An Unorthodox Dictionary of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo's Works

Book excerpt: This Dictionary is dedicated to my mentor Shri Gopal Dass Gupta (1912-98). Like most Hindu spiritual aspirants of his time GD had turned to Sri Aurobindo through Essays on the Gita, & diligently practiced this ideal offered by Sri Aurobindo in his Uttarpāra Speech: "...not only to understand intellectually but to realise what... He demands of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion & desire, to do work for Him without demand for fruit, to renounce self-will & become a passive & faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high & low, friend & opponent, success & failure, yet not to do His work negligently." Prior to settling in the Ashram GD had been a conscientious principled teacher in Govt. institutions, habituated to obey their principles & policies. Jayantilal Parekh appointed him stock-keeper of the reams of paper purchased for printing the 30-volume SABCL, & keeping a register of customers who had paid in advance & sending them volumes ready for dispatch. Then the research & publication (R&P) wing of JP's Archives charged him with compiling a glossary-cum-index of proper names in SABCL & in its own Archives & Research Journal (A&R). When GD's backbreaking fifteen years of labour was crowned by R&P's refusal to publish it, it was Harikant Patel, the Managing Trustee of the Ashram, who saw to it that a decent number of GD's 368-page Glossary & Index (G&I) ended up on SABDA's lap. Then GD, conscientious soul that he was, without care for his ailing 76-years old body, went on to add half-a-dozen more draining years of & produced a 30-page Corrigenda-cum-Addenda, as Supplement to the Glossary, which Harikant got published in 1996 - just two years before GD's body gave up. Prior to which he had instructed me on what he would like a revised edition to be. Providentially a professor of SAICE, keen to preserve GD's work, got it scanned & granted me a digital copy.My purpose in this 'brief compendium' is to place the proper names I have selected from GD's 'vast' G&I in what I believe to be their right context in the lives of Sri Aurobindo & the Mother, using my innate modus operandi defined by my classmate Rājendra Bālgé in 1964-65 as simplification by complification. I have omitted those entries on which ample material is easily available, those not used by Sri Aurobindo, & those about which GD repeats what was in SABCL & A&R as Sri Aurobindo's. I have added what I could obtain of the historical, political, & biographical background of those proper names directly connected with Sri Aurobindo, often with relevant quotations from him & Mother; as a result there are many half-to-four-five-page fusions of history & biography inspired by two scholarly works built on such fusions aimed at promoting European Enlightenment (q.v.) - note that like them, I too, am rather lax in giving my sources: (1) ex-ICS, C.I.E. (Companion of Indian Empire), C.E. Buckland's Dictionary of Indian Biography, London, 1905, reprinted by Indological Book House, Varanasi & Delhi, 1971. Its preface declares: "This Dictionary purports to be a handy Work of Reference, giving the main facts ['notices' he calls them, i.e. Imperial Edicts] of the lives of about 2,600 persons - English, Indian, Foreign, men & women, living or dead - who have contributed to the welfare, service, & advancement of India...or have gained some special notoriety [as enemies of Pax Britannica]. It has been thought desirable to commence the present volume from about 1750 AD...when the British power in India was being established." (2) Prof Sachchidananda Bhattacharya's Dictionary of Indian History, Univ. of Calcutta, 2nd Ed., 1972, devotedly dedicated: "To All Orientalists, Eastern & Western, who by their Learned Labour have contributed to the Advancement of our Knowledge of the History of this Ancient Land of Ours." [Cf. his book's M. Müller & Md. of Ghazni against its Ghose, Aravinda; in essence M & G were enlightened, GA introduced the Bomb in Beng