Discuss the contribution of Sri Aurobindo to English Literature.

Ans.

Sri Aurobindo Ghosh ranks among the greatest literary figures of modern India. He is a versatile genius-a political revolutionary, social reformer, historian, educationist, philosopher, yogi and above all man of letters. He is a journalist, editor. literary critic. linguist, translator, essayist, short story writer, dramatist and more than of all these a great poet.

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar showers praise on Sri Aurobindo saying that ‘Aurobindo was not merely a writer who happened to write in English but really an English writer’. In fact, after spending his early years in England and returning to Baroda, he reorients his Western studies with the studies of Sanskrit and modern Indian languages. By the process he gains contact with his Indian heritage through a program of rigorous scholarship. He attains a deep insight into Indian culture and civilization. This learning mounds his poetry and philosophy.

Sri Aurobindo’s poetry is meant to bridge the present and the future self-divided present life and Life Divine that is to be Songs to Martilla and Urvasi are his earlier poems published respectively in 1895 and in 1896; the Life Divine or the way to yogic feels is an evaluation of thought through love which is traced even from his earlier poem. Thus he says,

“Love is divine

Love is the hope of the Gods

Hearts to combine.”

Love is not love if it acquiesces in evil; great and true love is a power and it can break open the doors of captivity, it can change grass to gold, it can defy death or it is not love.

The lovers in Urvasi fail for their limitation in ultimate realization. But Savitri in Savitri (published much later in 1954) alone fuses the loss and the greater realization into an integral and total transformation of limited human life into the fullness and splendour of the Life Divine.

Even in A Tree, his earlier poem contains his quintessence of philosophy in which he sees us as present attainment, another thirsting for higher thing. In Life and Death, he tells that Death is life disguised; that what appears to be death is another kind of life, it is death itself, which reveals its true face as the Supreme Lord of Life and Delight.

Sri Aurobindo is a skillful craftsman in the use of blank verse and felicity in poetic expression. His grand, mantric and mystic style in his poetic works are ample testimony of his stupendous achievements.

Sri Aurobindo’s major poetic work, an epic in blank verse of about 24,000 lines in which a tale of the Mahabharata is made a symbol of the human soul’s spiritual quest and destiny.