On September 11, 1950, Krishnaji wrote to me from Ojai: “I have been here a good three weeks and need a long rest, as I have been talking for three years steadily. Also I have decided to go into complete retreat for a whole year without any interviews, public or private discussions or public talks. It will be more or less a silent year. So, I shall not be coming to India this winter.”
His retreat was total. There were no meetings, no interviews. It was from Rajagopal that we heard Krishnaji was observing complete silence. From August 1950 to December 1951 Krishnaji’s contact with India ended. Questioned later on what he did during this period, Krishnaji grew vague. The body was tired, he was inwardly drained, possibly some impurities, however subtle, still tinged the crystal clarity of his consciousness. And so, in keeping with the mystic tradition, he withdrew into himself.
In early spring of 1950 news of the dismissal of the case concerning Nandini’s plaint for separation and custody of the children had exploded in the press in India. Even Time magazine in the United States carried a paragraph with the headline, “Revolt of the Doormat.” It referred to Krishnaji as the Messiah and quoted Krishnaji’s talks, in which he spoke with passion of the position of Indian women, that they were treated as doormats. It also linked Krishnamurti’s name with Nandini’s demand for separation from her husband. Rajagopal telegraphed to me to enquire whether this news that had appeared in Time was accurate. We replied, giving details and expressing our grave concern that Krishnamurti’s name had been mentioned. On his return to Ojai later in 1950, Krishnaji faced a storm. Rosalind and Rajagopal questioned him relentlessly on what had happened in India. Letters from Rajagopal’s friends in India had spoken of Krishnaji’s “new friends.” Rosalind and Rajagopal were angry and anxious and insisted on knowing more about these people. Krishnaji remained vague.
Rosalind and Rajagopal’s personal problems were intensifying. Their marriage was under great strain. Krishnaji’s withdrawal into retreat and silence removed him from the center of the storm.
But Rosalind and Rajagopal were united in their concern for the new Krishnamurti that was emerging. Aware of his sensitive, shy nature and the passivity of his personality, Rajagopal and Rosalind soon sensed the change in him. They refused to accept that he was free of them. Krishnaji’s response was to grow increasingly passive and silent, and to withdraw within himself.
It was becoming evident to them, however, that the long spell in India, the people he had met, the freedom that had broken all the restrictions placed on him, had introduced entirely new elements in Krishnaji’s attitude to people and situations. For the first time he had friends in India who were unrelated to his old connections. These people, who made no demands on him, sensed the vastness of the sacred manifest through him. They saw him with fresh, unburdened eyes, and brought to him a relationship of deep veneration, affection, and friendship.
Krishnaji returned to India in the winter of 1951, after an absence of nearly eighteen months. Rajagopal accompanied him. The many friends Krishnaji had made in the previous years thronged to meet him in Bombay. Krishnaji entered the room, greeted us solemnly, took our hands, but did not speak a word. He was still maintaining absolute silence. Rajagopal looked uneasy. We were meeting him for the first time, and we were wary of each other.
Krishnaji did not break his silence in Bombay, but went on to Madras, where he was to give twelve talks between January 5 and February 12. Nandini and I went to Madras and stayed in Vasant Vihar. We were living in a space that had been created by using cupboards to partition the veranda; we shared a bathroom with Madhavachari and ate our meals separately from Krishnaji, who ate in his room alone.
Rajagopal was very much in control. His relationship with Madhavachari was also slowly growing clear. Rajagopal treated him in a friendly manner, but did not reveal to Madhavachari what he had in his mind. Madhavachari was respectful, addressed him as Mr. Rajagopal, took his instructions, and carried out his wishes. Rajagopal was staying in the Leadbeater Chambers in the Theosophical Society, as the upper floor of Vasant Vihar had been rented and there was no other room suitable.
Krishnaji grew vague when questioned on the reason for his silent year, but spoke to Nandini and me of Rajagopal. He tried to make us understand how much Rajagopal had sacrificed for him. Krishnaji was apologetic, anxious that we become friends with Rajagopal; soon after dinner one evening a meeting was arranged, and we went to the Leadbeater Chambers to meet him.
Rajagopal was courteous; but his eyes, sunk in deep hollows in his somber, shadowed face, bore into us, trying to read nuances of meaning into every word we spoke. He was suspicious and inquisitive, and one needed an awake and alert mind to answer his seemingly innocuous questions. He seemed to be trying to catch us unawares. He hinted that Krishnaji could not be counted on as he was constantly changing his mind. Rajagopal had heard from Velu, a servant who had looked after Krishnaji in Sedgemoor, what had happened at Ootacamund. So Rajagopal grilled us for over four hours, wanting to know every detail of what had taken place. It was a trying experience and we were both worn out by the end of it.
Later we were to discover another side of Rajagopal. He appeared deeply attracted to us. He was warm and affectionate and we became friends. Years later he was to say to Nandini that it was such a pity that they were to meet under Krishnaji’s shadow. He had an extremely intelligent and incisive South Indian
mind. Sensitive to disorder and dirt of any kind, immaculately dressed in a starched white kurta and pyjama, he spoke and moved with elegant precision.
Krishnaji and Rajagopal were to leave for Europe and the United States by the spring of 1952.
By July 1952 Nandini’s body, which had born the strain of five years of humiliation and the anguish of separation from her children, broke down. She was under pressure from many fronts: her ex-husband’s arbitrary attitude toward when Nandini could see her children; the disapproving attitude of the elders around Krishnaji. She fell mortally ill with a fast-growing cancer of the cervix and had to be flown to England for an urgent operation.
I sent a telegram to Krishnaji giving him the news. There was no reply. It was as if he had vanished, and all relationship with us at the outer level had ended. However, his silent presence could be felt all through the period of our troubles, and with it came great strength and the capacity to face calamity.
Nandini was told in London of the devastating cancer that was destroying her body. Faced with the imminence of death, she received the news with deep silence. She told me that her brain became for some moments totally still and free of all thought or feeling. Right through the period of waiting for the operation in the hotel room, where she was to suffer a severe hemorrhage, there were few thoughts—no fear, no anxiety, no concern for tomorrow. On the eve of her operation she spoke by telephone to her children in Bombay with tenderness and concern for their well-being.
Later, she was to tell me that as she went under anesthesia she heard the sound of resounding laughter, which continued all through the operation. There was no blocking out of consciousness. She knew what was happening. She found herself walking in green fields, soft breezes played on her, and the sound of birdsong filled her ears. She felt a protective presence that surrounded her and held her. The protection was not to keep her alive, but to be with her in death or life. The protection, the presence, was in the surgeon’s knife.
I was with her the next day, when she was told that the surgeon who had operated on her had suffered a stroke and was incapacitated. For two days she was without medical attention. After the operation, wherever she turned her face, the protection was there—to the left of her, to the right, above and below, she felt the touch of it. A few days after the operation she sat up in bed, cross-legged, and the breath of silence entered her. One day the young assistant doctor entered the room unexpectedly. Seeing her, he asked, “Are you a yogi?”
Like an underground spring of clear running water, unseen yet potent with life, Nandini’s years have passed. Living with our mother in the 1950s, she chanced upon two tiny orphan girls of the neighborhood. Destitute, they lived with a distant aunt, but spent their life on the street. Deprived of her own children, Nandini had taken the girls in and started a tiny play school for them and for the other poor children of the neighborhood. Later, the school shifted to two nearby garages. Children of the surrounding areas soon started pouring in— today there are 150 children. Teachers and helpers have also come forward. The school, Bal Anand, provides to the child who wanders the street a creative space
in an otherwise dreary landscape of concrete. Living alone for many years, Nandini has been the silent, nodal point of the school. The children sit round her and talk, laugh, and play. They are offered music, dancing, weaving, painting, language, dramatics, science, and a little arithmetic. After twenty-five years Bal Anand has become a part of the Krishnamurti Foundation, India, and Nandini has become a member of the foundation. As her own children have come of age, they have returned to her, overflowing with love and protection.
Nandini remained a close friend of Krishnaji’s, traveling with him to some of the centers when he was in India, and maintaining her contact through letters when he was away. Her hair is grey. She remains fragile, beautiful, anonymous.
As part of his Indian program it was decided that Krishnaji and Rajagopal would participate in a discussion group in Poona in the winter of 1952. Rao Sahib Patwardhan had arranged for a meeting of his friends at Vithal Wadi, where Achyut was living in a tiny cottage amongst forested hills, after his final break with the Socialist Party in 1950.
The people who gathered at Vithal Wadi for the discussions came from varied backgrounds. Professor Dhopeshwarkar taught philosophy at the University of Poona. S. M. Joshi was an austere, upright Chitpavan Brahmin, a Socialist and an active member of the Sarva Seva Sangh. He and Rao Sahib Patwardhan were close friends and had participated in many of the work camps with voluntary Sarva Seva Sangh workers. Mangesh Padgounkar, a poet, was one of the participants, along with Durga Bhagwat. Durga Bhagwat, a writer and anthropologist who had worked with Verrier Elwin in Madhya Pradesh, was a short lean woman with a tight bony face. Tough both physically and mentally, she had never married, had enormous energy, and felt strongly about problems of poverty in India. She was devoted to Rao Sahib. Madhavachari had come from Madras for the discussions, along with Padmabai and Sanjeeva Rao. Pandit Iqbal Narain Gurtu came from Varanasi and L. V. Bhave from Thana. I was the only other woman present.
Rao Patwardhan approved of me, and over two years he had become a close friend. His austere nature had responded personably and at depth to my totally alien background and attitudes. We discussed beauty, art, the Western mind, and the Indian creative matrix. For the first time I had established close contact with a traditional Brahminic intellect, a way of life that had no relevance to my early years as the daughter of a civil servant or to the life I led in the social milieu of Bombay.
Sunanda, who by then had married Pama, one of Rao Sahib’s and Achyut’s younger brothers, was considered by Rao Sahib, the Patriarch, to be too immature and was not invited to attend the seminar. Nor was Nandini. Her astounding beauty, simplicity, and childlike quality combined with the fact that she had been married into a family of great wealth, made it difficult for Rao to accept the fact that she was serious. Sunanda had been asked by Rao to look after the arrangements for Krishnaji’s food and other needs. Life was spartan, the rooms tiny; there were few amenities.
Krishnaji, sensing Sunanda’s hurt at being left out of the group discussions, was most affectionate. He talked to her at length and walked with her in the woods. His attitude to her was of a much-loved daughter. Rajagopal was wary, watchful, impatient. One could hear Rajagopal’s voice raised in heated argument in Krishnaji’s room. Krishnaji’s voice was never heard.
The discussions continued for over a week. Every morning and evening we gathered at Vithal Wadi. Krishnaji was dealing with tough minds entrenched and rooted in Marxian tenets of social service. The discussion kept impinging on poverty and the need for social action. This was understandable in a country of such immense poverty. But the minds that had gathered were intelligent enough to realize that at some point their approach was thwarted by their own inner conflicts, urges, and inadequacies. Slowly, with infinite patience, Krishnaji probed into the nature of mind, social action, thought and the thinker, and silence. He told the Socialists that the problem of food, shelter, and clothing could never be solved at an ideological level. It could only end when needs were not used for psychological purposes, but were dealt with on their own level. Though the hard-headed Socialists remained tethered to their perches, they were no longer secure in their positions.
At the end of the week we went our own ways. Of the group that had gathered, all drifted away except for the Patwardhans, Friedman, me, and the old friends of Krishnaji who had been with him from the Theosophical days. That the discussions had an impact on the tough minds of the Socialists and academics was evident. Professor Dhopeshwarkar wrote several books on Krishnaji’s teachings. Many years later, S. M. Joshi was to say to me that Socialists in India since 1934 were dominated by Western thought and its dialectics. Marx became the central point from which all Socialist thought radiated. They could not see that when applied to Indian conditions, the Marxist position lacked a critical base. Western Marxism had no place for humanism. S. M. Joshi said his concern with socialism had always been with whether man could grow to his full stature. Therefore a moral element was integral to the Socialist stance. In 1948 the Socialists were profoundly perplexed and in a dilemma. They saw that ends justified means in Marxist thought. This was never quite acceptable to S. M. Joshi. While in jail, between 1944 and 1945, for a moment he had felt that perhaps ends did justify means; but this did not satisfy him and he was very confused. The discussions with Krishnaji had a liberating influence on him. He said they had “helped to clarify my attitude to injustice—helped me to face confusion and come through with clarity.”1
While I was in Poona to attend the discussions at Vithal Wadi, I found myself watching with ruthless attention. I watched the movement of thought and feeling as they arose within me. I also watched what was outside me—people’s faces, a leaf, a stone. While on a walk alone in the woods around Vithal Wadi, I suddenly found myself running. It was a still evening. The cry of one bird superimposed itself on other bird cries; the murmur of mosquitoes and chirping of crickets, a distant voice, the sound of my heartbeats poured piercingly into me, while sharp scent of neem, tulsi, and a multitude of jasmine swept through me like a strong wind. I was afloat in a sea of exploding color. The living green of peepul leaf,
fresh fig green, new pink green of the mango shoot, the pale dawn green of a cactus bud, became one with sound; filling my nostrils, my ears, my eyes, my mouth. I found I was standing before a cactus bush weeping, unable to bear or contain the potency of that spring evening. The abundance of beauty, heavy like honey, lay in my eyes and ears for days. In seeing, beauty awakened; what was seen was unimportant. The intensity diminished as day followed day, but beauty taking over the sensory doorways, had generated a perception that seldom abandoned my eyes.
From Vithal Wadi in Poona, Krishnaji and Rajagopal went to Rishi Valley. The school had reopened with Pearce, the old Theosophist and educator, as principal. He had gathered a group of earnest young teachers around him. Rishi Valley was situated in the famine belt of Rayalaseema in Andhra Pradesh. The land was barren. Miss Payne had dug wells, but trees had still to be planted—the thousands of trees that in years were to make this valley an oasis out of barren land. The surrounding hills were formed of rocks and boulders of immense size. Torn and gnarled by wind and time, they had assumed sculptural form; the huge boulders were balanced precariously on rocks, amongst the oldest in the world. The colors of sunsets and sunrises over the valley were palettes of saffron and amethyst; the air was clear and free of dust. In spite of the poverty of soil and sparse population, the area stretching from Anantpur on one end and Tirupati on the other was dotted with shrines to the siddhas.1 Madanapalle was twenty
kilometers from the site of the school.
At the heart of Rishi Valley was a very ancient banyan tree, like a temple; its roots had formed pillars, its branches sheltered monkeys, and cobras dwelt in the hollow at its base. A stage had been built around the tree, where the children danced between the many trunks and hid in the hollows. There were few birds, for the trees that were to attract them were yet to be planted.
Only thirty children attended the school, but the problems of the place had been immense. The teachers held long discussions on the role of authority, freedom and order. No solution was possible, for the problems were living, moving, in flux; and the observations of the participants had to move, query, observe—with the same swiftness as the problem and its many nuances.