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
