A Centenary Tribute

Another "Living Centenary.."

Satadal

Last year we celebrated the "Living Centenary" of Nirodbaran, and this year we are going to celebrate another "Living Centenary", that of Amal Kiran.

Let us have some glimpses of this personality - the poet-essayist-critic-humorist - called Amal Kiran, as named by Sri Aurobindo, his Master.

Amal Kiran wrote a poem titled "Love and Death" which was published in Mother India of December 5,1969. One of the readers - Professor X - wrote to him: ".. .Your first line, 'We sign mortality in our marriage-beds' has a fribbling intervention of mind. Marriage is a flame which must have lighted you. The poem is rigged up in 'dense divinity' which presumes an ego to feel with. 'Mating' itself takes lines unknown which are more interesting than becoming 'immortal'.

"The withing movement of 'f'-sounds in the eighth line, 'From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh', takes us to the body's doom which is a self-inflicted doom. There is inevitable de-feat in using the word 'hermaphrodite'..."

In reply Amal Kiran exposed the untenability of such criticism thus:

... You are a Professor of English, not of Philosophy or Erotics. So why not give primarily an aesthetic response to my lines? I don't see - except in one place - that you have considered them as poetry at all. And in this one place I am afraid you have caught the rhythm wrongly. You speak of "the writhing movement of 'f -sounds in the eighth line, 'From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh'." What you have mistaken for writhing is really the trem-bling, quivering, flickering movement that is natural to an "f"-alliteration, as in Shakespeare's

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After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.

...Let me come now to your quarrel with my attitude and message. You refer to "a fribbling intervention of mind" in my opening sentence:

We sign mortality in our marriage-beds.

"Intervention of mind" I admit - in the sense that here is poetry of thought probing the problem of love. Thought surely is legitimate in poetry provided it is not abstract but moves with an intuitive edge. I do not plead guilty to "fribbling". I should say I am doing the very opposite of being frivolous: I am taking the phenomenon of love more seriously than people usually do. I am trying to understand why there is in us the urge to mate, and I say that it is because we are incomplete beings - incomplete both inwardly and outwardly - and one of the marks of our incompleteness is our little span of life, our mortality. To escape this sense of a life ending too soon and putting a finis to our hopes and dreams and aspirations, we move towards... a multiplication of our selves be-yond the death of the body, a vicarious immortality. And in the act of reproduction there is also a drive of ideal-ism: we have the vague prayer within us that our children may be wonderful - paragons of beauty, vessels of light, embodiments of happiness. The completion we ourselves lack is, instinctively, sought for in what we create: this is the point of the word "hermaphrodite" which I have used: it symbolises the wholeness that is not ours, the consummation of the fragmentariness which pushes us towards a counterpart....

(Mother India, March 1970)

In Mother India, January 2004, we find how beautifully \mal Kiran answers questions and rights the wrong while remaining faithful to his Master Sri Aurobindo:

You have asked me:

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"Would I be wrong if I said that one could word Sr Aurobindo's definition of poetry as in the draft below'

'"Poetry is the power of the word; the word that comes accompanied with vision; both the word and the vision mostly rising from their source in a higher consciousness - in Eternity - and coming up not necessarily to amuse, or teach, or earn, but as the inner being's own expressive impulse, an impulse for self-expression seeking liaison with Reality, the meaning of Existence, our real Home, - with Eternity, and affecting the "hearer" in an intense fearful way, putting him in a whirligig of sense and sound.'"

Yours is an interesting definition but perhaps as much a la Rameshwar Gupta as Aurobindonian. Below I have attempted one which I think is more Aurobindonian than Amalian and avoids the sudden sensationalism of your ending:

"Poetry, dealing with whatever themes are congenial to the poet, is intensity of vision, intensity of word and intensity of rhythm, caught from an inner intuitive consciousness. This consciousness is in touch with a one-yet-manifold universal being as well as with a higher realm of reality whose creative Delight and Truth-Consciousness have manifested all the worlds as its progressive self-expression. On the one side poetry may be called a happy play of the Gods; on the other it is a great formative and illuminative power. We have to listen to it across a thrilled silence within us, so that what has come from the inner intuitive consciousness of the poet may be received by our own 'soul' and open in us

                     A golden temple-door to things beyond."

(27.3.1976)

By the grace of the Divine Mother Amal Kiran had a fearful experience which showed him what in reality jealousy is. The experience in his own words is as follows:

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I was sitting at the top of the staircase outside the Mother's door. She used to open that door sometimes and glance at the people sitting. There was a girl next to me. I think it was Chinmayi who is no more with us. I had been waiting and waiting while she had just come. Suddenly the Mother opened the door, did not even look at me but just called Chinmayi in. Chinmayi went behind the Mother and I was left with the door practically shut in my face. I was terribly upset and a great surge of jealousy swept over me. Wave after hot wave struck against me and I was to-tally submerged. I felt extremely uncomfortable because it was a most unusual phenomenon with me. But I think the extreme form of my experience was secretly a gift of the Mother's grace, for it broke open an inner vision. When I hung my head down and looked between my legs at the stairs, I did not see the stairs but a black abyss, a bottom-less black abyss. At once I was shocked into saying: "Ah, so this is what jealousy is! It is a pit of darkness unfathomable which tries to suck us in irrevocably."

(Light and Laughter, p. 60)

Amal Kiran is full of wit and humour. In one of his talks to the students and teachers of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry - in short, of the Ashram School, - he said:

Let me whisper into your ears at the top of my voice an unbelievable secret. It is this: twice in Savitri, which is a legend and a symbol, Sri Aurobindo has referred to the present speaker, symbolically, although the speaker is very far yet from being legendary, (laughter) The first reference runs:

But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,

 Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow.

Surely the person intended is unmistakable.... The second reference goes:

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A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still

Accompanied by an eternal No.

Lest you should misunderstand, I must hurry to say that if the "limping Yes" is Amal Kiran, the "eternal No" accompanying him is not his wife! (laughter)

(Light and Laughter, pp. 2-3)

In Mother India, May 1971, we find that the Mother once asked Amal Kiran to paint the flowers given to him during Pranam. He did it with care and sincere devotion and we understand that there were many paintings of various flowers by Amal Kiran and on each painting the spiritual significance of the flower was written by the Mother herself. We hope that these paintings by Amal Kiran blessed by the Mother and carrying the spiritual significances of the flowers can be traced.

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