Sri Aurobindo deliberately flunked a riding test to escape the British civil service
Raised in England from the age of seven, Aurobindo Ghosh placed 11th of 250 in the Indian Civil Service exam, then skipped the horse-riding test on purpose. Back in India he became a revolutionary nationalist, survived a treason trial, and reinvented himself in Pondicherry as the yogi behind Integral Yoga.
Born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872, he was the son of a surgeon who had trained in Edinburgh, admired British culture and wanted his boys in the elite civil service. After a convent school in Darjeeling, the family moved to England in 1879 and left the brothers with a Congregational minister in Manchester. Aurobindo went on to St Paul's School in London and a scholarship at King's College, Cambridge. Biographer Peter Heehs reckons he eventually knew at least twelve languages, and early exposure to strict evangelical piety left him calling himself an atheist, later an agnostic.
By 1891 he had joined a student secret society sworn to Indian freedom. A post with the Maharaja of Baroda took him home in February 1893, but his father, falsely told that the ship had sunk off Portugal, died on hearing the news. In Baroda he worked in revenue and the secretariat, taught French at the college, taught himself Sanskrit and Bengali, and wrote anonymously for the nationalist press.
After the Partition of Bengal he moved to Calcutta in 1906, becoming first principal of the National College, today's Jadavpur University. Publicly he backed boycott and non-cooperation; privately he helped build revolutionary networks, including the Anushilan Samiti. He sided with Tilak's radicals at the Surat session of 1907, where Congress split. Arrested in 1908 over the Alipore bomb case, he spent a year in solitary confinement before the prosecution collapsed and he was acquitted.
Still harassed by the authorities, he moved to French-ruled Pondicherry in 1910. There he developed Integral Yoga, set out in The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga, and wrote the epic poem Savitri. In 1926 he and Mirra Alfassa founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He died on 5 December 1950.
Source: Sri Aurobindo
