(...Contd)

My immediate problem of getting to India was that I wanted to participate in the Independence movement. Here Providence was kind in finding me a sympathetic lady who became to me a second mother. We shared our ideals and so we both arrived at Bombay in April 1930 at the height of the salt satyagraha campaign. I was on the black books of the authorities who searched my luggage for hours, and in the years that followed there were always two CIDs on my trail.
But I was overjoyed to be in India, and although the summer heat was overpowering, it was fully compensated for by the riotous colour of flamboyant flowers -- pink cassias and the brilliant red of the gulmohurs.
As this is not a history of the last 40 years, nor an autobiography, I will skip my adventures with the Congress, and my meeting with so many famous Indians. I want to hurry on to the real India that I have come to understand far away from all immediate politics and passing events.
Many great lovers of India have never visited this land - great Sanskrit scholars like Max Mueller, poets like Goethe, philosophers like Emerson and Schopenhauer. I would boldly say that some of them seemed to know more about India, the spirit of the land, with their insight and adoption, than many Indians seem to do. : I agree with Max Mueller. In its eternal perennial aspect, India is not a geographical region in space. It is a state of mind. What is this state of mind, this mental climate which is conjured up at least overseas when the name India is spoken in the world? It is the aspect of the wonderful, the awe-inspiring, the ascharya that you find in the fourth Kanda of the Kena Upanishad as well as in the Gita (ii. 2), where it refers to the Absolute and to absolutist teaching:

“As wonder one person This (Absolute) sees;
And also a Wonder another one speaks;
Of this as a Wonder another one hears;
Yet even though hearing none knows this at all!”

(Contd...)