Situating Sri Aurobindo –
A Reader, edited by Peter Heehs and published by Oxford University Press in 2013, is one
of those arid unreadable books, the heavy metaphysical content of which simply
puts you off. The book is almost entirely a compilation of articles by professors
in American Universities who evaluate, analyse, dissect, compare, and situate
Sri Aurobindo within the framework of their disciplines. Though most of the
essays are surprisingly favourable assessments of Sri Aurobindo, considering
that they have been chosen by Peter Heehs, one still gets the impression
(except in a few cases) that the professors are straying beyond their
legitimate and natural boundaries. Understanding Sri Aurobindo certainly needs some
spiritual empathy, and that comes from a little inward opening, even if it be
only a drop of genuine spiritual experience. Otherwise one commits not only
spiritual but intellectual errors such as some of these professors have made,
despite the expertise in their own fields. I bring to the notice of our readers
one such major misunderstanding by Professor Steve Odin of the University of
Hawai’i, which should be set right before it spreads further in the academic
world. I quote below his conclusion with regard to Sri Aurobindo and Hegel:
1 Jun 2014
23 May 2014
The Supreme Court Verdict on the Five Sisters – Bireshwar Choudhury
Three newspapers (Times of India, New Indian
Express & Deccan Chronicle) have recently reported the adverse judgement delivered on the Five Prasad Sisters by
the Supreme Court of India on the 29th
of April 2014. The sisters have been ordered to vacate their present quarters
in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, by July 31st. What is however strange is that none of the newspaper
reports mention that the Ashram Trust will have to bear the expenditure of the
Five Sisters staying outside the Ashram premises! The Ashram Trust will have to
pay them a minimum of Rs 29000/ every month (subject to fair review and appeal on account
of inflation and other factors as this amount was fixed by the High Court a
long while ago) for accommodation, food and other basic necessities
of life until the original suit pending in the Pondicherry Court since 2005 has
been disposed of.
16 May 2014
History of the Ashram School (6) – Kittu Reddy
We shall now go into the details of the points
mentioned at the end of the previous article.
1. The first point was Mother’s keenness to introduce
the free system from the Primary section to those children who were ready; this
was to be done in a graduated manner starting at the age of 7-9 in the section
known as Avenir. Almost from the very
beginning of December when the interviews began, Mother wanted us to explore
the possibility of finding out the children in the Primary section who were
ready to use their freedom in the right way. As expected there was some
resistance from some teachers and a lot more from parents; there were also some
minor misunderstandings among the teachers. Some of them wrote to Mother to
explain their position; while Mother appreciated their goodwill, She was firm
that this should be started and tried out on however small a scale.
Consequently She sent Tanmaya to identify these children and two or three were
chosen with Mother’s approval. Here is an extract from the Mother’s talk:
12 May 2014
GURU NINDA ― by Niranjan Naik
[There is a story
behind this article. It was originally written in Oriya for the November 2008
issue of Navaprakash by Niranjan
Naik, who was its editor for the last 38 years. The Peter Heehs controversy had
erupted around mid-August / September 2008, shocking the devotees and disciples
of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The question that figured most prominently in
their minds was how an Ashramite could insult the Guru. Niranjan Naik answered
the question indirectly in his article without mentioning any names. The
November 2008 issue was printed and even bound at the Ashram Press when the
matter was brought to the notice of the Ashram Trust. The Managing Trustee, on the advice of Manoj Das,
immediately ordered the scrapping of the article and 9700 copies of the
magazine had to be redone. The cover pages were torn and the pages of the
article were shredded to bits. Luckily, a few copies of the article were
preserved, xeroxed and distributed in Orissa where it elicited a highly
favourable response. It is in the light of this event that readers of this site
should judge the dubious public statement made by the Ashram Trust in 2012 with
regard to freedom of speech and belief in Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
The story does not
end there. Niranjan Naik was later removed from the editorship of Navaprakash in
January 2011 under pressure from Manoj Das. His daily work of carrying the letters and offerings of devotees in Orissa to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s rooms was abruptly taken away from him by Manoj Das Gupta. Even now,
he constantly faces harassment by the henchmen of the Trustees in spite of
lodging two police complaints. This
is the mundane reality of the present Ashram administration. – Bireshwar]
8 May 2014
The History of the Ashram School (5) – Kittu Reddy
Before we move on to the next part dealing with the
meetings with Mother, it is important to mention about another aspect of the
project of The Spiritual History of India.
Manoj Das Gupta wrote a letter to Mother regarding the project to which Mother
replied with a long comment in a conversation with Satprem. We are reproducing
the conversation below.
5 April
1967
(Mother writes a note.) It is an answer to a question. Do you know
what I told the teachers of the school? I have been asked another question.
Here is the beginning of my reply:
“The division between `ordinary life' and `spiritual life' is
an outdated antiquity.”
Did you read his question? Read it again to me.
4 May 2014
Analysis of the Preface of Peter Heehs’ The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Bio-2 – part 6) – A Zombified Disciple
Murders in the Land of the Naïve – 8
Heehs
wrote Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, OUP, 1989 (Bio-1), The Lives of Sri Aurobindo,
CUP, 2008, (Bio-2) & much else
in the same vein. Bio-1 was, perforce, subtly
devious; Bio-2
is a shameless tour de force of
perfidy.[1] His pseudonym ‘Marcher’
is a fusion of his fêted forebears Catherine Mayo (1867-1940) & William
Archer (1856-1924), though Marcherism – degrading the Sanatana Dharma &
vilifying the greatest children of Mother India – was born centuries them. The
entire credit for his thriving at the expense of his subject and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram goes to his Daemon, a special
emission of “the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and
Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature”.[2]
All
text in Italics is from Bio-1, Bio-2 & their prefaces; all in
Roman is mine.
I have often interspersed my comments in Roman within Marcher’s text which is
always in Italics.
1 May 2014
The History of the Ashram School (4) – Kittu Reddy
We shall
now take up the period from 1968 to November 1973 when the Mother left Her
body.
As already
mentioned En Avant was started in
December 1967. We still had the two separate sections En Avant and Vers La
Perfection, functioning separately. However in December 1968, the two
sections got united and we had one section called En Avant Vers La Perfection. In the first two years, the
responsibility of running these sections were given to Tanmay, Amita and Kittu.
Despite the two sections being united, they were still sitting in two separate
blocks in the Eastern and Western parts respectively. One revealing incident
happened at that time.
24 Apr 2014
The History of the Ashram School (3) ― Kittu Reddy
We shall first review the developments in the School
from the year 1959.
As already stated earlier, the Free Progress System
was introduced on an experimental basis in 1959 at the Secondary level; from there it evolved to a surer and larger base
in 1961; a small group of students were trying out this method and the Mother
named it Vers la Perfection. However
the whole of the secondary section was not following the Free System. One
section – in fact, the larger section – was
still continuing with the old method. The school at the secondary level was
thus divided into two sections.
22 Apr 2014
The Medical Negligence of Vishnu Lalit – by Bireshwar Choudhury
The
deep-rooted fear that has spread in Sri Aurobindo Ashram is that the Ashram Nursing
Home, headed by Dr. Dilip Datta and Dr Salila Patnaik, provides a one-way
ticket to Heaven. But the journey itself is not so enjoyable considering the
medical trauma that you have to go through: the lack of basic health care, the rude
behaviour of some of the nurses you have to put up with, the frequent
references to Divine Providence by the Chief Medical Officer when he does not
want to spend money on you for referrals to specialists, and finally his
constant exhortation to “Have faith in the Mother” when the patient does not have
enough faith in him as a medical practitioner. The recent case of Vishnu Lalit is one such blatant case
of medical negligence.
17 Apr 2014
Sri Aurobindo’s Accident in November 1938 ― by Krish Patwardhan
In the paragraph below from the Lives of Sri Aurobindo (pp. 381-82), Peter Heehs not only
misrepresents Sri Aurobindo’s relation with the Mother but gets one of the most
basic facts wrong in the life of Sri Aurobindo, namely, the fracture of his
right leg in the early hours of 24 November, 1938. Heehs, disregarding the
factual accounts of Nirodbaran and Champaklal (the two disciples who personally
served Sri Aurobindo during his last twelve years), writes that it was “a fracture of the left thigh close to the
knee”! I wonder how he got his facts so wrong despite all the hagiographic
fanfare about his 40 years of research on Sri Aurobindo.
11 Apr 2014
Analysis of the Preface of Peter Heehs’ "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" (Bio-2 – part 5) – A Zombified Disciple
Murders in the Land of the Naïve – 7
Heehs
wrote Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, OUP, 1989 (Bio-1), The Lives of Sri Aurobindo,
CUP, 2008, (Bio-2) & much else
in the same vein.[1] I
analyse his prefaces using his device critical
openness of a seeker of truth &
his diktat: Biographers must take their
documents as they find them…, paying as much attention to what is written by
the subject’s enemies as by his friends, not giving special treatment even to
the subject’s own version of events. Accounts by the subject…need to be
compared against other narrative accounts…that do not reflect [his] point of view. The pseudonym ‘Marcher’ is a fusion
of his forebears Catherine Mayo (1867-1940) & William Archer (1856-1924),
though Marcherism – degrading the Sanatana Dharma & vilifying the greatest
children of Mother India – was born centuries before Mayo-Archer. The entire credit
for his thriving at the expense of his subject
and his ashram goes to his Daemon, a
special emission of “the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and
Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature”.[2]
All
text in Italics is from Bio-1, Bio-2 & their prefaces; all in
Roman is mine.
I have often interspersed my comments in Roman within Marcher’s text which is
always in italics.
4 Apr 2014
The History of the Ashram School (2) – Kittu Reddy
We shall now
go back in time to see how the Free Progress System was introduced in the
school.
From the
year 1959, many tentative experiments were being made in the Free Progress
System. These attempts were first made on a small scale with a small number of
students and teachers who were willing to try out the experiment. The source of
inspiration for these experiments was in the writings and talks of Mother and
Sri Aurobindo.
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