Remembering Dadaji

As a young man, he came face to face with numerous problems of poverty and discrimination, of social disorder and exploitation of every kind. Instead of withdrawing or adopting a militant mode of protest, he decided to draw on the very same indigenous sources that were being misused by the orthodoxy to perpetuate injustices at large. He faced enormous difficulties to give effect to his ideas because he refused to seek external funds. He was a driven person with an unshakable conviction that if his mission was God’s work then God would come to his rescue. He had plenty of contrary counsels from well-wishers, including Arthur Holly Compton, physicist-philosopher and Noble prize-winner, and Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan.

In 1942, he began to address very small gatherings at Madhav Baug Pathshala in Central Mumbai. Within the ambit of a kind of kathavachak, a role he had inherited from his father, he summoned new subjects, new sensations and new images. He discovered a new prose, lively and resonant. He made most innovative use of traditional symbols and imageries to give them new content, or perhaps to rehabilitate their original meanings.

His training equipped for philosophy, but he rejected the dilettante elegancies of a philosopher. Instead, he communicated the philosophical essence of the Gita and Upanishads in a language that could be understood both by the uninstructed and the over-instructed. He understood and appreciated the morality of the trader, big and small, the doctor, the lawyer, the accountant, the fisherman, the peasant, the forest-dweller and the depressed. He made every individual and every community appreciate his/her/its own worth by activating devotion as a social force.