Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
9 August 1940
Satyendra: Everybody is silent on the Viceroy’s declaration. Jinnah, Gandhi, C.R. nobody says anything. And he is interviewing the leaders all over again. He seems to be bent on expansion of his council, but perhaps nobody will accept it except the Liberals.
Nirodbaran: Why, Savarkar has said he will.
Sri Aurobindo: He has given qualified assent. He said some of his demands remained unsatisfied.
Satyendra: Our Suren has again covered his body all over.
Nirodbaran: In anticipation of a cold!
Sri Aurobindo: Or expecting an anticipation.
Nirodbaran: Today when he was doing pranam at the photo in the Reception Room in that protective attire, a visitor for Darshan was looking at him very intently. Suren ought to be removed from the gate duty. Otherwise it will give a bad impression of us.
Sri Aurobindo: The visitor was perhaps looking with admiration and saying to himself, “This man is so sick and yet has so much devotion!”
Satyendra: Suren and Manibhai seem to be friendly. They were talking very cheerfully.
Sri Aurobindo: Manibhai was talking of his health and Suren of his illness?
Purani: The British don’t seem to want to defend Somaliland. They have no forces there, only some camel corps.
Nirodbaran: What chances has the camel corps against mechanised units?
Sri Aurobindo: The camel corps also is mechanised, they say, or perhaps they mean the camels are mechanical?
Purani: If they don’t think Somaliland is important, what about Egypt? Italians have one-and-a-half lakh troops in Libya, while the British have only a few.
Nirodbaran: Egypt has no forces?
Sri Aurobindo: It has a trained army. But it is neutral.
Purani: Will it remain neutral even when it is attacked?
Sri Aurobindo (laughing): In this world of Leopold, I don’t know what it will do.
Nirodbaran: The American ambassador has said that Leopold is a prisoner in his own castle.
Sri Aurobindo: That is to gain people’s sympathy.
Nirodbaran: Also he says that Leopold informed the British about his surrender two or three days earlier.
Sri Aurobindo: How is that? If they had been informed, they would have taken immediate steps to withdraw their troops instead of exposing them to grave peril and there was no mention of that in the papers.
Nirodbaran: And he says further that Leopold was compelled to surrender, seeing so much destruction and suffering and the risk of complete annihilation of his army.
Sri Aurobindo: If he was so much moved by the suffering, he could have called the Germans in at the very outset.
Nirodbaran: That idiot about whom Charu Dutt was speaking also said that Nolini has only an assumed depth, he is a soi-disant philosopher or something like it. He said something about Anilbaran too.
Sri Aurobindo: Who is this man, I would like to know, then his depth or height could be judged. It seems he has only depth. And what is his opinion about me? Third-rate too? If my influence has produced third-rate works, my work can’t be any higher.
Nirodbaran: Charu Dutt doesn’t seem to consider Nishikanta’s poetry in Alakananda as first-class.
Sri Aurobindo: Is he a good judge of poetry?
Nirodbaran: I don’t think so.
Sri Aurobindo: Then his opinion has no value.
Nirodbaran: He didn’t, at first reading, understand the poems. After he had read them over and over again, they were clear to him, he said.
Sri Aurobindo: What kind of a mind these people have, I wonder!
Nirodbaran: They are very simple poems, except for one or two.
Sri Aurobindo: Quite so.
Nirodbaran: And people object to Nishikanta’s poems because they are all centred on the Mother and yourself, not so much because they are spiritual or lack variety.
Sri Aurobindo: How do they know about the Mother?
Purani: The poems can very well be taken as addressed to the Divine Mother.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. Besides, all the poems are not like that – “Garur Gadi”, for instance. He has variety too. Of course they are spiritual and mystic.
Evening
Sri Aurobindo (to Purani): Do you know anything about why Baron is being recalled from Chandernagore?
Purani: No, I only heard that he has committed some political indiscretion.
Sri Aurobindo: It seems that recently he invited Subhas Bose to his house and for that reason the Viceroy has asked the Governor to transfer him from there.
Purani: How could Baron do that? And how does he know Bose?
Nirodbaran: Probably through Dilip.
Sri Aurobindo: These people are wonderful. It will go against the Ashram. He ought to have known about Bose’s activities and the consequences of his visit.
Nirodbaran: Japan is concentrating her navy towards Indo-China.
Sri Aurobindo: No, not concentrating, that doesn’t matter. Japan is heading towards Indo-China.
Nirodbaran: Wants to swallow it, perhaps. Being a little hasty.
Sri Aurobindo: How? On the contrary this is the time, when other nations are engaged elsewhere. The only thing is that the Japanese are very involved in China. Don’t know how effective this move will be.