A Luminous Life

Madhav's path to the Ashram

Madhav's own path to Pondicherry began long before he knew anything of Sri Aurobindo — through his mentor, Kapali Sastri, whom he had known since he was a boy of twelve. But to understand how that came about, I should first say something of Madhav's father, Pundalik.

Pundalik Pandit had been named after the old Maharashtrian saint of that name — a great devotee of Vitthal, a form of Sri Krishna. The story goes that Krishna once appeared to this Pundalik just as he was bathing his elderly parents, who depended on him entirely; not wishing to keep the Lord waiting, and yet unwilling to leave his parents even for a moment, he simply threw down a brick and asked the Lord to stand on it until he was free. That is why the deity is called Vitthal — the one who stands on the brick — worshipped to this day at the great pilgrimage town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra, where the Varkari pilgrims still walk on foot, singing the old medieval songs, exactly as they have for centuries. Madhav's father was named after that devoted son, and he grew, in his own life, into a highly successful lawyer and a very large landowner — wealthy, aristocratic, and generous enough that the British government decorated him with titles, much as our own government today gives Padma awards.

It was this same generosity that first brought Ganapati Muni into the family's orbit. When Madhav was that age, Kapali Sastri's own Guru, Ganapati Muni, came to Sirsi — Madhav's birthplace in North Canara — seeking solitude for tapas in the old Vedic style, walking from place to place on foot without telling even his own family where he had gone. Pundalik Pandit's garden house was known as a place where wandering monks were sheltered during the four rainy months of Chaturmasya, and it was there that Ganapati Muni came to stay, undisturbed, his simple needs quietly supplied by the household. It was Madhav's elder brother, Sundar Pandit, who was really responsible for this: alone among his brothers he had been drawn to spiritual things since childhood, and he and a few like-minded friends made a habit of seeking out every wandering sadhu who passed through the district. Sensing that this particular visitor was no ordinary sadhu, Sundar Pandit asked his father to give him shelter, and it was arranged. When his own disciples, worried at his disappearance, went searching for him, Kapali Sastri was among them, and it was this search that first brought him into the world of Madhav's family. Ganapati Muni, before he left, told Kapali Sastri, "Watch this boy — there is a light around his head." That boy was Madhav, twelve years old at the time, and quite unaware that anything had been said of him. He went on to school like any other boy — good at his studies, good at sports, popular among his classmates.

Then, one day, wandering in his lawyer father's library, Madhav came upon a book on the Alipore Bomb Case — the trial in which Sri Aurobindo had been charged with sedition — and a photograph fell out of it: Sri Aurobindo's picture. Something moved in him at the sight of it. His elder brother wrote to Kapali Sastri, who had by then settled at the Ashram, and Kapali Sastri sent the boy a warm, simple letter of encouragement. Though Madhav did not fully understand what had happened to him, it proved to be the beginning of his path to Pondicherry — with Kapali Sastri as the instrument.

Kapali Sastri's own journey to the Ashram had come by a still older route. As a schoolboy he had witnessed, at the Shore Temple near his home in Chennai, a man of extraordinary tejas extemporising Sanskrit verses before the Devi — this was Ganapati Muni, whom he fell at the feet of and accepted as Guru. Through him, Kapali Sastri also came to know Ramana Maharshi — then an unnamed, silent young ascetic at Tiruvannamalai, called simply the Brahmana Swami, until Ganapati Muni himself gave him the name by which the world would come to know him. Kapali Sastri was already deep in the Tantra of the Dakshina Marga, the right-handed path, initiated by his own father, and steeped besides in Vedic study, aesthetics, and logic. He was also a fiery patriot, close friend to the poet Subramanya Bharati — who had himself accepted Sri Aurobindo as Guru — and it was through Bharati that Kapali Sastri, invited to Pondicherry to speak at a small literary club of exiles and freedom fighters, finally secured an audience with Sri Aurobindo. He greeted him in an extempore Sanskrit verse; Sri Aurobindo listened quietly, then asked, in English, whether Kapali Sastri knew the language, and the two were left alone. Afterwards, at night, Kapali Sastri would find himself transported in a kind of subtle vision to Sri Aurobindo's own room — a room he recognised the very first time he entered it physically. He soon resigned his post and asked to become an inmate of the Ashram.

Kapali Sastri, meanwhile, kept a close watch over the boy from a distance, and it was Ganapati Muni himself, on a later occasion, who told him plainly: this boy Madhav is a Vibhuti of the Lord, and he has a great future — he will do great work. Madhav, at that stage, cared for nothing more unusual than cricket and reading; he had gone through every book in his father's library and the local library besides, and stood first in his class always. Once Madhav went off to college, at some distance from Kapali Sastri, the two kept up a steady correspondence — Kapali Sastri's letters to him were later published — and it was through this correspondence, as much as anything, that Madhav's path was quietly prepared.

When Madhav next came to see him, it was to the Ashram that he came; Kapali Sastri took him to the Mother, who gave him meditation. Afterwards, Madhav fell at her feet and wept without knowing why — psychic tears, streaming — while she bent tenderly over him, caressing his head. She told Kapali Sastri afterwards that she had seen the goddess Mahalakshmi standing behind the boy: a sign, it was understood, that abundance of every kind — not merely money — would flow into the Ashram's work through him.

Madhav was eighteen then, and his family, a wealthy one in which he was the youngest and everyone's favourite, was shocked when he announced his wish to stay. In our tradition, one does not skip from studenthood straight to renunciation, bypassing marriage and household life; his elder brother insisted he wait until he was twenty-one, and offered, as a middle path, that he complete a Bachelor of Commerce degree in the meantime — training that later proved invaluable when he came to handle the Ashram's publishing and finances. The moment his examinations were done, without even waiting for the results, he took the little train to Pondicherry, arriving late at night with nowhere to go, too shy to knock on Kapali Sastri's door and disturb the household; he spent that first night alone in the railway station waiting room. In the morning the Mother asked him where he wished to live — with his mother and sister, who had by then also joined the Ashram, or with Kapali Sastri. He chose Kapali Sastri, and lived in the room beside him for the rest of his Ashram life — a room vacated, as it happened, from the same house where Sri Aurobindo himself had once lived.