#brahmo

I will utter Your name, sitting alone among the shadows of my silent thoughts. I will utter it without words; I will utter it without purpose. For I am like a child that calls its mother a hundred times, glad that it can say "Mother."

The Least Grain of Corn

Here is Thy footstool and there rest Thy feet where live the poorest, the lowliest, and lost. When I try to bow to Thee, my obeisance cannot reach down to the depth where Thy feet rest among the poorest, the lowliest, and lost. Pride can never approach to where Thou walkest in the clothes of the humble among the poorest, the lowliest, and lost. My heart can never find its way to where Thou keepest company with the companionless among the poorest, the lowliest, and lost.

Deliverance? Where is deliverance to be found? You Yourself have joyfully taken upon Yourself the bonds of creation; You are bound with us all forever.

Pluck this little flower and take it, delay not! I fear lest it droop and drop into the dust. It may not find a place in Thy garland, but honor it with a touch of pain from Thy Hand and pluck it. I fear lest the day end before I am aware, and the time of offering go by. Though its color be not deep and its smell be faint, use this flower in Thy service and pluck it while there is still time.

Yet at the same time, Mahalanobis was also representative of a specifically Indian rationalist tradition. Sankhya meant not only ‘number’ but something like a rational understanding of the universe. Mahalanobis’s family, from the famous small Brahmin gentry of Bikrampur in East Bengal, had converted to the rationalistic strain of the reforming Brahmo Samaj. His father was an activist in the widow re-marriage campaigns of the mid-nineteenth century. Mahalanobis himself was connected with the Samaj throughout his life, opposing the reintroduction of rituals and paying homage to the memory of the founder of the Samaj, Rammohan Roy. In fact it is striking how many of the Bengali intellectuals of the Independence generation, including Satyajit Ray, the film-maker and Nirad Chaudhuri, the self-declared ‘Unknown Indian’, were Brahmos or were influenced by the Samaj. For his part Mahalanobis declared that he was not a Hindu, but added paradoxically, a ‘Brahmo by religion.’ He also revered the great Bengali sage, Rabindranath Tagore, himself a covert Brahmo. So Mahalanobis’s cultural and religious stance stood on that intriguing Indian cusp between pantheism and what might be called ‘pan-atheism.’ As he once said, the human race would be improved by ‘thinking about him who cannot be known, by trying to know.’