On The Mother

CHAPTER 33

After Independence

I

In August 1947, the Congress leaders stampeded by Lord Mountbatten to some extent - had agreed, to the Partition in the hope of averting further communal strife and the resultant bloodshed. Actually, the "tryst with Destiny" - the midnight hour preceding the dawn of 15 August - was to prove the signal for the flow of rivers of blood in the Punjab. The anticipated moment of triumph and fulfilment was surpassed by shame-faced perplexity and the benumbing sense of fatality. The butcher's knife of vivisection let loose unimaginable horrors and the desecration of cherished national and all humane values. Lahore, Multan, Rawalpindi, Amritsar, Gujranwala, Sheikhpura... almost everywhere the coming of freedom meant, for hundreds of thousands, a death-trap fashioned by the inscrutable working of the Time Spirit.¹ The violence and humiliation, the bestiality and insanity, the terror and the pity of it all! Gandhiji had once ruefully speculated:

It almost appears as if we are nursing in our bosoms the desire to take revenge the first time we get the opportunity. Can true voluntary non-violence come out of this seeming forced non-violence of the weak? Is it not a futile experiment I am conducting? What if, when the fury bursts, not a man, woman or child is safe and every man's hand is raised against his neighbour?

The Mahatma had been prophetic indeed, and on 15 August and the days following "not a man, woman or child" was safe and every man's hand was raised against his brother and his neighbour. Also, it meant a colossal two-way traffic of uprooted humanity on the run Hindu and Sikh to India, and Muslim to Pakistan - daring the unspeakable abominations on the way. This was to raise the stupendous problem of rehabilitation and resettlement of the millions of refugees who had fled one way or another leaving all behind. In short, Hell was let loose, civil authority broke down, and the military was sometimes partisan and often ineffective. There was thus no end to the miseries of the children of mangled and mutilated Mother India.

It must, however, be conceded that those months were also a period of super-human endeavours - by men of iron like Sardar Patel, by unflinching humanists like Nehru, by great reconcilers like Rajaji, and by thousands of mute unknown knight-errants of succour and sisters of compassion - that somehow redeemed the envenomed time and began rearing slowly on the very ruins of the shattered citadel a new habitation for the future.

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II

It was in this context, when the fumes and marsh vapours and the smell of the blood of the innocents of the affected areas in North India could be felt even in the Ashram's sanctified precincts in Pondicherry, that the Mother gave this New Year prayer for 1948, out of the plenitude of her occult vision and overhead consciousness:

Forward, for ever forward!

At the end of the tunnel is the light...

At the end of the fight is the victory!²

No use repining; no use casting backward glances; no use opening up old sores! One must persevere, one must hold on - to win at last!

The Partition hadn't brought peace into the subcontinent, nor amity between the Governments of India and Pakistan. While the Punjab was all ablaze in the weeks after Independence, Mahatma Gandhi was able to bring peace in Calcutta and Bengal, as if indeed he were an effective one-man boundary force in the East. But the exodus continued, and the invasion of Kashmir by Pakistan, Kashmir's accession to India in October 1947, and India's resistance of Pak aggression were to sow the seeds of strife and enmity among the people, and there were to be violent recriminations, and even Gandhiji was to be misunderstood and reviled; and on 30 January 1948, he was struck down on his way to a prayer meeting. It was a black day for the people of India, and for all humanity On 4 February, Sri Aurobindo sent a wire in reply to a distracted devotee's call: "Remain firm through the darkness; the light is there and will conquer."³ The next day he gave the nation a message in answer to a request from the All India Radio, Tiruchirapalli:

I would have preferred silence in the face of the circumstances that surround us.... This much, however, I will say that the Light which led us to freedom, though not yet to unity, still burns and will burn on till it conquers. I believe firmly that a great and united future is the destiny of this nation and its peoples. The Power that brought us through so much struggle and suffering to freedom, will achieve also, through whatever strife or trouble, the aim which so poignantly occupied the thoughts of the fallen leader at the time of his tragic ending; as it brought us freedom, it will bring us unity. A free and united India will be there and the Mother will gather around her her sons and weld them into a single national strength in the life of a great and united people.⁴

But the Kashmir question continued to bedevil Indo-Pakistan relations, and the dispute was to be endlessly debated in the United Nations Security Council. Jinnah's death followed in September 1948, and the hopes of concord and cooperation in the subcontinent receded further still.

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The international scene was not much better. The 'cold war' was the grim image of global power-politics: the fall of Benes in Czechoslovakia was a portent, and the ascendancy of Mao Tse-tung in China, pushing Chiang Kaishek more and more into the background, was another. It was as though, within three years of the exorcising of the Hitlerite terror, another darkness was enveloping the world. Replying to a correspondent who had struck a pessimistic note, Sri Aurobindo wrote on 18 July 1948 that he could hold out but cold comfort to those who lamented the current situation. Things were certainly bad and growing worse and worse. What, then, was the best way of facing the ugly posture of affairs? The truth of the matter was that certain possibilities had to be suffered first and thrown out before "a new and better world" could have a chance of emergence:

It is, as in Yoga, where things active or latent in the being have to be put into action in the light so that they may be grappled with and thrown out or to emerge from latency in the depths for the same purificatory purpose.⁵

The night was very dark indeed, but the coming of dawn was inevitable, and the new world struggling to be born would be made of a different texture which would come from within and not without. One must hold on, one must master the art of endurance - and one must open oneself to the force and light of transformation.

III

If some disciples questioned Sri Aurobindo about the bewildering Indian and world situation, others ventured to doubt the wisdom of the Mother giving so much importance to sports in the Ashram, and of her playing tennis "for long hours" in spite of her advanced age and evincing a disproportionate interest "in the sports programmes and events, thereby taking needed time" away from "the more vital concerns" of Ashram life. Was the great Ashram to dwindle into a mere gymnasium? Was one's progress in Yoga to be measured by one's proficiency in games and sports alone? Was it true that the Mother was apt to frown upon those sadhaks who didn't take part in games and sports? In respect of all such hasty misjudgments, the Mother's stand was enunciated in a letter of 19 November 1948:

Do not judge on appearances and do not listen to what people say, because these two things are misleading....

...There is in the Ashram no exterior discipline and no visible test. But the inner test is severe and constant....⁶

But censorious people, driven by the demon of doubt and suspicion, could still continue to make unwarranted accusations.

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But Sri Aurobindo wouldn't dismiss even such irresponsible animadversions with a mere shrug or a gesture of contempt. He wrote to a correspondent on 10 July 1948, dismissing the popular fallacies and setting the matter in the right perspective. The sports and physical exercises, Sri Aurobindo wrote, were primarily for the school children, and were teamed with the academic studies exemplifying, incidentally, the ancient concept of a healthy mind in a healthy body. If the younger sadhaks also joined, it was a voluntary choice, and was clearly in addition to their other normal duties and yogic preoccupations. Actually, the Mother didn't bother as to who among the sadhaks took part in sports, and who didn't; it was entirely their own lookout. As for the question "Why any sports at all in the Ashram?" Sri Aurobindo said that "to be concerned only with meditation and inner experiences and the escape from life into Brahman... applies only to the ordinary kind of Ashram... this is not that orthodox kind of Ashram. It includes life in Yoga". And hence anything that was useful and not inconsistent with the imperatives of the Spirit was permissible activity in the Ashram. Although ever since "the shadow of Buddhism stalked over all the land" and the philosophy of Illusion hypnotised men into inactivity the 'ashrams' became mere monasteries, places of retreat and nooks of quietism, a very different ideal had flourished in still earlier times:

The old Ashrams were not entirely like that; the boys and young men who were brought up in them were trained in many things belonging to life: the son of Pururavas and Urvasie practised archery in the Ashram of a Rishi and became an expert bowman, and Kama became disciple of a great sage in order to acquire from him the use of powerful weapons. So there is no a priori ground why sports should be excluded from life of an Ashram like ours where we are trying to equate life with the Spirit.⁷

IV

One reason for the recurrent misunderstandings of the Mother's actions was her habit of throwing herself heart and soul into any new development or enterprise till it acquired the necessary sureness of momentum to stand or move on its own. It was thus she had ushered into existence the divers Ashram services and departments, notably the Dining Hall, the Bakery, the Building Service, the Workshop, Golconde, the School, the Printing Press, the Playground, and the rest. Above all, she had her own occult way of taking decisions and implementing them, and it was futile to weigh them in the sheerly mental balance of propriety and utility. Hers was an inner vision, and an integral consciousness. This the sadhaks - not all of them - would understand. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in the course of a subsequent letter:

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If she is busy with the organisation of these things [sports etc.] - and it is not true that she is busy with that alone - it is in order to get finished with that as soon as possible after which it will go on of itself without her being at all engrossed or specially occupied by it, as is the case with other works of the Ashram.⁸

In fact, even in the heyday of her supposed excessive preoccupation with sports when she played tennis for an hour and spent an hour or two in the evenings with the children on the Playground, even in that period of the evolution of the Ashram,

the Mother's whole day from early morning and a large part of the night also has always been devoted to her other occupations connected with the Sadhana - not her own but that of the Sadhaks - Pranam, blessings, meditation and receiving the Sadhaks on the staircase or elsewhere, sometimes for two hours at a time, and listening to what they have to say, questions about the Sadhana, results of their work or [other] matters, complaints, disputes, quarrels, all kinds of conferences about this or that to be decided and done - there is no end to the list: for the rest she had to attend to their letters, to reports about the material work of the Ashram and all its many departments, correspondence and all sorts of things connected with the contacts with the outside world including often serious trouble and difficulties and the settlement of matters of great importance.⁹

This passage is remarkable for its description in miniature of the Mother's heavy schedule of activities - and she was past seventy at the time! - comprehending the entire spectrum from the material to the spiritual. After a visit to the Ashram on 21 February 1948, the Ceylonese writer, J.Vijayatunga, wrote:

I have found here more 'Santi' than I did at Santiniketan, and a more perfect organisation than at any other community centre in India.

The personality behind the organisation, to the minutest detail, is the Mother.... A woman of great dignity and beauty in her youth, as well as of great intellect, she embodies in her frail frame to-day an amazing vitality, through her eyes pours a radiance that is not earthly.¹⁰

The Mother was all the time at once building, sustaining, and building again. Nor was she deterred by conventions, conservatism or sordid calculation, but relying on the Divine alone she dared and darted forward to her chosen goals, and always arrived on time. During the War years and after, under her intrepid and imaginative stewardship, the Ashram registered phenomenal advance in several directions. The Ashram Press was established with the help of Mr.Pillai, a former Director of the Government Central Press, Hyderabad. On 24 November 1945 came out The Four Aids, a "highly valued chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga". This "first

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fruit", as the Prefatory Note described it, was composed mostly by the sadhaks and sadhikas themselves.¹¹ And the first important publication was Sri Aurobindo's Hymns to the Mystic Fire (1946). A quarterly journal, The Advent, dedicated to the exposition of Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Future, was launched on 21 February 1944, in the first instance from Madras. Since 1942, Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual has appeared regularly from Calcutta on 15 August. Sri Aurobindo Circle, another annual publication, first came out from Bombay on 24 April 1945, and later shifted to Pondicherry, and has been appearing every year. And 1949 was to see the publication of two more journals: Bulletin of Physical Education, a quarterly, whose first issue appeared on 21 February, and Mother India, a cultural fortnightly, whose inaugural number came out from Bombay, also on the Mother's birthday. All these journals - with others to follow, in English as well as in the languages of India - were to establish themselves as authoritative organs for the exposition and propagation of the divers aspects of Sri Aurobindo's Thought and World Vision, and of the Mother's divine ministry radiating from the Ashram at Pondicherry.

V

It was on 11 December 1948 that the Andhra University, Waltair, honoured itself at its annual Convocation by awarding the C.R. Reddy National Prize for the Humanities to Sri Aurobindo, though in absentia. In his citation, Dr. Reddy, the Vice-Chancellor, hailed Sri Aurobindo "in all humility of devotion... as the sole sufficing genius of the age... among the Saviours of Humanity". Dr. Reddy reached Pondicherry on 19 December 1948, and the Mother received him the same evening, and found him a nice man who was quick to understand things. Next morning he had an interview with Sri Aurobindo whom he had known as a senior colleague over forty years earlier at the Baroda College. They were together for about thirty minutes, and Dr. Reddy personally offered the gold medal and cheque to Sri Aurobindo. Later, Dr. Reddy went round the Ashram, and in the evening witnessed in the Playground a demonstration of physical culture by the boys and girls, and had a discussion with the Mother about the working of the Ashram. Recalling the impressions of his visit, Dr. Reddy wrote in the columns of Mother India:

...this extraordinary Ashram in which life and the joy of life are mingled in happy union with spirituality and spiritual progress....

But in many respects what impressed me most were the educational institutions maintained by the Ashram and the ancient spirit of strength and joy that pervades them. The Mother, the embodiment of grace, light and tenderness, ordered an exhibition of games and physical exercises by

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the boys and girls of the Ashram School. I said to myself, "If all the schools were like this, won't India be unassailable by internal foes or external?" The parades were excellent. The exercises were gone through not merely efficiently but cheerfully. The girls... performed hazardous exercises like vaulting. Though there was risk of accident to limb, if not to life, they advanced, cool, calm, and resolute with bright looks and confident smiles, and went through the exercises without a single hitch or a single failure.... She told me that it was the Calcutta killings and the bestial abominations perpetrated on our helpless women and children that made her think of organizing the students in her schools, boys and girls, into a corps capable of self-defence. At the root is the great Vedic idea that, without a strong body, you cannot have a strong soul, undaunted in danger and ready to perform the great task, the root principle of all Dharma, of defending the weak and helpless.¹²

During his interviews with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, they discussed - though in brief - national and international problems, and they agreed that the times were truly out of joint. In India, after prolonged sufferance of the Razacker excesses, Sardar Patel ordered 'Police action' on the Nizam's Hyderabad, and the army quickly overran the State which presently became a part of India. Following Jinnah's death, the age of uncertainty began in Pakistan. The UN mediator in Palestine, Bernadette, was cruelly assassinated. In China, Mao's Communist forces continued their relentless advance, and captured Mukden on 30 October. The cold war in Europe seemed likely to wax at any moment into a shooting war. The Berlin blockade was an atrocity beyond description. And the Russians were frantically trying to explode an atomic device to achieve parity with America. These elements in the international situation added up to something quite ominous, and the future was almost frightening. But the Mother gave as the Prayer for 1949:

Lord, on the eve of the new year I asked Thee what I must say. Thou hast made me see two extreme possibilities and given me the command to keep silent.¹³

VI

To the superficial observer, the Mother was Ashram-centred, and her hands were full with the day-to-day problems of its organisation, as also of its school and the sadhana of the inmates. But the Mother's, like Sri Aurobindo's, was a plenary consciousness, and contained the globe and its maladies and its meanderings. In 1948, at a time of scarcity, she directed that soap-bits, instead of being thrown away, should be kneaded into new cakes and used again. "The world's economy is in my hands," she explained to Champaklal, "so I had to start from the Ashram."¹⁴

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From the apparently trivial to the incomprehensibly cosmic, her attention was everywhere all at once, and between her waking and sleeping states, there were the trance states when she roamed the immensities. As Sri Aurobindo had said:

The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence.¹⁵

The people around her, the people who saw or interviewed her, the people who even wished to be censorious about her actions, what did they know? How much did they see? That frail fair form, (she weighed less than 50 kilograms at this time ¹⁶) with eyes that were windows of the Real, who spoke words that were the accents of the Real, the tread of whose footsteps constituted the rhythm-beats of Existence, she the Mother was also a woman, a grand householder, an ethereal comrade on the Playground, - and, suddenly, when caught in an epiphanic stance, an apocalyptic vision as well. She was the endless enigma, she was the constant refuge, she was Grace incarnate. There was no end to the calls on her time, her patience, her boundless love. Birthdays were special occasions when the Mother received people, accepted their pranam and gave her blessings. Infinite as was her comprehension, so was her compassion. In 1946, on the birthday of a small girl whose parents had wanted her to learn the alphabet from her, the Mother "gave a pen in the hands of the little one, held it and made her write MA in English".¹⁷ Fond parents would beg the Mother to see and approve the bride or bridegroom chosen by their son or daughter; or to bless a son or son-in-law on the eve of his departure abroad. When someone close to her was bereaved, she would react in a divinely appropriate way. For example, coming to know of the death of Champaklal's father, she "kept silent, looked down for a long time" and there ensued this brief conversation:

Mother: Now your mother is alone there?

Champaklal: No, Mother, my elder brother is there.

Mother: Yes, that I know. She does not want to come here? Last time she was here she told me that she would like to come and stay here.... If she wants to come, she is welcome here. You will write that from me.¹⁸

But there was another side to the medal too, for to the human eye, this woman unparalleled was clearly overworking, she was exhausting herself. On 24 January 1949, she finished her day's work in the early hours of the next morning, almost at four. "No time to go to bed," she said - and so the routine for 25th January began.¹⁹ On 26 April, again, she told Sri Aurobindo that she had been going on from morning till night for four days

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running, finding no time even for tennis.²⁰ Nor would she disappoint those waiting for pranam or blessings. When Champaklal once suggested that she might take a day off from her work, she answered smiling: "I do not have so much freedom."²¹ But, then, she could also somehow find time, amidst her crowding preoccupations and the exhausting demands of her work, to do pencil sketches - of Sri Aurobindo, of herself, of Champaklal, of Pranab's fist and profile!²² If only she could be persuaded to find the time to do a painting of Sri Aurobindo in oil colours! Wouldn't that prove to be a real masterpiece? Although she finally agreed to try, things did not turn out like that, and the oil-painting was never done!²³

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