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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES : Dilip Kumar Roy the cooperators as against antagonists. And in his works he synthesised various traditions of the past so that there could follow even greater future. (B) Evaluation
This is the portrait of Sri Aurobindo that emerges from Dilip Roy's pages. too. Such intimate portrait with a focus on the spiritual self of Sri Aurobindo we do not discover in his exhaustive biographies like those written by A B, Purani (Life of Sri Aurobindo), K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar (Sri Aurobindo:A Biography and History), and Peter Hees (Sri Aurobindo:A Brief Biography). These biographies contain documented information and accurate picture of this greatman. But there is no sense of life in them. Here, you feel, you are in the living presence of the master. You feel his smile, you hear his voice. you see him face to face as it were. It is indeed a literary experience rather than mere information of a splendid life. So, Dilip Roy has succeeded in presenting a pulsating portrait or a movie picture which is quite different from a still picture.
It is clear that Dilip Roy employs comparative method of evaluation without its critical aspect in his approach to Sri Aurobindo and others. He has tried to compare the greatness of his guru with the greatness of other illuminates of the world, like Vivekananda, Krishnaprem, Rabindranath Tagore, Romain Rolland etc.
According to Dilip Roy, Sri Aurobindo, like Vivekananda, had great love for his motherland and its spiritual role in the world history. Both of them tried to transmit India's spiritual message to the whole world in their own peculiar manners.33 But Dilip Roy fails to note the difference between the two. Vivakanand blew like a cyclone through the East and the West in his short and tumultuous life in his god-assigned mission of awakening the motherland from her sleep. Sri Aurobindo, on the contrary, retired to the solitude of his Ashram in South India and spent his long life there practising yoga. Paradoxically, the sannyasi who is supposed to be retired and passive was more active than the prophet of the future 'fusion of the time and eternity' and an advocate of the love of life and action.
The portraits of Sri Aurobindo and Krishnaprem, too, look compared, and the outcome enlightens us on the peculiar features of both.34 Both Sri Aurobindo, Dilip Roy's formally accepted guru and Krishnaprem, one of his informal gurus, are the birds of the same feather. Both of them believed in guruvad and had deep love and sympathy for Roy. Both of them were scholars of the Eastern and the Western classics. But Sri Aurobindo formed his own philosophy of the Integral Yoga based on the synthesis of the Eastern and the Western philosophies and was convinced that Krishna Himself had mandated him for the work he was doing. On the other hand, Sri Krishnaprem, as the name suggests, stood for his love of Krishna only. Though he was an English man, he was convinced of the greatness
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