As profound as their spiritual contributions are, the arduous, separate and four-year-apart journeys of Sri Aurobindo and his compatriot The Mother to reach the city of their destiny are riveting stories in themselves.
According to the Ashram literature, The Mother’s journey in 1914, would take almost three weeks, from Marseilles — the biggest French port on the Mediterranean by ship, through the Suez Canal, down to Colombo and then by boat and train from there to then Pondicherry. The journey is documented in great detail in the Golden Chain, the alumni journal of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in its centenary edition of The Mother’s arrival to the city.
It mentions, for instance, her visit to a Cairo museum where one of the showpieces was the toiletries of a fabled Egyptian queen, Hatshepsut, and an encounter aboard a ship in the Red Sea with a clergyman on a mission to convert the Chinese.
From Colombo, she would cross the straits at Talaimannar and disembark at Dhanushkodi.
Talaimannar was the terminus of a ferry service to India which was part of the Indo-Lanka Railway service, where passengers were ferried between Talaimannar and Dhanushkodi on Rameswaram Island.
The Mother boarded the Boat Mail train on March 28, changed trains at Villupuram, and arrived the following day at Pondicherry, where she took a room at the Hotel de L’Europe on Rue Suffren, before going to meet Sri Aurobindo.
It was four years before that — in 1910 — Sri Aurobindo set out from then Calcutta by the steamer Duplex and reached these shores on April 4.
He was received at the port by Srinivasachari, a firebrand nationalist and the great poet Subramania Bharati and taken by horse-carriage to the house of Calve Shankara Chettiar, a citizen of gentry, — this was the same house where Swami Vivekananda stayed during his south India tour.
According to Dibyendu Goswami, chief convener of the celebrations, when he arrived in this city Sri Aurobindo was facing an arrest warrant issued by the British Government for his patriotic writings.
Pondicherry, being under French rule, was outside the jurisdiction of the warrant, though police detectives from erstwhile Madras mounted surveillance on Sri Aurobindo, he pointed out.
K. Lakshminarayanan, MLA, World Peace Trust president, points out that The Mother’s first visit to the city was a brief one as she left first to France and then Japan until she returned to the city for good in 1920.
