Saturday, June 4, 2011

Sri Aurobindo has not been given the importance he deserves

Other factors apart, the single biggest cause that made the shy Sri Aurobindo a legend is the fact that his was the first voice to demand unqualified freedom for the country, an idiom unheard till then – a fact that is often passed over if not deliberately ignored. He did so without the slightest inhibition at a time when many leading national figures of the day would have shuddered to proclaim anything resembling such an idea. […]

His political voice fell silent, but before long the ideal of freedom began echoing all over the country through a dozen other robust voices and that was what the pioneer himself must have desired. But it also accounts for the pioneer’s role being overlooked. […]

Indeed, great are those who demanded the freedom of the country and they deserve their place in history, but somehow the one who set the example has not been given the importance he deserves. It does not matter to Sri Aurobindo the Mahayogi, but it matters to the history of the subcontinent. --Manoj Das (Sri Aurobindo: Life and Times of the Mahayogi Chapter III, Mother India, LXIV:6, June 2011)

Sri Aurobindo was a freedom fighter, a revolutionary and a political activist jailed ... And by the way, that critique of the Congress was by Sri Aurobindo. ...

Towards the end of September 1947, leading Indian newspapers carried reports that Sri Aurobindo, in seclusion since 1926 had received two visitors, ...

Sri Aurobindo’s Opposition Why the Indian establishment resisted him MANGESH V. NADKARNI Indian Express  EDITORIALS & ANALYSIS Thursday, March 21, 2002
Sri Aurobindo, the world-renowned yogi, poet, philosopher, patriot and lover of humanity, devoted most of his life to the quest of the Supermind, which, he thought, was the only power that could bring perfection to human life on earth.
The Indian intelligentsia of the last half a century had many problems with Sri Aurobindo because he often raised inconvenient questions and forced them to review the intellectual paradigms by which they lived and so they conspired to marginalise him.