Between One and One Another. Michael Jackson
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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 mother, who was then not well but partly because of my involvement with Beena. I was not at peace. 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