In 1906, when he was thirty-four, Sri Aurobindo moved to Kolkata as Principal of the newly established Bengal National College but resigned soon after to participate openly in India’s struggle for freedom. He became a leader of the Nationalist Party, and his editorials in the daily Bande Mataram at once made him an all-India figure. In less than four years he revolutionised the moderate and ineffectual stand of the Congress Party, fixed in the national consciousness the goal of complete independence, and gave a new direction to the freedom movement. ‘Although he was on the high skies only for a time,’ observes Dr. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the celebrated historian of the Indian National Congress, ‘he flooded the land from Cape to Mount with the effulgence of his light.’
The one-year detention, from 1908 to 1909, imposed on him by the British Government proved to be of immense significance. It was during this period that he underwent a series of decisive spiritual experiences which established the course of his future work. In 1910, assured of the ultimate success of the freedom movement and in answer to a command from Above, Sri Aurobindo withdrew from political activities, for it was now his rule to move only as he was moved by the Divine guidance. He eventually sailed for what was then Pondicherry, today’s Puducherry, to devote himself entirely to his spiritual mission.
In 1914, after four years of silent yoga, he started the philosophical monthly Arya, through which he revealed his new message for humanity: man’s divine destiny, the theme later expanded in his book, The Life Divine. Among his other works, The Synthesis of Yoga looks at the path to its realisation, while The Human Cycle takes up the progress of human society towards a divine future. The realisation of the oneness of humankind is the subject of The Ideal of Human Unity, and the inner meaning and significance of Indian spirituality and civilisation are analysed in The Foundations of Indian Culture, On the Veda, The Upanishads, and Essays on the Gita. The Future Poetry considers the nature and evolution of poetry. His supreme work in poetry, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, is an epic of nearly 24,000 lines in blank verse, in which he takes a small episode from the Mahabharata and turns it into a symbol of the human soul’s spiritual quest and destiny.
In the midst of all this work, he also kept a close watch on all that was happening in India and the world, actively intervening, but with a silent spiritual force and action, whenever necessary. Sri Aurobindo left his body in 1950, but his vision and ideals, relevant for all time, continue to attract people from all over the world.
Sri Aurobindo – His Life and Work
Sri Aurobindo, freedom fighter, writer, poet and yogi, envisioned and strove for a divine life on earth and spent the greater part of his life in Puducherry absorbed in this work.
Born on 15 August 1872 in Kolkata, India, Aravinda Ghose (as Sri Aurobindo was known until late 1926) was sent to England for his education when he was seven. In the course of a brilliant career at St. Paul’s School in London, and then at King’s College, Cambridge, he mastered not only English but also Greek, Latin and French, and became familiar with German, Italian and Spanish. He had already begun writing poetry at an early age. During his fourteen years in England, he gained a deep insight into the culture of ancient, mediaeval and modern Europe.
In 1893, at the age of twenty-one, Sri Aurobindo returned to India with a completely occidental education, but the moment he set foot on Indian soil, Mother India welcomed him with a unique spiritual experience. A vast calm descended upon him and remained with him for months afterwards. Sri Aurobindo now turned his attention towards the wisdom and truth of the Orient, learning Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages, and assimilated the spirit of Indian civilisation. The thirteen years he spent in what is now Vadodara in the administrative and educational service of the erstwhile Baroda State were years of self-culture and literary activity. A great part of the last years of this period was also spent, while on leave, in silent political activity.
Out of this critique arose the concept of National Education—an education meant to awaken the mind and heart of the nation. He went on to add that "the National system of Education was intended to create a nation.It must produce men with all their faculties trained, full of patriotism , and mentally, morally, physically, the equals of the men of any other nation."
After 1905, Sri Aurobindo became deeply involved in India’s freedom movement and articulated education as one of its four essential pillars, alongside Swadeshi, Boycott, and Swaraj. As Principal of the Bengal National College, he sought to demonstrate that education could be both academically rigorous and spiritually rooted.
Sri Aurobindo envisioned education as a means of shaping complete human beings—physically robust, intellectually capable, morally strong, and inwardly free. He emphasised that the teacher’s role is to guide the learner’s natural growth. His essays on education, written during this period, laid down enduring principles applicable to all cultures and times.
When Sri Aurobindo later withdrew to Pondicherry, these educational ideas were no longer confined to national regeneration alone. With the support of his spiritual collaborator, The Mother, they evolved into Integral Education—a universal approach grounded in Indian spirituality yet addressed to the future of humanity, and embodied in the work of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
Sri Aurobindo and the Evolution of Integral Education
Integral Education has its historical beginnings in Sri Aurobindo’s early engagement with education—first as a brilliant student of Western institutions and later as a teacher and reformer in India. Having spent his formative years in England and completed his education at Cambridge University, Sri Aurobindo returned to India in 1893 with a rare, first-hand understanding of the colonial education system.
During his tenure as a professor in Baroda, he recognised that British education in India was deliberately restrictive in scope. It discouraged original thinking, ignored India’s cultural and spiritual heritage, and aimed primarily at producing clerical manpower. Sri Aurobindo openly criticised this model, he pointed out that the University system "turned out machines for administrative and professional work, not men."
“The schools and colleges in which we are taught give us an education which does not develop our intellectual capacity. Education in English schools and colleges has cut us off from our ancient strength; it is an education which does not fit our ancient strength. The education we receive is narrow, meagre and incomplete. We want to establish an education of our own in India.”
- Sri Aurobindo
“Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit.”
~ Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950)
The Mother and Her Mission
Sri Aurobindo once said, “My life is not on the surface for men to see.” Although this applies to the Mother as well, we may yet mention a few significant dates and features of her life. Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris on 21 February 1878. Even as a child, she had unusual dreams, visions and spiritual experiences, a constant feeling that she had a certain work, a mission to fulfil upon earth. She was a brilliant student and acquired a great mastery in painting and music. In the early years of the 20th century, she went to Algeria and gained a profound knowledge of occultism.
But the call of the Supreme was always uppermost in her life, and in Paris she became the centre of a group of ardent seekers and idealists. While pursuing a deep inner spiritual life, the Mother had frequent visions in which she was guided by spiritual personages, many of whom she met physically later in life. One in particular she called Krishna, the Lord of the Gita. When she came to Puducherry on 29 March 1914, and met Sri Aurobindo, she immediately recognised in him the Krishna of her vision and knew that her place and her work were with him in India. The next day she recorded in her Prayers and Meditations: “It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on earth: His presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth.”
She collaborated with Sri Aurobindo in starting the monthly Arya. But, after a few months, due to the exigencies of the First World War she had to go back to France. In 1916, she sailed for Japan and finally returned to Puducherry in 1920, never to leave again.
In 1926, Sri Aurobindo decided to withdraw into seclusion for more concentrated yogic work, entrusting the Mother with the responsibility of the inner and outer life of the small group of sadhaks who had gathered around them. Thus was born the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. From the very beginning, the task of giving a concrete shape to Sri Aurobindo’s vision was entrusted to the Mother. The creation of a new world, a new humanity, and a new society, expressing and embodying the new consciousness, was the work undertaken by her. By the very nature of things, it is a collective ideal that calls for a collective effort so that it may be realised in the terms of an integral human perfection.
The Ashram was the first step towards the fulfilment of this goal. Sri Aurobindo Society and Auroville are further steps in broadening the base of this endeavour to establish harmony between soul and body, spirit and nature, and heaven and earth, in the collective life of humanity.
The Mother left her body in November 1973, but her consciousness and presence are there as concretely as ever, and her creations continue to grow under her constant guidance and inspiration.
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The Mother’s Work in Education
Integral Education arises from the evolutionary vision of Sri Aurobindo, for whom education was a means of awakening the deeper potential of the human being. He viewed life itself as a progressive unfolding of consciousness, and education as a conscious collaboration with this process—helping individuals grow towards wholeness rather than merely acquiring information or skills.
This vision took practical form through the work of the Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator. After joining him in 1920, she gradually translated his spiritual insights into lived systems. During the 1940s, as families and children gathered at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, she initiated educational work that culminated in the founding of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (SAICE) in 1943. This was not conceived as a conventional institution, but as an evolving experiment in conscious education.
When Maria Montessori visited India in 1943, the same year the Ashram School was opened, she wrote a moving message to the students of the school:
In 1950, The Mother articulated the principles of what she named Integral Education. Its purpose was universal: to support the harmonious development of the physical, vital, mental, psychic, and spiritual dimensions of the human being. Rejecting rigid systems and ideological imposition, Integral Education seeks to help each learner discover their inner law of growth.
A Disciple:
Sublime Mother,
Our aim is no exclusive national system of education for India but an essential and fundamental education for all mankind. But, is it not true, Mother, that this education, because of India’s special fitness (by virtue of its past cultural striving and attainment), is India’s privilege and special responsibility towards herself and the world? At any rate, this essential education is India’s national education to my mind. In fact, I regard this as the national education of each great country with characteristic differentiations peculiar to each nation.
I wonder whether this is correct and Mother would endorse it.
Yes, this is quite correct and part of what I would have said if I had had time to answer your questions.
India has or rather had the knowledge of the Spirit, but she neglected matter and suffered for it.
The West has the knowledge of matter but rejected the Spirit and suffers badly for it.
An integral education which could, with some variations, be adapted to all the nations of the world, must bring back the legitimate authority of the Spirit over a matter fully developed and utilised.
This is in short what I wanted to say.
With blessings.
26 July 1965
The Mother
Integral Education restores the guiding role of the spiritual part within us – the soul – while fully engaging with material life. Rooted in India’s spiritual heritage yet oriented towards humanity’s future, it offers an education not only for knowledge or livelihood, but for life itself.
