Sri Aurobindo
Autobiographical Notes
and Other Writings of Historical Interest
Part One. Autobiographical Notes
2. Sri Aurobindo’s corrections of statements in a proposed biography
Early Life in India and England. 1872–1893
Language Learning [2]1
Quite early he was sent to St. Paul’s School at Darjeeling, and then, when he showed unusual promise, to King’s College, Cambridge. . . .
. . . His chosen medium of expression is English.
Another error is worth correcting. The reviewer seems to assume that Sri Aurobindo was sent straight from India to King’s College, Cambridge, and that he had [to] learn English as a foreign language. This is not the fact; Sri Aurobindo in his father’s house already spoke only English and Hindustani, he thought in English from his childhood and did not even know his native language, Bengali. At the age of seven he was taken to England and remained there consecutively for fourteen years, speaking English and thinking in English and no other tongue. He was educated in French and Latin and other subjects under private tuition in Manchester from seven to eleven and studied afterwards in St Paul’s School London for about seven years. From there he went to King’s College. He had never to study English at all as a subject; though it was not his native language, it had become by force of circumstances from the very first his natural language.
1 Note was written in reply to a review of Sri Aurobindo’s Collected Poems and Plays published in the Times Literary Supplement (London) on 8 July 1944. The note was incorporated in a letter by R. Vaidyanathaswamy, editor of the Advent (Madras), that was published in the TLS on 6 January 1945.