Sri Aurobindo: The Prophet of Nationalism

The rise of nationalism in Europe in the mid-19th century emerged from a wave of socio-political turmoil and discontent following the French Revolution. However, its emergence among the western-educated elite in traditional societies of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere in the colonised world was likely a reaction to colonialism. While the Latin American countries gained their freedom in the first two decades of the 19th century, independence came over a century later to the rest of the colonies.

In India, the early beginnings of nationalism can perhaps be traced back to the late 19th century in what is Maharashtra today. These were sporadic incidents of violence, such as the killing of two British officers by disgruntled individuals, rather than popular mass uprisings. The idea of independence had not yet spread among the diverse peoples of the subcontinent. On the contrary, the leaders of the newly founded Congress Party, with a few exceptions, were convinced of the benevolent effects of British rule, even as they sought reforms for some representation of Indians in the government and administration. This changed dramatically with Sri Aurobindo’s arrival in India from London in 1893. Over the next seventeen years, along with a few like-minded leaders, he launched a movement challenging the policies of moderate Congress leaders. He initiated actions that revolutionised political thinking by sowing the seeds of his unique brand of “religious nationalism” and the idea of total independence from British rule.

In his book Sri Aurobindo: The Prophet of Nationalism, first serialised in the quarterly Śraddha in 2017–2018, Anurag Banerjee traces the meteoric rise of Sri Aurobindo as a political leader and his radical ideas on nationalism. These ideas spawned several secret revolutionary societies across the political spectrum of India, culminating in numerous assassination attempts, subversions, and dacoities. Starting with the famous oft-quoted summation speech by defence counsel Chittaranjan Das in the Alipore Bomb Trial where he described Sri Aurobindo “as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity”, the first eight chapters offer a detailed narrative account of Sri Aurobindo’s activities as a political leader. The final chapter is a research paper titled “Sri Aurobindo on Religious Nationalism and Communal Harmony”. Originally presented at a national seminar in 2022, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of Sri Aurobindo’s novel but sometimes misconstrued views on nationalism.

In the Preface Banerjee explains the reasons for undertaking this “labour of love”; primarily to highlight Sri Aurobindo’s unsung pivotal role in India’s freedom struggle and his pioneering contribution in fostering the idea of an Indian nation among the politically fractured, culturally diverse, and psychologically shattered people of the time by referring to “several rare documents which had never seen the light of day”.

The book’s first part describes Sri Aurobindo’s early life in London, his return to India, and his stint as an employee from 1893 to 1906 of Sayajirao Gaekwad, the ruler of Baroda. During these years he came in contact with most of the political leaders of the Indian National Congress in Bombay and Bengal. As he became increasingly involved, he realised that the only way to free his country would be through armed insurrection, not constitutional agitation. With the help of his younger brother, Barindra Ghosh, and another associate Jatindranath Banerjee, he began to plan and execute the organising of secret societies dedicated to revolutionary activities. The duo was sent to Bengal in 1903 to establish samities or revolutionary centres in the garb of gymnasiums with considerable success.

That success came to a halt when Jatin left Bengal sometime in 1905 following a conflict between him and Barin arising from their different styles of functioning—much to the chagrin of Sri Aurobindo and despite his attempt to reconcile their differences. The dying revolutionary movement in Bengal was resuscitated by three unrelated events: the British announcement to partition Bengal, their defeat in the Boer war in South Africa, and the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war around the same time. While the first sparked widespread outrage and violent agitations, the two latter events created a sense of jubilation at what was seen as a huge blow to British prestige and the humiliation of a European power by an Asian country. Sri Aurobindo seized the opportunity to further fuel revolutionary sentiments by writing a twenty-page pamphlet called Bhawani Mandir, espousing the philosophical and religious basis of Nationalism. In this visionary scheme, he propounds the idea of India as the Mother, a “mighty Shakti”, not as an inert piece of land, whose liberation had to be attained at any cost. Such a document naturally attracted the ire of the British government who, although they grudgingly conceded that nothing in it could be labelled as seditious, deplored the use of religion to further political ends.

In the wake of the anti-partition riots, the Nationalist leaders’ call for boycott, the push for the Swadeshi movement, and the crying need for a national education took off in earnest and were successfully endorsed during the Benares session of the Indian National Congress in December 1905. Moderate leaders, however, rejected the motion that asked for the extension of the scheme to the rest of the country.

The Bengal National College and School, under the National Council of Education, was started on 15 August 1906 to impart learning along national lines. It emphasised India’s distinctive heritage and culture to counter the British education system and its parochial aim of producing a breed of loyal interpreters and clerks to govern their subjects.

In addition, to attract revolutionaries to the movement, a Bengali weekly paper, Jugantar, and a daily paper in English, Bande Mataram, were launched to spread the ideals of armed revolution and to disseminate the idea of creating a unified opposition to British rule through a movement of passive resistance. This would be carried out through methods such as economic, educational, judicial, and executive boycotts, as well as disobedience of unjust laws, refusal to pay taxes, and social boycotts.

Appointed the principal of the Bengal College and assuming the work of jointly editing Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo took the opportunity to leave the State Service of Baroda and settle down in Calcutta. By 1907, Bengal had been roused through his fiery writings to become the hotbed of revolutionary activities in India.

The British authorities were initially slow to react to the explosive articles in Jugantar, Sandhya, and Bande Mataram. Later, when notices sent to their offices to tone down their language went unheeded, managers, printers, and editorial staff, including Sri Aurobindo, were arrested on charges of sedition against the state. While some were found guilty and sentenced to various terms in prison, Sri Aurobindo was acquitted for lack of any evidence that proved him to be the managing editor of Bande Mataram.

The Bande Mataram sedition trial brought Sri Aurobindo to the forefront of the Nationalist movement after the top leaders of the Nationalist party were either deported or imprisoned. Neither proficient in spoken Bengali nor a strong orator like such stalwarts as Bipin Chandra Pal, he was content until then to act from behind the scenes. Under his leadership, the Nationalists emerged as the dominant force in the Midnapore Congress in early December 1907 much to the dismay and frustration of the Moderates, who tried in vain to persuade Sri Aurobindo to eschew his militant approach and embrace their conformist policies. The conflict between the Moderates and the Nationalists reached a breaking point during the Surat Congress held a few weeks later, where pandemonium broke out after a scuffle between supporters of the rival groups, culminating in a split in the Indian National Congress.

During this time Barin, who had assembled a group of young revolutionaries known as the Maniktola Secret Society, had been involved in several covert operations and assassination attempts. In April 1908 their botched attempt to kill Douglas Kingsford, the District Magistrate of Muzaffarpur, ended up killing two innocent ladies. All members of the Maniktola Society along with anyone connected to them, including Sri Aurobindo, were arrested and jailed pending trial. After a protracted trial that lasted almost a year, Sri Aurobindo was acquitted for lack of evidence as a co-conspirator. While some of the accused were acquitted and others sentenced to imprisonment, many were served life sentences and deported to the penal colony in the Andaman Islands.

Not pleased with the verdict of the Alipore Bomb Case that acquitted Sri Aurobindo, whom the British Government by then considered to be their most dangerous adversary, they began to explore legal options of detaining him without provoking more unrest and anti-government sentiment. By then, Sri Aurobindo’s powerful spiritual experiences in jail evident in his post-release speeches and his writings in the journals Karmayogin and Dharma (launched in June and August 1909 respectively) had rightfully earned him the respect reserved for saintly men. This was likely the first time he enunciated his nuanced views on Nationalism predicated on the Sanatana Dharma, veering off from the strictly religious Nationalism of earlier years.

In March 1910, after a tip from a source in the police about an impending arrest, he left Calcutta for the haven of the French enclave Chandernagore, eventually travelling on to Pondicherry. Sri Aurobindo’s arrival in Pondicherry on 4 April 1910 marked the end of his political career and the start of a long and unplanned stay in Pondicherry where he continued his spiritual quest till his passing in 1950. It also marked the successful quelling of the revolutionary movement by the British government, a movement that would only be revived after a hiatus of several years. From that point on, other leaders would eventually take up his ideas of passive resistance and Swadeshi to lead India to independence in 1947.

The book reveals a hitherto unknown facet of Sri Aurobindo’s personality as a business administrator and political strategist, highlighting his elaborate plans to make the Bande Mataram, then running at a loss, into a commercially viable unit (Chapter Three) and his efforts to restructure the Nationalist Party into a coherent organisation (Chapter Six). However, the real highlight of the book is not so much the extraordinary story of Sri Aurobindo’s role in the development of the Indian freedom movement, a story that has been well documented elsewhere in multiple publications, but rather its focus on Nationalism throughout and especially so in the last section of Chapter Eight and the entirety of Chapter Nine.

In essence, nationalism provides a common identity and a sense of belonging not dissimilar to the bonds of kinship prevalent in ancient societies. While these ties were “affectual, emotional and community-oriented” in ancient times, they are rooted in the legitimacy of a politico-legal system in modern nation-states. Although different in structure and complexity, they are similar in that they are informed by the idea of a “transindividual” identity. The obstacles that people of a given territory face in transitioning from traditional to modern societies are the apprehensions of having to surrender their primary, deep-seated moorings in community, religion, language, etc., to a larger impersonal construct of the nation-state.

At first, Sri Aurobindo’s view on how to resolve this quandary was to look upon the nation as the living embodiment of a “mighty Shakti”, which he called the Mother Goddess Bhawani. Nationalism or the selfless service to the country worshipped as the Mother, he stressed, would inculcate each citizen, irrespective of affiliations, with a sense of belonging and motivate them to rise in unity to free the mother country. Later, after his release from jail, in the famous Uttarpara speech, he revised his view to ascribe Nationalism to the Vedic idea of Sanatana Dharma. Unlike other religions which are “preponderatingly religions of faith and profession”, the Sanatana Dharma, he affirmed, is “the eternal religion because it is the universal religion which embraces all others”.

Sri Aurobindo was well aware that Nationalism was not only a catalyst for unification but could also be a divisive force, alienating the minorities. In the same speech, he went on to say to the large, silent crowd in the open courtyard of the Jaikrishna Public Library that “it is the Hindu religion only because the Hindu nation has kept it, because in this peninsula it grew up in the seclusion of the sea and the Himalayas, because in this sacred and ancient land it was given as a charge to the Aryan race to preserve through the ages. But it is not circumscribed by the confines of a single country, it does not belong peculiarly and for ever to a bounded part of the world”. [CWSA 8: 11]

—Gautam Chatterjee

Gautam, who studied at SAICE and earned a master’s degree from the Institut Universitaire
d’Etudes du Developpement in Geneva, has worked as an interior designer, furniture maker, and
builder for more than thirty years. Interested in history, economics, sociology, metaphysics, and the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, he also teaches history at SAICE.

Reviewed in February, 2025