Thread by @_shaambhavi

SEEDS THAT WERE TO SPROUT

Four years after leaving college I was ready to join the Communist Party of India when it declared war on the newly born Republic of India in February 1948.

I conveyed my decision to my friend Ram Swarup, whom I had met after leaving college & who was to exercise a decisive influence en my intellectual evolution.

He wrote back immediately: "You are too intelligent not to become a Communist. But you are also too intelligent to remain one for long."

This was a prophecy which came true. It was only an year and a few months later that I renounced Marxism as an inadequate philosophy,

realised that the Communist Party of India was a fifth-column for the advancement of Russian Imperialism in India, and denounced the Soviet Union under Stalin as a vast slave empire.

Before I tell the story of that transformation, I have to look back and point towards planting of some other seeds in my mind. These seeds were to sprout into life as soon as the spell of Marxism was broken, and grow into an abiding faith in Sanatana Dharma.

The first college teacher to leave a lasting impression on my intellectual growth was our professor of Sanskrit. This great language & literature was not my main subject in B.A.Hons. I was only supposed to qualify in it in a supplementary examination & then forget all about it.

The prescribed course was the first four chapters of Dafakamüracharit of Dandin and a few cantos of the Kirütürjuntyam of Bharavi, with some grammar and translation work thrown in as an aid.

In the normal course, therefore, a casual student like me should not have attracted any notice from our Sanskrit professor, nor he from me. But we were fated, as it were, to fascinate one another.

The outcome of this meeting was not only my lasting love for Sanskrit langauge and literature but several other decisive departures in my way of looking at Hindu philosophy and history.

This professor had spent several years in Europe to earn his Ph.D. He had also taught at Santiniketan for some time. But these were only his outer accomplishments which several other professors also had in their own fields.

What mattered most to me about him was his vast erudition in the wide fields of traditional Indian philosophy, Indian his tory, and Indian languages and literatures.

Every single line of prose, poetry in the prescribed texts was for him an occasion to launch on a learned discourse in comparative linguistics, metaphysics, history, and what not.

His contempt for modern Indologists was always as obvious as his admiration for everything which was traditionally Hindu.

He startled me one day when he poured undisguised contempt on Sir S. Radhakrishnan who, in his opinion,