Dear Auroman, I am reposting my reply to you enclosing in double quotes your text on which I have made my comments. "Our historian immediately distorts the presentation by adding Srinivasacharya's view that Sri Aurobindo made this decision influenced by two individuals, Paul Richard and Rangaswami Iyengar, who were offering help. "A rationalist, Srinivasacharya noted certain circumstances that might have helped Aurobindo arrive at his decision (to quit politics and move to Pondicherry)... meeting with Richard...Iyengar's interest in Aurobindo". As usual, Sri Aurobindo's decision made under Divine Guidance has been belittled into a triviality because the Ashram historian decided to include the opinions of peripheral people. A naive, uninformed reader might wonder after reading this page written by the ASHRAM HISTORIAN if Sri Aurobindo really had Divine guidance as claimed or if he was just fleeing the British and fooling around with people. " Absolutely. This is the purpose behind all this negative documentation on Sri Aurobindo. Heehs ran into trouble from the very outset of his historical career due to which he was forced to add at the beginning of his articles that the views expressed in them are not the Ashram’s official views. Even this book has that important disclaimer, which shows that the authorities had never much confidence in him. "Our historian never seems to accept the concept of an Adesh and tries to disprove its validity every time he finds an occurrence." Not only does he not accept the concept of the Adesh, but he literally squirms to accept anything spiritual. The spiritual sides of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and the Ashram, which is their creation, have been deliberately left out. Using the image of a tree, all the higher branches extending into the Spirit have been lopped off and only the ugly trunk remains. "I don't understand two things about this episode: 1) People were in awe of Sri Aurobindo, the freedom-fighter at the time. Why would Srinivasacharya want to question Sri Aurobindo's motives. 2) Where has Srinivasacharya written down his thoughts for the author to see ? This feels like a game of poker where maybe we need to start thinking it's a bluff and asking for documentary proof of every assertion we disbelieve." These documents exist in the Tamil language. Srinivasacharya did not question the adesh. I think he did not even know about it. When he (or his brother, I forget who) wrote his memoirs, he sort of overstressed the importance of Parthasarathy’s meeting with Sri Aurobindo, which could be therefore taken in that sense. But everything is based on supposition with regard to how much the meeting actually influenced Sri Aurobindo to come to Pondicherry, though Sri Aurobindo did send a letter through Moni before he arrived in Pondicherry. The fact that he wrote a letter to them does not mean that they made him come to Pondicherry. If the adesh had not come, who knows Sri Aurobindo might have bravely faced another jail sentence! So many other possibilities were open to him. He could have also gone elsewhere and some other people might have invited him, of which we do not know anything, because we have never cared to find out. It is like saying, “I know a number of buses going to Chennai from Pondicherry or a number of trains going to Villipuram or a number of taxis going to Madurai, but the adesh tells me to go to Chennai. So I hop onto the bus which I have been informed beforehand. But the fact that I knew about the bus beforehand, does not whittle down the nature of the adesh. The adesh comes first, the adesh itself decides one among the various possibilities available. There is a wonderful article of Amal Kiran written on this aspect in the Mother India of May 1988. It was the first rebuttal of Heehs when he started going awry. Deshpande has also written on this aspect on this very site. But the one indisputable evidence available to us is Sri Aurobindo’s own words, and he said it a number of times. He said in no uncertain terms that it was an Adesh which he could not but obey. He did not say that the circumstances were also appropriate, or that he remembered Parthasarathy , etc. Raman Reddy