Uttarpara Speech
(Delivered
at Uttarpara, on 30th May, 1909 under the auspices of the Dharma Rakshini
Sabha, just after Sri Aurobindo’s acquittal in the Alipore Bomb Case)
Page 1
When
I was asked to speak to you at the annual meeting of your Sabha, it
was my intention to say a few words about the subject chosen for today,
the subject of the Hindu religion. I do not know now whether I shall
fulfil that intention; for as I sat here, there came into my mind a
word that I have to speak to you, a word that I have to speak to the
whole of the Indian Nation. It was spoken first to myself in jail and
I have come out of jail to speak it to my people.
It
was more than a year ago that I came here last. When I came I was not
alone; one of the mightiest prophets of Nationalism sat by my side.
It was he who then came out of the seclusion to which God had sent him,
so that in the silence and solitude of his cell he might hear the word
that He had to say. It was he that you came in hundreds to welcome.
Now he is far away, separated from us by thousands of miles. Others
whom I was accustomed to find working beside me are absent. The storm
that swept over the country has scattered them far and wide. It is I
this time who have spent one year in seclusion, and now that I come
out I find all changed. One who always sat by my side and was associated
in my work is a prisoner in Burma; another is in the north rotting in
detention. I looked round for those to whom I had been accustomed to
look for counsel and inspiration. I did not find them. There was more
than that. When I went to jail the whole country was alive with the
cry of Bande Mataram, alive with the hope of a nation, the hope of millions
of men who had newly risen out of degradation. When I came out of jail
I listened for that cry, but there was instead a silence. A hush had
fallen on the country and men seemed bewildered; for instead of God’s
bright heaven full of the vision of the future that had been before
us, there seemed to be overhead a leaden sky from which human thunders
and lightnings rained. No man seemed to know which way to move, and
from all sides came the question, “what shall we do next? What is there
that we can do?” I too did not know which way to move, I too did not
know what was next to be done. But one thing I knew, that as it was
the Almighty Power of God which had raised that cry, that hope, so it
was the same Power which had sent down that silence. He who was in the
shouting and the movements was also in the pause and the hush. He has
sent it upon us, so that the nation might draw back for a moment and
look into itself and know His will. I have not been disheartened by
that silence, because I had been made familiar with silence in my prison
and because I knew it was in the pause and the hush that I had myself
learned this lesson through the long year of my detention. When Bepin
Chhandra Pal came out of jail, he came with a message, and it was an
inspired message. I remember the speech he made here. It was a speech
not so much political as religious in its bearing and intention. He
spoke of his realisation in jail, of God within us all, of the Lord
within the nation, and in his subsequent speeches also he spoke of a
greater than ordinary force in the movement and a greater than ordinary
purpose before it. Now I also meet you again, I also come out of jail,
and again it is you of Uttarpara who are the first to welcome me, not
at a political meeting but at a meeting of a society for the protection
of our religion. That message which Bepin Chandra Pal received in Buxar
jail, God gave to me in Alipore. That knowledge he gave to me day after
day during my twelve months of imprisonment and it is that which he
has commanded me to speak to you now that I have come out.
I
knew I would come out. The year of detention was meant only for a year
of seclusion and of training. How could anyone hold me in jail longer
than was necessary for God’s purpose? He had given me a word to speak
and a work to do, and until that word was spoken I knew that no human
power could hush me, until that work was done human power could stop
God’s instrument, however weak that instrument might be or however small.
Now that I have come out, even in these few minutes, a word has been
suggested to me which I had no wish to speak. The thing I had in my
mind He has thrown from it and what I speak is under an impulse and
a compulsion.
When
I was arrested and hurried to the Lal Bazar Hajat I was shaken in faith
for a while, for I could not look into the heart of His intention. Therefore
I faltered for a moment and cried out in my heart to Him, “What is this
that has happened to me? I believed that I had a mission to work for
the people of my country and until that work was done, I should have
Thy protection. Why then am I here and on such a charge?” A day passed
and a second day and a third, when a voice came to me from within, “Wait
and see.” Then I grew calm and waited, I was taken from Lal Bazar to
Alipore and was placed for one month in a solitary cell apart from men.
There I waited day and night for the voice of God within me, to know
what He had to say to me, to learn what I had to do. In this seclusion
the earliest realisation, the first lesson came to me. I remembered
then that a month or more before my arrest, a call had come to me to
put aside all activity, to go into seclusion and to look into myself,
so that I might enter into closer communion with Him. I was weak and
could not accept the call. My work was very dear to me and in the pride
of my heart I thought that unless I was there, it would suffer or even
fail and cease; therefore I would not leave it. It seemed to me that
He spoke to me again and said, “The bonds you had not the strength to
break, I have broken for you, because it is not my will nor was it ever
my intention that that should continue. I have had another thing for
you to do and it is for that I have brought you here, to teach you what
you could not learn for yourself and to train you for my work.” Then
He placed the Gita in my hands. His strength entered into me and I was
able to do the Sadhana of the Gita. I was not only to understand intellectually
but to realise what Sri Krishna demanded of Arjuna and what He demands
of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion and desire,
to do work for Him without the demand for fruit, to renounce self-will
and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands, to have an
equal heart for high and low, friend and opponent, success and failure,
yet not to do His work negligently. I realised what the Hindu religion
meant. We speak often of the Hindu religion, of the Sanatan Dharma,
but few of us really know what that religion is. Other religions are
preponderatingly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanatan
Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that had not so much to be believed
as lived. This is the Dharma that for the salvation of humanity was
cherished in the seclusion of this peninsula from of old. It is to give
this religion that India is rising. She does not rise as other countries
do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak. She is rising
to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world. India had
always existed for humanity and not for herself and it is for humanity
and not for herself that she must be great.
-
Sri Aurobindo
