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12.2.56
Opening
of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Delhi Branch
Let
this place be worthy of its name and manifest the true spirit of Sri
Aurobindo’s teaching and message to the world.
With my blessings.
– The Mother
Sri Aurobindo Ashram – Delhi Branch stands on hallowed ground. In the
1940s, it served as a venue for freedom fighters to meet and work out
their strategies. It also housed a printing press for producing
literature designed to shake the British Empire. The independence won,
the owner of the farm land, Shri Surendra Nath Jauhar (Chacha ji) had a
vision about how this land could contribute to the freedom of humanity
from the ignorant half-awake consciousness under which it has been
labouring for millennia. The inspiration for the vision came from Sri
Aurobindo and The Mother, whose lesson of complete self-giving Chacha ji
had taken to heart soon after his first visit to Pondicherry in 1939.
When he brought up the subject with the Mother, she gave her permission
without any hesitation, and also gave the place its name, “Sri Aurobindo
Ashram – Delhi Branch”. The Ashram was formally inaugurated on 12
February 1956. The inaugural ceremony was brief but significant. Prof.
Indra Sen, a close friend of Chacha ji, and also a devotee who had
voluntarily terminated his career as Professor of Psychology at the
University of Delhi to make Pondicherry his home, read out first in
English and then in Hindi the Mother's brief message for the occasion:
“Let this place be worthy of its name and
manifest the true spirit of Sri Aurobindo’s teaching and message to the
world.”
Soon after that, the Mother blessed the opening of the Sri Aurobindo
School of the Delhi Branch on 23 April 1956 with the following words:
“A new light has appeared upon earth. Let this new school opened today be
guided by it.
Blessings.”
The “new light” to which the Mother referred in Her blessings
was apparently the descent of the supramental consciousness on earth,
which the Mother had seen on 29 February 1956. When asked about the
significance of the date given by her for the inauguration of the school,
she gave a simple arithmetical explanation: 23.4.56 (2,3,4,5,6)! The
school has now blossomed into The Mother's International School.
The next milestone in the history of the Ashram was that the
Mother also graciously allowed, for the first time, the sacred relics of
Sri Aurobindo to be taken out of Pondicherry for being enshrined in the
Delhi Branch on 5 December 1957. The relics arrived in Delhi on 4 December
1957, and were accorded a touching reception at the airport. The event
received wide coverage by the Press and the All India Radio (AIR). The
running commentary on the event broadcast by AIR was in the scintillating
voice of none other than Melville d’ Mello.
Picture of The Shrine
The following extracts from Basant—1958, No.1 bring back some of
the flavour of that momentous event.
The Meditation Hall, wherein the relics lay
prior to enshrinement, was the scene of constant meditation by the
aspirants whose prayers mingled with the sweet fragrance of flowers and
incense to create a deeply devotional atmosphere. Men and women, deeply
touched by the serenity and solemnity of occasion, peered at the casket
containing the relics, marvelling at their power and force, which had so
highly surcharged the atmosphere with divinity.
The relics were now brought out from the Meditation Hall in a
small procession led by a boy and a girl carrying the flags of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother. The procession entered the gaily decorated lawn
in which lies the grey marble Shrine around which sadhaks had woven
beautiful patterns of multi-coloured flowers which formed symbols
alternately of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Shri Surendra Nath Jauhar
lifted the red marble lotus bud and Dr. C.D. Deshmukh, his head bowed and
hands carrying the casket, advanced and placed the relics in the marble
bowl on the top of the cube. The marble lotus bud was now put back into
its place—over the casket containing the relics—and thus ended the brief,
simple and dignified enshrinement ceremony.
Defying the chill of the December morning, the devotees had started
trickling into the Ashram since early hours. A number of sadhaks came
from different parts of the country. By about 9 a.m. the front lawn of
the Ashram was fully packed with devotees. People came to pay their
homage despite the distance, the overcast sky, which broke into a drizzle
twice or thrice, and despite the fact that it was a working day. Clouds
and the sun competed with each other in offering their
shradhanjali (homage), investing
the atmosphere with enchanting and dramatic colour and beauty. Gods also
did not lag behind and they sent the rainbow as their colourful offering.
The beginning made, now began a period of toil and sweat for
Chacha ji. Sparing neither himself nor his money or material, he jumped
into this new mission with the same courage, idealism and enthusiasm with
which he had entered the freedom struggle nearly forty years earlier.
Without any rigid plans, with little to guide him except inspiration and
encouragement from the Mother, came up the various institutions associated
with the Ashram: Sri Aurobindo Education Society, SABDA, Matri Printing
Press, Homeopathic Dispensary, Mira Nursery School, Matri Kala Mandir,
Mirambika Free Progress School – to name a few. By the time all this
development had taken place, Chacha ji was about 80, but his enthusiasm
and energy had not diminished one bit.
Picture: Tapasya Block
He (Shri
Surendra Nath Jauhar) had laid the foundations of this Ashram very deep,
they are founded on the spiritual vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
It is not just another Ashram; there are many Ashrams around the world,
but it is an Ashram that seeks to reflect a very deep commitment to the
spiritual quest.
– DR.
KARAN SINGH
Around 1966, Chacha ji spotted near Nainital on a hill top at 7400 feet a
bungalow that its owner, a Rana of Nepal, wanted to sell. The bungalow
once belonged to a Scotsman, who had named it Ben Nevis, after the highest
mountain peak of Scotland, which had the same name. Chacha ji saw in Ben
Nevis an opportunity to further the work begun in Delhi in the serene and
sacred Himalayas. Further, Ben Nevis was not far from the place that Sri
Aurobindo had visited with his wife, Mrinalini Devi, soon after their
marriage. Chacha ji acquired Ben Nevis and modified its name to Van
Niwas, an abode in the forest for radiating the new consciousness
envisioned by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Then began in the 1980s
another round of renovation to mould the property for the new purpose it
had found. In spite of his age, Chacha ji once again did not hesitate in
going through all the physical strain involved in the nitty-gritty of the
project. However, physical limitations spare nobody. Chacha ji’s health
deteriorated rapidly after that and he left his body in 1986. But by then
he had been joined in 1976 by his daughter, Tara, who had inherited his
dynamism and had also been nurtured by the Mother for 29 years. Left in
Pondicherry in 1944 at age eight, Tara turned out to be one of the
Mother’s favourite students. The Mother entrusted her to help take care
of physical education in the Ashram School in Pondicherry, and Tara, in
turn, imbibed a lot from the Mother, and got directly from the Mother the
answers to all her questions. The interactions between the Mother and the
devoted child have now been recorded in the book, Growing Up With the
Mother by Tara Jauhar. Thus, when three years after the Mother left
her body, Tara came to Delhi in 1976 to be by her father’s side to help
him in developing the Delhi Branch of the Ashram, Chacha ji got a person
who was not only physically and mentally well-equipped, but who also had
the right level of consciousness for the job. She soon became popular in
the Delhi Ashram as Tara Didi. Under the guidance of Chacha ji, and with
the help of her brother, Anil ji, she became a powerful instrument of the
Mother’s Force for developing the Ashram. Under Tara Didi’s guidance and
with her initiative started the Vocational Training and Teacher Training
Courses at Delhi, and the Study Camps, Youth Camps and National
Integration Camps at Van Niwas, Nainital. Tara Didi’s planning and
organization has led to the construction of several new buildings on the
campus, and with that the expansion of the activities of the Ashram. She
also started in the Ashram a school for the underprivileged, the Matri
Karuna Vidyalaya (MKV), which unfortunately had to be closed down in 2011
due to some limitations brought in by the Right to Education Act. It is
paradoxical that the Act took away the right of the underprivileged to get
excellent education from highly motivated volunteer teachers.
In the year 2003 came another opportunity for expanding the activities of
the Delhi Ashram. Dr. Qurban Hussain, a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother, had been giving all of himself for more than 30 years to the
development of a place for spiritual development in Ramgarh, about 40 km
away from Nainital. As he was getting old, he turned to the Delhi Ashram
to take over the management of the centre, called Madhuban. Tara Didi,
with her characteristic dynamism, has developed Madhuban into a vibrant
place, with vocational training, health camps, and plenty of activities
for the education and socio-economic development of the rural community in
Ramgarh and around.
In the year 2004, Tara Didi’s nephew, Pranjal, adopted a
remote tribal area called Kechla, in the Koraput District of Orissa, for
developmental work. The stimulus for the project came when he led a team
that went from the Delhi Ashram for relief and reconstruction work
following cyclone ‘Paradip’ that had devastated Orissa in October 1999.
Today the Kechla project has expanded to include three key areas that can
lead a community towards sustainable development and self-reliance:
education, health and environment. The educational activities in Kechla
include a primary school modeled on the lines of integral education as
envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Besides running the school,
Pranjal also conducts at Kechla camps for the teachers and students of the
Integral Schools of Orissa, and also camps for students from other parts
of the country. These camps are not just an adventurous outing for the
students, but also a subtle way of making the youth from privileged
sections of the society acutely aware of the primitive conditions and
material poverty in which many of their countrymen live. On the health
front, the Kechla project provides first-aid and essential medicines, and
also arranges for the hospitalization of children, if necessary –
something that the parents are unable to do. The result has been a
remarkable reduction in the number of infants and children who succumb to
the vicious cycle of malnutrition and infection. Although Kechla is far
away from the menace of industrial and vehicular pollution, it can benefit
from efforts to enhance awareness about protecting the environment. In
this area, Kechla has developed a model farm where organic food is grown,
supplies material for growing more trees with the help of manpower
generated by the local population, provides technology for drip irrigation
to farmers at one-eighth the cost, and has distributed about 1500 solar
lanterns, partly funded by USAID.
We owe the enormous growth and development of the Delhi Ashram, and its
spiritually uplifting atmosphere, to the Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother, and the untiring efforts of their chosen disciples. As the Mother
once wrote in a message to Chacha ji:
“I am more in Delhi Ashram than I am here (in Pondicherry)… I am hoping
and expecting a lot of Sri Aurobindo’s work to be done through the (Delhi)
Ashram.”
(with inputs from Sri Ravindra Joshi |
