Vasanti Rao's recollections of her life & experiences
The transcript of an interview of Vasanti Rao has been presented here in book form. AI tools have been used to render the transcript as a narrative for easier readability.
Vasanti Rao's interview was conducted by Narad and the original videos are available here.
I was born into a Brahmin family known as Chitapur Saraswats. Our people had lived, many centuries ago, on the Punjab-Kashmir border, and when the Mohammedans came and conquered Kashmir there was a mass exodus of Brahmins from that place. One branch went towards Uttar Pradesh, another towards Rajasthan and Gujarat, and a third travelled down the coast until the Maharashtrian kings gave us shelter in an area called Konkan — so we came to be known as Konkani Saraswats. We kept to our own way of worship, Hindu of course, with our Saptamatrikas; we were Smartas, worshipping Shiva and Vishnu alike.
My family was one of scholars and pandits, people who had practised many disciplines and even authored books of philosophy in the native language. Later, when the Portuguese came to Goa, we made our headquarters there, and our main temples — Mangesh and Shanta Durga — still stand. Shanta Durga is my family deity.
Brahmins are supposed to descend from the Rishis, and each family carries the Gotra, the clan-name of its Rishi ancestor. My father's Gotra was Vashishta — Vashishta being Rama's Guru — while my mother's people descended from Vishwamitra. It is a curious thing that Vishwamitra himself was born a Kshatriya, a warrior, who so admired Vashishta's greatness that he undertook great tapasya to be accepted as a Brahmin Rishi; and yet he was known for a quick temper. Strangely enough, my mother's father, and his brothers too, carried something of that same fire — quick-tempered but fine people — while my father's side were calm, tolerant, forgiving. Even after so many millennia, it seems, something of the old characteristics persists.
My father did not come to Sri Aurobindo through any spiritual seeking of his own — in fact he had never even heard the name. He had grown up in Bombay among Parsis, thoroughly westernised, knowing almost nothing of Indian culture, though his own parents were deeply Brahminical. He passed out of a Parsi school, a gold medallist in both English and French, and afterwards took his degree in Civil Engineering. His first posting, however, was not in the Bombay Presidency but in the Madras Presidency — that patchwork the British had assembled, under their old policy of divide and rule, out of parts of Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra, and the whole of Tamil country, governed from Madras.
He was posted to the West Coast, in the South Canara district — my mother's district; my future husband's father, incidentally, was from North Canara, from Sirsi. I was born near Mangalore, in my maternal grandfather's house, into a family of great distinction. My grandfather never once raised his voice — nothing of the Vishwamitra temper in him — yet he was so brilliant a lawyer that he could turn anyone's mind within ten minutes by pure force of reason, without the least appearance of pressure. He was a successful lawyer, a social reformer, and a freedom fighter, and when the Swarajya Party was formed and the Congress decided to contest the elections the British had permitted, he stood and was elected from constituencies in both Kerala and South Canara. He worked alongside Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das, and he laid down some of the earliest arguments for women's rights that were later carried into the Constitution of India — the very Constitution on which a distant cousin of his, Sir B. N. Rau, would later work as advisor to the Constituent Assembly, and who was afterwards made a judge of the International Court at the Hague.
Among my grandfather's brothers, two went to Cambridge, where they came to know of Sri Aurobindo — for his name was already known there as the leader of the student Majlis — and later, as ICS officers, they visited him in Pondicherry in spite of the British Government's disapproval. One of them became, many years later, a friend of mine, though he was of my grandfather's generation, and it was he who wrote what would be published as 'Letters of Wisdom', twenty years after his death — I withheld them from publication for a long time, until Madhav insisted, and they appeared, with names removed, in the World Union Journal.
On my father's side too there was a connection to the freedom struggle: my paternal grandfather had been secretary to Mahatma Gandhi, and his sister had given her textile mill entirely to the nation, living afterwards on a pittance while its profits went to the Congress. Such people sacrificed so much. And yet, on the West Coast, in all that family of scholars and patriots, it was only one great-uncle of mine — the one who had gone to Jodhpur — who had actually heard of Sri Aurobindo.
That great-uncle, my maternal grandfather's elder brother, had gone to Jodhpur as a Professor of English, become an advisor to the Maharaja's family, and in that circle came to hear that the brilliant, much-admired speeches of the Maharaja of Baroda were being written by a twenty-one-year-old who had passed the ICS examination but never joined the service — a young man who had entered the Maharaja's employ instead. That young man was Sri Aurobindo. My great-uncle, meticulous about English, followed his career afterwards — how he left Baroda, went to Calcutta, and plunged into the freedom movement. He had also, in Jodhpur, met Swami Vivekananda. So the threads of spiritual and cultural influence were already there in my family, long before I was born.
Every morning, before breakfast, my maternal great-grandfather would have me write out a couplet of the Bhagavad Gita — two lines a day. I did not understand a word of it, but I had picked up the Devanagari script; I was only six years old.
It was from South Canara that we children were eventually brought, by administrative chance, to the East Coast. My father was suddenly transferred to Cuddalore, just seventeen miles from Pondicherry — a transfer that caused great lamenting in the joint family, who had always had us close by, and who now felt we were disappearing to the back of the beyond, among people who spoke Tamil, a language none of us knew. This was in 1941.
One day my father said, "I will take you to French India, to Pondicherry, for a day's outing." The roads were beautiful then — green on both sides, ponds full of ducks — and I have never forgotten that first sight of the town's green outskirts, its three rivers, its little backwaters. Cuddalore itself, when we first arrived, exposed us to Tamil for the first time, and to a heat unlike anything we had known on the cooler West Coast.
We had brought a picnic lunch, and after seeing a few of the town's small sights, my great-uncle — who was with us that day — suddenly said, as the afternoon wore on, "I think Aurobindo Ghosh has his Ashram here." "Is that so?" my father asked, and made enquiries of the local supervisors accompanying him. "Yes, yes," they said, "the Ashram is there, on the Rue de la Marine." We were, it turned out, quite close by, so they took us to the gate.
No one could enter without prior permission, but the gates stood open, and two young men with long hair and meditative eyes sat on stools watching the entrance. We were made to wait outside — I was eleven, my brother nine, my sister Jayanti six — and we stood there with our mother, simply looking in.
As I stood in that open doorway, a strange sense of familiarity began to steal over me. It made no sense: French was unfamiliar to me, French India looked utterly foreign, and Tamil too was a language I had never heard. Yet something in me recognised this place. The two young men spoke in such soft, gentle voices, and the Ashram itself was so quiet — no cars, no rickshaws, nothing of the noise of the street outside.
My father and great-uncle went inside with the attendants, and I could just hear my father ask, "Can we see Mr. Ghosh?" "No," came the reply, "our Guru is in seclusion. He gives Darshan only four times a year. You must write beforehand for permission — you must write to the Mother." My father, ever willing to indulge an elder's wish, seemed about to press the request further, but my great-uncle stopped him: "No, no, Prabhakar" — that was my father's name, meaning the sun, the one who gives light — "let us come another time." The evening shadows were falling, the children had been out long enough, and so we turned back with only that much: our first glimpse. It was December 1941 — which, at the time of this telling, makes it seventy-one years since I first stood at the Ashram gate.
That evening the beach was already full of French soldiers; the Japanese were advancing from the east, bombs had fallen on Calcutta and even near Madras, and word came from the family on the West Coast: "Bring the children back, we want them safe here." So we returned, and school resumed there, and I had no chance to visit the Ashram again for some time. But my father did not let the matter rest. On a later visit, he met Dr. Rajangam and another of the older sadhaks, who took him into the library and had him buy several books — Bases of Yoga, Lights on Yoga, the small Prayers and Meditations (the prayers translated by Sri Aurobindo himself), and The Riddle of This World — each one autographed to my father's name, with blessings, by Sri Aurobindo, and the Prayers and Meditations inscribed by the Mother herself.
We children were brought back to Cuddalore again before the war had ended, because my maternal grandfather was dying and my grandmother wanted us with our parents. And it was around this time, in a temple corridor at Chidambaram, that something happened to me which I did not understand until much later: walking through the half-dark passages, unnoticed by anyone in our party, I suddenly felt a great suffering enter me — a difficulty breathing, an unaccountable distress. After perhaps half an hour it passed as suddenly as it had come. I later learned that this was exactly the half-hour in which my grandfather, far away, was dying; he breathed his last at eight that night, and it was at eight that the strange feeling in me had subsided.
I was thirteen, and in deep grief. So when my father told me, on my return, that he had applied for my own Darshan of Sri Aurobindo — for I was old enough now — I felt nothing stir in me at all. I only wanted to die myself.
Long before any of this, my search for my Guru had already begun — when I was only four years old.
My earliest memory is of Krishna: a boy just a year or two older than I, my playmate and constant companion. I did not know that he was not an ordinary child, that others could not see him. I would tell my family about our conversations and our games, and though they listened with a certain respect, they took it for a child's fancy. My mother told me long afterwards that she used to ask, "Child, where did you go? You disappeared for a while." "Oh, I was in the garden with Krishna," I would say.
My very earliest memory is bound up with what Mother later called the Aspiration flower — the Parijatha, which legend says Krishna brought to earth from Indra's garden. Waking each morning in our house on a small hillock in Puttur, I would run to the window to see if Krishna and his cowherd friends were out grazing in the distance; I could just make out the shapes of boys and cattle among the green knolls, and hear the sweet notes of a flute. "He has come!" I would cry, and rush out to the Aspiration tree by our door, gathering the fallen flowers spread like a carpet beneath it, stringing them in haste into a garland for him. That joy, and that urgency, are as vivid to me now as they were then — though I know now that none of it happened in the physical sense.
For some years I did not know this. I would tell my mother everything, and she kept it to herself. But when I was put to school and made the mistake of mentioning Krishna to a classmate or two, word spread, and the older girls began to mock me — even losing a milk tooth became an occasion for teasing: "Has Krishna taken it away?" I began to feel that I was strange, not normal, and it hurt me badly, for at that age one only wants to belong. So I told my mother, and she said, gently, "You see, they don't see Sri Krishna — only you do. So don't speak of it to anyone else. You can tell me, yes, but not others. They won't understand." After that I kept my mouth shut completely, and did not open the subject again until I wrote to the Mother, many years later, as I was about to settle here permanently — and then shut it again, not speaking of it even to my spiritual brothers and sisters in the Ashram, until I finally set it down in writing in my late seventies, when I felt it would no longer matter.
There was one exception, much later, when a related experience of mine — of quite a different kind, which I will come to — met with the same kind of quiet mockery from a colleague I had trusted. But that belongs to another part of the story.
Once we had returned and my father had written for my Darshan, the reply came that I should wait six months, since I had until then been underage. I was thirteen. But in those six months, without anyone teaching me, I had already stumbled into the very kind of meditation Sri Aurobindo describes in Bases of Yoga — before I had ever read it. Each evening, sitting quietly on the terrace of our rented Cuddalore house as the sun went down, I would feel something enter — a golden light, it seemed, entering and dissolving me, and I would not blink for the whole time. Afterwards a great peace would come, and then a presence — exactly the sequence he describes to a disciple: remain quiet, let the quietude enter, and afterwards the peace descends, and after the peace, the presence. No one had taught me this. My grief over my grandfather began, quietly, to lift, worked upon, I now believe, by the Master and the Mother together.
When my Darshan finally came, I stood in the queue with my father ahead of me and my mother behind. As I stepped to the threshold of the room, I saw the Mother first, seated on his right, smiling at me. Then my eyes met Sri Aurobindo's — he was not smiling — and it was as if two beams of silvery-blue light entered my eyes and passed through me. I could not blink; I could not look away, even as I was carried forward in the queue and my head turned automatically to keep his gaze until I passed out of the far door. What I felt afterwards was a vast calm, an oceanic reservoir of power and serenity, somehow held within a human body — the mystery, I thought, that is enacted every time a divine being takes birth on earth.
I had suffered for years from chronic throat trouble. After that single glance, it vanished completely, and did not return for ten years. An instantaneous, physical healing — the kind I would later see the Mother perform many times herself.
There is one experience from those early years that I kept to myself for a very long time, and I should set it down properly, because I only alluded to it a moment ago.
On the twenty-ninth of February — this was 1956 — the Mother was taking her usual class, and we all sat around her as we did in those days, close enough to remain in her presence for a good while. I was not well that day, and at some point I simply nodded off, missing part of the class. When I woke with a start, I felt at once that something was different, though I could not say what. I looked around at the others, thinking that if something significant had happened, I would surely see it in their faces — but I saw nothing unusual there, and so I told myself I must simply have dreamed something in my doze. I felt ashamed at having fallen asleep in the Mother's presence, and said nothing to anyone. It was only afterwards that the Mother spoke of a golden light having descended that day, and I understood, with a pang, that in my own unconsciousness I had missed witnessing the great Supramental Descent itself. I did not regret it greatly — after all, simply witnessing it would not by itself have transformed me; the sadhana still had to be done.
The second descent, though — the horizontal one, when the force spread outward across the world — that I was fully conscious of. I had gone for the early morning balcony Darshan, and suddenly I saw what looked like streamers of golden light spreading everywhere, over the whole horizon. I said to myself, "Oh!" — and then I felt it in my own body too, which had always been a sickly one: a sudden, distinct sense that there was hope for it now, that some kind of physical transformation had become possible. I understood only later, in my mind, what that hope really meant.
I told no one about it — not even Madhav, who was already going to the Mother daily by then. It was only two days afterwards that I thought to ask him, "Has Mother said anything about her own experiences recently?" "It's remarkable that you mention it," he said, "because she has just told a few people close to her that there was a horizontal descent of the Supramental Force." "Oh," I said, "I felt something like that myself." He was quite cross with me for not having told him at the time — he said he would have carried the news to the Mother, and she would have been glad to know that others had felt it too.
It was around this same time that I once mentioned a related experience to an older colleague in the library — the devoted, artistic old-timer I have already spoken of — and she only looked at me strangely and said nothing, though I learned afterwards, through a common friend, that she had herself felt the very same descent and was simply laughing at me behind my back for confiding it. "My God," I thought, "here is my childhood thing coming up again, and in this Ashram of sadhaks too." And I closed my mouth once more, and did not open it again on such matters for a very long time.
My first meeting with the Mother had actually come earlier, on her birthday, the 21st of February, when — through Nolini-da's kind arrangement, since the other children could not attend — I was permitted to join the Ashram courtyard for the collective meditation. In those days the Mother would come out from her room, stand on the little terrace leaning against the railing, and meditate while all of us sat below in the courtyard near the Samadhi. Wanting to look older than I was, I had worn a sari that day — I was tall for my age — and slipped in behind my mother, unnoticed.
As I entered that courtyard, a strange sense of familiarity surged up in me, as if I belonged there, as if I had come home. I had not yet had Sri Aurobindo's Darshan, had not yet found the one I sought — but something in me said, this is the path, this meditation into which I have entered by itself. It meant that the Guru had chosen me before I had chosen him.
After that I read the whole of the book that had come into our house — I knew it, quite literally, by heart; I had a photographic memory as a child, and could recite whole pages, footnotes and all, to my astonished father, who was not himself interested in reading it.
I want to set down one more memory of instantaneous healing — not mine, but my brother's. He had joined the very first Grey Group formed in the Ashram, and was here when Sri Aurobindo left his body. He suffered from asthma, though I did not know this well at the time. One morning, as we were to go for Pranam, he sat unable to move, in obvious distress. "I can't breathe," he said. My heart nearly stopped — we are taught, after all, that not breathing means dying.
I decided to go straight to the Mother rather than the doctor first. She was in the meditation hall; I told her simply, "My brother says he can't breathe." She looked at me quietly, took a flower from a tray nearby, and said only, "Give this to him." That was all. I ran home and gave it to him, saying, "Mother has given this to you." He took it, wondering, and grew calm. From that day — this was 1948 — to this day, more than sixty years later, the trouble has never once recurred. No fuss, no gesture, no display: just an ordinary day's work for her, though it was a permanent miracle for him. He is over eighty now, still fit, and still plays tennis.
There is another small memory I keep close. When I went for my medical check before joining the newly formed playground groups, the doctor found some irregularity in my heartbeat and would not clear me without the Mother's permission. I told her, at morning Pranam, "Mother, the doctor says there is something wrong with my heart." She grew serious, looked at me, wagged her finger, and said, in a rising voice, "Never be afraid. Never." She meant far more than the heart. I have understood that ever since — in every dangerous situation I have found myself in, in India and abroad, I have never felt the vibration of fear, because that voice has always returned to me: Never be afraid.
For a long time after I joined the Ashram, Madhav Pandit remained someone I knew only from a distance. When I first came here, at eleven years old, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were, for all of us, like Himalayan peaks — both still in their physical bodies, and we had eyes for nothing and no one else. There was Nolini Kanta Gupta, Sri Aurobindo's secretary — the very one who had arranged my early access to collective meditation — and Amrita-da and Pavitra-da, names we held in awe; but Madhav, though a remarkably handsome young man, was at that time still new to the Ashram and not yet widely known.
I settled here permanently at seventeen, still very raw about the world — girls of my generation were kept sheltered, and I could not even go to school unescorted. Since I had not completed my formal schooling and the Ashram school did not match my level, I joined as a sadhak, a worker, and was given work in the library — then housed in the main Ashram building, in what is now the Reading Room, before the Mother was able to take over the larger building (once the French vacated it) that became the true Sri Aurobindo Library. Madhav, I learned, belonged to the same community as I did — Konkani-speaking Saraswat Brahmins — and it was through this that we were introduced.
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.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother decided that Madhav should work as Nolini-da's assistant, in a tiny room beneath a staircase — barely large enough for a table and chair. Correspondence in those days was vast: three great baskets of letters would sit by Nolini-da's desk, one of which was given over to Madhav to answer under Nolini's brief instruction, while the Bengali letters Nolini handled himself after consulting Sri Aurobindo. Every letter was taken seriously by our Gurus — though neither of them wished to be addressed as such. This, incidentally, is the only Ashram in India where Guru Purnima is not celebrated; Sri Aurobindo was always called simply "Sri Aurobindo," and once the Ashram was formed, the Mother was addressed only as "the Mother" — never by her earlier name, Mira.
Kapali Sastri, for his part, put Madhav through a rigorous twelve-year private discipline of study, meditation, exercise, and a daily walk along the beach — though he taught him only the practice of Integral Yoga itself, withholding the wider Tantric, philosophical, and aesthetic learning he had received from his own many teachers. Nolini-da, meanwhile, taught Madhav French. And as the years passed, Madhav's responsibilities multiplied: he helped prepare The Life Divine for the press, joined the small Housing Committee alongside the senior Amrita-da and Kunuma, and eventually organised, almost single-handedly, the great International Centre of Education conference of 1951. It was, I think, this steady widening of his work — meeting all kinds of people, learning to administer, learning to speak — that quietly prepared him, though none of us knew it then, for the very different kind of life he would later lead in the world outside.
Through all these years I remained mostly in the library, working under Premanand and then Medhanand, though our paths crossed constantly, since the library supplied reference books for the secretarial work Madhav and the others were doing. It was only much later, when Madhav's own workload had grown too heavy — Nolini-da said plainly that he needed an assistant — that I offered myself for the post. Madhav, at first, did not think me suited to it; he was serious, withdrawn, absorbed entirely in philosophy, while I mixed easily with everyone in the playground and had already become something of a singer. But I persisted, pointing out that I knew several languages and had already been of use to him, and Nolini-da, who liked the idea very much, helped settle it. In my place at the library, I recommended a newly arrived young man named Kireet Joshi to Medhanand — who became so close to him that, as Medhanand later joked, he had had two of the nicest people in the Ashram working for him, only to lose them both to more important work.
Kapali Sastri used to walk on the terrace of his house because from there he could see the Mother walking on the terrace of hers — before the new rooms were built — and what he saw was not simply a woman walking, but a pillar of white light moving up and down. He once took Madhav up to see it too, and Madhav saw the very same thing: the Mother's form, entirely made of light.
It was this kind of direct, personal vision — not blind devotion — that had convinced men like Kapali Sastri and Ganapati Muni, both orthodox and exacting Vedic scholars, of the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's divinity; each had, in his own way, been shown forms of the Divine Mother before he would accept her. They were not merely adoring disciples; they were themselves realised men, already recognised as gurus in their own right, who had chosen to lay that position down. Even in his letters, Kapali Sastri had once asked the Mother directly who she was; her answer came in the form of the chapters she had written — not as a single planned book, but as separate pieces given out to different disciples as each one needed them — called the Four Aspects of the Mother. To Kapali Sastri, reading them was simply a confirmation of what he had already seen with his own inner eye. He never wavered afterwards in his faith, taking every word Sri Aurobindo wrote as literally true.
Kapali Sastri also translated Sri Aurobindo's Secret of the Veda into Sanskrit, following the tradition of the three great Acharyas — Shankaracharya's Advaita, Madhvacharya's Dvaita, and Ramanujacharya's Vishishtadvaita, the last of which comes closest, philosophically, to Sri Aurobindo's own vision. He had been astonished, in fact, to find on his own inner wall — quite literally, in vision — the Vedic deities appearing and confirming to him the very things Sri Aurobindo was writing in his commentaries on the Veda: confirmation that Sri Aurobindo had received his knowledge directly, from the source itself, with no human teacher in that field.
It was of Sri Aurobindo that one of our own Ashram poets, Pujalal, wrote in a Sanskrit hymn calling him Gurur-guroh — Guru of Gurus. That, in truth, is what he had become: men like Kapali Sastri, who had already been recognised as gurus in their own right outside, gave up that standing entirely to become disciples here. It is an extraordinary thing, when you think of it.
Kapali Sastri's own end came quietly, and in a way that felt, to those of us who loved him, entirely fitting. Some while before he died, he had fallen ill — an eczema had attacked his feet, the weakest and lowest part of the body, as we say, and Dr. Nripendra treated him for it as best he could. But Kapali Sastri himself knew that something graver had happened to him. Walking back from the Ashram one day after his Pranam, just past the dispensary, he felt what could only be described as a spear entering his chest — nothing physical, and yet unmistakable. He knew, from that moment, that he had been struck, and from that day he was truly ill, unable to go to the Ashram again, spending most of his time in meditation, sometimes with his eyes open and yet clearly elsewhere. Madhav looked after him devotedly, with his mother and sister coming often to sit with him, careful never to disturb his inward state.
Both the Mother's principle and Kapali Sastri's own were the same on this point: no negative thought — nothing of illness, nothing of death — should be allowed to enter the atmosphere around a person in that state. It was not a matter of fear, but of a different, occult way of meeting the end. Sensing that his time was near, Madhav asked the Mother whether he might bring Kapali Sastri to his gate one afternoon when her car passed on its way to the tennis ground, and she agreed. They stood waiting, and when her car came by, the window was lowered and the door opened slightly; Kapali Sastri bowed to her from where he stood, and she rested her hands on his head for a long moment, blessing him. They looked at each other once — she love and compassion itself, he surrender itself — and then her car went on. In this quiet way he let her know that he understood the end was coming.
He turned more inward after that, and on the fifteenth of August — Sri Aurobindo's birthday, three years after Sri Aurobindo himself had left his body — he remained deeply meditative all day, through the long Darshan lines, and again that night. Madhav's own bed lay only a few feet from his, separated by a single step, so that he might know if anything happened. After settling him for the night, Madhav found him still in what appeared to be peaceful meditation when he first looked in; some hours later, checking again, he found that Kapali Sastri had gone — with no trouble, no sound, nothing at all. He had passed, quite simply, from the state of Samadhi into whatever lies beyond it. Because no one could say exactly when in the night it happened, it is recorded as the sixteenth of August, but I believe he truly left on the night of the fifteenth itself — Sri Aurobindo's own birthday. It was, I think, exactly as he would have wished it: adoring Sri Aurobindo, as he had all his life, in his Sanskrit hymns, to the very last.
Among my many teachers in the Ashram, one of the most unusual was Medhanand — a former junior judge in Nazi Germany who had fled, with his French wife, to a small island near Tahiti after his outspoken opposition to the Nazi regime put his life in danger. During the war, when Britain and then America entered the conflict, he — being German — was interned by the French on a still smaller island, while his wife alone raised their children and ran their plantation. It was in the isolation of those islands that his own spiritual and occult development quietly began; he ventured, alone among the foreigners there, into a forest the islanders themselves avoided as haunted, and returned unharmed — a test, as they saw it, that made him one of their own. He came to know their old animist and shamanic knowledge of the subtle-physical world in a way almost no one else at the Ashram ever learned from him directly.
When Medhanand arrived at the Ashram in 1951, I recognised him at once — as, he told me later, he had recognised me — from some earlier existence we had shared, though I never made much of such things, feeling our whole focus must be on the present sadhana. He took it upon himself, in his own quiet way, to educate me: he would simply set a book down beside me at my little worktable and vanish without a word, leaving me to open it and find what I was meant to find — the sculpture and painting of ancient Egypt, of Sumeria, of Greece and Rome. He taught me German, and Latin too, so that I might understand the roots of the English words I dealt with constantly in my work. When we came to Rome, I found myself overtaken by violent, unaccountable memories — of having been a young Christian girl, a slave, hiding in the catacombs while Christians were pursued and Christ was crucified; I understood, then, why the Roman period in my school history lessons had always filled me with an unease I could never explain as a child. These were not things important to our Yoga, and that movement in me settled as quickly as it had risen — but I believe Medhanand wished simply to make me a citizen of the world, and not only of India.
I want to set down one more strange thing I witnessed with my own eyes, from around the time we lived near Equals One, Yvonne's place.
Yvonne kept a monkey there — a large one, almost like an ape, whom people called the King Monkey. She had come by him in an unusual way: she dreamed one night that someone was coming to her whom she would have to take care of, and not long afterwards she heard the drumming of the wandering monkey-handlers passing by. She went down, and the monkey immediately wanted to come to her, though she was a complete stranger to him; she had to bargain hard with the handler, who wanted a great deal of money, but in the end she brought him home. He grew up with her and was quite unlike other monkeys they kept. At one point they thought he was moping and might need a mate, so they introduced a female monkey into his enclosure; she stood near him for the longest time, until finally she went right up to him — whereupon he simply placed his hands on her head, blessed her, and that was that. He sent the mate away. He was not moping, Yvonne came to understand; he was withdrawing from the world, in his own way, as if something of a former life clung to him still.
The Mother herself once allowed this monkey into her presence — even onto her lap, where he peeled and ate a banana she gave him, perfectly well behaved.
Now, our community's own young Swamiji, from the Shankaracharya Math with which my family had old ties, came once to have the Mother's Darshan, and afterwards asked whether he might see this famous monkey he had heard about. I spoke to Yvonne and to Medhanand, and it was arranged. We went to the hall where the monkey was kept, and found him standing at the far end in an unusually pensive way — very few monkeys stand like that — with his back turned to us. But the moment we entered, he turned around, looked straight at our Swamiji across the room, raised his arm, and gave a loud cry of greeting. And our Swamiji — an educated man who certainly knew no monkey language — raised his own arm just the same way and answered him with the very same kind of cry. Then the two of them drew closer and closer to each other, staring, until they stood close together; the monkey made sounds like actual words, and our Swamiji went on nodding and nodding, as if he understood every one of them. I stood there and watched this extraordinary exchange with my own eyes — two beings, of such different kinds, plainly recognising something in each other that the rest of us could only watch from outside.
I twice visited Sri Ramana Maharshi's ashram at Tiruvannamalai, arranged through friends of my father among the government engineers of the district. I was not yet thirteen the first time. We sat, women on one side and men on the other, in the old hall where the Maharshi reclined on his couch; my small brother, only five, wandered up unafraid to stand close by him, gazing and gazing, until the Maharshi smiled and asked in Tamil, "Shapda? Shapda?" — "Will you eat? Will you eat?"
I sat at the far end of the hall, shy, and was told afterwards that his eyes had rested on me many times while I sat deep in meditation, quite unaware of it. When others wished to go sightseeing, I begged to be left where I was, and meditated there for hours, once seeing a great light. I told my mother, afterwards, that I loved him, that his path — so direct, so simple, straight to the point, know who you are and that is all — moved me deeply. But he was not my Guru. I had had definite inner indications of Sri Aurobindo already, and six months after that visit, I had my own first Darshan of him, and knew that my search had ended.
Once, long ago, a group of us girls formed a chorus to sing a melody built entirely on the syllable OM, for one of the Ashram's monthly programmes. Before we performed, the Mother gathered us and showed us, forming her lips carefully, exactly how the "O" should be rounded and full, and how the closing "M" must never be clipped short but drawn out into a long, resonant humming — because, she said, there is a humming sound at the very heart of the universe. It is why Sri Aurobindo always wrote the word as "O-M," never "A-U-M" — though the two vowels A and U do combine, phonetically, into that single rounded "O." I have always found it striking, too, that this seed-sound is itself woven into our two Gurus' names: the "O" of Aurobindo, and the "M" of Mother — the Shakti, the force that creates and manifests the universe.
I still sing in that OM choir on Fridays.
Some of that same music went into Yvonne's dance-drama, Le Périple d'Or — The Golden Journey — for which the Mother herself supplied all the music and read, in her own voice, the part of the Purusha, with Yvonne reading Prakriti, the Shakti. I was chosen, to my great and lasting fortune, for the small, wordless role of the Angel Musician — sexless, neither male nor female, dressed in an orange robe, seated on a little swing built to my own slight measurements, playing the tanpura throughout as a silent witness to the whole unfolding drama of the Two who are One. The recording itself was made upstairs, in the very room where Sri Aurobindo used to sit and look out at the sky, with the Mother's part written out for her in large handwriting, since she read without spectacles. Before we began, she once turned to me and asked, quite simply, "Can you come? Do you have the time?" — to me, who would have given up anything at all simply to be near her. Sitting there through that long recording, playing my tanpura at her feet, I came to see, quite vividly, the whole of creation as their eternal play — every relationship in the world only another guise of the Two who are One.
For a very long time, neither Madhav nor I imagined we would ever leave the Ashram. Invitations had come to him even in the Mother's lifetime, from universities and centres abroad, but he always declined, wishing never to be far from her. It was only after her passing that circumstance drew him out — beginning, almost by accident, with an invitation to Singapore.
The Singapore centre had been founded with the involvement of Devan Nair, a leading political figure there who, while imprisoned by the British for his part in Singapore's independence movement, had read The Life Divine in his cell and — a communist turned disciple of Sri Aurobindo — never looked back. He and others wrote to Madhav, acknowledging that he never travelled, but pleading that after the Mother's passing, disciples scattered across the world badly needed the presence of an older sadhak to give them courage; would he come, they asked, at least to Singapore, for a week? He agreed. We had, quite literally, no suitcases, having never expected to travel anywhere.
When we were leaving the Ashram for that first journey, one of our fellow Ashramites, the artist Krishnalal, made us a special painting as a parting gift — showing Madhav in his dhoti and myself in a sari, each of us holding what looked like the Mother's flag, standing beside an aeroplane we were about to board. It touched me deeply, because rather than viewing our going out into the world as something to be critical of, he had chosen to bless it in his own way — his manner of wishing us bon voyage.
In Singapore, Madhav was received with astonishing warmth — even at the university, dominated as it was by communist sympathies, where he was heard in pin-drop silence and fielded every hostile question so gracefully that no one could find fault with him. What was meant to be a week stretched, at Devan Nair's insistence, into a fortnight, with halls overflowing and journalists filling the papers with the visit. It was there, too, that Devan Nair's and a Chinese friend's wives took me shopping and, over my protests that I needed no such thing, bought me eight beautiful synthetic saris — "You will need them," they told me, "when you go to America." We had no such plan. "But we feel you will be going," they said. They were quite right.
From Singapore, invitations followed to Sri Lanka, where Mr. Murugesu, a distinguished and devoted admirer of Madhav's books, arranged a reception of similar warmth — lectures, a full-moon Puja of the Buddha shown especially in our honour, and, at Ananda College, a Buddhist institution, an invitation none of us had expected. I was asked to sing everywhere we went. At the great Buddhist monastery in Kandy, near the Temple of the Tooth, I was suddenly asked, without warning, to sing an invocation before several hundred ochre-robed monks — grim-faced men who, I was told, saluted no one, though laymen were expected to salute them. I had nothing prepared, only the Dhammapada I had been reading over and over during the long drive there; I closed my eyes and began the Pali invocation, Om Namo Bhagavate Sambuddhassa, followed by verses in the metre of the Gita describing the Buddha's teaching, set to a tune that came to me spontaneously in the manner of our own Sanskrit chants. When I opened my eyes, every one of those glum faces was smiling — grinning, even — and as we walked afterwards through the monastery's inner courtyard, monks who supposedly saluted no one stood everywhere with folded hands. "It was your day," Mr. Murugesu told me. "You saved the day."
After Sri Lanka, and a visit to the Baroda centre — housed in the very mansion where Sri Aurobindo had once lodged as a young man in the Maharaja's service — invitations began arriving steadily from the West. Getting our passports was, oddly, no trouble at all: the Governor of Pondicherry at the time, who had already had Madhav address gatherings at Government House, simply instructed an official to arrange everything without delay. I travelled as Madhav's secretary, since a man needed some official reason to be accompanied by a woman.
Before we left, there was a moment I still turn over in my mind. Waiting once in the first-floor room of the main Ashram building for the Mother to call me up, I suddenly had the sensation that the four walls around me — the walls of the Ashram itself — had simply fallen away, and I sat exposed, like a child, to the whole open world beyond. There was no fear in it, no sense of anything destroyed — only a strange, unmistakable feeling of being about to be exposed to the world entire. I remembered this vividly as we prepared to leave for America, and it proved true enough: for the next ten years I was travelling almost continuously, through America and Europe both.
We flew out in 1977, a party that soon included three young American helpers — Tatsat, Stan, and Barbie — who had taken it upon themselves to arrange our itinerary; Stan even gutted a van of its seats and fitted four comfortable armchairs so we could travel long distances in some comfort. I used to joke that we were a travelling circus, performing wherever we stopped.
Our first stop was the American East Coast, where fog forced our plane to circle over Philadelphia before we could finally land in New York. There, Eleanor Montgomery — a longtime friend of Madhav's from her days staying at Golconde — met us eagerly, already certain that Madhav would settle permanently in New York; she was deeply disappointed when he told her he had come only on a three-month visa and must return to the Ashram. I remember something she told Madhav once, on her own last day at the Ashram before returning to America: feeling sad to be leaving what she called Mother's Ashram for far-off New York, she heard the Mother say to her, quite simply, "You know something? The whole world is my Ashram." I heard this with my own ears, and it stayed with me — the Divine does not come to earth for one community alone, but for the whole of humanity, and Eleanor, in her way, would go on doing the Mother's work in New York just as surely as any of us did it here.
Wherever we travelled — universities, spiritual centres, private homes — Mother had long ago given Madhav his method for speaking to secular or unconvinced audiences: first speak only of the principles and ideas themselves, and only if people are moved enough to ask who taught you these things, then speak of us. At a symposium in Chicago, sharing a platform with followers of other paths including Rudolf Steiner's, Madhav's presentation of Sri Aurobindo's thought was met with such pin-drop silence, and such a rush of people afterwards wanting to know who his teacher had been, that they arranged two further evenings — one on Sri Aurobindo, one on the Mother.
Music went everywhere with us. I would fit fifteen minutes of song into a university programme, or a full hour-long recital elsewhere, tracing what I called the evolution of Indian devotional music — a Rik from the Rig Veda chanted on its ancient three notes, a verse from the Upanishads, a couplet from the Gita, a piece from the Puranas, the Guru Stotra from the Tantra, and then, moving into the medieval age of Bhakti, a song of Guru Nanak, a Bengali Shyama Sangeet to Kali, a Baul song, a hymn of the Tamil woman-saint Andal, a Marathi abhang, even a Gujarati devotional song — showing, in one small recital, both the unity and the astonishing diversity of the country's devotional traditions. I had learned many of these — along with the beautiful, image-rich Krishna songs of the Muslim poet Kazi Nazrul Islam — from a gifted Ashramite named Gitika, whose own father had once wandered Bengal's villages singing songs of revolution.
At one memorable retreat centre outside Detroit, belonging to a very old and dynamic follower of Paramahansa Yogananda's mission, I was nudged without warning during a morning assembly — "Your turn is next" — and made to sing before I had even had a glass of water; I sang Pujalal's Sanskrit hymn Namo Namaste in Raag Kedar, and the response was such that his secretary was overheard insisting, in a high, carrying voice, "I said no, she couldn't be just a secretary — it was so spiritual!" I had, of course, never claimed to be anything but a devotee singing before her Guru — "Even that is enough," came the reply, and I was asked to give a full concert that same evening.
In California, my old friend Jyotipriya — Judith Tyberg, whom I had known since her very first visit to the Ashram in 1947 — welcomed us with open love, even posting a public notice at the East-West Centre announcing "music by our beloved Vasanti." At Krotona, on the hill in Ojai once home to the Theosophical Society, we met people who had spent whole lifetimes in genuine spiritual practice; I remember, in particular, an old man walking quietly along a hillside path, his face lit from within, utterly ripe with a lifetime's sadhana, who exchanged not a single word with Madhav — only a bow, and a silent gesture of blessing — before continuing on his way. We attended, too, a talk by Krishnamurti nearby, though we left before it ended; and at the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder, an institution famously exclusive and devoted to a philosophy of emptiness quite different from our own, Madhav was received with unusual respect, introduced as a great authority on Indian Tantra, and kept back long afterwards for a private, searching, entirely amicable exchange of views.
Even flying over the American land itself, between one city and another, I felt distinct currents of what I can only call sacred vibration rising up from the earth — as though something ancient and holy were embedded there, quite apart from whatever modern America presented to the world outwardly. My mother's own village Guru used to compare it to a clothesline: pull one end and every garment hanging along its length begins, ever so slightly, to sway. I found, again and again in America, people and places that swayed in just that way.
I want to set down, too, what I remember of Madhav's own passing, many years later, long after our travels had ended. When it became clear that he needed to go to hospital in Chennai, we were told it would be a matter of three days — one day to travel, one for tests, one more before returning. Madhav himself chose the small team who would accompany him: doctors, every one of them, except for Shraddhalu, who went as the strong young man of the group and as a representative of the family. He did not want women near him at that time. I understood, later, that it was not a slight — only that we were too attached to him, too emotional, and he wanted around him only the kind of quiet, steady strength the boys could give. Ram, who was not himself a medical doctor, was also asked to stay behind for want of space in the car, though he was in tears at being left; Madhav told him simply, "I'm coming back in three days. You be here."
I could not go with him, but I did not need to be physically at his side to feel what was happening. I arranged an Ashram taxi, and Ram and I followed the next day to Chennai, where my father then lived; we stayed at his house, while Madhav himself was lodged, with his small team of doctors, at the home of a businessman friend, Mahendra Bajoria. I was not present in the room itself when Madhav finally left his body — only the boys he had chosen were allowed in, right to the end. But I do not think that mattered, in the way it might seem to. Some things are simply between the disciple and his Guru, arranged in whatever way is truly needed at the time, and it is not for us to feel excluded by it.
Looking back across all these years — the ancestral scholars and freedom fighters into whose family I was born; the small girl gathering flowers each morning for a companion no one else could see; the day my father, quite by accident of postings, brought his children within reach of a gate at Pondicherry we knew nothing about; the years of quiet work in the library and in Madhav's little office beneath the stairs; the singing that carried Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's presence into concert halls, university platforms, and Buddhist monasteries an ocean away — I can only say that none of it was planned by me. Each step seemed, at the time, to arrive by itself, as though something had already chosen the road before I ever set out on it. I do not know, even now, in my late eighties, how I have been able to speak of all these things without being overcome by them. But it is only because you insisted that I have. And there is always so much more — a lifetime among some of the most extraordinary people I have known — that I could go on, if you let me, endlessly weaving these stories back and forth.
Namaskar.
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