GRAD

5134
.M644
A32
2002

An Autobiography

T .N . M O H A N T Y
Between Two Worlds
East and West
Professor J.N. Mohanty
Between Two Worlds
East and West
An Autobiography

J.N. Mohanty

OXJFORD
U N IV E R SIT Y PRESS
 6 /
5'3 4
, h !.û t u i OXPORD
U N IV E R S IT Y PRESS
1
p \ c —- YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers th e
. University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
Sào Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto
with an associated company in Berlin

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in India
By Oxford University Press, New Delhi

© Oxford University Press, 2002

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquiror

ISBN 019 564 8358

Typeset in Times New Roman 10.5/12

Byjojy Philip
Printed by Roopak Printers, Delhi 110 032
Published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press
YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001
S a r . • ol
\^ ; '. 'U o 'i

In remembrance o f my aunt Rama Devi Chowdhury

who showed, but did not say,
how life can he good, beautiful, and holy.
 Contents

Foreword ix

The Town and the Village 1

School and College 5
The Family 10
Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta 19
Gottingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) 36
A Gandhian Experiment 56
Back in Calcutta 60
From the Ganges to the Red River:
in Oklahoma in the January of 1970 78
New York City and the New School 84
Oxford and Freiburg 91
The City of Brotherly Love 98
Visits to India 104
Philosophical Journey, Roots, and Religion 109
American Life in the Last Three Decades 121
Keeping a Promise 125
Epilogue 129
Appendix My Contribution to Philosophy 131
Glossary 134
\M
Foreword

his is the life story of an Indian philosopher who has spent his life in
T three countries: India, Germany, and the USA.
The writing has gone through many phases. Large parts were written
in Germany and in Calcutta. I am sending it to press almost fifteen years
after I began writing. One thing I did not want to do was write another
book on philosophy, or even an account of my philosophy. However,
since my life has been primarily dedicated to the pursuit of philosophi­
cal ideas, the connection of the story of my life to my philosophical
interests was almost unavoidable. It was equally important for me to
retrieve my ‘origin’, my ‘roots’ in my village in Orissa, India. Calcutta
and Gottingen have been recurrent presences in between, shaping my
mind and spirit.
Kenneth Merrill patiently read the penultimate draft of this book. His
unfailing sense of the English language and his sympathetic Verstehen
of my life helped remove many of my linguistic infelicities and lapses.
Without the help of Bina Gupta, this book could not have been pub­
lished. Bina Gupta improved the story with her sensitive responses; but
for her willingness to prepare the final draft, the book would not have
been published.
I present here a story of how one person, Indian by birth and upbring­
ing, Hindu by faith, philosopher by profession, living in the USA for
three decades, thankful to the country of adoption but never forgetting
the Indian heritage, has responded to the world at large and interpreted
his life. Remembrance and interpretation have mingled—this story is a
response to history.

J.N.M.
 The Town and the Village

he city of Cuttack then had red, dusty roads. Old brick houses, some
T with roofs and some thatched, stood along them, interspersed with
slums of mud huts and bamboo-walled shacks. The town lies encircled
by two mighty rivers, the one a tributary of the other, enclosed as it were
in an age-old conspiracy not to let the town grow beyond the limits
imposed by them. In summer and in winter, the rivers are but vast
expanses of sand with tiny trickling streams in one, and a larger expanse
of deep blue water in the other, protected and held together by a
crumbling dam that had been built nearly a century ago by the British.
The monsoons transform the rivers into mighty torrents of water that
sweep past the city, washing down trees and mud huts, cattle, even
elephants, living creatures and corpses, human and animal. Old Oriya
kings who made Cuttack their capital built enormous stone embank­
ments on both the sides of the city to protect it from the wrath of the
waters. There is no doubt that but for their farsighted work, the two
rivers would by now, have been flowing on one bed, and the city of
Cuttack reduced to their sands. However, the city stands—an age-old
relic to days gone, saved from destruction but closed in by space and
time.
To grow up in such a place as Cuttack is to feel secure that nothing
will matter in the long run. Perhaps the only fear I experienced as a boy
of ten was watching the fury and wrath of the waters of the Kathjori, on
whose banks we lived, in spate. But this fear would soon subside, with
the thought that this was an annual show of futile wrath, as the very
existence of the city tells us so convincingly. The ruins of the fort on the
north side of the city on the banks of the MahanadI—a fort which re­
portedly was nine-storeys high but of which a shapeless brick mound, a
moat and a stately gateway are all that remain—were supposed to fill the
2 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
mind of every Oriya child with a sense of pride in the greatness of the
people who spoke her tongue. As a young boy, that sense of pride filled
my entire being. But then life went on, chiefly around the families that
were related by ties of marriage and friendship. I found myself to be a
point within a series of concentric circles, the innermost circle of which
was my family—my parents and my siblings. But the line of demarca­
tion between these families was rather thin. A family was not bound by
rigid and impenetrable walls, nor by strict definitions. Often the
neighbour, a friend or a distant relative would acquire the privilege of
being an insider, an ‘uncle’, a ‘brother’, or a ‘sister’. My people carried
this flexibility from their villages to the towns.
A long stretch of dusty, red road began at a railroad station on the
other side of the river MahanadI, the great river, the larger of the two that
enclose Cuttack between them. The road wound first through mounds of
white sand deposited by the wind from the enormous expanse of the
river’s bed, but then ran through fertile rice fields bound on both sides
by a densely set wall of mango, banyan and coconut palms, through
which the clusters of mud huts of the villages were barely visible. There
were little ponds by the roadside with white lilies and red lotuses on their
waters. To the young observer, bamboo groves presented fearful images
of deadly snakes. The wide-ranging arms of the banyan trees appeared
as the habitat of invisible and mischievous spirits of all sizes and
descriptions. Every few miles, a half-ton bus would come to a stop at a
tiny roadside village, usually—if it were a mail bus—to pick up and
unload the mail bag, but also to load and unload passengers and their
baggage from the roof. Besides the post office (marked by a red post­
box sticking to the mud wall of a one-room mud hut), there would be a
cluster of tea shops and eating places (where food is served on lotus
leaves on rows of dark wooden tables, which, after eating, you throw
into an outdoor garbage dump to the excitement and delight of a couple
of the canine species who kept vigil around the place). After several
such road-side stops, which included one or two relatively larger town­
ships, the weary bus would pull into a tiny cluster of mud huts among
which a red-white brick Public Works Department bungalow stood out
with remarkable pride and pre-eminence. The family would disembark,
luggage pulled down from the roof top, curious village urchins would
gather in excitement, the village elders who knew us would bow down
to my father—once a boy from a nearby village, who had made it big in
the town as a lawyer and then as a judge; then there would begin, in a
row of bullock carts, a journey along a muddy road demarcated by rows
of date palms from the vast stretch of rice fields on both sides. We
 The Town and the Village • 3
youngsters would marvel at the skill of the cart drivers in negotiating the
carts along the terrain, as also at their strength and courage in command­
ing and being obeyed by those stout bullocks whose long horns were
always threatening us. In the summer, the road would be hardened with
mud, the carts would bump; in the rainy season, the muddy path would
be indistinguishable from the sheet of water all around, but for the rows
of palms and the winding open space between the tall rice plants, and if
the bullocks were not able to pull the carts through, there would be
servants, or even passers-by, who would lend their hands to push them
across a ditch.
The village of Nilakanthapur (the seat of the blue-necked god, i.e.,
Siva) is part of a chain of villages that merge into each other. Although
these villages are not physically separate from each other, they are
distinct legal entities, and perhaps have their distinct social personali­
ties. At one end of Nilakanthapur, where the complex chain of villages
may be said to begin, as it were, where the main street emerges out of the
village green (a patch of common green bound by hedges of kiya, shaded
by several massive banyans that stand witness to the funeral pyres that
have been lighted at one end of the field bordering the hedge, while at
the other end boys play native games or swing on the branches of the
trees, and cows graze), there stands the house which I leamt to identify
emotionally as ‘ours’. Though I was bom in the city of Cuttack, and
raised wherever my father was posted (the administration required that
judges could serve at one station at most for three years). Every vacation
brought us back to this home.
The home was in fact a cluster of homes; the family consisted of
many families. One side of a large square was taken up by a row of
houses, each of which had a hallway opening into the common square in
front. Then there was a first inner courtyard, around which there were
living rooms, and behind it a second inner courtyard, around which there
were kitchens, pantries and storerooms, all of these again leading to a
large tank which supplied water for most household work. Each of these
homes belonged to a ‘branch’ of a family which originally must have
been one, but now the branches represent different places in a complex
family tree, and not all connections between all of them are known
totmany. There was, however, a shared sense of belonging; joys and
sorrows were shared, weddings and births were celebrated, deaths were
mourned in common. Each, however, was a distinct legal entity. Some
were moderately wealthy, others nearly paupers; some then owned lots
of land, others none at all.
On one side of the common square and adjoining one end of the row
4 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
of homes, there was the cattle shed, which was divided up into spaces for
the different families. On the side opposite the cattle shed stood the bam
house, where once paddy was stored for all, but which, as everything
else, had been divided and subdivided into many different storage
rooms. No family would move into a new homestead. This was the
ancestral plot. The remaining side of the square was taken up by the
family temple. Some one hundred and fifty years ago, an ancestor,
Chaturbhuja by name, went on pilgrimage by foot to Vrindavan, about
a thousand miles away, and returned home carrying two idols, one o f
Krsna and the other of Radha, the former in black muguni stone, the
latter io bronze. Since then all the branches of the family worship these
idols, share in performing the ceremonies and rituals, and take care o f
the temple premises. Old men retire into the temple’s outbuildings.
Children learn their lessons on the temple verandah. Family guests live
there. Unexpected guests sleep on the outer verandah and do not go
unfed. Krsna’s prasadam is always available. In the evening, the ladies
send flower garlands that they painstakingly put together during the
afternoon. When the evening sets in and the cattle have returned home,
the priest performs the arati, the old and the young—in dwindling
numbers these days, for the old are dying and the young are leaving for
the towns—sing klrtan in chorus to the accompaniment of mrdang and
kartala. Without the temple, there would be no centre of gravity in the
lives of those people, no space beyond the cramped space of living, and
no moment outside of the time filled with work, to step outside for a
glimpse into the transcendent: into life beyond and things not quite
understood.
When we came home, there was no space for so many visitors within
the old family dwelling. The ladies and girls found a room, but the men,
old and young, shared the outer houses around the temple. I felt secure
from the snakes (I imagined them to be there) and spirits—none of these
evil ones dared enter the temple precincts. We boys would sleep on a
palm-leaf mat on the temple verandah; we were warned not to sleep in
front of the main temple door, for quite a few old men and women had
glimpses of the deity Krsna slipping out of the temple at the dead of
night, on horseback, when all eyes—save those of the lucky witnesses—
were closed in sleep.
m
UK
School and College

never studied in the village school. There was a one-room ‘lower

I primary’ school to which in the early hours of the morning, after the
cattle had gone out to graze, little boys and girls made their way, with tiny
square palm-leaf mats on one hand and dark slates framed in wood on the
other. Here they learnt reading, writing and (mental) arithmetic. The
‘upper primary’ and ‘minor’ schools were larger establishments, with
teachers for each class, a Headmaster for each school, and an apology of
a playground. Students read aloud, learnt the numerical tables by reciting
them together; there was a continuous humming that broke the stillness
of the village centre. Boys and girls, wealthy or pauper, joined under
these roofs, and formed an acquaintance that, I always thought, nothing
later on could diminish. My father, who had ‘made it’ in the town
recalled with emotion and affection his boyhood friends—the village
carpenter, the blacksmith, the temple priest and many others—who
would, when he was in the village, congregate around him after it was
dark; they had nothing else to do but converse endlessly.
Into that community of hearts I never really entered. Since my father
came to the village only during vacations, and spent the rest of the year
in the town, my brothers and sisters and I went to the government
English schools in the town. The government schools were invariably
sturdier brick buildings, not mud huts; they had spacious playgrounds
where we played soccer. I have been told that I began to speak rather
late; that my first lessons in the alphabet were from the family cook; that
when my brother, just a little older than I, was first sent to school, I cried
and cried, for I felt that too should have gone to the school with him. And
so I did go to school, ill-prepared, with poor skills in reading and
writing. However, I survived the early embarrassment and very soon
caught up with the rest of the class.
6 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

Those were the last years of the British Raj in India. Eleven years
after I started school (at the age of eight), India was divided in order to
be free. But as this school-going boy surveyed the world around him, he
did not have the slightest premonition of the end of the mighty empire.
The Raj appeared to be still secure. In the living rooms of the English-
educated middle class, in classrooms and post offices, railroad stations
and roadside tea shops—the King’s portrait smiled benignly at us. We
were taught in English, but did not have any British teachers as my
father’s generation had. My mother tongue, Oriya, was taught as a
vernacular—that is how the class schedule put it. Sanskrit, Arabic, and
Persian were classics from among which one had to choose one in the
higher forms. As I look back, I recall some of my teachers with the
fondest memories. They were not only good teachers, but taught with
genuine sincerity and authority. There were indeed two sets of instruc­
tors: in school and at home. Private tutors supplemented and reinforced
what was covered in school. They taught either in the morning hours
before school started, or in the evening hours after we returned from the
playground. They were either teachers in the very school we went to, or
perhaps office clerks with a B.A. degree. Invariably, they knew their
English—spelling and grammar—well, and their mathematics straight.
Some remarkable personalities stand out even now. There was the
Sanskrit teacher, the pandit, Nilakantha Misra, who taught me (as well
as my brother and older sister) Sanskrit at home. Every morning three of
us would recite conjugations and declensions of Sanskrit verbs and
nouns loud enough to be heard outside the house; we would compete to
do it first. The pandit taught me all the grammar that I learnt later. He
also taught this ten-year-old boy the primer of logic Tarkasamgraha,
and Kalidasa’s Raghuvamfam. Love of Sanskrit remained indelibly
imprinted on my mind. There was also the mathematics teacher, Srinatha
Roy, who once advised me: ‘Jitendra, walk barefoot, contact with the
earth will energize your brain.’ Then there was the English teacher who
drilled into me the notion that to spell incorrectly was ‘ungentlemanly’;
the private tutor for mathematics who wanted me not merely to solve
problems, but to solve them most elegantly; another who first told me,
when I was in class seven, that Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, the Indian
philosopher (later to be India’s president) was ‘a genius’ (we were
talking, I suppose, about what the word ‘genius’ meant). And school,
whether in the small town of Bhadrak on the encircling river Salandi, or
in Cuttack, the capital city of the state, was invigorating and enriching.
We played soccer at school and badminton at home during the winter.
The three most exciting days in the school year, to which we looked
 School and College • 7
forward, were the annual sports day, the prize distribution day (when I
invariably received loads of book prizes for academic achievements),
and the day on which we worshipped Saraswati, the goddess of learning,
which incidentally was the only religious day observed in the school.
The evening before the festival, we would decorate a room, hang
coloured festoons and garlands, set up a stage for the goddess—a
beautiful woman, clad in white, with a veena in one hand and books in
the other, a lovely swan at her feet. We would keep our books by her
side, to be blessed by her. Early in the morning, we would go around
town, stealing flowers from gardens, weave them into garlands for the
goddess, after which the priest would take over. The festival—on which
we would be given new clothes to wear—symbolized the arrival of
spring. Mango leaves and buds of mangoes would be all around us, and
birds would start to sing after winter. A new crop of vegetables—cabbage,
peas, eggplant and tomatoes—would be cooked into a marvellous curry
for the occasion. Music would fill the air in the evening. Our young
hearts would pine for something, we knew not what, something beyond
studies, beyond the confines of our homes, perhaps for the ethereal
touch of something sweet and delicate. Life was changing.
It was in Cuttack, in my senior year—1942, it was—that something
violent, but no less intoxicating, entered life, both at home and in school.
The previous year, Gandhi had asked that his followers ‘violate’ the law
(of the British rulers) and court imprisonment. My two uncles and their
wives (in whose care my elder brother and I had been left by our parents,
in order to study in Cuttack’s most famous school)—Gopabandhu
Chaudhury and Rama Devi, Nabakrushna Chaudhury and Malati
Devi—went to jail, following the Mahatma. But that was for a short
period of time. Some negotiations in Delhi led to their release, and they
returned home with stories of their adventures in the jails. We felt proud
of them and wished we had been there. But that freedom did not last
long. On 8 August 1942, Gandhi asked the British to ‘quit India’,
courted arrest in Bombay, and so did his leading followers around the
country. The country was on fire, so were our young hearts. My elder
uncle and aunt, being more staunch Gandhians, ‘courted’ imprisonment.
The younger couple, at heart Marxist ‘revolutionaries’, went
‘underground’, pursued by the police. How proud we were of them!
Detectives kept their vigilant eyes on the house, and we would give them
the impression that the two were ‘inside’ the house; the police would
search in vain, and we would heartily enjoy their frustration. Politics
entered the school. Our elders, my father and the school’s headmaster,
silently conveyed their sympathy for the Gandhian movement, but
8 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
advised us to attend to our studies and not to do anything foolish— for,
they told us, the country, when independent, would be in dire need o f
educated people to run it. And so we did what they told us to do.
In the final matriculation examination, I stood first in Orissa, and
enrolled myself in Ravenshaw College in Cuttack. The college con­
sisted of a set of modem buildings with well-kept quadrangles inside,
two large hostels for students on both sides (and was admired by us for
imitating Oxbridge). What excitement it was to bicycle from the house
at one end of the town to college at the other end, a distance of about
three miles, and to be a college student at last. I studied Mathematics,
Logic and Sanskrit, and the two compulsory subjects, English and Oriya
(my mother tongue). The college library was the first library I learned to
use. I would borrow heaps of books to read. One of the things I promised
myself was that I would read the main works of Nobel Prize-winning
authors. I read Anatole France, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Knut Hamsun,
Sigried Undset, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Rabindranath
Tagore, among others. I also borrowed a copy of Kant’s Critique o f Pure
Reason, tried to read large parts of it and made my notes, but am afraid
I did not understand much. It was at this time that my high school friend,
Aboni Ghose, introduced me to the writings of Sri Aurobindo. Aboni
(who had begun to spell his name ‘Aubony’) had already grown a full
beard and wore his hair long at the back; we all took for granted that he
was practising Yoga. He had already published an Oriya translation of
a small booklet by Sri Aurobindo on Yoga, had a large collection in his
home of Sri Aurobindo’s books, and knew many of his disciples. He
made me read Sri Aurobindo’s magnum opus, Life Divine. I read
perhaps the first six chapters, which impressed me a great deal by their
profundity and large scope. I even made plans to write a book on meta­
physics myself, with chapters on ‘matter’, ‘life’, ‘mind’, and so forth.
Soon after joining college, Aubony and I started a study circle at the
residence of a friend, Kangali Pati (who later joined the Aurobindo
Ashram in Pondicherry, changed his name to ‘Prapatti’, and succeeded,
in the sixties and seventies, in spreading Sri Aurobindo’s message
throughout Orissa). Kangali lived in a thatched one-room mud hut.
Besides the three of us, was an economist, an Oriya poet, and some
others, whose names I do not now recall, met in his room once a week
to read and discuss the writings of Aurobindo, Vivekananda and Gandhi.
I am not sure if I also tried Yoga, although I may have at times sat down
with eyes closed and tried to think of ‘nothing’.
In college, I became active in the debating society. I would write
down a speech, learn it by heart, and alone, on the roof of our house,
 School and College • 9
deliver the speech aloud. Gradually, I became quite good, and won all
the prizes and medals the college had to offer for debating. After going
to Calcutta, I gave up debating; my fellow students—Mohit Sen and
Shibendu Ghose—were better speakers than I was.
At last, the two years of college in Cuttack were over, I took the
‘Intermediate Arts’ examinations and stood first in the University. The
boy who stood third, Janaki Patnaik, went on to become the Chief
Minister of Orissa for quite some time, and the boy who stood tenth,
Ranganath Misra, recently retired as the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court of India. My future lay elsewhere. ‘Now’, my father said, ‘you
must go outside the state to face greater competition’. A friend of my
father suggested that I should try the Presidency College in Calcutta.
With letters of introduction to many people at Presidency, at the end of
June in 1945,1 boarded a Calcutta-bound train, full of soldiers returning
from the Burma front.
i*
I l f 'C

The Family

ost families in Cuttack maintained their village roots, as did my

M father, Jagannath Mohanty. Educated at the local village school,
the local college in Cuttack, and finally the University of Calcutta
(where he got a First Class in Economics, and then in Law), he had lost
his parents in his early childhood, and was raised by uncles and aunts.
True to the spirit of traditional joint families, he was never treated like
an orphan. The uncle who headed the family raised my father like his
own son, and in no way favoured his own children over him. Back from
Calcutta, my father started a law practice in Cuttack under Swami
Bichitrananda Das (who was called ‘Swamiji’ because of his saintly
disposition). The latter had been trained under Orissa’s most famous
lawyer-politician-social activist, the first Oriya Barrister, as a matter of
fact the first Oriya to have gone West, Madhusudana Das. I mention this,
for it was this connection that led to my mother’s marriage with my
father.
My mother’s family was more urban. Her father, Gokulananda
Chaudhury, had established himself in the town of Cuttack as a very
successful lawyer, who had accumulated a lot of wealth, built a large
home , lived a life of luxury and also aspired to political leadership. His
political rival was Madhusudana Das. The political platform in Cuttack,
in the first decade of the twentieth century, consisted mainly of the
autonomy of India within the British empire, and the creation of Orissa
as a separate state (within India), so that educated Oriyas could get more
opportunities for the advancement of their careers. The Indian National
Congress had not till that time declared political independence for India
as its goal. Orissa, along with Bihar, was a part of the larger state of
Bengal, in which Bengalis, already advanced in English education,
enjoyed preferences and privileges. The Oriyas were proud that Orissa
 The Family • 11
was the last province to fall into British hands, while Bengal was the
first; but this was also responsible for Bengal’s advancement in respect
of English education, which gave rise to a powerful, sophisticated class
of English-educated, often knighted, professional middle class, which
spread out over the rest of India as the local bureaucratic wing of the Raj.
Gokulananda Choudhury, along with Madhusudana Das, represented
the resentment as well as the aspiration of the Oriyas at the court of the
British.
The families of the two also entered into matrimonial alliance. Madhu
Babu’s younger brother’s daughter, Rama, was given in marriage to
Gokulananda’s eldest son, Gopabandhu; the mediator between the two
families was one Raj Kisore Das, who was a middle-level official in
English officialdom (the highest rank that the Oriyas achieved at the
time in the bureaucracy). A leader of the karana caste in the town, he
was already related to Madhu Babu’s family by marriage—he was a
maternal uncle of the bride and also a friend of the Chaudhury family.
My father’s only sister was the wife of this Raj Kisore Das’s brother. It
is out of this complex net of inter-family relations, that my father—a
promising lawyer, coming from the landed gentry—was chosen as the
groom for Gokulananda’s youngest daughter, Basanta Kumari (by which
time Gokulananda was already dead from a stroke preceded by exces­
sive drinking).
My mother was the youngest of five surviving children: two brothers
and two sisters (one of whom we leamt much later was adopted, but that
made no difference to her position as the eldest child of the family). The
two brothers were Gopabandhu and Nabakrusna. Gopabandhu went to
Calcutta to study mathematics at the Presidency College, and lived in
the Eden Hindu Hostel (a path I would follow much later). A bright and
intelligent young man, he was noted for his life of luxury, love of food
and friends, and ddda (that almost untranslatable Bengali word for
endless light conversation). Out of college, he entered the British Civil
Service, and served a few years as a Deputy District Collector (a power­
ful position for an Oriya to occupy at that time). It has often happened
that an utterly contingent event changes the direction and meaning of a
person’s life. This happened to Gopabandhu. When he was posted at
Jajpur—a rural town in the district of Cuttack—the surrounding coun­
tryside was flooded by rivers, all tributaries of the Mahanadi, in spate.
As the administrative official in charge, he reported the situation to the
British administrators higher up, but was asked to keep quiet. The
human misery around him was too much for him to keep quiet about,
and he resigned from the civil service in protest. The family wealth, after
12 • Between Two "Worlds: East and West
his father’s death, had declined, but persistent as he was, he had made up
his mind. His young wife, Rama, gave her consent. They started a life of
unflinching and selfless service to the poor and downtrodden in Orissa.
In 1921, Gandhi came to Orissa and asked for donations for the cause of
the Harijans or untouchables, ‘the children of God’ as he called the
untouchables. Rama took all her jewellery—an enormous amount of
gold that she had been given by her wealthy parents and in-laws at her
wedding—and put the bag in the Mahatma’s hands. An irrevocable
decision had been made.
My mother’s younger brother, Nabakrusna, was in college. Follow­
ing his elder brother, he gave up college, met Gandhi, spent some time
in the Mahatma’s Ashram at Sabarmati, and eventually landed in
Santiniketan, the school and the Ashram founded by the Nobel Prize-
winning Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. I do not know if he enrolled
in any course, but he certainly pursued his wide-ranging intellectual
interests. I can imagine that he was an introvert like me, engaged with
his own thoughts, trying to put Gandhi, Marx and Tagore together (but
it was Marx who won, initially), and dreaming of a social revolution in
Orissa. It was there that he fell in love with a brilliant Bengali girl,
Malati Sen, who had learnt singing and acting from the poet himself, and
who took part in dance-dramas that the poet wrote and first produced at
Santiniketan. Their marriage—she being a Brahmo1—shocked the karana
community in Cuttack (as mine did nearly thirty years later); but it was
his elder brother’s wife, Rama Devi, and my mother who gave Malati
Sen, fondly called Minu, protection and moral support when my grand­
mother, already widowed, would not even let her serve food and drink
or enter her kitchen. The two, Nabakrusna and Malati, complemented
each other: his introverted and intellectual nature was balanced by her
dynamic social activism, his political culture by her aestheticism. Both
led political movements, founded the peasants’ movement in Orissa
against the landlords, and led movements, often violent, of the people
against the Rajas and Maharajas, who still ruled with absolute power in
certain parts of Orissa. Malati continued to sing all the while.
These two couples—Gopabandhu and Rama Chaudhury, Nabakrusna
and Malati Chaudhury—had the greatest influence on me during my
youth. Through them, Gandhi ceased to be a distant reality (as Nicolai
Hartmann would have said, not a mere ‘ought to do’, but rather a pos­
itive ‘ought-to-be’), and the ideals of social justice (and the challenge of

1 Not synonymous with *Brahmin\ but stands for a new reform movement within
Hinduism, founded in the 19th century.
 The Family • 13

working towards it) became an incarnate actuality. All four represented

very different person-types. Gopabandhu was a man of action: for him,
once a course of action was recognized as an ought-to-do, there was no
hesitation in executing it, no intellectual exercise was needed either to
justify it, to cast doubt on it—you simply had to do it, or try your best to
do it, until you died. He seldom discussed intellectual ideas. Only once
did he write to me, when I was just finishing my doctorate in Germany,
that, in his view, Vinoba Bhave—Gandhi’s disciple about whom I will
speak later—had enriched the value of philosophy, for he had shown, or
rather was showing how philosophy can be practically effective. Instead
o f saying, as I was afraid he would say, that philosophy was useless, he
wanted to say—like the so-called Hegelians of the left—that philosophy
had to be ‘realized’, and that Vinoba was doing just that. Although he
had enormous affection for me, and he would affectionately refer to me
as ‘the philosopher’, I think he realized in his heart of hearts that I was
doing something important, something intrinsically good, and also that
his own path, the path of action, was different, and time was short (both
the time left for him, as well as the demands of the goal he was working
towards), so he had better work unceasingly to achieve that goal. For his
co-workers, he had affection, but affection was tempered by sternness,
that he thought ‘walking on the razor’s edge’ required: no compromise
with deviations. He would not censure or punish (for how could he, he
had no power?); he would go his own way. Sometimes, when this
uncompromising sternness caused pain to others, he would surprisingly
come back to smoothen and comfort with good humour, without com­
promising at the fundamental level.
Here are two examples of his responses. Once, when I was living in
the Hardinge Hostel of Calcutta University, he came to the city, and
stopped by to see me. I was in college, so he waited for me in my room
(which was opened for him by the floor servant, who knew of his
relationship to me). He waited for some time, and finding me late in
returning, left—leaving the following note on my desk: ‘Sorry I missed
you. Found on your desk a pile of old letters including some written by
me. A philosopher should not save, that makes you cling to the past
instead of being free for the future. Cultivate non-attachment’. I de­
stroyed the letters. If some of them were here, I would have now
reconstructed my story much better.
The other incident took place during the wedding of his younger
brother Nabakrusna’s daughter, Uttara. Uttara, or Bubu as she was
called, was a few months older than me, and we grew up as close friends.
She was marrying Narayan Desai, the only son of the late Mahadev
14 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
Desai, Gandhi’s life-long private secretary. Nabakrusna Chaudhury was
at the time the Chief Minister of Orissa. The official residence of the
Chief Minister was decorated and illuminated by multicoloured lights.
People from all parts of Orissa (and India) came with gifts for the bride
and bridegroom. A large room was filled with gifts. Just before the
wedding was to begin, Gopabandhu arrived. When he saw the pomp and
splendour and the gifts, he quietly called his brother aside and wanted all
the gifts to be returned before he could participate in the wedding
ceremony. ‘We did not sacrifice all we had’, he said, ‘to enjoy the
benefits of independence for ourselves'. His voice quivered with anger.
His instructions were followed; all the gifts returned, and the wedding
began with the austerity that marked all Gandhian celebrations.
With that unflinching dedication to his ideals—he had said a similar
thing when after India’s independence, he was asked by Nehru if he
would consent to be the Governor of the state, and also when Utkal
University was considering a proposal to confer an honorary doctorate
on him—the end came, almost inevitably, in disappointment. He had
been to the state capital, Bhubaneswar, where he heard about Congress
politicians and ministers consuming alcohol. He returned to Cuttack
rather saddened—and wondered if this was what they had all worked for,
and passed away the same night uttering ‘Oh Lord, show me the light!’
Gopabandhu’s wife, Rama Devi, was of a different kind. As a matter
of fact, she was not a kind at all; she was a unique person the likes of
whom you will not find anywhere. Beautiful, elegant and wealthy, she
had deliberately reduced herself to a pauper, with almost no material
possessions. Affection, love, and compassion for all beings radiated
from her. Her words comforted you in pain, soothed you when you were
suffering. An uncompromising idealist, she won you over by her affec­
tion, and I never heard her utter a single harsh sentence on any occasion.
For the worst offender, she was like a consoling mother. People were in
awe of her husband. Everyone loved her. When Indira Gandhi imposed
emergency laws upon the country, she went to the city centre in Cuttack,
and distributed leaflets urging people to disobey the laws non-violently,
and thereby courted arrest at the age of 75. People of Orissa, irrespective
of caste and creed, economic status and political opinions, capitalists
and communists alike, called her ‘Afa’ (mother), and were willing to
abide by her mediation when it was called for. She was above politics,
and had become all by herself an institution in Cuttack. When Utkal
University wanted to confer upon her an honorary doctorate of law,
she—who had never gone to school—conceded, for, as she told me, she
did not want to disappoint the university officials who were visiting her.
 The Family • 15

Rama Devi Chowdhury

When the Government of India awarded her a large sum of money for
the Seth Jamnalal Bajaj Prize for outstanding social work, she immedi­
ately used that money to establish a centre in Cuttack for free early
detection of cancer. It is ironic that when she died, Indira Gandhi, then
Prime Minister of India, named one of India’s coastguard naval ships
after her.
Later in life, I had many conversations with Rama Devi. She knew of
my early interest in Sri Aurobindo’s thought, and recorded in her
autobiography, that when she was a young girl, Sri Aurobindo was the
first influence on her mind. Gandhi entered her life later. Like Vinoba
Bhave, she did not see any incompatibility between their philosophies.
As a true Gandhian, she would always wonder, if philosophical thinking
could be ‘realized’ for the good of common people, or for the advance­
ment of social justice. Once she asked me a question that she repeated on
several occasions: why is it that at a certain time, i.e., within a certain
period, India produced such great minds, and now was barren? She had
in mind such giants as Sri Aurobindo, Tagore and Gandhi, Sri Rama-
krishna and Vivekananda. In her simple manner, she asked, what did
their mothers eat? What penance did they do, to bear such persons in
their wombs? I told her of two other periods in world history when this
16 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
happened: the Periclean Age in Greece, and the period from 1781 to
1832 in Germany.
Nabakrusna Chaudhury, the younger of my mother’s two brothers,
but older than her by two years, sought with some success, to combine
in his life, what I would have liked to combine: an intellectual scepti­
cism, a revolutionary zeal for social justice, and an active political life
administering power. A founding member of the Congress Socialist
Party, along with Nehru, Jayaprakash Narain, Achyut Patwardhan and
Lohia, he later became a Gandhian, gave up his long-time Chief Minis­
tership of Orissa to join Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan (land-gift) move­
ment. But then, in the final years of life, he turned to the ultra-Marxist
Naxalites. He was always thinking, trying to arrive at a satisfactory
philosophy. In my early youth, he saw me reading a Vedanta work, and
thought that old idealistic metaphysics was no good. He found Sri
Aurobindo more congenial, since he combined Vedanta with an evolu­
tionary philosophy and promised hope for political action outside and
spiritual life within. I think, as he grew older, in one way he was
attracted to spiritual ideas, which were non-metaphysical and socially
non-conformist. He found one such in the native Orissan religious sect
of the Alekhas, who were possibly influenced by the Buddhist doctrine
of emptiness or iunyatd. He began growing his beard like Ho Chi Minh,
and in spite of a stroke he suffered in prison, where Indira Gandhi had
put him during the Emergency she had clamped on the country, I found
him walking in the summer sun from Bolpur to Santiniketan. In his
revolutionary zeal, he became a critic of himself, i.e., of the years he
headed the government in the state. I think he was, after his Gandhian
years, impatient for social change, and became an ardent supporter of
the youthful Naxalites.
As I write this, of the two brothers and their wives, only Malati
Chaudhury is alive—somewhat infirm and mentally not quite alert. Last
year, during a visit to Orissa, I went to her Ashram in Angul to see her.
The Ashram is named after Baji Raut, the young boatman who was slain
by the police of the notorious Raja of Dhenkanal because he refused to
tell if the rebels the police were pursuing had crossed the river. This was
also the Ashram where Bani and I got married. It was painful to see this
woman of undaunted spirit, political and social activist, being pushed in
a wheel-chair, and to note that there were no more songs in her voice.
When my mother was on her deathbed, in the summer of 1989, Malati
sent one of her co-workers with a letter for her. I read out that letter to
my mother. Tears rolled down her eyes. They were old Mends, and
neither wanted to live when the other was gone.
 The Family • 17
It was among these four people that I grew up, and imbibed Gandhian
id eas not as an ideology but as a real force around me. Earlier in my
you th , I spun on a spinning wheel—following the Mahatma’s
example—and used only hand-spun and hand-woven clothes, practiced
vegetarianism, walked, if not on bare feet, with a locally made pair of
sandals, said, when possible, the evening prayers from all major reli­
gions, read and memorized large parts of the Bhagavadglta, washed my
ow n dishes after meals (this was not usually done in middle-class
families in India), and tried to cultivate a spirit of empathy with nature
and my fellow villagers. It was a way of life—where religion, social
activism, and ethical spirit merged together. After finishing high school,
I was spending the summer in the village, translating Tagore’s poems
(originally in Bengali) into Oriya, when I decided to learn tilling the land
with a bullock-drawn plough, as was the practice then (and also now). It
was hard work, but I wanted to experience what work in the field meant.
My father understood what I was doing, but he was not a Gandhian,
and on many matters he held different views from Gandhi and his
followers, that is to say, from his in-laws. He would often tell me about
what he perceived to be the dangers of Gandhi’s non-cooperation
movement: when the country became independent, the young people
would continue to disobey the law for any and every cause. He was
right, as we know today. He did not subscribe to Gandhi’s emphasis on
using hand-spun and hand-woven clothes. He was amused by my taking
to spinning and would have nothing to do with it. In these, and other
differences from Gandhi, he was not alone; many of the country’s
English-educated intelligentsia thought the same way. The poet Tagore,
whose admiration for the Mahatma was unbounded, once gave a force­
ful expression to this line of critique.
My mother did not join her brothers and sisters and their families in
their political activities—primarily out of deference to her husband.
Since my father was a government ‘servant’, she did not want to
embarrass him by joining anti-government activities. Even my uncles
and aunts would maintain a safe distance from him. But I think my
mother shared their beliefs and inculcated in us a sense of ‘belonging’ to
the freedom movement. She was a remarkable person—intelligent,
strong-willed and principled. She loved her children deeply, but never
expressed, nor succumbed to emotions. Devoted to her husband, I never
heard the two argue, but as was customary in society then, there was no
observable expression of love. I must put on record the deep influence
that my mother had on me. She never told me what to do, and had
complete faith in whatever I decided to do. The bond between us was
18 * Between Two Worlds: East and West
never strained by any differences: we supported each other right until
the end of her life. When she learned that she had stomach cancer and
would not live long, she wanted to be taken to our village home. She did
not want to die in a hospital. When I came to the village, she was alert
and in peace—although she was in pain. The village doctor, the only one
there, was attending to her. Literally hundreds of people—men, women
and children—from our village and the neighbouring villages came to
see her, to sit beside her and hold her hands. Slowly she faded into a
coma, and life slipped away. Something, an invisible tie which con­
nected me to India, to Orissa, to Cuttack and to the village, was severed.
I had to be on my own in the wide world. Karl Jaspers wrote to Hannah
Arendt on the death of her mother: ‘a fundamental change takes place
when a person’s mother dies .... The loss of one’s mother is the loss of
a refuge that has always been there for you, an unconditional affirmation. ’
When I left India for the USA, in the January of 1970,1 had sent home
all my books and papers to my mother. She took care of them in our
village home, protecting them from worms and humidity. When she
knew she was not going to be around much longer, she wanted me to do
something about them. It is not just the library, it is the entire home, a
sprawling complex, and the temple of Jagannath which my father built,
which need to be taken care of. Real estate in the village is not sold. It
is inherited and passed on. Nor are homes rented out. Now things are
changing, though. As long as my elder brother is alive, he will look after
everything. What will happen after that?
This is how family traditions woven around a village home come to
an end. The home in which men and women once lived, where children
were bom and raised, parties thrown, where there was a continuous hum
of activities, visitors, guests, ... will remain vacant, and then, in due
course, there will be cracks on the walls, worms will eat away the carved
wooden pillars, and it will all be in ruins. All the love and hatred, joys
and sorrows, anger and affection which filled it, will become floating
memories.
I do not believe in personal immortality, and have found no good
reasons to believe in it. Impersonal immortality—meaning that just as
my body will merge into the elements, so will my consciousness merge
into a cosmic consciousness—makes sense to me, but I do not know if
it is true. My father and my mother—as far as I am concerned—are
irretrievably and without residue gone. So will I. What remains and will
remain is memory transmitted through tradition, story, and history.
Ancestor worship makes sense—more sense than worshipping an imag­
ined deity.
iw
Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta

alcutta, the city of palaces, the city of teeming millions, where

C streetcars ran, and still run, on cobbled streets, where steamers
steamed along the muddy Hooghly, where red double-decker buses
(which are no more there, alas!) carried loads of passengers along
narrow paths—how can one fall in love with such a place? And yet, very
soon after arriving, I did fall in love with the city.
Mirzapur Street is a busy street, which meets College Street at one
end of the University buildings. I lived in one of the many dark, smoke-
filled lanes off Mirzapur Street, sharing a flat with my second brother,
who worked as a programme officer at the All India Radio. The stately
Asutosh Building of the University stands on College Street where
Mirzapur Street crosses it. A little further south stood the Corinthian
columns of the Senate House (sadly pulled down now, by unthinking
planners and insensitive architects), at the head of whose steps stood a
bust of Raja Prasanna Kumar Tagore. The College Square consisted of
a square tank around which there was a walk with benches along it. On
the side facing the Senate House, there was a statue of Iswara Chandra
Vidyasagar, sitting cross-legged on a column (I gather that in the
seventies the Naxalites tore down this statue). Further down College
Street, separated from the Senate House by Peary Charan Sarkar Street,
was Presidency College, which consisted of two huge buildings sepa­
rated by a green playground: on one side, the main college building, and
on the other, the Baker Laboratories. To the south of the Square stood
the massive columns of the Sanskrit College, where Vidyasagar was
once the Principal. In front of Presidency College, along College Street,
and all along the back lanes, there were (and still are) rows and rows of
book stores, mostly selling school and college textbooks, and also some
invaluable, old and rare books. Hidden among the bookshops, lies 15
20 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
College Square, where one stairway leads up to the India Coffee House,
and the other to the Aurobindo Pathamandir (which replaced the o ld
Albert Hall, where the citizens of Calcutta honoured Tagore after h e
won the Nobel Prize, and where, in response, Tagore opened his heart
and gave vent to his anger at the humiliation and unfair criticism that had
been showered upon him by the same people who were honouring h im
only after he was ‘recognized’ by the West). It is amidst these buildings,
and along these streets, that I spent the next four years as a student. For
a youth hailing from the sleepy town of Cuttack, it was awe-inspiring.
Of the greater part of Calcutta, I discovered very little during these
years. Even when I did, it was Calcutta, the seat of culture and politics,
which completely captured my interest. The commercial city, the city o f
wealth (and poverty), of rich businessmen (generally, ‘non-Bengalis’, a
category which was often used, much to my surprise), meant nothing to
me. The city I fell in love with was, in my eyes, the city not only o f
Tagore but of numerous lesser-known poets and writers, the city not
only of Aboni Tagore and Jamini Roy, but of many unknown and less-
known struggling painters and artists, likewise the city of Pundits and
scholars (among whom Raman and Radhakrishnan stood out in their
fame), of a great University, (alas! now fallen from its former height),
where matters of intellect and heart were widely respected—at least that
is how it all seemed to me then.
For the first two years, my life in Calcutta was centred around that
stately building on College Street which housed Presidency College. I
came to this college with great trepidation. The best students o f
Bengal—then undivided—used to compete to get into Presidency. Could
I compete with them? My credentials from Cuttack meant nothing. I had
to begin anew. Climbing up the wide and steep staircase—down which
Subhas Bose had pushed a British professor, Mr Oaten, who had used
derogatory words about Indians—was breathtaking, literally as well as
figuratively. My first philosophy professor was Nalini Kanta Brahma,
who had a cold and critical exterior, and wrapped himself clumsily in a
wrinkled suit which never quite fitted him. As he walked into class, we
were scared. He sat (this, I found out very soon, was his usual practice)
quietly for minutes staring at us steadfastly (gathering his thoughts as I
surmised later); then he would begin to speak—in measured words,
close to the subject matter, never uttering a sentence that was superflu­
ous, going directly to the heart of the matter in the minimum number of
sentences. Impressive as a teacher, he soon convinced me that his rough
exterior hid a warm heart. He told me he had learned that I was from
Orissa, tested me a couple of times (as I discovered later on) regarding
 Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta • 21
my philosophical sagacity, and when satisfied, placed unflinching faith
in me. Among my other teachers in the undergraduate class, I must
mention Tarapada Mukheijee and Tarak Sen, both of whom taught
Shakespeare; Sri Kumar Banerjee (known and often caricatured for his
pedantic English), who taught English romantic poetry; but above all,
Susobhan Sarkar, who taught European History. I have not, anywhere
else in the world, found better, more inspiring teachers.
Among my fellow students in Presidency College—students whose
company both provided competition and extended my intellectual
horizon—I think of Mohit Sen (later a member of the Politbureau of the
Communist Party of India), Shibendu Ghose (who died an untimely
death as Indira Gandhi’s Defence Secretary), Tapas Majumdar (a fa­
mous economist) and Surajit Sinha (anthropologist and later Vice Chan­
cellor of the Visva Bharati).
Life in Eden Hindu Hostel (where I moved from my brother’s
apartment) was marked by many hours of study, intense political and
political-theoretical discussion among peers (most of whom were Marx­
ists of some brand or the other), sipping coffee at the Coffee House at 15
College Square, and joining the proverbial adda of the Bengali youth.
Those were the years just preceding India’s independence and tragic
partition, and in a sense we all were involved, emotionally and intellec­
tually, if not actively, with the freedom movement. Bengal was then
ruled by Shahid Sharawardy, leader of the Muslim League. Jinnah’s call
for the partition of India, and creation of Pakistan was still regarded by
us, certainly by me, I recall, as late as early 1946, as a flimsy and not-to-
be-taken-seriously idea. Once Jinnah lectured in Calcutta before a large
Muslim crowd, and I slipped in to hear him: he was in one of his usual
immaculate suits, spoke perfect King’s English, had no touch of Islam
about him, but appealed to Muslim sentiments against the Hindu major­
ity. The Congress Working Committee was meeting in Calcutta to
consider the plan proposed by Sir Stafford Cripps. We went to Ballygunj
Circular Road and stood outside the home of Maulana Azad (who was
then the Congress President) to watch the members of the Congress
Working Committee arrive: Nehru, Kripalani, Pant, and Patel among
them. What excitement it was to listen to Nehru later in our college! But
all that excitement—largely romantic, patriotic and suffused with faith
in humanity—came crashing down when, on 16 August 1946, the great,
actually the meanest, ‘communal’ killings began in Calcutta. Corpses,
mostly of Muslims, accumulated in the College Square; Hindus were
killed in neighbouring areas. Eden Hindu Hostel, where we lived, was in
the middle; on one side was a large Muslim slum (the so-called
22 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
Kalabagan, or ‘banana garden’), and on the other side, the Hindu,
largely Marwari, locality. The hostel, being a Hindu hostel, as is appar­
ent by its name—a typically British way of keeping the communities
apart—was attacked by Muslim goondas. We had to accumulate stones
on the roof (to be hurled at the advancing crowd), boiling waters to be
poured over the attackers, and the walls were covered with live electric
wires connected to Baker’s Laboratory. Inside, an assistant superinten­
dent of the hostel, who was also an ex-army officer, trained us in self-
defence and in keeping a watch from all sides on the attackers. Food was
scarce until the Marwari Relief Society brought some in. With the
stench from decomposing corpses, one could hardly eat After two
weeks of storm and stress, blood and stinking flesh, when the riot sub­
sided, and the roads opened, some students from Orissa hired a horse-
drawn carriage, slammed the doors from the inside, and left for Howrah
Station. We squeezed ourselves into a Cuttack-bound train, which was
already overflowing with people fleeing the city.
Now Pakistan did not seem merely a frivolous idea of Mr Jinnah. My
faith in religion was shattered. How could religion be the reason why
innocent men, women and children are killed? (Later, in Germany, a
young mathematician, Herr Kleinschmidt, took me by surprise by insist­
ing that nothing was more worthy of fighting for than religion). But my
commitment to the Mahatma grew, and I tried to separate in my mind his
religious beliefs from the rest of his teaching. As the communal fire
spread from Calcutta to Bihar to Delhi and, on the other side, to East
Bengal, Gandhi rose to great spiritual heights (naturally, I was trying to
identify a sense of ‘spiritual’, that is independent of a religious point of
view). The political leader he had so long been, was changed into a
spiritual leader, trying almost single-handedly to restore reason and
sanity. When, several months later, I returned to Calcutta, Gandhi was in
the city at the height of his greatness, preparing for his visit to East
Bengal. My maternal aunt, Malati Chaudhury, accompanied him. Ev­
eryone in his entourage risked his or her life, but Gandhi’s fearlessness
made them go. Stories of inhuman cruelty against Hindus, as well as
Gandhi’s influence in bringing some sanity back reached us in the city.
Some regarded him as an unrealistic dreamer. I thought he was a most
realistic worker. From Noakhali, Gandhi went to Bihar, where Muslims
were being killed. From Bihar to Delhi, where he met his end. In
between, he came to Calcutta to stop the continuing killings, and I
managed to slip into the house in Beliaghata, where he fasted nearly
unto death, asking both Hindus and Muslims to return their arms. The
rest of the story is well known. A few months later, I saw him in
 Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta • 23
Sraddhananda Park, along with Sarat Basu and Shahid Sharawardy,
pleading for the cause of a united Bengal (even if India was to be
divided). It all fell on deaf ears. India was divided, so was Bengal. We
heard Nehru’s speech on the radio. Gandhi fell on the way, he was
assassinated on 30 January 1948. As Nehru said, the light had gone out.
I was on my way in a train to Ranchi for a vacation when the news
reached me. A dark sense of impending doom overtook me.
The final B.A. examination was postponed owing to communal
disturbances. Eventually, when we passed the examination, the country
was independent. That made me a member of the first group of college
graduates in independent India. I stood first in First Class with Honours
in Philosophy. Uma Mehta, the second daughter of Gagan Vihari Lai
Mehta (later Indian Ambassador to the USA), came second from Scot­
tish Church college. I returned to Calcutta from Orissa in order to enrol
for post-graduate classes in Philosophy, and at the same time to join Law
College. But where was I to live in ¿he city? The Eden Hindu Hostel was
closed to post-graduate students. The college had rented a dilapidated
house near the Sealdah Railway Station and converted it into a hostel for
post-graduate students. Many of my friends went there. I moved into the
Hardinge Hostel of the Law College (where my father had lived many
years earlier). Compared to Eden Hindu Hostel, Hardinge Hostel was a
beehive of residents, each in a little cubicle. Most ‘boarders’ were
students only on paper: They enrolled at the Law College (the easiest
thing to do, as no admission test was required); some enrolled only to get
a place to live—they remained students for years (the tuition fee was
nominal), while working full time, or being involved full time in student
politics. A future Chief Minister of Orissa lived there for years, along
with his own cook and servant. For me, the hostel was a blessing. I could
study in the University Library (two minutes away) in the morning, then
go for philosophy classes during the day, and to Law College in the
evening, without stepping outside the campus. Thus, I settled down for
years of hard work.
My connection with Presidency College became weaker—even though
I was still a student of the college. All our post-graduate classes were
held in the Asutosh Buildings of the University. Most of my under­
graduate teachers in philosophy had either retired or been transferred to
some other place. Nalini Brahma had become the Principal of Hooghly
Mohsin College. Jiten Chakrabarty and Baqui Saheb (the two other
philosophy teachers) had both retired.
Now in the University’s post-graduate department, I met teachers
who quietly changed my way of thinking. Nalini Babu had left me with
24 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
the concern: Samkara or Sri Aurobindo? That controversy had been well
thrashed out during many meetings at his home. With my friends from
and outside the Eden Hindu Hostel, the issue was Gandhi or Marx? We
talked endlessly about it, not merely as a theoretical issue but as a living
question during the lifetime of Gandhi, and at the height of his greatness.
But now theoretical philosophy, in all its ramifications, took hold of me.
Three teachers stand out with prominence: Kalidas Bhattacharyya, Rash
Vihary Das, and Mahamahopadhyaya Yogendra Nath Tarka Vedanta-
tirtha. Kalidas Bhattacharyya was the son of Krishna Chandra
Bhattacharyya, who was modem India’s most significant and creative
academic philosopher (I say ‘academic’ to exclude such thinkers as
Gandhi, Tagore or Sri Aurobindo). When I met Kalidas Bhattacharyya,
his father Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya was still living in his Serampore
home, but I never had the opportunity to see him. He passed away when
I was still in the post-graduate class. Later on, when I started teaching at
the University, Satish Chatteijee, then Head of the Department, and I,
worked hard, visiting alumni of the Department all over the city, to
collect money for a Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya Memorial Lecture­
ship Fund (to which Humayun Kabir, a former teacher in the Depart­
ment, then Education Secretary of the Government of India, gave a
matching grant from the Government). Much later, in 1981, the Univer­
sity invited me to deliver that lecture. For the present, going back to
Kalidas Bhattacharyya, I believe he was certainly the most inspiring
teacher I have ever had (possibly with the exception of Josef König in
Göttingen). He was not a great orator, and did not use any rhetoric, but he
did what very few philosophers do: he thought aloud in class, and by
doing so, taught us how to think. He would develop an argument, go
through possible objections, to each of which he would develop
responses—and in the process he would forget his initial point. There
was an utter simplicity about him, both as a person and a thinker, that
touched me: no sophistication, no scholarly pretensions, no name-drop­
ping but only sheer unadulterated thinking, wherever it might lead. After
I passed the M.A. examination, and even after I returned from Germany
and started teaching at the University, my discussions with Kalidas
Bhattacharyya continued. He left Calcutta University and joined the
newly founded Research Department of the Sanskrit College as a Re­
search Professor. There, in his office, we—besides me, Pranab Sen,
Sibajiban Bhattacharyya, and many others—would drop by to continue
our discussions. From outside Calcutta came Daya Krishna, then a
young and independent philosopher (he was not attached to any institu­
tion). I would go to his house on Janak Road near Ballyganj Lake on
 Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta • 25
Sunday mornings to talk philosophy, and would stay on until lunch time,
when Mrs Bhattacharyya would insist that I join them for lunch. When
Kalidas Bhattacharyya moved to Santiniketan, first as Professor, later as
Vice-Chancellor—our discussions were interrupted but never quite
stopped. Even when I visited India from the USA, I always looked
forward to visiting Kalidas Bhattacharyya at Santiniketan. He had then
retired, become older—but looked much older than he was because he
would not use dentures in place of the teeth he had lost. His whole
personality radiated the simple pleasure of thinking. It was contagious. ‘I
am writing a great deal after retirement’, he told me once, and we
immediately began philosophizing. My relationship with him—marked
by mutual affection and respect—continued. My one regret is that I
could not accept his invitation to be a Professor at Santiniketan, but he
held no grudge against me for that. In 1981,1 was living in Santiniketan
with my mother. I was there as a visiting Fellow. He came with his wife
to visit my mother, and suddenly, much to my embarrassment, bowed
down and touched her feet. When I told him that he should not have done
that, he said that it was spontaneous, that he knew who she was: wasn’t
she the sister of Gopabandhu and Nabakrusna Chaudhury? A year later,
I went to Santiniketan to invite him to a small reception that Sankari
Baneijee (then Registrar of Calcutta University) and I had arranged in
Calcutta, where we planned to present him with a volume of essays we
had edited in his honour. Much to my surprise, he said he could not
come, for he was afraid we would praise him at such a meeting, and he
said it was sinful to listen to one's own praise. I persuaded him to come,
assuring him that there would be no words of praise and no lectures
except for a few remarks made by me about his philosophy. He agreed,
we went to Calcutta together, and took part in a wonderful gathering of
many of his students and friends, in the University’s stately syndicate
room. The news of his passing away came as rude shock, particularly
when I learned that his life could have been saved if there had been better
medical facilities available in Santiniketan. I lost one whose affection
and understanding I had been always sure of. My world became poorer.
Rash Vihary Das was a very different sort of person. If Kalidas
Bhattacharyya taught me how to think, and gave me a taste of that
pleasure and also the difficulty of pure thinking, Rash Vihary Das
impressed upon me the value of rigorous schoarship, combined with the
spirit of skeptical questioning. A short and thin person (he thought he
was of the same height as Kant), with an imposing beard, he walked
briskly with his head slightly bent to the left (he thought, and rightly so,
that Kant also walked in that manner—his critics said he had deliberately
26 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
cultivated such intellectual mannerisms!), always with a book in one
hand and an umbrella in the other. He would always smile at one and
would tell a joke (which reflected his inner cynicism). Stories abound
about his cynicism. I recall only two. In his youth, he lived in Amalner,
Maharashtra, at the Indian Institute of Philosophy. The story is that once
he went to see the famous Hindu holy man, Lele (who reportedly had
initiated Sri Aurobindo into his spiritual life). Lele, learning that his
visitor was a philosopher, asked him, ‘Why do you dissect God?’ Rash
Vihary Das replied—I can imagine the ironic smile on his face— ‘Because
he (i.e., God) needs it.’ The reply certainly did not please Lele. The other
story is based on my own experience. In 1950, just a year after I had
passed the M.A. examination, the Indian Philosophical Congress met in
Calcutta. Radhakrishnan was the President. I was a volunteer worker,
waiting on the dais in the great Senate Hall (sadly, now tom down and
replaced by an ugly structure). Rash Vihary Das began to speak on the
topic of the discussion in a frail voice: ‘Has Sri Aurobindo refuted
Samkara’s mayavadaV Radhakrishnan reminded him, ‘Rash Vihary,
why don’t you speak to the microphone? They (meaning the people in
the back) cannot hear you.’ Quickly came his reply, in the same frail
voice, ‘But Professor, they won’t understand me even if they hear me.’
And he continued as before. (Radhakrishnan, on a later occasion when
I met him, as the conversation came around to the topic of Rash Vihary
Das, said to me, ‘Rash Vihary thinks I do not know any philosophy’).
Rash Vihary Das, I think, was a complete failure as a classroom teacher.
He whiled away his time in class in small talk. But what he was looking
for were really able would-be philosophers, and he invited them to his
home, where a group of young and not-so-young philosophers met to
read books and to discuss problems. (If I remember correctly, he taught
Kant’s first Critique along with Vahinger’s commentary to some of us.)
In his home, we would meet in his library, which left me with the
impression that he had taught himself to read German, French, Italian,
Arabic, Persian, and, of course, Sanskrit. He had opened a personal
account with the booksellers, Blackwell, in Oxford, through whom he
bought books of authors whose names no one had heard of in Calcutta.
It is from his library that I borrowed his copy of Husserl’s Logische
Untersuchungen (which he later asked me to keep), in which I devel­
oped a life-long interest. His streak of cynicism led him to suspect
whether a student who evinced interest in philosophy, and did well in
the examinations, was really interested in ‘doing’ philosophy. He sus­
pected that people who studied philosophy were motivated by some
other ulterior purpose. Some, for example, were really interested in
 Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta • 27
religion, and hoped to be able to use philosophy as a means, as a
handmaiden, for their religious ends. Others were motivated by political
ideologies. For a long time, he suspected that I had some such ulterior
motive. He would say, ‘Since you are also studying law, you may take
to your father’s profession; or perhaps you will follow your maternal
uncles into politics’. He was often worried when I gave, as I often did,
public speeches, for that led him, on one occasion, to remark to me,
‘Your real goal must be somewhere else’. He knew of my interest in Sri
Aurobindo. One Sunday morning, we were meeting in his house for
some philosophical discussion, when Haridas Chaudhuri (who later
emigrated to the USA and founded the Institute for Integral Studies in
San Francisco, now a University of a sort) sat down beside me and asked
me softly how I was. Rash Vihary Das suddenly interrupted: ‘Haridas,
don’t spoil him by your yoga’. (Haridas Chaudhuri was known to be
practising Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga.) I eventually learned why he
was so suspicious of people who showed an interest in philosophy.
During one of our conversations, he told me that for him, as for Krishna
Chandra Bhattacharyya, philosophy was ‘an autonomous spiritual
activity’, and should not be used for goals extrinsic to it. In a certain
way, this conception of philosophy deeply influenced me. Religion and
politics took a back seat.
My interest in Sri Aurobindo, however, continued for some time. I
thought I found in him (and later in Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya)-an
example of creative thinking which I missed in others in India. As I have
said earlier, during my undergraduate years at Presidency College, one
o f my central philosophical concerns was: ‘Are the world and finite
individuals real even from the point of view of the highest metaphysical
knowledge, as Sri Aurobindo would have it, or is the world, along with
finite individuals, only an appearance, mithya, sustained by ignorance
(avidya) of the ultimate reality, as Samkara holds?’ When in the B.A.
First Year class, I published an article entitled ‘The Finite and the
Infinite’ in the Presidency College Magazine, in which I argued against
Samkara’s maydvada, and in favour of Sri Aurobindo’s conception of
integral brahman, Nalini Babu, my professor of philosophy (about
whom I have written earlier in this chapter), read the essay, and asked
me to see him in his house. I went with some trepidation at the appointed
time. The house was in a dark smoke-filled lane somewhere around
Scottish Church College. The sparse living room with very old furniture
and walls showing humidity, and everything almost falling apart, be­
came a place where I visited for the next several months. Dr Brahma, as
we called him, wanted to discuss the issues which I found challenging as
28 * Between Two Worlds: East and West
well as thought-provoking. ‘If you did not quite accept Samkara’s “non­
dualism”, that must be because there is some deficiency in my teaching,’
he began telling me. Thus began an intensive reading of Sri Aurobindo’s
texts, interpretation of his arguments against mdyavdda, until it seemed
as though we were faced with a choice between two alternatives. If Sri
Aurobindo was right in his conception of the integral brahman, then
what he said must be the same as Samkara’s thesis. If what he said was
different from Samkara’s thesis, then he must have been mistaken. How
could we decide between these two alternatives? We were stymied. The
only way of solving this dilemma, we thought, was to write to the Master
himself. So we wrote a letter to Sri Aurobindo, stating very precisely the
arguments we had formulated. But how was the letter to reach him?
Could we just put it in a mailbox? A bright idea struck me: I knew that
the musician Dilip Roy (who lived at the Aurobindo Asrama in Pondi­
cherry) was in the city as a house guest of Raja Dhirendra Narayan Roy
of Lalgola. The Raja’s son, Biren, was a good friend of mine, and I had
been to their house at Merlin Park several times. So I carried the letter to
the Raja’s house and gave it to Dilip Roy. Dilip Babu was amused and
promised to get a reply for us. And very soon he did. Addressed to Dilip
Roy, the letter from Sri Aurobindo began with an expression of surprise,
that a very distinguished Advaitin (meaning Nalini Brahma) had argued
that his position was the same as Samkara’s. Then he went on to bring
out, more perspicuously than anywhere else, what the precise difference
was between him and Samkara. As he put it, Samkara’s emphasis was on
mayd, while his emphasis was on lila.
Although Dr Brahma gave me a good grounding in Advaita, it was
Pandit Yogendranatha Tarka Vedantatirtha who became my preceptor
in Vedanta texts. During one of my usual evening walks around the pond
in the College Square, I sat down on a bench beside the great Pandit, not
knowing who he was. He too was a frequent visitor to the Square in the
evenings. Soon we became friends and I gradually discovered who he
was—one of the foremost scholars of MImamsa and Vedanta in the
entire country. He told me about his guru, Pandit Lakshman Sastri
Dravid (whom Sir Asutosh Mukheijee brought from the South to be
Professor of Veda in the post-graduate Sanskrit Department of the
University), about his many years of teaching at the Gurukula near
Haridwar (from where many of the now famous Pandits of North and
Western India studied with him), and then his return to Calcutta. Among
his students in Calcutta were Suren Dasgupta, Satkari Mukheijee and
Gopinath Bhattacharyya. I joined that distinguished group. (Later, on
his death-bed at Chittaranjan Cancer Hospital, he told his son, Sitanshu
 Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta • 29
Bagchi, that he needed to discharge his obligations to his students. So he
dictated to him what he remembered of his students. This collection of
recollections appeared under the title Vidyd Vamia, i.e., ‘The Family of
Learning’. His son sent me a copy of this short booklet. One remarkable
feature of Yogen Pandit Mah&iaya (as we called him) was his astound­
ing memory. I studied with him Samkara’s Bhasya on Brahmasutras,
along with the commentary BhamatT and two sub-commentaries,
Kalpataru and Parimal. I would have the book containing these four
commentaries in front of me. He would recite exactly the lines from
Samkara and the corresponding lines from the other three texts. (Later,
I was to encounter a similar feat of memory in Marburg, where I was
participating in a seminar on Kant by Julius Ebbinghaus, son of the
famous psychologist, and the last of the great Marburg Neo-Kantians.
Ebbinghaus would ask his students to open the Critique of Pure Reason
at certain pages of the A and B editions (referring to the first and the
second editions of Kant’s Critique), then recite the texts from memory,
and go on with his explanations without the book in his hand.) Yogen
Pandit Mahasaya knew almost all Sanskrit literature by heart. On Sun­
day mornings, the living room of his flat on Amherst Street would be full
of people—professors, research scholars, and younger students such as
me—who would find an opportunity to ask him for references, for texts,
or want some explanations of a text, ask him to solve some other
scholarly problem (from any branch of Sanskrit learning). He would
unhesitatingly, and with enormous compassion, say, llikhe nao' (write it
down), and then would recite the appropriate texts, give book and page
references, and add his explanations. I know of at least a couple of
people who wrote their doctoral dissertations just based on what they
learnt at such occasions. The Pandit did not worry about what use or
misuse people made of his willingness to share his learning. On the
contrary, if you did not write down what he said, he would say, *Aar
kothai pabi na' (You will not find this elsewhere). He had no equal.
After my M.A. examinations, I was visiting an uncle (who was a
member of the Parliament) in Delhi. In his house I met Shyama Prasad
Mukheijee (son of Sir Asutosh), then the leader of the Hindu MahasabhQ.
He asked me about my studies. On learning that I was studying with the
great Pandit, he said, ‘Learn all that you can from him. There is, and will
be, none like him.’

After two years of post-graduate studies, I took the M.A. examinations,

which I passed, standing first in the First Class. I had cleared the first
30 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
two law examinations, but the final examination had yet to be cleared. In
the Law College, there were many distinguished teachers—judges and
barristers. But one stood out by sheer intellectual power. He was the
barrister, Ashok Sen (who would tell us how hard German students
worked and how lazy Indian students were!). But now the big question
for me was what I was going to do. I had already left the Hardinge Hostel
and moved into 80 Park Street, a flat rented by some ex-boarders of
Eden Hindu Hostel. The residents—mostly former Presidency College
students—were in that in-between, unstable and uncertain phase of their
lives, when one has left college but has not found one’s ‘place’ in the
world, still not having cut the apron strings of college; when at every
available opportunity one visits the college campus (where, except for a
few remaining old teachers, no one recognizes you), and sips tea at the
college cafeteria, still trying to determine what one should do with one’s
life. It was during this phase that 80 Park Street offered refuge and hope
to us, a group of young men who, it seemed, had no future and were
doomed to failure. Of all of us who lived at 80 Park Street, the non-
Presidency man, Mani Ghatak, was perhaps the most successful—he
was the goal-keeper of the East Bengal, later of the Rajasthan, football
team.
I got two part-time jobs teaching ‘logic’: One at St Paul’s College,
and the other at the evening section of Surendranath College of Com­
merce in Bally ganj, across Deshapriya Park. For each job I was paid Rs.
100 per month. I could pay my bills without asking for financial help
from my father. But why was I, after all, in Calcutta? Why didn’t I just
go back to Orissa and seek my fortune there? Two things held me: I was
studying Vedanta with Yogen Pandit Mahdiaya (and would also discuss
philosophy with Kalidas Bhattacharyya whenever there was any avail­
able time), and I was falling in love with a girl whom I would eventually
marry. A few months later, I think in the autumn of 1950,1 got what was
then considered a good academic job: a lectureship in the Bengal
Education Service, and was asked to join the Hooghly Mohsin College
(located in Chinsura, some thirty miles outside of Calcutta). My friends
considered me lucky. But if I had to leave Calcutta, why should I not go
back to Orissa? With this uncertainty in mind, I was walking along
College Street when, at the gate of Presidency College, I met Gopinath
Bhattacharyya, who had replaced Nalini Brahma as Professor of Phi­
losophy in the College. He had taught me briefly at the University, and
knew me well. The eldest son of the philosopher, Krishna Chandra
Bhattacharyya, Gopinath was reputed to be a very careful textual scholar,
and a logical and analytical thinker, who was adored by his students.
 Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta • 31
When I greeted him, he asked me what I was doing. When I told him
about the job I had been offered, and my indecisiveness, he asked me if
I was in dire need of money. I said, ‘No’. He then said, much to my
surprise (but, looking back at that moment now, in retrospect, with
eternal gratitude), ‘Give up the job and study Sanskrit with Ananta
Pandit Moidcya'. He then and there led me across College Street to the
Sanskrit College, past its enormous Corinthian columns, to a huge hall
where Pandits were seated on raised platforms covered with white linen.
He introduced me to one of them and said, ‘Pandit Moiaya, this is Jiten
Mohanty. Please teach him Navya Nyáya. You won’t be disappointed.*
Thus began years of intense study, which ended only with the great
Pandit's death in 1967, and was interrupted, with his permission, by the
years I studied in Gottingen. If I had not met Gopinath Bhattacharyya on
that day, if he had not introduced me to the Pandit, and if I had not
become his Schiiler, my life and my philosophy would not have been
what they are now. The course of one’s life is full of accidents, some of
which have far-reaching consequences. Even falling in love is an accident.
There are two kinds of philosophical wisdom: one sees a hidden
necessity behind all events, even the most unlikely and improbable; the
other sees every event, even the most seemingly planned, to be due to an
accidental collocation of circumstances (which might not have been).
My inclination was in favour of the latter.
Pandit Ananta Kumar Tarkatirtha was in his fifties—a short, well-
built man with large eyes which focused on you as though he was trying
to delve deep into your mind. After many years of teaching at Baidyanath
Deoghar in Bihar (at the Ashram of Balananda Brahmachari), he re­
turned to the Sanskrit College as Professor of Nyáya and Vedanta. By
this time, he had earned a tremendous reputation as a powerful logician
with a sharp intellect and a fearless mind. Among his students were:
Gopinath Bhattacharyya, Gaurinath Sastri and Pandit Visabandhu
Bhattacharya. We developed a close rapport. I had to promise that I
would not just stop my lessons midway. He was more than a pandit who
knew all the texts. He was certainly one of the most intelligent persons
I know. He encouraged me to construct new arguments, newpitrvapaksa-
s, not to take anything on authority, to try new modes of thinking. At a
certain point in my studies, in the mid-sixties, he told me one day, ‘Jiten,
I am tired of dealing with the same philosophical views—of Mlmámsá,
Buddhism and Vedanta. I want to respond to new positions. Can you
introduce me to some western views?’ We tried to read Aristotle’s
Metaphysics and later, Kant’s first Critique. He was happy and excited.
He raised new questions in response to both Aristotle and Kant. As his
32 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
health declined, he began seeing some holy men. He would come back
from his visits disappointed. His mind was too critical to accept any­
thing on faith. He tried to legitimize—on his authority as a pandit—some
reasonable changes in Hindu ritualistic systems. He even wrote an essay
in Bengali, defending the view that all the benefit that accrues from
worshipping Durga is mundane and this-worldly: the puja keeps various
artisans and specific classes employed, and brings about a social and
cultural renewal. His unorthodox views led some pandits in Calcutta to
write to the government to dismiss him, but he was fearless and stood his
ground. I admired him as much for his ability as a logician as for his
liberal views on social matters. As I said before, we continued our
lessons until his death. He was, during the last months, tired, and had
high blood pressure. But nothing gave him more pleasure and boosted
his spirits more than intricate issues of Nyaya logic. When he passed
away, I took the first opportunity to leave Calcutta for Burdwan. But I
will write about that later.

During my students days in Calcutta, 1 thought as much about Gandhi

and his ideas as about religion in the sense of mysticism. After my faith
in the established religions was shattered, there still remained the hope
that there was the possibility of redemption through cathartic religious
or mystic experience. Who could doubt the authenticity of a Sri
Ramakrishna, or of a Sri Aurobindo? Nalini Brahma encouraged me to
see holy men. He had earlier, during my undergraduate years, directed
me to one in Puri. He talked to me about Trailangaswami, and later
about Sri Krishna Prem and Anandamayi Ma. I saw Anandamayi Ma
from a distance—she seemed to sink into a trance when the devotees
sang mantras. The beauty and serenity of here face touched me. But
what was I to make of it? Nalini Brahma, in his later life (when I lost
touch with him) turned to her, and spent most of his time in her
Ashrama. Krishna Prem and I met during one of his rare visits to the city.
His appearance, his voice, and the sincerity of his affection moved me.
He asked me about my philosophical interests. He had, he said, left
behind his Cambridge philosophical learning for devotion to Krsna. It
was clear to me that that was not my path. I kept in contact with Sri Dillip
Roy—partly due to my connection with Biren Roy’s family. Several
times, I invited him, and succeeded in bringing him to musical functions
at the University. His songs moved me.
I found, among old papers, a letter Dillip Roy wrote to me. I repro­
duce it below in order to show what I was looking for:
 Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta • 33
Om

Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Pondicherry

To my friend
Jittendranath Mohanty

It is love’s labour lost to apologize for delay. Love doesn’t

listen. But the fact is, I have been overwhelmed with work after months of
absence. Letters have piled up. I have no secretary. A time was when I had a
great enthusiasm for answering questions. Nowadays, I feel I know too little to
enlighten others. The only thing I can discuss with some nerve is my Gurudev,
and personal experiences and my changed reactions to life. But even these are
not easy to express through intellectual language. When I go to Calcutta next (in
September) I would like to talk to you ina carefree manner. For I liked your keen
enthusiasm and sraddha. Nowadays, I have to attend to some dull work for the
press. From the morning I had to write letters, one to a Punjabi millionaire,
another to a multi-millionaire’s daughter. Both of them very fine stuff, and what
is more, with some real seeking which their wealth did not answer. But you are
fortunate: you are not wealthy, I take it. So I need not write to you. Besides, you
know already a great deal and are fairly advanced in philosophy. So my friend,
what can I impart to you except my sincere love and felicitations on being
philosophic?

Affectionately,
Dilipda

Through Dilip Roy and Nalini Brahma, I came to know Sri Gobinda
Gopal Mukhopadhyaya, Sanskrit scholar and singer. This led me to
another holy man, Mohanananda Brahmachari, whom, again, I saw
from a distance. (Much later, in the USA, I got to know him well, when
my daughter, Mitti, took diksd from him). My relationship with the
Aurobindo Ashrama continued. (As a matter of fact, as I mentioned
earlier, I was introduced to Aurobindo’s writings by my high school
friend, Aboni Ghosh, who by then was studying Philosophy at Allahabad
University. But Aboni’s interest in Sri Aurobindo had waned, and he
had shaved off his long hair and beard.) I visited Mr Cham Dutta, a
retired ICS officer, once a personal friend and then a disciple of Sri
Aurobindo. I would go to the Aurobindo Pathamandir at 15 College
Square, next to the India Coffee House, to listen to lectures by visiting
scholars and sadhus from the Ashrama. Later, after I returned from
34 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
Germany and started teaching at the University, I was persuaded by m y
dear friend Manik Mitra (who then ran the Sri Aurobindo Pathraandir)
to lecture regularly on Life Divine. For almost five years, I lectured
systematically on that great work from cover to cover—once a month.
This gave me an opportunity to study the book in detail and also to get
to know a large number of men and women who attended my lectures.
After Life Divine was finished, I continued lecturing on The Human
Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity, two other works of Sri Aurobindo.
I am told that very few have done what I did over the years, but this also
gave me a comprehensive grasp of Sri Aurobindo’s thought, although I
have been able to write very little on his philosophy. This is one o f the
things I still hope to be able to do.
I met Dilip Roy again in Europe. While I was in Gottingen, news
reached me that Dilip Roy (along with his disciple, Indira Devi, the
millionaire’s daughter he had mentioned in his letter to me) was in Paris.
Jagdish Mehra, a young physics student, and I arranged for his visit to
Gottingen, and got the University officials to extend an invitation.
Jagdish went to Paris to bring him to Gottingen. When Dilip Roy arrived
in town, we found, much to our distress, that the suite at the University
Guest House, that we had reserved for him, had been given to Martin
Buber, who was to lecture at the University as a distinguished guest. I
was delighted to be able to listen to Buber, but complained to the
University officials for taking away the suite we had reserved. The
University apologized and gave us full use of a castle—actually a castle
on top of a hill—the University owned, and placed a car at our disposal
for the duration of Dilip Roy’s stay. Dilip and Indira were just over­
whelmed by the place and the view of the valleys all around. Dilip sang
in Bengali, in English, and in German, while Indira danced. Back at the
castle, both wrote poems and songs. Indira dictated songs in a trance (as
I was told) and Dilip transcribed. That was the last time I saw Dilip Roy.
He left Pondicherry, and founded his own Ashrama in Poona, where he
passed away in the early seventies.

I married the girl I loved. Annada Sankar Roy wrote to me that it was
singular good luck. Bani left her home to marry me. My maternal uncle,
Nabakrusna Chaudhuri, and aunt Malati gave her in marriage to me in
their idyllic Ashrama at Angul. Mitti was bom a year later. Bani was
pregnant with Babuni when I left India for Gottingen. Annada Sankar
Roy accompanied me with Punyasloka, his eldest son, to Bombay, to see
us off.
 Calcutta, Oh! Calcutta • 35
After I left, Aboni married Bharati Roy, a close friend of Bani’s and
m ine. They moved to Rajasthan to settle down to a long life of scholar­
ship and teaching. Aboni suddenly passed away in 1992. Bani and I flew
from the USA to meet Bharati, alias Mukti-di. Her grief and ours was
partly relieved by recalling fond memories of our Calcutta and Cuttack
days.
 Gottingen: Then (1952-54)
and Now (1993)

hen, in the October of 1952,1 landed in Genoa—after a twelve-day

T voyage from Bombay on the ship Australia—and took an overnight
train to Frankfurt, from where a steam engine brought me, along with
three other friends from Calcutta (one of whom, alas! is no more), to
Gottingen in the middle of a wintry night. A Catholic mission gave us
shelter for the night in their tent, set on the railway platform to receive
refugees from East Germany, whose border was close to Gottingen.
Very early in the morning, we walked to the university’s Auslandsamt,
or foreign student’s office, to announce our arrival. We were sent
eventually, after formal preliminaries, to different places—I to the
Studentenheim, known as Historisches Colloquium, at 81 Kreuzbergring,
where, with students of history (some of them are now Germany’s
leading historians), I lived the next two-and-a-half years.
Although I returned to the city several times between 1954-93 for
brief visits, it is only now—more than 40 years after I first reached
there—that I have returned for a longer stay. In 1952, I came from
Calcutta as a young graduate student, coming to the west for the first
time, leaving old parents, a young wife and a one-year-old daughter.
Excitement about the intellectual world that I thought I was entering was
tinged with sadness for leaving a wife, who herself had left her home and
family to marry me. That conflict tormented me all through my two-and-
a-half year stay—overpowered only by the intensity with which I
persisted in learning all that Gottingen had to offer me.
This time I flew on a Lufthansa plane, in the business class, from
Philadelphia to Boston, and from Boston to Frankfurt. From the Frank­
furt airport I took a train to the city’s Hauptbanhof, from where an
 Gottingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) • 37

Gottingen University

ultramodern, superfast, all white and glass streamlined train brought me

to Gottingen. Gunther Patzig—a friend from the early fifties, a world-
famous scholar of Aristotle and Frege, now emeritus professor at
Gottingen—was at the railway station (which is all newly built—parts
of which .I could recognize as belonging to the station as it was forty
years ago) to meet me. We embraced each other. Patzig used to be a big,
hefty and handsome man, the son of an Admiral in the German Navy in
the Third Reich, blond and energetic, but has now turned into an aging
crouching figure with a beard, who wears blue jeans and a sweater (gone
are his dark grey business suits). We exchanged greetings and marvelled
at how long we had known each other—as did our children. (Mitti got to
know his children when she went from Oxford to spend a few days with
them. We recollected our first meeting in Hamburg (although we had
known of each other, and had even corresponded, having been introduced
38 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
by a person we both respected—Rash Vihary Das), and our subsequent
friendship during my student days in Göttingen (when he moved to
Göttingen as the assistant of Josef König). He drove me through the old
town, which, save for a few landmarks, I could hardly recognize. It is all
changed, rebuilt, roads redesigned, university building built anew .... I
was overwhelmed with sadness. But why did I not anticipate that? We
tend to cling to the past. My thoughts drifted to Calcutta, my favourite
Indian city, which had not changed that much since I first went there
fifty years ago.

The day after I first arrived in Göttingen, on a wintry day in October

1952,1 walked to the Kurze Geismar Strasse, a three-storey classical
baroque building, in which the Philosophy Seminar was located on the
third floor, and the Kunstgeschichte Seminar on the second. A beautiful
spiral stairway took me upstairs. Outside was written on a tablet— such
as may be found all over the town, in memory of its famous in­
habitants—that the musician Brahms lived, for some time, in this build­
ing (which was two centuries ago a Frauenklinik, and that Brahms
married the daughter of the doctor in charge of the hospital). As I
knocked on the door of the department, a large, handsome, baldish man
opened the door, welcomed me in, and introduced himself as Wilfried
Stäche. Stäche was the assistant in the department (in German academia,
you are lucky if after your Ph.D. you get an assistantship, thereby
providing you the opportunity of writing a second thesis, leading to
habilitation, which qualifies you to be a University instructor or Dozent).
Stäche did his Ph.D. with Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin; after the war,
when Hartmann became the Professor of Philosophy at Göttingen, he
brought in Stache as his assistant. But, to his bad luck, before he
habilitated, Hartmann died, and poor Stache was left hanging in the air,
with no certainty that he could habilitate (in the absence of a sponsor),
and have a career in academia. They were waiting for Hartmann’s
successor. In the meantime, Hermann Wein—another of Hartmann’s
Schülers—ran the place temporarily. I waited for Wein to come.
Eventually Hermann Wein became my supervisor. A witty, excitable
and highly intelligent man, Wein habilitated with Hartmann in Berlin,
expected to be an Ordinarius under Hartmann’s patronage but continued
to be an ‘extraordinary’ (ä. o.) Professor after his guru ’s untimely death.
Bitter at not being promoted, Wein was happy to have me as his student.
Although for my own philosophical thinking, Josef König (who, later, a
year after my arrival, came from Hamburg to replace Hartmann) and
 Göttingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) * 39

Hermann Wein

Helmuth Plessner (the eminent sociologist, Husserl’s Schiller, Max

Scheler’s friend) proved more important, Wein was a congenial super­
visor to work with, allowing me all the freedom I needed to pursue my
own interests and ideas. As a matter of fact, on the eve of my leaving
Göttingen after receiving my doctorate, in a farewell party he gave for
me, Wein said about me, ‘One of my best friends is leaving us. I have
only one complaint against Mohanty’, he said jokingly but half seri­
ously, ‘he has, within these few years, read almost all of German
philosophy, but he has not read my books.’
Returning to India, we kept in touch with each other. To every
generation of his students—he told me later during a visit—he would
mention how hard I had worked. Arriving in Göttingen once, I called
Frau König from my hotel. She picked me up and took me to their new
house in a Göttingen suburb. Later, perhaps, as far as I can remember, I
called Wein from the Königs’ home. He was hurt that I had not got in
touch with him first. He said, half in anger, ‘'Ich dachte, wir sind
Freunde’ (I thought that we were friends). He had an anger within him
for a world which, he thought, did not treat him well, which did not
recognize his talent, so that he never could become an Ordinarius in
Göttingen (only if Hartmann had not died, he would have!). König was
40 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
always generous with him (as far as I know) but he never could relate to
König. I adored König but felt sorry for Wein.
During my student days in Göttingen, I spent more time at the
Mathematical Institute and the Max Planck Institute than at the Philoso­
phy seminar. I always loved mathematics. In Presidency College, I
wanted to study mathematics along with philosophy, but the college
administration did not allow me that combination on ‘administrative’
grounds. (I was told that not all combinations were allowed, in order to
avoid conflicts in preparing timetables.) So I studied Sanskrit instead of
mathematics. But I did not learn much of Sanskrit beyond what I had
learnt in middle school. When I arrived at Göttingen, my immediate
inclination was to enrol myself for mathematics—which I did. Was not
Göttingen for centuries the world centre in mathematics—the place
where Gauss, Riemann and Hilbert, Klein and Courant, and Weyl and
Emmy Nothar taught? I started with a course on calculus with Rallich
(who, I heard, was a brilliant mathematician but whose career had come
to a halt because the Nazis had favoured him when the greats, Courant
and Siegel, left, and Hilbert retired and became mentally incapacitated),
then attended the lectures of Lyra (a very sympathetic man, with theo-
sophical and mystical interests) on Number Theory and Analysis, Max
Deuring (a brilliant algebraist) on Non-Commutative Algebra, and fi­
nally Carl Siegel (at that time, Gottingen’s star mathematician, formerly
Hilbert’s assistant, an émigré at Princeton, and just back in Göttingen)
on Higher Analysis. I got the taste of pure mathematics, of its beautiful,
systematic, often axiomatic elegance, of its freedom from all empirical
contents, of the beauty of its deductive demonstrations. I was introduced
to the way the domain of numbers is extended from natural to real, from
real to complex, and from complex to transcendental numbers. Peanos’
axioms impressed me by their simplicity, the Galois groups by their
almost magical structure, non-commutative algebras by turning around
our naively taken-for-granted ideas of symmetry. Overwhelmed by
formal mathematics and its structures, I called upon Carl Friedrich von
Weizäcker to seek permission to work in his seminar on the philosophy
of mathematical sciences.
Von Weizäcker, whose younger brother, Richard, is—as I write
this—the president of Germany, is the son of the Weizäcker, who was
Hitler’s State Secretary (and was tried in Nurenberg after the war but
was set free because he had fallen out of favour with the Führer during
the last years, relieved from his position and sent to Rome as Ambassa­
dor). He is the nephew of the famous physician and psychologist Viktor
von Weizäcker (friend of Freud and founder of the ‘psycho-somatic
 Gottingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) • 41
system of medicine’) and grandson of the most widely read German
translator of the New Testament. At the young age of forty, Carl Friedrich
von Weizacker was already a very famous nuclear and astro-physicist;
but even twelve years earlier, when president Roosevelt had asked
Albert Einstein if the Germans could develop an atom bomb, Einstein
wrote to him (much later I saw this letter at the West Point Military
Academy) that young von Weizacker could do it. During the last years
o f the war, Hitler had put Werner Heisenberg and von Weizacker in
charge of the group that was set up to develop an atom bomb. These two
decided to stall the work, so that Hitler would not acquire the bomb—at
least that’s what I was told by both Heisenberg and Weizacker. Thus, it
is wrong to believe (as many Americans do) that the group could not
make progress; the truth of the matter is that they did not wish to make
much progress. At the end of the war, Heisenberg, Weizacker, Max
Bom, Otto Hans (all of Gottingen) and other leading German nuclear
scientists were taken prisoner by the British and kept under house arrest
in England. When I arrived at Gottingen, they had all returned. Otto
Hans was the president of the Max Planck Institute (the new name of the
old and famous Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Berlin), Heisenberg, the
director of the Max Planck Institute of Physics, and von Weizacker was
Professor of Physics at the Max Planck. Heisenberg and von Weizacker
were close friends. Heisenberg, at twenty-five, persuaded von Weizacker,
then fourteen, to take physics (and then philosophy). Von Weizacker
already had reportedly turned to philosophy, to Plato and Kant and
Heidegger. I remember students saying that he was the best-educated
man in Germany. Later he told me that he could give up physics but not
Greek. He did not actually give up physics, but continued to work on
developing the idea of the unity of physics, combining Bohr, Einstein,
and Heisenberg, and astrophysics.
I met von Weizacker in his office one morning and became a member
o f his seminar for the rest of my stay in Gottingen. It is in this seminar
that I came to know Werner Heisenberg, who often joined the class.
How exciting it was for me to be in the presence of the discoverer of the
Principle of Uncertainty! Once in a party at the Historisches Collo­
quium, Heisenberg came as a guest, and I danced with his wife.
I became very close with two other Gottingen professors. Both were
distinguished German historians: Percy Ernst Schramm and Hermann
Heimpel. No two persons could have been more unlike each other. Both
were medieval historians. Schramm was peihaps more well known as a
historian, one of Europe’s most famous medievalists, whose work on the
medieval crown and its symbolism led to an invitation—remember, it
42 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
was just after the war—to become the historical advisor to Queen
Elizabeth’s coronation! Schramm was a big, open, outgoing fellow. He
had been the historian and archivist in Hitler’s office during the war, and
as a result his lectures in Gottingen on the history of the second world
war attracted hundreds of listeners, who spilled over into nearby halls,
where loudspeakers had to be installed. Heimpel was reserved, but a
kind, very smart, sophisticated intellectual with a unique style of speak­
ing, for which he was adored by his students. He became the rector when
I was a student, and continued for many years as the president o f the
West German Rectors’ conference. For some reason, he was enor­
mously kind to me. His wife, to whom I was closer, would often stop by
the Historisches Colloquium. We would walk together to the grocery
.and I would accompany her back to her house. The Heimpel family
comprised the husband, wife and two children. Their beautiful daughter
would often play chamber music with almost professional competence.
My life in Gottingen was enriched and beautified by their friendship.
Schramm was known in student circles as having been a Nazi. How
otherwise could he have had an office in Hitler’s headquarters? But he
was smart: after the war, he earned the confidence of the British Army,
and played a different role. (According to GUnther Patzig’s account,
during the Nazi era his name was P. Ernst Schramm; after the war he
called himself Percy E. Schramm.) He was smart enough to have been
able to overcome two serious dangers which normally would have
caused his downfall and possibly led to punishment. One was that his
niece, Miss Elizabeth von Thadden, a secretary at the headquarters, was
involved in organizing the 20 July failed bomb attack on Hitler, and was
executed. The other, though comic, could have resulted in serious
adverse consequences for Schramm. The then Rector of Gottingen was
asked by the Nazi government to send names of the faculty who were
opposed to Hitler. The Rector sent a list of twelve names, including
Schramm’s. General Jodi, the chief of staff, is supposed to have met
Schramm with that list. But Schramm was too smart even for Jodi, and
found his way out. After the war, the Rector who had sent the names of
innocent faculty, explained his action by saying that if he had given only
the names of the two who really were anti-Nazi, these two would have
been killed, so he added ten more names hoping that not all twelve
would he punished! However, the faculty senate retired him early on the
grounds that he had lied.
Schramm later visited Calcutta, where I met him again. I never saw
the Heimpels again. Heimpel founded and directed the Max Planck
Institute for History in Gottingen, and died at a ripe old age. Much later
 Gottingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) • 43
did I learn of the tragedy that overtook him. The family was vacationing
in their home in the Black Forest when Mrs Heimpel (to whom, as I have
said before, I was closer) was found missing, and was taken to be dead.
A month later, she was found sleeping (unhurt) deep within the Black
Forest. It appeared that she had become confused, and had gone to sleep
(with her hairpins neatly laid beside her), and had a heart attack. The
children had announced a 50,000 DM reward for anyone who found her.
The money went to a mentally retarded young girl, and Elizabeth
Heimpel was buried in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald), something she
had wanted very much. (Elizabeth was a close friend of Heidegger, and
with Heidegger she shared a deep love for the Schwarzwald). Hermann
Heimpel, saddened by his wife’s death, in his eighties, almost lost his
mind, and kept on weeping—not for her but for the fact that when the
Jews were being burned he could not do anything. Of every visitor he
would ask, ‘What should I do now?’ (How different he was from
Heidegger, who never even regretted his ‘political error’ but always
came up with devious ‘ontological’ explanations!)

Besides philosophy and mathematics, I also studied Sanskrit, especially

Vedic Sanskrit, with Ernst Waldschmidt in the Indologisches Seminar.
I joined Waldschmidt’s class partly out of curiosity to learn how San-
skrit was taught by German professors and studied by German students.
(For me, a Pandit was the natural teacher of Sanskrit—one who dressed
in Indian clothing, was a Brahmin by caste, and taught, squatting on the
floor.) In India, during my postgraduate years, I had studied Vedanta
with Mahamahopadhyaya Yogendra Nath Tarka Vedantatirtha. I had
just begun studying Navya-Nyaya with Pandit Ananta Kumar Tarkatirtha.
I have already written about these experiences in the preceding chapter.
But I had no experience of studying the Vedas, except trying, in a rather
amateurish manner, some Rig Vedic hymns, along with a Bengali
translation by Matilal Das which I had picked up from a bookstore on
College Street. I decided to enrol in the seminar on Vedic hymns that
Waldschmidt was offering.
Waldschmidt was of medium height, a stout person with rather black
hair—stem in appearance, and as I later realized, also in his relation­
ships. The German students who already knew him were afraid of him
in a way and called him Mahaguru. His standards were strict and he
would not tolerate any deviation. At the time I studied with him, his
main research lay in the Tukharisthan Buddhist manuscripts, which he
and his graduate students were engaged in editing. He believed, however,
44 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
that every Indologist should be engaged in Vedic studies at some stage
in his or her student life. So this was for him a must, and all his graduate
students and assistants were in this seminar—Lienhardt, Schlinglof,
Valentina Rosen, Dr Mehendale from Poona, Kusum Mittal from Delhi,
a Chinese scholar whose name I have forgetten—altogether twelve of
them, including me. (Of those with whom I had become close, and spent
hours and hours translating and unraveling Vedic Sanskrit. Lienhardt
has just retired as Professor in Stockholm, Schlinglof as Professor in
Berlin. Of Dr Mehedale I have not kept track, except that I would often,
in India, hear of his reputation. Kusum Mittal once met me in Calcutta,
\b*it disappeared from my life after that. About Valentina I will write
later.) In that seminar I learned the method of German indologists.
Waldschmidt assigned a hymn to each of us. Our task was to translate it
into German, point out and resolve problems in translation, identify
grammatical problems, and solve them with the help of Pánini as well as
other Vedic grammars. ‘Never use’, he warned us, ‘any existing transla­
tions, never use Sayana’s commentary (for, he said, Sayana is closer to
us in time than to the Vedic period); use dictionaries, especially nirukta
and grammar books, and prepare your own translations and report.’ And
when you presented yours to the class, Waldschmidt would critique you,
question you at every step, and tear your arduous work to pieces. He
once said to the class, ‘My goal is to train you in such a way that given
a fragment of a manuscript, you can make something of it, date it, build
a reasonable hypothesis about its style, internal and external cross-
references, produce a translation, and raise a host of questions.’ And in
all this, he remained a philologist—an excellent one at that—with no
interest in the value and validity of the ideas, concepts, or philosophies
of the texts. That is German Indology at its best.
Waldschmidt gave me my final test in the traditional manner of
Salakányáya. He put a needle through a palm-leaf manuscript, opened
the manuscript where the needle stopped, and asked me to explain just
that page—first to translate it, then to point out grammatical problems,
and then raise questions and so forth.
I last saw him in Calcutta, where he visited the Sanskrit College,
which conferred on him the title of Vidyarnava. We had a nice evening
on the verandah of a Park Street apartment where he was staying. He
was delighted to see me. After retirement, he donated his house to the
Indology seminar. On this visit to Gottingen, I went to that house to give
a seminar, and remembered the many occasions when, as a student, I had
had dinner with the maháguru and his wife.
Yes, when writing about the Gottingen Indology seminar, I cannot
 Gottingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) • 45
but write about Valentina Rosen. I do not exactly remember where I first
met Valentina. It must have been while working in the seminar library,
for she had been in Waldschmidt’s seminar for a couple of years before
me. Before coming to Gottingen, Valentina, the daughter of a German
diplomat, had studied in the London School of Oriental Studies, and had
done archaeological excavations in Greece. Tall and heavily built, she
had a simple and innocent look in her eyes. She was always eager to
help, and had a deep and passionate love for India. We became good
friends. On Sundays we would often go on long walks to the Nikolausberg.
(Surprisingly enough, she never met Wilfred Stache in Gottingen, al­
though Stache lived on the Nikolausberg.) We would often cook Indian
food together, along with Kusum Mittal; and then work together on
Vedic grammar. After I returned to India, Valentina arrived in Calcutta
(on her way to Poona, where she was to do Archaeology), and stayed
with us in our Southern Avenue apartment. She and Bani became
friends. Mitti and Babuni were small, and Valentina was a strict, though
unfailingly affectionate, disciplinarian for our ‘uncontrollable’ Babuni
It was about this time, somewhat earlier, perhaps, that Wilfred Stache
came to India to run one of the Max Muller Bhavans. He and Valentina
met, fell in love, and married. They lived for years in Bangalore, in
Bombay, in Pakistan—but I never met Valentina again, though I thought
of her often. In 1982,1 was invited to give a lecture in Gottingen on the
occasion of Nikolai Hartmann’s birth centenary. There, in front of
Hartmann’s former residence, where a tablet in his memory was being
placed, I saw Stache in the gathering. What a pleasure it was! We
embraced, and I asked: ‘Where is Valentina?’ Wilfred broke down and
said, ‘She passed away a month ago from stomach cancer.’ He had
retired from the German diplomatic service, and they had returned to
Germany to build a house in a Munich suburb, enjoying a life of re­
tirement—she had all kinds of plans for it—when she fell ill and passed
away. We wept together, spent the day walking around the town where
we had both lived thirty years ago. About three years later, I got a note
from their daughter (who, following her mother, studied Indology in
Munich) saying that her father had passed away. I plan to see her, and
wonder if she looks like Valentina.
Living in Gottingen, I remember all my old friends. None was closer
than Eberhard Bubser, who was a bright, handsome, young freshman at
the University. I met him perhaps in the Mensa. He had a girlfriend—the
two of them were inseparable friends, had been high-school sweet­
hearts, and you never saw one apart from the other. Eberhard radiated an
intellectuality that made him stand apart in a crowd. He always had with
46 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
him his pipe. Having just returned from Oxford, he thought (and said)
that there was in Germany no one equal to either Strawson or Austin. He
would caricature every professor, and would dismiss every received
view with a cynical remark. He became my guide and advisor about
everything in Göttingen. He shared with me his candid assessment of
each professor. He was good in mathematics but tended to lean towards
sociology. Old Kant he understood better than others, for he hailed from
Königsberg, where he grew up until the family left by the last boat
before the Russians marched in. Without seeing the Baltic sea at
Königsberg, he would say, you cannot understand old Kant. Bubser was
always short of money. I would have liked him to share my lunch with
me, which I would buy. But he was too proud to take any help. During
one vacation, I went, along with him and his girl friend, Ina, to their
hometown, Lingen, near the Dutch border. I got to know his mother,
whom I remember as being a very affectionate person. After I returned
to India, Eberhard and I continued to keep in touch. He completed his
Ph.D. under Wein, and became Plessner’s assistant. I believe, after
Plessner’s retirement he was left on his own. When I visited Göttingen
in the late sixties, I found him living in the basement of a dark, dingy
warehouse in the centre of the town. As usual, he had with him his pipe,
and he was cheerful but cynical. Ina had left him, and justifiedly so, he
said. He earned some money, just enough to keep him going, by
translating: I think he translated some of Carnap’s writings into English,
and some of Strawson’s works into German. I told him that, if he wanted
to try his luck in the United States, I could perhaps be of help. But he
said like Kant in Königsberg, that he would hang around in Göttingen
until he found a place there, even if he became old! I believe he knew he
was in an abyss. His only inner strength was from his mother. I do not
know of anyone who was so close to his mother. I had no news of him
for a year after I came to the United States. Then, at last, came a letter
from Elisabeth Stroker: Eberhard was dead. The circumstances of his
death were most remarkable. He did not have a phone of his own, and
would go out to the post office to call his mother (who was sick most of
the time). That day, he called his mother from a phone booth. A family
friend answered, and told him that his mother had just passed away.
Eberhard was found dead in the phone booth with the phone still in his
hand. The mother and the son were buried together.

Why is it that this time, in Göttingen, I am thinking so much about two

Göttingen women, brilliant and creative, brave and in their own ways
 Göttingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) • 47
unique, whose lives ended in tragedy? They arc Emmy Nothar and Edith
Stein. I have met neither of them. I could not have met either of them. I
heard about both of them when I was a student. But this time I feel close
to them. Nothar lived in Duestere Eichen Weg, close to where I now
live; Edith Stein lived in Untere Carspule 6.
Emmy Nothar is one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, and
single-handedly completed the axiomatic abstract algebra. It was only
after immense struggle, and with Hilbert’s support, that she could,
against all odds, habilitate, but had to emigrate to the United States
(being Jewish), where she found a position at the Bryn Mawr College. (I
went to see her grave there on the college campus.) However, her life
was cut short, most unexpectedly, by a surgery that she almost survived.
Among others, Einstein wrote an obituary for her; Hermann Weyl gave
the memorial speech at the college. In Göttingen, she was a legend—even
among the many legends at the mathematics institute. I studied under
one of the so-called ‘Nothar Boys’, Max Deuring. This time I have been
reading about her ‘habilitation’ controversy, and the great tragedy of
such a wonderful life and rare talent still haunts me.
Edith Stein was a philosopher. Richard Courant, the mathematician,
brought her cousin (from Breslau) to study with Husserl. Soon she
became a member of the Göttingen Phenomenology Circle, wrote a
dissertation on Empathy—I think under Reinach—and became Husserl’s
assistant in Freiburg. She helped put together both the Ideen II volume
and the so-called ‘Time Lectures’ of Husserl. But all her attempts to
habilitate failed, and Husserl’s support seems to have been lukewarm.
(Husserl was against ‘habilitating’ women: in Göttingen he had voted
against Emmy Nothar). Stein seems to have fallen in love with Hans
Lipps (one of Husserl’s most brilliant students, who came to philosophy
after being a physician, did a Ph.D. in plant physiology, and habilitated
in the philosophy of mathematics with Courant). Lipps left as a ship’s
doctor on a voyage around the world and, coming back, joined the war.
Edith Stein joined a Catholic monastery as a nun—having converted
from Judaism—but was captured by the Nazis in Holland and died in
Auschwitz, eleven months after Lipps fell on the Russian front. I knew
of both—I read about Lipps a great deal, have written about him, and
know that König was a close friend of his. It is now well known that the
Pope initiated the process of ‘sanctifying’ Edith Stein, and she has been
made a saint. But this time the tragedy, the greatness, the nearness hit me
as a person. I now realize that König was my last link to that circle (as
Deuring was to Emmy Nothar). I wish I had come to Göttingen around
the First World War (but how could I have?). The Göttingen Circle does
48 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
not mean much today to philosophers here. Only Patzig knows about it,
having been a student of Kurt Stavenhagen. I feel as though I almost
‘belonged’ to it, as I walk along the streets of this town. I feel ‘out of the
times’. And I often say to myself, ‘They (that is, the people of this town
now) do not know the Gottingen I know’. It is an irony that it has fallen to
me—an Indian—to keep the thoughts of those phenomenologists alive.

In the summer of 1954, my father died. I knew he was suffering from

diabetes and high blood pressure, and was having trouble with his eyes.
But he was still on the Bench. The news of his passing away reached me
through a family friend, Annada Sankar Roy. The letter from home
reached me later. Friends were of great help in my coping with this
shock. Father had been always good to me, and had complete trust in
whatever I was doing. Emotionally, I was closer to my mother, but my
affection for my father was tinged with respect and a certain awe. I
knew he felt disappointed when I decided not to finish my law studies
in Calcutta, and not become a lawyer (and a judge like him). He had
asked me whether I would compete for the Civil Service—knowing
fully well that I would not. He wrote to Annada Sankar Roy that he had
nothing against my taking up philosophy, but was worried that I would
be condemned to poverty. However, he did agree to finance my studies
in Germany, and requested
Bani that she ask me—when
I was about to leave for
Gottingen —if I wanted, af­
ter completing my doctor­
ate, to go to London to study
for the Bar examination. I
had declined. Did I disap­
point him in the long run? I
hope I did not. When I left
Orissa for my trip to Ger­
many, he bade me goodbye
in the village where we were
staying, and I saw tears in his
eyes. Now he was gone. I
was concerned about mother,
whose attachment to, and
dependence on, him was al­
most total. With him gone,
 Göttingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) • 49

the family finances were in doubtful shape. 1 could not ask my mother
for support. My eldest brother’s wife knew very well what my situation
was as we were very close to each other. She sold some of her most
expensive jewellery, and sent me money. How could I, a poor philoso­
pher, pay her back? She said, ‘You don’t have to.’
I worked hard to finish my dissertation. Wein, König and Plessner—all
three readers accepted it. On a cold winter night, accompanied by
friends, led by Frau Fischer (of the Historisches Colloquium), I walked
to the town centre, climbed up the steps of the fountain, and ‘kissed the
girl with the goose’, which generations of new Ph.Ds over the centuries
had kissed. Within a week I boarded a boat en route to Bombay.

I am in Göttingen to write a large book on Husserl. Most of the research

has been done in the United States. I receive gifts of prints of articles on
Husserl from all over the world in so many languages. My own collec­
tion of books on and by Husserl, is more than I would need. There
nevertheless were a few items belonging to the late nineteenth-century
German philosophy and psychology that I wanted to go through. I
attended the lectures of Konrad Cramer (son of the famous philosopher
Wolfgang Cramer), who made his theme suit my purposes and devoted
it to the relationship of the Marburg Neo-Kantians to Husserl. Cramer
and Patzig took part in my fortnightly seminars on Husserl’s philosophy
of logic. I am amazed at Patzig’s sympathetic attitude. He has lost his
earlier aggressiveness, although the penchant for making a nice logical
point remains. Besides these two, the philosophers at Göttingen have
nothing to offer me. What I enjoy is living here, walking on the old
streets, identifying old houses, seeing places I knew. Although I had
decided not to accept any lecture invitations, some I could not avoid. I
attended the Hegel-Kongress at Stuttgart, where I met many interesting
Hegel scholars—but did not learn very much. Perhaps one of the more
interesting lectures was given by the city’s mayor, Oberbürgermeister
Rommel (son of the famous General), who could cite Hegel chapter and
verse, and also make fun of the philosopher. Then I went to Ram’s
conference on inter-culturality in Heidelberg. (Here I should introduce
Ram Adhar Mall, a former student from Calcutta University, now an
äuberplanmässige professor at Bremen University. He lives near Köln
with his wife Renate and lovely and bright daughter Geeta, who is to be
a doctor. Ram has founded and is President of the Society for Intercul-
tural Philosophy, and is also the author of many books and essays on
this topic.)
50 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
The two universities I had to visit are Köln and Bochum. At Bochum,
I spoke on ‘Understanding the Other’ in Waldenfels’s seminar.
Waldenfels, whom I have known for the last fifteen years, is a good
Husserl scholar, but is now deeply into French phenomenology, espe­
cially Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Derrida. Since in my lecture I op­
posed this group of French philosophers, there ensued a highly critical
discussion, which went on until noon the next day. Then I left for Köln
with my former student Christina Schiis. In Köln, I was invited by
Elisabeth Ströker to her seminar. Elisabeth, an old friend, about the same
age as I am, is perhaps Germany’s best Husserl scholar and has edited
several of Husserl’s texts. A victim in many ways of German academia’s
male chauvinism, she has struck back and stood her ground with courage
and defiance. We had a lovely evening together; the next morning I
spoke to her seminar. I left Köln to spend the weekend with Ram and
Renate, who took me to a gathering of Indians in Müllheim near
Düsseldorf: for two days Indians belonging to different communities
talked about the Fremdenhass (xenophobia) which is common in Ger­
many, and discussed the idea of making Germany into a multicultural
society. My own views on this matter, at least at this time, is, that unlike
America, Germany has an old culture with a history of its own. I would
not like to see this culture disrupted by immigrants, who come mostly
with economic gain in mind. The immigrant has to learn to appreciate
German culture before he can lay claim to the fruits of possible
multiculturalism. I know what havoc the idea of multiculturalism (and
the accompanying idea of ‘political correctness’) is causing in America.
In two weeks’ time, I flew to England to take the oral examination of
a Ph.D. candidate in Oxford; upon my return, Günther Patzig and his
wife drove me to the former D.D.R. (East Germany). I went on to
Weimar, where Goethe and Schiller lived, to Leipzig, where Bach
composed and played, to Halle, where Husserl first taught, and to Jena,
where Hegel wrote his Phenomenology of Spirit, and finished it on the
eve of the Battle of Jena. Then I flew back to the United States.

At the end of these three months, and before I flew back to the USA, I
was at a bus-stop, waiting to board a bus on my way to the Philosophy
Seminar, when suddenly I saw an older lady. Her face seemed familiar,
but I realized that even if I knew her, time and age would have left their
mark. Spontaneously I greeted her and asked, ‘Did you, in the fifties,
live in the Historisches Colloquium?’ She said, much surprised, ‘Yes.’
I said, ‘So did I’, mentioned my name, and asked her, ‘Aren’t you, or
 Gottingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) * 51
rather, weren’t you, Wiebke Fesefeldt?’ She hugged me and said, ‘Yes,
I am now Frau von Thadden.’ and she remembered, ‘You must be Herr
Mohanty.’ We both boarded the bus, not even knowing where to begin
our conversation, trying to catch up on each other’s lives during the past
forty years. I was invited for tea the next afternoon to their house. I knew
von Thadden as a bright young historian, a former rector at Gottingen.
And he had the same youngish, rather boyish face he had then. Wiebke,
I recalled, was working with Heimpel, and finished her doctorate,
married Rudolph, brought up her four children, and then began writing
history books for children. We three tried to recount the story of our
lives, and the lives of our children; they told me about other members of
the Colloquium. We marvelled at how many of them have become
University professors! We talked about German historians. Wiebke
thought that even the great ones were ‘provincial’. Rudolph differed
—certainly Meineke and Schramm were not. However, they still did not
do social and cultural history. History for them was political history.
Marxism had not touched them (and yet, in a sense, ‘history’ as a science
began in Germany). It is surprising, how many people—professors and
students—have told me that it was the student revolution of 1968 which
changed everything. Marxism came to stay, while ‘revisionist’ ones like
Habermas lost their appeal. Conservatives became liberals, and liberals
became conservatives. The structure and function of German universi­
ties were transformed. The old Humboldt vision of University came to
be questioned, and is now vehemently rejected by some, and ruefully
mourned by others.
From 1968-70, there were, in the United States, the student protests,
often violent, against the Vietnam war. Whatever deep scars the Viet­
nam war left on American life and culture, it did not tumultuously upset
the apple cart of the Universities. In Germany, Universities were shaken
up and sometimes changed beyond recognition, and yet the 1968 student
movement, beginning in Paris, was not against any particular event such
as the Vietnam war but against the entire European society and values.
Universities in Germany were looked upon as authoritarian—the very
few professors (ordinarius) were thought to be in their ivory towers
ruling their institutes ‘from above’. The younger scholars, from the
doctoral candidates to the poor Privat Dozenten, were at their mercy.
The idea of pure science with no social responsibility had held its own.
All these were questioned. But with what result?
I remember, Bani and I were in Berlin in 1970 as guests of Berlin
Radio, to participate in a several-part radio programme on the response
of world religions to the problems facing humankind—problems such as
52 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
hunger, over-population and violence. We were invited to a reception by
the President of Frei Universität. He said that his successor was going to
be a graduate student. In the changed constitutions of Universities,
students, staff and faculty had equal representation in the Senate. So in
Berlin, the students and the staff joined together and set up a student
candidate who won. How would he sign his own doctorate diploma, they
all wondered.
Of course, some of those extreme absurdities were corrected, some
changes were rescinded. But the Universities never remained the same.
Now there are few Marxists, still fewer Maoists; as in the United States,
the new generation o f students are oriented towards their
careers—the only streak of idealism that remains concerns ‘ecology’.
Awareness of the environment and of the ‘world’ is much stronger in
Germany than in the United States. For me, it has been a great pleasure
that one person, singularly responsible for this awareness, has been
Hans Jonas—a dear friend and colleague from the New School days.
But more about him later.

When I came to Germany as a student, I, of course, did not know about

the concentration camps of Hitler and of the ‘final solution’ of the
‘Jewish Problem’. Most of those I talked to—and not merely students,
but also people who fought in the war—would tell me how little they
knew about it. (I had even heard some people saying that Hitler was all
right except for his policy towards the Jews and his invasion of Russia!)
Those who had a feeling of guilt would say, ‘We just did not know what
was happening to the Jews. We saw Jews in our town being taken away
but thought it was for their own security that they were being moved to
safe places. Only at the end of the war did we learn of the terrible things
that happened to them.’ This was difficult to believe, but in some cases
I have no reason to disbelieve. Patzig told me—and knowing him, I
would believe him—that his father, the Admiral, did not know until
1943 about the mass murders in the camps. Independent of the question
regarding who knew and who did not, I must admit that in India, before
and during the war, there was not only complete ignorance about the
Holocaust but also considerable admiration for Hitler. I remember that
as a high school student, I had read in Indian newspapers—which ones
I cannot now recall—glorious words of praise for Adolf Hitler. These
were not words of praise for National Socialism, or for Hitler’s policies,
domestic and foreign. Hitler was praised as a man of great moral and
spiritual power—one who, like the Hindu brahmacarin, was a celibate,
 Gottingen: Then (1952—54) and Now (1993) • 53
a vegetarian, and did not smoke or drink. Besides, he was trying to undo
what the British and the French did to Germany at the Treaty of
Versailles, and, of course, he was fighting the British, who were India’s
colonial rulers. I borrowed a copy of Mein Kampf from the College
Library in Cuttack, and discovered that Indians were not Aryans for
Hitler. The true face of Nazism, as well as that of Fascism, was not
clearly seen by most Indians (even by some good politicians). Nehru
was an exception, and it was he who brought home to Gandhi what
Nazism and Fascism meant. Even so astute a politician as Subhash
Chandra Bose had hoped that Nazi Germany would help him oust the
British from India. The poet Rabindra Nath Tagore had been duped by
Mussolini in accepting an invitation to visit Italy as his guest, until
Romain Rolland persuaded him to cancel it, after Rolland explained to
him what Mussolini stood for.
Even now I have met Indians in the United States, some highly
educated scientists and engineers, who (though very rarely) expressed
doubt regarding whether the Holocaust ever took place (there are crazy
historians everywhere who hold this view) but who (more often) hold
the view that the Holocaust is just like many other mass killings that are
always taking place around the world. In Germany, or possibly any­
where else, there are people who think that the number of Jews killed is
highly exaggerated—that it is not six million, but only two or four
million who were killed—as though the seriousness of the crime (and
the corresponding intensity of the guilt) depended upon, and increased
and decreased with the numbers! They fail to see or confront the almost
unique nature and the terrifying face of the Holocaust—the state-spon­
sored, ideology-driven, bureaucratically organized, cold-blooded at­
tempt to eliminate a whole race without any personal hatred for them.
Since my first visit to Germany, the world and I have learned much
more about the Holocaust, and it is very much more on my mind than it
was then.
I picked up from a Bochum University bookshop a little paperback
booklet called Heidegger im Kontext. Heidegger’s Nazism is well known,
and his Rektoratsrede is just disgusting. What this booklet does is to
place Heidegger’s Nazism in the context of the views, attitudes and
decisions of his colleagues in Germany. It contains names of all the
philosophers in Germany during the Nazi period, and reproduces data
regarding their memberships in the various Nazi Party organizations.
The result makes for a most depressing and disgusting reading. Very
good philosophers, whom I respected, are shown up as having been
members of all kinds of disreputable organizations. (I know that some,
54 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
like Hans Lipps, became members because otherwise they would not get
jobs and would have to starve! But many, I am sure, joined voluntarily;
many even joined Chamberlain’s despicable research institute on the
races!) Josef König, to my utter relief, was completely free from any
stain. I knew that König, when he was being considered for the job in
Göttingen, was asked to see Bäumler, a prominent Nazi philosopher in
Berlin. After a long conversation, Bäumler told him, ‘Mr König, you are
a bom philosopher, and in my view you cannot do anything else. If I take
your political views into consideration, you have no chance. But taking
into account your special gift, I am going to recommend you.’ The
famous classicist Karl Reinhart recounts how Lipps got a chair in
Frankfurt. When the commission set up to recommend a candidate for
the chair of Philosophy in Frankfurt met, two existing Dozents, both of
whom were Nazis but had no distinguished scholarly record, wanted to
be considered. The commission rejected both, and wrote to Heidegger
(who was a Nazi) for a recommendation. Heidegger recommended
Lipps, who was an excellent philosopher and had just joined a party
organization.
When I think of all this, of how German philosophers compromised
with the Nazis, my faith in philosophy drops to a low point. I can excuse
an ordinary person for not thinking clearly, and for falling prey to
powerful propaganda. But philosophers are supposed to be specially
adept in thinking. They are supposed to love wisdom. How then could
Heidegger, a lover of wisdom, the man who is a self-proclaimed thinker,
praise Hitler in his Rektoratsredel In this regard, Husserl and Jaspers
stand out as models. Politically conservative though he was, Husserl did
not fall into the trap, and as a result suffered indignity because of his
Jewish heritage, at the hands of his hand-picked successor.
Why did not Heidegger say even once, after the war, after he had
discovered his mistake, that he was sorry? Instead, he indulged in all
kinds of obfuscating discourse to confuse and confound. Hannah Arendt
told me that Heidegger had told her that he was sorry. But Heidegger
never said this in public, in writing! I have been too tolerant of his
philosophy. Hannah Arendt taught me to separate Heidegger’s philoso­
phy from his political views during the thirties. I have tried to do so, and
to be as charitable to his philosophy as I could. But I still have the
nagging doubt: is his political mistake totally unconnected with his
philosophy?
All these thoughts naturally haunt me while I am in Germany. But
something strange happened; I read about it in the German newspapers.
On his ninety-eighth birthday, Emst Jünger—the famed German author,
 Göttingen: Then (1952-54) and Now (1993) • 55
with a shady Fascist past—had two visitors in his home in a Bavarian
village— Chancellor Kohl of Germany and President Mitterand of France.
How does one make sense of the French President’s visit? It is true that
Jünger had given up Nazism—to be fair to him, he was never a member
o f the party—and had even criticized Hitler’s policies. Even then the
visit w as a mystery. My friend, the historian von Thadden, tried to make
sense o f it but I was not persuaded by his argument.

I returned to Philadelphia on 15 August 1993, after a four-month stay in

Germany. Günther Patzig travelled with me, by a glistening Inter-City
Express, to Frankfurt to see me off at the airport. Ram and Renate were
waiting there, having arrived from Köln. All three were worried about
my health and wanted to be by my side when I left. The last week of my
stay in Göttingen, I had to be hospitalized for pain in the chest. After
numerous and intense investigations, the doctors found nothing. They
suspected some sort of coronary problem but they allowed me to leave
Germany with the understanding that I would have a thorough check-up
in Philadelphia.
 A Gandhian Experiment

returned to India after receiving my doctorate, in the winter of 1954,

I in a ship belonging to the same Italian company, Lloyd Tristino,
whose ship had taken me to Europe. Before returning, I had made trips
to England and France—for the first time as a tourist, to see famous
places, museums, streets, and shops. I have never been happy playing
the role of a tourist. There is something superficial about it—an attitude,
or rather a gaze, which objectifies everything, more so with a camera. I
have never owned a camera, so I try to remember sights, colours, lights
and shades, faces and contours, even the feelings these evoke. In any
case, the voyage lasted some twelve days. I read E.M. Foster’s Passage
to India, lying in the cabin, or out on the deck. When that was finished,
I turned to Heidegger’s Being and Time. If there exists an unreal
existence anywhere, it is on board a ship.
Disembarking at Cuttack Railway Station, I saw my mother dressed
as a widow, and Bani with our two children. Delight and grief were
mingled together, as they always are. I went to the village for a few days
of rest. Stories of the last days of father were recounted. Mother was
reconciled to his death. She had enormous strength within. I saw Babuni
for the first time—he was bom while I was away. Bani had a difficult
time raising the two, especially after father’s death. She spent most of
the time with my brother and his wife, who took care of the children as
their own. I got to know Mitti well and played with her—she would
make me crouch like an elephant, and would ride on me; she would sing
songs she had learned, and show her tricks. I spent a few weeks with the
family, and then I left again.
Vinoba Bhave was entering Orissa at the Midnapore and Balasore
border, on 26 January 1955. It had been arranged, through my older
uncle Gopabandhu Chaudhury, that I would join his party on that day at
 A Gandbian Experiment • 57
that border. It was difficult to be separated again from Bani and the
children, and from mother. But Bani agreed that I should not let this
opportunity pass. So with a small bag in which I packed the bare
necessities, I left.
W hile at Gottingen I had heard of Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan march,
and was eager to get to know him. My uncle had written to me: ‘Vinoba
has raised the public esteem of philosophy, for he is putting a philoso­
phy into practice’. I had known of him as being, in the Mahatma’s own
estimation, his foremost disciple. When in 1941, Gandhi started the
‘individual satyagraha’ movement, he chose Vinoba to be the first to
offer satyagraha; Nehru was next. But Vinoba had been a recluse all his
life, and a scholar. As the story goes, as a young man he came to Gandhi
and sought his permission to live in Gandhi’s Ashram in Sevdgrdm.
Gandhi agreed, but he saw no more of the youth. A few years later he
again came to Gandhi and sought his permission to take leave to study
Sanskrit in Benaras for some years. Gandhi agreed, and soon forgot
about him. To the very day, after the promised number of years, Vinoba
showed up at Gandhi’s. He told me, in the course of a conversation that
he would not have left Sevdgrdm and entered public life if Gandhi were
alive. With Gandhi gone, and a communist insurrection in full swing in
Telegana, and Nehru preparing to send his army to quell the rebellion
and violence, Vinoba decided to act. Nehru agreed to let him make an
attempt. Vinoba’s Bhoodan or land-gift movement started. The story of
its beginning is well known and I need not recount it.
The morning after my first conversation with Vinobha, I began
walking with him. His daily schedule was as follows: he woke up early
in the morning when it was still dark; washed, prayed and gathered his
belongings; the party started on its walk an hour before the sunrise;
walking along village paths, across rice fields and village greens, across
creeks or rivers or whatever is on the way, usually a distance of eight to
ten miles to the next larger village. After arriving there, Vinoba took
rest; he and the others ate a simple breakfast, which the villagers
provided; then, members of the party—or, we Bhoodan ‘workers’ spread
out in the village; some collecting statistical data about the village
(population, caste breakdown, land holdings, number of landless peas­
ants, other cottage industries, etc.), others going from door to door to
spread the message of ‘land-gift’; in the evening, Vinoba addressed a
public meeting of people from the entire area, sometimes tens of thou­
sands in number; prayer after that; evening meals; then the actual ‘gifts’
would flow in with donors signing over their land-gifts to Vinoba. After
Vinoba left the next morning, the local workers would complete the
58 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

work of ‘distribution’. It is thus that ‘the god that gives away lands’ went
walking from village to village. What had I, trained in German philoso­
phy and abstract mathematics, to do with all this?
Vinoba asked me, ‘Can you express the philosophy you have learned
at Gotrangana (which was his Sanskrit rendering of Gottingen)?’ He
added, ‘The rendering was really Bhandarkar’s in your mother tongue,
i.e., Oriya?’ ‘I can try to do it in Sanskrit, to be sure’, I replied. He
seemed to like that. I asked him what he thought of Sri Aurobindo. His
eyes glistened, I knew that because of his Baroda connections, Sri
Aurobindo had great influence on Maharashtrian intellectuals. Vinoba
replied, ‘What can I tell you about Sri Aurobindo? Leaving Gandhiji
aside, he has been the most powerful influence on my mind’. ‘Let me be
more specific,’ I said, ‘I am very interested in Sri Aurobindo’s interpre­
tation of the Vedas. What do you think of it?’ This conversation took
place as I was trying to catch up with him in the course of our walk
together across a rice field in north Balasore in Orissa. As is well known,
Sri Aurobindo rejected the alleged ‘ritualistic’ understanding of the
Vedas by Sayana, and in its place advanced a reading which gave a
psychological (or spiritual) interpretation of key Vedic words. (Agni, for
example, meant, according to Sri Aurobindo, both sensible ‘fire’ [exo­
teric meaning] and ‘purified will’ [esoteric meaning]). I had put this
very question to Radhakrishnan, who had reaffirmed the position de­
fended by him in his Indian Philosophy—namely the position of Sayana.
Vinoba’s response was unique: ‘The Vedic texts are capable of a three­
fold interpretation: an adhibhautika meaning which one finds in the
textual records and reflections of the material (social, economic, even
political) forces of society then; an adhidaivika meaning which one
finds in the textual prayers and hymns to gods (i la Sayana); and an
ddhydtmika meaning referring to the inner spiritual life of man (£ la Sri
Aurobindo).’ I was impressed by his ingenuity. Later I realized (£ la
Gadamer) that there is no reason why the possibility of a fresh under­
standing of a text should be subjected to closure.
After a couple of days of walking, I asked Vinoba if he would teach
me some of the Upanisads. He agreed, but the only time he could give
me was en route. So after sunrise, along the way, he would stop, on a
field or under a tree, to hold a class for the group, and talk to us about
the Ua, Kena and the Katha Upanisads. He attempted to reinterpret
Upanisadic concepts by discussing their new etymologies (somewhat
like Heidegger) in their historical contexts, and also by showing their
relevance for contemporary India.
The evening public lectures, always in Hindi, dealt in one sweep with
 A Gandhian Experiment • 59

ideas from ancient Indian thought, medieval mysticism, Gandhi, Tagore,

modem science and technology, and contemporary political issues.
Although he had embarked on the mission of ‘land-gift’, seldom did he
talk about land-gift. I once asked him about this strategy. Vinoba
replied, ‘My real purpose was spiritual, and not socio-economic’. He
also said, on another occasion, ‘In ancient India, the philosophers (who
were also saints) travelled on foot all over the country, thereby educat­
ing not merely the elite but also the common folk. I look upon my
padayatra or ‘journey by foot’ as a way, a modem way, of following in
their footsteps. I want to educate the common people in matters of
ideas—in philosophy’. These lectures of Vinoba during the time I
accompanied him bore upon issues from science to self-knowledge,
from vijhdna to atmajfUina. He emphasized the need for bringing to­
gether the two, and insisted that a society founded upon both must be
founded upon non-violence. All this was not mere Gandhi. Vinoba did
not share Gandhi’s anti-science and unhistorical attitude; he sought to
bring Gandhi’s basic insight into harmony with science and history.
Some time later, after I started teaching in Calcutta, I translated some
of Vinoba’s lectures in a little volume called Science and Self-Knowl­
edge, and also wrote a little pamphlet in my mother-tongue, Oriya, on
Vinoba’s thoughts, primarily drawing upon my conversations with him.
My contact with Vinoba was lost after he left Orissa. Once when he
was passing through Calcutta (I believe he was returning from what was
then East Pakistan), I (and my late lamented colleague, Sashi Bhusan
Dasgupta) visited him but there was not much occasion for conversa­
tion. After I moved to the United States, my mother once visited him at
his Ashram in Panwar, and I learned that he remembered me and
enquired about me.
It was a great disappointment for me when this great man came to
Indira Gandhi’s defence when Indira imposed her brutal powers upon
the country under the pretext of National Emergency. Vinoba defended
Indira on the alleged ground that the country needed to go through a
period of self-discipline. I am afiraid he was not right. Even the wisest of
men are sometimes confused in their thinking!
Nabakrusna Chaudhury, Malati Chaudhury, and Rama Devi—all
went to prison, this time in independent India. The Mahatma’s dream of
India was turned into a caricature by someone who shared his surname,
and was the daughter of his close political disciple Jawaharlal Nehru.
The Sarvodaya movement, initiated by the Mahatma, has slowly
almost died out in my own lifetime, and is almost non-existent today.
im
lift
Back in Calcutta

returned to Calcutta at the end of 1955 after an absence of more than

I three years. I still did not have a job. Bani and the children were left
behind in Orissa. The idea was that I should first find a job and a flat, and
then bring them over. After brief teaching stints at two local colleges, it
did not take me long to be appointed as a lecturer in the graduate college
of the University of Calcutta, which was the best I had hoped for. When
I look back at how I landed myself in this job, I am convinced that again
a curious coincidence of incidents—sometimes misleadingly called
destiny—took place. I do not remember why I was on College Street
near the University, it must have been sometime in the December of
1955 (a year after 1 had landed in Bombay). I met Dr Saroj Kumar Das,
an old teacher in the University. Saroj Babu, as we called him, had a
Ph.D. from London, spoke English with an affected British accent,
always wore a finely ironed dhoti, panjabi and a shawl with style, had a
streak of oratory, did not have the depth of Kalidas Bhattacharyya but
impressed his students by a carefully cultivated rhetoric. I was, I knew,
one of his favourite students—partly because he was a friend of my
younger uncle, Nabakrusna Chaudhury, and his wife Malati, both of
whom he had got to know at Santiniketan. Saroj Babu greeted me, asked
me what I was doing, and upon learning that I was looking for a job,
immediately took me to Haridas Bhattacharya, and introduced me to
him in glowing terms. Haridas Babu was a retired Professor of Philoso­
phy from Dacca University, where he had taught at the time the Univer­
sity was at the height of its glory. He had made a name for himself
because of his expertise in Comparative Religion, in Psychology of
Religion, and also for his oratory. (It is widely known that many
philosophers in the past were orators—this phenomenon reached its
zenith in Radhakrishnan!) He already knew me; his eldest son, Asoke,
 Back in Calcutta • 61

and Asoke’s wife, Usha, were ray friends. He at once took me to the
Darbhanga Building of the University; we climbed the majestic stairs,
and he ushered me into the office of the Vice-Chancellor. The Vice-
Chancellor was a well-known chemist, Sir J.C. Ghosh, who had been
Haridas Babu’s colleague and friend in Dacca. Haridas Babu introduced
me to the Vice-Chancellor as one of Calcutta University’s most brilliant
students, told him about my doctorate from Gottingen, and said (did not
request), ‘Jnan, give him a job at this University.’ The Vice-Chancellor
said, ‘I will be happy to have him here but I do not know the situation in
the Philosophy Department.’ So he sent for Professor Sushil Kumar
Maitra, who was the Head of the Department of Philosophy. Sushil
Babu came a little later, and when the Vice-Chancellor introduced me to
him, and asked if there was a place for me in the department, he said, ‘I
know Jiten, and if he is appointed, many of my problems will be solved.
He can teach many different subjects. But the Vice-Chancellor has to
approve a position.’ A position was approved and I joined the depart­
ment soon afterwards. I rented an apartment on Southern Avenue, Bani
and the children joined me within a month, and for the first time we lived
as a family. The salary was very small; we could just pay the rent and
buy groceries. My mother continued to send money for the children for
quite some time.
I resumed studies with Pandit Ananta Kumar Tarkatirtha, and a lot of
time was spent preparing my University lectures. Professor Maitra was
right. I lectured on Indian Philosophy and German Philosophy after
Kant; I taught a special class on Ramanuja’s commentary on the
Brahmasutras, and also a special class on logic. For each of these
courses, I tried to make notes, and every year brought the notes up to
date. Once I was lecturing on Schelling, and Wilfred Stache was visiting
us in Calcutta. I asked him to come to my class and tell me if my lecture
on Schelling was up to the mark. He said it was at least as good as that
of any German professor he had heard on Schelling. That was veiy
encouraging, for I knew Stache had studied with Nicolai Hartmann
(whose book on German Idealism, along with Kroner’s Von Kant bis
Hegel, was the book I was using). For Indian Philosophy, I prepared my
lectures only on the basis of Sanskrit texts (some of which I had to read
afresh for this purpose), and avoided using English expositions. Several
years later, I lectured on theory of knowledge, large parts of which were
devoted to theory of meaning and theory of perception. My Husserl’s
Theory of Meaning arose out of these lectures, as did several chapters of
Phenomenology and Ontolgoy. (Much later, in the early seventies,
Hannah Gray, then Dean of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University,
 62 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
offered me a position at Northwestern, because she was impressed by
the fact—as I said in the preface to those two books—that my books
arose out of my lectures to students). When Dr Atin Bose—a bright
young Marxist—suddenly died, I took over his class on political phi­
losophy, began lecturing on the period from Hegel to Marx, and also
offered a special seminar on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. I think at that
time I was still far from being able to understand Hegel—I had not read
his Phenomenology, and was too much under the influence of the neo-
Hegelians in my interpretation of Hegel. It was not until the late
seventies, at the New School for Social Research in New York, that I
began to gain access to the Hegelian mode of thinking, as well as into his
texts, especially the Phenomenology, which then became one o f my
favourite texts for teaching. I also taught, in the early sixties, special
classes on Vivaranaprameyasangraha (an Advaita work), and on
Samkara’s Bhasya on the Brahmasütras. I recall all this, for looking
back I find that the nearest I came to teaching phenomenology was a
class on Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethics. I never lectured on Husserl at
Calcutta University, though I used Husserl’s Logical Investigations
(without saying so) in my lectures on theory of knowledge. My Husserl
studies were done entirely in the privacy of my home. Navya-Nyaya
studies continued at the Sanskrit College. I was not quite sure where all
this work was leading me. I was happy and excited but also worried
about the direction of my own thinking. I knew that my life was worth
nothing if I did not find for myself a ‘path of thinking’ that was to be
uniquely mine.

The Philosophy Department at the University, during my years of

teaching, was not terribly exciting any longer. Kalidas Bhattacharyya
had left for Santiniketan. Rash Vihary Das had joined the newly founded
University of Sagar, although he briefly returned to Calcutta before his
retirement. The Head of the Department, when I began teaching at the
University—as also when I was a student—was Sushil Maitra, about
whom I would like to say a few things. The other senior professor was
Dr Satish Chandra Chatteijee, who was well known as the author (along
with D.M. Datta of Patna) of a widely used, Introduction to Indian
Philosophy, and also of a more advanced book, Nyaya Theory of Knowl­
edge. After Sushil Babu’s retirement, Satish Chatteijee became the
Head of the Department, although he never got promoted to become a
full professor. The other notable member of the faculty was Dr Adhar
Chandra Das: a remarkably intelligent man, he spoke English with the
 Back in Calcutta • 63
native accent of one from the Sylhet district of Assam, enjoyed finding
fault with the English of his colleagues, and taking pride in his own,
taught very well, i.e., he always had something substantive to say, had
written a book on a negation, and also a critique of Sri Aurobindo—in
fact, one of the better members of the group. Of the younger members,
Kali Krishna Baneijee (who was still a part-time or rather adjunct
faculty) was the one—a few years my senior—I befriended. He was not
only very intelligent but he had studied Nyaya with great effort, and was
at that time turning towards Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. With this
group, I started and continued as their colleague. With the exception of
Kali Krishna Baneijee, all were my former teachers. This shows how
inbred Calcutta University was—there were very few faculty members
in the University, as a whole, who were not graduates from Calcutta
University. In this respect, I prefer the generally accepted American
convention that at least in the graduate school you do not hire your own
students unless they have already spent years of teaching and research
elsewhere. I would like to add that when Sir Asutosh started the graduate
college in Calcutta in 1905, he recruited professors from all over India,
some very famous names. Now the Universities in India, with the
exception of Delhi, are fast becoming provincial, primarily because they
are in favour of changing the medium of instruction from English to the
provincial language. Even my own appointment to the Calcutta faculty
was not entirely uncontested. When the position was advertised, a
Bengali professor teaching in Orissa also applied for the same position,
and made out his case on the basis that that he was not treated well in
Orissa and, therefore, needed to return to Bengal: I, being an Oriya,
should go back to Orissa and teach there rather than in Bengal. His
argument did not carry weight with the members of the Department, and
they hired me despite his objection. It turned out that the Bengali
professor in Cuttack owed his problems to the fact that he had two
wives, both of whom he kept in the same house.
I have already written about Kalidas Bhattachaiyya and Rash Vihary
Das. I will now write a few words about Sushil Maitra and Satish
Chatteijee, two individuals who loved me and for whom I have admira­
tion and respect, although neither of them meant much to me as far as '
philosophy was concerned, and neither played any role in my philo­
sophical development. Sushil Babu was unusually tall for a Bengali; he
was fair-skinned and had a rather broad forehead with large eyes. He
was restless—I never saw him sitting on his chair—and while you talked
to him, he would walk up and down or around you, reminding one of
Rilke’s panther whose ‘padded gait... is like a dance of strength around
64 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

a centre’. He had red marks on his forehead—signs of his spiritual (we

learned, tantric) practices. A very capable scholar in Indian philosophy,
also in some areas of western thought, he wrote (and spoke) fluent
English and enjoyed criticizing Radhakrishnan (who was the Head o f
the Department, when Sushil Babu was a young lecturer). Once
Radhakrishnan asked him what he thought of him, and Sushil Babu’s
reply was, ‘Professor, you are a first-rate speaker, a second-rate politi­
cian, and a third-rate philosopher’. Knowing Sushil Babu well, and the
sort of unpleasant truths he could easily pronounce, I can believe that he,
in fact, said that to Radhakrishnan. Radhakrishnan, on the other hand,
was a kind and generous human being. He always tried to help Sushil
Babu and did not let such acidulous remarks dictate his sense of right
and wrong. For example, when the Senate of the University was consid­
ering a resolution to terminate Sushil Babu’s appointment on grounds of
unethical conduct, Radhakrishnan came to his rescue, and eloquently
praised his scholarship. He pointed out to the Senate that Sushil Babu
was irreplaceable. Known to have been a favourite student of the late Sir
Brojendra Nath Seal, Sushil Babu was also known to haVe received from
Dr Seal, before the latter’s death, most of his unpublished manuscripts.
When Sushil Babu was appointed the King George V Professor (later
renamed Acharya Brojendra Nath Seal Professor), Shyama Prasad
Mukherjee (Sir Asutosh’s son) sent for him and reportedly said to
him: ‘Dr Maitra, I have supported your appointment because I know that
Dr Seal’s manuscripts are with you, and I hope that after becoming a
Professor you will edit and publish them.’ Then, after a pause, he is
reported to have added, rather ironically but prophetically, ‘But I know
you will not do it.’ Shyama Prasad Mookheijee was right; the manu­
scripts were eaten by insects in his Serampore house.
Dr Satish Chatteijee’s personality was the opposite of DrMaitra’s. A
quiet, unassuming and non-aggressive person, he bore his frustration (o f
never becoming a full professor) silently, always with a smile. I never
saw him excited; whether he was angry or he was happy, there would be
no change in his demeanour. He always spoke with the same measured
way of speaking (you had to wait for the next word, and then for the next
sentence). When his wife was dying, he stood by her side, then read
some scriptures, and maintained his composure when she died; there
was not even a single teardrop in his eyes. After retirement, he some­
times stopped at our house during his morning walks and advised Bani
about how to run our household economically. When he was the Head
of the Department, and when former students asked him for letters o f
recommendation, he would ask me (as an Indian teacher he felt he had
 Back in Calcutta • 65
the right to ask a former student to do this) to write the letter, which he
signed and mailed. He instructed me to compose only positive
letters—each letter must glorify the student.

Those days, the faculty of the college of Arts and Commerce shared a
large Senior Common Room. Only full professors had their own offices.
(There was a time when even the professors shared the same Common
Room.) There were long mahogany desks with green velvet covers, and
we all sat around the desks. There was a partitioned area where you were
supposed to talk privately with colleagues or with students. There was a
corner where attendants made the tea and toasted the bread. Students
came in and went out, looking for their teachers, keeping appointments,
discussing studies and examinations—all in the midst of a large crowd
o f teachers. University politics and faculty ‘politicking’ were all carried
out there in the open. Overlooking this academic market place were
photographs of past important academic figures, hanging on the wall in
rows. The philosophers, Suren Dasgupta and Krishna Chandra
Bhattacharyya, the historian, Hem Roy Chaudhury, the mathematicians,
Ganesh Prasad and Pillai, the all-rounder Brojen Seal, were among
those figures.
One advantage of the senior ‘Common Room’ system was that you
soon got to know members of all other departments of the college. How
else would you get to know Nihar Roy, Suniti Chatterjee, Sukumar Sen,
Jiten Banerjee and Anukul Baneijee, Satyen Sen, Pramatha Bisi,
Bhabatosh Datta, and many, many others—seniors and famous names
who taught in other departments? With some of them my friendship
grew. Suniti Chatteijee retired soon after my joining the University but
I nevertheless got to know him. Nihar Roy and Satyen Sen became my
friends. Satyen Sen, later Vice-Chancellor for a long time, wanted me to
succeed him, and as a matter of fact, tried to persuade me to agree (I was
then visiting Calcutta from the United States) but I declined. Nihar Roy
was one of the few who knew of my intellectual pursuits; he had a
European academic background too. When my first manuscript on
Husserl was accepted for publication by Nijhoff, I sought his advice
about the publisher. He assured me that Nijhoff was one of the world’s
greatest publishers and encouraged me to sign the contract. Pramatha
Bisi, who had great affection for me always would lighten me up with
his spontaneous sense of humour. Bhabatosh Datta radiated a natural
intelligence and was unfailingly courteous and civilized. There were
smarter people in the other departments than among the philosophers.
66 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

One person who became a good friend, and whose friendship I

thoroughly enjoyed, was the young historian Pradyot Mukheijee. After
having spent years in Warsaw, Paris, and London, Pradyot returned to
Calcutta as a lecturer in History; but he knew more than history. He had
picked up a lot of philosophy and sociology along the way, and we
found our interests very finely suited for intellectual conversations. His
end came rather soon. When his Polish wife left him, he was shattered.
He left for London to try for a reconciliation but in vain, and then went
on to Mexico. Somewhere along the way, while boarding a plane, he
died from a heart attack. He was a remarkable person. Barun De later
informed me that his unpublished papers were at the Social Science
Research Centre in Calcutta, and that he had many things to say about me.

My first book in English (I had already published, a little booklet on

Vinoba Bhave in Oriya)—which was my Gottingen dissertation with a
Foreword by Hermann Wein—was put out by the Progressive Publish­
ers of College Street. (The cost was borne by the German Embassy in
Delhi: Ambassador Meyer learned about me from Dr Pfauter, then
Cultural Attaché and an old Gottingen friend, and offered to help). That
book, as I look back at it, was a failure; it made no impact at all—except
on a few Hartmann scholars. Most Whitehead scholars overlooked it, for
I emphasized Whitehead’s Platonism rather than his process-philoso-
phy, which was and still is in vogue. Even after thirty-five years, I find
my predilection for Platonism is still strong, and my suspicion of what
I have lately called process-dogma, undaunted.
Talking about the Progressive Publishers, I can’t but recall, with
great fondness, the memory of Sushil Basu, who owned the company,
who was a friend of many Calcutta philosophers, and eventually became
my friend. A couple of times every week, I would visit his office just
opposite the main gate of Calcutta Medical College on College Street.
You went through a small clothing store, crossed a courtyard in which
people were generally busy lighting coal stoves, climbed up a slippery
stairway, and you would see Sushil Babu sitting on his bed. His publish­
ing office, living room, and bedroom were all in one room. You gener­
ally expected to find some other University or College professor there,
got all kinds of news about the academia, and an unending supply of tea.
Philosophy in India will forever be in his debt. He persuaded Gopinath
Bhattacharyya to put together his father’s works, scattered in various
journals, and almost goaded him into writing an introduction to it,
resulting in the two-volume edition of Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya’s
 Back in Calcutta • 67

Studies in Philosophy. He made me write an introductory essay for an

edition of David Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
that edition is widely used even now, much to my surprise, by college
undergraduates. He saw my Gangeto's Theory of Truth through the
press, although it is Visva Bharati, and not he, who was the publisher. I
could always depend on him for matters relating to publications, and
selflessly he laid his expertise at my service. Sushil Babu was a bach­
elor, and on his passing away, when I was already in the United States,
his nephew inherited the company. We all went there for the company
of this one man. It is ironic how men and women who contributed
towards your becoming what you are leave you alone when their work
is done. You go ahead, carrying their memories. You imagine, in
fantasy, that they are there watching you.
The fifteen years of my life in Calcutta, 1955-70, were marked by
several phases. First, I taught uninterruptedly at the University from
1955-60. From 1960-62,1 replaced Kalidas Bhattacharyya, when he
left for Santiniketan, as Associate Professor of Indian Philosophy in the
Postgraduate and Research Division of the Sanskrit College. In 1962,1
returned to the University, but again had to go on a long leave of absence
to be the Vivekananda Professor and Head of the Department of Phi­
losophy at the newly founded Burdwan University. However, we con­
tinued to live in Calcutta. In 1968,1 returned to Calcutta University as
the Acharya Brojendra Nath Seal Professor and Head of the Department.
In 1970,1 left for the United States with a two-year leave of absence and
resigned from the chair in 1972—therewith ending a relationship that
really began in 1945. I will recount some of the more important and
interesting of my experiences during those years.

C h ris a n d J a c q u e s

In Gottingen, one evening, I was in the Waschraum, when I heard a

voice in Bengali, ‘Jiten-da, keman acchoT (Jitenda, how are you?). And
there was this young man in his twenties, a white-skinned European,
with a long dark beard, a sharp nose, a big smile on his face, entering the
door. He introduced himself as Jacques Sassoon. He had learned a
smattering of Bengali from Amartya Sen and other Bengali friends in
Cambridge, from where he had graduated and come to Gottingen to do
research in Botany. A grandson of the British poet, Sigfried Sassoon,
Jacques was a melancholy person; his sadness grew in Gottingen the
more the Germans showed special hospitality to this young Jew coming
to Germany soon after the war. As he was walking one evening, with his
68 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

long beard, a long black coat and a middle-eastern cap on his head, a
group of passers-by stopped to look at him, and some among them
exclaimed ‘Jesus of Nazareth!’ Jacques and I became friends (the only
other English-speaking student I knew was George Holmes from Ox­
ford, who now holds a chair in History at All Souls College). Jacques
had learned to cook Indian food, so we—the four Indian students in the
town—would go over to his place to eat Indian curry. About a year after
I left Gottingen, as I was sitting in the Senior Common Room in the
Asutosh Buildings of the Calcutta University, the same voice sounded
again: ‘Jiten-da, Iceman acchoT There was Jacques again; this time in
tattered clothes. He had just arrived in Calcutta, travelling by land all the
way from Germany to India. He had given up his scientific research in
Gottingen, and wanted to learn Indian music. I took him to our Southern
Avenue apartment, where Jacques lived with us for a month or so, after
which I found a place for him at 80 Park Street, the same flat to which
I had moved from the Hardinge Hostel, nearly six years ago. Jacques
stayed there for some time, during which he learned sitar from Birendra
Kisore Roy Chowdhury (with whom he eventually co-authored a book
on Indian music). He then joined the Sangeet Bhavan in Santiniketan,
visited the Jewish community in Kerala, and then returned to England.
In 1982,1 rang him up from Oxford, and we met near Lincoln Inn. He
was in charge of the Botany section of the British Museum, still unmar­
ried, still keeping the company of Bengalis (including Amartya Sen,
who, in 1982, lived in London and Oxford). We spent hours in
a restaurant, reminiscing about how time had dealt with us, for good or
for bad.
It was Jacques who one evening brought to our Southern Avenue
apartment a friend of his, also from Cambridge, Christen de Linde.
Chris, he said, was longing to make Indian friends. He had been in the
city for several months as a ‘covenanted officer’ (as the local euphe­
mism went) with the British merchant firm, Bird & Co. The son o f a
retired British Army Colonel, Chris went to Harrow, and from there to
King’s College in Cambridge. Arriving in Calcutta, he discovered that
the British merchant companies had strict regulations (or conventions?)
regarding which parts of the city they could live in, and the extent and
manner of their socializing with the ‘natives’. Chris was eager to violate
each one of these regulations, and to get to know Bengalis as well as he
could. After a couple of visits to our apartment, he asked Bani and me
if he could move into our place and live with us as a member of our
family. For a number of reasons, this kind of arrangement seemed
impossible. To begin with, our apartment was too small. Moreover, in
 Back in Calcutta • 69

those days we lived as most Bengalis (and Oriyas) did—we ate our
meals on the floor of the kitchen; Bani cooked with a portable coal
oven, while sitting on the floor. We bathed by pouring water over
ourselves with a mug, and so on. But those presumed obstacles (other
than the size of our apartment) were precisely the reason why Chris
wanted to live with us, rather than with other, more westernized Indians
he knew. But what were we to do about the apartment? We rented a
small two storeyed house on Raja Basanta Roy Road, in a blind alley.
Chris lived on the ground floor, we on the first floor, with the kitchen
and dining place on the ground floor. Chris built bookshelves on the
walls of his room to accommodate his books; he also set up a wooden
platform on which a gas oven could be placed, so that Bani could cook
standing up. We decided we would continue to eat on the dining-room
floor. Chris insisted that no one should enter the kitchen and dining
room with shoes on. And so our joint household was set up. Chris lived
with us for six years, and became a part, not only of our small family,
but also of the larger family in Orissa. He learned to write and speak
Bengali, cultivated the friendship of Bengali intellectuals, and brought
all kinds of interesting younger men and women to visit us. He once
played the role of Anthony Phiringi in a play of that name at the New
Empire Theatre. Anthony was an Indo-Portuguese in Calcutta, in the
eighteenth century, who became a devotee of Kali and wrote and sang
some beautiful devotional songs. For months on end Chris would
practise singing Anthony’s Bengali songs. At last Chris left the Bird
Company, joined the British Council, and after a stint with the Council
in Sierra Leone, returned to Calcutta—this time to live at the Theatre
Road flat of the Council. His flat on Theatre Road became a place for
Bengali intellectuals to visit. There I met Alan Watts, the American
hippie poet whom Chris had picked up at the Nimtola Burning Ghat and
brought to his flat for a clean-up and some nourishing food. Sometime
in the late sixties, Chris left the Council, married Joe (a British woman
who came to Darjeeling under the Volunteer Service Scheme and stayed
with us for some time in Calcutta), returned to England, completed a
master’s degree in Linguistics in Edinburgh, taught Linguistics for
some time in Hong Kong University, and finally settled down in Paris,
running the Institute Brittanique there. Bani and I met Chris and Joe in
their Paris flat in 1981. ‘How could we not have met for so long?’ we
wondered aloud. He visited us at All Souls College, where he was my
guest for dinner—a ritual which he thoroughly (and, perhaps, per­
versely) enjoyed, inasmuch as he still took a derisive view of such
pretentious exercises.
70 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

A N e w U n iv e r s it y in a M a h a r a ja ’s P a l a c e

One Sunday afternoon, as I was enjoying one of those siestas which add
a special pleasure to the otherwise exhausting Calcutta summers, the
doorbell rang. When I opened the door, there stood before me a man,
probably in his early sixties, dressed in dhoti and punjabi, with his hands
folded in greeting. I soon learned he was B.K. Guha, a retired ICS officer
and the Vice-Chancellor of the newly founded Burdwan University. He
asked me point-blank if I would join his University as the Swami
Vivekananda Professor and Head of the newly created Philosophy
Department. I was only a lecturer at Calcutta University, and had yet to
become a Reader. I explained to him that the family could not move to
Burdwan, primarily because the children were going to schools in
Calcutta (Babuni to St Xavier’s and Mitti to Loretto House), and that I
did not want to dislocate them or leave the cultural milieu of the city
where I had found a niche for myself. He wanted me at any cost, and had
no objection to the idea of my commuting from Calcutta. We—Bani and
I—thought it over. The financial gain was substantial, and we .realized
that the move to Burdwan would relieve us form the financial hardships
that go with the meagre salary of a lecturer. After a few days of thinking
it over, I accepted the offer. Calcutta University gave me a long leave of
absence. I persuaded Sibajiban Bhattacharyya, an old friend and one of
the leading logicians in India, to join Burdwan as a reader. He agreed,
contingent upon the University Library’s acquiring a complete set o f the
Journal of Symbolic Logic. I knew I would have no difficulty persuading
the administration to buy the compete set. So the Department started
with two of us, and two lecturers—Mrinal Bhadra (later to do his Ph.D
with me and Kenneth Merrill in Oklahoma) and Sanat Roy Chowdhury
(an ex-political revolutionary turned Vedantin, which was not rare in
India, and an exceedingly noble and gentle soul).
We started by sitting together in the large library of the former palace
of the Maharajah of Burdwan. The palace was a stately pink-coloured
baroque building, built in imitation of many such buildings in England.
The library was a long hall with bookshelves covering both the long
walls. (When I had nothing else to do, I would peep through the dusty
glass doors at the books inside, hardly visible. What could a Maharajah’s
library contain? It contained books on hunting tigers, on jungles, on
wars, on the histories and dynasties of kings and queens from all over the
world!) I realized why the Maharajah had given away his.palace (and
adjoining golapbag, garden of roses) to the University. The upkeep of
the buildings must have been terribly expensive, and with the abolition
 Back in Calcutta * 71
of zjamindari (the quasi-feudal system of landholding and revenue
collection) after Independence, and the Maharajah turning more and
more to business investments in Calcutta, it was certainly prudent to
donate the dilapidated property for a ‘noble’ cause! Very soon, the new
university buildings were constructed in the so-called goldpbdg (which
had a wide moat around it, and the garden had hundreds of tall ma­
hogany trees, lined by rose bushes), and the teaching departments
moved away from the palace.
I taught at Burdwan for six years—«¿1 the while commuting from
Calcutta. Commuting on the suburban, newly installed electric trains
was an interesting experience. You soon began to make friends. Famil­
iar faces showed up. The vendors who sold their wares—medicines,
pens, watches and sundry snacks—got to know you. At the Burdwan
railway station, the rickshaw-pullers recognized you as University Pro­
fessors, and took you to your destination without needing to be asked to
do so. Since six hours of my time were spent travelling each day, three
days a week, I learned how to make use of the time—reading, marking
students’ essays, proof-reading, and even doing some writing. A faculty
colleague of mine caught me reading Gadadhari (supposedly the most
abstruse text in the abstruse discipline of Navya-Nyaya), and word went
around Burdwan and Calcutta academia to that effect. The three days I
commuted, I would come back home so exhausted that I could not study
at night. The other days I had to take care of various household chores,
attend to the children’s studies, and receive friends who dropped by the
house in the evening. I could sit down for a stretch of uninterrupted work
only after the friends left and everyone else had gone to bed. Thus I
developed a habit, which I still maintain, of working late into the night,
well past midnight. It was at this time that I was working on my book on
Ganges’s Tattvacintamani, which was published by the Centre of
Advanced Study in Philosophy, Visva Bharati in 1966.

Sa n t in ik e t a n

My inner connection with Santiniketan, which I had nurtured in my

mind through my aunt, Malati Chaudhury, became institutionalized
when Kalidas Bhattacharyya, then head of the Philosophy Department,
and later to be the Vice-Chancellor of Visva Bharati, prevailed upon me
to join his department as an adjunct Professor. This meant that I would,
once a week, after teaching in Burdwan, take an evening train to
Santiniketan, rest at night in Ratan-Kuthi, the Guest House, teach two
classes the next morning, and take an afternoon train back to Calcutta
72 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

(and again leave for Burdwan the next morning). The beauty and peace
of Santiniketan compensated for the stress and strain involved. The
evening I would spend at the Ratan-Kuthi, where 1 would have numer­
ous visitors—both faculty and students. We would go out to listen to
musical performances, stroll along the sal-bithi, stop by Kalidas
Bhattacharyya’s house for an hour of philosophical conversation. For
the first time, I started teaching classes outdoors in the mango groves. In
the early morning I would join the morning musical—as was the prac­
tice in the Ashrama. Exploring the Ashrama, learning about the Poet’s
associations with the buildings, collages, gardens, trees, and paths was
enchanting. The Vice-Chancellor at that time was Sudhi Ranjan Das,
who was a retired Chief Justice of India. My first morning at Santiniketan,
Sudhi-da (as one called him) knocked on my door and offered to take me
out for a walk. He said, ‘Jiten, I will introduce you to the most interesting
things in Santiniketan. They are not the human beings. They are the
trees.’ He was right. The Ashrama abounds in lovely and sometimes
majestic trees—around some of which there have grown legends. Sudhi-
da also made me give him my word that Visva Bharati would publish my
next book. So I gave Gangeta’s Theory o f Truth to Visva Bharati.
There were several interesting younger philosophers—younger at
that time than I—in Santiniketan, whom Kalidas Bhattacharyya had
brought from all over India. They were: Rajendra Pandey, Suresh
Chandra, and Dharmendra Kumar from Delhi; A.P. Rao, young Desh-
pande; G.L. Pandit from Kashmir; Jha from Bihar; and my former
students, Reena Mukheijee and Pradyot Mukheijee, from Calcutta.
(Many of them are now well known in the Indian academia.) I enjoyed
their company. We spent a lot of time discussing our ideas, sometimes
what we had written. I also gave them a course of lectures on Husserl's
Logical Investigations—for the first and the last time, I think, in India.
I also got to know the musicians Santi Dev Ghosh, Suchitra Mitra, and
Kanika Baneijee. It was easy for me to get to know them, since they all
knew and admired my aunt, Malati Chaudhury.
The Santiniketan connection continued until I left Burdwan Univer­
sity in 1967 to return to Calcutta as a Professor. However, I continued to
visit the Ashrama as long as Kalidas Bhattacharyya lived. Returning to
the Ratan-Kuthi aroused nostalgia, but I would go out to look at those
magnificent trees. Much later, in 19801think, I stayed at the Ashrama—in
a new Guest House called PancavatT—for three months as a Visiting
Fellow. My Presidency College classmate, Surajit Sinha, was the Vice-
Chancellor at that time. During those three months—one of the busiest
three months I spent in India since moving to the United States—I gave
 Back in Calcutta • 73

lectures on various topics, in various places: on phenomenology and the

social sciences at the China Bhavan, on the structural analysis of a
literary work in the Oriya Department, on the Copenhagen Interpreta­
tion of Quantum Mechanics at the Physics Institute, on phenomenology
and Marxism at Sri Niketan, or Sri Aurobindo at the Sri Aurobindo
Centre— not to speak of the various lectures I gave at the Philosophy
Institute. I would also commute to Calcutta to give lectures: perhaps the
one which drew the most attention was ‘Phenomenology, Marxism and
Structuralism’ at the Institute for Research in Social Science, of which,
Barum De, an old friend from the Burdwan days, was the director. I
enjoyed life at Santiniketan to the fullest: its music, its beauty and its
romantic peace. At the time I was about to leave, I felt one with it, and
wondered why I should return to the United States after all. The Poet had
been dead for forty years, and I wondered how it was that his spirit
pervaded, so subtly, everything around. The Poet not only wrote his
masterpieces but transformed the place by adding a new dimension, a
new layer of impalpable affective quality to the place. Among those
whose company I enjoyed are: the poet Sankha Ghose (who was a
Visiting Fellow like me) the cultural anthropologist Baidyanath Sara-
swati (who uniquely combined a sharp and perceptive intellect with a
sensitivity to the Indian tradition), the historian Ashin Dasgupta and his
wife, Uma, and, of course, Manasi Dasgupta, at that time the Director of
Rabindrasadan.

A few words about Manasi and her husband, the historian Arun Dasgupta.
They have been friends of mine since my postgraduate student days in
Calcutta, and continue to be friends in whose company I recover conti­
nuity with my old self. When I started teaching sometime in the early
fifties—I think I was lecturing at St Paul’s College and Surendranath
College, at both places on a part-time basis—Manasi and Arun lived in
an apartment near Kalighat Park. Their apartment became a place for
discussion meetings for young college students, and I joined them quite
often. Books were discussed, as were ideas. There I met, I think for the
first time, Ashin Dasgupta, and also Pratima Bowes, who had just
returned from England after receiving a doctorate in philosophy. Ever
since then Manasi and Arun have been fostering intellectual adda
wherever they have lived—in between they were at Cornell for years,
but then again back in Calcutta. Arun Dasgupta also took me to attend
the Calcutta Historical Society meetings, and I became a subscriber to
the journal Aitihasika (from which I have learned a great deal, especially
74 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
about Calcutta historians). In those meetings, I first met Ranjit Guha,
who is now a distinguished historian and the founder of the school of
history known as ‘Subaltern History’. Manasi moved from philosophy
to psychology (in which she earned a doctorate at Cornell), did aca­
demic administration and university teaching, and then returned to do
research in philosophy—always full of ideas tempered with a sensitivity
for literary and musical creativity. Their son Probal (or Mukur), a fellow
student of Babuni, became a dear friend when he was studying linguis­
tics at New York University, and would stop at the New School to
discuss his philosophical interests with me.

In 1968, after my return to Calcutta from a semester’s visiting Fullbright

professorship at the University of Oklahoma, I joined Calcutta Univer­
sity as the Acharya Brojendra Nath Seal Professor of Philosophy.
Returning to my alma mater to occupy a distinguished chair was a great
pleasure for me. Many of my older friends were still around in the Senior
Common Room. But what a change had come about in the course of
hardly six years! Suniti Babu had retired, as also Sukumar Sen. Nihar
Roy had left for the Indian Institute for Advanced Study as its director.
(Each such retirement generated seemingly endless infighting and con­
spiracies among the intending successors!) The most striking change on
the College Street campus was, of course, the disappearance o f the
stately Senate House, which we had learned to associate with the
University; in its place there rose the so-called Centenary Building,
which, to my mind, was a poor substitute—as a matter of fact, an ugly
structure. In the Philosophy Department, I succeeded Gopinath
Bhattacharyya, the eldest son of the world-renowned philosopher, the
late Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya. On joining the department, I
discovered that its nature had changed considerably. All my former
teachers had retired (thus sparing me the embarrassment of being the
only Professor at that time—many of them had been frustrated at not
being promoted to the chair); among the new faculty, many were my
former pupils, which I thought would make my task of heading the
department easier. At least that’s what I thought at the time I joined the
department. However, I soon discovered that that was not the case, and
reality proved to be quite the opposite. The faculty did not quarrel with
me, they treated me with deference. But they fought among themselves.
There were two waning factions. One consisted of those who champi­
oned the cause of Indian philosophy, of teaching Sanskrit texts, and
whose interest in ánd support for western philosophy did not go beyond
 Back in Calcutta • 75

F.H. Bradley; the other consisted of all the remaining faculty, who did
not like western philosophy any better but still resisted the department’s
becoming a haven for Sanskrit pandits. I had affiliations to both but I
saw the future of philosophy in India from a larger perspective than most
of them. I was sympathetic to both, though my vision of a philosophical
enterprise in the Indian context extended far beyond the narrow param­
eters o f both the warring factions. We struggled hard to change the
curriculum (which, as it existed then, was how Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan
conceived it to be), and had some success against overwhelming odds.
The introduction of more contemporary western philosophy was op­
posed by the ‘traditionalist’ camp; and the introduction of more Sanskrit
material by the ‘modernists’. In concrete terms, it amounted to an
opposition of the introduction of subjects that the faculty members did
not know. One senior faculty expressed his exasperation once at a
faculty meeting in the following words, ‘Do you want us to learn these
new areas at this age’?
It was during these years that the Naxalite movement began next
door— in Presidency College, and College Street was under siege. Mitti
was in Presidency, so she knew more about the strategies of the Naxalites
than I did. Since the Vice-Chancellor, Satyen Sen, was an old friend, I
would spend some time in his office sipping tea (which was brought in
continuously). One such afternoon, a dozen Naxalite students came into
the Vice-Chancellor’s office with (real or imagined) grievances, and
would not let us go until they were redressed. We were subjected to
what, in the political vocabulary of Bengal then, came to the called
gherao, which signified ‘being surrounded’, and not being permitted to
leave unless and until the grievances were redressed, or at least ad­
dressed. Satyen Sen would not call in the city’s police, to save the
University’s autonomy. Nor could he, even if he had wanted to, for the
telephone lines were cut. A group of fifty students—most of them from
Presidency College—shouted slogans, and read out to us, in their more
sober moments, from Mao’s Red Book; in worse moments, abused and
insulted the faculty and the Vice-Chancellor. We were allowed—in their
immense mercy—to go to the bathroom but not outside the Vice-
Chancellor’s office. This went on till the early hours of the morning,
when our captors, themselves exhausted, let us go. This was the first
taste of an experience which was to be repeated several times during that
year. I asked Satyen Sen to relieve me of the Chairmanship of the
Department, because in my capacity as the departmental chairman, I
belonged to the group against whom political wrath was directed.
Amlan Dutta, the Head of the Economics Department, and I shared
76 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

some of those experiences. (Amlan, known as an anti-Communist, was

subjected to much more harassment than I was.) The Vice-Chancellor
turned down my request on the ground that I was the only Professor in
the Department, and only a full Professor could (now things have
changed) be the Head. I was disappointed. I was forty-two years old, and
did not look forward to the Headship for another twenty-five years or
more. It was at this time that I got a letter from Kenneth Merrill asking
to visit the University of Oklahoma. I accepted.

Why did I decide to leave for the United States? There was no good
reason for my leaving. I already had a successful academic career. I had
become a Professor at the University of Calcutta at the age of thirty-
nine—younger than any other occupant of that chair, with the exception
of Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan. My research in philosophy was yielding
results—both in phenomenology and in Navya-Nydya. There were, of
course, irritants: the political extremism on the campus was one such.
Another was—which everyone who rents an apartment in Calcutta
knows well enough—the landlord of the Fern Road flat, once a close
family friend, became a source of harassment. He forced us to move to
a flat across the street. The harassment continued on issues not worth
mentioning. I did not see an end to this situation while living in the city.
Where should I go? Allahabad University offered me their Headship.
Delhi was considering an offer. But if I was to be in India, Calcutta was
still the place I wanted to be in. Satyen Sen advised me not to resign, and
suggested that I take a leave of absence from Calcutta University. I did
so, and began preparing to leave for the University of Oklahoma.
Preparing to leave the country was an exhausting matter. Bou (as I
called my mother) came to live with us. Chuntia, an old family hand
(with whom we all grew up), came to help. Books were packed. House­
hold articles and books were taken by him in a truck to our village home.
Those to be shipped to the United States were put into crates and
delivered to a shipping agent. I borrowed money from friends to buy
four tickets. The little poodle, Alice, had to have a crate to travel in. In
the midst of all this confusion, I finished the last committee work I had
undertaken at the University: a committee to enquire into malpractices
in the M.A. examinations.
An unending stream of colleagues and students came to bid me good­
bye. They knew that I was not coming back to the University! The most
touching was a visit from Amlan Dutta. Amlan was senior to me in the
college by a few years. Known as an impressive speaker, with a clear
 Back in Calcutta • 77

and analytic mind, a deep humanist and consistently anti-Communist,

Amian had been close to the late M.N. Roy’s ‘Radical Humanism’
group, and later in life moved towards a Gandhian point of view. He
became, about the time I was leaving India, a pro-Vice-Chancellor of
Calcutta University, later Vice-Chancellor of North Bengal University,
and Vice-Chancellor of Visva Bharati. He left his mark everywhere but
was harassed by the communists. In any case, Amlan’s visit surprised
me, for although we knew each other well in the university and on the
public forum, we had never met on a personal level. He said that he
wanted to make one last effort to dissuade me from emigrating. ‘Calcutta
University’, he said, ‘needs you more than the University of Oklahoma
does’. I had no reply. I had really nothing to say. I still did not think I was
emigrating. There were tears in my eyes. Why then was I leaving? I was
not really leaving—I told myself (and him). In retrospect, I think, deep
within m e, I knew that I was emigrating.
Bou went to the airport. Little did she know that I was not coming
back to live in India. Or, maybe, she knew. She knew me so well, I did
not have to say it
 From the Ganges to the Red
River: in Oklahoma in the
January of 1970

few days before we left India in the January of 1970 for the United
A States, the apartment was full of crates and packets to be shipped;
books and furniture had been sent by a truck to my mother in our village
home; friends and students continued to visit us in an unending stream.
The confusion became confounding when the Reserve Bank of India
would not let me leave the country (i.e., would not approve my so-called
P-form) unless I resigned from my position at the University, on grounds
that I was going to the United States with an ‘immigration visa’ (or, the
so-called ‘green card’). My argument that the University’s Vice-Chan­
cellor had insisted that I go on leave of absence and not resign did not
make a dent in the bureaucratic minds of the Calcutta-branch officials of
the Bank. So, I wrote a letter to the Governor of the Bank in Bombay (a
gentleman who later came to Washington D.C. as India's Ambassador,
whom I met at a party in the United States, and he remembered the
incident), who immediately, on receipt of my letter, phoned me at the
University, and asked me to go to his Calcutta office and collect my P-
form. This is a good example of lesser bureaucrats bending a law or a
rule to suit themselves, and the effectiveness of directly going to the
highest authority. The point of this little episode, however, is that I did
not then, not unlike many other immigrants to the United States, per­
ceive myself as an immigrant. I thought, sincerely and honestly, that I
would return to Calcutta after a few years teaching and research in the
United States—but that was never to be. You become a helpless victim
of forces more powerful than your best intentions. In this, no one
individual should be singled out as a co-conspirator.
 From the Ganges to the Red River • 79

Much later, when I was Head of the Philosophy Department at the

New School for Social Research in New York, I wrote to Jttrgen
Habermas asking whether he would consider joining the New School as
Hannah Arendt’s successor. ‘One does not want to immigrate without
reason’, he wrote to me, adding that if he were to go anywhere, he
would want to come to the New School, provided the circumstances
rendered it necessary. What was the reason for my immigration? Did I
immigrate ‘without reason’? Any reasons that I may give are likely to
be afterthoughts, rationalizations after the fact, reconstructions of a
narrative. It was another of those historical accidents which have given
shape to my life. Hannah Arendt advised me not to judge myself and to
let others judge after my life was over—in accord with one of her
favourite themes in The Human Condition. So began a new phase of my
life, a life cut off from my roots. But is not the very idea of ‘root’
questionable?

O klahom a
Because of my brief visit three years earlier, I was already familiar with
the red soil, red rocks, dry grass and bushes, rolling hills and unending
plain fields dotted with cattle and the petroleum wells of central Okla­
homa. The dust bowl days, when the whole state was covered with dust,
and many people emigrated to California in search of a better livelihood,
were long over. During the New Deal days, President Roosevelt spent
public works money to dig huge lakes and water reservoirs, and, as a
result, the state now has a longer coastline of lakes than Minnesota has.
And when oil was discovered, the state’s wealth increased. Some of this
money flowed into the University—but not so much as it did in Texas.
The University of Oklahoma was still known for its football team, and
not for its academic standing. George Lynn Cross, who was a long-time
President, and was the President under whom I joined the University,
reportedly said, ‘Now we should build a University of which the football
team could be proud!’ It is to this University that I came—from a great
University, the University of Calcutta.
The plane carrying the four of us from San Francisco arrived at the
Oklahoma City airport after it was dark, and friends who came to pick us
up— Bob Shahan, a future colleague and his wife Lee—drove us to a
house which had already been rented for us. Next morning, Bani, Mitti
and Babuni had a glimpse of suburban American life as they looked out
through the windows. No one was walking on the roads. But for passing
cars, there was no sign of life. Coming from the din and bustle of
80 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
Calcutta, even at daybreak, they were shocked by the ‘lifelessness’ o f
the world around.
But soon they all got busy. Babuni joined Norman High, Mitti
enrolled at the University, I started teaching, Bani was initiated by Lee
Shahan and other friends—wives of colleagues and neighbours— into
the skills and pleasures of grocery shopping, household matters, and
American cooking. Life slowly took on a fixed pattern. Calcutta life
receded into the distant past, like the receding coastline as your ship
leaves a harbour and steams into the ocean.

Whether you like it or not, there is a pre-existent groove, a pre-given

pattern, into which your life tends to fall in an American small town like
Norman. (Perhaps this is true of life anywhere.) This pattern, which soon
holds you hostage in its grip is as much due to the demands, or lack of
demands, of American life, as to the fact that you are an immigrant, and
there is already an immigrant community (of your ethnic origin) which
has predelineated your life for you. The Indian community in Norman
consisted then of students, some faculty members and their families, and
a few other assorted individuals and families. That was in 1970. Within
a few years—certainly by 1980—Indian doctors had moved into the
larger Oklahoma City area, and then Gujarati businessmen, motel-
owners and grocery shop owners. But let me begin my narrative with
what ‘Indian Culture’ signified or meant to most Indians in a small town
like Norman.
First, most Indian families needed babysitters, and Bani being older
than other wives (and mothers), and not being in need of money, was
politely asked if one could leave a child in the house when needed.
(Another reason was, she did not work—most wives did.) Soon, we
discovered, there was already a large and complicated network of
parties where Indian food was served, songs sung, and what was called
‘Indian culture’ lived. Once you are in this network, there is no escape.
You also throw parties, are invited to more, invite more, and this goes
on. You know more and more Indians (here the designation ‘Indian’
includes, happily for me, people from Pakistan and Bangladesh as well).
Easy accessibility to the telephone—in India few of us had phones in
our homes, and we certainly did not—leads to gossip, gossip leads to
para-charcha (discussing others behind their backs), which leads to
conflicts and tension. Friendships break (they are, in any case,
fragile—forged not out of any inner affinity, commonality of thoughts,
but of a common historical destiny of ‘being thrown’ together as
 From the Ganges to the Red River • 81
immigrants.) But that does not matter new ones are forged. A new­
comer is pounced upon.
There is something called ‘Indian culture’ that we all wanted to live
and share. This was more due to ‘homesickness’ and boredom than due
to a love for and an understanding of that culture. If I look at it with the
eyes o f young children who were growing up, in high schools or in
colleges, ‘Indian culture’, for their parents, meant a certain taste in food,
music (mostly film songs), Bhajan (religious songs), and certain reli­
gious rituals. A young person is said to be ‘Americanized’ if he prefers
to eat hamburgers, prefers western music, and does not understand the
Bhajan or puja. For many parents, cultivating Indian culture including
religious ceremonies, was meant for en-culturing the children, and the
latter needed this so that they, when they grew up, do not marry
American girls (or boys). ‘Understanding’ the culture was of no concern
to anyone, for no one understood all that, in any case. This peiiiaps
explains why the children in the beginning accompanied their parents to
feasts and festivals, but eventually gave up.

Babuni went to Cornell, Mitti to Oxford. With both gone, we were

alone. Bani joined the University to continue her postgraduate study in
history. The Philosophy Department in Oklahoma was moderately good.
It took me a couple of years to pick up a real research programme. I read
various things and devoted a lot of my time to the preparation of the
graduate courses. My reputation as a Husserl scholar, already estab­
lished when I was in Calcutta, got me invitations to conferences and
seminars for which I wrote occasional papers, but nothing of great
importance came along. One year after my arrival, the University
elevated me to one of their distinguished chairs—a George Lynn Cross
Research Professorship. I know that some of my colleagues in other
departments (not, to be sure, in the Philosophy Department) did not like
this, and one of them, a Political Science Professor, actually said to me
quite candidly, ‘I have been here so long, you just came the other day
and got this prized chair.’ I said, ‘I am sorry, but what could I have
done?’
Within the department, relationships were friendly and collegial.
Kenneth Merril and his wife, Vanita, have since then remained our best
friends in Norman, perhaps in the United States. Carl Berenda, origi­
nally Karl Berenda Weinberg, author of a famous book on Mach and
Einstein, became a close friend, helped Babuni in his studies in Physics
and successfully guided his research for a Westinghouse Prize—but
82 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
eventually, after his retirement, killed himself out of depression (he had
married five times, and his last wife had just left him). Very close
personally as well as intellectually to me was also Bill Horosz— Hun­
garian in origin, a student of Marvin Farber (and earlier at Columbia, of
Tillich). The friendship fell apart—much to my sorrow—when Bill
Horosz was disappointed with me for not being able to get one o f his
manuscripts published. (He refused to see me when I visited Norman a
couple of years ago.) Bob Shahan, a young, impulsive Northwestern
graduate, who chaired the department for a number of years, remained
strongly supportive of me until he left academia to work for IBM. The
Feavers, Clayton and Margaret continued to be genial friends, as do
many others on the campus. The Oklahoma campus failed to inspire me
intellectually. It did not provide the challenges that I needed badly at
that point in my career. It was a peaceful place to work in provided you
do not need external challenges, and know what to do. It was, therefore,
at the right moment that I got a telephone call from Aron Gurwitsch from
New York to go to New School on a year’s visiting appointment. I was
thrilled. I accepted the appointment. All this happened during the spring
of 1973.
But before I write about New School and New York, I must say a little
more about the country that was Oklahoma. For it was here, in the midst
of oil wells, prairies and rolling hills that I would spend twelve years of
my life. As I write this, I still have a home there—a lovely colonial
house made of stone hauled from the Oklahoma hills. Mitti lives there,
so in a way that is still the family’s home, although I moved to Philadel­
phia for twelve years. Norman lies almost at the centre of the state. To
the north and west of Norman are dry fields where wheat grows in
winter, and cattle graze in summer. Around Norman are green rolling
hills. To the far east, bordering Arkansas, are mountains belonging to
the Ozarks. Oil wells continue to pump black liquid gold all over the
state. One can imagine Red Indians galloping across the state—now
they are concentrated in certain areas but, unlike many other states, there
are no reservations in Oklahoma. Almost every white native Oklahoman
has some Indian blood, and people take pride in telling you what
fraction that is. The blacks are still poor, and in a city like Oklahoma
City, live in ghettos. When I first came to Norman, the town had no
black population. Although the sunset law was not in the books, blacks
came to work, and returned to Oklahoma City before dusk. Some years
later, a black University Professor came to live in Norman, bought a
home and settled down. I believe he had to face the wrath of some of the
whites. But now things have changed, and I would be surprised if there
 From the Ganges to the Red River • 83
were racial incidents in Norman. I was always surprised that the native
whites clearly differentiated us Indians or ‘browns’ from the blacks.
Indian émigrés all over the United States looked down upon the blacks
and thought themselves to be racially, and also culturally superior to
them. (I am not sure if they did not also think themselves to be superior
to the whites. Even if they did, they did not articulate it; about the blacks,
they did not miss any opportunity to do so). This may have something to
do with the Indians’ negative attitude towards people* with black com­
plexion within their own communities, and within India. In many lan­
guages, in Bengali, for example, the terms ‘fair-skinned’ and ‘beautiful’
are used synonymously. I have always wondered about what could have
been the origin of this colour racism. I am told it antedates British
Colonial rule, and perhaps goes back to the description of the ‘invading
Aryans’ as ‘fair-skinned’, and of the native Dravidians as ‘dark-skinned’.
Back to Oklahoma. The soil is red. Scratch the green or gray surface
a little bit, and you see the red underneath. The river that winds its way
outside o f Norman—a stretch of sand with a thin streak of water that
extends to Oklahoma City—is called the Canadian River. The native
Indians believed that the river ‘magically’ protected Norman from the
deadly tornadoes which hit Oklahoma. South of Norman are hills where
you can just go and scratch the surface with your hand, and collect ‘rose
rock’ stones—red rocks naturally structured like rose buds. Not long
ago, during the ‘dust bowl’ days, the whole state was covered by dust
blown by the wind from the west. The Oklahoma farmers fled to
California to start a new life there. This migration has been immortal­
ized by Steinbeck in his novel The Grapes o f Wrath. In California, they
were called ‘Okies’. They are still called by that name here in Okla­
homa. Some among them are called ‘Sooners’; they are the ones
who—when the land was opened for settlement—managed to arrive
first, illegally, and by jumping the gun, grabbed a lot of land, and
continued to bask in that glory and their consequent wealth.
I*
m
New York City and
the New School

have spent two stints of teaching at the New School—the first two
I years as a Visiting Professor, with a leave of absence from Oklahoma,
and then, after returning to Oklahoma for a year, three years as a tenured
Professor and Chairman of the Department. It was at the New School
and in New York that major lines of philosophical research opened up
for me and some international reputation came along. What was most
important for me was the enjoyment of the friendship of a remarkable
generation of (German) scholars. Among them, Aaron Gurwitsch, Hans
Jonas, and Hannah Arendt stand out with some pre-eminence in my
memory. To this must be added—an opportunity to get to know New
York’s intellectual life, and to have around me a bunch of highly
intelligent and intellectually motivated graduate students.
The move from Norman, Oklahoma, to New York went as smoothly
as the move from Calcutta to Norman. New York, in many respects, is
like Calcutta—only larger, with taller buildings, and far more dangerous
to live in. With all her poverty, Calcutta is a safer place. I could walk
anywhere in Calcutta but not in New York, without running the risk of
getting mugged or robbed. There is, in both cities, the same
intellectuality—without doubt, New York is more intense, more varied,
and almost unfathomable. Calcutta has the same love of music as New
York. Only Calcutta has nothing like the New York Philharmonic.
Calcutta has her poets and writers—like New York. But there is nothing
in Calcutta comparable to New York’s Harlem, noted for both its crime
and its music and dance. There is nothing in New York like Calcutta’s
College Square with its seemingly endless rows of bookshops and
colleges all around it, but where else in the world could there be New
 New York City and the New School • 85
York’s Greenwich Village? It is in the Village that I began to work at the
New School. Where else other than New York could there be something
like the New School? The New School is a typically New York institu­
tion, drawing upon talents which only New York could provide.
A word about this unique institution. What is popularly and affection­
ately known to New Yorkers as the New School, is the large adult-
education division of the School located on 12th Street at Sixth Avenue,
which offers non-credit courses in any conceivable subject—from por­
nography to Yoga, from Chinese poetry to African dance, taught by
experts in these fields, by men and women who have established
themselves in life but want to teach just for the sake of teaching. There
could be Walter Cronkite teaching journalism, or Paul Newman teach­
ing movie-acting. The New School became a forum where, as John
Dewey, one of its founders, said, you can teach (and learn) subjects not
falling within the boundaries of traditional academia. I had nothing to do
with this division of the School. The division where I taught is the
Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science, located on the east side
of Fifth Avenue, between 14th and 13th Streets. The ‘Graduate Faculty’
has a romantic history that needs to be sketched for those who do not
know about it.
Alvin Johnson, President of the New School at that time, decided to
approach the Rockefellers for help in setting up an academic institution
for social scientists who, under the threat of Nazism, were fleeing
Europe. He reportedly left 12th Street en route to the Rockefeller Plaza,
with the thought of asking for ten thousand dollars, but as he walked
those forty-six blocks, his estimate and request grew 46 times ($10,000
for each block, as he recounted). With support from benefactors, the
New School established its graduate faculty as the home for a group of
brilliant emigrees, mostly German social scientists. This group included
the political economists Staudinger and Adolph Lowe, the Gestalt
psychologist Max Wertheimer, the sociologist Alfred Schütz, philoso­
phers Hans Jonas, Aron' Gurwitsch and Fritz Kaufmann, and later,
Hannah Arendt. It became ‘the little Heidelberg on the 12th Street’. In
a reception at the home of the Dean, I heard Frau Staudinger remark,
‘When my husband became the Dean, he first hired American Cauca­
sians to the faculty’. Hiring me, an Indian, certainly required still greater
willingness to change. Gurwitsch was to retire in a couple of years. He
wanted me to succeed him but I had to try it out myself as a visitor.
A medium-built, short but handsome man, Aron Gurwitsch was a
Lithuanian German Jew, genial and courtly, single-mindedly committed
to his work without letting himself be distracted by other contending and
86 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
conflicting philosophical ideas. Gurwitsch’s original training, in
Gottingen, was in mathematics and gestalt psychology; later he went to
Freiburg to attend Husserl’s lectures and drew the Master’s appreciative
attention. His wife, Alice (alias Raja), was, in her youth, a spirited
woman from the German city of Fulda (where I used to visit during my
student days in Gottingen), a gifted painter, an active Zionist, always by
Aron’s side in his work. The extent to which Aron’s mind was exclu­
sively focused is shown by the following stories. When he was a refugee
in Paris, he dined regularly with a man whose company he enjoyed.
Years later he learned that he was the Russian mystic-philosopher
Gurdjiff. Gurwitsch told me he never had any philosophical conversa­
tions with him. After coming to the United States, when he earned his
living by teaching mathematics and physics at Harvard, he got to know
the logician Quine. His friendship with Quine continued but they never
discussed their respective philosophies (Quine’s could not be more
different from Gurwitsch’s). I always felt that Gurwitsch thought and
wrote as though he was still in the same academic world which he was
forced to leave. As soon as the war was over, and Nazism was eradi­
cated, he returned every summer to Germany! He still thought of
himself as a German, and also as a Zionist Jew. During my first lecture
at the New School, Alice Gurwitsch sat in the front row, and after I
finished, she came up to me, congratulated me and said, ‘You lecture
like Aron, you have the same clarity and analytic skill.’ Two years later,
when Gurwitsch suddenly passed away while vacationing in Zurich as a
guest of the Plessners (I will write about the Plessners later in this story),
I succeeded him to the chair to which he had almost nominated me.
After Aron’s death, my friendship with Alice continued. She would
send me, every Christmas, a wonderfully hand-painted or etched
card—which adorn my bookshelves to this day. Once when Bani and I
were visiting her, she asked me if I wanted to take any of Aron’s books
from his library. I preferred to ask her for Aron’s Gottingen ‘hood’ (he
had a Ph.D. from Gottingen), which I now use for ceremonial com­
mencement processions. The papers went to Yale’s Beinecke Library.
Gurwitsch did not fundamentally affect or influence my philosophi­
cal research. I was already working on lines which were close to his, so
he just found my work congenial. But two colleagues at the New School,
in many ways introduced me to new ways of thinking, and thereby
slowly and imperceptibly, affected my rendering of ‘phenomenology’.
They were Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt. Jonas and Arendt were very
different kind of thinkers from Gurwitsch. Gurwitsch was a Husserlian
in the strict sense. He thought with almost mathematical rigour and
 New York City and the New School • 87
clarity. Jonas and Arendt were closer to Heidegger, though by no means
Heideggerians, and thought, with a profound concern, about the histori­
cal destiny of human existence. Gurwitsch thought ahistorically. All
three were Zionists, but Arendt, by the time 1 arrived, had, owing to her
unorthodox reporting on the Eichmann trial in Israel, fallen into disfavour
with the Jewish community—so much so that her two colleagues misun­
derstood her, and even stopped speaking to her. And yet Jonas and
Arendt were friends from their youthful Marburg days.
Jonas, in his youth, had made a marie for his work on the history of
Gnosticism, which made him the leading scholar in the world in that
field. He wrote a ground-breaking book, Phenomenon of Life, in which
he followed a Whiteheadian line—arguing against the Husserlian pri­
macy o f subjectivity. In the early seventies, he was into the philosophy
of technology and medicine. He was the first philosopher who had been
asked by the US Congress to testify regarding the value of genetic
technology. At the time I got to know him, he was writing his work, later
to have a great influence in Germany, on modem technology and ethics.
In the late eighties, he became almost a guru for the German youth.
Germany named one of their Intercity trains after him (and another one
after Arendt). The last time I met him—he visited us in our Norman
home— he told me that none of his books had such sales as his book on
technology and ethics in the German version. I asked him how he was
enjoying his retirement. He said, ‘Mohanty, when I was teaching at the
New School, I had three days off. Now, after retirement, I have none.’
As Europe recognized, adored, and rewarded him, he worked harder. I
got his postcard from Madras, ‘I should have talked to you before I came
out to India. These temples have overwhelmed me’. He passed away on
his flight back from Rome, where Italy had just honoured him with one
of the country’s most distinguished prizes.
To write about Hannah Arendt is difficult for me. Her very being was
so completely intellectualized, so wholly given to ideas, that I could not
imagine her to be personally close to anyone. Yet she drew me to her
with a deep personal affection. During the few years that I got to know
her, there grew such a relationship between us that it now seems to me
as if I had known her all my philosophical career. Her pictures from her
early life and from her Marburg and Freiburg years, show her to have
been extremely beautiful. Her youthful face carried the stamp of her
deeply thoughtful nature. By the early seventies, when I met her, the
experiences of pain and suffering under the Nazis in Germany, and later
in France, and the disappointments in her personal life had left their
mark on her face. But her overall intellectuality would nevertheless light
88 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
it up, concealing that pervasive sadness. Heidegger, with whom she had
an affair in her youth, had disappointed her; Karl Jaspers, her eventual
mentor and lifelong correspondent, was gone. Her first marriage to
Alfred Stem, Husserl’s student, had broken up, though the marriage
with Hans Blucher in New York proved to be solid and based on
profound mutual respect. Success came slowly in the United States, but
when it did come, she received her due. (The New York Times obituary
on her death described her as among the ten most influential intellectu­
als in the world, and certainly the most significant woman philosopher.)
She rejected Heidegger’s offer to renew their old relationship, yet she
was capable of deep friendship: Karl Jaspers, Hans Blticher and the New
York authoress, Mary McCarthy, were amongst her closest friends.
A person of strong views about others, she once told me she found
that the Dean at the New School had lied to her, she never spoke to him
after that discovery. I think she regarded all Straussians as dishonest
because Leo Strauss had not been honest with her (they were colleagues
in Chicago). As I noted earlier, she was a Zionist, and while in New
York, had helped European Jews to emigrate to Israel. But when she
disapproved of Israel’s policies, she never hesitated to speak out, despite
consequences that were not pleasant for her personally. Intellectually,
she was not willing to make compromises. Notwithstanding Heidegger’s
Nazism and personal betrayal, she never let those experiences influence
her judgment of the Master as a thinker. I felt—and her posthumously
published Gifford lectures confirmed—that she had a category called
‘thinker’, which was so elevated above the life of action, vita activa, that
very few qualified for inclusion. This small group included Socrates,
Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. She herself was one of
them. Ideas, pure ideas, moved her.
‘Why did you want to hire me for the New School, when there were
many others, including German and French scholars, in the field of
Phenomenology?’, I once asked her. ‘You are not only the best,’ she
replied, ‘you also know the classics [she thought of Sanskrit]. Most
present-day philosophers do not.’ I learned later on, to what extent she
went to make it possible for me to move to New York. The following is
an instance. Learning that my wife was not willing to come to New
York, she started calling her trying to persuade her, making her promise
not to let me know that she had been talking to her. It came as a surprise
to me when Bani changed her views about the move and began insisting
that we accept the New School offer!
I was the chairman of the department when Hannah Arendt died. She
was talking to a French reporter in her study, full of books, when she
 New York City and the New School • 89
suffered a heart attack and fell on the floor. I buried her—near her
husband, who had predeceased her—on the campus of Bird College on
the Hudson, north of the city.
There was no longer a compelling reason for me to continue to live in
New York, and I began thinking about moving out.
But what I had learned and imbibed at the New School has sustained
me to this day. Gurwitsch confirmed or validated my understanding of
Husserl and my work on him. From Jonas, 1 learned that the existential
significance of philosophy need not be understood in narrowly prag­
matic terms. Arendt gave me a sense of both the historicity of ideas and
their eventual ahistoricity. From all of them, I derived a renewal of the
importance of thinking for my own existence. All three had become
urban intellectuals—they pined for New York’s intellectual and artistic
society. I loved New York but never came into its grip. The rustic
villager in me lived on and I did not mind going back to Norman, for I
knew what I had to write.
The only unpleasant experience at the New School came almost at the
end. When I resigned my position, Albert Hofstadter, whom I had per­
suaded to come from California, became hostile towards me, which
came to me as a surprise. Hofstadter was a New Yorker, who taught very
successfully for many years at Columbia, and then moved to Santa Cruz,
California. His earlier work on analytic philosophy and aesthetics was
overshadowed by the reputation he had acquired for his marvellous
translations of Heidegger’s works. We invited him, along with Anthony
Quinton of Oxford (now a Lord), to replace Jonas and Arendt. A highly
cultivated person, sophisticated in the New York style, Hofstadter
related very well to me. He threw a party to which Bani and I were
invited. When he learned that I had resigned, he thought I had let him
down, and even suggested that I might not enjoy the party. I told him that
1 would go, and I did (without Bani). I enjoyed the party—his wife
would not talk to me but A1 was pleasant (outwardly). But his meanness,
which caught me off guard, knew no bounds. He even warned the Dean
that I might move some of Husserl’s papers (from the Husserl Archive)
to my own library. The Dean saw the absurdity of his suspicions and
asked me not to be bothered about it. Once, much later, when I was at the
New School for a Ph.D. defence, I extended my hand to him but he did
not take it, claiming that it was too early for reconciliation. Years later,
I saw him in Berkeley—he congratulated me on the success of my
Husserl and Frege book, and thought we could be friends again. I always
wondered how a marvellously civilized person could demonstrate such
anger for no apparent reason, and for an imagined cause—namely, that
90 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
I had conspired to bring him to New York (from his Santa Cruz ivory
tower), and then let him down by leaving the New School!
Sometimes philosophers can show a face that does not serve the
cause of their noble profession well. As chairman of the New School, I
took enormous pains to get the school’s Board to approve of my efforts
to invite Jacques Derrida—at that time, he was not a household name
among intellectuals—to join the faculty. When I was negotiating his
salary with the Dean, I received a letter from Derrida cancelling the
negotiations, informing me that he had decided not to come to the New
School because the letter of appointment that I had sent him earlier did
not specify the salary he was going to receive. This was frustrating and
annoying—I had told him that the salary offer would come from the
Dean.
After I left the school to return to Norman, Oklahoma, Quinton also
returned to Oxford as the Master of Trinity, after which he became the
President of the British Libraries and a member of the House of Lords.
When I visited All Souls College in Oxford, we—the Quintons, Bani,
and I—spent some lovely hours together. When I was trying to hire
Quinton at the New School, I asked Isaiah Berlin if he would write a
letter about him. Berlin wrote, among other things, that Quinton was
possibly one of the most well-read British philosophers since David
Hume. That was high praise, true, if of anyone, of Isiah Berlin himself.
But there was no doubt about Quinton’s erudition. Jonas was sceptical
regarding my decision to hire him, and he told me so. But, in a few days,
Jonas met Quinton at a dinner in his house. They talked for hours, and
the next day Jonas told me, 4Mohanty, you made the right decision.*
Quinton could talk on any subject, read many languages, was an effec­
tive teacher, and above all, he was a friendly person and a generous
colleague. New York life suited him well. His wife Mircea’s family
owned one of New York’s famous department stores and a home in
Southampton on Long Island. Quinton enjoyed a good life, good cloth­
ing, and a feast of ideas. I found his sense of humour and witty style
refreshing. With his great wit, he constructed a definite description
which he claimed holds good of me and of no one else: ‘The one and
only x who is a specialist in Navya Nyaya, Husserl, and Frege’.
The glorious days at the New School ended in the summer of 1978.
We returned to Norman and bought a beautiful colonial house with a
stone exterior, a wood-panelled interior, and redwood ceilings. Life
took a turn towards peace and quiet, and I started writing down all the
thoughts that New York had stirred within me.
 Oxford and Freiburg

I n 1982,1was elected a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford

University. Matilal, an old friend from my Sanskrit College days who
had studied logic with me before going to Harvard for graduate work,
saw to it that I spent some time at All Souls. All Souls, a stately and
beautifully chiselled college on High Street, is perhaps the only college
in the world which has no students. It consists of Fellows—internal and
external. Radhakrishnan had been a Fellow for many years. So were
many distinguished British academics as well as politicians. The Fel­
lows administer the college and its vast landed property and real estate
in London. The Professorial Fellows draw their salary from the Univer­
sity and lecture. The other Fellows are maintained by the college; they
do their own research or teach undergraduates of other colleges (in
Oxford ‘teaching’ means ‘conducting tutorials for undergraduates’), for
which they receive some extra money. The college provides rooms or
apartments and free meals. Since at the time the college was founded the
Fellows were churchmen, it is no wonder that only male fellows were
admitted and no fellows could live, within the college premises, with
families. When I was there, the first woman was admitted. For families
(and so for me and Bani) the college provided an apartment in the village
of Ifley on the Thames. I could take free lunch and dinner at the college,
but Bani could not. There is a ladies’ day each term, when ladies can be
invited by the fellows for dinner but a fellow could not bring his own
wife as a guest. So, you have someone else invite your wife, and you
invite his. These are the remnants of social conventions of centuries
past. But the college, and the University, stick to them as far as possible.
92 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
By contrast, academic life in the United States has very few conven­
tions. There is no dress code—either for faculty or for students. At All
Souls, I had (most reluctantly) to live by the rules. For example, a bow
tie and gown were required for dinner (but not for lunch, which was
happily informal). Even more exacting is the conversation you are
expected to carry on at the dinner table—you do not talk about weather,
about politics, or about academic themes. What else is left? After dinner
you go for wine and cheese to another room (after lunch you have coffee
in the lounge and browse through newspapers). There is, of course, the
famous British tea at 3 p.m.—tea, cakes and biscuits served on elegant
silver. Bani could not join in any of these. She would, if she did not eat
in the apartment, buy her lunch from Oxford’s ‘covered market’, and eat
in my office. For American visitors, this put a strain on their domestic
peace.
I enjoyed reading in the college lounge where there were lots of
newspapers and magazines. After dinner, I would borrow books from
the college reading room—generally fiction. But most of my academic
research was done on the top floor of the Bodelian Library, which
houses the India-related (and Sanskrit-related) books. Slowly, the book
to appear ten years later as Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought was
taking shape.
I did not have much to do with Oxford philosophy. All Souls’ only
philosophy fellow was Derek Parfit (still a junior fellow who was too
shy to talk, and also was busy finishing his famous book on persons,
which led to his election to a senior permanent fellowship a couple of
years later). Michael Dummett, who had been a Fellow for a long time,
had moved to New College with a professorship. Since I was working on
Frege and Husserl, it was natural that I looked him up. We forged a
friendship which I enjoyed; I attended his lectures, and he learned
Husserl from me. As a matter of fact, Dummett began an intensive study
of Husserl’s works, resulting in various articles he wrote during the next
few years.
I had always been an admirer of Peter Strawson and had taught his
book, Individuals, to graduate classes in Calcutta and Oklahoma. Bimal
had told me of Strawson’s genuine love for India, so I looked him up at
the Magdalene College. He took me out for lunch and we talked about
matters of common interest. I sat in his Kant seminar and attended his
lectures. Somewhat bland and boring as a lecturer, the sheer goodness of
his personality compensated for his lack of charisma. I knew his ideas
only too well, and there was nothing new that I found either in his
seminars or in his lectures. On the other hand, Dummett, who at times
 Oxford and Freiburg • 93
spoke freely, and at other times thought aloud, I found exciting and
challenging.
I also looked up George Holmes, an old friend from my Gottingen
student days—now a well-known historian and a Fellow of St Catherine’s.
He had gone to Gottingen, after an Oxford degree, to study history, and,
like me, lived in the Historisches Colloquium. Both of us tried hard to
speak German well, although it would have been more convenient for us
to speak in English. We caught up on the news about the German
historians who had been graduate students at the Colloquium. Many of
them had made their mark—Schulin, Kamp, Lieppelt, Schramm (the
younger one), and a host of others.
On the whole, I enjoyed Oxford—walking on its streets by the famed
colleges, sometimes walking along the Thames, visiting the bookshops,
especially Blackwell’s, and working in Bodelian’s hallowed halls. Among
old friends, besides Matilal, whom I saw almost every day, I renewed
my acquaintance with Tapan Roy Choudhury and Amartya Sen. Young
students from India would stop by, and so did American and German
philosophers who were passing through.
I spent three terms at Oxford. Bani lived there for only one term.
Chris de Linde came ,to see us from Paris—we had him as a guest for
dinner at All Souls, which pleased him a great deal. We also took the
usual tours around England. The beauty of England’s countryside,
especially of the Cotswold area (from where the stones that All Souls
was built with were quarried) deeply inspired me.

II
About ten years later, in 1994, with the Humboldt Research Prize, I
decided to spend the summer in Freiburg, Germany. Freiburg is very
different from Oxford. The University in Oxford is older than the one at
Freiburg by almost a hundred years. I believe Oxford’s contribution to
learning is incomparable—her only rival in Europe could be Paris.
Oxford is more urbane—a large city compared even to its other rival in
England, namely, Cambridge. Oxford’s stately baroque mansions which
house its thirty-odd colleges already constitute a remarkable skyline
along the Thames. Freiburg, a lovely little town, is ensconced within the
Black Forest. It also has a long history—a tower in the city centre
memorializes witch burning, as does the Carfax in Oxford. Freiburg’s
contribution to Catholic theology rivals Oxford’s contribution to Angli­
can and Protestant theology. Freiburg has, like Oxford, a tradition of
historical research. While Oxford philosophy goes back, leaving aside
94 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

Edmund Husserl
(Photo Courtesy o f Herbert Spiegelberg)
 Oxford and Freiburg • 95
the middle ages, to John Locke, Freiburg’s philosophy is much more
recent but nevertheless has had its glory. The glorious period began with
the Neo-Kantians (with Heinrich Rickert at the apex). Husserl moved
there from Gottingen in 1916. Heidegger succeeded him in 1929. This
brief period of about 23 years (Husserl died in 1939) falls squarely within
my research interest, so where else could I wish to be—after Gottingen?
The people at the Husserl Archive, especially Hans Reiner Sepp (a
young and amiable scholar), and Sigfried Rombach (then assistant to the
Director and now at the University of Cologne), had arranged a one-
room studio apartment for me above an inn with the name Zur Trotte
(with the painted form of a rooster hanging out of the roof), situated in
the heart of the town, on Fischerau, a romantic cobbled street. As the
name suggests, the street was originally inhabited by fishermen. A
canal, whose waters flow down the hill, ran parallel to the street. From
my apartment, I could always hear the sound of the water flowing. On
summer evenings, tourists as well as romantic couples would prom­
enade on the cobbled street and crowd into the inn downstairs for drinks.
A two-minute walk brings one to the city centre, where a column
memorializes medieval witch-burning. Next to it, by a curious and
ironical contrast, stands the arch of McDonalds. Tiny canals flow
alongside every city street. I believe they are all man-made, to imitate
Venice. The water is clean—it flows from a natural stream in the hills,
around and into the river Dreisam, which divides the city into two.
Husserl’s house on Loreto Strasse was, oLeourse, the first place I
visited—it was for me a pilgrimage. The present owner and inhabitant is
a Professor of the History of Art at the University—a dignified and
courteous person who has become accustomed to the chore of receiving
visitors from countries around the world who come to see the Master’s
(as he puts it) residence. He points out, with distinct pride, where the
Master studied, relaxed to smoke his pipe (Husserl’s last illness was
emphysema), where he received visitors, where the maids were admit­
ted by the gracious Frau Malvine, and so forth. The old furniture is not
there but the bookshelves still are. Then there is the path along which the
Master set out on his evening walks, crossing the street into Loreto
Hill’s winding upward rise. I could imagine him resting on his walking
stick as a support, stopping to settle a point at issue with his young
assistant, Martin Heidegger. My imagination brought in the more well-
known visitors to the house, including Eugen Fink, Hans Lipps, Edith
Stein, Roman Ingarden (returning from Poland), Alfred Schütz and Fritz
Kaufmann (visiting from Vienna), Dorion Cairns from Harvard, and
many others.
96 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

Husserl’s Tombstone
Husserl had to move from the Loreto Strasse apartment soon after
retirement. He did not have the financial means to pay for such a
spacious place. (His savings were meager, and the money he had put
into the Gottingen house was all lost with the devaluation of war bonds
after the First World War.) He moved to a more modest place, Schone
Ecke 6, the apartment where he died some years later.
The picture of his death, which I reconstructed from stories and
recollections (especially of a ninety-year-old Catholic nun, still alive,
who stayed by his bedside, day after day, and persuaded the Catholic
church to agree to bury him—inspite of the persecution of the Nazis
against non-Aryans—just outside the church walls, within the church
precinct) was tragic, moving but nonetheless inspiring. I could not help
but contrast Husserl’s predicament with that of Heidegger, whom Husserl
chose as his successor but who collaborated with the Nazis, and, as the
Rector of Freiburg, signed an order depriving Husserl of all privileges of
using the University facilities. Until his death, Heidegger did not express
any regret for his Nazi past but tried to explain it away with all sorts of
obfuscating jargon.
 Oxford and Freiburg • 97
I also visited all those little Black Forest villages in the vicinity of
Freiburg where Husserl retired during the holidays to write. That added
to the charm of the Black Forest. The young philosopher Rombach
drove me around in his tiny Volkswagen. This young man hailed from
the region, with deep roots in the area. He took me to a small rural
museum depicting farmers’ lives over the centuries, and pointed out a
tiny wooden rocker where, on his (and the museum guide’s) account, his
mother had slept when she was a tiny baby!
My work on Husserl’s papers in the Archive continued. It involved
long hours of reading from the voluminous manuscripts he had left
behind. The story of this Archive is worth telling. As Husserl was being
severely humiliated by the Nazis, a former student, Father van Breda, a
Belgian Carmelite priest, visited him in Freiburg with the request to let
him (van Breda) remove Husserl’s library and all of his papers to
Belgium, in order to save them from possible destruction. Van Breda
sent the papers through the Belgian Embassy in Berlin in diplomatic
bags over a period of time. After the war, the Rockefeller Foundation
and UNESCO funded the Archive. Scholars—especially those who had
once worked with Husserl, and who could decipher the Gabelsberger
stenography in which Husserl wrote—were appointed to transcribe the
Nachlass manuscripts into typescripts. Slowly, a whole series of
Husserliana appeared. One of the greatest satisfactions of my life lies in
having been connected with this process.
I especially loved to read the old man’s manuscripts. It appears that
the philosopher thought while he was writing. He was always asking
new questions, criticizing his old positions, seeking to find new ways
out I was thrilled as I went on reading the manuscripts of his declining
years—years not only of growing physical debility but of great disap­
pointment and humiliation. How odd, he wonders, that he who had
devoted his life to the renewal of German philosophy, and lost a son for
the ‘Fatherland’ in the First World War, was declared by ignorant
‘bums’ (of the SS) as unfit to be a true German? Even close students
stopped visiting him. On one of his birthdays, very few people sent
cards—he wrote to Hans Lipps and thanked him for having sent one. But
he did not abandon his search for a ‘true foundation’ for scientific
knowledge, and refused to accept the irrationalism of emerging
‘existential’ thinking. I was inspired.
My project to work out a Gesamtdarstellung of this man’s philoso­
phy became clearer, and I found it not only philosophically interesting
but also personally inspiring. Lester Ebree and GUnther Patzig encour­
aged me by saying, ‘If you don’t do it, nobody else in the world could’.
m
The City of Brotherly Love

eturning from New York, I lived in Norman, Oklahoma, for seven

R years. The thought of leaving Oklahoma again never occurred to
me. The house was comfortable, Padmini was growing up with us, Mitti
had finished Law School, and had joined a law firm. The climate suited
us well; the Indian community with whom we generally socialized was
congenial. My writing was going well. My research money allowed me
to go to conferences and visit libraries in case I needed to do so. The
Department provided me with all that I needed for my work, and I got a
great deal of respect from the campus community.
Most unexpectedly one afternoon, I received a phone call from Joe
Margolis, asking me to consider moving to Philadelphia to join the
Temple University faculty. At first I dismissed the idea but as I thought
about it, it seemed to take hold of me. Earlier on, I had declined
invitations to the Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and the
University of Hawaii in Honolulu; refused to apply to Yale even after
being requested to do so by Ruth Marcus, who dominated Yale’s
department; and left the New School too. So why consider a move to
Philadelphia? Sometimes you do not discover the deep truth about your
psyche until you are awakened from a ‘dogmatic slumber’. I was
surprised to discover that I had lived in Oklahoma too long, that my
mind was pining for a more intellectual climate, offering more challenge
to my ideas. The ideas that New School had occasioned had been written
down, and had earned for me some recognition. But what next? I
decided to accept the invitation. Bani would stay in Norman for some
time to take care of Padmini. I found a flat in Chestnut Hill on the edge
of Philadelphia, and joined the faculty of Temple in the autumn of ’85.
Temple University is located in North Philadelphia on Broad Street,
about two miles north of the City Hall. The neighbourhood is notorious
 The City of Brotherly Love • 99
for its crime rate; so also is the area surrounding the more prestigious
University of Pennsylvania. That is no consolation as far as Temple is
concerned but as the taxi driver who first brought me to the Temple
campus said, ‘They would say bad things about Temple’s neighbourhood,
but not about the University of Pennsylvania.’ As a matter of fact, all the
great urban universities in the USA have been victims of the same urban
malignancy—Columbia, Chicago, and UCLA. Yale’s New Haven and
Harvard’s Cambridge are no better as towns. Crimes and drugs stalk you
everywhere. In that regard, Temple is no exception. But Temple, I think,
has a rapport with the surrounding ghettos, since more young people
from them attend Temple than is possible in the case of the more
prestigious and expensive schools named above. Originally a Baptist
Institution (which accounts for the name), now it belongs to the Com­
monwealth System of Universities of the state of Pennsylvania, and the
name is no more descriptive of the University. While its undergraduate
students are largely drawn from the sprawling urban area around it, the
graduate school is selective and of high quality. The Philosophy Depart­
ment has a good reputation. I came as the replacement of Monroe
Beardsley—quite a famous philosopher, and arguably America’s most
famous scholar in aesthetics.
The city of Philadelphia (‘Brotherly Love’) is a historic city, where
America’s constitution was adopted and freedom declared. It remained
the capital of the United States until Washington was built on the
Potomac. Battlefields of the American War of Independence almost
surround the city—Germantown and Valley Forge, Trenton and
Princeton, to name the cities of the more famous battles. The city
stretches along the Delaware River, which separates it from New Jersey,
and is divided into two by the Schulkyll River, which runs through it
into the Delaware River. The centre of the city, originally a colonial
area, where red brick colonial houses (now restored), attract wealthy
yuppies to return from the suburb, bear testimony to the original Phila­
delphia, where its most famous citizen, Benjamin Franklin, lived and
worked. North of the old city is the part which Franklin, when Ambas­
sador in Paris, had Munchausen (the architect of modem Paris) design
after Paris; the spacious Franklin Parkway leads up to the magnificent
art museum (imitating the Champs Elysse leading up to the Louvre).
The most European of all American cities, with numerous impressive
statues, bridges over the Schulkyll, monuments, public statues, and a
park, the Fairmount Park, running for tens of miles into the heart of the
city—all this magnificence fills my heart with joy. But it is surrounded
by poverty, ghettos, crime, and homelessness, and one often wonders if
100 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
the city of ‘brotherly love’ is not also the city of crime and all that goes
with it.
Initially we rented a town house in the north-west part of the city,
Chestnut Hill—perhaps the city’s most wealthy section, dotted with
superb eighteenth-century mansions. But soon we moved farther away
from the city to the small community of Ambler. Padmini moved in with
us to go to a High School—one of the few Girls’ Schools left—in
Chestnut Hill, the Springside School. And for three years I drove her to
and from school, followed her work and progress, and got to know, for
the first time, the pleasures and the pains of parenting a high school
student in this country—which also meant getting to know young
people of an age group with whom I had very little acquaintance before.
Without Padmini, our lives would have been spent without much of its
pleasures, and also many of its challenges. Her company has been a
source of delight, which brings with it its own counterpoints, but every
moment was precious.
Life in Philadelphia presented a rich variety of intellectual diet. The
city has, besides Temple, several distinguished institutions of higher
education—the University of Pennsylvania, and the three Quaker col­
leges: Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford. Their libraries, faculty,
and students offered many hitherto unknown possibilities. Princeton is
an hour’s drive away, and it was possible to go for meetings to all these
superb academic institutions. For some years I worked on Godel’s
papers on Husserl in the Princeton Library. But the most rewarding was
the Penn library, its holdings on Sanskrit proving to be an invaluable
asset for me, compensating for the distance from the Calcutta Sanskrit
College and the Bodelian, and making it possible to bring Reason and
Tradition to an end in 1990, and make progress on the second part o f the
Indian philosophy project.
At Temple, Joe Margolis proved to be an extremely valuable col­
league. Being himself one of the country’s most distinguished philoso­
phers, Margolis’s total dedication to philosophical thinking and writing
is overwhelming. Invariably courteous and highly sophisticated, Margolis
continuously engaged me in philosophical dialogues, challenging my
fundamental philosophical commitments in a manner that combined
incisive criticism with gentle appreciation. Many of the papers I wrote
during the decade at Temple bear the stamp of those conversations.
As in the New School, so also at Temple, I was lucky to have a group
of bright graduate students. Like McKenna and Kirkland in New York,
Michael Barnhart and Christina Schiis (from Germany) at Temple re­
warded me by their creative and productive work. While Barnhart read
 The City of Brotherly Love • 101
Husserl and Hegel in order to be able to appropriate Buddhist thought
creatively, Schiis translated her deep concern with Husserl into a post­
modernist feminist philosophy. I learnt from both. Just as at New
School, where my interest turned to Hegel and historicism, at Temple I
tried to respond to the post-modernist critique of phenomenology. But
by now, I was beginning to realize that my work on Indian philosophy
had to be brought to completion without further delay, for how can one
ignore, at the age of sixty-five, the imminent possibility of death?
Our social life continued to be dominated by the Indian immigrant
community but—in contrast with the Oklahoma years—now almost
exclusively by the Bengalis. The Bengali community of Philadelphia
and its surroundings, known as the Delaware Valley, is not large but is
mid-sized, closely knit, group-connected, as much by friendships as by
conflicts and quarrels. With my knowledge of Bengali culture and past
association with Calcutta’s academia and intellectual life (and, of course,
Bani’s heritage), we were naturally drawn towards this group as much as
this group was towards us. I was elected President of the Bengali
Cultural association, known as Pragati (progress), in which capacity I
had to oversee the annual celebration of the various Pujas (chiefly of
Durga, the beautiful goddess with ten arms, standing on a lion, and
killing with a spear, a green-bodied demon who was reportedly threat­
ening all living beings on earth, and even the gods in heaven), also
arrange for picnics and ‘cultural functions’ with artists visiting from
Calcutta. During such Puja celebrations and cultural functions, I, as the
President of the organization, found myself in the inevitable position of
mediating conflicts and, much in the Gandhian fashion, keeping the
lavatories clean, and the rented halls ‘in order’, after the audience were
gone. One is impressed by how people come to a foreign country with
most of their habits and manners intact—they are carefully hidden when
dealing with Americans, but erupt and come to the fore when among
their kind. Perhaps this is how it should be, and this is why there is such
a mushroom growth of ethnic ‘cultural’ societies.
Every Indian community, organized mainly according to linguistic
groups, is proud of its culture. Celebration of its ‘cultural heritage’ takes
the form of songs and dances, musicals and dramas, food and dress, as
members of the community had known or experienced that heritage
while in their country ‘back home’—for which there is an understand­
able feeling of nostalgia. The community’s aim is as much to relive
those experiences as to provide occasions for the young generation to
‘learn’ and assimilate their culture. The older people, who have grown
up being a part of that culture, think they understand it all. The younger
102 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
generation—born and brought up in America—are confused by the
strange sights and sounds, not knowing the myths and legends, and
prefer to settle for the food and drinks, games and sports of their new
country. There is a certain naivety regarding all this on the part of the
older generation, who assume that they already know it all but whose
‘understanding’ is more often than not shallow and false—and it is a
case of the blind leading the blind. The supreme motivation, of course,
is to prevent the children from ‘becoming Americans’, from dating and
manying Americans, and to ensure that they remain Indians (Bengali,
Oriya, or whatever the case may be). Underneath the Western clothing
and manners, there is an almost unavoidable sense of guilt on the part of
immigrant parents, that they have brought with them their children, who
have been ‘thrown to the wolves’, and the exciting life of the USA. All
that moral ‘degradation’ can be tolerated if the child goes to an Ivy
League college, and can eventually become a doctor.
The memorable events of my Philadelphia years are: an invitation to
be the President of the Indian Philosophical Congress (1986); arranging,
as the President of the Bengali Cultural Association, the celebrations of
the Tricentenary of Calcutta; being awarded the Humboldt Research
Prize from Germany (1992); and Padmini’s graduation from high school
and her going to Bryn Mawr College (1994).
I was told I was the first person living and teaching in a foreign
country to be elected the President of the Indian Philosophical Congress.
This was to me a matter of satisfaction—learning that the Philosophical
community still remembered me and valued my work. I went to Calcutta,
where the annual meetings were held that year, somewhat more appro­
priately for me to preside over. My Presidential address was devoted to
examining and re-interpreting the thesis of éabdapramána. I noticed
that I had changed my views on this matter. I met many philosophers
from all over India, especially many younger scholars whom I had not
known before. If only I could set aside the questions regarding the
quality of the work being done! I was overwhelmed by love and
affection, and, for a brief time, realized rather poignantly, what I had
missed for so long by living outside the country.
Returning to Philadelphia, I devoted myself—under the leadership of
Krishna Lahiri—to organizing the Tricentennial celebrations of the city
of Calcutta. This was an act of sheer love and gratitude for the city to
which I owe so much. My inaugural lecture, in Haverford College,
moved some to tears, because I could not help being personal, referring
to ‘a sixteen-year-old boy from the neighbouring state of Orissa coming
to Calcutta, carrying an insatiable curiosity to learn and to make friends,.
 The City of Brotherly Love • 103

and immediately falling in love with the city’. We set up an exhibition

at Haverford, devoted to Calcutta’s cultural history. For me, the most
romantic part of it was an exhibition of documents borrowed from the
Maritime Museum (all about two hundred years of trade between Calcutta
and Philadelphia), of which the central personality was a Calcutta mer­
chant of the name of Ram Dulal Dey, whom the Philadelphia merchants
simply adored. Mayor Goode declared the month ‘Calcutta month’. I
felt proud.
The award of the Humboldt Research Prize for 1992 meant for me
that the German scholars eventually recognized the value of my life­
long research on German philosophy, especially on Husserl’s phenom­
enology. The money allowed me to set aside a small fund for social work
in Orissa, and to use the rest for visits to Germany, for research and
writing— resulting in extended visits, on successive summers, to
Göttingen, Freiburg, and Tübingen. I must say I enjoyed living in those
picture-postcard towns more than meeting the scholars who lived there
(with the sole exception of my dear old friend Günther Patzig in
Göttingen).
Padmini finished at Springside, and went up to Bryn Mawr—a lovely
campus o f imitation Oxford-style buildings and greens. I had for so long
carefully guarded her and protected her; now she could go her own way,
making her own choices. The thought was as exhilarating as painful. I
would drive up to Bryn Mawr—a distance of 20 miles—once a week to
see her. This led to a deepening of my friendship with Michael Krausz,
who had, in the meantime, developed a strong emotional tie for India,
having been involved in saving the ecology of the Doabs and Ladakh,
and captured by the sheer beauty of Ladakh and the Kulu Valley.
m
m

Visits to India

here are two kinds of immigrants. There are those who are forced
T out of their native lands by poverty, starvation or political persecu­
tion; they leave for their survival. And there are those who immigrate for
better opportunities than what their native land could offer, for a better
future, with a dream in their hearts. I certainly, and, I believe most
immigrants from the Indian sub-continent, do not belong to the first
group. I would then fall in the second group. But do I? I think, there must
be another class of immigrants to which I belong, for like many others,
I did not come to the United States in order to immigrate. I came with a
‘green card’, to be sure, but that is because the University of Oklahoma
required me to get it before they could offer me a tenured position. They
did the paper work, and I collected the card in Calcutta. But I did not
perceive myself to be an immigrant; we were not ‘migrating’, leaving
our homeland and settling down in our new, adopted country. I thought
that I was just going to the USA with a professorship, still on leave from
the University of Calcutta—if possible, to do some research, which I
could not do in India; to put the children through school there, possibly
for a better education (not knowing in which way it would be better), and
eventually, not too long afterwards, to return to India! But slowly and
imperceptibly, while the thought of returning bums within your heart,
the flame becomes a flicker, and you find that dream—now the dream of
returning—being deferred to a distant future. Unknowingly, not as a
result of conscious thought, a reversal takes place. You still must return.
Despite all your professional achievements, despite the money you
make, and the future of your family, the idea of return provides the only
eschatological meaning to your existence. At this point, all two (or
three) kinds of immigrants are as one—or, I would suppose, most of
them are. The original dream of the new land of opportunities is
 Visits to India • 105
displaced by the dream of return from the ‘Diaspora’. The fate of the
Jews is the fate of all immigrants.
Before that dream is realized at the end of your lifetime, the best you
can do is to visit the home country as often as you can. Those visits
replace the periodical re-enactment of the original myths surrounding
the ‘Diaspora’. You return but not finally. You return with a sense of
guilt for having left the land, for not being by the side of the people who
had placed their trust in you. You have to tell them that you still exist,
that you still have your country in your heart, and her tradition in your
mind, and that it is only a question of time before you return.
Does the country really need you? An Indian diplomat in New York,
whom I knew in Presidency College, in the course of a conversation,
learnt that I had become a philosopher, and remarked that India could
afford to do without philosophers—meaning, what the country needed
were scientists, engineers, and doctors. As a contrast, take the view of
Sachin Ganguly—a most remarkable young philosopher in Calcutta,
whose life was cut short in an untimely manner—who once remarked to
me, ‘Jiten-da, I do not believe in what is called brain drain. Those who
have left should have left. The country is all the better (‘lighter’ as he put
it) for their departure. We have enough people here at home’. Sachin
perhaps meant that those who believe in India are the ones on whom the
country can depend, not those who are fortune seekers in foreign lands.
To believe that the country needs all those Indians who crowd in on
commuter trains to New York City, is to attach to them an importance
which they do not deserve. (Later on, the country welcomed their
dollars, not them.)
Fair enough. One has to maintain a low key when visiting India. Do
not show off your newly acquired wealth (India has far wealthier
persons, you will be told). Do not talk about your three-bedroom, two-
car garage home, your cars, and all the electronic gadgets that make life
easier. The fact is, the typical immigrant understands neither Indian
culture nor Western culture. He is ever moved by the newly found gold
(in whatever quantity); if he is a scientist, in the opportunities for
scientific research; if a technologist, he is overwhelmed by the idea of
not merely using technology but of contributing to its development.
Typically, to find solace in some deep recess of his heart, he turns to
religion. Temples are springing up all over America. Men who never
visited a temple, and who professed indifference to religion while living
in India, now go to temples, sing Bhajans, and perform rituals. Many
will still not admit to themselves that they have had a change of heart, a
‘conversion’. They will say that they were doing it for the sake of the
106 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
children, or because ‘going back to one’s roots’ is fashionable. The
same people, when visiting India, in Calcutta, Delhi or Bombay, visit
five-star hotels to take their friends out for drinks—but not for them the
holy men, the pilgrimages, the temples, unless, again, it is for their
children’s sake!
There were, up until 1989, two fixtures during my visits to India— my
mother and Calcutta. With her gone, Calcutta remains—Calcutta, with
her teeming millions, filth on the streets, automobile fumes, chaos on the
roads, poverty in the slums, and so forth. At first I stayed with Tara
Chatteijee in their spacious Ballygunje home. A former pupil at the
University, Tara drew me into her family and found for me a niche
alongside her husband and four children. I felt at home. Then Swami
Lokeswarananda, with his dignified, quiet demeanour and unobtrusive
hospitality, made me feel at home in the spacious well-maintained
premises of the Rama Krishna Mission Institute (RKMI). I began giving
lectures at the RKMI on sundry themes, every time I lived there, and the
Swami treated me as a guest, not accepting any fees from me for lodging
and meals. My lectures, held at the Sivananda Hall, were generally well
attended, but I was never sure how many understood what I talked
about. I began to notice that the lectures in Calcutta were taking a
different shape from the scientific papers I presented in USA and
Europe. In the West, the papers were what one would call ‘professional’,
‘scholarly’ and ‘scientific’. The Calcutta lectures were composed in
Calcutta. Without the help of libraries, they were motivated by more
‘practical’ and broad-based concerns and interests. In a certain way, the
two were complementary. But I had always suspected what a dear friend
of mine called ‘sagery’. Am I falling prey to that temptation? But a
merely scholarly, ‘scientific’ philosophy had never captured my mind.
The old interests of my youth—Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo—were not
totally gone. Like Kant, I continued to believe that philosophy had to be,
in spite of its scientific character, a theory of Welt Weisheit and Husserl’s
idea that the philosopher has to be a ‘functionary’ of humankind did not
cease to appeal to me. How to keep the two side at harmony? The
Calcutta lectures were inspired by this sense of harmony. They did not
quite succeed. I did not lecture in Calcutta to be recognized. I wanted to
tell my friends what and how I was thinking. I was returning their
friendship. This was the place I had grown up in, where I had learnt
philosophy, where I had forged lasting friendships and imbibed a sensi­
tivity to human values. I wanted to generate conversations, and feel I
was still a part of that community of minds. In this I was successful; the
measure of this success was simple—my own joy.
 Visits to India • 107
In 1995, the University of Jadavpur honoured me by conferring a
doctorate honoris causa, on me. It has amazed me how Jadavpur had
come closer to me than my alma mater, the University of Calcutta. I
seldom visit the latter. College Square is just too far from the RKMI; the
department has moved to a new building in Alipore, and the faculty
made me feel that I had abandoned them. Jadavpur University, on the
other hand, is closer to the RKMI, and Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya and
Pranab Sen—two members of the Jadavpur Philosophy Department—are
interested in my thinking. Sukharanjan Saha and Prodyot Mukherjee do
Indian philosophy to my liking, Krishna Roy and Chhanda Gupta have
become like members of my family. I became close to them and am
touched by their love. Jadavpur’s decision to confer the doctorate on me
came as a surprise. I was neither their student, nor had I ever been a
member of their faculty. Bani had a degree from there, so there was a
family connection. But I had been visiting them and lecturing in the
department for at least ten years. I accepted the honour with thanks.
The news reached Orissa. I received a telephone call from the Vice-
chancellor of the Utkal University at Bhubaneswar, Orissa, from where,
he said, I should have received such an honour first. Wasn’t I a son of
Orissa? They regretted that they were not the first (actually Burdwan
University had conferred an honourary D.Litt. on me nearly ten years
earlier). But could Bani and I visit them as the University’s guests, and
let the University Community honour me in some befitting manner? I
agreed. For the first time, we were not staying at home in Orissa. We
arrived at the Bhubaneswar railway station and were driven straight to
the University’s Guest House. For the first time, newspaper men, TV
reporters, literary critics, student representatives (and, of course, Uni­
versity faculty) kept me busy, reminding me that I was Oriya first and
foremost, a nephew of the Chaudhury brothers and, of course, about my
father and brother. I reassured them of my love for Orissa. Only, the
Orissa I knew, where I always returned was my village—not the new
middle-class that had arisen since I left the state.
In a way, the same is true of India as a whole, including Calcutta.
Within the past three decades, India has changed. A highly sophisti­
cated, westernized (rather, Americanized) middle-class has come into
being. They drink and dance at parties, even birthday parties. Young
people talk about Michael Jackson and the rest of the avant garde
musicians. Families in Delhi and Bombay go to Hong Kong, Singapore,
London and New York for vacations and shopping. Young intellectuals
practise (or rather talk about) deconstruction. Gandhi is regarded as
having pushed the country back. Those who combine their westernization
108 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
with Hindutva politics wish, and announce publicly, that it would have
been better if Godse had eliminated Gandhi earlier. Others—liberal in
politics—wish Gandhi’s antiquated ideas about technology had not
postponed the entrance of ‘high-tech’ into India. Even in Calcutta—where
as students, and later as University teachers, we revelled in liberal
socialist politics trying to combine Gandhi and Marx—I heard young
students tell me that the BJP was showing the way: bring back the
ideology of Hindutva. I shivered within myself, in disbelief and fear of
the unknown. (The ideologists of Hindutva were not believers in
Hinduism.)
Added to these changes is the report (I have heard about this) that,
even in Calcutta, young people are indulging in drugs. I refuse to believe
it. I cling to the Calcutta we left three decades ago—the picture of the
city we have lovingly protected.
The more India becomes westernized, the more do I seem to slip back
to the India that I adore and refuse to concede is no more. More and more
I get interested in Sanskrit philosophical tradition and refuse to have
anything to do with the ‘high-tech’ invasion. I tend to cling to the Gan-
dhian village-centred India, even if it is possible that that India never
existed, or ever will—but what a romantic picture! What is amazing is
that my annual visits to India during the last thirty years have not been
able to delete that picture. Maybe I have a genuine dream, a way of
looking at things, which is worth preserving.
For a thinker, the most powerful move—despite the practical weak­
ness of thinking—is interpretation. All my efforts have been focused
upon reinterpreting Indian thought.
 Philosophical Journey, Roots,
and Religion

s far as I can recollect, I cannot identify any particular experience

A which led to a lifelong concern with philosophy. High school
dabbling in philosophy books did not create any interest to pursue the
subject. Those were the years the Indian freedom movement was com­
ing to an inspiring climax. Within the family, one uncle and his wife
were Gandhians, another with his wife, was a Marxist. The one intellec­
tual issue which, in a few years, would mature into my first philosophi­
cal concern, was ‘Gandhi vs. Marx’, also a narrower question regarding
the effectiveness and desirability of non-violence as a method for
winning freedom. Another author whom I began reading during my first
year in college still muddied the field: this was Sri Aurobindo. What
attracted me to Aurobindo was not so much his reputation as a yogin, or
even as a scholar, but his role in the Indian freedom movement prior to
Gandhi’s entrance into Indian politics. Aurobindo’s brother, Barin Ghose,
was, of course, a leader of the terrorist anti-British movement that
sprang up in Bengal after the partition of Bengal. So I took Aurobindo
to be of the same political camp, and wondered whether Gandhi’s
leadership was good for India. Slowly, as I read more of Aurobindo’s
dauntingly difficult books. I became fascinated by his efforts to con­
struct a grand metaphysical system, particularly by his claims to have
refuted and overcome Samkara’s mayavada. By the time I arrived in
Calcutta to study at Presidency College, two philosophical questions
had gripped my mind— ‘Gandhi vs. Marx’ and ‘Sri Aurobindo vs.
Samkara’. With regard to the former, I leaned towards Gandhi, and
although I read Marx’s major philosophical works, I never was a
Marxist. Most of my friends at Presidency College were Marxists, and
110 • Between Two Worlds: East and West

in order to be able to converse and argue with them I had to be

conversant with Marx’s writings. It was much later, during my New
York days, that I began to appreciate an aspect of Marx’s thought which
I had been blind to—namely, that characterizing Marx solely in terms of
materialism is missing an important part of it. When human labour
shapes history, that labour is as spiritual and intentional as thoughts are.
I got over my early worry about historical materialism vis-a-vis the
constitutive power of thoughts. The other concern I had, during those
early college years, was about the role of individuals in history.
Plekhanov’s essay on the topic did not satisfy me. I had to read Hegel’s
work in order to appreciate the depths of Marx’s thinking. While my
understanding of Marx deepened, I began to detach the Marx I under­
stood from Engels, and also from Lenin. Marxism’s opposition to
Gandhi remained, and I felt myself always on the Mahatma’s side in the
long run, insofar as an individual could resist the force of Zeitgeist.
Tagore’s poem ‘ekla chalo, ekla chalo' (Let us go alone), a favourite of
the Mahatma, has a strong appeal.
The other philosophical concern of the Presidency College years was:
is the world, along with finite individuals, merely a false appearance as
Samkara would have it, or is it a real manifestation of an essential aspect
of brahman, a self-differentiation by virtue of the brahman’s own
creative energy, as Aurobindo would have it? I came to college, already
with a prejudice in favour of Aurobindo, and in spite of an intense effort,
which continued for the entire four years of college in Calcutta, to read
and understand Samkara, I found myself unable to appreciate the
maydvada. I came to know that the world, in Samkara’s view, was not
non-existent, that Samkara introduced a new category— ‘not describ-
able as either existent or non-existent’, that the brahman, as pure
consciousness, was the foundation of all phenomena, but in spite of all
these, it appeared to me unconvincing that mdyd, not as the brahman’s
creative power, but as a cosmic Ignorance that was not rooted in the
brahman’s own nature, could conceal and distort the nature of the one
reality that is all there is. The dualism between the brahman and avidya
seemed to be hardly compatible with a non-dualistic philosophy, and the
anxiety, that if ignorance could succeed in concealing the brahman,
what could be so powerful as to be able to remove that concealment
seemed very tantalizing. The use of the rope-snake illusion, I suspected,
was most inappropriate to understand the metaphysical situation of the
brahman-world illusion.
Of the two problems that haunted me during my college years, I had
no doubt about the intrinsic superiority of the Gandhian philosophy—
 PhilosophicalJourney, Roots, and Religion • 111
although at that time, the skeletons in the closet of Russian socialism
had not yet been disclosed, and stories about Stalin’s numberless vic­
tims and mock trials were still regarded by my Marxist friends as being
no better than capitalist propaganda (a convenient self-deception).
It was at this time that I was introduced to the theory of knowledge on
the one hand, and Navya-Nyâya logic on the other. With my proclivity
for analytical thinking, both provided fields where I could exercise that
ability, and as I enjoyed the Kantian epistemology and the Navya-Nyâya
theory of promana, those earlier problems, still unsolved to my satisfac­
tion, slowly receded to the background, like the outlines of a country
whose shores you leave as your ship sails away. My philosophical
interests changed, became more emancipated from the political and
eschatological motives, of my earlier concerns. They became more
theoretical.

II
Two new questions began to monopolize my thoughts. At Gottingen,
mathematical pursuits raised the spectre of Platonism. Reading White­
head and Husserl’s Logical Investigations led me to believe in abstract
entities such as propositions, numbers, and sets. In Calcutta, I had
devoted some time to reading Plato’s dialogues, and my admiration for
Platonic metaphysics was strengthened. At the same time, I became
aware of the growing anti-Platonism of analytic thinkers in England and
America. Frege, Russell, and Whitehead were gone; they had been
replaced by a generation of their disciples—Carnap, Quine, and Ryle,
disciples who sought to ‘preserve’ the heritage of their Masters by
annihilating their philosophies and replacing them with their own. I
began to ask myself; can Platonism be defended—and, for that purpose,
if necessary, be suitably amended—against its vociferous critics? The
critic of Platonism to whom I wanted to respond was the logical empiri­
cist, who distrusted, on grounds of his empiricism, all abstract, non­
tangible, non-sensuous entities. The critic of Platonism who raised his
head after two or so decades was not the empiricist, but the historicist,
who thought of essences—typically Platonic entities—as ahistorical,
and so, having no place, except as a provisional construct in his
historicized scheme of things. Was this criticism justified against a
Frege, a Whitehead, and a Husserl?
The phenomenology of Husserl confronted me with another enduring
question in philosophy. Phenomenology asks us to focus on the way
things are presented in consciousness, on the meanings that things have
112 • between Two Worlds: East and West
for those experiencing consciousness. Understanding consciousness as
intentional and meaning-giving, phenomenology raised consciousness,
in its transcendental (i.e., world-constituting) role, as the foundational
principle for philosophy. While this was going on in Germany,
Wittgenstein was glorifying language—at first, in the Tractatus, as an
ideal, system of mirroring the structure of reality; then as language-
games which we play, and within whose public rules meanings are
constituted—at the expense of the alleged privacy of consciousness.
Returning from Gottingen to India, and embarking upon a long career of
teaching philosophy, I jumped headlong into the controversy:
‘consciousness’ or 4language’? Very slowly but steadily, I explored
many different aspects and dimensions of this question. Is not
‘consciousness’ itself a word having its original home in a language-
game? Is not language—primarily as the act of speaking—a modality of
consciousness? Cannot the first reduction come under the scope of the
second reduction? At the same time, is it possible that in each of the two
reductions—of consciousness to language as well as of language to
consciousness—there is a surplus of what is sought to be reduced, and
so a failure of the project? When consciousness is situated within a
language-game, there is an awareness of it being so situated; when
language is reduced to consciousness of speaking, the history of lan­
guage, its diachronic aspect, escapes the presence to consciousness. If,
in response, language be regarded not alone as la parle but also as la
langue, consciousness must likewise be expanded beyond the limits of
the transparency of the present—into the deep recesses of memory, and
the indefinite anticipation of the not-yet. Linguistic meaning and the
meanings things have for consciousness seem to be but two aspects of
one and the same discourse. But is not the very reduction of language to
speech at fault, for is it not necessary for a language that it must have a
material corporeality? Yet what is this materiality of language but the
corporeality of consciousness as bodily? This dialogue went on until
‘consciousness’ proved to be the more all-comprehensive category, and
language, despite its inepressibility, seemed to have been overcome in
the silence of the ineffable. There is another line of speculation which I
pursued, and which I suggested in the course of a lecture on the ‘Root of
Twentieth-century Philosophy’ in the World Congress of Philosophy in
Boston—are not consciousness and language both unified in a third
something? It is Heidegger’s Dasein or is it Hegel’s Geistl Asking this
question shows that I was already caught up with Hegel and Heidegger.
The path of thinking had become enormously more complicated than the
simplistic formulation the alternatives might suggest.
 PhilosophicalJourney, Roots, and Religion • 113
This complication is due to the added dimension of Indian philoso­
phy, which accompanied my thinking, even when it was not the theme,
as unfailingly as a shadowy presence. Curiously enough, the relation­
ship was often reversed—when Indian philosophy became the focus and
the theme, Husserl and phenomenology functioned as an unfailing
shadowy presence. Consider the two philosophical concerns to which I
have devoted the preceding few pages: ‘Platonism vs. anti-Platonism’,
and ‘consciousness vs. language’. As I pursued these issues in the
context of Western philosophy, how could I not turn to, and learn from,
the rich tradition of Indian thinking? Buddhism was on the anti-Platonic
side, whereas the grammarians posited abstract meaning-entities
Csphotas), and the Navya-Naiyayikas revelled in using abstract entities
of all hues and colours. The non-dualistic Vedanta made consciousness
(<cit) foundational, but, to be sure, a consciousness that is non-intentional
(nirvisaya), and non-egological (nirafraya). The Grammarian Bhartrhari
would not have any consciousness that is not interwoven with language,
the two domains being, in the long run, non-different.
My philosophical journey has been as much through the Occident as
through the Orient. There have been many sub-paths which I have tried,
and then shunned. One of them is called ‘comparative philosophy’. The
philosopher compares the East and the West (or, rather schools, figures,
concepts, and theories from the East with those from the West). This
project never attracted me, for—among other reasons—I could not
decide where I should situate myself so that I could compare the two. I
found no ground outside the East and the West. Another sub-path was to
borrow bits and pieces from the East, and from the West, and combine
them to ‘manufacture’ what may be called ‘World Philosophy’. The
sheer artificiality of such a project repelled me, and the designation
‘World Philosophy’ seemed to me to be a misnomer. Thinking cannot
simply put together ideas as though they are slabs of stone. Thinking has
to enter into them, loosen their rigidity, transform them into the fluidity
of its own movement, and refashion a new form out of that fluid, like the
way a jeweller transforms an ornament into a new one. Moreover, the
essence of philosophy lies not in the conclusions arrived at, in the theses
and positions, in the systems constructed but rather in the process of
thinking that leads up to them. Without that process, those conclusions
are but corpses.
So I gave up the path which many of my predecessors in India had
followed. Much of the work, for example, of Radhakrishnan left me
cold, and I was bored to death. On the other hand, Aurobindo and K.C.
Bhattacharya (and the latter’s son Kalidas) showed me the way. I had to
114 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
develop my thinking from within Indian philosophy, and my thinking,
from within Western tradition, until they both mingled, and I could not
distinguish what I was thinking about—the East or the West. Philoso­
phizing would then become one process, all the richer for the diversity
that goes into its formation, but nevertheless flowing smoothly, undis­
turbed by the externality of comparisons and of the ‘putting together’ o f
different traditions. That is the goal which I have pursued.

Ill
Within Western philosophy my interest still centres around Husserl and
Kant, as it has for the past three decades or so. To think of Husserl is to
think also of Heidegger. Heidegger has been Husserl’s other, not from
the outside but from within Husserl’s thinking. The same is true of Kant
—to think with Kant is to think of Hegel, who critiqued and opposed
Kant from within.
‘Husserl-Heidegger’—the caption designates not only two philoso­
phers in their internal relation and contrast but also the whole story and
tragedy of philosophy. The Master symbolized relentless pursuit of the
path of thinking to its end, which—as in the case of Socrates’s drinking
poison—was ‘dying to live’. Refusing to sacrifice his rationality in the
face of the gathering clouds or irrationality in Europe, Husserl fell
victim to the latter, suffered indignities and eventually, as he passed
away, was buried outside a Catholic church’s walls. The Master’s self­
anointed disciple and successor, glorifying irrationality over rational
thinking, turned into an apologist for the perpetrators, and then sought to
recant his mistake without owning up to it. Husserl’s scrupulous adherence
to the idea of thinking that he had set for himself impressed me, and for
me, he ranked with Socrates as the main representative of the greatness
of Western thinking. Heidegger was a great philosopher no doubt, but
fell victim to a host of assorted irrationalisms—romantic nationalism,
anti-rationalism, mystification of the Germanic tradition, and obfusca­
tion of thought and expression. Although my natural inclination was not
to take Heidegger seriously, Hannah Arendt persuaded me to overlook
his personal failings and to learn to appreciate his important ideas. I
imbibed from Heidegger his hermeneutic thinking and from Husserl the
rigour of descriptive, scientific thinking. Much of my work during the
eighties consisted of combining the two.
What Heidegger was to Husserl, Hegel was to Kant. The limits that
Kant put on the human faculties of knowing, and their reach, were
abolished by Hegel—thereby, in effect, abolishing the line of demarcation
 PhilosophicalJourney, Roots, and Religion * 11 5
between man and God. This Vedantic strain had a subtle attraction for
me, and I started reading and teaching Hegel’s Phenomenology. At what
point my Kantian sense of limits slowly gave way to a historical-
developmental view of human cognition and morality, I do not know. I
still taught Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trying to make sense of the
idea of human receptivity to what is given, independently of any inter­
vention by thinking, as well as of the conception of moral law as a
categorical imperative. But the Hegelian insight that the distinction
between receptivity and spontaneity, the given and the constructed, is to
be relativized to the level of discourse you are in, made sense as well. I
could, to my satisfaction, identify the limits, perhaps excesses, of Hegelian
thinking—two of them, most of all: his ‘Eurocentricity’ and his
‘Absolutism’. I looked for a history of consciousness which has no
closure, i.e., does not end in an Absolute knowing; I wanted to make
room in my developmental account of the human spirit for more about
African, Chinese, and Indian experiences. The idea of rewriting Hegel’s
Phenomenology became a passion but also one of those dreams every
thinker has, knowing fully well that he cannot fulfil it. But such a
‘regulative Idea’ gives meaning to your being as a thinker.
It is with regard to this plan of rewriting the Hegelian text, that
Husserl’s later works seemed to be of momentous significance. Singu­
larly free from Hegel’s ‘Absolutism’, with a sense for the open-endedness
of the march of the human spirit—unfortunately still caught up in the
‘Eurocentrism’ of Hegel—Husserl showed the way. Blending Hegel
and Husserl, bringing in our knowledge of Oriental and African experi­
ences, I thought I could write a new Phenomenology.

IV
I have come a long way from my Presidency College student years. I
have earlier noted how my thinking became theoretical, and early politi­
cal and eschatological interests were left behind. Now almost thirty years
later, the sense for the practical has, virtually ignored earlier, returned.
My Göttingen teacher Josef König’s distinction between the theoretical
and the practical, so long in abeyance in my thinking, surfaced some time
in the eighties. Hanah Arendt’s writings reinforced a Gandhian sense for
the political. Much of my efforts were spent in trying to draw a clear
distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’—a distinction I hope will go
into the structure of my revised Phenomenology. I have now a renewed
sense of the importance of the ethical and the political. The Hindu
concept of dharma, which I had so long expelled from my thinking, now
116 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
occupies a central position. And if I can have another decade for think­
ing, this will be the focal point of my investigations.
What a wonderful and exhilarating path it has been! A journey which
is almost entirely within the interiority of my life of thinking. The
publications mark milestones, determined by external and contingent
circumstances. Shielded from public view, the life of the mind is most
rewarding, especially when it has been able to replace religion. Reli­
gion, with its thick layers of beliefs and dogmas, has become meaning­
less for me. It survives only as a thin layer of the sense for the sacredness
of nature, life and persons, and also as a layer of practices—rituals and
dharma—which, for me, is the Hegelian Sittlichkeit, a tradition outside
of which I have no place to stand. With religion reduced to irrelevance,
the life of philosophical thinking has replaced it and gained autonomy.
A philosopher needs to be an atheist but with a sensitivity to the
sacredness all around. Only if there is no God, will thinking and acting
gain the full significance they demand.

V
The philosopher is still a concrete human being: however far-flung and
cosmic his thinking may be; the thinker is still an embodied, historically
situated, biologically constituted, socially rooted, linguistically local­
ized and culturally conditioned creature. It is a miracle that he can use
these constraints to open out, in his thoughts, to the world at large.
I am an Oriya, I was bom in Cuttack. My father was a village boy. My
village roots are indelibly printed in my being. The features of that vil­
lage—its soil, its trees, its ponds, its greenery, its temples, its cattle—speak
to me in a language I understand. My two mothers are—the village, and
the one from whose womb I emerged into the light. These two ‘origins’
are the constituents of my being. And yet, none of my philosophy is
focused on them. After giving birth to me, they let me be free to wander
around the world. I do not know my own DNA, my own karmic
inheritance but my thinking moves unrestricted. My origin and inherit­
ance set me free.
At the age of seventeen, I migrated to Bengal, uprooted from my
native soil. How could I take root there? I picked up the language, made
friends, and flourished. The new roots again set me free. The original
roots remained in memory. Memory sought to reach back. What it
recovers are traces of the past. When I go to my village, those traces
cling to every aspect of it. But my present was being constituted
elsewhere, i.e., in Calcutta.
 PhilosophicalJourney, Roots, and Religion • 117
A radical transplantation took place when I moved to Germany, and
then years later to the USA. The German language and German philoso­
phy became parts of my being. I thought through them. No such ‘taking
roots’, however, occurred in America. You bring your roots, branches to
America, and you live with them—a little transformed and transmitted.
You still remain a rootless individual.
Thus, there are layers of rootedness, to all of which I cling with utmost
tenacity. Yet in my thinking, I wish to be free. The ability to think with
a conceptuality which transcends traditions—in my case, Indian, Ger­
man, and American—amazes me. A tradition nourishes your life, makes
possible a meaningful world but leaves openings through which other
traditions may be contacted. No tradition is a closed windowless monad.
I am not merely an Oriya, I am also an Indian. I am also a human, with
the entire history of human consciousness shaping me. In this way I
realize I am the midpoint of a series of concentric circles. To actualize
those circles within my consciousness is what it takes to be a world-
philosopher. Dialogue with other traditions is also a dialogue within
oneself.

VI
In the course of my philosophical journey, and in the process of recov­
ering my roots, it is not unusual for me to try to ascertain what has
happened to my religious beliefs. It must already have been clear to my
readers that I have lost most of them—while, I must add, preserving a
core of what I call ‘religiosity’. The important thing about a life’s story
is not so much where the story ends but the path it has followed. So let
me reconstruct that path so far as religion is concerned.
I was bom into a deeply religious family, where life moved around
the family temple. Raised amongst Vaisnava practices, I imbibed the
love for Krishna’s life, and learned to sing songs in praise of the lord.
When in the village, there would be non-stop (akhanda) singing, by the
community, in Krishna’s praise and in chanting his names, sometimes
for twenty-four hours, sometimes for days together. Those were highly
emotional experiences—along with all the dancing and singing it
involved—for a twelve-year-old boy, who never gave up the hope of
sometimes having a vision of the Divine one. That good fortune never
occurred for me. Since my father did not quite believe in the priestly
privileges of the Brahmins, he encouraged me to do the rituals for Lord
Jagannath, who was the centre of the puja room of the family. I enjoyed
doing the arati, which involved amongst other things, delicately and
118 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
gracefully moving the lamp-holder before the idols. The way my father
was moved by the rituals became a part of my appreciation of religious
life.
At fifteen, under the influence of Sri Aurobindo’s ideas, I thought of
myself as beginning to practise yogic meditation. My early immersion
in Vaisnava rituals became less important, although they still continued
to bring tears to my eyes and choke my throat with emotion. What
Aurobindo’s writings made me believe is that by practising meditation,
I could let a cosmic spirit descend into my being, take hold of me, and
use my resources for a cosmic transformation. The idea squared well
with my Gandhian obsession to save and uplift humankind. Aurobindo
convinced me that politics and religion, the service of humankind and
the yogic pursuit of spirituality, could and should go together. The
possibility of a new religion which accommodates social and political
reforms was brought home by Gandhi. My new search was for a religion
which could bring Gandhi and Aurobindo together. Yoga and social/
political activism were inseparable—did not Vivekananda stand for that
as well? The religious point of view was strengthened, now freed from
Vaisnava ritualism, and provided a rock from which Marxism could be
challenged and defeated.
This renewed confidence in the political implication of religion
centred in yoga found its decisive end during the ‘Great Calcutta
Killings’ during my B.A. final year—also the last year of British rule in
India. After having lived through a carnage, in which Hindus and
Muslims killed each other in thousands, I asked myself what the value
of religion was, and in whose name, over the centuries, and now before
my eyes, could such acts of wanton cruelty be perpetrated? Gandhi’s
path was to inculcate true religion, which breeds mutual respect and
tolerance. I would run, when the Mahatma was in the city, to his prayer
meetings, where recitations from all the major religions were read. It did
inspire but I thought otherwise. Might it not be more effective if the
importance of religion in my life were totally de-emphasized?
When I accompanied Vinoba in his padayatra, he would talk about
bhaktimarga, the path of devotion, of the Maharashtra saints; his eyes
would be full of tears as he spoke about Tukaram and Jnaneswar, and
also of Kabir. Again, I witnessed an attempt to bring about social change
with the help of religion. Vinoba often used the plain believer’s lan­
guage. When the first landlord in Telengana came up to him with a gift
of land, he saw God’s presence in him. Such locutions stirred something
within me but soon left me cold, whereas the progress of the land-gift
movement, or attending to Gandhian sarvodaya conference would inspire
 PhilosophicalJourney, Roots, and Religion • 119
me with a new vision of both end and means. What had that to do with
religion? Vinoba would often, in his more intellectual moments, de-
emphasize the word ‘religion’ and prefer to speak of the necessity of
reconciling science with self-knowledge—vijhana with atmajhanal
Spirituality, not religion, he would say, is what is needed in the age of
modem science and nuclear weapons. What was ‘spirituality’?
Again, my mind would go back to the figures whom 1 adored as
symbols of spirituality: Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Auro-
bindo, Tagore; also Krishna Prem, and Ramana Maharshi. But did they
not all still speak the language of religion, of ‘God’, the ‘Divine’? Could
I entirely reject the language of religion, and consequently the associ­
ated beliefs, and yet pin my faith in the idea of spirituality? That was my
last resort. By the end of the eighties I had been able to do that.
In between, lay the experience of witnessing my mother’s struggle
with her religion. Sometime in the seventies—I had returned to India
from the US—she asked me if it was good for her to take initiation or
dlksa from a guru. I was surprised that she should ask me such a
question. But in order that my scepticism did not mar her faith, I took her
to Tara Chatteijee’s father, who was supposed to have some insight into
these matters. The old man talked to her for several hours, at the end of
which she had made up her mind. She went back to Orissa and took
dlksa from a local holy man, Baya Baba (the crazy one). She would after
that spend a lot of time in this person’s ashram, and found comfort in his
guidance. I was happy. The guru passed away sometime in the early
years of the eighties, and she felt abandoned, for she had hoped she
would be able to meet her own death with fortitude with his spiritual
guidance. Left alone again, she would talk to me openly. Towards the
end, she once, much to my surprise, said to me, ‘I am grateful to you for
having made it possible for me to take initiation. Now, I am ready to go.’
And she died in peace, when the evening service in the family temple
was being performed along with all the attendant music. As she passed
away, my need—whatever need I felt—for religion was over.
I was much clearer than ever before in my mind that I did not believe
in God. Why not say that to the world— ‘ipiavantu sarve’ at the top of
my voice? I declared myself to be a ‘semantic agnostic*. I did not even
quite understand what ‘God’ meant. ‘Don’t you believe in some power?’,
friends asked. Of course, I did believe in many different things. Why
should any of the things I believed in be called ‘God’, if, indeed, it was
not God but something else? I have more sympathy and understanding
of what the Upanisads call the brahman, but it was muddle-headed to
say the brahman is God.
120 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
Once I clearly and unambiguously rejected belief in God, the idea of
spirituality, despite its equivocations and ambiguities, became more
interesting. Philosophy, as a search for the transcendental ground of
mundanity, began to make sense. I also attempted to recover the sense of
religiosity that was important for me. Religiosity now meant to me a
sensitivity to the irreducible sacredness of things: the sacredness of life,
sacredness of humanity, and sacredness of nature; the moral responsibil­
ity to preserve life, nature and humankind, to let humans flourish and
develop to their best ability—in brief, using Whitehead’s expression,
‘world-loyalty’.
I do not deny God’s existence because I hold a materialistic world
view that matter is all that there is. On the contrary, I totally reject
materialism as a bad philosophy. Idealism, for me is a quite plausible
philosophy. But all these issues have nothing to do with the question of
God’s existence. The point is, we neither understand what ‘God’ means,
nor have I ever understood what human need the alleged ‘God’ fulfils.
Conventional religious belief impedes both thinking and action.
Freed from that burden, I feel free to think. Thinking is hard; to
follow the path of thinking is harder still. To fall while moving along
this path is the best good fortune that a thinker can hope for. Can I have
the good fortune, in this regard, of my dear friend Hannah Arendt?
m
American Life in the Last
Three Decades

hen I arrived in the United States of America for the first time, the
W Vietnam War was in full swing, and I watched President Johnson
vow on the television to cany on the battle until the Communists were
defeated. When I returned, two years later, student protest against the
war was at its height. I was taken aback when a graduate student
expressed his surprise that I should have emigrated to the USA at a time
when the country had lost all moral greatness as never before. Students
at Stanford burnt a campus building (the well-known Indian sociologist
M.N. Srinivas lost his research notes in that fire). In Columbia Univer­
sity, the students took over the administration building. In Norman, the
Vietnam flag was hoisted on the campus. At Kent State in Ohio, several
students died from the National Guard gunfire. The campuses seemed to
be on fire. Political unrest bred spiritual hunger. Both political authority
and the church came under cloud of suspicion—culminating in the
Hippie movement, the Woodstock music festival, the proliferation of
eastern spiritual seekers (and, correlatively, gurus), the use of drugs
such as marijuana for raising one’s consciousness, free sex, and overall,
the search for a new brand of spirituality. My Indian philosophy classes
at the New School started off by being over-crowded but ended up with
half a dozen students as the discussions became more and more discur­
sive, and less and less to do with ‘consciousness raising’. It is amazing
how a political error of Kennedy and Johnson brought about the massive
transformation of the life and culture of the young. A new idealism, an
intense longing for something new and ennobling—for something whose
absence was lamented by my student David Power—emerged.
As I look back, after thirty years, to those Vietnam War days, what a
122 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
sea change I notice in the life and ideals in the USA! The milestones in
the political arena were: the assassination of the Kennedy brothers and
of Martin Luther King (with whom I had dined in Calcutta), the eventual
defeat and withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam; the Watergate
scandal and President Nixon’s resignation to avoid impeachment (I
watched Nixon leave the White House on the television), and the
emergence of the Reagan era, marked by a new culture of greed, self-
aggrandizement, attempts to set the clock back as far as civil rights,
affirmative action, and anti-poverty programmes were concerned. Com­
ing to more recent times, I must mention the new Republican majority in
the House. Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America’ embodying the
ideal of the pursuit of self-interest (a la Ayn Rand), hoping that this will
benefit all in the long run, Rush Limbaugh’s deliberate attempt to
transform, in the public eye, the feminist movement from having brought
about awareness (as well as social change) of women’s rights, into a
‘feminazi’ movement, with its attendant ‘Nazi-like’ tactics; and the
consequent critique of ‘liberalism’ as the irresponsible, self-serving
ideology of the intellectually elite. What a change from the time when to
be a liberal was regarded as being noble of character and concerned
about removing poverty and the evils of racism! Now, in the nineties,
the liberal ‘bleeding heart’ intellectual is abused, and the conservative,
engaged in pursuing self interest, is praised. ‘Welfare’ is today regarded
as corrupting its recipients, perpetuating and imprisoning them in their
poverty. If in the early eighties, the ‘Reagan democrats’ were young
democrats opting for Reaganite economic reforms (converted to ‘supply-
side economics’ and cutting down taxes for the wealthy), today the
Clintonite democrats (and also the Tony Blair-led labourites) are re­
garded as having ‘hijacked’ the Republican programmes of cutting
down the welfare budget. A middle-of-the-road political economy has
come to prevail as the century comes to a close.
The breakdown of the Soviet empire brought about the demise of
European communism, and the Chinese communists are eager to ac­
commodate capitalist economy. Ideologies are ceasing to be world
forces, and oppositions between ideologies are softening. In the United
States, one still hears of the reigning ideology, i.e., ‘Free-market
economy’. But one does not realize that the free market that reigns today
is different from Adam Smith’s. Three factors make for that difference:
there is a great deal of government regulation to promote public good, or
at least to ward off public danger; the huge government-owned defence
and armament production, even if contracted out to private contractors,
is ruled by, and marketed to, the state; and, finally millions of ordinary
 American Life in the Last Three Decades • 123
citizens buying stocks through mutual funds share in the ownership of
companies. The fact is that new technology makes the old dominance of
ideologies—be it socialism or free market, pointless. A new society,
which we do not quite understand, seems to be on the horizon.
It is precisely in this complex situation that I find myself losing my
way. When I left India thirty years ago, I could say with relative
certainty that I was a Gandhian socialist (not a state-socialist). The word
‘capitalism’—as I grew up in India—had for us pejorative connotations:
a capitalist was taken to be a ruthlessly selfish person who appropriated
all profits for himself at the cost of the hard labour of the impoverished
and de-humanized workers. The word ‘socialism’ correspondingly had
benign, even ethically praiseworthy connotations (despite the ruthless-
ness associated with the Stalinist regime). If you live in the United
States, the connotations would be reversed for you: ‘socialism’ would
mean something despicable, the ruthless denial of individual freedom,
while the capitalist would be regarded as one who, by his self-aggran-
dizement, created jobs for others, who is a symbol of free enterprise,
initiative and human potentiality.
Many Indian friends in the USA—doctors, scientists, and
technologists—have imbibed this new reversal of meanings. It is not
that you arrive at this changed significance by your own thinking. It is
rather the over-powerful media (including the Wall Street Journal)
which foster the comfortable self-satisfaction that you know the truth.
Why else should you be so wealthy and powerful, and why should
socialist Russia have collapsed? I have tried, in conversations, to argue
that these examples do not prove the case; that, as a matter of fact, in
American life there is not mere selfish pursuit but, on the contrary, there
is a great deal of social sense, caring for others, altruism, and a sense of
community, and that if Russia collapsed, that is not because of an inner
deficiency of socialism but because of the ruthless imperialism of the
Stalinist-Leninist dictatorship.
Several important truths seem to have escaped the point of view
fostered by the American media. Individual freedom is not selfishness;
pursuit of unmitigated self-interest is not the height of that freedom.
Social order is not simply an aggregate of individuals, each pursuing his
own self-interest, but requires that these freely acting agents be perme­
ated by a social sense that is not authoritatively imposed but is sponta­
neously enjoyed. In no case could selfishness be the highest of human
virtues. Altruism, self-sacrifice, and benevolence have to be accorded
that place. American society exhibits all these, while the theory which is
posited as undergirding it tells a different story. But that theory appears
124 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
to be working only because of the pervasive altruistic spirit that imper­
ceptibly permeates life.
Gandhi still seems to have a relevance. Unlimited greed must be self-
defeating, as Plato knew twenty-five centuries ago. Communitarianism
seems to provide a third alternative to capitalism and socialism, and
information technology seems to favour the Gandhian ideal of a decen­
tralized economy.
i*
m

Keeping a Promise

had promised my mother that I would consign her ashes to the

I Ganges, and perform the necessary rituals at Gaya. Every Hindu
wants the rituals to be preformed after he or she is gone. Nine years had
passed since she died, and I was still hoping to keep my promise. When
my eldest brother died, and my own health began declining, the urgency
of visiting Gaya took hold of me, and I made up my mind. But could I
make the trip—about a twelve-hour train journey from Calcutta—and
go through the trials and tribulations of the elaborate priestly ceremo­
nies, all by myself? Given the state of her health, Bani could not
accompany me. It was at this time that Bina Gupta and her husband,
Madan, came to my aid.
But let me first explain why a person who is a self-proclaimed atheist,
a western-trained analytic thinker, and one who has lived in the West for
thirty years, be so intent on performing the rituals in Gaya, which
involve offering oblations to the departed souls. Have I not said earlier
in this narrative that I do not believe in after-life? And so I do not believe
that my parents have another existence after they departed. My determi­
nation to make the trip to Gaya and perform the rituals, was due to two
considerations: first, I must keep my promise to my mother, and the
obligation to keep my promise does not depend on her watching me
from above. Like Pascal, I argued, if she is not there, that should not
make me to go back on my word; and in case my belief is wrong, and she
is there watching me, my keeping my promise would please her, and
perhaps in some sense ‘save’ her from ‘rebirth’. In any case, I ought to
take the trouble to go to Gaya.
Philosophically, although I no longer subscribe to implied meta­
physical beliefs, I still believe that performing ‘rituals’ is obligatory. In
this mode of thinking, I am as much influenced by the Mimamsa
126 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
thinkers as by Confucius. The fundamental insight that binds members
of a community, inheritors of a tradition, is not so much sharing theoreti­
cal beliefs as participating in common social practices (which include
ceremonies and rituals). The theoretical self-interpretation of partici­
pants may, as a matter of fact, differ, but the fact of participation is what
ties the members together in a shared social structure. So even though I
am an atheist, I enthusiastically take part in the pujas, religious ceremo­
nies and rituals. They attract me as signifying my belongingness to the
Hindu tradition, while I do not share all the Hindu beliefs.
So on a winter evening, accompanied by Bina and Madan Gupta, I
boarded the train at the Howrah station which would take us to Gaya. All
the travel arrangements had been made by Bina. When I left the Rama-
krishna Mission for the railway station, I already had fever; my body
was hot, and a cough had turned into a non-stop hiccup. The train was
several hours late in leaving the station. Waiting in that condition on the
platform was uncomfortable. Bina wrapped my head in a blanket, and let
me rest inside the car which had taken us there. After a night’s train
journey, we got down at Gaya station. I was shivering due to the fever.
We drove to a hotel in Bodh Gaya, and I was put to bed to rest, half
asleep, still hiccuping without pause. In the morning we were to go to
the temple where the rituals were to be performed.
Bodh Gaya is the place where Guatama attained enlightenment and
became the Buddha. The thought of being there was exhilarating but I
was shivering with fever. As we went from Bodh Gaya to Gaya in a
rikhshaw, a distance of about six miles, we followed the banks of the
river Falgu. It did not escape me that after attaining his wisdom, this was
the path on which Gautama Siddhartha walked, along the river Falgu, up
to Benaras, where he preached his first sermon. The hills on both sides,
that I now saw, were certainly there at the time of the Buddha, but not the
same trees and bushes. The river bed must be wider now than it was
then, so the grass his feet trod upon must be now in the riverbed. We
know that people from neighbouring villages flocked to see this young
holy man. My imagination wandered freely across two and a half
millennia. Did he pass through Gaya? How did the priestly tradition in
Gaya respond to him?
Before going further in my narrative, a few words about Bina, who
became my friend and saviour. Her family hailed from Ambala, in the
Punjab, but Bina was bom and raised in Calcutta. Eventually, she came
to Santiniketan to study philosophy. It was then that she attended some
of my classes. But I really met her in the USA, when she joined one of
my summer seminars sponsored by the National Endowment for the
 Keeping a Promise • 127
Humanities. She had already started teaching at the University of Mis­
souri. When I got to know her next, nearly fifteen years later, she was
already a full professor and had published a work on the Advaita
Vedanta theory of perception, and was thinking about writing on the
concept of saksi-caitanya or witness-consciousness. This book was
about to appear, when she offered to accompany me to Gaya. An
accomplished Vedanta scholar, she continues to help me in preparing
my manuscripts, and for the last few years all my manuscripts have
passed through her careful hands. Now I feel as if without her help I
cannot write anything for the press! She has sacrificed her own time for
doing creative work—although she is engaged in several research
projects—for my sake.
With high fever, an unceasing hiccup, with a dhoti and a shawl, I
stood in the temple, where a priest exempted me from dipping my feet
in the river, and I followed him reciting all the Sanskrit flokas. I tried to
focus on the Sanskrit verses, hymns and prayers, grasp their meanings
(which was not too difficult for me), tried to situate myself in the cosmic
order in which they make sense. I did not have much difficulty in
praying for my ancestors, for my parents, and three brothers who are no
more. I was exhilarated when I realized that the priest made me pray for
all the dead anywhere in the world, for those who have none to pray for
them, for those who, as the verse ran, ‘were eaten by tigers in the forest,
who had killed themselves (and so were not entitled to the oblations),
who died of snake-bite, who died leaving no one to mourn them’, and so
on and so on. I felt that having come to pray for my mother, I was indeed
praying for all the departed, and wondered if there was any difference
between the two prayers!
With the rituals over, we returned to the hotel. My hiccups were
getting more frequent and my chest and ribs were sore. Bina hurried to
a doctor in the town, who gave me a strong sedative. I fell into a deep
sleep. Later in the night they transported me in a rickshaw to the railway
station, as I vaguely recall. The train for Calcutta was ten hours late, it
was bitter cold, and the station’s platform was so crowded that there was
hardly any place to stand or sit, and I was heavily sedated. I have only
a faint recollection of when we boarded the train. Waking up late around
noon, I found myself sleeping on a berth on the train, hiccups over, and
the fever gone. Tired but relaxed, I recollected the events of the past two
days, and wondered if it had been a dream. Getting down in Calcutta, we
asked the driver—Bina had arranged for her sister-in-law’s car—to take
us to the RKMI. I had hardly eaten anything during the last two days;
Bina suggested that we finish our work before we went anywhere to get
128 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
a bite to eat. So we first went to a ghat of the Ganges. I steadily walked
down the broad steps of the ghat, into the water, and emptied my
mother’s ashes into die brown waters of the holy river.
Back at the Ramakrishna Mission, I felt as light and luminous as I
have seldom felt before. But I recalled—for the first time—that fifteen
years ago, when we were spending the summer in Calcutta near Lake
Market, my mother came to live with us when I was down with fever and
had an uncontrollable bout of hiccups, which continued for almost
twenty-four hours, even while sleeping. Bani said, ‘Mother was sitting
beside you all through the night.’ This time I had gone in search of her
spirit. Could she have been there in Gaya? It felt spooky to think about
it. Bina filled the void left by my mother’s death.
All this coincided with my turning seventy later that year. In an
international conference sponsored by the Society for Asian and Com­
parative Philosophy and Utkal University in Bhubaneswar, the present
President of the society, Bina Gupta, presented me with a leather-bound
volume of letters she had solicited from colleagues, friends, and stu­
dents in a rather moving ceremony. It touched me more than it ordinarily
would have, because the reception was held in Orissa, was attended by
close friends from the West, as well as by members of my family. The
Vice-Chancellor of Utkal University joined in, presenting me with a
plaque. Wasn’t I one of their former students?
TTiis story ends with the year 1998.
m
IW
Epilogue

wami Lokeswaranda died, and I had to move my Calcutta home

S from the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture elsewhere. We
bought a flat in Calcutta; I spent two nights there to satisfy the require­
ments of the puja performed for entering a home. An extraordinary
cyclone had hit the Orissa coast, destroying, amongst others, most of my
village. My elder sister passed away, and, for a few days before the end,
constantly talked about her brother, the philosopher. Bani’s arthritis is
getting worse, I have to help her in her daily chores. Bina tirelessly
carries on her editorial work.
The large Husserl book on which I have been working is yet to be
written. With the help of Bina, however, several books, most of them on
Indian philosophy, but some on phenomenology, are about to be pub­
lished. Bina is also editing a Festschrift for me, which she has titled, The
Empirical and the Transcendental: A Fusion o f Horizons.
It has been an exhilarating life, about which I have no complaints. I
either did not do or did not succeeded in doing everything that, as a
young man, I had dreamt of. Amongst those dreams are: doing Gandhian
village-level social work, political activism, practising yoga. Instead, I
have spent a life devoted to thinking, with few outer manifestations. The
books written are not results of thinking, but mark different phases in
that process. That process is its own reward.
Living outside India has been hard—comfortable for my outer life,
but hard for my inner one. The choice deprived me of many sources of
emotional enrichment. But spending a lifetime in a country of adoption
is also rewarding. In America, you become a part of a vibrant intellec­
tual life. To combine the rich philosophical heritage of India with the
ever-awake intellectual life of America is a benefit which one reaps.
Only, one should not be misled into thinking of America—under pressure
130 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
of power—as the centre of the universe. There are as many centres as
there are human communities. My village, now in ruins, is one.
Life is incomplete, and as Heidegger puts it, is beingrtowards-death.
However, Heidegger misconstrues the nature of human existence by his
one-sided description. There is, in the midst of this constant self-
exceeding, a fixed point of self-reference which Husserl captured in his
concept of transcendental ego. This prevents self-dissipation, a pointless
scattering in outward-directed projects. The process of living, with its
ever-new projects, always tends to return to that centre, where they are
unified.
This life will be complete, in its incompleteness, with my death. Then
it will be a matter for judgment by others. The fundamental question for
judgment, will be: ‘What was the point of it all*, not the simple moral
question, ‘Was he a good or a bad person?’ For myself, living this life
has been, if successful, an aesthetic project. Has it been enjoyable,
harmonious, and fulfilling?

15 October 2000
 Appendix:
My Contribution to Philosophy

I t is most probably Heidegger who remarked that every philosopher

has one central problem which he is concerned with in all perspec­
tives, at different depths, and with many variations—as happens with a
musical theme.
Besides such a central problem, I should add, a philosopher also
wrestles with certain texts, or certain figures, which beckon him all
through his life.
The problem which captured my imagination early in my thinking
life is what may be called the problem of Platonism. Are there entities
which are Platonic, ideal entities as the Germans called them, abstract
entities as the logicians named them? I was convinced that there are.
Much of my early work—including my Gottingen dissertation—consisted
in showing that nominalistic denials of such entities will not do. I soon
began to realize that what is brought under the title of Platonism is a
whole array of diverse entities; essences and meanings to introduce a
preliminary division of that realm. Once this ontology is rehabilitated,
one confronts several questions: is psychologistic reduction (psycho­
logism) any more viable than the nominalistic? Even if psychologism is
rejected, how does the mind apprehend or group these entities? These
questions are alive, and 1 seek to understand and answer them in my
most recent writings on phenomenology—after nearly four decades. It
is these questions which connect Husserl and Frege in my thoughts. I
found in these questions a central point from where I mediate between
analytic philosophy and continental philosophy: here the issues cluster
around a satisfactory theory of meaning. Reductionist psychologism
had, no doubt, to be rejected but the mental and ideal meanings had to
132 • Between Two Worlds: East and West
be bonded together, which required a new concept of the mental as a
correlation between two strata—real acts and ideal meanings.
Long before my research into phenomenology took shape, 1 had
embarked on the study of Navya-Nyaya epistemology, which resulted
in Gangefa’s Theory of Truth. I also studied the major Vedantic texts,
which resulted in my writings on Indian philosophy during the last few
years. Gangefa’s Theory of Truth contained an English translation of
Ganges’s chapter on knowledge of truth and also a detailed analysis of
the problems and arguments surrounding the concept of pramanya. The
original contribution of this book to philosophy is not much. Its service
is by way of expounding the doctrines of Navya-Nyaya, commenting on
the texts in a manner that is faithful to the work and the method of the
Pandit tradition, and to present the theories of the various schools on
pramanya in an analytical manner. Translation of some other chapters
from the ‘Pratyaksakhanda’ of Tattvachintamani are unfished, and
hopefully will be completed before long.
In the papers on Indian philosophy, which I have published during
the last thirty years or so, I have been concerned with the nature of
Indian logic, the theory of meaning, issues surrounding the realism-
idealism debate, the nature of the pramdna theories, the idea of reduc-
ibility of Sabda as a pramdna, and the claim of iruti to be apauruseya.
The studies and the resulting theses were brought together in Reason
and Tradition in Indian Philosophy. Besides giving new interpretations
of old concepts and theories (e.g., a theory of quasi-Sinn ascribed to the
Navya-Nyaya account of meaning), I have, in this book, pleaded for the
recognition of the claims of memory, history and mathematics to be
irreducible types of valid cognition. A continuation of these researches
into the domains of action-theory, freedom and art is being completed.
The connecting link between the two areas is provided by a series of
lectures given in Calcutta in 1992, and published under the title Theory
and Practice, and in a couple of journal articles on the theme ‘Theory
and Practice in Indian Thought’. In these publications, I have insisted
on the purely theoretical character of a large segment of Indian thought,
also ascribed to it a theory of action and practice, and have argued that
the ideal of moksa espoused in the different dartonas is heavily clouded
by the theoretical concepts of the system concerned.
In some of the papers of the last five years, I have drawn attention to
some very interesting and tantalizing features of the dialectic of knowl­
edge and ignorance in Advaita Vedanta, to the unsatisfactoriness of
Samkara’s criticisms of Buddhist philosophies, and to the many ways
 Appendix • 133
Vedanta has been understood, interpreted, and appropriated in modem
Indian thought.
Besides my continuing engagement with the task of interpreting
Husserl’s phenomenology (in the light of his total corpus including the
Nachlass), I have also undertaken a reformulation and defence of
transcendental philosophy in the tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Husserl.
According to my reformulation, transcendental subjectivity (in whose
life all meanings have their origin) is historical (here I am indebted to
Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind), corporeal and linguistic (I owe to
insights from Husserl), as well as inter-subjective (following Merleau-
Ponty). I have also sought to respond to the criticisms of transcendental
philosophy by de-constructionists such as Derrida and historicists such
as Foucault.
However, in this process of dialogue with the post-modernists, I have
also appropriated into my own thinking some of their important
insights—most importantly, the reduction of identities to systems of
differences. Thus I have spoken of ‘layers of selfhood’ instead of a fixed
identity, and of cultural identities as reducible to systems of
differences—as a consequence of which the concepts of cultural relativ­
ism and incommensurability amongst radically different cultures be­
come deceptively spurious. First representing cultures as circles (£ la
Herder), I defended the possibility of intercultural understanding with
the idea of intersecting circles. Then, I reflected on that representation of
a culture as a circle and defended the thesis that a cultural unity is a
construct out of ‘systems of differences’. The distinction between ‘inter-
cultural’ and ‘intracultural’ thereby gets blurred; we have then to adopt,
in the words of Welsch, the standpoint of ‘transculturality’. These ideas
have been for the first time expounded in my Calcutta lectures during
the last five years. These lectures have been put together in The Self and
Its Other, just published by the Oxford University Press, Delhi.
The path of thinking has not been solipsistic. Many students, col­
leagues and friends in India have contributed to it; so also have
innumerable friends in the USA and Germany. The responsibility for
the positions I have taken is, however, always mine, and the path is still
open-ended. Thinking cannot have a closure.
 Glossary

adda free, endless conversation

arati worshipping a deity with a lamp
ashrama the centre of a holy person
avidya ignorance
bhajan (usually collective) singing of devotional songs
bou the author called his mother ‘bou’
brahmacarin the practitioner of the path of brahman
dlksa initiation
dhoti a garment of Indians
ghat the steps from the bank leading to the water of a river
golapbag garden of roses
guru teacher
Krsna
••• an incarnation of Visnu
mdya illusion
puja religious ritual of worship, usually a deity
punjabi a kind of shirt worn by many Indians
pramana Means of true cognition
iabdapramana ‘word’ as a means of true cognition
sal-bithi promenade of ‘sal’ trees
sarvodaya ‘flourishing of all’, the economic and social utopia
conceived by Mahatma Gandhi
Tantric pertaining to the Hindu sect ‘Tantra’
zamindari landlordhship
OTHER OXFORD BOOKS

JONARDON G a NERI (EDITOR)

Philosophy, Culture and Religion
The C ollected Essays o f Bimal K rishna M atilal
Mind, Language and World
Ethics and Epics

J.N . M oh a nty
The Self and Its Other
Philosophical Essays
(Oxford India Paperbacks)

B im a l K ris h n a M a t i l a l
The Word and the World
India’s C ontribution to the Philosophy o f Language
(O xford India Paperbacks)

OXFORD
U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

www.oup.com