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,
