Sri Aurobindo

Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872 and sent as a child to England. He was educated at St Paul’s and King’s College, Cambridge, and trained for the Indian Civil Service, which he did not join. He returned to India in 1893, taught in Baroda, and entered the nationalist movement in Bengal — writing, organising, and arguing for complete independence when that was still a rare position.

Arrested in the Alipore Bomb Case in 1908, he spent a year in jail. There the political life turned inward. He later said that the Isha Upanishad and the Gita ceased to be literature and became fact. Acquitted, he withdrew in 1910 to French Pondicherry — not as a retirement, but as the place of a yoga whose aim was not personal liberation alone.

In Pondicherry he was joined by Mirra Alfassa, later called the Mother. From 1914 they issued the journal Arya, in which The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, and the essays on the Gita first appeared. The yoga he named integral: the psychic being (the soul-spark) to come forward; mind, vital, and body to be offered; a supramental consciousness to descend and transform earth-nature rather than abandon it. He wrote the epic Savitri over decades of silent work.

He left the body on 5 December 1950. The Mother continued the yoga and the building of Auroville’s seed until 1973. The demand of the teaching is still the same: all life is yoga, or it is not yoga at all.