41 PVK Blog Post. PVK Lecture on Swami Agehananda Bharati.
41 PVK Blog Post. PVK Lecture on Swami Agehananda Bharati.
(Note: This was originally delivered at Kalady, at the Sree Sankara College on their invitation.)
Here is the text of that lecture:
‘A Rasika in Kalady’
(A talk for ‘Shristi, the Pen Club’, Research and Post Graduate Department of English, Sree
Sankara College, Kalady.)
One evening in 1953 there was a classical music recital in Kalady. Sitting a few feet away from the performer was a guest. He was enjoying the recital as only a true rasika or connoisseur would; seated on the floor, marking rhythm with his gestures, lightly swaying his head, an expression of pure joy on his face. During the break after a keerthanam, the performer gestured to this rasika and asked him a question.
What was the question? How did he respond? What happened then? The answers to these
questions will bring us insights into culture, knowledge and attitudes and may contain lessons
that we need to imbibe.
The story begins in Austria in 1923 when a son was born to an Austrian cavalry officer. Austria had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, been defeated in the First World War and had merged with Germany. Louis Fischer, as the boy was named, hardly knew his parents (a set of servants raised him) but remembered their eccentricities. He turned his back on the Catholicism that his family tried to instill in him and also on the Nazism that was infecting Germany as he grew up. Once, when he asked his priest about what would happen to Gandhi after his death he was told sternly it was certain Gandhi would go to hell. Fischer developed a distaste for dogmatism and authoritarianism, both theological and political. He continued to be a member of the Church choir and frequented the Vienna opera house and learned to sing in the classical style and to play the recorder.
Fischer soon developed a love for India and things Indian. In middle school he opted for
Indology, Sanskrit and linguistics. In high school he extended that by choosing Indian
philosophy and Urdu. He would go on, while still in Germany, to learn other Indian languages.
In learning these he had one clear aim in mind. He wanted to speak these languages as a native would, without, as a phonetician would put it, any Mother Tongue Interference. He never lost a chance to converse with the Indians he met.
He met many. At the Indian Club in Vienna, which he joined at age 13, he got chances to speak Hindi. The club was founded by Vithalbhai Patel and Subhash Chandra Bose. Fisher even persuaded an Indian student to teach him English. Balakrishna Sarma, his tutor, spoke
impeccable English but Fisher spoke it with an Indian accent. (Other tongue interference?) In
three months they were reading Charles Dickens, in six Shakespeare. Most of the members of the club were students of science. Fisher’s love was for Indian languages and religion. From other Indians he began learning Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. He scrupulously trained his vocal organs to enunciate each as a native speaker would.
When WW II broke out Fischer was forced to join the army. Nazism produced in him “a spiritual nausea” and he sought refuge in music. He dodged the Hitler Youth because “there was something wrong with one of my grandmothers”. A lady in his family line did not meet the racial standards of the time. Nazism and Catholicism were similar: they prohibited certain interests and imposed certain others. (Remember W H Auden borrowed the idea and said “what is not forbidden is compulsory”.) Fischer realized that “in an increasing complex world the forms and methods of a teaching or a pedagogic ideology are more important than its content.”
Soon after joining the army Fischer found himself in a regiment Subash Chandra Bose had
persuaded Hitler to set up, the India Legion. All the soldiers were Indians, POWs who had
surrendered to General Rommel in Africa. The officers, like Fisher, were German. This was a
golden opportunity for Fischer to continue his linguistic conquests. His men, most of whom were fond of him, called him “bhai sahib”. Some were suspicious and felt he was a British spy or a German planted among them to spy on them. Deep suspicion and xenophobia are stronger in Indians than any other people in the world, he realised.
The war was not going well for Germany. Attracted more and more to Indian religion Fischer
began to participate in the worship of the Guru Granth every evening with Sikh soldiers. He
assumed the name of Ramachandra Sharma, a Kashmiri pandit. One night his fellow Germans tortured him and shut him up in a room to humiliate him. He had a mystical experience then and decided that his apostasy, that is his rejection of Catholicism, had to be total. As they were retreating from the Allies, Sharma began performing Hindu poojas before an idol of Ganesha every evening. He kept up this persona when the entire unit, except the German officers who had melted away, surrendered. In POW camps, Sharma meditated, sang classical arias and read all the books he could get hold of.
Released at last in January 1947, Sharma found his way to Vienna and joined the university, selecting Indology and philosophy and Indian languages as subjects. In his spare time, he learned classical music. His dream now was to get to India and become a monk. He had by now rejected all three Semitic religions and also the universality claimed by Kantian
notions of the categorical imperative. The rejection of Kant, the philosophical embodiment of the values of the Enlightenment, represented, to some extent, his rejection of the modern secular state. Fischer / Sharma wanted a faith that was truly undogmatic and liberal, one that would allow him to pursue what he passionately desired – a life devoted to pleasure. The greatest pleasure for him was intellectual enquiry. Here was a modern Dr Faust, headed for a land he thought was one of sages and wise men. He was an epicurean knowledge-junkie. He thought that India was a land that permitted, just for the pleasure of it, imaginative freedom and speculative thought. At least, it once had been such a land.
He had very high intellectual standards. Truth and value were, he knew, separate. Value, or a
sense of worth or meaning, did not mean truth or validity. Truth had to be obtained “by
investigation, by discursive thought, by comparison, by an exchange of ideas, by strict and
uncompromising tests with objective criteria – by logical, experimental or documentary proof”.
Not for nothing had he read India’s sacred books and also Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, J L
Austin and A J Ayer. His autobiography is dedicated to his two greatest heroes, Shankaracharya and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
He arrived in India in January 1949 and proceeded to Belur Math, to join the Ramakrishna Math.He was accepted as a brahmachari or novice and fell into the routine of the monastery:
meditation, prayer, the rituals of daily life in an ashram and specific work allotted to him in the publishing department of the ashram. After a few months he was transferred to an ashram in the Himalaya. (Near Thanakpur.) He slipped with ease into the discipline of ashram life. He used his spare time reading philosophy and other subjects and participating in satsangs. Friction soon arose, mostly centred on doctrinal matters or interpretations of the sacred texts. He would debate with the senior monks, a habit the monks increasingly found annoying. Sharma’s quotations from sacred Sanskrit books did not help him; if anything they deepened the hostility of the people who ran the ashram. Two weeks after he told the head monk that he did not believe in the concept of avatars, he received a letter to Mr Ramachandra Leopold Fisher. As he guessed on reading the address, he had been dismissed. (Until then, he had been brahmachari Ramachandra.)
Fischer / Ramachandra found his way to Benares looking for an acharya who would accept
diksha from him and initiate him into swamihood. Over a hundred swamis refused. He was a
mleccha. Finally a swami from Madras, Swami Visvananda Bharati, quoting an escape clause
from the Vedas that could be interpreted to mean that even a foreigner could be initiated into
swamihood, agreed to perform the initiatory ritual. At midnight at the cremation ghat, all the
rituals were gone through. He abandoned his old life and identity and accepted a new name
chosen by his guru. The name was Swami Agehananda Bharati. The Sanskrit compound of a + geha + ananda enclosed three meanings, bliss through homelessness, bliss that is homelessness and bliss when there is no home. The name was appropriate. This latest Bharati was in search of intellectual bliss.
Adi Shankara had founded a set of monastic orders. The members of these orders were
considered sanyasins par excellence. They wear the ochre robe, shave their heads and lead lives of learning and voluntary simplicity. There were ten subdivisions among them and so they came to be called the dasanamis. Bharati was one subdivision. Louis Fischer who had become Ramachandra Sharma was now Agehananda Bharati. He threw his danda or stick into the Ganges because paramahamsas are free and do not carry the rod of rules and rites and proceeded to live the rest of his life as a monk, albeit a very unusual one.
Bharati, following a suggestion of his guru, began a barefoot trek across India after abandoning all his possessions. (He kept a notebook and his passport with him. One never knows when the bureaucracy will come calling.) Avoiding cities, Bharati trudged all the way to Sringeri near Mysore. His descriptions of places and people are sympathetic, sharp and full of insights only an anthropologist with profound insights into the human condition can make.
His knowledge of Indian culture and history and his love for Indianess were extraordinary.
What did he love most about India? Remember he equated India with Hinduism. He loved all
aspects of popular Hinduism. The rituals, the chanting, the festivals, even the din, the bustle, the sounds, the colours, the food and all those little things that most foreigners do not like. More importantly he loved the sophisticated thinking and speculation and expansiveness of thought he found in classical Hinduism. If we call him a snob he was an aesthetic and intellectual snob.
But that is being unkind to Bharati because he took seriously the anthropologists’ dictum that one should not judge the beliefs and behaviour of others. One should observe and record.
Here is an episode that will explain the intensity of his devotion. While walking through a jungly area near Nagpur Bharati saw what looked like a temple to Vishnu. He went in expecting it to be a crumbling 14th century structure. Instead he sensed, as he reached an old gate, the strong smell of incense and jasmine. He entered and was struck by the sight of a Devi figure resplendent in flowers and with all the paraphernalia of recent worship there; smoke curling up from the wicks of an oil lamp, fresh flowers from a pooja, burnt incense sticks and so on. Convinced the pujari must be near-by, Bharati called out several times. No one responded. He prostrated in worship, placed flowers from a garland he found on a bush outside and then, filled with joy at this unexpected experience of numinosity, he continued his journey.
Half an hour later he came to a small village. The villagers greeted him warmly. He asked about the Devi temple. They were bewildered. There was no Devi temple anywhere close, they insisted. There was an unused temple in the direction he spoke about. Mildly irritated, Bharati trekked back to the temple accompanied by a villager. There was just an old ruin there, a shrine to a locally worshipped avatar of Vishnu. No Devi, no flowers, no sign of
any recent pooja.
He has an explanation to offer. He had been, to use a modern phrase, obsessing about the Devi for weeks. He would chant verses from Shankara’s Saudarya Lahari while walking. Such was the psychological force of his imagination and thoughts that when the right surroundings – lonelyroad, old temple in the shadowy forest etc etc – presented itself he imagined it was a real Devi temple. (Contemporary psychological explanations do not contradict his diagnosis.)
This is just one of the experiences and insights described that is remarkable about his travels.
Bharati reached Sringeri, was refused admission by the Abbot or head and then found his way to Delhi. Here, at the Birla Mandir, he met one of the Birlas himself. The wandering sadhu was appointed a professor of German and philosophy at Delhi University. He threw himself earnestly into the job. Attempts to bring change resulted in his removal from the post. A chance meeting with Pandit Govind Malavyia got him appointed to the philosophy department at BHU. The experience was repeated. He had a short stint at Nalanda, learning Pali and researching Buddhism. Frustrated in more ways than one, Bharati left India. He stayed at Buddhist monasteries in Thailand, Cambodia and Japan, learning from the monks and systems there.
All were happy experiences. While in Japan he was told that the right place for him was a good university in America. Soon he found himself in the department of Anthropology in Syracuse University. He worked there for the rest of his life. All his requests were met. Most of them were to do with rare manuscripts. He worked and led a very productive life. His best works, apart from academic papers, were books on mysticism, tantra, monasticism in India and studies of Indian culture. Till the mid-1980s when he was struck down by cancer, he was prolific. He passed away in 1991 and his contributions began to be forgotten.
Today, in India, he is not known. But not in Syracuse University. There in the university’s ‘Special Collections’ section, all available material relating to this astonishingly accomplished scholar are preserved. They include video and audio recordings and the hundreds of articles and papers he wrote and published. The South Asian Centre supported by Friends of Agehanda Bharati take very good care of the archives.
Now, to return to the beginning. What had happened at Kalady?
Bharati visited Kalady twice, in 1952 and 1953. On his first visit, his host was Swami
Agaamananda who headed the Kalady madom. A celebratory meeting was arranged to
commemorate the combined birthday, or so Agaamananda said, of Adi Shankara and
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. (Probably Feb 18, for that is Paramahansa’s birthday. How he
arrived at Adi Shankara’s date of birth, unknown even when a temple to Shankara was set up
here in Kalady by the Travancore royal family early in the 20th century, is a mystery.)
Bharati was asked to speak and before he started Agaamananda asked him to compare Adi Shankara and Ramakrishna. Bharati was delighted. Adi Shankara was his topmost hero. Ramakrishna was also a hero.
Bharati took on the job like he might have an academic assignment not by copying and pasting but by comparing the two. They were both fiercely independent, deeply committed to their spiritual vocation and had unshakeable loyalty to the Hindu tradition. Bharati moved on to differences. Shankara was a scholar and an intellectual manifesting in himself the rare
combination of a genuine mystic and a great logician. By contrast, Ramakrishna was a mystic
and a saint of great personal courage and foresight. But, he added, Ramakrishna was probably a naive and simple man, not an intellectual.
The mood in the hall changed. Notes were sent to Bharati not to criticise Ramakrishna and when he repeated a similar thought, he was asked to stop.
The offence Bharati caused was immense. How dare he say that Ramakrishna was no
intellectual? But Bharati thought that the evidence was on his side. Ramakrishna was a man of unmatched saintliness, but was neither a scholar nor an intellectual. Middle class intellectuals from Calcutta began to worship him precisely because he was not an intellectual but a simple and saintly man. Among those who flocked to him was Vivekananda, the towering figure of what Bharati called Renaissance Hinduism. The smiles around Bharati died and he left Kalady with the cloud of disapproval and suspicion, both born of his perceived disloyalty to Hinduism, hanging over him. His obvious ability to find and speak the truth was not appreciated.
Bharati was back in Kalady the next year. This was when he was part of the audience that was treated to a splendid recital by Chembai Vaidyanatha Iyer. Chembai like Bharati was at Kalady, at the shrine of Shankaracharya, out of devotion, in an act of worship. He wrote: “Here was orthodox, genial, most beautiful Hinduism, untouched by the Renaissance.” The epicure in him enjoyed a panel discussion on Vedanta and later, the exquisite music of Chembai. Remember for Bharati European classical music and Carnatic music were among the most beautiful creations of man. To quote him: “The music was pure, the architecture exquisite, the Renaissance far away.”
The occasion was also a send-off for Bharati and Chembai asked Bharati to sing a German song. His words are: “I did so, and in the pillared hall of the Goddess Sarada, tutelary deity of wisdom and of the Samkaracharya Head Math of Sringeri, I sang “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schon”, folding my palms towards the lovely icon of the Goddess.” (The German translates as “This image is enchantingly lovely”.) Everyone laughed with glee. When the Malayali laughs there is sometimes an element of something not quite glee. Bharati must have sensed it for he added “Mozart does seem funny to the Indian ear”.
Leaving Kalady Bharati travelled, by boat and bus, all the way to Kanya Kumari. He halted at
many temples and shrines along the way and everywhere his robe attracted the devout.
Uniformly they had one complaint. Christians are taking over our land. They have all the money; they are accumulating real estate. They build huge churches and mock our beliefs and rituals. They get help from abroad and are converting huge numbers of Hindus with inducements many cannot resist. Please help us.
Bharati told the grievance-filled Hindus that conversion itself was alien to Hinduism which was a plural and pluralistic faith. Pressed to offer some practical solution to this feeling of siege Bharati made a suggestion. Hindus should collect money and on land close to these new churches, they should build enormous Shiva lingams, taller than the churches. The Christian would be less cocky then. The bhakts were not happy with this solution. Too aggressive, they said. It was as if they thought that this sanyasin, with skin fairer than most others, would utter some mantras and make the Christians and their churches disappear. His statement that there was a freedom of spirit and a freedom of intellect in Hinduism, which Christianity cannot give, did not produce much satisfaction.
Seventy years on the irony of the faithful from both Hinduism and Christianity joining hands and making identical complaints about a third religion should not escape us.
There is a footnote to this story about Bharati and Kalady. While travelling to Kanya Kumari
from here Bharati was accompanied by a young Namboodiri college student. He asked Bharati to teach him the secret of becoming a sarvajnani. He aspired to be one, like Shankara,
Ramakrishna, Vivekananda or Bharati himself. Bharati soon realised that the student thought
sarvajnani meant being omniscient. He corrected him. In Vedanta, sarvajnani was a technical
term, like brahmajnani. It meant ‘a knower of Brahma’ that is ‘one who has realised his oneness with the Absolute’. Bharati told him “… the Absolute cannot be known objectively, it being the subject of the knower, never his object”. He continued that sarvajnanam did not mean knowing objective things like botany or mathematics; it referred to a state of mind, of supreme beatitude or ananda. Allow me to be flippant. The student had mistaken sarvajnanam not for a supreme spiritual experience and the joy it brought to the one having that experience and only that person. He had mistaken it for the happiness of knowing all the answers to the questions in university / entrance examinations. A neat philosophical argument was mistaken for a way to get past NEET.
The student did not yield. When Bharati asked him if he thought that Ramakrishna knew
“mathematics, atomic physics, English literature” and so on, he replied “Most decidedly, sir. He knew everything.” The Kerala student went on stating that Ramakrishna was a sarvajnani but he pretended not to know anything. “This is real greatness” he concluded.
Bharati concludes “Inspired words but not well-informed words. In the Hindu mind, inspiration tends to eschew information. A Hindu of intelligence and integrity may be well informed, about the imbecility and cruelty of a leader X, but that leader is a hero, or perhaps a concealed avatara who wears the guise of cruelty to achieve a higher purpose, then this mystical possibility exonerates the despot and inspires the Hindu; and inspiration supersedes information….”
Bharati, as a humanist and educationist, called for the final dissolution of those outlooks and
ideologies which he considered the fundamental evils of modern humanity, “patriotism and
nationalism marxist internationalism and claims to confessional universality.” He was a proud Hindu who believed that no religion should be imposed on people. He rejected all forms of dogmatism, including the dogmatism into which he felt Renaissance Hinduism had led India.
Teachers had a role, he felt, to play in this, not in the indoctrination but in training the mind to resist such seduction. Information leads to knowledge but comes at a cost. The cost is that of acquiring a vehicle to take us to that promised land (that is knowledge) and the recurring cost of mastering the skills needed to control that vehicle. I believe that in the contemporary world that vehicle is English and I hope you will all acquire it in your years in this campus. I hope you will all actually pass the driving test and not acquire the licence by other means.
Here, on the banks of the beautiful Periyar, which was once a river, it might help us to be guided by the sensible words of Agehananda Bharati. Let us not forget that he was a scholar whose first language was German, who preferred to converse with the senior monks in India in Sanskrit, who knew Hindi, Urdu, French and Latin but all of whose scholarly output was in standard English.
Good luck and thank you.
PVK
Note: This is part of a draft of an essay on Bharati and Indian ways of thinking. To be expanded and refined so it can be part of a long essay on Kerala.
Notes
All quotations are from ‘The Ochre Robe: An Autobiography’. Santa Barbara CA: Ross Erikson, 1980.
N; ആഗമാന, meaning one with discrimination; rather one who delights in discrimination.
I have changed spelling in script from the one used by Bharati and made it Aagamananda.
An aria. It is a solo song in an opera with orchestral accompaniment. An opera is a dramatic
work in which all, or most of the text is sung to orchestral accompaniment. Bharati sang an aria from Mozart’s (1756 – 5 Dec 91) ‘The Magic Flute’ first performed in 1791. This is coeval with the lives of the famous trio of Carnatic music, Shyama Shastri 1762 – 1827; Tyagaraja 1767 – 1847; and Muthuswami Dikshitar 1775 – 1835. Shastri was 29, Tyagaraja 24 and Dikshitar 16 at that time.
The aria that Agehananda Bharati sang was ‘Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schon’ or ‘This image is enchantingly lovely’. It can be heard if you use the following links:
The nature of Bharati’s argument about Shankara and Ramakrishna and their intellects can be understood with this parallel. Is J Krishnamurthy an intellectual? Is Mata
Amrithanandamayi an intellectual? If you think the former is but not the latter, you are
thinking like Bharati. If not, you are thinking like the Kaladeans of 1953.
A suggestion to all Kaladeans.
If the Shankara Math at Kalady should invite T M Krishna here to celebrate another
anniversary, you would be inviting one who combined the talent of Chembai with the
intellect of Bharati.
Apart from the works of Agehananda Bharati and the works of the philosopher of science
Meera Nanda, I have used the ‘Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science’ edited by James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (Leiden: Brill,2011.).
This talk has not attempted to critique any aspect of Bharati’s ideas. It also leaves
unaddressed the question of why India does not remember this devotee of Indian culture and Indian thought.
Even more important, I have not dwelt on caste and its historical, social and political dimensions. The Indian caste system, euphemistically referred to as the ‘varna’ system, is perhaps the most egregious form of enslavement and cruelty the world has ever seen. While it has virtually disappeared from most parts of Kerala, it still dominates the north of India, the ‘cow belt’. The cow belt does contain a lot of bull shit.
P. Vijaya Kumar / PVK
profpvk@gmail.com
Thank you. Nandri. Namaskaram.
PVK 14/June/2026.
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