A Clear Ray and A Lamp - an exchange of light
I FIRST met Amal Kiran in 1969, advised by Jayantilal-ji that in him I would find a kindred spirit - and how right he was! He was then living at 23 Rue Suffren, and I used to help arrange his numerous unpublished typescripts (numbering 23 in 1974 as he writes) in a wooden almirah. Whenever possible, I would get hold of newly published material on subjects he was dealing with and send these to him. For instance, in the 1970s he was heavily into Velikovsky. I was able to obtain issues of the journal published by the Velikovsky Society and keep Amal updated. Later, I sent him articles and books on the Indus Valley Civilisation from various libraries. He, on his part, used to send me books on these subjects that had been sent by friends and relations abroad. Our correspondence is full of references to these exchanges.
Let us turn to the scintillating play of light in his letters -rays of knowledge and twinkling sparks of humour suffuse them, shining through the clouds of financial crisis and labour trouble facing Mother India that try, vainly, to overcast the clear ray. He always ended, "Yours affectionately, Amal" and the pressures of editorial commitments and his own research never seemed to be obstacles to his typing out long extracts from books that he had found interesting and felt I would benefit from, or from sending me lengthy, closely argued letters on issues of mutual interest, mostly relating to ancient history.
The first letter I have retained is uncharacteristically undated and is sometime in mid-1974 from 23 Rue Suffren, informing me that the only poem I had written would be out in the October issue and offering interesting insights apropos my question regarding the symbolic meaning of the
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Utanka and the Ocean-churning episodes which were the subject of my Secret of the Mahabharata that was serialised in M.I. The distinction Amal draws between the double significance of the turtle is quite unique:
I have no particular solution to give for the problem you have posed to me. The kundala earrings most probably have to be interpreted along your lines. All I can say is that the ears, according to Sri Aurobindo, symbolise the medium through which spiritual messages and inspirations come from the Cosmic Consciousness to the individual consciousness. Your question on the turtle (kurma) calls for a two-fold answer. The turtle as one of the primal supports of the earth in Indian mythology is different from the turtle that belongs to the traditional Indian series of Avatars. The series has, as Sri Aurobindo points out, an evolutionary implication. The choice of certain animal figures marks the different definite stages of earthly evolution. As far as I can see, the evolution is considered significant after the vertebrate stage is reached. The sea is a symbol of, among other things, the universal life force. Scientifically, life is considered to have first appeared in the prehistoric waters of the earth. India seems to have had an intuition of this fact and, putting a stress on vertebrates, selected the fish form as the first Avataric manifestation. The next step in life's development and diffusion would be a vertebrate mediating between sea and land - an amphibian creature like the turtle. Perhaps we may say that with the coming of the turtle-Avatar we have the true meaningful Avatarhood, for the evolutionary progress has been a land-phenomenon and the turtle marks the first stage of that progress. In this way we may connect the kurma which supports everything with the kurma that constitutes the basic of Avatar-led evolution.
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He goes on to comment on the epic, giving an excellent condensation of Sri Aurobindo's views and offering information that led me to track down a particular edition of the Mahabharata in the Ashram library which Nolini-da confirmed to be the one containing markings indicating the original text as identified by Sri Aurobindo. I wonder where this copy lies now. Unfortunately, no one has pursued the course Amal suggests to identify the Ur-epic.
You want to interpret the Mahabharata in the light of Sri Aurobindo's revelation of the Veda's secret. And if we consider the Vyasa who wrote the epic to be Veda-Vyasa your venture is legitimate. But you must remember that Sri Aurobindo takes Vyasa's epic to consist only of 24,000 lines. According to him, the present Mahabharata is the work of three hands. There is the original Vyasa with his strong, bare, terse, direct style of vivid ideative illumination. He is overlaid by another poet who is more' romantic and decorative, a sort of secondary Valmiki -a good competent bard. Then we have a third layer -somebody continuing the trend of the Valmikiesque inspiration but with less poetic power and a more and more elaborative and decorative movement. This triple division holds so far as the poetry is concerned. Along with it we have the incorporation of a lot of dharmic verse. Of course each of the three poets must have had a side of dharma-exposition - particularly the original Vyasa who as an intellectual kavi would naturally have a good deal of dharmic lore to impart. But his contribution would still be highly poetic. What is not so in the mass of dharmic versification would be the work of the two other hands or else a dumping of goody-goody stuff by various later reciters of the epic. In any case, it is important to ascertain what exactly or approximately is Vyasa's own Mahabharata. Sri Aurobindo showed in detail what portions of the enormous poem came from Vyasa and what from the two inferior sources. I think
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Nolini has transcribed in his own copy of the epic Sri Aurobindo's classifications done on a copy brought from Madras. You may ask Nolini whether you could come over and transfer to your copy whatever he may have. Some indication of the threefold or at least twofold division may be had from Sri Aurobindo's English verse-versions of parts of the Mahabharata. All that is not Vyasa's he has put within brackets. Working on that clue, possibly you can on your own disentangle the three authors. But you must first read Sri Aurobindo's book on Vyasa. You have to steep yourself in what he writes on Vyasa's specific genius and manner of expression, and then read whatever Sanskrit passages he gives as characteristic of Vyasa and, using them as a touchstone, set about reaching the true Mahabharata. Possibly several parts which you have wished to explain a la Sri Aurobindo will get excluded. But, if your aim is not to deal with Vyasa's own composition but with the Mahabharata as it has finally come down to us, there is no need to bother about the authorship-question: you can go straight ahead and offer the right interpretation suiting a sruti. Poets inferior to Vyasa may be, as much as the Master, creators of Vedic symbols and legends. But I wonder whether the whole of the epic can be thus interpreted. There is a definite historic nucleus. You must not fall into the Gandhi-mentality which, unable to accept Krishna as the encourager of a violent war, desired to take him, as well as Arjuna and all the rest, as an allegory of a certain part of our psychological make-up and the entire battle of Kurukshetra as an allegorical event and not an historical episode.
I had asked Amal for tips on learning Sanskrit about which he said, "I am afraid I can proffer no advice on learning Sanskrit. Yes, I was told by Amrita that Sri Aurobindo had a private pamphlet on simplified Sanskrit-learning, but nobody has been able to trace it. Perhaps Nolini knows what
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fie method was, for he must have learnt Sanskrit by it." Here is another area for research! In a subsequent letter of 28th October he added, "I am glad you have struck upon Pujalal's Sanskrit lessons in M.I. I had completely forgotten about them... I don't know whether he has published any book on (Simplified Sanskrit but perhaps he can correspond with you On whatever problems you may have. I believe Jagannath has done some simplification, but that is not a simplifying of the study of Sanskrit but a Sanskrit rid of its knots and made easy to be India's lingua franca." I checked this out when I visited the Ashram by attending Sri Jagannath's class, and was taken aback to find I had little difficulty in following the Sanskrit!
Then Amal turns to Savitri:
My work on Savitri is sporadic. Quite an amount of comment on certain books has been tape-recorded by Nirod or his helpers, who have been coming to talk poetry with me every Wednesday. But not all of it is in final shape. I have to do the editing - but where the hell is the time for it? When I was in Bombay I wrote out some observations on the first five lines of the poem. The observations ran to twenty pages or so in typescript. One day I'll publish them in Mother India. But where is the space for them?
What a treasure-trove remains untapped, only awaiting transcription and publication!
Now financial trouble rears its Hydra-heads:
Mother India is in trouble at present. The tripling of paper-cost and of other things has burnt tremendous holes in Mother India's pocket. We are straining every nerve to get Ads but we still need at least seven more pages of them every month: otherwise, Naresh Bahadur tells me, we shall face a deficit of about Rs. 7000 at the year's end! I am looking out for donations on whatever scale
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and at the same time cutting down the number of pages. The issue of August 15 will be for some time our last bumper issue. I hate to diminish the reading matter, but what else am I to do?
He ends the letter with a sigh of relief that his Inspiration of "Paradise Lost" is complete:
The bally thing is over at last, with a triumphant last chapter: The Metaphysics of "Paradise Lost".
I had been asked to set up a Directorate of Homeopathy for the Govt, of West Bengal in 1975 and must have mentioned this to Amal, for in one of his rare "dateless" letters that can be dated by the contents to 1975, he writes,
Homeopathy I know at first-hand. I haven't practised it but it has been practised on me and I have seen it practised on others. Our Ashram once had a homeopath who could easily be thought of as Hahnemann reincarnated - or, if we can play with German and Indian names, we may say he was Hahnemann reappearing as Hanuman! The latter name would be all the more appropriate because he was a devotee of Rama reappearing as a Consciousness which could be called a Cosmorama (alias Sri Aurobindo). Homeopathy is a useful system and often does what Allopathy or Ayurveda and Unani fail to do, but is certainly not infallible. Every system has its successes and failures. Much depends also on the practitioner himself. The homeopath I have spoken of - Dr. Ramachandra - was a dynamo of vitality and Sri Aurobindo could use him as an effective vahana.
There is then a quick shift to M.I. problems:
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I am enclosing a dozen Advertisement Tariff forms. I hope your hunch proves right and we get a number of long-term Ads. We badly need all the help we can get -as you must have learned by now from the "To Our Subscribers" on the title-page of the October issue.
He shifts gear to provide a delightful tongue-in-cheek account of his latest book of poems, weaving in information that would delight me about my own poem:
My Exodus book is still high and dry on my shelf, along with my other twenty unpublished books. The only break-through in all these years is that an American woman luckily (for me) fell in love with my poetry instead of with the poet and is bringing out a beautiful edition of some of my unpublished poems. It is being printed here on handmade paper at the All India Press but will be published from the USA. The title is Altar and Flame. That reminds me to tell you that your "Illusions" adorns a full page of the latest M.I.
I used to send Amal whatever material I thought would be of interest to him, such as on the Mahabharata war. His eagerness to get his research published is something that is repeated in letter after letter - even asking me if any government grant could be available. It is here that one realises how long he had been working away on the Harappa problem - from 1963, a good twelve years! His response dated 26.3.76 pinpoints with characteristic precision what is lacking with current revisionist historians seeking to establish that whatever the epics record is historical. After this, he turns to an article I wrote after discovering a five feet high 12th century Vishnu statue while digging a well in the district of Malda. What he writes shows his encyclopaedic grasp of matters, the attention to minutiae and how he would temper his trenchant criticism with warm humour:
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.. .Your article is a pleasant composition and touches on several interesting matters. It does not seem to be you at your very best but it is surely publishable and the reflections on the meaning of the Avatar-succession has sound Aurobindonian sense. There are just two or three little slips. First, the jellyfish is not a "unicellular" creature. If it were, it would be quite invisible. The amoeba is unicellular and has to be studied under a microscope. Second, the Dryden-Ode does not end with "Music shall untune the sky" but with "And Music shall..." You have to put three dots before "Music", or else quote it correctly after reinstating the matter omitted after "devour". Third, Keats did not use "spirit" as noun-adjective in the phrase "spirit ditties of no tone". The word goes with what precedes it. Properly punctuated, the whole line would read: "Pipe, to the spirit, ditties of no tone." So, I would make your sentence run: "...Vishnu who piped 'to the spirit ditties of no tone', ..." That would save Keats from turning in his grave.
Despite the pat on the back, my article didn't get published in Mi.!
There is a gap in correspondence as I was transferred to Delhi where I got to know the Director General of Archaeology, Shri M.N. Deshpande, who encouraged me to submit a synopsis of Amal's research on Harappan Culture. When I informed Amal of this, he wrote heart-warmingly on 15.4.78 from 30 Rue Suffren where he had shifted, passing on a very interesting bit of information about Sri Aurobindo's attitude to Hindi:
It's been a long time since I received a long letter from you. I suppose the "long" of the letter is in just relationship with the "long" of the former. But there is some lack of balance because of the fact that at short intervals I have not been receiving short letters from you. Anyway, a communication from Pradip is to be received with deep thanks - palms open and eyes rolled upward.
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The thanks become deeper because of the cheque enclosed (this refers to the subscription), and deepest since there was no call for it at all. I would gladly post you Mother India free and it was a pleasure to send you my books.
Now to the matters that most matter. It's very gallant of you to make a 22-page synopsis of my book and send it off to Deshpande. If you have a copy I should like very much to be a second Deshpande. In despair of ever getting my mammoth published, I carved out portions of it and with suitable follow-ups got together two smaller books: (1) The Problem of Aryan Origins, (2) Cotton in Ancient India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue. The first runs to 129 pages and has been taken up by some chaps in Calcutta who were eager to bring it out by January this year but haven't got past about one-fourth of it up to now. The second is 179 pages long and is waiting for somebody to eye it favourably.
Sri Aurobindo may have endorsed Hindi in his early political days, but in his Pondi period he recommended English as a link language for the present and spoke of simplified Sanskrit as the lingua franca of the future.
Eagerly awaiting your next, yours affectionately, Amal.
In his letters of 10th and 24th August 1978 Amal soundly puts down Rajneesh1, provides a fascinating discussion on the proper adjective from 'Aurobindo' and speaks of his part in the Selections from Savitri:
To give Rajneesh who has written in Hindi a place in Mother India in English would be to disseminate his
1. Reprinted in Aspects of Sri Aurobindo along with another letter to me critiquing the philosopher Krishna Chaitanya's severe criticism of Sri Aurobindo.
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views unnecessarily. Besides, he is such an ignoramus that he hardly deserves mention, especially mention at some length. I tackled him in my letter to you because you wanted me to do so, and also because I got a bit of pleasure from pointing out his inconsistencies and the Stygian abysses of his mind.
As for the variant adjectives from "Aurobindo", "Aurobindean" is Sisir Ghose's own coinage. Sri Aurobindo never used it. In one place he has used " Aurobindian" and in another "Aurobindonian". I have always plumped for the latter because of its grand sound. I believe Dilip first employed it. Of course, other alternatives are possible:" Aurobindoic"," Aurobindoesque", "Aurobindoan".
I had something to do with the Selections from Savitri. Mary Aldridge was the prime mover but she did base herself partly on my old set of extracts and constantly consulted me.
In response to my apprehension that his The Problem of Aryan Origins would be a nightmare of typographical howlers that Calcutta was notorious for, Amal replied with his characteristic humour while expressing his respect for B.B. Lai's judgement:
My Calcutta book will not be marred by printer's devils. I have gone through the proof very carefully two or three times. I agree that our Indian products are quite a nightmare. But at times wonderfully grotesque effects are the result. I remember reading in Sankalia's Indian Archaeology Today: "At this point a new elephant entered the culture." It would be such a shame to cut out such a glorious misprint.2
2. In his letter of 11.4.81 he writes, "Evidently he (Sankalia) does not dream of correcting the proofs. I have offered to edit and proof-read whatever future book he writes. It is indeed horrible as well as hilarious when 'awls' becomes 'owls' and 'element' turns into 'elephant'."
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.. .The best critic of any attempt at deciphering the Indus script is B.B. Lai. If he is satisfied, something genuine can be said to have been achieved. Mahadevan hasn't come unscathed from Lai's pen. Perhaps the most attractive reading of the script is the recent one by Walter Fairservis Jr. apropos of excavations at Allahdino. I have dealt with it critically in the sequel I have prepared to The Problem of Aryan Origins.
On 10 August 1978 Amal added to this subject, giving an invaluable nugget of information about Sri Aurobindo's view of the Indus Civilisation:
Thanks for your gallant attempt to get my book published. It was an even more gallant venture to make a summary of so many-sided and intricate a thesis.. .You ask whether Sri Aurobindo said anything in this context. At a time when Marshall suggested a centrally Sumerian origin for the Indus Valley Civilisation Sri Aurobindo chose to call it Proto-Indian.
He added with inimitable Amalian humour at the end:
P.S. I'm glad your brother bagged a First Class in his B. A. (Honours-English) finals. If he has beaten you hollow, since you got a Second Class though you stood first in that Class, he has knocked me also into a cocked hat, because I missed my First Class (Philosophy Honours) though by merely three or four marks3 and though I, a Philosophy student, happened to win the much-coveted Ellis Prize which a Literature-student was expected to capture.
3. Curiously, I too missed my First by 2 rnarks in the B. A. (Honours-English) Part I exam and by 1 mark in Part II. By Divine Grace I was placed first in the first class in M.A.
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The next significant letter is dated 22.9.1979. After providing an incisive critique of B.B. Lai's paper on "The Indo-Aryan Hypothesis vis-a-vis Indian Archaeology" Amal clarifies some of my misconceptions regarding Sri Aurobindo at considerable length, providing a brilliant summary of the change from Vedic spiritual insight to Upanishadic philosophy and ends with a typically humorous quip:
C'est tout about Lai just now. Let me deal with your postcard of the 17th... .your queries don't seem quite to arise from a close reading of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo has said that the Vedic Rishis knew the Supermind as Satyam Ritam Brihat - the True, the Right, the Vast. He has also taken Vijnana and Mahas as old Indian terms answering to his vision of the Supramental plane. There appears to be no doubt in Sri Aurobindo that the Vedic seers and the early Upanishadic sages were aware of this level. What he says is that the later sages of the Upanishads concentrated on the Silent Brahmic Self instead of taking it as merely one aspect of the total Reality. The reason for this concentration is threefold. (1) The Vedics found no way to make the Supermind effective for transformation. (2) The Upanishadics came more and more to mistake the Overmind for the Supermind and, considering it the ultimate dynamic side of the Divine, saw that it lacked the power to divinise the nature-part of man's existence and that therefore this part which looked undivinisable could not be a real feature of the Brahman who is all: in other words, it must be a strange anomaly, an unreality wearing the appearance of the real. The world thus was regarded in a way which in philosophical history was the forerunner of the later Shankarite idea of Maya. (3) The experience of the Nirvanic Absolute or the Nirguna Brahman brought home to the post-Rigvedic Yogis the "truth" of their conviction of the world's ultimate non-divinity and unreality, because in this experience the world did actually figure as a floating phantasm.
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Both Vijnana and Manas came to denote the Over-mind. At a still more subsequent time, Vijnana got identified with Buddhi, the highest stratum of human intelligence, the pure reason as distinguished from the sense-mind which was labelled as Manas. Possibly Mahas suffered the same degringolade. Now between the intellect and the Beyond there stood nothing and the Beyond was identified with the silent Brahman or passive Atman. The concept of Ishwara remained and was held to be useful for a devotion-oriented or dynamism-motived practical sadhana preparatory for the realisation of the inactive One without a Second - but, theoretically and in the final reckoning, this concept was understood as the silent Brahman (alias passive Atman) experienced within Maya. Once Maya was got rid of in the experience of the inactive One without a Second, Ishwara would disappear: He was classed as the Highest Illusion, "The last infirmity of noble minds".
In the Gita we have a great attempt to go back to the ancient integrality of spiritual vision. The Purushottama who is superior to the Kshara Purusha and the Akshara Purusha and who subsumes them does strike one as a Supramental reality, especially when accompanied by the concept of Para-Prakriti, the creative Supernature. But this latter concept is rather shadowy and what in the last resort encompasses our minds as Purushottama is the shining shadow of the Supermind in the top-layer, the synthesising crest, of the Overmind from where Sri Krishna who is basically Anandamaya came as an Avatar. He wove together the three Yogas -Jnana, Bhakti, Karma - and suggested the secret of secrets, the abandonment of all dharmas to take refuge solely in the Purushottama who would deliver one from all evil and from the grieving in which it results. But still the world in the Gita's vision does not quite escape being anityam asukham (transient and unhappy) for all the field it offers of a great victory of Righteousness. The manner in which the Acharyas have interpreted
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the Gita, each in favour of his own penchant, is not entirely unconnected with the Gita's many-side synthesising failure to express what the Overmind fundamentally moves towards yet is unable to point 01 unequivocally, much less to reveal convincingly. Taking advantage of whatever temporary stress the Git puts on Jnana, Bhakti or Karma, the Acharyas harp on their spiritual predilections and feel self-justified be cause the Gita in fact falls short of a fully satisfying unification. The fault with the Acharyas lay in their missing the nisus towards that unification. Sri Aurobindo alone has brought it out unmistakably and disclosed the Overmind Godhead as a help towards the Supermind even though it may be a danger if dwelt on too concentratedly. Hence his designation of the realisation on 24 November 1926 as Siddhi and yet his "No" to the Mother when she was ready to precipitate the Overmind creation on earth.
I feel a little out of breath at the moment with all this semi-Overmindish survey. So I'll hang up for the present.
On 17.10.79 Amal clarified this further:
... did I actually say that vijnana and mahas were terms in the Vedas? In the Rigveda the descriptive name for them is satyam-ritam, with the additional brihat applied to one or the other as in ritam brihat (1.75.5). The full Aurobindonian Vedic appellation for the Supermind, satyam-ritam-brihat, comes only in the first verse of the Atharvaveda's great hymn to Earth. The Supermind is also denoted in the Rigveda by the expression "a certain fourth", turiyam svid (X.67.1) whose discoverer is said to have been the Rishi Ayasya just as the Rishi Mahachamasya is said in the Taittiriya Upanishad to have discovered Mahas. The Rigveda's turiya, however, is not to be mixed with
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the fourth state going by that name in the Mandukya Upanishad. The Rigvedic "fourth" is not the Mandukyan grand finale, the indescribable Supracosmic, but stands in that numerical position both from below and from above: it is above the lower triplicity of Prithivi (earth), antariksha (vital plane) and dyau (mind-level) as well as below the higher triplicity (tridhatu) constituted by Vasu (substance), urj (abounding force of being) and priyam or mayas (delight or love), the Rigvedic equivalent of the Vedantic Sachchidananda and the Puranic satya-tapas-jana. As for vijnana getting identified with buddhi in later times, I don't believe that the identification can be laid at the door of the Puranas. The philosophers who started interpreting the religious books seem to have divided manas from buddhi as sense-mind from the pure reason and interpreted vijnana with the latter. As far as I remember, Radhakrishnan does the same.
A sweet personal note is sounded at the end of this long letter, capped with a poem, in response to the news of my transfer to the Queen of the Hills, Mussoorie:
Isn't it thrilling news that you will soon be on one of the Himalayan foothills? Mussoorie, as you know, has beautiful memories for me. I'll reserve Ages in Chaos for your sojourn in sight of the eternal snows. Do you remember my poem in which the Himalaya finds tongue?
The tides of gold and silver sweep the sky
But bring no tremor to my countenance:
How shall sun-rise or moon-ebb lure, when I
Have gripped the Eternal in a rock of trance?
Here centuries lay down their pilgrim cry,
Drowsed with the power in me to press my whole
Bulk of unchanging peace upon their eye
And weigh that vision deep into the soul.
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My frigid love no calls of earth can stir.
Straight upward climbs my hush - but this lone flight
Reveals me to broad earth an emperor
Ruling all time's horizon through sheer height!
In November 1979 his name had gone up for the Sahitya Akademi Award, sponsored by me. Amal closes his letter with, "We have to keep our fingers crossed about the Akademi Award." I was in the Ashram in January 1981 and this is what I got on my return to Mussoorie:
I hope you reached Nandita's lap in one piece. You have left behind a lot of warmth in my heart and a glow in my mind. Thanks to you a lot of things got done also. One of the results is the letter whose copy I am enclosing.
The letter was Sita Ram Goel's enthusiastic response to the typescript of Cotton, stating that he started on it at 8 pm on 19th January and read up to page 138 "in one breath" when he had to stop at 2 am, and that he had never found so absorbing a book since he read Jayaswal's Hindu Polity in a single sitting in 1943. He sent it for printing straightaway, sending some more reference books to Amal and offering to make provision for some appendices. Here is Amal's amusing letter of 17.2.81 in which he responds to my suggestion that he get an introduction written by S.N. Kramer or H.D. Sankalia:
Your suggestion to get an introduction from Sankalia is one which Goel has also made. Kramer seems out of the question. I don't even know whether he by now is not "one with yesterday's seven thousand years". An Appendix on Mehergarh threatens to become an appendicitis. Mehergarh is precisely what has posed a difficulty for me...
My review of Amal's research on the Indus Valley Civilisation was not yet out in Puratattva. Of this Amal wrote on 9.5.81:
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Your work for Puratattva seems to have no end. You are a very patient fellow. In more eulogistic terms I should say a dogged one - a kind of Hound of Heaven where a worthwhile quarry is involved.
At this time he seems to have been afflicted with severe back pain, for he writes:
Unfortunately my back has not benefited - and I don't think it will unless I take a three-week's holiday in bed. This I can't do now. When Sehra was there, I could have indulged in the luxury. By now I have come to terms with the back-ache and as I don't do much of peregrination I am not specially bothered.
On 30.6.81 Amal sent me the correspondence between him and Sankalia over the unpublished review of The Problem that Sankalia had sent him for reactions. Amal's rejoinder was, typically, four times the length of Sankalia's letter! Amal's covering letter was unusual in that it was handwritten, not typed and had a postscript scribbled in the margin which warmed my heart ever so much:
While you are in England may I send (as gifts, of course) the September and October issues of M.I. by air?
Obviously, the financial crisis had passed!
Even on a postcard Amal could pack in precious guidance, as in this of 13.10.81:
The best and most reliable translation of the Gita is, of course, in Anil Baran's publication containing notes from Sri Aurobindo and two Appendices. I have heard of Mascara's rendering but its having taken 20 years to complete and 20 times rewriting cannot prevent it from having at least 20 mistakes in translation and construing. One must know what the Gita was driving at. This
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can be found only in Sri Aurobindo's rendering, which in most part is in AB's book.
After an unusual silence, I received this handwritten postcard dated 1.12.81 where he ends in his typical punning style:
Sorry to have neglected you so long. Or have I forgotten having attended to you some time back? My correspondence at present is in a bit of Lethe-mood. Thanks for the new Kronos and your magisterial preview of my Harappa. I wonder what the reactions of the old guard - Lal et al - will be like. The joke of the season is Sankalia's latest note to me. I am making an accurate copy below: "After reading your elucidating, a friend of mine was wondering whether the spiritual bases has any material bases or not? Or exists simply in air?"
The first two parts of my Megasthenes are almost ready. They have been enlarged now and can very well make the first push of a battering ram against the strong-hold of the current chronology. If my effort has the Divine's blessings, we may speak of my "Battering Ram" in the Lanka of fixed historical ideas.
After this I left Mussoorie, served in Murshidabad and was transferred to Kolkata where I went through a bad patch. Amal wrote a sweetly comforting letter dated 30.8.85:
I am sorry you had to pass through a bitter period. You must have offended some people by being just and fair to their opponents. Blackening your name is their way of trying to show you that only corruption really pays. I am glad you have come out of the gloom this attack had cast upon you. The coincidence of the emergence into light with Sri Aurobindo's birthday
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prompts me to quote those lines from Savitri that are some of my guide-lines:
A poised serenity of tranquil strength,
A wide unshaken look on time's unrest,
Faced all experience with unaltered peace.
Have you had the time to find out something helpful on the Unadi-sutras and the occurrence of the word "dinara" in them, to which some old commentators have given Indian roots and interpreted as meaning a gold seal or ornament?... When are you visiting Pondi again?
Amal was now busy revising The Beginning of History for Israel. In his letter of 19.11.85 one finds Amal regretting that he has had to demolish one of his favourite writers, besides a quite uncharacteristic reference to the weather and the Prime Minister:
You will be interested to know that a long appendix has been added: "Velikovsky's Chronological Challenge." I have dealt at full length with his dating of Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III, the two Egyptian rulers vital to my thesis on Moses and the Exodus. Velikovsky has been a favourite of mine for long and it was not enjoyable to demolish his basic thesis. I thought of an incident connected with Father Divine, the Negro God on earth who has a large following in the States. He was imprisoned for some legal misbehaviour and was waiting final trial which was to come off a week or so later. In the meantime the Judge who was to try him died. When the news was brought to Father Divine, he said: "I am sorry, but I had to do it."
Maggi has written a long novel telling the story of the Mahabharata. She considers it her masterpiece but Gollancz, her usual publisher, is hesitant to stake money
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on it4.. .She has made quite a name for herself here as a homeopath. Not only has she been practising impressively but others have caught fire from her and started treating people with success. Have you been continuing your own practice?
We have been having rather an excessive form of what the "brown Englishmen" of the old days of the Raj used to call "home weather". The devastation was sufficient to call Rajiv to make a helicopter survey of both Madras and Pondi. As he hovered for some time over us I hope he has caught a bit of the Mother's atmosphere. His actions in the near future will show whether he has caught it or not.
Amal sent me the typescript of his elaborate demolition of Velikovsky for comments. It took me some time to digest and react, and he became impatient. He wrote a long letter dated 16.5.86 which deals with diverse matters such as his newest publication effort from his own slender resources:
The very day your packet came I was thinking of asking you whether my Appendix had reached you or not. For the delay in referring to it was quite substantial. I am glad you have gone through the Appendix, but I have the suspicion that it suggests Appendicitis to you... By the way I am bringing out in book form The English Language and The Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, 500 copies in paperback: This is my first - and almost certainly the last and sole - publishing venture with my own money. It will cost Rs. 6,500 at our Press. 1000 copies will cost 7,000. A businessman may ask me to go in for them, but there is the problem of storing them. Balkrishna can store only a few.
4. Maggi Lidchi Grassi's magnificent trilogy was published first by Writers Workshop. Then the first two were brought out by ROLL the second with an Introduction by me that has recently been reprinted in M.I.
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The next letter is dated 7.6.86.1 had not been able to attend to Amal's queries because of a harrowing period of interviewing sadly deficient candidates in the Public Service Commission. It is humbling to see his complete absence of egotism in valuing my verdict on his thesis, although he was so much more senior in age and his reading in the relevant literature was incomparably more profound and vast. The letter also shares little-known information regarding the Mother's earlier emanations:
Yes, the intellectual standard today is appallingly low. I hope by now your interviews are over and you can attend to what I am enclosing. In my last letter I expressed my idea to take up Velikovsky's strongest point and deal with it critically. Now I have done so and the few pages which have to be added to the Appendix await your verdict...
As for identifying the Queen of Sheba, it is not necessary for my purpose. AH I can whisper in your ear is that Nolini once said that Sri Aurobindo had been Solomon and the Mother the Queen of Sheba. Nolini has also confirmed that the Mother had also been Queen Hatshepsut. So Velikovsky is perfectly right in visioning the two of them - Sheba and Hatshepsut -as being the same person but in a sense beyond his comprehension and having nothing to do with his chronology. By the way, I may say that it is possible for the Mother to be two different women in the same age. She was both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. In an earlier age she was at the same time Mona Lisa, Margaret de Valois and some other aristocratic lady whose name I forget for the moment. Of course we are here speaking of different partial emanations of the Mother, embodying one aspect or another aspect, and not the full central being which found embodiment only in our time...
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My reply evoked an enthusiastic response dated 27.9.86 and I still remain astonished at Amal placing so much store by my opinion:
I am immensely bucked up by your seal of approval on my latest treatment of Velikovsky. I'll weave this and the earlier instalment together and make them independent of my book The Beginning of History for Israel, and send them to the SIS Review...
He went on to type out several pages from Ancient India in a New Light ("the light now covered up by the Press's lockout" as he writes?) showing how he arrived at his conclusions. The lengths to which he would go to convince a correspondent were amazing indeed. Invariably, there would be a touch of humour tucked away somewhere. For instance, he writes on 10.10.86:
Your long letter was very welcome - and would have been still more enjoyable if your typewriter-ribbon had not been even fainter than the one with which my present letter is being done. You are grateful for the trouble I took to send you long extracts from my forthcoming book. I am equally grateful for the detailed chronology you have sent from Morton Smith's book...
The next letter dated 28.10.86 is an excellent example of Amal's typical epistolary style: begin with a delightful bon mot, go on to speak of the present preoccupation; touch upon problems M.I. is facing and end with some news about health, always laughing it away:
Your mention of my "extract" made me think of malt extract or liver extract and reminded me of the discussion between two Tamil would-be philosophers:
"How can you say there is God? Where is he?"
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"God is everywhere."
"Then why don't I see him?"
"You foolish man, how can you see God?
God is an essence."
"What essence? Chicken essence?"
The discussion could not proceed further after this crucial question. But I am led to inquire of you whether you mean by my "extract" my mind-nourishing essay in two parts: "The Greco-Aramaic Inscription of Kandahar: Some Second Thoughts on Its Interpretation." I shall be glad to know your impression. This area of chronological revision is of central importance.
Thanks for the address of the Interdisciplinary Society. I am preparing a copy for it under the title:
Is Velikovsky's Revised Chronology Tenable?
A Scrutiny of Three Fundamental Themes:
The Exodus, Hatshepsut, Tuthmosis III5
The Press-tussle is still on. I must have written to you that the burden of the November Mother India has been shouldered by the All India Press. Most probably the December issue will also be taken up at the same place. After fruitless negotiations under the auspices of the Labour Commissioner the case will have to go to the Court. Let's hope this will happen soon and the Judge delivers a fair verdict. Nowadays the dice are generally loaded in favour of labour.
Good news is that both my nephews - one a specialist in cardio-thoracic surgery and the other an expert advocate (ex-right-hand man of the late Rajni Patel) - have undertaken to get my 20 unpublished books out at the rate of at least one a year and perhaps two. This means I
5. Is Velikovsky's Revised Chronology Tenable? A Scrutiny of Four Fundamental Themes. Published in 2002 by The Integral Life Foundation, East Lyme, U.S.A.
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have to be alive for ten or more years provided I don't write any more books. A strong point in favour of my longevity is that my legs are too weak to kick any bucket.
I had responded at length to Amal's examination of the Kandahar inscription and it was so heart-warming and simultaneously humbling to receive his hearty appreciation of 28.11.86. It is difficult to envisage someone of his immense scholarship being encouraged by the reactions of an amateur. "Your appreciation of my 'Kandahar' has bucked me up no end," he wrote. In the same letter one notices his pressing eagerness to see his adventures in literary criticism published. Once again I failed to convince anyone in Calcutta to publish Amal's unconventional research. I used to act as the Devil's Advocate for Amal, bringing to his notice any news or studies that challenged the position he was taking in his yet-to-be-published works on ancient history. His letter of 12.8.87 provides insight into the type of material I used to send him and his detailed responses, which were as much to clear his head as to test on me whether his marshalling of arguments was adequate to demolish the academic-turned-Union Minister Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay. The letter has been reproduced in Supplement III of The Problem.
Amal's letter of 17.1.88 is extremely important because it contains a detailed comment on the only letter from Mrinalini Devi that Sri Aurobindo had preserved, which remains unpublished. I had sent Amal copies of all the letters my parents had painstakingly copied from the Alipore Bomb Case court archives. I had pointed out that though these contain a letter from Sri Aurobindo replying to Mrinalini, we do not realise this fact because somehow he had dated his answer wrongly. Amal confirmed my finding twice over:
Thanks a lot for sending me all those letters. Morel thanks are due to your mother for taking so much
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trouble. The unpublished letter from Mrinalini, full of abuse from the loving heart, is worth bringing out because we have Sri Aurobindo's response to it in the letter which is wrongly dated 17.2.1907 when the correct year should be 1908, as you suggest. This response of Sri Aurobindo's makes all the complaints of Mrinalini pointless since Sri Aurobindo is no longer himself but only a tool in the hands of the Divine and so he cannot be judged any longer from the human standpoint which takes into consideration the duties of a husband or even of a man in general. Mrinalini's of 20.12.1907 has been suppressed because of the fear that it might lead to a misunderstanding of Sri Aurobindo by its 'disrespectful' attitude, though a keener perception should assure us of the devotion behind it which makes the abuse itself humanly sweet. The letter whose true date you have properly intuited reveals the exact situation and brings a light in which Sri Aurobindo stands justified no less than Mrinalini or rather he is taken out of the realm in which she can be justified and he require any justification. As there is in her series of invectives no reference to any awareness that he is now in God's hands - as the reference is merely to some great work he is doing, evidently in the Nationalist cause - we can be sure that what is usually dated to early 1907 must be later than that series. No doubt, in his letter Sri Aurobindo wants her not to divulge to anybody the secret of his no longer being his own master, but this should not prevent her from showing in a private letter her own knowledge of the great change: she could have said that all this talk of being God's instrument altogether can cut no ice with her who was his rightful wife and needed to be attended to. As we find not the slightest inkling of such an attitude we cannot put her letter later than Sri
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Aurobindo's about the stupendous psychological revolution that has taken place in his life.
After writing the above, I consulted Purani's Life of Sri Aurobindo (Fourth edition, fully revised, 1978) and sought out the letter from Scott's Lane about this revolution. A very good translation of it appears on pp. 106 & ff, and there is a footnote which sets right the date:
The manuscript of this letter bears the date 17 Feb- ruary 1907. This is evidently a slip. In February 1907 Sri Aurobindo was staying in Deoghar. The house in Scott's Lane does not seem to have been taken till after Sri Aurobindo's return from Surat in February 1908. In 1909 the judge in the Alipore bomb-case, evaluating the letter as evidence, said of it, "dated 17th February 1907 - obviously a mistake for 1908." (Bijoy Krishna Bose, Ed., The Alipore Bomb Trial, Calcutta: Butterworth & Co. 1922 p. 157).
Nirod was against giving any publicity to Mrinalini's letter. I don't think he realised that Sri Aurobindo's letter about being a puppet in God's hands followed it. I'll try to open his mind to the fact and see what he has to say...
The postcard of 13.7.90 shows Amal's deep personal concern over my problems lightened with a radiant touch of humour that is his very own and prescription of a homely remedy for kidney stones!
I am so sorry to hear of your tale of woe upon woe. Your mother-in-law's case is typically suited for homeopathy. I suppose the whole Hahnemann implicit in you is at it. But do you believe in the Master's doctrine of one single unmixed dose? By the way, I am sure some Indophile will say that Hahnemann was a fiction hiding the reality of Hanuman.
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I pray everything sorts out and you find time for Archaeology and the Mahabharata. I have calculated the War to have taken place around 1450 B.C., as you will note from Ancient India in a New Light. I don't know when the epic was written.
.. .I have experienced the passage of the kidney stone through the ureter (not the urethra). A Hercules would fall on the floor and writhe with agony. But there is a simple remedy. Make bhindi soup, sip it as haot as possible, then walk for 15 minutes. Repeat this twice a day. Within a week or so the stone will pass out without P's knowing it...
In his postcard dated 6.9.90 in which he is keen to find out if I could get Ancient India reviewed in Puratattva or elsewhere. I had sent him some details of Lal's findings and asked about the new edition of Ilion.
Dating the oldest stratum of the MBH by tallying its information on artefacts, etc. with dated archaeological finds seems a very original and illuminating method. Do let me have your series of notes woven together. They will provide also a terminus ad quem of the War itself.
The new Ilion is indeed splendid. I regret that the essay on Quantitative Metre was omitted. It is a most important contribution to poetic technique. Of course, the numbering of lines would have been helpful.
In his letter dated 7 July 1991 Amal begins with a piercing insight into my own psychology - pulling no punches but quite confident that our affectionate relationship was such that the could say this without causing offence. I had posed to him the problem of evil in the world and received an illuminating reply:
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I was glad to hear from you. It's been a long time since I last received a letter. Within that time your handwrit-ing has undergone a bit of a change. I find it more carefully and patiently employed. Perhaps you have added a cubit to your stature and grown more efficient as well as more considerate all round?...
The questions raised by the fine article on Evil are age-old - only they have here been put in modern garbs. They are unanswerable on our own level. The materialist mind escapes giving any answer: it takes the world to be such and such and no moral or theological problems are involved by it. Beyond materialism the immediate temptation is to believe in dualism: God and Satan as equally existent and always fighting. Some sort of practical dualism is unavoidable even in the Aurobindonian spirituality, but some subtleties are felt and even made effective in the modalities of the Yoga. If God exists with the nature which would really make him Godlike, a problem analogous to that of Evil is the one of waste. The sole answer Sri Aurobindo considers as conveyable to the mere mind is that in the series of varied possibilities of manifestation by the Divine the possibility must arise and be accepted of a manifestation of the Divine starting from the very opposite of all divinity - an utter involution in which all existence, consciousness-force and bliss seem lost but from which a slow difficult evolution takes place of all these and shall culminate in a total divinisation of all the elements, including matter itself. There is a push upward from the involved Divine and there is a pressure downward from the free divinity: the result will ultimately be a trans-formation of a complete kind such as only Sri Aurobindo has envisaged because only he has visioned the supreme Plenitude as acting from both high above and down below. In this manifestation where an evolutionary process goes on as if initially God did not ex-;| ist, evil and waste as the consequence of the total|
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involution are bound to be logical and natural accompaniments of evolution, with the free godhead from "above" fighting them to fulfil
The Eternal broken into transient lives
And godhead pent in the mire and the stone.
Behind the apparent fight, there is also a subtle strategy born of the fact that in spite of all the differences and contradictions "the One without a second" is everywhere, so that even evil and waste are bound somehow to sub-serve, for all their natural and logical actuality, the purpose of sat-chit-tapas-ananda....
And that brings me to the end of a wonderful excursion into the past, traversing 17 long years from 1974 to 1991 in the company of a mind that astonishes with its encyclopaedic reach, suffused with humour and wit, and a heart whose warmth reaches out to envelop one, making a mockery of distance.
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