Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 2)

27

As you are yourself a painter I think you will be interested in knowing the background to the scene Jayantilal has depicted of the Mother taking up the development of a number of budding artists in the early 'thirties of this century. Jayantilal, a fine artist himself, deals in particular with his friend who was also my friend, the gentle and devoted Sanjiban, who passed away recently in the Ashram Nursing Home while I was there too, lying under complicated traction for a multiple fracture of the thigh-bone where it makes a joint with the shin. The article is well done and brings out effectively the right psychology of art in the Ashram and the Mother's way of fostering it. It is authoritative on the period with which it concerns itself, but it creates the impression that before the youngsters - "Anil Kumar, Sanjiban, Chinmayi and one or two others including Tajder", as Jayantilal lists them, seeming to forget the youngest, Romen - came under the Mother's wings the state of art in the Ashram was a howling desert.

Why it could not have been so may be inferred from the fact that some preliminaries of perspective were shown to Romen and Anil Kumar by Amal Kiran! In the course of time either of them proved a much more competent artist than I could have ever developed into. But the fact remains that for several years before the Mother took up the artistic education of the sadhaks in Jayantilal's list, she concerned herself with the Parsi newcomer - 23 years old when he entered the Ashram - in whom she detected the capacity to draw and paint.

In the early days when I used to watch people meditate with the Mother rather than do meditation myself, I made a series of sketches of many of them and put short sentences below my pictures. I had seen Purani's neck grow twice its normal width when he had plunged into meditation. Something from above his head appeared to be descending into

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him with tremendous weight, as it were, and his neck had to bulge out all round most spectacularly in order to hold the descent. Later I came to know that the descent could be like a bar of steel entering the head and sending one dizzy at first. My witticism below the little sketch of Purani ran: "Purani trying hard to swallow the Supermind." I remember my picture of the old American Vaun MacPheeters staring grimly in front of him with fixed eyes and set mouth. He earned the comment: "Vaun hypnotising the Absolute into submission." Another cartoon that comes up in my memory is of the young Muslim Ishak, renamed Prashanta. He used to take a posture of absorbed self-giving, losing all grip on himself, the face bent as far as possible over his right shoulder as if it hung loose there. Below it stood the gloss: "Prashanta in a state of dislocated devotion."

My drawings were seen by Purani and a few others, but we were afraid of letting the Mother see them lest she should frown at fun made of so serious a matter as spirituality. I did not know at that time how witty a person she was and how she would have marked the technique of what had been drawn well. I recollect the keen attention she paid to the way I had sketched the chair on which she used to sit during her lunch-hour. My wife and I wanted to present her with another such chair. So, with Champaklal, an artist in his own right, helping me with accessories, I had drawn the Mother's chair with due attention to all the niceties of perspective. There was welcome given also to a series I had done in ink after an injury to my left knee from a fall. 1 was partly immobilised with synovitis, but had recovered sufficiently to think of attending somehow a little concert which had been arranged in the Meditation Hall downstairs in the Ashram's main building, with the Mother presiding over it. My gurus were in doubt about my scheme. So to set their minds at rest I drew how I would get with a backward movement into the vehicle then in use called Push-push - and next how I would hold up straight with a hand the injured leg - and then start on my drive to the Ashram with my hair standing up with a

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bit of pain and my friend Ambu tripping ahead of the Push-push carrying my crutches aloft, each in either hand, while behind my vehicle would come with long strides the old big-built physician famous in the Ashram as "Doctor-babu", his right hand combing with its fingers his abundant white beard flowing down his bare torso. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were convinced of the viability of my plan. My sheet of drawing came back the next morning with a line written in Sri Aurobindo's small neat hand: "Seen and appreciated."

To return to the early days soon after my first plunge into drawing in the Ashram. One evening while the usual small group had gathered round the Mother in the Prosperity Room before the Soup Distribution downstairs a little later, the Mother suddenly asked me: "Will you draw and paint the various flowers I give to people every morning at Pranam?" I was rather surprised and replied: "Mother, how do you assume that I can do such a thing?" She answered: "1 know by looking at your right hand. It is quite clear to me." I was happy to take up the work.

In parenthesis I may say that object-drawing was no new thing for me. I had been addicted to pencil and brush since my boyhood. I had even passed the so-called Intermediate Examinadon in Art with a prize for the memory-drawing of a huge gorilla! Indeed at one period of my life I was posed with a choice between developing as an artist and devoting myself to writing. The enthusiasm to be an artist was most intense when, at the age of 6,I was taken out of India by my doctor-father, along with my mother, for treatment to my left leg which had been affected by polio three years earlier. London was our destination but we had a halt in Paris where we visited various picture-galleries. In one of them I saw a number of artists on high ladders which took them to paintings hung on the walls. They must be either copying the paintings or touching them up where they had faded. The sight of these men, with berets on their heads and palettes in their hands, fired my fancy so much that I could not think of a more romantic job when I would grow up. But in my

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middle teens I got the feeling that I would never do anything absolutely original and first-rate in painting, whereas there were fair possibilities of my growing into an effective writer. So I practically gave up the art-career which had seemed open to me, and yet I 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 for each of the poems which had won high praise from Sri Aurobindo. Under the encouragement of the sadhika whom jayantilal has mentioned as "Tajdar" I made two paintings, one of a poem called "Creators" and the other of a poem entitled "Two Birds", an old Upanishadic theme. Both the pictures were seen by the Mother several years later and she praised them for what may be termed their vivid symbolic and atmospheric suggestion. The rest of my poetic work remains un-illustrated. 1 am fairly old - 87 years of age hut the vision of a studio is still unrealised.

After the Mother had appointed me the Ashram's flower-painter she presented me with drawing-books and a paintbox, as well as small drawing-pads she had brought from Japan, made by a firm styled "Bumpodo". Every week she would look at my work. I got an insight into her way of judging from the remarks she made. There were paintings which 1 thought I had done very efficiently. She did not pause over them. There were others which did not have what I could have called the finishing touch and yet she smiled happily at the sight of them and passed appreciative remarks. The fact was that when doing these pieces I had a special warmth and glow in my heart in relation to her while the others had not been surrounded with as much of an inner attitude. The former must have spoken to her directly while the latter took her somewhat as part of the world in general.

Here a side-story which has nothing to do with painting as such will not be out of place as it shows an aspect of the Mother and is apropos of an item connected with my paraphernalia as a painter. There was a tube of pink water-

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colour which had somehow come up for inspection. I unscrewed it and for some reason smelt the paint and exclaimed: "It has such an appetising smell!" At once the Mother seemed to recoil and sharp words came out of her: "Never talk to me of food and eating!" My wife and I were both taken aback. Then my wife picked up the tube from where I had put it down and started pressing it somewhere near the nozzle. The Mother at once took her to task, remarking: "I can see that you have never been taught painting." Obviously we were not under fortunate stars on this occasion.

Besides the daily painting of individual flowers, I was asked to combine several and paint them skilfully intertwined to match the sentences which the Mother had composed for the ensembles. Very carefully the Mother had collected the sheets - smaller in size than the ones in the standard drawing-books - and kept them with her wrapped in a silk handkerchief. I have no idea where at present this collection may be.

Another job set me by the Mother was to prepare small-size paintings of individual flowers with their specific meanings typed below - paintings which were meant to be affixed to the walls of certain rooms. Thus a flower which looked like a rose but was not a rose had been dubbed "Falsehood". Its picture was put up in the Reading Room where the daily newspapers used to be spread out on mats every morning. I must have prepared a number of such labels. I don't remember any other label of room-significance except the one the Mother made me do for my own room. The flower she chose here signified: "Krishna's Light in the mind."

Some other jobs also came my way. I had to make designs for the bands round the Mother's head - either when she wore a sari or when she wore just a "kitty-cap" going with kamis and salwar. Designs had to be prepared also for borders to the Mother's saris. Vasudha and her companions made embroideries from them. Once I remembered to have been

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asked to draw a peacock on a large sheet of paper to serve as a model for a curtain. My official career for such work ended when Sanjiban and some others joined the Ashram and were available for various drawing and painting work. I may conclude my tale by mentioning that I did a few portraits too. Once in the evening gathering in the Prosperity Room it happened that both the Mother and I started sketching the face of Pavitra (Philippe Barbier St-Hilaire). She did the front face while I attempted the profile. She used swift bold strokes in contrast to my method of slow delicate lines. I seemed to be after precise resemblance, she cared more for general striking suggestion. Once 1 followed her way and sketched my own self - bearded at that time - and put some colour on the portrait. But, though people have liked it, 1 considered my own "masterpiece" to be a side-face drawing of a young Bengali girl named Savitri who was studying English under me. I called this picture: "Savitri on the verge of meditation." Both the portraits have somehow survived the sweep of the tides of time, whereas it has left no trace of a sketch I did of a Gujarati friend - Girdharlal - who was quite a character. A calculating worldly-wise strain bordered the basic spiritual aspirant in him and I rather piquantly flashed it out without really submerging the latter. I imagine his sense of humour enjoyed the double disclosure. Along with the pair of paintings I did of two poems of mine, the sketches of myself and my student are the sole signs today of my life as the Mother's earliest artist from a period when none of the sadhaks and sadhikas counted by Jayantilal had taken up pencil or brush and the one on whom the Mother as artist-moulder spent later the most time - Huta - was indeed a far cry. Huta whom the Mother assiduously taught and inspired to paint Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri belongs to the late 'fifties and after, but she happens to be perhaps the single friend in relation to whom the generally forgotten proto-artist of the Ashram has lingered in stray action on private occasions.

(9.3.1992)

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Your note runs: "I am working in an office that is infested with cockroaches. The place has been sprayed many times by management but to no avail. We have been unable to get rid of these pests. They crawl about over our papers and documents and food. Virtually every day I am killing these creatures. What is the karmic effect of this? Will this hamper, obstruct and delay my union with the psychic being and with the Divine?"

The killing of creatures that are pests is unavoidable. By itself such killing cannot have adverse karmic effects. But the manner and attitude with which we kill must have significance. The manner has to be swift. Out of any hesitation we should not do the killing in an inept fashion, leaving the unfortunate creature struggling and suffering until a second hit puts it out of whatever pangs it may be capable of. A single skilful swipe should finish the job. As for the attitude, a bit of excitement of the hunt is unavoidable but if it has some exultation in it we lower ourselves. Our minds should be calm and, in the very act of killing, we should offer not only our act but also the being of the victim to the Divine Compassion. Then our consciousness is not caught up in the work of extermination although it is directed towards it and does not wander away, rendering the work a fumble or a mess.

In fact, all work and not merely this has to be related to our consciousness in the same way - the way basically of what the Gita calls Karma Yoga, which in the Gita's synthe-sizing sweep merges in its core with the fundamental movements of the Yoga of Knowledge, Jnana Yoga, as well as the Yoga of Devotion, Bhakti Yoga. The directed skill of the deed, the inner detachment, the surrender of the deed and of the object involved in the doing, to a supreme Being with the aspiration that this Being may make us the channel of his Truth-Consciousness - such is the full mode of the Gita tending towards the Aurobindonian sadhana. What would turn that mode into the latter is the further ideal of total transformation - the Lord not only acting through us but

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descending into us and remoulding all our parts in the image of their perfect figures already existing in the Truth-Consciousness. Here the central dynamism in us invoking and receiving the Divine is what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother term the Psychic Being, the Soul of us which is stationed in the inmost recesses of the heart-centre, the centre which the Gita seeks to activate through its Yoga of Devotion. The Lord Himself or the Divine Mother or rather the two together as a single Reality are secretly present most luminously with the amalgam of Child and Seer that constitutes the Soul. My whole prayer is to be one with this Seer-Child, the amalgam in which I conceive the true Amal is hidden!

You see how far afield your cockroaches have led us. I may add the remark that the Seer part of the Soul is as important as the Child part. For the archetypal Child is not just the nth degree of the toddlers we were. It is more like Wordsworth's vision of the Child in his "Immortality Ode". He has actually the verbal turn: "Seer blest." Of course, the ordinary child has a delightful innocence, but it has too an amount of ignorance which is akin to the mind of the animals. What makes it worse than they is that the normal child often takes pleasure in killing creatures like cockroaches or even less pestiferous insects and animals. Thus tearing apart the wings of a moth with great glee is very common. Sympathetic identification with one's victim is extremely rare. Even the sight of butchering a living creature is a matter of much interest. Thus, when a boy, I used to enjoy a cook cutting the throats of hens and flinging off the screaming and fluttering birds into the sink. Grown up, I observed with admiration mixed with some amusement my little sister, junior to me by nine years, appealing to my father when he was cleaning up a nest of cockroaches: "O papa, please don't kill baby cockroaches!" I believe little girls are more sensitive than little boys, but by and large the innocence of childhood, though quite genuine, is not unadulteratedly psychic. And it is the play of the true Soul we need in every activity of ours.

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I am tempted to go considerably beyond the topic you have brought up. For the subject of slaughter in general looms before me. First, there is the controversy between meat-eaters and vegetarians. There is the broad question: "Has Nature evolved man as a feeder on flesh or as an eater of vegetables?" One school points to the gorilla - a cousin of ours, according to Darwinism - and preaches vegetarianism to us. The other school points out our canine teeth as Nature's signal that we are historically meat-eaters. There is also the ingenious argument that all animals that drink by licking up fluids with their tongues - dogs as well as lions, for instance - are meat-eaters, whereas those that drink with their mouths - for example, horses and anthropoids - are vegetarians. Man is like the latter and has unnaturally taken to the "flesh-pots". All this is scientific or semi-scientific debate. There is also the moral question - Gandhi's ahimsa or non-violence and Schweitzer's "Reverence for life." But Gandhi went to the extreme of advising Britain not to fight Hitler if he tried to invade her and rather welcome him so as to melt his heart. Gandhi did not realise how Indian spiritual insight has distinguished human ambitions and fighting urges from preternatural forces that seek to act through human beings and even to possess them - forces distinguished as Asura (Titan), Rakshasa (Giant), Pishacha (Demon). Sri Aurobindo knew the distinction and declared his whole-hearted support to a nation against which he had once led a vigorous many-sided opposition in his political days. Nor had his opposition meant always to be nonviolent. His ultimate plan was of an armed insurrection against British rule in India. But he always sought to bring an inner spiritual attitude everywhere. Even war without such an attitude was never ruled out by him: it is often a necessity in the drama of man's.progress. Extreme pacifism would seem to be as mistaken as thoughtless war-mania. A wide and judicious outlook is the desideratum. Something of it in a different strain appears also to have guided Schweitzer. On one occasion he was faced with the problem of feeding an

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eagle which he had saved from death and brought up as a pet. He decided to give it its natural non-vegetarian food. He fed it with fish from a river, saying: "The claims of higher life come before those of lower life."

What about issues like hunting for sport on the one hand and, on the other, animal sacrifices to gods? I find the latter gruesome and degrading, the former exciting but heartless. Then there is the question of vivisection. Darwin, the most gentle of men who would not deliberately hurt a fly, is on record as declaring that one who objects to experiments on living animals for medical research can never be a true friend of humanity. But I am sure Darwin wanted the vivisecting friends of humanity to be as humane as possible in their experiments. In all matters where a necessity of taking life is involved the main object should be avoidance of cruelty and an invocadon of some higher Being's care for the creature destroyed. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother always struck me as free spirits having no fixed notions, no faddism, in issues connected with life and death but always keeping above the level of ordinary psychology and acting in tune with a Consciousness and a Will that have no personal passion, no narrow motive or interest but act according to an inherent light and love.

(16.3.1992)

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