Introduction to 'Relating to Reality'
Excerpted from 'Relating to Reality' by kind permission of Banyan Books, New Delhi

‘How does one introduce an enigma?’ writes Kersy Katrak about Sri Madhava Ashish. ‘Of what use are the usual facts of biography about a man who has ceaselessly striven to transcend them? How does one present this man who after thirty years of close friendship, remains a mystery to me?

Even at first glance you would see that he incorporates in his person those very opposites that he urges you to reconcile. Anglo-Saxon, with the face of a Scottish Laird, but clothed in the simple ochre gerua of the traditional Vaishnav sannyasi. Mystic, scholar, intellectual, but also an expert mechanic who can regrind the head of an automobile engine by hand.  Dedicated to the world-transcending spirit, yet interested in every facet of human life, from psychoanalytic techniques to hill development, ecology, farming, family planning, economic policy…(I must stop or the shopping list grows tiresome.) Guide and Teacher to a group of several hundred disciples and friends, yet allergic to the word ‘guru’ and wary of pedestals.  You see my dilemma.’

As for the facts:  Alexander Phipps, who was to become Sri Madhava Ashish, was born in Edinburgh in 1920.  His father was a Lieutenant Colonel of Artillery, once ADC to Lord Kitchener in the Sudan, wounded in World War I, and awarded the DSO.  His mother was the daughter of a Ceylon tea planter and grand-daughter of a Scottish Laird, Alexander Campbell of Auchindaroch.   Phipps went to Sherborne Public School and from there to the College of Aeronautical Engineering in Chelsea, which equipped him, when World War Two broke out, to work on the repair of Wellington bombers at Brooklands and Doncaster, and then in 1942 for the Tatas at Dum Dum near Calcutta, on the overhaul of Rolls Royce engines for Spitfires.

Life at Dum Dum was schizoid: split between the limited society of colleagues in staff quarters on the one hand, with their cynically named Skid Club, notorious for heavy drinking and for hatching conspiracies for the removal of imagined rivals and, on the other hand, English friends in Calcutta of the rare sort who genuinely loved India and who provided the background of literature art and music lacking in an engineering education.  It was in the latter society that he began to meet highly cultured Indians and the sort of foreigners who were in India for cultural reasons and for the pursuit of India’s famous spirituality.  Among these friends were Colonel and Mrs Barwell, who were instrumental in his long-lasting love affair with the Kumaon hills by inviting him to their house in Ranikhet.  There he first heard of Ramana Maharishi, and of Sri Krishna Prem, the British-born professor of English Literature who had left his teaching career for a monastic life at Mirtola.
An army friend in Bombay had surprised Phipps by saying, ‘I hope you find what you are looking for’, this when he was unaware of looking for anything. From the conflicting attitudes to life that he found in Calcutta, a search for sanity began. Working for Tatas, a wholly Indian company, he escaped the pressures to conform to British standards which colonial society imposed. He began to explore Indian India. It was a milestone in his life when he visited Tiruvannamalai in the then Madras state to meet Ramana Maharishi – perhaps the one man in India at the time those spiritual attainment could not be doubted. When he left shaken by the experience, he was convinced that what he was seeking was utterly real.
Released from his wartime job in 1946, he refused other offers because he wanted to spend his accumulated leave seeing more of India. A chance friendship brought him to Almora, a small district town in the Kumaon hills, where he met Sri Krishna Prem, visited his ashram and lived there till his death in April 1997.
The Mirtola ashram, then eighteen miles by footpath from Almora, was founded in 1930 by Sri Yashoda Mai, the wife of Dr G N Chakravarti, founder and Vice-Chancellor of Lucknow University, together with her disciple, Sri Krishna Prem. The tall, good-looking, introverted Phipps was given the sannyas name of Sri Madhava Ashish. He began to submerge his public school persona in the service  of  the     Radha-Krishna temple and in that of his guru, Sri Krishna Prem. Yashoda Mai had passed away in 1944, but her extraordinarily gifted daughter, Moti Rani, used the few years she had left (she died in 1951) to mould young Madhava Ashish into a true seeker. The story of those years, which united him and Krishna Prem in the dedication of the spiritual goal, is legend. In 1957, when a disciple commented on Madhava Ashish’s glowing presence, Krishna Prem replied: ‘Yes, what took me twenty years, Ashish has done in ten.’

We see him slowly taking over from Sri Krishna Prem, performing the temple puja, beginning to develop the ashram farm, and using his skills to introduce basic amenities like latrines and water storage tanks.  In the late 1950s the temple regime was drastically simplified, a development which made the ashram more accessible to the modern Indian and foreign seekers who turned up in increasing numbers.

With greater mastery came more responsibility.  Not only did Madhava Ashish take over the role of guru to the new disciples, he also began to write.  His first and most daunting assignment was to rewrite and enlarge Sri Krishna Prem’s unpublished commentary on HP Blavatsky’s Stanzas of Dzyan, an ancient and mutilated text on cosmogony.  This task, which was interrupted by Sri Krishna Prem’s demise, was issued in two volumes: Man the Measure of All Things and some years later, Man, Son of Man.  The completion of these books marked the end of a phase in Madhava Ashish’s work and the beginning of a new one.  Until then the ashram had been an inward-turned establishment, supplying personal instruction about the spiritual path to people who found their way there.  Now, from the early 1970s, Madhava Ashish began to participate more actively in public affairs.  He travelled more and began to write on subjects other than the strictly spiritual.  After his first response to the beauty of the hills, Madhava Ashish now saw the increasing poverty, the degradation of the land and the deforestation.  And he now knew enough about the area to understand what had gone wrong and why.  His letters to the Lucknow government and his published articles led to his being invited to join the Planning Commission’s committees on hill development.  Improvement of the ashram land had been undertaken by a young Australian disciple, Dev Ashish, who raised high-yielding cattle by cross-breeding with local stock and thus he transformed the farm into a demonstration of what could be done with degraded land by improved management.  At the same time a local group was formed to design educational programmes to increase village awareness of the damage caused by population increases and out-dated land management.  Sri Madhava Ashish was awarded the Padma Shri in 1992 for his contribution via these programmes.

Quoting from Kersy Katrak again, ‘Over the years as his values emerged in teaching, the ‘big picture’ began to form and it changed the way I thought and felt. His ideal was presented to us early enough: the Perfected Man, the ‘Saint’, the ‘Mahatma’. Man looks in through the Saint’s eyes and finds the transcendent roots of his origin. God looks out of the Saint’s eyes and experiences and loves His creation. It is a single act that unites the inner and outer hemispheres: the Word made Flesh. This unity, this complete integration of meditative experience with the active life was stressed again and again. If one’s inner practices – the observation and analysis of dream life, meditative activity, the constant ‘self-remembering’ or mindfulness in the waking state with the body active and mind working – if all these together finally revealed an eternal set of values, then these values had to be fully incorporated into every facet of life, into one’s relationships, into the marriage bond, the pressures of one career, into mid-life crises and into one’s confrontations with pain, illness and death.  It was only when the surrender to the inner Beloved was mirrored in every facet of both personal and public life that the job was considered complete. As he said to me once when discussing the degrees of withdrawal in meditation, ‘What good is it, Kersy, if you’re Gangu Teli here and God Almighty there? It’s only when God Almighty looks out through Gangu Teli’s eyes that anything real can happen.’ That was when the shining superstructure of thought was presented by him through long luminous nights, summoning the shades of the mystic past: from the Neo-Platonists to the Sufis, from the Upanishads to the Buddha, Chandidas and Ramakrishna, from the alchemists to Blake and Jung and Gurdjieff.  We gasped at the dreadful ill-treatment handed out by Gurdjieff to his disciples at the Prieuré, wondering how they managed to survive it all, not knowing that we were soon to find out.’
The foundation of the teaching had been laid by Krishna Prem’s exposition of Vaishnava Seva – service of the Lord – in which every action, feeling and thought is dedicated to the deity established in the temple. In making one’s whole life revolve around that outer centre, the centre comes to life in the devotee’s heart.

‘When one came to live in Mirtola full time, one experienced his teaching in action.  He had always held the view that just as inner and outer had to be balanced, so had the various parts of man – physical, mental, emotional, intuitive. We were to find that view pitted against our soft, middle-class, citified selves. Eight hours of manual work. Five hours of sleep. No hot water in summer, just enough of it to take the edge off in winter. One blanket at night throughout the year: ‘If you get cold, sit over the fire.’ At least two hours of meditation: ‘If you can’t meditate, at least sit still.’ Just enough reading to nourish the mind, just enough music to revive the spirit, and the beauty, stillness and silence of the surroundings to gladden the heart. Not surprisingly, few of us could handle it, and cheated when we could; and then his pressures became remorseless. We screamed at the injustice of having our treacheries made plain, not knowing then, as we know now, that in spiritual work, unconscious motives are treated as conscious and responded to accordingly.’

It was during this period that his friendship with Romesh and Raj Thapar was developing, and for more than fifteen years these three thinkers struck sparks off one another, enriching their own and their friends’ mental lives.  Madhava Ashish’s vision was applied to public affairs, resulting in a stream of comment and analysis, much of it in Seminar, the Thapars’ instrument of national regeneration. Concurrently, the Thapars’ lifelong dedication to social justice and reform took on a new depth as Madhava Ashish’s input subtly began to colour their ideas, through the articles he contributed, through the related correspondence, and in private conversation. The Thapars’ pilgrimage of thought, from sentimental leftism through hero-worship to final disenchantment, was no more than the counterpoint to inner growth towards full awareness of the human lot.  Because Madhava Ashish was their companion on the road, there were compensatory insights. Because the Thapars were his travelling companions, Madhava Ashish found an outlet for this longtime fascination with the material correlatives of mysticism and the interconnectedness of everything. ‘Without them I wouldn’t have written so much,’ he has said.

There emerged a synthesis of Madhava Ashish’s vision of the unity of being – his constant theme – and the Thapars’ Gandhian commitment to raise the level of the ordinary Indian. The Thapars had to come to terms with ugly humanity. It meant a series of traumatic disillusionments, provided by the paranoia of the leading communists, the self-delusion of the party-liners, the vulgarity that lurked in Indira Gandhi’s regal mien, the vacuity of institutions in the hands of despots, and the futility of sermons in the face of mob hysteria. Madhava Ashish, who at this time would introduce himself at meetings as a subsistence farmer, was galvanised by the Thapars into translating his raw perceptions into a social charter. The three friends continued to refine their formulas for rural rehabilitation, for the restructuring of politics, for the salvation of the country’s institutions – until death carried the Thapars off (within five months of one another) and a lack of response from the powers-that-be, coupled with increasing age and illness, led Madhava Ashish to reduce his commitments. 

Facing the unpalatable fact of man’s inertia was a large component of this effort.  Seminar, a beacon for India’s intelligentsia, was sustained by optimism. Raj Thapar presided as editor month after month, as Seminar poured forth its magisterial prescriptions on the country’s ills. Each issue examined one or other burning question of the day from many points of view.  The result was not so much a journal of public affairs as an ongoing dialogue among the country’s intellectuals, administrators and educationists. However well or badly they expressed themselves, if they had a viewpoint they were heard. Romesh Thapar himself set the tone of many an issue with his laconic statement of the problem. That was but a small part of Romesh’s output. For many years he turned out columns, lectured, contributed to international symposia, rallied and inspired the staid news fraternity of Delhi. With Raj as an ever-present source of confidence and solace he briefly and, as it turned out, unavailingly counselled those whom destiny had placed in charge of Indian affairs, for better or  for worse. This high-profile phase of the Thapars’ education in human fallibility is documented in Raj Thapar’s memoirs, All These Years. How, after the end of the affair with communism, the idea of salvation by a suitable leader had them pin their hopes on Indira Gandhi’s stewardship, hopes she was unable to fulfill.

After this final disillusionment with politicians and political forms, Romesh showed signs of turning to a more introspective approach to national problems. ‘We will be compelled to turn inwards,’ he wrote in a hitherto unpublished article, ‘The Freeing of the Indian Mind’. ‘We survive because the Indian  mind, that complex unknown, nourished on lentils and cereals in scattered havens, has managed to remain open…it can meditate endlessly on the human condition….This is an extraordinary asset when you survey the closed minds all over the world. But where are our catalysts? We look around, but in vain.’ As emerges from these pages, the Thapars were the catalysts themselves.

This book is not a biography, but there is a story line, elaborated through the medium of ideas. The keynote is sounded when Madhava Ashish reacts to Romesh’s Design for Living, a UNESCO-inspired call for an Indian solution to the ‘aberration of affluent anarchy’ — the consumerism of the West. Madhava Ashish seizes on Romesh’s unfortunate aside — amounting to a negation of his thesis — that: ‘Science and technology will dictate the ideology.’ ‘Please God, may they not!’ retorts Ashish, in an atypical appeal to the deity. This caps an exposition of the dominant concern of Madhava Ashish’s contribution to this volume: ‘All discussion of values necessarily involves … extra-material-world considerations.’  ‘Maybe we are closer than we realise,’ replies Romesh. But it takes fifteen years of interaction, in writing and conversation, for the realisation to become explicit, precipitated by the death of his life partner: ‘…are they not the creatures of my mind, her presence in everything. She lives in me’ – surely an acknowledgement that the reality is inner. What Raj had called her husband’s ‘undefinable faith in the future of India and the wisdom of her peoples’ had found a less capricious object, beyond heartbreak.

As in any friendship worthy of the name, the traffic in ideas and emotions was two-way. ‘I deeply honour your feelings. They are what distinguish you from the typical intellectual… whose mind, like the lawyer’s, is at the service of whoever pays it best…. With or without a conceptual framework, you feel that these bloody bipeds are worth it, and your mind is at the service of that feeling. And it’s a fine position to be in’. This avowal — a declaration d’amour, no less — tells us why Madhava Ashish could submit his writing in this new phase to the Thapars for approval. Outlining his sketch on subsistence economics, Ashish writes: ‘I want to know whether you think it worth doing anything with, or whether I should go back to meditating on my navel.’ The Thapars replied with an enthusiastic telegram. There was a continual trade in confidences. When Madhava Ashish proposes a newspaper that would truly serve the nation, Raj puts a damper on it. ‘I hate to express the feeling of hopelessness about the Indian psyche…. I literally would not be able to count five people who could, or rather would, agree to run a newspaper on the lines you suggest.’ Much later Ashish is questioning the optimism that has fuelled his and the Thapars’ crusade for a truly Indian mentation: ‘There is something we passionately want to preserve…because we sense the presence of qualities unequalled elsewhere,’ he writes – ominously, less than three months before the massacre of Delhi Sikhs to avenge Indira Gandhi’s death. So, as if in dire foreknowledge, he adds: ‘Is this the illusion? Is our faith in real India unfounded?. . . Have we created these fine rural communities, with their exceptional men and women, entirely from our imagination?’ Seemingly in answer to this, Raj writes in the aftermath of the Delhi massacre: ‘What a monstrous people we are… How can we ever recover from this madness — or is it not madness but just the human condition? I don’t know anymore.’

I was present at some of their meetings, Romesh Thapar holding forth, his leonine head and strong voice dominating; Raj’s presence a serene polarity; Madhava Ashish, tall, angular, a living symbol of detachment, bending before Romesh’s torrent of thought, content to await an opening, which came in the end as an almost artificial question about ‘spiritual’ things, so that one felt Thapar was granting his guest a say out of courtesy, not curiosity. One saw the relationship evolve, so that years later, when late one evening Raj abruptly began to talk about death (before she knew about her cancer), Madhava Ashish, who had as it were been waiting all these years to show his hand, was able, absolutely naturally, to reassure her to say: ‘This is not speculation. I speak of facts.’

It is facts that earn Madhava Ashish a hearing: facts about the world and facts about his apperception thereof. The judgement that persuades is based on first-hand knowledge of conditions. The light that informs the judgement is that of an illumined mind. 

Even as a youth Madhava Ashish wanted to farm. The development of dairy farming at Mirtola served several ends, a demonstration of what could be done in these conditions being only one of them. Under Madhava Ashish’s tutelage the farm became a test bed for psychological as well as agricultural ideas. The sedentary innocents who came to live in the Mirtola ashram were assigned work on the farm which showed them more about themselves than half a lifetime in a city office. 'Most of the people who come to him for regular guidance’, says Pervin Mahoney, ‘have never worked with their hands and carry within them the baggage of the middle-class Indian’s standards which devalue physical work—indeed, which other language in the world has a regular verb form for “to cause to be done”? That’s often the first shock; many visitors would climb the hill to Mirtola and walk straight past the 70-year old, six-foot-plus figure with grimy hands bent over a lathe in the workshop, looking for the enthroned guru who would discourse on atma-paramatma. There was talk, of course; though the to-and-fro of questioning conversation is its form, not discourse. Any subject elicited his concentrated attention, sometimes with much cross-talk, sometimes with silences whose quality differed as much as talk, sometimes with him recurring to a troubling point hours or days later — ‘just to drive a peg home’.

‘Many people came to meet Ashishda when they had gone through a crisis of suffering: the death of a husband or child, a nervous breakdown, the news that one had a fatal illness, or just the chaotic whirlpool “Why? What is it all for?” Modern westernised man often assumes blithely that his “world picture” is that of an agnostic: there may be a point to everything, there may not; how can one ever know, the intellectual’s shoulder-shrug. Ashishda’s response was a slap in the face, ‘Isn’t that the position of a coward? How can you bear to rest till you find out that either there is something or there is nothing.’

Thus, the quest.

When Krishna Prem passed on in 1965, there was no break in the parampara. What Krishna Prem was, Madhava Ashish had become, and with as firm a hand he taught the way. He may be said to have spent the last quarter of a century defining the One in the Manifold. Those who know only Madhava Ashish the environmentalist, may look there for the source of his engagement.

Donald Eichert