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
