The children should be helped to grow up into straightforward, frank, upright and honourable human beings ready to develop into divine nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo
5 July 2010
From
RY Deshpande
Sri Aurobindo Ashram
To
The Managing Trustee
Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust
Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Subject: The Trust and the Book entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
Reference: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust Letter dated 21 June 2010
Dear Manoj-baboo
I am referring to the letter dated 21 June 2010 signed by Dilip Datta and addressed to Kittu Reddy, Ranganath Raghavan, and Sumita Khandpal. This was in response to the summary of discussion prepared by them after they had a meeting with you personally on 9 May 2010. From these two documents it is very clear that there are now two versions of the May session which make the whole thing dubious. The first element of dubiousness arises from the fact that it is not you as the administrative head of the institution but a member of the board of the trustees should have signed it for them. This immediately gives rise to a question: Is there a resolution passed by the board to this effect? If it is so, then it should have been made clear by referring to the minutes of the board meeting, that the reply would be sent by Dilip Datta. This is necessary for the highly loaded reason that the matter has now assumed an altogether different dimension, something more than informal discussions among the intimate inmates who are seriously concerned about the administrative happenings in the Ashram. In the course of several forwards, these papers have now reached me and I felt that I should candidly express my views in my individual capacity as well as a matter of right without hesitation being a beneficiary of the Ashram trust, if at all these views have any importance or pertinence in this regard. After going through them with due care I must very regretfully say that anyone who is perceptive enough to the values of the Ashram will get stunned, that its administrative body should have climbed down to such a depth of crudeness. The papers have no contents in them, no substance, have no value in any sense, neither medical, administrative, technical, legal, literary, historical, nothing whatsoever, in the least the spiritual. In fact they appear to be a draft coming from a small insensitive official employed in a Tehsil office of a State government; they seem to have been prepared by a person whose head is of the size of a pea, or who is with a dead soul. It is shocking that it should make reference to one who is no more. Some might feel, it was good riddance; but simple rules of civic politeness and justice demand that the accused be given a fair chance to defend himself which cannot happen in the present instance. In fact the whole document looks to be a terribly dark document, holding a terribly dark occult charge in it. I am not sure if Dilip Datta has read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar but, sure enough, generally the students of our Centre of Education are aware of it. Many of them even know by heart Mark Antony’s famous speech that turned out to be a crucial turning point in the unfoldment of history; its opening lines are as follows:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar...
In the case of the present deceased, it seems that only the evil lives after him and that there is nothing good about him to be interred with his bones. If one has nothing good to say in the absence of a person, tells the Mother, one should keep mum. Or, are there grades of what you call “dignified silence” which at times appears to be what could be called vindictive silence; nothing can be more disastrous to the soul of man than this stuff, the venom of the king cobra. What we have here is perversion, gross perversion. Are our souls dead? that we have idée fixe about ourselves? that we must protect our amour propre, our abhimān all the while? at the cost of values? and for whom? In any case, in the deeper sense, in the occult sense, it is a matter between the soul of the individual and the Mother, and there is always for the sincere the Hand of Grace, the Golden Smile, the Sunbright Gaze which transcends all our notions of things. However, my concern at the moment is specific, connected with the book entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo for which you have perhaps given the copyright permission, that it can use the unpublished Archival material also. It is a book which is published by the prestigious Columbia University Press, and this devolves on you a serious responsibility that nothing of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother is misrepresented. But what we see here is falsification of their vision and work. If you also see that it is so, you must immediately withdraw the permission. Your non-doing it, would make you, ipso facto, an accomplice in that abominable task.
There have been professional objections to The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, objections coming from several learned and perceptive quarters, objections raised by competent students of Sri Aurobindo and not just a few but hundreds of them. But let me first quote what is said in the 21st June letter from the trustees:
As regards the book The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, the issue as to whether the content of the book is offensive, warranting a ban on the book, is the subject matter of adjudication by the High Court of Orissa, in a litigation initiated in their wisdom by some devotees there. It is therefore inappropriate for the Trust, whatever be the perceptions of the trustees to pronounce itself on an issue seized of by the Court from as early as October 2008 or so. We are informed that the Writ Petition lists out and quotes a very large number of specific citations from the book The Lives of Sri Aurobindo with a prayer to issue a Writ of Mandamus to ban the printing, publication and distribution of the impugned book. In June 2009 or so, a newspaper report from Orissa claimed that a group of persons have filed a contempt application in that particular Writ Petition in the High Court of Orissa against the trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust for interfering with the orders of the Court. It is besides the point that the claim was apparently false. However the news report serves as a reminder that we should be prudent not to make any pronouncement on an issue being adjudicated upon by the High Court. Hence our comments on this topic can necessarily be only very general, not in any way impinging into the prohibited domain.
The letter makes a wise-looking statement that “we should be prudent not to make any pronouncement on an issue being adjudicated upon by the High Court.” This is a highly misleading statement when the Orissa government by a gazette notification proscribed The Lives of Sri Aurobindo written by an inmate of the Ashram. That the Trust came to know about the matter through a newspaper report is therefore plain trash. It is well-designed falsehood. I understand that the Orissa government in their April 2009 notification, stated that the book depicts wrong and distorted facts, that it contains absurd, irrelevant and self-made stories about the life of Sri Aurobindo. If the Trust has not obtained a copy of such an important and vital notification it will only speak of utter incompetence of the Trust management. But it is inconceivable that the alert-attentive Trust did not know the reasons for issuance of the notification by the Orissa government. By pleading ignorance, the Trust would essentially be promoting wrong depiction of the life of Sri Aurobindo in whose name the Trust ‘functions’ here. But to get back to the adjudication argument: when there is a clear order by the Orissa government then, I suppose, the question of the issue being adjudicated by the High Court simply does not arise. This seems to be obvious to me.
In fact, the statement that the issue is being adjudicated upon by the High Court reveals several contradictions in the stand taken by the trustees. Firstly, I don’t think the Trust was ever a respondent in the case. Therefore I don’t understand the reasons for you to make this statement. In any case, I may wish to know specifically if this adjudication-argument applies only to the Trust, and if so on what grounds. But we have in ‘your’ letter itself a statement on the book given by a retired High Court Judge; he calls the book “a model of a biography” and goes quite far in recommending it to the general public. Here is what the letter says: “A Retired Judge of the High Court at Madras who is a long time resident of Pondicherry has gone public in an article published recently wherein he wonders why people are disturbed by this book which he calls a model of a biography and goes so far as to recommend this book to the members of the general public.” Can we take his statement seriously? But I will go a step farther. Let me put it in the following.
You are saying that the issue is adjudicated upon by the Court and you cannot opine on it. But since October 2008 the Ashram is displaying a notice about a few things which the Trust should do forthwith. It is extremely critical of the book, criticizing it in no ambiguous words. It cannot accept the downgrading of Sri Aurobindo in dark and cruel pages. It wants the Trust to purchase all the copies of the printed book and destroy them. I am referring here to “Pranab’s Proposal” issued out on 10 October 2008 after learning about the character of the book. So, we have here a situation in which, on the one hand, the Trust refuses to make any comment on the book, thinking it to be a matter under adjudication, and on the other, displaying a notice in the premises condemning it in no uncertain terms. That seems to be the magic of the book, that dark agent of falsehood. If we have any spiritual element in us, we should at once disassociate ourselves from it; we should take the side the Mother would be glad about. The test is to ask a question to oneself: would have the Mother approved the book? This was the question I had posed to you in early October 2008 itself. The suggestion was, to get an answer to it and act accordingly. I don’t know where your ‘inner voice’ is leading you. But let me quote here a passage from The Life Divine:
It can be often observed that when a self-assertive vital egoism goes on trampling on its way without restraint or scruple all that opposes its will or desire, it raises a mass of reactions against itself, reactions of hatred, antagonism, unease in men which may have their result now or hereafter, and still more formidable adverse reactions in universal Nature. It is as if the patience of Nature, her willingness to be used were exhausted; the very forces that the ego of the strong vital man seized and bent to its purpose rebel and turn against him, those he had trampled on rise up and receive power for his downfall: the insolent vital force of Man strikes against the throne of Necessity and is dashed to pieces or the lame foot of Punishment reaches at last the successful offender. (pp. 813-14)
You are confidently quoting a retired High Court Judge certifying the good nature of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, as if Pranab’s statement is useless-worthless, groundless, though coming from one who served the Mother for decades, served in a special way. The impression one gets is that of strangeness. I fail to understand the reason for singularly quoting a judge when there are hundreds of articles and comments from all over the world available, these analyzing and discussing the ‘merits’ of the book in several respects. I have myself forwarded to you in the course of time a number of them but you have preferred to ignore them. But, more specifically, let me draw your attention to one I had given to you in person and had requested to publish it in Mother India, the periodical about which Sri Aurobindo had said that it is “My Paper”. This enclosing letter of mine is dated 20 September 2008 and runs as follows:
Dear Trustees
It is after a lot of hesitation I’m writing this letter
in connection with the highly controversial biography The Lives of Sri Aurobindo authored by Peter Heehs of the Ashram’s
Archives. The controversy arises not only on devotional-emotional grounds but
also in respect of its ostensible objectivity and rationalist methodology. It
is very likely that he has already taken the permission from the Trustees,
particularly as regard the copyright held by the Trust. We have no idea how he
had presented his case or on what grounds the permission was granted to him.
But the result is shocking, to put it rather mildly. The book has been recently
published, in May 2008, by the Columbia University Press,
I’ve any number of letters and comments about the
despicable-ludicrous manner in which Sri Aurobindo has been depicted by this
wise, rather all-wise, historian-biographer who claims himself to be the
builder of the Archives department. One particular letter mentions the “spirit
of disdain and dismissal” vis-à-vis Sri Aurobindo present in the biography.
Another feelingly says it is “a writing without a soul or a heart!” Surely, it
doesn’t behove of an Ashramite, I suppose. And just recollect the havoc that
was created in the matter of editing Savitri’s
present “official” version! In the frustrating sequel followed tiresome and
endless court cases, and came humiliation; wounds have been inflicted on the
psyche of the Ashram, something which happened largely due to our own
ineptitude. The expectation is that it won’t repeat in another manner.
There is a line in Savitri
which says “terrible agencies the spirit allows,” offspring of the abyss,
administrators of the shadowy Force, and perhaps there is nothing we weaklings
can do about them. Whatever has to be done will be done by the supreme Shakti
herself. Yet there are two things we can and we must do. It is only in response
to our sincere aspiration and invocation that she comes, comes as Durga for
instance every year, or comes as Mahakali at the moment of great transformative
actions. And the other thing is, we have to do our human bit also in the perceived
values of the spirit. The last is the action step and it cannot be avoided
under one pretext or the other. The divine action needs the human agency in the
pragmatics of the occult-spiritual functioning. These have to go together.
In these pragmatics, there might be several options
available for the experienced trustees and I’m sure the right thing will be
done by them. However, a certain academic response is also needed. One of the
possible responses could be what I have drafted in the enclosed paper: The Lives of Sri Aurobindo—a Controversial
Biography by Peter Heehs. There might be others also looking at the issues
differently and it is required that all these be presented not only to the
inmates of the Ashram but also to the large following of the Mother and the
Master. In fact, proactively, this effort must be promoted by the managers of
the institute.
It is in this context my request to you all is to have
the article published at the earliest in the Ashram’s mouthpiece, Mother India. I consider this as my duty
and small service to the Mother and please accept it in that spirit also.
cc. Pranab-Dada
The article has not been published so far in Mother India in spite of my personally giving a copy to its ‘editor’ also, and asking him on a couple of occasions later. I do not know your reason for not publishing it. A couple of days after giving a copy of this letter to Pranab-dada, we had a fairly long talk the details of which need not be mentioned here; but I must say that he expressed his total dismay at the present Ashram management. He was also very critical of the way in which the Archives functions and about which he had spoken to the founder Jayantilal also.
This letter of mine was followed by another, dated 5 October 2008, enclosing an article entitled Ascent to Supermind. This article essentially examines in some details the said chapter in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. This article like the first one has remained unpublished, and the reason unanswered. I maintain that both the articles are purely academic-technical in nature, both critically and professionally examining the book for which you have given the copyright permission. In these matters simple courtesy would require to inform the author about acceptance or rejection of the material given for publication. But unfortunately this rule of simple courtesy was not, is never, observed by you, smacking of officious arrogance of an authority. While I am no longer keen to know the reasons, I must say that the whole affair puts you in terrible light. Next day morning, at about seven, after reading my letter dated 20 September, Dilip Datta embraced me and congratulated for the letter and the article; this was in the Ashram, in front of Nolini-da’s room. But he told me that he would leave the decision of the publication of the article to you. Earlier, in his office, he had also told me that, as he understood from his son Sanjiva, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo has a viscous dot of poison on every page, and he condemned it on that ground. You also admit, I suppose, that the book is “bad at places” but suggest that we should ignore these lacunae in it,—because of the larger good it fetches for Sri Aurobindo. But this is as good as saying that there are only a few drops of potassium cyanide in a full pot of payas in the Dining Room, and that these should not really hurt the Ashram ‘beneficiaries’, that, after all, it was only one lizard that got cooked in it, and nobody is going to die because of it, except suffering for a minor stomach upset or vomiting; but then you ignore the stigma that would come to the Dining Room. You seem to be unconcerned about it. All these days we had a different opinion about you, but the artifice of The Lives has exposed the real colours. Poison? Here it is, for instance.
Can there be anything more atrocious, dirtier than saying that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had a wrongful private relationship? Is this the kind of archival material we have collected in the Ashram? is it to publish that you give the copyright permission? By the way, according to the Mother’s copyright notice dated 28 August 1972 two copies of the book for which copyright permission was granted should be sent to the Ashram free of cost. We presume that this has been done in the present instance; perhaps the intention behind this stipulation by the Mother is to make the book available to them who wish to study it. It could as well be to check if there are any copyright violations, violations including the use of quotations to “distort the meaning or the spirit of the original”. This is a pretty serious situation as everywhere we see deliberate prevarication or twisting of the copyright material. Or, is it that the members of the Archives are above all such stipulations? are irreproachable? that they should not be questioned? Why are archival papers not accessible for research studies? On one occasion when I had gone to the Archives looking for details regarding some Savitri-text, I was rudely asked if these were meant to file a court case! Helplessly I had just to walk out. But let us get back to the Mother-Master relationship depicted by the mischievous Lives. Does its ‘discovery’ of the said wrongful relationship constitute as one of the “invaluable” services rendered by the author to the Trust? Is it this relationship that the retired High Court Judge sees in the book as good for the general public and applauds its disclosure as an aspect of a “model biography”? By quoting him, is it this that you wish to project about the Mother and the Master? In your famous “dignified silence”, is it this that you wish to spread around? In an official letter—written on the Ashram Trust letterhead—addressed to Amal Kiran, dated 26 November 2003, you wrote: “I have personally witnessed Mother’s strong reaction to any mention of her personal life when I used to go with Andre-da to Her in the evenings (’72 & ’73) for print-orders for Ashram publications.”
And now here is a whole book presenting to the large wide and wise ignorant world things about the personal life of the Mother and the Master, a book on which, in your prudence, you do not wish to opine for the fear of incurring possible judicial wrath. It only means that the possible judicial wrath is more insulting to you than the insult inflicted on the Mother and the Master. You will say that Sri Aurobindo is above all these things, that he need not be defended by us. Of course it is true, and what really we small mortals can do, do anything about it? But, remember, in spite of the divine assurance he had, there had to come CR Das to defend him in the Court of Law. We have an instrumental role to play, and not to play it is not to serve the Mother. It is in this background that we have to ask the question to ourselves as to what has happened to our sense of propriety, what are we here for. Are these the values given to us that we can bend over backward or forward when we should find bending over backward or forward convenient to protect misplaced personal interests? To every student in the Centre of Education your office gives notebooks on the front cover of which is printed, right at the centre, a quotation from Sri Aurobindo: “The children should be helped to grow up into straightforward, frank, upright and honourable human beings ready to develop into divine nature.” And here is a situation in which we depart from what is expected of us as elders. Isn’t that a terrible pity? There cannot be a situation more despicable than this. If we stand for great and noble and elevating ideals, ideals that give meaning and value to life, give authentic content to life, then we must act in the greatness of those ideals. But it seems that these verities of life in us disappear when arrives the moment of the truth, when we are forced to take a position in life. Perhaps the spell of the Lives has worked on you to make you forget all that, all that the Mother expects of us to do and to work for.
But let me get back to a couple of issues that emerge from the loathsome Lives. Some of these I have already communicated to you via e-mails. It is pretty strange that the loathsome Lives should have been recommended by an ex-judge as a “model biography”, and stranger yet that ‘you’ should have included it in the 21 June letter sent to Kittu Reddy-Ranganath Raghavan-Sumita Khandpal. As I have already said, there are hundreds of articles and comments on the book and taking no cognizance of them makes the judge’s note simply worthless; he cannot plead ignorance about them. Here is someone who is not in possession of facts, or who feigns not to possess facts, and yet happily passes judgements on crucial issues, issues of fundamental nature. And there, you quote him as if you had some compulsions to do it. If you are not already aware of the hundreds of articles and comments and posts, let me append at the end a representative list for you to have a proper look at the Lives. It is this total lack of mention of these innumerable views that goes to make your document a dark and terrible document, dated 21 June 2010, a premeditated preconceived document, and hence worthless in every respect, having no substance, no contents, no finesse, neither administrative, medical, technical, legal, literary, historical, nothing of any sort, nothing whatsoever, in the least the spiritual.
But let us look at the character of Sri Aurobindo that is being portrayed by your ‘remarkable’ and favourite Lives of Sri Aurobindo. If the Indian renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century was God-willed, we must say that Sri Aurobindo had a very major role to play in bringing it about. We need not go into his nationalist activities of the period 1905-10, but we can see what the Lives’s author has to say.
According to him, Sri Aurobindo was effectively a
terrorist. Here is a legitimate Ashram inmate, and he goes to the
It is a pity that Sri Aurobindo’s formulations and actions are totally
misunderstood by the author of the unsightly Lives of Sri Aurobindo when
he makes a preposterous attempt to discredit Sri Aurobindo by saying this: “It
is impossible to say anything certain about the success or failure” of Sri
Aurobindo’s endeavor. In fact he goes farther and says that Sri Aurobindo’s
success always seemed to elude him, if not delude him. He disbelieves that Sri
Aurobindo succeeded in bringing down a new consciousness into the
earth-consciousness. But this is plain stupid when one has no understanding of
the occult-yogic aspects of the entire issue, aspects which have perhaps no
concern for a historian as he claims himself—how dippy of him!—to be one. There
has to be some insight into them, some perception of things, preferably some
experience or realization of them, before making any comment of the kind. This
is absent, which only makes the Lives yogically hollow and hence of no
value while approaching the great Master-Yogi that Sri Aurobindo was. It is a
greater pity that the present management thinks that such a person is rendering
“invaluable” services to the Institution. Indeed, what ought to be recognized
is the new birth Sri Aurobindo had given to the soul of a country. Instead he
is branded as a “terrorist”.
And then we have Rich Carlson with a terrible bias against Sri Aurobindo, he as
a firm supporter of the historian. For him Sri Aurobindo was a religious fundamentalist.
Carlson says: “Although Sri Aurobindo, the founder of Integral Yoga formally
eschewed couching his yoga in religion nevertheless, religious practices crept
into the practices of its followers. It is in fact the transference of Hindu
religious practices on to Integral Yoga which has facilitated a fascination of
some of his followers with the fundamentalist rhetoric of today’s militant
Hindu nationalism, Hinduvta.” According to Carlson, the earliest evidence of
Sri Aurobindo’s fundamentalism can be traced to his compositions during the
political days: Hymn to Durga, Bhavani Bharati, Bande Mataram, and conducting a
periodical under that title, speeches proclaiming Sanatan Dharma which is
equivalent to Hindutva, and so on. These were activities, says he, to
effectively "rouse the masses with a religious frenzy." During his
Baroda-Calcutta period, Sri Aurobindo “discovered and immersed himself in the
text and practices of Hinduism.” Later, both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
mimicked traditional forms of Hinduism and encouraged worship and deification.
But has Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga become a Religion? Perhaps the basic or
more appropriate question is: Can the Integral Yoga given by Sri Aurobindo
really become a Religion? In the absence of any clear and cogent understanding
of the term, to talk of religious fundamentalism is to distort things, is to
produce and propagate in the minds of people deliberate confusion. It looks
that there are destabilising forces or elements active in their suspicious designs.
These need be thwarted.
Then we have another strong supporter of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, Dr
Raghu based in the
The question is: should not the Sri Aurobindo spawned by The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, he being portrayed as a terrorist-fundamentalist-lunatic, be nipped in the bud, be destroyed? Should you not, as a head of the Institution, feel responsibility towards it? Let us remember what the Mother had said about Sri Aurobindo:
·Sri Aurobindo came to tell the world of the beauty of the future that must be realised. He came to give not a hope but a certitude of the splendour towards which the world moves. The world is not an unfortunate accident, it is a marvel which moves towards its expression. The world needs the certitude of the beauty of the future. And Sri Aurobindo has given that assurance. (27 November 1971)
·Sri Aurobindo came to tell us how to find Thee and how to serve Thee. Grant that in this year of his centenary we may truly understand what he has taught us and in all sincerity put it into practice. (6 December 1971)
·Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to announce the manifestation of the supramental world and not merely did he announce this manifestation but embodied also in part the supramental force and showed by example what one must do to prepare oneself for manifesting it. The best thing we can do is to study all that he has told us and endeavour to follow his example and prepare ourselves for the new manifestation. This gives life its real sense and will help us to overcome all obstacles. Let us live for the new creation and we shall grow stronger and stronger by remaining young and progressive. (30 January 1972)
·Sri Aurobindo came on earth from the Supreme to announce the manifestation of a new race and the new world, the Supramental. Let us prepare for it in all sincerity and eagerness. (15 August 1972)
·Man is the creation of yesterday. Sri Aurobindo came to announce the creation of tomorrow: the coming of the supramental being. (15 August 1972)
·From the spiritual point of view,
And remember again: “The children should be helped to grow up into straightforward, frank, upright and honourable human beings ready to develop into divine nature.” That help can be offered only we following what is expected of us in this place of ours. Your non-action will amount to being an accomplice in a degrading act which is pure guru-droha, betrayal of the spiritual preceptor. About its consequences I am least concerned, as it is a matter between the Teacher and the Disciple. My writing this longish letter is a part of concern about the Institution, to serve its interest. But before I close this letter let me say something apropos of Savitri.
There cannot be any more laughable an assertion than saying Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri is a “fictional creation”. But this is precisely what the determined author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is saying. It is forgotten, or else ignored, what the Mother has spoken of Savitri, that it is the “supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision”. This revelation gets immediately nullified in the Lives by one single phrase, a “fictional creation”. And Sri Aurobindo himself had said that Savitri was his “main work”, and he took it as his own means of ascension, of transformative spiritual progress and expression, and he had ceaselessly given the last ten years to give to it the form he wanted to give to it, the form of perfect perfection, of yogic embodiment of truth and light and beauty and power. Was all that an aspect of “fictional creation”, the Yogi virtually occupied with it throughout? That would be a sad paradox. But is Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri really a fictional creation? After 1938, with the establishment of the Mind of Light in his physical, the physical’s mind opening to the supramental Light and Force, Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga for the collective took an upward turn, a positive turn, and things started happening in rapid succession; it is to this period that the definitive composition of Savitri belongs. That indeed makes Savitri a rich source to get a peep into the yogic attainments of the Yogi during the last twelve years or so. The Lives published by the Columbia University Press dismisses Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri as a possible source for getting some idea about the yoga-tapasya of Sri Aurobindo. It says: “Because his talks entirely ceased and his correspondence virtually so, there are no first-hand accounts of Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana after 1941. One is tempted to mine Savitri to make up for the lack. … But the poem is a fictional creation.” It is implied that it has no value for a historian, is of no use for a biographer. In other words, he wants to write the biography of a yogi after scouring old gunny sacks holding the government records. Possibly, the author of The Lives was using unpublished archival material. This could then well imply the use of unpublished archival material without any specific copyright permission. Or else the deeper question could be: was permission to use unpublished archival material sought and given? About Savitri Sri Aurobindo writes: "Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save." What is true of Savitri as a person is also true of the epic Savitri as Sri Aurobindo’s creation. There is nothing, cannot be anything, “fictional” about it or in it. The adjective “fictional” has the following synonyms: imaginary, imagined, story bound, illusory (with the shades of deceptive, false, illusive, misleading, not real, erroneous,” unreal (dreamlike, weird, out of this world, incredible), fantastic (grotesque, whimsical, fanciful), made-up, invented, feigning invention, fiction conventionally accepted as falsehood, story-telling as a branch of literature; Webster: Fiction is a creation of imagination, and does not necessarily imply an intent to deceive, fiction is the opposite of fact, a term strictly applied to, in literature, to any form of story, whether in prose or verse, of which the characters are purely imaginary, or one in which historical events and persons are treated in an original and imaginative manner. Is Savitri that stuff? But in Savitri “the characters are … incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies…” It is this character of Savitri that lends itself for a possible mode of presentation as an autobiographical account. In one of the Savitri-letters, Sri Aurobindo writes to Amal: “The Inconscient and the Ignorance … are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass. I [am] presenting a happening that was to me something sensible and, as one might say, psychologically and spiritually concrete. … It is in fact for myself that I have written [Savitri] and for those who can lend themselves to the subject-matter, images, technique of mystic poetry. … Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event. … All that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character.” It is a pity that a person who has stayed in the Ashram for more than three decades does not recognize these aspects; instead, he mischievously goes about telling the world through world-famous Columbia University Press that Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri is a fictional creation. Assuming that the world-famous Columbia University Press is not the world-famous Beverly Hills Wilshire Hotel, one given to the weighty academic and the other to another style of life assuring best prices, it is necessary that we dismiss this whole thing in every respect. Of course this can happen only if you with your inner convictions unsubscribe to the theory of Savitri being a “fictional creation”. By calling Savitri a fictional creation this author has violated the copyright conditions, that he has misrepresented, distorted “the meaning and the spirit of the original”. To put it in plain English: he has falsified the works of Sri Aurobindo. And yet you certify that he is rendering “invaluable” services to the Ashram and that he is of good conduct. Amazing!
The biographical aspect in Savitri has to be seen in a different manner, a double biography. The Mother herself has said that he was writing her biography, her great experiences and realizations revealed in it. And of course it is also the most valuable Record of his own Yoga. For instance, Book I Canto III, The Book of Beginnings, The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Soul’s Release, is an exact transcription of the early spiritual attainments of Sri Aurobindo, these belonging roughly to the period 1908-12. In those 24 pages with 824 lines we have one of the most vivid accounts of a Yogi poised for a new birth, of becoming a dwija. Here, as a line from Savitri says, “A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.” Let me quote a few lines from the concluding portion of the Canto:
Time's secrets were to him an oft-read book;
The records of the future and the past
Outlined their excerpts on the etheric page.
One and harmonious by the Maker's skill,
The human in him paced with the divine.
His acts betrayed not the interior flame.
This forged the greatness of his front to earth.
A genius heightened in his body's cells
That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works
Akin to the march of unaccomplished Powers
Beyond life's arc in spirit's immensities.
Apart he lived in his mind's solitude,
A demigod shaping the lives of men:
One soul's ambition lifted up the race;
A Power worked, but none knew whence it came.
The universal strengths were linked with his;
Filling earth's smallness with their boundless breadths,
He drew the energies that transmute an age.
Immeasurable by the common look,
He made great dreams a mould for coming things
And cast his deeds like bronze to front the years.
His walk through Time outstripped the human stride.
Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's.
And here is a toffee-nosed member and privileged beneficiary of a spiritual institution who says that revelatory Savitri is a “fictional creation”! And here is the board of extraordinary trustees who swallow the fiction!
Sincerely
RY Deshpande
5 July 2010
NB: If in the larger interest of the Institution and in the interest of the aspiring followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother I should feel it desirable, I might send this letter widely around to bring into the spirit of things the strength and the nobility of ideas cherished by everyone of us in the soul’s trueness and greatness.
Appendix
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