Why do we need yet another biography of Sri Aurobindo?
Peter Heehs: What justifies a new biography is new material or a new interpretation. Most biographies of Sri Aurobindo published before 1989 were based on his reminiscences, supplemented by an assortment of secondary sources. The idea that a historical work must be based on archival sources had apparently not occurred to the writers. It might not have occurred to me either if my first boss at the Ashram Archives, Jayantilal Parekh, had not suggested that I make a chronology of Aurobindo’s life, basing it on authentic documents. With his encouragement, I spent a few years working on and off in archives in Delhi , Calcutta and Baroda , and later in London and Paris . It wasn’t always easy the records of Baroda College were stored in gunny sacks covered with bat droppings, heaped up in an unused attic but all this research provided me with a lot of new material. When you do biographical research, you find out things about your subject by going to primary sources that state that such and s
