Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
5 October 1940
Nirodbaran: Mandel is acquitted!
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, he seems to have dangerous documents against everybody.
Nirodbaran: Like Daladier!
Purani: Yes, Daladier said he would drag down many others with him.
Sri Aurobindo: If politicians were made responsible for their mistakes, then many would have to go to the scaffold. It is like the French Revolution: when a General failed, his head was cut off!
Satyendra: Is it some new poetry you are writing now, Sir?
Sri Aurobindo: No, it is Savitri.
Nirodbaran: Is it not finished yet?
Sri Aurobindo: The writing is over, but every time I see it, I find imperfections. Only about two and a half cantos can be said to be finished.
Satyendra: It is good that it is something innocent. Otherwise every time you took up The Life Divine some catastrophe took place: first in 1914 and now in 1939 – both times war. (Laughter)
Sri Aurobindo: Savitri also contains war, but it is imaginative. So I suppose the opposing forces may not object.
Satyendra: What would that commentator Girija make of it?
Sri Aurobindo: He said nothing biographical about “Baji Prabhou” either. He could have said that it was the glorious account of a scuffle I had with some Mahommedan!
Nirodbaran: But what was this man trying to prove? He seems to be trying to establish some connection between the development of your poetry and that of Tagore.
Sri Aurobindo (laughing): Yes.
Nirodbaran: He said that Tagore wrote his “Jete nahi dibo”1 when you came back to India and that it was as if a new glimpse of his “Aurobindo Rabindrer laha namaskar2.” I don’t see any connection.
Sri Aurobindo: Neither do I. I thought Girija idiotic when he was writing in Das’s paper. “Jete nahi dibo” is about some daughter, isn’t it?
Purani: Yes. The daughter doesn’t allow her father to return to his place of activity and then he philosophises about love, etc. What is the connection there?
Sri Aurobindo: I don’t know. He makes out that Das, Tagore, I and others were writing under the same influence, with the same bhava, on the same subject! But how can he say that some new poems were added to Songs to Myrtilla? None were added.
Purani: No!
Sri Aurobindo: In this book only earlier poems were included. He says three poems in Myrtilla are about a part of my life I wanted people to know about. He objects to the poem on Rajnarayan Bose being excluded from the new edition. The fact is I had no copy of it. Besides, these are the usual sorts of things critics say about a poet after his death. I am still alive. I should be immune so long as I am alive. (Laughter)
Satyendra: They construct a biography out of the poems since they can’t approach dead poets. But they can approach you.
Purani: About Shakespeare also they have built up many stories.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. They say his dramas are all experiences of his life. He deserted his wife, became an actor-manager, later abandoned that job. Now it is denied. They also made him out to be a usurer, a thief who killed a deer in a park and stole it. As a protest against the theory about Shakespeare’s sonnets that “with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart”, Browning wrote:
“Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!”
Satyendra: It was said that no such person as Shakespeare existed.
Sri Aurobindo: That idea has been given up – then they said there were two Shakespeares – both at Stratford.
Purani: Bacon also was bolstered up as the real Shakespeare.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. Some critic made Bacon out to be both an Elizabethan and a post-Elizabethan poet. But take the actual poetry he has written: one can see how prosaic it is!
Evening
Sri Aurobindo: Moore has written an article against Gandhi, taking his stand on the Gita and on me. He says that if Gandhi considers himself an instrument of God and preaches non-participation, he, Moore, is also an instrument of God entitled to object to it. (Sri Aurobindo gave us the gist of the article.)
Purani: Azad and others take a different standpoint from Gandhi.
Satyendra: They make it a political non-participation, while Gandhi …
Sri Aurobindo: Brings in both political and conscientious objections. (Laughter)
Satyendra: It seems Azad, C.R. and Nehru aren’t very warm towards this new stand of Gandhi.
Sri Aurobindo: That is evident from C.R.’s speech. After the rejection of the Poona offer, they didn’t know what to do. So they had to take Gandhi’s help. Now they are in an impossible position. It was Venkataram Shastri, I think, who has said Congress has been making mistake after mistake. After they had resigned their offices, if they had stuck to civil disobedience it would have meant something. Right or wrong, it was a line of action, a policy. But instead they have been going now this side, now that side.
Satyendra: Nehru also speaks of being international. Now his sister speaks in the same vein.
Sri Aurobindo: In that case he should support Britain. Otherwise, he will only help Hitler.
Nirodbaran: If there is any trouble in India, Hitler will be glad.
Sri Aurobindo: Of course!
Purani: Benoy Sarkar writes in Rupam about art, that the subject matter is not important. Indian art has been always concerned with the subject while what matters in art is whether it is aesthetic or not. From that point of view, pattern, design, colour, line are things that count.
Sri Aurobindo: But that is decorative, not aesthetic.
Purani: Yes, he takes the current modern view of art. He says one must see the balance and mass, etc., in a work of art, for instance in a Buddha seated in a triangle.
Sri Aurobindo: That is again scientific art, not aesthetic, and besides, has modern art no subject?
Purani: Agastya answers Sarkar by saying that by the Indianness of Indian art what is meant is not so much the subject as the tradition, the training that one follows in one’s art, which is quite different from the European tradition.
Sri Aurobindo: Apart from the subject, art has something which is extremely important, but the subject, too, has its value. If it is all mass and balance, why call in Buddha then? The image or figure of Buddha is supposed to express the calm of Nirvana. If you are not able to feel that or if the art hasn’t been able to bring that out, then you don’t appreciate the art.
Purani: It is the same thing they are doing in poetry.
Sri Aurobindo: Poetry has no subject? No meaning? Then it is what Baron makes out of it when he says, “Why do you want to understand?”
1 “I shall not let you go.”
2 The poem composed by Rabindranath Tagore on the occasion of Sri Aurobindo’s arrest: “Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee!”