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
