-74_Letter to his Father.htm

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