Prophet of a New Hindu Age

The Life and Times of Acharya Pranavananda

Ninian Smart,Swami Purnananda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351801058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This is the fascinating biography, first published in 1985, of the remarkable Bengali religious leader Swami Pranavananda who lived in the turbulent years of the early twentieth century. The story of his life has to some extent been eclipsed by the struggle for Indian independence, but his extraordinary personal qualities, his determined asceticism, his high ideals of social service and commitment to Hindu solidarity all serve to set him apart from his contemporaries and entitle him to be better known by political and religious historians of the period.

1
The Childhood of a Yogi

Around the birth of a saint there cluster legends. Parents recall significant dreams. Neighbours remember strange signs. Later biographers seek for meaning in the date. All this is true of Swami Pranavananda, whose story and place in Indian spirituality and political history this book unfolds. He was born in 1896, in a water-girt village in what is now Bangladesh but which was then part of that greater India over which the British presided. It was at the beginning of the greatest and most fruitful period of Indian modernity: the period which saw the ultimate success of the nationalist movement, during just over half a century of powerful debate, turmoil, war and struggle. 1896 was a year of both suffering and new hope.

It was in the middle of a dreadful period of famines and plagues, especially in Bengal. But it was also the year when, on the other side of India, in Maharashtra, the Shivaji festival was founded by a militant nationalist, Lokamanya Tilak. Shivaji had been the founder of the Mahratta empire which had broken away from Mughal rule in the seventeenth century, and so had prepared the example of a Hindu Raj to set against both the Muslims and later the British. Tilak, in founding a new militancy, trod a path which ultimately the majority of the Congress Party, under the leadership of Nehru and Gandhi, was not going to take. A more moderate and non-violent nationalism was to prove more adequate to the task of prising away Britain’s grip. But Tilak’s strong patriotism was important in representing a promise of revolt which the British could never ignore.

Only three years before 1896, a highly significant event had occurred in the unimaginably distant city of Chicago. There the dynamic Bengali religious teacher Vivekananda, disciple of the saintly Ramakrishna, had made a great impact on the so-called Parliament of Religions held in connection with a World Fair. Vivekananda’s message of the universality of Hinduism, as a faith embracing many different paths to the Divine, had given quite a new perspective on the Indian tradition – a perspective new, that is, to Westerners, who had hitherto mainly encountered missionary reports of strange images and dark cults. Vivekananda’s message was to become the heart of a modern Hindu ideology which helped at the same time to express a pluralistic nationalism. Both the militancy of Tilak and the universalism of Vivekananda were to remain important ingredients in the Indian national struggle, and were important features of the background to the future Swami Pranavananda’s life and thought.

1893 was also the year that Gandhi had gone to South Africa where, over the next twenty-one years, he was to forge new weapons with which to return to a now restless India near the start of the First World War. It was, then, at a propitious time that young Binode was born in Bajitpur, about two hundred miles east of Calcutta.

He was born into a traditional Hindu setting. Like many other such villages in India, Bajitpur was in effect a cluster of settlements. But unlike those in most parts of the great sub-continent it was a very watery place. A branch of the river Kumar twisted through the area, forming streams and ponds between which were placed different settlements accommodating various castes and groups – the Brahmins whose purity and high status made them the chief repository of ancient Vedic rituals and teachings, the intermediate Kayasthas, the lowly Sudras, the Muslims and the untouchables. The streams and ponds could cater for the drinking, washing and ritual requirements of the different groups. Here was a model, in some ways, of the wider pluralism which much of modern Indian thinking has tried to express: different castes and religions living together in a fashion, close but separated. And everywhere water – sometimes inundating the whole area, washing into the yards, brimming up towards the houses and giving the village the aspect of a fleet of boats, surrounding the fruit-trees, washing away dirt and bathing away the causes of sickness, renewing the soil and enriching the next season’s harvest, filling the broad fields that stretched round Bajitpur, tearing away the creepers and flowers that in drier seasons embellished the paths and yards beside the huddled houses and beneath the varied trees.

In Binode’s day there were, too, the four temples and other shrines which helped to focus the religious life of the area. There was a Sanskrit school with its traditional pundit, and later there was to rise the English-language high school, the major key to moving onwards in the new hierarchy of learning and employment grafted on to India by the British. But although here was a symbol of that wider world into which India was moving willy-nilly, the rhythms of the village were primordial. They were times without time.

Life in the village was not a matter of diaries and printed calendars but of the change of seasons, the phases of the moon, the rising of the sun and its setting. The year revolved in the minds of men and women who anticipated the festivals and traditional routines and duties. Tradition produces a matrix out of which the stuff of life is daily fashioned. Despite the floods, storms and plagues that beset Bengali life, the people had security in the repeated structures of time which bind lives together. For each festival and each routine, whether of sowing or harvesting or housecleaning, reminded a person of his brothers and sisters in the fabric of village life with whom he shared joys and tribulations. Life was warm, humid, patterned by sacred events, glimmering with the traces of the glorious past, and haunted by the gods who were the outer messengers of the one Divine Being.

The interpreters of these messengers were, as often as not, the old folk. Grandparents in such a milieu delighted in telling the ancient epic stories of the Ramāyaņa and the Mahābhārata – those immense mixtures of adventure and high derring-do on the one hand and spiritual and ethical teachings on the other. For village India it was as if John Buchan, Fenimore Cooper, Tolkien and the Pentateuch were blended together, so that the young absorbed the values of the Hindu world as they sat around the cots of the old men late into the night. Thus they were kept in touch with the timeless values of seers who conveyed to the human race the sacred utterances of the Vedas and the spellbinding teachings of the Song of the Lord. They could listen to the village boatman cry at dusk ‘Hari Lord, the day has gone, evening has come, guide me across the stream of life’. As they were prepared themselves to cross that river, the children, wide-eyed and eager, would call on their elders to repeat the sacred tales which wound long, even endlessly, through the adventures of gods, humans and demons in Ayodhya and Lanka and the ancient battlefields of Bharata, of old India. In this way the village was linked dimly but firmly to a sense of a huge, unitary past: and now that past was being mobilised anew as a consciousness of Indian identity was being stimulated by alien rule and alien educational values. But this new national sense was only a ripple as yet on the surface of village life in Bajitpur.

The rhythms of the Hindu festivals are complex, and it was within this dense pattern of living that the young Binode came to consciousness. He was to see the astrologers come to the house during the first week of Baisakh, in the middle of April, at the start of the Hindu year. They would exhibit their learning and their knowledge of the heavenly bodies whose subtle influences helped to shape human destinies. Astrology was, and is in most of India still, respected as a vital science by which social life could and should be regulated. One should not run contrary to the stars; and days for weddings, all kinds of larger endeavours in daily life, plans for leaving home to go to market or to college – all such were undertaken in the light of the reasoning and observations of the professional exponents of jyotish, star-science. The boy would listen to their thoughts about the coming year and whether its seasons boded good or ill. It was a subtle affair, for blended with the heavenly influences were the natural powers of things, the karma of living beings, the activities of gods, the will of the Creator. All these affected human life and all should be studied seriously by those who wished to understand why things happen as they do.

In July and August came the monsoon, when the village would take on its aspect as a fleet. It was time, too, to honour snakes, those obscure and vibrant repositories of sacred power, beautiful in their sheeny skins and kindly in action if only humans treated them with respect; time to offer milk for their delectation, and honour their divine role in the wider dispensation of the gods as symbols of time, promisers of fertility, reminders of creation. Also in August came the date of the Lord Krishna’s birth. Not all those in the village would directly participate, for not all were followers of Vishnu and his charming, heroic, dashing, sacred avatar, Krishna. But who in the village could fail to be affected by this Christmas of the Hindu year? Binode, like other children, could take joy in the example of the by no means solemn childhood and youth of blue Krishna, chubby in face, with cascades of black curls running round and down his lovely head.

October was the time of Durga, a most powerful deity in Bengal and beyond, but especially in Bengal. It was a time for getting new clothes and parading through the village – the Easter, as it were, of the Hindu world. The beautiful and fiercely impressive figure of Durga, reflecting the powers of divine creation and destruction, was the focus of sacrifice. The brahmins presided, and the sacrificial specialist would slaughter the goats before the image. The wild and insistent drums, the chants, the glory of the feast, would create an intense excitement that even the Muslims and the Harijans (although excluded from the rituals) would sense and enjoy. And so the year moved on. There was the festival to Lakshmi, sweet consort of Vishnu; the time of lights; the special festival for those who work in iron (bringing joy and power to the blacksmiths’ quarter in the rambling village); the time for honouring the forefathers, when heads of families did reverence to the ancestors (themselves part of the wider, invisible society in which the living are embedded); the sibling festival when sisters honoured brothers with a dot of sandal paste on the forehead, thus reinforcing the bonds of the family. There was the feast of Sarasvati, goddess of learning, when education itself was worshipped, the high school was a riot of colour and great processions took out the clay-built statue of the goddess and wound their way through the village until the impermanent image was drowned joyfully in the river (for life moves on, and the images were as impermanent and kaleidoscopic as anything else in this glory-filled universe). Finally the year drew to a close in March and April. During this time there was the Shiva festival, when the God was taken in procession by the untouchables and high caste Hindus celebrated one of the great orthodox representations of Deity, the great Yogi Shiva, auspicious one, frighteningly powerful creator and destroyer, personifying the immense cosmic cycles of emergence and fiery collapse. The eve of the New Year was at hand – a joyful time of village fairs, of sweets for the children and money for little toys, a time when fathers bought supplies of spices for the coming year and wives prepared delicacies for the visitors on this last day – priests who came to celebrate end-of-year ceremonials in each house and themselves received food and offerings, while those who wished to considered what vows to make for the coming year. The rich gained merit by organising public meals. The temple bells and drums sounded. The whole day and night were occupied with the repetition of God’s name; and the fairs abounded with sweets, little toys and feats of magic and music.

All this of course was superimposed on grimmer realities. The labour of the paddies and rice fields could be seriously disturbed by flooding, crops destroyed, children deprived. There were, then as now, large numbers of poor people; disease sometimes struck the mosquito-infested villages; malaria and amoebic dysentery were endemic. But despite these troubles and sufferings, a way of life had given shape, meaning and joy to the annual cycle. It provided for the Hindu a background of divinity, as it still does. The continuous singing of religious songs can be heard from a temple, paid for by the local rich: there is daily feeding of the poor; bells clang before the temple deities; and meanwhile in every Hindu household, regular offerings are made and rituals performed. It is a highly structured life, although belied sometimes by the appearance of chaotic bustle in the village and its satellites. Even in 1896 the number of people gave a semblance of chaos and today the pressures of population are even greater.

This was the village background – not without its idyllic side, even if it were laced with divisions, sufferings and anxieties – of the first years of Binode, later to be known as Acharya Pranavananda. Clearly there was much there, to any young person so predisposed, which would stimulate the religious sense. He was born on 29 January, during the holy month of Magha, towards dusk, when Hindus offer prayers both at the temple and in the home. For his later followers the time was auspicious; as one sun sank so another sun was rising. The full moon of Magha, as of other months, was a sacred turning point in the calendar, and it also coincided with the beginning of the present epoch in Hindu cosmic history, the Kali Yuga, which had begun five thousand years before.

The Kali Yuga is not a fortunate time to be alive, even if it contains great and holy figures who can arrest human decline by recalling humanity to the holy dharma or teaching. In previous epochs of the present aeon, life was more blessed and spacious. This is a common theme of Indian thought (and is shared with some other cultures). Not for them the easy assumption of human progress; rather a sense that life and virtue are decaying, sliding downwards. Thus Binode was born into a society which was on the brink of a contradictory, dualised world-view. The new national struggle promised a fresh beginning, a liberation, a revitalised India of the future. It contained the message of freedom and implied the modernist, evolutionary eschatology of progress. But older thought was more pessimistic, rooted in concepts of falling away from more golden ages. In the Kali Yuga humanity is afflicted by diseases, both physical and spiritual. It is rare for men to live beyond a hundred years. Religion is in decline, and various forms of viciousness are on the increase. Homosexuality is rife, as is heterosexual promiscuity. The dharma, in other words, is no longer preserved and this, in itself, affects the health of society. Still, there are those who struggle against this downward flowing stream: they swim higher. They are saints and human beings of great virtue. And their births are typically attended by all kinds of signs.

Binode’s parents were called Bishnu Charan Das and Sumati Devi. They were a pious couple belonging to the Kayastha caste which is variously classified in different places and regions. Its members range from landowners and bureaucrats to merchants and lawyers. As a minor landowner, Bishnu was part of the Bengali system of those days. He was subagent of the local major landlord or zamindar and had the task of collecting rents on his behalf. These larger landlords had of course an interest in squeezing the peasants, and agents could either become harsh enforcers of an increasingly oppressive system or act as buffers against their superiors. Bishnu, being a pious person who took virtue and mercy seriously, adopted the latter course. This brought him into conflict with Rajkumar Majumdar, the local landlord, and his managers, who tried to pressurise him with accusations and legal processes. A civil suit against him was to drag on for some twenty years – not uncommon in India then or even now – although an attempt to implicate Bishnu Das in the murder of two Bajitpur villagers was dismissed by the magistrate.

After the birth of Binode, Bishnu’s luck in regard to the law began to pick up, and he attributed his success as somehow due to the boy and his special relationship with God. As is not unusual in such cases his parents later looked back on certain dreams they had had before his birth as highly significant. They both had intimations that their future child was to be a manifestation of Lord Shiva. Sumati had a dream vision of Shiva turning into a baby whose exquisite aura filled the whole room. It was of course a common belief among such pious Hindus as Bishnu and Sumati that God adopts a human form and that both Shiva and Vishnu were liable to appear as humans from time to time in order to restore the holy teaching and the love of virtue in periods of chaos and degeneration like the present epoch.

Early events in the boy’s life were, they thought, confirmations of his exceptional nature. For one thing he seemed remarkably serene, not given to crying or making demands. The rumours that perhaps he was a manifestation of Shiva had spread and peasant families sometimes came to the house hoping for a power-enhancing glimpse of the divine child. His parents, impressed by his manner and intimations of his higher destiny, let him do much as he pleased and were no doubt surprised when he got them to give him an outhouse to use, and transformed it into a place of study and meditation. Even as a young boy, before his initiation into the life of the pious, upper-class Hindu, he was practising being a holy ascetic, preparing himself for his future career. Although his family ate fish and meat he remained vegetarian and kindly attempts to make him at least eat fish, for otherwise he might become sickly, resulted in his vomiting it up. He was it seemed a natural vegetarian. Indeed, he was very strict, for he even refused milk and ghee; and despite the remonstrations of the family priest, one Mahendra Chakravarty, he kept to this regime. His physique was strong and healthy. Apart from questions of the impurity which is brought upon one by eating flesh, Hindus often think of food in terms of the various forms of energy it generates. For the future Acharya there was always an abundance of energy, so he thought, so that taking these animal substances would give him a dangerous excess. The boy spent many hours in his outhouse trying out forms of traditional austerity or tapas. India and the Bengali milieu provided him with a great variety of heroes and role-models. What might seem to the modern Westerner peculiar and even rather precious (for children’s piety can indeed be sickly), could have been natural enough for Binode; his parents’ dreams and the rumours of peasants gave substance to the thought that here was a child destined for great things in the life of the spirit.

He was supposed, moreover, to have had a spiritual experience of great power when he was very young. The story was told by him many years later, when he was already in his 20s, but there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the account. He referred to the experience in conversation with Swami Purnananda, for instance, in October 1924, when he said: ‘My first God-realisation came to me at the age of 6’. Some think that this is a very early age for such an event. But already, as we have noted, the child was orienting himself towards the spiritual. Indeed if children can be precocious in music like Mozart or in philosophy like Shankara, why not in the numinous like Binode? The story is as follows.

One day he had climbed on to the roof of the family home, which was flat like that of most well-built Indian dwellings. Looking down, he saw his mother worshipping the Tulsi plant. This is a form of basil, and sacred to Vishnu. The legend is that there once was a beautiful and sa...