Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

Amal's Epistolary Wonder

"A man speaking to men" — that is Wordsworth's conception of an ideal poet. Amal Kiran's innumerable letters to his friends and admirers in the series Life-Poetry-Yoga more than glowingly fulfil this poetic condition. We present in the following a very small sample of the lively correspondence that went on - and is going on - between PR of the Ashram Press and him. Amal as an expounder of Savitri, a very perceptive critic of poetry, a sharp historian, an alert editor, commentator on things and events spiritual and esoteric as well as scientific, an interpreter of dreams and, very happily, a warm humorist and wit with a rich and robust sense of life and understanding of human nature, stands again in front of us in pure gleaming colours that are deeply satisfying - because they all come from the very quality of his soul that is perfectly Aurobindonian. PR's note itself is good introduction to this little, but precious, selection:

"My dear Deshpande

Regarding Amal's epistolary wonder:

As many of these letters have already been published in Mother India and his book Life-Poetry-Yoga, I cannot object to your compilation. But one important point Amal agreed to: nowhere should there be any mention of my name. I am sure you too won't disagree.

If at all they come out you may supply a short editorial note just befitting the occasion. Of course I am keeping Amal informed as well.

With love, PR (23.8.94)."

The correspondence between the two dear friends runs into four thick volumes and the "scoop" - as Amal says - needs mere space than is possible here. —Editors

PR: Has the author of "Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare" entered into nirvikalpa samadhi?

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And is it advisable for an integral Yogi ?

And the physical frame! Is that steady and sound?

AK: I had just begun to show on my typewriter that there was no danger of even the savikalpa (is the word right ?) when your note came. After looking at the references I shall continue tapping the keys which will unlock my heart and mind to you.

*

PR: Is Amal's letter to me still swelling ? When will it reach a desirable size! Amen' (not women!!)

AK: Quite a philosophical question [with an arrow pointing to the bracket]. Yes, it's swelling - but there was a short interval before further swelling. Now the process will continue to the bursting point.

*

AK: Thank you for your warm note. Yes, I am as I have been and there is no complication. I try to imitate the immobile Brahman but to be as far away as possible from the motionless Brahman!

PR: I can wait for eternity. But that "eternity" is not "eternal". Sri Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna) should remember that it is only "temporal"'.

AK: Being a student of Blake, I must for my friend's sake remember how

To hold infinity in the palm of my hand

And eternity in an hour.

*

PR: A D are reading proofs carefully. Her corrections in the margin are in pencil. Please do not miss them.

AK; I suppose that since there are 2 names - "A" & "D" this plural form is used.

PR: Good heavens! I never knew that I used the plural form! But still something might have worked subconsciously. When the lady was introduced to me, I was told that if necessary, she would compare the proofs with her husband, "D".

AK: What's this again? The concluding phrase would mean that she was permitted to consider the proofs comparable with "D": that is, he would be likened to a heap of galleys!

*

PR: Have I flooded you with work ? If so hold your secrecy of "Splendour" for some time and attend to M.I. [Mother India}.

AK; I can bear a lot on my back. Actually the burden becomes so much less when I feel my friend's deep concern for me.

PR: "The Secret Splendour" pages. I make a generous gift of all I had in my hand. Now I have to wait for more pages to come

AK: Thanks. Let the Splendour that is still secret take its time. When it comes to you let your generous heart flow out!

*

PR: We have held-over matter from February. It has not been included in the March issue. Kindly throw some Kiran.

AK: The "Kiran" is not "Amal" enough to be sure at the moment about the fate of the article. If it's no trouble to the Press, store it. Otherwise kill it. The author has wanted to enlarge it after some months.

*

10.9.91

Friend most dear,

I have brought out from my drawer a regular heap of letters from you calling out for answers. All are vibrant with affectionate warmth and each has its own particular spark of inner light, showing that my friend has really been living with a sense of Sri Aurobindo tingling in his mind and a feeling of the Mother

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athrob in his heart and, along with these divine Ones, a few humans are also at home in his sincere aspiring life. I am sure nobody can say about you what my friend Anil Kumar once told me people were saying about him. His words have stuck in my memory because of both their quaint imagery and their AnilKumarish English: "People think Anil Kumar has no backbone and no legs. He is simply sitting and digesting foods."

Let me try to take up your notes chronologically. I was surprised to find one as early in the year as 31.3.91. It is one of the shortest but packed with sweetness as well as an imaginative thrill. It has also a Biblical ring by a repeated use of the conjuction "And". It runs:

                       My dear Amal,

And then "Savitri" again!

And a Sunday of rest, relaxation and peace!

And when I come across the lines:

And Will is a conscious chariot of the Gods,

And Life, a splendour-stream of musing Force,

Carries the voices of the mystic Suns...

as a sequel there appears before my mind's eye Sri Aurobindo's "The Clear Ray" - my dear and rare friend "Amal Kiran". My feeling is too evident to elucidate.

I feel deeply moved, nor can I be happier than when I am associated with lines from Savitri. In my whole life in the Ashram I have made only two impassioned dramatic statements to the Mother. The first was a little ridiculous. It couched the very first declaration I made to her. I said with a sort of sweeping gesture:

"I have seen everything in life. Now I want only God." You may remember that the Mother coolly asked me: "How old are you ?" I replied: 'Twenty-three." She gave what I may term a serious smile and remarked: "At twenty-three you have seen everything of life ? Don't be in a hurry to make any decision. Stay here for some time and look around. If the life here suits you, join the Ashram." As I have always commented: The Mother's response was like ice-water dashed on my enthusiasm, but I realised that

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she was a Guru who was not avid to have disciples and this was definitely in her favour in my eyes. I stayed on - for good! And it was many years later that I made my other impassioned pronouncement. I had worked almost single-handed for the Ashram to bring out the first one-volume edition of the complete Savitri along with the copious letters Sri Aurobindo had written to me apropos of his epic - the 1954 "University" publication. While preparing it I had several occasions to talk with the Mother on various points and she was quite aware of my labour of love. Still, it so happened that when the book was out she did not give me any copy. After a few days I drew her attention to the fact and declared what Savitri meant to me. I made the resounding statement: "I would give my heart's blood for Savitri." She at once asked Champaklal for a copy and, writing my name on it and signing, presented it to me.

Yes, I would give my heart's blood because it is as if it were itself given to me by Savitri!  Ever since, apropos of a certain spiritual situation suggested by a poem of mine, Sri Aurobindo quoted two lines telling of a Ray from the Transcendent coming through the silent Brahman -

Piercing the limitless unknowable,

Breaking the vacancy and voiceless peace -

ever since he quoted them and, in answer to my question where these profoundly reverberating lines had hailed from, wrote the single word "Savitri" - ever since that mystery-packed moment I have felt my very heart to be a rhythm of life wakened by the grace of the Power which could create such poetry and whose Ray from the Transcendent was the ultimate source of whatever little light was sought to be evoked in me by the Aurobindonian gift of my new name "Amal Kiran" meaning 'The Clear Ray".

You write as though my life were already carrying "the voices of the mystic Suns". I wish that were true. But what is true is that indeed from far-away those golden accents have raised as an echo in my depths the constant prayer:

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Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart, —

Call of the One!

Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,

O living Sun.

Your next "missive" is of 13.4.91. It has many interesting facets of your inner and outer life. I pick out a few. You have conjured up the picture of some of you  sitting around Nolini after his dinner and before putting him to bed. The talk turns on past births. Somebody asks Nolini who you were in the Ramayana epoch (Yuga). You write: "He did not answer, kept quiet. When pressed again, he replied very softly: 'He was a friend of mine.'" No wonder you were "overjoyed", thinking "being his friend I was not far away from the Divine, - he being with the Divine." I am glad to mark that for all your devotion to Nolini the topmost concern in you was the Divine and you did not stop short with whatever was noteworthily Nolinian and that to you the most noteworthy part in him was the one turned Divineward.  The next point that strikes me is the natural way in which "the Ramayana epoch" figures in the talk.  It is taken for granted that it was a genuine historical age and not a mytholegendary one.  Sri Aurobindo has affirmed that in the cultural process of the ages the Rama-figure stands for the establishment of the dharmic (ethical) mind over the mental titanism on the one hand and on the other the animal mentality, two trends in the path of human evolution. Sri Aurobindo also declares that in the Rama depicted by Valmiki he can feel the afflatus of Avatarhood, the movements of a consciousness beyond the personal, a consciousness that has a cosmic character. How far back in time Rama may be considered to have existed ? My new chronology dates Krishna at the time of the Bharata War to c. 1482 or 1452 B.C. In the traditional table of royal genealogies, starting with Manu Vaivasvata, Krishna's number is 94 and Rama's 65 - a difference of 30 generations.  Taking a generation to be roughly 30 years we get about 900 years. This would carry Rama to around 900 years before the Bharata War, that is, c. 2382 or 2352 B.C.

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Here I may clear a possible misunderstanding. In Chapter X, verse 31 of the Gita, Krishna speaking of his Vibhutis tells us: "I am Rama among warriors." We must remember that Indian tradition knows of two Ramas: Rama Jamadagnya and Rama Dasarathi. The former is also called Parasurama, "Rama of the Axe". This designation distinguishes him as a warrior. It is to him that Krishna refers.

You have quaintly wondered, before Nolini's reply., whether your “evolution” had reached the "human level by that period".  According to archaeology, man in some form or other, is about two million years old. The modern form was approached atleast 20,000 years ago. Surely, there has been time enough for each of us to attain the human level by the Ramayana epoch. The Tantra calculates that three lakhs of lives had to be passed through before the soul could have a human embodiment. Earth's long history amply allows time for our pre-human past. You and I are certain to have been real Manu-man (mental being) and not something like Hanuman when Rama flourished and Nolini was in his train. In fact, I believe that most disciples of Sri Aurobindo were with Sri Aurobindo each time he  manifested in human history, especially when he must have taken an Avataric form to establish

A prominent feature of your letter is the "vision" you had of Mahakali in the state of a semi-sleep into which you had entered after reading those beautiful words of the Mother to Huta published by Huta in White Roses: "Behind the sorrow and loneliness, behind the emptiness and the feeling of incapacity, there is the golden light of the Divine Presence shining soft and warm." You write about the Mahakali you saw: "She was not terrible-looking; she looked affectionate and soothing...." Your pair of adjectives answers well to the Mother's "soft and warm". Of course. Mahakali too, as Sri Aurobindo has said, "is the Mother..." And her motherliness, her affectionate and soothing aspect is natural for those who invoke her to remove their defects with rapidity, those who are on her side and not stuck in their follies and obscurities. The dreadful aspect is only for those who are enemies of the Divine within and without. "Terrible," writes Sri Aurobindo, "is her face to the Asura."

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     Referring to Savitri as "a wide ocean" and your feeling that you "can touch a drop only", you quote a sloka from the Gita; ''Even a little of this dharma delivers from the great fear." The last two words ring a bell in my mind. This mahato bhayāt-  this "great fear" - what does it evoke in the spiritual vision ? Somewhere in the Upanishads there is a phrase with some such suggestion as: "Where there is one, there is no fear: fear comes where there are two." The Isha Upanishad asks about the spiritual seeker in whom the one Self has become all creatures: "How shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief who sees everywhere oneness ?" Evidently the delusion, the grief from the common human state obsessed by cosmic multiplicity and lacking in the realisation of the unitarian Atman, the single Brahman who, in theIsha's words, "has gone abroad" and manifested the diverse devious phenomena in which we are submerged. The "great fear" of your quotation strikes me as being the unillumined condition of our life, what the post-Upanishadic Vedanta dubs samsara, maya, with their perils and pitfalls, in which the soul is ever in danger of wandering for ages away from its true goal.  My idea gets confirmed when I read in the Taittiriya (II.7) that when a man has found "the invisible, bodiless, indefinable and unhoused Eternal" to be his "refulgent firm foundation", then "he has passed beyond the reach of fear". If "fear" characterises or represents the phenomenal existence, the world of meandering multiplicity, surely Atman or Brahman, the ultimate Self of selves, the single supreme Reality would be the very opposite. And actually we have the Brihadaranyaka (IV.4.25) saying:"Brahman is indeed fearless.  He who knows it as such certainly becomes the fearless Brahman." Again, the same Upanishad (IV.2.4) figures Yajnavalkya exclaiming: "You have obtained That which is free from fear, O Janaka!'" It is curious that, unlike Shankara and his ilk, the Upanishads rarely allude to moksha or mukti, "freedom, liberation". I can find only one reference anticipating in a general manner the sense of mukti. The Brihadaranyaka (IV.2.8) has the expression: "being freed". Obviously the Upanishads are more psychological than philosophical in rendering their spirituality. In this respect they connect up with the Rigveda rather than the Brahmasutras.  In fact, I

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recall from the former some phrases aptly bearing on the theme I am discussing. The Gods are said to bring about, by their fostering, the "fearless light", abhayam jyotih, even in this world of fear and danger, bhaya ā cinmayabhu. Again, we hear about Swar, the divine "solar" plane, in arms of the usual cow-bull symbolism: "The wide and fear-free pastures of the shining cows." (12th hymn to Agni, verse 6)

Perhaps the compound adjective standing for the Rigvedic attitude points to at least a strong strain in the original Indian spirituality which persisted in the Upanishads and differed markedly from the later Shankarite intransigence towards earth-life. Freedom is sought not from earth-life as such but from what in it makes for fear — the fact that our existence does not rest on a sense of oneness and is always aware of a multitudinous otherness which is a cause of fear. A synonym, as it were of the "fear-free" state desired, aspired after, is the epithet "wide'" in the Rigvedic phrase.

Our non-spiritual condition, our delusive ignorance consists essentially in being locked up in oneself, being exclusive of one's true reality which includes everyone and everything, an inner vastness which rules out the feeling of the other, the alien that can oppose and injure one. Do you remember the Chhandogya Upanishad's glorious utterance: 'There is no happiness in the small: immensity alone is felicity" ? The Rigveda always associates brihat (the Vast) with its satyam (the True) as well as its ritam (the Right) in describing the supreme world of the soul's fulfilment. I say "world" because the Rishis use the term loka or its equivalents which do not cut off the Beyond from the Here: it is not into a wordlessness that one enters when one is "fear-free": one enters an ideal world high above, which has no divisiveness and fulfils our multiple earthly existence by providing the basic unit weaving everything together instead of setting one part over against the others as here below. And the correspondence of the higher with the lower in being no void, no wordlessness, leads to the compatibility of the Here and the Beyond so that the Seers, once they have realised the underlying unity of things by constant contact with the Beyond, do not fly away from the Here but remain to work towards a finer and greater life: there is no

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"refusal of the ascetic" as in later ages.  The compatibility persists as a vital element in the Upanishads where often there is talk of Brahmaloka and not just Brahman. The context in which Yajnavalkya and Janaka figure with their "That which is free From fear" is, I think, particularly rich in reference to Brahmaloka. Indeed Yajnavalkya is a denizen par excellence of both the Here and the Yonder: with one hand he keeps a hold on the earth and with the other readies out to the empyrean. In a most exalted way he settles for "All this and Heaven too". He seems to have anticipated Sri Aurobindo in a more flamboyant manner than would suit our Master's nature,

Your letter of 23.5.91 relates two dreams, both on a Tuesday. Your dreams of Nolini used to occur mostly on this day ~ but now, in answer to your call to him, a lesser sadhak made his appearance as though he were an envoy from him. What you saw seems to add one more chapter to Amal Kiran’s visits to the Press in the old days to carry out some alterations and corrections. Such a move by him is characteristic. He is a typical case of the ache for perfection in both poetry and prose. Some ideality ever haunts him and he goes on chiselling until the vague vision he has discerned in his depths looks out at him from his literary work in a splendid clarity suddenly emerging from his stroke on shaping stroke on the challenging material before him. If not in anything else, his copious alterations and corrections show him to be a true disciple of the creator of Savitri who made nearly a dozen transcripts of it in order not merely to make it as poetic as possible but also to charge it with the Utmost power of spiritual illumination. Apropos of your dreams I may add that along with typifying the ever-aspiring Amal the writer, what you dreamt typefies the never-tiring helper in you. You have recorded your response to my proposal for alterations and corrections; "My attitude was - these must be done: we must oblige him."...

Affectionately

Amal

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