The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

The Mind and Spirit of Our Age: Dilip Kumar Roy's Interviews with Five World-Figures

Dilip Kumar Roy was a famous Bengali musician,

poet, novelist and disciple of Sri Aurobindo. Several

of his articles appeared in 'Mother India'. (K.D.S.

2004)

" AMONG the Great"¹ - a book of conversations packed with pleasure and instruction, a book that is in the short compass of 367 pages and at a trifling expense a most fascinating guide to the mind and spirit of our age as manifested in five outstanding personalities! And the fact that it is such a guide is due in no small measure to the author's own personality, the mind and spirit of Dilip Kumar Roy; for it is his own eager search for truth and beauty and goodness that has taken him to the very centre of each great man interviewed, and has done this across various paths so that the word of wisdom when it comes out throws light on a multiplicity of interests, trends, movements, aspects of life. Dilip Kumar Roy himself emerges as an extremely interesting type, many-sided, acutely modern and at the same time steeped in rich traditions, deeply Indian but no less widely international for that. While being a revelation of the core of Romain Rolland, Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo, his book is also a subtle disclosure of his own being - a kind of indirect mental autobiography written with the aid of five world-figures.

I said "five", but though that is the number of great ones conversed with, there are in fact six notable personalities represented. For, the author has added to his already glittering treasury by getting Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan to contribute a nine-paged introduction which gives us a general survey of the field of character

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1. Revised and enlarged Popular American Edition - Jaico Publishing House (New York, Bombay, Calcutta) - Price: Rs. 1-12.

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and thought covered by the book as well as a glimpse of his own attitude and position. Except for two or three phrases in the third paragraph, with a rather exaggerative and indiscriminative ring as if all the individuals here were equally rishis of the ultimate vision, the introduction is balanced and felicitous. To secure it was no mean part of the inspiration which led Roy beyond the interviews to some extra features, the most precious being a substantial sheaf of letters of Sri Aurobindo's, nearly seventy pages of literary criticism, philosophical discussion, mystical knowledge, socio-political analysis, marked by insight, energy and humour.

Romain Rolland

The order in which the interviews are arranged is not without meaning. Born a musician, Roy begins with Romain Rolland the literary artist who made musical experience his special study. And many utterances that go to the heart of music in particular and art in general are here recorded. Several striking judgments are also passed on the methods of Indian and European music. In fact, a few flaws of extremism notwithstanding, a more discerning and far-reaching piece of declaration of faith by a great artist who is also a great humanist and idealist would be hard to find anywhere in literature. This is high praise, yet on the whole deserved. The true Rolland stands here, revealed all the more by Roy's sensitive and accurate descriptions of his look and manner; and there is so much clearness of deep thought in the midst of warmth of deep feeling that these conversations of his and the half a dozen letters supplementing them can be regarded as the best rejoinder to those who try to make him out a mushy and gushy thinker. One does not know what to quote out of the beautiful abundance. I particularly liked the discussion about an artist's duty to society and to himself. Rolland says that an artist cannot be impervious to the misery and injustice around him, he should do his bit towards removing them, but never at the sacrifice of his own métier. No job can be done better than what one is fitted for: besides, to help humanity one need not always be social-reformist. "Do you think," asks

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Rolland, "that the creative endeavours of art can't and don't prove a daily succour in our sorrow? ,A single symphony of Beethoven is certainly worth half a dozen social reforms... The first and paramount duty of the artist and the intellectual is to be true to his inner call and urge - sleeplessly: he must above all keep the lamp burning in the shrine of inner perceptions - and must create whenever his daemon prompts him. This done, his surplus time and energy he may devote to the betterment of social conditions, as Goethe used to. He served society, but only during lulls in his creative inspiration... A man's duty is not done if he thinks only of his contemporaries - his neighbours: he has to take count of his duties to the Eternal Man who, emerging out of the lowest animality, has climbed obstinately through centuries towards the light. And what constitutes the ransom for the liberation of this Eternal Man in bondage is his conquest of the Spirit. All the efforts of the savant, the thinker and the artist compete for this heroic campaign (campaign in the sense of battling against odds); whoever among them repudiates this obligation - were it even for the sake of altruism - betrays his ultimate mission."

Lest it should be thought that Rolland gives a carte blanche to egoism on the artist's part, we must note that for him the true artist is he who never lies on a bed of roses. Rolland agrees with what Tolstoy wrote in a letter to him: "The vindication of the truly artistic vocation lies in the trials and tribulations cheerfully suffered and nobly accepted." But he does not go the whole way with Tolstoy's theory of art. Here a remark of his is worth citing about a point which Gandhi, the next subject of interview in the book, attempts to drive home. Gandhi wants art to be always universal in appeal, to reach the masses and never to need any specialisation, a certain high level of culture, for its appreciation. Rolland is certainly against pretentious high-browism, against punditism putting on airs, but he cannot for all his passionate admiration of Gandhi share Gandhi's Tolstoyan view that art's supremacy lies in its being not above the heads of peasants. Such a criterion is too rigid, for the artist cannot always keep himself tied to the receptivity of peasants - and his being above common

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heads does not annul his inward touch with humanity and his contribution to progress. "Humanity," says Holland, "is always on the march. The intellectual élite are its vanguard, its pioneers, paving the way along which the entire humanity shall pass eventually. It would therefore be wrong to represent the élite as separated from the rank and file because the latter lags behind. And he would be an indifferent leader of the people who would constrain its vanguard to march with the bulk of the army."

Gandhi

The interviews with Gandhi (the last in an ominous atmosphere on the eve of the shots that rang round the world) are no whit inferior as a document of personality, though their mental value is not as high. They appropriately follow on the heels of that with Rolland because next to being a natural artist Roy was a lover of India when he set out on his life's odyssey. In the minds of many people during the twenties and thirties Gandhi was a symbol of India, and our author's sympathy with him came all the easier for the latter's keen enjoyment of music. The "Mahatma" is shown as holding that India's music is of her very essence, and it is frequently that he asks Roy to sing to him. About painting, however, he is quite cold - and on all art that strikes him as not the heart's immediate outflow but as going in frequently for complex values he is rather severe. But what constitutes the worth of his presence in the book is not his attitude towards art: the man of action, the man of ethical askesis - that is the real Gandhi. While speaking even of music he brings us face to face with this basic substance of himself. "How well I remember," he says in one place, "the joy and comfort that music used to give me when I was ailing in a South African hospital. I was then recovering from the hurts I had received at the hands of some roughs who had been engaged to cripple me - thanks to the success of my 'Passive Resistance Campaign'. At my request the daughter of a friend of mine used, very often, to sing to me the famous hymn, Lead Kindly Light! And how it acted like a healing balm invariably." The heroic "experiment with truth" stands out here,

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while the mention of Lead Kindly Light! confirms the trait which his predilection for devotional songs from among the wealth of Indian music puts forward in the interviews time and again: his religious fervour.

But though his religious fervour is considerable and his life shorn of evil hungers by a strong-willed self discipline, he is as little the mystic as the philosopher. Just as the philosophical intellect's impartial multi-mooded questing is absent in him, the direct illumination of the ecstatic or the contemplative - leading to Mahatmahood in the original sense of union with the Infinite Being - is also not his. But that scarcely implies that he was not in his own sphere a salutary force in India. He was salutary both because he was straight and strong and because he had a childlike simplicity combined with a twinkling puckish humour. Not to know Gandhi's laughter is not to know him at all. Roy supplies us in four and a half pages with a portrayal of Gandhi's laughter as well as of his agility in political discussion-"the frail athlete", he is called in a priceless phrase - and of his high moral seriousness, a portrayal that is the work of a remarkable artist in character-nuances. A widely human figure steps out of these pages - and that wide humanity tends to make even his prejudice against what Rolland terms the world's vanguard a moving limitation. There will, perhaps, be some to doubt if there is actually a limitation here and for them there will be a convincing sentence pronounced on a part of Rollandian, Tagorean and Aurobindonian aims when Gandhi dogmatically declares: "I maintain that the profoundest utterances of man in every great philosophy or religion as in every great art must appeal equally to all. I cannot for the life of me see much in any specialisation which must mean nothing to the vast multitude. Its only tangible effect seems to be that it gives a swelled head to a few and sows aversion and contempt where there should be sympathy and understanding."

Bertrand Russell

I cannot help feeling that to apply this stricture to even a part of Rollandian, Tagorean and Aurobindonian aims is really not to

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understand their depths - and to take apparent and outward humanitarianism as the only one, the sole true one. A non-understanding no less of a part of these aims and, into the bargain, that of Gandhism itself is Bertrand Russell's "limpid crystalline thought". He is the pure scientific intellect - not standing quite beyond the voice of feeling and whatever is connected with religion but remaining uncoloured by them in its judgments and guiding our nature by its unswerving impersonal regard for demonstrable fact. He is the emblem, in Roy's own life, of the doubting critical outward-shining mentality the latter developed during his tour in Europe. A mentality not to be brushed aside, for there is a lot of stale and cankering superstition, a lot of stifling emotional hot air, which the Russsellian open-eyedness can dissipate with profit. For Russell is not merely a destroyer; he has several good things to offer - a sane and frank attitude towards sex, for instance. He is particularly acid about the Roman Catholic Church's ban on birth-control and divorce. He regrets also Gandhi's sympathy with such a ban just as he regrets the belief Gandhi shares, with many great men, in the soul and God. He offers us science as a mighty improver of the human mind by rendering it impervious to religious "irrationalism" and by improving the racial stock through sterilisation of the mentally unfit as well as through judicious birth-control. It is to be supposed that the racial stock might be improved by the means Russell advocates, but his stern censure of religious experience is rather indiscriminate. He can see nothing sound in mysticism: when Roy speaks of mystics preaching lofty principles from their illuminations and ecstasies, he retorts: "I believe in ecstasies as data of definite experience, but when they imply vision of the highest reality I cannot accept them; for, the lofty principles you speak of are by no means the results of these mystic illuminations. As a matter of fact such ecstasies render the mystics distinctly self-centred and selfish. Through such transports they become more and more subjective and get more and more loth to lead a healthy life of varied activities and lose interest in things for themselves. Consequently, their joys tend to become more and more similar to the joys of the voluptuary or the drunkard." To

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redress the apparent lopsidedness a statement of this kind argues in Russell, Roy opines that it is just a conversational emphasis and that Russell does not really leave the boons of mysticism out of the picture. I am afraid they are left out; for to admit, as Russell does, that equal in value to the scientific pursuit of knowledge are the creation and enjoyment of beauty, the joy of life and human affection, is merely to give a place to the non-intellectual sides of us, not to afford a locus standi to religion and mysticism. No true concession is made even by the fine declaration: "The organised life of the community is necessary, but it is necessary as a mechanism, not something to be valued on its own account. What is of most value in human life is more analogous to what all the great religious teachers have spoken of." For, what Russell has in mind, as his book Religion and Science proves, are the equanimity and compassion, the radiance and healing atmosphere which the master-mystics speak of but which, according to him, are attainable without mysticism and should be so attained rather than in conjunction with an erroneous belief and an aberrant psychology. To those who have even an inkling of true mystical experience of any type it would be absurd to imply that Buddha's supreme equanimity and compassion are possible without his ego-annulling and desire-destroying Nirvana or Ramakrishna's intensely radiant nature and healing atmosphere can be acquired without his rapturous realisation of the omnipresent Divine Mother. Qualities of the soul reach their acmes only through the soul's awakening to its cosmic and transcendent source. But Russell's failure to assess rightly the validity and worth of spiritual experience must not blind us to the noble, acute, healthy sagacity he is shown by Roy to be commanding in many respects on the outer tangible plane.

Before I pass to the author's fruitful contact with Tagore I must pause a moment to quote from Radhakrishnan's introduction a remark apropos Russell. While appreciating the latter's unmuddled courage and humanitarian concern, Radhakrishnan applies a fine intuitive touch-stone to the theory of naturalistic evolution which denies the supra-physical soul, the spark of the Divine Spirit: "Russell does not seem to realise that the human

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individual who can sit in judgment on the universe, who has the intelligence to know that his life is but a brief episode in the history of this planet, who has developed a conscience which protests against the waste and want of the world is not a mere phenomenon among phenomena, an object among objects." I dare say a sceptical and analytic intellect like Russell could give a riposte to this subtle thrust - but the riposte would be, in any way, effective on the abstract plane, not on the plane of the whole being with its many dimensions, its in-dwelling magnitudes and overbrooding mysteries. A semi-poetic logic is here, far more satisfying and convincing than any pronouncement of that merely intellectual argumentation to which there can be no end.

Rabindranath Tagore

This is not to undervalue the intellect - it is to attune it to the integral personality, ponderable and imponderable. The intellect must have a definite play: else we sink mostly into rank vitalism and uncurbed emotionalism and invite the fanatic and the obscurantist more than the seer. Its importance is implicit in the conversations with Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. The one is a skilful thinker at the same time that he is an intuitive poet and the other a profound philosopher plus an illumined Yogi and an inspired bard. Towards Tagore, Roy is drawn by the seeker in him of the Ideal through love and beauty. That seeker is affined to the artistic aspirant who went to Rolland - but with one difference. What drew him to the great Frenchman was something that was in a struggle and trying to break forth and expand, the great Frenchman was himself a fighter, he crusaded for a rare vision that made him lonely, his triumphs and exultations were plucked all the while from a wrestling with dark forces. The wrestling sharpened both his artistic insight and his heart's desire but prevented his full growth. Tagore has a calmer and brighter atmosphere, a less wounded exquisiteness of being, a certain happy poise, some actualised neighbouring of the Ideal - but it is a sort of natural neighbouring and is thus not quite aware of the rigours as distinguished from the graces of art, while it is bathed more than

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Rolland's edged heroism in sweetness and light. Tagore was a finer artist and his inner self too had a' finer fulfilment - though Rolland strikes us as having had possibilities of an inner realisation beyond Tagore's possibilities, which yet fell short of their promise and left him less harmonised. Tagore's talk has not, except in a passage at the end, the burning piercing note - it has a certain degree of assured radiance. Just a faint soupçon of self-complacence too is there in a couple of minor places, as if the consummate artist in him as well as the intuitive depth finding voice in his art were not always worthily accompanied by the rest of the consciousness. On the whole, however, the talks are indeed attractive - with a half-humorous personal streak running in and out of serious and beautiful reflection. The poet does not dwell exclusively on his semi-mystical pursuit of the Ideal through love and beauty; he introduces a very human element by remembering his own early shy encounters with romance and by discussing love and beauty in the life of man and woman. He points out the difference between the needs in man's nature and those in woman's. He is not anti-feminist, wanting woman to remain shackled and inferior nor is he in favour of old cramping customs; Russell has a good word for Tagore's progressiveness and, as shown by the excerpt from a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy in the Foreword which adorned the original Indian edition of the book but which has unaccountably been dropped from this American one, Havelock Ellis who has done champion service in breaking ancient taboos agrees with Tagore's conception of man's and woman's offices. Not man's competitor but his complement: this is Tagore's formula for woman. "Woman's function," he says with a poet's flair for simile, "works passively, subterraneously, like the roots of a tree, while man's fulfilment consists in spreading himself out like branches, through growth, adventure and activity. But in order that his activity may find fruition in lasting contributions to our civilisation, his roots must be strongly embedded in firm soil, otherwise his growth becomes topheavy." A still more suggestive remark soon follows: "Just as in the physical plane the germ of man works in the background while woman carries it within her and nurses it into life, so in the mental

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plane the inspiration of woman must first implant its seed in man's subconscious in order that his creative impulses may bear fruit... It is not for nothing that man turns with relief to her in the monotonous round of his activities and is drawn to her as iron to magnet. Her grace and charm and sweetness are necessary to our very existence." Elucidating the dissimilarity of the two sexes, Tagore declares that the personal and the social are more vividly real to the feminine nature, the masculine is inclined more towards impersonality and is in its dealing with the world more utilitarian than humanly intimate and understanding. Another difference, according to Tagore, manifests itself in the deeper spiritual field: man quests for freedom, a rising above earth and embodiment, a flight to the Absolute, whereas woman does not feel earth to be a bondage and she cannot give up the beautiful significance of form for the bare and the formless.

Much of all this is, in the main, true, so far as the ordinary disposition of life is concerned. But there is something also to be said for the modern tendency, often crude and superficial though it may be, to equalise the sexes; for, behind it is a pressure towards climbing beyond the outward differentiations, since the fundamental human nature is the same and escape the sex limits and holds every sort of potentiality and commands the power of a varied function. In essence this pressure is a highly evolutionary factor. We tend overmuch to see man and woman in relation to each other and in the way their natures manifest commonly on the mental, vital, physical levels. What we often forget is that either is an expression ultimately of a soul, a spiritual self, and that the destiny of both is not so much in relation to each other as in relation to the single Godhead they have to evolve side by side and co-operatively on earth. Transcendent of the sex-differentiations and of the physical-vital-mental formula is the more-than-human nature they bring as their basis: considered in the light of that nature, their finest development would appear to lie in a large equality of status and function, with yet a subtle variety of tone and mould and gesture and interaction in that nature's out-flowering.

Even as things are in the present stage of our evolution,

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Tagore seems to slip from the right track when, touching upon the deeper spiritual field to which we have access, he says that the wife of Buddha could not have renounced him for the Infinite as Buddha renounced her. The formless Nirvana may not generally be suited to a woman's aspiration and in that sense she cannot leave her mate and seek the Infinite; yet without violating her swabhava she can surely pass beyond her human attachments and pursue the Eternal as a personal Being who, while infinitely exceeding earth, does not in the least disdain it. In the realm of spirituality there is not only Buddha as a type: there is also Mirabai. And the two types are not strictly distributed between the sexes. Tagore himself of the Gitanjali-lyrics has the bhakta's disposition. As ardent a bhakta as the woman Mirabai was the man Chaitanya, and Buddhism had nuns as well as monks. Incline as it frequently may in one or the other direction exclusively, the psyche in either sex is two-moded.

Sri Aurobindo

This fact gives us a clue to what may be termed the complete spiritual aim for us - inner liberation from earth and from embodiment together with transformation and fulfilment of both, mukti in the impersonal Infinite together with ascension to the personal God and incarnation of His powers and purposes in our total nature. That would imply a consummating of all that is truly valuable and creative in Rolland, Gandhi, Tagore and also Russell where his attack on mystical isolation and other-worldliness is concerned, no less than the bringing of a value and creativity beyond any of their achievements or their dreams. And it is just because of discerning such a synthesis of the essential best in them and at the same time an integrality and harmony vastly superior to what they offer that Dilip Kumar Roy reaches his goal at the feet of Sri Aurobindo the Yogi of the dynamic divinisation of the human, the Yogi who is also a poet, a philosopher, a social thinker, a man of idealistic action. Naturally the interviews with which the book closes become its climax, providing the cream of its significance. Here the profoundest feelings and desires of the

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author are laid before us, his life's various movements and the curves of his character find their intimate record. He opens his heart and mind to Sri Aurobindo and in return Sri Aurobindo pours the rich stream of his illumination, buoying him up, turning him towards the secrets of the Supreme, sweeping around him and into him the myriad currents of his wisdom born of God-realisation. There is conveyed to us, thanks to the inspired "reportage", both the Master's moving humanness and something of his yogic personality's perfume and aura. Sri Aurobindo's "Everlasting Yea" to the challenge of earth-evolution dispels the misapprehension with which the author approached Yoga. "I was scared," writes Roy, "by what I thought Yoga had in store for its devotees: a life of awful asceticism, desiccating discipline and withering solitude, all of which meant for me an utter stultification of life." Meeting Sri Aurobindo he was convinced that far from stultifying life and, with it, art, the Integral Yoga taught at Pondicherry would heighten and fulfil everything.

It must have been novel indeed to find a Yogi who could write in a book of his that the rationalistic Materialism which characterised nineteenth-century Europe had an indispensable utility both in counteracting the spiritual habit of recoiling from the earth and in training the human intellect to a clear austerity without which in the past a real nucleus of spiritual truth had been encrusted with such an accretion of perverting superstitions and dogmas that all advance in true knowledge was rendered impossible. He is as little perturbed by the materialistic mind as he is taken in by it. When Roy puts a certain idea in a rather sceptical manner and adds, "it may be that I have been somewhat Westernised," the Master smiles and, remembering his fourteen years of education in England from the age of seven, remarks: "You may have heard that I too happen to know a thing or two about the West and Westernisation." And he proceeds to flay as forthrightly the defects of the materialists as he has praised their merits: "I know their mentality well with its throw-away-the-baby-too-with-the-bathwater attitude. Since mountebanks use trickery to exploit the supra-physical phenomena, therefore - they will argue - all such phenomena are frauds and stagecraft."

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Having himself been - as he admits - an agnostic at one time, it is extremely interesting to read what he writes in a letter to our author about the demand for the Divine as a concrete certitude, quite as concrete as any physical phenomenon caught by the senses: "Certainly, the Divine must be such a certitude not only as concrete but more concrete than anything sensed by eye or ear or touch in the world of Matter; but it is a certitude not of mental thought but of essential experience. When the Peace of God descends on you, when the Divine Presence is there within you, when the Ananda rushes on you like a sea, when you are driven like a leaf before the wind by the breath of the Divine Force, when Love flows out from you on all creation, when Divine Knowledge floods you with a light which illumines and transforms in a moment all that was dark, sorrowful and obscure, when all that is becomes part of the One Reality, when it is all around you felt at once by the spiritual contact, by the inner vision, by the illumined seeing thought, by the vital sensation and even by the very physical sense, when everywhere you see, hear, touch only the Divine, then you can much less doubt it or deny it than you can deny or doubt daylight or air or the sun in heaven - for of all these physical things you cannot be sure that they are what your senses represent them to be; but in the concrete experience of the Divine, doubt is impossible."

It is, of course, by Yoga that this experience arrives at its full intensity: Sri Aurobindo sets no great store by mere religiosity and dogmatic belief, though he never discounts faith as a staff until the realisation comes in our very underlying substance and essence. Even while showing the necessity of faith he does not discourage the sincerely questioning mind, nor does he wish to be dictatorial in any way. The main thing is not to bend the mind by force but to render it possible for the true soul, the inmost psychic being, to emerge and bring its spontaneous contact with the Divine as a constant factor in the evolution of the Divine in the earth-formula. The full evolution would mean the descent of what Sri Aurobindo terms the Supermind, the Truth-consciousness from which all perfection, not excluding the physical body's, can result for us but which no one in the past has securely possessed or brought

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into manifestation and for whose rapid descent for mankind Sri Aurobindo went into so-called "retirement", leaving his coworker the Mother in direct day-to-day charge of the Yogic development of his disciples. In this connection some of Roy's questions and Sri Aurobindo's answers are of the utmost value at present when the world seems so gloomed over with terrible possibilities and the Asura or Titan is on the march and Sri Aurobindo has withdrawn from his physical body. Apropos a couple of letters in which the Master had written that he was not in the least discouraged by the steady trend from bad to worse in the world-situation since it was temporary and he knew and had experienced hundreds of times that behind the blackest darkness there lay for one who was a divine instrument the light of God's victory, Roy shoots out the query: "Have you any direct evidence in favour of such a prognosis?" In the author's own words:

"A smile edged his lips. He held my eyes for a few seconds without replying, then said: ' I have.'

" 'Do I understand that your Supramental means business after all -1 mean by coming down at long last for us humans?'

"His smile now broadened into laughter... 'Do I understand,' I pursued again after the laughter had subsided, 'that the conquest of the Asuric forces will usher in the Supramental Descent?'

"'Not in itself,' he said with a far-away look, 'but it will create conditions for the Descent to become a possibility.'

. "There was something in his tone and look which stirred a chord deep down in me. I hesitated for a little and then hazarded the question, just to have the answer from his lips, was it? I do not know. All I know is that something irresistible impelled me to it.

" 'Is your real work this invocation of the Supramental?'

" 'Yes,' he replied, very simply, T have come for that.'

"And I was laughing with him, arguing with him, examining his point of view... because he had given me the right by calling me 'a friend and a son', in his infinite compassion! The remorse of Arjuna in the Gita recurred to me, inevitably:

Oft I addressed thee as a human mate

And laughed with thee - failing to apprehend

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Thine infinite greatness, sharing with thee my seat

Or couch - by right of love for thee as friend:

For all such errors of irreverence

Thy forgiveness I implore in penitence. "

What are we to think? An Avatar's presence invades us -and with a wonderful promise. If Sri Aurobindo's mission from on high is to call down the Supermind and establish a radical and revolutionary spiritual change on earth, not only will the prevailing chaos and corruption terminate in the near future but also the termination will be aided by the very event which seems to a superficial view so heart-shattering - his departure from the material scene. That departure cannot have been by any compulsion: it must have been of free choice, a strategic sacrifice of his own body to help in some occult way his work of integral earth-transformation!

Dilip Kumar Roy could not have come to a close with a subtler touch. A uniquely large and far-seeing, just and careful and profound consciousness which is an undefeatable "secret splendour" behind its human face is the Sri Aurobindo that emerges from Roy's delineation. Remark after acute and satisfying remark - with an indefinable authority of ultimate truth - cries out for quotation; but there is no space here to do full justice to the interviews and to the letters packed between them. One gets absolutely fascinated by a man who is so much at home in a hundred matters - bringing to each a penetrating word. Among the letters, those treating of poetic values, Frank Harris and Shaw, Anatole France, European philosophy, art and spirituality, the inner meaning of the war with Hitler are perhaps the finest. If not anything else, "Among the Great" is worth buying for these discourses.

Roy is nothing but generous in his gifts to the reading public. Besides these epistolary masterpieces and the precious documents from Rolland elsewhere, he has included in the book beautiful English renderings of the many Bengali or Hindi songs he had sung to his friends. And the Aurobindonian letters he has interspersed with certain pages of correspondence by an English

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friend of his, Ronald Nixon, erstwhile professor of philosophy at Lucknow, at present practising Yoga in Almora under the name of Krishna Prem. Those pages are apt not only because Sri Aurobindo comments on Krishna Prem's ideas but also because it was through the pointing finger of this Indianised Westerner that Dilip Kumar Roy the Westernised Indian first turned his eyes towards Sri Aurobindo who is the perfect synthesis of East and West. And they are excellent writing, too! It is impossible to thank enough our wanderer among great men for the opulence he has collected for us. But let us not forget that he is no mere collector: himself a creative artist with a sensitive style, the greatnesses in whose midst he has moved are - with the exception of Sri Aurobindo who gets clean out of the cadre of merely human greatness - far from quite overshadowing his own presence and stature.

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