Between One and One Another. Michael Jackson
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Raboteau chronicles the events that brought these men to understand that the monastic and prophetic traditions of which they were a part were not incompatible with critical thought and social activism. Sixteen years after publishing The Seven Storey Mountain, in which he embraced a philosophy of world renunciation, Merton decided that this goal was illusory, and he experienced “the immense joy of being a man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.” His epiphany occurred in the most pedestrian setting: a shopping district at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky.
I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.4
Martin Luther King's transformation from church pastor to civil rights leader was triggered by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Like Merton, he came to the realization that love for his fellow human beings was the way to God, and that fighting for human rights—even if it cost him his own life—was the path to righteousness.
Raboteau's insights also helped me understand that, for me, the dialectic between the outward and inward poles of being had not found expression in a rhythm of political activism and periodic retreat but in an oscillation between intellectual or literary work (which is, of necessity, solitary and silent) and a passionate engagement, as an ethnographer, in the lives of others on the margins of the Western world. This was my personal variation on the theme of being at home and being away.
Fortuitously, Brijen was not only sympathetic to Merton's paradoxical synthesis of contemplation and social commitment; he identified with the disillusionment that preceded Merton's decision to retreat from the chaos of the world in the early 1940s. Brijen drew my attention to Arthur Koestler's famous essay, “The Yogi and the Commissar,” in which Koestler uses the image of the spectrum to account for “all possible human attitudes to life.” At the infrared end, the figure of the commissar exemplifies a commitment to change from without. He is the revolutionary for whom all means, fair and foul, are justified in realizing his vision of a brave new world. At the opposite, ultraviolet, end of the spectrum, where the waves are short and of such high frequency that they cannot be seen, crouches the yogi who believes that little can be accomplished by willful striving and exterior organization. In seeking change from within he distances himself from the social sphere in order to make possible a mergence with the universal and cosmic all-one. “It is easy to say,” writes Koestler, “that all that is wanted is a synthesis —the synthesis between saint and revolutionary—but so far this has never been achieved. What has been achieved are various motley forms of compromise…but not synthesis. Apparently, the two elements do not mix, and this may be one of the reasons why we have made such a mess of our History.”5
There is, perhaps, a third way. I glimpsed it in a letter Brijen wrote me in 1965, at a time when his energies were being drained by his involvement in the American civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.6 “I wish I could be nearer to you,” he wrote. “I know that we [friends from Wellington days], could start a circle of friendship, in which sharing and creativity may bind us together. But I know now it will remain a vain dream: I dreamt of it in India when I was in college, and it was shattered; then I had a vision of success in the sixties; it has now turned into frustrtion.” It was a utopian theme to which Brijen would return several times in his conversations with me—that a close-knit family or an intentional community offered the possibility of closing the gap between retreat and engagement, and that an intimate group of friends or kin could provide a refuge from the wider, impersonal worlds of national, academic, or corporate life yet prevent narcissistic withdrawal into oneself. Only in such contexts could one forge the bonds of mutual care, shared interest, and affection that make life worthwhile.
At first, Brijan was coy, resistant to my proposal that we retrace the course of his life. Memory was fallible, he said, and memories often painful. Even if accurate recollection were possible, and pleasurable, what was the point in returning to the past when it is the present 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