Life - Poetry - Yoga: Volume 1

Amal Kiran, "the Clear Ray", much like the Avatar of the Supramental Sun, Sri Aurobindo, lights up the paths of the pilgrims of Eternity in a series of letters. Amal's letters to the fellow-disciples of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother are both wide in range and rich in content, much like the letters of the Master. Unlike Sri Aurobindo's letters, Amal's are "Personal" not only in revealing a personal relationship between the writer and the recipient but also in bringing before us the personality of both. Amal who has wielded different literary forms proves to be no less an artist as a letter-writer than as a poet, etc. In a few strokes he conjures up before us the qualities of head, heart and spirit of his correspondent. Here are few examples:-

To me you are a person who is made "new" more and more in the image of the "true" every twenty-four hours. Your whole life is attuned to the Divine and each sunrise leads on to a finer harmony of your various parts in their turning towards the Infinite and the Eternal…

You have grown considerably — numerous eyes have been opened. Some of them forcibly, others flowerily; you appear to be like a little Argus, half interested in the hundred directions suddenly shining into view, half bewildered by their seemingly different calls…

You have become a store-house of creative life fissioning the human to set free the divine within and fusioning the human and the divine to bring about the super-person ahead…

Amal's own personality comes out in a thousand ways. He himself describes and comments on his physiognomy on seeing an enlargement of a coloured photograph of his. The opening section is very instructive:
To begin with I note that around the pupils of my eyes the not uncommon ring of dark brown fades away into a broad circle of blue. This unusual combination in the iris seems to give the face a two-fold look, at once attentive and far-away, earth-tinged and sky-touched — apparently whatever of the poet I have in me and whatever of the Aurobindonian Yogi I strive to be: the visionary of mysterious distances who yet has to be precise in dealing with the many-shaped multimooded procession of terrestrial objects…

The physical reflects the inner personality. Amal himself touches upon the two primary elements that constitute his essential being — the poet and the Aurobindonian Yogi. We also see the writer's humility which co-exists with his superhuman attainment and achievement of which he is totally unconscious. There are many other aspects revealed by the other letters. The very title of the series of letters published since July 1980 in Mother India and now begun to be brought out in a "row of volumes", the first two of which are before us, Life-Poetry-Yoga, begins with Life. His being a poet and being concerned with the various aspects of poetry and his being a Yogi are intertwined with Life. To Amal Life, Poetry and Yoga are bound each to each by his Aurobindonian piety, or rather devotion and dedication to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Nobody is more qualified than Amal to counsel others about life in its diverse aspects and of course in its relation to poetry and Yoga. Having lived a healthy vigorous life in spite of his being handicapped (or "leggicapped" as he puts it with a sense of humour at his own expense — fun and humour are another essential ingredient of Amal's personality) and having been "amoral" or unconventional in his ways he is able to penetrate into the truth of life. When someone mentions his killing cockroaches he presents a very balanced view of killing animals, not only pets but other creatures even for food. He points out how Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never made a fetish of vegetarianism or the so-called "ahimsa" for that matter.

The letters also bring before us the whole life of the writer from the time of his being taken to England to get his polio treated to the moment he is writing. A brilliant Parsi intellectual and poet who could also enjoy riding of horses entered the Ashram at the age of 23 with a young lady. The lady chose to stay in the Ashram. Amal, after nine years, returned to his native place, Bombay, and to ordinary life for some time without losing contact with his Gurus. He even edited and wrote for the then Bombay-based Ashram magazine Mother India which Sri Aurobindo called "My paper", in which Amal covered a number of subjects including politics. Returning to the Ashram for good he not only took part in the various activities but created wonderful poetry praised by Sri Aurobindo himself. He had the unique good fortune of becoming the first reader of Savitri on which he freely commented, sometimes even raised an objection to a line here and a line there. He became the critic and interpreter of not only Sri Aurobindo but other poets. His total devotion to Sri Aurobindo and his Yoga did not "de-humanize" him, when the lady who was responsible for his entering the Ashram and the lady he married during his first return to Bombay and to ordinary life passed away his reaction could be described only in Wordsworthian language:

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

He never lost is Yogic samata, ability to face life with an equal soul. His letters to his correspondents who mention illness and pain, death and bereavement, present the same sense of poise.

Life-situations draw from him quotations from his own, Sri Aurobindo's or others' poems and end up with a deeper opening to the Gurus.

There are letters exclusively concerned with literary problems: comparison of Yeats and A.E., explication of poems and passages from Savitri etc. One of the best explications happens to be a poem of Arjava (J.A. Chadwick, an English disciple of Sri Aurobindo) which he quotes in a particular context. Of greater interest is not an explication but an explanation of two levels of inner experience presented in two of his own poems, "At Last" and "Veiled within" composed on May 15, and October 10, 1986 respectively.

The earlier phase was a psychic one: here is a deepening from or through the psychic into a sense of the Self — the Chaitya Purusha opening backwards into something of the Atman. I have mostly had in a very general manner the awareness-touch of a wide luminous tranquility as the background of my being and, along with it, the frontal movement of a little soul offering its littleness to the Divine Beloved in a stream of sweet warmth. But this withdrawal through the "Unfading Rose", as it were, into a vastness as of some secret ever-still air was quite unusual. I am reminded in a small way of the Yoga of the Upanishads. This Yoga is, as a rule, taken to be an ancient Jnana Yoga, a Path of Knowledge through the discriminative mind. But, as Sri Aurobindo once pointed out to me, it was an entry into the universal Self via the heart — Purusha, the being "no bigger than the thumb of man who is like a fire without smoke and is the one who was in the past and is the lord of today and the lord of tomorrow". As soon as "the knot of the heart strings" is "rent asunder" the "mortal" is said to "enjoy even in this body immortality". This "immortality" is twofold: the realisation of the inmost soul that never perishes and goes on growing through birth and death across the ages and the realisation of the single Infinite Being who is unborn and undying and is "the immensity which alone is felicity".

There are letters commenting on dreams and visions, on astrological predictions, even on "the Anthropic principle in physics".

One who has gone through the two volumes eagerly looks forward to the subsequent ones but in the two volumes themselves one has "God's plenty" to enrich one's life, elevate it, ennoble it and lead to the highest possible evolution of one's soul.

— K. B. Sitaramayya

July 1995