The Seeker

By Sudhir Kakar

It is 1925 and India’s struggle for independence is in disarray, impeded by factionalism among its leaders and rising incidents of unrest across the country. Meanwhile, having withdrawn himself from active politics, Mahatma Gandhi is in an ashram immersed in what he considers the most important undertaking of his lifethe creation of a community that is wholly dedicated to the highest standards of self-discipline, tolerance, and austerity.

Into this world comes a young British woman named Madeline, the daughter of a British admiral. Madeline has set her heart on becoming Gandhi’s greatest disciple. Madeline’s wish to serve him soon becomes an all-consuming desire to be near him at all times. Because her adoration of the great teacher is in direct conflict with his exacting moral and spiritual codes, Gandhi struggles with wanting to distance himself from her, yet wanting not to let go of her love and friendship.

Using words preserved in their letters and diaries, and drawing on the reminiscences of others, the author has created a compelling fictional narrative based on the extraordinary friendship that lasted over two decades between these two people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Jul 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781941088272

Book preview

Prologue

IT WAS IN JUNE 1968, during the hottest part of the summer when invitations to attend conferences and seminars in cooler climes are most welcome, that I flew to Vienna to attend a conference on Asian literature in the age of decolonization. My recent book on Premchand had earned me a modest reputation in literary circles, and my conference paper was on the influence of Premchand on modern Hindi fiction. At the reception given to the Indian participants by our ambassador to Austria, I casually asked one of the younger diplomats hovering around us, anxious to ply us with a predetermined amount of food and wine and then hurry us off the embassy’s premises, whether he knew Mirabehn.

When I had last heard from Mira, her agonizing restlessness, no longer held in check once Gandhiji was gone, had pushed her ever deeper into the Himalayas. In her first letter to me in many years, written from Pakshikunj, Mira described the breath-taking beauty of her surroundings—the patches of grasslands, the deodar groves, and the magnificent peaks towering before her. She would watch the sun set every evening, spreading its golden light on the snow which rapidly turned orange and then a brilliant pink as dusk fell. The vision filled her with peace, she wrote, but even as she made her way back to the house from the grassy slopes, the restlessness came creeping back, as if it had never left her. So when someone mentioned in passing in 1959 that she had left India for England and moved from there in a few months to Austria to settle down somewhere near Vienna, I was not surprised.

I had not really expected the diplomat to have heard of Mira. To the younger generation of Indians, Gandhiji is a mythical figure. They are familiar with him as an icon, as the father of the nation. His dreams about the future of independent India, his vision of what makes for an ethical life and the people who shared this vision and accompanied him through his life, have long been forgotten. Even people who were close to him once and proudly called themselves his followers had found other gods after Gandhiji’s death. Some became Marxists, others sang praises of the dynamism of a capitalist America; almost all of them turned to the worship of new idols—modern science and industry. For most, there was no sudden awakening from their infatuation with him, no kiss from a prince to transform them, just a gradual turning away of hearts that grew colder. I was quite surprised therefore when the diplomat said that he knew Mirabehn.

She is quite a character, you know, he said, in the condescending way the young sometimes speak of the old who are no longer relevant to their generation but still occasionally intrude on their consciousness. Anyone who visits her is immediately informed that she will not speak of Gandhi or her years with him. That chapter of her life is firmly closed, she says. All she talks about now is Beethoven. She!’s writing a book on him, you know. She lives just outside Vienna with an Indian servant and an old dog in a small town called Baden. Do you know her?

Yes, I replied. I taught her Hindi once, some forty years ago when she first came to Gandhiji.

The young diplomat seemed interested, although in my somewhat inebriated state I might have mistaken his polite attention for curiosity. I do not remember what all I told him as my memories of those years came rushing forth. It is possible that I exaggerated my closeness to Mirabehn, and to Gandhiji. I might even have hinted that I was privy to secrets I would reveal at an appropriate time. I had not realized that wine was, so to speak, a nonvegetarian grape juice which heats you from within before lighting a slow fire in the part of your brain that controls speech, that it not only loosens the tongue but also opens up the pores of a memory prone to exaggeration. I think I was boasting about how Gandhiji had regarded me as a son and how I remained wedded to his ideals to this day when the young man cut me short.

Would you like to meet her? he said, waving away the waiter bearing a tray of drinks just as I stretched out my hand for more of the delicious, red intoxicant.

Yes, of course, I said hastily. Could we go tomorrow afternoon? The conference ends at noon.

I did not know that with this casual commitment, I was embarking on a journey that would have me doubling back on the tracks of Mira’s life. I would spend a good part of the next five years poring over her notes, diaries and letters, chasing eyewitnesses for their recollections besides rummaging in the chest of my own memories, as I prepared myself to tell her story, which, in a way, would also be mine.

one

ON THE MORNING of 25 October 1925, a pleasantly warm autumn day in the south of France, Madeleine Slade, a thirty-three-year-old Englishwoman, walked up the gangplank of a P&O liner docked in the port of Marseilles that was to sail for Bombay later in the day. The ship had been stoking her fires since early morning. Just before noon, she weighed her great anchor and majestically edged out of the harbor, sounding six blasts on her horn in a familiar salute to the port. Madeleine did not go up to the deck and lean against the railing to watch the shoreline of Europe recede. Unlike most other passengers, fellow Britishers going out to the colonies for the first time or returning from home leave to once again take upon their shoulders the white man’s burden, Madeleine was not sailing into a parting but into pristine hope.

Madeleine’s luggage consisted of two newly bought steel trunks and an old but well-preserved leather valise made from the finest cowhide, its brass clasp and the studded brass strips reinforcing its edges gleaming softly from a recent application of Brasso. The trunks were crammed with books, selected from a personal library of over four hundred volumes she had collected since she was in her teens. The ones she was taking with her were general books on philosophy and history. Repositories of impersonal knowledge, they were incapable of conjuring up and connecting her to a past she was not as much relinquishing as locking up in a secure vault of her memory. Her recent acquisitions, which she planned to dip into during the voyage, were a book on Urdu grammar, French translations of the Bhagavad Gita and the Rigveda, a large French-English dictionary, and two recently published biographies of Gandhi, of which one was in French—Romain Rolland’s Mahatma Gandhi. For a while she had deliberated taking along Jean Christophe, Rolland’s ten-volume epic novel partly based on the life of Beethoven, which she had read and reread many times over in the last few years when her involvement with the composer and his music was at its most passionate. In the end she decided against doing so, although she did slip the slim Vie de Beethoven into a pile in one of the trunks. Beethoven was not quite a part of the past she was depositing in the vault. True, he was no longer in full, imperial possession of her consciousness, but he was also not so irrevocably gone from her life that he was incapable of stirring any emotion in her.

The leather valise contained five new, shapeless frocks stitched from white, hand-spun khadi cloth especially ordered from India, a couple of baggy Shetland wool pullovers, a woolen scarf almost the size of a small shawl, which Madeleine had herself spun, dyed and woven during the past year, cotton underwear, two pairs of sensible walking shoes and a small box of jewelry which she planned to gift to Gandhi’s commune, his ashram. All her other possessions, never many to begin with, since she had always been a young woman singularly uninterested in fashionable clothes and expensive jewelry, had been distributed among the servants of her parents’ household. In fact, while she was cutting off her ties with her past life, the valise was possibly her one concession to sentiment. It was a remnant from her first trip to India eighteen years ago, when she was fifteen.

That had been a very different voyage. Her father, recently elevated to the rank of an admiral in the Royal Fleet was setting out to take command of the East Indies station in Bombay. The Slade family—Madeleine’s mother, her sister Rhona, three years elder than her, and their old nurse Bertha, now promoted to lady’s maid, had been the most important passengers on board the P&O liner, fawned over by the ship’s captain and officers. Their luggage had consisted of more than twenty wooden crates and steel trunks of all shapes and sizes, filled with evening dresses, party frocks, fashionable hats, an admiral’s gold-braided uniforms, tennis and riding clothes, saddles and bridles, double-felt hats, anti-cholera belts, bottles of medicine against all conceivable tropical maladies, and odds and ends that her mother hoped would turn the family quarters of the Admiralty House in Bombay into a passable replica of their London rooms.

Memories of that earlier voyage did not cloud Madeleine’s mind. She prided herself on her ability to concentrate effortlessly on a person, a situation or a train of thought, shutting out the irrelevant and the extraneous for as long as she wanted. In other words, she could concentrate even when she was not concentrating, a certain sign of spiritual giftedness, as Romain Rolland had told her at their last meeting. Her inner guard could always be depended upon not to let an unwanted intruder enter her consciousness unless expressly summoned. Well, almost always. Not only did she never remember her dreams but she even remained unaffected by the miasma a dream can leave upon the waking hours, subtly determining the mood for much of the day. The thoughts and feelings she dutifully wrote down during the voyage, to be mailed to Rolland in Switzerland once the ship docked in Bombay, were thus exclusively about the new life awaiting her in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram.

Each evening, the moon climbing the sky from the east laid out a lane of shimmering light on the placid surface of the Mediterranean, a lane that became wider with the passing of the days as the moon waxed. Madeleine would stay up on the deck late into night when, except for the urgent whispering of occasional lovers embarking on a shipboard romance, all was quiet, and the deep-throated hum of the engines was no longer a disturbance but had become a particular quality of the silence. Leaning against the steel railing on top of the ship’s prow, she would gaze out in front of her where in the distance the band of moonlight on the water crawled into the dark horizon. Slowly, she would feel herself entering a fugue-like state, all content and form gradually leaking out of her thoughts and becoming a part of the ship as it sailed along the path of the light.

Fugue-like state are my words, the words of her erstwhile Hindi teacher and now would-be biographer. They are words of ignorance in search of understanding. Madeleine, in her diary, calls the state a moment of grace. Timeless moments like these were familiar to her from childhood. Then, they would often steal up on her when she was alone with nature—while she was out for a walk in the woods on a sun-dappled summer morning, for instance, and came across a swallow’s nest, fragile and leaning precariously against a sunlit stone, or when she spotted a clump of dandelions, deep yellow in the dark shade, and perceived in them a promise of eternity. These moments of complete well-being, or rather, of a state of being that spurns all qualifiers, stands above all adjectives, became rare when she was growing into a woman. They deserted her completely for years till she encountered Gandhi in Rolland’s prose and felt the heralds of grace come whispering into my heart… their tendrils brush against me like the touch of eyelashes on my cheek, as she writes in her diary in her sometimes overwrought prose. It was then that she had known with utter conviction where her future path lay. Grace, she affirms, is the only guide I have always trusted to steer me through the shoals of an unknown fate.

To everyone’s surprise but her own, Madeleine’s family had not tried to stop her. After all, her father was one of the first officers of the British navy, connected to the highest officials and ministers of the land, and dedicated to the protection and continuity of the Empire. And here was his daughter setting out to join someone whom the British considered the Empire’s most implacable enemy.

Once they saw I was serious, she writes that I was fulfilling a deep need of my spirit, both Mother and Father respected my decision. Father even helped me when I told him I needed to learn an Indian language to prepare for my life here. He wrote to Lord Birkenhead, the Secretary of State for India, who had been at Eton with him. The minister advised that I learn Urdu and even recommended an Indian student living in London as my tutor. Of course, in their quiet and gentle way they were concerned. But no one tried to stop me.

Bertha, her old nanny, had been the only one to express a little of the family’s unvoiced apprehensions. How lonely you’ll be, lost among all those Indians, she said.

It will be the first time in my life when I shall not be alone, Bertha, Madeleine replied. Indeed, the exile was returning home, although her destination was the man, Gandhi, rather than the country.

Madeleine was to travel to India via Paris where her father had gone for some official work. Be careful, was all he said when he came to see his daughter off at the Gare de Lyon from where she took the train to Marseilles. He had come straight from a function at the French defense ministry. The white ostrich feather plume in his admiral’s hat was visible for a long time from the window of her compartment, bobbing above the heads of the people on the platform, as the evening train steamed out.

Unlike the preceding years which were considerably tumultuous, the year Madeleine arrived in India had been unusually uneventful. Completely unaware of the social and political context for events in far-off India, her interest in what was happening in the country channeled solely through her fascination with the Mahatma, Madeleine could not know that 1925 had been a quiet year only because the British believed that Gandhiji (as an Indian I would feel extremely uneasy if I did not add the respectful suffix ji to his name) was a spent political force. They were convinced that he was pursuing vague social programs which were sufficiently far removed from actions that constituted a threat to their empire. As we came to know later, Lord Birkenhead had commented with evident satisfaction, Poor Gandhi has indeed perished! As pathetic a figure with his spinning wheel as the last minstrel with his harp, and not able to secure so charming an audience.

It had been five years since Gandhiji’s call for noncooperation with the Raj had electrified the country. The movement had given birth to unprecedented enthusiasm and hope among the masses that self-rule, swaraj, freedom of the country from the British colonial masters, would be theirs in a matter of months. The hope had been dampened but not extinguished by the violence in Bombay and Madras, and especially the incident at Chauri Chaura where twenty-one policemen were burnt to death by a mob which set fire to the police station. In characteristic protest Gandhiji had gone on a five-day fast of penance. Then, declaring that the violent incidents had convinced him that the country was not yet ready for self-rule, he had called off the civil disobedience movement.

Four years had passed since the political ferment of those days, and two years since his release from Yervada jail. The British might have written him off, but we knew better. We watched and waited for his next move, not quite ready to believe that he had retired from the political stage for good. Although he repeatedly affirmed that the movement for self-rule now had a different form—a moral politics which emphasized spinning, eradication of untouchablity in Hindu society and the fostering of Hindu-Muslim unity—most people remained unconvinced. How could such mundane activities replace the heady excitement of the earlier civil disobedience movement when crowds had taken to the streets all over the country to protest British rule? The students were especially incensed by his decision to stop the mass agitation. Instead, he was now asking them to participate in campaigns whose purpose they could not comprehend. What if there had been some violence in 1921? These things happened. There could be no omelet without breaking eggs. Even a vegetarian like him should know that. All this talk about India not being ready for swaraj! How was spinning yarn from cotton supposed to prepare the country for swaraj? And what about the campaigns against untouchability and for Hindu-Muslim unity? These problems went back hundreds, if not thousands, of years and were not going to be solved in a few. Was it not enough that a beginning had been made, that all of us were now aware of these evils? And if the Hindu-Muslim problem had to be solved first, before India was ready for swaraj, then the country may well have to wait another hundred years for freedom! Some, quietly agreeing with Lord Birkenhead’s assessment of Gandhiji’s growing irrelevance in the political scenario, were looking with increasing favor upon the young revolutionaries in Punjab and Bengal who advocated violent means for the overthrow of British rule.

However, though politically uneventful, 1925 had not lacked in the normal catastrophes: floods in Bengal and Assam, drought in some districts of the Madras Presidency and in most of the princely states of Rajputana, caste atrocities in a dozen villages of Travancore and, of course, Hindu-Muslim riots throughout British India had ravaged the country claiming the lives, property and livelihoods of thousands. Madeleine avidly followed the reports of the riots in London newspapers in which Gandhiji’s name often cropped up in connection with efforts at restoring peace between the two communities. In the beginning of the year there was a report about him being refused permission to visit Rawalpindi where Hindu refugees from Kohat had taken shelter after their Muslim neighbors had attacked their homes and places of worship. In July he was in Calcutta, setting up peace committees after riots disrupted Bakr-Id festivities. In August, the newspapers printed a short version of his appeal for calm after Titagarh was engulfed by religious strife and killings. Madeleine had been especially alarmed by a small item on an inside page of the Guardian which said that Mr. Gandhi was considering going on another prolonged fast for the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity, like the one he had undertaken the previous year after riots broke out in Delhi. To her relief, the report proved to be unfounded.

It had been the ending of the Delhi fast, which many people had not expected Gandhiji to survive—after all, he was fifty-five years old, and exhausted from the strain of incessant work and travel—that had finally prompted Madeleine to write to him. The twenty-one days of the fast had been agonizing. The thought that she might lose him even before they met, that he might forever remain a sacred image in her mind, enveloped in the aura of her devotion, but never acquire the density of flesh, never become a living person, was unbearable. Each day, as she went about her studies and preparations for her life in India, she silently prayed for his survival. When the news finally came that the fast was over, her joy was so great that her strong sense of self-discipline deserted her. She threw the newspaper down on the floor of the morning room of their Bedford Gardens house where she had just finished breakfast and rushed to the kitchen. Without uttering a word, she threw her arms around her astonished mother who was giving instructions to the cook for the special dinner to which Winston Churchill and two of her father’s colleagues from the Admiralty had been invited. Madeleine did not remember hugging her mother with such fierce abandon since her tenth birthday when her parents had given her a pony as a birthday present.

In her relief she decided that her thankfulness to God for sparing the Mahatma’s life needed a more concrete expression. Not wishing to ask her parents for money, she sold the only valuable item she possessed, her grandmother’s diamond brooch, for twenty pounds in a jewelry shop in Kensington. She sent a check for this amount to Gandhiji at the ashram together with the first of many letters she was to write to him. The letter was both shy and determined. She was thankful that the fast had ended successfully, she wrote, and hoped he did not mind her writing to him. Six months ago, she had read Romain Rolland’s book about him and had been so moved that she had wanted to leave immediately for India. But on further reflection she had realized that she should prepare herself through a year of rigorous training, in which she was now engaged. She hoped he would accept her check as a contribution to his work in which she wanted to participate one day.

Madeleine had not really expected a reply, and was both surprised and quietly happy—it was not in her nature to be deliriously so, at least not openly—when she got one on a worn and creased postcard. Written in a spidery handwriting and in cheap black ink that was already beginning to fade unevenly, some letters demanding attention while others seemed content to remain in the background, the letter read,

Dear Friend,

I must apologize to you for not writing earlier. I have been continuously travelling. I thank you for the twenty pounds sent by you. The amount will be used for popularizing the spinning wheel.

I am glad indeed that instead of obeying your first impulse you decided to fit yourself for the life here and to take time. If a year’s test still impels you to come, you will probably be right in coming to India.

On the train,

Yours sincerely,

31.12.24

M. K. Gandhi

Madeleine had not given Gandhiji the details of her training. Reading books about India, studying some of its sacred literature and learning Urdu were only a part of the exacting regimen she had set up for herself. The language sessions with the Indian student were particularly difficult. Both teacher and student spent many frustrating hours trying to cut through the nets of mutual incomprehension: he struggling to recognize his language in her upper-class English pronunciation of Urdu words, she occasionally glimpsing familiar landmarks through the heavy Punjabi accent that befogged his English.

Madeleine was also learning to spin and weave, since spinning was an obligatory daily activity in the ashram. She had read that spinning was essential to Mahatma Gandhi’s constructive program for the masses which he had been zealously pursuing ever since his release from prison in 1922. An activity that would involve every house in every village, spinning, he believed, could make a perceptible dent in India’s desperate poverty by making the poor economically self-reliant. Apart from its economic