Forgotten Indians: Sri Aurobindo

Aurobindo was another Bengali who left his mark on the freedom struggle. He was sent to England when he was 7 years old to get some “serious studies”. When he returned to India in 1893, the situation in India had changed. People were revolting against the British.
bq. Sri Aurobindo included in the scope of his revolutionary work one kind of activity which afterwards became an important item in the public programme of the Nationalist party. He encouraged the young men in the centres of work to propagate the Swadeshi idea which at that time was only in its infancy and hardly more than a fad of the few.

bq. Apart from that, he preferred to remain and act and even to lead from behind the scenes without his name being known in public; it was the Government’s action in prosecuting him as editor of the Bande Mataram that forced him into public view. And from that time forward he became openly, what he had been for sometime already, a prominent leader of the Nationalist party, its principal leader in action in Bengal and the organiser there of its policy and strategy. He had decided in his mind the lines on which he wanted the country’s action to run: what he planned was very much the same as was developed afterwards in Ireland as the Sinn Fein movement; but Sri Aurobindo did not derive his ideas, as some have represented, from Ireland, for the Irish movement became prominent later and he knew nothing of it till after he had withdrawn to Pondicherry
But later, he withdrew to Pondicherry where he moved into the spiritual path. Read the rest at “A General Note on Sri Aurobindo’s Political Life”:http://intyoga.freeservers.com/sa_note.htm
This series is part of “15 days of independence”:https://varnam.org/archives/cat_indian_independence.html