Dec 5, 2009

A Review by Manoj Pavitran

What is Great?

The most outstanding feature of the book that beats all other biographies that have been written so far is the sheer mass of research data that has made even the bibliography a book by itself. This is where the author excels and this is where we see his labour of love for Sri Aurobindo, who is the very subject of his investigation. No one can persist with such thoroughness for nearly three decades, collecting a huge amount of empirical data from all over the world, without a deep love for the subject. Here is a true researcher excelling in his craft, a lover who persists tirelessly. Any one who wants to investigate Sri Aurobindo’s life in the future will find this an immense treasure. This is the empirical domain, the verifiable data and Peter has done a great job, hats off!


What is Poor?

Once you have the data, you have to organize it in such a way that some new perspectives emerge and then interpret what one perceives or leave the readers to draw their own conclusions. This is a slippery ground where subjective judgments step in and we see the researcher in the author stumbling and becoming somewhat like an art critic and not even a connoisseur; here is where the lover ends and the critic begins, here is where the intellect shuts out the heart. The very opening shot of the book with the two photographs illustrates the pattern, which will be followed throughout the book. One photo is the original and the other is a touched-up version of the same. This much is fact, and putting them together is great to show the difference – it is an excellent view. Now personal preferences and taste come in when one starts interpreting them in one way or the other. Here we have already left the empirical ground and entered purely subjective space where any interpretation can claim itself as truth, and behind such interpretations we can perceive certain intentions, attitudes, etc., of the interpreter. These interpretations reveal more of the author’s inner workings than the object of investigation. If some readers of the book have perceived malicious intentions in it, I wouldn’t blame them. The author is not merely collecting and organizing the data to give us some new perspective, but he is also bringing in active interpretations and myth-making based on his personal preference and taste. If the reader is not careful, he is likely to miss the point where historical data ends and story-telling begins. This is a serious flaw of the book. An amazing layer of data is presented through an equally luxurious and imaginative layer of interpretations. What makes it poor is the author’s claim that his interpretations stand for greater truth than the other biographies of Sri Aurobindo, which he dumps together as hagiographies. Writing a biography of someone like Sri Aurobindo is like blind men describing an elephant, but when one blind man claims that all the others are false, we are dealing with someone who takes his personal views far too seriously and making a religion out of it. A reader should be extremely careful to see through these two layers and take only the facts and leave aside the fiction. But it is not at all easy because the author is an excellent storyteller and weaves fact and fiction seamlessly like a magician. If you have not read Sri Aurobindo’s own writings or his biographies by other writers, you are likely to be mesmerized by Peter’s interpretations and take them to be the truth about Sri Aurobindo.


The Freudian Bug

What makes the book bit silly is when we see the author sniffing around, which looks almost desperate, to find some evidence of sexual dynamics in the life of Sri Aurobindo. His “scholarly research” to find the reason why Sri Aurobindo married is a case in point. His dive into some selected poetry of Sri Aurobindo to analyze its plot shows a little Freud in the closet. It is laughable, to say the least. I wouldn’t say that these adventures have added any depth or credibility to the book; to me it looks rather pathetic. This Freudian bug is evident in quite many places.


Active Omissions

Anyone who is familiar with Sri Aurobindo can see that the author carefully omits quite many well-known aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s life, especially what has been told by the Mother, who in my view is the foremost authority on Sri Aurobindo. The author has no difficulty in using newspaper clippings as documented evidence in his interpretations, but when it comes to documented evidence coming from the Mother, we see a great reluctance to use them and active omissions. The Mother’s words may not be palatable to an academic audience, but to omit them from Sri Aurobindo’s life is not intellectual honesty or historical integrity or academic rigor. Truth is truth, whether it is appealing to the academic world or not, and hiding it to please a particular audience may be good marketing strategy but lowers the standards of truth.

Finally, the continuation of Sri Aurobindo’s work by the Mother and the supramental descent of 1956 are strangely missing, without which Sri Aurobindo’s life is not complete.

Having said all this, I repeat, the greatest value of this biography is in bringing together a huge mass of historical data even if he omits actively quite many. Its main weakness is in too many interpretations and judgments coloured by a personal bias.


Manoj Pavitran
manoj at auroville.org.in

Posted by Raman Reddy at 12/05/2009 12:03:00 PM
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3 comments:

  1. "The most outstanding feature of the book that beats all other biographies that have been written so far is the sheer mass of research data that has made even the bibliography a book by itself. This is where the author excels and this is where we see his labour of love for Sri Aurobindo, who is the very subject of his investigation. No one can persist with such thoroughness for nearly three decades, collecting a huge amount of empirical data from all over the world, without a deep love for the subject. Here is a true researcher excelling in his craft, a lover who persists tirelessly."

    Manoj Pavitran has written an excellent review on the whole, assessing rightly both the positive and negative content of the book. But I would like to make one qualification to the above quoted praise from his review. Even Heehs will be embarrassed by this glowing encomium on his “tireless love” for Sri Aurobindo. If he had loved Sri Aurobindo, he would not have poured out his secret hatred for him all throughout the book in a most deceptive manner – I believe it was a love-hate relationship or the confused state of a revolted disciple who finally opted out of the path of sadhana to fulfil his ambition of producing a book which will please the Western academia at the expense of spiritual truth.

    As for the mass of data available in this book, clever and selective omission of important facts (spiritual and material) has made the whole presentation suspect and difficult to recommend it to a newcomer. It is only people already familiar with the facts of Sri Aurobindo’s life who can use the new data available in this book. It should also be noted that he was at the helm of a whole department of the Ashram meant for the purpose. He did not do it alone, so many other members of the department worked hard to build this impressive edifice of research. Finally, instead of showing Westerners the beauty of Indian values (which are implicit in Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga), he made them feel different from Indians and assert their so-called Western intellectuality. It is this force of division that has done the greatest harm to the admirers and disciples of Sri Aurobindo.
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  2. Alok Pandey’s comment:

    Oh yes, a labour of love indeed! And what labour and what love that would even put the best of bhaktas to shame! How foolish and unloving must be the bhaktas who did not travel round the world to gather facts that would disprove what the Master Himself said. What inner and outer labour it must have taken for a man to struggle against this stupendous and overwhelming Grace that one constantly feels here, to shut his doors against this tireless Love and declare to the world (as if it were some new discovery) that all this may be just a chimera, a megalomania after all. Keep your head and senses intact and do not listen to the voices of the heart that deceive and the eye of faith that conjures. Indeed what love and what a labour! If this is bhakti, then what would hostility mean?

    Yes, it is no doubt a strong force of division and hostility, one may even say of hatred against all that is true and beautiful and sacred and divine, a consciousness that is revolting against the Light – this can be felt in the atmosphere of the book. Love enhances the Ananda and beauty in the being, not raises doubts and confusions. It is not the number of pages written or researched, but the quality of the consciousness that emanates from a work that reveals what is behind it. And anyone with a little spiritual sensitivity can feel that what is there in the book is anything but love, unless we redefine it and include hostility as one of its expressions.
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  3. "This is where the author excels and this is where we see his labour of love for Sri Aurobindo, who is the very subject of his investigation. No one can persist with such thoroughness for nearly three decades, collecting a huge amount of empirical data from all over the world, without a deep love for the subject."

    Interest, maybe. But love? Strange and unsupported conclusion by the reviewer.
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