Why eyes deceive us
Alternate Realities (How Science Shapes our Vision of the World) by Joel Davis. Plenum Trade, New York and London. Pp. 309. $ 36.
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning — Heisenberg.
THERE was a "time" when there was no time! Logical fallacy? Queer? Perhaps. But then what?

Little India in distant Mauritius
In the Service of God and Man:The Ramakrishna Mission in Mauritius by L.P. Ramyeed and edited by Swami Kirtidananda and Kevin Shillington. Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius. Pp. 282+6. Price not given.
THIS book makes an excellent study of the growth of the Ramakrishna Mission in Mauritius from its establishment in 1939 by Swami Ghanananda to the present.

Man on killing mission
The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions by David Quammen. Frank Bros. & Co., New Delhi, Pp.702. Rs. 325.
HOW does the plant and animal population in specific areas of our planet change over time?

A fauji fires with his pen

Punjabi literature
by Jaspal Singh

Jasbir Bhullar is probably the only Punjabi writer who has written scores of short stories about life in forlorn military camps, burning battle fields and lively army cantonments. He is a writer not only of daring war deeds but also of the finer feelings which the soldier carries in his heart even during the most brutal and desperate times.

Nine of his collections of stories, three novels and half a dozen books for children have already appeared and some of them have been commented upon by well-known literary critics.

The present volume, "Beeba kabutar" (Lok Sahit Parkashan, Amritsar), contains 18 love stories written over a period of 30 years or so.

Those familiar with his tales of battle and grit cannot imagine that he can write with equal felicity about sensuous relations and their multi-dimensional intricacies.

The first story "Beeba kabutar"(the gentle pigeon), after which the collection is named, is about the desolate life of a painter Raj Kumar (Beeba) who has lived for a long time in the debris of his failed love. The painter tries to get over his past failures and plans to begin all over again. But this time the relation is not going to be a sensuous one as before. It would now be a kind of a compromise based on convenience.

Somehow the painter has to be saved before he turns into a fossil. The author undertakes to help him out of his damned pit of despair.

"Jangal di chiri"(wood sparrow) is a long story about the destiny of three sisters whose parents migrate to East Africa leaving them with their maternal uncle.

The girls grow up as pretty maidens and the eldest Mitra Sandhu is abused by many on her way to adulthood. But she is able to look after her younger sisters well. In the end Mitra meets a sensitive youngman whom she wants to marry. But circumstances do not permit their plan to materialise. She is tricked into a marriage with a rich harem-keeper at Nairobi from where she escapes to India.

Now her younger sister who has married her lover in her absence does not like her presence in her home. Ultimately she is packed off and she goes into the world to fend for herself.

"Gatte da kilha" (cardboard castle) is a fantasy in which a prince goes to reclaim a princess made captive by an ogre who is a king of a different people. After crossing all obstacles on the way, the prince reaches the castle where the princess is confined. But strangely she refuses to oblige him and she prefers to say in the confinement of the ogre-king rather than shifting to the confinement of another prince. She believes every king is as good or bad as the other, and decides to stay put in the enchanted castle.

The story "Char, tin, do, ikk" (four, three, two, one) is about the fate of a consumptive rickshaw puller who is forced to indulge in flesh trade deploying his wife as a means. The story lays bare the impact of stark poverty and helplessness, compounded by penury-related chronic disease. The story actually does not fit in the collection of love stories.

"Lamm salammi maut" (prolonged death) is about an unfortunate girl married to a rich man, ignoring her deep feelings for her lover (Jeeta). The girl ultimately dies after a long life of suffering during childbirth. Only her lover Jeeta shows genuine compassion. All the other members of the family are worried about the right observance of rites and rituals. Their hypocrisy is skilfully exposed.

"Marsie di umar" (life of an elegy), though a sensitive love tale, has a weak story-line with lot of passionate padding. The narration becomes unduly heavy and even unnatural in its unfolding.

"Lashan de shehr vich" (in the city of corpses) is a story in which insensitive denizens of a town slowly and steadily assimilate vibrant new-comers. Ultimately the living ones lose their elan and become one with the dead. Whosoever thinks and acts differently in this town is forced into a corner and is made to shed his peculiarities so that he begins to conform to the dead pattern of life there.

The recalcitrant protagonist after having been tamed becomes a great votary of conformity and norms that plague the city.

In the story "Kandh da rishta", a widow Toshi and her male child live alone. She remarries a rich widower but dies during childbirth; both her son and his stepfather have to confront the world without anybody to console them. The story lacks action and depends more on the narrative technique.

"Vavarolian di juun" (life of whirlwinds) is a story about husband-wife relationship. Everyday a number of differences appear and are glossed over till they explode into a devastating crisis. "Safarnama"(travelogue) is a tragedy of the being of woman who, according to the author, is always at the receiving end. Suffering is an inalienable part of womanhood. The characters in this story do not speak the language of their types. They are over-intellectualised and speak a metaphorical language of the author himself.

"Agg da mausam" (season of fire) is about the love of a Hindu boy Vishwas for a Muslim girl Naseem, which could not succeed due to a misunderstanding. The story seems very unrealistic. "Sukki nadi de taeraak" (swimmers of a dry river) is again focused on the failed love of a Brahmin boy for a shudra girl.

"Gavaal mandi" (the cattle fair) is the tragedy of five daughters who could not make the necessary adjustments in marriage leading to a lot of turmoil and the ultimate breakdown.

"Panahgir", "Parchhaven", "Chanan di sirjana" and "Postscript" revolve around similar problems.

The last story "Vavarala"(whirlwind) is a long one about teenage love and its aftermath in the wake of failure a la Bhullar. Both the protagonist Sumit and his beloved Bindi meet at a marriage years after their separation and again have a feel of their former relation. The lovers fall into a reverie about the past. It is a sensitive story of frustrated love that burns alive in the heart. This story could be easily developed into a novel.

Jasbir Bhullar has developed his own style which is highly metaphorical though it falls short of being an allegory. Sometimes the metaphors conceal more than they reveal and the reader is left to fend for himself. When Bhullar speaks plain language, the reader becomes suspicious. This kind of convoluted prose is a little unsuitable for fiction where the reader likes to confront situations, events and characters. At times it irks the reader when the narration is made unduly ponderous.

The most important thing in fiction is the story-line and a proper chronology of events and situations. Of course various literary devices like the use of fantasy and allegory have their own impact. But they add to the narrative grandeur only if they are not opaque.

Almost all Bhullar’s characters are disillusioned, frustrated and forlorn. Most of the stories end in disaster and despair. For Bhullar suffering is the veritable reality of life, other aspects are an illusion. Quite a few of the stories probe the past where old wounds bleed.

Sometimes the author ends the story all of a sudden. The reader whose expectations have been aroused is left high and dry.

Multiplicity of subplots in a short-story is also intriguing. At places the reader has to make a lot of effort to pick up the thread.

All great stories in world literature revolve around simple truths of life and nature. Their language is revealing and expository that allows a glimpse into the inscrutable mysteries of life.

"Home" in its various manifestations — house, shelter, abode, residence, etc — is an important fixation that possesses Bhullar’s mind. That is why most of the characters in these stories feel insecure and they remain in perpetual search of "homes" as a be-all and end-all of life.

These love stories actually are stories of despair which Bhullar as a soldier has to get over.

Nirad Babu: beyond cynicism

Nirad C. Chaudhuri: The Renaissance Man by R.K. Kaul. Rawat Publications, Jaipur & New Delhi. Pp 179. Rs 350.

SOME of his detractors compare him with Diogenes, but admit that instead of spewing his cunicism from a tub, he chooses his cosy Oxford home to rail against things Indian. Others simply dismiss him as a later-day Cassandra making unwarranted doom-laden prophecies about the decline of the country of his birth. A few, however (the present reviewer included), admire the courage of his contradictions, the idiosyncracies of his prose style and the spead of his unconventional erudition.

Nirad C. Chaudhuri is a writer you cannot ignore. He compels attention both as a scholar and as an intellectual provocateur. You may ridicule his dowdy appearance or make fun of his gawky movements on the Oxford streets; you simply cannot brush aside his jeremiads or question his involvement as concerned intellectual, however, hare-brained his judgements may sound to you. He lines you up either for or against himself, never on he middle ground. He answers neither to Gramsci’s definition of an intellectual, nor to Cyril Connolly’s ("one who sleeps with other people’s wives", etc. etc.). Good at raising everybody’s hackles and enjoying the spectacle, Nirad Chaudhuri, a true Renaissance man, always makes you want to snap your fingers at him.

It is because R.K. Kaul successfully navigates the difficult terrain between unqualified praise and unreserved denunciation that this monograph is welcome and timely. Kaul belongs to the fast dwindling tribe of scholar-teachers who refuse to be swept aside by trendy slogans and fashionable opinions. He is unique among his peers in that he remains firmly rooted in humanistic knowledge, even as he critically engages with the latest twists and turns of theory. Not a subscriber to ideological purity, he is a staunch defender of literature as an entity in its won tight. (I need not recall our private quarrels in this score.) With no axe to grind, he reads literature steadily and reads to whole — a trait rather uncommon among many of the newer university wits of today.

Deeply read in English and Urdu literatures, his capacity to organise the facts of Chaudhuri’s life and works and the meticulous ways in which he examines texts are equalled only by the clarity and sureness of synthesis, leading to the identification and recovery of whatever is authentic and essential in Chaudhuri’s writing.

Moreover, his interpretations have a rare merit: they are precise. Although the only thing common between Kaul and Chaudhuri seems to be their liking for Alexander Pope (Kaul is our foremost interpreter of English of the 18th century), we are offered an extremely level-headed account of Chaudhuri’s with no attempt to either glorify him or to play down his achievements. True, as Kaul trenchantly argues, Chaudhuri’s views on Indian history and the Hindu belief systems are out of step with the accepted wisdom. But this does not prevent him examining closely this belief system and placing Chaudhuri within it.

In the event Kaul;s own liberal credentials get an airing, which is a good thing, for the first impressions on reading this monograph suggest that the author is letting his subject speak for himself without his own intrusions. Kaul gives credit where it is due. He approvingly records Chaudhuri’s impatience with corruption in India or with the softening of civil society. But he does bot hesitate to point out that "in spite of monumental scholarship, Chaudhuri’s formulations about Indian history and culture are essentially unsound".

Here I would like to suggest that one could read Chaudhuri’s works not as religious, historical and cultural documents, But as impressionistic reflections — like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s on Russia and the West — of a sentimental if also an egoistic commentator. We don’t live by truth or logic alone. We also need fantasies; not the ones foisted on us by others, not those that insinuate themselves through the trappings of history and culture, but the ones we create out own demons as fleeting compensations for what we cannot realistically attain. Chaudhuri’s eccentricities and pathologies of hate are pardonable (didn’t Auden pardon Kipling and Claudel for "writing well"?, because the label "intellectual" is no automatic passport to lucidity.

Bertrand Russell said in 1937 that if the Nazis were to invade Britain, they should be welcomed as tourists so that "they would become malleable". In 1949 Julian Benda, author of the celebrated "Treason of the Intellectuals", applauded the rigged trial in Communist Hungary of Laszlo Rajk in the pages of "Les Lettress Francaises" (November 17).

Intellectuals are as much prone to common aberrations as the rest of us. The itch to trail their coattails tempts quite a few of them into posturing of the worst kind. With Chaudhuri this itch may have something to do with his systematic neglect by fellow Indians. Hence his arrogance and his uppishness.

My own favourite among Chaudhuri’s works is "Autobiography of an Unknown Indian", but I also admire "Continent of Circe" and "Thy hand, Great Anarch!" for their irreverence towards established beliefs. Kaul’s analysis of their literary dimension enhances my pleasure further. The chapter, "Of imagination all compact" offers a persuasive appreciation of Nirad Babu’s prose style, its evocative quality, the "accurate and minute observation, with the eye of a painter".

Often reminding us Wordsworth, Chaudhuri presents epiphanies of intense personal experiences which the author receives "with the passivity of a writer’s mind". people have noticed the poetic qualities of the writing earlier, but Kaul brings home to us in elaborate detail the resonances and nuances of Chaudhuri’s descriptive passages, even as he draws attention to the occasional lapses of his diction. Close literary reading of the primary texts is the most significant part of this monograph.

Kaul has once again demonstrated his unbiased judgement and scholarly scruple.

One minor quibble is in order here. On page 107, Kaul says that the Nobel committee "seems to have been partial to dissident writers of Eastern Europe during the days of the iron Curtain". Mikhail Sholokov, an out and out conformist of there was one, was also given the prize. And Joseph Brodsky was an American citizen when he received the Nobel.

— M. L. Raina

Why eyes deceive us

Alternate Realities (How Science Shapes our Vision of the World) by Joel Davis. Plenum Trade, New York and London. Pp. 309. $ 36.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning — Heisenberg.

THERE was a "time" when there was no time! Logical fallacy? Queer? Perhaps. But then what?

You are entering the world of 20th century science.

Here space may have a curvature and time breaks into discrete quantas at some "singularities". Space tells matter how to move... and matter tells space how to curve. Symbiosis... you said? There is a theory for the existence of "multiple universes" to the tune of ten to the power of 72, probably having their own laws. Our universe is a participatory universe. We participate in it to create reality! Please, don’t mind some sociological language.

No "things" exist at the quantum level — fundamental particles are not "things". They are only relationships or interconnections.

Between what? Between further interconnections, of course.

But then there must be some fundamental level. Yes, the most fundamental level is an "unbroken wholeness"! Some sutra from the Buddha this? you wonder.

Not for nothing Stephen Hawking jokes that many prizes have been awarded for showing that universe is not as simple as we might have thought!

Just like the development of science itself, the book winds its path slowly in the beginning and acquires lightening speed towards the end where theories and paradoxes are tossed up one after the other. Written in simple language by a science writer, it weaves a pattern from the macrocosm of the universe to the microcosm of the quantum world, and in the process stretches our concept of the universe to an immense, awesome chasm in which force and matter are enmeshed in strange ways. And saying "strange" might be an understatement.

The paradigm shift from geocentric cosmologies of Ptolemy and his forebears, through the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Galilio to the modern picture of earth being just a tiny dot in an immensely huge landscape is fantastic indeed. But imagining once "tangible" elementary particles as "relationships" instead of "things" and to move from the realm of actualities to probabilities is simply mindboggling.

You and I believe that empty space contains nothing. But, the famous "uncertainty principle" of Heisenberg doesn’t allow you certainty after a certain point. "Nothing" does not exist because "nothing" is too definite a property!

So what happens? Virtual particles exist there! How come? Simply because if they don’t exist, you will be very certain that they don’t exist — and that is a very big certainty. The "uncertainty principle" won’t allow you that. So virtual particles exist even if for a quantum blink of time in the quantum foam you and I call "empty space".

By the way, who said that there wasn’t any free lunch!

Scientific miracles are a typical feature of the 20th century. The epoch of certainties and absolute oppositions is over. Apparent transparency of classical thought has been replaced by a probabilistic and statistical opaqueness of quantum mechanics. You don’t understand often what physical picture to make of the complex equations that this "black box" of mathematics brings about.

There was seemingly nothing "impossible" in the classical theoretical science but thermodynamics, relativity and quantum mechanics are all rooted in the discovery of impossibilities.... There are relations in them that are "eternally impossible", to use the term of Comte. These impossibilities imply an unexpected intrinsic structure of reality that dooms the intellectual to failure.

The sense of physical sight had a very important part in the classical scientific and commonsensical parlance. But that is eternally gone now at some levels. The world of quantum is forever beyond our sense of physical sight because it is predominantly the world of probable and we cannot see probabilities, only actualities.

In quantum mechanics an elementary particle is defined by "wave function". It is probabilistic. Now, how do you answer the question — what is its reality? What is the reality of probability?

Probability is just a set of possibilities. It may not be actual. So the elementary particles exist as a set of possibilities. How does a possibility becomes an actuality? When you observe it!

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is born. It says there is no real correspondence between theory and reality, at least not at the quantum level. For, quantum reality does not exist until we measure something.

Heisenberg, Bohr and Wheeler subscribe to this. Says Bohr: "There is no quantum world, there is only an abstract quantum description. There is no deep reality." Wheeler adds: "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon unless it is an observed phenomenon." We are the ones who first establish the iron posts of observation and then weave a brilliant tapestry of reality between them.

Contends an opposite view, the probability might be only for measurement and the sub-atomic particles may be existing at their own "definite" place out there, objectively. "God doesn’t play dice," Einstein is supposed to have told Bohr.

"We are not concerned with how a particle exists out there objectively, that’s speculation.For us, there is no ‘out there’ and no divine point of view — that is, objectivity in the quantum world," argue the Copenhagen interpretation-wallahs. As for Einstein’s remark, Bohr is supposed to have replied, "don’t tell God what to do!"

One may not agree with the fashionable Copenhagen interpretation but the fact that there are fashions in science also points to the acceptability of the idea of alternate realities.

Science is also science "fiction" in the sense that it makes images, models, representations which though mathematically consistent do not exhaust all information in that particular field, but are just some particular viewpoints in science’s symbolic world. Various points of view about the system may be complementary.

"The ‘laws’ of science are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world," said Einstein. The "laws" are properties of our conceptual map of reality, rather than of reality itself; parts of a map, not of the territory.

Einstein ruled out the possibility of a conditioned mind being able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and even of imagining the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison. The observer remains separate from the observed.

Hitler won’t accept that. Along with David Bohm and Fritjof Capra he would say that the act of observation to an extent also dissolves the boundary between the observer and the observed.The separation of the world into an objective outside reality and "us", the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained. The object and the subject then become inseparable from each other.

Until now science excluded subjectivity and the exclusion, it seemed, was total. Within the strict confines of natural science, there was no place for self, love, beauty and aesthetics. But subjectivity is slowly making its place felt in the science. The subject is an important factor in the "interconnections" of "reality" and helps in a large measure in the "making" of the "reality". What we "see" also depends upon what we want to "see". The observer is a participant.

This communion of our insights about the world around us and the world inside us is a satisfying feature of the recent evolution of science.

If science remains true to itself, it will be as alive and as sloppy and chaotic and self-centered and mystical and joyous as art or religion, the author of the book feels.

— Rajesh Kathpalia

Man on killing mission

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions by David Quammen. Frank Bros. & Co., New Delhi, Pp.702. Rs. 325.

HOW does the plant and animal population in specific areas of our planet change over time? This is a question that has drawn volumes of research in the past three decades. Contributions have come from all corners. From physicists to environmentalists, the chant of deep ecology has taken shape and is heard in diverse tunes the world over. While radical activists and abstract thinkers have collaborated, and at times confronted each other, the story has grown more interesting and yet revealingly worrisome.

Taxonomy, the science of classifying information on life forms in an orderly fashion, and elementary cell biology used to be the conventional biologist’s job a hundred years ago. From then to today, it has been a very long journey in a rather short period of history. The evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell, Wallace, genetics of George Mendel and applications of theories of structure and bonding in molecules have transformed the discipline. And after the early sixties, when Robert MacArthur with a master’s degree in mathematics brought abstract models in looking at the changes that populations of plants or animals go through in time, biology became truly inter-disciplinary. Today, on the one hand, scientists try to understand the complexity of biology at the level of molecules, a large number of them also look at how nature and man play together with the vast larger systems, the organisms themselves.

The first monograph published (by Robert MacArthur and Edward O Wilson) in this area titled "The Theory of Island Biogeography" was, in the words of David Quammen, a "eyecrossingly mathematical book" that "concerned itself not just with islands and not just with biogeography."

The isolation of islands ensures that interaction of one species with too many other kind does not occur too frequently. Thus islands are natural laboratories for evolutionary and population studies. What one finds from island studies of life forms is that isolation can also give rise to enhanced extinction. The modern human civilisation has created islands for non-human species on the land and ocean alike by first invading their habitat and then forcing them to stay away from the human habitat. This has the obvious result: extremely high rates of extinction of life species from the earth.

Quammen himself is not a biologist and in this marvellous book, he has succeeded in what every scientist dreams of doing— putting things across in simple layman’s terms. While this teaches theoreticians a lot about how to be better communicators, it also becomes clear after reading the book that for deeper understanding, training in mathematics helps. Otherwise you get what Quammen does in his glossary at the end of the book: logarithm — a mathematical thing, never mind. A message for all those foolish (and criminally so) educators, who believe biology could be done without mathematics.

The other extreme is equally bad. Robert May, a physicist-turned-theoretical biologist, once told me that in his opinion we (Indian scientists) have a brahmanical mindset against doing things by hand, especially when it comes to playing with lower life forms.

MacArthur died young after having established biogeography as a rigorous, analytical science. Before his death, he along with Edward Wilson worked on the problem of balance or equilibrium between life species on earth.

Species are gained or lost by different mechanisms. Speciation splits a single older species into a pair of new species, and immigration brings a new species from elsewhere. Speciation occurs over a time scale of hundred thousand years or more while immigration is more frequent.

Wilson went on to propose the highly controversial idea of human social behaviour being shaped by evolutionary genetics. This aspect of his work known as sociobiology has been broadly denounced (for instance in "Not in Our Genes" by Stephen and Hillary Rose. More significantly, their work has enhanced the awareness of biological diversity and its gradual loss from our planet.)

Quammen’s book is, first and foremost, a highly readable rendering of the incredible beauty of human mind, the remarkable association of ideas and the forward leaps that occur at intervals, that are exponentially decreasing.

But underlying this mesmerising account is the constant reminder of how cruel our species is in its collective inventions and innovations, in its relation with other life forms. Thus the questions like "how many mountain gorillas inhabit the forested slopes of the Virunga volcanoes, along the shared borders of Zaire, Uganda and Rwanda?" or "how many grizzly bears occupy the North Cascades ecosystem... along the northern border of the state of Washington (USA)" do not remain mere intellectual curiosities.

The dynamics (how large is the population? how long will it survive?) presents to us a horrible scenario with species after species disappearing as we mercilessly destroy their habitat.

While communities struggle to maintain the self-sustaining economies in hills and forests, the irrationality of capitalism causes destruction of nature and life for "growth and development."

Quammen has written award-winning science essays and three novels and other books. A recipient of an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he shows in this book his mastery of pen as well as the extreme labour that must go in preparing such a large volume.

The publishers deserve to be lauded for bringing this excellent work to Indian readers at a reasonable price.

— Harjinder Singh

Little India in distant Mauritius

In the Service of God and Man:The Ramakrishna Mission in Mauritius by L.P. Ramyeed and edited by Swami Kirtidananda and Kevin Shillington. Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius. Pp. 282+6. Price not given.

THIS book makes an excellent study of the growth of the Ramakrishna Mission in Mauritius from its establishment in 1939 by Swami Ghanananda to the present times.

The author provides a backdrop to the subject by describing the emergence of Swami Vivekananda as a world teacher and his contribution to Indian renaissance, the cardinal principles and activities of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission and the growth of mission centres outside India.

This is followed by a profile of Mauritius in historical, geographical, political, economic and cultural terms and the role of Indian immigrants in its development.

The book lucidly describes the social and cultural milieu in which the Ramakrishna Mission was founded. Many factors and historical events have been mentioned in this context: The visit of Mahatma Gandhi to Mauritius in 1901, work of Manilal Doctor for the upliftment of the Indo-Mauritius community, establishment of the Arya Sabha and the Hindi Pracharini Sabha, public debates between the exponents of the Arya Samaj and Sanatana Dharma over caste, idolatry Karma Kanda, etc., craze for Indian sacred literature like Ramacharita Manas, role of Kunwar Maharaj Singh in promoting Hindustani and Indian values and that of Dr Maurice Cure in founding the Mauritius Labour Party and, finally, the foundation of Indian Cultural Association (1936) which may well be said to be the precursor of the Ramakrishna Mission.

When the proselytising activities of the Christian missionaries and the rising tide of materialism were fast eroding Indian cultural and social values, a group of enlightened Tamilians in Mauritius led by Mootoocomaren Sangeelee contacted John de Lingen Kilbern, a British protagonist of Hinduism, for his help and service.

He, in turn, asked them to seek the assistance of the Ramakrishna Mission, Calcutta. The arrival of Swami Ghanananda (1939-46) in Mauritius and the establishment of the Ramakrishna Mission ushered in a period of cultural resurgence in Mauritius.

Swami Ghanananda’s popular sermons, philanthropic work, inspired writings, educational and cultural activities and cyclone relief operations endeared him to many, including the leaders of other religious organisations some of whom honoured him publicly. He opened a Hindi school and an orphanage and propelled the establishment of the Sarada Society and the Ramayana Association. He purchased with donations a huge mansion known as "Campaign Armonville" in Vacoas which now forms the headquarters of the Ramakrishna Mission in Mauritius. The mansion stood on a land 5 acre 78 preches in area. It comprised one big wooden building and a smaller wooden outhouse behind. Later, Swami Tattwabodhananda started constructing a temple (1973) on this property. It was completed by Swami Aparanananda in 1976. Swami Krishnarupananda continued construction for ashram purposes in the vacant space.

Swami Nishreyananda (January, 1947-December, 1950) consolidated the work of the mission after Swami Ghanananda. He was an erudite scholar, an eloquent speaker and a great organiser. Besides holding religious classes, lectures and meetings, he provided a solid economic footing to the organisation by purchasing sugarcane land at St Julien D Hotman and by getting 36 acres of crown land for tea plantation on a 99 year lease. During his term, the mission headquarters at Vacoas and the subcentre in Julian D’ Hotman remained very active.

Swami Nisreyasananda’s successor, Swami Kritananda, earlier Brahmachari Avinashi Chaitanya (1951-71) was an intelligent person but it took him long to gain acceptability. He had a good voice and rendered bhajans in lilting tunes; his satsangs were popular and his knowledge of Vedanta superb. But his administrative acumen was often questioned.

To begin with, he was assisted by a board of management to carry out new plans and projects. But after about a decade the board became "less active and less effective" because of the death of Sree Narain Jugdutt, a dynamic member. It was a time of "progress and regress" and some of the projects conceived earlier were aborted. Swami Kritananda established Ramakrishna College on the premises of an orphanage and a part-time Hindi school at 15 Cantons, Vacoas (mission’s headquarter).

Swami Kritananda’s was followed by Swami Tattwabodhananda. His activities included the holding of Sunday prayer meetings followed by a spiritual class, celebration of the birth anniversaries of Sri Ramakrishna, Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda, holding the first Durga Puja "on an image" besides starting the construction of a magnificent temple. He was also given the honour of presiding over a religious ceremony in which a kalash of holy water brought from the Ganges was placed in the centre of "Pari-talab". Since then it is called Ganga-talab by the Hindus in Mauritius.

In subsequent chapters the author delineates the work and achievements of swamis who came after Tattwabodhananda. They were Swami Aparnananda (July, 1974-August, 1978), Swami Sudarshnananda (January, 1976-October, 1979), Swami Purnananda (February, 1979-March, 1979), Swami Balaramananda (August, 1979-June, 1987) and Swami Purnakamananda (January, 1980- December, 1980).

Swami Krishnarupananda who holds charge of the mission at present is a spiritualist with great managerial qualities. Under his stewardship the mission has grown on all fronts.

The book has a useful set of three appendices. Swami Kirtidananda’s and Kevin Shillington’s editing is excellent. Well produced, the book is a must both for the historian and the devout. Even an ordinary reader would find it interesting.

— Satish Kapoor