(I)

 

My professors at college were giants, Olympian gods all. They are memorable names in the fields of scholarship, learning and teaching. Of these, J. C. Bose, P. C. Ray, Percival, M.Ghose and our Principal P. K. Roy were mature elderly men; among the younger group were Harinath De, Prafulla Ghose, Khagendranath Mitra, and a few others who will appear in this story later.

All these men possessed a special gift for which they deserve admiration. Learning and teaching ability are qualities not so rare, many teachers have them. But the quality for which our ancient teachers were known as preceptors, guru, is something unusual: that is the power of influence, the touch of an awakened soul. The true quality of a teacher does not He in what mysteries he has taught the disciple or how deep has been his exposition. How far has he evoked with his own personality the inner spirit of his disciple? – that is the question. We find this in the records of our ancient tradition. A disciple comes to the teacher for the knowledge of Brahman, brahmavidya. The teacher, instead of giving him any instruction or explanation of any deep mystery, asks him simply to repair to the forest and tend the kine for a while. 'For a while' meant quite a few years in fact – as in the Gautama-Satyakama episode of the Chhandogya Upanishad! As we all know, here in the Ashram, the Mother has often given us to clean the dishes and not engage in study.

The great men with whom we studied had this gift in large 

measure, at least many of them. Percival taught us Shakespeare. He never expounded in full the meaning of words and phrases. This was done in detail by Manomohan Ghose, although he too did this only during the first two years of college; for we were then just fresh from school and he had to explain everything in detail, so that we had no need of any other help, not even of a dictionary. But, from this point of view, there was no one, the students thought, who could match 'Professor J. N. Dasgupta. He was actually a History man, but he was given to teach English as well. The boys would say, the naughty ones perhaps, that Dasgupta left us in no doubt or uncertainty as to the meaning anywhere, so he would dictate, "father means the male parent'.'! Percival did not act as a lexicon. He, dwelt only on such passages as had any complexity or dramatic intent, and he would convey the inner sense by his manner of reading. I remember a passage in King John, where a single monosyllable, "O!" is uttered by a character. Percival omitted to read it, his only comment was, "Only a great actor can utter this word." We read Burke with him. He would turn over pages after pages of the huge volume, with occasional sentences as to the writer's drift; this would help bring out the personality of Burke, the mould of his thought. Percival's figure lives clearly in my mind. He always walked with his back erect, sat in his chair in the same posture. I have never seen him bend or sway. He would sit immobile and straight, his head high up on a stiff neck; only the words came out of his mouth as from an oracle.

Manomohan Ghose not only gave his explanations and comments, he also helped us in appreciating poetry. He taught us The Princess. This was his comment on the book. "You know what this work is like? If Tagore had cared to write a poem on female emancipation, it would have been something like this book of Tennyson's. But even in this arid expanse there are some oases, as for instance these charming lines: 

Page – 430

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

 Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes."

 

I was lucky to have his comments on two of my own compositions. One was on my very first essay in college. We were asked to do a home-work, the subject given was "Imitation". He explained what it meant: I still recall he gave as an illustration the protective mimicry of birds. I wrote out a very full essay, dwelling first on the virtues of imitation, next on its drawbacks. I began the second part of my essay by saying, "But Janus has his other face too." I had at the time just heard about the god Janus. You know who is Janus? He is the two-faced god of ancient Rome. He was also known as a god of war, war and peace being his two faces. The doors of his temple were opened in times of war, they were closed during peace. So he symbolised the door; indeed the word in Latin means the door, through which one can pass this way or that. The month of January derives from the name of this god, as this month faces both the old year and the new. Anyway, the professor wrote on my composition, "First-class essay." You can well understand how elated I felt.

The second time it was probably just after I had come to the Degree class. In a tutorial class he set an essay to be written on the spot. We were given the choice of a number of subjects. I chose "Self-Realisation or God-Realisation". I do not now remember which of the two I supported, Self or God! Perhaps I said that Self-Realisation really meant God-Realisation, for the Self was nothing but an illusi'on. Or did I say that to realise God was nothing but Self-Realisation, for God was nothing, Self alone was the reality? I must have introduced a lot of such metaphysical stuff. This brought the following comment from the professor: "He is one of those generalisers who fight shy of facts and figures." I could see these "facts and figures" clearly illustrated in the work of my neighbour. Next to me sat Naren Laha (now well-known as Dr. N. N. Law).

I cast a furtive glance to see what he had written. He had chosen "Bankimchandra" as his subject. I found he had serially classified the collected works of Bankim with a full tabulation of their good and bad points. Here was a shining example of clear "facts and figures", and complete statistics.

There is another amusing anecdote about this Naren Laha; it relates to another professor of ours, Harinath De. De was then a comparatively junior man just returned from England. One day he mentioned in class that before he left for England he had kept a page mark in a book he had been reading in the college library and that the book must still be there with its page mark, exactly as he had left it. I went to the library to search out the book and could verify the truth of his remark, though I cannot now tell you what the book was about. In his teaching he was noted for parallel passages; he would bring in heaps of quotations from passages of similar thoughts. He also prepared a book of Notes on these lines, although he once himself admitted in class that the Notes had been written at an immature stage with the sole object of showing off his learning and that all those parallel passages were really unnecessary. This Harinath De happened to be our examiner in English at the Annual Test, and in his hands our Naren Laha, a good boy, an exceptionally good boy in fact, received a big zero. This left us gaping and we had no end of fun. We decided among ourselves it must be credited to drink. I need not hide the fact that De had been addicted to alcohol, but that had no adverse effect on his character or learning. He was simple and easy in his manner and very sociable. And as for his learning, it was a veritable ocean. He was proficient in about two dozen languages; whatever language he offered for an examination, he always got a first class first. Greek and Latin he had read with Sri Aurobindo; he knew Sri Aurobindo.

The youngest of all our teachers of English was Prafulla 

Ghose. He had just passed out of the University. Precisely because he was a raw young man, he could infuse into his feelings and attitude, his manner and language, a degree of warmth and enthusiasm. One day he asked a question in class. One Kiran Mukherji (he was first in English in his B.A. and M.A. and a Greats scholar at Oxford later) stood up and gave a fine answer. .But Prafulla Ghose remarked, "I see the Roman hand of the master", that is to say, the answer had been given after getting hold of Percival's Notes on the point.¹ It seems I came under his special favour, somehow. Two of us once took part in a recitation competition. I do not now recall exactly what was the particular piece of which poet or dramatist. Very probably, it was from Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, the piece beginning:

 

A stark moss-trooping Scot was he.

 

Prafulla Ghose and an Englishman named Tipping, another teacher of English, were the judges. They listened to our pieces and Tipping decided in favour of the other boy. He being the senior man, and an Englishman at that, it was his verdict that prevailed. Prafulla Ghose sent for me afterwards and expressed his opinion that Tipping had not done justice to me. I believe my competitor spoke English with a slightly Anglo-Indian accent, like the one our educated people in Calcutta used to affect once or do even now in imitation, and that must have sounded better in Tipping's ears than my "native" Bengali pronunciation.                                                                                              .

Now that we have been discussing Mr. Tipping, let me add a little more about him. As a teacher his speciality lay in drawing sketches. That is to say, he tried to present before the students in a concrete, living manner any scene described

 

¹ The phrase "Roman hand" occurs in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (III. 4.48). The hero receives a letter from his fiancee and can guess who the writer may be from the handwriting itself. He exclaims in joy, "I think we do know the sweet Roman hand." 

in the text, by sketching it on the black-board. It can .hardly be said that he was a skilled painter or artist. But perhaps illustrations in literature belong to the same category as advertising posters; they serve the same purpose.

         As I remarked at the outset, bur professors were like the  Olympian gods, not merely because of their calibre or gifts. and greatness of character; their position and attitude were like that – somewhat aloof and quite beyond the reach of personal contact or relations – at least for the first two or three years. But there were some who sought to establish with the students an intimacy, or at least a relatively closer relationship. Take for example our professor of philosophy, Aditya Mukherji. He was nearing his forties perhaps at the time. On the very first day of the First Year class he announced during the roll-call that he would try every day to make himself familiar with the faces of about half a dozen students. But this turned out to be impossible later on, his resolution turned into a merely pious wish. He was a very good teacher who would present the subject matter in a very simple, easy, neat and clear manner. He had about his manner and expression what I have subsequently come to recognise as French clarity. There is a pleasing association linked with his name in my mind. I have told you about my first composition in the first year of college, in connection with Manomohan Ghose. The first essay I had to write in my Degree course was in the Honours class in philosophy. Professor Aditya Mukherji gave an essay to .be written at home and it was duly submitted. One day in class the Professor called out, "No. 40" – this happened to be my roll-number. He said to me, "Here is your essay. I hope you will get a first-class in English also." You may well imagine the state of my mind! My neighbours clustered round me and said, "What is this wonderful stuff you have written! Let's have a look." I had shown off a lot of learning, by quoting isvarasiddheh, from Vijnanabhikshu, to show that the Sankhya is not necessarily atheistic, also by stealing 

whole passages from Mill and so on.

The paper finally reached the hands of Kiran Mukherji. I have spoken to you about him before; perhaps something more could be added here. As I have said, he returned from England after attaining great distinction. at Oxford. Ashutosh Mukherji took him on as a professor at the Calcutta University. I met him several times during my trips to Calcutta from here. While in England he used to read with interest all my articles in the journals. Our relations grew more intimate several years later, that is, when he got interested in our work and sadhana here. There had been some tragedy in his life, – I do not know the exact story, – so that in spite of his intellectual gifts and learning he was an unhappy man. He had been turning this way in search of peace and a different kind of life. But he was taken away from this world by an untimely death.

P. C. Ray was the one person who could set up an intimate personal relationship with the students; that indeed was his outstanding gift, and it was this that enabled him to leave behind a series of disciples. At the very sight of his pleasant smiling face, the students felt their minds and hearts suffused with joy, almost with a light as it were. One day in class he happened to say something in Bengali. We were taken aback: a professor using Bengali in college, at the Presidency of all places! This was unprecedented! He could guess immediately what we felt and came out with the Bengali verse, meaning:

 

All over the world there is a babel of tongues;

Can anything please unless it's one's own?

 

You can understand how unfailingly he could draw the students towards him.

J. C. Bose was a somewhat different type. I did not have the luck to meet him in class more than once or twice, for he left for England soon. But he was by nature of a serious temperament;  

and in contrast to P. C. Ray who never bothered about his dress or appearance, he was always neat and prim and proper. But he too was equally worthy of respect for his nobility of mind and innate greatness. I have referred elsewhere in an earlier talk to his friendship with Sister Nivedita and the encouragement I had from him in my attempt to master the technique of the bomb.

There was another professor of philosophy I should not omit to mention. He too was quite young at the time, a fine handsome and pleasing figure. But the subject that he taught gave us – to me at least – no kind of pleasure. The subject was Ethics, and the text book was James Seth's. To me, it seemed, it talked all sorts of rubbish and nonsense, things that had neither depth nor sincerity. The professor, Khagendranath Mitra, did, however, take a good deal of pains to initiate us into the mysteries of morality. But. J am mentioning his name here not for that reason; nor again because he developed into a well-known singer of Vaishnava hymns. It is because he chanced to turn up here, many years later, on the occasion of a Darshan; this was after he had retired from service. When we met, I reminded him in the course of our talk, "Sir, you are my guru, I have been a student of yours". He was a little surprised. I then explained everything. "That's very well," he said, "I am very pleased to hear it, for I have found what I wanted. Well, I was your guru, now give me my fee." "Tell me, sir, how." "I have given you some teaching, now you give me some: tell me about the sadhana you follow here."

While speaking of my professors, I must not omit to mention our Pundit. This was a title given by the students to the teacher of Sanskrit in college as in school, no matter how big a professor he might be – as if to show that the feeling of distance created by English was not there in the case of Sanskrit. Our Pundit was Satischandra Vidyabhushan, who later became a Mahamahopadhyaya, an extremely courteous man, entirely modest, one who behaved as if he 

were an absolute "nobody". In his class the students had no fear or worry, no constraint, sometimes even no sense of propriety either. One day they said in class, "There is not going to be any reading today, sir; you had better tell us a story. You are familiar with the languages and histories and cultures of so many strange lands, please tell us something." Vidyabhushan was particularly learned in Pali and the Buddhist scriptures. Without a murmur he accepted the order of the boys. While talking of Pali and the Buddhists, he told us something about the Tibetans too. "What you call Darjeeling," he said, "is not a distorted version of Durjayalinga. Actually it is a transcription of a Tibetan word." He spelt out the word on the black-board, in the Tibetan script – it looked somewhat like Bengali – something like Dang-Sang-Ling, I cannot now exatly recall. On another occasion we had the chance to hear a conversation in Sanskrit in his class. The class was on, when one of the officials of the college entered the room with a Ceylonese monk. The monk wanted to meet the Pundit. They talked in Sanskrit. I only remember a single sentence of our professor, "ghatika-catustayam eva  agacchatu bhavan, "Be pleased to come at four o'clock." The kindness and affection of our Pundit are still fresh in my mind. He was never afflicted by the weight of his learning, nor did it ever afflict us.

Now to conclude: let me give you the scene of my final. parting with college, the professors and college life.

I had just been released after a year of jail. My father said, "You should resume your studies, but not in Calcutta. Calcutta is a place for all sorts of excitement. Young people easily lose their heads on coming in contact with Calcutta. If you are to study, you shall have to choose a place outside Calcutta where there is not much excitement." I said, "All right." I had no intention of proceeding further with my studies; my real object was to bide my time until I found a safe anchor. What kind of anchor it would be I had no idea. So, on the pretext of securing a Transfer Certificate, 

for getting admitted to a college outside Calcutta, I went to my old college, the Presidency. The certificate had been made out by the clerk and submitted to the Principal for his signature. As we waited, there was a summons for me from the Principal to see him. In the column for "conduct", there was this entry on my certificate, "He was an accused in the Alipur Bomb Conspiracy case, but was acquitted." This entry must have drawn the attention of the Principal, and perhaps he wanted to see for himself who and what kind of man was this "accused". As I entered his room, he looked up and saw me. Could he recognise me? For in his English classes I used to sit on the front bench just facing him. He must have observed me any number of times, so I used to think. Now he kept on asking why I wanted a transfer and why I should not continue in the same college. "My guardians do not want me to continue here," I said. He expressed his doubts, "You won't find it convenient. It is better to continue here." In the end, he had to give me the Certificate. I bowed to him and came away. The Principal happened to be our professor of English, Percival. 

 

(2) 

 

In an earlier talk I told you incidentally that I had a mind to say something about the English poet Wordsworth. I mentioned then that I did not come to appreciate his poetry in my school days; it happened in college, and to a large extent thanks to Professor Manomohan Ghose. In our school days, the mind and heart of Bengali students were saturated with the poetry of Tagore:

 

 

In the bower of my youth the love-bird sings,

Wake up, O darling, wake;

Opening thy lids that are lazy with love,

Wake up, O darling, wake... 

This poetry belongs to the type once graphically characterised by our humorous novelist Prabhat Mukherji through one of his characters, a sadhu, describing the charms of the Divine Name:

 

It has the sweetness and the sugar

Of sandesh and rasogulla.

 

Indeed Tagore's poetry drips liquid sugar. To young hearts enraptured by such language and feeling, Wordsworth's

 

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:

And when I crossed the wild,

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child...

 

would appear rather dull and dreary, tasteless almost.

Let me in this connection tell you a story. We were then in college. The Swadeshi movement was in full flood, carrying everything before it. We the young generation of students had been swept off our feet. One day, Atul Gupta, who as I have told you before was my friend, philosopher and guide, happened to pass a remark which rather made me lose my bearings. a little. He was listing the misdeeds of the British in India. "This nation of shopkeepers!" he was saying, "There is no end to their trickeries to cheat us. Take for instance this question of education. The system they have set up with the high-sounding title of University and of advancement of learning is nothing more than a machine for creating a band of inexpensive clerks and slaves to serve them. They have been throwing dust in our eyes by easily passing off useless Brummagem ware with the label of the real thing. One such piece of eminently useless stuff is their poet Wordsworth, whom they have tried to foist on our young boys to their immense detriment." This remark was no doubt a testimony to his inordinate love of the country.  

But it remains to be seen how far it would bear scrutiny as being based on truth.

For us in India, especially to Bengalis, the first and foremost obstacle to accepting Wordsworth as a poet would be his simple, artless and homely manner:

 

Behold her, single in the field,

 Yon solitary Highland Lass!

 

And, as a classic instance of that famous homely diction, a line that follows:

 

Will no one tell me what she sings?

 

Who would be moved by lines such as these?

    On the gates of entry to the poetic world of Wordsworth

is engraved this motto:

 

...the Gods approve

The depth and not the tumult of the soul.

 

It is as if the hermitage of old, an abode of peace and quiet, santa-rasaspadam asramam idam. All here is calm and unhurried, simple and natural and transparent, there is no muddy current of tempestuous upheaval. That is why the poet feels in his heart the time of evening as if it were

 

...quiet as a Nun

Breathless with adoration,

 

or else in. the early morning he has the experience:

 

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.

 

Here is an easy, natural, limpid flow, undisturbed in its movement and yet with a pleasant charm and filled with an 

underlying sweetness. But perhaps one has to listen intently to get at the sweetness and beauty of such lines. They do not strike the outer ear for they set up no eddies there; the inner hearing is their base.

 

She was a Phantom of Delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight...

 

Is this not a silent opening of the divine gates of vision?

 

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!

 

Do not these words bear us far away on some unknown wings?

Tranquillity and a pleasant sweetness are then the first doors of entry. Through the second doors we come to a wide intimacy, an all-pervading unity, where man and nature have fused into one. This unity and universality breathe through and inspire such simple yet startling words:

 

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

 

or,

 

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face,

 

or else this easy and natural yet deep-serious utterance carrying the burden of a mantra:

 

 

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea.

 

Once we cross beyond these second gates we reach an inner region, a secluded apartment of the soul where poetry assumes the garb of magic, a transcendent skill lends to words 

the supernatural beauty and grace of a magician's art. How often we have read these lines and heard them repeated and yet they have not grown stale:

 

A voice so thrilling never was heard

In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,

 Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides,

 

or,

 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

 

This magic has no parallel, except perhaps in Shakespeare's

 

          Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim…

                   .          (The Winter's Tale, Act IV, Scene 4)

 

Sri Aurobindo has referred to another point of greatness in Wordsworth, where the poetic mind has soared still higher, opening itself not merely to an intimacy but to the voice of a summit infinity:

 

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone

                                                     (The Prelude, III, ll. 62-63)

 

Thus, with this poet, we gain admittance to the very heart, the innermost sanctuary of poetry where we fully realise what our old Indian critics laid down as their final verdict, namely, that the poetic delight is akin to the Delight of Brahman.

But even the moon has its spots, and in Wordsworth the spots are of a fairly considerable magnitude. Manomohan 

Ghose too had mentioned to us these defects. Much of Wordsworth is didactic and rhetorical, that is, of the nature of preaching, hence prosaic, even unpoetic although couched in verse. Ghose used to say that even the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality which is so universally admired is mainly didactic, much of it high rhetoric, with very little real poetry in it. I must confess, however, that to me personally some of its passages have a particular charm, like

 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar...

But trailing clouds of glory do we come...

 

Atul Gupta had seen perhaps only this adverse side of Wordsworth. He had marked the heavy hand of the metaphysician,. sthula-hastavalepa, but omitted to see the delicate workmanship of the artist. However a man's true quality has to be judged by his best performance, and the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order.

Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even. Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet.

 

Breaking the silence of the seas

           Beyond the farthest Hebrides,

 

and

 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn,

 

are indeed two of the highest peaks of English poetry.

    Sri Aurobindo has said that Vyasa is the most masculine of 

writers. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This classification of poets into "masculine" and "feminine" was made by the poet Coleridge. "Masculine" means, in the first place, devoid of ornament, whereas the "feminine" loves ornament. Secondly, the masculine has intellectuality and the feminine emotionalism. Then again, femininity is sweetness and charm, masculinity implies hard restraint; the feminine has movement, like the flow of a stream, the play of melody, while the masculine has immobility, like the stillness of sculpture, the stability of the hill. This is the difference between .the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and, Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, adi-kavi. In the Mahabharata we find not so much the beauty of poetic form as a treasury of knowledge, of polity and ethics, culture and moral and spiritual discipline. We consider the Gita primarily as a work of philosophy, not of poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth has not been able to capture the mind and heart of India or Bengal as Shelley has done. In order truly to appreciate Wordsworth's poetry, one must be something of a meditative ascetic, dhyani, tapasvi,– indeed

 

                              ...quiet as a Nun

                                 Breathless with adoration.