Gods and Godmen of India (15 page)
In the depth of that silence, he heard it! The tinkle of a tiny bell followed by another, and another and another…. and soon every one of the thousand temple bells was pealing out in glorious unison, and his heart was transported with wonder and joy.
If you wish to hear the temple bells, listen to the sound of the sea.
If you wish to see God, look attentively at creation. Don’t reject it; don’t reflect on it. Just look at it.
10/8/89
I
had a most unusual visitor on New Year’s Day. “I am Ram Kumari Marwah from Ghaziabad,” she said by way of introduction as she limped into my apartment. “You see I am limping. I had a fracture of my hip bone. Within a year I will be walking straight. No surgery, no medicine, only Yoga Mantra.”
She took her seat. I took her in: late 50s, hawk nosed with bright eyes that pierced into you. She spoke rapidly changing from Hindi into Punjabi into English with equal fluency. “I run the Prag Vedic Therapy Centre – we are a small group of women calling ourselves by a big name. We have cured asthma, epilepsy, elephant foot and frostbite. We can cure any disease including cancer and AIDS. You put me in touch with some foreign organization doing research on AIDS and I will prove the efficacy of my method.”
I am sceptical about such claims. I became more disbelieving as she spelt out her therapy. “Tension causes disease. First you locate the source of conflict inside you. Confront it and teach yourself how to relax. Then chant loud and clear
“Om Aarogyam”.
She chanted the two words several times till the echoes reverberated in my apartment. I became uneasy. Was she nutty? “You don’t believe me?” she asked, “take a look at these letters.” The first one was from Major S.S. Ahluwalia who got a Vir Chakra in 1972 for capturing a Pakistani machine gun post entrenched on snow-bound mountain. His toes got frost bitten. He was removed to the military hospital in Delhi where the doctors advised amputation. Ram Kumari wrote to him to try out the
‘Om Aarogyam’
therapy before submitting to surgery. The Major who had given up all hope of keeping his toes intact, tried it out. A month later he wrote to Mrs Marwah acknowledging the efficacy of her method. He got away with a minor surgical operation. She produced similar letters from patients who had been cured of asthma and epilepsy.
Who is this Ram Kumari Marwah? She is a Punjabi Hindu born and educated in Nagpur. She got her teacher training in Lahore, returned to Nagpur to take up teaching, married and has a son and a daughter. She lost her husband some years ago. Both her children are married and she is a grandmother. She lives in Raipur (MP) but is frequently in Ghaziabad with her married daughter.
“Our cures are very simple,” she assured me. “If the right side of your nostril is blocked, you put your left hand in your right armpit and blow through your nose as hard as you can. It will be clear in a few seconds. If your ears are clogged, clinch your nostrils with your thumb and index finger and blow. They will clear.”
It all sounded very simple. But she claimed that when the wife of a marine officer was about to have her menstrual periods just when her husband was due for a three days’ leave, she was able through prayer to stop the outflow so that the girl could have a good time with her husband. It came back when he had left. This seemed to me somewhat farfetched. I refrain from passing judgement till I see her next year walking into my apartment without limping. By all means try out
‘Om Aarogyam’.
And may it bring you good health in 1990 and the years to come!
10/2/90
M
y first contact with the Brahma Kumaris was in the 1970’s. I was intrigued by these ladies in white saris going about in groups asking for nothing besides time to listen to the message of their founder Dada Lekh Rai and accept them as your sisters.
Since then, at least once a year, on
Raksha Bandhan,
sister Asha comes to my home accompanied by three or four others. She dabs my forehead with a
tilak,
ties a
raakhi
around my wrist, and presents me a box of
laddoos
cooked in
shudh ghee
and honey in a bottle of Scotch whisky.
Our dialogue soon assumed a pattern. “Why don’t you give me Scotch in a bottle of honey?’ I ask her. “This is much better for your health, because it is given with love,” she replies. I protest: “On
Raksha Bandhan
brothers are expected to give money or gifts to their sisters. What would you like to receive from me?” Her reply is invariably the same: “I want you to give me not one but five gifts: your
kaam
(lust),
krodh
(anger),
loabh
(greed),
moh
(self-love) and
ahankaar
(ego).”
Since then I have got to know many others belonging to the movement: Brij Mohan who edits their journal
Purity
and Nirwair who is high up in their administrative set-up. I spent a couple of days in their headquarters in Mount Abu and met Dadi Prakashmani and other lady elders.
I cannot pretend I fully understand what the Brahma Kumari movement is about, but I know it is female-dominated, that a large number of its members are Sindhis – who are more prone to religiosity than any other Indian community – and that from very moderate beginnings it has become a worldwide organization with 3,500 centres spread over the globe in which 3,00,000 students receive instruction in spiritual matters.
It is affiliated to the United Nations. This year they celebrate the diamond jubilee of their foundation.
Why was Dada Lekh Raj known to his followers as Brahma Baba? He was a Sindhi diamond merchant doing extensive business with Indian princely states. He was a married man with children. He got the call for spiritual regeneration in middle age. He felt it was time to let women play the leading role in uplifting humankind.
A mystical experience caused him to abandon his business and take to preaching. He had vision of Vishnu Bhagwan who proclaimed:
Aham Vishnu chaturbhuj tat twam
(I am the four-armed Vishnu, so art thou).
A little later he had another mystic experience in his own home temple. His wife Jashoda and daughter-in-law were witness to it. A strange light suffused the shrine and Lekh Raj recited:
Nijanand Swaroopam, Shivoham Shivoham,
Gyan swaroopam, Shivoham, Shivoham,
Prakash Swaroopam, Shivoham, Shivoham.
(I am the blissful self, I am Shiva,
I am Shiva,
I am the knowledgeable self, I am Shiva, I am Shiva,
I am the luminous self, I am Shiva, I am Shiva.)
Dada’s early congregations only chanted the word
Aum.
In 1938 he gave all his personal property to a trust set up by him and devoted himself entirely to preaching. On Partition, the Brahma Kumaris shifted to Delhi and in 1951 set up their ashram at Mount Abu. Dada Lekh Raj died on January 18, 1969.
Brahma Kumaris (and Kumars) are strict vegetarians (I approve of that) and take vows of celibacy (which I do not approve of) and spend some time of the day in meditation (which I do not understand).
What distinguishes this movement from others of the kind is that while others splinter into factions when the founder is gone and slowly die out, the Brahma Kumaris have gone from strength to strength, remain united and no scandals, financial or others, have sullied their reputation.
I do not know from where they get the money to run such a vast organization. I expect that all of them work whole time without drawing salaries and give whatever they own to it.
“W
riters, I think should have no religion. They should make up their plots themselves,” writes Aubrey Menen in his autobiography
The Space Within the Heart.
Nevertheless, when it came to himself, this author of 27 books turned Roman Catholic in his forties and died in the faith in his home town Trivandrum.
Aubrey Menen was born in London. His father, a Keralite, was studying medicine. In the hospital to which he was attached, he ran into a pretty Irish nurse, fell in love with her and married her. Aubrey was their only child. Neither of his parents cared much about any religion and were somewhat upset when their son wrote to them from Rome that he had decided to be baptized. What brought about this change of heart in the mind of a sensitive writer who held nothing sacred is told in his autobiography – much the best book he ever wrote and one of the most memorable autobiographies I have read.
I met Aubrey in London soon after his first novel
The Prevalence of Witches
had been published. It was a beautifully written account of his stay with the Dangi tribals of Maharashtra during World War II. He had spent the war years broadcasting talks and plays for the External Services of All India Radio. I told my boss Krishna Menon how much I had enjoyed the book and if he knew this man who spelt his name Menen. Krishna Menon knew him well because Aubrey had worked with him in The India League and the two had often gone round lecturing on the need to liberate India from British Raj. He asked Aubrey to come over and introduced me to him. I could sense there was something very effeminate about this handsome young man of light-brown complexion. I found out that he was a homosexual. He makes no secret of it in his autobiography. He had affairs with women including tarts before his sexual preferences became exclusively male. What evidently contributed to the change was his mother who became flagrantly unfaithful to his father and even tried to seduce him. He writes: “I first became aware that my mother had carnal thoughts about me when I was about 16. At that age my mind was lively enough but as for my body, gangled with the best and my face had an unfinished look, as though it had just been unwrapped from damp rags by a sculptor who was not feeling his best. I was not attractive to anybody, except my mother.”
“Seventeen years, as everybody knows, is a long time to be married to the same man, especially when a woman finds that the onset of middle age has done no great havoc to her looks. My mother began to cast around for an adventure. She became exceedingly hospitable to visiting Indians, particularly students. I chanced upon her one day sitting on the knee of one of these, a handsome dandy. I was not upset. I held very advanced views about sex; in fact, I held very advanced views about everything. But I imagined that my father would be furious.’
After a terrible row with her husband, she came to her son’s bedroom for solace. She told him. “Your father is jealous of you; his own son! Why shouldn’t you love me? Why shouldn’t you?” She embraced him passionately. He gently broke out of her arms on the excuse of getting her some brandy. When he came back with it, she had stretched herself out in his bed, with her skirt drawing up to bare her shapely legs and thighs. Aubrey did not yield to his mother’s incestuous desire for him. But it obviously left a deep psychic impact on him.
Sex forms a very small part of Menen’s autobiography. It is essentially the search for his inner self. And despite his Catholicism and reading of Christian theologians, he comes closest to finding answers in the Upanishads. One finds one’s inner self by peeling off external layers like one peels an onion.
He spells out the practical steps one has to take to discover one’s true identity. The best time is when you’ve had a serious setback in life: death of someone very close to you or rejection in a love affair. “Then is the time to go off alone. You cannot find yourself amid other people. You merely find them,” he writes. You are best alone in your own room on your own bed. He writes: “I can only say that the space within the heart seems to be some core of consciousness which had been overlaid by all the necessities of living, and it may be the core which sustains us against all the changes and chances, we must suffer from the day of our birth, and even before. Most of us do manage to hold together some personality of our own, battered and twisted by others as it may be. Some unfortunates do not, and we lock them away in asylums. Is it because this tranquil, unchanging and the unchangeable core dies in them?”
I was more interested in the second part of the autobiography.
It is All Right,
which was written when Menen was told that he had only a few months to live. He was stricken with oral cancer and was in his mid-seventies. He tried to overcome fear of dying and make terms with death. He went over the Upanishads and works of Christian theology. He discovered that there are no answers. Without saying so he seems to have come round to the point of view of Epicurus: “Death is no concern of ours, for when we are present, death is not present, and when death is present, we are not.”
11-17/8/1991
A
s I bent low to touch her feet, she hauled me by my shoulders and took me in her embrace. She kissed me on both sides of my chest murmuring
Namo Shivaye, Namo Shivaye!"
It was a warm, sensuous hug: I had to hold back my tears. She addressed me as for son, my wife
mor
(daughter). Both of us were a lot older than her parents. This was the 36-year-old Sadhvi, worshipped by millions of her devotees as Mata Amritanandmayi. To her fellow villagers of Vallicava, she is Valimma. Vallicava lies along the Arabian Seacoast on the Cochin-Trivandrum highway. The route is marked with red flags, pictures of Karl Marx, Lenin and Stalin: This is a communist country with its base at Alleppey. About 20 miles south of the helipad, you branch off to the right. This is Lord Krishna’s country presided over by Ma Amritanandmayi. The road ends at a broad canal. You hire a boat to take you across to the
math.