Joins service in the State Government in Baroda (age 21)

While in London, Sri Aurobindo was appointed by Sayajirao Gaekwar, the Maharaja of Baroda State, to Baroda State Service. Arriving in India, he immediately travels to Baroda to take up his post in the Survey Settlement Department. In this same year on September 11, 1893, Swami Vivekananda sails to America and takes part in the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, carrying with him the light of Vedanta.

Click here: Swami Vivekananda addresses the Parliament of Religions in Chicago

Sri Aurobindo passes the next fourteen years (age 21-35) , from 1893 to 1906, in the Baroda Service, first in the Revenue Department and in secretariat work for the Maharaja, and afterwards as Professor of English and Vice-Principal in the Baroda College.

Sri Aurobindo narrates much later in his ‘Autobiographical Notes’ about this period: “These were years of self-culture, of literary activity—for much of the poetry afterwards published from Pondicherry was written at this time—and of preparation for his future work. In England he had received, according to his father’s express instructions, an entirely occidental education without any contact with the culture of India and the East. At Baroda he made up the deficiency, learned Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages, assimilated the spirit of Indian civilisation and its forms past and present.”

Even at this time in his life, Sri Aurobindo claims: “The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion.” And so, mastering Sanskrit on his own, Sri Aurobindo immerses himself in the immense spiritual heritage of India: the Upanishads, Gita, Puranas, Ramayana and many others.”

While working for the State Government of Baroda, Sri Aurobindo begins writing articles in the newspaper Induprakash of Bombay, exposing the futility of the Congress aims and methods. In an article, he speaks of the high expectations raised by the vociferous protagonists of the Congress and the actualities of the situations. He is then asked to write a series of articles in this same newspaper under the title New Lamps for Old. Here he urges his countrymen to shake off the yoke of British rule. His moto is: “No reform, no collaboration”.