The Story of The Ashram Main Building

Preface

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother stayed for over half a century in a block of four houses that came to be known as the Ashram main building at Pondicherry. It was the centre of life in the Ashram when they were physically present and will remain so even in their physical absence. Hundreds of people go inside daily to breathe the serene atmosphere and come out spiritually charged. On special occasions, long queues are formed and visitors wait patiently to get a glimpse of their rooms. The building has become a means of contact with their subtle-physical presence. It is this reverence for the House of the Lord that has inspired this book on the Ashram main building.

There were no grand beginnings, no great plans of action and not much money either when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moved from 41 Rue Francois Martin to 9 Rue de la Marine on 25 October 1922. The Mother kept an account of the sundry expenses incurred on that day. The rent was fixed at a hundred rupees a month and the owner charged them Rs 20 for the last six days of October. The property later came to be known as the Library House (because of a library on its ground floor) - this is the house that you first see as you enter the main gate of the Ashram main building. After a few years, two adjacent houses -7 Rue de la Marine and 8 Rue Saint Gilles - were taken on rent for the disciples. These came to be known respectively as the Rosary House (because of the rose-pots kept on its terrace) and the Secretariat where Pavitra, a French engineer and secretary to the Mother, resided on the first floor. Finally, the house at 28 Rue Francois Martin, later known as the Meditation House because of the two halls used for collective meditation, was rented in December 1926 and almost immediately purchased. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moved to the Meditation House on 7 February 1927 after carrying out minimum repairs and before paying the second instalment due in July of the same year.

At first, the four houses were internally connected through small doors and passages. For example, an extra door was added to Sri Aurobindo's bathroom connecting it to the terrace of the Secretariat, and Sri Aurobindo's lunch was carried daily through this door at noon by the Mother and Pavitra. Similarly, a short link-staircase was built for the Mother to access the Library House from the courtyard of the Secretariat, so that she could meet the sadhaks in the Stores after her afternoon drives to the countryside. Late in the evening, after distri-buting soup to the disciples, she came back to the Meditation House through doorways cut in the Rosary House compound wall, one of which looked like a small tunnel, and Dara, a Muslim disciple, preceded the Mother with a lantern in his hand. It is this blend of the material and the spiritual that makes early Ashram history so fascinating a study.

The decision to rebuild the Secretariat came after a few unsuccessful attempts to repair the dilapidated old building. Both the Secretariat and the Library House were purchased in March-April 1929. Construction work began around August of the same year and, by April 1932, the "New Secretariat" was ready. It provided the Mother with much needed additional space to work and rest - the Green Room and Salon. Pavitra too had an office and room on the first floor with a balcony attached to it, which the Mother later used for the Balcony Darshan. A workshop with a car-repair section and a garage were built on the ground floor. Work proceeded in the backyard of the Library House. The Prosperity block and the ground floor rooms on the west (which now form the Cold Storage wing) were built by 1935, integrating the new structures with the old buildings. The Ashram main building was now transformed into one large, well-connected mansion with several spacious courtyards. There was no further major construction except for the building of additional rooms on existing terraces, including the Mother's own rooms on the second floor of the Meditation House.

This early phase of construction gave a certain administrative unity to the Ashram, and the main building literally became a secretariat of the Mother. Many of the disciples who stayed in it served as the principal secretaries of the Mother and played an important role in the small but well-organised life of the Ashram. Nolini, Amrita and Purani resided on the ground floor of the Meditation House. Chandulal and Dyuman, heads of the Building Service and Dining Room respectively, moved to their new rooms on the ground floor of the New Secretariat. Purushottam, the disciple in charge of the Prosperity department, went to his newly-built block, and Anilbaran, Champaklal and Rajangam, the doctor, continued to stay in the Library House. The other Ashram services within the same premises were the Building Service, the Dispensary, the Dining Room and Kitchen (up to January 1934), the Accounts Office, the Reading Room and Library, and Pavitra's workshop for repairing cars (Atelier), which also did electrical and plumbing works. These departments were of course in their early formative stages and did not require much space. Most of them were later shifted to separate buildings when the Ashram expanded in the forties and fifties.

The most important part of life at the Ashram was the daily contact of the disciples with the Mother in the Ashram main building. Daily group meditations were held by the Mother in the two halls upstairs and downstairs (during different periods) of the Meditation House. For a short while, the room later occupied by Bula (head of the Electricity Service) was the venue of her morning pranam. Soup was distributed by her in the evening to the disciples in the present Reception Room. The Stores on the first floor of the Library House witnessed lighter moments when she conducted lotteries and simple games of skill for the first generation of sadhaks. Around the same time, she gave symbolic names to the rooms in the Ashram main building according to their functions or the sadhaks who occupied them. For example, Nolini's and Amrita's rooms were named respectively "Pure Mind" and "Vital Immortality". Sri Aurobindo's room was named "Supreme Manifestation upon Earth". The Darshan Room was "Divine Consciousness" and the soup hall "Divine Communion". Amusingly, the room where newspapers were kept was called "Falsehood".

Finally, it is interesting to note the connection between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's sadhana and the history of the Ashram main building. Sri Aurobindo wrote to Rajani Palit in 1936, "The change to this house [Meditation House from the Library House] marked the change in the sadhana on the vital to the sadhana on the physical level." The change of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's residence coincided with their rejection of the Overmind creation after the Siddhi Day. A "brilliant creation" with "marvellous experiences" and "all kinds of manifestations which are considered miraculous" had become possible after the descent of the Overmind on 24 November 1926. But Sri Aurobindo renounced it in order to prepare the physical consciousness for the descent of the Supermind. Nolini Kanta Gupta writes how this drastically affected the sadhana of the disciples. When the Mother dissolved this "brilliant creation", "the Gods withdrew" and the sadhaks "came down with a thud upon earth". They had to "come to the lower levels and work for the purification there, in order to raise them beyond themselves by the infusion of the higher consciousness". It is this descent of the sadhana to the physical level that Sri Aurobindo refers to in his letter to Rajani Palit with regard to the change of their residence from the Library House to the Meditation House on 7 February 1927.

Similarly, the construction of additional facilities for the Mother on the second floor of the Meditation House began around the same time she went through a critical phase of her sadhana and life. In March-April 1962, the Mother suffered a series of heart attacks that led to a perilous condition in which her "body was cut off from the vital and the mind and left to its own means". She described it as "a sort of death", and she "could have died, had the Lord willed it". But then "the cells woke up to a new receptivity and opened directly to the divine Influence" and "there was the direct contact" of the body with the supramental power without the intermediacy of the vital and mind. On 13 April 1962, this state culminated in her experience of the Supreme Love manifesting through "big pulsations", each pulsation "bringing the world further in its manifestation". She recounted this experience time and again in later conversations as a major landmark in her sadhana. It was during this time that a bathroom was immediately constructed on the second floor, so that she did not have to come down to the first floor to take her bath. Until then, her room on the second floor (which we now call the Mother's room and visit on Darshan days) had no attached bath! Soon, another room for her organ (later known as the Music Room or her Reception Room) was added to her second floor apartment, with a balcony facing east. The Mother's daily routine considerably changed after the completion of her second floor apartment in 1962. When she recovered from her illness, she did not go out anymore to attend special functions in the School or Playground or other departments of the Ashram. The daily early morning Balcony Darshan from the first floor balcony overlooking Rue Saint Gilles was never resumed. The venue of the general Darshan on the four Darshan days was shifted from the Meditation Hall to the new balcony facing east and overlooking Rue Francois Martin. Ashramites, school children and visitors went upstairs to meet her individually as she restricted herself to the second floor apartment for the last eleven years of her yoga of physical transformation.

The Ashram main building thus acquires a far greater significance than the mere brick and mortar structure that it outwardly is. We have therefore noted down in this book every structural change, major and minor, since the time Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moved in. Detailed drawings, explanatory graphics and old photographs have been interspersed with textual documents and notes to provide a picture of the building as it was at various stages, especially during the early period. The book leans preponderantly on the physical aspect, the building itself, and we could barely touch the other interesting aspects of Ashram history, such as the collective activities of the Mother or the growth of the departments under her guidance. We have only set the stage, or rather, built the external foundation of the history of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. It is now for others to delve deeper and tell us the rest of the story.

Editor

Note on captions used in this book

The captions used in this book to describe old photographs and drawings do not sometimes relate to the actual date of the illustrations. For example, "M.P. Pandit's office" has been indicated in a photograph dated 1922-1929 on page 43, even though he had not come to the Ashram during that period. Two reasons have led to the use of these anachronistic labels. One, the sheer convenience of identifying that part of the Ashram building with what most Ashramites and regular visitors are familiar with in the present year of publication, which is 2008. Two, very little is known about that room except that it was once occupied by Doraiswamy Iyer. At the same time, I have avoided mentioning the present status as far as possible, unless it has sufficient historical association. With the exception of such cases, the captions correspond in time to the date of the illustration. Wherever they do not, the dates to which the captions actually correspond have been given in parentheses. Taking the example above, the room occupied by M.P. Pandit in the photograph on page 43 dated 1922-1929 has been captioned "M.P. Pandit's office (1993)" because he last occupied it in 1993. However, the captions marked by the present year 2008 have to be taken in the sense of "as last observed in 2008" rather than until the end of that year.