The end of March and the beginning of April 1942 are memorable for one of the very few interventions of Sri Aurobindo in India's public affairs. World War II was in full swing and Japan had joined hands with Hitler and posed a threat to Burma and even India, both of which were then under British rule. There was considerable discontent in India and a great reluctance to join the war effort of the British Commonwealth. India could not see much difference between German Nazism and British Imperialism. Most people forgot that the latter was the gradually fading remnant of an old turn of the human political mind, which had once played a necessary role in history but had lost its raison d'etre in the modern age of national freedom, whereas the former with its dogmas of master race and absolute dictator and merciless regimentation was a current contrary to the drive of human evolution with its many-sided variation both individual and collective.

Churchill was England's Prime Minister at the time. He had been known as a die-hard Imperialist. All of a sudden he appeared to have felt that in the war he was conducting against Hitler the cause of civilisation was at stake and that to serve it at all costs was more important than to preserve the sanctity of the British Empire. He wanted India to give up her distrust of the British and throw in her lot whole-heartedly with Britain's own valiant effort to fight the barbarism that was on the march from Germany under the emblem of the Swastika. He gave ear to the advice of liberal thought in England which was in favour of conceding greater freedom to India that had been agitating for independence, especially since the days when Sri Aurobindo had become for a few years the leader of the Nationalist Movement. The well-known liberal thinker, Sir Stafford Cripps, was prominent as a spokesman of this advice. Churchill chose him to carry to India certain proposals meant to meet her basic demands and induce her to join the united front of Britain and her allies against Hitler and his associates. In connection with what came to be known as the Cripps Proposals it may be interesting to put together all the documents relating to Sri Aurobindo's intervention.

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Apropos of the rejection of Cripps’s Proposals, we have an account in Nirodbaran’s Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo; he draws our attention to a report about the Mother's stand on the Cripps-question. Her ardent request to India was that she should not reject it. She must not make the same mistake that France had done recently and that had plunged her into the abyss. But the Proposals were rejected. “Now calamity will befall India,” she said. Subsequent events proved so.

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In spite of such an unequivocal and clear advice from Sri Aurobindo, and his action pertaining to it, he kind of seeing an imperative in it, we have the following statement from the author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo: “Such judgments after the fact have to be taken with a grain of salt; but the possibilities that might have opened if the Cripps proposal had been accepted are among the great unanswered questions of modern Indian history.” But this itself is an act of judgement, and quite frankly not very flattering to Sri Aurobindo; it does little justice to his concerted efforts to have the Cripps’s offer accepted. For a historical study having the benefit of Aurobindonian vision it comes as a surprise that the “ifs” and “buts” of the Proposals should remain great unanswered questions of modern Indian history. But that itself an act of judgement, and quite frankly not very flattering to Sri Aurobindo; it does little justice to his concerted efforts to have the Cripps’s offer accepted. More critically, how are we to square the assertion that such judgements “have to be taken with a grain of salt” in the wake of the Mother’s stating unequivocally that “there would have been no division” had the proposal been accepted? Historical presentation from the inner Aurobindonian circle has yet scope to put all these in the right historical perspective. Let us hope that one of these days this will happen—unless one says that it is the credulous who believes in what the Mother had said; that would be the end of the course of the perceptive thought itself. …   more »