Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

Remarks on Public Figures in India

Jawaharlal Nehru

I have just finished Jawaharlal’s autobiography. I send you some citations which moved me deeply. I caught myself today praying for him that he may have peace. How I wish he could do yoga for a year at least, if only to realise the divine harmony within him — even in this age when times are so grievously “out of joint”.

I have not read Jawaharlal’s book and know nothing of his life except what is public; now of course I have no time for reading. But he bears on himself the stamp of a very fine character, a nature of the highest sattwic kind, full of rectitude and a high sense of honour: a man of the finest Brahmin type with what is best in European education added — that is the impression he gives. I must say that Mother was struck by his photograph when she first saw it in the papers, singling it out from the mass of ordinary eminent people.

But peace? Peace is never easy to get in the life of the world and never constant, unless one lives deep within and bears the external activities as only a surface front of our being. And the work he has to do is the least peaceful of all. If Buddha had to lead the Indian National Congress, well! For the spiritual life there is perhaps no immediate possibility: his mind stands in between, for it has seized strongly the Socialist dream of social perfection by outward change as the thing to be striven for and has made that into a sort of religion. The best possible on earth has been made by his mind its credo: the something beyond he does not believe in, the something more here would seem to him a dream without basis, I suppose. But pray for him, of course. He is a man with a strong psychic element and in this life or another that must go beyond the mind to find its source.

13 September 1936