In his Bengali writings in Dharma, published in October 1909, Aurobindo elaborated his idea of Swaraj or full political independence, rather than Dominion Status within the British empire: ‘Aryan Rishis used to designate the practical and spiritual freedom and its fruit, the inviolable Ananda, as ‘Swarajya’, self-empire. Without strength, even devotion is useless: ‘in the absence of Shakti we cannot concentrate, we cannot direct, we cannot even preserve it.’ Sri Aurobindo believes that India must be reborn to manifest its strength and genius: ‘No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.’ The cultivation and exaltation of strength as the crying want of Indians is Sri Aurobindo’s motto in Bhawani Mandir, an idea that hearkens back to Swami Vivekananda’s injunction ‘Strength and manliness are virtue weakness and cowardice are sin’ or ‘This is a great fact: strength is life weakness is death.’ His reason is simple, ‘Our knowledge then, weighed down with a heavy load of tamas, lies under the curse of impotence and inertia.’ How true this is of today’s India! If India has been a knowledge society for millennia, we are also not lacking in ‘Bhakti’ or devotion.īut again, ‘OUR BHAKTI CANNOT LIVE AND WORK FOR WANT OF SHAKTI’ (ibid 82). Why? Because it lacks strength it is ‘a dead knowledge, a burden under which we are bowed, a poison which is corroding us rather than as it should be a staff to support our feet, and a weapon in our hands’. We have abandoned Shakti and are therefore abandoned by Shakti.’ The consequences of such weakness are disastrous as the heading of another section avers: ‘OUR KNOWLEDGE IS A DEAD THING FOR WANT OF SHAKTI’. He explains: ‘We have all things else, but we are empty of strength, void of energy. Sri Aurobindo starts with a startling assertion, ‘WE IN INDIA FAIL IN ALL THINGS FOR WANT OF SHAKTI’ (caps. A copy of this pamphlet was submitted as evidence in the Alipur Bomb case in 1908, with Barindra’s signature on the cover, and police markings all over. To elaborate on this plan, Sri Aurobindo wrote a small but extraordinary manifesto, Bhawani Mandir. This would not be a physical temple so much as a nation-wide invocation of Mother India as Bharat Shakti in a number of revolutionary cells spread across the country. It consisted of only two words: Mandir Gado!-raise a temple! Sri Aurobindo interpreted it as a commandment to propagate a new revolutionary creed based on the consecration of a temple to Mother India. In 1905, while still in the Maharaja of Baroda’s service, he received an intriguing message from ‘Sri Ramakrishna’ in a séance, with his younger brother Barindara serving as a medium. Swaraj being the life of a nation, it is essential for it.’ Notice how the word ‘nectar’ or ‘amrit’ is used for Swaraj, presaging the Modi sarkar’s slogan of today.īut the roots of Sri Aurobindo’s experiments and ideas for freeing India go back much farther, even to his days as a Cambridge undergraduate.
So also, without Swaraj, a nation is dead. Without the breath of life, a man is dead. Swaraj in a nation is the breath of life. Sri Aurobindo elaborates on the meaning of ‘Swaraj’ in this speech: ‘If we do not acquaint ourselves with the object in view, viz., Swaraj, I am afraid we, thirty crores of people, will become extinct.… Swaraj is life, it is nectar and salvation. In fact, we know about it only because of a colonial intelligence report.
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