Sri
Aurobindo’s Prose Style by Goutam
Ghosal is one of the professional studies which examines the characteristics
and nuances as much as influences and traditions given to the creation of newer
possibilities of expression. It is not in an isolationist manner that one would
admire his uniqueness, but by holding a universality which can become
spiritually wide and comprehensive, and rewarding, that one might be able to
enter into the vastness of its exoteric as much as its esoteric spirit. Ghosal
says in his preface that “Sri Aurobindo never wrote like a scholar… [even] when
he was a real scholar. Tradition formed his outline, the novelty came from
experience. The more he matured the more he depended on his own experience.
…his prose is of a literary artist with a mind of exceptional calibre.” It is a
pity that the recent biography The Lives
of Sri Aurobindo is unable to enter into its immensity and feel the charm
of its ambiance, the presence of the spirit pervading it; not only that, it hurriedly
and disparagingly speaks of it, Sri Aurobindo’s prose style, having problems in
structuring itself for the modern mind to appreciate and understand it, to
value the contents. But there is in his prose style, says in the foreword VK
Gokak the eminent literary critic of yesteryears, “meticulousness and
virtuosity possessing the power, charm and propriety” that stand out
distinctly. In this author must have been from
The creative writer generates life into the ancient
myths by using them significantly in his texts. Quotations are often lifeless
for the creative artist. He re-shapes them and reminds
us of the myth by his own sentence which is full of the memory of a citation,
an epigram or a paradox or any kind of pithy saying. For Sri Aurobindo, the
past is a living reality to be found in the future. The sleeping myth becomes a
flaming metaphor in his texts. He knows both the worlds—the east and the west—very-well
and he sees the soul of myth$. In the great books of the
... he is thus blown along on the hurricane of his
desires and ambitions until he'stumbles and is broken, in the great phrase of
Aeschylus, against the throne of Eternal Law.
In Essays on the
Gita, he recalls an apophthegm by Heraclitus and harmonises the idea with
the Gita's ideal of life as battle. From Heraclitus he moves freely to the
world of the Upanishads. He refers to the Darwinians and "Modern
Science" in passing. He also uses myths as metaphors both in satiric prose
and in serious discourses. He is annoyed with William Archer, who
.misinterprets Indian culture. After pages of refutatio, he calls Archer's
attack a "ridiculous Phillipic". Phillipic refers to any discourse
which is full of invective. The myth refers to one of the three orations of
Demosthenes against Phillip of Macedon. Archer is also 'Apollo'. Sri Aurobindo
changes the myth into metaphor and pun in the following words:
This new journalistic Apollo, our Archer who is out to Cleave
with his arrows the python coils of Indian barbarisrn, abounds in outcries in
this sense.
The metaphorical flourish is meant to be ironical.
Hence the surplusage.
Essays on the
Gita is full of illustrations based on
the clues offered by the Sanskrit text. The book becomes experiential and original,
as Sri Aurobindo recreates myths, metaphors and symbols.
The culmination of an exposition is often marked by a synonymous phrase or a
clause or a sentence from the original text, which has often a metaphorical function.
After the original commentaries, the Sanskrit synonym looks like his own
creation. The word 'Over-Soul’ belongs to Emerson in a special sense. Sri Aurobindo
uses it in a fresh context. Prose style achieves a global character, as the
transcendentalist's phrase is blended with the culture of the Gita.
He is at once the Father and Mother of the universe; the
substance of the infinite ldea, Vijňāna, the Mahat Brahman, is the womb into which
he casts the seed of his self-conception. As the Over-Soul he casts the seed; as
the Mother, the Nature-Soul, the Energy filled with his conscious power, he receives
it into this infinite substance of being made pregnant with his illimitable, yet
self-limiting Idea.
The substance of the passage will show that Sri
Aurobindo is not applying Emerson's phrase. The word might be floating somewhere
in the vast contour of his consciousness, but the idea is non-Emersonian. The
synthesis of eastern and western myths is also to be found in The Life Divine.
This is the fall of man typified in the poetic parable
of The Hebrew Genesis. That fall is his deviation from the full and pure
acceptance of God and himself, or rather of God in himself, into a dividing
consciousness which brings with it all the train of the dualities, life and death,
good and evil, joy and pain, completeness and want, the fruit of a divided
being. This is the fruit which Adam and Eve, Purusha and Prakriti, the soul
tempted by Nature, have eaten.
This is from Chapter VII entitled The Ego and the Dualities. There is a citation from Shwetashwatara
Upanishad before the beginning of the discourse. The quotation hints at the
theme of the chapter. The reference to the "Hebrew Genesis" shows the
synthetic mind. Sri Aurobindo's intuitive comments on great personalities and events
are full of mythical metaphors formed of Balaram, Jehovah, Nero, Rudra,
Vibhuti, Kali, Yatudhani and other classical figures from that world and this
world.
We see seven kinds of style in the
God to the soul that sees is the path and 6od is the
goal of his journey, a path in which there is no self-losing and a goal to
which his wisely guided steps are surely arriving at every moment. He knows the
Godhead as the master of his and all being, the upholder of his nature, the
husband of the nature-soul, its lover and cherisher, the inner witness of all
his thoughts and actions. God is his house and country, the refuge of his seekings
and desires, the wise and close and benignant friend of all beings. All birth
and status and destruction of apparent existences is to his vision and
experience the One who brings forward, maintains and withdraws his temporal
self-manifestation in its system of perpetual recurrences. He alone is the
imperishable seed and origin of all that
seem to be born and perish and their eternal resting-place in their non-manifestation. It
is he that burns in the heat of the sun and
the flame; it is he who is the plenty of the rain and its withholding; he
is all this physical Nature and her workings. Death is his mask and immortality
is his self-revelation. All that we call existent is he and all that we look
upon as non-existent still is their secret in the Infinite and is part of the
mysterious being of the lneffable.
This is English on the surface, but Sanskrit at bottom.
Sri Aurobindo does not sacrifice the principle of the English sentence
structure, but he infuses in his impeccable English the rhythm of Sanskrit
verse. The Gita is an influence. While translating the sacred verses, he is
trying to transfer the essence and rhythm of the original to his English. The beginning
is Sanskritic in rhythm, and a peculiar twist makes it complicated. But then it
is the thought that causes the complexity. The discipline of the structure is
remarkable, especially in view of the fact that the material is born with the inspiration.
The complex beginning, is immediately followed by the typical tīkā (expository) style of Sanskrit literature.
Then he blends the sutra (aphorism) with his explanatory mode. There is a
memory of Thomas Browne, and yet it will be futile to search for an influence.
The most condensed mode in the passage is "Death in his mask and immortality
is his self-revelation”. Even the expository sentences in the passage conceal
more than they reveal. Much depends on how we read the passage. For instance, there
is almost a pauseless movement in the last sentence.
The second is an inspired style caught in the periodic structure.
Of the sixty-nine words in this passage, fifty-six are contained in the four
parallel infinitive phrases which make up the compound subject and contain the main
themes of the sentence.
To make the mind one with, the divine consciousness, to
make the whole of our emotional nature one love of God everywhere, to make all
our works one sacrifice to the Lord of the worlds and all our worship and
aspiration one adoration of him and self-surrender, to direct the whole self
Godwards in an entire union is the way to rise out of a mundane into a divine
existence.
This type of writing is very common in his major works and
we often see it in The Life Divine
and in Essays on the Gita. The structure is not new, neither is it obsolete.
Even Saul Bellow uses it. De Quincy, Ruskin and Burke were masters
of the mode. What is new is the intensity of spiritual emotion, which gives a
new flavour to this style. In a way this is the style of the Yogi as lover.
Generally, this kind of periods hints at the Yoga of surrender. The writer
tries to heighten the emotional tone; he tries to make us feel the romance of
surrender. Obviously, he is less of an intellectual here.
The third is a synthetic style. It is based on a synthesis
of science, psychology and literature.
The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part
of us—intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire self, the heart, the body—has
each, as it were, its own complex individuality and natural formation
independent of the rest; it neither agrees with itself nor with the others nor
with the representative ego which is the shadow cast by some central and centralising
self on our superficial ignorance. We find that we are composed not of one but
many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature. Our being
is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of
a divine order.
This is not the language of religion; this is the
language of psychological investigation, we have taken a very short unit. After
finding our being to be a roughly constituted chaos, the writer goes on to
clarify the inner and outer influences, the materials coming from outside and
inside, and the impression left is that of; cosmic photographer who takes the
total picture of the inside of man. Even this short unit speaks of the language
of experience. The listing inside the parenthesis is the initial picture of the
many planes inside us. The 'shadow' metaphor is so naturally used that we hardly defect it as metaphor: It would be
interesting to see the rest of the passage, where details come in abundance.
Moreover, we find that inwardly too, no less than outwardly,
we are not alone in the world; the sharp separateness of our ego was no more
than a strong imposition and delusion; we do not exist in ourselves, we do not
really live apart in an inner privacy or solitude. Our mind is a receiving,
developing and modifying machine into which there is being constantly passed
from moment, to moment a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of disparate
materials from above, from below, from outside. Much more than half our
thoughts and feelings are not our own in the sense that they take form out of
ourselves; of hardly anything can it be said that it is truly original to our
nature. A large part comes to us from others or from the environment, whether
as raw material or as manufactured imports; but still more largely they come
from universal Nature here or from other worlds and planes and their , beings
and powers and influences; for we are overtopped and environed by other planes
of consciousness, mind planes, life planes, subtle matter planes, From which
our life and action here are fed, or fed on, pressed, dominated, made use of
for the manifestation of their forms and forces.
The inspiration is camouflaged by a very powerful
intellectual mind. Every parallelism, every phrase and every word should be
marked. Not a single word is decorative. The phrase "modifying machine” is
absolutely natural in the context. A careful eye scrutinises the inspired
details: "from above, from below, from outside”. There is a memory of Eliot's
essay on tradition, but Eliot could not characterize the planes inside us.
There is a sudden rush of polysyndeton at one place ("from other worlds
and planes and their beings and powers and influences"). This sudden scope
given to inspiration deepens the sense of wonder associated with the topic. In
the very next clause, inspiration is once again allowed to be mixed up with
intellect, and this time inspiration chooses the mode of asyndeton. No
rhetorical figure is a waste.
The fourth style is a great rush of eloquence born of spiritual
inspiration.
A guidance, a governance begins from within which exposes
every movement to the light of truth, repels what is false, obscure, opposed to
the divine realisation: every region of the being, every nook and corner of it,
every movement, formation, direction, inclination of thought, will, emotion,
sensation, action, reaction, motive, disposition, propensity, desire, habit of
the conscious or subconscious physical, even the most concealed, camouflaged,
mute, recondite, is lighted up with the unerring psychic light, their
confusions dissipated, their tangles disentangled, their obscurities, deceptions,
self-deceptions precisely indicated and removed; all is purified, set right,
the whole nature harmonised, modulated in the psychic key, put in spiritual
order.
The wonder lies in the fact that the explanatory
character of the passage is unhampered by the breath-stopping flow of single
word parallelism. A less gifted writer trying this game would have offered us a
caricature. This cannot be the product of a mere trick. The verb
"exposes" is apt in the context: the opening of the psychic being
means a great inner exposure. The anaphoral "every" is not just for emphasis;
it is a way of detailing and it is also a way of entering into a fluent single
word parallelism. After the third "every", Sri Aurobindo drops the anaphoral mode
just to highlight the different areas of
the, being. Obviously, he wants us to study. every word carefully and a further
prolongation of the anaphoral "every” would have distracted us from the
details, The, passage is about the "unerring psychic light" which
takes the lead of our being. The anaphoral "their" stresses the power
of the psychic and the last part of the passage heightens the degree of
emphasis; the psychic being brinp about a total purification and leads us to a
"spiritual order".
The fifth is something like the style of a historical
novelist. In the following passage, the writer brilliantly transcribes his intuitive
inlook into history. There is no imaginative rush and the prophetic note is
much too clear in the manner of presentation.
The old Hellenic or Graeco-Roman civilization perished,
among other reasons, because it only imperfectly generalised culture in its own
society and was surrounded by huge masses of humanity who were still possessed
by the barbarian habit of mind. Civilization can never be safe so long as,
confining the cultured mentality to a small minority, it nourishes in its bosom
a tremendous mass of ignorance, a multitude, a proletariate. Either knowledge
must enlarge itself from above or be always in danger of submergence by the ignorant
night from below. Still more must it be unsafe, if it allows enormous numbers
of men to exist outside its pale uninformed by its light, full of the natural vigour
of the barbarian, who may at any moment seize upon the physical weapons of the
civilized without undergoing an intellectual transformation by their culture.
The, Graeco-Roman .culture perished from within and from without, from without
by the floods of Teutonic barbarism, from within by the loss of its vitality.
The problem of citing a longer unit prevents us from showing
the full argument. However, the passage quoted is enough to show another new
style. This is a deep visional inlook into history. A careful gaze will reveal
that this style is different frorn the manner used in
In the social writings, he holds his inspiration tight.
Coming here' we find that the long procession of parallel structure has
vanished; the inspirational tempos are cut short and the mighty waves of rhythm
have given place to lapping ripples. The poet" however, is not dead; as
the sixth style will confirm.
For Nature is slow and patient in her methods. She takes
up ideas and carries them out, then drops them by the wayside to resume them in
some future era with a better combination. She tames humanity, her thinking
instrument, and tests how far it is ready for the harmony she has imagined; she
allows and incites man to attempt and fail, so that he may learn and succeed better
another time.
The passage is a colourless wonder; its poetry is
concealed by the apparent, bareness. Every sentence is a truth-saver and yet
there is no outward show, no glaik of rhetoric. The metaphor ("her
thinking instrument") is colourless but pregnant. It is a metaphor by
courtesy and may elude the attention of a careless reader. The rhythm is
unmistakable. It is the prose of a seer-pet who is a great economiser like the
poet of the Mahabharata.
There is sometimes a sense of thrill and adventure in
Sri Aurobindo's prose. This is the seventh style.
Imagine not the way is easy; the way is long, arduous, dangerous,
difficult. At every step is an ambush, at every turn a pitfall. A thousand seen
or unseen enemies will start up against thee, terrible in subtlety against thy ignorance,
formidable in power against thy weakness. And when with pain thou hast
destroyed them, other thousands will surge up to take their place. Hell will vomit
its hordes to oppose and enring and wound and menace; Heaven will meet thee
with its pitiless tests and its cold luminous denials.
Thou shalt find thyself alone in thy anguish, the demons
furious in thy path, the Gods unwilling above thee. Ancient and powerful,
cruel, unvanquished and close and innumerable are the dark and dreadful Powers
that profit by the reign of Night and Ignorance and would have no change and
are hostile. Aloof, slow to arrive, far-off and few and brief in their visits
are the Bright Ones who are willing or permitted to succour. Each step forward
is a battle. There are precipitous descents, there are unending ascensions and
ever higher peaks upon peaks to conquer. Each plateau climbed is but a stage on the way and reveals endless heights beyond it.
Each victory thou thinkest the last triumphant struggle proves to be but the
prelude to a hundred fierce and perilous battles...
One has the impression of a fairy tale writer trying to
captivate his audience with fearful possibilities in the life of the hero. But
this is a real tale told not by a dreamer but by an experienced adventurer of
consciousness. There is a striking antithesis in the strange phrase "cold
luminous denials". The Divine Life
is not a prize without effort. The cold denial, according to Sri Aurobindo's
world-view, is a blessing, because it ripens the consciousness. Denial involves
suffering and suffering is the key to the