5

“Oh, are you listening? I am not entering your prayer room — have no fear. When your devotions are done, come to that room once — I have something to say to you. Now that two new sannyasis have come, I know I shall not be able to see you for some time — that is why I came to tell you. Do not forget — come once.”

Saying this, Anandamoyi returned to her household duties.

Krishnadayal Babu was a dark-complexioned man of middling build, not very tall. What struck one most in his face were two large eyes; the rest was almost entirely covered by a salt-and-pepper moustache and beard. He was always dressed in a saffron-dyed silk garment; close at hand lay a brass water-vessel, and wooden sandals were on his feet. The hair at the front of his head had begun to recede — the long hair remaining was knotted and coiled up into a topknot upon his head.

There had been a time, when he lived in the west, when he had freely mixed with the European soldiers and indulged in meat and liquor without restraint. In those days he considered it a mark of manliness to deliberately insult the priests, Brahmins, Vaishnavas, and sannyasis of the country; now there was nothing he would not acknowledge. The moment he saw a new sannyasi, he would sit down with him to learn new paths of spiritual practice. His craving for the hidden ways of liberation and the secret methods of yoga knew no bounds. Krishnadayal had been taking instruction in Tantric practice for some time, with the intention of pursuing that discipline, when news of a Buddhist priest reached him, and his mind was recently thrown into fresh agitation.

His first wife died after giving birth to a son, when he was twenty-three years of age. Blaming the child for the mother’s death, and moved in a surge of violent renunciation, he left the boy at his in-laws’ house and went off entirely to the western provinces; and within six months he married Anandamoyi, the orphaned granddaughter of Sarvabhauma of Kashi.

In the west, Krishnadayal found himself employment and by various means established his standing with his superiors. In the meantime Sarvabhauma died; with no other guardian remaining, he had no choice but to bring his wife to live with him.

When the Sepoy Mutiny broke out in the interim, he contrived to save the lives of one or two senior Englishmen, by which means he gained both fame and a revenue-grant. Not long after the Mutiny he gave up his post, and spent some time in Kashi with the newly born Gora. When Gora was about five years of age, Krishnadayal came to Calcutta and brought his elder son Mahim from his maternal uncle’s house to raise him himself. Now Mahim, through the favour of his father’s patrons, was carrying on his work with considerable authority in a government treasury office.

From early childhood Gora had lorded it over the boys of his neighbourhood and school. To make the lives of masters and tutors unbearable was his chief occupation and delight. As soon as he was a little older, he began to recite in student clubs ‘Who would live without freedom’ and ‘The home of two hundred million souls,’ and delivered speeches in English, and rose to become the leader of a band of small rebels. At last when, in time, Gora burst from the shell of student assemblies and began to make his voice heard in gatherings of adults, Krishnadayal Babu found the matter highly amusing.

Gora’s influence outside the house grew visibly with each passing day; but within the house no one took him very seriously. Mahim was by then employed — he had tried to cut Gora down to size in various ways, sometimes calling him ‘Patriot-Uncle’ and sometimes ‘Harish Mukherjee the Second.’ In those days there were frequent near-brawls between Gora and his elder brother. Anandamoyi felt deep anxiety within herself at Gora’s hostility toward the English. She tried in various ways to calm him, but to no avail. Gora would have considered his life well spent had he managed to pick a fight with an Englishman on any road or street.

Meanwhile, captivated by Keshab Babu’s lectures, Gora fell under a strong attraction toward the Brahmo Samaj; and it was precisely at this same period that Krishnadayal became intensely strict in his religious observances. So much so that even when Gora entered his quarters, he grew agitated. He set apart a few rooms as his own exclusive domain. With great ceremony he had a wooden board inscribed with the name ‘Sadhana Ashram’ and hung it at the entrance to this domain.

His father’s conduct and proceedings caused Gora’s mind to rise in revolt. He said: “I cannot endure all this folly — it is a thorn in my eye.” On this occasion Gora had been on the verge of severing all connection with his father and leaving the house entirely — Anandamoyi had somehow contrived to hold him back.

Whenever he found an opportunity, Gora would pick arguments with the Brahmin pandits who came to his father. But these were scarcely arguments — they were closer to blows. Many of those pandits had very little genuine learning and unlimited greed for money; they could not hold their own against Gora, and they feared him like a tiger. Among them, it was only for Harchandra Vidyabagish that Gora came to feel respect.

Krishnadayal had engaged Vidyabagish for the study of Vedanta. Gora at first went to argue with him in an arrogant manner and found that argument was impossible. The man was not merely learned — the breadth of his outlook was extraordinary. That the mere study of Sanskrit could produce so keen yet so expansive a mind was something Gora had not been able to imagine. In Vidyabagish’s character there resided an unwavering patience and depth filled with forgiveness and peace, such that it was entirely impossible for Gora to be other than restrained in his presence. Gora began studying Vedantic philosophy under Harchandra. Gora could not do anything by halves, and so he plunged to the very depths of philosophical inquiry.

As chance would have it, at this very time an English missionary attacked Hindu scriptures and society in a newspaper and challenged the people of the country to a debate. Gora blazed up entirely. Although he himself, whenever he had occasion, would criticise the scriptures and social customs and cause all manner of pain to those of opposing views, yet the contempt of a foreigner for Hindu society stung him as though he had been struck with a goad.

Gora opened battle in the newspaper. Not one of the charges levelled against Hindu society by the other side did Gora acknowledge — not one, and not in the slightest degree. After much exchange of responses on both sides, the editor declared: “We shall print no more letters on this matter.”

But by then Gora’s obstinacy had fully roused itself. He began to write a book in English under the title ‘Hinduism’ — in it he set himself to gather, by exerting himself to the fullest, all the arguments and scriptural authority he could muster, in order to prove the unassailable superiority of Hindu religion and society.

Thus it was that, in going to quarrel with the missionary, Gora gradually found himself vanquished by his own advocacy. Gora declared: “We shall not allow our own country to stand as a defendant before the court of the foreigner and be judged by the foreigner’s law. We shall neither be ashamed nor feel pride by minutely comparing ourselves with the standards of England. For the customs, beliefs, scriptures, and society of the land in which we were born, we shall not be the least bit self-conscious either before others or before ourselves. Whatever exists in our country — all of it — we shall take up with strength and with pride upon our heads, and thereby protect our country and ourselves from dishonour.”

Saying this, Gora began to bathe in the Ganges and perform his daily rituals, he kept his tuft of hair, he exercised discrimination in matters of eating and touching. From now on, every morning he would take the dust of his parents’ feet; Mahim, whom he had never ceased to call a ‘cad’ and a ‘snob’ in English on the slightest pretext, he now rose and stood for when he saw him and prostrated himself in reverence; Mahim said whatever came to his mouth in relation to this sudden-born devotion, but Gora made no reply.

Through his counsel and conduct Gora seemed to awaken a certain section of the people of the country. They felt as though they had been saved from a constant pulling and tearing; drawing breath, they said: “Whether we are good or bad, civilised or uncivilised — we do not wish to account for this to anyone. We only wish to feel, fully and completely, that we are ourselves.”

But Krishnadayal did not appear to be pleased by this new transformation in Gora. Indeed, on one occasion he summoned Gora and said to him: “See here, my son, the Hindu scriptures are a very deep matter. The religion established by the sages — to fathom and understand it is not the work of just any person. In my judgment, it is better not to meddle with it without understanding it. You are a young man, you have grown up studying English all your life; when you inclined toward the Brahmo Samaj, you were acting in a manner appropriate to your proper station. That is precisely why I felt no anger at it — indeed I was rather pleased. But the path you are now following does not seem quite right. This is not your path.”

Gora replied: “What are you saying, Father? But I am a Hindu. If I do not grasp the deep import of the Hindu faith today, I shall grasp it tomorrow — and if I never grasp it at all, I must still walk this path. It is because I could not sever the bond formed in a past life with Hindu society that I was born in a Brahmin household in this life — and so, birth after birth, passing through this Hindu faith and this Hindu society, I shall ultimately attain its furthest fulfilment. If at any moment I should stray through forgetfulness toward another path, I shall return with twice the strength.”

Krishnadayal went on shaking his head and said: “But, my son, one does not become a Hindu merely by saying so. To become a Muslim is easy, anyone at all can become a Christian — but a Hindu! My goodness! That is a very hard thing.”

Gora. That is quite true. But since I was born a Hindu, I have already passed through the great gate. Now if I pursue the discipline with steadfastness, I shall be able to advance, step by step.

Krishnadayal. My son, I cannot make you truly understand the matter in argument. Yet what you say is also true. Whatever is the fruit of one’s actions, whatever one’s appointed path — sooner or later one must return to that path — no one can prevent it. It is the will of God. What can we do! We are only instruments.

The fruit of karma and the will of God, the doctrine of ‘I am He’ and the philosophy of devotion — Krishnadayal accepted them all in perfectly equal measure, without feeling in the slightest the need for any reconciliation among them.