CHAPTER 3

Hermit in the Water of Life

And in the evening of my days
Let me remember and be remembered
By the friends that I have made…

—Brijen K. Gupta

 

 

If I have recourse to metaphors of water and darkness to describe myself at twenty-one, it is partly because I spent that turbulent year in a harbor city buffeted by high winds and ransacked by winter storms. In this emotional maelstrom, I knew only one person who seemed to have the knack of staying afloat. And so I clung to him as to a life raft, buoyed by his concern for my welfare, guided by his advice, secure in his example. In retrospect, I am amazed that Brijen Gupta was only ten years older than I was.¹ Yet the difference between twenty-one and thirty-one is the difference between youth and manhood, and it was magnified, in this instance, by Brijen's political savvy, breadth of experience, and formidable self-confidence.

Though he lectured in the Asian studies program at Victoria University of Wellington, he enjoyed the company of students as much as academic colleagues and presided over our small circle of leftists and would-be writers with the autocratic assuredness of a guru and the bemused detachment of a Cheshire cat. Whether in the student cafe or at a Ghuznee Street coffee shop, Brijen would play the avuncular roles of provocateur and sage. I remember riding in his car through rain-swept, pitch-dark Wellington streets as he, by turns, chanted Hindi lyrics or chided me for my romantic illusions about tribal societies.

Talking in the cities, longing for the earth,
Those ignorant of life will tell their neighbors

That in the country there is natural bliss
For men and women, who are nearer angels
Because they feel the wind upon their faces,
Or eat their supper sore from tramping furrows
And see the lightning scorch the prairie night.

These have not woken in the smothering dark
To listen to the clock draining away,
Second by second, the inner spring of joy;
Nor caught the smell of death that floats around
The farmhouse in the early afternoon.²

That I was not crushed by Brijen's criticisms may have been because I had such a dim view of myself and envied Brijen's urbanity, erudition, and forthright way of engaging with everyone he met, from gas station attendants to professors. But it irked me that he was always in the right, always calling the shots, always knowing what was best, politically, aesthetically, and intellectually, and brooked no opinion that ran counter to his own. Perhaps this was his failing, or the price of his precocious and encompassing knowledge of so many fields—that he was inclined to associate with those who would assent to his opinions and look up to him as a god. In any case, it was the absolute asymmetry of our relationship—his assumption of authority, and my willing acquiescence to it—that made me deaf or indifferent to the snippets of information he shared about his background. And it wasn't until I came to Harvard in 2005 that I rectified this and asked Brijen—who was now retired from university teaching and living in Rochester, New York—if he would agree to a conversation about his early years in India and the United States. So began a series of meetings and e-mail exchanges that gradually filled in the gaps in my knowledge of this man who had figured so importantly in my development, a man to whom, in many ways, I owed my life.

Not long before our conversations began, I had read Albert Raboteau's essay on Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom died in 1968.³ Raboteau chronicles the events that brought these men to understand that the monastic and prophetic traditions of which they were a part were not incompatible with critical thought and social activism. Sixteen years after publishing The Seven Storey Mountain, in which he embraced a philosophy of world renunciation, Merton decided that this goal was illusory, and he experienced “the immense joy of being a man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.” His epiphany occurred in the most pedestrian setting: a shopping district at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.⁴

Martin Luther King's transformation from church pastor to civil rights leader was triggered by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Like Merton, he came to the realization that love for his fellow human beings was the way to God, and that fighting for human rights—even if it cost him his own life—was the path to righteousness.

Raboteau's insights also helped me understand that, for me, the dialectic between the outward and inward poles of being had not found expression in a rhythm of political activism and periodic retreat but in an oscillation between intellectual or literary work (which is, of necessity, solitary and silent) and a passionate engagement, as an ethnographer, in the lives of others on the margins of the Western world. This was my personal variation on the theme of being at home and being away.

Fortuitously, Brijen was not only sympathetic to Merton's paradoxical synthesis of contemplation and social commitment; he identified with the disillusionment that preceded Merton's decision to retreat from the chaos of the world in the early 1940s. Brijen drew my attention to Arthur Koestler's famous essay, “The Yogi and the Commissar,” in which Koestler uses the image of the spectrum to account for “all possible human attitudes to life.” At the infrared end, the figure of the commissar exemplifies a commitment to change from without. He is the revolutionary for whom all means, fair and foul, are justified in realizing his vision of a brave new world. At the opposite, ultraviolet, end of the spectrum, where the waves are short and of such high frequency that they cannot be seen, crouches the yogi who believes that little can be accomplished by willful striving and exterior organization. In seeking change from within he distances himself from the social sphere in order to make possible a mergence with the universal and cosmic all-one. “It is easy to say,” writes Koestler, “that all that is wanted is a synthesis —the synthesis between saint and revolutionary—but so far this has never been achieved. What has been achieved are various motley forms of compromise…but not synthesis. Apparently, the two elements do not mix, and this may be one of the reasons why we have made such a mess of our History.”⁵

There is, perhaps, a third way. I glimpsed it in a letter Brijen wrote me in 1965, at a time when his energies were being drained by his involvement in the American civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.⁶ “I wish I could be nearer to you,” he wrote. “I know that we [friends from Wellington days], could start a circle of friendship, in which sharing and creativity may bind us together. But I know now it will remain a vain dream: I dreamt of it in India when I was in college, and it was shattered; then I had a vision of success in the sixties; it has now turned into frustrtion.” It was a utopian theme to which Brijen would return several times in his conversations with me—that a close-knit family or an intentional community offered the possibility of closing the gap between retreat and engagement, and that an intimate group of friends or kin could provide a refuge from the wider, impersonal worlds of national, academic, or corporate life yet prevent narcissistic withdrawal into oneself. Only in such contexts could one forge the bonds of mutual care, shared interest, and affection that make life worthwhile.

At first, Brijan was coy, resistant to my proposal that we retrace the course of his life. Memory was fallible, he said, and memories often painful. Even if accurate recollection were possible, and pleasurable, what was the point in returning to the past when it is the present that summons us? He then cited one of his 1952 poems in Hindi that began: mere itihason per smriti laga gai hai tala (Memory has placed a lock upon my histories). But my references to Merton seemed to trigger something in him, and he began recalling his childhood in the city of Dehra Dun, the present capital of Uttarakhand State in northern India. Delhi was only 140 miles away, and to the north lay the Himalayas—images, one might say, of the political and religious poles that pulled Brijen in such different directions for so many years.

“I was born into a middle-class, well-to-do family, mostly of professionals and some business executives. The household, by Indian standards, was fairly Westernized. Until I was sixteen, I lived in Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas, home to a unit of the British brigade and a host of government agencies and institutions, which gave the town an urbane atmosphere and above-average interracial contacts. Dehra Dun was also the home of many Anglicized schools and a refuge for boys and girls who wanted ‘modern’ education. At my parental home we had electricity, running water, and a flush system in the toilet. A maid washed the dishes and kept the house clean. A full-time gardener also doubled as a watchman. And there was a Brahmin cook. The most remarkable feature of our life was evening meetings when, as a rule, men congregated in one room and women in another. Children were not allowed to attend these discussions, but we stayed on the steps of a staircase and listened to the talk, which ranged from the bizarre to the profound. Moreover, I was enrolled in the American Presbyterian Mission High School from grade four to ten and made friends with my American teachers and matrons (I was a part-time boarder, though the school was less than a mile from home!). Being at a Mission school meant heavy doses of English language and literature and compulsory Bible classes. To balance my religious education, my mother had me study Sanskrit and Hinduism with a private tutor. I graduated from high school in my fourteenth year, two years earlier than the average. Thanks to my principal, Rhea McCurdy Ewing, a Princeton graduate, who was a regular at our home, I had early exposure to Western classics, not only Palgrave's collection but Wren's tome of representative European literature. The trick was to respect and stand in awe of the literatures of India at the same time as one respected the Western canon. Not an ordinary feat because, apres Macaulay, Indian literatures were not worth studying, since the mission of the Empire was to create a class brown in color but English in outlook and tastes. Though my family observed Hindu feasts and festivals, we were not temple goers.

“My first moving encounter with the West came, I believe, in 1942. That summer, in the hills of Mussooree, in the company of my matron (and lover to be) and a couple of other boys, I visited a European cemetery. I was touched by the great number of graves of little boys and girls, children of British civilian and military officials, as well as the numerous graves of women (wives) who had died in India. The number of adult males paled in comparison. The grief that possessed me was that thousands of ‘innocent’ Westerners had given their lives in and to India for whatever reasons and motivations.

“I think I came of age in 1942: Gandhi had launched the Quit India movement and I had entered puberty, though did not know at that time what puberty was. But the crisis I faced was to identify which part of me was Indian (or Hindu) and which part Western. Like Nehru, I had become a curious mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere. I did not have any good friends in my own age group: I solicited the company of persons much older than I was, but there was a catch. These elders generally affected a professorial manner.

“Within fifty miles of Dehra Dun was the holy city of Haridwar, and in the lofty hills of the Siwalik range nestled dozens of ashrams led by swamis, chastened by Vivekananda and Aurobindo, preaching neo-Hinduism (Sankara's Vedanta) to illiterate but English-speaking Hindus who felt uncomfortable with Hindu religious rites and temple visits. One of the women swamis was Anandmayee, to whom my parents were devoted and who became famous several years later when Nehru and his daughter, 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, but the results were mixed. My difficulty lay in my rejection of religious 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 the political front, I resumed my contact with Lohia and assisted him in firming up his ideas about the Third Camp—equidistant from the orbits of Washington and Moscow. I had met Harris Wofford and his wife Clare (who were to become close friends of mine after 1953) and I had become fascinated by their idea of a world government—which I told them was a pipe dream. But Lohia's socialism, in which I had a great investment, was rapidly going down the tube, though he would only realize this several years later. Those he considered possible partners in an International that would rival Trotsky's Fourth International were following Tito's example and courting Nehru. And he refused to believe, despite my persistent urging, that nationalism was already on the way to eclipsing socialism. He believed the opposite would be the case. Together with Tito, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, he envisaged a creative synthesis of humanism, agrarian socialism, and nationalism. As for me, I considered nationalism a cancer that was bound to lead to chaunism and strengthen totalitarianism. “In 1951 India had its first general elections. My grandfather, who was a member of the Constituent Assembly, predecessor to the Lok Sabha [the directly elected lower house of the Indian Parliament], decided not to run, and he and my parents suggested that I run for a safe provincial assembly seat on the Congress (Nehru Party) ticket; Lohia made me a similar offer for a Socialist Party ticket. All agreed that though I was only twenty-two, and the election law required a minimum age of twenty-five, the age issue could be finessed by a false birth certificate. I found this repellent, but my friends and I nevertheless decided to be politically active, and we put up a close associate, Gulab Singh, as an independent candidate with covert support from my family's and Lohia's vote banks. Gulab Singh lost by one percentage point to a Congress candidate, so strong was the hold of the Congress Party over the 1951 electorate.

“While I was trying to cope with the disarray in Lohia's political thought as well as the disarray in India's everyday politics, I was also preoccupied by my own inner growth. New ashrams had sprung up in the Himalayan foothills led by gurus who hailed from what is now Pakistan. I visited a few of them and found them unappealing. With a friend of mine, Balram Khanna, who shared my spiritual yearnings and had become my close confidante, I revisited Sri Krishnaprem in the summer of 1951. He granted me a private audience, only to denounce European philosophies as the devil's handiwork, designed to lead true believers astray. In his public audiences over the next three days, he propounded on Indian and European ideas of consciousness, and I considered him ill-informed. On the last day of our visit I found a note in Hindi pinned to my pillow. Beautifully handwritten, it read: Find God, peace without Him is not possible. I never saw him again. But in 1965, at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky, Father Louis (Thomas Merton) said the same thing to me.

“My break with Hindu worldviews was now almost complete, though I could not ever rid myself of the Maya postulate that the world does not exist, it is merely an idea, an idea that wishes to be entertained, and once entertained forces the mind to accept it as reality.

“It was also in 1953 that I met Agehananda Bharati for the first time. He was an honorary professor of philosophy at Benares Hindu University and came to Dehra Dun to visit Nigam and Nigam's mentor, M. N. Roy, the ex-Stalinist who mentored Mao, established the Communist Party in Mexico, and was a humanitarian philosopher in his own right. It was great to see Bharati and Nigam get along so well.

“Bharati and I kept in touch thereafter. Ironically, after I had left India, Bharati and Beena became lovers, and he was expelled from Benares Hindu University when caught in a tryst with her. In May 1991 he died in my presence and in the arms of his last lover, Rita Narang. Together we had nursed him during his last days.

“In 1952 I declined a Rhodes Scholarship, mostly at the urging of my mother, who was then not well but partly because of my involvement with Beena. I was not at peace. I was smoking heavily and had begun drinking. Beena disliked both. I proposed to her, but she declined, asserting that one marries to have babies, and she was not ready for them. We also toyed with the idea of setting up an intentional community on the model of the kibbutz, as many of my Gandhian friends had done, but neither Beena nor I were the salt of the earth.

“That same year, Radhakrishnan was elected vice president of India. Since 1946 he had been my mentor and patron and had castigated me from time to time for my Left and pro-Western orientations. But he was pleased that I was aiming to be a teacher, and early in 1953, when asked by Maude Hadden, president of the Institute of World Affairs (Radhakrishnan was on its board), to nominate an Indian student to participate in a six-week-long international affairs seminar, he nominated me. Maude accepted his recommendation. Three weeks of hard bargaining followed before I secured an all expenses paid, six-week trip to the States with the added provision that Maude would help me get into an American university for graduate studies.

“In the summer of 1953 I left for the States. My mother was convinced I would never come back. All partings are partings forever. I promised annual visits and kept my bargain until she and my father died. Lohia was in mourning, but both he and I knew that there was no political future for me in India. As for Beena, she was angry that I had announced my decision without confiding in or consulting her—which was not entirely true. One day, soaking our legs in the sulphur springs near Dehra Dun, I told her of my decision. She wanted no explanation and simply said, ‘All right.’ When I told her that I would come back to her, and she could later join me in the States, she replied with a sense of resignation, ‘We shall see.'

“In June I was on a TWA flight to Paris and New York. I had a premonition that my break with India was now final. In another few weeks, Beena left for Benares Hindu University to read philosophy. We never met again.”²³

The six-week seminar on international affairs was led by Walter Sharp of Yale. Impressed by Brijen's acumen and ambition, Sharp offered him an Overbrook Fellowship. In his year at Yale, Brijen met several key figures in the Democratic Party and began a lifelong relationship with the Dutch-born Socialist and pacifist Abraham Johannes Muste.²⁴

“Almost every time I would go to New York City, I would call on him and his wonderful assistant Colette Schlatter, my first love in [the] USA, who a year or two later forsook me to join Bruderhof, an intentional, Jesus centered community, in Rifton, New York, where she married, produced half a dozen children, and scores of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all committed to the communal way of life. My unwillingness to accept Jesus as savior, and other Hutterite tenets (including unprotected sex) kept me from following her. Before she opted for Rifton, we had discussed Taos, and as a parting gift she had given me Witter Bynner's Journey with the Genius, which I treasured for more than fifty years.

“So you can see that my life was full at Yale, thanks to Maude Hadden, whose munificence helped me avoid spending too much of my time making money, though I was on the lecture circuit in and around New Haven and received honoraria for speaking on Gandhi and India.

“At the end of the 1953–1954 academic year, I decided to spend the summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Russell Johnson, a Quaker, had offered me room and board. He and I had agreed that I would speak on nonviolence, Gandhi, and civil liberties on a Quaker circuit, beginning with a one-week summer camp at Avon, Connecticut, where A. J. Muste was also going to be on the faculty. This plan came in conflict with my inner yearnings, exacerbated by Colette, to discover my identity. So I left Russ in midsummer and moved to New York with the aim of spending several weeks at the Catholic Worker,²⁵ to which Muste and Colette had introduced me.

“The Catholic Worker was unlike any other church grouping I had known. It was committed to labor unions, and both Muste and Schachtman were friends of Dorothy Day, who they consulted when drafting their manifesto for a third camp in world affairs. One of my tasks during those eight weeks was to add my knowledge of Asia to the roundtable discussions. Through Muste and/or Dorothy Day I also met Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington. And it was out of the Catholic Worker experience that I became interested in Thomas Merton, who I was to meet in 1965.”

I was fascinated by the echoes between Brijen's and Merton's concern for the “gap between thought and action.”²⁶ Like Brijen, Merton pondered the relationship between religious traditions, East and West, only to come up against their “essential difference.” For Merton, the Christian view that Christ is at the center of all reality, “a source of grace and life,” and that God is love, could not be reconciled with the Hindu view that “God is void,” though he would foster interfaith dialectic with a passion that Brijen could not share.²⁷ Moreover, both Brijen and Merton were deeply influenced by the Catholic Worker and profoundly concerned about the pervasive violence in America, particularly its racial strife, social injustices, and the war in Vietnam. But how could one bring together a monastic life on the edge of the polis (atopos) and an active life within it?²⁸

During “a year of reflection” at Pendle Hill,²⁹ with weekly breaks to attend a seminar on Arnold Toynbee³⁰ in New York City, Brijen's interest in the relationship of “withdrawal” and “return” was sharpened by Toynbee's ideas, by conversations with Dorothy Day, and by his reading of Thomas Merton's recently published The Sign of Jonas. Later he would fall back on Koestler's contrast between “change from without” and “change from within” and Bernard McGinn's contrast between “flight” and “commitment” to articulate this struggle to be a “hermit in the water of life.”³¹

This struggle also arose from Brijen's relationship with his homeland.

“After Yale I made a quick trip to India to visit my parents and Radhakrishnan. Radhakrishnan was quite upset at my plans. He called me something of an aimless wanderer, dismissed me uncharacteristically without offering a meal, and I do not think he ever replied to my notes thereafter or agreed to see me again. His son, Sarvepalli Gopal, a distinguished historian, also grew quite hostile to me over the years, and he berated me at two conferences. I have al—ready told you that I had lost Beena's friendship a year earlier, though had gained Bharati's.

“By the summer of 1954 I realized that my ties to India—to family, friends, politics, and philosophy—were both attenuating and changing. Muste and Scott Buchanan³² had replaced Radhakrishnan. The Labor Action crowd of Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, Hal Draper, and Michael Harrington had replaced my socialist friends in India. Also the troubled Bayard Rustin. And in a superficial sense, Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker, Muste and Liberal Quakers had taken the place of Mother Anandamayi. Why I hung around Muste and Dorothy Day remains an unexplained mystery to me. Their mysticism was Christ-centered and their faith in Christianity unshakeable. Yet here I was, totally rejecting Christianity and Christ. Though I had utopian ideals, the Kingdom of Heaven was not my goal.

“September found me settled in a cozy little room at Pendle Hill. Henry Cadbury and Howard Brinton were also in residence; Gilbert Kilpack and Peter Docili ran the ‘academic’ curriculum. Every morning there was an hour of silent worship. I found these times greatly strengthening. Peter introduced me to Simone Weil and her pamphlet on the Iliad, published under the Pendle Hill imprint in 1956. My commitment to peace and pacifism grew even stronger. In the spring of 1955 Gwen Catchpool (recently widowed) and Horace Alexander came to Pendle Hill, and the three of us ran a seminar on the Gandhian tradition.

“Thanks to unlimited free postal privileges, I managed a lively correspondence with many people. The year helped me not only extend the frontiers of my knowledge but be at greater peace with myself. I felt that I was destined to establish a new Pendle Hill—not a transient but a permanent intentional community, without the academic rigors of an Institute for Advanced Study and faithful to Martin Buber's vision. In this I found an ally, pioneer, and mentor in Ralph Borsodi, whose romantic agrarianism I found compelling. A friend of Dorothy Day, he was about to close his institute in Suffern, New York, and move to Melbourne, Florida. For the next few years we kept up a lively correspondence.”

I was keen to know more about the impact of Marx on Brijen's thinking, and how he reconciled his pacifism with his views on overcoming the world's social injustices, inequalities, and structural violence.

“During that critical year at Pendle Hill,” Brijen replied, “I came across Marx's Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, commonly known as the Paris Manuscripts—the notebooks of a very young Marx. This volume led me to Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and both these books firmed up my view that industrial societies create an alienated man, and unless human beings returned to what Borsodi called romantic agrarianism, Gandhi called rural socialism, or Buber envisaged in the Israeli kibbutz, humanity was doomed to a culture of internecine violence. This idea I would later refine under the influsence of Christopher Lasch, who taught me that family was a haven in a heartless world.

“Quakerism influenced me but did not fulfill. Even in my encounters with Muste and Day, I remained a liberal agnostic humanist at heart. The Labor Action crowd of Max Schachtman, Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, and Hal Draper firmly instilled in me the idea of social justice: that until utopia was achieved, I had the duty to do whatever I could to further human rights and social justice, but it was incumbent upon me to be a witness for nonviolence, if not pacifism. Milton Mayer's essay on Muste, ‘The Christer,’³³ moved me. On several occasions, Milton and I appeared in Quaker-arranged institutes, and his opposition to the Second World War, even though he was a Jew, greatly touched my life.

“In 1954–1955 liberation movements in Asia, Latin America, and Africa were all in full swing. Cuba under Castro had appeared as a challenge. Mao reigned supreme over China. Both Tito and Ho presented challenges to Marxist orthodoxy. Suddenly I saw Marxism and nationalism intermarrying just as, in a different way, socialism and nationalism had been integrated under Hitler and Mussolini. I saw most of my Quaker activists supportive of these movements, ignoring Muste's and Mayer's ardent belief that there could be no compromise with any kind of authoritarianism, let alone totalitarianism. I was leery of the argument that Communist Russia and China and semi-Communist Cuba were authoritarian because of Western hostility toward them. Here I found Lohia, Muste, and Schachtman³⁴ instructive: a liberal, humanist democrat had to be equidistant from the two warring camps in world affairs. I did not budge from this position, and by 1969, which is going to be [the] terminal point of my narrative,³⁵ I had become totally irrelevant to the world around me.

“As far as inner growth was concerned, I think that by 1955 I had become alien to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism, though I continued to admire both Sri Krishnaprem and Anandamayi. Reading and rereading the Bhagavad Gita, I found it to be a hopeless treatise, whose central message, like the Iliad, was war, power, and greed. No amount of retelling by Gandhi or Vinobha could modify my thinking. Hardly anyone who rejects the Gita has the right to call himself a Hindu. The Judeo-Christian God did not impress me as an alternative: he was the God who commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Nor could He answer the fundamental questions that Job had raised; He only rewarded him with material goods. On Christ, privately but not publicly, I took my cue from D. H. Lawrence's great fable The Man Who Died. Sexual fulfillment was the paramount need, and eros was more important than agape. Only through eros could man find beauty. Yet I continued to admire Muste and Day, as well as Merton, until they lay dead. I reaffirmed to myself the tenets I had worked out with Beena: that God was evanescent, that life was absurd, that Abel and Cain realistically represented the human dilemma, and that woman was the true anodyne for human suffering.”

This was the second time Brijen had used the phrase “woman is anodyne,” and I asked him to elaborate.

“Generally speaking, Vedic literature and the two great epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, treat women with disdain. Manu, the great commentator on Hindu law, imposes restrictions on a woman's freedom, her right to property, education, and almost everything else. In the Ramayana, Lord Rama, God's incarnation, bemoans that it was a woman who caused not only a great war but the imminent death of his loyal brother who he loved more than his wife. The Ramayana enjoins that women should be treated like drums, idiots, animals, and outcastes, and beaten regularly. In the Mahabharata, the communal wife of the five brothers is staked by her husbands in a poker game, and though Lord Krishna throws her a lifeline in the form of a long sari as she is being stripped, the message is nevertheless clear that she can be gambled away. Not so in the non-Vedic shakta literature, which focuses on Shakti or Devi, the Hindu divine mother, as the ultimate godhead. Here Siva's consort Parvati is at all times equal to and at times superior to her husband in every respect, even though he is the rejuvenator of the universe. The divine energy of which Tantric texts speak so eloquently is essentially if not exclusively feminine. Having rejected the inferences inherent in Vedic texts, and without accepting all that goes with Tantric mysticism, very early in my life I was attracted to the concept of equality between the two sexes, a concept strengthened by my parents and, to a lesser extent, by my own association with Anandamayi. But there was also the influence of coming of age in northern India, where ties between males and their female siblings are quite strong. While traditional North Indian families do not have a Father's or Mother's Day, or even the equivalent of Valentine's Day, there is a Sister's Day, called Raksha Bandhan, when a brother affirms his vows to protect his sister or sisters, including at least first cousins. Indeed, it is quite common for boys/men to adopt sisters, and to carry on a highly charged Platonic relationship with them. Additionally, special bonds are fostered between a woman (called bhabhi in North India) and the younger brother or brothers of her husband, and a married man and his wife's sisters. In a paper I once wrote, I observed that such bonds often led to the initiation of the young into adult sexual activities. Boys/Men come to see women/girls as anodynes. When they cannot open their hearts to their mothers, they do so before their adopted sisters and sisters-in-law. True, erotic activities are frowned upon, but low-l evel activities within certain well-crafted limits do take place.

“Let me now merge text with context. A visit to the Meenakshi Temple—in my judgment the most beautiful Hindu temple in India—brought me face-to-face with the gentler side of Goddess Parvati, who in most other temples is depicted as a fierce goddess who can dance over the body of a prostate Siva, the First Lord of the Universe. There for the first time I heard Lalitha Sahsarnamah, which had the same calming influence on me as Gregorian chants. Sahsarnamahs are panegyrics to principal male gods but the Lalitha was to a goddess, which increased its poignancy and relevancy. All the Puranas, those wonderful, irrelevant, mini-epics written after the fourth century, are full of eroticism, and the Saivite ones particularly so, but nobody reads and admires them except perhaps Wendy Doniger, whom I have, alas, never met.”

In the summer of 1955 Brijen was again in a quandary. Chester Bowles, a former U.S. ambassador in India, proposed that he spend a year at the Democratic Party headquarters. Scott Buchanan had arranged, at Brijen's request, a month at the Abbey of Gethsemane (Brijen had already been corresponding with Thomas Merton). But while teaching a summer course on India at Columbia, Brijen met Virginia Martin, a Wooster graduate he would marry in 1957. Ginny had come to New York after a “missionary” year at Piney Woods, a black school in Mississippi. She had enrolled in courses on art history before heading to Chicago in the fall. “A product of the Brethren tradition, her commitment to public service and pacifism matched mine, though she rejected all my intellectual, neo-Marxist, trappings,” said Brijen.

Rather than pursue his original plan to do his doctorate at Yale, Brijen followed Ginny to Chicago, where he graduated in 1958. There followed two years teaching at the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, during which Brijen's and Ginny's second child, Sunita, was born. But social life in Carbondale was as dull as it was politically conservative.

“I was denied a haircut by a barber in town because I was not white, but decided it was not worth making a fuss when a black barber welcomed me with open arms and scissors. Whenever we went out to eat at a fancy restaurant, we made sure that they served blacks. There was no cultural life, not even beer bashes. It was still the McCarthy era, though ebbing. There were no Quakers in the area. Though Ginny and I had each other, and our children, I was restless, and craved intellectual companionship.

“During my Chicago years, the civil rights struggle had picked up steam. Almost all my New York friends were banking upon a Democratic victory. Bayard Rustin urged me to join the struggle, and when I declined he declared me an AWOL Gandhian. Harris Wofford, as early as November 1959, had predicted a Kennedy victory and had left his law practice to join the campaign; he invited me to follow. But I had promised myself and Ginny that I was going to sit this one out. One of my mentors at Chicago was Hans Morgenthau, and since 1955, if not earlier, he had been predicting looming disaster for American foreign policy, and he was no peacenik. His devastaing piece on the Kennedys—I believe it came out in The New York Review of Books—shattered any faith I had in the Democratic Party. So I began shopping for a small college. Bert Hoselitz, my academic advisor at Chicago, worked overtime to recommend me. I was interviewed at several places and pleased to receive several offers. Then one day Ginny saw an ad in the Times Educational Supplement for a teaching position in the newly inaugurated Asian studies program at Victoria University of Wellington.

“The decision to move to New Zealand was made very quickly. Contrary to my general style, I did not consult anyone about it, not even Hoselitz. Mercifully, I didn't have to ask for recommendations because Chicago maintained a placement file, and this sufficed. Victoria University's academic bureaucracy was courteous and efficient. The registrar made me an offer; I asked him to improve it; he did, and advanced the money to travel. In Wellington, Leslie Palmier, head of Asian studies, was exceptionally warm, helping us find a house in Koro Koro and offering other aid. Ginny had hastily read up on New Zealand and opined that it was going to be the agriculture-based paradise I was longing for. She was surprised that New Zealand did not welcome Asian immigrants but realized that Australia was even stricter. Indeed, there were job opportunities in Perth and Adelaide, but I had not applied. Once I accepted the offer, postcards went out to my mailing list that had, by 1960, grown to about four hundred. I had already resigned from Carbondale and had also notified the dean at Bucknell—a beautiful small university in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, overlooking the famous penitentiary—that I would not be accepting his offer. Several of the recipients of my postcards wrote back to say that they found my decision unbelievable. Borsodi asked me to benefit from my New Zealand sojourn and help him upon my ‘return.’

“Toward the end of my Carbondale years I had worn several masks. I did not discourage my parents and friends in India from believing that in a year or so I would be returning, even though I had made up my mind long ago to seek my notoriety and poverty in the West. Notwithstanding Carbondale's intellectual and cultural isolation, my New York friends continued to see me as one of their own in their march for civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and economic intervention in third world societies, though I had grown weary of them. My love for A. J. Muste and Scott Buchanan continued unabated.

“As far as my academic future was concerned, I was making a bad move. Under Eisenhower and the challenge of Sputnik, America had embarked upon strengthening Asian and European studies, though African studies lagged. Jobs were opening up in almost all major universities, and I was bound to land an offer sooner or later to start a South Asia center. From day one, when I landed in [the] USA in 1953, I had cultivated potential donors, and my access to them was bound to be a plus. Hoselitz had visions of getting me back to Chicago if the reviews of my first book³⁶ were good. But I had powerful foes too. I had alienated Dan Ingalls (Harvard), and he was one of the godfathers certain to be asked for an opinion on any major appointment. The world had lost Robert Redfield, and I did not expect any support from McKim Marriott, his putative successor.

“Politically it was also a bad move. Rosa Parks and the Little Rock Nine had ushered in a new era in civil rights, and the Warren Court was busy dismantling all the legal underpinnings of racial discrimination. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, Jim Crow had found himself shot in the leg. Though not entirely visible at that time, a cultural revolution in the West was in the offing. Old-fashioned colonial empires were crumbling though new imperialisms were on the horizon, needing to be challenged. The revolution of rising expectations provided new opportunities, both creative and destructive, to the old imperial masters.

“Cliff Dancer, my son Martin's godfather and a dear friend, was peeved that I had made the decision to go to New Zealand secretively and expressed the strong opinion that I was escaping, and that action lay in New York, not New Zealand. Yet Ginny was deliriously happy. She wanted a break and was completely unconcerned that my Victoria salary was going to be about one-half of what Bucknell had offered. Her parents’ poignant comment was ‘Come back soon.’ Though I assured Leslie Palmier that we were moving to New Zealand for good, in 1960 I saw New Zealand as a temporary refuge, a Toynbeean withdrawal. Little did I know that we would fall hopelessly in love with the country.

“We fitted at Victoria fairly well. I cannot recall any on the faculty who crossed me. Ties with Peter Munz [professor of history] and Keith Bu—chanan [professor of geography] were particularly strong, though the two were not the best of friends. Val Maxwell³⁷ and Margaret Clark were my earliest students and friends, and they introduced me to several other stu—dents whose cosmopolitanism (not internationalism) I found refreshing. Outside Victoria, the Friends House and Sunday meetings filled a great void. Literally dozens of Friends befriended us, and we quickly melted into Wellington society.

“During my New Zealand years I met you, and our friendship has endured. For years my ties with Margaret Clark remained strong: I helped her get a Rotary Fellowship to Malaya, and she was grateful. Two other women continued to be in touch long after: Narena Oliver Randall and the future Janet Macdonald. Like you, they had [an] ambivalent relationship with New Zealand, largely because they found the country too confining, which Ginny and I did not.

“Early in 1962 Ginny and I, with Marty and Sunita, moved to Canberra for several months. While in Canberra I received feelers from John Hope Franklin, then chairman of the history department at Brooklyn College, and a job offer materialized. I asked Victoria to give me a year's leave of absence, but the request was made at the wrong time, because Palmier had resigned to take up a UNESCO posting in India, and it was declined. Pissed off, I resigned, and we were back in the States. Soon after we returned, we felt the desire to go back to New Zealand. I applied for a position at Auckland, was selected, but before I could accept the offer it was withdrawn, without explanation. I knew then that something had gone awry, and a return to New Zealand was never going to take place. For almost half a century now I have felt that resigning from Victoria was the worst academic decision in my life.”

As our conversations drew to an end, I was struck by the extent to which Brijen's life had oscillated between disenchantment with the world and engagement with it. This “dialectic between withdrawal and return, flight and commitment,” has always been, as Bernard McGinn observes, “an essential element in the history of the monastic movement,”³⁸ and so I asked Brijen if he could help me understand why he had been so attracted by ashrams, Quaker retreats, and places of peaceable community yet had thrown himself so vigorously into the struggle for civil rights and social justice. “Would it be true to say,” I asked, “that the polis often proved exhausting, corrupting, and disillusioning, and that, despite your commitment to improving the state of the world, you have recoiled at times, and sought refuge in a more manageable microcosm?” Brijen did not give a direct reply but agreed that my observation was “correct.”

Perhaps all one can say is that every person must make his or her own way through this world, seeking a path through trial and error but hoping for occasional sustenance or guidance from other travellers. One's journey is always improvised, a work in progress. On the one hand, the world itself offers possible openings—more for some than for others. On the other hand, we come into the world with personal predilections and dispositions that draw us to certain ideas, people, and places but not others. Hammering out a rough amalgam between our inner persuasions and what the world provides defines the work of a lifetime. Nor is any path or position, once discovered, something we can settle for, sufficient for all time and every exigency. We change, as do our circumstances. The path we took yesterday may prove an impasse today, obliging us to retrace our steps or strike out into the wilderness again, seeking another route. Accordingly, no map, no way, no experience, no precursor is intrinsically superior to any other. Each must be tested against the situations we encounter and the inner yearnings that compel our steps. And even when some exemplar, met along the way, suggests a shortcut or gives us a light to cut through the darkness ahead, we quickly learn that their retrospective accounts of their journeys cannot be used to chart our own. Map is not territory.

Yet everything is potentially grist to our mill. One needs silence in order to think or write. But one needs the noise of the world to have something to write about. One needs routine to make a family life run smoothly. But without confusion and argument, order is not necessary. Whether we must also accept that there is a time for peace and a time for war, a world for the rich and a world for the poor, I cannot say. I only know that striking a permanent balance, or organizing such disparate elements into a coherent whole—politically, aesthetically, theologically, or intellectually—is an absurd task. Better to accept the incoherence of the world than try to render it intelligible.

Teaching in a divinity school, I meet students who are passionate about being of some use in the world, doing some good, changing things for the better, yet whose ambitions never clearly differentiate pol itical goals from religious ethics. Many see in interfaith dialogue between East and West a way toward peaceful coexistence. All play down the incommensurability of traditions, as well as the practical impossibility of the heroic ideal that one can change the world. Wisdom seems to lie in scaling down such ambitions, in what Bharati calls a “fastidious humanism,”³⁹ that while tolerant of human differences focuses on those with whom one has something in common. Thankfully, one finds such people everywhere, despite the dogmatists who assert that men and women, Christians and Muslims, and old and young are essentially unalike and best left to their own devices. Like Brijen, I am grateful for the friends I have made and mindful of the mystery of elective affinities, the widely scatered, intentional community to which I now belong—a symbolic kindred⁴⁰ centered on myself, yet not assembled out of self-centeredness. While such a community, when freely chosen, can be a haven in a heartless world, coercive communities like prisons, ghettos, refugee camps, and tribal reservations represent some of the most abhorrent examples of man's inhumanity to man. Nor is a chosen community, familial or national, immune to the self-satisfied belief that its charter myths and way of life are superior to all others. As Hannah Arendt observed, the political refers primarily to relations among human beings, and only derivatively to relations among nations, polities, and abstractions. It is by recovering this original sense of the political (and the ethical) that we best avoid the hubris that comes from extending our ambitions too far, and seeing the world as an arena on which our particular will or worldview must be stamped.

Indeed, there were moments in Brijen's narrative when the lists of significant others grew so compendious that I had the impression that his personal genealogy had metamorphosed into a pol itical history. It was as if his life encapsulated the theme of my book—the oscillation between identifying as a singular individual and identifying as a member of a collectivity, cultural or human. As with Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, the celebration of life begins with an author who “dotes” on himself, but almost immediately this author proposes that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” His thoughts “are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me.” “Do I contradict myself?” he asks. “Very well, then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Brijen Gupta contained multitudes. The individual elements did not always coexist easily within him. But he refused to suppress any one. I like to think that when Brijen was honored with the India Community Center of Rochester's first award for lifetime achievement in 1997, it was not only for his financial and personal gifts to this community, or even for his efforts as a social activist over many years, but for a humanitarianism that was realized through adversity and vitality rather than spelled out as a set of precepts to which lip service alone was due—a humanism born of a struggle to reconcile spiritual and political passions—the hermit and the water of life made one.