150th Birth Anniversary of Sri Aurobindo

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• August 15, 2022 marks the 150th birth anniversary of Sri Aurobindo.

Aurobindo Ghose

• About:
  • Popularly known as yogi Rishi Aurobindo.
  • He was a revolutionary, nationalist, poet, educationist and philosopher. 
  • Birth:  Born on August 15, 1872, in Calcutta.
  • Early life and Education: At the age of seven he was taken to England for education.
• Roles played  as a 
  • Service officer and professor:
    • In 1893 returned to India and worked in the Princely State of Baroda in the service of the Maharaja and as a professor at Baroda College. 
  • Revolutionary: 
    • In 1906, he quit the job in Baroda and went to Calcutta.
    • Became one of the leaders of the Nationalist movement and took a leading role in secret preparations for an uprising against the British Government in India. 
    • He was the first political leader in India to openly put forward the idea of complete independence for the country in his newspaper Bande Mataram.
    • Aurobindo’s pragmatic strategies to get rid of British rule marked him as “the Prophet of Indian Nationalism”.
  • Yogi 
    • In 1910 he withdrew from politics and went to Pondicherry in order to devote himself entirely to his inner spiritual life and work.
    • He evolved a new method of spiritual practice, which he called Integral Yoga and founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926
• Literary works: 
  • The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and Savitri. 
  • He wrote a series on Bankim Chandra’s Vande Mataram, attributing divine nationhood to “Mother India” and depicting the independence struggle as the sacred cause of freedom.
  • In 1943, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature and then again in 1950 for the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Teachings: 
  • Propounded a philosophy of divine life on earth through spiritual evolution.

• Death:  December 5, 1950.

Source: PIB