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PREFACE
PREFACE
Sri Aurobindo's spiritual and intellectual stature and his exceptional command of the English language have impressed number of scholars of global culture and attracted them with their various disciplines to the study of his voluminous work. I, too, with a moderate amount of learning and a keen desire to learn more about Sri Aurobindo had been contemplating a doctoral work of some sort on his plays or poems or prose. But then I realized that it was almost impossible for me to attain a fresh insight into Sri Aurobindo's work what with so many scholarly published and unpublished dissertations and theses of the universities in India and abroad.
. I felt then that if I intend to do a meaningful work in the area of Sri Aurobindo-scholarship now, I must turn to some eminent disciples of his. K. D. Sethna, Nirodbaran, Dilip Kumar Roy, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, Nishikanto are some of the well-known names. How can the tradition of Sri Aurobindoscholarship ignore them if it has to go ever further and forward to enrich itself progressively ?
When I thus turned to the works of Dilip Kumar Roy, I found them too serious to escape easily critical notice. He is a versatile writer and a determined pilgrim of eternity. We discover in his works an expression of a sincere and burning quest of true spiritual knowledge, an authentic account of his encounters with great men of the East and the West, sweet and poetic prose and a strange vitality of style. A doctoral research on him is not only possible but also necessary in the interest of scholarship. In fact, he requires a number of thematic and stylistic studies. Yet, to my surprise, I discovered that his work has received no serious critical attention that it deserves so far. Hence, this thesis about an aspect of his literary art evident in his numerous biographies and an autobiography. A study of Dilip Kumar Roy, inevitably, though indirectly, also becomes a study of Sri Aurobindo, too. Hence, my work, I trust, prove to be supplemental to Sri Aurobindoscholarship.
As critical books on Dilip Roy, to the best of my knowledge, have not yet been written, for some critical help I turned to a few old disciples of Sri Aurobindo, who had been Roy's contemporaries, and who, except Jayantilal Parekh, are still luckily for me alive. I have tape-recorded their conversations and presented them here as Appendix A. I also met Indira Devi, Roy's daughter-disciple, and have reproduced here conversation with her as Appendix B.
Dr. Jagdish Chandra Dave, (Professor and Head, Department of English, North Gujarat University, Patan) my supervisor, with his unusual scholarship and patience, guided my thought processes and inspired me to work when at times certain diffidence and dullness temporarily seized my soul. I gratefully
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