PETER HEEHS

An American Historian in India
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Extracts from Reviews of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
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Most books on Sri Aurobindo are hagiographical, with little or no biographical information; in keen contrast, this book covers in great detail the various stages of his life…. Many expositions and commentaries on Sri Aurobindo's principal works have been written, especially on The Life Divine, but this reviewer believes that Heehs’s book stands out as the very best by enabling readers to understand the various circumstances that led Sri Aurobindo to his final destination. Heehs (independent scholar) richly deserves congratulations for the first-class research and scholarship evident in this rare work. - Ramakrishna Puligandla in Choice more>>
 
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This meticulously reported and scrupulously footnoted account of the Bengali saint Sri Aurobindo leaves no stone unturned. Most know him as the founder of Integral Yoga, a system that synthesizes karma, jnana, and bhakti yogas and focuses on the expansion of consciousness. But many don’t realize that Aurobindo was also a poet, journalist, author, philosopher, scholar, and political leader. . . . Heehs makes it clear that this brilliant, mysterious figure lived his truth. And that was, as Aurobindo wrote himself in his most famous book, The Synthesis of Yoga, “All life is Yoga.”

- Nora Isaacs in Yoga Journal more>>


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Unlike other books relating the life of Sri Aurobindo, Heehs’s study follows the norms of historical writing as practiced in universities, and is based on a large number of authentic sources. Peter Heehs has done a great deal of research lasting many years, working in archives in Delhi, Calcutta, Baroda, London, and Paris…. After the reader closes the book, Sri Aurobindo seems, even more than before, to be unseizably immense, unfathomably deep.… Speaking for myself, I found the book full of new things to learn and admire.

- Christine Devin in Revue d’Auroville more>>


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It is almost a year since the publication of Peter Heehs’s latest book The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by the Columbia University Press in the United States. In the meantime, a lot has been said and written about it; it has even sparked a controversy among the admirers and followers of Sri Aurobindo. In this essay I will steer clear of the controversy as far as possible, examining the book in the wider context of Heehs’s other writings, most of which are aimed primarily at academic audiences. part 1>>  part 2>>

- Marcel Kvassay in AntiMatters

Historian Peter Heehs has done the world a great service with the publication this year of a book that may finally make Sri Aurobindo and his work accessible to a broader audience. Appropriately titled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, this meticulously researched and beautifully written scholarly biography follows its subject through five periods and personas—Son, Scholar, Revolutionary, Yogi and Philosopher, and Guide. While biographies of Aurobindo have been published before, including a short one by Heehs himself, none has ever drawn on such a vast resource of original letters, diaries, and other primary sources. - Ellen Daly in EnlightenNext more>>

 

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Despite his massive political and spiritual influence, the twentieth century Indian revolutionary turned mystic Sri Aurobindo Ghose has been curiously neglected in Western scholarship. Heehs ... corrects this by producing what is certain to become Aurobindo’s definitive biography....The result is a clear and detailed picture of a fascina-ting figure whose continuing religious relevance can be seen in the contemporary popularity of many of his pioneering East-West teachings: the evolution of consciousness, an integral approach to spiritual liberation and a socially engaged this-worldly mysticism. Particularly recommended for those interested in the religious, cultural and political landscape of twentieth-century India.

- Ann Gleig in Religious Studies Review more>>

 

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[Heehs's] book, which is around 500 pages long, is remarkable. It is an exhaustive biography of the thinker covering all the different facets of his life . . . Peter Heehs shows himself to be a very serious historian who bases his conclusions on documents that are carefully cited in the endnotes. A bibliography completes the book, which is far indeed from being a hagiography. . . . The author has given us a model biography, which is accessible to the general public.

- David Annoussamy in Le Trait-d'union more>>


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All biographies of gurus and saints face a painful choice: should they paint over human blemishes and glorify them, as it helps the devotees better focus on the divine? Or should they give the entire picture of a journey from the human to the perfect? Most religious texts and scriptures have chosen the first option. But Peter Heehs went for the second one — and we are grateful for that. For his work will be regarded by future generations as the absolute biography of Sri Aurobindo, avatar extraordinary, poet, revolutionary, philosopher and yogi. Not only is the book remarkably well researched but, as the title indicates, he has really covered all aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s life. 

- François Gautier in The New Indian Express  more>>