Aurobindo Ghosh : Writing Style

Sri Aurobindo is one of the outstanding figures in Indo-Anglican literature, and his language skills match with those of the English writers. He was a politician, revolutionary, Yogi, poet, writer and philosopher: all rolled into one. His powerful output as a poet represents the creative effort of about 60 years and, on a modest estimate, may run to some 3,000 pages. He touches the heart and the soul with his poetry :

Love is divine.

Love is the hope of the gods

Hearts to combine.

He possesses undying zeal for love, so he says :

Some day surely

The world too shall be saved from death by love.

He had mastered the art of blank verse, and this is manifested in his several poems. As a prose writer, his insight into philosophy takes a deep understanding of the Almighty and he could feel Him almost anywhere and it reflects well in his writing, as he describes in the celebrated Uttarpara Speech :

“I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell, but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me His shade.”

As we can see, his writing takes a deep dive into the psyche and shakes a man out of consciousness only to make him have a union with the Supreme Being. Even in politics, he mixed divinity with the concrete. In his message on his 75th birthday, which coincided with the dawn of India's independence, he wrote : “I take this identification, not as a coincidence or fortuitous accident, but as a sanction and seal of the Divine Power which guides my steps on the work with which I began life.”

He was seeing divinity even in the gruesome Second World War, when he observed : “What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves; if they put themselves on the right side, they at once make themselves instruments for the Divine purpose in spite of all defects, errors, wrong movements and actions which are common to human nature and all human activities.”

When the Congress leaders accepted the country's partition in 1947, Sri Aurobindo felt strongly that it was not a solution; he wanted that the unity and greatness of the country couldn’t be achieved through this lunatic process; he said : “In spite of all, India has a single soul, and while we have to wait till we can speak of an India one and indivisible, our cry must be: 'Let the soul of India live for ever.”

His revolutionary self becomes evident on more occasions than one, and he says : “The light which led to freedom, though not yet to unity, still hums and will burn on till it conquers. I believe firmly that a great and united future is the destiny of this nation and its peoples…A free and united India will be there and the Mother will gather around her her sons and weld them into a single national strength in the life of a great and united people.”

An important quality of his writing stands out in long sentences, yet he puts his words so carefully that each word becomes quite expressive and leaves nothing to chance so far as understanding for a common man is concerned. And this narration is manifested by his deep understanding how literature works; for example, in The Future Poetry, he remarks : “The true creator (of poetry), the true hearer is the soul. The more rapidly and transparently the rest do their work of transmission, the less they make of their separate claims to satisfaction, the more directly the word reaches and sinks deep into the soul, the greater the poetry.”

While his poetry rides the reader into ascent of consciousness to the supernatural level, suggested through imagery and music; his prose is founded in logical reason and presents the already known fact into something that travels right into the soul. Philosophy is the main trait of his prose; an extract from his The Life Divine is only an example from his vast sea of wealth : “The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of Consciousness-Force and Bliss and the creative medium of supermind into cosmic being; we ascend from Matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the illuminating medium of supermind towards the divine being. The knot of the two, the higher and the lower hemispheres, is where mind and supermind meet with a veil between them. The rending of the veil is the condition of the divine life in humanity; for by that rending, by the illuminating descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-comprehending supermind, the soul realizes its divine self in the all-possessing all-blissful Ananda, life repossess its divine power in the play of omnipotent Conscious-Force, and matter open to its divine liberty as a form of the divine Existence.”

He defines wisdom in so simple terms that it is set in the mind effortlessly. He writes : “We have therefore two fundamental facts of pure existence and of the world existence, a fact of Being, a fact of Becoming. To deny one or the other is easy; to recognize the facts of consciousness and find out their relation is the true and fruitful wisdom.”

And then he goes on to advise man how he can achieve the supreme. Don’t forget to look at the clever  wordcraft which easily establishes relation with the reader : “Man, the individual, has to become and to live as a universal being; his limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his very physical being has to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sustaining in itself the whole flow of the indivisible Force that is all things; his whole nature has to reproduce in the individual the unity, the harmony, the one-ness-in-all of the supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.”