Ten Writers And Their Interaction With Indian Thought And Spirituality

Ten acclaimed writers from across the world, and their interaction with Indian thought and spirituality

1) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

American Transcendentalist poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s interest in Indian thought spanned the greater part of his life and career, roughly from 1820 to 1870. He was drawn to both Indian poetry and philosophy — Kalidasa and Vedanta, the latter as a reaffirmation of Transcendentalism, which was ultimately an act of experiencing the world, set against the intellectual and spiritual vacuity that it came to perceive in social institutions, including the church, university and politics.

What Emerson took from India, he preserved remarkably unaltered. His poem ‘Brahma’ – about the pure being, unknowable and formless – bears this out:

The strong gods pine for my abode,
…But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

The Transcendental seeker, like the karmayogi, must perform the selfless deed, which is greater than the merely good deed that brings the doer the lesser reward of heaven.

2) Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau became the first entry point for Hindu and Buddhist thought in the New World. By the time Swami Vivekananda arrived on America’s shores, both Emerson and Thoreau were dead. But Raja Rammohun Roy’s writings, as well as the Bhagavad Gita had a profound influence on them. Thoreau’s pantheism stemmed from his readings of Hindu philosophy, which did not separate the godhead from the human and natural world. While Thoreau indulged the flute, in reverence to Krishna, he was also a practising yogi.

In Walden (1854), Thoreau writes: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta…” Although the translation of Buddhist texts came much later than other works of Indian philosophy, Thoreau had in his possession an early French translation of the Lotus Sutra, and the impact of Buddhist thought is visible in his writing and his life in Concord.

3) Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)

A German-born Swiss novelist and poet, Hesse’s life and work was characterised by a deep spirituality and search for the self. His family was Protestant-Pietist, and consisted of theologians and preachers: his parents’ and grandfather Dr Hermann Gundert’s missionary work in India meant the young Hesse was exposed to both Hinduism and Buddhism. Much later, his study of German philosopher Schopenhauer led to his reading of the Bhagavad Gita.

Hesse’s understanding of both Buddhism and Hinduism is often criticised as homogeneous and facile but Siddhartha – his novel based in India that tells the story about the spiritual journey of a young boy who was a contemporary of the Buddha – remains much-read, a work in which his familiarity with Indian spiritual thought is most apparent.

4) Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

The world’s great spiritual traditions came of aid when the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was 50, his best works behind him and he found himself melancholic and depressed, contemplating suicide. The account of his emotional turmoil finds place in A Confession, written in 1879-80 and though it does not endorse any particular faith, its account of suffering acceptance closely echoes the Buddhist tradition. Later, he edited, translated and composed a number of texts about the Buddha and his teaching, including the 1889 essay, ‘Siddhartha, Called the Buddha, That is The Holy One’. Tolstoy’s A Letter to a Hindu (1908), which had a profound impact on Mahatma Gandhi, was written in response to a letter by revolutionary Taraknath Das, asking for his support for India’s freedom struggle against British colonial rule. Tolstoy argued for non-violence, citing, among others, the Vedas and the writings of Swami Vivekananda to make his case. The latter particularly impressed Tolstoy, and he is said to have read Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga in 1896 in a single sitting.

5) WB Yeats (1865-1939)

Yeats’ fascination with Indian spiritual thought was shaped by his acquaintance with a number of individuals. While his friend painter George Russell introduced him to eastern thought and mysticism, his interest was also sharpened by the theosophist Madame Blavatsky, as well as Mohini Chatterjee, whose lecture in Dublin on Upanishadic philosophy Yeats had attended in December 1885. Years later, in 1928, Yeats would write a poem called ‘Mohini Chatterjee’; his ‘Quatrains and Aphorisms’ show the distinct influence of Chatterjee’s Hindu belief, albeit with a western twist. (As academic P Lal points out, ‘Mohini Chatterjee would have smiled at that’.) With Rabindranath Tagore, Yeats maintained an epistolary relationship till 1930, writing the introduction to Gitanjali in which he had found “a world I had dreamed of all my life long”. Later, his familiarity with Shree Purohit Swami allowed him to work closely with both Vedantic and yogic philosophy as he translated and wrote introductions to the Swami’s works.

6) TS Eliot (1888-1965)

Eliot’s interest in eastern philosophical traditions stems from his student days at Harvard University: it is estimated that one third of his graduate course work was devoted to Asian philosophy and philology, from Patanjali’s metaphysics to Buddhist studies in China and Japan. Later, speaking of his formative years, he had famously remarked that the intellectual subtleties of the great Indian philosophers made “most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys”.

It is not surprising then that both Hindu and Buddhist influences are scattered throughout his body of literary work, in imagery and metaphors, even when he had stopped actively pursuing Indic thought and traditions. The more famous instances? The triple benediction offered at the end of The Waste Land (shantih shantih shantih), the Upanishadic advice of datta (give), dayadhvam (compassion) and damyata (self-control) that come just before it, to ‘The Dry Salvages’ section of The Four Quartets, which echoes Krishna’s advice to Arjuna at Kurukshetra.

7) W Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

In December 1937, when Maugham, the British novelist, playwright and short story writer set sail for India, he was already a famous and successful man. But despite his life of plenty, he wasn’t happy. He had started taking an interest in Indian spirituality and carried with him books on Hindu philosophy and LD Barnett’s translation of the Upanishads.

Early in 1938, he arrived at the ashram of Ramana Maharshi, a few hours away from Madras. The Maharshi would serve as the model of Shri Ganesha in The Razor’s Edge (1944), a sage who guides WWI ace pilot Larry Durrell to salvation, after the latter is traumatised by his war experiences. The epigraph to the novel is chosen from a verse in the Katha Upanishad. Maugham himself does not seemed to have gained as much as his hero: a fainting incident he underwent at the ashram was interpreted widely as a spiritual experience though Maugham always insisted he had no such recollection.

8) Octavio Paz (1914-1998)

A Mexican poet and writer who won the Literature Nobel in 1990, Paz was a career diplomat. In 1952, he travelled to India for the first time, visiting Mathura, which led to his long poem Mutra, a “subject associated with Hinduism and its search for unity in the plurality of the forms of life”. In 1962, he was appointed Mexico’s ambassador to India (he resigned six years later, in protest against the Mexican government’s massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco).

His essay In Light Of India, which deals with India’s painting, music, architecture, philosophy and religion, rests on how a Mexican writer at the end of the twentieth century perceives the reality of India while his poems on India are collected in East Slope (Ladera Este). Paz was interested in Tantra, with Tantric thought and imagery permeating his works; his understanding of Vedanta and Buddhist religious philosophy is apparent in essays he wrote on those subjects.

9) Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986)

The playwright-novelist, English born but American by citizenship since 1946, embraced Vedanta with a passion and severity that matched his equally passionate rejection of Christianity earlier in life. He collaborated with Swami Prabhavananda, the founder and head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, all his life, most importantly, co-translating Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God, which carried an introduction by Aldous Huxley. Isherwood wrote a large number of articles, mostly on Swami Vivekananda and Ramakrishna Paramhansa, in ‘Vedanta and the West’, the official journal of the Vedanta Society, some of which were later compiled into a book called Vedanta for the Western World. In the 1974 Paris Review interview, Isherwood admitted that Vedanta had “made a very great difference” to his life, including influencing his literary work, and that at one point, he had toyed with the idea of becoming a monk himself.

10) JD Salinger (1919-2010)

American novelist and short story writer, Salinger is as much known for the cult popularity of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) as his decision to lead a recluse’s existence for the better part of his life. Salinger arrived at Vedanta after a brief dalliance with Zen in the late 1940s, and remained a lifelong believer, finding in the teachings of Swami Vivekananda a cure for the emotional trauma he was suffering after the end of World War II.

Even away from the public eye at his New Hampshire cottage, he kept in touch with the monks of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center at New York’s 17 East 94^th Street, writing to them and visiting them often, especially his mentor Swami Nikhilananda. Both Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction have explicit references to Vedanta and yoga.