Born Like Krishna in the Prison-House: Revolutionary Asceticism in the Political Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe revolutionary thinker and later yogi of Pondicherry, Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), played a critical role during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, articulating a radical vision that determined the limits and possibilities of the Indian political. Reading his polemical journalism in Bande Mataram alongside his prison memoir, Karakahini, reveals the importance of the jail for his staging of politics. This paper refutes the usual dichotomy of politics and spirituality in readings of Aurobindo and instead explores their underlying interconnectedness in relation to his scripting of an insurrectionary and universalist Hindu metaphysics in which divinity intervened in human history on the side of the oppressed. Aurobindo's central symbol—of Krishna being born in a prison cell—inscribed enduring theo-political significance into the colonial jail, which was successfully re-imagined as a revolutionary ashram, a transformative and sovereign space where political prisoners could be reborn.