Sri Aurobindo Biography Quotes 13 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Aurobindo Ghose was born on 1872-08-15 in Calcutta (Kolkata), Bengal Presidency, British India, into a family shaped by the crosscurrents of colonial modernity and cultural recovery. His father, Dr. Krishna Dhan Ghose, was a Western-trained physician determined to educate his children in an English milieu; his mother, Swarnalata Devi, came from a distinguished Bengali family. The late 19th century city around him was a furnace of new print culture, reform movements, and a tightening imperial state - conditions that would later make his shift from brilliant student to revolutionary seem less a rupture than an answer to the era.

When Aurobindo was still a child, he was sent to England, a decision that gave him near-total immersion in European language and thought and also seeded a lifelong tension: outwardly fluent in the colonizer's culture, inwardly haunted by a missing India. The early deaths and dislocations of these years - including long separations from family and the harsh impersonality of boarding life - helped form a temperament that sought an absolute basis for meaning, first in intellect and later in spiritual experience.

Education and Formative Influences

Educated at St. Pauls School in London and later at Kings College, Cambridge, Aurobindo mastered Latin, Greek, and European literature while absorbing the political vocabulary of liberty and nationhood; he also prepared for the Indian Civil Service and passed the written examinations, but deliberately failed the riding test, ensuring he would not serve the Raj. In Britain he joined Indian nationalist circles and wrote early, unsentimental critiques of imperial rule; the classic epics, European romanticism, and the disciplined logic of Greek and Latin all trained him in synthesis - the habit that would later let him write philosophy with the amplitude of poetry and politics with metaphysical stakes.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Returning to India in 1893, he worked in Baroda State Service while quietly studying Sanskrit and Indian scriptures, then plunged into the nationalist movement after the 1905 Partition of Bengal; as editor of Bande Mataram and a leading voice in the Swadeshi agitation, he argued for complete independence when many still sought reform. Arrested in 1908 in the Alipore Bomb Case, he underwent a decisive inner transformation in jail, speaking afterward of realizations of the silent Brahman and the divine presence in all beings; acquitted in 1909, he continued political writing briefly, then withdrew in 1910 to the French enclave of Pondicherry, beyond British reach. There he devoted himself to yoga and a vast body of writing - including The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of the Veda, and the epic poem Savitri - and, with Mirra Alfassa (The Mother), founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (1926), turning a revolutionary career outwardly into a revolutionary project inwardly.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Aurobindo's philosophy is best read as an attempt to reconcile the modern hunger for progress with the Indian insight that consciousness is primary. He treated nationalism not as mere sentiment but as a stage in humanity's self-unfolding, and he insisted that India's civilizational task was unfinished: "India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples". That claim reveals his psychology as much as his politics - a mind unwilling to accept either colonial dismissal or antiquarian nostalgia, determined instead to transmute history into purpose.

His mature teaching, Integral Yoga, aimed at more than liberation from the world; it sought the divinization of life through an ascent to higher consciousness and a descent of what he called the supramental. The compassion in his metaphysics resisted sharp boundaries between species and selves: "Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage". This was not rhetorical kindness but a clue to his inner discipline - the stripping away of egoic preference so the same Spirit could be perceived in all forms. Yet his pluralism was equally rigorous, rooted in India's long practice of many paths: "Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite". His style mirrored these commitments: long-arched sentences, patient distinctions, and a constant effort to hold reason and revelation in a single frame.

Legacy and Influence

Sri Aurobindo died on 1950-12-05 in Pondicherry, leaving behind a rare composite legacy: a major figure in early Indian independence thought, a philosopher of evolution of consciousness, and a poet whose Savitri became a central text for his community. His influence persists through the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the later creation of Auroville (founded 1968 in The Mothers vision), and a global readership that finds in his work an alternative modernity - neither secular reduction nor escapist mysticism, but a disciplined wager that inner transformation can become a historical force.