THE MOTHER-20..5-1. Gentleman and Scholar Manchester, centre of the cotton industry, was the second most important English city, the symbol of the new industrial society and the image of the world’s future. ‘It was the shock city of its age, busy, noisy and turbulent. It was the city Karl Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels associated with the Industrial Revolution.’ It was also for the most part ugly, dirty and unhealthy, for the Industrial Revolution had as little consideration for the human environment as it did for humans. Young Aravinda must have seen some of those horrors from nearby. The Reverend Drewett and his wife took excellent care of the three Indian brothers. Benoybhusan and Manmohan joined Manchester Grammar School, but Aravinda was taught by the Drewetts themselves, and very well indeed, as his success in his future studies would bear out. The Rev. Drewett, a scholar in Latin (he had been a Senior Classics scholar at Oxford), taught him Latin and history, Mrs. Drewett French, geography and arithmetic. ‘As the young boy grew up, his studies covered a wide field: poetry, literature, history; Shakespeare, Shelley and the Bible were his habitual companions.’176 ‘Auro was a very quiet and gentle boy, but at times could be terribly obstinate,’ his elder brother would remember. Proof of his early talent is a poem entitled ‘Light,’ recently discovered, written by Aravinda when he was ten years old and sent to an obscure and short-lived journal, Fox’s Weekly. It is an imitation of ‘The Cloud’ by P.B. Shelley. We quote the last stanza of eight: I waken the [flowers] in their dew-spangled bowers, The birds in their chambers of green, And mountain and plain glow with beauty again, As they bask in their matinal sheen. O, if such the glad worth of my presence on earth, Though fitful and fleeting the while, What glories must rest on the home of the blessed, Ever bright with the Deity’s smile.177 W.H. Drewett must have been a broad-minded man for sure, for although a minister he never tried to impose his views or faith on the three young Indians of whom he was the guardian. ‘I never became a Christian,’ Sri Aurobindo would say, ‘and never used to go to church.’ However, a very strong feeling arose in the boy when he read Shelley. ‘The Revolt of Islam was a great favourite with me even when I was quite young and I used to read it again and again — of course, without understanding everything. Evidently it appealed to some part of the being. There was no other effect of reading it except that I had a thought that I would dedicate my life to a similar World-change and take part in it.’178 But the Drewetts emigrated to Australia, travelling via Calcutta to collect the arrears K.D. Ghose owed them for the boarding, lodging and education of his sons. The three brothers, under the tutelage of grandmother Drewett, moved to London. There, in September 1884, Manmohan and Aravinda were admitted to St Paul’s School, one of the best schools of its time. ‘Impressed by Aurobindo’s proficiency in Latin, [Headmaster] Walker awarded him a Foundation Scholarship and placed him directly in the upper fifth form... [He] taught him the rudiments of Greek... Before long Aurobindo was studying the Latin and Greek classics, writing poetry and prose in both languages, and reading English literature, ‘divinity’ (Bible studies), and French.’179 It is generally believed that Aravinda did not study mathematics and science, but this seems to be a misconception. For ‘Sri Aurobindo not only was well grounded in algebra and plane geometry but had also taken two years of “analytical conics” (conic sections). Many of his classmates on the “classical side,” Manmohan among them, took no mathematics at all. Sri Aurobindo evidently was looking ahead to the I.C.S. examination.’180 Aravinda did very well indeed, so well that his interest in the obligatory subjects slackened and his teachers suspected him of wasting his remarkable gifts because of laziness. In fact Aravinda spent most of his time in general reading, giving himself a kind of complementary education that would constitute the stock of his enormous erudition. He read especially English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of ancient, medieval and modern Europe. ‘He also taught himself Italian, German and Spanish in order to read Dante, Goethe and Calderon in the original tongues. A boy with so ambitious a programme could not rightly be accused of laziness.’181 The Foundation Scholarship awarded him by his headmaster must have come in useful for Aravinda. Grandmother Drewett had suddenly grown furious when Manmohan, weary of her bigotry, insulted Moses, and she had thrown the three brothers out of her house. James Cotton had become acquainted with them through his father in India, Sir Henry, who was a friend of their father. Cotton paid Benoybhusan five shillings a week to assist him in his job as Secretary of the South Kensington Liberal Club. He also allowed the brothers to stay at the Club in a room under the roof. They were now living in poverty, for K.D. Ghose sent his sons hardly any money. ‘When they outgrew their old overcoats they could not buy new ones. At home there was no coal for the fire and hardly any food. During a whole year Aurobindo and Benoybhusan had to survive on “a slice or two of sandwich bread and butter and a cup of tea in the morning and in the evening a penny saveloy [a kind of sausage]”... Manmohan by this time had gone up to Oxford and was receiving most of the scanty resources that their father was sending.’182 K.D. Ghose’s reasons for withholding their allowances are not clear. Sri Aurobindo would later say that when his father was in Rangpur, he was on friendly terms with the Magistrate (the highest British authority in a district), who did nothing without consulting him. When this magistrate was transferred and a new one came in his place, the latter found that he had no authority in the town, all power being in the hands of Dr. K.D. Ghose. The new magistrate could not tolerate that. He asked the Government to transfer the Civil Surgeon, who was sent to Khulna and felt deeply hurt by such treatment. He lost his previous respect for the English people and turned into a nationalist. All this had an increasing influence on Aravinda, for his father, from then onwards, sent his sons ‘the newspaper The Bengalee with passages marked relating maltreatment of Indians by Englishmen and he denounced in his letters the British Government in India as a heartless Government.’183 In the last year of his studies at St Paul’s, Aravinda joined the I.C.S. class, consisting of students who were preparing for the I.C.S. entrance examination. From that time onward he took on a double load of work, on the one hand the study of the normal school curriculum, on the other the preparations for the examination that might launch him on a successful career in the Indian Civil Service. Speaking in July 1890, Headmaster Walker was full of praise for the almost eighteen-year-old Aravinda A. Ghose. He is reported to have said that of all the boys who had passed through his hands during the past twenty-five or thirty years, Aravinda was by far the most richly endowed in intellectual capacity. In December of the previous year Aravinda had taken the Scholarship Examination for King’s College at Cambridge University. As a result of his performance in this examination, he was elected to the first vacant open scholarship, which means that he was the best candidate. Oscar Browning, one of the examiners and a Cambridge celebrity, would take Aravinda aside and tell him: ‘I suppose you know you passed an extraordinary examination. I have examined papers at thirteen examinations and I have never during that time seen such excellent papers as yours... As for your essay, it was wonderful.’ Aravinda studied at King’s College, where he was known as A.A. Ghose, from October 1890 to October 1892. His scholarship earned him £ 80 a year, which he shared with his brothers; the time of the direst poverty was over. The burden of his studies was considerable. ‘As the recipient of a scholarship he had to prepare for the Classical tripos,184 taking that difficult honours examination after two instead of the usual three years. At the same time, as an I.C.S. probationer, he had to follow a completely different curriculum and demonstrate his mastery of a half a dozen subjects in three periodical examinations.’185 He did very well indeed on all fronts. And in addition to this was the general education received at that famous university, concisely but strikingly depicted by Peter Heehs: ‘As a classical scholar, Aurobindo was participating in an educational system whose traditions went back to the Renaissance. To master Greek and Latin, to read Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, to absorb the culture of classical Greece and Rome — these were considered the proper training of an English gentleman. And what one learned in the classroom and lecture hall was only part, and not the most important part, of the Cambridge experience. The university’s atmosphere took hold of those who entered it and wrought a comprehensive change.’186 A.A. Ghose was ‘one of the two best Classics of his year in King’s College.’ The first year he won a prize for Greek iambics; the second year he ended his study with First Class Honours and won prizes again for Greek iambics and Latin hexameters. The same year he won ‘books bearing the College arms, to the value of forty pounds’ for having distinguished himself in the college examination in Classics. He would never get his B.A., as the Classical Tripos comprised three years and he had to stop after two. But he left Cambridge in October 1892 as a gentleman and a classical scholar who would keep the knowledge acquired there for the rest of his life, both as a generally recognized master of the English language and as one who was widely read, also in the life of revolutionaries such as Jeanne d’Arc, Giuseppe Mazzini, Garibaldi and Charles Parnell. In August 1892 he passed his final examination for the I.C.S. with ease albeit without ambition. But the last part of it was a horse-riding test. After he returned to London, A.A. Ghose was summoned three times to the test; three times he failed to show up. The Senior Examiner of the Civil Service Commission gave him a last chance accompanied by a serious warning. Again the candidate did not show up, and he was consequently disqualified. It is clear that the cause of Aravinda’s behavior was quite simply that he did not want to join the I.C.S. any more. ‘He felt no call for the I.C.S. and was seeking some way to escape from that bondage,’ Sri Aurobindo would write about himself later. Under his father’s influence he had started to look at the British colonial presence in India with new eyes. Besides, he abhorred the administrative aspect of all I.C.S. offices, with their routine and dreary paper work. And the British authorities, apart from wishing to keep the I.C.S. as British as possible, had reasons for being suspicious of this Indian candidate. In Cambridge he had been a member and for some time secretary of the ‘Indian Majlis’ (association or assembly) which on the surface was a kind of social organization, but which was in fact an assembly of patriotic Indian students. This group was infiltrated by government spies who reported Aravinda’s ‘many revolutionary speeches.’ And in London he had, together with his brothers, taken the oath in a secret Indian society, ‘Lotus and Dagger,’ in which ‘each member vowed to work for the liberation of India generally and to take some special work in furtherance of that end... This happened immediately before the return to India.’187 The secret society was short-lived, but its membership was nevertheless indicative of a mentality the colonial rulers and their I.C.S. could do without. Aravinda was now without a job. As luck would have it, the Maharajah of Baroda, Sayaji Rao III of the Gaekwad dynasty, was in London on a visit, the first of his many visits to Europe. With an introduction from James Cotton, A. A. Ghose applied for a job in the Maharajah’s administration. The prince soon understood that he could acquire for a song the services of a highly qualified functionary, an I.C.S. man in fact, for Cotton had reckoned that Rs. 200 a month was a reasonable salary and had convinced his protégé of the same. A.A. Ghose was hired without more ado. His father knew nothing of these developments. So proud was he of his third son that he travelled all the way to Bombay to welcome him and take him back in triumph. But the ship, the steamer Roumania on which he expected Aravinda, did not arrive and the disillusioned doctor returned home. There he was informed by telegram that the ship had gone down in a storm off the coast of Portugal. Krishna Dhan, who was already suffering from heart disease, succumbed to the shock and died on 14 December 1892 ‘while uttering Aravinda’s name in lamentation.’ Some years later Aurobindo would write in a letter: ‘In all my fourteen years in England I hardly got a dozen letters from him, and yet I cannot doubt his affection for me, since it was the false report of my death which killed him.’188 Aravinda had not booked his passage on the ill-fated Roumania but on the Carthage. He arrived in Bombay on 6 February 1893. From the moment he set foot on Indian soil, on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, a vast calm descended upon him; the black cloud, which had been hovering over him since that day some seventeen or eighteen years before at Darjeeling, dissolved and he began to have spiritual experiences. Two days later he joined the service of the Gaekwad in Baroda.
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