Between One and One Another. Michael Jackson
Indira Gandhi, joined the group of her acolytes. From 1942 to 1952 I would visit her almost every month either in Dehra Dun or Benares, toying with the idea that I would renounce and join her ashram.
“In 1943 I entered the local college to read English literature, physics, chemistry, and mathematics, since my parents had decided that I was to pursue engineering. But thanks to the librarian, Daulat Singh Chauhan (and what a ramshackle library he had, probably containing less than 10,000 books), I embarked on a curriculum of my own. He urged me to go through ‘histories’—the history of English literature, the history of Western political thought, the history of economic ideas, the history of religion, and so forth. In one of the junk piles at the library, I found a beat-up but complete edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I persuaded my parents to have it bound and placed on the library shelf. But one fine day, out of the blue, arrived a bundle of books from my great-uncle, Bhupal Singh, author of A Survey of Anglo Indian Fiction. This bundle included Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. So 1943–1945 became two of my most academically instructive years.
“But these were also troubled years. I was being pulled in different directions. The nationalist struggle pulled me one way, a desire to be a hermit pulled me in the opposite direction, not to mention my desire to read and reflect. I was also confused about my sexuality. Though short in height and small in weight, college girls nevertheless found me attractive and I had modest sexual encounters almost every week. I bared my life in those years to my English professor, R. L. Nigam, a wonderfully well-read man, a lecher and a renegade Marxist-Leninist, who referred me to Abelard and Heloise.
“With all these quandaries, I left home in the summer of 1945 to enroll at Benares Hindu University and train to be an engineer. But my heart was not in it.”
Brijen seldom spoke of his parents, except to say he had disappointed them. But their active involvement in India's struggle for independence undoubtedly shaped his own sense of political responsibility. Though drawn to Western philosophers, particularly Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, Brijen was equally intrigued by Aurobindo Ghose and Swami Vivekananda.
Sent to England at age seven to be educated, Aurobindo returned to India fourteen years later, “thoroughly denationalized,” to find that his father was dead and his mother afflicted by senile dementia.7 After many years in the vortex of the nationalist movement, Aurobindo gradually withdrew from the world. With Mira Paul Richard, a Frenchwoman who left her husband and children to join Aurobindo, he developed his philosophy of integral yoga and founded a famous ashram in Pondicherry. Vivekananda was a disciple of Ramakrishna and integrated the contemplative and quietist philosophy of his guru with the activist spirit that came from his studies of Western and Christian thinkers.
Paying lip service to high principles is one thing; realizing them in practice is another. This may be why several of Brijen's anecdotes concerned intellectual or spiritual leaders whose own lives fell far short of their ideals—Gandhi's compromised vows of celibacy and his racist remarks about Africans, John F. Kennedy's personal failings, and so on.
In early 1946, at the end of his first year of studying at Benares Hindu University, Brijen was delayed at the railroad junction of Laksar because of the derailment of an earlier train. He was obliged to spend thirty-six hours in an overcrowded waiting room.
“As providence would have it, an ochre-robed swami, Lokeshwaranand, of the Ramakrishna Vivekananda Mission, took pity on me and kept me amused, wondering why I, who had such good knowledge of his Mission and its founders, had not made any attempt to be active in the Mission.
“These were the final years of British rule in India, and I had excellent political connections with the Congress Left. I now began an active correspondence with Swami Lokeshwaranand—two or three letters a week—and his own personal story as to why he had renounced the world made a deep impact on me. At his urging I left home to spend three months at the Ramakrishna Vivekananda Mission in Mathura, where I accidentally saw a kanya, the equivalent of a Catholic nun, having oral sex with the head swami. The swami behaved as if nothing had happened. He got up, put on his robe, took me for a walk, and explained to me that such casual sex was the stuffof Indian renunciation. The swami's sex was of no consequence, as no attachment with the novice was involved. The swami, whose name I have forgotten, was a learned man. In a discussion that I vividly recall to this day, he outlined for me the key difference between India and the West. In India, spirituality and sexuality coexisted, and the more of one did not necessarily mean the less of the other. In the West, increased spirituality meant decreased sexuality. All of a sudden, a new light dawned on me, though it could not excuse the behaior of the swami. I left Mathura after three days.”
As Brijen's story began to unfold, I was reminded of Leopold Fischer, who was born into an assimilated Jewish family in 1923, became enamored of India from an early age, and was inducted into the Dasnami Order as Agehananda Bharati. Though Bharati was six years older than Brijen, both were intellectually precocious in their youth. And while Bharati found himself more at home in India than Europe and Brijen “rejected the relevance of Hindu philosophies in [his] personal growth” to espouse an existential Marxism derived from European sources, both men shared a cosmopolitan vision that eschewed identification with any one nation, religion, or ethnicity. Thus, Bharati embraced a humanism exemplified by G. E. Moore, M. N. Roy, Russell, and Wittgenstein, while Brijen adhered to an ethos of friendship, family, and communitas that he had first glimpsed in an Indian ashram. Moreover, both Gupta and Bharati were fascinated by the tantric tradition, and Bharati's succinct observation that “the theme of harnessing instead of suppressing the senses for the sake of the higher life is one of the most delicate and…most important in the religious traditions of Asia”8 found echoes in Brijen's discomfort with asceticism and his view that the sexual impulse was not inimical to liberation but one way of achieving it.
These themes were familiar to me from the times Brijen and I had spent together over many years—our paths crossing in London, New York, Rochester, Bloomington, and Cambridge. In times of desolation, he helped me out. In his belief that poetry, stories, myths, and art—like friendship and love—make the emptiness of existence bearable, and that “analysis makes the absurdity of life more than one can bear,” I found consolation for my own attempts to integrate social science with philosophy and literature.9 In the delight he took in Frank Harris, the Kama Sutra, and literary pornography, my own Puritanism was exorcized. But though I spent years in community development and welfare work in Australia, England, and the Congo, committed to making small improvement in the lives of the poor, the homeless, and the downtrodden, I would never find in myself the sustained devotion to the needs of others that characterized Brijen's life.
Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children draws an analogy between the story of India's birth as an independent nation on midnight, August 15, 1947, and the story of a group of telepathic children, born at the same time and brought together by Saleem Sinai, the hero and narrator of the book. Brijen's story had similar overtones, as if India's struggle for independence coincided with his struggle to find his path.
Brijen entered DAV College in Dehra Dun in 1943, when he was fourteen. “During the following five years, I discovered myself, buried myself in Indian and European literature and philosophy, overcame my adolescence, suffered romantic agony, entered student politics, came under the influence of radical socialists Acharya Narendra Deva and Ram Manohar Lohia,10 made friends with mighty men of my generation like S. Radhakrishnan,11 later president of India, and Amaranatha Jha, successively vice chancellor of Allahabad and Benares Hindu Universities, and fell afoul of Govinda Malaviya, the university's acting vice chancellor, whose appointment I had bitterly opposed as a student leader. In 1948 he suspended me from the university.”
Abandoning his political and social activities, breaking off his contacts with the Congress Socialist Party, and limiting his correspondence with Lohia, Brijen intensified his reading of religious and philosophical texts Hindu, Buddhist, and European. To cover his material needs, his parents (at his grandfather's urging) paid Brijen a monthly stipend.
“As I read more and more religio-philosophical tomes, a desire came upon me to go travelling and visit various ashrams. I had the proper letters of introduction to speak directly to the leaders of the ashrams,