pp. 17 – 20.
ANILA KARMA KHECHOG PALMO (FREDA
BEDI), SIKKIM
MEMORIES OF ACHARYA RAGHUVIRA
I shall always remember a slight scholarly figure writing Sanskrit with exquisite handwriting. It was in an Oxford library—the Indian Institute, and the year was 1932. Those were the days when I knew I should spend my life in India. "I would like to write like that" I said. Babaji, then a young student in PPE like I was, said '"Yes, you shall".
The young student went on writing. Some Karma had put him in
a suit, but he, I realised only later, should have been dressed in the white
cottons of Benares. Pandit Gauri Shankar of Lahore has passed into the mists of
history, but his delicate laborious hands still write in a timeless way. He did
not know, nor I, that he was showing me again a path perhaps I had been
travelling on in many life-times.
We reached Lahore a couple of years later. The old Lahore of the 'thirties when the
great shack of the Lajpat Rai Bhawan was full of students and staffed by
brahmacharis. In the Shalimar Gardens the fountains played; women crowded the
colleges, but the Purdah Club still met in garden settings. In Dubbi bazar,
history lived. Craftsmen, wizened,
with embroidered caps, fashioned marvels of beauty out of gold thread.
We lived in Model Town, the brain child of Dewan Khem Chand,
whose heart was larger than his enormous tribe of relations, and whose natural
community spirit brought into being a modern housing estate. It was a perfect
place to live in. Between us and the Lahore of the Sahibs, the Cantonments and
Stiffles was a long dusty road.
A long dusty road that had
all Punjab in it: donkeys, with potters on them. Bearded walkers, wearing
checked lungi cloths. Fantastically uncomfortable buses with their cargoes of
good companions.
Somewhere in the middle, in a waste of land where new houses
Were growing into new villages, under the burning midday sun there was a modest
bungalow. It was there in what must have been his first family home that Babaji
and I met Dr. Raghu Vira. With him were Mataji and the children.
I had my first sight of Lokesh as a schoolboy.
To be honest I can't remember what we talked about, and why
we ever went there. But Babaji and I seemed to find our way into the circle of
scholars and artists and spent hours and days discussing history and books and
writing; looking at paintings. Those were the days of political overtones but
we lived in the books and the colours and the folk life of the villages.
On one visit to the budding Acharya we found a few Japanese
scholars in his sitting room, an unusual sight in days when air travel had not
made international living a reality. It was on the verge of the Second World
War. Suddenly, we heard that Dr. Raghu Vira had been interned. "Not Dr.
Raghu Vira . . . . He never bothered about politics." I tried to imagine
him sitting behind some barred door somewhere trying to explain to somebody
something about Japanese culture . . . It was incongruous.
Of course his University friends rallied round and in a few
days he was out again. Smiling, behind his round eyeglasses.
After that the great storm of 1947 blew over the Punjab and
stripped the trees bare of so many leaves that had given us summer shade. Prof.
Brij Narain was gone. Where was Dr. Lakshman Swarup who used to descend on our
Model Town huts, and sit in the mudded courtyard under the thatch of grass,
correcting the English of his beautiful manuscript. Written by a South Indian
queen, translated from the Sanskrit, it
brought with it the scent of the forest ,and the flowers twining round the tree
trunks.
"Where, 0 where . . .” The land was rent, and the old
Punjab was no more.
Dr. Raghu Vira had gone with his family to Nagpur. We were up in the refugee camps of
Kashmir. In Delhi the forts were full
of suffering humanity. Kurukshetra lived again in a township of tents. It was
not until the early fifties that we all found each other again. It was a joyful reunion. The Raghu Vira
clan, now grown up. Dr. Lokesh Chandra married with his bride of the moon face;
the girls growing up; various grandchildren.
They were in that extraordinary beehive of industry and scholarship that
is modern and yet traditional . . . the International Academy of Indian
Culture. I found that all the members of the family, the young bride included,
knew some unusual oriental language, and all were working together on.
multi-lingual dictionaries that linked Indian culture with the Buddhist culture
of Tibet,
China, Mongolia, Korea, Outer
Mongolia and Buryatia that lies in the USSR. Indonesia with its Sanskrit
undercurrents; Afghanistan and its giant Buddhas in the rocks of Bamiyan. It
was a new, old world.
Acharya Raghu Vira was born. His historic trail took him
across the steppes into yurt and temple. Across mountains into cave and
library. With his magnificent Red Cross mind that looked to the greater
humanities and stepped lightly over Governments and their rules and
regulations, he travelled where others cannot travel. Made friends
everywhere. All he brought he housed
with cleanliness and infinite care.
I can see the central hall with its books of dharanis,
before which incense burned. The artists contributed rupas and pictures and line
drawings.
For me and for many others however the greatest wonder of
the Acharya's work has been the way in which like a traditional SRUNGMA or
guardian of the secret teachings, he has worked for the preservation of Mahayana
Buddhist culture in its Tibetan form.
It was in the Buddha Jayanti year of 1956 that His Holiness
the Dalai Lama and the Panchcn Lama Rinpoche made their visit to the Academy,
and it was as if foreshadowing the great influx of scholars and manuscripts
that came in 1959, when the forcible occupation of Tibet released a stream of
culture that came back to the land of its origin, India, like a great
fertilising river.
Perhaps others will write in detail of the great collections
and dictionaries that have been printed in the Tibetan language, with English
introductions. The world and its scholars know more of that great work (that
will be honoured for centuries to come) than does India.
It was Lokesh who struggled with the casting of Tibetan
type; complex and expensive printing methods. Artists came from the old Tibetan
monasteries, calligraphists, monk scholars.
The India of Acarya Nagarjuna; the days of old Nalanda; the
Mahapandits of the past. All come to mind. We are in a new Oriental renaissance
sparked by the arrival of the living religious tradition of Tibet. Acharya
Raghu Vira knew it; so does Lokesh; so do His Holiness the Dalai Lama; His
Holiness the Gyalwa Karmapa; His Holiness the Sakya Trizin; the venerated
Dudjom Rinpoche and a whole line scholars of the Nyingma and new
Tantra tradition of the Himalayan
range.
All honour to Acharya Raghu Vira and those who carry on the
great work. His untimely death was a tragedy, but he has left a son to carry on
all the publication that his great vision encompassed. Is it too much to ask
that he may leave his Celestial Heavenly Halls and take the patient path of the
Bodhisattvas instead? He is needed-here
21.10.1971
Dharma Chakra Centre, Rumtek,
Sikkim.
Notes by Samten de Wet, 3rd
May 2003.
In a footnote in her own
handwriting, sister Palmo noted:
“Dr. Lokesh Chandra is now the Publisher, especially of the Satapitaka Series of which several volumes are in my collection.”
This text was xeroxed from The Dr.
Ernst Landsberg Papers, in the University of Cape Town Library. It was sent to
the late Dr. Lansberg sometime during the mid-1970’s.
At the top of the document, Sister
Palmo had written:
“To show you our Indian “Punjab” background: 1934 – 1947. *the break-up of old India into India and Pakistan).