Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose, 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was a Bengali freedom-fighter turned philosopher and yogi who developed the system known as Integral Yoga. After early education in England (1879-1893, including King’s College, Cambridge), he served thirteen years in the Baroda State Service while teaching himself Sanskrit and Bengali, then led a brief but consequential phase of the Indian nationalist movement. Arrested in the Alipore Bomb Case in May 1908 and acquitted in May 1909, he moved to French Pondicherry in April 1910 and remained there for the rest of his life. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded on 24 November 1926, the day Aurobindo retired into seclusion and his collaborator Mirra Alfassa, known to the community as “the Mother”, took on the day-to-day direction of the ashram. The principal philosophical works are The Life Divine (serialised 1914-1919 in Arya), The Synthesis of Yoga (same period), and the epic poem Savitri (revised over decades, published posthumously 1950-1951; approximately 24,000 lines in blank verse).
Early life and the English education
Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872, the third son of Krishna Dhun Ghose, a civil surgeon, and Swarnalata Devi. At age seven he and his brothers were sent to Manchester under the care of an English family with explicit instructions that they be raised without Indian influence. He won a senior classical scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, and qualified for the Indian Civil Service but deliberately failed the horse-riding test, ending the ICS path. He returned to India in 1893 at twenty-one and joined the Baroda State Service under Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III. The Baroda years (1893-1906) were a period of self-directed study; Aurobindo learned Bengali (his first language but unfamiliar to him after the English years), began Sanskrit study, and read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in the original.
The political phase (1906-1910)
Aurobindo left Baroda in 1906 to take up principalship of Bengal National College in Calcutta and to edit the English-language paper Bande Mataram. He was a leading voice of the Garam Dal (extremist) faction of the Indian National Congress and argued for swaraj (full independence) at the 1907 Surat Congress against the moderate position of Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Arrested in the Alipore Bomb Case in May 1908 on charges related to the activities of his brother Barindra Ghose’s revolutionary group, he spent a year in Alipore Jail awaiting trial. His acquittal in May 1909, secured by the defence of C. R. Das, was followed by a brief return to public activity and then, in April 1910, by his abrupt departure for the French enclave of Pondicherry. The political phase ended at thirty-seven.
Pondicherry and the development of Integral Yoga
The Pondicherry years (1910-1950) were the period of Aurobindo’s principal philosophical and contemplative work. Between 1914 and 1921 he co-edited (with Paul and Mirra Richard) the monthly journal Arya, in which most of his major prose works first appeared in serial form:
- The Life Divine: his principal philosophical treatise, presenting his metaphysics of Sachchidananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) descending into matter and being progressively revealed.
- The Synthesis of Yoga: his analysis of the major yogic traditions (karma yoga, jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, the yoga of self-perfection) and his proposed integration.
- Essays on the Gita: a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Bhagavad Gita.
- The Secret of the Veda: his argument for a symbolic-spiritual reading of the Rigveda against the prevailing ritualistic and historicist interpretations.
- The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Foundations of Indian Culture: his social and political philosophy.
The Mother and the founding of the ashram
Mirra Alfassa (21 February 1878 – 17 November 1973), French by birth and trained in art and occultism in Paris, met Aurobindo in 1914 during her first visit to Pondicherry and returned permanently in April 1920. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram was formally founded on 24 November 1926, the day Aurobindo described in his diaries as the descent of the Krishna-consciousness. From that point Aurobindo retired into seclusion in his rooms, while the Mother took on the public direction of the community. The ashram grew from a small group of about twenty-five disciples in 1926 to several hundred by Aurobindo’s death in 1950, and continued to expand under the Mother’s direction until her death in 1973. The township of Auroville, founded by the Mother on 28 February 1968 on land near the ashram, is the most ambitious institutional extension of the work.
The supermind and the central philosophical claim
Aurobindo’s principal departure from classical Advaita is his insistence on the descent of consciousness into matter as the structural point of the cosmos, against the classical emphasis on the ascent of consciousness out of matter. The supermind (his coinage) is the intermediate principle between the Absolute and the lower mental, vital, and physical layers; the supramental descent into the human is what Integral Yoga is oriented toward. For what it’s worth, this is the part of Aurobindo’s philosophy that most divides his readers. Sympathetic readers see it as a creative extension of Vedanta into evolutionary and incarnational language; sceptical readers see it as speculative metaphysics insufficiently grounded in the classical texts. The current scholarly consensus is that Aurobindo’s system stands on its own terms as an original 20th-century philosophical synthesis, distinct from the classical Vedantic schools but recognisably continuous with them.
Common questions
Where should a first reader begin?
The Life Divine is long (around 1000 pages in the standard edition) and philosophically dense. Most newcomers begin instead with the shorter Essays on the Gita or with the curated selections in The Essential Aurobindo edited by Robert McDermott. For an overview of the ashram’s daily life, the Mother’s Agenda (recordings of her conversations 1951-1973) and her short text Prayers and Meditations (1932) are starting points.
How is Integral Yoga different from other yoga schools?
Integral Yoga claims to integrate karma yoga, jnana yoga, and bhakti yoga rather than choosing one as primary, and adds the goal of the supramental descent. There is no formal initiation, no fixed asana or pranayama practice, no required external discipline beyond the daily orientation of life toward the divine as understood within the ashram. The Mother’s institutional structure (study, work, art, education) is the practical form the yoga takes for ashramites.
Is Auroville part of the ashram?
The two are related but legally and administratively distinct. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram, founded 1926, is centred on the original premises in Pondicherry city and is governed by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Auroville, founded 1968 on land about ten kilometres north of the city, is an international township established under UNESCO patronage and is governed by the Auroville Foundation Act, 1988. Both trace their origin to the Mother but operate as separate institutions.
What is Savitri?
Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol is Aurobindo’s epic poem in blank verse, an extended treatment of the Savitri story from the Mahabharata (Vana Parva). At approximately 24,000 lines it is one of the longest poems in the English language. Aurobindo worked on it across roughly four decades; the final version was published posthumously in 1950-1951. The poem encodes the major themes of his philosophy in poetic form.
One limitation worth noting
Aurobindo’s writing is dense and the vocabulary is idiosyncratic; readers encountering him for the first time often find the prose hard to parse. The ashram’s own publications can be read as a curated and self-consistent corpus, but secondary scholarly literature on Aurobindo is unusually thin compared with other 20th-century Indian thinkers. Peter Heehs’ biography The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (2008) is the principal critical biographical study; its reception within the ashram has been contested.
For background see the Sri Aurobindo Wikipedia entry and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram official site.
