Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

Forerunner of the Divine Word

I LOVE and admire Amal Kiran, not only for himself, bur for the entire context of space, time and atmosphere which engendered so variegated a flower. And for the fact that I personally came to know this phenomenon and to partake of some at least of its hues and scents. I deliberately use the plural in this regard, simply because this particular bloom is so multi-hued and multi-scented that one does not know where to begin,

In any case, I am not qualified to speak about the multifarious achievements of a man who can only be described as a polymath. I forget the details, but I recall that even the Mother once had occasion to speak to Sri Aurobindo about her discovery that Amal was so amazingly knowledgeable. Pose a riddle, and he will produce exactly the right rabbit from an inexhaustible hat. He had even remembered, it seems, the title of some western opera, which Mother had forgotten.¹

       In the circumstances, my contribution on Amal will be entirely personal in orientation. Scholars to come will no doubt qualify for their doctorates in philosophy by researching into the many-sided achievements of this extraordinary life.

To talk about a poet-child of Sri Aurobindo, one needs to begin with the Master himself. So no apologies arc offered for dwelling a little more on the spiritual spark-plug of Amal's creative might than on Amal himself, indubitably, Sri Aurobindo was at once the first prophet and practitioner of the WORD of a new divine dawn of consciousness on our planet. He had seen, like the Vedic rishis, that all our dawns had always been early prefigurements of wider and more brilliant dawns to come.

Following the evening of the great reptiles came the dawn of our feathered cousins, just as the evening of the great apes was followed by the dawn of Homo Sapiens.  In his prescience Sri Aurobindo also knew that we already live in the fast-fading

1. "I believe it was Wagner's parsifal”, informs Amal (Editors).

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evening twilight of our own species.  Which was certainly why he had placed that premonitory text from the Rig Veda at the very head of the first chapter of his magnum opus, The Life Divine:

She follows to the goal of those that are passing on beyond, she is the first in the eternal succession of me dawns that are coming, - Usha widens bringing out that which lives, awakening someone who was dead....What is her scope when she harmonises with the dawns that shone out before and those that now must shine? She desires the ancient mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards her illumination she enters into communion with the rest that are to come.

Kutsa Angirasa-Rig Veda

Nothing like Savitri has ever been attempted by anyone else before. For it is the only poem of its kind in world literature, past or present, giving as it does altogether unprecedented expression to the greatest story that can ever to told under the stars - the adventure of consciousness on our planet, and its culmination when

The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze

And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face.

Other tales about gods, demons and men have about them a statuesque luminosity, a sense of completion. They may be likened to movie epics, rewound after screening and neatly stored in film libraries for repeated re-screenings. But Savitri is the tale of an unfinished epic, the chapters of which are even now unfolding in all our tumultuous, somnambulist lives and deaths. Like Draupadi's endlessly unfurling sari, it is an ever-unrolling tale, which does not come to a finis at any point, at least not for the likes of us, unless we come to possess what the Upanishadic seers had spoken of as trikāla drsti - the simultaneous vision of the three times.  That would involve a transcendence of Time, which few mortals, as we are at present constituted, are capable of.

Some of us, in particular inspired poets, musicians and artists

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do manage, on rare occasions, to achieve the quark-like evanescence of a timeless epiphany. It may have been after such a leap of vital intuition, which we find so liberally scattered in the works of Shakespeare, that caused him to make the dying Hotspur say (I Henry IV; V.iv):

But thought's the slave of life, and life tune's fool,

And time, that takes survey of all the world,

Must have a stop....

One has the sense of a similar intuition at work, when one looks at some paintings by Huta inspired by the Mother, or listens to Sunil's music. There are other instances too numerous to mention here.

In the very nature of things, an epic like Savitri cannot merely be the product of a lively literary imagination fantasying reality. For it is Reality itself, and to truly appreciate an ever unfolding Reality one has to actually experience it - live it in spirit, mind, heart and body. Yes, right down to the body. For it is an awesomely true story, which men and nations are even now living through, at all levels of consciousness. And there are levels...and levels...and levels - both above and below - all kinds of else- wheres.

We recall Sri Aurobindo. "No, it is not with the Empyrean that I am busy: I wish it were so", he had written to a disciple. "It is in the Abyss that I have to plunge to build a bridge between the two. But that too is necessary for my work and one has to face it." For the first time in history, the richest spirit of all ages attempted a poetic utterance of his highest realizations and experiences, in all their heights, breadths and depths - something altogether new in world literature.

We need to mark here a crucial distinction between, on the one hand, the mass of beautiful poetry in all languages which is our precious heritage from the richest vital, mental and intuitive expressions of mankind in the past, and, on the other, the poetry of direct spiritual experience — at once a veridical descent from several levels of the heights - and a bone-chilling upsurge from

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the depths. We recall Sri Aurobindo's Pilgrim of the Night:

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God's deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.

I left the glory of the illumined Mind

And the calm rapture of the divinised soul

And travelled through a vastness dim and blind

To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.

I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime

And still that weary journeying knows no end;

Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,

There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,

And yet I know my footprints' track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality.

There are cantos in Savitri which make one cringe in sheer horror of what we house within ourselves. As a traveller of the worlds, and without pulling any punches, Sri Aurobindo tells us:

Here must the traveller of the upward Way -

For daring Hell's kingdoms winds the heavenly route-

Pause or pass slowly through that perilous space,

A prayer upon his lips and the great Name.

A terrifying journey otherwise - without that prayer and the great Name. For Sri Aurobindo journeyed

In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudes

Companionless he roamed through desolate ways

Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream

And Death's black eagles scream to the precipice,

And met the hounds of bale who hunt men's hearts

Baying across the veldts of Destiny,

In footless battlefields of the Abyss

Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,

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Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes

And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.

A prisoner of a hooded magic Force,

Captured and trailed in Falsehood's lethal net

And often strangled in the noose of grief,

Or cast in the grim morass of swallowing doubt,

Or shut into pits of error and despair,

He drank her poison draughts till none was left.

Shades of Shiva himself here. And, who knows, perhaps much more. For does not Savitri contain the following lines ?

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,

The forge where the Arch-mason shapes his works.

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,

Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.

What did Sri Aurobindo and the Mother not endure for our sakes? Armoured in soul-strength, they were the first to hew a path through trackless virgin jungle. Their hallowed tracks remain for us to walk on. The only requirement is to first find the truth of our own beings - our psychic beings - and thereby tread the sunlit path. If we attempted our own unaided pilgrimages into the Night, we are more than likely to be reduced to imbecilic terror; to raving, ranting lunatics.

It should come as no surprise that the world at large has failed to appreciate the kind of poetry written by Sri Aurobindo. Mother knew why. She once remarked: Three quarters of humanity is obsolete. And those who are already obsolete or on their way to obsolescence cannot reasonably be expected to resonate to supernal sound values and significances. Similarly, one can imagine the once largely simian world being totally indifferent to the first few human voices of wonder and awe as they looked up at the star-spangled wonder of a cloudless moonless night-sky. Perfectly understandable! After all, here were merely a few aberrant apes uttering sounds abnormal to the 'cultivated'

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gibberish of simian culture. Pshaw! (in gibberish, of course).

Be that as it may, this does not pretend to be an essay to expatiate on what I have called the crucial distinction. For that, probably the most authoritative living source is K.D. Sethna himself, whose 90th birthday this festschrift volume commemorates.

Sri Aurobindo knew perfectly well what he was doing when he named K.D. Sethna Amal Kiran - The Clear Ray. For among those who responded to the rhythmic footfalls of Divinity, Amal is surely the greatest, if one goes by the collection of his poetry so aptly titled: The Secret Splendour.

Of course, even among Mother's fourth of humanity which may not be obsolescent, not everybody needs to accept the new poetic inflatus as a means of spiritual sadhana. The Integral Yoga is not a monopoly of those with a taste for poetry, although that and much more might be added along the way. No justification, therefore, for superiority or inferiority complexes in this regard in any quarter.

Speaking for myself, I am neither a poet nor a literary critic. But I love poetry. As for literary critics, I seldom allow them to play any part in determining my own tastes in the matter. Personally, I find that I am better off without their opinions. Opinions are worthless, as Mother said. It is experience, and experience alone, which is the touchstone of all truths - not opinions - whether mine, yours or anybody else's. We might usefully recall Virginia Woolf’s words about the opinions of literary critics: "Hot as java, discoloured as dishwater."

The test I apply is simple. If I respond with a shock of inner recognition to a mood, perception or experience expressed in a poem, then it registers in my being. If it doesn't, it's not necessarily because the poem is a poor one. On the contrary, it may well be a poverty of reception on my own part.

I know of instances of whole passages in Savitri which were obscure to me when 1 first read them a few decades ago. .A subsequent reading of the same passages much later had a stunning result: a sudden inner recognition accompanied, as it were, by an amused, inaudible voice (murdhanya in Sanskrit

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meaning head sounds) which seemed to ask: "Now do you understand?"

The explanation cannot be that Savitri had grown in stature and significance during the intervening years, but that something in my inner being had undergone an unsuspected metamorphosis in the interval. Thence followed the lightning-flash of recognition. "Only like can recognize like", as the Mother said somewhere. Perhaps, for all we know, what we finally come to recognize had all along been awaiting its hour and occasion to suddenly emerge in luminous streamers, like the aurora borealis in northern latitudes.

With his innate poetic genius, his phenomenal memory of everything he reads, and an extraordinary sensitiveness to ever-so-subtle nuances of shade and significance, Amal proved to be an uncommonly clear conduit for the Truth-burdened word and phrase. Indeed, Sri Aurobindo's comments on several of his poems, as on those of Nirodbaran, Dilip and others constitute, in themselves, a practical education with regard to the shape and thrust of the Future Poetry.

I will quote just two of Amal's poems which appealed to me powerfully. The first, This Errant Life, is the yearning of every Bhakta. We recall the great Sri Ramakrishna saying: "I don't want to be sugar, I want to eat sugar." We stand on human feet, and it is as humans that we seek to know the Divine. Not merely to know Him, but if possible to see Him, touch Him, kiss and embrace Him. All India's vaunted spirituality would amount to little or nothing if not for the divine cowherd with his entrancing flute, who had once inundated the groves of Brindavan in, to use a line from Savitri, "A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire". Yamuna's flowing blue waters themselves had seemed to merge in an immense ocean of incredible rapture.

Sri Aurobindo more than once gave expression to this fundamental need of the human being. The author of The Life Divine, which even erudite scholars find a work of forbidding immensity and scope, wrote a surpassingly moving sonnet tided simply — Krishna:

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At last I find a meaning of soul's birth

Into this universe terrible and sweet,

I who have felt the hungry heart of earth

Aspiring beyond Heaven to Krishna's feet-

1 have seen the beauty of immortal eyes,

And heard the passion of the Lover's flute,

And known a deathless ecstasy's surprise

And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.

Nearer and nearer now the music draws,

Life shudders with a strange felicity;

All Nature is a wide enamoured pause

Hoping her lord to touch, to clasp, to be.

For this one moment lived the ages past;

The world now throbs fulfilled in me at last.

It is not knowledge which fulfills all. It is Love which is the fulfilment of knowledge, and of all else besides.

The disciple recalls the Master.  If not, what need of disciples and Masters; The prolific polymath who Amal Kiran is, discoursing learnedly on the principles of modern physics; probing into India's historical past; is at once also a searching literary critic, a formidable debater on a variety of subjects, a devastating critic of literary or metaphysical poseurs and know-alls; and a Bhakta who yearns for the Divine Beloved. Who else but a Bhakta could have written This Errant Life ?:

This errant life is dear although it dies;

And human lips are sweet though they but sing

Of stars estranged from us; and youth's emprise

Is wondrous yet, although an unsure thing.

Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!

I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.

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If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.

For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.

If Radha saw divine Love moulded in Krishna's face, why not Amal Kiran who saw it moulded in Sri Aurobindo's ? Anyway, here is Sri Aurobindo's own comment on the poem:

"A very beautiful poem, one of the very best you have written. The last six lines, one may say even the last eight, are absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, yon would take your place among English poets and no low place either. I consider they can rank - these eight lines - with the very best in English poetry."

No mean praise, coming from so high a source!

One more of Amal's poems, this time on Sri Aurobindo, titled The Master:

Bard rhyming earth to paradise,

Time-conqueror with prophet eyes,

Body of upright flawless fire,

Star-strewing hands that never tire —

In Him at last earth-gropings reach

Omniscient: calm, omnipotent speech,

Love omnipresent without ache!

Does still a stone that cannot wake

Keep hurling through your mortal mind

Its challenge at the epiphany ?

If you would see this blindness break,

Follow the heart's humility -

Question not with your shallow gaze

The Infinite focussed in that face,

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But, when the unshadowed limbs go by,

Touch with your brow the white footfall:

A rhythm profound shall silence all!

When I first read this poem, a profound gratitude welled up in my deepest heart. I, who had greatly regretted not having had Sri Aurobindo's personal darshan, felt that regret almost disappear. It was as if Amal's lines gave me the much-coveted darshan of the Lord, and I was reduced to a trembling bundle of ecstasy. Thank you, dear Amal, thank you!

We can hail Amal the polymath, Amal the poet, or Amal the humorist. But all too often forgotten, so it seems to me, is Amal the Bhakta. For he is a true disciple of the multi-faceted Master whose Synthesis of Yoga includes a stupendous chapter on The Mystery of Love, and who ended His poem Ahana, with ten lines which sends one (at least this one!) reeling in intoxication:

Thou shalt not suffer always nor cry to me lured and forsaken:

I have a snare for his footsteps, I have a chain for him taken. Come then to Brindavan, soul of the joyous; faster and faster

Follow the dance I shall teach thee with Shyama for slave and for master.

Follow the notes of the flute with a soul aware and exulting;

Trample Delight that submits and crouch to a sweetness insulting.

Then shalt thou know what the dance meant, fathom the song and the singer,

Hear behind thunder its rhymes, touched by lightning thrill to his finger,

Brindavan's rustle shalt understand and Yamuna's laughter, Take thy place in the Ras and thy share of the ecstasy after.

No piece on Amal would be complete without reference to his wit and humour. For if he was formidably cerebral in his prose writings, deeply intuitive in his poetry, in his humour he went unabashedly for the belly, as I came to know personally.

How gently, how wittily, how vividly he had once suggested a

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correction to an atrocious verbal slip on my part in an article I had sent him for Mother India. I had referred to "persons turning their noses down" on things they deemed beneath them. Amal's corrective response caused me to laugh till my belly ached. He wrote: "As far as I know, elephants are the only animals which can turn their noses up and down and sideways." And with what joy I made the necessary correction!

Finally, I will acknowledge what Amal himself might not know.  It was largely thanks to his sympathy, and his enlightening words of encouragement, that I was able to recover from what at the time had seemed to me a personal calamity. It turned out to be a vast liberation instead.

One more thing I need very much to say to Amal in this commemorative volume: "Carry on, dear Amal, in our midst. You have given so much, as only you can. You can give more. I would like to be around to contribute to the festschrift volume to observe your hundredth birthday as well. I will only be a more stripling of eighty-one then."

C.V. DEVAK NAIR

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"Kekoo Uncle"

"WHEN we go to Pondicherry we must meet Kekoo Uncle," I told my husband who had heard about him only through me, as my distant relative whom I myself had last seen about thirty years back in Bombay, when I was about ten years old.

As we were getting down from the rickshaw in Pondicherry, I once again reminded my husband and myself that we had to meet Kekoo Uncle. Lo and behold! There he was, just coming down from his own rickshaw. This was in 1969, I leapt down from the rickshaw, shouting, "Kekoo Uncle! Kekoo Uncle!" 'The same old face, the same old face," he said, as he recollected the face of a ten year old girl! So, he could at once recollect the face, only the placing of the relations had to be fixed. I had only to give my father's name and that was enough, his memory could set it all correct. My grandfather and his grandfather were first cousins.  I felt so close to him, even though I had met him after so long, that I felt as though I had met my father again,

I used to write to him from Bombay and receive back his much cherished letters in reply. My husband, and my three sons too, are all extremely fond of him - but then, who is not ? I have yet not come across one person having a single word for him which is not of reverence, praise or affection.

About his learning and intellect we need no credentials. Poetry, prose, history, geography, logic, humour and spirituality all get treated safely and beautifully under his delicate-looking fingers; as do the PhD theses sent to him by universities for evaluation. The spiritual values, the sincerity, the peace the Mother speaks of, are all practised by him. When one apologizes for disturbing him by taking a lot of his time, he says: "How can you disturb me ? I am no yogi if I get disturbed!"

After his last fall he remained in bed for five months — two months with one leg stretched up in traction when he could not

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move at all to either side. His attitude then was an eye-opener to people who grumble and complain about illness. He had not one single word of complaint or discomfort. He-said later, "time just stopped" for him and he never felt that he had stayed in that most uncomfortable position for so much time. His face was literally glowing and had a constant smile on it. There was some humorous titbit ever ready for you. You never felt you were meeting a person who really was in such terrible physical discomfort. The doctors were leaving it to him to decide what they should do to his broken thigh! Once I had the good fortune of sitting next to him in the Nursing Home when he happened to be asleep. Such lovely, soothing, divinely beautiful vibrations were coming from him! I just sat and meditated.

Kekoo Uncle makes no show, of course, of anything, not even his colossal intellect, though that can be seen from his works and his articles, but least of all does he show how spiritually advanced he is. That can only be experienced by those who are close to him even though living thousands of miles away.  I feel in gratitude bound to mention at least one incident.

I had tremendous pain in the ribs due to a fall in December 1993.  It was a fractured-rib pain. Apart from it being excruciating, a rib-fracture pain lasts and lasts for months even when the severity lessens. I had already once before experienced such pain after a car-accident in the U.S. in 1990; and so I knew about it only too well!

This time I wrote to my dear Kekoo Uncle. I jokingly told him that since our ancestors were related, maybe somewhere there was some genetic similarity - and that I could not claim it in scholarship, just only claim it in falling (as he too has had various falls in his life because of one leg having been affected by polio during early boyhood). At this he wrote a humorous letter, asking me not to follow the uncle who keeps falling, for then he would be more a "carbuncle" than an uncle! However, he wrote to me that he would pray to the Mother for the removal of the pain. That same day when he went to the Samadhi he concentrated and made "an intense inner gesture of offering it to the Mother for its removal". After my writing the letter to him and

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before getting his reply, here in Bombay, one day, all of a sudden, I felt as if an arrow which had been constantly piercing me in the chest was removed with a soothing balm put in its place. Poof it went - no pain at all! I kept wondering how... till all was cleared when I received Kekoo Uncle's reply to my letter - his prayer to the Mother had done it - never ever to return, no, not even that less severe pain, not at all! The pain of the 1990 accident still erupts some times!

DHAN PAuanwALA

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With Birthday Greetings

WHEN I first visited the Ashram in 1959, I stayed in a small hostel looked after by Ganapatram. It was on the corner of a street, and on the opposite corner stood a house screened by palms and pale green banana trees. At times there would come, from behind these trees, a vibrant voice raised in recitation. This was the voice of K.D. Sethna reading Paradise Lost or Savitri. Every morning a boy with a neat single-seater rickshaw would transport him to Balcony Darshan. Sometimes he would pass me as I went that way on foot, and sometimes he would tell his boy to slow down, and he would talk to me about poetry as we went along together. My first memory of him, however, is of a passionate unseen voice declaiming great poetry from behind the banana trees.

At that time, Amal Kiran, as Sri Aurobindo named him, — it means ‘The Clear Ray' - was lecturing on Poetry at the Ashram School, the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. The substance of his talks was appearing in the monthly Ashram magazine Mother India of which he was, and is, the editor. As an Englishman, I was at once struck by his detailed familiarity not only with English poetry - especially that of Shakespeare, Milton and the Romantics - but also with that of Europe. And he appeared familiar not only with the literature but with the best of Western criticism, too.

As was Nolini Kanta Gupta, Sethna has been encouraged and inspired by the example of Sri Aurobindo's exceptional and truly catholic range of interests. He has been able to develop the wide-ranging intellect and sympathy one may expect from a follower of the Integral Yoga. Thus, among other things, he has written on Shakespeare, Blake, Mallarme, on Indian history and philology, on the philosophy of the new physics, on Teilhard de Chardin and on Christian theology - and most abundantly and helpfully on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, for whose yoga, as editor and

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contributor to Mother India for over 45 years, he has been a major interpreter and apologist.

Personally, I am most grateful to him, as an editor, for publishing poems of mine, and also an article on Sri Aurobindo and the Kingdom of God. To this he later added an illuminating postscript on the meaning of the text from St. Luke's Gospel that is variously translated as ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ or ‘The Kingdom of God is among you’ — the one having mystical and the other purely social overtones. Anyone interested in his solution to the question may find it in the issue of Mother India for September, 1971.

It must not be forgotten that Sethna is a poet. In 1993 his Collected Poems, The Secret Splendour appeared. Especially memorable out of its 750 pages are the surrealist poems published earlier as The Adventure of the Apocalypse and the poems written after the death of his wife, Sehra.

One poem, A Prayer for Ignorance, asks that the Lord will "Drown in huge sleep the ever-dancing hum of knowledge". Then might the Light of the ineffable Truth beyond truths "suddenly find room". Behind all Amal's writing there is perceptible a sense of the far horizon towards which he is moving, and an ingredient of lightness and humour that leavens his multifarious learning, and keeps it from dryness and irrelevance. I remember the title of a book he once published with Nirodbaran: Light and Laughter: Some Talks from Pondicherry. He has, too, a wicked gift for punning.

      The Sethna's are a Parsi family, living in Bombay. In another poem, The Parsi, Amal asks, "What country shall I take as mine ?" Not Iran, nor can "Europe's large earth-richness" nor "India's infinite Unknown" totally claims him, but "My country's a future where all dream-lights merge".

It is this pilgrim aspiration that is evident in his book. The Spirituality of the Future. Here, he explicates with sustained thoroughness the thought and vision of Teilhard de Chardin and contrasts them with those of Sri Aurobindo. Familiar with the Jesuit set of mind, since his education at St. Xavier's School and College in Bombay, Amal disentagles Teilhard's real beliefs from

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the gloss put on them by his orthodox colleagues in the order. He shows how Teilhard's loyalty to his church made him formulate his insights ambiguously, and look for support from traditional texts and teachers of the past, whereas, in fact, he was speaking from a present world-view of science and evolution in an hour which was new and unprecedented.

Amal finds Sri Aurobindo also relating to the past - to the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and the Tantra - but, in his case, to corroborate and enrich the profession of his own understanding. Teilhard appears "mentally head and shoulders above every one of his Christian commentators" but is, nevertheless, forced into a procrustean bed of past formulations. Sri Aurobindo, going beyond earlier scripture, and speaking with the magisterial authority of his own experience of Supermind, can open a path to the future without a backward-pulling look.

Another area of Sethna's work may be mentioned: The anonymous help given to the editing of Sri Aurobindo's works for publication. I do not know the full extent of his involvement in the preparation of the Birth Centenary Edition of Sri Aurobindo, but it must have been considerable.

It is surely good to appreciate people before they leave us, and I trust that Amal will be with us for many years yet. Meanwhile I hope funds will be found, as he said 17 years ago, in a letter to. me, "enough to launch a part of my fleet of unpublished books". "But," he added, "they have to come soon because I have not yet stumbled (which is the right word for me) on the elixir vitae." .Since then a good number of his works have appeared, but there are still many more to which we can look forward. May they come soon, and may Amal find that elixir of life.

DICK BATSTONE

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