Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

3 January 1939

Nirodbaran: It is assumed here that illness brings some progress in sadhana after it has been cured. Is that true?

Sri Aurobindo: Not necessarily. Do you mean that your cold will give you some progress? (Laughter)

Nirodbaran: Cold is hardly a disease!

Sri Aurobindo: It is said that for every disease there is a psychological reason.

Nirodbaran: Said by whom?

Sri Aurobindo: By the Yogis. If that reason can be found and remedied, then there may be a progress.

Nirodbaran: What about children then?

Sri Aurobindo: What about them? They have no psychology? Do you mean to say that when they are born they come with a blank page to be filled up only later on in life? They are full of psychology, each one differing from the others.

The body is an expression of one’s nature, and if one could detect the exact psychological factor behind, which is not easy to do, then many helpful things can be done.

Here the Mother came in and silence followed. After she had gone, the talk began about homoeopathy.

Sri Aurobindo: Lila was cured by Ramchandra. She found fault with him and discontinued the treatment, saying that she would rely on the Mother’s Force since it was the Mother who had cured her.

Satyendra: That is the difficulty here, Sir! The patients come to oblige us and when they are cured it is done by the Mother. Then why come to us? They say they come to give us work; otherwise, how will our sadhana go on?

Here Nirodbaran gave an instance of a homoeopathic cure. Dilip’s cousin had a tumour which was cured by homoeopathy. There was no question of faith in this case. Then the topic arose of long life achieved by Yoga or other means. Someone mentioned Tibeti Baba.

Sri Aurobindo: But he says that it was not due to Yoga but to some medicine that his body has changed and he has attained longevity. Brahmananda also lived very long – some say two or three hundred years. None knew how old he was and he never told his age. Once when he had a toothache, Sardar Majumdar took some medicine to him. Brahmananda said, “This toothache has been with me since the Battle of Panipat.” That gave the clue to his age. He had the most remarkable eyes. Usually they were either closed or half shut. When I went to see him and took leave, he opened them fully and looked at me. It seemed as if he could penetrate me and see everything clearly.

That reminds me of a compliment given to my eyes by Sir Edward Baker, Governor of Bengal. He visited me in Alipore Jail and told Charu Dutt, “Have you seen Aurobindo Ghose’s eyes?”

“Yes, what about them?” asked Charu.

“He has the eyes of a madman!”

Charu took great pains to convince him that I was not at all mad but a Karmayogi!

Purani: Nevinson, the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, said that you never laughed.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. I met him twice, once in Bengal at Subodh Mullick’s place. I was very serious at that time. The next occasion was when I was president of the National Conference at Surat. Then also I couldn’t laugh, being the President. So he called me “the man who never laughs”. (Laughter)

Nirodbaran: Taggart regarded you as the most dangerous man in the British Empire. He was dead against lifting the ban on your entry into British India, when it was discussed in England, if I remember rightly.

Sri Aurobindo: How could that be? I never knew that there was such a ban. The last prosecution against me was for two signed letters in the Karmayogin, and they were declared to be non-seditious. That ban seems to be just a legend.

Nirodbaran: All over India there was the impression that a ban had been put and everybody thought you were the head of the revolutionary movement.

Sri Aurobindo: That was the idea of all Englishmen. You know Olive Maitland. She was friendly with some members of the royal family. When she went back to England from here she tried to persuade them that I was rather an innocent person and the Ashram was a nice place. She found that instead of converting them to her view they began to look askance at her.

Lord Minto said that he could not rest his head on his pillow until he had crushed Aurobindo Ghose. He feared that I would start the revolutionary movement again, and assassinations were going on at that time.

But there was no ban. On the contrary, Lord Carmichael sent somebody to persuade me to return and settle somewhere in Darjeeling and discuss philosophy with him. I refused the offer.

The Government was absolutely taken by surprise when our movement was launched. It never expected that Indians could start revolutionary activities.

Nirodbaran: I hear Chant Dutt also joined the movement.

Sri Aurobindo: Oh, yes. Everybody knew of it and so he was called by the Europeans “the disloyal judge”. He was very courageous, spirited, powerful and frank. That’s the kind of man I like. He used to talk openly and frankly about his revolutionary ideas to Englishmen.

Nirodbaran: They – at least of some of them – also liked him.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, they like such people. There was another man, D’Souza, whom I knew very well. He is working in Mysore State now. He is one of the cleverest brains I have ever met. He is an Indian Christian. Not that much of Christianity is left in him. He has an independent mind.

Nirodbaran: Taggart was mainly responsible for crushing the movement, we hear. He narrowly escaped being killed in Palestine the other day.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, it is surprising how some of the greatest scoundrels have so much protection.

Nirodbaran: Dutt has mentioned in his reminiscences two incidents about you – bridge-playing and shooting with a gun.

Sri Aurobindo: It is true that I didn’t know how to play cards and bridge is a difficult game, but I kept winning. So he thought I knew everybody’s hand. As for shooting with a gun, it is quite easy. I could have shot even small birds high in the air.

Nirodbaran: Dutt is afraid to come here lest he shouldn’t be able to go back.

Sri Aurobindo: It would be his last journey?

Nirodbaran: Was he a great friend of yours?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. Beachcroft, who was my schoolmate, somehow couldn’t believe that I was a revolutionary.

Another intimate English friend of mine, Ferrer, came to see me in the court when the trial was going on. We, the accused, were put into a cage for fear we should jump out and murder the judge. Ferrer was a barrister practising in Sumatra or Singapore. He saw me in the cage and was much concerned and couldn’t conceive how to get me out. It was he who had given me the clue to the real hexameter in English. He read out a line which he thought was the best hexametrical line, and that gave me the swing of the metre as it should be in English. English has no really successful poetry in hexametres and all the best critics have declared it to be impossible. Matthew Arnold’s professor friend and others tried it but failed.

Nirodbaran: I thought Yeats also has written hexameters.

Sri Aurobindo: Where? I don’t know about it. I think you mean alexandrines.

Nirodbaran: Yes, yes.

Sri Aurobindo: That is different. Plenty of people have written alexandrines. But this is the dactylic six-foot line, the metre in which the epics of Homer and Virgil are written. It has a very fine movement which is most suitable for Epic. I wrote most of my hexametres – the poem Ilion – in Pondicherry. Amal and Arjava saw them and considered them a success. I may cite a few lines:

One and unarmed in the car was the driver; grey was he, shrunken,

Worn with his decades. To Pergama cinctured with strength Cyclopean

Old and alone he arrived, insignificant, feeblest of mortals,

Carrying Fate in his helpless hands and the doom of an empire.

Nirodbaran: When did you begin to write poetry?

Sri Aurobindo: When my two brothers and I were staying at Manchester. I wrote for the Fox family magazine. It was an awful imitation of somebody I don’t remember. Then I went to London where I began really to write; some of the verses are published in Songs to Myrtilla.

Nirodbaran: Where did you learn metre? At school?

Sri Aurobindo: No. They don’t teach metre at school. I began to read and read and I wrote by a sense of the sound. I am not a prosodist like X.

Nirodbaran: Had your brother Manmohan already become a poet when you started writing?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. He, Laurence Binyon, Stephen Phillips and Arthur Cripps, who did not come to much in poetry afterwards, brought out a book in conjunction. It was well spoken of. I dare say my brother stimulated me greatly to write poetry.

Nirodbaran: Was Oscar Wilde a friend of your brother?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. He used to visit him every evening and Wilde described him in his Wildish way as “a young Indian panther in evening brown”. Wilde was as brilliant in conversation as in writing. Once some of his friends came to see him and asked how he had passed the morning. He said he had been to the zoo and gave a wonderful description of it, making a striking word-picture of every animal. Mrs. Wilde, who was all the time sitting in a corner, put in a small voice, “But, Oscar, how could you say that? You were with me all morning.” Wilde replied, “But, my dear, one has to be imaginative sometimes.” (Laughter)

Nirodbaran: I have heard a Wilde story. Once when he was correcting the proofs of a book of his, some friends visited him and asked him what he was busy with. He said, “I have to decide whether to put a comma in one place or not.” They returned after a time and found him still busy. He said, “I have put a comma in, but now I don’t know whether it should be there. I have to decide.” The friends went away and came back a little later. Wilde said, “I have decided to take the comma out.”

Sri Aurobindo: The story is very characteristic of Wilde.

Here Purani brought in the subject of Epic and the experiments that were being made in Gujarat to search for a proper medium for it. He regretted that no Indian vernacular had any genuine and successful epic poetry.

Sri Aurobindo: Why do you say that? Madhusudan has succeeded in Epic. He has excellent movement, form and swing, but the substance is poor. It is surprising that he could write an epic, for Bengalis haven’t got an epic mind. The Bengali Ramayana and Mahabharata are not worth much. But I believe he got his inspiration from Homer and Virgil whom he read a lot.

Nirodbaran: What exactly do you mean by “an epic mind”?

Sri Aurobindo: The epic mind is something high, vast and powerful. The Bengali mind is more delicate and graceful. Compare Bengal’s painting with the epic statues of the Pallavas in South India. For the same reason the French couldn’t write an epic. Their language is too lucid and orderly and graceful for it.

Nirodbaran: Why do you call Madhusudan’s epic poor in substance?

Sri Aurobindo: For a high substance one must have a noble and elevated mind, a capacity for sympathy with great thoughts, a heart that is large and deep. And, as you know, Madhusudan was nothing in that respect.

Nirodbaran: And yet he was by his genius able to create sympathy in us for Ravana and not Rama. Isn’t this striking?

Sri Aurobindo: But even then his Ravana is insignificant as compared to the tremendous personality in Valmiki’s Ramayana. Or see the character of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. And Rama’s character too has been much degraded in Madhusudan.

(Turning to Purani) Is there any epic in the Marathi language?

Purani: I don’t know. I have heard about Moropant.

Sri Aurobindo: I believe there was somebody – Sridhar – who has written something like an epic. I hear Jnanadev wrote brilliantly but he died at an early age: twenty-one. And Jnaneshwar wrote his Gita at fifteen.

Purani: They say Tulsidas’s Manas is a recognised epic in Hindi.

Sri Aurobindo: The South Indians say that Kamban’s is a great epic. I remember somebody trying to prove that Kamban is the world’s greatest poet.

(Looking at Nirodbaran) Nishikanto also aspires to write an epic.

Nirodbaran: He may be able to do it. For he seems to have the necessary gift.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, he may come to it.

Nirodbaran: He combines power and delicacy wonderfully well.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, and when he writes lyrics he is superb.

Nirodbaran: Have you seen Iqbal’s poems? Some hold he is greater than Tagore.

Sri Aurobindo: I don’t know what his poems are like in Persian or Urdu. But the translations give me the impression that they haven’t got as great and original a substance as Tagore’s poetry.

Purani: Do present conditions permit the writing of an epic? It is said that epic subjects may be there but there is not the epic poet to write of them.

Sri Aurobindo: I can’t say. It is believed that the epic poet comes only once in centuries. Look at the world’s epic poets. How many are they? As for subject, what subject could be more suitable to an epic than the career of Napoleon?

It is surprising – the large number of epic poets in Sanskrit. The very language is epic. Valmiki, Vyasa, even classical poets like Kalidasa, Bharavi and others have all achieved epic heights.

Nirodbaran: Has your own epic Savitri anything to do with the Mahabharata story?

Sri Aurobindo: Not really. Only the clue is taken from the Mahabharata. My story is symbolic. I believe that originally the Mahabharata story was also symbolic, but it has been made into a tale of conjugal fidelity.

Nirodbaran: What is your symbolism?

Sri Aurobindo: Well, Satyavan, whom Savitri marries, is the symbol of the soul descended into the Kingdom of Death; and Savitri, who is, as you know, the Goddess of Divine Light and Knowledge, comes down to redeem Satyavan from Death’s grasp. Aswapati, the father of Savitri, is the Lord of Energy. Dyumatsena is “the one who has the shining hosts”. It is all inner movement, nothing much as regards outward action.

The poem opens with the Dawn. Savitri awakes on the day of destiny, the day when Satyavan has to die. The birth of Savitri is a boon of the Supreme Goddess given to Aswapati. Aswapati is the Yogi who seeks the means to deliver the world out of Ignorance.

Nirodbaran: But how far are you with it? Have you finished the first draft?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, I have finished the first draft, but I have to revise it. I have revised this poem, as I once told you, twelve times and I have finished only the first part of the first book.

Nirodbaran: In what form have you cast it?

Sri Aurobindo: I have gone back to Shakespeare and Marlowe. Each line stands by itself and each sentence consists at most of five or six lines. The blank verse differs from Milton’s. There are practically no pauses or enjambments like those in Paradise Lost. Blank verse after Milton has not been very great. So if you write the kind that is in Paradise Lost, you imitate Milton’s style – and there can be only one Milton.

Yeats has written some successful blank verse in the Tennysonian form on Irish Celtic subjects. There is one long piece about a king, a queen and a divine lover: I forget the name. He has given his blank verse a greater beauty than Tennyson was capable of.