Asian Current

European Quest

In Danzig Harbor I deserted the freighter and journeyed to Bel lin to look for the small office maintained by Indian exiles. The first person I met there was the Indian revolutionary leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. In New York I had often heard of him as one who had helped form an Indian government-in-exile and build up a world-wide network of Indian revolutionary activity. In fact, it was because of him and his colleagues that I had been imprisoned.

I found the personality and past life of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya compelling. In a very short time I had entered into a union with him; it was not a legal marriage, but I bore his name and was known as his wife. It was to last for nearly eight years, but became so complex that it tended only to aggravate my sick state of mind.

Whether or not I loved him I do not really know. Many years after I had left Viren I remember writing to an American friend that “to my astonishment and resentment Viren remains the center of my emotional life, and if he were in danger I suppose I would walk barefoot around the world to help him. Yet I would not live with him for a day.” That was long ago, and time again proved the great healer. That he loved me there is no doubt. Neither I nor others understood why, for he had little interest in women.

Thirteen years before he met me, Viren had married an Irish Catholic girl. Because he was a pagan who rejected all her efforts to convert him, she bought a special dispensation from the Pope to marry him. After the ceremony she informed him that a condition of the marriage was that any issue was to be Catholic. They quarreled and parted, she becoming a nun in some hidden English convent and he trying for years to have the marriage annulled. He failed and we were never legally married. As a result my American citizenship was twice challenged in later years by the British Secret Service, which claimed, with no good intentions, that I was a British subject. To a shocked American consular official in China I once explained the situation thus:

“My husband was married to a Catholic nun and for this reason could not marry me. You may call me a concubine if you will, but not a British subject.”

The official threw up his hands in despair.

Virendranath was the epitome of the secret Indian revolutionary movement, and perhaps its most brilliant protagonist abroad. He was nearly twenty years my senior, with a mind as sharp and ruthless as a saber. He was thin and dark, with a mass of black hair turning gray at the temples, and a face that had something fierce about it. He might easily have been taken for a southern European, a Turk, or a Persian. To me he seemed something like thunder, lightning, and rain; and wherever he had sojourned in Europe or England, he had been just about that to the British. His hatred for the islanders who had subjugated his country knew no bounds. ,

The foundation of his emotional life had been laid in the feudal Mohammedan state of Hyderabad. To this he had added a quarter of a century of intellectual training in England, Europe, and the Near East. His was a famous Brahmin family abounding in poets, singers, educators, and scientists. One of his sisters was the poetess and national leader Sarojini Naidu, and his younger brother was married to Kamala Devi, who later became a great leader. By race the family was Hindu, by culture a mixture of Hinduism, Mohammedanism, and the best of English liberalism. Viren’s father had been one of the first Brahmins to defy caste laws by going to England and later to Germany to study science. An outcast, he was forced to emigrate to the Moslem state of Hyderabad, where he became a pioneer in modern university education.

Viren had been educated by his father, by Moslem scholars and English tutors. He grew up speaking Hindustani, English, a smattering of German, and the court language of the Moslem world, Persian. Throughout his childhood he had heard his mother - a poetess and an advocate of the emancipation of women - referred to with contempt by Moslems, and this had generated in him emotions which he had never been able to reconcile. This was only one of the many conflicts that went on within him and made his mind and emotional life remind me of one of those Hindu temples in south India - repository of all the cultural movements of the ages.

In Heidelberg and Jena Viren had pursued the study of comparative philology. He spoke English like a ruling-class Englishman and had learned French, German, Swedish, and some Italian and Spanish. He had lived in Sweden for a few years and had not only mastered the language but gone on to study Icelandic. When he and I went with an Indian delegation to the Soviet Union in 1921, shortly after my arrival in Germany, he soon assimilated Russian and in his leisure time sought out men from Lithuania or Iceland, or haunted the encampments of gypsies, in order to compare their languages with ancient Sanskrit.

Like Nehru and many other men of the upper classes of India, Viren had absorbed British traditions of liberty. These he had come to apply to his own country - a practice that enraged most Englishmen. He and his colleagues, some of them caste-ridden, orthodox Brahmins, were among the early nationalist terrorists of India - as they were also among India’s early educators, scientists, artists, labor organizers, and, later, Communists. They hunted British rulers of India and Egypt with pistol, bomb, and knife. Some had been shot, some hanged, others imprisoned for life. In whatever sections of the world Indians gathered they were to be found.

Each summer, when groups of Indian students left England to spend their vacations on the Continent, one goal of pilgrimage was always Virendranath’s home. Of this they never dared speak, and some even preferred not to recall their conversations with him, for he made violent attacks on Hindu caste prejudices and Moslem superstitions. He would eat pork in the presence of Moslems and beef in front of Hindus. To Hindus he spoke of Hinduism as a “cowdung religion,” and he made the adherents of both religions writhe under the sting of his tongue. He taunted them by asserting that even in poetry they learned not from India, but from England, and that they believed England was the paradise to which their souls would go after death. His contempt for Indians aspiring to official posts under the British Government was boundless. He warned his students that only clerks watched time-clocks or lived an orderly, respectable life. When told that one must live, he would answer in the words of Voltaire: “I don’t see the necessity.”

He practiced what he preached. He never possessed more than one suit of clothing, which I was constantly darning, patching, and pressing. Nor did he care what he ate. When he had money, he gave it to anyone in need, so that we were forever in debt. Money was merely a means of working for the independence of his country. His attitude toward it had been formed by the great joint families of India and in particular by that caste of Brahmin teachers and scholars who gave their knowledge freely. Years later I found the same attitude among those intellectuals of China who also came from families in which the clan cared for the individual.

Virendranath turned more and more to the study of Marxism as a means of gaining independence for India; and he eventually became a Communist Party member. I always wondered just what new design was added to the Hindu temple of his mind by this act.’ I could never imagine him being regimented by any political party or following “lines” of thought and action. His mind. took the whole world as its province and drew nourishment from every age.

When Viren and I began life together, two eras and two cultures met. I was an American working woman, the product of a distorted commercial civilization, he a high-caste Indian with a cultivated, labyrinthine Brahmin mind and a British classical education. Though he hated everything British, he had an even deeper contempt for an American capitalism which judged all things by their money value. His mind was modern, but his emotional roots were in Hinduism and Islam.

Like a storm, he existed according to his nature, absorbing, influencing everything he touched. Our way of life was of his choosing, not mine; our home a small edition of that of a great joint family of India. Any Indian who became ill was brought to our home and nursed by me, and on one occasion I had two of them at once. Moslems and Hindus of every caste streamed through it as through a railway station or a hotel. Students came directly from their boats, carting all their bedding and cooking utensils. Some wore weird clothing. One student bought himself a woman’s straw hat with a bunch of grapes hanging down the side; it looked somewhat like a turban, and only with difficulty could we induce him to cease wearing it.

We were desperately poor, and because Viren had no possessions, I sold everything I owned in order to get money. Just as the year 1923 began, protests from the British caused the German Government to order Viren to leave the country. We met the problem by moving repeatedly and changing our name. But our debts and difficulties seemed to increase by geometric progression.

Whenever things seemed about to improve, new problems would turn up. Sometimes Moslems with their wives still half in purdah came to live with us. At other times we visited some who were very much out of purdah, including, for example, the Moslem leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his wife. Cold, sleek, cruel-faced, Jinnah was a great landlord who had married a Parsi woman, daughter of a millionaire Bombay factory-owner. Certainly Mrs. Jinnah could never be accused of living in purdah. She was a beautiful but superficial society woman, whom Jinnah displayed as he would a jeweled shirt-stud. She often wore nothing above the waist except a brassiere carelessly covered by the sheerest of lace saris.

Viren had hopes of inducing the two of them to establish a scholarship fund for poor Indian students in Europe, and when they once wired him to visit them in a German spa where they were recuperating from night life on the Continent, he went in high anticipation. But they were not interested in scholarship funds. Bored, they had thought of Viren merely as a diversion. He was a brilliant conversationalist and Mrs. Jinnah was perplexed by a great problem: she could not find the rouge and lipstick she desired and wanted Viren to look for them in the shops of Berlin.

Such incidents engendered a cold disgust within me. I was, moreover, harassed by domestic difficulties. Hindu and Moslem religious festivals were sometimes celebrated in our home, with dozens of men sitting in a circle on the floor. In the manner of India, no man could be turned away hungry. The cooking and preparation for dinners were therefore endless and the very walls of our home seemed to be permeated with the odor of curry.

Viren thrived on company, but I began to wilt and sink under the complexity and poverty of our life. Everyone understood and loved Viren; few understood me. To them I was a queer creature who grew ever more strange - as indeed I did.

I was with Virendranath and witnessed the power of his personality when his youngest sister, Suhasini, came from Oxford to see him for the first time. She had been born after he left India, and her mother had sung her to sleep with lullabies about her exiled brother. The British Government had forced her father to leave Hyderabad and live in Calcutta under perpetual house-arrest and her childhood had been overshadowed by tragedy. British police were forever raiding their home, tearing up pillows, and disemboweIing Suhasini’s dolls to see if her father had hidden messages or codes from his exiled son. The old man had died a prisoner.

Suhasini was a musician and singer, a woman of striking beauty and noble bearing. When she stood before her brother for the first time, neither spoke, and I saw Suhasini trembling. Viren’s face was tense with inner struggle; it was the first time in a quarter of a century that one of his family had come to share his life, and Suhasini must have reminded him of the tragedy of his father, his country, and his own long years of exile. In later years Suhasini returned to India as a Communist and labor organizer, earning her living as a singer. Her Communism had sprung from Viren’s influence. But it was years before she would bow her handsome aristocratic head and meet on a plane of equality with men of lesser station. Thus it was that member after member of Viren’s family, people of the highest caste and culture, broke the Brahmin bonds of privilege and placed their trained minds at the service of their country or of the dispossessed.

Perhaps my respect and admiration for such men and women robbed me of objectivity. As I saw Viren, his white-hot passion for liberty seemed never to wane; it communicated itself to every one of his countrymen who knew him. It was, in fact, the majesty of his life and intellect that bound me to him even in our most unhappy moments and long after our marriage had become a formality