Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
SABCL 26
Fragment ID: 7566
Since 1900 Sri Aurobindo had wished to enter the political fray and to contribute his mite to the forces that were seriously working for India’s redemption and rehabilitation. He held private talks, he corresponded, he put pressure on front-rank leaders; but as yet he could do little.
This does not give a correct idea. He had already joined with some of the more advanced leaders to organise bodies for political action which would act when the time for action came1; it was only in public as yet that he could do little.
1 The programme of this organisation was at first Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott – Swaraj meaning to it complete independence. The word Swaraj was first used by the Bengali-Maratha publicist, Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, writer of Desher Katha, a book compiling all the details of India’s economic servitude which had an enormous influence on the young men of Bengal and helped to turn them into revolutionaries. The word was taken up as their ideal by the revolutionary party and popularised by the vernacular paper Sandhya edited by Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya; it was caught hold of by Dadabhai Naoroji at the Calcutta Congress as the equivalent of colonial self-government but did not long retain that depreciated value. Sri Aurobindo was the first to use its English equivalent ‘independence’ and reiterate it constantly in the Bande Mataram as the one and immediate aim of national politics.