A Living Tradition of South Asia
On the morning of August 15, 1872, in a house in north Calcutta, a son was born to Dr. Krishna Dhan Ghose and his wife Swarnalata Devi. Dr. Ghose, a product of the Calcutta Medical College and a devout admirer of British civilization, resolved that his children would be educated as Englishmen. At age seven, Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose was sent with his two brothers to England and placed with an English family in Manchester, with instructions that they were to have no contact with India, Indian culture, or Indians. He would not return to his native country for the next fourteen years. He came back fluent in English, Greek, Latin, and French; saturated in the classics and English poetry; entirely ignorant of Sanskrit; and, by his own later account, virtually a stranger to the land of his birth.
He spent the next seventeen years becoming Indian. In Baroda state service, he learned Sanskrit, Marathi, and Bengali, read the Upanishads and the Mahabharata, and began the yoga practices that would occupy the rest of his life. He moved to Calcutta in 1906 and became, within a year, the most electrifying voice of the Indian independence movement — the first political leader in the country to publicly demand complete independence rather than self-governance within the Empire. He was arrested in 1908 in connection with a revolutionary conspiracy, spent a year in jail awaiting trial, was acquitted, and then, in April 1910, following what he described as a divine command, crossed the border into the French enclave of Pondicherry and never returned to British India.
In Pondicherry he turned entirely toward the work that the nationalist career had been, he understood in retrospect, only a preparation for: a systematic exploration of consciousness beyond the ordinary human mind, and a project — unprecedented in the history of religion or philosophy — to bring that consciousness permanently into the fabric of earthly life. He would spend forty years in Pondicherry. He published ceaselessly for the first decade, then retired to his rooms and rarely appeared in public again. He died in 1950 still working. His collaborator Mirra Alfassa lived another twenty-three years, spent most of them dictating a thirteen-volume record of what she maintained was the transformation of her own cellular consciousness, and in 1968 inaugurated a city in a dry plateau north of Pondicherry that was meant to embody what all the work had been pointing toward. The city exists. It is still being built.
I. The Making of a Philosopher-Yogi
Aurobindo Ghose was born on August 15, 1872 — the same calendar date that would become Indian Independence Day in 1947, a coincidence he considered significant. His father, Krishna Dhan Ghose, was a civil surgeon who had been educated in Scotland and returned with a thoroughgoing admiration for British rationalism and a corresponding contempt for traditional Hindu religion. His decision to send his sons to England was not mere educational ambition; it was an act of cultural severance. The three boys were placed with the Reverend W. H. Drewett's family in Manchester and given strict instructions that no contact with Indians was to be permitted.
The Manchester years (1879–1885) were followed by St. Paul's School in London (1885–1889) and then King's College, Cambridge (1890–1892), where Aurobindo won a scholarship in classics and distinguished himself in Greek and Latin composition. He read for the Indian Civil Service examination, passed with distinction, and then, apparently by design, missed the riding test that was required for admission — arriving too late to take it. The avoidance has the quality of deliberate choice: the young man who had been sent to England to become an administrator of Empire was already becoming something else.
He returned to India in 1893 and entered service at the court of the Maharaja of Baroda, where he spent the next thirteen years in a sustained process of self-recovery. He taught himself Sanskrit and Bengali, read the Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, and Mahabharata directly, studied the yoga systems and began practicing pranayama, and began writing — in English — a body of poetry and critical prose that would establish him as one of the finest English stylists working in India. He also, quietly, began the political work that would explode publicly a decade later: writing revolutionary tracts, corresponding with nationalist organizers, contributing to underground publications.
The Partition of Bengal in 1905 — Lord Curzon's division of the province along religious lines, widely understood as a deliberate administrative weakening of Bengali national consciousness — brought him fully into the open. He moved to Calcutta, became principal of the new National College, and began writing for Bande Mataram, the nationalist newspaper he effectively ran. His editorials were the most uncompromising in the Indian press: where the Congress moderates asked for greater self-governance, Aurobindo demanded complete independence, and argued that passive resistance needed to be prepared to become active. He was tried for sedition in 1907 and acquitted.
He was not so fortunate in 1908. On April 30, 1908, two young nationalists attempted to assassinate the British magistrate Kingsford in Muzaffarpur — mistakenly killing two English women instead. The Alipore Bomb Case, as the subsequent investigation was called, swept up thirty-eight men, including Aurobindo's younger brother Barin and eventually Aurobindo himself, arrested on May 2. He spent a year in Alipore Jail awaiting trial.
The year in jail was, by Aurobindo's own account, the decisive spiritual turning point of his life. He had entered jail a practitioner of yoga but not yet a realized one; he emerged something different. He later described visions of the Gita's author Vyas, an experience of divine presence pervading every object and person in the jail — including his guards and judges — and a progressive opening of consciousness that he identified as the experience of Brahman (the universal divine ground of being) in everything. He was acquitted on May 6, 1909, through the brilliant courtroom advocacy of Chittaranjan Das, and emerged to address a large public gathering at Uttarpara — a speech that announced, for those who could hear it, that his understanding of the political struggle had become inseparable from his understanding of the divine work.
He edited his publications — Karmayogin and Dharma — for several more months, but the British authorities were preparing new charges, and on February 15, 1910, he received what he described as a sudden divine communication: go to Chandernagore. Then go to Pondicherry. He went. It was the last time he crossed the border of British India.
II. Pondicherry: The Yoga of Transformation
Pondicherry in 1910 was a French colonial town of some 40,000, distinguished mainly by its slightly wider streets and French signage. Aurobindo arrived under a false name, settled in a modest house in the Indian quarter, and began the work that would occupy the rest of his life: a systematic exploration of the highest levels of consciousness and an attempt to bring what he found permanently into the physical world.
From 1914 to 1921, he published Arya — a monthly journal of philosophy, running initially to sixty-four pages per issue — in which he composed, in serial form, the principal texts that would define his teaching. The Life Divine, his major work of metaphysics, appeared there; so did The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of the Veda, and The Human Cycle. The pace was extraordinary: he was producing what amounts to multiple books per year, in real time, without revision, in a voice of unusual philosophical command. The Life Divine alone — his attempt at a complete philosophical reconciliation of matter and spirit, of the evolutionary sciences and the testimony of the mystics — runs to nearly a thousand pages.
The philosophical vision at the center of these texts is best approached through the concept of involution and evolution. Aurobindo's cosmos begins with what he calls Sachchidananda — the triple compound of Sat (pure being), Chit (pure consciousness-force), and Ananda (pure bliss) that constitutes the Absolute. From this ground of infinite free consciousness, the cosmos is produced not by creation ex nihilo but by involution: consciousness limits and concentrates itself progressively through a hierarchy of planes — the Supermind (the highest cosmic intelligence, which knows unity and multiplicity simultaneously), the Overmind (which perceives the unity but allows distinct cosmic forces to operate as if relatively independent), and then successive veils of mental, vital, and material consciousness — until it reaches the almost total self-forgetfulness of physical matter. Matter is not the absence of spirit but spirit in its most contracted, concentrated, apparently self-concealing form.
Evolution, in this framework, is the reverse movement: matter evolving life, life evolving mind, mind evolving toward the higher planes from which the whole process descended. Darwin's evolution is real, but partial: it describes the outer surface of a process whose inner significance is the progressive self-discovery of consciousness. Humanity represents the current frontier of this process — a being that has evolved mind and is now at the threshold of what Aurobindo calls the supramental transformation.
The Supermind is the central concept of Aurobindo's mature teaching. It is not simply a higher intelligence; it is the plane of consciousness where unity and multiplicity, the divine and the individual, are perceived simultaneously and without division. All religions and mystical traditions, Aurobindo argues, have touched the edges of this plane — hence their convergent testimonies about light, union, the dissolution of the separate self — but none has fully brought it down. The traditions that achieved the highest realizations (the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara, the formless mysticism of the Sufis) characteristically dismissed the material world as illusion and advocated liberation into a transcendent consciousness from which matter was a fall to escape. Aurobindo reverses this: if matter is the involution of spirit, then the completion of the divine work is not escape from matter but its transformation. Liberation into a transcendent silence is not the goal; it is the preparation for the real work, which is bringing the Supermind into the material world.
This is what makes integral yoga — the practice Aurobindo developed toward this end — structurally different from every earlier yoga. Earlier yogas aimed at liberation (mukti): the individual soul's release from the cycle of birth and death, whether into Brahman's impersonal vastness or into a personal deity's paradise. Integral yoga aims at transformation: the divinization of the individual and, through individuals, of the collective and material world. The body is not to be transcended but transformed. Death is not to be accepted but — eventually, through generations — overcome. Aurobindo was describing what he believed to be the next stage of evolution, and he was claiming that the instruments of that evolution were already available to human beings who undertook the required practice.
The three elements of integral yoga are surrender, aspiration, and rejection. The practitioner turns toward the Divine not for personal liberation but in the spirit of offering all that one is and does toward the larger work. Aspiration toward the higher planes of consciousness opens the being to what Aurobindo calls the psychic being — the soul, the divine spark within each person that has been evolving across incarnations and that, when it comes to the front of the consciousness, provides the warmth, clarity, and discernment necessary for the transformation. Rejection is the steady refusal of the forces of the lower nature — desire, ego, attachment — that obstruct the psychic opening.
Aurobindo's mature philosophical synthesis is worked out in The Life Divine (1939–40), which attempts nothing less than a complete reconciliation of the evolutionary understanding of the universe with the non-dual testimony of the Upanishads, refracted through Hegelian dialectics, the Vedic symbolism, and the testimony of his own extended yogic investigation. The work does not read like most philosophy: it has the patient, spiraling quality of a mind working through an enormous problem in real time, willing to hold contradictions open for hundreds of pages before resolving them. Its conclusion — that the apparent opposition of spirit and matter, knowledge and ignorance, the eternal and the temporal, dissolves at the level of the Supermind — has been called one of the most systematically argued claims in the history of religious philosophy.
Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol is the other major work of this period — a poem in blank verse that Aurobindo worked on for most of his adult life, revising it until the end. At 23,813 lines, it is one of the longest poems in the English language. Its source is the Sanskrit myth of Savitri and Satyavan from the Mahabharata: the princess who follows Death itself to reclaim her husband's life. In Aurobindo's telling, the myth becomes a symbolic account of the entire spiritual evolution of consciousness — Savitri as the avatar of the Divine Mother, her descent into the worlds of ignorance and death as the taking on of the human condition, her victory as the promise of the supramental transformation. The poem was unfinished at his death; what exists runs to three books and twelve cantos.
III. The Mother — Mirra Alfassa
No understanding of this tradition is possible without Mirra Alfassa, who was born in Paris on February 21, 1878, to a Turkish-Jewish father (Moïse Maurice Alfassa, from Edirne via Egypt) and an Egyptian-Jewish mother (Mathilde Ismalun, from Cairo). The family background is as cosmopolitan as backgrounds come in the late nineteenth century: Turkish, Egyptian, Jewish, French, the Sephardic diaspora routed through the Ottoman Empire and deposited in Paris.
Alfassa was an artist, studying at the Académie Julian (where she trained alongside painters of the post-Impressionist generation); a musician of serious ability; and, from her adolescence, a person who reported consistent experiences of inner visions, guidance from presences she could not name, and states of consciousness she had no vocabulary to describe. In 1905 and 1906, she traveled twice to Tlemcen in Algeria to study with Max Théon, a Polish-born occultist (born Eliezer Mordecai Bimstein) who had founded the Cosmic Movement — an elaborate system of occult practice drawing on Kabbalistic, Hermetic, and neo-Theosophical sources. Théon's wife, Alma Théon, was a gifted medium who could withdraw her consciousness from her body while in trance and explore other planes. The Tlemcen experiences gave Alfassa both a technical vocabulary for her inner life and a direct encounter with the possibilities of consciousness development through systematic practice.
In Paris she founded a small spiritual circle, L'Idée Nouvelle (The New Idea), which met at her home and drew artists, philosophers, and spiritual seekers. She married twice: first to the painter Henri Morisset (1897; one son, André), then to the French diplomat and philosopher Paul Richard (1911). It was with Paul Richard that she arrived in Pondicherry on March 29, 1914, looking for an Indian spiritual master whom she had seen in visions.
She found him. Aurobindo recognized her immediately; she recognized him as the figure who had guided her inwardly for years. During their meetings, Alfassa experienced states of consciousness she would later describe as a complete stilling of the ordinary mind — exactly the kind of opening that Aurobindo's own practice had been cultivating. The Arya journal, which began in August 1914, was published simultaneously in the English prepared by Aurobindo and the French prepared by Alfassa and Paul Richard. WWI ended the visit in February 1915; the Richards returned to Europe.
Alfassa returned permanently in 1920, arriving on April 24. Paul Richard left India shortly thereafter; the partnership that had brought her to Pondicherry dissolving now that it had served its purpose. She remained in Pondicherry for the rest of her life — fifty-three years.
Aurobindo's declaration of her significance was explicit and unambiguous. In the tradition's understanding, the Divine has both a masculine aspect (Purusha: pure consciousness, witness, seer) and a feminine aspect (Shakti, or Prakriti: the dynamic energy, the executive power, the Mother). The masculine divine knows; the feminine divine does. Aurobindo declared Alfassa to be the living embodiment of the Divine Mother — not a figure of devotion at a symbolic remove, but an actual descent of the Shakti into a human body to do the transformative work that his own practice had prepared the ground for. She was addressed thereafter as "the Mother" — a title meaning something precisely different from the honorific "mother" in most devotional traditions. She was not the Mother because she was revered; she was the Mother because she was, in the tradition's understanding, the Mother.
On November 24, 1926 — a date kept in the tradition as "Siddhi Day," the day of spiritual achievement — Aurobindo announced the descent of the Overmind into his consciousness: the highest cosmic plane, the global awareness of unity and multiplicity that immediately precedes the Supermind. He retired from public life into his rooms, and the Mother took over the management of the growing community of disciples. Aurobindo would emerge from his rooms publicly only four times after 1926 — twice yearly for darshan, the ritual act of beholding the master, at which disciples would file silently before him.
The ashram that the Mother managed grew from a handful of disciples in the 1920s to several hundred by the 1940s. She organized every aspect of its life with extraordinary administrative precision: housing, food, a school (the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, founded 1943), a printing press, a sports ground. She taught directly, received visitors, answered correspondence in multiple languages, gave talks and conversations recorded by disciples. The tradition produces a vast documentary record: volumes of her conversations on specific topics — education, health, the meaning of music, the significance of flowers — as well as the extraordinary thirteen-volume Agenda (1951–1973), a record of her daily conversations with her secretary Satprem over the last two decades of her life, in which she described, in real time, her attempts to transform her own cellular consciousness.
On February 29, 1956 — another date kept in the tradition — the Mother announced what she called the supramental manifestation: the opening of the Supermind into the earth-plane. Aurobindo had died in 1950 still working toward this; the Mother described it as the fulfillment of the work they had been doing together, the moment toward which the ashram's entire existence had been oriented. The announcement was quiet, matter-of-fact, and absolute.
The Mother died on November 17, 1973, at the age of ninety-five. Her relationship to death was consistent with her teaching: she had worked for years on what she called the "cellular transformation," maintaining that the body's subjection to decay and death was a condition of the current evolutionary stage and not a metaphysical necessity. The transformation she was attempting was meant to change this. Whether it succeeded, in any sense, is a question the tradition holds open.
IV. Auroville — The City of Dawn
The idea of Auroville had been forming for decades. As early as the 1930s, the Mother had commissioned the architect Antonin Raymond (designer of the Golconde guesthouse, the first fully modern building in India) to draw plans for a new city. The concept was realized only in the 1960s, with the appointment of the French architect Roger Anger as designer of what would become Auroville — a city for 50,000 people laid out on a circular galaxy plan on a dry plateau eleven kilometers north of Pondicherry.
The inauguration ceremony took place on February 28, 1968. Representatives from 124 nations and all the states of India brought handfuls of soil from their homelands, which were mingled in a white marble lotus urn at the center of the proposed city. The Mother, ninety years old and in declining health, did not attend; she addressed the gathering by radio from her rooms at the ashram. Young people from around the world had come; they camped in the red laterite dust of the plateau and built their first structures in the months that followed.
The Mother's Charter, handwritten by her in French, expresses the vision in four points: that Auroville belongs not to any individual or group but to all humanity; that to live in Auroville one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness; that Auroville is to be a place of unending education and constant progress; and that Auroville is to be a bridge between the past and the future — living proof that human unity is practically possible. UNESCO unanimously endorsed the project in resolutions passed in 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1983.
The Matrimandir — the "temple of the Mother," designed by Roger Anger — is the architectural center of Auroville and the most arresting structure in the tradition. A golden sphere forty meters in diameter, it rises from the center of the galaxy plan surrounded by twelve gardens, each named for an aspect of the Mother's yoga (Sincerity, Humility, Gratitude, Perseverance, Aspiration, Receptivity, Progress, Courage, Goodness, Generosity, Equality, Peace). Construction began in 1971. It was not completed until 2008 — thirty-seven years. Inside the sphere, at its heart, is the inner chamber: a white marble room in perfect silence, lit by a beam of sunlight tracked by a heliostat through a ninety-centimeter crystal sphere — reported to be the largest optically perfect glass sphere in the world — that scatters the beam into the room as a circle of light on the floor. No meditation instruction is offered. Visitors are asked to bring their own concentration. The space is not dedicated to any deity.
The early years of Auroville were years of extraordinary creative energy and physical hardship. Pioneers from France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and elsewhere arrived on a barren plateau stripped of topsoil by decades of overgrazing, with no infrastructure, no clean water, no electricity. They planted trees — eventually several million of them, restoring a degraded landscape into the subtropical forest that now covers much of the Auroville area. They built houses, schools, workshops, farms. They developed building technologies appropriate to the local climate and materials. The reforestation of the Auroville plateau is one of the significant ecological achievements in the history of intentional communities — a dry wasteland that became a forest in two decades.
The governance question was always complicated. The Mother's vision was of a community living by higher consciousness — not by rules and hierarchies but by the collective discernment of people genuinely committed to the supramental ideal. In practice, this meant an absence of formal governance structures that became acute after her death in 1973. The Indian government, which had assisted Auroville's establishment, passed the Auroville Foundation Act in 1988, creating a statutory authority with a Governing Board appointed by the national government, a Residents' Assembly with exclusive authority over admissions, and an International Advisory Council. The intent was to protect Auroville from factional disputes; the reality has been a layered governance structure whose ambiguities have generated repeated crises.
V. The Contemporary Situation
The Sri Aurobindo Ashram continues to function in Pondicherry, centered on the buildings that Aurobindo and the Mother inhabited, including the Samadhi — the burial shrine where both are interred in the ashram courtyard beneath a large spreading tree. The Samadhi is one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in South India; tens of thousands of visitors come annually. The ashram maintains extensive educational and welfare activities through more than forty departments: a school serving some 2,000 students from pre-primary through undergraduate, a press, agricultural farms, a handmade paper factory, workshops in weaving and craft. Governance since 1973 has been through a trust structure, and the ashram has navigated significant internal tensions over succession and institutional authority.
Auroville's present situation is marked by a governance crisis that has become, since 2021, both acute and visible. The Auroville Foundation, whose Secretary is a Union government appointee, has pursued an aggressive development agenda — centering on the construction of the "Crown Road," a circular boulevard linking the four zones of the galaxy plan — over the sustained objection of the majority of residents. In December 2021, over nine hundred trees were cleared on sixty-seven acres in a single operation; police were deployed against residents who physically blocked construction equipment, and accounts of midnight operations and alleged assaults on residents including minors were documented by journalists. An internal petition signed by more than five hundred residents requested delay pending collective consensus; the petition was dismissed.
The subsequent years saw the Governing Board assert increasingly comprehensive authority over Auroville's internal life — including, in December 2023, new regulations granting Board appointees control over who joins and leaves the community, directly contradicting the Residents' Assembly's exclusive statutory authority over admissions. In June 2024, 98% of 945 residents voted to halt, review, and reverse land deals undertaken by the Secretary; the Governing Board proceeded with further exchanges in October 2024. On March 17, 2025, the Supreme Court of India reversed a Madras High Court ruling and affirmed the Governing Board as Auroville's supreme administrative authority, effectively ending the residents' recourse to the courts.
Critics, including many long-term Aurovilians and international observers, describe the trajectory as the subordination of the Mother's vision of a collectively self-governing community to the priorities of an Indian nationalist government that views Auroville as a useful international showcase. The conflict between the ideal of Auroville — governance by higher consciousness, the city as living demonstration of human unity — and the reality of a legally constituted authority whose Secretary is a government appointee is not new; it has been present since 1988. What has changed since 2021 is the intensity with which the authority has been exercised and the explicit alignment of the development agenda with Union government priorities.
Auroville counts approximately three thousand residents from over fifty countries, making it arguably the world's most genuinely international intentional community. Its economic life has diversified far beyond its founders' expectations: Auroville enterprises (in sustainable construction, organic agriculture, handmade paper, software development, educational materials, wellness) generate revenues that sustain the community's infrastructure and development. The Auroville International zone hosts research, conferences, and cultural exchange that give the community a continuing international profile distinct from its internal governance troubles. Whatever the institutional future, the landscape itself — that forest grown from a barren plateau — stands as the most material expression of what the tradition was trying to demonstrate.
VI. The Aquarian Significance
In the sequence of Indian reformers that begins with Ram Mohan Roy, Sri Aurobindo represents the end of a progressive radicalization of ambition. Roy wanted to purify religion. Dayananda Sarasvati wanted to return to the Vedas. Ramakrishna and Vivekananda wanted to synthesize all paths. Aurobindo wanted to transform matter itself. Each generation of the Hindu reform tradition had expanded the scope of what spiritual practice was meant to accomplish; Aurobindo brought it to the point where the distinction between spiritual practice and cosmic evolution collapsed entirely.
In the broader Aquarian context, the tradition occupies a singular position. It is the Aquarian movement that most explicitly claims to be doing something that has never been done before — not recovering a lost wisdom, not synthesizing existing traditions, but inaugurating a new evolutionary dispensation. This claim distinguishes it from the neo-traditionalism of the Arya Samaj, the perennialist synthesis of Vivekananda, and even the experiential directness of Transcendental Meditation. It also makes it vulnerable to a criticism that the tradition's own practitioners tend to acknowledge: the claim is extraordinarily large, the evidence for its success is internal and experiential, and the institutional history of the ashram and Auroville has produced many of the same dynamics of authority, succession, and conflict that characterize the institutions against which the tradition originally defined itself.
Aurobindo's philosophical achievement is, separately from the question of its truth, one of the most systematic attempts in modern thought to develop a non-dualistic account of matter, consciousness, and evolution that takes seriously both the testimony of the contemplative traditions and the findings of modern science. Scholars of Indian philosophy (Peter Heehs, whose Lives of Sri Aurobindo remains the most comprehensive biography; Rod Hemsell, whose work on the philosophy is available through the Savitri Foundation; Makarand Paranjape at Jawaharlal Nehru University) have wrestled with the system on its own terms and continue to find it generative. The tradition's journals and study groups maintain an active intellectual life alongside the more devotional aspects of ashram practice.
Whether the supramental transformation that the tradition announces has occurred, is occurring, or will occur is not a question this profile can answer. What can be said is that the tradition poses the question with unusual philosophical seriousness, and that the city growing in the Tamil Nadu landscape — however compromised, contested, and incomplete — remains one of the most committed material experiments in what an Aquarian religion thinks the world can become.
Colophon
This profile was researched and written in March 2026. Key sources: Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press, 2008); Wikipedia (Sri Aurobindo; Mirra Alfassa; Sri Aurobindo Ashram; Auroville; Matrimandir; Integral Yoga; Savitri); sriaurobindoashram.org; auroville.org; Auroville Media Liaison (auroville.media, crisis documentation 2021–2025); WRSP (Integral Yoga — Aurobindo; Auroville); Mongabay India (environmental documentation 2022); NewsLaundry (governance analysis 2025); Supreme Court of India (March 2025 ruling); UNESCO resolutions (1966, 1968, 1970, 1983); Integral Yoga Wikipedia article (levels of consciousness); Philosophy Institute series on Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision; Britannica (Sri Aurobindo; Mirra Alfassa).
No texts archived. The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) and the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL) are under active copyright held by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. The Mother's Agenda (13 vols.) is copyright of the Institut de Recherches Évolutives, Paris. Sri Aurobindo died 1950; most major works were first published in book form 1939–1951; copyright renewal by the Ashram Trust means no texts enter the public domain for several decades. The early Arya journal articles (1914–1921) may be investigated in future sessions as potential public-domain candidates — pre-1928 periodical publications in the US. Future archive candidate if confirmed free: early Arya articles if original periodical scans with public domain status are located at archive.org.
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