Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

Little Known Facets of the Immortal Diamond

IF THE term "myriad-minded" could be applied to anybody with justice, Amal richly deserves it. It is not uncommon to find jacks of all trades with a kind of shallow omniscience.  To be a first-rate poet uttering overhead notes, a superb critic with a mastery over "the heart and art of poetry", a rare type of historian with imagination and insight, a keen student of scientific thought and for some time even a commentator on the contemporary political scene is to be only in the truest sense of the term an Aurobindonian.

On the occasion of his ninetieth birthday it is good to remember he was barely nineteen when an essay of his on H.G. Wells¹ was sent by the brilliant writer of the yesteryears, A.S. Wadia, to Wells himself. Wells wrote to Wadia: "Your young man will go far."

Wells could little imagine, few of us, even his admirers, could realise, how far he has gone, the real magnitude and nature of his achievement and accomplishment.

Not long ago Amal brought out his Collected Poems with a frontispiece - a painting illustrating a poem of his. Not many could have really guessed that the painting was his own. When someone in the Ashram was asked whose painting it was, it was suggested it could be Champaklal or Huta! Amal himself described his interest in drawing and painting from his boyhood in one of his personal letters on Life-Poetry-Yoga:²

I was addicted to pencil and brush since my boyhood.... Indeed at one period of my life I was posed with a choice between developing as an artist and devoting myself to writing.... In the middle teens I got the feeling that I would never do anything absolutely original and first-rate in painting whereas there were possibilities of my growing into a effective writer.  So I practically

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gave up the art career which had seemed open to me and yet cherished the dream that towards the end of my life I would have a studio and paint away. One of the projects I had conceived quite early during my stay in the Ashram was to make a painting to each of the poems which had won high praise from Sri Aurobindo. Under the encouragement of a Sadhika, I made two paintings, one of a poem called Creators and the other of a poem entitled Two Birds on an old Upanishadic theme.

When the writer of this note wrote to Amal expressing his wonder at the possibility of one man being capable of developing in so many directions, he replied in a personal letter dated 13 June 1992 (not published):

I didn't know that you were unaware of my dabbling in drawing and painting. Perhaps an even more of a surprise will it be to you to hear that one of my greatest passions was riding. A life on horseback seemed at one time the peak of fulfilment.

The rest of the paragraph gallops into another field but it is delightful:

And an intense favourite of mine among poems was Longfellow's The Leap of Roshan Beg. When I came across it I couldn't help featuring it in Mother India. Did you notice it ? You'll be surprised that the only reference to it I got from readers was from Dyuman!  As far as I remember, he remarked that he was like the horse of the poem. I suppose he meant "obediently ready to take even the most hazardous action under the command of the rider". Here the rider would be the Mother, of course.

In another letter written earlier (dated 28 April 1990) he was speaking of his early life:

Some of my happiest days were spent at Matheran. It is there I had my fill of horse-riding. My sister (Minnie Canteenwalla) was a trained horse-rider.

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Amal's personal letters, published or unpublished, reveal a facet which is more precious than the more iridescent ones: His deep humanity. Kathleen Raine, his "pen-friend" who admires him greatly, has written a book called The Human Face of God. The writer of the note has with him numerous letters since he met him on the 29th of March 1955 revealing the Human Face of a supra-human genius.

K.B. SITARAMAYYA

References

1. Mother India, October 1966, p. 16.

2.Ibid, June 1992, pp. 377-8.

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