Between One and One Another. Michael Jackson
rites and rituals, temple worship, and an anthropomorphic God. Under the influence of R. L. Nigam12 and Lohia, as well as Marxist and existentialist writings, I had become a humanist in its narrowest formulation. I found Vedanta troubling and yet scholastic and challenging. Yet I could not bring myself to accept Carvaka's materialism as an alternative.13 Buddhism fascinated me for its nonmonotheistic outlook, and Nigam helped me discover the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata (void), which was only a stone's throw away, as I would later discover, from Camus's notion of absurdity. Sunyavad (the doctrine of voidness) rejected the absolutism of Vedanta, as well as nihilism, and I decided to study it further.
“In addition to Anandamayi and Lokeshwaranand, my memorable visits in 1948 were to Sri Krishnaprem, the Aurobindo ashram, and Maharishi Ramana's ashram.14 Sri Krishnaprem, nee Ronald Nixon, was a Cambridge don who had come to Lucknow University with another don, Chadwick,15 to teach English. Both fell under the influence of Vice Chancellor Chakravarti's wife (Monika Devi, later Yashoda Ma). Chadwick left Lucknow to go to Aurobindo at Pondicherry, and Nixon, initiated by Yashoda as Krishnaprem, went to Benares and then Almore in the Himalayan foothills, where he and Yashoda Ma built a temple and ashram called Uttar Brindaban, a few miles away from the palatial home of Gertrude Emerson Sen, granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson.16
“Sri Krishnaprem was a remarkable man, a scholar and a religious devotee rolled into one.17 I stayed with him for about a week, found him very comforting, yet was not equal to his intense devotionalism (bhakti) and left dissatisfied. My week at Gandhi's ashram at Wardha was also unfulfilling. The devotion of his disciples to Gandhian ethical social action (karma) was admirable, but Gandhian ashrams, like most other ashrams in India and elsewhere, rejected libido.18 This came into conflict with my firm view that woman was anodyne. My visit to Aurobindo's ashram was a failure: I could not see or speak to the master. The visit to Sri Ramana Maharishi's did not yield much: I saw the master briefly and his deputies spoke to me in cliches, reminding me that the journey to spiritual salvation was long and treacherous. My visit to a Tantric ashram in the Vindhyachal range, near Mirzapur, where I was willy-nilly introduced to hallucinogens, opened an area of inquiry that I never seriously entertained, notwithstanding encouragement some years later by Agehananda Bharati. Whenever anyone talked to me of salvation, and almost every swami did, I was reminded of Calvin. But I did not ever think that man was born into and lived in ‘sin.’ Yet with all these imperfections, Indian ashrams were a sight and an experience to behold. They rejected caste, they treated men and women almost equally, and all were supposedly engaged in bringing internal realization to every individual, one at a time if necessary.
“Enter Quakerism. The booklets Horace G. Alexander gave me had a profound influence.19 Quaker commitment to pacifism was more clearheaded than Gandhi's or any Buddhist's. Suddenly I realized that the tension between agape and eros, which non-Tantric Indian religions had resolved by renouncing libido, was a creative one. Quaker references to God were, moreover, benign, and Christ was seen as neither relevant nor irrelevant. And their relief efforts were more than Boy Scout exercises.”
By November 1948 Brijen was preoccupied by the need to put some distance between himself and India.
“My father thought, as usual, that I might learn something from someone, somewhere in England or Europe, and did not object. But my mother was heartbroken. She had lost her only brother when the ship on which he and his wife were returning to India had been sunk (in 1941 I think), and she was bedeviled by the idea that England was a curse on her family. She again urged that I go into retreat at an Anandamayi20 ashram somewhere in India. Even Nigam, my peripatetic mentor, was against my leaving India. He saw it as an escape from life, and felt that ‘action’ was in India. He gave me newspaper accounts of how Britain in 1948 was still suffering from the ill effects of the Second World War.
“After promising my mother that I would be back within a few months, she relented. Radhakrishnan (Fellow of All Souls) arranged a visiting studentship at Balliol, while Lohia introduced me to several labor leaders. Gwen Catchpool21 agreed to provide funds and hospitality in London.
“Early in 1949 I set sail for London. No member of my family or any friend came to see me off. Once at sea, I saw my voyage as an exile.
“The ship was almost entirely occupied by English families, returning to the motherland with sweet but mostly bitter memories of their departure from India. I thought the source of their bitterness came from their knowledge that they would never replicate their Indian lifestyle in their homeland, and many were already talking about packing up again and migrating to Canada, New Zealand, or Australia. Several opined that they would soon be back to India, to govern a country that Indians would find ungovernable. But a lot of the women were happy to be going home. Though the women my age deigned not to socialize with me, I endeared myself to the married women because of my uncanny ability to delight their children—still blissfully ignorant of racial prejudice and fear of strangers.
“The three-week journey was engrossing: I was neither particularly happy nor sad. I had ample time to meditate. And the small library had plenty of good books I had not read. I had also brought with me a few books on Indian philosophy and a couple of articles by T. R .V. Murti who, in the 1950s, would emerge as perhaps the greatest living commentator on Buddhist philosophy.22 I had attended his lectures at Benares, where he was considered the putative heir to Radhakrishnan.
“The voyage had few ports of call. From every port I sent a postcard to my mother. I wrote to no one else, even though the steamship company offered free airmail service. I could not get over the fact that no one had come to see me off. Though this brooding was not consistent with my character, the feeling was nevertheless there.”
Of his year in England and Europe, Brijen would say little except that he spent several months as a relief worker in a Quaker Center in Darmstadt, Germany, and that, in retrospect, it was a period of “withdrawal.” I suspected that he had encountered, and been stunned by, the endemic racism in Britain—and when I pressed him on this point, he grudgingly admitted as much, referring to “pervasive and subtle” snobberies of class, grafted on to a deep-seated contempt for coloreds and colonials who would not accept their lowly place in the allegedly “natural” order of the world.
“I slipped back into India in May 1950 as quietly as I had slipped out of it. I had made up my mind to resume college and eventually become a teacher. After finding my Dehra Dun apartment intact, and debating whether I should return to Benares or remain in Dehra Dun, I opted for the latter. Geographically, Dehra Dun was midway between the political capital Delhi and the spiritual homes (ashrams) that dotted the Himalayan foothills, and this tension between political and spiritual yearnings still ruled my life. My life was also suddenly and deliriously complicated by love.
“Her name was Beena Banerjee. She came to DAV in July 1951. I was then in the final year of my BA, and from the very first moment I laid eyes on her, I was smitten. Whenever I saw her, she would return my glances with a mysterious but mischievous smile. Then, one rainy August afternoon, as I stood half drenched under one of the classroom verandahs, she crept up behind me. ‘I am Beena, can I talk to you?’
“I froze. Though notorious for straight talking, I was speechless. Sensing victory, she smiled. ‘You see, I am taking English Literature, and Professor Nigam told me that you have the best notes for the first year. Can I borrow them?’
“It was sheer flattery. She needed my notes like a hole in the head. But the ploy worked. Now, however, I was in command of myself. ‘And what do I get in return?’ I asked.
“‘Friendship,’ she said, and without waiting for any response she darted off to her philosophy class, leaving me to wonder whether she meant merely friendship or love.
“The whole conversation took less than a minute, but it transformed my life. Over the next twenty-two months we exchanged 917 letters. We walked to and from college, read books together, shared private jokes, mused on life, and loved each other intensely. With Beena, my philosophical outlook matured. Following Sartre and Heidegger, I affirmed conflict as the natural relationship between man and man, stressed the absurdity, suffering, and futility of life, and assumed the evanescence of God.
“On