Sri Aurobindo, 1872-1950, an Indian philosopher and freedom fighter.

Since his death in 1950, Sri Aurobindo Ghose has been known primarily as a yogi and a philosopher of spiritual evolution who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in peace and literature. But the years Aurobindo spent in yogic retirement were preceded by nearly four decades of rich public and intellectual work. Biographers usually focus solely on Aurobindo's life as a politician or sage, but he was also a scholar, a revolutionary, a poet, a philosopher, a social and cultural theorist, and the inspiration for an experiment in communal living. Peter Heehs, one of the founders of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, is the first to relate all the aspects of Aurobindo's life in its entirety. Consulting rare primary sources, Heehs describes the leader's role in the freedom movement and in the framing of modern Indian spirituality. He examines the thinker's literary, cultural, and sociological writings and the Sanskrit, Bengali, English, and French literature that influenced them, and he finds the foundations of Aurobindo's yoga practice in his diaries and unpublished letters. Heehs's biography is a sensitive, honest portrait of a life that also provides surprising insights into twentieth-century Indian history.

In this epic spiritual poem, Sri Aurobindo reveals his vision of mankind's destiny within the universal evolution. He sets forth the optimistic view that life on earth has a purpose, and he places our travail within the context of this purpose: to participate in the evolution of consciousness that represents the secret thread behind life on Earth.

Since 1980, Shraddhavan has been teaching English in Auroville through close readings of Sri Aurobindo’s revelatory epic Savitri: a legend and a symbol. In August 1998 these classes were resumed at Savitri Bhavan, with a growing number of students, including young Tamil teacher-trainees from the Arul Vazhi School located in Promesse, Auroville. These classes were given the name ‘The English of Savitri’ and they concluded in May of 2009 as this group reached the end of the poem. This book is based on the transcripts of a new series of classes given by Shraddhavan between August 2009 and October 2010, which have been edited for conciseness and clarity, while aiming to preserve some of the informal atmosphere of the course. Edited transcripts of these classes began to be published serially in the Bhavan’s journal of Study Notes on Savitri, ‘Invocation’, from issue 32 onwards, since it was felt that they may be of interest to a wider audiance. They are now being published in book form in several volumes by Yukta Prakashan publishers of Vadodara. This suggested the idea of collecting the original English articles into a book form as well. This is the first such volume, covering all the five cantos of Book One of the poem, ‘The Book of Beginnings’.

This work examines the work of six 20th-century Indian writers who experienced both the colonial and postcolonial waves in Indian culture, and have explored this theme in their writings in English. It reads the work of Sri Aurobindo, Mulk Raj Anand, Balachandra Rajan, Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Joshi, and Anita Desai, examining issues of representation and identity, colonial and post colonial India, gender, power, and imperialism under a post structuralist and sociohistorical lens.

Sri Aurobindo began writing poems while a young man in England and continued to write poetry throughout his life. More than two hundred poems are collected in this volume along with an essay On Quantitative Metre , though his epic Savitri is not included. The poems are grouped into categories, beginning with short poems and lyrics written during specified periods between the years 1890-1950. These are followed by his sonnets, his longer poems such as Urvasie and Love and Death , Ilion, an epic in quantitative hexameters, and poems in new metres.

Insights & critical observations in the light of Sri Aurobindo into the work of the great Bard.

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