Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

32

Two Beautiful Hours

"I spent two very beautiful hours exploring India's ancient philosophical ideas with an interlocutor of exceptional intelligence," wrote Madame Alexandra David-Neel to her husband Philippe Neel in a letter dated 27 November 1911.

We have already met her a few times.¹ The reader perhaps knows that she had set out from Europe in August 1911 promising her understanding husband Philippe Neel that she would be back with him within eighteen months. In actuality it became fourteen years, for it was in May 1925 that the couple saw each other again. During those fourteen years Alexandra had covered thousands of kilometres through the Far East, a good part of Central Asia, not to speak of South Asia, and crisscrossed the Indian subcontinent. On 18 November 1911 she reached Mandapam via Rameswaram from Colombo. From there she took the train to Pondicherry, then to Madras. She took her lodgings with the Theosophical Society at Adyar. At Madras that was the cheapest she could find, because "any hotel worth the name asked 8 Rs. a day" ("equivalent to 13 F 60," she noted)

¹ Mother's Chronicles, Book III, chapters 25 and 28; Book IV, chapter 3. What follows is from her book, Journal de Voyage.

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and she added charitably that Madras was a big city and it was the tourist season. At the Theosophical Society they offered to lodge her for Rs. 25 a week (which was 42 F 50 and came to 6 F a day, she told Philippe). She was also hopeful of getting there vegetarian food "which is sure to suit me better than preserved meat which is the main ingredient in the hotels of this country." Her description of Adyar is quite entertaining. The villa she occupied reminded her of Paris' "Trianons with its Louis XVI colonnades. Inside too it is Versailles: white rooms, in rotunda, white paneling, doors fitted with small squares of glass." She was very pleased, I think, with her room which measured "about 8x6 with a ceiling 6 metres high or almost." There followed a lengthy description of the things around her. She was quite an adept at giving detailed descriptions. It should not surprise us. She had been a student at the Sorbonne, at the College de France, learned English in England, she had taken courses in Oriental languages, so naturally she had a good grasp of languages. And, of course, an observant eye. An eye moreover which never missed an incongruity, such as the ascetic's cot "like a jewel among the commonplace of English furniture."

It was from her cosy villa at Adyar that Alexandra was writing to Philippe, describing her adventures. "Adventures ... I promised you adventures and I have a lot to tell you."

Which brings us back to the subject close to our hearts.

"First I went to Pondicherry. There too I had a taste of Versailles. A dead town that was 'something' and remembers it, stiff in its dignity, irreproachably clean, hiding under impeccable whitewash the cracks of the old town...." She was rather disgusted with the lack of cleanliness in her hotel room. But

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luckily the weather was fine and the whole afternoon "I could be out driving in a kind of nameless prehistoric contraption, pushed by four blacks." The 'contraption' was the same poussepousse Moni earlier described to us. She took photos of it to send to Philippe.

"In the evening," Alexandra continued, "I had a conversation with a Hindu, about whom I don't think I ever spoke to you because we never corresponded, but knew him only through friends who spoke highly of him." The friends were Paul and Mirra Richard. "I passed two very beautiful hours exploring the ancient philosophical ideas of India with an interlocutor of rare intelligence, belonging to that uncommon tribe that I like so much (for which I have a fellow-feeling): the rational mystics. I am really grateful to the friends who recommended me to look up this man. He thinks with such clarity, there is such lucidity in his reasoning, such radiance in his look that you are left with the impression of having contemplated the genius of India as you dream of it after reading the most sublime pages of Hindu philosophy."

The 'Hindu of Pondicherry' seems to have left a deep impress on her mind. Writing to her husband on 19 December from Madras, Alexandra again referred to him. "... As for me? I no longer know. One loses the sense of things in the

ambience I am living in One of these days I am going to

write to the Hindu of Pondicherry about whom I spoke to you and who has a keen power of analysis and a critical turn of brain. I shall tell him, reminding him of the experiences he himself is pursuing with such a care for a meticulous observation." Alexandra lists her whimsical questions. "I think that the question

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will make him laugh, as he had so charmingly laughed the day I told him about similar things. There you are then, not knowing any longer whether you are becoming so fabulously wise or going mad."

Mad? She had already found out who in reality were mad. "From the sublime to the ludicrous," said Napoleon, "is but one step."

Hardly had she alighted from the train that brought her to Madras from Pondicherry and had taken but a step or two, when she was brought up short. Who was it waiting for her on the platform? Let us hear from her. She thought the perfectly dressed Englishman was from Adyar. Was he?

"I knew this philosopher had a political stand which displeased the British, but naturally, not wanting to be indiscreet, I did not broach the subject. Besides we were soaring too high above politics." Ruefully she added, "However, while we soared, others were content to remain on the ground ... these others being the English police," she said in her letter of 27^th November. "When I arrived in Madras the chief of the C.I.D. was waiting for me in person. Avery correct and polite man for all that, he asked me why I had gone to see that suspected gentleman in his house. I was not surprised having expected my visit to become known. What's more, I did not at all hide it."

She told the chief of Police, "I had heard of Aurobindo Ghose as a distinguished philosopher, and it is as such that I wished to see him and have a talk with him."

" 'He certainly is a remarkable scholar,' conceded the chief of Police, 'but a dangerous man. We owe him the recent assassination of Mr. Ashe.'

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"I never heard of Mr. Ashe.... I merely replied that it seems to me quite improbable that the savant, who discoursed so knowledgeably on philosophical questions, could be an assassin.

" 'He certainly did not kill Mr. Ashe himself,' retorted my interrogator. 'He got him killed.' "'

"Ah, good heavens! How all their agitation seems petty and paltry, their scare and their distress! And what a different atmosphere there was in the silent house at Pondicherry where the breath of things eternal blew, where in the peaceful evening, near the window opening onto the rather funereal gardens of that fallen town, we looked beyond life and death. And how he seems to view with superb disdain the cot of the ascetic— which beckons to me even now—and how he promises dreams other than those that haunt the poor feverish brains of these lunatics!"

Poor Alexandra! This was not the last she was to hear about the 'Hindu of Pondicherry' A few days later when she went to lunch with the governor of Madras, "I was seated at the right of His Excellency, who, of course, spoke again about my visit to Pondicherry."

She left Madras soon after and went to Calcutta. From there Alexandra wrote to Philippe on 14 February 1912. "... This morning I have been to the Government House.... Naturally, there also they knew that I had been to Pondicherry and met Aurobindo Ghose. I had no idea that he was such an important man. Had I known I would have tried to make him speak on politics to find out what kind of ideas could germinate in

¹ See L'Inde où 'j'ai vécu.

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the brain of a Vedantic mystic. But though I knew that he had undergone a political trial, I did not know why exactly. This morning the private secretary to the Viceroy was telling me, 'I think he finds our civilization, our education, and all our modern progress godless, that is why he repudiates them.' Could well be. Hindus view things and the world from another angle than we do. Had not our interview been limited to a few twilight hours in that monastic house at Pondicherry, I perhaps would have discovered where, for that brain, lies the 'flaw' in our materialist Europeans ... and could have made an interesting study of a mentality foreign to Europe. Yes, it could have been interesting.... But, bah! maybe I owe a beautiful memory to the fact of not being sufficiently informed about him. False, illusory, no doubt, as most beautiful memories are—that of the vast empty room, near the window open onto the pale purple evening sky, Aurobindo Ghose and I speaking of the supreme Brahman, of eternal existence and, for a moment crossing the threshold beyond which cease life and death, living the dream of the Upanishads...."

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