A Centenary Tribute

Amal Kiran: A Profile

P. Raja

It was Sri Aurobindo, the Yogis' Yogi, who renamed K.D. Sethna Amal Kiran, meaning "The Clear Ray".

A Parsi Bombayite by birth, Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy Sethna, was born on November 25,1904. Son of a well-to-do physician, who spent much of his leisure in his personal library, Sethna had the privilege of having his early educa-tion at St. Xavier's School and College, a Roman Catholic Institution managed by foreign Jesuit priests. As a Collegian, he won in his Intermediate Arts examination of Bombay University the Hughlings Prize in English and the Selby Scholarship in Logic. He passed his B.A. (Hons) in Philoso-phy and won the Ellis Prize in English, which a student not of Philosophy but Literature should have taken. While still in college, he began his literary career as a book-reviewer to the Bombay-based newspapers and magazines. At this time his father suddenly died. He dedicated to his father his first book titled Parnassians, a critical assessment of the work of H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw, G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Hardy, whom he considered the four outstanding denizens of Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses. The Parsi author, A.S. Wadia sent Wells, whom he personally knew, the article on him. Wells wrote back, "Your young man will go far."

"But Wells didn't know," remarked Sethna in his characteristic jovial vein, "that I would go as far as Pondicherry!" In December 1927, when he was still a student of the M.A. class, Sethna visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry and decided to stay there and practise the Integral Yoga. He did not complete his post-graduate course, and he never regretted this.

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How the guru came to him is an interesting story, good enough raw material to make a novelette.

Sethna had a friend who had done Pranayama. He told Sethna that Pranayama gave him an abundance of energy, an energy, which could be used in any way he liked... And there was no question of strict brahmacharya or spiritual objective. What he said struck the young man as very fascinating and helpful. Therefore, he started reading books on Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga in particular. While he was doing this, he got interested naturally in the works of Vivekananda. And Vivekananda gave him a greater perspective. Yoga is a means not just to amass energy, which one can throw about as one likes but to gather energy to concentrate on a certain aim which would lead one to the true self within.

In the meantime, a girl with whom Sethna had a close relationship in that period talked to him of a Bengali saint whom she had known and who was still alive. She requested him to come and see the saint called Pagal Harnath, meaning "Mad Harnath", mad with love for Krishna. Previous to his interest in Yoga, Sethna had been a scoffer and denier of all traditional values. And his aim in Yoga too was originally not spiritual. To meet this old man seemed to him just a curious thing to do. Still in order to please his girlfriend he consented.

They went to see the saint, who used to come to Bombay and be the guest of some rich Gujarati. There was a big hall in a posh house and the old man was sitting lost in medita-tion. There was a semi-circle of his disciples, all the time watching him. And when he was in a certain posture and a finger of his seemed to point to somebody, they all looked at that person to find some meaning in his involuntary gesture.Cheekily Sethna went and sat almost next to the saint, told when the latter at last opened his eyes and looked around, he saw a new face there. Everybody prompted sethna to ask a question. Therefore, he asked him: "Since he Universe is governed by fixed laws, what is the need of i creator or a God to govern it?" The saint at once answered:

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"If there are laws, there has to be a law-giver." The answer was rather simplistic. Ordinarily Sethna would have mustered up an array of arguments to counter it. Somehow he fell silent, impressed by the way the old man spoke. To Sethna, he seemed to speak not from his head by way of an argument but from some depth of actual touch on things beyond our ken, from some sort of realisation. So Sethna did not argue further. That was the first time in his student days that somebody could silence him.

Argumentative that he was, he was surprised at himself. He became faintly aware of something within him, which was beyond the mere argumentative intellect. It must have been this something which had fallen silent, most unusually and to his own surprise. After that, he began to take more and more interest in things beyond human understanding.

In the course of a few more months, Sethna read in a newspaper that a Maharashtrian Yogi had come to town. With his friend, he went to meet the Yogi. Seeing Sethna dressed wholly in the English style, the old man who was the Yogi's host asked him to show his right palm before going into the inner room where the Yogi was to be met. After glancing at the palm, the old man shook his head and said, "You are destined to have six children. Why are you bothering about Yoga?" Sethna pleaded, "I haven't even a single child yet. Let me go in." Rather disgustedly the old man grunted, "All right", as if he meant, "Go and be damned!" In the inner room, Sethna and his friend sat down with the rest of the people. After a while the Yogi went round touching each one's head. When he touched Sethna's head, Sethna felt a sort of electric current run down his spine. Towards the end of a brief meditation session, Sethna requested the Yogi, "I want to do something which would take me beyond my ordinary consciousness. Give me some practical hint for it." The Yogi advised, "When you are alone, lie in your bed and try as it were to pull your consciousness, right up from your feet... up... up... up to your head and try to feel that you are on the top of your head. When you succeed in doing

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so, you will see a ring of light above it. Then try with your consciousness to leap into that ring and you will be in what is called Samadhi."

It looked interesting and so night after night Sethna practised this exercise of lifting up his consciousness.

After this experience, he started looking out for passing sannyasis or yogis in Bombay. He found one and requested the yogi to impart something spiritual. The yogi said: "Dig a hole in your floor and light a fire there." For Sethna, that was impossible to do. His grandfather would shout and get angry if he did anything of that kind. "You light a fire and then I will give you a mantra to repeat. Then ultimately a Goddess will appear to you. You may ask her for a favour... whatever you want." However, Sethna had to rule out this whole practice of invoking supernatural powers. So he just kept quiet.

It was during that period of his life as a spiritual seeker that he met a theosophist plus art-critic who had paid a visit to Sri Aurobindo. Seeing the bundle of various qualities, even contradictory ones, in Sethna, he said: "A complex person like you will be satisfied only with Sri Aurobindo. I could see that Sri Aurobindo had the cosmic consciousness. He could feel even the grass grow! He could know everything within the universe as if it were within his own consciousness." That interested Sethna. But things rested there.

Then one day he went to Bombay's Crawford Market to buy a pair of shoes. The shoes had been put in a box and the box was wrapped in a newspaper sheet, and a string ran around the sheet. He brought his purchase home and as soon as he took off the string, the newspaper sheet fell open in front of him. A headline in very bold type attracted his attention. It read: "The Ashram of Sri Aurobindo Ghose." To Sethna, it looked like a Divine Call. At once he read the article and felt that Sri Aurobindo's Ashram in Pondicherry was the place for him because life was not denied there. Everything possible in man was sought to be brought out, enhanced and geared to a divine purpose... By seeking

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something beyond our senses, the Infinite, the Eternal, life would be transformed. Sethna found that it suited him. He decided to go to Pondicherry.

He and his friend wrote to the Ashram. An answer came from a person named Purani, who was in charge of the Gujarat side of the correspondence. He wrote that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had said they could come and see for themselves the Ashram life.

But how to go there? For one thing, they did not have enough money. Moreover, in those days an unmarried couple travelling together for several days was not the thing done in polite Parsi society or in any other society or community. Since they were in love with each other and seeking the same goal, they decided to marry. By getting married, they would be able to collect a fairly good sum of money. It would make them independent and therefore not helpless in case their parents were not in favour of what they wanted to do.

Two months after his marriage Sethna and his wife decided to go to Pondicherry. But it was not openly mentioned. The plan was to go to Calcutta on a sort of belated honey-moon. After a short stay at the Grand Hotel and a meeting with Tagore, he and his wife visited the village of Sunamukhi where Pagal Harnath had been born and had died a few months earlier. They went back to Calcutta and from there started for Puri of the Jagannath temple. From Puri they went to Madras and from Madras Sethna sent a telegram to his grandfather: "Visiting picturesque Pondicherry." The family in Bombay expected a short stay at Pondicherry, for how long could this little town prove "picturesque"? When the stay ran into its sixth month, there was a sharp inquiry from home. Then it proved necessary to say that he was studying spiritual philosophy at the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo.

The work done by the Ashram greatly interested him -Yogic work and other work too. It was not a passive kind of Yoga... in a way it was Karma Yoga... and much more than that. Pondicherry, being an abode of peace, gave the spiri-tual seekers what they wanted. Far from the common turmoil, they became sadhaks ready to go into their selves

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While Pondicherry gave the mental peace Sethna wanted, the practice of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo provided him with an abundance of energy.

A clean-shaven man with a handsome face, his years rest lightly upon him. Since 1949 he has been editing Mother India, a Review of Culture, first a fortnightly, and after a couple of years a monthly. The list of Sethna's publications is quite substantial and includes five volumes of poetry (now all of them along with his uncollected works are available in his volume titled The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems), seven volumes of critical writings on poets like Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare, Mallarme and Blake, six volumes of essays on diverse subjects, four volumes of research in Ancient Indian history, two volumes of correspondence with the British poet and critic Ms. Kathleen Raine, besides innumerable articles and scholarly essays.

Sethna is a poet above anything else. "A moved rhythmical expression, which is at the same time precise and widely suggestive", is the working definition he gives to poetry. The original impulse behind his poetry goes back to his teens. It was competition. It was his cousin, older than he by some years, who used to tell him every day how many lines of poetry he had composed, rather light-hearted romantic verse. And when once he said that he had composed 200 lines, Sethna thought that he could compose more than that and rival him at the game.

"When I started writing poems, I was in the second standard," he related, "and at that time I thought the poems would be correctly metered if I could make each line the same length. So, a certain length on the page I fixed upon. If any line was a bit too long, I wrote in small script. I believed that there ought to be a measure. And after that, I wrote more natural poems, which I would like to call love poems. I was greatly moved by the beauty of a certain young woman. And so I had to create a sort of Shelleyan Romantic verse."

Sethna had to wait for several years to gain recognition as a poet. And that was only when Sri Aurobindo complimented him. Before that he was like all young men,

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with a sort of high conceit of his own powers. Only when Sri Aurobindo brought a critical eye to his poems and ad-mired some of them did Sethna feel that the genuine spark was there!

Apart from numerous studies on the problems of Indian History, he has very persuasively put the Rig-Veda anterior to the Indus-Valley civilisation of c. 2500-1500 B.C. in his two major books on History - The Problem of Aryan Origins and Karpasa in Prehistoric India. It was Sri Aurobindo who was the first to dismiss in the course of his writings the theory of an Aryan invasion but did not pause to substantiate the dismissal thoroughly. Sethna's massive work on the subject - Ancient India in a New Light - fortifies the new revolution-ary outlook. The International Institute of Indian Studies based in Ottawa, Canada, gave him the Devavrata Bhishma Award for 1994 for this work.

In her letter dated 5.8.1961, Ms. Kathleen Raine after making general remarks on the poems of K.D. Sethna, concludes thus: "Only one thing troubles me: why do you write in English?... Have you not, in using English, exiled your poetic genius from India, to which it must belong, without making it a native of England, for English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry. I feel this even about Tagore, and so did Yeats. I do not believe that we can - or if we could, that we have the right to - write poetry in a language other than our own."

Ms. Raine's comment sparked off the discussion on whether Indians can write genuine poetry in English. The correspondence on these lines between the two poet-critics continued and led to the publication of two books - The English Language and The Indian Spirit and Indian Poets and English Poetry.

Sethna argues: "What evidently is necessary for poetic success in English is an intimacy somehow won with the language... If a notable command of the English language and a thorough knowledge of English poetical technique could be at the disposal of Indian inspiration, I see no reason

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why memorable English poetry should fail to be produced." When Raine comments: "I have read no poetry by an Indian that does not seem to an English reader to be written by a foreigner. This I find even with Tagore, certainly with Sri Aurobindo, and also with most of your poems", Sethna refutes this criticism and finally counter-argues: "If you didn't see an Indian name under a poem, would you infallibly know that its English was not by an Englishman?"

After many arguments and counter-arguments, Kathleen Raine withdraws from the discussion by saying: "Of course if India is determined to adopt the English language nobody can stop you. The blame lies with the English, who as a 'ruling race' for two hundred years impressed India with the power and prestige of our brief moment of material supremacy."

As Sethna nears his hundredth birth anniversary, we can do no better than to salute the man with his varied achievements and versatile talent.

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