Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

Amal Kiran: Sadhak, Poet, Friend

I WAS introduced to Amal Kiran in the first days of August 1971.  In the intervening 23 years I have met him more or less weekly... sometimes more, occasionally less often.  23 x 52 = 1196 - say 1200 hours... not counting sleeping time, this amounts to only 100 waking days, just over 3 months. Such a statistic does nothing to convey the immense amount of support, encouragement, inspiration and guidance for which I owe him a still-accumulating debt of gratitude.  How to speak about all I have received from and through him?

SADHAK

First and foremost Amal has been a living example to me of what a follower of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could be.

Our last darshan message told us: "In the integral Yoga there is no distinction between the sadhana and the outward life; it is in each and every movement of the daily life that the truth must be found and practised." This is the ideal of which Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Hard is it to be in the world, free, yet living the life of attempted and accomplished. Sannyasa has a formal garb and outer tokens; therefore men think they can easily recognise it; but the freedom of a Janaka does not proclaim itself and it wears the garb of the world; to its presence even Narada was blinded."

This is what I have seen in Amal: All the big and little joys and vicissitudes of life over almost a quarter of a centuryoffered up to the Master and the Mother, sometimes smilingly, sometimes with an intense call for aid and understanding, but always with unfailing confidence in their solicitude and constant guiding presence, and a spontaneous surrender to their will.

Although increasing bodily difficulties have gradually restricted his physical movements, they have not limited the far-ranging integrality I have always found in Amal: mentally, in the vast

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scope of his interests; psychically and emotionally in the wideness of his sympathies; and spiritually, in the subtlety of his intuitive grasp of inner truths and circumstances. Practically, it has always seemed to me, he is ready to take any and every aspect of life into his sadhana, whose keyword has been, as he has often told me, "Remember and offer". I have seen that unobtrusive but persistent remembering and offering at work in big and little things day by day over the years, and I am convinced that it is this everrenewed opening of the Mother and the Master that has shaped his whole nature into such a wide warm flow of sweet strength.

Into this flow I have had occasion to pour various troubles and difficulties; and always felt that they were sympathetically seized and lifted up into the joint sunlight of Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's consciousness. The wideness and depth of Amal's link with our gurus - established and enlarged over so many years for closeness and intense aspiration - enables help from them to flow freely to those who appeal to him for assistance. He has always been scrupulous in insisting that the help comes from them, while readily accepting to intercede on behalf of any troubled questioner. In this way, through his personal influence and example, as well as through his many writings on life and yoga, he has helped to spread their sunlight brightly and broadly.

POET

The mental and vital affinities that attracted me to Amal have much to do with his qualities as a poet. The adventurous intellect which I could not always follow into his explorations of Jewish orEgyptian or Indian history, into theological discussion or literary criticism, I could immediately respond to in his poetry. The  recently-published Collected Poems is in my eyes a towering achievement, second only to Sri Aurobindo's own poetic oeuvre... although it seems that a new generation of readers will have to emerge before its true position and value can be widely appreciated.

I have been privileged to glimpse some of the 'juvenilia' Amal had written before he came to the Ashrain in 1927, and I can attest that although he may have been born a poet, it was Sri Aurobindo who made him the great poet he is. Those early

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efforts were poor stuff compared to the masterpieces that started to flow only a few months later under Sri Aurobindo's guidance.

In fact Amal has told me that after coming to the Ashram he wrote only for Sri Aurobindo - no one else's assessment counted a jot for him. But from the Master he wanted to elicit the highest praise: Not satisfied with a "very good", he strove to deserve an "excellent" or "superb", and to reach, the highest possible levels of poetic inspiration.

The remarkable thing is that he has been able to sustain this high level-of poetic achievement over more than 60 years - although of course there have been variations in the rate and intensity of the output. His astonishing volume The Adventure of the Apocalypse, which was written over a few months in 1948 and which Sri Aurobindo immediately arranged to have published without alteration as soon as he had seen it, is a significant milestone towards the future poetry, which remains to be emulated.

It was not only the poems which appealed to me, but the personality of their maker. Qualities such as the spiritual artist's delight in varied forms of beauty, capacity for high intensities of feeling and vision, subtle richness of comprehension, discrimination and expression, which make him such a fine poet, also flow out in Amal's daily dealings, enhancing his response to the people and ideas that enter his orbit. Perhaps the almost reckless adventurousness which he showed in earlier life, now muted to a steady courage which helps him to sustain with cheerfulness the trials of his present restricted life-style, forms part of this poetic persona too.

A photograph in my possession, taken last year, catches his outer features even better than the one on the back cover of The Secret Splendour: The wide brow, dreaming eyes, sweet sensitive smile, and serene presence of the sadhak-poet, who has consistently aimed for

A wide unshaken look on time's unrest.

The innermost state of Amal Kiran as he approaches 90 is evoked

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by Far, dated 1 July 1993, the latest poem¹ to be included in The Secret Splendour: (p. 662)

Far from his own heartbeat, his wakeful day

Breathes a huge mountain-air's lucidity

And views a wide earth many-faced yet one.

A calm conspiracy of signalling stars,

An infinite mystery's throb on silvery throb

Of news from nowhere tingling everywhere,

Is now his sleep. Within his fragile form

Gods move with radiant smiles from hush to hush

Of inmost heaven: an immortality

Touches with healing hands the million shards

Left round his stillness by the tramp of time.

FRIEND

While I could not fail to respect such a sadhak, and be attracted by such a fine poet, an equal open-heartedness on his side could not be taken for granted. Yet from our very first meeting he drew me, as he has drawn many others, into his circle of friends.

In our friendship, some of his other qualities have been shown to me: For example, a simple and unassuming companionableness which dissolves formal barriers and allows a spontaneous intimacy; an immense loyalty, ever ready to extend sympathy and understanding, even when, in anyone else's eyes, we would not merit them; a capacity for wordless communication it has sometimes happened that he was occupied with someone else when I came, or that during our talk someone would come in who required his foil attention... then a glance between us would say all that needed to be said, and I could withdraw without disappointment.

His humour is well known.... I have heard (it was before my time, of course) about how, when he was giving his talks on poetry in the Ashram school, the whole building was shaken by gales of laughter from his audience, so that other teachers

1. Missed in the Index. - Editors

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complained of the disturbance. Sometimes this humour takes an unexpectedly playful form. I remember once taking an 8-year old to visit him.  Seeing that the child was somewhat overawed at first, Amal, as if absorbing some of the little one's mischievous nature, began to demonstrate the extraordinary capacities of his polio-damaged left leg. Lifting, it high in the air like a ballerina and jiggling it around as if it were not properly connected to his body (I suppose it isn't), he explained to the delighted child, whose shyness had all vanished, that Mother had promised to give him a golden leg one day. He also explained that it is very important to know how to fall without hurting oneself, and proved it by dropping to the floor like a plank!

Of course this happened many years ago, and unfortunately Amal gift for falling and rising again did not prevent the catastrophic breakage of his good right leg a couple of years ago - as a result of which he is now riding a wheelchair, instead of the spirited white horse of his dreams. But this has not banished the smile from his eyes, nor prevented him from tranquilly continuing to fulfil all his many responsibilities as editor of Mother India. Although he is in his 90th year, he has not yet retired from service. Happily too, it did not prevent Amal and Nirodbaran from completing the tremendous labour involved in their detailed consideration of all the pros and cons of every alteration proposed for the definitive edition of Savitri. The Mother has told us that our best friend is one who loves the best in us, and helps us always to live up to our best. This is what Amal Kiran has been to me: a great poet and real friend, because always, first and foremost, a true sadhak, faithful follower of Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother's child.

SHRADDHAVAN

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