A Luminous Life

A Westernised father in the Madras presidency

My father did not come to Sri Aurobindo through any spiritual seeking of his own — in fact he had never even heard the name. He had grown up in Bombay among Parsis, thoroughly westernised, knowing almost nothing of Indian culture, though his own parents were deeply Brahminical. He passed out of a Parsi school, a gold medallist in both English and French, and afterwards took his degree in Civil Engineering. His first posting, however, was not in the Bombay Presidency but in the Madras Presidency — that patchwork the British had assembled, under their old policy of divide and rule, out of parts of Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra, and the whole of Tamil country, governed from Madras.

He was posted to the West Coast, in the South Canara district — my mother's district; my future husband's father, incidentally, was from North Canara, from Sirsi. I was born near Mangalore, in my maternal grandfather's house, into a family of great distinction. My grandfather never once raised his voice — nothing of the Vishwamitra temper in him — yet he was so brilliant a lawyer that he could turn anyone's mind within ten minutes by pure force of reason, without the least appearance of pressure. He was a successful lawyer, a social reformer, and a freedom fighter, and when the Swarajya Party was formed and the Congress decided to contest the elections the British had permitted, he stood and was elected from constituencies in both Kerala and South Canara. He worked alongside Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das, and he laid down some of the earliest arguments for women's rights that were later carried into the Constitution of India — the very Constitution on which a distant cousin of his, Sir B. N. Rau, would later work as advisor to the Constituent Assembly, and who was afterwards made a judge of the International Court at the Hague.

Among my grandfather's brothers, two went to Cambridge, where they came to know of Sri Aurobindo — for his name was already known there as the leader of the student Majlis — and later, as ICS officers, they visited him in Pondicherry in spite of the British Government's disapproval. One of them became, many years later, a friend of mine, though he was of my grandfather's generation, and it was he who wrote what would be published as 'Letters of Wisdom', twenty years after his death — I withheld them from publication for a long time, until Madhav insisted, and they appeared, with names removed, in the World Union Journal.

On my father's side too there was a connection to the freedom struggle: my paternal grandfather had been secretary to Mahatma Gandhi, and his sister had given her textile mill entirely to the nation, living afterwards on a pittance while its profits went to the Congress. Such people sacrificed so much. And yet, on the West Coast, in all that family of scholars and patriots, it was only one great-uncle of mine — the one who had gone to Jodhpur — who had actually heard of Sri Aurobindo.

That great-uncle, my maternal grandfather's elder brother, had gone to Jodhpur as a Professor of English, become an advisor to the Maharaja's family, and in that circle came to hear that the brilliant, much-admired speeches of the Maharaja of Baroda were being written by a twenty-one-year-old who had passed the ICS examination but never joined the service — a young man who had entered the Maharaja's employ instead. That young man was Sri Aurobindo. My great-uncle, meticulous about English, followed his career afterwards — how he left Baroda, went to Calcutta, and plunged into the freedom movement. He had also, in Jodhpur, met Swami Vivekananda. So the threads of spiritual and cultural influence were already there in my family, long before I was born.