Sri Aurobindo

Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta in 1872 and sent to England at the age of seven. He studied classics at King’s College, Cambridge, and passed the examination for the Indian Civil Service, but did not take up the post. Returning to India in 1893, he served the state of Baroda for thirteen years, learned Sanskrit and Bengali, and began to read the Upaniṣads and the Gītā.

From 1906 he was a leader of the radical nationalist movement in Bengal, as a writer and editor. In 1908 he was arrested in connection with a bomb attack and spent a year in Alipore jail awaiting trial; there, he later said, he experienced the divine as present in everything around him. After his acquittal in 1909 he withdrew in 1910 to Pondicherry, a French territory, to pursue his yoga.

In Pondicherry he wrote, between 1914 and 1921, most of his major prose works for the review Arya, among them The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga; later he worked for decades on Savitri, an epic poem. From 1926 he lived in seclusion, while Mirra Alfassa, the Mother, directed the ashram that grew around them. He died in Pondicherry in 1950.