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Evidently I have survived the celebration of my debut as a nonagenarian on 25 November 1994!"It was a bit of a hectic time, what with a large gathering in the spacious Dining Room of the Park Guest House and a wheelchaired Me being - as old-fashioned reporters would have put it - the cynosure of all eyes. My friends Nirodbaran and Deshpande had arranged the celebration. Nirod was asked to make an introductory speech and I had to follow up with one which might have gone on and on if I hadn't remembered that people might be waiting for nice things to fill their mouths as soon as I stopped wagging mine. There was a lot of cordiality and appreciation and I am really grateful to my "fans" - especially those who got ready on time the beautiful festschrift titled "Amal-Kiran: Poet and Critic", which was meant to be accompanied by a supplement with a caption which could cause me a lifelong blush: "The Wonder that is KDS".
From the viewpoint not only of timeliness but also of appraising insight, my gratitude goes amply to the contributors of articles as well as to the enterprising editors and the lavish-handed finance-providers, whose hearts and minds moved to make memorable my ninetieth birthday.
Your article with the epigraph from Horace has well touched the core of my poetic life with the words "musarum sacerdos" and taken them far beyond the priesthood of the Muses practised in the Augustan Age of Rome. It is thought-provoking that Caesar Octavius, renamed Augustus, was, as we have come to know, an early manifestation of Sri Aurobindo not as an Avatar, a direct conscious expression of the Divine, but as a Vibhuti, a leader of the age in whom the Divine works from the background. No wonder the two greatest bards Augustus had patronised were born again -Virgil as Nolini and Horace as Dilip - to be patronised by Sri Aurobindo. I, who as a poet was patronised by him even more than they, am still a question-mark in connection with the
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time of the first Roman emperor. I feel a strong affinity to Catullus with his commingling of the erotic and the wistful, and very interestingly the early verse of Sri Aurobindo himself is most reminiscent of this lyrist. Save for the jar of the girl-friend's name as compared to the dulcet appellations on Catullus's lips, what could be more in his vein than those lines in "Night by the Sea", a poem of Sri Aurobindo's Cambridge days? -
With thy kisses chase this gloom: -
Thoughts, the children of the tomb.
Kiss me, Edith. Soon the night
Comes and hides the happy light....
Love's sweet debts are standing, sweet;
Honied payment to complete
Haste - a million is to pay -
Lest too soon the allotted day
End and we oblivious keep
Darkness and eternal sleep.
We at once hark back to those unforgettable hendecasyllables:
Soles occidere et redire possunt,
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Da mi basia mille.
Sri Aurobindo renders the three opening lines literally:
Suns may set and come again;
For us, when once our brief light has set.
There is one perpetual night to be slept.
The fourth line would run:
Give me a thousand kisses.
Ordinarily we would be tempted to see Catullus redivivus
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in the early Sri Aurobindo, but knowing better the personality of his past we can only say that he carried over to our time a close kinship to that poet which would tend to draw to himself whoever happened to be a new manifestation of him. Catullus died before Octavius became emperor, but part of their lives coincided in time and it is a guess worth hazarding that Lydia's victim with his passionately pathetic "Amo et odi" ("I love and I hate") was as much a literary influence on him as the master of the epic and the expert of the odes.
(3.12.1994)
I suggested to my warm-hearted admiring friends who wanted to celebrate my ninetieth birthday that a laudatory hullaballoo would be more fit for the hundredth year. But nobody seemed confident about my hitting a century. No Ashramite had done it so far by way of encouragement. So Nirod and Deshpande couldn't cross their fingers and bide time. My grandfather bade adieu at the age of 99 years and 9 months. This record could be encouraging if we forgot that my father had taken leave of us at a mere 44. The total of the two life-spans is 143 years and 9 months. The average comes to a wee bit under 72. I have exceeded it by 18 years. How much further is probable? A clue seems to come from a very early letter of Sri Aurobindo's whose facsimile is published in the souvenir volume presented to me by Nirod and Deshpande. The letter appears on pp. 7-8. At its end is the date in unmistakable figures: 28.2.98. Does this slip of the pen suggest that Sri Aurobindo foresaw me still alive in 1998? As the letter was written very near the beginning of my stay in the Ashram, could we surmise that 1998 is not the terminal of my experience of earth but some sort of starting-point? In that case I would have ahead of me at least as many years as have elapsed from 1928 to now: that is, 66 years! Imagine me as a (90+66=) 156 years old museum-piece.
What frightens me about deductions from the letter is: Would I have from 1998 onwards the same weaknesses and
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shortcomings that I have had to face from 1928 up till today? If Oscar Wilde's antinomian mind is to be followed, the only way to keep young is to go on repeating the follies of our youth! So are those weaknesses and shortcomings the sole means of saving myself from becoming a prize dotard? But we are not a prolongation of the Aesthetic Movement, in which Wilde participated, of the last century's closing quarter. We may be considered aspirants to what Sri Aurobindo has described to me as "the Overmind aesthesis" which sees and feels the world as the manifold play of a single divine Delight, revealing beauty everywhere - even in the most unlikely forms - and inspiring vision and word and deed shot with a significance as if gods and goddesses were playing variations of eternal things upon themes that at present spell out passages of what the Gita calls "this transient and unhappy world".
(8.12.1994)
My letter to all of you was meant to reach not only all your minds but also the heart and soul of each of you. For, I try to write - no matter how small the subject - from my own depths and strive to find a try sting-place in others' inmost being. The thoughts may wear an ordinary look and the words sound casual, but always the intent is from the Divine Mother in me to the same shining secret in my correspondent.
The celebration planned and executed by Nirodbaran and Deshpande took me by surprise and the substantial souvenir with its accompanying supplement multum in parvo ("much in little") projected the small helpless wheelchaired fellow into the figure of a colossus striding across history! Both the souvenir and the supplement must be in your hands now. The photos in the former will interest you. There is the tiny tot Amal ("Kekoo" in those days) in a sailor-suit standing between his father in an English costume including the waistcoat and the inevitable umbrella for the English weather - and his mother in a stylish London-attire topped by a wide-
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brimmed hat bright with artificial flowers and stuck to her hair with various pins. This picture dates back to 1910, when my parents took me to London for polio-operations on my left leg. Another picture has the same sailor-suited boy charcoal-sketched to a remarkable nicety" by a pavement-artist in Hyde Park within five minutes. The next illustration catches two poets standing side by side - Harindranath Chattopa-dhyaya, already famous, and Amal Kiran still in the world's background but with Sri Aurobindo's grand certificate in his pocket. Harindranath looks sweetly satisfied, with a calm smile on his handsome clean-shaven front-face, a sense of extraordinary achievement happily tracing it, whereas his companion, rather lanky and somewhat taller, with a tiny moustache and a close-cut fringe of a beard, appears to strain his gaze towards a future
which lends
A yonder to all ends.
Indeed, to make both life and Yoga an endless movement of ever-new discovery is the message of Sri Aurobindo to his followers. I add the word "life" to the word "Yoga" because to an Aurobindonian the two are inseparable. Yoga to him is not a special practice set apart from the outer consciousness: an inward air has to pervade whatever he thinks, feels, says, does - and he has never to stop at any point as though there were nothing further to achieve. This look ahead is no gesture of discontent. How can one be discontented when one is exploring the Divine? But the Divine is a constant enrichment of each point reached and a constant step onward, the onwardness not a forsaking of anything but a carrying of everything into a wider disclosure of its sense in what lies beyond it.
(21.12.1994)
Savitri has been for all of us a beautiful series of stepping-
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stones from our common human moods to a mind-state of glorious vision and a heart-state of intense aspiration. When puzzled over some problem of inner or outer life, we have followed the Mother's advice to concentrate on the Divine for a moment and then open Savitri wherever we are instinctively led to do so and read the passage which our eyes first light upon. My own mode of consulting this massive magnificent oracle is to conjure up the face of Sri Aurobindo and appeal for his guidance through this poem with which I have the most intimate link because I happen to be the disciple to whom it was first revealed in secret in its version of 1936. Morning after morning, hand-written passages used to come to me. I would type them out and make my response in the form of appreciative comments, critical questions, requests for elucidation. Even when Savitri became public property originally by being quoted in my essay "A New Age of Spiritual Inspiration" in the annual "Sri Aurobindo Bombay Circle" of 1948, edited by my friend and fellow-sadhak Kishor Gandhi - even when certain parts of the poem came out in fascicles from the Ashram Press, new matter was sent to me beforehand. One of the last letters about the poem said:
"You will see when you get the full typescript [of the first three books] that Savitri has grown to an enormous length... In the new form it will be a sort of poetic philosophy of the Spirit and of Life much profounder in its substance and vaster in its scope than was intended in the original poem..."
It is this "new form" that has become for us a guide-book in times of indecision. What is even more important is that it is a magnet to draw for us further spiritual experience. What could be more vivifying to an urge to see a subtle mystical presence in Nature at the break of dawn than the lines? -
All grew a consecration and a rite.
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.
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When we feel as too heavy the sense of a long road to the Divine, the Eternal, we can get the assurance that all can change with a touch from our hidden spiritual potencies:
A magic leverage suddenly is caught
That moves the veiled Ineffable's timeless will.
A prayer, a master act, a king idea
Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.
Then miracle is made the common rule.
One mighty deed can change the course of things;
A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.
A great push can be received towards a surpassing of our present scene of incessant turmoil within and without by the passage on Aswapati's breakthrough from his human state to an all-enveloping Beyond from where a new life could derive:
Across a wide retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone....
Out of that stillness mind new-bom arose
And woke to truths once inexpressible....
We are helped towards a wonderful change for which we have always aspired but without much success:
We hear what mortal ears have never heard,
We feel what earthly sense has never felt,
We love what common hearts repel and dread,
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient.
At times a deep depression enshrouds us and we wonder whether there is any hidden meaning in what seems a succession of barren days and empty nights. Then Savitri comes with a huge assurance which strengthens our failing limbs and forlorn thoughts:
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We whirl not here upon a casual globe
Abandoned to a task beyond our force;
Even through the tangled anarchy called Fate
And through the bitterness of death and fall
An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives....
One who has shaped this world is ever its lord;...
Whatever the appearance we must bear.
Whatever our strong ills and present fate,
When nothing we can see but drift and bale,
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.
Yes, Savitri can be and has been a many-sided support to us and a godlike goad towards
A Silence overhead, a Voice within,
a ladder of light along which our beings can move from perception after keen perception of the spiritual vita nuova to which we have to ascend.
It has lately been asked in some quarters: "What was it to Sri Aurobindo himself?" And a strange answer was given, based on a statement of his to Nirodbaran in 1936. The opening of the statement was: "I used Savitri as a means of ascension." Here the meaning was seriously taken to be that Sri Aurobindo made use of his composition of Savitri to rise to ever higher spiritual experiences. I was amazed at such an interpretation, an impossible one if we go beyond the opening to the sentences that follow, for the word "ascension" connotes only the lifting of the poetic expression from height to greater height, from plane to loftier plane, "towards a possible Overmind poetry", as he wrote to me long ago. The true point of the letter whose start has been misunderstood by being cited in isolation should come through from the very question Nirodbaran posed: "We have been wondering why you should have to write and rewrite your poetry - for instance, Savitri ten or twelve times - when you have all the inspiration at your command and do not have to receive it
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with the difficulty that faces budding Yogis like us." Sri Aurobindo's reply runs:
"That is very simple. I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular - if part seemed to me to come from any lower levels I was not satisfied because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible of the same mint. In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative. I did not rewrite Rose of God or the sonnets except for two or three verbal alterations made at the moment."
One issue touched upon here gives us to believe that if Sri Aurobindo had not left his body at the end of 1950 he would have gone on revising his poem in the matter of expression, rendering the speech even more uniformly of the Overmind mint. And with the coming of the Overmind further into play there would have been a more voluminous no less than more luminous utterance. A provisional limit had been set long ago when Sri Aurobindo conceived of his epic as being "a minor Ramayana". The Ramayana, as it is, is about 50,000 lines long. And actually this possible length was mentioned by me for Savitri in my book, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. When it was read out to Sri Aurobindo he did not demur. In a note scribbled by him apropos of my friend Mendonca's criticism of Savitri and published in Mother India in August 1991 he refers to the same number as being presumed for Savitri.
Nor would Savitri have been only longer: it would have been recast whenever necessary in the forge of the greater consciousness which would have been at play. In one of his last letters to me (1948) Sri Aurobindo mentioned one part of his current spiritual work to be the supramentalisation of the Overmind more and more. With the Overmind completely
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supramentalised, a grander poetry would have come. Perhaps that too would not have been a ne plus ultra. Did not Sri Aurobindo write to me in 1936: "As for expressing the supramental inspiration, that is a matter of the future"? Would not this "future" have materialised if Sri Aurobindo had continued to. compose Savitri beyond December 5,1950?
(13.9.1994)
I am pleased to hear from you. Your name "Monika" rings a very melodious bell, being the same as that of St. Augustine's mother who was a partner with him in the spiritual quest. And Augustine himself was, according to our Divine Mother, a man very much like me. This pronouncement confirms my own sense of affinity with the young aspirant to monkhood who appealed to God: "Give me chastity - but not yet!"
Your very first response to Sri Aurobindo clearly shows that you spontaneously know him from the very inside of him, so to speak. It is as if you were made out of his substance. That is why you are moved to feel not only that he will lead you to the Divine but also that this Divine will be his own self. And the sense that you have known him for ages proves that you are touching him not merely with your mind which varies with each rebirth but with your soul which has had a long history going from birth to birth across centuries. Nor is the soul's experience of its existence confined to the long passage of time along which your inmost being has moved. This experience is as well of a contact with a reality that is outside the run of the years - an unchanging splendour of fullness that can exist even if time stopped. Actually this splendour is a state in which there is no starting of time and no stopping of it. It is distinguished by that mysterious term: "eternal".
What I have discerned as your relationship with Sri Aurobindo solves immediately your first problem. Indeed the way you have commented on the problem shows that it is in fact no problem at all. For you say: "All the years before, I had
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many problems in trying to feel an intense love and longing for God but towards Sri Aurobindo I feel this love and a spontaneous will to surrender."
When such is the whole trend of your being, why bother about what your past religious condition has been? I was educated at a Roman Catholic school and college and knew several fine European Jesuits, particularly Swiss German Fathers, one of whom influenced me greatly. I am a Parsi by birth, belonging to a community which follows the religion called Zoroastrianism. Zoroaster ranks with the greatest religious figures of the past. But the moment I was touched by Sri Aurobindo both Zoroastrianism and the influence of Roman Catholicism vanished. I could not even rank Sri Aurobindo as just the latest representative of the spirituality that shone out from bygone ages. He fell outside that category, for I perceived a radical difference. Those figures founding the various religions - one and all - taught that our fulfilling end is beyond the earth. Earth-life can be radiant with God-realisation, but it cannot itself be completely divinised. Even Krishna who is the most dynamic no less than the most many-sided in his divine manifestation has still a final wistful note in speaking of the earth-scene - "this transient and unhappy world". Sri Aurobindo alone looks on Matter as potentially divine and provides a cosmic picture in which resides this potentiality because the total Divine is concealed or "involved" in Matter prior to His evolution into the plenary Spirit on earth itself. Here is a picture of a future fulfilment utterly lacking in the vision of all past leaders of spirituality. Only that seer who is in the ultimate "know" of things can talk of a complete "transformation" in which the body itself can stand forth one day as an expression of godhead in its own right.
(In short, you are perfectly justified in the absoluteness of your attitude to Sri Aurobindo. If that is so, how can you raise your second question - your doubt whether Sri Aurobindo will accept you as his disciple? You are already a part of his vast being. Your very worship of him to the ultimate degree
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makes you nestle in his heart for ever. You feel towards him as you do because he has already taken you up as his beloved child. And he does not make any credal conditions; he does not insist that you should first pay homage to his philosophy. Neither he nor the Mother has cared for mental beliefs as preconditions. They are for a direct personal interchange. If you are moved by them, they are satisfied about your discipleship. Even if you are stuffed full with past religious dogmas they welcome your heart's leap and deem it sufficient for you to deserve and receive all their love. It is the resonance of your substance to their substance that counts primarily with them. Whether or not your mind - packed with one religion or another - says "Yes" to their luminous presence at once is a secondary question. Do you feel like prostrating yourself or else bowing your head or at least yearning in your heart for their nearness? This is what weighs in the relationship between them and you. All your "strict Roman Catholic education" will drop away if you listen to your soul's cry. You were "taught to pray only to Jesus Christ" - but now you are not being just "taught" something else as a rival confession of faith. You are helplessly pulled towards Sri Aurobindo because, looking at his photograph, you see, as a poem of mine puts it,
All heaven's secrecy lit to one face
Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry -
A soul of upright splendour like the noon!
Now to your last question, which poses really no puzzle at all. You ask: "What is the difference between the two names: Sri Aurobindo and Sri Aravinda?" The former is the name as written by the bearer of it himself. The latter is the Sanskrit original of the former's Bengali version. I suppose that, logically, in a Sanskrit mantra "Aravinda" would figure. But, as far as I know, the Mother said: "Sri Aurobindo sharanam mama" - "Sri Aurobindo is my refuge." Psychologically it is best to put into a mantra the name we are familiar with. A
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pedant may not be pleased, but our aim is to please the Divine Presence in our hearts and I am disposed to believe that he will prefer the name that has been ringing in his disciples' ears.
You wrote as a sort of apology for your pressing inquiries: "Clearness on my sadhana is so important to me." Well, I hope I have not failed the name Sri Aurobindo gave me: "Amal Kiran", meaning "The Clear Ray", and I hope I have also not failed the wise saying: "Be clear, be clear, be not too clear." This I understand to convey: "By your clarity do not deprive the hearer of the intuition that there is always a Beyond to all knowledge."
(29.8.1994)
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