Sri Aurobindo influenced my father most

Message from Mr Janadas Devan, son of Mr C. V. Devan Nair: Dear Friends:

I write to thank each of you for the messages of condolence and comfort you sent on the occasion of my father’s death. My family and I are grateful to you for your thoughtfulness. My father had been ill for some time. Though his death was not unexpected, the loss is nevertheless wrenching for his family. We are comforted by the thought that he seemed reconciled to his imminent passing, especially after my mother’s death on April 18. We held a simple funeral service for him last Saturday, December 10, in accordance with his wishes. His grandchildren, my brother Janamitra and my wife Geraldine, were among the speakers. I read some of his favourite passages from scripture and poetry.

Gerry told a story of him, which I would like to share. It concerns an exchange she had with him about 25 year ago about "human nature". "If you met a ferocious tiger, it would be human nature to run,- he told her. But what if there was a baby between you and the tiger? It would be human nature then to rescue the baby, no matter what the consequences to you, he said. Gerry was staggered by his conviction. It seemed obvious to her that human nature wasn’t as he had described it. You read in the newspapers every day of people sacrificing the equivalents of babies to save their own skins. My father, she concluded, thought it was human nature to rescue the baby because that was what he would have done. He had generalised his own intrinsic nature as applying to all humanity. It explained at once the strange uncalculating courage that he displayed so often in his life, as well as the peculiar innocence that he had about people and life in general, which so baffled his family and close friends.

To conclude the funeral service, I read three passages - an excerpt from Sir Aurobindo’s Savitri; Corinthians 1:13; and a passage from T.S. Eliot’s Dry Salvages. Sri Aurobindo because he was the philosopher and poet who influenced my father most. Reading his magnum opus, The Life Divine, in prison in 1957 probably played as great, if not greater, role in my father’s break with the Malayan Communist Party than did his disillusionment with the CP’s policies and actions. Among his surviving papers from that period, there are drafts of political essays as well as a few letters and notes detailing conversations with his fellow detainees and their legal advisor, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, but many more exercise books filled with excerpts from his readings in what Leibniz called the philosophia perennis, or perennial philosophy.

Corinthians 1:13 because that was almost the last passage that he read aloud to me. About three months ago, already seriously ill and his memory rapidly declining, he suddenly asked for a copy of the Bible. The nurses at the home he was staying in found one and brought it to him. I saw him frantically flipping through its pages, looking for something. I asked him what he was looking for. He said: you know, the passage about charity, the one that says ‘I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal’ without charity. You know, first Corinthians, chapter 13. I found the passage for him. He read it silently to himself, and then looked up puzzled. "They’ve done something to the Bible," he complained. "It is not as I remember it." I guessed the reason: he was used to the King James Bible; the nurses had given him a modern rendition, where "charity" or caritas appears as "love", and the sonorous 17th century rhythms of the King James are flattened. I went home, found his King James, and brought it to him. For thirty to forty minutes he read aloud his favourite passages from the New Testament, knowing precisely what he wanted, chapter and verse, but having difficulty finding them. I could barely keep back my tears, listening to his once resonant voice, now considerably weakened, reminding himself, in his last days and months, even as his memory was fading, that "charity" is the greatest of virtues, that "the gift of prophecy", the ability to "understand all mysteries, and all knowledge" -- even "faith" that can "remove mountains" -- are as "nothing" without love.

The passage from Eliot’s Dry Salvages is perhaps one of the most beautiful renditions in English of the "way of action" or Karma Yoga, as it is described in the Bhagavad-Gita. Krishna advises Arjuna, on the battlefield, of the right attitude in action. Eliot summarises Krishna’s teaching thus: "do not think of the fruit of action", but "consider the future and the past with an equal mind". I append the entire passage below because it expresses beautifully the ideal that this brave, generous and kind man, Devan Nair, tried to live by, both in his public as well as personal life. His was a "stormy life", as President S.R. Nathan put it, but also one quietly devoted to a search for meaning. I would like to think he is still on a voyage of discovery. "Not fare well. But fare forward." Thank you again for your condolences and kind words. My family and I will always treasure them. - Janadas Devan

Dry Salvages III
I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant

Among other things or one way of putting the same thing:

That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray

Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,

Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,

That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

When the train starts, and the passengers are settled

To fruit, periodicals and business letters

(And those who saw them off have left the platform)

Their faces relax from grief into relief

To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.

Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past

Into different lives, or into any future;

You are not the same people who left that station

Or will arrive at any terminus,

While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;

And on the deck of the drumming liner

Watching the furrow that widens behind you,

You shall not think ‘the past is finished’

Or ‘the future is before us’.

At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,

Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,

The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)

‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;

You are not those who saw the harbour

Receding, or those who will disembark.

Here between the hither and the farther shore

While time is withdrawn, consider the future

And the past with an equal mind.

At the moment which is not of action or inaction

You can receive this: on whatever sphere of being

The mind of a man may be intent

At the time of death -- that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others:

And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare forward.

O voyagers, O seamen,

You who come to port, and you whose bodies

Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,

Or whatever event, this is your real destination.’

So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

On the field of battle.

Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.