pilgrimage to me "jumping from station to station" without a ticket. Since his arrival he has be~ been making scenes in the streets, collecting small crowds, shouting Bande Mataram, showing portraits of myself and other Nationalists along with copies of the Geneva Bande Mataram and the Indian Sociologist as credentials, naming men of advanced views as his "gurus", professing to possess the Manicktola bomb-formula, offering to kill to order all who may be obnoxious for private or public reasons to any Swadeshist and informing everyone, but especially French gendarmes, that he has come to Pondicherry to massacre Europeans. The man seems to be a remarkable linguist, conversing in aU the languages of Southern India and some of the North as well as in English and French. He has made three attempts to force or steal his way into my house, once disguised as a Hindustani and professing to be Mr. Tilak's durwan. He employs his spare time, when not employed in these antics for which he claims to have my sanction, in watching trains for certain Police-agents as an amateur detective. I take him for a dismissed police spy trying to storm his way back into the kingdom of heaven. Extravagant and barefaced as are this scoundrel's tactics, I mention them because he is one of a class, some of whom are quieter but more dangerous. I hear also that there are some young men without ostensible means of livelihood, who go about Madras figuring as my shishyas, instructed by me to undertake this or that activity, and request people to pay money for work or for my maintenance. After this letter I hope they will lose this easy. source ofincome. I have authorised no such youths to collect money on my behalf and have directed none to undertake any political activity of any description. Finally I find myself besieged by devotees who insist on seeing me whether I will or not. They have

L etter to " The Hindu " 187

crossed all India to see me - from Karachi's waters, from the rivers of the Punjab, whence do they not come? They only wish to stand at a distance and get mukti by gazing on my face ; or they will sit at my feet, live with me wherever I am or follow me to whatever lands. They clamber on to my windows to see me or loiter and write letters from neighbouring Police stations. I wish to inform all future pilgrims of the kind that their journey will be in vain and to request those to whom they may give reports of myself and my imaginary conversations, to disbelieve entirely whatever they may say. I am living in entire retirement and see none but a few local friends and the few gentlemen of position who care to see me when they come to Pondicherry. I have written thus at length in order to safeguard myself against the deliberate manufacture or mistaken growth of " evidence" against me, e .g. such as the statement in the Nasik case that I was " maintained" by the Mitra Mela. I need hardly tell my countrymen that I have never -" been a paid agitator, still less a " maintained" revolutionist, but one whom even hostile Mahatmas admit to be without any pecuniary or other axe to grind. Nor have I ever received any payment for any political work except occasional payments for contributions to the Calcutta Bande Mataram while I was on its staff.

23 February 1911

Notes on the Texts

On Poetical Genius . . This long paragraph was written around the tum of the century as part of the fiTst section ("Its Authenticity") of Kalidasa 's "Seasons ". It was omitted by Sri Aurobindo when he published the essay in the Karmayogin in 1909. In Sri Aurobindo's manuscript this passage follows the sentence "This imperfection ... self·expression", coming near the end of the first paragraph of the. essay (SABCL Volume 3, p. 250).

Vikramorvasie: The Characters. These pages constitute a thoroughly revised version of what is published in SABCL Volume 3, pp. 263·301, as Kalidasa 's Characters. In the present version several passages omitted from the earlier version have been included, the order of the material has been significantly changed and many correc· tions of words and punctuation have been made. Sri Aurobindo wrote these essays on the characters in Kalidasa's drama Vikranlorvasie shortly after finishing his translation of the play around 1900. They were never prepared by him for publication and they remain in a rather rough state in his manuscript notebooks. Essentially there are four essays, one on Pururavas (the hero), one on Urvasie (the heroine), o ne on the Apsaras (of whom Urvasie is one) a nd one on the various minor characters. The essay on Pururavas is complete in one piece ; but the others are formed of separate passages that have had to be put together editorially. In some cases Sri Aurobindo left sufficient indications of his intentions to make the assemblage certain; in others the editors have been forced to make decisions about the order of the passages. The state of the manuscripts has necessitated other editorial operations, such as the addition of paragraph indentations, etc.

In the Gardens of Vidisha or Malavica and the King. This is Sri Aurobindo's fair copy of his translation of the first act of Kalidasa's drama Miilavikiignimitra. An incomplete rough draft of this translation has already been published in SABeL Volume 8, pp. 137·54.

The First Hymn of the Rig-veda. We published in our last issue what we thought to be "Sri Aurobindo's last known rendering" of Rig·veda 1.1. The present trans· lation, found since then, is apparently later, dating from the early 1940s.

Selected Hymns. These translations of Rig·veda 1.90·92 were done on 23 and 24 May 1914.

Letter to the Hindu. This letter was published in The Hindu (Madras) on 24 Feb· rua ry 1911 , below this heading: "Babu Aurobindo Ghose writes us from 42, Rue de Pavilion, Pondicherry, under date the 23rd instant [23 February 1911]."

GLOSSARY

Words already listed in the G lossary to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Libra ry have not been included.

durwan (Hindi , properly daravan) , porter, gate-keeper (of a king) . gendarme (French), a policeman. genus irrilabile valum (Latin) , the irritable race of poets. [Horace. Epistles 2.2.10]

On Editing Sri Aurobindo (Continued from the issue of April 1981 )

Spot verification, such as was described in the last issue, can be of much use in purging a printed text of typographical and editorial corruptions. But if one's aim is to produce a text that is as near perfect as the materials will allow, spot verification is not sufficient. Numerous errors will always escape the notice of even the most careful reader. The only way to arrive at an ideal text is to examine and make use of each available version of a work. All variants must be noted and evaluated from the point of view of the textual critic. He must decide which readings a're to be printed as parts of the text and which relegated to the critical apparatus (notes, tables etc.). At the same time doubtful, suspicious or corrupt readings must be located and, if necessary. emended. In this wayan eclectic text that represents the author's intentions better than any existing text - a critical edition - will be established. An attempt is being made to apply this procedure to the text of Sri Aurobindo's epic Savirri.' A Legend and a Symbol.

The Revision of Part One of Savitri

Sri Aurobindo worked on Savirri over a thirty-fo ur year period, from 1916 to 1950. 1 In its first dozen or so drafts the work does not exceed fifty handwritten pages. During the thirties the first of this narrative poem's "cantos" was developed into three "books" consisting eac h of many cantos. By 1944 a draft of the first "part" of the poem consisting of three books (twenty-four cantos) had been completed. This draft, handwritten by Sri Aurobindo in two columns on standard-size bond paper, was then revised. Many of the extensive alterations were written by Sri Aurobindo. but a good number were set down at his dic tation by his disciple Nirodbaran. Some of the revision is on the double-co lumn manuscript ; longer passages were written on small sheet s of a "chit-pad H

• which were later pinned to the manuscript, or else were written in separate notebooks.

The work of revision did not stop here. The entire first part was now hand transcribed by Nirodbaran into a 393-page ledger. This transcription was then read out to Sri Aurobindo and revised a t his dictation . After this a typed copy incorporating the new revision was made. This was revised in its turn ; sometimes two stages (top an d ca rbo n copies) or even three stages of revi sio n exist.

At this point, in the year 1946, sepa rate cantos began to be printed. They ap-

I The ea rliest s urviving draft of Savitri is dated .. August 8th 9 th/ 19 1 6". The present writer believes tha t this i!!o the first draft of the poem. A companion o f S ri Aurobindo's at Baroda. Dinendra Kumar Roy, has writte n that Sii Aurobindo was work ing on a poem dc:aling with the legend o fSa vitri and Satya van around 1900. No trace of such a poem exists, despite the fact that a great number of Sri Aurobindo's wr itings from the Baroda period have survived. It may be that the poem Dinendra Kuma r saw was Love and Death. " 'r illen in 1899. The Ruru-Pramadvara legend treated in this poem has many simi larities to the SavitriSatyavan legend. In any case. Sri Aurobindo a lmos t certa inly wrote the Savitri draft of 1916 without any reference to an earlier version. This makes it practically, eOven if not abso lute ly, the first draft of a new poem.

On Editing Sri Aurobindo 191 . peared either in journals published from Calcutta or Bombay by groups connected with the Ashram, or in small fascicles printed by the Ashram press. The proofs of these journal-instalments or fascicles were read out to Sri Aurobindo and corrected by him. He also heard and corrected the printed text of each of the cantos after it was published. Finally, in 1950, the whole of the first part was printed in book form by the Ashram press. The proofs of this first edition were read to Sri Aurobindo . and he made some changes and additions. No other edition of Savitri was issued during Sri Aurobindo's lifetime.

The double-column handwritten manuscript of Part One of Savitri is sometimes called its "final version". It is indeed the last manuscript written by the author, but it can hardly be considered final, since it lacks some 1500 of the approximately 12,000 lines of the full text - -more than twelve per cent. The various manuscripts which came after the double-column version contain, in addition to the new lines. innumerable changes of words and punctuation in existing lines. There are no less than six manuscripts (more accurately, stages of development) between the handwritten version and the first edition of 1950. These have been alphabetically identified as follows:

A - Handwritten and hand-revised double-column draft B - Lengthier additions to (A) handwritten by Sri Aurobindo 'o r his scribe

on chit-pad sheets or in separate notebooks C - Scribal transcription of (A) + (B), handwritten in a ledger and hand-

corrected D - Typed copy (or typed copies, designated D" D 2 ..• ) of (C) E - Proofs of (F) F - Fascicles or journal-instalments consisting of one or more cantos, revised

by hand G - Proofs of the 1950 edition

The corrected proofs (E and G) have not survived; all the other stages of the revision are preserved in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives.

The Making of a Critical Edition

How is an editor wishing to prepare a critical text of Savitr; to deal with this material? But first , why should it be necessary to prepare a new text , "critical" or otherwise, of such a well-established work? The entire first part of Savilri was seen through the press by Sri Aurobindo. Could any new text be more ideal than the one he himself approved?

We have seen that an author is not responsible for every point , indeed not even for every word that is printed as his. He certainly cannot be held responsible for typographical errors ~ even if he was given an opportunity to correct them. Similarly he is not responsible for errors of transcription made by cppyists of his manuscript, nor for unnecessary editorial "improvements". The principal task of the editor of a critical text is to remove all such "' transmission erl-ors". To find them, he must backtrack from the printed text to the author's manuscript, and check every operation in which anyone but the author has had a hand. He must ensure that a ll transitions were made without error" that nothing falsifying the author"s intention :-.


has slipped into the text. In the development of Part One of Savitri there are two principal stages where

errors of transmission might have occurred. These are the scribal transcription (Stage C) and the typed transcription (Stage D). Errors also might have taken place at any other point where revisions were transferred from one stage to another, as between Stage D and Stage E. Indeed human error was possible at every point where revisions were written down scribally, in other words, at every stage A to G.

In fact in its passage through its various stages very few significant errors have entered into the text of Savitri. But given the importance of the poem to numerous readers today, and the more numerous readers of the future, no pains taken to purify it could be considered useless. •

But how is one to locate a few "needle"-sized errors in a "haystack" formed by thousands of pages of handwritten, typed and printed manuscripts? The textual editor' s work may be broken down here, as always, into the stages mentioned in the first instalment of this essay: inventory, choice of copy-text, collation, and emendation. A great deal of time is needed to carry out all these operations thoroughly, but practical considerations have a determining effect on how much time can be given. The ideal means of collation of the manuscripts of Part One of Savitri would be to read each stage of the poem against the one that precedes it - B against A, C against B, etc. On a rough estimate, for two people working three hours weekly, one cycle of such a collation would take six years. And at least three cycles would be needed to ensure a reasonable standard of perfection. Collation is, as Gaskell says, "An appallingly laborious process, and is one which ... is liable to a good deal of error." For large institutions "it is no longer necessary to collate unaided, since copies (or photocopies) can be compared mechanically. '" But collating machines are prohibitively expensive. A small archives is obliged to look for a shortcut.

What the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives has done in the case of Part One of Savitri is to read the earliest stage (Sri Aurobindo's handwritten manuscript) against the latest (the edition of 1972). When any differences between these two versions are noted, the source of the change or addition is sought among the eight stages that intervene, viz. , Stages B-G and the printed editions of 1950 and 1954. If the transmission of the text has been carried out correctly all the way through, no irregularities will be noticed. If, however, a mistake of copying, typing or composing has taken place, the discrepancy will be visible. When an error has been identified and its source discovered. the text can be changed to accord with the correct reading. This shortcut method is obviously not so foolproof as a complete collation. It is not adequate to discover a deliberate authorial change made after Stage A that was not carried over to subsequent stages. A special search for such missed changes would have to be made. Fortunately this would not be difficult, and once done could be considered sufficiently complete, since deliberate authorial changes stand out clearly from fair copies (Stage C) and typed and printed manuscripts (Stages D-F).

E,:,amples from Part One, Canto One of Savitri

A few examples from the first canto of Savitri will make the editorial process

I Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Biblio[(raphy (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1972), p. 374.

On Editing Sri Aurobindo 193

clear. (All book references are to the Centenary Edition.) On page 4, line 5, the following line occurs:

An instant's visitor the godhead shone:

In manuscript A the line ends with a full,:;top . The colon was introduced in transcript C. A close examination of manuscript A shows the colon to be the result not of revision, but of faulty copying. There are indeed two dots at the end of the line; but one of these is the dot of an "i" in the line below. Seen together the two dots look like a colon. and were copied as such in C. This tiny error was not noticed by Sri Aurobindo when transcript C was read out to him. The colon is not, however, what he wrote. In the critical edition it will be replaced by a full stop.

In the whole of Canto One only ten suspected errors of transcription have been found . Of these, seven involve, like the first example, accidentals - minor matters of punctuation ",nd capitalisation. Only three substantive errors have turned up. One occurs in a line printed on page 7 of the Centenary Edition (line 32).

And from its deep chasms welled a dire return,

The line is first written in manuscript B. This manuscript, it must be said, is practically illegible. In spite of this Sri Aurobindo's scribe was able to copy it almost without mistake. Here, however, Nirodbaran nodded. Sri Aurobindo did not write "deep", but Hdim". The error, introduced in transcript C, was never removed. "Dim" will replace "deep" in the critical edition.

Similar to this mistake is a scribal miscopying of "to" for "of" in line 7, page 5. The third substantive error is the only one of great significance. It is one of the

rare cases where a copyist has missed an entire line. In manuscript B Sri Aurobindo wrote:

Her self and all she was she had lent to men, Hoping her greater being to implant And in their body's lives acclimatise That heaven might native grow on mortal soil.

The third line was not copied in transcript C (see p. 7, lines 7ft). This is especially unfortunate, since one might suppose that Sri Aurobindo would have wanted to revise the line when it was read back to him. He often retouched the details of a line in the stage immediately following its first writing. Here he was given no chance to revise, and the line must be reinstated as originally written.

The problem of editorial form is the last problem that the textual critic must face. How is he to present the text and the variant readings of a critical edition? Variants can either be given as footnotes, or listed at the back of the book. The second alternative, which allows for an uncluttered and easy-to-read "clear text" , is preferable for a work not intended principally for scholars.

Documents In the Life of Sri Aurobindo

THE ALIPORE BOMB TRIAL - ARREST AND INVESTIGATION

HOME DEPARTMENT REpORT ON THE ARRESTS

I have the honour to submit a report describing the course of events prior and subsequent to the outrage at Muzaffarpur , which occurred at about 8-30 P.". on the night of the 30th April 1908, so far as they affected the Calcutta Police. Mr. Plowden received certain information in connection with the enquiry into the Midnapore outrage on His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor's train. This information was confidentially communicated to me by the Chief Secretary ; but I was requested to take no action in Calcutta . as it was feared that the conspirators might take alarm and fe-form at another centre which would not be known. and would therefore presumably be the more dangerous. I consented of course to this arrangement in the public interest, although the centres of intrigue and conspiracy lay in Calcutta as well as in Midnapore , Nadia, Jessore, and other places. In the course of conversation I received hints from the Chief Secretary and from the Deputy InspectorGeneral of Police from time to time that further information was coming in and that certain persons were being watched. The Chandernagore outrage occurred on the 14th April 1908. I received information of this from the Maire, Mons. Tardival, on the 15th April 1908, and at his request I sent up to Chandernagore two officers to assist the French Police. Mr. Plowden then informed me that he believed he had reliable information as to the culprits. I withdrew the Calcutta Police officers engaged, and the matter was taken up by the Bengal Criminal Intelligence Department officers. Mr. Morshead, Mr. Plowden, and I had a consultation on or about the 20th April 1908; but the Officiating Inspector-General and Mr. Plowden still pressed the fact that they were not prepared to search houses in Calcutta, the suburbs of Calcutta, and in other districts. Mr. Plowden and myself, however, met the Governor of Pondicherry , the Administrateur de Chandernagore, and the Maire , Mons. Tardival , at the Howrah station on the 21st April , and promised to render all assistance. Mr. Plowden arranged to send for the bomb thrown into Mons. Tardival's house and for its analysis by Major Black. Chemical Examiner to Government. I have not seen this report, but I understand picric acid and other high explosives were found in the bomb. )

2. On the 20th April Deputy Superintendent Rai Ramsadoy Mukharji Bahadur saw me, and informed me that he had received information that two persons had left Calcutta for the purpose of killing Mr. Kingsford at Muzaffarpur. He was unable to say whetper these persons were Bengalis, their description or age; but it was surmised that they were Bengalis and youths. One of the Deputy Superintendent's officers waS at once sent to the District Superintendent of Poi ice, Muzatfarpur, with a letter informing him of the facts so far as known and recommending search and precautions.

3. I received infonnation by telegram at about 6 A.M. on the morning of the 1st

Plate I Sri Aurobindo on the eve of his arrest (5 April 1908) (detail from a group photograph)

Plate 2

Bari ndra K . Ghose Ullaskar Out!

The leaders

Upendranath Bannerjee Hem Chandra Das

Plate 3 A " rogues' gallery" of revolutionaries

Indubhusan R oy Sudhir Kuma r Sarkar Sailendra Nath Bose

Birendra Nath Ghosh Hri sh ikes h Ka njil a l Kri shna Jiban Sanyal

Bibhuti Bhusa n Sarkar Bijoy Kumar N a g Abinash Bhattacharya

•• ' ... ,) f

-~ ~t,(":: - ~ - ~ -.2.!J~ __ ._

\

Plale 4 The "sweets lelter"

Documents in the Life of Sri Aurobindo 195

May 1908 from the Superintendent of Police, Muzaffarpur, that a bomb, evidently intended for Mr. Kingsford, had been thrown at the wrong carriage, killing one lady and dangerously wounding the other. The offer of Rs. 5,000 reward was also telegraphed and a very rough description of the Bengali lads suspected , who were said to have absconded. I went over with the telegrams to Mr. Plowden and saw him: wired to the Chief Secretary that we had heard of the outrage and were in consultation as to action to be taken; wired Muzaffarpur to intimate further details in cipher. I saw Mr. Dring, the Agent, East Indian Railway, and arranged that he should send a European to Lillooa to supervise all tickets taken for Calcutta: he also received what description of the offenders we could give. I deputed officers to Howrah and Sealdah, and telephoned to the Assistant Inspector-General, Howrah. Mr. Plowden arranged for further watching officers up the line through the Superintendents of the Railway Police. A consultation was held by Mr. Plowden, the Deputy Superintendent of the Criminal Intelligence Department, Inspector P.e. Biswas, and myself. Mr. Plowden wished, if possible, to postpone searching the centres of the conspiracy for three days, as some of these centres were in Midnapore or elsewhere. I was personally averse to this. In the end the Empire newspaper got word, though direct from Muzaffarpur, to the effect that it was known there that two boys had been followed from Calcutta to Muzaffarpur. The Editor was good enough to suppress this fact in the evening issue , but it finally decided us that the searches in Calcutta and the suburbs of Calcutta must be made at once and the Midnapore searches must be directed by wire and left to take their chance. The same afternoon the police officer deputed to Muzaffarpur returned from Muzaffarpur with a letter from Mr. Armstrong, the Superintendent of Police, saying that the men had not, he thought, arrived in Muzaffarpur. This Criminal Intelligence Department officer had left Muzaffarpur only some six hours prior to the outrage.

4. This decision having been come to, no tim£. was lost. I with Mr. Plowden , the Deputy Superintendent, Criminal Intelligence Department, and Inspector P.e. Biswas drove at about 5 P .M. to the Court where the Officiating Chief Presidency Magistrate, Mr. Thornhill, had waited on a telephone message to hear our application. Search warrants were taken out on the sworn testimony of Inspector P.C. Biswas for the following houses:-

(I) 32, Muraripooker Road, Manicktollah Garden, suburbs of Calcutta. (This was an oversight, as the Chief Presidency Magistrate's warrant does not run in the suburbs. The search was, however. legal without warrant for the arrest of the accused and the discovery of the arms and ammunition.)

(2) IS, Gopi Mohan Dutt's Lane, Shampooker, Calcutta. (3) 134, Harrison Road, Colootollah, Calcutta. (4) 30-2, Harrison Road, Calcutta. (5) 48, Grey Street, Calcutta. (6) 38-4, Raja Nobo Kissen Street, Shampooker, Calcutt'a. (7) 4 , Harrison Road , Muchipara, Calcutta. (8) 23 , Scott's Lane, Muchipara , Calcutta.

At 7 P.M. Mr. Plowden and I collected at 2 , Kyd Street , a number of Police officers of the Bengal and Calcutta Police. The warrants were distributed among


them, as detailed in Form A attached ;! and arrangements were made as to where these officers were to meet, the force of European and other Police that should accompany each search party, where they should be picked up, where the prisoners were to be placed after arrest , and where the property when found was to be lodged. The searches were to be simultaneously made at 5 A.M. at each of the places named in the warrants. Mr. Superintendent Haultain had charge of the European Sergeants and the Constables at Lall Bazar who were to accompany each party, and made arrangements quietly during the evening to collect 30 ticca gharries there. He did his part of the mobilization effectively . The searches, as arranged, took place without any hitch; and the result of these searches, as shown in the search lists attached, marked B - there are seven of these - was eminently successful and reflects credit both on the Police who collected the information and on those who conducted the searches. The houses were in every instance completely taken by surprise. The most important finds were at 134, Harrison Road, where 3 boxes and a bag containing 6 live bombs, a large quantity of dynamite detonators, fuses and about 400 rounds of rifle and revolver ammunition were found; and at the garden of Arabindo Ghosh and his brothers at Muraripooker, Manicktollah, in the suburbs of Calcutta, where 3 rifles, 2 double-barrel guns, 9 revolvers, 3 bombs and a quantity of explosives were found in a house, buried in the garden and in a temporary mat shed in the grounds of the house.

5. Twenty-nine arrests in all were made that night , as detailed in the attached list, marked C . One further arrest was made on the 3rd May 1908 of one Din Dayal Bose. His name is shown last in the lis t marked C , with other details.

3rd May 1908. - Four of the prisoners made statements to the Police incriminating themselves as well as other members of the conspiracy.2 Their names are (I) Barindra Kumar Ghose, (2) Ullaskar Dutta, (3) Upendra Nath Banerjee, (4) Indoo Bhusan Roy, (5) Bibhuti Bhusan Sircar. Their statements were recorded in writing by the Police.

8 a.m. - The Commissioner of Police interviewed all the accused persons in the Lall Bazar lock-up.

3.30 p.m. - Din Dayal Bose, another member of the conspiracy, was arrested at the Sham Bazar Tramway Depot , where he was employed as a clerk. His house at 80 , College Street , was searched , and some incriminating letters were found.

4th May 1908. - Thirty prisoners were placed before the Commissioner of Police, who questioned each prisoner individually; and in compliance with the request of the Deputy Inspector-General of Crime, who stated that he was not then in a position to formulate charges a~inst the conspirators arrested in the Manicktollah Garden , 14 of these persons, as shown in Form C , were sent to the District Magistrate, Alipore , for disposal under section 54, Criminal Procedure Code. Four arrested persons, viz., the 2 garden malis and 2 lads who entered the garden after the

1 This and the items referred to below as B. C and 0 were not reproduced in the printed Home Department report.

2 Five names are me ntio ned in the nex t sentence. Eventually five mo re confessed : Sudhir Sa rka . , Biren Ghose. Hrishikesh Kanjilal . Kristo Jiban Sanyal and the future info rmer. Narendra N ath Goswami . Photographs of eight of the ten appear in Plates 2 and 3.

Documents in the Life of S"i Aurobindo 197

search and were arrested on suspicion , were released on bail , as there was no evidence of their complicity in the conspiracy. The District Magistrate of Alipore had , on a communication from myself, expressed a wish that the cases of these persons should not be sent , as would be usual , to the Sealdah Court, but should be forwarded to him for disposal.

6 . The following accused who were placed before the Distric t Magistrate of Alipore made statements before him implicating themselves and others :

(I) Barindra Kumar Ghose. (2) Indoo Bhusan Roy. (3) Ullaskar Dutta . (4) Upendra Nath Banerjee. (5) Bibhuti Bhusan Sircar.

I have not got copies of these statements ; they are with the Deputy InspectorGeneral, Crime, in whose hands, owing to the ramifications of the conspiracy throughout Bengal, I have entirely left the prosecution of these members.

7. 5th May 1908. - The following officials arrived in Calcutta from Simla and Darjeeling:-

(I) Mr. Stevenson Moore. (2) Major Smallwood (from Allahabad).

(3) Mr. Morshead } from Darjeeling. (4) Mr. Denham

A conference was held , at which it was arranged that Major Smallwood should examine the explosives, bombs, etc., at the Park Street police-station , Mr. Superintendent Bowen and Inspector Chamberlain assisting. Major Black, Chemical Examiner to Government, further personally assisted Major Smallwood, who speaks in high terms of the gratuitious and valuable help thus given by this officer. A copy of Major Smallwood's report is attached , marked D .

8. To Mr. Denham was entrusted the examination of the whole of the correspondence, papers, books, etc. , seized. Mr. Macrae. Deputy Commissioner, Port Police, was detailed to supervise a further and careful search of the Manicktollah Garden, including the tanks. I sanctioned the utilization of one of the Fire Brigade steam engines to pump out two of these tanks ; Chief Engineer Fulthorpe was assisted by Mr. Haultain and the Fire Brigade staff. Mr. Macrae emptied two tanks and thoroughly dug up the entire garden with bands of coolies. An old horse pistol only was found in one of the tanks, but some pieces of paper of some importance were found showing the vows taken by the occupants of the garden, etc. These with all other papers and documents were made over to Mr. Denham. Although this fufther search proved infructuous , it was undoubtedly essential. The plan-maker was directed to prepare plans of the Manicktollah Garden and 134, Harrison Road. It was decided that the further search of this garden should not be made until the plan of the first search was completed. Meanwhile an armed guard and European Sergeants were placed on duty over the premises. Inspector Percy proceeded to photograph objects of interest at the Manicktollah Garden. Copies attached marked E.

9. J 0 a.m. - The 12 prisoners who had been remanded for further enquiry on the 4th instant were again placed before the Commissioner of Police. Of these


12 prisoners. 5 were arrested at 134, Harrison Road , in connection with the seizure of bombs, etc. Their names are -

(I) Nogendra Nath Gupta. (2) Dharani Nath Gupta. (3) Ashokh Chundra Nundy. (4) Bijoy Ratna Sen Gupta. (5) Moti Lal Bose.

The remaining 7 prisoners were arrested by the Police in connection with the other search warrants taken out on the 1st instant. Their names are

(6) Nirapado Roy. (7) Kanai-Lal Dutta. (8) Arabindo Ghose. (9) Abinash Chundra Bhuttacharjee.

(10) Soilendra Nath Bose. (II) Hem Chandra Das. (12) Din Dayal Bose.

Nos. I to 5 arrested at 134, Harrison Road , and Ullaskar Dutta were placed by order o f the Commissioner of Police before the Chief Presidency Magistrate for trial under sections 19 (j) and 20 of the Arms Act. Prisoners Nos. 6 to 12 were forwarded by the Commissioner of Police to the Chief Presidency Magistrate , Calcutta , with a request that they should be transferred to the Court of the District Magistrate, Alipore , for trial under sections 143 , 144, 150, 157, 121 , 121A , 122 and 124, India n Pena l Code.

This was done. The conduct of this case in Court was handed over to the Inspector-General of Police who had the evidence of conspiracy.

Arabindo Ghose was further charged under sections 19 and 20 of the Arms Act. Up to this date there are thus 13 +7~20 prisoners arrested in Calcutta and the suburbs before the Alipore Magistrate and 6 prisoners before the Chief Presidency Magistrate, Calcutta.

10. I may add that copies of the search lists, the form showing prisoners arrested and arresting officers, with full details of the houses searched and the results, have been made over from day to day as the investigation progressed to the Director, Criminal Intelligence. Mr. Stevenson Moore has also taken voluminous notes from Mr. Denham, who is examining the mass of correspondence, books and pamphlets the Police have seized.

II. I have personally not yet examined Mr. Denham's notes on the correspondence seized both in Calcutta and elsewhere. He will doubtless submit a full report as to the result of his enquiries when they are completed.

Lefler F.L. Hallida .... Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, 16 May 1908

2

" MEM ORANDUM OF THE DISCOVERJES MADE IN CALCUTfA CONCERNING THE

ANARCHlST SoaETY OF BARJNDRA KUMAR GHOSE"

Ever since the. attempt made to blow up the Lieutena nt-Governor's special


train near Kharagpur last December, it was known that the question of assassinating Government officials by means of bombs was being freely discussed by a section of the extremist agitators, chiefly men connected with the Yugantar , Sandhya, and Navasakti newspapers, and it was more than suspected that practical steps were being taken to carry out these designs. The conspirators. however, showed great caution and suspicion of outsiders, and the information which could be obtained about them was of a vague and apparently untrustworthy character. More recently, however, the information had taken a more definite shape and the police had actually been able to warn the authorities at Muzaffarpur that it was believed that emissaries had been sent to that station to attempt the assassination of Mr. Kingsford. When news was received of the outrage at Muzaffarpur. it was decided to search the premises which were supposed to be used by the conspirators, and eight separate parties were detailed for this duty in the early morning of May 2nd.

Places searched. - Of the eight places searched the most important were -1. A garden house in Maniktolla. 2. A so-called pharmacy at 134, Harrison Road. 3. The Navasakri ne~spaper office. 4. A house in Scott's Lane. 5. A house in Bagh Bazaar.

The garden house in Maniktolla, which has been found to belong jointly to Arbindo Ghose of the Bonde Mararam, his brother Barindra, who was the head of the anarchist gang, and two other brothers, is in a secluded quarter of the suburb. The house itself is dilapidated and the surrounding grounds neglected and overgown with trees and shrubs; in the garden there are two tanks of stagnant water.

The premises were surrounded in the early hours of the morning of May 2nd and the raid was apparently entirely unexpected, as the leader of the gang and about a dozen members were found within and arrested. Buried underground at various places in the garden were found a few guns and sporting rifles and about eight revolvers, as well as a forge and other machinery for making bombs, and large quantities of acids for preparing explosives. There was also one finished bomb ready for use, besides large quantities of picric acid already prepared, dynamite cartridges, and 25 Ibs. of dynamite. In addition there was a large amount of printed matter and correspondence which has not yet been completely examined; it included books upon explosives and military training. Marks of revolver bullets on targets of whitewash on the trees of the garden showed that revolver practice was also indulged in.

The search in short that the garden was a regular school for practical instruction in revolutionary methods and in the manufacture of explosives, and a text-book was found which was compiled apparently in imitation of similar books which are used by European anarchists.

No. 134:Harrison Road is a small shop separated only by a partition from a genuine chemist's shop next door, and it had been open for about two months in a similar character. In the outer room a few bottles of medicine were kept on the shelves, but in the inner room there was large stock of explosives, six large bombs ready for use, and a quantity of electrical and chemical apparatus. Some of the explosives were kept in steel trunks and in one of these there was a picture from a London illustrated weekly paper of the attempted assassination of the King and Queen of Spain on their wedding day, on the back of which there was a sketch of the bomb


used on that occasion. In another box was found a mass of correspondence and some anarchist literature.

This shop appears to have been used as a store-house for explosives and completed bombs, while the work of manufacturing the various infernal machines was carried on in the Maniktolla garden. One of the men arrested, however, informed the police that the explosives, etc., found in the shop were deposited by him there in three trunks and a canvas bag, four or five days before the search was made, for safe custody, as the gang thought the police were after them.

General description of bombs used. - Of the bombs found eight were loaded and six unloaded. The larger bombs are about the size of a cricket ball with projecting spikes all round; it seems probable that these spikes are in contact with a fulminate inside so as to explode the bomb on percussion. The result of the expert examination of the bombs and explosives has not yet been received, but it appears that the main charges were of dynamite, and picric acid was used for the fuses.

Persons arrested. - The following persons were arrested in the garden at Maniktoll a on May 2nd. It appears that except the two gardeners they were all members of the secret society, and the approximate date of their initiation is given according to the statement of Upendra Nath Banneriji (no. 14):-

I. Barindra Kumar Ghose (Original member, July 1907). 2. Shisir Kumar Ghose (Original member, July 1907). 3. Bibhuti Bhusan Sarkar (Original member, July 1907). 4. Nalini Kanta Gupta (February 1908). 5. Bejoy Kumar Naj (February 1908). 6. Ullash Kar Dut! (February 1908). 7. Indu Bhusan Roy (February 1908). 8. Poresh Chandra Manlik (February 1908). 9. Sachindra Kumar Sen (a month before arrest).

10. Kunja Lal Shaha (a month before arrest). II. Puma Chandra Sen (a fortnight before arrest). 12. Norendra Nath Bakshi (a week before arrest). 13. Hemendra Kumar Ghose (3 or 4 days before arrest). 14. Upendra Nath Banerji and two Uriya malis (gardeners), named

Panu and Nidhu, who were afterwards released on bail. At 134. Harrison Road the following arrests were made the same morning:

15. Nogendra Nath Banerji. 16. Dharm Das Gupta. 17. Asoke Chandra Nandy. 18. Bejoy Nath Sen Gupta. 19. Moti Lal Bose, of whom Nogendra is described as the owner of

the shop. Other persons arrested the same day were -

20. Ara,bindo Ghose of the Bande Mataram. 21. Abinash Chandra Bhattacharji , formerly manager of the Yugantar. 22. Sailendra Nath Bose. 23. Hem Chandra Das, an original member of the secret society. 24. Nirmal Roy, an original member of the secret society. 25. Kanai Lal Out!,


and on the next day -26. Din Doyal Bose, a clerk in the Sham Bazaar tramway depot,

was also arrested. He is the brother of Sailendra Nath Bose above mentioned.

The most important members of the gang have made statements to the police which they have repeated without any material variation before the District Magistrate of Alipore, confessing their share in three attempts to blow up the LieutenantGovernor's train, in the attempt to murder the Maire of Chandernagore and in the attempt to murder Mr. Kingsford at Muzaffarpur. Other matters have come to light in the papers seized which show the connection of the gang in the attempted murder of the missionary, Mr. Hickenbotham, at Kushtea.

The leading members of the gang. 3 - Barindra Kumar Ghose (no. I) , as admitted by himself, and confirmed by the statements of the other persons arrested, was the head of the organisation. He is 28 years of age, the son of the late Dr. K.O. Ghose, Civil Surgeon of Khulna town, and was born at Croydon, England. He was educated at Oeogarh H.E. School, passed the Entrance examination of the Calcutta University, and studied up to the F .A. standard. While his brother Arabindo (no. 20) was professor at the Gaekwar' s College at Baroda, he lived with him for a year and studied "politics," returning to Calcutta in 1902. He helped to start a number of akharas for lathi play at several centres in Bengal , and in the middle of 1903 again returned to his brother at Baroda, where he stayed for a year more. They discu.sed politics together, and he states that their opinions were the same, but that his brother "did not participate in his mission."

He returned again to Calcutta in 1904, but his revolutionary work proper, after a period of preparation regarding which he refuses to give details and which was presumably spent in collecting money and consulting his friends , began with the publication of the Yugantar newspaper, which he started in 1906 along with Bhupendra Nath Dutt~ at present undergoing a sentence of one year's rigorous imprisonment for publishing sedition as editor of this paper, and Abinash Chandra Bhattacharji (no. 21). In the same year Arabindo abandoned his appointment on Rs. 400 a month in Baroda and accepted a post in the National College, Calcutta, on Rs. 150 a month. About this time, too, the Bande Malaram newspaper, in the direction of which Arabindo has been all along the leading spirit, was started.

The secret society with its head-quarters at the garden house in Maniktolla was started in 1907, and Barindra recruited, he says, 16 members, namely, nos. 2 to 14 above, with in addition Nirmal Roy (no. 24), Kanai Lal Out! (no. 25), and Profulla Chandra Chaki, the youth who shot himself at Mokameh station when an attempt was made to arrest him for complicity in the Muzaffarpur case. There may have been other mem.bers of the gang as Barindra, and the other persons arrested have been careful in their statements to give as far as possible the names only of persons known to them to be already implicated.

In the garden the members of the secret society used to live together, discuss the regeneration of the country, and hatch revolutionary schem~s for getting rid of the British Government. Barindra was responsible for the collection of anus, ammunition and explosives, and he states that he arranged in what manner and by

1 Pho tographs of the four leaders are reproduced as Plate 2.


whom al1 the attempted outrages were to be carried out, and himself took part in three of them.

Upendra Nath Banerji - Another leading member of the society was l.1pendra Nath Banerji , a resident of French Chandernagore , who gives his age as 29. His education began at the Dupleix College, Chandernagore, and he studied in the Medical College, Calcutta, for two years and again after an interval attended the B.A. classes at the Duff College , Calcutta , for two years more. Thereafter he was a disciple of a certain Swami Swarupanand in the Adwitya Asram at Almorah in the United Provinces for about two years, and there he was instructed in Hindu and Western philosophy and underwent a course of training in Yoga according to the principle of Hinduism.

In 1906 he joined the Bande Mataram staff and was a regular contributor to the Yugantar. In 1907, according to his own statement , he thought of freeing the country from the foreign yoke by starting a religious institution or joining one if such an institution existed , and for this purpose between September 1907 and February 1908 he visited in quest of a sadhu or an institution the following places: Benares, Allahabad , Mirzapur , Chitrakote , Bombay, Baroda, and Nepal, returning occasionally to Calcutta. His search was, he says, unsuccessful.

Hejoined the secret society in July 1907 and used to assist Barindra in selecting boys suitable for working members. He had no part in collecting money or bombs and explosives, as he says that was Barindra's work. His occupation was to train the boys in political economy, political science, and Hindu religion. He admits, however. that he was consulted about the attempt to derail the Lieutenant-Governor's train near Kharagpur, and that he knew that the purpose of the society was to overthrow the British Government and to take the life of officials who hampered the national work.

The manufacture of explosives. - The work of bomb-making was at first carried out by Ullash Kar Dutt who was afterwards assisted by Hem Chandra Das. The former has made statements to the police and to the Magistrate from which it appears that he joined the society in 1907, and that even before that he had made a study of explosives and experimented with various chemicals such as nitro-compounds at the house of his father, a professor of agriculture at Shibpur. He gives his age as 22, and he was educated at the Com ilia Zillah School from which he passed the Entrance examination, and after studying in the Presidency College for two years failed in the F.A. examination in 1903. He then went to Bombay and went through a course of instruction in the cotton industry for a year and a half at the Victoria Technical Institute. His part in the various revolutionary outrages is detailed below.

Hem Chandra Das has not yet made any statement. Barindra' s account of him is that he went to Paris about the middle of 190]. to learn mechanics, and , if possible, also about explosives. and returned three of four months ago, and this has been confirmed from other sources. Both Barindra and Upendra state that Hem Chandra and Ullash formed .the explosives department of the society , and this is confirmed by the statement of Ullash.

Revolutionary allempts . - The following revolutionary acts attempted by the secret society have been described by Barindra. whose statement is corroborated by oth er members to the extent noted below: -

I. An attempt was made last winter to derail the Lieutenant-Governor's train


near Chandernagore as he was proceeding to Ranchi. Barindra says he himself did. not go, but he sent Ullash Kar Out! (no. 6 above) who took with him a dynamite mine with a fuse and detonator; he was disturbed, however, while laying the mine and came away unsuccessful, leaving a few dynamite cartridges which exploded under the train without doing any damage. Ullash corroborates this statement, and adds that he made this mine himself.

2. A second attempt to derail the Lieutenant-Governor's train was made shortly afterwards, also near Chandernagore, apparently on the return journey. On this occasion Barindra himself went, accompanied by Profulla Chandra Chaki and Bibhuti Bhusan Sarkar, and they waited near the line from 4 P.M. till morning. Finding . however, that the train was not coming that way they did not lay the mine, and returned to Calcutta. On this occasion also the mine was prepared by Ullash Kar Outt.

3. The third attempt on the life of the Lieutenant-Governor was made on December 5th near Kharagpur in Midnapur district. On this occasion, too, Barindra went in person and took Profulla and Bibhuti with him. They carried a mine containing six pounds of dynamite with a fuse and detonator of picric acid which was also prepared by Ullash Kar Outt. The mine was laid under Barindra's supervision, and before midnight Barindra left the place, returning to Calcutta by the last train , and leaving the two younger men to place the fuse on the line. This they did at 2-30 A.M., and they had walked a distance which Bibhuti estimates as two miles towards Midnapur when the explosion took place with the result already known. The whole account is fully corroborated by Bibhuti.

4. The next attempt made was against the Maire of Chan derna gore on April 11th by Birendra accompanied by Indu Bhusan Roy and Norendra Nath Gossain of Serampore, who was arrested on May 5th in consequence of the infonnation give by Birendra.

This bomb was made by Hem Chandra Oas and thrown by Indu Bhusan Roy. Only the detonator and not the main charge exploded, and Barindra explains that they afterwards found that the picric acid which they bought in the bazaar was not good. Both Indu and Norendra have admitted before the District Magistrate of Alipore their complicity in this affair.

5. The last outrage was at Muzaffarpur. This was arranged by Barindra , who, after consulting Upendra, sent out Khudiram Bose, a Midnapur youth introduced to him by Hem Chandra Oas, his fellow-townsman, along with Profulla to kill Mr. Kingsford. The bomb used was made by Hem Chandra Oas and Ullash Kar Out! and thrown apparently by Khudiram Bose.

From Government of India . Home Political Department A. Proceedings. May 1908, Nos. 112-150.

Archival Notes SRI AUROBINDO ON TRIAL

The Alipur Bomb Trial, " the first State Trial of any magnitude in India'''' is still remembered as a landmark in India's freedom struggle. The arrest of Sri Aurobindo and 32 other Bengalis of "respectable families" in connection with a faraway murder was possibly the biggest news in Calcutta since the Black Hole. Day after day the Bengalee ran reports on the investigation under the headline THE GREAT CALCUTTA

SENSATION . Other papers, from every part of the country, Anglo-Indian as well as Nationalist, followed suit.

The investigation, which kept the Bengal police busy for weeks and even months, turned up as evidence over 4000 documents and 300 to 400 material objects - bombs, tools, revolvers, etc. 277 witnesses were examined in two separate preliminary hearings in the court of the District Magistrate of Alipur (24-Parganas District). After three months he committed the accused to the Sessions Court, 'where "altogether 206 witnesses were examined and cross-examined at length", after which "both sides argued the case at great length".2 Both defence and prosecution were represented by outstanding barristers - Eardley Norton, the "Lion of Madras Corporation", and C.R. Das, the future nationalist leader, whose fame was established by his securing of Sri Aurobindo's acquittal. .

It would not be possible in one or even in several instalments of these Notes to give a full account of this famous trial. We will instead concentrate on a few interesting sidelights.

In retrospect the most remarkable thing about the case is the fact that Sri Aurobindo was acquitted. The contentions of the prosecution were, after all , correct. Sri Aurobindo and the others were charged with "waging war against the king".' Barin and several others confessed to being members of a "secret society" (gup ta samili) formed for this purpose. None of the confessions mentioned Sri Aurobindo. The prosecution maintained that although he kept aloof from overt actions, he was the " mastermind" behind the whole organisation. This is, of course, exactly what he was. And despite the care taken to keep Sri Aurobindo's name in the clear, enough evidence was found in May 1908 to convince the police that they could convict him.

I Bijoy Krishna Bose, ed. Alipore Bomb Trial (Calcutta: Butterworth and Co., 1922), p. i. An official letter (Duke to Norton 28 November 1909) in a file of the Government of Bengal (No. 109 of 1909) call s the trial "a prosecution of a new order and probably of a more serious character than wehaveeverhad,in Bengal".

2 Ibid, pp. 3-4. 3 The actual charges were multiple and complex. Under Section 122, the accused were charged wit h

::;~~~;·:~~I~~:~er::nde~7e~t7~na~27~~i~~o;h~;h.~;;;~S::::~:~;:i::~~ew~na:.a!~;;~::e~it:g!~; war against the King and abetted the waging of war against the King". Under Section 12l-A came conspiracy to wage war against the King. There was another charge under Section 123 and some talk, at least, of Section 124. (Those accused found in possession of bombs etc. were charged separately under the Anns Act.) Section 121 , if proved, would have been quite sufficient. Corresponding to High Treason, it is, after murder by a life convict, the " most serious" charge in the Indian Penal Code; the sentence provided for gu ilt -" to be hanged by the nec k until dead" and forfeiture of all property. (Alipore Bomb Trial, pp. 52-54, 184-85)

Archival Notes 205

The Government decided against deportation without trial - a course that would have aroused hostile public opinion - and poured out its resources in a tremendous effort to find him guilty. How was Sri Aurobindo able to escape the gallows?

Just luck, perhaps. It certainly was lucky that no arms or bombs were found in his house when he was arrested. There was every possibility they might have been. In 1940 Sri Aurobindo told some of his disciples:

Barin was very reckless. On the eve of the search he brought two bombs to my house. I told him, "Take them away. Don't you know that the house is going to be searched? And remove the things from Maniktala." He took the bombs away but didn' t do anything at Maniktala.4

In fact Barin did try to do something. As Nolini Kanta Gupta has written, that night Barin and his companions decided "to remove all traces, by burning or hiding away or whatever other means, of anything that might raise a suspicion against us". And

the very first thing that came to our heads was this. There were two or three rifles in the house where Sri Aurobindo lived. They were in the custody of Abinash (Abinash Bhattacharya) who lived with him and looked after Sri Aurobindo's affairs. Those rifles must be removed at once, they could on no account be left there .... The rifles were brought back, they were packed in two boxes bound with iron hoops, together with the few revolvers we had and all the materials for the making of bombs, and hidden away un~erground.5

It is hard to see exactly how this account fits in with the statement of Sri Aurobindo quoted above. The sequence of the events is not certain. At any rate steps were taken to see that Sri Aurobindo's house was free from incriminating materials.

What the police did find at 48 Grey Street were documents - mountains of them. Among the hundreds of letters, notebooks and papers were two items of particular interest - the "sweets letter" and the "scribblings". The first of these was a note found with an envelope addressed " A. Ghose, confidential":6

Dear brother

Bengal Camp Near Agit's 27th Dec. 1907.

Now is the time. Please try and make them meet for our conference. We must have sweets all over India readymade for imergencies [sic). I wait here for your answer.

Y OUf affectionate Barindra K . Ghose

The important word is " sweets". It could hardly, the prosecution maintained , mean " sweetmeats U

, 7 Indeed one of the conspirators told the ~ourt: " W e used to

4 Nirodbaran. Talks with Sri Aurobindo. Part II (Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971), p . 246. 5 Nolini Kanta Gupta, Reminiscences (Pondic herry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 1969), p. 22. (i See Plate 4. 7 Trial proceedings reported in the Bengalee, 12 March 1909.


call bombs Rashogullas. sweetmeats.". "The suggestion of the prosecution", in the words of Justice Beachcroft, "is that sweets means bombs. The term would be a not unnatural one to use." Was not another document found in which Kingsford, the intended Muzaffarpur victim, was referred to as the "bridegroom", and revolvers itemised under '"marriage expenditure"?9 27 December 1907, the date borne by the letter, was the second day of the famous Surat Congress. (The Bengali delegation stayed together at Surat in a "camp" near Agit Singh's.) The prosecution argued "that the Extremists, having won a victory on the first day of the Congress, were so elated that Baren [sic] sent this letter to Arabinda to have immediate action all over the country on the lines followed in the garden and No. 15 [Gopimohan Dutt's Lane, where explosives were manufactured and stored]. " lO

It is a known fact that Barin went to Surat principally to interest Nationalist leaders in his terrorist schemes. There is reason to believe that the letter was just what the prosecution declared it to be. lI The defence called it a forgery ; Justice Beachcroft said thllt "ifit is, it is a splendid specimen of the forger's art" .12 Nevertheless he finally found it "of so suspicious a character that I hesitate to accept it" .13 The document had been questioned by the defence on the ground that a proper record of its finding had not been kept. Then there was the problem of the form of greeting and signature. Would a younger brother have addressed the older as "Dear brother" and signed his full name? All in all, it was fishy business, and the judge was forced to conclude, throwing out the letter as evidence: "Experience tells us that in cases when spies are employed documents do find their way into houses of suspected persons in a manner which cannot be explained by the accused." 14

There was always something fishy about the evidence. As C.R. Das pointed out in his defence address: "The particular feature of this case is that where the prosecution associated Aurobindo with the conspiracy, there we find some sort of difficulty with evidence." 15 Take the "scribblings", a few pages in one of Sri Aurobindo's notebooks in which the names of some members of Barin's group are mentioned, and vague reference is made to some '"attempt", The text is incoherent and the handwriting strange, almost feminine, but the writer of the document was certainly in the know about the activities of the society. Was the writer Sri Aurobindo? In fact" it was. The scribblings, which still exist,16 are an example of his automatic writing. The handwriting, however scribbly, is recognisably his . It was not possible in an English court of law to say that the recipient of an automatic writing could not not be held responsible for its contents, that he was merely a scribe and not the writer. What the defence did maintain was that this, too, was a forgery. Justice Beachcroft was not convinced . "1 look upon this piece of evidence as the most difficult point

8 Ibid. 4 July 1908. 9 Alipore Bomb Trial, p. 169.

10 Ibid.

)

liOn 2 November 198~1 , Nolini Kanta Gupta , o ne of the Alipur underlrials. said that he be lieved the letter was not genu ine.

12 Alipore Bomb Trial. p. 169. 13 Ibid. p. 172. ]4 Ibid . I ~ Bengalee. 26 March 1909. 16 Sri Aurobindo Ashram Arc hives MS.SA .NB GIS. pp. 4a-10 even.

)

Archival N otes 207

in this case, " 17 he wrote in his judgment. But finally, after considering all the evidence, Beachcroft concluded : "I should hesitate before saying that his complicity in the conspiracy can be considered established on these facts." \8

Beachcroft had not even heard the really damning evidence against Sri Aurobindo - the testimony of the approver, Narendranth Goswami. Goswami's second confession was specially arranged to show his connection with Sri Aurobindo, and Sri Aurobindo's active involvement in the society. The approver mentioned several attempted dacoities and bombings that Sri Aurobindo not only knew about, but helped to plan . Such evidence, if accepted, would have proved Sri Aurobindo a conspirator. It would indeed have shown him to be the principal figure in the co nspiracy, for Goswami stated that he often reported to Sri Aurobindo " because he is aUf leaderH .19

Goswami was rendered pardon for his confession, a circumstance which makes it suspect. Recently Nolini Kanta Gupta stated that he thought the approver's testimony was a tissue of lies, that no one in the society had the free access to Sri Aurobindo that Goswami claimed to have.2o Certa inly much of the testimony was outright falsehood, for example the information given about members of a great allIndia conspiracy that did not exist. The police , certain that a countrywide uprising was planned, asked their approver to find out who was behind it. It is told in Sri Aurobindo's Karakahini and Upendranath Bannerji's Nirbasiter Atmakatha how Hrishikesh, always a good one for a gag, made up a set of names and divulged them to Goswami, saying that he, too ~ wished to become an approver. How the boys must have laughed when Goswami solemnly declared :,

There are societies in connection with our society in Bombay, Guzrat, Satara . I don't remember others. There is also one in Madras. Upen told me of one Madras man, I think his name was Bisambar Pillay. I never saw him.

I am not aware of any society at Bangalore. At Baroda there was a ma n named Kishnaji Rao Bhau who shared our views.2 \

The bulk of Goswami's evidence, however, was no laughing matter. The statement that Sri Aurobindo was the leader wa s as incriminating as it was true. Most of the boys in the society, even those that had never seen Sri Aurobindo, knew he was the chief, their "Karta" or " Bara Karta". These code-names appear on certain documents found in the garden. The defence had stories ready to explain them; it was unsettling when Goswami said to the magistrate:

I have heard the name "Bara Karta" applied to a member of our society: it was applied to Arabindo Ghose: Karta means a " leader".

The name "Chhota Karta" is applied to Barendra Kumar Ghose. If the word Karta was used without either " Bara" or "Chhota" it would refer to the "Bara Karta ," viz., to Arabindo Ghose.

17 AlipQre Bomb Trial. p. 173 . 18 Ibid , p. 176. 19 Government of India. Home Political-A . Proceedings, September 1910, N os. 33AO, p. 23. 20 Conversation of 3 November 1981. 21 Government of India. Home Political-A. Proceedings, September 19l0. Nos. 33-40, pp . 32-33. In

Nirbas iler Almakalha Upendranath says that he gave the names to Hrishikesh, who gave them to G oswami . From Goswami's statement it would seen that Upendranath revealed at least some of the "secrets" himself.


Goswami went on

I do not remember whether I know Arabindo Ghose's writing. I can't say whether I should recognise it if I saw it.22

Nevertheless he was able to identify some 18 documents as being "in Aurobindo's handwriting" .

Goswami's confession, recorded before the magistrate in June, July and August 1908, was a virtuoso performance. It effect was bound to be decisive. On 31 August 1908 he was shot to death in the jail hospital. His testimony, never subjected to crossexamination, was invalidated.

22 Ibid , p. 31.

Outline Bibliography OF THE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO

Subsidiary works. The distinction between primary and subsidiary works was explained in the last issue. The line between the two is sometimes indistinct. Chitrangacia, reproduced from the Sri Aurobindo Circle in 1949, has been considered a primary title, while The Birth of the War-God, reproduced from the same journal in 1952, has been considered subsidiary. One deciding factor here was the presence in the first case and absence in the second ofa reverse-title (imprint) page. (However, some books having imprint pages have been considered subsidiary, for example The Life Divine: A Commentry on the ISM Upanishad.) The decisive factor was that Chitrangada was published during Sri Aurobindo's lifetime.

Correspondence. The subsidiary list has been divided into two parts ; the first consists of collections of letters. As noted in the last issue, collections prepared under Sri Aurobindo's direction have been placed on the primary list; those considered subsidiary "owe their form more to the disciple whose correspondence they chiefly or wholly contain than to Sri Aurobindo". Some letters of Sri Aurobindo have appeared in books written by disciples, e.g. Dilip Kumar Roy , Sri Aurobindo Came to Me (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1952), and Yogi Sri Krishnaprem (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1968) ; R.S. Agarwal , Yogafor Perfect Sight (Madras: Dr. Agarwal's Eye Institute, 1974).

Reprints. The second part of the list consists principally of reprints of short works originally printed in periodicals. Almost all of Sri Aurobindo's works, primar.y as well as secondary, !,ppeared in periodicals before being published as books; the form ofthose considered primary was either determined by Sri Aurobindo during his lifetime, or (as in the case of Sonnets) suggested by indications left by him. Titles considered subsidiary were generally created without Sri Aurobindo's authorisation and have proved to be too ephemeral to be considered primary. I Certain reprints have been excluded even from the secondary list, viz: (1) separate issues of pages from periodicals without printed cover or imprint page, e.g. The Maid in the Mill (1962); (2) undated separate issues of pages from the Centenary Editions of various works or parts of works, e.g. Ideals and Progress, The House of Brut , The Prince of Mathura , The Divine Body: (3) reprints of primary works issued under special circumstances, e.g. Sri Aurobindo on Ideals and Progress (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo's Action, 1977). All compilations have, of course, been excluded.

Miscellaneous titles. A few titles fall into no particular category, for example, Sri Aurobindo: A Life Sketch, Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram. Yogic Sadhan. Footnotes explain the history of these works.

I The ephemeral nature or many subsidiary works makes it impossible to ensure that a ll books that might have been included are listed. Five editions are shown for Dayananda the Man and His Work: more may have been printed.

210

Archiloes No.

SI 5 1.1 51. Ia S1.Ib S1.2

S2 S2.1

SRI AUROBINDO: Archives and R esearch

SUBSIDIARY WORKS IN ENGLISH

Part I : Correspondence

Title Edition/ Impression

Prinrecl Designation

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo [Part 1)1 First Edition

F irst Series Second Series

Second Edition

(" Firs t publi sh ed") (,'First pub:i shed") (""First Combined

Edition")

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo: Part III

Publication Data

Pondic he rry: Sri Aurobindo A shram. 1954 Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo A shram. 1959 Po ndic he rry: Sri Aurobindo A shram. 1969

First Edition (,'First Edition") Po ndic herry: Sri Aurobi ndo Ashram. 1972

83 C orrespondence [with Sri Aurobindo]: Part III (Sri Aurobindo's Humour)2 S3.1 First Edition ("" First Edition") Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo A s hram, 1974

S4 Guidance from Sri Aurobindo: Letters to a Young Disciple [Volume 1]3 54.1 First Edition Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Society, 1974

S5 Guidance from Sri Aurobindo: Letters to a Young Disciple: Volume 113

S5. 1 First Edition Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo As hram, 1976

56 S6. 1 S6.2

S7 S7.1

S8 S8. 1 S8.2

S9 S9. 1

Life-Literature-Yoga4

First Edition ("First Edition") Second Editio:1 ("Revised & Enlarged

Light to SuperlightS First Edition

Edition")

My Pilgrimage to the Spi rit6 First Edition ("First Published") Second Edition ("Second Revised

Edition")

Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1952 Po ndic herry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1967

Calcutta: Praba rta k Publishers, 1972

Po ndic he rry: Dipti Publicatio ns. 1974

Ahmedabad : Gift Publications, 1977

"Overhead Poetry": P;t:ms with Sri Aurobindo's Comments' First Edition Y First Editio n ") Pondicherry: S ri Auro bindo Internatio na l

Centre o f Education, 1972

S ri Aurobindo's Humour see Correspondence [with Sri Auro bindoJ: Part III

I Compiled by NirodbSo'.ran. 2 Compiled by Nirodbaran. Ac tual printed title: "Sri Aurobindo's Humour : (Correspondence ParI III) ". J Compiled b y Nagin Doshi. " Compiled by K . D . Sethna. S Letters to MOlilal Roy compiled by Aruo C handra DUH. 6 Compiled by Dr. Govindbhai Patel. 7 Edited by K .D . Sethna.

/

Outline Bibliography of the Works of Sri Aurobindo 211

Part 2: Reprints and Miscellaneous

SIO SIO.I

Ana ndamal h8 F irst Ed itio n

S I i The Birth o f the War-God9

5 11.1

SI2 S 12. 1

S 12.2

S 12.3 S12.4

S. 12.5

First Edition

Dayananda: The Man and His Work 1o

First Edition ("1st Ed itio n")

Second Edition

Third Edition Fourth Edition

Fifth Editio n

5 13 The Four Aids l 4

SI3. 1 First Editio n

Calcutta : Basumati Sahitya Mandir. n.d .

Po ndicherry: Sri Aurob indo Ashram. 1952

Kangri : Gurukula Vi sh vavid ya laya. Samvat 1977 [c. 192 1]

Calcutta: Tract Publishmg Society. Daya nandabda 102 [c . 1927J11

Lucknow : Sanyukta Arya Samaj. n.d. (1 935) D elhi : Internatio na l Aryan League. n .d . [c. 1935]"

Santa C ru2; (Bombay): N.K. Kapadia. 193913

Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 1945

SI4 The Life Divine : A Commentary on tbe Isba Upanishadl 5 S 14. 1 First Edition ("First publi shed") Calcutta: Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir. 1981

S IS Messages of S r i Aurobindo and the Mother {First Series] S 15. 1 First Edition (" First published") Pondic he rry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1949

S16 Messages of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (Second Series) 5 16. 1 First Edit io n ("Firs t Publi shed") Pondicherry: S,i A u mbindo Ashoarn, 1952

S 17 An Open Letter to His Countrymen 16

S 17. 1

S I8 S 18. 1

First Editio n

The Seven Upanish_ds17

First Edition

S t9 S ri Aurobindo : A Life S ketc h l8

S 19.1 Firs t Ed ilio n

Calcutta: Mano m o h a n Ghose, n.d. ( 1 909~

Poona: A shtekar & Co., 1920

Calcutta : Arya Publis hin g H o use, 1937

8 " Tra n sla ted from Bankim C handra C hatterjee's famous Be n galee novel"; repri nted from the Karmayogin. "Up to 1 5th Chapte r of Part I transla ted by Sree Aurobindo. Subseq ue nt pages translated by Sree Barindra Kuma r Ghosh ." The edi to rs of the Sr i Aurobindo Birth Centena r y Library have cons idered o nl y chapte rs 1- 13 to be by Sri Aurobindo.

9 " Re printed fro m : S r i Auro bindo C ircle . Eigh th Number. 1952." 10 T h is tit le was used for three of the five k nown ed itio ns o f this reprint o f two (or o ne) art icles fi rst

published in the Vedic M agazine (Laho re), v iz.: "Oayananda the Man a nd His Work". a nd "Oayananda and the Veda".

II An incomplete edition, entitled Dayananda and ,Ire Veda and consistin g on ly of the essay having that ti tle.

12 An incomple te edit io n . consisting o nl y of the essay" Dayananda the M a n and His Wo rk" . 13 Entitled "Swami Dayananda Saraswati" .

14 " Being the first c h apter of the Yoga of Works in the Synth esis of Yoga"; (allowed by a selection of lette rs on yoga.

15 Reprinted fro m Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual. 16 R e printed from the Karmayogin . 17 Maralhi titl e: ~ 'dqr .... Gjffi.;(~. 408 pages o f Sanskrit text a nd Marathi comme ntary followed by

45 pages of English transla ti o n . ··The trans la tion of Isha, Ke na a nd Mundaka is by A urobindo Ghose." 18 T he author o f this pa mphlet (reprinted wit h some a ltera ti o n s in SABeL Vo l. 30. pp. 1-5) is not


S20 S20.1 S20.2 S20.3 S20.3.1 S20.3.2 S20.4

S20.5

Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram l9

Firsl Edition ("First Edition") Second Edition ("Second Edition") Third Edition

First Impression ("Reprinted") Second Impression (,'Reprinted")

Fourth Edition ("Fifth Edition (revised)")

Fifth Edition ("'Fifth Edition")

Calculla: Arya Publishing House. 194820

Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1951

Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1964 Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1969 Pondicherry: Sri AUTobindo Ashram, 1975

Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1981

Swami Dayananda Saraswati see Dayananda the Man and His Work

821 Two Lectures of Sriyut Aravinda Ghose21

521.1 First Edition Bombay: Bombay National Union , n.d. (1908)

822 Two Plays22 S22.1 First Edition Calcutta: Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir, 1962

S13 What a Sadbak Must Always Remember23 S23.1 First Edition Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, n.d,

(1951)

S24 S24.1 S24.2 S24.3

S24.4

Yogic Sadhan24

First Edition Second Edition Third Edition

Fourth Edition

("Reprinted") C'TIURD EDITION" I "Only Authorised

Edition")

Srirangam: Sri Vani Vilas Press, 1911 Pondicherry: Modern Press, 1920 Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1923

("Fourth Impression") Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1933

known. Possibly the text was written by a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and revised by Sri Aurobindo. At least one passage (the first footnote) is known to have been written by Sri' Aurobindo. It may be, however, that the whole life-sketch was written by Sri Aurobindo, or so thoroughly revised by him that it couid still be attributed to him. Conclusive data are lacking.

19 See footnote 60 to the first part of }his Outline Bibliography (A & R. April 1981. p. 108). 20 Part I, .. A Short Biography' \ -conslsted of part of Sri Aurobindo: A Life Sketch, a note on Sri Auro

bindo's political life written by Sri Aurobindo, and a note on Sri Aurobindo's spiritual life not written by Sri Aurobindo but incorporating extracts from his writings, Part II . "The Ashram and the Teaching", was a reprint of The Teaching and the Asram of Sri Aurobindo. Each succeeding edition was revised. material being added, rewritten or removed.

21 "Advice to NationaJ College Students", reprinted from The Dawn, and "The Present Situation", reprinted from Bonde Malaram. Sri Aurobindo's speeches were often reprinted during the period. The India Office, Madras. reproduced "Srijut Arabindo Ghose on the Present Situation" in 1908. Marathi and Gujarati translations of the speeches made by Sri Aurobindo in western India in 1908 (including "The Present Situation") are known to exist.

22 Two incomplete plays, The Maid in the Mill and The House of Brut. "reprinted from Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir Annual". "-

23 An extract from a letter of November 1928 (SABCL Vol. 24. pp. 1310-11). 24 This book was "received" by Sri Aurobindo as automatic writing. Although once widely considered

to be his own composition, it was always disclaimed by Sri Aurobindo. He wrote, referring to himself in the third person. on 28 October 1934: "The 'Yogic Sadhan' is not Sri Aurobindo's own writing. but was published with a note by him, that is all.·· The note, an "Editor's Epilogue", gave "a few words. sary in conclusion". The editor, called on the title page "The Uttara Yogi", was Sri Aurobindo.