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SRI AUROBINDO was born on August 15,1872, in Calcutta, India. At the tender age of seven, his
father, a country doctor, sent him to England for "serious studies," as was the custom of the day among
certain anglicized Indian families.
For 13 years Sri Aurobindo would be immersed in Western culture - which would eventually reward his academic prowess
with abundant laurels. In 1893, at the age of twenty, his Cambridge degree in his pocket, he returned to India
to find a profoundly revolting political and social situation in his country (under British rule). After a few
years spent between a teaching post of French and English at the College of Baroda and the private secretariat
of the local maharaja, Sri Aurobindo moved to Calcutta and entered the political fray. Simultaneously, he set out
on his inner quest not to escape into higher worlds of consciousness, but as a means of sharpening his revolutionary
action against the British occupation. As editor of the daily Bande Mataram (Hail to Mother India) and leader of
the Extremist Party, he would soon be suspected of participating in a criminal attempt against a British magistrate,
and he would spend a year in prison while awaiting trial. That year of forced isolation made him realize that the
occupation of his country by a foreign power was but one aspect of a much vaster problem: the transformation of
human nature. "It is not just a revolt against the British empire that we must wage, but a revolt against
the whole universal Nature!" he exclaimed. Acquitted but still pursued and spied on by the British police,
he had to take refuge in French India, in Pondicherry, where he arrived in 1910. This is where he spent the rest
of his life until 1950, in the "ashram" that gradually formed around him under the supervision of Mother,
who joined him in 1920.
His written work, mostly composed between 1914 and 1920, comprises poetry, plays, philosophy and an enormous body
of letters to try to explain to his disciples what he was doing in the silence of his room.
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