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Sri Aurobindo
Biography
Sri Aurobindo was born on 15 August 1872 in Calcutta. At the age of seven he went to
England for his education. After a brilliant career at St. Paul's School, London, and King's College, Cambridge, he returned to India in 1893. For the next fourteen years he worked in
the Princely State of Baroda, serving in various government departments and as a professor in Baroda College. During this period he mastered Sanskrit and Bengali and wrote much poetry
and literary criticism. He also joined a revolutionary society and took a leading role in secret preparations for an uprising against the country's colonial masters.
In 1906, Sri Aurobindo quit his post in Baroda and went to Calcutta, where he became one of
the leaders of the Nationalist movement. As editor of the newspaper Bande Mataram he boldly put forward the idea of complete independence for India. Prosecuted twice for
sedition, he was acquitted both times for 1ack of evidence. Arrested in May 1908 for conspiracy, he spent one year in jail as an undertrial prisoner, but was then acquitted. In
1910 he withdrew from politics and came to Pondicherry in order to devote himself exclusively to the practice of Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo had taken up Yoga in 1905 at Baroda. After gathering up in himself the
essential elements of past spiritual experience, he moved on in search of a more complete realisation, one which would unite the two poles of Spirit and Matter. During his forty years in
Pondicherry he worked out a new system of spiritual development which he called the Integral Yoga; its aim is a spiritual realisation that will not only liberate man's consciousness
but transform his nature and divinise life. In 1926, when the Ashram was founded, Sri Aurobindo withdrew to his room, but continued to maintain contact with disciples through a large correspondence and by giving darshan four times a year. Among his many writings of
the Pondicherry period, the best known are The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita and Savitri. Sri Aurobindo passed away on 5 December 1950, at the age of seventy-eight.
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