Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Letters

Fragment ID: 6409

(this fragment is largest or earliest found passage)

Sri Aurobindo — Unknown addressee

1916 (1916-1920)

Fragmentary Draft Letter¹

[.....] with whatever the superior wisdom and political experience of the ruling race to grant to them. You are asking for a thing contrary to human nature.*²

I state the difficulty broadly as I see it; I shall try to make my meaning more precise in a subsequent letter. Meanwhile all I can say is that whatever can be done to alter this state [of] things – subject to my conscience and lights, I am always willing to do. But my scope of action is very limited. I am an exile in French India, in danger of arrest or internment if I step across the border. I have long abstained from all intermiscence in politics, and anything I might say, write or do now would be misunderstood by the Government. They regard me, I believe, as an arch revolutionary and irreconcilable; any assertion of mine to the contrary would be regarded probably as camouflage or covert for unavowable designs. Nor could I engage to satisfy them by my utterances or action, I would necessarily have to speak and act from the point of view of Indian aspiration to liberty and this is a thing which they seem still to regard [as] objectionable. All that I can see at present to do is in the line I am doing, but that is necessarily a [?samadhic] kind of action which can only bear fruit indirectly and not in the present

But if the English mind would take the first step and try to see things from the Indian’s standpoint – see their mind and act accordingly, all difficulties might be solved. The Indian mind has not the Irish memory for past wrongs and discords, it forgives and forgets easily. Only it must be made to feel that the approach on the other side is frank and whole hearted. If it once felt that, every difficulty would be solved.

I send you my volume of poems since you have desired to read it, but with some hesitation. I doubt whether you will find much that is worth your perusal except two or three of the shorter poems, they were written long ago, some as many as 20 or 25 years, and are rather gropings after verse and style than a self-expression. It is only now that I am doing work which I feel has some chance of living, but it is not yet ready for publication.

¹ 1916–1920. The surviving portion of this draft (its beginning is not available) was written on one side of a sheet of paper that on the other side was used for part of a relatively early draft of the poem Savitri. It is not possible to assign an exact date to the Savitri draft, but it must have been written between 1916, when Sri Aurobindo began work on the poem, and 1921, when he temporarily stopped all forms of writing. The “volume of poems” mentioned was probably Ahana and Other Poems (1915). The intended recipient of the letter is not known for sure, but it is likely that it was Chittaranjan Das (see below).

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² The asterisk is Sri Aurobindo’s; its significance is not known. – Ed.

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