6 AUGUST 2022
AUROVILLE ART FOR LAND EXHIBITION CELEBRATES THE 150TH BIRTH ANNIVERSARY OF SRI AUROBINDO AND 75TH YEAR OF INDEPENDENCE OF INDIA FROM 7 AUGUST 2022 TO 4 SEPTEMBER 2022.
“August 15th, 1947 is the birthday of free India. It marks for her the end of an old era, the beginning of a new age. But we can also make it by our life and act as a free nation, an important date in a new age opening for the whole world, for the political, social, cultural and spiritual future of humanity.
August 15th is my own birthday and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance. I take this coincidence, not as a fortuitous accident, but as the sanction and seal of the Divine Force that guides my steps on the work with which I began life, the beginning of its full fruition…….” Sri Aurobindo’s Independence Day message contains his Five Dreams of World Union.
Born on 15 August 1872 in Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo after studying at the Loretto Convent School, Darjeeling, was taken by his parents to England at the age of seven. He spent the next fourteen years in Manchester. London and Cambridge, shining as a scholar, passing high in the 1st Tripos at Cambridge and the I.C.S. examination, but got himself disqualified from the Civil Service by deliberately absenting himself from the horse-riding test.
He returned to India in 1893 and worked as a professor at the Maharaja’s college in Baroda. In 1901 he married Mrinalini Devi in Calcutta. During his thirteen-year stay in Baroda his life flowed quietly but intensely in several streams. On the one hand he delved deep into the mystic heritage of India and took up the practice of Yoga; on the other he began to give a bold new direction to the politics of the time, writing a series of newspaper articles and, with the help of some trusted lieutenants, inspiring secret revolutionary societies of several places across the country.
In 1906 Sri Aurobindo moved to Calcutta. After briefly serving as the first Principal of the newly founded National College, he took over the editorship of the newspaper Bande Mataram, the herald of Indian nationalism. It was he who, along with Bal Gangadhar Tilak, gave a radical turn to the politics of the Indian National Congress at its Surat session in 1907. He was the first political leader to publicly demand complete independence for India.
Failing to prove two charges of sedition against his paper, the colonial authorities arrested him in May 1908 in connection with the now famous Alipore Conspiracy Case. The celebrated Deshbandhu C.R. Das defended him, making his historic prophecy: “Long after he is dead or gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity.” Acquitted in 1909, Sri Aurobindo emerged from his year-long confinement enriched by momentous spiritual experiences. He continued his political work for one year more. Then, in compliance with an inner command, he sailed for Pondicherry, a French enclave in South India, which he reached in April 1910. It was time for him to explore the way for mankind’s liberation from its bondage to ignorance through spiritual means.
During his forty years in Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo devoted himself to the practice of Yoga. He worked out a new system of spiritual development, which he called the Integral Yoga, and revealed what he deemed to be the next step in evolution – the emergence of a supramental being out of the present mental man, to be effected through a transformation of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5 December 1950.
To enter the world of Sri Aurobindo’s literature is an adventure in consciousness. To refer to a few of Sri Aurobindo’s works, his Life Divine presents the wide perspective of his Integral Yoga and his vision of human destiny. The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita and The Mother show the way of sadhana or the practice of Yoga in life. Then there is the epic Savitri – a unique creation that explores the invisible forces, occult and spiritual, influencing our life and foresees the triumph of Divine Love over all human failings.
THE MONTH LONG PROGRAMMES WILL BE INAUGURATED BY DR. JAYANTI RAVI, SECRETARY AUROVILLE FOUNDATION ON 7 AUGUST 2022.
Content & Images credit/ AUROVILLE ART FOR LAND EXHIBITION
