Life & Background
Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta in 1872 and sent to England at seven, where he was raised entirely in English, took a first in classics at King's College Cambridge, and passed the Indian Civil Service examination but deliberately failed the riding test. He returned to India in 1893, worked in Baroda for the Gaekwad, and learned Bengali and Sanskrit as an adult. From 1905 he became one of the most radical voices of the Swadeshi movement, editing Bande Mataram and arguing for complete independence when Congress still sought reform. He was tried for sedition, and then in the Alipore Bomb Case of 1908, where he spent a year in jail awaiting acquittal — a year of intense spiritual experience. In 1910 he withdrew to French Pondicherry, abandoned politics for good, and spent forty years developing Integral Yoga with Mirra Alfassa, known as the Mother. He died in 1950.
Savitri
An epic of nearly twenty-four thousand lines in blank verse, expanded over some thirty years of revision, taking its story from the Mahabharata. Savitri, daughter of King Aswapati, chooses Satyavan as her husband knowing from the sage Narad that he is fated to die within a year. The narrative frame is slender; most of the poem is interior. Book Two, The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, follows Aswapati's yogic ascent through planes of matter, life, and mind. When Satyavan dies, Savitri follows Death into the darkness and holds a long debate with him, refusing every argument for accepting mortality — and her refusal wins not merely her husband's life but a promise of the divine descent into earthly life.
Savitri is a philosophical poem in epic dress: the Mahabharata story functions as a vehicle for Aurobindo's own metaphysics, in which the evolution of consciousness towards what he called the supramental is the real action, and Savitri's confrontation with Death is a spiritual rather than narrative climax. He described the mode as mantric — verse intended to work on the reader's consciousness rather than merely to describe — which is also the reason critics divide so sharply on it: admirers read the sustained blank verse as visionary, and detractors find the diction abstract and the Victorian idiom dated by the time of publication in 1950. His prose, particularly The Life Divine and The Human Cycle, sets out the same system discursively.
Why Aurobindo Matters
Aurobindo occupies two places on the syllabus at once. As a poet he wrote the most ambitious long poem in Indian English, and his critical work The Future Poetry proposes a theory of poetry as spiritual utterance. As a political thinker his early writing for Bande Mataram made the case for purna swaraj a decade before Congress adopted it, and his later philosophy of Integral Yoga is a major current in modern Indian thought. His translation of Vande Mataram and his essays on the Vedas and the Gita are also standard references.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Bande Mataram (journalism)1905–08
- The Life Divine1914–19
- Essays on the Gita1916–20
- The Future Poetry1917–20
- The Synthesis of Yoga1914–21
- Savitri1950