Editor’s Note: This article was first published in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram journal, Mother India, 15 August 1972, under the title “Laughter of the Gods: Sri Aurobindo’s Wit and Humour”, Vol. XXIV, No. 7, pp. 473-479. We have made minor formatting revisions for the purpose of this digital presentation.
Sense of humour? It is the salt of existence. Without it the world would have got utterly out of balance—it is unbalanced enough already—and rushed to blazes long ago.
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 31, p. 174
To most of his disciples Sri Aurobindo was the Avatar of Supramental Wisdom. To me he manifested himself at first as the Avatar of Supramental Humour. Perhaps he saw that he could catch this ‘medical gent’, as he once dubbed me, only in this way.
A masterpiece of spiritual philosophy like The Life Divine would be entirely lost upon me. In fact, both Dr. Manilal and I complained of its ‘unintelligibility’. I wrote to Sri Aurobindo that since I could not get anyone with whom to study it I would have to fall back upon myself. He replied: “You might try. Read an unintelligible para from the L.D., then sit in vacant meditation and see what comes from the intuitive Gods. They will probably play jokes with you, but what does it matter? One learns by one’s errors and marches to success through one’s failures.”
Every morning when the ‘Divine Post’ came down and I knocked at Nolini’s window for the ‘window delivery’, my heart would leap in joy in anticipation of the manna poured from above. And I was rarely sent away empty-handed. The nectar flowed through a number of years. That made me write to him a bit of burlesque:
“We are not worshippers of you,
But your immortal letter;
We do not worship the dumb blue
But His resplendent Star.”
Sri Aurobindo wrote back about lines 2 and 4: “Good Lord ! I hope you don’t imagine that is a rhyme.”
Apropos of this rhyme, let me quote another doggerel of mine. I had asked his permission to have a cane-table. He seemed to have clean forgotten about it. So I reminded him:
“Out of the silence
What is the word that be
About my cane-table, Sir?
Shall I wait till eternity?
Yes or No, do tell me, Sir:
Either of them I can take with surrender.”
His reply ran: “Good Lord! Another! If you rhyme ‘Sir’ and ‘surrender’ you don’t deserve a table but only a cane and plenty of it.”
In this manner my rugged Yogic journey proceeded through the varied plain, heights and abysses of Yoga, fields of Medicine, Poetry, etc. And he followed me throughout, sustaining me with his sunny humour, his gentle raillery, sometimes in a long letter, sometimes in a sentence, a phrase, a word, even a punctuation mark. He invited me to duels, giving me all chances of victory but ending with my ‘genial massacre’. On the other hand, if provoked, he almost always took up the challenge and met it either by an elaborate campaign or, if time was short, by a single decisive stroke.
I have used the expression “Avatar of Supramental Humour”. If we took into account all the fun in his drama, The Viziers of Bassora, in his Bengali booklet Kara Kahini on his jail-life, and particularly in his voluminous correspondence with Dilip, Amal and me, I think we would be tempted to say that he surpassed even Shakespeare, at least that he reminded us strongly of the great English poet. It is said of Shakespeare that poetry in him always flowed.
About Sri Aurobindo’s writings, beginning with his Bande Mataram period, the same truth holds. And about his correspondence it is well known that in the early years of the Ashram every night he used to spend on it eight to ten hours, answering at a vertiginous speed the letters of over a hundred and fifty inmates. Now, if all this were written from the mind, it would be an impossible feat. Read all his correspondence, remembering the conditions under which it was penned and the conclusion will be irresistible that no human faculty was in operation here.
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A Very Modern Guru – Excerpts from Nirodbaran’s Talks
Now I shall give concrete instances, the proof of the pudding. Let me start with a specimen from Dilip, who at that time was a great fan of Bertrand Russell. Dilip writes: “I must quote here in full the first letter he wrote, shedding the solace of his humour on my badly hurt head. This happened in 1933.”
“You struck your head against the upper sill of the door our engineer Chandulal fixed in your room?” Sri Aurobindo wrote.
“A pity, no doubt, but remember that Chandulal’s dealings with the door qua door were scientifically impeccable: the only thing he forgot was that people of various sizes should pass through it. If you regard the door from the Russellian objective point of view as an external thing in which you must take pleasure for its own sake, then this will be brought home to you and you will see that it was quite all right.
“It is only when you bring in irrelevant subjective considerations like people’s demands on a door and the pain of a stunned head, that objections can be made. However, in spite of philosophy, the Mother will speak to Chandulal in the morning and get him to do what has (practically not philosophically) to be done. May I suggest, however, if it is any consolation to you, that our Lilliputian engineer perhaps measured things by his own head, forgetting that there were in the Ashram higher heads and broader shoulders?”
From my own correspondence I shall choose short letters in order to have both abundance and variety. I shall classify them into General, Poetic, Medical and Spiritual.
General
MYSELF: “You wrote the other day that you had lived dangerously. All we know is that you did not have enough money in England, also in Pondicherry in the beginning. In Baroda you had a handsome pay and in Calcutta you were quite well off.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “I was so astonished by this succinct, complete and impeccably accurate biography of myself that I let myself go in answer! But I afterwards thought that it was no use living more dangerously than I am obliged to. So I rubbed all out. My only answer now is ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! I thank you for the safe, rich, comfortable and unadventurous career you have given me. I note also that the only danger man can run in this world is that of the lack of money. Karl Marx himself could not have made a more economic world of it! But I wonder whether that was what Nietzsche meant by ‘living dangerously.”
**
MYSELF: “You refuse to be a Guru and decline to be a Father, though ladies especially think of you and call you by the latter name. If they know that you refuse and decline, I shall have to run from one lady to another with smelling salts.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “Father is too domestic and Semitic — Abba Father! I feel as if I had suddenly become a twin brother of the Lord Jehovah. Besides, there are suggestions of a paternal smile and a hand uplifted to smite, which don’t suit me. Let the ladies ‘father’ me if smelling salts are the only alternative, but let it not be generalised.”
**
MYSELF: “What does your newspaper say about Abyssinia? Another ‘black country’ swallowed up by the ‘whites’, ‘prayers to God of no avail’!”
SRI AUROBINDO: “Why all this sentimental fury? This and worse has been happening ever since mankind replaced and improved on the ape and tiger. So long as men are what they are, these things will happen. What do you expect God to do about it? The Abyssinians have conquered others, Italy conquers the Abyssinians, other people had conquered the Italians and they will probably be sat upon again here after. It is the law, sir, and the great wheel and everything else. Keep your head cool in the heat. If you want to change things you have to change humanity first and, I can assure you, you will find it a job — yes, even to change 150 people in an Ashram and get them to surmount their instincts.”
Poetic
MYSELF: “What poem, you ask? Good Lord! Didn’t I request you to compose a poem illustrating the point I had submitted? If the Guru is so forgetful, the Shishya can be worse.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “And didn’t I tell you that it was an extravagant and unwarrantable idea to demand a poem for such a grammatical purpose and I kept the carte blanche that I might use it for other purposes? What’s this Shishya who does not read his Guru’s objurgations however illegible?”
**
MYSELF: “Last night I tried to compose a poem. It was a failure. I fell asleep over its first two lines.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “You call it a failure when you have discovered a new soporific?”
Medical
MYSELF: “A swelling — the size of a cherry inside the nose. The tip is damn painful. I hope it won’t leave me with a nose like that of Cyrano de — quoi?”
SRI AUROBINDO: “Let us hope not. That kind of nose wouldn’t suit either your face or your poetry.”
**
MYSELF: “My brain is now less hampered by the body’s indisposition.
My boil has burst and as you see
From the depression I am free;
Thanks, Guru, thanks to thee!?’
SRI AUROBINDO: “Yes, I got irritated last night by your persistent boiling and put a gigantic force which, I am glad to see, burst the little boil.
Thank God for that!
Free from boil,
At poems toil,
Laugh and grow fat.”
**
MYSELF: “The Specialist said that N’s eye-condition has improved. He has advised to give salicylates for his past rheumatism.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “All right — salicylate him as much as the Ost likes. Queer! one has to be dosed not only for present and future but past ailments. Medicine, like the Brahman, transcends time.”
**
MYSELF: “Yesterday J’s finger was incised prematurely, as pus was suspected, but there was hardly any. Today the swelling persists.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “Mother suggests hot water, 1 part peroxide 3 parts water and dipping the finger for 15 minutes. Some of these things are cured by that — it ought really to be done immediately but even now it may be effective.”
MYSELF: “Why, that is almost exactly what we have advised him to do from the very start, only peroxide was not given.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “You are taking daily almost exactly the same thing as Anglo-Indians take in their clubs, i.e. a peg. Only brandy and soda are not there — but the water is.”
**
MYSELF: “Could not touch the patient without making her shed tears. The ladies are thinking ‘What heartless brutes these doctors are!'”
SRI AUROBINDO: “Much safer than if they think ‘What dears these doctors are, darlings, angels!”
**
MYSELF: “Doctor B prescribes butter for my thinness and cod liver oil has been prescribed by myself.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “??”
MYSELF: “Why two interrogation marks??
SRI AUROBINDO: “Butter and cod liver oil — which is two.”
MYSELF: “Since the Force doesn’t help, I have to seek freshness from butter and cod liver oil. How else to stop being a jutting skeleton? Of course, Dr. B added also cheerfulness to the prescription.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “Mother pours scorn on your idea that you are a jutting skeleton. She says that you are less shockingly plump than when you came but that is all. But if you take butter and oil together, to say nothing of cheerfulness, what will you become? Remember Falstaff.”
Spiritual
MYSELF: “I hear from a reliable authority that the Supramental Descent is very near. Is it time, Sir?”
SRI AUROBINDO: “I am very glad to hear it on reliable authority. It is a great relief.”
**
MYSELF: “Heard the great news? X singing in theatres! Gracious, fancy that! In theatres and perhaps singing spiritual songs! O Lord!”
SRI AUROBINDO: “Bringing the highest to the lowest — quite spiritual!”
MYSELF: “I am pained when I hear people saying, ‘After all, Pondicherry has brought him to this.'”
SRI AUROBINDO: “Why can’t they say he has acquired a Godlike samata? Don’t you remember the sloka — a Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog and an outcast are all the same to the sage? So X can embrace even actors — hope he will stop short of the actresses, though.”
**
MYSELF: What will be the nature of the physical transformation? Change of pigment? Mongolian features into Aryo-Greek? Bald head into luxuriant growth? Old men into Gods of eternal youth??
SRI AUROBINDO: “Why not seven tails with an eighth on the head — everybody different colours, blue, magenta, indigo, green, scarlet, etc.? Hair luxuriant but vermilion and flying erect skywards; other details to match. Amen.
“Now you can’t surely say that all your points have not been cleared?”
**
MYSELF: “I am plunged in a sea of dryness and terribly thirsty for something. Along with it waves of old desires. Any handy remedy?”
SRI AUROBINDO: “Eucharistic injection from above, purgative rejection below, liquid diet, psychic fruit juice, milk of the spirit.”
**
MYSELF: “For this Yoga one must have the heart of a lion, the mind of a Sri Aurobindo, the vital of a Napoleon.”
SRI AUROBINDO: Good Lord! Then I am off the list of candidates — for I have neither the heart of a lion nor the vital of Napoleon.”
**
MYSELF: “I make the unhappy discovery that it is from a financial pressure that I jumped for the Unknown and Unknowable.”
SRI AUROBINDO: “It must have been a stupendous pressure to produce such a gigantic leap.
“All this simply means that you have, metaphorically speaking, the hump. Trust in God and throw the hump off.”
MYSELF: “Trust in God? Personal or Impersonal? Tell me instead, ‘Trust in Me’! That would be more comforting, tangible and practical.”
SRI AUR0BINDO: “All right, it comes to the same thing in the upshot.”
**
I think I have given sufficient examples to prove my thesis that Sri Aurobindo is an Avatar of Humour, at least that humour comes to him as naturally as his serious writings. There was a Bengali litterateur who complained that Sri Aurobindo might be a Yogi but was lacking in humour. I hope the impression now will not swing to the other extreme and make somebody declare, “Sri Aurobindo may be an Avatar of Humour but he is not a Yogi.”
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DIVINE HUMOUR
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