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Most biographies of Aurobindo have made his sadhana, or practice of yoga, seem like a series of miracles. The most remarkable discovery was a diary he had kept for more than nine years, in which he noted the day-to-day events of his inner and outer life. Accounts that had been written to correct this deficiency were so uncritical that they undermined their own inflated claims. Nevertheless, his contribution was significant and, at the time, not very well known. They confirmed that he had been an important figure in the Struggle for Freedom, but fell short of proving what his followers believed: that he was the major cause of its success. Most of the documents I found in public archives dealt with Aurobindo’s life as a politician. “It would be years before I learned that all of these features owed their distinctiveness to the retoucher’s art.” His deepening interest, fed by reading, eventually brought him to India and to “the ashram Aurobindo had founded.” “I might not have stayed,” he confesses, “if I had not been asked to do two things I found very interesting: first, to collect material dealing with his life second, to organize his manuscripts and prepare them for publication.” This was his entry into the science of history: It started in 1968 in one of New York’s yoga centres, the instructor of which offered “instructions in postures and breathing for a fee, dietary and moral advice gratis.” Among the photographs of “realized beings” covering the centre’s walls, one was “of Aurobindo as an old man.” Heehs remembers not being particularly impressed “as the subject wore neither loincloth nor turban, and had no simulated halo around his head.” A few months later, “after a brief return to college and a stopover in a wild uptown ‘ashram’,” Heehs encountered another photograph, “the standard portrait of Aurobindo.” “I was struck by the peaceful expanse of his brow, his trouble-free face, and fathomless eyes,” Heehs recalls. The preface to the The Lives of Sri Aurobindo gives a lively account of Heehs’s early acquaintance with Sri Aurobindo. I will also quote at length from the online edition of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Fully available online, it details my past association with Heehs and provides extracts that document lesser-known aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s thought. In so doing, I will build on my earlier review (Kvassay 2005) of Nationalism, Religion, and Beyond, an anthology of Sri Aurobindo’s writings edited by Heehs. In this essay I will steer clear of the controversy as far as possible, examining the book in the wider context of Heehs’s other writings, most of which are aimed primarily at academic audiences. In the meantime, a lot has been said and written about it it has even sparked a controversy among the admirers and followers of Sri Aurobindo. It is almost a year since the publication of Peter Heehs’s latest book The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by the Columbia University Press in the United States. A Discerning Tribute (complete text) Review of Heehs: The Lives of Sri Aurobindo Marcel Kvassay
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