The Sri Aurobindo Library is, in its own way, an instrument of education. Just like all the other departments of the Ashram - the flower gardens and paddy fields, the workshops, the laboratories - the library tries to embody or represent that spirit of universality and integrality of all life which, according to Sri Aurobindo, is the foundation of the coming age.

The library is international, and brings to the student the whole panorama of the different regions of the earth. No philosophy, no science, no religion is excluded. The student is confronted on the shelves of the library with all the ideas, theories and principles, the achievements, the habits, the ways of life, the dreams of the world's various peoples. The extensive pictorial material of the library is presented in a kind of continuous world exhibit, in which all the countries and viewpoints are represented in a concrete and living way.

There is no segregation between the child student and the postgraduate research scholar. Thus the student is in living contact with the future tools of his intellectual life. "The elite of humanity must be ready, who would be able to work for the progressive unification of the race and who would be at the same time prepared to embody the new force descending upon earth to transform it."

Nowhere can that be done so intensively as in a library; no school room, no lecture theatre can replace this concrete presence and availability of the accumulated treasures of mankind. The child has to learn when he is young to select what is useful, to absorb what is needed and to reject that which should find no place in him. The only place where a child can really grow in full freedom according to his own needs and inclinations is in a free-access library. The need of the child who accosts the librarian with: "I have to paint a picture," is as important as that of the pandit who is seeking a Vedic concordance.

A library in India is necessarily many libraries in one, in many different languages, Indian and non-Indian. The Sri Aurobindo Library has 80,000. books in 25 different languages. It also receives over 300 periodicals, some of. general interest and others of a technical nature. In addition to its collection of pictorial and pamphlet material, maps,. etc., it has colour slides and a projector, and a record collection of Indian and Western classical music. It also has a collection of South Indian bronzes.

It is not only for reading that children come to the library, but also for relaxation. Don't be surprised if, when you step on to the verandah, you find them listening to music. (if it is a holiday) or doing nothing at all; or if in a back room you see them painting or making dolls, or a librarian modelling clay; or if you find classes being conducted in rooms where art books are available. These are all part of the freedom, and harmony in freedom, which is the spirit of the library.