The brief biography of Meher Baba’s early life below is
simply intended, as with the previous posting ‘Paul Brunton: Early Life’, to
set the scene, so to speak. Both entries function as a necessary background for
the understanding of events to be later recounted. In addition I have focused
on Hazrat Babajan in the text because she was such a pivotal figure in Meher
Baba’s early life. Also, during Paul Brunton’s stay in India he was clearly emotionally
affected following his brief meeting with her, and had reflected afterwards in his
hotel room (1934: 64–65): “That some deep psychological attainment really
resides in the depths of her being, I am certain. Respect rises unbidden within
me. I find that the contact has diverted my normal thought currents and raised
up an inexplicable sense of that element of mystery which surrounds our earthy
lives, despite all the discoveries and speculations of the scientists. I see
with unexpected clarity that those scientific writers who profess to reveal the
fundamental secrets of the great world puzzle, profess what is nothing more
than surface scratching. But I cannot understand why a brief contact with the
woman faqeer should so sap at the very base of my confident mental
certainties.” Brunton’s critique of Meher Baba hinges on his ‘hypothesis’ that
“Hazrat Babajan, did really create an upheaval in Meher Baba’s character that
upset his equilibrium … I believe that Meher Baba has not yet recovered from
the first intoxication of his exalted mood, and a lack of balance still exists
as a result of the tremendous derangement which occurred to his mental
faculties at such an early age.… He shows on the one hand, all the qualities of
a mystic—love, gentleness, religious intuition, and so on, but on the other
hand he shows signs of the mental disease of paranoia. He exaggerates
everything which pertains to his own self” (1934: 258, 259). That of course is what
Brunton wanted his readers to believe. This was ironic coming from a man who
exhibited a phantasy prone personality throughout his life. During the 1950s, Brunton had spoken of the
likelihood of World War III occurring in 1962. At the time he let it be known
verbally to his close friends that plunged in a 'yogic trance' he had received a
vision of a terrible calamity resulting from nuclear fallout that would befall
the world, affecting mostly the Northern Hemisphere. A few chosen disciples
were warned to wind up their business affairs in the United States and flee to a safer location. South America was deemed the closest
refuge. After getting the prediction embarrassingly wrong, many of his
followers “felt abandoned, some even tricked … They had turned their lives
upside-down for him, they had destroyed themselves financially to follow his
instructions to move to South America” (Masson, 1993: 132). Brunton wrote informing them that he could no
longer “get involved in correspondence or answering personal or spiritual
questions. He has to be outwardly away and free to attend to his personal
assignment which involves the fate of millions. He cannot allow himself to be
distracted by the few and they [his followers] should not be so selfish to
expect him to” (Hurst, 1989: 153). It is interesting to note that during Brunton’s
meeting with Babajan he had asked no questions about Meher Baba, even though it
was the latter who had suggested he visit her. And yet according to Bhau
Kalchuri, she would openly state: “He is my son, my beloved son. He is the
reason why I am here in Poona …”
(1986: Vol. 1, 246). The fact is, Brunton merely scratched the surface of
Babajan’s “deep psychological attainment” and shows no depth of understanding regarding
her association with Meher Baba.
Meher
Baba: Early Life
In contrast to Paul Brunton, Meher Baba’s early life is well
documented, although there are few biographies written or published outside of
the Meher Baba movement. I have therefore chosen to follow the independent
scholarly account by the British writer Kevin Shepherd, from his Meher Baba,
an Iranian Liberal (Cambridge: Anthropographia Publications, 1988), rather
than rely on published devotee versions. The exceptions being Charles Purdom’s The
God-Man (1964) and Tom Hopkinson’s Much Silence (1974). Both writers
were British and devotees of Meher Baba, but their books avoid devotional
idioms and personality cult emphasis on the ‘Avatar’ theme to be found in the
majority of Indian and American accounts of Meher Baba’s life.
Meher
Baba was born in Poona (now known
as Pune) on February 25, 1894.
His name at birth was Merwan Sheriar Irani. His parents were Irani Zoroastrians
who had emigrated to India,
where they had become part of the Parsi community of Zoroastrians centred in
the Bombay-Surat area. His father, Sheriar Mundegar Irani, had been an
itinerant dervish for eighteen years, travelling widely in both Iran
and (later) India
before adopting a sedentary life and marrying. Starting from poverty, he had become
a prosperous tea shop proprietor by the time of Merwan’s birth. As a child he
had received no education, but later learned to read and write Persian and
Arabic, and maintained an outlook on life that was saturated with Sufi ideas
and perspectives. Merwan was his second eldest son, and benefited from his
father’s acquaintance with Persian classical literature.
Merwan
Irani was an intelligent boy and was ensured a good education by his father. According
to Purdom (1964: 17), “When five years old he was taken to the Dastur Girls’
School, where he learned to read and write the Gujarati language and the
rudiments of arithmetic. At the age of nine he went to the Camp
Government English
School, where he remained five
years. Then he went to St Vincent’s High School (Roman
Catholic), considered the best school in Poona.”
He had learnt English in accordance with the general Parsi vogue, but did not
neglect other languages. He was not only proficient in Persian and Gujarati,
but also Urdu, which is related to Persian and spoken by Indian Muslims.
After
matriculating successfully from St Vincent’s, Merwan
became a university undergraduate at the Deccan
College in 1911, at which “Sir
Edwin Arnold and other distinguished men had been professors. The finest
educational institution in the province, it was one of the few which already,
in the days before the First World War, allowed some liberty to its students”
(Hopkinson, 1974: 26). He showed a flair for English literature, which was his
academic speciality, but his main interests were in Persian and Indian
literature. He was familiar with the Sufi works of Rumi and Hafiz, and modelled
his own poetic style upon the latter. He wrote much poetry in Persian and
vernacular languages. Some of the poems were published in a popular Gujarati
newspaper in Bombay under the
pseudonym of Huma. He also delighted in music, loved to sing, and was an
eager conversationalist.
In
addition to athletic capacities at school and college (in particular hockey and
cricket), Merwan also exhibited a contemplative disposition, and spent solitary
hours at the local Zoroastrian tower of silence and also Muslim cemeteries. In
this he was clearly following his father’s precedent, who was the son of the
keeper of the Zoroastrian tower of silence, which belonged to his native
village and as a boy “spent his days with his father looking after the place to
which human corpses are brought to be devoured by vultures” (Purdom, 1964: 15).
Sheriar’s influence upon him seems to have been a strong one, and certainly
underestimated by most devotees. A useful study of Sheriar Mundegar Irani can
be found in Kevin Shepherd’s From Oppression to Freedom: A Study of the
Kaivani Gnostics, Part One: The Life of a Dervish (Cambridge:
Anthropographia Publications, 1988).
During
his college studies, Merwan became strongly linked to Hazrat Babajan. This
Muslim woman was reputed to be about a hundred years old, and then had the
beginnings of what transpired to be a substantial following in the local area.
Of strong Sufi associations, she lived in the same cantonment zone in Poona
as Merwan’s family. It has been stated that few within the Meher Baba movement regard
her as much more than a ‘curious influence’, but in actual fact Babajan’s influence
was a key event in the young man’s life. She would later state that Merwan was
the reason why she had come to Poona.
Hazrat
Babajan (d. 1931) was a female Pathan (Pastun) Muslim faqir who, after
years of travel, finally became resident in Poona
around 1905, later becoming a famous and revered figure in the area. According
to Dr Abdul Ghani Munsiff (1939: 31), who had known Babajan: “The information
gleaned from different sources is meagre, since Babajan herself was never
communicative to anyone with regard to her life story.” The accounts of her early
life before arriving in Poona should
be viewed as largely hagiographic, and read with caution. The sparse documented
reports occur after her arrival in Poona.
The
earliest recorded account of Babajan’s life available occurred in 1927, when Meher
Baba gave a discourse on the ‘Duty of Women’ for about an hour to an audience
predominantly comprised of women. This was, perhaps, the first time publicly
that he told the story of Hazrat Babajan’s early life, intended as a moral of
spiritual aspiration for those present:
“Hazrat
Babajan was the daughter of one of the then responsible and chief ministers of
the Amir of Afghanistan at Kabul.
From her very childhood she had a natural inclination toward spirituality and
the realization of Truth. When Babajan was fifteen years of age her parents
began to arrange for her marriage … at this juncture she made bold to leave the
family home. For fifty years thereafter she led a life of complete resignation
and renunciation.
After
wandering from place to place for fifty long years she at last came across her
Master, and became God-Realized at the age of about sixty-five. After being
God-Realized Babajan lived for some time … in the Punjab.
During this stay many people began to respect her as a saint. Her occasional
remarks, declaring to be God (Ana’l-Haqq, “I am the Truth”) is said to
have upset the Muslim population, and some fanatical Baluchi soldiers (sepoys)
of a local military regiment buried her alive. But she survived the ordeal and
made her way to Bombay.
After
a lapse of many years, during the First World War a Punjab
regiment was transferred to Poona,
along with the same Baluchi sepoys who had buried Babajan. In that city the
solders came face-to-face with Babajan sitting under a neem tree at Char Bawdi.
Their fanaticism was transformed into devotion, and as long as the regiment
remained stationed at Poona, the
soldiers came to pay their respects to her.”
Without
discounting the component in the narrative regarding the alleged burial, more convincing
perhaps is the fact that during the 19th century in India there arose among
Muslim soldiers what has been academically termed as ‘barracks Islam’. The
soldiers were for the main part rooted in rural cultures but had to spend their
lives away from their villages and families in the restricted cantonment. In
order to escape the perils of the war, and the insecurities and monotony of the
cantonment, they sought the company and protection of faqirs such as
Hazrat Babajan, who in turn became patron saints for the soldiers, achieving
personality cult status. The shrines of saints became centres for
get-togethers, where tea-drinking, along with dancing and
singing, proved popular forms of recreation and entertainment for the soldiers
and onlookers. During their free time Pathan soldiers would sit near Babajan
and virtually guarded her at all hours. See Nile Green, Islam and the Army
in Colonial India:
Sepoy Religion in the Service of the Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University
Press, 2009).
The
‘get-togethers’ are confirmed by an eyewitness account (Ghani, 1939: 34), which
mentions that within a decade of Babajan taking residence in Poona
“… the [Char Bawdi] locality underwent a metamorphosis surpassing all
expectations. What with the featural changes in the buildings all around,
electrified tea-shops ringing with the clatter of cups and saucers, a concourse
of peoples consisting of all ranks and creeds waiting for Babajan’s darshana,
a street bard entertaining the crowd with his music, the beggars clamouring for
alms, easy-going idlers standing indiscriminately hampering vehicular traffic
and the whole atmosphere heavily laden with sweet burning incense perpetually
kept burning near Babajan, presented a scene typically Indian, leaving an
indelible impression on one’s memory.”
Following
the biography A Sufi Matriarch: Hazrat Babajan (Cambridge: Anthropographia
Publications, 1986), by Kevin Shepherd, and also revisions I made some time ago
to the Wikipedia article on the subject of Hazrat Babajan (that is, before that
article was zealously and ridiculously purged of all references to Kevin
Shepherd’s books, see http://www.kevinrdshepherd.info/hazrat_babajan.html), I
provide a brief sketch of Babajan’s life up until her residence in Poona:
Hazrat
(‘The Presence’) Baba (father) Jan (soul) was born to a Muslim family of ‘noble’
lineage in the early nineteenth century, and named at birth Gulrukh (‘rose-faced’).
Her exact date of birth is unknown. Biographical variants range from 1790 to
1820. According to Shepherd (see web page link above): “The earliest accounts
differ in describing her geographical origin; Afghanistan
and Baluchistan are the two contenders. Perhaps she was
born on the Afghan borders near Quetta;
the issue is not certain.” Her education was in keeping with her family’s
social status, and well-educated, she was fluent in Arabic, Persian and Urdu,
in addition to her native Pashtu. Contemplative and religious as a child, she
is said to have become a hafiz, one who has learnt the Qur’an by heart.
Following
the conventions of that period, Babajan was reared under the strict purdah
tradition, in which women were secluded from the outside world, and also
subservient to a custom of arranged marriages. She opposed an unwelcome
marriage planned for her, and ran away from home on her wedding day. She
journeyed to Peshawar, a frontier
city at the foot of the Khyber Pass, but nothing is
known about her life until her subsequent move to Rawalpindi
many years later. It is possible that due to her contemplative disposition she
may have attached herself to various Sufi communities, though she does not appear
to be linked to any specific orthodox Sufi order, but instead adopted a free
and independent itinerant existence.
It
was in or near the city of Rawalpindi
that she is said to have led an ascetic life for some years, “and may well have
ventured into Kashmir to more remote sites that were favoured
by dervishes and others” (Shepherd, 1986: 33). She eventually came into contact
with a Hindu spiritual guide, and following his instruction went into seclusion
in a nearby mountain outside Rawalpindi
where she underwent spiritual austerities for what is said to have been
seventeen months. Thereafter she came down to the Punjab
and stayed a few months in Multan, and
here (at the age of thirty-seven) met with a Muslim Sufi adept who further
refined her consciousness. After that experience she returned to Rawalpindi
to reconnect with the Hindu guide who, after several years, helped her return
to normal consciousness. We can speculate here that Babajan was perhaps undergoing
the fana-baqa spiritual process whereby the annihilation of ‘self’ (fana)
is followed by stabilization (baqa) into a greater reality. Tradition
attributes Shaykh Abu Sa’id Ahamd al-Kharraz of Baghdad
(d. 899) as “the first Sufi to explain and elaborate the theories of ‘fana’,
or the soul’s annihilation in God, and ‘baqa’, or the soul’s subsistence
in God. According to this school of thought, soul’s annihilation means the
mystic’s obliteration from every kind of knowledge of his phenomenal existence
and individual qualities. Subsistence of the soul denotes knowledge of eternal
existence and the seeker’s abiding in God” (Bhatnagar, 1973: 240–41). There are
various stages of refinement and Babajan “is said to have been perfected in the
(fana-baqa) process of realization at the age of sixty-five. This would
mean that twenty-eight years had elapsed since her achievement of fana
at Multan” (Shepherd, 1986: 39).
Again,
there is a blank in the record as to where Babajan next travelled after the
second stay at Rawalpindi. “She is
known to have visited Bombay at
some unrecorded date, but after only a few months stay she returned once again
to the Punjab, residing a number of years at different
places in North India. It is evident that she lived as a
mendicant” (Shepherd, 1986: 40–41). By around 1900 she was seen again in Bombay,
in the Chunna Bhatti locality near Byculla. “She did not remain sedentary, but
moved around the teeming metropolis. She made occasional visits to two leading Sufi
figureheads in the area, namely Hazrat Maulana Saheb of Bandra and Hazrat Baba
Addur-Rahman of Dongri. Although both were well-known saints, she would refer to
them as ‘my children’” (1986: 43–44). After dwelling in Bombay
for a few years, she undertook the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca
in 1903 (apparently disguised as a man), and it is possible that she also made
a further pilgrimage to the tomb of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in Medina.
By 1905 she arrived in Poona.
Now
an old woman, her back slightly bent, shoulders rounded, white matted hair, and
shabbily dressed, Babajan was seen sitting or resting at odd places, in
different parts of the city. She finally located to a slum area called Char
Bawdi (Four Wells) on Malcolm Tank Road, part of a British Army cantonment. It
was under a large neem tree, by a dusty dirt road, that she remained until she
died in 1931, though for “some part of the day she used to sit under a banyan
tree in the Bund garden looking over the river, to which she would be escorted
by her Muslim devotees” (Purdom, 1964: 19). The Char Bawdi area at that time
has been described as “a picture of dirt, desolation and ugliness, a breeding
spot of plague and pestilence and a regular haunt of dangerous riff-raffs by
night” (Ghani, 1939: 33). Babajan was liable to make startling statements to
the effect that she was the Truth (Haqq), which offended some of the
Muslims living in Poona, and who
interpreted her words as blasphemy. Children were in the habit of throwing
stones at her. Her speech was largely cryptic, she “did not give any set
‘teaching’; any verbal instruction came in asides or what seemed to be chance
utterances” (Shepherd, 1986: 55). She became regarded as a saint by the local Muslim
community. Yet the more orthodox would seldom approach Babajan because the
Pathan soldiers who guarded her were threatening personages, and the idle beggars who
lived off the gifts or money given her by devotees were looked down upon. Yet Babajan’s
influence made an impact on the desolate area. It is said that the love
emanating from her was so intense that visitors felt pained at leaving her
presence. Gradually, out of reverence, or mere curiosity, increasing numbers of
people sought her out. They would congregate about her at spare times during
the day, and included Muslims and Hindus, together with a number of
Zoroastrians.
In
May 1913 Merwan began to frequent Babajan’s makeshift abode under the neem tree
in Char Bawdi locality. He visited her every evening, but their meetings were
almost completely silent. “’I was drawn to her,’ he later said, ‘as steel to a
magnet.’ And whenever he spoke of her he would use the words ‘matchless,’
‘incomparable.’ He often referred to her as ‘Emperor.’ And it is noteworthy
that she herself took the name Baba (father) Jan, and would flare up if anyone
addressed her as Amma (mother) Jan, since women are held to be the weaker sex
and God-realization is not for weaklings” (Hopkinson, 1974: 29).
In
January 1914 Merwan’s mother Shirin was horrified to discover early one morning
that her son could not speak and was lying in his bed with wide open but
vacuously staring eyes. He lay like this for three days to her even greater
alarm. She concluded that he was critically ill. She felt some hope when he
began to move about of his own volition on the fourth day, but was soon
dismayed to realize that he acted like a virtual automaton. She could not even
get him to eat any food.
Medical
treatment produced no change in his extraordinary condition. It is reliably
reported that for nine months he would not eat (unless force-fed) and did not
sleep. His mother thought that he had become insane, which is what the doctors
assumed. He himself much later commented that his father knew that his
condition was not as everyone thought. In his own varied travels Sheriar had
doubtless seen strange states of mind exhibited that were known to dervish
lore, but the increasingly westernized Parsi community had no knowledge of such
experiential tangents and could not credit their existence.
Sherin
came to blame Babajan for her son’s strange condition. According to Merwan’s
later report, Babajan was in fact the cause of it, but his version of causation
was very different to his mother’s. He said later that his inner state had consciously
expanded; his mother assumed that he had lost consciousness.
After
nine months, his condition changed to some semblance of normality. He began to
eat regularly and seemed aware of what was going on around him, but remained
strangely indrawn and largely aloof from human contact. According to Hopkinson
(1974: 31), Baba later explained that Babajan had given him “God-realization,
and that the intensity of his suffering was due to unwillingness to come down
into normal consciousness, which was essential for the work he had to do.
Babajan herself used to quote Merwan certain Persian lines which mean: ‘Having
gained freedom, you have to come back as prisoner (to free others).’” A few
months later, in April 1915 he became more physicalized and began to take long
walks around the city, followed by excursions to distant places. He visited
several figures of Sufi background: Banemiyan Baba of Aurangabad,
Tippu Baba of Bombay, Tajuddin Baba
of Nagpur, and Sai Baba of Shirdi.
He also made contact with the Hindu sage Narayan Maharaj of Kedgaon.
All
these contacts were fleeting, and his relatives had little idea of his
motivations, since he was not very communicative. But there was one figure that
they all had good cause to remember in subsequent years, namely Upasni Maharaj
of Sakori. This fierce Hindu guru was a highly atypical holy man, and became
Merwan’s supervisor from now on. After their initial encounter in December
1915, Merwan visited Upasni regularly at the latter’s new ashram at Sakori.
This relationship lasted for six years. [On Upasni Maharaj, see Kevin Shepherd,
Gurus Rediscovered: Biographies of Sai Baba of Shirdi and Upasni Maharaj of
Sakori (Cambridge: Anthropographia Publications, 1986); see also Kevin
Shepherd, Investigating the Sai Baba Movement: A Clarification of
Misrepresented Saints and Opportunism (Dorchester, Dorset: Citizen
Initiative, 2005), pp. 59–104.]
Sherin
insisted that Merwan adopt some profession, or at the least take up some
business venture. He tried to oblige her, but was unable to remain in
employment owing to his acutely introverted state. He ended up working in his
father’s toddy shop, for Sheriar was now old and sick. But Merwan was “not a
successful shopkeeper, for he could not keep his mind on the business, and was
cheated.” He afterwards opened a toddy shop in partnership with his friend
Behramji. “The toddy is the sap of the palm tree, a cheap drink, not of strong
alcoholic content. [Merwan], however, used to urge his customers, who were
largely from the poor of the city, to drink moderately, and often urged them to
abstain.… After a year he merely became a sleeping partner, and in the times of
the Non-co-operation Movement the toddy shops were picketed as well as liquor
shops, and [Merwan] prevailed upon Behramji to dissolve their partnership and
close the shop” (Purdom, 1964: 25). Bhau Kalchuri perceptively observes (1986: Vol.
1, 248), during this phase Merwan was still regaining normal consciousness, and
“needed to do some menial, but intensely gross, physical tasks—dirty work. He
had to do some low-type labour such as cleaning toilets, washing dishes and
sweeping floors to increase his gross awareness or worldly consciousness. The
objects and the tasks, by the very nature of their grossness, were bringing him
down sooner to function normally in the world.”
Merwan
again “started to revisit Babajan with whom he would sit for about an hour each
evening. He also went almost daily to the Parsi Tower of Silence or wandered on
into the jungle beyond, where he would repeatedly knock his head against stones,
wrapping his brow with a handkerchief to conceal the bruises from his family.
Twice a month he visited Upasni Maharaj” (Hopkinson, 1974: 33). Finally, in mid-1921
Merwan moved from Pune to Sakori to stay with Upasni Maharaj. After several
months, Upasni told some of his pupils that Merwan had gained a special
prerogative. He told one of his leading disciples, a Zoroastrian named Gustadji
Hansotia, that Merwan was “the sadguru of this age,” and that Hansotia should
now serve Merwan and not he (Upasni).
By
now, Merwan displayed a completely normal demeanour and reflex, but far from
reverting to college habits or taking up any profession or business, he chose
to lead an ascetic existence in a small hut (jhopdi) on open ground at Poona.
Throughout his life he was to display a personal preference for small and
rudimentary huts as living quarters. At the Poona
jhopdi, he was the focus for a mixed assortment of Zoroastrian, Muslim,
and Hindu acquaintances and admirers who began to identify themselves as his
followers. For the most part, however, he did not impose on them any form of
training or discipline. This he began to do after journeying by foot to Bombay
in May 1922; there he accommodated over forty men in the urban dwelling known
as Manzil-e-Meem, and presided over a rigorous and distinctive routine in which
he asserted his prerogative as the instructor and ‘master’ of the pupils. But
he would not align himself with any particular religious or spiritual
tradition, not Zoroastrian, Vedantic, or even Sufi. His teaching was already
distinctive even at this very early period.
He
was now known as Meher Baba (‘compassionate father’) to his devotees. Though he
was very easygoing towards women, he was an iron disciplinarian with males, and
those in his close proximity soon found that it was not easy to maintain his
standards. Many of the men with him found a welcome respite from discipline
when he closed the Manzil and departed with only a few selected individuals on
a gruelling and unpredictable series of journeys that took him as far afield as
the Afghan and Nepalese borderlines. Meher Baba (whom I shall hereafter also refer
to as Baba) was no soft-pedaller, and never opted for any easy course as he
could very conveniently have done. Instead he commenced his characteristic
programme of prolonged fasting in addition to non-luxury travelling and general
austere living standards.
The
ascetic personal characteristics of Meher Baba received their most well known
manifestation in his adoption of complete silence of mouth, commenced in July
1925. He never spoke a single word until his death forty-four years later. This
notable personal aloofness from human intercourse was mitigated to some extent
by his aura of humour which he managed to mutely project, but the concentrative
aspect of his personality was often unduly minimized in devotee reports. In
January 1927 he gave up writing, save for his signature, and thereafter
employed an (English) alphabet board for the purposes of communication. But
this meant that he was often dependent upon the verbal clarifications of others
to an extent that should not be ignored.
It is
perhaps not entirely surprising that in a man of Meher Baba’s introspective
capacity, there were increasing references to his ‘inner work’. Yet some of
these statements sound blatantly fantastic even to people who are disposed to
concede that there are forms of extra-sensory activity. This feature remains
the most problematic one in respect of evaluating him. In the interests of
clarification, it should be pointed out that there are recorded instances of
his having made an exotic prediction which he afterwards made clear to those
concerned as representing a contrived exaggeration which they should have been
able to see behind, though the possibility of cognitive dissonance cannot be
discounted. That literalists often took him for granted is no reflection upon
the fact that he himself was a non-literalist by his own admission..
A few
months before commencing his silence, Baba established himself again at a site
near Ahmednagar which became known as Meherabad. Initially a small ashram, he
now quickly developed it into a sizeable colony of some four hundred
inhabitants. The daily and overall emphasis was unusually practical, one of
pronounced disciplinarian and humanitarian dimensions. Not only did he
undertake personal supervision of the local village untouchables, but he also
maintained a (secular) school for boys, fed the poor, and tended lepers with
his own hands. Purdom writes (1964: 49):
“Meherabad
began to grow; a school, hospital and dispensary were set up and an ashram for
lepers and the destitute.… Hundreds of people came regularly to Baba for darshan,
and many Mahar amd Mang boys—of the untouchable class—came daily for singing
and prayers—also for the sweets that were distributed.… the ‘Meher Charitable
Hospital and Dispensary’ was opened, under the charge of a qualified medical
officer, to supply medical attendance without charge to all without respect to
class or creed.… The Hazrat Babajan school was opened to impart free primary
education to the village boys and girls of all classes and creeds, mostly
untouchables. Free boarding and clothing were also provided. The school started
with about twenty boys, and grew to one hundred and fifty boys and girls. The
boys’ and girls’ schools were separate. At first the untouchables were taught
apart, but after a few months all were taught together. The vernacular Marathi
was taught to the girls, who had a woman teacher; the boys were also taught
English.”
This
humanitarian penchant was to continue through various phases for many years. Though
the Meherabad colony flourished and began to acquire a very favourable
reputation in the Deccan, Baba unaccountably closed it
down completely at the end of 1926, and even left the site temporarily. He said
that his ‘work’ no longer required the colony, and hence the latter had to go.
He had already curtailed the inflow of visitors substantially, and was clearly
not intent upon accumulating a greater public fame.
A
much less popular, though undeniably exceptional, undertaking was actualized at
Meherabad the following year when Baba returned to the site. He kept himself
aloof from any public limelight and commenced a punishing fast during which he
subsisted on liquid only for six months, at the end of which he could not
immediately walk properly. During this fast, he confined himself in a small
hut, a characteristic aspect of his repeated seclusions. Yet he managed
throughout to supervise an educational institution that was perhaps unique of
its kind in India
at that time. This was the Meher Ashram, which lasted from 1927 to 1929. It
numbered over a hundred boys on an inter-religious basis, providing them with
free boarding school services. The inmates notably included both Sunni and
Shi’i Muslims in addition to Hindus, Mahars (untouchables), and Parsi and Irani
Zoroastrians. In addition to a secular curriculum, these boys were given a
non-sectarian tuition in mystical and philosophical subjects, and Baba himself
strongly contributed to the latter.
Part
of the school developed into a specialized faculty known as the Prem Ashram.
This was for selected boys who effectively became pupils of Meher Baba and not
merely pupils of the secular course. Most of these boys were in their early or
mid teens. A contemplative capacity became a pronounced hallmark of these
selected individuals, but the two most exceptional instances were two Muslim
youths from Iran.
Chota Baba Hazrat Abdulla and Aga Ali ibn Haji Muhammad are monograph subjects
in their own right, and repay close attention from anyone interested in Sufi
states of mind. [For an interesting account of that period, see Ramjoo Abdulla,
Ramjoo’s Diaries 1922–1929: A Personal Account of Meher Baba’s Early Work
(Walnut Creek, CA. Sufism Reoriented, 1979).]
Even
this institution was not permitted to last, however, much to the concern of his
disciples. Tom Hopkinson (1974: 45–46) provides an insight into the transitory
nature of these various activities. “Baba’s own comment was: ‘Usually a
temporary scaffolding is set up around a big building which is under
construction, and when the building is completed, the scaffolding is removed.
Often my external activities and commitments are only the outward expression of
the internal work I am doing. The school, hospital, etc., were but scaffolding
for my real work.… Hence, when my work is finished, I have no need of
scaffolding.’ Another time he declared: ‘I have not come to establish retreats
or ashrams, I create them for the purpose of my … work, only to repeatedly
dissolve them once that purpose has been served.’”
In
1929 he undertook a visit to the country of his forebears. He went to several
cities in Iran,
including his ancestral Yazd where
he gained a surprisingly strong recognition from Babis and Bahais. His
reception as a whole was very favourable, and the sympathy of the new Pahlavi
government for the pre-Islamic Iranian heritage seems to have contributed to this
enthusiasm. It is surprising to some that Meher Baba did not exploit this
situation more; it is a fact that he desired privacy on this visit and declined
offers to arrange a meeting with Reza Shah. Returning to India,
Baba switched his headquarters from Meherabad to Nasik,
a city in the same zone of Western India.
Meher
Baba’s personal routine at his ashrams was invariably strict. He was a
vegetarian and teetotaller, and maintained a firm disciplinary environment for those
resident with him. They were even forbidden to smoke tobacco, and alcohol was
taboo. The men and the women were segregated. The men were largely occupied in
routine chores and manual labour. All were vegetarian (though he permitted
pupils outside the ashram to eat meat). The ashram routine did not involve any
relinquishment of former religious affiliations: Muslims remained Muslims, and
Hindus remain Hindus. This was his expressed wish, and he never at any time in
his life formulated any sectarian identity for his followers.
His
ashram community were referred to as mandali, from the Marathi word mandal,
meaning a group, or by extension, the members of a family. This word was not in
ashram usage elsewhere. The community wore no distinguishing uniform, and there
was a marked absence or ritual observance such as was common in Indian ashrams.
He did allow his Hindu followers certain latitude in respect of ceremonial,
though restrained by comparison with orthodox norms. His emphases were
consistently egalitarian and anti-ritualist.
On 15 November
1930, Meher Baba was in strict seclusion in the ‘Panchvati
Cave’, a man made construction that
the mandali dug out from the south-eastern side of Meherabad Hill. When work on
the eight foot deep cave was completed a tin roof was installed overhead, a
carpet spread over the earthen floor, and a canvas hung across the entrance.
Whilst in seclusion news reached Baba that a ‘freelance journalist’ named H
Raphael Hurst (Paul Brunton) was coming from England
for Baba’s darshan and to interview him. Baba apparently had no desire
to see Brunton, but nevertheless instructed his secretary to write to a disciple,
Adi K Irani in Nasik, informing him
to go to Bombay and meet Brunton at
the dock, lodge him in a hotel for the night at his own expense, and bring him to
Meherabad along with Baba’s brother Jal.
Copyright © 2013 Stephen J Castro
