Krishna Dhun Ghose, a Bengali doctor who held British culture to be superior, meant his sons for the Indian Civil Service, the corps of officials through which Britain governed India. To fit them for it he took them to England in 1879, and his third son, Aurobindo, then seven, stayed fourteen years. He went to St Paul's School in London and King's College, Cambridge, where he read classics, and he passed the written examination for the service, ranked eleventh of 250. Then, by his own account, he deliberately failed the riding test that every candidate had to pass, and was disqualified.
He came home in 1893 to a post in the princely state of Baroda and a country he hardly knew. In thirteen years there he taught himself Bengali and Sanskrit, and with them the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the epics. The partition of Bengal in 1905 brought him to Calcutta, where he wrote for the paper Bande Mataram and demanded complete independence at a time when the Indian National Congress was asking for much less. In May 1908 the British arrested him in the Alipore bomb case, which followed a failed attempt to kill a British magistrate, and he spent a year in jail while the trial ran. He said afterwards that he had practised the yoga of the Gita in his cell, and that for two weeks he heard the voice of Swami Vivekananda, the monk who had carried Vedanta to the West. Chittaranjan Das, a Calcutta barrister, won his acquittal in May 1909.
Within a year he was gone from politics. Facing a fresh charge of sedition, he hid at Chandernagore and in April 1910 reached Pondicherry, a French enclave where the British warrant did not run. He stayed there for the remaining forty years of his life.
The thinking he did there starts from a refusal of two answers. The Life Divine, serialised from 1914 in the Arya, a monthly he founded, and revised as a book in 1939–40, calls them the materialist denial and the refusal of the ascetic. The first holds that only matter is real. The second, which he found in the Advaita of Shankara, the early medieval teacher of non-dualism, holds that only spirit is real and the world is maya, an illusion from which the wise escape. Aurobindo argued that both cut the knot instead of untying it. Spirit, on his account, has hidden itself in matter, and evolution is its slow return: matter produced life, life produced mind, and mind is not the last step. The next is what he called the supermind, a consciousness that knows the world from the side of the infinite. Human beings are a transitional stage. Yoga is that evolution made conscious and faster, and its aim is not release from rebirth, India's traditional goal, but the transformation of life on earth.
In November 1926 he withdrew into seclusion and handed the community that had gathered round him to Mirra Alfassa, a Frenchwoman his disciples called the Mother, who organised it as the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. India became independent on 15 August 1947, his seventy-fifth birthday; he had opposed the partition that came with it. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1943 and for the Peace Prize in 1950, and he died at Pondicherry that December.
Stephen Phillips, writing in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, presents the system as an attempt to reconcile science and religion through evolution. Scholars have traced Western debts in it, to Hegel among others, though Aurobindo denied that Hegel had influenced him. The philosopher Ramakrishna Puligandla argues that his picture of Shankara is a misreading. His followers have not always welcomed scholarship from inside the ashram. When Peter Heehs, an American historian who worked in the ashram's archives, published The Lives of Sri Aurobindo in 2008, devotees' objections delayed its Indian edition, and in 2012 the Indian government at first declined to extend Heehs's residence visa.