Passage to More than India

<p>This book is a voyage of discovery. In 1959 the author Dick Batstone a classically educated bookseller with a Christian background comes across a life of the great Indian polymath Sri Aurobindo though a series of apparently fortuitous circumstances. A meeting in Durham England leads him to a determination to get to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry a former French territory south of Madras...</p><p>Compared with Gandhi and Tagore Sri Aurobindo is little known in the West. For many in India Sri Aurobindo is a more significant figure as the great patriot pioneer yogi and philosopher of the evolution of consciousness and of the future of humanity.</p><p>So I originally wanted to find an English or American publisher. In this I was unsuccessful as the book seemed not to be 'suitable' for their lists being neither a travelogue nor a book about religion.</p><p>Now at last it is being brought out in Auroville the international community founded by the Mother in 1968 and which I have visited many times since its inauguration. Why was it not published here before? Because I wanted to reach a Western audience rather than 'preaching to the converted' but have now seen how truly international Auroville has become and that its diaspora reaches further and to a wider diversity of people than a Western publisher would. I am delighted my friends here wish to produce it.</p>