Sri Aurobindo Was Acquitted in the Alipore Bomb Case on 6 May 1909, Spent the Next Four Decades in Pondicherry Where He Wrote The Life Divine, and Auroville Was Founded in 1968 on His Teaching

Sri Aurobindo was arrested at about 5 a.m. on 2 May 1908 at 48 Grey Street in Calcutta, and a Sessions judge acquitted him of waging war against the King-Emperor on 6 May 1909. Eleven months later, on 4 April 1910, the French ship Dupleix landed him at Pondicherry, where he remained until his death on 5 December 1950.

He is remembered as a nationalist editor and as a philosopher and teacher of yoga. This article follows the documents for the first and attributes the second to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and to Auroville, which preserve and teach it. Where accounts disagree on a number, it says so.

A scholarship boy who skipped the riding test

Aurobindo Ghose was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872. By the life sketch in the Ashram’s edition of his Autobiographical Notes, he was taken to England in 1879, aged seven, with his two elder brothers, and stayed fourteen years, first with an English family in Manchester. A senior classical scholarship took him to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1890, the year he also passed the open competition for the Indian Civil Service, the elite administrative service of the Raj.

After two years of probation, the sketch says, he did not sit the riding examination and was disqualified. Through the Gaekwar, the ruler of the princely state of Baroda, he obtained a state appointment and left England for Baroda in early 1893.

Thirteen years in Baroda, then Calcutta

From 1893 to 1906 he served the Baroda State, first in revenue and secretariat work and then as professor of English and vice-principal of Baroda College. Political activity, in the sketch’s dating, runs from 1902 through 1910, and he began practising yoga in 1905.

His younger brother, Barindra Kumar Ghose, stayed with him in Baroda in late 1902, and Aurobindo initiated him with a revolutionary oath. That detail comes from the Ashram’s own profile of Barindra, and it is part of the background to the trial that followed.

In 1905 Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal set off the Swadeshi boycott. Aurobindo left Baroda for Calcutta in 1906 as principal of the newly founded Bengal National College.

The daily that asked for complete independence

Bande Mataram was an English-language daily started in 1906 by Bipin Chandra Pal, who began it with Rs 500 and asked Aurobindo to join. According to the Ashram’s page on the paper, a company with Rs 50,000 of capital was formed that year to finance it, and Aurobindo became its leading spirit and set its policy. Its columns argued for passive resistance, swadeshi (the use of Indian-made goods), a boycott of British goods and national education.

The Ashram also says he was the first Indian politician to declare complete independence openly as the aim of political action. That is the Ashram’s claim of priority, and its page cites no other source for it.

The Government prosecuted him as the paper’s editor. Police arrested him on 16 August 1907 under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, the sedition section, after he presented himself at the detective police office that night, and he was released on bail the next morning. The Chief Presidency Magistrate, Douglas Kingsford, acquitted him on 23 September 1907. Apurba Krishna Bose, the printer, received three months’ rigorous imprisonment.

At the Congress session in Surat that December the party split between its Moderates and the Nationalists around Bal Gangadhar Tilak. By the Ashram’s account, the Nationalists held their own conference on 24 December 1907, which a police report records as chaired by Aurobindo Ghose.

Arrested at five in the morning

On 30 April 1908 a bomb thrown at Muzaffarpur in Bihar killed two European women. At about 5 a.m. on 2 May a police superintendent named Cregan arrived at 48 Grey Street and asked whether he was Aurobindo Ghose. “Yes. I am Aurobindo Ghose,” he answered, according to the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. Handcuffs went on, and a rope round his waist.

The same morning police raided a garden house at 32 Muraripukur Road in the Maniktala quarter of Calcutta. They found a bomb factory, arms, ammunition and revolutionary literature, and took fourteen inmates into custody, among them Barindra Kumar Ghose and Ullaskar Dutt, who had learned to make explosives. Raids through May brought the total arrested to about forty.

The charge was conspiracy to wage war against the King-Emperor, under Section 121 of the Indian Penal Code, an offence that could carry a death sentence.

A year in Alipore jail and the verdict of 6 May 1909

Aurobindo was held as an under-trial prisoner in Presidency Jail at Alipore, in solitary confinement. He described being treated like an animal in a cage, the Ashram’s page says. Preliminary hearings before a magistrate named Birley heard 222 witnesses. Before Charles Porten Beachcroft, the Sessions trial began in October 1908 and heard 206. Eardley Norton led the prosecution, and Chittaranjan Das took over the defence and argued for eight days.

The approver, Naren Goswami, had testified that Aurobindo was the principal leader of the secret society. Two fellow accused, Kanailal Dutt and Satyendra Nath Bose, then shot him dead inside the jail hospital. That made his evidence inadmissible in the Sessions Court, the Ashram’s page says.

Beachcroft delivered the judgment on 6 May 1909. Of Aurobindo, the Ashram’s page quotes Beachcroft as finding that the evidence “falls short of such proof” as would justify a conviction on so serious a charge. Larry Seidlitz, reviewing the judgment, writes that the judge also noted that Aurobindo’s writings did not advocate violence. Barindra Kumar Ghose and Ullaskar Dutt were sentenced to death, and the Ashram says the sentences were commuted to transportation for life on appeal.

Accounts count either 36 or 37 men on trial, and they list the lesser sentences differently, so this article gives no tally of convictions. Legally, the acquittal settled the question. Both the 1902 oath and the acquittal appear in the Ashram’s own pages.

On 30 May 1909, at Uttarpara in Bengal, he gave a speech describing his months in jail. Walking in the compound, he said, he felt “it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned.” Vasudeva, a name of Krishna, appeared to him, by his account, in the tree outside his cell, in the bars and in the prisoners. The speech is his own account of what he experienced.

Chandernagore, then the French ship to Pondicherry

After his release he launched Karmayogin, an English weekly, with a Bengali sister paper, Dharma. In February 1910, at the Karmayogin office at 4 Shyampukur Lane, he learned that police planned to search the premises the next day and arrest him. An inner voice told him, “Go to Chandernagore,” the Ashram’s page says, and he left at once. It dates the departure to 15, 16, 17 or 18 February 1910, a deduction from press reports and not a confirmed date.

Chandernagore was French territory. About six weeks went by in hiding there, with Motilal Roy as host, and, by the Ashram’s account, received a second inner command: “Go to Pondicherry.” The Dupleix left Calcutta on 1 April 1910 and reached Pondicherry on 4 April.

More than forty years, a monthly review and one long book

He began publishing the philosophical monthly Arya in 1914, and it ran until 1921. The Life Divine appeared in it serially from August 1914 to January 1919. A revision followed in 1939 and 1940, and the first volume came out as a book in November 1939 and the second in July 1940.

The Ashram describes it as his principal work of philosophy and metaphysics. Per its summary, the book sets out a spiritual evolution that ends with humans changing from mental to supramental beings and with a divine life on earth. That is the Ashram’s description of his teaching. Its site lists his other books, among them The Synthesis of Yoga, The Secret of the Veda, The Human Cycle, the poem Savitri and his Essays on the Gita. Auroville’s website says Integral Yoga was developed by him and the Mother together. She was Mirra Alfassa, his spiritual collaborator.

The Ashram says it “was founded or rather founded itself” in 1926, the year he gave the Mother charge of its outer work so that he could withdraw into concentration. The Ashram, he wrote, is the Mother’s creation and would not have existed without her.

On 14 August 1947 All India Radio broadcast a message he wrote for the eve of independence. It set out five dreams: a free and united India, the resurgence of Asia, a union of the world, India’s spiritual gift to others, and a step in human evolution to a higher consciousness. Independence day, 15 August, was also his own birthday. Open magazine quotes him calling the coincidence the “sanction and seal of the Divine Force.”

He died at 1:26 a.m. on 5 December 1950. His body was buried on 9 December, the Ashram’s account says, in the Ashram courtyard under a Service Tree.

Auroville, inaugurated on 28 February 1968

The Supreme Court’s judgment of 17 March 2025 in The Auroville Foundation v. Natasha Storey records that the Mother conceived Auroville in 1965 as an international township for human unity, and that it was inaugurated on 28 February 1968. Auroville’s own page says about 5,000 people attended, including representatives of 124 nations. Auroville names the Mother as its founder, and its website describes the task of giving form to Sri Aurobindo’s vision as entrusted to her.

The Mother gave Auroville a four-point charter. Its first point, as the Ashram’s page summarises it, is that Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole and not to any individual.

UNESCO appears in the record twice. Auroville says UNESCO unanimously passed a resolution in 1966 recognising it as a project of importance to humanity’s future. Within the Auroville Foundation Act of 1988, the Statement of Objects and Reasons says resolutions were sponsored by the Government of India at four general conferences of UNESCO. Its recitals say the resolutions noted that “the project on Auroville is contributing to international understanding and promotion of peace.” The count and years of the resolutions vary between Auroville’s documents, so this article gives only the Act’s figure of four.

After the Mother’s death in 1973, the Act’s statement says, difficulties in management led the Central Government to take Auroville over temporarily under the Auroville (Emergency Provisions) Act, 1980. Parliament passed the Auroville Foundation Act on 29 September 1988, vesting its undertakings in a statutory Foundation. Auroville’s site puts the planned population at 50,000 and the present one at 3,300, from 60 nationalities.

The Supreme Court’s 2025 judgment held that the Foundation’s Governing Board could reconstitute the Auroville Town Development Council, and that the Residents’ Assembly has an advisory role under Section 19 of the Act.

A biography, a forfeiture order and a Supreme Court bench

Peter Heehs published The Lives of Sri Aurobindo with Columbia University Press in 2008. His website quotes the historian Ramachandra Guha and the scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta praising it. Legally India reports that the Odisha Government ordered the book forfeited under Section 95 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, treating it as a work punishable under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which covers deliberate insults to religious beliefs.

In January 2016 a Supreme Court bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and S. A. Bobde declined to remove the Ashram’s trustees over their mild reaction to the book. Legally India reports that the Court did not decide whether the book should be banned, and that the forfeiture order’s legality was then before the Orissa High Court.