Where the mind is led forward by thee into everwidening thought and
action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.^55Aurobindo Ghose(1872–1950), a Benga ̄lı ̄ schooled in England, returned
to India in 1893 intending to serve in the civil service. Soon he was seeking
to rediscover his Indian heritage. He studied Sanskrit and read the works
of Ra ̄makrishna, Vivekananda, and B. C. Chatterjee, the Benga ̄lı ̄ nationalist.
He soon found himself embroiled in the “extremist politics” of Bengal. His
speeches and writings made him a “persona non grata” with the British and
he was jailed for “sedition.”
While in prison he had a series of religious experiences, which led him
eventually to abandon politics and Bengal. He withdrew to the French pro-
tectorate, Pondicherry, to practice his yogic discipline and to let his religious
thought mature. While he had once idealized Indian nationalism and
Hinduism, in his later years his thought became more eclectic, and he
sought to wed notions of the Indian spiritual tradition with Western science
and philosophy. His religious orientation turned inward as he sought to
live and express union with the divine. What he called “Integral Yoga” was
the “rendering in personal experience of the truth which universal nature
had hidden in herself and which she travails to discover. It is the conversion
of the human soul into the divine soul and of natural life into divine life.”^56
For Aurobindo, the hope for the future lay not in nationalistic politics or
even the establishment of a universal religious creed, but rather in the
realization that all persons share an inner spirit and could evolve through
appropriate discipline to their true nature. To assist followers in that quest,
Aurobindo, and a French woman of similar bent, established an ashram
in Pondicherry. Another less successful product of Aurobindo’s vision was
the establishment of a universal village known as Auroville, intended to
be a commune where work, resources, and faith could be shared by all,
irrespective of background.
A final figure illustrating in a very different way the kind of sentiment
stirring in the first half of the twentieth century is V. D. Savarkar(1883–
1966). A Maharashtrian brahman, Savarkar was influenced by the politics of
B. G. Tilak and by several incidents in his youth, including the hanging
of two Maharashtrian “terrorists.” Savarkar became a firebrand in the cause
of Hindu nationalism.
As a youth he learned the art of bomb making from a Russian revo-
lutionary and organized groups to protest British policies, from the throwing
of stones, the building of bonfires, and the advocacy of violence, to the
writing of a pamphlet glorifying the “Sepoy Mutiny” as the “First Indian War
of Independence.” For his activities, he was imprisoned for years and
188 Streams from the “West” and their Aftermath