A Bahujan Vihāra

Round the corner from the improbably named Chaos Control Cafe in Parel (“Where Chaos is under control with harmony”) is the Bahujan Vihāra that was built between 1935 and 1937. I had gone in search of the Vihāra (finding the CCC was sheer serendipity!) based on what I had read in Meera Kosambi’s account of her grandfather’s life, as well as what another granddaughter of his, Mrs Indrayani Sawkar (neé Kunda Sathe) wrote in a fictionalized biography of Dharmanand, Man from the Sun. In Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings, Meera Kosambi has this to say:

“A concrete form of Dharmanand’s effort to spread the knowledge of Buddhism was a long-cherished task of building a Buddhist vihara in the mill area of Parel in Mumbai. It was named ‘Bahujan Vihara’ — rather than Buddha Vihara — because of its focus on mill workers and Dharmanand’s experiment to eradicate caste discrimination and untouchability among them. He enlisted the help of the philanthropist Shet Jugal Kishore Birla, who had already built Buddhist temples and rest-houses at places such as Sarnath, Kushinara, Calcutta, and Darjeeling. The building was completed in 1936 and the plaque near the entrance mentioned Birla’s donations and other contributions; Dharmanand’s name is nowhere to be found. He stayed here until the end of 1939, working in various ways: he gave discourses every Sunday, and taught Pali and Buddhism — taking pride in the fact that he taught Pali to a Dalit student (of Mahar descent) who had passed his BA in Sanskrit and was now studying for his MA.”

Sawkar is more florid. Writing in Man from the Sun about her grandfather, who was also known as Bapu, she says that in 1935 he “took up residence at Mumbai and began to build his Bahujana Vihara, a vihara for the workers, the mill workers mainly. Jugalkishor Birla had sponsored the project on the condition that Bapu himself supervise the work. The project represented a culmination of Bapu’s devotion to Buddhism and his interest in improving the plight of the masses. The site chosen was in the quarter of the mill-workers popularly known as Girangaon, the cotton mill city, a very crowded part of Mumbai. The vihara would furnish the workers with a nice, quiet place for discussions and get togethers. That is why he had named it Bahujana Vihara. It was socialism in an old style Buddhist temple. The vihara got completed in a year. It is still there. A plaque embedded in its wall informs the visitors that Jugalkishor Birla gave 19,000 rupees for its construction […] Bapu’s name is nowhere there, by his own insistence. Bapu was immensely attached to his Bahujana Vihara. He had a small cell here wherein he read, wrote and meditated. […] He taught whomsoever wished to learn Pali. He found many students amidst the Nav-Bauddhas. On Sundays he gave sermons about a Buddhist or socialistic topic, equality, education, unions and freedom. Workers and their children turned up here at all odd hours to discuss something or the other and he welcomed them with warm feelings.”

Today, all that can be seen of the original Vihara is a prayer or meditation hall. A peepul tree that was planted just behind the hall has grown to impressive proportions. There are statues of the Buddha and one of Ambedkar, and the Bahujan Vihar Trust offices are also on the premises.

It is true that there is no mention of Dharmanand anywhere on the premises today, and the person there who seemed to be in charge was not aware of Dharmanand Kosambi or his contribution to the establishment of the Vihāra.

There is a plaque of recent provenance which says that the historic Buddha Vihara was consecrated by the footfall (पदस्पर्शाने) of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar who, on the Thursday evenings when he would stay at the Rajgriha Dadar, would come along with his wife to worship the Buddha and to meditate. The Buddha Vihara, according to this plaque, was inaugurated on 4th April 1938.

As it happens, his role in the establishment of this vihāra seems to have been indirect. On October 13, 1935, at the site now termed the Muktibhumi in Yeola, Babasaheb Ambedkar made the emphatic public announcement, “I was born a Hindu, but will not die a Hindu” to reject caste (just a year before Annihilation of Caste would be written). After the publication of Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa in December 1935 by Kosambi, Ambedkar had had some discussion about Buddhism with him. Although Ambedkar would only formally adopt Buddhism twenty years hence, it was clear that he was deeply attracted to Buddhist philosophy and thought. For Dharmanand, Buddhism was more than a faith. Ever since he had met Iyothee Dass in Madras in the early 1900’s, he knew that this was a way of liberation from caste, that it possibly held answers to resolving a host of social ills. The combination of socialism and spirituality appealed to him more than the implementation of Marxism that he had seen in the USSR some years earlier.

Gail Omvedt, in her biography of Ambedkar, sees the events unfolding differently. “Kosambi met Ambedkar in October 1935, and immediately afterwards went to discuss the issue of conversion with Gandhi. Ambedkar, he told Gandhi, was close to Buddhism, and asked for funds to build a Buddhist vihar in Parel. Gandhi immediately turned to Jugalkishor Birla, sitting nearby, who presented Kosambi with a cheque for Rs 17,500. Out of this came plans for a ‘Bahujan Buddhist Bihar’ in Parel. But an initial meeting was broken up primarily out of rivalry between two Chambhar leaders, Sitaram Shivtarkar, who was taking part in the meeting, and his opponent Balkrishna Deorukhkar. In any event, nothing came of the Bahujan vihar, perhaps because Ambedkar was not ready to throw his support to anything financed by Gandhian money.”

Bits and pieces of this might well be factually correct, except that the conversation was between Gandhi and Kosambi and Ambedkar was not directly involved, and further, something did come of the Bahujan Vihara. The meeting between Ambedkar and Kosambi was in 1936, and that between Kosambi, JK Birla and Gandhi was probably in 1936, and it is very likely that the Vihara was ready by January 1937.

I suspect that the plan to make the Bahujan Vihara was largely Dharmanand’s social experiment, and would have started in 1935 or 1936, based on Sawkar’s chronology which comes in large part from her conversations with her grandmother. There is something to be said for family memory when there is so little documentation. In Gandhi’s daily diaries, there are no records of Dharmanand meeting him in 1935; an entry for 4 August, 1936 says that “Dharmanand Kosambi and Abdul Gaffar Khan called on Gandhi”, but the construction of the Vihara might have already started by then.

By 1939, Dharmanand would dissociate himself from the Vihāra, and according to Meera Kosambi this was in reaction to JK Birla’s criticism of some statements in Hindi Sanskriti ani Ahimsa. There may be more to this, given Dharmanand’s inability to stay in any one place for very long. The interactions between Gandhi, Ambedkar, Kosambi, and even Birla, were not simple: their private and public positions played out in the background of the freedom movement where they all were all on the same side, but there were caste tensions as well as opposing philosophical positions and vastly disparate economic positions as well. Ambedkar and Dharmanand took to Buddhism for different reasons. The debate on caste between Gandhi and Ambedkar is well known even today. Birla would support the construction of any number of religious buildings, but as a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, his motives would be viewed with some degree of suspicion by both Dharmanand or Ambedkar, again for different reasons.

Dharmanand’s philosophy was in some ways very innocent. Having translated the Visuddhimagga of Buddhaghosa he was seized with the mission to communicate this in as simple a manner as he could to as many people as he could reach. He therefore wrote Samadhimarg or The Path of Meditation in 1925, a do-it-yourself manual in Marathi. In addition to information about the purpose of samadhi, Dharmanand discusses factors that promote or prevent successful samadhi, sprinkled with relevant anecdotes from Buddhist literature. As Meera Kosambi says in The Essential Writings, even while Dharmanand “saw the urgent need to introduce the common man to this means of obtaining peace in a world increasingly caught up in a feverish whirl of activity — from various types of entertainment to diverse expressions of nationalism — he doubted whether it was within the latter’s intellectual and philosophical grasp. Finally he was encouraged by the example of the renowned Gandhian, Kishori Lal Mashruwala who had lived for several months in solitude before rejoining Gujarat Vidyapeeth as its Principal and resuming his work for the education and enlightenment of the common man. It was to Mashruwala that Dharmanand dedicated the book as a token of his admiration.”

In 1926, when DD Kosambi was an undergrad at Harvard, one of his stated projects was to translate Samādhimarg to English, French and German, but nothing came of this in the next forty years. Last week I was in Pune and managed to get a copy of the Marathi text from among the books left behind in the Kosambi family library. This is a bit of a long term project, but here is a text that needs translation, if not into German and French, into English at the very least. It would be a fitting tribute to all three Kosambis, Dharmanand, Damodar, and Meera.

26 Pieces of Silver

One of DD Kosambi’s last articles was a paper submitted to Scientific American entitled Scientific Numismatics, that was published in Volume 214 of that journal in February 1966. In this short article (10 pages in all) he summarises his main contributions to numismatic metrology, especially in relation to the statistical analysis of hoards of old coins.

The gist of Kosambi’s arguments is that with increased circulation and usage, the average weight of a coin will decrease, and with increased usage in transactions, the spread in the weights of a group of coins of the same denomination will increase. His publications on these matters date back to the 1940’s. As he says in his autobiographical note, Steps in Science, he took up this problem as a way of learning statistics! Not able to make much headway with analysing examination marks in the Indian system, he turned to the statistical study of punch-marked coins. He noted that “not all coins issued at the same time are used in exactly the same manner. Therefore, the effect of circulation is to decrease the average weight but also to increase the variation”.   On how these observations have influenced Indian historiography, there is more, much more, in his various articles on the subject, but that is grist to another mill.

In 1929 DD Kosambi (or DDK) graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College.  He had been admitted to Harvard in 1924, but had taken what would now be called a gap year, leading to a “mid-year” graduation, a short note on which appeared in the New York Times on March 4. In any case, DDK was considered a member of the Class of 1929 and the yearbook mentions some of his academic honours, but is missing his photograph.

Also in 1929, in the Annual Report of the Fogg Museum, the Director includes a list of GIFTS AND PURCHASES, wherein he acknowledges receipt of a set of 26 silver Indian Coins from Kosambi: 

Both the Director as well as the Curator of the Fogg Museum wrote letters of thanks to DDK and these are among the Kosambi papers in the PMML archives so it clearly meant a lot to him, but for whatever reason he does not mention these coins again in any of his writings.

When I first learned of this a few months ago, the donation seemed both exceptional and very generous. DDK was not yet 22 years of age and had gone through Harvard on a shoestring budget. He was also one of the few overseas students there at the time and his social profile was quite different from the few other students who had made gifts to the museum. Exactly what induced him to make this donation to the Fogg remains unclear, and the few accompanying documents in the archives at Harvard are sparse on details.

An additional complication emerged: the coins have, in the words of the Museum staff, been unlocated since the early 1970s. Unlocated has a complicated connotation so more about this elsewhere, but in short the coins could not be physically examined. There was some other information available, but the actual coins are now not available to view.

Further correspondence, and a visit to the Fogg, threw up some more details.  I had conjectured that the coins were likely to be from either  Portuguese India (of which he was then a citizen) or British India (where the family was then living) so it came as quite a surprise to me to learn  that the records at Fogg indicated that these were “26 Indian silver coins from date of Shah Jahan onward”!

This was more than just intriguing. Where did he get the coins from? And when? The two trips that Kosambi made from India were in September 1918 (when he was 11) and in early 1926, and a set of 26 Mughal coins, while not excessively expensive at the time, would still be outside the scope of what little is known about his father, Dharmananda Kosambi, and his financial conditions, especially as an indulgence. A little more sleuthing revealed that the coins had already been given to the museum as a loan perhaps in 1927, but they had briefly been misplaced and found again in 1928, but there are few other details. Are the coins all from one period? Since the note says “Shah Jahan onwards” it would suggest that they are from different Mughal mints, but one cannot tell for sure. There are tantalizing clues that these are mostly silver rupiyas, but at least three were of other denominations. This is also a mystery, since the Mughal mohur was cast in gold, and the dam in copper, and these coins are all classified as being silver.

The matter stands at this point now since the coins are physically not there. After donating the coins in February 1929 Kosambi returned to India in July that year and did not go back to the US till 1948. His first paper on the distribution of coin weights did not appear until 1940 – a paper in the journal Current Science (Bangalore) was followed up in a longer article in The New India Antiquary, vol. IV, pages 1-35, in 1941. But these are almost exclusively pertaining to the Taxila hoard and do not discuss Mughal coinage at all. Indeed, none of Kosambi’s articles on Numismatics do, and the papers that talk about silver coinage refer to other hoards. This is particularly strange since much more information is available on the economy of the Mughal empire. Indeed the only more modern coins that Kosambi refers to are British India rupees.

Some of these papers are well worth re-reading, not least for their acerbic wit. But more importantly, DDK notes in one of his articles, “I wish to point out the necessity of studying hoards of coinage as a whole and for every period if we are to reconstruct the lost economic and political history of our country from our unusually meagre and conflicting records.”

Whether or not the 26 pieces of silver – that almost surely was the first such hoard that he had had access to – triggered his interest in numismatic metrology, it is difficult to conclusively assert.  In the absence of any further information, it is perhaps wisest to  follow the caveat DDK gave in his superb 1941 article on the silver punch-marked coins of the Taxila hoard that were  described in a Memoir of the Archaeological Survey of India by E.H.C. Walsh. Kosambi says “It is unfortunate that this Memoir should be the foundation of the present study, because it is full of errors and oversights; in any case, it is the only description of large, approximately dated, hoards available to me, and I advise prospective readers to use it with caution and with my commentary on it”.

The Kosambi Nativity

D D Kosambi died in his sleep on 29 June 1966, a few weeks short of his 59th birthday, in his home on Bhandarkar Road in Pune. The date of his birth is recorded in his High School yearbook as 31 July 1907, but the place of his birth is not as clearly specified. In various essays written after his passing (as well as on Wikipedia) it is mentioned that he was born in Kosben, allegedly a small village in Portuguese Goa. There are no traces of this village in today’s Goa, but this is in of itself not odd since many such settlements might well have shifted in the course of a century. However, Kosambi himself does not mention Kosben in his writings.

The surname Kosambi is an invention that dates back to his grandfather’s generation, when the family (according to Meera Kosambi’s prefatory note in Nivedan, her grandfather Dharmananda Kosambi’s autobiography) who were originally known as the Shenai-Lotlikars, from the village of Loth (which is also untraceable on today’s maps) moved to escape persecution, and variously adopted the surname Kosambe or Kossambe drawn from the name of the village they moved to. Whether this was Kosben is not clear and in any case Dharmananda, who modified the spelling from Kossambe to Kosambi as a nod to the ancient Buddhist city of that name, grew up in and around the village of Sankhwal or Sancoale.

The family house is still standing, home today to the Sahaj Marg Spirituality Foundation‘s Shri Ram Chandra Mission Heartfulness Meditation centre. As their newsletter Echoes noted in 2013, the Goa ashram was “gifted by Br K.D. Kossambe of Mumbai” although as Nayanjyot Lahiri wrote in her brief vignette Remembering and Forgetting, Dharmananda Kosambi and Other Goan Saints, there are no markers to indicate that this had once been the Kosambi homestead.

Dharmananda’s sister had been married into a family in Chikli (or Chikhali) another village some 25 miles to the north of Sankhwal, and this eventually led to his marriage with Balabai Lad (लाड, also spelled Laud in Indrayani Sawkar’s book, Dharmananda Kosambi: An untold story) of that village in 1892, when he was sixteen years old. The Lad family was quite prosperous: Dharmananda’s brother-in-law Sakharam, one of the first Indians to study medicine in Lisbon, returned to Goa and set up practice in the market town of Mapusa. When Balabai was to have her first child, she returned to her home in Chikli: Dharmananda mentions in Nivedan that his eldest daughter Manik was born at the Lad house in Chikli on October 26, 1899.

Balabai was to spend a fair amount of her married life in this house when Dharmananda was away on his peregrinations, first to Poona, Varanasi and Nepal, then to Calcutta, Madras, Colombo and Rangoon, with numerous stops and side-trips.  Indrayani Sawkar, a granddaughter of theirs, has documented some of this in the fictionalised biography Dharmananda Kosambi: An Untold Story. By 1906 Dharmananda was teaching Pali at Calcutta University and Balabai joined him, but in 1907 she was back in Goa,  pregnant with their second child. Dharmananda brought her to Chikli to leave her with her natal family and returned to Calcutta via Baroda (where he met the Gaikwad and agreed to eventually move to Baroda) leading to more wanderings, to Bombay, Pune, Cambridge, Leningrad, and so on…

I had gleaned most of the above from Nivedan and from the Untold Story, which also had a photograph of the Lad house, along with the inscription “Laud House at Chikhali, Goa. Bala and her children Manik, Damodar (Baba), Manorama (Manu) and Kamala were born and raised here by the Laud brothers.” 

Given that the date of construction of the house is not known, Balabai’s having been born here is conjectural, but what is more certain is that DD Kosambi was born in the Lad house (as, subsequently, were his sisters Manorama in 1909 and Kamala in 1918). For much of 1907,  Dharmananda Kosambi was teaching in Calcutta, only returning to visit his family in Goa later in the year. Given his taciturnity about personal matters, there are very few references to his family in Dharmananda’s writings so considerable interpolation is needed in order to match times, places and events.

A week ago I was in Chikli/Chikhali and with the photograph in Sawkar’s book and more than a little luck I was able to track down the Lad house. Like the Kosambi home in Sankhwal, it is no longer with the descendants of the Lads, but it is in utter ruin, the roof having caved in some time ago, so all one can see is the bare outline of what must once have been an imposing structure. The house is large, and one can imagine that it once commanded quite a view of the lands that the Lads owned, and probably a view of the Chapora river as well.

There are neighbours who remember the Lads, and in particular one who was able to show me different rooms within the ruins of the house, including the one where births usually took place. (The practice, of sequestering a room for this purpose in a corner of the house that could have an access from both inside and outside, was quite common – I recall my mother telling me of a similar room in Allathur Villa, her ancestral home in Madras, where she and her siblings had all been born. And also her mother, but that is a different story.) But there was not much awareness of DD Kosambi, or indeed of others on that side of the family: when I mentioned the name, one of my interlocutors reached for his smartphone and quickly read the Wikipedia entry, so that even recognition is, with each passing day, fading rapidly.

But this post is not just about setting the record straight on the matter of where DD Kosambi was born. The University of Goa has established a DD Kosambi Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies, funded by Directorate of Art and Culture under their Visiting Research Professorship Programme,  one way of rejuvenating and revitalising the University by bringing in scholars from other institutions for short periods of time, and this year, I have the privilege of occupying this position. There is the attendant responsibility of living up to the name – of emphasising interdisciplinary scholarship – but given my interest in the Kosambis, that is relatively straightforward, and something that will occupy some or all of my time this coming year.

Both D D Kosambi and his father Dharmananda Kosambi have been rare, important, public figures: the former a polymath with formidable intellectual abilities in a broad range of disciplines, and the latter a mahatma who spearheaded the Buddhist revival in India, a near saintly figure who embodied pure scholarship, both classical and contemporary. One does not need to remember them for nostalgia alone – their contributions to the development of ideas and critical thought in modern India have been significant, and much is needed to be done to keep the memory of such forebears alive in the public domain.

The one that got away

I thought I had made a complete bibliography of D D Kosambi‘s published works in mathematics, statistics, as well as in other areas of science, but there was one paper that was hiding in plain view. 

The October 1, 1932 issue of Nature has a letter by Kosambi, titled “The Expanding Universe” on pages 507 and 508 of volume 130 (the image on this page is from the Internet Archive). The letter is dated 28 July with the byline Malleswaram, Bangalore. 

In the 2 July issue of Nature that year, the cosmologist E A Milne, Rouse Ball Professor in Mathematics at the University of Oxford, had published a note, which was, as I learned from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, the start of a debate and a major ideological conflict in the field of cosmology. Milne opposed Eddington and others’ relativistic cosmology and instead put forward another cosmological model, that of  kinematic relativity. The details of the ideological conflict and the evolution of the ideas themselves make for interesting reading, and while I can’t claim to understand most of the arguments, Milne’s subsequent statement, that “a theory cannot be accepted as satisfactory unless it is philosophically satisfying” does strike a chord.

Finding a theory “philosophically satisfying”  seems like a somewhat restrained way of saying that one finds it beautiful. Many physicists have made similar remarks linking truth and beauty, some very directly, as for instance Paul Dirac who said that it was “more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment” or Steven Weinberg,  “time and again physicists have been guided by their sense of beauty not only in developing new theories but even in judging the validity of physical theories once they are developed”. (It is good, though, to keep in mind that the pursuit of elegance and beauty can be misleading in science; see the cautionary essay by Phillip Ball.)

What is quite remarkable is that the first comment on Milne’s paper was the note by Kosambi, who although not participating in the ideological debate, pointed out that an assumption made by Milne was not essential, and that Milne’s results would hold more generally. The note is short but reveals much – Kosambi’s familiarity with the n-body problem, the work of Birkhoff on ergodicity, and with cosmology.  It had been just about three years since he returned to India from Harvard.

Following Kosambi’s note is a longer comment,  dated 19 August, by Milne who says

“It is very satisfactory to find that the explanation I have. given of the phenomena of the expanding universe can be freed from some of the restrictions which were introduced. […] Mr. Kosambi points out that the expansion and recession to infinity may also occur under more general conditions. But Mr. Kosambi is scarcely correct in saying that in my explanation “the material particles that form the universe are taken initially to have been enclosed in some finite space “.

Milne then goes on to derive some extensions of his ideas which  he feels “remove many of the traditional philosophical difficulties concerning time and space as a means of description of matter and motion.”

This post is, of course, not about Milne’s theory (which had its ups and downs) or even about Kosambi’s note itself. In the summer of 1932, Kosambi had already decided to resign from the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) where he was a lecturer in Mathematics. The briefly vibrant department of mathematics at AMU was crumbling, with André Weil returning to France and Vijayaraghavan moving to Dacca. DDK would then join the Fergusson College in Poona  and would spend the next dozen years or so there before moving to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay in 1945. The visit to Bangalore was a summer vacation – the 25 year old Kosambi was visiting his sister Manik and her husband, Dr Ram Prasad and staying with them at their home in Malleswaram. 

The timeline is, quite frankly, astonishing. The issue of Nature in which Milne’s first article is published is dated 2 July. Kosambi’s note has the date 28 July, a gap of just a little over three weeks, in which time he had to read the paper, realise that he had something to say and say it bluntly: 

IN NATURE of July 2, Prof. Milne has published a very simple and attractive explanation of the phenomenon that has given rise to so much speculation among recent cosmogonists. The sole defect in his clear analysis is that the material particles that form the universe are taken initially to have been enclosed in some finite space, but without mutual action, or even collisions. I should like to bring to the notice of those interested that the last restriction may be easily removed.

Even by today’s standards, this is impressively quick. There was airmail of course and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (where Kosambi could probably have accessed the journal) would have had a subscription to Nature. In three weeks therefore, DDK must have read and reconstructed the argument of Milne’s work, added his observations, written up his note and mailed it out to the Editors.

In less than a month Nature had received the note, sent it to Milne who had reviewed, and responded in detail, by August 19. It then took the journal another month to publish both the notes, on October 1 – three months to the day from 2 July. And that too in 1932. 

 

A Death Foretold

Dharmanand Kosambi died in a manner of his choosing, and almost at a time of his choosing. By mid 1946 he had tired of life: his diabetes was causing him acute physical discomfort, Indian independence – for which he had worked hard alongside Gandhiji in the preceding years – was a certainty, his book on the Buddha was widely read and widely appreciated, and he felt that there was little else that he could contribute. 

“When Kosambiji realized that he was no longer physically fit to carry on any work, he decided to give up his life through fasting. ” Speaking at the prayer meeting on 5 June, Mahatma Gandhi recalled the manner in which his close associate Dharmanand elected to die. Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain traditions all endorse, under special circumstances, ritual starvation that leads to death. Even today, there are recorded instances of Jain monks undertaking Sallekhana each year, which is the most formalised of the fasting traditions, to be undertaken when one is afflicted by an incurable disease, under circumstances when one fears the loss of character or dignity, old age and impending death, or when the body and senses get weak.

Dharmanand had already begun a fast in 1946, but Gandhiji (advised by Purushottam Das Tandon) intervened. “Bapuji asked me to give up my fast, and in deference to his wishes I did so. I had no painful symptoms then, nor even this itch which I now have, and I could have then died in peace. But out of his love for me Bapuji wired to me again and again to desist from fasting. I gave it up at his request on the 23rd of September and have undergone much physical suffering ever since. Ultimately, I had to resort to fasting once again. Bapu is not to blame for all that has happened because he did it from the best of motives. Nor am I sorry for all the agony which I have had to suffer for, as the Lord Buddha has said, ‘Forgiveness in the form of titiksha (endurance), is the greatest austerity.’”

Dharmanand came to Sevagram in 1947 and Balvantsinha, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi who lived in the Ashram described the times in “Under the Shelter of Bapu”  that was published in 1962. Writing on the 12th of May, 1947, he says about Dharmanand, “His health had seriously deteriorated. He could not digest anything. He had asked for Bapuji’s permission to live merely on water and thus eventually to shed his useless body. As for obsequies, he wished that the disposal of his dead body should be done in the cheapest possible manner and suggested that burial would be the best under the circumstances.”

Insofar as this decision was religious, it was Buddhism that motivated Dharmanand, who wanted to pass on Buddha Purnima, 5 May 1947. Nevertheless, the lack of solid food or Bhakta Pratyakhyan, the decision to stay in one place or Inginimaran, and keeping away his children and refusing the concern of others, Paadpogaman, all were aspects of the Jain tradition of Sallekhana. 

There is a strange contemporaneity to this mode of dying. In countries where the so-called  accompanied suicide is permitted today, there is considerable similarity to the formal requirements: the person has to be of sound judgement,  should be suffering from a disease which will lead to death (terminal illness), and/or an unendurable incapacitating disability, and/or unbearable and uncontrollable pain. (Because this form of death requires the ingestion of a drug, there is the further requirement that the person should possess a minimum level of physical mobility,  sufficient to self-administer the drug.)

But surely Gandhiji would have felt a tinge of regret later when he noted that due to the first fast in 1946, Dharmanand’s “digestion had been severely affected and he was not able to eat anything at all. So, in Sevagram, he again gave up food.” Writing to Balvantsinha, he gives the instruction, that “Kosambiji may live on water, if he cannot digest any food whatever. If he cannot take even water, then, of course, there is no help and the body will slowly die. Inner peace being established, there remains nothing more to be achieved.”

For a month, Dharmanand lived on, an inspiration to others in the Ashram. Deeply concerned about the further propagation of Pali and Buddhism, he wanted reassurance that Gandhiji would endorse his plans for sending students to Sri Lanka. Gandhiji was not so sure that this would be useful. At any rate, it was clear to Balvantsinha, Vinoba Bhave, and others that they were in the company of an exceptional person.  “In the eleven years of the Ashram’s history, Kosambiji’s death was the first to occur. I have never seen a nobler and a more serene death in my life,” says Balvantsinha.

Dharmanand passed at 2:30 pm on 4 June, with Balvantsinha in attendance. “At about 12 noon, he said that he was now about to depart. At 2 p.m., he drank a little water and asked me to open all the doors, as though someone had come to carry him away and the doors had to be kept open for them to pass out. He had never before requested me to keep the doors open. The throb of life in his body gradually slackened and he expired exactly at 2:30. Between the moment till which he continued to speak in full consciousness and the time he drew his last breath, there was not more than ten minutes’ interval.”

The decision to keep both his son Damodar and his daughter Manik away in the last month was more than a little harsh. There was a special closeness among the three, especially in the years 1918 – 1928, when they traveled to America and lived in Cambridge, MA, with Manik at Radcliffe, Damodar at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and then at Harvard, and Dharmanand at Harvard. Although not given to overt displays of affection, and while they were used to long periods apart from each other, the mode of their father’s death left both of them and their families quite shaken, even though they all knew of his intentions and had said their goodbyes. 

Dharmanand had left it to Gandhi to decide what to do with his effects, and had apparently wished that his body be buried since it would be cheaper. Gandhiji, though, felt that cremation would be more appropriate, and within a few hours this was carried out, in the presence of Kakasaheb Kalelkar and Vinoba Bhave. (Thirty-five years later, Vinoba Bhave would choose to die in the same way, refusing food and medicine.)

Dharmanand Kosambi’s death, as noble as his life had been, Balwantsinha records, was an inspiring sight of solemn splendour. Those were times when sacrifice, simplicity, and austerity were greatly admired and emulated. At a prayer meeting the next day, Gandhiji was overcome with emotion and devoted the first part of his address to an appreciation of the life and work of Kosambi.

“I have no doubt whatsoever that his stay in the Ashram has sanctified it.”