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354 Aurobindo Ghose d D Amystic seer and guru, an Edwardian aesthetic poet, a 0re-breathing revolutionary—one could describe Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) in these contradictory ways. Or one could parcel out such descriptions, assigning them respectively to Aurobindo and to his brothers Manmohan and Barindra Kumar. All three achieved fame, or at least notoriety, in turn-of-thecentury Bengal. Manmohan became a respected poet and teacher; Barindra Kumar became a revolutionary and convicted terrorist; and Aurobindo, 0nally, became best known as a religious teacher, espousing human evolution toward the divine and forms of yogic practice designed to facilitate unity with the transcendent. Born Aravinda Ackroyd Ghose in Calcutta to Krishna Dhan Ghose, a medical o2cer in the civil service, and Swarnalata Basu, the daughter of a distinguished poet and historian of Bengali literature, Aurobindo was soon sent, with his two brothers, to an English-medium school in Darjeeling. Although Aurobindo was only four years old, his father, by later accounts, evidently wished to separate the children from their mother, who was subject to bouts of mental illness during which she abused the children. Two years later, in 1879, the family traveled to England. There Swarnalata gave birth to her 0fth child, Barindra Kumar, who along with his sister (born in 1877) returned to India, while the three older boys remained in Manchester, in the home of the clergyman William Drewett, who treated the boys well and prepared them for competitive schools. Both Manmohan and Aurobindo won scholarships to St. Paul’s School in London, and both went on to study at university , with Aurobindo winning a senior classical scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, Aurobindo continued to excel, earning a 0rst class in the classical tripos at the end of his second year. He left Cambridge without a degree at this point, largely because his father had destined him for the Indian Civil Service and he was to sit for the ICS examination. Aurobindo duly passed the examination, though perhaps demonstrating his ambivalence toward a career in the Civil Service by his poor performance. At this point, only the ICS riding examination remained between him and what his father judged to be a good posting in India, but he failed a 0rst attempt, failed to show up to a second examination , and when ofered yet a third opportunity did not respond to the examiner’s requests and even lied about his absences. Despite special pleading Aurobindo Ghose D 355 from his English friends, the ICS administration felt obliged to fail him, notwithstanding his obvious brilliance at St. Paul’s and at Cambridge. His biographer, Peter Heehs, argues that while we cannot know precisely how clearly Aurobindo planned this failure, it relieved him of a burden he did not wish to take up; Aurobindo wrote in later years that he could not reject the Civil Service outright because of his obligation to his father but was “greatly relieved and overjoyed” by the ICS failure (Heehs, 32). Indeed, Heehs shows that Aurobindo’s failure in the ICS was owing to what amounted to a personal and generational shift between his father’s views and his own. Aurobindo’s political views had already led him to conclude that he could do little to improve the lot of his countrymen from within the government. With the assistance of British friends, accordingly, he found employment with the maharaja of Baroda. There he served as the maharaja’s private secretary and taught in the college. Living in Baroda for thirteen years, he studied Sanskrit and Indian vernacular languages and wrote a great deal of poetry. As a “princely state,” Baroda was not under direct British rule, and it served as Aurobindo’s introduction to India. His circumstances difered markedly, then, from those of his brother Manmohan, who felt himself isolated in Calcutta as an Anglicized Indian, fully accepted neither by Indians nor by the British. As the nationalist movement increased in intensity and the partition of Bengal in 1905 gave rise to strong opposition , Aurobindo resigned his position, moving in 1906 to Calcutta, where he edited the English language newspaper Bande-Mataram. Aurobindo and his brother Barindra began organizing secret societies in Bengal, bent on radical opposition to the British raj. Aurobindo was prosecuted for and acquitted of sedition charges in 1907 but was arrested along with Barindra Kumar and others in 1908 on charges stemming from an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate a British judge who had handed down harsh sentences to...

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