I give a brief history of the Extracts for the benefit of the reader who is not familiar with the circumstances in which they were compiled.

The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs was published by the Columbia University Press in New York in April 2008. A couple of months later, a few copies of the book turned up at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, of which Peter Heehs is a long standing inmate. Heehs, who works as an editor at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and Research Library, had taken many years to write this biography. But the book could hardly be said to have been written in the spirit of a disciple and inmate of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, which is a spiritual institution and not a debating centre where you can question its very founder. A murmur of protest arose when a review of the book was published in Auroville Today in August 2008. Soon there was a demand and curiosity to know what exactly was objectionable in the book. There was the practical question of whether the book could be put up for sale in the Ashram’s official bookshop and the more serious consideration of taking administrative action against the author. It was under these circumstances that the Extracts were compiled, so that the reader at once knew the worst that Heehs had written. The compiler never intended them to be representative extracts of the book in order to get a brief introduction to it.

The Extracts caught on and before long most of the Ashramites were seething with anger, for, all said and done, they were Heehs’s own words, and he had dared to denigrate Sri Aurobindo in his own Ashram. Had he written the same book as an outsider and not as a member of the Ashram, nobody would have cared for it. But Heehs had written in his position as a senior editor and researcher of the Ashram Archives, which is the repository of the most valuable documents written by Sri Aurobindo. Not only was there a lack of basic allegiance to the institution that had fed him for 37 years and facilitated his research in every way, but his cursory dismissals of Sri Aurobindo’s works and denigrating statements on him were detrimental to the very spiritual well-being of the Ashram. People began circulating the Extracts by making Xeroxes, sending emails and posting them on the Net, and soon the whole Sri Aurobindonian community was convulsed with waves of anger. Thenceforth the discussions that followed between Heehs’s critics and supporters often referred back to the Extracts, as still not many copies of the book were available.

Around this time a strange theory was put forward by Heehs’s supporters who said, “Yes, if you read only the Extracts, you get a bad impression of the book. But read the whole book, and you will not feel that the book is so bad. In fact, you will not only start appreciating it, but find it wonderful.” Heehs himself argued that the Extracts were decontextualised and provided a corrected version of them. He filled in the footnotes, phrases and sentences passed over in the Extracts and claimed that he had restored the original content to its full glory. The objectionable portions suddenly became unpalatable but true statements on Sri Aurobindo and his denigration came to be termed as the human side of the Avatar. Heehs’s unwarranted criticism became academic objectivity and Sri Aurobindo’s disciples had to be taught the superiority of his intellectual assessment over what they felt deeply in their hearts about the greatness of their Master. It is then that I felt it was necessary to write a Defence of the Extracts, extracts which have so well exposed the mischief behind Heehs’s biography. For mischief it is, and there is no point in saying that he insulted the Master only a few times, or arguing that there is plenty of good research in his book in order to spare him the severe reprobation he deserves.   more »