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SUPPLEMENT
TO
VOLUME
26
ON
HIMSELF
Letter
to his Father. The passage reproduced here is part
of
a letter written by Sri Aurobindo to his father
K.D. Ghose (evidently from Cambridge before December 1890). It was quoted
by K. D. Ghose in a letter to his brother-in-law on December 2, 1890. This
entire letter was published in The Orient, an illustrated weekly of
Calcutta, on 27th February 1949, in facsimile.
Letter to his Father-in-law. Sri Aurobindo wrote this letter on February 19,
1919 after the death of his wife Mrinalini Devi on December 17, 1918.
Letters to Anandrao
and "M" (Motilal Roy). These letters, except one which was recently
found, have been reproduced from the book LIGHT TO SUPERLIGHT published by the
Prabartak Sangha, Chandernagore. They have been rechecked with photostat copies
of the original letters supplied by the Prabartak Sangha. One or two of these
letters are either lost or else found in a tattered condition, and in such cases
the version of the LIGHT TO SUPERLIGHT has been followed. The dates in square
brackets in some of the letters are given to indicate approximately the period
in which, on the basis of internal evidence, the letters appear to have been
written.
Sri Aurobindo kept
some contact with the revolutionaries for the first three or four years of his
stay in Pondicherry through one or two correspondents. In writing to them about
their activities Sri Aurobindo often used code words like "Tantra" and
"Tantrik Kriya".
Letter to The Hindu. This letter was published in The Hindu of
July 20, 1911.
Page-417
Letter to his Father
LAST
night I was invited to coffee with one of
the dons and in his room I met the great O.B. otherwise Oscar Browning, who is
the feature par excellence of King’s. He was extremely flattering, and
passing from the subject of cotillions to that of scholarship, he said to me:
"I suppose you know you passed an extraordinarily high examination. I have
examined papers at thirteen examinations and I have never during that time seen
such excellent papers as yours (meaning my Classical papers at the scholarship
examination). As for your essay, it was wonderful" In this essay (a
comparison between Shakespeare and Milton) I indulged my Oriental tastes to the
top of their bent; it overflowed with rich and tropical imagery; it abounded in
antitheses and epigrams and it expressed my real feelings without restraint or
reservation. I thought myself that it was the best thing I have ever done, but
at school it would have been condemned as extraordinarily Asiatic and
bombastic. The great O.B. afterwards asked me where my rooms were and when I had
answered he said, "That wretched hole!", then turning to Mahaffy:
"How rude we are to our scholars! We get great minds to come down here and
then shut them up in that box! I suppose it is to keep their pride down."
Page-419
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