A review of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Marcel Kvassay, originally published in two parts in AntiMatters Vol 3 No 1, pp 117–136, and Vol 3 No 2, pp 99–128 (2009).

A Discerning Tribute

Part One: Politician and Revolutionary

It is almost a year since the publication of Peter Heehs’s latest book The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by the Columbia University Press in the United States. In the meantime, a lot has been said and written about it; it has even sparked a controversy among the admirers and followers of Sri Aurobindo. In this essay I will steer clear of the controversy as far as possible, examining the book in the wider context of Heehs’s other writings, most of which are aimed primarily at academic audiences. In so doing, I will build on my earlier review of Nationalism, Religion, and Beyond, an anthology of Sri Aurobindo’s writings edited by Heehs. Fully available online,[1] it details my past association with Heehs and provides extracts that document lesser-known aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s thought. I will also quote at length from the online edition of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.[2]

[1] “India as a Synthesis of Cultures,” a review of Nationalism, Religion, and Beyond.
[2] The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo in PDF format can be downloaded via this URL.

The preface to the The Lives of Sri Aurobindo gives a lively account of Heehs’s early acquaintance with Sri Aurobindo. It started in 1968 in one of New York’s yoga centres, the instructor of which offered “instructions in postures and breathing for a fee, dietary and moral advice gratis.” Among the photographs of “realized beings” covering the centre’s walls, one was “of Aurobindo as an old man.” Heehs remembers not being particularly impressed “as the subject wore neither loincloth nor turban, and had no simulated halo around his head.” A few months later, “after a brief return to college and a stopover in a wild uptown ‘ashram’,” Heehs encountered another photograph, “the standard portrait of Aurobindo.” “I was struck by the peaceful expanse of his brow, his trouble-free face, and fathomless eyes,” Heehs recalls. “It would be years before I learned that all of these features owed their distinctiveness to the retoucher’s art.” His deepening interest, fed by reading, eventually brought him to India and to “the ashram Aurobindo had founded.” “I might not have stayed,” he confesses, “if I had not been asked to do two things I found very interesting: first, to collect material dealing with his life; second, to organize his manuscripts and prepare them for publication.” This was his entry into the science of history:

Most of the documents I found in public archives dealt with Aurobindo’s life as a politician. They confirmed that he had been an important figure in the Struggle for Freedom, but fell short of proving what his followers believed: that he was the major cause of its success. Nevertheless, his contribution was significant and, at the time, not very well known. Accounts that had been written to correct this deficiency were so uncritical that they undermined their own inflated claims.

...The most remarkable discovery [among Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts] was a diary he had kept for more than nine years, in which he noted the day-to-day events of his inner and outer life. Most biographies of Aurobindo have made his sadhana, or practice of yoga, seem like a series of miracles. His diary made it clear that he had to work hard to achieve the states of consciousness that are the basis of his yoga and philosophy....

The genre of hagiography, in the original sense of the term, is very much alive in India. Any saint with a following is the subject of one or more books that tell the inspiring story of his or her birth, growth, mission, and passage to the eternal. Biographies of literary and political figures do not differ much from this model. People take the received version of their heroes’ lives very seriously. A statement about a politician or poet that rubs people the wrong way will be turned into a political or legal issue, or possibly cause a riot. The problem is not whether the disputed statement is true, but whether anyone has the right to question an account that flatters a group identity.

Aurobindo has been better served by his biographers than most of his contemporaries have. But when I began to write articles about his life, I found that there were limits to what his admirers wanted to hear. Anything that cast doubt on something that he said was taboo, even if his statement was based on incomplete knowledge of the facts. Almost as bad was anything that challenged an established interpretation, even one that clearly was inadequate. (p. xii)

Heehs’s articles began appearing in late 1970-s in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, a journal of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. India’s Freedom Struggle 1857–1947, a winner of an Indian State Prize in 1987 and Heehs’s first book, was published by Oxford University Press India in 1988. Since then he has written four other books and more than forty articles, and edited three anthologies. While producing this remarkable output he remained focussed on a few primary themes. One was Sri Aurobindo’s role in the Indian Independence movement. In the opening essay of Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) Heehs sums up:

The image of Mahatma Gandhi and the overall success of his methods have led many to believe that India achieved freedom without resort to violence. In fact violent resistance was preached and practised from the beginning of the national movement till its end and had a significant effect on its course and outcome.

Roughly speaking, there were four factors behind the success of the movement: ‘legitimate’ pressure exerted by public bodies, non-violent passive resistance, violent resistance, and global political and economic changes. Most historical accounts highlight the first and second factors, give an inadequate account of the third and all but ignore the fourth. (p. 1)

Heehs devotes a number of articles and a full monograph, The Bomb in Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), to violent resistance and its consequences. He tries to show that the revolutionary movement was much more complex than most people assume. He highlights the difference between what Aurobindo intended (a large-scale military uprising against the British) and what actually happened (isolated acts of small-scale terrorism primarily targeting British officials). Second, he examines the apparent links between the militant nationalism of the early revolutionaries and subsequent communal discord.

Aurobindo was firmly convinced that oppressed nations were entitled to use violence to attain freedom. As he wrote in The Doctrine of Passive Resistance in 1907:

It is the common habit of established Governments and especially those which are themselves oppressors, to brand all violent methods in subject peoples and communities as criminal and wicked. When you have disarmed your slaves and legalised the infliction of bonds, stripes and death on any one of them, man, woman or child, who may dare to speak or to act against you, it is natural and convenient to try and lay a moral as well as a legal ban on any attempt to answer violence by violence, the knout by the revolver, the prison by riot or agrarian rising, the gallows by the dynamite bomb. But no nation yet has listened to the cant of the oppressor when itself put to the test, and the general conscience of humanity approves the refusal.

With regard to India, he would have preferred an armed uprising, or guerilla warfare, but when the movement started veering towards terrorism, he did not actively intervene to stop it. What then was his attitude towards terrorism, and how did it evolve over time? Aurobindo and other radical politicians of his time are, in Heehs’s words, “sometimes accused by liberal and left-wing historians of preparing the way for communalism by giving a Hindu slant to the movement.” Is there any link between the leaders “most often mentioned as proponents of religious nationalism” — such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipinchandra Pal, Aurobindo Ghose, Mohandas Gandhi — and the ideology of the modern Hindu right wing? Without credible answers to these questions it is impossible to fix Sri Aurobindo’s place in Indian political history. In going through The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, I shall therefore refer to Heehs’s other writings to clarify some of the issues which he did not elaborate in the biography.