Nirodbaran
Nirodbaran (17 November 1903 – 17 July 2006, Pondicherry) or "Nirod" for short, was the literary secretary and personal physician to Sri Aurobindo and scribe for SAVITRI: A LEGEND AND A SYMBOL. And senior member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
Sri Aurobindo |
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Life
He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in medicine. He was told about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother by Dilip Kumar Roy while in Paris. In 1930 he visited the Ashram and met the Mother and was overwhelmed and had a spiritual experience. After some vacillation he finally felt the call and joined Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1933, leaving behind the prospect of a highly lucrative career. In the Ashram he entered upon a new life and had many experiences and realizations. He returned to the Ashram with the intention of practising Yoga, and took up work as the resident doctor. He found to his surprise that poetry was one of the vocations taken up by some of the disciples. As Sri Aurobindo had already withdrawn from the public life of the ashram, he communicated with and instructed the sadhaks via letters, and Nirodbaran entered into a voluminous correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (receiving about 4000 letters), who encouraged and guided his attempts at poetry. He published a collection of his poems as Blossom of the Sun and 50 poems by Nirodbaran, which were revised and commented on by Sri Aurobindo.
In November 1938 Sri Aurobindo broke his leg and as a physician Nirodbaran was one of the disciples with medical knowledge who attend him while he recuperated. Nirodbaran was born into an aristocratic and distinguished Zamindar family. His close relatives were Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Chittaranjan Das, General Jayanto Nath Chaudhuri and Air Chief Marshal Subroto Mukherjee. Later he had published Talks with Sri Aurobindo (3 volumes), Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (2 volumes), and his memoir 12 years with Sri Aurobindo, as well as various volumes of poetry and other writings.
Nirodbaran died peacefully on the evening of 17 July 2006 at the Ashram Nursing Home in Pondicherry. He was 102. He was buried at the Ashram's Cazanove Gardens the next day. Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid homage at Dr. Nirodbaran Samadhi in Sri Aurobindo Ashram Puducherry, on February 25, 2018 as shown in a Doordarshan video Film.
External links
- Twelve years with Sri Aurobindo Chapter 1 - about Sri Aurobindo's accident on 23/24 November 1938]
- Nirodbaran
- Name Index - brief bio
- Supporting spiritual search