1. Mahasaraswati's Child
Sri Aurobindo was born on 15th August, 1872 at Calcutta. His father, Dr. Krishna Dhan Ghose was a physician. His mother was Swarnalata, daughter of Rishi Rajnarain Bose. Dr. Ghose already had two sons, Benoybhushan and Manomohan as also a daughter, Sarojini. Sri Aurobindo's younger brother was Barindra Kumar. Even in those distant days, Dr. Ghose had gone to England for higher education. He had been much anglicised and naturally wished for a complete English education for his children. At home he had engaged Miss Pagett to teach the children. Later, he sent his first three sons to the Loretto Convent School at Darjeeling. Here Sri Aurobindo was moving among English children and so was not exposed to his mother-tongue, Bengali.
In 1879, Dr. Ghose took his family to England. The boys were placed with the Rev. William H. Drewett and Mrs. Drewett in Manchester. Sri Aurobindo was hardly seven when he came to England and now began a period of intense learning of languages like English, Latin and French as also subjects like history, geography and arithmetic. No wonder he grew up practically as an English child. Having made the necessary arrangements for the education of his sons, Dr. Ghose returned to India.
Five years later, Sri Aurobindo went to London and joined St. Paul's School, London. Founded in 1509, the School had been giving value-based education for boys in their teens. When Sri Aurobindo joined it, it was known as one of the 'nine great public schools' of England. Here was a perfect student for a perfect school and Sri Aurobindo made rapid progress.
He won the Butterworth Prize for Literature and Bedford Prize for history. The Head Master, Dr. Walker took special interest in him for the Indian boy showed exceptional talent not only in studies but in handling the English language creatively. By the time he was nineteen, Sri Aurobindo had quite a wide and deep knowledge of the Classics in Greek and Latin and had got acquainted with Italian and German as well.
Having procured a scholarship, Sri Aurobindo entered the King's College, Cambridge. Here too his academic work was very satisfactory and he even passed his preliminary test for the I.C.S. His brothers also were doing very well in their studies. However, behind all these academic successes was the harsh reality of being left to fend for themselves in an alien land by their father. Dr. Ghose was a hard-working doctor but the income was not enough and there was an increasing burden on his resources, both financial and emotional, when his wife, Swarnalata became mentally unstable. The boys managed somehow with their scholarships though often it was terrible to survive the English winter with their poor clothing and inadequate food. For Sri Aurobindo these prolems that came upon him perhaps hardened him to face immense challenges successfully in the future.
Dr. Ghose, however, kept up a correspondence with his children. As the years passed, he became less of an anglophile and there were stirrings of patriotism when he saw the Britisher ill-treat the Indians and exploit them as well. In a bid to educate his sons to face the Indian conditions since they would be returning soon to take up jobs in their motherland, Dr. Ghose sent them newspaper cuttings of what was happening in India. Sri Aurobindo derived inspirations from this correspondence. This led to his giving nationalist speeches in the Indian Majlis, an organisation founded by Indian students in 1891 at the Cambridge University. Majlis is a Persian word meaning assembly and it was here that students debated and improved their skills in communicating through English language. Among such students mention may be made of Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru. The students were addressed by visiting Indian dignitaries like Lala Lajpat Rai and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Sri Aurobindo was no doubt an 'eka-santha-graahi'. Along with his academic studies, he made rapid strides with his knowledge of the state of the Indian nation as well. The stirrings of nationalism in him had its quick effect on his immediate future. He rejected the Indian Civil Service as that would mean being a servant of our oppressors. Instead he took up service in the State of Baroda and returned to India in 1893, having passed the Classical Tripos in the First Division, and also secured a prize for Greek and Latin iambics.
Altogether, Sri Aurobindo had spent fourteen years in England all by himself not meeting even his parents. The only relations he knew in the foreign land were his two brothers but each of them was busy in his own way. Astonishingly, he was not denationalised at all. He may have dressed as an Englishman but he thought as an Indian. As an L.C.S. probationer, he had begun to learn his mother tongue, Bengali. Obviously he was clear about his future allegiance: it would be to Indian culture, not the West. He indicates this in a poem which he wrote on leaving England. He speaks of the poems he had written, poems which were basically a recreation of the Western ambience, chiefly Greek. But now he was going away, probably for good. The concluding lines of the poem, 'Envoi' makes it clear how he is turning from the West to the East:
"For in Sicilian olive-groves no more
Or seldom must my footprints now be seen, Nor tread Athenian lanes, nor yet explore Parnassus or thy voiceful shores, O Hippocrene. Me from her lotus heaven Saraswati Has called to regions of eternal snow And Ganges pacing to the southern sea, Ganges upon whose shores the flowers of Eden blow."
Two major experiences confronted Sri Aurobindo when he landed in Bombay. Probably he was worrying about the future and how he had remained totally alienated from his natal culture. But all anxieties were set at rest once he landed on the Indian soil. According to him, when he disembarked in Apollo Bunder "a vast calm descended upon him... and surrounded him and remained with him for long months afterwards." The child had come back to its mother, at long last.
His return also made him face a great tragedy. Dr. Ghose who had been ill and was looking forward eagerly to his son's return died of shock when he learnt that the ship in which the young man was traveling had sunk in the sea and all lives were lost. In a letter written to his brother-in-law some months earlier, Dr. Ghose had said proudly:
"Ara, I hope, will yet glorify his country by a brilliant administration. I shall not live to see it, but remember this letter, if you do. I tell you what Oscar Browning, the great son of the father, said to him when he was at tea with one of the dons of his college (he is at King's College, Cambridge now, borne there by his own ability): 'I have been examiner for scholarships for 13 years and during that time there was not presented papers like yours, and your essay was excellent.
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