After the Surat Congress in December 1907 Sri Aurobindo, at the request of Tilak, visited a number of places in Maharashtra and addressed public meetings. On 15 January 1908 he gave a speech in Girgaum, Bombay, explaining the National Movement that had set in Bengal a few years earlier. In Bombay Sri Aurobindo dwelt specifically on Education, as he was specifically requested to expound on the theme which was actively being pursued in Bengal. The desire was to understand the purport of this new trend and what precisely it conveyed, the true sense of education rather than it becoming mechanical, its role in awakening the sleeping consciousness of the people. The speech was reported in a Marathi newspaper and was received very appreciatively. The text of the original in English does not exists, and the following is a translation of the address as was reported by the paper.

Along with this speech we also reproduce two extracts of an earlier unpublished article which now appears in Bande Mataram, CWSA, Vol. 7, pp.1114-16.

We then trace the early history of singing of Vande Mataram in national conferences. There have been oppositions to it right from the beginning and differences continue to be there even today. The hardened sectarian and religious sentiments that got behind it have clouded our thinking and now it has become nigh impossible to plead for the values of the spirit it invokes; it is a prayer to divine powers to build national quality and character in the strength of the soul dedicated to them. It is a secular prayer and there is nothing ritualistic or religious in it. Sri Aurobindo had spoken about it as the Mantra given to awaken and rejuvenate a Nation, and it did it in no uncertain manner. There was another Mantra that had to be given and perhaps it has yet to await its great moment when the life of a nation, the collective life, opens to the verities of the higher manifesting will and force. For that to happen we must engage ourselves in the tapasya of the transformative power of the spirit, and there is no way other than that.

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