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March 01
“The Mother – the Story of Her
Life”
Book review by Carel
 In
1997 HarperCollins India published Georges van Vrekhem’s Beyond Man,
the Life and Work of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. “After that book
appeared I realized I had to write a biography in homage to The Mother,”
says Georges, “for too many people are unaware of what She stood for
and has done. In India only Sri Aurobindo is known, not The Mother of
whom Sri Aurobindo has stated, ‘The Mother’s consciousness and mine
are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two bodies because that is
necessary for the play’. Amongst the published biographies, I could
not find any unbiased or complete one.”
HarperCollins has now
published this biography, titled The Mother: The Story of Her Life. Like
Beyond Man, the book is based on the premise that whatever Sri Aurobindo
and The Mother have written and said is unquestionably true – and who
can question statements which are beyond the normal human consciousness?
Compared to the material
already published in Beyond Man, the biography stands on its own. Making
use of all that has been published on The Mother, Georges has written a
biography that reads like a novel – not surprisingly in view of his
background as a dramatist before joining the Ashram in 1970 and later
Auroville in 1978.
Typical of this biography is
that the events in the Mother’s life have been put against their
historical background. The Paris of the Mother’s youth with its
circuses and artistes, her sojourns with the occult masters M. and Mme.
Théon in Algeria, her first arrival at Pondicherry and her meeting with
Sri Aurobindo, the years in Japan, and her life after her return to
India in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: it all comes alive, sketched with a
sense of detail and sprinkeled, where suitable, with a pinch of humour.
The description of the people around Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is
also interesting, for “the Avatar,” writes Georges, “never comes
alone”.
The biography contains much
new material, for example, the meaning of the church murals in Pau which
Mother painted together with her first husband Henri Morisset; the
activities of the Théons before they moved to Algeria; the writings of
Mother’s second husband, Paul Richard, in Japan; and the refusal of
some of Sri Aurobindo’s disciples to accept a French lady as their
guru. In the chapter “Explorations of the Occult”, one reads that in
the beginning of the twentieth century the Mother established the “pathways
for the dead”, whose existence has now been documented in the records
of near-death experiences.
Another chapter concerns the
Mother’s previous incarnations. The Mother explicitly mentioned some
of them and the biography gives details of these incarnations and puts
them in their historical context. The stories of the lives of Queen Tiy,
“King” Hatchepsut, the Maid of Orleans, Mona Lisa, the Virgin Queen,
and Catherine II of Russia, are intriguing and reading them alters one’s
view of history, to say the least.
But the main value of the
book is that it provides an insight into what The Mother came on earth
to manifest. The descriptions of the descent of the Supramental on earth
in 1956, the Mother’s work on the cells of the body, the manifestation
of the consciousness of the Overman in 1969 and the realization of the
Supramental in a new subtle body are among the most fascinating parts of
this biography.
The Mother, The Story of
her Life
545 pages
by Georges van Vrekhem
HarperCollins Publishers, India
ISBN 81-7223-416-3
Price in India: Rs 495
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