Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

22 November 1939

Dr. Manilal arrived in the afternoon from Baroda. After doing pranam to Sri Aurobindo, he spoke with him.

Dr. Manilal: How are you, Sir?

Sri Aurobindo (smiling): Status quo.

Dr. Manilal: Is the leg better?

Sri Aurobindo: In some ways better, in some ways not. And how are you?

Dr. Manilal: Getting on, Sir. How do you find me?

Sri Aurobindo: You look flourishing!

Evening

Sri Aurobindo (to Dr. Manilal): What’s the news? Baroda has declared war on Germany?

Dr. Manilal: Seems only in writing. Even an insolvent State has offered to help the Government!

Purani: Why, it can help with other people’s money!

Dr. Manilal: Do you think the Government will give something?

Sri Aurobindo: Not likely so long as the Muslim League and others go on like that and don’t unite.

Dr. Manilal: Jinnah gave one of the finest speeches of his life and he talks of unity now.

Sri Aurobindo: Nonsense! You can’t take politicians’ words at their face value. You have to see what they do. He is going on just in his old way.

Dr. Manilal: This war doesn’t even seem to have begun. It must be that some peace proposal is underway.

Sri Aurobindo: Why? Each party may be afraid of the other and so doesn’t want to attack as it would mean a tremendous loss of life. If Germany attacks London by air, Berlin may be attacked by England. So they are trying to make it an economic war.

(Addressing Purani) I have finished Selincourt’s book on Blake, which he ends by saying that all art is spiritual, all art is mystical.

Purani: What would Shakespeare say to it?

Sri Aurobindo: No, he means only the art of painting. “Spiritual” he uses perhaps in the old foolish way, meaning something idealistic.

Nirodbaran: You have said in The Synthesis of Yoga that the conscious aim of art should be to express God and His principles in everything, in objects and persons. Now how can one express God in a landscape, for instance? I thought: could it be an aspect of His beauty and vastness?

Sri Aurobindo: In that case, all artists express God in their work.

Nirodbaran: Yes, so I argued, but you have said “conscious aim”; some may not do it consciously.

Sri Aurobindo: It depends on the context. But I suppose I meant a Divine Reality behind everything. Do you mean God in the religious sense?

Purani: Perhaps.

Sri Aurobindo: No, I did not refer to that but to the Reality behind.

Nirodbaran: Even so, how can one express it?

Sri Aurobindo: You have to see it first and then express it.

Nirodbaran: Are there any examples where it has been done?

Sri Aurobindo: In Eastern Art, something has been achieved in human figures.

Nirodbaran: But in landscapes do you know any artist who has done it?

Sri Aurobindo: In Japanese drawings of flowers and landscapes, there is some expression of the Reality.