Sri Aurbindo

Poet Revolutionary, social and religious thinker. Sri Aurobindo was born on August 15, 1872. born into a rich Calcutta family.Sri Aurobindo studied at St. Paul’s School, London during the years 1884 to 1890. He left St. Paul’s to go to King’s College, Cambridge on a scholarship from 1890 to 1892. Throughly Anglicized, he returned to India and passed the Indian Civil Service examination but refused to take the mandatory riding test.
A brilliant scholar in Greek and Latin, Aurobindo passed the Cambridge tripos to return to India to join the Baroda State Services as Administrator and Professor. But by 1906 he was disillusioned with both his British education and the British rulers of India. He resigned his post in 1906 to return to Bengal, where he joined the freedom struggle. He took part in the Swadeshi movement and the anti-partition riot during the years 1906 and 1910. In his quest for spiritual peace he also took to the practice of yoga during this period.
Aurobindo, a true nationalist, edited Bande Mataram, a beautifully produced nationalistic publication. He was arrested in May 1908 in the Alipore conspiracy case but was released for lack of evidence. It was in 1909 in Alipore jail that he had a spiritual vision of Vasudeva and heard his command to abandan politics. He made his mark in the field of journalism by publishing karmayogin, an English weekly and Dharma, a Bengali weekly.
Aurobindo broke away from materialistic existence and settled down secretly in Pondicherry in1910, devoting more nad more time to spiritual work and sadhna. During this time (1914 to 1921), he published Arya, a philosophical monthly and went on to write a series of philosophic works – The Life Divine, The Synthesis of yoga, Essays On The Gita, Isha Upanishad. The Foundation Of Indian Culture, The Secret Of The Vedas, etc.
Sri Aurbindo wrote: “Evolution is the one eternal dynamic law and the hidden process of the earth nature. An evolution of the instruments of the spirit in a medium of the values of the earth existence. All its other laws are its values of operation and process; the spiritual evolution is its one pervading secret sense.“ He also wrote: “The movement of the ignorance is egotistic at his core and nothing is more difficult for us than to get rid of egoism while yet we admit personality and adhere to action in the half-light and half force of our unfinished nature. It is easier to starve the ego by renouncing the impulse to act or to kill it by cutting away from us all movement of personality.”
A prolific English language poet, his range extended to lyrics, sonnets and epics. His major work is the 24000-line blank verse, cosmic epic, Savitri, on which he worked for 30 years. The saint was, thus, aptly called the poet of the human soul. When he died on December 5, 1950, he left behind thousands of bereaved followers collectively known as the Sri Aurbindo Society.