SRI AUROBINDO'S WRITINGS

SRI AUROBINDO'S WRITINGS: Sri Aurobindo's earliest writings were poems that he penned as a student in England. This literary interest continued during his thirteen-year stay at Baroda, where he wrote a number of poems and plays, and afterwards in Calcutta and Pondicherry. His dramas and short stories are presently published in two volumes entitled Collected Plays and his poetic works in the volume Collected Poems; there is, in addition, Sri Aurobindo's major poetic work, Savitri, an epic in blank verse of about 24,000 lines. Sri Aurobindo first rose to national prominence as a writer for his editorials and articles in Bande Mataram, a Calcutta daily he edited between 1906 and 1908. A large number of other political and cultural pieces appeared in two Calcutta weeklies in 1909 and 1910, the year in which Sri Aurobindo retired from active politics in order to devote himself exclusively to the practice of Yoga. In 1914, after four years of concentrated yoga at Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo launched a 64-page monthly philosophical review, Arya, in which most of his important works were serialised during the next six and a half years: The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of the Veda, The Foundations of Indian Culture, The Future Poetry, The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity. Though he retired from public life in 1926, Sri Aurobindo maintained a large correspondence with his disciples, especially in the 1930s. Several thousand letters on his teaching, his system of spiritual self-discipline and other subjects have been published in three volumes entitled Letters on Yoga. The Mother contains his shorter work of that name and his letters on the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Notes and letters on his own life appear in Sri Aurobindo on Himself. Other important works are: The Upanishads (part of which appeared in 'Arya'), Hymns to the Mystic Fire (translations of Vedic hymns to Agni), The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, Essays Divine and Human (both the volumes contain short prose works on philosophy, psychology and yoga). The Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo was published as the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL) in the year 1972, the Birth Centenary year of Sri Aurobindo. This set of thirty volumes is no more available. However, as subsequent editions of Sri Aurobindo's major works correspond to the Centenary edition, this facilitates uniform referencing for the study of his work. Currently The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo in thirty-five volumes is under publication.