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I1893-1910
 
(After thirteen years in England where he received a thoroughly Western education, Sri Aurobindo returned to India on February 6, 1893, at the age of twenty.Bankim Chatterji's Anandamath, which contained “Bande Mataram,” the hymn to the Motherland, had been published eleven years earlier. Swami Vivekananda had just come to the end of his first pilgrimage round India, and was preparing to sail for America. But it was going to take another dozen years for their call to their countrymen to find expression in the political field. For the present, the eight-year-old Indian National Congress, whose members were mostly drawn from the Anglicized upper classes of society, had full faith in British fair- mindedness and the “providential character” of British rule in India, and year after year swore its “unswerving allegiance to the British crown”; it was content with submitting petitions which were simply ignored by the Colonial rulers. There was another twelve years to go before the start of the open struggle for freedom in 1905, and twenty-five years before Mahatma Gandhi's entry on the political scene in 1918.Sri Aurobindo was twenty-one when he wrote a series of nine articles, “New Lamps for Old”, in the 
Indu Prakash
, a Marathi- English Bombay daily; in these articles, which had to be stopped following pressures on the newspaper's editor, Sri Aurobindo took stock of the prevailing situation and launched into a detailed and forceful criticism of the “mendicant policy” of the Congress. Afew extracts:)
August 7, 1893
We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do sowould be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery.***
 
August 21, 1893
Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our owncrying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, ourpurblind sentimentalism.***
August 28, 1893
I say, of the Congress, then, this—that its aims are mistaken, that thespirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit ofsincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are notthe right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of mento be leaders;—in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind,at any rate by the one-eyed.***
December 4, 1893
To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions ina spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with ourLegislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations,
1[1]
our ingeniousschemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions,—while we, Isay, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirredand that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societiesare superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely andominously agitated.***
1[1]
References to two largely meaningless reforms that the Congress was atthe time begging from the British rulers.
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