A Cry in the Wilderness: The Works of Narayana Guru

By Narayana Guru

What is your name, from where,

of which caste, what job, how old?

One who is free from such questions,

his alone is beatitude.

In the verdant countryside of south-west India, at the turn of the last century, lived the great poet-seer Narayana Guru. His message was very simple: 'Man is of one caste, one religion and one God / Of one same womb, one same form, with no difference at all.'

Grounded in the mystical depths of life, he wandered across the landscape, gently proclaiming justice and equality for all, interacting with the multitudes who came to meet him, electrifying them to be at their best, and galvanizing a peaceful movement to eliminate oppression in all its forms. Stalwarts like Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi sought his counsel. He inspired social reformers such as Sahodaran Ayyappan, Mahatma Ayyankali, Pandit Karuppan, V.T. Bhattathiripad, among others.

Along the way, he composed a compact body of writing in prose and verse of exceptional potency. These are stimulating, deep and original explorations, entryways into a profound appreciation of the human condition.

A Cry in the Wilderness: The Works of Narayana Guru collects his oeuvre in one volume, in a lucid translation from the Malayalam, Tamil and Sanskrit by Vinaya Chaitanya.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9789356290402

Narayana Guru

Narayana Guru (1854-1928), born in Chempazhanti (Kerala), was a mystic, philosopher, visionary, poet and social reformer, who envisioned mankind's solidarity based on the irrefutable unity of the Self. Writing in Malayalam, Sanskrit and Tamil, his works gave a new orientation to literature. Rabindranath Tagore found in him a continuator of the most ancient of rsis (seers) reliving the message of advaita (unitive wisdom).

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Translator’s Introduction

A guru is a teacher of wisdom. Nārāyaṇa Guru is a guru. Wisdom refers to finalized knowledge. It is more than mere reason prevailing at a given place at a particular time. It arises from contemplation. Wisdom has been compared to a great river, which flows silently through time. Teachers of such wisdom have enriched human traditions everywhere. Such teachers have been held in high esteem and honoured in different ways in different contexts. Their teachings have influenced generations through myths or legends, theologies or mysticism, religion or philosophy. Whatever the form, they have always had a perennial content and message for humanity. The wisdom that they teach leads one to appreciate values that are universal. It is this knowledge of value appreciation that distinguishes Homo sapiens from the rest in the animal kingdom. Without such wisdom, society will drift without norms or standards, and social units will become stagnant and steeped in the mire of relativism. It is then that the influence of an absolutist teacher raises the standards – ethical and spiritual.

A long line of such teachers have walked the soil of India from the most ancient times. The present (fourteenth) Dalai Lama may be seen as an exemplar of this universal outlook that characterizes wisdom, or unitive understanding. We must also not forget that there are many unknown, unsung representatives of this wisdom always on this earth. That they are not known does not diminish their stature in any way. Also, guruhood has nothing to do with institutional pomp and paraphernalia.

Nārāyaṇa Guru (1854–1928) was such a guru. In himself, he represents the guruhood of mankind. His message is summarized in very simple terms, in his own words: Man is of one kind, one faith and one God. While representing the perennial teaching, he was fully awake to the transactional realities of his time. He decried the caste system as unscientific, and encouraged inter-caste marriages and inter-dining (in a society which forbade such practices.) The Guru’s message, printed in his own autograph and distributed by followers on the anniversary of their association for Universal Brotherhood, reads: ‘Whatever may be the differences in men’s creeds, dress, language, etc. – because they belong all to the same kind of creation, there is no harm at all in their dining together or having marital relations with one another.’¹

Nārāyaṇa Guru was of very simple stock and dressed in two white pieces of cloth. His name is one of the most widely known, yet one of the most misunderstood, in the story of modern India. We also cannot overlook the godlike stature he had attained even in his own lifetime. A report on the law and order situation of the time mentions his influence in reducing the number of litigations.

He was exempted from appearing in courts of law by the order of the then princely state of Travancore. A (court-appointed) commission used to record the Guru’s statements when needed. Once, such a commission was questioning the Guru about his age, caste, etc., as was usual in those days. The Guru answered: ‘Our caste is human.’ The commission again requested caste details very humbly, and the Guru insisted: ‘We are human in caste’, and the commission recorded this as such. He must have been the very first human to be recorded in a state census!

Stalwarts like Rabindranāth Tagore and Mahātmā Gāndhī sought his counsel. The Guru asked Gāndhī how he could ask for freedom from the British while large sections of Indians were not free to walk on public roads or draw water from public wells – oppressed by their own compatriots. This eventually resulted in Gāndhī incorporating the removal of untouchability as part of the Indian independence movement. The Guru was associated with the temple entry movement that Gāndhī’s followers undertook. He inspired great social reformers Sahodaran Ayyappan, Mahātmā Ayyankāli, Pandit Karuppan, V.T. Bhattathiripad, among others.

Numerous biographies have been written, but very few are free from the exaggerations and myth-making tendencies that the human mind is prone to. A very authentic one is The Word of the Guru² by Naṭarāja Guru, who was his direct disciple and successor.

Fortunately, we have a vast body of literature, mostly poems, left by the Guru himself, and a volume of conversations with him (The Unitive Life)³ from which we can trace the different stages in the blossoming of the Guru from a simple Hindu villager to a Universal Teacher – jagad guru – fully awake to the highest aspirations of the human spirit, anywhere, any time.

After the customary primary education at home, and higher studies in Sanskrit at a traditional gurukula, Nārāyaṇa Guru wandered around southern India as a mendicant. He walked the villages in present-day Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. Then, turning his search inward, he meditated in the mountain caves of the Western Ghats, in intense contemplation, resulting in the awakening of his wisdom. As he himself describes it: ‘Like the dawn altogether of ten thousand suns, wisdom’s function comes, tearing the darkness of māyā that shrouds awareness.’⁴ Coming out of his retreat, he unhesitatingly set out as a Teacher, a Guru. He also says in another verse in the same poem:

‘I’ am not darkness, if I were, blind

we would remain, not knowing the ‘I, I’;

since we know, declare to anyone and all,

that ‘I am not darkness’, in order to know.

This compassion for his fellows, to tell everyone that ‘we are not darkness, because we know’ also must have urged the recluse to adopt the public role of a Guru. There are many other verses also, where the Guru expresses his empathy and concern for those around him. And this was not limited to humans either.

I came across the writings of Nārāyaṇa Guru as a student of Naṭarāja Guru. He would often quote some fragments during classes held thrice a day. I would look the verse up later and often end up asking Naṭarāja Guru to explain it further. Thus started a study, which has lasted nearly fifty years. Of course, this has not been academic, but a source of great consolation in many a difficult time. It was Naṭarāja Guru who first suggested that I translate Nārāyaṇa Guru into English. My background of studies in that language and my attempts at poetry must have prompted the Guru to ask this of me. Translating the works of Nārāyaṇa Guru into English has been a labour of love, but a labour nonetheless. There have been times when I just wanted to give up, but something in these poems kept tugging me right back into them. And here is the result that I happily share.

As a disciple of the wisdom tradition, I would like to recommend a passionate affiliation and sympathetic, repeated reading of these works so that they reveal their deep-hidden treasures.

Translating the Guru’s works has been an inspiring endeavour, as has revising them over and over again.

Nārāyaṇa Guru grew up seeing temples and ritualistic worship, and, in his early poetic career, wrote many hymns praising the popular divinities. Naturally, he followed available mystical literature, both in Tamil and Sanskrit, the two major sources of Indian spirituality.

The traditions of male asceticism – the debasement of the body, fear and rejection of the woman, withdrawing to mountain caves – are all parts of his intense search and also form parts of his writings from this early period. I know people who have only had a cursory glance at his works and refuse to read them further, saying he is against women or that he was a Hindu revivalist, etc. I can only say that he deserves a better reading. The Guru not only sublimates his earlier fears of the body and of women in his later poems, but also elevates them in terms of erotic mysticism. This is especially true of his poems addressed to the Goddess. Also the body is contemptible only when it is without kindliness, as seen in poems like ‘Ten Verses on Empathy’. In his ‘Ātmopadeśa Śatakam’, the body comes to have pure existence (sat) for content. I must also refer to Naṭarāja Guru’s questioning him about some of the earlier poems, and Nārāyaṇa Guru dismissing the question saying, ‘They happened to have been written once upon a time.’⁵ He is said to have added, ‘The person who wrote them is not there any more …’⁶

As to the charge of Hindu revivalism, I would like to quote the Guru himself from a public declaration made in May 1916:

It is now some years since we have left caste–religious differences. Yet, we have come to know that certain special groups consider us as belonging to their group and act accordingly and that because of this some people have come to misunderstand our truth.

We do not belong to any particular caste or religion. It has been stipulated specifically that such alone have been admitted to our successor disciples at the Advaita Ashram at Aluva, and [such alone shall] be admitted to the body of disciples in future. This has been published for the knowledge of the public.⁷

Another statement of the Guru clarifies his position further:

‘... We have no special attachment to any specific religion that exists now. Nor have we founded any religion. Each may follow the religion of one’s choice. We have installed certain temples in keeping with the need of certain Hindus. If other religionists, like Christians and Muslims, etc., desire so, we shall always be happy to do what is needed. When we say that we have left caste–religious differences, it only means that we have no sense of belonging to any particular caste or religion.’⁸

The Guru’s own translations of the Īśāvāsya Upaniṣad from Sanskrit and the Tamil classic Tirukkural provide sufficient models for any translator. It is said that the Guru had also translated into Malayalam the Tamil classic Ozhivil Odukkam, but it has not been traced. We have not included these two translations in this volume.

He wrote at a time when paper was not in common use; therefore, fragments have been found missing and sometimes whole works are mentioned which have not been found. At present, there are fifty-six of his works available. He wrote more poetry than prose. Except for six, the rest are poems. He wrote in Malayalam, Tamil and Sanskrit. In whatever language, they are all fully metrical; rules of rhyming are followed meticulously. In these poems, you can hear the rumblings of thunder, the roaring and gurgling of rivers through the mountains, the buzzing of bumblebees and the hissing of snakes. That he was open to the changes happening around him can be seen from his use of foreign words like ‘rail’ and ‘jail’ in his ‘Subrahmaṇya Kīrtanam’.

The works of the Guru are generally classified as the hymns to divinities of his student days, the poems of mystic agony and introversion of his wandering years, and the finalized philosophical visions of his more mature years. But this is not the system we have followed in this edition.

Here, the poems have been arranged according to a structural gradation as suggested by Naṭarāja Guru. Naṭarāja Guru found Nārāyaṇa Guru’s poems full of a fourfold dynamic structure, explicitly referred to in verse 36 of the ‘Ātmopadeśa Śatakam’, as the same and the other, making a vertical–horizontal framework for clarity of thought. Wherever available, I have tried to give Naṭarāja Guru’s introductory remarks to these works.

Such structural dynamism is implicit in the first poem in this collection, ‘Embryo’s Gratitude’. Here, in keeping with the modern spirit of a biologist, he takes up the human foetus as his starting point and follows its history very much in the same way as an investigator would in experimental science. The foetus represents the personality of the seeker or aspirant, in its most primal, simple form. In the intimate, dark recesses of the mother’s womb before birth, the self or the ego subsists in direct relation to whatever draws it out into life manifestation. In this process, there are two poles, the Self and the conception of a Providence, an ultimate or God conceived as light, making a vertical axis, along which life must be led. Kindness, grace or love, is a value that fits into this process as its natural counterpart, and is of the same stuff as bliss, or self-knowledge.

The search for truth does not take place in a vacuum, but in the here and now, in the world of actuality. Philosophy without warmth of heart and fellow feeling would hardly be worth its name.

Then we pass on through poems dealing with the other pole, like ‘Thoughts on God’, ‘The Luminous Play of the Self’, ‘Ten Verses to God’, etc., where this God, or Light/High Value is explained in as clear terms as possible. It is the relation or affiliation to this pole, which enables all of life to regulate itself in progressive stages of Self-realization and Self-expression or unfoldment. Devotion or pious surrender is only the recognition of this fact. The alternation between these two poles is what is to be noted.

Many of the poems are centred on the mythology of Śiva, and use a language – a proto-language, rather – where the devotee consecrates the simple dark stone by his devotion, in love, and is blessed by the associated ideals. For example, the child god Gaṇeśa is a personification of relaxation, contentment and contemplation. The same qualities are induced in the votary through the complementary relationship established between the worshipper and the worshipped. Or the King Dancer Śiva, dancing over his own recumbent lower self, encircled by flames, leads the votary to heights of cosmic consciousness. It also must be noted that whatever the particular name or form of the deity invoked in these poems, it is always the one high value of the Absolute that is adored, in different settings. This must also be why we see the Goddess, Gaṇeśa or Subrahmaṇya in these poems often adorned with the symbols usually associated with Śiva, for instance, the crescent moon which represents the most verticalized form of the mind. The message is always one of universal values – open and dynamic. This is also true of his temple installations where, starting from archetypal Śiva through Devī, Subrahmaṇya, etc., progressively to mirrors, lamps and even plain words like ‘truth’ and ‘kindness’ inscribed in place of an image, to when he said that temples should thereafter be temples of learning (that is, schools).

The approaches common to the Sāṃkhya and Yoga traditions of philosophy can be found in poems like ‘Arivu’ (Knowing), and ‘Advaita Dīpika’ (Lamp of Non-Duality). Then we come to the most sublime form of contemplative literature to be found anywhere in the world, laying the foundations for a full-fledged Science of the Absolute or Science of the Self, as found in works like the