Chapter 2Early Life in India and England, 1872–1893 · In London

Early Life in India and England

1872–1893

He may have known a smattering of Bengali till he was five years of age. Thereafter till twenty-one he spoke only English.

In my father’s house only English and Hindustani were spoken. I knew no Bengali.

*

Quite early he was sent to St. Paul’s School at Darjeeling, and then, when he showed unusual promise, to King’s College, Cambridge. . . .

. . . His chosen medium of expression is English.

Another error is worth correcting. The reviewer seems to assume that Sri Aurobindo was sent straight from India to King’s College, Cambridge, and that he had [to] learn English as a foreign language. This is not the fact; Sri Aurobindo in his father’s house already spoke only English and Hindustani, he thought in English from his childhood and did not even know his native language, Bengali. At the age of seven he was taken to England and remained there consecutively for fourteen years, speaking English and thinking in English and no other tongue. He was educated in French and Latin and other subjects under private tuition in Manchester from seven to eleven and studied afterwards in St Paul’s School London for about seven years. From there he went to King’s College. He had never to study English at all as a subject; though it was not his native language, it had become by force of circumstances from the very first his natural language.

He was sensitive to beauty in man and nature. . . . He watched with pain the thousand and one instances of man’s cruelty to man.

The feeling was more abhorrence than pain; from early childhood there was a strong hatred and disgust for all kinds of cruelty and oppression, but the term pain would not accurately describe the reaction.

* There was no positive religious or spiritual element in the education received in England. The only personal contact with Christianity (that of Nonconformist England) was of a nature to repel rather than attract. The education received was mainly classical and had a purely intellectual and aesthetic influence; it did not stimulate any interest in spiritual life. My attention was not drawn to the spirituality of Europe of the Middle Ages; my knowledge of it was of a general character and I never underwent its influence.

Between 1880 and 1884 Sri Aurobindo attended the grammar school at Manchester.

I never went to the Manchester Grammar school, never even stepped inside it. It was my two brothers who studied there. I was taught privately by the Drewetts. Mr.. Drewett who was a scholar in Latin (he had been a Senior Classic at Oxford)1 taught me that language (but not Greek, which I began at Saint Paul’s, London), and English History etc.; Mr.s. Drewett taught me French, Geography and Arithmetic. No Science; it was not in fashion at that time.

* 1 See Table 2, page 567. — Ed.