Aurobindo Ghose

Context 

• Prime Minister of India is heading an extensive 53-member committee that has been set up to mark the 150th birth anniversary of spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo.

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About Aurobindo Ghose

• He is popularly known as yogi Rishi Aurobindo.
• It was a revolutionary, nationalist, poet, educationist and philosopher. 
• Birth:  He was born on August 15, 1872, in Calcutta to Shri Krishnadhan Ghosh.
  • His father was a rich doctor from Calcutta.
• Early life and Education: At the age of seven he was taken to England for education.
  • There he studied at St. Paul’s School, London, and at King’s College, Cambridge
• Roles played  as a 
  • Service officer and professor:
    • He became a state service officer on his return to India in 1893. 
      • He worked for the next thirteen years in the Princely State of Baroda in the service of the Maharaja and as a professor at Baroda College. 
  • Revolutionary: 
    • He also joined a revolutionary society and took a leading role in secret preparations for an uprising against the British Government in India.

• In 1906, soon after the Partition of Bengal, Sri Aurobindo quit his post in Baroda and went to Calcutta, where he soon became one of the leaders of the Nationalist movement. 
  • He was the first political leader in India to openly put forward, in his newspaper Bande Mataram, the idea of complete independence for the country.

• Prosecuted twice for sedition and once for conspiracy, he was released each time for lack of evidence.

• Yogi :
  • He had begun the practice of Yoga in 1905 in Baroda. 
    • In 1908 he had the first of several fundamental spiritual realisations. 
    • In 1910 he withdrew from politics and went to Pondicherry in order to devote himself entirely to his inner spiritual life and work.
    • During his forty years in Pondicherry, he evolved a new method of spiritual practice, which he called the Integral Yoga. 
      • Its aim is a spiritual realisation that not only liberates man’s consciousness but also transforms his nature.
      •  In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, the Mother, he founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 

• Literary works: 
  • He was also a journalist and his first philosophical magazine called Arya was published in 1914. 
    • Among his many writings are The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and Savitri. 
• Teachings:
  •  He propounded a philosophy of divine life on earth through spiritual evolution.

• Death:  Aurobindo Ghose died on December 5, 1950.

Source: IE