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Mrinalini: Sri Aurobindo's Forgotten Wife |
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| by Dr. Kavita Sharma |
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Sri Aurobindo’s birthday on the 15th of August provides an occasion to remember his forgotten wife, Mrinalini who died in the scourge of influenza at the young age of 32 while waiting in Calcutta to go and join her husband in Pondicherry. Very little is known of her. Few letters between her and Sri Aurobindo survive as, according to her cousin, she wanted the box in which she kept them to be offered to the Ganga after her death. The few that remain are those confiscated by the police on the night of Sri Aurobindo’s arrest in the Alipore conspiracy case. In addition there is a small reminiscence by her father Bhupal babu in which he describes Mrinalini as having nothing uncommon about her.
 Mrinalini was 14 years old when she married Sri Aurobindo in April 1901, who was 29 at that time. They met through an advertisement that Sri Aurobindo put into the newspaper indicating his desire to marry a Hindu girl according to Hindu rites. A close friend of her father’s, Girish Chandra Bose, arranged the marriage. It was a Hindu ceremony attended by eminent persons like J.C.Bose. Lord Sinha and others as Sri Aurobindo was already a name in Calcutta, but not by his own family who were Brahmos. Mrinalini herself had studied at a Brahmo girls’ school in Calcutta, but all her life she tried to live up to the impossible ideals of a ‘Hindu wife’ that Sri Aurobindo demanded of her. After four years or so they seemed to drift apart perhaps because of the ‘generation’ gap between them but more probably because Sri Aurobindo became increasingly preoccupied with politics, the organization of a secret revolutionary party and was also getting drawn to yoga. He also started the journals Karmayogin and Dharma which consumed a lot of his time.That Sri Aurobindo was aware of what she must feel is evident from the well known letter he wrote her in 1905 in which he was certainly trying to shift the responsibilities of a householder from his shoulders. He described himself as “a strange person,” “a mad man” who could never make his wife happy but he said, Hindu religion loved extraordinary characters, endeavors and ambitions. The wife of such a person was bound to be miserable but the sages fixed a way out of this by declaring that for a woman the husband was the supreme guru. She shared his dharma and so was bound to help, counsel and encourage him in his endeavours. She had to regard him as her God and make his joys and sorrows her own. It was for the man to choose his work and for the woman to give him help and encouragement. Sri Aurobindo’s question to Mrinalini was whether she would accept this path. And would she have the capacity to do so? In his estimate she did not as she was so simple that she listened to anything anyone might say which made her mind “forever restless,” her “intelligence” could “not develop” and she could not “concentrate on any work.” Also she was a product of her times in which people according to him seemed to have become incapable of listening to serious things in a serious manner. Religion, philanthropy, noble aspirations, high endeavour, the deliverance of the country, all was being ridiculed. She needed to reject this attitude and develop the strength of mind that she lacked. But if she did not feel up to the task she could take refuge in God, enter into the path of God. He will fill up all your wants. Or if you have faith in me, I shall impart my strength to you which, instead of reducing my strength, will increase it. This of course placed the burden of responsibility and the eighteen years of her marriage were mostly spent in loneliness and often solitude. After Sri Aurobindo’s arrest in 1907 and although he was released a year later, Mrinalini experienced the dark night of the soul when she felt that she “couldn’t call even God” because she “had no other God” except her husband. She had “seen God’s manifestation in him alone.” Death seemed to be the only way out but at that moment Sudhira, her friend from school took her to Ramakrishna Ashram and Mrinalni began to frequent it from that time onwards. She was of course a celebrity as Sri Aurobindo’s wife but she kept aloof as far as she could. Sarada Mata, Ramakrishna paramhansa’s wife, who came to love her deeply assured her that Sri Aurobindo would be proved innocent but he would not lead a worldly life. After his release from the prison Sri Aurobindo left for Pondicherry unknown to everyone including Mrinalini. The eight years that followed were the dark night of her soul but Mrinalini transformed her suffering into a sadhana to become a “heavenly being” in the words of Sarada Mata, wife of Ramakrishna Paramhansa to whom she turned during this period. Mrinalini’s father took her away to Shillong where she steeped her life in austere tapasya. She ate simple vegetarian food and always dressed neatly looking like a yogin. Every early morning, after her bath she would pluck flowers from the garden and then go to her Puja room which had beautifully decorated pictures of Kali, Sri Vivekananda and Sarada Mata together with that of Sri Aurobindo to which she offered flowers and incense. She would meditate there for hours and then spend the day reading religious books mainly of Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna. In the evening, too, she meditated alone for hours. Letters arrived sporadically from Sri Aurobindo and enlivened her spirits for a while but her marriage had actually ended. However she felt an inner bond with Sri Aurobindo and never ceased to hope that she would be united with him. At last when it became a possibility in December 1918 death intervened. The mental agony that she had suppressed for years exploded during the delirium of her illness especially the nightmarish experience of the night of Sri Aurobindo’s arrest when she had been with him. The otherwise still and detached Sri Aurobindo, too, on hearing the news of Mrinalini’s death, was moved to tears. It is remarkable that Mrinalini sold many of her ornaments during her lifetime to contribute to charitable causes. Her last wishes were that the remaining ones were to be kept in her friend Sudhira’s custody, to be sold and a scholarship instituted for a poor girl-student of the Nivedita Girl’s School with Sri Aurobindo’s approval. Ironically it was in separation and suffering that Mrinalini fulfilled the role of a ‘Hindu wife’ assigned to her by her husband proving both him and her father belying both the words of her father and husband who had judged her so unjustly. She deserves to be remembered as a profile in courage who overcame impossible odds to find some meaning in her life; a flower that blossomed unseen but left its everlasting fragrance. |
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| 24-Dec-2012 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| More by : Dr. Kavita Sharma | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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