Sri Aurobindo gives assurance to A.B. Purani that India will be free 1918

A.B. Purani was the younger brother of Chotalal B. Purani who had received instructions from Sr Aurobindo during his Baroda days for revolutionary work. He had been an enthusiastic member of the group then formed and now comes with a view to getting Sri Aurobindo’s permission for the revolutionary activity for which he and his group felt they were ready.

During his visit with Sri Aurobindo, A.B. Purani asks Sri Aurobindo about India’s freedom: “Are you quite sure that India will be free?” He says: “Sri Aurobindo became very serious. His gaze was fixed at the sky that appeared beyond the window. Then he looked at me and putting his fist on the table he said: ‘You can take it from me, it is as certain as the rising of the sun tomorrow. The decree has already gone forth, it may not be long in coming.”

1920 – Sri Aurobindo receives various invitations to re-enter the political scene (age 49)

Around 1920, two prominent nationalist leaders write to Sri Aurobindo appealing to him to come back to British India and resume leadership of Indian politics. Sri Aurobindo declines their request to take up the Presidentship of the Indian National Congress.

Later that year, Bal Gangadhar Tilak who is the unquestionable leader of the Nationalists suddenly dies and other leaders felt that only Sri Aurobindo could fill his place. But Sri Aurobindo declines and writes in his explanatory letter: “… I am no longer first and foremost a politician, but have definitely commenced another kind of work with a spiritual basis, a work of spiritual, social, cultural and economic reconstruction of an almost revolutionary kind, and am even making or at least supervising a sort of practical or laboratory experiment in that sense which needs all the attention and energy that I can have to spare. It is impossible for me to combine political work of the current kind and this at the beginning. I should practically have to leave it aside, and this I cannot do, as I have taken it up as my mission for the rest of my life. This is the true reason of my inability to respond to your call.”

Letter to Barin, his younger brother

Early in 1920, Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother, Barindra Kumar Ghose, who had been sentenced to transportation for life in the Andamans, was released. He wrote to Sri Aurobindo on a number of counts.

In a lengthy reply to one such letter, Sri Aurobindo responds to Barin’s request to be initiated into Sri Aurobindo’s yoga:

When Barin asked to be initiated into Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, he replied: And you should know that the inevitable result of this will be that you will have to follow the path of yoga which He has given me, the path I call the Integral Yoga. This is not exactly what we did in Alipur jail, or what you did during your imprisonment in the Andamans. What I started with, what Lele gave me, what I did in jail—all that was a searching for the path, a circling around looking here and there, touching, taking up, handling, testing this and that of all the old partial yogas, getting a more or less complete experience of one and then going off in pursuit of another. Afterwards, when I came to Pondicherry, this unsteady condition ceased. The indwelling Guru of the world indicated my path to me completely, its full theory, the ten limbs of the body of the yoga. These ten years he has been making me develop it in experience; it is not yet finished. It may take another two years. And so long as it is not finished, I probably will not be able to return to Bengal. Pondicherry is the appointed place for the fulfilment of my yoga—except indeed for one part of it, that is, the work. 

Read other parts of Sri Aurobindo’s reply to Barin’s letters