A Centenary Tribute

Introduction

 

Celebrating a Genius

K.D. Sethna: The Man and His Work

 

Sachidananda Mohanty

 

I

 

The Moment

 

In an era of late capitalism, governed by commercial culture and TV sound bytes, it is hard to envision a place for the sublime in human affairs! How can we fathom human greatness when reputations are built and sullied hourly by cable television and Sunday tabloids?

 

How can we assess the real worth of an outstanding thinker who voluntarily embraces a life of isolation and self-effacement even while being engaged with the world? His centenary may come and go! It might evoke a mild curiosity among the lay public when attention is drawn to the more sensational and superficial aspects of his life, the staple, of gossip - real or make believe - that surrounds inevitably the life of celebrities.

 

Celebrating a genius, his life and achievements in an essentially deromanticised age, could however be a compulsive act for some, therapeutic for others! For, in choosing to do so, we go against the grain and manage to defy the tem-per of the age, its dominant ideals and ruling ideas. While that would carry its own reward, in the process we also succeed in upholding our faith in an alternative set of values as an antidote to the self-prophesying future of despair.

 

On 25 November 2004, K.D. Sethna (named Amal Kiran by Sri Aurobindo on 3 September 1930) completes one hundred years of his earthly life. A Renaissance personality and a multifaceted genius in the true sense of the term, Sethna

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turned his back on worldly life, fame and success early in his career, and took the path of the Integral Yoga in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram under the direct guidance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. However, in choosing this new life, he did not seek to annul his intellectual and artistic interests or integrity for the sake of a passive surrender and self-abnegation, characteristic of traditional religiosity. Like his spiritual Master, Sri Aurobindo, he sought a fulfilment of his innate creative talents under the influence of a higher afflatus.

 

When Sethna began his career, his mind was shaped by the intellectual-cultural matrix of a vibrant metropolis, Bombay. The city was rivalled by few others then. He had studied in some of the best institutions there and intimately knew many of the leading personalities. There was the possibility of higher education at Oxford or Cambridge followed by a coveted academic career or an equally attractive future in law and civil services. An estimate of H.G. Wells that Sethna wrote, when barely nineteen, was sent to Wells himself by a Parsi author, Mr. A.S. Wadia. Wells predicted: "Your young man will go far!" While one could speculate about the possible worldly and professional future of Sethna, had he continued in the outside world, he himself had no doubt that the distance he could have travelled could never exceed what was made possible thanks to the grace he received from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Indeed, the more he travelled in his artistic-spiritual life, the less he was concerned about worldly recognition, although admittedly there were times when he must have felt a tinge of sadness and genuine puzzlement about the insincerity of the academic world. The note that he inscribed in one of his books dated 23 August 1972 essentially sums up his approach to intellectual and artistic achievements: "Who cares for what the world says when those great wide eyes, deeper than oceans, fell on these poems and accepted them as fit offerings to His divinity? The Lord's look, the Lord's smile - that is what I have lived for."¹

 

1. Overhead Poetry: Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments, Pondicherry: SAICE,1972.

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Thus, in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, under the guidance of his Gurus, Sethna found his true self and field. He grew in his intellectual, poetic, psychic and spiritual self, like many sadhak-intellectuals: Dilip Kumar Roy, Nirodbaran, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, Arjava and others. By the time of his centenary, more than fifty books and innumerable articles of great depth and scholarship will have been published. For almost fifty years he has unfailingly edited Mother India, one of the best cultural monthlies of our country, known for its high standards and professionalism.

 

Sethna has pioneered research in areas as diverse as Blake and Shakespeare Studies, Aryan Invasion Theory and Ancient Indian History, Overhead Poetry, Christology, Comparative Mythology, the Study of Hellenic Literature and Culture, Indian systems of Yoga, International Affairs, the question of the English language and the Indian spirit, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Mystical, Spiritual and Scientific Thought, the Structure of Thought in Modern Physics and Biology... the list is endless!

 

II

 

The Problem and The Prospects

 

Making a critical, biographical or literary assessment of K.D. Sethna is a matter of both delight and despair! An interested biographer and critic of his works finds plentiful material in early works, autobiographical sketches, self-portraits, letters, diary notes, newspaper clippings and correspondence, scrupulously documented and preserved by the author and his admirers over the years. While the manuscripts of other writers have perished due to fire and flood, Sethna's own have been largely a case of delayed publication. He was al-ways orderly in his intellectual habits: letters were always answered, longer correspondence invariably typed by him with two fingers and copies preserved. As a result, posterity

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is fortunate enough to have access to creative exchanges between Sethna and Kathleen Raine² and between Bede Griffiths and himself.³

 

On the other hand, the critic must face his disciplinary academic limitations. While the more ambitious of us might boast of a command over one or two disciplines and a nod-ding acquaintance with a few others, in Sethna we find a huge province of knowledge, hard to grasp and harder to follow. If imitation is the best form of flattery, then the best way Sethna has paid homage to his guru Sri Aurobindo is by emulating his example. He wrote on a myriad of subjects with felicity and fervour: poetry, criticism, history, comparative literature, yoga, spirituality, science, philosophy, inter-national relations, journalism, archaeology, mythology, art history and future studies. Like Dr. Faustus, Sethna seems to have taken the whole universe as his province, and the whole world of knowledge under his scrutiny. Clearly, the extraordinary range of interests that Sethna evinces is hard to grasp for an ordinary critic.

 

While lesser mortals would have lost their way in the confusing paths and bylanes of scholarly and intellectual trails, Sethna emerges triumphant. To be sure, he never fights shy of intellectual and scholarly combats. Unsparing in his arguments, he is always civil and never personal in attack. A sense of earnestness and forthrightness in intellectual approach governs his style. But there is no hostility or antipathy; no personal rancour or animosity, no name-calling, no attempt to discredit, caricature or ridicule the rival point of view or target opponents through the habit of "guilt by association".

 

 

2. The English Language and The Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1986. Also see, Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1994.

3. A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo: Correspondence between Bede Griffiths and K.D. Sethna, Pondicherry: 1996, reprinted Clear Ray Trust, 2004.

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There is no equivocation either in Sethna; no easy com-promise is offered for extraneous consideration that many academicians tend to make due to the desire for the promo-tion of career goals: pecuniary or institutional.

 

What I propose to do in this essay is therefore to confine myself to three broad areas in the Sethna canon: Firstly, I shall look at the relationship between Sethna's life and career. Secondly, I shall examine the reception accorded by the mainstream academic world to Sethna's works. And finally, I shall attempt to sum up what according to me constitutes the true significance of the centenary of K.D. Sethna. I shall not attempt a summary of any of his books, nor shall I endeavour to assess his contribution to each of the key disciplinary areas. Indeed, several contributors to this volume have attempted precisely this exercise. What I shall do in-stead is to try and offer basically a larger picture commensurate with the grandness of Sethna's vision.

 

III

 

Early Life and Influences

 

On 25 November 1904, Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy ("Kekoo") Sethna was born in a respected Parsi family of Bombay. His father, a Specialist in Ophthalmic Surgery (M.D. Bombay, M.R.C.P from Dublin, Ireland), a highly rated and an intellectually gifted man, who cherished lofty morals and ideals in life, was an extremely loving and considerate parent. While the father at times appears to be stern and withdrawn, young Sethna, especially in later childhood, felt emotionally drawn to his mother. A touch of self-deprecatory humour constantly marks the recollection of his childhood experiences, even when it involved family accounts:

 

The moment I was born the big lamp in our drawing-room flared up. My father had to answer the frightened servant's cry and run from my mother's side to prevent

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a fire. The English lady doctor in attendance on my mother took the flaring lamp as an omen and said: 'This boy will be a great man.' It seems to me that she went beyond her data and should have confined herself to saying: "This boy will be a fiery fellow!' I displayed from the beginning a very hot temper and the fury with which I, as a baby, yelled and grew red in the face was worthy of a Riza Shah Pahlevi. And it is quite on the cards that I might have become a soldier or at least a main of action if misfortune had not dogged my steps in my third year. In the literal sense, my steps were dogged by misfortune, for a severe form of infantile paralysis attacked my legs.⁴

 

Sethna's childhood was spent in Bombay. His family owned a house in the Hill Station of Matheran near Bombay. Sethna and his family frequently went there to spend their weekends and holidays. As a small child he had himself lifted once to the back of a "huge horse". Pastime usually involved playing the "Grand Inquisitor" with "ugly looking insects". However, one night of fever brought in the fatal polio that left his left leg lame. A timely operation in London fortunately prevented "paralytic effects" and "permanent deformity".

 

Everything in Kekoo's life seemed to be playful, a matter of fun and frolic. And thus, he recalls that he took to verses because a cousin was writing verses about a girl called Katie and he "resolved to outdo him". He outdid his cousin by writing five hundred lines. His cousin also introduced him to some of the major British poets like Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Keats. Under the influence of Byron he wrote "two interminable poems in the Byronian ottava rima based on surreptitious feasting on Beppo and Don Juan" which he was strictly forbidden to read at home.

 

4. Autobiographical Note written in 1951. Sethna's Papers.

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Then followed the lives of Shivaji and Napoleon in verse form, plus an imaginary account of a Utopia in verse, a few plays, "thousands of gnomic couplets", twenty-six novelettes each with an interesting alliterative title like "The Sign of the Serpent", or "The Mine of Madrid". He spent time reading out the detective novels he wrote to his Maths tutor, a pious Hindu, until one day, as he recalls, the tutor stumbled down the stairs. That, alas, was the end of his Maths lessons as well as the composition of detective stories.

 

The atmosphere at home, especially after dinner, was creatively stimulating. In the company of his father, Kekoo created interesting sketches, in particular the sketches of family members while he lay "sprawling on the carpet". For the children, the father's book of quotations was an all-time favourite!

 

At school, the choice of a serious interest revolved around literature and painting. Although Sethna preferred the pen, he dreamt that one day he would transform into painting his conception of "coloured scenes and symbols" of the Keatsian world in an ideal studio.

 

 

Matriculation, by Sethna's own admission, was a "poor affair"! It was however at the College level that he excelled in his studies, winning in the Intermediate Arts the Selby Scholarship in Logic as well as the Hughlings Prize for English. He followed it up by taking the Bombay University's prestigious Ellis Prize. "I missed my first class (Philosophy Honours)," he later wrote to his correspondent Pradip Bhattacharya in his letter of 10 August 1978, "though by merely three or four marks and though I, a Philosophy student, happened to win the much-coveted Ellis Prize which a Literature-student was expected to capture." He was advised to take up law. Instead, he joined the M. A. program in Philosophy. His planned thesis was called "The Philosophy of Art" but it never got completed as he settled in the Ashram.

 

At St. Xavier's School and College, Sethna was exposed to "a many-sided culture" and had "a mind razor-sharp". Along with literature he developed an interest in Philosophy. His

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"early preoccupation with religious studies" had inclined him towards "questions of metaphysics". He spent a great deal of his time over masters like Plato, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. He thought over profound issues like "good and evil, justice, charity and equanimity". While earlier he had "a reckless and wayward disposition", there was now a gentleness, which was the outcome of philosophical deveopments. The influence of a Jesuit teacher with a scientific bent of mind, and the exposure he received to the world of Bernard Shaw ("a laughing colossus") made him disdain "cheap religionism, as well as cheap materialism, puritanical sham no less than erotic tawdriness". Ernst Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe and the work of the Catholic priest Joseph McCabe led him to a crisis of faith.

 

 

I suffered fits of somber depression, a tearing at the vitals made me miserable whenever I wanted to reject the unseen Friend whom I had taken to my heart so fervently in my early school days. Under the night sky I would sit with tears in my eyes at the prospect of infinite emptiness where there had once been an invisible omnipresence. I put up every argument I could to keep in its place the old religious conviction, but nothing was of any avail against the relentless march of the outward-looking analytic mind. At last I became an atheist.⁵

 

 

The new found disbelief in God led him to a confrontation with his father, until one year after his matriculation, the latter suddenly died of heart-failure. The death of his father made him gloomy; it also led him to a new path of self-reliance and a gradual recovery of faith.

It was undoubtedly Bombay's literary circles that provided a great source of creative stimulus to the young Sethna. Then, as well as right up to the early 1950s before he settled down permanently in Pondicherry, he discovered a number

 

 

5. Autobiographical Note written in 1951. Sethna's Papers.

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of literary friends and associates: apart from A.S. Wadia, there was Simon Pereira, connected with the Evening News of India, upcoming poet Armando Menezies and D.F. Karaka, later to shine in the field of journalism. There was also Frank Moraes, later the famous editor of The Times of India and The Indian Express and Frederic Mendonca who went on to be-come a Professor of English at St. Xavier's College. Then there were R.K. Karanjia (later the editor of Blitz) and Nissim Ezekiel, who would carve out a place for himself in the do-main of Indian English poetry.

 

Bombay greatly excited Sethna and fascinated his intellectual-artistic imagination. There was, however, another self in him that was to take him away radically to a new path, an unknown universe, a powerful and abiding attraction to the life of the Spirit.

 

IV

 

A Turn Inward: Pondicherry

 

A number of aspects of Sethna's life seem to share un-canny parallels with that of his Master Sri Aurobindo: both had studied in elite institutions. Early in life both had been exposed to Western languages and literature, especially the Hellenic culture, and had learnt Latin. Both had experienced a bout of atheism. Both shared an equal interest in Literature and Philosophy, while both turned in later life to the pivotal question of Indian history: the problem of the Aryan invasion. Both were attracted to spiritual and mystical poetry. Significantly, it was the city of Bombay that was to provide for both a catalytic experience for their growth into spiritual consciousness. Both championed atheism with a degree of youthful enthusiasm and in both the turning to spirituality was equally powerful.

 

While Sri Aurobindo had the Nirvanic experience in Bombay, thanks to the Maharashtrian guru Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, Sethna recalls that he sought out in his city men in ochre

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robes, Sadhus and Sannyasis and questioned them about the Unknown. It was from a South Indian Theosophist plus artcritic that he first heard about the Cosmic Consciousness of Sri Aurobindo. A picture of his Guru in a booklet and the special qualities: "multi-presence and polyglottism" associated with Sri Aurobindo provided additional stimulus.

 

Later, he discovered an account of "The Ashram of Sri Aurobindo Ghose" from a newspaper sheet that covered the shoes he had bought from a shop in Bombay's Crawford Market. The notion of the new yoga that the article men-tioned appealed to him. Soon he wrote to the Ashram.

 

Sethna arrived in Pondicherry on 16 December 1927. He was taken directly to A.B. Purani's room. Sethna was able to see the Mother walk on her terrace from one of Purani's win-dows. Even though he saw her from a considerable distance this left a powerful impression on him.

 

Sethna's first Darshan of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother took place on 21 February 1928. Until then he had never seen Sri Aurobindo. Sethna spent the next ten and half years in Pondicherry. Thereafter he alternated between Pondicherry and Bombay, keeping in contact inwardly and through correspondence with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

 

One of the many trips Sethna used to make to Pondicherry was for the Darshan of 24 November 1950; he stayed in Pondicherry till December 3, leaving Pondicherry on the same night. He left in spite of having had some feeling earlier that he should stay on and not leave. He arrived in Bombay in the afternoon of December 5. Before leaving the station, he got the news - via a telegram brought from his house - that Sri Aurobindo had passed away. Sethna along with two others immediately returned by plane to Madras and from there by taxi to Pondicherry.

 

At Pondicherry, he found himself overwhelmed by a profound sense of "helplessness". It was then, that he received the smile and the grace of the Mother. Her words came as a great source of reassurance: "Nothing has changed. Call for inspiration and help, as you have always done. You will get everything from Sri Aurobindo as before!"

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In 1944 Sethna had got married to Sehra. In February 1953 he made the crucial decision to settle in the Ashram again. He was badly in need of Rs. 500. - "To settle a few matters and pay for a thorough migration with my wife and dog." He managed to get hold of the five hundred rupees by writing an article on Sri Aurobindo for a special India supplement of the Atlantic Monthly. As it happened, the article never got published! Eventually in February 1954 the "big event" of Sethna's "second coming home" took place. He and his wife were given a flat to live in at 13, Rue Ananda Rangapoulle. On 29 February 1956, he had to leave for Bombay in order to see his ailing grandfather who was ninety-eight years old. In the Bombay-bound night train Sethna had a profound experience of the Mother:

 

I went to sleep in the compartment and had a dream. I saw a wide-open place with the Mother seated at one end and people going to her to make pranam. I was at the very boundary of the place. It seemed I might miss the chance of the pranam. I tried to hurry. But in the hurry I somehow could not get my feet out of my slippers and in the excitement I woke up. When I opened my eyes I saw, against the opposite berth and the facing wall of the compartment, the Mother standing. Her body was in shadow, her face was in moonlight and both were transparent so that through them I could see the wood-work and part of the upholstery of the berth. I kept gaz-ing for some time. Not believing my eyes, I shut them and opened them again. It made no difference to the vision. There still stood the transparent form of the Mother, the face softly shining. After looking for a quar-ter minute I once more shut my eyes. When I reopened them the form was gone.⁶

 

 

6. "The Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother" in The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1968, reprinted 1992, p. 143.

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In the history of the Ashram, 29 February 1956 marks "the long awaited manifestation of the Superrnind as a universal force in the earth's subtle physical atmosphere." According to the reported remark of the Mother: "Only five people knew what took place - two in the Ashram and three outside." When Sethna wrote to the Mother about his experience in the train, she said to him: "Among those outside, I counted you."⁷

 

One word that is recurrent in Sethna's accounts is the grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Parallel to his intellectual-scholarly interests, there is the lifelong commitment to the Integral Yoga and the life of the Spirit. Nothing that he wrote after coming in contact with Sri Aurobindo is free from this larger vision. To the observer, there is always the sense that Sethna was chosen by the Divine. From his Master he received, in closed envelopes, lines from Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Sri Aurobindo's epic poem .that he was then com-posing. And in a letter dated 25 December 1948, two years before he passed away, using the Ashram letter head, Sri Aurobindo states: "Amal, I have gone through your manuscript of poems and I propose that they should be immediately published without further delay."⁸

 

A number of volumes by Sethna are exclusively devoted to the spiritual aspects of the Ashram life. They are also about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, their Avatarhood, about life, literature and yoga and about the vexing questions all seekers of the inner life face. Compared to the often dense style that Sethna employs in many of his scholarly works, books like Aspects of Sri Aurobindo, Waterford, U.S. A., 1995, reprinted 2000, Our Light and Delight, Pondicherry, 1980, reprinted 2003, Life-Poetry-Yoga: Personal Letters in three volumes, Waterford, U.S.A., 1994, 1995, 1997 and The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry, 1968, reprinted 1992, are written in an extremely lucid style that appeals to the heart; the books are full of light and delight!

 

 

7. Ibid., pp. 143-44.

8. Sethna's Papers. The Adventure of the Apocalypse, Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1949.

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Although these volumes form a separate body of work, distinct from his scholarly corpus, it will be correct to say that Sethna's scholarship is always shaped and guided by a larger spiritual vision. This becomes clear when we examine the various contacts and encounters he had with the academic world outside.

 

 

V

 

Spiritualised Intellect

 

One of the most noteworthy aspects of Sethna's literary and intellectual career is the correspondence he had with fellow scholars, editors, writers, poets and laypersons. These include world-class personalities and international celebrities like Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Kathleen Raine and Paul Brunton. But there are lesser-known people too. At times admirers and readers were drawn to him for instruction and insight. A spirit of deep engagement and empathy marks Sethna's relationship with all his correspondents. We have in this volume two writers who focus on his letters as part of their study of Sethna the man and the writer; other essayists concentrate on related aspects of his scholarly interests.

 

In a letter dated 19 September 1946, Paul Brunton, an acclaimed Western scholar and indologist declares:

 

I was sorry to note that All India Weekly had become more of a competition journal than a literary one, so that your own articles disappeared in the three issues which have reached me since April. Please let me know if you are likely to write for them again; otherwise, I shall not renew my subscription. If you are not likely to do so, there are no doubt several other high class journals who would be glad to print your work - so please advise me should you change over to one of them, in order that I might subscribe to it.⁹

 

 

9. Letter from Paul Brunton to K.D. Sethna, 19.9.1946. Sethna's Papers.

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An identical warmth of admiration is noticed in Brunton's review of The Secret Splendour in a Bangalore periodical in 1941:

 

K.D. Sethna is a rising star in the Indian literary firmament who is well worth watching. With this slim volume of nearly one hundred pages he makes his debut to the larger world but I have been familiar with his work since the time, several years ago, when he showed me at Pondicherry the yet unprinted manuscripts, which were then being privately circulated among a few lovers of poetry.¹⁰

 

Sethna's correspondence with Einstein and Huxley also throws an interesting light on their encounters. In a paper entitled "Mysticism and Einstein's Relativity Physics" published in Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay, Sixth Number, 1950, Sethna speaks of the implications of the Einsteinian theory of relativity in the domain of religion and mysticism and concludes that:

 

We may now briefly take stock of our conclusions from Einstein's relativity physics. By three independent routes we arrive at an undeniable implication of the supra-physical, the mystical: 1) the Einsteinian "field" whose four-dimensional continuum of indistinguishable space and time is revealed by the special theory of relativity as a mathematical approximation of the mystic's Infinity-Eternity and by the general theory of relativity as an utterly non-material space-time ether rendering the approximated Infinity-Eternity all the more real and even originative of matter; 2) the Einsteinian "energy" which, by positing something in-definable by any scientific concept, points beyond materialism to a World-Will; 3) the Einsteinian theoretical

 

 

10. The Secret Splendour, Bombay: Published by K.D. Sethna, 1941. Review by Paul Brunton in a Bangalore periodical, 1941. Typescript sent by Paul Brunton. Sethna's Papers.

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method with its "free creation", involving the discovery of scientific truth by our mind "insighting" a World-Intelligence that seems all-formative. The independence we have given to each of the three routes results in a threefold strength to the suggestion of the supra-physical and the mystical.¹¹

 

Einstein's reply is marked by caution, and there are many caveats. In a letter dated 15 August 1950 written from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study he wrote back:

 

I have read your paper and found it partly interesting.

 

Concerning the physical contents your considerations about mass and energy are, in my opinion, not clear. Especially I do not like the introduction of a mass dependent of speed. There is much loose thinking in the popular literature about this subject.

 

.. .It seems to me rather obscure how mysticism can be brought together with that theory for there is no place in it for psychological concepts - as in any physical theory. Of course, the hie and nunc has no place in any physical theory either. Maybe that "mystical insight" means something to you what is completely hidden to me. I am therefore no judge about it.¹²

 

On the other hand, there are letters that are extremely illuminating and elevating. For instance, in a note sent from California, U.S.A. dated 29 January 1949, Aldous Huxley, known for his deep empathy for Eastern traditions of reli-gion and spirituality, compliments K.D. Sethna on the launching of Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture. While regretting his inability to contribute to the journal due to a number of pressing engagements, he holds out hope for the success of the venture: "I can only wish you all success in

 

 

11. Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay, Sixth Number, 1950, p. 54.

12. Letter from Einstein to K.D. Sethna, 15.8.1950. Sethna's Papers.

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your venture. You will, of course, be a voice crying in the wilderness. But if a few individuals pay attention, something will have been accomplished."¹³

 

Professional recognition for Sethna came from prestigious quarters. On 14 July1965, Kimon Friar, the editor of the reputed international journal Greek Heritage, while accepting Sethna's article "Greece and Sri Aurobindo" for publication, compliments the author and says: "I read your text with great interest and fascination. It is an outstanding piece of work and a most valuable addition to the Greek Heritage."¹⁴

 

There were fewer accolades at home. And they came late! The International Institute of Indian Studies conferred upon Sethna the Devavrata Bhishma Award for 1994 for his contribution to international peace and world order on the basis of universal Vedantic values. He was also nominated for the Sahitya Akademi Award.

 

However, while thanking the IIIS for the honour, Sethna, in his letter dated 12 December 1993, draws the attention of the office bearers of the organisation to the fact that "most members of your group are unaware of that most illuminating book, The Secret of the Veda by Sri Aurobindo, which contains a Supplement of extreme originality, "The Origins of Aryan Speech'."¹⁵

 

Similarly, C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, Vice Chancellor of Annamalai University in his letter dated 22 October 1964 acknowledges the pioneering research of Sethna in the field of Harappan Culture and the Vedic Civilisation: "You have exploded," he says, "many wishful theories of pseudo-authorities and furnished almost conclusive evidence about the pristine and autochthonic character of the Aryan civilisation in relation to the Indian background."¹⁶

 

 

13. Letter from Aldous Huxley to K.D. Sethna, 29.1.1949. Sethna's Papers.

14. Letter from Kimon Friar, Editor of Greek Heritage to K.D. Sethna, 14.7.1965. Sethna's Papers. Also see the book Sri Aurobindo and Greece, Waterford, U.S.A.: The Integral Life Foundation, 1998.

15. Letter from K.D. Sethna to Sushil Mittal, 19.121993. Sethna's Papers.

16. Letter from C.P.R. Aiyar to KD. Sethna, 22.10.1964. Sethna's Papers.

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Similarly, in a review of Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation by Sethna, well-known critic Prema Nandakumar concludes with the following words: "Thanks to his enormous scholarship, Blake's Tyger turns out to be a valuable tutorial on classical and Christian mythology as well as Milton's poetry. This extensively researched volume establishes him as one of the foremost literary critics in contemporary Indian literature."¹⁷

 

Likewise, in the review of Sethna's Karpasa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue, G.C. Pandey, one of the foremost indologists of our country, declares:

 

This work attempts a large-scale reconstruction and is necessarily speculative. It remains, however, consistent and plausible. The hypothesis that Vedic culture pre-ceded Indus civilization has never before been argued with such force. Although Mr. Sethna disagrees with many accepted views, he represents them faithfully and summarizes the data as well as the interpretations of archaeological research in considerable detail. He writes in an eminently readable and suggestive manner and his work deserves to be widely welcomed by general readers and scholars alike.¹⁸

 

 

Similarly, H.D. Sankalia who is the doyen of archaeologists had this to say in his response to The Problem of Aryan Origins: From an Indian Point of View in 1981: "I went through your book as soon as it reached me. I think you have covered all the points quite impartially. I think for the Aryans and the Indus Civilisation, we have to await the accepted reading of the Indus Script. Meanwhile, congratulations!"

 

 

17. "Beast and the Rebellious Angels?" by Prema Nandakumar, The Hindu, 12.1.1990. Sethna's Papers. Book reviewed: Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation, Pondicherry: K.D. Sethna, 1989.

18. "A Tale of Two Civilizations" by G.C. Pandey, The Times of India, 1.8.1982. Sethna's Papers. Book reviewed: Karpasa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue, New Delhi: Biblia Implex Private Ltd., 1981.

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It is characteristic of Sethna that even while he gets recognition from admirers, he seems to be more particular that the real credit should be given to his Guru, Sri Aurobindo. One is constantly struck by this sense of modesty and his loyalty to the Master. And thus, while appreciating the inclusion of his poem "Tree of Time" in An Anthology of Verse being brought out by Blackie and Son (India) Limited, Sethna asks pointedly: "I hope your Anthology will try to do justice to the most creative poetic spirit of modern India, Sri Aurobindo. I would be interested to know what poems of his have been included."¹⁹

 

There have been awards from the Ashram circles as well. Mention may be made of the Sri Aurobindo Purashkar for 1998 that he received from the Sri Aurobindo Samiti, Calcutta. There was also an excellent festschrift entitled Amdl-Kiran: Poet and Critic, edited by Nirodbaran and R.Y. Deshpande, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1994, on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

 

VI

 

The Scholar as the Visionary

 

A discerning mind cannot help noticing that there is a mismatch between Sethna's creative/critical/scholarly output and the academic-institutional recognition bestowed upon him. This is a curious fact of academic life!

 

Although he has written a great many books of substance and lasting value, it seems to me that it is basically in seven principal areas that Sethna has excelled and made pioneer-ing contributions:

 

• First, as a poet following in the footsteps of his Master, Sethna's achievement is notable in the field of mystical/spiritual poetry. The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems, 1993, is a

 

 

19. Letter from K.D. Sethna to the Manager, Blackie and Son (India) Limited, 24.3.1962. Sethna's Papers.

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magnificent achievement in this category. He is also known for the letters on Savitri that he received from Sri Aurobindo.

 

• Second, Sethna will be remembered as an outstanding literary and cultural critic. His books like Classical and Romantic: An Approach through Sri Aurobindo, 1997, Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation, 1989, Adventures in Criticism, 1996, and Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression, 1995, "Two Loves" and" A Worthier Pen": The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1984, "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal": An Interpretation from India, 1995, are excellent examples of this kind. He is also noteworthy as a literary detective. His detective work to identify the Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Mr. W.H. in the book "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" is worth special mention.

 

• Third, Sethna's volumes offer some of the best intellectual responses that the Indian mind has made to Western literature and culture. Sri Aurobindo and Greece and "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal": An Interpretation from India are two perfect examples of this kind.

 

• Fourth, Sethna's contribution to the understanding of the intimate relationship between the English language and the Indian mind will have lasting value. His books The English Language and The Indian Spirit and Indian Poets and English Poetry containing correspondence between him and Kathleen Raine are. a critic's delight, full of insights and illumination.

 

• Fifth, Sethna's considerable body of writing in the field of Indian history and archaeology has disproved the pernicious dogma of the Aryan invasion theory. His work The Problem of Aryan Origins: From an Indian Point of View²⁰ will always remain a landmark in this genre.

 

• Sixth, Sethna has made a notable achievement in the field of creative journalism. His indefatigable role as the editor of

 

20. Op. Cit, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, first edition 1980, second extensively enlarged edition with five supplements, 1992.

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Mother India: Monthly Review of Culture right from the Bombay-days remains unrivalled in the annals of Indian periodical literature. Sri Aurobindo had once said: "Doesn't he know that 'Mother India' is my paper?" when a sadhak's skeptical attitude to the opinions expressed in Mother India was reported to him. He wrote powerful political editorials in this journal that were read out to Sri Aurobindo and certified by him prior to publication. In the editorials, Sethna showed courage and conviction in upholding the Aurobindonian vision in the murky world of national and international politics

 

And finally, Sethna has given us a valuable understanding regarding the place of the Mother in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. His slim book, The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to It provides us with a rare perspective.²¹ Sethna has always been a leading exegete of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and yoga. He has never failed to take up arms in defence of Sri Aurobindo and his yoga.

 

In any single area mentioned above, a scholar-critic would have earned for himself a well-deserved permanence. All the seven areas put together would undoubtedly confer upon Sethna the status of a genius!

It is true that the world has not given due recognition to K.D. Sethna's scholarly and literary works commensurate with his multifaceted talents. But men, fame and recognition have never been the cherished goals of Sethna's life. Despite having a considerable following, he has never desired to travel abroad and to the West. In 1949, Professor Frederic Spiegelberg offered him a special professional position in the U.S.A. Sethna recommended the name of Haridas Chaudhury instead. That's the spirit of the man!

 

In this volume, we have invited a number of leading critics and thinkers from India and abroad to contribute reflec-

 

 

21. Op. Cit, East Lyme, U.S.A.: The Integral Life Foundation, 2003.

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tive pieces on the life and works of K.D. Sethna. The essays come in three categories: Reminiscences of Sethna, Essays on Sethna's works, and finally, essays on Sri Aurobindo's vision. They come in many voices and represent diverse approaches. It is hoped that these articles would contribute to a better understanding of the literary achievements of K.D. Sethna on the occasion of his birth centenary.

 

Every system has its own dynamics and academics has its own. As in religion, here, dogmas and shibboleths die hard, and institutions regrettably remain resistant to innovative ideas. Amateur scholars from the "non academic world", especially those who challenge received wisdom, are seldom lionised. Sadly, Indian academics continue to parrot their Western mentors even today. Macaulay might have gone but his counterparts continue to "teach" Indian "students" from the "superior" heights of metropolitan universities in the West. It will be a long time before Indian academics drop their colonial blinkers. Only then will they be ready to grasp the true worth of a genius like K.D. Sethna!

 

Hyderabad

21st July 2004

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Part I

Amal Kiran: Reminiscences

 

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What's a Hundred Years!

 

When the youthfulness of the Spirit grows with vintage time...

 When the bloom on the visage is richer by far... in tone and hue...

When the fullness of Being brims over into space and time...

When the Timeless meets us in the gaze...

 

And our mortal boundaries stretch...

to look spellbound into that other world...

 

...

 

To such a 'Being',

these lines are offered with great affection...

One who 'befriended' us...

 

 

And who once asked, "What are sculptured waters?"

Swift came the response, "Translucency given a form.."

 

A 'form' such as these lines conjure up for us...

 Gratefully, through the years.... Aster

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Amal Kiran: A Profile

P. Raja

 

It was Sri Aurobindo, the Yogis' Yogi, who renamed K.D. Sethna Amal Kiran, meaning "The Clear Ray".

 

A Parsi Bombayite by birth, Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy Sethna, was born on November 25,1904. Son of a well-to-do physician, who spent much of his leisure in his personal library, Sethna had the privilege of having his early educa-tion at St. Xavier's School and College, a Roman Catholic Institution managed by foreign Jesuit priests. As a Collegian, he won in his Intermediate Arts examination of Bombay University the Hughlings Prize in English and the Selby Scholarship in Logic. He passed his B.A. (Hons) in Philoso-phy and won the Ellis Prize in English, which a student not of Philosophy but Literature should have taken. While still in college, he began his literary career as a book-reviewer to the Bombay-based newspapers and magazines. At this time his father suddenly died. He dedicated to his father his first book titled Parnassians, a critical assessment of the work of H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw, G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Hardy, whom he considered the four outstanding denizens of Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses. The Parsi author, A.S. Wadia sent Wells, whom he personally knew, the article on him. Wells wrote back, "Your young man will go far."

 

"But Wells didn't know," remarked Sethna in his characteristic jovial vein, "that I would go as far as Pondicherry!" In December 1927, when he was still a student of the M.A. class, Sethna visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry and decided to stay there and practise the Integral Yoga. He did not complete his post-graduate course, and he never regretted this.

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How the guru came to him is an interesting story, good enough raw material to make a novelette.

 

Sethna had a friend who had done Pranayama. He told Sethna that Pranayama gave him an abundance of energy, an energy, which could be used in any way he liked... And there was no question of strict brahmacharya or spiritual objective. What he said struck the young man as very fascinating and helpful. Therefore, he started reading books on Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga in particular. While he was doing this, he got interested naturally in the works of Vivekananda. And Vivekananda gave him a greater perspective. Yoga is a means not just to amass energy, which one can throw about as one likes but to gather energy to concentrate on a certain aim which would lead one to the true self within.

 

In the meantime, a girl with whom Sethna had a close relationship in that period talked to him of a Bengali saint whom she had known and who was still alive. She requested him to come and see the saint called Pagal Harnath, meaning "Mad Harnath", mad with love for Krishna. Previous to his interest in Yoga, Sethna had been a scoffer and denier of all traditional values. And his aim in Yoga too was originally not spiritual. To meet this old man seemed to him just a curious thing to do. Still in order to please his girlfriend he consented.

 

They went to see the saint, who used to come to Bombay and be the guest of some rich Gujarati. There was a big hall in a posh house and the old man was sitting lost in medita-tion. There was a semi-circle of his disciples, all the time watching him. And when he was in a certain posture and a finger of his seemed to point to somebody, they all looked at that person to find some meaning in his involuntary gesture.Cheekily Sethna went and sat almost next to the saint, told when the latter at last opened his eyes and looked around, he saw a new face there. Everybody prompted sethna to ask a question. Therefore, he asked him: "Since he Universe is governed by fixed laws, what is the need of i creator or a God to govern it?" The saint at once answered:

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"If there are laws, there has to be a law-giver." The answer was rather simplistic. Ordinarily Sethna would have mustered up an array of arguments to counter it. Somehow he fell silent, impressed by the way the old man spoke. To Sethna, he seemed to speak not from his head by way of an argument but from some depth of actual touch on things beyond our ken, from some sort of realisation. So Sethna did not argue further. That was the first time in his student days that somebody could silence him.

 

Argumentative that he was, he was surprised at himself. He became faintly aware of something within him, which was beyond the mere argumentative intellect. It must have been this something which had fallen silent, most unusually and to his own surprise. After that, he began to take more and more interest in things beyond human understanding.

 

In the course of a few more months, Sethna read in a newspaper that a Maharashtrian Yogi had come to town. With his friend, he went to meet the Yogi. Seeing Sethna dressed wholly in the English style, the old man who was the Yogi's host asked him to show his right palm before going into the inner room where the Yogi was to be met. After glancing at the palm, the old man shook his head and said, "You are destined to have six children. Why are you bothering about Yoga?" Sethna pleaded, "I haven't even a single child yet. Let me go in." Rather disgustedly the old man grunted, "All right", as if he meant, "Go and be damned!" In the inner room, Sethna and his friend sat down with the rest of the people. After a while the Yogi went round touching each one's head. When he touched Sethna's head, Sethna felt a sort of electric current run down his spine. Towards the end of a brief meditation session, Sethna requested the Yogi, "I want to do something which would take me beyond my ordinary consciousness. Give me some practical hint for it." The Yogi advised, "When you are alone, lie in your bed and try as it were to pull your consciousness, right up from your feet... up... up... up to your head and try to feel that you are on the top of your head. When you succeed in doing

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so, you will see a ring of light above it. Then try with your consciousness to leap into that ring and you will be in what is called Samadhi."

 

It looked interesting and so night after night Sethna practised this exercise of lifting up his consciousness.

 

After this experience, he started looking out for passing sannyasis or yogis in Bombay. He found one and requested the yogi to impart something spiritual. The yogi said: "Dig a hole in your floor and light a fire there." For Sethna, that was impossible to do. His grandfather would shout and get angry if he did anything of that kind. "You light a fire and then I will give you a mantra to repeat. Then ultimately a Goddess will appear to you. You may ask her for a favour... whatever you want." However, Sethna had to rule out this whole practice of invoking supernatural powers. So he just kept quiet.

 

It was during that period of his life as a spiritual seeker that he met a theosophist plus art-critic who had paid a visit to Sri Aurobindo. Seeing the bundle of various qualities, even contradictory ones, in Sethna, he said: "A complex person like you will be satisfied only with Sri Aurobindo. I could see that Sri Aurobindo had the cosmic consciousness. He could feel even the grass grow! He could know everything within the universe as if it were within his own consciousness." That interested Sethna. But things rested there.

 

Then one day he went to Bombay's Crawford Market to buy a pair of shoes. The shoes had been put in a box and the box was wrapped in a newspaper sheet, and a string ran around the sheet. He brought his purchase home and as soon as he took off the string, the newspaper sheet fell open in front of him. A headline in very bold type attracted his attention. It read: "The Ashram of Sri Aurobindo Ghose." To Sethna, it looked like a Divine Call. At once he read the article and felt that Sri Aurobindo's Ashram in Pondicherry was the place for him because life was not denied there. Everything possible in man was sought to be brought out, enhanced and geared to a divine purpose... By seeking

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something beyond our senses, the Infinite, the Eternal, life would be transformed. Sethna found that it suited him. He decided to go to Pondicherry.

 

He and his friend wrote to the Ashram. An answer came from a person named Purani, who was in charge of the Gujarat side of the correspondence. He wrote that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had said they could come and see for themselves the Ashram life.

 

But how to go there? For one thing, they did not have enough money. Moreover, in those days an unmarried couple travelling together for several days was not the thing done in polite Parsi society or in any other society or community. Since they were in love with each other and seeking the same goal, they decided to marry. By getting married, they would be able to collect a fairly good sum of money. It would make them independent and therefore not helpless in case their parents were not in favour of what they wanted to do.

 

Two months after his marriage Sethna and his wife decided to go to Pondicherry. But it was not openly mentioned. The plan was to go to Calcutta on a sort of belated honey-moon. After a short stay at the Grand Hotel and a meeting with Tagore, he and his wife visited the village of Sunamukhi where Pagal Harnath had been born and had died a few months earlier. They went back to Calcutta and from there started for Puri of the Jagannath temple. From Puri they went to Madras and from Madras Sethna sent a telegram to his grandfather: "Visiting picturesque Pondicherry." The family in Bombay expected a short stay at Pondicherry, for how long could this little town prove "picturesque"? When the stay ran into its sixth month, there was a sharp inquiry from home. Then it proved necessary to say that he was studying spiritual philosophy at the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo.

 

The work done by the Ashram greatly interested him -Yogic work and other work too. It was not a passive kind of Yoga... in a way it was Karma Yoga... and much more than that. Pondicherry, being an abode of peace, gave the spiri-tual seekers what they wanted. Far from the common turmoil, they became sadhaks ready to go into their selves

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While Pondicherry gave the mental peace Sethna wanted, the practice of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo provided him with an abundance of energy.

 

A clean-shaven man with a handsome face, his years rest lightly upon him. Since 1949 he has been editing Mother India, a Review of Culture, first a fortnightly, and after a couple of years a monthly. The list of Sethna's publications is quite substantial and includes five volumes of poetry (now all of them along with his uncollected works are available in his volume titled The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems), seven volumes of critical writings on poets like Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare, Mallarme and Blake, six volumes of essays on diverse subjects, four volumes of research in Ancient Indian history, two volumes of correspondence with the British poet and critic Ms. Kathleen Raine, besides innumerable articles and scholarly essays.

 

Sethna is a poet above anything else. "A moved rhythmical expression, which is at the same time precise and widely suggestive", is the working definition he gives to poetry. The original impulse behind his poetry goes back to his teens. It was competition. It was his cousin, older than he by some years, who used to tell him every day how many lines of poetry he had composed, rather light-hearted romantic verse. And when once he said that he had composed 200 lines, Sethna thought that he could compose more than that and rival him at the game.

 

"When I started writing poems, I was in the second standard," he related, "and at that time I thought the poems would be correctly metered if I could make each line the same length. So, a certain length on the page I fixed upon. If any line was a bit too long, I wrote in small script. I believed that there ought to be a measure. And after that, I wrote more natural poems, which I would like to call love poems. I was greatly moved by the beauty of a certain young woman. And so I had to create a sort of Shelleyan Romantic verse."

 

Sethna had to wait for several years to gain recognition as a poet. And that was only when Sri Aurobindo complimented him. Before that he was like all young men,

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with a sort of high conceit of his own powers. Only when Sri Aurobindo brought a critical eye to his poems and ad-mired some of them did Sethna feel that the genuine spark was there!

 

Apart from numerous studies on the problems of Indian History, he has very persuasively put the Rig-Veda anterior to the Indus-Valley civilisation of c. 2500-1500 B.C. in his two major books on History - The Problem of Aryan Origins and Karpasa in Prehistoric India. It was Sri Aurobindo who was the first to dismiss in the course of his writings the theory of an Aryan invasion but did not pause to substantiate the dismissal thoroughly. Sethna's massive work on the subject - Ancient India in a New Light - fortifies the new revolution-ary outlook. The International Institute of Indian Studies based in Ottawa, Canada, gave him the Devavrata Bhishma Award for 1994 for this work.

 

In her letter dated 5.8.1961, Ms. Kathleen Raine after making general remarks on the poems of K.D. Sethna, concludes thus: "Only one thing troubles me: why do you write in English?... Have you not, in using English, exiled your poetic genius from India, to which it must belong, without making it a native of England, for English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry. I feel this even about Tagore, and so did Yeats. I do not believe that we can - or if we could, that we have the right to - write poetry in a language other than our own."

 

Ms. Raine's comment sparked off the discussion on whether Indians can write genuine poetry in English. The correspondence on these lines between the two poet-critics continued and led to the publication of two books - The English Language and The Indian Spirit and Indian Poets and English Poetry.

 

Sethna argues: "What evidently is necessary for poetic success in English is an intimacy somehow won with the language... If a notable command of the English language and a thorough knowledge of English poetical technique could be at the disposal of Indian inspiration, I see no reason

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why memorable English poetry should fail to be produced." When Raine comments: "I have read no poetry by an Indian that does not seem to an English reader to be written by a foreigner. This I find even with Tagore, certainly with Sri Aurobindo, and also with most of your poems", Sethna refutes this criticism and finally counter-argues: "If you didn't see an Indian name under a poem, would you infallibly know that its English was not by an Englishman?"

 

After many arguments and counter-arguments, Kathleen Raine withdraws from the discussion by saying: "Of course if India is determined to adopt the English language nobody can stop you. The blame lies with the English, who as a 'ruling race' for two hundred years impressed India with the power and prestige of our brief moment of material supremacy."

 

As Sethna nears his hundredth birth anniversary, we can do no better than to salute the man with his varied achievements and versatile talent.

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Thinking of Amal - As He Wheels

 His Way Towards A Century

 

 

A HUNDRED years is like a moment in eternity and yet it is a long span of time in human life. Not many reach a century. The few who do, often get into a dilapidated state or begin to appear like ruins of a once grand monument.

 

Here in the Ashram we have two most marvellous disciples of Sri Aurobindo: the much loved and universally ad-mired Nirod-da who is 101, and the quintessential poet Amal Kiran alias K.D. Sethna who will be 100 this year.

 

Lines of Robert Browning come to my mind:

 

Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made...

(Rabbi Ben Ezra)

 

Growing they are; but old, I am not sure.

At hundred it is quite amazing how well Amal looks. With not a wrinkle on his face, he glows today as ever be-fore. His skin is fresh, taut and incredibly young. Last November during my annual visit to Pondicherry I met Amal for a few moments in the Ashram Nursing Home. He was sitting in the hall which has windows opening towards the sea. Amal sits there in his wheelchair in the mornings after breakfast with a book, either reading or gazing at the silvery ocean. Impressed as always by his finely chiseled features, I could not help saying - "Amal you look so wonderfully well! What is the secret?" He smiled, "Is that so?... There is no secret."And then after a pause he said softly: "I live in Sri Aurobindo."

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Amal is generous and tolerant. In a tête-à-tête with him you can take liberties and ask him any question or say any-thing, provided you are sincere. "Your nose is so shapely, Amal!" I exclaimed almost like a child. He slowly raised his eyes from the book he was reading and from behind his thick spectacles he looked at me and counter-questioned me very seriously - "Is it of good shape or in good shape?" This is Amal who loves to play with words never losing sight of the comic or the cosmic in any situation, however grand or apparently trivial... Amal always finds a turn or a twist, a sweet and sour flavour in everything and makes us chuckle with delight!

 

I have often felt that Amal lives in an infinity within. In his own words:

 

My heart unto me an ocean is

Where time rolls inward to eternal shores.

 

To converse with Amal is always a great pleasure. As one listens to him, to his distilled thoughts, to his perfect language with the 'mot juste', to his spontaneously poetic rhythm in speech, one is gradually lifted up in consciousness and one begins to respond from a higher level of one's own being. In his company, no matter how short or long, I become a better me. The mind stretches its limits, the expressions heighten and the inner being revels. In retrospect, I realise that Amal, by his mere being, helps raise the consciousness of those around him, of those who are fond of him and who cherish him. For in true admiration, somewhere deep within, lies a secret wish to be like the one we admire. Hasn't Douce Mere said, "We grow into the likeness of that which we adore!" That explains the importance of Satsang. Amal has a beautifully benign influence on all. Just before leaving Pondicherry, I ran up to say au revoir to him. Hesitatingly I said to him: "Please tell me something wonderful that I may take back with me..." He paused. I love these pauses before he speaks, because I become aware of some-thing exquisite happening inside his creative mind. After a

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pause he said gently, yet clearly, "The most Wonderful is unspeakable. The Ineffable - it will always remain a mystery..." He seemed to be feeling "The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone..."

 

Amal never complains of the heat. In fact I have never seen him grumble about anything. During the scorching summer heat of Pondicherry, when I once asked him on the phone -"How is the weather? How is everybody?" Amal said laughing "... with the mounting heat, everyone's tongue seems to be hanging out. I am the only one with the tongue in cheek..."

 

After his fall and fracture in 1991, it was he who made the visiting doctors laugh. When his leg was in traction and he was asked by the doctor how he felt - Amal quipped: "Uncomfortably comfortable."

 

I had not visited Pondicherry for a long time. The telephone to me was a great support. I often spoke to Amal to gain strength from him and from his words of wisdom. Once I told him how I longed to see him. He comforted me with a long sentence instead - "You hold me, but cannot behold me. This is the triumph and the tragedy of the situation..." Only from Amal can you receive such an unusual answer! Speaking of the importance of telephoning he said: "Thanks to Graham Bell - today all the bells of heaven are ringing!"

 

In 1995 when my father passed away I was shattered. As always I reached out to Amal for that rare human comfort which you get from the Divine Mother and Sri Aurobindo's children alone. The other greatest comfort I found in my saddest moments was from The Life Divine, Savitri and Prayers and Meditations. These are 'life-saving' books which bring deep peace, inner poise and sweet calm to a mind dumb, dead and drowning in a sea of sorrow! Amal Kiran's first advice to me was, "Now you must find the Self-Existent Happiness" - and later "Learn to be happy under all circum-stances." This has since been my motto and I share it with my friends and pupils. Amal continued: "You ought to distil perfume from each rose bud of a moment. The distillation goes on in the heart. Learn to keep the Eternal in your each

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heart throb..." I did learn that remembering intensely Sri Aurobindo and the Divine Mother has the most soothing effect on pained emotions. The heart heals and we learn to laugh again, laugh silently with our whole being.

 

In his rooms at Rue Francois Martin, Amal enjoyed reaching out to Nature through his window above his desk. "The tree outside my window is twinkling green and gold - A limpid beauty of new-born leaves! The sun is shining in all its glory" - he once said over the telephone. Amal paints with words as well as with a brush. His paintings too are beautiful.

 

With poetic insight he once said, "When I look at a per-son or a thing, I look into its soul, its deepest depth." Amal's words, even the seemingly casual expressions, always carry within them a deep truth which becomes a continuous subtle education for the listeners.

 

As a poet Amal loves words. Talking of words he said: "Words, while they have a beauty of their own, are some-times transparent and reveal hidden depths of great poetic value. They give the feel of that which is beyond linguistic expression. Words then become not an end in themselves, but lead to further subtle beauties."

 

Reflecting on time he mused: "Time is composed of two things - extension of time and depth of time. The next step is to be above the moment. All this comes by reflecting on the Above. If one is like a steady lake or a clear mirror one can receive the flow of the Timeless. It can be felt by bringing into every activity of life a certain peace and equanimity. We then catch what is above." Sri Aurobindo writes:

 

And heavens the sea of motionless Nature.

 

It is receiving thoughts of this kind that makes a conversation with Amal a rich reward.

 

I was very fond of and looked up to three wonderful human beings destiny brought to me: My beloved father Dr. Santoshananda, who had the singular fortune of being

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accepted by Sri Aurobindo in 1942; my revered guide and friend Dr. Svetoslav Roerich who in Bangalore provided me with a beautiful atmosphere like that of the Ashram and opened my eyes to the world of art; and Amal Kiran from whom I learnt to read Sri Aurobindo with the deepest happiness and to celebrate poetry in life. All aged men. Amal laughingly cautioned me: "You have put all your eggs in three old baskets!" I had done so because these were baskets of solid gold!

 

I remember Saurav the brave, who always thought of new ways of making Amal happy. He arranged to have Amal lifted in his wheelchair to Sri Auorbindo's room on one of Amal's birthdays. Mohan Mistry shares his birthday with Amal, while Jhumur-di and I follow him. The morning after his birthday I asked Amal how he felt. He began on a jolly note -

 

Remember, remember, children of November,

We are Sri Aurobindo's for ever and ever.

 

and then speaking of his visit Upstairs in the Ashram he said slowly: "Sri Aurobindo's Room - I went there after so many years." "What did you feel?" - I was pleading for a response. "ADORATION, SIMPLICITY and DIVINE SMILE" - was his answer.

 

I had the great pleasure of meeting Amal on 26th May, Wednesday, at the Ashram Nursing Home around 9.30 a.m. I narrated this article to him. He laughed every now and then, enjoyed being taken back in time, was amused at listening to things he had said and remarks'he had made long ago. He was happy and almost whispered, "...you have taken a lot of me!" A little later at the Ashram entrance under the flow-ery bower when I told this to Montu-da he beamed, "That means Amal-da has understood everything you have told him." That was true. Soon after Saurav dropped in to return an old book with Amal's extensive markings, holding it like a treasure in his hands. "Amal, you are a treasure!" I said.

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He smiled. "What kind of a treasure are you?" I prodded for a response. After a moment he replied: "Unstealable." That is Amal precise, clear and to the point. And always original. Just as knowledge and wisdom become a part of us and are established in us beyond the reach of robbers, so is Amal a treasure to all who know and love him - a dear treasure that cannot ever be taken away from us.

 

Amal is one of the dearest persons in the Ashram. We may quote William Butler Yeats to describe him:

 

And sweetness flows from head to foot.

 

By his contact, may we too grow in divine sweetness!

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Coming to the Turnstile

 

 

WHEN my dear friend Sachidananda Mohanty asked me, without preamble, whether I would write some-thing in tribute to K.D. Sethna, most appropriately known as Amal Kiran, I foolishly agreed. For I had once reviewed a book of his, and thought that sufficient justification for paying an honest tribute to him. It is always an honour to praise a doyen of any walk of human life. However, it took me only a few minutes' reflection to admit that the better Amal Kiran's qualifications were for a tribute, the worse mine appeared to render it. For I have had an ordinarily small life, can boast only of ordinary and small achievements, while he seems extraordinary and his achievements extraordinary likewise. Besides, he is a hundred! And although I am now the 'old man' of the place where I work, Amal Kiran has shown wisdom, and knowledge and courage in leaving one world to enter another without contemptuously renouncing either.

 

My 'acquaintance' with him, the excuse to pay him tribute, began to appear flimsier by the minute. Anything I thought of saying began to assume increasing degrees of triviality vis-à-vis a man who had passed down so many paths before us, and was now "at the turnstile". Therefore, I realised, he was above picky distinctions about his 'place' in the scholarly domain, 'fine' analyses of his written works, and nifty phrases in praise. As Rudyard Kipling says in his preface to Life's Handicap, "When man has come to the turn-stile of Night all the creeds in the world seem to him wonderfully alike and colourless."

What, then, should I do? Amal Kiran would deserve any praise he received. Everyone about him was obviously right

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in wishing to praise and honour him. Yet one fact seemed to press itself forward, again and again, and with greatest ease - that long decades ago he had left 'this' world to enter another in a manner I would neither apprehend nor find it possible to write about, because I had not experienced it; and I did not wish to use Kalibanese.

 

Therefore, I came to two conclusions - that pretended tribute constitutes the worst offence from man to man, and that I did know another man just like him, but described with all the power of language a man could wield. So if present-ing this other man in tribute to Amal Kiran was acceptable, I would let a better writer present a character that might neither diminish nor offend him. Here it is -

 

*

 

THE MIRACLE OF PURUN BHAGAT*

 

The Jungle Books, Rudyard Kipling, 1894-95

 

The night we felt the Earth move

We stole and plucked him by the hand,

Because we loved him with the love

That knows but cannot understand.

 

And when the roaring hillside broke,

And all our world fell down in rain,

We saved him, we the Little-Folk;

 But lo! He will not come again!

 

Mourn now, we saved him for the sake

Of such poor love as wild ones may

. Mourn ye! Our brother does not wake

 And his own kind drive us away!

 

Dirge of the Langurs

 

THERE was once a man in India who was Prime Minister of one of the semi-independent native states in the north-western

 

* Abridged version

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part of the country. He was a Brahmin, so high-caste that caste ceased to have any particular meaning for him, and his father had been an important official in the gay-coloured tag-rag and bob-tail of an old-fashioned Hindu Court. But as Purun Dass grew up he realised that the ancient order of things was changing, and that if any one wished to get on he must stand well with the English, and imitate all the English believed to be good. At the same time a native official must keep his own master's favour. This was a difficult game, but the quiet, close-mouthed young Brahmin, helped by a good English education at a Bombay university, played it coolly, and rose, step by step, to be Prime Minister of the kingdom. That is to say, he held more real power than his master, the Maharajah.

 

When the old king - who was suspicious of the English, their railways and telegraphs - died, Purun Dass stood high with his young successor, who had been tutored by an Englishman. And between them, though he always took care that his master should have the credit, they established schools for little girls, made roads, and started State dispensaries and shows of agricultural implements, and published a yearly blue-book on the "Moral and Material Progress of the State", and the Foreign Office and the Government of India were delighted. The Prime Minister became the honoured friend of viceroys and governors, and lieutenant-governors, and medical missionaries, and common missionaries, and hard-riding English officers who came to shoot in the State preserves, as well as of whole hosts of tourists who travelled up and down India in the cold weather, showing how things ought to be managed.

 

At last he went to England on a visit, and had to pay enormous sums to the priests when he came back, for even so high-caste a Brahmin as Purun Dass lost caste by cross-ing the black sea. He was given honorary degrees by learned universities, and he made speeches and talked of Hindu social reform to English ladies in evening dress, till all Lon-don cried, "This is the most fascinating man we have ever met at dinner since cloths were first laid!'

 

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When he returned to India there was a blaze of glory, for the Viceroy himself made a special visit to confer upon the Maharajah the Grand Cross of the Star of India - all diamonds and ribbons and enamel. And at the same ceremony, while the cannon boomed, Purun Dass was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire, so that his name stood Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E.

 

That evening at dinner in the big Viceregal tent he stood up with the badge and the collar of the order on his breast, and replying to the toast of his master's health, made a speech that few Englishmen could have surpassed.

 

Next month, when the city had returned to its sunbaked quiet, he did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing, for, so far as the world's affairs went, he died. The jewelled order of his knighthood returned to the Indian Government, and a new Prime Minister was appointed to the charge of affairs, and a great game of General Post began in all the subordinate appointments. The priests knew what had happened and the people guessed, but India is-the one place in the world where a man can do as he pleases and nobody asks why. And the fact that Dewan Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up the begging bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sannyasi or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter - though he had never carried a weapon in his life - and twenty years head of a household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; and he had seen men and cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him. Now he would let these things go, as a man drops the cloak he needs no longer.

 

Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin and brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polished brown coco de mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on the ground - behind him

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they were firing salutes from the bastions in honour of his happy successor. Purun Dass nodded. All that life was ended, and he bore it no more ill-will or good-will than a man bears to a colourless dream of the night. He was a Sannyasi - a houseless, wandering mendicant, depending on his neighbours for his daily bread, and so long as there is a morsel to divide in India neither priest nor beggar starves. Even when he was being lionised in London he had held before him his dream of peace and quiet - the long, white, dusty Indian road, printed all over with bare feet, the incessant, slow-moving traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood-smoke curling up under the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sat at their evening meal.

 

When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister took the proper steps, and in three days you might more easily find a bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas than Purun Dass among the roving, gathering, separating millions of India.

 

One evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then - it had been a two days' climb - and came out on a line of snow-peaks that belted all the horizon - mountains from fifteen to twenty thousand feet high, looking almost near enough to hit with a stone, though they were fifty or sixty miles away. The pass was crowned with dense, dark forest -deodar, walnut, wild cherry, wild olive, and wild pear, but mostly deodar, which is the Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the deodars stood a deserted shrine to Kali -who is Durga, who is Sitala, who is sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.

 

Purun Dass swept the stone floor clean, and sat down to rest.

 

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for fifteen hundred feet, to where a little village of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the tlueshing-floors. Looking across the valley the eye was deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise

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that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-flank, was in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat saw an eagle swoop across the enormous hollow, but the great bird dwindled to a dot ere it was half-way over. A few bands of scattered clouds strung up and down the valley, catching on a shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying out when they were level with the head of the pass. And, 'Here shall I find peace,' said Purun Bhagat.

 

Now, a hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down, and as soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted shrine, the village priest climbed up the terraced hillside to welcome the stranger.

 

When he met Purun Bhagat's eyes - the eyes of a man used to control thousands - he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl without a word, and returned to the village, saying: 'We have at last a holy man. Never have I seen such a man. He is of the plains - but pale coloured - a Brahmin of the Brahmins.' Then all the housewives of the village said: 'Think you he will stay with us?' And each did her best to cook the most savoury meal for the Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but with the buckwheat and Indian corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out of the stream in the little valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built in the stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger, and bannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things. And it was a full bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was he going to stay? Asked the priest. Would he need a chela - a disciple - to beg for him? Had he a blanket against the cold weather? Was the food good?

Purun Bhagat ate, and thanked the giver. It was in his mind to stay. That was sufficient, said the priest. Let the begging-bowl be placed outside the shrine, in the hollow made by those two twisted roots, and daily should the Bhagat be fed, for the village felt honoured that such a man - he looked timidly into the Bhagat's face - should tarry among them.

That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat's wanderings. He had come to the place appointed for him - the silence and the space. After this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the

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mouth of the shrine, could not tell whether he were alive or dead: a man with control of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the shifting rain, and sunlight. He would repeat a Name softly to himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each repetition, he seemed to move more and more out of his body, sweeping up to the doors of some tremendous discovery. But, just as the door was opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.

 

Then came such summer rains as had not been known in the hills for many seasons. Through three good months the valley was wrapped in cloud and soaking mist - steady, unrelenting downfall, breaking off into thunder-shower after thunder-shower. Kali's shrine stood above the clouds, for the most part, and there was a whole month in which the Bhagat never caught a glimpse of his village. It was packed away under a white floor of cloud that swayed and shifted and rolled on itself and bulged upwards, but never broke from its piers - the streaming flanks of the valley.

 

At that time he heard nothing but the sound of a million little waters, overhead from the trees, and underfoot along the ground, soaking through the pine-needles, dripping from the tongues of draggled fern, and spouting in newly torn muddy channels down the slopes. Then the sun came out, and drew forth the good incense of the deodars and the rhododendrons, and that far-off clean smell the Hill-People call "the smell of the snows". The hot sunshine lasted for a week, and then the rains gathered together for their last downpour, and the water fell in sheets that flayed off the skin of the ground and leaped back in mud. Purun Bhagat heaped his fire high that night, for he was sure his brothers would need warmth, but never a beast came to the shrine, though he called and called till he dropped asleep, wonder-ing what had happened in the woods.

 

It was in the black heart of the night, the rain drumming like a thousand drums, that he was roused by a plucking at his blanket, and, stretching out, felt the little hand of a langur.

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It is better here than in the trees,' he said sleepily, loosening a fold of the blanket. 'Take it and be warm.' The monkey caught his hand and pulled hard. 'Is it food, then?' said Purun Bhagat. 'Wait a while, and I will prepare some.' As he kneeled to throw fuel on the fire the langur ran to the door of the shrine, crooned, and ran back again, plucking at the man's knee.

 

'What is it? What is thy trouble, Brother?' said Purun Bhagat, for the langur's eyes were full of things that he could not tell. 'Unless one of thy caste be in a trap - and none sets traps here - I will not go into that weather. Look, Brother, even the barasingha comes for shelter.'

 

The deer's antlers clashed as he strode into the shrine, clashed against the grinning statue of Kali. He lowered them in Purun Bhagat's direction and stamped uneasily, hissing through his half-shut nostrils.

 

'Hai!Hai!Hai! said the Bhagat, snapping his fingers. 'Is this payment for a night's lodging?' But the deer pushed him towards the door, and as he did so Purun Bhagat heard the sound of something opening with a sigh, and saw two slabs of the floor draw away from each other, while the sticky earth below smacked its lips.

 

'Now I see,' said Purun Bhagat. 'No blame to my brothers that they did not sit by the fire to-night. The mountain is falling. And yet—why should I go?' His eye fell on the empty begging-bowl, and his face changed. 'They have given me good food daily since - since I came, and, if I am not swift, to-morrow there will not be one mouth in the valley. Indeed, I must go and warn them below. Back there, Brother! Let me get to the fire.'

The barasingha backed unwillingly as Purun Bhagat drove a torch deep into the flame, twirling it till it was well lit. 'Ah! Ye came to warn me,' he said, rising. 'Better than that we shall do, better than that. Out, now, and lend me thy neck, Brother, for I have but two feet.'

 

He clutched the bristling withers of the barasingha with his right hand, held the torch away with his left, and stepped

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out of the shrine into the desperate night. There was no breath of wind, but the rain nearly drowned the torch as the great deer hurried down the slope, sliding on his haunches. As soon as they were clear of the forest more of the Bhagat's brothers joined them. He heard, though he could not see, the langurs pressing about him, and behind them the uhh! uhh! of Sona. The rain matted his long white hair into ropes; the water splashed beneath his bare feet, and his yellow robe clung to his frail old body, but he stepped down steadily, leaning against the barasingha. He was no longer a holy man, but Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small State, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life. Down the steep plashy path they poured all together, the Bhagat and his brothers, down and down till the deer clicked and stumbled on the wall of a threshing-floor, and snorted be-cause he smelled Man. Now they were at the head of the one crooked village street, and the Bhagat beat with his crutch at the barred windows of the blacksmith's house as his torch blazed up in the shelter of the eaves. 'Up and out!' cried Purun Bhagat, and he did not know his own voice, for it was years since he had spoken aloud to a man. 'The hill falls! The hill is falling! Up and out, oh, you within!'

 

'It is our Bhagat,' said the blacksmith's wife. 'He stands among his beasts. Gather the little ones and give the call.'

 

It ran from house to house, while the beasts, cramped in the narrow way, surged and huddled round the Bhagat, and Sona puffed impatiently.

 

The people hurried into the street.

 

'Across the valley and up the next hill!' shouted Purun Bhagat. 'Leave none behind! We follow!'

 

Then the people ran as only Hill-Folk can run, for they knew that in a landslip you must climb for the highest ground across the valley. They fled, splashing through the little river at the bottom, and panted up the terraced fields on the far side, while the Bhagat and his brethren followed. Up and up the opposite mountain they climbed, calling to

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each other by name - the roll-call of the village - and at their heels toiled the big barasingha, weighted by the fall-ing strength of Purun Bhagat. At last the deer stopped in the shadow of a deep pine-wood, five hundred feet up the hillside. His instinct, that had warned him of the coming slide, told him he would be safe here.

 

Purun Bhagat dropped fainting by his side, for the chill of the rain and that fierce climb were killing him. But first he called to the scattered torches ahead: 'Stay and count your numbers.' Then, whispering to the deer as he saw the lights gather in a cluster: 'Stay with me, Brother. Stay - till -I- go!'

 

There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter that grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing, and the hillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the darkness, and rocked to the blow. Then a note as steady, deep, and true as the deep C of the organ drowned everything for perhaps five minutes, while the very roots of the pines quivered to it. It died away, and the sound of the rain falling on miles of hard ground and grass changed to the muffled drums of water on soft earth. That told its own tale.

 

Never a villager - not even the priest - was bold enough to speak to the Bhagat who had saved their lives. They crouched under the pines and waited till the day. When it came they looked across the valley, and saw that what had been forest, and terraced field, and track-threaded grazing-ground was one raw, red, fan-shaped smear, with a few trees flung head-down on the scarp. That red ran high up the hill of their refuge, damming back the little river, which had begun to spread into a brick-coloured lake. Of the village, of the road to the shrine, of the shrine itself, and the forest be-hind, there was no trace. For one mile in width and two thou-sand feet in sheer depth the mountain-side had come away bodily, planed clean from head to heel.

 

And the villagers, one by one, crept through the wood to pray before their Bhagat. They saw the barasingha stand-ing over him, who fled when they came near, and they heard

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the langurs wailing in the branches, and Sona moaning up the hill. But their Bhagat was dead, sitting cross-legged, his back against a tree, his crutch under his armpit, and his face turned to the north-east.

 

The priest said: 'Behold a miracle after a miracle, for in this very attitude must all Sannyasis be buried! Therefore, where he now is we will build the temple of our holy man.'

 

They built the temple before a year was ended, a little stone and earth shrine, and they called the hill the Bhagat's Hill, and they worship there with lights and flowers and offerings to this day.

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Amal Kiran-Reminiscences-Shyam Sunder Jhunjihunwala

 

Shyam Sunder Jhunjhunwala

 

When you are asked to write about someone you know personally, you usually go down memory lane to your first encounter with him. So do I when I sit to write about Amal Kiran who is going to step into his 100th year soon. The first encounter, in the middle of the last century, was a bit funny though.

 

I went to Bombay a few times in those years in connection with a litigation between my father and Raja Narayanlal Bansilal Pittic and once I wanted to consult a specialist in company law there. My friend and well-wisher Keshavdeo R. Poddar (later named Navajata by the Mother), who was still in Bombay involved in business, advised me to see one Mr. Sethna who was well known to him and an appointment was made by him.

 

At the appointed hour I reached the place and the door was opened by Mr. Sethna who knew Keshavdeo Poddar very well but was innocent of company law nor was any appointment made with him for me. Soon we came to the conclusion that there was a comedy of error on the part of Keshavdeo. He had given me the address of another Sethna, viz. K.D. Sethna, i.e. our Amal Kiran.

 

I was feeling quite awkward in a delicate situation, intruding on the privacy and precious time of a genius, al-most a quarter century elder to me. But he was gentlemanly and polite and did not show any sign of displeasure at all. He must have been amused at the absent-mindedness of a common friend. I was in a hurry to leave for the unfinished work and we just exchanged a few words on Pondicherry, our common base, before parting.

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This chance acquaintance emboldened me later to write an article for Mother India edited by him and on its acceptance I felt encouraged to write occasionally. Once I felt that my articles were mostly quotes from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother with my short sentences serving as connecting links or notes and I went to him (we both were at Pondicherry then) and placed this limitation of mine before him for his advice. He at once said, "Go on. Framing is also an art."

 

 

His editorials in Mother India were eye-openers for me in respect of current affairs, I having been brought up in the Gandhian Congress club in my early days. His writings, I believe, did shake up many others, and led readers to a deeper understanding of India and the world. No wonder for he was getting direct guidance from Sri Aurobindo who had spoken of that journal as 'my paper'.

 

Amal Kiran sees things clearly - he is a 'clear ray' in Sri Aurobindo's words - and he has an incisive logic when it comes to its exposition in intellectual terms and he has the correct words to tear the opponent to pieces with love. With love, for he is tolerant and gives the others the right to continue to hold a different view.

 

Amal Kiran is also clear about the Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Some years ago there was a question about the status of the Mind of Light that had got realised in the Mother when Sri Aurobindo left his body. I had got confused on reading a viewpoint about it and thought of asking Amal about it. In those days he used to sit in the evening on the seaside with some friends. I was told that he had been often saying, T do not remember'. But I took a chance during my evening walk and asked him about this serious matter. His entourage also got curious. It took him only some moments to recollect that he had asked the Mother about it and she had said that the physical mind receiving the supramental light was called by Sri Aurobindo the Mind of Light. This answer dispelled my confusion. Back home, after dinner, I tried to locate the answer in the Mother's writ-

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ings and I could locate it quickly in some minutes. Amal had quoted correctly word for word from her answer of 1953.

 

Amal is a polymath. Here I have referred to but a part of him, but before closing I would give another glimpse of him. That also is from some years ago. He was admitted to the Ashram Nursing Home after one of his repeat performances of falling down and fracturing his leg. I was sad to see his leg put in traction and his body lying in a fixed state. I was surprisingly glad to hear him speaking to me in his usual cheerful voice, the morning sunlight peeping into the room and falling on him. I had gone to see a patient known as a Literary Colossus, but met a Yogi with a song on his lips, lovingly blessed and guided by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the path.

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The Clear Ray Beacons

 

The Supreme Master's gift of the lovely appellation,

Sweet, charming and all-inspiring name,

As bright as the immaculate, radiating white rays

 Of the Truth-heralding dawn's spiritual Sun.

 

Haven't you spent your glorious hundred years,

 Trying to be a forerunner and discoverer

Of Beauty's sunlit ways, chanting the Soul's anthem.

Carrying fiery poetic words for wiping out tears?

 

Your inner psychic fire, the sublime Pavakagni,

Is observed by a few to be blazing forth

In the deepest recesses of your noble heart;

Others get glimpses of your beatific soul-journey.

 

Your marvellous, marathon labour of editing

 Mother India for more than half a century,

Leaves behind a legacy of luminous literature

With glamorous English's fragrance ever permeating.

 

Your magic-pen and style make readers spell-bound,

And your breadth of vision often elevates

Weary, ordinary mortals to empyrean heights;

What exotic sketch of esoteric ideas in exoteric mould!

 

Amal Kiran! You have truly mastered the secret Art

Of steering the seekers' mind, groping in the dark,

When lost specially in labyrinthine spiritual topics;

We pray for your longer healthy life, brighter and vast.

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A Clear Ray of Sri Aurobindo

 

 

I KNEW hardly anything about Amal Kiran in those days - in 1958. I had just joined the Ashram School and I was slowly getting into the rhythm of Ashram life. One such important rhythm was the Balcony Darshan.

 

My room-mate and I used to wake up in the nick of time, brush our teeth quickly, and then we used to run, jog, fast-walk to the Balcony street. Most of the time we were well in time and we even had some time to sit down on the footpath below the Balcony. Only on a very few occasions did we catch the last glimpse of the Mother withdrawing from the Balcony because we were a bit too late!

 

There, under the Balcony, I noted a very impressive personality, tallish, handsome with curly hair - although with a walking stick in hand. He would sit every day on the foot-path waiting for Her. When the footfalls of the Mother were felt over us, he would jump up and stand right beneath the Mother, the spot where the Mother stood during the Darshan. Looking up at Her, he would stand arrested in concentration, pulling down the Force and Light that was the Mother. I could not reach him, but I thought the best way to attract the Mother's attention on me would be to stand just beside the statue of concentration and prayer that was Amal Kiran. Thus, day after day I stood in his borrowed light!

 

As days passed by and my mind opened up to literature and philosophy, Amal Kiran once again got focussed in my consciousness. I started discovering Amal the critic, for, I had read his book Sri Aurobindo - The Poet in order to get a deeper understanding of Sri Aurobindo's poetry. His depth of analysis, his passion to deal with the subtleties and nuances of words and imagery, and his very special capacity to feel the

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rhythm and metre were amazing. His insights into the feeling and thought and imagination behind each verse impressed my young mind and I became Amal-the-critic's fan! There was none better than him who could bring forth the 'poetical beauty and the technical mastery' embedded in each verse of Sri Aurobindo's poetry

 

It is only much later that I started discovering the multi-faceted genius that is Amal Kiran. Most of all these facets have been briefly but very clearly sketched by Jugal Kishore Mukherjee in his book The Wonder that is K.D. Sethna alias Amal Kiran as well as by Nirodbaran and R.Y. Deshpande in their edited book Amal-kiran: Poet and Critic. In these works much has been written by different authors and critics about Amal Kiran's "radiant multifaceted personality and universal genius". (The Wonder that is K.D. Sethna...)

 

What I am interested in here is to get a glimpse of the person behind the 'multifaceted personality'. Not that one can separate easily the person from the personality in Amal Kiran's case, but I feel that while one may won-der at Amal Kiran's personality, one cannot but fall in love with the person that is Amal Kiran.

 

I used to go to him for several things —for discussions on Savitri's verses to other mundane matters. Each time I used to just barge into his room, almost without courtesy, and he would in a gentle voice ask me to take my seat while he would complete his next sentence on his type-writer or finish reading the paragraph he was reading or give the strike-order to the proofs of Mother India journal.

 

Those few moments of waiting for Amal Kiran to finish his work in hand were the ones during which an indelible image of Amal was engraved in my mental consciousness: a radiant face with delight in its eyes! He would turn around and with a welcoming smile he would ask me the purpose of my visit. It was as if he had suspended the avalanche of higher thoughts and come down to my level fully and whole-heartedly. There was no distance between us; he was with me and for me during those few minutes! That established an immediate rapport, maybe, a deeper identity with me.

 

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This way we could speak to each other without tension, with-out my being in awe of a great critic, poet, historian, etc. His face hardly showed all these.

 

His conversations were full of wit interspersed with mirth. When speaking on Savitri, he would floor me with his flow of recitations of the verses from Savitri. When he talked about mundane issues, there was great sympathy in his heart although he never compromised on the level of right advice and judgement.

 

Well, at the end of the precious moments, he would invariably shake my hand and wish me a warm bye-bye! He would then re-ascend to his level of thoughts and intuitions received from his Master - Sri Aurobindo - that is the impression he gave me.

 

Speaking of intuitions, well I am not very much off the track. Read his poems from the "Overhead Poetry" Poems (The Secret Splendour) and one would be mind-boggled to read Sri Aurobindo's comments. For instance take the poem "Pool of Lonelinesses":

 

I have become a secret pool

Of lonelinesses mountain-cool,

A dream-poise of unuttered song

Lifted above the restless throng

Of human moods' dark pitchers wrought

Of fragile and of flawful thought.

 

........

 

And in their crystalline control

Of heaven-mooded ecstasy

Carry the waters of my soul

Unto God's sacred thirst for me!

(Pp. 72-73)

 

Sri Aurobindo commented: "It is a very fine poem. It comes from the intuitive plane - belonging to the Intuition proper which brings with it a sort of subdued inspiration -I mean inspiration of the more quiet, not the more vivid kind and a great felicity of language...."

 

Another poem selected at random, "This Errant Life", reads:

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This errant life is dear although it dies;

 

.....

 

I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.

 If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,

 Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.

 For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

 And mould Thy love into a human face.

 

(pp. 70-71)

 

And Sri Aurobindo said about the last eight lines:".. .one may say even the last eight, are absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, you would take your place among English poets and no low place either. I consider they rank - these eight lines - with the very best in English poetry."

 

Such height of praise from Sri Aurobindo only shows Amal's Himalayan poetic consciousness and it goes to prove that he is truly a clear ray of Sri Aurobindo's poetic dimension. It seems that the Master brought down his own apostles to manifest his multifaceted aspects and Amal Kiran is surely His ray of poetic genius!

 

And yet, this genius, whom the world will discover only in the far future, was all humble and he came down to en-courage the younger minds. Once, in 1969, when I had writ-ten an article on Sri Aurobindo's poem "Love and Death" he spent caring moments to correct it and even published it in Mother India! Another time I ventured to send him a few of my poems and the master of rhythm selected some and even gave a few comments on some of them. Such is his tender heart behind all that 'trumpeting' voice!

 

Yes, this is what he said once about himself: "At times I am a bit of a musician too: as you have just seen, I can blow my own trumpet." (Some Talks at Pondicherry)

 

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During my personal meetings he hardly ever bragged or blew his own trumpet! It was during his talks in the Ashram School, in 1970 and 1971, that we heard his melodious trumpeting. He hid himself constantly behind wit, humour, comic incidents, and laughing at himself, but, as peeps the sun from behind the radiant clouds, so his true self peeped out with utter devotion and dedication to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

 

I shall quote here a few examples from his talks published as Some Talks at Pondicherry (compiled by K. L. Gambhir, 1972) to illustrate my point:

 

a) Let me whisper into your ears at the top of my voice an unbelievable secret. It is this: twice in Savitri, which is a legend and a symbol, Sri Aurobindo has referred to the present speaker, symbolically, although the speaker is very far yet from being legendary, (laughter) The first reference runs:

 

But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,

 Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow.

 

Surely the person intended is unmistakable, (laughter) The lines indicate an inequality between the intellectual aspiration and the physical achievement. Not that the possibility of physical achievement is denied, but what is implied is that the glorious sky-traveller puts up a pretty poor show on the world-stage. The second reference is also more or less like the first, not very complimentary but on the other hand not altogether unappreciative and after all to be mentioned in Savitri in any way, however veiled or even unrecognisable, is itself a compliment, (laughter) The second reference goes:

 

A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still

Accompanied by an eternal No.

 

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Lest you should misunderstand, I must hurry to say that if the "limping Yes" is Amal Kiran, the "eternal No" accompanying him is not his wife! (laughter) I may admit that my wife does have a strong restraining influence on many of my extravagances and recklessnesses; but here I take Sri Aurobindo to be speaking of two sides of a movement within one single person - yes, a person single, even if married!

 

b) After our brief talk, the Mother got up. "I am going," she said and moved towards the door. "No, please wait," I urged. Then I started to indulge in my habit of falling. It was taking a new turn, for I was preparing to fall - as I have already told you - at her feet. She seemed a little surprised at a man clad in European clothes, with a neck-tie and so on, wanting to fall like that. Seeing the surprise on her face I made an explanation: "You see, Mother, we Indians always do this to our spiritual Masters." (laughter) I taught her what was the right thing to be done. Afterwards I learned that the Mother at that time couldn't move from one room to another without 20 people fall-ing at her feet! (laughter) When she found me determined she said: "All right" - and let me go down. Then she put her hand on my head and I got up. At home I thought I had done something very important: I had asserted my Indianness, I had shown my Indianness in spite of those clothes, and I was sure the Mother must have appreciated it. It seems the Mother went and told Sri Aurobindo: "There is a young man here who came to see me and taught me how Indians do pranam.'" (laughter) Sri Aurobindo was much amused.

 

c) I knelt down at her feet, she blessed me; then I went to Sri Aurobindo's feet and looked at him. My physical mind came right to the front: "What sort of a person is Sri Aurobindo? How does he look?" I saw him sitting very

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grandly, with an aquiline nose, smallish eyes, fine moustaches and a thin beard... I was examining him thoroughly. At length I made my pranam. He put both his hands on my head - that was his way - a most delightful way with his very soft palms. I took my leave, looking at him again. I observed to myself: "Quite an impressive Guru: (laughter) he is very fine in appearance, very grand - I think I can accept him!" (laughter)

 

The next day I met the Mother and asked her: "Mother, did Sri Aurobindo say anything about me?" (laughter) She answered: "Well, he just said that you had a good face." (laughter) Here was a piquant situation. When I was examining him, he was examining me - on the same level, it seems, (laughter) He had come down, as it were, to meet my physical mind.

 

d) Indeed Dara was quite a character - a very extraordinary character with a lot of eccentricity. He was also a poet, of course: at that time poets were budding all over the place. But he was a very original kind of poet. His themes al-ways used to be like how he sat in his canvas chair and the canvas tore apart, (laughter) Such exciting events be-came the subject matter of his poetry. On another occasion, as you might have heard, he exhausted his stock of tea, so he penned a furious poem to the Mother:

 

Mother Almighty,

I have finished all my tea. (laughter)

 

e) To return to my friend Nirod - it was after some time that he got the dispensary. I don't know whether he wanted it, or liked it or not, but he established his reputation as the frowning physician, (laughter) People used to come to him with a cold and he would stand and glare at them, and say, "What? you have a cold!" Poor people, they would simply shiver (laughter) and this had a very salutary

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effect because they thought that it was better not to fall ill than face the doctor's drastic disapproval of any kind of illness which would give him any botheration, (laugh-ter) But he did his job all right, and every time he fright-ened off a patient he went to his room and started trying to write poetry (laughter) - because that, he thought, was his most important job. And, whether he succeeded as a doctor or not, as a poet he has eminently succeeded. Sri Aurobindo has really made him a poet.

 

f) There was a Telugu gentleman whom I had come to know because he and I used to eat opposite each other at a small table outside the Reading Room. We would bring our food from the Dining Room which was where Prithwi Singh stays now. This chap used to bring with him some ghee every time and pour it on all that he ate. When I look at people I always try to fix them in my mind by comparing them to some author or other. And this person looked liked the famous novel-ist H.G. Wells. So I began to call him H. Ghee Wells! (laughter) Now, he was a man who used to be very sen-sitive and very impulsive. One evening he was found missing. And people wondered where he had gone. Those who were staying in the same house as he - that is, in Tresor House - came home at about 8 o'clock and heard shouts and screams. They didn't know from where the sounds came, they could only recognise the voice. They looked in every room but couldn't find him. Then at last they found him sitting at the bottom of a well (laughter) and howling, "Please take me out!" "Why the hell did you get in there?" "I heard Sri Aurobindo's command and jumped into the well." (laughter) It was indeed very creditable that he had obeyed immediately, but it wasn't Sri Aurobindo tell-ing him. Though proverbially Truth is found at the bottom of a well, (laughter) it cannot be the Supramental

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Truth; this Truth is to be found somewhere high up. (laughter) They had to haul him up.

 

g) No doubt, I always had the ambition in my younger days to took like Bernard Shaw whom I admired a great deal. But when I was in Bombay I could not grow a beard -beards at that time were not in fashion for people who were rather young and perhaps inclined to be romantic, (laughter) Even when I returned to Bombay after a six and a half years' stay here and met my future wife Sehra, whom I had known earlier, she was indignant on seeing me bearded, though not long-haired any more. She made a disgusted face and said: "What is this?" Then I very calmly explained to her: "You see, I am a Yogi, (laughter) God thrust on me the spiritual favour of a lame leg so that I might not run after anybody glamorous (laughter) and I have spiritu-ally favoured myself with a beard so that nobody glamorous may run after me!"

 

h) By the way, my beard did not last all my life, as you can see for yourselves. Actually the first shaving of it marked the first spiritual fall I had, because after a year and a half my people from Bombay came on a visit and they brought the Bombay atmosphere. Although I agreed to see them only twice a week, I was afraid I might lose or spoil my Yogic halo. And those few meetings made me open myself to the Bombay atmosphere and I said: "Why should I not shave off my beard? I'll be better-looking without it!" My brother had no beard, the friend accompanying my family had none, either. So one morning I just cleared mine away. But when I looked in the mirror it seemed as if half my face had been cut off! (laughter) So much removed from under the chin so suddenly made the face look horribly small. And it was with this face that I went to the Darshan of Sri Aurobindo. He was a little puzzled: "Who is this funny-looking fellow with a face familiar but inexplicably

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halved?" (laughter) Then he concentrated a little and recognised that here was Amal Kiran. Seeing his expression, I on my return home wrote at once to him: "How did you find me?" He replied: "Grow back your beard as fast as you can!" (laughter) And I started re-growing it by what-ever means I could - even watering my face at times in my desperation. (laughter) In a fortnight there was some result to show of all my pains and prayers.

 

Gradually as I grew out of the complex of fear I felt that the beard which formed part of the early-Christian ensemble of my face did not fit in with the new look I was acquiring. But now I was wiser by that first abrupt change from hirsute to clean-shaven: so I began to trim my beard. Every month it became shorter and shorter, (laughter) Finally, on the eve of my third visit to Bombay during the first ten years of my Ashram-life, I asked the Mother: "What shall I do? Do you think I could shave off my beard?" She said: "There is hardly any beard left. You might as well shave off what you call a beard. Do what you like; it won't make any difference." (laughter) So that was the end of the beard. And since then I am afraid to grow it because now I think most of it will come out white and make me look even more old than I am.

 

One could perhaps go on and on with these delightful narrations each of which gives us a glimpse of the person that is Amal Kiran. It is interesting to note how he would prefer himself to be seen:

 

Sitting in the midst of profuse reading-matter and absorbed in the craft of endless writing and turned as much as his numerous human weaknesses allow towards the all-healing and all-fulfilling infinity of that dual divine presence - Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - such is Amal Kiran...

(Jugal Kishore Mukherjee,

 The Wonder that is K.D. Sethna p. 2)

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And to turn towards that 'dual presence', the best way, advises Amal Kiran, is:

 

If you ask me what is the simplest way, I shall quote to you three words of the Mother - "Remember and Offer." Wherever you are, whatever you do, you can always think of the Divine, and you can always make an offering of yourself and your doings. There is nothing too small, too trivial to be offering. Suppose I put this walking stick of mine in some place. Well, even that action can be and should be a gesture of offer-ing. The inward movement has to be - "I am giving my stick to you, O God." To take in everything into the practice of offering is to make Yoga an integral part of your life.

 

It is not by cutting yourself off from people or by shut-ting out activity and locking yourself up in an impen-=etrable Samadhi that you meet the Divine. Yoga means being in touch with the Divine's presence every minute. It is an all-time job, as Sri Aurobindo has often said.

 

And, if you live out the Mother's formula of remembering and offering, you will feel that something ex-tremely sweet and at the same time extremely strong is awakening in you. Soon you will feel as if a bright nec-tar were welling in your heart and flowing everywhere in your body. The whole of you will feel perpetually blessed and everything you lay your hands on will ap-pear to you as if it were receiving blessedness. What awakens in you is - to use Sri Aurobindo's phrase -"the psychic being", the true soul in you.

 

(Some Talks at Pondicherry)

 

In one of my last meetings with him, when he was in his house near Minku-Boarding, he confirmed that he was con-stantly being guided by his psychic being. For this constant inner guidance he must have prepared for long, as is seen in one of his prayer-poems:

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"O Silent Love..."

 

Because You never claim of us a tear,

O silent Love, how often we forget

The eyes of countless centuries were wet

 To bring Your smile so near!

 

Forgive if I remember not the blaze,

Imperishable, perfect, infinite,

Of far Omnipotence from which You lit

Your lamp of human face!

 

Make me a worship-vigil everywhere,

 Slumber and wakefulness one memory

That You are God: O let each pore of me

 Become a mouth of prayer!

(The Secret Splendour, p. 459)

 

He has walked miles in consciousness to cherish the Rose of Light and the Rose of Love as seen in his poem, "At Last":

 

At last the unfading Rose -

Felt mine yet sought afar

 In the flowering of forms

That proved but surface-sheens,

 Mirrors of a mystery

That never broke to a star.

 

Now wakes a sudden sky

In the centre of my chest.

Bliss-wafts that never die

Float from a petalled fire

Rooted in godlike rest.

They spread in the whole world's air,

Cold distances breathe close,

Worship burns everywhere.

Life flows to the Eternal's face.

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Unveiled within, light's spire,

At last the unfading Rose.

(The Secret Splendour, p. 651)

 

With worship burning in his entire being, he now spends his hours in the Ashram's Nursing Home with an absolute equanimity to life and death:

 

I am doing my best to live long both because I am happy and can give happiness and because I want as much time as possible to go nearer to Sri Aurobindo's luminous Truth and the Mother's radiant Beauty. All the same I am ready to say "Hurrah" whenever they tell me, "Your time is up.

"(Jugal Kishore Mukherjee,

The Wonder that is K.D. Sethna)

 

And to put it in his own poetic verses:

Farewell, sweet earth, but I shall find you sweeter

When I return

With eyes in which all heaven's farnesses

Intimately burn.

 

Then you will show in all I once held dear

The cause of my keen flame:

The holy hush my poet tongue miscalled

Name on poor mortal name.

w

The Secret Splendour, p. 751)

 

Such is Amal Kiran, a pure ray of Sri Aurobindo's consciousness.

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Long Live Amal Kiran!

 

 

It is difficult to write anything on Amal, who is a profound scholar, skilled in many arts and sciences. He is a prolific writer on so many subjects, - literary, historic, scientific, archaeological and spiritual. To read his books is to sharpen one's intellect and to widen one's mind. But I would not go into the details of these studies. I would rather leave the reader to discover for himself Amal's perceptive insight and be thrilled with the delight of the reading.

 

I would like to share here what touches me the most: his correspondence with Sri Aurobindo on Savitri, in the early stages of its composition.

 

I was privileged to read Savitri with Amal, whose wonderfully alert mind, rhythmic recitation and remarkable sense of humour filled the hours with a unique joy.

 

Unfortunately, we could read Savitri only up to the end of Ashwapathy's Yoga due to his convalescence. But it is reassuring to see him cheerful as ever with the constant presence of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, shining on his face which beams with their Light and Delight.

 

Sri Aurobindo was an Avatar, who came upon earth to guide those who are ready to take a leap to the next stage of the evolution of consciousness. He represented "a decisive action direct from the Supreme." Poetry arose in Sri Aurobindo like a mantra, cascading with its glory and splendour and filling us with the nectar of the Divine.

Amal was definitely aware of this and respected it fully. How could he, then, even think of commenting on Sri Aurobindo's lines or images and even the choice of words in Savitri?

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Well, Amal has the sharp, distinct mind of a critic and he did not want any question that may arise in the mind of the reader of Savitri, the magnificent epic of Sri Aurobindo, to be left unresolved, unanswered or unattended to. He loved and adored Sri Aurobindo. And Sri Aurobindo had seen in Amal Kiran "the clear ray". He used to send the very first draft of Savitri only to Amal, who was like His sounding board.

Sri Aurobindo had kept himself "open to every suggestion from a sympathetic and understanding quarter." He could accept the suggestion only when he saw that it was well-founded. For that "the critic must be open to this kind of poetry, able to see the spiritual vision it conveyed, capable too of feeling the Overhead touch when it comes - the fit reader."

Sri Aurobindo must obviously have found in Amal this fit reader. And Amal was a meticulously careful reader too of Savitri's drafts that came to him from Sri Aurobindo. He ensured that "whatever seemed a shortcoming, no matter how slight and negligible in the midst of the abundant excellence, was pointedly remarked upon so that Sri Aurobindo might not overlook anything in His work towards what he called 'perfect perfection' before the poem came under the scrutiny of non-Aurobindonian critics at the time of publication. The commentator was anxious that there should be no spots on Savitri's sun."

Well, this explains Amal's critical yet respectful daring which Sri Aurobindo welcomed and even asked for his suggestions. And what has emerged from this correspondence is such a treasure of knowledge, which enlightens us on so many aspects of Savitri.

On many occasions, Sri Aurobindo holds his ground and strongly defends himself. Sure of the inspiration he has received from above, he gives a detailed analysis of the lines, images or words criticised, rejecting the alternatives suggested and refusing to change even if he were to be given

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"the crown and income of the Kavi Samrat for doing it." And what a marvellous elucidation flows from the pen of the Master!

We understand Savitri better through this correspondence since Sri Aurobindo explains this legend as a symbol of the spiritual adventure of the evolution of consciousness. Aren't we, the readers, grateful beneficiaries of this magnificent gift, thanks to Amal, who could draw out from Sri Aurobindo the great wealth of innumerable rarest gems of this mystic poetry by his dogged persistence and pointed intellectual questionings.

It is a greater delight to read the mantric chant of Savitri, filling us with its splendour and glory revealed by Sri Aurobindo, the Master to his conscientious disciple, Amal Kiran.

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Celebrating a Centenary

 

 

A CENTENARY, if it has not to become a brief evanescent moment inspired by some faithful sentiments, is a time to look back. It is a looking back in a special way, to look back so as to move ahead, since that is the general direction in which flows the Time-spirit. And when we look back, especially upon the life of someone as great and many-sided a personality as our very own Amal Kiran, we have to be even more careful that we do not lose sight of the person who stands behind the personality. For, our persona is a mask that hides behind its veil of many hues, the face of the One Eternal whom we love in different forms. And this indeed is the true greatness of an individual, the greatness of the divine in him. For a man can be great and many-sided, he may possess a rare force of intellect, a strong and robust vital in a truly beautiful and healthy body. Yet if the secret soul is not born then there is nothing of true and lasting significance about him. The real worth of a man's life is not in what he does or does not do but in what he is and inwardly becomes. It is the extent to which he has been able to reveal to our mortal eyes the face and beauty of the Eternal who hides within every form. Our life will have meaning if through the facade of our outer nature, earth and humanity can come in some palpable touch of His Love, Light, Peace, Strength, Sweetness and Bliss. For is not Sri Aurobindo's yoga essentially about making the human consciousness a bridge through which the heavenly goods can be brought down upon earth:

 

What would be the use of man if he were not created to throw a bridge between That which is eternally but is unmanifested and that which is manifested, between

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all the transcendences and splendours of the divine life and all the dark and sorrowful ignorance of the material world? Man is the link between What must be and what is; he is the footbridge thrown across the abyss, he is the great cross-shaped X, the quarternary connecting link. His true domicile, the effective seat of his consciousness should be in the intermediary world at the meeting-point of the four arms of the cross, just where all the infinitude of the Unthinkable comes to take a precise form so that it may be projected into the innumerable manifestation....

 

That centre is a place of supreme love, of perfect consciousness, of pure and total knowledge. There establish, O Lord, those who can, who must and truly want to serve Thee, so that Thy work may be accomplished, the bridge definitively established, and Thy forces poured unwearyingly over the world.

 

(The Mother: Prayers and Meditations;

August 29,1914, p. 255)

 

Amal-da surely deserves this place of honour among Her children for being such an instrument and bridge for the Clear Ray of the Divine to shine upon our dull and clouded earth. It is not just the force and brilliance of his intellect that touches one so much as the clarity, light and sweetness of the soul in him. The throb of the soul and the light of higher regions are transmitted through a wide and plastic mind and clothed in powerful and luminous drapes from the creative vital. That makes a true genius in clay, and a beautiful one too. His is not just a bone-dry philosophy, brilliant and boring, analysing life from a remote and cold corner of the earth. It is rather a deep and profound wisdom born from life itself, a wisdom as of one who has truly lived his life and lived it fully, through all the senses and is yet somewhere free and above them. His is not a puritan, holier-than-thou attitude that makes you feel poor and low before a greatness man cannot touch. Greatness yes, but one that moves among the natural life of

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humanity, of one who has seen and known not only the rare summits of the inner Kanchanjangha or moved amidst the guardians of the sky, but also one who has seen and experienced the Grand canyons of life, passed through the dry desert-storms of Sahara, and is therefore full of a rare humility and compassionate understanding for the sweet-bitter follies of our earthly life. His is not the narrow equality of an ascetic temperament born of a withdrawal but from the touches that draw us out. It is more of the equality of a man who has seen all, lived all and loved all. Not the wisdom of a Jnani alone who sees but one half of the truth, but also and even more the wisdom of the courageous Bhakta who seeks after and finds his beloved everywhere, in the beatific splendours and raptures of high heavens as well as in the nerve-twisting agonies of hell. Such is the feeling one gets about him as one goes through the enormous work that the creative genius in him has been able to create. And what shines throughout these luminous pages is a deep devotion for his and our Masters Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. It is a kind of cheerful enthusiasm that flows out of some deep and soothing stream of love. It is a love that does not flow on the surface as a superficial sentiment but can be seen to a deeper view as a constant current intertwined in the very fabric of his consciousness and therefore very palpable through the light of the pages. Nor is this love of a traditional Bhakta who has forgotten man and humanity in his solitary and ecstatic contemplation of his personal Deity. It is rather a love that genuinely strives to find Him behind every mask, especially in that enigmatic mask of our humanity. It is this unique and beautiful blend of the loving Bhakta and the inspired, intuitive seer of truth rolled into one, this rare and forceful combination of the Apollonian and the Dionysian that makes his personality so very integral and attractive. For, is not the purpose of the Integral Yoga in one sense to reunite the diverse and even seemingly contradictory elements in our nature in and around the inmost soul, to offer this many-petalled unity at the Feet Divine with a

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will and aspiration that He may fill this flower with His sweetness and joy so as to make this earth a little more fra-grant, a little more beautiful? Or to put it differently, is not Integral Yoga an opening of our entire humanity to the divine influx from above so that all in us may be gradually moulded into a diviner image that can widely receive and flawlessly transmit the Divine Influence to our struggling and striving earth? And to the extent that one can do this or allow the Divine in him to do it, we discover the wonder of the person behind the personality. Since more than the individual it is the wonder and marvel of the Divine in him who can infuse Light, Beauty, Love and Truth into this engine seemingly built out of mud and broken as a toy after a day's use by careless powers. When we admire a person truly, we actually admire the Divine and His work in him. For who would be foolish enough to think or believe that an exquisitely carved vase full of rare and lovely flowers is a credit to the clay that allowed itself to be moulded and the flowers that resisted not the bloom when the sun shone above them! The divine artist is one with His art. Nay it is He Himself who becomes His art and wherever we find a touch of His splendour we can be sure that it is He who is hiding behind it or shining through it. Those through whom He shines are the creative works of His art, those through whom He yet shines not are also His works of art that are yet in the making. And are not all of us that, a little half-made, a little in the making! This is the real significance of looking back at the lives of those who have trodden the path before us. It helps us appreciate the working of the Divine in man and reveals to us something of His art and creative mystery in human terms.

 

 

Having said that let us now turn to something about these moments of celebrations and reminiscences on a more general note. In our approach towards those who have walked before us we sometimes adopt one of the two attitudes, that of admiration and offering a eulogy, or else that of denunciation and offering an apology. Both of these approaches are of no good, and depending upon the

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context may even be harmful. For, to be unduly impressed by someone is to come directly or indirectly under the influence of the person's individual consciousness, and if the individual has arrived at some higher perfection, he is still but one filter through which the Divine consciousness pours Itself and Its energies upon the world. We have to be exclusively under the Influence of the Divine who alone can be the true and perfect guide, who for us has assumed the form of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. When we appreciate and admire someone we must never lose sight of this central fact that it is the Divine who has made the person what he is. Once when the sehnai maestro Bismillah Khan in one of those rare soulful moments remarked, "People appreciate Bismillah Khan's sehnai, his music, but the real praise is to the Almighty who created a Bismillah Khan." So very beautiful and so very true! So this is not about eulogising any-one. But also in our approach to the lives of the truly great ones we should safeguard against the tendency of denouncing and criticising, of belittling the struggles and efforts of those who have walked before us. For when we do that we. are actually critical of the Divine in man. To criticise some-one is to actually interfere with the Divine working in that individual. It is also the sign of a warped ego failing to acknowledge the much greater difficulties of those who came along with the Divine and form part of His Work upon earth and humanity. Let us not forget that while theirs has been a greater privilege, theirs has been a greater difficulty as well. So let us in all humility owe the gratitude that is due to those who have shared with the Divine the burden of our frail humanity and accepted the difficulty that few could dare. At the end what counts is not who or what we were but what we could become by lending ourselves to the workings of the Divine Grace. Even to be able to stay near the Divine is no easy task, to bear the sweet and fiery assault of that ether and of fire. It is said and rightly so that fools judge the Master by the disciple while the wise judge the disciple by the Master.

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Yet there is something really important that we can learn by looking at the life of these vanguards of the future. And therefore is this effort of looking back abundantly rewarding. The very first thing that we learn by turning the pages in the life of these illustrious ones who have lived close to the Divine is something about the Divine's dealings with our humanity. It is a Bhagavata in its own right, the Lila of The Lord with His playmates whom He called along with Him from those concealed spheres of Light. And just like the Bhagavata it has also a liberating effect upon us since it brings the Divine so very close to us. It is thanks to the many reminiscences of these early forerunners that we get within the range of our vision the human side of the Divine and the pragmatic side of the yoga. We can relatively easily identify with them, with their ail-too human difficulties, with their aspirations, hopes and falls and climbs. Because there is one thing that is uniquely human and that is faith. For while we can see all other human qualities sublimated, purified, intensified and uplifted to their true divine stature in the Divine-become-human, it is only faith that is the special privilege of humanity since it does not yet live in the self-aware light of the Divine consciousness. The story of the Divine revealed in a human form is the story of Love and Strength and Compassion and Grace and Truth and Force and Harmony and Peace and Wisdom and Bliss. But the story of the Divine half-revealed, half-masked in man is the story of faith, aspiration, courage, perseverance, sincerity, devotion and surrender. Both are a necessary complement to each other; both inspire us, one from above, the other from below and within. If the Divine Master opens the path and shows us the way and carries us in His arms, the devotee of God shows us how to walk on the path thus opened, how to be carried despite ourselves and our follies. For in the end what counts is not our follies but our faith, not the number of times we fell on the road but the number of times He helped us get up and walk and climb again, not the failures of yesteryears but the victory of tomorrow. For a man is not his failings,

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just as he is not his success, not his personal deficiencies, just as he is not the capacity of a more or less developed nature. These are only pale hints and weak reflections, distortions of a truth by the mirror of his outer nature which is not yet polished and pure. There are some who can see nothing but the surface and the shadow in others. Trapped in their own surface mud they are blind to anything deeper within and therefore see by proxy in others what they al-ways carry but refuse to acknowledge in themselves. It is foolish to measure a man merely by his outer capacities and achievements. It is even more and doubly foolish to measure a man by his outer failures and deficiencies. The true measure of a man is his inmost aspiration and faith. It is this that the Divine sees, this that carries the stamp and seal of the Divine within him. And when we turn to the lives of these great and shining ones this we must see, the fire of aspiration that they carry within their hearts and souls and the faith with which they are born. For truly a man is his faith says the Gita.

 

...there comes a remarkable line in which the Gita tells us that this Purusha, this soul in man, is, as it were, made of sraddha, a faith, a will to be, a belief in itself and existence, and whatever is that will, faith or constituting belief in him, he is that and that is he. Sraddhamayo yam purusoyo yac-chraddhah sa eva sah. If we look into this pregnant saying a little closely, we shall find that this single line contains implied in its few forceful words almost the whole theory of the modern gospel of pragmatism. For if a man or the soul in a man consists of the faith which is in him, taken in this deeper sense, then it follows that the truth which he sees and wills to live is for him the truth of his being, the truth of himself that he has created or is creating and there can be for him no other real truth. This truth is a thing of his inner and outer action, a thing of his becoming, of the soul's dynamics, not of that in him which never changes. He is what he is today by some

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past will of his nature sustained and continued by a present will to know, to believe and to be in his intelligence and vital force, and whatever new turn is taken by this will and faith active in his very substance, that he will tend to become in the future. We create our own truth of existence in our own action of mind and life, which is another way of saying that we create our own selves, are our own makers.

(Sri Aurobindo: Essays on the Gita, p. 482)

 

What we leave behind as we look back is the shadow of our past, but what is still unborn in us and towards which we inevitably move navigated by the light of faith is our future. For as is a man's faith, that in the end he becomes. Faith is the cry of the unborn child in him. It is this that we must look for and be inspired by in turning towards those who walk ahead, their backs turned against the trail of the shadow left behind, their face turned towards the blazing lights of God ahead. For God moves always forward in a perpetual and endless becoming. And that is what we must wish for each of those who have gone ahead and for many who are still to follow the footprints of the Divine left upon the waste-lands of human life. For wherever we find a divine bloom, something true and beautiful, something high and inspiring, something that uplifts us beyond our little humanity, there has He passed by and His breath has leant its fragrance to our otherwise insipid life. So let us end as we began but on a more practical note. To celebrate the centenary of some-one like Amal-da is to celebrate a hundred years of a fruitful life lived in close collaboration with the Divine. And that indeed is the most unique achievement. Let us wish them hundreds of years more of such a wonderful collaboration. Let us celebrate one more passage to victory of the Divine in man.

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Amal Kiran - My Wonderful Teacher

 

The MOTHER arranged my reading with Amal Kiran (K,D. Sethna) in 1962.

 

Sri Aurobindo had first introduced Savitri to Amal in private drafts and written to him most of the letters that are now published along with the Epic.

 

For the first time Amal and I met in 1961 upstairs in the passage which connects the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's rooms. I casually asked him about a chess board because the Mother and I were doing something on the theme. He drew it and made me understand it.

 

When we started our reading of Savitri, some interested people warned Amal against me and asked him to discontinue. Amal cut them short by saying: "The Mother has ar-ranged our reading. Besides, I have seen and felt Huta's soul. I cannot back out."

 

Amal made me understand Savitri intellectually and aesthetically.

 

It was 7th August 1965 when I finished reading the whole of Savitri with him. I could not check my tears of joy. Amal too was moved. We shook hands over the long harmonious collaboration and absorbing discussions.

 

That day in the afternoon I went to the Mother to inform her about it. She smiled and heaved a sigh of happiness and said:

 

Ah, one great work is done.

 

*

 

As soon as Amal left my apartment, I wrote down what he had explained to me in detail. I have cherished several note-books which are of great value to me.

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Here are Amal's own words in Mother India, May 1979, p. 276:

 

...An appreciative treatment of Savitri in terms of its quality - an elucidation of its thought-content, its imagery-inspiration, its word-craft and its rhythm-impact: this the Mother did not consider as beyond another interpreter than herself. I can conclude thus because she fully approved Huta's proposal to her that I should go through the whole of the Epic with Huta during the period when the Mother and she were doing the illustrations of the poem, the Mother making outline sketches or suggesting the general description of the required picture and Huta following her instructions, invoking Sri Aurobindo's spiritual help, keeping the Mother's presence constantly linked to both her heart and hand producing the final finished painting.

 

It was a long-drawn-out pleasure - my study-sessions with the young artist who proved to be a most eager and receptive pupil, indeed so receptive that on a few occasions, with my expository enthusiasm serving as spur, she would come out with ideas that taught a thing or two to the teacher.

 

I never thought he would write such a thing about me. I always marvelled at his modesty, selflessness and good will.

 

He also wrote without my knowledge in his book Life-Poetry-Yoga:
 

...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, sixties and after, but she happens to be perhaps the single friend in re-lation to whom the generally forgotten proto-artist of the Ashram has lingered in stray action on private occasion.

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Here is Amal's letter to me dated 4-12-74:

 

Dear Huta,

May I make a request to you? You are free to say 'No' without feeling any embarrassment. I remember that in your diary there is a statement by the Mother that before she came here she went through all possible occult experiences. She never told them to Sri Aurobindo but later she found them all expressed in Savitri. I should like very much to publish this statement in the February Mother India. Will you permit me and, if you do, will you please send me as soon as possible the exact words as reported by you? I shall be thankful and, of course, I will mention that they are from you.

Yours affectionately

Amal

Later Amal gave the account of this matter in Mother India's issue of November 1982 and not in that of February 1975.

 

*

 

When the paintings of the whole of Savitri were over they were exhibited in February1967along with the Mother's sketches.

 

The Mother asked me not to attend the exposition. So I wrote my declaration as follows:

 

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

 

This is what Sri Aurobindo has written in Savitri. I feel that the painting of the pictures exhibited here is explained only by this line. For the task which the Mother had given me was so immense, so beyond the capacity of the little instrument she had summoned, that only her Grace working in Sri Aurobindo's Light could have seen me through.

 

I am deeply grateful to the Mother for her constant personal guidance - outward as well as inward. And what shall I say of the Presence of Sri Aurobindo helping all along?

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I thank the Mother also for making possible a study of the Epic with Amal Kiran.

 

Several years later Amal wrote:

 

From 'The Clear Ray' to 'The Offered One'.

 

Dearest Huta

A happy birthday

embodying that vision of Sri Aurobindo -

"Light, endless Light! darkness has room no more" -

and ever voicing for earth the invocation: "

O Wisdom-splendour, Mother of the universe, Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride."

In unison with your old friend

 

Amal

1-9-1993

 

Amal never lost the chance to write to me humorous notes. Here are two masterpieces!

 

Dear Huta,

It does not matter even if you forget. But once you remember that you have not forgotten, your memory is not yet sufficiently supramentalised like Nirod's. Wish you more progress!

 

I had misplaced the October instalment of The Story of a Soul. Then eventually I found and sent it to Amal. He wrote:

 

Dear Huta,

I am glad that the "Old Lady" has been saved from the re-typing the Oct. instalment. Some tonic for the memory is needed - to save it from getting Nirodianly Supramentalised at such a young age!

 

I relished his sense of humour. I like his company, be-cause he has treasures of knowledge, he has a wonderful understanding, consideration, and a broad mind. The adjectives to describe him are not enough.

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I have been always feeling that his consciousness is flour-ishing in Sri Aurobindo's Light, and his psychic is constantly nestled in the Mother's loving arms. That is the reason why I always see Amal as "The Clear Ray".

 

May the Supreme Lord and the Supreme Mother fulfil all his highest aspirations.

 

IN THEIR LOVE

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K.D. Sethna as the Editor

of Mother India

 

 

K.D. SETHNA (Amal Kiran) is a veteran editor of the journal Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture. Nirodbaran says: "Sri Aurobindo had made Amal a political thinker and a commentator as well. When Mother India was started in Bombay with Amal as its editor, he used to send his editorials for Sri Aurobindo's perusal and sanction. I used to read them to Sri Aurobindo. The Mother found one editorial too strong and brought it to his notice. But he approved of it. He considered Mother India as his paper, as did the Mother consider the Bulletin as her paper.

 

"During the twelve years when all correspondence was stopped only Dilip and Amal were made exceptions."¹

 

Why did the editor decide to launch Mother India on 19th February close to the Mother's birthday, 21st February?

 

On 21st February the earth received into its bosom the child that was destined to become the manifestation and embodiment of the Divine Shakti, the Mother who, sacrificing the heavens for a mortal birth, came so that she might ensure the fulfilment of the Supreme Endeavour, the Supramentalisation of earth's nature. She was destined, in this earth-drama of evolution, to play the role of Prakriti to her Purusha, Radha to her Krishna and Savitri to her Satyavan. She is the Mediator between the light and the human consciousness bringing her Force to the disciples who could bear its Light and Power.

 

 

1. Nirodbaran and Deshpande, R.Y., Ed. Amal-Kiran: Poet and Critic, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1994, pp. 306-07.

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The Mother and SriAurobindo are the guiding spirits of the Ashram. The Ashram is the nucleus of the Integral Yoga where the true Indian consciousness, the consciousness of the Divine and Eternal, is sought to be developed on the basis of a new, dynamic solution to the problems of life.

 

K.D. Sethna, editor of Mother India, has chosen this name for the magazine, because "India is a country whose very birth-cry, so to speak, was for the Superhuman, the Divine in concrete experience. The Vedas and the Upanishads are not primarily artistic creations, structures of speculative thought or manuals of morality and religious injunction. No doubt, they are masterpieces of poetic beauty and sub-limity, embalm enormous audacities of the thinking mind, fountain forth a myriad wisdom of noble living. But, first and foremost, they are scriptures of God-realisation, word-embodiments of mysticism and spirituality, testimonies of union with the Infinite and the Eternal. India, therefore, essentially represents the luminousness that is the Truth of truths."²

 

Growth and decay, changes and revolutions may occur in the body of a country, in the outer form, but so long as the idea it represents is kept secure and living and conscious, there is no danger to the country. Sri Aurobindo has said, "In the worst period of decline and failure this spirit was not dead in India... ."³ He further says: "In spite of all drawbacks and in spite of downfall the spirit of Indian culture, its cen-tral ideas, its best ideals have still their message for huma-ity and not for India alone. And we in India hold that they are capable of developing out themselves by contact with new need and idea as good and better solutions of the prob-lems before us than those which are offered to us second-hand from Western sources."⁴

 

 

2. Mother India, February 1952, p. 2.

3. Sri Aurobindo on India, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Society, p. 50.

4. Ibid., pp. 14-15.

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The living idea in the inner being of Bharat is the attempt to achieve a resolution, a reconciliation, a harmonisation and synthesis of the oppositions, contradictions, riddles and paradoxes of this world. The seers, who saw oneness in the manyness that we see around us, began to explore the causes of the apparent multiplicity, how the many are strung invisibly upon the thread of the unity, how the one unites the many and how this is the answer to the problem of existence, this the explanation and this the synthesis. It was then that the idea which is the soul of Bharat was born.

 

What is the ideal of Mother India?

 

K.D. Sethna published his first editorial in Mother India on February 19, 1949 under the title "WHAT WE STAND FOR". I am quoting the following lines from his article: "We have named our paper Mother India with a purpose. There is a tendency among us to regard India as just a collection of human beings with certain common racial and cultural characteristics. But India is more than a collection of human beings. India is a living entity, a pre-siding genius, the one self of all these human beings and the one consciousness that is at work in them. You cannot make a nation with a mere aggregate of individuals. A nation is a single being....

 

"The sense of India as the living Mother is what we are aiming to kindle everywhere in this country. But to kindle this sense is not to answer the whole need of the times. Every country has a presiding genius, whether openly acknowledged or not. But every country has predominant qualities, a typical nature, a central function. We must realise what exactly are the face and form of our presiding genius. What is Mother India?

 

"Mother India is manifold. Art, philosophy, science, politics, industry - all these she has been known for through the ages. Yet brighter than her fame for these has been her fame for seeking the Godhead secret within earth's life... And un-less we realise that Mother India is a spiritual light we shall either fumble in the dark or run after delusive gleams. We

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cannot fulfil our destiny without following the instinct of divinity in us.

 

"Does this mean we must be religious zealots, fanatics of a creed? Certainly not. The spiritual light that is Mother India is wider than religiosity. It has room for a thousand different ways of worship. Inasmuch as it is not limited to a narrow sectarianism it makes for a secular view of the State. But by 'secular' we must not understand indifference to the instinct of divinity. To be secular can be for Indians nothing except being widely spiritual rather than narrowly religious. The instinct of divinity we must never lose hold on: without it we shall be false to our whole historical development and to the power that has made us great in the past and led to our survival while all other ancient civilisations have died. It shows us our 'swabhava' our real fountainhead of action. If we deny our 'swabhava', we shall miss our goal.

 

".. .We have to admit that there has been a trend in India to look too much beyond the world and renounce earth-life. But it is not the only trend, and spirituality can be dynamic as so often spirituality has been in India. The full flowering, the full richness of life on earth is what we aim at when we point to the instinct of divinity as the 'swabhava' of the Indian nation.

 

"Our paper, therefore, will not stand aloof from the march of events. It will be in the very thick of them and take its position in the arena of politics. But in the hubbub of political slogans we bring a standard that is non-political.... And our standard of judgment, by being essentially non-political and above all parties, will conduce to an impartiality, a freedom, a wideness, a depth of vision.

 

"We are on the side of neither capitalism nor communism nor any other political 'ism'. In every field of activity we shall criticise whatever militates against the instinct of divinity and blocks the work of the spiritual force that is Mother India.... The Godhead secret within man is the truth of the man and most keenly the truth of the Indian nation, he truth that has to be lived out as much as possible. Not

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for any lesser ideal dc/we launch our paper and only this highest ideal we have in mind when we take as our motto the ancient cry: 'Great is truth and it shall prevail'."⁵

 

Why is our magazine called a Monthly Review of Culture?

 

Culture means essentially inner refinement and education. It means also the outer system of civilisation, the arts and crafts, the literature, the physical and psychological sciences, the social-political organisation, the economic and industrial set-up. In a deeper and truer sense, the culture of India is a way of life intended to prepare man for a greater existence. Both the individual and collectivity seek to achieve that aim through this culture. But each depends on the other for its growth. Therefore in social orders and institutions every facility is given for man to develop and grow in readiness for the ultimate aim of life. Sri Aurobindo has explained the distinctive character of Indian Culture in his books: The Foundations of Indian Culture, The Renaissance in India, Essays on the Gita, The Synthesis of Yoga.

 

We can sum up the distinctive character of Indian Culture in the following passage from Sri Aurobindo's writings:

 

"...the people of India, even the 'ignorant masses' have this distinction that they are by centuries of training nearer to the inner realities, are divided from them by a less thick veil of the universal ignorance and more easily led back to a vital glimpse of God and Spirit, self and eternity than the. mass of men or even the cultured elite anywhere else.... This strong permeation or close nearness of the spiritual turn, this readiness of the mind of a whole nation to turn to the highest realities is the sign and fruit of an agelong, a real and a still living and supremely spiritual culture."⁶

 

K.D. Sethna has shown the highest aim of culture in his articles published in Mother India, In the following passages he gave his illuminating  thoughts; "...a proper understanding

 

 

5. Sethna, K.D., India and the World Scene, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Institute of Research in Social Studies, 1997, pp. 3-5.

6. The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, pp. 128-29.

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of the cultural activity points to a spiritual origin of it and a spiritual objective. In Culture, considered deeply and not as a mere inventive exercise for the adornment or aggrandisement of common life, we have two movements - the unfoldment of man's power of the True, the Beautiful and the Good and the lifting of that power to its highest realisable creativity.... The second movement of Culture - the lifting ever higher of our power of unfolding the True, the Beautiful and the Good - directs attention beyond the intellect which seeks to catch the whole of complex Reality in logically consistent formulas, the aesthetic faculty which strives to seize in delightful patterns all the affinities and contrasts of existence, the ethical nature which longs to turn the varied conditions of life into equal occasions for striking into unegoistic shapes the interrelations of individuals. The second movement does not only testify to the idealist in the thinker, the artist and the moral man: it also gives evidence of a gradation in Values. Truth is seen as of many planes - outer, inner, inmost, highest. Beauty is visioned as of several degrees - gross, subtle, supernatural, beatific. Goodness is beheld as of numerous poises - impulsive, intelligent, inspired, enlightened. And an urge is felt to rise from stage to stage, refine and largen one's capacity, merge one's initiative with some in-dwell-ing and over-brooding Mystery that is the All-True, the All-Beautiful, the All-Good." ⁷

 

The editor of Mother India kindles a vision that bears on the whole human situation, meeting its most central and re-current as well as its most external and diverse issues, man in every mode and field - the thinker and scientist, the artist and the mystic. Reminiscences, essays, stories, talks on Art and Culture, Integral Yoga and world problems have poured from his pen.

 

K.D. Sethna's untiring effort has been to bring out the in-ner truth of manifold activities and problems of human life.

 

 

7. "The Cause of Culture", Mother India, March 1952, pp. 1-2.

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A message was given by the Mother to the Society for the Spiritual and Cultural Renaissance of Bharat on 23 August 1951:

 

"Let the splendour of Bharat's past be reborn in the realisation of her imminent future with the help and blessings of her living soul."

 

Throughout his life K.D. Sethna has followed the method of "Remember and Offer" in editing the magazine. When Mother India was in a quandary at the time of launching it, the editors of other magazines of Bombay discouraged him from launching the magazine on the particular date as the materials for at least six months were not ready at hand. "The Editor was rather worried over that part of his job which was to consist in writing thousands of words on various political themes in a manner that would be clear, cogent, penetrating, widely informed, easily authoritative, enlightened by a view of national and international situations from the height of Sri Aurobindo's thought."⁸ In order to be relieved from the burden, the editor put it to the Mother: '"Mother, I have to be an expert political thinker and writer. But I have no turn for politics and no touch with it.' She smiled a cool sweet smile and answered: 'Neither have 17 The editor got a start: 'Well, then what shall I do?' Again the imperturbable sweetness and then the reply: 'There is Sri Aurobindo. He will guide you in everything.' A sudden flood of power swept over the hearer. 'Oh, yes,' he said, 'Sri Aurobindo will surely do the impossible.' And Sri Aurobindo did."⁹

 

K.D. Sethna writes: "When the main articles for the first issue - written by the Editor and Albless -* were sent to Pondicherry, not only Sri Aurobindo but also the Mother listened to Nolini's reading out of them. Both the Gurus sent words of praise and total sanction. However, in the Bombay-

 

 

8. Sethna, K.D., The Sun and the Rainbow, Hyderabad: Institute of Human Study, 1981, p. 60.

9. Ibid, p. 61.

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office where various practitioners of journalism dropped in for a close look at the experiment, a crisis arose. The office had been set up only six or seven weeks before the projected date for the opening number. There were no materials in reserve except for two or three issues. Several newspapermen raised their eyebrows to convey that this would never do. One day a veteran journalist appeared and clinched the others' contention. He told the small staff that they were heading for the rocks: unless they had six months' matter in hand it was foolhardy to start on February 21,1949. They said their opening number would be a brilliant one and it would be a shame to suppress it.

 

"Mother India was in a quandary.... Yet the Editor could not bring himself to involve everything in a rapturous risk. He thought it best to consult the Mother. So he despatched to her an .urgent note... On January 27, 1949, the Editor received the telegram: 'Stick to the date. Live on faith. Blessings - Mother.' With a whoop the office went into action - and faith in the Mother's Grace has kept Mother India in action up to now."¹⁰

 

Throughout his life Amal Kiran has been depending on the Mother's Grace. It was noticed by me when Amal met with a serious accident in 1991 and he fell down in his office room while moving with the help of his 'Walker' and his right thigh-bone was fractured. He was taken to the Ashram Nursing Home. It was decided by the doctors that his leg should be kept in traction. I was with him often in the Nursing Home and noticed what an uncomfortable life it was for him. But he was calm, always smiling. The days were spent in meditation, in writing letters, dipping into literary journals or else preparing the future issues of Mother India. I remember that he had told me, just two days after his fall, that he had the matter ready for the next issue, but that it might not be possible to continue under these circumstances. As the manager of Mother India, without thinking for a moment,

 

10. Ibid., pp. 61-62.

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I told him: "No, Amal, the Mother's Mother India cannot be discontinued. Did you forget the Mother's gracious telegram at the time of your first publication, 'Stick to the date. Live on faith. Blessings'?" When I reminded him of these words, his face lighted up and he said: "Yes, it will be continued." I kept on saying: "Whatever help you need from me for bringing out the magazine I am ready to give." I have found that he was able to bring out subsequent issues very meticulously without any difficulty. What Grace it was! It is my feeling that Amal Kiran lives in Sri Aurobindo.

 

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The Sky Sings...

 

 

The sky sings his glory;

The sea swells far and wide,

 The soil smiles beside

While I push a soul-suffused

Centennial baby

In a wheel-chair-pram.

 

 

The baby scatters

 His fun and smile

 As of a cute child

Of ten-months old.

His wise joviality

Impresses the traffic

And the passers-by

 In a magic circle

Of exuberant ecstasy.

 

 

As a companion

Or as a meek matron

 I feel nothing but pride

 In pushing his wheel-chair

 Or seeing him

Pushed by my side.

 

 

My motherly heart,

Sealed so long

Opens abruptly

Like a secret spring

And I have nothing

 

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More to offer

 Than a love

Perennial and pure,

A wish to see him

Stay still longer!

 

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The Magic Shoes

 

 

IN Satyajit Ray's famous film "Gupi Gyne -Bagha Byne" one comes across the king of Ghosts who gave three boons. One of the three was a gift of magic shoes. These were beautifully brocaded shoes of the Lucknow's Nabab's era. They carried Gupi and Bagha anywhere they wanted to go and finally the shoes carried them to Shundi, their final destination.

 

In case of Amal Kiran's magic shoes, I am sure they were not of Nabab's era but they were the "Bahanas" to have carried him to his ultimate destination - Pondicherry -not only physically but inwardly to a destination of soul's climb.

 

Born in an well-to-do Parsi family, the humorist Yogi never faced any material need but the need of his soul to grow, to develop, to reach higher and higher was always a necessary yearning of his being and still at the age of a hundred, the climb up with determination and persistence has not diminished. Age is no bar when the spirit is immersed in the Sadhana of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

 

At a very early age an attack of Polio deformed one leg and here too he is a living example that a physical incapability need not hamper the growth of intellect and spirit. A Stephen Hawkins of our Ashram, he spent his early life in Bombay. Tall, slim, fair, with attractive features, he would be noticeable, in any case, among many others but his deformed leg would make one look at him with sympathy. Not in the least! His sense of humour, his vast knowledge, his alertness of mind, quick thinking and stuttering while speaking enhanced his charm and drew many towards him, especially his charming smile attracted the ladies.

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In Bombay, one day, he went to a shop to buy shoes. Back home he opened the newspaper covering that was wrapped around the shoes. His life took a sudden turn. An article on Sri Aurobindo had appeared in that newspaper and it caught his eyes. A voracious reader, he read the article, and a hidden small flame lit up in his innermost being. It was undistinguishable in the beginning, then the flame started growing and an urge to know the spiritual heritage of India grew. He met Sadhus and Sannyasins mainly due to the interest of his wife Lalita. They went to Calcutta, then came to Pondicherry. The "Bananas" carried him to his final destination They settled down in Pondicherry but after a few years went back to Bombay. But the "Bahanas", the magic shoes knew of his inner urge and Amal came back to Pondicherry and settled down here permanently.

 

In our school days in the Ashram we were in awe of and respeced his vast knowledge and intelligence - a man who could correspond with Sri Aurobindo on Savitri!

 

For us there were two Pandits in the Ashram - Nolini-da and Amal Kiran. Later on, a few casual meetings unveiled the loving, caring and understanding aspects of his nature. His whole being is so immersed in intellectual pursuits that he hardly bothered about his physical disability.

 

In 1991 when he fractured his thigh-bone, I went to meet him in the Ashram Nursing Home with some errand. His tall body was supine on the bed, one leg held high in traction. The upper body inclined on the pillows was bare and slurring bright, his face was calm and composed, aglow with a pink tinge -immune to any pain. He was holding a paper with his left hand, engrossed in reading and with a pen held in his right hand was doing proof-reading, as if the pain, the uncomfortable position, the agony were not his. His intellect was separate from his body - the agony and ecstasy co-existing side by side!

 

One after another he is climbing the hills, one after an-other, new splendours engulf him, his incessant march for-ward may never end because of the magic shoes wrapped in the newspaper with an article on Sri Aurobindo. We may close this piece with the following poem of Sri Aurobindo:

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Hill after hill was climbed and now,

 Behold, the last tremendous brow

And the great rock that none has trod:

A step, and all is sky and God.

 

("One Day - The Little More")

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Another "Living Centenary.."

 

Satadal

 

Last year we celebrated the "Living Centenary" of Nirodbaran, and this year we are going to celebrate another "Living Centenary", that of Amal Kiran.

 

Let us have some glimpses of this personality - the poet-essayist-critic-humorist - called Amal Kiran, as named by Sri Aurobindo, his Master.

 

Amal Kiran wrote a poem titled "Love and Death" which was published in Mother India of December 5,1969. One of the readers - Professor X - wrote to him: ".. .Your first line, 'We sign mortality in our marriage-beds' has a fribbling intervention of mind. Marriage is a flame which must have lighted you. The poem is rigged up in 'dense divinity' which presumes an ego to feel with. 'Mating' itself takes lines unknown which are more interesting than becoming 'immortal'.

 

"The withing movement of 'f'-sounds in the eighth line, 'From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh', takes us to the body's doom which is a self-inflicted doom. There is inevitable de-feat in using the word 'hermaphrodite'..."

 

In reply Amal Kiran exposed the untenability of such criticism thus:

 

... You are a Professor of English, not of Philosophy or Erotics. So why not give primarily an aesthetic response to my lines? I don't see - except in one place - that you have considered them as poetry at all. And in this one place I am afraid you have caught the rhythm wrongly. You speak of "the writhing movement of 'f -sounds in the eighth line, 'From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh'." What you have mistaken for writhing is really the trem-bling, quivering, flickering movement that is natural to an "f"-alliteration, as in Shakespeare's

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After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.

 

...Let me come now to your quarrel with my attitude and message. You refer to "a fribbling intervention of mind" in my opening sentence:

 

We sign mortality in our marriage-beds.

 

"Intervention of mind" I admit - in the sense that here is poetry of thought probing the problem of love. Thought surely is legitimate in poetry provided it is not abstract but moves with an intuitive edge. I do not plead guilty to "fribbling". I should say I am doing the very opposite of being frivolous: I am taking the phenomenon of love more seriously than people usually do. I am trying to understand why there is in us the urge to mate, and I say that it is because we are incomplete beings - incomplete both inwardly and outwardly - and one of the marks of our incompleteness is our little span of life, our mortality. To escape this sense of a life ending too soon and putting a finis to our hopes and dreams and aspirations, we move towards... a multiplication of our selves be-yond the death of the body, a vicarious immortality. And in the act of reproduction there is also a drive of ideal-ism: we have the vague prayer within us that our children may be wonderful - paragons of beauty, vessels of light, embodiments of happiness. The completion we ourselves lack is, instinctively, sought for in what we create: this is the point of the word "hermaphrodite" which I have used: it symbolises the wholeness that is not ours, the consummation of the fragmentariness which pushes us towards a counterpart....

(Mother India, March 1970)

 

In Mother India, January 2004, we find how beautifully \mal Kiran answers questions and rights the wrong while remaining faithful to his Master Sri Aurobindo:

You have asked me:

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"Would I be wrong if I said that one could word Sr Aurobindo's definition of poetry as in the draft below'

 

'"Poetry is the power of the word; the word that comes accompanied with vision; both the word and the vision mostly rising from their source in a higher consciousness - in Eternity - and coming up not necessarily to amuse, or teach, or earn, but as the inner being's own expressive impulse, an impulse for self-expression seeking liaison with Reality, the meaning of Existence, our real Home, - with Eternity, and affecting the "hearer" in an intense fearful way, putting him in a whirligig of sense and sound.'"

 

Yours is an interesting definition but perhaps as much a la Rameshwar Gupta as Aurobindonian. Below I have attempted one which I think is more Aurobindonian than Amalian and avoids the sudden sensationalism of your ending:

 

"Poetry, dealing with whatever themes are congenial to the poet, is intensity of vision, intensity of word and intensity of rhythm, caught from an inner intuitive consciousness. This consciousness is in touch with a one-yet-manifold universal being as well as with a higher realm of reality whose creative Delight and Truth-Consciousness have manifested all the worlds as its progressive self-expression. On the one side poetry may be called a happy play of the Gods; on the other it is a great formative and illuminative power. We have to listen to it across a thrilled silence within us, so that what has come from the inner intuitive consciousness of the poet may be received by our own 'soul' and open in us

 

                     A golden temple-door to things beyond."

(27.3.1976)

 

By the grace of the Divine Mother Amal Kiran had a fearful experience which showed him what in reality jealousy is. The experience in his own words is as follows:

 

 

 

 

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I was sitting at the top of the staircase outside the Mother's door. She used to open that door sometimes and glance at the people sitting. There was a girl next to me. I think it was Chinmayi who is no more with us. I had been waiting and waiting while she had just come. Suddenly the Mother opened the door, did not even look at me but just called Chinmayi in. Chinmayi went behind the Mother and I was left with the door practically shut in my face. I was terribly upset and a great surge of jealousy swept over me. Wave after hot wave struck against me and I was to-tally submerged. I felt extremely uncomfortable because it was a most unusual phenomenon with me. But I think the extreme form of my experience was secretly a gift of the Mother's grace, for it broke open an inner vision. When I hung my head down and looked between my legs at the stairs, I did not see the stairs but a black abyss, a bottom-less black abyss. At once I was shocked into saying: "Ah, so this is what jealousy is! It is a pit of darkness unfathomable which tries to suck us in irrevocably."

(Light and Laughter, p. 60)

 

Amal Kiran is full of wit and humour. In one of his talks to the students and teachers of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry - in short, of the Ashram School, - he said:

 

Let me whisper into your ears at the top of my voice an unbelievable secret. It is this: twice in Savitri, which is a legend and a symbol, Sri Aurobindo has referred to the present speaker, symbolically, although the speaker is very far yet from being legendary, (laughter) The first reference runs:

 

But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,

 Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow.

 

Surely the person intended is unmistakable.... The second reference goes:

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A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still

Accompanied by an eternal No.

 

Lest you should misunderstand, I must hurry to say that if the "limping Yes" is Amal Kiran, the "eternal No" accompanying him is not his wife! (laughter)

(Light and Laughter, pp. 2-3)

 

In Mother India, May 1971, we find that the Mother once asked Amal Kiran to paint the flowers given to him during Pranam. He did it with care and sincere devotion and we understand that there were many paintings of various flowers by Amal Kiran and on each painting the spiritual significance of the flower was written by the Mother herself. We hope that these paintings by Amal Kiran blessed by the Mother and carrying the spiritual significances of the flowers can be traced.

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Amal Kiran - The Pilgrim of Truth

 

 

Sri Aurobindo gave him the name Amal Kiran, a Sanskrit name that means The Clear Ray. With this name, Sri Aurobindo revealed K.D. Sethna's spiritual identity and his life's goal-of integral transformation for the Su-pramental Truth - the Supreme Light. On September 3,1930, at the age of nearly 27, thus began with Sri Aurobindo's santion this Pilgrim of Truth's exalted yoga sadhana of commitment and consecration in search of his destiny and its fulfilment. Sri Aurobindo had early on delineated to him the very nature of his personal Integral Yoga sadhana,

 

.. .There is only one truth in you on which you have to lay constant hold, the truth of your divine possibilities and the call of the higher Light to your nature.... Fix upon your mind and heart the resolution to live for the divine Truth and for that alone.. ¹

 

Amal Kiran has been single-minded about his quest all his life like a yogi. Even at an early age of twenty-three, he had expressed to the Mother, "I have seen everything in life. Now I want only God." We notice that at the age of twenty-four, his inmost longing was granted along with the assurance of fulfilment as recorded in his letter to the Mother,

 

Mother Divine, ever since the day you told me that it is my destiny to be transformed,I have tasted some-thing of the Peace that belongs to the time-transcending Consciousness in which the future is no uncertain

 

 

1. Nirodbaran and Deshpande, R.Y., Ed., Amal-Kiran: Poet and Critic, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1994, pp. 7-8.

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possibility but a path already traversed, a goal already attained, a truth of Eternity waiting only to be revealed and realised in Time.

 

.. .But with utter finality came your answer: "When I refer to your destiny, I mean this life and no other...²

 

In my pursuit of the Integral Yoga, I have immensely enjoyed reading Amal Kiran's writings. I have come to recognise that Amal Kiran's Yoga sadhana and his poetic endeavours are intertwined. His inner prayer, which he described as an echo in his depths became his fount and font of poems of deep within,

 

Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart, -

Call of the One!

Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,

O living Sun.³

 

He expressed what he experienced or aspired and his expressions became beauty and truth of his inner being. I consider yogi Amal Kiran a seeker of the Truth and discoverer of cosmic splendour as a poet of Integralism. His characterisation of his own poems published under the title, The Secret Splendour, is clearly indicative of his pursuit,

 

Poems seeking a new intensity of inner vision and emotion that would catch alive in words the deepest rhythms of the spirit secret behind man's life and the world in which he labours and aspires.

 

To me he is the sage poet of the Ashram. He inspired me and comforted me with recognition that my spiritual quest may be personal but that I am not alone in my endeavours. For instance, I find his following poems are representative of the universal nature of his poetry:

 

 

2. Ibid., p. 9.

3. Ibid., p. 325.

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"Pilgrim of Truth"

Each moment now is fraught with an immense

Allure and impulse of omnipotence;...

And all my waking grows a fathomless force,

An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I

Where time rolls inward to eternal shores.⁴

 

"My Life"

I live not from hour to hour

But in dream on dream of you, Sweet!

The dawn is the ten-petalled flower

Of your holy feet... .⁵

 

"This Errant Life"

This errant life is dear although it dies;...

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

 And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.⁶

 

In ancient India, the Seers were the poets of spirituality. They had heard the eternal Truth whispering in their inner being and seen the infinite Truth within and without. Their revelations were mantric in nature. We are fortunate to have Amal Kiran among us as an Aurobindonian poet, which he has characterised as follows,

 

The Aurobindonian poet recognises within himself the Lord of the Flame into whose creative beatitude he incessantly steeps his imagination by surrendering his conscious being to the spontaneities of mystical love and by contacting through the intuition of the aesthetic unity of the world a common spiritual foundation, to himself

 

 

4. Sethna, K.D., The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems, Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1993, p. 433.

5. Ibid., p. 244.

6. Ibid, pp. 70-71.

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and his environment, of a multiple yet unified glory presiding over the inferior phenomenon of the Spirit's hide-and-seek with Itself....

 

The Aurobindonian poet will be not merely... an instrument of forces which will work through him by passing inspirations. It will be a commentary on the consistent sainthood of his personality, on the divine way he will carry himself, the godlike way he will repose, the inexpressible way he will be silent.⁷

 

It is self-evident and inspiring that Amal Kiran as a pilgrim of Truth in the role of an Aurobindonian poet has be-come a shining example of the Mother's message: "Let your life be a constant search for the Truth and it will be worth ' living."

 

Amal Kiran is regarded around the world with admiration, respect and affection. He is a versatile genius and a polymath. He is an acclaimed poet, humorist, artist, historian, critical thinker, holistic philosopher and, above all, a sadhak of the Integral Yoga.

 

Over the years, I have come to know Amal Kiran as very affectionate Amal in my relation with him. Amal Kiran fascinated me in my earlier days because of his keen intellect, incisive analytical prowess, exhilarating ability to remember and relate disparate topics with thoroughness, and charming ability to synthesise seemingly complex issues in a reasonable and conclusive manner. His very precise and often-comprehensive discourses on Integral Yoga that seem to encompass literature, philosophy, science, history and spirituality in a very natural and harmonised way stimulated my interest in those subjects as well as they illumined my limited mind. He has been my hero when it comes to pursuing spiritual journalism to advocate, elaborate, elucidate and to counter criticisms of Sri Aurobindo's pursuits by

 

 

7. Amal Kiran, "The Aurobindonian Poet", Mother India, February 2001, pp. 99-101.

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people endowed with partial knowledge, preoccupied with preconceived notions, and limited ability to see things holistically. I used to think of Champaklal as the Mother's Lion, guarding Her physical domain. Likewise, I view Amal Kiran as Sri Aurobindo's Lion of mental-spiritual pursuits.

 

Yes, all these and some more are the reasons why I was drawn to Amal, in the first place. However, what has kept me coming to him time and again, and what has enabled me to strike an evolving and everlasting friendship with him is his engaging affection and his eagerness to welcome me whole-heartedly with a genuine soul-beaming smile. Yes, I know, I am fortunate! I am fortunate not because I deserve any of it but because it is the Grace of God working in a human relation. It is how Amal Rasa experience began for me and has continued.

 

After his hip injury in 1999, Amal opted to relocate to the Ashram Nursing Home. I visited him several times during my Pondicherry pilgrimage in the summer of 2000. Amal enjoys, gazing at the waves of the Pondicherry sea through the windows of the Nursing Home. During one of my visits, he seemed to plunge into the vast inner consciousness while enjoying the perpetual shore-bound motion of sunlight reflective luminous waves. It has been my privilege to take his photographs during my visits and so many of them have his affectionate notes on the back making them my priceless treasure. I would like to share two of them as they have pivotal significance indicating his transition from expressing to experiencing.

 

On May 1, 2000, he reflected about himself looking at his photographs taken by me. On the back of one photo-graph he wrote: "His look seems to try to pierce some will and to wonder whether any proper words could be found to express the discovery."

 

In addition, on the second photograph he wrote: "He seems to feel that the expression is possible but only with words native to the height and the depth and wideness of the plane envisioned."

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How remarkable these comments are! Amal, the master wordsmith was pondering about finding the proper words for the inner discovery! Amal, the articulate par excellence was experiencing inadequacy of our human language to capture and convey what was experienced deep within in the profound silence of his soul -chamber! Amal had transcended the glorious literary persona Amal. Amal was immersed in the rhythm of the cosmic vibration. Amal instead of being splendidly expressive about "it", was becoming humbly one with "it". It is a momentous transition from expressing to experiencing and this distinction is of a paramount significance. It reminds me of revelatory lines of Savitri:

 

A world unseen, unknown by outward mind

Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul.⁸

 

This transition of Amal Kiran as a silent individual is indicative of a paradigm shift - signifying the fundamental change in the state of his being. After decades of sadhana of consecration leading to prodigious creation, Amal now seemed to be at the threshold of the next step of his inner journey - not busy describing but submerged in experiencing and becoming. His poem, "My Emptiness", (February 26, 1981) was poignantly indicative of such things to come:

 

"My Emptiness"

So few can understand

My emptiness

 Which the Ineffable

Chooses to bless...

Now waits my life without

A gripping "I"-...

 How shall those unseen glories

Poor words express,

When all I show is a vigil

Of emptiness?⁹

 

 

 

8. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 27.

9. Sethna, K.D., The Secret Splendour, p. 641.

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To appreciate better his progressive transition, let us con-sider his poem "The Divine", (January 1,1944) in which Amal seeks the Divine that seems far far away and yet in the poem "Great Wings" (June 9,1948) he expresses his realisation that the Divine is within us!

 

"The Divine"

 

Frail boat of mine,

Be brave! Far though you wander,

 Your prow will face a secret yonder:

Ever the gleam of a new horizon-line

 Is the Divine.¹⁰

 

In the poem "The Divine", Amal portrays a mental im-age of where and what the Divine is.

 

"Great Wings"

 

But life gains not this liberty

Unless a wideness ever free

Is the formless depth of what we are,...

Godhead is only godhead by

A soar of Self within Self-space.¹¹

 

"Great Wings" is a very remarkable poem as in this poem Amal is sensitive to and expressive of the essential requirement of boundlessness of the inner-self to find the Godhead within. It resonates the aspirations or the rev-elations so elegantly expressed by others: Kahlil Gibran had whispered in his book, The Prophet, "...And then I shall come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean." Kabir, India's saintly bhakta had echoed the same spiritual encounter in a reverse sense as a duality of human-divine relation where the Infinite merges into an infinitesimal, "nave mey doob gai nadiya - river got submerged

 

10. Ibid., p. 539.

11. Ibid., p. 294.

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in canoe." Sri Aurobindo in Savitri: The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds revealed the reality of divinity as, "All ocean lived within a wandering drop."

 

Amal's "This Errant Life" is not merely a poetic expression of thoughts voyaging through Eternity randomly but it clearly reveals the blueprint of the inner transitional process of self becoming selfless to embody the Self within:

 

This errant life is dear although it dies;...

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow...

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow....

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,...

 

How prophetic is Sri Aurobindo's revelation:

 

The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,

One who is in us as our secret self...

We are sons of God and must be even as he:

His human portion, we must grow divine.

Our life is a paradox with God for key.¹²

 

Regarding the influence of Sri Aurobindo on his quest, Amal conveys in his introspective Introduction of The Secret Splendour, "...he (Sri Aurobindo) has been the end of my quest for a life-transforming spirituality as well as a poetry seeking a new intensity of vision and emotion, an illumined inwardness that would catch alive in words the deepest rhythms of the human soul evolving towards infinite beauty and eternal joy." In view of Amal's such consecration and aspiration, it comes as no surprise to notice the parallel between some of the lines of Savitri and the sadhana he pursues with utmost sincerity.

 

A wanderer in a world his thoughts have made,...

He journeys to a home he knows no more.

His own self's truth he seeks who is the Truth;

 

 

12. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 67.

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He is the Player who became the play,

He is the Thinker who became the thought;

He is the many who was the silent One... .¹³

The Voice replied: "Remember why thou cam'st:

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths,

Then mortal nature change to the divine.¹⁴

 

Sri Aurobindo has helped us with the framework of the blue-print of life's evolutionary mission but it is our choice to follow it. The choice is always ours - The Divine does not dictate the course of action. If the evolution is the driving force of the mystifying universe, the fathomless free choice seems to be one of its most alluring governing principles. This choice has to come from deep within us and one has to be able to hear it as well as recognise it as one's true calling. Amal Kiran's life journey is illustrative of this principle and reassuring to the seekers of Truth about the feasibility of it. It is indeed comforting to know the doability of life's mission when our individual undertaking is like J. R. R. Tolkien's the "Ring Bearer" but of individual destiny, which is how-ever inexplicably and integrally connected to the occultic universal scheme of things.

 

Maybe, someday Amal Kiran would choose to share with us the glimpses of his twilight journey culminating in a trans-formation of his transitional human self to a being of evolution of next step. Maybe someday, as and when it happens and if Amal Kiran would choose to narrate them, we may be privy to the process involved, the experiences encountered, and the milestones attained - the saga of Grace.

 

It seems to me that for the Poet Amal Kiran his poetic transition is reflective of his own inner transformation. His own transformation may be subtle in appearance but it is of significant value. Maybe the poet himself is sublimely be-coming the part of the cosmic poem of Splendour. This all-

 

 

13. Ibid., p. 68.

14. Ibid., Vol. 34, p. 476.

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encompassing reality of oneness with multitudinous cosmos most certainly leads to recognition of an individual self as a part and parcel of the Universal Being. It also seems that Amal in his eloquent silence is indicating that the journey of life is for the understanding of this transcendental Reality and internalising it as realised experience through one's own inner calling and sadhana.

 

This notion of oneness of an individual self with the Universal Being is not new. It is a verifiable statement of spiritual fact supported by the very essence of India's ancient Veda. It means that Existence is integrative and it is a unified seamless whole with infinite perspectives inherently impregnated with the trinity of Truth, Bliss and Beauty (Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram). This transformational relationship of man and God is depicted in the two-bird metaphor in Mundaka Upanishad, which derives its origin from the two-bird parable in Rig Veda. In case of Amal, an inevitable mile-stone in his pursuit of the Integral Yoga appears that he internalised this realisation, which is expressed in his poem,

 

"Two Birds"

 Lost in a dream no hunger broke,

This calm bird - aureoled, immense -

Sat motionless: all fruit he found

Within his own magnificence.

 

The watchful ravener below

 Felt his time-tortured passion cease,

And flying upward knew himself

One with that bird of golden peace.¹⁵

 

Amal by virtue of his quest and yogic sadhana has be-come a true example to all the Aurobindonians aspiring for the Truth and pursuing the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, "I aspire to infinite force, infinite knowledge, infinite bliss.

 

 

15. Sethna, K.D., The Secret Splendour, p. 131.

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Can I attain it? Yes, but the nature of infinity is that it has no end. Say not therefore that I attain it. I become it. Only so can man attain God by becoming God."¹⁶ Sri Aurobindo has presented to us the golden key of heavenly existence here on earth as, to find God, one has to become God. The New Year Message of 2000 in the Mother's words was: "O divine Master, let Thy light fall into this chaos and bring forth from it a new world. Accomplishing what is now in preparation and create a new humanity which may be the perfect expression of Thy new and sublime Law."

 

Among us, a few have dedicated their soul, life, work, and wealth completely to the Mother in the preparation of this new creation. They are the harbingers of a New Dawn. Amal is one of them.

Happy 100th Birthday, Amal Kiran - The Clear Ray!

 

 

16. The Hour of God, SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 2.

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Amal Kiran: The Clear Ray

 

 

I FIRST heard of him before I came to Pondicherry in 1972. One day some of my friends were going to visit him; I accompanied them so as to meet him. We all went to his house without prior appointment. We felt that all of us were part of the Mother's family and no formality was required. Truly, he received us very cordially, and made us feel free. Later, we were happy to have his contact.

 

Later, sometimes I had gone to show him my poems and articles. At such times, he used to treat me with the same frankness. Thus, an intimacy grew between us, and I was touched by his gentle behaviour.

 

Sometimes, in the 1970s, there used to be the Ashram Poets' Meet in the Hall of Harmony of our Centre of Educa-tion. Amal Kiran used to preside over such events at times. All of us knew his humorous temperament. He used to add his touch of humour while announcing the names of the poets. I do not remember all the comments that amused us, but one of them is still fresh in my memory. It was for a Gujarati gentleman (I still do not know his name) who used % to be on duty at the Golconde Gate. Amal-da announced his name as "GGG - Glory of Golconde Gate".

 

For quite many years, around 4 p.m., I used to go to the Samadhi with the Agarbattis given by our dear Ammaji (Navajata's mother). It so happened that it was also Amal-da's time to visit the Ashram. Mostly we used to pass by with a smile without any talk, but that smile was more than enough to keep the rapport intact. He would enter the Ashram holding two crutches and looked down as he walked towards the Samadhi. But he would never fail to see and smile at anyone known to him on the way. His seat was a

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chair near Pujalalji's room. Observing his temper free from mood of anger or antipathy for anybody, I was very much impressed. So one day, I told him, "1 feel very happy when I see you as you do not have any anger." Immediately, he replied, "You also do not seem to get angry." I said, "At times, in some situations, I do get angry, which I do not like." He told me very cooly, "Why should you get angry?" I reflected upon the worth of his statement. Because our getting angry never solves the problem or eases the situation. One has to just detach oneself from the unpleasantnesses and offer them to the Mother. His motto of life is "Remember and Offer". How simple but effective it is! But always we forget it and tend to react, which is a wrong step. We have to practise "Constant Remembrance of the Divine" and offer everything to Him. In spite of repeated failures we have to persist. Here we see him as the brightest example of this ideal. By regular practice he has established a divine equanimity in him. That is why we always see him as the same sweet person - Amal Kiran.

 

Another positive trait of his nature is that he never counts the outward worth of a person. Whosoever comes to him, he sees the divine possibilities and encourages him. A visitor from Orissa, a so-called layman, once came to meet him once. But he gave him much of his time and answered all his questions. One of such questions from this person was "Can I find the Divine in this life?" He replied, "Surely, you will!" Such a great assurance came not only from his surface mind bearing no weight, but from his insight which is confident and sure.

 

Years back, in 1991, when he had his accident after which he could not walk any more and was to be in a wheelchair, he was admitted into the Nursing Home for some time. When I went to meet him, I was surprised to see that he was sitting in his bed and editing the papers of Mother India. When he saw me, he immediately stopped his work and started talking to me. I felt rather guilty that his work suffered due to me. But he told me fondly that he could continue it after I

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leave, and he was not at all disturbed. Somebody else also came after me and he attended to the person gladly. I wondered how polite, humble and sincere is he!

 

A man free from ego is our dear Amal-da. He has received much of The Mother's and the Master's Grace that on the evening of the Supramental Manifestation upon earth in 1956 during the Playground meditation, he saw The Mother in his train compartment while he was travelling to Bombay. She had come there to inform him about the great descent in order to fulfil her promise to him years back.

 

In spite of all these divine boons, he is so humble and gentle that nobody ever feels any bar between him or her and Amal-da. He becomes a friend of all who come to him.

 

He is free from all useless gossip and politics. Never have I heard any criticism of anybody or anything from him. He is a true follower of The Mother's advice to the Ashramites. "When you have nothing pleasant to say about something or somebody in the Ashram, keep silent.

 

"You must know that this silence is faithfulness for the Divine's work." All of us have read this on the Dining Hall wall but how many of us practise it sincerely? Amal-da has succeeded and has kept himself engrossed in his work, read-ing and drawing more and more within to be closer and closer to our Gurus.

 

He never ran after any fame or recognition during his career but kept busy with his writing and sadhana. To quote him:

 

.. .1 am called and called beyond each mundane prize. Whatever Thy form, Thou unknown menace to my human heart, I love Thee. O sweet devouring wideness - from above and around and below Thou comest. No-where can I escape Thee then,...

(The Thinking Corner by Amal Kiran, p. 38)

 

Amal-da is a poet, writer, editor, critic and above all a Yogi. Learned and wise, he is always hopeful about the world.

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Whenever he is asked "What is the future of the Ashram", he replies in his assuring tone: " The Ashram will reach its goal of Supramental Transformation" for which The Mother and Sri Aurobindo are working ceaselessly. Let us all take a pledge to work towards this goal without wasting our time. Let us draw more and more inspiration from this full blossomed Lotus in The Mother's Pond. I end my tribute with a poem dedicated to Amal Kiran:

 

O Visionary Poet and Seer!

Behold! all around is full of cheer,

To see the great day of your Centenary,

At the Mother's Gracious Sanctuary.

 

Smiling, you can make others smile,

 Enduring, make us amaze awhile.

Sitting on the Throne of Confidence,

 Proclaim always future brightness.

 

A mother's love, tenderness and calm,

 Fills your heart as a soothing balm.

Yet detached and aloof in the wordly pond,

Bloom like a Lotus in the mud.

 

Fulfilling the mission of life ever,

Marching progressively, O great Victor!

 Lead us more and more towards the great goal,

O the Mother's worthy child, O Noble Soul.

 

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To the Centenarian (Amal Kiran)

 

G.K. Satyathy

 

Ripe in age and wisdom

 He is loved by all

Because he is he:

 A poet and a scholar

Of high stature,

Of experience and erudition

Banked on days of yore,

Pragmatic of present's lore

 Penetrating vision of future.

 Nay, is he something more,

For he himself loves

all As a child does its mother.

 

And above all,

Of no common clay

He is made, rather

Of another stuff altogether.

As gives the banian tree shelter

Guidance and care of Mother

And the Lord he is under.

Unaffected, not robbed of his grace

By any stress of age

A comely personage

He is, an ever-blessed one

 

And it is he who

By the breath of Her Grace

Scaled new heights

Into the ethereal region,

And stole in on the Golden Day

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A Parsi Family in Bombay -1905 From left to right:

Little Amal ne Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy Sethna, also called Cooverji for official documents and, to suit the needs of day-to-day life, "Kekoo". Kaikhushru is the Persian equivalent to the Latin Cyrus; Dhunjibhoy

is literally the Gujarati for Brother Opulence. Amal's grandfather (Pestonji Cooverji Sethna) wears the traditional Parsi hat; Amal's uncle Perojshah Pestonji Sethna; Amal's grandmother Hamabai Sethna; Amal's elder sister "Minnie" (Manekbai Dhunjibhoy Sethna); Amal's father Dhunjibhoy Pestonji Sethna and Amal's mother Bhikaiji Dhunjibhoy Sethna.

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The celestial miracle

Of enriched gold-hued halo.

I wish, I pray

May he live still longer,

Shine a beacon of light,

And disseminate his delight

To all, to those

Who come within his sight.

 

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Part II

 

Essays on Amal Kiran-S. Viswanathan

 

 

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The Savant's Reading of Shakespeare

 

 

G.Wilson Knight once designated his practice as that of 'interpretation' rather than 'criticism'. More recently, the idea of reading Shakespeare without offering 'readings' in the New Critical or other fashion, or, for that matter, 'interpretation', has been broached as the basis of their practice by two major critics, Helen Vendler writing on the Sonnets of Shakespeare and Stephen Booth on the plays [Russ McDonald, ed. Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 25 and p. 43]. A suitable way to characterise K.D. Sethna's writings on Shakespeare is to call them the gathering of the harvest or fruit of his long-lived-with reading of the poetry of the plays and the Sonnets, the reading being, in a sense, its own reward. His Shakespeare reading is enshrined in two books of his, Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1965 and 1991) and "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen": The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets further sub-titled An Identification through a New Approach (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1984) [SAOS and TL & WP, here-after]. The ideas and material of both the books were, in germ, originally presented in the special Shakespeare quater-centenary lectures Sethna gave at Annamalai University, Annamalainagar in 1964, and were subsequently developed and expanded in the form of the two books.

 

In the first book in his exposition of Sri Aurobindo's invaluable comments on Shakespeare, Sethna codifies and highlights the seminal insights Sri Aurobindo expressed in The Future Poetry, the Letters and other correspondence, and illustrates both the value and implications of these findings by applying them to a number of passages, using these as

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tell-tale 'touchstones'. The book on the Sonnets is in the nature of a historical investigation or literary sleuthing a la Leslie Hotson. It is one of seeking answers to those 'still-vex'd' questions of the identities of the personages of the Sonnets, the 'fair youth', the 'Dark Lady' and the 'Riyal Poet' and two minor rival poets, to boot, and also that of the exact period of composition of the Sonnets. The questions are such as may be described by the cliche, puzzles wrapped in an enigma shrouded in mystery. But, alongside or rather anterior to the historical enquiry, the author reads many of the Sonnets closely. In fact, as the second subtitle makes clear, he em-ploys an 'intrinsic' method as his way of arriving at inferences and conclusions about such 'extrinsic' questions of who and when and their minute details. So in both the books we have Sethna as an illuminating reader of Shakespeare, in the one after Sri Aurobindo and in the other as a close reader drawing historical inferences from his reading of the poems.

 

As we watch him read, we are struck by the intensity with which he experiences the passages and his thorough internalisation and long possession of these over the decades. Moreover, he 'winds himself into his subject', in the process, as was said of Edmund Burke. The basic methods are those of what T.S. Eliot called 'comparison and analysis.' But remarkable is the deep engagement and at-homeness combined with a keen perception and discrimination of poetic qualities of diction, sense, rhythm and tone with which Sethna carries out comparison and analysis, whether he applies the seminal Aurobindonian insights in the matter or examines verse on his own. Needless to say, his numerous other writings on poetry also demonstrate these qualities. All this would give a good indication of the great impact Sethna must have made on generations of students and disciples at the Ashram as an impressive teacher and influential guide.

 

Sethna fully assimilates the Aurobindonian vision of poetry and literature. Building on the basis, he develops findings on his own, beside corroborating the insights by bring-ing up the examples already given by him and also through

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sampling on his own. Starting with Sri Aurobindo's placing of Shakespeare in the highest rank in the orders of the eleven world's greatest and best so far of poets in his estimate, along-side Valmiki, Vyasa and Homer, Sethna re-emphasises that Shakespeare is the supreme poet of the vital, the elemental and the human plane of life-force, informed and impelled by the creative demiurge. The phenomenal creative range, scope, power and energy of the dramatist is his distinction. It is complemented by his 'architectonic' power as a great builder of dramatic structures with dynamic movement and his easy mastery over expression that is characterised by 'in-evitability'. Thus an individual modification and reapplication is made by both Sri Aurobindo and Sethna of the concepts of'architectonics', 'inevitability' and 'touchstones' of Matthew Arnold. Sethna appropriately stresses the Aurobindonian description of Shakespeare as a Hiranyagarbha in contradistinction to a Virat, in the sense that he was a creator of 'forms' with fully internalised qualities rather than those with only external features, and the dramatist's creation of 'brave new worlds' in the manner of the rishi Viswamitra who called up the special world of 'Trisankuswarga' mid-way between earth and heaven. That is, Shakespeare's drama does not content itself with 'hold(ing) the mirror up to nature' or with being 'a just representation of general nature' alone. The overplus of Shakespearian creative poetic energy goes far beyond in that it conjures up new worlds or invents the world anew, this latter 'the invention of human nature' that Harold Bloom has recently celebrated in Shakespeare in his recent book of that title. This point of Sri Aurobindo, emphasised by Sethna, would remind usthat the same Dr. Johnson who in his Preface to Shakespeare praised the playwright's enduring supremacy as consisting in his 'just representation of general nature' declared in his poem (which is a good critical statement as a whole), the 'Prologue written for Mr. Garrick at the Inauguration of his Drury Lane Theatre'

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.. .immortal Shakespeare rose,

Each change of many-colour'd life he drew,

Exhausts worlds, and then imagined new;

Existence saw him spur in her bounded reign,

And parting Time toiled after him in vain.

 

Sethna acutely points out that Sri Aurobindo recognised not only the limits which Shakespeare could not go beyond at that stage in his time in the overall universal evolution of poetry in his view. He also detected 'an unfailing divinity of power in his touch' (SAOS, p. 28) within the limits. Sethna instances Hamlet's lines

 

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

(5.2.10-11)

 

and

 

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,

When our deep plots do pall.

(5.2. 8-9)

 

Sethna remarks: 'it is a profundity almost in excess of the occasion' (p. 28). But when he goes on to aver that Shakespeare is 'not a poet of the thinking mind proper' (p. 28), he may be missing how much of the mind thinking (in the fashion of Emerson's 'man thinking'), which is to be preferred to 'the thinking mind', is there in Shakespeare. However, his main corroboration of the Aurobindonian perception of 'an unfailing divinity of power' in Shakespeare is Valuable. It is the kind of idea which John Bayley on his own developed to good purpose in his book, Shakespeare and Tragedy. We may also compare Eliot's statement in his unpublished Edinburgh lectures on the last plays of Shakespeare (1937) that the final plays were 'the work of a writer who has finally seen through the dramatic action of men into a spiritual action which transcends it.'

 

Sethna outlines the master's gradation of poetic expression and style into five kinds starting with the 'adequate'

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through the 'effective' or 'dynamic', the 'illumined', the 'in-spired' and reaching up to the supremely 'inevitable' style. He emphasises the quality of 'pulsing palpable life itself' in such verse. Such stress on the quality of life, life-force and energy in Shakespearian verse is, in one perspective, akin to F.R. Leavis's celebration of the quality of felt life, its living force, as the hall-mark of Shakespeare's poetry. Sethna's unravelment (SAOS, pp. 14-15) of such a quality in Macbeth's lines

 

Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:

'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor

Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more!'

(2.2.4345)

 

is an example of his keenness and subtlety of response and lucid formulation, as also are the analyses of pas-sages elsewhere like, SAOS, pp. 39-41. The keenness of his analysis is, no doubt, to a large extent, imbibed from the phenomenal master as shown in the examples Sethna quotes of Sri Aurobindo's close analysis in the best ways of practical criticism and yet going beyond its bounds well before its day. Sethna illuminatingly sets one pas-sage beside the other in terms of the Aurobindonian clas-sification of poetry into planes - for example, his contrast -of Othello's (p. 33)

 

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,

But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,

Chaos is come again.

(3.3. 90-92)

 

with Chaucer's Troilus's lines to Cressida who has actually broken faith with him.

 

Through which I see that clene out of your minde

Ye hen me cast, and Ine can nor may,

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For all the worlde, within my herte finde

T'unloven you a quarter of a day.

 

from the poet's Troilus and Criseide.

 

Sethna focuses on the 'interpretative power' (another Arnoldian concept in origin) which Sri Aurobindo identifies in Shakespeare's poetry, he cites and discusses the astute comparisons which Sri Aurobindo institutes between Shakespeare and Kalidasa and Shakespeare and Browning. He shows how, although Sri Aurobindo would set Kalidasa close to Shakespeare but at the same time a notch or two below him in view of his lack of the Shakespearian range and scope of creativity, he gives credit to Kalidasa in two respects, his portrayal of children and his delineation of mothers, in which he finds Shakespeare lacking in spite of his overall superiority. Thus, what Sethna offers in the first three of the five chapters of his book Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare is an examination of the 'intensity of revealing speech' (SAOS, p. 73) of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry in terms of the 'styles and planes' distinguished by Sri Aurobindo in poetry in general. Sethna then goes on to probe the 'essential movement, the process by which it takes birth, the process commonly termed inspiration' (SAOS, p. 73) of Shakespeare's poetry. It may seem that Sri Aurobindo and Sethna stress the 'intensity' of the verse, whereas the Western critics especially of the twentieth century have focused on its 'complexity'. But the two Indian critics' actual reading and analysis well recognise the 'complexity' and incorporate their response to it. After all, Shakespearian verse is distinguished by its blend of intensity and complexity; what makes the lines inspired is in their estimate what they call the 'intuitive' quality they often attain. The 'intuitive' quality, which they instance examples of and analyse, lifts the poetry above their 'illumined' style and on to what they call the overhead plane - a plane in the highest reaches though it just falls short of the very highest, the overmind plane to which belong the mantras such as the Rig Veda and the Gita.

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The main example celebrated by Sri Aurobindo is the lines on sleep:

 

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge...?

King Henry IV, Pt. 2 (3.1.18-20)

 

As Sethna points out, Sri Aurobindo, with fine discrimina-tion, would deny the same level of quality to Cleopatra's

 

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows bent: none our parts so poor

But was a race of heaven.

Antony and Cleopatra (1.3. 35-37)

 

He would limit the passage to the vital plane 'the vital in its excited thrill' and cite as counter-example of poetry with the Overhead touch the lines of Hamlet:

 

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain.

Hamlet (5.2. 351-52)

 

And also the phrase from The Tempest, 'in the dark backward and abysm of time'. Interestingly, Sethna recounts an inter-pretation he offered of the famous lines from The Tempest

 

We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

 Is rounded with a sleep.

 

He suggested to Sri Aurobindo that since the actors con-jured up by Prospero for the masque he presented for the betrothal of Miranda and Ferdinand vanish at the end of it, but not altogether and only into the spirit-realm where they came from, Shakespeare's lines may be construed as indi-rectly conveying the idea that our annihilation from the world is only apparent as we revert to our original mode of

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existence and to our home in eternity, our immortal des-tiny. But Sri Aurobindo would not read any such connotation into the lines and would regard such an interpretation as against the grain, in spite of Sethna's persistence in his argument. Similarly in the later chapters, Sethna presents as good examples of Sri Aurobindo's delicately poised and nuanced judgment as literary critic his contrastive comparison between Shakespeare and Whitman and his rejection of the view of A.E. Housman who claimed superiority for Blake over Shakespeare as a pure poet.

 

Along the way, Sethna brings forward several acute incidental observations of Sri Aurobindo sparked off in the course of other discussion. Examples are such as the one about Marlowe (p. 61) excelling mainly in 'strong detached scenes and passages and in great culminating moments', that is, in a trompe l'oeil manner, and the one on the principle of tragedy, the Aeschylean drasanti pathein, 'the doer shall feel the effect of his act' (p. 63), in other words, the Karmic view expressed by Anouilh in his statement about the 'ever so slightest turn of the wrist' causing dire consequences.

 

Thus, Sethna provides not only an elucidation of Sri Aurobindo's ideas about poetry and Shakespeare but abundant examples of his own application and development of these. It would be beside the point to ask if the study does not betray an insufficient recognition of the theatrical dimensions of the verse and the drama. It is a poetic reading of the dramatic verse that is on offer.

 

In SAOS (p. 50), Sethna quotes Sri Aurobindo [Kalidasa: Second Series (Pondicherry, 1954), pp. 13-14].

 

It may matter to the pedant or the gossip within me whether the sonnets were written to William Herbert or to Henry Wriothesley or to William Himself, whether the dark woman whom Shakespeare loved against his better judgment was Mary Fitton or someone else or nobody at all... but to the lover of poetry in me these things do not matter at all....

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It may surprise us why Sethna came to write a whole book in an attempt to take up and revolve exactly these and related questions which the master would deem irrelevant. Indeed, Sethna starts his book with a rebuttal of exactly the same argument about the irrelevance of these questions advanced by W.H. Auden. Sethna's defence of the legitimacy and value of his enterprise is that he anchors his enquiry and whole case firmly in the internal evidence of the Son-nets themselves, the Dedication and especially the diction and certain other literary features of the verse, this in correlation to the same kind of evidence available in the plays and also in correlation to such findings of historical and editorial scholarship as he relentlessly examines. Sethna finds that in such a reading the Sonnets date themselves (Ch. 1, 'The Sonnets Self-Dated: The Method of Internal Chronology'). On the basis of such an analysis, he concludes that they were almost all written during a nine-year time-bracket, 1598-1607; he goes on to suggest both an order and a closer periodisation if not dating of their composition. In successive chapters he builds an elaborate and detailed, step-by-step argument, picking his way carefully but assuredly amidst a mass of conflicting evidence, by way of a precise identification. The 'fair youth', friend and patron and what not, is William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. Sethna sees in the Dark Lady, the other love of the 'two loves' in the Sonnets, a continental lady with the name he conjectures to be Anastasia Guglielma. Sethna would identify Ben Jonson as the major 'Rival Poet', and Samuel Daniel and Francis Davison as the minor rival poets shadowed in the Sonnets. Sethna would seem to put rather too high stakes on the inference that the name 'Will' ('Willa' in the feminine) was common to all three, poet, youth and lady, in the Sonnets, from the play on the word 'will', some of it quite bawdy, in several Sonnets (especially 135 and 136, 'Will will fulfil', 1.5, 136) He arrives at the speculative conclusion that the Dark Lady had the name Anastasia Guglielma and that she was a London citizen of continental origin.

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There is much to be said for the positive side of the whole conduct of the argument of the book, for the eagle-eyed spot-ting, careful weighing, accepting or rejecting of evidence of a variety of kinds. For one thing, Sethna starts from and generally takes care, in centripetal fashion, not to cut loose from the centre which is the verse of the Sonnets. Secondly, in all fairness, he takes into account findings of scholars which may work against his case, and examines these and reasons out his rejection. His demolition (TL & WP, pp.159-163) of A.L. Rowse's case for the candidature of Emilia Lanier, an Italian lady of London, as the Dark Lady is an instance which is also a good demonstration of Sethna's polemical skills. In his research, Sethna amasses a vast amount of material. Besides, the cross-referencing and the comparison and contrast between parallels, analogues, and verbal and ideational similarities and identities take him wide a-field, as he ranges between Sonnets and play-passages, passages from other poets and playwrights, major, minor and some obscure. But the reader, while fully appreciating such deep engagement and the basic Tightness of the general way of proceeding, may also detect a certain literal mindedness or literalism in the argument and interpretation in a few places as in the attempt to fix the age of Shakespeare at the time of writing particular Sonnets, and also a shade of laboriousness of a protesting too much in a few instances. In the givens of the nature and circumstances of Sethna's enterprise, it would be beside the point to complain that he does not adequately address the question of the likely role of homo-sexuality in the relationship between poet and friend or that the writing is slightly on the expansive and leisurely side for the purposes of a research study. Also, there is not much attention paid to the ways in which themes and images and rhetorical devices function in the Sonnets though the diction is closely and acutely analysed.

 

The overall impression is, however, that of an excellent opportunity given to us in this second book as well as in the first (SAOS) of watching and responding to a remarkably

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committed, keenly sensitive, highly perceptive and subtle reader and expounder of poetry who shares his valuable response to poetry and literary issues with us with true gusto, a quality rare in critics of the present day. We cannot but be unqualifiedly thankful for it.

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A Man of Letters

 

 

K.D. SETHNA (the "Dear Amal" of a correspondence spanning more than twenty years) is a prodigious letter-writer. The 'clear ray' of his sparkling intelligence muminates any subject to which his attention is drawn, and ( no matter how profound the observation or how complex the question under consideration, his quick wit and gentle humour plays over it like sunlight on an ocean's depth. I am among the fortunate recipients of some of these wonderful letters - a few of the longer ones have already appeared in print as part of the series published in Mother India.

 

My first letter from Amal is dated May 18th, 1979. It acknowledges receipt of a short poem I had sent. I remember still the shyness I felt when sending those lines to so eminent a writer, and furthermore to one who had corresponded on literary matters with Sri Aurobindo himself. I did not then know about Amal's unfailing kindness to aspiring poets, and his ability to find exactly the right words to inspire confidence and hope. He always managed to combine uncompromising truthfulness with an empathy that perceived behind the inadequate form of words an inspiration that struggled to express itself. "Your poem," he wrote, "on it's own diminutive scale has both feeling and imagination and is well-turned... it reminded me vividly of a famous prayer in the Illiad by the Greek warriors who did not wish to be killed under the night's bewildering pall." Suddenly it did not matter if my small attempt had any merit of its own -enough that it had kindled in the mind of a lover of great literature the moment of pure joy that a memory of Homer's lines calls forth! That letter was the start of a correspon-dence that began in the nineteen-seventies and a friend-ship that endures to this day.

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I first met Amal during a visit to Pondicherry in December 1979. The meeting took place at the house where he was staying in Rue Suffren. I had called on an impulse, without making an appointment. To my amazement I, a complete stranger, was greeted with a beaming smile, and the words "Oh, you've come!" My first thought was that he had mistaken me for someone else. I had been thoughtless and in-sensitive to turn up unannounced, and expected at any minute that our conversation would be interrupted by the arrival of the person who should have been there instead. But nobody else arrived and in the meantime we discovered a whole range of mutual interests: Sri Aurobindo of course, but also Teilhard de Chardin, William Blake, Mallarme and the French symbolist poets, the sonnets of Alfred Douglas, the strange historical/visionary perspectives of Immanuel Velikovsky - the list seemed endless, while Amal's enthusiasm and his extensive knowledge appeared to have no limits. I was impressed by the humility and honesty of his approach to every subject - rare enough qualities in men or women of outstanding intellect - but perhaps even more by his apparent ability to quote accurately from memory the works of any poet whom he had read. Only once I was able to tell him something he did not already know, and it was that Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin and Mallarme had something else in common besides their genius, for they had all spent time in Hastings, a small town on the South coast of England. All must have climbed to the top of Castle Hill to look out over the English Channel (Sri Aurobindo had even written a letter from there on his sixteenth birthday), and all must have walked on the stony beach beside the cold grey sea. Amal was charmed by this thought, and even more pleased when I offered to read one of his own poems aloud on that shore as a mark of his admiration for these revered figures. It was an offer he did not forget. A letter arrived soon after my return to England:

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Now that I realise Hastings played a part in the lives of such three beings as Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard and Mallarme, I am quite thrilled at the thought of your plan to recite one of my poems to the English Channel when you next visit the place. I wonder what poem you will choose. There are five which have something to do with the sea: "Sky-Rims", "Glamour Tide", "Prefigure", "Symbol Mood", "Deluge". But it is not one of these which should necessarily be read. Pick out your own favourite. Whichever moves forth most naturally on a surge of Sonia-appreciation will be the most appropriate. If you can let me know the date on which you will do me this lovely favour I shall concentrate on you at the right time. I wish I could accompany you in person.

(10.01.1980)

 

So it happened that a poem composed in Pondicherry and submitted to Sri Aurobindo with the question "Will you tell me the worth of these fourteen verses both as poetry and as sonnet? I want perfection - so be unrelentingly critical if there is any drop...." was read aloud to the sea at Hastings. There could be no hesitation about the choice. "Sky-Rims" is not only a fine sonnet, it is the purest expression of Amal's questing and questioning spirit responding to the endless adventure of life, daring to explore 'the wideness ever new', seeking to capture and express each new insight with the greatest possible perfection. There was also a personal reason for the choice of "Sky-Rims". I had myself struggled with this verse form. It is a Petrarchan sonnet, named for the great Italian poet who invented it, and because of its demanding rhyme scheme it is not easily adapted to the English language. Sri Aurobindo had mastered it easily -and Amal too succeeded brilliantly:

 

As each gigantic vision of sky-rim

Preludes yet stranger spaces of the sea,

For those who dare the rapturous wave-whim

Of soul's uncharted trance-profundity

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There is no end to God-horizonry:

A wideness ever new awaits behind

Each ample sweep of plumbless harmony

 Circling with vistaed gloriole the mind.

 

For the Divine is no fixed paradise,

But truth beyond great truth - a spirit-heave

From unimaginable sun-surprise

Of beauty to immense love-lunar eve,

Dreaming through lone sidereal silence on

To yet another alchemy of dawn!

 

That magnificent final line did not come easily, as we know from Amal's correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. He waited a long time for 'the inevitable word' which would complete the poem. Mallarme, a fellow-seeker after perfection (whom Amal once referred to as 'ME') would have understood the search and appreciated the result.

 

At the end of that memorable first meeting with Amal I made a second promise - to myself - that I would attempt to find a publisher for the forty-five unpublished manuscripts he had at that time. Some of our subsequent correspondence dealt with my unsuccessful attempts to do so. I took away with me his study of Mallarme, and - a gift that I will always treasure - his last remaining copy of The Adventure of the Apocalypse. Already I could see on the book's cover the ravages wrought by the humid climate of Pondicherry and its thriving insect population. I feared greatly for the fate of the works still in manuscript! Eventually the Mallarme translations found their way to Oxford University and into the hands of an acknowledged expert, Dr. Annie Barnes, who praised it highly and offered to have the manuscript catalogued and placed in the Bodeleian Library where it would be available to other scholars. Amal, however, preferred to wait until a publisher could be found. He wrote: "I personally think Mallarme is one of my best things in the literary field."

 

I had never been a gifted letter writer, but from time to time I would send books that Amal had been unable to get

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in Pondicherry, or my own attempts at poetry. I often had cause to wonder how a few lines or a small gift could inspire the wonderful replies I received. I once sent him a volume of early English poetry, and was rewarded by a paragraph ex-ploring the nature of poetry itself from a most original angle:

 

Alexander's Introduction brings up the question of what a poet does. The old Anglo-Saxon word "scop" comes from a root suggesting "shaper, former, creator" and it is allied to the Greek term which is related to "polein" - to make - and to the old Scots expression "maker". All these are unlike the Provencal "trobator", North French "Trouvere" and Italian "tobatore", which come from a "find" root. Alexander considers all these vocables to in-dicate "more modest aspiration". But I am not sure. One might well read in the other terms an emphasis on the mere art aspect, working from outside on a pre-existent material rather than a practice of creativeness. Actually, to my mind both the descriptions are to the point.

 

The Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Scots terms combine the God-like creative function with the function of formative labour - the rolling of the "eye in a fine frenzy" from earth to heaven and heaven to earth, as Shakespeare says, together with a skilful excitement of the hand giving the correct curve and line to the various visions so as to catch them with a measured precision, a moulded memorableness. As for the Gallic and Italian designations, they can be plumbed to mean not just a polishing up of what is "found" but rather a "voyaging on strange seas of thought alone" towards the magical shores of a hidden Reality greater than our day-to-day world's - an adventure of discovering or un-covering the idealities behind or beyond phenomena...

 

Analogously, to be Godlike as a maker would signify for me "the thinking of God's thoughts after Him" as some scientist has tried to depict his own job. The imaging and echoing of the Supreme Secrets is the way one plays the deific role. The ancient Vedic formula hits

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the mark: the Rishi of each hymn is "the seer and hearer of the Truth". The full Vedic account tells of the revelatory Word arising simultaneously from the heart of the Rishi and from the lofty ether of Surya-Savitri and get-ting shaped like a chariot in the calmly dynamic mind for the gods to ride from their mysterious stations into the world of men.

(30.3.80)

 

In April that year Amal's wife of thirty-six years died, and he moved into a smaller flat at 21, Rue Francois Martin. He told me: "This is the street on which I began my life in the Ashram when I set foot in Pondicherry on December 16th, 1927. The wheel has come full circle." From this new address letters continued to arrive, sometimes in response to material I had sent but often simply reflecting his own literary interests, which he knew I shared, or the spiritual and historical research engaging his attention at the time.

 

The occasional glimpses of Amal's early life appearing here and there were of special interest to me:

 

Your mention of England brought back impressions en-graved on my mind from my sixth year. I had an attack of polio when I was two and a half years years old. For over three years I used to walk with a hand pressing my left knee downward because the heel of the left foot had been pulled up. As this was in almost prehistoric time my father who was a doctor took me, along with my mother, to London. We stayed at Earls Court where two operations were done by Dr. Tubby. Later we stayed at Shepherd's Bush. Every scene is clear in my memory. Before returning to India we visited Dublin where my father took the degree of MRCP. Once during a visit to Phoenix Park it suddenly poured super-cats and super-dogs. A tall policeman gave me shelter under his cloak. It was the most thrilling incident in my young life. I had the privilege to touch his thick belt! I wrote of it to my younger brother and how he envied me! On a higher plane an unforgettable experi-

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ence was a visit to the art galleries of Paris where artists on tall ladders were touching up old paintings. I changed my ambition from being a fire-brigade man to being an artist. After my B.A. I wanted to go to Oxford. If my father had been alive I could have done so. My orthodox grandfather put his foot down. His fear was that I might bring back an English wife - and such a thing was intolerable. But when I started turning to yoga he tried to persuade me to go to Oxford. Evidently, an English wife was preferable to the Divine Beloved. At that time I was in a hurry to find my guru - and soon enough I found him and, on reaching Pondicherry, gave up preparing a thesis for the M.A. The new atmosphere would not allow the old academic grind. But life under Sri Aurobindo opened up fresh founts of literary creativity in a short while.

(24.6.82)

 

The picture of the little boy sheltering from Irish weather under a policeman's cloak was certainly unforgettable to me and I must have asked for more, because a long autobiographical note written for a friend appears in the file of letters around this time. Another letter, written on Sri Aurobindo's birthday, brought precious memories of a darshan in 1928:

 

The next best thing that has happened is that I am writing on August 15th in Pondicherry. As I was meditating, my mind went back to my first August 15th in Pondi. Between February 21,1928, which was my first darshan of Sri Aurobindo, and his birthday celebration which at the time was the next since there was no April 24th in the interval, a great deal had happened. At the first darshan I had watched Sri Aurobindo's outer appearance closely and approved his being my impressive Guru. When a day later I met the Mother and asked her whether Sri Aurobindo had said anything, she re-ported: "Yes, he said about you 'He has a good face'."

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Quite a tit for tat! Before the next darshan, my whole being had opened up, there had been moments of un-bearable psychic ecstasy and a general effluence of the deep heart had become a part of my life. I had grown a beard and my hair had been worn a little long. As the Mother once noted, I had the face of an early Christian of the Thebaid. When I knelt at Sri Aurobindo's feet, he blessed me with both his hands. When, before kneel-ing, I had looked at his face he had kept gently nod-ding. Later I had the experience of a tremendous bar as of luminous steel entering the head from above and making me dizzy. The same afternoon I met the Mother. She took me into the darshan room, sat in a chair and I knelt a second time at her feet. She blessed me and said "Sri Aurobindo was very pleased with you. He said that there had been a great change." I was extremely moved.

 

I think that it was after this darshan I started writing poetry in the new vein - from the in-world or the over-world. Of course, all genuine poetic stuff hails from these domains but it is not always couched in the very tongue of them - the fire-tongue that has tasted paradise: it is translated into the imaginative language of the reflective mind or the passionate life-force. There is a whole bunch of poems by me of the pre-Pondi time -intense in thought and sensuousness passing often into an artistic sensuality edged with a topsy-turvy ideal-ism. Much of it was published under the soubriquet of "Maddalo", the name given by Shelley as "Julian" to Byron. (My identity had to be concealed to save my grandfather from jumping out of his orthodox seventy-year-old skin.) Before I came to the Ashram I destroyed all the copies I could lay hands on.

(15.08.1986)

 

Quite a number of letters from Amal concerned the art of writing and I always hoped that he would speak directly about his own work, but he seldom did. However there was

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a good deal to be learned about his approach to poetry in general from his comments on poems I sent for his appraisal. During my stay in England I had retrieved some very early work of mine - below is an extract from one of his letters in reply. It is typical of the meticulous care he took, not to mention the generous use of his time:

 

My reply has got delayed by a little over a fortnight after the receipt of your letter, so I don't know if it will catch you still in England. What you write about your poetry brings up to me the image of Athene full formed and perfectly panoplied from the head of Zeus. Where then is any room left for "improvement"? Your early work is essentially as good as any "grown-up" might compose. Once you realise this, you won't break your heart because you don't write better now. Just let your pen run - in my direction -I mean just send your new  things to me without thinking whether they are worth sending. Too much self-criticism stands in one's way. I am quite confident that you will turn out fine stuff with a line here and there which you can "thrust like a lean knife between the ribs of Time".

 

Your desire to break metrical regularity is nothing freakish: some of the most memorable effects are produced by it, like:

 

Cover her face, her eyes dazzle, she died young

or:

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain...

 

Even in verses that seem regular, the best ones offer have a little kink somewhere, a modulation or an unexpected sound-play, as in:

 

Time like a snake coiling among the stars

or:

In cradle of the rude imperious surge

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But whatever irregularity one commits must be allowed to pass from the outer ear to the inner hearing and not be merely a surface stroke made for its own unusual sake because of a deliberate rather than an instinctive sense.

 

Your "Cathedral Windows" appeals to me very much: the art is perfect, every line a cut gem, but, as you say, the whole is extremely condensed. By the way, the little bit of explanation with which you have prefaced it in your letter is a gem in itself and deserves to go as a small note by the author below the poem, shining on its own at the same time as it illuminates the superscription....

 

"Road Accident" is all that poetry, if it wants to be modern without sacrificing the ancient office of song, should be. Even the modern fashion of baffling the reader is carried off in a mysterious manner that carries the overtone of some universal presence - "seen nowhere though felt everywhere". I am reminded of the last stanza of a poem by Sarojini Naidu:

 

I, leaning from my sevenfold height,

 Shall teach thee of my sevenfold grace:

 Life is a prism of my light

And death the shadow of my face.

 

Your whole piece is poetry without a break. Both the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus respond to it. They receive the impact of the secret it vibrantly communicates past the mere mind's logpoeia. No wonder ordinary readers can't understand the lines - they are not meant for understanding but for "overstanding". Some-thing of what Housman calls "pure poetry" is here. He would have thought at once of Blake's "hear the voice of the bard..." Rather irrelevantly perhaps and yet with a happy thrill I remember the closing line of Hecker's "Song of the Arab Horsemen": Pale Kings of the sunset, beware!

(4.12.82)

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There were also occasions when Amal allowed me to see a poem of his that had just been composed. In October 1989 he sent some lines written two days earlier, with the comment:

 

One bit of news in which you will perhaps be especially interested. On the 14th I found myself waking up in the morning with a poem taking shape on a subject which seems just a bolt from the blue -

 

I've visioned many barenesses - a beach

Of mile on tawny mile swept clean by sea -

A noon of cloudless blue serenity -

A hill, pure rock, out-soaring all bird-speech.

An unforgettable moment I have stood

Bereft of voice to act interpreter

To a timeless flash of unveiled Aphrodite.

But O the nakedness when one deep night

Caught suddenly my mind beyond thought's stir,

Shorn of a million stars to grope sheer God!

 

I am too close to the poem to arrive at a just estimate of it. Perhaps you can tell me whether it deserves even to come at the tail-end of the new Secret Splendour which is in the making....

 

In some years it was a fancy of mine to send Amal a poem for his birthday- and, as the 25th November was approaching my response was not simply an appreciation of the lines he had sent, but also a sonnet which began "Go words And dance your way across the paper" and included the line "So words, I send you to Amal in Pondicherry". This juxtaposition seemed to please him very much. He wrote back:

 

What an enchanting birthday gift! The very measure of the verse is exquisitely terpsichorean. And the personal note imaginatively woven into the word pattern meant to celebrate a particular occasion - "Amal's natal day" sets us two delightfully together as partners tripping

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out of the poem into some subtle actuality to the rhythm of more than metrical feet. I don't know whether your conscious mind intended this overtone of suggestion. But poetry, even if deliberate artistic workmanship has gone into it, is surely more than the poet's doing. Yeats has said somewhere that though a lot of conscious labour may be spent on a poem, the result is worth nothing if it does not read like "a moment's thought". This "thought" exists beyond the poet's conscious mind, and the latter toils to dig a channel for that secret wonder to flow through, destroying all appearance of the passage prepared for it. And what breaks out from within car-ries often much more than the toiling poet is aware of.... I am charmed by the quatrain:

 

The ant embraces the ant in a wordless greeting;

A pulse of delight moves the delicate steps

of the deer;

All nature dances for joy at fortuitous meeting'

And treads out a burden of bliss on the listening air.

 

I think it's the first time that "Pondicherry" has figured in a poem. The first time I heard of this town was in connection with a competition in an old TLS (Times Literary Supplement). Readers were asked to invent a name for a book such as would never interest one to read it. The first prize was won by "How to Ride a Tricycle"; the second by the title "The Roads of Pondicherry". In literature proper the town had a place in Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes story "The Sign of the Four". The four conspirators fix on Pondicherry as their venue. When this novel was published, Sri Aurobindo had not made Pondicherry world-famous by his presence in it. Now the name is on everybody's lips but none before you has put it in poetry and even made it an end word evoking the rhyme "simple and merry". If not for anything else your piece should be published for the sake of its making

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music with this name. The poem will also be noted for the phrase "Amal in Pondicherry". So far Pondicherry was associated with Sri Aurobindo. Now it will be linked forever with a disciple of his, too.. ..

 

...I am glad you liked my little poem. This is the second time I have awakened in the morning with a poem taking shape. As you have approved it I shall add it to the collection which is slowly piling up for a final burst upon the world in at least your lifetime if not mine. Of course I know that you would like it to take place when the poet himself has not yet under-gone "the ecstasy of being over".

(18.12.1989)

 

Amal's health has been a constant concern to those of his friends who live at a distance and thus are not able to feel reassured by the sight of his smiling face and cheerful acceptance of the ongoing consequences of a tragic illness in childhood. All enquiries as to his well-being are turned aside with a typically humorous response:

 

It should be really cheering news that all the vital organs are functioning well, and in contrast to the fate envisaged in Swift's famous "Meditation on a Broomstick" there is no decay at the top but rather quite a topping state there. I think (and this is a sign of that state) a good deal on all kinds of subjects, and if you read my 130-page critique of Asko Parpola's impressive attempt to prove the Aryan-invasion theory, you will agree that my grey matter is in plentiful evidence even though its activity in this particular field - Indology - may bore you to a massive stupor. The main trouble I have is with my legs. They are getting weaker and weaker, but let's hope they won't have the strength left even to kick the bucket! There's something wrong with my arms near the shoulders. Perhaps I exert them too much with my Marathon plod with my "Canadian canes" daily from

 

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the Ashram gate to my chair under the clock opposite the Samadhi. If I turn to left or right in bed I am in pain and the arms go numb. A Sikh neurologist was brought by a local physician to examine me. He took out a pin from his turban and poked me here and there and asked me if I could tell him where he had poked. I said "Certainly - since my eyes are open." "Oh", he exclaimed, "I forgot to tell you to shut them." After a week of cogitation he sent the re-port that nothing could be done: there must be some-thing wrong in the spine. Maybe he is right, but it doesn't trouble me. No matter what happens, I am bathed in bliss all the time. That is Sri Aurobindo and the Mother at work in me....

(17.1.90)

 

Later that year Amal's physical health was once again threatened by a mystery illness that defied medical treatment -until the Mother herself came to the rescue. The whole story is told in a letter addressed to Singapore, after my return torn a short stay in England. As this letter is not long, it lay be reproduced in full:

 

Sonia, My Dear Friend,

By now you must have received my letter of 27th November. As it was long overdue in reply to yours, writ-ten on the eve of going to England for over a month, I was in a hurry to post it. so, after my reflections apropos of my completing 86 years on 25 November, I went on to discuss the questions you had raised about poetry. In doing this I omitted a very significant occurrence connected with my statement: "all I know at this instant is that an all-pervading peace appears, in a far-away manner, to hold me at its core and that I am caught, however faintly, in some eternal Now."

 

As soon as I had written these words the peace which I had spoken of came forward from the back of my consciousness, made the centre which it had in my

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little self a spreading glow, at once intense and soothing, what I can only call an omnipotent softness. It permeated my whole being, my entire body and I was immediately a new person.

 

The newness had a particular relevance as well as a general one. My birthday had passed as usual with friends dropping in with their warm smiling faces. Here was an atmosphere of happiness. But in one respect the occasion was a little different from my past birthdays. This time the birthday had fallen in the midst of a period of indisposition - a fortnight during which I had a persistent low fever accompanied by a constant unease in the stomach. For more than two days the stomach refused to let any food in. I was reminded of the time -seventeen years earlier - when I had gone to Bombay for my first cataract removal. Some time after the operation I contracted a fever and a great malaise in the stomach as if an ogre were sitting there and refusing all nourishment. My nephew who was a doctor in that hospital swept me out of the place and took me home. The illness went on more than a week. Medicines made it worse. During that period a passive prayer to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went on - passive because there was just a turn towards them with no direct call for intervention. When conditions looked as though there were a hidden form of typhoid at work, suddenly one evening around 8 p.m. I saw with my closed eyes a fist come down with great force behind me on the right side and at once the ogre was pushed out of my stomach and the fever vanished. The same night I had a dream of the Mother walking on her roof-terrace and I was standing in the street below. A tremendous wave of emotion went up to her from me - such as I had never known before nor have I ever experienced since. In my latest illness I had made a definite appeal to our Gurus to rid me of the fever and the stomach upset. But noth-ing took place until the day I wrote to you. Then with that momentous sentence the fever and the general

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discomfort in the body were just washed out. I suspended my typing for a minute or two, lost in that glowing softness of utter tranquillity in which I was held from head to foot. Then I returned to the typewriter.

 

The exteriorised sense - delicate and yet most concretely invasive - of "some eternal Now" stayed for a few hours, then gradually receded into the background without disappearing. The work it did directly in the body is a settled thing.

 

Today is the fortieth anniversary of one of the most important days in the Ashram: December 5th, 1950, when Sri Aurobindo left his body. The message distributed this morning is a prayer by the Mother: "Grant that we may identify ourselves with Your Eternal Consciousness so that we may know truly what Immortality is."

 

With my love, Amal

(05.12.1990)

 

Amal's total reliance on the loving guidance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and their ever-present help has always been a source of inspiration to me and, I am sure, to many others in the Ashram and the world outside. The 'clear ray' emanates not only from his mind but from his heart, illuminating for himself and others the difficult path of the Integral Yoga. Courage is a quality he possesses in abundance, and reading between the lines of his letters one senses the fortitude with which he has at times endured intense physical pain. A year after the previously quoted letter was written, after a silence of some months, a hand-written note replaced the familiar well-worn script of Amal's trusty type-writer. He was in the Ashram Nursing Home following serious injury to his leg resulting from a fall:

 

Prof. Nadkarni visited me and had a ringside look at the complicated apparatus in which my right leg was housed. The most impressive item was a slim steel rod driven through my shin-bone (tibia) close to my knee. Its function

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was to hold the traction poised! I was able to turn neither right nor left and had to sleep on my back for a month and a half. After the traction was removed on November 30th I thought I could sleep on the side, but no! The injured leg was not to be treated too freely. Perhaps a month more I will have to be like this. It seems a long time will have to pass before I am a little mobile. Quite a number of problems will have to be faced when I go home -presumably before the end of January '92.

 

My fracture has been in the same bone (femur) and the same leg (right) as Sri Aurobindo's in 1938. But I am said to outdo his achievement. His was in the middle of the thigh-bone, while mine is next to the knee. The two parts of his femur were in contact though one was thrust a little higher than the other. My fragments - three in fact -were all separate and in a kind of jumble. The healing will also have to be in a rough way and will take a long time. My nephew, a doctor, who happened to drop in from the States, was appalled on scrutinising the X-ray picture. He said that serious arterial damage could have occurred...

(18.12.1991)

 

Amal's modesty with regard to his own poetry ex-presses itself in a certain reluctance to talk about it un-less a direct question is asked. At the same time, his own finely tuned critical sense must leave him in no doubt about its exceptional quality, even if Sri Aurobindo had not praised his work so highly. Recently I asked him to name the poem that had come closest to satisfying his constant desire for perfection, and without hesitation he named "This Errant Life". Of this poem Sri Aurobindo wrote "it goes home to the soul". There is a quality in the best of Amal's work which is indefinable, a sheer inspiration that denies itself to any other channel than the precise language the poet has chosen for it. My own attempts to measure and explore his extraordinary achievement in poetry met with his constant encouragement and support, and it is my hope that one day his confidence will be justified, and I will be able to convey

 

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to a wider audience something of the power and audacity of his creative genius. In an article written for Amal-Kiran: Poet and Critic which appeared in 1994 to commemorate his 90th birthday, I had called him Musarum Sacerdos (Priest of the Muses) borrowing a phrase from Horace. This struck a chord with Amal and even provoked some speculation about a possible previous incarnation:

 

Your article with its 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 poetry practised in the Augustan Age. It is thought-provoking that Caesar Octavius, renamed Augustus, is an early manifestation of Sri Aurobindo of the vibhuti kind. No wonder the two greatest bards Augustus 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 time of the first Roman emperor. I feel a great affinity to Catullus with his commingling of the erotic and the wistful, and very interestingly Sri Aurobindo's early verse is most reminiscent of this lyricist....

 

... Ordinarily we would be tempted to see Catullus redivivus 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 it is a guess worth hazarding that Lydia's victim with his pathetic "odi et amo" was as much a literary influence on him as the master of the epic and the expert of the odes.

(03.12.1994)

 

The life of each one of us is woven of many strands and Amal's letters reflect the innumerable influences and interests of one who carries in himself the impetus of the past

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evolving towards its consummation in the future. In 1996 I must have pressed him unusually hard for more stories from his family history, because a letter written on the eve of his birthday brought memories of his grandfather and the Persian poets whose work had delighted him in his earliest years, and with them reflections on the immortality of art. He speaks of Ferdausi and Hafiz and Saadi "a few echoes of which are still intoxicating to my mind". And he quotes "a famous vaunt" in which Ferdausi forsees the verdict of the future on his work:

 

The homes that are the dwellings of today

Will sink 'neath shower and sunshine to decay,

 But neither rain nor fire shall mar what I

Have built - the palace of my poetry.

 

We live in an age when the art and craft of poetry is appreciated by comparatively few. But then this eminent poet of Persian descent whom we have had the privilege of knowing seeks neither fame nor fortune. The "palace of my poetry" built by Amal will last as long as we need language to express the soul's deepest needs and aspirations, and to reflect, as in a mirror, the light of a Truth that lies just beyond mind's grasp.

 

When I look back and recall the pleasure and support the correspondence with Amal has given me over many years, it is with a feeling of immense gratitude. His generosity knew no bounds. When I once requested permission to use his photograph in an article he wrote back: "you have my permission to make use of anything connected with me." Omar Khayam famously wondered what the vintners buy, one half so precious as the goods they sell. And I too wonder what I could have written to Amal, one half so precious as what he wrote to me!

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Amal-kiran - the Fire-Worshipper

 

 

On the occasion of Amal-kiran's eighty-sixth birthday fourteen years ago Sonia Dyne had offered him a bouquet of flowers from an English garden:

 

Send to him snowdrops that the sun's cool kiss

 Fathered in mossy glades before the spring;

A riot of poppies scarlet in the grass;

And every fragrance that the warm winds bring

 

From roses after rain - with clarion daffodils,

First in the van of summer, celebrate this day,

And golden buttercups from Sussex hills!

All these dispatch to Amal...

 

The bunch is still fresh and fragrant carrying the authentic inspiration that had prompted her to express the jubilation which becomes hundredfold brighter and richer today. In the Ramayana there is an episode describing the garland of flowers the Rishis of the Matangavana had left with Shabari to put at the feet of the Avatar. It perhaps remains sparkling-new and sweet-scented even today, - because it was charged with their tapasya. There is an element of it in English and that must be very endearing to Amal. His love for the language is something which, to enter into the spirit of Sri Aurobindo's works, into their vastness and spiritual sublimity, we should always cherish with keener warmth and enthusiasm. We must acquire both intuitive and professional command over it. All the shades and nuances of English poetry Amal knows with absolute thoroughness even as they become an aspect of his creative personality. Everything from

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Canterbury Tales to Savitri flows in his blood-stream. Once I told Amal that he would be carrying English poetry along with him to the next life, which he with a confirming smile seemed to savour. It has become a part of his psychic being. He is a Polymath but it is only with poetry that his flame of diamond zeal rises to sky above purple-blue sky in its flight towards truth and beauty and delight.

 

Once the Mother mentioned that Amal's personal number is 15. It reduces to 1+5=6, the number corresponding to "The New Creation". This is symbolised by the commonly known flower tuberose or Nishigandha. But the Mother considered his flower to be the one she named "Krishna's Light in the Mind". A certain cosmicity of intellectual perception shines through all his writings, acquiring even spiritual intensity in his poetry.

 

While reviewing Amal-kiran's collected poems The Secret Splendour in The Hindu of 27 September 1994 K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar has the following to say. Amal is a "lyric genius whose sensitive responses to English and French poetry have filled his poems with honeyed delight. He can coerce us into entering the worlds of the spirit with effortless ease...The paindefying Ananda that marks these poems is a welcome gift for a world wallowing in self-pity. Sri Aurobindo's comments add to the value of this lyra mystica and give us a clear idea of how fine poems are shaped on a creative anvil."

 

Yes, "creative anvil". Amal had graduated himself with flying colours from the poetry department that was run by Sri Aurobindo during the 1930s. His batchmates were wonderful giants like Arjava(Arjavanada was the name given to the British logician-poet J.A. Chadwick by Sri Aurobindo), Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, Dilip Kumar Roy, Nishikanto, Nirodbaran, Jyotirmayi - just to name a few. Reflecting on a joint photo of Amal and Harin belonging to this period, this is what Amal says: "Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, 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,

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with a calm smile on his handsome clean-shaven 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 beard, appears to strain his gaze towards a future" which, to quote Meredith, "lends a yonder to all ends." Harin, "overburdened with the favours of the goddess," was already famous with his Feast of Youth which was reviewed by Sri Aurobindo himself in the November 1918 issue of the Arya. In the early time his poetry was full of "imagination, beauty and colour of phrase and a moving sentiment" with a promise of great mystic-spiritual efflorescence. But the promise remained unfulfilled. One wonders whether the gift of the goddess was not frittered away. The mystic possibility was squandered and only the tinsel gave joy to the emotional-vital. The roots were not deep enough. About his best mystical creations during the three years of stay in the Ashram, Sri Aurobindo says that Harin's "poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind - other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, coloured and beautiful, - but surely not mystic..." The domains of spiritual speech or else of the deeper psychic utterance stayed unexpressed in him.

 

It is here we see the distinctive advance made by Amal in the poetry workshop of the Master. When Harin left the Ashram in 1933 he sold his bicycle to his young poet-friend Amal who used it on the quiet streets of Pondicherry of those days. But on via mystica he had gone far ahead crossing the boundaries of our space and time. To appreciate the niceties of poetic expression let us take the following comment of Sri Aurobindo made in one of his letters to him: "The poetry of the Illumined Mind is usually full of play of lights and colours, brilliant and striking in phrase, for illumination makes the Truth vivid - it acts usually by a luminous rush. The poetry of Intuition may have a play of colour and bright lights, but it does not depend on them - it may be quite bare;

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it tells by a sort of close intimacy with the Truth, an inward expression of it. The Illumined Mind sometimes gets rid of its trappings, but even then it always keeps a sort of lustrous robe which is its characteristic." This is well illustrated by Amal's poem "Agni," for example:

 

Not from the day but from the night he's born,

Night with her pang of dream - star on pale star

 Winging strange rumour through a secret dawn.

For all the black uncanopied spaces mirror

The brooding distances of our plumbless mind.

O depth of gloom, reveal your unknown light -

Awake our body to the alchemic touch

Of the great God who comes with minstrel hands!...

 

 

Lo, now my heart has grown his glimmering East:

Blown by his breath a cloud of colour runs:

The yearning curves of life are lit to a smile.

O mystic sun, arise upon our thought

And with your gold omnipotence make each face

The centre of some blue infinitude!

 

 

Sri Aurobindo comments: "The last six lines... have i breath of revelation in them; especially the image 'my heart has grown his glimmering East' and the extreme felicity of 1 'the yearning curves of life are lit to a smile' have a very intense force of revealing intuitivity - and on a less minute, larger scale there is an equal revealing power and felicity in the boldness and strength of the image in the last three lines, These six lines may be classed as 'inevitable', not only separately but as a whole. The earlier part of the poem is also I fine, though not in the same superlative degree - the last two lines have something of the same intuitive felicity,] though with slighter, less intense touches, as the first two of the (rhymeless) sestet - especially in the 'alchemic touch' of the 'minstrel hands'. Lines 2 to 5 have also some power o large illumination."

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The occurrence of 'alchemy' in Amal's sonnet entitled "Sky-Rims" has a fine history which immediately illustrates the care with which Sri Aurobindo attended to details with respect to the mot juste in poetic compositions. He appreciated the poem very much except, writes Amal, "for the last line which seemed insufficiently shot with revelatory turn of sight and sound. To fill the lacuna I invoked the Muse day after day. Harin was a close friend at that time and he too sportingly took up the challenge for me. Actually the fault of the non-revelatory line was that it ran: 'To yet an-other revelatory dawn!' Sri Aurobindo found the adjective of my choice 'flat and prosaic, at any rate here.' The best I could do at the end of several experiments was: 'To yet an-other ecstasy of dawn.' Sri Aurobindo's comment was: 'It is better than anything yet proposed. The difficulty is that the preceding lines of the sestet are so fine that anything ordinary in the last line sounds like a sinking or even an anticlimax. The real line that was intended to be there has not yet been found.' I made one more attempt and wrote to Sri Aurobindo: 'I have got Harin to put his head together with mine. He has come up with 'lambency of dawn'. A good phrase, no doubt - but I wonder if it suits the style and atmosphere and suggestion in my sonnet. After over a fort-night of groping I have myself struck upon: 'To yet another alchemy of dawn!' Do you like my 'alchemy'? Sri Aurobindo replied: "That is quite satisfactory - you have got the right thing at last.'" The Fire-worshipper passed the Fire-test, Agni-Pariksha. What Harin had in his pocket and Amal didn't - the "grand certificate" - he now got with letters calligraphed in gold.

 

About Agni the Fire-God Amal writes: "If I visualise him in his role of all-refiner as a splendour in front of me, I thrust my dross out of my body and feel liberated from it. As a Parsi, dubbed 'fire-worshipper' in religious classification, I had been accustomed to face in the temple or at home the urn bearing the golden bouquet of flames flying up, sustained by logs of fragrant sandalwood. This fire addressed

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as 'Son of God' in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture, symbolised the Divine Presence in the midst of the world, in the midst of each living creature, an 'objective correlative' of the ineffable secrecy in the human heart." The true nature of this God was revealed to him by Sri Aurobindo after his arrival at the Ashram in December 1927. Agni is the immortal in the mortal leading us on the upward climbing slopes of Heaven - even as in the Aurobindonian experience he comes down into us and shapes our thought and feeling and will in his own splendour and amethyst sovereignty. He makes those who are receptive to him living centres of blue-and-gold infinitudes. A conscious effort on our part is needed. But rare is such a conscious effort and rarer yet the guiding Light leading us on the path. "The yearning curves of life are lit to a smile" only when is present the incarnate Divine amongst us.

 

But the yearning soul of a poet is always in search of the smile of beauty held in its embrace by the truth of the creative spirit. Arthur Rimbaud had made a pertinent insightful discovery, that one must be a seer, that one must make oneself a seer. He held that "the poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses." The last phrase is somewhat puzzling. Rimbaud's own life was a question mark in spite of his association with Paul Verlaine who had introduced him to the nineteenth century literary circles of Paris. Rimbaud was a "mystical thief of fire" and believed in purification by dissolution. It is acceptable that we must not depend upon the senses because their faulty workings invariably cause distortions in our understanding.

 

Their disbandment is therefore perfectly justified. In-stead we should always employ higher and keener instruments of perception. In the context of spiritual poetry it certainly implies making the mind silent in order to receive the Word carrying with it the excellences of sight and sound and sense. It is this which becomes consistent with Rimbaud's concept of the ultimate quest, of knowing the

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self and the soul. His Le Bateau Ivre - The Drunken Boat -"the most influential French lyric of the nineteenth century" - is undoubtedly a fine expose of his poetic ideas. But he had no recipe to offer as to how to become a seer. A commentator of Rimbaud's poetry has an Indian theory for it. But the "derangement of senses" by the severe practices of five forbidden things of the Tantra, by avoiding meat, fish, wine, mudra - a hallucinogenic seed - and not indulging in sexual intercourse, as is at times suggested, cannot take us to the drunken boat for a felicitous literary voyage across the strange seas of thought.

 

The uniqueness of Sri Aurobindo's Department of Poetry lies precisely in its founding a new aesthesis of the spirit and making it a part of the creative experience itself. He sees its springs in the grades of consciousness climbing all the way up to the Overmental regions. These can also plunge into the inner depths and give a kind of occult density charged with the glow of some hidden sun, meet the "Fire burning on the bare stone" or, to use Amal's somewhat surrealistic phrase, be in possession of a diamond burning up-ward in the roofless chamber walled by the ivory mind. Not only does the Master see and locate all these inner and up-ward-ascending grades; he also asserts that their powerful or else revelatory currents have to rush in our well-prepared mind and heart and soul and spirit. The discipline of poetry itself thus turns into a field of work for making progress of every kind, literary, aesthetic, occult, spiritual. Artistic perfection carrying with it authentic emotional felicity at that time starts acquiring the qualities of the expressive soul it-self. Mystical experience then just becomes one aspect of its rich and many-dimensional possibilities.

 

We have a good glimpse of it in AE's (George William Russell) "The Vesture of the Soul". When he says

 

.. .I could not guess

The viewless spirit's wide domain,

.. .The royal robe I wear

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Trails all along the fields of light:

Its silent blue and silver bear

 For gems the starry dust of night

 

he somehow gets in contact with that mystical source of in-spiration. "AE at his highest inspiration is," writes Amal, "as great as Yeats but he hasn't Yeats's subtly rich incantation-effect. ... AE has his own music even as he has his own moods. But there is a spell-binding by words, which Yeats commands very often and AE very seldom. AE can be delicate and intuitive, colourful and revelatory: what he does not have as a rule is that verbal spell-binding - an art which to those who are sensitive to the soul of words is most precious....Yet to make Yeats the touchstone of poetry is misguiding; for the spell-binding art of subtly rich incantation is one of the rare modes of poetry and does not com-prise all the poetic modes." Amal the critic is in his glorious shades here. As a furious critic he can also be devastating.

 

' But first let us take another example of this aesthesis of the spirit, of Arjava's "Moksha" dated 25 August 1933. Its middle stanza is as follows:

 

Each man is wildered myriadly by outsight and

surface tone

Engirdling soul with clamour, by his fragmentary mood,

This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude

Of Truth's abidingness, Self-Blissful and Alone.

 

In his copy of Arjava's Poems published in 1939 Amal makes the following note: "I have not been able to trace the com-ment, but I remember that Sri Aurobindo praised the poem very highly and remarked about lines 7 and 8 [lines 3 and 4 in the above quotation] that they had come perhaps from some of the highest levels of inspiration that had been reached in the world's poetic history. Afterwards he wrote to me that they originated in: 'Illumined Mind with an Intuitive element and a strong Overmind touch.' (7 March 1934)

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Ihese lines can be considered what Sri Aurobindo regarded as 'Mantra' in the spiritual sense."

 

But what is Mantra? Let us read what Amal wrote apropos of it in one of his letters in 1990: "All great literature is at the same time sculpture and music. In Savitri and The Life Divine there is not only artistic rhythm: there is also the wing-beat of the Mantra, the significant sound that lives in a modulated phrase as if it entered it - whether ideatively or imaginally - from a vast of wisdom above the human mind and a depth of exaltation beyond the human heart. Without the ear sensitively responding along with the attentively answering eye, the life-thrill of the superhuman planes from which the words come will not be sufficiently caught in our being. The Mantra, in order to make its impact in full, requires to be realised in its vibration no less than in its message. Perhaps you will wonder if philosophy can be Mantric. All depends upon the source of it. In the Overmind, whence the Mantra hails, Truth and Beauty are one and it is Gods and Goddesses that covertly move in the steps of sentences like the one with which The Life Divine opens its procession if logical vision: "The earliest preoccupation of man in his wakened thought and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, - for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality.'"

 

The rustle of movements of Gods and Goddesses is felicitous and sweet-scented in the sweep of Mantric prose, but in the powerful rhythmic swing and sway of Mantric poetry it becomes the charged Word that ushers in divine experience even in the most objective realities in which we live. We are not only put in contact with them; we also see that they bring about a transforming miracle in us. Even the body's cells respond to their greatness in luminosity of the truth-existent. Does not incarnate Savitri stand in front of us in her assuring grandeur and sweetness and beauty in the

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following, one who has come as the radiant Word to express divinity in the world?

 

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple door to things beyond.

Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight

Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives,

A wide self-giving was her native act;

A magnanimity as of sea or sky

Enveloped with its greatness all that came

And gave a sense as of a greatened world:

Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,

Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise...

Love in her was wider than the universe,

The whole world could take refuge in her single heart...

At once she was the stillness and the word,

A continent of self-diffusing peace,

An ocean of untrembling virgin fire:

The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.

 

There is another kind of occult and densely packed Mantra in Arjava's "Moksha"-lines

 

This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude

 Of Truth's abidingness, Self-Blissful and Alone.

 

In spite of the bewildering condition of man, his outward-looking viewpoints, surface tones, his engirdling clamours and fragmentary moods, there is something magical in

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This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude Of Truth's abidingness,

Self-Blissful and Alone.

 

In the stillness of our heart let us read these lines again:

 

This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude

 Of Truth's abidingness, Self-Blissful and Alone.

 

And once more in the stillness of our entire being:

 

This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude

Of Truth's abidingness, Self-Blissful and Alone.

 

Such height of inspiration! Such wholesomeness and integrality of harmony that can give to Time's marring steps assuring bliss of the Alone! In the preface to Arjava's works his yogi-friend Sri Krishna Prem has the following to say: "For Arjava... Nature was a shrine in which each form seen in the flickering firelight of the senses was a shadow of realities that lay within, shining in the magical light of the secret Moon which was the Master-Light of all his seeing...." How true!

 

Contrast this to Keki N. Daruwalla's tribute to Nissim Ezekiel - A Poet of the Heart that appeared in The Hindu dated 1 February 2004: "He was a poet of the heart, of failure, of the doubt, of 'the unquiet mind, the emptiness within,' some-one who revelled in rodent-like explorations of love. Though he was an academic and read a lot, he was not 'barricaded from/The force of flower or bird' by what he read. He showed the others how to break away from the pseudo-spiritual, pseudo-philosophical poem brimming with sonorous Miltonicisms. Imagine what would have happened to Indian poetry in English if poets had followed in the footsteps of Sri Aurobindo, that great savant and revolutionary, but a terminal poetic disaster?" Here are rootless self-styled professionals arrogant to the degree who, as Keats would say "Standing apart in giant ignorance", pass judgments about matters for which they have never developed sensibilities.

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That great savant and revolutionary but not reckoned as a poet or critic, that "the greatest brain on the planet" as Bernard Shaw seems to have said about Sri Aurobindo, is a challenge to their academic standing and prestige and therefore must be ridiculed for self-promotion. Such peddlers of excellence simply take pride in aesthetics transplanted from the alien soil.

 

Does one become authentically spiritual by "revelling in rodent-like explorations of love"? And what is pseudo-spiritual in Sri Aurobindo? This is neither to understand spirituality nor poetry. And what is Miltonic in him? Let us take just a few lines with which Paradise Lost opens and see the vast difference that exists between the two:

 

Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

Sing Heav'nly Muse...

 ...I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

 Above the Aonian Mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime...

.. .What in me is dark

Illumin, what is low raise and support;

That to the highth of this great Argument

I may assert Eternal Providence,

And justifie the ways of God to men.

 

Here is Milton's blank verse, writes Amal, "in a philosophico-religious mood conveying strongly-cut imaged ideas in a tone of exalted emotion with the help of words that have a powerful stateliness and a rhythm that has a broad sweep. But Milton's substance... is 'mental, mentally grand and noble' and his 'architecture of thought and verse is high and

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powerful and massive, but usually there are no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence'.... Something in the rhythm remains unsupported by the sight and the word." In Milton spiritual things do not "reveal their own body, as it were, and do not utter themselves in their own tongue: they are reflected in the mental imagination and given forceful speech there." Mantra is altogether unknown to Milton. Modern-ism does not have even that music of Milton.

 

Long ago Sri Aurobindo himself said that the rise of modernism was necessary against the Victorian type. He wrote: "It is the most unlovely and uninspiring period of the English spirit. Never was the aesthetic sense so drowned in pretentious ugliness, seldom the intelligence crusted in such an armoured imperviousness to fine and subtle thinking, the ebb of spirituality so far out and low... Poetry flourishes best when it is the rhythmical expression of the soul of its age, of what is greatest and deepest in it, but still belongs to it and the poetry of this period suffers by the dull smoke-laden atmosphere in which it flowered;... there is still some-thing sticky in its luxuriance, a comparative depression and poverty in its thought, a lack in its gifts, in its very accomplishment a sense of something not done." Something had to be done and Modern Poetry attempted that. But modern-ism was an out-and-out reaction against tradition, even against future possibilities. Therefore, when Sri Aurobindo leaps from tradition into the Overhead, he at once gets by-passed in the current aesthesis. Obviously, this is a passing phase and the aesthesis will have to change and gather itself into a future form. Daruwallas and their ilk may fail to see it but it is inevitable. After all, Modern Poetry has not delivered the goods and man's deepest aspirations have remained unfulfilled. "Empty and barren is the sea," but it must find new waters and new tides. Kathleen Raine's realisation that

 

Behind the tree, behind the house, behind the stars Is the presence that I cannot see

 

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is also her hope. And she is a lady who never considered Sri Aurobindo to be a poet. In the hasteful modernity what we have lost is the calm and self-assuring music of the spheres. With the telescope of the mind what we see are only glimmerings of the distant fireflies, what we probe are the surface details of the subconscient. But nowhere is there poetry. The Western critic is just an adult of the city and is bereaved of his mother. Indians ape him. For Meredith poetry is the overflow of our inmost in the sweetest way. Will we get it? Ogden Nash proclaims that

 

Brightness falls from the air

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen's eye...

 

Here are "some of the most delicately magical lines in the English language." Do we respond to their charm? The modern mind has no patience for that; that is its tragedy.

 

Sri Aurobindo's modernism does not rest at all in the sordid and the ugly. In him there is a kind of assimilated richness. He exploits, so to say, everything that can tellingly if not revealingly serve his purpose. Kalidasian moods of sea-sons and the featurelessness of Nirvana, for example, are as important to it as Homeric similes or the correlative expressions of the Modernists. It is so because his epics or short lyrical verses come from an original source of inspiration inaccessible to us. That incapacity of ours cannot be a reflection on the quality of his creations. Thus Savitri is full of Rasas - Madhura, Karuna, Vatsalya, Adbhuta, Veera, Bibhatsa, Shanta, etc. Quintessentially, however, it is founded on the Shanta. It is in this great Silence that the Epic was born - Silence the true home of Overhead Poetry. To really appreciate it one has to enter into it. Poetry is not only image and symbol; it is also sound and silence; if there is sight's sound, there is also sound's sight. And when "Le Musicien de Silence" becomes one with "Le Musicien de

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Son" we have an unsurpassable marvel. Listen to Ezra Pound: "When we know more of overtones we shall see that the tempo of every masterpiece is absolute, and is exactly set by some further law of rhythmic accord. Whence it should be possible to show that any given rhythm implies about it a complete musical form, perfect, complete. Ergo, the rhythm set in a line of poetry connects its symphony, which, had we a little more skill, we could score for orchestra." If one is deaf to these sounds, to these rhythmic accords, to these happinesses rushing from the creative possibilities of the inevitable Word, then what can the creative poet do? In the Overhead Poetry as given to us by Sri Aurobindo what we have are the perfect rhythm and thought-substance and soul-vision fused into one, the supreme Mantra itself.

 

Sri Aurobindo wrote prophetically, four score years ago, that the future poetry "transcending the more intellectualised or externally vital and sensational expression" would speak "wholly in the language of an intuitive mind and vision and imagination, intuitive sense, intuitive emotion, intuitive vital feeling, which can seize in a peculiarly intimate light of knowledge by a spiritual identity the inmost thought, sight, image, sense, life, feeling of that which it is missioned to utter. The voice of poetry comes from a region above us, a plane of our being above and beyond our personal intelligence, a supermind which sees things in their inmost and largest truth by a spiritual identity and a lustrous effulgency and rapture and its native language is a revelatory, inspired, intuitive word limpid or subtly vibrant or densely packed with the glory of this ecstasy." He saw five suns of truth-beauty-delight-life-spirit in the sky of poetry waiting for us to receive their glow and warmth. Our creative endeavour should be to open ourselves to them.

 

Students who graduated themselves from Sri Aurobindo's Department of Poetry received magnificences of these suns in Sri Aurobindo's plenty. "The silent wonders of eternity" that were waiting for the inspired utterance suddenly found in rock-hewn images the quivering lips that speak of the blue

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skies and the golden truths. We witness the ear of ears and the eye of eyes waking to the subtleties of sense and sound, marvelling at the mystery of God's creation even in Time. Not only did Sri Aurobindo himself write seizing "the absolute in shapes that pass"; he also encouraged actively and positively his disciples who came forward to participate in such an apocalyptic adventure. Amal-kiran was one among the most prominent practitioners of this new poetry, Poetry of the Future. He invoked heaven's light in the inner chamber and called out the occult fire from the depths of the being to take the form of the deeply expressive and intuitive Word. His was the Hymn of Affirmation welcoming the Aurobindonian Muse, a chant in the praise of Ahana of the Eternal. Glory to the New Dawn appearing on the poetic horizon!

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Bhishma Pitamaha of Indian History-Tribute to a Pioneer

 

 

In a career sparuiing more than half a century and covering several fields, K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran as Sri Aurobindo called him) has been a true pioneer. His work on ancient Indian history has been characterised by originality, by an approach that combines technical data from archaeology and other sources with a mastery of ancient literary works to reveal them in unexpected light. One of his major contributions has been the correlation of technical evidence from archaeology and other sources with literary accounts to help place ancient history and chronology on solid ground. In his search for both technical and literary evidence, Sethna has not been content to limit himself to the Indian subcontinent; his search has taken him far and wide, to Sumeria, in particular to the empire founded by Saragon of Akkad in the third millennium.

 

Sethna has made two fundamental contributions to ancient history. First, mainly on the basis of the evidence of cotton he has shown that the Harappan civilisation, which overlapped the Sumerian and the Akkadian, belonged to the Sutra period of the Vedic Age. Second, he has also shown that the Rigveda preceded the Silver Age. Both these are of far-reaching significance, a fact that is now coming to be recognised with improved understanding of metallurgy and archaeology of Pre-Harappan sites.

 

His finding about silver and the Rigveda is now receiving support from the unfolding ecological picture of the Sarasvati river region and also the discovery of silver ornaments at the Pre-Harappan site of Kunal on the Sarasvati. He has also highlighted the fact that horses existed in India in prehistoric times and it is therefore wholly unnecessary to

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postulate any Aryan invasion or migration to account foi their importance in the Vedic literature. Thanks largely to Sethna's insights, we now have a sheet anchor r ancient history and prehistory in the form of the Sutra-Harappa-Sumeria equation.

 

More recently, following N. Jha's decipherment of the! Harappan script, this writer found Sethna's discovery of the Sutra-Harappa connection to be crucial in identifying the language of the Harappan seals to be a form of Vedic Sanskrit. This, along with the writer's own research on Vedic and Babylonian mathematics gave a determination of the Harappan language as Vedic that was independent of the decipherment.

 

The author of the present article met Sethna (Amal Kiran) only once, in March 1997, when he visited Sethna to present him with a copy of the book Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization by N.S. Rajaram and David Frawley, which was dedicated to him.

 

What follows is a summary of Sethna's work based on excerpts from two of his major works: KARPASA in Prehistoric India (KPT) and The Problem of Aryan Origins (PAO). By this the author's goal is to convey some idea of the originality and power that characterise the work of this pioneer researcher. The author's own comments are given in italics.

 

Introduction

 

Sethna terms the Aryan invasion theory a dogma and then goes on to bring together an impressive body of evidence to highlight the fact that an objective evaluation of it shows the theory to be without any basis. The following can serve as a background to his argument.

A dogma that seems to be fast fading among a number of archaeologists is that Aryan, invaders had a prominent hand in destroying the Harappa Culture of the ancient Indus Valley. But the dogma that the Aryans of the Rigveda came

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into this Valley from outside India around the middle of the second millennium B.C. still dies hard. And naturally then the 'heresy' that the Rigvedics preceded the Harappa Culture is too difficult to entertain. As difficult also appears the contention that there are not two prominent races in India -the Aryans and the Dravidians - but only one internally diversified race which we may call 'Dravidaryan' and whose original common language developed into Sanskrit and Tamil, a pair of languages disclosing on a penetrating scrutiny more affinities than common linguistics can suspect. Finally, there is the general view of the Rigveda as the record of a fight between Aryan Rishis and devilish-seeming non-Aryans who were dubbed Dasa-Dasyus. Here nobody thinks of asking: "If the Rigvedics did not destory the Harappa Culture, what enemies did they fight - enemies credited by them with an array of 'forts' (purah)?" None answering to the Rigvedics' account are to be found between the end of the Harappa Culture in c. 1500 B.C. and the postulated Aryan advent. Nor, if we make the Rigveda anterior to the Harappa Culture, do we have evidence of a confrontation of fortified Dasa-Dasyus by Rishi-led fighters. (Foreword to the Second Edition, 1992: PAO)

 

Having set this background, Sethna then goes on to point out:

 

In the field of history we must face the crucial questions:

 

(1) Is there any genuine evidence of what almost every history book at present takes for granted, namely, an Aryan invasion of India around 1500 B.C.?

 

(2) Was the Harappa Culture of the Indus Valley, which ran for at least a thousand years and whose end has been dated in the middle of the second millennium B.C., basically non-Aryan, anterior to the oldest Aryan document in India, the Rigveda, and given its finishing stroke by hostile Rigvedic tribes, who hailed from beyond India's north-west and who came to reflect in their scripture the story of their fight with and conquest of this civilisation?

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We shall deal with these questions not always in the above order. Significant side-issues, which are not mentioned, will also arise. (PAO: 1-3)

 

Horse-evidence from both Outside and

 Inside the Indus Valley

 

The horse is often regarded as the quintessential Aryan animal. The supposed absence of the horse in India before the middle of the second millennium, particularly at the Harappan sites has been pressed into service as negative evidence indicating an Aryan invasion. But Sethna produced abundant evidence to refute the claim. Here are some excerpts from his writings on the subject [Sethna's account is more detailed]:

 

Dr. K.R. Alur, a veterinary surgeon, has some pertinent information detailing a faunal report on the excavation at Hallur, a border village in Mirekerur taluka (county) of Dharwad district in Karnataka. His paper of 16 June 1990, Aryans and Indian History: an archaeo-zoological approach¹ says (PAO: 216-22):

 

This site was excavated by Dr. M.S. Nagaraja Rao during February-March 1965. Excavation of two trenches showed that the occupation of the site was during the neolithic period circa 1800 B.C....

 

From this collection I identified the following bones of Horse:

 

S no. 212. Small metacarpal (splint bone).

S no. 467. Proximal extremity of small metacarpal.

S no. 497. Molar (from the middle series).

S no. 517. Second phalanx.

 

 

1. This paper was apparently a publication of the Karnataka Department of Archaeology. Sethna does not provide a reference but quotes extensively from it. Nevertheless it became widely known for understandable reasons.

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When I wrote this report, I least expected that it might spark off a controversy and land me in the witness box before the Indian historians' jury.... I was apprised of the gravity of the situation when I began to get letters asking me for clarification of the situation against the prevalent belief that the horse is a non-indigenous species and was introduced into India only by [invading] Aryans....

 

To make my position clear, I wrote in my article... "whatever may be the opinion expressed by archaeologists, it cannot either deny or alter the find of a scientific fact that the horse was present at Hallur before the [presumed] period of Aryan invasion..."

 

The find of this fact put the Indian archaeologists and historians in a predicament in which they could not deny a scientific fact, yet could not accept it. So those on whom the responsibility lay made a reasonable approach and ordered a second excavation near the original site to avoid a probable introduction of an artifact. I examined the fauna! collection of this excavation also and found the presence of some more bones of the Horse'.

 

.. .Dr. Alur [later] touches on how the Indian tradition, which knew nothing of an invasion and took the horse's presence in India to be natural from the beginning, got flouted further by "the report written by S. Sewell and B. Prasad on the fau-nal study from Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa". This report declared "that there is no evidence of the presence of the horse in the Indus valley" though "they declared that they had recovered a few metacarpals of the domestic Ass".

 

Then Dr. Alur brings to light a little-known riposte to that report: "Dr. J.C. George of the M.S. University of Baroda stated that the study of the above table of the comparative measurements shows beyond doubt that the metacarpals recorded by Prasad are definitely not of the domestic Ass and it is therefore possible to conclude that the smaller size horse did exist in Harappa. He further states: 'It is rather

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incredible that in a great civilisation like India, the horse alone should be conspicuous by its absence, while allied species like that of the Ass have been identified....'"

 

By this Sethna established that the horse was present in Harappa. He then produced even more decisive evidence to show that the horse was present in India even in prehistoric times. As he observed in PAO (ibid)

 

Still more devastating is the report published in 1980 by the Department of Ancient History, Culture and Archaeology, University of Allahabad: History to Prehistory: Archaeology of the Vindhyas and the Ganga Valley by G.R. Sharma.² Co-workers with Sharma were not only Indian archaeologists but also Dr. M.A.J. Williams and Keith Royce, who were members of the team led by Professor J. Desmond Clark of Allahabad University. The following passages from Sharma are well worth study:

 

The explorations in the valley of the Belan and Son have resulted in discoveries of thousands of animal fossils. From the Belan section these fossils have been obtained from four Gravels as well as from the red silt overlying Gravel II. Most of the fossils, however, have been obtained from Gravels I & II. The species include bos-nomadicus, bos-bubalis, gavialis, sus, elephas, antelope, bos-elephas, stag, deer, equus, chelonia (tortoise) and unio...

 

The excavations of neolithic sites of Koldihwa and Mahagara have brought to light evidence of domestication of animals and cultivation of plants. The domesticated animals include cattle, sheep, goat and horse...

 

Mahagara and Koldihwa have yielded evidence of both wild and domesticated cattle, thus presenting an interesting picture of transition from wild variety to

 

 

2. Published by the University of Allahabad, Department of Ancient History, Culture and Archaeology.

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domesticated ones. The change in size and bone structure attest to nature's law of selection. Evidence of wild sheep/ goat and equus has also been found from Cemented Gravels III&IV in the Belan Valley. They are still wild at Mahadaha and Sarai-Nahar-Rai, the Mesolithic sites of the Ganga valley. The Neolithic Mahagara offers evidence of their domestication, suggesting a natural selection and domestication of these animals almost parallel to that of cattle....

 

With the help of a number of radiocarbon dates obtained from the Belan and the Ganga valley, Stone Age Cultures from Upper Palaeolithic to Mesolithic have been dated. The Cemented Gravel III which has yielded the Upper Palaeolithic tools has also yielded the C-14 dates - 23,840 B.C. and 17,765 B.C. As the earliest date is not from the lowest horizon, the Upper Palaeolithic in this area had possibly still an earlier antiquity.

 

For the pre-pottery Geometric Mesolithic we have two dates, one from the Belan valley and the other from the Ganga valley. The date obtained from Shari-Nahar-Rai is 8395±110 B.C. We have two dates from the Neolithic levels of Koldihwa reading 5440+240 B.C. and 4530 ±185 B.C.

 

Within the chronological framework provided by C-14 dates for terminal Upper Palaeolithic reading 17,765±340 and for the pre-Neolithic 8080±115 and the early Neolithic levels reading 6570 ±210 and 5540 ±240 B.C., the totality of evidence furnished by these excavations and explorations... presents a continuous story of human achievements...

 

To judge finally whether this whole picture is plausible we have to revert to Sharma's History to Prehistory. The Neolithic sites of Koldihwa and Mahagara which have evidenced the domesticated horse are dated by radiocarbon to 6570 B.C. With the possibility of adding 210 years we reach 6780 B.C.... (PAO: 278-9)

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By this Sethna showed that the horse was -present in India going back to Neolithic times. To this must now be added the information that the capture of a horse has been depicted in the rock paintings of Bhimbetka near Bhopal in Central India discovered by V.S. Wakankar of the Sarasvati River fame. These paintings are at least 30,000 years old. Thus, as Sethna pointed out, no Aryan invasion is necessary to account for the importance accorded to the horse in the Rigveda.

 

[Added Note: Some readers will be familiar with the recent storm of controversy over the 'Harappan horse' whipped up by Michael Witzel and his associates following the publication of The Deciphered Indus Script by N. Jha and N.S. Rajaram in 2000. As Sethna had observed a while back, the issue had been settled years, even decades earlier. In fact, as far back as 1931, no less a person than John Marshall had noted the presence of the smaller "country bred" Indian horse at Mohenjo-daro. Further, it has been noted that the 17-ribbed horse described in the Vedas is anatomically different from the 18-ribbed Central Asiatic horse. The Indian horse is probably descended from the 'Siwalik horse' (Equus Sivalensis), also with 17 ribs, fossils of which have been found in India going back to untold antiquity. It is time to stop flogging this dead horse.]

 

KARPASA and the Case for Cotton

 

In his book KARPASA in Prehistoric India - now a classic -Sethna made a major contribution to Vedic chronology by establishing that the archaeology of the Harappan Civilisation belongs to the Sutra period. This now is strengthened by the connections found between the mathematics of the Sulba Sutras - also from the Sutra period - and the mathematics of Old-Babylonia and the Egyptian Middle Kingdom brought to light by A. Seidenberg. All this now receives further support from metallurgy and ancient ecology, particularly the picture that is emerging of the drying up of the Sarasvati River. It now becomes possible to speak of a new sheet anchor for the Vedic Age - the Harappa-Sutra-Sumeria equation. Here are some excerpts from Sethna's work leading to that important chronological landmark.

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' We may sum up: a general survey of the popular invasion-theme lights upon so many factors to the contrary that : we are led to give the Rigveda such antiquity as would perforce show the Harappa Culture as posterior to it and draw it broadly into the fold of Aryanism in however modified a form.

 

This historical perspective passes even beyond extreme probability and becomes a certainty the moment we concentrate on the topic with which we have initiated our research: Indian cotton. The crucial point deciding the issue of precedence as between the Indus Valley Civilisation and the Rigveda and thus constituting a clue both chronological and cultural, of vital importance is the question: "Where does the word karpasa, which is the sole one available for Indian cotton, first occur in the literature of India?" (KPI: 16-17)

 

Over fifty years ago Sir John Marshall announced the discovery of cotton cloth at Mohenjo-daro. Wheeler says:³ "The occurrence [of cotton], with another reputed example at Lothal, is by far the earliest known; in Egypt cotton, though abundant today, was not cultivated in ancient times.".. .Excavations at Mehrgarh on the Bolan River in Central Baluchistan have uncovered a series of agricultural settlements more than 3000 years older than Mohenjo-daro and there... dating back to the fifth millennium B.C. some seeds of cotton (Gossypium) have been found. Jean-Francois Jarrige and Richard H. Meadow write:⁴ "...Their presence in association with the seeds of other cultivated plants near a structure apparently used for storage, however, suggests that cotton was indeed cultivated by the farmers of Period II at Mehrgarh because they prized either its fiber or its oil-rich seeds."

 

Yes, the Indus Valley Civilisation's cotton is fairly later, but what is pertinent to our purpose is not mere antiquity: it is what is remarked by Rao Bahadur Dayaram Sahni, a colleague of Marshall's and the actual discoverer of the woven cloth in which a silver vase had been wrapped and which

 

 

3. The Indus Civilization, Cambridge University Press, 1968, p. 2.

4. "The Antecedents of Civilization in the Indus Valley", in Scientific American, August 1980, pp. 131-32.

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was scientifically ascertained to have the typical convoluted structure of true cotton-fibre. Sahni writes in relation to India:5 "When cotton cloth first came into use and whether it continued to be worn right through the historic period is as yet uncertain. The Vedic literature from the Rigveda down to the Sutra period contains numerous references to weavers, the art of weaving, the weaver's shuttle, wearing of clothes like turbans, shirts, etc., soiled garments and washermen. But whereas wool (samulya) and silk (tarpya) are mentioned, cotton {karpasa) is unknown from early texts." (KPI: 18-19)

 

Here indeed is a strange situation. ...it is impossible to think that cotton cloth, once in use in the Indus region for a millennium (2500-1500 B.C.) could fall entirely out of use in the same region soon after and then again, after a long interval, come into use. It becomes all the more unreasonable if we credit the theory that the Rigveda records the Aryan invasion and destruction of the Indus Valley cities; for then the Vedic Aryans must know of cotton, and their actual ignorance of it mean something else than the sudden start of its disuse down to the Sutra period. But Sahni's query would not even arise if we considered the Rigveda anterior to the Harappa Culture. And logically the presence of cotton cloth in this Culture and its non-mention in the Vedic texts should raise the question: "Did not these texts precede in time that Culture?" (KPI: 19-20)

 

Yet, if the Rigveda and its documentary progeny are set after this Civilisation, we have literature glaringly contradicting archaeology. Consistency is achieved solely on our affirming that the Rigveda came before. (KPI: 23)

 

The sequel in general may be spotlighted by stating that even in the texts which succeed the Rigveda over a lengthy period it [cotton] is not to be found: none of the three other Vedas, none of the numerous BrShmanas and Aranyakas, none of the early principal Upanishads contain the word

 

 

5. Indian Archaeological Survey 1926-27, p. 65.

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karpasa.... This extraordinary silence, significantly continued and sustained, must imply that throughout the period concerned - about a thousand years by the present chronology - nobody knew of cotton. The Cotton Age, in which the Harappa Culture flourished and which in a distinctly developed form would seem to have been brought about by it,  was definitely posterior to the Rigveda and, by the same token, to everything down to the Sutras. (KPI: 24)

 

Now we may briefly draw up our chronological scheme in general. A cue may be taken from the current chronology and applied anew in respect of interrelations.

 

In our time-scheme the type of work exemplified by the existing Sutras would begin somewhere in the early period of the Harappa Culture: between 2500 and 2000 B.C. The end of the Rigveda's composition would be about 3000 B.C. or a little after: the commencement of it would go back to at least 3500 B.C. The intervening age - say, from c. 3000 to c. 2300 B.C. - would see "the great development in culture, religion and language" of "the later Vedic literature". (KPI: 38-39)

 

Everything up to the cotton-mentioning Sutras must be taken as anterior to and anticipatory of the Indus Valley Civilisation even when certain aspects are in common. And in this hypothesis of ours we are confirmed from another side also: Sutra-material apart from mention of cotton.

 

The Cambridge History of India informs us:⁶ "We find in the Sutras for the first time the recognition of images of the gods." There we have the characteristic iconism of the Harappa Culture thrown into relief as never before in Indian literature. Surely, parallel contemporary developments of the Indian religious life confront us. (KPI: 50)

 

Thus the Sutras and the Indus Valley Civilisation stand face to face, products of a single Zeitgeist for all their differences as between Aryan and semi-Aryan. They are proved contemporaries in vision and attitude in various ways that support our synchronisation of them on the score of cotton. (KPI: 53)

 

 

6. Cambridge History of India, Vol. I, p. 228.

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Having used combined technical and literary arguments to establish that the Indus Valley Civilisation corresponds to the Sutra period, Sethna goes on to identify them as the people referred to as the Mlechchhas in the Brahmanas and the Sutras. These Mlechchhas were looked upon with disapproval by the orthodox Indians. This allowed him to establish a connection between India and West Asia. But the Sarasvati ecology was unknown at the time and Sethna did not realise that the division of the Vedic civilisation into the Eastern and the Western is accounted for by the gradual drying up of the Sarasvati River and the relentless advance of the desert. But he did note the cleavage in the Vedic civilisation and its significance.

 

And the attitude of all the Indian books of the post-Rigvedic epoch of the Indus Valley Civilisation may be gauged from what Pusalker⁷ has written apropos of the shift of the Vedic culture "to the east of the land of five rivers": "The Punjab and the west not only recede in importance but the tribes of the west are looked upon with disapproval in the Satapatha and the Aitareya Brahmanas."

 

To these Brahmanas the process leading to the formation of the Harappa Culture must seem deserving of disapproval, for various forces at work from outside the Vedic ethos have found expression in that Culture side by side with the line of natural development and change from the Rigveda. Forces from Mesopotamia and Iran have been traced in the Indus Valley Civilisation even while the general structure and shape of it have been seen as essentially Indian and may be considered by us as an unusual Rigvedic derivative, at once a development and a deviation. The mixture may be expected to provoke a broad semi-condemnatory label from the post-Rigvedic civilisation proper to the east of the Indus Valley. So we may ask the momentous question: "Can we not find from post-Rigvedic literature, in combination with Mesopotamian

 

 

7. Pusalker, A.D., "Interrelation of Culture between India and the Outside World before Asoka", The Cultural Heritage of India, Calcutta: The Ramakrishna Mission, 1958.

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sources, who the authors were of the Harappa Culture?" (KPI: 64)

 

And these were known as Mlechchhas both to the Indians and in the Mesopotamian sources. It is likely that the word Mlechchha is itself of foreign origin applied by the Harappans to their own language - a term that later became a derogatory term in the Indian literature. It is worth noting that according to the Mahabharata, in conveying a secret message to Yudhishtira, Vidura used the language of the Mlechchhas.

 

The Sutras seem to have borne in mind the Satapatha Brahmana's point about language. The Vasistha Dharmasutra (VI.41)... states that an Aryan should not learn the Mlechchha speech. And the first thing the hoary Gautama Dharma-sutra enjoins about the subject is that one should not speak with Mlechchhas.

 

The Harappa Culture, with its Mesopotamian and Iranian elements superimposed on the Vedic Aryan, could very well have been based on a Mlechchha language not only Prakrt in form, a kind of popularised or corrupt Sanskrit, but also infused with foreign words and phrases so that the Prakrt itself became corrupt... (KPI: 66)

 

Cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia, inscribed on clay-ablets, speak often of a far-away kingdom called Meluhha. ean Bottero^,8 in his introduction to the French translation of he famous Assyriologist S.N. Kramer's History Begins at smer, tells us that in Sumerian the h, by itself, is aspirated and hard, like the German ch or the Spanish jota: we may say this equivalent to kh. Thus Meluhha is to be pronounced Melukhkha. Gordon Childe9 uses the form: Melukha. Here is a name which could very well be the Sumerian pronun-iation of "Mlechchha".

 

8. Bottero, J., L'histoire commence a Sumer, p. II: "Note sur la pographie et la prononciation des mots sumeriens", France: 1957.

9. Childe, Gordon, What Happened in History ?, Harmondsworth: Pen-uin,1971, p. 150.

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All the more precisely could it be this pronunciation if we should look at the Prakrt version of "Mlechchha"... He [Mookerji10] quotes the Prakrt equivalent of "Mlechchha": "Melakha." Have we not in "Melakha" a sound as good as identical with Childe's "Melukha"? (KPI: 69)

 

After having established the identity of the Harappans of the Indus Valley as being the same as that of the people known as Melukha to the Sumerians, Sethna, in a remarkable tour-de-force showed that Indian articles including karpasa-coffon were imported into Mesopotamia. As evidence of trading articles he noted:

 

(1) A couple of pieces of ivory work from Meluhha - a comb and two human-headed bulls mounted on a pedestal supported by wheels - were found in a grave of the Akkad period of Kish. Ivory combs and model oxen mounted on wheels as well as human-headed animal figurines are familiar Indus articles.

 

(2) At Lothal, the most important Harappan site in Saurashtra, archaeologists have dug up not only what in all probability is a complete port with docks, etc., showing the Harappa Culture to have been strikingly maritime,...The Harappa Culture is thus directly linked to Mesopotamia's Persian-Gulf trade with far-away Meluhha.

 

(3) In a Mesopotamian text of approximately the same period the peacock (dha-ja-musen) is described as a bird of Meluhha - the peacock which is a characteristic Indian bird and often depicted on Indus objects. (KPI: 79-80)

 

All things considered, the Harappan realm and Meluhha must have been one. (KPI: 81)

 

After this Sethna goes on to point out the existence of kapazum in Mesopotamian records, the equivalent of the Sanskrit karpasa.

 

 

10. Mookerji, R.K., Ancient India, Allahabad: University Press, 1956, p. 121.

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In this connection Leemans,¹¹ who also credits the Meluhha-Mlechchha equation we have elaborated, has a number of highly suggestive remarks which could serve as our starting-point:

 

If, indeed, Meluhha was western India, the region of the Indus civilisation, in the period of the Larsa dynasty [of Mesopotamia] and before, it may perhaps be assumed that some of the unknown names of articles mentioned in the texts... and also occurring in other Ur texts, were (prae-Indo-Aryan) Indian words, e.g., words like kapazum and lahakitum,... arazum and tuharum. It may be observed that most of these words have an Akkadian and not a Sumerian form. On the other hand, if Meluhha was western India, one could expect to find cotton among the imports in Ur. An impression of it on clay has been found at Ur but no Sumerian word for it is known unless it was among the unidentified names of articles. (KPI: 142-3; emphasis ours)

 

About these words the prime question to be asked is: "Does any suggest the Indian term we employ for cotton?" The merest glance at Leeman's list should bring kapazum leaping to the eye. The Sanskrit word for cotton in Indian post-Rigvedic literature is karpasa, and its Prakrt version which would naturally omit the r would be something whose very likely echo in Mesopotamian mouths would be kapazum. (KPI: 143-4)

 

This correspondence would, for one thing, clinch our position that Meluhha was the land of the Indus Civilisation.

 

Secondly, it would confirm the chronology we have offered for the Sutras. If the word karpasa occurs for the first time in that part of Sanskrit literature which is known as the Sutras and if it is also an element in the language of the first cotton-cultivating civilisation, namely, the civilisation of the Indus Valley, then the age of the earliest Sutras must be the same as the age of this civilisation. (KPI: 144)

 

 

11. Leemans, W.F., Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960, pp. 165-66.

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Sethna's conclusion has now been strengthened by the discovery of the connections between the Sutras and the mathematics of Old-Babylonia and Egypt. This combined with the most recent data from ancient ecology suggests that the early Sutra literature may have to be moved back by several centuries. The date for the Indus Valley Civilisation current when Sethna wrote this (B.c. 2500-1500 B.C.) will now have to be moved back by several centuries. The Sarasvati dried up more or less completely by 1900 B.C. The ending of the Indus Valley Civilisation must be placed before that date. But his fundamental contribution - the Sutra-Harappa-Sumeria equation - is being confirmed by every new discovery, the latest being Jha's decipherment of the Indus (Harappan) script.

 

Other Technical Evidence: Metals and Silver

 

While the evidence of cotton allowed Sethna to place the Sutra period in the same general time frame as the Sumerian and the Harappan Civilisations, his study of the knowledge of metals, particularly silver, now places the Rigveda in the fourth millennium. This is now strengthened by the discovery of silver ornaments at the pre-Harappan site of Kunal on the ancient Sarasvati dating to the fourth millennium B.C. His conclusions are supported also by the absence of any reference to bricks in the Rigveda.

The fire-altars at Kalibangan, in Sankalia's words,¹² "consist of shallow pits oval or rectangular in plan" and he adds: "around or near about were placed flat rectangular or circular terracotta pieces, known hitherto as 'terracotta cakes'." All these structures definitely indicate Aryanism. Yet they cannot be related to the Rigveda. Stuart Piggott¹³ correctly says about the Rigvedic Age: "There is no evidence that any temples were built, and the altar is nothing more elaborate than a pile of turf." Parpola¹⁴ himself notes in one context: "Besides

 

 

12. Sankalia, H.D., Prehistory and Protohistory of India and Pakistan, Poona: Deccan College, 1974, p. 360.

13. Piggott, S., Prehistoric India, Harmondsworth: A Pelican Book, 1960, p. 283.

14. Parpola, Asko, "The Coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and

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the implements needed in the preparation of Soma and the sacrificial fire, the sacrificial place contained little beyond a shallow bed dug out and covered with grass for the gods to sit on." .. .he informs us that "the brick-built fire altar... is never mentioned in the Rigveda." In fact, even the existence of bricks -such a marked feature of the Indus Valley Civilisation - cannot be traced in the Rigveda. The Rigveda, flourishing in the same locale - the valley of the Indus - has no word for 'brick': istaka occurs only in later literature. (PAO: 233)

 

Sethna then points out that the Vedic Aryans knew metallurgy but not iron. The Rigvedic people in addition had no knowledge of silver. And this is an important chronological marker. He notes:

 

"The Rigvedic Indo-Aryans" writes A.L. Basham¹⁵ "were ...acquainted with... metallurgy, although they had no knowledge of iron.... Gold was familiar and made into jewelry." He refers bronze and copper implements to Vedic times, but is silent about silver. At another place he tells us: "where the Rigveda speaks only of gold and copper or bronze the later Vedic texts also mention tin, lead, and silver, and probably iron." A.A. Macdonell¹⁶ makes the statement:

 

Among the metals, gold is most frequently mentioned in the Rigveda.... The metal which is most often referred to in the Rigveda next to gold is called ay as (Latin aes).... In most passages where it occurs the word appears to mean simply 'metal'.... It seems quite likely that the Aryans of that period were unacquainted with silver, for its name is not mentioned in the Rigveda....

 

______________

the Cultural and Ethnic Identity of the Dasas, Studia Orientalia, Vol. 64, Helsinki, 1988, pp. 225 & 250.

15. Basham, A.L., "Ancient India", The Oxford History of India, 3rd revised edition, 1970, p. 516.

16. Macdonell, A.A., A History of Sanskrit Literature, London: Heineman, 1928, p. 151.

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No scholar of India's most ancient scripture breathes a word about silver. (PAO: 234-5)

 

From this it follows that the introduction of silver in the Vedic literature provides a chronological lower limit for the Rigvedic Age. This, Sethna shows, occurs for the first time in the Yajurveda.

 

Furthermore, as regards silver, we can go beyond the mere though significant fact of its absence. From the linguist A.C. Greppin¹⁷ we gather the following information. In the early Sanskrit texts the word rajata which has the same root as the Greek arguros, the Latin argentum, the Armenian arcat' and the Celtic argat does not by itself denote silver as do all the other terms. It simply means 'white'. In those early texts the expression for silver is rajatam hiranyam, literally 'white gold'. The next step after Greppin is to note that the common word for 'white' in the Rigveda, the earliest Sanskrit text, is svetd or sukra. But rajata does occur just once in 8,25,22 [Rigveda, VIII.25.22]. The verse concerned along with its successor reads, in Ralph T.H. Griffith:¹⁸

 

From Uksanayayana a bay, from Harayana a white

 steed,

And from Susaman we obtained a harnessed car.

These two shall bring me further gain of troops of

tawny-coloured steeds,

The carriers shall they be of active men of war.

 

In the original, we have rajatam without any noun to qualify; but the general context of the first verse and even more that of the second where steeds of tawny colour are mentioned after a reference to 'these two' make an implied white steed

 

 

17. Greppin, A.C., Review of J.P. Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans, Times Literary Supplement, August 11-17,1989, p. 881, col. 4.

18. Griffith, R.T.H., The Hymns of the Rigveda, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, reprinted 1976, p. 417.

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pair with a bay. The sense of silver is impossible with a horse, especially in the company of other horses with common colours. And if early Sanskrit knows silver only as rajatam hiranyam, the Rigvedic rajatam - whatever it may qualify -can denote nothing else than 'white'. There cannot be the slightest suspicion of silver in the Rigveda's period. (PAO: 243-4)

 

Based on this Sethna concluded that the Rigveda must be dated to before 4000 B.C. He had this to say:

 

But an important fact has come to my notice which would necessitate the dating of the Rigveda to beyond c. 4000 B.C.

 

We have shown, on the basis of the term rajatam hiranyam as the name for silver in early Sanskrit texts, that the Rigveda's solitary use of rajata simply as an adjective for a horse proves the existence of this scripture prior to the Silver Age.... Turning to the Encyclopaedia Britannica¹⁹ we gather the earliest date available for this metal.. ."Silver ornaments, vessels for ceremonial services, and decorations have been found in royal tombs dating back to 4000 B.C." So the silverless Rigveda must go past this date. (PAO: 264)

 

In this, as in other essays (like the 'Harappan horse') Sethna proved to be remarkably prescient: silver ornaments found at the Sarasvati site of Kunal dating to the fourth millennium indicate that the 4000 B.C.E. date arrived at by Sethna is entirely reasonable. This is supported also by the fact that the perennial Sarasvati described by the Rigveda as flowing from 'the mountain to the sea' had ceased to exist long before 3000 B.C.E. But the existence of the Sarasvati as the greatest of the rivers of North India is clear from satellite photos. This however belongs to a phase several centuries before 3000 B.C.E. So Sethna's date for the Rigveda is remarkably close to the mark.

 

 

19. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1977 ed., Vol. 16, p. 776, col. 2.

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In summary: his two main contributions-the Sutra-Harappa-Sumeria equation, and the chronology of the Rigveda - are fully in agreement with the latest findings from archaeology, metallurgy and ecology. And every new discovery from silver ornaments at Kunal to Jha's decipherment of the Indus script is adding to the lustre of his discoveries.

 

 

References

 

The main references are:

 

Sethna, K.D., The Problem of Aryan Origins: From an Indian Point of View. Second extensively enlarged edition with five supplements, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1992.

Sethna, K.D., KARPASA in Prehistoric India: a Chronological and Cultural clue, New Delhi: Biblia Impex, 1981.

Jha, N. and Rajaram, N.S., The Deciphered Indus Script, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2000.

Rajaram, Navaratna S. and Frawley, David, Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization, New Delhi: Voice of India, 3rd edition, 2000.

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The Gift of Goddess Saraswati

 

 

CHAKRAVARTI Rajagopalachariar described the English language as the gift of Goddess Saraswati to India. There was, of course, a time towards the end of our independence struggle and in the first decade after becoming free when English teachers were worried whether the pro-Hindi leaders would oust English ultimately because of political compulsions to promote swadeshi. There was genuine concern that the English language itself would be expelled from India as it represented foreign domination and that India would assert its independence in spirit by enthroning the Hindi language in its place. Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, then teaching English in Lingaraj College, Belgaum, thought about the problem and was amazed that in spite of such worries, Indians went ahead embracing the language with greater vehemence:

 

It is impossible to predict the future of English (the language and literature) of India. Hindi may eventually oust it from its position of vantage, may even kill it altogether as far as India is concerned; on the contrary, one thinks (hopefully) it is likely that English will take deep roots in India, without however prejudicing the growth of vernaculars. Be that as it may, in this so uncertain period of transition, several Indians are aspiring to express themselves in English, in literary prose as well as verse.¹

 

By then, Iyengar had been collecting a lot of English books by Indians and was trying to program them as a separate discipline of Indo-Anglian literature within the larger

 

1. The Mahratta, 18.6.1937.i think it was published from Pune in those days, I am not sure.

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framework of English literature. Reviewing V.N. Bhushan's Horizons he wrote on 31.12.1937:

 

The future of the Indo-Anglians is uncertain. The Hindi movement may in due course succeed in killing English in India. Having fielded with English for over one hundred years, - and at the very moment when some Indians learned to feel at home with it - we are now likely to smother it systematically and attempt to start Hindi on its very dubious career as the national language. However, for the time being, English counts; and the Indo-Anglians are doing their best.

 

Independence came in 1947. The worries were not totally banished. However, at the end of fifteen years, fears were allayed somewhat when a Parliamentary enactment gave English the status of an 'associate language' with Hindi for the future. No time limit was placed on this period of grace. One of the powerful leaders of the movement against banishing English was Rajagopalachariar who said:

 

I am convinced that the attempt to replace English by Hindi at the Union level, be it now or on a future date, will once again bring into being a disintegrated India. Whatever unification has been brought about as a result of history will be disrupted... With English will go all the all-India feeling we have now got. Nuts, walls and countries easily crack where there is a natural or innate breaking demarkation. I utter this grave warning. It is the warning of one who loves India and loves unity.. .²

 

But the Spirit of India had added English to its rich repertoire of languages, and no temporal power could reject this gift of Goddess Saraswati. For, even during these 'thirties and 'forties, Mother Saraswati's gift was giving shape to the greatest English epic of our times, Savitri.

 

 

2. Quoted in K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., Third edition, 1983, p. 11.

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Amal Kiran was a close observer of the growth of this literary flame. A young man then, did he wonder about the future of English in India and the wisdom of casting one's greatest creation in a "foregin language"? Was English foreign? The questions no doubt assailed Amal Kiran and others like him who were undergoing training under Sri Aurobindo to write poetry in English. Sri Aurobindo himself had gained an enviable and creative mastery of Sanskrit (Bhavani Bharati) and Bengali (Durga Stotra) so should he not go further and enrich these great languages of India? In a letter dated 28th February, 1936, Sri Aurobindo gave the reasons for his choice:

 

I put forward four reasons why the experiment (by us of writing poetry in the English language) could be made: 1. The expression of spirituality in the English tongue is needed and no one can give the real stuff like Easterners and especially Indians. 2. We are entering an age when the stiff barriers of insular and national mentality are breaking down (Hitler notwithstanding), the nations are being drawn into a common universality with whatever differences, and in the new age there is no reason why the English should not admit the expression of other minds than the English in their tongue. 3. For ordinary minds it may be difficult to get over the barrier of a foreign tongue but extraordinary minds (Conrad etc.) can do it. 4. In this case the experiment is to see whether what extraordinary minds can do cannot be done by Yoga.

 

By 1942 when the two volumes of the Collected Poems and Plays of Sri Aurobindo appeared it was very clear that Goddess Saraswati's gift had not only struck deep roots in the Indian clime but had also put forth immensely rich foliage where a million flowers bloomed. The disciples were now convinced that an Indian could master the foreign language and even go a little beyond. An Indian could make it a deva bhasha, worthy of encapsulating scriptures. In 1947 Amal Kiran published The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. Here was

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undeniable mantric poetry. Savitri had not been published as a complete work yet. However, Amal Kiran could state unhesitatingly that it was "a poetic marvel":

 

The power and perfection of each line of Savitri lies in utter faithfulness to the fact, the atmosphere, the life-throb found on the overhead planes.... From the very start we have the full grip on profound realities, the expanse and richness of a revelation beyond the mental meaning.³

 

So when Amal Kiran began his correspondence with Kathleen Raine in the 'sixties, he was certainly the glorious champion of Indian writing in English and had himself authored innumerable poems and critical studies on a variety of subjects, was editing a highly admired journal, Mother India and teaching English poetry to Indian students. He came in contact with Miss Raine because of his studies in William Blake and his Christological interpretation of Blake's Tyger. Kathleen Raine was already a big name in English writing by 1960.

 

Born on 14th June 1908 in Essex, Raine had a happy childhood, adored by her parents. A student of Girton College, Cambridge, she began publishing poetry which became a life-long passion. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she believed that a power beyond the mind - call it imagination or whatever - was the source of creativity as well as destruction. For instance, she had once cursed her companion Gavin Maxwell after being banished from the house during a raging storm and while standing under a rowan tree which she had visualised as a visible symbol of their eternal togetherness: "Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now." Unfortunately, from then on Maxwell had to suffer a lot and Raine laid the blame on herself. Such was her entunement with her vocation. Though she did

 

 

3. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1947, p. 121.

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feel she was not writing as much as she should, she managed to publish more than a dozen books of poetry in the six decades of her active poetic career. Her spiritual inclinations drew her to a poet like William Blake and to India. She considered India to be a beautiful land, its people beautiful metaphorically and literally. This view of life no doubt inspired her to launch the magazine Temenos4 for she felt the sacred was closely related to the arts. It was unfortunate that Western society of her times had lost this link and she wished to correct this "deviation". The Temenos Academy had discussions and lectures on subjects concerning the earth and sought to give a global view of matters concerning man. Indeed she never forgot "the divine vision" till her quiet withdrawal from the physical on 6th July, 2003.

 

With her turn towards the spiritual, Raine's love for India was genuine. As she wrote in the Resurgence magazine:

 

I am not an expert on any aspect of India - historical, architectural, economic, political, ecological, literary or philosophical. I am not a devotee of any Indian teacher; I have never travelled south of Bangalore or north of Beas, or seen the great Himalayas beyond Rishikesh where the Ganges flows from the foothills into the plain. I did not set foot in India until I was already an old woman! But what I have is a deep love for something I would call "the India of the Imagination", a realm by no means imaginary - some might say, the real India, the eternal India, created over the long centuries of unbroken civilisation. India's contribution to our shared human heritage, in the realms of sculpture, dance, poetry, music, philosophy, wisdom and glory, all that comes from the heart of life and leaves traces and records as culture that is communicable in mysterious ways other than those of information or academic learning. When I reached India it seemed to me that this was the place to which I had always been travelling.

 

 

4. The holy area around a temple.

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According to her all roads in the twentieth century led to India and for one like her engaged in Blake studies, the arrival here was inevitable. When she did, and that was when she was quite advanced in age, she found a dignified beauty here which quite overwhelmed her:

 

On my first visit to India the beauty of young and old, women and children, came to me as a revelation. And the dignity, above all, that the sari imparted to its wearers; or is it that the wearer imparted the dignity? Beauty was everywhere, even the Tata lorries were beautified with tinsel, lotuses and peacocks, the horns of the cattle painted; all was adorned as if all India recognised that beauty is not a superfluity but a necessity of life....

 

But a quarter century later, in 1994, she saw a different India with a heavy heart: "Younger women are beginning to adopt the Western unisex uniform of jeans and jerseys, expressing their adoption of Western values. In exchanging the most beautiful and dignified women's dress in the world for the ugliest, they are renouncing the concept of beauty - and with beauty, love and delight."

 

This disillusionment was to come later. The English Language and The Indian Spirit (1986) contains some of the letters exchanged between Kathleen Raine and Amal Kiran in 1961 and 1962. The background is of course Raine's love for India and Amal Kiran's love for English literature and the love both have for William Blake. The correspondence begins with Amal Kiran's manuscript of Blake studies which had been sent to Kathleen Raine by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar spent some time cogitating upon the approaches of Amal Kiran and Kathleen Raine to Blake's poem and wrote to Amal Kiran:

 

As in your study of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in the present work too, you have mobilised to brilliant effect your seasoned and manifold faculties, now on the issue of a christological reading of Tyger. But a doubt per-

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sists: to seize the "meaning" and surrender to the magic of the poem, should we read it necessarily in the light of Milton's description of the war in heaven, or (as Kathleen Raine does) with the insights of the Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Hermetic, Cabbalistic and Alchemist traditions? To the extent I have been able to follow the winding bout of reasoning in the book, I'm more inclined towards yours rather than Raine's interpretation, but this may be because I am far more familiar with Milton than with the "sources" investigated by her. It is a pity the two readings - the result of so much research and hard thinking - cannot be entirely reconciled with each other.⁵

 

If there was no reconciliation of the viewpoints, there was certainly a richness of understanding between the two scholars in their letters. It is a charming world that we enter when we take up the slim volume. There is no stuffy scholasticism with Raine embroidering the alternate traditions to Christology or Amal Kiran on his favourite spree of quoting at length from masters of poesy. We have nothing in Raine's letters to give us an idea of her way of life (marriages, motherhood, separations, elopement); but Amal Kiran's deep engagement in the yoga of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is made clear. These are like-minded wanderers in the realms of golden memories. Here is an evocation of Greece as a literary whisper from Amal Kiran:

 

Katounia, Limni, Euboeae, Greece - how these names move me! Ever since I was at school the sense of Greece has been like a glow in my heart. Perhaps you would expect me to say "in my mind" - and indeed I have drawn a lot of joy and strength from Greece's "foundations" in "thought and its eternity", but my sense of her

 

 

 

5. From a letter to K.D. Sethna, dated 15.4.1989.

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has been much more than intellectual. Even to get fully at her thought in its characteristic movement of beauty, shouldn't we combine the heart with the head?⁶

 

The thought of Greece gives Amal Kiran an "imaginative thrill" and there is an adequate response from Raine for she too had "lived in imagination in Greek mythology (the mythology I knew best, as all children in England did at one time) and the Gods were entirely real to me." But then a curiosity about life had led her to Natural Sciences at Cambridge and away from the loftier flights of ancient mythology though she came back to the Platonic tradition by her involvement with Blake. Instead of dissecting Tyger the two correspondents experience the leap and the calm and the dangerous sweetness of the planes beyond what is seen by the naked eye as when a lovely letter from Raine about her surroundings in Greece enraptures Amal Kiran' living in the (then) sleepy town of Pondicherry with all its old-world grace:

 

It is as if the very air, the very soil retained and conveyed, in the midst of all modernisation, the chiselled lucidity that was the soul of antique Hellas, the moulded mystery that was the soul of early India^.7

 

So the pukka Cantab English and our own Aurobindonian English meet in the glowing morning twilight of a distance-conversation. The diction meets and merges: monastery, transcendence, Holy Cross, the Silence beyond the world, Nirvana. And oh so casually, Raine makes a pertinent remark that would lead us all to meditate upon life and literature. After commending Amal Kiran's poems and expressing, her desire to be born in India in a future life, Raine remarks:

 

 

6. Sethna, K.D., The English Language and The Indian Spirit, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1986, p. 1. 

7. Ibid., p. 5.

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Only one thing troubles me: why do you write in English? You write of the land of India, subtilised, in an almost physical sense, by the quality of life that has been lived there; is not the same true of language? Have you not, in using English, exiled your poetic genius from India, to which it must belong, without making it a native of England, for English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry. I feel this even about Tagore, and so did Yeats. I do not believe that we can - or if we could, that we have the right to - write poetry in a language other than our own.⁸

 

Strong words! But for the fact that we know she was so totally in favour of the beauty of life and the truth of a gnostic atmosphere covering the world and had total sympathy with India, these words would be put down to the arrogance of a colonial power. Amal Kiran received the words as an opening for another adventure in intellectual areas of intercontinental understanding. Was the English language a gift of Goddess Saraswati or the instrument of a great thief?

 

Kathleen Raine was partially right, of course. There was a time when Indians knew nothing about what they were losing when Orientalist Englishmen (or Germans or whoever else from the West) took away bundles of palm-leaf manuscripts or Indian artefacts (it could be a sculpted Shiva in the Grove of Palms, a carved Krishna dancing on Kaliya, a painting of an Apsaras floating in a celestial tarn) and not necessarily were they thefts. The Indians willingly gave them away for nothing or just sold them. They had no idea of the value of their heritage, having been mesmerised by the colonial master that their past was good for nothing, it was barbaric, it brought you neither material rewards here nor spiritual gains in the beyond. Masti Venkatesa Iyengar has caught the theme of our culture in peril during colonial times in his brilliant Kannada story, Masumati:

 

 

8. Ibid., p. 7.

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An Englishman comes to the village Masumati in search of old paintings. India under the British appears like an en-slaved person who had once seen better days. The Karnataka village had been despoilt by Muslim invaders a hundred years earlier. It is typical of thousands of such Indian villages. There is a mandapa built with huge stone blocks. A pushkarini (village tank) spreads in its front. About one hundred and fifty square yards encircled by carefully sculpted stones. The work of artisans who found joy in their work. Now weeds have grown over and some stones are loose.

 

The Englishman Farquhar goes with his local contact to the house of an old man who shows him the paintings stored in his house. One of them is the flute-playing Krishna. Absolutely divine. The old man refuses to show it first, saying it is not meant for the eyes of an outsider. But after a while he is satisfied with the sincerity of Emily and Farquhar. When the painting is brought down and unveiled, the English are amazed. The music flows on as anahata nada⁹ as Krishna stands grace-fully surrounded by cows and cowherds and cowherdesses and even the air is still with the music, for the leaves of the trees seem to be listening carefully too. This is art that has risen from the depths of the mystic vision of the Indians.

 

The old man tells them that his grandfather was engaged in painting this picture when enemies struck. The painter immediately got up from the work that was almost finished, left his work saying he will come back to complete the painting and went to defend his village. He lost his life in the battle but the family has safeguarded the painting in the hope that the painter-hero would come back and fulfil his task and redeem his promise. The two foreigners cannot have enough of that painting and keep gazing at it. Emily says:

 

Here a calf had come running to feed. Just then the Lord had held the flute to his lips and the sweet music had risen. The painter must have thought to paint the calf in a way that the calf's hunger vanished with the sounds

 

 

9. unheard melody

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of Krishna's flute. The calf would feel hungry some time after drinking milk from the mother cow. But one will never be hungry again if one heard the sounds of Krishna's flute. It is obvious the rest of the painting had been prepared to usher in this moment.¹⁰

Such depth of understanding from a foreigner! From the old man Emily and Farquhar learn that his maternal grand-son has shown interest in the art. Who knows! The genius of the past could have reincarnated in him to complete the painting! With such possibilities, the nation may yet regain its past glory. Else, the spirit will come back to reinhabit its body, but find the body missing. What a great tragedy it would be! The two foreigners decide not to take away such life-giving art from India but leave the Time Spirit to give India a great future, and take their leave.

 

Thus Raine is quite right in her perception about Indians caught in the danger of losing their heritage. But would writing in English mean such a loss? Apparently not. Amal Kiran posits the problem of English in India, its nativisation over two hundred years, its mastery by a chosen few and its inevitability in usage for the likes of him. He is sure that there is no other language open to him for self-expression. So he crowns English as the only language he finds "more suited to the deepest movements of the Indian soul than are any of the modern Indian languages." This is somewhat naive but understandable in one who has "no other speech open to me". In any case if we are going to question his premise, he will flash his enchanting smile at you and then where would you be but in the booth casting your vote for English? Now comes his meaningful rapier thrust at his correspondent, true to the Aurobindonian self-confidence:

 

A further truth with the appearance of a paradox is that, since English is the language most subtly, intensely, profoundly developed and since India is still the

 

 

10. Translated by Prema Nandakumar.

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country with the greatest spiritual experience, the spiritual fulfilment of English speech along the inward lines indicated or initiated by many English poets themselves will first come - if it already hasn't - through Indians and not Englishmen, Indians who have steeped themselves not only in the deepest culture of their own land by Yogic discipline but also in the finest essence of the English culture that has been diffused here for some centuries. The coming together, rather the love-affair, of India and the English language has on it the stamp of a divine destiny.¹¹

 

Raine does not deny any of his arguments but then she thinks India is not yet ripe to produce work "that unites the knowledge of Indian spirituality with the polymorphous potentialities of English" Not for a long time. Pat comes Amal Kiran's reply which I did not read till this volume was published in 1986 and when I did, I felt as though I am, like the squirrel in the Ramayana, one who had brought a few grains of sand to build a bridge to the West for Savitriyana. Heaven it was to know that Amal Kiran had mentioned my name to Raine when speaking of an Indo-Anglian apocalypse as not a whimsy but a settled fact:

 

He [Wordsworth] is the authentic presage, in the English consciousness itself, of what I have called the destined Indo-Anglian apocalypse which I firmly believe has already taken place in the 23,812 lines of Savitri whose first impact on H.O. White of Trinity College, Dublin, led him to write, after examining for Ph.D., a thesis on the poem by Prema Nandakumar, daughter of the distinguished critic K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar: "I... greatly appreciated the privilege... of making the acquaintance of Savitri, a truly remarkable poem... I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordi-

 

 

11. The English Language and The Indian Spirit, p. 11.

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nary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world." (21 July, 1961)¹²

 

Kathleen Raine must have smiled to herself as she read through this letter, dated 11th October 1961, that she had a Worthy opponent here. Yes, Amal Kiran cannot be denied. wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman and AE had brought about a union of the English language and the Indian spirit. The devoted student of Sri Aurobindo's The Future Poetry marshalls his arguments and there comes a moment when there is a direct thrust: "But what exactly is meant by writing as if in a foreign idiom? Is the English at fault?" How about Sri Aurobindo and Manomohan Ghose who had learnt English from their childhood? The rapier takes a sharper fling: "Or would you go so far as to assert that one who has English blood in his veins can alone have that literary inwardness?" On and on, so charmingly unstoppable.

 

Raine does not easily budge, but she knows how to parry: Sri Aurobindo's Isha Upanishad translation is revealing (but she has no sympathy for the archaisms used), she is happy about Amal Kiran's finding the Indian soul in Wordsworth but must needs reiterate that English remains a foreign instrument to convey the Indian spirit. She is in sympathy with Middleton Murry who feels that "Indian poets writing in English employ the words for uses they were never born for", and Herbert Read who feels that "poetry is of all things the most localised speech." But she will not condemn the Indians who opt for this dominant language. At the same time she cannot keep back the hobgoblins that prey upon her mind regarding the future of poetry itself:

 

But if the impulse in India to write poetry in English is really so strong, I suppose that in time a sort of "silver" English might be produced, comparable to Latin as a world-language. Even so, the world conditions are different; the Church needed hymns in a language understood

 

 

12. Ibid., pp. 18-19.

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in all countries; but nowadays it is the scientists and the imperialists and the press-mongers who want a world-language, and the advertisers of industrial products, and the power-seekers, and in a word the destroyers. Well, there it is. I see very little hope for the future of English poetry in any country, truth to say; and how much longer will the world itself last?¹³

Those were the days of the Cold War. The Atomic Clock was ticking away fast and the United Nations had already proved quite ineffective. If Raine situated in the bleakest part of the exterior world felt depressed, it comes as no surprise. Amal Kiran was in the safe custody of the Mother's love at Pondicherry where the newspapers did not destroy the breakfast time, spreading cynicism all over. So there is sunshine in Amal Kiran's reply who notes that Raine is too conscious of the tiger, "even outside Blake's poem." He is a yogin of the Supermind. For these aspirants nor twilight nor darkness can be hurdles to envision a bright future for the world. The eerie perturbations caused by globalised greed triggered by the West are the necessary pains of delivering a new future for man, an understandable Angst. No, no, mankind will not be destroyed but the human life will be transformed.

Man today is in such dire travail because Superman is being born: only he does not see what has descended from above to help the Divine Wonder break forth from below; hence the feeling of a return of chaos and old night.¹⁴

The world is real and darkness is no illusion. But they, are not the whole truth. As for archaisms, one needs them when translating an ancient scripture like the Isha Upanishad] Poor Raine! Amal Kiran chuckles to inform her that she is "somewhat rigid in your attitudes - not plastic enough to the diversity of fact or possibility." Getting back to her state

 

 

 

13. Ibid., p. 30.

14. Ibid., p. 32.

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ment about English poetry is best written by Englishmen, Amal Kiran assures her that "much of the Englishness you speak of is merely a matter of certain national interests, historical habits, popular stock-responses, subtle temperamental 'slants', sensitive mirror-moods." How can a language belong exclusively to a particular territory? Haven't innumerable "creative eccentrics" enriched the English language by bringing a foreign idiom, like the Germanisms of Carlyle and un-English ethereality of Shelley? Amal Kiran is typing so fast that the rapier seems still, it is moving with such incredible skill. Raine steps back and opens another front. Ah, not to use one's mother tongue is a kind of betrayal, what else?

 

... the very desire to use an alien language reflects a break with tradition, in those who are infected with such a wish. The words of the ancestors come to us loaded with their experience of the earth as they have known it. In disowning our language, do we not disown ourselves?

 

Sri Aurobindo was uprooted, as I understand, and in any case doubtless wished to write in English for the. instruction of English readers - whose need is certainly great, in philosophic matters, and who should therefore be grateful to him. But his poetry is certainly not on the same level as his philosophic writings.¹⁵

 

Raine's chief anguish is of people considering English as a universal language and writing in it for a global spread instead of remaining compartmentalised in their own local language. This temptation to use what is seen as a universal tongue would be a real loss to world culture which has rich components. We would end up with "this mass tele-culture that infects the whole world now with its sub-humanity." But Amal Kiran will not allow Raine to dissolve in the grey self-pity of living in Anno Bombini. He presents a muster of opinions by English scholars and assures her that Sri Aurobindo never did disown his Indianness. If he had, he

 

 

15. Ibid., p. 46.

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would have built his Ashram in England! Nor need Raine fear that Indians accept English for politics and commerce. They love the language. Kathleen Raine has much to say against the materialist civilisation being spawned in the West, Planter's Pea-nut advertisements and outer space shuttles of varied hue, but Amal Kiran reiterates that the language cannot be blamed for these ills. How can anyone criticise a language which now has Savitri?

 

I should think that the English language, holding as it does the most deeply spiritual poetry of modern times, is just the power that could touch modernism to nobler and higher issues. In England itself and perhaps more in America, this power may be in danger of being stifled by the too loud and rampant materialism that has developed with the modern spirit. But here in India where the voice of the Vedic Rishis is still vibrant and "Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us" -the flute of Sri Krishna sounding from an eternal Brindavan in the collective consciousness - and the revelatory rhythms of Sri Aurobindo's message, "Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps", are about us stronger than the titan roar of the machine.. ¹⁶

 

Raine replies with aplomb congratulating Amal Kiran for saying "the last word on the English language question; history has made English a world-language." In any case why should one bother about it? After all, language itself may lose its prime place as a communicator of ideas. Maybe telepathy would soon take its place! Still Raine is Raine! The English language she and Amal Kiran have been speaking of has no longer a future. Its decadence as a literary language is inevitable "from the influx of so many races which have forgotten their own without perfectly mastering English (how can they, their history and landscape being different?) and of the barbarous illiterate populace produced in England and America by industrialisation."

 

16. Ibid., pp. 61-62.

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The beaming cheeriness between the two remains to the end of the present volume (they did correspond later but it was desultory and had to do with Blake criticism) and when Raine writes that she is waiting for Amal Kiran's views on her Collected Poems she had sent, he cannot resist one of his angelic smiles and say that he does not understand: "Am I not, as an Indian whose mother-tongue is different from yours, unfitted in your eyes to appreciate a creation like English poetry, which is your language at its subtlest?"

 

It is a beautiful, meaningful, poetic passage of letters to and from, bridging the East and the West. Amal Kiran's heroic stand to remain optimistic in the face of all the bleakness of the contemporary world must have gone into Raine's statement of hope that India will be the teacher of the world for a beautiful future, the beauty of external living, the beauty of the soul. As she wrote in Resurgence:

 

India, notwithstanding the deep wounds inflicted on her by Westernisation, still embodies a spiritual dimension which is virtually non-existent today in a world that simply disregards spiritual knowledge as irrelevant, or illusory, probably pathological, no part of the real world. This treasury of spiritual knowledge and practice is beyond doubt India's greatest resource. And it may be that our bankrupt materialism has brought us in the West to a point where we recognise our own need to relearn what our full humanity entails. Western civilisation, notwithstanding our impressive attainments in material sciences and technology, has not significantly impaired that great edifice of India's spiritual civilisation.

 

It was a gift of Saraswati for the West when Kathleen Raine was born; and Amal Kiran is a gift of Saraswati for us to remain firmly anchored in the Aurobindonian world, taking around the candles he has lit for bringing light and delight into common lives. Bless this candle then, The English Language and The Indian Spirit!

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Revolutionising Ancient History:

The Case of Israel and Christianity

 

 

BECOMING a poet, a political commentator, a literary critic while editing a monthly journal of culture without stirring out of an ashram in South India may not be a matter provoking comment let alone arousing wonder. But to revolutionise the very chronology of the ancient world based on minute examination of the latest archaeological findings and texts from within such confines - that, too, in the pre-internet era - could not but astonish. It becomes all the more amazing when the subject is not just the prehistory of one's own country but so distant a subject as the beginnings of history for Israel and Christianity. The short compass of this paper does not permit examination of both; so, we shall restrict ourselves to the "foreign" sphere of scholar-extraordinaire K.D. Sethna's research.

 

Taking his point of departure from the 1968 lectures Professor Chaim Rabin of Hebrew University delivered in India placing the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt in the mid-13th century B.C., Sethna, in The Beginning of History for Israel¹ challenges this as well as archaeologist W.F. Albright's dating of the Exodus to c. 1294 B.C. and his identification of the Pharaoh responsible for this as Ramses II. While? painstakingly taking Albright apart over 227 pages, Sethna? also takes on - and demolishes - a completely different type! of antagonist who is himself denounced by orthodox historians as "the other" because of his revolutionary reading of Egyptian history: Immanuel Velikovsky, notorious author of Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos.

 

 

1. Waterford, U.S.A.: The Integral Life Foundation, 1995.

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The paradox that stumps one in studying Jewish history is that it presents a paradox that is the converse of what we find in Indian history. Our records have no mention of Alexander's invasion by which Western historians set such store in determining our chronology. On the other hand, although the Exodus is such a watershed for the Israelites, the Egyptian records are innocent of it. Two Pharaohs are prominent in the context of the Exodus. The first is the "Pharaoh of the Oppression" under whom the Jews suffered; the other is the "Pharaoh of the Exodus". Albright conflates the two in Ramses II (1304-1238 B.C.) who enslaved the Jews to build the store-cities of Raamses and Pithom leading to the Exodus in c. 1294 B.C. This leaves Ramses II living for 46 years more, whereas the Bible states that the oppressive Pharaoh died before Moses returned to Egypt. On the other hand, if the Exodus occurred in the reign of his successor Merneptah and the Jews wandered for 40 years en route the Promised Land, how could this Pharaoh defeat them in Palestine? Further, as the mummies of both Pharaohs have been found, how can either be the one who was drowned in the yam suf in the miraculous parting of the waters?

 

Sethna alone points out that nowhere does the Bible say that it was the Pharaoh who went into the sea. It was his horse and horsemen, while he rode in a chariot. Sethna conclusively demolishes F. Mayani's special pleading, showing how he distorts the Biblical text to make Seti I the ruler who oppresses and dies. A critical inscription lists the 'Apiru as labouring at Per Re-emasese that the Albright school (Werner Keller, G. Ernest Wright) has interpreted as referring to the Hebrews of Egypt although this word is found in other epigraphs too and nowhere connotes Hebrews. Rather it means foreign warriors and prisoners of war reduced to slaves.

 

Sethna takes his point of departure from the phrase "the land of Rameses", from where the Exodus began, as marking the original settlement of the Israelites, identifying it as the Biblical Goshen where Jacob's people were allowed to settle by Joseph's Pharaoh. Sethna examines the several

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Biblical sources (termed J, E, D, P, etc.) to show that the city Raamses is not only delinked from Ramses II but is relevant to the Exodus. "What remain are Goshen," writes Sethna, "and Moses parleying with the Pharaoh in some city to which he comes from the Israelites and which, not having to be Raamses, could be anywhere in Egypt." This city he identfies as Memphis, the capital of Thutmose III and his two successors Amenhotep (Amenophis II) and Thutmose (Tuthmosis IV), located near Goshen. It is evidence of Sethna's unflinching dedication to seeking out the truth that he imports a possible hurdle into the smooth course of his thesis: can this be reconciled with the Pharaoh's injunction that the Israelites should find their own straw? This needs harvested fields. He studies ancient Egyptian agriculture to present a picture of such areas ready first in southern Egypt (usually called Upper Egypt), then shifting northwards to Middle Egypt and concluding in Lower (northern) Egypt. That is why the Israelites have to range far and wide, says the Bible, to gather stubble. Goshen, with its rich alluvial clay is ideal for brick-making.

 

Sethna, the Devil's Advocate par excellence, now asks: "But is there any Egyptian evidence of this when the word 'Goshen' has not surfaced in any record?" Why this word, there is absolutely no allusion to the Israelites and hardly to bricks (references to stones are found), certainly not in the time of Ramses II. Sethna marshals evidence to identify the Bible's Shamgar Ben-Anath as the one who got his daughter married to a son of Ramses II. Ben-Anath being far removed from the time of Moses, neither Ramses II nor Merneptah can be the Pharaoh of the Exodus. A possible synchronism that can upset this is the date of the Song of Deborah and the Song of Miriam, describing the victory of Israel over Sisera, with whose rule Ben-Anath is linked. Here, again, Sethna shows Albright's dating to be contradictory in placing the Song of Miriam in the time of Ramses II. Both are triumphal poems celebrating victories that is a form going back to the victory Stele of Tuthmosis II from Karnak, whose phrases

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were re-used by many later Pharaohs like Amenophis III, Seti I, Ramses III. The songs, therefore, need not be forced into the 1300-1100 B.C. bracket but can easily be older, at least to the time of Tuthmosis II who is pre-1400 B.C.

 

Sethna cites a frontier official's letter under Merneptah describing the peaceful passage of Bedouins through a fortress to graze their herds in Pithom, just as the Hebrews did in Joseph's time. This is certainly not a state of affairs we can associate with the Pharaoh of the Oppression or of the Exodus. Rather, it indicates a continuation of a system prevalent in the time of this Pharaoh's predecessor Ramses II.

 

To fix upon the date of the Exodus, Sethna takes his clue from the Bible's computing of Solomon starting to build the Jerusalem Temple in the fourth year of his reign, which came 480 years after the Jews had left Egypt. Starting with an authentic date - that of the Battle of Qarkar on the Orontes in 853 B.C. (the 6th year of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser Ill's reign) in which Ahab fought - Sethna arrives at 964 B.C. for Solomon's accession, whereby the Exodus is fixed at 1441 B.C.

 

The schema has now to be fitted into Egyptian history. This is the period of Amenophis II. Therefore, his predecessor, the 5th king of the 18th dynasty, Tuthmosis III was the Pharaoh of the Oppression. The only representation of slave-labour in Egypt comes from Tuthmosis Ill's reign in a rock tomb west of Thebes, showing Semitic foreigners as bricklayers. Working backwards, Sethna fixes on the "Pharaoh's daughter" who brought up Moses as the famous Hatshepsut, daughter of Amenophis I (1546-1525 B.C.), with Moses being born in 1521 B.C. and she dying in 1482 B.C. to be succeeded by Tuthmosis III.

 

On the other hand, following the Albright school, if Ramses II was ruling during the Exodus and Seti I was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, Moses would have to be born in 1373 to be 80 years old in 1294 B.C. (Albright's date for the Exodus) well before Seti I's reign and quite out of sync. Sethna expands on the unique role of Hatshepsut - inevitably, when

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we recall that she is supposed to have been one of the Mother's avatars - to show that Moses' monotheism had its roots in the new religion of Amon that she established, merging all the temples into a single organisation. He points out how Moses' dialogue with God in the burning bush episode echoes the colloquy between Amon, speaking from his shrine about God's land and living among the trees there, and Hatshepsut. Punt, of which she speaks so lovingly, was approached through the Promised Land. Albright himself points out that the Hebrew Yahweh, the Biblical "I am what I am", actually means, "He causes to be what comes into existence", Yahweh asher yihweh; a formula occurring repeatedly in Egyptian texts like the 15th century B.C. hymn to Amon.

 

A digression is in order here. In order to make Hatshepsut contemporary with Moses, Sethna has to demolish a powerful challenge: Immanuel Velikovsky's revised chronology identifying Hatshepsut with the Queen of Sheba who visited Solomon in the latter half of the 10th century B.C.² Sethna is able to show that:

 

(i) Velikovsky's interpretation of the Papyrus Ipuwer and the Ermitage Papyrus is biased;

(ii) there is little to support his arguments for dating the Exodus a few weeks prior to the Hyksos invasion of Egypt;

(iii) the Amalekites are certainly not the Hyksos;

(iv) Saul cannot possibly be contemporaneous with Ahmose I who drove the Hyksos out of Egypt;

(v) Velikovsky has doctored evidence to make it seem that Hatshepsut, who did not journey abroad, is Queen of Sheba who did;

(vi) "God's Land" is not Punt as the two are mentioned separately in the great hymn to Amon of the 15th century B.C. and

 

 

2. Is Velikovsky's Revised Chronology Tenable?, A Scrutiny of Four Fundamental Themes, Waterford, U.S.A.: The Integral Life Foundation, 2002.

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(vii) the Egyptian king Shishak who looted Jerusalem after Solomon cannot be identified with Hat-shepsut's successor Thutmose III, as Velikovsky strives to by tinkering with the evidence.

 

Sethna proposes that the Queen of Sheba is the Queen of Ophir (the Somalia shore of Ethiopia) that is Punt. Her capital appears to have been in Saba (Yemen) from where she travelled to Jerusalem by land on camels (1 Kings and 2 Chronicles). He suggests that Shishak can be recognised as Pharaoh Sheshonk or Sosenk, centuries after Thutmose III.

 

We can return to the matter of the Exodus now. A remarkable piece of detective work by Sethna brings to the fore the only Egyptian record that can be equated with the Exodus. The earliest Egyptian historian, Manetho (c. 250 B.C.), recounts that 240,000 Shepherds (the Hyksos) left Egypt and built in Judaea a city later called Jerusalem. The Egyptian king, told by a prophet to chase away the "unclean ones" if he wishes to see the gods, drives out 80,000 of them under their chief Osarseph (Moses) who directs them to avoid worshipping the gods and eating consecrated meat. Helped by the Shepherds, they defeat Pharaoh Amenophis II's son (Amenophis III) in battle who has to seek refuge in Ethiopia while the Unclean Ones and their allies spread over the entire land.

 

Having established correspondence between the Bible and Egyptian history satisfactorily, Sethna examines another puzzle: what was yam suf, the "red" or "reed" sea and how to explain the miraculous "parting of the waters"? Many have hazarded that the ten plagues of Egypt tally with the phenomena (red rain, fish poisoned, whirlwinds, swamps, water turning rusty red) attendant upon the volcanic explosion on Santorini in the Mediterranean that destroyed a 4,900 feet high mountain c. 1400 B.C. Sethna cites Glanopoulos' identification of the yam suf as Sirbenis Lake that is separated from the Mediterranean by a narrow isthmus across which the Israelites could flee during the 20 minutes interval when the

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sea was drawn back towards the Aegean as the cone of Santorini dropped into the sea, the Egyptians drowning in the returning tidal wave. However, like the uncompromising truth-finder that he is, Sethna demolishes this evidence that would have clinched his thesis. He finds that the explosion had no effect in the southern direction, for it did not even affect nearby Crete lying south, but produced tidal waves that travelled east towards Palestine. It did not lead to flooding of the Nile delta. Finally, the explosion probably occurred between 1475 and 1450 B.C., which does not tally with the date for the Exodus. Therefore, Sethna leaves the ten plagues a puzzle and Serbenis Lake vies with the Papyrus Marsh as a candidate for the "Reed/Red Sea".

 

After finishing with the Exodus, Sethna takes up the question of fixing the time of the wandering Israelites conquering Palestine, drawing upon rich archaeological evidence for his conclusions. Once again, Albright's chronology is weighed and found wanting in the light of Kenyon's excavations. Around the time Albright proposes for the Exodus, both cities of Bethel and Hazor actually fell (c. 1350-1325 B.C.). Even if we accept Kenyon's date c. 1325 B.C. for the fall of Jericho, it rules out Albright's dating of the Exodus to 1294 B.C., whereas it is closer to the Israelites entering Palestine in 1401 B.C. (40 years of wandering after the Exodus). Another city, Debir, shows destruction first in c.1350 B.C. that could have been the work of Israelites. The last city in the list of conquests is Lachish whose date is debatable (either the end of the 13th or in early 12th century). Sethna points out that the fall of Jericho has to precede that of Debir and Bethel, i.e. before 1350 B.C. and that Kenyon's comments in Digging up Jericho permit such an earlier date. Further, he shows that the El-Amarna Letters support the Bible's picture of "the lands of Seir (Edom)" as not hostile to the Israelites though capable of defending themselves. The excavations of Glueck support this picture of Edom, Moab and Ammon before c. 1300 B.C., who allowed the newcomers to pass through

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peacefully. Therefore, nothing contradicts Sethna's proposed dating of Joshua's conquests in consonance with the Exodus in 1441 B.C.

 

Working back from here, based on the Biblical 430 years of sojourn in Egypt, Jacob's arrival can be dated to 1870 B.C., in the reign of Pharaoh Sesostris III of the 12th Dynasty. Supporting evidence for interaction between Semitics and Egypt in the 12th Dynasty is found in the Beni-Hasan tableau dated to 1892 B.C. that depicts 37 semi-nomadic Palestinians led by a chief with the Semitic name Absha bringing stibium (kohl) from Shutu in central Transjordan to the court of the "nomarch" (provincial nobles). Albright finds this illustrating the story of Lantech's family in Genesis IV.19-22. Joseph's supreme position tallies with the practice of Sesostris III who made the vizier superior to the nomarchs whom he suppressed totally. The vizier combined the functions of the governor and the superintendent of granaries who presented to the Pharaoh the account of the harvests that were the key to. Egypt's wealth. Joseph calls himself "father to Pharaoh" which is the epithet used by Ptahhotep, the name borne by five successive viziers of the 5th Dynasty, showing that it was a familiar title. It is significant that the earliest record of this title comes from a text dating to the Middle Kingdom which included the reign of Sesostris III. It was during his reign that there was marked interaction, because of his campaigns, between Egypt and Asiatic countries, with large numbers of Asiatics serving as domestic help. This reminds us of the slave-trade mentioned in Joseph's story. Sesostris III also moved his capital into the Delta-area that features in the story of the Pharaoh and Joseph. Finally, the name "Potiphar" is the Egyptian "Potiphera" i.e. "Gift of Ra". So, Joseph's father-in-law is a priest of On (Heliopolis, the centre of Ra worship). Joseph married into Egypt's most exclusive nobility and was named by the Pharaoh "Zaphnath-paaneah" i.e. "God says: he is living". Unfortunately, the Egyptian records do not give the name of Sesostris Ill's vizier, which would

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have clinched the identification. If Joseph became vizier to Sesostris III, he had to see 7 years of plenty and 2 of famine before Jacob entered Egypt in 1870. Thus, the first year of Sesostris Ill's reign, 1878, coincides with Joseph's appointment. Working backwards from this, Sethna fixes that Jacob was 92 when Joseph was born ("the son of his old age" says the Bible), that Joseph was 30 when he became vizier, and Jacob entered Egypt at the age of 130.

 

Depending on the introduction of horse and chariot by the Hyksos, Albright fixes Joseph at a much later date in the early 18th Dynasty. Sethna shows that the use of the horse and of the chariot in Egypt cannot be attributed to the Hyksos as there is no evidence of these before 1570 B.C. If Albright's chronology for Joseph is to be accepted, we have to reject the sojourn of 430 years by the Israelites in Egypt as it would take us to 1140 B.C. for the Exodus, leaving no time for the numerous Judges preceding Saul, who is dated between 1020 and 1000 B.C. Sethna proceeds to demolish conclusively Albright's thesis of Joseph existing in the period of a Hyksos Pharaoh by mounting a seven-point attack combining ammunition from the Bible and history, culminating in showing that even Joseph's oath tallies only with a regular Egyptian Pharaoh of at least the Middle Kingdom and certainly not the hated Hyksos usurpers.

 

Sethna closes with the patriarch and founder of the Jewish nation: Abraham, again working back from when the Israelites entered Egypt. He fixes on 2085 B.C. for Abraham the Habiru (a people mentioned in the Babylonian records of the 21sl century B.C. as present in every Near Eastern land) proceeding to Palestine and thence to Egypt in 2081-80, harassing Amraphel of Babylonia (Shinar)'s rear guard before 2075 B.C. His original name " Abram" (the Father is exalted) occurs in Babylonian texts. According to the Bible, he settled in the Negeb in the southern area in the plain of Mamra in Hebron. Glueck's explorations have shown that the period when the Negeb was settled tallies with Abraham's residence at Hebron in the 21st century B.C. To crown the demolition of Albright's chronology, Sethna calculates from his proposed

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dating of the Exodus back to Abraham (645 years). Albright attributes Abraham's departure from Ur to its destruction by the Elamites about 1950 B.C. But no such calamity is cited in the Bible, which states that Abraham's father left behind one of his sons and his family in Ur. Actually, Ur is not even featured in the Greek Septuagint (c. 3rd century B.C.) which simply has "in the land of the Chaldeans". The city is first mentioned in a work dated to around 150 B.C. The Israelite tradition prefers Haran in north-west Mesopotamia as the original land of the Patriarchs. It is from there that Rebecca is brought to wed Isaac. Nothing, therefore, prevents Abraham's departure from being earlier, c. 2085 B.C., and not linked to the fall of Ur.

 

From the Old Testament Sethna turns to the New and takes up what is no less a formidable challenge than flying in the face of orthodox historical opinion to prove that the Rig Veda preceded the Indus Valley Civilisation and that the Gupta Empire has to be pushed back in time by 600 years.³ In Problems of Early Christianity (Integral Life Foundation, 1998) and The Virgin Birth and the Earliest Christian Tradition (-do-2001) he deals with the hypersensitive issues of immaculate conception, the question of Jesus' historicity and whether it was a resurrection or a resuscitation that Jesus underwent, drawing much from the writings of Sri Aurobindo. However, as archaeology is not a tool in this investigation, what we have is only literary evidence and that detracts considerably from the conviction that his arguments are supposed to carry. Dissecting Biblical literature piecemeal with great pains in the finest tradition of scholarship Sethna strives to prove his case. We are strongly reminded of his correspondence with Kathleen Raine where he exerts every intellectual sinew to convince her that Aurobindonian poetry is great English literature - but fails. With the NT, too, the final decision will have to rest with the reader of these books.

 

 

3. "Karpasa" in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural clue, New Delhi: Biblia Impex, 1981; Ancient India in aNew Light, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1989, reprinted 1997; The Problem of Aryan Origins, -do-1980, reprinted 1992.

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Sethna begins his examination of the birth of Jesus by pointing out that neither Protestant nor Catholic theologians exclude the fatherhood of God in case of the physical fatherhood of Joseph as Jesus' divinity is not so much a biological fact as an ontological verity out of time in God's eternity. That, however, is hardly something that will carry the field with a non-Christian as a decisive argument. A better point is that only the narratives of Matthew and Luke speak of the immaculate conception. It is Pauline and Johannine Christology that creates the idea of Divine Sonship quite independent of the gospels. The infancy accounts, unlike the rest of Jesus' life, provide no evidence of eyewitness testimony. There is also the issue that Jesus had brothers and sisters (Mark 6:3, Matt 13:55, John 2:12, 7:5) and the fact that no special sanctity is accorded in the NT to the state of virginity, nor does the virginal conception preclude normal marital relations thereafter. The Gospel of Luke describes the conception of John the Baptist using the same phrases as for that of Jesus, although the former was a product of Zechariah's normal marital relationship with Elizabeth. Mary chose to marry Joseph when she had conceived and lived with him as his wife. Joseph and Mary are designated as Jesus' parents when they seek him in the Temple and she tells him that he has worried his father, meaning Joseph. Both fail to comprehend Jesus' reply that he is busy with his Father's affairs. Mary has no insight into her son's special nature or mission. The parallel passages in Mark (3:31-35) show a clear rejection by Jesus of any special place for Mary in his scheme of things, least of all his considering her as "blessed among women" or being aware of any extraordinary experience on her part at his conception. The mother-son relationship is quite clearly unsympathetic and lacks mutual understanding. Sethna examines considerable theological evidence between 100 and 200 A.D. to prove that the alternative to the Virgin Birth account of Matthew was not any accusation of adultery on Mary's part, but simply asserting that Jesus was normally born of Joseph and Mary (as in "Acts of Thomas",

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Cerinthus, the Carpocratians, Irenaeus and later Gnostic and Jewish Christian Ebionites). Paul does not suggest any special manner of Jesus' birth while describing him as "God sent his Son, born of woman, born a subject to the Law" which indicates a normal conception. Sonship-to-God does not exclude sonship-to-man. The nature of Jesus' mission stresses not the manner of his conception but the fact of his being born of a woman, emphasising his human experiences and his assuming "sinful flesh" for the sake of mankind (2 Corinthians 5:2, Romans 8:3, Philippians 2:6).

 

Sethna concludes that everything about the virgin birth in Matthew and Luke "has an air of fiction". There is no trace of any family tradition of the virginal conception of Jesus till it appears in two gospels towards the end of the Isl century A.D. Mary does not appear to have spoken of it to the apostles. Peter, the foremost disciple, is silent about it. Further, there is the complete absence of any scandalous rumour regarding Mary in every source till c.178 A.D. Matthew alone introduces Joseph thinking of divorcing Mary on finding her pregnant, because that is the only way in which he can propose a virginal conception.

 

Sethna seeks to correct a very important misconception that the OT prophesied Jesus' virgin birth in Isaiah 7:14. Actually, the reference is to the birth of a child to a young woman about 700 years before Jesus signifying the continuance of David's lineage. Matthew imported the Greek mistranslation of the Hebrew "a young woman" as "virgin" to show the OT prophesying his account of Jesus' virgin birth. Unfortunately, Sethna fails to clinch this issue because he neither tells us who this "young woman" was nor the name of her son who is the subject of so momentous a prophecy.

 

Inevitably, Sethna ends his study on an Aurobindonian note, pointing out that the dogma regarding Mary rising bodily into Heaven specifies the event as having occurred on 15 August. Sri Aurobindo interpreted it as Mary, representing Mother Nature, raised to Godhead. He looked upon the Virgin-Birth doctrine as representing the manifestation

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of the Primal Shakti, the Creatrix. The appearance of such an avatar does not call for virgo intacta. The attribute of virginity is essentially symbolic of the para-prakriti. Sri Aurobindo explains that what it symbolises becomes clear from the name of the Buddha's mother, Mayadevi or Mahamaya, i.e. the Goddess-Force. We may add that the traditional shlok celebrating five much-married women as virgins (pancha kanya)⁴ canonly be understood if this symbolic meaning of kanya is kept in mind. This symbol got attached "by a familiar mythopoeic process to the actual human mother of Jesus of Nazareth". In a stirring conclusion, Sethna states that somehow she, who did not comprehend her son's mission in his childhood, came to assume in the post-crucifixion generations a role far beyond what she played in his life, carrying a great spiritual truth known to India into the heart and soul of the Occident.

 

When was Jesus actually born and was he a historical figure or fiction? This is possibly the most satisfying of Sethna's excursions into NT territory because it conflates evidence from ancient Babylonian astronomy with textual testimony to prove his case. It was only in c. 354 A.D. that Christ's birthday was made to coincide with the traditional Roman festival known as Dies Natalis Invicti ("the birthday of the unconquered") on 25 December to placate converts while weaning them away from old associations. Analysing all available historical and astronomical evidence, Sethna dates the birth to 7 B.C. at the latest, between March and November (the fields would have been frostbitten in December and no shepherds would be grazing their flocks) synchronising with Herod's reign and the governorship of "Cyrenius" (the Roman Quirinius under whom the census was held in 6 A.D.) in the reign of Augustus Caesar. The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces

 

 

 

4. Ahalya Kunti Draupadi Tara Mandodari tatha/ Panchakanya smarenityam mahapataka nashaka/See my "Riddle of the Pancha Kanya" in Mother India elaborated further in "Panchakanya: Women of Substance" at http://wiow.boloji.com/hinduism/panchkanya/pk01.htm

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occurred on May 29 and October 3 in 7 B.C., tallying with the legend of the Magi following the star. Augustus' birthday was celebrated as tidings of joy, "euangelion" - precisely the word used for the birth of Jesus in the NT - connoting the birth of the divine saviour of the world. The Pax Romana Augustus established ensured the means for disseminating the Christian euangelion.

 

It is here that Sethna dispels a prevalent misconception that Sri Aurobindo had stated his having been Leonardo da Vinci and the Mother Mona Lisa in a previous birth. He quotes Sri Aurobindo's written reply: "Never heard before of my declaring or anybody declaring such a thing."

 

Objections raised regarding the historicity of Christ are taken up by Sethna and shown to be without foundation. For Ramakrishnaites, however, a stumbling block remains in the dream Swami Vivekananda recounts having seen near Crete while travelling back from Almora: one of the Therapeutae of Crete appeared to say that their teachings had been propagated mistakenly as those of Jesus who never existed. Even Eusebius (3rd-4th century A.D.) remarks on the remarkable similarity of Therapeutae to Christian monks and feels that their writings (referred to by Christ's contemporary Philo of Alexandria) might be the Epistles and Gospels of the NT. It is, however, important to note that even the opponents of Gmstianity have never questioned Jesus' existence, but only doubted his divinity and criticised his followers' practices.

 

Taking up the problem of the Turin Shroud, Sethna painstakingly analyses all the pros-and-cons to conclude that there is no evidence for questioning the Carbon-14 test made independently by three laboratories in different countries dating it between 1260 and 1390 A.D. The description of how Jesus' body was wrapped given in the gospel of John 206-7 clearly has his body and his head wrapped in separate pieces of cloth using linen bands (othonia) not a single piece (sindon). Thus, there is no question of the shroud being the cloth in which Jesus was wrapped. Sethna also lays to rest the popular myths that Luke and Mark were friends of Paul, that the former was a medical man and that he also wrote the "Acts of the Apostles".

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The controversy about when the NT envisages Christ's Second Coming interests Sethna. The earliest writing, Paul's epistles, clearly envisages that it is due anytime. There is a crisis of faith mentioned in Peter's Second Letter because the expected return has not occurred. Everything in the NT points to the Second Coming being fixed c. 1st century A.D. It is most unlikely that any apostle would, therefore, leave for so distant a shore as India, as Thomas is supposed to have done. Whatever happens thereafter is not part of Christ's schema, therefore! Thus, another myth is laid to rest.

 

What engages Sethna at length is the examination of the dogma regarding the resuscitation of the crucified body as distinct from the resurrection of Jesus in a different form. The extreme physicality Luke and John attribute to the appearance of Jesus after the burial is suspect. Paul does not support it despite having spent time with Peter and James the brother of Jesus and referring to six contemporary instances of Jesus' appearance. The NT stresses that his form was different and disciples could not recognise him till he announced himself. Paul says, "Even if we did once know Christ in flesh, that is not how we know him now... there is a new creation; the old creation has gone..." (2 Corinthians 5:16-17). What appeared from the dead mortal body was a divine being, the Messiah, who had descended into the body at baptism by John. Sethna shows that there is no evidence of any rock-hewn tomb in a garden as described in Mark/ Luke nor of Joseph of Arimathaea, who is supposed to have used an exorbitant hundred pounds of myrrh to embalm the body, nor of any feminine witness. Crucifixion being the most cursed of executions, the criminals used to be thrown into a common pit for burial. Paul states that Christ accepted being cursed as a slave for mankind's sake as the scripture (Galatians 3:11) says "Cursed be everyone who is hanged on a tree." Sethna turns to Albright the archaeologist to show that even prior to Mark - in the late 60s of the Is' century -there were practically no Christians left in Jerusalem to testify regarding Jesus' burial, the Romans having driven them all out in crushing the Jewish revolt of 66 A.D.

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In short, Paul's account of Jesus' resurrection in a non-physical body is the earliest and only first-hand evidence available to us. There is no evidence of any special burial or entombment or feminine witness to resurrection. We are left with a series of appearances to some people of a spiritual form identified as Jesus.

 

Sethna caps this discussion by daring to hazard what the nature of the form was in which Jesus appeared after death. Drawing upon Sri Aurobindo's pronouncements, he identifies this as a subliminal reality, apprehended by the inner vision of mystics like Paul, of a subtle physical substance, a causal body, descending from Paul's "third heaven" (the ideal or spiritual plane, beyond the vital and the mental). It is a remarkable conclusion, unprecedented and calling for serious attention, bringing to bear on Christian tradition the full weight of the experiential evidence of modern world's Master of Integral Yoga.

 

In these three books Sethna has embarked upon a unique journey through territory none have dared to explore with such dedication, refusing to take any statement at face value, testing every claim against all possible evidence till only the incontrovertible truth shines forth. His Problems of Ancient India (Aditya Prakashan, 2000) is an outstanding fourth in the series, complementing the revolutionary Ancient India in a New Light^.5 Unfortunately, space constraints do not permit us to discuss its findings in this paper. Perhaps sometime, in some other forum, readers will be able to savour the riches it contains.

 

 

5. cf. my "High Adventure in Historiography" in Amal-Kiran: Poet and Critic, 1994.

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Soul Prompted:

A Reading of Amal Kiran's Poetry

 

 

Somebody once said, and wisely was it said, that a beggar might look on a king. In addition, we have this gem from the Bard, "Now, Sir, thought is free." Encouraged by these two dicta, I have made bold to give voice to my personal observations about a very small number of Amal Kiran's poems, letting, for once, "I would" wait upon "I dare not", unlike the poor cat in the adage.

 

As I was leafing through The Secret Splendour, I distinctly heard certain poems calling out, "Me, me, choose me!" as if they and I had an inner affinity and they wanted to whisper their secrets into my inmost ear. So I opened my heart's closed doors to them and led them to the core of my being which they filled with their sweetness and light. Their soul spoke to mine and prompted my soul to speak.

 

"The Tree of Time", a sonnet with a difference, being in blank verse, reveals the ultimate reality of a true poet. 'Earth-bound, heaven amorous', Timeless bound in time, the poet here sees himself as the tree of time whose 'one sole branch is lit by eternity', this sole branch being the poet's 'song-fruitful hand'. On this branch bloom 'the deathless flowers of ecstasy'. The poet's entire existence is concentrated in these 'few fingers that trace on life's uncoloured air a burning cry from God-abysses to God-pinnacles.'

 

The octave, while describing the 'swaying shadow' and 'the dark depths' of the tree, focuses our attention on the sole, luminously efflorescing branch. Here we discover another truth about poets - that the poet and the man who houses the poet are two completely different beings. They must never be confused. The man may be the swaying

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shadow of the dark tree but the poet is lit by eternity. The metaphor of the tree continues throughout the octave, giving such a minute detail as the turning of the sap into flower by the Targe splendour', before spilling over into the first line of the sestet - 'the buried vast which holds me rooted' -in order to maintain the link.

 

The antithetical sestet looks forward to a glorious future:

 

the buried vast which holds me rooted

 In dreamful kinship to the height of heaven

Shall wake.

 

Then the promise will be fulfilled, the dream become a reality and 'nectar-flame' shall course through every nerve.

 

This 'nectar-flame - a Force drunk with its own infini-rude' is in sharp contrast to the 'feeble brightness self-consumed in joy like the brief passions of earth', suggesting a glorious picture of supramental transformation.

 

As students in the Ashram School, there were many ways • we learnt to relate to poets like Amal Kiran. From the time Tehmi-ben, our peerless professor of English, introduced us to "A.E." by reading out his "Babylon" to us, this Irish poet has exercised a tremendous fascination on me. Although I was then just a callow youth, my whole being immediately thrilled 'through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon.'

 

Soon I learnt that I was not the only one, even before I was born "A.E." had begun to cast his spell on many an Ashramite, especially the poets of the 1930's. The 1930's mark a golden age in the life of the Ashram not only in the field of Sadhana - we hear that almost every sadhak and sadhika in the Ashram used to have rich spiritual experiences at that time - but also in the fields of poetry, painting and music. On the one hand Sri Aurobindo was either creating poets out of non-poets or inspiring inborn poets to greater endeavour, to 'faather sail' in Whitman's words; on the other, the Mother was doing the same for the painters. It was a wonder

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of wonders to find so many class poets like Amal Kiran, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, Nishikanto, Arjava, Dilip Kumar Roy, Nirodbaran; painters such as Jayantilal, Krishnalal, Nishikanto, Sanjiban, Amal Kiran; and singers like Dilip Kumar Roy, Sahana Devi, Bhishmadev Chattopadhyay, Venkatraman, all enriching with their art forms a small community of some one hundred inmates.

 

To come back to "A.E.", I do not think that the poet and painter, George William Russell who wrote under the penname "A.E.", was appreciated anywhere in the world as much as he was in our Ashram. "The vaporous sapphire, violet glow and silver gleam' of his spiritual experiences were perhaps too ethereal to be grasped by the average western reader but, mystic experiences being universal by nature, they were readily identified here by people engaged in spiritual pursuit.

 

Dilip Kumar Roy had corresponded with "A.E." and had sent him six of Amal Kiran's poems, requesting him to comment on them. Unfortunately, "A.E." was very ill at the time and not in a position to write at length. But he did pen a few lines praising Amal Kiran's poems. He spoke of their 'genuine poetic quality' and 'many fine lines' and added that they 'show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable since the poet is not writing in his native but a learned language.'

 

Celtic mysticism vibrates in the lyrics of "A.E." with lines like these:

 

But I have touched the lips of clay.

Mother, thy rudest sod to me

Is thrilled with the fire of hidden day

 And haunted by all mystery.

 

"A.E."s poems are mostly brief but they silence the mind and let us look into the life of things. It is this brevity that Amal Kiran stresses in his poem, "AE":

 

No fragile joy were those song-briefnesses:...

 but laden with a breath of mysteries.

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It is interesting to note that this short eight-line lyric which Amal Kiran had begun on 21.8.1935, shortly after " A.E."'s death on July 17, he did not complete until 16.4.1992 when he added the last two lines:

 

Each song the tiny-seeming giant mood

 Of a world aglow in a far empyrean.

 

"The Signature: Sri Aurobindo":

 

The signatures of both the Mother and Sri Aurobindo are very beautiful and significant. The Mother's signature has inspired many painters to depict it as the Bird of Fire in flight, but none before Amal Kiran dared to fathom the mysterious depths of the bold lines of Sri Aurobindo's signature and interpret their recondite beauty and bliss.

 

Amal Kiran finds the strength of sculpture there which he expresses as:

 

Sharp-hewn yet undertoned with mystery,

A brief black sign from the Incommunicable.

 

In this poem Amal Kiran uses a most original metaphor. The 'laughing whip-lash of love' merging into the image of the snake with its coils as well as 'straight sweep', is rife with a wealth of shimmering suggestions which escape the mind before they are caught. The 'whip-lash' is naturally followed by 'a wonder-weal holding bright secrets'.

 

Sri Aurobindo tells us that great poetry comes from the 'interpretative and intuitive vision'¹ of the poet. I feel that while meditating on Sri Aurobindo's signature, Amal Kiran too had such an interpretative vision. Hence he could reveal the secret of the'S' in 'Sri', as

 

Clutching with gentle finger our dumb desire

 A slanting full-bodied soar loops a firm loop

Of light...

 

1. SABCL, Vol 9, p. 30.

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and of the 'A' in 'Aurobindo', as

 

Then one curve-straightening gracefully girdled stance,

A peace and pulchritude and potency,

 A slender pyramid chasing a viewless line

Within,...

 

and of the ultimate 'o', as

... and then the term

Of all this labour and rapture in a full sweet circle,

 

He says that Sri Aurobindo's signature with its final flourish is 'never a stagnant splendour' but is dynamic: '...it casts a hook... to dig and drag the dark Divine out of some heaven made hell, the Abyss that is All.' These last two lines are reminiscent of Sri Aurobindo's famous poem, "A God's Labour":

 

.. .Go where none have gone!

Dig deeper, deeper yet

Till thou reach the grim foundation stone

 And knock at the keyless gate.

 

"Pranam to the Divine Mother"

There are two ways of bowing

To you, O Splendour sweet!

One craves the boon of blessedness,

One gives the soul to your feet.

 

As I read these lines, my mind left today and yesterday and flew back three score years. I saw the little boy that I then was, clutching a bunch of flowers in my hand, climbing the stairs in the Meditation Hall. At the top of the steps she stood, the Sweet Splendour, clad in sari, a golden band on her forehead holding her veil in place. Smiling sweetly she took the flowers from my hand. I bent down and touching her

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beautiful, white feet gently placed my forehead on them. Oh, how tender they were! I could feel their softness on my forehead, long after I came down after receiving the Mother's blessings. I was too young then to know whether I craved the boon of blessedness or gave my soul to her feet. Most probably it was the latter as it is the case with the very young, because I do not remember asking for anything. To be able to touch her feet was its own reward and made us

 

quite forget

Whether our day be a richer rose,

A wealthier violet.

 

Sighing nostalgically, I read the next stanzas. Here Amal goes on to elaborate the craving for the boon of blessedness. It is somewhat self-centred. The touch of the Divine Mother makes us feel holy and happy, but this is a

 

rapturous robbery

 Deaf to infinity's call

That we should leap and plunge in [Her].

 

The other way of bowing to the Mother is to surrender oneself completely to Her and drown one's whole life in Her vastnesses. Amal Kiran ends the poem uttering the mantra of self-surrender. "Your will alone my peace", in the manner of Dante - "E'n la sua volontate e nostra pace."

 

A gem of a lyric is "Purblind". The metaphor of the candle runs all through the four stanzas, at times revealing, at times concealing the beautiful beloved who has so felicitously been compared to the brief candle. Only a true poet discovers similarity in the dissimilar. And when he does discover it with the power of his intuition, o joy, what Truth unfolds itself before the reader! Like a candle, a loving woman brings light and joy in a man's life quietly sacrificing herself in the process:

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Quiet as a candle,

She burned the brief

White span of her beauty 

With a golden grief.

 

An admirer once complimented a sculptor on the beautiful statue that he had created out of an ordinary piece of marble. The sculptor merely smiled and said, "It is no credit to me. She was already there hidden in that piece of marble. I've merely liberated her." In the same way, while we see nothing but an ordinary candle, the poet's eye has seen what is hidden in the slender white candle with its golden flame -the quintessence of womanhood, the Eternal Feminine. It is 'her wondrous flame' which enables the poet to find within himself 'secrets... of a minstrel mind'. It is 'her wondrous Flame' which glimmers

 

a votive dance

In [his] spirit's temple

Of lonely trance.

 

And yet, oh irony of ironies, in spite of possessing such magic powers of seeing, very rarely does the purblind poet see that Love is burning away its life for him!

 

About the "Giant Wheel" Amal Kiran's note acknowledges that it was inspired by a poem of Nishikanto. Once again we are back in the golden thirties, when the literary creation of one poet in the happy family of the Ashram used to be passed on to the others to savour. The word savour is doubly apt in the case of Nishikanto who, apart from being a poet and a painter, was known for his exceptional culinary skills. Amal Kiran's inspiration might have launched itself from Nishikanto's springboard, but the flight path that it takes, is entirely its own.

 

The image of the Giant Wheel is presented in the first stanza complete in all the details, but when we begin to take note of the keywords and phrases - 'One curve ethereal

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hite, one earth embrowned', 'a timeless pole fixed in each our', 'bearing its load of lives', 'the magic power/Moves in erpetual self-oblivion' and 'a cycle of desire half shade half in' - the symbolism reveals itself in all its glory. It is the giant Wheel of Prakriti, teeming with life, fixed upon a time-bound timeless pole in the cosmic Fair. The motive force is finished by the Purusha who in perfect equanimity 'looks with far eyes of calm' and 'turns the dream-mystery of gold and gray'.

 

In the last stanza the poet describes his yogic experience:

 

After the rise and fall of a myriad days,

My vision merges now with his wide gaze

And through all changing cry of colour sees

One single beauty born of deathless peace -

 

"Tennis with the Mother" has a special place in my heart, remember the time when the tennis courts were made ready and the Mother came to the Tennis Ground almost every afternoon to play her favourite game. I was very young then, and although myself a tennis enthusiast, I was never skilled enough to play with the Mother. But whenever I got the opportunity, I made good use of it and watched the Mother playing tennis. She was in her seventies then but insisted on using a very heavy racquet. She had a strong, steady foreland and she returned every ball that came within her reach with devastating accuracy. As it was customary in those days, he was a baseline player and her rallies lasted long. Her rower of concentration was worth observing and emulating, as did those players privileged to oppose her from across he net.

 

In the Indian mythology we have the story of Jaya and Vijaya, the celestial gatekeepers of lord Vishnu in Vaikunth, who were cursed by the rishi Sanaka that they would be ex-led from the Lord's presence. Later when the rishi was mollified he commuted the period of exile to either seven human births as friends of the Divine or three human births as His

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Asuric enemy, to be destroyed by Him. Jaya and Vijaya, in order to return to Vaikunth quickly, chose the latter alternative and opposed the Lord on the earthly battlefields in three incarnations as Hiranyaksha-Hiranyakashipu, Ravana-Kumbhakarna and Shishupala-Dantavaktra.

 

My immature mind with its fertile imagination, often wondered whether the players who opposed the Mother on the tennis court would have a quicker spiritual realisation on that count. Even now, although a part of my mature intellect ridicules that idea, another part nods gravely and thinks that there might be something in that notion. Whether they made spiritual progress or not, it is an undisputed fact that all the players who played against the Mother improved their game greatly, achieving smooth strokes, fine ball control and intense concentration.

 

Against this backdrop, when Amal Kiran's poem "Tennis with the Mother" appeared in Mother India in the year 1954, it is no wonder that I took a special interest in it. I had studied the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in school, so when I saw the title "Tennis with the Mother", Fitzgerald's popular lines

 

The ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes

 But Here or There as strikes the Player goes

 

spontaneously came to my mind. But as I read Amal Kiran's revelatory words

 

She seems but playing tennis -

The whole world is in that game! A little ball she is striking -

What is struck is a huge white flame

Leaping across time's barrier

Between God's hush, man's heart,

 

the facile, fatalistic philosophy of Fitzgerald, like the unsubstantial pageant that it undoubtedly was, melted into air, into thin air, leaving me to concentrate on the deep significance of the next two lines

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And while the exchange goes speeding

The two shall never part.

 

This yoga, this union between 'God's hush' and 'man's heart' is further strengthened by the mystic mantras of 'Love' and 'Service' - words in constant usage in tennis, which, as Amal Kiran has intuitively discovered, symbolise Bhaktiyoga and Karmayoga, the two most essential disciplines of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga.

 

Playing tennis with the Mother, as indeed anything that is done while concentrating on her in the deep heart's core, is sadhana par excellence - this is the great Truth, one might think, that this poem expresses. But the phrase 'huge white flame leaping across time's barrier' conveys much more, an awe inspiring vision, to the 'meeting soul'. I feel that while watching the Mother at play, Amal Kiran went into a deep trance and as his inner eye opened, he had a cosmic vision. All the boundary walls fell away and the little tennis court started widening, becoming vaster and vaster every moment. The net stretched and stretched and became 'time's barrier' separating the Eternal Mother who grew and grew until she pervaded the water, earth and sky, from her time-bound children who gamely returned the huge white flaming ball that she struck towards them. And all the while the poet dimly heard the referee intoning, among others, the mystic words 'Love' and 'Service'.

 

The Secret Splendour is a collection of nearly six hundred poems. A good number of them (ninety-two to be exact!), especially the ones written in the golden thirties, have had the good fortune of being read and commented upon at length by Sri Aurobindo himself. Then how can I dare to tarnish them by wrapping them in my 'more rawer breath'? Why even think of gilding the lily? While commenting on many of Amal Kiran's lines Sri Aurobindo has pinpointed their origin to the illumined Mind, touched with the Overmind! Regarding some others he has congratulated the poet by calling them "absolutely perfect"! He has even explained the apparent unintelligibility of some of Amal Kiran's

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poems by saying, "It is precisely because what you put in is not intellectualism or a product of mental imagination that your poetry is difficult to those who are accustomed to a predominantly mental strain in poetry....That is the difficulty, the crux of imaged spiritual poetry; it needs not only the fit writer but the fit audience - and that has yet to be made."

 

Perhaps I should conclude by saying that vis-a-vis these poems and many other poems from The Secret Splendour that came clamouring to be cuddled and appreciated, I wisely adopted Cordelia's policy: "Love and be silent."

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K.D. Sethna: The Creative Critic

 

 

RESEARCHERS of critical theories must remember that Sri Aurobindo has touched virtually on every critical issue. Because he has condensed his material, the purpose of the researcher would be to pick up the clues for detailed explanation of them. Unfortunately, most of the academic projects on Sri Aurobindo have ended up with long passages with insufficient and irrelevant commentaries on them. Some of the critical works of K.D. Sethna will teach us how we should go about investigating the Master's work in an academic way, which may also be an original way of expanding the condensed texts of Sri Aurobindo. If we look back at the earlier prose of K.D. Sethna, this quality does not-seem very obvious. There was, of course, a very strong original note even when Sethna was explaining the overhead aesthetics. But because the subject was new, the essays did not abound in references to Western writers. They were spontaneous, inspired, often revelatory essays.

 

In Sethna's critical prose a modern academic style has been combined with a perceptive voice, which seeks to relate Sri Aurobindo with the major critical tradition of the West. After Blake's Tyger, he has taken up Wordsworth's A Slumber, and here too he shows how a single-poem survey may lead up to a book-length study. A Slumber turns K.D. Sethna into a literary detective, who coolly moves on with his search for the exact girl from Wordsworth's neighbourhood. He seems as comfortable with Robin Skelton as with Sri Aurobindo. He examines the biographical details from all major interpreters of the Lucy-poems and uses his own eyes and brain to know whether the poem was inside the cluster or outside it. The eyes of a detective never miss a

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small thing. The mystic as detective may suddenly start concentrating on an apparently unimportant verb. Who knows what cosmic mystery remains hidden in that bare lone verb or a pronoun? The mystic researcher becomes a laborious linguist. If you wish to see this strange combination in a literary critic, you have to read the latest critical works of Sethna.

 

The one-poem-analysis scheme of Sethna has never been the touch-and-go gesture of a casual writer who has read or taught just one poem from a writer. This scheme shows us the author's acquaintance with the major works of the writer concerned and indicates how a modern Ph.D. student will have to tackle a single poem if he or she takes that up for the field of research. However, the most important lesson that a modern Ph.D. student may learn from Sethna is the art of expanding the concealed critical principles of Sri Aurobindo. On reading Sethna's explanations, I understand how Sri Aurobindo's art of criticism has remained a closed book for many of us who have struggled with him over the years. Classical and Romantic, which came out in 1997, is such a bright book of research. In his "Foreword", Sethna briefly indicates that the book is a search for Sri Aurobindo's credo, which still remains unclarified for the literary audience. Since it is an "expanded version" of Sethna's earlier prose, the later prose style has coloured the book.

 

The last paragraph of Sethna's "Foreword" to Classical and Romantic is the first lesson for our PhD. students, who seldom know that the "Preface" to a book should be brief and clear and expressive.

 

An expanded version of this attempt constitutes the present book. As Sri Aurobindo is not only a scholar in many languages, a penetrating literary critic, a far-reaching philosophical thinker and profound poet but also a master of spiritual illumination, a guide to the all-round inner development which he terms the Integral Yoga, it has been felt that concentration on an approach to the

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subject of "Classical" and "Romantic" through him is most likely to yield what is new as well as true.

 

The attentive reader of Sri Aurobindo's literary criticism will remember that he has never used the title, Classical and Romantic, for any of his essays in The Future Poetry. The words appear here and there in the book and in the letters along with Sri Aurobindo's passing thoughts on them. While reading him deeply, Sethna has tried to understand what Sri Aurobindo would have meant by the words, Classical and Romantic, and in this effort at interpretation Sethna's own thinking mind and vision have created an authentic Sethna-stamp, his own voice, the voice of the creative writer as critic. It is not hard to see the modification of Sri Aurobindo's style and the effort at clarity:

 

According to Sri Aurobindo, the subconscious or the unconscious is not all that lies beyond our wak:' condition. He refers to the subliminal being, a hidden domain much greater, with powers like those of our wakeful state but intenser, wider, finer, more varied and with rarer ones too that are either absent from that state or present there only in embryo. Poetry, like all art, draws considerably on the subliminal and discloses that domain's surprising realities in diverse patterns of image and sound.¹

 

Sethna then points out in very clear terms where Sri Aurobindo departs from Freud. Later, within the texture of the same argument he goes on to clarify, once again in his own style, the point of the mixed inspiration of which Sri Aurobindo has spoken on various occasions. He does not copy or just alter a passage like most of our modern Ph.D. students. Instead he thinks it out again, lives with the idea received from his Master, and discovers his own voice:

 

 

1. Sethna, K.D., Classical and Romantic: An Approach Through Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1997, p. 6.

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But it is seldom that the whole word leaps from the source, that cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of its divine origin, - ordinarily it goes through some secondary process in the brain-mind itself, gets its impulse and unformed substance perhaps from above, but subjects it to an intellectual or other earthly change; there is in that change always indeed some superior power born of the excitement of the higher possession, but also some alloy too of our mortality.²

 

Not that he is writing about this mixed inspiration for the first time. He had done this in his preface to Overhead Poetry and elsewhere in his early writings. But there had been that rhythmic Aurobindonian efflux everywhere, a touch of the classic Victorian which had once come out through the pen of Ruskin and Newman, a style which had reached its culmination in Sri Aurobindo. Sethna knows how to curb his inspired efflux, how to combine revelation and argument, •how to subdue as much as possible the Master's voice even when he is out to explain his grand themes. Let us listen to that controlled voice:

 

There is emotion in the Classical poets too. Indeed, with- out a moved language no poetry can exist, just as no poetry can exist without the wings of the imagination in the word. Both may be controlled, both may be let loose - but they must be present. In the Greeks and Ro- mans, in Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, they are controlled, though often very intense - and the controlling actually adds at times to the effect of the intensity. In the Elizabethan Romantics they are mostly let loose, though even in the letting loose there is the Shakespearian way and there is the Chapmanian...³

 

 

2. Ibid., p. 8.

3. Ibid., p. 83.

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Such is Sethna, who manipulates the language masterfully, switching off there, switching on here, shows keenness when he needs poetry and is expansive when clarity is of prime necessity. The problem is he demands too much from his readers. His intellectual logic is as powerful as his poetic sight. The reader must know that Sethna is not just another Indo-Anglian prose writer in the literature supermarket. He demands our concentration. For instance in the following passage, he deals with a very subtle issue relating to Mallarme's not-too-apparent spontaneity. He explains in his high serious style of exposition how Mallarme's work has an appearance of "premeditation".

 

The premeditation is an appearance only, because what it does is just to employ a certain mode of transmitting the inherently spontaneous: the spontaneous is not always that which leaps out at once from within but simply that which is inherent in the activity of a power beyond the superficial subjective being and this spontaneity can be reached either with effort or without it and does not change its essential character according to the way it is reached. All that is necessary is that no trace of the pedestrian, the laborious, the heavy-handed should remain in the result: no matter how achieved, poetry must bring an inevitable facility, a smiling certainty.⁴

 

How many in the post-Aurobindo Indo-Anglian scene have this subtlety and high-seriousness? Sethna was the first to start a systematic exploration of Sri Aurobindo's theory of art and literature. He taught us how to reject rehash by concentrating independently on the texts from Sri Aurobindo. Poetry had long ended with the passing of Sri Aurobindo. After that it was time for prose. For more than fifty years, he has spent hour after hour, trying to write prose that would not go bad. He has thus ensured a permanent place for himself in the literary firmament.

 

 

4. Sethna, K.D., The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, 1987, p. 64.

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"Karpasa" in Prehistoric India*

 

 

SELDOM does a work of historical scholarship confront us with such far-reaching new insights as this companion volume to The Problem of Aryan Origins, which was published in 1980 by the same keen-sighted, energetic and wide-ranging thinker. That earlier book was an incisive reexamination of the "Aryan invasion" theory, a doctrine that was long accepted much too uncritically in most academic discussion of Indian history and has continued to exert a divisive influence on Indian life decades after the departure of the colonialists who conceived it. With abundant documentation and persuasive logic, Mr. Sethna's exposition drove to the conclusion that on an impartial scrutiny of the existing evidence, this theory must be discarded - or, at the very least, acceptance of it suspended until better arguments can be advanced in favour of it. Archaeologically, "the Aryans... have not yet been identified" (Dales). Anthropologically, "the population [at Harappa and Lothal] would appear, on the available evidence, to have remained more or less stable from Harappan times to the present day" (Wheeler). The general picture is that "direct testimony to the assumed fact is lacking, and no tradition of an early home beyond the frontier survives in India" (Basham). Little is left but nebulous inferences from linguistic affinities for which other historical explanations could just as well be hypothesised. So instead of a gratuitous invasion of the Punjab by untraceable Central Asian nomads in 1500 B.C., what was proposed in The Problem of Aryan Origins was a "belt of ancient Aryanism" extending by the fourth millennium B.C. from the Ukraine to

 

 

*A review of "Karpasa" in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue, by K.D. Sethna, New Delhi: Biblia Implex, 1981.

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northwestern India, attested by such evidence as the data for the domesticated horse, a feature recognised as especially distinctive of the early culture termed "Aryan".

 

"Karpasa" in Prehistoric India vindicates this view of the remote antiquity of the Aryan presence in India from a different and unexpected angle. It focuses on the identity of the enigmatic Indus Valley civilisation, which the previous book had insufficiently illuminated. A notable characteristic of that civilisation as indicated by its material remains is its priority in the cultivation of cotton, which it is even thought to have exported to other parts of the ancient world. (Sethna finds fresh support for this notion, as will be shown in a moment.) From the time of the Harappan culture (c. 2500-1500 B.C.) forward, the prevalence of cotton in north India is ascertainable from a number of sites spread over a widening area. There is no sign or probability of a cessation in its cultivation with the decline of the Indus Valley cities. Now, the. varied and copious extant compositions of the Vedic Aryans -the oldest of which reveal themselves to have taken shape in the Indus region itself, the very homeland of cotton - frequently mention wool but betray no hint of an awareness of cotton, the later karpasa. It is on this striking fact, a puzzling anomaly in the current chronological framework, that K.D. Sethna seizes to throw the Vedas boldly yet cogently back into pre-Harappan times.

 

Undoubtedly, a single book is not enough to work out all the implications of so drastic a shift in historical perspective, establishing it once for all as viable and necessary. But Sethna deals minutely and effectively with several major objections that could be raised. As regards his reinterpretation of the Indus culture as an essentially Aryan development, though imbued with Near Eastern influences, it must be said that the pieces fall into place impressively. The Sanskrit texts in which cotton first makes its appearance, the early Sutras, are synchronised with the Harappan civilisation at its height. Immediately certain astronomical references, which in the old chronology had to be dismissed as yielding

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these Sutras an antiquity that could not be credited, cease to be problematic. Then there are a number of aspects of the Indus Valley civilisation which, juxtaposed abruptly with the Rig Veda, have looked like sure signs of a culture that was radically non-Aryan, although many of its features somehow became typical of Aryan life after the lapse of a few centuries. But in Sanskrit literature, it is precisely the Sutras that reveal these persistent characteristics of the Indian way of life - archaeologically traceable in the Harappan remains - taking shape. The hundreds of years interposed between Harappa and the Sutras accomplish nothing. Moreover, the evolution from Vedic origins of supposedly non-Aryan manifestations like image worship and the cult of the Mother Goddess is not only free of difficulties but, as Sethna demonstrates, was practically inevitable.

 

Yet Mr. Sethna resists the facile temptation to simply Sanskritise the Harappans. His eye is focused tirelessly on the actual evidence, and his clear and inquisitive gaze unblinkered by academic orthodoxy and undistracted by partisan bias perceives a more complex and interesting panorama. In particular, his rethinking of the Aryan question allows him to utilise with an unprecedented fruitfulness the perspective to be gained from Mesopotamia, with which the Indus Valley had commercial relations. In one of his most fascinating chapters, whose substance amounts to an independent corroboration of the argument from cotton as well as a refinement of its implications, he establishes a significant equation between the Sumerian name for the Indus civilisation - Meluhha - and the term which the speakers of archaic Sanskrit, whose centre had now shifted eastward, are shown to have applied to its members: Mlechchha. Other scholars have tried to work out this correspondence, but failed due to chronological difficulties which look more and more artificial to the reader of "Karpasa". To validate the Meluhha-Mlechchha equivalence which investigators have found so appealing, the last Brahmana which first speaks of the Mlechchhas must obviously be dated somewhere near

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the Harappan culture and not come a millennium after it. In Sethna's analysis the Brahmana falls just where it should, contemporary with the Harappan beginnings; the connection of these two terms at once becomes compelling and sheds a valuable light on the exact identity of the mysterious Harappans. For the Mlechchhas are first mentioned in Sanskrit with specific reference to a difference in language. Indeed, while we may now take the earliest use of the word to signify the inhabitants of the Indus Valley, being simply a Sanskritic form of the name by which they must have known themselves - otherwise approximated by Sumerian "Meluhha" - it came later to be applied to all who talk in a strange or non-Aryan way, such as tribal peoples and Dravidians. The example of Mlechchha utterance cited by the Brahmana, however, indicates clearly that it is alluding to a mode of speech that was not non-Aryan at all but simply "corrupt" in relation to Sanskrit. Thus, the language of the Harappan culture may be deduced to have been, as Sethna calls it, a proto-Prakrit.

 

With respect to this designation as well as the general force of the argument, it is worth noting Sethna's comparison of later Prakrit equivalents of "Mlechchha" - "Melakha" and "Milakkha" - with the actual pronunciation of "Meluhha", which may be represented "Melukhkha". Certain scholars quote the Sumerian word as "Melukha" or "Milukhkha", and "Melahha" has also been proposed, which would be pronounced "Melakhkha".

 

Striking confirmation of Sethna's theory comes again from Mesopotamia and brings us back to cotton. A distinguished scholar has speculated plausibly that among the unidentified names of articles occurring in Sumerian texts, the adaptation of an Indian (Harappan or "Meluhhaite") word for cotton is very likely to be present. But naturally, labouring under the usual assumptions, something resembling a Sanskrit word was not what he had in mind. Consequently he was able to cite kapazum as one of these unknown terms without pausing to wonder at its similarity to Sanskrit

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karpasa, which denotes the very commodity he was looking for. Yet the resemblance of kapazum to karpasa, and even more to a Prakritic form that would drop the r, is inescapable. All factors considered, the identification of Sumerian kapazum as referring to Indian cotton must be counted as a technical contribution of K.D. Sethna's that is of considerable historical consequence. It aptly epitomises the undeniably brilliant accomplishment of this work which pioneers a stimulating new outlook on a large field of human antiquity.

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A Clear Ray and A Lamp - an exchange of light

 

 

I FIRST met Amal Kiran in 1969, advised by Jayantilal-ji that in him I would find a kindred spirit - and how right he was! He was then living at 23 Rue Suffren, and I used to help arrange his numerous unpublished typescripts (numbering 23 in 1974 as he writes) in a wooden almirah. Whenever possible, I would get hold of newly published material on subjects he was dealing with and send these to him. For instance, in the 1970s he was heavily into Velikovsky. I was able to obtain issues of the journal published by the Velikovsky Society and keep Amal updated. Later, I sent him articles and books on the Indus Valley Civilisation from various libraries. He, on his part, used to send me books on these subjects that had been sent by friends and relations abroad. Our correspondence is full of references to these exchanges.

 

Let us turn to the scintillating play of light in his letters -rays of knowledge and twinkling sparks of humour suffuse them, shining through the clouds of financial crisis and labour trouble facing Mother India that try, vainly, to overcast the clear ray. He always ended, "Yours affectionately, Amal" and the pressures of editorial commitments and his own research never seemed to be obstacles to his typing out long extracts from books that he had found interesting and felt I would benefit from, or from sending me lengthy, closely argued letters on issues of mutual interest, mostly relating to ancient history.

 

The first letter I have retained is uncharacteristically undated and is sometime in mid-1974 from 23 Rue Suffren, informing me that the only poem I had written would be out in the October issue and offering interesting insights apropos my question regarding the symbolic meaning of the

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Utanka and the Ocean-churning episodes which were the subject of my Secret of the Mahabharata that was serialised in M.I. The distinction Amal draws between the double significance of the turtle is quite unique:

 

I have no particular solution to give for the problem you have posed to me. The kundala earrings most probably have to be interpreted along your lines. All I can say is that the ears, according to Sri Aurobindo, symbolise the medium through which spiritual messages and inspirations come from the Cosmic Consciousness to the individual consciousness. Your question on the turtle (kurma) calls for a two-fold answer. The turtle as one of the primal supports of the earth in Indian mythology is different from the turtle that belongs to the traditional Indian series of Avatars. The series has, as Sri Aurobindo points out, an evolutionary implication. The choice of certain animal figures marks the different definite stages of earthly evolution. As far as I can see, the evolution is considered significant after the vertebrate stage is reached. The sea is a symbol of, among other things, the universal life force. Scientifically, life is considered to have first appeared in the prehistoric waters of the earth. India seems to have had an intuition of this fact and, putting a stress on vertebrates, selected the fish form as the first Avataric manifestation. The next step in life's development and diffusion would be a vertebrate mediating between sea and land - an amphibian creature like the turtle. Perhaps we may say that with the coming of the turtle-Avatar we have the true meaningful Avatarhood, for the evolutionary progress has been a land-phenomenon and the turtle marks the first stage of that progress. In this way we may connect the kurma which supports everything with the kurma that constitutes the basic of Avatar-led evolution.

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He goes on to comment on the epic, giving an excellent condensation of Sri Aurobindo's views and offering information that led me to track down a particular edition of the Mahabharata in the Ashram library which Nolini-da confirmed to be the one containing markings indicating the original text as identified by Sri Aurobindo. I wonder where this copy lies now. Unfortunately, no one has pursued the course Amal suggests to identify the Ur-epic.

 

You want to interpret the Mahabharata in the light of Sri Aurobindo's revelation of the Veda's secret. And if we consider the Vyasa who wrote the epic to be Veda-Vyasa your venture is legitimate. But you must remember that Sri Aurobindo takes Vyasa's epic to consist only of 24,000 lines. According to him, the present Mahabharata is the work of three hands. There is the original Vyasa with his strong, bare, terse, direct style of vivid ideative illumination. He is overlaid by another poet who is more' romantic and decorative, a sort of secondary Valmiki -a good competent bard. Then we have a third layer -somebody continuing the trend of the Valmikiesque inspiration but with less poetic power and a more and more elaborative and decorative movement. This triple division holds so far as the poetry is concerned. Along with it we have the incorporation of a lot of dharmic verse. Of course each of the three poets must have had a side of dharma-exposition - particularly the original Vyasa who as an intellectual kavi would naturally have a good deal of dharmic lore to impart. But his contribution would still be highly poetic. What is not so in the mass of dharmic versification would be the work of the two other hands or else a dumping of goody-goody stuff by various later reciters of the epic. In any case, it is important to ascertain what exactly or approximately is Vyasa's own Mahabharata. Sri Aurobindo showed in detail what portions of the enormous poem came from Vyasa and what from the two inferior sources. I think

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Nolini has transcribed in his own copy of the epic Sri Aurobindo's classifications done on a copy brought from Madras. You may ask Nolini whether you could come over and transfer to your copy whatever he may have. Some indication of the threefold or at least twofold division may be had from Sri Aurobindo's English verse-versions of parts of the Mahabharata. All that is not Vyasa's he has put within brackets. Working on that clue, possibly you can on your own disentangle the three authors. But you must first read Sri Aurobindo's book on Vyasa. You have to steep yourself in what he writes on Vyasa's specific genius and manner of expression, and then read whatever Sanskrit passages he gives as characteristic of Vyasa and, using them as a touchstone, set about reaching the true Mahabharata. Possibly several parts which you have wished to explain a la Sri Aurobindo will get excluded. But, if your aim is not to deal with Vyasa's own composition but with the Mahabharata as it has finally come down to us, there is no need to bother about the authorship-question: you can go straight ahead and offer the right interpretation suiting a sruti. Poets inferior to Vyasa may be, as much as the Master, creators of Vedic symbols and legends. But I wonder whether the whole of the epic can be thus interpreted. There is a definite historic nucleus. You must not fall into the Gandhi-mentality which, unable to accept Krishna as the encourager of a violent war, desired to take him, as well as Arjuna and all the rest, as an allegory of a certain part of our psychological make-up and the entire battle of Kurukshetra as an allegorical event and not an historical episode.

 

I had asked Amal for tips on learning Sanskrit about which he said, "I am afraid I can proffer no advice on learning Sanskrit. Yes, I was told by Amrita that Sri Aurobindo had a private pamphlet on simplified Sanskrit-learning, but nobody has been able to trace it. Perhaps Nolini knows what

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fie method was, for he must have learnt Sanskrit by it." Here is another area for research! In a subsequent letter of 28th October he added, "I am glad you have struck upon Pujalal's Sanskrit lessons in M.I. I had completely forgotten about them... I don't know whether he has published any book on (Simplified Sanskrit but perhaps he can correspond with you On whatever problems you may have. I believe Jagannath has done some simplification, but that is not a simplifying of the study of Sanskrit but a Sanskrit rid of its knots and made easy to be India's lingua franca." I checked this out when I visited the Ashram by attending Sri Jagannath's class, and was taken aback to find I had little difficulty in following the Sanskrit!

 

Then Amal turns to Savitri:

 

My work on Savitri is sporadic. Quite an amount of comment on certain books has been tape-recorded by Nirod or his helpers, who have been coming to talk poetry with me every Wednesday. But not all of it is in final shape. I have to do the editing - but where the hell is the time for it? When I was in Bombay I wrote out some observations on the first five lines of the poem. The observations ran to twenty pages or so in typescript. One day I'll publish them in Mother India. But where is the space for them?

 

What a treasure-trove remains untapped, only awaiting transcription and publication!

 

Now financial trouble rears its Hydra-heads:

 

Mother India is in trouble at present. The tripling of paper-cost and of other things has burnt tremendous holes in Mother India's pocket. We are straining every nerve to get Ads but we still need at least seven more pages of them every month: otherwise, Naresh Bahadur tells me, we shall face a deficit of about Rs. 7000 at the year's end! I am looking out for donations on whatever scale

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and at the same time cutting down the number of pages. The issue of August 15 will be for some time our last bumper issue. I hate to diminish the reading matter, but what else am I to do?

 

He ends the letter with a sigh of relief that his Inspiration of "Paradise Lost" is complete:

 

The bally thing is over at last, with a triumphant last chapter: The Metaphysics of "Paradise Lost".

 

I had been asked to set up a Directorate of Homeopathy for the Govt, of West Bengal in 1975 and must have mentioned this to Amal, for in one of his rare "dateless" letters that can be dated by the contents to 1975, he writes,

 

Homeopathy I know at first-hand. I haven't practised it but it has been practised on me and I have seen it practised on others. Our Ashram once had a homeopath who could easily be thought of as Hahnemann reincarnated - or, if we can play with German and Indian names, we may say he was Hahnemann reappearing as Hanuman! The latter name would be all the more appropriate because he was a devotee of Rama reappearing as a Consciousness which could be called a Cosmorama (alias Sri Aurobindo). Homeopathy is a useful system and often does what Allopathy or Ayurveda and Unani fail to do, but is certainly not infallible. Every system has its successes and failures. Much depends also on the practitioner himself. The homeopath I have spoken of - Dr. Ramachandra - was a dynamo of vitality and Sri Aurobindo could use him as an effective vahana.

 

There is then a quick shift to M.I. problems:

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I am enclosing a dozen Advertisement Tariff forms. I hope your hunch proves right and we get a number of long-term Ads. We badly need all the help we can get -as you must have learned by now from the "To Our Subscribers" on the title-page of the October issue.

 

He shifts gear to provide a delightful tongue-in-cheek account of his latest book of poems, weaving in information that would delight me about my own poem:

 

My Exodus book is still high and dry on my shelf, along with my other twenty unpublished books. The only break-through in all these years is that an American woman luckily (for me) fell in love with my poetry instead of with the poet and is bringing out a beautiful edition of some of my unpublished poems. It is being printed here on handmade paper at the All India Press but will be published from the USA. The title is Altar and Flame. That reminds me to tell you that your "Illusions" adorns a full page of the latest M.I.

 

I used to send Amal whatever material I thought would be of interest to him, such as on the Mahabharata war. His eagerness to get his research published is something that is repeated in letter after letter - even asking me if any government grant could be available. It is here that one realises how long he had been working away on the Harappa problem - from 1963, a good twelve years! His response dated 26.3.76 pinpoints with characteristic precision what is lacking with current revisionist historians seeking to establish that whatever the epics record is historical. After this, he turns to an article I wrote after discovering a five feet high 12th century Vishnu statue while digging a well in the district of Malda. What he writes shows his encyclopaedic grasp of matters, the attention to minutiae and how he would temper his trenchant criticism with warm humour:

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.. .Your article is a pleasant composition and touches on several interesting matters. It does not seem to be you at your very best but it is surely publishable and the reflections on the meaning of the Avatar-succession has sound Aurobindonian sense. There are just two or three little slips. First, the jellyfish is not a "unicellular" creature. If it were, it would be quite invisible. The amoeba is unicellular and has to be studied under a microscope. Second, the Dryden-Ode does not end with "Music shall untune the sky" but with "And Music shall..." You have to put three dots before "Music", or else quote it correctly after reinstating the matter omitted after "devour". Third, Keats did not use "spirit" as noun-adjective in the phrase "spirit ditties of no tone". The word goes with what precedes it. Properly punctuated, the whole line would read: "Pipe, to the spirit, ditties of no tone." So, I would make your sentence run: "...Vishnu who piped 'to the spirit ditties of no tone', ..." That would save Keats from turning in his grave.

 

Despite the pat on the back, my article didn't get published in Mi.!

 

There is a gap in correspondence as I was transferred to Delhi where I got to know the Director General of Archaeology, Shri M.N. Deshpande, who encouraged me to submit a synopsis of Amal's research on Harappan Culture. When I informed Amal of this, he wrote heart-warmingly on 15.4.78 from 30 Rue Suffren where he had shifted, passing on a very interesting bit of information about Sri Aurobindo's attitude to Hindi:

 

It's been a long time since I received a long letter from you. I suppose the "long" of the letter is in just relationship with the "long" of the former. But there is some lack of balance because of the fact that at short intervals I have not been receiving short letters from you. Anyway, a communication from Pradip is to be received with deep thanks - palms open and eyes rolled upward.

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The thanks become deeper because of the cheque enclosed (this refers to the subscription), and deepest since there was no call for it at all. I would gladly post you Mother India free and it was a pleasure to send you my books.

 

Now to the matters that most matter. It's very gallant of you to make a 22-page synopsis of my book and send it off to Deshpande. If you have a copy I should like very much to be a second Deshpande. In despair of ever getting my mammoth published, I carved out portions of it and with suitable follow-ups got together two smaller books: (1) The Problem of Aryan Origins, (2) Cotton in Ancient India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue. The first runs to 129 pages and has been taken up by some chaps in Calcutta who were eager to bring it out by January this year but haven't got past about one-fourth of it up to now. The second is 179 pages long and is waiting for somebody to eye it favourably.

 

Sri Aurobindo may have endorsed Hindi in his early political days, but in his Pondi period he recommended English as a link language for the present and spoke of simplified Sanskrit as the lingua franca of the future.

 

Eagerly awaiting your next, yours affectionately, Amal.

 

In his letters of 10th and 24th August 1978 Amal soundly puts down Rajneesh¹, provides a fascinating discussion on the proper adjective from 'Aurobindo' and speaks of his part in the Selections from Savitri:

 

To give Rajneesh who has written in Hindi a place in Mother India in English would be to disseminate his

 

 

1. Reprinted in Aspects of Sri Aurobindo along with another letter to me critiquing the philosopher Krishna Chaitanya's severe criticism of Sri Aurobindo.

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views unnecessarily. Besides, he is such an ignoramus that he hardly deserves mention, especially mention at some length. I tackled him in my letter to you because you wanted me to do so, and also because I got a bit of pleasure from pointing out his inconsistencies and the Stygian abysses of his mind.

 

As for the variant adjectives from "Aurobindo", "Aurobindean" is Sisir Ghose's own coinage. Sri Aurobindo never used it. In one place he has used " Aurobindian" and in another "Aurobindonian". I have always plumped for the latter because of its grand sound. I believe Dilip first employed it. Of course, other alternatives are possible:" Aurobindoic"," Aurobindoesque", "Aurobindoan".

 

I had something to do with the Selections from Savitri. Mary Aldridge was the prime mover but she did base herself partly on my old set of extracts and constantly consulted me.

 

In response to my apprehension that his The Problem of Aryan Origins would be a nightmare of typographical howlers that Calcutta was notorious for, Amal replied with his characteristic humour while expressing his respect for B.B. Lai's judgement:

 

My Calcutta book will not be marred by printer's devils. I have gone through the proof very carefully two or three times. I agree that our Indian products are quite a nightmare. But at times wonderfully grotesque effects are the result. I remember reading in Sankalia's Indian Archaeology Today: "At this point a new elephant entered the culture." It would be such a shame to cut out such a glorious misprint.²

 

 

2. In his letter of 11.4.81 he writes, "Evidently he (Sankalia) does not dream of correcting the proofs. I have offered to edit and proof-read whatever future book he writes. It is indeed horrible as well as hilarious when 'awls' becomes 'owls' and 'element' turns into 'elephant'."

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.. .The best critic of any attempt at deciphering the Indus script is B.B. Lai. If he is satisfied, something genuine can be said to have been achieved. Mahadevan hasn't come unscathed from Lai's pen. Perhaps the most attractive reading of the script is the recent one by Walter Fairservis Jr. apropos of excavations at Allahdino. I have dealt with it critically in the sequel I have prepared to The Problem of Aryan Origins.

 

On 10 August 1978 Amal added to this subject, giving an invaluable nugget of information about Sri Aurobindo's view of the Indus Civilisation:

 

Thanks for your gallant attempt to get my book published. It was an even more gallant venture to make a summary of so many-sided and intricate a thesis.. .You ask whether Sri Aurobindo said anything in this context. At a time when Marshall suggested a centrally Sumerian origin for the Indus Valley Civilisation Sri Aurobindo chose to call it Proto-Indian.

 

He added with inimitable Amalian humour at the end:

 

P.S. I'm glad your brother bagged a First Class in his B. A. (Honours-English) finals. If he has beaten you hollow, since you got a Second Class though you stood first in that Class, he has knocked me also into a cocked hat, because I missed my First Class (Philosophy Honours) though by merely three or four marks³ and though I, a Philosophy student, happened to win the much-coveted Ellis Prize which a Literature-student was expected to capture.

 

 

3. Curiously, I too missed my First by 2 rnarks in the B. A. (Honours-English) Part I exam and by 1 mark in Part II. By Divine Grace I was placed first in the first class in M.A.

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The next significant letter is dated 22.9.1979. After providing an incisive critique of B.B. Lai's paper on "The Indo-Aryan Hypothesis vis-a-vis Indian Archaeology" Amal clarifies some of my misconceptions regarding Sri Aurobindo at considerable length, providing a brilliant summary of the change from Vedic spiritual insight to Upanishadic philosophy and ends with a typically humorous quip:

 

C'est tout about Lai just now. Let me deal with your postcard of the 17th... .your queries don't seem quite to arise from a close reading of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo has said that the Vedic Rishis knew the Supermind as Satyam Ritam Brihat - the True, the Right, the Vast. He has also taken Vijnana and Mahas as old Indian terms answering to his vision of the Supramental plane. There appears to be no doubt in Sri Aurobindo that the Vedic seers and the early Upanishadic sages were aware of this level. What he says is that the later sages of the Upanishads concentrated on the Silent Brahmic Self instead of taking it as merely one aspect of the total Reality. The reason for this concentration is threefold. (1) The Vedics found no way to make the Supermind effective for transformation. (2) The Upanishadics came more and more to mistake the Overmind for the Supermind and, considering it the ultimate dynamic side of the Divine, saw that it lacked the power to divinise the nature-part of man's existence and that therefore this part which looked undivinisable could not be a real feature of the Brahman who is all: in other words, it must be a strange anomaly, an unreality wearing the appearance of the real. The world thus was regarded in a way which in philosophical history was the forerunner of the later Shankarite idea of Maya. (3) The experience of the Nirvanic Absolute or the Nirguna Brahman brought home to the post-Rigvedic Yogis the "truth" of their conviction of the world's ultimate non-divinity and unreality, because in this experience the world did actually figure as a floating phantasm.

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Both Vijnana and Manas came to denote the Over-mind. At a still more subsequent time, Vijnana got identified with Buddhi, the highest stratum of human intelligence, the pure reason as distinguished from the sense-mind which was labelled as Manas. Possibly Mahas suffered the same degringolade. Now between the intellect and the Beyond there stood nothing and the Beyond was identified with the silent Brahman or passive Atman. The concept of Ishwara remained and was held to be useful for a devotion-oriented or dynamism-motived practical sadhana preparatory for the realisation of the inactive One without a Second - but, theoretically and in the final reckoning, this concept was understood as the silent Brahman (alias passive Atman) experienced within Maya. Once Maya was got rid of in the experience of the inactive One without a Second, Ishwara would disappear: He was classed as the Highest Illusion, "The last infirmity of noble minds".

 

In the Gita we have a great attempt to go back to the ancient integrality of spiritual vision. The Purushottama who is superior to the Kshara Purusha and the Akshara Purusha and who subsumes them does strike one as a Supramental reality, especially when accompanied by the concept of Para-Prakriti, the creative Supernature. But this latter concept is rather shadowy and what in the last resort encompasses our minds as Purushottama is the shining shadow of the Supermind in the top-layer, the synthesising crest, of the Overmind from where Sri Krishna who is basically Anandamaya came as an Avatar. He wove together the three Yogas -Jnana, Bhakti, Karma - and suggested the secret of secrets, the abandonment of all dharmas to take refuge solely in the Purushottama who would deliver one from all evil and from the grieving in which it results. But still the world in the Gita's vision does not quite escape being anityam asukham (transient and unhappy) for all the field it offers of a great victory of Righteousness. The manner in which the Acharyas have interpreted

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the Gita, each in favour of his own penchant, is not entirely unconnected with the Gita's many-side synthesising failure to express what the Overmind fundamentally moves towards yet is unable to point 01 unequivocally, much less to reveal convincingly. Taking advantage of whatever temporary stress the Git puts on Jnana, Bhakti or Karma, the Acharyas harp on their spiritual predilections and feel self-justified be cause the Gita in fact falls short of a fully satisfying unification. The fault with the Acharyas lay in their missing the nisus towards that unification. Sri Aurobindo alone has brought it out unmistakably and disclosed the Overmind Godhead as a help towards the Supermind even though it may be a danger if dwelt on too concentratedly. Hence his designation of the realisation on 24 November 1926 as Siddhi and yet his "No" to the Mother when she was ready to precipitate the Overmind creation on earth.

 

I feel a little out of breath at the moment with all this semi-Overmindish survey. So I'll hang up for the present.

 

On 17.10.79 Amal clarified this further:

 

... did I actually say that vijnana and mahas were terms in the Vedas? In the Rigveda the descriptive name for them is satyam-ritam, with the additional brihat applied to one or the other as in ritam brihat (1.75.5). The full Aurobindonian Vedic appellation for the Supermind, satyam-ritam-brihat, comes only in the first verse of the Atharvaveda's great hymn to Earth. The Supermind is also denoted in the Rigveda by the expression "a certain fourth", turiyam svid (X.67.1) whose discoverer is said to have been the Rishi Ayasya just as the Rishi Mahachamasya is said in the Taittiriya Upanishad to have discovered Mahas. The Rigveda's turiya, however, is not to be mixed with

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the fourth state going by that name in the Mandukya Upanishad. The Rigvedic "fourth" is not the Mandukyan grand finale, the indescribable Supracosmic, but stands in that numerical position both from below and from above: it is above the lower triplicity of Prithivi (earth), antariksha (vital plane) and dyau (mind-level) as well as below the higher triplicity (tridhatu) constituted by Vasu (substance), urj (abounding force of being) and priyam or mayas (delight or love), the Rigvedic equivalent of the Vedantic Sachchidananda and the Puranic satya-tapas-jana. As for vijnana getting identified with buddhi in later times, I don't believe that the identification can be laid at the door of the Puranas. The philosophers who started interpreting the religious books seem to have divided manas from buddhi as sense-mind from the pure reason and interpreted vijnana with the latter. As far as I remember, Radhakrishnan does the same.

 

A sweet personal note is sounded at the end of this long letter, capped with a poem, in response to the news of my transfer to the Queen of the Hills, Mussoorie:

 

Isn't it thrilling news that you will soon be on one of the Himalayan foothills? Mussoorie, as you know, has beautiful memories for me. I'll reserve Ages in Chaos for your sojourn in sight of the eternal snows. Do you remember my poem in which the Himalaya finds tongue?

 

The tides of gold and silver sweep the sky

But bring no tremor to my countenance:

How shall sun-rise or moon-ebb lure, when I

Have gripped the Eternal in a rock of trance?

 

Here centuries lay down their pilgrim cry,

Drowsed with the power in me to press my whole

Bulk of unchanging peace upon their eye

And weigh that vision deep into the soul.

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My frigid love no calls of earth can stir.

Straight upward climbs my hush - but this lone flight

Reveals me to broad earth an emperor

Ruling all time's horizon through sheer height!

 

In November 1979 his name had gone up for the Sahitya Akademi Award, sponsored by me. Amal closes his letter with, "We have to keep our fingers crossed about the Akademi Award." I was in the Ashram in January 1981 and this is what I got on my return to Mussoorie:

 

I hope you reached Nandita's lap in one piece. You have left behind a lot of warmth in my heart and a glow in my mind. Thanks to you a lot of things got done also. One of the results is the letter whose copy I am enclosing.

The letter was Sita Ram Goel's enthusiastic response to the typescript of Cotton, stating that he started on it at 8 pm on 19th January and read up to page 138 "in one breath" when he had to stop at 2 am, and that he had never found so absorbing a book since he read Jayaswal's Hindu Polity in a single sitting in 1943. He sent it for printing straightaway, sending some more reference books to Amal and offering to make provision for some appendices. Here is Amal's amusing letter of 17.2.81 in which he responds to my suggestion that he get an introduction written by S.N. Kramer or H.D. Sankalia:

 

Your suggestion to get an introduction from Sankalia is one which Goel has also made. Kramer seems out of the question. I don't even know whether he by now is not "one with yesterday's seven thousand years". An Appendix on Mehergarh threatens to become an appendicitis. Mehergarh is precisely what has posed a difficulty for me...

 

My review of Amal's research on the Indus Valley Civilisation was not yet out in Puratattva. Of this Amal wrote on 9.5.81:

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Your work for Puratattva seems to have no end. You are a very patient fellow. In more eulogistic terms I should say a dogged one - a kind of Hound of Heaven where a worthwhile quarry is involved.

 

At this time he seems to have been afflicted with severe back pain, for he writes:

 

Unfortunately my back has not benefited - and I don't think it will unless I take a three-week's holiday in bed. This I can't do now. When Sehra was there, I could have indulged in the luxury. By now I have come to terms with the back-ache and as I don't do much of peregrination I am not specially bothered.

 

On 30.6.81 Amal sent me the correspondence between him and Sankalia over the unpublished review of The Problem that Sankalia had sent him for reactions. Amal's rejoinder was, typically, four times the length of Sankalia's letter! Amal's covering letter was unusual in that it was handwritten, not typed and had a postscript scribbled in the margin which warmed my heart ever so much:

 

While you are in England may I send (as gifts, of course) the September and October issues of M.I. by air?

 

Obviously, the financial crisis had passed!

Even on a postcard Amal could pack in precious guidance, as in this of 13.10.81:

 

The best and most reliable translation of the Gita is, of course, in Anil Baran's publication containing notes from Sri Aurobindo and two Appendices. I have heard of Mascara's rendering but its having taken 20 years to complete and 20 times rewriting cannot prevent it from having at least 20 mistakes in translation and construing. One must know what the Gita was driving at. This

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can be found only in Sri Aurobindo's rendering, which in most part is in AB's book.

 

After an unusual silence, I received this handwritten postcard dated 1.12.81 where he ends in his typical punning style:

 

Sorry to have neglected you so long. Or have I forgotten having attended to you some time back? My correspondence at present is in a bit of Lethe-mood. Thanks for the new Kronos and your magisterial preview of my Harappa. I wonder what the reactions of the old guard - Lal et al - will be like. The joke of the season is Sankalia's latest note to me. I am making an accurate copy below: "After reading your elucidating, a friend of mine was wondering whether the spiritual bases has any material bases or not? Or exists simply in air?"

 

The first two parts of my Megasthenes are almost ready. They have been enlarged now and can very well make the first push of a battering ram against the strong-hold of the current chronology. If my effort has the Divine's blessings, we may speak of my "Battering Ram" in the Lanka of fixed historical ideas.

 

After this I left Mussoorie, served in Murshidabad and was transferred to Kolkata where I went through a bad patch. Amal wrote a sweetly comforting letter dated 30.8.85:

 

I am sorry you had to pass through a bitter period. You must have offended some people by being just and fair to their opponents. Blackening your name is their way of trying to show you that only corruption really pays. I am glad you have come out of the gloom this attack had cast upon you. The coincidence of the emergence into light with Sri Aurobindo's birthday

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prompts me to quote those lines from Savitri that are some of my guide-lines:

 

A poised serenity of tranquil strength,

A wide unshaken look on time's unrest,

Faced all experience with unaltered peace.

 

Have you had the time to find out something helpful on the Unadi-sutras and the occurrence of the word "dinara" in them, to which some old commentators have given Indian roots and interpreted as meaning a gold seal or ornament?... When are you visiting Pondi again?

 

Amal was now busy revising The Beginning of History for Israel. In his letter of 19.11.85 one finds Amal regretting that he has had to demolish one of his favourite writers, besides a quite uncharacteristic reference to the weather and the Prime Minister:

 

 

You will be interested to know that a long appendix has been added: "Velikovsky's Chronological Challenge." I have dealt at full length with his dating of Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III, the two Egyptian rulers vital to my thesis on Moses and the Exodus. Velikovsky has been a favourite of mine for long and it was not enjoyable to demolish his basic thesis. I thought of an incident connected with Father Divine, the Negro God on earth who has a large following in the States. He was imprisoned for some legal misbehaviour and was waiting final trial which was to come off a week or so later. In the meantime the Judge who was to try him died. When the news was brought to Father Divine, he said: "I am sorry, but I had to do it."

 

Maggi has written a long novel telling the story of the Mahabharata. She considers it her masterpiece but Gollancz, her usual publisher, is hesitant to stake money

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on it⁴.. .She has made quite a name for herself here as a homeopath. Not only has she been practising impressively but others have caught fire from her and started treating people with success. Have you been continuing your own practice?

 

We have been having rather an excessive form of what the "brown Englishmen" of the old days of the Raj used to call "home weather". The devastation was sufficient to call Rajiv to make a helicopter survey of both Madras and Pondi. As he hovered for some time over us I hope he has caught a bit of the Mother's atmosphere. His actions in the near future will show whether he has caught it or not.

 

Amal sent me the typescript of his elaborate demolition of Velikovsky for comments. It took me some time to digest and react, and he became impatient. He wrote a long letter dated 16.5.86 which deals with diverse matters such as his newest publication effort from his own slender resources:

 

The very day your packet came I was thinking of asking you whether my Appendix had reached you or not. For the delay in referring to it was quite substantial. I am glad you have gone through the Appendix, but I have the suspicion that it suggests Appendicitis to you... By the way I am bringing out in book form The English Language and The Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna, 500 copies in paperback: This is my first - and almost certainly the last and sole - publishing venture with my own money. It will cost Rs. 6,500 at our Press. 1000 copies will cost 7,000. A businessman may ask me to go in for them, but there is the problem of storing them. Balkrishna can store only a few.

 

 

4. Maggi Lidchi Grassi's magnificent trilogy was published first by Writers Workshop. Then the first two were brought out by ROLL the second with an Introduction by me that has recently been reprinted in M.I.

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The next letter is dated 7.6.86.1 had not been able to attend to Amal's queries because of a harrowing period of interviewing sadly deficient candidates in the Public Service Commission. It is humbling to see his complete absence of egotism in valuing my verdict on his thesis, although he was so much more senior in age and his reading in the relevant literature was incomparably more profound and vast. The letter also shares little-known information regarding the Mother's earlier emanations:

 

Yes, the intellectual standard today is appallingly low. I hope by now your interviews are over and you can attend to what I am enclosing. In my last letter I expressed my idea to take up Velikovsky's strongest point and deal with it critically. Now I have done so and the few pages which have to be added to the Appendix await your verdict...

 

As for identifying the Queen of Sheba, it is not necessary for my purpose. AH I can whisper in your ear is that Nolini once said that Sri Aurobindo had been Solomon and the Mother the Queen of Sheba. Nolini has also confirmed that the Mother had also been Queen Hatshepsut. So Velikovsky is perfectly right in visioning the two of them - Sheba and Hatshepsut -as being the same person but in a sense beyond his comprehension and having nothing to do with his chronology. By the way, I may say that it is possible for the Mother to be two different women in the same age. She was both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. In an earlier age she was at the same time Mona Lisa, Margaret de Valois and some other aristocratic lady whose name I forget for the moment. Of course we are here speaking of different partial emanations of the Mother, embodying one aspect or another aspect, and not the full central being which found embodiment only in our time...

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My reply evoked an enthusiastic response dated 27.9.86 and I still remain astonished at Amal placing so much store by my opinion:

 

I am immensely bucked up by your seal of approval on my latest treatment of Velikovsky. I'll weave this and the earlier instalment together and make them independent of my book The Beginning of History for Israel, and send them to the SIS Review...

 

He went on to type out several pages from Ancient India in a New Light ("the light now covered up by the Press's lockout" as he writes?) showing how he arrived at his conclusions. The lengths to which he would go to convince a correspondent were amazing indeed. Invariably, there would be a touch of humour tucked away somewhere. For instance, he writes on 10.10.86:

 

Your long letter was very welcome - and would have been still more enjoyable if your typewriter-ribbon had not been even fainter than the one with which my present letter is being done. You are grateful for the trouble I took to send you long extracts from my forthcoming book. I am equally grateful for the detailed chronology you have sent from Morton Smith's book...

 

The next letter dated 28.10.86 is an excellent example of Amal's typical epistolary style: begin with a delightful bon mot, go on to speak of the present preoccupation; touch upon problems M.I. is facing and end with some news about health, always laughing it away:

 

Your mention of my "extract" made me think of malt extract or liver extract and reminded me of the discussion between two Tamil would-be philosophers:

 

"How can you say there is God? Where is he?"

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"God is everywhere."

"Then why don't I see him?"

"You foolish man, how can you see God?

God is an essence."

"What essence? Chicken essence?"

 

The discussion could not proceed further after this crucial question. But I am led to inquire of you whether you mean by my "extract" my mind-nourishing essay in two parts: "The Greco-Aramaic Inscription of Kandahar: Some Second Thoughts on Its Interpretation." I shall be glad to know your impression. This area of chronological revision is of central importance.

 

Thanks for the address of the Interdisciplinary Society. I am preparing a copy for it under the title:

 

Is Velikovsky's Revised Chronology Tenable?

A Scrutiny of Three Fundamental Themes:

The Exodus, Hatshepsut, Tuthmosis III⁵

 

The Press-tussle is still on. I must have written to you that the burden of the November Mother India has been shouldered by the All India Press. Most probably the December issue will also be taken up at the same place. After fruitless negotiations under the auspices of the Labour Commissioner the case will have to go to the Court. Let's hope this will happen soon and the Judge delivers a fair verdict. Nowadays the dice are generally loaded in favour of labour.

 

Good news is that both my nephews - one a specialist in cardio-thoracic surgery and the other an expert advocate (ex-right-hand man of the late Rajni Patel) - have undertaken to get my 20 unpublished books out at the rate of at least one a year and perhaps two. This means I

 

 

5. Is Velikovsky's Revised Chronology Tenable? A Scrutiny of Four Fundamental Themes. Published in 2002 by The Integral Life Foundation, East Lyme, U.S.A.

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have to be alive for ten or more years provided I don't write any more books. A strong point in favour of my longevity is that my legs are too weak to kick any bucket.

 

I had responded at length to Amal's examination of the Kandahar inscription and it was so heart-warming and simultaneously humbling to receive his hearty appreciation of 28.11.86. It is difficult to envisage someone of his immense scholarship being encouraged by the reactions of an amateur. "Your appreciation of my 'Kandahar' has bucked me up no end," he wrote. In the same letter one notices his pressing eagerness to see his adventures in literary criticism published. Once again I failed to convince anyone in Calcutta to publish Amal's unconventional research. I used to act as the Devil's Advocate for Amal, bringing to his notice any news or studies that challenged the position he was taking in his yet-to-be-published works on ancient history. His letter of 12.8.87 provides insight into the type of material I used to send him and his detailed responses, which were as much to clear his head as to test on me whether his marshalling of arguments was adequate to demolish the academic-turned-Union Minister Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay. The letter has been reproduced in Supplement III of The Problem.

 

Amal's letter of 17.1.88 is extremely important because it contains a detailed comment on the only letter from Mrinalini Devi that Sri Aurobindo had preserved, which remains unpublished. I had sent Amal copies of all the letters my parents had painstakingly copied from the Alipore Bomb Case court archives. I had pointed out that though these contain a letter from Sri Aurobindo replying to Mrinalini, we do not realise this fact because somehow he had dated his answer wrongly. Amal confirmed my finding twice over:

 

Thanks a lot for sending me all those letters. Morel thanks are due to your mother for taking so much

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trouble. The unpublished letter from Mrinalini, full of abuse from the loving heart, is worth bringing out because we have Sri Aurobindo's response to it in the letter which is wrongly dated 17.2.1907 when the correct year should be 1908, as you suggest. This response of Sri Aurobindo's makes all the complaints of Mrinalini pointless since Sri Aurobindo is no longer himself but only a tool in the hands of the Divine and so he cannot be judged any longer from the human standpoint which takes into consideration the duties of a husband or even of a man in general. Mrinalini's of 20.12.1907 has been suppressed because of the fear that it might lead to a misunderstanding of Sri Aurobindo by its 'disrespectful' attitude, though a keener perception should assure us of the devotion behind it which makes the abuse itself humanly sweet. The letter whose true date you have properly intuited reveals the exact situation and brings a light in which Sri Aurobindo stands justified no less than Mrinalini or rather he is taken out of the realm in which she can be justified and he require any justification. As there is in her series of invectives no reference to any awareness that he is now in God's hands - as the reference is merely to some great work he is doing, evidently in the Nationalist cause - we can be sure that what is usually dated to early 1907 must be later than that series. No doubt, in his letter Sri Aurobindo wants her not to divulge to anybody the secret of his no longer being his own master, but this should not prevent her from showing in a private letter her own knowledge of the great change: she could have said that all this talk of being God's instrument altogether can cut no ice with her who was his rightful wife and needed to be attended to. As we find not the slightest inkling of such an attitude we cannot put her letter later than Sri

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Aurobindo's about the stupendous psychological revolution that has taken place in his life.

 

After writing the above, I consulted Purani's Life of Sri Aurobindo (Fourth edition, fully revised, 1978) and sought out the letter from Scott's Lane about this revolution. A very good translation of it appears on pp. 106 & ff, and there is a footnote which sets right the date:

 

The manuscript of this letter bears the date 17 Feb- ruary 1907. This is evidently a slip. In February 1907 Sri Aurobindo was staying in Deoghar. The house in Scott's Lane does not seem to have been taken till after Sri Aurobindo's return from Surat in February 1908. In 1909 the judge in the Alipore bomb-case, evaluating the letter as evidence, said of it, "dated 17th February 1907 - obviously a mistake for 1908." (Bijoy Krishna Bose, Ed., The Alipore Bomb Trial, Calcutta: Butterworth & Co. 1922 p. 157).

 

Nirod was against giving any publicity to Mrinalini's letter. I don't think he realised that Sri Aurobindo's letter about being a puppet in God's hands followed it. I'll try to open his mind to the fact and see what he has to say...

 

The postcard of 13.7.90 shows Amal's deep personal concern over my problems lightened with a radiant touch of humour that is his very own and prescription of a homely remedy for kidney stones!

 

I am so sorry to hear of your tale of woe upon woe. Your mother-in-law's case is typically suited for homeopathy. I suppose the whole Hahnemann implicit in you is at it. But do you believe in the Master's doctrine of one single unmixed dose? By the way, I am sure some Indophile will say that Hahnemann was a fiction hiding the reality of Hanuman.

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I pray everything sorts out and you find time for Archaeology and the Mahabharata. I have calculated the War to have taken place around 1450 B.C., as you will note from Ancient India in a New Light. I don't know when the epic was written.

 

.. .I have experienced the passage of the kidney stone through the ureter (not the urethra). A Hercules would fall on the floor and writhe with agony. But there is a simple remedy. Make bhindi soup, sip it as haot as possible, then walk for 15 minutes. Repeat this twice a day. Within a week or so the stone will pass out without P's knowing it...

 

In his postcard dated 6.9.90 in which he is keen to find out if I could get Ancient India reviewed in Puratattva or elsewhere. I had sent him some details of Lal's findings and asked about the new edition of Ilion.

 

Dating the oldest stratum of the MBH by tallying its information on artefacts, etc. with dated archaeological finds seems a very original and illuminating method. Do let me have your series of notes woven together. They will provide also a terminus ad quem of the War itself.

 

The new Ilion is indeed splendid. I regret that the essay on Quantitative Metre was omitted. It is a most important contribution to poetic technique. Of course, the numbering of lines would have been helpful.

 

In his letter dated 7 July 1991 Amal begins with a piercing insight into my own psychology - pulling no punches but quite confident that our affectionate relationship was such that the could say this without causing offence. I had posed to him the problem of evil in the world and received an illuminating reply:

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I was glad to hear from you. It's been a long time since I last received a letter. Within that time your handwrit-ing has undergone a bit of a change. I find it more carefully and patiently employed. Perhaps you have added a cubit to your stature and grown more efficient as well as more considerate all round?...

 

The questions raised by the fine article on Evil are age-old - only they have here been put in modern garbs. They are unanswerable on our own level. The materialist mind escapes giving any answer: it takes the world to be such and such and no moral or theological problems are involved by it. Beyond materialism the immediate temptation is to believe in dualism: God and Satan as equally existent and always fighting. Some sort of practical dualism is unavoidable even in the Aurobindonian spirituality, but some subtleties are felt and even made effective in the modalities of the Yoga. If God exists with the nature which would really make him Godlike, a problem analogous to that of Evil is the one of waste. The sole answer Sri Aurobindo considers as conveyable to the mere mind is that in the series of varied possibilities of manifestation by the Divine the possibility must arise and be accepted of a manifestation of the Divine starting from the very opposite of all divinity - an utter involution in which all existence, consciousness-force and bliss seem lost but from which a slow difficult evolution takes place of all these and shall culminate in a total divinisation of all the elements, including matter itself. There is a push upward from the involved Divine and there is a pressure downward from the free divinity: the result will ultimately be a trans-formation of a complete kind such as only Sri Aurobindo has envisaged because only he has visioned the supreme Plenitude as acting from both high above and down below. In this manifestation where an evolutionary process goes on as if initially God did not ex-;| ist, evil and waste as the consequence of the total|

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involution are bound to be logical and natural accompaniments of evolution, with the free godhead from "above" fighting them to fulfil

 

The Eternal broken into transient lives

And godhead pent in the mire and the stone.

 

Behind the apparent fight, there is also a subtle strategy born of the fact that in spite of all the differences and contradictions "the One without a second" is everywhere, so that even evil and waste are bound somehow to sub-serve, for all their natural and logical actuality, the purpose of sat-chit-tapas-ananda....

 

And that brings me to the end of a wonderful excursion into the past, traversing 17 long years from 1974 to 1991 in the company of a mind that astonishes with its encyclopaedic reach, suffused with humour and wit, and a heart whose warmth reaches out to envelop one, making a mockery of distance.

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Amal Kiran's Contribution to the Study of Indian Prehistory

 

 

AMAL KIRAN developed a systematic understanding and exposition of the subject of Indian prehistory over a period of nearly forty years. Four books by him bear upon this subject. Two are devoted entirely to this topic, while two more touch upon it with considerable emphasis.

 

It is evident that as a historian, Amal has minutely pored over several hundred original research sources and findings covering a wide array of viewpoints and methodologies. Nothing has been rejected from consideration on doctrinaire or dogmatic grounds; each item has been dealt with on its merit. He has sifted through a mass of details of both fact and conjecture, compared theories and data within and across sources, weighed probabilities and subjective assessments assigned by and to different authors, and systematically discovered inconsistencies between theories and between theory and fact. He has synthesised and integrated all relevant material available during the course of his work. With novel insights gained from such a deep study, he has put forth a cogent view of Indian prehistory that unifies known facts and relieves inconsistencies. He has corresponded with several researchers either to test the validity of his view or to test the conviction of their position, and he has refined his ideas, their substantiation and their presentation through successive publications.

 

The Problem of Aryan Origins was first published in 1980 as a result of work since 1977. A second extensively expanded edition, which tripled the size of the material, was published in 1992. Karpasa in Prehistoric India: a Chronological and Cultural Clue, with an introduction by Dr. H.D. Sankalia of the Deccan College in Pune, was published in 1981. Ancient

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India in a New Light was published in 1989, and Problems of Ancient India was published in 2000. Much earlier, in 1963, he had published a paper, "The Aryans, the Domesticated Horse and the Spoked Chariot-Wheel" in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay.

 

Amal Kiran has not conducted fieldwork that produces primary physical evidence. Such work is hardly a requirement of every researcher in this domain, or indeed in any scientific pursuit. He has considered in detail and without prejudice the fieldwork of others. The lack of narrow specialised expertise has freed him to bring his penetrating analysis to every aspect of this complex and many-sided issue. Far from producing derivative or imitative works, he has staked out new and defensible ground with his method and results. His research is scholarly and thorough and follows the best principles of sound scientific methodology.

 

Amal Kiran's central thesis regarding Indian prehistory, stated negatively, is that there was not in or around the mid-second millennium B.C. an invasion or even a migration of a people into northwest India who brought or later developed the culture and practice evidenced in the Rigveda, and stated positively, is that the Rigveda and its associated culture was developed by a people substantially native to the greater Punjab, in the period of 3500 B.C.-2500 B.C., and it continued as and contributed significantly to the civilisation of the Indus Valley and other interior settlements.

 

He does not deny the possibility of an incursion into the Indian northwest circa 1500 B.C. or at other times, but denies that such presumed intruders were the bearers or later developers of the Rigveda. He does not claim that the people of the Indian northwest developed in isolation; rather he identifies a belt of like civilisations, fairly developed by 4000 B.C.-3000 B.C., spanning the Indian northwest and the Black Sea. He does not claim nor deny that the Rigvedic Indians migrated out and colonised Iran and Central Asia, though he suggests that the civilisation in the Indian northwest was the most advanced one in the fourth millennium B.C., based on available evidence.

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This focused, clear and defensible statement, unencumbered by ideological postures and fully submitted to Occam's razor is strenuously defended and convincingly developed by Amal Kiran in his books.

 

A significant effect of Amal Kiran's work, aided by the compulsions of mounting evidence, has been to move the main line of discourse on the opposing point of view from the position of a sudden invasion in 1500 B.C. to one of a gradual migration over 2000 B.C.-1000 B.C. into the Indian northwest. The refinement of the opposing position can be said to have broadened it to such an extent that the only remaining major discrepancy appears to be the precedence relationship between the Rigveda and the Indus Civilisation.

 

Numerous items have been excavated in the many Indus sites which find no mention in the Rigveda: wheat, rice, cotton, tiger, ass, camel, and indeed the urban and commercial character of the civilisation itself is at variance with the contrasting pastoral worldview. While supportive of the precedence of the Rigveda, this can fairly be said to be neither here nor there. There is, however, the mention of horses and chariots in the Rigveda, and these have not, it is claimed, been satisfactorily evidenced in the Indus excavations.

 

Amal Kiran deals with this issue thoroughly in multiple places in his books. The following quotation from The Problem of Aryan Origins, second edition, supplement II, pp. 180-183 is reproduced below not only to bear upon this issue but also to illustrate his comprehensive treatment of this (and any) subject, and his exposition (as always) in the clear light of logic and in masterly English.

 

The scapula of a camel has been found at the considerable depth of 15 feet at Mohenjo-daro, but no seal depicts a dromedary. Again, "nowhere is a donkey shown" and yet the bones of the domestic ass (Equus asinus) have been recovered from Harappa. Unless we know the "why" of the depictions we cannot make any capital out of "the fact that the horse is conspicuously missing". We cannot infer from it that the horse was unknown.

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Here scholars like Parpola may urge: "The non-depicted animals have still left their bones for the archaeologist. Where are horse-bones from early Mohenjo-daro or Harappa? Earlier than c. 2000 B.C. we have no osteo-logical evidence of Equus caballus. With such a double blank - that is, osteological plus pictorial - how can we claim knowledge of the horse as possible in the early Harappa Culture which, according to you, was later than the Rigveda in the Indus Valley?

 

A counter-question which at once springs to mind is: "Surely, c. 2000 B.C. is much before the postulated arrival of the Rigvedics in India. How could the horse be present at least 500 years before them?" Parpola, aware of this difficulty, has the remark: "As Mr. Mahadevan mentioned, the Aryans are thought to have come to India earlier. I agree with this, although I think it was a different wave altogether. An earlier wave than the Rig Vedic Aryans." When even the Rigvedic wave is a hypothesis lacking either archaeological or documentary evidence, how can we dare to bring in a fairly earlier wave? From references in the Rigveda we know that the Rishis were in India at whatever period we may deem most appropriate. What grounds have we to place in India a wave of Aryans in a period around 2000 B.C.? Have we to go in for this wave merely because the Harappa Culture has horses around that date in an apparent way? The explanation seems to be arbitrary. It seems more natural to believe that Aryanism was at work in the Harappa Culture as one element in the midst of several at the root of it. And, looking more deeply, more logically we can perceive a basis for such a belief.

 

Not only must the unknown "why" of the horseless depictions keep us unattracted to Parpola's novel supposition. Even the absence of horse-bones should not draw us to it. For, indeed an eye-opener is the background against which we have to view the Harappa Culture of the third millennium B.C. Stuart Piggott has observed: "one clay figurine from Periano Ghundai [in

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North Baluchistan] seems to represent a horse, and is interesting in connection with the find of horses' teeth in RG [Rana Ghundai] I, at the type site." He assigns this figurine to the RG III phase which he begins some centuries before 2500 B.C. and ends as still pre-Harappan. He traces the diverse relationship between the Harappa Culture and RG, especially with pottery in mind. RG areas have also evinced that characteristic feature of the Harappa Culture: the "stamp seals". What is of yet greater import than the obvious suggestion of horse-knowledge by the Harappa Culture on account of all this relationship with a horse-knowing locality is marked not only by Piggott but by other archaeologists as well. Among them is H.D. Sankalia who writes of "Rana Ghundai IIIc Culture found under the debris of Harappan and the low level (-32 feet) Mohenjodaro". So we have at the two central sites of the Harappa Culture in the Indus Valley a background of horse-knowledge and horse-use much before 2000 B.C.

 

Once we note this, the reluctance to see the Harappa Culture as post-Rigvedic must disappear. And I may draw Parpola's attention to the curious fact that the Rigvedic testimony to the horse's presence in the Indus Valley is not at all borne out by archaeology for the post-Harappan period he assigns to the Aryans of the Rigveda. In the several excavated sites in Punjab and Northern Haryana - Bhagwanpura, Dadheri, Ropar, Kathpalon, Nagar, etc. - in the early time after 1500 B.C., when iron was not yet in use, has any sure sign of the horse been discovered? The only definite equine bones the Indus Valley has yielded around this date are from an upper level of Mohenjo-daro and from Area G in Harappa which is likely to be just post-Harappan but has nothing to do with any possible Rigvedic presence.

 

I may add here that the eminent archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who has always been against the idea of Aryanism in the Indus Civilisation, has yet an

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attitude unlike Parpola's. Not only does he write: "One terracotta, from a late level at Mohenjo-daro, seems to represent a horse, reminding us that the jaw-bone of a horse is also recorded from the same site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in northern Baluchistan." He notes as well, after referring to the bone of a camel recovered from a low level at Mohenjo-daro: "There is no evidence of any kind for the use of the ass or mule. On the other hand the bones of a horse occur at a high level at Mohenjo-daro, and from the earlier (doubtless pre-Harappan) layer at Rana Ghundai in northern Baluchistan both horse and ass are recorded. It is likely enough that camel, horse and ass were in fact all a familiar feature of the Indus caravans."

 

Seeing things in a wider perspective than Parpola's, Wheeler attaches hardly any importance to the lack of ass-bones or the absence of ass-representation. He considers it reasonable to surmise the use of this animal no less than of the camel and the horse. So, even if Parpola's mention of a negative result regarding osteological and pictorial evidence be correct, the vision of the whole ancient area of which the Harappa Culture formed a part could suggest to us most naturally the equine's presence in the Indus Civilisation.

 

Now we may give brief summaries of the books. The Problem of Aryan Origins begins with a critical examination of the invasion theory on several grounds in the first five chapters: on archaeological, literary, historical (studying the correspondence between the Mittani documents with the Rigveda, for example), cultural. Then the following chapters begin to give a positive view by exploring the knowledge of horses and chariots in the Indus Civilisation, the pre-Harappan Aryanism of the Rigveda, the belt of Aryanism and its dating, and points to the ultimate origins of the Aryans and the Rigveda, with sidelights on linguistic arguments and symbolic interpretations. The second edition has several

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supplements that respond to reviews and criticisms, expand on special points and critique or survey recent work, in particular Asko Parpola's "The Coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the Cultural and Ethnic Identity of the Dasas".

 

Karpasa in Prehistoric India begins by considering the remarkable absence of the term for cotton in the Rigveda and all subsequent literature conventionally dated to span a thousand years, in the face of the discovery of cotton seeds and cloth in the Indus Civilisations. However, this is used only as a starting point, and the case is buttressed by additional evidence. While Problem can be considered primarily a defensive book, Karpasa is almost entirely positive. It proceeds to tackle the precedence relationship between the Rigveda and the Indus Civilisation and then gives the cultural process by which the Rigvedic culture developed into the latter with correspondence to the post-Rigvedic literature. It casts lights on the relationship (equality) of the Indus Civilisation to Melukkha mentioned in Mesopotamian documents, problems of the Indus script and linguistic aspects.

 

Ancient India in a New Light, as it pertains to the topic at hand, argues from the traditional Indian chronology of the royal dynasties, examines them for internal consistency, compares them to accounts from Greek, Chinese, Arabic and other sources, shows them to reach back to 3138 B.C. to the end of the Mahabharata war, points out a flaw in the conventional correspondence accorded to the different lists as it pertains to Sandrocottus in circa 320 B.C., and reconciles them by pushing back the correspondence by around seven hundred years.

 

Problems of Ancient India, as it pertains to the topic at hand, provides in chapter 2 an in-depth exposition of "The Aryans, the Domesticated Horse and the Spoked Chariot-Wheel".

 

*

 

Recent studies in the subject of human prehistory in general and Indus Civilisation in particular (especially because

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of its charged nature and checkered history) favour primary, quantitative, physical evidence over subjective interpretations of literature or culture. Archaeology, carbon dating, genetics and geological surveys are often relied upon to provide primary data.

 

Over two thousand sites of the Indus Civilisation have been discovered. Out of these, less than five per cent have so far been excavated. Amongst those that have been excavated, several have been found that show over eight thousand years of continuous in situ development. Much more is there to be learned from the remaining sites and from still others that are yet to be uncovered.

 

Genetic studies of the Y chromosome in diverse populations for a record of markers along with their observed rate of mutation strongly suggest a pattern of human migrations out of Africa. It is claimed that the first migration began 50,000-60,000 years ago and traversed South Asia along the coasts, reaching Australia. A second wave of migration began 30,000-40,000 years ago, went North to Central Asia and then entered the Indian northwest. This second wave eventually populated the entire globe over subsequent millennia. The racial diversity that is found in India is accounted for by these two waves of early humans, along with minor incursions from the northeast and elsewhere. But their dates are in the remote past, and certainly not in the last 10,000 years or more. Specifically conducted studies have not discovered any gene splash in the Indian northwest in this pe-riod of interest. Studies of the mitochondrial DNA consistently yield similar but earlier results, typically by 20,000-50,000 years. Genetic studies conducted so far have been of minuscule segments of the population, and have typically focused on finding the exceptions. They need to be expanded significantly for the mainstream population.

 

The other techniques are yielding insights into the courses of rivers (especially of the much-described Saraswati of the Rigveda) from geological surveys and locations and epochs of the Rigvedics based on astronomical calculations.

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The clinching evidence for Amal Kiran's viewpoint would be the unambiguous archaeological discovery of horse remains in the Indus sites. There is ample room for such a discovery by patient and professional scientists delving into the secrets of Indian prehistory.

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Bejewelled Craftsmanship: Tracing an Aurobindonian Influence in the Poetry of K.D. Sethna

 

Rita Nath Keshan

 

K.D. SETHNA was a poet and scholar of recognised merit even before he decided to settle down permanently in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. The poet's indifference to his early work and his consequent prominence in the Aurobindonian School of Poetry have deterred critics from judging the shift in Sethna's poetic sensibility. Secondly, Sethna's assertion about his dual identity as poet and as disciple has quite often raised this issue. Was his spiritual training responsible for his poetry or did the poet in him gain access to the great 'Overhead' heights? To this, Sethna (Amal Kiran) would probably reply that his inner progress was of paramount importance to him. A poet who was blessed with Sri Aurobindo's critical attention would care little for lesser beings with their yardsticks and measuring rods! P. Raja, who published a series of insightful interviews with K.D. Sethna in Bhavan's Journal, Mumbai (from August 15 to October 15, 1995), highlights the restless quest of this complex personality for a more meaningful vision of life. Here Sethna appears as the quintessential disciple who strove relentlessly to adopt a practical approach to Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga.

 

If such were the case then what can prompt my effort to evaluate his poetry? Sethna's voluminous book of poems The Secret Splendour (1993) reveals to the serious reader the spontaneity and the restraint in line after line. Even the abstract images, with their tag of 'Overhead' inspiration, tease us to follow the trail of the unknown.

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Due to his creative proximity to Sri Aurobindo, it is but natural that Sethna's poetry would bear some influence of his spiritual master. In The Secret Splendour (1993) the recurring references to precious metals and other gemstones help us recall a similar poetic method, refined and upgraded to the level of a tradition, in Savitri. Sri Aurobindo has encrusted the lines of his epic with an abundance of gold and precious stones in order to translate for the common reader something of that ineffable grandeur of the higher planes of consciousness. In his book Letters On Yoga Sri Aurobindo discusses the spiritual value of gold:

 

Gold indicates at its most intense something from the supramental, otherwise overmind truth or intuitive truth deriving ultimately from the supramental Truth-Consciousness.

(SABCL, Vol. 23, p. 959)

 

In Savitri gold, as a metaphor, has been used effectively to establish the presence of the spiritual element in earth-consciousness. Probably this influence permeates Sethna's poetry as well in an implicit manner. Some of his poems in The Secret Splendour offer us a glimpse of the glittering preciousness:

 

I had not bargained to behold

A rhythm of cerulean gold

Nor with an aching mouth impress

Calm firmamental nakedness!

("Earth-Heaven," p. 7)

 

With what other than the sky can the poet's free spirit mate? Here is an evocation of Keatsian sensuousness in the phrase 'aching mouth'. At the beginning of the creative process the poet does not foresee how his rhythm will throb in unison with the harmony of the universe. Here 'cerulean gold' could signify the manifestation of Truth in the illimitable blue spaces.

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Maintaining the Aurobindonian tradition of employing gold as a paradigm, Sethna voices the urge of a realised soul in the poem "Rishi Parasara's Invocation":

 

O merge my dazzled mind

 Into thy Truth's transcendent gold,

Lord of the Flame!

(p. 14)

The cumulative effect of 'dazzled, gold and Flame' nearly leaves us dazed as we visualise different shades of orange and yellow. Once the Rishi's mind merges with the Flames this canvas will keep expanding before us.

 

In a similar way, a realised soul is spellbound by a unique revelation:

 

He whose desire from mortal love is freed

 Catches the treasure veiled in Thy pure speed

And, from the bare white, views a luxury burst:

Truth-pulsing gold to which the sun were black,

A griefless carmine that all roses lack,

One ample azure brimming every thirst!

("Plenitude", p. 26)

 

'Pure speed' here denotes a new dimension or a divine dynamism into which the unencumbered soul can gain entry and possess the hidden treasure. This is seemingly quite a bargain because divine love stoops to the mortal's level when he detaches himself completely from others of his kind. The icon of treasure is extended to highlight 'luxury' in the third line. In this rarefied atmosphere a brilliance pulsates that proves the inadequacy of the sun. By contrasting sunlight with an even greater effulgence the poet reminds us of the scientific truth that there are stars brighter than our sun. He brings science and spirituality a little closer.

 

In these lines, the poet balances the precious glittering of 'truth-pulsing gold' with three different colours. 'Bare white' is a colour traditionally associated with ascetic spirituality.

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'Griefless carmine' conjures up before the mind's eye a life enriching correspondence with the Rose of God, though its exact connotations remain elusive. The limitless expansion of the sky is restricted in the single epithet' ample' implying that the liberated soul can ignore all restraints of time and space.

 

The Divine is portrayed as the 'Magic gem-cutter, the lapidary of light in the poem "Vision Splendid" (p.271).Out of the dead resistance of stone the Master Jeweller hews a race of beings that, after the process of 'alchemy, emergw with multi-faceted glory. Beads of glass or dull sublunary men are transformed into Kohinoor-like magnificence. The poet imagines the dark stretches of the universe encrusted with countless diamond-like human beings aspiring to divinity. 'An adamantine energy shall break' (line 13 of this poem), elaborating the conceit of precious gems and diamonds in the previous lines, almost echoes a similar expression in Savitri:

 

And adamantine is the evolving Law;

(SABCL, Vol. 28, p. 342)

 

In another poem "Equality" (p. 388), the poet addresses God as the great Jeweller who transforms the crude metal of the human soul into a perfect ornament. The poet admits the frailty of human nature and its reluctance to reflect a multi-faceted sparkle. God alone can create the necessary conditions for inner perfection since human nature has the tendency to slacken its pace of progress:.

 

Not every hour can glow a perfect gem:

Pallor of glass mingles with diamond fire—

 

Sethna reveals a strong awareness of the decadence on earth though he nourishes hopes of seeing its salvation. He is aware of the tug of war between the 'diamond fire' of divinity and the impenetrable darkness of despondency. Quite often, the poet contrasts gold with grey to express the stark difference between the sterling quality of godhead and the dross in earth-consciousness. We can compare such lines:

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Yet, through the passion of frail feet which stray,

A peace beyond all peace, a gold through grey

Felt goldener,...

("Height and Depth", p. 283)

 

'Grey' here is unmistakably an index of human frailty. Nevertheless, a tranquillity, transcending the entire gamut of peace, pervades the aspiring soul. Secondly, due to the flatness of 'grey' 'gold' is carved in high relief. We could also consider the following example:

 

God is intense

 With bliss undying that would gladly die

 If one time-creature's gold might never grey.

("The Great Face", p. 286)

 

The quibbling on dying focuses sharply on God's immortality and the essential finite nature of man. Since these two irreconcilable points cannot meet therefore God need not meet with human fate. At the same time man does not wish to alter his destiny.

 

In the poem "Giant Wheel" Sethna repeats the same image of smoky shades of human nature with greater intensity: "the dream-mystery of gold and grey." In the nebulous impressions of dream sequences gold and grey merge together. Is there a suggestion that at the level of the subconscient this kind of intermingling is but natural? Gold cannot retain its distinct purity in a region dominated by shades of ash colour.

 

Similarly, in the poem "Yoga of Sri Aurobindo" Sethna addresses his spiritual masters as 'wisdom-packed messengers twixt the deep gold and the grey of the out-gaze'. Here 'deep gold', in all probability, refers to the supramental Truth-consciousness. 'Out-gaze' seems to be a word coined by the poet or is it simply a contraction of the phrase 'outward gaze'?

 

Is there a realm beyond the gold? Human imagination, deprived of the actual experience of exploring unknown regions, can lean on its presumptions and rely on the poet's

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vision. The following lines from the poem "Mantra"(p. 713) suggest that the barriers were removed: All's struck away/ The gold and the grey (11.1-2). One has to step beyond the plane of perfection to discover another level since by its nature perfection is not absolute or final. There are endless gradations to it. The poet has been blessed with such a vision. The 'mystic silence' that envelops the poet prepares the right atmosphere for the descent of Mantra or the Creative Power.

 

Although 'gold' has dominated K.D. Sethna's imagination other precious stones and gems have also graced his poems. "A Diamond Is Burning Upward" (p. 140) in the eponymous poem refers possibly to the psychic aspiration limited by the seemingly roofless but walled enclosure of the mind. We continue to fancy that we are free but are bound in the 'narrow sky of a futile human face'. About this poem Sri Aurobindo commented:

 

It sounds very surrealistic. Images and poetry very beautiful, but significance and connections are cryptic. Very attractive though.

(The Secret Splendour, p. 140).

 

Like all poets, Sethna is anxious about avoiding verbosity and wishes to be 'niggardly of words'. He prays fervently:

 

Let me not utter five things in five words,

But by one word of densest diamond

Pack five things to a shining secrecy...

("Words", p. 276)

 

As in the poem "Mantra" so too in this one, condensed thought with magic expression flows down from the great heights above. The poet implies that just as the best diamonds are colourless and flawless so, in a similar manner, mystic poetry should not be tainted and flawed by the base colours of life.

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Though diamonds and gold enjoy a reverential attitude, rubies and pearls do not seem to fare well. Here there seems to be a deviation from the tradition crafted by Sri Aurobindo. In "The Adventure of the Apocalypse" ephemeral joys and sorrows are compared to 'small rubies and brief pearls' (p. 296). In "A Diamond Is Burning Upward" the two human eyes, blind to the soul's upward aspiration, are compared to ruby and emerald. However, this line 'Unless by pain's warm ruby-scattering opulence' ("Askesis", p. 445) reveals a metaphoric image of pain and life-blood and the rewards one subsequently receives.

 

Likewise, sapphire is used to describe both the sea and the sky without suggesting any inherent spiritual aspects. The precious gem is used as a synonym for the blue colour in poems like "In Horis Aeternum" (p. 483), "Garuda" (p. 425) and "O Voiceful Words" (p. 446).

 

Amethyst makes a brief appearance in one poem "Beginning of an Autobiography"(p. 519). Along with mauve, amethyst is projected as the signifier of an intermediate stage between the ordinary level of creativity and the top level of immutable and infallible inspiration. Pearls are treated as poor cousins to these precious gems.

In Savitri jewels and gold have been deployed effectively to provide poetic and spiritual connotations for plumbing the depths of this epic. Gems and precious metals become almost a medium for portraying the areas of spiritual experience beyond our ken. They are used as poetic embellishments, as strikingly new images where sound, sight and sense mingle and as parameters of truth, light and beauty. The word, the inspiration and the spiritual vision fuse together in Savitri. In a similar vein, Sethna has adopted something of this poetic tradition in his poetry that enhances his style, individuality and vision. The influence of his II miglior Fabbro is perceptibly there but does not overshadow Sethna's achievements.

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Works Cited

 

1. Sethna, K.D., The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1993.

2. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, SABCL, Vols. 28-29, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972.

 

Select Bibliography

 

1. Raja, P., "Life Is Great Fun At Ninety," The Sunday Statesman, Kolkata, 5.11.1995.

2.---, "Talks With K.D. Sethna of Sri Aurobindo Ashram," (a set of 12 interviews), Bhavan's Journal, Mumbai, from August 15 to October 15, 1995.

3.---, Interview (The Man and the Superman were so Intermixed), SABDA Newsletter, Pondicherry, December 1995. 4.---, Review (Expressing the Inexpressible), SABDA Newsletter,

Pondicherry, December 1995.

5.---, "Viewpoint: K.D. Sethna in Conversation with P. Raja," The  Scoria, Chandigarh, January 1996.

6.---, "Musings Of An Ascetic," Sunday Magazine: Deccan Herald, Bangalore, May 19,1996.

7.---, "The Story of 'Mother India': Straight from the Horse's Mouth," Mother India, Pondicherry, February-March 1999.

8, Korstange, Gordon, "An Interview With Amal Kiran", Collaboration, Berkeley, California, Summer 1994.

9. Chakraborty, Dilip, "A Poet in His Guru's Mould: K.D. Sethna - An Appreciation", Indian Book Chronicle, Jaipur, April 1992.

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Part III

 

Sri Aurobindo's Vision-Arabinda Basu

 

---

The Main Distinctive Mark of Integral Yoga

 

 

I THANK Professor Sachidananda Mohanty for giving me an opportunity to be associated with this volume of tributes to K.D. Sethna. Sethna has written on almost all topics under the sun. History, Archaeology, Old Testament Studies, Egyptology, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Science, Poetry, Aesthetics and last but not the least, facets of Sri Aurobindo's life and works. The clear ray of his luminous intelligence shed light on all of these subjects. However, the favourite subject that he holds most dear to his heart is Sri Aurobindo. And of Sri Aurobindo, the most important and significant contribution is the introduction, exposition and practice of the Integral Yoga. Hence, I am translating into English here an article written in Bengali by Sri Aurobindo and entitled "The Main Distinctive Mark of Integral Yoga".

 

* * *

 

The Main Distinctive Mark of Integral Yoga¹

 

A good deal has been said about integral yoga from the point of view of thinking and theory. Now when many have come and are coming to this path, it has become necessary to explain simply the path of this yoga of ours, its goal, and the main characteristic mark of the accomplishment of this yoga. The state of yoga, union, is not accessible to rational

 

 

1. Sri Aurobinder Bangla Rachana (The BengaliWritings of Sri Aurobindo), Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 4th Edition 2001, pp. 227-28.

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intellect, its true understanding depends on experience and is a fruit of self-realisation. Even then it is necessary to place before the rational intellect such an indication of it as will paint to mental perception its directions, the end of the journey and a map for the easy understanding of those who wish to know the goal of the yoga and its main distinctive mark.

 

(incomplete)

 

Our ideal is not liberation, not attaining Nirvana by being dissolved in the indeterminable Unlimited; the ideal is attainment of divine consciousness by the individual and by the collective, unity, perfection, and delight in the divine consciousness and being self-realised, life and works established in the self and inspired and directed by the divine Shatki, - works as of a liberated yogi. It has been said in the Geeta, 'do works being established in yoga', that kind of action done from yoga, is not only a limb of this sadhana but also a part of its realisation. The manifestation of life, of the inner and the outer in the divine being and the expression of divine unity is the goal and the characteristic sign of the state of its realisation.

 

*

 

There are four limbs of the integral yoga, Knowledge, Works, Love, and Realisation. The cloud-piercing temple of Truth of the life of god, is based on these four pillars.

 

The goal of the yoga of knowledge in the integral yoga is not liberation, not dissolution, nor the escape of one afraid of the world, not disgust of the universe of the ascetic, not excluding the Lilamaya, Playful Divine for seeking Parabrahman. The goal of this knowledge is awareness of God, to raise our consciousness to the divine consciousness, to be united with it, one in the self and the world, one in vijnana, the supermind and in mind, life and general consciousness, one in the body, we will not exclude anything. Full Oneness... All this is Brahman, the

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fourth, the causal, the subtle, the gross, deep sleep, dream, waking, Brahma and Maya, Purusha, Prakriti, you, I, He is all, Vasudeva is all this, this is the root mantra of this Knowledge.

 

*

 

The Gita says equality is yoga, 'equality is said to be yoga'. Further, those whose mind is firmly established are conquerors of the creation though remaining in the world, because since the Supreme Brahman is equally present everywhere, the wise man who is accomplished in yoga and is a doer of works is in all action and in all ways established in Brahman, [translated from Gita] Even here on the earth the creation is conquered by them whose mind is established in equality. The equal Brahman is faultless, therefore, they are stationed in Brahman. This is the root foundation of the truth of equality.

 

In the method of sadhana of the integral yoga equality is. the primary ladder in the ascent to its realisation. Or we may say brahmabhava², is the ground of yoga, equality is the branch and all the results obtainable by sadhana are various leaves, flowers and fruit. Full being, complete self-knowledge, integral consciousness, fullness of the power of the concentration of the energy, complete undivided delight, there is no way of attaining any of these without equality, the fullness of these is manifested and securely gained only in equality, that is why it should be understood that so long as

 

 

2. It is difficult to suggest the meaning of brahmabhava here by one or two English words. It seems to me that what Sri Aurobindo intends to say | is that the seeker of the integral yoga has the sense, feeling, and spiritual perception of Brahman everywhere and in everything. He is fully inclined towards Brahman. That is why his equality is based on the knowledge of the presence of the faultless Brahman and the spiritual beyond the sattwik, the pure mental equality, taught by the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece to their followers and also by the Gita. The sattwik equality leads on to spiritual equality.

 

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perfect equality is not permanent, large and concrete in the seeker, the accomplishment of this yoga is shaky and inadequate. When equality is perfectly realised the path of yoga becomes equal, without any thorn, straight and full of joy.

 

*

 

To be one with the Divine Being, to connect our consciousness with the Divine Consciousness and dwell in it, to dissolve one's power by the influence of the Divine Force, to be self-realised and perfect by attaining the Divine Nature, this is the goal of the integral yoga. In one word, to accomplish birth of god, divine life.

 

Not featureless, ineffable dissolution, that kind of liberation is not intended by me. Brahman is eternal and ancient, the expression of Brahman as the world is also eternal and perpetual. I am a centre of that manifestation, the whole world is my limit, the whole cosmos is my universal form, all living creatures are my innumerable self. Just as the ineffable Oneness of the unlimited Brahman is real, so also the unity of Brahman qualified by many forms is true.

 

Brahman the Master, the supreme Person in his nature as the unmoving Person, enjoys that indeterminable Oneness, simultaneously also enjoys in the same receptacle, unity in the moving Person. This play of the Purushottama....The fullness of the Unlimited is in enjoyment of the delight of these two kinds. The undivided being of the Divine is one. We call that being the Supreme Self.

 

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Theories of Evolution

and Sri Aurobindo's Concept

of Supramental Manifestation

 

 

THE process of evolution was detected in ancient times. Both in India and in Greece, there were important ideas of evolution. In modern times, the theory of evolution is mainly the work of Linnaeus (1707-78), Buffon (1707-88), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Lamarck (1744-1829), Charles Darwin (1809-82) and his followers.

 

On the Origin of Species written by Charles Darwin (1859) gave details and demonstrations of his scientific theory of evolution, according to which, life on the earth evolved by a gradual and yet continuous process from the earliest forms of living organisms to the latest product, man. Natural selection, variation and heredity are said to be the factors through the operation of which new species arise out of existing ones. When new characters are produced by the variability of organisms, natural selection decides their survival or death. If the characters do not adapt to their environment, they are eliminated in the competition. If, on the other hand, they equip themselves better for the struggle, they tend to survive. The offspring of the successful tend to resemble the parents in exhibiting the favoured variation to a greater degree than the parents, and a new type becomes established by a continuous piling up of small useful accretions through many generations.

 

The two original components of Darwin's theory were (i) that evolution is gradual, and (ii) that the nature of the change is dictated by natural, not divine, selection. Both of these are closely interlinked, and both are at the heart of controversy today, as they were in Darwin's time.

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Many naturalists accepted Darwin's gradualism because it accorded well with what they saw in living species. But critics could not accept that all the world's marvellous species and their extraordinary structures such as those of the eye, could have arisen only by chance. Some biologists accepted that minor changes might be the result of natural selection, but held that beyond extremes within a range of variation, a new species could not arise by natural selection alone. The only way in which the boundaries of species might be breached, they contended, would be through a sudden jump.

 

Palaeontologists who dug up and classified the remains of extinct species raised another major objection to gradualism. They argued that if Darwin were right, they should be able to find a series of specimens that could be laid out in a gradual continuum from one major type of animal to another. If, for example, reptiles evolved into mammals, there should be fossils representing every gradation between these two groups. Instead, the palaeontologists found more gaps than continua. Darwin conceded this, but he thought that further research would reveal the intermediate links. As it turned out, only a few links have been found, and this issue is a part of today's controversy.

 

 

There are biologists today who maintain that the evolutionary process jumps from one species to another. Their theory is called 'saltationism' (from Latin saltare - to leap).

 

The early geneticists maintained that plants and animals sometimes produce offspring with unusual abnormalities or variations that could be considered well outside the normal range of variation. These odd offspring were called sports. Hugo di Vries, an early Dutch geneticist, also observed that the sports undergo some kind of permanent, large scale alteration of the hereditary units. He called the change a mutation. On the other hand, gradual changes or variations were called 'fluctuations' by him.

 

In the early twentieth century, evolutionists were divided into two camps. There were geneticists, who saw only

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evidence for sudden discontinuous change or mutation. They supported the saltationist view. On the other hand, there were naturalists who supported Darwinian gradualism. By the 1930s, however, the rift between these two camps came to be healed by a new evolutionary theory that Julian Huxley named the 'modern synthesis'. As part of the new theory, Dobshansky emphasised the need for what he called isolating mechanisms. He recognised that a new species could not emerge from an old one in the wild, if its early members continue to breed with the parent stock. The novel features would either be swamped by the existing species, causing the entire species to evolve slightly. If part of the species population is to split from the parent stock, it must be isolated from the larger population of the stock. A river, mountain range, or some other geographic feature must prevent the small variant group from breeding with its original stock. Eventually, the isolated population would become so different that biological differences would prevent inbreeding.

 

In 1972, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge asserted that evolutionists had become too rigid in insisting on gradualism. They put forth a new theory that reduced gradualism to a rare event and named the dominant phenomenon 'punctuated equilibria'. According to them, species are, for most of their existence, in evolutionary equilibrium or stasis. They change very little, if at all. But once in a while the stasis is punctuated by a sudden 'speciation event'; somehow, a small population of the parent species begins evolving rapidly and, within a relatively few generations, becomes a distinct species.

 

However, there are evolutionists who continue to stick to the gradualist view, and at the moment, there is no clear resolution in sight. The present debates point to the possibility of the emergence of a new scientific theory which might give a better understanding of the intrinsic 'how' of the evolutionary process.

 

There is still a deeper question. Why do variations occur? Whether they are small or great, gradual or abrupt, we cannot trace them to the influence of the environment. For types

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without variations seem to be just as well adapted as those with them. Darwin's view of chance variations is virtually a confession of his inability to explain the source of variations.

 

Modifications and variations do not come singly but in complexes, involving many minor and consequential modifications and variations. Each single small variation is not independently selected. In other words, the organisms seem to 'vary' as a whole.

 

Bergson pointed out that the molluscs in the order of evolution proceed by steady steps to develop an eye, which resembles very much the eye developed by the independent line of vertebrates. How does it happen, he asked, that similar effects appear in different lines of evolution brought about by different means? How could the same small variations occur in two independent lines of evolution if they were purely accidental? According to Bergson, the two series must have been governed by a common vital impulse to this useful end. There is something more in evolution than merely mechanical urge. He is inclined to attribute a 'rudiment of choice' to the species which, travelling by different paths, reach the same goal. Given a new situation, the 'urge' (elan vital), common to all members, leads them to meet it by a new method.

 

According to Bergson, it is the inner urge, or life force, or an upward drive that incites the whole species in a definite direction. The striving of the organism is the creative effort to which evolution is due.

 

The biological theory of evolution assumes that life always came from life. Herbert Spencer questioned this assumption and attempted to give a philosophical account of the rise of the living from the non-living, the mental from the non-mental. According to him, the differences between these are due to the degree of the complexity of the organisation. But still the question why life should evolve out of Matter or in Matter is not explained. Why should life occur at all? The theory of the survival of the fittest does not carry us far. Life has little survival value as compared with

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matter from which it is supposed to have sprung. A rock survives for hundreds of millions of years, while even the oldest tree is only a few thousand years old. If survival was the aim of nature, life would never have appeared.

 

Other significant philosophical theories have also come to be formulated. According to Samuel Alexander, the whole process of the universe is a historic growth from space-time. The original matrix is space-time. Time is the mind of space. In course of time, space-time breaks up into finites of ever-increasing complexity. At certain points in the history of things, finites assume new empirical qualities which are distinctive levels of experience - primary qualities, matter; and secondary qualities, life and mind. As explained in his book Space, Time and Deity, the cosmic process has now reached the human level, and man is looking forward to the next higher quality of deity. According to him, men of religious genius are preparing mankind for this next stage of development. The divine quality or deity is a stage in time beyond the human. The whole world is now engaged in the production of deity. As time is the very substance of reality, no being can exhaust the future. Even God is a creature of time.

 

Alexander's philosophy is called the philosophy of emergent evolution. According to him, when physical structure assumes a certain complexity, life 'emerges' as something new. When the physical structure alters in complexity, as it does when it produces a central nervous system, 'mind' emerges, and the gap between life and conscious behaviour is supposed to be covered. Alexander finds the explanation in a nisus or thirst of the universe for higher levels. It is the nisus that is creative; that satisfies the thirst.

 

But is nisus an unconscious drive coming by degrees to consciousness in man? Unless we assume the nisus to be a spiritual power ever drawing on its resources and ever expressing new forms, Alexander's whole account becomes unsatisfactory.

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Lloyd Morgan, who comes very close to Alexander in his account of emergent evolution, acknowledges God as the nisus through whose Activity emergents emerge, and the whole course of emergent evolution is directed. According to him, God is not the emergent deity, but an Activity within which qualities emerge. God is the breath from the whole movement, the deep root which feeds the whole tree. The course of history is the gradual coming of God to Himself. Lloyd Morgan contends that emergent evolution is not predictable. But it is not strictly undetermined like Bergson's creative evolution, not only unpredictable for human minds, but in principle for all minds. Lloyd Morgan infers the coming of divinity from the purposeful direction of the universe, and he is inclined to make his God completely immanent. He maintains that the whole course of events subsumed under evolution is the expression of God's purpose.

 

Lloyd Morgan is basically an adherent of Spinoza, and although he speaks of 'emergence' in the evolutionary process, one suspects that changes occur according to rule, and there is no spontaneity.

 

According to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the evolutionary process cannot be described or evaluated in terms of its origin. What comes later is more than what was there earlier. There is, according to him, a developing process marked by increasing complexity. It is true that the powers and properties of matter, life, mind, history and values are not entirely different. They interpenetrate and produce an increasing complexity and concentration. In man evolution becomes conscious of itself. Tracing the story of evolution, he examines the phenomena, big and small, from subatomic particles and cells to stellar galaxies, biospheric and noo-spheric. There are, according to him, two complementary tendencies in the evolutionary process, differentiation and integration. In his palaeontological studies, he found that evolution tends towards unification.

 

According to him, all energy is essentially psychic. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, he conceives for man a superhuman future and presents a transcendental vision of

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omega-workings. Evolution is pushing man towards a higher goal, an omega point, which can be described as collective divinity. A cosmic divine manifestation is in the making,

 

Whitehead, who recalls the Platonic view of the cosmic process, maintains that nothing can emerge in the evolutionary process of the universe if its constituents were not already in existence. The qualities which are said to emerge historically in the philosophy of Alexander are ingredients into events from the beginning, according to Whitehead. The ingredience of eternal objects into events is the explanation of the historical becoming. He admits that at every step there is the emergence of what is genuinely new. Every event, accord-ing to him, is a miracle, but it embodies an idea from beyond the developing series of events in the universe. Whitehead suggests an eternal order and a creative reality. The cosmic series has a nisus towards the eternal order which is beyond itself, though it is increasingly realised in the cosmic.

 

According to Whitehead, an actual event is the meeting point of a world of actualities, on the one side, and a world of ideal possibilities, on the other. Like Plato, Whitehead believes in eternal objects. He maintains that eternal objects in their interaction with creative passage issue in actuality, reckoning with space-time, limitation, causal push or drag of the past, and that ultimate irreducibility which we may only call God. It is God who envisages the realm of possibilities and the world of settled fact as to focus them on each occasion for the creation of something new. It is He who determines the ideal plans of events by the imposition of His nature. In the words of Whitehead, "The universe exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom, and a realm of forms with infinite possibilities; but this creativity and these forms are together impotent to achieve actuality apart from the completed ideal harmony, which is God." God, according to Whitehead, is the home of the universals and their ideal harmony.

 

Tngressive evolution' is a phrase that aptly describes Whitehead's theory. There is, according to Whitehead, a progressive ingression and incorporation into the cosmic series

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of the eternal order which God embraces in himself. The 'primordial' nature of God is the conceptual consciousness of the possibilities capable of harmonious concurrent realisation. These possibilities are called by Whitehead 'eternal objects'. They are eternal forms or ideas, to use the Platonic expression, but unlike Platonic ideas, they are not substances, but possibilities, conceptually realised in God. They are not imaginary or abstract. Some of them are apprehended as possibilities logically prior to their manifestation in existence, and others as symbols of values that we pursue. The relation of form to the temporal world is that of potentialities to actualities. In the view of Whitehead, the temporal actualities realise the possibilities surveyed in God's nature. The order and purpose we see in the world is the result of actuality fulfilling the highest possibilities it sees before itself, which is the vision of God as relevant for it.

 

 

According to Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), evolution presupposes an involutionary process. If Life evolves in Matter, and Mind in Life, it must be because Life is involved in Matter and Mind in Life. The material Inconscience is the involved Super-conscience. Evolution is fundamentally a spiritual phenomenon. It is a phenomenon of an evolutionary self-building of Spirit on a base of Matter, which is itself a formation of spiritual reality. There is first an involutionary foundation in which all that is to evolve is present, although not yet manifested or not yet organised. An original Inconscience without any previous deployment from consciousness cannot evolve consciousness. In the evolutionary process, there is a development of a triple character. An evolution of forms of Matter, more and more subtly and intricately organised so as to admit the action of a growing, a more and more complex and subtle and capable organisation of consciousness is the indispensable physical foundation. An upward evolutionary progress of the consciousness itself from grade to higher grade, an ascent, is the evident spiral line or emerging curve that, on this foundation, the evolution must describe. A taking up of what has already

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been evolved into each higher grade as it is reached and a transformation more pr less complete so as to admit of a total changed working of the whole being and nature, an integration, must also be part of the process, if the evolution is to be effective.

 

The end of the evolutionary process would be to manifest the supramental consciousness-force in the material body. "The Supermind", according to Sri Aurobindo, "is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which

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are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproad distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplet statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to further truth, its incomplete action a step towards complete ness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind i guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncer tainties that are our lot; it moves in safety towards its per fection. Once the truth-consciousness was established hen on its own sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would be a progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda." ¹

 

Man is a transitional being, and the spiritual man is the sign of the new evolution. The intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man is not merely to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself. There is a further intention - not only a revelation of the Spirit but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that nature. There is thus something that is not yet accomplished, and there becomes clear to view all that still has to be done; "there is a height still to be reached, a wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of the will, the self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe."

 

A distinctive feature of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of evolution is that it is not speculative; its premises and conclusions are tested on the anvil of experimentation. "The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?"² Indeed, Sri Aurobindo made an experiment upon his entire integral being, using it as an evolutional laboratory, so as to evolve

 

 

1. Sri Aurobindo: The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 41-42.

2. Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 18, pp. 3-4.

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and manifest higher and higher grades of consciousness reaching up to the supermind and to supramentalise the human body to the furthest extent possible. Even when he left his body, he assigned the task to his collaborator, whom he called The Mother (1878-1973), to continue the task of the supramentalisation and integral transformation.

 

Sri Aurobindo discovered in the ancient systems of Yoga some of the basic clues for the experiment. He did not, however, find in any one of them the secret that would enable him to eventually bring about the mutation of the human species. He and The Mother, therefore, experimented, day after day, for years and decades, and they developed a synthesis of Yoga and laboured to perfect it.

 

The practical necessity of this experiment was not merely to advance knowledge; nor was this experiment directed towards seeking any personal gain, gratification or glory. But Sri Aurobindo and The Mother saw that the contemporary human crisis cannot truly be met without the evolutionary saltation or mutation. There are, according to them, only two alternatives before mankind today; either a revolutionary and evolutionary ascent towards the supramental manifestation on the earth or the abyss.

 

An account of the momentous experiments undertaken by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother cannot truly be given; they can only be glimpsed from the records they have left. Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Letters on Yoga, The Mother, The Surpamental Manifestation and Other Writings, and The Mother's own account of the supramental action on the earth, recorded by Satprem (born 1924) and published in 13 volumes as L'Agenda de Mere, give us some indications of both the secret and the fulfilment of their momentous experiments.

 

Indeed, if the human body were a functioning of Matter, and if Matter were merely chemical and nothing more, then it is obvious that any divinisation or divine transformation of the body or of anything else would be nothing but an illusion, an imagination, a senseless and impossible chimera.

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But even if we suppose a soul or a conscious will at work in the body, it could not arrive at a divine transformation if there were no radical changes in the bodily instrument itself and in the organisation of its material workings. As Sri Aurobindo points out, "A radical transformation of the functioning and, it may well be, of the structure and certainly of the too mechanical and material impulses and driving forces of the bodily system would be imperative... A total transformation of the body would demand a sufficient change of the most material part of the organism, its constitution, its processes and its setup of nature." Sri Aurobindo conceives of the possibility where all the physical life and its necessary activities could be maintained and operated by higher agencies and grades of consciousness in a freer and ampler way and by a less burdensome and restricting method. The evolutionary urge, he maintains, would proceed to a change of the organs themselves in their material working and use and diminish greatly the need of their use and even of the existence of some or many of them.

 

According to Sri Aurobindo, this might well be a part of a supreme total transformation of the body, though this too might not be final. He admits that to envisage such changes is to look far ahead and minds attached to the present form of things may be unable to give credence to their possibility.

 

Something there is in us or something has to be developed, perhaps a central and still occult part of our being containing forces whose powers in our actual and present make-up are only a fraction of what could be, but if they became complete and dominant would be truly able to bring about with the help of the light and force of the soul and the supramental truth-consciousness the necessary physical transformation and its consequences. This might be found in the system of Chakras revealed by Tantric knowledge and accepted in the systems of Yoga, conscious centres and sources of all the dynamic powers of our being organising their action through the plexuses and arranged in an ascending series from the lowest physical to the

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highest mind centre and spiritual centre called the thou-sand-petalled lotus where ascending Nature, the Serpent Power of the Tantrics, meets the Brahman and is liberated into the Divine Being. These centres are closed or half closed within us and have to be opened before their full potentiality can be manifested in our physical nature: but once they are opened and completely active, no limit can easily be set to the development of their potencies and the total transformation to be possible.

 

At the same time, Sri Aurobindo acknowledges that all does not have to be fundamentally changed; on the contrary, all that is still needed in the totality has to be preserved, but all has to be perfected. "The human body has", says Sri Aurobindo, "in it parts and instruments that have been sufficiently evolved to serve the divine life; these have to survive in their form, though they must be still farther perfected, their limitations of range and use removed, their liability to defect and malady and impairment eliminated, their capacities of cognition and dynamic action carried beyond the present limits."³ On the other hand, new powers have also to be acquired by the body which our present humanity could not even dream of or could only imagine. In Sri Aurobindo's own words:

 

"The body itself might acquire new means and ranges of communication with other bodies, new processes of acquiring knowledge, a new aesthesis, new potencies of manipulation of itself and objects. It might not be impossible for it to possess or disclose means native to its own constitution, substance or natural instrumentation for making the far near and annulling distance, cognising what is now beyond the body's cognisance, acting where action is now out of its reach or its domain, developing subtleties and plasticities which could not be permitted under present conditions to the needed fixity of a material frame. These and other numerous potentialities might appear and the body

 

 

3. The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 39.

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become an instrument immeasurably superior to what we can now imagine as possible. There could be an evolution from a first apprehending truth-consciousness to the utmost heights of the ascending ranges of the supermind and it may pass the borders of the supermind proper itself where it begins to shadow out, develop, delineate expressive forms of life touched by a supreme pure existence, consciousness and bliss which constitute the worlds of a highest truth of existence, dynamism of Tapas, glory and sweetness of bliss, the absolute essence and pitch of the all-creating Ananda. The transformation of the physical being might follow this incessant line of progression and the divine body reflect or reproduce here in a divine life on the earth something of this highest greatness and glory of the self-manifesting Spirit."⁴

 

 

4. Ibid., p. 40.

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Is Progress Possible Without Culture?

 

 

SEVERAL readers are likely to find the title of this article rather superfluous. This author's impression was not different when the chief organiser of a seminar on the theme of culture asked him to answer this question in his inaugural address.

 

But, luckily, when at a casual meeting of a few intellectuals I casually introduced this subject, I woke up with a shock, taking careful note of their spontaneous reactions, that there could be highly divergent thinking on this apparently simple issue. The divergence could be articulated through two questions opposed to each other. One: Who doubts that culture is indispensable for progress? Two: What had culture to do with progress? If a team of scientists would tomorrow invent a strategy that would harness the law of gravitation to run the automobiles instead of oil or solar power, what would it matter whether they had a taste for classical music and Bharatnatyam or not?

 

By and by it dawned on me that much depends on what we understand by culture and what we understand by progress.

 

* * *

between my house in a remote hamlet in Orissa and the sea lay a vast meadow, evergreen and ever quiet but for the majestic roar of the sea. Twilight spread an almost uncanny it serene calm over it.

 

A huge rainbow spanned the sky during one such twilight, its end appearing to have reached a cluster of trees not far from me, then a toddler aged four. To touch it, if not to grab and capture a palmful of it, must be an exciting achievement. I ran towards it, only to find that it receded farther

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and farther. Exhausted I stopped and before my yearning eyes the rainbow disappeared.

 

I was intrigued why the memory should surface in my mind, decades later, when I began reflecting on my current assignment: Culture. It did not take me long to realise why. To locate the foundation of culture was as chimerical a task as catching the rainbow. The exercise will only lead us farther and farther down time and the goal would continue to be elusive.

 

The governments have their ministries and departments of Culture and they are devoted to promoting literature, art, music, dance and allied activities. Starting from this, where Culture has a specific scope and the term's use has an indisputable justification, to its use as a euphemism for snobbery ("Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors," as the tradition was described by the French thinker Simone Weil in The Need of Roots), the term has several tiers of meaning. But broadly speaking it has two aspects - Culture as individual trait or traits and Culture as an identifiable trait or traits in the collective life of a community, society, race or nation. Needless to say, the traits in question are those that convey refined and ennobling thoughts, ideas and inspirations and their evidence in the conduct and actions of the people concerned.

 

With this scope of Culture in view, as said earlier, we can broadly identify two streams of it: individual and collective. Often an example in refinement or nobility set by an individual becomes a star to which the society hitches its wagon. Let us take the instance of King Harishchandra. He promised to grant anything a sage asked of him and to our horror (even to this day) we saw that there was no end to the sage's demands. The king, the queen and their little son are all reduced to slavery and are driven to the farthest point of a tragic denouement, but their steadfastness to their truth serves as the invincible boat, speaking figuratively, to tide them over what seems to be an ocean of despair. Over the

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millennia past a second Harishchandra might not have emerged (who knows, there might have been a few unknown and unsung), but at the collective plane the example had played an invaluable role in inspiring faith in man, in man's capacity to stick to truth despite adversity and great suffering.

 

Or take the example of Sir Philip Sidney and his immortal last words - "Thy need is greater than mine." Nobody (or could there be some?) who had read or heard of the episode could have remained unaffected by it. Thus we have numerous proofs to establish the fact that a collective refinement emanates from the individual refinement while the quality of the individual model's consciousness remains as inexplicable as the phenomenon of consciousness itself. Why were such models unlike any other self-centred man? Why must a Dadhichi, instead of enjoying life, sacrifice it so that the weapon to be made of his bone could destroy the elements hostile to civilisation? That of course is beyond the scope of the present treatment of the subject.

 

It is important to examine the relationship between Civilisation and Culture. Here is a poignant statement on the issue by Sri Aurobindo:

 

Even when a nation or an age has developed within itself knowledge and science and arts, but still in its general outlook, its habit of life and thought is content to be governed not by knowledge and truth and beauty and high ideals of living, but by the gross vital, commercial, economic view of existence, we say that that nation or age may be civilised in a sense, but for all its abundant or even redundant appliances and apparatus of civilisation it is not the realisation or the promise of a cultured humanity. Therefore upon even the European civilisation of the nineteenth century with all its triumphant and teeming production, its great developments of science, its achievement in the works of the intellect we pass a certain condemnation, because it has turned

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all these things to commercialism and to gross uses of vitalistic success. We say of it that this was not the perfection to which humanity ought to aspire and that this trend travels away from and not towards the higher curve of human evolution. It must be our definite verdict upon it that it was inferior as an age of culture to ancient Athens, to Italy of the Renascence, to ancient or classical India. For great as might be the deficiencies of social organisation in those eras and though their range of scientific knowledge and material achievement was immensely inferior, yet they were more advanced in the art of life, knew better its object and aimed more powerfully at some clear ideal of human perfection.¹

 

Cultured life can keep pace with the march of civilisation only if the demand for achieving perfection of the form does not sideline or ignore the spirit beneath the form. Take the case of the Indian classical dance. It has been accepted by the authorities and masters of the tradition - the belief going back to the most remote point of recorded history - that dance originated in Lord Shiva. "Among the greatest of the names of Shiva is Nataraja, Lord of Dancers, or King of Actors. The cosmos is His theatre, there are many different steps in his repertory, He Himself is actor and audience..." (Ananda Coomeraswamy: , The Dance of Shiva) All the classical dances began and matured as an offering to the deity, as a way of prayer or obeisance, as a Yajna or 'sacrifice'- be it with the Devadasi performing in ecstatic abandon all alone in the temple (as for hundreds of years, till the death of the last Devadasi in the eighties of the 20th century, in the temple of Sri Jagannath at Puri) or the devotee in a religious ritual. The stage, commercial or otherwise, on which it is presented today, is a long way from the sanctum sanctorum, but it is certainly much more elegant today and the dance proper far more accomplished. The number of artistes too has multiplied, thereby indicating the expanding

 

 

1. Social and Political Thought, SABCL, Vol. 15, pp. 84-85.

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popular interest in the art. Innovations have enriched the dance and have either complicated it or, according to some, simplified its original intricacy.

 

All this is fine provided the spirit of the dance is not ignored. If that is ignored, then it is merely an entertainment. There are entertainments and entertainments; some of them satisfy the subtle sense of Rasa; others entertain, titillate or amuse the superficial senses. "Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training," said Aldous Huxley. ("Beliefs", Ends and Means) We can replace 'suitable training' with an attitude kept alive by the inner culture.

 

Hence, despite all the glitter, popular applause and patronisation by the society and the administration, Culture may be absent in the performance of a cultural item. And it does not take long for a soul-less culture to become anti-culture. An abundance of such activities accompanied by hype may pass on as a wide cultural awakening, but that is deceptive and in combination with other decadent factors, culture in this sense can serve as yet another brand of fertilizer for breeding anarchy. It can neither be an experience of any higher order nor can work as catharsis.

 

Culture induces empathy. Take the case of Music and let me refer to a unique legend about its efficacy. Once when the great sage Narada, the link between the heavens and the earth, was returning to his abode Goloka through the Himalayas - the range of mountains that remains interspersed with a subtle passage to the supra-physical worlds - he chanced upon a beautiful lot of demi-godly beings, male and female, and enquired of them as to their identity. Reluctant to speak out at first, they were obliged to reveal that they were the Gandharvas and the Gandharvis, the presiding spirits behind the modes of music - the Ragas and the Raginis.

 

On a closer look Narada detected that each one of those beings, extremely charming though, had been maimed. If one had lost one limb, another had been bereft of another. A third one carried a visible wound.

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Intrigued, Narada probed into its cause. Once again unwilling to satisfy him, the beings had to come out with the explanation after all: Each time a musician sang or played his or her instrument with ego and pride or sang or played wrong, the presiding spirit of the Raga or Ragini concerned received a blow. Over the long passage of time, repeated blows had caused them the harm Narada witnessed.

 

The sage now realised why they were so reluctant to speak. The truth could embarrass Narada who was a musician himself!

 

Narada extracted from them the panacea for their plight. Only if they got a chance to listen to the perfect musician, they would become whole again.

 

Who was the perfect musician? Who but the creator of music - Lord Shiva again.

 

Narada approached the great God and requested Him for a performance for the benefit of the Candharvas and Gandharvis in distress. Shiva agreed, but on condition that He must have in His audience at least one perfect listener!

 

Who were the perfect listeners? There were only two -Lord Vishnu and Lord Brahma.

 

Narada met the two who were but too willing to oblige him, for an opportunity to listen to Shiva singing came but rarely.

 

The event took place with the two great Gods as well as all the other divinities and the Gandharvas and the Gandharvis constituting the grand audience. As Shiva started singing, spring came over the region, all were splashed with wonderful waves of delight and of course, the lost limbs were restored to the presiding spirits of music.

 

But something most unexpected happened too. Lord Vishnu became so completely identified with the flow of music that his aura melted and began to flow away. Lord Brahma, however, captured the flow in his Kamandalu and did not let it go waste. (That was the genesis of Ganga. Later He released it in heavens and later still Prince Bhagiratha

 

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brought it down to the earth. The Ganga is so very sacred because originally it is the melted form of Vishnu's aura.)

 

What is relevant in the context of our subject is the symbolism in the major part of the legend - how music can unite the listener with itself in the latter's calm meditative attention, how the imperfect and the disharmonious can be made perfect and harmonious - as it happened to the Gandharvas and the Gandharvis for music is auditory representation of the secret rhythm of harmony at the core of Creation.

 

What I said with the tradition of dance and music as examples, applies to every other visible manifestation of our cultural life - to literature, drama, art, et al. Despite all the sparkle in appearance the absence and ignorance of the spirit and purpose of culture in any one of its manifestations (be it literature, drama or music) will inevitably contaminate the rest, for if they have emerged out of a genuine culture, there is bound to be a bondage and harmony among them. There can be a negative harmony too - in their joint decadence. An observation by T.S. Eliot may be relevant here: "Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pur-sued for its own sake." (Notes towards the Definition of Culture)

 

From another angle (which does not contradict Eliot's) we can say that the right kind of cultural activities are the product of a harmonious state of the collective life.

 

Can there be a Manadanda, a measuring rod for culture -to determine whether it was on its right path or had deviated from it at any given time? The word in Sanskrit for Culture is Samskriti - a force in operation that leads from the gross to the subtle. There are certain processes that cannot always be put into the grip of a rigid definition. Our consciousness has a built-in capacity, an innate sense that can discriminate between what degrades us and what ennobles us. The pleasure derived from a degraded indulgence and the elevation, which Culture brings, can be instinctively differentiated. The former is followed by a sense of guilt if the

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person concerned is sufficiently advanced as human; if not he falls into a state of inertia, which in its turn is stalked by restlessness, depression and violent upheavals of raw pas sion. The latter (the elevation which Culture brings) culti vates right intelligence, poise and calm, the elements required for progress in consciousness.

 

Progress in consciousness - that is the purpose of our life's journey. Let me quote Sri Aurobindo again: 

 

The whole aim of a great culture is to lift man up to something which at first he is not, to lead him to knowl-edge though he starts from an unfathomable ignorance; to teach him to live by his reason, though actually he lives much more by his unreason, by the law of good and unity, though he is now full of evil and discord, by a law of beauty and harmony, though his actual life is a repulsive muddle of ugliness and jarring barbarisms, by some high law of his spirit, though at present he is egoistic, material, unspiritual, engrossed by the needs and desires of his physical being. If a civilisation has not any of these aims, it can hardly at all be said to have a culture and certainly in no sense a great and noble culture².

 

*

 

The concept of Progress in no less subject to variations, if not confusion, than that of Culture. Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork, instead of bare fingers, while eating his human prey? - asked the-Polish author, Stanislaw Lec. Unfortunately, however improbable it may sound, the concept of progress, even for the greater part of the educated and the elite population, is merely a greater scope for hedonistic indulgence. More productions, new inventions and novel innovations are mostly patronised and controlled by consumerism. Such advancements can

 

2. The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, pp. 172-73.

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be called progress, but progress in a limited sense. Barring some experiments and drives in health care and some scientific explorations which are the outcome of an evolutionary urge in man to conquer obstacles on one hand and to outgrow himself on the other hand, a mere proliferation of human activities and changes in lifestyle do not indicate progress.

 

A review of the history of mankind will show that its real progress has been a progress in consciousness. From its primitive state to the present, mankind has, however imperfectly and however unconsciously, tried to rise from its animal-like existence into higher possibilities inherent in it. If that is progress, an aspiration very conscious and very determined, can alone be the basis for a charter for our further progress. Such an outlook can be moulded only by a sound culture marked by a harmony among the different aspects of our being and a harmony between the individual and the environment - both social and natural environment. Indeed, there can be no progress in the true sense of the term without a culture in the true sense of the term.

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Matter as 'Substance of the Spirit'

 

I

 

Not from Mind to Supermind...

the ways are 'other'!

 

THIS is not - and, perhaps, cannot be - a paper like the usual ones! There is nothing 'usual' about the subject itself.

 

A presentation - sequential and standing complete by itself - would not be a true rendering of this experience. An experience which is taking place in the life of humanity - in the being of man and in the new structures of his life and his civilisations, in the upheavals and movements that mark our times.

 

We will be true to experience as it is being lived - in its concreteness and in its specificity - without trying to 'organise' it in a seeming pattern of 'coherence', which is the mind's way of dealing with everything. We shall only attempt to share some of this experience, as it comes, without an effort to 'explain' it, in any way whatsoever.

 

Such is the nature of the action of the Supermind in Matter... it sees, it acts, it creates... and the multiple vibrates with its single movement. This movement is visible, it is there....

 

An intermediary instrument - such as the mind - is not needed to explain and organise this 'action', in the limits of its own characteristic functioning.

 

As the nature of the experience - so the form of sharing it. Direct... and as it comes, in its pristine quality.

 

When the mind reaches its zenith of development - and arrives at the same time at a keen and agonising awareness of its inability to deal effectively with life and with matter - then

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it is getting ready to exceed itself. But not by an increase of its own activity - but by a silencing of it and by a grounding of the stuff of itself 'into the material base of one's being. Specifically - in the body itself.

 

Thus held in the body, the mind's habitual functioning undergoes a change. A kind of totality of perception - in which knowing, feeling and action form one single movement of perceiving and of being - begins to emerge. It is direct in its nature, not inferential, not successive, not constructional in any way. To be is to see. To see is to know, to feel and to act in one sweep - where there is no distinction between them. There is one movement in which the being participates in all that is around - from the most minute to a wide sweep of existence.

 

Here lies a path to the Supermind. There must be others -for the infinity of possible approaches have to make themselves manifest.

 

But it is certainly not by a further and further increase of the activity of the mind as we have known it that we can reach it. A falling away from this activity, in whatever way, seems necessary at a certain stage of the human journey. More one cannot say - but this seems to be sure.

 

These words of The Mother resound in us:

 

The effect of the Supramental action will be multiple, infinitely varied, not forced to follow one precise line and the same line for all..¹

 

The Supermind is already realised somewhere in the domain of the subtle physical, it is already existent and visible and concrete, already expressing itself in forms and in activities... And inevitably there is a subtle influence of that phy sicality on external matter if one is ready to receive the impressions and admit them into one's consciousness.²

 

 

1. The Mother, Towards February 29,1960, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1960, p. 11.

2. Ibid., p. 12.

 

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Matter seems to 'haunt' us... with what it carries within itself. We are happier using the French word hantise - which is more sensitively expressive of what we feel. It has almost become a passion of the Spirit!

 

Not so strange in our times that are unusual...

 

We share, in these pages, a few lines of experience - concrete for us - without trying to link them up as an 'organised presentation'.

 

II

 

Supermind... emerging in Matter?

 

There is a new Matter - palpable to our touch. To our feel, to our sense of texture, to our sense of fragrance... A matter, of a molten density, of a fullness of 'love'. 'Love' that is not an emotion. Love that is the very stuff of matter. Love that is power - matter in its omniscience.

 

A matter that has become aware of itself as being the 'substance of the Spirit'.

 

*

 

Through a perfection of 'form' and an organisation of 'forms' - which is the great achievement of our times - it has pierced the veil of its own 'objectivity', that kept it from knowing itself in its true state. Its very perfection has fine-tuned it to 'turn within'... matter 'turning within' itself to know what lies hidden in its core. And, it discovers that it is none other than the 'body' of the Spirit.

 

In this poise of itself as the Spirit, it begins a new creation. The beginning of a new 'possibility' in creation....

 

No longer one that evolved from a base of inconscience. But one that rises in the full blaze of a golden light - from a matter become conscious of its 'self in the Spirit.

 

This new creation bursts forth in a 'translucency of matter'.. . in its forms. And 'form' presents itself as consciousness - between 'form' and 'form'... there is no veil that interposes

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itself. There is only a direct contact of 'conscious being' with 'conscious being'... in a space of utter transparency.

 

A change that is beginning to take place on earth, with us humans... and with nature, as the first instrument to respond to this new manifestation.

 

This throws the world of man and his civilisations into utter chaos and confusion, with jets of the transparent air piercing great holes in the opaque fabric of the world's life.

 

Till the 'new' stabilises itself and grows in fullness and in extent, as a growing embryo. And by such growth, it replaces the old.

 

The 'old' is not transformed - it is replaced. Like the 'new particle' of the physicist, whose very presence makes the old particles lose their energy and disappear in the 'mass'.

 

This 'new' matter - 'self aware of its own true reality -is there, in our body, in the first instance - and around us, in the contiguity of matter, in which we live and have our being. The old tries to crowd in - but the new emerges and holds its own. It has come to stay. To be - and to grow in fullness.

 

*

 

There are - or, must be, we do not know - a million ways to sense and live in this 'new7 matter. We can only share our own.

 

Perhaps, the steps that have led to this can be shared. We will try to do so...

 

As embodied beings, our very personality is grounded in matter. It is the matrix in which we live and move and work. Our entire external personality - not only the body - but in a large measure, the life parts in us and several levels of the mind even, have their base in matter. We have a ground of rootedness in materiality. It is thus that we are here on the earth and live and function as we do.

 

And, yet, as the mind develops the activity innate to it and takes it to a high peak of achievement, it finds itself... for a while... in a circle of its own self-sufficiency. Of ideas well worked out, of processes that are deductive, constructive or

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sequential. Or, it even has a glimpse of totalities or vast interconnections - but it cannot turn them into direct and concrete 'experience', in which the conscious being, in its integrality, takes part. Mind spins its world, takes it to a lofty perfection and, by the very perfection of this cogency and well-orderedness, shows its limitations! Limitations that are inherent in it - by nature and function.

 

It makes an abstraction of the rest of life, matter included! It seizes 'figures' of it, offers explanations - but does not enter into the living reality of their existence.

 

This is a powerful experience that we go through and it marks a turning point in one's movement of consciousness... with its barrenness and a kind of inconclusiveness that leaves life where it was, cold and untouched. The brilliance of thought hangs up above - planning on another level of existence - and existence, in its concreteness, vibrates at its own. Between the two, there is a chasm - in no uncertain terms and of no mean magnitude. The gap is wide, difficult to bridge - and the labour painful in the extreme. Painful... in the sense of being 'physically' painful.

 

For the link with matter is lost, and to recover it - in another mode of being, for one does not travel backward in a process of growth - there is need of an arduous labour.

 

*

 

How does it take place and work itself out?

 

The need of it has to be acute - till it hurts! Till one can no longer live in this vacuum, splitting the planes of existence in one's being. Otherwise, the effort needed would not be forthcoming.

 

The activity of the mind - that is at the 'top' like a point or position of attenuation - of the 'column' of consciousness that is oneself, has to 'travel' down the levels, till it comes to rest in the material base of one's total being, in the body itself, and be firmly held there. This is a first step. And, then, to take its abiding 'station' there and start on a new kind of functioning of itself altogether.

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This process takes time and it is painful to the body itself - not in an emotional way but in a 'physical' one. The natural activity of the mind tries to persist, to re-assert itself at the least provocation. It doesn't unwind its own processes easily! To settle in 'matter' - it has to do the latter. For, in matter, there is a directness - whether of perception or of willing or of action - which is at the level of existence as such. Matter goes straight to the point. It does not deduce, construe or build up.

 

But this settling down of the activity of the mind... in the base of the material substance of the body itself... does take place. With this, the mind's own functioning begins to change. It perceives, wills and moves into action in one direct movement of conscious being. And the concrete result and effect on life is both immediate and visible.

 

There is no 'thought' - but there is 'seeing', which effectuates itself at the level of existence, in a 'self-realising' manner. There is no effort, no straining. A totality of process of the conscious being existing in life and matter begins. There is no sense of hiatus anywhere. There is an ease of self-effectuation, marked by simplicity... There is no 'knowing' and, then, a 'doing'. There is a 'seeing' - that just 'works' itself out!

 

When this new positioning of the mind is firmly established - which takes time, as there are customary recurrences of its earlier activity, because the habit is of long standing -then, one finds that one is within matter... through the body itself. And, through the body, in the 'contiguity of matter' around us.

 

*

 

Our habitual way of dealing with matter, of working with it, is to see it from the 'outside' - to handle it 'organisationally'. To see its bits and pieces and to organise them in spatial relations in an objective sense of dimension.

 

But to be 'inside' matter and to reach out to it from the core of one's conscious being is to discover matter in an entirely different way. It is supple, malleable, offers itself in a movement of 'self-giving'. It is not fixed, rigid, obdurate with

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hard surfaces - to the touch, to the feel, to smell. It has another quality of substance - for 'substance' it is and always remains.

 

And this way of being 'inside' matter - of thus penetrating it and working with it - makes one experience all the matter around one's body as an unbroken contiguity of material existence.

 

There is relation, structuring, form - but no separation, no distancing. Space is there - but as extension of this 'contiguity' of material existence. Time keeps changing its modality. It has its own evolution - it is not given to be always and ever the same! It grows, it changes in its very nature and 'form of being', as the rhythm of the universe creates and recreates itself endlessly from its Eternal source.

 

The body itself spills over into space and tunes itself to the changing modality of time...

 

In this contiguity of matter, one lives the life on earth. And matter, reveals more and more, the stuff it is made of... . with a vibrancy, a concreteness, a power that has no parallel, and an 'infallibility' in action unknown before.

 

There is a joy in that discovery, a sense of delight that floods the entire being. The senses themselves partake of that delight - each in its own manner - in touch and feel, by sight and smell. Matter offers itself as 'substance of the Spirit' to the senses that are turned within! The joys of matter, it is said, are greater than the joys of the mind.³ They have to be experienced to realise how true this is....

 

We are witness to another line of action on matter - not as an mtimate participant in its existence - but one that consists of a disengagement of its constituents by an objective analysis of it, under externally controlled conditions of experimentation.

 

We see the physicist using a reductionist method to break up the constituents into their smallest elements and then to re-construct an aggregate by a sum of them - so as to arrive at a knowledge of matter, its properties, the forces at work in

 

3. Sri Aurobindo

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it and the potencies they carry. The knowledge of the parts leads to the knowledge of the aggregate. A process of reduction and subsequent re-construction is the path followed in an exploration and 'utilisation' of matter.

 

At a certain point of this labour - arduous, disciplined and productive of astounding results - the physicist has arrived at a discovery that has totally, and irrevocably, reversed this position, on which he had earlier taken his firm stand. That there are no parts that can make an aggregate! He finds himself, in the presence of wholes. A 'whole' of dynamic energy, conscious and self-existent, which presents itself in the parts, losing nothing of its totality and imbuing each part with the role and function it has the specific purpose to serve within the 'whole'.

 

As if a reversal could be more total - or, more irrevocable!

 

The functioning of this 'whole' - in matter - is like a rhythmic action that touches the multiple points of its own fine and complex structuring in a single movement of conscious force. The movement of the entire universe is of this nature.

 

*

 

Today, we have a wide world of a net-working technology that is created from the knowledge of forces and of points of transmission and their specification, springing from this perception of matter and of its working. We live by this technology and function by it. A technology that is changing and evolving, by the dizzying speed of new revelations.

 

A question arises... The physicist has arrived at this reversal of the knowledge he had of matter by continuing to pursue the reductionist method of investigation. Either - the deeper he delves into the stuff of matter, newer realities emerge. Or - some change in the quality of his perceiving consciousness must have taken place, for him to seize hold of realities other than the ones accessible to him earlier.

 

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We cannot say but, possibly, both have their part to play. The practical application of this reversal of the knowledge of matter, in the form of present-day technology - and its fast pace of further advance - is a fact of all importance that stamps our life in every way.

 

Moving deeper into the stuff of matter by the method of objective analysis, the physicist reaches a point of great and incredible 'sensitivity'. We use this word, in place of another, because how else to describe the progressive disappearance of a line of demarcation between the objective and the subjective! Matter appears to shed its own objectivity and reveals itself in its utter subjectivity - even to the physicist!

 

This is the miracle of our times! By whichever method, we move into matter - through our conscious being or by a process of external disengagement of its constituents - we reach its intrinsic status and reality... that of a whole of conscious energy, giving form to itself in a substance that is the 'stuff of the Spirit.

 

*

 

A massive action is in the making... Levels of being, in a vertical dimension, and in the movement of a many-sided axis focussing on to a nodal point seem to be pressing down and into us. With an effort to 'ground' the entire graded complexity of existence into matter - the matter of our being, the body... and, into the matter of the world and of our civilisations.

 

A massive action reaching into the stuff of matter itself. To make something 'new' emerge from it? To make it conscious of its own omniscience - as substance of the Spirit?

 

A totality of being - being-in-matter - like the compressed curves of a spiral seem to be our mode of existing! Complex and not easy - but the experience seems to carry an incredible kind of plenitude. Or, the near possibility of it!

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The time of great achievements is not marked by a cloudburst in the sky or a rain of gold. Though both may be there! Matter - by its own refinement in seeking a perfection of the 'form', and by a sounding of its depths by a movement of consciousness - reveals its identity in a totality of its being. Of being conscious of itself as the substance of the Spirit. It is this that is significant - it has become conscious of its 'self.

 

The millennium that has just begun witnesses the birth of this new creation - beginning from a matter that knows what it is: the body of the Spirit itself.

 

What will it create? How will it spin a new raiment for man from the gold threads of the Spirit's stuff?

 

The future awaits us - to reveal its fullness. But the process of this new creation has begun...

 

Signs are there.. .visible and active. A translucency of gold is in the air - that throws up all things dense in a blaze of light. A power of love and a sense of delight make it possible for us to bear such an action. Gratefully... and to ask for more...

 

A new perfection beckons - too new to be even given a name...

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Yoga and Psychology

 

The Relationship Between Yoga and Psychology in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga

 

 

AS. Dalai

 

Sri Aurobindo, writing on his teaching and the method of its practice, refers to yoga as "the ancient psychological discipline".¹ He has also described yoga as "nothing but practical psychology.".² Regarding the method of yoga he states: "the whole method of Yoga is psychological; it might almost be termed the consummate practice of a perfect psychological knowledge."³ All these statements point to the intimate relationship between yoga and psychology.

 

This relationship becomes more obvious when we look at the objects of yoga. Sri Aurobindo states:

 

In all yoga there are three essential objects to be attained by the seeker: union or abiding contact with the Divine, liberation of the soul or the self, the spirit, and a certain change of the consciousness, the spiritual change. It is this change, which is necessary for reaching the other two objects, necessary at least to a certain degree, that is the cause of most of the struggles and difficulties; for it is not easy to accomplish it; a change of the mind, a change of the heart, a change of the habits of the will is called for and is obstinately resisted by our ignorant nature.⁴

 

 

1. Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, SABCL, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Vol. 26, p. 95.

2. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga - Parts One and Two, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 95.

3. Ibid., p. 496.

4. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - Part Four, SABCL, Vol. 24, p. 1622.

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The relationship between yoga is implicit in all the objects of yoga stated above. The first object - union or abiding contact with the Divine - implies "the contact of the human and individual consciousness with the divine [consciousness]".⁵ The relationship between yoga and psychology can be seen here because psychology, from the viewpoint of yoga, is the science which deals with the nature of consciousness and the method of transforming the ordinary human consciousness into the divine consciousness. The second object of yoga - the liberation of the soul or the self - is related to what in psychology is called identification. In the ordinary consciousness, the soul or self is identified with its instruments - body, life and mind - which leads to bondage. The aim of yoga is to attain liberation of the soul by overcoming the ignorant identification with its instruments. The process of disidentification is thus at once yogic and psychological. The third object of yoga - a change of the mind, the heart and the habits of the will - aims, in the language of psychology, at a change of the cognitive, affective and volitional aspects of our nature. Thus the stuff of our nature which is to be changed is what both yoga and psychology deal with.

 

The three parts of the being just mentioned - mental, vital, physical - which yoga aims at changing, constitute what in Sri Aurobindo's yoga psychology is called the outer or surface being which is distinguished from the inner being, composed of the inner mind, the inner vital, the inner physical, with the psychic or the soul as the innermost part of the being supporting all the rest. "The whole art of yoga", says Sri Aurobindo, "is to get that contact [with the inner being] and from it get into the inner being itself."⁶

 

This leads up to the view of yoga as both a science and an art. The psychological science which underlies the art of

 

 

5. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga - Parts One and Two, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 27.

6. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 533.

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yoga is difficult to recognise for someone who is familiar with psychology only as it is generally conceived today. For psychology today is regarded as the science of behaviour, and behaviour is related to what in yogic psychology is called the outer being referred to above. Yogic psychology, on the other hand, is the science of consciousness which studies the totality of Being it manifests at various levels of consciousness, ranging from the lowest to the highest and from the outermost to the innermost. The outer being, which is what modern psychology mostly deals with, is all that we are normally aware of in our waking existence, but as even modern depth psychology has partly discovered, "our waking and surface existence is only a small part of our being and does not yield to us the root and secret of our character, our mentality or our actions. The sources lie deeper."⁷ The aim of yogic psychology has been to discover and know these deeper sources, "and, so far as possible, to possess and utilise them as physical science possesses and utilises the secret of the forces of Nature".⁸

 

These deeper sources of our waking and superficial existence as discovered by yogic psychology are seen to lie below, behind and above our normal consciousness. What lies below the normal consciousness is called the subconscient in Sri Aurobindo's yoga psychology. The subconscient proper is entirely below the mental, vital and physical consciousness, but the mind, the vital and the physical are also partly submerged in the subconscient. Thus there is a subconscient mental, a subconscient vital and a subconscient physical. What Freud called the unconscious is related mainly to the subconscient vital. Remarking on the exaggeration and over-generalisation of the partial and very limited truth contained in the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, Sri Aurobindo writes:

 

 

7. Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 259.

8. Ibid.

 

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It [the psychoanalysis of Freud] takes up a certain part, the darkest, the most perilous, the unhealthiest part of the nature, the lower vital subconscious layer, isolates some of its most morbid phenomena and attributes to it and them an action out of all proportion to its true role in the nature. Modern psychology is an infant science, at once rash, fumbling and crude. As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of Nature in its narrow terms -runs riot here.⁹

 

What lies behind the superficial consciousness of the outer being has been referred to earlier as the inner being, often called the subliminal or inner consciousness. Regarding the subliminal, Sri Aurobindo states:

 

Even in Europe the existence of something behind the surface is now very frequently admitted, but its nature is mistaken and it is called subconscient or subliminal, while really it is very conscious in its own way and not subliminal but only behind the veil. It is, according to our psychology, connected with the small outer personality by certain centres of consciousness¹⁰ of which we become aware by yoga. Only a little of the inner being escapes through these centres into the outer life, but that little is the best part of ourselves and responsible for our art, poetry, philosophy, ideals, religious aspirations, efforts at knowledge and perfection. But the inner centres are for the most part closed or asleep - to open them and make them awake and active is one aim of yoga. As they open, the powers and possibilities of the inner being also are aroused in us; we awake first to a larger consciousness and then to a cosmic consciousness; we

 

 

9. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - Part Four, SABCL, Vol. 24, p. 1606.

10. [Chakras]

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are no longer little separate personalities with limited lives but centres of a universal action and in direct contact with cosmic forces. ¹¹

 

From the viewpoint of yogic psychology, it is the subliminal consciousness that is at the basis of the yet not well understood and not fully recognised psychical or parapsychologi-cal phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience and other phenomena of extrasensory perception. Extrasensory perception is explained by yogic psychology in terms of inner or subtle senses (corresponding to the physical senses of sight, hearing, taste, etc.) which are possessed by the subliminal. As Sri Aurobindo states:

 

... all the physical senses have their corresponding powers in the psychical being, there is a psychical hearing, touch, smell, taste: indeed the physical senses are themselves in reality only a projection of the inner sense into limited and externalised operation in and through and upon the phenomena of gross matter.¹²

 

The subliminal is also at the basis of the well-recognised phenomena of hypnosis, as also many experiences of the cosmic consciousness which have as yet received only a slight recognition in modern psychology. Several aspects of what Jung called the collective unconscious are related to the subliminal.¹³

 

The subliminal is often mistaken for the spiritual because of the failure to distinguish between the inner consciousness, which is behind the surface consciousness, and the higher consciousness which is above the normal consciousness. The

 

 

11. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - Part Four, SABCL, Vol. 24, pp. 1164-65.

12. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga - Parts Three and Four, SABCL, Vol. 21, p. 844.

13. This has been elaborated in A.S. Dalai, "Sri Aurobindo and the Concept of the Unconscious" in Psychology, Mental Health and Yoga, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, second ed. 2001, pp. 34-35.

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spiritual is the higher or superconscient consciousness which is above the normal mental consciousness. Distinguishing between the subliminal or inner consciousness and the spiritual or higher consciousness, Sri Aurobindo writes:

 

The inner consciousness means the inner mind, inner vital, inner physical and behind them the psychic which is their inmost being. But the inner mind is not the higher mind; it is more in touch with the universal forces and more open to the higher consciousness and capable of an immensely deeper and larger range of action than the outer or surface mind - but it is of the same essential nature. The higher consciousness is that above the ordinary mind and different from it in its workings; it ranges from higher mind through illumined mind, intuition and overmind up to the border line of the supramental.¹⁴

 

A more serious confusion found in modern psychology is due to the failure to distinguish between the subconscient and the superconscient, as is seen in psychoanalysis which regards everything that does not pertain to the conscious mind as belonging to the unconscious. Consequently psychoanalysis tries to explain spiritual experiences of the higher consciousness also in terms of the unconscious. As Sri Aurobindo remarks:

 

They [the psychologists] look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esam.¹⁵ The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus... is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these

 

 

14. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - Part One, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 308.

15. [Their foundation is above. Rig Veda 1.24.7]

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psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest.¹⁶

 

Psychological distinctions, such as those indicated above, between the different parts of the being and the different levels of consciousness become particularly important in yoga when the veil between the outer consciousness and the inner consciousness is pierced through sadhana - or, in rare cases, spontaneously - giving rise to various experiences which have generally been described as "transpersonal" experiences in modern psychological thought. Many of these experiences belong to what Sri Aurobindo has called the Intermediate Zone by which is meant

 

that when the sadhak gets beyond the barriers of his own embodied personal mind he enters into a wide range of experiences which are not the limited solid physical truth of things and not yet either the spiritual truth of things. It is a zone of formations, mental, vital, subtle physical, and whatever one forms or is formed by the forces of these worlds in us becomes for the sadhak for a time the truth -unless he is guided and listens to his guide. Afterwards if he gets through he discovers what it was and passes on into the subtle truth of things. It is a borderland where all the worlds meet, mental, vital, subtle physical, pseudo-spiritual - but there is no order or firm foothold - a passage between the physical and the true spiritual realms.¹⁷ The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higher Mind) without having yet

 

 

16. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - Part Four, SABCL, Vol. 24, pp. 1608-09.

17. Ibid., Parts Two and Three, Vol. 23, p. 1053.

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transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels, but one can receive something from them, even from the overmind, indirectly. Only, as one is still immersed in the cosmic Ignorance, all that comes from above can be mixed, perverted, taken hold of for their purposes by lower, even by hostile Powers.¹⁸

 

Sri Aurobindo has sounded many warnings against the dangers of the intermediate zone, such as "imitation higher experiences", "false inspirations" and "false voices" which come from this realm "into which hundreds of yogins enter and some never get out of it".¹⁹ To a disciple who reported an inner experience, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

 

You are taking the first steps towards the cosmic consciousness in which there are all things good and bad, true and false, the cosmic Truth and the cosmic Ignorance. I was not thinking so much of ego as of these thousand voices, possibilities, suggestions. If you avoid these, then there is no necessity of passing through the intermediate zone.20

 

Distinctions need to be made even with regard to experiences of the cosmic consciousness which tend to be regarded as being always the highest spiritual experiences. For, according to yogic psychology, there are different levels of cosmic consciousness. As Sri Aurobindo states:

 

The cosmic consciousness has many levels - the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the overmind and still above that the supermind where the Transcendental begins.

 

 

18. Ibid., pp. 1052-53.

19. Ibid., p. 1061.

20. Ibid., pp. 1053-54.

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A reflected static realisation of Sachchidananda is possible on any of the cosmic planes, but the full entering into it, the entire union with the Supreme Divine dynamic as well as static, comes with the transcendence.²¹

 

Even the higher planes of the cosmic consciousness mentioned above are part of the Ignorance (Avidya), and therefore have both sides - cosmic Truth and cosmic Ignorance. Sri Aurobindo states:

 

There are in the cosmic consciousness two sides - one the contact with and perception of the ordinary cosmic forces and the beings behind these forces, that is what I call the cosmic Ignorance - the other is the perception of the cosmic Truths, the realisation of the one universal, the one universal Force, all the Vedantic truths of the One in all and all in one, all the various aspects of the Divine in the cosmic and a host of other things can come which do help to realisation and knowledge...²²

 

It is because of the presence of Avidya in the cosmic consciousness that one who breaks the bounds of the personal consciousness and enters the cosmic planes of being has to be on guard.

 

The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces - for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness - and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient.²³

 

 

21. Ibid., Part Four, Vol. 24, pp. 1157-58.

22. Ibid., Parts Two and Three, Vol. 23, pp. 1070-71.

23. Ibid., Part One, Vol. 22, pp. 316-17.

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Mental teaching or explanation, though insufficient in itself is of immense help in the practice of yoga and in most cases is quite indispensable. For without the teaching by someone who has explored the inner and higher realms of being and has discovered a path leading to self-realisation, the pursuit of yoga solely on one's own would be like trying to hew one's path through a virgin forest beset with snares and ambushes. The path of yoga leads through inner and higher realms of consciousness which need to be illumined by the light of a psychological knowledge of the various parts of the being and planes of consciousness. To be of any value in yoga, such knowledge must not be, like modern psychology, based on "the worldly-wise reason which anchors itself on surface facts and leans upon [sensory] experience and probability."²⁴ Nor must it be a philosophical knowledge based on the speculative intellect. It must be a scientific knowledge of supraphysical and spiritual realities which have been arrived at by

 

Adhering still to the essential rigorous method of science, though not to its purely physical [sensory] instrumentation, scrutinising, experimenting, holding nothing for established which cannot be scrupulously and universally verified.. .²⁵

 

Such is the nature of yogic psychology. It simply

 

...extends the range of our observation to an immense mass of facts and experiments which exceed the common surface and limited range [of natural Science] very much as the vastly extended range of observation of [natural] Science exceeds that of the common man.²⁶

 

 

24. Sri Aurobindo, The Harmony of Virtue - Early Cultural Writings, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 367.

25. Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 256.

26. Sri Aurobindo, Archives and Research, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Dec. 1982), p. 158.

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Yogic knowledge, affirms Sri Aurobindo

 

.. .is scientific to this extent that it proceeds by subjective experiment and bases all its findings on experience; mental intuitions are admitted only as a first step and are not considered as realisation - they must be confirmed by being translated into and justified by experience.²⁷

 

Yogic psychology is scientific also because its discoveries, like all scientific findings, are empirical, that is, of the nature of " experience always renewable and verifiable".²⁸

 

_________________

This article had first appeared in the journal: Anweshika, Indian Journal of Teacher Education, vol. 1 no. 1, June 2004. We thank the publisher and the editors of this journal for their kind permission to reproduce this article.

 

 

27. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - Part One, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 189.

28. Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 79.

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The Indian Intellectual and Making of Modern India

 

 

I

 

There is a particular appropriateness in writing a piece on the relation of the literary intellectual to the spiritual traditions of our country and the links between these to the idea of India. Amal Kiran's entire life was spent in engagement with these ideas. He saw himself as 'poetic' and 'philosophic' and able through the Grace of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother to comment on the political questions of the day. For him the life of the literary intellectual, for such we may characterise him to be, was not unrelated to public affairs, more especially to political questions which had a bearing on how one represented the idea of Indian nationhood. Amal Kiran was, moreover, a partisan of English, and was convinced about the significance of the language for India. It was a cultural asset for him and it was a fit instrument for the expression of the Indian soul. English had the plasticity and flexibility to embody the Indian genius which was essentially spiritual in its urge and synthesising in its character. "The synthetical and assimilative Indian genius", he wrote, "meets in the English tongue a multiplicity and pliancy of temper and tone which give that genius all the more chance of taking hold of this tongue for living self-expression." And again, "English promises, therefore, to be the expressive body par excellence of our true soul."

 

I find in Amal Kiran's outlook and his commitment to English a sympathetic statement of what many of us in the profession of English Studies in India have often felt but perhaps never so well expressed. Consequently, this essay is an attempt to give expression to my own reflections on the literary intellectual, for such I believe myself to be, and the

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response of the literary intellectual to important spiritual traditions of modern India and the way these traditions provided a foundation for the idea of India. An important feature of this discourse was that it was conducted in English and Amal Kiran's own Master, Sri Aurobindo was a key figure in this discourse. Sri Aurobindo is modern India's distinguished savant, thinker and poet and he carried out his task in the English language, for which he had the greatest admiration and respect. Savitri was an epic in English with mantric potency. To talk of the literary intellectual and the spiritual traditions which gave Indian nationhood a character is also consequently to acknowledge the significance of the English language in our scheme of things. As a scholar of English I am naturally enthusiastic about this.

 

To talk of spiritual traditions in our country in relation to our conception of nationhood generates a series of related enquiries. First is the question of culture. In a strict personal sense culture is an inward quality, a tendency to refine all that is gross or crude in ourselves and to move to higher and higher levels of awareness and consciousness. This is a continuing process and I suppose the end is always a notch or two away. I understand this movement as a progress but also as overcoming a decline. "Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home" says Wordsworth, and I do believe that human birth is a violation of an integrity that existed prior to it, that it is a dispersal of a unity, a refraction of the One into the Many, or to put it differently, it is an inexorable focus on the play of difference. The human quest, clearly, is to recover that sense of Unity which we have lost, to get back the Garden of Eden which we have willingly let go. The primary patterns of human experience as embodied in myth, folklore, pre-verbal artifacts and in the written word everywhere in the world are a testimony to this human experience of loss, desire and recovery. 'Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise Regained' remain central metaphors of the human experience.

 

At another level, culture is an external thing, a communal (using the term in its positive sense and divesting it of the superfoetation of dust that has gathered upon it, mostly

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pejorative in implication) matter. It is, as T.S. Eliot knew, a whole way of life of a people. Thus the manner in which way Ugadi Pacchadi is made and served, the items of costume one must possess for various social gatherings, the festivals we celebrate, the vigils we keep, the music and art, both highbrow and middlebrow, which we enjoy - the sum total of this is culture. It is an anthropological way of looking at culture and we would be well advised to keep in mind this dimension, the secular dimension of culture, if you like, while we grapple with the relation of inner culture with outer culture, the subjective life of the soul and the way this issues forth in creative acts of nation-building.

 

If culture is a related concern so is the vital question of the nature of the intellectual and the self representation of the intellectual. There is a view current in our circles that the intellectual must be a dissident, and dissent is seen as the prerogative of the Left. It is fashionable to speak of intellectual dissent in terms of cultural materialism, post-coloniality and of collectivities which together constitute the nation and its fragments. While acknowledging the important work done by such schools of opinion, I would nevertheless enter a caveat and assert that there can be a radicalism of the conservative kind which can also ask fundamental questions about our capitalist social organisation. Radicalism of the kind Burke represented or his spiritual heir in India, C.Rajagopalachari, is a legitimate response to our technologico-Benthamite civilisation, a civilisation now linked up with what is called economic liberalisation, globalisation and information technology. The intellectual, on this showing, is also a dissenter, but unlike his or her Left Wing counterpart is likely to draw on tradition and in the Indian context characteristically on Indian spiritual traditions for the analysis of modern Indian culture and society. After Rajaji we have not had a continuity of the profound form of conservatism he represented. A profound conservatism is radical, in the sense of being rooted. Yeats speaks of his ideal woman 'rooted in one dear perpetual place', and of radical

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innocence, ideas only a profound conservative can appreciate. The conservatism I am speaking of has this Yeatsian radical innocence. It has, besides, the following features:

 

(a) It believes in the continuity of a society and in its traditions, particularly spiritual traditions.

 

(b) Its focus on spiritual matters stems from its acceptance of a Transcendental Reality which, nevertheless, pervades and permeates life and the world.

 

(c) It accepts the fundamental proposition that all are equal in the eyes of God but it stops short of accepting that all are therefore equal in the world, though as I shall later assert, we must move towards a reordering of gender and caste relations in modern times. Such a move would not be a negation of a profound conservatism.

 

(d) The inequalities we see are fundamental to life. While we must naturally strive to do everything humanly possible to give succour to the disadvantaged, it must be clearly understood that a sentimental humanism or a naive humani-tarianism are no answers to human problems of inequality. A spiritual sense of human unity is a necessary part of a profound conservatism.

 

(e) Society is the secular or temporal manifestation of God's purpose. It is organised subtly and everyone has a place and a purpose in God's plan. The conservative imagination is teleological in character.

 

(f) Society has an organic unity and it should be the purpose of man to discover that unity.

 

(g) Overturning society in the name of revolution is , hardly the conservative idea of how men and women must conduct themselves in society. Evolution and the refinement of one's consciousness is a preferable ideal to revolution. Man is constantly Becoming.

 

(h) The conservative thinker is, therefore, vocal in the negation of laissez-faire capitalism and the evils of such a social organisation. Laissez-faire market-driven economies: breed an unrestrained materialism. 

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(i) Finally the conservative is likely to promote a coalition between classes. S/he is likely to accept Coleridge's views on a clerisy which will provide leadership in society and s/he is likely to see the middle-class insular mind as an obstacle to the necessary link the clerisy must have with the people who are rooted to the soil. Yeats with great acuteness saw the unity of the aristocrat and the beggar and was opposed to bankers, priests and clerks, who only distorted the integrity of the individual and of society.

 

To cut this part of the exploration short, it is my view then, that an intellectual defined by conservative impulses is likely to have a stake in nation-building, in culture both in its inward and external dimensions. Above all in his or her radical critique of culture and nationhood, he or she is more often than not going to draw on a usable past, a past informed by spiritual traditions. In Hindu India this is likely to mean choosing from the different Vedantic traditions or going away from Vedanta to embrace one or other heterodox Darsanas or philosophies current in India. In this essay I shall focus on the Vedantic dimensions, partly due to my Samskara, and partly because I do not feel qualified to speak of other theistic traditions like Islam or Christianity in India, and also I have little sympathy with heterodox theologies because of their denial of God. Also as a strategy I believe a personal narration or response has the advantage of coherence and intensity, and clearly it is impossible for me to detach my subjectivity from such an enquiry. My enquiry is, therefore, informed by a conservative impulse to draw from the past, particularly the recent past of the nationalist period, and to delineate its main features which will help us to define our idea of Indian nationhood.

 

By temperament and upbringing I am theistic and I believe that if I were to explore my own relations with the theistic forms of philosophy, I would, in a way, be focusing sharply on the related questions of culture, conservative intellectual-ism, the spiritual traditions of our land and our conception of

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the Indian nation. I shall therefore embark on this personal narrative by quickly surveying some important landmarks in the nineteenth century and twentieth century to show how modernity in India was implicated in our spiritual traditions. I am, of course, referring to the movement from Derozio to Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the establishment of the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, the Prarthana Samaj in Western India, the Arya Samaj in the North and the political, cultural and educational offshoots of these events. The Indian Renaissance, as it is called, is rooted in our spiritual traditions.

 

II

 

Ram Mohan Roy is rightly called the father of Indian nationalism but it is remarkable how much his work in the public domain depended on his inward apprehension of his spiritual provenance. He effected reforms in Hindu society because he had a non-sectarian view of his Vedic religion. In 181.4 he started the Atmiya Sabha which was a forerunner of the Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1828. These social and religious activities were to run parallel to the political regeneration he attempted to bring about. The Brahmo Samaj in its long history is inextricably linked to the nationalist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Roy called for the purification of the Hindu system which he felt retarded spiritual progress and national progress. He wrote: "I regret to say the system adhered to by the Hindus is not well-calculated to promote their political interest. The distinction of castes, introducing of divisions and sub-divisions among them, has entirely deprived them of political feeling, multitude of religious rites and ceremonies and the laws of purification have totally disqualified them from undertaking any difficult enterprise. It is, I think, necessary that some change should take place in their religion at least for the sake of the political advantage and social comfort." With this as his motivation, Roy sought to go back to the philosophical portion of his Vedic tradition and to reconcile it with the Unitar-

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ian views he had derived from his contact with English and American philosophers. The oneness of God and the oneness of man thus became his faith. It was to be a faith which would move the elite sections of Bengali society and generate a rich stock of social, educational, political and intellectual ideas in Bengal. This had an impact elsewhere in the country and perhaps it is no accident that many of the Bengalis who were associated with the Indian National Congress were also Brahmos by faith. We must not forget the important religious and social ideas which Brahmos like Keshab Chandra Sen or Sitanath Tattvabushan initiated nor those by non-Brahmos like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in reaction to the Brahmos. Tagore's Gora dramatises this aspect of Indian modernity and is perhaps one of the most illuminating of literary texts to emanate from Brahmoism.

 

If the Brahmos held sway in East India, the Arya-Samaj dominated the North and part of the West. Swami Dayanand Saraswati is another example of a person whose inner life reflected nation-building activity. In 1875 he established the Arya Samaj in Bombay and the Samaj spread to other parts of the country. His Satyarth Prakash is a defence of Vedic religion and is based on his philosophic interpretation of the Vedas. Dayanand accepted caste but deplored its modification. He did not accept caste as birth oriented. Instead he stressed moral character and projected a view of Varna as flexible and mobile. A person could become a Brahmin by his actions, or fall in the societal order due to despicable actions. Dayanand saw no sanction for untouchability in the Vedas or for the discrimination against women. He was the first to use the term Swarajya, and perhaps the first nationalist to advocate Swadeshi. Dayanand, in other words, anticipated the agenda of Indian nationalism and, in particular, one sees Gandhiji's non-violent Satyagraha as having many points in common with Dayanand's discourse of resistance to national ills, foreign hegemony and injustice. The point is that the nationalist in Dayanand cannot be separated from the expounder of Vedic philosophy.

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In the West of India too figures like Justice Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak furthered social and nationalist causes. While Ranade was a Rishi-like figure in his relation to Gokhale (he was also a friend of Dayanand) he was forward looking and saw Western education as a solution to Indian backwardness. Tilak resisted Ranade because nativism was at odds with Ranade's Westernised ways; but Gokhale who represented the middle path of moderation revered him, likening him to Eknath and Tukaram in his enthusiasm. Ranade was fired by a religious conviction about India's manifest destiny and acted on that belief, but it was Gokhale, the founder of the Servants of India Society who imbibed the best qualities of his mentor and who converted what he learnt into a Karma Yoga of service. An optimist, he believed in the perfectibility of man through social action. His was a syncretic philosophy, a life devoted to constitutional change. His was the liberal mind at its best and we need not doubt the spiritual foundations of this mind which were thoroughly Indian and which were embodied in institutions like the Prarthana Samaj. For him politics had to be spiritualised and the Servants of India Society attempted just that.

 

When we turn to Tilak we see religious passion fusing into an almost xenophobic and chauvinistic patriotism. Tilak was an agitator, a leader of the Extremists, a man of instinct and fervour. He wrote the Gita Rahasya, an original treatise on a text which many nationalists either were attracted to or commented upon. Today we see fundamentalist forces at work in our society and regrettably they draw inspiration from the fiery platform of Tilak. Tilak's sacrifice and assertion of Swaraj are important aspects of our national struggle but our point now is not whether Tilak was a force for good or bad but only that one cannot understand nationalist extremism without acknowledging the place of revivalist Hinduism in it. A corollary is the extremist movement in Bengal where the nation was transformed into Mother India and a whole tradition of Sakti and Tantrik worship underscored the recourse to violent revolutionary methods. I shall be referring to this later.

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I believe that in this somewhat potted survey I have said enough to demonstrate the intimate links nationalist discourse had with an Indian spiritual provenance. The two have to be seen together and to ignore these connections is completely to misread the main currents of modern Indian culture and nationhood. Lest I be misunderstood, the survey has touched only on Hindu traditions, but the work of Ferozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai Naoroji, of Badruddin Tyabji, of Pandita Rama Bai, of C.J. Andrews and Maulana Azad to take names at random, clearly speak of a multiplicity of religious traditions at work in our country. This pluralism is central to our culture and it is perhaps the most valuable lesson we have learnt about ourselves - that we are the proud inheritors of a catholic view of life where narrow religious and domestic walls will not negate our multiple identities, our pluralism and diversity. If I choose to speak of a Hindu theistic identity it is because I know that best. I certainly do not claim an exclusive status for it but would assert its centrality to nationalist consciousness.

 

III

 

Having outlined the salient features of India's Renaissance, I shall now undertake a somewhat personalised narrative to dramatise the conflicts of the contemporary cultural critic or intellectual engaging with questions of nationhood. The first conflict I want to dramatise is the question of writing in English. English, as McCully has shown, is deeply implicated in nationalist discourse. Our freedom was won with English but it is necessary to point out that there was always an uneasiness about it. Our modern literature is replete with instances of this conflict. However, the modern intellectual cannot wish away the presence of this language in our conceptual universe and I want to draw attention to the work done by many of our men of religion who, while they sought to explore their inner lives, almost always found a parallel with the national life. I refer to autobiographies by Yogananda

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Paramahamsa, Swarrti Rarndas, Purohit Swami and Gandhiji, not to speak of the deeply subjective writings of Sri Aurobindo. Mahatma Gandhi in The Story of My Experiments with Truth points out how Indians are not accustomed to write autobiographies which are Western in origin. He opts to speak of his life as a series of experiments with truth and I believe he succeeds in showing a life always in the process of becoming. Gandhiji wrote his work in Gujarati but it was translated into English and it is with the English work that I am presently concerned. It dramatises the dilemma of the modern Indian intellectual where one is compelled to clothe, in a foreign form, deeply felt Indian values. The conflict, I believe, is still central to the way the contemporary intellectual represents himself or herself and the nation. In Gandhiji, for example, the scene where he is describing his sinful cohabitation with his wife, when he should have been tending his dying father, implies that his sin cost him his father. This for me is a deeply felt Indian emotion. It blighted Gandhiji's life and his entire emphasis on Ahimsa and Satyagraha can be seen at one level as emanating from that one sinful episode in his life. But in the terms of my personalised argument, it is not Gandhiji's sin alone. It is mine and ours as well, because if there is one feature which one kind of the modern Indian intellectual grapples with it is this question of sin, of the claims of the body, of guilt about it. Gandhiji's impact has been so deep that the austerity and self-abnegation he practised has in turn informed the responses of the modern Indian intellectual. In anything this kind of modern Indian intellectual undertakes there is this deep distrust of the life of the senses, this revulsion for the body and its uses. To some extent it is also responsible for the general intellectual tendency often visible in University academicians to shy away from the world. And to add to this there was the other Gandhiji, the Gandhiji who saw in the Gita the message of Karma, of activity. The consequences, I believe, of a Gandhian philosophy, deeply rooted in the Gita's ethic of Karma, has been to ensure that the intellectual

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who is at the cutting edge of nation-building activity, will not allow emotion and instinct-free play. The consequences of Gandhianism are that a completely rational apprehension of the world has resulted in an inability to give freedom to the imagination. It has created a utilitarian, Puritanical mind set. This intellectual provenance must not be minimised because out of it, after all, came a Vinoba Bhave. I am not minimising the importance of Karma but the anti-aesthetic Gandhian way has in it the seeds of its own deconstruction because Man does not live by Duty alone. He or she needs Beauty too.

 

The attractive alternative to Gandhiji is, of course, Tagore. Tagore celebrated the senses and he represents for me the complement to Gandhiji in the modern Indian mind. Tagore's Brahmo background ensured that he would apprehend the unique and essential truths of Vedanta. But the poetry of the Vedic hymns and of the Upanishadic utterances convinced Tagore that the world ought not to be denied or negated. So Tagore engaged with Maya. The doctrine of Maya, as Ramakrishna Parama-hamsa has pointed out, has two sides to it. On the one hand Maya does mean illusion, the not-self, the false, the transient, whose evil influence on human beings we are daily witness to. According to this view one has to transcend Maya and reach out to the One behind the Many. Difference is evil, Unity is good. That clearly is a dominant view among a large number of people, but there is another view of Maya which Sri Ramakrishna advances and which Tagore held fast to and this stems from the realisation that the One pervades and permeates the universe, that the world, nay human existence, is nothing more than God's play, His Leela. Seen this way one accepts the world with all its contradictions and inconsistencies, one celebrates difference and plurality, recognising the play of diversity to be only the emanation of the One Self, the Godhead, from which we come.

 

Tagore's entire career offers the modern Indian intellectual an important balance to Gandhiji. It allows one to be in the world and to take interest in what is happening around

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one. Indeed Tagore's own institution building is based on his recognition of this principle of unity in diversity. And it is a lesson the modern Indian intellectual ought not to forget easily. Tagore's provenance owes not a little to the Vaisnavism practised in Bengal from Chaitanya's times. Bhakti of the Tagorean kind foregrounds Beauty and the aesthetic, and does have a link with texts as ancient as the Narada Bhakti Sutras, or Jayadeva's Gita Govinda. It celebrates the body and the world and takes delight in the plenitude and variety of nature. Bhakti itself is a democratising tendency and clearly broke through caste and ritualistic taboos. The great Azhwars and Nayanmars were not all Brahmins and many of them came from a working-class background. The sociology of Bhakti has been extensively commented upon but I wish to point to its twin features of intense personal feeling and intense community feeling, both of which exercised an important influence on Tagore. Tagore's example complements the Mahatma's. Both had a deeply felt inner life and in both, this inwardness co-existed with a deep concern for the people at large.Jn Gandhiji it took the form of an austere sense of Duty. In Tagore it took an aesthetic form, a love of Beauty and of God. Both Gandhi and Tagore together account for the best in modern intellectual life in India, and the modern Indian intellectual is likely to derive inspiration from both.

 

No modern intellectual with a spiritual cast of mind can escape the influence of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda and their disciples. Sri Ramakrishna represented a high point in Indian spirituality, the quintessential moment, the culmination of over five thousand years of experiment with Godliness in India. The remarkable thing about him was that he experimented with a variety of religious traditions, including Christianity and Islam, and effortlessly reached high levels of religious consciousness through these various religious traditions. The lesson the modern intellectual learns from Sri Ramakrishna is the les-son of a positive secularism, a catholic respect for the variety of religious experience. Once touched by the spirit of Sri

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Ramakrishna, no intellectual can accept the small minded-ness of religious sectarianism, the ignoble agenda of com-munalism, the destructive and divisive politics of casteism. Sri Ramakrishna was truly catholic. On this foundation of a catholic spirituality, Swami Vivekananda built an edifice of social and religious service. The Ramakrishna Mission and the Sarada Mission embody in themselves the spirit of their progenitors. Most important they are the living manifestations of Swami Vivekananda's burning patriotism born through personal Sadhana and sacrifice. A modern intellectual in India has much to learn about social service as an aspect of spiritual life from this particular tradition.

 

Anyone at all alert to the spiritual and cultural barometers of our times cannot but remember the contemporaneous presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Shirdi Sai Baba, Sri Ramana Maharishi and the Paramacharya of Kanchi. Each in his or her Sadhana, I believe, exemplified the ancient Indian truth about Satyagraha, self-abnegation, self-absorbed meditation, and the inward gaze. None escaped from the world but each established an original relationship with it. Each of them helped us to include the world and transcend it in one's scheme of things. I am thoroughly convinced that the Sadhana of these great souls provided a counterbalance to what Sri Aurobindo has referred to as the asuric forces which were in the ascendant in our times, the public face of which was world wars, revolutions, violence and nuclear conflagration. That we have not destroyed ourselves over and over again is because the spiritual energy these souls generated proved so invincible, that even Hitler and other Satan-driven figures retracted in the face of it. This is my article of faith and as an intellectual I am proud to wear it on my sleeve. Our men of religion were first-class patriots and their contribution to our freedom and our representation of nationhood cannot be over-emphasised.

 

In much of what I have said so far the relation of gender issues to the spiritual life has not been specifically addressed. Gender questions determine our imaginative conception of

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nationhood. Historically the nativist response to British colonial rule was to demarcate an essential, pure, subjective spiritual realm distinguished from the public, secular space. More often than not this subjective inner realm was feminised and the Nation was seen as taking its origin in a purely feminine space. Bankim Chandra exploited the symbolic potential of such a mind set and conceived of Bharata Mata and his heroines in Anand Math and Debi Chaudhurani are idealised versions of Indian womanhood. The modulation from this conception of the Indian woman informed by the spirit of Sita, Tara, Savitri and Mandodari, to India herself as woman, and the further linking of India as Mother with the Mother Goddess, was natural and inevitable. Sri Aurobindo's Bhawani Mandir is an articulation of this idea. As I pointed out earlier the Shakti cult in many parts of India provided the necessary spiritual foundations for this nationalist conception. And yet it is clear that while it might have served a useful purpose of arousing patriotic feelings when we were a subject race, it is a conception which is severely limited in a contemporary context. I have deep veneration for the traditional conception of Indian womanhood, but I am acutely aware of the human costs involved in the imposed self-abnegation on woman by a patriarchal social structure. From the profoundly conservative standpoint I have adopted I would expect the modern Indian intellectual to reorder these relations in order to preserve that which is valuable and reject that which is unacceptable today. Clearly gender relations must be based on equality, and this equality is based on spiritual foundations. Our myth of Siva and Sakti and our iconic representations of Ardhanariswara make for a positive and radical reinterpretation in favour of gender equality and opposition to sexual or other forms of exploitation. No less a person than Gandhiji has spoken in favour of the androgynous mind. There is something of the woman in every man and something of man in every woman and it is time that the binary opposition between men and women gives place to a transcendental conception of the essential

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unity of man and woman. To my mind, and the recent work by Lata Mani bears me out, Mother worship with all the colourful ritual and litany is an extremely potent weapon for a reorientation of gender relations. Woman worshipping the Mother acquires the attributes of Sakti. Man worshipping the Mother acquires the necessary humanity and veneration for Woman. These cannot but be positive contributions to nation-building.

 

Kancha Illaiah has made a bold effort to question Hindu values and practices in Why I am Not a Hindu ? Without going into the merits of his arguments we can concede that if Indian society has to be regenerated the social relations between castes will also have to be reordered. In a profoundly conservative sense I do not have any illusions that caste will disappear, but I do believe that it can be made relatively unimportant for our public life by taking our inspiration from the profoundly humanistic aspect of our spiritual traditions advanced by figures like Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and, of course, Mahatma Gandhi, all of whom focussed on the individual and promoted the quest for self-perfection. In such a discourse who cares if you are man or woman, Brahmin or Dalit? The subtle spiritual unity of individuals moving towards God will ensure a glorious future for this Karma Bhoomi of ours. The intellectual driven by a conservative quest to interpret the past for the sake of the present, thus, becomes a cultural analyst and that in turn has its obvious relationship with questions of nationhood. I am convinced that those of us in academic life would do well to study the immediate past of our nation and draw lessons for ourselves and society. The lessons, I am convinced, will only be positive ones. Amal Kiran's life was a spiritual Sadhana devoted to these concerns and these concerns were in profound ways realised in Sri Aurobindo's Vision of Man rising to the Divine and when the moment came, of Divinity descending on the aspirant. That Aurobindonian quest should be ours as well. Nothing less than a supra-mental consciousness should satisfy the intellectual and if the profoundly conservative intellectual makes the effort that ideal could be achieved.

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Of Transience and Transformation: The Ebb and Flow of Creativity

 

 

AMAL KIRAN is a scholar of extraordinary depth and understanding. His intuitive analysis of Sri Aurobindo's insights offers a unique instance of the creative integration of scholarship and inner vision. I, for one, have been greatly benefited by his critiques of Aurobindian poetry and poetics. His is not a mere re-rendering of the master's voice but a creative interpretation. He never takes anything on trust, and his writings evidence his relentless intellectual curiosity and inquiring mind. Amal Kiran, I believe, is essentially a poet in whom the creative inner-view and the critical intellect coincide. In what follows, I have attempted an exploration of the interface of creativity and the human mind in the line of the intuitive methodology that informs Amal Kiran's readings. The idea of time, ageing and the creative tension had always been in some corner of my mind, and I was always intrigued by the manifestation of these in the poetry of Wordsworth and Yeats. So this felicitation volume proffered me the ideal context for problematising these issues in a new light.

 

* * *

 

The creative is of course more important than the creator or the created, for it is often the most elusive, the most unpredictable and the most incomprehensible. Almost every creative artist and writer would vouch for this fact. Why and how does this activity take place? And when, actually? It might not be easy to pinpoint this factor. For despite the plethora of theories and counter-theories, the wealth of actual evidence and data collated from creative artists upon

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which many psychologists and psychoanalysts have built their own interpretations, the actual act and its manifestation remains for the most part mysterious. Insightful creative artists and writers have recorded minutely what happens during the process of creativity; however, they themselves sound a little unsure about that unleashing of the fount of the creative which spurs forth the act of creation. There might be many external agents that trigger off like the episode of the hunter and the wounded bird as in the case of Valmiki. There might also be many internal causes that could account for the act. However, the creative is so amorphous and protean that it takes many shapes - any shape - and remains the elusive and also the transient. The energy does not last for long - it wanes and ebbs, and so often traces a trajectory of pain and longing. It is ineffable. Perhaps it is the ineffable.

 

In the Hindu cremation rites among the many unique mantras that are chanted, there is one that remains for a slightly longer time in the hearts of the genuine listeners:

 

Vayur anilam amrtam athedam bhasmantam sariram

Aum krato smara krtam smara krato smara krtam smara

 

(May this life enter into immortal breath; then may this body end in ashes. O intelligence remember, remember what has been done. Remember, O intelligence, what has been done. Remember.)

 

Only the memory of what has been done remains; all else disappears into the ashes of the past. Perhaps it is this irrepressible desire to eternalise the present before it lapses into the past that surfaces as the creative? Or even the realisation of the evanescence of life as it ebbs away unpredictable and unpossessed? The Will would search around for anything to grasp on to and would that result in the creative? Is the creative finally a mere by-product of the human mind? Or is there a higher realisation that penetrates from some other higher regions of the human soul at least momentarily? In the Isa Upanishad we read:

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Hiranmayena patrena satyasyapihitam mukham

Tat tvam ptisan apavrnu satyadharmaya drstaye

 

(The face of truth is covered with a golden disc. Unveil it, O Pusan, so that I who love the truth may see it.)

 

The creative act is the unmasking of this everyday truth. It is the descent of the pratibha and the ascent of the human spirit that sees into the heart of things and even sees beyond light into Light itself. It is the ineffable frarisforrning itself into the seeing and the seen. The poet, the artist, come to be in the process of the birth of the poem, the work of art. As Heideggger puts it so cleverly: what is a work of art? That which is created by the artist. Who is the artist, then? He who creates a work of art. Thus they are mutually interlinked - the work of art and the creator. The entire process of creativity vaguely resembles the primal art of creation itself. The created universe brings Eswara into being. Thereby rests the mystery of the creative.

 

The idea that the creative act is bound with the concept of time as evanescent and passing might sound a bit too overstretched: but this is an unavoidable realisation that almost all creative minds are given to at some or other point in their life. In The Spiritual Exercises of Nikos Kazantzakis, entitled, The Saviors of God, the Greek poet writes: "I recall an endless desert of infinite and flaming matter. I am burning! I pass through immeasurable, unorganized time, completely alone, despairing, crying in the wilderness." (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960, p. 82)

 

This cry in the wilderness is the fate of the insightful poet who has tasted the profundity of vision that the creative moment afforded, which was but a fleeting glance! This but underscores the evanescence of time! Time is felt reality. It is the change, transformation that every living thing in the universe undergoes. There is absolutely nothing that we could define as time, per se. It is the totality of past, present and future as we envisage it from our dynamic state of living. The moment that passes by is now a thing of the past;

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none can freeze it. Neither can we realise the future unless we let go the present, by which time that future becomes the present and automatically a thing of the past as soon as we realise it. As psychologists would vouch for, we can only experience something that undergoes a transformation into the past. This would amount to saying that there is no present at all as everything has to pass through into the past before it is realised by the human senses. In other words, only the past exists as the future does not become a reality until it ceases to be so and the present is so negligible a period to be real at all. Simultaneously, we are given to understand that the past too is something that is virtually unrealisable as present. In short, there is no past, present or future at all - in existence - but a constant and relentless becoming. "All being is nothing but becoming." Socrates points out that the unexamined life is not worth living. This is the predicament of the thinking mind. The creative experience creates a present that is relishable, while it grapples with the experience of transience and temporality. Raso vai sah - "Bliss verily is the essence of existence", says the Taittiriya Upanishad (7.1). However, the creative artist/poet who experiences that bliss is most often than not left with the burning sense of an absence that desires more and more to be re-lived. "After such knowledge what forgiveness?", writes T.S. Eliot.

 

Time could be seen in different aspects - the conventional and the biological. As we measure conventional time by the swinging of the pendulum or the lengthening of the shadows, or the movements of the hands of a watch, we realise the internal time by the change of our inner perceptions. If we are eagerly awaiting an event or a person we might feel the drag of time, but on the other hand, when we are in the thick of some activity we are not even aware of the passage of time. Time has different effects in different emotional situations: pain tells severely on the victim while happiness is virtually felt after it is past. These experiences would go a long way in evidence of the inner experience of time, which

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is no constant. The outer conventional time is supposed to be maintained at a normally universally accepted regularity. Although there are stretchings and squeezings of temporal experience in different spatial locations, under normal circumstances, time is more or less uniform, in given situations, at least its effect is uniformly spaced. Time, decay, old age and death are real for all living beings, however varied be the response to them. Consider Corneille's famous observation: "Every moment of life is a step towards death."

 

The decay of the living body and the instability of the world, its pleasures and pains alike have time and again been the focus of attention of religion and philosophy. We read in the Bhagavad Gita: anityam, asukham lokam imamprapya bhajasva mam. (Thou who hast come into this insubstantial and painful world, turn to Me.) Let us not miss the Buddhist connotation in these lines: the Buddha recognised the essential tragic sense of worldly existence - the Dukkha. In order to overcome Dukkha he propounded the Dharma and the Sangha.

 

In one of the most moving poetic passages in Adi Sankara we come across these lines:

 

Ayur nasyati pasyatam pratidinam yati ksayam yauvanam

 Pratyaydnti gatah punarna divasah kalo jagatbhaksakah

Laksmistoyatarangabhahgacapala vidyuncalam jwitam

Tasmattvam saranagatam saranda tvam raksa raksadhuna

(Sivaparadhdksamapana stotram)

 

(Life ebbs away each second each minute, Kala - time - is the eater of the world, and Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth, is as transient and fickle as the breaking of the wave of water; jivitam - life - is as evanescent as lightning - vidyunchalam -and each moment life ebbs away. Youth, like all these is equally transient and disappears in no time at all. Therefore I seek refuge in Thee, O Lord Siva, I am the saranagata.)

 

This is no negative view of the world but a truthful account of the vanishing nature of all and everything. Time is the jagat,

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time is the jagatbhakshaka. This is indeed a mature vision considering the age of the man who composed the verse. Such a vision of the fickleness of life most usually dawns on the ageing mind and is one of the signs of the setting in of old age. In another well-known hymn, Sankara writes:

 

Balastavatkridasakta

Tarunastavattarururakta

Vrdhastavaccintamagnah

Pare brahmani ko api na lagnah

 

(As a child, one is absorbed in play, as a young man, attached to women. As an old man, one is lost in one's thoughts; Alas! no one is attracted to the Supreme Brahman.)

 

This recognition is the beginning of wisdom.

In "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" Carl Jung notes:

 

From the psychological point of view life in the hereafter would seem to be a logical continuation of the psychic life of old age. With increasing age, contemplation and reflection, the inner images naturally play an even greater part in man's life. "Your old men shall dream dreams." That to be sure presupposes that the psyches of the old men have not become wooden or entirely petrified. In old age one begins to let memories unroll before the mind's eye, and musing, to recognise oneself in the inner and outer images of the past. This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter, just as in Plato's view, philosophy is a preparation for death.

(London: Fontana, 1983, pp. 351-52)

 

Old age is thus a preparation for the afterlife when the soul or that divine element in human beings continues its earthly being in a different form. But although such a continuous dwelling on the life after death appears to be the condition of the aging human psyche, the sensitive, creative mind recognises early enough the fact that authentic or real existence surfaces

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only when life is lived in a continuous present, devoid of regret, remorse and misgiving. These are obviously contrapuntal pulls. Human existence is thus a complex condition caught between the paradox of now-and-then. Tasmatjagrata, "therefore be aware", says Adi Sankara. And yet for the ordinary mortal there appears to be a contradiction. Chuang Tzu talks about this as "great deception":

 

The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.

 

(See Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book

of Living and Dying, San Francisco: Rider, 2002, p. 17)

 

How does the creative mind respond to this dialectic? The creative is always a dynamic force. It operates from multiple planes. In the Aurobindian scheme of things, it manifests itself in many levels, and depending on the plane of its source and the corresponding creative inspiration that organises its manifestation, it varies.

 

With the insight of a true mystic Sri Aurobindo has'observed that all problems of existence are problems of harmony. And the apparent paradox of spatio-temporal human existence could only be reconciled through the poetic. To live here and now with the knowledge of the passing of each moment and the impossibility of possessing the moment in its totality calls for a yogic transformation of human's being. Such a realisation could also be achieved through the creative act.

 

W.B. Yeats is a unique instance of the creative-vital that constantly confronted the tragic situation of human's being. "Out of quarrel with the world," wrote Yeats, "we make rheto-ric, out of quarrel with ourselves, we create poetry." Old age for Yeats was a "tin-can tied to a dog's tail". In a tiny unique poem, "Politics", he actualises the inner trauma and tension of old age:

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How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

Yet here's a travelled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there's a politician

That has read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war's alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

 

Examples like this are too many in Yeats. His was a poetry of passion, of bodily and corporeal energies and their tensions. His poetry was an escape into personality, a sublimation of the vital, the ojas, as we would term it in Indian psychology. Yeats gave free access to the poetic mind and allowed the complete free play of the creative to surface at free will from whichever levels. In another short poem fancifully titled "A Drinking Song", he writes of the dying of sexual energies that cause physical morbidity:

 

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

 That's all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

 I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh.

 

The sexual energy is so closely bound up with the passion for the absolute - in fact for the illuminated, these two are the two faces of one single sheet; tear one you tear the other too. That the sexual leads us on to peak experience is a fact well recognised by many psychologists and philosophers. The resemblance to the spiritual kinesis is so obvious yet complex. The releasing of the sexual energy leaves the inordinate craving for more; it is as if with lightning speed the mystical

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spasm withdraws after providing momentary glimpses of a superior harmony. The sexual is bound by virtue of its ontology to the physical and the vital - it is but a showcase of the possible. And yet there is no denying the similarity in its transient passing with the creative. Yeats's confession of his sexual frustration is frank and unashamed - he allows the poem to shape itself and flow unconstrainedly as the raw yearning of the physical that recognises the ebb and flow of time - the tragic sense of being.

 

However it is in "The Wild Swans at Coole", that Yeats achieves that poetic magic that is so often associated with him. The poem opens with a graphic description of natural beauty:

 

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

 The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

 Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

 Are nine-and-fifty swans.

 

The scene is so composed, so serene. The swans symbolise the majesty of a long lost time that is frozen in the inner mind of the poet who looks upon them, and "now my heart is sore". Their hearts, on the other hand "have not grown old" and

 

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

 

The poet compares his tragic situation with their drifting lives, "mysterious, beautiful" and feels the drag of a profound sorrow:

 

Among what rushes will they build

By what lake's edge or pool

Delight men's eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

 

The poem is unique in that it embodies the deep tragedy inherent in human time that is so ephemeral and eva-

 

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nescent. It matters little that the swans are also biological creatures that are not free from the bonds of physical existence. In the text of the poem, they are transformed poetic symbols that represent the dynamic/static unity of an ideal that exists so remote from the world of physical decay and decrepitude. Nothing and no one can reach their majestic state, but their very sight infuses the poet with a heightened vision. "The bell-beat of their wings above" his head sounds like some angelic annunciation of sorts. And yet the poet is torn with remorse at the unstoppable passing of time. In the final analysis the poem refuses to yield anything more than this deep and profound regret. Even from the opening lines onwards this feeling is built up and later through image after image led towards a culmination of uncertainty. The poet is already in the autumn of his life, and the "woodland paths are dry"; even the "water" and sky are "still". The only movement is when the birds suddenly rise "upon their clamorous wings". The poet bemoans that earlier day when he first heard them, and the nostalgia for the lost days becomes hauntingly real, and adds to the agony of that final loss "when I awake someday/To find they have flown away?" The transience is what becomes so tauntingly real throughout the poem. And it maintains a dhvani of such deep magnitude that the poet fades away alongside the ebbing sound of the swan wings. The words, "Mysterious beautiful," resonate to create a magic of silence afterwards. W.B. Yeats does not attempt to resolve the tension of the transience of time of past and the present in any manner whatsoever in his poem, but leaves the finer sentiment of time displaced and irrecoverably lost, unresolved and open. Such is the human situation - irredeemable, passe. However one can discern a certain element of the egotistical sublime in the last stanza where the poet feels that the swans will be there to delight some other eyes somewhere hence, while he is left with the trace of their absence. The poet certainly knows that authentic life is when the mind is free from such self-doubts and regrets.

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In an earlier poem, "A Dialogue of Self and Soul", we read these beautiful lines that remind us of the painful yet wonderful feeling of reconciliation with the deformity of old age and its discrepancies:

 

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

 We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.

 

This feeling of being blessed and being able to bless all other life is a near-Yogic view that dawns upon the mind that is completely drained of any regret or misgiving - it is akin to the nascent innocence of the just-born. It is something more inspired than the amateurish jealousy that taunts the poet while he looks upon the swans moving about, "unwearied, lover-by lover..." Here the poet has transcended the corporeal and grazed the overmental levels. In Coleridge's "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", when the mariner beholds the sea creatures playing about in the sea and in a total thoughtless state blesses them from deep within his heart, the albatross that hung like a cross round his neck falls off on its own - he is released of his sinful bondage. This is a vision that beatifies from within; the outside phenomenal world is but a mere occasional cause by simply being there. Life when it is lived from within and liberated from the then and later becomes fresh and uncontaminated. Then time appears to start afresh. The creative mind finds its consummation in itself. It is the sublimation of the vision from within. Such static-dynamism can be approached from the thinking vital also. According to Sri Aurobindo, all British Romantic poetry could be considered as Rajasic as occurring from the vital and emotional planes. (See "The Sources of Poetry", written in 1912; first published in Advent, 1953). Interestingly, William Wordsworth could be seen as the one single instance of a didactic poet who through a vital engagement with the

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dynamic aspects of creativity comes to discover the very soul of being - approaching it through not a silencing of the intellect, but on the other hand, through singular reflection. Let me take a closer look at what I hold to be Wordsworth's greatest achievement in this direction - "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". The poem opens with the almost oft-repeated poetic feelings of nostalgia for the past:

 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth and every common sight, To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore; -

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

 

A few lines later we read: "But yet I know, where'er I go,/ That there hath past away a glory from the earth." Now this poem has been read and reread by a number of poets and critics alike and its interpretations are innumerable, and my intention here is not to reread the entire poem. But what touches me is that Wordsworth is not merely crying over the things that are past and bygone, but the anguish that the poem enfolds is the angst of creativity. The glory that has passed away is the glory that the creative eye had proffered him. Of course the overall effect of the poem is the touch of profound sadness at the human situation - the tragic sense of being. However, the poet, after a longish philosophical argument, comes to comfort himself with certain convincing arguments and reasonings, and the reader is also incorporated into this. There is the art of growing up - that is growing apart, and seeking intellectual comfort and security in the knowledge of what is abiding as a residual gift of the visionary eye. Transience is a truth but once we internalise this we learn to see the

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world afresh, unbound from the wheel of change and causality.

 

The creative surfaces in the deeps of subjectivity, offering a momentary respite, endowing the humblest phenomenon with the appearance of sublimity. Even the meanest flower that blows could give rise to the experience of the mysterious. However, the transience of the world is again highlighted by the transience of the vision. What remains for the poet is to recast the original in poetry. As the poet recognises, the writing of poetry is a momentary stay against confusion. The creative nevertheless offers a human strategy designed to overcome both the sense of temporal discontinuity and ultimately the sense of despair that such discontinuity provokes. Transience is a fact. Transformation is the magic of the creative eye. It is also to cultivate the possibility for future poetry where hope and memory are one. The rest of course is silence.

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The Rose and the Flame: Psychic and Spiritual Poetry

 

 

 

"The truth which poetry expresses," Sri Aurobindo says, "takes two forms, the truth of life and the truth of that which works in life, the truth of the inner spirit."¹ In a general way, we can say that the poetry which expresses the second form of truth is mystic. But this poetry is not something uniform. The spirit is infinite, therefore the mystic's vision of the spirit too takes many forms. And the poetry that expresses the vision cannot easily be grasped within a clear definition. However, when we study mystic poetry we discern two main movements: the psychic and the spiritual. The psychic is an inward movement "to the inner being, the Self or Divinity within us," and the spiritual is an upward movement "to a supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. ²

 

When the poetic sight reaches the inmost soul what it discovers is the heart-ocean (hrt-samudra) of divine delight and the beauty of the Real which is also the truth of the Real. The emphasis here lies on delight, of which beauty is the visible sign. This inward movement goes deeper than the emotional heart which is but the rippling surface of the ocean. When the poetic sight ascends upwards and removes the mental lid that conceals what lies beyond, it discovers the spirit's knowledge which is the luminous expression of the truth of the Real. This truth is also the beauty and delight of the Real. However the emphasis here lies on knowledge.

 

 

1. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 195.

2. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 910.

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We can then say that psychic poetry is the poetry of delight and spiritual poetry is the poetry of knowledge. Taking a suggestion from Sri Aurobindo we may say that the psychic poetry is the poetry of the kingdoms of the deathless Rose and the spiritual poetry is that of the kingdoms of the deathless Flame. He describes the first kingdoms in the following lines:

 

On one side glimmered hue on floating hue,

 In a glory and surprise of the seized soul

And a tremulous rapture of the heart's insight

And the spontaneous bliss that beauty gives,

The lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose.

(Savitri, II. 12.)

 

Such is the world of psychic poetry seen by the seer-vision. In a letter, speaking of the psychic expression in poetry, he writes: "it has less of greatness, power, wideness, more of a smaller sweetness, delicate beauty; there is an intense beauty of emotion, fine subtlety of true perception, an intimate language. The expression 'sweetness and light' can very well be applied to the psychic as the kernel of its nature."³

 

The natural habitation of spiritual poetry is the world of the deathless Flame through which the ascending path rises to the absolute Being:

 

On the other side of the eternal stairs

The mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame

Aspired to reach the Being's absolutes.

(Ibid.)

 

These kingdoms, of which the highest is the Gnostic or supramental world, manifest the truth of the Real:

They keep God's natural breath of mightiness,

 His bare spontaneous swift intensities...

(Ibid.)

 

 

3. Sri Aurobindo, Letters, on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL,Vol. 9, p. 364.

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Spiritual poetry, as distinguished from psychic poetry, has "a wider utterance, a greater splendour of light, a stronger sweetness, a breath of powerful audacity, strength and space.^"4

 

Psychic poetry is fundamentally love-poetry, for, it is through love that delight and beauty, sweetness and loving light can best express themselves. But although the origin of love is the soul yet mostly it loses its pure psychic nature due to its contact with the mind, the life-force and the body. Poetry of love - even the love of the human soul for the divine Beloved - may get diminished because of this contact and become poetry of religious fervour or prayer that does not have the beauty and fragrance of the heart in which divine joy dwells. Take the following lines:

 

Father of all, to Thee

With loving hearts we pray,

Through Him in mercy given,

The Life, the Truth, the Way;

From Heav'n Thy Throne, in mercy shed

The blessings on each bended head.

(The Book of Common Prayers)

 

Love is, first of all, personal; it is the fragrance that rises from the heart-rose of the lover towards the loved one. And poetry of love is that fragrance transmuted into rhythmic words and music. Poetry does not say, "I love"; it suggests, through the vibration of the heart transported to words, the feeling deeper than what words alone can ever express. Suggestiveness, resonance (dhvani) and musicality are the vehicles of love-poetry. Poetry is not saying but evoking. In the above lines the poet "says": "With loving hearts we pray"; it is a statement of love, not love itself. The psychic vibration has not been able to take a suggestive form which would illuminate and gladden the heart of the reader.

 

 

4. Ibid., p. 365.

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Even behind human love there can be a psychic influence. When love is not merely a vital desire it has its roots in the psyche even if one is not always aware of it. In love-poems we often feel the subdued intimations coming from the far-off source but hardly ever the direct and unmistakable touch of the soul. The feeling is generally translated in mental words:

 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and the ideal Grace.

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "How Do I Love Thee?")

 

These are beautiful lines but they are not the expression of the soul in the language of the soul. There, can be great love-poetry without the evident soul-touch. But when the soul-touch transmutes and sublimates human love, then words that embody that love vibrate deeper in the reader's soul. Take Shelley's lines:

 

I can give not what men call love,

But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above

And the Heaven's reject not, -The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow.

("To-")

 

Sri Aurobindo remarks that "it would not be easy to find a more perfect example of psychic inspiration in English literature" than these lines. And he adds that they possess "the true rhythm, expression and substance of poetry full of the psychic influence."⁵

 

5. Ibid.

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The starting point of Shelley's poem is human love but the love is interiorised and sublimated. The last traces of vital love are wiped away and what was desire becomes a worship and a yearning of the heart for the unattainable beauty. In the human love the heart tries to enclose in itself all that it desires, but the psychic love is the heart's self-offering, pure and disinterested. "The psychic love is pure and full of self-giving without egoistic demand."6 Because there is no vital desire the poet knows that the heart's worship will not be rejected by Heaven.

 

One way of getting some touch of the psychic influence is by the sublimation of human love. But there is another kind of psychic touch in poetry which is the manifestation of the soul's love and delight. However this manifestation has also to take place through language, and our language is normally a poor instrument for expressing anything that goes deeper and further than our physical, vital and mental experiences. The psychic love has to use the metaphor of the human love. "The Song of Solomon" can be taken as an example of psychic poetry which "seems to sing earthly beauty, but intends to suggest another beauty that abolishes the first."⁷ The same thing could be said about the Vaishnava poets. Chandidasa makes Radha speak about her night of love with Krishna thus:

 

ekatanu haiya mora rajani gonai/

 sukhera sagare dubi abadhi napai//

 rajani prabhata haile katara hiyay/

deha chaRi jena mora prana calx jay//

 

(My body one with his I passed the night,

I was drowned in the ocean of endless joy,

And when the day dawned it seemed to my sad heart

That my soul had gone away leaving my body behind.)

 

 

6. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 23, p. 764.

7. Albert Beguin, Poesie de la presence, Paris 1957, p. 70.

 

 

 

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This is the poetry of psychic love with an erotic undertone. This is the voice of the lover who rejoices in the union with the beloved and feels that without him she is but a soulless body.

 

"The direct psychic touch is not frequent in poetry. It breaks in sometimes - more often there is only a tinge here and there."⁸

 

Perhaps the art-form that can most adequately express the psychic influence is music, for, love, joy and beauty are more feeling than meaning. The bhakti-poets of India have always sung their poems in order to bring out more fully the psychic influence. They knew that the subtle inner melody of love could best be conveyed through music - both the pure music and the music of the poetic word. When we read poems that have a psychic touch, we are at first moved by the musicality of the words. It is the music, more than the meaning, that enters through the ears in the depth of the soul and makes the psychic influence felt.

 

John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz), the great Spanish mystic and poet, says that there is a voice that speaks from inside (que habla de dentro). Psychic poetry is that voice and poets who have ears to hear try to grasp it as perfectly as possible. As in the Vaishnava mysticism Radha, the woman in love, represents the human soul, so also for John of the Cross, the Bride (Esposa) is the human soul yearning for the love of the divine Lover (Esposo). In the dialogue between the soul and the Lover the Bride-soul says:

 

Addnde te escondiste,

Amado, y me dejaste con gemido?

Como el ciervo huiste

habiendome herido;

salt tras ti clamando, y eras ido.

("Canciones entre el Alma y el Esposo")

 

 

 

8. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 364

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(Where did you hide yourself,

 Beloved, and left me moaning?

Like a stag you fled

having wounded me;

I went out after you wailing, but you were gone.)

 

The words, simple as they are, rise from the inmost heart. They have no veil; they have a transparency that is different from mental clarity - a transparency that, we may say, lets through the sweet glow of the soul. Even the wounded heart - the pain of separation - is a joyous yearning of the soul for the Divine. It is the vipralambha (love-in-separation) which the Vaishnava poets and mystics consider to be intenser and purer than sambhoga (love-in-union).

 

The same sweetness, simplicity and clarity mark K.D. Sethna's lyric "Appeal", that has an unmistakable psychic influence. Here is the first stanza:

 

My feet are sore, Beloved,

With agelong quest for Thee;

Wilt thou not choose for dwelling This lonesome heart of me?

 

Spiritual poetry is the poetry of knowledge, of vision and of stark luminosity. It is not so much the poetry of the depth as of the height. Its source is above our mental knowledge, in the region of vijnana, the suprarational. It is the poetry of the Flame that gradually burns, as it rises higher and higher, the veils hiding the face of Truth (satyasya mukham).

 

We are making a distinction here between psychic and spiritual poetry; however we should not forget that there is no clear-cut demarcation between the two. In fact, psychic inspiration opens the soul towards the higher visions of truth. The poetry that is created in the heart illumined by the above-mental knowledge can be called psycho-spiritual poetry. About a passage from Sethna's "This Errant Life" Sri Aurobindo writes to the poet that there is a spiritual ulumination, "but it is

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captured and dominated by the inner heart and by the psychic thrill, a certain utterance of the yearning and push of psychic love for the Divine incarnate."⁹

 

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn Light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow;

For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

 And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.

 

We hear, in these lines, the heart's aspiring cry, an intense supplication that rises from the sphere of our mortality. But there is something else too. Psychic poetry is the soliloquy of the poet's soul. The speaker, the subject, is the poet. But here the poet's personality is withdrawn. "I" is replaced by "Thou": "If Thou desirest." In the Vedantic experience of oneness "Thou" and "I" are one; yet before the experience, and even after it if the human soul does not definitely merge into the absolute Spirit, the love of "I" and "Thou" remains. "Thou" is the Spirit. The poet's heart does not only lift a worship or a devotion to something afar, but puts the Spirit, "Thou", in front, so that "the unborn Light" and the "formless glory", which are realities of the spiritual world, can become incarnate love. It is, we my say, the poet's prayer to the Flame to become the Rose.

 

A somewhat similar inspiration may be detected in the following lines of George Russell (AE):

 

And with what yearning inexpressible,

Rising from long forgetfulness I turn

To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still:

White for Thy whiteness all desires burn.

Ah, with what longing once again I turn!

("Desire")

 

9. Ibid., p. 366.

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The source of spiritual poetry is above the mind; it is the poetry of a Thought and a Knowledge that lie beyond our rational thinking. There is in man an evolutionary urge to rise beyond the mind. The Upanishadic seers had realised that there was a vast world above. Poets and mystics can rise to the higher ranges of that world or get, in some extraordinary moments, intimations and lightning flashes from there, and write things that have a greater clarity of thought than philosophers can ever dream of. Mallarme, the French Symbolist poet, has sometimes caught the higher Thought by polishing and repolishing language and eliminating from it all the dross of mental thinking. However the true spiritual breaks through only on rare occasions and mostly in flashes which may leave a sense of frustration. Mallarme's line about the swan caught in the glacier

 

Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!

("Lecygne")

(Transparent glacier of flights that have not fled)

 

shows this frustration. "There can be," Sri Aurobindo writes, "no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned swan as developed by Mallarme."¹⁰ The frustration itself is an indication that the poet knows there is a region overhead. And the line itself, even though it expresses the soul's inability to rise to those "high-peaked dominions" yet catches some light of the Spirit.

 

When the real spiritual sight is there vast boundless kingdoms open up; a clear light bursts forth; the rhythm becomes full and vigorous. The Spirit itself, the spiritual Reality itself, seizes thought and transmutes it into something which is beyond thought, which is the very essence of thought. Many verses of the Upanishads are supreme examples of spiritual poetry:

 

 

10. Ibid., p. 531.

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na tatra silryo bhati na candra-tarakam nemo.

vidyuto bhanti kuto 'yam agnih/

tarn eva bhdntam anubhati sarvam

tasya bhasa sarvam idam vibhati//

(Katha Upanishad, II.2.15.)

 

(The sun does not shine there, nor the moon; the stars do not shine; the lightnings do not flash there, let alone this earthly fire. All things reflect Him who is the shining One; everything shines by his shining.)

 

tad ejati tan naijati tad dure tad u antike/

tad antarasya sarvasya tad u sarvasydsya bahyatah //

(Isha Upanishad, 5)

 

(That moves and That does not move; That is far and That is also near; That is inside everything and That also is outside everything.)

 

These lines express the Real not through a lofty and vast Idea only but also through the rhythm which is the vibration of the Spirit itself. The idea may even seem absurd to the rational mind but if we are open to the things of the Spirit, we "see" in the simplicity of the expression and the soul-penetrating rhythm, the truth of That which is above the mind.

 

Sometimes reading a line of poetry we feel a sudden illumination, a ray of light, a going-beyond. It then seems to us that what was concealed stands revealed before us, clear, simple and concrete. A higher Intelligence than our own possesses us and we seem to see the Invisible, hear the Inaudible and know the Unknowable.

The "splendour of the spirit's realms" becomes visible in the following lines:

 

The million-pointing undivided grasp

 Of its vision of one same stupendous All,

 Its inexhaustible acts in a timeless Time,

A space that is its own infinity.

(Savitri, II. 15.)

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Here we have the same kind of clarity of vision as in the Upanishads and expressed in the same kind of diction and the same simple penetrating rhythm although these lines are written in a language very different from Sanskrit.

 

Spiritual poetry, Sri Aurobindo writes, has "the luminous and assured clarity of the fully expressed spiritual experience."¹¹ Sri Aurobindo and the Upanishadic seers write from the direct spiritual experience, but even poets who have not risen to the regions above the mind grasp sometimes the flashes of those illumined heights. These flashes are not usually sustained and sometimes lose their native clarity, directness and intensity. Nevertheless we can hear in some lines, here and there, the rhythm of the heights and see the glow of the hidden glory:

 

The intolerable vastness still, to the uttermost star.

(George Russell, "Dark Rapture")

 

The infinite incantation of our selves

(Wallace Stevens, "The Poems of our Climate")

 

II ponente schiumd ne' suoi capegli

 Immensa apparve, immensa nudita

(Gabriele d'Annunzio, "Stabat nuda aestas")

 

(In her [Summer's] hair foamed the setting sun. Immense, appeared to me her immense nakedness.)

 

His spirit moves like monumental win

That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.

He is the end of things, the final man.

(Theodore Roethke, "The Far Fields")

 

Now I shall quote a few lines from poets who have consciously tried to go beyond the mind to the realms of higher spiritual knowledge.

 

The Dark has foundered and returns no more.

(Arjava, "Light's Victory")

 

 

11. Ibid., p. 354.

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and this line about "stars" by the same poet,

 

Gold-shining sentries of Truth's dwelling-place.

("Star Purified")

 

A gloom of God strewn with a million stars.

(K.D. Sethna, "Milk in Almighty Breasts")

 

and finally from the same poet,

 

A sun beyond this sun above the mind

Waits in a mystery beyond the blue:

A night more vast than the blind distances

Between our reveries and the flame they reach

Is spread between that flame and fathomless truth's

Gigantic star seen like one diamond speck

Lost in a time-transcending loneliness.

("Suns")

 

As the psychic poetry should not be confused with the poetry of religious devotion so the spiritual poetry should not be confused with the philosophical poetry. There is certainly a place for philosophy in poetry, but in the philosophical poetry the idea is of the mind and may reach the heights of pure intellect but it cannot reach beyond the mental barrier. The following couplet expresses clearly a high philosophical idea, but if we place it beside the Upanishadic verses we see the difference:

 

Anadi nidhanam brahma sabda tattvam yad aksaram

Vivartate artha-bhdvena prakriyajagato yatah

(Bhartrihari, Vakyapadiya, 1.1.)

 

(The beginningless and endless Brahman, which is the imperishable substance of the word, evolves as significant idea; and from that idea the world-process originates.)

 

The idea is clear but the rhythm that raises the idea to spiritual heights and makes verse aglow with immensity is missing here.

 

 

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But there is a spiritual philosophy that can use the language of the mind by infusing in it a clarity that is foreign to its ordinary nature:

 

All is abolished but the mute Alone.

(Sri Aurobindo, "Nirvana")

 

The bareness and simplicity, the unemphatic but superbly efficient rhythm give to the line an inevitability that lies beyond the powers of the mind. A similar line is Dante's:

 

E'n la sua volontate e nostra pace.

 (In His will is our peace.)

 

Spiritual poetry can and often does free itself from the philosophical content and directly convey the significance of the spiritual matter in a spiritual manner and through a spiritual rhythm:

 

... the sole timeless Word

 That carries eternity in its lonely sound,

 The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,

The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum

That equates the unequal All to the equal One,

The single sign interpreting every sign,

The absolute index of the Absolute.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, II.l.)

 

This passage is, at one and the same time, a description of spiritual poetry and its illustration. The Idea that spiritual poetry expresses is "self-luminous". In fact we can distinguish two elements in spiritual poetry: Thought and Vision. In spiritual poetry there is always a Thought that is beyond our present thinking, but as the poetic soul focuses its sight to ever higher summits this Thought becomes more and more luminous, it becomes a Vision. Beyond the regions of Truth-Thought, Sri Aurobindo writes, "we can distinguish a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and

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intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth-Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity."¹² Thus in the poetry of the higher spiritual regions we find an expression of the solar flame reaching towards something beyond all mental-spiritual influence -the plane of Truth-Consciousness.

 

In spiritual poetry, both the Thought and the Vision are present - the Vision growing more and more luminous and insistent as the poetic inspiration comes from higher and higher sources. How are we to distinguish between the poetry of spiritual thought and that of spiritual vision? When there is a vision the truth becomes visible and concrete. "The poetry of spiritual vision," Sri Aurobindo says, "as distinct from that of spiritual thought abounds in images, unavoidably because that is the straight way to avoid abstractness; but these images must be felt as very real and concrete things, otherwise they become like the images used by the philosophic poets, decorative to the thought rather than realities of the inner vision and experience."¹³

 

The poetry of spiritual thought is not an abstraction either. The Thought itself is "real and present"; it is incarnate and intimate to the being of the poet and it expresses truths that to the ordinary mind may seem abstract metaphysical speculations. Thus when Sri Aurobindo describes his experience of nirvana

 

Only the illimitable Permanent

Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,

Replaces all...

("Nirvana")

 

the words "Permanent" and "Peace" are not abstract notions; they are more concrete to the seer-vision than material things. Likewise in the following line of Mallarme "Nothingness" is a concrete experience:

 

 

12. Sn Aurobindo, The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 18, p. 277.

13. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 352.

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Et trouver ce Neant que tu ne connais pas!

("Tristessed'ete")

(And find the Nothingness that you do not know!)

 

In these verses, concepts that are abstract to the intellect have become concrete. Thought thus transfigured is no longer a mental thought but is a Paraclete:

 

As some bright archangel in vision flies

Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities,

 Past the long green crests of the seas of life,

Past the orange skies of the mystic mind

Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God.

(Sri Aurobindo, "Thought the Paraclete")

 

This transformed thought, as Sri Aurobindo describes it, has become visible. And with luminous images and metaphors he gives to the Thought a living body. These lines, we can say, are of the spiritual vision. The following lines possess also the illumination that is beyond mental thought:

 

A force of gloom that makes each flicker-stress

Bare the whole body of its goldenness

And yield in that embrace of mystery

A flaming focus of infinity,

A fire-tongue nourished by God's whole expanse

Through darkness of superhuman trance.

(K.D. Sethna, "Night of Trance")

 

The Vedic poetry is essentially the poetry of spiritual vision. It is the mantra, the embodiment of revelatory thought and of revelatory light, "the Word discovering the Truth and clothing in image and symbol the mystic significance of life."¹⁴ The highest prayer of the seers was to the divine Sun, the vivifier, asking him to illumine, inspire and invigorate their thoughts. The famous verse, the most sacred to the aspirants of divine truth, bears testimony to this:

 

 

14. Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 260.

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tat savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhTmahi/

dhiyo yo nah pracodayat//

(Rigveda, III. 62.10.)

 

(We meditate upon that excellent splendour

of the divine Sun:

May he impel our thoughts!)

 

In the poetry of the spiritual vision the thought itself becomes vision; apparently all mental traces vanish. What remains is pure symbol, pure rhythm and pure illumination. As an example we may take:

 

Gold-white wings a-throb in the vastness, the bird of flame went

glimmering over a sunfire curve to the haze of the west,

 Skimming, a messenger sail, the sapphire-summer waste of a

 soundless wayless burning sea.

Now in the eve of the waning world the colour and splendour

returning drift through a blue-flicker air back to my breast,

 Flame and shimmer staining the rapture-white foam-vest of

the waters of Eternity.

(Sri Aurobindo, "The Bird of Fire")

 

Here all is vision. Our usual imagination sees something but cannot grasp the real thing. But when we go behind the images - wings, bird, sail, sea, flame - the Truth-Vision shines forth.

 

The poetry that endeavours to reveal the hidden mystery of the world and man may seem hermetic and obscure to the consciousness that sees only the surface of things and the phenomenal appearance and the reality that is fragmented and darkened by the intellect. The psychic and the spiritual poetry are the creation of the human genius to reinstate reality in its pristine glory, with the help of a language that is exiled by the analytical rational mind, a language that illumines all that is distant, all that is concealed:

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Syntaxe de I'eclair! bpur langage de I'exil!

 Lointaine est I'autre rive oil le message s'illumine:...

(Saint-Jean Perse, "Exil")

 

(Syntax of lightning! O pure language of exile! Far-off is the other shore where language is illumined!)

 

Note

 

The quotations from Savitri are according to the Sri Aurobindo Brith Centenary Library (SABCL), Pondicherry: 1972.

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