In 1879, a young Indian boy arrived in England from Calcutta (now Kolkata), in the state of Bengal, sent by his father to receive a British education. Aurobindo Ghosh showed enormous promise and would go on to receive a scholarship to study classics at King’s College, Cambridge.
By the time he had moved back to Calcutta in 1906, the state had been split in half by Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India. The British claimed this schism was ‘administrative’, but it was largely an attempt to quell burgeoning political dissent in the region.
Image Courtesy: Auroville.org
The partitioning of Bengal – a
prime example of British ‘divide and rule’ policy – incensed many sections of
the population, and the Indian ‘middle classes’ mobilised under the banner of
Swadeshi, the anti-imperial resistance movement that would eventually force the
British to revoke the partition six years later.
While ‘moderate’ Indian
leaders lobbied the British for greater representation, many of the younger
generation in Bengal – particularly Hindus – believed that ‘prayer, petition
and protest’ would fail, and more radical action was needed: non-cooperation,
law-breaking and even violence, in the name of ‘Swaraj’ – self-rule. One of the
figureheads of ‘extremist’ Swadeshi was Aurobindo, a teacher, poet, polemical
journalist and underground revolutionary leader.
In his later years, Aurobindo
became one of India’s most influential international Gurus, redefining Hinduism
for the modern age with his experimental mysticism (Integral Yoga), global
outlook and life-affirming metaphysics of divine evolution. His philosophy is
taught across India and was recognised early on by prominent Western figures
including Aldous Huxley, who nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. He
was also a major inspiration for the ‘New Age’ movement that swept across the
West.
Today, the popular perception of
Aurobindo’s life is divided. The early political firebrand and later mystic are
seen as separate identities, split by a year of imprisonment during which
Aurobindo was spiritually ‘awakened’.
However, for Alex Wolfers, a researcher
at Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity, this dichotomy is a false one. The
spiritual and political blurred throughout Aurobindo’s extraordinary life,
particularly during his time as a leading light of radical Swadeshi, says
Wolfers, who is investigating spirituality in Aurobindo’s early political
writing.
Through research at archives in Delhi, Kolkata and Aurobindo’s Ashram
in Pondicherry, Wolfers has traced the emergence of a new theology of
revolution in Aurobindo’s thoughts, one that harnessed the spiritual to
challenge “the sordid interests of British capital”.
Aurobindo fused the
political and spiritual, mixing ideas from European philosophy, particularly
Hegel and Nietzsche, with Hindu theology under the aegis of the Tantric mother
goddess, Kali, and Bengali Shaktism – the worship of latent creative energy –
to develop a radical political discourse of embodied spirituality, heroic
sacrifice and transformative violence.
He complemented this with poetic
interpretations of the French revolution and Ireland’s growing Celtic
anti-imperialism, as well as contemporary upheavals in Russia, South Africa and
Japan.
Through his polemical speeches and essays, Aurobindo furiously developed
his political theology against a backdrop of assassination, robbery and
bombings, weaving all of these strands into what Wolfers argues is the central
symbolic archetype in his political theology: the ‘revolutionary Sannyasi’.
In
Hindu philosophy, Sannyasis are religious ascetics – holy men who renounce
society and worldly desires for an itinerant life of internal reflection and
sacrifice. Throughout the late 18th century in famine-stricken Bengal, roving
bands of Sannyasis – together with their Muslim counterparts, Fakirs –
challenged the oppressive tax regime of the British, and repeatedly incited the
starving peasants to rebel.
Aurobindo amplified and weaponised this already
potent symbolic figure by recasting him as a channel for divine violence. By
embodying Swaraj, the revolutionary Sannyasi could kill with sanctity. Violent
revolution became spiritually transcendent, without murderous stain.
"Just as
the traditional Sannyasi intensifies his inner divinity through ascetic
practice or the voluntary embrace of suffering, Aurobindo venerates the element
of violence and adversity in existence as a prelude to collective
‘self-overcoming’," says Wolfers.
As Wolfers puts it, the revolutionary
Sannyasi is the man of spirit and action, sanctified by sacrifice, whose
volatile potency is ready to detonate like a bomb in a violent spectacle of
Liebestod: the ‘love-death’ of German romanticism, the ecstatic destruction
needed for rebirth. As Aurobindo himself states, “war is the law of creation”.
“This violent vanguardism is often seen as an infantile politics that limits
broader participation in a political movement,” says Wolfers, “but even the
non-violent Gandhi significantly borrowed from Aurobindo’s transgressive
politics. This form of terrorism was crucial in implanting the radical ideals
of Swaraj that later anti-imperialist politics were structured around.”
Aurobindo’s highly Anglicised, elite Cambridge education had left him estranged
from his roots. On his return to India in 1893, he had to ‘re-learn his
identity’ through classical Hindu texts, whereas his younger brother Barin, who
had grown up closer to home, was more familiar with the living traditions of
Bengal.
Together, Aurobindo, the prophetic visionary, and Barin, the untiring
activist, organised the spread of a loose network of underground terrorist
cells throughout the land and incited the increasingly politicised student
communities of Bengal to submit themselves to the militant spirituality of the
‘revolutionary Sannyasi’.
“These young revolutionaries took their cues from
Aurobindo’s discourses of Sannyasi renunciation: they left their families and
society, living rigorously according to rituals and timetables, dressing in the
traditional ochre robes of the Sannyasi. Some even made use of Tantric
practices, carrying out blood rites and secret vows in cremation grounds to
purify their life in contact with death,” says Wolfers. “Through these
practices they cast off their allocated ‘middle classness’, breaking free from
imposed British society.”
The revolutionaries targeted figures of British state
authority and, in May 1908, Aurobindo was arrested in connection with the
botched assassination attempt of a notorious magistrate. It was while in
solitary confinement in Alipore jail that he experienced the ‘spiritual
awakening’ that confirmed his mystic status.
Over 60 years after his death in
1950, Aurobindo’s legacy continues to live on, despite often being
misappropriated
for political
gain.
“The figure of the ‘revolutionary Sannyasi’ has had an enormous afterlife: in its
various guises and mutations, its influence is evident across the political
spectrum from Gandhian mobilisation to Bengali Marxism and Hindu nationalism.
Even today, it remains an important trope in Indian politics,” says Wolfers.
“From as early as the 1920s, Hindu nationalist
organisations began to recast Aurobindo in an increasingly right-wing mould to
assert Hindu dominance against the subcontinent’s Muslim and Christian
minorities,” he says. “But hyper-masculine Hindu chauvinism, still a major
force in Indian politics today, stands in sharp contrast with his original
inclusive and ‘anarchic’ outlook.”
The text in this work is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by the Original Publisher.
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