Chapter 40Early Spiritual Development · Beginnings of Yoga at Baroda

accompanying a donation of Rs.1000/–to the War Fund which was meant as a mark of Sri Aurobindo’s adhesion to the cause of the Allies against the Axis. There was also a letter to the Governor of Madras forwarding another contribution along with a statement of his views about the war which was published. Besides this, other contributions were made direct to France. Later on, letters supporting the war were made public. As for the Cripps’ offer, it was supported in a long telegram sent not to the Viceroy’s Secretary but to Cripps himself after his broadcast in which he announced the offer.

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[The telegram was a “political gesture”.]

Sri Aurobindo does not know whether this can be described as a public political gesture. The interest of your chapters is historical and biographical rather than concerned with the present course of politics or any new intervention in it. At any rate Sri Aurobindo did not intend these notes as constituting any such public intervention or gesture.

Muslims, the descendants of foreigners, favoured the partition of Bengal.

This would seem to indicate that all the Mohammedans in India are descendants of foreigners, but the idea of two nationalities in India is only a new-fangled notion invented by Jinnah for his purposes and contrary to the facts. More than 90% of the Indian Mussulmans are descendants of converted Hindus and belong as much to the Indian nation as the Hindus themselves. This process of conversion has continued all along; Jinnah is himself a descendant of a Hindu converted in fairly recent times named Jinnabhai and many of the most famous Mohammedan leaders have a similar origin.

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Assam had a majority of Muslims.

The majority in Assam is made up of the Hindus and the tribal peoples; in Assam proper the Mussulmans are only 20% of the population. The balance has been altered by the inclusion of Syl-het, a Bengali district in Assam, but even so the non-Mussulmans predominate. At present [1946] a Congress Government is in power in Assam elected by a large majority and Assam is vehemently refusing to be grouped with Mussulman Bengal in the new constitution.

Sri Aurobindo’s first turn towards spiritual seeking came in Eng-land in the last year of his stay there. He had lived in the family of a Non-conformist clergyman, minister of a chapel belonging to the “Congregational” denomination; though he never became a Christian, this was the only religion and the Bible the only scripture with which he was acquainted in his childhood; but in the form in which it presented itself to him, it repelled rather than attracted him and the hideous story of persecution staining mediaeval Christianity and the narrowness and intolerance even of its later developments disgusted him so strongly that he drew back from religion altogether. After a short period of complete atheism, he accepted the Agnostic attitude. In his studies for the I.C.S, however, he came across a brief and very scanty and bare statement of the “Six philosophies” of India and he was especially struck by the concept of the Atman in the Adwaita. It was borne in upon his mind that here might be [a] true clue to the reality behind life and the world. He made a strong and very crude mental attempt to realise what this Self or Atman might be, to convert the abstract idea into a concrete and living reality in his own consciousness, but conceiving it as something beyond or behind this material world, — not having understood it as something immanent in himself and all and also universal.

Sri Aurobindo was preoccupied, even when he was but a conscientious teacher or an accomplished poet . . . with the problem of service and of sacrifice. . . . From the very first the idea of personal salvation or of individual felicity was utterly repugnant to him.