A conversation with Prof. Murali Sivaramakrishnan at his home in Kowdiar takes one back to another Pondicherry.
A quieter, more contemplative place, when the coastal town was known more as the spiritual abode of Sri Aurobindo.
For decades, Aurobindo’s public image was that of a yogi. His earlier life as a revolutionary, however, is receiving renewed attention, thanks to discussions about his influence on India’s freedom struggle and figures such as Rash Behari Bose and Subhas Chandra Bose.
It is in this broader understanding of Aurobindo that the Sri Aurobindo Award recently bestowed on Murali acquires significance. Presented annually by Sri Aurobindo Bhavan in Kolkata, the award recognises a Malayali whose engagement with the philosopher extends beyond spirituality to his literary imagination, political ideals and philosophy of hope.
Murali received the award on August 15 at Santiniketan in West Bengal — a date that marks both India’s Independence Day and Aurobindo’s birth anniversary.
For Murali, the honour reflects a growing recognition of Aurobindo’s reach. “An influence that has often worked quietly, finding expression in literature and other works of social relevance,” he says.
His engagement with Aurobindo began as a young researcher at Kerala University, where he worked with the late Prof. Ayyappa Paniker on the book ‘The Mantra of Vision: An Overview of Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics’.
The research explored how Aurobindo’s spirituality impacted his writing across genres. “And it was not something passive. He was a revolutionary who was awakened to the power of the soul (atman) while in Alipore Central Jail,” Murali explains.
“There, a young man who worked to free the country from oppressive rule went beyond the material boundaries of a nation. He realised that true freedom included the liberation of the soul. But even after this realisation, he did not retreat into hermitage. His spirituality, too, bore a revolutionary zeal.”
Murali recalls how people with revolutionary pasts, such as A B Purani, were drawn to Aurobindo’s vision of asceticism. “The world, in this conception, was a laboratory; work was a mission directed towards transformative change,” he says.
Paniker encouraged Murali to explore Aurobindo’s idea of “overhead poetry”, which drew deeply on Indian philosophy and psychology.
“I have probed the mix of sabda and artha in his works through an ancient Indian linguistic framework called ‘sphota shastra’, which explains how speech sounds, or dhvani, convey meaning, or artha, to the listener,” says Murali, a former head of the English department at Pondicherry University.
“The revelation is instantaneous, almost a burst. It emanates a certain power, which you can find in Sri Aurobindo’s writings, such as his magnum opus ‘Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol’ — the longest epic poem in English. It is a sublime blend of his spiritual vision and poetic brilliance.”
The meeting of the spiritual and the literary became a central subject of Murali’s study. He went on to write several books, including ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics and Poetics: New Directions’ and ‘Sri Aurobindo and Poetics of Hope’.
His research also brought him into “deep interactions” with some of Aurobindo’s closest followers, such as K D Sethna, Champaklal and Dilip Kumar Roy. “They gave me access to rare and original manuscripts of Aurobindo’s works, which have now been digitised, with the originals kept out of public view,” says Murali.
“These experiences also led me to write regularly for journals such as ‘Mother India’ and ‘Action’. I have since collected some of these writings in books such as ‘Learning to Think Like Myself’.”
Tracing Aurobindo’s influence on poets and writers, Murali says, similarly requires an understanding of literary movements, individual voices and exchanges across geographical boundaries.
He recalls, for instance, the intellectual exchanges between Aurobindo’s disciple K D Sethna and the English poet Kathleen Raine. Their disagreement over Aurobindo’s 24,000-line ‘Savitri’ developed into an extended dialogue between two literary sensibilities.
“They engaged in an intellectual duel. Their exchanges later became a book, ‘The English Language and the ‘Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K D Sethna’,” says Murali.
Raine would go on to develop a lifelong reverence for Indian philosophy, which she explored in her autobiography, India Seen Afar.
“As a person of letters, I could sense Aurobindo’s touch in several poets across the world — Australians, New Zealanders, the English…,” says Murali.
In Keralam, this influence dates back to Aurobindo’s revolutionary years. ‘Swadeshabhimani’ Ramakrishna Pillai admired his advocacy of Purna Swaraj, articulated through the fiery editorials he wrote for ‘Bande Mataram’.
Aurobindo’s commitment to the Swadeshi movement and his revolutionary activities, including his association with the Anushilan Samiti, represented a more radical challenge to British rule than the moderate nationalists’ approach of prayer, petition and protest.
The echoes in Malayalam literature were less direct. Akkitham attempted to translate Savitri, while Aurobindo’s poetic imagery and universal vision found resonances in the works of Malayalam poetry’s romantic trio — Kumaran Asan, Vallathol Narayana Menon and Ulloor S Parameswara Iyer.
Vallathol drew inspiration from Aurobindo’s fierce nationalism, while Asan’s philosophical verse shared affinities with his cultural and spiritual vision.
The influence extended beyond literature. Among the post-Independence Keralite intellectuals inspired by Aurobindo were P Parameswaran, S Guptan Nair and Velayudhan Nair. Poet and scholar Vishnu Narayanan Namboodiri, too, translated portions of ‘Savitri’ into Malayalam.
For Murali, these connections establish how Aurobindo’s ideas “travelled across generations, through both direct engagement with his works and their reinterpretation by others”.
“This has become universal. Recently, a Romanian magazine named ‘Creativity’ asked me to review a book on the Mother (Mirra Alfassa), Aurobindo’s foremost spiritual collaborator,” says Murali, whose book Roads to Nowhere reflects Aurobindo’s influence on his thinking.
“My books on Aurobindo have been translated into Malayalam by R Jayaram, and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry has asked for more copies. This suggests that his influence is growing even among Malayalis.”
Yet, how far Aurobindo speaks to younger generations remains an open question. “Today’s youth oscillate between heightened self-absorption and a sense of futility, much like what the psychologist Ashis Nandy observed in the context of ‘selfie culture’. But a sense of romance remains strong among them, as seen in their adoration of Jalaluddin Rumi and Bhagat Singh, though they understand the romantic ideals of these figures differently,” he says.
“Sri Aurobindo, who indirectly influenced Bhagat Singh, was a radical mystic. He declined Mahatma Gandhi’s offers to chair Congress sessions to pursue a life devoted to his own ideals. Such romanticism is still alive among the youth. Aurobindo was a practical dreamer who spoke of a dream boat that comes for those who can perceive its arrival. This thought embodies a true romantic zeal, and that is why Aurobindo remains relevant.”
Aurobindo’s works, Murali adds, hold an enchanting mystery. “But once we delve into it, he becomes as accessible as living and breathing. Aurobindo is not heavy; he is subtle,” he says. Making that subtlety accessible to a wider readership is now his immediate task. At the behest of Aleph Book Company, Murali is working on an introduction to Aurobindo for general readers, especially the youth.
“I do not go by the beta and omega of the future or the past, but believe in the alpha of the present. As Sri Aurobindo perhaps implies,” he smiles.