“There he goes! There!”
Who? And where?
“Ego! And everywhere.”
Two friends, seated on a bench by the side of one
of the gravel-paths in the Lal Bagh of Bangalore–that premier city of parks in
the South–were overheard one evening talking in this mysterious and
semi-mystical manner. Both of them were intently gazing on a figure, of
somewhat generous proportions physically, clad in the colour of spring, with
the joy of life streaming from his face, framed in a head the top of which
shone like a polished billiard-table and the periphery whereof was fringed with
curly ringlets of hair. As he moved along and around the shade-carpeted trunk
of a big and tall tree, he hummed something which might have been either a
scrap of an old favourite song or the refrain of one newly composed. For, he
appeared to be of the race of the ancient singers of India whose compositions
were born of the wedlock of tune and text, inasmuch as they were seekers and
saints first and minstrels and musicians afterwards. And truly, because all
human creative expression, in its manifoldness, is but a reflection of the
archetypal visions and a reverberation of the original voices, seen as well as
heard in the Divine consciousness. Therefore, the best of artists are only
copyists, in one sense; and, for aught one knows, the humming of the singing
soul was just an attempt at learning the tune which it inwardly heard being
sung by the invisible, eternal, Seer-Singer, whose song has stars for its words
and the sky as its basic note.
Then, all of a sudden, it dawned upon one of them
that the person who had gripped their attention, to the exclusion of the
beautiful flowers in the garden, was probably the author of Among the Great and
The Subhas I Knew. So, at once, he got up and walked briskly, as if
hypnotised by hero-worship, in the direction of the spring-coloured messenger
of the Soundless Sound.
“Are you Dilip Kumar Roy, Sir?”
“Yes, I think so; at least, the people call me so,”
answered the artist ascetic with the humility of St. Francis blended with the
humour of Low. For, Sri Dilip is both a bit of Pan and a bit of Puck plumped
into a single entity.
Three days later the two friends heard Sri Dilip
sing at a public recital. It was a varied programme consisting of a Sanskrit
hymn to Siva, a patriotic song of his famous father Dwijendralal, and a Hindi
song of Mirabai, that queen among the mystics of medieval India. He sang the
hymn to Siva in a voice which was cosmic in its force and cultured in its fineness.
It was like listening to the roll of the far-off, yet near, Ocean of Infinity.
When he sang Mirabai’s song, it was as if his very heart was going to burst its
bonds, to enter into the limitless Sea of Love. The silent tears trickling down
the faces of not a few of his hearers were evidently a spray from that sea.
It was at this stage, when Sri Dilip was having a
momentary respite and sipped tepid water, that I understood the stray sentences
overheard in the Lal Bagh. The depth of his devotion acts for him as a
spring-board from which his little ego flies to the limitless Ego, and in that
transmuting touch “I go” becomes “He goes”! What the layman would call the
element and intensity of emotion in Sri Dilip’s singing is but an unveiling of
Him,–it is He to whom his soul makes a motion, a movement.
Some people say that there is still much of the
little ego in Sri Dilip, and to it they attribute his ago-centredness when he
talks,–and he talks brilliantly. Methinks, they misunderstand him, inasmuch as
they overlook the chrysalis change between the artist and the ascetic-aspirant
through which he is passing, with all its pains of growth which, however, are a
hint of the perfume of godliness that has secretly begun to hover round his
soul. He is evidently conscious of this, for, he is treating himself, so to
say, to get over these pains. If he dresses himself in an attractive style, if
he speaks often in the first person, it is to bring the little ego out of its
dark lair into the sun-light of self-consciousness, so that, recognizing it, he
may harmonize it into the wholeness of his being. A man of the modern age with
its emphasis on the intellect and ego, Sri Dilip has today become a sage whose
life of aspiration eloquently, though silently, preaches the truth of all
truths, “He goes; He goes”–He, who is the beginning, the middle and the end,
with its corollary that “I am nowhere.”
In the space of a single generation, Sri Dilip has
outgrown the ambition of the worldly man for name and fame, and grown into an image
of the ideal of the Divine. And so, it has come to pass that, unlike his
singing of previous years, his song now is but a refreshing reminder of the
Silence of the Spirit, of which Sri Ramana Maharshi once said, “It is the
speech of the Eternal; our speech only disturbs it.”