The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  The place is run by Swami Ranganathananda, a very handsome well-built middle-aged man, who is reputed to live entirely on milk. There is also a sort of hostess, Mrs. Bouman, who is Dutch and tall in her winding sari, and rather like Virginia Woolf. And there is Aranyananda, looking older today and unshaven, but still beautiful. I took the dust of his feet, and he tried to do the same to me. When I jumped backwards, protesting, he said, “We regard you as more than a swami.”

  We had lunch at the institute—rather delicious British-type fish rissoles—and got involved with Dr. Miroslav Novák, who is head of something called The Czechoslovakian Church. (He calls himself a Protestant, but other information seems to suggest that he is Russian Orthodox. At the meeting he wore a black Protestant pastor’s robe on which was embroidered in red what appeared to be the Holy Grail.)573 Didn’t like him. Too much a faux bonhomme.574

  Aranyananda introduced us to a Dr. Roy, who is a surgeon and lives here. He will get us a negative of the complete cremation picture for our book. It is far more impressive than the two-thirds which are usually printed. The gazes of the mourners have a focus, and the corpse isn’t at all shocking; it is nearly buried in flowers. As Swami says, many crucifixion scenes are far more gruesome. But no doubt there will be fusses. The Math itself is opposed to printing the whole picture. We shall see. This is something I’m prepared to take a strong stand about.575

  After lunch, Aranyananda was in a flap, because he had to produce biographies of the foreign delegates. So I helped him correct their awful English. An adorable brahmachari named S[h]ashi Kanto,576 who rooms with Aranyananda, made this task seem even lighter.

  But there was nothing light about the inaugural session of the parliament. It began at 3:30 p.m. and went on for three hours. Next to the hashish experience in Tangier, this was the least endur able time stretch I have ever known. Not one of the speakers bothered to project; they droned out their written speeches as if they were saying mass. There was an audience of about eight thousand people, and I doubt if eighty of them really understood English. They sat there with—no, one can’t call it patience—with the inertia of cows. Nikhilananda, who was next to me on the platform, fidgeted openly and didn’t bother to applaud. He really is a very second-class swami, but I find his disgust humanly sympathetic. When it was my turn, I spoke too loud and too urgently—rather like a communist speaker in the thirties.

  After the meeting, Swami, Krishna and I were taken to the Calcutta Club by a Mr. and Mrs. Gupta. He’s a cricket-anyone? English-type Bengali; he even wears a kind of blazer and knotted scarf. He has some important job managing the port of Calcutta. Her name is Mallika.577 She’s American, plump, pale, blonde, humorless. The Calcutta Club was founded in 1909578 by an Indian who was refused admission to the regular British club—but it is more British than the British, charmingly old-world London club atmosphere. A weepy young rich drunk who was a friend of theirs was introduced to Swami and confessed embarrassingly. He was playing a scene.

  Then we went on to the Star Theater, to see the old paintings of Ramakrishna and Girish Ghosh backstage.579 The backstage part of the theater is probably very much as they knew it; the rest has been modernized. They were doing a modern play by Debnarayan Gupta (whom we met) called Tapasi. The plot was wildly complicated, with old-fashioned coincidences; recognition of a blind mother, first deserted by her husband and then reunited with him when he too goes blind. Sheer Dickens. But the acting was so lively and enjoyable. Without understanding a word, you could see how naturally theatrical these Bengalis are, and how unnatural it is for them to put on a ditch-dull show like the Parliament of Religions.

  Afterwards, the Guptas took us to supper at the Sky Room, quite a grand restaurant, but the food was inferior to the guest-house. A mixed clientele—two bald-headed Britishers out on a spree with Hindu girls; two club-type Britishers obviously trying to pretend they were in London; a mixed-up family of Eurasians, some of them beautiful.

  As night falls, a truly hideous smoky fog closes down on the city, from all the charcoal pots on the streets and the soft coal fires in houses. Back in my room I really wondered if I should be able to breathe. In these few hours my shirt has become filthy around the neckband.

  December 30. Swami didn’t sleep much. He complains of the smoke but won’t go back to the Math. Showed him an astonishing folder I found waiting for me last night when I got back to the institute; a bunch of pages of lettering and pictures in ink and watercolor, headed “Jesus Christ Writes to Christoper Isherwood in Calcutta.” There is a small snapshot of a skinny bearded young man, naked to the waist, grinning in a slightly mad self-conscious way. On the other pages, various facts are revealed—that Jesus is opposed to the partition of India, that he has broken with St. Peter (who, it appears, is now in London), that he was helped by Cyril Frederick Golding to get a job in The Times of India’s layout department. Some quotes: “Peter came and established the Rock of Hatred in advertising. I joined him on the Rock and got what I wanted.” “During the War and the riots of Calcutta, Peter loved God as his own child and raised his wages to a thousand silver pieces per month; but Christ, after looking at the cruelty of man, resigned from the services of Peter and took up the pen for judgment.” However, on the next page, Christ says, “Oh, why bring tears in the eye of an old man! He suffers anyway.” All this rings faintly homosexual, especially as the last page refers to “John.” Christ approves of Sir Christopher Wren, Beethoven, Mozart. He disapproves of Nero.

  I think he’s quite likely to show up today. I rather wish he’d come and make a scandal at the parliament and brighten things a bit.

  I forgot to mention yesterday that Swami is conspiring with Dr. Roy to bribe the custodians to hand over a coat belonging to Ramakrishna which is at Mathur’s former house.580 Roy says it isn’t being kept properly, and Swami wants to bring it to the Hollywood Center.

  Calcutta is a pale faded yellow city—all strong color has been burned, parched out of it by the sun. At night it is crowded but cheerless, under its pall of dirty smoke. A poor wretched place; the joyless street of six million people. Looking out the window at dawn, you see bent figures in wispy smoke-colored garments moving silently about like emanations of the smoke, as they light their fires to create more smoke.

  Ranganathananda showed us around the institute. He is the Monsignor Sheen type,581 very handsome, grey haired, youthful, fanatic ally energetic, fiercely ambitious, socially alert. He tells us he keeps his health by doing asanas. He no longer sticks to his all-milk diet but still limits himself to just a few vegetables.

  The institute is really well equipped and admirably efficient. Poor students can get meals almost for nothing and study all day in the library. There is a meditation room with nothing in it but an electric light projecting from a kind of lingam. It is in the shape of a flame. Swami, who doesn’t really like or trust Ranganathananda, complained that it was much too strong; you couldn’t concentrate.

  Ranganathananda is greatly excited about the growth of interest in Vedanta among the Japanese. He showed me a letter from a young Japanese who is coming here soon to join the order and work at the institute. His eyes gleam with fanatical delight as he tells about this. I feel he thinks he is running the order singlehanded.

  Aranyananda and Shashi Kanto were also around; they came with me to the parliament for my speech. Shashi Kanto says his name means Moon Beauty or Husband of the Moon. He is from near Bombay, a big boy of about eighteen, bulky and yet graceful in his cocoon of white muslin. The cropped hair and little topknot suit the charm of his long sensitive affectionate nose and dark soft velvet eyes. He seems utterly incapable of anything but love. He finds all manner of excuses to be around us. Every day he washes Swami’s and Krishna’s gerua clothes.

  At the parliament, I found that two or three of the speakers were missing; there were only Prema, and a Captain Bhag Singh,582 and the president of the day, Dr. Chatterjee. Prema talked on “Vivekananda Through the Eye of an American.” He was good b
ut much too brief. He seems quite a dour elderly figure on the platform; projecting grim austerity. He even reminds me a little of de Gaulle. As for myself, I was pretty good. I pretended to myself that the audience could understand me, and indeed they seemed to—probably because I talked a lot of political stuff about Vivekananda and the English, the oppressors in their bondage to the oppressed, etc.

  When it was over, a tiresome peg-toothed swami (of the Gokulananda tribe—swamis fall into quite recognizable physical groups, I notice) tried to sick the journalists on to me. But Aranyananda charged them like a little tiger and made a way for me through to the car. As we drove back to the institute, he was very indignant because there had been a translator to render the gist of the talks into Bengali, and, said Aranyananda, he hadn’t done so but had wandered off into remarks of his own. Aranyananda said that the audience did understand English and would certainly have booed the translator if they hadn’t been intimidated by the pictures of Ramakrishna etc., which made the pandal into a shrine where you had to behave yourself.

  December 31. Just before going to bed, I started to get the gripes and shits. I shivered a lot and couldn’t sleep all night. Lying awake in the dark, I was swept by gusts of furious resentment—against India, against being pushed around, even against Swami himself. I resolved to tell him that I refuse ever again to appear in the temple or anywhere else and talk about God. Part of this resolve is quite valid; I do think that when I give these God lectures it is Sunday religion in the worst sense. As long as I quite unashamedly get drunk, have sex and write books like A Single Man, I simply cannot appear before people as a sort of lay minister. The inevitable result must be that my ordinary life becomes divided and untruthful. Or rather, in the end, the only truth left is in my drunkenness, my sex and my art, not in my religion. For me, religion must be quite private as far as I’m publicly concerned. I can still write about it informatively, but I must not appear before people on a platform as a living witness and example.

  Luckily, Swami’s sister came to visit him in the morning with her son-in-law, who is a doctor; Dr. G.K. Biswas. He examined me and gave me pills. I felt achey and sleepy.

  Three women got me into a corner at the end of the balcony and started to ask me about karma, reincarnation and so forth. Another little woman joined in. Another came and got my autograph, after giving me a New Year’s card. And merciless Aranyananda, after shooing away a man who said he was the son of a millionaire, got me to correct a translation of a speech made by one of the Japanese delegates.

  Then I was fetched to go out to Narendrapur, where the mission has a huge project; schools, clinics and a farm. This was more fun than I’d expected, because Winslow and Carlson and Prema’s two friends who are staying at the Great Eastern, Bill Chapman and Jay Taylor, all came along. I very much liked Swami Lokeswarananda, who runs the place; he reminded me of Dore Schary. Also, there was a nice solid young bra[h]machari from Pavitrananda’s center in New York, called Amul (his name is Clare Street) who has been here three years already. Also a handsome and sexy nineteen-year-old boy from Cheshire, named Mark Vallance,583 who isn’t a devotee yet but has come here to teach English—or rather, his very no-shit Midlands accent. He plans to start reading Vivekananda’s works as soon as he has finished [Hemingway’s] For Whom the Bell Tolls!

  Sick as I was and groggy from the hot sun, I was hugely impressed by the Narendrapur project. It makes you feel that India isn’t in such a bad way after all. The government favors the mission because it is one of the very few social service agencies where there is no graft. Vivekananda was absolutely right; you simply cannot do this work without dedicated people. For others, it is too tiresome, so they turn into crooks. Lokeswarananda told us how he went to the ministry prepared to ask for 25,000 rupees for his project. But before he could speak, the minister told him, “Look, Swami, we admire your work, we respect what you are aiming for—but we simply cannot let you have more than half a million. It’s no use arguing. That’s our limit.” So he got half a million.

  It was lovely to be out in the clean country air. Afterwards I came home exhausted and lay down and napped on the bed. Aranyananda tried to wake me to perform some new chore, but I acted dazed-sick and he went away.

  1964

  January 1. Slept well and woke feeling much better. I still am resolved to tell Swami I won’t give any more religious talks; but I’ll do so only after my talk at Belur on the 6th; and I’ll offer to give two talks about this trip, in Hollywood and at Santa Barbara, and also two readings on other Sundays while he is still away.

  Like a marvellous omen of joy for 1964, the first person to appear at my door (while I was shaving) was brahmachari Shashi Kanto. He had come to wish me a happy New Year.

  Dr. Biswas looked in to see me after breakfast. I have to admit it gave me a slight jolt when he told me that he’s the senior medical officer in a leprosy clinic! He says the disease can now often be cured and always arrested, but that there is still a great deal of it around. There is still no law to compel lepers to report themselves and be treated. People from all classes get it—usually during childhood, from infected nurses. People with European blood are hard to cure; they have no immunity to it. Often they must be treated for the rest of their lives.

  Swami presided at the parliament yesterday. He says Nikhilananda tried to persuade him to speak first (the president is supposed to speak last) and then leave. This was because Nikhilananda plans to do this when he presides, and he wanted to have a precedent created for him.

  View from my bedroom window, on to the street outside: A large building, once a wealthy family mansion, now broken down and overcrowded. The plaster has fallen away from it in great pieces, exposing brickwork. Its green shutters are faded. Small trees grow from crevices in the upper balcony. A bamboo pole is fixed across the main entrance, to hang laundry from; a crow perches on it. There is more laundry in another part of the balcony which has carved balustrades and some faceless figures which may once have been lions. The trunks of the four tall palms in front of the house are stained with smoke. An old woman fans a charcoal brazier. A young man pees against the wall. Barefoot children wander back and forth. Along the street a white cow passes. Then an incredibly stringy calf. (The cows belong to people. The bulls were let free in the streets as sacred creatures, whenever a loved person died.) A bridge connects the main house with a garden house. It, too, is ornate, with broken Corinthian pillars, but now it is roofed with corrugated iron and bamboo matting. Two long saris, of different shades of green, are drying from the rail of the bridge.

  After lunch today, Swami told Maria Bürgi to stop wearing hats altogether. (She had on a truly weird contraption, just like a slipped turban.) Bürgi explained that she wore hats out of respect for our sacred surroundings. Swami replied that that was merely an idea of St. Paul’s; it doesn’t apply in India. Swami also advised Bürgi to wear gerua on her head, if she must wear anything. The result will probably be appalling.

  I have a new badge now. The same ribbons and general design, but this one has the motto, “Mother, make me a man.”

  I presided at the parliament this afternoon, after a flirty tea party with Aranyananda and Shashi Kanto. Such languishing looks, delicate hand-touches and flashing glances are perhaps only possible for the absolutely innocent. Though I’m not sure if Aranyananda is quite as innocent as all that. I feel he has been around.

  Our session of the parliament was fucked up by the non-appearance of Mr. Humayun Kabir, the minister for petroleums and chemicals. There is a possibility that he may have heard that Swami Sambuddhananda (the organizer of the parliament, who has the tact of a hog and the voice of a bull) referred to him, by a slip of the tongue(?) as Mr. Hanuman Kabir—which could be construed as a deadly insult since Kabir is a Moslem. Making a monkey out of him, literally!”584

  My speech was better than the other, though less well received. When I had reached the very last sentence of it, Sambuddhananda handed me a written message, “Continue for f
ifteen minutes.” Because they had realized that Kabir wouldn’t show. I ignored this, and stopped. This kind of behavior is enormously insulting, however unintentionally so; typical Hindu thick-skinned bossiness.

  When I got back to the institute, I dropped and broke my glasses. So Prema had to be phoned at the Math to send my other pair by Sujji Maharaj, who is to meet us tomorrow on our way to Sikra Kulingram, Brahmananda’s native village. Meanwhile, Krishna temporarily mended the broken frame with adhesive tape. He cut his finger doing so—and somehow this seemed touching, a kind of bloodshedding for me.

  Maria Bürgi appeared at supper hatless, with a ribbon around her hair. She looked very good.

  I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, when Aranyananda appeared. He obviously wanted to talk, so we did, until half past twelve—that is, for more than three hours.

  He started with anecdotes about his relations with Shankarananda. (At least, I think it was Shankarananda. Anyhow, it was some very senior swami of the order—which one hardly matters much, since Aranyananda’s attitude to the whole thing was so subjective.) Such studies in monastic psychology exceed by far the sensitivity of a Proust. Aranyananda—his eyes blazing with remembered passion and also with satisfaction at his own hypersensitivity—described how, after waiting on the swami faithfully and faultlessly for months, he made one little slip—forgot to get some medicine the swami had ordered. Next day, he was told that the swami had been very annoyed. So Aranyananda became furious and went into the swami’s presence spoiling for a fight. But the swami somehow conveyed to him by a glance how much he loved him. So all was well. The motif of a loverlike need for reassurance kept recurring. You are equally ready to leave your guru and the monastery for ever, or to fall at his feet in tears. Such scenes could obviously become as necessary to one as playing Russian roulette. They would have to be repeated at least once a week.