Sri Aurobindo

Autobiographical Notes

and Other Writings of Historical Interest

Part Two. Letters of Historical Interest

1. Letters on Personal, Practical and Political Matters (1890–1926)

Letters and Telegrams to Political and Professional Associates 1906–1926

To Motilal Roy [11]¹

[April 1914]

Dear M.

I send you today the electoral declaration of M. Paul Richard, one of the candidates at the approaching election for the French Chamber. This election is of some importance to us; for there are two of the candidates who represent our views to a great extent, Laporte and Richard. Richard is not only a personal friend of mine and a brother in the Yoga, but he wishes, like myself, and in his own way works for a general renovation of the world by which the present European civilisation shall be replaced by a spiritual civilisation. In that change the resurrection of the Asiatic races and especially of India is an essential point. He and Madame Richard are rare examples of European Yogins who have not been led away by Theosophical and other aberrations. I have been in material and spiritual correspondence with them for the last four years. Of course, they know nothing of Tantric Yoga. It is only in the Vedantic that we meet. If Richard were to become deputy for French India, that would practically mean the same thing as myself being deputy for French India. Laporte is a Swadeshi with personal ambitions; his success would not mean the same but at any rate it would mean a strong and, I believe, a faithful ally in power in this country and holding a voice in France.

Of course, there is no chance, humanly speaking, of their being elected this time. Laporte is not strong enough to change the situation singlehanded. Richard has come too late; otherwise so great is the disgust of the people with Bluysen and Lemaire, Gaebelé and Pierre that I think we could have managed an electoral revolution. Still, it is necessary, if it can at all be done, to stir things a little at the present moment and form a nucleus of tendency and , if possible, of active result which would be a foundation for the future and enable us at the next election to present one or other of these candidates with a fair chance of success.

I want to know whether it is possible, without your exposing yourself, to have the idea spread in Chandernagore, especially among the younger men, of the desirability of these candidatures and the abandonment of the old parochial and rotten politics of French India, with its following of interested local Europeans and subservience to their petty ambitions in favour of a politics of principles which will support one of our own men or a European like Richard who is practically an Indian in beliefs, in personal culture, in sympathies and aspirations, one of the Nivedita type. If also a certain number of votes can be recorded for Richard in Chandernagore so much the better; for that will mean a practical beginning, a tendency from the sukshma world materialised initially in the sthula. If you think this can be done, please get it done – always taking care not to expose yourself. For your main work is not political, but spiritual. If there can be a Bengali translation of Richard’s manifesto, or much better, a statement of the situation and the desirability of his candidature succeeding,– always steering clear of extremism and British Indian politics,– it should be done and distributed. I lay stress on these things because it is necessary that the conditions of Chandernagore and Pondicherry should be changed, the repetition of recent events rendered impossible and the cession of French territory put out of the question. There would be other and more positive gains by the change, but these I need not emphasise now.

I have just received your letter and the money. I shall delay answering it for the present, as this letter must go immediately. l shall answer soon, however. I am only waiting till this election is over to give some shape to the decision I have arrived at to resume personally my work on the material plane and it is necessary that there should be some arrangement by which the Vedantic work can go on unhampered by the effect of errors in Tantric kriya. For Tantric kriya carried on in the old style, to which your people seem to be so undivorceably attached, can only help so far as to keep up the Yogic flame in the hearts of a few, while on the other hand it is full of dangers to the spirit and the body. It is only by a wide Vedantic movement leading later to a greater Tantra that the work of regeneration can be done; and of that movement neither you nor Saurin can be the head. It needs a wider knowledge and a greater spiritual force in the Adhara through which it is engineered; it needs, in fact, the greatest which India contains and which is at the same time willing to take it up. I see only Devavrata and myself who have the idea – for the Dayanandas and others are a negligible quantity, and Devavrata seems to me to have gone off for the moment on a wrong route and through egoism has even allowed his spiritual force to be used against us by secret forces in the sukshma world which he is not yet advanced enough to understand. Therefore, if God wills, I will take the field.

K.

P.S. Gaebelé has given me strenuous assurances that Bluysen is not working for the cession of Chandannagar and has sworn that he (Gaebelé) will ever be a stern and furious opponent of any such cession as well as a staunch defender of the Swadeshi refugees! Such is the fervour of electoral promises! He has given a number of the Journal des Débats in which there is a full account of Bluysen’s interpellations, from which it appears that both Bluysen and Doumergue were agreed that there can be no question of cession but only of “rectification of Pondicherry boundaries”. But only then did Bluysen tell us solemnly that the cession was a “settled fact” and any refugee in Ch must run to Pondicherry at once. However, I am trying to send you or get sent to Banamali Pal the copy of the Journal, so that Bluysen may have the benefit of his public declarations. They are in a sense binding, if anything can bind a French politician. If you don’t get the Journal, at any rate contrive that the substance of it as given by me here should be known in Ch, if it is not known already. For you must remember that Lemaire has made no such declaration and is not bound at all by any past professions, but has rather been an advocate of the cession.

¹ April 1914. For Paul Richard, see the note to “Extracts from Letters to the Mother and Paul Richard” in Section Two below. Every four years an election was held in Pondicherry to choose a Deputy to represent the colony in the French Chamber.{{1}}In February 1910, Sri Aurobindo left Calcutta and took temporary refuge in Chandernagore, a small French enclave on the river Hooghly about thirty kilometres north of Calcutta. There he was looked after by Motilal Roy (1882–1959), a young member of a revolutionary secret society. After leaving Chandernagore for Pondicherry in April, Sri Aurobindo kept in touch with Motilal by letter. It was primarily to Motilal that he was referring when he wrote in the “General Note on Sri Aurobindo’s Political Life” (p. 64 of this volume): “For some years he kept up some private communication with the revolutionary forces he had led through one or two individuals.” In these letters, which were subject to interception by the police, he could not of course write openly about revolutionary matters. He developed a code in which “tantra” meant revolutionary activities, and things connected with tantra (yogini chakras, tantric books, etc.) referred to revolutionary implements like guns (see Arun Chandra Dutt, ed., Light to Superlight [Calcutta: Prabartak Publishers, 1972], pp. 27–30). The code sometimes got rather complicated (see the note to letter [3] below). Sri Aurobindo did not use his normal signature or initials in the first 22 letters. Instead he signed as Kali, K., A. K. or G. He often referred to other people by initials or pseudonyms. Parthasarathi Aiyangar, for example, became “P. S.” or “the Psalmodist”.

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