Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

''WE CANNOT be quite the same in metre… The metre of all of you may be said to be spondaic: your feet fall with equal stress on the ground. Mine do not on account of a limp in one of them. And I use a stick to help me walk better. So my metre is two slacks and one stress; I am an anapaestic fellow," said K.D. Sethna in his very first lecture on Poetry given to a group of students starting their university career. No reader of these lines could ever miss the Joke the author has cracked on his own infirmity. To call him a fountain of humour will be far from exaggeration. People - his fans, friends, admirers, students and writers, who seek his help in one way or another - invariably say "When is it not a party when we are around Amal ?"

It was Sri Aurobindo, the Yogis' Yogi, who renamed K.D. Sethna Amal Kiran, meaning "The Clear Ray".

A Parsi Bombayite by birth, Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy Sethna, was born on November 25, 1904.  Son of a well-to-do physician, who spent much of his leisure in his personal library, Sethna has the privilege of having his early education at St. Xavier's School and College, a Roman Catholic institution managed at that time by European Jesuit priests. As a Collegian, he won in his Intermediate Arts examination of Bombay University the Hughling Prize in English and the Selby Scholarship in Logic. He passed his B.A. (Hons) in Philosophy and bagged the Ellis Prize in English, which a student not of philosophy but literature should have taken. While still in college, he began his literary career as a book-reviewer to the Bombay-based newspapers and magazines. At this time his father suddenly died. He dedicated to his father his first book titled Parnassians, a critical assessment of the work of H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw, G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Hardy, whom he considered the four outstanding denizens of Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses. The Parsi author A.S. Wadia sent Wells, whom he personally knew, the article on him. Wells wrote

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back, "Your young man will go far."

"But Wells didn't know," remarked Sethna in his characteristic jovial vein, "that I would go as far as Pondicherry!" In December 1927, when he was still a student of M.A. class, Sethna visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry and decided to stay there and practise the Integral Yoga. He didn't complete his post-graduate course, and he never regretted.

How the guru came to him is an interesting story, good enough raw material to make a novelette.

Sethna had a friend who had done Pranayama. He had told Sethna that Pranayama gave him an abundance of energy, an energy which could be used in any way he liked…And there was no question of strict brahmacharya or spiritual objective. What he said struck the young man as very fascinating and helpful. And so he started reading hooks on Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga in particular. While he was doing that he got interested naturally in the works of Vivekananda. And Vivekananda gave him a greater perspective. Yoga is a means not just to amass energy which one can throw about as one likes but to gather energy to concentrate on a certain aim which would lead one to the true self within one.

In the meantime a girl with whom Sethna had a close relationship in that period talked to him of a Bengali saint whom she had known and who was still alive. She requested him to come and see the saint called Pagal Harnath, meaning "Mad Harnath", mad with love for Krishna. Previous to his interest in Yoga, Sethna had been a scoffer and denier of ail traditional values. And his aim in Yoga too was originally not spiritual. To meet this old man seemed to him just a curious thing to do. But still in order to please his girl friend he consented.

They went to see the saint, who used to come to Bombay and be the guest of some rich Gujarati.  There was a big hall in a posh house and the old man was sitting lost in meditation. There was a semi-circle of his disciples, all the time watching him. And when he was in a certain posture and a finger of his seemed to point to somebody, they all looked at that person to find some meaning in his involuntary gesture.

     Cheekily Sethna went and sat almost next to the saint. And

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when the latter at last opened his eyes and looked around, he saw a new face there.  Everybody prompted Sethna to ask a question.  And so he asked him: "Since the Universe is governed by fixed laws, what is the need of a creator or a God to govern it?" The saint at once answered: "If there are laws, there has to be a law-giver." And the answer was rather simplistic.

Ordinarily Sethna would have mustered up an array of arguments to counter it. But somehow he fell silent, impressed by the way the old man spoke. To Sethna, he seemed to speak not from his head by way of an argument but from some depth of actual touch on things beyond our ken, from some sort of realization. So Sethna did not argue back. That was the first time in his student days that somebody could silence him.

Argumentative that he was, he was surprised at himself. He became faintly aware of something within him which was beyond the mere argumentative intellect. It must be this something which had fallen silent, most unusually and to his own surprise. After that, he began to take more and more interest in things beyond human understanding,

In the course of a few more months, Sethna read in a newspaper that a Maharashtrian Yogi had come to town. With his friend he went to meet the Yogi. Seeing Sethna dressed wholly in the English style the old man, who was the Yogi's host, asked him to show his right palm before going into the inner room where the Yogi was to be met. After glancing at the palm, the old man shook his head and said, "You are destined to have three children. Why are you bothering about Yoga?" Sethna pleaded, "I haven't even a single child yet. Let me go in." Rather disgustedly the old man grunted, "All right", as if he meant "Go and be damned!" In the inner room Sethna and his friend sat down with the rest of the people. After a while the Yogi went round touching each one's head. When he touched Sethna's head, Sethna felt a sort of electric current run down his spine. Towards the end of a brief meditation session, Sethna requested the Yogi, "I want to do something which would take me beyond my ordinary consciousness. Give me some practical hint for it." The Yogi advised, "When you are alone, lie in your bed and try as

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it were to pull your consciousness, right up from your feet...- up...up, upto your head and try to feel that you are on the top of your head. When you succeed in doing so, you will see a ring of light above it. Then try with your consciousness to leap into that ring and you will be in what is called Samadhi."

It looked interesting and so night after night Sethna practised this exercise of lifting his consciousness up and up.  He never got to the top of his head but one night something startling happened, Sethna found that he was not in his body. He was high up in the air and he was floating in the room pushing against one wall, going to the other wall, pushing against that and coming back where he had started from. He could see his own body lying in the bed. And so he was really surprised that he could be out of his body like that, free from physicality and still perfectly conscious... not dreaming. He could voluntarily do things. And he had a subtle body with all the needed parts. All of a sudden a doubt rose in him. He asked himself how he could ever be like that.  It looked impossible.

When he attempted to analyse his condition, Sethna lost it and came back rushing into his reclining body with a sort of warmth near the heart region. And when he came back his usual body was utterly immobile. Only his eyes could see things. Then gradually life seemed to flow back into him. He was normal again, and said to himself: "No materialist can now convince me that I am only my body. I have gone out of it and still lived consciously. So materialism is wiped out." Sethna had been inclined to both materialism and atheism.

After this experience, he started looking out for passing sannyasis or yogis in Bombay. He found one and requested him to impart something spiritual. He said: "Dig a hole in your floor and light a fire there." To Sethna, that was impossible to do. His grandfather would shout and go mad if he did anything of that kind. "You light a fire and then I will give you a mantra to repeat. Then ultimately a Goddess will appear to you. You may ask her for a favour...whatever you want." But Sethna had to rule out this whole practice of invoking supernatural powers. So he just kept quiet.

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It was during that period of his life as a spiritual seeker that he met a theosophist plus art-critic who had paid a visit to Sri Aurobindo.  Seeing the bundle of various qualities, even contradictory ones, in Sethna, he said: "A complex person like you will be satisfied only with Sri Aurobindo. I could see that Sri Aurobindo had the cosmic consciousness. He could feel even the grass grow! He could know everything within the universe as if it were within his own consciousness." That interested Sethna. But things rested there.

Then one day he went to Bombay's Crawford Market to buy a pair of shoes. The shoes were put in a box and the box was wrapped in a newspaper sheet, and a string ran around the sheet. He brought his purchase home and as soon as he took off the string, the newspaper sheet fell open in front of him. A headline in very bold type attracted his attention. It read: "A Visit to the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo Ghose." To Sethna it looked like a Divine Call.  At once he read the article and felt that Sri Aurobindo's Ashram in Pondicherry was the place for him, because life was not denied there. Everything possible in man was sought to be brought out, enhanced and geared to a divine purpose...By seeking something beyond our senses, the Infinite, the Eternal, life would be transformed- Sethna found that it suited him. He decided to go to Pondicherry.

     He and his friend wrote to the Ashram. An answer came from a person named Purani, who was in charge of the Gujarat side of the correspondence.  He wrote that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had said they could come and see for themselves the Ashram life.

But how to go there ? For one thing they didn't have enough money. Moreover, in those days an unmarried couple travelling together for several days was not the thing done in polite Parsi society or perhaps in any other society or community. Since they were in love with each other and seeking the same goal they decided to married. By getting married they would be able to collect a fairly good sum of money. It would make them independent and therefore not helpless in case their parents were not in favour of what they wanted to do.

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Now, before going further, a little bit of background in relation to Sethna's grandfather would help. After B.A., Sethna suggested that he should be allowed to go to Oxford for higher studies. Had his father been alive he would have certainly encouraged him and helped him in all possible ways.  But the orthodox old man said: "If you go to Oxford, you will bring back an English wife. And that will never do. We don't want an English wife in our Parsi family." When Sethna said that he would not bring back an English wife, the old man remarked, "I can see your plan. You won't bring her back. You will keep her there. And ultimately you will join her and be lost to us." A little later when he found that his grandson was doing some very peculiar things like meditation in a particular pose and was interested in spiritual philosophy he feared that he might lose his grandson completely that way. So, one day he suggested to Sethna: "Why don't you go to Oxford ?" Evidently according to the grandfather an English wife was preferable to the Divine Beloved! Perhaps the old man felt that he could tackle an English wife in some way but the Divine Beloved would be beyond his reach.  Sethna simply replied: "I'm not interested."

Two months after his marriage Sethna decided to go to Pondicherry. But it was not openly mentioned. The plan was to go to Calcutta on a sort of belated honeymoon. After a short stay at the Grand Hotel and a meeting with Tagore, he and his wife visited the village of Sunamukhi where Pagal Harnath had been born and had died a few months earlier. They went back to Calcutta and from there started for Puri of the Jagannath temple. From Puri they went to Madras and from Madras Sethna sent a telegram to his grandfather: "Visiting picturesque Pondicherry." The family at Bombay expected a short stay at Pondicherry; for how long could this town prove "picturesque" ? When the stay ran into its sixth month, there was a sharp inquiry from home. Then it proved necessary to say that he was studying spiritual philosophy at the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo.

The work done by the Ashram greatly interested him - Yogic work and other work too. It was not a passive kind of Yoga...in a way it was Karma Yoga...and much more than that. Pondicherry,

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being an abode of peace, gave the spiritual seekers what they wanted. Far from the common turmoil they became sadhaks ready to go into their selves.

While Pondicherry gave the mental peace Sethna wanted, the practice of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo provided him with an abundance of energy.

At 90, but looking at least 20 years younger, Sethna remains vigorous and active with several works either in progress or awaiting his decision on whether they deserve further effort. He can't stop celebrating new experiences. So many things seem to excite him and influence his writing - literature, history, psychology, mysticism, philosophy, scientific thought, the arts and archaeology -- that it is hard to keep up with him.

An attractive man with a handsome face, his years rest lightly upon him. Since 1949 he has edited Mother India, a Review of Culture, first a fortnightly, and after a couple of years a monthly. The list of Sethna's publications is quite substantial and includes five volumes of poetry (now all of them along with his uncollected work are available in his recent volume titled The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems¹) seven volumes of critical writings on poets like Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare, Mallarmé and Blake, six volumes of essays on diverse subjects, three volumes of research on Ancient Indian history, two volumes of correspondence with the British poet and critic Ms Kathleen Raine, besides innumerable articles and scholarly essays,

Sethna is a poet before anything else. "A moved rhythmical expression which is at the same time precise and widely suggestive", is the working definition he gives to poetry. The original impulse behind his poetry writing goes back to his teens. It was competition. His cousin, older than he by some years, used to tell him every day how many lines of poetry he had composed, rather light-hearted romantic verse. And when once he said that he had composed 200 lines, Sethna thought that he could compose

1. Unfortunately Sethna has somehow missed including in this volume the translations of some of Mallarmé’s poems done by him; in this respect his memory has become Nirodianly supramental! - Editors

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more than that and rival him at the game.

"When I started writing poems, I was in the second standard," he related, "and at that time I thought the poems would be correctly metred if I could make each line the same length. So a certain measure on thle page I fixed upon. If any line was a bit lengthy. I wrote in small script. I believed that there ought to be a measure. And after that I wrote more natural poems, which I would like to call love poems. I was greatly moved by the beauty of a certain young woman. And so I had to create a sort of Shelleyan Romantic verse."

Attacked by polio when he was two and half years old, Sethna became crippled.  His doctor-father took him to London at the age of six. Two operations, entailing two months' stay in bed in England, made him walk straight though with a slight limp. He reminisced: "My lameness brought a number of disadvantages in active social life. But it brought me some compliments from my literary friends. They used to call me Byron. Byron was club-footed. And I too aspired to write poetry."

But Sethna had to wait for several years to gain recognition as a poet. And that was only when Sri Aurobindo complimented him. Before that he was, like all young men, with a sort of a high conceit of his own powers. Only when Sri Aurobindo brought a critical eye to his poems and admired some of them did Sethna feel that the genuine spark was there!

Though Parsi-Gujarati was the language spoken at his home, he couldn't be very articulate in that; for he had to rely entirely on the English language to communicate with the outside world. At home too, after every three or four words in Parsi-Gujarati, there was an English word. Hence English being practically his mother-tongue, it is no wonder that Sethna writes only in English.

In his school days he had tried his hand at fiction-writing. He wrote nearly 20 little novels and bound them himself. All kinds of stories were there and each had an alliterative title like “The Sign of the Serpent", "The Mayor of Madrid". He has written detective stories too. "The writing of detective stories has a tale hanging thereby," recollected Sethna with both a chuckle and a

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sigh: " I had a Hindu private teacher in mathematics, who used to come to my home, on the fourth floor of our family house in Bombay. He was so interested in my novels that instead of teaching me mathematics, he would read my stories with me. And when anybody came in the room we used to cover up that stuff with the arithmetic book. And once the Story was so intriguing and the criminal was so hidden away that the teacher could not guess who it could be.  I told him to keep the problem revolving in his mind. So when he was going down the stairs and revolving the problem in his mind he missed his step and tumbled from the fourth floor to the third. I ran behind him, tried to pick him up. And after that fall he never came to teach me."

Fiction writing didn't appeal to Sethna, though he wrote two short stories after joining the Ashram. Sri Aurobindo liked them a good deal.

Apart from numerous studies on the problems of Indian history, he has very persuasively put the Rig Veda anterior to the Indus-Valley civilization of c. 2500-1500 B.C. in his two major books on History — The Problem of Aryan Origins and Karpasa in Pre-Historic India. It was Sri Aurobindo who was the first to dismiss, in the course of his writings, the theory of an Aryan invasion but did not pause to substantiate the dismissal thoroughly. Sethna's massive work on the subject - Ancient India in a New Light fortifies the new revolutionary outlook. The International Institute of Indian Studies, based in Ottawa, Canada, gave him the Devavrata Bhisma Award for 1994 for his work.

In her letter dated 5 August 1961 Ms Kathleen Raine, after giving general remarks on the poems of K.D. Sethna, concludes thus: "Only one thing troubles me: Why do you write in English?... Have you not, in using English exiled your poetic genius from India, to which it must belong, without making it a native of England, for English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry.  I feel this even about Tagore, and so did Yeats. I do not believe that we can - or if we could, that we have the right to - write poetry in a language other than our own."

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Ms Raine's comment sparked off the discussion on whether Indians can write genuine poetry in English. The correspondence on these lines between the two poet-critics continued and led to the publication of two books — The English Language and the Indian Spirit and Indian Poets and English Poetry.²

Sethna argues: "What evidently is necessary for poetic success in English is an intimacy somehow won with the language...If a notable command of the English language and a thorough knowledge of English poetical technique could be at the disposal of Indian inspiration, I see no reason why memorable English poetry should fail to be produced." Raine comments: "I have read no poetry by an Indian that does not seem to an English reader to be written by a foreigner. This I find even with Tagore, certainly with Sri Aurobindo, and also with most of your poems." Sethna refutes this criticism and finally counter-argues:

"If you didn't see an Indian name under a poem would you infallibly know that its English was not by an Englishman ?"

After many arguments and counter-arguments, Kathleen Raine withdraws from the discussion by saying: "Of course if India is determined to adopt the English language nobody can stop you. The blame lies with the English, who as a 'ruling race' for two hundred years impressed India with the power and prestige of our brief moment of material supremacy."

When Sethna was a small boy, his father put two ideals before him: "You will never tell a lie. And you will not have any fear." As for the first one Sethna is afraid he didn't live up to his expectation. But in the matter of courage he compliments himself on having done several things which a person with his polio leg would not have dared to do... Riding horses, for instance. He had ridden horses for nearly 15 years before he joined the Ashram. Once he went on horseback from Dehradun to Mussoorie, a height of 8000 feet by a winding path skirting the precipice. That was his biggest feat of horsemanship so far.

Perhaps the boldness inculcated by his father was responsible in making K.D. Sethna what he is today. It is quite clear from the

2. In the Press. - Editors

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arguments and counter-arguments that we read in the works that it is dangerous to match wits with K.D. Sethna. Boswell’s remark (about Dr Johnson may be true of him if modified a little to show a multiple resource. He can use his pistol not only to fire but also to knock you down with the butt-end of it.

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