Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

11 September 1940

Purani: Udar has got an unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf. If you want to see …

Sri Aurobindo: I don’t want to waste my time on it.

Purani: Charu Dutt says that the modern poets are trying to follow Pope and Dryden in their play with words, their metrical devices, etc.

Sri Aurobindo: How? Pope and Dryden are very clear in what they say, while you can’t make out anything of the Modernists. As regards metre, Pope and Dryden are formalists and limited. One may say they don’t play with words. The Modernists are unintelligible and their irregularities are eccentric. The only similarity they have is in their intellectuality and the ingenuity of their mind.

Sahana wrote an aphorism in which darkness indicates unwillingness to receive the Light. Dilip didn’t agree.

Sri Aurobindo: It is partly true. In one state it may be true, but in the state of inconscience there is a temporary obstruction which produces an incapacity to receive even if one has the will. You can say it is also an unwillingness, but one of nature, not a personal unwillingness. In other cases, the mind may be unwilling, or it may be willing but the vital may not agree. In these cases you can say that one is unwilling.

Then there was some talk about Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava. It seems that X found Raghuvamsha full of problems, questions of morality and immorality.

Sri Aurobindo (to Purani): Have you been struck by a great number of problems in Raghuvamsha? Kalidasa being concerned with morality and immorality?

Purani (laughing): I thought Kalidasa was the last person to be concerned with them. He was more concerned with beauty, the aesthetic aspect. No ethical question troubled him.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. If it was a feeling, he was concerned with the beauty of the feeling, if an idea, with the beauty of the idea.

Purani: Some people – Bankim was one, I think – are trying to make out that Kumarasambhava is earlier than Raghuvamsha.

Sri Aurobindo: I don’t think so. Raghuvamsha is brilliant while Kumarasambhava is more mature, has more power and energy.