India is Free

It will be seen from what has been set forth in the earlier chapters that, on the one hand, Mirra was reaching the end of the Japanese interlude, having arrived at a new poise of purposive purity and serenity and puissance; and, on the other hand, Sri Aurobindo was approaching the end of the great ‘Arya’ phase of his career, "tying up his bundle ... teeming with the catch of the Infinite", awaiting the right time to open it and call into existence his Deva Sangha. He had a few ardent young men with him, Nolini, Amrita, Moni, Bejoy Nag. But the Deva Sangha, the Ashram, was yet to be born. The ‘Arya’ itself was magisterially drawing towards its preordained end. The major sequences had been concluded, and one or two were well on their way to a rounded close. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga had won phenomenal victories during the decade then ending, and the uplifting message of ‘The Life Divine’ had been broadcast through the pages of the ‘Arya’. The Yoga was now poised for a new leap, for a new and decisive of phase action and manifold realisation. Everything was ready: the room, the lamp, the oil, the wick - and it only needed somebody divinely appointed for the task to arrive upon the scene, strike the match, light the lamp and throw open the illumined chamber for the reception and initiation of the first of the new race, those that Mirra had described in 1912 as "the race of the sons of God" or the elect of Sri Aurobindo's Deva Sangha. That 'somebody' who came to Sri Aurobindo's aid was of course Mirra, the Mother. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1935, "the Sadhana and the work were waiting for the Mother's coming". Anilbaran Roy has recorded Sri Aurobindo telling a group of disciples in 1926: “When I came to Pondicherry, a programme was dictated to me from within for my sadhana. I followed it and progressed for myself but could not do much by way of helping others. Then came the Mother and with her help I found the necessary method.”

There is a divinity indeed that shapes our ends, and answering its veiled dictates, Mirra and Paul Richard as also Dorothy Hodgson finally decided to leave Japan for Pondicherry in the early months of 1920. For Mirra, the four years in Japan had on the whole been a period of quietude and sadhana, a time for perfection in minutiae, a season for the cultivation of the integral as well as the miniature; in a word, the Japanese interim had proved a sanctuary and phoenix-hour for the whole tapasya of a Mahasaraswati:

“The science and craft and technique of things are Mahasarawati's province. Always she holds in her nature and can give to those whom she has chosen the intimate and precise knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the accuracy of intuitive mind and conscious hand and discerning eye of the perfect worker. This Power is the strong, the tireless, the careful and efficient builder, organiser, administrator, technician, artisan and classifier of the worlds. When she takes up the transformation and new-building of the nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flawless. Nothing short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and she is ready to face an eternity of toil if that is needed for the fullness of her creation.”

While in solitary confinement in the Alipur Jail in 1908, Sri Aurobindo had composed a poem of supreme defiance doubled with an appeal that was not to be resisted:

With wind and the weather beating round me

Up to the hill and the moorland I go.

Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?

Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?

I sport with solitude here in my regions,

Of misadventure have made me a friend.

Who would live largely? Who would live freely?

Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.

That call must haunt those who had heard it once, and Mirra of course had come to Pondicherry in 1914 even without that particular call, and instantaneously recognised in Sri Aurobindo "the Lord of my being and my God"; and now, after an absence of five years in France and Japan, she was coming back to Pondicherry. She was leaving behind in Japan her good friends - the Kobayashis, the Okhawas, and others - and Japan meant the kindliest memories. But the boat was carrying her towards the shores of India, and she was sublimely content. And on 24 April 1920, the boat approached the shores of Pondicherry. As she was to recall her experience thirty years later: “I was on the boat, at sea, not expecting anything (I was of course busy with the inner life, but I was living physically on the boat), when all of a sudden, abruptly, about two nautical miles from Pondicherry, the quality, I may even say the physical quality of the atmosphere, of the air, changed so much that I knew we were entering the aura of Sri Aurobindo. It was a physical experience.”

Again, returning to the subject two days later: “...in the experience I was speaking about, what gave it all its value was that I was not expecting it at all, not at all. I knew very well, I had been for a very long time and continuously in "spiritual" contact, if I may say so, with the atmosphere of Sri Aurobindo, but I had never thought of the possibility of a modification in the physical air and I was not expecting it in the least, and it was this that gave the whole value to the experience, which came like that, quite suddenly, just as when one enters a place with another temperature or another altitude.”

And, perhaps on her part, expectant Bhaaratvarsha, our India, felt something like the promise of the Divine Mother, in Sri Aurobindo's epic, King Aswapathy, the father of ‘Savitri’:

One shall descend and break the iron Law,

Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power. ...

And in her body as on his homing tree

Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings ....

She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,

Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword

And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,

A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;

Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.

Once, in a moment of startling divination, Mirra actually saw India free. She was to refer to it more than once in after-years, but the only time she dwelt on its date at length was in a Playground talk of 1953: "I do not remember exactly when it happened; it must have been some time in the year 1920 probably (perhaps earlier, perhaps in 1914-1915, but I don't think so, it was some time in the year 1920). One day - every day I used to meditate with Sri Aurobindo: he used to sit on one side of a table and I on the other, on the veranda - and one day in this way, in meditation... I reached a place or a state of consciousness from which I told Sri Aurobindo just casually and quite simply: "India is free." It was in 1920."

"But how", queried Sri Aurobindo, and Mirra's answer was that there would be no fight, no battle, no violence, no revolution: "The English themselves will leave, for the condition of the world will be such that they won't be able to do anything else except go away." And, she further added, "It was done. I spoke in the future when he asked me the question, but there where I had seen I said, India is free, it was a fact. Now, India was not free at that time: it was 1920. Yet it was there, it had been done .... That is to say, from the external point of view I saw it twenty-seven years in advance. But it had been done."

Could she see Pakistan as well? "No, for the freedom could have come about without Pakistan." In 1956, she further clarified that she had not seen the precise details of the British withdrawal. "There must have been a possibility of it’s being otherwise, for, when Sri Aurobindo told them to do a certain thing, sent them his message, he knew very well that it was possible to avoid what happened later. ... Consequently, the division was not decreed. It is beyond question a human deformation."

In this connection, it is interesting to recollect that Sri Aurobindo, - who had prophesied India's independence as early as 1910, - had given a similar assurance to Ambalal Purani in 1918, though without any reference to the circumstances in which the independence would come. When, in the course of their talk, Purani insisted,

" ... I must do something for the freedom of India. I have been unable to sleep soundly for the last two years and a half .... "

Sri Aurobindo remained silent for two or three minutes. It was a long pause. Then he said: "Suppose an assurance is given to you that India will be free?"

"Who can give such an assurance?"

Again he remained silent for three or four minutes. Then he looked at me and added: "Suppose I give you the assurance?"

I paused for a moment ... and said: "If you give the assurance, I can accept it."

"Then I give you the assurance that India will be free", he said in a serious tone.

If Mirra's vision of a free India - as a thing decreed and accomplished already there where these things are first settled - was to offer effective corroboration to Sri Aurobindo's own conviction on the subject and help him to concentrate exclusively on his Yoga, her second coming to Pondicherry and close association with him were to lead to momentous results in their work of "divine man-making" and earth-transformation.

(K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in ‘On The Mother’, Chapter 14, ‘Second Coming’, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry)